Claire Stapleton on ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ Her Memoir About Loving—and Leaving—Google

In November of 2018, more than 20,000 Google employees walked off the job, protesting the company’s alleged mishandling of sexual harassment allegations. Claire Stapleton, then a marketing manager at Google, was one of them, helping to organize what came to be known as the Google Walkout for Real Change. Yet the cultural changes Stapleton and her peers sought were difficult to implement across the company.

Now, Stapleton is telling her full story in her memoir Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Vogue spoke to the author about attempting to reform Google from the inside and the other tech nonfiction that inspired her.

Vogue: You describe Google when you started there, in 2007, as a “full-blown cultural event.” I’m curious about whether you can pinpoint when the company’s appeal began to fade for you.

Claire Stapleton: I think the walkout moment was so dramatic that it surprised me to go back and look at the whole history of my time at Google—12 years—and see that I did have a lot of weird cognitive-dissonance moments throughout. I mean, even from the very beginning, they put us through this comms department training I talk about in the book that was called “Radical Accountability,” and it was really weird. It was this Silicon Valley career guru who Sheryl Sandberg loved, and it was basically telling the young people of the corporation the kind of narrative we now see in tech, where blaming the circumstances is completely verboten, and to be a high performer and to be valuable in the organization, you have to be sort of taking accountability for everything at all times. I feel like I really internalized that as a young person.

Towards the end of my first stint at Google, so within my first five years, Larry Page became the CEO, and he had this vision for Google where technology was going to do all the hard things in life, all the annoying tasks, so humans could get back to doing what they do best, quote: “Learning, living, and loving.” I kind of believed Google was going to improve the world in all these exciting ways; he was like, “We’re going to extend the human lifespan, and we’re bringing effortless Wi-Fi to the planet.” When I would listen to that rhetoric and all these weird techno-utopian ideas, I’d be like, what are we actually doing here? Because at the end of the day, Google was such a huge online advertising juggernaut, and it was becoming hard to square some of the vision things with what Google actually seemed to be doing well.

When I moved to New York, I worked in a department called Creative Lab, and even though I ended up staying another six years or something, that was really when the scales began to fall from my eyes. I think anyone who has been in the creative agency world knows that you’re selling something, but there’s also a lot of grandiose rhetoric around it that it’s something else, something virtuous, something inherently good. Google was that on steroids, because the language of everything is so moralistic and sweeping. I had a horrible time in this department, and just a really classic difficult manager relationship—couldn’t get put on projects, didn’t really know how to navigate it, and felt completely destabilized by that. Even when I was on projects, though, it was just pitching to the world what a virtuous, progressive, amazing center of the future Google was. I had so many different moments that were just like, there’s this massive gap between what my job is as a spokesperson and what I actually experience, and tuning into that gap was sort of how I ended up becoming a rabble-rouser.

How did it feel to revisit all the organizing work you did around the walkout?

In a way, that’s why I wrote the book. I was sort of a good girl, as a lot of girls at Google are, as a lot of people at Google are. You know: good student, probably not questioning authority too much if you’re going into a pretty normative corporate path. As cool as Google seemed in certain ways, back in the day, it really attracted a lot of classic achievers. It was a mystery to me: How did I end up upsetting the apple cart so hard?

But I’m really proud of that, because I think we’re so conditioned to not rock the boat. It was an awesome zeitgeist moment that really felt bigger than us, and so many people were so pissed about various things, and also were so hopped up on Google’s rhetoric that we were there to change the world. It was this exciting moment where we were reckoning with, well, what is our combined power instead of just blindly trusting our leaders? Memoir is kind of the ultimate therapy project, where you revisit things that are really gutting, but you also know you’ve moved through them and grown through them and all these other aspects of the process.

Do you think it’s inevitable for a company of Google’s scale to eventually “be evil,” or are there mitigating steps that can be taken along the way?

Well, the wordplay of the book is that those are Google’s own words; when Google went public in 2004, Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] said, “We’re not a conventional company and we don’t intend to become one. We will continue to be guided by our values, and we’re going to be this different type of corporation.” I don’t think that corporations are inherently evil, I just think they’re subject to this gravity and these growth incentives and they end up perpetuating a system that’s, in my opinion, inherently sort of exploitative and extractive of society at a certain level. They also seek to preserve themselves, and I think that’s where Google was very misguided and disappointing and sort of soulless. After the walkout, they punished all the women who were pushing back. And the people at the top are billionaires, so I think that leads to a level of corruption and making moral compromises in order to preserve not only their own spot in the system, but the system as a whole. Are there things along the way that companies can do? I think it’s important for people to be leaders and try to push back against things that are wrong.

What’s the biggest thing you learned while writing Don’t Be Evil?

I think the lesson isn’t that Google is uniquely bad; I think it’s that institutions are not people. I love so many people at Google, and you can believe in the mission and do your best to do meaningful work and still discover that when an institution becomes threatened, it will behave according to its own incentive, rather than anything it states as its ideals. It was just a shift in how I understood power. My perspective as someone who’s been privileged by the system while moving my way through the world is that I kind of just believed that if you worked hard and were a good person and appealed to shared values, the institution would take care of you. The walkout was basically the last expression of that for me; thousands of people at the company really believed that Google wanted to live up to its own principles. But basically all that taught me was that institutions don’t really have a conscience, they have an incentive structure.

Are there other books that helped inspire you to write this one?

Okay, there’s an absolutely insane book by a Stanford professor named Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyberculture. On a very personal level, my dad grew up in Palo Alto in the ’50s and ’60s, when there was this burgeoning youth culture there. He was best friends with Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac, his brother was friends with Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez was around, there was all this hippie music culture, and I’ve had this open question in my mind forever: How did that area end up spawning Silicon Valley? This book is all about how hippie culture, which was very libertarian and against institutions and the state, ended up kind of creating the founding mythology of Silicon Valley. It’s completely riveting.

Careless People came out when I was editing the book last year; and there’s another book called Uncanny Valley which was a really amazing memoir from a few years ago, about the strange psychology of being a person taking in all this tech rhetoric and trying to navigate your way through it. What else? There’s a book called Private Government, which is also by a professor and is basically about how we live in the most corporately organized society; like, we live in authoritarian rule under corporations, and if you lose your job you lose your health insurance. We put up with a lot of very authoritarian, sort of anti-freedom stuff within the workplace. It’s not a democratic institution. I read tons of memoirs throughout writing the book, but I didn’t intend to write a whistleblower memoir. It’s more of a coming-of-age story.