Comment by OutOfHere
16 days ago
Being that ICE has also been kidnapping some US citizens, this is par for the course. Beyond ICE, Google however needs to go further and also cut ties with Palantir which otherwise will become stronger by continuing to serve as a proxy cloud for ICE.
All these tech companies have cowards for leaders, and Sundar Pichai is no different. And he’s a non white immigrant! The CEOs fear being attacked by the administration through regulations or anti trust or not being given contracts. They are some of the most powerful people and yet they bend the knee so easily. Andy Jassy of Amazon is the worst though - funding the Melania documentary is so blatantly corrupt.
This era is evidence for why we cannot continue allowing individuals or mega corps to accumulate the kind of money and power they have. It is too easy to corrupt them.
> he’s a non white immigrant!
This seems like a very white-centric categorization to assume that a Tamil Brahmin should necessarily see himself as in the same racial solidarity group as a Somali, Haitian, or Venezuelan as opposed to a European.
He’s going to be a victim of the same anti immigration anti foreigner anti minority movement that the other groups you mentioned will be victim to. Remember the DHS tweeted a supremacist call to deport 100 million people. That is only possible if you denaturalize all the citizens who were once just immigrant workers on visas. The fact that he’s “Tamil Brahmin” isn’t relevant - his right to exist in America is at risk, by his very own actions of supporting the administration.
It doesn't much matter how Pichai sees himself.
What matters is how Trump and ICE see him.
And all they really notice is the color of the skin.
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Cowardice is the wrong word here. It implies that these people have a desired action that they're not taking because of fear, weakness, or hesitation.
What tech companies actually have is rapacious sociopaths for leaders. They have purposely brought about the current state of affairs through intensive lobbying, spending, and direct action.
For the most part, they don't believe that they should be held accountable for their behavior. They don't fundamentally believe in democracy, and many of them don't really believe humans and human life are more important than some other abstract concept that they have in their heads. At root, they all believe in rule by the elite.
This may seem like an argumentative distinction, but I would counter that it's crucial to understanding what we have to do next, which is not to try to convince them, but rather to take back the power that they've accumulated over us, against their best efforts to stop us.
> take back the power that they've accumulated over us, against their best efforts to stop us.
It sure would be nice if so many smart technologists hadn't spent the last two decades poo-pooing distributed p2p software in favor of centralizing https and javascript webcrapps because "they have nothing to hide" and can always "vote with their wallet".
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