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Googlers Can Save The World

metacrisis, google, climate, ai-safety Originally on Substack

This document is an open letter that I published to fellow Google employees during my last week as an employee. Certain parts of the document have been modified from the original to remove any sensitive, proprietary, or confidential information, and all remaining criticisms, opinions, and conclusions are made on the basis of publicly available and hyperlinked information.

TLDR:

We must radically change the organization, objectives, and operating procedures of Google and reorient Google products in an entirely different direction, if we are to help humanity overcome the multiple, interrelated, existential threats of climate change, war, political dysfunction, mental health degradation, widespread attention and agency erosion, and AI catastrophe---many of which we are directly culpable for.

In this document, I outline the challenges that humanity faces in this unprecedented time in history, and draw on the work and writing of multiple thinkers---Googlers and external thinkers alike---to show that:

  • Google has profiteered and continues to profiteer from the active perpetuation and intensification of these crises.

  • Google’s current system of organization, leadership, and decision making maintains the status quo and will not lead to meaningful change.

  • Google is uniquely positioned to make significant, humanity-scale progress on all of these challenges in a way that no other organization on the planet is. As such, we---you, the reader of this document---have not just the ability, but also the responsibility, to rise to this occasion, and help reorient the direction of Google. Doing so is the only meaningful way to honor our Google Values.

If you care about the planet, or children, or preventing humanity’s extinction, or Google itself, you should

  • join the Alphabet Workers Union (or your local union) to organize for real collective change

  • share this document widely within the company, and immediately talk about this with your colleagues, managers, directors, and everybody else at Google

  • commit to continuing the journey of learning and discussing these challenges

  • take a moment to consider the real, human impact of every code change that you make---not just the metric movements

My hope for this document is to plant the seeds of a movement that redefines Google’s place in the world, as an organization that uses its immense, historically unparalleled power to steward humanity forward.

(views are exclusively my own. I do not speak for anybody in the AWU or any of the other quoted persons)

Introduction

Fellow Googlers,

The world is not right. And we are the only ones that can fix it.

We are living in the era of the Polycrisis. We know this, we feel it. You may have not heard this term, but you likely have a felt sense of this predicament. You’ve seen people around you, both loved ones and strangers, struggle with tech addiction, loss of focus, burnout, mental health issues. You may have dealt with one of these issues yourself. You’ve also probably seen the scary articles about ecological overshoot, which say things like “Kids born today are going to grow up in a hellscape” due to climate change, and “The human brain may contain up to a spoon’s worth of tiny plastic shards”. You’re probably aware of the worldwide shift towards exclusionary, violent politics that seems to represent a global backpedalling of our values. As a tech worker, you’re no-doubt familiar with the rhetoric around AI, where even our own leaders say that the risk of extinction from the products we’re actively developing is “pretty high”.

In this document, I’ll discuss these various problems and Google’s involvement, and chart a path forward for how we might radically change Google to address them.

Ecological Overshoot

Google’s Mountain View campus sits on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, a beautiful waterside campus with parks, creeks, butterflies, and birds abound. I’ve spent many wonderful sunny days g-biking between those sleek buildings to pop in to meeting rooms, grab the wonderful free lunches, and seek out shady spots for focused coding sessions.

As I read more about the climate crisis, I wondered what the sea level rise would imply for the wonderful campus I was in. Projections vary widely, but scientists from NASA (which also happens to be the neighbouring building to the Google complex) project that sea levels could rise by 6.6 feet. I plugged that into a sea level rise visualiser, and was shocked to see that the ground my office was on could soon be underwater.

In the year 2024, we blew past 1.5 degrees, the target that was originally set in the Paris Agreement. We’re also close to climate tipping points, which are positive feedback loops that would amplify warming in a non-linear fashion, which could lead to unstoppable runaway heating. We’re already seeing more frequent catastrophic disasters, and climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades. This is going to get a lot worse very soon, unless we do something about it.

Climate Change is only one facet of ecological overshoot. The Planetary Boundaries Framework, compiled by a global group of internationally acclaimed scientists, lists 9 separate Earth Systems that regulate the habitability of the planet. Any one of these systems going out of balance could lead to the uninhabitability of the planet. We are in overshoot of six out of the nine. That is six different ways that the near-term habitability of the planet is critically threatened.

Many Googlers have repeatedly come to the conclusion that the world we’re in now is radically unsustainable. Googler Ross Koningstein, one of the pioneers of AdWords, all the way back in 2014 saw the direness of the situation, when he wrote:

“Incremental improvements to existing technologies aren’t enough; we need something truly disruptive to reverse climate change”

Other Googlers have come to similar conclusions: Eugene Kirpichov left Google to work on climate, and he wrote in no uncertain terms:

“The reason I’m leaving is because the scale, urgency and tragedy of climate change are so immense that I can no longer justify to myself working on anything else, no matter how interesting or lucrative, until it’s fixed. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I think others, who have the privilege of being able to do so, should follow suit. I like to frame the problem positively as “how much can we save”, and every one of us can have a hand in saving something.”

Sincere or and Greenwashing

It seems that we at Google are aware of the scale of the challenge. We publish an annual environmental report which highlights our progress (with a picture of beautiful redwoods on the cover, just the sight of which made me feel like Google must be green). We regularly publish blog posts with amazing technical feats, like FireSat to detect wildfires and data center optimization to manage electricity use, and we announce partnerships with innovative energy storage products. I was particularly impressed by the 100% plastic-free packaging. There’s a whole community of Googlers inside the company that hosts regular talks and discussions about climate change.

I want to be clear. All of this is amazing work, done by smart, well-intentioned Googlers who care about the future of our planet, and I’m proud that this community exists at Google.

And yet, it’s not enough. It’s not even close. We continue to barrel towards climate armageddon an faster and faster rates. And I believe that, while the individual Googlers who work on these projects are genuine, smart, and caring, Google as a whole is being disingenuous and greenwashing.

No Climate Results Found is a campaign run by Kairos, an organizing and advocacy group focused on tech reform. Last month, they published a report, called “Google’s Eco-Failures”, which showed how many of the claims made in our 2025 environmental report were technically true, but misleading and insincere. A few excerpts:

Google’s reported total greenhouse gas emissions increased 1,515% from 2010 to 2024 according to the company’s own published data.

While Google reports a decrease in its data center emissions, it is doing so by only reporting “market based emissions,” which use renewable energy purchased elsewhere to obscure real emissions. Google’s only emissions that have shown an absolute decrease since 2019 are its scope 1 emissions, which merely account for 0.31% of Google’s reported total emissions.

Google’s claim that it can achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 relies heavily on speculative technologies, particularly nuclear power, which remains dangerous and toxic----and which experts agree and Google itself admits has been scaling too slowly to make a difference in time. Our report concludes that the company is unlikely to achieve any emissions reductions by 2030.

So we’re using accounting tricks and selective reporting to make the picture seem rosier than it is. Again, I’d like to inject some nuance here: purchasing renewable energy is great, efficiency improvements are great, making planes fly more efficient routes is great, and Googlers that worked on these projects are sincere. But let’s not kid ourselves---this is not solving climate change. The laws of physics don’t care if the emissions were Scope 1 or Scope 2 or Scope 3---the heating effect is the same.

Something similar is true of efficiency gains. When asked about the climate impact of GenAI, Sundar and other leaders proudly proclaim that we get 6x the compute per watt as we did 5 years ago. That’s both true and amazing, and yet simultaneously very disingenuous.

The phenomenon of Jevon’s paradox has long been analysed in the climate space. Jevon’s paradox is admittedly hotly debated and contentious, but the core idea is that efficiency improvements do not lead to decreased resource usage, but paradoxically, lead to increased resourced usage: because the improved efficiency translates into cheaper prices, which means that more can be done with the same money. In our case, it means that instead of making our data centers more efficient and keeping the gains as reduced carbon emissions, we instead just build a lot more data centers and do a lot more computation. Quoting again from the NCRF report:

Using hypothetical numbers, increasing a polluting activity by, for example, 500% while improving its efficiency by 50%, still greatly increases absolute emissions. As the charts show, this is precisely what Google has done. For example, when describing its alleged data center emissions, Google does not chart the increase in energy use from the computers operating inside its data centers (known as IT equipment), which accounts for an estimated 88% of the Google’s Scope 2 GHG emissions and 42% of Google’s 2025 All Scopes emissions (Scope 2 location-based).

Of course, the demand for all this AI usage is not some magical, independent phenomenon that we need to service, it happens because we spend millions of dollars to buy Superbowl ads and shove AI into every single product and side-panel we can think of. To claim that we’re simply servicing a need is not true: we clearly induce the demand, then direct our resources towards serving the demand, and the demand makes our carbon emissions go up. We call this progress, but is it really?

The NCRF report raises multiple other points, including how Google continues to partner with oil and gas companies including Aramco and Chevron, and continues to platform and promote climate disinformation on Youtube and in AI overviews. I don’t completely agree with everything in the report, especially regarding new technologies like nuclear, but I do think it’s largely well researched and raises some points that Googlers should contend with seriously, like the real environmental impact our decisions have.

To put it bluntly, we’re careening towards global ecological catastrophe in the coming decades, and while individual Googlers and teams are making valiant efforts, Google is greenwashing, paying lip service to climate change in a manner that is entirely incongruous to the scale of the problem.

Attention, Algorithms, Agency, and Society

There’s a long and rich tradition of Googlers pointing out the contradictions in our approach with monetizing attention.

Right from the beginning, Larry and Sergey were sceptical. Here’s our founders in the very founding document of Google, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”.

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users […] It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Nevertheless, we ploughed ahead, building systems like AdSense and pioneering (or at least, significantly promoting) what came to be known as The Attention Economy.

In 2013, Tristan Harris, a PM on Gmail, published a piece on distraction. I’d highly recommend going through this slide deck. Tristan was one of the early folks to see how a tech ecosystem built to monetize people’s attention would inherently make people more distracted, less able to focus. He kicked off a movement at Google, which, as far as I can tell, lasted for a few years until he felt that no real change could happen from inside Google. Tristan went on to found the Center For Humane Technology, the organization that produced the pathbreaking documentary “The Social Dilemma”.

James Wilson Williams, another Googler, took Tristan’s ideas even further, when he wrote his book “Stand Out Of Our Light”. He wrote about how the erosion of our attention doesn’t just affect our “spotlight” (everybody’s had the familiar experience when you go to your phone, but then forget what you went for, and end up scrolling through a bunch of other apps). It also affects our “starlight”, which is our ability to chase our longer term goals, like pursuing a degree, learning a skill, etc. as opposed to chasing attention-heavy low-level goals. Perhaps his most significant insight was the way these technologies shape our “daylight”. Our daylight is our ability to form a coherent meta narrative about ourselves and the world around us. It is our ability to reflect on our light path, to decide the things we want to want, and to have a coherent sense of self. It is our agency, in a very real sense.

Googler Trevor Stone wrote about the impact this is having on our politics and our society. He writes quite eloquently in his farewell address:

“Google’s products played a role in this ecosystem of cultural antagonism. YouTube is one of the biggest social media sites, and a decade of development on engagement metrics and recommendation algorithms had the emergent property of optimizing for rabbit holes where someone without pre-existing negative thoughts about a topic could develop a strong hatred of some group or concept just be continually watching the next recommended video. None of the ML system’s inputs were “How’s this person’s mental health?” or “Do they better understand the world?” It’s like observing that people tend to stare intently at car crashes, then routing drivers through the most crash-prone streets with the expectation that accidents are what people really want to see when travelling. Google’s advertising products also played a big role: the most effective way to make money writing articles that are high on outrage and low on facts is to put it on a website with a lot of ads.

External thinkers have pushed these ideas even further, with both empirical and theoretical analysis.

  • The book that kicked off an entire journey of inquisition for me: Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” is a must-read for everybody at Google in my opinion. Carr talks about how the way a technology is designed shapes the very way we think---making us more shallow thinkers, jumping around more and less able to focus deeply on any one thing.

  • Johann Hari’s “Stolen Focus” talks about how our worldwide attention spans are being eaten away by technology, and office workers on average only focus for 3 minutes at a time today. I’ve seen this at the Google office. Whether we’re at our desks and we’re in meetings, we keep glancing at our phones, switching tabs or apps on our laptops. For sure, some productive folks have developed better systems to get deep work in, but that’s the exception, not the rule. It’s almost counterculture to read a book, or to leave your phone at home when you go for a walk. Imagine how much more productive Google could have been if it hadn’t built attention-destroying technology that its own workers fall prey to.

  • In “The Chaos Machine”, Max Fisher implicates the design of social media platforms in the violence, political unrest, and widespread rightward shift of politics in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Sites such as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube don’t just polarize political discourse and spawn conspiracy theories: by design they have elevated extreme content, allowed otherwise isolated “crazies” to find one another---and even ushered some of that recklessness into being. There’s a section of the book where he investigates YouTube specifically, and showed that the algorithm had learned that a cluster of right-wing political thinkers was the most engagement-drawing narrative, and so it’s no understatement to say that YouTube’s algorithm is directly responsible for multiple far-right election outcomes and multiple instances of mass violence worldwide.

  • In “Technofeudalism”, Yanis Varoufakis talks about how we’ve shifted away from capitalism, and large tech companies like Google act as digital overlords, similar to feudal lords. Instead of paying with labor or money, users “serve” these companies by providing data in exchange for access to their “cloud” services. This creates a feedback loop where user preferences are shaped by algorithms, leading to a loss of agency and control over one’s own choices. This feedback loop idea really resonated with me. I don’t even know if the stuff I think I like these days is organic, or it’s because YouTube told me that I’m supposed to like it.

  • Shoshana Zuboff calls this model that we’ve developed “The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism”. She defines surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data, which ultimately leads to the complete erosion of free will.

“Right from the start at Google it was understood that users were unlikely to agree to this unilateral claiming of their experience and its translation into behavioral data. It was understood that these methods had to be undetectable. So from the start the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. They were able to see and to take - and to do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening […] What is abrogated here is our right to a future tense, which is the essence of free will, the idea that I can project myself into the future and this make it a meaningful aspect of my present. This is the essence of autonomy and human agency. Surveillance Capitalism’s “means of behavioural modification” at scale erodes democracy from within because, without autonomy in action and in thought, we have little capacity for the moral judgement and critical thinking necessary for a democratic society.”

  • Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, HTML, the URL system, and HTTP, talks and writes regularly about the damage the attention economy is doing to society.

What’s worth noting---and Johann Hari (amongst many others) talks about it on this podcast---is that the agency problem is upstream to the climate problem, or indeed many of the other problems we face in the world. We cannot mobilize the world to act on the climate crisis, if the world’s attention is too fragmented, their information ecosystem too polarizing, and their sense of agency too demolished. In a very real sense, the way we build our products is degrading humanity’s collective ability to deal with its impending threats.

On a personal note---I struggled with YouTube addiction for a lot of my life. I found some solace in r/nosurf, but my inability to control my impulses made me feel useless and disappointed in myself. I blamed myself for my low self control. But then, I began to see that this wasn’t just affecting me. It was affecting my close friends and family in equally dire ways. That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t just with me, it was systemic.

To end this section with a quote by Ted Nelson, the man who invented hypertext.

“The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world.”

Google today is in the business of planet-scale AI-powered human behaviour manipulation

If you know anybody that works in Search or in YouTube, ask them about live traffic experiments (LEs). When we run an LE, we split-test the world’s population with slightly different versions of our products. We use highly complex, hyper-optimized statistical methods to look at an enormous number of metrics about human behaviour, and we pick the version of the experiment that had people do the thing we wanted them to do. Pick up their phone more. Spend more time on our app.

As engineers, we regularly make changes that have subtly altered the behaviours---and thereby the information, beliefs, and even values---of hundreds of millions of people. And we’re incentivized to make these changes (largely) in pursuit of growth and growth-correlated metrics, with little ability to change what those metrics are. There’s thousands of us, using some of the greatest AI models the world has ever developed to figure out how to get people to search more, scroll more, watch more.

It seems crazy to me that we can frame this as a personal-choice issue. How can I tell a friend or loved one that’s come to me seeking help with phone addiction to just “use their phone less” or “set app timers” when I’ve seen the other side of the coin? When I’ve worked on the algorithms, seen the sheer scale of compute used, witnessed the science of our statistical methods?

As many commentators have noted, we’re developing the digital equivalent of cocaine.

What’s more is that I’ve seen my own teammates at Google feel addicted. I’ve seen my own teammates make New Year resolutions about using their phones less, and failing. I’ve seen my own teammates at Google complain about being in a low point in their life because they’ve been hooked on YouTube shorts.

Let’s be clear about it: Google today is in the business of planet-scale AI-powered human behaviour manipulation.

We could, of course, put these tools in pursuit of any other set of metrics. We could optimize for self-reported long-term happiness (we do actually do this at times), or for metrics that model deep understanding of content, or any other of a plethora of ideas. But we choose growth.

Debunking the “Growth is Good” meme

We tend to sell ourselves the notion that when we optimize our products for growth, or for other metrics that are correlated to growth, we build products in the manner that maximizes usage, which must necessarily imply that we are serving users’ inherent needs more and therefore providing them with more value, making our users happy. I’ve heard different versions of this idea espoused by multiple leaders at Google.

This narrative is useful to ward off the cognitive dissonance of the impacts we’re having without looking too closely. But it’s easily falsifiable, and doesn’t hold up to the slightest intellectual scrutiny.

For one, if we really wanted to to build the best products for users, we would give them more choices. We would allow them to shape their UIs, their algorithms, their devices’ behaviour. That’s most definitely not what we’re doing.

One of the most highly requested features for YouTube, both publicly and in my conversations with fellow Googlers, is to provide a button to get rid of the Shorts on YouTube. Googlers I’ve spoken to have complained about their own mental health being destroyed, their own habits changing, and their kids becoming addicted.

If we really wanted to serve users’ intents, we would serve their agency. We could open up our Search algorithms, so users could tune their ranking preferences with more granularity. If we really wanted to, we could provide an API to access our YouTube library, so that people could build an ecosystem of competing UIs and recommendation algorithms, and instead of monetizing the video content of the planet, we could treat YouTube as the public good that it should be treated as. Instead, we use our lawyers to go after people that build other ways of accessing YouTube that bypass our manipulative, agency eroding, depression inducing recommendation algorithm. We even pay billions for exclusivity deals to make sure users can’t leave our platforms, and we’ve been called out for it multiple times.

We’ve built a series of public goods---which continue to be technical marvels---but we’ve enshittified them. We’ve used our vast wealth and power to lock in users, lock in long-form-video creators, lock in website creators, lock in app designers, lock in businesses, and we’ve made our platforms worse for them and squeezed the attention out of them to convert it into our dollars. We did this to Google Search. We did this to YouTube. We won’t even build a feature to allow users to choose for themselves if they want shorts removed from YouTube.

Growth is good till a point, but growth for growth’s sake leads to addictive and deceptive product design.

Black Boxes Galore

According to a commenter on YCombinator forums, former head of Google Search, Amit Singhal wrote an internal piece about the use of ML in systems like Google Search. The document purportedly argued that it’s important to make Google understandable, so that engineers can figure out why things are happening, and fix things when they break. The commenter goes on to state how Google Search decidedly did not go down this route, and is now filled with a host of massive deep learning models and creeping complexity. The same is probably true of YouTube recommendations, and now also of LLMs and Gemini at large.

So we’re putting billions of people face-to-face with technology that works most of the time, but when it breaks, or does things that we didn’t predict, we have very limited ability to reason about it. Of course, we’ve done a spectacular job of coming up with better evaluation algorithms, better vetting mechanisms, and so on. But the fundamental opaqueness of these types of algorithms can likely never be completely surmounted. We will never know if the AI we release to billions of people on dozens of surfaces has mal-intentions---until it’s too late.

AI-pocalypse?

Sundar recently said on a podcast that the probability of an extinction-level catastrophe from AI is “actually pretty high”. Let me say that again.

Our CEO said that the system that we’re all working super hard to build, and putting on every Google surface that we can, has a “pretty high” probability of ending human civilization.

Sundar is not alone. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and our very own Demis Hassabis have made similar statements. Googlers and other tech workers I’ve spoken to have been worried as well.

And yet, how have we responded to this issue?

We fired Timnit Gebru who published a paper about the risks of LLMs in reinforcing pre-existing biases, being inscrutable, and propagating disinformation. We removed the clause from our AI principles that said we wouldn’t build AI weapons, and shortly thereafter, signed deals with Lockheed Martin and Palantir. Amnesty International called this shameful.

The risk from AI isn’t just a Skynet-style takeover, it’s also about distributing the capacity for things like deepfakes and AI generated misinformation websites and bio-weapon creation and personalized phishing campaigns and algorithmic discrimination. Tristan Harris is very incisive at elucidating these risks, with “The AI Dilemma”. We do work on detecting some of these, but this still feels to me like a band-aid rather than a real solution.

Sundar continued on the podcast to talk about his faith in humanity to prevent catastrophe.

“So the irony is, so there is a self-modulating aspect there. I think if humanity collectively puts their mind to solving a problem, whatever it is, I think we can get there. So because of that, I think I’m optimistic on the p(doom) scenarios. I think the underlying risk is actually pretty high, but I have a lot of faith in humanity kind of rising up to meet that moment”

That’s amazing---I want this document to be that rising up.

This document is my invitation, for both Google and for Humanity, to think deeply about the kind of risk that we’re introducing into the system, as well as the incentive structures in our company that make decisions about that risk, balancing it with other considerations like market share, stock price, or profits. What incentive structures do we have in place to make those trade-offs? Are they the incentive structures you would have in an ideal Google, to minimize catastrophic AI risk?

Google today is an agent of the status-quo

I used to love our mission statement. “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It sounds bold, ambitious, amazing. But there’s more to it.

What do we mean by “useful”? Is stopping climate change “useful”? Is preventing an AI catastrophe “useful”?

If you were to look at the public complaints and analyses about the evolution our search results, it would seem that one of the things Google considers the most “useful” is Shopping.

Of course, shopping is completely antithetical to sustainability, since more shopping leads to more material extraction, more energy use, and a more shallow short-term culture, and a crazy amount of pollution, especially on returns. We also have a 1-year refresh cycle on Pixel phones, which has absolutely disastrous environmental effects.

So when we say “useful”, it seems that what we really mean is “useful in maintaining the status quo” of an unsustainable, consumerist, more-is-better culture that routinely prioritizes material accumulation over the well-being and long-term habitability of our planet.

It’s a similar argument with YouTube shorts. When people watch shorts more, we convince ourselves that shorts are “useful”, which is why people watch shorts more. But “usefulness” is not a single sliding scale that one can measure with watch-time: it’s a complex, multidimensional space. There are one-marshmallow versions of “useful” and two-marshmallow versions, but there are also long-term conceptions of useful, ecological conceptions of useful, social and collective conceptions of useful, and so many more that we don’t serve, because they don’t make us money.

When we say “useful” in our mission statement, we choose a very narrow, self-serving definition of useful, one that involves entrenching existing power dynamics, and then delude ourselves into thinking of it as an absolute indicator of utility.

What I’m claiming is not novel---we even recognize this at Google, with discussions like “The Tyranny of Metrics”, but we don’t seem to internalize this message into our work patterns at scale.

This is further amplified by ranking systems that use interaction patterns as a feedback mechanism. With these systems, we are building an information ecosystem for the world that inherently reinforces existing power dynamics. We are building a winner-takes-all information ecosystem. This is likely part of the reason why big media organizations and private equity firms can control the top page of the SRP and juice it for affiliate links.

Systems like this that learn from past interactions are inherently pro-status-quo. So are LLMs, which learn from the internet, so they learn the ideas that are reinforced at scale on the internet, irrespective of how biased those ideas may be. What we need to seriously address the climate crisis, is a radical departure from the status-quo, not systems that feed users more of the same.

So what do we do about it?

If you look at any one of these challenges in isolation, you may feel like they’re patch-able. Maybe we just need a little but more investment here, or some more headcount there, or a change in a metric somwhere.

But if you see the entirety of the predicament that we find ourselves in, you must see that Google, as it is today, is structurally deficient in rising to the occasion demanded of us by humanity. You must see that the incentives we chase---for growth, for unlimited profit, for stock price---have only led to disastrous consequences for humankind, and will continue to do so unless we do something about it.

Google is unique in it’s tremendous power to shape what the world sees, and by extension, what the world believes. I believe that no other organization has on the planet has the amount of power we wield. As such, we’re uniquely positioned to make real change on the existential threats that society faces today. But how do we build coordination systems inside Google that enable us to wield our power in that way, instead of just making more money at the expense of the planet?

Time and time again, research has shown that worker-owned and worker-run businesses, like cooperatives, are better for the planet. To quote economic anthropologist Jason Hickel:

“We can and should extend the principles of democracy into the economy. We know, empirically, that when people have democratic control over production --- economic democracy --- they are inclined to organise production more around meeting human needs, they manage resources more sustainably, and they distribute yields more fairly. Researchers have shown that if production were organised around these objectives, we could end deprivation and provide good lives for 8.5 billion people with less energy and resources than we presently use.”

So the start of the answer is simple: we should unionize. I think every single Googler should join the Alphabet Workers Union. When we build collective power, we can shape outcomes in ways that we think are more ethical, sustainable, and just.

Once we’re all in the union, the possibilities are endless. We could put some real muscle behind our sustainability efforts. We could shut down contracts that we think are immoral. We could reshape our algorithms to promote science-backed climate information, and stop accepting advertising money from groups that we know are causing irreparable damage to the planet.

We could even make bigger changes---we could think about reshaping our business model away from advertising and consumerism, and towards futures that allow the planet to still be habitable in a few generations time, and to let our kids enjoy the best this planet has to offer---peace, nature, community, sunsets, and more. As a stalwart of cyberspace, Google could collectively redefine human-computer interaction at scale, as we have done so many times before, but this time, we could do it for the better, in a way that’s humane. We could give our users more agency, and build our products as the public goods that they are.

Conclusion

My hope for this document is for it to be a pivotal moment in this company’s history. I hope that this document can spark a revolution.

As a teenager, I was enthralled by technology. I loved programming, I loved problem solving, and I loved computers---and I imagine many of you reading this document have a similar story. Working at Google was my dream job, and I don’t for one moment forget the tremendous privilege and fortune that landed me a job here.

But now, as a 25 year old looking ahead, seeing the interrelated crises of the present and worried sick about what the future holds in store, I’ve come to realize that the very organization that I admired, served, and worshipped is actively contributing to the downfall of the planet.

But I also see a different way. None of this is inevitable, and we, Googlers, are the ones behind the wheel.

We have to ask ourselves what side of history we want to be on. We have to take the reins of the company and steward our immense power to serve the world for the better. I’ve had the privilege of working with so many folks at Google, who are all such technically adept individuals. Imagine if we could channel that intellectual might towards a future that is better in a meaningful way.

Googlers of the world, unite! We have to fall back to our original motto: Don’t be Evil. But that’s not enough. We have to be better---and we have to do it together, in union.

As Ursala K Le Guin said:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art---the art of words.”

I hope my words can spark resistance and change.

Thank you, fellow Googler.