NYT: Google Employee Protest Was Rejection of ‘Individualism’

New York Times writer Noam Scheiber claimed in an article, Tuesday, that the mass Google employee walkout protests against sexual harassment at the company were a rejection of “individualism.”

In the article, titled, “Google Workers Reject Silicon Valley Individualism in Walkout,” Scheiber claimed the mass organization was evidence of a rejection of Silicon Valley’s formerly individualist identity.

“For decades, Silicon Valley has been ground zero for a vaguely utopian form of individualism — the idea that a single engineer with a laptop and an internet connection could change the world, or at least a long-established industry,” Scheiber declared. “Class-consciousness was passé. Unions were the enemy of innovation, an anchor to the status quo.”

“But the issues that contributed to the walkout at Google — the company’s controversial work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence, its apparent willingness to build a censored search engine for China, and above all its handling of sexual harassment accusations against senior managers — proved too large for any one worker to confront alone, even if that worker made mid-six figures,” he continued. “They required a form of solidarity that would be recognizable to the most militant 20th century labor organizers.”

Last week, Google employees staged mass walkout protests around the world following allegations that Google protected sexual harassers at the company.

Employees from New York City, Dublin, London, Singapore, Toronto, Berlin, Cambridge, and Mountain View in Silicon Valley all joined in with the protest and provided a list of demands to Google executives.

As previously reported, Google allegedly gave former executive Andy Rubin a “hero’s farewell” and a “$90 million exit package,” despite concluding that sexual harassment allegations against him were “credible.”

Rubin has denied the allegations.