Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
I didn’t do that, you just did. Try to grasp a little nuance.
On a systemic level, “white,” is power. Power often means negative, yes.
In the US, are Italian Americans considered white? Yes. How about Irish? Hard to think of many people whiter than the Irish. I say this as an American of Irish descent.
And yet, their inclusion in this definition is relatively recent. Up until recently, Irish and Italian people were decidedly not white. And yet, the color of their pale skin…? I don’t understand?
So clearly, the term (at the systemic level, obviously, I’m not talking about individual racism) is elastic. It is culturally defined in the context of the times.
At a systemic level, “racism” implies oppression by that power. Oppression against “whiteness” at a systemic level is not possible because there is no power in a position to oppress whites. By definition, they’re at the top.
I fully expect you to just gloss over everything I said and call me racist again. Maybe someone will read this and think twice about how they view these things.