"On Monday, workers announced the establishment of the Alphabet Workers Union" .. So now, as well as your manager telling you what to do, you'll have your Union Organizer telling you what to do. Neo-Sovietism with a coating of Wokism is coming to America.

Why is everyone writing as if John L. Lewis were about to bring American industry to a halt? I've heard numbers for the Google union members around 300, which might amount to a decent bargaining unit for the faculty of a community college, for Alphabet not so much. Sometimes the proverbial "cloud no larger than a man's hand" signals a change of the climate; more often it breaks up and disappears.

It would have been appreciated if the Google Union had bothered to include any links or additional information to inform the reader about references to: suicides, mass murders, a fascist movement in the US etc.

They can’t because that’s all fiction.

Great, as though it wasn't enough to have the Google HR and PR departments enforcing totalitarian liberalism on the masses, now we have the new voice of the Alphabet Worker's Union with outsized amplification drawing the company even more leftward.

Imagine going back to the heyday of unions - not unions for people making 1%'r salaries in an incredible position of gilded privilege like these Googlers are, but unions for actual working people fighting for basic work-life balance - and telling them that in a hundred years, workers making top-tier salaries will be pushing to restrict freedom of speech because it makes them mildly uncomfortable.

I cannot imagine being such a weak-minded individual as to be bothered when someone I do not like or agree with is posting videos and comments. What small-souled people these must be, to not be able to simply close the browser window and go and spend some time with their family, perhaps doing something real in the world, instead of obsessing about trying to shut down something half the nation wants.

Its the usual political BS that comes out of there. We don't need this "political insight" from a surveillance/advertising company that makes money by tricking you into clicking on an ad or convincing you to buy some trinket that some other random company made. Maybe one day, instead of forming these unions they would just quit and stop enabling Google.

But then how would they make six figures for cushy work that leaves room for activism?

It’s out of desperation.

I’m in my late 20s and I’ve seen America in a tailspin for pretty much my entire life. This week it’s culminated in the capitol building being forever disgraced by a mob that was endorsed by the President.

America is already at a place where I’m not considering a future here, and I’m sure a lot of these employees are trying to do _something_ to try to remove whatever it is that is causing these people to lose all sense of reality.

Oh, come off it. Forever disgraced? Do you even know how many other groups have protested there? Nobody burned it down. Nobody defaced any art. It's still there in one piece. You're being melodramatic.

Maybe it's easier said as a Canadian, but the problem people like you (yes, you personally) have is that you can't find your way to see common cause with the mass of people that were protesting. You think you're different from them, for some strange, artificial, media-induced reason. You think that they're reprehensible, when at the end of the day, they want the same thing you do: a stable income, a safe city, a place where they can raise a family, some amount of upward mobility, and less financial fragility when something unexpected happens like an injury, disease, or loss of employment.

Don't you understand that a wedge is driven between red and blue folks in order to ensure you never get these things? Every single media narrative you are reading today is designed to make you hate and scorn those people. The purpose of this is clear from the outside: it's to make sure you NEVER make common cause with them, and NEVER hold the entire system accountable.

Go ahead and play your side, champ. It's what everyone does in their 20s, it's natural, but one day you'll look back at it and realize that this mob was just as correct in their ultimate yearning for a more just world as any other mob has been. The problem is finding any conceivable step forward that gets you there, rather than continually attacking people who are ultimately far closer to being your class peers than the elites who rule you both.

> I’m sure a lot of these employees are trying to do _something_ to try to remove whatever it is that is causing these people to lose all sense of reality.

I guess they were asleep for the past four years. Gotta impress the new boss and get those sweet government contract dollas!

What do government contracts have to do with wanting to try to tackle a problem where millions of people of this country can’t be trusted to personally vet what they read/watch online?

Don’t get me wrong it’s not about taking the right action because what’s right is subjective.

I’m simply saying it’s not surprising that they seem to be wanting to at least TRY something to help the problem.

Perhaps, but I would say what people believe is right is subjective. So should we burn books that we disagreed with? The book burners are TRYING to do something to help in their view.

>wanting to try to tackle a problem where millions of people of this country can’t be trusted to personally vet what they read/watch online?

Yeah, I don't trust them to do anything remotely competent here. They've happily accepted ad spend from Trump, as-if the past four years were any different. Google is the problem, not the solution. They're an advertising and surveillance company - the last company to be trusted on "vetting" anything. They're entire business model is to get people to click on ads and open their wallet based on "marketing" - which itself is a form of manipulation. For me, Google is at a negative trust level.