Stanford Grads Say Big Tech Is Creating a 'Modern-Day Draft’

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20:50Amanda Campos:He described interference in the election in alarming terms that involved almost everything but little green Martians, honestly. But there was absolutely no final bottom line where he was able to prove that a single vote was stolen in the election. Join me, Susan Glasser, and my colleagues Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer every Friday on the political scene. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

21:27Amanda Campos:What's the backlash been like? I'm sure you've heard from people who were not on board with what you did or with your message. Not students. I mean, yeah, I would say that among students, there's definitely popular opposition against inviting the Google CEO as the commencement speaker. It is not something that students chose. Students made a list of speakers they wanted to. Students outside of the organizing. Yes.

21:53Eva Jones:Students are tasked with choosing the commencement speaker every year. It's like some sort of elected body at Stanford. I don't know.

22:00Amanda Campos:Yeah, they made like a list of speakers, none of them. Google SEOs and that pitch high, but it ended up being chosen somehow by administration, presumably. And definitely there was, you know, opposition to, you know, having another tech billionaire, you know, coming here and then telling us how to also be successful and become a billionaire through quite literally exploiting workers and oppressing people. But definitely popular position among the student body. You know, there's this pervasive narrative of like, why would you walk out of your own commencement ceremony? You know, like it's not an appropriate time to do that.

22:37Amanda Campos:And I mean, we found it pretty insulting to have the Google CEO as a commencement speaker because, you know, the Google Cloud and the Google Gemini technologies that Google is providing to ICE and CBP through pretty expensive contracts. You know, that's impacting our communities, too. like I come from the immigrant family here right and I emigrated from Brazil like these are my communities these are our communities being impacted by this campaign of persecution and the only thing separating me from someone whose parent was kidnapped is luck the only thing separating me from a student in Gaza whose university has been bombed is luck and we understand that as the student movement and we deserve a commencement ceremony where actually our values are celebrated and we our pursuits are celebrated and that's exactly what we organized.

23:38Amanda Campos:You talked a bit at the top about the culture at Stanford and maybe what kinds of students in some cases are drawn to that institution. I'm sure many of the people sitting at that ceremony that day looked at Sundar and thought to themselves, I hope I get there one day, right? They aspire to that big tech pipeline. They want to be at Stanford to get a job at an institution like Google, like OpenAI. What was the reaction among your fellow students to the walkout? Is Stanford a polarizing place to do the kind of activism that you have done? To begin with, I would emphasize, you know, that I think many students come to Stanford just like us wanting to build a better world and are then met with this very cultivated career pipeline into harmful industries and you know when it comes to like the dominant narratives and just simply where the money is where the money is for internships where the money is for opportunities and are then bought into influenced by this very very harmful funneling into big tech and the broader like military web of companies and governments.

24:54Amanda Campos:So I would emphasize that, that I think it's also a highly systemic and institutional problem. But with that being said, for the walkout, you know, it was very memorable that despite all the protest repression at Stanford, despite all the fears and hesitancies around it, like hundreds of students walked out and made a statement and many more supported it. Given that so many students at Stanford likely aspire to those big tech jobs and are in that pipeline and that's where they are maybe content to be, want to be, whether you encountered any resistance or blowback from the student community with regards to the walkout?

25:33Eva Jones:Yes. So I, as an organizer with Tech for Liberation, this is sort of our, this is our camp. We do a lot of organizing at career fairs. We started as a few people just flyering at career fairs, trying to educate people. Do you guys know what Raypeon does? You know, Boeing's trying to hire you. Do you know what you'll actually be doing? Because I think that there's a lot of students who, like Amanda is saying, are enticed by these big tech jobs, but they don't really understand the world they're trying to build. They understand the concept of a nice job with a nice title and a nice salary. But it's not necessarily like they're really passionate about, you know, building drones for the future of AI warfare or something.

26:16Eva Jones:They are they're looking for success. And that is something that Tech for Liberation specifically has been focusing on doing, whether it's education on, you know, the reality of what these companies build. alternative career fairs of ways that you can, you know, use your education to not contribute to warfare, to detention, immigration detention and police violence, but to be a part of, you know, clean energy solutions to be part of, you know, in my case, I do work in water justice and water management. But what I get way, way, way more when I'm flyering, when I'm standing outside of the classroom that Palantir just spoke in, you know, handing out flyers to people about what's really going on, what Palantir is trying to recruit you to do, I'm mostly getting thank you.

27:07And I really believe that the expropriation of warfare to these contracted companies,

27:15Eva Jones:whether they're explicitly defense tech, someone like Palantir, or whether they shroud themselves in other services like Google, it's a modern day draft. When the technology that our students are being asked to create with their education, with their minds, are fueling these massive exploits of military violence, that is a modern draft of our minds, of our intellectual labor, of our intellectual time and capital. I'm sorry. You're okay. And so I guess I don't think most students want to be drafted into this dark, dark future that these companies want to cycle each other's profit into through these self-fulfilling contracts and such.

28:03Amanda Campos:What do you want to see Stanford do?

28:06Eva Jones:I want to see Stanford become the place of learning that I thought it would be. I want it to be a place of devotion to understanding, of learning, of really putting together the resources that it has to make the world a better place and really take on integrated challenges that would face us instead of securing a never-ending bottom line for its corporate shareholders. Yeah, I mean, what would that look like in practice?

28:43Amanda Campos:What would have to change for Stanford to be that place that you want it to be?

28:48Eva Jones:I don't so much. I mean, that's like really a foundational issue.

28:55Amanda Campos:To first answer the first question, I'll never forget how President Levin, President of Stanford, one time to paraphrase said something along the lines of the mission of the university is not social justice. and I'll never forget that line and also talking to the provost Jenny Martinez talking about the problems that student organizers have faced in terms of only being able to protest from 12 to 1 and ridiculous protest rules and her quietly asking if it's a problem that we're learning too much social justice activism in our classes and I just remember being shocked at her asking us that and I was like, what?

29:36Amanda Campos:But I would like to see a university as a place for learning for the sake of justice. And it's crazy that that is a bold thing to say, I guess. It should be a place where our goal is to better the lives of people. And that is justice. And to have the administration inquiry go against that. And, you know, we can departments and community centers where, you know, so many students of color, so many communities feel safe and are able to learn about social justice struggles, are able to learn about histories that Stanford majoring classes don't necessarily teach. I would say that Stanford as an institution needs to, first of all, stop weakening those alternative spaces that students and allied faculty and staff try to cultivate despite all the threats.

30:31Amanda Campos:So first of all, strengthening things like the Environmental Justice Center that they only now created, which is ridiculous because the environmental justice movement has been around since the 80s. So protecting those spaces, strengthening those spaces, and definitely ending corporate highs with so many of these big tech AI military companies are actively funneling us into this AI dystopia and are actively contributing to its creation.

31:00Eva Jones:I mean, fundamentally, it's answering the calls that students have been making for decades and decades. It's divestment from companies who are fueling violence abroad and at home because those investments, whether they are, you know, investments of the endowment or corporate gifts and such, do control our education. And they, you know, who is let dictate whether it's the material or the career fairs is going to shape what Stanford becomes.

31:36Amanda Campos:We have Stanford. We talked about what you want to see from Stanford. Big tech, Google. Yes. What do you want to see from them? That simple. Drop Project Nimbus and terminate the contracts with ICE and the CBP. very clear explicit calls. To begin with, it has been done before in terms of Project Maven was a project that Google had with Palantir that after so many people, especially Google workers, stood up saying, I don't want Google to be working for the U.S. military for these drone strikes, the project was dropped, even though Google still has some relationships with Palantir. it's interesting because most people think of Google as a search engine company.

32:21Amanda Campos:Maybe now we have the annoying Google Gemini popping up whenever I try to search up something. It's the AI Overviews company now. Awesome. Okay, the AI Overviews company. Thank you. No problem. But what most people may not know, it's how since 2021 and even before Google has been actively working for the Israeli government through Project Nimbus, this$1.2 billion contract. And this big tech war partnership is not new at all, especially Silicon Valley, which was basically founded on big tech, on tech for war. And we, as students of Conscious and many, many people around the world call on Google to job project numbers and for accountability to ensue.

33:17Amanda Campos:In the press release about the walkout, you mentioned ICE contracts specifically. Can you talk a little bit more about how Google intersects with ICE, which I'm sure is something that for anyone listening in the United States is always top of mind right now? Yes. So to start off with, through the contracts, right, the pretty profitable contracts for Google, Google Gemini is used by CBP for operational efficiency, quote. And there are definitely many ties. There are smaller things, like, for example, the Google Play Store doesn't allow certain like ICE tracking apps to be sold. Ice Walk, for example, has been one.

33:55Amanda Campos:And Google Cloud is also used as a platform by ICE and CBP to store the massive amounts of surveillance data. And Google has also shared personal data on people.

34:07Eva Jones:Yeah, without the informatics tools, the data collection and, you know, aggregation tools that Google and other companies are creating, ICE would not be able to surveil organizers, immigrants, and create the lethal system of control that they have in our own communities.

34:28Amanda Campos:And I mean, just recently, two people have been killed at the hands of ICE, Lorenzo Salgado, Araujo in Houston, Misa Guerrero in Maine. And, you know, without companies like Google providing the, again, technological backbone for this, like this entire campaign of persecution wouldn't be possible. It would be a lot weaker. And it's crucial for us as students to refuse to work for these companies. They're quietly killing our own communities, but also call out the system that is enabling these campaigns of persecution and genocide to happen in the first place. I'm assuming you didn't hear from Google after the walkout.

35:09Eva Jones:No, no. I would ask Google to make good on its slogan since its founding, which was dropped in 2018, which is don't be evil. Google, whether it's your contracts with defense and weapons manufacturers across the world or your never-ending hunger for the freshwater and energy supply around rural and black America, don't be evil. Your employees don't want to be a part of that. And the consumers that use your products every day don't want to be, you know, searching on a weapons manufacturer's platform every single day. Exactly.

35:51Amanda Campos:All right, another quick break. We'll be right back.

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37:18Amanda Campos:He described interference in the election in alarming terms that involved almost everything but little green Martians, honestly. But there was absolutely no final bottom line where he was able to prove that a single vote was stolen in the election. Join me, Susan Glasser, and my colleagues Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer every Friday on the political scene. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

37:55Amanda Campos:what's next for both of you you're done being students goodbye stanford what now well i work in environmental justice advocacy and currently i'm working at this ej non-profit in richmond california where there's a huge chevron oil refinery and we're actively you know trying to advocate for the majority of people of color community that has been impacted by this refinery for over 100 years. And it definitely makes me thankful of the organizing communities I've been part of because it does feel like Stanford as an institution would prefer me to work as head of corporate sustainability or something at Chevron instead of being more of a troublemaker.

38:41Amanda Campos:But what's next for me is continue to advocate for communities in environmental space. And I'll definitely keep organizing.

38:50Eva Jones:I'm working right now in water quality monitoring and communications for a water justice organization in East Palo Alto near Stanford in the Bay Area.

39:00Amanda Campos:And you've graduated. You're moving on. So are your classmates. But a new class will start at Stanford in the fall. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Idealistic, enthusiastic, maybe naive group of students. What advice do you have for them for the incoming class?

39:17Eva Jones:I think it's the same advice that, you know, every young person gets from anyone, which is you have to make it your own. At a place like Stanford, you know, there's going to be a lot of people trying to entice you that their way, their innovation, their technology, their lab is the future is the best way forward. but what you need to do is find people of conviction who resonate with you who are dedicated to building the kind of world that you want to see and devote yourself to that it may not be the easiest path but if it is your own i promise you it will be worth it i would say

39:54Amanda Campos:organize it definitely probably saved me in my stanford experiences to students of conviction as Eva was talking about. I found so many friends in the organizing space, and I believe that, you know, right now in particular, it's just a very desensitizing time and very disillusioning. And do not let yourself get lost in that. And Stanford and this dominant narrative will constantly tell you to just stay in your lane and don't cause trouble, you know, be the good student. And again, find your own path. And I highly encourage you to organize, to actually fight for the Stanford that you want to have and that you deserve.

40:47Amanda Campos:Thank you both. It was great. Thank you.

41:14Amanda Campos:Thank you.

41:28Amanda Campos:This week on The Political Scene from The New Yorker, Trump's election fraud obsession. He described interference in the election in alarming terms that involved almost everything but little green Martians, honestly. But there was absolutely no final bottom line where he was able to prove that a single vote was stolen in the election. Join me, Susan Glasser, and my colleagues Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer every Friday on the political scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.