In amongst all the political fallout of the National Party this weekâwhat Iâm dubbing (and hashtagging) âcaught in the Rossfireââwas a series (well, over 100) Tweets from Morgan Knutson, a designer who once worked for Google. Unlike most Googlers, especially the cult-like ones who refuse to help when you point out a fault with Google, Knutson decided he would be candid and talk about his experience. And it isnât pretty. Start here:
Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.
I'm still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I'd be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.
Or, if you prefer, head to the Twitter page itself, or this Threader thread.
As anyone who follows this blog knows, Iâve long suspected things to be pretty unhealthy within Google, and it turns out that itâs even worse than I expected.
A few take-outs: (a) some of the people who work there have no technical or design experience (explains a lot); (b) there’s a load of internal politics; (c) the culture is horrible but money buys a lot of silence.
Knutson claims to have received a lot of positive feedback, some in private messaging. His Tweets on the aftermath:
Iâve received a number of DMs from former and current google employees that say theyâve experienced similar things.
Bad politics, mismanagement, and back-stabbing colleagues.
This, I thought, summed it up better than I could, even though I’ve had a lot more space to do it:
This reads like a Google version of 'Chaos Monkeys': unvarnished, unblinking, just the right amount of sneering, and merciless when it comes to arrogant mediocrity and the machinery of cushy ass-kissing mixed with an un-fuck-up-able monopoly that underwrites the outlandish pay. https://t.co/PmB6zYwgZT
Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I donât think this was meant as a compliment.
Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an attempt to take down his party leader. Except it was so much more condensed than the machinations of Francis Urquhart, and, if you were Chinese, Indian or Filipino, in the words of Taika Waititi, it was âracist AFâ.
Two of my Tweets garnered hundreds of likes each, which generally doesnât happen to me, but I am taking that as reinforcing something I truly believe: that most New Zealanders arenât racist, and that we despise injustices and treating someone differently because of their ethnicity.
Botany MP Jami-Lee Ross and opposition leader Simon Bridgesâ phone call, where the former stated that two Chinese MPs were worth more than two Indian ones, drew plenty of thoughts from both communities, where we felt we were treated as numbers, or a political funding source, with none of us actually getting into a National Cabinet (or the Shadow Cabinet) since Pansy Wong was ousted last decadeâmaking you feel that had other Cabinet ministers been held to the same standard, they would have been gone as well. Here was my first Tweet on the subject:
In a bid to win National Party clients, Iâm changing my business slogan to âWorth more than my mate Krishna.â
Thereâs the inevitable look back through the history of Chinese New Zealanders, who have largely been humiliated since the gold-mining days by earlier generations, and the Poll Tax, for which an apology came decades after during the previous Labour government.
And the scandal also inspired Tze Ming Mok to write an excellent op-ed for The New Zealand Herald, which I highly recommend here. Itâs one of the most intelligent ones on the subject.
Sheâs absolutely right: those of us with few connections to the Peopleâs Republic of China donât like being grouped in among them, or treated as though weâre part of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.
Her research showed that roughly half of Chinese New Zealanders were born on the mainland, and that the group itself is incredibly diverse. My fatherâs family fled in 1949 and I was raised in a fairly staunch anti-communist household, images of Sun Yat Sen and the ROC flag emblazoned on my paternal grandfatherâs drinking glasses. My mother, despite being born in Hong Kong, grew up behind the Bamboo Curtain and survived the famine, and didnât have an awful lot of positive things to say about her experiences there, eventually making her way out to her birthplace during her tertiary studies.
Tze Ming writes:
This chilling effect is harming Chinese people in New Zealand. Many people cannot differentiate Chinese people from the actions of the CCP (I mean hey, many people canât tell a Chinese from a Korean), but this is made worse when hardly any authorities on the topic will address the issue openly. Concerns can only erupt as xenophobia against the Chinese and âAsianâ population âŠ
CCP-linked politicians parroting Xi Jinping and promoting Beijingâs Belt & Road priorities don’t speak for at least half of us.
âAt leastâ is right. My father was born in the mainland where ćć ± was a catch-cry in his young adult life. Iâm willing to bet thereâs an entire, older Chinese-born generation that thinks the same.
She continues:
It’s endlessly irritating and insulting that both Labour and National have lazily assigned Chinese communities as the fiefdoms of politicians openly backed by the Chinese government.
Thatâs true, too. In 2014 I was approached by the National Party asking how best to target the Chinese community. My response was to treat us the same as any other New Zealanders. Iâm not sure whether the advice was taken on board, as within months I was invited to a Chinese restaurant for a $100-a-head dinner to be in the presence of the Rt Hon John Key, a fund-raiser that was aimed at ethnic Chinese people resident here. It certainly didnât feel that I was being treated like my white or brown neighbours.
The other point Tze Ming touches on, and one which I have written about myself, is the use of the term Asian in New Zealand.
Let me sum it up from my time here, beginning in 1976, and how I saw the terms being used by others:
1970s: âChineseâ meant those people running the groceries and takeaways. Hard working. Good at maths. Not good at politics or being noticed, and Petone borough mayor George Gee was just an anomaly.
1990s: âAsianâ became a point of negativity, fuelled by Winston âTwo Wongs donât make a whiteâ Peters. He basically meant Chinese. Itâs not a term we claimed at the time, and while some have since tried to reclaim it for themselves to represent the oriental communities (and some, like super-lawyer Mai Chen, have claimed it and rightly extended it to all of Asia), itâs used when non-Chinese people whine about us. Itâs why âMy best friend is Asianâ is racist in more than one way.
2010s: âChineseâ means not just the United Front and the Confucius Institute (which has little to do with Confucius, incidentally), but that all Chinese New Zealanders are part of a diaspora with ties to the PRC. And weâre moneyed, apparently, so much that weâve been accused of buying up properties based on a list of âChinese-sounding namesâ by Labour in a xenophobic mood. Iâve been asked plenty of times this decade whether I have contacts in Beijing or Shanghai. If youâre born in Hong Kong before July 1, 1997, you were British (well, in a post-Windrush apartheid sense anyway), and unlikely to have any connections behind the Bamboo Curtain, but youâve already been singled out by race.
Now, I donât want to put a dampener on any Chinese New Zealander who does have ties back to the mainland and the CCP. We share a history and a heritage, and since I wasnât the one who had any experience of the hardships my parents and grandparents suffered, I donât have any deep-seated hatred festering away. My father visited the old country in 2003 and put all that behind him, too. A republic is better than the imperial families that had been in charge before, and if I’ve any historical power to dislike, I’d be better off focusing on them. So in some respects, there is âunityâ insofar as Iâll stick up for someone of my own race if theyâre the subject of a racist attack. Iâll write about Chinese people and businesses without the derision that others do (e.g. here’s an article on the MG GS SUV that doesn’t go down the Yellow Peril route). But weâre not automatons doing Beijingâs bidding.
Iâll lazily take Tze Mingâs conclusion in the Herald:
We deserve better than to be trapped between knee-jerk racists and Xi Jinping Thought. Abandoning us to this fate is racism too.
I havenât even begun to address the blatant sexual harassment that has since emerged as a result of the scandal, but others are far better placed to speak on that.
Iâm not familiar with The Anti-Media, but New Zealand-based lawyer Darius Shahtahmasebi, who contributed to the site, notes that it was caught up in the Facebook and Twitter purge last week. The Anti-Media, he notes, had 2·17 million Facebook followers. âSupposedly, Facebook wants you to believe that 2.17 million people voluntarily signed up to our page just to receive all the spam content that we put out there (sounds realistic),â he wrote in RT.
After Facebook removed the page, Twitter followed suit and suspended their account.
Not only that, Shahtahmasebi notes that Anti-Media team members had their Twitter accounts purged as well. Its editor in chief received this message: âCareyWedler has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for:â. That was it. Sheâs none the wiser on what violation had been committed.
But here are the real kickers: their social manager had access to 30 accounts, and Twitter was able to coordinate the suspension of 29 of them, while their chief creative officer had his removed, including accounts he had never used. The Anti-Media Radio account suffered a similar fate, Twitter claiming it was due to âmultiple or repeat violations of the Twitter rulesââand it had no Tweets.
Shahtahmasebi has his theories on what was behind all of this. It does give my theories over the years a lot of weight: namely that Facebook targets individuals and its ârulesâ are applied with no reference to actual stated policies. Essentially, the company lies. Twitter has been digging itself more deeply into a hole of late, and itâs very evident now, even if you didnât want to admit it earlier, that it operates on the same lines. Google I have covered before, some might think ad nauseam.
One of his conclusions: âThere is nothing much that can be done unless enough people take a principled stand against such a severe level of censorship.â In some cases, including one Tweeter I followed, it has been to vote with oneâs feet, and leave these spaces to continue their descent without us.
Above: Behind the scenes of the Ć koda Karoq road test for Autocade.
I hadnât kept track of Autocadeâs statistics for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to see it had crossed 14,000,000 page views (in fact, itâs on 14,140,072 at the time of writing). Using some basic mathematics, and assuming it hit 13,000,000 on May 20, itâs likely that the site reached the new million in late September.
The site hadnât been updated much over the last few months, with the last update of any note happening in early September. A few more models were added today.
Since Iâve kept track of the traffic, hereâs how thatâs progressed:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for twelfth million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for thirteenth million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for fourteenth million)
In May, the site was on 3,665 models; now itâs on 3,755.
As the increase in models has been pretty small, thereâs been a real growth in traffic, and itâs the third four-month million-view growth period since the siteâs inception.
Weâre definitely putting in more crossovers and SUVs lately, and thatâs almost a shame given how similar each one is.
With my good friend Stuart Cowley, weâre extending Autocade into video segments, and hereâs our first attempt. Itâs not perfect, and we have spotted a few faults, but we hope to improve on things with the second one.
If you’re interested, you can subscribe to the Autocade YouTube channel here. Of course, given my concerns about Google, the video also appears at Lucireâs Dailymotion channel. Once we get a few more under our belt and refine the formula, we’ll do a proper release.
And, as I close this post, just over 10 minutes since the start, we’re on 14,140,271.
Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political content – something they didn't actually want to do – are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed. That's what has happened to every censorship advocate in history: https://t.co/IZHF8GVkgC
Unlike most leftists who laughed & celebrated when Infowars was purged by Big Tech, I vehemently oppose the censorship and deletion of left-wing pages by Facebook and Twitter.
If you don't support free speech for even your most ardent adversaries, you don't support free speech.
Big Tech isnât afraid of the law, but it is afraid of bad press that could affect its stock price. The Murdoch Press has, refreshingly, stayed on Googleâs case, revealing that there had been another exposure of user data, allowing developers access to private information between 2015 and March 2018.
The company sent a memo warning executives not to disclose this, fearing âregulatory interestâ.
The access was available via Google Plus, which the company says it will permanently close. In 2011 I predicted Plus would be a flop, while tech journalists salivated at the prospect, calling it, among other things, a Facebook killer. A few years later, you couldnât find much support among the tech press, but no one admitting they were wrong.
I had warned regularly on this blog of privacy holes that I had found on Google, with inexplicable mystery parties among my Circles or on Google Buzz, as well as strange entries in my Google account. Iâve talked often about what I discovered with Googleâs ad preferences (something it got away with for up to two years), but Iâve also found YouTube and search history settings turned on without my consent. Murdochs had revealed Google hacked Iphones, which led to a lawsuit. To learn that Google has had a privacy problem, one that it let slip for three years, does not surprise me one bit.
I think the signs of a departure from Twitter are all there. Certainly on a cellphone there’s little point to it any more. As of last week, this began happening.
If you donât seesee me on Twitter as often, itâs becausebecause itâsitâs no longer compatible withwith the Swype keyboardkeyboard on my phonephone. I canâtcanât be botheredbothered correcting faults createdcrcreated by technologytechnology and not me. Other sites are fine.
That last sentence refers only to the fact that Twitter is the only website on the planet where the keyboard is incompatible. (Thanks to Andrew McPherson for troubleshooting this with me.) Other sites are buggy, too: earlier today I couldn’t delete something from Instagram (being owned by Facebook means all the usual Facebook databasing problems are creeping in), and one video required four upload attempts before it would be visible to others:
I couldn’t reply on the Facebook website to a direct message (clicking in the usual typing field does nothing, and typing does nothing) except in image form, so I sent my friend this:
Earlier this year, many friends began experiencing trouble with their Facebook comments: the cursor would jump back to the beginning of text fields, pushing the first few characters they typed to the end. Others are complaining of bugs more and more oftenâreminds me of where I was four or five years ago. And we all now know about Facebook bots, four years after I warned of an ‘epidemic’.
It’s as I always expected: those of us who use these sites more heavily encounter the bugs sooner. Vox was the same: I left a year before Six Apart closed it down, and the bugs I encountered could never be fixed. I’m actually going through a similar battle with Amazon presently, blog post to come.
Now, since Mastodon and others work perfectly fine, and there’s no end of trouble to Big Tech, it’s inevitable that we jump ship, isn’t it?
As Twitter (and other social media) descend, whatâs been interesting is seeing how many of us Kiwis arenât being terribly original. No, I donât exactly mean Dr Don Brash thinking that he can import US-style division into New Zealand wholesale without understanding the underlying forces that helped Donald Trump secure their presidency (in which case such attempts here will fail), but I do mean how later Tweeters hunt for keywords and arguments to defend institutionalized racism, sexism, and other unsavoury -isms, then use imported techniques because they saw on television that they worked overseas.
I recall one not long ago who was evidently looking out for white male privilege, with some pretty standard Tweets prepared and an odd refusal to address fundamental questionsâthat sort of thing. Thereâs little point getting into a debate with nobodies who troll, and itâs all too obvious how they emerge on your radar.
Once upon a time social media didnât have these types, but then once upon a time, email didnât have spammers. Itâs the natural development of technology that humans tend to mess up pretty decent inventions. But, like spam, we find ways of dealing with it.
Race was one that came up over the weekend. Now, if youâre against racism, it would stand to reason that busting false stereotypes would be something that youâd savour. Ditto if youâre battling sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
Iâve mentioned some of these before, e.g. âAsian driversâ somehow being terrors on our roads, something that statistics donât bear out. (Or, for that matter, the total lack of truth about âwomen driversâ, who are statistically safer than men.) Among tourists, weâve established Australians and Germans are the two most dangerous groups. Food has been one thatâs been on our minds lately, since my other half managed to find herself ill from eating at two occidental restaurants, and given the amount of research sheâs done into the area, Iâll defer to her on the subject. Again itâs an area where I hear myths about Chinese food repeated ad nauseam.
The thing is that busting stereotypes gives racists less to go on, less of a feeling of superiority, so theyâll begin countering. Women know full well when sexists attack, and racists follow the same pattern.
A very funny chap sent two swear word-filled Tweets whichâand this is the only interesting thing about themâwere extracted fully right out of the racistsâ playbook. I was only surprised that this was still going on in 2018, hence this blog post, since I thought these signs were so clear by now that no one would be daft enough to try them on.
Their overriding message: dissing a western stereotype makes you a racist.
Akin to the âIâm not the Nazi, youâre the Naziâ Tweets and comments seen overseas, there was a suggestion that my lot was just as racist. Now, I donât deny that any majority race in any country can be racist. Itâs how I met one gentleman in Hong Kong who pointed out racism in a schoolbook that had a Filipina caricatureâI reached out offering to help. Or calling out the treatment of Malays and Indians by certain business people among my own lot in Malaysia. When youâve been the minority for most of your life, you can spot it, and you find it particularly tasteless when itâs perpetrated by your own race. (Thanks to #MeToo, it appears some men are getting better at calling out âlocker-room talkâ, too.)
But this is a diversion meant to cloud the issues. The intent is to criticize the person (by their race) in order to devalue the argument they make, and not deal with the argument itself. They miss the irony of this and it actually validates your original point. If you canât answer something civilly, then you havenât answered it at all.
In Tweet no. 2 (I wish I had taken a screen shot, as it has been deletedâI didnât expect the cowardice) was a variation on âMy best friend is Asian.â This one was about his partner and stepchildren being Asian, and his own son, who is half-Asian, and how he considers himself Asian. Um, no, youâre not, not from the exhibited conduct, but itâs a feeble attempt to scramble to give his own position a status above yours. Again itâs not about addressing the argument (a classic move in social media), but about debasing the opposition. Another one to look out for.
Now, if you really were to address this, wouldnât your best friend being Asian, or having a child with Asian heritage, mean you have a stake in busting myths that could harm that person? Thatâs not something they really care about, even if it harms those supposedly closest to them. (And those of us in New Zealand have a negative history with the term âAsianâ, so I doubt youâd actually use it in referencing your âbest friendâ. Youâd actually know their heritage, whether it was Iraqi, Asiatic Russian, Japanese, Kazakh, or whatever.)
Then there are the emotive overreactions, the falsely placed righteous moral indignation that this group is particularly good at. Itâs to make you think (unconvincingly) that your statements have potentially offended not just the racist, but, shock, horror, all right-thinking people.
Think about how a normal person would have reacted, and you have to conclude that no one jumps to uncontrollable shaking anger, the keyboarding equivalent of firing a gun as a result of road rage.
Thereâll be aspects of one or more of these in social media, and those who are combatting prejudice would do well to spot the signs.
To me, these are signs of unstable characters, akin to an adult having a tantrum. Or they specifically fish for things to make them angry. Now, I donât know how they dealt with their powerlessness ten years ago, but now they surf among us, hoping in vain to drag you to their level.
So given they are still around, the local body elections next year are going to be interesting, because you donât need the Dirty Politics crowd to coordinate it now: itâs a lot easier to provoke this dying group with fake news and let them run riot. On the other hand, itâs also a lot easier to spot them and see the conceit behind them.
Weâre a small enough country for most of us to know this by now anyway. Or so I hope.
No, this isn’t my idea: Reed Allman used a version of this in his Medium post about de-Googling.
Looks like Iâm not the only one writing about de-Googling, even if this piece in Medium is many years after I wrote about my efforts in 2009â10. (Here’s an even earlier one.)
It does mean that others are becoming warier of Googleâs privacy intrusions, if itâs now a mainstream issue. Reed Allmanâs piece is very good, and it was interesting to see that it took him 36 days and upward of US$1,500 to get free of Googleâs clutches. Iâm sure it can be done for less with some judicious use of certain services. It’s far better having it all in one place (unlike my documenting nearly a decade ago), and his guide is bang up to date.
I will recommend Zoho ahead of others as a Gmail alternative, only because of personal experience and Zohoâs excellent customer service. I havenât used Zohoâs office programs but I assume they are the equal of Google Docs et al.
He does conclude that he didnât feel others were convinced about following suit, which is sometimes how I feel when these warnings fall on deaf ears. (And youâve already heard me go on about other Big Tech players elsewhere.)
In amongst all the political fallout of the National Party this weekâwhat Iâm dubbing (and hashtagging) âcaught in the Rossfireââwas a series (well, over 100) Tweets from Morgan Knutson, a designer who once worked for Google. Unlike most Googlers, especially the cult-like ones who refuse to help when you point out a fault with Google, Knutson decided he would be candid and talk about his experience. And it isnât pretty. Start here:
As my final post on Google Plus, I posted 
