Thread by @alexhanna

A thing to pay attention to in @sundarpichai's non-apology is this bit:

"One of the best aspects of Google’s engineering culture is our sincere desire to understand where things go wrong and how we can improve."

Google has the notion of a "blameless" postmortem, the idea that if a system breaks, then folks sit down and write up what went wrong, without anyone to blame.

This was brought up by a higher up in a prior meeting as well.

But the idea that HR and @timnitgebru's firing operate like engineering systems (which are already social systems, but let's bracket that) shows how brittle this analogy goes.

There is blame to go around, and we know where to put it.

STS scholars know this game. Cast the failure into a "complex" engineering system, and you've lost the contexts of movements of power -- in this case, the power is corporate, racialized, and gendered.

So @sundarpichai's non-apology is more than just a non-apology. It's a dodge which equates social systems with engineering systems and obscures the power running through those systems.

/end rant