It was in Wojcicki’s Silicon Valley garage that Larry Page and Sergey Brin began building the search giant. Brin later married her sister, and Wojcicki stayed with the company, rising through the ranks and holding a number of major roles before being appointed head of YouTube in 2014.Wojcicki was seen by many Google employees as more or less a member of Brin and Page’s family....
So that was never a very encouraging sign of the ability of women to rise to power in Silicon Valley.
Over the years, Wojcicki... faced scrutiny over how YouTube handled problematic content. During her tenure, activists and regulators around the world criticized the company for allowing hate speech, misinformation and conspiracy theories.... Wojcicki... made the decision, along with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, to ban Donald Trump from YouTube after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. When Facebook said earlier this year that it would rescind its ban on Trump, the focus swung to whether YouTube would do the same. YouTube’s ban remains, for now.
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I hope that somewhere in the WaPo article they review how successful YouTube is and detail how it became successful under Susan Wojcicki's leadership.
Althouse said, "So that was never a very encouraging sign of the ability of women to rise to power in Silicon Valley."
I thought we had established that marriage and sex were no longer disparaging methods of gaining feminine empowerment in 3rd wave feminism. The secret order of the pussy hat declared it in a secret session right before Hillary launched her campaign in 2015.
We attempt to "prove" the success of women by the numbers in all fields being equal, rather than by methods which measure whether women are getting what they want out of employment. This should be the aim of feminism. We never see this kinds of metrics because we all know that "progressives" won't like the answer. Large numbers of women would rather be home raising a family, and large numbers of men would rather be supporting a woman at home raising his kids. These people don't count for a large number of reasons.
It wouldn't be the end of the world if AI created a new reality where half the workforce was redundant, and they could stay home raising children.
YouTube's censorship problem is not about Trump. YouTube is still a popular venue to start a brand, but once started, YouTube is quick to either demonetize or ban just about anything. I've seen content creators sued for music copyright, despite having commissioned the music in the first place, but some bot copied that music, put it a search algorithm, came across the video and filed multiple fraudulent copyright complaints to YouTube for the creator to be demonetized. I watched a video yesterday by a woman that creates armor for cosplay that brilliantly explained the silliness of sexualized female armor, yet she expressed in the video her fear of being demonetized because she uses the word "boob". I watched another video that was initially taken down by YouTube for gratuitous violence when it was about a ship capsizing in downtown Chicago. There was no intentional violence in the video, but it did purposely discuss the great loss of life involved. Yet it triggered someone, and YouTube took it down. Hiding behind "but we banned Trump" is hardly a fig leaf covering the disgraceful censoring under Wojcicki's leadership.
For live music, music videos, and entertainment YouTube rocks. Old Johnny Carson shows, stuff when MTV was good.
But their censorship and politics suck like the rest. Won't matter who is CEO.
But...I still wonder with "women's rise to power" shows that are as thirsty for totalitarian control just like men throughout history. It could even be worse because they are cloaked in the fake "we are more sensitive" bullshit.
Women have proven themselves equal to men when it comes to abuse of power and slinging bullshit that harms the masses.
Why don’t you try and build your own thing, ladies?
The thing you're not allowed to say: It was in her parents' garage, and it was because of friendships and relationships, and the neighborhood and civilization built by others which allowed her to use her talents.
This is true of most of us, most of the time.
It was the brilliance and hard work of both Brin and Page, and their efforts that much of her luck was created, and the opportunities for her revealed themselves.
But it was probably also her intelligence and abilities, her relationships, and her sisters', that help make many things be managed competently and the engineers not to be fucked with and to grow the platform (and some incompetently imo)
I'm so tired of the radical pose, the destruction in its wake, and so tired of feminist cant and (S)elf-radicalism, which must view men as oppressor and women as oppressed.
But it's an industry, mostly parasitic, doing dirt on good writing, clearer understanding and reasonable politics.
You helped use the battering ram, Althouse, and they bash you with it from time to time. In your view: Probably worth it for the sake of freedom, and opportunity. That could well be true.
But the costs aren't discussed nearly as much as they should be.
It’s the tired old Aaron Sorkin line If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.
Does it never occur to women to invent Facebook?
At first glance, with the addition of the twitter files revelation, it would appear that this is a victory for the free speech movement. But if look further, the stepping down is touted as a failure to censor enough. The woman was weak, as the stereotype predicted... or something.
Put away those Champaign glasses.
Silicon Valley has long been the land of nepotism -- those with money spend a lot of time on smoke-and-mirrors marketing about tech superiority even as they bring along friends and family. Handing out salaries to an ingroup might be viewed as embezzlement or money laundering by some, but surely isn't different than how our government functions.
YouTube truly needs a change of leadership. They've been censoring the most solid stuff we have on COVID. Dr. John Campbell became downright paranoid after receiving a strike for criticizing "authorities." He said "I'm critical when I'm allowed to be." He's now politely hostile and politely enraged, and runs videos that show other elected officials speeches with perhaps disclaimers about his own views.
YouTube also went on a "gun accessory" strike-fest. I heard that people received timeouts for merely screwing devices to the end of the barrel. They then noted that James Bond films and all sorts of action movies do exactly the same thing, and asked why those too were not removed. Perhaps it was an untrained overzealous censorship team or bowing down to activist pressure to maintain government contracts (see the actions of the FBI regarding Trump, etc.)
In bed with the boss. In bed with the government. Happy family.
Journalistic accounts of CEO transitions are always strangely devoid of details about what the departing and successor CEO are actually like as human beings and as managers. I can understand some reasons for that, but the effect is that the news is vacuous. All we know is name age gender and years of service. It's like walking around the graveyard and trying to piece together the lives of the dead.
So that was never a very encouraging sign of the ability of women to rise to power in Silicon Valley.
You know what was an encouraging sign? When Musk hired Gwen Shotwell to run SpaceX for him. Everyone including Musk acknowledges that she is as responsible as he is for SpaceX's success.
But Musk is evil now, so that doesn't count.
.. more or less a member of Brin and Page’s family....
So that was never a very encouraging sign of the ability of women to rise to power in Silicon Valley.
serious question: are there, a LOT of women? That made it on their own; instead of who they were related too?
Sounds like an improvement. Youtube has been a champion of censorship.
"So that was never a very encouraging sign of the ability of women to rise to power in Silicon Valley."
As encouraging as it could be. It's not like there are thousands of women building hundreds of great companies, rising to power on their own creativity and drive. Is there any great company built mostly by women, any great fortune they made on their own? Lululemon. Oprah. Some Chinese companies. Others?
It seems that, at long last, we are finally discovering a great truth of sociobiological science, that men and women are . . . different.
It is always disappointing when women are deprived the opportunity to be partisan, incompetent censors, just like the men.
It doesn't matter how she got the job nearly as much as how well she did at the job, and no one can say she didn't do a good job, YouTube now being the undisputed long-form video powerhouse (and more recently a cable-TV alternative).
Is DC not the same?
Hillary Clinton, please call your office.
Shorter WAPO: No one cares about female Silicon Valley executives so let's make this about Trump.
Isn't gender just a social construct? If anything a man can do a woman can do then why does it matter if we're counting men vs. women? Either men and women are different, or they're not.
Where are my sensibilities supposed to be on this?
The two most impressive startup founder / CEO I have met were both women, and were both the technical inventor as well as operational boss. Both in the medical device industry. (GYN, and orthopedic surgery)
One was very successful and fairly quickly sold the company to a major firm. The other i sadly lost track of, but was certainly having no trouble raising funds.
Will Cate: I agree. She's arguably done a pretty good job (competence is a high bar). I'm pretty happy with Youtube (with some exceptions)
What does matter as I see things. Because feminism has such radical roots, many similarly placed people will either get a fair chance to shine, or they won't, based on their connections, BUT we now have much more entrenched envy, division and a politics of semi-Marxist complaining. Sure, you opened things up for all women some percentage of the time, some connected women some of the time.
But at what cost? A rearranging of our civilization towards the '-Ists' and a kind of semi-functional liberal idealism, which overlaps with the radicals/activists, and which create a new secularized and postmodern body politic.
What's probably still true: Strong, ambitious men will pursue their own fortunes, and they'll be attracted by, and will attract, strong, beautiful women. New clubhouses will be built. The socially sentimental move towards 'rationalistic' men (centrally rationalized idealism), women, and gay men/women, won't be where all the action is all of the time.
A lot of the other traditions, religious belief, and more masculine enterprises (blue-collar and war fighting) will be relegated to a lesser status or constantly attacked.
I don't recall a lot of women, nor feminists, arguing thatthis much social division, postmodern drift, radicalized elements in our institutions, and weakened instuituions and anew authorianism were part of the deal.
Freedom is next. Liberation is good. ....lots of creativity....blah blah. It'll all work out.
Ampersand said...
Journalistic accounts of CEO transitions are always strangely devoid of details about what the departing and successor CEO are actually like as human beings and as managers.
Not in the case of Theranos. That is a great story of how accomplished older men were fooled by a pretty young college dropout with a fake invention.
No worries, they're all feminized men.
Leland - I believe I saw that video. Jill Bearup, correct?
Just some background on Youtube. It was founded in Feb 2006 by Chad Hurley and 3 other men. After the Google Buyout for over 1.5 billion, Hurley continued on as CEO until 2010, when he was replaced by another man Salar Kamangar, the 9th Google employee. He managed Youtube until Wojcicki took over in 2014. When he turned the reins over, Youtube was a multi-billion dollar segment of Google, and most of the copyright issues had been resolved.
Wojcicki had nothing to do with youtube founding or developmet. SHe was parchuted in 9 years after it was founded, because she was the sister-in-law of one of the Google founders. Her Degree was in Marketing. And she didn't decide to Ban trump. She went along with the decision made by Google's CEO.
Now, if you want to talk Gender, her role in Youtube is typical of women execs. THere are exceptions, but in general its men who start the companies, make them successful, and then when its a stable business and just needs to be "managed" - a women is brought in. Because it doesn't really matter too much who is in charge. Especially when its just a segment of a bigger conglomerate. Women can be good at managing things. They just aren't good at creating things. In Business/Engineering terms.
I'm glad when women or blacks get a chance. Some live up to it and some join the Whimper League - DIE, BLM, etc. - and spend their time sending in nominations of Republicans and dissenting Democrats for Hitler of the Month or Fascist of the Year
Sarah Huckabee Sanders got her start in politics through her father and gained traction working for Trump. Now, as Governor of Arkansas she's raised teacher's salaries to get education going in Arkansas and she's implementing a strong school choice program. So the good teachers get a good salary but the Teacher's Union is undercut. The public schools must improve or lose students. Pretty smart, huh? Not going to happen here in Milwaukee but, of course, here we're all in with Black Lives Matter. Wherever you see that logo, BLM, you know you are going to see a high murder rate and a low graduation rate in the public schools in the black community. That's what we have. They say our mayor favors those who look like him. Hmm. What's going on is favoritism just the way the black cops in Memphis were favoring Tyre Nichols. I just have to turn my attention away. It's too sad.
You cannot make women study tech. And of those who do, you cannot mandate excellence. I'm not saying women don't have the intellectual heft. I'm saying it just may not be an area of interest and all the wishing and whining cannot make it so.
People will be what they are. It's not a shame. It's not racism or sexism. It's not a devious plan. Sometimes human nature is the culprit. Challenge science. Or challenge the creator when you get the chance.
That is a great story of how accomplished older men were fooled by a pretty young college dropout with a fake invention.
She was the female role model sans achievement. A handmade tale conceived to signal their virtue and an object of leverage in DIEversity theology.
That said, it could have been worse. She could have been reduced to a gender, a sum of her sex-correlated attributes. As it was, the progress of a colored, self-abortive choice. Fortunately, only their capital, and not their lives or liberty were at risk.
You cannot make women study tech.
Neither women nor men, who are both equally and separately influenced by Her choice.
Fortunately, only their capital, and not their lives or liberty were at risk.
Although, the last should certainly have been a consideration, if the investigation could demonstrate criminal intent.
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