1. Since a corporate restructuring in 2015, Google’s parent company is called Alphabet, and Google is technically a subsidiary.
2. Perl is a programming language that was once widely used on the web.
3. TVCs are temps, vendors, and contractors. This is Google’s term for its contingent workforce.
4. By late 2015, Google had scanned more than twenty-five million books from more than a hundred countries, in four hundred different languages. According to Google, there are approximately 130 million published books in the world.
5. According to The New York Times, Google employed 121,000 TVCs and 102,000 full-time employees by March 2019.
6. Doxing is the practice of collecting and publishing an individual’s personal information on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
7. 4chan and 8chan are message boards popular with the alt-right, while Stormfront is a long-running neo-Nazi forum.
8. While Google offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine as early as 2000, it didn’t officially launch Google.cn until January 2006. Google.cn provided censored search results, in compliance with Chinese government regulations, until it closed in 2010.
9. Cambridge Analytica was a British consulting firm that worked on political campaigns around the world, including Donald Trump’s presidential bid in 2016. In March 2018, revelations about the extent of the firm’s data-harvesting operations on Facebook caused a major scandal.
10. Dragonfly was a search engine prototype being developed within Google to enable its reentry into the Chinese market. It returned censored search results and recorded users’ searches. In August 2018, The Intercept published a leaked internal memo about Dragonfly, which is how many Googlers discovered the existence of the project. Following the disclosure, workers mounted a campaign to shut down Dragonfly.
11. Baidu dominates the search engine market in China, and is the second-largest search engine in the world after Google.
12. On October 25, 2019, the Pentagon awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft. Amazon lawyers filed a lawsuit to challenge the move, alleging that President Trump’s personal hostility toward Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, led him to interfere in the procurement process. In February 2020, a federal judge ordered Microsoft to stop working on JEDI until Amazon’s suit is resolved; the following month, the Pentagon asked the court to let it reconsider aspects of its contract, which was granted. As this book goes to press, the future of JEDI is unclear.
13. In April 2019, two of the organizers of the Google walkout, Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker, went public with claims that they were facing retaliation from management for their role in the action; Stapleton left the company in June 2019, with Whittaker to follow shortly after in July. In November 2019, The New York Times reported that Google had hired a consulting firm that specializes in union busting. The same month, management fired four employees who were active in worker organizing.