The Rise and Fall of Access
Thank You For Your Feedback Loop is a monthly newsletter that will share previously unpublished reporting and analysis on the elite capture of disability movements.
by: Liz Jackson & Rua M. Williams
In the Year 2000, Google’s 23rd employee, Paul Buchheit was pulled into a “meeting to decide on the company’s corporate values.” He was fairly new to Google, but was keenly attuned to the hypocritical practices of its competitors, and as such, found himself resistant to corporate platitudes.
So, in a mundane, but courageous act, Buchheit suggested “Don’t be evil” as Google’s motto. There were a few interrelated reasons for this, one of them being “a bit of a jab” at those competitors who were exploiting their users. But mostly, it seemed to amuse him, “the real fun of it was that people get a little uncomfortable with anything different.”
It should have ended as a suggestion, but another employee, Amit Patel, backed up Buchheit by refusing to succumb to the person in charge, who was “trying to push “Don’t be evil” to the bottom of the list.” Amazingly, “Don’t be evil” eventually “made it onto the final set and took on a life of its own from there. Amit started writing it down all over the building, on whiteboards everywhere.” This unexpectedly successful act of subversion has come to define Google, because “once you put it in there, would be hard to take out,” which proved to be true.
“Don’t be evil” became so integral to brand lore that it appeared in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s 2004 ‘Founders IPO Letter,’ though “that promise hadn’t been repeated by Page or Brin in their annual founders’ letters” since. Nevertheless, when 2015 rolled around, the time had come to address structural liabilities that had formed over the first decade and a half-or-so of Google’s existence. The world’s largest monopoly was in the throes of an official European Commission investigation for breaching EU antitrust rules. And like so many 16 year olds, it became prudent to ask, how do we protect this incorrigible monster from itself.
The answer? The establishment of Alphabet Inc., a parent company to shield Google from accountability for its brazen anti-competitive practices. Rather than adopt the motto of its wholly owned subsidiary, Alphabet instead helped itself to “Do the right thing,” morphing Spike Lee’s scorching meditation on the ambiguity of justice into a slogan which velvets the iron fist of smash grab power. Google followed suit, relegating “Don’t be evil” to the very last page of its code of conduct (after the conclusion) to maintain the pretense of adhering to it. By pursuing contracts like Project Nimbus, Google proved its full scale abandonment of the "don't be evil" axiom. Project Nimbus is “a joint contract between Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing infrastructure and AI capabilities to the Israeli government and military” with no oversight over its use as a tool of war.
This forms the backdrop for something that happened the year before Google abandoned its motto. In 2014, Page acknowledged he believed Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” had become a constraint, though he was unsure about a suitable replacement.
Since Page’s admission, “Google results [have become] an increasingly useless morass of #SelfPreferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren't good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former,” creating “a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense.” These are the words of Cory Doctorow, a tech journalist who coined the term enshittification to describe the “pattern of intentional decreasing quality observed in online services.”
In an April, 2024 article titled ‘The Man Who Killed Google Search,’ journalist Edward Zitron detailed Google’s decision to replace Ben Gomes, “a Googler of 19 years that built the foundation of modern search engines” because he was worried that Google search, which had previously been kept separate from Google’s ads team, was “getting too close to the money.” Gomes was succeeded by Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist who “actively worked to make Google worse” in order to feed a “monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem.”
The public is beginning to connect their frustration over the engine’s degraded search results to Google’s domination machinations. Just as Google’s abandonment of “don’t be evil” was interpreted as an admission of its villainy, users seem similarly primed to interpret any change to Google’s mission to make the world’s information universally accessible as an admission that it has eroded search. What if, instead of replacing its mission, Google has instead chosen to bend it?
In 2013, Google organized an internal one-day event to “to raise awareness around the importance of accessibility and disability inclusion.” If Google had been thinking about disabled people when Page and Brin wrote “accessible” into their founding mission, there would have been no need for such an internal campaign. What is Google poised to gain as the connotation most associated with “accessible” shifts in the public consciousness from the democratic to the disabled?
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For the past three years Google’s Super Bowl ads have featured disabled Pixel users. Google’s 2024 Super Bowl commercial, Javier in Frame, was lauded by mainstream media; described in the New York Times as a “best of the bunch” Super Bowl ad that they’ll “remember for at least a day or two.” It told the fictional story of Javier, a blind man who documents his life through pictures, and was directed by Adam Morse, who has inaccurately assumed the status of being “the world’s first award-winning blind filmmaker.” Describing his approach, Morse reflects, “right from the first conversation I pitched the idea of using petroleum jelly to impair the lens” of the Google Pixel phone that was used to shoot the commercial to simulate blindness. It was a curious decision in the context of frequently cited studies that detail how simulating disability “promotes distress and fails to improve attitudes toward disabled people.”
This year, Google seemed primed for a fourth consecutive disability-centric Super Bowl ad when it announced Expressive Captions — an AI Pixel feature that “communicate[s] things like tone, volume, environmental cues and human noises.” Perfectly timed and likely coordinated to the Super Bowl, the ad was not to be. Instead Google has undergone an identity change from an illegal monopoly to a federal contractor so compliant that it dropped its original pledge to not create “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,” and “technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.”
As a result, this year’s ad features a wealthy-seeming, white-appearing, stay-at-home dad who is likely to benefit from Google’s recent announcement that it “would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce.” There is scant reporting on how this shift impacts its disabled workforce, but earlier reporting showed that despite claims in C-suite reports, accommodations that employees require to do their jobs have been denied.
At the same time, KR Liu, “Intersectional Disability Influencer” and Google’s head of brand accessibility, was attending high profile events, proselytizing to organizations and companies the virtues of “strive[ing] to make their events and marketing materials more inclusive of, and accessible to, people with disabilities.” Under Liu’s tutelage, Google became the first accessibility partner for Cannes Lions, “the world's most prestigious advertising awards.” The sign language and CART [Captioning and Real-Time Translation] accommodations Google provided on the beach in the south of France were the very accommodations it was refusing to provide internally.
One would think “Advertising's Biggest Accessibility Advocate” would have spoken out, as industry media has decreed her “as influential a voice for the disabled community as you'll find on the corporate carpet.” But, as Paulo Freire describes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.” So, Liu continues on, using her platform to spread the fable that “accessibility has always been core to our company’s mission.”
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This disingenuous talking point, which ties disability to Google’s mission statement, predates Liu’s employment. A 2018 Google Blog post opened by informing readers that “accessibility is written into our mission statement and foundational to our values as a company.” But accessibility is nowhere to be found in Google’s mission, and the multiple connotations of "accessible" creates a semantic flexibility that allows its chosen leaders to shift into whatever virtue is most in vogue at the time.
In 2022, Google UK uploaded a YouTube video featuring Christopher Patnoe, Google’s Head of Accessibility and Disability Inclusion for EMEA. The video description attributed the near verbatim statement from Google’s 2018 Blog post to “our CEO,” Sundar Pichai, claiming he said “accessibility is written into our mission statement and core to our values as a company.”
But there’s no public evidence to be found that Pichai has ever said this. In 2016, Pichai used the word available, not accessible, in a tweet sharing that year’s Founders Letter: “17 years after Google was founded, our mission to make information available for all has never been more important.” Notably, the only mention of access in that year’s Founders Letter - excluding Google’s mission statement - was the exclusive access that would be offered in their now defunct YouTube Red subscription service.
Reading back on that 2018 Google Blog post, the very next sentence did quote Pichai, but he said “Technology’s great promise is to give everyone the same power to achieve their goals. As long as there are barriers for some, there’s still work to be done.” If anything, it shows the urgency that the authors of the blog post felt to link the disability connotation of accessibility in Google’s mission to the authority of Pichai.
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In a 2024 Microsoft Design blog post, Christina Mallon, who is Microsoft’s contemporary to KR Liu, described “Solve for one, extend to many” as “a mantra from the disability community that Microsoft has long used to guide our designs.” But she is wrong. Logics that deduce the expansive nature of disability solutions, including “solve for one, extend to many,” are industry derived and can be traced through the convergence of rehabilitation and technology. For example, Heart of the Home, a pamphlet distributed by the American Heart Association in 1948, claims to be a resource for “the homemaker who has heart disease.” The pamphlet, which evangelized the organization’s authority and relevance, opened by informing readers that “this is important to everyone.”
Industry powers benefit from the misconception that accessibility ethos originates in ‘community,’ because the evocation of ‘community’ makes it possible to absorb public movements into profitable campaigns. For instance, the ‘curb cut effect’ wasn’t coined to describe how disabled people benefited after slopes were cut into curbs, allowing wheelchair users to seamlessly transition from the sidewalk to the street and vice versa. Instead, the ‘curb cut effect’ was explicitly coined as an expression of how something ‘for’ disabled people – curb cuts – benefited everyone else i.e. made sidewalks easier for parents with strollers, skateboarders, the mail person and so on to traverse. It further confirmed what the American Heart Association wrote in 1948, that everyone benefits from accessibility.
As Elizabeth Petrick, associate professor of history at Rice University has found, the phrase ‘curb cut effect’ wasn’t developed to name the impact of curb cuts, per se. Rather, it was deployed by computer engineers, as a metaphor to persuade stakeholders (often, their employers) to invest in making personal computers accessible. The earliest known instance can be found in a program for attendees of the 1979 Interagency Conference on Rehabilitation Engineering and was provided to us by Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden, founder and Director Emeritus of the Trace R&D Center and a Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. It states “curb cuts are a boon to shopping carts and baby carriages” to back up the claim that “technology with a specific purpose — to help the physically disabled [...] also helps the population at large.”
While on the face of it, such declarations for the benefits of accessible design to broader society could point toward our collective interdependence, that’s not how the concept is generally deployed in practice. It is unknown how many, if any, of these engineers were disabled. Petrick notes that “disability advocates began to employ this metaphor in the early 1980s for computer development; by the end of the decade, it was widely used in broader disability and technology advocacy.” The attribution of corporate ambition to community activism obscures a process of elite capture, which “happens when the advantaged few in a group steer the resources [...] toward their narrower interests and aims” according to philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, who authored the book on the subject.
Google’s talking point – that accessibility is contained in its mission – has been most frequently deployed by Patnoe as he has traveled the world, evangelizing Google’s supposed commitment to accessibility. Táíwò clarifies, “elites get outsize control over the ideas in circulation about identities by, more or less, the same methods and for the same reasons that they get control over everything else.” Patnoe is a silver haired white man who arrived at Google from a “white, male privilege space in Silicon Valley,” and “hadn’t really thought about” DEI until he “discovered” accessibility, and has since ascended into a role where is “job is to come to Europe, to Africa, the Middle East, to understand disability,” as he told the Inclusive Africa conference audience in 2022.
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While perceptions of grassroots disability advocacy are used to launder capitalist projects, the spectacle of disabled inclusion and celebration are used to launder militaristic ones. Once Google’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus project was revealed to employees and the public alike, Google scrambled to precipitously quash demands to end the contract for its role in the US-Israeli Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. As a part of their distractory media flurry, Google launched a Rising Influencers with Disabilities (GRID) program.
The cognitive dissonance must have been disorienting for employees, such as software engineer Eddie Hatfield. Hatfield was terminated after he protested Project Nimbus at MindTheTech, a Google-Sponsored Israeli tech conference. During the sponsorship-package keynote given by Google’s managing director for Israel, Barak Ragev, Hatfield echoed the slogan of an internal resistance group, demanding “No tech for apartheid.” Meanwhile, Google was characterizing GRID as “a new influencer fellowship working to increase accessibility awareness inside and outside the disability community” because “people have the power to create community, help others feel seen and spark meaningful change.”
By insisting that Hatfield’s efforts to spark meaningful change, rather than its own technological acceleration of war crimes “had damaged the company’s public image,” Google positioned itself as a “preacher of civility, [who], having assumed the offensive position, leaves the conversation without having to defend their own position.” Google then indiscriminately fired 28 No Tech for Apartheid aligned workers, claiming they “defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers.” Adding, “their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made coworkers feel threatened.” Google officials claimed they “took over office spaces” in an act of protest. The No Tech for Apartheid campaign describes these accusations as lies and an “excuse to avoid confronting us and our concerns directly, and [an] attempt to justify its illegal, retaliatory firings.” Google has not provided any evidence to back up their claims.
This is the environment in which fifteen GRID influencers were given “challenges” to “highlight Google’s accessible products and features” on their individual social media platforms. As a “token of appreciation,” Google paid each fellow a mere “$5,000 in usage fees for the content generated during the [six month] program,” noting “for many in the disability community, a lack of available resources can often act as a barrier to being able to create that sense of belonging online.”
That $5,000 compensation structure obscures the value Google sought to generate by recruiting influencers in the three disability segments (blindness, deafness, mobility) most used in its research. Instead, Google called it a “unique opportunity to provide direct feedback to Google’s product teams, ensuring that the voices of individuals with disabilities are heard and incorporated into the development of future products and features.” This “unique opportunity” is a perversion of the types of feedback we most commonly relay, namely bug reports and evidence of access failures in products and systems we are already tethered to. What these GRID participants are being compelled to provide could create a boon for Google, and the token of appreciation they would receive for this would amount to little more than a “thank you for your feedback” capable of sustaining these creators for a month, at best, while Google continues to accrue profits from the optics of accessibility.
When there are no accountability measures to ensure a meaningful response, feedback is not an opportunity. It’s a risk. You say what they want to hear, and they take it from you. You say what they wish to ignore, and you’re shown the door. For three years, Google workers committed to the No Tech for Apartheid movement “tried basically every avenue possible to try and get the executives to talk to us, at least have some sort of conversation with us, sent petitions. We've exhausted every avenue that we could think of possible” to enact the meaningful change the GRID program alleges. But, “they wouldn't even give a statement or a conversation with us. So we wanted to make it impossible for them to ignore us.”
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The world has changed in astounding ways in the few short weeks between inauguration of 47 and Super Bowl LIX. The executive order to close all DEI offices, programs, and positions within the federal government did something unique, beyond the immediate impact it had on the psyche of marginalized people throughout the nation. It managed to attach disability – through the euphemism of accessibility – to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that traditionally excluded it, thus forming a new acronym - DEIA.
The world has also changed in more subtle ways in the decades since Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated an ‘accessible’ that meant democratically and publicly available – into Google’s mission. The public isn’t just losing access to the “more than 8,000 pages [that] have disappeared from the websites of agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Census Bureau, the Department of Justice, and the Food and Drug Administration.” The public is also losing the language to describe what is happening as the word accessibility becomes synonymous with disability.
It needs to be understood that for all its good intentions, this is the outcome of much activism around disability and technology. It’s the byproduct of a chummy culture, in which corporate advocates attempt to inspire the best parts of the worst amongst us to action. There are two phrases, “the power of persuasion” and “beyond the reach of persuasion” that combined explain why corporate advocate’s claims that ‘everyone benefits from accessibility’ manifests the reverse. Their executive overlord’s power to exist beyond the reach of their persuasion is why ‘accessibility’ has fallen into a trap of neoliberal theatre and neoconservative reactionary politics, to the detriment of the masses. More of this power, unfortunately, is what Google is poised to gain as the connotation most associated with “accessible” shifts in the public consciousness from the democratic to the disabled to the discarded.
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