BY DANIEL WEY
Impact. Amazon and Google love to talk about their impact while students seeking roles at these companies aspire to make impact with their careers. In my interviews with Princeton STEM students who have considered roles at Amazon and Google, most students talked about making an impact as very important to them. Common definitions of impact centered around “leaving the world a better place than how you found it” and “changing things for the better for other people”—actions very accessible to someone working an Amazon or Google job. As a Princeton computer science student, I’ve heard these ways of talking about impact or “impact-speak” constantly circulated among peers and faculty when talking about tech companies at job fairs or the latest research projects on campus. It’s the product of corporate as well as academic narratives, shaping how people think about technologies, the institutions that make them, and the outcomes that they produce.
In this essay, I’ll focus on troubling the oft-inspirational and aphoristic impact-speak as shaped by Amazon and Google, but this discourse can also serve as a roadmap for deciphering and decoding the impact-speak (tech or not) proliferated by powerful institutions at large. Examining Amazon and Google’s corporate marking as a source of impact-speak, I argue that impact-speak perpetuates duplicitous, colorblind, and ahistorical understandings of Google and Amazon (and Big Tech), masking the oppression overseen by these companies and distracting individuals from engaging in collective change. Instead of the status-quo of impact-speak, I offer guidance for a new language of collective outcomes that situates technology and tech institutions within systems of oppression and efforts for collective resistance as they have existed both in the past and the present.
On U.S. Amazon’s “Our Impact” page, the company celebrates that it has “created more jobs in the past decade than any U.S. company.” Amazon says it actively works “to help communities” by “reducing hunger and homelessness and investing in education.”[1] The narrative is similar on Google U.S.’s “About” page, where the company advertises its mission of “creating economic opportunity … for all Americans.”[2] [cite] The page talks about how Google has created 40K full-time US jobs over the past five years, generated $617 billion dollars in economic activity, and contributed $185 million to support small businesses. This is Amazon and Google’s impact as determined by the very companies themselves. These companies’ impact-speak, centered around universal benefits to “all Americans” and “communities” at large, is of the same brand as the impact-speak I heard from my peers. When impact-speak narrates an ethically conscious vision of Google and Amazon, there’s little room to question Amazon’s claim to “embed respect for human rights throughout [its] business”[3] and Google insistence that “you can make money without doing evil.”[4]
If you’ve read Part 1 of this zine, you will begin to see the duplicitous nature of Amazon and Google’s impact-speak. Amazon and Google’s participation in Project Nimbus flies in the very face of their declarations for human rights and doing good. As these companies proclaim their contributions in the U.S., they actively enable and profit off the Israeli government’s surveillance and removal of Palestinian people from their lands.[5] Furthermore, their impact-speak masks the harm they oversee not only abroad but also in the U.S. Wherever we are situated in the world, we should ask: how is the impact-speak of Amazon and Google (and any other powerful institution) one-sided? What are these institutions hiding with their impact-speak?
Both in the positive impact they claim or the harms they overlook, Amazon and Google fail to acknowledge the ways that they produce outcomes that perpetuate systemic oppression. For example, who is being employed for the 40,000 U.S. jobs that Google has created and the benefits that employment promises? A review of Google’s annual diversity report[6] shows the company’s U.S. workforce is largely Asian and White men, with leadership dominated by white men—groups that have historically benefited and held power in the Tech industry. Simultaneously, as of 2021 in the U.S., Black women make up only 1.8% of the total workforce and are also leaving the company at the highest rate in the last 4 years. The racially skewed outputs of Google’s employment practices reflect how historically dominant groups in tech continue to receive opportunities while marginalized groups are left behind. By excluding race and gender in its impact-speak, Google’s impact-speak masks the ways its “impact” only furthers the oppression of marginalized communities.
Amazon does the same with its colorblind advertising of its product Ring. Selling smart doorbells for civilian homes that can record video and connect to the internet, Amazon Ring’s mission is to “help make neighborhoods safer.”[7] What Amazon quietly hides is that it has partnered with over 2,000 police departments in the U.S.,[8] allowing 1 in 10 police departments in the U.S. to access video feed from Ring doorbells without a warrant.[9] Sold with the narrative of community safety, Amazon Ring contributes to the expansion of the U.S. surveillance and carceral state that surveils and criminalizes Black and brown communities. Ring also operates an app called Neighbors,[10] a social-media app in which Ring users can report instances of “suspicious” behavior to other users—turning neighborhoods into civilian surveillance networks.
Amazon Ring is exemplary of what leading race and technology scholar Ruha Benjamin calls coded exposure. This concept captures a form of discriminatory design in which technologies like Ring are designed to “expose [Black people] to systems of racial surveillance” in a state in which “Blackness is coded as … criminal.”[11] It shouldn’t be surprising then that on the Neighbors app, people of color are often the subjects of “suspicious” reports that invoke racist stereotypes and language.[12] These are the outcomes of a discriminatory product like Amazon Ring.
It’s time that we look past the colorblind presentations of impact-speak and instead examine the outcomes that companies like Amazon and Google produce and whether they contest systems of oppression or further them. Especially when impact is defined as “changing things for the better for other people,” it’s crucial to ask which groups of people stand to benefit.