It’s fair to say there are those that want Mountain View to be Capitol Hill. They want politics to be a focal point of the tech industry in Silicon Valley. They want their worldview to be incorporated in what’s produced. It’s a convoluted path with a lot of tip-toeing around.

This is also why there is motivation for employees to continuously dig up dirt on Google and leak it to The Intercept: because the group wants to make it political. Wouldn’t it feel great to stand before a crowd and say “I fought ‘the man’” over “I decided to walk away”? Broadly speaking, who is the fight actually against?

There’s more news (at least in the tech circle) about employee protest of Dragonfly than what Dragonly actually is or how it works. Clearly it’s censored, which puts people off, but what is Dragonfly censoring, how is the censoring done, and who keeps track of what is censored? Given China already has Baidu running (which I will over-simplistically call Google’s knockoff), this isn’t China’s first rodeo with crafting a search engine, so there must be some cooperative development plan in place that is much less covered in these articles.

Further, the worldview expressed surrounding the concern of building a censored search engine for China often ignores that Chinese internet users aren’t all stupid. Yes, there is the Great Firewall. For 10+ years, that has not stopped users in China from finding “hacks” to access Google and censored websites, and share the information online. I understand the sentiment that access is still limited to many Chinese out there; however, from my experience of interacting with Chinese natives and ex-pats (which isn’t a perfect sample, but w/e), it’s not like Chinese people live under a rock as much as Westerners sometimes think. Even without Google, there is still a huge online culture in China.

I get that ethics is hardly a simple matter. The employees at Google can follow their own compasses. The real story is that a small group thinks their compass should be the direction everyone follows because it is “right”, and it’s being used on a project so publicly vague there’s more controversy than evidence.