Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  As this realization sank in, Sara decided to take a trip to Houston, a five-day vacation that was both a chance to see some friends and an opportunity to find out how Stephen would fare in her absence. On her third day away, she received a phone call, informing her that he’d gotten into another car accident after drinking too much. Although no one was hurt, the accident shook her profoundly, causing her to wonder what might happen the next time she left his side. The thought of living with this fear for as long as they were married frightened Sara, who had always valued her independence. A few weeks later, she told Stephen she wanted to split up.

  Sara relayed all of this to me over dinner at a restaurant in Los Angeles, around the corner from the apartment in Hollywood to which she’d moved after she and Stephen separated. She had come to L.A. to make art—more specifically, to make movies. She was now a graduate student, enrolled in UCLA’s acclaimed film school. The inspiration to apply to the program had come from one of the few new friends she’d made after the Deepwater blowout, a documentary filmmaker named Margaret Brown who had reached out to her back in 2011, after coming across her Survivors paintings. Impressed by the work, Brown asked Sara whether she and Stephen might be willing to appear in a film that she was making about the Deepwater spill. Under normal circumstances, the answer would have been no: after the blowout, neither she nor Stephen felt any desire to expose their lives to an outsider, much less an outsider pointing a camera at them. But Brown, who had grown up in Alabama, was a fellow southerner and fellow artist with whom Sara felt a connection. Her film, titled The Great Invisible, came out in 2014, deftly interweaving stories of the human beings whose lives were devastated by the spill—rig workers, oyster shuckers—with vignettes illuminating how quickly business as usual resumed once the disaster faded from the headlines. In one scene, a former chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon who was badly injured by the blowout talks about the less visible emotional wounds that he bears. “It makes me feel guilty ’cause I played along,” he says as his wife prepares a slew of pain and anxiety pills for him to take. “A lot of things that I was doing, I knew were wrong. I feel really guilty for working for BP.” In another scene, a group of executives attending an oil and gas trade show in Houston toast the industry’s resurgence on the deck of a luxury hotel. After lighting up cigars, one of the executives says, “Personally, I think we should tax the living hell out of gasoline.” “That’s a political statement,” another objects. The argument eventually goes the way of the smoke wafting over the table and the carbon emissions the oil industry belched out year after year, drifting into the atmosphere as the executives sip cognac and agree that what most Americans want is for gas to remain cheap and plentiful. “They love their cars and they love to drive,” one of them says with a chuckle.

  A decade after the Deepwater disaster, when lockdowns and travel bans during the coronavirus pandemic caused the global demand for oil to plunge, some analysts speculated that this ravenous need for cheap energy might finally be changing. Millions of Americans suddenly stopped taking flights and driving to work. At one point, the pandemic caused the price of oil futures to fall below zero, prompting some to suggest that fossil fuels might soon lose their significance in the metabolism of the modern world. As sea levels rose, forests burned, and the effects of climate change became increasingly dire, oil would inevitably be phased out, some argued, giving way to a new era of clean, renewable energy. A few energy companies themselves seemed to be betting on this (and making plans to cash in), including BP, which, in 2020, announced that it was investing billions in renewable energy and embarking on a path to becoming a “net zero” emissions company.

  To the extent that the pandemic altered behavior in a lasting way, leading more and more people in America and other countries to work from home and travel less, it was certainly possible to imagine the age of oil ending. On the other hand, plenty of analysts had wrongly predicted this in the past. At the start of the pandemic, fossil fuels still dominated global energy consumption. The plunge in oil prices wouldn’t necessarily help motivate consumers to install solar panels in their homes and telecommute. It could have the opposite effect. “If you look at SUV sales they’ve gone beyond their stronghold in the US,” an industry analyst told the Financial Times a few months after the coronavirus pandemic began. “Cheap oil is likely to exacerbate that trend.” Without support from the world’s leading economies, moreover, the shift to cleaner forms of renewable energy was likely to remain a pipe dream. During Donald Trump’s presidency, such support was sorely lacking from the United States, which, in 2017, pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty on climate change that went into effect in 2016. The move was consistent with Trump’s “America First” energy policy, which called for opening 90 percent of America’s coastal waters to offshore drilling. The agenda appeared to shift dramatically under Trump’s successor, Joseph Biden, who, on his first day in office, announced that the United States was reentering the Paris Agreement and that he was elevating the climate crisis to a national security priority. But bold steps to address the effects of climate change were still likely to meet with stiff resistance in Washington, not only from lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry but also from many elected officials. In the Republican Party, acknowledging that these effects resulted from human activity was increasingly rare.

  For years after the Deepwater blowout, Sara had avidly followed such developments. By the time she enrolled in film school, she’d taken to tuning them out. What she wanted now was to focus on her own well-being and to channel her feelings into the one thing that had always come naturally to her—visual art—this time by making a film that would fill in some of what The Great Invisible left out. When Sara watched the film, she felt validated, she told me. But she was also disappointed. One reason for the disappointment was that none of the friends she’d invited to a screening in Houston—people from Katy who, like her, had grown up in oil families—showed up. Sara attributed their absence to the fact that, like the people in Frankfurt with whom Everett Hughes met after World War II, they lacked the will to know about things that might make them feel implicated. “They didn’t want to talk about it,” she said. “They still don’t want to talk about it.” One guy she knew, a friend whose father had been involved in designing the well that caused the Deepwater blowout, told her that she and Stephen “should just get over it,” she told me. Later, the friend apologized and told her he felt awful about what had happened. “He carried a lot of guilt,” she said.

  The other reason watching The Great Invisible upset Sara was that although she and the wife of another rig worker appeared in the film, their role was mainly limited to talking about the ordeals their husbands had undergone. As always, it seemed to her, the spouses and family members were pushed to the margins; they remained invisible. In her Survivors paintings, Sara had made a point of foregrounding the experiences of family members by including people like Chris Jones, whose brother died on the rig, and Natalie Roshto, who lost her husband. “I think ‘survivors’ extends much further than the guys that were just on that rig,” she explained. “I wanted to make sure that people saw the layered effects that occur. Your children get affected; your family gets affected. It’s not just—there’s an explosion, your husband’s hurt, that’s it. It keeps extending out quite a bit.”

  What Sara said about rig workers was true of all forms of dirty work, it dawned on me later. It didn’t just stain and tarnish the lives of individual workers. It tarnished whole families and communities, lingering in the minds and memories of the people with whom dirty workers interacted and shared their lives. The dirty work of caging human beings in crowded, violent prisons affected not only corrections officers but also their spouses and children. The dirty work of staring at screens on which human beings were blown to pieces by Hellfire missiles made it difficult for some drone operators to feel much when learning that members of their own extended families had died.

  The next day, Sara invite
d me to watch another film, a narrative work she had made that elaborated on this theme. It opens with a U.S. Coast Guard transmission at 9:51 p.m. on April 20, 2010, indicating that an explosion had taken place on an oil rig in the Gulf. The rest of the film toggles back and forth between two women—one in California, the other, modeled on Sara, in Texas—who learn the news and try to figure out if their husbands have survived. We watch the women register the initial shock. We see them strain not to panic as images of the burning rig appear on television. Eventually, the woman in Texas starts randomly calling the burn units of hospitals in the Gulf, and later, after seeing a report on the news describing the accident as catastrophic, stumbles onto the front patio of her house, screaming and sobbing.

  The screening took place on the UCLA campus, in a theater located next to a sculpture garden dotted with jacaranda blooms. Sara and her peers gathered there to present their final projects in the narrative-film class she was taking. After her film was shown, Sara sat on the edge of the stage, fielding questions from her peers. Then she went home to “numb out,” she told me. The hardest thing about watching the film wasn’t looking at the images, she said at a diner where we met for brunch the following morning. It was listening to the sounds, which brought back the terror and helplessness she’d felt on the morning of the disaster. “The screams were hard,” she said. “That was really hard.”

  After finishing brunch, Sara and I took a walk, strolling along Melrose Avenue before turning onto the street where she lived, which was lined with flower gardens and lemon trees. Her apartment was halfway down the block, a one-bedroom flat with walls adorned with Peruvian rugs and a couple of paintings. Sara had not put any of her own work up, but she did have it with her. At one point, she went into the bedroom and returned with a stack of canvases wrapped in brown paper that she laid out on the living room couch. It was the Survivors paintings. We stood over the portrait of Chris Jones—lips sealed, face blue, eyes brimming with rage. “He was furious,” she said, “but so sad.” Next to the painting of Jones was the painting of Stephen, wearing a vacant, glassy-eyed stare. Sara told me it was the hardest painting in the series to draw, because its subject was both so close to her and so distant. After the blowout, “he just took off,” she said, drifting away to escape a world he’d lost faith in. Despite their separation, Sara clearly didn’t blame Stephen for this. “I just think about what it’s like to have such a tender soul and then have, like, everything bad put in front of you,” she said.

  Before I left, Sara brought out one other painting, an unfinished portrait of a young boy crouching next to a stone walkway shrouded in plants. Frogs and lizards scurry through the yard where the boy has bent down to play. It, too, was a portrait of Stephen, as he’d appeared in a family photo that his mother had sent to Sara. It showed him in more innocent times, she told me, in the one place that had always managed to bring him a measure of solace—nature. “That’s where he went to,” she said.

  9

  Dirty Tech

  The stigmatized institutions where dirty work unfolds tend to be located in isolated areas with a high concentration of poor people and people of color. But aren’t plenty of morally distasteful jobs performed in wealthy pockets of the country as well—places like Wall Street and Silicon Valley? And aren’t many of the white-collar professionals who do these jobs also at risk of feeling dirtied by what they do?

  In the spring of 2016, an assistant professor of mathematics named Jack Poulson left Stanford University for a job that seemed to carry no such risk. The job was at Google, which, that year, was ranked as the best place in America to work by Fortune magazine, both because of the perks—high salaries, gourmet meals served in the cafeteria of Google’s lavish headquarters in Mountain View, California—and because of the company’s moral cachet. “Don’t be evil” was Google’s motto, a slogan that would have seemed grossly out of place at a fossil fuel company. At the time, it did not seem out of place at Google, certainly not to the chorus of evangelists who hailed the digital revolution as a utopian development that would empower ordinary people and make the world a better place. The latter phrase appeared more than once in the letter that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, drafted when the company went public in 2004, affirming their commitment to making information more accessible and to creating a more connected world—which, it went without saying, would be a better world. “Google is not a conventional company,” the letter proclaimed. “We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place.”

  Jack was thirty and was hired as a research scientist in Google’s Artificial Intelligence Division. Many Google employees came to the company with advanced degrees in computer science. Jack’s PhD was in applied math, but he possessed the technological skills and the slightly nerdy habits of a typical “smart creative,” the term that Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, and Jonathan Rosenberg, the former vice president of products, used to describe the ideal Google employee in their 2014 book, How Google Works. On weekends, Jack liked to read math textbooks and write open-source software. One of his heroes was the British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell. He also admired iconoclastic thinkers such as George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, writers who appealed to his skeptical sensibility and independent streak. It was this sensibility that fueled another hobby he’d developed—reading investigative journalism.

  In August 2018, a piece of investigative journalism posted on an internal Google message board caught Jack’s eye. The subject of the article was a version of Google search that the company was planning to launch in China. In theory, such an undertaking was perfectly in keeping with Google’s stated mission to broaden access to information and make the world a better place. Repressive regimes such as China were indeed where the internet could foster the most dramatic change, many analysts had assumed at the outset of the digital revolution, foiling the ability of governments to censor and control the flow of information. But according to the article, which was written by Ryan Gallagher, a reporter at The Intercept, and drew on documents marked “Google confidential,” Google’s project in China, code-named Dragonfly, posed no threat to China’s authoritarian government. Instead of challenging China’s restrictions, the documents indicated, Google had chosen to comply with them, developing an Android app that would automatically identify websites barred by the Great Firewall, an online censorship apparatus that the Chinese government had erected and designed. “When a person carries out a search, banned websites will be removed from the first page of results,” Gallagher reported. The app also blacklisted “sensitive queries,” for which no results would appear at all. Among these blacklisted terms were “human rights” and “democracy.”

  Like most Google employees, Jack had never heard of the Dragonfly project. Although he wasn’t involved in designing the app it described, one of his responsibilities was to improve the accuracy of a component of Google search across a variety of languages. The idea that Google customers in China would be steered only to websites vetted and approved by one of the world’s most repressive governments was chilling to him. Equally chilling was the thought that Google’s app, which required users to sign in to perform searches—activity that might then be linked to their personal phone numbers—could expose users to harm. The Chinese government didn’t just censor content on the internet. It also conducted aggressive online surveillance, monitoring the views expressed on social media and using mobile phones to eavesdrop on the conversations of human rights activists, some of whom wound up in prison. This was hardly a secret to Google, which had entered the Chinese market in 2006. Four years later, in 2010, the company pulled out of the country, after discovering that Chinese security forces had hacked into Google and accessed the Gmail accounts of numerous dissidents. Among the targets of the operation was the artist Ai Weiwei. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Sergey Brin, whose family had fled the former Soviet Union during his childhood, cited his family’s experience in a totalitarian cou
ntry as a factor in the decision to withdraw. “At some point you have to stand back and challenge this and say, this goes beyond the line of what we’re comfortable with and adopt that for moral reasons,” he said.

  After the Intercept story appeared, a coalition of human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights in China, sent an open letter to Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, calling on the company to cancel Dragonfly or risk “directly contributing to” human rights violations. Some Google employees dismissed this concern, arguing that Google’s presence in China could help change things for the better. In Jack’s view, the problem extended beyond China. He failed to see how the Dragonfly project could be reconciled with Google’s AI principles, which stated that the company would neither build nor design “technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” As an email he sent to his manager made clear, he also failed to see how he could continue to do his job without feeling complicit in human rights violations. In the email, Jack laid out his concerns and indicated that unless someone with more knowledge of the situation could address them, he would resign.

  “VOICE” AND “EXIT”

  If fossil fuels powered the global economy, digital communication linked it together. The transmission of information across wireless networks was no less important in the metabolism of global capitalism than oil, creating an interconnected world in which products, services, and ideas could be posted, shared, and downloaded by anyone with a mobile device or laptop. For a while at least, there seemed to be few downsides to this development and nothing but praise to lavish on the forward-thinking entrepreneurs who facilitated it. “In the public consciousness, high tech is the antithesis of that old-fashioned, fossil fuel–driven industry,” observed two reporters back in 2000. “The news media normally discuss the new technologies as digitally clean, trafficking in information rather than goods, thriving on creativity rather than muscle.”