A dense revolving door moved 258 people between Google and the US government

Evidence

Second, with the 2012 election in sight, an interview with the Washington Post in 2011 found Schmidt boasting about another fortification strategy: “The staffers are young—the staffers get it.… So that’s what we depend on. And of course we’ve hired ex-staffers as well. They all know each other. So that’s how it really works.” Google’s political utilities paved the way for the unusually crowded and fast-spinning revolving door between the East Coast and West Coast centers of power. The Google Transparency Project analyzed the movement of staff between the Googlesphere (the company plus its affiliates and its law and lobbying firms) and the government (including the White House, Congress, government agencies, federal commissions, and national political campaigns) during the Obama years. It found that by April 2016, 197 individuals had migrated from the government into the Googlesphere, and 61 had moved in the other direction. Among these, 22 White House officials went to work for Google, and 31 Googlesphere executives joined the White House or federal advisory boards with direct relevance to Google’s business. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 397

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the surveillance-capitalism ‘installed base’ claims of earlier chapters and to later work on tech lobbying (e.g., Eubanks, or the broader platform-governance literature).