Breaking news: someone at Google grew a spine. Earlier this month, after a dozen employees locked themselves inside a manager’s office and refused to leave until their company ended the war in Gaza, Google called the cops and had them all arrested. Then, along with dozens of their friends, who also considered it perfectly acceptable to perform various acts of “civil disobedience” within the halls of the actual company where they “worked,” the degenerates were fired. But the real surprise came last week, at the end of another one of CEO Sundar Pichai’s nothing-statements on AI, in which he introduced the company’s new “mission-first” philosophy. Google, he wrote, “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” While a relatively benign statement to the untrained eye, this was in fact a stunning departure for the House That Built Crazy, and so we arrive, some seven years after its clownish incarnation, at the conclusion of tech’s “bring your activism to work arc,” in which a silent majority of kind, hardworking idealists were bullied into submission by a minority of actual psychopaths clawing for workplace power behind a cloak of virtue.

It’s been a long road to sanity, and a little bit of celebration is in order. But the industry remains in great danger of reversion back to tech’s recent Maoist norms, and the mission-first policy, increasingly widespread, has proven the entrepreneur’s most successful tool for self-defense in America’s ongoing culture war. Here, a retrospective on the policy, a brief history so that we don’t forget ourselves, and exclusive comments on the subject from two of tech’s most courageous leaders.

Obviously, everything begins with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, who famously chartered the industry’s course away from workplace activism back in 2020, at the height of America’s mass hysteria, with a first-of-its-kind mission-first policy. For his courage, he weathered total war from the tech-loathing press. He regrets nothing. Following this recent bit of Google news, I reached out to the man with a mission for comment.