Future Tense

Future Tense

The Friction Artists

How engineers learned to feel good about what they build

A Z Mackay's avatar
A Z Mackay
Dec 16, 2025
∙ Paid

About a dozen Google employees resigned over Project Maven in 2018. Not thousands. Not hundreds. Twelve. The Pentagon’s machine-learning contract that sparked 4,000 petition signatures and months of internal controversy ended with roughly twelve people walking out publicly. Google declined to renew the contract. Something shifted.

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