This was originally posted on blogger. Let’s talk about Salesforce. Maybe you don’t care about them or what they do –  frankly I don’t either – but many people from my school want to go work there. Their internships will give you free housing and lots of money. And according to the stock market they’re worth 171 billion dollars.

First I should say what they do, because the name Salesforce isn’t exactly self-explanatory. Salesforce analyzes a bunch of data. They provide a service, selling special software and algorithms that only they and their Berkeley-educated employees know how to use. Let’s look at their website and see what they say.

Turn more contacts into customers.

Mkay.

Collaborate to close deals faster.

Good word, collaborate + the age old adage: always be closing.

Reduce customer response time and build positive, lasting relationships with your clients.

Ah. Maybe Salesforce is some kind of therapist, letting you help your clients and help them find out their inner fears. And if customers respond faster, you can connect more often – kinda like a booty call.

Now this is interesting, because even though Salesforce does a very innocuous thing, they’ve had a lot of criticism. (I’m just looking at their Wikipedia page, so don’t take this as high quality investigative journalism).

1. RAICES donation refusal. The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services provides legal services to immigrants in the US. They also provide housing for people being tracked down by certain authoritarian governments who don’t want foreigners in a country. They do a great thing. But when Salesforce tried to give 250,000$ to them, RAICES refused the donation. Jonathan Ryan, then director of RAICES said, “the technical services you [Salesforce] provide to CBP form the foundation that helps ICE operate efficiently… your software provides an operational backbone for the agency. There is no room for hair splitting when children are being brutally torn away from parents, when a mother attempts suicide in an effort to get her children released….” Interesting, maybe RAICES is just too picky.
2. Assisting in sex trafficking. In 2019 fifty anonymous women filed a lawsuit against Salesforce for profiting from and facilitating sex trafficking on Backpage.com, which Salesforce does analytics for. But, I mean, come on – everyone does a bit of shady business now and then, right?
3. In 2018 Salesforce, along with dozens of other rich companies, paid an effective federal tax rate of 0%. That money’s supposed to give schools, food, and clean water to Americans. And instead, it’s going to Salesforce executives – and perhaps a Berkeley students’ internship stipend.

Maybe these breaches in morality are okay though, a means to an end. Because Salesforce does a good thing, right? They’re helping small businesses grow. They’re building authentic relationships with customers. They’re closing deals and growing the economy.

But let’s dig a little deeper into Salesforce’s language.

Turn more contacts into customers.

This is targeted advertising. Actually, it’s worse than that, because with the troves of data that Salesforce has they find out everything about their customers – much like Facebook constructs ghost profiles of non-users. This is not advertising – it’s hypnosis, behavior manipulation via technology.

Collaborate to close deals faster.

Closing deals faster? This is a fetishism of productivity. The companies that make best use of “analytics, reporting, and forecasting” are the big ones, the ones that’ll grow even richer with these tools.

Reduce customer response time and build positive, lasting relationships with your clients.

There is not a “positive, lasting relationship” – there is an exploitative, abusive one where Salesforce and their partners turn you into a raw material. They want your money. Your attention will be bought and sold – and so too your votes or purchases – with Salesforce’s help.

“Agh, okay Rohan. We get the point,” you say. “Salesforce is evil, and I’ll never work there.”

No, no. I don’t blame you, or any of my Berkeley friends. We live in a system that encourages us to think these ways and value questionable technology. In fact for some, a job at Salesforce may be the best thing out there (or maybe not! You should explore).

But for god’s sake, don’t brag that you got an internship at Salesforce or Snapchat or TikTok or the next cool thing out there. Don’t talk about data science or artificial intelligence like it’s going to save humankind (It’s probably doing the opposite). Don’t read those company slogans and think you’re at all making a difference, because that’s not the point of a corporation. Working under capitalism should be something you don’t want to do, but you have to – kind of like voting for Joe Biden or eating your veggies.