Let's acknowledge "nondisparagement" clauses for what they are: one party's intent to intimidate another. They are a coercive tactic not unlike those deployed by dictatorships or cults: designed to invoke fearfulness and repression of facts or truth.

The courts are very reluctant to hear any of it from contract-smacking plaintiffs going after people they claim "disparaged" them. The whole basis of our judicial system in the US was designed around citizens' rights to criticize overbearing institutions (like the monarchy of Great Britain when a lot of people decided to ship out) freely and without fear of repression by the institutions being criticized. Hence the extensive First Amendment protections that came soon thereafter.

Google, that great beacon of transparency, was accused in a lawsuit of using a broad confidentiality measure that prevents employees from ever talking about their work at Google—or, hilariously, from so much as writing a novel about a Silicon Valley tech company without company approval.

This is disconcerting. The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to rely upon a set of public values rather than fine-print legalese. Employees should be encouraged to challenge the upholding of values at every front... even publicly, if necessary, if that company diverges from what it says it's all about.