#twitter workforce
Photo
He’s only officially owned Twitter for 17 days.
#Twitter#Elon Musk#Blue Checkmark#Listen the Ted Cruz and Bush Impersonators were just....comedy gold#but this?#Elon is crashing the stocks of companies HE DOESN'T EVEN OWN#people warned him this exact thing would happen and only conceded#'maybe this is dumb' and then did it anyway#maybe this will finally dispel the ridiculous media image of him as some genius real-life Tony Stark#meanwhile Ely Lilly - having done literally NOTHING - not only lost BILLIONS in stock#because the stock market is all the worst elements of automation and human greed#but now them having to tweet that Insulin is in fact *Not* free#is sparking conversation from people asking 'Yeah but WHY is this extremely cheap to make life-saving drugs SO EXPENSIVE??'#and they deserve all of it#and I'm not even gonna touch the Lockheed thing because HOLY SHIT#I feel sorry for all the small time artists and people whose living depending on the networking and visibility Twitter provided#and of course the huge swaths of Twitter's workforce that were kicked to the curb on a fucking WHIM#but I am also loving the chaos#is making a lot of very rich people and companies very very miserable#Capitalism#Stock Market#Social Media#Billionaires
162 notes
·
View notes
Text
#free gaza#free palestine#gaza#palestine#from the river to the sea palestine will be free#israel#pray for palestine#ceasefire#america#usa#canada#tweet#twitter#doctors#work discrimination#discrimination#medical field#petition#workforce#medical professionals#medical staff
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
Nothing tells me someone’s age range and twitter usage faster than seeing ‘OOMF’ being used.
#and i cringe with my whole body every time#you can call me a boomer if you fucking want#i think all twitter lingo is dumb as fucking hell#but i also think all of the twitter culture that has bled into reality is fucking nauseating#the way that people unironically intentionally cant write a complete sentence anymore#but 'just because youre old and thats how you say the rule is doesnt mean its right'#no but it DOES mean no one outside your little posse knows what the fuck youre saying half the time#if you unironically write your texts and an actual fictional story the same#i will back out so damn fast#and worry about your future job prospects#as someone who has already had someone in the workforce attempt to write in that manner#and quickly realize it wont fly if you want to retain a real job
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
this resurgence of the housewife is concerning
#pls women pls use your heads and stop begging for your rights to be taken away from you#we’ve really idealized the life of the housewife and convinced ourselves that its just sitting at home making a bed cooking here and there#and that its the peak of luxury and femininity#when in reality being a maid and nanny and having your identity reduced to how you serve others all while being unpaid#is not actually an amazing life. and you’d think these women would have understood this from second wave feminism. but no. here we are#see theres a couple reasons why we’re seeing this response#I think women have genuine frustrations with capitalism and rather than wanting to improving working conditions#theyre pointing the finger at feminism and the whole concept of “working" itself#and that neglects the idea that a housewife is the same soulless labor that working in a factory or fast-food or retail is#as well as the fact that women have been working forever whether it be in the form of a housewife or actually in the workforce#like need I remind you WOC in the us never had the opportunity to be the middle class suburban housewives#and im sure some women are housewives and are happy with this lifestyle and good for them!#but I assure you theyre happy with their job because they have a good relationship with their husband and kids#and by good I mean their husband doesn’t just value them for their ability to cook and clean and have sex with them#and the reality is that the majority of men especially the ones who are urging women to be housewives aren’t interested in an equal marriage#because if they were they would let you decide if you want to be a housewife and notlurking on the streets of twitter begging for one#I need you all to know that being financially dependent on someone else is not good for you. because what the fuck are you gonna do#if youre unhappy in the marriage and you wanna leave but you can’t provide for yourself#you’re fucking screwed and this is why women abandoned this lifestyle#also this lifestyle is practically unattainable for most of us cause in the nature of capitalism the middle class will disappear#and more people will have to work so goodbye!
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
the craziest part about Twitter imploding has been the mindboggling speed that it's happening at. i hate Elon as much as the next guy, but a few weeks ago i was still telling myself that like. okay, sure, he's an idiot, but it's not like the CEO personally has his hands on every aspect of the business, right? he might kill Twitter eventually, but it'll be a death by a thousand cuts as he slowly introduces useless and hated new features. he would have to actively TRY to kill the company as soon as he takes over to truly do something disastrous.
and then within 12 hours of the deal going through he's fired half the company and a few days later he's down to like 15% of the original workforce, none of which know how to do things like "reboot the servers" or "send out paychecks" or "not be in flagrant violation of legally binding federal agreements with the FTC". fucking incredible. this is like watching your drunk cousin light a firecracker at your 4th of July cookout, and you're worried he's gonna try to throw it and might fuck up by holding onto it too long and blowing his hand off, but before you can say anything, he swallows it instead
17K notes
·
View notes
Text
Full thread from Sam on the SAG strike and Dropout!
[ID: A thread from Sam on twitter, as follows: "A thread about the strike and Dropout production: 👇✊.
I stand in complete and utter solidarity with our striking performers. I myself am SAG-AFTRA, as are others on our executive team, having come from the world of working actors.
I am nothing but sympathetic to their cause and outraged by the mafia-like behavior of the major streamers and AMPTP. It is harder than ever to make a living in this industry, and that goes even for the lucky few of us who get to work on meaningful projects.
In the meanwhile…
🤑 Uber-rich CEOs and shareholders are cashing in like never before
💸 Major streamers are gambling millions on dubious projects and business models
🍾 Hollywood is hiding profits and playing the victim while drinking champagne aboard their superyachts
Dropout production is right now on hold. Because we aren't associated with the AMPTP, it's possible we may be able to reach an interim agreement with SAG that allows us to continue to produce content during the strike.
But we'll only do that, obviously, if we get the blessing of the union and the buy-in of our performers. If not, we have enough content in the can to last us a little past the end of the year.
I pride myself in that Dropout has always paid above SAG minimums. As the years go on and the company is healthier, we will strive to do even better, and then even better still. Without the talent of our performers, we are zilch. Zero. Nothing."
Attached is an instagram post from an actor reading: "The Netflix show in question is shorter than a traditional half hour. But @ collegehumor and @ dropouttv paid me MORE than that for one of their scripted series. Dropout was a brand new online platform at the time and they still managed to pay their actors more than NETFLIX for scripted short form content."
Thread continues: "Public companies don't do this for the very simple reason that they feel more indebted to their executives and shareholders than they do their workforce. It's why corporations are so often exploitative.
Our industry, because our jobs are so desirable, is especially vulnerable to exploitation. Hollywood takes advantage of that by making us feel generally commoditized, cheap, and replaceable …which is ironic given just how personal our work so often is.
That's why unions - and the power of collective bargaining - is so important: because public companies often won't pay their workforce any more than they're forced to.
As for me, I intend to honor my union's position that I not promote SAG productions as a performer -- even if they are produced by me.
That means that I won't personally be promoting any of our shows for the time being.
Attached is a screenshot of Sam on Discord responding to the question "given the strike… what picket line chant will you be rockin'?" with "i'm a talent / CEO! me says me has got to go!"
Thread continues: "This year, instead of running a FYC campaign for Game Changer, we donated $10k to the Entertainment Community Fund in solidarity with the WGA. Today, in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA, I'm personally matching that donation with another $10,000.
If you have any disposable income, I encourage you to donate as well: https://entertainmentcommunity.org. And as soon as I test negative for COVID, I'll see you on the picket line. ✊"]
4K notes
·
View notes
Text
Being on twitter, as is dies is like, literally giving me anxiety. So many relationships with people you've never met, on other sides of the planet, that are just going to disappear, because an asshole billionaire decided he knew was 'real free speech' was, and destroyed the company in under a month.
#i seriously want to cry#goodbye twitter#rip twitter#twitter#elon musk#it's dying#it's really dying#most of the remaining workforce QUIT today
0 notes
Text
WebNewsify : Twitter drops flagship developer event as CEO Musk trims workforce (Ld)
WebNewsify : Twitter first organised the developer convention in 2010. In June this 12 months, then CEO Parag Agarwal had introduced that the corporate was bringing again the Chirp convention in November.In a tweet, the corporate stated: "We're at the moment onerous at work to make Twitter higher for everybody, together with builders! We have determined to cancel the #Chirp developer convention whereas we construct some issues that we're excited to share with you quickly"."We'll nonetheless have a good time the soon-to-be-announced winners of our Chirp Developer Problem - keep tuned for extra particulars," the corporate added.Amir Shevat, Twitter head of developer merchandise, did not disclose any particulars however posted: "Winds of change".The occasion was scheduled to occur in San Francisco within the US on November 16.The corporate had additionally introduced a developer problem with prizes valued at over $520,000.The cancellation comes as Twitter is going through turbulent instances underneath Musk, with job cuts and product adjustments on the fly because the Tesla CEO desires to make Twitter like TikTok, with films, video games and extra to reach on the platform quickly.He has additionally sought to revive the microblogging web site's short-form video app Vine within the TikTok period.Musk has informed Twitter workers that the platform must change into extra like TikTok if it desires to attain his objective of reaching one billion customers.
Read the full article
0 notes
Text
"Judith Love Cohen, who helped create the Abort-Guidance System which rescued the Apollo 13 astronauts, went to work on the day she was in labor. She took a printout of a problem she was working on to the hospital. She called her boss and said she finished the problem and gave birth to actor Jack Black.
"Judith Love Cohen was, at various times in her fascinating life, an engineer who worked on the Pioneer, Apollo, and Hubble missions, an author & publisher of books about women in STEM and environmentalism in the 90s, a ballet dancer with the New York Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company, an advocate for better treatment of women in the workplace, and actor Jack Black's mother. From an obituary written by her son Neil Siegel after her death in 2016:
“'My mother usually considered her work on the Apollo program to be the highlight of her career. When disaster struck the Apollo 13 mission, it was the Abort-Guidance System that brought the astronauts home safely. Judy was there when the Apollo 13 astronauts paid a "thank you" [visit] to the TRW facility in Redondo Beach.'”
"She finished her engineering career running the systems engineering for the science ground facility of the Hubble Space Telescope.
"During her engineering career, she was a vigorous and tireless advocate of better treatment for women in the workplace. Many things that today we consider routine - the posting of job openings inside of a company so that anyone could apply, formal job descriptions for every position, and so forth - were her creations. She had a profound impact on equality in the workforce.
(via @historyinmemes at Twitter)
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
Gonna need to put Mary Kirby + other long time staff being fired into perspective because this isn't a recent development. Bioware has been plagued with issues for well over a decade, and it's not just because of EA.
When Gaider decided to move on from Dragon Age in 2014, everyone thought it was just because he wanted to move onto a different project. He ended up leaving the company completely in 2016 after working on Anthem for a bit, and it was later reported that staff on the project had issues with his writing. He didn't mention why he left Bioware until very recently in a long twitter thread detailing that, while Bioware is a company known for its storytelling and characters, upper management went from valuing its writers to quietly resenting them, and feeling as though the writing were "holding the company back."
When they started working with Frostbite they encountered so many technical problems with it because it was specifically designed for FPS games. They were literally designing the tools they needed to work on both Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda while they were working on those games. Darrah (or perhaps Laidlaw, I forget which) even acknowledged when he was interviewed by Jason Schreier for Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, that this is a big industry no-no. But Bioware was put in a hard spot to either work with Frostbite or use the Eclipse engine that DAO was designed on (which I'm assuming would've required developing the engine and toolkit further to bring the graphics up to industry standards). So they ended up working with Frostbite which resulted in a fuckton of issues both for Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda, because the teams behind both projects had to design their own tools.
With the added stress of the toolkit also came the toxic work environment, departments that were perpetually understaffed, directors leaving and new writers coming in with different visions for the project, time mismanagement where they spent too much time on "high concept" gameplay, not having a clear vision for the game, resentments between studios, inexperience with coordinating video calls across multiple studios, the resultant mandatory crunch, etc. All of this is mentioned in this article about Mass Effect Andromeda's production cycle and this article about Anthem's.
Casey Hudson and Gérard Lehiany left Bioware in 2014 right in the middle of production on Andromeda (Casey rejoined the company as general manager in 2017, but left again in 2020). David Gaider left in 2016 in the middle of production on Anthem, as did Aaryn Flynn who left before the game was shipped in 2019. Mike Laidlaw left in 2017 and left production of Dragon Age Dreadwolf in Mark Darrah's hands, who left in the middle of its production in 2020. Matt Goldman (creative director for Dreadwolf) left the following year. Mac Walters (production director on Dreadwolf) who's been with the company for over 19 years left in January of this year. Are you seeing the pattern here?
I don't doubt that EA has influence over Bioware considering the recent layoffs appear related to the announcement back in March that EA would lay off 6% of its workforce. But it's clear there's something deeper that's going on at Bioware, and it's really not good.
When veteran senior staff are leaving one by one along with other long time staff, and it's been reported that the studio has a toxic work environment with management issues that make crunch necessary, there is something deeply wrong with the company and how things are being run. This is a sinking ship, and in all likelihood everyone is betting on keeping the company afloat with the success of Dragon Age Dreadwolf and/or the next Mass Effects game.
I want to say something more about how broadly the mainstream AAA video games industry is abusive and how incredibly fucked up their practices of layoffs have been normalized, but this is already pretty long. What I will say is that I'm not claiming this means DA4 or the next ME game is going to tank. It sure as fuck doesn't look good for it, but despite my grievances with Dragon Age, I do want the game to be successful and for Bioware to keep doing what they're doing.
And honestly, whether those games do well or not is really besides the point. Something is wrong at Bioware, whether it's the company itself or the fact it's owned by EA, and it can't be solved with mass layoffs. This is a cultural problem within the company itself, and it's very unlikely to be addressed considering how MEA failing seems to have done little to change how things are being run right now.
#dragon age#dragon age inquisition#mass effect#mass effect andromeda#bioware#bioware critical#ea critical#dragon age dreadwolf#dragon age 4#da4#i was gonna reply to another post but decided to just make my own because i have a lot of shit to say
1K notes
·
View notes
Text
i hate that twitter is too big to break and elon musk is too big too break, so he can continue on driving like a maniac on the wrong side of the road and he’ll still not fail because the platform is still there and everyone is going to continue to use it even as they joke about how twitter is dying, nearly every week. i hate that corporations and billionaires can get away with clowning around and misusing their workforce and we give them our money and our time so they can continue doing it.
698 notes
·
View notes
Text
That quote 'women are unaware how much men hate them' and it's pretty apt right now.
Over the last few years I've spent time looking in manosphere circles and this stuff has been brewing the last few years.
There are compilation videos on YouTube by MGTOW (men going there on way) of women that they hate. Mostly tiktoks about dating and feminism. The comments are full of men who talk about how much they hate 'modern women', they hate that were in the workforce, they hate that women have 'high standards' for dating, the gate childless women, they hate career women, they hate single mothers, they hate religious women 'chameleons' they call them, they hate slutty women and they hate that we can divorce now. A lot of them hate their own female relatives.
It's a real visceral hatred. One comment was a guy saying he only spoke to women when he imagined them as an inferior being. Another said all he imagines when women speak was whether or not his dick fits in her mouth. They discuss rolling back the clock on women's rights or talk about women causing the downfall of the west.
They lament the lack of pure women, saying even 18 year olds are 'ran through', used up, smashed, have '1000 cock stare', unable to pair bond, hypergamous whores. Women over 30 are dried up hags who are hysterical, bitter Karen's destined to either die with cats and wine or divorce rape a beta.
When you look at their profiles a lot seem to normal guys. You wouldn't spot them in the wild. And there is a lot of them. People obsess about white male republicans but a lot of them aren't. A lot of these manosphere channels are run by black men. A lot of comments are left by Indian men who complain about Indian women getting 'tainted' by Western feminism. Stuff like fresh and fit is a starting point but these guys get crazier the more you follow the algorithm. Some are religious but a lot aren't. I saw a lot of 'i hate Muslims but Islam is right about women'.
There's a black manosphere guy who films foreign women in his Uber and asks them 'why aren't American women feminine anymore?' and puts up the videos despite them saying they're uncomfortable
They share tips on getting a young, untainted wife from poorer countries. A lot share videos of their trips to South America or Asia surrounded by young women (sometimes VERY young).
You also have the tradmen, who claim to care for women but also believe they are inferior and illogical, best kept at home to serve and raise babies. They will say they value women's natural role', but it's telling that this role requires financial dependence and an inability to leave no matter what (these guys get angriest about divorce). These are the ones who feel most cheated that an income is no longer all a man really needs to land himself the attractive 20 something he feels he deserves.
Then you have guys really angry about the dating market, whine about Chad and Stacey, the 80/20 rule, height standards and hypergamy. They talk about living for the day women 'hit the wall' and they can laugh at their teenage crush getting older and less attractive. I've seen comments where they hope women ask them out, so they can have the satisfaction of turning them down cruelly.
They can't be normal about anything. One Brit talked about going for a walk, and said all the 30 something women he encountered looked miserable. A woman posts a video of her dog and they assume she's fucking it (dogpill they call it, pornrot more like). A woman posts a video for women about life over 30 and they swarm the comments to say how unattractive she is and that women expire.
There are lots of alpha male type accounts on twitter, usually fronted as fitness advice for men. But there are a lot of posts about women being illogical, childlike, simple minded and often just evil. Lot of younger guys follow these and again, chat about how to bring women to heel.
I know as a woman that being aware of this is very straining for mental health. But I don't think pretending these guys are a handful of gross yet mostly harmless trolls is a good idea. And they aren't just cis white men in their mums basement either. The subway shooter was deep in this manosphere stuff, as was the Toronto van killer, yoga shooter and more I'm sure.
A lot talk about wanting sons, but also how they'd never ever want a daughter. The hate is that deep rooted. The she's someone's daughter' isn't going to help them see women's humanity.
Keeping women dependent is what a lot of these guys want. And some don't even want a wife out of it, just putting women back 'in their place' is enough to make them happy. They love watching videos of women being upset, revel in it.
Removing the right to abortion is one step, they are already talking about repealing women's right to vote and a lot want women out of the workplace.
Like idk what the solution is, but these guys are out there and would like to get more extreme.
6K notes
·
View notes
Note
a lot of people are probably asking you this, but if they aren't... do you have any clue what's going on with bioware? first moving swtor to another studio, which seems like it can be both a good or a bad thing, and now they're laying off 50 more people? studio veterans included?
this just seems like a very weird move to me, if not outright shitty. i want to believe in bioware, i love their games, no matter how flawed they are, but in the three years i've been familiar with them, things seem to be getting worse and worse. i know that DAD is in alpha so probably this layoff won't affect its quality too much, but again, that looks like a terrible move towards the employees themselves and the studio's more distant future.
Bioware is basically following the publisher mandate. In March of this year, EA declared that they were going to cut roughly 6% of their workforce (~800 layoffs) to lower costs, likely because they (like many tech companies) over-hired during the pandemic and need to correct the burn rate to appease their shareholders. These 50 devs being cut are Bioware's unfortunate sacrifice to the layoff declaration. As to whom and why, I suspect it is a combination of things.
Bioware probably had some kind of incubation team working on a secret new project that wasn't a sequel to an existing current franchise. I know that they would often have one or two such teams going at any given time - Anthem was one such project, as was the short-lived Shadow Realms project. New projects like that are much riskier than franchise sequels, so it is likely that the publisher decided that the risk moving forward was too high and they cancelled the experimental projects in favor of focusing on their established brands (Mass Effect and Dragon Age).
It is also likely that some of the long-term veterans are quite expensive to keep - they have high salaries and have been around long enough to collect on many of the big benefits EA offers, like sabbatical leave and the like. There's also the real possibility that there could be some bad blood or major creative differences between the current studio leadership and some of those veterans that were let go.
My heart goes out to those affected and I really do hope they land on their feet. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that employers never deserve any more loyalty than they're willing to give their employees. The employer will never choose an employee over its own survival, so we as workers should expect to do the same for ourselves. I never consider long tenure at an employer to be worth much when it comes to the business decisions, because I know how little it is worth when all is said and done. Business gonna business.
[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]
Got a burning question you want answered?
Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
Frequent Questions: The FAQ
259 notes
·
View notes
Text
You have rich billionaires who control the actual leaders of nations. People who purposefully destroy foreign nations so they don’t harm the central bank’s control in some far off part of the world. People who decided not only that destroying nations across South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America would benefit their reach and influence in the area over there but that the dispossessed people from these nations could serve as a new labor force that wouldn’t be as demanding or as costly as the native workforce over here. You have men who are proud economic hitmen and banking cabal attack dogs who destroy even first world nation’s economies and political autonomy so they are forever subservient to the UK and US ruling class agenda.
But when all the performative eat the rich rhetoric comes out on this site, reddit, twitter, etc just generally with any Gen X to Gen Z fair weather revolutionary it all boils down hating on some gimpy rich boy tech bro type who’s only real sin in the eyes of these people is not kissing the right moral ring fingers everything else is just window dressing and excuses after the fact that they really don’t care about deep down because the moment you name names and bring up the first group of shitty billionaire monsters guilty of all the same abuse of workers and the trust of society and economy they will defend them up and down, deny, downplay, or simply denigrate you bringing up these rich behemoths who rule and ruin so much of this planet.
330 notes
·
View notes
Text
I was stunned to find the number of people in the tech industry who are all-in on the theory of scientific racism and eugenics. They've been out about that for years, though.
There's a sort of complex where this was the birth of, whether you want to call it the intellectual dark web, I think that was the moment there. They've sort of been radicalized gradually, as happens with these things, where they started with, like, Slate Star Codex was a really big key central point for them to gather and sort of say, well, we have to interrogate and question a lot of these (egalitarian) assumptions. They were very actively courted by the neo-reactionary movement.
So you have things like Peter Teal holding dinner parties with the founders of the movement, and sort of people who have explicitly endorsed slavery, explicitly endorsed disenfranchising women, and people of any non-male gender from being able to vote.
And I always resent it because I sound like a crazy person by just merely accurately describing what they have publicly said. I sound like a conspiracy theorist who's pinning up red strings on a cork board by literally being like, “This is a thing they said out loud, in public, multiple times.” And people are like, “There's no way.” And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, but it's all out there. We have receipts for ten years.
They are way out there, and they have an explicit agenda of normalizing, really radical, really hateful agendas.
And for me, it's like, it's just a very simple thing.
It's like I have to care about my kid’s safety. I have to care about my friend's safety, I have to care about, you know, basic moral values that we used to agree on.
And that's the other thing too, is because I knew these people 10 and 20 years ago. Like the first blog that Marc Andreessen ever had, I set up. It was on a platform I helped build. So I know that there was a point in which, at least from the public visible face, this was once a reasonable person. And for them to embrace the sheer intellectual dishonesty, along with the hatred… the fact that they're just like, they don't care that they're lying because it's an effective tool to get what they want.
That stuff is… I don't know.
It really soured me on the traditional tech industry.
This is what their tech is for. The things they fund are meant to carry out their agenda.
Let me give you a clear example: To the people who believe in this extremist racist ideology, Elon Musk being willing to lose tens of billions of dollars in value of his own money, presumably, in Twitter, turning into “X,” is a principled person who puts his values ahead of the dollar. He is so committed to advancing this reactionary movement that he's willing to forego tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth in order to advance it.
And what rational people see as the destruction of Twitter is rather, the destruction of the ability for anybody to ever again make a Black Lives Matter hashtag, or to make a Me Too hashtag. And that is because he's not a dumb person. Like the thing that a lot of progressives and reasonable people want to just say, well, he's racist and evil, so he must be dumb.
He's not a dumb person.
Peter Thiel's not a dumb person.
So if we assume they're smart people who understand how systems work and have virtually unlimited resources, then why would they choose to do this?
Well, there must be a reason.
And there is a reason.
It's just one we don't like to confront.
Even more insidious is the fact that these tech moguls own huge companies with enormous influence, and wielding that kind of power over their employees creates a herd mentality within their workforces.
So if, for example, Facebook's board includes both Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. They don't have to give somebody an order to say what kind of content they want to promote on the newsfeed, on Facebook.
Everybody who works there knows this is who our bosses are. This is what we got to do, because they're smart. Everybody's smart, everybody's very reasonable.
And so you don't have to imagine, like I said, I don't have to be a conspiracy theorist that's putting up some red strings on a cork board to connect the dots and whatever. You're like, “Oh, I'm a midlevel product manager at a company. I'd like to make a name for myself and make the share price go up. And I know the boss's boss has been on every podcast in the world saying we need to promote more voices that are calling for ethnic cleansing,” okay?
Message received.
That's what a person who has no moral context would do. And there are a cohort of people in the technology industry that have come up entirely consuming media owned and created by these people, because they know the programming site Hacker News, which is owned by a venture capital firm and run by Paul Graham, is one of these guys.
They read blogs written explicitly by these guys. They consume it. They were on clubhouse. They're in a Discord chat with others that are sort of buying the stuff. They have a full wraparound media bubble. If they just read substacks and listen to the blog posts or read the blog posts from these folks, you can have what feels like an entire media diet shaped solely by this dialogue.
And this is why they're trying to own the media outlets and the distribution, like Twitter, alongside owning the platforms. And the fact that they can control more parts of society, right? The leverage of owning the distribution networks, the leverage of owning media outlets, the leverage of owning the platforms is very, very different, because we do have a lot of historical precedent.
If we go back 100 years ago and we say you're reeling from coming out of a pandemic, you are reeling from economic precarity and inequality at unprecedented levels, and you see the rise of, again, a direct parallel, virulent antisemitism. And you have things like the oil barons giving way to the Henry Fords of the world, the labor crackdown of the Pinkertons, Ford's embrace of, you know, to the point where he's pen pals with Hitler, and IBM building the technology.
The first person that ever asked me to do technology work for him was a neighbor of ours, and he had a tattoo on his wrist. And I was a little kid and didn't know what it meant. And I asked him what it was. It was his concentration camp tatoo. And what people don't realize is those are database entries in an IBM database.
And IBM's stance at the time was that they were neutral.
This is what technology does to enable the rise of fascism and victimization around the world. And we have a direct precedent less than 100 years ago, of how these technologies are used.
And I don't say that lightly.
I'm not saying we're there yet, but that is how you get there. And I would be surprised if the pattern doesn't play out in some ways, in terms of if you have tycoons of industry at a moment when the world is reckoning with massive social change, cultural change, along with recovering from things like economic destruction, inequality and pandemics… And you have rising military threats around the world.
That is exactly where we were a century ago.
—ANIL DASH shares his thoughts and experiences on Richard Hanania and rampant neo-fascism in Silicon Valley
#anil dash#richard hanania#peter thiel#elon musk#silicon valley#eugenics#fascism#twitter#white supremacy#antisemitism#racism#anti blackness#misogyny#transphobia#homophobia#conservatism#libertarianism#libertarians
149 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
jam-art
:3
updatetoon
일일툰
fishboytech
Fishboy Tech
kookie-culture
spring day
kookie-culture
spring day