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Boards should have more apprehension about their companies being exploited as political platforms by employees. It's as though there is a bargain where in exch
by motohagiography 5y ago
Boards should have more apprehension about their companies being exploited as political platforms by employees.
It's as though there is a bargain where in exchange for boards tolerating staff radicalization, these employee groups cheerfully overlook the dystopian, totalitarian surveillance infrastructure, environmental devastation, and political corruption machines they seem to have zero problem building and managing on their behalf, and decieving users into depending on them. One doesn't even need to take a side to recognize the bitterness and contempt in tech toward red state denizens. I've sat through numerous meetings where all the shibboleths were trotted out to make sure we were all on the same political page before senior executives engaged in what would be considered hate speech against working class people in any other context. If calling people "trash" isn't hate speech, I really don't know what is.
There still exists a group (perhaps even a majority) in society who are good and charitable people with an immense amount of tolerance for this stuff because they believe tolerance is the price of principles, and they're only principles when they are hard to keep.
Radicalized platform company employees do not have a single moral leg to stand on in this regard. Bringing your whole self to work to build defacto social credit systems and partisan social engineering and surveillance tools is just moral licensing. Maybe that's how they sleep at night. While they found a new way to take a few more minutes of peoples time to show them outrage and advertisements, at least they mouthed the right party lines in favor of distant oppressed people they don't know personally?
I know a number of people in tech who sincerely believe they do not need to be good men or women by any standard because they are self justified by being engaged not in discourse, but ideological warfare. I used to think they were misguided idealists and I thought their passion could be used for good, but I've come to realize they are just dispicable.
All I can recommend is, don't let yourself be bullied.
- etrabroline 5y ago> Boards should have more apprehension about their companies being exploited as political platforms by employees. The ownership of these companies are the ones pushing these politics. Their employees are just pointing out their hypocrisy.
- fighterpilot 5y agoThey are, and the reason for this was given in the GP: "It's as though there is a bargain" The board and executives know who weilds the stick. If it's the left that generally wants higher corporate taxes, more regulation, more anti-trust, and they control the media, then they're the ones that you want to appease as a bargain. Adopting wokeness is significantly cheaper than all the alternatives. The right mostly wants to leave companies alone (aside from the "censorship" issue in social media), have little representation in mainstream media, and are not on social media as much (due to age), so companies don't see them as a threat and don't need to kowtow to them.
- 8note 5y agoThe right mostly wants companies to push the politics of their owners, ensuring that the payments keep flowing from the companies to the right wing leaders.
- kodah 5y agohttps://howmuch.net/articles/the-30-biggest-political-donors-on-the-fortune-500 https://howmuch.net/articles/the-30-biggest-political-donors... Democrats get paid a lot more by companies than Republicans do. In fact, drastically so.
- justbored123 5y agoI fail to see your point, you seem to contradict yourself in an attempt to justify your own bias. Are you arguing that the solution to the problem you mentioned: "dystopian, totalitarian surveillance infrastructure, environmental devastation, and political corruption" is to avoid radical politics at work??? So, what do you propose? That the board (that is responsible for those horrors) steps in an remove / do away with these "radicals" in a "totalitarian" manner??? That is your solution? It sounds that you are no different from them, just have a different agenda and you are perfectly fine with them and their methods as long as they are aimed at the people you don't like.
- nearbuy 5y ago> tolerance is the price of principles, and they're only principles when they are hard to keep. I like this line. I might steal it.
- Barrin92 5y ago>All I can recommend is, don't let yourself be bullied. well the shareholders are always free to write the software that earns them their money themselves then. Completely aside whether I agree with the rest of your post, this isn't about people being bullied, it's simply about tech workers exercising their very considerable bargaining power to pursue their goals which have transcended earning a paycheck, which is their right. This is the free market everyone in tech loves, negotiating for political leverage is just a higher form of compensation Turns out tech firms love disruption, except when their own work model gets disrupted