One Percent - Pirate Wires
Tech’s crazy people problem still a problem, fyi. Another week, another culture war attention heist at Apple. Employees demanded Tim Cook speak up about Palestine, The Verge’s Zoë Schiffer reports. But let’s be a little more precise: 1000 employees signed a letter asking Tim Cook to speak up about Palestine, and Zoë once again — three stories in a row now — omitted the essential piece of context that Apple employs close to 150,000 people. That’s a “demand” from less than one percent of the company.
I’ve written at length about the expectation technology companies publicly support the cultural and political positions of their in-house activists, something I think both inappropriate and more clearly by the day contributing to a culture of workplace harassment. But the expectation Tim Cook personally take a stance on so complex and highly-polarizing an issue as war in the Middle East is truly a bold new ask from the industry’s craziest people. Not only does this have nothing to do with Apple, it’s easily one of the most complicated geopolitical questions in modern history. For example, while activists at Apple want Cook to speak specifically about Israel’s “illegal occupation” of Palestine, the Gaza Strip, aka a massive chunk of Palestine, is controlled by Hamas, the fascistic, theocratic terrorist organization not only responsible for launching 4,000 rockets at Israel, beginning with the barrage that began this most recent conflict, but for the brutal oppression of men and women throughout… Palestine. Among the group’s many horrific human rights positions, a few notable highlights: Hamas is in favor of the total subjugation of women, Hamas is in favor of hunting down and executing gay men, Hamas is in favor of a Jewish genocide. To be clear, I don’t expect Cook to speak out against a group of mass-murdering fascists half-a-world away, I’m just wondering what the rest of his employees would think if he took an activist stance in their favor, and why isn’t this part of the story? Has anyone asked the ninety-nine percent what they think?
In last week’s absurdist foray into the priorities of Apple’s activists in residence, a petition demanded ‘accountability’ for the hiring of the critically-acclaimed, bestselling author of Chaos Monkeys. Unlike the demands for a workplace discourse on Palestine, this drama could at least be forced (if dishonestly) into a broader conversation about respect in the workplace, which many people other than committed activists might justifiably care about. Even still, the petition was only signed (allegedly) by 2,000 employees. This seems to indicate Apple’s perennially furious activist class maxes out somewhere in the 1,000 to 2,000 range, and likely closer to the bottom end of the spectrum. Behold: the technology industry’s One Percent.
