The Package
Picture yourself a bright young activist that is coming up in the movements of 2012-2019. You have been wanting to get into the fight, maybe since the whole Save the Whales movement that our generation led… in middle school.
Here you are. You’ve made some good points on Twitter and now you have 15,000 followers. You think to yourself, huh, maybe I can really make something of this, make an impact, help. And to be clear, your intentions are good. And you joined a group, even a small one, and you did that for awhile, and some of it worked. You led a protest, a hashtag, you built a community, you helped get food out to your community, you resisted a new tech office coming into town. You’re coming up, you’re developing your voice, you’re building comradeship and feminist community, people are really listening to you now, people are really starting to rally around you now,
and then they come to you with…
The Package.
It’s a fancy job at a famous company. It’s a book deal, it’s a blog job. It’s a VC fund, or a keynote talk at a major conference, or a teaching position. Hell, maybe they say you have what it takes to rise up in the Democratic Party. Or it’s a TV show you get to write or direct. It’s a non-profit you can be an executive at, or you can start one, we’ve got a grant alllll lined up for you. It’s a meeting at the White House, it’s a consulting deal at one of the most important companies in the world. It’s a salary and a bunch of stock in a new tech startup. It’s a magazine profile, an editorship, a column.
It is whatever your dream looks like, or whatever dream they can sell you.
When you think about the state that our movements are now in — dead as a fucking doornail — please consider that the vast majority of the potential leadership in our movement took the package. I’m not even saying this is a personal flaw per se (tho in many cases it indeed was), but rather, to describe the reality wherein we ended up with most of our people tied up in the corporate, government or non-profit whirlpool, fully out of independent organizing, and we ended up with a major financial reliance on corporations and “The Man” more generally, to fund our movements. Both of these are extreme blows to the movements.
Independent movements are the only ones that work; ours ended up all boggled up in bad money and careerism and thinly veiled bribery. Suddenly people needed to focus on -themselves-, not the movement, but their own new “careers”, their new vocations as full time “personalities” and “thought leaders” and “change makers”. And those careers had their own agendas and their own structures and their own politics… their new agendas.
Trying to express the movement from within a capitalist or non-profit formation is idealistic… and unrealistic. It hasn’t worked, and it won’t work.
Ever.
I think we need to be having a lot more conversations on the left about how this happens, specifically how corporations are able to control and manipulate and defang and generally just pull our people out of movements and into the unending fight to “change things from the inside”, and in the process, slowly bleed our movement dry. It’s a brain drain of the worst kind.
We should probably teach about this like DARE did about drugs.
Don’t take The Package. Not even once.
This is your brain on The Package.
Just ideas.
However, this points us back to having a serious financial issue on the left which is there is no viable, sustainable alternate financial options and apparatuses which to appeal. And people needed money for themselves and for the work. That is very real. Especially as this pattern of extreme, targeted, person-by-person corporate abduction of the movement, kicked off and became rife, the few independent funding attempts that remained were totally abandoned, because they were pumping money into us. This ended up being no more than simple bribery, and it was very effective… for them. Because it turned out that the people who were paying us to fight…. were the people we were fighting.
As we can see now, all else aside, this put us completely at their mercy. We think of backlash to social movements as something that happens in the moment, but in tech we are seeing how the real backlash is actually starting 10 years after the beginning of the movement. Already all of the DEI departments are being dissolved, while the marginalized people they were seemingly fighting for are themselves washed out in layoffs. This was a containment strategy and one that puts the enemy in the position to flush us away.
More broadly, people online have been saying that the market for conference appearances is gone, the college teaching tours are over, there’s no more media left to pay artists and writers, and for those who thought they’d get into “ethical investing” to try to change things at “the source”, VC funding to women in tech is at 2% and dropping. Yes, I said 2%. And that’s important because it is just one way we know that the strategies we tried, didn’t even result in any change; any small change has been swept away.
They know this kills movements.
One of the most effective things that venture capitalists did during the tech movement was they started to hire up all the tech activists from any number of small-time startups, contracting gigs, and generally just extremely harmless occupations, and into big splashy jobs at household-name companies, with all of the lights and all of the fancy offices. In tech, it was earnestly believed, or at least it seemed earnest, that the more powerful position for us was WITHIN the structure, where presumably we could use the structure itself to “make things better”. Obviously, this never materialized.
The thing is, this is their PLAYBOOK. They never gave a damn about making these changes and they were never going to. Instead they managed to get huge amounts of the movement inside of them and running on a treadmill to nowhere. The loss of time and energy and momentum is extreme. These were techniques that they were doing *on purpose*, and knowing full well what it would do to our movements. Some of our best people got hired up and disappeared in the corporate miasma. Some were turned into minor celebrities too busy posing for adoring fans or pursuing their several years in the spotlight, only to now discover that their platform was a hit on the movement, not an elevation of it. Everyone thinks it will last forever and our movements thought they would last forever. Instead, a once in a life time opportunity for social justice was slowly strangled and sucked to death by the system itself.
In the most notable case I observed, there was a company called Github. And Github was at the very very top of the cool, prestige startups to go work at. Indeed, they behaved much as spoiled emperors. In fact, they had chairs like thrones in the offices, along with something like 4 full service bars, a nap room, a tiki bar (I made those up because I’m not going to go look up the full opulence of the thing, but one thing I *can* definitively tell you is that they had a to-scale replica of the Oval Office including a custom-built rug, a seal reading “In Meritocracy we Trust”.) Github was the very height of toxic startup culture. It was almost all white male princes. They threw wild parties where free liquor poured on everyone’s head as people succumbed to alcohol addiction and women were getting sexually harassed and worse. They promoted a structure-less, open-ended, “no manager” system that we found to have a very negative impact on everyone who wasn’t a white man, and that system of lack of accountability and of hidden power structures proliferated across the industry. And of course, they were centralizing and owning a prodigious chunk of code production in the industry. And they were funded by a16z.
Now, a very serious issue came up at Github where a woman there experienced sexual misconduct and when she blew the whistle on the culture there, it created a significant “scandal” in the tech community. Specifically, she was attacked and terrorized by Github employees, sparking a tidal wave of devastating terorrism against her.
To compensate from the backlash to the backlash, Github began hiring up activist after activist after activist, each of whom had been courted with big salary packages, the chance of stock that was surely destined for greatness upon exit, and often a significant public-facing role; many Github employees were mini industry-celebrities of sorts.
And then they just…
Kept going.
And kept going.
A great number of people I had *personally* worked with, and considered to be strong emerging leaders in the movement, suddenly were MORE than willing to overlook Github’s terrible legacy and to throw this poor woman away, pretending she didn’t even exist, while yelling at anyone who questioned them joining. How dare you tell us we can’t make money!!!
Uh… no one said that. They said you shouldn’t GO TO WORK FOR THE ENEMY.
I got in several public fights with people about joining the company and I was deeply, deeply disappointed in multiple of the people that I had considered partners in the movement. The second they got those jobs, they began discrediting other activists who criticized them, already doing their jobs before they even started.
During this event, I saw some of the most cynical, narcissistic set of excuses ever given for selling out, “well if *I* don’t go in there to try and change it, how will it ever change?” This led to transparently disingenuous accusations that critics “didn’t want change” and “just wanted to see the world burn”. Even at the first hire you could see the division that was made.
From then on, GitHub became a hole into which some of the people with the most leadership potential and the most important skill sets in the tech movement continuously disappeared. You never really heard from them again, and they certainly stopped contributing to the REAL movement — because then, it would put their jobs in jeopardy. Nothing ever more came of them except I guess that they all get to claim they slightly diversified one of the worst companies in the industry, and one that has betrayed every purported value of the open source movement: Github hostilely took ownership of all of the code it was hosting, and turned it into the basis of the coding AI software that is already causing , or being used to justify, major layoffs across the sector.
That company ALONE did tremendous damage to the movement, handing out packages left and right. They have unending resources for packages. These are people who are all the time paying away sexual harassment and abuse lawsuits — this was a very similar phenomenon and it didn’t hurt them financially in the slightest, yet it paid off big time.
A common response people have when they are essentially accused of taking the package is that “what, you don’t want to see (insert marginalized group of people here) succeed? Are you saying you don’t want me to have a job? Are you saying I should do all this for free? Are you saying I’m wrong to want to build generational wealth?”
Lots going on here, but first of all: no one fucking said that. Just because we KNOW that taking corporate jobs for the worst companies, taking funding from people we know are the worst people, is a bad idea, doesn’t mean that people think you should be out on the streets or that you shouldn’t have everything you need.
We let our movements become more and more subsidized by The System Inc., and that is a problem because The System Inc. just cut off our phone bill. One of the big problems with how things have gone down is that we don’t even have the internal competency to fund independent movements now… and I don’t know if you noticed, but we are on our own now. Yes, we know how to give money to non-profits and we know how to get jobs and management training and how to build awareness, but we don’t know how to keep our movements afloat outside of corporate and government financing.
I wrote more about the financial crisis the left is facing here, but the most important thing I want to leave you with is this: it is our responsibility as a movement to make it package-resistant. We cannot expect this to be done on an individual level as it is a systemic problem and it is a systemic attack by corporations, etc. on individual activists, and it should be treated that way.
We need more education about The Package as an attack on the movement, and to come to a shared understanding of how this functions and the toll it has had on our movements, as well as the lack of a result that is in any way commiserate to the sacrifice. We need to support each other to keep ourselves out of this. These corporations and entities are very effective at squashing dissent and we need to be mindful of all of those ways.
People DO want to make change but they often don’t see a way via the movement itself… and THAT is a problem. This isn’t only about funding, its also about having, for example, independent infrastructure, free presses, independent conferences and so on, that give people the tools and platforms they need to get work done. WITHOUT the enemy.
But of course the money is the heart of the problem, and specifically, how do we make it possible for people on the left who are vital to our movements, to work on those efforts and to be able to feed themselves and their families and have a roof over their heads; and even beyond those bare necessities, giving people the money they need to get the impact that they are searching for when the enter into the vortex, never to come out again.