They are making an example out of Twitter employees. Here’s the message:

I’m going to let you in on a little secret of what is happening with regards to the Twitter layoffs/firings. 

In between 2012-2015, you probably heard about the women in tech, or more broadly, diversity in tech movement. It became a very well known and widely covered issues in the mainstream for obvious reasons, which is that users of tech products had a big stake in the results.

 For a short window of time, somewhere in those years, we were up the bosses’ asses and we - at least - seemed to be making progress — or at least you would THINK so, for all the global news coverage, the infinite conferences and meetups, the codes of conduct battles, the dizzying array of non-profits and coding schools and new tech feminist frameworks… 

Every. Single. Tiny. Gain. we got out of these people since, had to be BRUTALLY, AGONIZINGLY, extracted from the tech elite/VC class over the course of YEARS. *The* most basic things: hire a few more women, think about how your code is affecting your users with a bit more sensitivity, consider not calling the women in your offices sluts and using them like free office sex, etc. The basics. The BARE MINIMUM. Everything took dozens or hundreds of scraps with power, and we didn’t even get there. Anyways…

Perhaps the hardest won progress was at Twitter, where for years, literal Nazi and fascist harassment on Twitter the platform was tearing through our movements and literally chasing people who were simply advocating for things like *checks notes* “more people who aren’t white men in position of power”, into actual hiding. The harassment problem was truly severe. (And do think back to that time, for an indication of where things are going next on Twitter). Point being, the impact of major attacks on liberals and the left from THAT time, reverberate to this day. 

And here its important to note, that what was happening on Twitter in those days was not some kind of mutual argument. Liberals/the left were not attacking the other side almost literally at all, which is fucked up and a huge miscalculation on our part, but you simply can’t say seriously that this was a symmetrical situation or involved mutual aggression that Twitter was deciding to take sides in and mediate. It was very clearly one group of users, un-provoked, attacking another and doing so in ways that were clearly dangerous to the notion of democracy more generally. It was the extremist right, Nazis and growing hate groups that were initiating this conflict. 

(As a manner of reasoning about these things, these issues were collapsed into  “online harassment”. This was a mistake, of course — the “online” part, the platform-specific part, was merely one small component of a much more complex and distributed, organized movement on their side that was NOT addressed as such. This was never an online harassment issue first, it was an organized hate/Nazi/fascist etc. issue, and instead of looking at it in that matter, we flattened into “online harassment” and pretended that we could fix it at that level). 

Nonetheless, the important thing to note is that “online harassment” became THE battleground and proxy war that we were fighting on, and that battleground was… Twitter. 

The platform AND the company became a huge focus of the left/liberals, who were constantly agitating for Twitter the Corporation to implement stricter moderation and policies, and, key point: to HIRE representatives of groups *outside of* the white male base that was leading the attacks, to work at Twitter. Thinking was, we’ll have more people in there who get it. Totally reasonable and in fact, not even particularly political. And yet, in many ways, Twitter the Corporation became the avatar for the fight against technology, for pressure on the industry, and as far as left/liberals outside of the tech industry itself, it was also the major point of contact they had with the tech apparatus. 

After many, many years of uncontested gang harassment, stalking, doxxing, sexual harassment and abuse, hacking, sea lioning, SWATing, etc., Twitter did, eventually, and again, slowly, over years, during which continuous damage was being sustained — slowlyyyyy, they implemented a new set of moderation policies and a more dynamic approach to moderation on the platform that was responding to some subset of the major concerns.  

All along this path, the Twitter employees, who had become public figures to its community, were highly visible as they started, internally, initiatives to diversify the company and, significantly, formed internal groups around shared identities and workplace experiences; these included Black Bird, for Black employees, Twitter Women, I’m pretty sure there was one for queer workers, and there were a few others. 

These groups advocated for changes on the platform, advocated for themselves and for its users, shaped internal education and programming and policy, and were at times working very visibly on social disruptions such as those that took shape during and in the wake of Ferguson. Twitter became REGARDED as something of a “model” for what a tech company with a social justice influence, framework or presence within the company could look like. Twitter quickly acquired a reputation for being an “SJW” company, even though the only material changes we saw out of the scenario were, kicking a few absolute monsters off the platform and having a few internal employee happy hours. 

Greattttt. 

So, an important thing to understand that is Twitter is a.) the center of Silicon Valley intellectual life and b.) probably the most visible base of employees in the country (a pattern which continues). And c.) that Silicon Valley grew, over the very tepid movements against it, absolutely more and more furious with each passing quarter they were asked to provide, I.e. , a simple documentation with the demographics at their company. As we were chipping away at Twitter, crushing any social justice movement in tech became an absolute priority of the industry. This over-reactivity to the specter of “SJW” is interpreted as an artifact of very sensitive egos and narcissism on the part of tech elite, but it is actually about the fact that: even right-leaning LIBERALISM  (which is what Twitter was AT BEST, ever), posits a fully existential threat to the tech status quo. We will not go into it fully here, you can check out the rest of the writing on this site, but tech, much like any version of capitalism you see, is fundamentally reliant on MASSIVE wealth gaps, labor exploitation, gender and racial violence, etc. So what you and I see as very mild-mannered and very reasonable things: banning Nazis, having some employee advocacy groups, the Powers that Be see a splinter that could ultimate lead to a crack. There engineers were letting the users through, into the product teams themselves. It could have broke the dam. 

Yes, this all does play some small role in WHY Twitter was purchased by an elite group of Silicon Valley co-conspirators (Musk is far from the only extremely rich, extremely dangerous, person in the Valley who is totally wrapped up in this), but for the purposes of this post, we are going to watch the HOW (and the why of the how, I suppose). 

I underestimated, myself, how much venture capitalists were FURIOUS about their perception of Twitter as a rogue activist tech company,  how many of them saw *its staff alone* as a threat to their hegemony, and how much they hated the dynamics of feedback between user/platform represented, and so on and so forth. 

(Another issue is that when Twitter had to ramp up moderation policies in response to user outrage, a lot of Silicon Valley elite lost their ability to direct the hate groups that they had bought, paid for, nurtured, etc., but more on that elsewhere). 

Twitter became symbolic of the concessions that the industry had been forced to make. It wasn’t enough for us, but it was enough for them. For them, it was way, way too far. 

In Silicon Valley, Twitter became the frightening threat of what a “woke”, “SJW” (derogatory) company is. And VCs fucking hated that, as did the core of essentially white, Right extremists that are actually the dominant worker core of the industry, as they always had been. Silicon Valley was never liberal, it never even approached being left a single time. It is center right -in public- , and behind closed doors it is the Nazi party itself, is organized fascism itself, is extremist right wing terror cells, etc.  

What you are seeing is a public demonstration that the days of having ANY kind of social justice lens in tech, is fucking over. O. V. E. R. People caught “doing SJW” will be unceremoniously fired and HUMILIATED. The HUMILIATION that is playing out here should not be discounted. This is the whipping boy for 10 years of effort at reform. It would have taken a lot of work to pull off what they have pulled off here: performing a seeming magic trick of eliminating all of its engineers and the site staying up!! It stayed up because of the over 6 month of planning the TOP  people in the industry were able to put it into it; but to everyone else, it looks like it just fired an entire global engineering team and kept the site running just fine. 

Why? 

Because they are acting out the logics of: “SJWs aren’t real engineers and they can’t write code and they can’t run sites and they are just a dead weight on the industry and we’ve basically been giving them welfare” and you can see where this is all going, continue down the train of thought. They are making it LOOK like the stereotype THEY invented, their straw man, and its consequences are just playing out naturally in the market.

People are fretting about Twitter, which they should, but they are not realizing the effects this will have on the rest of the technology industry. Every single tech company in the Valley now has permission to fire all of its “SJWs” (literally just anyone who isn’t a white or Asian man), (and hey, btw, just hide them in industry-wide mass layoffs to get rid of them), and to lean fulllyyyy, and for the first time in a long time, OPENLY, into the true politics of the industry. You think that this is a wake up call; no, this is a call to take the masks off. 

This has been exercised SPECIFICALLY to show that any kind of tech organization that thinks that its employees can have equal representation, power, advocacy groups, can have really any say that diverges from capital’s interest in any way or COULD, will be smashed to fucking pieces by the people who run the show, the people within it totally humiliated (and perhaps even made unemployable, there’s a strong blacklist threat coming through) . 

The reason this is not provoking any widespread tech worker organization project is because this was a very specific demonstration for a very specific set of engineers and tech employees. It is the bell: DEI is over. Women in tech is over. And even… giving users a voice in products is over. Because what Twitter was doing, its TRUE unforgivable sin, is that it was maybe going to actually listen to its users or actually do things that are good for them. The engineers they are so intent to get rid of were just the conduit for the voices of the USERS: that is their danger, and that danger is now cut off. What is hidden inside this entire Trojan Horse operation is not the rejection of just women in tech, DEI in tech, SJW in tech, but the very idea of user input itself and whether or not the safety, needs, wants, desires, of users — of THEIR needs and not what tech corporations want to get OUT of them — will be on the table. 

Even though you would think that this would be a huge wake up call for the entire industry of engineers, I think its becoming very quickly apparent why it is NOT: that is because, they, too, benefit from a SJW free environment; and because as long as they are not “SJWs”, they are at absolutely no risk from the latest industry-wide memo, this one straight from the top. In fact, this is a moment to rejoice for many of them. The character and overwhelming majority of the technology workforce are white and Asian men. They love the things privileged men love: unilaterally dictating without input from the affected parties. They also love to steal, cheat, lie, abuse women, bulldoze local communities of color, blah blah blah. 

For many of them, this is not a wake-up call. Not at all! 

Instead of having to tediously roll back the minuscule gains of the last 10 years of tech activism company by company, this public smashing of the avatar of “woke” tech companies, tolls the bell instead. 

The playing field has changed terrain. Players, on your marks! Get ready…

ready…

ready…

oh look, we’re out of time.