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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36164 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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So, in the wake of Elon Musk's bid for Twitter being back on and him apparently suggesting layoffs of up to 75%, Twitter employees have released an open letter begging demanding:

We demand of current and future leadership:

  • Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.
  • Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.
  • Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.
  • Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.

I mean, obviously there's a lot of schadenfreude to be had by conservatives and anti-wokes over demands that political beliefs be respected.

Personally, as someone who has watched the Left begin to sound like libertarians on corporate power ("Facebook is a private company) when it comes to social media sites (which I view as a purely self-serving move) I find it hard to be sympathetic. Since nobody has any principled solution to billionaires owning the public square and they should deal with the consequences if things don't always swim left.

Even on the matters that aren't that "culture warrey" and align with my beliefs (e.g. good worker protections) I see no reason to care since their argument seems to be that they're important enough to have a right to an outsized say and protection (since Twitter is apparently being used in important places like the Ukraine war). You see similar things during the Chappelle Netflix or Peterson-publisher kerfuffle where relatively well-off employees think they have right to dictate the direction of the company, a right they don't seem to fight for for any other set of employees.

This is the game. I think these people are confused: you're the imperial functionaries, not the Emperor. Sometimes the tune changes and you have to dance.

My perspective is probably economically naive, but I think, if Elon actually wants to change the direction of Twitter, a purge is a good idea - perhaps in the vein of Basecamp: the culture is getting less partisan, we're not going to cater to your activism, accept it or take severance. A lot of the more "woke" employees are never going to reconcile themselves and will in fact attempt to be internal saboteurs who are waiting for their chance to cause a mess and potentially get a payday (like Netflix getting sued by the anti-Chappelle protestors).

Uproot it and start again, setting good expectations for the company culture.

Firing 75% of the employees is probably a good business decision more than anything else and Elon is not big on letting workers veto those.

I do feel like pointing out that yes, I agree with the point that these are well off functionaries trying to dictate terms to protect themselves and don’t intend on those protections extending to anyone else.

We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs.

Aside from the last one, isn't that just literally the law?

I noticed the absence of religion in the list, which may distinguish it.

You skipped the best part: this is supposed to be what they mean by "safety". They gave away the game! Can it possibly be made more obvious that this political movement has co-opted the word "safety", which normally has the connotation of things like protection from physical violence, to mean "my political preferences about (non-)discrimination"? Is there any better way to point out the motte/bailey than to simply read people this section?

Well, there's the law and there's the law. One is what's written on paper and sometimes even upheld by the US Supreme Court. The other is the one actually followed by companies and practiced and enforced by the lower courts and administrative bodies. That's the one that allows for various internship programs where white and Asian straight men need not apply. Or similar quotas in hiring.

Grutter v. Bollinger

No; that case was limited to education (which is a different law)

Grutter v. Bollinger

Grutter held that laws or policies involving affirmative action were constitutionally permissible and not immediately in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act; it did not change the ground state for laws. And it depended on Bakke holding that quota- or quota-like systems which were recognized as in violation.

I'm pretty sure Grutter only applied to educational contexts, because diversity was held to be of particular benefit there?

Doesn’t it also have the interesting conclusion that the diverse community resulting from actions affirmative is an educational benefit to that community receiving education, not just those so affirmed? I’m not sure that applies as well to an employment context.

Yes, I believe that is correct. The claimed mechanism is that diversity in skin color indicates diversity in background, which indicates diversity in perspective. Diversity in perspective in the classroom yields a more rounded educational experience for everyone. I don't believe Grutter holds up well under critical scrutiny.

Even the last one is apparently the law in California (though that didn't stop Google from winning the case against James Damore, from what I recall)

Personally, as someone who has watched the Left begin to sound like libertarians on corporate power ("Facebook is a private company) when it comes to social media sites (which I view as a purely self-serving move) I find it hard to be sympathetic. Since nobody has any principled solution to billionaires owning the public square and they should deal with the consequences if things don't always swim left.

Presumably Twitter will be privately owned, so Twitter will be a private company and not publicly traded and Musk can do what he wants. They should be happy given how often they use that argument.

Elon and Kanye are arguably the two most influential people in the world now. The culture war divide between the woke, who oppose Elon and Kanye, and the anti-woke has never been clearer. And it's going to intensify, especially come 2024 and if Trump's account is restored. I wonder is Bezos will jump in the mix too. He does not tweet much though but if he wanted to he could become almost as popular as Musk by tweeting memes and opinions.

I don't see Bezos taking that route. I don't know a ton about him, but he just doesn't code as someone trying to be relatable. He'd probably lean more on his entreprenurial bona fides if he wanted to run for President.

The real reason Google, et. al. have been hiring these people is because hiring them prevented them from becoming competition. Something which will become very obvious if they stop.

Even if Google doesn't have anything useful for them to do, I occasionally hear people claim the big tech companies try to cast a wide net and hire everyone smart they can, so those smart people aren't working for their competitors (or, worse, starting an actually disruptive start-up).

Unless I'm really missing something this claim doesn't really ring true to me, the tech giants paying $250k starting aren't the type of places just any dev can get a spot at. If this was the case they wouldn't be paid that much because those coding bootcamps would have actually worked.

I think he exaggerated a bit but he is largely correct that average employee quality at a firm like Google has dropped dramatically in the past decade.

Sure, Google won’t hire total idiots. At the same time, they do not have very high bar these days: otherwise they wouldn’t be able to hire quarter million of people over past 15 years.

(I worked there myself for ~5 years, and saw many changes over time first hand)

I think you might be sheltered from just how bad it gets at places that actually run on code monkey labor. If people are regularly doing productive work for 8 hours a week they're probably ahead of the median output. It's not unusual for one or two people to do 80% of the work on a team of twelve. Being good and productive at programming is not that common of a skill.

Eh. I think any dev with an IQ above 110 and a modicum of good sense and ability to study Leetcode in a structured way for three months can get in.

That's a relatively rare to come across, sadly enough. Big tech's problem is less idiots who can't tie their shoelaces and more the sinecured SWEs who are just resting, vesting, and hiding behind bureaucracy to excuse their doing single digit hours of work per week.

How much does it actually cost to maintain YouTube, cloud hosting, Gmail and Google Search (their only valuable products

Also apps / workspace / education (presumably valuable for the same reason gmail is), and investments in AI (driven by hiring high quality people from hardware to researchers). I'm not sure if chrome, maps, android, and hundreds of other services are 'valuable' in that sense of shareholder value - but should google just drop chrome development or maps?

There's also all the non-coder staff to support operating in 100+ countries, culturally, legally, physical infrastructure, etc, which a small startup needs much less of.

YouTube is a huge business now , unlike in 2008. I think a lot of employees are for advertising-related stuff. As Google's ad business has grown, it's reasonable to assume its headcount will too. Same for app store and other new developments. But probably a decent chunk of those employees may be redundant.

Big tech essentially offered dead-end code monkeys $250k a year to do middling work that a six-month intensive coding bootcamp plus three years as a junior dev could train any American with an IQ above 110 to do.

I don't think this is accurate. Bootcamp grads have terrible job prospects. If Google could save money by hiring from bootcamps without sacrificing competence, they would.

Google hires dozens of people from the business program I did every year (which might sound like nothing but it's just one program) to essentially be sales development and account managers for ads.

I know lots of bootcampers at fang companies making more than 200k.

They were the most talented of their classes but they made it.

What percentage of employees actually signed this letter?

This sentiment looks bog-standard for any employees undergoing a merger. It’s speaking up about it that’s a bit unusual. I’d be willing to bet that signing the letter correlates quite closely with working in at-will California.

It’s also mild evidence that the company really is as bloated as Musk says. In my limited experience, essential engineers and staff don’t wring their hands, but walk. Especially in a tech hub city, and doubly with one of the biggest names in the industry on a resumé.

Isn't there something of a hiring freeze in the tech sector of late? Something to do with all the line goes down across $DJUSTC, $NDXT, $SP500-45 and the like.

freeze and layoffs for many tech companies now

Yeah, if I was randomly let go I'd laugh and say I'm willing to come back and fix all the problems they're going to have in a couple weeks as a consultant for double pay.

He never said he would let people go “randomly”. The way to stay employed is always to be someone who is viewed as indispensable. He will get to work figuring out which teams and individuals are generating value and which are not.

I don't like that the culture war is taking place over control of the platforms themselves but this does seem like people who live by the sword dying by the sword. I just wish there were more places one could live without swords. I deeply hope that a lesson is learned here and that it isn't "fight even more underhandedly at platform control."

I just wish there were more places one could live without swords. I deeply hope that a lesson is learned here and that it isn't "fight even more underhandedly at platform control."

Everything is becoming political now

For those whose life motto is "The personal is political" I would expect to be in cloud nine. But I think when all is said and done and we are in a Cyberpunk Dystopia (without all the cool shit and a ton more of subscription services) they will be between the first to revolt.

I mean, obviously there's a lot of schadenfreude to be had by conservatives and anti-wokes over demands that political beliefs be respected.

"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences! If you don't like it, get your own platform!" Musk purchases Twitter. "...please don't punish us for our political speech."

Sorry, had to get my daily dose of schadenfreude.

For what it's worth, principled commitment to freedom of speech (of the thick, not thin, variety) has never really helped anyone. Those with power do as they will, and those without complain about violations of rights and freedoms. Those Twitter employees on the chopping block would be in no better a place even if they had advocated for a genuinely free platform.

Those with power do as they will, and those without complain about violations of rights and freedoms

This is not the trajectory of world history over recent centuries. You do in fact have more rights and freedoms as an average modern American than as an average citizen of almost any premodern civilisation. All of this apparently gritty cynicism about how it's all about power and rights don't real is just historical denialism.

You do in fact have more rights and freedoms as an average modern American than as an average citizen of almost any premodern civilisation.

I have a different interpretation. Various governments in history claimed to have absolute power over their territories, and the right of life and death their subjects. So the average joe had no rights. In fact, though, these governments barely controlled the outskirts of their capital city. Their grip over the empire amounted to negotiating with local magnates and associations. When I read about farmers and shepherds living in the Pyrenees, it seems like the king in Paris, the pope in Rome, and even the nobles in Bordeaux barely influenced their lives at all.

Obviously, their local nobles and clergy could tyrannize them. But tyrannizing a community that lives right next to you and knows where you sleep is a dangerous business. In practice, serfs worked the lord's strip one day per week and did a pretty lazy job of it. In theory, the church required that everyone attend mass; in practice, only a fraction did.

The early modern period, on the other hand, saw an explosion in state capacity. Monarchs gained standing armies, the right to permanent taxes, bureaucracies, and modern financial instruments. Local nobles and clergy became absentee nobles and clergy, leaving the collection of dues to deputies. This caused turmoil and revolt.

The formal rights we gained in the 19th century are not new things; they are a reaction to attempts by the state to enforce hypothetical claims as actual policy starting in the 16th century or so.

By analogy, do you remember all those states banning gay marriage in the 90s and 00s? Would you say gay rights were increasing or decreasing, then? The formal law was not a sign that gay rights were declining, but that they were growing. Things like "civil rights" are the reverse situation. In theory, we have more freedoms than ever. In practice, institutional control over people's lives is at an unprecedented high.

This is all a re-litigation of Uncle Ted's take, so I'll quote him directly.

It is said that we live in a free society because we have a certain number of constitutionally guaranteed rights. But these are not as important as they seem. The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government. Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than out society does. In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler's will: There were no modem, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.

"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences! If you don't like it, get your own platform!" Musk purchases Twitter. "...please don't punish us for our political speech."

Are you sure it's really the same people saying this or is it just "the left" saying it?

There probably also a rarely heard take:

Delegating our most important speech to private platforms was a mistake.

I've yet to see someone hold up the 'aggressive' version of free speech principles. i.e. "I will support unlimited free speech by every person except those who would suggest censoring others. Those people we censor."

That is, a version of free speech absolutism that nonetheless supports censoring those who advocate censorship of others.

It's too easy to claim that your enemies support censorship of others.

A sort of "fortified democracy" like in Germany, which considers democracy itself outside of the reach of democratic means.

Except that Germany's "fortified democracy" is in practice just the officially institutionalized defense of the established (political, media, business, and otherwise) elite against any would-be upstarts, even though the system is nominally democratic (and capitalist).

Isn't that just the paradox of tolerance?

The real one, yes.

"The law has no mercy..."

That is just silly wordgames. A life for life, and it stops there; the execution itself engenders no guilt.

The same argument applies to any state punishment, be it fines ("theft"), death penalty ("murder"), or prison ("kidnapping").

But this ignores the two other possibilities of MĂĽnchhausen trilemma: uncaused cause, which would be the state monopoly on violence and circular argument, where the line of guillotines eventually loops back on itself and the first murderer releases the blade that decapitates the last executioner.

I've yet to see someone hold up the 'aggressive' version of free speech principles. i.e. "I will support unlimited free speech by every person except those who would suggest censoring others. Those people we censor."

You don't need free speech absolutism, just parity.

For example: let's say you ban an LGBT or pro-Palestine speaker from a university, what does would be the response to this? "Any company or campus can do what they like?" No. Allies will probably appeal to the broader ideals of free speech and inquiry (not necessarily the 1st Amendment), especially if they can frame the opposition as hypocritical about that ideal (which shows they understand it)

It could be just as easy to apply this logic to Ben Shapiro - who has opinions on many things held by huge numbers of people (a few years ago I recall one MSNBC host saying that his opinions on affirmative action made him beyond the pale because it implied that some students didn't deserve to be there which is just absurd: by this standard conservative stances are basically inherently forbidden). The only reason this does not happen is that one side feels it has won so it doesn't have to be principled anymore.

I'm going to guess that letter gets a lot fewer explicit signatures than we're used to seeing e.g. from Google employees. And that signing that letter will likely earn an employee a spot in the 75%.

I’m guessing it was started by a low-seniority hr lady who knew she was getting laid off and wanted 15 minutes of fame to take with her.

As someone on the left, my only problem with this is conservatives acting like the left as a whole is aghast at Musk laying off 75% of twitter.

I don't care! It's (soon to be) his company!

I'm surprised someone on the left would take the "it's a private company" stance (though I suspect your version of it is not the same as the usual take for justifying speech controls on platforms like Twitter). Why is this?

I honestly don't understand the question. If it helps I consider myself center-left.

I suspect it is less about the firing itself and more about the loss of control/influence over the twitter platform that the left might be 'aghast' at.

But I do think it is something that one should really not lose sleep over unless one's whole ideological bent is based on ensuring that your opponent's ideas are kept from even being debated in public.

Sounds like that is not your position.

My first reaction when I heard of Musk's plans here was that this does indeed sound a bit harsh, however, that was before I found out that Twitter apparently employs 7500 people. I get that Musk is controversial and has enough of a reputation by now that many people will view his suggestions with instinctive disapproval, but even as someone who doesn't like his personality, I can't help but agree with him here: what are they even doing with 7k people? When was the last time Twitter rolled out a significant feature?

7k wouldn’t be that odd for moderation. That’s like 1 moderator per 50k accounts. I don’t know how many actually run the business but I can see these platforms needed a lot of employees for moderation and that’s if we mostly consider moderation as anti-bot.

Basically none of the moderators are actual Twitter employees. These companies also employ an army of contractors. When you hear that Google employs 150 000 people, you need to understand that this figure only include full time employees that are directly employed by Google. When you add in temps, vendors and contractors, the figure probably exceeds 500 000.

I remember seeing something about Twitter's R&D budget being over a billion dollars per year. The most recent source I can find says $1.5 billion for the year ending June 30, 2022. Their R&D budget has also grown a lot. I guess an edit button for paid users costs a lot.

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