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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I happen to know someone who works in management at a rather large multi-national, and they shared a copy of their internal comms strategy for pride month. It was quite interesting in general, but one aspect in particular may be of interest here.

They distinguished between their internal comms and public comms. If employees asked about their plans for pride month, they would talk about the various internal activities/resources/whatever they had set up for it, but the story on public comms was different. "Due to the unprecedented backlash in the US market," they wouldn't be doing/saying anything publicly. Their "stakeholders" have decided that it wasn't worth the risk, and even though they totally totally TOTALLY support everything about pride, they just feel like they have to protect other equities too. Ya know, like, continuing to make money.

They emphasized that this was for the US market only, and that other localities would make decisions locally. Insert twitter meme about various companies having rainbow logos on their US twitter accounts, but not on their "[Company] Middle East" twitter accounts.

I chalk up points for two things. 1) The backlash is actually having an effect, at least for now, this year. 2) The theory that these things have been done so far in large part not because the market cared, but because employees cared. The classic example is that if you're a tech company in the Bay area, you're not really asking, "Should we signal support for this because it will improve our perception in the market?" You're asking, "How many of our employees will revolt if we don't signal support for this?"

Now that the market is showing signs of actually caring about this a little bit, they're rushing to make a distinction: do what they can to continue to placate their internal bands of radicals while not being publicly perceived as political. I'm left with two questions: 1) How long will this distinction be tenable? Perhaps that depends on how strongly the market continues to backlash against overt pride support (i.e., can the right take another scalp next year). 2) Is there sufficient internal appetite in any companies to revolt against the internal shit? If the prior theory was, "They're listening to the market," and this shift in the market response is actually generating a shift in public comms, and if the current theory is, "They're still listening to employees at least enough for internal efforts," then perhaps some companies could well be primed for an internal backlash that actually results in changes there, too.

I don't think I expect (2) to be probabilistically super common, but from what I'm hearing, lots of upper management folks who really just want to make money actually know that woke radicals in their ranks are a serious threat... and really are gradually working on, uh, marginalizing them, to the point that if they have an excuse, any excuse, to move them out without inciting too much leftist backlash, they'll absolutely take it.

The main goal at a major company is to not rock the boat. Companies barely have owners, they have managers with poor job security. The "owner" is a collection of pensionfunds who are run by managers who run a double digit risk of getting fired every year. The higher up management of the company also have below average job security compared to most white collar workers. Compentence isn't the most important factor when it comes to getting promoted at big companies, avoiding scandals is.

The people who succceed in politics and in the corporate world are the people who have an excellent talent for feeling which way the wind blows. A car salesmen will act very differently when a sterotypical biker walks through the door compared to when a vegan feminist walks through the door. These people are tremendously skilled at reading the room. The ability to read the room and adjust accordingly is probably the most indispensable skill if one wants to be highly successful.

This leads to people high in anxiety struggling with what to say when simply agreeing with everyone else in the room is no longer an option.