"... One answer, I think, is that Zuck’s new image is as much about a shifting political environment within Silicon Valley as it about the changing winds outside of the industry. A period of tech-industry labor unrest--walkouts and protests at tech megaplatforms over sexual harassment, racism, and defense contracts[]--has given way to a 'reset' marked by mass layoffs and corporate clampdowns. A looser tech labor market (and a general national atmosphere of reaction) has shifted power back to management, and a highly visible clique of tech workers with quasi-libertarian, open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science politics, clustered on Twitter in communities like 'tcot' and 'tpot,' has presented executives with the tantalizing (if still ephemeral) prospect of workforce free of Obama-era idealism and political consciousness.
"News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context--as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action.2 I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like 'legacy media' and 'virtue-signaling'--but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do. (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite)..." Max Read, "Read Max" substack, on the aggressive "vice-signaling" of techbro Mark Zuckerberg. Read's analysis of the emergence of Zuck-up as a sort of right-wing junior Musk (along with the execrable Jeff Bezos) seems on point. Good read (no pun).
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