"The lack of women in tech is a complicated problem. Attacking or ignoring one book written by a misogynist won’t solve it."

"However, rejecting the book as a typical narrative of our industry might be a good start. The book tells the story of an uninspiring, morally questionable individual in tech, who stands out only for the way he disparages people of minorities. It’s not 'a guide to the spirit of Silicon Valley' as the author and his publisher try to present. Men don’t have to be like the author, and women don’t have to work with, even tolerate, men like the author to fit into the tech world." 

Wrote Chip Huyen, a writer and computer scientist, in "A simple reason why there aren't more women in tech - we're okay with misogyny" (at her own blog). She wrote that 2 years ago, criticizing Antonio García Martínez for his memoir, "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley." It was March 2019, and García Martínez had just been hired to write at Wired. Huyen wanted people to know that he'd displayed himself as an out-and-proud sexist. 

Huyen quoted this passage from the book:

“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

I was reading that because I was sent there by Axios, in a new article, "Apple parts ways with employee amid backlash." García Martínez had moved on to a job at Apple, and some employees there put together a petition, stating "We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again."

That is, whoever hired him at Apple could have read the whole book. It was conspicuous, published by Harper Collins and well reviewed. Even just the cover might make you wonder whether he's the sort of person you want in the corporate community:

Apple had to have known about this book. Maybe the hirers only looked generally at the book — who reads books? — but the passage had been extracted and quoted on line, so didn't they even find that? 

The petition demands to know "how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored," so ousting the author is not an answer to the question it asks. Did they miss his openly sexist presentation of himself or did they see it and decide it was okay? Might they even have actively wanted it?

Firing García Martínez is like settling one lawsuit. It evades the larger problem. If García Martínez told the truth, then the book is evidence of the culture of the tech industry. Maybe that's why he seemed to belong there and was hired in the first place. I don't know. Maybe the book is bullshit — lies and puffery in pursuit of the goal of becoming a NYT bestseller, which it was (according to the cover).  

Getting rid of García Martínez, now that the petition has made a spectacle of his sexism — his real or fake sexism — is a way for Apple to do its PR. I don't know. Maybe that PR is bullshit — a phony message about Apple's wholesome inclusiveness. 

But good for García Martínez if he wrote a great memoir. I haven't read "Chaos Monkeys," but I've believed for a long time — ever since reading "Liar's Club" — that the key to writing a memoir is to be harder on yourself than on anyone else. You have to look into the darkness and tell the truth. Don't flatter yourself and make other people the antagonists. You are the one with the deep flaws. Maybe García Martínez is a great writer. If so, he's better off without his corporate job. It's ludicrous to think that Apple is a place for looking into the human heart. 

If García Martínez is a good pop culture writer — as the book cover suggests — then he's got the option to write more books like that. Lay it on thick. Be outrageous. Get your readers. I see the blurb on the cover says it makes "Gordon Gekko look like Gandhi." Gordon Gekko, Gandhi — this is grist for the movies. A movie could be made out of his book. He'll have to be the villain, of course, but is that any worse than being a corporate drone for Apple?

ADDED: From the 2016 NYT review of "Chaos Monkeys": 

The literature of Silicon Valley is exceedingly thin. The tech overlords keep clear of writers who are not on their payrolls or at least in their thrall.... There are other barriers to literature.... Nailing this slippery culture would take an unholy combination of David Mamet and Tom Wolfe in their primes...

But "Chaos Monkeys" will have to do:

It is autobiography as revenge, naming names and sparing few, certainly not the author.... He describes the way the big companies resemble life in Cuba or Communist China circa 1965, with “endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader,” not to mention the posters on the wall proclaiming, “Proceed and Be Bold!”... 

For all his criticism of the valley’s way of doing things, he never stops to wonder about ethics....

First prize in Silicon Valley is enough money so your family and descendants will never have to work again until the sun goes cold. Second prize is a whole heaping pile of money. Third prize is you’re fired, which is often pretty sweet too. Three years after being escorted out of Facebook, García Martínez is living on a 40-foot sailboat on San Francisco Bay.

That was in 2016 — fired and doing just fine. Now, some of us — e.g., me — are hearing about him for the first time as he's fired again.  

AND: Matt Taibbi writes about Apple's treatment of García Martínez in "On the Hypocrites at Apple Who Fired Antonio Garcia-Martinez/Much easier to ruin a career than mess with a corporate cash cow." I've avoided reading this until now because the beginning is (intentionally) off-putting: "I’m biased, because I know Antonio Garcia-Martinez and something like the same thing once happened to me...." I'll read it now: 

At one point, as a means of comparing [his girlfriend favorably to other women he’d known, he wrote this:

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

Out of context, you could, I guess, read this as bloviating from a would-be macho man beating his chest about how modern “entitlement feminism” would be unmasked as a chattering fraud in a Mad Max scenario.

In context, he’s obviously not much of a shotgun-wielder himself and is actually explaining why he fell for a strong woman, as the next passage reveals: [His girlfriend], on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.

Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It’s a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself.

The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references....

James Damore... I'd forgotten that guy, but now I remember.

[T]he same people at Apple who hired Antonio, clearly having read his book, [immediately] fired him, [and issued] a statement that implied a problem with workplace “behavior,” which was not remotely the case.... It’s cowardly, defamatory, and probably renders him unhirable in the industry, but this is far from the most absurd aspect of the story.

Taibbi takes a sudden turn:

I’m a fan of Dr. Dre’s music and have been since the N.W.A. days. It’s not any of my business if he wants to make $3 billion selling Beats by Dre to Apple, earning himself a place on the board in the process. But if 2,000 Apple employees are going to insist that they feel literally unsafe working alongside a man who wrote a love letter to a woman who towers over him in heels, I’d like to hear their take on serving under, and massively profiting from, partnership with the author of such classics as “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Lyrical Gangbang,” who is also the subject of such articles as “Here’s What’s Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.”...

[G]oing after Dre would mean forcing the company to denounce one of its more profitable investments — Beats and Beats Music were big factors in helping Apple turn music streaming into a major profit center....

Taibbi proceeds to bring up Apple's use of Uighur labor in China. That's a much bigger deal that the passages in "Chaos Monkeys," an opinion Taibbi expresses with sarcastic humor that (of course) will be taken out of context and used against Taibbi: 

Maybe the signatories to the Apple letter can have a Chaos Monkeys book-burning outside the Chinese facility where iPhone glass is made — keep those Uighur workers warm!

ALSO: García Martínez is tweeting about the conflict, here. He says: "Apple was well aware of my writing before hiring me. My references were questioned extensively about my bestselling book and my real professional persona (rather than literary one)."

"As [Christopher] Rufo sees it, critical race theory is a revolutionary program that replaces the Marxist categories of the bourgeois and the proletariat with racial groups..."

"... justifying discrimination against those deemed racial oppressors. His goal, ultimately, is to get the Supreme Court to rule that school and workplace trainings based on the doctrines of critical race theory violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.... Rufo insists there are no free speech implications to what he’s trying to do. 'You have the freedom of speech as an individual, of course, but you don’t have the kind of entitlement to perpetuate that speech through public agencies,' he said. This sounds, ironically, a lot like the arguments people on the left make about de-platforming right-wingers. To [Kimberlé] Crenshaw, attempts to ban critical race theory vindicate some of the movement’s skepticism about free speech orthodoxy, showing that there were never transcendent principles at play. When people defend offensive speech, she said, they’re often really defending 'the substance of what the speech is — because if it was really about free speech, then this censorship, people would be howling to the high heavens.' If it was really about free speech, they should be."

From "The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness/How the right is trying to censor critical race theory" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). 

Here's a good comment over there: "The problem with your argument is that Critical Race Theory is presented at schools and workplace sessions as the TRUTH, not just an (unprovable) social science theory. And it would be very uncomfortable (if not career or social suicide) to question this theory in front of one’s bosses and peers."

That makes me think of Justice Jackson's famous line, one of the most important points about freedom of speech: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." 

The problem is compelled speech. To be compelled to assert belief in what you do not believe is a severe intrusion on individual free speech, and that seems to be what is happening in these workplace training sessions. Is there some way to present the insights of Critical Race Theory as ideas to be understood and weighed against other ideas and debated instead of compelling attendance at events where the ideas are dictated and participants are forced to attest to the dictated beliefs?

"The online publication Slate has suspended a well-known podcast host after he debated with colleagues over whether people who are not Black should be able to quote a racial slur..."

"... in some contexts. Mike Pesca, the host of 'The Gist,' a podcast on news and culture... made his argument during a conversation last week with colleagues on the interoffice messaging platform Slack. In a lengthy thread of messages, Slate staff members were discussing the resignation of Donald G. McNeil Jr., a reporter who said this month that he was resigning from The New York Times after he had used the slur during a discussion of racism while working as a guide on a student trip in 2019....  Jacob Weisberg, Slate’s former chairman and editor in chief [said]... 'I don’t think he did anything that merits discipline or consequences, and I think it’s an example of a kind of overreaction and a lack of judgment and perspective that is unfortunately spreading'... Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate... disagreed. 'For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,' he said."

The NYT reports.

ADDED: If a place of business wants to have zero-tolerance rule that says you will lose your job if you ever say the syllables of the n-word, that's one thing. But I don't see how the policy can be, as Joel Anderson suggests, that it only applies to white employees. That's overt and unsubtle race discrimination, and it would, I think, be hard to argue that it's not a violation of statutory law. Would Anderson support a rule that required the firing of black employees who happen to slip into say the word? I don't think I've ever heard anyone push for a rule like that. So I think the employer would be well advised to take the context of the saying of the word into account.

AND: A race-neutral zero-tolerance rule would create a much greater risk for black people. I think it's very easy for white people to avoid ever saying the word. Some just don't think we should be so repressed and sensitive about the word — as opposed to its use as an insult. But if the rule is you'll be fired if you ever say it, regardless of context, white people will abide by the rule.

Should have?

I'm giving this my "Althouse the pedant" tag, so stop now if you don't like where this is going. I'm reading the headline at The Washington Post, "Why Scalia should have loved the Supreme Court’s Title VII decision."

The man is dead. There's NOTHING he should have done.

Why not say "Why Scalia would have loved the Supreme Court’s Title VII decision"? I think I know why. The article is by George Conway. It's in WaPo. I'm going to say: They don't want to concede that Scalia would have joined the majority in this case, that he would have stuck to his principles (and that this case was truly an instance where these principles dictated the outcome the majority reached).

"Days after Bon Appétit's editor in chief, Adam Rapoport, wrote in a May 31 newsletter that 'food is inherently political'..."

"... he again denied a pay raise for the only Black woman on the magazine's staff. Ryan Walker-Hartshorn... whose annual base salary is $35,300... had not received a pay increase in her tenure as Rapoport's assistant. Aside from her editorial duties, she said, she had cleaned Rapoport's golf clubs, fetched his son's passport, and taught his wife how to use Google Calendar. So, once again, the Stanford graduate asked for more money. 'I thought this conversation might be different this time,' Walker-Hartshorn said in a recent interview. After all, Condé Nast, the parent company of Bon Appétit, had just donated $1 million to racial-justice organizations amid global protests over the May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.... Instead, Walker-Hartshorn says, Rapoport told her, 'Well, maybe you should consider that this is not the right job for you.' 'I am the only Black woman on his staff,' Walker-Hartshorn said. 'He treats me like the help.'"

From "Bon Appétit's editor in chief just resigned — but staffers of color say there's a 'toxic' culture of microaggressions and exclusion that runs far deeper than one man" (Business Insider).