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Life During Woke Time
I came across this thread this morning, supposedly an insider account of life in Big Tech from an engineer enduring work life under the plague that has taken lives, disrupted workplaces, turned schools into rigid, authoritarian child prisons, and spread suffering to countless families across the country. And also, COVID, which has somehow made the woke plague even worse. Keep in mind that not only can anyone make up anything on social media, but making up fake stuff is social media’s raison d’être. (Raison d’être being a French word meaning, I believe, “shoehorn.”) Also, the usual caveat of being skeptical to any anecdote that validates a prejudice applies. All that said, it’s an interesting read.
I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now. Obviously insanely radically leftwing. BLM/LGBTQ. Trans flags hanging in office. Pronouns stated before meetings. Special affiliation groups for everyone but white men. All what you’d expect.
True. Silicon Valley may be patient zero in the woke plague, but the contagion has spread across corporate America.
There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?”
Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!” It’s toxic. When it got to me, I said “Good.” and then a lady engineer proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her.
This is a great truth: Miserable people do not want to be happy; they want everyone else to be miserable. This is absolutely essential to understand the left.
The author goes onto explain that between COVID, working from home, and a company coasting on past successes, the business isn’t developing product anymore, it’s simply providing paychecks for miserable leftists.
Things my coworkers spend an enormous amount of their day on: – Coming up with a “clever” new Zoom background each day (something Harry Potter or Star Wars like children) – Clever Slack emojis – Reddit style responses in threads (“First!) and other low brow irony for the lulz.
You have a certain fire in your 20’s. Ready to reform and change everything. You get noticed when you perform. Promoted, bonuses, etc. But eventually you keep hitting the same problems or gatekeepers over and over. I recall asking an older coworker (mid-thirties at the time)… …what drove him, and he said he just does it for the paycheck now. I’m at that point. Lost the fire for career and collecting my paycheck for other purposes in life where the fire has been rekindled.
I am left wondering, if it’s this bad when the company is flush with profits, what happens when the inevitable crash happens? If you ever read a book like “Rivethead” or “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors,” you would realize that, minus the woke politics, this attitude of employees and managers not caring about their jobs and thinking they could get away with anything was pervasive in the American auto industry in the 1970s. And those of us who studied some history know how that worked out.
Published in Culture
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In the meantime, is our labor force becoming more skilled or more mindless, and depending on free benefits? Are we creating new coping skills to mope around and complain? Boy! The CCP could not have planned it better – we’re an easy target to roll over if we don’t wake up. I heard there is a massive blood shortage – only a day’s worth. That right there is scary.
losing your mojo in your mid-thirties or earlier… This I suspect is the result of a generation that never had to face adversity, never had to persevere past a difficult situation. A generation that had helicopter Moms clearing the path from any criticism, obstacle or potential bully. They have never had a chance to develop “character”. Everything was given to them, including participation trophies. This generation was always being told they were the best, without ever really having to achieve and earn that praise.
So now they hit a gatekeeper and fold like a deck of cards, and give up. There is no happiness or joy or sense of accomplishment. It is a sad tragic existence that our generation created in them in our desire to make their lives easy and better. For most of them, I fear their world will devolve into depression, and with that, they will become anarchists and socialists. Of course Socialism will appeal to this group. From their perspective, why work hard? It is useless. They want to be taken care of by the surrogate mother, the government.
Very scary for the future of our country and our children and grandchildren.
The jist of what these large corporation programs want is for straight non BIPOC folks to defer to LGBT and BIPOC on all matters social and business. Questioning anything said by any protected group is outright “ism.” All work relationships are supposed to be akin to parent – child relationships. Is that right? Might work out, but good luck.
This theraputic crap has existed for a while, its just more pronounced now. But at some point employees have to stop apologizing and demanding apologies, or the company will go away.
Depressing, except for the homage to Talking Heads in the post title.
I hope this situation is not as ubiquitous as it is depressing.
Corporations today are just job programs for women and minorities.
Thank you. Titles are hard.
Just to get out ahead of this, it has come to my attention that Hazard Harrington, the author of the thread I originally commented on, may have some sort of prejudice toward individuals of the Jewish persuasion. If so, I disavow his antisemitism and reiterate that the thread only concerns work environment observations, and my interest was strictly limited to those observations. (Stinks that I have to explicitly disavow what should be obvious that I don’t support, but that’s the place where we are.)
I read this Twitter post today, and sent it to a few friends. I did not realize just how awful it’s gotten out there.
My thoughts were:
That’s all very well, but where does he stand on left-handedness?
Well, if he’s a reasonable person, he’ll want them all to burn in Hell, like all reasonable people do. Lousy Mollydookers.
Of course they are miserable. Playing the game of greatest victim is a trap. You may win the game, but you lose the fight to feel worth.
Theodore Dalrymple comments:
A good way to produce lots of depressed, demoralized, unproductive people. Which is great if you want a nation of serfs wracked by poverty and social dysfunction, but not so great if you want prosperity and cultural/personal flourishing. Which should lead one to ponder what those supposedly high-minded, benevolent HR people really want (aside from those too foolish to understand consequences.)
Theodore Dalrymple again:
Again, one can be pretty sure what the American left genuinely wants.
“…this attitude of employees and managers not caring about their jobs and thinking they could get away with anything was pervasive in the American auto industry in the 1970s.”
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I thought that Big Tech was all about stopping disinformation? Did nobody correct this wrong statement?
Then again as Paul points out…