Twitter hasn’t apocalypsed yet

I find the Twitter saga mostly amusing, for now, and my guess is that surprisingly little is going to change for most people on the platform.

What’s curious is the reaction I’m seeing from tech thought-leader types. For example, here’s a Twitter thread with some of the big names in content design, stating that these poor Twitter employees don’t deserve this.

I’m genuinely curious what the this actually entails. Is it working for management that holds slightly different, but still very mainstream, political views than the most outspoken tech workers? Could it be that Twitter’s don’t have to roll out of bed and do mediocre work from your pajamas policy could be questioned? Or is it the economic reality that Twitter is way overstaffed with engineers and designers?

I’m trying to come up with a name for this, it’s a sort of Sola fide activism or maybe tech-worker dissociation syndrome whereby there’s absolutely no connection between one’s radical political beliefs and one’s day-to-day reality.

I know of people who work for companies that are causing serious social harm yet are outspoke about whatever the Latest Thing™ is. I’m close enough to some of these people to ask them, and each time the response is something along the lines of they can’t take the lower salary that other companies offer or that “yeah, Facebook is an awful company but my team is one of the good ones”.

There’s something more to banal hypocrisy going on. There’s some sort of mass dissociation and widespread rejection of personal agency among the highest paid tech workers. You can make six figures to genuinely make life worse for millions of people as long as announce your pronouns at the start of each Zoom meeting.