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Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

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Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#11

Post by thinkingemote »

dmitrygr wrote: post #2

Can somebody please explain to me this modern fashion of employees attempting to strongarm CEOs to publicly voice views irrelevant to the company's mission? I've been seeing a lot of this lately and I simply don't understand it. Should CEOs also be forced to publicly state that smoking is bad for you and recycling is good?

It's sort of a new thing. All the major tech companies were forced in the last decade to move away from the neutral platform position and started to do more proactive moderation or some would say censorship, turning themselves into responsible publishers.

Thus, in being willing censors (or at least moderators) for the powers of good, they have also let themselves be strongarmed by whomever says what is good.

from another angle, the Arab Spring uprisings or Ukrainian Euromaiden events from last decade which were organised on neutral tech platforms, would not be able to take place now because these tech companies have much more moderation and internal responsibilities to be a clean publisher.

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#12

Post by websites420 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #2

Can somebody please explain to me this modern fashion of employees attempting to strongarm CEOs to publicly voice views irrelevant to the company's mission? I've been seeing a lot of this lately and I simply don't understand it. Should CEOs also be forced to publicly state that smoking is bad for you and recycling is good?

It’s a combination of a few things:

(1) Tech demands a lot from its employees. We are dedicating a significant portion of our waking hours. They expect us to believe in their mission, and so we also expect that mission to align with our values.

(2) Technology itself is much more far reaching than any other industry. These corporations are massive, and with them massive budgets for lobbying etc. Not demanding that they reflect the values of their employees and customers would be a massive waste of that power or worse — letting them actively use that power to make the world worse.

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#13

Post by YuriNiyazov »

thinkingemote wrote: post #9
mc32 wrote: post #8

Heh. Just wait till they get wind of XinJiang or labor conditions in Foxconn factories and see how the management responds to those concerns... oh, nevermind. We’ve known that for years but that must okay to activists since silence is violence and I haven’t heard peep.

The response to this argument from the activists is "don't let perfect be the enemy of good", and they will carry on ignoring the stuff they want to ignore without feeling bad. (It's not true that they don't know though.) There is some logic here and I've not found a good way to argue against it.

Well, the way to respond to it is “wait, no, Apple as a company is a much more direct contributor to working conditions at Foxconn than it is to violence against Palestinians. You are concentrating on an empty statement from management in lieu of demanding corporate actions that would actually have an effect. Your priorities are misordered.”

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#14

Post by rvz »

mc32 wrote: post #8

Heh. Just wait till they get wind of XinJiang or labor conditions in Foxconn factories and see how the management responds to those concerns... oh, nevermind. We’ve known that for years but that must okay to activists since silence is violence and I haven’t heard peep.

Yup. Radio silence on that front for years. But it’s not just them, it’s many others on this new trendy virtue signaling dance until they later do something incompatible with their public statements and ignore it once again when called out.

Perhaps Coinbase and Basecamp are the clever ones to resist accidentally signing up to the lifetime of demands from extremely politically charged activists that thrive from catching out employees and cancelling them for wrongthink and screaming about their dramas all over Twitter.

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#15

Post by u801e »

wearywanderer wrote: post #5
m3kw9 wrote: post #3

I thought they are both at war? And Apple is supposed to interfere?

It's called disinvestment and it's not a new concept. For instance in years past, activists called upon companies to disinvest from apartheid South Africa. Among those activists was a man you may have heard of, Barack Obama.

There's the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement [1]. A number of states in the US have passed laws or issued executive orders targeting participation in that movement [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sancti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#16

Post by sendbitcoins »

dmitrygr wrote: post #2

Can somebody please explain to me this modern fashion of employees attempting to strongarm CEOs to publicly voice views irrelevant to the company's mission? I've been seeing a lot of this lately and I simply don't understand it. Should CEOs also be forced to publicly state that smoking is bad for you and recycling is good?

When you give people a lever, they tend to pull it. Silicon Valley CEOs have signaled they will respond to this kind of pressure.

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#17

Post by grillvogel »

websites420 wrote: post #12
dmitrygr wrote: post #2

Can somebody please explain to me this modern fashion of employees attempting to strongarm CEOs to publicly voice views irrelevant to the company's mission? I've been seeing a lot of this lately and I simply don't understand it. Should CEOs also be forced to publicly state that smoking is bad for you and recycling is good?

It’s a combination of a few things: (1) Tech demands a lot from its employees. We are dedicating a significant portion of our waking hours. They expect us to believe in their mission, and so we also expect that mission to align with our values. (2) Technology itself is much more far reaching than any other industry. These corporations are massive, and with them massive budgets for lobbying etc. Not demanding that the…

>we also expect that mission to align with our values.

"we" do? personally i expect my employer to provide financial compensation in exchange for me doing things for them. beyond that i don't really care about whether the giant corporation i work at is truly reflecting my core beliefs. i suspect that they probably aren't.

> reflect the values of their employees

do all employees truly feel the same way about every issue? do employees with a minority opinion feel comfortable expressing those views?

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#18

Post by mc32 »

rvz wrote: post #14
mc32 wrote: post #8

Heh. Just wait till they get wind of XinJiang or labor conditions in Foxconn factories and see how the management responds to those concerns... oh, nevermind. We’ve known that for years but that must okay to activists since silence is violence and I haven’t heard peep.

Yup. Radio silence on that front for years. But it’s not just them, it’s many others on this new trendy virtue signaling dance until they later do something incompatible with their public statements and ignore it once again when called out. Perhaps Coinbase and Basecamp are the clever ones to resist accidentally signing up to the lifetime of demands from extremely politically charged activists that thrive from catchi…

My wish they’d all eventually gravitate to one particular state (Calif or NY, whatever) attracted by their common goal, do their thing there, let the rest of us work in peace and they can go on with their forever revolutionary activism to their hearts’ content till they realize that someone has to do actual productive work to ensure continuity.

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#19

Post by ArkanExplorer »

wearywanderer wrote: post #5
m3kw9 wrote: post #3

I thought they are both at war? And Apple is supposed to interfere?

It's called disinvestment and it's not a new concept. For instance in years past, activists called upon companies to disinvest from apartheid South Africa. Among those activists was a man you may have heard of, Barack Obama.

Black income, and income inequality, has worsened since the end of apartheid: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan06/why-south-african-incomes-...

South Africa is heading towards being a failed state.

Re: Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter

#20

Post by WhySoCEREAL »

dmitrygr wrote: post #2

Can somebody please explain to me this modern fashion of employees attempting to strongarm CEOs to publicly voice views irrelevant to the company's mission? I've been seeing a lot of this lately and I simply don't understand it. Should CEOs also be forced to publicly state that smoking is bad for you and recycling is good?

This seems to be a pretty expected outcome of an American narrative that societal decisions should be made through or in partnership with the private sector. If we've gone through decades of policy and ideological thought taught that action should happen through the private sector, that people would start acting through private companies rather government acting as our method of social action. I know plenty of individuals in the tech sector that ascribe to some form of the "government is so woefully incapable, it's best left to the private sector" or "I'd rather solve problems through entrepreneurship rather than government or non-profit" school of thought. This seems to me to be a pretty direct expected consequence. We've made private companies pretty central to the way our society is organized.
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