one of the problems we have in Tech (as an industry and on social media) is to allow individuals who make poor and bad decisions to hide behind the collective of a company/organization. And we continue applauding them for their great work they do in areas that are removed from the political. But these days innovation acts as a shield where we let the innovators get away and reap praise as individuals (the inventors of golang, the teams who standardized QUIC, the guys doing netflix propaganda about their simian-devops-army, facebooks React, Amazon's DSSTNE...) all of them have engineers who wear these things like a badge and are proud to give talks. Yet when they are responsible for projects that violate human rights, remove the Taiwanese flags from their app, or censor speech as in this case then we're never talking about people but it's always the opaqueness of the firm that hides these abuses.
We need a list of these lizards so we know when to throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at them whenever they give a talk or share feel-good posts on LinkedIn.
people should be ashamed instead of proud when they write "disclaimer I work at X"
When the hell has that /not/ been the case in society? Institutions have always been shields and your dehumanization and desire for shaming ironically shows exactly why they serve that function - they don't want to be subject to the whims of random mobs who aren't a part of them.
The tech industry is a place where people generally prefer to talk things out rather than yelling and shaming. I think that's worth protecting, even if we see short term gains that might be available from defection. After all, once Google realizes the norms have changed, won't they be able to leverage their resources to find people who yell louder and shame more frequently than you?
The old days were never as controversy-free as most people remember. There was a time not that long ago when common techie opinions like "Internet piracy isn't a big deal" or "shooter games are fun and kid-friendly" were seen as quite immoral in some circles, and calling your forum "Hacker News" was kinda subversive. If we're headed back to that kind of environment, just with a different set of moral issues enforced by a different set of people, that seems solidly OK.
We need a list of these lizards so we know when to throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at them whenever they give a talk or share feel-good posts on LinkedIn.
people should be ashamed instead of proud when they write "disclaimer I work at X"