Apple employees call for company to support Palestinians in internal letter (opens in new tab)

Personally, I think it's important to encourage corporations to take human rights into greater consideration. Complex as the issue is, it still results in Apple enriching itself and a nation which could reasonably be considered an apartheid state, by doing business there. In my view, that gives them at least some responsibility to speak out against human rights violations by states hosting economies in which they participate, if not to stop doing business there entirely...

This isn't a statement from a big corporation, though. This is a statement from employees of the big corporation (presumably all of whom feel comfortable leaving on a moment's notice) to the corporation.

Companies have long known that making your customers happy involves retaining skilled employees, and that incurring extra costs to keep skilled employees happy is worthwhile for the business. Sometimes that involves paying them well. Sometimes that involves putting San Pellegrino in the fridge. And sometimes that requires boycotting the State of Israel.

Love this. Complete thread killer.

Quoting from another HN member post [1] not long ago ( I remember this post so vividly )

>When I talk to my family and non-tech non-coasts non-city friends about the sort of political polarization I encounter at my high-tech Seattle job, they often think I'm messing with them, that I'm being facetious or exaggerating. Unfortunately, I'm not. It's all so tiresome. The increasing politicization of everything, and tech being at the center of it, made me realize I have no interest anymore in climbing the corporate ladder. I realize that my lack of political fervor is a liability. I wish I cared more about these things, I really do, but I don't.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044664

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.

There is something special about being able to buy your food from the store and not having it be a political issue. I feel like we are slowly losing this. Commerce should really be separate from politics. Pushing politics into everything risks reducing cooperation between people and all these positive sum trades that naturally occur.

One term I have heard for this phenomenon is a "purity spiral".

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.

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.

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

This is kind of a non-sequitur. Jewish people are allowed to have weird gender-based opinions and get fired for them too, just like everyone else. I don't really have a strong opinion on the overall actions by Apple, but people being offended by this quote is orthogonal to what ethnicity he is:

> Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit

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.

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.

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.

And nothing about the ongoing Uyghur genocide. So you know these activists are not sincere actors. It's about flexing political or tribal power and signaling to other tribal members.