Outrage Monkeys

It was soon after my son graduated from college and moved out west to work in a start-up where the second round before Y Combinator was mere months away, and they weren’t ready with a working prototype. It was exciting and heady to be involved in a start up, even if I thought the idea they were working on was dumb. After all, a lot of dumb ideas seemed to succeed, even if only for the purpose of being bought out later and killed.

Millions were being thrown at kids with dreams and no life or management skills. and my son was going to be Employee 1 at a start up run by and a tech-smart narcissistic child who was simultaneously unpleasant and irresponsible. But my son was excited at the prospect of creating something that never existed, and why not? That was when I read Antonio (@antoniogm) García Martínez’s book Chaos Monkeys.

There were three things about the book that mattered to me. First, it enabled me to understand the foreign world my son was entering. What did I know of the Silicon Valley scene? I understood, to the extent I could, how brilliant science nerds thought, their peculiar combination of smart and immature, outward success and achievement and internal sense of failure and worthlessness. The loneliness, anxiety and depression they felt by their self-isolation from normies who may have admired what they could do but always made them feel weird.

Second, the book pulled no punches. Martinez didn’t gloss over the ugly, the stupid, the pathetic, but put it out for all to see, pulling the covers off the idiocy and disingenuousness of the geniuses. You didn’t have to read between the lines. Just read the lines.

Third, Martinez had something that many of us thought had died. A sense of humor. He was funny. He was hysterically funny, and showed no reluctance to let it out. At a time when the minefield of political correctness was half built, and there were a million people planting mines of their own, Martinez ran through the minefield with abandon, screaming blow me up if you can.

 García Martínez has described the book as “total Hunter S. Thompson/Gonzo mode.”

And it is. But even writers of great books need a day job, and Martinez went back to work for Apple. That’s when the mine blew up.

A group of Apple employees has written a petition asking for an investigation into the hiring of Antonio García Martínez — a former Facebook product manager and author of the book Chaos Monkeys.

In the petition, the employees expressed concern about García Martínez’s views on women and people of color. His hiring “calls into question parts of our system of inclusion at Apple, including hiring panels, background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don’t share our inclusive values,” they write.

What was it that caused the outrage?

Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

There is context to this outtake, more an homage to British Trader than an attack on women.

Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It’s a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself. The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references.

There are other quotes from the book that similarly reflect his failure to characterize all women as brilliant, brave, fierce and inherently above criticism, as a certain cohort of women have since demanded of their allies. If you seek reasons to be outraged, you’ll find them. That’s what outrage monkeys do.

So there was a letter and a petition to demand redress from this years-earlier heresy.

Eddy and I&D champions,

We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio García Martínez. His misogynistic statements in his autobiography — such as “Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit” (further quoted below this letter) — directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity. We are profoundly distraught by what this hire means for Apple’s commitment to its inclusion goals, as well as its real and immediate impact on those working near Mr. García Martínez. It calls into question parts of our system of inclusion at Apple, including hiring panels, background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don’t share our inclusive values.

It is concerning that the views Mr. García Martínez expresses in his 2016 book Chaos Monkeys were overlooked — or worse, excused — during his background check or hiring panel. We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again.

Before the day was out, so was Martinez from Apple, ironically proving the point. Matt Taibbi wrote of the facile hypocrisy of the outrage monkeys.

I’m a fan of Dr. Dre’s music and have been since the N.W.A. days. It’s not any of my business if he wants to make $3 billion selling Beats by Dre to Apple, earning himself a place on the board in the process. But if 2,000 Apple employees are going to insist that they feel literally unsafe working alongside a man who wrote a love letter to a woman who towers over him in heels, I’d like to hear their take on serving under, and massively profiting from, partnership with the author of such classics as “Bitches Ain’t Shit” and “Lyrical Gangbang,” who is also the subject of such articles as “Here’s What’s Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.”

It’s easy to get someone like Antonio Garcia Martinez fired. Going after a board member who’s reportedly sitting on hundreds of millions in Apple stock is a different matter.

But this misses the point. It’s not about taking their grievances seriously, or expecting  a principled consistency in whom they demand be canceled. This is about searching for excuses to claim offense because it’s so much easier to cry “unsafe” than to be the person you pretend to be on twitter, and bask in the glory of a million likes of victimhood.

“It’s so exhausting being a woman in tech; sitting opposite men who think because of my gender, I am soft and weak and generally full of shit,” wrote an Apple employee on Twitter, drawing attention to the quote. “It’s not even worth it to say I have worked relentlessly for every accomplishment I have.”

Whoever said this revealed her internal sense of failure and worthlessness. No one said she was “soft, weak and generally full of shit.” She just announced that the shoe fit. Being an outrage monkey may be exhausting, so take some Geritol. Or better yet, just do something useful rather than announce your wonderfulness on twitter. Then, maybe, the shoe won’t matter because you actually are accomplished and you don’t care whether anyone validates you.

My son managed to create a prototype in time for Y Combinator, and the start up got its funding. His founder, “soft, weak and generally full of shit,” enjoyed the funding but didn’t care much for the guy who made it happen, who was inadequately sycophantic and preferred to sing ’60s rock songs while working than wring his hands and feel sad. The start up has yet to put out a product, promised to be ready four years ago, and if it did, no one would want it.