Kara Swisher: “Do you imagine you’ve become a symbol of something, and what is it? You lost. But what is the symbol that you were hoping to have happen, and what do you think you represent now?”

Ellen Pao: “I didn’t plan on becoming a symbol…but it ended up that I became a symbol for different things, and the symbol that I focus on is just this person who told her story and allowed other people to feel more comfortable telling their stories.”

A recent retrospective in First Things about former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, ousted a decade ago from the company he co-founded over outcry about his opposition to gay marriage, sparked a chain of mea culpas from bystanders to the industry’s years-long, media-abetted crusade against wrongthink. On X, after Marc Andreessen apologized for “not doing more to support Brendan” during his cancellation, former Oculus CTO John Carmack expressed regret for not publicly opposing Facebook’s witch hunt against Palmer Luckey, who was chased out of the company in 2016 for supporting President Trump. These statements, paired with Google’s recent disavowal of workplace activism, suggest we may have finally reached the end of “tech’s silent winter” — the years of free speech suppression and forced ideological conformity that prevailed from, roughly, the mid-aughts to late 2021, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and exposed the censorship apparatus it had empowered.