Check your guillotine at the door. Last Sunday, Brian Armstrong set the internet ablaze with his reckless, dangerous, literally basically violent… oh wait no, it was just a thoughtful blog post on focus, and the mission-orientation of his company, Coinbase. But our culture is now sufficiently toxic as that was enough for him to be maligned by the media, and so began, in this batshit year, our truly batshit week.

Throughout the history of American industry, a statement like Armstrong’s would indeed have been unusual, but not for the CEO’s resistance to the idea that his company should be taking activist positions on culture and politics unrelated to its core business. Rather, the invocation of any ideal higher than doing business would have been the piece that felt alien. Corporate “mission-orientation” is a relatively new phenomenon, and something our own tech press has made fun of for years as either hopelessly naïve or, in some sense, insidiously fraudulent. The technology industry isn’t here to make the world a better place, critics often said, the technology industry is here to make money. But culture has warped quickly these past few years, and the “bring your full self to work” mantra of Silicon Valley, which began as a kind of happy-go-lucky “hey, it’s okay to be gay,” has given way to zero opt-out, company-wide activism on highly-divisive topics, and toxic slack chats that a majority of employees find distracting and demotivating. This toxic culture has somehow become an expected norm, or at least according to the press, which has been tracking painstakingly the distressed, activist outcry of tiny fractions of employees across tech for over a year. Of the minority of tech leaders willing to touch this topic, most softly endorsed Armstrong’s position (thread), while the media either attacked him or feigned surprise that this was an issue at all, and the tech industry’s activist influencers kept a commendable focus of their own with an expression of predictable outrage and hyperbole. As I’m sufficiently used to the dynamic, the only critiques that really bothered me came from what is probably the smallest industry subculture of all: rich, personally well-protected tech leaders who know how toxic our discourse has become, but who also want dibs on an increasingly-thin sliver of positive media attention. Leaders in this mold have correctly intuited the only way to secure such attention in our current media environment is by submitting to the narrative that our industry is filled with bad little children who need to be spanked by Kara Swisher, and these people are nothing if not dutifully submissive.