One percent useful. Today, with the state of California’s final, reluctant acquiescence to The Science, U.S. cities from coast to coast are largely open for business. The sun is shining, the masks are off, and for America at least the pandemic is effectively over. On one hand, this is an obvious, unmitigated good. On the other, let’s complain about it.

Week before last, Apple’s One Percent — the team of in-house activists improbably allowed to spend their time crafting petitions that have nothing to do with their stated jobs and leaking them to the Verge’s anti-tech team — was back in the news with their third in a series of ridiculous grievances. From outrage concerning the hiring of newly-minted Bad Tech Man Antonio García Martinez to the utterly bizarre insistence Tim Cook take an opinion on Israel and Palestine, the ire of Apple’s activist class finally settled on something close to actual work, or at least… close to their place of work. Long story short, they don’t want to go back. With offices set to partially open by fall, Apple’s brief, deeply-uncharacteristic stint with work-from-home culture was placed on the endangered species list, and for Tim Cook’s hipster militants, obsessively posting in their “screw this workplace” workplace Slack channels between sips of nine-dollar pour-over coffee, this could not be tolerated.

Working from home is not a new concept in the technology industry, but the pandemic shuffled the deck, and over the last year the practice came to be seen not as a perk, but as a fundamentally new kind of corporate organization — at least, potentially. Is a team’s physical proximity critical to a team’s success, or can we decentralize our companies? Then, if we can decentralize our companies, can we decentralize our industry? Is Corporate America destined for the Cloud? Are we leaving San Francisco?! These are interesting questions, and I’m of two minds on the topic. For startups, a culture of working remote strikes me as probably a path to failure. For a mature company like Google, where many employees don’t really do very much, a culture of working remote seems probably fine. We’ll know a lot more in two or three years, when the pandemic’s class of new startups have a little more fully matured. But when exactly did forever work-from-home become an employee’s right? At Apple specifically, an outlier in tech, working from home was never a perk. Famously, Apple doesn’t even offer free workplace lunches. This means the hipster militants now running to the press over Tim Cook’s beyond-the-pale three-day work week signed up for, actually, a much more committed workplace culture. Nonetheless, the horror:

“… Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit.”

How could it even be possible that a more flexible work environment caused some Apple employees to quit? Unless these employees started working during the pandemic, they signed up to work in an office. So… welcome back? The truth is, for a lot of these activist questions I don’t really expect answers. The purpose of the exercise has always seemed less concerned with actually getting something than with the performance of asking — of demanding, really, and the rush of a thumbs up from our always-obliging press. Given enough money and time, people get into to all sorts of interesting activities. One interesting activity people with money and time like to get into is live action role-play, and what is any of this, really, but a revolutionary LARP? It’s rich kids playing dress-up all the way down. Still, I find the focus on language fascinating. Apple’s activists do seem to believe Apple’s intended policy of three days a week in the office is oppressive, but what really seems to be setting them off is the language Apple has been using to discuss the policy:

“Over the last year we often felt not just unheard, but at times actively ignored. Messages like, ‘we know many of you are eager to reconnect in person with your colleagues back in the office,’ with no messaging acknowledging that there are directly contradictory feelings amongst us feels dismissive and invalidating...It feels like there is a disconnect between how the executive team thinks about remote / location-flexible work and the lived experiences of many of Apple’s employees.”

The obsession with language here is typical of political activism, and it’s something we’ve seen across the industry. In a sense, there’s not a meaningful difference between Apple’s hipster militants demanding a more “inclusive” (???) vocabulary while discussing work-from-home culture and Coinbase’s ex-activist class demanding their CEO speak publicly about controversial political topics well beyond the scope of Coinbase’s core product. In both cases, a small handful of activist employees invoked a language of oppression to shape their workplace environment, thereby controlling their colleagues. But then, far more incredibly, they demanded a public act of submission from their managers. It’s a sort of surreal Millennial S&M vibe, which isn’t exactly sustainable in the context of a corporate hierarchy. Conflict was inevitable. Safety words were whispered.

Over the weekend, Peter Savodnik delivered the first really honest piece of reporting on the growing backlash against workplace political activism in tech. For the last few years the topic was mostly breached quietly, in direct messages and Signal chats. What do we do about these crazy people at war with workplace morale? But with what is starting to feel a broader shift in American culture, whispers of dissent on the topic of cultural authoritarianism have become a reasonably open dialogue, and that dialogue is just beginning to shape corporate policy.

“A handful of founders and CEOs—Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jason Fried of Basecamp, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, Medium’s Ev Williams—have said the unsayable,” writes Savodnik. “In the face of shop-floor social-justice activism, they’ve decided, business owners should resolve to stick to business.”

Are you wondering how to manage the in-house team of cultural authoritarians you inadvertently hired? Well, allow me to be so bold as to make a few humble suggestions. One possible approach is refusing to tolerate psychotic behavior in the workplace initiated on your time, with your money. Speaking of money, if you have the resources, literally paying activists to leave is a now proven, effective strategy (thank you, Brian). But the easiest thing to do remains the simple act of never hiring employees primarily focused on niche political activism in the first place. Here, I would attempt honesty. For example something like this:

“Why did you choose to leave your last company?”

‘Not enough niche political activism.’

“Interesting, what sort of workplace culture are you looking for today?”

‘24/7 niche political activism.’

“…”

‘…’

“Well, thanks for stopping by!”

Thoughts and prayers to the kids who left Basecamp.

How can I help. The fundamental silliness of workplace tech dramas is never more frustrating than when the industry is facing actual challenges. For the last few years, executives have done everything in their power to alienate the base of both major American political parties. Today, we reap the fruits of their labor: congratulations, everyone, it’s anti-trust season.

With loosely bi-partisan support, members of Congress introduced five new bills last week targeting the technology industry for a variety of crimes roughly in the orbit of “being too successful.” Historically, the purpose of anti-trust legislation was to protect consumers from harm. For politicians today, this question appears to be less explicitly central. For the American right, the call to dismantle the tech industry is fueled by a belief that tech companies are committed to erasing conservative speech from the internet. After Dorsey and Zuckerberg nuked Trump, I think it would not be a stretch to say many Republicans view the censorship question as existential, and they will undoubtedly support almost any curbs to tech industry power available. On the further extremes of the American left, the call to dismantle the tech industry is fueled by a belief that very large companies are in general a problem — for employees in the work-from-home land of free lunches, for consumers knee deep in literally free products, and for competitors (well, certainly our competitors in China are happy with this most recent news). Predictably, the most dubious claims of our politicians underpin the only question that should matter: consumer harm. I have no problem criticizing Apple and Facebook. I criticize them myself almost every week in these wires. But is the market dominance of either of these companies hurting consumers? Of course not.

Consider the push to ban Amazon’s sale of AmazonBasics-branded items, which include everything from cheap batteries and flashlights to chargers and cutlery. This is plainly beneficial to Amazon’s competitors at the direct expense of American consumers. Such decisions, ostensibly in the service of some ambiguous, broader economic good, have been made for decades, often to unintended consequence. But any claim that Amazon is hurting consumers is just a lie.

To her credit, Elizabeth Warren at least admitted what this is really all about:

Power.

The anti-trust conversation has nothing to do with principle. It has nothing to do with reason. It certainly has nothing to do with the American economy. The technology industry is our world’s most significant incarnation of new power — “zero to one.” It’s a miracle machine, and for the politically-minded this might presumably make the industry a tempting treat. But for all of its benefits, freedom also injects some measure of chaos into the world. Technology is a powerful agent for positive change, but it is also destabilizing of pre-existing power. The entrance of cryptocurrencies into the recent dialogue between tech and government, at first glance far afield of the anti-trust conversation, is therefore not surprising because, again, none of this is actually about anti-trust.

Warren is an open, hostile opponent of nuclear energy, the only source of clean power capable of meaningfully reducing our carbon footprint and averting the global warming apocalypse she’s here, in the case of crypto, invoking. But her aversion to bitcoin has nothing to do with the environment. It can’t because, per her policy proposals, she doesn’t actually care about global warming. Warren’s problem with crypto is that it at least theoretically presents an alternative to the dollar that can’t be controlled, and she’s an authoritarian.

Power.

As Jack Dorsey correctly noted in response, were Warren interested in the average person she would be on the other side of this conversation. But she isn’t. Like most politicians in Washington, Warren doesn’t actually believe in much of anything at all. She will say and do whatever she has to say and do to first gain political power, and to then keep and maximize its influence. The mistake thoughtful people in tech continue to make is in their attempt to have an earnest conversation with people in power. But we’re speaking different languages, which politicians seem to understand and tech people either don’t or won’t. All any genuinely well-meaning technologist can hope to do is persuade the American people, which will in turn drive political outcomes, which is where we should exclusively focus.

Because while America consumes itself with self-consumption, the world turns:

Xi claps. I was surprised by a recent executive order of Joe Biden’s on China — or rather “foreign adversaries” — slinging data-surveillance tech behind an army of dancing teenagers. In accordance with the sort of language we saw throughout the Trump administration, Biden plainly acknowledges our nation is in a state of dangerous conflict with the Chinese Communist Party, assumes the CCP is collecting data on our citizens for malicious purposes, and seems to argue this is a problem. But the meat of his order, ostensibly drafted to curb Chinese power, is the revoking of three Trump-era executive orders themselves drafted to curb Chinese power: Executive Order 13942 (down with TikTok basically); Executive Order 13943 (down with WeChat basically); and Executive Order 13971 (down with a bunch of others).

Trump’s executive orders clearly never had teeth, which is presumably why nobody really seems to care about the proliferation of this bizarre executive god power. But for a moment, let’s entertain the LARP. What was the point of revoking the orders? Biden’s proclamation further promises to talk this all over for 180 days, at which point we’ll have some further sense of what’s to be done about our massive Chinese espionage problem. This means we’ve sort of arrived back at the absolute worst of Trump culture: inflammatory language, now here directed at the CCP, with no corresponding action that could potentially make the fallout from the war of words worthwhile.

Once again, it’s all about language. The hardness of language. Appeals to change language. Earnest promises of future language. Meanwhile, over in Asia, Hong Kong is gone, Taiwan is in Xi Jinping’s crosshairs, India has been brought to its knees by the emergence of — for China, with which it is presently in a state of conflict — a fortuitously-timed Covid-19 variant, and the CCP builds on.

But hey, at least we’re talking about it.

-SOLANA