The hire that roiled Apple

How workers decided the fate of Antonio García Martínez

May 14, 2021

Photo of a man wearing an Apple Watch using an iMac. Austin Distel / Unsplash — Austin Distel / Unsplash

Today, let’s talk about workers organizing in public in one of the last American workplaces where you would expect to find them: Apple.

Yesterday, some colleagues at The Verge and I published an internal petition circulating at Apple calling for an investigation into a new hire — Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook product …

manager and author of the gonzo tell-all Chaos Monkeys about working on ads there from 2011 to 2013. The book makes sexist generalizations about women and other boorish comments that lit up various Slack channels at Apple yesterday, leading to 2,000 people signing a petition.

Here are me, Zoe Schiffer, and Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge:

One screenshot from the book that has been circulating on Twitter calls women in the Bay area “soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.”
“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.” The tweet also contained a screenshot of the passage in question.

García Martínez’s employment at Apple, which was only just beginning, did not last the day, Schiffer reported later Wednesday afternoon:

Shortly after the petition began circulating internally at Apple, Martínez’s Slack account was deactivated. The ad platforms team was called into an emergency meeting where it was confirmed Martínez would no longer be working at the company.
In a statement emailed to The Verge, an Apple spokesperson said: “At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.”

I’m not here to dance on anybody’s grave. But I do think the García Martínez case illustrates the degree to which managers at big tech companies continue to underestimate how much the power balance at their workplaces has shifted to rank-and-file workers.

I first wrote about this shift last summer, amid a wave of conflict that was too conveniently framed as “tech vs. journalism.” (Benjamin Wallace has a really smart, sober piece on the whole affair and its aftermath this week in New York.) A key element of the story is the way in which any company can be massively disrupted by a single employee tweetstorm, whether it’s Bon Apetit or the team at Reply All.

Some managers have responded by attempting to turn down the dials on internal employee discussions, which often have a way of spilling over into uncomfortable collective actions. Employees asking too many questions about Black Lives Matter? Coinbase took that opportunity to ban internal discussions of politics. Workers holding the company accountable for maintaining a list of “funny” (and often ethnic) names? Basecamp saw that as a moment to disband its volunteer committee on diversity, equity, and inclusion — and lost well over a third of its workers as a result.

Coinbase’s founder is somewhere on the libertarian-conservative spectrum; Basecamp’s founders are progressive liberals on many issues. But both were ultimately blind to the way that social networks had recast power away from them and toward their workforces, and bled talent as a result. (Here a Coinbase partisan would probably note that the company has done fine anyway, financially at least.)

On one hand, you can understand why Apple would be unlikely to anticipate the outrage that hiring García Martínez would ultimately generate internally. We are now years into collective actions at tech giants spilling out into public view, whether it’s Googlers protesting sexual harassment or Amazon workers demanding action on climate change. But whatever internal conflicts Apple employees may have been working through — or whatever public controversies the company may have been facing — it has always stayed inside.

That changed yesterday when, in addition to that circulating petition, Apple employees simply began tweeting their disdain about García Martínez’s hire. As I have written before, Twitter is an asymmetric battlefield when it comes to labor issues. Employees will post their complaints and be showered with thousands of likes and retweets; managers’ responses will be dismissed and used primarily as surfaces for dunking.

Apple executives generally maintain a muted presence on Twitter — Tim Cook appears mostly to announce corporate donations and acknowledge public holidays — and you certainly were not going to find them engaging on this one. What could they say? That generally they have not made a practice of reading new employees’ books before sending out offer letters? In any case, Apple’s publicly stated values had tied their hands: you don’t get to be America’s staunchest human rights defender while also hiring ad engineers who complain loudly of “being snookered into fatherhood via warm smiles and pliant thighs, the oldest tricks in the book.”

If there’s anything to truly be surprised about here, it’s that García Martínez didn’t see this coming himself. A couple years back, I tweeted out some gross passage from Chaos Monkeys — his gig writing op-eds for Wired had spurred some complaints basically identical to the ones that resurfaced this week — and he sent me a huffy DM in protest. (Some people who did the same, particularly women, got worse.)

A year or so later, I interviewed him as part of a panel discussion of former platform employees at the Code Conference; our vibe was frosty but cordial. After that, he reinvented himself as a techno-optimist in the Andreessen Horowitz mode. He started a Substack and conducted interviews that systematically checked every box on the 2021 tech booster syllabus: Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham; author Martin Gurri; the mayor of Miami; venture capitalist Keith Rabois; the CEO of Lambda School. (Around this time García Martínez also took another page from the Andreessen syllabus and blocked me on Twitter.)

It has traditionally been an effective career move to conspicuously flatter power in this way. And perhaps in the coming days and weeks, one of his interviewees in the above list will offer him a new job. (Graham called him a “good guy” in a tweet today.)

But the most important lesson in the García Martínez story is how little power the powerful had here in the end. Suddenly at Apple, as everywhere else, managers can only stand back and watch as workers reshape the bounds of what will be permitted at work.

Pushback

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with thoughts on my piece yesterday about child safety issues on platforms. Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner wrote today that after reading it he has become convinced that, due to these issues, something like Instagram Youth really is needed — but shouldn’t come from Instagram:

Helping pre-teens understand the intricacies of the online world is important. But putting Facebook in charge of that discussion might not get us very far. The messenger is often as important as the message, and in this case, I’m not sure the world is ready to listen to Facebook.

Elsewhere, a reader parodied the platforms’ responses to the questions I asked, and they made me laugh and I present them here:

Snap: we really appreciate this. We have more work to do.
Facebook: thanks for the research. But let's talk about Apple and why we hate them.
YouTube: we don't actually allow this content, so it can't be on our platform, thanks.
TikTok: we've been quietly innovating while no one pays attention.

Spot on.

Governing

⭐ The Apple-Epic Games trial has revealed the contradictory nature of Apple’s App store policies. Adi Robertson reports on the contradictions exposed in Wednesday’s testimony:

The past week has demonstrated a bunch of extremely fine lines between what Apple considers good and bad. The iOS Xbox app allows console-based remote play, for instance. But as Microsoft’s Lori Wright testified, Apple and Xbox failed to strike a deal for xCloud, which lets players stream games without an Xbox. Wright even accidentally got an approved streaming app called Shadow kicked off the store, until Apple decided Shadow offered a “full Windows 10 PC, rather than a library of games.” From the outside, that looks more like a semantic dodge than a decision based on privacy, security, and quality.
Apple hammered Epic for offering access to Itch.io, a storefront featuring adult content. But Steam has a nearly anything-goes policy on porn, and Steam Mobile and Link put those games a few taps away on iOS. Conversely, an App Store executive testified that Roblox user-built “experiences” were fine because they couldn’t sneak new, malicious code onto iPhones. But it’s said cloud gaming services threaten the iPhone’s “safe and trusted” model, despite being essentially just streaming video.

But: Despite some bruising exchanges, observers say Apple appears to be winning the trial. (Josh Sisco / The Information)

⭐ eBay said it would begin letting governments remove “dangerous” listings from the site directly without consulting the company. How long before some governments begin insisting on using this authority on social networks? (BBC)

How disinformation drives restrictive voting laws. “The bills demonstrate how disinformation can take on a life of its own, forming a feedback loop that shapes policy for years to come. When promoted with sufficient intensity, falsehoods — whether about election security or the coronavirus or other topics — can shape voters’ attitudes toward policies, and lawmakers can cite those attitudes as the basis for major changes.” (Maggie Astor / New York Times)

Google was hit with a $123 million fine in Italy over Android Auto. The case has to do with Google restricting third-party access to the platform. (Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch)

QAnon channels are deleting their own videos to escape punishment on YouTube. The company has since banned 40 channels that have used the tactic. (Richard Nieva / CNET)

Ads are impersonating government websites in Google search results despite a ban. The company removed the ads described here after being shown them by the reporter. (Jeremy B. Merrill / The Markup)

Clubhouse’s shared block lists are meant to promote user safety, but have also turned blocking into a tool to harass other users. Vaccine conspiracy theorists block doctors to prevent being debunked; misogynists block feminists who challenge their views. (Will Oremus / The Atlantic)

The Facebook-backed crypto project Diem abandoned its Swiss license application and will move to the United States. I read this story twice and still have no idea what it means other than that this project continues to feel cursed. (Ryan Browne / CNBC)

A former Facebook content moderator on why he quit: “One thing that would be important to organize around would be to give content moderators more of an active role in crafting policy. They’re not going to ever have an effective policy unless you have the people implementing the policy shaping it in some way.” (Josh Sklar / New Republic)

The actor whose voice is used in TikTok’s text-to-speech function sued the company, saying her voice is being used without her permission. Well here’s my favorite sentence today: “Bev Standing recorded about 10,000 sentences of audio for the state-backed Chinese Institute of Acoustics research body to use in translations, in 2018.” (Cristina Criddle / BBC)

Industry

⭐ Twitter has stepped up its pace of acquisitions after years of inactivity. Kurt Wagner explains at Bloomberg:

Twitter’s six purchases so far in 2021 -- less than halfway through the year -- are the most the company has made in a calendar year since 2015, when it publicly announced eight acquisitions. Many this year have been directly related to Twitter’s effort to build a subscription offering, which would generate revenue outside of the main advertising business.
In addition to Scroll, Twitter acquired startup Revue with plans to build out a subscription newsletter business. Other employees added through deals this year are working on “super follows,” or letting Twitter accounts charge followers for special content or access. Twitter will eventually take a cut of these subscriber fees, providing the company with a more predictable revenue stream than its current advertising business.

Amazon is hiring 75,000 more workers, and will pay some $1,000 signing bonuses while raising wages for others. “The retail and tech giant said the new roles—representing nearly 8% of its U.S. workforce—are offering average pay of $17 an hour, an increase over the company’s typical starting wage of $15 an hour.” (Sebastian Herrera / Wall Street Journal)

An Amazon dispatcher talks about surveilling delivery drivers. “It hurts my heart when I have to call someone and say, ‘You got to speed up.’ And they’re just like, ‘I’m doing what I can.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, Amazon says you got to speed up.’ It’s a stressful thing.” (Sarah Jones / New York)

Meet the migrants answering phones for Big Tech. Workers for Teleperformance, which offers customer support for companies including Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Sony, say they faced “ruthless productivity quotas and frequent harassment from managers.” (Moira Lavelle / Rest of World)

You can now use other TikToks as the background for your own TikTok. The company’s latest green-screen feature shows how innovative it is when it comes to building creator tools. (Kait Sanchez / The Verge)

The podcasting app Castbox makes it easy to search for private RSS feeds, which grant free access to paid podcasts. Podcasters say the company is unresponsive when they request the feeds be removed. (Ashley Carman / The Verge)