Misogyny And Accountability At Apple

May 14, 2021 7:59 AM

Earlier this week, Apple employees petitioned the company for an investigation into the hiring of Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook employee who had published Chaos Monkeys, in which he had made a number of blatantly misogynistic comments. Hours later, Apple had verified that García Martínez was fired.

Needless to say, this has caused a backlash in Silicon Valley, with figures like Paul Graham defending García Martínez and his writing.

posted by NoxAeternum (117 comments total)

My dudes simply refuse to get their heads around "freedom of speech != freedom of consequences." At least, as it applies to them. You can play the gonzo bad boy, as Martinez said he was doing, or you can be considered a decent colleague in a decent office. HST himself did not try to demand both.

In any case, this doesn't seem to be his only problem. Apparently he harassed a woman on Facebook over her defending not having children and called her "a barren bitch." Again, you can do this, or you can be a company man at Apple, but not both.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:22 AM on May 14, 2021 [104 favorites]

I was rather delighted to see this unfold in realtime. And of course the big name shit dingos will rally around their own.

If Apple is going to denormalize bad behaviour in their shop, the legitimacy of the culture of SV itself is at risk.

That said, he should never have been hired in the first place. There's work yet to be done.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:22 AM on May 14, 2021 [24 favorites]

What exactly was he even hired for? Aren't his privacy views antithetical to Apple's current stance?
posted by toastyk at 8:29 AM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

(n-gate recently described Paul Graham as "increasingly belligerent walking participation ribbon Paul Graham" and, yeah, this defense of a true shitbird is exactly that.)

Good riddance to bad rubbish.
posted by introp at 8:30 AM on May 14, 2021 [30 favorites]

I followed him on Twitter for a while because he seemed to have interesting insights into how Silicon Valley 'really' operates, but after a while enough other tweets accumulated that made me come to the conclusion, "He's just a complete a-hole."
posted by PhineasGage at 8:31 AM on May 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

My dudes simply refuse to get their heads around "freedom of speech != freedom of consequences."

The problem is that there's a lot of people who argue that freedom of speech requires freedom from consequences - that if someone faces repercussions for their speech, then they don't have free speech. (A good example of this illogic is the idea of "self-censorship", where people who choose to moderate their language so as not to be seen as horrible are said to be "censoring" themselves.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:31 AM on May 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

god it gets tiring how men hate us so much
posted by fluttering hellfire at 8:35 AM on May 14, 2021 [161 favorites]

>That goateed man, gentle reader, was me. The woman was a former City of London derivatives trader. She was thirty-seven weeks pregnant. We had known each other for thirty-nine weeks. Let’s rewind before we fast-forward again. “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”

Article digs a lot into his misogynies and his shitty views and that's more important and all -- but geez, look at this guy's writing. Reminds me of the lighthouse keeper from Rick and Morty with the godawful manuscript for his novel, albeit with a much less extreme "purge" to accompany it in the end.

>The problem is that there's a lot of people who argue that freedom of speech requires freedom from consequences - that if someone faces repercussions for their speech, then they don't have free speech.

How do people using such faulty logic prevent themselves from applying that to all of their other freedoms? No person is truly free because you cannot commit murder without consequences (technically about half of murderers get away with it, but besides the point).
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:35 AM on May 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

If Apple is going to denormalize bad behaviour in their shop, the legitimacy of the culture of SV itself is at risk.

Apple hasn't really been part of the "SV culture" for 20 years now, they were always pretty different and have a history of being judgmental/picky in the industry so this choice by them is not particularly surprising. Most SV startups are "Work really long hours and embrace the company vision, but otherwise do whatever you want" while Apple is "Work medium hours and embrace the company vision, and also follow these 45 confusing rules".
posted by JZig at 8:35 AM on May 14, 2021 [13 favorites]

Again, you can do this, or you can be a company man at Apple, but not both.

More cynically, you can do this and be a company man at Apple--as long as a critical mass of people don't notice. I suspect there's many in exactly that position.
posted by Drastic at 8:39 AM on May 14, 2021 [32 favorites]

What exactly was he even hired for? Aren't his privacy views antithetical to Apple's current stance?
Apparently some kind of advertising tech.
posted by Lanark at 8:40 AM on May 14, 2021

every time i read these stories i think about how many women just immediately noped out of joining tech because they think its the norm to deal with people like this. and we keep asking why we have a pipeline problem.
posted by zsh2v1 at 8:41 AM on May 14, 2021 [98 favorites]

The problem is that there's a lot of people who argue that freedom of speech requires freedom from consequences - that if someone faces repercussions for their speech, then they don't have free speech.

Unless, of course, they are the ones handing out repercussions. Then "you're fired" becomes freedom of speech again.
posted by romanb at 8:57 AM on May 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

Why is it so fucking hard for some people to accept that treating women as equals is a basic requirement of most jobs? People are fired for being bad at their jobs all the time. This is no different.

This guy is not qualified for a job in which he will have to collaborate with, evaluate, manage, or interact with women. He has hateful beliefs about women and extremely poor personal judgment. Apart from the question of whether his beliefs themselves contribute to a hostile work environment, the fact that he wrote this noxious book demonstrates he is not able to keep his beliefs to himself. How is any woman he works with supposed to trust that he won't publish demeaning bullshit about them?

I mean, it's rhetorical question, you don't have to answer. Misogyny is so normalized that many still see it as merely a personal flaw, if they even disagree with the misogynist beliefs in the first place. It's excused from being a job disqualifying flaw because the consequences would be too radical.

And probably some of them are afraid for their own fucking jobs. Good.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:59 AM on May 14, 2021 [104 favorites]

I’m going to hazard a guess that Apple knew, and expected it to fly under the radar.

I'm not sure if you can attribute this pair of decisions (hiring and firing) to Apple as a monolith. Seems more likely one hand didn't know what the other hand was doing.
posted by mr_roboto at 9:00 AM on May 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

he seemed to have interesting insights into how Silicon Valley 'really' operates, but after a while enough other tweets accumulated that made me come to the conclusion, "He's just a complete a-hole."

Probably a coincidence.
posted by zamboni at 9:01 AM on May 14, 2021 [15 favorites]

Happily, I'm a man-in-tech who works with an all-women crew of scientists who would yeet this motherfucker into the North Pacific* before his resume hit the table. Life really is better that way.

* With apologies to the creatures of the North Pacific. I hope you'd at least find him tasty.
posted by klanawa at 9:01 AM on May 14, 2021 [24 favorites]

The problem is that there's a lot of people who argue that freedom of speech requires freedom from consequences - that if someone faces repercussions for their speech, then they don't have free speech.

That argument is a distortion of the idea of chilling effects--which are certainly real. That's when "consequences" includes minoritized people getting harassed and threatened for speaking.

But the people claiming that that's what's happening here are usually the type to aggressively ignore power dynamics, so...
posted by pykrete jungle at 9:07 AM on May 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

I'm not sure if you can attribute this pair of decisions (hiring and firing) to Apple as a monolith. Seems more likely one hand didn't know what the other hand was doing.

Which isn't any better. Someone decided to hire this guy either knowing his history of misogyny or not caring, and expecting that it would all get smoothed over. The good thing is that it wasn't, but the reality is that he should never had made it in the door in the first place.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:08 AM on May 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

every time i read these stories i think about how many women just immediately noped out of joining tech because they think its the norm to deal with people like this

Interestingly this was part of his defense when being taken to task on some other occasion. Basically "you think I'm bad? I'm one of the good ones, the industry is full of people way worse than me." This can simultaneously be true and totally fail to exculpate him, of course.

But yeah, the pipeline is being blocked because who wants to emerge from the pipe into a world of born-on-third shitheels who think you're genetically inferior?
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 9:19 AM on May 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

Being a "gonzo" misogynistic shitheel means you're still a misogynistic shitheel.
posted by ryoshu at 9:39 AM on May 14, 2021 [25 favorites]

Apple is "Work medium hours and embrace the company vision, and also follow these 45 confusing rules".

This is Old Apple, but: 90 hours and loving it.
posted by pwnguin at 9:41 AM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's almost as if someone's very public behavior outside of work has implications for whether a company will want to be associated with that public image.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 9:55 AM on May 14, 2021 [18 favorites]

Definitely no power dynamics involved in a corporation firing someone for speech outside of work

More like a corporation firing someone because 2,000 of their current employees signed a letter saying they do not want to work with this person.

Reminds me of an incident at another tech company I was working for. Some important dude had 5 or 6 sexual harassment complaints against him and they just shuffled other people (the victims) around for years, because this guy was delivering on the important metrics.

Until he got assigned to a new team and every member of the team signed a letter saying that they were not comfortable working around this person and that this was affecting team performance. The letter got leaked and by the end of the week several hundred people had signed another letter saying they did not want to work with this person in the future, as the uncomfortableness would affect their performance and they worried they would not be able to meet objectives.

This they did listen to, and he was soon gone.
posted by Dr. Curare at 10:03 AM on May 14, 2021 [40 favorites]

The problem is that there's a lot of people who argue that freedom of speech requires freedom from consequences - that if someone faces repercussions for their speech, then they don't have free speech.

Great! I look forward to those dudes fighting for me after I was disciplined at work for talking about sexism and racism. Right, dudes?
posted by medusa at 10:05 AM on May 14, 2021 [24 favorites]

So don't hire him.

Agreed. But it's not like hiring is some kind of magical investiture that grants him immunity from judgment or consequence forevermore.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:06 AM on May 14, 2021 [18 favorites]

The extended excerpts are horrendous. How does this stuff get published and who's buying it, ffs?
posted by jquinby at 10:14 AM on May 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

Cezar Golescu, you are missing the point so completely that it seems you have either not actually read the story or are not engaging in good faith.
posted by biogeo at 10:18 AM on May 14, 2021 [31 favorites]

I hope you can see why this is a bad reason to fire someone.

I can’t. Can you explain why retaining any one employee is worth demoralizing or even losing two thousand others? Personally I’d strongly consider letting someone go if only a single other employee felt that way, if it were for good reason, especially at a company like Apple, which can easily hire a top tier replacement.
posted by jedicus at 10:18 AM on May 14, 2021 [26 favorites]

Similarly, the workplace doesn't have a magical firewall around it that prevents that which happens in the outside form impacting that which happens in the inside. His prior public behavior alienated a whole lot of his coworkers and potential job applicants from the jump.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:19 AM on May 14, 2021 [18 favorites]

if it were for good reason

Unapologetically publishing a book that says "40% of my coworkers are idiots and I will never take them seriously" seems like a pretty good business reason.
posted by sainttoad at 10:20 AM on May 14, 2021 [68 favorites]

Definitely no power dynamics involved in a corporation firing someone for speech outside of work

It's not about the speech, it's about the content. If someone has hateful views about women, held strongly enough to publish them in public particularly, they may not be a great person to have on a team that includes women.

100% agreed. If he were to do something in the workplace that warranted firing he should be fired.

He published a book, which is professional act. It's not like he was overheard on a bus.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:22 AM on May 14, 2021 [26 favorites]

Cezar Golescu is, I'm pretty sure, coming from a much more labour-oriented perspective that a lot of people would, if I remember some past comments and thoughts. ie, this would play out differently under a different scheme of stronger labour laws, which are defensible for other reasons.
posted by sagc at 10:23 AM on May 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

(Although I think they're being annoyingly oblique about it.)
posted by sagc at 10:23 AM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

Asshole is not a protected class.

Yes, there are power dynamics between an employer and an employee. There are also power dynamics present between men and women, such that it takes the word of 200 employees and near-universal opprobrium to notice readily apparent disqualifying toxicity.
posted by pykrete jungle at 10:24 AM on May 14, 2021 [33 favorites]

This guys talent isn’t tech it’s selling himself.

He failed at Facebook and Twitter — he didn’t seem to make anything lasting or important in those places. For example he talks about how key he was to Facebook’s ad platform; but his project, called FBX, was 3 people and was never integrated with mobile and their profile targeted ad platform.

So he’s the typical self important tech bro whose toxic bullshit makes him impossible to work with.
posted by interogative mood at 10:24 AM on May 14, 2021 [21 favorites]

Good on my former employer. As someone who had an Apple manager twice go to HR over the company's social media policy and public statements, it'd be nice to see the same level of scrutiny applied before the hiring. While I never read Garcia Martinez's book, the Reddit Ask Me Anything stuck with me even four years later. Particularly the part where he talks about fatherhood, which re-reading strikes me as too close to Men's Rights/redpill talking points for comfort.

Still not as bad a hire as John Browett for SVP of Retail.
posted by now i'm piste at 10:24 AM on May 14, 2021 [6 favorites]

Unapologetically publishing a book that says "40% of my coworkers are idiots and I will never take them seriously" seems like a pretty good business reason.

I 100% agree. I’m saying that even a single upset employee can justify firing another, though of course it has to be a good reason (eg not “I don’t like their haircut” or whatever). The fact that there were 2,000 employees upset about something well beyond the pale makes this an easy case, but I think the line is far below that.

As for “conduct outside of work”: the extremely public nature of that conduct has brought the consequences back into the workplace. There’s no putting the misogynistic toothpaste back in the tube.

Political beliefs are not a protected class. We should all be happy to see employers firing sexists, racists, fascists, etc.
posted by jedicus at 10:24 AM on May 14, 2021 [21 favorites]

As someone upthread alluded, the irony of this particular fellow possibly not having been summarily fired if only the US had the sort of stronger labor laws that the generally reflexively libertarian techbros and/or deeply labor-antagonistic corporate executives have worked assiduously to whittle down, should not be lost on anyone.

But inasmuch as US labor law does suck, and generally these folks were happy to have it that way: game on.
posted by jscalzi at 10:32 AM on May 14, 2021 [34 favorites]

This is also not a company firing an established employee for behavior outside of work. This is a company correcting a hiring error that violated its own policies and procedures adopted to protect other employees, on the basis of information that was available prior to hiring that should have been taken into account but wasn't, when other employees called attention to that fact.

Sometimes positive principles come into conflict with each other. Letting blind devotion to a single principle, like "employers should not regulate employee behavior outside of work", override all other concerns means you are bound to violate other principles, like "employers should not force their employees to associate with or be in the power of people known to be habitually discriminatory or abusive." Life requires assessing cases individually rather than just adopting rules.
posted by biogeo at 10:33 AM on May 14, 2021 [61 favorites]

I worked at a Jewish nonprofit for a while. If they had hired someone who spent his time outside of work publishing hateful things about Jewish people, I would have had serious concerns about collaborating with or working for that person. That hiring would have privileged the inclusion of one person over the alienation of most of my colleagues.

Increasing inclusion in the workplace involves cultural competency, patience, and, within reason, letting people's freak flags fly. But when someone's freak flag involves repeatedly and publicly denigrating a specific, underrepresented class of their colleagues and profiting off of it, including them effectively excludes an entire swath of other employees.

coming from a much more labour-oriented perspective
I might be concerned if this were an edge case, but it isn't. Do workers deserve to have union representation and grievance processes? Sure. Do I think a grievance process should privilege this one guy over all of his coworkers, who are, themselves, laborers? Nope.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:36 AM on May 14, 2021 [34 favorites]

The multiple quotes from this shitheel's book were absolutely sickening to read, I couldn't make it through all of them. Someone who would write and publish such vile hatred really should never be forced on others.
posted by biogeo at 10:42 AM on May 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

I oppose employers getting to police employee conduct outside of work.

That’s a defensible position in a labor-centric working relationship, but not for somebody in a management or leadership position. The conduct outside of work here is his describing how he views and treats people he works with, and who report to him.
posted by mhoye at 10:53 AM on May 14, 2021 [25 favorites]

I think there's room to be concerned about employers policing employees non-work behaviour, because those kinds of power dynamics will likely far more often play out with a conservative employer firing an employee for pre-marital sex or being gay but at the same time, there's a huge, huge difference between firing someone for private, non-work behaviour that doesn't affect their job and firing someone for being a misogynist asshat in a way that they publicly, in-writing, associated with their professional work.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:08 AM on May 14, 2021 [19 favorites]

coming from a much more labour-oriented perspective

Even if it is, it's the sort of backwards thinking perspective that's served to alienate labor from its ideological allies on the left. Arguing that people are obliged to put up with abusers because their abuse didn't take place in a certain venue is a good way to get those people to tell you to kindly fuck off.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:13 AM on May 14, 2021 [28 favorites]

This isn't really about "conduct outside of the workplace."

This is about "publicly demonstrating incompetence." That level of misogyny is incompatible with being a fair and effective manager. Thinking you can publish that sort of screed and have it not impact your career is itself blindingly bad judgment that itself should disqualify you from certain jobs requiring decision-making.
posted by explosion at 11:31 AM on May 14, 2021 [40 favorites]

So, Apple fired him. But did they make any kind of statement about how he got hired in the first place? The letter also requests that Apple outline the steps they will take to not hire someone like this in the future. What steps are they going to take?
posted by nat at 11:34 AM on May 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

Political beliefs are not a protected class.

If "rich male" isn't a protected class, then what's the point of having social classes in the first place? Geez, it's like you people forgot to take civics class or something.

Anyway, the important thing to remember is that the real crime here is that a rich guy has had to face some minor consequences -- the sort of consequences that several billion people might face simply because they slept in one day, or their kid had the temerity to get sick.

I look forward to shitheels like Paul Graham rushing to protect those people.
posted by aramaic at 11:35 AM on May 14, 2021 [16 favorites]

It’s clear from the Chaos Monkey excerpts included in the first link that Martinez isn’t your garden variety sexist. He has a malignant and completely unreflective loathing for women which I can only hope and pray is extremely rare in any population, or we are in even deeper shit than I thought.
posted by jamjam at 11:46 AM on May 14, 2021 [14 favorites]

He apparently also stalked journalist Heidi Moore across multiple platforms to call her a "barren bitch". Such behavior is disqualifying on its own.
posted by toastyk at 11:51 AM on May 14, 2021 [13 favorites]

I bet this guy will land on his feet. I hear Basecamp is hiring.
posted by Nelson at 11:54 AM on May 14, 2021 [25 favorites]

I'm happy for Apple labor that this guy was let go, because even though I am not a woman, if I was in a workplace with him, I would not feel safe. Especially after reading some the violent language in the excerpts, and especially in this country, where people (almost all men, statistically speaking) can and do easily and legally obtain guns to commit massacres, often over violent hatred of women.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:57 AM on May 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

Why is it so fucking hard for some people to accept that treating women as equals is a basic requirement of most jobs?

It's a basic fucking requirement to be a good person.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:05 PM on May 14, 2021 [12 favorites]

I look forward to shitheels like Paul Graham rushing to protect those people.

Even if he somehow recanted all his bullshit and made amends, I still wouldn't want to hear from him.
posted by fedward at 12:05 PM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's almost as if someone's very public behavior outside of work has implications for whether a company will want to be associated with that public image.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 9:55 AM on May 14 [3 favorites +] [!]


So don't hire him.
posted by Cezar Golescu at 10:02 AM on May 14 [+] [!]

If it's a reason to not hire him, then it's a reason to fire him. There's no magic "ha ha, missed your chance, now you have to live with it" gate he made it through. And sunk-cost fallacy applies to staffing.
posted by ctmf at 12:07 PM on May 14, 2021 [58 favorites]

Can I also say...as a regular person working a non-tech job...it's really weird how hiring/firing decisions get such outsized media coverage in tech. Like, I couldn't tell you I know anything about the top layer of execs in my line of work, and if people get hired, fired or quit, we generally are just informed, and people are just like "Ok, moving on, next task." We would not be told the reasons why, and we would not have a reason to care.
posted by toastyk at 12:32 PM on May 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

We would not be told the reasons why, and we would not have a reason to care.

You should care. I may have shared this before: I managed a cyber security team at a large bank many years ago. Part of our responsibility was monitoring employees internet activity. Because of this, our work expanded to include monitoring for HR infractions.

I oversaw the investigation of multiple “streaming porn at work” cases - usually 2-3 a year. All but one were male Executive Committee, SVPs and VPs — all responsible for hiring, mentoring, and promoting women. Mapping their porn activity to their work calendars showed that a majority of the time, the streaming coincided with they being of work conference calls.

All of these men were allowed to bypass actual firing by agreeing to “resign” to “save them the embarrassment” — except the one poor porn-watching night watchman who was flat-out fired.

Every female direct report and second-tier employee deserved to know this. Every woman whose requested raise or promotion passed thru their purview deserved to know this and potentially have their HR record reviewed. Knowing about this stuff DOES matter.
posted by Silvery Fish at 12:54 PM on May 14, 2021 [93 favorites]

Every female direct report and second-tier employee deserved to know this. Every woman whose requested raise or promotion passed thru their purview deserved to know this and potentially have their HR record reviewed. Knowing about this stuff DOES matter.

Flagged as fantastic.
posted by Gelatin at 1:37 PM on May 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

In my small workplace, a colleague was hired a few years ago. Prior to his hiring, multiple women begged my boss not to hire him as it was clear he was at best low-grade sexist, had poor respect for boundaries, and was a self-promoter who would damage our group's collaborative culture. As usual, my boss ignored this input, and the newly-hired colleague has turned out to behave exactly as predicted. Since his hiring there has been significant turnover, and our group has gone from predominantly female, a real rarity in our field, to overwhelmingly male. Yesterday, during a whole-group meeting, our boss had the gall to claim to our faces, while this sexist was present, that he had only once ignored advice on hiring from his employees... about a totally different sexist jerk several years ago who also caused numerous problems in our group that our boss ignored as they were ongoing before he finally flamed out in a dramatic fashion that forced our boss to admit there had been a problem.

Good for Apple for fixing their mistake with this asshole, but employers need to fucking listen to their employees about obvious red flags with new hires.
posted by biogeo at 1:41 PM on May 14, 2021 [34 favorites]

→ how Silicon Valley 'really' operates … "He's just a complete a-hole."

Looks like you got the answer you were looking for. SV is a-holes à gogo.
posted by scruss at 3:03 PM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I guess people are saying that if there were stronger labor protections, apple couldn't have gotten rid of this asshole. But if there had been stronger labor protections, Apple would have just not hired the guy in the first place exactly because it would be harder to fire him if he did something problematic.

Anyway, the idea that stronger labor protections would have been a problem here ignores how rarely this sort of thing happens at all to men like him.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 3:12 PM on May 14, 2021 [9 favorites]

One thing I think is being overlooked in the "I oppose employers getting to police employee conduct outside of work" debate is that people at his level of wealth and prestige are very much celebrities within Silicon Valley and their getting hired by a company means that they are, to a large degree, going to be perceived as a very public face of that company. It's very much like a movie star or famous director getting hired onto a production. The production becomes absolutely inseparable from who they are, and that's why getting certain people to sign on can mean the difference between a film that no one hears about and a summer blockbuster.

So when Mel Gibson goes off on a very public drunken tirade about Jewish people and gets dropped from projects, it's not merely a case of an employer overreaching into a person's private life. It's the employer saying "your very public reputation is going to tarnish ours." As far as I can tell, that's exactly what's happening here.
posted by treepour at 3:28 PM on May 14, 2021 [30 favorites]

AGM is talking about the situation on Twitter.
posted by enfa at 4:14 PM on May 14, 2021

I hope Apple drop-kicks him into the sun. I am so tired of chin-stroking rationalizations about the need for the rest of us to think of the plight of the bigot class.
posted by FallibleHuman at 4:42 PM on May 14, 2021 [43 favorites]

The second best time not to employ a sexist is "not any more"

The best time is "never".

Sometimes you have to settle for second best.
posted by ChrisR at 4:51 PM on May 14, 2021 [21 favorites]

I hope it's a big settlement.

On what grounds, exactly? I'd imagine he was well within his probation, when Apple has carte blanche to dismiss him (in fact, this sort of situation is why probationary periods exist.) Note also that not once did he offer any attempt to apologize for his misogyny, but instead argued that Apple knew who he was in the first place. Which may be so, but it also turns out that when you become a liability, that no longer matters.

And finally, when abusers are defended out of "principle", all that does is erode support for those principles.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:40 PM on May 14, 2021 [16 favorites]

> Cezar Golescu: "I hope it's a big settlement."

Apple's main mistake was hiring this guy in the first place. They either didn't do their due diligence on this guy or they did but didn't correctly anticipate the blowback. However, once he was hired, it would likely have been an even larger mistake to keep him on. But, in basically firing this guy instantly for stuff they definitely should have known about (and probably did know) before hiring him, I suspect that AGM may indeed have a case under the doctrine of promissory estoppel.

Now, while I personally think AGM is almost certainly an asshole and really don't relish the idea of him walking away with a nice chunk of cash out of this situation, I also think that Apple should probably pay some kind of penalty (on top of the PR hit) for their bone-headedness and I suppose a non-trivial monetary penalty might be what's required to remind them not to make the same mistake again.
posted by mhum at 5:45 PM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

California is an At-Will state, and he's not a protected class, the firing was not for protected reasons, so his main gamble is his "good cause" clause, which ... c'mon ... it's Apple. Their "good cause" clause almost certainly validates his firing.

AGM is just posing for his Twitter fanboys. He may even get a few of the bigger losers to bankroll his quixotic little filings, which is his real game here.
posted by aramaic at 5:51 PM on May 14, 2021 [24 favorites]

The responses to his Twitter thread are pretty damn disheartening. He's pretty clearly seen (at least by the small sample size of his twitter followers) as someone they look up to, and good fucking god, how warped does one have to be to look up to someone who writes the garbage he has.

Behind every asshole parroting "go woke, go broke" is a guy terrified that they're going to be called to account for the flagrantly sexist/racist behaviors they've gotten away with their entire lives. The louder they are about it, I imagine the more reprehensible shit they have done/are still doing.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:54 PM on May 14, 2021 [15 favorites]

The Apple letter links to a 2016 Recode interview with Kara Swisher, in which Garcia Martinez talks about burning his bridges:

... The reaction has actually been surprising positive. I thought I was literally incinerating my career.

Q. So you were doing "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again."

That was exactly what …

Q. Which it kind of is. It has that tone.

I haven't read the book, but from the excerpts it sounds like a cynical and overwhelmingly negative portrait of Silicon Valley - not just misogynist, but misanthropic. Reviewers liked his acid literary portrait of Silicon Valley (the model was "Liar's Poker"), but it doesn't seem surprising that a lot of people at Apple would have a hard time working on a team alongside a controversial writer.

In the interview he talks about this as well, describing Silicon Valley corporate culture as surprisingly conservative:

Q. Why do you think that is? Why do you think people don't, you know [write books about how terrible Silicon Valley is?] …

Oh, because ... well here's where the nasty comes out. For all their presumptions of being subversive and bohemian and counterculture, whatever, Silicon Valley people actually maintain these very well manicured exteriors, and frankly everybody has too much to lose. At the end of the day no one wants to pay the opportunity cost of saying the truth and missing out on, you know, being employee 70 at the next Pinterest or whatever. And so, yeah, they've just got too much skin in the game and they really don't care about posterity. They don't think about the future.

posted by russilwvong at 7:02 PM on May 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Cezar Golescu is, I'm pretty sure, coming from a much more labour-oriented perspective that a lot of people would, if I remember some past comments and thoughts. ie, this would play out differently under a different scheme of stronger labour laws, which are defensible for other reasons.

It is not a defense of the rights of labor to argue that bigots who publicly denigrate their coworkers must not be fired unless you are excluding the targets of their bigotry from the category of "labor". The right to a workplace in which you are treated with dignity and respect is tremendously important, and your employer hiring somebody who openly thinks you are an incompetent idiot due to your innate characteristics is incompatible with that right.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:43 PM on May 14, 2021 [37 favorites]

Cezar Golescu is, I'm pretty sure, coming from a much more labour-oriented perspective that a lot of people would, if I remember some past comments and thoughts. ie, this would play out differently under a different scheme of stronger labour laws, which are defensible for other reasons.

The devil has plenty of advocates already. No need to swell their ranks.
posted by ChrisR at 8:26 PM on May 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

Mod note: Cezar Golescu, you've made your opinion of women and minorities in tech perfectly clear; don't come back to this thread to clarify further.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:40 PM on May 14, 2021 [40 favorites]

Antonio García Martínez sounds like a complete shit-bag plus some rich person who will likely land on his feet. The labor issues are relevant to me though:

- At will employment is terrible and should be abolished
- Just cause would usually require some kind of workplace-based reason to fire someone - although even in a union workplace like mine there is a probationary period where employees are at-will for an initial time period
- Whether or not he was hired into a supervisory roles is important here. As a supervisor, your racism and misogyny has very material impact on the lives of others.
- I think we should inoculate ourselves against the idea that this is an adequate way to remove barriers to women at Apple. So while firing one asshole might be necessary, it is definitely not sufficient to address things like pay inequity or whatnot.
- There are all kinds of ways that the hardware and software made by Apple materially harms women and also poor people in poor counties, from e-waste to factory labor conditions and beyond, and we should also have an expansive idea of fighting misogyny in tech that includes that reality.
posted by latkes at 9:50 AM on May 15, 2021 [8 favorites]

Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Dr. Dre is on the Board of Directors of Apple, whose own writings - and past actions - include no small measure of violent misogyny.
posted by PhineasGage at 10:39 AM on May 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

There’s another Recode Media interview with Martinez from late yesterday, about 20 minutes long. Good pointed questions, I thought. It sounded like Apple asked him a lot of questions about the book and to what degree it was “him” during hiring. I haven’t read anything on Twitter so apologies if this is old information.
posted by michaelh at 11:01 AM on May 15, 2021

Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Dr. Dre is on the Board of Directors of Apple, whose own writings - and past actions - include no small measure of violent misogyny.

And this justifies the hiring of a misogynist...how, exactly?

It sounded like Apple asked him a lot of questions about the book and to what degree it was “him” during hiring.

Which is why there needs to be an investigation into how he was recruited and by whom, because as has been pointed out at several points, García Martínez should never have been considered because of his writing. Trying to determine how much of the book was "him" was a fool's errand, because none of it was acceptable, especially for a manager.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:12 AM on May 15, 2021 [9 favorites]

That may be so. I haven’t worked in HR but I’m sure a company Apple’s size could handle assigning a candidate’s book to a few reviewers, including from PR, and maintaining a database of acceptable and unacceptable speech examples to guide evaluations.
posted by michaelh at 11:33 AM on May 15, 2021

He has a malignant and completely unreflective loathing for women which I can only hope and pray is extremely rare in any population, or we are in even deeper shit than I thought.

The Venn Diagram of him and Bitcoin Bros is probably a perfect circle.
posted by ryoshu at 11:43 AM on May 15, 2021

Freedom of speech should not enable a workplace to be a race to the bottom of the barrel of racism, sexism, misogyny, anti LGBTQIA+ and all the other stuff certain people think is their Right, and everyone else finds horribly uncomfortable.
posted by Jacen at 12:09 PM on May 15, 2021 [6 favorites]

Hey NoxAeternum, WTF - I was adding to the list of other problematic things Apple is doing that should also be addressed.
posted by PhineasGage at 1:16 PM on May 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

He has a malignant and completely unreflective loathing for women which I can only hope and pray is extremely rare in any population,

Surprise! You've failed the "listening to women" test! Because if you had been listening to women, you would know this piece of shit's brand of misogyny is not rare in any way. Your hopes and prayers in vain, man.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro at 1:20 PM on May 15, 2021 [12 favorites]

My wife and I lead pretty sheltered lives in some ways, and she sometimes talks about how she's largely been insulated from this particular type of misogyny. Which don't get me wrong, is fantastic, and we're both really happy about that fact. But there's also a weird dynamic around the presumption that this experience is universal for all women that sometimes makes her feel in a weird, self-acknowledged-irrational way like there's something wrong with her as a woman that she doesn't have to put up with this type of bullshit from men in the way that other women describe. (Don't get me wrong, she still has to put up with a lot of sexism, just not this type of predatory misogyny.) It's not that she wants misogynistic male attention, but rather that she wants her experience of womanhood not to be ignored, erased, or othered because it's not the same as what many other women experience. She actually quit Metafilter a while back because of this dynamic.

Anyway I don't think it's fair to make assumptions about whether other folks here are or aren't listening to women on the basis of whether they believe men like García Martínez are common, because they may well listen to the women in their lives, or in fact be women themselves, but those women may be fortunate enough to not have to deal with that type of asshole. Let's try to treat each other charitably here.
posted by biogeo at 1:52 PM on May 15, 2021 [7 favorites]

I can be fired for shit I might say on social media or other public forums if that reflects sufficiently badly on myself and thus my employer, and I'm (officially) waged doing warehouse work, with nobody below me. This sort of clause has been standard in every contract I've signed or seen for at least five years now. How this guy being fired for his heinous published book is even slightly controversial to anyone, I do not understand. It does not reflect well on you that this guy is the hill you want to die on, not a bunch of disempowered wage workers who can (and regularly are) fired for much less (a former colleague at a different job was fired for saying that his manager was an asshole - not by name, just those words - after one of his friends ratted him out to said manager, who was not in his Facebook friends list, and to whom the post was thus not visible.)
posted by Dysk at 1:57 PM on May 15, 2021 [9 favorites]

They should have fired him for being a bad "cultural fit", so we could watch all the techbros' heads explode.
posted by fuzz at 2:01 PM on May 15, 2021 [9 favorites]

where people (almost all men, statistically speaking) can and do easily and legally obtain guns to commit massacres

Every time it happens again it's the easiest, most horrible Mad Lib ever:

The [white man] in the [location] with the [AR-15].
posted by kirkaracha at 2:14 PM on May 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

Anyway I don't think it's fair to make assumptions about whether other folks here are or aren't listening to women on the basis of whether they believe men like García Martínez are common, because they may well listen to the women in their lives, or in fact be women themselves, but those women may be fortunate enough to not have to deal with that type of asshole.


I broadly agree, but would also argue that it's important to listen to women from a variety of backgrounds. I don't experience much of this kind of misogyny either, nor do most of the other women I know personally, and I can absolutely relate to the kind of invalidation that cab result from it being claimed as some universal truth is womanhood. However, I still believe this type of misogyny to be pretty commonplace, because of the experiences of others from different backgrounds, in different situations, and with different presentations, that I have heard and read.
posted by Dysk at 2:18 PM on May 15, 2021 [10 favorites]

Hey NoxAeternum, WTF - I was adding to the list of other problematic things Apple is doing that should also be addressed.

I apologize for my wrongful assumption. In these sorts of discussions, I've seen the bad faith argument of "well you allowed this asshole" get used that I'm a bit sensitive to it these days.

How this guy being fired for his heinous published book is even slightly controversial to anyone, I do not understand.

Because we live in a culture where we place greater value in words over people. Hence why we hold up allowing Nazis to commit an act of terror against Holocaust survivors as a demonstration of our commitment to free speech, why we defend demanding the dispossessed to repeatedly defend their right to exist with "the answer to bad speech is more speech", and why a publisher choosing to no longer publish a biography of a misogynist written by a predatory rapist is an affront.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:19 PM on May 15, 2021 [6 favorites]

Also, while García Martínez keeps saying that "Apple" recruited him, I'm willing to bet that what really happened was that it was a connection of his that did the recruitment, and that everything was kept quiet because of his background,with the idea that once he was in, it would be a fait accompli. Which is why the investigation is still needed - because there's someone who thought that he should be recruited.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:25 PM on May 15, 2021 [9 favorites]

Hence why we hold up allowing Nazis to commit an act of terror against Holocaust survivors as a demonstration of our commitment to free speech

"We" on metafilter don't generally do that in my experience. But here is a thread with several people defending the right of a despicable misogynist to spew his bullshit without consequence.
posted by Dysk at 2:26 PM on May 15, 2021 [6 favorites]

Maybe best to steer clear of generalizations about MeFites and assumptions on how "we" react to different situations. Even though they want to kill people like me, I supported the rights of Nazis to march decades ago and continue to do so today. Let's listen respectfully to what each of us has to say in each different thread, assume good faith, and respond forthrightly with our own views.
posted by PhineasGage at 2:45 PM on May 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm basing my impression on views expressed in threads here on the blue. There is a difference between allowing Nazis to march, and allowing Nazis to commit acts of terror, which is what I was suggesting was not something that has received any support from mefites in any threads I have been party to.
posted by Dysk at 2:50 PM on May 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

(And there is also a difference between allowing Nazis to march, and disallowing anyone from presenting them with consequences - such as the loss of employment - for doing so. This situation is more akin to the latter than the former.)
posted by Dysk at 2:53 PM on May 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

There is a difference between allowing Nazis to march, and allowing Nazis to commit acts of terror,

And I'm going to have to disagree. The whole point of Nazis marching is to beget terror in a show of force. This is the point that Sartre and Popper were pointing out - the fascist is looking to use your principles against you to further their ends, and it's up to you to either let them use your principles against you, or to realize that tolerance is a peace treaty and that those who refuse to abide by it cannot use it as protection. There's a reason why, after Charlottesville, the leftist community forced the ACLU out of the Nazi defending business.

As long as we argue that free speech requires abuse, the words will ring hollow to those in the cross hairs.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:16 PM on May 15, 2021 [17 favorites]

It's a complete derail, but I think "allowing them to march" means different things to you and I. I oppose banning them from doing so by force of law, but strongly encourage making it impossible for them to do so in practice by showing up to block them. They get to "speak". We get to drown them out.

That is not what happened in Charlottesville, where two dozen people were arrested for attempting to block the marchers. That is bullshit, and if you must frame this in free speech terms, suppressing the speech of the counter-protestors.
posted by Dysk at 3:31 PM on May 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

An excerpt from "Chaos Monkeys": How I Sold My Company to Twitter, Went to Facebook, and Screwed My Co-Founders. Garcia Martinez has also written a number of articles for Wired.

I've got a Scribd subscription, and "Chaos Monkeys" is on Scribd, so I started reading it. As a scathing portrait of Silicon Valley at a particular historical moment - venture capital, startups, Facebook, and Internet advertising, described in terms of greed, monomaniacal ambition, ego and humiliation - it's pretty fascinating. Garcia Martinez is an entertaining storyteller, even if I completely understand people at Apple not wanting to work with him. As he says himself:

... large companies have valuable public brands they must delicately preserve, and which can be assailed by even small companies such as yours, particularly in a tight-knit, appearances-conscious ecosystem like that of Silicon Valley.

In 2011, around the time described by the book, the Economist called this period the new tech bubble. A more recent update.
posted by russilwvong at 3:47 PM on May 15, 2021

Garcia Martinez would presumably have been a product manager at Apple, with people reporting to him. With two thousand Apple employees signing onto the letter, there was no way for Apple to do anything but fire him.

Here's his description of the product manager role at Facebook (what Microsoft calls a "program manager"):

The MBA-esque job description would be "CEO of the product," because those B-school pukes like sporting acronymic titles. This is many a company's definition of the role, and it's not completely wrong, though it makes the job seem statelier than it is.

A more illustrative description is "shit umbrella." If you imagine a bursting monsoon of clumpy diarrhea pouring down like God's own biblical vengeance, that is more or less where you find yourself in either a startup or a large, high-profile, and complex organization like Facebook. You, my dear product manager, are the communal manservant to your engineering team, holding a large, cumbersome paramerde above their heads bent over keyboards on which they furiously type.

By definition, what you do is everything that needs to be done, other than hands-on-keyboard type code. So that means sitting in endless meetings with the privacy legal team, giving highly selective and edited versions of what your product is going to do, and explaining how it fits into some antediluvian legal rubric. It means pitching a roomful of smiling and empty-headed salespeople, so they can start priming the client pump and bring spend into your new product baby. It means wheeling and dealing with other PMs to either cajole a product change or cadge some engineering resource. It means fronting for the product in high-level meetings with senior management, and trying to place it, like a quickly falling Tetris piece, into the rudimentary blueprint of their world.

posted by russilwvong at 3:56 PM on May 15, 2021

Wow. That really demonstrates his unfitness for his very own position, just from the sheer contempt in the wording.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:51 PM on May 15, 2021 [4 favorites]

Minor correction:

PhineasGage: Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Dr. Dre is on the Board of Directors of Apple, whose own writings - and past actions - include no small measure of violent misogyny.

Not sure where this got started, but Dr. Dre (Andre Young) isn't on the Apple board of directors.
posted by russilwvong at 6:25 PM on May 15, 2021 [7 favorites]

Dr Dre founded Beats, which Apple bought for a pretty penny. As you note, Apple's leadership page is as empty as Dre's own LinkedIn profile on the subject. Perhaps there's some subsidiary relationship "firewalling" Beats like Claris or the real estate firms, but it seems likely Dre holds a position of leadership?
posted by pwnguin at 7:59 PM on May 15, 2021

> As for “conduct outside of work”: the extremely public nature of that conduct has brought the consequences back into the workplace.

> California is an At-Will state

> I'd imagine he was well within his probation, when Apple has carte blanche to dismiss him

God damn it. California has other labor laws besides the ones that prevent non-compete agreements and allow firing without cause. Specifically Labor Code 96 (k). There's no protection for an employer to fire someone in their first n weeks of employment except in some kinds of apprenticeships.

I'm not arguing that this guy is A-OK, but if he isn't protected by a "lawful conduct" code, is anyone? If a server in Murphy, CA travels to a Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland & folks back home in the "upcountry" hear about it & complain to the restaurant's owner is it OK to fire her? What if she's arrested? What if a photo of her in handcuffs appears at the top of sfgate.com?

If "consequences back into the workplace" can strip someone of protections, were there any in the first place?
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 10:02 PM on May 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

There's no protection for an employer to fire someone in their first n weeks of employment except in some kinds of apprenticeships.

Yes, there is. This is why probationary periods exist - because you may not know everything about a new employee right off the bat, or it may turn out that they just aren't a good fit. (And when 2000 of your employees are voicing concerns over your new hire's misogynistic writings, "not a good fit" is an understatement.)

I'm not arguing that this guy is A-OK, but if he isn't protected by a "lawful conduct" code, is anyone?

This is the sort of argument that undermines the very principle you're trying to defend. If you're going to argue that an abuser's victims are obliged to put up with abuse because of a principle, then they're going to reject that principle - and rightfully so!
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:20 PM on May 15, 2021 [16 favorites]

I'm not arguing that this guy is A-OK, but if he isn't protected by a "lawful conduct" code, is anyone?

Pretty sure this guy isn't the first person in line for consequences. People at the bottom of the food chain get fired for less all the time. This hand-wringing about the effects on the people at the bottom now that someone at the top is facing consequences is misguided if it isn't disingenuous.
posted by Dysk at 12:46 AM on May 16, 2021 [15 favorites]

He wrote a book about tech company management. He was hired as a tech company manager. The statements in that book are not shielded from his employer’s assessment of his abilities as a manager.

Furthermore he was hired for a public role and Apple used what they understood of his public reputation to promote his hiring a small public relations effort. The story they wanted to tell was Apple hired a former leader in n Facebook ad platform team to improve its own ad platform. Apple PR offered an exclusive to Business Insider and that story got run and picked up.

Then it came to light that someone missed some discriminatory views he holds regarding the hiring and management of women and minorities. That conduct is directly related to his job.

The claims regarding some kind of protected political speech are absurd.
posted by interogative mood at 1:13 PM on May 16, 2021 [21 favorites]

interogative mood: Furthermore he was hired for a public role and Apple used what they understood of his public reputation to promote his hiring a small public relations effort. The story they wanted to tell was Apple hired a former leader in a Facebook ad platform team to improve its own ad platform. Apple PR offered an exclusive to Business Insider and that story got run and picked up.

Really? I thought Business Insider picked it up from his LinkedIn page. The original story says that Apple offered no comment.
posted by russilwvong at 3:09 PM on May 16, 2021

I wonder how many of those 2,000 employees read the book. I wonder if any of you have.
posted by Violet Blue at 9:12 PM on May 16, 2021

Exactly how many women does he have to harass and how many vile misogynistic passages do I have to read before I am allowed to decide the guy is dogshit?
posted by tavella at 10:20 PM on May 16, 2021 [15 favorites]

I wonder how many of those 2,000 employees read the book. I wonder if any of you have.

I don't think there's any context that could excuse those excerpts.

Even if the rest of the book made it clear that it was written as an American Psycho style satire of how toxic Silicon Valley is its pretty clear from the excerpts that it failed deeply in execution and publishing it was a mistake.
posted by zymil at 2:17 AM on May 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

Even if the rest of the book made it clear that it was written as an American Psycho style satire of how toxic Silicon Valley is its pretty clear from the excerpts that it failed deeply in execution and publishing it was a mistake.

One description said that he was trying to emulate Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis' book on his time in the finance industry. But the thing is that Lewis never had the sort of contempt that García Martínez demonstrates - rather, my recall (it's been a while since I read the book) was that Lewis reserved his ire for the industry and the people at the top, and viewed the people at his own level as being victims of a horribly abusive system.

But again, I'm not sure what reading a bitter, abusive screed is going to tell me anything that is going to explain the excerpts that have been posted.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:52 AM on May 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

This whole situation would not have arisen if Silicon Valley's much-ballyhooed "culture fit" interviews were actually worth a damn.
posted by Apocryphon at 9:57 AM on May 17, 2021

Unless it's the culture itself at the top within Apple that is the problem. The people hiring him might have considered him a fantastic culture fit, if it hadn't been for those damn employees further down the food chain kicking up a fuss.

I don't know if that is the case, but it's certainly a possibility.
posted by Dysk at 11:01 AM on May 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

violet blue: I wonder how many of those 2,000 employees read the book. I wonder if any of you have.

Just finished it. I can't say what it'd be like to have Garcia Martinez as a co-worker, but I'd recommend the book. It's a fascinating story, describing both the Silicon Valley startup scene during the current bubble, and Facebook when they were building up their advertising business. Garcia Martinez tells it in an entertainingly mocking style, insulting everyone and everything, and he certainly doesn't spare himself (like a lowly court jester who's the only person who can openly insult the king).
posted by russilwvong at 8:27 PM on May 17, 2021

like a lowly court jester who's the only person who can openly insult the king

Yes, the world has a desperate shortage of ex-Goldman Sachs bankers, Y Combinator alums, Facebook directors, etc. willing to rib the tyrannical rule of...women existing in the workplace.
posted by naoko at 6:15 AM on May 18, 2021 [17 favorites]

He was just joking.

It's being taken out of context.

You can't know someone's true intent.

What if every facet of the situation was altered in a way to force another answer, have you thought about that.

Bingo!
posted by Drastic at 6:38 AM on May 18, 2021 [12 favorites]

Apple hasn't really been part of the "SV culture" for 20 years now, they were always pretty different and have a history of being judgmental/picky in the industry so this choice by them is not particularly surprising. Most SV startups are "Work really long hours and embrace the company vision, but otherwise do whatever you want" while Apple is "Work medium hours and embrace the company vision, and also follow these 45 confusing rules".

Note however they were still enough of a part of SV culture to be part of the organized criminal conspiracy to suppress tech worker wages.
posted by srboisvert at 4:08 AM on May 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

how many women just immediately noped out of joining tech because they think its the norm to deal with people like this. I was driven out of my job because my young, arrogant, male boss was really, really sexist. It is the norm. It must change.

I sued my employer, got a settlement, but it was a miserable and abusive process. If you are in Tech, fight sexism and racism hard, excellent workers are being shut out and screwed over.
posted by theora55 at 11:45 AM on May 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Verge reports that the firing has broken through Apple's culture of secrecy with regards to workspace issues.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:43 AM on May 26, 2021