"The Email Caste's Last Stand"

How about a happy thread?

As you probably know -- or maybe I have the great pleasure of being the first one to tell you -- "Meta," which is what FaceBook calls itself now because "FaceBook" has the brand approval rating of NAMBLA or The Lincoln Project, just laid off 11,000 of its least useful employees, which, considering that these are "workers" paid to play ping-pong and drink lattes all day in an industry devoted to goldbricking, check-hammering and clock-watching, is really saying something.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed employees virtually on Wednesday around 1pm ET, hours after the company announced it is laying off 13% of its staff.

A Meta employee impacted by today's layoffs provided this video to NBC News.

In a letter early Wednesday morning, Zuckerberg said Meta is making reductions in every organization but that recruiting will be disproportionately affected since the company plans to hire fewer people in 2023. The company extended its hiring freeze through the first quarter with a few exceptions, Zuckerberg said.

Impacted employees will receive 16 weeks of pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, Zuckerberg said. Meta will cover health insurance for six months.

Here's a transcript of what he said in the video segment:

I know there must be just a range of different human emotions. I want to say up front that I take full responsibility for this human decision.

I'm the human founder and CEO, I'm responsible for the human health of our human company, for our direction, and for deciding how we execute that, including human things like this, and this was ultimately my human call.

And it was one of the hardest calls that I've had to make in the 18 earth years of running the company. And a lot of why it's hard is, obviously, it has a big impact on your human lives, but also for our peaceful, non-xenocidal mission. We're losing human terran people who... you've really put your human heart and imaginary ha-ha soul into this place.

Each of you generic labor units is talented and passionate, and each of you has played a role in making Meta the success that it is. No matter what subcreature team you may have worked on, each of you played a role in contributing to the products that billions of zoo people use to connect every standard terran day.

I sprinkled in some words like "human" and "earth" and "terran" to better approximate the tone of Zuckerberg's delivery.

Slate whines that the firings at Meta will mean that people only in the country due to H1-B visas sponsored by Meta will have to go back to their countries of origin.

They similarly whined about that at Twitter.

I don't know what to tell you. It's a contract for employment in a foreign country, not a grant of citizenship. That's how the contract works.

By Malcolm Kyeyune, the end of the "email caste" that has flourished in the Courts of High Tech.

[T]here is another aspect of the Musk takeover that has little to do with free speech or even ideology--although it has a great deal to do with the class interests of Big Tech censors. As a recession looms, Silicon Valley is shedding the non-essential workers it acquired when unlimited venture funding made turning a profit an afterthought. Musk happens to have taken the helm at Twitter just as this reality is asserting itself. In this sense, the revolt against his leadership is the last stand of a cohort of activist hangers-on who are about to find themselves unemployed.

You can't have Trumpian levels of DEI overstaffing in a Biden economy.

Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, and all indications are that the platform isn't worth anything close to that. Once he got access to the company's finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day, and that many of its employees weren't doing much work at all. So he proceeded to do what most executives would do in this situation: He laid off some of his workers.

The abrupt firing of thousands of employees solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk's haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn't have gone much longer without massive layoffs. The same thing is happening across Silicon Valley. Last week, the online-payments company Stripe announced it would cut 14 percent of its workforce, as did the rideshare giant Lyft; Facebook parent company Meta looks poised to do the same. [Did the same, as mentioned above. -- ace] Like Wile E. Coyote, tech companies ran off the cliff long ago; only now is economic gravity starting to assert itself.

Many "unicorn" tech startups began with a few engineers and a product they wanted to sell, but over the past decade-plus, they have accrued a bloated bureaucracy of "equity"-minded h.r. activists, ESG-savvy consultants, affinity-group mavens, climate-change specialists, and many other email-caste hangers-on. Now that times are turning bad, tech companies can no longer afford to sustain a massive "court" of professional-class nobility, paying sinecures to sons and daughters of the good and the great who don't know how to code or crunch numbers, but know how to write emails, hold useless meetings, and talk about diversity and inclusion.

Golgifrinchan Space Ark B is ready for take-off.

He compares these useless hangers-on to the officer corps of the pre-Revolution French Army, hopelessly clogged with the useless second sons of the talentless nobility, who could not be fired, because they needed jobs and had nowhere else to go.

A similar dynamic is operative in America today. The people who worked "on climate" at Twitter, now being given the ax by the perfidious Elon Musk, are openly complaining that they won't be able to find jobs anywhere else in this economy. They are, of course, right to worry.

One of the biggest and least-talked-about social questions in the West is how to economically provide for our own modern version of France's impecunious nobles: that is, how to prop up high-status people who can't really do much economically productive work.

Learn to scavenge. Posted by: fd

Instapundit often mentions an "overproduction of elites" being a marker for social upheaval but I can't see how you're an "elite" if you literally have no useful skills by which to put food into your mouth without the intervention of state or corporate welfare programs.

...

In an earlier column, I ended with the following question: "Gen. Mark Milley infamously testified before a congressional hearing that he wanted to understand 'white rage.' But who right now is prepared for progressive, multiracial, demisexual rage, as the core social groups driving progressivism in America are hit the hardest by layoffs and the end of Silicon Valley subsidies?" That rage is no longer coming--it's here.

Who the hell is this guy? He's amazeballs.

Bonus:

And ICYMI, Ace, remaining Twitter employees are to be back in the office for minimum 40 hours, according to an email this morning (IIRC).

Posted by: Comrade flounder

posted by Ace at 05:09 PM

| Access Comments