May 18, 2021 - 3:06pm
Last week, tech giant Apple made headlines for the summary dismissal of one of its employees. Following a petition signed by over 2,000 Apple employees, the company decided to fire Antonio García Martínez, a senior ads engineer who had only just started, over comments he made in his 2016 book Chaos Monkeys. According to the petitioners, García Martínez had a “history of publishing overtly racist and sexist remarks” which “directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion & Diversity”.
The quote from the book that is regularly cited, out of context, as proof of García Martínez’s apparent sexism is below:
But as Matt Taibbi writes, this quote has been taken out of context, which is crucial to understanding the deliberately over-the-top style of the passage. In the memoir, García Martínez writes about meeting a six foot tall British trader who is “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels,’ who he compares favourably to other women in the Bay Area. But it is also a comparison with himself — a geeky tech engineer — which is why he was attracted to the strong British trader:
In an interview with UnHerd, what García Martínez finds so strange about his defenestration is that the company knew about his literary past when they first hired him:
On the hypocrisy of Apple regarding his book:
Why is the quote re-surfacing now?
Where does this all lead?
García Martínez has personal knowledge of such regimes, as his parents fled from Communist Cuba:
Referring to his case, some reports claimed that Silicon Valley had a white male workforce. Is this true?
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SubscribeWhat was the point of this interview? What are we to learn from it?
Mr. Martinez is currently interesting because he was ousted from Apple by his woke colleagues. At the start of the interview, however, he made it clear he wouldn’t discuss that event except to acknowledge information already in the public domain. I would guess he is constrained by a non-disclosure agreement with Apple. Fair enough.
During the interview Mr. Martinez also declined to answer questions relating to the cancellation of Trump, the culture wars, the gender wars, or anything remotely controversial. His contributions were little more than generic statements about the potential adverse effects of big tech censorship. He added nothing that isn’t already well documented elsewhere.
So why did he agree to this interview? What did he hope to achieve? Why did Unherd air this non-event?
In his concluding comments, Freddie acknowledged that Mr. Martinez was clearly nervous. Maybe that was the point. Perhaps Unherd wanted to show the effects of cancellation on a specific person and its broader effect on free speech. I’m stretching here to find a reason for airing this interview with a nervous, evasive, barely communicative man.
Completely agree.
In his concluding comments, Freddie acknowledged that Mr. Martinez was clearly nervous
Was he nervous? He just seems very high-strung. He seems like exactly the type of person I imagine creating all of these ‘amazing’ high-tech products that are designed to keep one scrolling through multiple apps and screens all day long. He even admitted he was one of the creators of the advertising schemes early on. He just seems like a great example of what I imagine those at the upper echelons of Apple, Google, FB, etc are like – full on 24/7 constantly checking their devices.
“”Hoist with his own petard”” as Shakespeare put it – haha, what a D***.
So he made his millions writing code so Facebook advertisers can track and fallow you everywhere on the internet, and then a decade later gets fired because his past fallows him about. Karma. My guess is the reason he actually said nothing but appeared with Freddy is because he has a huge lawsuite mounting as a Hispanic fired by a bunch of White guys. haha (sorry if my unconscious bias against the entire tech/woke/rabidLiberal1984/elites shows up in my posts)
***Freddy, next interview, the second in command of MI-6.***
Freddy: ‘So tell us about all this secret stuff you do.’
MI-6 Guy: ‘Can’t really say much, it’s not that big a deal really.
Freddy: So what sort of places do you work in?’
MI-6 Guy: Well, some here and some there, bit all over really, sort of like anything, just doing stuff and whatever.’
Freddy: ‘Well thankyou for these wonderful insights, good by.’
I’ve read the quote ‘in context’ and it doesn’t sound any better. Agree…he is a bit of a D.
I dunno. When 2,000 Apple D**** sign a petition to get you out, I’m betting you’ve got SOMETHING going for you.
Maybe they just needed to find an excuse to fire him because listening to him blithering is so painful?
This interview made me think of the case of Carmen Segarra, the US Fed employee hired to study conflict-of-interest policies at the vampire squid, Goldman Sachs. Martinez is of Cuban, Segarra of Puerto Rican descent. They are both Hispanic but both look like white Americans. Lovely Carmen’s case was even sadder than Martinez. Her employer thought she was being too uncompromising in her recommendations regarding Goldman Sachs, and they fired her. She received vindication of a sort when a corporate merger between Kinder Morgan (yes, the same Kinder Morgan Justin Trudeau gave billions to when the Canadian government bought the Trans-Mountain pipeline) and El Paso Corpn was ruled on by a judge who found many of the same deficiencies in conflict-of-interest procedures that she had complained about. It seems that being Hispanic doesn’t prevent people like Martinez and Segarra from being hired to responsible positions. Possibly it even helps them. But it also doesn’t seem to offer them any protection against unfair dismissal. (I know, you can’t draw any firm conclusions from the experience of just two Hispanic-Americans, but it does suggest a hypothesis for testing.)
One mistake in Antonio’s take, Twitter is replete with porn…
Was the book a work of fiction or autobiography. Was it written in the first person