(2021-05-18) Solana Making Space For Monkeys

Mike Solana: Making Space for Monkeys. In 1984, Apple released one of the most famous commercials in American history, declared itself the mother ship for “thinking different,”... last week the house that Jobs built set a new creative standard when, just days after Business Insider reported he’d been hired to Apple’s ads team, the company fired Antonio García Martinez for the crime of having produced, five years ago, the critically-acclaimed, bestselling book Chaos Monkeys.

Apple tried to make the controversy vanish by ousting the newly-determined “bad tech man.” The controversy did not vanish.

Chaos Monkeys is not an essay on Antonio’s views about working with women, or women in general, and by the way women — in general — are never generalized in the book. Chaos Monkeys is a literary portrait of Antonio’s life, written clearly — obviously — in a highly-stylized Gonzo voice.

A company that fires artists for art is not a company that values creativity or risk, two essential components of innovation, which, folks, is the entire reason we’re here.

Apple’s canned, corporate-speak statement on Antonio’s firing was simply:..

Separate from the firing, this was a spectacular blunder. Exactly what behavior are we talking about?

what Apple appears to be asserting is Antonio’s having written Chaos Monkeys — which Apple leadership knew about, which Apple leadership in part recruited him for — itself constituted discriminatory behavior.

Signatories argued the Chaos Monkeys author made them “unsafe” at work (explicitly this was the claim), and cited a handful of “racist,” “sexist” excerpts from the book as evidence.

You may be wondering how a mob of 2,000 people could be made to feel unsafe for the presence of a single, moderately spicy writer now focused on ad privacy. This is a great question that was not asked by the Verge

Antonio’s real crime here was employing a kind of cliched literary device to express how much he loved a woman — but explicitly for being an incredibly, uniquely strong woman. It’s essentially a kind of very weirdly-worded love letter framed inside an awkward disaster movie metaphor.

As is obvious in context, Antonio was joking about what he perceived to be a shitty local dating pool. I’ve lived in San Francisco for ten years. Almost every single straight man I know has complained about the local girls, almost every single straight woman I know has complained about the local guys

I don’t like when people blame their shitty love lives on others. I’ve always just thought the excuses were sort of embarrassing. Be great, and you’ll attract great people. But stuff like this is nonetheless common. If we scour the social media posts of every person who signed the Apple petition, will we not find a single instance of “men are assholes” in the context of… dating?

Amidst the controversy, Katherine Boyle shared a great Hitchens quote... A culture that values taking offense, and empowers the offended, is a culture with clear incentives to outrage.

Have you found yourself wondering why, in the middle of a controversy so great, we haven’t discussed Antonio’s workplace behavior?

Every great artist and writer in history has been an outlier. Every great entrepreneur, scientist, and technologist has been an outlier. Without robust experimentation, and a culture that protects our weirdest handful, we will absolutely stagnate and decline into oblivion

Among people who feel out of control of their own lives there tends to be an impulse towards aggressively policing the perceived weirdness of others out of existence. Increasingly, such efforts are succeeding.

High-level, I think it’s always worth asking if you’re on the side that’s burning books, and try to be honest if you are: do you really think you’re the hammer-wielding heroine of this saga, or are you the aging Orwellian villain, terrified of change?