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I think she genuinely believed that a large number of the other young lawyers at the firm felt likewise but were afraid to say anything, that the whole thing was a coordination problem, and that if she got the ball rolling others would follow suit and that while losing one associate is no big deal losing double digit percentages would be. And who knows, 10 years ago when SJWism was riding high maybe the company would have dithered for a few days instead of firing her immediately and during that time others would have been emboldened to join.
I think the lower appetite of others to join is obviously a big deal, but the main issue is the decreased willingness of companies to bend the knee. They fired her quickly giving no time for others to join and no sign of weakness or uncertainty that would encourage them to do so. Mozilla buckled like a belt under employee pressure and that really kicked off the SJW movement of corporate pressure. This is a signal, though a small one, that those days are over. Mozilla booting Eich was a signal to others, they will capitulate to young employees throwing a temper tantrum so go throw one. This will hopefully be taken as the opposite signal, if you throw a tantrum you will get fired and put a big "Don't Hire Me" sign around your neck.
The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do and B) People who will cite this incident as proof of hate forever regardless of what you do, should not be reasoned with. But so many institutions were convinced that if they gave the sharks a few drops of blood, they'd be sated, and the institution spared. So they resorted to emboldening cancel warriors with insane stuff like a company firing employees of ten years because their kid said the n-word on the internet, or school principals expelling children because a one-sided video with no context made them seem guilty.
Why did it take so long for anyone to just try not listening to them?? The standard response was to only ever give the crazy people exactly what they want and hope it goes away.
The simplest explanation, though not necessarily the correct one, is just that many large corporations have huge numbers of people who genuinely hold progressive political views, including on the higher levels where they can make policy. In other words, it's not that they bent the knee to the crowd, it's that they agreed with the crowd.
Many prominent tech industry people, for example, grew up in progressive households and held/hold a mix of libertarian and progressive views. It's only very recently, once the woke really well and truly overstepped their bounds, that some of them began to change their minds. I think some people might overestimate the degree to which these shifts are just staged for mass consumption. For example, the simplest though not necessarily correct explanation for why Musk went from a somewhat Democrat-leaning moderate to a full-on Trumpist over the course of the last few years is that he genuinely changed his mind.
What makes these explanations not necessarily correct, would you say?
I do agree with this take, though, I think there's examples of legacy-corpo family heirs who are both stupid-rich and very progressive.
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After a decade of Twitter mobs exploding at the main character du jour, we know how it plays out now. But in 2014, thousands of people suddenly coming out of the woodwork demanding that you fire employee X was a relatively new experience, and one they were obviously struggling to grapple with: there was an obvious fear that failing to capitulate could gut their brand reputation and share value. After a decade of these blow-ups, companies have started to cotton on to the fact that these mobs are ultimately impotent. The mobs can kick up a stink on Twitter, they can get journalists who use Twitter to publish sympathetic articles damning the company - but I'm not aware of a single instance of a Twitter mob eventually snowballing into a genuine boycott from consumers at large (except Bud Light, as noted by @FCfromSSC below - and even then, that wasn't a case of "one of this company's employees said something dubiously offensive in their private life, therefore we're boycotting the entire company").
Bud Light.
Mea culpa.
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Here's your boycott.
Can you put this information into some sort of context?
Presumably the circled part is the boycott, which in terms of overall stock isn't too distinguishable from noise and other events.
If that's the point @stolen_brawnze was trying to make then it's some pretty Reddit-tier cope. There's plenty of information on the significant and lasting damage done to the Bud Light brand. The line could have gone up during the boycott if InBev were doing good enough things in other areas, but that wouldn't change the extent of the punishment they received.
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They thought that the wind was going to be blowing in this direction permanently, and that they had better get on the Revolution’s good side by joining up early. And to be fair, a lot of people on this site also thought that the Revolution had won and this was the new permanent state of affairs.
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Full court press from all sides -- the media, regulatory bodies like the EEoC, their own lawyers (listening to left-wing legal academics) -- plus infiltration into the executive ranks (that is, many of them weren't bending the knee but doing what they wanted to do anyway)
Also the employment market for tech people is probably worse today than at any time since immediately after the financial crisis, so companies have more leeway to take actions employees disapprove of.
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