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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Having said that, I've recently moved away from thinking big corporations make woke decisions only because it directly improves their profit. It's hard to explain things like really aggressive diversity hiring at tech companies.

So leaving ESG scores aside.

There's an easy Scylla and Charybdis metaphor to be made for companies deciding their level of wokeness. If a company acquiesces to internal activists with zero hesitancy, it ends up as a "Go Woke Go Broke" anecdote. On the other hand, if it ignores the social justice zeitgeist entirely, it stands out as a tall nail to be hammered down by lawsuits or activist fury.

As for really aggressive diversity hirers? They're just sailing a little too close to Charybdis. This might happen because it's safer/more satisfying for the people in charge of hiring, though not for the organization they work for.

They missed the lesson of the tale. The lesson isn't that you try to steer a course between Scylla (the monster) and Charybdis (the whirlpool). The lesson is you steer for Scylla and take the losses, lest you lose your whole ship and company to Charybdis instead.

it stands out as a tall nail to be hammered down by lawsuits or activist fury.

Nah, it's nowhere near as dramatic. If they lose a particular fight they just start pretending nothing ever happened, and that you don't exist. They might come after you again when the stars align, but for the most part they realize that if they don't score a kill, they're just handing their opponents free publicity.

People love reaching for these structural explanations, but they fail to explain the material reality.

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