A few weeks ago, more than 2,000 employees of Apple Inc. signed a petition that led to the sacking of a clever and capable tech engineer, Antonio García Martínez. García Martínez was fired for sexism — not because he behaved badly towards any women, but because of a passage in a book he wrote five years ago. The book was Chaos Monkeys, an exposé of the Silicon Valley scene, and here’s the offending sentence: ‘Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit… but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or a foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.’
Chaos Monkeys was a New York Times bestseller — funny, confessional and pacy. Everyone at Apple who welcomed Antonio on board would have read it. No one took issue with the book when he was hired, but a week after he started the poisoned petition began to circulate: ‘We are deeply concerned about the recent hiring of Antonio García Martínez,’ it read. ‘His misogynistic statements… directly oppose Apple’s commitment to Inclusion and Diversity. We are profoundly distraught by what this hire means for Apple’s commitment to inclusion goals as well as its real and immediate impact on those working near Mr García Martínez.’
Did Apple defend García Martínez? Of course it didn’t. Apple crumbled. Victory for Bay Area Woman. But was it really a win for women? No. It wasn’t. I reckon it set back the feminist cause decades. And were the petitioners really women? I’m not so sure. This was a new low for American cancel culture, and the best explanation I can think of is that, for the most part, the petitioners were men.
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