Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Chairman Pao and the Ministry of Truth

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 11, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

13:51

Chairman Pao and the Ministry of Truth

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	The lady pictured here wearing the problem glasses is Ellen Powell, an American lawyer.
	In 2005 she joined a venture capital firm called Kleiner Perkins and in 2012 she failed to gain a promotion within that firm, so she decided to sue them for gender discrimination.
	This happened in May 2012 and by October 2012 Powell had taken to a question and answer site called Quora to announce that she had been fired which is a particularly bizarre way to announce such a thing.
	Quote, I have been terminated from my job at KPCB.
	On Monday afternoon senior management told me to clean my office, leave and not come back.
	The senior office then released a statement of their own.
	Miss Powell's Quora post is misleading.
	She remains an employee of the firm.
	Because of long-standing issues having no relationship or bearing on the litigation, Kleiner approached Miss Powell to facilitate her transition over an extended period of time out of the firm.
	The proposed terms that did not require Miss Powell to waive any legal rights or claims are generous, fair and intended to support Miss Powell in a successful career transition.
	This is because, according to senior management at Kleiner Perkins, Powell's performance was generally poor.
	In his testimony during the trial, Murphy spoke of Powell's failure to improve her performance despite receiving mounds of criticism from senior partners and her resistance to being a team player and unwillingness to do what was expected of her.
	In his testimony he said that Powell fell asleep during a board meeting, which was really embarrassing.
	Instead of apologising, Powell told Murphy that she fell asleep because the meeting was boring.
	Powell felt protected and maybe a little bit entitled, Murphy said on the witness stand, and he began meeting Powell frequently to discuss problems with her performance in late 2011.
	Murphy then put Powell on a 60-day evaluation period in September 2012, after which he recommended that Powell be terminated.
	As Powell's direct superior, it was Murphy who instigated Powell's firing in October 2012.
	This was three years later as the case didn't go to trial until 2015, and Ellen Powell lost.
	A jury soundly rejected Ellen Powell's claims of gender discrimination.
	The verdict followed testimony by two dozen witnesses who variously painted Kleiner as unfriendly to women or as Powell as a difficult employee.
	And given the evidence against Powell, the jury came down against her.
	Despite Powell looking lazy, stubborn, irresponsible, and entitled, she went on to say, if I've helped to level the playing field for women and minorities and venture capital, then the battle was worth it.
	In a statement that seems just remarkably disconnected from reality.
	At least the reality described by a dozen former partners, with most testifying that Powell was difficult to work with and depicting her as quiet, resentful, and territorial.
	With Powell's former boss testifying that he thought she had a quote female chip on her shoulder.
	Powell spent more than three days being questioned, telling jurors that she had been taking a stand for women's rights when she sought an eight-figure payout to leave Kleiner when she decided to sue.
	Because in her own words, she says, I think there should be equal opportunities for men and women to be venture capitalists, and I wanted to make sure my story was told, apparently completely oblivious to the glaring personality defects that everyone else could see.
	After losing the case, Powell didn't stop there.
	She then tried to extort Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield and Byers for $2.7 million, or else she was going to appeal the decision.
	This was presumably because she had racked up nearly a million dollars in legal fees fighting this case.
	But going back to 2012 when she had been fired from her job at KPCB, she was hired by Reddit six months later in 2013.
	Yishan Wong, then Reddit's chief executive, said that Powell had been a formal and informal advisor to Reddit for more than a year and had recently decided to join them full time.
	In November 2014, Yishan Wong resigned from Reddit, leaving Ellen Powell to be the interim chief executive officer.
	Powell then began exercising her executive powers, frankly to advance an authoritarian feminist agenda on Reddit.
	Studies show that women are less likely to negotiate their salary if it's not explicitly stated that the wages are negotiable.
	And even when they do negotiate, they're less good at negotiating for their salaries than men.
	So instead of trying to encourage women to negotiate for their salary more vigorously, or maybe being a little more generous with women when they are negotiating, Powell instead decides to drag everyone down to the lowest level by simply banning salary negotiations.
	A move taken solely for ideological reasons, specifically to hamstring men in order to eliminate the persistent disadvantage that women have at the bargaining table.
	And then came the firing of popular community director Victoria Taylor, who was fired for several reasons but a leaked chat log makes references to issues that Taylor had had with Pao herself, because of her rather authoritarian attitude.
	Shortly after Taylor's dismissal, another employee came out and said that they were dismissed by Powell after having cancer and not recovering fast enough.
	And then Powell and the rest of the team said that they were going to, quote, remove harassing subreddits.
	Now anyone with a vague familiarity with modern feminism will probably be able to tell you that the feminist definition of what harassment actually is on the internet is very fluid.
	So they decided to remove five subreddits that broke their rules on harassment of individuals.
	The largest of which was a subreddit called Fat People Hate.
	Understandably, this was seen as an attempt to enforce authoritarian social justice policies on the Reddit community.
	And YouTuber Boogie2988, who regularly featured on Fat People Hate, coming out in opposition to what is widely perceived as censorship.
	So Redditors called Ellen Powell Nazi and asked her to resign for deleting abusive threads.
	Of course, Powell did not resign.
	And thus began the Reddit Revolt, where hundreds of subreddits comprising hundreds of thousands of people were made dark, that is, inaccessible to their communities, as an act of solidarity against the firing of Taylor and the censorship of other subreddits for ideological reasons.
	And the memes began, comparing Ellen Powell to Chairman Mao Zedong, gracing her with the nickname Chairman Powell for her authoritarian practices while at Reddit.
	But it wasn't just shitposting that Redditors were doing.
	They also organised a petition, in which over 200,000 people asked Powell to step down as the CEO of Reddit.
	The petition was successful.
	About a month and a half after the failure of the lawsuit she had placed against Kleiner Perkins, Caulfield and Byers for alleged gender discrimination.
	Subsequent to her leaving Reddit, more details emerged about Victoria Taylor's dismissal from Reddit, with Yishan Wong alleging that the reason Victoria Taylor was dismissed was because of co-founder Alexis O'Hanian.
	He claims that the board pressured Powell to outright ban the hate subreddits in a sweeping purge.
	She resisted knowing the community and claiming it would be a shit show.
	But like Powell, Wong seems to be incapable of understanding exactly why the Reddit revolt occurred.
	It wasn't due to the firing of Taylor, as unpopular a decision as that was.
	It was due mostly from censorship.
	Censorship that was informed by a distinctly authoritarian mindset.
	The sort of mindset that says, we know best for you.
	A mindset that Wong unwittingly displays in the remainder of this interview.
	Wong claims that Powell would have been the perfect defender for Reddit's trolls, especially considering her recent legacy as a gender discrimination crusader.
	What all the white power racist sexist neckbeards don't understand is that with her at the head of the company, the company would be immune to accusations of promoting sexism and racism.
	She is literally Silicon Valley's number one feminist hero, so any SJWs would have had a hard time attacking the company for intentionally creating a bastion of sexist/slash racist content.
	At least this shows that Wong understands that the Reddit Revolt wasn't about Taylor being fired, but was in fact the subreddit bannings.
	But again, it's more the attitude that we know best for you, which Wong displays just so clearly here.
	Now she's gone, and Huffman has the moral authority as co-founder to move ahead with the purge.
	We tried to let you govern yourselves and you failed, so now the man is going to set some rules.
	Admittedly, I can't say I'm terribly upset.
	And as for Wong, he's probably unhireable now.
	He's pretty sure that no one will ever hire him as a CAO or any other executive position again.
	Ellen Powell then took to the Washington Post to write a blog dehumanizing the eternal enemies of feminists, Trolls on the Internet.
	That she begins by saying, I have just endured one of the largest trolling attacks in history, and ends by saying, I'm rooting for the humans over the trolls.
	I know we can win.
	Of course, when she says, astonishing human responses and rooting for humans over trolls, what she really means is feminists.
	The narrative of Ellen Powell's departure from Reddit, according to feminists, is that a team of coordinated online trolls sent her sickening abuse in a misogynistic attempt to drive women out of technology because she's a feminist.
	And unsurprisingly, this is where the Ministry of Truth makes its appearance.
	The New York Times posted an article entitled, It's Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Powell Nought.
	Fighter of Sexism is Out at Reddit.
	This article is so biased that it's almost a parody of what a feminist article would look like.
	Ellen Powell became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley.
	Powell's abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment, and cruel behaviour are out of control on the web, and that Silicon Valley's well-publicized problems with gender and ethnic diversity in its workforce persists.
	This sounds like a standard feminist propaganda piece, and it is.
	But it wasn't always like this.
	Despite the fact that there has been no information on the page to signify that there has been any kind of update whatsoever to this page, this story is drastically different to the one the New York Times originally ran.
	Thankfully, the internet never forgets.
	The original article read as follows: Ellen Powell, the interim chief executive of Reddit, resigned from the online message board Friday after a week of ceaseless criticism from scores of angry users over the handling of an employee departure.
	Miss Powell will be replaced by Steve Huffman, who, along with Alexis O'Hanian, started Reddit from a two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Boston a decade ago.
	Miss Powell said that she would remain as an advisor to Reddit's board for the remainder of the year.
	Her exit, which the company described as a mutual agreement between her and Reddit's board, follows a week of unrest in the Reddit community, which is made up of more than 160 million regular users, who use the site to talk about anything from current events to viral cat photos.
	Miss Powell characterised her departure as a result of a disagreement with Reddit's board on the future of the company.
	There was no mention by the New York Times that this article had even been updated.
	One day it was information event-driven news, reported in a relatively impartial and unbiased way.
	The next day, it is a feminist ideological propaganda piece, designed to push a narrative, designed to demonize people who disagreed with the authoritarian practices of a powerful feminist.
	Quote, As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the times had been assembled and collated, their number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.
	This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs, to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.
	Day by day and almost minutes by minute, the past was brought up to date.
	In this way, every prediction made by the party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.
	All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
	In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
	The largest section of the records department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction.
	A number of the times which might, because of changes in political alignment or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times, still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it.

▲