On Meta’s Q1 2026 earnings call, CFO Susan Li said the quiet part out loud. “We recently shared internally that we plan to reduce the size of our employee base in May. We believe a leaner operating model will allow us to move more quickly while also helping to offset the substantial investments we are ... Mark Zuckerberg Just Told 8,000 Employees Their Layoffs Are a Line Item in His $145 Billion AI Bill
Why stop there? Fuck all employees of the owning class. How dare they be employed
Meta is a special kind of evil, they’re exemplary
While I do generally agree, there are a LOT of companies that have their own special kind of evil, and ultimately if people are choosing between being employed and working for one, they will work for one. There simply aren’t enough ethical jobs for the number of people who would prefer to work for ethical companies
Its not a dichotomy. Its a spectrum. Meta, palantir they are at the bad end.
Nobody working at facebook has any illusions that they work at a company that helps people make connections and express themselves online. They know its a manipulation machine that oversteps its boundaries, constantly, hoovering up their data. They are also well paid, so its not bread line or facebook. Its a choice.
Many are starting to wake up, but the damage is done. So, its also perfectly reasonable for anyone to not feel sorry for them, if their choice to screw over the world ended up being less beneficial to them than they hoped. That doesnt mean they deserve vitriol or they had it coming.
Couple things.
Firstly; just because they are well-paid does not imply they have the means to survive without employment. In fact that places them far closer to you and I than to somebody capable of living solely off the labor of others. Additionally, large tech companies utilize H1B visas as a form of coercion for both the visa holder and the other employees.
Secondly; you open your first paragraph with
But open paragraph #2 with
Those two statements contradict each other.
That’s not my point, though! My point is; blame the goddamn reptilian tech bro billionaire and the shareholders. Blame the government that allows Meta to exist at all. Blame the dysfunctional and cancerous-at-best socioeconomic systems that allow either to exist.
Or, to put it more succinctly; don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Being aware it’s not what they present themselves as is not the same as realising you’re helping fascists and genocides.
The world isn’t black and white. I work for a company that’s been around for over a decade. We work with hospitals to improve operational efficiency. This leads to safer outcomes for patients, better working conditions for staff, and less wasted time or money.
We recently signed a limited contract with palantir for a certain software data structure. It’s limited the very specific things. I’m not happy about the contract, but I’m still proud of what I do. I’ve been in different hospitals with and without our company. It’s a big difference and it can literally save lives.
Should I quit then spend months looking for a new job in an economy currently with a very high unemployment rate just because someone online thinks the world is black and white?
lol, what part of saying it’s a spectrum makes you think it’s black and white. We all make decisions based on our interest, and we all have a line. You seem to have gotten closer to yours.
Only because they’re in a position to be. Lots of other companies/execs would literally kill to be in the same position. They’re not not pieces of shit out of the kindness of their hearts, it’s because they don’t have the power to be.
If you’re willing to defend Meta employees on those grounds you’ve got to be willing to give ICE employees a pass too.
Facebook and the other meta companies have done AT LEAST as much damage to society. MORE when you consider they’re ALSO partly responsible for ICE.
facebook is actually the first to do the most damage, by being one of the sole platform for russian backed propaganda to bring people into conservatism. boomers/gen x are the users.
Can you explain that last part about them being partly responsable for ICE? ICE has existed for a few years before Facebook was even founded, and they were also evil back then.
They were evil but constrained and minor. Their current power is the direct result of the anti-immigrant flames social media like Facebook have been fanning with their algorithms for years.
I don’t see a reason to assume Facebook employees are, to a man, engaging in war crimes the way ICE officers are. Maybe some of them are pushing back against their overlords, like these Google employees.
Now if it were to a man… Just yesterday I learned of a Mozilla employee vouching for their partnership with Anthropic, with suspiciously close timing to when Anthropic was used to justify the bombing of children in Iran.
It’s the company they keep and the crimes they enable with their support. You don’t have to be running the gas chambers to know what managing the punchcards is doing.
I was a 6 figure FAANG level employee in the early aughts doing consulting/development, realized I was contributing to predatory lending, quit, and took a 15k a year teaching job overseas instead. If I’d not made that choice, I wouldn’t consider someone who held me personally responsible at some level for the financial crisis to be out of line.
If that’s the case, then are all Mozilla employees also complicit?
Mozilla Used Anthropic’s Mythos to Find and Fix 271 Bugs in Firefox
U.S. Strikes in Middle East Use Anthropic
(cc @Nomad@infosec.pub)
you don’t choose to work in a factory, but as a sw eng myself, you definitely choose to work in a faang corp. fuck the owning classes but remind the faang workers they’re trying to become the next owner and betraying the working class at the same time.