Having a Seat at the Table is No Longer an Excuse
A lot of people write off their staying on Twitter or giving Trump useless trophies as doing what they need to do to have a seat at the table; that maybe if they stay they can do something to make things better. That time is gone, we need to move to a better system.
For a while there was a reason for influential people to bend the knee a little bit in order to keep a seat at the table. The goal was never simple: these influential people would have to pick their battles and give up some ground in certain places to maintain ground in others.
The Strategy
I’m going to use Tim Cook as the example here, because he (used to) be the king of doing this. Now…not so much.
Cases like taking the president on a tour of the US Mac Pro factory to ease supply constraints for your actually important products is a tradeoff that many would be willing to make. On the other hand, going to see the Melania movie while Minneapolis and other cities are besieged by that same president’s own version of the Gestapo…not so much.
Why
The original goal is simple: so long as Tim Cook gives Trump small wins, Cook can stay at the table (he may be called “Tim Apple” from time to time, but he still has a voice). This means that the president is listening to the only openly gay CEO at this scale and is listening to a company that stands up for women in the Middle East, who issues a public statement about the murder of George Floyd during their keynote event, and serves as an avenue to creativity for so many people around the world (including myself).
The worry being, if Tim were to truly resist, he would risk putting Apple into financial trouble, meaning that he would likely be fired and replaced with a pushover who wouldn’t even attempt to push back against Trump’s ideals.
The Problem Now
See, that’s all cool and all when there’s a leadership who will actually listen, but that’s very clearly gone. Trump S2 doesn’t give a single flying fuck about what Timmy has to say about anything.
I’ll give Tim the benefit of the doubt here, but we’re not seeing much good coming from anything Tim’s been doing. All we’re seeing is some saliva on some boots. It’s not going well. Now the company is starting to look more like the stodgy multi-trillion–dollar corporation it’s been trying not to look like: the company that will give Trump a fake trophy, the company who will crush creativity to sell a product, and the company that no longer cares about its causes.
The Rest of the World
This isn’t restricted to just CEOs, this isn’t something that doesn’t affect anyone else. People on Twitter, Instagram, other centralized social media: you want to stay because you don’t want to just allow someone to come in and take away your platform. But they did, staying isn’t going to change that.
These platforms are not built to connect you to your audience and to allow you to share what you love, they’re just there to serve you ads and make as much money as possible.
We have better.
