An Apple engineer, Antonio García Martínez, who wrote the NY Times bestseller Chaos Monkeys in 2016, was fired by the company this week after thousands of coworkers signed a petition calling for an investigation into his hiring based their reaction to selected quotes from the book.
Chaos Monkeys is currently rising again on many booksellers’ sales charts, so the vapid Apple employees who instigated this “protest” have succeeded in having García Martínez’s oh-so-terrible passages be even more widely read than ever.
Very likely they’ve also succeed in causing Apple to eventually pay him a hefty sum in a legal judgement or, most likely, a settlement. Congratulations on your efforts.
But, hey, their warm puddle of groupthink remains unpolluted by independent thought. So, there’s that.
We have a feeling that Steve Jobs, of all people, would not approve:
Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts. — Apple, “1984”
MacDailyNews Take, May 12, 2021:
So… Apple loses the rare employee capable of writing a NY Times bestselling book, but retains a handful of yentas who think a book written half a decade ago about different companies is about them, alongside some 2,000 others who are dumb enough to sign it.
Here’s the funny thing, the book was about them.
Now Apple’s cloistered petitioners can continue to pump out mediocrity without their panties bunched.
Antonio García Martínez said on Twitter he was fired “in a snap decision” and that Apple made defamatory statements about him.
MacDailyNews Take: Via his Twitter account , García Martínez said:
Apple actively recruited me for my role on the ads team, reaching out via a former colleague to convince me to join. Apple found my experience in the ads space, specifically around data and privacy, highly relevant to their efforts and persuaded me to leave my then role.
I upended my life for Apple. I sold my WA residence which I built with my own hands, relocated myself, shut down any public media presence and future writing aspirations, and resolved to build my career at Apple for years to come.
Apple was well aware of my writing before hiring me. My references were questioned extensively about my bestselling book and my real professional persona (rather than literary one).
This set of prominent Valley VCs and execs are all willing to assert as much under oath.
I did not ‘part ways’ with Apple. I was fired by Apple in a snap decision.
Apple has issued a statement that clearly implies there was some negative behavior by me during my time at Apple. That is defamatory and categorically false.
García Martínez should sue the Apple and win.
A fish rots from the head down. A big bank account hides a lot of rot.
Chaos Monkeys is a great read!
The most fun business book I have read this year? Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, by a former Facebook executive, Antonio García Martinez. I was sent a galley copy several months ago and picked it up with no intention of reading more than the first couple of pages. I don’t think I looked up until about three hours later.
This is a tell-all of Mr. Martinez’s experience in venture capital and later at Facebook, filled with insights about Silicon Valley — what he calls “the tech whorehouse” — mixed with score-settling anecdotes that will occasionally make you laugh out loud. Clearly there will be people who hate this book — which is probably one of the things that makes it such a great read.
The dedication page includes this gem: “To all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.” Mr. Martinez is particularly incisive when it comes to illustrating how failed ideas that happen to work are often spun into great successes: “What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary,” he writes. “The world crowns you a genius, and you start acting like one.” — Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times, Independence Day, July 4, 2016