More than 2,000 Apple employees called for the sacking of a “clever and capable” tech engineer called Antonio García Martínez, says Mary Wakefield in The Spectator – and the tech giant duly obliged. This is “a new low for American cancel culture”. His alleged offence is he described Silicon Valley women as “soft and weak, cosseted and naïve”, and “generally full of shit” in a book he wrote five years ago. Chaos Monkeys was a New York Times bestseller – everyone who welcomed him on board would have read it. But when the “poisoned petition” started to circulate a week after García Martínez started, Apple “crumbled” and fired him.
Unsurprisingly, most of the petitioners were men. “Allies are often more merciless because the wrong isn’t theirs to forgive.” But maybe “I simply don’t want to believe that women can be so dim”. Reading the passage in context shows it’s part of a “love letter to García Martínez’s then girlfriend”; the other women are “simply there to provide dramatic contrast”. Either way, it has “set back the feminist cause decades”. You can’t complain about a “wimpy woman” stereotype, then “hyperventilate” at the thought of the author sitting next to you at work. If you do, you are – literally – proving his point. “Perhaps Apple should stock smelling salts beside the hand gel dispensers.”
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