When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. - Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

A few years ago, a software engineer at Google named James Damore published an internal memo—in response to a mandatory diversity training program he attended—titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.

Damore, by all conceivable metrics the kind of competent, curious engineer that tech companies pay mountains of money to retain, made the unforgivable mistake of essentially asking: “Hey, what if Reality—and not targeted misogyny—accounts for the fact that more men than women work in tech? Also, why does it feel like I could get fired for asking this?”

He was, of course, fired less than three months later for “[advancing] incorrect assumptions about gender” and for raising a perspective that “is not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes, or encourages,”1 said Danielle Browne, Google’s VP of Diversity, Integrity, and Governance.

What struck me the most in revisiting his story is that this happened at the end of 2017. In my mind, this was something that happened circa 2012—at least or nearly a decade ago, with enough time for the Overton Window to collapse to the point where this kind of discussion is now ubiquitous on X and in other places.

Had he waited for the Vibe Shift, Damore could have posted the above tl;dr to a receptive audience of tens of millions: