Several years ago, after reading some of my writing, an elderly Chinese woman who had lived through Mao’s regime told me, “You would have been shot on the second day of the revolution.” I took this as a compliment. Though I am not an important person and therefore not a candidate for execution on the first day, my work seemed sufficiently provocative to her to set me before a firing squad on the second day. She confirmed this when I asked her, “Are you sure you don’t mean the third day?” She replied, “Yes. The second day.”
I now know who’ll be shot on the first day: insufficiently woke CEOs. In a now-deleted tweet, Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo said that business leaders refusing to inject political activism into their workplaces will be “the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” He was responding to a blogpost by Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency firm Coinbase, arguing that developing good products should take priority over encouraging employees to air their political grievances or dedicating one’s company to a political mission. Costolo accused Armstrong of wanting to “separate society from business.”
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