Technology

The main thing I remember about Tim Cook was him making me realize how wealthy white cisgender gay men were hardly different from wealthy white cisgender straight men.

The whole article has always been really worth a read, seeing how a techbro tried to turn a classic magazine into a tech company somehow. Besides that though, these passages always stuck out to me, because it feels deeply like these wealthy men exploit their sexuality to justify avoiding critique of their actions outside of their sexuality.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-collapse-new-republic

In 2014, Hughes’s personal life and business life became increasingly intertwined, in ways that would coincide with changes at the magazine. His husband, Sean Eldridge, was running for Congress in a district that spanned the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, but his political campaign was not going the way he had hoped. Eldridge and Hughes had bought a two-million-dollar home in a district in which neither of them had ever lived, and Eldridge began investing in local businesses in what was widely seen as a transparent effort to influence the race.

Ioffe dates the abrupt change in mood to late summer, shortly after Foer’s birthday party—the period when, as many current and former T.N.R. employees noted, Eldridge’s expensive campaign to win a congressional seat started looking hopeless. “We all liked him; he seemed to like us,” she told me. “Everything was going great. Then, in the summer, something snapped, and he started talking to me about money and how we’re losing money and he’s tired of it. And then he became just downright contemptuous and hostile toward us.”

Hughes’s eroding relationship with the staff took on an ideological edge. On the morning that Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, announced that he was gay, MacGillis wrote a note to “the Plank,” T.N.R.’s internal e-mail listserv for writers and editors. “I see the celebration of his announcement, while entirely justifiable, as another sign of what’s happened to liberalism today, where rights/identity liberalism trumps economic liberalism,” he wrote. “This is, after all, a guy who embodies so much of what’s amiss in the age of inequality—pulling down $378 million in 2011 alone; Apple skirting taxes more brazenly than anyone else—yet those revelations have caused barely a stir.”

Hughes responded to the note six minutes later: “I think those are valid issues, although Apple has acted squarely within the law,” he wrote. “The law itself is fucked up. But I don’t think you can underestimate the difficulty of his decision or how tone deaf that argument would be today.”

The other editorial employees on the list were surprised by the response. It was an internal listserv for writers and editors, and the staffers didn’t realize that Hughes, who had relinquished his title as editor-in-chief when he installed Vidra, was on it. MacGillis responded by saying that he would hold off on writing, but added, “Just for the record, though, it is not so clear that Apple acted squarely within the law. The law’s a mess, but Apple pushed the bounds of it more than anyone.” He pasted text from a piece in the Times that questioned some of Apple’s practices.