The most striking thing here has got to be that for some people being told they worked at a company riddled with white supremacy and racism would have been a relief.
I know the stock response is that denying the existence of a problem is worse than admitting it, but if the gravamen of the issue is not whether or not the company is built on the most murderous ideology in history but whether or not the founders will affirm that it is publicly seems an excellent indicator the term 'white supremacy' has been hollowed out and is now just another target in woke language games.
The great irony with these terminology changes is that those most tripped up will be learners with access to fewer up to date resources and autodidacts who lack access to the usual educational opportunities afforded to those pursuing a career in tech.
Isn't the sort of person most likely to be tripped up by this the sort of person it is nominally supposed to help? Isn't it much more likely that it proves a stumbling block to the black teenager teaching herself to code from resources a few years old than to the white undergraduate whose new edition textbook will include the change and who has a professor and peers to explain it just in case?
If you want marginalized outsiders to have an easier path into programming isn't a change that makes that just a little bit trickier in order to make those with established tech careers feel better about themselves the wrong sort of change?
What passes for AI ethics research is akin to a "Hiroshima ethics research" that focuses on the carbon footprint of the Enola Gay and the lack of BIPOC representation on the team that assembled the Little Boy bomb.
I don't care if the corporations building a dystopian panopticon are intersectional.
Some guy wrote a satire of Silicon Valley in an exaggerated tech bro literary persona.
Guess which one triggered the strenuous denunciations of woke tech activists?