Yeah I've seen this for a bunch of startups that weren't profitable and struggled to close a new funding round. They pay back the VCs, the employees get zeroed out, and the execs usually get a retention bonus in the 6 figure range.
This is such a superficial understanding of "support". They make their logo rainbow for a month. None of the groups you mentioned support police abolition, prison abolition, for instance. Police budgets still go up. Homeless encampments still get bulldozed. Black people are still killed by police.
Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.
I do think Daniels are a great example of actual counterculture like this article is talking about. Swiss Army Man is weird as shit, and deeply affecting. EEAO has very much broken into the mainstream while preserving a lot of their style and sensibility. I think there will probably be a set of filmmakers in the future who saw their movies at a young age and thought "you can do that?"
That's not what the article is about. The article is about creative content, and how YouTube content is aesthetically all the same. Jordan Peterson videos have the same stupid thumbnails as all other clickbait.
People have said it in the thread, but counter-culture is really defined retrospectively. You look at the movements that existed on the periphery but later inspired the mainstream. Velvet Underground wasn't selling millions of records, but everyone who started a band listened to them. Lou Reed is pretty indier than thou.
What are the great creative works you identify with the alt-right? I know lots of great leftist artists, musicians, etc. but I don't see alt-righters making a lot of daring indie cinema for instance.
In the recent layoffs I've seen some very senior high-performing engineers get the axe, because they were very expensive and the org could get two juniors grinding out CRUD for the same value as one super senior architecture astronaut.
Based on the people I know who work at Confluent, the messaging at all hands meetings has been that the market conditions didn't affect staffing plans. Employees make decisions based on the expectation of ongoing employment - if the CEO keeps says "we won't do layoffs" and then you buy a house and get laid off, that seems like detrimental reliance.
It's also worth noting many places enshrine in law protections for layoffs because of the power imbalance between employees and employers.