Check your guillotine at the door. Last Sunday, Brian Armstrong set the internet ablaze with his reckless, dangerous, literally basically violent… oh wait no, it was just a thoughtful blog post on focus, and the mission-orientation of his company, Coinbase. But our culture is now sufficiently toxic as that was enough for him to be maligned by the media, and so began, in this batshit year, our truly batshit week.

Throughout the history of American industry, a statement like Armstrong’s would indeed have been unusual, but not for the CEO’s resistance to the idea that his company should be taking activist positions on culture and politics unrelated to its core business. Rather, the invocation of any ideal higher than doing business would have been the piece that felt alien. Corporate “mission-orientation” is a relatively new phenomenon, and something our own tech press has made fun of for years as either hopelessly naïve or, in some sense, insidiously fraudulent. The technology industry isn’t here to make the world a better place, critics often said, the technology industry is here to make money. But culture has warped quickly these past few years, and the “bring your full self to work” mantra of Silicon Valley, which began as a kind of happy-go-lucky “hey, it’s okay to be gay,” has given way to zero opt-out, company-wide activism on highly-divisive topics, and toxic slack chats that a majority of employees find distracting and demotivating. This toxic culture has somehow become an expected norm, or at least according to the press, which has been tracking painstakingly the distressed, activist outcry of tiny fractions of employees across tech for over a year. Of the minority of tech leaders willing to touch this topic, most softly endorsed Armstrong’s position (thread), while the media either attacked him or feigned surprise that this was an issue at all, and the tech industry’s activist influencers kept a commendable focus of their own with an expression of predictable outrage and hyperbole. As I’m sufficiently used to the dynamic, the only critiques that really bothered me came from what is probably the smallest industry subculture of all: rich, personally well-protected tech leaders who know how toxic our discourse has become, but who also want dibs on an increasingly-thin sliver of positive media attention. Leaders in this mold have correctly intuited the only way to secure such attention in our current media environment is by submitting to the narrative that our industry is filled with bad little children who need to be spanked by Kara Swisher, and these people are nothing if not dutifully submissive.

Armstrong’s perfectly reasonable position that he will henceforth not be making activist political statements or endorsing political candidates on behalf of everyone who works for him is here purposely mischaracterized by Aaron Levie as “Coinbase employees can no longer talk about politics.” This is the opposite of Armstrong’s position. By abstaining from speaking on their behalf, Armstrong is protecting the right of employees to take cultural and political positions for themselves, albeit, one presumes, respectfully while at work. Mischaracterization of this sort, at this time, and from within the industry, is frustrating. Responsible leaders in tech are trying to navigate a hostile press in the middle of an extremely volatile cultural period, and Aaron chose to “help” with a purposefully obtuse tweet targeting another CEO under fire. But he got his media claps — so congratulations, buddy — and he at least managed not to prove the point of Armstrong in the body of his own critique. The person who achieved this charming act of self-destruction was the man without a plan, ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. And oh boy, did he pen a poem for the ages:

Yes, why on earth would Armstrong want to keep his company out of a political discourse of this kind?

Dick’s comment, which concluded his critique of Armstrong for stifling good faith debate, was certainly ironic. But that’s not why the tweet went viral. The public recognized Dick’s language not only as shocking, and not only as ridiculous coming from a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but as indicative of something deeply broken in our culture. That brokenness has been for some time broader than anything happening in tech, and was last week seen as coming from a man of significant influence and, at least ostensibly, power. I found Dick’s tweet disturbing myself, and commented as much, because his “joke” didn’t happen in a vacuum. “We should kill rich people” Twitter is a cultural phenomenon I’ve followed for years. Keyword search the platform for “guillotine,” and you’ll see the mob of people in front of Jeff Bezos’ house “peacefully protesting” his life are not outliers. They’re also not just random trolls. A little earlier this year Dan Saltzstein, a writer for the New York Times, defended the French Reign of Terror, one the bloodiest massacres in Western History, and a direct precursor to one of the most infamous dictatorships of all time — which Saltzstein defended in the name of democracy. Now, while Guillotine Twitter is unquestionably the playground of our Bernie Sanders left, it must be said that wanting people with whom we disagree to be hurt is by no means exclusive to socialists. It’s also no longer a trivial sentiment. Last week, a widely-shared poll indicated a massive, bi-partisan minority of Americans now believe violence is justified “to advance political goals.” But while the poll garnered a bit of concerned attention for a moment or two, it was promptly forgotten when our third and final drama of the week appeared as mana from Discourse Hell. Donald Trump eclipsed every internecine drama in tech, along with every other story on the planet, when he was diagnosed with COVID-19.

The internet went wild.

Verified users on Twitter, our contemporary status bourgeoisie, were overjoyed. The Democratic Socialists of America — the softer side of that philosophy, Ocasio tells us — assured the public it was good to wish the President dead, while the writers at Saturday Night Live tried to keep it all a little more playful, and the writers at the Los Angeles Times tried to keep it a little more implicit.

This is our culture.

In apparent response to what was happening, Twitter reminded users “tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against *anyone* are not allowed and will need to be removed.” The reminder was immediately and incorrectly framed by journalists as new policy designed for Trump, rather than existing policy Twitter has simply ignored, and was more or less uncritically reported on as policy in action, even while almost every tweet I’ve mentioned in this wire remained — and as of publishing today remains — unaffected. I’m still not sure which tweets were deleted. Well, that is other than Dick Costolo’s OG “can’t wait for capitalists to die” tweet, which either he or someone at Twitter finally took down nearly two days after he published it, and about a day after his NOT deleting the tweet itself became a meme.

I’m not convinced tweets like Dick’s, or even the gnarliest guillotine content, should be banned — which is probably a healthy place to be emotionally, as despite what Jack says it really doesn’t seem he’ll ever put an end to this kind of thing. I’m likewise not convinced people shouldn’t be allowed to openly hope their president succumbs to a lethal virus. There’s a clear difference between incitement of violence, or actual death threats, and simply declaring, in a public space to millions, that you find the notion of political violence pleasing. I just think public declarations of this kind are disgusting, and horrifying, and should absolutely strike us all as morally reprehensible. I also think we’re normalizing these kinds of comments. Last week, I watched as overwhelming initial disgust with such sentiment gave way to a broader, if generally tacit acceptance, and this week I imagine we’ll pretend it didn’t happen. But it did happen. This is happening.

Polarizing content does numbers online, and so we’ve drifted to the cultural poles. From the poles, insulated in our tribal bubbles, and with this never-satiating Twenty-first Century thirst for attention, the glorification of violence was inevitable. But worse still was the inevitable normalization of that discourse, which somehow no one seems to take seriously when it’s coming from inside their own house.

More importantly, what’s behind this language? While I sincerely doubt the spank-me capitalists out there are actually looking forward to recording executions on their iPhones when the socialists take America, I do think we have to listen to the actual words people are using. Can the sober left among us be so sure the unhinged comments we’re seeing online are all performative? Even if they started out that way, are we certain such sentiment remains hollow? Because I tend to believe people when they tell me what they want and who they are, which is why last week’s poll on political violence didn’t surprise me. My sense is many people really think the world is ending. They think the enemy at home, in their political rivals, is more dangerous than any enemy in nature or abroad, and as this belief becomes more greatly entrenched in our minds I’m not entirely sure the sentiment is wrong.

I want to believe our culture will correct itself, and we’ll rediscover some commonality in observation of our shared humanity. But does that kind of thing just happen? And how many of us even really want that now? People are angry, and this kind of anger is a drug like no other — an intoxicating, righteous rage that feels justified. We can point at it, and we can say we think this is wrong. But that’s not the kind of thing that changes hearts and minds. People need a common identity for that, or a common enemy. We’ve long been at a loss for the former, and I don’t think any of us want the latter. I’m not sure what the solution is. I only know we have to be better.

Or maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s just that simple: be better. Expect people to be better. Demand something better, for all of us, and from our friends as well as from our rivals. Because we’re the adults in the room now, and I understand that’s scary. But it’s not nearly as frightening as what will happen if we refuse to grow up, and to get a grip.

I can’t think of anything more dangerous than a society that hates itself.

-SOLANA