The Leopard Doesn't Change Its Socks

Pour one out for Mapbox đź«—

Ryan Mac and David Yaffe-Bellany profiled Jesse Powell, the thirty-one-teen year old edgelord CEO of crypto exchange Kraken, who has all the dumb opinions you’d expect from someone who never outgrew 4chan, along with the power to enforce them as company policy. And sure, that guy sucks, but his whole company is the front door of an unregulated casino where his customers risk losing what meager life savings they’ve managed to accumulate in a rigged game against wealthy hucksters like Marc Andreessen. “Shitty Company Run By Shitty Guy” is the business section “Dog Bites Man.” We can gawk at all the blood, but it’s not very surprising.

But in Protocol, Anna Kramer wrote about the anti-union campaign run by supposedly progressive “people first” Mapbox, where outside union-busters defeated the organizing drive at the cost of leaving the company culture a smoking ruin.

“It was like watching this beautiful thing wither up and die,” Erb said of the fallout at Mapbox, where workers voted down the union. “Before, it was probably one of the best company cultures I'd worked at.”

…“To look at what company culture at this company had been a year ago versus what it is now, the vibrancy has just been sucked out of it,” one current Mapbox employee told Protocol.

Rather than create a #trolling-999plus channel or bring in a truckload of Pinkertons to crack some skulls, Ben Jackson suggests that companies with a presence on virtual platforms like Slack need to invest in professional community management. I’m gonna just screenshot my favorite part here:

Today in Overthinking An Emojo: Jennifer Daniel on “pouring glass.” 

We’ve been “pouring liquid” as a way to honor the dead for millennia. In truth, the earliest citation can be traced back to Ancient Egypt (water mostly did the trick back then). Water was symbolic, considered as a life-giving liquid. To pour some out was presumably a true sacrifice.

He gives water for the dead! Muad’dib! 🫗🫗🫗🫗 You may now visit the National Archives in London if you wish to examine an 18th century cockroach named Peri with a problematic history in the slave trade. Socialite scammer Anna Sorokin is finally getting out of scamming and getting into, uh, NFTs. I guess the leopard doesn’t change its socks. Followers of the QAnon Queen of Canada (and/or the world) are having a hard time enforcing the Queen’s edicts on Canadian utility companies, reports Mack Lamoureux for Vice.

Paul Ford wrote that the fundamental question of the web is: “Why wasn't I consulted?” so in an effort to stop failing to consult you I’m working with the Oxford Internet Institute in a study exploring newsletter audiences. We have a survey for you! it’s anonymous and your responses will only be shared with me, so that I can [REDACTED], and with the researchers at Oxford, to help them understand “the ecosystem of email news” whatever that means. If you haven’t done it yet, this is likely the last day, so come through and be counted.

Gawker finally went all the way to Western Australia for its first good post, in which Patrick Marlborough makes a convincing case that the rest of the world should be able to mute America.

Why? Because America has no chill. America is exhausting. America is incapable of letting something be simply funny instead of a dread portent of their apocalyptic present. America is ruining the internet.

Alexandra realized that she was dealing with someone she felt was truly a threat to her, and that she had to, as she put it, “sound as crazy as possible so he’d never want to talk to me again.” She made the decision to dramatically escalate her own behavior.

Alexandra told him she would kill herself, that she had a lawyer, that she would expose him, that she would “carve his username in my chest and shoot myself in the head.” She called him dozens of times. She told him that she was a witch, that she would curse his bloodline, and sent videos of herself performing a hex on him using Santa Muerte, a powerful and revered figure in Mexican Catholic folklore.

“I didn’t let him win,” she said. Apparently unsettled, Bell seems to have deleted the photo of her, because it soon disappeared. 

“He’s never contacted me again,” she said. “He never messaged me or tried to DM me. I never had any emails from him… I think he realized he had other girls he could terrorize.” 

Today’s Song: Sudan Archives, “Selfish Soul”

~ I should have been a pair of ragged tabs scuttling across the floors of silent seas. ~

Today’s header image is DALL-E 2’s answer to the question ”was j. alfred prufrock goated with the sauce?” The Gardoe parcelt is Aned is golioguor Pardee, indeed. Let us tweet then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table. If you ignored the email header, Tabs is off next week. See you tomorrow if you subscribe, or June 27th if not.

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