May 28, 2021 9:00 AM

How a Chaos Monkey Caused an Apple Uprising

Plus: A review of the book from 2016, the accessibility potential for AR, and a few too many sinking ships.

Photograph: Getty Images

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Hey, everyone. Wasn’t Lauren Goode terrific last week? But not so terrific that you’re not happy to see me again. Right?

The Plain View

I was surprised when Apple hired Antonio García Martínez earlier this month. But I was even more surprised at how it fired him only a few weeks later.

First, the hiring. García Martinez was certainly qualified to be a product manager for Apple’s alleged effort to ramp up its advertising business. (This remains alleged since Apple doesn’t reveal such things, and García Martínez isn’t confirming.) He once started an ad-tech company and has also worked at Facebook and Twitter on their ad products. He knows his stuff; when researching my last book, he gave me a super helpful private lecture on how the Facebook ad system operates.

But García Martínez is also something else: a pugilistic personality and a writer who delights in waving red flags at the bulls of tech world self-righteousness and political correctness. His 2016 book, Chaos Monkeys, became a best seller, undoubtedly in part because of its flagrant, even reckless transgressions. It not only told corporate secrets out of school, but also shared personal details and opinions that were unfriendly to the opposite sex. He called women at Facebook unattractive, criticized the “entitlement feminism” of women in tech, and shared his own sexual conquests, which sometimes resulted in bawling tax deductions.

I was an early reader, and García Martínez asked me to interview him for his Amazon author page. When I asked him about sexism in the book, he seemed taken aback. (That exchange didn’t make the cut in the final interview.) I also asked if he thought he’d be blackballed from Silicon Valley, and he said, “Oh, yeah.” That exchange remains on the page, as does a short piece he wrote on Medium where he described his own book as “career suicide.” He further elaborated: “Since I’m violating both written and unwritten codes of silence around divulging the often dark inner workings of these tech behemoths,” he wrote, “I have every expectation of being completely unemployable for the foreseeable future.”

For the past three years, García Martínez has pursued a writing career, including a stint as a columnist for WIRED that ended in 2019. (Despite some complaints by employees to the then editor-in-chief, he wasn’t immediately canceled.) This year, he decided, partially for money reasons, to rejoin the tech workforce. Apple was an unlikely employer. “The most secretive company in the world hiring me is odd,” he admits, talking to me while auto-piloting his Tesla up Interstate 5 to sort out his suddenly upended life. “The whole AGM show, such as it exists, was going to have to shut down, which I was willing to do.” Apple knew all about his book and seemed to agree with him that his life as a click-bait-y author was “dead and buried.”

Boy, was he wrong. Within days, Apple employees were circulating a petition charging that his hiring was a mistake, and that there was no room for such a misogynist at Apple. As proof, the petition included lengthy excerpts from Chaos Monkeys. The Apple petitioners demanded an investigation into how such a person had been hired, and they expressed concerns that his presence on campus would “contribute to an unsafe working environment.” By the time the petition appeared on the Verge, 2,000 Apple employees had signed it.

Within hours, Apple fired him. García Martínez was stunned. He doesn’t know what’s in store for him next, and he will not confirm or deny whether litigation over his firing is the next step.

Legal issues aside, I'd venture that the most serious damage in L’Affaire García Martínez is to Apple. No company in tech expends more energy on controlling its own narrative. And this month, the company was also in the docket as the defendant in a very public trial, being sued by the game maker Epic for the onerous tax it charges developers. In the course of the case, internal emails were released that show how the company flings its sharp elbows against rivals. At the end of his testimony, CEO Tim Cook was grilled—flambéed—by a judge who clearly wasn’t buying his bromides.

The last thing Apple needed after that was 2,000 of its employees publicly objecting to a hire and dragging Apple into the rat’s nest of a national controversy about cancellation. Normally Apple demands that its people, save for the few executives who bound onto the set of its upbeat keynote presentations, be neither seen nor heard. Now, as with Google and Facebook, Apple must contend with a workforce that feels empowered to overrule its leaders on moral practices. The petition they circulated expressed much more grievance than a wrongly hired employee—it included demands to address a diversity problem at Apple that clearly had been festering.

Should we shed a tear for Mr. García Martínez, who was hired on the premise that his book wasn’t disqualifying, but was fired for it anyway? As an author myself, I am particularly sensitive to, well, the rights and concerns of authors. Still, we must take responsibility for our words. From Interstate 5, García Martínez now insists his comments about women do not reflect his heart. “I obviously hammed it up for the sake of sales and literature,” he says. “That's not really how I live my life.”

But hold on. Let’s roll the tape back to the release of Chaos Monkeys. At my publication, Backchannel, executive editor Sandra Upson reviewed it, recommending it despite anti-women passages that “kept me scowling for several chapters,” she wrote. In response, García Martínez wrote me a testy comment, to which I responded with a question: “How much of this is trolling/bravado,” I asked of his book, “and how much is what you truly believe about women?”

“Perhaps misogyny is more in the eye of the reader than actually on the page,” he replied.

Famous last words.

Time Travel

Since I mentioned it, let’s devote this week’s Time Travel to Sandra Upson’s review of Chaos Monkeys, which ran in Backchannel in December 2016:

Antonio García Martínez is a very particular kind of tech bro. He’s brash and irreverent, and almost deliberately unlikeable. But it’s his fearlessness, in both business and storytelling, that distinguishes Chaos Monkeys. He’s the kind of guy who writes about how he signed an NDA, and then proceeds to recount exactly what happened next … His acerbic portrait of the Bay Area tech world is full of gossipy details, which kept me turning pages even after digesting a paragraph so odious that it took me several chapters to stop scowling. Here it is, provided so you can be fully informed about your potential purchase:

“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

For what it’s worth, that argument is irrelevant to the story at hand. It didn’t need to be there. And yet. And yet! I recommend this book. Its candor on most topics is so refreshing, and its author just bumbling enough, that even the occasional tasteless aside can be almost forgiven, and almost forgotten.

Ask Me One Thing

Len writes, “My wife has significant hearing loss in both ears, to the extent that hearing aids are of no help. I remember Google Glass and its short life and thought that a voice-to-text app on a device like that would be very helpful to those who are hearing impaired.”

Closed captioning of real people via AR glasses? That’s a great idea! Not a new one, though. This 2012 paper suggests the same thing. More recently, Rev, one of several companies working on automatic transcription, posted a blog about this possibility. I guess the target audience for Snap’s new Spectacles isn’t suffering massive hearing loss, but I’d hope that when Apple and other mainstream companies release their glasses—including the now commercially oriented Google Glass—this application is top of mind. Let’s make those companies hear us!

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

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