I don’t talk about where I work. I don’t add my former employers to my bio, a practice super common in tech for the purpose of lending weight to your opinions—“Oh, she’s ex-Google; she must be smart!” Someone once described this as quitting the company but not the brand.

I think it’s interesting in light of this current debate about speech, platforms, and cancelation, but also the much longer trend of firms demanding access to your social media before hiring you. The root cause is the same: corporatism.

In the US in particular (but pretty much everywhere in the world), we filter so much of our perceived value, worth, prestige, etc through corporations. We center them in our lives and assign importance to our relative distances from power within them.

It’s gross and inhuman.

It’s also lazy. “If you work for high-market-cap firm X, you must be smart!”

But also, “If you work for high-market-cap firm X and say something transgressive, then you don’t ‘deserve’ to keep that job.”

I’m ambivalent about “cancelation.” That isn’t what this is about. It’s about looking at humans primarily through the lends of the immortal fictional persons we legally create to facilitate joint ventures, and thinking that’s okay.

Focus on people.

(Sidebar: it’s interesting to think about the etymology of the word “brand,” a permanent “mark made by hot iron.” Metaphorically branding ourselves by corporations and institutions… I can’t help but observe that slaves used to be physically branded, too.)