this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Fuck AI
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In all fairness, if a CEO doesn't introduce themself as a CEO, there's really no reasonable expectation for random internet strangers to know that.
I would have had no idea who that was.
I think key context is that the guy is representing himself as having special knowledge about what Signal is doing internally and what they'll do next.
It's not "you bump into some rando on the street. Don't you know she's CEO of Signal??"
It's "you're giving a Ted Talk about Signal. The woman in the front row offers a correction and you're like, 'shut up, dummy.'"
I didn't get that impression- to me it just came off as him being cynical about platform enshittification.
Like, with recent news of Nexus being sold, my reaction was to join a chorus of others excplaiming that Nexus is about to be shit. We don't know that - we just know it's being sold. But we've all seen a ton of services follow a similar path, so the assumption feels justified. If a Nexus employee came out and said "Don't panic, literally nothing is going to change!" Whether that came from the janitor or CEO, I'd have a similar knee-jerk as the dude in the OP.
I also have no idea who the old or new CEO of Nexis is. If it happens to be a woman, me arguing with her wouldn't be from sexism, it'd be because Nexus is setting the stage to go down the toilet.
Dude in OP absolutely could just be a misogynistic prick, but there's certainly not enough info in the screencap to say so with any certainty.
In general perhaps, but he literally said
This really makes it sound like he's pretending to know what he's talking about when he doesn't.
funny story, I insulted a Microsoft exec, to their face, because they introduced themselves as "working for Microsoft".
I told them in response, " Don't worry, I won't hold that against you." To which they asked, "What's that supposed to mean?" I said, "You work for them and don't even know? you certainly drank all the koolaide."
almost lost my job over that when my employer found out.
If I found out I was talking down to a Microsoft exec when I thought I was talking to a regular employee, I'd double down.
I would have told them to bring back Clippy 📎 as an AI companion, but inappropriately erotic. 👠
So...Cortana?
He replied to her post about how signal won't use AI and she said "we". He 100% assumed a woman was a nobody so he paid no attention. This is all on him.
https://bsky.app/profile/meredithmeredith.bsky.social/post/3lrqccvwnqs2z
Important context. Yeah that definitely reduces the benefit of the doubt, but I still wouldn't jump to sexism. People refer to the organizations they're employed by as 'we' all the time - that doesn't imply any kind of authority. He definitely assumed she was a nobody, but 99.999% of us are just peasants milking a roof over our heads from a system we have absolutely no control over... so, assuming she's a nobody is a pretty safe assumption. Were she a dude and all else the same, I don't see the conversation going any differently.
There are tons, and tons, and tons, and tons of examples of demonstrable and absolutely clear misogyny in our dumb fucking society - it's really not necessary to try to find it by attempting to read between the lines.
So... unless that dude has a history of misogynistic bs, imo the safer assumption is that he's being cynical about platform enshittification (and reasonably so when you consider the patterns shown by every single other platform), vs an attack based on gender.
Sometimes it's obvious misogyny and sometimes it isn't but this has the hallmarks.
It definitely does; my take is only that is has the hallmarks of more benign activity too. I can't say with any certainty that it IS one or the other. Suspicion is justified; torches and pitchforks, not quite yet.
Because nobody on the internet ever talks down to a man.