We all love a good tech industry takedown. There’s a specific kind of moral schadenfreude that comes from watching the architects of our dystopian present get dragged through the mud. You’ve seen the headlines. Flock, a company knee-deep in building out surveillance infrastructure, is now offering voluntary severance packages. Why? Because their employees are completely demoralized by the sheer volume of public hatred directed at them.
It feels like a win. The internet mob grabbed the pitchforks, the engineers cried foul, and the company blinked. We love to believe that shame is the ultimate driver of social change.
Shame feels like a weapon of justice, but in corporate architecture, it’s just a filter.
Think about what a voluntary severance program actually is. It’s a mechanism for purging the people who can no longer stomach the work. The employees taking the buyout are the ones who felt the public pressure and felt guilt. They are the ones who still had a conscience.
When you shame those people out the door, you aren’t dismantling the machine. You are just removing the safety brakes.
Imagine the Slack channels at Flock right now. The people leaving are the ones who hesitated. The ones staying? They are doubling down. They are the ones immune to public backlash, driven by a defensive, radicalized commitment to the mission. You haven’t stopped the surveillance state; you’ve curated the perfect workforce to build it.
A dystopia isn’t built by villains. It’s built by the people who stayed after everyone with a conscience left.
This is the survivorship bias of corporate shame. The public backlash didn’t kill the project. It just eliminated the internal dissent. The remaining core is now ethically unmoored and dangerously resilient. They don’t care if you hate them. They think you’re wrong.
And they won’t even keep the name. As insiders already predict, Flock will likely fracture into a dozen subsidiaries with different names, operating in the shadows. The radicalized core will just keep building, safely insulated from the PR nightmare, staffed entirely by zealots.
When you shame the conscience out of a company, you don’t get accountability. You get a cult.
The next time you cheer for a mass tech resignation, remember what you’re actually looking at. You aren’t watching a company die. You’re watching it harden.
FAQ
Q: Doesn't public pressure still hurt their bottom line?
A: Short-term, yes. Long-term, they'll rebrand into subsidiaries. The structural financial incentives remain, now staffed by zealots who don't care about PR.
Q: What should we do instead of shaming employees?
A: Regulate the tech itself. Target the funding, the legal frameworks, and the government contracts, not the individual engineers.
Q: Are you saying we should feel bad for surveillance tech workers?
A: No, they chose to build the dystopia. But relying on their guilt to stop it is a lazy, failed strategy that accidentally makes the company stronger.