As Elon Musk is proving yet again at Twitter, Big Tech has always had trouble with layoffs.

In fact, Big Tech has always had trouble accepting a reality in which it is not a deity basking under the glow of the California sun, somehow impervious to the ordinary plights of the common business.

But now, as the facade crumbles and the shortcomings of the industry are laid bare, it is ultimately the tech employees who are left to suffer the consequences. The rose-colored glasses are off, and workers can finally see past the rhetoric and marketing materials that drew them to the supposed promised land of Silicon Valley to the reality that, at the end of the day, even tech companies have just one audience to appease: Wall Street.

While there are, of course, some anomalies, the layoff strategies that Big Tech has taken to date seem to careen between two extremes: cringe-worthy or Disney-villain-level. Many have resisted even using the term layoffs to avoid sending a signal to investors that their business is in trouble — a reality that anyone would be able to see simply by taking a quick glance at the stock market.

But the industry has always been ruthless when it comes to firing. While it’s easy to forget given the growth of the tech sector over the past two decades, the dot-com boom left tens of thousands without jobs. Even today’s stalwarts like Microsoft had to let thousands of workers go at certain points under the guise of business continuity. And it’s not uncommon for a company to fire workers soon before or right after big fundraising rounds or record sales quarters.

Mass layoffs aside, Big Tech constantly shows that it has trouble when it comes to managing people. There’s the rampant sexism and racism that continues to plague even the most “inclusive” cultures, like Salesforce. Even in an industry known to offer big salaries, compensation has always been a challenge, particularly at places like Amazon, where employees have alleged discrimination based on pay. And it’s clear that companies like Google that consider themselves bastions of free speech seemingly throw that value out the window when it comes to any criticism of their business, instead opting to try to silence detractors through bungled firings that end up dominating press headlines.

The last several months should be a lesson to tech workers to not believe the hype peddled by so-called luminaries who have somehow convinced themselves they’re making the world a better place by pushing largely unnecessary technology on customers and consumers alike.

It’s easy to be swayed when companies, particularly private startups, dangle lucrative compensation packages — chock full of stock options and topped off with a fancy new title — that promise to make employees rich if they stick around long enough.

It’s the Silicon Valley fairy tale. But it’s a fantasy that can be very easily shattered. Look at Stripe. To CEO Patrick Collison’s credit, his recent note announcing layoffs at the payment processing platform was much more considerate than Musk’s inbox Russian roulette. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for years, despite ample pressure, Collison resisted an IPO. Now with the public markets likely closed through 2023 due to economic uncertainty, it’s the employees who were eagerly awaiting their paydays — not Collison, with an $8 billion net worth — who are bound to suffer.

Part of the challenge is that most tech workers, especially younger ones, have only known boom times. Even during the economic recession in the late 2000s, the sector remained largely resilient and used the time to invest heavily in growth.

That’s not true now, as the sugar rush that propelled the growth of so many Silicon Valley startups and behemoths suddenly evaporates, leaving behind bloated businesses that have significantly higher head count than existing sales can support. And instead of growth at all costs, investors are in their “show me the money” phase, forcing companies to take drastic measures like layoffs in a bid to finally post profits after, in some cases, over a decade of operations.

But it’s also a reflection of the fact that, in the minds of tech CEOs, it’s sunshine all the time. Yes, executives have struck a more dour tone lately as fears over a recession rise. But listen to the earnings call of any software vendor, particularly one that just posted subpar results, and it’ll feel like you’re in a different reality. Twilio, for example, is clearly facing a huge challenge ahead as it looks to finally become profitable. But you’d never know that hearing CEO Jeff Lawson talk to investors.

“Despite all the macro that’s going on, I’ve never been more excited about the opportunity ahead,” Lawson said on the company’s Thursday earnings call.

Laying off workers is never going to be an easy task for corporate leaders. But they only made it harder for themselves after spending the last decade pretending like tech’s Gilded Age would last forever.

It’s sadly too ambitious to expect the top brass of businesses beholden to investors to act any differently. But if there’s one positive outcome from all the layoffs, it’s that tech workers can finally view their sector with clear eyes.

The White House just laid out its climate tech priorities to reach net zero by 2050.

As part of a new initiative to accelerate research into “game-changing climate innovations,” the Biden administration highlighted five areas where research today could have a particularly transformative impact on cleaning up carbon pollution. Among them are building efficiency, the power grid, aviation, industrial processes, and fusion energy. The initiative illustrates where the federal government believes the most promising technology will spring from as the country — and the entire world for that matter — attempts to innovate its way to net zero.

A working group with members from 17 agencies is spearheading the initiative, though it will be chaired by White House climate advisers. In its initial report, the group laid out 37 categories of technology where R&D could make major inroads. These span from reducing emissions from livestock to advanced nuclear fission. The five priority areas that the group will focus its near-term attention, though.

• When it comes to efficiently heating and cooling buildings, the report specifically cites the importance of researching refrigerants with low global warming potential. Those will be especially crucial following U.S. ratification of the Kigali Amendment earlier this year.
• Power grid research also stands poised to provide major returns on investment. The report notes that technologies from advanced transmission to improved distribution systems could “reduce the total cost of reaching net-zero emissions across the economy” as people integrate more electric vehicles and appliances into their lives.
• While private companies are beginning to make progress in cleaning up aviation's climate footprint, said progress remains marginal. The report said the working group will look into both electric and hybrid planes as well as the use of sustainable aviation fuels.
• Improving industrial processes and fuels also presents a particular challenge. The administration is focusing on “new ways to make materials and fuels” to cut emissions, improve efficiency, and limit waste. This could include the creating synthetic fuels using renewable energy, dubbed "electrofuels."
• The report says fusion energy “could potentially meet a large fraction of electricity demand.” The technology, though, is still many years from commercial viability.

While we have many of the technologies needed to start cutting emissions today, an International Energy Agency report found that nearly half of the emissions reductions that the world will need to get to net zero by 2050 will involve many technologies “that are currently at the demonstration or prototype phase.” The administration (as well as the tech industry) will now work to speed up getting them ready for deployment.

With that in mind, the report defined potential “game-changers” to include new technologies with no current commercial adoption (such as fusion energy), improved existing technologies (such as direct air capture), or combinations thereof. Some of those technologies that the White House highlighted have proved controversial or seen high profile failures, though. That's not a reason to not invest in them, though, and the working group will be calibrating what the best levels of funding could look like.

“A diversified portfolio is needed to ensure success in meeting our climate commitments and capturing the opportunity for American industries to lead the global energy transition,” the group concluded in the report.

The new initiative does not come with a specific price tag or funding, though. The working group’s report said it will be “leveraging clean energy innovation investments" that were included in the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act in order to accelerate research into the five near-term priority areas. The group will also lay out plans for bringing new technologies from early-stage research to widespread deployment.

Hello and welcome to Protocol Policy! Today, I’m dreading the thing you’re dreading too. We’ll get to it, but there will also be Vonage’s settlement with the FTC, China’s tech plans, and Nick Clegg’s very British enjoyment of Musk’s travails.

A sequel no one asked for

U.S. election infrastructure is exceedingly secure, and voter fraud here is so rare it’s comparable to your annual chances of getting struck by lightning. Despite this, former President Donald Trump and a long list of allies in the Republican Party have spent the last two years questioning the overall integrity of the U.S. election system. Many of those allies are now candidates themselves, and their coordinated attack on the country’s status as a democracy is not a relic of 2020. Some have already started repeating these “Big Lie” charges ahead of next week’s midterms. And the social platforms that help them spread their message have prepared few measures to stop it.

In short, many of the efforts from companies — including Twitter, Meta, and YouTube — to protect 2022’s elections look a lot like the measures the platforms took in 2020.

• The platforms had made (some) genuine progress on the threats from 2016 or so. Many of their policies, for instance, focus on coordinated inauthentic behavior, like foreign botnets and Chinese or Russian interference campaigns.
• Social networks have also put pretty expansive rules in place around lies that would stop people from voting — such as when polls close or who is eligible to cast a ballot.
• The services have also tried to plug some remaining holes with resource pages posting accurate information, limits on ads about political topics, or more invoking of policies forbidding certain types of harmful misinformation.

But many lies about the security of the whole system and the reliability of the general results still don’t fall under these policies, and such content often slips through moderation nets because it’s not clear what rules apply.

Twitter could be making the problem worse, especially given Elon Musk gutting half the company’s staff in the last 24 hours.

• In terms of policy, Twitter actually goes a little further than some of its peers, limiting “misleading claims intended to undermine public confidence in an election.”
• Musk also punted on bringing Trump back onto the platform for a few weeks, pushing off any decision until after the election.
• The company, though, had its hands full enforcing its rules even before the cuts.
• Its coming changes to verification will also allow bad actors to pay just a few bucks to pose as reliable sources of information and further the flood of lies, particularly during what’s expected to be slow counting and certification of results.

Meta seems to have mostly recycled its 2020 playbook, despite reporting that suggested the company’s three platforms were particularly helpful in supercharging the original Big Lie — focused on Biden’s election — in the leadup to Jan. 6.

• In laying out its plans for the midterms, Meta said it might append labels to “content discussing the integrity of the election.”
• The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp said users disliked the volume of labels it applied last time around, though, so it suggested any labeling that does occur will only happen on posts that reach a certain level of virality.

Other platforms’ approaches don’t necessarily inspire confidence either.

• YouTube, in addition to the usual bans on incitement and lies about the voting process, prohibits “false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in certain past elections to determine heads of government.” The company said it has also taken down such claims about 2020.
• That sounds like a policy tailor-made for confronting the new Big Lie with its firmness and specificity — except it doesn’t apply to claims about 2022, which is both current and a contest when the president isn’t on the ballot.
• TikTok actually says it will go so far as to remove misinformation that undermines “public trust in civic institutions and processes such as … elections,” although its record is thin and staff turnover may threaten its efforts even as it becomes a major news source.
• Reddit’s policies seem to focus on detecting attempts to intimidate voters or suppress turnout (like lies about when polls close), as well as the site’s usual ban on calls to violence.

Many Republicans will win election contests fairly next week. It’s quite possible there’ll be enough of them that they’ll take control in one or both chambers in Congress. There’s real risk, though, that some will seek to overturn legitimate losses — or even that a few Democrats will sense an opening for bad behavior — by fostering doubts about whether the U.S. can still pull off real elections. The social networks seem mostly to be hoping they have the tools to tackle that. It’s not clear they do.

​In Washington

The Department of Justice is set to investigate Adobe’s blockbuster $20 billion acquisition of Figma, a direct competitor, according to Politico. The probe is expected to include a merger review as well as an investigation into Adobe’s overall acquisition history.

Ericsson subsidiary Vonage settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $100 million. The agency sued Vonage over allegations the company made it difficult for customers to cancel phone service while also charging termination fees.

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The news is out! Join the Financial Technology Association’s inaugural Fintech Summit: Shaping the Future of Finance, produced in partnership with Protocol. Taking place in Washington, D.C., on November 16th, the Summit will examine the most pressing issues in fintech.

Learn more and reserve your spot here.

​On Protocol

Protocol analyzed data from the Chinese Communist Party’s National Congress speeches going back as far as 1992. We found key tech trends in this year’s speech from Xi, including a renewed focus on the environment, a shift in emphasis from poverty alleviation to national security, and a push for economic self-sufficiency.

Protocol’s Climate Team has a preview of the upcoming United Nations Conference of the Parties meeting in Egypt. Christian Kroll, a venture partner at World Fund, told Protocol: “I’m afraid that these big corporations are hijacking the agenda and making it less ambitious. I’ve seen that happen over the last year, and it’s painful to see big companies that could be doing so much more getting away with unambitious sustainability targets, like going carbon neutral by 2050, when it’s way too late.”

Around the world

TikTok clarified that EU users’ data can be accessed by employees around the world. Ireland’s data watchdog is conducting a study into the export of EU user data to China, The Guardian reports. TikTok says it’s in compliance with EU laws, including one that requires protections for EU citizen data being processed outside the bloc.

The EU might soon require Airbnb to provide basic data on usage, according to Reuters.

In the media, culture, and metaverse

Updates from a very chaotic week at Twitter:

• Musk began mass layoffs of Twitter employees Thursday night. Employees all across the organization are affected, including in trust, engineering, legal, marketing, and sales. Internal documents obtained by The Washington Post showed employees were concerned about Twitter’s ability to remain running after losing so many people.
• A group of one-time Twitter employees is suing the company for allegedly violating state and federal labor laws. The group alleges that Twitter didn’t provide sufficient warning for the layoffs as required by the federal WARN Act and California WARN Act.
• Advertisers such as General Mills, Pfizer, and Volkswagen paused advertisements on Twitter over concerns about the direction of the company, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Twitter plans to start charging for $8 per month for verification as soon as next week, Bloomberg reported.

​In data

12% and 14%: The percentage of their workforce Chime and Stripe plan to lay off, respectively. Chime co-founder and CEO Chris Britt said the layoffs were intended to position the firm for success "regardless of market conditions." Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison wrote that the cost reductions were needed to “adapt ourselves appropriately for the world we’re headed into.”

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'Welcome to the club'

Nick Clegg had a message for Elon Musk: “Welcome to the club.” The president of global affairs at Meta was responding to Musk’s assertion that “being attacked by both right & left simultaneously is a good sign.” “You can't keep everybody happy, and certainly [not] in the United States,” Clegg said at Fortune’s CEO Initiative 2022 yesterday. “Half the country thinks that you're taking too much content down; the other half thinks you should take down more.”

Thanks for reading — see you Monday!

Nearly three years into a pandemic and several months into an economic downturn, corporate layoffs have all started to borrow from the same flawed playbook: the earnest, if impersonal layoffs over Zoom. The blog posts, written by CEOs, who claim to be heartbroken by their decisions. The cringey crying CEO videos.

Each of these approaches is flawed in its own way. Layoffs are never anything but brutal. But few examples have compared to the singular cruelty of Twitter’s overnight purge.

Unlike so many of his industry peers, Twitter’s new chief, Elon Musk, has yet to personally express — or even feign — any remorse at all about his decision. There was no tortured thread about how difficult the cuts would be, no public blog post laying out the company’s reasoning or the benefits fired workers would receive going forward.

Instead, as Twitter employees found themselves suddenly locked out of company accounts Thursday night, after receiving a companywide email that said layoffs were about to begin, Musk spent the wee hours reacting to shitposts about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and literally posting about shit.

“Why is small talk even legal!?” Musk tweeted at nearly 1 a.m. ET, as one-time Twitter employees around the world tweeted salute emojis and emotional goodbyes.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even the email that Twitter’s new leadership sent to staff was uniquely cold. It acknowledged that this is “an incredibly challenging experience to go through,” but immediately followed up by reminding the thousands of people who were about to be canned “to adhere to Twitter policies that prohibit you from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere.” The brief memo — the first communication employees had received from their new boss — wasn’t even signed by Musk. Instead, the email was signed simply “Twitter,” a reminder to the thousands of people who have built Twitter for years that it now belongs to people who have been with the company about a week.

This was never going to end well. Musk has said almost nothing but lousy things about Twitter since he first tried to buy it, and that was before an ugly court fight where he tried to back out of the deal. He had barely stepped foot in the place before he fired the top brass, without so much as a word of warning to the staff, and has reportedly ruled with an iron fist ever since in a desperate bid to ship more paid products to offset the $13 billion in debt Twitter is now saddled with.

Musk was never going to give Twitter employees a warm and fuzzy goodbye — or, apparently, even a hello — but the suddenness and scale of the layoffs, the utter lack of communication leading up to it, and Musk’s complete failure to even address it in the midst of his gleeful overnight emoji spree smacked of a particular kind of vengeance. “Layoffs are a fact of life — this isn’t the only one today and it’s far from the first at Twitter,” tweeted Twitch Chief Product Officer Tom Verrilli. “But it’s the inhumanity of this one that strikes such a chord.”

The question now: Did Musk’s harsh approach violate labor laws? Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan filed a lawsuit Thursday in San Francisco federal court claiming Musk did not give employees enough notice before layoffs. “Look Ma I’m suing Twitter,” tweeted former Twitter software engineer Manu Cornet, who is one of five named plaintiffs in the suit.

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires employers with 100 or more workers to provide at least 60 days of notice before laying off 50 or more employees at a single site of employment. The federal and California versions of the law are similar, though the California law is slightly more friendly to employees.

According to the suit, Cornet was fired from Twitter “effective immediately” on Nov. 1 and received no severance. Musk’s other company, Tesla, has been fighting a separate WARN Act suit filed by former factory workers.

Proving that Twitter violated the WARN Act would force Musk to offer affected employees benefits and backpay for up to 60 days, but it can only go so far. “The WARN Act doesn’t have many protections,” Lee Adler, an employment law professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said. “It can’t restore employment.”

Bloomberg reported that Musk planned to eliminate around 3,700 jobs, but it’s still unclear exactly how many Twitter employees were actually affected, where they’re based, and what Twitter is offering them as severance. Depending on those details, there may be ways for Musk to avoid another court battle. If Twitter were to offer two months’ severance, it would void any lawsuits claiming a WARN Act violation, employment attorney Jack Raisner of New York firm Raisner Roupenian told Protocol.

Twitter might also use the “single site of employment” required under the law to its advantage. Though the company is based in California, Twitter employees work from around the world. “Everything [has] to be looked at through the prism of: What is the location in which these layoffs have occurred?” Raisner said.

Even if Twitter and Musk don’t suffer legal consequences, it seems inevitable that the brutality of the layoffs will leave a stain on the company’s reputation and internal culture, which has been singled out in the tech world as being notably inclusive and open — characteristics that are rarely, if ever, attributed to Musk’s other companies.

On Thursday night and throughout Friday morning, Twitter employees past and present mourned the end of that chapter. “Quitting Twitter Inc earlier this year is like graduating high school and feeling a bit sad but like, nostalgic,” one former Tweep wrote, “and then a few months later your high school explodes.”

There’s a collective tech nostalgia of what could’ve been, would’ve been, should’ve been when it comes to Vine. Years before TikTok, Vine had created a social network around six-second looping videos. It had all the early hallmarks of TikTok: the virality, the influencers, the marketing. But three years after a 2013 launch which saw it catapult to the top of the app charts, Twitter shut Vine down. Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube were all competing over short videos, and Vine didn’t build the right features or help creators monetize.

Now, Elon Musk is considering resurrecting Vine and bringing it back as a challenger to TikTok.

“Instagram is vulnerable now, so any new approach has better chances of working than before. But if it's the exact same product, it's tricky to believe that it's going to go as well,” said Niko Bonatsos, an investor at General Catalyst who has backed social app makers like Snap, Discord, and Yik Yak.

There’s certainly public support for a Vine redux. In a Twitter poll with over 4.9 million votes, nearly 70% of respondents were in favor of bringing back the short-form social network.

Nostalgia alone will certainly drive some people to return to Vine if Twitter reboots it. But sentimentality for an app won’t mean it becomes useful overnight. As Bonatsos pointed out, most of Vine’s original fans from nearly 10 years ago are no longer in their teenage or college years, with loads of free time to spend on social media, but are now full-time working adults, perhaps with a family. Today’s time-rich teenagers don’t have that fond recollection of Vine that would help drive them to naturally use it.

“To bring back the app is not that hard. To make it culturally relevant again is the hardest thing,” Bonatsos said.

Bringing it back might not be so easy either. There’s a whole lot of technical debt, thanks to an untouched codebase that a slimmed-down army of Twitter engineers would have to work through. While Musk has asked employees to start looking through the existing code, it might be better if the company just started from scratch, according to Sara Beykpour, who worked on Vine at Twitter and led its shutdown. “This code is 6+ years old. Some of it is 10+. You don't want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over,” Beykpour said in a tweet. (She didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Products have come back from the dead before. Steve Jobs is hailed as a hero for reviving the Mac. Yik Yak, a once-popular app among college students, died in 2017 and relaunched last year; it recently released an Android app. Gowalla was dissolved in 2012 but came back with new venture funding in 2021. The cyclical nature of trends means things like QR codes, vinyl records, and even Polaroid cameras are having a moment again. (Unfortunately, ’90s fashion is too.)

But resuscitating a beloved brand isn’t a guarantee it will work. There are plenty of zombie startups walking around that exist in name after somebody bought the IP, but aren’t quite the same. Munchery, the former food delivery service, is now a recipe website. Napster’s latest revival is some kind of Web3/NFT play. Social network Bebo was resurrected four times and sold twice before giving up the ghost. “It’s been emotional,” wrote founder Michael Birch on what's left of its website.

A return of Vine as is likely wouldn’t be enough to pry away users from TikTok — especially a younger generation of time-rich social media users who don’t have the same fond memories of Vine in the first place.

Creators have already realized Vine would need to be something new to bring it back with any staying power. “If you did that and actually competed with tik tok that’d be hilarious,” YouTube creator MrBeast replied to Musk’s original tweet about whether Twitter should bring it back. But even he pointed out that everyone has copied TikTok, so whatever Twitter does, it has to make it more than a copy or it could be a waste of time. “No one is original anymore, whatever you do will be on every other platform the next month unless it has a deep moat,” he said.

Twitter’s product leaders are already trying to think through it with the goal of potentially relaunching by the end of the year. An early idea is to turn the camera inside of Twitter’s app into an easy way to record and post Vines, according to a report from Platformer. A reported use case could be users filming reaction videos to tweets they see. With Twitter’s product road map evolving by the hour, it’s too early to say what will happen to a Vine 2.0. Let’s just hope its lifespan isn’t as short as its videos.