Apple has fired advertising manager Antonio García Martínez, just days after he joined the company and hours after an internal petition called for his removal, The Verge reports.
García Martínez, who worked as a product manager at Facebook between 2011 and 2013, is the author of the book Chaos Monkeys. The book, which is available on Apple's Book Store here, contains a large number of contentious passages widely denounced for misogyny and racism.
These accusations are not new: Chip Huyen covered the subject comprehensively in a blog post published when García Martínez started writing for Wired in early 2019. It's difficult to understand how Apple was unaware of the potential issues attached to the hire.
An excerpt from the book that has been circulating on Twitter gives an idea of why so many Apple employees are upset:
"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."
But it's important to be clear: that passage is not the entirety of the problem, nor is it unrepresentative of the views outlined at length in the book.
Far more context is presented in a letter addressed to Eddy Cue, the top manager of Apple's advertising sales, which is reproduced in the Verge's original article about the petition. As the writers put it, "We tried to contextualise the above quote further with additional text from his book, but there was no context that made the language used and views expressed acceptable. In fact, the additional context opened our eyes to some of Mr García Martínez's other problematic views - none of which he has disclaimed since Chaos Monkeys was published."
In the letter, Apple employees question how the decision to hire García Martínez was made, and how it was possible to have missed his published views on women and minorities.
An Apple representative has said: "At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted. Behaviour that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here."
This article originally appeared on Macworld Sweden. Translation by David Price.
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