Twitter commentary erupts after Microsoft Ignite speakers described their physical appearance and race and noted the Microsoft campus was built on native land
where literally thousands of cultures have been eliminated by the most violent forms of conquest https://twitter.com/... @nostrachavez : As @peterboghossian said, maybe @Microsoft should give all of that stolen land back to these mentioned tribes if they are really about that social justice life? Or is it all about empty, meaningless, virtue-signaling gestures in the end? Yea, probably the latter https://twitter.com/... Joseph Kahn / @josephkahn : I am a Korean American male wearing a white shirt with Tikka masala stains from lunch. https://twitter.com/... Frank X. Shaw / @fxshaw : @balajis Some context. Inclusion matters to us. Our events have ASL, Captions, Audio Descriptions and starting last year, visual descriptions. These enable us to be inclusive of everyone including those who are blind or have low vision. Speakers chose if they want to do this. Zeynep Tufekci / @zeynep : @JamesSurowiecki ... It's the classic “noble savage” trope. If there was more to it they would be talking reparations. It doesn't even occur to them there's a link, because once again, there are no human beings in this picture for them. James Surowiecki / @jamessurowiecki : @chrislhayes ... Also, “time immemorial” is absolutely horrible, since it makes indigenous people sound like these mythical creatures who existed outside of actual human history. Antonio García Martínez / @antoniogm : When wokeness finally gets to Israel: I would like to recognize we are on land occupied by the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, the Assyrians, the Seleucids, the Hasmoneans..are we still only in 160 BC? Fuck it, it's ours now. https://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : @donasarkar As a Black person, I'd find it extremely uncomfortable to start presentations where I'm likely 1%-4% of the demographic at the event by reminding people of my minority ethnic status. I also honestly don't think people knowing my race matters in pimping the latest Excel features. Kat Rosenfield / @katrosenfield : if u really want to serve the visually impaired, stop letting your (dull, weirdly race-obsessed) presenters describe themselves & hire a novel-style narrator: “Dana, florid curls, breasts the size of grapefruits; Matt, who looks like he's never eaten a vegetable in his life” https://twitter.com/... Dawn Neesom / @dawnneesom : Literally can't stop watching this particular #Microsoft virtue signalling madness. Hoping it's some incredibly clever spoof but...😬🤣#woke https://twitter.com/... Sam Harris / @samharrisorg : It seems like part of the rationale for this must be to help the visually impaired. But, whatever the intentions, this makes Microsoft look like the Cirque du Soleil of wokeness. https://twitter.com/... James Surowiecki / @jamessurowiecki : I don't understand the point of land acknowledgments like this, where the indigenous people whose ancestors owned the land you're on are still here. If you feel bad about it, give the land back! Don't keep it and say, “We know the land once belonged to you, but oh well.” https://twitter.com/... Noah Rothman / @noahcrothman : The project I'm kicking off for the next year is to give all of you permission to laugh at this objectively humorous display. It's not intimidating. It's absurdist. https://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Truly curious about what the rationale is for starting a talk and introducing your race, gender and describing your outfit? Even if it's for the visually impaired, do they need to know your shirt is blue and you're Hispanic before one starts a tech talk on enterprise software? https://twitter.com/... Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : what is interesting about ppl who are put off by or think this stuff is cringey is that most cultural norms are weird and arbitrary if you think about them a lot. is it weird/arbitrary that we sing the natl anthem before a bunch of ppl play sports? yes! so why is this bad? hmm https://twitter.com/...
@balajisBalaji Srinivasan
Context & Ripple Effects
The flare-up sits inside a running argument over how much identity politics belongs in corporate tech settings. It follows months of [[a:955073|first-person accounts from women, people of color, and LGBTQ tech workers describing discrimination and microaggressions]], which pushed companies toward visible inclusion gestures — like the appearance and land acknowledgments Ignite speakers used here.
Microsoft faces immediate reputational pressure at its own flagship conference, with critics like Srinivasan and Nostra Chavez arguing the land acknowledgment invites a challenge — give the land back or drop the gesture — and forcing Frank X Shaw to defend the practice publicly on Twitter.
Speakers who followed the appearance-and-race introduction format become the visible face of the policy, with mockery (Joseph Kahn's satirical self-description) aimed at them personally rather than at Microsoft's leadership.
Second-order effects
Other conference organizers and comms teams now weigh whether the same acknowledgment format is worth the predictable backlash, since the criticism template — quote the gesture, demand consistency — is now public and reusable.
The episode hands ammunition to the anti-DEI side of the investor conversation, feeding directly into the dynamic around Lonsdale's later tweets where diversity rhetoric itself becomes a contested topic among tech investors.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, companies split into two camps on workplace identity discourse: those standardizing inclusion gestures despite backlash, and those following Basecamp's route of banning societal and political discussion outright to avoid recurring flashpoints.
Corporate communications shifts from broadcasting values statements to litigating them in real time on social platforms, raising the cost of any public-facing gesture that critics can frame as inconsistent with company behavior.
The trend: Corporate inclusion gestures are becoming recurring flashpoints in tech's culture-war loop, pushing companies toward either doubling down on public values signaling or formally excluding social discourse from the workplace.
Holy crap this is real! Is this the new normal in tech? Not just stating your pronouns but your race and hairstyle and whether you wear glasses and eye color? This is pure insanity. Normal people want to get as far away from this as possible https://twitter.com/...
@NuanceBro Many blind people make assumptions about how someone looks based on their voice, including mine. Describing yourself is a personal choice that helps prevent harmful assumptions, & I for one love when people offer visual descriptions. I did a video on this: https://www.…
“My name is Antonio, and I'm a 6'1”, Class 2 Latinx, with an undercut, size 43 shoes, with 20 lbs. I need to lose, wearing whatever was on sale at Bonobo's, and I'm a senior product marketing guerrillero at Microsoft!"
Kind of weird how Twitter freaks the fuck out whenever extremely minor accommodations and acknowledgements are made to anyone that isn't an able-bodied white person. https://twitter.com/...
Microsoft and Facebook must never be allowed to announce product launches on the same day, it might unleash a cringe shockwave that would cause the earth's mantle to collapse on itself
Before we begin this symposium, I'd like to acknowledge that we, Microsoft, have built this facility upon the graves of ancient peoples who we decimated with our brutally inconvenient Windows Security Updates. https://twitter.com/...
From thread by AGM. I think he's too optimistic though. The century is still young. And the Gods of the Copybook Headings may return. https://twitter.com/...
What we need to do is export wokeness to China so their next generation grows up too obsessed with apologising for millennia of Han supremacy to conquer the Pacific. https://twitter.com/...
@fxshaw I'd be impressed if you used AI to deliver a better experience for the vision-impaired, by auto-generating audio descriptions of scenery. They could hit a button to turn that on/off. But this approach is like mixing Chinese and English in a talk. Doesn't increase accessib…
Will Microsoft begin future conferences with a ritual incantation of every competitor they've copied over the years? “We stand on ideas copied from the Netscapes and the Notions...” https://twitter.com/...
I admire much of what Satya has done in turning around MSFT. So here's an alternate approach. First, donate to any group you feel obligation towards. Done. Now you don't need to be performative. Just point to it if accused of not doing anything. Actions > words.
Comms at Microsoft now apparently involve a lengthy land acknowledgement followed by speakers announcing not just their race but also their height and what color their clothes are. https://www.youtube.com/...
The mind-boggling thing is that some genuinely well-intentioned people genuinely seem to think that this sort of thing constitutes progress towards a better society. https://twitter.com/...
How does the two-century-old Western experiment in liberalism end? In blood and fire at the hands of fascists and autocrats? No. In declared races, genders and hairstyles at corporate marketing events. https://twitter.com/...
This is weird. What the settlers did to the Native Americans was messed up. It's a shameful chapter in our history, and worth teaching and remembering. But we live in a fallen world and most of us live where we do because of violence and cruelty done by and/or to our ancestors. h…
Whatever one's views are of these expressions of guilt over former landowners, it's gonna get legit complicated when they film from the Mideast or Europe — where literally thousands of cultures have been eliminated by the most violent forms of conquest https://twitter.com/...
As @peterboghossian said, maybe @Microsoft should give all of that stolen land back to these mentioned tribes if they are really about that social justice life? Or is it all about empty, meaningless, virtue-signaling gestures in the end? Yea, probably the latter https://twitter.c…
@balajis Some context. Inclusion matters to us. Our events have ASL, Captions, Audio Descriptions and starting last year, visual descriptions. These enable us to be inclusive of everyone including those who are blind or have low vision. Speakers chose if they want to do this.
@JamesSurowiecki ... It's the classic “noble savage” trope. If there was more to it they would be talking reparations. It doesn't even occur to them there's a link, because once again, there are no human beings in this picture for them.
@chrislhayes ... Also, “time immemorial” is absolutely horrible, since it makes indigenous people sound like these mythical creatures who existed outside of actual human history.
When wokeness finally gets to Israel: I would like to recognize we are on land occupied by the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, the Assyrians, the Seleucids, the Hasmoneans..are we still only in 160 BC? Fuck it, it's ours now. ht…
@donasarkar As a Black person, I'd find it extremely uncomfortable to start presentations where I'm likely 1%-4% of the demographic at the event by reminding people of my minority ethnic status. I also honestly don't think people knowing my race matters in pimping the latest Exce…
if u really want to serve the visually impaired, stop letting your (dull, weirdly race-obsessed) presenters describe themselves & hire a novel-style narrator: “Dana, florid curls, breasts the size of grapefruits; Matt, who looks like he's never eaten a vegetable in his life” http…
It seems like part of the rationale for this must be to help the visually impaired. But, whatever the intentions, this makes Microsoft look like the Cirque du Soleil of wokeness. https://twitter.com/...
I don't understand the point of land acknowledgments like this, where the indigenous people whose ancestors owned the land you're on are still here. If you feel bad about it, give the land back! Don't keep it and say, “We know the land once belonged to you, but oh well.” https://…
The project I'm kicking off for the next year is to give all of you permission to laugh at this objectively humorous display. It's not intimidating. It's absurdist. https://twitter.com/...
Truly curious about what the rationale is for starting a talk and introducing your race, gender and describing your outfit? Even if it's for the visually impaired, do they need to know your shirt is blue and you're Hispanic before one starts a tech talk on enterprise software? ht…
what is interesting about ppl who are put off by or think this stuff is cringey is that most cultural norms are weird and arbitrary if you think about them a lot. is it weird/arbitrary that we sing the natl anthem before a bunch of ppl play sports? yes! so why is this bad? hmm ht…