It’s been two years since US tech execs swung visibly right. They partied at Mar-a-Lago, popped up on all the manosphere podcasts, and donned some of the most hilariously “tough guy” drag you’ve ever seen. (Cute necklace, Zuck!) 

Then they promptly tore down the BLM signs back at HQ, dismantled their DEI programs, and told their employees to suck it up if they wanted to keep their jobs. 

For a lot of my clients and friends, this whiplash was both painful and personal. Some felt targeted—no longer safe being out at work, no longer welcome as an employee of color. Many others felt disenchanted. They’d spent years focused on equity and inclusion in their products: removing racial bias from style guides, educating teammates on trauma-informed design principles, improving accessibility on all fronts. Then suddenly not only was their work getting rolled back or shelved, but they were also heavily discouraged from making a stink about it—if they wanted to keep their jobs, at least. 

But the winds shifted again last week. Turns out most Americans actually aren’t super into creeping authoritarianism. They’re not excited about a future ruled by roving thugs rounding up immigrants on their way to work and data centers sucking their towns dry overnight. 

So… will all those tech titans (and the execs who follow their lead) now swing leftward again? Is it time to fly the office Pride flags again? Are the Zuck chains going back in the jewelry box for good? 

Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not a billionaire-whisperer. I’ll leave that to the pundits. But what I do know is this: Whenever our CEOs start talking about how much their organizations care again, the rest of us need to remember not to believe them. 

No matter what they say, these companies don’t actually care. 

I don’t say that to be harsh. I mean that they can’t care—they’re not people. Companies don’t have values, or feelings, or regrets that wake them up at night. Not even my own—that’s a job for Jen and me. But when a company is publicly traded or investor-backed, it operates according to market incentives at its best, and the whims of delulu shareholders and investors at its worst. This rightward shift wasn’t really ideological so much as transactional.

But perhaps more importantly for us to remember right now: so was the left-leaning one before it. 

I don’t mean that the people who turned the logo into a rainbow for June or got budget for a Black History Month speaker didn’t mean well. I suspect nearly all of them were genuine. I certainly was, over a decade ago, when I first started writing books and speaking about the ways design and content choices could harm people and leave them out. 

What I mean is that their companies approved and invested in this work because they were responding to the moment: Customers were getting online to demand tech companies speak up and make a statement whenever a social justice issue became national news. A hot job market and cheap cash meant everyone was hiring and retaining your talent mattered—so companies needed a feel-good story to tell employees and prospects. And most of all, there was the desire to avoid outside regulation by signaling an internal commitment to values: safety pledges, diversity initiatives, ethics and inclusion principles.  

When macro conditions and incentives changed, voilà: so did their principles and political alignments. 

So what does that mean for those of us who did and do care about the impact of our work on the world? For the people who care about debiasing AI, or banning deceptive UI patterns, or designing systems that don’t reward and reinforce extremism? For the people sick and tired of a tech vernacular built on the language of war and domination?

Should we dust off our old anti-racist style guides and ethical design principles, and use this political moment to pressure our companies to invest in them again? Or should we not waste our time, and let that work remain a relic of a bygone, bright-eyed era? 

God, those two options are depressing, aren’t they? 

Instead, I’d like to see us come back to this work—but approach it differently than we did last time. Not with our workplaces as the endgame, but as one container among many where social change can take root. 

Because it’s not enough for our fight to end when a company changes its style guide or publishes another safety pledge. Not even if the company lets us embed those choices right into its AI models, as powerful as that might be for codifying new norms on our teams. Because our goal isn’t to get our corporations to say that they care. What they say doesn’t matter, when their underlying drivers are still the same: Shareholders over users. Growth over everything.  

They can make all the caring-shaped motions they want. Deliver a million caring-flavored sound bites. But those have always been and always will be facsimiles of care. 

The care itself is always human. It’s the way we relate to one another, the way we see the world, the choices we each make on a daily basis. Choices about who we listen to, who we deem important, who we help. Choices about which work we’re willing to do, and for whom, and how to know when the paycheck isn’t worth the moral injury.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use this political moment as an opening at work. I think we can, and we should. But instead of focusing on making our companies care, what if we saw work as a way to get more of our values out into the world? A place where we already hold some power, where we already have relationships, that we can use to open up new space for others to learn and feel inspired and think differently. A place where other people can carry our ideas forward, be radicalized by them, see the world differently as a result of them. A place where we can collectively raise the bar on what we accept from the companies we work for and do business with. 

But that means we can’t orient ourselves toward our companies. We have to orient ourselves toward one another, and do it with one another—in relationship with our peers and colleagues, not just twisting the ethics and inclusion knobs on our companies’ LLMs. Because while our human beliefs are certainly encoded within an LLM, changing the LLM alone doesn’t ensure a durable shift.

In fact, it might even erode it. That was the headline for some new research published in HBR last week: “Team dynamics weaken when employees turn to AI instead of colleagues.” The more we turn to AI as the primary way to address workplace situations, the more dysfunctional our teams become: trust decreases, isolation increases, and shared knowledge disappears. 

That’s not fertile ground for social change. That’s just a recipe for more tech-enabled individualism—aka, the worst parts of millennial optimism, as Garrett Bucks put it this week in his call to younger folks to build something better with this moment than what came before:  

The work still matters. But we can do it better, this time. At our jobs, and beyond it. 

But most of all, with each other. 

December 2: Philly UX community holiday happy hour
Locals, come through! Join us at Triple Bottom Brewing from 5-7pm.

December 4: Throughline Mini
A free two-hour taster of the Throughline vibe. Hear a series of short talks packed with big ideas—and don’t tell anyone, but we might just give away some special prizes.

December 31: Last day to save 25% on strategy sessions
Feeling stuck, lost, and in need of new perspective? Close out your year with a 90-minute deep dive with me or Jen. Use code SARA25 of JEN25 when you book.

January 9: Last day for standard pricing on Throughline passes
Snag yours before last-minute prices start.

February 3-5: Throughline 2027
Two days of livestreamed talks, optional workshops, a lightning talk showcase, and tons of bonus content. The absolute last day to get a ticket is February 2.