Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and we are continuing our top tech news stories of closing out the year. What a year it was. And one thing I feel I should mention right off the top of this episode which I forgot about. Well, yesterday's episode went up. You know, all that ranting about Meta and Facebook, I forgot to mention the company has been voted the quote worst company of the year end quote. Now. That's according to Yahoo Finance, which selects a company for this dubious honor each year using metrics like market performance and achievements, and mostly polling people to find out which company upset them the most over the course of the previous twelve months. This year, that was met h slash Facebook, though notably the investment service Robin Hood, which we will talk more about in just a few minutes, was also a contender. Last year it was the Nicola Motor Company. So you know Nicola Tesla being this very instrumental engineer in the field of electricity. Of course, the Tesla motor company takes its name from him, and so does the Nicola Motor Company that's an electric truck company. It also got some votes this year, but it won if you can call it that worst company of the year last year at corn Yahoo Finance. Anyway, this isn't like a scientific examination of which company is in fact the worst. I mean, it's a pole. There's not even that many people who respond to it from what I can tell. Uh. And also meta slash Facebook was in the news a lot towards the end of this year, so most of that news was not positive at all. It's not a big surprise. I should also point out that TikTok and Twitter both end up on a lot of hated company lists. Not necessarily the yeah who finance one, but lots of companies or lots of outlets will organize lists like this, and TikTok and Twitter and Facebook are frequently in that mix. All right. In our last episode we ended with my rant about n f t s, there was a lot of ranting. Uh spoiler alert, there'll be more ranting in this episode. Well, since we talked about n f t S in the last episode, I suppose we should also talk about cryptocurrency. While we're on the subject of block chains and such, crypto had another roller coaster of a year, with bitcoin prices climbing rapidly and steadily into early spring, reaching around sixty thou dollars per bitcoin. Then there was a big crash in May, with the value dropping by are you know, around fifty or so. Then there was a recovery period. It got back as high as sixty three thou dollars per bitcoin in November. Uh, as I record this, it's closer to around fifty thou dollars per bitcoin, but that's as I record this. By the time you hear this, who knows. But bitcoin continues to be a volatile investment, and I still wouldn't call it a currency because the value fluctuates so dramatically that it's hard to imagine using it as a practical currency. It's far more likely to be used as either a way to invest money and hope that the value of the bitcoin continues to grow, or, as we've seen in the recent past, to use it as a means to launder ill gotten gains and hide the fact that you've been on Santa's naughty list. This year, we've seen proof of work cryptocurrencies take a bit of a beating on another pr front this year, one that revolves around conservation and climate change. It's no secret that proof of work currencies, particularly bitcoin mining, require massive amounts of electricity. This is tied into the value of the currency itself. If it is hugely profitable to mine the cryptocurrency, well then you'll find people and organizations who will pour a ton of money into building out mining operations. And of course, these these operations that they're using powerful computers to play a complicated guessing games. What it really boils down to, But one thing that's not a guess is the amount of electricity that these machines need. It's a lot. So much, in fact, that it's not unusual for bitcoin mining operations to purchase or at least facilities that are co located to power plants, including coal fired power plants, including ones that are no longer online, and then bringing them back online. This has brought more focus on bitcoin mining and its impact on consumption and climate change. China has shut down bitcoin mining operations in several regions, citing concerns over the potential environmental impact of bitcoin mining. However, I think I should add that I suspect China's government also has a healthy concern for any ind tree that could potentially acquire enough power to rival the government itself, and we're seeing some governments around the world at the country or the local level consider or even enact bands on operations that would require bringing defunct fossil fuel power plants back online. So we have seen some opposition in various places. Ethereum is currently also a proof of work cryptocurrency. Uh. It does also have a much lower value than bitcoin, so you don't see the same massive ethereum mining operations because the the profits aren't there. It would cost you more to run the operation than you would make in mind cryptocurrency. So for that reason, mining rigs for ethereum are a little more modest than the ones that are used by bitcoin miners. That's more than a little bit of an understatement. So it's the ethereum miners who frequently go after graphics processors for their rigs, which of course makes it even harder for gamers to get hold of a good GPU at a decent price. You've got the semiconductor shortage, you've got bots buying up cards and then trying to sell them for marked up prices on secondary markets, and you've got Ethereum miners who are after those same cards, but for the purposes of mining cryptocurrency. However, Ethereum is supposed to switch to a proof of steak approach next year, which has a much lower computation requirement, so we'll see if that actually changes things. But yeah, was a year in which crypto sword to new heights, then plummeted, then rose again, then plummeted again. You get the idea, and a lot of this was fueled by a passionate and frankly kind of scary community in places like Reddit. Oh and also Elon Musk played a part in it too. I'm gonna save a lot of my Elon Musk fire for the third episode in this series. I think I also received a request recently on Twitter to do a full episode about Web three, and I'm still planning to do that, but I should talk about the emerging discussions of Web three, which is usually spelled out altogether, so it's w e B, the number three no spaces that ended up becoming a pretty big thing this year, particularly on Twitter. There were some Twitter spats about Web three. There are also some parallels here between Web three and the metaverse, because they're both kind of this concept of what the next phase of the Internet, or at least internetwork connectivity are all going to be about. And like the metaverse, the definitions here get pretty lucy goosey because it doesn't exist yet, so it's kind of hard to talk about what it is because there isn't anything at the moment, and different people have sort of a different concept of what it will be if it ever does become a thing. But generally speaking, the concept of Web three, at least the one that most people are referring to, is one that uses blockchain as a backbone. And you might say, okay, how and uh uh hey, look over there, it's something shiny, okay, so well, the concept is that Web three will leverage blockchain in such a way that ideally the power of the Internet will be distributed to those who are using the Internet. In other words, it's kind of like putting the Internet's ownership into the hands of the people. That's in contrast with how Web the three enthusiasts see the Internet today, because they see the Internet today as an entity that is heavily dependent upon a few major companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta and you know, like we'll talk about stuff like the Amazon Web Services outage that shows that a lot of what we depend upon in connectivity does route through Amazon in some way. So this general notion is that Web three projects are are similar to cryptocurrencies and n f t s. There's some form of implementation that relies on the blockchain to keep track of transactions, though what those transactions actually are varies dramatically from implementation to implementation. However, once you get past that kind of vague description, things really start to break down. I have yet to see a compelling case explaining how blockchain will enable a new version of the Internet, or even of just the Web, because remember the Web and the Internet or two different things. The Web exists on top of the Internet. So I haven't really seen a compelling case for this distributed ownership model. And there are a lot of folks who are expressing skepticism about the idea in general, including people who say that if Web three does become a thing, it will be a thing that is controlled by venture capitalists rather than big companies. But it still means that the hoi poloi, meaning folks like you or me will still be left out of the loop. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, made this point on Twitter, saying, Hey, you know, the people who will own Web three will be venture capitalists, not the people in general, and those making Web three applications will be doing so with their investors in mind. So it'll be the venture capitalists who are essentially directing how Web three evolves, again without really going into details about what Web three is going to look like. And anyway, that whole criticism is not making Web three evangelists very happy. So I'm gonna save a deeper conversation about this topic for a full episode further down the line, because honestly, it would take me hours of research to really dive into it and separate the buzz terms from anything with you know, actual substance to it, Because every time I read anything about Web three, I feel like I'm reading ad copy for a product that doesn't exist yet, and that's not really useful. But since we're talking about tech and money, let's chat about something that unfolded early this year that involved both, and it all has to do with Game Stop and stock prices. Alright, So game Stop is a video game retail company. They sell video games and video game systems. Early in two thousand twenty one, there was a move to short sell Game Stop stock among certain hedge funds. So a short sell is when you borrow a bunch of shares of a company from another stockholder. You don't known these shares, you're borrowing them, and you're promising that you will return that same number of shares to the stockholder at some agreed upon time. Then you take the shares you borrowed and you sell them. You know, the ones that you do not own. You sell them and you take the money, and your goal is to buy back the shares you just sold, but at a lower price, and you pocket the difference. So what you're hoping for is for the stock price to come down. You're hoping that a company hits hard time send their stock price reflects that. So you might sell a bunch of shares at around twenty dollars a pop, and then your plan is to buy back those shares when they reach five dollars a pop, and you pocket the fifteen dollars difference per per share. More or less, it gets a little more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea, and then you return the shares to the stockholder, you keep what's left over. Everyone's happy, while the stockholder is probably not happy because their shares are worth less now, but hopefully they're in it for the long term because they believe in the company or some nonsense. Now, if the price of the stock goes up instead of down, well, you then have to spend more money to purchase the shares back then you made when you sold the shares in the first place, because you still have the obligation to return those shares to the original holder, like you can't just walk away. So then you get a bunch of folks online who decided to do something called a short squeeze. Is on some hedge funds that we're planning to short sell the game Stop stock. So what these folks did was they just started buying up shares of game Stop, like lots of shares, and that activity drove up the stock price because there was a demand for game Stop stock, so the price went up. Demand is high, price increases, and that meant that these hedge funds were suddenly faced with the very real possibility of having to pay more money to buy back those shares that they had borrowed than they had on hand to cover the short cells. And it was a kind of activism mixed with speculation because as the price was going up, it also meant that the stock that people were holding was growing in value, that the stuff they owned was actually getting more valuable, and their wealth was increasing. In fact, it was increasing significantly. And you might wonder how significantly well. The stock price had been at around seventeen dollars per share before the squeeze really got moving. At the height, it was closer to five hundred dollars per share. So imagine you bought something for seventeen bucks and then you could sell it for five hundred bucks. So there were a lot of people who are jumping on board this not because they were trying to push against hedge funds, not because they were like trying to take down the the These these groups that were, you know, boasting memberships of incredibly wealthy people, and to stick it to the man, they were joining because they saw this as a way to get rich quick. So there was a mixture of both of these kinds of people. Now, this peak wasn't to last. It did settle down a bit. But even as I record. This the stock prices valued at around a hundred fifty dollars per share, so not quite ten times what it was valued at before the squeeze. This also did force a few hedge funds to shut down, and it also brought to lights and disparities in the individual investor world. So the investment service robin Hood that I mentioned earlier, it made headlines because it began to deny robin Hood users the opportunity to purchase game Stop stock. Like that's what robin Hood exists for, is for the individual person to participate in the stock market. Because the individual typically if they have any involvement in the stock market at all, it's because they happen to have something like a four oh one K plan where some fund manager is deciding, you know, what moneys go to what stocks. This is a case where the individual person can say, no, I want to buy fifty shares of game Stop stock for example. Well, robin Hood's stopped that. They stopped letting people do that on their service, and they cited a desire to not contribute to an unstable market environment, which is pretty rich when you consider robin Hood's namesake, right, I mean, like the Robin Hood, the legendary figure, was all about creating an unstable market environment. Anyway. This prompted folks to draw connections between Robin Hood and people who were involved in hedge funds who had participated in the short selling, and some people started claiming that Robin Hood was trying to mitigate the effects of the short squeeze because they had financial interests in those, you know, folks that were higher up in the food chain of various hedge funds. In other words, they were saying, you're not really for the people, you're for other big companies. The whole game stop saga prompted a lot of folks to get into individual investors stuff when they had never really dipped their toes into it before, and several sub credits saw their ranks swell due to this interest, and a lot of folks came out at the subject from all different angles, a lot of them uninformed angles. You could almost taste the frustration of the more seasoned investors in those groups as folks totally new to the field began delving out their expert advice. You know, people who had been investing for all of like two weeks were suddenly experts anyway. In many respects, this whole thing was part of a larger, more vague trend of people finding ways to push back against big corporate and financial entities. And we'll talk about that more after we come back from this quick break. So another kind of expression of this anti corporate sentiment, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean this, this feeling of I've taken all I can take and I won't take anymore. Was this general trend of workers organizing and unionizing. Here in the United States, we're seeing support for the concept of unions grow, but the pandemic really pushed folks to move at a faster rate. Workers get to demand more from employers, and uh employers began complaining about stuff like labor shortages. They were saying, we can't we don't have enough people to do the work we need to do, and the workers were saying, well, there's no surprise there, you know, look at the compensation you're offering people, look at the working conditions that people have to endure. It's no wonder that you aren't able to attract and retain employees. You've got to offer more to them. And companies were like yeah, that doesn't sound right. And then workers at lots of places said, okay, well, we're all going to band together and create a union so that we have the leverage to force you into negotiations for better conditions or else you don't have anyone to do your work for you, and where will that put you. So we saw unions go on strike at Freedo, Lay, at Kellogg's, John Dear, Nabisco, and more. And while John Dear is the only company in that short list I gave that is most related to tech, at least as the way we think of it. I mean, all of these companies rely on tech obviously, but John Deere is a company that makes technological products. But the sentiment spread much further than just those companies. Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama rallied to unionize, and they held a vote on the matter, but that vote famously failed. In fact, it failed it like a two to one ratio. However, in the process of that, workers were alleging that Amazon had engaged in anti union practices and was actively trying to discourage employees from supporting a union. This was enough to prompt the US Labor Board to order a revote, which has not yet happened, but should in the not too distant future. On a similar note, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York, filed a union petition earlier in then withdrew the petition, and and this month chose to refile that petition. They also staged a walk out during the holiday rush, placing enormous pressure on Amazon to respond before customers started losing their ding dang minds that their Christmas presents We're gonna arrive late. The message is clear. Workers around the US are starting to demand better working conditions and better compensation. Many of the industries involved are ones that required people to come into situations that are dangerous even when there isn't a pandemic going on. Amazon fulfillment centers are notoriously hazardous, for example. And we've also seen these kind of movements among hospital staff as hospitals get consistently overwhelmed and the staff are demanding better conditions because they're under extreme circumstances for an extended period of time due to lots of other factors that go well beyond the scope of this podcast. So don't worry. I'm not gonna rant about all that generally speaking, unionization has been on the decline in the United States until fairly recently, but we're seeing the movement spread across multiple industries, including the tech world. In fact, will tackle a really notable case in just a moment. But uh, I should also add for full transparency that the I Heart Media podcasters also submitted a petition to unionize, which passed a vote the podcasters past that now that process is still ongoing, and considering my position, I can't really comment on it any further than that, but I wanted to at least acknowledge that it is a thing that is happening. All right. Now, let's tackle another really big story in tech that unfolded throughout twenty one, the story of Activision Blizzard. Now, this is such a big and nasty story that's gonna take up essentially a third of this whole episode, and it plays into a lot of other trends in tech that we saw over the year, such as the continuation of the Me too movement as a movement in which people are coming forward with allegations of like hostile work environments and sexual harassment and worse. And it also ties into the labor organizing movement that I touched on just a second ago. So let's dial back, and let's go back to July twenty one. That's the date when the world at large got a glimpse into what the heck was happening over an Activision Blizzard. That was when the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing or d f e H, filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, the video game company. So, in case you're not familiar with Activision Blizzard, it is a truly enormous company that has its roots way back in the Atari days. Activision originally formed with a group of Atari programmers left Atari and found their own game company. The company is known for a lot of ultra popular titles like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo Overwatch, and dozens of others. Well, the lawsuit had some really ugly accusations in it, which have been expanded upon quite a bit since then. They included instances of discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile work environments, sexual assault in some cases, and more. There are also charges that the company had very few women in leadership positions and many women were subjected to unwanted advances from male coworkers. Further, the accusations said that the company's HR department had categorically failed to respond to complaints, furthering the idea that the company's HR department isn't really there to protect employees, it's there to protect the company. And that's a narrative that I wish I could say is unrealistic, but based upon a lot of similar stories in the business world in general and the tech world in particular, that's a hard narrative to refute. The complaints specifically called out Alex Afrasiab, who had previously led the World of Warcraft creative department, stating that Afrasiab had engaged in quote blatant sexual harassment with little to no repercussions end quote. Now by that point he had already left the company, but this was sort of the reckoning of of his actions, and the next day, on Tuesday, July one, the press ran stories about this lawsuit. Activision. Blizzard Reps kind of went into a damage control mode, claiming that the allegations that were being spread were not accurate and quote distorted and in many cases false descriptions of blizzards past end quote. Then came a collection of contradictory reports about internal communications. Some executives at activision Blizzard appeared decide with the people who brought forward the complaints. They were essentially saying, that is awful, it is inexcusable, and it's something that must absolutely stop. Then there were others who were denying that this was a problem in the first place, like, no, that never happened, and you're wrong. In the public sphere, you had folks sharing video clips of a panel that happened at a ten blizz Con event. Blizz Con is an annual conference that Blizzard held to promote games and build a community of users and that kind of thing. The video clip showed Blizzard executives ridiculing a request from one woman. She took the mic and said, is there any way that future World of Warcraft female characters could be presented in a way that was less sexualized? And the people started joking about that as a response, it was not, as they say, a good look. Things escalated. Employees planned a walkout and they issued demands to management. One of the big ones was to end mandatory arbitration clauses and layee contracts. All Right, so this particular practice, which is pretty darned disgusting is one in which a company requires employees to sign an agreement UH that says if they ever have a complaint against the company, they must first go through internal channels before doing anything else. The employee is not to go public with a complaint, nor are they to seek legal action against the company without first going through this internal process. So again, this is a damage control practice that tries to eliminate an employee's options to seek out any kind of external help for an internal problem. And as employees have frequently pointed out, this is an issue because if the system is rotten, then there's not like you have any hope that you're going to find a solution within that system. Right. If the system is broken and it's favored for you know, keeping the status quo, then going within the system them is going to be fruitless. So if the HR department frequently fails to act or to protect folks who are at the center of these complaints, uh, well, the employees remain the ones who are hurt and the people who were the bad actors frequently they were people in positions of power, and the the tendency was to protect the people in positions of power. After all, this is a company that's making bookoos of money. And if the thought is, well, yeah, they're awful human beings, but look at how much cash they're making us, then there was this tendency to protect them. The workers also demanded greater efforts to create a diversified workforce, to publish compensation and promotion rates in an act of transparency, essentially to say, hey, I want to know how much my co workers make because I want to know that we're being compensated fairly. Uh, and a lot of other similar demands along those lines. The employees staged the walkout on July one. Game developers with other studios contributed their support with messages of solidarity. Saw a lot of that on Twitter, and that same day, Kotaku published a story about a room the blizz Con staff would set up at their annual blizz Con uh and the room had the nickname the Cosby Suite. The purpose of the room, according to the jokes quote unquote, was to be a place where hot chicks would be brought in their words, not mine, presumably for the male Blizzard staff to have someone to harass. Again, not a good look, now, Folks who were involved with Blizzard during these days. Later on said what these rooms really were were just break rooms. They were like a green room for people to rest between events, and that the whole hot chicks thing was just a joke, it wasn't actually reality. However, even if it's just a quote unquote joke, it does indicate a pretty pervasive sexist culture at the company. Again, not a good look. The bad news was just beginning though, with more people coming forward with truly awful allegations about the culture at the company. And I'm not going to repeat all those stories because there are, first of all, too many of them, and they also get super upsetting, but I will say that the picture being painted was one of a truly hostile and terrible work culture if you happen to be, you know, a woman. Then we started seeing some high level executives and creators exit Activision Blizzard, including the head of HR. The president of the Blizzard division left and was replaced by two co head creators, so you you got rid of the one president and then two people stepped in to fill that role. And then some of the creative directors on some of Blizzards big titles also left. One of those people, Jesse McCree was the inspiration for the name of an Overwatched character who was previously called McCree. I say previously because the company subsequently renamed McCree to Cole cassidy Activision. Blizzard then committed to no longer naming characters or items in games after real world people, and the company was also in the process of scrubbing references to alphre Siabi, which was that was in tons of other games, so they were already in that that uh stage of trying to wipe out those those markers. We also saw some corporate partnerships appear to end. For example, T mobile branding that had been part of games like Overwatch mysteriously vanished. Uh. The company hired on a law firm called Wilmer Hale, which had a reputation that, you know, companies that want to discourage employees from organizing will get the services of this particular law firm. So, in other words, like the workers were saying, Hey, the law firm you hired on, they have a reputation for trying to stop people from unionizing. That didn't go over well either. In September, employees partnered with the Communication Workers of America to file a separate lawsuit against the company, this one about conditions that restricted employees rights to talk about stuff like hours and working conditions, as well as wages. A couple of days later, the U S Security is an Exchange Commission or SEC, opened an investigation into Activision Blizzard regarding the sexual harassment and discrimination complaints. Things would continue to get worse, even as the company publicly committed to making substantive changes to the culture and policies. For one, Jen O'Neill, who was one of the co heads of Blizzard, who was named after the president of Blizzard had departed the company, she resigned. She had only been the position for a couple of months at that time, and she revealed that she had received a lower compensation package than the other co head of Blizzard. So the two people, these two people had the same job, same responsibilities, right, they are co leaders of a major division within the company, And she said, found that he's making more than i am, which makes no sense. I mean, we're doing the same job. And of course the other co head happens to be male. She also said that she had been the victim of sexual harassment at the company as well. Another terrible terrible incident of sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard. All right, we're gonna have more to say about that story, but first I need to take a breath, so let's take a quick break. All right, we're back, and we're talking about Activision Blizzards terrible year. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or e o C reached a settlement with Activision Blizzard in September overall lawsuit about the sexual harassment claims at the company. That settlement would require Activision to establish an eighteen million dollar fund to compensate employees who are claiming damages against the company. Now, the state of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which you remember, that was the department that filed the initial lawsuit in July that started off this whole public pr disaster for the company, They attempted to intervene here. They said that, you know, the settlement could hurt other lawsuits and potentially allow Activision Blizzard the chance to destroy some valuable evidence. But a judge overruled their objection and a formal ruling on the decree will wait until January. And some people are expecting that eighteen million dollar fund to grow significantly. On November six, employees staged another walkout following an expose published by The Wall Street Journal. In that piece, the Wall Street Journal shared a story in which CEO Bobby Kodick, who had so far more or less been expressing support for workers and and committing to making changes at the company, well. According to this expose, he allegedly made a death threat to his assistant, and there was another incident in which he personally intervened during a sexual harassment investigation inside the company. The employees then demanded co tex resignation as CEO. Now, as of this recording, he's still the CEO of Activision Blizzard, but calls for his resignation continue, and he has reportedly said to colleagues that should the problems that the company not be something that can be fixed quickly, he might consider leaving. Then in early December, there was a third walkout at Activision Blizzard. This one came in response to Raven Software. That's a company that's another part of Activision Blizzard. It was one that was acquired by Activision Blizzard not too long ago, and recently the company laid off twelve quality assurance contractors and that first compelled sixty raven Software employees to hold a work stoppage, which as far as I know, is still going on right now. And then that spread to other departments with an Activision Blizzard, and it points to this growing anger of employees who are really taking a stand against their employer. So this goes beyond the hostile work environment stuff. This is getting into solidarity territory. Other components of the story include the fact that the Game Awards, which is an industry awards event that pretty much does what you would expect it to do, they announced that they would not highlight Activision Blizzard in any way outside of the nominations that the company's games had already received. This was significant because, and if you've ever watched a Game Awards presentation you know this. The event is frequently one where gamers will see trailers of upcoming titles for the first time. But this meant that there would be no promotional material for upcoming Activision Blizzard titles like Overwatched two or Diablow, for pretty big blow on the marketing front for Activision Blizzard. Now, the reason I dedicated essentially a third of this whole episode just to this topic was the stuff that's happened at Activision Blizzard is really just a microcosm for stuff that's going on throughout the tech industry and really with throughout business in general. We're seeing a growing worker movement at different places, including companies like Apple. Uh the Apple too movement is still fairly young, but it involves people coming forward to protest work culture and conditions at the notorious secretive company. So, you know, usually Apple keeps everything buttoned up. That's kind of their work culture, and for years that was the way it worked. And now we have Apple employees coming forward and saying no, like, the only thing that the only person this benefits are the only entity this benefits is Apple. It does not benefit the employees. And so they started speaking out and they formed websites to share stories about issues with work culture and demands that the company change things. And the Activision Blizzard story follows similar things we heard last year about a totally different game company, Ubi Soft, which has also had its share of scandals and awful revelations. Also, there's been some criticism about Ubisoft this year, with people saying that even in the wake of all those terrible things that came to light last year, the company has not done enough to address the problems, and just to be clear, while stories like Activision, Blizzard and Ubi Soft and Apple bring a lot of attention to specific cases, the underlying message here is that there's a lot more of this kind of toxic and harmful stuff going on that isn't making headlines. I have no doubt that there are those among you listening to the show right now who have experienced something akin to what I've described in this section at some company or another, and I expect we're going to see more stories from more employees at more companies about similar issues moving forward. My hope is that will actually you make moves to address those problems and make workplaces a fair, equitable environment where people won't have to fear harassment and where corporate responses to such behavior are swift and just. Okay, let's move on from that now. In our episode yesterday, I talked about how various governments around the world are looking at meta slash Facebook and considering the possibility of making the company divest itself of properties like Instagram and WhatsApp. In other words, the whole breakup Facebook movement. I also want to add that other companies are also falling under similar scrutiny, though in all cases very little action has actually followed that scrutiny. But Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, the other members of the Big five in tech, have also served as a launch point for discussions about anti competitive practices, market domination, and a possible need to break up those companies into smaller entity ease. And while there's been a big pr war waged in the press about this kind of thing, and we've heard politicians deliver rhetoric about how these companies hold far too much power in their various markets, as I've said, we've seen precious little actual movement on those issues. I suspect we may hear more about this next year, but honestly, at this point, at least here in the United States, I would be shocked to see any real progress being made on it. Because there are a lot of other issues, many of which pertain to the infrastructure of democracy itself, that I suspect will take precedence over the need to curtail tech companies and their increasing hold over their various industries. Okay, let's talk about some big fails in the tech space. In one, like literal fails, we saw a few major outages across the Internet this past year. In June, a cloud computing services provider called Fastly experienced what we in the tech biz like to refer to as a massive oopsie. See. Fastly service mostly involves having edge computing servers that store information on behalf of major sites so that when someone calls up info from one of those major sites, it gets that person more quickly. So let's say I'm in Spain and I want to pull up information that technically calls a server in California in the United States home. Well, that's probably gonna mean a longer load time, right like that that has to travel all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to California and across the United States to to California, and longer load times are not great from a user experienced perspective. So Fastly is a service that prides a way to store information on servers that are closer to the end user and thus reduced load times. So this in that case, a fast Le server in Spain would hold copies of the information that I wanted to pull from the service in California, and it would just come from the server in Spain instead. It would look just as it would if it were coming from California, but it's faster that way, so Fastly is kind of a way to I guess you could call it a way to reduce buffering times if you want to think of it that way. Well, a month before the actual old Age, so this would be May for those of you not paying attention, Fastly pushed out a software deployment and within this deployment was a little bitty software bug. And under most circumstances, nothing would actually happen with that bug. It was just there, but it was inert. However, under the right situations, the bug would cause a massive shutdown of the Fastly network. And in June, that's what happened. A customer mercifully unnamed, accidentally triggered this bug. Not really the customer's fault, it was a bug. So what followed was a massive outage of Fastly and affected dozens of websites and services, including major ones like the BBC, The New York Times, CNN, Amazon. You try to go to those sites and you would get a five oh three error and you're wondering what the heck is going on. Now. It did get fixed, not you know, it didn't take too long to do, but it was one of those big things that affected lots of different sites. In October, Facebook had its own massive outage. Meta would later say that this was a faulty configuration and it just brought Facebook services down for several hours, like Facebook, Instagram, Watsap, etcetera. And as you can imagine, activity on other platforms those not owned by Meta anyway exploded, with lots of folks talking about how they were suddenly freed up to do other stuff like spend that time on other platforms. I guess Google also had a massive outage back in April that brought many of its services down, like Google Drive and that kind of thing. It's actually amazing that knowledge wasn't noticed by yours, truly, because I depend on a lot on Google services. But then again, I also create tech stuff episodes using Office three sixty five software, so maybe I was actually, you know, working buckling down on a tech stuff episode when the outage happened. And of course there was the massive Amazon Web Services outage caused by a configuration problem in their network, and that one fouled up everything from real world package deliveries from Amazon to interfering with services like Netflix. It also impacted tons of apps that depend upon Amazon Web services, including apps tied to stuff like home automation systems. That particular outage really illustrated how much we now depend upon the cloud in order to get stuff done. All right, I'm gonna wrap this episode up because I still have other stories to cover for one more episode and um and I'm tired of being angry and and next stuff. Y'all is my thoughts on Tesla. So you know, I'm gonna be angry again, but I'm gonna save that for the next episode and then we'll start to you know, shift over to talking about stuff in two yea. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in the future episodes of Tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and we are continuing our top tech news stories of closing out the year. What a year it was. And one thing I feel I should mention right off the top of this episode which I forgot about. Well, yesterday's episode went up. You know, all that ranting about Meta and Facebook, I forgot to mention the company has been voted the quote worst company of the year end quote. Now. That's according to Yahoo Finance, which selects a company for this dubious honor each year using metrics like market performance and achievements, and mostly polling people to find out which company upset them the most over the course of the previous twelve months. This year, that was met h slash Facebook, though notably the investment service Robin Hood, which we will talk more about in just a few minutes, was also a contender. Last year it was the Nicola Motor Company. So you know Nicola Tesla being this very instrumental engineer in the field of electricity. Of course, the Tesla motor company takes its name from him, and so does the Nicola Motor Company that's an electric truck company. It also got some votes this year, but it won if you can call it that worst company of the year last year at corn Yahoo Finance. Anyway, this isn't like a scientific examination of which company is in fact the worst. I mean, it's a pole. There's not even that many people who respond to it from what I can tell. Uh. And also meta slash Facebook was in the news a lot towards the end of this year, so most of that news was not positive at all. It's not a big surprise. I should also point out that TikTok and Twitter both end up on a lot of hated company lists. Not necessarily the yeah who finance one, but lots of companies or lots of outlets will organize lists like this, and TikTok and Twitter and Facebook are frequently in that mix. All right. In our last episode we ended with my rant about n f t s, there was a lot of ranting. Uh spoiler alert, there'll be more ranting in this episode. Well, since we talked about n f t S in the last episode, I suppose we should also talk about cryptocurrency. While we're on the subject of block chains and such, crypto had another roller coaster of a year, with bitcoin prices climbing rapidly and steadily into early spring, reaching around sixty thou dollars per bitcoin. Then there was a big crash in May, with the value dropping by are you know, around fifty or so. Then there was a recovery period. It got back as high as sixty three thou dollars per bitcoin in November. Uh, as I record this, it's closer to around fifty thou dollars per bitcoin, but that's as I record this. By the time you hear this, who knows. But bitcoin continues to be a volatile investment, and I still wouldn't call it a currency because the value fluctuates so dramatically that it's hard to imagine using it as a practical currency. It's far more likely to be used as either a way to invest money and hope that the value of the bitcoin continues to grow, or, as we've seen in the recent past, to use it as a means to launder ill gotten gains and hide the fact that you've been on Santa's naughty list. This year, we've seen proof of work cryptocurrencies take a bit of a beating on another pr front this year, one that revolves around conservation and climate change. It's no secret that proof of work currencies, particularly bitcoin mining, require massive amounts of electricity. This is tied into the value of the currency itself. If it is hugely profitable to mine the cryptocurrency, well then you'll find people and organizations who will pour a ton of money into building out mining operations. And of course, these these operations that they're using powerful computers to play a complicated guessing games. What it really boils down to, But one thing that's not a guess is the amount of electricity that these machines need. It's a lot. So much, in fact, that it's not unusual for bitcoin mining operations to purchase or at least facilities that are co located to power plants, including coal fired power plants, including ones that are no longer online, and then bringing them back online. This has brought more focus on bitcoin mining and its impact on consumption and climate change. China has shut down bitcoin mining operations in several regions, citing concerns over the potential environmental impact of bitcoin mining. However, I think I should add that I suspect China's government also has a healthy concern for any ind tree that could potentially acquire enough power to rival the government itself, and we're seeing some governments around the world at the country or the local level consider or even enact bands on operations that would require bringing defunct fossil fuel power plants back online. So we have seen some opposition in various places. Ethereum is currently also a proof of work cryptocurrency. Uh. It does also have a much lower value than bitcoin, so you don't see the same massive ethereum mining operations because the the profits aren't there. It would cost you more to run the operation than you would make in mind cryptocurrency. So for that reason, mining rigs for ethereum are a little more modest than the ones that are used by bitcoin miners. That's more than a little bit of an understatement. So it's the ethereum miners who frequently go after graphics processors for their rigs, which of course makes it even harder for gamers to get hold of a good GPU at a decent price. You've got the semiconductor shortage, you've got bots buying up cards and then trying to sell them for marked up prices on secondary markets, and you've got Ethereum miners who are after those same cards, but for the purposes of mining cryptocurrency. However, Ethereum is supposed to switch to a proof of steak approach next year, which has a much lower computation requirement, so we'll see if that actually changes things. But yeah, was a year in which crypto sword to new heights, then plummeted, then rose again, then plummeted again. You get the idea, and a lot of this was fueled by a passionate and frankly kind of scary community in places like Reddit. Oh and also Elon Musk played a part in it too. I'm gonna save a lot of my Elon Musk fire for the third episode in this series. I think I also received a request recently on Twitter to do a full episode about Web three, and I'm still planning to do that, but I should talk about the emerging discussions of Web three, which is usually spelled out altogether, so it's w e B, the number three no spaces that ended up becoming a pretty big thing this year, particularly on Twitter. There were some Twitter spats about Web three. There are also some parallels here between Web three and the metaverse, because they're both kind of this concept of what the next phase of the Internet, or at least internetwork connectivity are all going to be about. And like the metaverse, the definitions here get pretty lucy goosey because it doesn't exist yet, so it's kind of hard to talk about what it is because there isn't anything at the moment, and different people have sort of a different concept of what it will be if it ever does become a thing. But generally speaking, the concept of Web three, at least the one that most people are referring to, is one that uses blockchain as a backbone. And you might say, okay, how and uh uh hey, look over there, it's something shiny, okay, so well, the concept is that Web three will leverage blockchain in such a way that ideally the power of the Internet will be distributed to those who are using the Internet. In other words, it's kind of like putting the Internet's ownership into the hands of the people. That's in contrast with how Web the three enthusiasts see the Internet today, because they see the Internet today as an entity that is heavily dependent upon a few major companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta and you know, like we'll talk about stuff like the Amazon Web Services outage that shows that a lot of what we depend upon in connectivity does route through Amazon in some way. So this general notion is that Web three projects are are similar to cryptocurrencies and n f t s. There's some form of implementation that relies on the blockchain to keep track of transactions, though what those transactions actually are varies dramatically from implementation to implementation. However, once you get past that kind of vague description, things really start to break down. I have yet to see a compelling case explaining how blockchain will enable a new version of the Internet, or even of just the Web, because remember the Web and the Internet or two different things. The Web exists on top of the Internet. So I haven't really seen a compelling case for this distributed ownership model. And there are a lot of folks who are expressing skepticism about the idea in general, including people who say that if Web three does become a thing, it will be a thing that is controlled by venture capitalists rather than big companies. But it still means that the hoi poloi, meaning folks like you or me will still be left out of the loop. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, made this point on Twitter, saying, Hey, you know, the people who will own Web three will be venture capitalists, not the people in general, and those making Web three applications will be doing so with their investors in mind. So it'll be the venture capitalists who are essentially directing how Web three evolves, again without really going into details about what Web three is going to look like. And anyway, that whole criticism is not making Web three evangelists very happy. So I'm gonna save a deeper conversation about this topic for a full episode further down the line, because honestly, it would take me hours of research to really dive into it and separate the buzz terms from anything with you know, actual substance to it, Because every time I read anything about Web three, I feel like I'm reading ad copy for a product that doesn't exist yet, and that's not really useful. But since we're talking about tech and money, let's chat about something that unfolded early this year that involved both, and it all has to do with Game Stop and stock prices. Alright, So game Stop is a video game retail company. They sell video games and video game systems. Early in two thousand twenty one, there was a move to short sell Game Stop stock among certain hedge funds. So a short sell is when you borrow a bunch of shares of a company from another stockholder. You don't known these shares, you're borrowing them, and you're promising that you will return that same number of shares to the stockholder at some agreed upon time. Then you take the shares you borrowed and you sell them. You know, the ones that you do not own. You sell them and you take the money, and your goal is to buy back the shares you just sold, but at a lower price, and you pocket the difference. So what you're hoping for is for the stock price to come down. You're hoping that a company hits hard time send their stock price reflects that. So you might sell a bunch of shares at around twenty dollars a pop, and then your plan is to buy back those shares when they reach five dollars a pop, and you pocket the fifteen dollars difference per per share. More or less, it gets a little more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea, and then you return the shares to the stockholder, you keep what's left over. Everyone's happy, while the stockholder is probably not happy because their shares are worth less now, but hopefully they're in it for the long term because they believe in the company or some nonsense. Now, if the price of the stock goes up instead of down, well, you then have to spend more money to purchase the shares back then you made when you sold the shares in the first place, because you still have the obligation to return those shares to the original holder, like you can't just walk away. So then you get a bunch of folks online who decided to do something called a short squeeze. Is on some hedge funds that we're planning to short sell the game Stop stock. So what these folks did was they just started buying up shares of game Stop, like lots of shares, and that activity drove up the stock price because there was a demand for game Stop stock, so the price went up. Demand is high, price increases, and that meant that these hedge funds were suddenly faced with the very real possibility of having to pay more money to buy back those shares that they had borrowed than they had on hand to cover the short cells. And it was a kind of activism mixed with speculation because as the price was going up, it also meant that the stock that people were holding was growing in value, that the stuff they owned was actually getting more valuable, and their wealth was increasing. In fact, it was increasing significantly. And you might wonder how significantly well. The stock price had been at around seventeen dollars per share before the squeeze really got moving. At the height, it was closer to five hundred dollars per share. So imagine you bought something for seventeen bucks and then you could sell it for five hundred bucks. So there were a lot of people who are jumping on board this not because they were trying to push against hedge funds, not because they were like trying to take down the the These these groups that were, you know, boasting memberships of incredibly wealthy people, and to stick it to the man, they were joining because they saw this as a way to get rich quick. So there was a mixture of both of these kinds of people. Now, this peak wasn't to last. It did settle down a bit. But even as I record. This the stock prices valued at around a hundred fifty dollars per share, so not quite ten times what it was valued at before the squeeze. This also did force a few hedge funds to shut down, and it also brought to lights and disparities in the individual investor world. So the investment service robin Hood that I mentioned earlier, it made headlines because it began to deny robin Hood users the opportunity to purchase game Stop stock. Like that's what robin Hood exists for, is for the individual person to participate in the stock market. Because the individual typically if they have any involvement in the stock market at all, it's because they happen to have something like a four oh one K plan where some fund manager is deciding, you know, what moneys go to what stocks. This is a case where the individual person can say, no, I want to buy fifty shares of game Stop stock for example. Well, robin Hood's stopped that. They stopped letting people do that on their service, and they cited a desire to not contribute to an unstable market environment, which is pretty rich when you consider robin Hood's namesake, right, I mean, like the Robin Hood, the legendary figure, was all about creating an unstable market environment. Anyway. This prompted folks to draw connections between Robin Hood and people who were involved in hedge funds who had participated in the short selling, and some people started claiming that Robin Hood was trying to mitigate the effects of the short squeeze because they had financial interests in those, you know, folks that were higher up in the food chain of various hedge funds. In other words, they were saying, you're not really for the people, you're for other big companies. The whole game stop saga prompted a lot of folks to get into individual investors stuff when they had never really dipped their toes into it before, and several sub credits saw their ranks swell due to this interest, and a lot of folks came out at the subject from all different angles, a lot of them uninformed angles. You could almost taste the frustration of the more seasoned investors in those groups as folks totally new to the field began delving out their expert advice. You know, people who had been investing for all of like two weeks were suddenly experts anyway. In many respects, this whole thing was part of a larger, more vague trend of people finding ways to push back against big corporate and financial entities. And we'll talk about that more after we come back from this quick break. So another kind of expression of this anti corporate sentiment, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean this, this feeling of I've taken all I can take and I won't take anymore. Was this general trend of workers organizing and unionizing. Here in the United States, we're seeing support for the concept of unions grow, but the pandemic really pushed folks to move at a faster rate. Workers get to demand more from employers, and uh employers began complaining about stuff like labor shortages. They were saying, we can't we don't have enough people to do the work we need to do, and the workers were saying, well, there's no surprise there, you know, look at the compensation you're offering people, look at the working conditions that people have to endure. It's no wonder that you aren't able to attract and retain employees. You've got to offer more to them. And companies were like yeah, that doesn't sound right. And then workers at lots of places said, okay, well, we're all going to band together and create a union so that we have the leverage to force you into negotiations for better conditions or else you don't have anyone to do your work for you, and where will that put you. So we saw unions go on strike at Freedo, Lay, at Kellogg's, John Dear, Nabisco, and more. And while John Dear is the only company in that short list I gave that is most related to tech, at least as the way we think of it. I mean, all of these companies rely on tech obviously, but John Deere is a company that makes technological products. But the sentiment spread much further than just those companies. Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama rallied to unionize, and they held a vote on the matter, but that vote famously failed. In fact, it failed it like a two to one ratio. However, in the process of that, workers were alleging that Amazon had engaged in anti union practices and was actively trying to discourage employees from supporting a union. This was enough to prompt the US Labor Board to order a revote, which has not yet happened, but should in the not too distant future. On a similar note, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York, filed a union petition earlier in then withdrew the petition, and and this month chose to refile that petition. They also staged a walk out during the holiday rush, placing enormous pressure on Amazon to respond before customers started losing their ding dang minds that their Christmas presents We're gonna arrive late. The message is clear. Workers around the US are starting to demand better working conditions and better compensation. Many of the industries involved are ones that required people to come into situations that are dangerous even when there isn't a pandemic going on. Amazon fulfillment centers are notoriously hazardous, for example. And we've also seen these kind of movements among hospital staff as hospitals get consistently overwhelmed and the staff are demanding better conditions because they're under extreme circumstances for an extended period of time due to lots of other factors that go well beyond the scope of this podcast. So don't worry. I'm not gonna rant about all that generally speaking, unionization has been on the decline in the United States until fairly recently, but we're seeing the movement spread across multiple industries, including the tech world. In fact, will tackle a really notable case in just a moment. But uh, I should also add for full transparency that the I Heart Media podcasters also submitted a petition to unionize, which passed a vote the podcasters past that now that process is still ongoing, and considering my position, I can't really comment on it any further than that, but I wanted to at least acknowledge that it is a thing that is happening. All right. Now, let's tackle another really big story in tech that unfolded throughout twenty one, the story of Activision Blizzard. Now, this is such a big and nasty story that's gonna take up essentially a third of this whole episode, and it plays into a lot of other trends in tech that we saw over the year, such as the continuation of the Me too movement as a movement in which people are coming forward with allegations of like hostile work environments and sexual harassment and worse. And it also ties into the labor organizing movement that I touched on just a second ago. So let's dial back, and let's go back to July twenty one. That's the date when the world at large got a glimpse into what the heck was happening over an Activision Blizzard. That was when the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing or d f e H, filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, the video game company. So, in case you're not familiar with Activision Blizzard, it is a truly enormous company that has its roots way back in the Atari days. Activision originally formed with a group of Atari programmers left Atari and found their own game company. The company is known for a lot of ultra popular titles like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo Overwatch, and dozens of others. Well, the lawsuit had some really ugly accusations in it, which have been expanded upon quite a bit since then. They included instances of discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile work environments, sexual assault in some cases, and more. There are also charges that the company had very few women in leadership positions and many women were subjected to unwanted advances from male coworkers. Further, the accusations said that the company's HR department had categorically failed to respond to complaints, furthering the idea that the company's HR department isn't really there to protect employees, it's there to protect the company. And that's a narrative that I wish I could say is unrealistic, but based upon a lot of similar stories in the business world in general and the tech world in particular, that's a hard narrative to refute. The complaints specifically called out Alex Afrasiab, who had previously led the World of Warcraft creative department, stating that Afrasiab had engaged in quote blatant sexual harassment with little to no repercussions end quote. Now by that point he had already left the company, but this was sort of the reckoning of of his actions, and the next day, on Tuesday, July one, the press ran stories about this lawsuit. Activision. Blizzard Reps kind of went into a damage control mode, claiming that the allegations that were being spread were not accurate and quote distorted and in many cases false descriptions of blizzards past end quote. Then came a collection of contradictory reports about internal communications. Some executives at activision Blizzard appeared decide with the people who brought forward the complaints. They were essentially saying, that is awful, it is inexcusable, and it's something that must absolutely stop. Then there were others who were denying that this was a problem in the first place, like, no, that never happened, and you're wrong. In the public sphere, you had folks sharing video clips of a panel that happened at a ten blizz Con event. Blizz Con is an annual conference that Blizzard held to promote games and build a community of users and that kind of thing. The video clip showed Blizzard executives ridiculing a request from one woman. She took the mic and said, is there any way that future World of Warcraft female characters could be presented in a way that was less sexualized? And the people started joking about that as a response, it was not, as they say, a good look. Things escalated. Employees planned a walkout and they issued demands to management. One of the big ones was to end mandatory arbitration clauses and layee contracts. All Right, so this particular practice, which is pretty darned disgusting is one in which a company requires employees to sign an agreement UH that says if they ever have a complaint against the company, they must first go through internal channels before doing anything else. The employee is not to go public with a complaint, nor are they to seek legal action against the company without first going through this internal process. So again, this is a damage control practice that tries to eliminate an employee's options to seek out any kind of external help for an internal problem. And as employees have frequently pointed out, this is an issue because if the system is rotten, then there's not like you have any hope that you're going to find a solution within that system. Right. If the system is broken and it's favored for you know, keeping the status quo, then going within the system them is going to be fruitless. So if the HR department frequently fails to act or to protect folks who are at the center of these complaints, uh, well, the employees remain the ones who are hurt and the people who were the bad actors frequently they were people in positions of power, and the the tendency was to protect the people in positions of power. After all, this is a company that's making bookoos of money. And if the thought is, well, yeah, they're awful human beings, but look at how much cash they're making us, then there was this tendency to protect them. The workers also demanded greater efforts to create a diversified workforce, to publish compensation and promotion rates in an act of transparency, essentially to say, hey, I want to know how much my co workers make because I want to know that we're being compensated fairly. Uh, and a lot of other similar demands along those lines. The employees staged the walkout on July one. Game developers with other studios contributed their support with messages of solidarity. Saw a lot of that on Twitter, and that same day, Kotaku published a story about a room the blizz Con staff would set up at their annual blizz Con uh and the room had the nickname the Cosby Suite. The purpose of the room, according to the jokes quote unquote, was to be a place where hot chicks would be brought in their words, not mine, presumably for the male Blizzard staff to have someone to harass. Again, not a good look, now, Folks who were involved with Blizzard during these days. Later on said what these rooms really were were just break rooms. They were like a green room for people to rest between events, and that the whole hot chicks thing was just a joke, it wasn't actually reality. However, even if it's just a quote unquote joke, it does indicate a pretty pervasive sexist culture at the company. Again, not a good look. The bad news was just beginning though, with more people coming forward with truly awful allegations about the culture at the company. And I'm not going to repeat all those stories because there are, first of all, too many of them, and they also get super upsetting, but I will say that the picture being painted was one of a truly hostile and terrible work culture if you happen to be, you know, a woman. Then we started seeing some high level executives and creators exit Activision Blizzard, including the head of HR. The president of the Blizzard division left and was replaced by two co head creators, so you you got rid of the one president and then two people stepped in to fill that role. And then some of the creative directors on some of Blizzards big titles also left. One of those people, Jesse McCree was the inspiration for the name of an Overwatched character who was previously called McCree. I say previously because the company subsequently renamed McCree to Cole cassidy Activision. Blizzard then committed to no longer naming characters or items in games after real world people, and the company was also in the process of scrubbing references to alphre Siabi, which was that was in tons of other games, so they were already in that that uh stage of trying to wipe out those those markers. We also saw some corporate partnerships appear to end. For example, T mobile branding that had been part of games like Overwatch mysteriously vanished. Uh. The company hired on a law firm called Wilmer Hale, which had a reputation that, you know, companies that want to discourage employees from organizing will get the services of this particular law firm. So, in other words, like the workers were saying, Hey, the law firm you hired on, they have a reputation for trying to stop people from unionizing. That didn't go over well either. In September, employees partnered with the Communication Workers of America to file a separate lawsuit against the company, this one about conditions that restricted employees rights to talk about stuff like hours and working conditions, as well as wages. A couple of days later, the U S Security is an Exchange Commission or SEC, opened an investigation into Activision Blizzard regarding the sexual harassment and discrimination complaints. Things would continue to get worse, even as the company publicly committed to making substantive changes to the culture and policies. For one, Jen O'Neill, who was one of the co heads of Blizzard, who was named after the president of Blizzard had departed the company, she resigned. She had only been the position for a couple of months at that time, and she revealed that she had received a lower compensation package than the other co head of Blizzard. So the two people, these two people had the same job, same responsibilities, right, they are co leaders of a major division within the company, And she said, found that he's making more than i am, which makes no sense. I mean, we're doing the same job. And of course the other co head happens to be male. She also said that she had been the victim of sexual harassment at the company as well. Another terrible terrible incident of sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard. All right, we're gonna have more to say about that story, but first I need to take a breath, so let's take a quick break. All right, we're back, and we're talking about Activision Blizzards terrible year. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or e o C reached a settlement with Activision Blizzard in September overall lawsuit about the sexual harassment claims at the company. That settlement would require Activision to establish an eighteen million dollar fund to compensate employees who are claiming damages against the company. Now, the state of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which you remember, that was the department that filed the initial lawsuit in July that started off this whole public pr disaster for the company, They attempted to intervene here. They said that, you know, the settlement could hurt other lawsuits and potentially allow Activision Blizzard the chance to destroy some valuable evidence. But a judge overruled their objection and a formal ruling on the decree will wait until January. And some people are expecting that eighteen million dollar fund to grow significantly. On November six, employees staged another walkout following an expose published by The Wall Street Journal. In that piece, the Wall Street Journal shared a story in which CEO Bobby Kodick, who had so far more or less been expressing support for workers and and committing to making changes at the company, well. According to this expose, he allegedly made a death threat to his assistant, and there was another incident in which he personally intervened during a sexual harassment investigation inside the company. The employees then demanded co tex resignation as CEO. Now, as of this recording, he's still the CEO of Activision Blizzard, but calls for his resignation continue, and he has reportedly said to colleagues that should the problems that the company not be something that can be fixed quickly, he might consider leaving. Then in early December, there was a third walkout at Activision Blizzard. This one came in response to Raven Software. That's a company that's another part of Activision Blizzard. It was one that was acquired by Activision Blizzard not too long ago, and recently the company laid off twelve quality assurance contractors and that first compelled sixty raven Software employees to hold a work stoppage, which as far as I know, is still going on right now. And then that spread to other departments with an Activision Blizzard, and it points to this growing anger of employees who are really taking a stand against their employer. So this goes beyond the hostile work environment stuff. This is getting into solidarity territory. Other components of the story include the fact that the Game Awards, which is an industry awards event that pretty much does what you would expect it to do, they announced that they would not highlight Activision Blizzard in any way outside of the nominations that the company's games had already received. This was significant because, and if you've ever watched a Game Awards presentation you know this. The event is frequently one where gamers will see trailers of upcoming titles for the first time. But this meant that there would be no promotional material for upcoming Activision Blizzard titles like Overwatched two or Diablow, for pretty big blow on the marketing front for Activision Blizzard. Now, the reason I dedicated essentially a third of this whole episode just to this topic was the stuff that's happened at Activision Blizzard is really just a microcosm for stuff that's going on throughout the tech industry and really with throughout business in general. We're seeing a growing worker movement at different places, including companies like Apple. Uh the Apple too movement is still fairly young, but it involves people coming forward to protest work culture and conditions at the notorious secretive company. So, you know, usually Apple keeps everything buttoned up. That's kind of their work culture, and for years that was the way it worked. And now we have Apple employees coming forward and saying no, like, the only thing that the only person this benefits are the only entity this benefits is Apple. It does not benefit the employees. And so they started speaking out and they formed websites to share stories about issues with work culture and demands that the company change things. And the Activision Blizzard story follows similar things we heard last year about a totally different game company, Ubi Soft, which has also had its share of scandals and awful revelations. Also, there's been some criticism about Ubisoft this year, with people saying that even in the wake of all those terrible things that came to light last year, the company has not done enough to address the problems, and just to be clear, while stories like Activision, Blizzard and Ubi Soft and Apple bring a lot of attention to specific cases, the underlying message here is that there's a lot more of this kind of toxic and harmful stuff going on that isn't making headlines. I have no doubt that there are those among you listening to the show right now who have experienced something akin to what I've described in this section at some company or another, and I expect we're going to see more stories from more employees at more companies about similar issues moving forward. My hope is that will actually you make moves to address those problems and make workplaces a fair, equitable environment where people won't have to fear harassment and where corporate responses to such behavior are swift and just. Okay, let's move on from that now. In our episode yesterday, I talked about how various governments around the world are looking at meta slash Facebook and considering the possibility of making the company divest itself of properties like Instagram and WhatsApp. In other words, the whole breakup Facebook movement. I also want to add that other companies are also falling under similar scrutiny, though in all cases very little action has actually followed that scrutiny. But Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, the other members of the Big five in tech, have also served as a launch point for discussions about anti competitive practices, market domination, and a possible need to break up those companies into smaller entity ease. And while there's been a big pr war waged in the press about this kind of thing, and we've heard politicians deliver rhetoric about how these companies hold far too much power in their various markets, as I've said, we've seen precious little actual movement on those issues. I suspect we may hear more about this next year, but honestly, at this point, at least here in the United States, I would be shocked to see any real progress being made on it. Because there are a lot of other issues, many of which pertain to the infrastructure of democracy itself, that I suspect will take precedence over the need to curtail tech companies and their increasing hold over their various industries. Okay, let's talk about some big fails in the tech space. In one, like literal fails, we saw a few major outages across the Internet this past year. In June, a cloud computing services provider called Fastly experienced what we in the tech biz like to refer to as a massive oopsie. See. Fastly service mostly involves having edge computing servers that store information on behalf of major sites so that when someone calls up info from one of those major sites, it gets that person more quickly. So let's say I'm in Spain and I want to pull up information that technically calls a server in California in the United States home. Well, that's probably gonna mean a longer load time, right like that that has to travel all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to California and across the United States to to California, and longer load times are not great from a user experienced perspective. So Fastly is a service that prides a way to store information on servers that are closer to the end user and thus reduced load times. So this in that case, a fast Le server in Spain would hold copies of the information that I wanted to pull from the service in California, and it would just come from the server in Spain instead. It would look just as it would if it were coming from California, but it's faster that way, so Fastly is kind of a way to I guess you could call it a way to reduce buffering times if you want to think of it that way. Well, a month before the actual old Age, so this would be May for those of you not paying attention, Fastly pushed out a software deployment and within this deployment was a little bitty software bug. And under most circumstances, nothing would actually happen with that bug. It was just there, but it was inert. However, under the right situations, the bug would cause a massive shutdown of the Fastly network. And in June, that's what happened. A customer mercifully unnamed, accidentally triggered this bug. Not really the customer's fault, it was a bug. So what followed was a massive outage of Fastly and affected dozens of websites and services, including major ones like the BBC, The New York Times, CNN, Amazon. You try to go to those sites and you would get a five oh three error and you're wondering what the heck is going on. Now. It did get fixed, not you know, it didn't take too long to do, but it was one of those big things that affected lots of different sites. In October, Facebook had its own massive outage. Meta would later say that this was a faulty configuration and it just brought Facebook services down for several hours, like Facebook, Instagram, Watsap, etcetera. And as you can imagine, activity on other platforms those not owned by Meta anyway exploded, with lots of folks talking about how they were suddenly freed up to do other stuff like spend that time on other platforms. I guess Google also had a massive outage back in April that brought many of its services down, like Google Drive and that kind of thing. It's actually amazing that knowledge wasn't noticed by yours, truly, because I depend on a lot on Google services. But then again, I also create tech stuff episodes using Office three sixty five software, so maybe I was actually, you know, working buckling down on a tech stuff episode when the outage happened. And of course there was the massive Amazon Web Services outage caused by a configuration problem in their network, and that one fouled up everything from real world package deliveries from Amazon to interfering with services like Netflix. It also impacted tons of apps that depend upon Amazon Web services, including apps tied to stuff like home automation systems. That particular outage really illustrated how much we now depend upon the cloud in order to get stuff done. All right, I'm gonna wrap this episode up because I still have other stories to cover for one more episode and um and I'm tired of being angry and and next stuff. Y'all is my thoughts on Tesla. So you know, I'm gonna be angry again, but I'm gonna save that for the next episode and then we'll start to you know, shift over to talking about stuff in two yea. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in the future episodes of Tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.