The Machine Does Not Care About Your Loyalty
The other day, I commented on a post about the reported 8,000 Meta layoffs. I said the cruelty was institutional by design, and that management by uncertainty has become one of the defining tropes of modern working life. Someone replied by asking what time I would have chosen to send the email.
This made me smile and raise an eyebrow at the same time, in that special way only whataboutism entering the chat can achieve. The question was not really about timing. It was a diversion into etiquette, as though the scandal were the hour of delivery rather than the machinery of disposability behind it.
I recognised the gesture immediately: misdirection by performative loyalty. A certain kind of person will go to great lengths to perform it online, and often in real life too. Why a certain kind? Because it is often the naive person: the person still young enough, insulated enough or ambitious enough to believe that defending the machine might one day be remembered by it. But the machine is not keeping a ledger. Every public defence of the indefensible does not become a little bonus accruing somewhere, ready to be dispensed when the gears turn.
The machine does not care about loyalty. Not the real kind, and not the performed kind. It does not care how fervently you defended its cruelty online when your own line in the spreadsheet is converted into liability. This is not always stupidity. Sometimes it is ambition, fear, habit, class mimicry, or the learned fluency of corporate life. People learn the accent of power because it works. Until it doesn’t. In practice, power has a language, and some people become extremely good at speaking it. But fluency does not make them owners of the system. It makes them reusable servants of it.
I have worked with plenty of colleagues who learned the accent of power and used it effectively, because that accent is useful: startup accent, executive accent, ruthless-pragmatist accent, “hard decisions” accent, “moving at pace” accent, transformation accent. I have watched this learning happen in real time, including when I was relocated to report to someone who could have been my own offspring. My own redundancy was soon followed by his own. The accent of power may carry those who learn it elsewhere, but it will not save them when the gears of the machine are made to turn unfavourably. When the machine needs to shed weight, it does not care how fluent in power people are. It cares what line they occupy on the cost model.
The loyalist who staunchly defends redundancies as optimisation exercises is the proverbial turkey voting for Christmas. What the machine remembers is not loyalty. Allegiance is not a currency that can eventually be banked. It is spent the moment it is performed.
