The first floor was designed as an event space, complete with Hogwarts-style wooden banquet tables, a museum, a sweeping bar, and the Thinktocat, a giant bronze sculpture of GitHub’s mascot, the Octocat—a humanoid cat with octopus legs.
A little over a month after the new office opened, one of GitHub’s employees opened an internal discussion thread. A feminist hacker space had launched a crowdfunding campaign with a satirical perk, priced at $50,000: a “Meritocracy is a Joke” rug, custom-designed “for your company’s oval office [sic], to show you don’t support the myth of meritocracy .
The discussion was lively but remarkably civil by today’s standards, with participation from employees of all backgrounds and levels of seniority. Everyone agreed that GitHub’s intentions had been good, but if the term “meritocracy” was upsetting people, perhaps it was best to remove it. Many employees also felt that, true to theof meritocracy , any controversy or confusion about the word would be a distraction from GitHub’s actual efforts to foster a welcoming environment.
The debate seemed innocuous—a minor kerfuffle, but nothing that couldn’t be resolved and moved on from. But the anti-tech political climate continued to escalate. Tech had entered a new era of discontent and mistrust, culminating in a backlash in 2016, after the presidential election, when Big Tech companies finally broke, embarking on a multiyear apology tour. Earlier that same year, the Oval Office was finally torn down.
While the backlash is commonly remembered as a collective disillusionment about tech’s influence on society, the cultural heart of the conflict was this: There are some who believe the tech industry’s values are cause for concern, and others who believe they are worth emulating.GitHub’s office, straddling both moments in time, was a parable for this rift, which continued to widen in the following years. Soon, there will be no physical trace left of the monument it built.
Without the visual reminder of these monuments, however, tech seems determined to forget that the potential magnitude of its legacy is much greater than the software it builds, or the free meals and office perks its employees once enjoyed. These were merely the tangible artifacts of a different way of looking at the world, and that perspective still holds promise as tech’s most meaningful contribution to society.
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