James Damore’s Twitter account has over 75,000 followers and he had a successful Reddit AMA (which I highly recommend reading).
From a personal branding perspective things are working great for him..he got 100k twitter followers in a week. He’s a veritable celebrity now. This agrees with the rise of the ‘STEM celebrity‘. If he weren’t in STEM, there would be much less interest in his opinions on non-STEM stuff.
STEM is the new priesthood and celebrity in society, for better or worse (although I think better..it sure beats drugged-up tabloid celebrities). This AMA and his other press will raise awareness about Google’s repressive policies. Google will have to make changes to their policy in response to all this bad press.
The reason why people in STEM are so respected is because they succeed due to quantifiable individual merit, not because of nepotism, connections, welfare, affirmative action, etc., but also because their jobs create economic value and improve society as a whole, whereas it’s harder to quantify the value that, say, a social justice warrior produces or an ‘African-American studies’ professor produces. Elon Musk, for example, who embodies both wealth and intellectualism, became wealthy by being smart and through hard work, not by whining about ‘white male privilege’ or ‘the patriarchy’.
Unlike the useless single mom drawing government benefits, or the overpaid corporate cog, people in STEM create economic value through intellect and competence, which is why everyone likes STEM and why people in STEM get rich.
But at the same time, ‘liberal arts’ fields/subjects such as philosophy, psychology, history, and writing are also highly respect by millennials on Reddit and 4chan. This is because those subjects, unlike overtly political/activist ones such as ‘blacks/feminist studies’, have actual intellectual rigor and objectivity, rather than being conduits for far-left indoctrination and white-male bashing. Smart millennials understand that not all liberal arts are the same, and that philosophy is much higher on the ‘totem pole’ of prestige than worthless, politicized, commercialised subjects such as ‘child development’, ‘education’, ‘gender studies’, or ‘business administration’. Jordan Peterson is also respected even though he’s not in STEM for that reason. His expertise and strait-talk against SJW-indoctrination makes him respected among both sides. People see Peterson as an objective, sober bearer of ‘truth’ in a world and media overrun with hype and demagoguery.
Related to the wealth-intellectualism-individualism synthesis, this post about how someone cashed out of Etherium currency to payoff the down-payment on his home, also went hugely viral:
This post shows how millennials are rejecting ostentatious materialism, choosing financial independence and self-sufficiency instead, getting rich with high-IQ endeavors such as crypto currencies and stock trading, and posting on Wall Street Bets and other subs how much money they are making. Had he chosen to buy a sports car instead (which depreciates very quickly), he would not have gotten as much support.