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Sorry you were fired but putting it on TikTok won’t change anything

A combination of workplace norms and new technologies makes it more likely all sorts of private conversations end up online.

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Videos might seem like a way to level the playing field of power, but that is an illusion.

Videos might seem like a way to level the playing field of power, but that is an illusion.

PHOTO: UNSPLASH

Sarah Green Carmichael

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Viral videos don’t usually last nearly 10 minutes. They don’t usually spawn a week-long conversation. But a video an employee at Cloudflare recorded of being fired from her sales job clocks in at 9min 15sec. It has been viewed more than a million times on her TikTok account – and has been shared, remixed and endlessly analysed since it was posted several days ago.

Its popularity is due not only to a prurient interest in watching someone suffer – there are countless videos of human suffering online. And it is not just because of morbid curiosity about what it is like to get fired. There are other videos of that too.

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