I was recently one of 20 people laid off from The Intercept, and one of my sources of comfort in the wake of that event has been re-watching Drifting Clouds, a 1996 film from the gifted director Aki Kaurismäki. It portrays a couple who lose their jobs amid recession in early 1990s Finland. There's a great scene set at the closing night of a restaurant where one of the couple works as head waitress. The owner spends her last moments there listening to a band play the sentimental iskelmä song Kohtalon Tuulet, or "Winds of Fate," and watching the aging clientele dance. Subtitles helpfully translate the wistful lyrics into English:

My youth is gone, but bitter I never should be
Happiness I was able to feel
With my friends to accompany me

All of our dreams now faded away
Bringing tears to my eyes

The winds of fate took all that away
All of our dreams never fulfilled

When those winds blow over me some day
You will never see me here again

As the band plays its final notes inside the plush and colorful restaurant, the head waitress, from the cold grays of a Helsinki sidewalk, bundles the owner off into a cab. "Thanks for everything, Ilona," says the owner. "And farewell."

"Goodbye manager," says the head waitress.

It is about as moving a depiction as I've seen of the last moments of a job, of the heartbreaking blend of sentimental humanity and brutal reality.

But really what sticks with me are the lyrics, and how Kaurismäki links the "winds of fate," a kind of death, to the end of a job. It's a perceptive move, because these days our careers feel like a series of hypotheses about how the world will work — and all of them are eventually smashed.

The Intercept I just left is, for example, one in a series that were born and died in my seven and a half years there: The editor in chief who hired me left a few months in and was replaced, the parent company's business model switched from blogs to streaming video, the publication went from for-profit to nonprofit, we housed and then relinquished the Snowden archive, the staff grew and shrank, the focus evolved.

Another provocative media company where I used to work, in the same building as The Intercept, was profitable and thriving until one day it ended up bankrupt because its reporting angered the wrong billionaire.

The couple in Drifting Clouds persevere, even as the setbacks pile up to comical heights, and with some merciful good luck create a new start for themselves. Similarly, change in the media business has done me more favors than harm. When I started college, my expected career track was to start at a small newspaper and hop to a series of progressively larger ones, earning a pittance along the way. By the time I graduated there was an explosion of web publications, then blogs, then digital media juggernauts like BuzzFeed and Vox, nonprofit investigative publications like Pro Publica and The Intercept, then the micro-nonprofits, and now further atomization into the likes of Substack and Patreon-supported publishers. I find these new vistas invigorating.

I'm on record as saying that some post-me Intercept is going to be the best yet, but I'm still proud of the ones I was a part of. My colleagues there (and the contractors and freelancers I worked with) were unbelievably talented and generous human brings, and thanks to them my teams

• revealed hidden NSA listening stations in a New York skyscraper and across the U.S.;
• exposed Google's secret plans for a search engine censored by the Chinese government;
• revealed Facebook's secret blacklist of people and groups too dangerous to praise;
• reported out the biggest-ever leak of files from Chinese authorities;
• explained new forms of surveillance, from tower dumps to your car's onboard computer to plug-in video surveillance networks;
• shined light on Oracle's activities in China;
• carefully redacted, reported out, and published more than 2000 internal NSA documents; and
• caught Zoom lying about encryption.

Yes, the "winds of fate" eventually blew over me, and I got bundled into my metaphorical cab. That was the price of being able to work at a fearless investigative online magazine with the kindest and most capable coworkers I've ever encountered, and it was absolutely worth it. At some point I'll figure out what comes next; hit me up on LinkedIn! In the meantime I'm enjoying some much-deserved beach time with my family this summer, which thankfully comes with some much nicer winds (and sadly not any iskelmä).

—Ryan Tate, June 15, 2022

I am quoted in Owen Thomas’ San Francisco Chronicle obituary for David Bunnell, a pioneering tech publisher who, along with his son Aaron, gave me my first journalism job at long-gone Upside magazine. He also stared PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld; working at a pioneering early PC maker called MITS in New Mexico, he edited articles for company’s Computer Notes publication by Bill Gates and Paul Allen about their new company Microsoft’s version of the BASIC programming language. 

You can find other obituaries from Harry McCracken and Karen Wickre. Below are my own scattered thoughts upon learning of David’s passing.

Subject: Re: David Bunnell
From: Ryan Tate <ryan.tate@theintercept.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2016 13:24:50 -0400
To: "Thomas, Owen" <-redacted-@sfchronicle.com>

I had not. This news is devastating, and not just on a personal level,  but on a professional one as well, because it comes at a time when the technology sector needs more than ever the sort of humbling, irreverent, technically sharp journalism and satire that David pioneered. I saw all  of his work, especially at Upside, where I worked for David and his  late, remarkable son Aaron, as paving the way for to critical voices  against technological overreach and for publications like Valleywag and The Intercept, which extended the work he helped begin to cut through the zealous optimism and confidence games of Silicon Valley and thus help distinguish true innovation from banal corruption.

What was most brilliant about David, in my eyes, was that he always saw the essential humanity of the Valley, and the nitty gritty implications of technological change for ordinary people, even at times when the prevailing wisdom said that technology floated above, and apart from, mundane human struggles and foibles. This is someone who relentlessly tried to use computers and other innovations to improve the lives of the poor, who gave his own time and energy to help those less fortunate than himself, who was happy to speak the truth about large corporations, who was skilled at mocking self-important executives, and who fundamentally always wanted to bring the personal computing back to where it started o the ideals of a countercultural movement intended to empower those at the margins.

On a personal level, David='s work was a part of my life long before I met him. I subscribed to Macworld as a teenager and later, in college, was delighted to discover the cheeky online tech industry column he had commissioned from Tish Williams, who wrote Upside's “Daily Tish.”When I entered business journalism after college, the tech boom was in full swing, and the Bay Area was overflowing with reporter jobs, but I didn't consider applying anywhere but at Upside, where I had been freelancing for David’s son Aaron. When Aaron, all of 26, passed away, David helped pull the rest of us through the emotional devastation, and he did his best to shield us from the industry collapse the followed shortly thereafter. Long after Upside folded up shop, I would see David around Berkeley, and he would talk about his latest ventures, which involved innovations in health. He had my wife and over for dinner; another time we dined together at a local barbecue spot after finding we were both, by chance, enjoying an evening alone at the bar. Though I avoided the topic, I always sensed that Aaron's loss was an emotional blow from which David never fully recovered. And yet in a way he became warmer, and more alive, in the wake of that tragedy, especially after he had been away a good long while from the Silicon Valley hustle.

I will always be deeply grateful to David Bunnell, a man as loving as he was smart and as critical as he was awe-struck, who saw the potential of technology even as he recognized the emptiness of tech as an ends unto itself. As we are sucked ever more completely into electric screens and the global tangle of wires and radios that network them together,  I hope the rest of us learn to keep the world in perspective as well as he did.

> On Oct 20, 2016, at 12:43 PM, Thomas, Owen <-redacted-@sfchronicle.com 

 wrote:
>
> Ryan, you may have heard of David Bunnell's passing. Do you have any 

memories to share?
>