I think one should be careful with the word toxic. I’ve seen every manner of dishonesty and unscrupulousness and in some cases outright sociopathy and I’ve seen all these things done with an eye to optics: the right language, the right audience, the right timing to present stuff somewhere between “unsavory” and “fraud” in a fashionable light. This is locally non-toxic in the sense that it is unlikely to ruin the financials next quarter. It’s globally toxic in the sense that it’ll just kill your company over years or sometimes decades.

I’ve seen aspy nerds be the squeaky wheel (and very often be correct) in the long tradition of neuroatypical people who care more about an ideal than about fashionable niceties that fluctuate like hemlines called toxic way more often over the last few years. This is locally toxic in the sense that it can be temporarily disruptive until either the problem gets fixed or the aspy nerd gets fixed. But it’s in no way globally toxic: it never kills your business unless it’s one of two founders, and often saves your business from getting hit by an asteroid when the subject matter changes abruptly. Back when there was real competition at the apex of the software business you were cooked without those people around.

5-10 years ago Elon Musk was so popular in SV that people were buying up Teslas and posting every SpaceX launch and all but naming their kids after him. Today he’s anathema in huge parts of the Valley culture. Same guy, same behavior really. Good or bad? Eh, I don’t know, seems complicated.

Palmer Luckey was forced out of Meta for giving like eight grand to a conservative PAC, today he’s the darling of everyone with a family office.

Linux was built by a Linus that would call people “fucking brain damaged” on LKML, he’s mellowed but he built one of the longest-running and most successful engineering artifacts in all of human affairs acting in the “locally toxic, globally enlightened” mode.

The thing is that bad behavior at scale, bad behavior with real, lasting, irreversible consequences is almost never called toxic. This is the globally toxic behavior of those with power.

Transient words are routinely called toxic. This is the locally toxic, globally enlightened behavior of those with little.

This doesn’t seem like a word we use in a way that is either practically useful or morally sound.