I've had an employer require me to make a facebook account. They let me use a fake name, but it seems like that decision was made during hiring by my immediate manager. Upper management only allowed it to continue because it was agreed upon during hiring. If I were required to use my real name, it would be impossible to stop actual acquaintances from seeing my profile. You're not obligated to work for a specific company, of course, but saying "nobody is obligated to clean toilets regardless of social class" would seem ignorant of the reality of working class life.
It's not like they wanted me to make a Facebook account to keep tabs on my private life.
Edit: For those that don't know, thats code for an intelligence agency or similar.
I don't use Facebook, or LinkedIn, or whatever else.
I can do that because:
a) I have enough personal wealth that I am comfortable with working for reasons other than money.
This is distinct from simply being able to afford it at a minimal level.
b) I have a level of self confidence, hard won, that allows me to stand up to people and say no.
This might mean, for example, interrupting a conversation at a bureaucratic firm about how "all X are required to do Y"; or just not doing it; if I think it's wrong.
I don't agree with calling it privilege - it's more like a personality trait, or perhaps even a talent or skill, because it's developed rather than bestowed.
But not everyone is in that sort of situation. A checkout worker, for the most part, just does what the boss says. Regardless of the actual personal power they have, that's just "how it works" out in the real world.
Society is not full of hyper individualistic people. If it were, it would look radically different, if it even functioned.
Edit for the -1 downvote: being able to interrupt a meeting to refuse to do some work, because you have enough personal resources that the negative social, financial or reputation consequences won't harm you, is "A special advantage, immunity, permission, or benefit granted to or enjoyed by an individual". It is a privilege, held by very few people.
Being born in a developed country in a relatively stable home environment is a privilege.
Having the above as a baseline, and being born with a particular set of talents and personality can propel a person far higher than that.
I dislike the use of the term 'privilege' when used in the context of any form of success because it is, as you point out, tautological.
People who need their job and have few other options are not necessarily docile and compliant by personality, as you seem to be saying; you can be outspoken and principled by personality /and/ have the privilege to be able to use that, where others can be outspoken and principled by personality but must appear docile and compliant to avoid consequences which you can ignore.
Were you instead running for public office, you would need to avoid taking unpopular positions or you would be out of the running. You couldn't ignore the consequence of people not voting for you, compared to an unelected positions who don't have to care about popularity.
It's not tautological to say that success ~= privilege, but that is where the idea of "fuck you money" comes from - it's an amount of money which lets anyone do the things you attribute to your talent and personality. If anyone can buy it, how much personality or talent can it involve? And if it's situation dependent - you might not do the same things if working behind a Top Secret classification, or conscripted into the military, or if dependent on your public image - again how much can it be "success"?
That said - I don't think it's even meaningful to discuss whether someone earned their place in life. Personally I pretty much figure I was born with a reasonably "useful" organization of neurons or whatever and so lo and behold, I get rewards whilst random other people suffer. Nature is a bitch.
But I digress.
What I'm trying to get at, I think, is that the personality traits govern what you actually end up doing in life, right.
One does not simply "run for public office". You make an active choice to do that - at least if you believe in free will anyway - and so you've intentionally limited your capacity to stand out of line.
I mean, in some sense, you could even say that running for public office is precisely the opposite of that. You're intentionally choosing to fall in line with a large portion of society - you're going to be their representative!
I could expand on this more (your other examples are fairly similar - top secret classification? like that just happens?), but really what I'm trying to get at is - the level of privilege required in order to stand for what you believe in really depends on what you want to do.
You probably can't simultaneously be an oil executive and a climate protestor. No amount of money will change that.
But anyone - anyone can stand up for what they believe in. There might be sacrifice. You allude to it in 'avoid consequences which you can ignore'.
Some people - a _lot_ of people - are loss averse to the extent that they just won't do anything interesting. It's income / career / whatever maximization to the end.
I've been a stubborn prick since as far back as I can remember. Before the money. It's my defining characteristic - for good and bad.
It's healthy to minimise consumption of them, and harder to do when your decision-making brain reserves are taxed by anxiety, social pressure, and lack of good available alternatives.
Whereas, larger companies may very well have the brand recognition to lean away from those platforms and comfortably absorb the lost potential business. It's that ability to survive that is being described as "privilege". Part of a pretty terrible linguistic shift around the idea of businesses as distinct individuals.
And as a final note, what you're zeroing in on is a quote from Rumman Chowdhury, so it's probably not Rose Eveleth's words (The Vox Reporter), though she did absolutely choose to include them.
So they tell you how you are supposed to think. Smells like propaganda to me.
What an absolutely absurd thing to say.
In the context of small business owners, your Facebook/Instagram/Yelp presence is no different than that of a "hyper-privileged" company, sans the advertising budget and amount of staffers who work on it.
In the context of your employer, enterprise software like Google Docs and Slack are (ostensibly) different than their consumer counterparts, in terms of analytics, data collection, and advertising. Further, the "hyper-privileged" middle- and upper-managers at tech companies are far more likely to use these forms of enterprise software than the under-privileged classes in America.
In the context of personal life, you are under absolutely no obligation, regardless of social caste, to join Instagram or Facebook and it's disingenuous to claim otherwise.
There is a certain class of media, of which I count Vox as a preeminent example, which constantly use hyperbole and socially-charged arguments in contexts where it doesn't fit or make sense.