This Silence Has Terms and Conditions: Saying No To A Cash Settlement From Apple

Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey

If someone asks for your silence, ask yourself what part of you they’re trying to erase. Speak anyway. That’s how you stay whole.

A humorous take on the concept of paying someone to disappear, with a man questioning the logic behind accepting money if it means ceasing to exist, referencing a scene from Avengers: Endgame.

Disclaimer!

This post reflects my personal experience and philosophical reflections following a conciliation process. It does not disclose any confidential information from the Alberta Human Rights Commission, nor does it accuse any individual or organization of unlawful conduct. My intention is to explore the emotional and ontological impact of silencing, not to undermine ongoing proceedings.

The Price of My Silence

On December 6, 2023, I had a conciliation meeting with my former employer, Apple Canada Inc, facilitated by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. I’m not allowed to talk about what happened inside that meeting.

But I can talk about what happened after.

We thought we had acomplished a 'meeting of the minds' and formed an agreement to settel. It should have brought relief. Closure, maybe. But when the contract arrived, it wasn’t just a confidentiality clause. It was a full erasure order. Not just of the complaint, but of my entire time at Apple.

I Worked at apple for 8 years, which is a long time and a considerable chuck of time i would have to blip from the story of my life. I had agreed to an NDA that covered the contents of the complaint and the settlement details, but the contract they sent me went way beyond this.

Signing the agreement would remove my ability to talk about my entire time employed, Branded as “non-disclosure.”

So I said no.

I walked away from closure, a resolution that would have been enough to keep a roof over my head, enough to buy time, finish school, stabilize. I knew exactly what it would cost me. I did it anyway.

Because I knew what signing would mean.

It would mean agreeing that my story wasn’t mine. It would mean pretending it didn’t happen. It would mean cutting out my own tongue and calling that professionalism.

This post is about what silencing does to a person, not just ethically, not just emotionally, but ontologically.

Ontology is the fancy branch of philosophy that ponders the big questions like "What is being?" and "Why does reality have to be so... real?" When you slap the label "ontological" on something, we are basically saying it's all about the nitty-gritty of existence and how everything in the universe plays nice (or not) together.

Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I want to show why silencing isn’t just a denial of speech. It’s a denial of selfhood. A foreclosure of becoming. And why, sometimes, preserving your voice is more important than preserving your comfort.

Because there are worse things than hardship. One of them is disappearance. Another is consent

Speaking Is Not Just Talking, It’s World-Making

When I was handed the NDA, i wasnt simply being requested discretion. By removing my ability to speak about anything acted as a little ritual of forgetting. Not just of the complaint, but of everything: the long hours, the small violences, the professional niceties that thinned into mockery by the end.

The NDA wasn’t there to protect innovation. It was there to disappear me. The terms were clear, if unspoken: let your memory be devoured, and we will call it closure.

I didn’t sign. Partly out of principle, but also instinct. Survival, like a lung refusing to deflate.

Refusing to Be a Squawk

Merleau-Ponty tells us that speech is not an afterthought, not a tool plucked from the drawer of the mind. It is thought, incarnate, risked, embodied. To speak is to take up space, to cast a shadow. To exist not just as an object in a room but as someone with a room.

He draws a line: birds squawk. They alert, they react, they echo the world back to itself like sonar. But the squawk carries no self. No intention. No history. It is pure noise.

Humans, on the other hand, we gesture. We shape the air with meaning. We speak not just to inform, but to be.

We act in ways that are meant to be seen, felt, understood by others. Even a shrug or a silence can be our way of saying, “Look, this matters,” or “I feel something,” or “Pay attention. Our speech, our tone, our expressions, they're not just noise. They're how we show others who we are. We're not machines carrying out tasks. We're people trying to be felt and recognized.

What Apple asked of me, with that neat little stack of clauses and conditions, was to become a squawk. To let my pain pass as noise. To let it be incidental. To ensure that nothing in me stuck to the record, like breath fogging glass.

I said no.

I said: I am not here to warn the flock. I am not disposable, not reducible, not noise. I will not contort myself into someone else's silence. I will not pretend that my voice is a threat to your safety, just because it makes you listen.

Thought Exists Only Through Speech

Merleau-Ponty again, he tells us that thought is not a pre-packaged commodity waiting for the correct syntax. It begins as pressure, as heat, as a vibration just beneath articulation. And only when we speak, only when we dare to shape it, does it resolve into meaning.

So what happens when speech is denied?

The fever lingers. The thought remains unsaid, and therefore unborn. It festers. And the self, denied this process of making-sense, begins to dim.

Apple’s NDA wasn’t a polite “shush.” It was more like asking me to lock my thoughts in a vault, throw away the key, and pretend I never even had them in the first place. 8 years i a long time to pretend never happened.

Jill Stauffer calls this ethical loneliness, the harm that comes when no one is willing to hear you, and so your story begins to unravel even within yourself. In her words:

“If stories lack support, they may begin to seem unreal, even to those who lived them… The absence of a willing audience is a second harm compounding the original violation.”(Ethical Loneliness, p. 46)

Closure and security in exchange for unreality. A payout in return for self-erasure. A tidy check to compensate for the original injury, provided I agreed to extend it forever.

But as Susan Brison reminds us, narrative is never solitary:

“It is a social interaction—actual or imagined or anticipated or remembered—in which what gets told is shaped by the (perceived) interests of the listeners, by what the listeners want to know and also by what they cannot or will not hear.”(Aftermath, p. 40)

What Apple offered was not peace. It was a refusal to listen, formalized. And when no one is willing to hear, the self falters. It begins to flicker.

Even solitude presumes a kind of trust, that the world is there, at the edge of one’s voice, waiting. When that trust is shattered, even solitude becomes exile.

Silencing as Ontological Harm

We’ve established, with Merleau-Ponty, that speech is not ornamental. It is bodily, ethical, existential. And we’ve seen, through Stauffer and Brison, that speech needs a listener, that storytelling is a covenant, however fragile.

But what happens when that covenant is broken by force?

Axel Honneth calls it personal degradation. A violence not always visible, but felt in the bones. He writes:

“The forms of practical maltreatment in which a person is forcibly deprived of any opportunity freely to dispose over his or her own body represent the most fundamental sort of personal degradation. […] The kind of recognition that this type of disrespect deprives one of is the taken-for-granted respect for the autonomous control of one’s own body.”(The Struggle for Recognition, pp. 132–133)

He is speaking of physical violence, torture, assault. But the same architecture holds when the violence is symbolic. To seize someone’s right to speak is to seize the means by which they exist socially. It is not merely censorship. It is a kind of narrative annihilation.

The NDA was paperwork, yes. But what it meant, what it did, was unmistakable. It asked me to accept that my version of events would not survive. That my voice, my memory, my truth, was surplus. That the story of what happened to me was no longer mine to tell.

And what is stolen in that moment is not abstract. It is something we learn slowly, through trust, through care, the implicit right to one’s own experience. The right to say: this is what happened. This is mine. I lived it.

When I refused, I wasn’t declining a settlement. I was rejecting the invitation to vanish.

I said: I will not file my voice under “conflict resolution.” I will not let your comfort be the price of my coherence. I will not make myself small so that you can call it peace.

What Silencing Feels Like (and Why)

It doesn’t feel like falling. That would imply motion.

It feels like shrinking.

Not drifting off. Not fading gently. But being compressed, steadily, systematically, into a space that was never designed to hold you. That is the sensation of being silenced. The enclosure is not made of walls. It is made of expectations, procedures, contracts. Of what counts as acceptable, legible, “appropriate.” The architecture is legal. The effect is suffocation.

When I try to speak and the world does not respond, when my gestures are swallowed by static, ignored or intercepted, it is not simply rude. It is annihilating. I press outward, trying to make room for my experience, and the world replies with narrowing. The space closes like a throat. The gesture curls in on itself, folding like a letter that will never be mailed.

Merleau-Ponty teaches the body is not an object we carry, but the means by which we exist, the visible form of our intention in the world. Our movements are not just functional. They are ontological. To reach is to be.

So what happens when the reach is blocked?

Apple’s NDA was not merely a gag, it was a lid. A constraint on how far I was permitted to extend, to mean, to be recognized. It didn’t just limit my words. It truncated my possibility. I could feel that limit like a physical pressure, not figuratively. Literally.

The breath goes shallow. The ribs resist. The limbs become ideas instead of tools. I am not absent, I am pressed inward until the very sound of my voice feels indecent. Too loud. Too much.

There is no way to express meaning when meaning itself is off-limits.

There is no way to be heard when hearing is not permitted.

What is left then? Where does the self go when its gestures are rejected, its words unwelcomed?

Nowhere. It stays. But cramped. Curled. A body present in a room that denies its scale.

This is not the silence of serenity. It is the silence of structural containment. Of narrative implosion. Of a coffin just large enough to lie still in.

When speech is stripped of impact, its meaning doesn’t disappear. It buckles.

You still know what happened, but not how to hold it. The memory stays intact, yet its proportions begin to distort. It swells in places. Collapses in others. It stops behaving like a fact and starts behaving like a fever dream.

You try to tell it straight, but the story comes out crooked. You’re not confused, but the world no longer makes room for its shape. There is no outline to rest it in. No socket to hold the truth in place.

It’s erosion. The truth hasn’t gone, it’s gone porous. You carry it like water in your hands. Always slipping. Always evaporating just before someone looks close enough to see.

And the longer you go without speaking, without being heard, the more the silence begins to impersonate reality. The memory remains, but your faith in its communicability thins. You start to wonder: is it still real, if there’s no language to carry it?

This isn’t forgetting. This is fog. A saturation of impressions without form. Not the absence of light, but too much of it, scattered, unfocused, searing in all the wrong places.

Even thought gets warped. Not silenced, surveilled. Every sentence crowds itself with preemptive disclaimers. Every idea braces for interruption. You draft your thoughts like you’re planning a jailbreak. Not because you’re guilty. Because you expect capture.

This is what sustained non-response does. It rewires the psyche. Not dramatically, incrementally. Like a house settling into its own disrepair. You begin to mistake the echo for the voice.

And still, the day demands function. Pleasantness. Politeness. The performance of normalcy continues. You answer emails. You make tea. You laugh at things that aren’t funny.

But beneath the surface:a stockpile of unsaid things.Not unspeakable because they’re scandalous, unspeakable because they no longer fit the grammar of permission.

They’ve grown wild in the dark.

Speaking vs. Spoken Speech, Why Clichés Survive and Truth Dies

Some speech is already dead when it arrives.

It doesn’t reach. It doesn’t risk. It doesn’t make a mark on the world or the speaker. It simply circulates. This is what Merleau-Ponty calls spoken speech, language that has lost its origin, its struggle, its breath. It doesn’t build anything. It repeats. It wears the appearance of meaning without the burden of emergence.

Think: “Nice weather today.”


Think: “Per company policy.”


Think: “Thank you for your feedback.”

Spoken speech is efficient. It slips through systems without friction. It gets the job done, not because it says anything true, but because it says what’s already been said. A polished repetition of what the world finds easiest to hear.

Underneath that smooth terrain lies another kind of utterance: one that trembles. That stalls. That stutters. Speaking speech. This is language as event, as improvisation, as birth. It is what happens when something inside presses outward and risks forming, raw, untested, real.

It’s trying to name a grief that doesn’t fit in any diagnosis.
 It’s saying the thing you’ve never said aloud, because saying it makes it real.
It’s groping for words while your throat closes, and saying them anyway.

That is speaking speech.

And it is the first to die when silencing begins.

Because it is slow. Because it is inconvenient. Because it demands a witness, not just a listener.
 Because it might change something.

Spoken speech survives because it’s already been neutralized.
It’s safe. It’s sanctioned. It asks for nothing and reveals even less.

Speaking speech, on the other hand, arrives shaking. It breaks form. It resists containment. And institutions, like the one that handed me the NDA, have no tolerance for trembling.

The NDA didn’t just forbid speaking about the complaint. It demanded that all speech be spoken, rehearsed, non-threatening, procedurally sanitized. It was a condition that I disown the moment of becoming. That I replace it with a template.

Pain was to be acknowledged, yes, but only as a past event, already resolved.
 Not as a present-tense gesture trying to make meaning.

This is how truth disappears. 
Not with violence. With paperwork.

What looks like maturity, discretion, professionalism, resolution, is often just interruption wearing a tie. The expressive act is halted mid-gesture. The self attempting to emerge is redirected, deflected, or quietly buried.

Speaking speech is not branding. It’s not copy. It doesn’t survive the red pen. It happens once, and only then. If it’s interrupted, or forced into euphemism, what was meant to be born never arrives.

That’s how truth dies:
not because it’s too loud, but because the room demands it come pre-approved.

And so clichés survive.
 Policies endure.
 Statements are made.

But nothing becomes.

That is the difference:
 Spoken speech carries information. 
Speaking speech carries becoming.

And if we are not permitted to become, in voice, in gesture, in the full scale of our truths, then we are not being heard.
 We are being managed.

The Afterlife of Refusal

I didn’t sign. So there was no payout. No neat ending. No bow tied around the mess. But there was something else, space. Not safe. Not forgiving. But mine. The refusal didn’t repair what was broken. It didn’t undo the harm. It didn’t give me justice. What it gave me was a rupture wide enough to stand inside. A place where my version of events could remain uncorrected, unprocessed, unlicensed. A place where my voice, even trembling, could still belong to me. I don’t call that healing. I call it not disappearing.

Conclusion: Silence Is Not Neutral

Silencing is not the absence of sound.It is the presence of control.

It is not quietude. It is choreography. The forced containment of meaning. The pruning of memory until it no longer resembles experience. The flattening of gesture into something that won’t make a mess. What Apple offered me was not discretion. It was deletion. A curated void. A softer disappearance, dressed up as maturity.

I refused. Not out of exhibitionism. Not because I enjoy speaking of pain.

But because I know what silence does when it is not chosen. I know what happens when truth is rephrased until it disappears. When injury is renamed “miscommunication.”When outrage is papered over with professionalism.

What happens is fracture. Not a clean break, but a slow splintering, a person divided from their own coherence.

What survives that process is not a self. It is a version. A quieter echo. A safer silhouette. A person made suitable for circulation.

That is what I want understood: Silencing is not passive. It is infrastructural. It is built. And it is enforced.

And it is most often imposed on those whose speech risks making something visible, something a system would rather keep abstract. Personal. Isolated. Dismissed.

When I said no to Apple’s NDA, I refused more than a document.

I decided disappearing wasn't my style.

I'm still hanging around.

Still yap-yap-yapping away.

Not fixed.

Not patched up.

But definitely not on mute.

---

Big Thought Thumper Of The Week--> "Not Noise"

'Not Noise' By Dick Gariepy

Works Cited

Brison, Susan. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton University Press, 2002.

Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson, Polity Press, 1995.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes, Routledge, 2012.

Stauffer, Jill. Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Saying No To ASaying No To A Cash Settlement From Apple

Saying No To A Cash Settlement From Apple