Degeneracy in Development
This blog is dedicated to Humzah Choudry and Shreeya Upadhyay, my two inspirations for this article.
I’ve always felt kind of weird about writing my own blog. Why is it that what I have to say important enough to warrant having other people read it and having it accessible to the public? It probably isn’t, but I went ahead and did it anyway. I think this warrants a trigger warning as well? I’m not sure how those work.
Silicon Valley has successfully put on a facade of being progressive. However, despite these billionaire CEOs putting on a show of being progressives, actions speak much louder than words. Even if your actions involve having a race and sex quota for your company.
Misogyny and sexism plagues the tech industry like small pox does for anti-vaxxers’ children. The prominent story within the last few years is the blog post by Susan Fowler which depicted the intolerable conditions of working at Uber. Fowler had to endure having an employee blatantly asking her to have sex with him. When Fowler contacted HR, it was clear that they weren’t willing to help her due to the risk of losing one of their top talents if they decided to confront him. However, HR gave her an ultimatum entailing to either suck it up or join another team, so she chose the latter and convened with other women stating that they had endured similar circumstances at the hands of other men (and occasionally even the same man) in the company. HR gave them similar ultimatums as well. Fowler’s blog goes into detail about more obscenities occurring at Uber the likes of which you would think would only occur in the 1950s.

In addition to all of the outrage, Uber did not indicate at all that they had learned from the situation. 7 months later, in Bangalore, India, UberEats had sent a promo-code to their customers for “Wife Appreciation Day” with a caption paraphrased as
give your wife a break from cooking today! Here’s a promo-code to buy your family food! So she doesn’t have to cook fellow husbands!

Uber apologized for the situation, but this almost seems as if it’s a parody of itself given how recent the Fowler controversy had occurred.
However, not to cherry pick, let’s move from Silicon Valley to Silicon Port (a name I just made up right now for Seattle) which is home to the two richest people in the world. Microsoft and Amazon had recently been caught in a huge sex scandal that did not pick up much traction on the main stream media. However, this is not just an employee getting caught with his pants down where it shouldn’t have been, but employees getting entangled into human trafficking. Over 120 emails sent from employees’ work accounts at Amazon and Microsoft (among others) had been sent to pimps and brothels. Employees used their emails as proof to indicate that they do not work for law enforcement. The article also goes on to state that Seattle’s sex trafficking industry is proportionate to the growth of the tech industry due to workers’ pay increasing. Incredible to think that one of the most powerful forms of dehumanization is being catalyzed at two of the biggest companies in the world, huh?
In addition to the pervasive sexism in the industry, racism has been shown to rear its ugly head as well. Tesla has been show to mistreat their black workers. Marcus Vaughn, who is 1 in 100s of black employees who stood to write an account of his harassment, stated that his supervisors and managers repeatedly and liberally used racial slurs around him. He wrote to HR and to Musk himself about this but was fired for “not having a positive attitude”. Musk responded that one should have thick skin when being apologized to but civil rights lawyers retorted that Civil Rights protection doesn’t require an individual to have “thick skin”.

These examples are only touching the surface on the atrocities being committed in the tech industry. However, while all these obscenities are occurring, one should not be reluctant to work for one. Good is being done as well at the hands of these companies ranging from DUI rates decreasing because of ride sharing and sex trafficking taking a huge hit as a result of data analysis(which is antithetical to the previous point. heh.) Complicity is a huge catalyst to injustices. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said about Civil Rights violations at the hands of complicity
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice
Speak up. Fight back. Don’t settle for the bare minimum. You deserve better than this. And make sure that these companies can put their money where their “code of conduct” is.
