Your Diversity & Inclusion-Themed Hackathon Is Large-Scale Tokenism

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Yes, there is a coded message in the binary. Tweet me if you decode. / Illustration by Schessa Garbutt.

If you’ve come here to be fragile, please check that at the door, or leave.

If you’ve come here to listen and learn like you vowed you would, welcome. Thank you for following through and making time and mental space for this.

I call myself a Near-Futurist because I believe that we already have the knowledge, technology, and resources to fix our most pressing problems — food scarcity, police brutality, accelerating climate change, privatized healthcare, and a fragile economic system, to name a few — and that we should focus on solutions before we even think about bringing these broken systems with us to Mars. We can already solve these problems. We have known, written, and talked extensively about solutions. The missing piece of the puzzle (or perhaps the puzzle itself) is the cultural shift required; social change is only sustainable if more of us (and the most power-rich of us) believe that all Bodies deserve food, health, and peace.

In recent weeks I’ve observed tech companies grasping for meaningful change in their organizations. Mostly, they’ve ended up shoehorning initiatives into their existing structures and work cultures, which were problematic from the outset. One recent example of this is…