The Urgency of Conflict in Technology

I’m hesitant to call it “conflict.”

Perhaps most telling of the changing political climate in tech, aggravated by the increasing audience of cultural and feminist critique, is Silicon Valley’s reaction:

Incessant, obnoxious, infantile fucking whining.

All day and night I have hysterical mewling white privilege brats in my mentions and comments crying foul at their profound emotional wounds, inflicted by the “vitriol,” “hatred,” “anger” of critique.

This tells me a few things:

• Many people in Silicon Valley have either no familiarity with, or have not made a connection to, the enormous canon of feminist, intersectional, and cultural texts that exist in this world; nor are they willing to gain such a framework
• Many people in Silicon Valley are so unbelievably fucking coddled by their fancy jobs, free lunches and laundry, and corporate paternalism that they cannot interpret critique of the system or their participation in it as anything but a violent and personal attack

The other thing it tells me is that the human production system responsible for much of the world’s technology is completely out of touch with the context and consequences of its work...

which is fucking horrifying, considering:

• Facebook and many other social media tools are translating the objectifying, abusive patriarchal male gaze into massively scalable platforms, with women receiving up to 2/3 of all profile and picture views. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested into these and similar programs while anti-oppression projects go unfunded everyday.
• Women can’t raise money to start companies, but men can raise millions and millions of dollars to start companies for women.
• The entire investment system into early stage technology companies is dominated by white men and invests primarily in white men, ensuring the creation of technology that only benefits the dominant class can continue unchallenged and unimpeded. Women receive only 4.2% of VC funding, 87% of founders are white and less than 1% are black. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s most prominent VCs publicly promote their discriminatory practices. Attempts at VC reform are a fucking joke, an arrogant combination of white-male-dominated crowdfunding with a spray-and-pray strategy that results in pages and pages of horrible things getting funded.
• The attrition rate of women in technology is staggering, so not only will investment continue to flow to mostly white men, but the system of harassment, oppression and bias within tech ensures that the underrepresented groups who DO enter the field will leave at high rates.
• The ongoing obsession of white men with meritocracy and open source serves to reinforce the existing system and exclude all groups without the privilege to contribute unpaid labor to making other white dudes super rich.

While Silicon Valley’s bizarre psuedo-leftism and attachment to ideals like “meritocracy” and “open source” would seem to imply an investment in tearing down existing systems of oppression, it simply reproduces and strengthens them, all under propaganda designed to make white dudes feel good about giving up their lives for the cause.

Silicon Valley is a human machine uncritically, reflexively, automatically turning out morally bankrupt system after morally bankrupt system.

In summary, the system is completely fucked and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

But when we start talking about it, deconstructing how it works, why it functions, and all the harmful, racist, sexist shit both white men and white women are doing in the community everyday?

All most of Silicon Valley can do is cry after its hurt feelings and apparently, start bullshit conferences dedicated to just hugging it out.

So while y’all are calling for an end to all the “conflict”, if that is what you want to call it, excuse me while I’m over here, screaming for more of it.

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