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January 9 - January 22, 2019
What Silicon Valley gets right is that tech is an insular industry: a world of mostly white guys who’ve been told they’re special—the best and brightest.
(though, honestly, many companies never get beyond talking about gender here),
Adding to the problem, Thomas says, potential employers spend their time looking for a “culture fit”—someone who neatly matches the employees already in the company—which ends up reinforcing the status quo, rather than changing it:
Regardless of how many women and underrepresented minorities study computer science, the industry will never be as diverse as the audience it’s seeking to serve—a.k.a., all of us—if tech won’t create an environment where a wider range of people feel supported, welcomed, and able to thrive.
Because when you’re white in the United States, you’re used to being at the center of the conversation. Just look at the concept of the “working class,” something we heard a lot about in 2016: “Working-class Americans are concerned about immigration.”
A word!
Lots of people think caring about these microaggressions is a waste of time too: Stop being so sensitive! Everyone’s a victim these days! Those people also tend to be the ones least likely to experience them: white, able-bodied, cisgender men—the same people behind the majority of tech products.
We’re not actually friends with our digital products, no matter how great their personalities might seem at first.
no matter how much tech companies talk about algorithms like they’re nothing but advanced math, they always reflect the values of their creators: the programmers and product teams working in tech.
“Big data processes codify the past,” she writes. “They do not invent the future.” 4 So if the past was biased (and it certainly was), then these systems will keep that bias alive
Kodak decided it needed its film to better handle color variations because furniture retailers and chocolate makers had started complaining: they said differences between wood grains, and between milk-chocolate and dark-chocolate varieties, weren’t rendering correctly.
The entire fuck??
“People need to understand that data is not truth. It is not going to magically solve these hard societal problems for us.”
The bigger Facebook’s ambitions get, the riskier these cultural values become. It’s one thing to play fast and loose with people’s cat photos and status updates. It’s another when you start proclaiming that you’re “developing the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all,” as Zuckerberg himself wrote in a 5,000-word manifesto about the future of the company published in February 2017.51 He went on to talk about a future where Facebook AI listens in on conversations to identify potential
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Good lord...
Fake suggests that the tech industry instead needs to stop prioritizing programming over every other skill.
another generation of women and people of color in tech pushes to be visible and valued in an industry that wants diversity numbers, but doesn’t want to disrupt its culture to get or keep diverse people.
How can the industry that put a powerful computer in my pocket and self-driving cars on the street not be able to figure out how to get more diverse candidates into its companies? Well, I’ll tell you the secret. It’s because tech doesn’t really want to—or at least, not as much as it wants something else: lack of oversight.
ultimately, the tech industry doesn’t really exist.
But by being labeled “technology”—by being better known as an app you download to your phone, rather than a massively complex system of vehicles and drivers—Uber gets to change the conversation.
And the best way to ensure that happens is to build a monoculture, where insiders bond over a shared belief in their own brilliance.
As a result, maintaining the monoculture becomes more important than improving products.
Because the tech industry prides itself on talking about the industries it disrupts. Taxis, groceries, you name it. But it seems to forget that a synonym for “disruption” is “instability.”
We hold technology in our pockets. We tell it our secrets. We rely on it to sustain relationships. It’s the first thing many of us interact with in the morning, and the last thing we look at at night. Technology
