Sucking it Up

23Oct2023 [links]

Tim Bray is very much an elder white tech dude, but his discovering and documenting his priviledge has been interesting; here he figures out something:

That system depends on another class doing shitty jobs for low pay, mostly women and people of color. One of the biggest reduce-racial-injustice policy moves I can think of would be to pay those people more. It’s pretty easy to see how powerful individuals (mostly white) who might not personally be racist are economically invested in the racist status quo.

And the real kicker:

I think (you won’t be surprised) the problem isn’t the tech worker bees, it’s the big-money culture. Because big money attracts morally crippled people. There’s the VC-driven winner-take-all growth-hacking buzz of the Bay Aryans, and the world of big finance it feeds into, and neither of those cultures offers rewards for doing the right thing.

...

Is it fair to say that we should have seen it coming? ... That uncritically empowering anyone to say anything to anybody leads inexorably to GamerGate and KiwiFarms and slaughtered Rohingya?

There’s also an awkward thing where he doesn’t like the “Ok Boomer” tag, which I’ve heard from other boomers but doesn’t really make sense (like, when the label doesn’t apply to you, maybe simply ignore it?)... But I think he gets it overall