Hello World! Halloween just passed us by, and even though I didn’t go around dressed as the Plague Doctor like I dreamed (we’re the same height, if you can believe that), I did discover something else disturbing when I could tear myself from drowning in SCP databases: A practice of race exclusion in the tech industry. The odd thing is, despite me being usually pessimistic and cautious about everything from the political parties being the monsters more than the candidates to thinking there is a secret cult of gremlins who steal my socks from the laundry, I will counter this by saying I was always naïve when it came to issues concerning race in the tech industry. I always believed as long as you had the skills to demonstrate you could understand and manipulate the technology, there would be a place for you working with computers. Unfortunately, I recently discovered this wasn’t always the case, and that even Silicon Valley, arguably the technology center of the world (outside government contracts…) was founded on principles meant to deny minorities a foothold in the field. As any person who took a history class in America knows, systemic racism has been a large driving force in politics and making sure certain “clubs” stay in power. This has been expressed from the juvenile guessing-the-amount-of-cotton-balls-in-a-jar test for African American voting rights to straight up murders and lynching for free-speaking, “problematic” dark-skinned individuals. However, if you’ll believe it, there are a group of liberals who, while not jumping on the tikki torch and Confederate flag bandwagon, are still opposed to policies in opposition to systemic racism or, as they’ll put it, are opposed to “government oversight in business practices, a.k.a laissez-faire economics.” This political party is known as the Libertarians. Now, to make things fair, the Libertarians would not consider themselves liberal or conservative, but somewhere in between, and they are no longer the dominant voice in Silicon Valley (get to that later), but their ideology played a large part in California’s technology culture, and, despite what its followers or dissidents paint themselves as, plays a large part in their practices today. From my understanding, the Libertarian philosophy, and the one that runs the mindset of our current big tech companies, has a positive credo that has taken a negative spin. They support free enterprise and less government, because they’re movement was founded against people who didn’t or refused to understand the technology they were trying to police (the politicians vs the hackers, basically). If you even understand hacker culture, you’ll understand there’s a constant war between individual enthusiasts in understanding technology vs government officials trying to regulate everything. We’ve seen the negative end of the government end with communist countries regulating their internet access so tightly people’s only intellectual salvation is a Tor browser and a VPN, and this appears to give a valid point to the Libertarian philosophy. However, in America, and at the height of Britain’s industrial revolution, we’ve also seen the other end of the spectrum, where muck-rackers and human rights activists had to tackle big companies to make sure people got a livable wage and children weren’t climbing inside chimneys. Now that IT industries are replacing the coal plants in this current industrial revolution, the disparity between enabling its minority brothers into the field is staggering: A study showed less than 2.7% of the employees of Google, Facebook, and other tech companies centered in Silicon Valley are African American (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-google-diversity-black-women-workers). Of course, if you were to ask a big tech CEO and me why there is such a large disparity, and why they don’t support programs to end the disparity (like Affirmative Action) you’ll get two different answers. The tech CEO will say Affirmative Action is racist, and that you should hire based on merit, not race, and that government oversight will lead to more restrictions that will hinder the tech boom. My answer is: I’ll give you a cookie: It’s great you don’t have a discriminatory business that turns away applicants based on their skin color (or so you say), but what about the historical evidence of businesses that do? What about the businesses shown throughout history which disproportionately hired less than qualified White applicants over well-qualified minority ones to keep “Blacks and Hispanics” in their place? That’s my first answer, but there’s another deeper one, a darker one running in the shadow of Libertarian philosophy: Silicon Valley doesn’t want minorities in their well of knowledge. As I stated in my last article, the search engines of Google and the systems of Facebook controls the world we live in tomorrow, and many of these leaders, I believe, follow a creed of knowledge-eugenics, where they control who understands how the coding and wires behind their systems works. The world has seen this before when slaves weren’t allowed to read and write and doing so was punishable by death. Only now, in a world where most people in civilized nations know how to read just as well as they can tie their shoes, the new situation of control, the border between the “enlightened” and the “plebeian,” is going to be who can understand the technology making our economic, social, and political systems work. Whoever rocks this high-RAMed cradle, effectively rules the world, and Silicon Valley is setting themselves as the gatekeepers by keeping their ethnic “club” in the know. But don’t worry: It’s not all doom and gloom with big tech. Even though I’ve not been a fan of this administration, they did attempt to break-up some of the bigger tech companies due to their monopolistic practices (A sprinkle of cinnamon on a pile of crap doesn’t make it taste better though). There has also been a larger movement to examine the diversity in big tech workplaces. However, these are only steps in the right direction, the overall picture starts with fighting the demons from the outside while regulating the battle within. Minorities need to keep pushing for Silicon Valley to create more open doors for people of color to have a voice at their companies. As for the people for whom the door remains shut to, they must band together, support one another, and create their own businesses to open the way for like-minded brothers to have a chance in the field. Afterall, America is not White or Black, but a rainbow of a melting pot that must blend together perfectly to produce a flavor of success. Stay safe this holiday season, and peace out…
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MAYJOR E. JohnsonAll updates for my projects, any news I find interesting, and my personal thoughts will go here. Archives
February 2022
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