Can you run away from yourself?
I have had access to the internet since at least 1995. And for all kinds of reasons — how I was educated, my own interests and personality, people I got to meet and learn from, luck and scholarships and sponsorship — I have spent a majority of the years since working in and on and around technology and media.
What I have been consistently struck by, beyond the persistent and deliberate and casual and ongoing erasure of women and their accomplishments, is the abiding belief among many people in technology that they are “making the world a better place”1, and pursuit of that goal excuses actions up to and including genocidal violence.
There is a similar in-the-moment obtuseness in media. Decades after the fact there might be an apology for covering certain populations with “outright hostility” or a clinical post-mortem on having abetted a massacre or perennial and perpetually temporary reactions to the reality of who gets hired into positions of power in newsrooms.
I long ago stopped being interested in “the future of” tech and media, because I have been deeply obsessed with what is happening right now, with why and how we got here, with what we are doomed to repeat because we refuse to remember. Obsessed with the present choices that those of us who work in and on and around these influential industries make every hour, with every headline and every sprint.
Why spend time merely speculating about the future when we can reckon deeply with the current consequences of our collective choices?
There’s no need to imagine who might get hurt as a result of what we allow or what we fail to consider when the harm is already happening, has already been happening.
Better to be aware of the effects of what we’re doing or failing to do right now rather than with the convenient hindsight of a press release.
You can’t run away from yourself.
The Main Event: Resources, compiled by the LA Times, on how to help people affected by the fires. Capital B on what Altadena means.
Silicon Valley was, in fact, a documentary. ↩