Matter Anti-Matter

Yesterday a random post from tech blog The Next Web popped up on my dashboard, featuring a snippet from a story they ran about Filip Santa, a “Gutsy Designer” who launched a site that doubles as his resume called takemetosiliconvalley.com.

“Hello Guys, Scroll Down Please,”  the site says.

Go ahead, look at the site and soak it in.

When I landed on the site, my first thoughts were 1) the design isn’t that great and 2) wtf why is this page designed to look like a pair of giant breasts, so much so that the design “theme” carries forward as you go down the page?

fig 1: cleavage

fig 2: boobs

Now regardless of whether or not you feel it’s innovative to make a website where your cover letter is merged into your resume, I thought the page was offensive. 

I get that Filip, a 19-year-old guy with dreams of a job in Silicon Valley, might also like boobs and thus brazenly designed them into his website. What I don’t get is why The Next Web rewarded him by uncritically writing up his site like it was the best idea since sliced bread:

The site serves as a resume and timeline of Santa’s life, and is actually quite humorous and brave at the same time.

Brave?

I don’t get why commenters on the piece praise Filip for going “big.” It’s equally baffling that he’s already received job offers on account of TNW’s coverage:

Sounds like everyone has been drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid. Either they saw the boob thing and didn’t care, or worse, they saw the boob thing and thought it was in fact brave and gutsy. 

Something is deeply wrong here. It’s embarrassing and unacceptable that The Next Web wrote this piece as though there are no women in the audience. It’s worse yet that readers and commenters didn’t see what was right in front of their eyes. 

There’s a strong bro-energy that can often pervade the tech scene, something made worse when there are no women in the room. But gender diversity in tech is about more than just training women programmers, making sure there are more women founders, and establishing parity in numbers. It’s about a fundamental cultural shift, starting with the ability to see when something is wrong.

For a freshly launched geek culture website not quite one month old, Geekosystem seems to have raised the ire of at least one vocal blogger.  Zennie Abraham’s initial criticism of the site as representing the “young, white, frat boy perspective” came as a major surprise to me, mostly because I enjoy, identify with, and even write some of the content available on Geekosystem.  Last I checked, I’m a short, Asian female.  I certainly don’t consider myself “an intern who’s of color” writing from “behind the veil,” as Abraham puts it, and I take issue with Abraham’s contention that “Geekosystem doesn’t get the diversity message.”

The first time I met with editors Robert Quigley and Andrew Cedotal, one of their primary concerns was how to enlarge the scope and meaning of “geek culture” for a diverse audience.  Both Quigley and Cedotal wanted Geekosystem to represent geek culture at large and ensure that the site speaks to ALL the geek tribes, not at the expense of identity categories like race and gender, but with those very identities in mind.

In fact, the reason why a site like Geekosystem exists is because the old white male geek archetype is about as outdated as any other stereotypical characterization of race or gender.  Of course there are black male geeks out there, and of course there are Asian female geeks, and lesbian geeks, and rich geeks, and poor geeks—you get my point.  The reason anyone visits a site like Geekosystem is not because they’re black or white or asian or female, but because they like geeky stuff.  And geeky stuff, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t tied specifically to any one race or ethnicity or gender or class.  It’s geeky because it just is.  Geekosystem recently posted stories about Chatroulette and real time Twitter updates at the Olympics.  Now I wouldn’t necessarily have headed out into the Internet seeking that information out, but I enjoyed reading those stories because they appeal to the geeky knowledge-seeker in me (especially the Chatroulette story.  I mean a 17-yr old Russian kid created it—that’s awesome, right?).  Does the fact that the content of these stories do not speak directly to my race or gender bother me?  Not in the least.  Race and gender do not determine geekiness anymore than geekiness determines race and gender.  There are times when blatant gender or race bias exists, and then there are times when you’re just looking for bias to exist.

I guess the bottom line is this: There’s plenty of evidence supporting Abraham’s critique of the entire media as generally skewed towards white and male. Media companies are not out to challenge existing preconceptions about race and gender, they’re out to maintain profitability and that often means serving up media to as general an audience as possible.  Abraham’s critique of Geekosystem as ostensibly reproducing that bias is misplaced.  Abraham should laud the opportunities that sites like Geekosystem,io9, or Wired—to name a few—have made possible by demonstrating that success can also be found by serving niche communities that aren’t necessarily the general masses.  In turn, niche communities like geeks have proved able to hold their own and dominate among a larger Internet culture.

The fact that I have news, stories, and essays about innumerable aspects of geek culture at my fingertips is quite simply awesome.  Yes, some of the content on the Internet is without a doubt aimed at white frat boys.  Some of the content on the Internet is also aimed at cats.  Perhaps what frustrates Abraham—and admittedly at times myself—is that what was once the exclusive geek subculture we could all secretly enjoy has grown into a geek culture that offers something for almost anyone.  While I like to envision faceless white frat boys to be angry at when things like the collapse of the economy happen as much as the next person, if we’re to believe that geek culture is a democracy that privileges diversity, then we have to accept that some of those white frat boys might be geeks too.

If Abraham is truly interested in promoting diversity across the Internet/media/geek culture landscape, then the first thing he’ll need to do is broaden his understanding of the terms.