Growing up, she had a keen sense for injustice. “My mom always told me I’ve been wired this way. I think probably a lot of people who identify as activists are wired this way.” Even in college, she saw the chasm widening between the tech and wider communities. She now works as a diversity consultant for the tech industry.
In tech, there is a derogatory term for somebody like me, do you know what it is? “Social Justice Warrior.” “SJW” is how you’ll see it.
Someone once said, “Doesn’t that sound awesome? ‘Social Justice Warrior’? Wouldn’t you be so happy to be called that?” And I was like, “Yeah, you would think so in a vacuum. But it’s the shorthand for ‘these lefty assholes.’ ”
If you go on Twitter and search for “SJW,” the kind of things you will see are horrific. About those of us who are trying to bring social justice into the fold of technology. Which I absolutely am unabashedly trying to do. I’m not even going to pretend like I’m not.
This is an epochal battle. So much of tech is driven by people who believe in a libertarian change model—they like to pretend they are just building tools and are neutral politically. You can’t be neutral. If you have no orientation—whatever happens, happens—that’s a bias.
I was at Stanford from 1990 to 1994. It was a really hard time to decide that racial and social justice was going to be the thing that you cared about. We had affirmative action backlash. Prop 187 passed right after I graduated—an anti-immigration bill that targeted Mexicans in particular.* And then Prop 209 shortly after that, which gutted affirmative action in public schools.† Condoleezza Rice was our provost. And so, this was the climate. I was miserable.
Tons of the people who espoused this libertarian model were there at the same time. They did not have neutral opinions about politics then, and I don’t believe that they had some sort of transformational experience later on that reshaped their sense of justice. I don’t. I can tell you stories about them; they would tell you stories about me; and both our stories would be pretty much in line with what we’re all doing now.
And so it’s continued to be the same fight in a different arena—then and now. An age-old struggle. A lifelong battle with a very similar cast of characters. So when people say, “But haven’t you heard the latest from”—fill in the blank. I’m like, “That dude? That dude carved ‘fag’ into the door of one of my friends’ rooms when we were eighteen years old. Let me tell you how much I trust that person.” Most of my people have left tech or never joined in the first place because they’re like, “I don’t want to be around those people.”
These are people who have no humanities background, so they have no fluency in the language of social justice. There is a person who is very well known in Silicon Valley, who has funded many, many, many companies, who will regularly go on rants on Twitter about how humanities majors are wrecking technology. I want to tell them, they just need a little exposure—read A People’s History of the United States, listen to a speech by Shirley Chisholm. You’ll realize, Oh, I can re-imagine everything!
One of the things that makes me effective today is that I can see this stuff coming from a mile away. We were one of the only Mexican families where I grew up. My sisters and I very much got told, “You have to be twice as good. You have to be twice as fast.” All that stuff. But my dad, being a mathematician, would tell us, “Look. The story goes you have to be twice as good to be seen as half as worthy, which means you have to be four times . . .” Ha-ha-ha! No pressure at all!
When I got accepted into Stanford, people said, “Well, we know how you got in. . . .” The same people who had been praising me, who had voted for me for student body president, who had come to cheer me on when we won the softball championship—the same people could pull the rug out from under you. I had a teacher—her “fave” didn’t get into Stanford for whatever reason—she gave us this whole speech about how mediocrity rises to the top and then said, “You know what I mean, Nicole?”
I don’t have to have it decoded for me anymore. I go, “No, I totally understand what you’re saying. Please, stop talking, because I absolutely understand.” Even the person perpetrating it sometimes doesn’t understand how it is unfolding into a very racist rant. And you go, “Hold up. I think you’re gonna want to stop right there. Let me explain to you where this is going.” And it’s shocking to white folks.
My first job in diversity-and-tech was 1999. We’ve been ignored; we’ve been laughed at; now we’re in the fight—absolutely in fighting mode. And the shift that comes is that things start to get a little more nuanced.
The mental gymnastics are more complicated. It’s less about educating and more about what we really do with that awareness. So the conversation stops being “Diversity isn’t important.” The conversation is “Great. You know you sound outdated if you say that diversity isn’t important. But the interventions that you put in place are often wrong. They’re just wrong.”
I’ve worked hard to professionalize diversity work. There are so many companies that will say, “Oh, I’m just going to call that black woman engineer and see what she thinks about diversity, because she must know the answer . . .” What the hell? She’s spent her training learning how to be an engineer. She’s got a lot of lived experience, which is great, but diversity work is not her field. Her deal is engineering. Please give her the room to be a successful engineer and hire people who do this thing for a living.
You wouldn’t have a non-accountant counting your money. You wouldn’t go to someone with no background in cloud computing and say, “What do you think we should do about migrating everything to the cloud?” Right? Simultaneously, if this is not your discipline—and I’m not just saying, “Are you a person of color? Are you a woman?”—if this is not your discipline, you can be helpful, but you cannot lead this conversation.
Because we will tell you, you cannot program your way out of this problem. There is no algorithm that will solve this. Bias continues to be embedded in the code.
Many of the solutions that will bring about racial-social justice, put an end to police violence, do those kinds of things—need to have, at their root, technology.
Technology, to scale. Technology, for accessibility. Technology, for low-cost solutions and low barriers to entry. Technology in and of itself is going to be a critical part of the movement. Twitter itself has been a critical part of bringing Black Lives Matter to the forefront. That was in spite of what Twitter thought it was doing!
This is the place where stuff is scalable, where we will start to build apps that are about access to clean water and not delivering food to my doorstep. This is the moment when we can merge the amazingness of Silicon Valley technology and the Bay Area’s roots in protest politics and social justice.
If we can merge the two worlds, we stand a chance.
CHARLES CARTER (CONT’D)
Sitting on his porch, he fell silent. He had finished describing his career, then nodded and leaned forward—I thought, as if to get up, extend his hand, and conclude the interview. Instead, he rested his elbows on his knees and stared out across the street where a neighbor was mending part of his roof.
I’ve always struggled to reconcile the benefits of California with the ambition you need to reap those benefits. I’m still struggling with that.
Europeans came to California out of ambition, quickly recognized how special the place is. The human duality—we’re part of nature, yet we need to control it, subdue it. So at the same time we discovered the environmental benefits of this place, we learned it had raw materials to support other endeavors. Across the history of the state, you see these instincts in tension—environmentalism and development, restraint and greed.
I’m part of that story. Growing up in Pennsylvania, my dad told me the Jackie Robinson story, about how he went to UCLA and did all these wonderful things. I was a big Brooklyn Dodger fan, and when the Dodgers moved, I said, “I’m gonna go to California.” The Gold Rush never ended, right? Everybody was gonna go to C
alifornia, and do whatever they couldn’t do wherever they were.
I’m a trained physical designer, I’m a landscape architect. Most of us think we’re gonna go be protectors of the environment. I like to make pretty things. I like to know the names of the trees and the birds around me. I came here in an interesting time, the ’70s and ’80s, when people were looking for ways to harmonize growth with these more noble, if you will, objectives to protect this wildly fantastic environment.
So I’m all about place. Humans get fixated on their social place and have lost touch with the physicality of it. As much as we’re masters of our planet, and can go anywhere and do anything at any time, our spaces still define the boundaries of our behavior. We get clues on how to be, from our environment. The more disconnected you are from it, the more lost you are, as how to be as a species, an organism, an individual.
The challenge is, how do we build great societies without great machines that deplete the resources that enable it in the first place? We need to understand how it all fits together better, not that any one way is right or wrong. We were local creatures once, and we will remain local creatures for a long time to come. Maybe we have to revisit the model of everybody having a means to get anywhere within five hundred miles in a single day.
The original purpose of technology was to provide greater material comfort for humans. With greater material comfort, we had more time for intellectual, cultural pursuits. It feels like, again, we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns. Man is the most successful organism that’s walked this planet. How much better can we make it for him? How much more do we need?
Maybe because it happened in my lifetime, I’ve just been really skeptical about the information age and the benefits it’s gonna reap. I don’t know that it necessarily addresses what we struggle with as individuals or as communities.
Can we have broad-based, inclusive communities that are still economically vibrant? Can we avoid building what we, in the landscape business, call monocultures? Can we avoid narrowing the range of diversity of experience? Can we expand the access to opportunity? It doesn’t look like technology has answers to these questions.
There’s a physicality to our culture, a presence, that I think is being lost through technological manipulation. We may get to a point where the physical geographical associations aren’t necessary anymore, because we connect other ways, but is there a point we become too disembodied?
I don’t know that what California is producing now, as a sustainable crop, can sustain a population or a growth in population for a long time.
COCO CONN (CONT’D)
In the ’80s and ’90s, inspired by the expansive spirit of early innovators, she started teaching and leading expos, bringing technology to children around the world. Her approach was inspired by her daughter: “When she was two years old, she was on a Macintosh already, using MacPaint, and I thought, Wow, this is great. At first, I thought she was unique, someone so young adapting to this technology, until I realized this is the only technology she had ever used. Of course she was going to adapt to it. The people that hadn’t grown up with it, they were the ones that were struggling to learn it at all.”
A friend of mine wanted kids to build a city on the internet. This was ’93. There wasn’t even an internet then, but he wanted kids to collaborate. I brought in some high-end engineers. We got access to some military software. We took the aim, shoot, and kill functionality out of it. And so, we had a place for the kids to build.
We did a little traveling road show. We held tutorials at museums and science centers, teaching kids how to model. And whatever they would create would go in the city. We weren’t really teaching. We were just asking the kids to build a city.
There were very few boundaries because schools were terrified of technology because, to them, that meant money and budgets. They couldn’t afford it. So I would come in behind the scenes . . . I would bring in the administrators and the teachers and say, “Look, we’re not teaching anything. The kids teach themselves.”
We’d say, “Here’s how to make a box, how you extrude the box. Here’s how you make a window.” The basics of computer graphics, the building blocks are so simple. And with that little bit of information, they’d say, “Okay, now I’m gonna put some instruments in the wall and I need a chair.” And it was wild: by leaps and bounds they were building this massive city.
We were just kludging. But it was amazing how advanced we were. All my friends were coming in saying, “We were talking about building this technology, and you guys are here doing it.” We were doing VR before there was VR.
You could see the city on the screen. We’d say to the kids, “While you’re building it, you can fly through the city.” We were connected over T1 lines—which was unusual at the time—so they were flying through the model in real time. We built a controller box so you could jump to different parts, like teleporting.
It was really beautiful. It was very expansive. It had a dark background. Tall buildings. One kid built a very, very tall building, and the other kids were up in arms. They all had a meeting about how tall the building could be. One little girl was making furniture, beautiful furniture. And one of the boys put her furniture in his casino, and oh my God, she was so upset.
She said, “You can’t use my furniture for that.”
And he said, “Okay, let’s find a way to make this work. How about I donate all the proceeds from my casino?”
And she said, “Oh, that’s a great idea.”
Technology can awaken children. The most critical thing is that you reach people while they still have their self-esteem and a willingness to learn. If we don’t use this technology in clever ways for the younger generation, we’re missing the real reason to have these things in the classroom. It’s not just about entertaining and engaging. It’s how do these technologies help us evolve to the next step in our evolution—in a way that helps the planet.
I’ve been watching cuttlefish on the internet. They have only a two-year life-span. They die shortly after they mate. But most amazing, they have this ray-tracing machine inside them—their little brains can control these pixels on their body. I think there’s four colors on each pixel, and so you’re watching this animal and, depending on its situation, it can completely animate itself. It’s so brilliant!
I’m fascinated by this instinct to adapt.
Some of my philosophy friends say there’s people that believe, ultimately, we need to get off this planet. Because we’re destroying it and it’s only gonna last so long anyways. So no matter how long we’re on the planet, there’s gonna be this fixation to get off of it.
We can’t send humans into space, because they’ll die. We don’t have years to travel to the next galaxy. So maybe on some weird level, we are destined to create a cyborg version of ourselves that can travel. Maybe some of the technology today is helpful to the survival of the species thousands of years from now, even millions of years from now. We don’t know what’s driving it. We don’t know if we’ve been here before.
But we are going to adapt. We’re hardwired to do it, like the little cuttlefish. If we have three eyes, then fine, we’ll have three eyes. We are ruining the planet, so it doesn’t matter, in the long run, whether we destroy our bodies or ourselves. We’re all going to mutate together.
SAUL GRIFFITH (CONT’D)
Whether it was trying to build more efficient carburetors for the family car, or novel printing presses for his mother, he had always been inventive. He got accepted into MIT “through the tradesman’s entrance” and exited with a PhD. He graduated determined to defend the environment and moved to San Francisco because it had the best windsurfing. It also had a culture that embraced his instincts: “There’s a narrative that exists here, an ecosystem where you can do some of these things. I just worry it’s batting above its real contribution.”
I did metallurgical engineering for my undergraduate engineering degree. One and a half years of which I was working in indust
ry. I worked at a steel research facility. I worked at a blast furnace. I worked at a steel-rolling mill. I worked at an aluminum smelter. I saw three men die in that period.
One guy got caught between a train coupling that was bringing in the raw materials. One guy got hit by a piece of rebar that was at 1200 degrees Celsius. And the other one was probably a suicide underneath a hydraulic industrial lift. I saw the pool of blood and I reported it in at maintenance as “The hydraulic fluid is leaking in the elevator.” Then I realized, as we walked back, Oh shit. It’s blood.
These are just brutal industries. Australia still, including culturally, is roughly California of 1880 or 1890. We do two things. We do tourism. And then we do coal, and iron ore, and bauxite, and uranium. So Australia is a prehistoric economy based on raping the land and selling the friendliness of your people to the highest bidder.
I grew up in an environment where we cared greatly about the natural world. My mother painted Australia’s natural landscape. For six weeks each year, we would go to some World Heritage Area or some national park. We would go to these amazing places. I would carry the camera gear and take photographs for my mother that she would use as reference material to paint.
I have tried to spend my whole working life trying to unfuck the planet. We’re on a horrible trajectory. But how do you make the biggest difference? What actually can work at a scale to solve the problem? The biggest of those problems is climate change.
I could employ myself and twenty thousand other people on the problems to solve climate change for the rest of my life. And we try to work on the most impactful things, giant economic opportunities. We don’t all want to live in caves, so how do you build the compromise between what culture and society want to be and what is physically possible?
I wish I could paint you a narrative: There is an easy pathway to a beautiful world. We have more great technology than ever before to do more great things. Everything works. We all work less. We live amongst gardens. There is every reason to hope. But I am a little dark these days.
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