a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
Quatrarius  ·  2493 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Dirty War Over Diversity Inside Google  ·  

There are two problems.

I like to call the first one (since right now, when I made it up) CONTROVERSY-AS-DISCUSSION. CONTROVERSY-AS-DISCUSSION (CAD) is what you do when you have no news, but you have to write about something otherwise you don't make any money. Here's how it works:

1. Take any divisive social issue (race)

2. Find someone who has an opinion about it (megawhitey)

3. Feed the opinion into the media ouroboros

4. KEEP FEEDING

5. Success!

You can write articles debunking the original opinion, articles debunking other articles, hot takes, thinkpieces about thinkpieces --- going on forever. Nobody would care about what this guy had to say if it wasn't used as ammunition by these people. They're pretending to report on something that they made up out of thin air. Internet journalists are the agents of controversy (megawhitey knows this too), so this story gets picked up by the right-wing sites instantly - but I'll get there.

Look at some of the titles these articles have around the time this started to take off:

Google employee's leaked anti-diversity memo sparks evaluation of tech culture

Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

Right away, it gets called a manifesto. This random guy's craziness is a manifesto? Is it that important? Fuck you.

SECOND PROBLEM: It's not really crazy. It's pretty mild. It's not really right, either, but that's not the point. When things like this get drawn into the culture war, they immediately get painted as extreme.

(here on hubski, we're smart, we're moderates, we don't buy into the system, man, we know that this guy isn't a nazi)

But now this guy is hanging out with a lot of wannabe nazis smart scientific gentlemen. Dangerously/occasionally reasonable-sounding gentlemen. I'm assuming this guy wasn't a crypto-fascist, but maybe just a regular (friendly) conservamoderate? You know - the kind that shakes his head at how dumb these kids can be about race and sex, but doesn't quite tip over the edge into being alt-right?

(he'd have to be alt-right because he's too young to be rightright)

Now he's been driven into the arms of these people. Because he probably thinks he's right, right? He probably thinks all he was doing was making a reasonable point, with !!science!! and !!analysis!!, and he's getting shouted at by ev-er-y-body with a blog/twatter/"journalistic position" on the internet. Except for the fine fellows at

The Daily Wire

Breitbart

Jordan Peterologist the Canadian Psychologist, INC

n'all that. Because they're taking him seriously, and not shouting at him, and calling his critics crazy liberals obsessed with political correctness. Which is what he was talking about in the first place.

SECRET THIRD PROBLEM:

Could we talk about diversity without sparks like this setting everything off, almost like we care?

I didn't use my CAD abbreviation at all after I defined it, too. That could be the fourth problem here. The fourth problem might be this comment as a whole.

Meh.