Creative Commons photo by Dan Taylor/Heisenberg Media. Click to see the source.
You can find out a lot of the Valley from the Twitter responses to the story about Travis Kalanick’s resignation as Uber’s C.E.Bro.
Alexia Tsotsis is Kalanick’s “Cool Tech Girl”
Travis leaving Uber is a big loss, and very frustrating for people who know him. He’s not the monster the media turned him into.
— Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) June 21, 2017
TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Tsotsis’ tweet reminded me of Sarah Stockdale’s recent (and brilliant) article titled The myth of the ‘cool tech girl’ (and why she’s dangerous), a warning about the women in tech who try to “fit in” by going along with the brogrammers and end up perpetuating tech’s most toxic problems.
Some key excerpts:
The cool girl in tech plays ping pong, drinks beer at work, is “one of the guys”, participates in inappropriate slack .gif threads, says things like “she’s overreacting”, “I don’t consider myself a feminist, I just work hard”, “I’ve never experienced discrimination at work”. The cool girl doesn’t call out sexist remarks, she laughs at your ‘jokes’, she defends you to other women, and helps silence them. The cool girl is ‘one of the boys’.
The cool tech girl is a toxic myth, she helps men feel safe in their sexism. She enables the persistent and perpetual gender discrimination in our field. She’s hurting you, and me, and she needs to fuck right off already.
Congrats, Alexia: you’re a cool tech girl!
Bill Gurley plays Smithers to Kalanick’s Mr. Burns
There will be many pages in the history books devoted to @travisk – very few entrepreneurs have had such a lasting impact on the world.
— Bill Gurley (@bgurley) June 21, 2017
Note to Gurley: Dude, in the final analysis, he created an app that combined crowdsourcing, taxi services, and 21st century serfdom. This sort of hyperbolic praise reminds me of the “making the world a better place” bit from the finale of Silicon Valley’s first season:
Gurley’s skewed picture of history also reminds me of this New Yorker comic by Tom Toro:
Click the comic to see the source.
For a longer look at where this inflation-of-importance mindset in the Valley comes from, check out part one of the BBC documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, whose thesis is that computers have failed to liberate humanity, and instead have “distorted and simplified our view of the world around us”.
Michael Arrington is…well, Michael effing Arrington.
I remember when I too worked with Arianna Huffington. Same outcome :) https://t.co/YNYxHWcKhc
— Michael Arrington (@arrington) June 21, 2017
One thing I always admired about arianna is that she never let her stupidity get in the way of her ambition.
— Michael Arrington (@arrington) June 21, 2017
Stay classy, Mike.
As a reminder of the the company and culture created by the guy that Arrington is defending, allow me to refer you to these articles:
- The blog post heard ’round the Valley: Susan Fowler’s article, Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
- The Uber story that everyone’s talking about right now, and some helpful background info
- What if we applied the “People don’t quit their jobs, they quit their BOSSES” maxim to Uber’s president’s resignation?