An Open Letter to the New Class of Women in Tech

I started working in the tech industry when I was 22. I’m 35 now, I don’t work for the industry anymore, and I’ve spent the last ten years working in various capacities on radical and revolutionary approaches to changing the tech industry. 

This is important to me politically and ethically, but it is also personal. Tech killed my best friend, of over-work, exploitation, abuse, and medical neglect, and it almost killed me, through the same and also with organized terror campaigns, destroying everything I tried to build, and crushing my spirit because I spent 10 years fighting injustice in this field and I never fucking got anywhere. 

No one did. Not even “women in tech” got anywhere. All that work, all that noise… In 2009, the year I got to the Valley, 20% of computer programmers were women; in 2019, ten years later, 18.7% of computer programmers are women. 

Damn.

That’s cold af. Do you know how hard people worked to give you a different field than the one you step into today? I’m so sorry. This is what I wish I knew when I first came to the Valley . 

+ This is a very bad industry. Coming into it, you’re going to think that its mostly good, there are just a few places that need some tweaks. Some education. A little bit of perspective change. Some reform. A fresh approach — exactly the type you are ripe to provide. 

Absolutely not. 

The people who run this industry are megalomaniacal, narcissistic, sadistic,  psychopaths and sociopaths, war architects and weapons builders, and financial criminals, operating in an organized crime ring, aka “VC” (I.e., PayPal Mafia is literal). Venture capitalists fix markets, they collude to create monopolies, they fund all kinds of weapons-grades drones and surveillance towers, they supercharge the police that shoot our people in the streets, they destroy entire cities. San Francisco and Oakland were once thriving hotbeds of intelligence and creativity and dynamism and resistance. Oakland in particular is home of the Black Panthers and where we have seen some of the most significant resistance to police violence and tech take-over. Now these cities are shells of what they were, filled up with vacuous, brainwashed Javascript programmers and the bougie restaurants and bars brought in to buy out real estate from generational residents. Gentrified streets, nothing but startup dorms and startups, company towns, and all the shit that comes with it. And they’re gonna do that exact same thing to every major city in the world. Tech is truly the villain of the Marvel movies. 

“Software eats the world.” It’s literal. These are bad people who are doing bad things.  

For most people, their cognitive dissonance is too much — well *i’m* working in the industry and I’m a good person so there’s no way this is like, *evil* evil. 

No, it is evil. This industry is evil. It has a cheery face. It takes awhile to truly see, but just keep this is the back of your head: this industry is truly evil. It will help explain a lot of what you see, when there is no other answers.   

+ You need to know that this is not a safe industry for women. I am not being dramatic or hyperbolic. You need to know. You are in grave danger. The men around you are not safe for you to be around. Do not, under any circumstances, underestimate the men around you and their capacity to ruin your career and your life. These are not your fucking friends. Everyone around you is in it to get rich and famous. If they aren’t at first, give it a few years. This industry turns its employees into disgusting pigs, mired in greed, powerhungry, even blood thirsty.  

Why in the fuck do you think over 50% of women leave the industry by 10 years in? If you started tech after school, that means you are out of the game by 32, which is just before a lot of men start to hit their stride in it. Ten years and then we’re gone. One of the reasons they push women out is because, well, they just like younger women better. Because they are sex perverts and rapists and misogynists. But isn’t it funny how it works out, that if you’re joining the industry, not many girls are around from the bubble before you to tell you the truth of what happens? 

This is my message in a bottle. 

The women before you did not leave because of some micro aggressions and the occasional ass grab. Think about the reality of how much it takes to actually push someone who is interested in their field and has been working hard for it, for a decade or more, whose life revolves around their industry, and the financial stability it can provide is what their family depends on, and this is the only thing they know how to do really, really well… what it would take for her to just walk away? 

What it takes is fucking disgusting and its far worse than ANYTHING that has been portrayed of any “women in tech” media circuses. I know *many* girls who have had a nervous breakdown related to work, oftentimes overwork but more often how they were being treated at their companies. Girls end up addicted to alcohol or stimulants of some kind. I know multiple girls who have fucking PTSD from this shit, just from office abuse. I know many women who have been sexually assaulted and drugged and raped (more on that later). I know many women who have been terrorized by their partners in tech, stalked for years at a time by men they worked with, and screwed over by their bosses. 

They’re gonna sabotage you, they’re gonna bully and humiliate you, they are going to block you from projects. They’re not gonna give you raises, they’re not gonna give you promotions without a battle. Chances are everyone who manages you will be a man and he will do at least one of the following, guaranteed: terrify you, yell at you, hit on you, take credit for all your work and ideas, drive you into the ground or keep you from accomplishing anything at all. You will being getting paid half or less of what men in your same position do — trust me, one way or another they will make that pay gap happen. Men will treat you with constant disrespect at every level. Even women in the highest offices of tech are ignored and spoken down to in meetings, including by their own subordinates. 

You are not better or different than the huge numbers of women who have joined and then left this field. Things have not “changed” so that it will be different for you. 

+ The popular notion of how women are sidelined in tech has to do with vague abstractions, “micro aggressions”, “unconscious bias”, “gender+/racial stereotypes”. LOLOLOLOLOLOL. How easily that functions to excuse misogyny, racism and to dilute it as far away from a material remedy as possible. 

Here’s the absolute fact: many men in tech truly hate women. They don’t have “unconscious bias” toward women; they fucking hate women. And in particular, a lot of them hate women who work in tech specifically. This entire industry is about access to money and power, and its about keeping other people from having it — especially women, and especially Black women. Most men in the industry truly believe that women aren’t as good at programming, they’ll talk down to girls in marketing and call them sluts and make fun of them, they collude among each other to get sex from you, etc. You are NOT going to “explain what its like to be a women in tech” and suddenly they are able to access their capacities for critical thought about systems of oppression. Or give a shit.  

They are never going to like you. They are never going to respect you. They will never put you on par with other men in the industry. They will never stop talking shit about you and sabotaging you. I have had a number of close *male friends* in the industry and believe me, they were shitbags too. Just look at HackerNews. HackerNews has been swarm-terrorizing women in tech for years, Y Combinator has let them do it, and it is full of anonymous right wing white male extremists, which you can see alllll over the comments. “Unconscious bias” is a whole world away from “gang-bullying women out of the industry on purpose for decades” and “threatening to kill women in anonymous emails and messages because she showed up on HN”.

You can do with this information what you will, but just know, anything that you think is about unconscious x, socialized y, micro aggressions z, is just outright, material misogyny. 

Women are not leaving the industry because they didn’t lean in enough or they didn’t have what it takes, or because they wanted to move onto something else; it is because they are terrorized and humiliated and exhausted and maltreated and bullied and abused into leaving, for years and years on end. 

Oh, and then there’s the sexual violence. 

+ This is probably the most important thing in here. There’s a lot, a lot of rape and sexual abuse that happens in this industry, and we don’t have a clear picture of just how far that goes, nor is it particularly considered even in the wheelhouse of “DEI” outside of like, being looked at as a rare outlier. Because that’s one thing they never talk about when they talk about the pipeline and women in tech is: the rape. Because the rape, when you follow it down, exposes everything else as a lie.

Well, some of you went to MIT so you probably already know. 5% of women undergraduates get raped at MIT, before they are even done with school. And it is up and coming “men in tech” who are doing it. The rape pipeline starts at the college/university level and it just goes on. And on. And on. Until you “leave”. 

Rape is in no way some kind of anomaly in Silicon Valley. You have an environment where there are massive wealth and power gaps across gender and racial lines, where abusive people are inherently attracted BECAUSE of wealth/power, where there’s a perpetual party atmosphere, tons of alcohol, where men get away with all kinds of stuff, all of the time. 

Lots of it is kept intact by NDAs, but more of it is just, if you come out about being raped, they will bully you to death. From my time in Silicon Valley, I know at least two high-profile cases where women were bullied into suicide attempts and leaving the country after coming out about sexual abuse. VCs make public examples, and they make them definitively.   

So: listen to me. They will absolutely rape you. You’ll start to hear the horror stories soon enough in the back channel. Names, offices, parties. Girls getting drugged at conferences. Girls in hotel bars and hotel rooms on business trips. There are lots of places for men to attack women in tech. 

+ And then there’s also a lot of things that girls don’t CALL rape but really are; like when they get you so inebriated you’re almost totally passed out and then you “have sex” with a colleague after a “beer up”, or when you and your boss are “having sex”. All just violent coercion and abuse and manipulation.  

It is common to get “passed around” the office — where you somehow “just happen” to end up sleeping with multiple men in the same office. This phenomenon to me most highlights the sexual exploitation that happens in startups. I know a bunch of girls who got stalkers from this, men in our industry who followed them for months or years. A few of those incidents have been extremely serious and extremely frightening. Women’s lives are ruined over this.

One thing that tech loves in the office girlfriend. I’ve literally seen it from the inside: the excitement when a new girl gets hired. Discussions about her tits and ass, taking her out to get absolutely shit hammered on day one — it is during these “welcome to the office” shin-digs that you can be the most vulnerable, because you JUST joined a new place, you don’t have a lay of the land, and everyone you work with is in a position of power over you. You can even be above someone in rank, but below them in terms of power, when power in the office is all for men. I have heard with my own ears men negotiating which one of them will take a swipe at the new girl. As much as YOU might think you’re a great coder and programmer, they are worried about your tits and who gets to get you drunk enough to assault first.  

+ Absolutely do not “date” in your office. It happens a lot. A lot a lot. Why? Because power dynamics in the office fundamentally warp consent, attraction, and creates feelings of artificial connection designed into the “culture” and that are just natural from working … 60 hour weeks together (unnatural). Regardless of his job title, he’s going to have power over you because all of the other men in the company are going to be on his side. That’s before we even get into any kind of dynamic around office politics and job titles. 

The fear of not making some man in the company happy cannot be underestimated. We know that they can make our work lives miserable: that alone is a massive coercive force that should preclude in-office dating. 

Men in tech like to date their co-workers because they have control of them, because they want their working experience to include them receiving sex and emotional labor, because it makes their lives easier and better, because the office power dynamics gives them an advantage in getting women to date them. Women are almost never in a meaningful position of power over any man in tech; and even the lowest-ranking male generally has more material power over the women in the office because of… misogyny. Once dating, women can be scared to break up because they don’t want it to ruin their job or ruin their ability to work successfully in that office. You can see exactly who has the power in what happens when you break up. Often the work environment becomes incredibly hostile. Men in the office with sympathize with and relate to the man, shunning the woman. The fact that if you are dating a man in the office, and that breaking up by default means a hostile work environment for you, is plenty of evidence that these relationships are inappropriate, coercive and created/maintained by office power dynamics. 

You do not just “happen” to feel attracted to the men in your office. Maybe there’s an analog from the therapy world. We recognize that it’s normal sometimes that you might have a “crush” on a therapist, we understand that that can happen in the therapeutic environment, but it doesn’t mean therapists and clients can ethically “date”, and that we don’t have clear boundaries established for ethical reasons and protective reasons. Similarly, it is “normal” to sometimes develop feelings for people you work with; and that’s okay. Those feeling will fade and you DONT need to act on them. 

 It’s OK to have a crush at work — wait 2 months and I promise you it will pass. And if you do have feelings so strongly for a man in the office, see if he is willing to go to another company so he won’t jeopardize your reputation and employment. If he isn’t willing, that should tell you all you need to know. If you live with a man who you work with, you could lose your man, your job, and your housing all in the same day.  

Fuck that. 

If a man wants to date you so fucking bad, if he just *happened* to fall in love with the girl in the next cubicle (snort, this is all about access and convenience for him), he should do the right thing and the gentlemanly thing which is to leave the company immediately. 

You’ll find most of them won’t. 

And there you go. 

+ Related to the above, it is incredibly common for men in power to make promises or implicit guarantees to girls in tech that, if they only sleep with them, they will get jobs/promotions/money/power/media placement etc. It’s amazing how with all these women supposedly “sleeping her way to the top”, its amazing how few *get* to the top… that’s because men are liars.  

 Implicit in the relationship between someone in power vs someone who is not in power is the idea that the latter will get something out of the arrangement.  Having sex to get ahead is absolutely fine and valid, but the important thing to note is that men will make promises about how they’ll help your career that don’t come true. Promising or implying something in exchange for sexual services, and then not providing those things, is sexual violence, even rape.

So make sure you are getting things out of these fuckers the whole time. They want to date you? They can wire you 100k so you aren’t out on your ass when they turn around and devour you. They want to fuck you? Promotion first, pussy after. They don’t want their wife to know? Maybe he needs to buy you an apartment. Make sure to look out for your material needs, because someone who is doing this to you, will not be. 

Remember that any man in his 40s who is trying to get with a 24 year old has something incredibly wrong with him in the first place. You. Cannot. Trust. Anything. These. Men. Say. 

Pay, then play. 

+  There is no way to ensure that you will be totally safe from rape and sexual abuse in tech, but if you keep rape in mind when you are making decisions, I hope this will maybe help you be just a little safer. 

First of all, don’t get drunk around them if you can possibly avoid it. If you do get drunk and are sexually assaulted it is no way your fault, absolutely not. Alcohol is the #1 drug used to facilitate sexual assault; you’ll pretty quickly become aware of the industry’s efforts to keep you drunk as fuck, all of the time. This puts everyone, but in particular women, in danger. 

Alcohol is a very important component that makes all the magic you see in your office happen. You’ll soon notice that there’s … a LOT of alcohol around. Booze at business meetings and from the beer keg in the office, they have Bloody Marys right at 9 am before the conference, there’s an entire cart of expensive Japanese whiskey that gets rolled out at 4 pm. Almost every man you meet in tech will engage in trying to get you drunk. And they always push it just a little too far. There’s a reason they want you inebriated, every single time. 

My advice to myself would be not have more than two drinks at an professional event. But the problem with two drinks is it is easy to turn to 3. Working in tech can be pretty stressful, and so providing alcohol to you is a way that they medicate you. A lot of strange stuff happens in tech late at night and if you drink and hang out too long, you can find yourselves in it. 

It is NOT true that your career will be dead if you don’t go and hang out with “the boys”, for the full tour of the strip club and the after-hours club. There’s very little evidence in my experience that it either does or doesn’t do anything for your career. You should go and have fun, but don’t plan on staying for the entire night. These things REGULARLY go to 2 am or later, and by that time people are often blackout drunk. It helps to have a plan for after the event, something you need to go do or someone to meet up with who is safe.

Listen to me:  Once the men start to get drunk, you absolutely need to leave. That is when things truly start getting dangerous. And never allow your escape from a tech event to rely on a man. He’s not gonna let you go.

+  While we are talking about social dynamics in tech, let’s talk about your coworkers. You love your coworkers while you’re working together. You share these really deep relationships. And yes, relationships with your co workers can be really rewarding. But the fact of the matter is you will never see them again once you or they leave. Tech does lots of things to keep you chummy while you’re working at the same place, absolutely tons of benefits to them from doing that. All the after work happy hours, team retreats, and you bond. And you… work. You work that whole time. And you work and that whole time you are working. 

A lot of times, because of the hellish hours and constant office “team building” (getting shitfaced and talking about competitors), you end up where you entire social circle is at work and revolves around work. I’ve spent significant amounts of time with my coworkers “outside” of work (work never really ends when you hang out with them all the time), and the reason I regret it is because that time I was investing in them, a relationship fully contingent on an employer, I could have been investing in people whose relationships could continue for way longer than a job. It’s easy to work a long time around here and end up with very few friends. There’s a tendency to just take on the next job as a full social life that has been handed to you — that’s what they are trying to make happen, that everything in your life is happening in context of the job. Resist that, because whatever they are handing you expires as soon as your use to them does, when you get fired or laid off or leave. Not worth it. 

+ I mentioned previously the “backlash” to women in tech taking the form of online harassment, but I want to take a minute and double back on it. There are hate groups in tech, legions of members of hate groups in tech… the FIRST online harassment platforms were created by programmers, have been ever since, and programmers exist in large numbers on 4/8chan and other sites they may be using (it changes every few years). The reason why the largest attacks on women in tech and gaming, is exactly because it is men in their fields that drive a large amount of hate group activity. Think about this: Google hired the creator of 4chan during the last bubble, *while* 4/8chan were engaging in mass coordinated attacks on women in tech speaking about sexism. 

Wow. 

In particular, the Linux open source community uses swarm and trolling techniques, swatting and doxxing, and is very very sophisticated at ruining girls’ lives. I’ve been attacked by this group in the wake of criticizing Linus Torvalds for comments made about women in tech; they were some of the most significant attacks I’ve faced, and I’ve been attacked by alllll of these fuckers. 

“Online harassment” came out of the industry and has been perpetrated by its members. They try to pretend that the hate groups are an organic phenomenon on the internet and something our “users” are doing  — but nothing on the internet is organic. So just know what you’re dealing with. Tech is currently in the process of becoming much more overtly right wing extremist. Wins over online harassment on the basis of technical platforming are fleeting. Venture capitalists are still frothing with anger over the political changes we tried to make in the last bubble; with Elon Musk owning Twitter we already have his commitment to restoring the accounts of suspended fascists, Nazis, extremist right wingers, etc. And it looks like they will also be changing the rules to be more permissive of “free speech” (aka, organized hate group activity). 

Every once in awhile you’re going to see a woman get publicly attacked to such a severe point that it changes the course of her life forever. They do it every once and awhile to keep all the women nice and scared of speaking up. 

The assumption to operate off of is that you WILL be attacked by these groups in some form, some day, or that one of the many serial stalkers of women in tech will settle on you one day. 

Secure all of your shit. There’s lots of guides out there on keeping yourself safe from doxxing and hacking and so on.  The most important thing is to try to keep your address off anything that could end up online or be part of the public record. Yes, this includes voter registration and home ownership documents. Check out virtual mailboxes, I use EarthClass Mail for a notarized alternative to using a home address for mailings. 

When they can find your home, that’s a totally different level of fear and danger. 

Digitally, use strong passwords, use 2 factor auth. On EVERYTHING. You will wish you had 1000x over. Try to get information removed from the internet with location information, go back and check your social media feeds — they will dig through years of history to get what they want. Consider having even just a rough plan for what you will do if you get doxxed or harassed. 

I’ve been through this so many times that in my opinion, the BEST thing to do is not say anything, leave your house for 3 weeks, and don’t go on your computer. A lot of white women know they can get careers off of becoming online harassment hyper visible victims, so oftentimes this is just an opportunity for them to build some kind of platform that will let them turn around and get a better job at fucking Google. But if your plan doesn’t include becoming an online harassment activist, the best thing you can do is just know that your shit is tight and have a plan of what you will do. Even the most fleeting thought of planning, like the one you are having now, can make a huge difference when its go time and you’re getting thousands of people threatening to kill you, distributing maps of your house and face and shit. Like, these people are crazy. Know what you are dealing with and know what you are seeing when you see another woman in tech get swarmed by hate groups. That’s your colleagues. That is these men in tech you work with, doing that. 

We don’t fare well in the tech industry. There will never be a point that they will start treating you better because you’ve attained some career milestone. That’s just the design of it. Things might go fine for awhile, and then again, maybe again, but then they won’t. It’s pretty much a matter of time before something bad happens to you. So it’s best to have a plan, even if it’s just a little bit of a plan. Save as much money as you can. Working a lot, traveling, rents in San Francisco — its really easy to spend as much on your lifestyle as your salary is. You need a fuck you fund for your career — I would try to put away $100k cash as soon as possible, even if it means living well below your means in the early days of your career. 

+ If something happens to you at work, if there’s some kind of issue, get a lawyer. Period. Even if you don’t have the money to do it, you MUST. 

Tech manages to get away with lots of this because they have good cover-up strategies. The first strategy is to just terrorize the girl into going away and being too afraid to speak up, but if not, you’re looking at NDAs and lawyers and settlements and severance offers. They factor it in, just another budget item on the map. The entire industry has a sexual harassment problem and always has. It is operationalized. 

If you think, or become convinced, that “telling your story” will “create awareness” and do something positive, keep in mind that every single person in tech is aware of the industry’s sexual violence problem. If it’s important to you personally, go for it. But “telling our stories” and “speaking our truth” is not going to change anything. We’ve been creating awareness about sexual violence in tech for fucking decades. Nothing has changed. 

So: NEVER sign an NDA without having a lawyer review it. Tech companies have giant legal backing from their venture capitalists, there’s internal and external and specialty lawyers, they have all kinds of lawyers. Oftentimes they will create a false sense of urgency, like you have to sign the documents right now to get the deal or something. Always know you can step away from any kind of negotiation and that you SHOULD so you can think clearly about what path to take. Maybe even consider getting a lawyer on retainer, and to read what lawyers working in office sexual harassment and abuse have said in articles or talks. 

Your priority, in the event of sexual and/or workplace trauma/abuse/harassment, needs to be on your safety and security, and to this end, you need a lawyer to negotiate the most favorable settlement to you, or to take it to court.  

+ Please, please believe me on this: Women have been trying to change things in this industry for many decades. There’s been petitions and conferences and meetups and seminars, protests, employee walk-outs, and now unions, lawsuits, class actions, educational programming, entire media platforms, whole consultancies and TONS of non-profits …  so, so many non-profits…. 

Nothing has changed. Everything we have done has failed. 

We have learned some things, however, that are now totally manifest and based on the conclusion of thousands of years of human effort we have put into this stuff.

The main one for the purposes of this article, is that your personal ambitions are not systemic change. Lots of careerist feminists want you to think that just *being* there is enough, that by “providing diversity” you are doing something good. But materially, it just doesn’t work like that. The things that are happening in the industry are so severe and so systemic that individual success stories aren’t meaningful anymore. Representation of women in the industry is the same now as it was 10 years ago, ~20% in both 2009 and 2019. So you aren’t even increasing representation. 

The most catastrophic effect of “DEI” strategies is that it makes representation itself the morality, not part of a full ethical strategy, and obscures all else. If you are a woman in a male-dominated team, then you are doing the right thing for women in tech. 

Problem: The Valley is full of awful companies who do terrible things, who commit war crimes and human rights abuses. Their employees are culpable, even if they are women. And yet “women in tech” is continuously used as an excuse for why is is okay to collaborate with technofascism. Some of the biggest voices for “DEI” have a long record of working at the worst companies. This is not a mistake. And no, they didn’t fix SHIT from the inside. 

So let me be clear: It is not OK to work in the technology workforce of evil companies like Meta, Google, Palantir, Anduril, Apple and Amazon. You won’t change *anything* from the inside, we’ve been seeing for more than 10 years that that strategy simply does not bear out. At this point in the game, there’s just no way you can say in good faith that these companies are going to “change” just because of small changes in demographics. If you work there, you are culpable. 

Other companies might not have the same “prestige” or “household name”, but there are plenty of software companies that don’t have a horrifying track record and that will not go down in history as gross violators of civil and human rights. Plentyyy of companies that make things that don’t hurt anyone, give mental illnesses to children, bomb people, surveil and jail and kill Black people, report abortion data to the cops and government, and shit like that. There’s lots of regular, nuts and bolts type shit. Go there. 

+ The abject failure of the last 10 years of the women in tech movement: that in 10 years, we failed even the most basic precept of increasing women in tech. I cannot emphasize enough that from 2009 to 2019 (most recent data), women’s representation in tech barely moved — except to go slightly *down*. I cannot tell you enough how big of a “fuck” you tech gave to anyone who was working in the space in the past 10 years. People lost everything to do that work… and we got nowhere. 

+ Which means we need to start doing some shit differently. Everything you see around you for women in tech is legacy — we know it doesn’t work, and we know that the things we tried were turned against us. They *want* you to stay busy worrying about little non-profits, worrying about raising awareness, teaching little girls how to code, creating “communities” and “platforms” for women in tech. This is all very tame and manageable for them, they are comfortable with it and will subsidize it on an ongoing basis as a hedge against more direct, revolutionary strategies. 

I assure you, every single person with meaningful power in this industry knows, in detail, what is wrong with this industry. They don’t want to change it in any way. Hyperconcentration of money and power in white male elite is the only purpose of the industry. You are, definitionally, outside of that purpose, and always will be. The industry must fall. They are happy to let us have these little meetups in their offices. What they are scared of is a *materialist* rebellion that could actually threaten them. If what you are doing regarding women in tech is not a *direct and material* threat to power, it won’t accomplish anything. 

+ Please, please, just get an idea of what has been done before you. There’s an important concept in our industry of “don’t repeat work”, and I am *begging* you not to do what we did. Don’t repeat our work. There’s extensive documentation you can find on everything that we tried in the last bubble to get changed. I edited a magazine that has a lot of it, Model View Culture, where we archived a significant amount of the thought and movement in technology over the last bubble. Story for another time, but its a good archive to give you an idea of where we actually are. We don’t have time for you girls to go through the cycle of discovering everything that we did for yourselves. You must learn from us and make different choices. Technology as an industry grows scarier and scarier by the day as it grows in wealth and power and inculcates itself more and more into the war machine. 

You need to get booted up very quickly on what has been done and make sure that you aren’t just repeating the work. Or you’re gonna get the same result. And let me tell you: that result sucks. I cry about it every day. You don’t want this for you, and you don’t want to have to look at the next generation of women and tell them that you failed.

+ Always keep in mind: this is not a cute little game about startups with important stories to tell, it’s not about amazing products, it’s not about changing the world, and it sure as fuck isn’t about “building community” or “empowering women” … 

This is about empire building, it is about wars, it is about really significant amounts of land takeover, it is about using the data of the whole world to optimize human behavior for tech KPIs. Things in Silicon Valley have a way of looking harmless when they aren’t. This is on purpose. Silicon Valley has a mask. So no matter what, never let them lull you into thinking that this isn’t serious. 

This field attracts some extremely dangerous people (including, some women). This is an environment of little to no regulation, where huge amounts of money and power and control are at play, where there is a significant amount of chaos and abuse, where much that is good and beautiful and *belongs to others* is systematically and deliberately stolen and destroyed. Sociopaths and psychopaths and malignant narcissists are everywhere. The closer to the top, the worse they are. People will lie to you, manipulate you, use you, scapegoat you… just assume that no one has good intentions, and you’ll be a lot safer. 

+ You need to start organizing very seriously to find ways that we can take the industry back from venture capitalists. The movement of technological development and human innovation is literally held hostage in the hands of Silicon Valley elite, their own personal goose with golden eggs. The implications to the rest of the world are far too profound for you to sit on your ass in there preening about how you’re the startup’s first female engineering manager.

Who gives a fuck. Tech grows bigger, stronger, and more destructive each day.

In my opinion, the next logical move is a general strike of women. The industry would be on its knees within hours. We can seize control of the infrastructure, move it away from elite access, and begin the process of turning everything into a democratic utility. We will be supported in this globally — the whole world has a stake in tech justice, and we must partner with them, particularly those who are facing tech invasions of their cities and countries.

There is no alternative left under the sun than a full takeover of the industry. The heads of it *must* see citizen tribunals for crimes against humanity and war crimes. We have more than enough evidence to move on these cases. And we *must* democratize technology. The real technology field, the one you dream of, lies there and nowhere else. 

I hope I’ll see you there. But I’m happy to die trying, too.