Diversity, Representation and Inclusion in Tech: It Doesn’t Work. Now What?

Just about exactly ten years ago, we were headed into the second bubble: cloud computing. I got to the Valley in 2009, right before things really got popping again. I had a bad feeling in the first six months, but it took me another three years to really get my head around what the fuck was going on, why tech killed, damaged, exploited and abused everything it touched. And like many of you, I started to panic. 

A lot of people were in the same place as me around that time, and so we decided that we were gonna Fix This Bitch. 

From about 2012-2015, give or take, hell, make it 2012-2022 if you want, we went full force at the tech inequalities and oppressions we saw around us. We worked on surveillance, weapons tech, BLM, industry rape, digital violence, online harassment, police violence, “revenge porn”, exploitation of youth by tech companies, ethical AI, accessible websites, gentrification and data colonization, climate change. We were actually very through and very conscientious about what the issues were, looking back.

Between 2012 and 2022, we tried everything we could think of to make things better. We did it all. Training, mentorship, the pipeline. Diversity, representation and inclusion. There were magazines, hacker spaces, online collectives, chat rooms, micropayment platforms, giving circles,  unionization drives, donations, even the occasional petition or small protest. We started all kinds of non-profits and programs for kids. We had dozens of programming schools, many free. There were never-ending media articles, awards, there was a magazine, there was new theory: tech feminism, surveillance capitalism, etc. We analyzed diversity data, brought in diversity consultants and started entire educational programs so that those in power would change. 

By now? I think we all know damn well that every single person at the top of this industry knew and currently knows alllll of the many demands of its workers and customers, knows alllll of its harms and its body counts, knows alllll of its inequalities and concentrations. Guess what? They were the point all along. Of course we weren’t going to nicely ask them to change the very things they were in the game for, the whole reason the tech industry exists.  In these 10 years we have seen the people who are in charge of this industry refuse, time and time and time again, to make even the tiniest of changes. We haven’t gotten fucking anywhere. 

So this, these days of a new bubble, and a scarier one — a bubble about weapons and financial crimes and the meta-verse: This is a moment to really look around and say, that we are actually in a very bad state, and in fact, every single axis of every single thing that we were working on either has stayed the same or gotten worse.

The one thing we put the most time into - diversity - basically didn’t move anything at all.  Here are there you might see a percent or two above in the demographics, but in some areas they got even fucking worse. 

Are you fucking kidding me? 

This was *the* center of the demand made to these companies. With all of these efforts, the fundamental distribution of money and power did not change, even if some individuals were able to benefit. 

What the FUCK went wrong and how do we keep ourselves from repeating it? The hour is dire — you see what tech is up to, don’t fucking lie to yourselves. We need to do something to stop them or we will all die. 

So why did we lose? 

+ We lost because we thought that once we got marginalized people, and enough of them, into positions of influence inside companies, that they would work, and work together, to make really deep, significant changes. “Change it from the inside.” But that’s not what happens. Marx has discussed at length the level of brainwashing that happens within these structures. Cognitive dissonance plays a huge role. Time and time again we saw that people who appeared to have good politics, turned into greedy, brainwashed, power-hungry, tech-defending zombies, actual enemies and human shields to progress. Even if people were true to the cause, tech companies are designed to crush any internal resistance at first sign. They control their workers to the minutia. Tech workers are products, too. Representation doesn’t matter if there is zero room for resistance towards *material*, large scale impact. 

There was no change from the inside. None. We poured hundreds of years of labor into getting people into jobs that produced no change. It doesn’t work. We have to switch it up. 

We organize from the outside now. 

+ We underestimated the level of bribery that was going on and people’s ability to withstand greed via moral principle. Because alllllll the fat cats came in and started offering literally anyone who MOVED in this space… all kinds of shit. And they did it down to a *person*. Almost everyone I know who was very active in 2012-2015 sold out or quit. There are literally tens of thousands of companies who aren’t committing direct, global scale human rights abuses; people had all the options in the world. But it was the bad companies who offered the most money and the most “opportunity” and the prestige. A lot of it was just as dumb as: these were household names. We got sold out over scraps by people we thought were comrades. 

Remember, tech owns all the social media and all of the companies and all the media and all of the startups. People got jobs, speaking appearances, magazine features, VC funds, their own non-profits and startups. They got bought. Point blank period. We had been ignorant, and we didn’t have any mechanisms to stop this from happening. No commitment to the movements. We had no accountability procedures. We had no preventative strategies. 

We got bought.  

This led to a broken movement because there could be no trust in it. A lot of you who were SUPPOSED to be participating in the movement sold out. Sold completely the fuck out. No one is saying that you shouldn’t have gotten credit or a stage. But did it have to be a position at, I don’t know, the top fucking 10 worst companies in the industry? The “profiles” of the people working in this space suddenly turned to @apple @github @google @meta, ad nauseum . Are you fucking serious? You are working at irredeemable companies, that have committed very serious human rights abuses and war crimes, and are claiming you are some kind of figure in tech diversity? You can fool yourself, but no one else was fooled.

I think we genuinely thought that leadership changes could happen that could change the entire course of the industry; I think we’ve learned that that is not the case. 

We organize from the outside now. 

+ We lost because we weren’t fighting VCs. We were going after change on a startup-by-startup, company-by-company basis ….even as the source of allllll of their funding and power was right behind them: venture capitalists.  There was almost NO analysis that these individual startups were but part of a collection of meaningfully *inter-related* assets, that combined (by VCs), were creating incredible, enmeshed impacts on the world around them. We ignored how startups were configured in specific ways BY venture capitalists to produce effects like gentrification (AirBnB, WeWork, Flow, company HQs and large scale influx of white men); hijacking an entire financial system (Coinbase, PayPal), and building a private army (Anduril, Skydio, Palantir). 

VCs have thousandsssss of startups. And we went after them one by one, spending year on year trying to get incremental changes, if changes were made at all. All the time, it wasn’t startups setting the agendas or the policies or the programs or the moral codes or the products. That was all coming from above. And we didn’t do shit about them, the VCs. They watched us trying to fuck with their little toys and laughed. 

+ We underestimated the enemy. By a lot. The people running this industry have no actual moral compass. Our strategies were designed with the idea of a democratic or at least moral target in mind. We didn’t realize that they fully know what they are doing, and the bad things we framed as being an “unintended consequence” of rapid technology growth, were in fact its aims. 

You should be able to see very clearly now that the entire industry is run by a small group of very interrelated and connected, psychopathic, sadistic, colonial war criminals and human rights abusers. Our strategies were not designed for this; for enemies this bloodthirsty and ruthless. Time to change it up. 

What do you do with war criminals? 

Tribunals and executions.  

+ The biggest mistake we made was making everything so goddamn individualistic and so immaterial on a global impact scale. Diversity, inclusion, representation, these are very much about individual advancement within the system, they propose a goal within the system. We were worrying about getting women in tech better fucking salaries and getting jobs at Facebook, while Facebook is out here literally giving little girls eating disorders and making them kill theirselves.  

We made this shit way too much about us. Our worker’s rights, if we were getting hired or not, how fast we were getting promoted. Who fucking cares? These people are literally taking over the world. 

Before we conclude, let’s just take a final buzz through the best example of what happened here: Women in tech. What were the *material* results of that? 

We have more evil, greedy, sadistic and sociopathic women in positions of power than ever before, mainly white women. We have more women sitting as a shield for tech companies: deflecting criticism and providing essential PR functions, keeping a revolutionary at pay. We’re teaching middle school girls to code in programs sponsored by Raytheon and the fucking CIA — literal child abuse to subject children to that, and not only that, it turns out that *all we did* was provide a free pipeline of talent into the industry, that tech never had to even pay for, under the guise of inclusion. Rape of women in the industry is, I imagine, higher than ever as VCs have shown time and time again they will not tolerate a sexual abuse problem interfering in their precious unicorns. Men, hating the incursion of women into the field, continue to run coordinated terrorism campaigns and rape and assault women with no change or consequence. Instead of a revolutionary, materialist feminism, we got Lean In and Girlboss ideology that just gave a feminist glint to what is basically just white female sociopathy and narcissism. 

Women as a class don’t have any more power or money than they did before. And they are more endangered by tech, all over the world, than ever before. 

I could do this analysis for every other faction of the justice in tech movement, but I think we all know we got our asses handed to us. 

So what the FUCK do we do now? 

We need an immediate, coordinated, significant shift to new strategies. We need to take what we learned, turn around, change it up, train, play, study, do better and attack. 

We need to IMMEDIATELY move away from strategies that are predicated on personal success within the industry. It doesn’t work, individualism will not save us. 

We need to IMMEDIATELY stop putting all of our time, energy and money into diversity and inclusion because it is utterly clear they will NOT be changing the demographics of the industry; in the places they do, any potential for radical change is cancelled out by in-house brainwashing and containment strategies. We need to immediately stop the never ending educational campaigns and petitions and workshops. They haven’t worked, they aren’t going to, and data suggests that these efforts may actually make white men MORE hostile to other demographics in the field. 

We need to IMMEDIATELY restructure our efforts around venture capital, NOT startups, and, instead of taking an educational approach, take an adversarial approach that is clear and realistic about what type of people we are dealing with. These are organized crime rings; our strategies must respond to that. 

We need to IMMEDIATELY stop focusing on internal (within startups) efforts; these have not created any notable changes. We need to work as an outside pressure, working with other affected groups, and directly confront the power. 

It is time for change. There is no plausible deniability left to work on these failed strategies. Our strategies have been soft and immaterial — representation, inclusion, education, unconscious bias, the pipeline. 

What we need now is something much more material, something much harder: direct confrontation with the fucking psychopathic monsters that are running this industry and leading us further into a global hell of city takeover, perpetual surveillance, high-tech warfare and economic exploitation of the most severe parameter. 

It’s time to get rid of venture capitalists and take this industry back for the people. Let’s fucking go.