you keep using that word

Wed Sep 3 19:37:48 BRT 2014

found this occasionally when looking on a pjax developer. it really
reflects my thoughts! you keep using that word

I keep seeing the word “meritocracy” pop up, mostly in discussions that
seem to have stemmed from Faruk Ateş’ “A primer on sexism in the tech
industry” <http://www.netmagazine.com/features/primer-sexism-tech-industry>.
Do yourself a favor, don’t go googling. It’s the same shit:
“Sexism isn’t real because I’m a woman and no one did the sexism to me!”
“Women resent being treated as women instead of being evaluated solely on
their capabilities!”
“You’re a sexist moron!”
“Some people called me a sexist moron after my moronic sexist blog post and
it hurt my little feelings and I’m leaving the internet!”
“You GUYS, remember this is supposed to be a *meritocracy*.”

Except no. No it fucking isn’t. Because a meritocracy is not a real thing.
It is a joke.

The word meritocracy comes from a political satire
<http://home.uchicago.edu/~aabbott/barbpapers/barbmerit.pdf>. It was never
meant to be something we should aspire to. It was the opposite, actually, a
warning about how we rationalize what we believe we’ve “earned”. If that
sentence doesn’t seem to you applicable to the tech industry and our
cyclical discussions about sexism, racism, and even occasionally classism,
go get yourself another cup of coffee.

There’s some dumb bullshit in one of the current crop of reaction posts
waxing poetic about “hacker culture,” and its freedom of speech and lack of
PC dogma. Hacker culture was a bunch of white dudes. Hacker culture is a
great example of a meritocracy. Some of the most privileged of the
privileged got together and formed a community around the idea that they
were smarter than everyone else. They created an arbitrary set of metrics
for membership and according to their metrics, they triumphed. This was the
first time in the history of the world white men had experienced the
elation of peer recognition.

A meritocracy is not a system for locating and rewarding the best of the
best. If it were, the “best of the best” in almost every goddamned industry
or group on the planet would not be a clump of white men. I’m having
trouble finding good stats on this, but white men are something like 8% of
the world’s population. When you go to a fucking conference and you look
around at all the white dudes, do you really honestly think, “Wow! What a
bizarre fucking statistical anomaly it is that basically everyone with the
special magic gift of computer programming happened to be born into a teeny
tiny little demographic sliver of the population”? Of course you don’t. You
don’t think about it. You focus on telling yourself that you’re supposed to
be there, because you’re so fucking smart, and if other people were as
smart or, if you prefer, they were “technically inclined,” they could be
there just as easily.

A meritocracy is a system for centralizing authority in the hands of those
who already have it, and ensuring that authority is only distributed to
others like them or those who aren’t but are willing to play by their rules.

Somebody on twitter told me that when the computer industry was
overwhelmingly female, it was due to merit. I think that makes a really
good counterpoint to this meritocracy bullshit. Because no, it was not due
to merit. Merit didn’t fucking enter into it. Most of those women had no
experience in the industry and – even if we accept the lol-worthy premise
that merit can be objectively measured – there was no way to evaluate their
merit as computer scientists. That’s not to say we shouldn’t use that as a
template. We absolutely should. Those women had jobs and were happy to have
them. They worked hard. Those who stood out did so because they had
demonstrated that their work was good (through their work, not through
their savvy) and because standing out and advancing the field was necessary *to
their work*. I would rather work with a roomful of those women than with
the arrogant, privileged brats our industry too often recognizes “merit” in
these days.

If we met the utopian ideal we toss around in blog posts, we’d still have
lots of middle-aged women in this field. We’d have black people. We’d have
Asian people – not a smattering, but a majority, cause the world is mostly
Asian people. We’d have an even ratio of men and women. Because if there’s
one thing I’ve learned after sixteen years in this career, it’s that if a
middle-class white boy who literally never had a job before getting a sweet
internship at some cutting edge technology company can eventually, through
practice, become a passable computer programmer, anyone can do it. If
there’s one thing I’ve learned after thirty-three years of being alive,
it’s that if you see middle-class white boys flocking in droves to a
particular career path, it’s a pretty fucking easy job and you should try
and get yourself one like that.

I guess that’s a little mean. Sorry, middle-class white boys. I’m not
calling you dumb. I’m calling you soft. I’m calling myself soft, also, and
everyone else who works in this field. What a meritocracy really protects
us from is challenge. If we don’t even allow most people through the gates,
we don’t have to worry that we might pale in comparison to them (pun
intended). There will always be a place for us in an industry we keep
others out of. That’s why we should seek out diversity – because the lack
of it makes us weak.

If you give a shit about this industry’s goals beyond making yourself look
smart and cool, for fuck’s sake, stop calling it a meritocracy.

-- 
"Lute pela sua ideologia. Seja um com sua ideologia. Viva pela sua
ideologia. Morra por sua ideologia" P.R. Sarkar

EITA - Educação, Informação e Tecnologias para Autogestão
http://cirandas.net/brauliobo
http://eita.org.br

"Paramapurusha é meu pai e Parama Prakriti é minha mãe. O universo é meu
lar e todos nós somos cidadãos deste cosmo. Este universo é a imaginação da
Mente Macrocósmica, e todas as entidades estão sendo criadas, preservadas e
destruídas nas fases de extroversão e introversão do fluxo imaginativo
cósmico. No âmbito pessoal, quando uma pessoa imagina algo em sua mente,
naquele momento, essa pessoa é a única proprietária daquilo que ela
imagina, e ninguém mais. Quando um ser humano criado mentalmente caminha
por um milharal também imaginado, a pessoa imaginada não é a propriedade
desse milharal, pois ele pertence ao indivíduo que o está imaginando. Este
universo foi criado na imaginação de Brahma, a Entidade Suprema, por isso
a propriedade deste universo é de Brahma, e não dos microcosmos que também
foram criados pela imaginação de Brahma. Nenhuma propriedade deste mundo,
mutável ou imutável, pertence a um indivíduo em particular; tudo é o
patrimônio comum de todos."
Restante do texto em
http://cirandas.net/brauliobo/blog/a-problematica-de-hoje-em-dia
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