I'm going to spend some time tonight writing a longer thing about white men in tech and the fear of being cancelled, but want to drop a couple thoughts here before I write that post.

With the Basecamp debacle this week, it's the first time I have actually seen a cultural generational divide between those of us who were here at the beginning of the web and those living and working in it now.

And when you look at it through a lens of the startup/engineering-heavy way of thinking ("bring the solution not the problem, grind/hustle, this is bigger than society") of course the modern world looks like an "Oberlin class." (Also, Oberlin rocks, stfu Maciej.)

We saw the university as a hindrance, for good reason: There were no classes on building a website in 1995-00. We did it ourselves. So we eschewed the humanities for the concreteness of building. (Also, profs just droned on and on, c'mon, I just made bank on a startup.)

Over time, though, the myth of the internet being this magic land of egalitarian equality collapsed when the libertarianism at its heart ground at the world it was in. The web is HURTING the world. It's an extraction industry, just with clicks, attention, and server racks.

But when it's all working well for you, there's no need to change. You can live in that belief that what you are doing is GOOD, even as the evidence tells you otherwise.

What I hadn't thought about until this week is that we've been pointing fingers at Silicon Valley, when in reality we need to look at our own practices as white men to build this shit up. We didn't see our privilege. Then we started using it as a shield.

The ones who built the web are not the ones best suited to running the web. And worst of all, when they stop listening to users, the very people they're extraction all that cash and attention from, well. DHH and Jason Fried and Gruber and Pinboard happen. /rant