How to be a Good Collaborator in Tech Without Even Being a White Guy! 

Whilst Elon Musk and fellow Muskateers track the bajillionair tech giant’s personal aircrafts in their quest to follow his next dumb act, we women of the world are sitting here going 

WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK !? 

Who cares where this guy’s jet is, how big his___ is or even what he will do next.

We have bigger catfish to fry! #amIright??

At least his most recent public opinion poll indicates that the general populace (still on Twitter) thinks Musk ought to step down from his leadership role with Twitter. You may have thought the open letter penned in early November of this year from the United Nations  asking Musk to consider human rights from the Twitter pulpit would have prompted such a pass of the torch sooner. But sadly, that’s just not how the ego lead use of big tech works. 

{ See Zuckerberg at the Senate hearing on his social network’s use of data or rather the misuse of it data privacy } 

Spoiler alert: big tech has not been built for anyone but the ‘early pioneers’ of the internet’s open, albeit wild wild west frontier that chiefly looks like Zuckerberg & Musk. They and their forefathers 

( literally) have been stealing the ideas of less known folks like Hedy Lemarr. Hedy was known for her late 1930’s Hollywood star power but also for developing a radio guidance system aka frequency hopping tech aka EARLY INTERNET for allied forces during WW2. Hellllllllo women in tech! Vintage, glam AND tech savvy. I would have totally swiped right on Ms. Hedy and also been sure she had proper credit for her advances both off the screen as well as on. 

Oh the patriarchy is thick, isn’t it! 

Though a collaborative nod must also be paid to Dr. Philip Emeagwali for his early work on integrating much of this same science Ms. Lemarr had worked with the modern day version of what we now know as Google. Dr. Emeagwali is amidst a long line of innovators including inventors Granville T. Woods (1856–1910) who’s patent for was bought by Alexander Graham Bell, most commonly credited as inventor of the telephone but it was really Woods who was key to its development. As well as Marie Van Brittan Brown (1922-1999), a nurse who developed a prototype for closed circuit television security, or as we more commonly call it, CCTV. You can thank Ms. Brown for your Nest and any other tech trinkets that allow you to spy on your own home!

But what if we framed the use of the internet in a fully different way? Like what if it was generative instead of its current use of being absolutely, 100 % extractive? (Hello data mining !!) Aside from the innovator grabs that have historically shown the white guys get to market first with groundbreaking tech, what if we shifted the way tech was built altogether?  This, of course, would mean we need to shift who holds the power of the tech, the check book and well, the mighty (Twitter) microphone!

The way that Musk and most of Silicon Valley have built their success has been on super rapey vibes, ya’ll. There I said it. Modern day tech is in no way collaborative. 

Modern day tech is non consent based. It’s exploitive at best and the super rapey vibes don’t just start in the dm’s. Ladies, I know I don’t need to tell you that. The way this “could be technology collaboration’ fails, is because it has not been built to better the human species; it’s been built to take and take and take. I think …no, I KNOW we can do collaboration better.

We can do tech better in 3 distinct ways: 

We can be more inclusive as we build tech. This is an obvious solution but it has to be said over and over AND over again. In creating advanced solves for humans to do better tomorrow cannot just be band aids for today.  Certainly, we could do better TODAY to ensure a variety of voices & differentiated lived experiences to be part of the build of that technology. But we have to ensure the moves today stick for tomorrow and the next day. Take AI’s freshest tech baby ChatGPT for example. Super cool way to shave minutes, hours maybe even days off of our busy work loads. But I am curious about this technology reflecting the insights of not just the white men who have historically run tech and been chiefly responsible for its procreations.

Sentient robots seem mildly helpful, if even a bit scary but even scarier are they if  they have the emotional band width of any of the dudes I’ve dated in the past.

Sorry not sorry, I’d suggest a swipe left on that. 

We can be so much more collaborative in the process of sourcing talent by building better pipelines to these jobs in the first place. I was recently talking with a fella industry disruptor, a black woman in tech, and she shared with me just how far we are missing the mark of diversity from those entering into the workforce in tech and related sciences. She reports directly from her post in tech that whilst women, particularly women of color are the most educated group in the US at present, she doesn’t feel like she has stable footing in her upper management role. Why, if women are becoming so well trained and educated, is it so hard to get a good, secure seat at the tech table?  And what about that good old fashioned meritocracy?  

After all, she had done her homework, is very skilled, qualified and merited but as layoffs are imminent in this current economy, she is well aware of how stable her small seat at the vacillating table isn’t. And this is likely the case in various other tech hubs as well as businesses regardless of the space they occupy as we work to fill optics but not actually lean into the social change that is needed to keep these posts as influential and crucial to their jobs’ objectives.  

It’s also worth noting that women make up 53 % of the United States population, 47.7% of the global workforce and contribute $1.9 TRILLION dollars into this US economy on average each year but yet we don’t have a strong footing in tech and its advancements for the human species. We also don’t yet have a space designed by, built for and with the safety of women in mind to commune online. 

Certainly there are such fine, niche groups as the Dow Janes who chat all things Money as it pertains to equity for women.    

Verve Romance is a space built specifically for women to connect about sex positivity by way of Romance literature, and She Should Run leads with civic engagement for women through a political lens. But notably, because women have not been taken into account when large platforms like FB, Twitter and the like where created, there are zero, non niched, online forums where women can show up safely to just exist and speak about things which matter to us without the worry we will be attacked, blamed or shamed for doing so. And so sub groups emerged.  As it is so eloquently pointed out in this recent Forbes article, we often see less women participating in larger conversations online, outside of niche communities on key topics in leadership like money, sex and politics  because we are disproportionately targeted in online bullying; even when we just show up to say “Hello, like my shirt!?” Because if we speak to our real voices, we may offer a possibly divisive opinion. And what if we did that? What if we used our voice to inform the way tech progresses without the chance we’d lose our social footing, sanity or sense of safety? 

The third and final way I can see us collaborating in the world of tech better in 2023 and beyond has to do with diligently preparing the youth for success in said dumpster fire, train wreck, recessioning world without them having to purchase a #45 NFT trading card 🙂 

We can share tech resources to young people sooner than later. And I don’t just mean buying them more tokens for Minecraft. Let’s assist the survival of next generations that will undoubtedly be tech centered by creating programs for kids at various socioeconomic levels. Big tech could do well to build stronger pipelines into their hiring pool by offering access to not just computers, tablets and smartphones but ensuring high speed internet access is as accessible as clean water. But, as we know, we are also still working on that!

Whilst this entry might be read as an attempt to save all the tech wales, it’s really a call to action around how we use tech daily, what we are willing to put up with and how we equip ourselves and our future selves for interactions that actually serve us instead of us serving the internet beast. As it’s been built, we are quite literally slaves to an extractive model. 

And, it doesn’t have to be this way.