mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

329K
active users

Cat Hicks

I strongly believe if we want to define "tech culture" as different than these narratives from the loudest richest voices right now, we need to USE OUR POWER to platform and amplify every example of work and vision that is *different* from this.

I'm not saying I don't understand the venting. I do. But I hope people can reflect that posting famous men's names three hundred times & never once sharing the names and work of good people, fighting important battles, is failing to use a form of power

I actually believe it is mentally, psychologically restorative to do this *whether or not* it changes anything (I also think it is a route to changing some things). Soaking yourself in the things you don't want will make what you don't want the only thing you can imagine.

Also, on repeating the narratives we don't want to define tech culture: their quotes sound mockable on the surface but they are not. Many mechanisms exist to perpetuate polarization and define what is the "ingroup" of tech. By activating social identity beliefs around who belongs (a core need) & invoking pre-existing stereotypes, they lean into people's group biases and fear of being the outgroup, and make deficit, biased evaluations of ability and achievement more cognitively available.

We need to combat this by highly valuing accuracy and truth, which can counteract groupthink. "When the accuracy goals outweigh the group-based goals, people will be less likely to engage in biased processing and less likely to believe false material to be true (Bullock, Gerber, Hill, & Huber, 2015; Jakesch, Koren, Evtushenko, & Naaman, 2018; Periera, Harris, & Van Bavel, 2019)." (from: doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.)

We already have values in tech around this that can work to counteract these beliefs

Social identities are much more fluid than we think, and we overestimate consensus across groups about social norms and frequently act assuming that fewer people will support us than actually would. We *can* expand identities to include others, and every action in this direction matters. In fact people *rapidly* tune to social identity goals (sciencedirect.com/science/arti)

I don't know about you but I'm not willing to let the window shift on who *I* see as "tech"

@grimalkina 💯times this, I wish everyone spent at least as long celebrating and amplifying more of what they *do* want to see in the world rather than only ever standing in opposition and reaction to what they don’t want to see. Bad stuff needs to be opposed but good stuff needs advocacy even more!