Metzl - Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland.

Author: Jonathon Metzl.

Review:

An overview and introduction into the major causes of politically induced death, of whites are cleared stated in this book. It talks about the outcome of whites in the rural Midwest after the Trump administration. Through the 3 major causes of death for rural white Americans are 1. Gun induced suicide, 2. Lack of hospital due to reduced ACA and 3rd. The reduction in education spending. All of those major scenarios have an epidemiological approach and conclusion of their research, introduction into the history of racism in that field, soulful interviews with communities that have gone through it, and with disclaimers of why a certain research approach was picked.

I’m really happy with this book’s introduction to the politics of guns, and is a great place to jump off into the world of gun related death statistics. Heavily reliable for the understandings of rural white Americans who’s lives, some racist, of why they do the actions they do. The conclusion of this book is thus: dying of whiteness.”

Reading Stats:

• 12/31/19 - 1/1/20

• Reading Level: Sophomore Level College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes

• The “Dickies” legislation that was passed in 1996 prohibits any NIH or public funding on any research that could be used to study gun violence or any research that has to do with gun prevention. The legislation has been renewed every year since then.

• Due to the lack of funding in gun prevention research, there is thus a lack of public information on guns! So one of the best place for gun information is from death! Since the “causes of death” section of death certificate includes guns. :D

• Fascinating research on suicidality methods! Thinking is the best prevention for suicide, thinking requires more time to concentrate the death. Thus pills have a 3 percent chance of death, even though it’s the highest weapon of suicide where as guns have 85 percent due to lack of time to think. To think then kill rather than eat, think, then die.

• How many people just wanted to make a statement, to the end that turned themselves into a number wasting away.

• Americans held 4.4 percent of the world population but owns about 43 percent of the world supply of privately own guns. Like whaaaa?? Also there’s 200 million guns in the United States, wtf.

• The gun acts as a form of totem for whites, it symbolizes: masculinity, freedom, and patriarchy. But for the non whites it’s like giving the tools of oppression to the oppressor (the whites).

• Gun Background Check law( PTP) In Missouri when the ptp law was rejected, there was an increase of 16 percent in gun suicides, where as the enforcement of sub laws in Connecticut has reduced gun suicide by 13 percent. Other variables has been included for control sample.

• White men in Missouri is 7x times more likely to kill them selves with a handgun than it is to protect themselves when armed. Bruh

• Cost! Healthcare. The ACA saved money and allowed people to live longer!

Kendi - How to Be an Antiracist

Author: Ibram X. Kendi

Review:

In an interlacing of pedagogy and personal livelihood, Kendi has given a clear account of overt racism compared to the more dangerous subversive racism in the United States. They are both politically induced racist policies that propagate into the world of racist thinking styles. In this overview course on what it means to be an anti-racist, compared to a racist, compared to an assimilationist, Kendi gives precise introductory origins of each sector of racist ideologies and their backgrounds. The book is broken down into Dualing Consciousness, Power, Biology, Ethnicity, Culture, Class, Queer, and a few more topics. Each section delves into each other as intersectional as it must be, and has a clear focus on the elucidation of such issues. Each issue chapter with terms and definitions, to clearly solidify what grounds of truth that we will be standing on. Each section has a form of personal anecdote, which later finds to be very important in the formation of policies, histories, and self-consciousness of that topic.

Overall, an excellent introduction to race talk, because all people can be racist, asians can be racist, black people can be racist, whites can definitely be racist because we all have the power to be racist. We all have the power to be anti-racist. This book is a must-read for all Americans, and especially for the African Americans who have anti-black-thoughts, and especially for the majority of the whites, who think that they don't see color.

Reading Stats:

• Reading Date: 1/2/20 - 1/3/20

• Reading Level:

  • African American: 8th Grade Level

  • White Americans: Freshmen College Level

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• 5-10% What is racism - a marriage of racist policies and ideologies, that produces and normalizes racial inequalities?

  • Racial Inequality: when two or more racial groups that aren't standing in an approximately equal footing. Ex: 71 percent of white families live in owned homes in 2014, compared to 44 percent of African Americans, and Latinx.

  • Racial Equality: When the different racial groups would own similar percentages rather than having a 30 percent difference.

  • Racist Policy: Any policy that would reproduce racial Inequality based statistics.

  • Antiracist Policy: Any policy that would reproduce racial equality based statistics. And the strategy is written laws that rule the people.

  • Why use these terms rather than more abstract and overview based terms like systematic oppression? These terms are more tangible in understanding, especially for those who aren't normalized to these terms. Racist ideas: Any notion that says one group is better than another in any way.

• ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none needs developing, and is supporting policy that reduces racial inequity.”

  • “ASSIMILATIONIST: One who is expressing the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioral enrichment programs to develop that racial group.

  • SEGREGATIONIST: One who is expressing the racist idea that a permanently inferior racial group can never be developed and is supporting policy that segregates away that racial group.

  • Since Reagan's agenda on "War on Drugs": from 1980 - 2000, 4x increase in the American prison population.

  • Whites are more likely than Black and Latinx to sell drugs.

  • African Americans are far more likely to be jailed than white Americans.

  • Non-violent Black drug offenders remain in prison for the same amount of time (58.87 months) as Violent white criminals (62.7 Month)

  • 2016, Black and Latinx people are grossly overrepresented in the prison population at 56%, while White People are grossly underrepresented at 30%. When looking at the national population of Black, Latinx, and White Americans, it's significantly off.

  • “Black people have often expressed a desire to be American and have been encouraged in this by America’s undeniable history of antiracist progress, away from chattel slavery and Jim Crow. Despite the cold instructions from the likes of Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal to “become assimilated into American culture,” Black people have also, as Du Bois said, desired to remain N*gro, discouraged by America’s undeniable history of racist progress, from advancing police violence and voter suppression, to widening racial inequities in areas ranging from health to wealth.”

  • “The White body defines the American body. The White body segregates the Black body from the American body. The White body instructs the Black body to assimilate into the American body. The White body rejects the Black body assimilating into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.”

  • “The Black body in turn experiences the same duel. The Black body is instructed to become an American body. The American body is the White body. The Black body strives to assimilate into the American body. The American body rejects the Black body. The Black body separates from the American body. The Black body is instructed to assimilate into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.”

  • “But there is a way to get free. To be antiracist is to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness. To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.”

• BIOLOGICAL ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences.”

  • “BIOLOGICAL RACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.

  • We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets.

  • “Looking back, I wonder, if I had been one of her White kids would she have asked me: “What’s wrong?” Would she have wondered if I was hurting? I wonder. I wonder if her racist ideas chalked up my resistance to my Blackness and therefore categorized it as misbehavior, not distress. With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if we are adults.

  • The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child.”

  • “We practice ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group or support a racist policy toward an ethnic group. Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior, instead of policies, as the cause of disparities between groups.”

  • “Where are you from?” - I am often asked this question by people who see me through the lens of ethnic racism. Their ethnic racism presumes I—a college professor and published writer—cannot be a so-called lowly, lazy, lackluster African American.
    ““Who do you think your fellow Ghanaian Americans got these ideas about African Americans from?” He thought much longer this time. From the side of his eye he saw another student waiting to speak to me, which seemed to rush his thoughts—he was a polite kid in spite of his urge to lecture. But I did not rush him. The other student was Jamaican and listening intently, maybe thinking about who Jamaicans got their ideas about Haitians from. “Probably American Whites,” he said, looking me straight in the eye for the first time.”

  • “Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups? - The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans is not that their transnational ethnicities are superior. The reason resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants.”

  • “all they saw were our dangerous Black bodies. Cops seemed especially fearful. Just as I learned to avoid the Smurfs of the world, I had to learn to keep racist police officers from getting nervous. Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths.”

  • The so-called “first Black president” followed suit. “It isn’t racist for Whites to say they don’t understand why people put up with gangs on the corner or in the projects or with drugs being sold in the schools or in the open,” said President Clinton in 1995. - Indeed, I was irresponsible in high school. It makes antiracist sense to talk about the personal irresponsibility of individuals like me of all races. I screwed up. I could have studied harder. But some of my White friends could have studied harder, too, and their failures and irresponsibility didn’t somehow tarnish their race. My problems with personal irresponsibility were exacerbated—or perhaps even caused—by the additional struggles that racism added to my school life, from a history of disinterested, racist teachers, to overcrowded schools, to the daily racist attacks that fell on young Black boys and girls.

  • -- while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy. This shouldn’t be surprising: One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary

  • Black people. the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE. I had already forked over $1,000 for a preparatory course, feeding the U.S. test-prep and private tutoring industry that would grow to $12 billion in 2014 and is projected to reach $17.5 billion in 2020. The courses and private tutors are concentrated in Asian and White communities, who, not surprisingly, score the highest on standardized tests. My GRE prep course, for instance, was not taught on my historically Black campus. “The teacher was not making us stronger. She was giving us form and technique so we’d know precisely how to carry the weight of the test. It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests—the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength.” Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism.

• COLORISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequities between Light people and Dark people, supported by racist ideas about Light and Dark people.

  • COLOR ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between Light people and Dark people, supported by antiracist ideas about Light and Dark people. Dark Black men regardless of qualifications? Even Dark Filipino men have lower incomes than their lighter peers in the United States. Dark immigrants to the United States, no matter their place of origin, tend to have less wealth and income than Light immigrants. When they arrive, Light Latinx people receive higher wages, and Dark Latinx people are more likely to be employed at ethnically homogeneous jobsites. “To be an antiracist is not to reverse the beauty standard. To be an antiracist is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups.

  • To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes. To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty.”

  • Skin-bleaching products were raking in millions for U.S. companies. In India, “fairness” creams topped $200 million in 2014. Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea.

  • 50% ANTI-WHITE RACIST: One who is classifying people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior or conflating the entire race of White people with racist power.

  • When on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida’s recount, I no longer saw the United States as a democracy. When Gore conceded the next day, when White Democrats stood aside and let Bush steal the presidency on the strength of destroyed Black votes, I was shot back into the binary thinking of Sunday school, where I was taught about good and evil, God and the Devil. - this is similar to what we going through right now.

• To Be an Antiracist:

  • To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people.

  • To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people.

  • To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites.

  • To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power. Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us.

• Getting over Powerless Defense, „When a Black man stepped into the most powerful office in the world in 2009, his policies were often excused by apologists who said he didn’t have executive power. As if none of his executive orders were carried out, neither of his Black attorneys general had any power to roll back mass incarceration, or his Black national security adviser had no power. The truth is: Black people can be racist because Black people do have power, even if limited.“

  • But according to the theory that Black people can’t be racist because they lack power, Blackwell didn’t have the power to suppress Black votes. Remember, we are all either racists or antiracists.

• CLASS RACIST: One who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes. ANTIRACIST ANTICAPITALIST: One who is opposing racial capitalism.

  • Pathological people made the pathological ghetto, segregationists say. The pathological ghetto made pathological people, assimilationists say. To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in poor Black neighborhoods are pathological.

  • In losing focus on racist power, they fail to challenge anti-Black racist policies, which means those policies are more likely to flourish. Going after White people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming Black life. In the end, anti-White racist ideas, in taking some or all of the focus off racist power, become anti-Black. In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people.

  • White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

  • This stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence. Recent research shows, in fact, that poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are. Racist Black elites thought about low-income Blacks the way racist non-Black people thought about Black people. We thought we had more than higher incomes. We thought we were higher people.

  • “The N*gro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,” Du Bois projected. “Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters.”

  • “In the forty years since Clark’s Dark Ghetto, dark had married ghetto in the chapel of inferiority and took her name as his own—the ghetto was now so definitively dark, to call it a dark ghetto would be redundant. Ghetto also became as much an adjective—ghetto culture, ghetto people—as a noun, loaded with racist ideas, unleashing all sorts of Black on Black crimes on poor Black communities.”

• SPACE RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to resource inequity between racialized spaces or the elimination of certain racialized spaces, which are substantiated by racist ideas about racialized spaces.

  • SPACE ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity between integrated and protected racialized spaces, which are substantiated by antiracist ideas about racialized spaces.

  • “If we can’t be objective, then what should we strive to do?” She stared at me as she gathered her words. Not a woman of many words, it did not take long.

    “Just tell the truth. That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth.”

  • Mazama, she lectured on Asante’s contention that objectivity was really “collective subjectivity.” She concluded, “It is impossible to be objective.”

  • The idea of the dangerous Black neighborhood is the most dangerous racist idea. And it is powerfully misleading. For instance, people steer away from and stigmatize Black neighborhoods as crime-ridden streets where you might have your wallet stolen.

  • Americans lost trillions during the Great Recession, which was largely triggered by financial crimes of staggering enormity. Estimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300 and $600 billion per year, according to the FBI. By comparison, near the height of violent crime in 1995, the FBI reported the combined costs of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion.

    • The argument: Black students are better served learning how to operate in a majority-White nation by attending a majority-White university.

    • The reality: A large percentage of—perhaps most—Black Americans live in majority-Black neighborhoods, work in majority-Black sites of employment, organize in majority-Black associations, socialize in majority-Black spaces, attend majority-Black churches, and send their children to majority-Black schools.

  • They are conceptualizing the real American world as White. To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as the “real world,” only real worlds, multiple worldviews. Why: unfairly comparing Black spaces to substantially richer White spaces. The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of a Stanford or Yale.

    • HBCUs to HWCUs of similar means and makeup, HBCUs tend to have higher Black graduation rates. Not to mention, Black HBCU graduates are, on average, more likely than their Black peers from HWCUs to be thriving financially, socially, and physically.

  • When black people create space, they see spaces of White hate. They do not see spaces of cultural solidarity, of solidarity against racism. They see spaces of segregation against White people. Integrationists do not see these spaces as the movement of Black people toward Black people. Integrationists think about them as a movement away from White people. They then equate that movement away from White people with the White segregationist movement away from Black people. Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy.

  • Non-White students fill most of the seats in today’s public school classrooms but are taught by an 80 percent White teaching force, which often has, however unconsciously, lower expectations for non-White students. When Black and White teachers look at the same Black student, White teachers are about 40 percent less likely to believe the student will finish high school. Low-income Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are 29 percent less likely to drop out of school, 39 percent less likely among very low-income Black boys.

  • White spaces that hoard public resources, include some non-Whites, and are generally, though not wholly, dominated by White peoples and cultures. White majorities, White power, and White culture dominate both the segregated and the integrated, making both White.

  • Integration had turned into “a one-way street,” a young Chicago lawyer observed in 1995. “The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around,” Barack Obama wrote. “Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial.” Integration (into Whiteness) became racial progress.

  • “Antiracist strategy fuses desegregation with a form of integration and racial solidarity. Desegregation: eliminating all barriers to all racialized spaces. To be antiracist is to support the voluntary integration of bodies attracted by cultural difference, a shared humanity. Integration: resources rather than bodies. To be an antiracist is to champion resource equity by challenging the racist policies that produce resource inequity. Racial solidarity: openly identifying, supporting, and protecting integrated racial spaces. To be antiracist is to equate and nurture difference among racial groups.”

  • But antiracist strategy is beyond the integrationist conception that claims Black spaces could never be equal to White spaces, that believes Black spaces have a “detrimental effect upon” Black people, to quote Chief Justice Warren in Brown. My Black studies space was supposed to have a detrimental effect on me. Quite the opposite. My professors made sure of that, as did two Black students, answering questions I never thought to ask.

• GENDER RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequity between race-genders and are substantiated by racist ideas about race-genders.

  • GENDER ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-genders and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-genders.

  • To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders. To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. To be antiracist (and feminist) is to level the different race-genders, is to root the inequities between the equal race-genders in the policies of gender racism.

  • “The intersection of racism and sexism, in some cases, oppresses White women. For example, sexist notions of “real women” as weak and racist notions of White women as the idealized woman intersect to produce the gender-racist idea that the pinnacle of womanhood is the weak White woman.”

  • the opposite of the gender racism of the unvirtuous hypersexual Black woman is the virtuous asexual White woman, a racial construct that has constrained and controlled the White woman’s sexuality (as it nakedly tainted the Black woman’s sexuality as un-rape-able).

  • Gender racism is behind the thinking that when one defends White male abusers like Trump and Brett Kavanaugh one is defending White people; when one defends Black male abusers like Bill Cosby and R. Kelly one is defending Black people.

  • For example, sexist notions of “real men” as strong and racist notions of Black men as not really men intersect to produce the gender racism of the weak Black man, inferior to the pinnacle of manhood, the strong White man.

  • Sexist notions of men as more naturally dangerous than women (since women are considered naturally fragile, in need of protection) and racist notions of Black people as more dangerous than White people intersect to produce the gender racism of the hyperdangerous Black man, more dangerous than the White man, the Black woman, and (the pinnacle of innocent frailty) the White woman.

  • These ideas of gender racism transform every innocent Black male into a criminal and every White female criminal into Casey Anthony, the White woman a Florida jury exonerated in 2011, against all evidence, for killing her three-year-old child. White women get away with murder and Black men spend years in prisons for wrongful convictions.

• QUEER RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequity between race-sexualities and are substantiated by racist ideas about race-sexualities.

  • QUEER ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-sexualities and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-sexualities.

  • "I thought about this hypersexuality and recklessness causing so many Black gay men to contract HIV. I thought wrong. Black gay men are less likely to have condomless sex than White gay men. They are less likely to use drugs like poppers or crystal methamphetamine during sex, which heighten the risk of HIV infections."

  • I watched, stunned, in awe of their intellectual attacks. I call them attacks, but in truth they were defenses, defending Black womanhood and the humanity of queer Blacks. They were respectful and measured if the victimizer was respectful and measured with them. But I call them attacks because I felt personally attacked. They were attacking my gender racism about Black women, my queer racism about queer Blacks, my gender and queer racism about queer Black women.

Additional Reference Links:

• Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X Kendi

• New York Times reading list for How to be an Antiracist

• GSU’s reading list for this book

• Kendi’s Talk at UC Berkley

• Kendi’s Commencement Speech at U of F

Lee - AI Superpowers China

Author: Kai-Fu Lee

Review:

The technological, cultural mindset of China is very different from the American mindset. That's an easy first sentence, for China has a history that spans to the 4000BC, and with it, a culture of Confucianism, Taoism, and, therefore, different styles of living and thinking. Then the last 100 years happened, Japan attacked China in WWII, then many internal conflicts also arose. Thus, in the 1990s, China was on the catchup for everything in the economic sphere, but all that has changed in the last 20 years. From what I've followed on the internet where the American mindset has a heavy bias against China, to the personal trip I took to China, I've noticed that if the United States ignore China as a worthy colleague or opponent in terms of technological progress, then China's sleeping dragon will soon dominate all things technology.

This book gives a reason as to why that is, why is China growing so fast? How do their culture allow for such growth? Why is the "copy cat" method of technology copying working? How are they using Copy Cat technology as a method of growth rather than copy? All of those questions are elucidated in the first section of Lee's book. In the later sections of this book, the assumptions made by Lee of the general AI future is are reasonable; nevertheless, there are many other people in the industry with more critical analysis of general AI. However, as I said, his analysis of China is magnificent.

I would heavily recommend this book for anyone who is in finance, technology or has an interest in Chinese culture. This book is meant for the understanding of how China operates, and not for how general AI research would operate in the future.

Reading Stats:

• 1/6/20 - 1/8/20

• Reading Level: Sophomore College, or Freshmen Level with Sino culture and business knowledge.

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 2018

• Relevancy: Until 2022

Quotes and Notes:

• “They were on roughly parallel tracks, and the United States was slightly ahead of China. But around 2013, China’s internet took a right turn. Rather than following in the footsteps or outright copying of American companies, Chinese entrepreneurs began developing products and services with simply no analog in Silicon Valley. Analysts describing China used to invoke simple Silicon Valley–based analogies when describing Chinese companies—“the Facebook of China,” “the Twitter of China”—but in the last few years, in many cases these labels stopped making sense. The Chinese internet had morphed into an alternate universe.”

• * Chinese urbanites began paying for real-world purchases with bar codes on their phones, part of a mobile payments revolution unseen anywhere else. Armies of food deliverymen and on-demand masseuses riding electric scooters clogged the streets of Chinese cities. They represented a tidal wave of online-to-offline (O2O) startups that brought the convenience of e-commerce to bear on real-world services like restaurant food or manicures. Soon after that came the millions of brightly colored shared bikes that users could pick up or lock up anywhere just by scanning a bar code with their phones.

• Tying all these services together was the rise of China’s super-app, WeChat, a kind of digital Swiss Army knife for modern life. WeChat users began sending text and voice messages to friends, paying for groceries, booking doctors’ appointments, filing taxes, unlocking shared bikes, and buying plane tickets, all without ever leaving the app. WeChat became the universal social app, one in which different types of group chats—formed with coworkers and friends or around interests—were used to negotiate business deals, organize birthday parties, or discuss modern art. It brought together a grab-bag of essential functions that are scattered across a dozen apps in the United States and elsewhere.

• * “As a result, American companies, citizens, and politicians have forgotten what it feels like to be on the receiving end of these exchanges, a process that often feels akin to “technological colonization.” China does not intend to use its advantage in the AI era as a platform for such colonization, but AI-induced disruptions to the political and economic order will lead to a major shift in how all countries experience the phenomenon of digital globalization.”

• * Copying ideas or product features is frowned upon as a betrayal of the zeitgeist and an act that is beneath the moral code of a true entrepreneur. It’s all about “pure” innovation, creating a totally original product that generates what Steve Jobs called a “dent in the universe.”

• * Startups that grow up in this kind of environment tend to be mission-driven. They start with a novel idea or idealistic goal, and they build a company around that. Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations. 

• * In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

• * Jarring as that mercenary attitude is to many Americans, the Chinese approach has deep historical and cultural roots. Rote memorization formed the core of Chinese education for millennia. 

• * “For years, the copycat products that emerged from China’s cultural stew were widely mocked by the Silicon Valley elite. They were derided as cheap knockoffs, embarrassments to their creators and unworthy of the attention of true innovators. But those outsiders missed what was brewing beneath the surface. The most valuable product to come out of China’s copycat era wasn’t a product at all: it was the entrepreneurs themselves.”

• * Combine these three currents—a cultural acceptance of copying, a scarcity mentality, and the willingness to dive into any promising new industry—and you have the psychological foundations of China’s internet ecosystem.

• * “That first act of copying didn’t turn into an anti-innovation mentality that its creator could never shake. It was a necessary steppingstone on the way to more original and locally tailored technology products.”

• * “Early Chinese tech entrepreneurs looking for mentors or model companies within their own country simply couldn’t find them. So instead they looked abroad and copied them as best they could.”

• * “It was a crude process to be sure, and sometimes an embarrassing one. But it taught these copycats the basics of user interface design, website architecture, and back-end software development.”

• * “They learned what worked and what didn’t with Chinese users. They began to iterate, improve, and localize the product to better serve their customers.”

• * “That strikingly fundamental difference in user attitudes should have led to a number of product modifications for Chinese users. On Google’s global search platform, when users clicked on a search result’s link, it would navigate them away from the search results page. That meant we were forcing Chinese “shoppers” to pick one item for purchase and then, in effect, kicking them out of the mall. Baidu, by contrast, opened a new browser window for the user for each link clicked. That let users try on various search results without having to “leave the mall.””

• * I’ve found Silicon Valley’s approach to China to be a far more important reason for their failure. American companies treat China like just any other market to check off their global list. They don’t invest the resources, have the patience, or give their Chinese teams the flexibility needed to compete with China’s world-class entrepreneurs. They see the primary job in China as marketing their existing products to Chinese users. In reality, they need to put in real work tailoring their products for Chinese users or building new products from the ground up to meet market demands. Resistance to localization slows down product iteration and makes local teams feel like cogs in a clunky machine.

• * Weibo, a micro-blogging platform initially inspired by Twitter, was far faster to expand multimedia functionality and is now worth more than the American company. Didi, the ride-hailing company that duked it out with Uber, dramatically expanded its product offerings and gives more rides each day in China than Uber does across the entire world. Toutiao, a Chinese news platform often likened to BuzzFeed, uses advanced machine-learning algorithms to tailor its content for each user, boosting its valuation many multiples above the American website. 

• * Underneath this transformation lay several key building blocks: mobile-first internet users, WeChat’s role as the national super-app, and mobile payments that transformed every smartphone into a digital wallet. Once those pieces were in place, Chinese startups set off an explosion of indigenous innovation. They pioneered online-to-offline services that stitched the internet deep into the fabric of the Chinese economy. They turned Chinese cities into the first cashless environments since the days of the barter economy. And they revolutionized urban transportation with intelligent bike-sharing applications that created the world’s largest internet-of-things network.

• * They aspire to the mythology satirized in the HBO series Silicon Valley, that of a skeleton crew of hackers building a billion-dollar business without ever leaving their San Francisco loft. Chinese companies don’t have this kind of luxury. Surrounded by competitors ready to reverse-engineer their digital products, they must use their scale, spending, and efficiency at the grunt work as a differentiating factor. They burn cash like crazy and rely on armies of low-wage delivery workers to make their business models work. 

• * Silicon Valley juggernauts are amassing data from your activity on their platforms, but that data concentrates heavily in your online behavior, such as searches made, photos uploaded, YouTube videos watched, and posts “liked.” Chinese companies are instead gathering data from the real world: the what, when, and where of physical purchases, meals, makeovers, and transportation. Deep learning can only optimize what it can “see” by way of data, and China’s physically grounded technology ecosystem gives these algorithms many more eyes into the content of our daily lives. As AI begins to “electrify” new industries, China’s embrace of the messy details of the real world will give it an edge on Silicon Valley.

• * By the end of 2017, 65 percent of China’s over 753 million smartphone users had enabled mobile payments.

• * Given the extremely low barriers to entry, those payment systems soon trickled down into China’s vast informal economy. Migrant workers selling street food simply let customers scan and send over payments while the owner fried the noodles. It got to the point where beggars on the streets of Chinese cities began hanging pieces of paper around their necks with printouts of two QR codes, one for Alipay and one for WeChat. Cash has disappeared so quickly from Chinese cities that it even “disrupted” crime. 

• * “Analysts dubbed the explosion of real-world internet services that blossomed across Chinese cities the “O2O Revolution,” short for “online-to-offline.” The terminology can be confusing but the concept is simple: turn online actions into offline services.” -- The O2O revolution was about bringing that same e-commerce convenience to the purchase of real-world services, things that can’t be put in a cardboard box and shipped across country, like hot food, a ride to the bar, or a new haircut. -- Silicon Valley gave birth to one of the first transformational O2O models: ride-sharing. -- After a day spent commuting on crammed subways and navigating eight-lane intersections, many middle-class Chinese just want to be spared another trip outdoors to get a meal or run an errand. Lucky for them, these cities are also home to large pools of migrant laborers who would gladly bring that service to their door for a small fee. It’s an environment built for O2O. 

• * From there the O2O models became even more creative. Some hair stylists and manicurists gave up their storefronts entirely, exclusively booking through apps and making house calls. 

• * “Chinese parents could hire van drivers to pick up their children from school, confirming their ID and arrival home through apps. Those who didn’t want to have children could use another app for around-the-clock condom delivery.”

• * “WeChat Wallet linked up with top O2O startups so that WeChat users could hail a taxi, order a meal, book a hotel, manage a phone bill, and buy a flight to the United States, all without ever leaving the app.”

• * “In effect, WeChat has taken on the functionality of Facebook, iMessage, Uber, Expedia, eVite, Instagram, Skype, PayPal, Grubhub, Amazon, LimeBike, WebMD, and many more. It isn’t a perfect substitute for any one of those apps, but it can perform most of the core functions of each, with frictionless mobile payments already built in.”

• * !!To Chinese startups, the deeper they get into the nitty-gritty—and often very expensive—details, the harder it will be for a copycat competitor to mimic the business model and undercut them on price. Going heavy means building walls around your business, insulating yourself from the economic bloodshed of China’s gladiator wars. These companies win both by outsmarting their opponents and by outworking, outhustling, and outspending them on the street.

• * “That willingness to go heavy—to spend the money, manage the workforce, do the legwork, and build economies of scale—has reshaped the relationship between the digital and real-world economies. China’s internet is penetrating far deeper into the economic lives of ordinary people, and it is affecting both consumption trends and labor markets. In a 2016 study by McKinsey and Company, 65 percent of Chinese O2O users said that the apps led them to spend more money on dining. In the categories of travel and transportation, 77 percent and 42 percent of users, respectively, reported increasing their spending.”

• * By enrolling the vendors, processing the orders, delivering the food, and taking in the payments, China’s O2O champions began amassing a wealth of real-world data on the consumption patterns and personal habits of their users. Going heavy gave these companies a data edge over their Silicon Valley peers, but it was mobile payments that would extend their reach even further into the real world and turn that data edge into a commanding lead.

• * Subsidizing both the client sides (worker and the client side payer) -- A large portion of cars on the leading Chinese platforms were traditional taxis driven by older men—people who weren’t in a rush to give up good old cash. So Tencent offered subsidies to both the rider and the driver if they used WeChat Wallet to pay. The rider paid less and the driver received more, with Tencent making up the difference for both sides.

  • * cheap pay to use bikes - those sensors generate twenty terabytes of data per day and feed it all back into Mobike’s cloud servers.

• “Chinese students of AI are no longer straining in the dark to read outdated textbooks. They’re taking advantage of AI’s open research culture to absorb knowledge straight from the source and in real time. That means dissecting the latest online academic publications, debating the approaches of top AI scientists in WeChat groups, and streaming their lectures on smartphones.”

• government Funding: Behind these efforts lies a core difference in American and Chinese political culture: while America’s combative political system aggressively punishes missteps or waste in funding technological upgrades, China’s techno-utilitarian approach rewards proactive investment and adoption. Neither system can claim objective moral superiority, and the United States’ long track record of both personal freedom and technological achievement is unparalleled in the modern era.

  • It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, one that runs on a peculiar alchemy of digital data, entrepreneurial grit, hard-earned expertise, and political will. To see where the two AI superpowers stand, we must first understand the source of that expertise.

• * One study by Sinovation Ventures examined citations in the top one hundred AI journals and conferences from 2006 to 2015; it found that the percentage of papers by authors with Chinese names nearly doubled from 23.2 percent to 42.8 percent during that time. That total includes some authors with Chinese names who work abroad—for example, Chinese American researchers who haven’t adopted an anglicized name. But a survey of the authors’ research institutions found the great majority of them to be working in China.

• * When Obama made plans for AI, there was no splash in the news pond, when China made similar announcements in 2018, it was a roaring success. This shows signs of political difference.

• * Between 2017 and 2020, the Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone plans to put at least 3 billion RMB (around $450 million) into AI development. That money will go toward a dizzying array of AI subsidies and perks, including investments of up to 15 million RMB in local companies, grants of 1 million RMB per company to attract talent, rebates on research expenses of up to 5 million RMB, creation of an AI training institute, government contracts for facial recognition and autonomous robot technology, simplified procedures for registering a company, seed funding and office space for military veterans, free company shuttles, coveted spots at local schools for the children of company executives, and special apartments for employees of AI startups. And that is all in just one city.

  • * Contrast that with the political firestorm following big bets gone bad in the United States. After the 2008 financial crisis, President Obama’s stimulus program included plans for government loan guarantees on promising renewable energy projects. It was a program designed to stimulate a stagnant economy but also to facilitate a broader economic and environmental shift toward green energy.

  • * “For the past thirty years, Chinese leaders have practiced a kind of techno-utilitarianism, leveraging technological upgrades to maximize broader social good while accepting that there will be downsides for certain individuals or industries.”

  • * Difference between the self driving car ethical question - West: What should a self-driving car “optimize for” in situations where it is forced to choose which car to crash into? How should an autonomous vehicle’s algorithm weigh the life of its owner? Should your self-driving car sacrifice your own life to save the lives of three other people?|| China: Chinese political culture doesn’t carry the American expectation of reaching a moral consensus on each of the above questions. Promotion of a broader social good—the long-term payoff in lives saved—is a good enough reason to begin implementation, with outlier cases and legal intricacies to be dealt with in due time.

• * internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI. Each of these waves harnesses AI’s power in a different way. 1, The first two waves—internet AI and business AI—They are tightening internet companies’ grip on our attention, replacing paralegals with algorithms, trading stocks, and diagnosing illnesses. Perception AI is now digitizing our physical world, learning to recognize our faces, understand our requests, and “see” the world around us. This wave promises to revolutionize how we experience and interact with our world, blurring the lines between the digital and physical worlds. Autonomous AI will come last but will have the deepest impact on our lives. As self-driving cars take to the streets, autonomous drones take to the skies, and intelligent robots take over factories, they will transform everything from organic farming to highway driving and fast food.

• ** Smart Finance’s deep-learning algorithms don’t just look to the obvious metrics, like how much money is in your WeChat Wallet. Instead, it derives predictive power from data points that would seem irrelevant to a human loan officer. For instance, it considers the speed at which you typed in your date of birth, how much battery power is left on your phone, and thousands of other parameters.

• * “OMO: online-merge-offline. OMO is the next step in an evolution that already took us from pure e-commerce deliveries to O2O (online-to-offline) services. Each of those steps has built new bridges between the online world and our physical one, but OMO constitutes the full integration of the two. It brings the convenience of the online world offline and the rich sensory reality of the offline world online. Over the coming years, perception AI will turn shopping malls, grocery stores, city streets, and our homes into OMO environments.”

• * The Confucian virtues is why Chinese is okay with follow culture: That type of data collection may rub many Americans the wrong way. They don’t want Big Brother or corporate America to know too much about what they’re up to. But people in China are more accepting of having their faces, voices, and shopping choices captured and digitized. This is another example of the broader Chinese willingness to trade some degree of privacy for convenience. That surveillance filters up from individual users to entire urban environments. 

• Shenzeng: * entire supply chain available for prototyping is in Shenzhen: At the city’s dizzying electronics markets, they can choose from thousands of different variations of circuit boards, sensors, microphones, and miniature cameras. Once a prototype is assembled, the builders can go door to door at hundreds of factories to find one capable of producing their product in small batches or at large scale. That geographic density of parts suppliers and product manufacturers accelerates the innovation process. Hardware entrepreneurs say that a week spent working in Shenzhen is equivalent to a month in the United States.

• * Xiaomi's smart appliance influence: It’s a constellation of price, diversity, and capability that has created the world’s largest network of intelligent home devices: 85 million by the end of 2017, far ahead of any comparable U.S. networks. 

• * the AI behind it. : Key to that incremental deployment will be the construction of new infrastructure specifically made to accommodate autonomous vehicles. In the United States, in contrast, we build self-driving cars to adapt to our existing roads because we assume the roads can’t change. In China, there’s a sense that everything can change—including current roads. Indeed, local officials are already modifying existing highways, reorganizing freight patterns, and building cities that will be tailor-made for driverless cars

• * At this point, we just don’t yet know where that bottleneck will be, and fourth-wave AI remains anyone’s game. While today the United States enjoys a commanding lead (90–10), in five years’ time I give the United States and China even odds of leading the world in self-driving cars, with China having the edge in hardware-intensive applications such as autonomous drones. In the table below, I summarize my assessment of U.S. and Chinese capabilities across all four waves of AI, both in the present day and with my best estimate for how that balance will have evolved five years in the future.

Reference Links:

• Wire Article: AI's real impact? Freeing us from the tyranny of repetitive tasks

• Youtube Interview: 'AI Superpowers': A Conversation With Kai-Fu Lee

• Kai-Fu Lee talk at Oxford University

• arXiv.org Free publication papers archive that was referenced.

• CGP Grey’s videos

  • On Self Driving Cars

  • Visual video on Machine Learning

  • AI taking over jobs.

Wiener - Uncanny Valley

Author: Anna Wiener

Review:

What does it mean to work in Silicon Valley post-2010? What does it mean to work in a world where the evolution of all aspects of life had been privileged, accelerated, and even "Optimized"? I disliked the term optimized, like Anna's observations too, I used to love it (and to an extent today, I still use that term in my life, as I manage different To-Do list, and optimizing strategies of delegation and GTD). I used to love the world of silicon valley and their holistic everything. How going down the streets of SF, I saw a techno-utopia rather than dystopia. I read the last chapter of this book sitting in the heated room of my company, on the massage chairs that my bosses put in for funsies. I love working in my work environment. I like a lot of things I do as a data analyst that covers the flow of traffic and how to find points of contention in our data-driven company. But the discontent and my relationship to the technopolitical world that we live in right now means that I have to be critical of everything that I do, everything that I write, many aspects of my life since most of them are on the internet.

This book isn't a revolution, or in theory, it's not a revolution in memoir, but it is a must-read for those who are coming into the adolescent world of the current technopoly. It's a tremendous holistic insight into the nature of technological change for the iGeneration (born post 1998ish), and Millenials, and even those who inspire or aspire into viral fame. It's a sad, yet revelatory insight into what the postmodern thinkers have projected, but actualized, and what how that effects us today. What I see in the online space is different than the real world, and yet I don't know what's real or not anymore. I no longer understand the power of Twitter trends as truth, compared to the racist incident that I had a few weeks before reading this book. When I said, wait, this guy was racist to me (saying that I looked like Randall Park), and yet, on the online world, this would never happen to me. I know where to go online, and however, in the physical meat spaced world, I had no idea most of the time.

A great read and a must-read for those growing up that aspire into silicon valley. An excellent read for me, because with all due respect, as a male, I can traverse into those tech worlds.

Reading Stats:

• 1/20/20 - 1/22/20

• Reading Level: Freshmen Level College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

• Publication Date: 2020

Quotes and Notes:

• Pivoting meant they were worried about runway. Pivoting meant they were a cautionary tale. Only the two cofounders were left, tucked off to the side. Everyone else had been let go once funding ran out.
• The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were only opportunities.
• I began to wonder why it was, exactly, that they had hired me. I had been operating under the vain premise that it was because I knew something about books: I could be a bridge between the old and new guards. I had fancied myself a translator; I had fancied myself essential. Later, once I better understood the industry-wide interest in promoting women in tech—if not up the ranks, then at least in corporate marketing materials—I would allow myself to consider that perhaps I was more important to the aesthetic than critical to the business.
• “We host full-time,” he said. “I guess you could say we work for a startup, too.” -- Could I? He and his wife had both quit their day jobs, in the nonprofit sector, to provide the trappings of an authentic urban experience—different enough to be interesting, -- They slept in the basement. They weren’t employees. They were part of the product.
• When asked how he would spend the new funding, the CEO made his priorities clear: he would pay the first hundred employees far above market, he said, and spoil current employees to retain them. This was the language of customer acquisition
• I was selling out. In reality, I was not paying attention: those who understood our cultural moment saw that selling out—corporate positions, partnerships, sponsors—would become our generation’s premier aspiration, the best way to get paid.
• Good interface design was like magic, or religion: it cultivated the mass suspension of disbelief.
• Anything an app or website’s users did—tap a button, -- stored, aggregated, and analyzed in those beautiful dashboards. Whenever I explained it to friends, I sounded like a podcast ad.
• Data could be segmented by anything an app collected—age, gender, political affiliation, hair color, dietary restrictions, body weight, income bracket, favorite movies, education, kinks, proclivities—plus some IP-based defaults, like country, city, cell phone carrier, device type, and a unique device identification code.
• The culture these inhabitants sought and fostered was lifestyle. They engaged with their new home by rating it. Crowdsourced reviewing apps provided opportunities to assign anything a grade: dim sum, playgrounds, hiking trails. Founders went out to eat and confirmed that the food tasted exactly how other reviewers promised it would; they posted redundant photographs of plated appetizers and meticulous restaurant-scapes. They pursued authenticity without realizing that the most authentic thing about the city was, at this moment in time, them.
• Even so, the enemy of a successful startup was complacency. To combat this, the CEO liked to instill fear. He was not a formidable physical presence—he had gelled, spiky hair; he was slight; he often wore a green jacket indoors, presumably to fight the chill—but he could scare the hell out of us. He spoke in military terms. “We are at war,” he would say, standing in front of us with his arms crossed and his jaw tensed. Across the world, Syria and Iraq and Israel raged. We were at war with competitors, for market share. We would look down at our bottles of kombucha or orange juice and nod along gravely.
• there was always an opportunity to accelerate straight into management, like skipping a grade, skipping three. We dressed however we wanted. We were forgiven our quirks. As long as we were productive, we could be ourselves. Work had wedged its way into our identities. We were the company; the company was us. Small failures and major successes were equally reflective of our personal inadequacies or individual brilliance. Momentum was intoxicating, as was the feeling that we were all indispensable.
• Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, or globalization—or maybe nihilism, but fun. It made me feel like I had just railed cocaine, except happy. It made me feel like I was going somewhere.
• He asked us to write down the names of the five smartest people we knew, and my coworkers dutifully obliged. --I wrote five names down: a sculptor, a writer, a physicist, two graduate students. I looked at the list and thought about how much I missed them, how bad I’d been at returning phone calls and emails. I wondered how I’d stopped making time for the things and people I held dear. I felt blood rush to my cheeks. “Okay,” the solutions manager said. “Now tell me, why don’t they work here?”
• Everyone was sorting out a way to live. Some of the women instituted systems of gender reparations with their male partners. Staunch atheists bought tarot decks and fretted over how best to infuse them with powerful energy; they discussed rising signs and compared astrological birth charts. They went to outposts in Mendocino to supervise each other through sustained, high-dose LSD trips, intended to reveal their inner children to their adult selves.
• Processing as a hobby made me feel an affinity for the cool, impersonal bullshit of business culture. Radical honesty often looked to me like a collapse of the barrier between subjectivity and objectivity. It could look like cruelty. But it also seemed to work.
• Much as we tried, we were not the CEO’s friends. We were his subordinates. He shut down our ideas and belittled us in private meetings; dangled responsibility and prestige, only to retract them inexplicably. He was not above giving employees the silent treatment. He micromanaged, was vindictive, made us feel inessential and inadequate. We regularly brought him customer feedback, like dogs mouthing tennis balls, and he regularly ignored us.
• I felt very protective of the CEO—or, at least, of my idea of him. For a long time, I would harbor a free-floating sympathy for people I imagined hadn’t had the opportunity to experience their youth the way I had. He never had space to fuck up. He’d been under pressure—and a certain degree of surveillance—from venture capitalists and journalists and industry peers since he was twenty. At the age when I was getting drunk with friends on bottles of three-dollar merlot and stumbling into concerts, splitting clove cigarettes and going to slam-poetry open mics, he was worrying about headcount, reading up on unit economics. I was exploring my sexuality; he was comparing health insurance providers and running security audits. Now, at twenty-five, he was responsible for other adults’ livelihoods. Some of my coworkers had families, even if they tried not to talk too much about their children in the office. Surely, he felt that weight.
• Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.
• I wanted to avoid, at all costs, being the feminist killjoy. -- I stopped wearing dresses, to stanch a recruiter’s stream of strange and unsettling compliments about my legs, which he spoke about as if I were a piece of furniture. A chair without a brain. A table with shapely legs. -- Sexism, misogyny, and objectification did not define the workplace—but they were everywhere. Like wallpaper, like air.
• The influencer brought a scooter into the office and rolled around barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking: value prop, first-mover advantage, proactive technology, parallelization. Leading-edge solutions. Holy grail. It was garbage language to my ears, but customers loved him. I couldn’t believe that it worked.
• I also resented that it seemed as if we had no choice: -- to skip out on the off-site. This made it feel like mandatory vacation, mandatory fun. Though it was a reward, a treat, the company trip was scheduled for a three-day holiday weekend, what others in the workforce might have considered personal time.
• Despite the family-friendliness, however, we lacked the natural ease of blood relatives choosing to vacation together. The housing groups had been preassigned, without employee consultation. I liked some of my coworkers better than others, but was largely indifferent to the sleeping arrangements. There was one person I hoped not to bunk with
• The CEO came in and announced that he was flipping the script: to allow the support team some leisure time, the engineers were to do our job instead. We’d spent the morning on the road and the day on the mountain, and the queue of customer tickets stretched out for hours. Already, most of us were drinking. Some had been drinking all afternoon. Though it wasn’t clear if we were working as we partied or partying as we worked, the scene in the condo was one of good-natured frustration as the engineers struggled to explain their own product to our users.
• didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to correct him. It was perhaps a symptom of my myopia, my sense of security, that I was not thinking about data collection as one of the moral quandaries of our time. For all the industry’s talk about scale, and changing the world, I was not thinking about the broader implications. I was hardly thinking about the world at all.
• As a software engineer, Ian had never encountered a job market with no space for him; he didn’t know what it felt like not to have mobility, options, not to be desired. He loved what he did and could easily command three times my salary. No company would ever neglect to offer him equity. He was his own safety net.
• The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate.
• At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.
• Unfortunately for me, I liked my inefficient life. I liked listening to the radio and cooking with excessive utensils; slivering onions, detangling wet herbs. Long showers and stoned museum-wandering. I liked riding public transportation: watching strangers talk to their children; watching strangers stare out the window at the sunset, and at photos of the sunset on their phones. I liked taking long walks to purchase onigiri in Japantown, or taking long walks with no destination at all. Folding the laundry. Copying keys. Filling out forms. Phone calls. I even liked the post office, the predictable discontent of bureaucracy. I liked full albums, flipping the record. Long novels with minimal plot; minimalist novels with minimal plot. Engaging with strangers. Getting into it. Closing down the restaurant, having one last drink. I liked grocery shopping: perusing the produce; watching everyone chew in the bulk aisle.
• human. The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop? Charts and data sets. It wasn’t, to me, an aspiration. It was not a prize.
• At the very least, I figured, employees would be talking about sexism openly. Sexism had to be part of the internal conversation. I’d read Foucault, a million years ago: discourse was probably still power. Surely, in the fallout, women would have a place at the table.
• This was peak venture capital, the other side of the ecosystem. The company appeared to be spending its hundred million dollars in venture funding the way any reasonable person would expect founders in their twenties to spend someone else’s money: lavishly. I didn’t need to compare the office to the austere, fluorescent-lit tundra of the analytics startup, or even to Ian’s cool, industrial-chic robotics warehouse, to appreciate the novelty of the work space. It was a fever dream, a fantasy, a playground. It was embarrassing, too giddy; more than a little much.
• For nearly two years, I had been seduced by the confidence of young men. They made it look so simple, knowing what you wanted and getting it. I had been ready to believe in them, eager to organize my life around their principles. -- an entire culture had been seduced. I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.
• To ensure that all employees were on equal footing regardless of geography, the majority of business was conducted in text. -- All internal communications and projects were visible across the organization. Due to the nature of the product, every version of every file was preserved. The entire company could practically be reverse engineered.
• But also—it was complicated. “On the one hand, if we have a problem with sexism or sexual harassment, then that problem needs to be addressed,” a teammate told me. “On the other hand, this hurt everyone.” I asked what she meant, and she pushed her hair to the side. “I don’t know if the company will ever recover from this,” she said. “And, to put things bluntly, she wasn’t the only one with equity.”
• Our relationships, fostered through software, did not immediately map onto physical reality. We were all more awkward in person than in the company chat rooms and over video, where conversation flowed.
• I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted.
• “Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” said an internal tools developer, rolling her eyes. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.” -- Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely, we joked, though of course we were wrong.
• The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next.
• Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to.
• It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach.
• On any given night in America, exhausted parents and New Year’s–resolution cooks were unpacking identical cardboard boxes shipped by meal-prep startups, disposing of identical piles of plastic packaging, and sitting down to identical dishes. Homogeneity was a small price to pay for the erasure of decision fatigue. It liberated our minds to pursue other endeavors, like work.
• My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick;
• Technology was gnawing into relationships, community, identity, the commons. Maybe nostalgia was just an instinctual response to the sense that materiality was disappearing from the world.
• But using male pseudonyms wasn’t just useful for defusing or de-escalating tense exchanges. It was useful for even the most harmless support requests. I was most effective when I removed myself. Men, I saw, simply responded differently to men. My male pseudonyms had more authority than I did.
• I wasn’t sure why anyone should be so eager to hand the keys to society over to people whose primary qualification was curiosity. I wasn’t eager to go to bat for older industries or institutions, but there was something to be said for history, context, deliberation. There was something to be said for expertise.

This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto by Suketu Mehta

By: Suketu Mehta

Review:

Suketu Mehta, a first-generation immigrant's open manifesto on what it means to be an immigrant in this country and some other countries as well. This book backs up the personal narrative from those seeking to cross the borders with statistics about them, making his arguments much more convincing both on moral grounds and on statistical grounds. The first part of this book hit me hard. Many times it triggered me due to how close I was personally to these migrants journeys. Thankfully the second part of the book was a lot easier for me to digest due to the more global ideas on migrants. For example, he covers much about colonialism, war, global warming, and various factors that aren't covered by the Trump administration.

The last part of the book, however, gave some impressive stats on why immigration is a good thing for many first-world nations. Notability that the more immigrants there are (whether legal or illegal), the better the crime rates become (lower crime rates). There is an increase in social security benefits for the older generations since most of the new migrants are younger influx.

The hardest part that one ought to think about is the cost of the first immigrant communities. Because once the migrants are set in, the following generations provide financial, social, and educational improvements to the culture around it.

Overall, a fantastic statistically filled book on what the cost of immigration, whether legal or illegal is, that covers the full map of immigration issues.

Stats:

• Reading Date: 12/9/19 - 12/9/19

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• "It’s astonishing that the multiculturalism is lower Manhattan had some of the lowest crime rates since 1950s due to the amount of immigrants there."

• "Among the various themes I've learned from this book so far, on why migration exist in many third world countries is, global warming. Migrants can't eat because the lands are dry, where the only source of jobs is the militias. Also with 1.5 raise in global temperature, there's a 15 percent lost of corn in India."