Today is my last day at Betabeat. I’m going to miss the site, the team and our lovely readers terribly, but there are a number of things I won’t miss about being a “tech blogger.” A few things that come to mind:
1. The words “pivot,” “disruption” and “game changing.”
2. Guys who try to hit on you by asking if you want to try on their Google Glass.
3. Unnecessary celebrity apps.
4. Lovable dorks in T-shirts for forgotten Techstars companies spilling their drinks on me at launch parties.
5. Booing the word “monetization” at New York Tech Meetup.
6. People with skin so thin they forget that they can just wipe their tears away with absurd checks from VCs or, even easier, pay a TaskRabbit to do it for them.
7. The communal obsessions with expensive, over-brewed coffee, Nike Fuelbands and auto-tweeting scales, all of which are basically just narcissism masquerading as enlightened futurism.
8. The notion that being the slightest bit critical makes you a “hater” and the idea that providing any kind of coverage that isn’t a big sloppy B.J. shows a lack of “journalistic integrity.”
9. Hacker News. In fact, all of the overeager start-up hangers-on and fedora-wearing “bitch, make me a sandwich” tools convinced code will save the world, whose willful blindness just helps perpetuate a sexist, racist, classist environment where white guys with computer science degrees can continue jerking off other white guys with computer science degrees until millions of dollars fall in their laps and they can shout, “MERITOCRACY.”
Also, all those snotty mansplainers and people who called me a “cunt” for talking about women in tech, and anyone who tries to derail honest conversation about these issues by finding minor typos or formatting errors that they can use to discredit my entire perspective so that they don’t have to reflect on their own participation in a culture that so clearly devalues women’s beliefs.
10. Meritocracy, in general, and the notion that tech is somehow a level playing field, unspoiled by entrenched societal attitudes that affect literally every single other industry on Earth. Silicon Valley isn’t a meritocracy when I’m the only girl at a Bitcoin meetup and my opinion is dismissed as “cute,” and it isn’t a meritocracy when women founders struggle with fundraising, because investors think their wombs are ticking time bombs, and it isn’t a meritocracy when people of color and the poor find it more difficult to succeed in tech. Once we get that through our skulls, maybe we can move forward and things can get better.
Of course, there are many things I will miss terribly, like writing about poop and that time my editor tried to get me to go on a date with a sex robot and What Will Elon Musk Think of Next and that one month where John McAfee went completely insane; I’ll miss watching hardworking entrepreneurs with incredible visions succeed and how contagious creativity can be and all those genuinely innovative ideas that make me reconsider my ban on the word “disruptive” (see No. 1). Those are the things that are funny and interesting and make tech blogging fun, and if we have to Close a lot of Tabs to find them, I suppose it’s worth it.
We’ll always have Twitter, bbs.
