When I went to Harvard in the late 1990s, other folks had warned me that the (paper) freshman facebook was largely a way for skeevy guys to decide who they wanted to perv on, uh I mean "meet," IRL. So since we weren't allowed to have no headshot, I submitted my license photo.

And just so we're clear, Zuck was exactly one of these kinds of skeevy guys that lots of us were trying to protect ourselves from as undergrads. Now he's not a campus problem anymore though. He's a whole world problem. He literally built a platform around his skeeviness.

This is also important to understand in light of toxic masculinity & how young white men seen as "geeks" in the 90s & earlier 2000s often self-consciously appropriated a style of overt chauvinism to show they were "real men" & not "emasculated nerds": http://marhicks.com/writing.html#debrogramming …

It actually ties in, in a direct & scary way, with everything going on in "r*dpilling" & inc*l culture today, & the violent real world impacts of that. These links are not just juxtapositions or coincidences. They grew from the same soil of an increasingly sexist late digital age

It's almost like heteronormativity in tech and society is prescriptive as much as descriptive and has major real world impacts and long term consequences on our infrastructure?¯\_(ツ)_/¯





just sayin'... there's a lot of historical precedent.

You can follow @histoftech.

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