I miss email. I miss writing and receiving long letters with shared references and hyperbolic descriptions. I miss responding line by line, the effort of writing with a particular person in mind. I think there has been a drop in real correspondence since the newest crop of new micro and meta blogging tools.⁰¹ There was a lovely boom in letter writing in the nineties that corresponded with the adoption of email, but I am afraid that might be over. Great swaths of my journals were just cut and pasted correspondence until a couple of years ago. There’s not much of that there now. I’m still in touch with most of the same people, and, although the conversations are more frequent, they are neither as complex nor as personal, mostly because they take place (more or less) in public or in 140 characters.

Actually I just conflated conversating with broadcasting, but they aren’t the same thing. I am starting to think that if we don’t have enough intimate, even secret exchanges with others, we are denying ourselves (not to mention the people we love) the chance to speak openly, mistakenly, and half-bakedly, without the complex disclaimers and defenses that go with writing for a more public, potentially hostile audience. If we don’t do that, we risk becoming our public selves; that is we become accustomed to being dishonest with ourselves, to portraying ourselves the way we want strangers to see us rather than speaking the way we do to someone whom we know plans on liking or loving us more or less indefinitely. We lose our sense of humor about ourselves and we forget how to speak honestly to a generous listener. I was reading about the history of Shinto recently and was struck by the emphasis on “sincerity” and the idea of being periodically cleansed in order to regain one’s sincerity, or ability to connect genuinely with the world. (It’s more than likely I made this all up based on a bad translation, but pretend it’s Shinto.) I thought of letter writing as a way of scrubbing away the crust of pretensions that build up as we communicate via broadcast.

At this point though, it feels like an imposition to send a long, newsy email. Inbox Zero is a cruel mistress. Also, how on earth did we have time to write such meandering epistles in the golden era of email? Maybe we should return to handwritten letters. That would hurt my hand, but I might actually do if it didn’t involve an altercation with the post office. How about hand-written and scanned letters? I could probably find the time if I cut one small activity like bathing.

Here’s the thing (another thing, sorry)—in order for a woman to convincingly make the claim that the technology-money world is a utopian meritocracy free of gender bias, she has to demonstrate an awareness of her own lack of objectivity. In case it’s not obvious, that means she has to make it clear that she understands she has much to lose by disagreeing with that widely accepted claim and much to gain by telling the story tacitly approved by those in power. By agreeing that the tech scene is a pure meritocracy and that the scarcity of women demonstrates their volatile emotions, lack of intelligence or commitment to hard work; she demonstrates the she is unthreatening to the incumbency of those in power, and sets herself apart from the popular stereotypes of the culture—particularly the trope of the woman who complains about sexism to make up for her technical incompetence. On the other hand, pointing out the existence of sexism is as good as saying to those in power that she is incompetent and expects special treatment as a token. She risks her reputation, the reputation of her company, her own livelihood and those of her employees, as she is even less likely to receive either funding or positive media coverage for her company if she’s considered an incompetent whiner by the people with the money.

Not only do women or minorities in these situations have more to lose, the relevant audience is incapable of hearing them, having already determined their worth and having every motivation not to rethink that determination. That’s why there’s an imperative for those placed objectively outside the scene or already within a position of power to point out the absurdities and inequities in the situation. And why it’s so disturbing when people who humbly do so are meta-critiqued for it. Conversations about the dicey business of representing a group you aren’t part of are worth having, but ultimately I choose to see the decision to recognize your own privilege and use it to defend others, as both generous and right.

On the other hand, allowing those in power to define the vocabulary, context, and parameters of the conversation, the way many of the groups advocating for women in technology do by responding in context to the latest mob of ignorant, pitch-fork-carrying commenters arguing the myth of the pristine tech meritocracy and denying their own privilege with their last breath, is a betrayal of the basic issue at stake. Women may be different than men in any number of ways, but that’s both irrelevant and impossible to quantify. We shouldn’t have to ape a ludicrous system, force our way into hostile environments, or speak a language that demeans us in order to be treated fairly.

That doesn’t mean I won’t speak up for someone else. Situations like these make me even more exquisitely aware of my (white, educated, middle class, developed world) privilege in almost every other context. But I’m not going to throw myself on this fucking grenade. I have too much work to do.

I am collaborating with my neighbor-friend to write a thing (we aren’t sure what it is yet) and we are working on dialogue in which two characters talk about why they each choose to work within different, but equally impossible systems—health care and public school. It’s been really hard for me because the idea of choosing to work within a sprawling system like either of those sounds crushing to me⁰¹, but the characters know with certainty (as does my writing partner, who used to be a public school teacher and now works in health care) that for the real, individual students and patients involved, their presence makes things go unequivocally better. And that’s enough of a reason. If it weren’t, they are good at it (they say like a chorus of Flannery O’Conners), and that together that makes it more than enough.

I suppose that’s the caketaker. I am not so good at it. I can’t take my eyes off the crazy-redundant-looping-mesmerizing systems. And I am, it not good, at least better at thinking about how to skip or short-circuit pieces of those, than I am at anything that requires I ignore them. Viz: I get all tangled up in the morality of either decision—work to staunch the blood flow from real, existing people and risk enabling a broken, sometimes bad system to continue to function, or work to fix the system and risk watching real, existing people topple over from blood loss.

I read an article a while ago about differences in the cultural context of drinking and drunkenness and it discusses how it turns out drinking doesn’t exactly break down our inhibitions so much as cut us off from any concern that’s not immediately in front of us. And I think to do the triage work, the work that real live people deserve, the work I admire and am horrified by, I would have to stay pretty drunk, pretty much all the time.

~

Yeah, yeah, and while I’m at it: Hey famous hipster writer, I call bullshit on your practice of regularly admitting to something really ugly and then refusing to take any responsibility for it by saying everyone feels that way and if they don’t, they aren’t being honest. No, not all of us are the same kind of asshole you are. Some of us have a rich array of other, different failings and if you were more curious about the inner lives of other people, you might productively notice them.