zlacker

> The problem isn't sexism/racism/etc per-se, and more the current culture of airing dirty laundry in public, amplified by hungry mobs and social media companies who profit off the resulting dumpster fire ("engagement" as they call it).

I see the latter as a mere symptom of the former—that is, the angry mob is a side effect of the rampant discrimination. It’s certainly not limited to tech, although I’m sure each industry experiences it differently.

> Nowadays however, it's commonplace to turn it into dirty laundry and air it on social media and wait for the mob to jump in, which also allows false accusations and witch hunts to emerge.

Perhaps, but that all goes away if discrimination is eliminated from our culture. And make no mistake—it’s rampant. It’s not specific to any single industry or country.

What’s curious is that although the specifics of any given case of discrimination are often disputed, there does seem to be a general consensus that it’s an issue. We might not all agree on what constitutes discrimination, but most of us acknowledge that it’s a major social issue for the entirety of humanity. Yet, despite this acknowledgement, we’ve never really found a solution other than, “educate people and wait a few generations.”

We’ve found ways to combat pandemics in ways our ancestors thought impossible. We’ve found ways to travel to the moon. We’ve found ways to communicate instantaneously across the world. Yet imagining such a casual solution to social issues seems to be naïvely optimistic at best, delusional at worst.

Who will be the Gutenberg or Pasteur of our social revolution? I’ve come to expect amazing things from humanity; I’m sure we can pull it off again.

>>zenexe+(OP)
My problem with this whole situation is that I'm not sure the mob is angry because of the discrimination problem as opposed to pretending to be angry and virtue-signaling to take advantage of the situation. I'd bet that for every person legitimately angry about the situation and has valuable input, there will be dozens who simply exploit the situation for their own benefit. This isn't limited to people even - companies do this too.

The mob mentality itself supports this theory; a genuine effort to solve discrimination would involve respectful communication in an attempt to understand the problem, iron out any misunderstandings and change minds; but this is not what we see - instead we have witch-hunts, partly because the mere appearance of being human towards the "enemy" would cause the rest of the mob to turn on you, but maybe also because there isn't much willingness to actually solve the problem, or maybe even because there wasn't actually a problem if you drill down into the details?

This reminds me of Daryl Davis, a black man who attended KKK rallies in an effort to understand their racist opinions and change their minds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis - that is a genuine effort to solve a problem, which unfortunately wouldn't be possible today because you'd be attacked by the mob for attempting something like this.

> Perhaps, but that all goes away if discrimination is eliminated from our culture.

I'm not sure this will go away; if certain people (or even entire industries) benefit from outrage they will happily find something else to be outraged about.

> We’ve found ways to combat pandemics in ways our ancestors thought impossible. We’ve found ways to travel to the moon. We’ve found ways to communicate instantaneously across the world. Yet imagining such a casual solution to social issues seems to be naïvely optimistic at best, delusional at worst.

The difference is that there is a major upside for solving these problems and little to no downside. I'm not sure whether mob/outrage/SJW culture will ever disappear instead of just digging even deeper for things to be offended about especially when money or virtue is at stake.