Okay, time for another mini-rant. And, seriously, I bristle at devolving into the get-off-my-lawn trope, but I find it difficult not to express myself. Anyway, all I was doing was logging into iCloud and I was presented with this:
What I’ve presented to you above is the entire “welcome” animation which takes place on the iCloud home page. It represents, I would assume, the people using iCloud. Based on these representations, I can only conclude, from the five human beings represented:
- 60% of them require glasses;
- 20% are Caucasian;
- 60% of them are female;
- 80% of them are outside North America;
- 0% of them are white guys
As for White Angle Saxon Protestants, like me, I assume it’s something like negative 90%.
See, I grew up through the infancy of computers. I was introduced to them in 1979, was programming in 1980, was writing nationally-published articles in 1981, and wrote my first published book about computers in 1982. This scene from War Games constitutes approximately 100% of what everyone that had anything to do with computers looked like………
In other words, if the above animation contained five different versions of Eddie Deezen, I wouldn’t be writing this bitchy post.
War Games was 40 years ago, so let’s get more modern and show a picture from 40 hours ago. Here is Elon with the Twitter engineers who actually chose to, God bless ’em, actually WORK hard at the company instead of being a bunch of social-engineering goldbrickers like the thousands of ex-employees that have ditched the placed already (and, inexplicably, are being handed three months full salary).
This picture was from 1:30 in the morning, and, as you can see, it’s a total sausage-fest. I would feel totally comfortable with this smelly hoard. These are my people!
My point is that my stomach kind of turns at the iCloud animation, because it’s virtue-signaling to the fifth power. Maybe it’s supposed to give me empathy to feel like what it feels like to be totally marginalized and not see someone who looks like me in a product (even one as simple as an animation), but I doubt it’s that contrived. It just seems to me someone was looking to score some serious points by showing every possible kind of person that looks absolutely nothing like the people who actually created Silicon Valley, which is basically super-smart, awkward, sexually-frustrated young men, of which I used to be a proud member.
Now excuse me while I put on a head scarf, don some cat-eye glasses, plaster on a smile, and give you a sassy wink. Because I’m like totally into high-tech and stuff.
