Some years ago, at a company in the Midwest, I was reprimanded by my employer for “fraternizing” with the “lower” engineers. This same employer also refused any offer to socialize with yours truly; then a bright eyed and bushy tailed English immigrant with a young family and a fresh doctorate from the Sorbonne.
His reason in both these cases was the same, “It makes it harder to fire people,” he said.
The group of QA engineers he was referring to were working on a product for the illustrious, but imminently terminal, Kendall Square Research. I was responsible for the technical relationship and getting the product back on track.
The fact is, I am comfortable talking with people from a variety of educational and economic backgrounds – perhaps that has to do with my own origins – but, in this case, there was method to this supposed madness. I needed to know the technical problems with the KSR product, and the truth is that the QA team told me more in social settings and in informal hallway conversations than I could ever get in filtered formal meetings.
Shortly after my arrival in the Valley, the Taiwanese CEO of a new start-up went to great lengths to explain how inferior the Chinese people felt European intellectuals are. They think we are Barbarians apparently. The disclosure was conspiratorial and, it seems, meant to make me feel better somehow about being associated with the predominantly Chinese company.
Some years later I promoted an attractive female engineer in favor of male counterparts and was promptly asked by the CEO if I was having an affair with her. No, I explained, unlike her male counterparts she had a scientific training, in addition to her outstanding record, and this better qualified her for the role on my team.
More recently, also here in the Valley, interviewing for the Executive Director position of a new Research Institute. I am told by non-white candidates and advisers that in the USA you simply cannot place a non-white person in that top position if you want to succeed.
The color issue is underscored for me recently in debates in working-class studies forums in which the white working-class are subjected to racial prejudice from non-white working-class groups because the they benefit peripherally from the systemic prejudice of US society. I argue that prejudice is unacceptable in any degree and that the white working-classes cannot be penalized for perceived benefits of the prejudice that is outside of their control, but I understand the resentment that leads us to these vicious cycles.
I recall, growing up in working-class England, that one of the favorite pastimes of white working-class Yobs is “paki-bashing” - violence aimed at the influx of Pakistani immigrants. Witness myself to the continuing prejudice toward Pakistani's in the members of my family that linger in the English working-class, I am ultimately unsurprised that it is Pakistani youth raised in England that become the new generation of terrorist and bomb the London underground.
Just yesterday I was asked by a prominent Valley personality if the product my start-up project is building could be extended to allow individuals to rate content. “For example,” he said, “articles on Evolution.” Given the recent public torture of the subject, I observed that I didn't think such a feature would be useful since I would fully expect articles on Creationism to supersede those on Evolutionary Convergence Theory (the most advanced form of Evolutionary Theory).
At this point I'd like to tell the story of Hyapatia and Library at Alexandria, but I fear for the attention span of my audience – and in any case it is too late, the mob is upon us.
Growing up in the 1970's, with the foundations of the 1960's behind us, I had somehow come to believe that we lived in enlightened times. As the 1980's was born and the first public networks appeared, I became convinced of it. And fifteen or so years ago the Internet, bright eyed and bushy tailed, promised a new future, one in which information and, potentially, education was at everyones finger tips. A world where individuals were knowledgeable and enlightened, and one believed, compassionate. I, and I hoped the rest of my generation, saw a world where reason prevailed and where peace was the natural order.
What the hell happened?
In the recent frenzy of Google panacea one is left wondering if the transformation of the modern world into the information age has served us well. The quick fix info junky with a poor education and impatient self-learning is now the master of the art of “Googling” and “Cut and Paste” - creating the illusion of deep and substantive knowledge in a paper thin web of guessed relevance, creating a world of illusion where the teen and the senile dominate the truly professorial.
In the fifteen minutes of Warholian fame foist upon us by each blogger, chat room commentator, or web page narcissus, whence authority?
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