<story><title>Ben Horowitz Explained</title><url>http://fitsnstarts.tumblr.com/post/72678355503/ben-horowitz-explained</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lhnz</author><text>This is a beautiful post. I don&amp;#x27;t know these people personally but I&amp;#x27;ve deep respect for those that understand inequality, and wish to pay it more than just lip service.&lt;p&gt;They are completely correct. You can&amp;#x27;t just create separate clubs for new cultures entering the system, you have to help them to connect into the dominant networks and that means legitimising their own culture in the dominant one. This is one of the reasons I&amp;#x27;ve found it so disgusting how the tech community reacts around the site RapGenius: there&amp;#x27;s this undercurrent of hatred for baller&amp;#x2F;rap&amp;#x2F;black (so-called &amp;quot;douchebag&amp;quot;) culture which seems to aggravate every single PR problem they have.&lt;p&gt;I remember a couple of weeks ago seeing a few people turn their noses up at poetry.rapgenius.com (and other networks on the same platform) but I can&amp;#x27;t think of a better way to let both cultures cross-pollinate.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Networks equal access to jobs, funds, and deal flow, and the networks that run silicon valley are Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Google, HP, Ebay, Facebook, Apple, and PayPal.&lt;p&gt;Is anybody else genuinely annoyed that sites such as angel.co use these as legitimising signals of worthiness?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dylandrop</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; there&amp;#x27;s this undercurrent of hatred for baller&amp;#x2F;rap&amp;#x2F;black (so-called &amp;quot;douchebag&amp;quot;) culture&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but the hatred for RapGenius doesn&amp;#x27;t come from programmers hating black culture. It&amp;#x27;s from the founders being fake, and as you said, douchebags. They&amp;#x27;re three white Yale graduates trying way too hard and ultimately being inauthentic. That&amp;#x27;s what&amp;#x27;s off-putting -- saying things like &amp;quot;baller-sourced&amp;quot; [1] just is an obvious ploy, appropriating words to give themselves fake credentials and personalities as rap aficionados.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo&lt;/a&gt; (~1:30)</text></comment>
<story><title>Ben Horowitz Explained</title><url>http://fitsnstarts.tumblr.com/post/72678355503/ben-horowitz-explained</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lhnz</author><text>This is a beautiful post. I don&amp;#x27;t know these people personally but I&amp;#x27;ve deep respect for those that understand inequality, and wish to pay it more than just lip service.&lt;p&gt;They are completely correct. You can&amp;#x27;t just create separate clubs for new cultures entering the system, you have to help them to connect into the dominant networks and that means legitimising their own culture in the dominant one. This is one of the reasons I&amp;#x27;ve found it so disgusting how the tech community reacts around the site RapGenius: there&amp;#x27;s this undercurrent of hatred for baller&amp;#x2F;rap&amp;#x2F;black (so-called &amp;quot;douchebag&amp;quot;) culture which seems to aggravate every single PR problem they have.&lt;p&gt;I remember a couple of weeks ago seeing a few people turn their noses up at poetry.rapgenius.com (and other networks on the same platform) but I can&amp;#x27;t think of a better way to let both cultures cross-pollinate.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Networks equal access to jobs, funds, and deal flow, and the networks that run silicon valley are Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Google, HP, Ebay, Facebook, Apple, and PayPal.&lt;p&gt;Is anybody else genuinely annoyed that sites such as angel.co use these as legitimising signals of worthiness?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joncooper</author><text>I enjoyed the post.&lt;p&gt;My take on the this is that tremendous amount of access politics in the Bay Area seem to revolve around where you went to school and what your pedigree is, and that since those are very highly correlated with the class you were born into, it ends up being emergently classist.&lt;p&gt;Poor people mostly don&amp;#x27;t go to the schools that matriculate the players who participate in the traditional valley power scene. I don&amp;#x27;t buy that this scene is any more racist than the rest of the US, and probably would argue that it is less so. But in terms of class bias, I think considerably greater. And the low incidence of black and latino folks can be attributed significantly to their statistically-lower class distribution.&lt;p&gt;As an anecdotal data point, I haven&amp;#x27;t met a lot of white people from lower-class backgrounds who are players in the Bay Area technology scene. Actually haven&amp;#x27;t met a lot of technology workers that are.&lt;p&gt;This is in contrast to the environment when I worked in finance in NYC and London. I found that scene to be transparently racist and sexist, but there are very many powerful white dudes who started off poor and lower-class.</text></comment>