This is something I want to write at length about, but I can start with this. I'm not the same person I was last year, five years - shit, a decade ago. I was posing in front of a Tesla after going to a Thiel Fellowship meeting because from what I was told, these people were "changing the world".

Then I got more causally involved in what this industry does, with the same people around me then. There's quite a few of them left - and I'm not too torn up about it (it's always hard to disconnect from people) because the constant reminder that wealth and misogyny is way more to maintain than giving half of a shit about people — even those who show directly how this shit affects them is irrelevant because "it makes them uncomfortable to think about bad things" told me enough.

I do not trust the genre of people who nod in saying "damn, shit is bad" and then continue to shovel said shit on top of people, suffocating them with even more stress. And this was across backgrounds. The most common thing was the class of said folks. Growing up around not that many white folks and coming into high school (and then tech), the yo-yo of such messages got louder and louder because people that I expected to understand the lived experiences of most Black folks could not relate. The elevation of one in class makes them numb (or generally indifferent) to the fact that Black capitalism is the modern form of the commercialization of the "house negro". Which Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Kwame Ture, Elaine Brown, Claudia Jones and dozens of Black activists that people like to parade and talk about this time of year but never truly understand that if they saw these folks, they would either be saying the same shit I'm saying or completely ignore them.

My trust for new folks has dropped dramatically because it's more often than not that people will pick class over anything, and not even in a degree that encourages true comradery across folks. Just to line their fucking pockets.