the dispossessed

Yesterday, on the train back home, I finished the last few pages of Ursula K Le Guin’s the Dispossessed (1974).

I’ll try not to spoil too much (if game-of-thrones-spoilergates are anything to judge by, we are living in a world, where our stories, just like our plastic, have become very much single use) by recounting an encounter that happens between Shevek, a resident of the planet Anarres and Keng, an ambassador from Earth to Urras, the sister planet of Anarres.

Shevek’s society is built on a form of non-authoritarian socialism:, while the society he visits on Urras, in the land of A-Io, is a tightly regulated capitalist society. At the end of the novel, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, Shevek finds himself asking the ambassador from Earth for help and in the conversation describes the world on Urras as a kind of hell. She says,

“Now, you man from a world I cannot even imagine, you who see my Paradise as Hell, will you ask what *my* world must be like?”

He was silent, watching her, his light eyes steady.

“My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable - but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert….We survive there, as you do. people are tough! There are nearly half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The noes and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do -they never adapt either. We failed as a spceis, as a social species. We are here now, dealing as equals with other human societies on other worlds, only because of the charity if the Hainish. They came; they brought us help.”

I came to think of this phrase over and over again today as I thought about the findings of the upcoming report on the state of biodiversity in the world. It seems, that in 1974, we were already aware of the facts and we chose to do nothing, or not nearly enough to avoid the climate crisis we are in now. I remember being in school and making colourful cardboard posters about endangered species and climate change, copying those hard words from workbooks, and then standing in front of the class explaining what was what. A few years later, I started studying chemistry and Gratzel cells - the long weekends in the laboratory were driven by the need to make a way for us as a society to keep going as we were - consuming, flying, traveling more and more - without destroying the planet. Perhaps, I always had an inkling of doubt about our ability to make a sacrifice to keep our planet livable.

Interestingly enough, in Le Guin’s juxtaposed world of Anarres and Urras, it is unregulated consumption, not capitalism on its own, that is as the root driver of planetary destruction. When Shevek first arrives in A-Io, his guests take him around their country for sightseeing.

He was driven into the country in hired cars, splendid machines of bizarre elegance. There were not many of them on the roads; the hire was expensive, and few people owned a car privately, as they were heavily taxed. All such luxuries which if freely allowed to the public would tend to drain irreplaceable natural resources or to foul the environment with waste products, were strictly controlled by regulation and taxation. His guides dwelt on this with some pride. A-Io had led the world for centuries, they said, in ecological control and the husbanding of natural resources. The excesses of the Ninth Millenium were ancient history, their only lasting effect being the shortage of certain metals, which fortunately could be imported from the Moon.

But for our world, ever increasing consumption has become closely linked with out increasing obsession with growth under capitalism. Companies are supposed to post better and better quarterly results, for better and better share prices and dividents. Startups are supposed to grow at eye watering speeds. The adoption of social media technologies must keep increasing at all costs.

In the same class where we worked on coloured posters about endangered species and climate change, were classmates who read Ayn Rand and believed that climate change was a hoax designed to make them consume less. In fact, the first time I openly heard someone saying that climate change was a hoax, I was standing in the home of a former classmate. The door to the refuse bin was ajar and from there peaked the strap of a luxury handbag. I’d never seen anyone so casually dispose of a luxury good, just like I’d never heard anyone doubt the facts that we read in or science books.

Here we are, in 2019, and things have not changed for the better in the past 10 years. I know that there are limits to individual action: eating less meat, flying less, travelling with a smaller footprint, but I refuse to accept that therefore, these measures are pointless. If we do this together, we can reverse course before we make the livable Earth into something that only exists in the tales and myths of our future selves.

no ducks in a row

a long farewell to the tech industry

I suppose one could say that I’m losing hope. In fact, I’ve always been losing hope, one small papercut at a time. Yet, after the publication of the black hole image, the rate of loss of hope has accelerated dramatically. After news broke out of another ‘diversity manifesto’ incident - this time at Microsoft, it accelerated a bit more. Sometimes, I have to wonder, why I keep coming back to a place that clearly believes I can never be as good as my colleagues because of the way my body looks. In an industry that always makes a point to talk about “the future”, “progress” and that dreadful word that in practice means the complete opposite than what says in the dictionary, “meritocracy”, we get quite hungup on someone’s external characteristics that have no bearing on how they will do their job. I thought I could help us fix that, but it looks like no one truly wants to fix the problem unless it’s a quick brushup for an upcoming photo-op.

This change may seem sudden, but in reality I’ve always nursed small kindlings of discontent ever since my first job out of university, which by all accounts, was as close to a dumpsterfire as one can get. It’s always fun to watch as my teammates rate the appearance of a woman job candidate from 1-10, scavenge her facebook account for pics. Another woman candidate’s coding test was passed around after her coding interview so that it could be torn apart, mocked and laughed at. “For the lolz, you know”. Furthermore, you know it’s a complete dumpster fire when the manager of the said team observes the proceedings with a smirk and then laughs it off with a “I guess I should make you stop”. Yeah, I guess, my dude.

The point when those kindlings blew up into a fullblown fire was the day the image of the black hole was published. News outlets had stories of Dr Katie Bouman, the MIT researcher, who had written the algorithm to generate the image of the black hole from observations made by a global team. Within hours, internet message boards were full of messages discrediting her contribution. The supporting evidence was found when someone dug up the Github repo with the code and calculated the percentage of her contributions (in terms of lines of code written). Every person in software engineering knows that lines of code is a shit metric to measure someone’s contribution, but alas, the internet bros were at it again.

Shortly after this debate flared up, Mekka Okereke, engineering director at Google who I follow on twitter, wrote a thread about it. Dr Katie Bouman “survived” this challenge, to quote Mekka, because she had all of her ducks in a row - enough ducks and good enough ducks to satisfy the nasty commetators looking to discredit her - a PhD from MIT and a professorship at CalTech. That is how good, how amazingly excellent you have to be, to survive in this industry.

Amongst all of this, I can’t help but think, that I have finally become one of those ‘mediocre/terrible women developers’ that Amy Nguyen wrote about, the awkward type that won’t fit on any kind of diversity poster (which I suppose was my only purpose to begin with) and in a post-black-hole-gate world, I wonder if I should just call it quits now, before someone realises that I don’t really have my ducks in a row, I have barely any. I never studied CS in university. I don’t have a degree from a well-known place. I don’t have stints of work at the Big 4 (or is it 5 these days?). All I have is this, the work I’ve done, which is ok, the stuff I’ve written which is kind of ok and the talks I’ve given (also kind of ok).

Perhaps all of this sounds too gloomy and self-defeating, but I honestly see no way forward for me in this career. In fact, I can even clearly pinpoint the day when I realised that my progress in this industry would always be slow. As a recent graduate, I participated in a graduate program at a company in London. There were five of us in the group, I think, and I was the only women. Three or four other women (out of a department of 60 or 70 engineers) worked there.

During my graduate program, I had expressed, to my manager, a strong interest to join the team working on our backend component to learn more about the project, but no one on that team seemed terribly enthusiastic about the prospect of me joining. I asked if the senior engineer, who I shall call X, would be available to pair program for a little bit to show me around the codebase. This request was met with a smile and a “X doesn’t pair”. There. That’s it. He just doesn’t pair, especially not with you.

I wasn’t defeated by this. I had previously navigated large codebase without anyone guiding me, so I was confident that with enough overtime, I would be able to navigate this one as well. What really killed it for me, was a conversation that took place in the kitchen during snack time. Another senior engineer from the backend team was talking to one of my colleagues from the graduate program. ‘We’re really looking forward to you joining the team’, he said with enthusiasm and I remember how my fellow graduate’s eyes lit up. I felt jealous, because throughout my program, it felt that no one else, except for perhaps the support team, was enthusiastic when my rotation (we all did those in the graduate program) with the team began. More bad things happened at this workplace, but the stories are too long to put in this post and too sad for a Sunday morning.

Similar patterns reappeared at the places I worked after this. The constant need to prove yourself before acceptance into the team. Clients who refused to accept technical explanations from me until one of my male colleagues corroborated them. It became embarassing to always have to take one of them with me when I went to speak to other teams or users, but I swallowed my pride (and tears), because this was the best for the project. I’m not sure I can keep proving myself again and again at great cost to other parts of life and I’m quite confident that the end result will be the same. Nothing will change and I’ll be relegated to writing and re-writing that script no one else wants to touch over and over again.

If you made this far in the text, thank you! If you’ve successfuly transitioned to another career path after tech, I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to drop me a note on camillamon[at]gmail.com.

relativity

It seems that at some point, back in 2011, I had a mistaken idea that I was capable of poetry. Today, I came across an old USB stick and in a fit of curiosity decided to perform some digital archaeology. Herein is one of the recovered artifacts.

relativity

white feather morning, you
kissed me with your dead lips 
inhale, exhale, 
I, in a thousand little pieces, 
dissolve. 

Time, 
wait for me. 
the membranes
of memories, like silken strings
tangled at my feet. 

You open like a flower at midnight
stains of life
leek out from your black petals. 
 
I peel myself from you, ripe peach skin
drip, dripping, fluid falling flowing
quiet honey nectar, I am liquid. 

Whispers, kisses, lies
time smothered our goodbyes
like an ink-blotted thumb 
grease fingerprint 

your light is falling in the footsteps of twilight, 
on black velvet darkness
a finger left a trail on still water 

the mind falls within itself, unfolds quivers and disappears, 
are you older or younger, flying at the speed of light
yet tied to me,
I don’t know. 

red lights

Content warning: this post mentions sex work and sex. If you are uncomfortable with either subject matter, please navigate away.

In 2018, I made a brief visit to Amsterdam to speak at a conference. I took notes during the trip, but was undecided about whether or not I should publish them. I’ve decided to do so today.

London to Amsterdam

The train is making its way through the Belgian and Dutch countryside. A bit after Brussels, we were diverted and are now 30 minutes late, still en route for Rotterdam though according to schedule we should have made it there by now.

A group of American (judging by the accent) tourists in the 4-seat cluster just ahead of me are discussing sex.

“You know what being a starfish means, right?” “Yeah, it’s like when you lie on your back like a 5 pronged star.”

Then, to the annoyance of my very very British (the topic of discussions here are the royal family, country homes and what to wear for a neighbour’s garden party) companions in the 4-seat cluster just behind them, the Americans change the topic of conversation to anal and start crunching Doritos.

The whole situation would be rather amusing had the seating lottery not cast me as the proverbial 4th wheel in this seating cluster of this very British family, who, by poor luck, has been separated from their son. They whisper about this just loudly enough for me to hear them through most of Dover and northern France and cast slight furtive looks in my direction.

As we near Rotterdam, the train starts to smell of stale cheese nachos or maybe that’s the aromatic accumulation of propped up feet liberated from the confines of their sweaty shoes.

We slow down to a complete crawl near Zwaluwe. Out of the window, the landscape alternates between cute houses and chemical transportation tanks.

Someone, perhaps in response to the nachos meet feet situation we have going on here, has cranked up the cooling in this place to a complete maximum and I am freezing. The father of the family, sitting opposite me in the 4-seat cluster, has taken offense with the lack of space and decided that my knees deserve less of it than his legs.

Summer evening

The air is sulty, saturated with the sounds of laughter and excitement. It’s not even 10pm, but the red light district is already a buzz. The movement on the streets has ground to a halt as groups of mostly drunk and mostly young men cluster around the red-tinted windows. There is a direct line of sight from the bars to the windows. A man finishes whatever is in his Heineken branded glass and his eyes dart toward the two windows in the building opposite the bar.

A bachelorette party passes by and the women smile gleefully and wave at the woman in the window. “You’re amazing!” they shout and smile. I suppose this is how they, the women in bachelorette party, feel edgy. After they have gone, a man walks by dressed as a gigantic inflatable penis. It looks like a wonderland of sexual exploration - but a wonderland designed by overly horny 20-something young men, whose ideas about sex come from mainstream pornography.

Glasses are shattered against the pavement, heads turn to locate the source of the noise. Someone cheers. Live sex show, just around the corner a sign proclaims. The crowd grinds to a halt as the groups of men look at the windows and heckle the women. A bit furter up the street, a woman in the window smiles and waves. Behind her, in the room, small reminders of the mundane. A bottle of water on the counter and some juice. Behind another window, a room with a bed and a cat. The pillowcase is patterned. The mundane details of work peering behind the surface. In an alley, two women lean out of the windows and one of them draws a few puffs from her cigarette.

troublemakers

An extract from a long form piece of writing I am working on.

Leila Esfahani had a scarf on her neck to cover a scar from a thyroid surgery she had had a few years ago. When we first met, I didn’t like her. Not one bit. We were at a lunchtime gathering of women in tech at the Company. Out of the 20 people or so that were on the calendar invitation list, only four had come and so we sat awkwardly on chairs in a large empty room and attempted to do some sort of exercise to hone our skills in agile project management. We shuffled the little coloured post-its around the circle and every now and then uttered some buzzword filled sentences.

As these meetings go, the carefully planned exercise eventually disintegrated into a confessional meets group therapy session where agitated voices talked over and over again about being ignored and belittled. I too joined the chorus this time. It had been a bad few weeks up in my department and instead of colour coding post-its I wanted to vent. ‘Being good at what you do doesn’t matter’, I said bitterly and Leila looked at me carefully and shot back ‘So you think you are the best programming language X developer on your team?’. It was a challenge, a question that was meant more as a comeback than a genuine curiosity and even though I did not remotely think this was the case, I replied I am.

I am, I am. And I looked at her. I was conscious of how I appeared. That morning when getting dressed for work, I had made a very unfortunate wardrobe choice. My stomach made a bulge under my shirt and my skirt was a bit too tight. I felt like a girl playing dress up and trying to be a serious woman and I could feel that she saw right through me and laughed inside. I hated her immediately. She seemed the kind of woman who competed with other women just to put them down. As I asserted what I believed to be true about my programming skill compared to the rest of the team, she smiled incredulously and the subject was dropped. We spent a few more minutes doing rounds of tech workplace group therapy and then left for lunch. As we were leaving the room, she, to my surprise, asked if we could have coffee at some point so she could learn more about programming language X.

We went for a coffee not long after that at the nearby Starbucks, where I sipped on a sligtly acrid latte, while she drank some green tea. While we were taking the elevator back to the 20th something-or-other floor of the glass tower, she told me that she did not like the coffee at Starbucks and I immediately felt embarassed, because I had suggested we go there. In this money-hallowed place, my tastes – in clothing, in food, in hobbies (no, I did not play golf on the weekends), in culture and music – always felt too “lower class”. I breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the elevator reached my floor.

She was preparing for a technical interview at a famous hedge fund and so we went for coffee again. This time to a fancy place with a vaguely franco-italian name. The coffee was served in tiny cups and smelled of chocolatey refinement and sophistication. We had coffee once more and after that, in fact, right after the year end performance review, she quietly disappeared.

When I reflected back, I realised that I had in fact met her even before that Agile meeting. We, the women in the tech department, were at one of those “group therapy meets self help meets empowerment” lunches where we sat around in neatly arranged circles and spoke about how to improve our executive presence. There was a lie, right there in the middle of the room, but no one spoke about it, because it was a comfortable lie, a lie that we all bought into gladly, because it removed the process of success and promotion from the murky backrooms filled with managing and executive directors (people who on the whole definitely did not look like us) into our very own, very un-assertive hands.

This lie had looked at the problem in the Company squarely in the face and concluded that the reason our gender had not made any progress up the ladder since the 1980s was because we lacked that mystical “executive presence” which our esteemed cohort of leaders exuded in their crisp suites.

But, it was all going to be ok, our circle leader told us, because now that we had established that we only had ourselves to blame for our predicament, we only needed to fix ourselves and voila, le probleme would be solved! Only follow these five easy steps to erase yourself and become someone else!

First up – always make sure you smile when you are on a videoconferencing call. My ears, if they could, would have done a double take. Leila snorted. No one gives this kind of advice to the male executives, she said. They are taught to acquire a certain gravitas, she said – searching for the right English word. The rest of the circle and the leader looked uncomfortably embarassed and perhaps a bit disgusted – as though someone had just shown them how the little sausages that came with the hors d’oeuvre were really made. The circle leader started making some concilliatory noises and the conversation was quickly shepherded from “smiling” to the topic of “power words” and “power poses”. It seemed that the corporate feminism faux pas was soon forgotten, but in reality, this branded her as a troublemaker – ready to be cast into a special circle of tech corporate hierarchy hell – the neverending perfomance improvement plan.

We saw each other briefly in the elevator after the results of the midterm performance assessment were made public. I told her, I had been placed in the top percentage and it was possible I was getting a promotion by the end of the year (it wasn’t a significant promotion, but for someone who had never been promoted in any sort of tech role before, it would be a big step). She was visibly happy for me, but shortly after giving me a congratulatory hug, she confessed she had had a falling out with her manager and her performance ranking had plummetted. It was expected that she would be “managed out” by the end of the year. She was actively looking for another position – perhaps at the neighbouring Company.

I felt devastated and unnerved. The internal system of the Company had quickly taken revenge on a person who challenged the status quo and the veneers that were put in place. It could just as easily have been me. Of late, I had not spared caution while criticising our choice to recruit from only elite schools. We have hardly any socioeconomic diversity, I had told a managing director during our meeting. And hardly any appetite to fix the problem, I added to myself.

Speaking to Leila on that elevator landing made me realise the nature of the knife’s edge I balanced on. In spite of my outspokeness, I was liked, which had translated into a potential promotion, but it could have just as easily translated into a demotion. On the 7th floor, we parted in front of a large look-at-us-we-are-very-postmodern-and-art-savvy painting. She hugged me and wished me luck. It was the last time we spoke in person.

A year or so later, long after I had left the Company too, I saw her on the street. She was walking, stylish and elegant as always, with a determined stride, into the neighbouring Company. I felt relieved. It looked like she had landed on her feet.