Baggage

A specter is haunting the Bay Area – it is the specter of the 10 cent grocery bag. All over cloudy NoCal, grocery stores, mini-marts, and corner bodegas are now required by law to make customers pay for their bags instead of giving them out like candy.

The most beautiful thing in the world.

I still haven’t ascertained whether the law also requires the snooty tone of the checkout people at the local hoity-toity foody grocery store when they surmise that you are bagless and ask “would you like to purchase a bag?” in a way that sounds suspiciously like “did you really vote Republican?”

It’s a funny turn of events. When my family moved to the States from then-Soviet Ukraine, my mother went on her first American grocery-buying expedition (Ralphs in Alhambra, stay classy) armed with my father’s briefcase. It had never occurred to her that American grocery stores would be so plentifully stocked with gossamer-thin plastic satchels.

Even years later, when we visited my family in now-independent Ukraine, plastic grocery bags were a hot commodity: people dressed in immaculate business attire walking down the streets of Kiev would be toting a briefcase or purse in one hand and a lumpen piece of polyethylene emblazoned with a Marlboro logo in the other. You had to be prepared in case you needed to pick something up on the way home, I guess, and even though bags were available (for purchase), they cost much more than 10 cents, adjusted for terrible post-Soviet economy.

I’m hoping someone, somewhere has already made the Godwin’s Law type analogy between this and socialism, but in case they haven’t, I’d like to declare my firstness openly and publicly. It’s totally socialism. First!1

There was a sendup of this in a recent episode of Portlandia – the show that I imagine was actually secretly cowritten by a bunch of cultural studies grad students in an effort to legitimize their PhD thesis on post-humor comedy. However, as a former resident of PDX pointed out, Portland has never actually managed to enact such a law. I guess it’s only fitting that the Bay Area would take something that’s in the realm of liberal absurdism and dutifully legislate it.

I do hope this policy will have the intended effect, curbing our over-reliance on wasteful convenience, much like taxing cigarettes has contributed significantly to the decline in smoking. But no small part of me resists this latest incursion of the nanny state in my ability to be unapologetically wasteful. It’s things like this that make me respect (okay, maybe respect is a strong word…) the ranting of the other half of red-blooded Americans, who hate any obviously engineered attempt to make them into better people. Capitalism creates waste, as we all know, but even Marx admitted that this process leads to creative destruction. We run out of wood, so we use coal; we exhaust coal (pun intended), so we turn to gas. Who’s to say that there isn’t some tipping point at which landfills choked with plastic won’t inspire some visionary to finally step up the game and invent that mythical biodegradable packaging material? I would personally like to see Sergei Brin turn his attention away from bionic eyewear and toward some cool ethereal shopping bag matrix – great opportunity for targeted advertising!

If I’m honest with myself, though, I guess what upsets me most about this new law is that I’m still constantly forgetting to bring bags, even when I remind myself to do so five times before leaving home to do the shopping. It’s just not a habit I’ve gotten into, and not one I imagine is going to be easy to instill in my busy, chaotic, unstructured Bay Area life. In the end, my excuse should be a familiar one to all those namby-pamby nanny state liberals: society made me do it!

Women in software

Cover of the American Phrenological Journal, 1848.

Confession: I am a woman. And I work in the San Francisco tech scene.

There have been a flurry of publications on the gender gap in technology, most recently the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook. There are equally numerous theories as to why so few women populate the ranks of top Internet enterprises at the engineering, management, or executive levels. Allow me to add to the cacophony by positing my own humble two-pronged theory.

Basically, for me, it breaks down into one of two paths in the gender discrimination choose-your-own-adventure:

Scenario one: The Calvin J. Candie/Larry Summers hypothesis

I am a woman who is interested in working in the hot software scene, or perhaps has just begun an entry-level job at a startup or established web enterprise. I look around and see very few women in the industry. All around me are men – some of whom are jerks, granted, but many of whom are sympathetic, progressive, iconoclastic men who certainly don’t seem like sexist stone-age dinosaurs. I admire these men; they are brilliant and powerful, and they exhibit the kind of pro-active leadership and self-confidence that I lack as a junior person in my organization.

I begin to suspect that women must simply lack those skills; otherwise, why aren’t there more of them in those positions to guide and inspire me? I know there is a severe shortage of talent in Silicon Valley, so much so that kids barely out of school are being snapped up by the Fortune 500 tech giants, so it’s hard to imagine that there are no female applicants.

I also know that in all other respects I am no different from my male colleagues: we share the same geeky cultural background, have the same humor and hobbies, believe in the same causes, and I know dozens of women like me out there in the world. The only logical conclusion is, of course, inherent differences in intelligence and talent in the sexes.

In the 1800s, it would have been phrenological literature that reassured me of my inability to be the next Thomas Edison. Today, there are various and sundry theories of inherent difference, from evolutionary biology to pop psychology. All of them tell me two things: I am fighting an uphill battle, and my gender is not predisposed to fighting or battles. And as crazy at it sounds, as mad and sad as it makes me, I kind of want to believe it. Because at least it’s not the alternative…

Scenario two: The status quo bias hypothesis

Same scenario. I am a woman who is interested in working in the hot software scene, or perhaps has just begun an entry-level job at a startup or established web enterprise. I look around and see very few women in the industry.

It stands to reason, then, that if women’s skills and talents are equal to men’s, the only thing explaining women’s absence in the industry is underlying systemic bias. It may not be the kind of overt sexism we all gasp at in Mad Men, now equally un-P.C. and verboten in law alike, but a more prosaic status quo bias upheld by both parties: women decide not to apply for jobs in technology because they don’t feel like they’re supposed to, and men don’t have to feel so bad about not hiring them if they’re not out there.

By bucking this trend, I am disrupting the status quo, whether I want to or not. If I want to be a part of that illustrious status quo, I’ll just have to pretend my difference doesn’t exist, while constantly being worried about making men uncomfortable.

(And, of course, Scenario one tells me that my gender hates making people uncomfortable.)

I can’t speak to the experience of every woman who has ever worked in technology, but I can say that I’ve oscillated between these two positions over the years I’ve worked in San Francisco. My organization happens to be a stand-out in the field – our executive director is a woman! we have, gasp, three women engineers out of fifty, a whopping 6%! But it’s hard not to suffer a certain amount of anxiety when you are an obvious minority, despite comprising 50% of the world’s population, no matter what your HR hiring practices statement says.

I don’t have horror stories of being openly harassed or insulted like some in the biz, but I can attest to a nagging feeling of inequality that’s made worse by internalized and difficult-to-eradicate paranoia. Is analyzing this data inherently difficult, or am I failing because I’m just not as good at writing code as my male colleagues? Does everybody secretly hate it when I mention gender issues? Is it better for my career to dress like a 12-year-old boy or a Sex and the City character?

No matter the situation, in my reptilian brain, it usually boils down to incompetence on my end or bad faith on someone else’s. It’s a terribly unproductive and demoralizing way to feel at the end of the workday, made more so by the fact that I know that the overwhelming majority of my colleagues don’t have this additional burden cluttering their psyche.

But the worst – the absolute worst – part of this is feeling like I’m not supposed to be admitting it; not to myself, and certainly not to other people. It feels patently absurd to indulge such paranoiac fantasies, even if they contain kernels of truth. The solution to self-doubt is self-confidence, the solution to being held back is fighting harder, fear is the mind-killer… end of story.

These, at least, appear to be the recommendations of Sheryl Sandberg. Lean in, sister! Forget about those nagging whispers of self-doubt and just work harder! I can’t blame her for this very practical, no-nonsense bit of advice; I also can’t stop blaming myself for not being able to live up to it.

Of course, it’s probably my fault that my mind is so heavy with all this negativity. If I just lighten up, I’m sure I’ll be much more likely to get that hot executive-level position one day.

Moral exhibitionism versus political action

Václav Havel by Zbigniew Kresowaty.

Of all the novels I read in college and grad school as a precocious bibliophile, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was the one that probably stuck the hardest to my ribs. It wasn’t my favorite novel or even one I necessarily think of when I’m rattling off a list of Great Works That Have Moved Me ™ when I want to sound smart and interesting to a stranger at a party. I think it’s because Kundera’s voice seems to have wormed its way into my ear, assimilating his ideas so seamlessly with my brain that I don’t even realize they’re his until moments like today, when I stop to think about why I am not a moral exhibitionist.

Unbearable Lightness is a War and Peace style blend of politics (it’s set around the time of the Prague Spring), love (but the tanks play second fiddle to Czech girls’ mini skirts), and philosophical rumination (Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return features prominently). There is a moment where Tomas is asked by a dissident to sign a petition to free some political prisoners – an act he rejects on a variety of grounds, primary among them the fact that dissidents seem to care more about being viewed as heroes by history than performing any pragmatic, altruistic action. 

The roots of this view, that protest and dissidence is primarily a self-aggrandizing, egotistical endeavor, trace back to an essayistic argument between Kundera and Vaclav Havel, basically the chief dissident of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s (and, later, friend of Frank Zappa and president of democratic Czechoslovakia). Havel insisted that after the Soviet takeover, political action on the part of those opposed to the Soviet regime was necessary, despite the seemingly hopeless situation the Czechs found themselves in. Kundera fired back that the political action Havel referred to had two aims: (1) to unmask the world in all its irreparable amorality, and (2) to display its author in all his pure morality. 

I have thought a lot about this debate over the years. Even before reading Kundera, I sympathized with his position; student protest, particularly around the start of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan during my first year of college, struck me as paltry and vain, in both senses. I couldn’t stomach the idea of one man or woman standing up in a crowd and declaring him or herself the arbiter of truth in a world of lies, not to mention myself in that role. Those who truly wanted the world to change, I reasoned, would do it within the system – cynically, deviously, hiding their true intentions and secretly chipping away at the foundations until one day the great granite face of the world suddenly resembled their personal vision of it. Expecting that great granite face to turn on its pedestal, stare at one lonely individual standing up with a placard in the middle of the freshman quad, and tremble and shatter from the power of the almighty truth seemed… well, downright silly.

At that age, like many of my peers, I had a blog (ages 16-21, Livejournal, no judgment), in which I recorded daily ruminations and impressionistic accounts culled from my rather conventionally lonely and troubled adolescence. My greatest enemies were the truism on one side and pretentiousness on the other, and stalwart effort went into maintaining a persona of ironic, aesthetic detachment. I was certainly no Kundera, but the gist was the same – I was Tomas, fallible and quixotic creature, and I wanted no part in putting my name on something permanent and declamatory.

Like all maxims, though, moral exhibitionism is easy to turn on its head. It’s hard to read Kundera’s essay on moral exhibitionism now without smiling sardonically at his own obsession not to sully his hands in the mundane dealings of politics and remain ideologically pure. After all, there is no better author on the subject of unmasking the immorality of the world than Kundera himself, who ruthlessly deconstructs the petty delusions of his characters with scene after scene of humiliation and hamartia. And few authors are better at maintaining their ironic distance from their subject matter, always twelve steps ahead of worldly ambition in a realm of pure aestheticism. It’s trite, but Kundera’s inaction was always just another kind of action, more rarefied and gnomic, but still speaking against some great granite monolith, still gleefully intended to cause certain fault-lines to tremble in the world.

These days, the pressure to maintain some kind of distinction between the one kind of moral speech and the other seems less important to me. Exhibitionism is only a matter of degree, and to aim for the opposite extremely, terrified secrecy, feels equally selfish and vain. I’d like to navigate the distinction in this blog, with full awareness that I may at times slip into embarrassing hubris. The risk seems worth it, both to flex the authority I often feel I lack, and to avoid the much greater peril than, as Tomas feared, being immortalized, misquoted, and hopelessly misunderstood in history books – to say nothing at all.