For years and years, I hit the talking points: Yes, diversity is important. We build better products with diverse teams. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s also the smart thing to do. Diversity is more than gender diversity. True inclusion must be intersectional. The data matters so we can understand our baseline, set targets, and track progress.

But then I got tired. I stopped repeating myself, moved onto the startup founder life, ran headlong into new frustrations around sexism and discrimination, and wondered if all my diversity work had been a waste.

Ten years on, we’ve achieved a lot less than I hoped for at my most naive, but also a lot more than I despaired at my gloomiest. When I pull myself out of the thickets of the day-to-day to take perspective on the past decade, I am heartened that the comparison of now vs. then is quite a favorable one:

1. General awareness of diversity issues today is much, much greater. We went from general apathy about a topic niche even within tech to the Obama White House hosting its first ever Demo Day in 2015 and announcing initiatives to bring more women and minorities into the industry. To this day there are journalists whose entire beat is diversity.
2. The level of sophistication in the discourse around diversity has increased dramatically, too. People used to conflate “diversity” with “gender diversity”. Post-Ferguson, post-George Floyd, race has become impossible to ignore. It is also now assumed that you can reference intersectionality in a conversation without having to stop and define it.
3. An entire industry of diversity consulting came into its own. Doing work that used to be regarded at best as a side project and more often as an irrelevant distraction, people are now paid, and paid well, for their time and expertise.
4. Diversity and inclusion efforts now extend beyond recruiting and HR at tech companies into product work. My favorite examples of this come from the team at Pinterest: search on the platform allows users to filter by skin tone and hair type, and and recent AI improvements promote body type diversity in recommendation feeds and search.
5. The blue chip VC firms all hired their first token women partners, and then some. Back in the day, no one even blinked at a team page that was entirely Chads at a ball game. Even if we do still see the occasional fund launch announcement with an all male crew, these days it is roundly criticized and apologies arrive in short order.
6. Female founders now exist in enough numbers that there are entire funds that only invest in women. Likewise for underrepresented minorities. I am thrilled that more people representing much more diverse lived experiences get to participate in the tech innovation ecosystem in a way that we never did before. It has a real impact on the types of problems that we try to solve, and how we go about it.

I know that every one of these notes of progress can be followed up with sour caveats. Increased attention on diversity comes with alarming pushback; resourcing for diversity teams and initiatives gets cut dramatically when the economy turns; female founders still only get 2% of all VC funding; and yet — sometimes you have to celebrate the small wins.

Happy ten years to the little blog post that changed my life and put me on a course of diversity activism. It’s been an honor to be a part of a movement much greater than myself and I’m glad to be able to look back and see the progress we’ve made.

The irony is not lost on me that I incited a tidal wave of harassment from Reddit’s cesspit of toxicity because I went in there to talk about working on anti-harassment software. It was the perfect case in point for why we’re building what we’re building at Block Party. And all the same, it was a torturous way to re-learn a lesson I’ve already had beaten into my psyche from more than 15 years of online bullying, hate, abuse, and stalking.

I was so foolishly optimistic about how a Reddit AMA might go

When someone first suggested the idea of going on Reddit, I instinctively recoiled from the idea, knowing the site’s reputation — but I ignored my intuition and last week I went in naively optimistic about doing an AMA (“ask me anything”) question and answer session in the subreddit r/IAmA/. I thought it would be a good opportunity to share more about how I came to be working on Block Party and to engage in genuine discourse about the problem of online harassment and our product thinking on how to solve it. Perhaps I would get questions about what I’ve learned from building and running a distributed team, or other lessons from working in Silicon Valley and then leaving for less tech-saturated locales. Or about diversity and inclusion, especially as I just released a course for startup founders. When I announced on Twitter that I would be doing a Reddit AMA, I even got a few good questions there: about COVID and re-opening, collaboration with social media platforms, crowdsourcing of Block Party’s filters.

The site tagline is “Reddit gives you the best of the internet in one place”. I shudder to think what the worst of it is, Reddit is vile beyond belief

I barely started the AMA on Reddit before the troll brigade arrived. They quickly overtook the page with bad faith “questions”, gotchas, twisted accusations, and insulting and abusive comments. They coordinated to downvote all of my answers into oblivion, as Reddit’s platform hides content that has been excessively downvoted. As I struggled to surface my answers, they taunted me about my alleged silence: “She has no answer because her views are wrong.” “She didn’t answer because she hates asian americans..” It felt like a violent mob had ambushed me and was forcing me to the ground, muzzling me, and violating me. Typically authors will start their AMA, let questions come in for a while, then write answers for an hour, maybe longer if they’re generous. I tried, I really tried, even as I write this now I’m crying as the feeling of trauma resurfaces, for four hours I tried, fighting through the abuse to write candid, thoughtful answers about what we’re working on with Block Party and how we’re trying to solve online harassment, I addressed willful misinterpretations of our privacy policy, questions about filter bubbles and polarization, data or lack thereof on the problem of online harassment, the role of machine learning in content moderation, diversity and inclusion in hiring, diversity and inclusion outside of America, activism, how Asian Americans figure in racial inequity conversations — no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t matter. Even for innocuous content, like the list of books I’m currently reading, I got downvoted into negative territory and an asshat reply saying I wasn’t actually reading those books and I cherry-picked those to be over-the-top. The harassment spilled over into Reddit direct chats, onto Twitter, into waitlist signups for Block Party where people submitted flagrantly racist and other abusive content.

Even worse than the harassment on my AMA itself was Reddit’s infuriating response: blaming me and refusing to take responsibility

Worse than the trauma of the AMA itself, which landed on the Reddit homepage and got up to 4k+ comments, the overwhelming majority of which were toxic and vile, was the response. My god, the response. From Reddit, I got only blame, gaslighting, a refusal to take any responsibility, and a bland declaration that they do not condone harassment on their site. Then they put the onus on me to report any “policy-breaking comments” so they could investigate — yes, because of course it should be the person being targeted with abuse who’s responsible for wading through the vileness to clean it up. One r/IAmA/ moderator went onto Twitter as well to blame me for apparently doing it “wrong”. There were more who told me it wasn’t Reddit’s fault that people just didn’t like my answers. Friends privately reached out to Reddit employees, including some that I know and (used to) regard as friends. A number of these people work in policy and product, areas directly responsible for a situation like this. The responses ranged from a reiteration of putting the blame on me, to silence and refusal to acknowledge the situation, much less express any sympathy. The absolute abdication of accountability has been the most angering part of the whole experience.

None of this is new. Reddit’s problems with harassment have been documented widely for many years. I am no expert on Reddit as I previously steered far clear of it and apart from my mistake last week to do an AMA, will do so in the future; but it is clear that they do not care to make even the most basic fixes to check the metastasis of the hate on their platform.

It is clear that Reddit does not care to make even the most basic fixes to check the metastasis of the hate on their platform.

The sleight of hand Reddit is attempting in order to cast the blame on me is this: An error in how my AMA was posted prevented the pathetically meager anti-harassment protections they do have from kicking in (though all those would have done was prevent my answers from being downvoted into oblivion, it would not have been any defense against the thousands of trolls showing up to post harassing content). The claim is that I didn’t know how to use the site so it’s my fault. To be very clear, though, the error occurred on the platform side. And even if I had made a mistake because Reddit’s usability is so poor and it is a fundamentally user-unfriendly product, ultimately that is still on them. If Redditors pick up on this post and use technical nit-picking to try to discredit me, that only further proves my point. All of this finger-pointing from Reddit company, the official Twitter account, the employees, the moderators, the users, is merely a means of distracting from their own culpability.

Try to follow, if you want. Here’s the “technical issue”: Someone else can schedule an AMA on your behalf, but if so, then it may post from their account, such that the OP does not match your account even if yours is marked correctly as the person conducting the AMA. In this scenario, you have no downvote brigade protections, and even as the AMA author, your answers can be disappeared. You’re shit outta luck, sorry.

I find Reddit’s deflection of the blame enraging. First, my teammate and I did nothing wrong in how we scheduled and conducted the AMA. We filled out all the boxes correctly. She put her username in the box for who was scheduling the AMA, and my username in the box for who was conducting the AMA. If you need any proof of that, my account was flaired correctly as the one doing the AMA. Second, it was never our responsibility to reverse-engineer Reddit’s pathetic anti-harassment protections to understand that there is only one way to avoid the silencing that comes from coordinated downvoting. Third, the true problem is that Reddit’s voting mechanisms have this pernicious silencing effect on people from minority or marginalized communities. This is well known to mods as well as researchers. One sympathetic mod did let me know that this happens elsewhere too: For example, Black scientists in r/science/ getting so downvoted by racists that their posts disappear, even when they were expressly invited to do panel discussions on their areas of expertise. This admission of a pervasive issue leads to the next point: Fourth, it’s not actually that fucking hard to fix this. I am a software engineer who was literally one of the first engineers at Quora, another consumer web scale user-generated content site with answers, comments, voting, and ranking. Guess what, all you need to do to protect an answer from being collapsed is to add a not-collapsible boolean to it. Yes/no. That’s it. If moderators see an answer being inappropriately hidden, someone being unfairly silenced, it is possible, and not just possible but infuriatingly simple, to fix it. (Yes, I know that this is only one small tool that is needed and there are much broader issues, but even so, it seems stupid obvious to me to build this.) I cannot believe the condescension of the multiple responses I got from Reddit team and mods that the situation was “not possible to fix”, “it’s a technical issue”. Fifth, even if somehow the most basic engineering change is impossible to prioritize, help docs and other copy are easy to change. At very least, the scheduling tool should have an aggressive, big, bold warning to AMA participants that the system has this vulnerability.

Online harassment is a form of violence

Online harassment is a form of violence. What I experienced on Reddit was a coordinated, sustained act of violence. And not only did the authorities and responsible parties not stop it, they gaslit and blamed the victim. My own friends, the ones who could do something, merely looked away. They were unable to offer even an acknowledgement of the situation, much less a modicum of sympathy. I am still shaking in anger and disappointment.

What I experienced on Reddit was a coordinated, sustained act of violence. And not only did the authorities and responsible parties not stop it, they gaslit and blamed the victim.

If you have never experienced violence in this way, it can be hard to understand how traumatic it is. Nowhere is safe. I know what it’s like to be physically stalked and threatened, to be fearful of my security in the offline world, and that is bad enough. Sometimes I wake up in a panic wondering if I forgot to lock my door, and I still start when I hear unexpected sounds outside my flat. But at least there are places that I can lock myself in and hide away, and I can be with friends who protect me. Online, the same platforms where I get encouragement and solidarity from supporters are the ones where I receive harassment as well. Do you know the feeling when someone makes a remark that bothers you and it sticks, even when you try to shrug it off? It might not even be directed at you, or maybe it is but you know it’s not true, just a throwaway insult, but it keeps running through your head. Imagine that, multiplied by thousands, a mob feeding off its own energy, shouting you down with perverted, nasty things, choking your protests into silence, declaring their freedom of speech. Your supporters might be trying to get through, too, but it’s hard to hear them through the onslaught of abuse. The psychological toll is terrible. I have dealt with online harassment for a long time, but this past week crushed me. I haven’t been able to sleep through the night, despite the Ambien, anti-anxiety medication, CBD, melatonin, essential oils, meditation, anything I could possibly try. My resting heart rate spiked 20% the day of the Reddit AMA and my physiological state remains extremely poor.

I also have to live with the fear and possibility that the online harassment will escalate, that I will have yet more reason to fear for my physical safety. Just in the last few days there have been multiple news stories about people being shot dead, their murderers groomed and goaded on by toxic communities like Reddit’s, a noxious trail of online hate in their wake. People who have the power, influence, and ability to do something need to do it, not perform allyship on social media while disclaiming responsibility for harm directly attributable to their action or, more likely, inaction. I can only hope that they act faster in the future when danger and death is imminent.

Just in the last few days there have been multiple news stories about people being shot dead, their murderers groomed and goaded on by toxic communities like Reddit’s, a noxious trail of online hate in their wake.

Welcome to the life of being a startup founder

I have still not been able to take a break. I am the solo founder of a very early stage startup and things are always go-go-go-go-go.

The latest urgent, p1 TODO for Block Party is one triggered entirely by the Reddit situation. If you hazard a glimpse at the AMA page, there are strenuous objections to our privacy policy, and although it was a standard one that we picked up from our original legal counsel and we do absolutely none of the nefarious things that people accuse us of, they twisted reality so much I felt we should address it. Numerous Redditors even pointed out that I used to work at Facebook as proof that I must be violating user privacy and selling user data — the cruel joke is that I was so put off by what I saw during my Facebook internship that I once wrote an answer on Quora decrying the cavalier disregard for people’s privacy, but my answer got downvoted into the negative by Facebook employees and collapsed. For the past week, I’ve been spending late nights with our current lawyer to draft a new custom privacy policy that makes it clear exactly what we do. For a startup like Block Party, which is at such an early stage and still has so few users, it feels like a waste of investor money, not to mention my time, to be combing over these legal documents, but I want to be clear on our commitment to putting the user first.

If we must grasp at silver linings, I am only more certain of the importance of what we’re working on at Block Party

The Redditors in my AMA perfectly illustrated the very need for “troll management” software, and though we didn’t need it, we did get additional validation for many of Block Party’s product intuitions and directions.

My biggest takeaway is that it’s quite clear platforms will not solve the problem of online harassment. The Reddit company stance has been that it’s not a priority to implement the product or engineering fixes that could turn back the tide on the toxic sludge. This doesn’t leave the moderators with much to work with, even when some good ones do care to try. In the case of my AMA, they were conspicuously absent, and though they very belatedly took some action to lock my AMA thread and do minor cleanup, all it did was leave the thread frozen with pages and pages of bad faith argumentation and misinterpretation and wrongful accusations that you had to scroll through before you could find anything I’d written.

To a further point about content moderation, there is a big difference between what’s not so egregious to be in violation of policy and what makes for reasonable, good faith discussion and a healthy community. Some of the most perverse trolling comes from people who are just clever enough to twist words around in a pseudo-intellectual fashion, with a pretense at being “genuine”, good at toeing the line and knowing how to avoid being removed or banned. As a participant in a community, or simply a guest, I have no interest in engaging with those people. I am interested in civil discourse that brings hard questions, contrary viewpoints, and challenges to my assumptions and thinking, but just because a platform has disallowed the shouting of racist and misogynistic slurs and will sometimes belatedly chastise people for it does not mean it has created a productive space for the interchange of ideas and information.

As for the most toxic, terrible comments on my AMA that were eventually removed, their absence from the thread now does nothing to remedy the damage that has already been wreaked, and the destruction of the evidence is only a setup for more gaslighting. I’ve already been deluged with the hate. I’ve already suffered for it, my mental well-being poisoned. Perhaps after I publish this essay, it will spur the moderators to remove even more of the bad comments. But it will only be worse that everything is gone. Abusers and harassers know this tactic well: Attack, then destroy the evidence. The most wretched of them will come back around to torment further. Even curious bystanders coming by later will not understand the violence and trauma that has happened, instead choosing to doubt the victim, wondering if things were really that bad. I know I’m supposed to document everything, but I cannot sacrifice any more of my mental health to do so.

Abusers and harassers know this tactic well: Attack, then destroy the evidence. Curious bystanders coming by later will not understand the violence and trauma that has happened, instead choosing to doubt the victim, wondering if things were really that bad.

And we have yet another data point for how pathological it is that platforms put the burden of managing abuse on those targeted by it. Reddit not only makes it so others cannot help you, but if they do try to—as in the case of my teammate helping me to schedule the AMA — you are subject to even worse terrors than if you went at it alone. At least for catching the harassment spillover to Twitter, I had Block Party to filter my @mentions, and my teammate was able to go through everything that collected in my Lockout Folder to block, unmute, or keep muted as appropriate. It was a relief to still be able to use Twitter without letting the trolls keep tearing down my mental health. And though some of those harassers fell back on their usual trick of deleting their Tweets, Block Party is keeping the receipts for me.

We have yet another data point for how pathological it is that platforms put the burden of managing abuse on those targeted by it.

A deep thank you to those who gave me support, acknowledgment, and validation through the most traumatic episode of my life

I am grateful to the many people who reached out to offer their support and encouragement, the people who posted indignation and outrage on my behalf, the people who threw me “upvote parties” to try to rescue some of my answers, all these people who cared. I cried, in a good way, to read the messages from people who told me what my work has meant to them, how they have directly benefited from it or been inspired to pursue their careers. I cried, too, when reading the messages from people acknowledging and validating what happened. I needed to hear that I’m not crazy, not overreacting, that none of this is okay, that none of this is my fault. I haven’t been able to respond to every message but to all of you who have sent positivity my way, thank you.

I needed to hear that I’m not crazy, not overreacting, that none of this is okay, that none of this is my fault.

Unfortunately, I have a creeping sense of dread that things are only going to get worse as the brokenness of the Internet becomes more and more overwhelming and the toxicity of the tech industry forces out those who have the heart and integrity to try to make it better. As for myself, I am doing all I can to stay in the fight. I’m doing everything I can to try to make things better, not just for me but for everyone who must endure this almost unbearable heaviness of online existence.

You can find me on Twitter at @triketora. If you want to stay updated about Block Party, subscribe to our newsletter here.

It’s been almost 20 years and I still remember the dread of Mile Day in high school gym class: four terrible loops around the track, greeted at the graceless end by the rest of the class long awaiting us, some of the cool popular athletic girls laughing in that mean girl way at the misery of the final finishers.

Last week I went out with no particular training and hit an 11.5 mile rocky trail run through the desert, up 1600 feet of elevation gain. One thought kept drifting through my mind as I pushed through the sand and gravel and rocks: A mile on this run is so much harder, and in so many ways I didn’t even know it could be harder! than a mile on one of those synthetic rubber tracks, but damn am I feeling so much stronger and more powerful and yes it still sucks and I’m hurting but I’m going to make it.

It reminded me of a cartoon I saw in a diversity & inclusion workshop a long time ago. There are two runners at the starting line of a race. One, to the left, is in his running uniform and cleats, sprint position, ready to tear down a smooth track lane. On the right is someone who doesn’t have proper athletic gear and is looking down a path that’s torn up, obstacles in her way, rain and weather adding insult and mockery to the course she’s about to run. Tell me, is it fair to compare their mile times?

In high school, in that artificial, controlled environment, we were all on the same track, close to perfect conditions for running our best. In the real world, in life, in work, it’s not so comparable. Some people are still on the track and others of us are out here on the trails. I think running is hard no matter what the conditions (“running never gets easier — you just get faster”), but I’ve learned it can be comically more difficult than I ever imagined. I’m going through unknown terrain, under hot desert sun, on a path so poorly marked and mislabeled I keep losing it, up rocky inclines, through dried out river washes that sap my energy as my feet keep slipping through the sand and gravel, dodging accidental cactus pricks, just barely avoiding face-plants when my shoes catch against rocks, the strap of my hydration vest rubbing against a blistered bug bite.

I feel like I’m doing a miserably tough trail run version of the startup founder race. Of course startups are always hard. But I’m a solo female founder, working on a problem that most of the gatekeepers of capital and power neither understand nor empathize with. I’m an activist trying my utmost to dismantle those systems of bias and privilege that have elevated them and kept them floating in those roles. As a competent and experienced software engineer in my own right, I also threaten some people’s notions of what a woman in tech might be capable of. Anticipating the reply guys who’ll come along to tell me it’s unbecoming of me to be sure of my worth, I will not enumerate all the ways in which I am outrageously better than most of my peers and yet still am treated with far less respect or even outright disrespect.

I have been sexually harassed during fundraising. I have had different investors inquire about my age and relationship status and tell me about their first time having sex. In roomfuls of men, I have been completely ignored and talked over, despite being the expert in the room. Although Twitter is the water cooler of the tech industry, on that platform being a woman of color with an opinion and a minor following means I deal with harassment every day, some drive-by, some extremely targeted and persistent, spanning 6+ years by this point. I get racism, misogyny, sexually explicit threats, links to Asian porn, incoherent and disturbing professions of love, conspiracy theories involving me and a former FBI director, all sorts of anonymous heroes just letting me know that I’m off-putting to men and I would be more attractive and dateable if I weren’t so angry. I have been stalked in real life and then gaslit by law enforcement and private security firms trying to make me feel like I’m self-obsessed.

Over and over I’ve had men who purport to be advocates of diversity & inclusion try to take advantage of me and my company, costing me months of invaluable time, attention, and energy, not to mention so many tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, billed by the 6 minute increment. One, I discovered later, has a pattern of using his position of fame and wealth to prey on female founders, I suppose because we are more vulnerable. A potential co-founder, after negotiating vigorously for special terms that I almost acceded to, accidentally emailed me his diary full of unflattering and coded sexist thoughts about me, wondering if I would be able to step up to the role of CEO. Another job candidate sent repeated emails after a bombed interview and subsequent rejection berating me for making a huge mistake and not seeing that he would be a huge asset to the team and telling me I was a bad interviewer anyways.

The stories go on. It’s a lot of abuse to take, in so many different forms.

Through all of this, I’m just trying to build my company. The great irony is that everything I’m trying to do directly addresses the adversity I’ve had to face and stare down. The tech industry’s dearth of diversity, ethics, and accountability has led us to a place where our real and digital worlds are rife with harassment, and disproportionately women, minorities, and other marginalized groups bear the brunt of it. I started my company not only to give people a safer experience online, to empower them and protect them from bullying and abuse, but also to attempt another existence proof for a company run by a woman, with a diverse team, that prioritizes the well-being of our users.

The people who care most deeply for me ask me if it’s worth it to put myself through all of the pain, suffering, and stress. But how could I not? I’m one of the few that even has the privilege to try. I am immensely lucky to be able to do what I do. And my crucible of experiences makes me uniquely suited and determined to solve the problems I’m trying to solve.

I was never a gifted runner but by force of will and perseverance over decades I can now casually do the kind of trail running that I once thought sheer impossibility. The rocks, the hills, the sun, the heat, the dehydration, everything that makes the running a challenge is that much more a reminder that I’m alive and it’s glorious to be able to move through this beautiful world. And it’s that same endurance and brutality of training that I trust will make me stronger, faster, and more resilient as a founder, an activist, and someone trying to make a little bit of positive difference.

What’s upcoming in 2019? I’m moving back to San Francisco. I’m looking forward to fresh California produce and healthy eating, cold brew, yoga, good running weather, fast Internet, LTE speeds on my phone again, and most importantly, my friends and all the really inspiring ambitious techfolk of SF. And I’m working on a new startup! Which means less travel, less speaking, more focus, more building.

75 books 📚
41 non-fiction 🖊
18 by female authors 🤦🏻‍♀️
A more global perspective this year, reflecting my travels — including Zimbabwe, Botswana, China, UK, Sweden, Czechia, Germany, Portugal 🌍
One theme around trauma, abuse, and sociopathy — very enlightening, very resonant, a good area of learning and growth for me this year 😥
Quite a few memoirs — which I don’t usually like, but enjoyed this year 🤷🏻
Favorites are starred 🌟

Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom
Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Evicted, Matthew Desmond
The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson
Brotopia, Emily Chang
Down and Across, Arvin Ahmadi
Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann 🌟
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, Peter Godwin 🌟
Whatever You Do, Don’t Run, Peter Allison
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan 🌟
The Making of Asian America, Erika Lee
Machine Learning, Hugh Howey
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos
The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu 🌟
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Dance of the Possible, Scott Berkun
Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard 🌟
Bad Blood, John Carreyrou 🌟
Hunger, Roxane Gay 🌟
Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain 🌟
This Is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay 🌟
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix
Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller
The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van der Kolk
Crucial Conversations, Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron Mcmillan, and Al Switzler
Wabi Sabi, Andrew Juniper
A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman
Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker 🌟
The Software Engineer’s Guide to Freelance Consulting, Zack Burt and Jay El-Kaake
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee 🌟
Lost Connections, Johann Hari
Ice Cream Social, Brad Edmondson
Turtles All the Way Down, John Green
How to Fix a Broken Heart, Guy Winch
Wonder, R.J. Palacio
Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan 🌟
China Rich Girlfriend, Kevin Kwan
Rich People Problems, Kevin Kwan
Girl in Translation, Jean Kwok
Fresh off the Boat, Eddie Huang
The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch
Tin Man, Sarah Winman
The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick
Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas 🌟
Healing from Hidden Abuse, Shannon Thomas
The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson
Dangerous Personalities, Joe Navarro
Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey
AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee 🌟
R.U.R., Karel Čapek
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
Technically Wrong, Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
In the Penal Colony, Franz Kafka
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carré
The Dip, Seth Godin
Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Less, Andrew Sean Greer
I Am Pilgrim, Terry Hayes 🌟
Educated, Tara Westover 🌟
Becoming, Michelle Obama 🌟
Faces in the Crowd, Valeria Luiselli
The History of the Siege of Lisbon, José Saramago

Step 1. The invite.

Watch Crazy Rich Asians. Not once, not twice, but three times, each. Between two of you, that’s six times altogether. Maybe even go to the LA premiere and interview some of the cast on the red carpet. Or meet Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations when the country’s tourism board hosts a screening in New York.

Pick your spiritual inspiration from a cast of characters that, for the first time ever, might actually look like you. Astrid. Peik Lin. Obsess over the whole thing a little bit more. Decide to host a Crazy Rich Asians-themed party.

Attire:
~ Fancy-shmancy or “snoshy”
~ Favorite waterproof wedding dress
~ Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops
~ One word: “clubbing”
~ Shirtless to show off your six-pack

Splashthat: $0.

Step 2. The decor.

Order some paper lanterns and twine off Amazon. That’s the easy part.

To recreate the lush Singaporean jungle effect of Araminta Lee and Colin Khoo’s wedding scene, you need some florals and foliage. Take a spin through Manhattan’s floral district and find some end-of-life flowers to bargain down on price. Bring your Asian mom for full effect; with a huge smile and the sweetest voice, she casually mentions to the seller the broad monstera deliciosa leaf has holes in it and looks “broken.” A huge discount is offered. Negging: an effective haggling tactic! Return home triumphant with a haul of four dozen baby roses, two dozen orchids, many fistfuls of stemmed green leafery, plus the “broken” monstera, all this for only $22.

Put up the twine like clotheslines across the room, tie alternating lengths of the string to dangle vertically from those, then knot on the lanterns and flowers for dramatic hanging effect. On the table beneath, arrange the leaves and remaining flowers like a table runner.

Don’t forget to put up that Crazy Rich Asians movie poster you picked up from the third screening you went to. Just to remind people of the theme, in case they forget.

Paper lanterns: $25.
Twine: $4.
Flowers: $22.
Crazy Rich Asians movie poster: $0.

Step 3. The food.

Go for cookies, cakes, and tea. Like Eleanor’s bible study session. Indulge in mooncakes, since it’s almost Mid-Autumn Festival. Trust that your friends will be darlings and bring a dazzling array of desserts to contribute. (They do.)

Swing by the dollar store for a handful of 100 Grands and Oh Henry!s. They make for good party decor.

Assorted teas and almond milk from Trader Joe’s: $20.
Assorted cookies from Trader Joe’s: $20.
Mooncakes from Lung Moon Bakery: $34.
Candy bars from the dollar store: $1 each.

Step 4. The wardrobe.

Screenshot movie stills to your phone for fashion inspiration. Search Rent the Runway for appropriately glamorous garments and accessories. Get excited, then get realistic that you’re not actually going to spend $150 to wear a designer dress for a day. Realize that the Rent the Runway Unlimited subscription you canceled has a week left until expiration. Get excited again.

For Astrid: Reserve that Prabal Gurung tea rose side slash dress you’ve been eyeing and a gorgeous pair of gold-plated, resin-painted Oscar de la Renta floral drop earrings (clip-ons, though, because you don’t have pierced ears). Finish off the look with dramatic cream-and-brown cat eye sunglasses, on sale at GAP.

GAP sunglasses: $17.
Prabal Gurung dress: $0 (with Rent the Runway Unlimited subscription).
Oscar de la Renta earrings: $0 (with Rent the Runway Unlimited subscription).
Any non-black high-heeled footwear from closet: $0.

For Peik Lin: Sadly, Rent the Runway doesn’t do animal-patterned silk pajama sets (yet?) but some of their glittery pieces do give a good nouveau riche Goh family vibe.

Step 5. The guestlist.

Miscellaneous high-society well-dressed Asians, Rachel, “Cocktail Dress” and “Walk of Shame”. Jet-setting friends in town from Singapore, London, and San Francisco. (They definitely came in by private jet.)

Step 6. The toast.

Clink your glass and marvel at how the room immediately falls silent.

Against a backdrop of opulence and abs, Crazy Rich Asians is about the magic that awaits those who are brave enough to take on the world as their very best, most bok-bok selves. Your own crazy rich party on a budget is obviously not about being rich in the Taiwan Plastics Chus kind of way.

You are grateful to be crazy rich in all the ways money can’t buy.

Toast to adventure, to life experience, to grand opportunity.

Toast to friendship, and to your friends in the room: The ones who make their way through the world with you, whether that’s tech events in San Francisco, Russian baths in New York, congressional hearings in Washington, DC, or Sundance Film Festival in the dead of winter in Utah. The ones who remain by your side when air conditioners malfunction and hearts break, who power through jetlag and tears. Who cheer your successes. Who protect you from harm. Who show you the love you deserve. Who make all things feel possible.

Bonus! Step 7. The photoshoot.

Once the guests are gone, take full advantage of both you and the space looking fabulous to stage a photoshoot. Bask in being extra.

P.S. Your mom joins for this part. She’s rocking a rose gold sequin gown off the CRA rack at Rent the Runway. And she’s got the sunglasses to match.

I love who I am and that I have lived at the intersection of cultures, but I also feel a sense of rootlessness, that I don’t belong anywhere. Like every other Asian-American, I’ve been asked countless times: “Where are you from?” “But where are you really from?” I don’t know. There is no answer that is satisfactory. I’ve never truly felt at home anywhere. I don’t “look” American, and even in the Asian-dense Bay Area, I’ve alternately been praised, “Your English is really good!” and disparaged with, “Do you even speak English?”

The rallying cry of “Representation matters!” has been loud enough that I at least intellectually knew it would be powerful for me to see someone like me on screen. I didn’t realize how much more powerful it would be for me to feel seen, to feel mainstream American acknowledgment and validation of the stories and experiences of people like me.

(Even the funny bits, like Peik Lin’s dad trying to set Rachel up with her brother, dismissing the fact that Rachel has a boyfriend; I’ve 100% been at that dining room table before, with a friend’s dad voicing aloud his strong approval of my physical appearance, Taiwanese heritage, and Stanford degree and how I would be very good for my friend’s brother, despite my friend’s protestations that I already had a boyfriend. “Well, when you break up!”)

I was so afraid that a box office flop for this movie might be another repudiation of Asians in Western society, culture, and media, another reminder that we don’t belong and might never belong. Instead, I’m crying happy, grateful tears of relief for a #GoldOpen and a breakthrough moment in the form of a crazy rich fantastically-set love story that also happens to be the coming-of-age story of an Asian-American woman who reminds me of me. As director Jon Chu writes, “It’s a lavish, fun, romantic romp but underneath it all, there’s an intimate story of a girl becoming a woman. Learning that she’s good enough and deserves the world, no matter what she’s been taught or how she’s been treated, and ultimately that she can be proud of her mixed heritage.”

Maybe someday I’ll meet my Nick Young, too ;)

Time named its 2017 Person of the Year to be ‘The Silence Breakers’: the brave women and men who spoke up and unleashed that wave of reckoning. They were not the first to speak, but theirs were the voices that resonated and were able to break through, which is as much a statement about them as it is about the world that would finally hear them.

In the tech industry, the first big harassment story of 2017 was that of Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer. Her self-penned account of her very “strange” year at Uber was measured and effective, her anecdotes specific and salacious, documenting systemic harassment and discrimination at the company. A few months later, in June 2017, six women went on record with The Information to name Justin Caldbeck, an investor at Binary Capital, for sexual harassment. Shortly after that, the New York Times went on to name several more prominent investors, including Dave McClure of 500 Startups, for their misconduct. There were ramifications: Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick was forced to step down, and Caldbeck and McClure as well, from the firms they had helped to start. All of this presaged the #MeToo stories and fallout soon to come in Hollywood, media and politics.

And yet, almost a year later, and on the other side of the Harvey Weinstein reports, which broke in October, it feels like the force of that reckoning in tech has already abated. #MeToo in tech is not a trending hashtag. In the tech world, today, in 2018, despite everything, conferences are still hosting events at strip clubs, known offenders are still going on speaking tours, and people who’ve been fired for sexual harassment simply pop up elsewhere to pick up new plum appointments.

The worst behaved in tech have largely come from the ranks of investing, the venture capitalists (VCs). They control access to capital. Some companies manage to get off the ground without the infusions of cash that VCs provide, but most need that money to even have a shot at trying to achieve their start-up dreams. The percentage of female investors at top venture firms currently stands at no more than eight per cent. A female founder trying to secure funding for her company has no choice but to pitch many male VCs, and in most cases the founder is vulnerable. Furthermore, the legal protections that are theoretically if not practically helpful within companies, among co-workers in the same corporate environment, do not exist at all in the hazy grey area of founder/potential investor relations. (Update: Since this piece went to print, I helped to launch a project called #MovingForward, which encourages VC firms to codify and publish their inclusion and anti-harassment policies for external parties, alongside points of contact, so there is both guidance and recourse for founders.) For all of that, female founders only get two per cent of all venture money.

The follow-on effects for the rest of the tech industry are clear: men keep their stranglehold on leadership in the small tech start-ups of today, out of which come the big tech corporations of tomorrow. These men continue to hire and promote their mostly male friends, not necessarily nefariously or even consciously biased, but often simply out of convenience and comfort.

Just as male-written, -directed and -produced Hollywood means an untold loss of storytelling from women, male-designed, -engineered and -funded Silicon Valley misses out on critical ideas and perspectives even as it seeks to craft the future of the world we live in. To study the example of one hot-button subject of late, the role of tech platforms in proliferating hate and harassment: women were the proverbial canary in the coal mine for this, yet our experiences of being harassed, trolled, stalked and doxxed hardly informed better tools for managing public discourse and protecting individuals from abuse. There are belated efforts underway now, but being able to say “I told you so” is scarce comfort.

Some companies, undervalued and dismissed because they are built by and/or sell to women, struggle at the start yet manage to break through anyway: Pinterest, the visual-bookmarking site, and Stitch Fix, the personal shopping service, are good examples in recent history. But so many others are lost in that early struggle. Take the case of Naya Health, which makes a smart breast pump that is Food and Drug Administration-approved, loved by mums, and yet can’t win over the Silicon Valley gatekeepers of capital. The founders, a husband and wife team, has had to turn to crowdfunding and validation via Kickstarter instead.

In the era of #MeToo, why has it been so hard for change to come to the tech industry, an industry that itself wants to change the world? Far more dangerous and insidious than a few bad men are the systems and power structures that have enabled them. At its most fundamental, sexual harassment is not about sex, it is about power and being able to abuse it. In business, it is economic and financial power and the ability to make deals, projects, or even companies and careers, that men are abusing.

The #MeToo movement fights back with the power of public accountability, but it isn’t always there, and it isn’t always enough. In Hollywood, media and politics, the spectacle of celebrities and public figures sharing or figuring in #MeToo stories has been an incredible media draw. The testimony of women like Salma Hayek, Lupita Nyong’o and Uma Thurman, speaking to Harvey Weinstein’s monstrosity, has been some of the most devastating. For most people seeing actors, newscasters and elected officials being implicated in #MeToo accusations is far more arresting a sight than tech insider takedowns. At the same time, accusations and consequences do not unfold independently of the press coverage and public attention. Where legal recourse has repeatedly been unsuccessful, in some cases the court of public opinion can demand accountability — as long as the public cares to have an opinion.

In tech, we will have to go about fixing our broken operating systems in our own slow, boring and not particularly newsworthy ways. For those who are not activists or diversity practitioners, the litany of recommended changes is a list more likely to inspire eye glaze: more inclusive recruiting; fairer, more calibrated hiring and promotion processes; more evidence-based decision-making, less of the kind based on gut feel and pattern matching; more work schedule flexibility; more supportive family/caretaker leave policies and benefits; third-party ombuds programs and other non-conflicted reporting and accountability mechanisms; etc, etc.

The list doesn’t make for much of a hashtag — but hopefully it makes for lasting change.

This story originally appeared in the April 2018 issue of Vogue Australia.

In 2005, the late writer David Foster Wallace delivered a now-famous commencement address. It starts with the story of the fish in water, who spend their lives not even knowing what water is. They are naively unaware of the ocean that permits their existence, and the currents that carry them.

The most important education we can receive, Wallace goes on to explain, “isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” He talks about finding appreciation for the richness of humanity and society. But it is the core concept of meta-cognition, of examining and editing what it is that we choose to contemplate, that has fixated me as someone who works in the tech industry.

As much as code and computation and data can feel as if they are mechanistically neutral, they are not. Technology products and services are built by humans who build their biases and flawed thinking right into those products and services — which in turn shapes human behavior and society, sometimes to a frightening degree. It’s arguable, for example, that online media’s reliance on clickbait journalism, and Facebook’s role in spreading “fake news” or otherwise sensationalized stories influenced the results of the 2016 US presidential election. This criticism is far from outward-facing; it comes from a place of self-reflection.

I studied engineering at Stanford University, and at the time I thought that was all I needed to study. I focused on problem-solving in the technical domain, and learned to see the world through the lens of equations, axioms, and lines of code. I found beauty and elegance in well-formulated optimization problems, tidy mathematical proofs, clever time- and space-efficient algorithms. Humanities classes, by contrast, I felt to be dreary, overwrought exercises in finding meaning where there was none. I dutifully completed my general education requirements in ethical reasoning and global community. But I was dismissive of the idea that there was any real value to be gleaned from the coursework.

Upon graduation, I went off to work as a software engineer at a small startup, Quora, then composed of only four people. Partly as a function of it being my first full-time job, and partly because the company and our product — a question and answer site — was so nascent, I found myself for the first time deeply considering what it was that I was working on, and to what end, and why.

As my teammates and I were building Quora, we were also simultaneously defining what it should be, whom it would serve, and what behaviors we wanted to incentivize amongst our users. I was no longer operating in a world circumscribed by lesson plans, problem sets and programming assignments, and intended course outcomes. I also wasn’t coding to specs, because there were no specs. As my teammates and I were building the product, we were also simultaneously defining what it should be, whom it would serve, what behaviors we wanted to incentivize amongst our users, what kind of community it would become, and what kind of value we hoped to create in the world.

I still loved immersing myself in code and falling into a state of flow — those hours-long intensive coding sessions where I could put everything else aside and focus solely on the engineering tasks at hand. But I also came to realize that such disengagement from reality and societal context could only be temporary.

The first feature I built when I worked at Quora was the block button. Even when the community numbered only in the thousands, there were already people who seemed to delight in being obnoxious and offensive. I was eager to work on the feature because I personally felt antagonized and abused on the site (gender isn’t an unlikely reason as to why). As such, I had an immediate desire to make use of a blocking function. But if I hadn’t had that personal perspective, it’s possible that the Quora team wouldn’t have prioritized building a block button so early in its existence.

Our thinking around anti-harassment design also intersected a great deal with our thinking on free speech and moderation. We pondered the philosophical question — also very relevant to our product — of whether people were by default good or bad. If people were mostly good, then we would design the product around the idea that we could trust users, with controls for rolling back the actions of bad actors in the exceptional cases. If they were by default bad, it would be better to put all user contributions and edits through approvals queues for moderator review.

We debated the implications for open discourse: If we trusted users by default, and then we had an influx of “low quality” users (and how appropriate was it, even, to be labeling users in such a way?), what kind of deteriorative effect might that have on the community? But if we didn’t trust Quora members, and instead always gave preference to existing users that were known to be “high quality,” would we end up with an opinionated, ossified, old-guard, niche community that rejected newcomers and new thoughts?

In the end, we chose to bias ourselves toward an open and free platform, believing not only in people but also in positive community norms and our ability to shape those through engineering and design. Perhaps, and probably, that was the right call. But we’ve also seen how the same bias in the design of another, pithier public platform has empowered and elevated abusers, harassers, and trolls to levels of national and international concern.

At Quora, and later at Pinterest, I also worked on the algorithms powering their respective homefeeds: the streams of content presented to users upon initial login, the default views we pushed to users. It seems simple enough to want to show users “good” content when they open up an app. But what makes for good content? Is the goal to help users to discover new ideas and expand their intellectual and creative horizons? To show them exactly the sort of content that they know they already like? Or, most easily measurable, to show them the content they’re most likely to click on and share, and that will make them spend the most time on the service?

Ruefully — and with some embarrassment at my younger self’s condescending attitude toward the humanities — I now wish that I had strived for a proper liberal arts education. That I’d learned how to think critically about the world we live in and how to engage with it. That I’d absorbed lessons about how to identify and interrogate privilege, power structures, structural inequality, and injustice. That I’d had opportunities to debate my peers and develop informed opinions on philosophy and morality. And even more than all of that, I wish I’d even realized that these were worthwhile thoughts to fill my mind with — that all of my engineering work would be contextualized by such subjects.

It worries me that so many of the builders of technology today are people like me, people who haven’t spent anywhere near enough time thinking about these larger questions of what it is that we are building, and what the implications are for the world.

But it is never too late to be curious. Each of us can choose to learn, to read, to talk to people, to travel, and to engage intellectually and ethically. I hope that we all do so — so that we can come to acknowledge the full complexity and wonder of the world we live in, and be thoughtful in designing the future of it.

This post originally appeared on Quartz.