You really need to get into Karla's thread. There is so much here. She has been chewing on power, and how it moves. I think it's such a necessary part of the discourse we are having about things need to change.
We've been talking about how social media platforms have created a new form of power. Unlike many of our older institutions, the power conferred by internet platforms is less able to be controlled by gatekeepers. People who haven't had power now have it.
Karla has also helped me see something else. (I highly recommend the thread and a follow).

Different kinds of power used to be coupled together. E.g. money, access, platform, decision-making. Now it's being decoupled. That has massive implications.
I've been asking the question of how the "blue check" moniker became such a thing on twitter. I knew it was about power, but now I understand the issue. People are assuming that platform power is still coupled to other kinds of power.
If you have a high follower count, you do have a certain kind of power. But people speak to you as if you have other kinds of power by default. They often assume you're making money somehow. They think you have outsized influence on things outside of twitter attention.
It's *possible* to parley a social media following into other opportunities. It requires work (like a real job). If you don't do that work, you don't somehow magically get shit. And not everybody is interested in pursuing that. Somehow people don't seem to understand that.
Also, like Karla said, it has been *wild* to watch white people react to these shifting power dynamics. I've understood for a while now that part of Whiteness is being very keyed into power structures. Now that we have it, many of them are *losing their shit*.
Let me be clear what I'm saying. Most people respond to power dynamics. But one of the privileges of Whiteness is they usually control the dynamics. How do you get power. Who has it and who doesn't. And they can assume we don't have enough power to warrant their deference.
We are usually non-entities in their perception of power. But when they perceive non-white people with power on here, there is a weird dissonance. They're trying to figure out how to acknowledge that power and get close to it while *also* being contemptuous that we have it.
When you talk to some people on here, that inner conflict is so apparent. Even though I've been struggling to put into words, the feeling comes through so clearly. And I've just been learning a lot about what kind of reality white people live in.

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More from @polotek

7 Apr
I think companies should be more transparent about compensation. But let's be clear. Putting ranges in job descriptions doesn't really do any of these things Nathan suggests. Not without other tradeoffs anyway.
Does it save time? Sort of. If you mean you'll have a whole set of people self-select out of your process. Many don't want people self-selecting out early. There's flexibility to how things might work out. Posting salary ranges can suggest more rigidity than there truly is there.
Does it set expectations up front? Sort of. I mean there should be salary ranges that are consistent internally. But often the job description can't capture things like different levels that you might be evaluated at. Is the range for one level or multiple?
Read 15 tweets
7 Apr
Paraphrased: "Page auditioned to play Superman’s grandfather. They rejected him on grounds that fans expected the character to look like a young Henry Cavill."

This is really tortured way to say "white people must have white ancestors or white viewers get confused."
Ask Black Americans if we get confused when a Black character has white ancestors.

On second thought, don't.
That's just it though. Of all the ways that sci-fi and fantasy get to play with the rules of reality, we can see that white supremacy can not be tampered with. That's what we mean when we talk about how it pervades everything.
Read 5 tweets
5 Apr
I really want us to stop letting random (white) men set the bar for what constitutes a reasonable discussion around issues. They so frequently do not come into it with good faith, especially on twitter. Fuck getting them to understand something they don't want to understand.
I need more people to be confident in rejecting this kind of thing. These bad faith attempts to set themselves up as the arbiters of what needs to be "explained" or "proven". We are not obligated to meet their arbitrary demands for what would make them get on board. It's a trap.
This is especially true when it comes to white men reacting to issues around race. They don't want to understand. The way they engage is a tactic. Often, their real goal is to trivialize and devalue these issues instead of giving them the intellectual weight they deserve.
Read 6 tweets
1 Apr
I had to come back to this after vacation. It's a good thread. I've argued with Oscar about agile principles in the past. But I know he and I look for the same outcomes. We used to work together. It feels like I run into more and more people who aren't impressed with scrum.
Oscar hits on something really important here. But it requires a bit more context. He says "good engineers" know how to adjust scope. Instead I would frame that as a core skill that a good product engineer needs to develop.
The important pieces of context are these.

I'm using the loose term "product engineer" to describe devs who build products at companies that usually need to iterate and ship new features quickly. There are other kinds of dev jobs where maybe this kind of advice doesn't apply.
Read 8 tweets
26 Mar
It's so wild how when you ask any random white person, they do SO MUCH for Black people. Sending us to college and everything. And yet somehow we still can't seem to make it. SMH.
8 out of 10 white people I talk to are adamant that they do their part to help the blacks. That should be highly visible no? I mean when you go to Black neighborhoods, they must be teeming with well meaning white people. Hang on, I'm gonna look outside and see.
Hm. I don't see any right now. Maybe it's an off day. It's still early though. Maybe they'll show up later.
Read 4 tweets
26 Mar
After undermining the election for Governor, Kemp is now using his stolen position to establish disenfranchisement laws.

We have to start treating the Republican party as actively hostile to our democracy and specifically hostile to non-white Americans.
The GOP is watching their political power diminish in an increasingly diverse nation. They built a base on top of fomenting white supremacy. And they're realizing that leads to ever-escalating extremism. The GOP leadership is morally and ethically bankrupt. It's a broken party.
We managed to dodge a bullet with this presidential election. I still believe things would've accelerated towards fascism and authoritarianism had Trump won a second term. But we are not out of the woods. The rot didn't start with Trump and won't end with him.
Read 5 tweets

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