Thread by @elfsternberg

Someone asked me how "He Man" is responsible for the Internet being such a terrible place. Let me explain. In 1981, HE-MAN and the Masters of the Universe toys hit the shelves. Six years later, this happened: npr.org/sections/money…

Those two events are related. In 1981, He-Man sucked all the money out of families' Christmas budgets. Apple and Atari and Commodore and so forth saw their "A machine that's programmable and fun!" message fall dead.

Consumer computer makers needed to stay alive, so they changed their message from "fun" to "anxious:" The future is coming, and boys need to learn "computers" to stay competitive. But not just any boys. Marketers targeted middle class white boys.

Those ads went into Better Homes & Gardens. Time Magazine. Even Playboy. Advertisers didn't put Apple or Commodore ads in Jet or Ebony. Black families didn't have the kind of money it took to buy a PC. Only middle class white families could afford such an expensive outlay.

So those ten and twelve year old white boys grew up, went to college and sure enough, they were ahead of everyone else. Women and Black students dropped out of computer science, bewildered by how freshmen white guys seemed to be so much better "at computers."

In 1993, when the Internet became commercialized and Perl made getting onto the web easier, it was those same white men who created all the cool new tools. Therein lies the problem: White guys have no threat model.

Black people worry that Karen will call the cops on them for being Black: that's a threat model. Gay people are worried they'll be outed or exposed at any moment: that's a threat model. Privileged white men have no threat model. They ARE the threat.

I'm as guilty of that as anyone. Although I am queer, I live in what was at the time a very queer town. I'm as white as it gets. I am highly privileged. I never thought, "How could what I'm writing today be used to harass or hurt someone?" Few of us did, not enough to matter.

Marketers chose to make "computers" a topic dominated first by white teenagers and, at almost exactly the same time the commercial Internet started, the men those teenagers grew up to be. The success of He-Man was the catalyst of that choice.