Chris Anderson Leaving Wired for Robots

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/chris-anderson-leaving-wired-for-robots.html

by marshallp • 14 years ago

28 9 14 years ago

nacker5• 14 years ago

"His successor has not yet been named, but already, observers online are calling for a female replacement. In the words of Wired reporter Steve Silberman, "It's been a boys' club for too long.""

Well, that gave me a laugh! Anyone else?

http://www.springerlink.com/content/vg7322727mgl1875/fulltex...

colmvp• 14 years ago

Indeed. I can't imagine saying, "this company has far too many white people for far too long! We have to market ourselves to African Americans, Latinos, and Asians!"

nacker5• 14 years ago

From my admittedly tl;dr link:

"The large institutions have almost all been created by men. The notion that women were deliberately oppressed by being excluded from these institutions requires an artful, selective, and motivated way of looking at them. Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. Almost certainly, this reflects one of the basic motivational differences between men and women, which is that female sociality is focused heavily on one-to-one relationships, whereas male sociality extends to larger groups networks of shallower relationships (e.g., Baumeister and Sommer 1997; Baumeister 2010). Crudely put, women hardly ever create large organizations or social systems. That fact can explain most of the history of gender relations, in which the gender near equality of prehistorical societies was gradually replaced by progressive inequality—not because men banded together to oppress women, but because cultural progress arose from the men’s sphere with its large networks of shallow relationships, while the women’s sphere remained stagnant because its social structure emphasized intense one-to-one relationships to the near exclusion of all else (see Baumeister 2010). All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small."

Also, I just love Monkey Economics. I hope it works for the soon-to-be-dumbed-down-so-dudes-can-get-laid version of Wired:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8449HgS3FM

nacker5• 14 years ago

On deeper reflection, this apparently trivial "tech-news-pc-item" has more significance to me than just another signpost on the socio-sexual-cultural degeneration narrative that I see being played out every day.

I was an early reader of Wired, and at one point in the 90's I was proud of my complete collection going back to the second issue. A very long time ago, both for "culture" and for me. I have always been one of those people who are ahead of "culture" by five to ten years - and this has not been necessarily a good thing, more of a burden, in fact.

It is, of course, pretty random that this news-snippet should mention the movement of a male writer from Wired to a Robot-focussed publication, with the additional laugh-tag of his possible replacement by an affirmative-action femnerd. But is this indicative of a something more general, and novel?

Wired used to be a tech mag for techies about the internet. Now the internet seems to be more and more focussed on (crap) like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. Women's stuff, and (yeah, I am unapologetically un-PC about everything) 20-something BS. It's beginning to feel really old and suffocating.

Where are the MEN going? It seems to me that they are heading for hardware. Robots. 3D Printing. Drones. It's not about money. It's about getting away from the goddamn women. I really think this is the ur-impulse that took us from the caves to where we are today. Discuss.

Chris Anderson Leaving Wired for Robots

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