The end of tokenism? Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí    – Creative director, etc etc / LMMiami.com

“When I came to this country I spoke one language. Now I speak none.”
Heard on the mean streets of Miami.

• My columns have been known to follow a certain literary brand of free-associative stream of consciousness.
• An idiosyncratic yet enthralling litany of loosely connected lofty thoughts, eye-opening factoids, saucy snark, playful mischief, whimsical one-liners, devil-may-care invective, off-of-left-field bon mots and non sequiturs.
• The good news?
• No libel lawsuits so far.
• This particular op-ed you’re kindly consuming today sorta takes the free-wheeling genre to an extreme.
• Please read on at your own risk.
• And mine.
• Madison Avenue felt the heat first and is scrambling to change but diversity in Silicon Valley sucks (unless you are cheap backend labor from India, that is).
• Silicon Valley, not unlike Wall Street, believes the rules don’t apply to them.
• They are quick to point fingers.
• Yes, they lobby DC to get more visas to hire entry level engineers.
• The glass ceiling is still there though.
• Up the corporate ladder they don’t feel THEY need to “change” yet.
• Not that I’m bragging here but I’ve been to Silicon Valley a few times.
• Tokenism is pervasive.
• One rarely finds a Latino in the rank & file of tech companies, let alone in the C-Suite.
• I met my share of Northern California masters of the digital universe intent on world domination.
• I’m afraid the only Hispanic entrepreneurs over there are in the landscaping business.
• Who’s to blame for the sorry state of diversity in Silicon Valley?
• Who knows.*
• In any case, all I saw in Cupertino, Palo Alto and Mountain View was a bunch of greedy insular monolinguals worshipping at the altar of big data.
• Sifting piecemeal through the sacred data to confirm their interests and prejudices while squandering rounds of funding.
• In other words, cheating at solitary.
• It ain’t no secret that the biz model in Silicon Valley is to separate suckers from their money.
• When I say suckers though I mean investors and advertisers.
• Consumers?
• It’s funny to see how Silicon Valley still struggles to figure out a proper way to convince actual consumers to pay for their services.
• Silicon Valley’s MO seems to be always the same: give away highly subsidized products and services at little or no charge, creating a spiral of free-loading that eventually becomes impossible to disrupt.
• Sell hot air (or better yet, give it away).
• Meantime, buy time.
• With somebody else’s money.
• Silicon Valley has dangerously trained billions of people around the world to believe everything online is free.
• Search, social, news, long distance calls, music, movies, storage. Even car services, if one is cunning enough to game the system.
• Why?
• Hey Silicon Valley, if your products & services are so revolutionary and disruptive why is nobody willing to pay for them?
• OK, what you are selling is audiences, eyeballs.**
• Fair enough.
• So what’s so innovative about selling audiences, folks?
• Broadcast media invented this business model a century ago.
• I stand corrected, newspapers invented it three centuries ago.
• Go try to break the freeloadin’ mentality now.
• It is an ironclad vicious circle.
• A scam of epic proportions.
• Them Silicon Valley con artists might have done a serious disservice to humanity.
• A profound damage akin to Marxism and Justin Bieber’s mom.
• Silicon Valley has nurtured a generation of people who are willing to spend $300 on a trashy tattoo yet won’t spend a dime to read The New York Times.
• To be sure, only a handful of Silicon Valley start-ups have survived after the funding ran out and a paywall was imposed.
• It is one big game of B2B musical chairs, if you ask me.
• Eventually the music will stop.
• They will need to reinvent themselves, quite like Madison Avenue is scrambling to do as we speak.
• Reach out to paying consumers.
• Truly understand them
• My humble advice to them?
• Stop hiring the same old talent from the same old “elite schools”.
• Enough with the folks who believe one-size-fits all.
• The dudes who try to solve everything with an algorithm.
• The monocultural monolingual “American exceptionalists” who believe the US ethnic mainstream is the trial market of humanity.
• Silicon Valley will need truly open minded talent.
• And you know what the sign of a superior & open mind is?
• Multilingualism.
• To be continued next week.

*Latinos still lag in college education. It is self-inflicted to a considerable extent. Individually and as a community we are culprits too. Big time. BIG TIME. But hey, neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates finished college. The running phrase in Silicon Valley is “finishing college is useless, what really matters is which colleges admit you.” Hey, by no means am I advising to skip college. COURSE NOT!

**Privacy advocates and assorted paranoids claim that Silicon Valley makes its money selling our personal information. You know the running phrase: when you’re given a product for free it’s because you are actually the product. There’s some truth in that notion. Hardcore paranoids, however, claim Silicon Valley is a weaponized network, a massive intelligence machinery controlled by the Defense Department, the CIA, the NSA. Which would explain why all things Silicon Valley are closely monitored or simply banned in China. Mark Zuckerberg would be a kingpin -or simply a puppet- of the military industrial complex. I love this conspiracy theory.