That's a fantastic piece. I always found it hypocritical that people promoting inclusion or diversity only focus on a few legally defined classes at the expense of all the others. There are many reasons people get systemically discriminated against and most of them aren't protected. A common one is personality. "If you don't have the right personality then you don't belong here." is somehow acceptable by the same people who promote inclusiveness. There's also confidence, height, attractiveness, socioeconomic background, etc.

Affirmative action takes the most advantaged members of a protected class and replaces the most disadvantaged members of a non-protected class. That's the opposite of equity.

The group that I see increasingly discriminated against in tech are those on the aspie/autistic side of the spectrum. In the past few days I've seen aspie wielded as an insult on more than one occasion. People on both sides of the spectrum contribute to cognitive diversity. People on the aspie/autistic end of the spectrum are increasingly at risk in environments where what you say and how you say it matter since they may not have the same social faculties/graces to know the right way to talk about something or even be aware that something is inappropriate. Political correctness creates a hostile work environment for those on the aspie/autistic end of the cognitive spectrum.

BTW, If you enjoyed that article, also read this more recent article by the same author:

https://status451.com/2017/08/06/judging-things-by-their-sid...

Edit: To whomever thought this comment was downvoteworthy, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Pictures".

I remember a time when classism in tech was a hot topic, but it's rarely discussed anymore.

What happened?

Over the last decade, and especially in the last 5 years, the world view amongst equality activism has shifted very strongly towards intersectional identity politics and its associated groupwise oppressor/victim dynamic as the root of all evil. Classism fell to the side in favor of sexism, racism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, and so on.

Some attribute the downfall of Occupy Wall Street to this, where a very simple message about financial justice was replaced with a focus on the slights of its middle-to-upper class revolutionaries. This is where privilege rhetoric and the progressive stack (i.e. ranking oppression) came into full vogue.

A similar thing happened with tech. The decentralized libertarian and egalitarian culture up to the early 2000s made way for a corporatized one. Censorship and moral control came into it, first by way of copyright enforcement, then by way of a rhetoric of gentrification, civility and anti-harassment. This too was pushed as benefiting marginalized identities, despite the identity blind nature of the culture it was replacing. This was already going on in the mid 2000s, crossing a few geek subcultures, and started to become mainstream around 2012. In the subsequent years, the associated "women in tech" and racial oppression narrative skyrocketed and became a regular fixture in media.

It's not outlandish to notice both of these cases played out as a divide-and-conquer scenario that benefited the societal elite by defusing potential threats to their power. In the case of Occupy it was the financial sector and the god of money, and in the case of internet culture it was governments and the ability to control from the top down. The technology that was supposed to liberate us is now used for Orwellian purposes, controlled by an oligarchy of giants.

Directly contributing to both was the long and slow push in academia to shift from enlightenment values to postmodern values, where subjectivity and social constructionism reign supreme. We can also see the clear role of modern media culture, where entertaining is preferable to informing, and that of social media in particular, where one's personal brand and personal views reign supreme.

If you put it all together, it is anyone's guess how much of this was a purely natural evolution, and how much of it was accelerated to satisfy particular agendas. Probably an interplay between both. Egregores protect themselves and rally their self-interested members to fight for them. The fact that all of this came to a well-timed crescendo in the lead up to an American presidential election however speaks volumes IMO.

Near as I can tell, those most vociferous demanding others to check their privileges avoid classism because its a privilege they often benefit from.