The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Add Greg Gopman to the list of Silicon Valley people contributing to the “Cyberselfish” and “Entitled Millennial” stereotypes, thanks to this Facebook post that he and his company’s PR person will be dealing with for the next little while:

Just got back to SF. I’ve traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down market st in San Francisco. Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue. Each time I pass it my love affair with SF dies a little.

The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay.

In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city. Like it’s their place of leisure… In actuality it’s the business district for one of the wealthiest cities in the USA. It a disgrace. I don’t even feel safe walking down the sidewalk without planning out my walking path.

You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn’t made anyone’s life better in a while.

In case you have any doubts as to which side of the rich/poor divide Gopman lives on, remember that he’s in the business of organizing hackathons worldwide, which clearly puts him on the “shuffling wealth around, not creating it” side of economics. He’s doing all right, judging from a couple of his recent tweets:

@casey_lau @andy_mui @JoshuaKrammes @joshuaxls @SoftLayer Join me in Singapore this weekend to see one double that size 😉

— Gregory Gopman (@Gopmania) November 21, 2013

@alexabyte me and Carmen are in Bali this weekend. You should join us ^^

— Gregory Gopman (@Gopmania) November 27, 2013

Gopman has since deleted his original Facebook posting and posted an apology:

Last night, I made inappropriate comments about San Francisco and its less fortunate citizens on Market st. I’m really sorry for my comments. I trivialized the plight of those struggling to get by and I shouldn’t have. I hope this thread can help start an open discussion on what changes we can make to fix these serious problems. Again, I am deeply sorry.

Gopman’s original sentiment will become only more prevalent on those who are on the better side of the ever-widening Gini coefficient gulf that separates rich from poor. It’s a line of thinking I see more and more among people who are making more — oftentimes much more — than the mean wage: that people who’ve had bad breaks must have bad character. (Were this true, Rob and Doug Ford would not be millionaires.)

Let’s see if Gopman’s metanoia is real, or if it’s just backpedalling to counter bad PR.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the ad that everyone’s been talking about — the one that highlights how the same qualities in men and women at work get judged differently. It’s an ad for Pantene for the market in the Philippines, where yes, you’ll see ads in English (it’s one of the official languages):

The video’s name is Labels Against Women, and it’s been marked with the hashtag #WhipIt. The ad came out in November, and while it was aired only in the Philippines, it was also posted online where Facebook COO Cheryl “Lean In” Sandberg saw it, and linked to it in her Facebook feed. From there it — as we say in the industry — went viral:

The agency behind the ad, BBDO Guerrero, has teamed with the website Rappler to feature a series of articles called #WHIPIT that focuses on the issues that women face today, including the way they’re viewed in society and in the workplace. The first article, On self-labelling: women stereotypes or female archetypes? was published a few days ago, and it’s a worthwhile read.

If you’d like to see what happened at the “town hall” discussion covered by the Rappler article, here’s a video. The discussion appears to have been done in mostly English (I’ve skimmed it), but if some stray Tagalog words pop in, just ask and I’ll explain:

You’ve got to hand it to China Central Television, who either see the silver lining in every cloud (even if the cloud is smog), or are the most bloodyminded of propagandists. As eastern China continues to be blanketed in a brown cloud of air pollution, they published this list of the five “surprising benefits” of smog:

1. It unifies the Chinese people.
2. It makes China more equal.
3. It raises citizen awareness of the cost of China’s economic development.
4. It makes people funnier.
5. It makes people more knowledgeable (of things like meteorology and the English word haze).

The article has since been yanked from the site — presumably after much ridicule from insides and outside the Middle Kingdom — but that hasn’t stopped China’s government boosters from singing smog’s praises. A pro-smog article on the nationalist Global Times’ website reads:

“Smog may affect people’s health and daily lives … but on the battlefield, it can serve as a defensive advantage in military operations.”

The South China Morning Post has an article on this claim, which includes this cartoon:

While this sort of thing isn’t done as crudely and transparently as in China, it happens here in North America too, as documented in the book below, which is where I drew the first photo’s caption from:

The screen capture above is from The Lorelei Signal, an episode from the Star Trek animated series that aired from 1973 to 1974. The observation that this scene has more women in it than the entirety of JJ Abrams’ “reboot” films was made by a woman name Emily, a reformed Star Wars fan who fell in love with Trek after the 2009 film. She’s behind the Make Trek Not War Tumblr, and she’s been working her way through the Star Trek oeuvre, from the original 1960s series and going forward.

You can read a synopsis of The Lorelei Signal at the Memory Alpha wiki, and — if you’re willing to put up with some ads — you can watch the episode here.

Come to think of it, many partnerships of all sorts — business and personal — end up like this.

Two take-aways from this photo:

• When providing instructions, be as clear and unambiguous as possible.
• It’s reassuring to see that someone with a “Life is Good”-branded wheel cover actually takes things in stride.

My pet peeve microagression from the BuzzFeed article.

BuzzFeed recently posted an article titled 21 Racial Microagressions You Hear on a Daily Basis, and it reminded me of the very first time that I decided I’d had enough.

“C'mon, man. Admit it: you're not Asian,” read the text on my chat window.

This was nothing new; I’d been hearing this kind of garbage at least as far back as university. If you’ve heard me speak (and if you haven’t, you can click on any of the videos featured in my LinkedIn profile) and if you’re a bit slow, a shut-in, or just ignorant, you’d say I sound “white”. I like a chicken fried steak and bourbon as much as the next guy south of the Mason-Dixon line. Those of you who’ve seen me onstage, whether doing a presentation or playing the accordion know that I do not fit the quiet, “inscrutable” stereotype. There’s a bike thief in Toronto and two muggers in Prague who have object lessons in the form of injuries because they assumed that all Asians are are shy and retiring and will roll over and play dead until they met me.

It’s come from all sorts of people, ranging from casual acquaintances to really good friends, and I used to put up with it. “Stick and stones” and all that. I was about to let it go yet another time.

As I moved the cursor over to the chat window’s “close” box, another message from the same guy — white, male, a little younger than me, educated, well-travelled, and purportedly smart enough to know better — sent another message:

“You're a banana.”

As in “yellow on the outside, white on the inside.”

I continued moving the cursor over to the “close” box, when another similar message appeared. My memory for personal events is pretty good, but I can’t for the life of me tell you what that third message was. I don’t recall. I do remember that on that mid-afternoon in the summer of 2000, I’d had enough and rose from my chair to do something about it. I could, because the offending party was in the next room.

He didn’t see me coming, so it was a complete shock to him when I grabbed the back of his chair and slammed it towards the ground so that he ended up like this:

He’d had a cup of coffee, which was now empty, its contents spilled over his shirt. As he lay stunned but mostly unhurt on the floor, still in the chair, I said:

“Let me get this straight. Because I speak so that you can understand me and fit in, you make fun of me. If I spoke with a ‘Chinese’ accent and didn’t fit in, you’d make fun of me. No matter what, I can’t win.“

“If I’m not allowed to win, I don’t want to play your fucking game.”

I looked at him and everyone else in the room, who were stunned into motionless silence.

“You have a problem with what I just did,” I said, “take it up with HR. I have the chat log.”

I was gambling that between sheer force of personality, the shock of a normally easy-going guy unloading on someone like that, and some amount of shame, no one would report me. No one did.