The 👁👄👁 debacle sums up tech's race issues

Not gonna lie that's some pretty epic shitposting. Never would I have imagined it's possible to raise $200k for a cause I care about by shitposting collectively with other shitposters.

It's interesting what can be accomplished by even a small amount of collective action, even when there's no clear purpose or goal.

Wow! I hadn't heard about this. I think it's pretty clever. However, this just sums up tech reporting:

Josh Constine, a venture capitalist and the former editor of TechCrunch, wrote about the nascent app in his newsletter, speculating that 👁👄👁 was a platform that lets people “share your voice and imagery to a map and Stories-like bar that you can serendipitously tap through.”

So based on absolutely nothing, he literally just made up what it was and then told the world about it. This seems like the same way they report on rumors about Apple or other big tech companies that like to have big flashy introductions for their products. I mean some of it does come from insiders, but it seems like just as much of it is made up from whole cloth.

I’m not sure if this story really sums up tech’s race issues. The article mentions how some of the participants in this stunt are critical of the role that black people are largely relegated to by venture capital - as a diversity token. And yet it also says that a largely non-white group of jokers managed to exploit the system by creating a fake hype cycle for a nonexistent product.

One question that immediately springs to mind is: if it’s so easy to manipulate the system, couldn’t these tactics be used for the next real tech startup founded by black entrepeneurs? It seems to be the moral of this story isn’t so much ‘tech has race issues’ (which I don’t doubt for a second) but ‘you can achieve whatever you want if you’re just willing to exploit the system.’ I don’t mean to belittle the challenges that black entrepeneurs face, which I really wouldn’t know anything about, but could something resembling positivity come out of this? I think it’s awful that the tech world is built on fake hype, but until such time as we can change that system, maybe this tendency can be exploited to lift up those who have been excluded from benefiting from it?

The tweet thread that the article linked is really something. I'm trying to wrap my head around the criticism and I feel like a moron. Can someone tell me if I've got this right? A handful of people on tech twitter, many of them POC, started putting the 👁️ 👄 👁️ sign in their bios and handles which gained quite a bit of interest and speculation. Then they posted about receiving seed funding, which amplified the interest and speculation due to "VC FOMO" (?) so much so that they realized they could turn this moment of fake hype into something positive by spreading rumors that people who donate to social justice charities will get a look at their product. By doing that, and selling some merchandise, they raised about 200k - is that right? Am I missing something critical? Because I dont understand the backlash, or how that makes a mockery of BLM.

Sort of off-topic question, but does anyone else see the emojis like this ? I have a black-and-white eye before the lips (and tongue in @Keegan's reply), and a full-color, 'emoji'-style eye *after the lips. I thought it might just be a Wired thing, but nope, it's here too. I think it must be a rendering thing -- the question is, why?