Maker or techie?
When phrases get twisted, feelings get trampled, ululations jump, and hearts descend to pitiful infernos — the flames simplest dampened through tears. It can be taking place all around San Francisco, Calif., and it can be very concerning. It sounds as if people who work in the tech group are raging. They feel they are being insulted they usually wish to disrupt the insults.
What is hurting them so? It’s the very word techie.
The San Francisco Chronicle experiences that a word that once might have signified sophistication now incorporates more than a nuance of spectacularly entitled, cash-grabbing, socially unaware, nauseatingly conceited, barely shaven, test-shirted wastes of space.
I paraphrase, however speak with some experience of this fairly much less-than-Carmelite community. One plaintive tech entrepreneur, Dan Gaily, instructed the Chronicle: “quite a lot of negative terms like that — yuppie, hipster — are outsider phrases. We don’t call each and every other techie — in any respect, ever.” And, after all, what matters is what techies name themselves. They are defining, redefining, and refining the world.
They need the rest of the sector to listen, not talk. It appears the words they want to hear are “hacker,” “coder,” or, please imagine, “maker.” Some may really feel their hearts dance to see a word once in a while used to consult with God being twisted to describe a techie.
Techies, in the meantime, are wafting on the axis between perturbed and disturbed. Explained Dan little, an illustrator for a gaming company: “folks speak about ‘techies’ with such disdain, like ‘Oh, it can be this thing that is swamping the town,’ so after all the word’s gotten bad.
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There’s a contact of proof that techies have contributed to the darkening of the word “techie. Who might disregard transplanted techie Peter Shih and his condescending excoriation of San Francisco? A pattern: “Why the f*** would I wish to go anyplace if I’ve to choose from spending an hour on a bus where homeless folks publicly defecate or an equally enraging hour of circling the identical 4 side road blocks looking for parking on a forty five-degree hill?
There are these — a few of whom I’ve even talked to on the topic — who consider that the phrase “techie” is insufficiently stern. They would favor “sashay” or something much more anatomically expressive. I prefer, though, to search out hope in the insanity. I imagine that the tech neighborhood will have to meet in its tech church hall and resolve to disrupt this disruption to its popularity.
It will have to in finding how to interfere with all of the world’s keyboards to forestall the phrase “techie” from ever being typed. Surveillance expertise is now so sophisticated that surely some software can be invented whereby any individual who utters the word “techie” may be dealt a severe, quick-wave electric shock.
Failing that, the tech neighborhood might force San Francisco to make uttering the phrase an offense even higher than sitting on the sidewalk or wandering nude in Noël Valley. Techies don’t seem to be yuppies with a technological heritage. They are the saviors of the present world, the makers of a new one. Why will we all the time in finding it so laborious to be grateful to the good ones?
