The answer is: No. Of course not.
So… just why was I ever asked such an odd question?
A few months ago on Y Combinator’s forum, Hacker News, I pulled a word out of Middle English: queynte. This word is neither profane nor sexual. It’s not used much today, but was pronounced identically to its extant adjectival form, “quaint”. The most faithful modern translation of the noun would probably be “ornament” or “device”.
Saying queynte would have been a non-event if I were a civilian. However, my half decade of opposition to Silicon Valley’s social injustices has made me somewhat of a public figure, and it has taken some time for me to adapt to that. This puts a lot of extra attention on everything I say. There are a number of people who would just love it for me to fuck up completely and say something that’s actually offensive, because it would undermine the moral credibility that I have and that they, despite being the social and economic leaders of the technology industry, don’t have and (because of their unethical actions) never will have.
As my reach and publicity grow, I have to be increasingly mindful of the ways in which a statement– any statement I make, really– can be taken out of context. I’m still getting used to this.
The word queynte is phonetically close to cunt. I don’t shy away from profanity in general, but cunt is used in a number of ways, some of which are extremely offensive. So I tend to avoid it.
Did I mean the word queynte as any kind of slur against anyone’s gender? Of course not. (If anyone ever thought otherwise, then I’m truly sorry.)
Do I consider it acceptable to demean people simply because they are women? No, and if that isn’t obvious from everything else that I’ve written, then I’m embarrassed.
Did I anticipate that a hardcore misogynist like Dan Gackle would take it as his excuse to start throwing around the word “cunt”? (He’s edited his reply considerably, and now seems to be taking a mansplaining stand against that word.) No. Perhaps I should have expected that, but I didn’t.
Should I have avoided “queynte”, seeing how open it is to misinterpretation, and used a different word (like “jerk”) in its place? Yes. I think we can all agree on that.
I have asked Mr. Gackle, multiple times, to remove both my misconstrued comments and his belligerent ones. He declined on each occasion.
That’s all that I’m going to say on this topic.
Actually, I should say one more thing.
Dan Gackle tried to ruin my reputation. I can’t that let that slide. I’m trying really hard to get out of the internet drama business, but sometimes a haughty fucker needs to get put in his place, and this is one of those times.
I don’t wish to waste breath on Dan Gackle, though. He’s not interesting. I mean, his pompous, sniping sanctimony makes him a negative presence on Hacker News, but he’s not exactly relevant in the real world. Moreover, since no one likes him to begin with, there’s also not much of a point in taking him down; no opinions really need to be changed. So let’s talk about the creeps who sent him: Y Combinator (“YC”).
It’s time for Y Combinator to die in a taint fire. Y Combinator has ruined startups for at least a generation. Its growth-at-any-cost ethos has enabled cultural sloppiness and ethical turpitude to reach shameful extremes, it has generated some of the worst companies of the 21st century, and it has created a culture of ageism, sexism, racism and classism that has made technology people look like the worst people in the world– all of this on no less than a global stage.
Y Combinator’s main product is division. In fact, that’s its only meaningful purpose. Y Combinator is a bona fide rat’s nest of catty drama, backbiting, lapses of professionalism, junior-high antics, and unjustified sanctimony. It exists to pit against each other the people doing the actual work, for the benefit of Paul Graham and the little boys whom he’s chosen as his protégés.
Some of the divisions that YC is most eager to create and exploit are: founders versus employees; in-crowds versus out-crowds; “brogrammers” versus women; young “hackers” versus “old hands” (meaning 30 and up); Rubyists versus Java users versus Lispers; West Coast versus East Coast versus what they call “flyover country”; citizens versus “H-1Bs”. Why? Many of the top people in Silicon Valley are terrified of any sense of collective identity emerging among the working classes. Unions, guilds, professional organizations… they don’t want any of that, and they punish people severely for even suggesting such ideas. In order to make it less likely that such institutions are created, they divide programmers against each other along any cleavage they can find.
This probably isn’t surprising, but real venture capitalists don’t like Y Combinator. The YC people are considered, by the rest of Silicon Valley, to be Northern California’s version of Donald Trump.
Still, Y Combinator is permitted to exist. The real venture capitalists could kill YC if they wanted to, just by refusing to fund or purchase any of its excreta. It wouldn’t be hard and it wouldn’t take long. So why don’t they? Why do they permit it to have another day?
The answer is that, right now, Y Combinator is more effective at dividing labor against itself than any other organization in the technology industry. The more progressive venture capitalists (who often privately oppose the divisive, exclusionary, and anti-intellectual culture that has become dominant, in venture-funded technology, over the past ten years) just refuse to work with the YCs, for that reason. The ones with a strong unionbusting impulse, on the other hand, recognize that Y Combinator is uncannily effective at creating the kinds of bitter sectarian divisions that keep technologists and makers from organizing around shared economic, social, or political interests.
If you want to go after Y Combinator, don’t just create another incubator. That market is flooded; you won’t win. Instead, defeat (or “disrupt”) its culture of arrogance, immaturity, anti-intellectualism, and divisiveness. Build something that unites, rather than something that divides.
