Sextech Revolution by Andrea Barrica

Author:Andrea Barrica
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-10-16T21:29:53+00:00

The Internet Needs Sexual Wellness

One of my early investors, Jake Gibson, was also one of the co-founders of NerdWallet. When I asked him why he was investing in O.school, his answer was simple:

“When the internet started, it was a place for all freaks and geeks,” he said. “It was a safe space for them in a way that other places in society weren’t as safe. As the internet grew and evolved, it has gotten toxic, exactly like the places you would run away from before.”39

The first generation of tech entrepreneurs was often comprised of those who didn’t fit in. When they got into tech, it wasn’t necessarily for money—the idea was still radically untested. Mainstream companies and financial institutions regarded it as a novelty, not a major investment opportunity. But once the internet exploded it brought in a new generation of investors and entrepreneurs, many drawn by the outsized returns. These weren’t necessarily experimental outsiders, but they were still largely men.

There are a lot of ways to look at diversity, but the most helpful way I have found is called “diversity debt.” In the same way that engineers can accrue “technical debt” when they push out sloppy code, or business owners can accrue “bookkeeping debt” when they procrastinate their financials until tax time, companies can also accrue diversity debt over their life cycle. The more people your company hires until you have a diverse team (meaning an array of genders, LGBTQ, socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities, ages, able-bodiedness, etc.)—the more diversity debt your organization has accrued, and the greater danger it is to your long-term success. The tech community has accrued a blinding amount of diversity debt, and it’s going to take a while to pay it down.

When tech platforms are built by people with homogenous lived experiences, it creates problems. It limits the appeal of the platform, and excludes audiences that can help it grow and evolve. Without a diverse team, without elevating voices and experiences unlike yours, you’re operating in a bubble. You can’t see what’s going on outside until it’s too late. Until the bubble pops.

Because sextech grew outside that bubble, it attracted an incredibly diverse set of ideas, drawn from a more diverse set of experiences—women, queer people, non-binary people, and people of color. In terms of access and potential, sextech is much closer to the original founders of the internet than it is to the homogeneity of the second internet boom.

Sextech isn’t just about sexual wellness—it’s a way for tech to move past diversity debt and heal its deeper issues.

Every day, we hear more stories about the distrust of big tech platforms—congressional hearings on Twitter, the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook, YouTube’s arbitrary demonetization of users, toxic doxxing and harassment at Reddit, and deadly white nationalist galvanizing on 8chan. When scandals break, they can threaten the entire platform.

Silicon Valley is often criticized for its lack of diversity, but many of the problems it’s faced are precisely because un-diverse, homogeneous teams were unable to see the problem before it exploded.

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