Dear God, Dear God, Tinkle Tinkle Hoy

If you were a computer-loving male child who took a lot of shit from your peers, I suspect you heard something similar from the adults in your life. Maybe it was “Sure, things are bad now, but when you’re a little bit older, women will LOVE guys like you!” Or maybe it was “That kid who makes fun of you now will be working at a gas station when you run a big fancy computer company and marry a supermodel!” If you were once young, nerdy and male, it is not unlikely that your future sense of self-worth was funded with a non-consensual IOU from the world’s women. It’s taken me a long time, but at this point I genuinely believe that much of this “GEEKS SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH” rhetoric is little more than patriarchy’s bespectacled wingman. It excuses the pain that systems of power exert on children by promising little boys future dominion over little girls. It is deeply and massively fucked.

I do think there’s a distinction between art and craft, and I think it’s a distinction that needs to be maintained. However I do not think it’s the historical distinction. I think the historical distinction is - if men do it it’s art and if women do it it’s craft. I think there’s a tremendous amount of sexism and racism and classism in the traditional distinctions between art and craft, and what I use as my working distinction is that in art, the technique or the material or the process in an end in itself.