Justin Whitaker

From what I recall, the first time I saw 'rainbow capitalism' from a big brand was this image from Oreo in 2012.

Kinda weird to reblog screencaps of something I wrote on Twitter, but these hashtags summarize what I was trying to say much more succinctly.

I’m not an “elder queer”, but I am an elder.

“That’s the seductive power of the spreadsheet: it’s a tool for asking what if? With just a little training, anyone can use a spreadsheet to build a model of some real-world phenomenon, from an ecosystem to a convenience store, from a lemonade stand to a retirement savings plan. Then, by tapping new numbers into those neat little boxes, you can change the model: what if I pay a little less here? What if I save a little more there? What if this number goes up? What if it goes down? Change a box and all the numbers dance in their gridwork of faint gray lines, and the future is revealed, with a terrible and false precision. Terrible and false because the model is a model, it’s not the world, and each of those sharp figures and formulae obscures a fuzzy, squishy set of assumptions, guesses and elisions. The model can suggest, it can guide – but it cannot predict. This is what made spreadsheets so science fictional. As we lose ourselves in a futuristic parable, it’s easy to forget the “parable” part and start to think we’re experiencing the future. To forget that sf writers have no more insight into what the future holds than any of us, and thank goodness, because if the future could be predicted, there’d be no reason to do anything or try anything. The future is up for grabs. That’s the point of science fiction: not to predict the future, but to inspire it, or ward it off. To work out our present-day anxieties and aspirations on the page, to provide a virtual fly-through of the emotional experience of this technological arrangement or that.”