Conservatives cannot design:
Still true eight years later

(2025.02.04) My affectionate sobriquet for you kids is “right-wing assholes.” Call yourself a member of the alt‑, dissident. or new right, non‑ or anti-progressive, or simply conservative. I will respect your pronouns no matter how you identify. But all of you operate under an iron law: Conservatives cannot design.

This means you. [continue with: Conservatives cannot design →]

For months I have had a desire to send along, via postal mail, handwritten thank-you cards to loyal friends and those who had treated me well in eras seemingly long gone.

I don’t mind the fact that they are all now or always were shitlibs, but they would mind the fact that I am not and would find a way to use that against me even in a context of gratitude.

Daniel O’Shea, as yet unshitcanned from the Twitter: “LinkedIn has reached peak cringe. Help us build something better.” Then he goes on to list terribly banal prerequisites that guarantee nobody with an original idea will be allowed on his “team.”

LinkedIn baffles everyone. I assume it too is some kind of money-laundering operation, but that is as sideshow to its true function, kompromat. LinkedIn exists to provide oppo research on zero-profile civilians who run afoul of progressives (or, rarely, non‑ or anti-progressives). If one dares to render a forbidden word online, or espouse some ostensibly controversial topic (“LGBT+ are doing the work of the Man of Lawlessness, in knowing defiance of God”), one’s enemies will scrape the LinkedIn page one had set up for reasons unclear even at the time. It’s certainly a great source for headshots, which one should never have uploaded anyway, as their true usage is in the service of reverse-racist employment discrimination.

As I wrote O’Shea (saving a relevant portion for a later day):

Surely you’ve had all sorts of nerds writing in with ideas that amount to shuffling deck chairs on the Linkedtanic. The imperative for this project, I submit, should be to become the natural home of refusé(e)s, the blacklisted, the cancelled.

And I have something to offer there, given how many times… I was told directly to my face I would never work at the company in question, or that open blacklists were in place keeping me out of entire industries, including one I cofounded. (I’ve been online for 31 years, wrote the book on Web accessibility, have a breezy 45 years in typography, did my own usability research, and have other qualifications, but if you’re shopping for qualifications this is itself an error for which a recruiting site must correct.)

And if you work with me at all, even though I will ask for very little at the outset, you’ll basically be tarred for life… assuming news of same gets out.

If I’m not perfect for this project, I don’t know who might be.

Elon Musk wrote (separately and later): “We need to make this interface far more beautiful.” “Note that part of my proposition here is doing just that,” I appended to O’Shea.

This LinkedIn manqué can serve as a recruiting hub for anyone at odds with the régime – even if, as must someday happen, the polarity of that régime flips. Red Balloon has attempted to do something similar, but the network effect dooms them.

Through intelligent markup (inevitably some form of XML – still, in the 21st century) and well-more-than-intelligent typography and design, any such LinkedIn manqué can render the résumé obsolete. (I would always ask the blind people I met if they wanted my card. No – I’ve got everything electronically, they’d say. I appreciate Latin, but, while XML in the 21st century can be tolerated with gritted teeth, curricula vitæ in that century really cannot.)

Recapitulating the experience I explicitly stated to him, Daniel O’Shea couldn’t be bothered to get back to me. Now he can assemble a well-compensated team to half-assedly implement the ideas I could have achieved with brilliance and panache.

Nearly two decades into its existence, Twitter does not and did not need an accessibility “team,” which was shitcanned by Elon Musk basically before he sat down for coffee. And rightly so.

A qualified developer of any stripe is indeed expected to build accessibility into all his or her work. Like producing valid HTML, it’s a baseline competency. (I kid. I’m the last one writing valid HTML.)

The scenario of autistic Democrats, furries, or Indics on work visas banging out a Web app, with an accessibility “team” swooping in to unfuck that Web app minutes before launch (or, quite commonly, years afterward), gets the process ass-backward.

Accessibilitistas expected, as the saying goes, to put themselves out of business. You’re supposed to be able to code accessibly just to get an interview for any kind of Web job, least of all a blue-chip position paying six figures.

I previously warned that the cannibalistic subsuming of accessibility under the rubric of diversity (or – much worse – of equity) has a single outcome: To discriminate against persons with disabilities who are male, White, or both. Vizmins and gendergoblins will get first dibs in this régime. And that is the intended, planned-for outcome. [continue with: Twitter accessibility politburo rightfully shitcanned →]

After 35 years (and true of basically everything in which I take an interest), how I tire of repeating myself. Another rich software startup is about to blow it vis-à-vis accessibility.

Mincing in the footsteps of Camino and iCab (the latter quite beloved), Arc is some kind of Web browser one might eventually have to pay for. They’ve pulled in a preposterous $17 million of vulture-capitalist money, or perhaps even more. (Alexander Clauss, sole proprietor and sole creator of iCab, is owed a Mormon-style tithe of at leat a tenth of that.)

Maybe Arc is a good product. (À l’époque, Opera certainly was. So was Lynx in its.) But they’re launching out of the gate with no real accessibility. It isn’t a straightforward task: It took Firefox till Version 87 to be usable in VoiceOver. (Or halfway thus: “we think it’s complete enough for everyday use” [sic].) There has never been a browser that fully complies with the almost-completely-unknown UAAG (“yuuagg”), the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines.

I basically expected to be called a sexist faggot by a Jewish developer (Halide did that) when I posed this question, but the general E‑mail box, and Arc cofounder Hursh Agrawal (no relation) and CEO Jason Miller, refused answer “Who, if anyone, is looking after accessibility for Arc?”

Because nobody is.

But they’ll apologize all day for the races and sexes of their developers.

Someday, somebody is going to pick up the thousand-dollar-bill getting damp in the rain on the trottoir alongside a “homeless” encampment and ship a fully accessible product. Because one can earn open-ended millions from government contracts by doing so, a fact none but I understand.

(Don’t worry. The ineluctable course of the universe will remain undisturbed: Arc will hire some kind of girl or a Democrat voter instead of me. The imperative is I must be kept in my place. But to paraphrase Karen Silkwood, there’s a moral imperative here.)

By unreasonable stroke of luck, I found out that Scott Thompson was running yet another one-man show. I’d last seen him in 2018 – a tight and well-constructed act that ended with an request from the crowd for one of his many oldies but goodies. (Everything, and everyone, is an oldie here.) “I knew I should have rehearsed this,” he said, and still pulled it off impromptu.

The one-man show I saw on January 20 was a one-man shitshow. It took place in what barely constituted a “theatre,” located as it was in the bottom corner of a gruesome postmodern condo, with asymmetric zinc cladding, on Bathurst at Queen. (I like postmodern buildings.)

I remember getting yelled at by a functionary at a Broadway theatre in the ’90s that every show starts at 8:00, and that indeed was the listed start time. A flotilla of eldergays and equally fat cranberry-dyed faghags muttered to themselves, when I “nonchalantly” walked “past” the place at 7:40, that they wouldn’t be opening the doors till 8:00. Nope: They didn’t let us into the house for a full hour. Certainly gets one in the mood for ribald comedy to stand interminably in the cold next to a screechy streetcar turning circle (and hidden washroom frequented by drivers and cops). [continue with: Buddy Cole taken off life support →]

Halide, the camera application that actually takes good pictures, won the Apple Design Award. (Then again, so had Interarchy, now dead as a doornail, with no replacement remotely as good.) Halide’s cocreator, Ben Sandofsky, is a homophobe and a blackmailer. (Also “deranged”?) [continue with: Contempt →]

I maintain this list since Artforum (and now Vulture, whatever that is) cannot manage to render or typeset such a thing.

2024

1. Love Lies Bleeding

2. Queer

3. The Brutalist

4. Hard Truths

5. Messy

6. Joker: Folie à Deux

7. Femme

8. Emilia Pérez

9. Babygirl

10. Viet and Nam

2023

1. Beau Is Afraid

2. A Prince

3. Master Gardener

4. Full Time

5. Last Summer

6. Sparta

7. Fallen Leaves

8. Strange Way of Life

9. Oppenheimer

10. Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World

2022

1. Peter Von Kant

2. Eo

3. Everything Went Fine

4. Sick of Myself

5. Bruno Reidal, Confessions of a Murderer

6. Detainee 001

7. Dinner in America

8. Will-o’-the-Wisp

9. Smoking Causes Coughing

10. Bones and All

2021

1. Annette

2. Summer of Soul

3. Vortex

4. France

5. The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

6. Mandibles

7. Red Rocket

8. The Tragedy of Macbeth

9. Saint-Narcisse

10. The Onania Club

Previously:

It is torture to read a novel not just because nobody in it goes to the bathroom, spends every night watching TV, or surfs obsessively on their phones, nor just because the novel was permanently discredited by David Shields’ Reality Hunger as a Victorian form that has not evolved. (I’ve never been the same.)

I decided to fact-check my ass. I looked through Publishers Weekly and (lying) Times best-fiction-of-2021 lists, located novels set in the present day, and downloaded their ePubs via Library Genesis. I set about searching through these full texts for telltale tokens:

• email E-mail · E‑mail · electronic mail

• TV · television · show/program

• bathroom · toilet (⁓ paper)

• Facebook · Twitter

• Gmail · AOL

• laptop

• printer

• Skype · FaceTime · WhatsApp · iMessage

• social media · social-media

• Spotify · iTunes · Pandora

• stream · Netflix · Hulu · Amazon

• texted (only that token)

• voicemail

• website · Web site

After plowing through three E‑books, it became clear that the discriminating tokens were exactly and only email (that rendering; confoundable with voicemail), TV (case-sensitive), and bathroom. So for the remainder of the subject cohort, only those tokens were searched for. (I’ll still report variant renderings from those first three novels inspected.)

Accordingly, and contrary to my postulate, only Cloud Cuckoo Land and Second Place conjure worlds we are not living in. Second Place cannot even acknowledge that TV exists, though it does go to the bathroom once.

Notes

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You? includes something resembling a self-parody, or a sentence from a TOEFL study guide:

   Opening a private browser window on her laptop, the woman accessed a social media website, and typed the words ‘aidan lavin’ into the search box.

   (Did she type the single quotes? Publishing cartels remain incompetent at typography and copy.)

2. Assembly: “I almost start scrolling, down to where I know I’ll find my sister’s name, with the link she sent me yesterday to some show or other we’ve both been wanting to see. Instead, I let the screen dim, then flick, to nothing. Absent my phone’s glow, the dark is perfect.”

3. In Wayward, “TV room” was one usage. Then, for bathroom: “ ‘Who puts a bathroom off a kitchen, you know? And this door—’ ”

4. Apples Never Fall even acknowledges talk shows: “In fact, Savannah seemed to treat her and Stan as if they were talk[‑]show guests and she the host.”

5. I did not include tokens found in publishers’ front or back matter, self-evidently.

6. Hillary Clinton’s coauthored book was unlocatable. I rather expect it mentioned email.

An amazingly original piece of work by Tilcsik et al., “Concealable stigma and occupational segregation: Toward a theory of gay and lesbian occupations” [Administrative Science Quarterly 60(3)], came up with a theory of which occupations gay males and lesbians might choose, then tested that theory. The results are so accurate the whole process seems like it was run in reverse.

The authors propose that gays and lesbians both prize “task independence,” i.e., potentially homophobic bosses not breathing down their necks. Both groups further prize “social perceptiveness,” which could be seen as actually applying one’s social skills instead of keeping them in reserve.

The bothersome point in the paper is entertaining the idea that gay males’ and lesbians’ job choices are a puzzle. I can’t take that puzzlement seriously. It amounts to wilful blindness on the part of gay-money researchers, who reach for ever-more-bizarre and counterintuitive explanations for the jobs gays and lesbians do. They’re just not willing to admit that gay men are too sensitive to duke it out with straight guys on the job (my terminology). Oddly, they’re also not willing to admit that a lot of dykes are diesels who are perfectly fine repairing such engines. Everything is dressed up as discrimination or some kind of youthful trauma (see below).

Tilcsik et al. helpfully quote some other research that shows discrimination is not a plausible explanation for gay and lesbian job choices. That’s as plain as the nose on your face, or the acute accent in András Tilcsik’s name.

Running through a set of statistical surveys, what jobs did the authors identify as typical of gay men and lesbians? You’ll never guess!

Shocker.

Meanwhile, leftist gay publications (tautological) continue to lie about the legitimate gay and lesbian community. A glorified blog of some kind claimed that gays’ near-invariant choice to enter untroublesome cultural occupations or quiet office work instead of shipping out to the oil rig is straightforwardly the result of bullying in school.

No.

Gays are temperamentally different from heterosexualists, save for the uncounted few gay boys who were masculine from birth (and, for example, always liked football). I have read what I believe is all the research on that topic and have asked scientists directly, yet nobody has an estimate of the percentage of young gay boys who are, in effect, straight-acting. That’s how rare they are.

Of course the rest of these boys are going to become, say, stewardesses or actresses. Getting called a fag in high school, which would now get the harasser booted out of that school, has no bearing on anything. Indeed, faggy young gay boys can really fuck up straight boys’ lives by untruthfully squealing to the principal that the real boys called them a name. It’s the maladaptives who have the power now.