Mike Solana

2/ but looking at @foundersfund portfolio there’s plenty of companies I think no one would call racist, sexist etc - @Affirm @Spotify @DeepMindAI and so on - so they prob deserve to at least wait for the speakers to be announced before everyone dives into 2 min of hate right away

I’m pointing out that the rhetoric of the event is the same rhetoric used by a right-wing that explicitly talks about PC gone mad and not being able to express their opinions about women, minorities and LGBT people.

It may not be their intent to use that rhetoric in this way, but they’ve chosen to use it and as a result it’s hardly unexpected that people are responding to that rhetoric.

Obviously I cannot know who the audience at the event will be. But I can say that the rhetoric seems designed to appeal to those people who think that ‘PC has gone too far’ and that ‘safe spaces’ for minorities are a bad thing. Which seems self-evidently intensely dubious to me.

I might be missing a cultural context here as I am based in Poland, which would occur to me otherwise but when I read text starting with “From Galileo to Jesus Christ, heretical thinkers have been met with hostility...” it makes me think pf people who tried to build smthg new

Expand on what we know or think, or believe, and not trying to turn back time to when people were repressed - and it was a terrible thing. So the way I read this announcement, it’s about looking into what new tech could do for us all and let’s not worry of being laughed at

I understand that may be how you read it. From where I’m sitting what a ‘safe space’ is is pretty well established and clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_space 

And the people who get removed from conferences generally get removed for being abusive, sexist, racist etc. People who break the Codes of Conduct https://confcodeofconduct.com