Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools

Jeffrey Zeldman: At the time of the initial conversation, I believed most people involved in the creation of websites were motivated by altruism, aesthetics, and the desire to create a fairer world. And of course many are. Many, but far from all. I did not see how quickly fascism was infiltrating our trade. Perhaps infiltrating is the wrong word. Perhaps there had always been a Dark Side. For a long time, I had been guilty of assuming that many people in tech just want to mess around with computers for the enjoyment of it. Maybe they were awkward, outcasts, the square-peg-in-the-round-hole and this was a place that accepted them. That was too naïve and maybe my formative corner of the world (Apple and Web 2.0 in the early 2000s) was more of an empathetic, creative echo chamber. Today, that assumption has been long-gone, but I’d often give people the benefit of the doubt or try to see things from their perspective. However, in the last few years, and the last two weeks especially, a…