I.
In the early 2000s, an old friend with a new business wanted me to design his website, but his partner balked:
“I can get two websites made in India for half the price,” the partner said.
“Sounds like you should do that,” I replied, ending the negotiation.
Rude fools were not clients I chose to pursue.
The rude, cheap partner was later part of the self-selected posse of suck-ups and hangers-on who advised Elon M*sk on his invasion purchase of Twitter.
It was the rude, cheap partner’s idea to strip Twitter users of note of their blue verification badges and sell meaningless blue verification badges to anybody willing to pay $8/month for the privilege. So, no blue verification mark or algorithmic support for the tweets of Stephen King, but blue “verification” and an algorithmic boost for Joey Knuckles, First of His Mother’s Basement.
M*sk must have dug the idea, because he implemented it immediately—proving, as if we weren’t already drowning in evidence, that people with bad taste run in packs.
The instant my old friend told me his former partner was responsible for the “pay for blue marks that mean nothing” plan, I recalled our abortive design negotiation from years before and was like, Yup, that tracks.
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.
II.
In the 2010s, I co-founded a traveling web design conference with Eric Meyer, an internationally respected CSS expert, author, and lecturer, and founding member of The Web Standards Project’s CSS Samurai. Together, we crafted a single-track, holistic web design conference peopled by charismatic speakers who had made major contributions to the industry. Our events sold out immediately, without advertising.
One night when our event was playing in a U.S. city, we held a party for attendees, and I invited a friend who lived in that town to join as our guest. I had known this man since his early 20s, and watched him grow into an industry-leading design consultant who was just then transitioning his business from a services to a product company. As his plus-one, he brought a young partner.
The young partner did not know from Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, any of our speakers, or any of the community projects to which we (including our speakers) devoted so much of our work and time. His first and only words to me were “Who are you?” He didn’t add a popular expletive to the question, but it was implied.
As I began to answer his question, I watched his eyes wander. He was clearly scouting for somebody cooler to talk to. So I smiled, stopped talking, and, with a wave, invited him to sample the buffet and drinks. If he’d noticed that I’d stopped talking before finishing, it didn’t bother him. Off he ran.
I am still friends with the man I’d invited to the party, although we haven’t spoken for a few years (from lack of opportunity, not lack of interest), and I have watched with happiness over the years as he has moved from success to success.
Alas, he is still partners with the punk who came to our party to paint the roses black, and the punk has become even more famous (and more of a cult figure) than my friend. That’s fine, except that the punk has since blossomed into a fascist and racist with money and power; his latest project, although it comes cloaked in tech, is about removing brown people from Europe, I kid you not.
I’m not saying every rude and entitled young man in tech grows up to be a fascist, but politeness or lack of it is a signifier, and maybe if you take an instant dislike to someone who acts like a jerk, you should trust that instinct.