I wanted to go to a different event. I wanted to go to a part of London I had never been to before, like Dagenham, Romford, or Penge. Instead, my phone told me that I needed to go to a technology event hosted in New Zealand House, a short walk from Charing Cross station.
When I got to New Zealand House I smiled at the security guard at reception and saidI was here for ‘the event’. Without meeting my eyes, he made a lazy hand gesture towards his right, where I saw another bored chap sitting at a desk laden with pens, wrist bands and sticky labels. After donning a wrist band and writing my own name badge, I was allowed to travel, unaccompanied, to the first floor.
The moment the lift door opened, I heard the buzz of voices.
‘Hello, my name is Andrea. What brings you to this event?’ Andrea was a smartly dressed woman in her mid-twenties; she was keen to network. I had inadvertently joined a queue for pizza. People around me were holding beers.
‘Hi, er, I’m Chris.’ I replied, offering my hand. ‘I’m just here for the free beer and pizza’ I said, before going on to explain that I had been to a quite a few entrepreneur and networking Meetups, and I was interested in ‘cloud applications’.
‘Ah! What you want to do is have a chat with that guy over there in the corner; he’s sponsoring the event. He’ll be able to tell you a lot about what is going on’.
Whilst balancing a pizza in one hand, and carrying a beer in the other, I nudged myself through the crowds to chat to ‘the cloud guy’, who was deep in conversation with someone called Lisa who was a head of products and networking at a global telecommunications company. Detecting a lull in the conversation, I made my move.
‘I like your T-shirts!’ I said, gesturing towards a shirt which had a prominent image of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. Not only was I happy about free beer and pizza, I also had my eye on free clothing too. Louis asked for my size, and he offered me a shirt that was, unexpectedly, advertising a financial technology company.
‘We’re taking a ‘revolutionary’ angle’, explained Louis. I later understood the angle: his business offered financial data feeds, competing against well-established financial companies; the kinds of companies that offer exceptionally nice sandwiches when you go to Python programming events. Whilst the business might well be disruptive and revolutionary in some senses, I couldn’t help think that Che may well have been turning in his grave about the possibility of his image being used to advertise tools that enable capitalist wizards to make lots of money.
Carrying my new T-shirt, I found a seat. It was time for the introduction. We were thanked for coming; there were to be around five speakers. Our first speaker spoke about the importance of designing user experiences and designing ‘businesses’. As soon as I heard the phrases ‘closing the loop’, ‘entire customer lifecycle’ and ‘minimal viable product’ I started to switch off and began to study the intricacies of the air conditioning ducting that was screwed to the ceiling.
The next talk was from the kind gentleman who had given me a T-shirt. His talk was, thankfully, more engaging. He spoke about programming interfaces and the different ways you could transfer data between computers. He then went on to talk about equities, funds, forex, bonds, futures, options and metals. When he got to derivatives, I came to realise that the air conditioning would have probably been retrofitted after the building had been constructed.
The third speaker, who was called Tony, was a smartly dressed man in his fifties who had an impressive head of hair and very expensive teeth. He ingratiated himself to the audience by telling us a story about how he became very rich, before asking us a question which woke us all up: ‘what is the national debt of America?’
‘The national debt of America is over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for every citizen in America. What does this tell us about money? Can anyone say? Do you think that America will ever say ‘no’ to lowering the national debt ceiling? I’ll tell you what this says about money.’ Tony paused for a moment, to allow us to take in the enormity of what he was saying. ‘Money does not exist.’ He paused for a second time and looked around at the one hundred or so people who were at the event.
‘Does anyone know what debt is? Debt is money that you owe that you are able to pay back. What do you do if you can’t pay it back? The answer is: you make it up. If money doesn’t exist, then where does it leave us? The answer is: we play the game’.
Tony moved towards the audience, as if presenting a further confession. ‘Who here wants to raise some money? How much do you want to raise?’ A member of the audience ventured a figure of two million. ‘Wrong. Do you know why this is wrong? Anyone?’ He looked around, seeking answers.
Everyone was as confused as I was. ‘Because no matter what you ask for, you always need more’.
‘Okay, can all the women who are here go sit over there? Come on! We haven’t got much time!’ All the women who were sat in the right of the meeting space started to move to the left. ‘Men, you go over there. Quick! Right; look around you, and make small teams, of up to three or four people. I’m going to give you a task.’ I looked around. I could see four fellow men, one of whom I had briefly ‘networked’ with, which meant that I had shaken his hand. I guessed this was our ‘team’.
‘In your groups, you’re going to be asked to design a product; an enhanced version of an existing product, okay? Here it is. It’s a familiar product. Women: I want you to design a ‘better’ man. You got that? What should they do or what should they look like. Men: I want you to design a ‘better’ woman. You’ve got three minutes, and I’ll be asking three groups to report back. Go!’
I turned around and looked at my co-conspirators. We blinked at each other.
‘I, erm, think that it would be good if women didn’t need as many shoes’ I said, making the first sexist contribution, recalling having to play ‘snake’ on an ancient mobile phone whilst enduring the torture of having to visit endless shoe shops to look at shoes that were, to all intents and purposes, identical to each other. It was agreed; our ‘ideal new woman’ shouldn’t have a shoe fetish. ‘And, not to have any male height preferences’, I ventured, bitterly recalling numerous internet dating failures.
‘An increased appetite for risk’ was another suggestion, which led to a discussion about what was meant by ‘risk’. A further suggestion was that it would be great if women could be paid even more than men, since men could then stay at home. Arguably, this was less of a feature, more of a societal desire.
‘TIME UP! Okay, so what have we got? This team! How would you improve women?’ asked Tony.
‘They should be durable and long lasting, be very agreeable (or have good user experience), be cheap to run, be keen on sex, come with an instruction manual, be more predictable and have some kind of translation feature so you knew what they were talking about’
‘Okay, and the women? How would you improve men?’
The executive from the global telecommunications company was the spokeswoman. ‘We think that their intelligence should be augmented by some kind of chip that we put in their heads, which helps them to better remember the important things that we tell them. Another key point is that it’s important to have, let me put it this way, a bodily reconfiguration. Their lower regions, if you get what I’m saying; location should be changed…’. Lisa gave up on the pretence of gentle euphemism.
‘What I mean is men should think with their brains and not with their cocks.’ This direct conclusion elicited a cheer and a round of applause from all the women in the room.
‘I think I’ve just about had my time!’ announced Tony, regaining control of the room. ‘The point of this exercise is: team work. Teamwork is important’. Like everyone else in the room, I had no idea what this had to do with the exploration of sexism that we had just completed. ‘But before I go, I’ll leave you with this: even though money doesn’t exist, each of you exist; go out there and find what you really want to do and do it well’.
The next speaker, Tim, was a bit more reserved and a whole lot more understandable. He spoke about his new business that continually scanned the internet to keep an eye out for anything that might be a threat to his corporate clients. As he was talking, I remembered my trip to the NetRunner card game night. Tim’s business was all about security; it was about protecting the ‘agendas’ of corporations.
The final speaker, Nina, worked for a business accelerator. She began by asking the audience how many people were working at a start-up or thinking about starting one. I looked around: half the audience raised their hands. I learnt something: I learnt that you can get office space, a little bit of money, and access to some highly connected people in exchange for equity. The catch was that access to an accelerator was competitive. At the end of her talk, everyone clapped, the control of the meeting was returned to the ‘host’ who thanked us for coming. He also told us to give a round of applause for Mo, the group organiser. The group had been running for around four months and had attracted over four hundred people.
On my way to the exit, I caught up with Mo. Like quite a few other people in the group, Mo was in her mid to late twenties. I asked her about her group.
‘This is the second one. I’ve had experience running events in other industries, such as the creative industries, like, film. I’ve worked in this area for a couple of years now so I thought I might try to set up an event to get different people together. My plan for the group? We’re going to put on another one in a month; we need to have a think about sponsors and where we’re going to hold it’.
No comments:
Post a Comment