e-traces

those people are really committed,” Bobb told me. But their motivation is largely driven by providing access to the existing state of affairs. “They’re compelled by the argument that it just isn’t fair that more people don’t have access to the Google life—the free food and the power and the money,” Bobb said. Their goal is to get more people in the game, not necessarily to change the rules of that game. In this line of thinking, inclusion is first a problem of economic equity; any resulting social or moral benefits would just be gravy.

Google’s focus on the “next billion users” entails a better understanding of people of color, he said, but only because the company finally understands that they represent an untapped market for advertising.

For Webb, the underrepresentation of women, black people, and others is a real problem, but it’s not the fundamental one. “We’re all discriminated against by computing,” she insisted. Computing professionals constitute a “tribe,” separated from the general public not primarily by virtue of their race, gender, or nationality, but by the exclusive culture of computing education and industry. That culture replaces all knowledge and interests with the pursuit of technological solutions at maximum speed. “Anyone who falls outside of that core group of interests are not being represented,” Webb said. If she’s right, then the problem with computing isn’t just that it doesn’t represent a diverse public’s needs. Instead, the problem with computing is computing.