Patron saint of women in tech Packing for California was, for the most part, easy. If I couldn’t wear it in 100-degree heat or to my big tech internship, it went into storage. With near mechanical precision, I divided my wardrobe into “leave” and “take” piles. But there was one item that stumped me. Six months ago, my friend sent me a tweet with a picture of a t-shirt that read “Disgraced founder of Theranos Elizabeth Holmes” — a shirt I now hold in question. I bought it on a whim in the middle of class after realizing I had saved my credit card information to Etsy. I thought it was ironic, perhaps something to differentiate me from my peers. “I’m not like other people in tech,” the shirt would say. “I can critique Holmes and start-up culture.” Elizabeth Holmes, with her faux deep voice, signature black turtleneck and inexplicable charisma, was an enigma even before her crimes were discovered. She’s the subject of best-selling books, award winning journalism and even a Hulu miniseries. At the age of 19, Holmes dropped out of Stanford to start what would become Theranos, a biotechnology company that claimed it could perform a suite of tests with just one drop of blood. Later, an investigation into the company revealed the blood testing technology didn’t actually work — but not before Holmes had raised over $700 billion in venture capital and defrauded countless investors including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, future Trump Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the DeVos family, an ex-Wells Fargo chairman and two former U.S. senators. In a highly publicized trial, Holmes was found guilty on January 3 of three counts of wire fraud and one count of intent to commit wire fraud. As former Theranos patients expressed outrage at the jury’s failure to find Holmes guilty of defrauding patients, a squad of internet cheerleaders rooted for their favorite “femme fatale.” Some fans even took it upon themselves to wait outside the courthouse, eager to catch a glimpse of their hero. She raised millions of dollars on lies. She built a multi-billion dollar company on impossible claims and shoddy science. She hurt innocent patients. She’s a girlboss, the embodiment of women in tech. Commentators describe Holmes’s deception and fall from grace as being spectacular, even exceptional. It certainly is — Holmes fooled some of the brightest minds in tech, medicine and finance and obtained a net worth of over $4.5 billion before losing it all. But there’s also something about it that’s very reminiscent. If you look closely, it’s part of a story we’ve seen before. Holmes is women in tech programs taken to their natural conclusion. She is the most extreme embodiment of a culture that pushes women to emulate toxic, male-dominated hacker culture and pursue arbitrary markers of success without meaningfully challenging — or, to use a favorite term of the tech industry, disrupting — the status quo. *** Initially, I set the Elizabeth Holmes T-shirt into the “maybe pile,” along with a collection of skirts that were probably too short to wear to my corporate internship, sweatshirts that were probably too warm for the California heat and shoes that were probably too impractical to walk to the train station in. But it didn’t feel like it belonged there — there was nothing functionally wrong with sporting “disgraced founder of Theranos Elizabeth Holmes” in the office. Rather, it clashed with the ethos of Silicon Valley. I saw the T-shirt as ironic, as tongue-in- cheek. I knew I’d very well encounter a number of former Theranos employees in the Bay Area, but my real hesitation was that I doubted that they would see the humor in it; I doubted that they would also consider Holmes a toxic girlboss icon. The girlbossification of Elizabeth Holmes, I think, can best be attributed to how depraved and bereft of meaning Theranos’s downfall felt. Holmes came out of the court case relatively unscathed and the questionable business practices she engaged in still run abound in the start-up world. It’s so absurd that it demands parody. Turning Theranos and Holmes into a joke, into a cultural moment, is the easiest way to acknowledge her rise and fall without really reckoning with the factors that produced it. And Holmes’s adoring, pseudo-ironic fans certainly deliver. At the same time that we were collectively rebranding Holmes, we began using the same terms to describe women in tech initiatives. Organizations like GirlTechBoss emerged, predicting women’s imminent takeover of big tech and praising the cult of the “female founder” — a Holmes-like figure who embodies the role of the brilliant, male, visionary founder with a feminine twist. It all feels reminiscent of early 2000s consumer feminism, a perverse interpretation of women’s empowerment that focuses on catchy slogans and commodifiable T-shirts. S T A T E M E N T The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 4—Wednesday, June 8, 2022 If you were to walk into a grade school library, there’s a good chance that you would find a shelf devoted to Judy Blume. Blume, a prolific author best known for her children’s books from the 1970s, is a champion of addressing taboo aspects of adolescence. Books like “Blubber”, “Forever…” and “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t” have long opened a door for young readers to learn more about puberty, bullying, sexuality and more. Although I, like many of her fans, have only read a handful of her books, it did not take much to become a fan. Blume’s bestselling — and arguably most famous — book, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” is the main source of my fondness for her. I first read “Are You There God?...” when I was around Margaret’s age; I found the story of a pre-teen girl who was contemplating many of the same things that I was (friends, bras, periods, religion) extremely comforting. Her style and earnest honesty are so distinctive that I have enjoyed each of her books that I have picked up, regardless of my age. Blume’s refusal to shy away from taboo topics has made her simultaneously beloved and maligned. Her books have been consistently challenged since the 1980s, when the election of Ronald Reagan spurred a wave of widespread book censorship, one much like the recent wave of bannings this past year. Some consider her books too graphic because of their depictions of sex, menstruation, birth control, masturbation, etc. — so much so that, at times, Blume has had to travel with a bodyguard to her events in response to numerous hate-mail warnings. Yet the things that made her so unpopular with conservative parents and lawmakers over the years are what make her so adored by fans: her frank, unflinching discussion of topics that children were concerned about, but that they struggled to get information about on their own. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Jo Angela Oehrli, a learning and children’s literature librarian who manages the Children’s Literature Collection at Hatcher Graduate Library, spoke more about banned children’s books and Blume’s presence on those frequently challenged lists. She talked about the ways that books act as reflections of a child’s experience, referencing an essay by Rudine Sims Bishop that refers to the way that books can be “mirrors” or “windows” — reflections of one’s own experiences that help children put their emotions into words, or views into a person’s perspective that is completely different from their own. HALEY JOHNSON Statement Columnist Read more at michigandaily.com Read more at michigandaily.com Design by Jennie Vang KARI ANDERSON Statement Correspondent Design by Abby Schreck Are you there, Judy?