If you want to join an existing group with an existing culture, you don't get to say "here I am; now change your culture to suit me". As an older gentleman(?) it's bizarre to see how traditional nerd hideaways such as programming and comic books have evolved into cool things that the cool people now feel entitled to participate in...you know, if we could just get these spergy nerds to act like cool, or at least normal people.
The mainstream tech industry offers us money, status, and a stable (if weak) position in its idealised social hierarchy. The voices clamouring for change offer us no money, a social role reversal back to “disempowered outsider,” and a status demotion to “likely sexual predator.” (The polite euphemism for this is “creepy,” a pejorative applied indiscriminately both to those who actively transgress other people’s boundaries and to those with the unmitigated gall to be attracted to someone else while being funny-looking.) Given a choice between these two, which would you side with? It’s true that the one is confining, essentialist, and a far cry from the best of all possible worlds, but the other is all these things and a step backward for people who finally got to take a step forward for once when the internet took off.
