sungoThing about being a digital plumber is that your name gets lost to history. So, yeah, Time Warner Cable won a technical emmy for essentially inventing this era of video streaming on the internet, particularly to mobile devices. But I know whose handwriting was on that hotel napkin, which hotel’s logo was on the napkin, and I know who was at that hotel bar table. I know whose names were on the commits and who sold the dream to our CEO. No patent carries our names because slicker employees wrote patents based on our work. No standard carries our names because we were already on to the next impossible problem.
We didn’t cure cancer. We didn’t smash the patriarchy. But we did change the world. When you watch Netflix or Amazon Video, when you hit a porn site, or when you watch a Twitch feed, we’re there in the bits watching back. We are the nameless, the forgotten, the digital plumbers.
Annah
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