Naomi Wu is one of the friendliest, most helpful, creative, compassionate, and passionate DIY tech voices from Mainland China on YouTube. Her channel Real Sexy Cyborg, is at or near the top of all engagement measures on YouTube for channels originating in Mainland China (she is in Shenzhen) .
She is a ‘maker,’ that is, someone who builds new things out of stock parts, using easily-available mass-produced tech like circuit boards, motors, cameras, LCDs, LEDs, and 3-D printing, to solve problems or investigate possibilities in new, creative, often fun, sometimes downright silly, ways.
She first came to my attention when she built the Barbot. A fully automated bartender.
Full disclaimer: Clearly, I have met her, I like her, I am a financial supporter (very modestly) of hers.
Naomi has a tall, lanky frame and long, beautiful chestnut-brown hair. Her most striking feature in person is her gaze. It is both warm and intense. She is buxom, owing in part to cosmetic breast augmentation (which, one should note, in China is done under local anesthesia). In person and in her videos, she is the same person—warm, friendly, engaging and funny.
She also leverages the power of, and interest in, her appearance to encourage and solicit viewers by showing a bit of skin. It is harmless fun. I see it as a kind of subversive commentary on straight male tech culture, like drag queens are for masculinity writ large. After meeting her once in person at a maker event in NYC, I feel as though I see the very same person when I watch her videos.
As a personal aside, she told me she learned English by being a devoted fan of Beverly Hills 90210, taking her Western name from one of the characters. There remains a charming bit of valley girl in her English pronunciations. She is fluent in English. Conversation with her came natural to me, she understood my idioms.
Despite being the number one channel for engagement on YouTube, the powers-that-be at YouTube have decided to strip her of the ability to generate income there because her content violates standards.
Let’s get this straight, it’s okay for the Proud Boys to monetize violent threats of domestic terrorism because well, free speech, but we can’t let Naomi make a living because she doesn’t cover up her boobs the way YouTube requires according to some puritanical polemics.
Thumbs up to the hate, thumbs down to the boobs.
No, my friends, this is about so much more than boobs. This is about the threat that powerful women in tech pose to the paternalistic, misogynistic, frat-boy bro culture that pervades tech like fungus in a damp basement.
She gets their attention because hey! boobs! and then when they find that she’s serious, insightful, and influential, all the effort (including and especially from US tech media companies), turns to discrediting her, bullying her, harassing her, and ultimately denying her the income that she earned by being very good at what she does.
Oh no, we can’t have the boobs. Think of the children!
I have two very important children in my life, eight and ten years old, the offspring of a very close friend. I am very protective of them, I worry about the future world they are coming into almost daily. After explaining that she dresses this way because people like it, I would park them in front of Naomi’s YouTube channel all day. Their mom would only object to the screen time.
I anticipate, because each of you have been reading me thus far, that I don’t have to explain to you how this connects to George Floyd, but just in case, Mr. Floyd and Ms. Wu are both members of socially marginalized groups. YouTube would not do this to a white shirtless tech bro in bike shorts. They’d promote him.
This, like all of the other forms of scapegoating and punishment of dissenting sub-groups, has to stop if humanity is to survive. it is that simple. We collectively have to stop doing this to each other, from militarizing the police to act out institutional racism, to starving creative females because of institutionalized misogyny. It all has to stop or we will perish.
Please. They’re just boobs.