Instead, however, GoldieBlox did exactly what you’d expect an entitled and well-lawyered Silicon Valley startup to do, which is pick a fight. It’s the way of the Valley — you can’t be winning unless some household-name dinosaur is losing. (The Beasties are actually the second big name to find themselves in the GoldieBlox crosshairs; the first was Toys R Us.) The real target of the GoldieBlox lawsuit, I’m quite sure, is not the Beastie Boys. Instead, it’s the set of investors who are currently being pitched to put money into a fast-growing, Stanford-incubated, web-native, viral, aggressive, disruptive company with massive room for future growth — a company which isn’t afraid to pick fights with any big name you care to mention.
Just when I think I’ve become jaded, something like this comes along to make me marvel at some people’s capacity for cynical manipulation. Gotta hand it to them, they had a plan and they executed it perfectly. If this had been the work of a true believer, it would have been merely laughable — really, like it’s somehow subversive and challenging to put a stereotypically “girly” gloss on children’s construction toys? And who honestly thinks that playing with pastel Tinkertoys will directly lead to more girls involved in STEM fields later on? Does your career have anything to do with the sorts of games and toys you played with as a kid? But of course, such superficial rah-rah-empowerment platitudes have an enormous, receptive audience in the twitosphere, and those fucking morons reacted exactly as GoldieBlox anticipated they would.