So Mike Arrington announces some of the new advisors on the “panel of experts” for the TechCrunch20 conference that he and Jason Calacanis have started up as a kind of anti-DEMO conference. And the first thing that some people — like Ben Metcalfe and I, and Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, for example — think when we look at the list is: What the F? MC Hammer is on this panel? What’s he an expert on?
Ben makes some good points, I think (points whose value is only slightly decreased by the fact that he consistently misspells the name “Michael” as “Micheal”). The Hammer — or to use his real name, Stanley Kirk Durell — seems to have done very little that qualifies him for a role on a panel of Web 2.0 startup experts. Yes, he is reportedly working with a music-based startup, but is that really all it takes to get on the panel of experts? Then Nick Denton at Valleywag weighs in with the “tokenism” card, at which point Karoli lashes out at the Wag for picking on Hammer — and then Nick and Mike take shots back and forth at each other in Karoli’s comment section. Nick says Karoli has missed the whole point, and Mike says he’s race-baiting. Is he? Who knows. But one thing occurred to me while I was reading this whole sordid tale: It would be a lot easier to argue that Hammer isn’t a token black guy if he had actually accomplished anything in the last decade that justified his presence on the panel. Just saying.