Exactly. The old saying was "The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog."

... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.

>> except they didn't mean dog

The quote is from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon which literally has two dogs talking.

See the original image:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....

'Dog' could be a placeholder, but the cartoon showed dogs.

Dog was used a a euphemism for undesirable. In the more specific case of the image, black. Look at the color of the dogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Maybe. Maybe not.

It was newsprint, so the color is not clear.

Maybe the dog was brown:

https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1862.gif

Not that it matters much.

I agree with the quote from the Wikipedia article:

Sociologist Sherry Turkle elaborates: "You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words."

> All they see are your words.

Correct. And the mistake we made was assuming that that implied they weren't making assumptions.

> It was newsprint

Not in the New Yorker it wasn't.

Of course they meant dog. Which is a placeholder for _anything else_.

> they meant dog

> which is a placeholder for

... exactly. It's a placeholder; not literal.

It's a placeholder because if the New Yorker had run a comic that said "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a black man," that wouldn't have been funny at all.

Definitely no hints to that in the cartoon at all. None... none at all... >.> <.< >.>

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....

No, we literally meant dog. It was a joke.

Why might it matter? Because the rest of the world was a lot more racist and sexist, but IRC wasn’t.

No, no. You need other people to tell you what you meant. It's how things work now. Don't you dare think otherwise!

And w now we're doing this whole "guilty of X by technology choice".

/s

Where and when does this this neurosis stop?

The joke is even funnier if you're a furry, and the entire point of your online persona is people knowing you're a dog. (Even if your fursona actually is, say, a cat. The joke is enhanced.)

> but IRC wasn’t

No, sorry, I was there. That's the key thing people need to remember about the Old Internet.

Some of IRC was extremely racist and sexist. Almost all of the rest was "regular" racist and sexist. It was pretty closely related to 4chan culture (under-moderated by outside forces that had little power to force any particular standards upon the moderators). The magic of the medium was that since everything was text, nobody knew you were the butt of the joke and you could pretend you weren't.

But go mask-off and admit you were a woman or a minority, and oh boy. Good luck with that. Good thing it's easy to change your handle, right?

There's a reason anonymity as a virtue grew in that space: it protected people from those who hadn't left their IRL baggage behind by letting people pretend to be the "default" (which was almost always white men).

We made a mistake believing the online space wasn't the real world. It was. It was just the real world where you could pretend to be something else. That was good at the time; it let more people participate by donning masks. But we should aim for better.

Saying we should aim for better sounds nice, but I fear that bias and prejudice based on things that shouldn't matter is an incurable part of human nature, and anonymity, and using text for everything, would be our best defense. I say "would be" because I doubt that I can convince a large enough percentage of people, including my own cofounder, to use anonymized text chat for important things like interviews and work conversations. Especially the "text chat" part since, at least for now, talking is still much faster and smoother for most of us than accurate text input. But I can dream.

IRC isn’t a place, it’s a platform for speech for lots of diverse groups, some of which were/are racist. Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist.

Yes. It's a generalization.

... but it's also a true generalization, in the sense that if you throw a dart at a random IRC channel across all networks, you'll proabably hit one where the level of tolerated racism and sexism is at least "American standard."

> Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist

I completely agree.

> The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog

That comic meant a lot to me. When I was growing up, I found that most adults would treat me with condescension. On the internet, I could engage in conversation as an equal. Anonymity didn't change the prejudices that people held, but it did change my experience.

I agree, and I had a similar formative experience. There's a great quote about being alive during the era of the moon landing that also resonates with me on this topic: "It was as if all of us, all over the world, had been given permission to dream big dreams."

I think it was a strict step forward over the previous status quo but (not unlike the changes to American culture after military necessity broke racial segregation barriers in the military during World War II) it's not the final step.

2/3 of GNAA weren't even white people.

But that groups name was not supposed to be emblematic was it? It was just an inflammatory name given at the time to be inflammatory.

We focused on technical discussions on technical channels.

I’m sorry if you had a bad time on IRC, but as someone who cut their teeth on IRC in the early 90s, and got their career started through contacts made on IRC, what you describe couldn’t be further from the kind of technical communities I participated in.

Great, that's your experience. But I was sharing mine, and those of the other minorities I know very well.

How do you know the experience of other categories of people very well?

I don't. I only know my experience and the experience of other minorities, that I personally know well, who have convey their experiences to me.

> EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad.

There can only be one omnipresent IRC God, and you're talking to them. You can wipe your ass with your experience for all they care.

My lord, the lack of self awareness...

My experience was a lot of petty interpersonal drama instead of technical discussions, but very little about race.

Exactly, nobody was a color or an X, we were just hackers.