What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that.
I certainly never "left the world" and certainly not because I found all those things useless or oppressive.
I can still nerd out on a multitude of subjects from music to board games to digital culture and I do prefer to do it with people that don't use this culture as a reason to be terrible to other people.
I run 3 meetups (one of them now the biggest NoSQL UG for one technology in Berlin), organised 8 very well-received conferences and moderated multiple bulletin boards. All are nerdy to the core - and are successful because you can expect not to be met with aggressiveness. Our credo is that the baseline to attend is interest in the subject. Anything else is hindering.
Your nerdiness is definitely not mine.
Why? Why can't hyperion2010, or anyone else, have an abrasive culture if they want to?
There is nowadays some controversy about, best as I can tell, gamers who like abrasive gaming, ie. shoot and insult each other. I can see how one might not want to participate, but why the need to force them to stop? Wouldn't leaving them to it be a reasonable solution?
If some nerds prefer a different code of conduct than you, can you really oppose that? Do you really think you can or should go into their group and tell them how they should behave?
What happened to live and let live?
What they aren't free to do without push-back is to tell others who want to do gardening that they should tolerate their abuse. I agree with Angorak that there is nothing in what we do that would require people being assholes which is why I, too, find it unacceptable.
If someone doesn't like the mood and tone of a given culture, they can start their own club or practice the activity without taking part in the social culture. They don't have to right to demand that everyone else change because their sensibilities are offended. If the members of a culture want to change to be more inclusive, then that's their decision. It has to be internal, not forced on them by pushy new members.
Maybe the analogy would be a goth at an alternative conference, where you have emos, punk, neon-hair cyberpunk people, SM enthousiasts, etcetera. What's acceptable for one subculture (say, smoking in public, to use the South Park stereotype) may not be appropriate for the other.
And here I think is the crux of the problem; it's what the article was about. Tech became mainstream, and attracted people who look at it as a job. From the point of view of us native nerds, we became colonized and are being pushed back from the thing we built as our little place in the universe where we would feel safe from the society calling us "weirdos". It's not just a clash of cultures, it feels like an invasion - contemporary tech industry is not the place it used to be. As a native tech nerd I honestly feel threatened by it.
The impression I got when I got started in technology two decades ago was that being weird was accepted because we all liked technology. Not that you had to be weird to like technology. Heck, today you don't even have to like technology. Just know the right cultural-references and you're in.
But now you are excluding others from joining your world. Are you not as bad as the people who made you feel displaced?
Why not take the stance that you can be better?
I knew people like that too, though I can't tell how often it was because they were just jerks with technical interests, and how much it was a defense mechanism, trying to maintain a little bit of self-esteem while being constantly bullied.
> I dont fit the real nerd stereotype. I played football and I don't like dnd. I resent the notion that I am some kind of brogrammer picking on the poor helpless nerds. Who is really picking on who here?
I don't think that was the message coming from the article. Most of the hardcore nerd circles I know would happily accept you and wouldn't mind you like football and are not into DnD. But usually this doesn't work the other way - your DnD-playing football-agnostic nerd gets picked on and called a "nolife".
> If it truly is about the code, as the author states, then why should this bs about authentic nerd culture even matter?
Because the author states that the nerd culture is (among other things) about "the code over status games".
Yeah well 9 times out of 10 the "jocks" who bullied the "nerds" were doing it out of a deep seated insecurity too. Just because someone self identifies with a subculture does not mean they are any less capable of being an asshole.
What I am not fine with is the cultural invasion, the people suddenly appearing, realizing there is more of them than us "weirdos" and telling us "this is our field now, you are outnumbered, you must conform to our standars". "OK, join our field; the good land is rich, and can provide for everyone. But why won't you let us live in peace, why you need to keep bullying us?".
This US vs THEM mentality is something that was not created by "weird nerds" - all those nerds wanted was to be accepted. But we had to escape, because mainstream society doesn't accept our way of thinking (curiosity, intellectual interests, intellectual honesty) and bullied us. It's them who started it, and it's them who are invading our safe harbour again.
And it probably would still be fine if social justice crowd just stayed away.
Anyway; the article explained it very well, actually.
I'm also female. I don't like being pushed out of my own d*&mned nerdy home by people who think I'm invading because I happen to stand up for myself.
I have no sympathy if you feel uncomfortable or threatened by people who expect you to treat others with respect, especially when you use terms like "invading" and prop yourself up as a paragon of intellectual pursuits.
That's not the people I'm talking about. Social justice crowd is the exact oposite of treating others with respect. And by their actions they are exacerbating the very problems they claim to fight against.
> when you use terms like "invading"
That's what it feels like.
> prop yourself up as a paragon
Well, I played Paragon Shepard, for what it's worth.
Only dogs bark at strangers. The rest of us say "welcome."
We asked for this, whether we like it or not :)
Yes, unfortunately we did. We dreamed for an amazing world, but it's not what we got when the world joined in.
We democratised technology. We built a global IP network-of-networks and used it to connect a UNIX-like kernel in everyone's pocket, in a way that serves and delights them.
I distinctly remember a large family gathering in summer 2010 where I expected the usual pattern of sitting in a corner of the garden with the handful of other techie cousins, discussing whatever was new in our world. Instead, I had people coming and asking me if I was holding an iPad, and if they could play with it. That was a profound moment for me, it told me that we'd really achieved something special - a form of cutting edge technology that wasn't something non-techies ignored until they were forced to use it for work or banking or some other mundane task. Instead, they were drawn to it with the same fascination and wonder that I have always been. For that moment, everyone present, was a geek. I loved it.
Have some of the complex technical things that I once held as "mine" become dulled by the need to serve the masses? Of course. If that annoys me from a philosophical or technical perspective, my best choice is to forge ahead again and find a niche equivalent, or build something for myself.
In many cases, I welcome it, because something that I once had to invest time and effort into, is now smoothed over and shifts into the background, making time for me to focus on something else.
Yes, this is the amazing world we wanted. :).
> Have some of the complex technical things that I once held as "mine" become dulled by the need to serve the masses? Of course. If that annoys me from a philosophical or technical perspective, my best choice is to forge ahead again and find a niche equivalent, or build something for myself.
> In many cases, I welcome it, because something that I once had to invest time and effort into, is now smoothed over and shifts into the background, making time for me to focus on something else.
Here you captured what I never could in words, so again - thank you. It's exactly what I feel - as cool tech I held as "mine" became mainstream, it also became dulled. I know it's an irrational feeling, but I do have it. But as you say, the best thing to do is to move on, find a new frontier, a new niche, and live there, until it again becomes common, and you can go even further. That is the beauty of progress!
Thinking more about it, I realize you're right. We have that amazing world. But with it, unfortunately, we once again exposed ourselves to the people who reject us and want to bully us. I'm not sure what to do about it. Should I escape even further, into another niche, one that hasn't been tainted by the culture of dishonesty and signalling games yet? It's getting harder and harder, because now everything is on the Internet, and the bullies move at the speed of light.
grow the fuck up.
> grow the fuck up.
I always say I'm 5 years old, and I like it that way.
I can't stand nativism anywhere I smell it.
The article was about hackers, the set of outcasts that self-identify based on rough consensus and running code and merit. The article wasn't about hackers, the buzzword that is good to have on your meetup and LinkedIn profile.
Such is the extent of the appropriation of hacker culture--there is this weird notion that workplace professionalism (whatever that is) somehow now has to be embraced by people claiming to be hackers. It's bullshit.
In detail: Hackers can't complain that their movement has grown and developed facets they don't like. Hackers are mischievous, hackers are smart, hackers are always ahead of the pack discovering and inventing cool new things. Therefore, hackers, by their very self-definition, can't be called hackers anymore, they must have moved on elsewhere and developed new labels for themselves. If they haven't, and have become complacent and jaded with newcomers, they have ceased to be true hackers.
(I use "they", because one should never self-apply the term hacker :)
To you, it's a job. To me, it's one of my many hobbies that I enjoy doing. It just turns out that there's more demand in the business world for software engineering than there is for admiring artwork of anthropomorphic creatures or swinging swords around.
My other pet project for a long time was moderating a metal board - what do you think happened when people came up with Nu Metal? It was an outrage.
If you want to have a private, invite-only community that has strict rules of abrasive (or other) behaviour, that is also possible.
If, however, you run around the world telling everyone how amazing your culture is, how it's producing things that will change all our lives, how it's great for getting a well paying career, etc, etc, all of which the hacking culture has done, then you have nobody to blame when people start paying attention. We asked for all of this, and we reap the rewards, good and bad.
The real problem is that there is no coherent definition of abuse and people who are better at playing the social game use that skill to define everything as abuse which they do not like / undermines their status. And that is what the article calls out in the context of 'nerds', 'nerd culture' and 'newcomers' (or at least that is my interpretation of it)
There are many abusers that are quite good at the "social game" you describe, by exploiting insecurities about rules, especially in their absence. Saying they are "bad at the game" is actually one of the standard plays (and terribly harmful to those that are _actually_ "bad at the game").
The solution is not "there are no rules", but "we have rules here and others here". We need more spaces with with different sets of rules, where everyone can nerd out in their fashion, not chaos.
The problem about society is that you can't cut out social interaction from humans. Any attempt to do so is doomed in my opinion.
The moment you're thinking in dichotomous terms like "the organizers" and "the attendees", you're not talking about culture. The moment you cut out the play, you're not talking about culture. Every culture has varying degrees of play (that go well beyond the amount of play allowed by any CoC I've seen), and that play is acceptable but only known to members of whatever in-group is in question. Introducing rules that eliminate the play inherent in cultures is okay when you do so for the purpose of letting members of disparate cultures to interact safely with each other. The big concern hackers have and that the author of the article we're discussing is getting at, is that the values from which CoCs are fashioned are fine within the confines of the events where they are enforced, but when those values are foisted upon every hacker and nerd sub-culture (including the abrasive ones) and attempts to squelch the diversity of cultures, then it no longer represents intersectionality inclusive of weirdos.
The problem about society is that you can't cut out social
interaction from humans. Any attempt to do so is doomed in
my opinion.
What you want is an abrasive culture and I oppose that.
highly relevant: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&w=2
Hold it right there. I run the space, I raise the money, I sign the contracts, I'm can be held responsible if someone misbehaves (morally and legally) and I'm the person that doesn't watch the talks, but uses them as a time where they can actually make sure that the next person has their time and the tables are clean?
And "organizer" and "attendee" is a dichotomy? Both are roles and forcibly assuming that everyone plays the same role is harmful.
The point is: In the end none of these group has a right to redefine the CoCs. They've joined a space which has been built by the "weirdo nerds" for their purposes and has the CoCs those deemed fair. Joining this space was no problem, the "weirdo nerds" welcomed them (or didn't bother to say: GO AWAY, both interpretations are acceptable), but now they try to dominate this space by abusing their skills in the "game of social skills" and rewrite the spaces CoC to one they like more and that's neither fair nor right.
If you can't get enough people to stand up and say "we're running a conference for tough as nails abrasive people, make sure you come in armored clothing", that might be a description of a problem.
If a few people founded a company like this and became successful, some people who joined later would complain about the abrasiveness.
And if the complainants happened to be from certain "protected classes", abrasiveness would be legally prohibited.
If people like hyperion2010 or others want an abrasive culture, why can't they take what they dish? Why is it so ok for someone to call me a c*&t but I can't say the words "male privilege"?
Basic in-group/out-group dynamics.
Are you surprised that the system (and the people within it) reacts to broad-based accusations about its structure, rather differently from how it reacts to angry beefs between individuals?
Let them take up knitting.
The only thing it creates, ultimately, is the endgame of the Geek Social Fallacies: a place where the only people left all have nasty personalities and no social connections to any other kinds of people.
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
If you haven't been in an environment where everybody is tolerated -- you're really missing out. I've been lucky enough to work on projects where programming nerds mingle with visual artists, mechanics, hardware hackers, fashionistas, musicians, and more, and it's amazing. And furthermore, it's not like we're watching what we say all day. In my experience, if you have a baseline where everyone knows they are accepted and have recourse to call someone out, then there's lots of "inappropriate" humor.
I also don't think there is any implication that I want an abrasive culture. I do not think that early google style corporate culture is a good thing. I think we need to dissociate nerds behaving badly from simply not picking up on social signals or not caring about them. The reason I say this is because when you treat someone as a villain who is simply thinking out loud you basically stop any potential for real dialogue in its tracks.
The two groups are not identical, but the probability of being uninterested in playing the hierarchy game increases significantly when conditioned on being a nerd (and even more so, being in the infosec scene, where the author and I spend most of our time) to the point that they dominate the social scene.
Sidenote: The word "hacker" doesn't seem to mean anything anymore, it has been used in so many different ways that it has become too ambiguous. I personally like the phrase "weird nerd" better, because it might be a little more specific, and it is how I feel. (Probably doesn't help that I don't have the skills that seem to go along with "weird nerds"/"hackers".)
On the peak, we ran a 5-day conference set with a one week program around it only on voluntary work.
We currently have an attendance that is very diverse (we don't count) and we worked for that a lot.
It couldn't be any less professional and if it can, we'd like to remove that.
http://2014.eurucamp.org/concept/
The Elasticsearch usergroup is run at a small community-driven coworking space (and existed before Elastic, the company) and the Rust usergroup definitely has no professional outset.
I also ran devrooms on FOSDEM.
One of the meetups the Ruby Berlin e.V. runs (the governing body for all of this) has _3 full talks_+Lightning talks every month, without any company involvement other then providing rooms.
Suits are really of no interest to me in this case.
Also, I'd like to say that I'm not discussing from a theoretical point here - I've been doing community work for more then 10 years and have put all the things I say here into production at some point and in multiple contexts. With measurable successes and failures.
I just say all this sounds more like "conference" (= prof) than "hacker space" (= hobby)
Both can be fun.
I'm from Stuttgart and going to the Shack is a whole different experience than going to any meetup or conference.
I do help and attend spontanous meetups of all forms and fashions as well - still, they all have rules and they are all better for it.
I agree.
I prefer to use the term "nerd" to mean that type of abrasive person and "geek" as someone who is enjoys the same interests but is not interested in point-scoring and other aspects of that abrasive culture.
You seem very sure about when Adria Richards (the lady involved in "donglegate") "tried" to join the nerd community. And yet you're wrong.
Here's a partial bio from a recent article:
"She was introverted, smart, and "weird" (according to the other kids)—a burgeoning nerd.
By age 17, she'd fallen in love with computers. A year later, she was working at Geeksquad, employee #26, and she absorbed everything she could about hardware, operating systems, and networks. That summer, she registered her first domain name for a client for whom she was building a website, and learned about DNS. She buried herself in books and scoured websites, learning new things and trying them out, relying on friends whose parents had more resources to get access to hardware."
http://www.shakesville.com/2015/02/the-falsest-of-false-equi...
At the core of the issue of women in tech is a belief that women’s ideas are as good as men’s ideas—on average, women produce as high a percentage of good ideas (and bad ideas) as men. So we want to include women because of their ideas, because we care about their ideas and not who they are.
I don’t know the solution to this problem.
But the solution being proposed in the Adria Richards debate is that Adria Richards was threatened because of who she was. But she wasn’t threatened, she just felt threatened. People are saying we should listen to these feelings and include people like Adria Richards who feel threatened when they aren’t being threatened. It’s an attempt to place her within the group based on who she is, in direct opposition to the fact that her idea, in this case, is wrong. THE ENTIRE POINT of including women is THEIR IDEAS. Holding up someone whose idea was wrong as the poster child for gender equality in tech is diametrically in opposition to why anyone in tech wants to include women in tech.
Not only is this not a solution to the first problem, it directly breaks the ideology that makes tech culture something worth joining.
If we’re going to treat women’s ideas as equal to men’s, that includes treating women’s bad ideas as equal to men’s bad ideas.
I think if you talk to any of the women I’ve worked with, they would describe me as an ally. I’ve called out coworkers on saying sexist things, in front of other people. But I want to solve the problem of there not being many women in tech, not create spaces where people can’t validate ideas because of who said them. If we do that, we’ll just be creating terrible tech companies where women work but ideas can’t be validated, and all the real technologists will move to real tech companies that have no women. A false solution is no solution.
To be clear, she was literally, actually, threatened with death (amongst other things) after it blew up in the media.
I'm kind of intrigued what the next, easily disproved lie is going to be on this topic.
“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
[...]
“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”
“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”
from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-s...
http://butyoureagirl.com/2013/03/18/forking-and-dongle-jokes...
Who's interpretation fits better? The "I was literally threatened with death" version or the "I was anxious because I was confronting people who were behaving boorishly"?
At best you can claim that 2 years after the fact she suddenly decided that she was threatened with death, and just happened to announce this new interpretation in an article that she is on record (in the article I previously linked to in another comment) as feeling misrepresented by the author of.
"What could be worse than someone taking what you've told them and portraying you as the aggressor? It was a sucker-punch to the gut. This is what Jon Roson's article in the NYTimes did. I simply become an agitator affecting the man's life, no more, no less."
So, no, I don't think I'm being very charitable in my interpretation.
Also, hsod didn't even quote the entire thing, and context only makes it look worse for her. The interviewer gave her plenty of chances to clarify her position, that the quote was just talking about anxiety. But she stuck to what she said. She definitely believed that she was in physical danger.
If we want all people to turn up with their ideas, we have to create an environment where all people feel comfortable being present and expressing their ideas. We have mainly done that for white dudes with reasonable levels of social capital. I'd like to do it for everybody.
The feeling of being a visibly different minority in a crowd can be unsettling. (As a white guy I experience it rarely, but when it happens, I notice the difference acutely.) This is true regardless of actual risk. But women are currently at higher risk of all sorts of predatory behavior: creeps, stalkers, harassers, sexual assaulters, rapists. I personally expect that a sexualized environment will increase those risks. But even if they don't, suddenly having your context shifted from, "professional who likes to code thinking about code" to "fuckable prey for the predators in the crowd around you" is problematic.
Our choices are either to give up and have those people mainly stay away or to work on creating a safe space so that everybody can attend. There is no middle path here. Pycon explicitly chose the latter.
Does this exclude ideas? I guess, in a sad and limited sense of the term "ideas". Pycon's limited the acceptable content thusly: "All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks."
Does this mean you can't talk about your favorite masturbation techniques on stage? Sure. But seriously, why would you? What sort of incredible idea exchange are we missing out on here by saying that a Python conference has to be about Python? If you also want to talk about sex, there are conferences about that. There's even a well-established conference about sex and technology. [1]
What you're refusing to connect here is what happened to Adria before and after she posted a tweet about a Code of Conduct violation. She was harassed and threatened; her employer was attacked, harming their business. These are all crimes, and they're crimes for a reason. You might not see the connection, but to me (and I'm sure to any woman in tech) it's pretty obvious: men willing to attack women are part of the tech community. They could be anybody. [2]
She surely knew that there could well be predators in that crowd. And the moment the context is sexualized is the moment that she has to start paying attention to that rather than the content. This is true for anybody, but it is especially true for people who have been traumatized in the past. And given the stats on sexual assault, there are guaranteed to be women like that at any significant conference.
So I'm firmly on the side of codes of conduct because I don't want a random grab-bag of ideas at a conference. I want a specific curated set of good ideas. And if that means people have to save their weak sex jokes and their pictures of porn stars for a few hours until they're somewhere else, I'm fine with that.
[1] http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/
[2] This basically makes you and me and any dude in a crowd Schroedinger's Rapist: http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-sch... http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_Rapi...
In the fullness of time, his employers acted like craven cowards and sacked him. Did she sack him? No.
Was he scarred for life? Ostracized? No, he found work again quickly. But what happened to her? A bunch of other people exercised their freedom of speech and shared their opinion of her choices, and she was also fired. Was she ostracized? Yes. People said things like, “She should never work in tech again.”
To anyone on the outside of that incident, it’s quite obvious that the treatment of the two persons involved was completely asymmetrical, especially considering that what she did was express an unpopular opinion.
Which is something that hackers, especially hackers here, often say is something that ought to be protected. But there’s always the weasel words that “speech has consequences,” which mean that in reality, “privilege” is being insulated from those consequences, and lack of privilege is being exposed to the maximum consequences.
Getting back to your rules, she didn’t get anyone fired. She spoke out about something that was said in a public place loudly enough for her to hear it.
I’ll gladly defend that. There is nothing remotely civilized about saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to object to anything she hears, or express her opinion about how a civilized society should respond.
White males do that all the time. Why is a black, Jewish female not afforded the same option?
She took his photo and shared it on twitter. That's as good as calling him out by name.
> Was he scarred for life? Ostracized? No
That's not how he describes it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw...
Search the page for "Santa Clara"
> To anyone on the outside of that incident, it’s quite obvious that the treatment of the two persons involved was completely asymmetrical, especially considering that what she did was express an unpopular opinion.
And what was he doing, besides expressing an unpopular opinion?
> There is nothing remotely civilized about saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to object to anything she hears
Of course she should be allowed to object. She should also be sensible enough to recognize that including the identity of the individual in the objection is the same as asking the public at large to take action against the individual.
Free speech does not mean free from consequences. Both parties learned that in spades.
As far as I know the guys name was not widely, if at all, published.
What she did was escalate, and that unwisely.
She added identifying info. Anyone familiar with the internet knows what can happen.
Say I'm wrong, and that she never meant for it to get so out of hand. Where was her defense of mr-hank? She could have stopped the madness or even reversed it after the fact with the right blog post. Perhaps she felt culturally unsafe in a big conference room surrounded by a bunch of white male Christian programmers, but when you complain, and someone gets fired over it, turns out you had more power than you thought, and with that comes responsibility.
In short: she started a lynch mob fight, and lost.
What I’ll actually say is that you appear to have decided that she got what she deserved, and everything you’re arguing is post-facto reasoning to rationalize the decision you’ve already made.
I might as well have a discussion with a volleyball.
"Say I'm wrong, and that she never meant for it to get so out of hand." Is him saying "let's assume I'm wrong, and etc etc"
Comparing people with a volleyball, on the other hand, is pretty clearly an insult/ad hominem.
What was said code of conduct? Saying things in a certain tone of voice is not allowed? Referring to a dongle as being big is not allowed? Their claimed violation was all very up for debate TBF.
This is the code of conduct: https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/
In particular, I think this was the part that was violated: "All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks."
The jokes were about forking and big dongles; they were obvious sexual references. The maker of the joke, the overhearer, and the people running the conference all agreed that it was a code of conduct violation, so there's nothing really up for debate about that.
That you don't understand why these codes were created or what practical benefit they have means little other that you haven't taken the time to learn anything before opening your mouth.
Have you ever complained about any employee at any time for any reason? Does that make you an uncivilized beast?
Briefly ignoring both that she did not "get [him] fired" and that your definition of "private conversation" apparently extends to "conversation in a public place that others can easily hear", there are plenty of obvious situations in which a private conversation can and should result in consequences (sexual harassment and threats being clear examples).
Your position on the rules of civilized behavior is incoherent.
That seems more like a policy of exclusion from your side – ala obviously a real nerd wouldn’t ever find something inappropriate or be clumsy in how they complain about something.
This whole thing is a way of cordoning yourself off, isolating yourself from criticism, shunning others, excluding others. It’s so, so weird. And hateful.
It's a perfect example of counter-productive, oppressive behavior that was outlined in this article. Do you think getting that guy fired is going to suddenly change his sense of humor? Not likely. If anything, it's going to poison his view of feminists in the field by coloring them all as psychopaths willing to do anything to push an agenda rather than focus on the actual technology the community was originally built around.
A conference attendee overheard another conference attendee making dick jokes in a public space at a conference, violating the terms of the CoC that he'd agreed to before attending. She reported him and posted it on her Twitter feed, complaining about it. He was reprimanded by the conference organizers, and apologized
When he returned to his work, he was fired—and he immediately posted to HN that she'd gotten him fired. He found a new job, while she was subjected to two years of personal threats, identity theft, employer-targeted DDoS attacks, and chan grief. She still is to this day.
If you think that reporting someone for violating an conference code of conduct is the 'most hostile, weird, and hateful' way you've ever seen someone behave, you aren't watching very closely.
1. The words were never meant for her
2. She didn't contact him, maybe she misheard?
3. She was, in fact, way more powerful than him (privilege)
4. She has a history of being a professional victim
5. -and a history of making similarly bad jokes herself, publiclyIt's also an odd definition of professional victim, where publicly being a 'victim' results in you getting booted out of the profession.
I don't want to comment on the event itself here -- but I think that the aftermath, and the continued reaction to it, say a lot of sad things about the tech community.
Which is most privileged:
* Developer evangelist vs developer-on-the-floor
* 10 000 twitter followers vs nothing
Why she was booted from her profession was because she misused her position, -in a way that caused significant harm to the employer.
No company wants to be perceived as "the place that employs the most-hated sexist in the world" if they depend on selling to regular people. An Internet lynch mob can ruin SE rankings, launch DDoS attacks, etc. Anything that attracts one is a liability.
He was already fired by the time the "East side of Internet" reacted.
As for this being brought up again and again: it is a very good example and I can't recall the person in question ever coming up with a real apology.
I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life?
“I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”
So I guess it poisons his view of the entire gender.
It's pleasing to think that ineffective activism is zero-sum. In reality a lot of people have been turned off to ideas that fit their principles and ideals. Getting them back is going to take much more work than it would have taken to appeal to their principles before they got burned.
tl;dr Generalization: Nerd withdrawal is rarely directed at anyone, it is a defence mechanism. Responses to nerd withdrawal or nerds expressing themselves (in their blithely unaware way) are often direct attacks on the nerd. This asymmetry is what drives me nuts.
I'm not quite as socially oblivious as the original writer. I do agree with her that being completely oblivious to social cues is really useful for women in tech. However, you can't turn off that fact that many women are pretty conscious of social cues.
If "no one should ever be allowed to determine what is appropriate", why don't you guys just lighten up and deal with what women say at face value? Why do you take it so personally? You can't tell me it's inappropriate after a statement like you just made!
The distinction is the same as if they were seated in a coffee shop. Conversations there are between private people, not with some coffee shop "audience". People who listen in to such conversation, and worse, reacts to it, are doing something which polite people consider very rude.
I don't agree with what Adria did, in that she shamed these guys on Twitter, and furthermore, she's doubled down on some conspiracy theories afterwards. And maybe she has an itchy trigger finger on what might constitute a hostile environment.
But, the issue of hostile environments -- as created through a shared culture of sexualized talk -- that's real. The best intervention I think, would have been to talk to those guys. If she didn't feel comfortable confronting them, she was also justified in taking it to the PyCon organizers.
"The only way forward is REAL tolerance for all kinds of behavior and a good faith attempt to see people in context."
This only applies when a member of the group has been caught doing somethings stupid. If someone "trying to join" the group has complaints, there is no need for tolerance. "Nerd culture", for example, has its own standards of "appropriate".
And, the majority, the ones who care less about right and wrong as long as they are on the correct side, will happily follow along, just as they did when Catholics ruled, just as they did when White Straight ruled.
If I had a very good developer who was perfectly courteous and professional at work but in his spare time was (say) a member of the Westborough Baptist Church or the Socialist Workers Party I'd not be concerned.
For your typical standard worker it doesn't really matter what he/she does outside of work, as long as it doesn't damage the company - which is pretty hard unless you really try, since nobody outside gives a damn about some noname employee. For someone very high in hierarchy it actually becomes much easier to damage it, so you have to draw a line somewhere. If your company, supposed to promote messages of equality and taking pride of its supposed openness, elects someone who actively supported means of oppression against minorities as its representative and people start to react, there might be something worth reconsidering in this situation.
Why is it suddenly be acceptable the other way around?
I'm reminded of Grigori Perelman's critique of mathematicians: "But almost all of them are conformists." "It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens. It is people like me who are isolated."
If anyone of us is a nerd and can't improve their own culture, GTFO. And take your "dongles" and Big Bang Theory goofiness with you. No special privileges for those who simply preceded others temporally. Dinosaur.
Change or be killed, at your hands, it sounds like.
Can you blame people for fighting back against that?
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.
> Desire for civility and freedom from objectification is "censorship"
> Wanting to not support misogynists/rape apologists/rape denialists/sexual predators is worse than the soviets
> My fear of social ostracism is as or more valid than your fear of being raped
> My chosen "identities" are as important as the assigned social castes you've been placed in and are violently oppressed into staying in
> Not having friends in high school is the same as being a woman, or black
Eventually feminism will win; anti-racism will win; these are inevitabilities we can trace from the first slave revolts in Sumeria to John Brown to the Black Panther Party to even Barack Obama, in his own way. The ratchet of history turns only ever in one direction. Reactionaries howl over lost ground, but they'll never reclaim it.
I eagerly await this world, where finally we will have real hackers, hackers that bring their skill to bear against real enemies, fight real battles, and are strong, rather than weak, building on a foundation of just conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed, rather than being mentally locked in the 3rd grade in the moment of shame when their lunch money was taken.
One day the creeps will be gone. Only the strong will survive. Choose your side wisely, for you can only be on one side of history, and one it has left you behind you will be behind it forever.
>Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet.
If progressive values are not hacker values, the hacker values will be, should be, and must be destroyed.
To presume that every aspect of your value system is superior to every aspect of everyone else's value systems is both astoundingly arrogant and also authoritarian. Improvement of societal values can't come about without minority groups being allowed to practice alternative value systems, as abhorrent as they might seem to the mainstream. As long as these groups aren't dramatically harming someone (ie: slavery, killing homosexuals etc) then I don't see what the problem is with this. The progressive values you espouse would have likely been popularly embraced much sooner had society not used it's force to clamp down on people practicing alternative values; yet now that your value system is gaining societal support, you are suggesting that society do the exact same thing to different people employing alternative values.
I would encourage you to be a bit more open minded. You might find that elements of hacker culture's or other cultures' values are superior to elements of your value system, and fuse those aspects into your existing values to make a superior system. At the very least, if progressive values are universally superior to hacker values then they will naturally win out over time. There is no need to to advocate the silencing of dissenting voices.
In order to have any concept of morality, we must presume that every aspect of our value system is superior to every aspect of any other value system. But this isn't a negative. It isn't ~presumptuous~ to believe that murder and torture and rape are wrong. Likewise, supporting these things is not some mere "alternative" that should be encouraged by some moral-relativist position that all forms of society are equally preferable.
The universe is not fair. There is no law of physics that naturally leads to good triumphing over evil. The history of humanity is the story of the slow climb of our species out of the darkness, away from tyranny and patriarchy and towards freedom for everyone, but this has not come for free. The road to freedom is mortared with the blood of freedom fighters, from Joan D'Arc to John Brown to Bobby Seale to Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X to Andrea Dworkin. In order to continue this slow climb, we have to fight. There is no alternative. This article and the voices supporting it here are evidence of the backslide that would occur if ever we stopped.
It's laughable to suggest that patriarchy doesn't harm people. Read the thread I linked and the comments if you think otherwise. Every rape joke/rape denial is one more brick in the wall of PTSD facing one quarter of women. Every dongle joke is one more pane in the glass ceiling protecting the good ol' boys club. You have the luxury, the privilege, of pretending these things don't exist because you are a member of the social class committing these oppressions. With your silence, you become complicit; and you are not even silent.
It's comforting to know that I'm not alone among hackers. There is no intrinsic aspect of hackerdom that demands being creepy or misogynistic. And one day, just as there are few hackers that are KKK members or Nazis, there will be few hackers that are misogynists. Because the ratchet of history only ever turns in one direction, and once this ground is lost to you it will be lost forever.
What I (and probably many other nerds) don't get is why feminists are so adamant in calling all sex related crimes "rape", does it really matter if a person gets X years in prison for sexual abuse instead of X years in prison for rape? And how is it obvious that arguing for one of the sides equals being a misogynist who thinks that women shouldn't have rights to bodily integrity?
I'm optimistic -- while there's a lot of noise and badness right now, ten years ago people weren't even talking about these problems in the tech community. Imagine where we'll be in another decade.
You can't really win, but slowly morph the world from one view to another. In the process, your perception of what is right or wrong changes and thus, the terminal position is never the one you initially expected.
One thing I'm willing to bet on is that any extreme position will be seen as wrong 50 years from now on. The hive mind of the western global village might sway 180 degrees, like it did on the question of race in the 20th century. From genes to apology. But the "intellectual" belief about race is perhaps still as wrong as ever, and we understand comparatively little about its position in society.
Likewise, we don't have any clue how the human mind is affected by being closely connected through the internet. Or for the fact that the private individual was eradicated for the public group. Or for the total persistence of information from every human being connected via IP-addresses to everyone else in the ultimate peer-to-peer network ever envisioned.
It is so easy to blame someone as a reactionary who won't understand the position to which the world moved. But reality is perhaps that they have seen things oblivious to everyone else.
In other words, I think the human society is so complex we don't really understand how little we understand of it.
But if anyone thinks otherwise, they should know they are on the losing side of history in every regard.
"Rape apologist" is the left wing version of "terrorist sympathizer"
That said, this does paint reality for those who do honestly want to see more women involved in tech etc. My take home is that if you keep trying to push on people who intentionally leave "appropriate" communities behind because they don't care about those things and find them oppressive, then you are simply going to drive them to leave again and you will have to start all over again.
edit: Actual take home. The only way forward is REAL tolerance for all kinds of behavior and a good faith attempt to see people in context.