Da! Complete agitation! Scientific demonstrations of Westinghouse washing machine by smart woman with pointer.
"The Internet" is blowing up -- that is, a few hundred people who went to a conference about geeky Python coding stuff called PyCon and their friends -- over the case of Adria Richards. So now the Pythonistas are having various spasms and everyone is piling on. Here's the Pastebin version, favourable to the male victims -- but it makes some good points. Here's Adria's version, self-serving, but calling out the larger problem of male geek sexism.
After Richards tweeted about some sexist comments made by two men at a developers' comment and getting "the Internet" roiled, one of the developers, from Play Haven, was fired; then Richards herself, from SendGrid, was fired. So, "the Internet" wins, at least two developers lose, and many people have a chance to do a sanctimonious star-turn by dumping on one or both of the employers.
Shouldn't Tim Berners-Lee come around and mourn that we are two down? The man who made the sexist remark privately in a conversation -- not from the stage at the conference, not on Twitter -- a father of three, has now lost his job. Where are all those free speechniks that want to try to turn hacking into free speech? Is that the only free speech they're available for?
I'm grateful to VRHax for pointing me to Amanda Blum, who has the very important backstory on this where I've made a comment.
I don’t share Amanda’s rosy view of the open source movement, both because of its rampantly authoritarian methods and culture, and because of its misogyny — which is common to the geek world in general. So part of me was glad that this woman Adria, whom I don’t know, was able to publicize the awfulness of the misogyny and nastiness that make it so hard for women to be in tech, or even for women bloggers on tech to comment on the obvious.
But a common function of the open source/social media cult is this “gotcha” game and these Saul Alinsky/Leninist methods of harassment, stalking, heckling, smearing, etc. And Twitter gives you a big amplification tool for that purpose. These two men made their sexist remarks to each other, in a private conversation that constituted backchat to what was going on, on stage, if I have understood correctly. Adria overheard their backchat, decided it was offensive, and then aggressively took a picture of those men, and then put them on Twitter. This led to public vilification of them for their private remarks, it led to one of them getting fired after a scandal was attached to their firm’s name in public, and it led to Adria getting fired for the same thing.
Don’t people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their remarks made not in public but to each other sotto voce while a conference is in session. Those men after all didn’t tweet their sexist jokes. So rightly or wrongly in terms of content, their speech has a reasonable expectation of privacy as it is not made publicly for public consumption. Yet Adria overrode that with this nasty authoritarian gambit of her own, which was basically to say “We will forcibly reform you according to our feminist notions even for what you say in private, just to make a point”. And that’s just not on — it’s more imbalance and more authoritarianism.
When you put it all into context as Amanda Blum has here, you feel like you’re in an episode of Portlandia.
I can’t help thinking that had Adria returned to her blog that day and wrote a post on this incident, about the men — even naming them — about their hurtful remarks and how it made her feel — even with a picture showing that this conference, like so many dev and geek type conferences, was basically a sausage fest — well, that might have been more tolerable. It’s that real-time that really makes companies freak out. But on a blog post, she could have taken time to frame it, and they might have had an opportunity to response in a length longer than a tweet. I do wonder if she or they would have been fired, had this been a blog post — and had it been one without naming names, it would have ensured no one got fired, but maybe the cause of women’s right got advanced.
I think Ashera Wolf took this approach — and she described the awfulness of the misogyny at conferences, and she even named some names, but I think her method — not getting into people’s faces and taking pictures to instantly tweet and not shaming them on Twitter in real-time — probably was more effective.
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If you've never seen the Portlandia Women and Womyn First Book Store episodes -- go see them, especially the very first episodes in season 1, they're hilarious, they capture perfectly that creepy, dysfunctional arbitrary authoritarianism of certain forms of feminism.
And that's what this story feels like -- deciding that the cause of trying to reform gross geeks trumps privacy and the normal give-and-take of human relations.
I don't support the action of taking pictures of a person at a conference and attempting to shame their behavious -- but in fact, it's free speech and these things aren't written in stone. A reporter could do this -- it's a public meeting -- and make a comment, and as long as the context was the hipster one that people might support, they wouldn't care.
Nothing justifies DDoSing a site -- which is what happened to SendGrid, Adria Rich's former employer, once Anonymous decided they had to weigh in.
Obviously, Blum has called this correctly -- they all lose, and certainly the pious sanctimoniousness of Richards in thinking she was saving a little girl from sexism by "taking a stand" just doesn't wash. You feel all along that it's a power trip, it's about her, and that she's using this issue as a "Shakedown Street" -- much in the way that the Rev. Jesse Jackson or the Rev. Al Sharpton have used the issue of racism to fight for political power, sometimes charging bundles for "sensitivity training".
That there is even a business or agency that manages these things and makes money off it is creepy here, and nobody has mentioned that except Blum -- to say that it doesn't work.
As I think about it further, I do want to say that firing employees seems an awfully harsh and I wonder if a lesser punishment could have been found -- put the Evangelist on desk duty for a week or two, take them off their lovely conference circuit with its per diems and free food and nice hotels, and force them to operate the Twitter account with no injection of sentiment. Gah!
But here's the thing -- SendGrid isn't in the geek-reform business. They're in the email business. Their job -- Dev Evangelist -- depends on having a kind and friendly face to their business. If they become the object of scorn, and worse, the object of Anonymous' ire, why should they be required to keep the employee who brought that on?
Maybe people have to stop thinking that they can dog-whistle to Anonymous or make common cause with such thugs and still keep their jobs.
That Anonymous picked up Adria's cause is only more proof of how her method was wrong. Indeed, any company that sees their employee making common cause with Anonymous for ANY reason has to consider termination, in my view. Because they can't be trusted to be decent and not coercive and destructive with the public or the customers. Adria used Anonymous methods when she took pictures and tweeted them to use social media to create social pressure on people. She essentially endorsed Anonymous to come DdOS her employer. Hey, I don't see her condemning Anonymous doing that.
Then there's the deeper question: what is an Evangelist and why is it that Silicon Valley, which has few jobs for women, puts them in this job?
SendGrid talked Newspeak with the rest of them in their explanation of Richard's firing when they described this essentially marketing job as a job that is "supposed to unite the community" (around what principle? Send more email and use SendGrid to do it? lol) but that then had the unfortunate effect of "splitting the community". Oh, gobbledegook. Your job shouldn't have such a goofy name taken from religion, and it shouldn't have a social engineering role. The job is to sell the product to other businesses as a b2b product, and that means reaching the devs and engineers at other businesses who make decisions about what to use etc. That's all.
It was easier to understand what this role was really all about when the woman was the part-time homemaker or the single unmarried daughter working part-time to demonstrate the Hoover in the store on demonstrating washing machines in early TV commercials. Then you realized her role was secondary, and she was being called upon her womanly charms to hustle a product.
I notice that when women get into tech companies these days, unless they are super badass coders, they are put in this womanly role of "evangelist" which is mainly a social role -- being nice and charming while you essentially take customer questions and demonstrate the product. You can dress it up with geek-speak, but it's about teaching and socializing and smoothing relations -- the women's role. It's not about science -- except for the lore you have to master about using the product, but note in our TV ad above from 1956, that the woman there could sound scientific while talking about spin cycles and removing cores.
I keep thinking of Scoble's film of that geek dude selling the phone cracker thing that jailbreaks your phone, and "his lovely assistant" who is now going to be taking over the evangelism/community manager role. She was silent throughout and Scoble to his credit tried to reverse the sexism and try to get her to talk more and featured her in the film.
A beneficial byproduct of Adria's picture is that you look over the shoulders of those two geeks talking trash to see a room full of men. It's the typical sausage fest and to a certain extent I feel for Adria having the bravery to get up and call these people out. But it's by adopting a form of authoritarianism that is as bad as the patriarchy they echo -- but only unevenly impose. I'll bet neither of those two neatly dressed white hipsters have been in court for beating their wives or girlfriends, but I could be wrong.
All these hipsters on Twitter wanting to sign petitions to reinstate her ought to ask the same thing of the geek who was fired for making the sexist remarks.
This is only the beginning, or really, the beginning might be properly have said to begun with Weev treating Kathy Sierra so abominably. Some people came to her aid back then, but certainly not enough -- I left a comment on a site about the story back then, but few people in the Second Life/web 2.0 community back then felt they should defend her -- there was this sense that she was wimping out. And Kathy Sierra did nothing remotely like Adria Richards. In fact, she did nothing at all except blog about tech and tell people to come to her talk. Weev, a fucktard extraordinaire who is right where he needs to be for malicious hacking right now -- in jail -- was the one who harassed her, doxed her and exposed her to untold pain over past episodes of her life, and made death threaths -- and 4chan, which was the early form of Anonymous from which it has not evolved at all, piled on.
That's why it's so disingenuous for Anonymous to say they have "weighed" the story and decided to harass SendGrid -- while some of their very members from 4chan and similar low-life sites are happy to send her death threats.
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