Here Greg Sandoval, who was quit CBS over a tech editorial scandal, has a piece on Weev and his nastiness to Kathy Sierra: The End of Kindness: Weev and the Cult of the Angry Young Man.
Let's not call this about "angry young men," please and spell out what it really is about: the cult of the insolent and arrogant hacker, the cult of the Internet nihilist, the cult of open source software with its "benevolent dictatorships" and "pruning" of people who don't fit, it's endless hostile and nasty edge-casing and word-salading, it's capacious ability to forgive itself with each new iteration -- and assign the blame elsewhere.
That cult isn't about swaggering males who don't tolerate females, it's about an authoritarianism in society that makes for oppression for everyone, male and female, geek or non-geek.
I so well remember the days of the Kathy Sierra saga at the dawn of Twitter in 2007, and wrote a comment on a widely-read blog there and did my own post. Here's what I wrote:
This murderous, thuggish "insult culture that has run off the rails" as Mark Wallace so wonderfully put it isn't just in Second Life. That's the news for me. That is, it's a particular form of amplified hate there in 3-D streaming, but it's a larger Internet and RL phenomenon that is growing by leaps and bounds.
Sarah Lewitton. The indie music grrl everybody loved to hate and death-threat. Kathy Sierra. Judith Regan, the woman who tried to publish these interviews with OJ, "If I Did It," that HarperCollins ultimately spiked. All hated. Reviled, Objects of scorn.
Because it's about the need of the individual, especially the female individual, to amplify to overcome the tide of conforming collectivism.
I'm running with an operating theory here that this astoundingly cruel and humiliating treatment that happens mainly to women on the Internet isn't just a feminist problem, a backlash problem with humiliated puerile dweeb males in their mom's basement lashing out with the Internet Fuckwad Theory.
No, it's about any individual, and women seem to have more of the endurance for it, bucking the tide of collectivism and conformity that is all over the place in the name of "progress". It's a particularly brutal clash because human consciousness is actually changing. Pay attention.
Where is Jared Lanier of "Digital Maoism?" This isn't a problem you write about once, then have the luxury of not returning to. This is an urgent social task. The world is collectivizing, even though the people who collectivized in the last century, by mass-murdering millions, are thoroughly discredit and their virtual world collapsed. How could this happen?
And most of all, recalling how while a few techs like Robert Scoble stood up for her, quite a few didn't and told her to man up, so to speak. And few people who heckled me back then or stood by why I was heckled then drew any larger lessons.
I didn't realize (and I don't think it was known) that Weev was the one who did this (and she may have known and not given all the information in order to help authorities track him down, I don't know).
What's astounding is that even though his persecution of Sierra is known now, all the discussion of his court case focused on his "math in the browser" bullshit and at best said he was a loathsome individual, and maybe an antisemite, but failed to tell the full story about Kathy Sierra.
I think the argumentation against his claim that he didn't really hack anything has to go hand-in-hand with the defense of Kathy Sierra from his online persecution.
But exasperatingly, Kathy Sierra herself as part of the Silicon Valley geek culture herself, doesn't think he belongs in jail.
The key to understanding why he does, and why she has a case, too, has to do with seeing this in larger terms of the rule of law, the perversion of law in code, and not just feminist values.
My comment at The Verge:
Weev is right where he belongs and I hope Orin Kerr and others will fail in their effort to invoke hacker notions and edge-case and law-fare him out of jail. The judge didn’t buy the machinations to start with — it is not “math in the browser” but brute force on the server. Hacking is not defined by hackers, but by victims, and in this case, the people whose emails were exposed and AT&T with their gadget web site exposed get to define that yes, it was unauthorized and not “math”.
That’s a principle that Kathy Sierra should understand — harassment of women is not defined by nasty men on the Internet, but by the law, and by victims who have been harmed.That’s why she needs to get her head on straight about his hacker crimes because they are very much part and parcel of his very real crimes against her. It’ s not about mere misogyny but about a nihilist notion that law and community norms don’t matter and exist to be transgressed at will when and as hackers conceive at their whim.They want their anarchism to be in charge and not the rule of law and they’ll do anything to obfuscate and dance around this actuality with all kinds of fake alibis and excuses.
No one should be rooting for Weev to get out of jail over a very real hack — and please spare me with special definitions of “hack” to mean “touching the server” so that if he only got at it with brute force that in fact didn’t involve a log-on, oh, this isn’t a hack.
Of course it’s a hack.And no one should be calling for free speech that turns into harassment and stalking via the Internet. I can’t understand why Sierra hasn’t pressed charges against Weev for every single thing he did to her.I’m not liking the turn of events that see the solution to the horrid culture of hackers on the Internet as merely a problem of feminism or how women should be respected, especially at tech conferences loke Tech Crunch and that dongle one.
As the numerous accounts of harassment indicate that Sam Biddle gathered and published at Gawker, this isn’t just about women’s rights. It’s about a narcissistic self-aggrandizing arrogant and nihilistic culture of geeks in general, and concentrated in hackers in particular. And that harms all of us, male and female, and the society at large. And that’s how we should conceive it.In that respect, the judge’s ruling against Google’s cunning hacker logic today in the wireless networks case is very, very welcome.
It means that Google engineers can’t invent excuses for breaking the law and pretend wireless is “radio” and “available to the public” when they war-drive and slurp up data from private citizens.In exactly the same way, Weev can’t pretend that just because he can get ahold of Sierra’s data he gets to bully and harass her and expose this, and that just because he can get at a list of emails by brute-force and manipulation that there’s something “public” or “okay” about this. There isn’t.The key to understanding this is coercion. What all of these acts have in common is coerciveness against the will of the victim. They are wrong; they are illegal.
I think this interesting article is marred by not being critical enough of hacker culture in general, and also by edge-casing with some of the particularly horrid graphic stories. Not everyone is raped by weirdos from the Internet with razor blades; many more get the kind of routine harassment I got today in which some assclown wished a SWAT on me to gun me down so I could really “get it” what the security state is like, since I disagree with his extreme hackers’ take on the NSA.
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