This is a great piece -- Please Do Feed the Trolls -- and a great step in fighting the hegemony of authoritarian geeks on the Internet.
I'm a big believer in fact of fighting back -- I call it pushing back. I push back, as everyone knows. Then people accuse me of being complicit in my own harassment. They say I should keep the silence of mafia-like omerta and never, ever talk about harassment by griefers, hackers, Anonymous, etc.-- that it "glorifies" them and they "feed on attention" and do it more to get glory.
Nonsense. You don't do that offline with terrorists and other criminals -- of course the news reports on their evil deeds. There are always debates about whether coverage "glorifies" them and there are several obsessives in the field who constantly claim that TV coverage is only manufacturing more mass shooters. I tend to think that a) access to guns b) violent video games c) narcotics d) autism spectrum are far more likely to be culprits than copy-cat impulses, but in any event, you will never get the free media to stop reporting on crime.
My beef with "uberfeminist" not surprisingly, however, is how she has converted this all into a "feminist" issue.
It's not, really, because the authoritarianism of male geeks is a threat to everyone, male and female and is a larger problem than can be fixed by just various PC solutions like "sensitivity training".
All you're doing by taking the "feminist" approach to the boorish nerd online is then creating a new set of problems which is the boorishness of speech minders.
There's quite the backlash now going on in the tech world about women in tech being harassed. I get it, truly I do; all you have to do is look at my vandalized Wikipedia entry to see the visible work of male geek trolls trying to silence my critical speech about tech and their bad behaviour by trying to ridicule me and print falsehoods about me.
But I don't see this as merely an issue of feminism. So far, I merely see that feminist sort of response as mirroring the authoritarianism of the geeks who spawned the nastiness in the first place. You get things like this:
o in the "dongle" story, some guys who made a tasteless joke between themselves are fired, and the crusading feminist tech gal who overheard them and made a huge ordeal out of it also gets fired and everyone in that narrow tech media sphere obsesses endlessly, trying to make "rules" to control spontaneous jokes and speech at conferences -- which is anti-science and anti-freedom;
o in the story of the CTO of Business Insider, "the Internet" (actually only that major-league douche Anil Dash and the irritable sectarian Jillian Yorke of EFF) got this guy fired -- truly appalling when his crime consisted also of a few off-colour jokes
o TechCrunch had to contort itself into a pretzel over yet another tasteless presentation by some app builders -- and those fellows got themselves banished from tech-land and VC land probably for life
Throughout all these manufactured ordeals, we've had to endure enormous net-nannying and rule-making that -- again -- is contrary to a free society, which of course means it is contrary to the innovation that tech supposedly needs to thrive on.
Now, I totally get it that when people make a hostile and threatening environment, they drive out OTHERS' free speech and then it isn't a free society.
But that's why I'm for fighting back hard -- and that requires the net-nannies and moderators and troll-suppressers themselves to stop and quit saying it's the fault of those who fight back. Nine times out of ten, when I have seen flamewars on forums or Twitter, it's because people are not allowed to fight it out. They are stopped by oppressive little mods who stack the deck against those they like, their friends, the in-crowd, the PC. With everyone able to press the "report abuse" button on these services, the fight can never be fair because some mod can enter it late in the last round and not realize who is truly to blame and ban the victim not the perpetrator.
The uberfeminist post degenerates into a lot of inside baseball from wars on Twitter that I didn't follow and have more to do with the agendas of feminists or atheists or whatever.
But I can't emphasize enough: the threat of bullies that these feminists are identifying as only misogyny simply has to go further in its analysis.
Otherwise it's like the Cat in the Hat in your house making messes -- you get the Business Insider CTO guy fired, but then humiliated and trounced and threatened by Anil Dash never to see another VC dollar in his life -- and that's just plain wrong. Because then you're left with Anil Dash. Who the hell is Anil Dash? He's a PC douche with an enormous ego and sense of righteousness and a thin skin and neuralgia about "progressive" topics that make him unsufferable. He actually made his fortune as a developer of this very blog platform. Bully for him! But that doesn't entitle him to go around being king of the world on other people.
Why should I have to trade the brogrammer's off-putting talk for Anil's bullying? I shouldn't. The punishment should fit the crime. Tweets are not a crime; they are merely speech. Getting up with an off-colour act in a conference shouldn't lead to job loss but merely an expression of disapproval. When the punishments are made so harsh, you just get more backlash, I suspect.
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