> people who try to join nerd communities and then immediately start complaining about "inappropriate behavior" (eg the dongle thing)
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."
I agree with you—she wasn’t an outsider trying to join the group. She’s a real nerd, culturally. But this is exactly what I (and many nerds) don't care about. I don't care whether Adria Richards is in the in-group or the out-group. I care about her ideas. I care about her code. So far I’ve only seen her ideas, and her ideas include feeling like her life was threatened because of a “dongle” joke. That’s not a scathing review of her as a person—I’m not reviewing her as a person. I’m reviewing her idea. Her idea is just wrong. Everyone has a few wrong ideas—it’s not a big deal.
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.
Talking of "false", you know that you just made up the bit about Adria feeling her life was threatened by the dongle jokes, right? She tweeted that it was " not cool" and against the code of conduct.
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.
Quoting a witty Margaret Atwood line two years after the fact is not the same as saying "my life was threatened by someone". She's clearly describing a physical reaction to anxiety, hair standing up on her neck at the thought of a confrontation, which reminded her of school. If not she could have answered the simple question "You felt fear?" with "Yes, I feared for my life".
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.
hsod quoted what I was referring to, and whether you buy my interpretation or not, what I said was not an "easily disproved lie".
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.
Is the dongle thing even remotely defensible? She got a man fired over a private conversation. One of the rules of civilized behavior is that you don't do that.
What exactly did she do? I recall she complained on Twitter, and exercised her freedom of speech to express her opinion. A number of people shared that opinion and also spoke freely about their opinion.
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?
> 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.
Yes, his name has been carefully kept out of public discussions. This is the patriarchy protecting his reputation while repeating the complainant's name as often and as widely as possible to make sure that anyone who dislikes what she did has a target for criticism and/or abuse while the people who dislike what he did don't.
He didn't ask for his name to be published and she outed him under her real name on her employer's Twitter account. 'The patriarchy' is not conspiring against her to keep her name public, it's just maintaining the status quo.
>What exactly did she do? I recall she complained on Twitter, and exercised her freedom of speech to express her opinion.
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.
How about you don’t tell me what I’m going to say in response to you, and then you don’t argue with yourself?
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.
Exactly. And I'll add that a private conversation is one thing. A conversation had in the middle of a crowd is another. And it's another still when that crowd is at a convention with a code of conduct and the conversation violates it.
I think the article mentions how in the good old days, conventions didn't have (or need) codes of conduct and a politically correct squad on standby to escort people out of the building if they made innocuous jokes that anyone turning on the TV to watch a sitcom gets peppered with (followed by laugh tapes to make sure people understand that it was supposed to be funny).
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.
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.
Apparently the reference to "forking" and "dongles" could be considered sexual, if you squint enough. Never mind that it was a private conversation and Richards wasn't a part of it - she needed to get her outrage quota for the day so she photographed the jokers and tweeted it to tens of thousands of people with her martyrdom narrative appended.
I think the problem with the whole event in the end was that people don't think too highly of other people's privacy anymore - posting someone's picture or even using someone's real name on the internet was unheard of and Not Done ten years ago, nowadays people just do it because IDK, they haven't gotten their required 100 tweets / day yet or something.
In that very article I linked to she points out that it was his employer that fired him, apparently because loudly making rude jokes at a conference while representing them was considered the last straw.
Have you ever complained about any employee at any time for any reason? Does that make you an uncivilized beast?
She got a man fired over a private conversation. One of the rules of civilized behavior is that you don't do that.
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.
She didn't get the man fired, mainstream values got the man fired. In retaliation the hacker community did the same thing and got her fired. Sadly individuals will always get hurt when ideologies clashes.
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...