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When Nerds Collide (2014)

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Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#21

Post by angersock »

Terr_ wrote: post #5

> When weird nerds watch the cool kids jockeying for social position on Twitter, we see no difference between these status games and the ones we opted out of in high school. [...] “corporate culture” that’s as loudly promoted and roughly as genuine as the “school spirit” These bits resonated with me more than I had expected. The declaration "life is not like high school" is only partially true. College offers a tempo…

The fact that we even have a collective shared-ideal of "we judge you by your work" is an achievement worth celebrating and continuing, even if we individually fail at it, or even fail at it a lot.

And that's the problem I've got with a bunch of the attacks I'll commonly see that are based on privilege: the entire idea is that "well, no, that cool hack doesn't count somehow, because you're a member of $MALIGNED_GROUP". We've finally found a group of people that will actually base how awesome we are based on our code, and suddenly these newcomers want to butt in and tell us that isn't a valid idea? It's like these folks never read The Conscience of a Hacker.

You know why Sandi Metz is awesome? It's because she writes awesome code.

You know why Alan Turing was awesome? It's because he wrote awesome code.

You know why James Mickens is awesome? It's because he has amazing satire of hard problems in computer science.

The fact that we don't celebrate those people because of their biological traits or social status, and instead do so because of their accomplishments, is a feature, not a bug.

I think that that's kind of the key issue a lot of these folks are running into, and because they tend to come from very communication-privileged backgrounds (e.g., dedicated social-media mouthpieces, very organized mass-media representation, etc.) hackers tend to fare poorly when they misinterpret why they aren't welcomed. They easily get to portray us as creeps and bigots because they get to choose from patterns of representation that (taken out of context) look very much like bigotry and because they get to pick from people whose social skills and identity are not always attuned or even aware of the prevailing social conventions.

No reasonable hacker, I believe, wants there to be fewer people of $MINORITY in developer positions--at the same time, you'll never get that hacker to suggest we censor the existing culture or forcibly inject more $MINORITY into the space. "They should make their bones, same as we did", the hacker will hold. They'll then be decried as $MINORITY_PERSECUTOR.

It's a problem, but only insofar as we're willing to let them continue framing the discussion. Maybe if we can make them understand that we aren't against diversity, but that we are against cultural manipulation, we can get somewhere.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#22

Post by dropit_sphere »

shortoncash wrote: post #17
Yhippa wrote: post #15

The brogrammers and geek feminists won. There's no turning back.

Respectfully disagree. There are other places to seek refuge, even if it has to be done on the down low and within the same industry. Also, great article.

Indeed. The safe space may be intruded upon, but it was never the space that was important. A culture of makers can always make more.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#23

Post by misuba »

But the proof can't be made. If you’re conditioned to feel like an outsider, you’re going to believe the rejection is always lurking around the corner, and the acceptance is never real, never complete. You’ll remain in sullen sureness that outside is where you’ve been placed — or you’ll keep testing, poking and prodding for the thing you could do that’s horrible enough to prove that you were never really welcome.

The word the author is looking for to distinguish "weird nerds" from "nerds" should never have been "weird" - the word is "wounded." And the wound is real, crippling, and unjustly dealt. Time doesn't heal all wounds. We shouldn't be looking to prove something that can't be proven; we should be looking to heal the wound, actually heal it, in all the generations of children to come. Or even, heavens forfend, stop it from being inflicted at all.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#24

Post by pseudoplatypus »

Yhippa wrote: post #15

The brogrammers and geek feminists won. There's no turning back.

... and with that victory, they have given rise to generations of new weird-nerds that no longer feel as much as outsiders.

Ok, I went there for the sake of the quote, but as someone who spent most of high-school maintaining an online forum about nerd topics on a Hardened Gentoo[1] Pentium III[2] server in the floor of his own bedroom; I still find I cannot quite empathize with the fear of "insiders"/"normals" that the OP talks about and which other comments seem to echo. Not saying I can't imagine it, or that it's not real, but it wasn't like that for me. In my experience: video-games were utterly mainstream, MTG/D&D where "a bit weird, but hey, to each their own", computer programming was cool (not a super popular hobby to pursue, but people seemed either neutral or genuinely impressed if you did).

Many of those cherished "hacker values"? They are now mainstream ideals: Net neutrality! Wikileaks! "I prefer texting than talking on the phone"! ;) Everyone I know is now in an online forum or another (Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Reddit). Not saying all of the values have been popularized, but many have. Our pop culture now a days makes more fun of jocks than of nerds. It has more nerd heroes (specially for middle-school/high-school aged kids) than "popular" heroes. Freaking LoTR is one of the biggest movie franchises of all times!

Besides, it's not like the groups have no intersection. Geek feminists often are or were at some point "weird-nerd" girls or "weird-nerd" guys that agreed that the world was, among all of its unfairnesses, biased to take male as the default. So we are not excluding just those "not from our tribe" (whatever that means), we are excluding "those from our tribe happen to be different from what we picture our tribe to look like". Even for those genuinely not part of the culture you might naturally want to associate with? Well, we still need to interact with and do business with them in a civilized manner. That's all any diversity advocacy I have ever read demands: not that you be friends with anybody, but that you be willing to interact respectfully with everybody.

"Brogrammer" is less well defined. But the most gym-going and adventurous friend I have is also among the most nerdy, smartest and occasionally painfully awkward people I know. Also, the most social person in my circle is a gregarious, party going, business savvy, MIT engineering trained woman that in the right crowd can make jokes consisting entirely of function plots.

There are no three cliques against other! There are many ideas, associated with different stereotypes, let's try not to pit armies of stereotypes against each other, and be open to the ideas! If that's not a hacker value, then I don't what is.

[1] Why Hardened Gentoo just to host a small PHP forum? Because it was there...

[2] Gives the age away fairly precisely, doesn't it?

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#25

Post by bootload »

"The idea of anathematising all of a person’s good works because of something else they said or did is just as alien and repellent to us as our reaction is to someone who wishes Hacker News would die because Paul Graham is kind of a dick sometimes."

Ha, love this bit, bit wordy though. If you squint while you read, it sort of reads like a pg essay.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#26

Post by hyperion2010 »

This article is so spot on and covers many of the things that have bothered me for years about people who try to join nerd communities and then immediately start complaining about "inappropriate behavior" (eg the dongle thing). Yes, there are cases where there is real inappropriate behavior surrounding positions of power in corporate or workplace settings, but in the community at large and in the communal and public spaces that we now interact no one individual should ever be allowed to determine what is appropriate (much less attack people for their supposed transgressions). We all left the world of "appropriate" because we found it a) useless and b) oppressive. The fact that our conversations are now public means that, if someone goes looking for something to be offended by they are going to find it, and then they play the primate power game and we're back to Cardinal Richelieu: "Give me 6 lines written in the hand of the most honest man and I will see him hanged."

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.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#27

Post by A_COMPUTER »

One of the biggest frustrations to me, and I do believe this is a new thing, is people with evangelistic universalist worldviews joining these groups and expecting everybody to conform to it. I feel like "nerd culture" was partially defined by being made up of the parts left out of mainstream, inherent heterogeneity, rather than a positive set of things, so arguing you're right and I'm wrong and that's that, is highly alien. There is a lot of talk about how as nerd interests have become mainstream, the disdain many nerds have for this is a sign of their elitism or desire to just be different. But I think also it is because before it was mainstream, you only got viciously judged by the outgroup, so you could at least go "fuck them, they didn't like me anyway" and keep doing your own thing. Now you have people who consider themselves part of that ingroup telling you you're doing it wrong and bringing all their social jostling into the group with them trying to make it act the way they want. I don't think people are exaggerating when they feel like their groups are being "taken over."

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#28

Post by djcapelis »

mistermann wrote: post #19
fr0styMatt2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does calling people 'brogrammers' in a derogatory sense make us any different than the supposed 'cool kids' that rejected us? Shouldn't we strive to be better than that? (not saying that you are using the term 'brogrammer' like that, just posing a more general question).

Brogrammer is perhaps used for efficiency, so you don't have to write a 10 page screed as we just read (which was excellent by the way). I don't think there's any way to say it in a non-derogatory way if the central message is derogatory. The article seemed to be saying, we have a culture, and if you people infiltrate it, there is a good chance you will ruin it. I happen to agree with him.

> I happen to agree with him.

Her, for whatever it's worth.

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#29

Post by RKoutnik »

I was shocked, visibly, when I found out that no one at the first startup I worked at played tabletop RPGs. I was shocked again when they looked down on me because I did. In a city that prides itself on "weirdos", I was the wrong kind of weird.

In college I poured over Steven Levy's Hackers, hoping one day I would be able to meet the tech elite. I jumped at the first chance I got to work out here, hoping I'd finally find "my people" (substitute whatever pithy phrase you like). Hasn't worked out so far.

I'm in SF now and have been for a while. Where are you guys? All the meetups I've been to were fun (hard to turn down free pizza) but it seemed like everyone was more interested in collecting business cards than talking hacker-speak. Maybe I'm going to the wrong ones?

Re: When Nerds Collide (2014)

#30

Post by fr0styMatt2 »

pseudoplatypus wrote: post #24
Yhippa wrote: post #15

The brogrammers and geek feminists won. There's no turning back.

... and with that victory, they have given rise to generations of new weird-nerds that no longer feel as much as outsiders. Ok, I went there for the sake of the quote, but as someone who spent most of high-school maintaining an online forum about nerd topics on a Hardened Gentoo[1] Pentium III[2] server in the floor of his own bedroom; I still find I cannot quite empathize with the fear of "insiders"/"normals" that t…

This is exactly what I couldn't figure out how to say! Thank you.
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