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This Industry is Fucked

blog.jessfraz.com

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Re: This Industry is Fucked

#231

Post by wpietri »

mahyarm wrote: post #172
wpietri wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One, demanding that the victims do extra work to solve the problem is problematic in that it shifts the burden onto people who are already having a hard time. (If you think this can be easily solved, volunteer to deal with the police for someone. Or just pay for someone to act as an advocate.) Two, if you were paying attention to previous victims of online harassment, you'd know that police generally don't give a shi…

So if I was mugged or being robbed, I have no friends around when this is happening, and I am not paying a security service, I shouldn't call 911?

If you think calling 911 will benefit you, by all means do it. There are plenty of people for whom it is either not a benefit or an active danger. For them, I can understand why they don't call.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#232

Post by wpietri »

obstacle1 wrote: post #35
aaa667 wrote: post #9

And people ask why more women don't speak at conferences or at meetup groups or contribute to open source software, or even publish blogs. It's because we are SCARED. We know what the consequences of making our voices heard can be, and it's terrifying, and we question whether it is worth the risk.

I think you're being a bit overbroad in speaking for all women (that's the kind of thinking which leads to sexism in the first place). Frankly the 'consequences' here are receiving a bunch of unsavoury PMs. i.e., there are no real-world, physical, dangerous consequences. So the fear of contributing to a community because of it is unfounded. It's just a side-effect of Internet culture, and it happens to men too.

> It's just a side-effect of Internet culture, and it happens to men too.

This is false-equivalence horseshit. It may also happen to men, but it happens a couple of orders of magnitude less. I've spoken at a number of conferences and never received anything like this. If you talk to prominent men and women in tech about their experiences, they get radically different levels of abuse.

Also, Internet culture is not something that has been going on for thousands of years. It is entirely new. So either a) this should be a pretty easy fix, or b) it's actually part of something bigger than "Internet culture".

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#233

Post by tomjen3 »

LGBT_2000 wrote: post #215

It's offensive how whenever topics of bigotry and hatred in tech come up, the ensuing conversation is always dominated by regular commenters (typically privileged white males) giving their two cents on something they've never experienced and have no way of relating to. Here's a radical idea: if you're actually interested in supporting and being an ally of women, people of color, LGBTQs and other minorities DO sit bac…

You are new here, so I will just say that this isn't tumblr and we do not categorise people based on the color of their skin, nor take kindly to those who do.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#234

Post by tomjen3 »

shockzzz wrote: post #108

The reason why "trolls gonn' troll" isn't an acceptable excuse is that straight white men don't get told that people are jerking off to their conference talks. Just google "Kathy Sierra" and see why.

Nope. As a white man it would be a compliment if somebody wanked of my conference talks.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#235

Post by tomjen3 »

Kapura wrote: post #40
astrocyte wrote: post #27

This is not common and, given her focus area in tech, it just happens to be more pronounced among those individuals. Ever heard of 4chan? All it takes is one post of your info and you'll get a swarm of people descending on you... Linux/open source is full of such individuals. They do it to get a rise out of people and the internet is a nice anonymous vehicle to do it under. Has nothing to do w/ the broader industry o…

"Not common?" Really? This SEEMS pretty common. And while I believe it's true that not every woman in tech gets harassed, it's obvious that a much higher percentage of them get this sort of shit than men. And it only gets worse as they get more visible for the good work that they're doing. You say you're tired of this shit. How do you think these women feel? It's not you writing the tweets and emails, but if you beco…

>And while I believe it's true that not every woman in tech gets harassed, it's obvious that a much higher percentage of them get this sort of shit than men. And it only gets worse as they get more visible for the good work that they're doing.

Well of course. Assume that 1/x of men harass and 2/x (ie twice as high a fraction) of women harass. Since this industry has so many more men than women more women will be harassed than men, even if each individual man is less likely to harass.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#236

Post by Jamie_Dobson_CS »

shykes wrote: post #149

I am a colleague of Jess, and have witnessed her dealing with this ordeal. She is a badass and doesn't need anyone to speak on her behalf. But some aspects of her experience are relevant to all of us and we have to talk about it. 1. If this is happening to you and you haven't spoken to anyone about it - please do. There is a specialized support group at https://www.crashoverridenetwork.net . Even if you feel you can…

I think the question for many will be, 'how to fix it'?

As people who run businesses, we can work on policies and culture. As events organisers, we can spread the word and raise awareness. As writers, we can write about this.

In answer to point 4, in terms of legal, you can always sue people for harassment. That's also a way of bringing attention and raising awareness. That might not be what the victims of trolls want, however, and you have to balance any needs for revenge against other people's needs to get on with their lives.

I know we have a zero tolerance approach to this stuff. But we are not a police force - the web is the perfect for helping people to be anonymous.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#237

Post by vparikh »

I am convinced that this happens because the anonymity that the Internet provides. And so the best way to combat this is to post the incidents on a public site. Blow away the anonymity and these people will retreat like the cowards they are.

I would set up a website where people can post these - sort of like the previous F*cked Company website, but I would have to look into legal issues if any that were relevant.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#238

Post by aklemm »

aklemm wrote: post #128
MollyR wrote: post #28

I'm sorry to hear this. But I want to add a counter statistic. I've only had pleasant experiences from people trying to help me. The only shit I got in the industry was from a business manager trying to push our team into a death march. There are many factors out in there in the world. We need to put things back into context, rather than just saying things like "Our Industry is fucked". It feels like lately its too e…

Focusing on the minority is important, and kind of the point of article. The vocal minority in the tech world seem to be more unreasonably misbehaved than other industries. Imagine a woman in the medical industry or energy sector who gives conference talks and blogs...no way she's going to get this level of harassment.

Would love to hear an explanation of where I'm wrong along with the downvotes.

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#239

Post by dummy7953 »

I'm convinced that there is a highly vocal group (of young men, most likely) that are hell-bent on breaking Internet communities and even corporeal communities with their grotesqueries. And when they're challenged, they howl "but you're censoring my free speech!"

Re: This Industry is Fucked

#240

Post by purp »

vonklaus wrote: post #150
corysama wrote: post #88

There is a small culture of people online who make a hobby of harassment. They don't have an agenda. They aren't representative of anything. They're not distinguished by being part of any particular industry, race, sexuality or economic status. They are simply selfish individuals. They do it because it gives them little endorphin pops to think about how upset their victim must be and because it is a very low risk act…

> There is a small culture of people online who make a hobby of harassment. They don't have an agenda. They aren't representative of anything. They're not distinguished by being part of any particular industry, race, sexuality or economic status. They are simply selfish individuals I wish more people understood this. It is a big problem with no solution. We can keep spamposting these tropes of #gurlgamers and #womeni…

There are no social problems so large that we can't fix them once we develop the will to do so.

> It is a big problem with no solution. [...]

I imagine a lot of the country felt that way about civil rights in the early 1960s. Then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968 ... And while it's nowhere near solved, people don't regard cross-burnings and lynchings as matter-of-fact daily occurrences anymore.

> This is an insanely hard problem to solve, and it might actually not be possible to fix.

I imagine folks in the mid-1960s thought exactly that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation; that folks in the 1860s thought exactly that of reuniting the states after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_war; and that folks in the 1760s thought that of the whole "How can we get the King to listen to us and help us manage our colony in our best interest?" until we did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution

There are no social problems so large that we can't fix them once we develop the will to do so. We don't develop the will until we admit that these problems are tractable.

So let's fix it.

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