

Internet abuse culture is a tech industry problem - mjg59
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/35416.html

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api
I'm going to agree completely with this, and with this:

[https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/this-industry-is-
fucked/](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/this-industry-is-fucked/)

... and I'm going to be un-PC and explain why I think this is such a problem.
My explanation is un-PC because I am going to talk about reality here and
reality isn't PC.

So here you go:

The computing industry contains a large number of introverted, socially
alienated males -- or at least males who _were_ this way at some point earlier
in their lives. Many were abused -- and _it is abuse_ \-- in school by
bullies. Needless to say, girls wouldn't talk to them and probably still
don't. It's not the girls' fault. If they did talk to them, they'd be abused
too. Jr. High and High School are torture rooms where violating clique
boundaries and social castes results in both physical and emotional abuse.

Two problems emerge from that.

One is the very predictable subconscious chip on the shoulder that these folks
have. Now that they're no longer socially alienated abuse victims but
upwardly-mobile professionals, there's a powerful temptation to reverse the
abuse and heap it out on the sorts of people they felt rejected, slighted, and
insulted by when they were young. This unfortunately includes women -- pretty
much _all_ women. It's a deep subconscious imprint and as anyone who's ever
done any work trying to change themselves knows it is _hard_ to shed deep
imprints.

The second problem is related but a bit different. It's tough to develop your
social skills once you fall into the trap of alienation. It's a chicken or egg
problem: you need human contact to develop your social abilities and empathy,
but when you're alienated people systematically deny it to you. Once a pariah,
you become more of a pariah. (Writ very large this is one of the mechanisms
behind racism, classism, and sexism itself.)

Many socially alienated individuals -- again predominantly males in this
particular case -- independently discover a simple and elegant solution to
that problem: _be an asshole_.

Being an asshole is easy once you get up the gumption to do it. This loss of
fear sort of happens naturally-- you reach a certain age and realize nobody is
going to stop you. Being an asshole has a surprising result: people start
superficially deferring to you. It also allows you to kind of batter your way
into something superficially resembling a social life, or at least to ascend
to higher social ranks in things that can serve as proxies for a social life
such as business or academia.

Being an asshole is so easy that it often takes the place of developing real
social skills. Why bother challenging your deep negative imprints and
developing yourself as a human being? Just turn up the volume and the problem
seems to kind of go away... that is until you try to do something like form a
deep long term relationship or actually build a team of people who can work
together for the long haul.

Those two factors -- one circumstantial and one path-dependent -- are I think
responsible for most of the misogyny and other general assholery that infests
our industry.

I also think these two factors explain the lack of social conscience shown by
our industry. After all, "normal people" are the enemy. They beat the shit out
of you as children. (I was, for example, held down and urinated on once for
being a "dork.") So why should you care if your company is systematically
destroying their income and replacing it with nothing? Fuck them. Disrupt
away. Of course none of that is ever spoken or even explicitly thought. It's
well in the realm of subconscious emotional motivation. Hurt people hurt.

P.S. my children won't attend public school unless it's a last resort for
financial reasons.

