
I'm Telling: Employer-Tattling and the Decline of Agency - canweriotnow
http://decomplecting.org/blog/2014/06/09/im-telling/
======
opendais
I think the core problem here is we have someone (Shanley) who is allowed to
attack people on the basis of their gender, class, profession, etc. [e.g.
[https://twitter.com/ryan/status/474791621100199936](https://twitter.com/ryan/status/474791621100199936)
]

An example relevant to HN is:

[https://twitter.com/shanley/status/474601030986903552](https://twitter.com/shanley/status/474601030986903552)

"HN is fucking obsessed with me lol. what is wrong with you little boys? mad
cuz i'm cute and would NEVER talk to you or know you exist?"

Yet, this person is still able to get an employer to fire one of their
employees for engaging in the same behavior she does.

Is it just me that feels people who attack people on the basis of their gender
shouldn't be able to get people fired for doing the same thing?

Edit: I was trying to say the consequences should be equal. I probably should
have said the reverse in my question at the end there since it seemed to lead
to confusion. [e.g. Both should be fired since consequences should be equal
for equally bad behavior]

~~~
scarmig
For that particular tweet: this is what we call trolling. Shanley's MVC (which
is a very interesting site that everyone should read, its proprietor
notwithstanding) has a "feature" where they highlight the worst and most
clueless comment on HN of the month. This entire imbroglio has doubtlessly
netted MVC a very rich upcoming "worst of HN" piece. Joy.

Substantively: why should the previous behavior of the reporter matter one
bit? If someone does something bad, whether a person complaining about it is
"good" or "bad" is sort of besides the point, and digging into how evil that
person is amounts to an all-too-transparent attempt at deflection. Shanley,
for better or for worse, takes advantage of that to generate news. That means
that even if you get provoked, external observers won't and shouldn't care
enough to get caught up in whether Shanley's a bad person or not. (Your
takeaway, by the way, should be "do not engage" because she's communicating
with an audience that's not-you when she engages with you. Also: all comments
on this story amount to engagement, hence the heavy flagging.)

My sympathy for the fired guy is very limited. He clearly fucked up, and
immediately knew it and took it down (before she even posted her screenshot,
it seems), either because a friend told him he was out of line or he realized
it himself. Which does elicit a bit of sympathy from me, and if I were in her
shoes, I'd have let it slide--there's more than enough misogyny in tech than
to need to scrape the bottom of the barrel here. Despite that, he did fuck up.
Freedom of speech is not an issue: if he had posted a long stream of tweets
calling for Jews to be slaughtered, no one would be upset that his company let
him go. She has just as much freedom-to-report-speech as he has freedom-to-
insult-speech, and freedom of association is an equally important right.

~~~
rrss1122
I think it's clear he realized soon after he posted that he did something
wrong, either because a friend told him he was out of line or he realized it
himself. Getting him fired doesn't help him realize more that he did something
wrong.

I think the main point is the precedent that Jon Snoeder tweeted about. This
isn't to just punish the fired guy. It's to set an example to everyone else
about what would happen if you are out of line.

~~~
calibraxis
We saw his retweets and insults, for example retweeting someone calling her
"animal". No, he didn't accidentally slip up with a single tweet.

~~~
Torgo
That's straight-up whining. She doesn't deserve to be called a "c __t " but
insults because of her behavior are perfectly valid.

------
ad_hominem
I suggest you be careful with your jokes or they'll put you on their list:
[http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/weve-all-got-a-
list](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/weve-all-got-a-list)

The people you've mentioned curate their own echo chamber. If you read their
Twitter stream you can see that they block anybody who even tries to engage
them from an ignorant-but-skeptical point of view. Then they crow to their
followers about the ignorant "bros" they block to gain plaudits. It's a toxic
atmosphere that is best avoided entirely.

------
tedks
This isn't the decline of agency, it's feminism and anti-racism _creating_
agency for oppressed people.

Traditionally, if a woman or ethnic minority is being harassed in their
workplace, they are unable to speak out against it for fear of being fired by
their bosses. In this sense, capitalist hierarchies (as the author identifies)
are used to enforce gender and race hierarchies.

Now that it's become unacceptable to be outwardly racist or sexist, capitalist
hierarchies are occasionally used to stop oppressive behavior. This is still
rare, and not at all at the level it should be, but this is a positive trend.
Just as we as a society decided that public segregation was not acceptable in
the 1960s, we as a society are currently in the process of deciding that
private bigotry is not acceptable.

What the author is really calling for any conflict between privileged and
oppressed people to be limited to exactly those people -- which of course
means the privileged person wins.

The author misses exactly the point of liberatory social struggle: to _reduce_
the agency of privileged people, in favor of _expanding_ the agency of
oppressed people.

(As an aside, to appeal to class when discussing software engineers is
laughable. I'll take the author seriously on this when he starts organizing a
union for developers in his workplace.)

~~~
gress
Agency is not a zero sum game. We don't have to reduce the agency of
'privileged' people. We just have to resist oppressive behavior.

~~~
tedks
You're right that agency is not zero sum, but in this case we can see
privilege as having enhanced agency in some areas (ability to call women names
on social media with impunity, ability to command higher salaries, ability to
get into better schools, etc.) and oppression as not having agency in those
areas.

Resisting oppressive behavior is limiting the agency of privileged people to
oppress others.

You can construct some notion of agency that doesn't say these words, but at
the end of the day you're reducing the amount of available actions and that is
reducing agency. Sometimes it is good to reduce agency.

~~~
gress
You are conflating agency and privilege. In the case of resisting oppression,
the available actions are unchanged, but the consequences are different.

~~~
tedks
This is a weak sort of agency. Indeed I'm able to resist capitalist oppression
by not working, but if the consequences are that I starve to death than I
hardly see that as a reasonable outcome.

I think this is an uninteresting definitional question at this point, though.
If I'm misusing agency than so is the author of this piece; the important
thing is that we be able to communicate, which I think is possible. If you
want to further nitpick specific words to garner karma, do it with someone
else.

~~~
gress
There are lots of other things you can do to resist capitalist oppression -
e.g. Unionize, or create other kinds of social support. A strawman isn't very
useful.

I'm sorry you've chosen to be accusatory instead of reasonable.

------
fleitz
Has this guy not been around on the internet long?

Everyone knows not to feed the trolls. They have no real power so they will
try to get you fired, order pizza to your house, etc.

Best to ignore them and do something productive.

------
joesmo
Livestream firing an employee for off-work conduct is just as morally wrong as
Shanley was for tattling. Calling someone a cunt is certainly not nice, but
it's miles away from firing someone or getting someone fired. _It 's not even
in the same ballpark._

That said, he should've known better and used an anonymous account if he
really wanted to make comments that might be dangerous to his well-being.

------
mathattack
If you follow the stream, not only does the tattler go after the person and
get him fired, she stays at it trying to make him unemployable. Strange.

------
koberstein
What I can never comprehend is how so many people have the time to argue with
each other on twitter and such.

~~~
jacalata
What people on twitter can never comprehend is how so many people have the
time to argue with each other on HN and such.

------
benmmurphy
I'm surprised you can get fired in the UK for this. Though, livestream seems
to be a US company so maybe he was a contractor.

~~~
opendais
The person that was let go has a profile that says Contractor:
[https://twitter.com/zivcjs](https://twitter.com/zivcjs)

So I'd assume contractor.

------
lsaferite
Honest question, how does a comment like this get you fired? I mean, beyond
the person calling for your head.

Since when do personal statements translate into firing offenses at your place
of work?

I'm from the "I May Not Agree With What You Say, But I’ll Fight For Your Right
to Say It" camp and things like this honestly confuse me.

To clarify, I think what he said was morally wrong.

~~~
calibraxis
The article omits a lot which might cause people to disagree with it.

For instance, @zivcjs aggressively harassed her, retweeting attackers calling
her "animal" and I believe "psychob---h". He also deleted many of his tweets.

Furthermore, such harassment campaigns generally cause an increase in the
violent threats they already normally receive. It contributes to an
environment where women are terrorized and chased out of the industry. And
imagine a woman having to work with this harasser.

As for economic oppression, he crows about "Non-stop phone calls" with so many
job offers that he's "struggling to remember who sent what."
([https://twitter.com/zivcjs](https://twitter.com/zivcjs))

~~~
lsaferite
But that still leave my original question.

Assuming his job is not PR (I don't know or care to know him), how would his
behaviour during non-company time translate into being fired?

Mind you, it sounds like he's a real pleasant person that I'd totally get
along with. /s

