
Alienating Atmosphere (2014) - shervinafshar
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/AlienatingAtmosphere.html
======
leereeves
The trouble with discussing this issue is that so many people have a "with us
or against us" attitude, and will attack (verbally, professionally, socially,
and sometimes violently) anyone who questions any aspect of their agenda.

~~~
a3n
"Agenda" itself has become a negative word in the US, and so that comment
_can_ be read as an attack itself. (I upvoted you in good faith.)

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malandrew
Alienating atmospheres impact people across more vectors than just those that
are protected classes:

[https://status451.com/2017/08/04/another-point-of-
view/](https://status451.com/2017/08/04/another-point-of-view/)

~~~
leereeves
I remember a time when classism in tech was a hot topic, but it's rarely
discussed anymore.

What happened?

~~~
stillkicking
Over the last decade, and especially in the last 5 years, the world view
amongst equality activism has shifted very strongly towards intersectional
identity politics and its associated groupwise oppressor/victim dynamic as the
root of all evil. Classism fell to the side in favor of sexism, racism,
homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, and so on.

Some attribute the downfall of Occupy Wall Street to this, where a very simple
message about financial justice was replaced with a focus on the slights of
its middle-to-upper class revolutionaries. This is where privilege rhetoric
and the progressive stack (i.e. ranking oppression) came into full vogue.

A similar thing happened with tech. The decentralized libertarian and
egalitarian culture up to the early 2000s made way for a corporatized one.
Censorship and moral control came into it, first by way of copyright
enforcement, then by way of a rhetoric of gentrification, civility and anti-
harassment. This too was pushed as benefiting marginalized identities, despite
the identity blind nature of the culture it was replacing. This was already
going on in the mid 2000s, crossing a few geek subcultures, and started to
become mainstream around 2012. In the subsequent years, the associated "women
in tech" and racial oppression narrative skyrocketed and became a regular
fixture in media.

It's not outlandish to notice both of these cases played out as a divide-and-
conquer scenario that benefited the societal elite by defusing potential
threats to their power. In the case of Occupy it was the financial sector and
the god of money, and in the case of internet culture it was governments and
the ability to control from the top down. The technology that was supposed to
liberate us is now used for Orwellian purposes, controlled by an oligarchy of
giants.

Directly contributing to both was the long and slow push in academia to shift
from enlightenment values to postmodern values, where subjectivity and social
constructionism reign supreme. We can also see the clear role of modern media
culture, where entertaining is preferable to informing, and that of social
media in particular, where one's personal brand and personal views reign
supreme.

If you put it all together, it is anyone's guess how much of this was a purely
natural evolution, and how much of it was accelerated to satisfy particular
agendas. Probably an interplay between both. Egregores protect themselves and
rally their self-interested members to fight for them. The fact that all of
this came to a well-timed crescendo in the lead up to an American presidential
election however speaks volumes IMO.

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devmunchies
> _it 's a constant indication that "you're not welcome here"_

Maybe the software industry can be more inviting or attractive to different
types of people, but I don't think there is an agenda by computer folk to
exclude others or make people feel un-welcomed. I think the "geek" culture is
simply unattractive to most girls (yes, I'm assuming girls are less geeky).
The question is "how to make it more attractive", not "how to make it less
alienating".

Edit: tell me why you disagree.

~~~
munin
I disagree because I know a lot of geeky women who don't like geek culture
because it is hostile to women. In my life, I haven't noticed a difference in
gender when it comes to someone being a "geek" or not. I'm not sure how to
gather broader evidence really, though F/M ratios in hard sciences requiring
quite a lot of "geek" are much higher than in computer science.

~~~
devmunchies
If you haven't noticed a difference in m/f ratio of geeks, then how can you
say geek culture us hostile to women? Assuming you think all male geeks are
hostile to women, wouldn't it just be half of the culture that is hostile?

idk, something about "half of geeks culture is women" and "geek culture is
hostile to women" doesn't seem like a good argument to me.

~~~
munin
The women geeks I know keep separate from geek culture, and I only know them
due to luck or circumstance. So they are women geeks, but not part of geek
culture, if that makes sense.

~~~
stagbeetle
Then are they really geeks or just have geek tendencies?

Geekdom is a blood pact that one carries with them wherever they go. There's a
lot of "us vs. them" mentality, especially in more introverted circles that
feel as though normal society is not for them and they will never fit in.

This hostility is aimed at anyone who, to use their vernacular, is a normie.
Someone that, as they see it, has had the luck to be able to fit in to the
molds society demanded of them, is not "one of them." This includes men,
specifically the "high-status," attractive, promiscuous, and athletic men. As
well as normal women, who by the real life random number generator we call
chance, are a much greater portion of their gender than men. This is one
possible reason it may seem like there is large hostility targeted
specifically at women.

Women, using only the frequent amount of stories I've heard, are known for
their affinity to want to insert themselves into groups they don't belong in
and feel like a great injustice has been done upon them by this. There are
certain groups of people that your average woman will never be able to fit in,
no matter how much activism she engages in. To tie these two paragraphs
together, the largest problems I've seen arise of clashes between geeks and
normies, are people who want to "be part" of the group in name, but don't want
to be part of the group in lifestyle and essence.

These groups are very welcoming to anyone who shows similarity to their
members, but like most groups of people, will not tolerate those who wish to
disrupt their bubble and way of being. It's like joining a smoker's support
group, but coming in and chain smoking in everyone's faces. Then declaring
that the hostility you receive is unwarranted. That it is them who should
change their ways, not the malefactor.

~~~
anon32763
Note that it is a particularly cruel fate to be unattractive, low status,
while being intelligent enough to not only fully comprehend what they are
missing but also to know the implacable foes of probability and physics that
put them there. Geeks have the rawest quadrant of the distribution.

We finally carved out an enclave around the 80s where we could have a stable
equilibrium with the rest of society, trading our specialized skills for goods
at an arms length. But the normies greed and avrice knows no bounds. They
burst into our very halls to throw us back out into the cold night. They
demand we tithe all the fruits of our labours in recognition of the "natural
order". They would make us beggars in our own kingdom.

Geeks are not aggressors in any us vs them sorting match. The hostility flows
endlessly in one direction -- downhill -- from the haves to all the have-nots.

Meet us at the river fork every fall to trade, but do not harvest our gardens,
hunt our animals, or cut down our homes for your firewood. Stay in your domain
normie and we will stay in ours.

------
eecc
Just google for "lego girls 70s" images and there is the answer, laying bare
in front of you

------
zachrose
But what about Betty Joe with the Unix book in Wayne's World 2?

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imminentviolet
So what? I feel an "alienating atmosphere" at snooty high end boutique art
galleries where people sip Champagne and talk about the nebulous genius it
took for someone to throw feces at a picture of the Madonna, or whatever. They
are attracted to each other and to the subject they are interested in.
Sometimes you just don't belong, for whatever reason, even if you're totally
drawn to the subject. That's life. Grown ups are supposed to learn to cope
with it, not whine like children.

~~~
II2II
No. Grown ups are supposed to solve their problems. Solving the problems of
sexual harassment and discrimination is exactly what the industry is trying to
do.

If you disagree with the approach, fine. Please suggest a better way to handle
the situation. If telling women to cope with it is your sole suggestion, then
don't expect very many people to agree with you since women with a passion for
engineering should not be driven out simply on the merit of how they were
born.

~~~
imminentviolet
The kind of soft discrimination that you're complaining about is a fact of
life. Any industry who's life blood consists of relatively immature young men
is going to have this kind of problem. What people like you are proposing is
complete upheaval of basic behavioral tendencies to accommodate a few special
cases. What exactly do you even want? Are you sure you know? If you want a
social work atmosphere full personable people get into sales, tech is not the
industry for you. That goes for men, women and everything in between.

