I don't read her as saying that the nerds were invalid.
I think what she's saying is that if you were part of this group, the early Internet seemed welcoming and inclusive, but if you weren't, it was the opposite. From within a community it's easy to feel inclusive!
For whatever it's worth, even though I am a white male nerd myself, I never really felt welcome in "hacker spaces" and such. It must be a lot worse for people who are not white or male. And I'll believe her when she says that that was her experience with the early Internet. (Or, well, today's Internet.)
> I think what she's saying is that if you were part of this group, the early Internet seemed welcoming and inclusive, but if you weren't, it was the opposite. From within a community it's easy to feel inclusive!
Arguably, the people who weren't "in the group" at that time were people who weren't interested or didn't have access. Internet was neither global nor cheap nor popular back then.
As for the misogyny angle, I feel either she fixated herself on a problem and is projecting, or this remark was included to signal allegiance with the social justice crowd. As it is now, the comment reeks of antiintellectualism.
> It must be a lot worse for people who are not white or male.
I don't think it was back then, because back then people didn't care much about it, and a lot of communities of post-university Internet were text-only pseudonymous communication anyway. As for what's today, increasingly it's being white or male that makes you out of place in a hacker space.
> a lot of communities of post-university Internet were text-only pseudonymous communication anyway
So is this. Which is enough for you to spread the old, tired, harmful, and incorrect trope that "people who are not in tech are just not interested". A text-only discussion of how women or minorities don't belong because they don't want to belong is unwelcoming in itself.
> As for what's today, increasingly it's being white or male that makes you out of place in a hacker space.
You are twisting my words. For one thing, I don't feel "out of place" among non-white non-male people. People are people, I'm not afraid of them because of the color of their skin or what I guess their genitalia are like. For the other, all the hacker spaces I've seen where I didn't feel welcome had large white male majorities.
Yes. And I don't know what your race or gender is, nor do I care, nor would it make a difference if I knew.
> Which is enough for you to spread the old, tired, harmful, and incorrect trope that "people who are not in tech are just not interested".
At this point in time today, not only it's not a tired trope, it's pretty much an obvious truth. Programming today has zero structural barriers to entry, minimal capital requirements, and unprecedented amount of affirmative action targeted at all kinds of minority groups. If in 2019 you aren't programming, you're either not interested in doing so (a fine choice!), or can't (due to economic or health constraints).
Still, I was talking about the times where the Internet was a peculiar things only particular types of nerds, discriminated against in the physical world, ever found interesting. Getting on-line, or into programming in general, required more effort and money - you had to convince yourself or your parents that a PC and a modem and future phone bills were useful expenses - and didn't yet offered obvious paths to riches. If you were in there, it meant you were interested and had wealth to spare. That means, obviously, that a lot of people were excluded.
But if the point you're making is that any group with barriers to entry will exclude someone, then I don't see the point of making that point.
(You'll also notice that all the talk of the tech being unwelcoming started only after commercial Internet exploded and some of those high-school oppression targets made a shit ton of money and influence. Once tech became seen as the easiest path into money and fame, people started asking "how come the population of tech workers isn't uniformly distributed across all the characteristics you could think of", and people who were underrepresented followed that with "how can we fix it so we too get a piece of the pie?".)
I see some people on-line have a peculiar definition of what it means for a field to be welcoming - not only it has to remove all the barriers to entry, but it also has to bend over backwards to make the demographics uniform. It's true that the tech, until recently, didn't do the latter.
With a massive change like this, there must be some sort of societal shift behind it. You don't have to buy the article's thesis regarding the concrete reason. But there was something going on in society that changed young women's minds.
But "society pressured me into losing interest" is not the same as "I wasn't, our could not have been, interested in the first place". So yes, many women "aren't interested" in the trivial sense of "we had enough discussion threads in HN and elsewhere signaling that they shouldn't be interested, and finally this perception stuck".
> If you were in there, it meant you were interested and had wealth to spare.
If we agree that in many cases that wealth came from parents, there is no reason to assume that young women had less of it than young men. Unless there were factors like parents saying things like "computers are for boys". From the article above: "In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers."
If you were in there, it meant you were interested (check), your parents had wealth to spare (check), and you were very likely a boy.
Anyway, all of this has been rehashed many times before, and we're unlikely to change each other's minds.
> For one thing, I don't feel "out of place" among non-white non-male people
This seems like your own biases are your worst enemy then. So a predictor of your comfort is the non-white, non-maleness of the group? I wonder what this predictor would be called if it was black men that made you feel uncomfortable?
You really feel equally "in place" among a group of Hmong women as you do among a group of Honduran women as you do among a group of Nigerian women, but you can't get settled in a group of Russian women?
Yes, I'm familiar with denying the antecedent. I assumed you weren't just making the "I'm comfortable around non-white, non-male people" as a logical declaration in the vacuum, and not part of any point.
> For whatever it's worth, even though I am a white male nerd myself, I never really felt welcome in "hacker spaces" and such.
I never really felt welcome in my university sci-fi club, and only went a couple of times. Looking back, I realise it's because I was cripplingly shy rather than through any fault of the other people in the club. (In fact some of my good friends now were in the club at the time!)
I think this kind of thing is more common than usually acknowledged, especially in this kind of discussion. It's one thing to feel out of place or unwelcome, it's quite another to lay sole responsibility for your feelings on the people around you.
I agree that shyness is a huge factor. I don't think that I wrote or suggested that I'm laying responsibility for my shyness on others.
Shyness is a thing, and it can be hard to overcome. And harder still if you are shy and you are not a white male in a white male dominated community. If the community wants to be inclusive, it has some responsibility in communicating who is welcome and what is offered to help newcomers overcome their shyness.
