In short, yes, we are, and it's shitty. Reg, everything you wrote here is pretty spot-on.
Adria Richards' behavior was definitely a tactical misstep. With the benefit of hindsight, she should have reported the inappropriate behavior to the conference staff more discretely. Or, even, turned around and told them to show some respect. (And, if they didn't cut the crap, THEN get them kicked from the conference.)
I don't believe that what she did was inappropriate/unacceptable in any kind of moral sense, and I would gladly hire Adria if I was hiring for that kind of role. If a person is making jokes with sexual innuendoes during a talk, they shouldn't be at that conference, and shouldn't be surprised that there are consequences, no matter how many kids they have. Behavior in public is already public; putting it on the internet may make it more so, but it's not as if they had any expectation of privacy in the first place.
At the root, I'm glad she stuck up for herself somehow, rather than just kept quiet. She did so in a clumsy way, and has been castigated for it far more harshly than is useful.
Furthermore, this is a clear incident of sexism in our community. If I had done the exact same thing, there's no way that /r/mensrights would DDoS Joyent into firing me. This is why women feel unsafe and mistreated in our communities: because they are. If they stick up for themselves, they're going to face an onslaught of trolling, and even the ostensible "good guys" are quick to point out that yes, yes, we don't condone this sort of thing, but come on, She Was Asking For It.
As I said, her reaction was a tactical misstep. At a higher level, there's a strategic point about preventing these sorts of things from happening in the first place. How do we ensure that the next Adria feels empowered enough to tell the boys behind her to cut it out, where they realize their inappropriateness for the environment and apologize and the world moves on with dignity? How do we build communities that are compassionate, without so many pikes looking for heads?
Every time some shitstorm like this happens, we all lose a chunk of our humanity, no matter what side we're on, or who does or doesn't get fired.
I feel like a parent of a 14-year-old child, reading a news story about a 16-year-old dying in some horrible car wreck on prom night, knowing that mine will be that age soon enough.
Node is SO nice right now. As technology communities go, it's astounding how compassionate and friendly we've managed to keep things. Even in the face of some strongly held religious feelings about CoffeeScript or async or promises etc, we still talk to one another, like human beings. Our IRC channel and mailing list has a zero-tolerance policy for rude conduct. Our meetups are small and there are enough regulars to keep up a culture of "We don't do that sort of thing here" with respect to lewd jokes, homophobia, sexism, ableism, etc.
What happens when Node is as big as Python? How do we keep this going?
I don't believe this was a Python problem or an issue of the Python community, it's a general issue plaguing technology. We're all trying to figure our way through it as best we can - and when things like this happen we need to do our best to stay calm and rational and keep everything in proportion. I think no matter who's "side" you were on in this debate, everyone can agree that most reactions were overblown for the actual events that occurred.
So I think as long as the Node community remains aware of the gender issues and goes to lengths to promote a friendly and tolerant environment that's the key. But to put it in perspective, I think that everyone should be doing that no matter your language of choice. :)
> I don't believe this was a Python problem or an issue of the Python community, it's a general issue plaguing technology.
Obviously broader than the scope of this conversation, but let's not forget that /society/ is bad at this. You carve out a subsection of the larger culture, and, surprise! Sexism is still a problem. I find it absurd that anyone would think the larger tech community /wouldn't/ have this problem.
Thus, I'm pretty happy that, fex, the Node community seems to have a decent grip on keeping things under control, at least in the early days. There will be occasional trolls, newcomers, and people that don't "get it" yet, but I think the community leaders are leading responsibly.
True, despite my joking tweet earlier, I don't think that this is at all a Python problem, except insofar as the "python community" is a huge community of people who (by virtue of its size) mostly are strangers to one another.
You're right that it's not about the language of choice. But a community is made of people. I think that the Node community's niceness has little to do with JavaScript, and more to do with the fact that there were folks like you, mikeal, maxogden, nexxy, polotek, ryah, substack, janl, etc, who imprinted the community with your sense of values and a culture of kindness early on.
But keeping that ball rolling, as the community gets bigger, is very challenging, and it does stress me out a bit. It takes such a little match to set the whole thing on fire!
I'm afraid this is a pattern in the history of technology, we as a society, have yet to overcome:
As along as it's experimental women are welcome (or at worst ignored) by the early adopter community. When it's proven to be economically lucrative, new players enter the field, turf war behavior kicks and - consciously or not - nothing seems easier than driving out a good part of potential rivals by resorting to means like sexism.
This happened in early film [1], early computing (ENIAC) [2] and now in seemingly every small programming sub-community on it's own. I'm just tired of waiting for this to end. We loose so much as a whole, by letting a small subset of people with the most reckless of tactics win again and again.
Gotta agree too, I'm not sure I would use the word "easy" though, as it sure is a simple rule to follow - be nice, continue to be nice, zero-tolerance for not nice behaviour - however, simple things are often the hardest to implement - as you gotta be drawing the line somewhere, which as was mentioned, if one thing slips through, a lot more could slip through - this seems to be a big misconception with society in large, lack of enforcement of an ideal, does not mean that the ideal doesn't matter and shouldn't be respected - that to me seems like the vehicle for these small things to slip through, and a lot of similarity of your original post - how can we make people feel empowered to act correctly when misfortune occurs instead of letting it slip by? be it a conference, a meetup, an IRC chat room, or any circumstance.
What I see here is a person who saw possibility to get some social high fives after posting the photo. The female who did the tweet should have spoken to them first, instead of Tweeting.
In the end Even when speaking one should first think and then speak.
There are two really interesting, and frankly devastating, double standards at work here:
(1) We all know Adria Richards's name. We know all about her. Her personal address has been spread. Things she wrote in the past have been used against her. But we don't really know anything about those guys. We know who they work for and what they look like, but there's been no widespread effort to expose them in the same manner that Adria's been exposed.
(2) When that guy lost his job, everyone thought it was a great injustice, and that Adria should make a heartfelt apology to him. But when Adria lost her job this morning, there were no such pronouncements going the other way. No one declared, "That dude really needs to apologize to Adria for making the dick joke that eventually led to her getting let go." That's not an argument that's being made anywhere.
Ask yourself why these things are happening in one direction. In an equal world -- a balanced world -- things should cut both ways. These tactics should be used by people on both "sides". But in this instance, that's decidedly not happening.
(1) Adria was the one using her non-anonymous Twitter account to publicly out these two individuals. So, by her own actions, we know her name.
(2) There is a direct set of causalities leading from Adria's actions to the first firing. It wasn't (IMO) Adria's fault that he was let go, but it was a direct byproduct of the way she dealt with the situation. On the flip side, Adria did not lose her job because that guy made dick jokes. The causality there, while perhaps still arguable, is far more uncertain. There are numerous other ways Adria could have dealt with the situation which would not have resulted in her being fired.
Furthermore, regarding it being a double-standard in general -- Had Adria been a man, I suspect that both your #1 and #2 points could still have been true given the nature of the events. But hypotheticals are tricky, and in either case there would probably be numerous double standards at play. But the divisiveness of how it was handled makes it hard to address the real issues, which is highly unfortunate.
And lastly, to be clear, I could never, ever condone the hurtful, misogynistic, vitriolic backlash against Adria that we saw. I'd like to believe that much of that was from the froth-mouthed fringes of an otherwise reasonable community, but nonetheless I do wish there were a lot more being done to address that part of this debacle. I myself flagged a Facebook comment, but gave up when nothing really came of it and hurtful comments started coming into my own message inbox.
(1) She publicised herself widely, posted the picture on Twitter, wrote a long blog post on her blog, named her employer directly, claimed her employer backed her actions, has all her contact details and photos on her blog and Twitter. She made herself public.
You don't know much about the guys as they didn't make public claims or announcements.
You appear to be saying they should be identified, named and shamed... which is exactly what Adria tried to do, and look where that ended up
(2) The guy in question apologised almost immediately on HN, a very well written, and seemingly honest and heartfelt apology for making a mistake.
The PyCon organisers took the guys and Adria into a room and discussed the matter at the time, and all were said to have apologised and agreed the matter was over.
If "everyone" thought it was an injustice that the guy lost his job, but felt it was fair and reasonable that she did, perhaps this tells you something. Perhaps it tells you that "everyone" thought her actions were wrong (as the instigator of this affair), and the guy did little wrong
The "reason these things are happening in one direction" is that Adria behaved like a jerk. Quite simple really.
Not a woman jerk, not a black jerk, not a Jewish jerk ... just a jerk.
Regarding point (2), you are completely wrong. You are saying that because lots of people harassed Adria, therefore she was a jerk and deserved it. That is trivially disproved by noting that ethics as such exists, and is not simply whatever a group of people does. The reason this is happening is because people like you are shitheads who are doing bad things or enabling other shitheads to do bad things.
I think that when responding to these events, we should keep in mind that we all make mistakes. At this point I feel that Adria made a mistake, sometimes mistakes cause bad things to happen and I hope she moves forward and learns from her actions. Everyone is human and she didn't deserve all the snap judgements leading to hatred.
so the moral of the story, according to raganwald, is that Adria Richards worst mistake is that she trolled somebody candidly instead of anonymously?
indeed Reggie, what can be done about anonymous trolling on the internet? this is an honest question to which nobody knows the answer.
do we all need to admit that we are powerless to stop anonymous dickheads from making death threats on the internet? I admit it. We all would admit it. We are powerless. We don't like to see that. But the world is ugly. Adria Richards did something ugly and got something much much uglier in response. She didn't deserve the death threats, but she did deserve the firing.
I don't think we're powerless, and the first step to you not thinking we're powerless is to stop and ask yourself, what would it take for things like this to be reduced to a few weird cranks and outliers instead of a flood?
I would be very surprised indeed if your response is, "There is nothing we can do to change human behaviour around this."
Personally, I'd like to see some of the smart folks in the community assist the police in identifying the source of the threats and helping to ensure that those miscreants get jail time.
A good first step is to actively reduce the level of misogyny and other ugliness in your circles to the degree possible.
This sort of crap goes on in part because it has tacit support from "normal" folks. We rush to punishment of Adria, but we shrug and say "oh well" about the others, or the initial incident that started it all.
Hmm, I couldn't read your entire essay because your choice of font size and font color and background color makes for very difficult reading, and probably for many people.
