Internet abuse culture is a tech industry problem

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/35416.html

by mjg59 • 11 years ago

6 1 11 years ago

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

api• 11 years ago

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

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.

Internet abuse culture is a tech industry problem

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