Tim's journal

Since writing "It's All Connected" almost a month ago, I haven't had much to say about GamerGate; it seems like everything's been said and the people who should be listening are refusing to.

Tonight, though, I do want to add something. On Twitter, whump linked to this pro-GamerGate article by Georgina Young. The article is entirely unremarkable except for one thing: it appears on Mozilla's Open Standard blog. Unlike Planet Mozilla, Open Standard's messaging is that it is a blog curated by Mozilla, and Mozilla is responsible for any editorial choices.

By choosing to present the issue of whether women should be purged from the video game industry as if it has two sides, Mozilla is legitimizing the abuse of women and actively participating in the creation of a hostile environment for women in software.

Moreover, as solarbirdy pointed out, Open Standard almost gave Eron Gjoni -- the abusive stalker who launched the GamerGate harassment campaign back in August as revenge against his ex Zoe Quinn -- a platform to continue perpetrating his abuse. Gjoni has admitted that he started GamerGate in order to defame and abuse Quinn.

This might be more surprising to me if not for what happened back in September when I filed a Bugzilla bug report about GamerGaters' use of Mozilla's Etherpad installation -- basically, a public pastebin -- to coordinate their attacks. Mozilla runs an open, unauthenticated Etherpad server at etherpad.mozilla.org (e.m.o.) -- the e.m.o. home page contains the following disclaimer: "Mozilla systems and collaborative tools are intended for use by the Mozilla community for Mozilla related work and subject to web site terms and conditions at Legal Notices." I expected that -- since coordinating Gamergate was obviously not Mozilla-related, and the people using it for that were not members of the Mozilla community -- the content would be swiftly deleted., in the same way that Github swiftly deleted a repository used by Gamergaters. [Edit: see comments.]

The contents of Bugzilla issue 1063892 are private, visible only to me (as the bug reporter) and Mozilla staff. But here's the gist of it: several Mozilla staff concurred that it was not an option to remove the content from their Etherpad server without consulting their legal team. This is puzzling, since most other companies I'm familiar with would not need to consult their legal teams to remove consent that constituted an abuse of company resources. When a member of the Mozilla legal team asked, "does the existence of these mopads have any negative consequences to the company?", multiple Mozilla employees answered this question "no" -- that is, they don't believe that it hurts Mozilla's reputation to provide free Web hosting for a harassment campaign. Jake Maul, a member of the Mozilla ops team who the bug was assigned to, elaborated:

If Mozilla removes this content (without any legal requirement to do so), without a policing system in place to remove other non-Mozilla content, we open ourselves up to the claim of being biased. This is not a Mozilla issue. By removing content (without law or policy protecting us), we potentially make it one.

If someone can point to specific lines of pads that infringe specific parts of the Mozilla CoC (or other suitable document), then IMO that drastically lowers the bar to removing these pads because we can easily point to why the pad was removed. For instance, we could remove the pad and then create a new one with the same name containing a link to the relevant document to explain why it was removed.

I'd personally be much more at ease about removing content if someone can show me where in the pads the harassment is happening. They're large, and much of what I've skimmed seems like links to other places and (without following every link) I'm not sure the stuff hosted on our servers constitutes harassment. If it doesn't, then what reason do we have to remove it?

In case it seems like I'm supporting harassment, let me be clear: all I want is a good solid leg to stand on before we employ the banhammer. Mozilla has had plenty of bad PR this year, and I don't want to add to it with a claim about censorship, "hating gamers", or "supporting misguided Social Justice Warriors". If we get our ducks in a row first, we can (hopefully) avoid any negative fallout.

Jake seemed to be under the misapprehension that Mozilla -- a private company -- requires some sort of law that specifically justifies them using their property in the way that they choose. In fact, Mozilla is free to delete any content from their servers, for any reason that they choose, just like every other private company (an exception is common carriers like your ISP or the phone company; Mozilla is not a common carrier).

In response to Jake's comment, I wrote:

I'm afraid I don't see how Mozilla will be hurt by criticism from people who self-identify as opponents to social justice.

No one addressed this comment. In any case, the legal team's final response was:

Jake: please take down only the specific etherpads that were reported in this bug. The basis for removal is that these reported pads: (1) do not relate to the Mozilla community and (2) contain objectionable content. The combination of both us why we're requesting a takedown.

Moving forward, we're recommending against active searching of public pads using keywords. Instead, our position is that we'll consider any specific reported pads and decide on a case by case basis if there is a basis for removal. We feel this is the best way to retain and encourage the positive uses of public pads that can be used by Mozillians and non-Mozillians (e.g. teachers, other nonprofits, community groups, etc.). This approach also means that, when pads are being used for questionable purposes and this is reported to us, we'll examine and remove public pads based on the specific situation. There are many interpretations and perspectives of what is objectionable content. The legal team assists in making this call.

Please file a legal bug if there are more reports of objectionable mopads. You can file here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Legal

In this gamer situation, if more reports come in regarding objectionable pads, we can evaluate and discuss if further action is needed and what that might look like.

It's unclear to me how removing harassing content interferes with use of Mozilla resources by "teachers, other nonprofits, community groups, etc." I am also genuinely unsure what kind of backlash Maul and several other Mozilla staff members feared from people who don't like "social justice warriors", but in any case, it seems to me like if Mozilla is going to get out of the business of standing up for social justice on the Web, they should probably let their donors and volunteers know that.

You could, of course, argue that all of this is evidence of Mozilla's collective cowardice in the face of a genuine threat to the open Web, but I would argue that organizational cowardice in the face of coordinated bullying is indistinguishable from support for those bullies. Unlike the many women who Gamergate attacked -- with the help of free Web hosting from Mozilla, at least temporarily -- Mozilla is a wealthy organization with the resources to resist harassment and attacks. Instead, Mozilla has chosen to walk a path paved with false equivalences and bogus free speech concerns -- a path that ultimately leads to a Web where only people with the resources and social standing to resist or evade harassment and doxxing can make their voices heard.

If you support Mozilla but can't feel safe supporting an organization that presents attacks on women as just another side in a debate, I encourage you to let them know.

Edit: Since at least one person has complained that the quotes are out of context, here's the entire PDF of the Bugzilla thread, with innocent parties' names redacted.

This is a parody of an article by Clay Shirky.

---

A Rant About Men

By Claudia Worky

So I get email from a good former student, applying for a job and asking for a recommendation. "Sure", I say, "Tell me what you think I should say." I then get a draft letter back in which the student has described their work and fitness in terms so self-effacing it would make a Jewish comedian suggest you take up affirmations.

So I write my letter, looking over the student's self-assessment and dialing it up so that it sounds like it's coming from an enthusiastic mentor and not a depressed 14-year-old, and send it off. And then, as I get over my annoyance, I realize that, by understating their abilities, the student has probably gotten a letter out of me that's appropriate to their level of talent without sounding unrealistic.

Now, can you guess the gender of the student involved?

Of course you can. My home, the Solitary Silence Department at Buffalo Lake State, is fairly gender-balanced, and I've taught about as many men as women over the last decade. In theory, the gender of my former student should be a coin-toss. In practice, I might as well have given her the pseudonym Titsy McBoobity for all the mystery there was. And I've grown increasingly worried that most of the men in the department, past or present, simply couldn't write a letter like that.

This worry isn't about psychology; I'm not concerned that men don't engage in enough abnegation of themselves or don't build enough self-doubt. I'm worried about something much simpler: not enough men have what it takes to behave like humble self-mortifying pushovers.

Remember Nora Helmer, the housewife immortalized in "A Doll's House" who sacrifices to save her husband's life? She hides the truth to protect his pride and acts like a ditzy child to keep him from realizing that she earned money to save his life. She didn't miss the fact that she was getting the short end of the deal and suffering just to protect some man. She just didn't care. (Until the end, anyway; everyone has their limits.)

It's not that men will be better off being doormats; a lot of doormats aren't better off being doormats either. It's just that until men have role models who are willing to contemplate suicide just to protect someone else's ego, they'll miss out on channeling smaller amounts of self-sacrificing charity to help who they want to help, and if they can't do that, they'll help people less than they want to help them.

There is no upper limit to the amount of suffering women are willing to undergo in order to protect someone they care about, and if there is an upper limit for men, they will do less good. They will also hurt themselves less, but I don't think we get the rewards without the risks.

---

When I was 19 and three days into my first year in college, I went to see Billie Lefraw, the head of music theory (my chosen profession, in those days) to ask if I could enroll in a composition class. She asked me two questions. The first was "How's your intonation?" Not so good, I replied. (I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.) "OK, how's your sight-reading?" I realized this was it. My sight-reading was just okay; I could have said it was good, but I just couldn't countenance getting into a class on false pretenses. Besides, out in the hall I had happened to see three students waiting to talk to Billie about getting off the waiting list who I knew were much better than me.

"My sight-reading's crappy," I said.

That's the kind of behavior I mean. I sat in the office of someone I admired and feared, someone who was the gatekeeper for something I wanted, and I told her something that made me look terrible. We talked some more and then she said, "You'd better take a different class." And I ran to the local textbook store and bought some math books, since I had to find a new major.

That got me out of the fire. I got the satisfaction of knowing that I made way for students with more competence and passion than I had, I never considered music as a career again, and four years later, I got a job after I graduated. I can't say that my escape from a life of poverty working in a profession I was always mediocre at was due to my behavior in Billie's office, but I can say it was because I was willing to do that kind of thing. The difference between me and Nora Helmer isn't that she's a martyr and I'm not; the difference is that I only assessed myself with brutal honesty when there was no real risk to my health or welfare, and I knew when to stop. That's not a different type of behavior, it's just a different amount.

And it looks to me like men in general, and the men whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren't just bad at behaving like humble self-effacing pushovers. They are bad at behaving like selfless altruists, meek softies, or modest mice, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in the world's best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can't say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Now this is asking men to behave more like women, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We're in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage women to be louder talkers and more sexually aggressive partners, to spend less time obsessing over their own feelings and worrying about others' feelings. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching men strategies for being less of a violent asshole, including directly not raping women. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching men self-effacement as self-control.

---

Some of the reason these strategies are useful is because we live in a world where men don't do their fair share of emotional labor. However, even in an ideal future, self-effacement will be a skill that produces disproportionate social rewards, and if skill at self-effacement remains disproportionally female, the rewards of a place in the world appropriate to one's talents and inclinations will also remain disproportionally female. This isn't because of oppression, it's because of freedom.

But rather than writing some douchebaggy drivel that tortures free-market economics into supporting my questionable argument (see what I did there?), I'll get straight to the point. Institutions that offer opportunities operate in an environment where accurate information is hard to come by. One of their main sources of judgment is asking the candidate directly: Tell us why we should admit you. Tell us why we should hire you. Tell us why we should give you a grant. Tell us why we should promote you.

In these circumstances, people who wave their hands in the air get called on, and people who wave their hands in the air while yelling loudly get called on more. Some of this is because quiet people are easier to ignore, but some of it is because keeping your mouth shut is a signal that underneath your veneer of modesty, you have self-respect and aren't willing to give it up just to work at some dumb-ass job.

That in turn correlates with many of the skills that douchebags need to work at organizations run by douchebags: recruiting other douchebags and raising money, conning naïve people and fooling skeptics, pretending your company has a business plan when all that's actually written down is "Step 3: Profit". Institutions assessing the fitness of candidates, in other words, often pass over self-effacers because self-effacement is linked with being too smart to play such childish games.

It's tempting to imagine that men could be sensible and reserved without being weak or easily manipulated, but that's a false hope, because it's other people who get to decide when they think you're a pushover, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To hold yourself back as someone who's not willing to accept a position that goes beyond your innate abilities is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or doing what you know is right despite feeling hurt by the reaction.

---

Doing what you think is right works surprisingly well. Another of my great former students, now a peer and a friend, saw a request from a magazine reporter doing a science story and looking for examples. My friend, who'd previously been too loud about his work, realized that his work had nothing to do with the reporter's request and decided not to make himself look silly by writing to her about it. Instead, he wrote to the reporter to call her attention to the work of our mutual friend Jane, saying, "Jane's work is awesome. You should write about it."

The reporter looked at Jane's work and wrote back saying "Jane's work is indeed awesome, and I will contact her about it. I also have to tell you that you are the only man who suggested a female colleague's work. Women do that all the time, but men only recommend their own work." My friend started helping other colleagues as well, and now he enjoys the satisfaction of knowing he played a part in others' success.

If you walked into my department at Buffalo Lake State, you wouldn't say "Oh my, look how much talented the women are than the men." The level and variety of creative energy in the place is still breathtaking to me, and it's not divided by gender. However, you would be justified in saying "I bet that the students who are happiest with what they've done for their family, friends and colleagues and for social justice in five years will include more women than men", because that's what happens, year after year. My friend talking to the reporter remains the sad exception.

Part of this sorting out of fates is misandry, but part of it is that women are just better at being altruistic, and less concerned about trying to get people to give them credit for things they haven't done.

Now I don't know what to do about this problem. (The essence of a rant, in fact, is that the ranter has no idea how to fix the thing being ranted about.) What I do know is this: it would be good if more men see opportunities to do something for somebody else, opportunities to sacrifice rewards they might otherwise have enjoyed for the sake of the greater good, and then try to take them on. It would be good if more men got in the habit of shutting the hell up when someone asks for an opinion they're not qualified to give, no matter how uncomfortable that makes them.

Well, apparently the Flash community has taken it upon itself to find out whether it's possible for a software community to be a bigger bunch of douchebags than the Ruby on Rails community. The preliminary verdict: yes. Don't be fooled: a speaker who gets invited to a conference and then illustrates use of a graphics app by drawing bukkake scenes during his talk is not an isolated douchebag. The existence of a context where anyone would pull such a thing denotes a socially coherent network of douchebags.

The comments on the above-link blog post are surprisingly clueful compared to the whole Rails clusterfuck, but there is just one thing that needs to be said. Guys: you do not get to dictate the terms under which women feel affronted by sexist behavior. Seriously. When you tell women, "You shouldn't be offended by this as a woman; instead, everyone should be offended by flagrant disregard for professional etiquette and good taste," you are not being a good ally. I'm not implying the talk, as described by Wilkes and Lyons, wasn't in bad taste. But complaining about its bad taste is like complaining about the bad smell in the Amtrak bathroom while your train is going off the rails. I'm going to say this in small words and I hope I'll only have to say it once:

When a speaker uses sexualized images of women in a technical talk, that is saying a couple of things. It is saying, "I consider my audience to be straight men, so I'm employing buddy-buddy beer-and-dick-jokes bonding as a good way to gain rapport with them. I don't care how many women I lose in the process. I don't see women as equal colleagues, because if I did, I wouldn't communicate with them in ways that I know will make most of them feel disgusted, alienated, or unwelcome. I know that using porn to communicate a non-sexual idea sends the message that I see women's bodies as tools for achieving my ends. And I don't mind sending that message."

Of course men should be outraged too. They should be outraged that their colleagues think it's acceptable to try to drive away the few women who have shown the fortitude required to assert themselves in a male-dominated field. But people who have never had to assert themselves professionally while also being seen as a woman do not need to claim that this task grants no special perspective to those who've carried it out. It might make you feel better to reduce the silencing of women to flagrant and isolated incidents of crude and adolescent behavior, but in reality, it's regular people being complicit in a sexist culture who behave this way. That's a little scary, isn't it? The next person to expose their complicity at the wrong time might be you. Trivializing the perpetrators as "boys, not men" is another non-answer. If only boys treated women as accessories, we wouldn't have a problem. The patriarchy comprises men, not boys.