It's definitely spot-on. I think it has a great example of anti-feminist/male-privileged mindset:
> Desire for civility and freedom from objectification is "censorship"
> Wanting to not support misogynists/rape apologists/rape denialists/sexual predators is worse than the soviets
> My fear of social ostracism is as or more valid than your fear of being raped
> My chosen "identities" are as important as the assigned social castes you've been placed in and are violently oppressed into staying in
> Not having friends in high school is the same as being a woman, or black
Eventually feminism will win; anti-racism will win; these are inevitabilities we can trace from the first slave revolts in Sumeria to John Brown to the Black Panther Party to even Barack Obama, in his own way. The ratchet of history turns only ever in one direction. Reactionaries howl over lost ground, but they'll never reclaim it.
I eagerly await this world, where finally we will have real hackers, hackers that bring their skill to bear against real enemies, fight real battles, and are strong, rather than weak, building on a foundation of just conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed, rather than being mentally locked in the 3rd grade in the moment of shame when their lunch money was taken.
One day the creeps will be gone. Only the strong will survive. Choose your side wisely, for you can only be on one side of history, and one it has left you behind you will be behind it forever.
>Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet.
If progressive values are not hacker values, the hacker values will be, should be, and must be destroyed.
> If progressive values are not hacker values, the hacker values will be, should be, and must be destroyed.
To presume that every aspect of your value system is superior to every aspect of everyone else's value systems is both astoundingly arrogant and also authoritarian. Improvement of societal values can't come about without minority groups being allowed to practice alternative value systems, as abhorrent as they might seem to the mainstream. As long as these groups aren't dramatically harming someone (ie: slavery, killing homosexuals etc) then I don't see what the problem is with this. The progressive values you espouse would have likely been popularly embraced much sooner had society not used it's force to clamp down on people practicing alternative values; yet now that your value system is gaining societal support, you are suggesting that society do the exact same thing to different people employing alternative values.
I would encourage you to be a bit more open minded. You might find that elements of hacker culture's or other cultures' values are superior to elements of your value system, and fuse those aspects into your existing values to make a superior system. At the very least, if progressive values are universally superior to hacker values then they will naturally win out over time. There is no need to to advocate the silencing of dissenting voices.
Progressive values are in fact the minority. Most people on hacker news (for example, but also in the world at large) do not believe women have rights to bodily integrity, to be respected as people rather than sex objects, and to be comfortable in their communities. This thread from yesterday is a great reminder of that, to anyone who thinks HN is some egalitarian utopia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9168299
In order to have any concept of morality, we must presume that every aspect of our value system is superior to every aspect of any other value system. But this isn't a negative. It isn't ~presumptuous~ to believe that murder and torture and rape are wrong. Likewise, supporting these things is not some mere "alternative" that should be encouraged by some moral-relativist position that all forms of society are equally preferable.
The universe is not fair. There is no law of physics that naturally leads to good triumphing over evil. The history of humanity is the story of the slow climb of our species out of the darkness, away from tyranny and patriarchy and towards freedom for everyone, but this has not come for free. The road to freedom is mortared with the blood of freedom fighters, from Joan D'Arc to John Brown to Bobby Seale to Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X to Andrea Dworkin. In order to continue this slow climb, we have to fight. There is no alternative. This article and the voices supporting it here are evidence of the backslide that would occur if ever we stopped.
It's laughable to suggest that patriarchy doesn't harm people. Read the thread I linked and the comments if you think otherwise. Every rape joke/rape denial is one more brick in the wall of PTSD facing one quarter of women. Every dongle joke is one more pane in the glass ceiling protecting the good ol' boys club. You have the luxury, the privilege, of pretending these things don't exist because you are a member of the social class committing these oppressions. With your silence, you become complicit; and you are not even silent.
It's comforting to know that I'm not alone among hackers. There is no intrinsic aspect of hackerdom that demands being creepy or misogynistic. And one day, just as there are few hackers that are KKK members or Nazis, there will be few hackers that are misogynists. Because the ratchet of history only ever turns in one direction, and once this ground is lost to you it will be lost forever.
Where are all the misogynists in said thread? All I see is a bunch of nerds arguing about semantics. Just because some of them don't think that a certain behavior constitutes rape doesn't mean that they actually condone said behavior. I believe that almost everyone in that thread thinks that the man should be put behind bars for a long time.
What I (and probably many other nerds) don't get is why feminists are so adamant in calling all sex related crimes "rape", does it really matter if a person gets X years in prison for sexual abuse instead of X years in prison for rape? And how is it obvious that arguing for one of the sides equals being a misogynist who thinks that women shouldn't have rights to bodily integrity?
Wanted to chime in and thank you for your posts in this thread -- good, insightful, correct stuff.
I'm optimistic -- while there's a lot of noise and badness right now, ten years ago people weren't even talking about these problems in the tech community. Imagine where we'll be in another decade.
I think your point is discrete by creating a dichotomy in which you are either "right" or "wrong" while i'd err on the side of "the world is more complicated than it looks".
You can't really win, but slowly morph the world from one view to another. In the process, your perception of what is right or wrong changes and thus, the terminal position is never the one you initially expected.
One thing I'm willing to bet on is that any extreme position will be seen as wrong 50 years from now on. The hive mind of the western global village might sway 180 degrees, like it did on the question of race in the 20th century. From genes to apology. But the "intellectual" belief about race is perhaps still as wrong as ever, and we understand comparatively little about its position in society.
Likewise, we don't have any clue how the human mind is affected by being closely connected through the internet. Or for the fact that the private individual was eradicated for the public group. Or for the total persistence of information from every human being connected via IP-addresses to everyone else in the ultimate peer-to-peer network ever envisioned.
It is so easy to blame someone as a reactionary who won't understand the position to which the world moved. But reality is perhaps that they have seen things oblivious to everyone else.
In other words, I think the human society is so complex we don't really understand how little we understand of it.
What on Earth did I just read... Please tell me that this is a sarcastic comment, because otherwise I can't even begin to address the amount of hostility it advocates. Read seriously, this shows exactly the cancer that is eating tech right now, a memeplex built on signalling and lack of any honesty or civility.
I agree with you 100%, but I feel the need to point out that you can still be a "weird nerd" and have progressive values. I do not think hacker values and progressive values are mutually exclusive, but I think they are orthogonal.
I agree completely. In fact, I think that the only hacker values that are true hacker values are progressive, and that the people invoking "hacker values" to justify misogyny, objectification and sexualization of women, etc., are going against hacker values in a truly insidious way.
But if anyone thinks otherwise, they should know they are on the losing side of history in every regard.
The article we're discussing, which you consider "a great example of anti-feminist/male-privileged mindset", is written by a woman. Perhaps she's some sort of self-hating misogynistic woman in your eyes, but she is a woman in technology.
Typical privileged male trying to talk over a woman in tech's lived experience. Instead of screaming at her that she's wrong about everything, how about listening for once?
> Desire for civility and freedom from objectification is "censorship"
> Wanting to not support misogynists/rape apologists/rape denialists/sexual predators is worse than the soviets
> My fear of social ostracism is as or more valid than your fear of being raped
> My chosen "identities" are as important as the assigned social castes you've been placed in and are violently oppressed into staying in
> Not having friends in high school is the same as being a woman, or black
Eventually feminism will win; anti-racism will win; these are inevitabilities we can trace from the first slave revolts in Sumeria to John Brown to the Black Panther Party to even Barack Obama, in his own way. The ratchet of history turns only ever in one direction. Reactionaries howl over lost ground, but they'll never reclaim it.
I eagerly await this world, where finally we will have real hackers, hackers that bring their skill to bear against real enemies, fight real battles, and are strong, rather than weak, building on a foundation of just conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed, rather than being mentally locked in the 3rd grade in the moment of shame when their lunch money was taken.
One day the creeps will be gone. Only the strong will survive. Choose your side wisely, for you can only be on one side of history, and one it has left you behind you will be behind it forever.
>Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet.
If progressive values are not hacker values, the hacker values will be, should be, and must be destroyed.