Alienating Atmosphere (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Alienating Atmosphere (2014)

martinfowler.com

65 pointsshervinafshar20 comments

The trouble with discussing this issue is that so many people have a "with us or against us" attitude, and will attack (verbally, professionally, socially, and sometimes violently) anyone who questions any aspect of their agenda.

"Agenda" itself has become a negative word in the US, and so that comment can be read as an attack itself. (I upvoted you in good faith.)

Alienating atmospheres impact people across more vectors than just those that are protected classes:

https://status451.com/2017/08/04/another-point-of-view/

I remember a time when classism in tech was a hot topic, but it's rarely discussed anymore.

What happened?

Near as I can tell, those most vociferous demanding others to check their privileges avoid classism because its a privilege they often benefit from.

Over the last decade, and especially in the last 5 years, the world view amongst equality activism has shifted very strongly towards intersectional identity politics and its associated groupwise oppressor/victim dynamic as the root of all evil. Classism fell to the side in favor of sexism, racism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, and so on.

Some attribute the downfall of Occupy Wall Street to this, where a very simple message about financial justice was replaced with a focus on the slights of its middle-to-upper class revolutionaries. This is where privilege rhetoric and the progressive stack (i.e. ranking oppression) came into full vogue.

A similar thing happened with tech. The decentralized libertarian and egalitarian culture up to the early 2000s made way for a corporatized one. Censorship and moral control came into it, first by way of copyright enforcement, then by way of a rhetoric of gentrification, civility and anti-harassment. This too was pushed as benefiting marginalized identities, despite the identity blind nature of the culture it was replacing. This was already going on in the mid 2000s, crossing a few geek subcultures, and started to become mainstream around 2012. In the subsequent years, the associated "women in tech" and racial oppression narrative skyrocketed and became a regular fixture in media.

It's not outlandish to notice both of these cases played out as a divide-and-conquer scenario that benefited the societal elite by defusing potential threats to their power. In the case of Occupy it was the financial sector and the god of money, and in the case of internet culture it was governments and the ability to control from the top down. The technology that was supposed to liberate us is now used for Orwellian purposes, controlled by an oligarchy of giants.

Directly contributing to both was the long and slow push in academia to shift from enlightenment values to postmodern values, where subjectivity and social constructionism reign supreme. We can also see the clear role of modern media culture, where entertaining is preferable to informing, and that of social media in particular, where one's personal brand and personal views reign supreme.

If you put it all together, it is anyone's guess how much of this was a purely natural evolution, and how much of it was accelerated to satisfy particular agendas. Probably an interplay between both. Egregores protect themselves and rally their self-interested members to fight for them. The fact that all of this came to a well-timed crescendo in the lead up to an American presidential election however speaks volumes IMO.

That's a fantastic piece. I always found it hypocritical that people promoting inclusion or diversity only focus on a few legally defined classes at the expense of all the others. There are many reasons people get systemically discriminated against and most of them aren't protected. A common one is personality. "If you don't have the right personality then you don't belong here." is somehow acceptable by the same people who promote inclusiveness. There's also confidence, height, attractiveness, socioeconomic background, etc.

Affirmative action takes the most advantaged members of a protected class and replaces the most disadvantaged members of a non-protected class. That's the opposite of equity.

The group that I see increasingly discriminated against in tech are those on the aspie/autistic side of the spectrum. In the past few days I've seen aspie wielded as an insult on more than one occasion. People on both sides of the spectrum contribute to cognitive diversity. People on the aspie/autistic end of the spectrum are increasingly at risk in environments where what you say and how you say it matter since they may not have the same social faculties/graces to know the right way to talk about something or even be aware that something is inappropriate. Political correctness creates a hostile work environment for those on the aspie/autistic end of the cognitive spectrum.

BTW, If you enjoyed that article, also read this more recent article by the same author:

https://status451.com/2017/08/06/judging-things-by-their-sid...

Edit: To whomever thought this comment was downvoteworthy, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Pictures".

> it's a constant indication that "you're not welcome here"

Maybe the software industry can be more inviting or attractive to different types of people, but I don't think there is an agenda by computer folk to exclude others or make people feel un-welcomed. I think the "geek" culture is simply unattractive to most girls (yes, I'm assuming girls are less geeky). The question is "how to make it more attractive", not "how to make it less alienating".

Edit: tell me why you disagree.

I disagree because I know a lot of geeky women who don't like geek culture because it is hostile to women. In my life, I haven't noticed a difference in gender when it comes to someone being a "geek" or not. I'm not sure how to gather broader evidence really, though F/M ratios in hard sciences requiring quite a lot of "geek" are much higher than in computer science.

If you haven't noticed a difference in m/f ratio of geeks, then how can you say geek culture us hostile to women? Assuming you think all male geeks are hostile to women, wouldn't it just be half of the culture that is hostile?

idk, something about "half of geeks culture is women" and "geek culture is hostile to women" doesn't seem like a good argument to me.

The women geeks I know keep separate from geek culture, and I only know them due to luck or circumstance. So they are women geeks, but not part of geek culture, if that makes sense.

Then are they really geeks or just have geek tendencies?

Geekdom is a blood pact that one carries with them wherever they go. There's a lot of "us vs. them" mentality, especially in more introverted circles that feel as though normal society is not for them and they will never fit in.

This hostility is aimed at anyone who, to use their vernacular, is a normie. Someone that, as they see it, has had the luck to be able to fit in to the molds society demanded of them, is not "one of them." This includes men, specifically the "high-status," attractive, promiscuous, and athletic men. As well as normal women, who by the real life random number generator we call chance, are a much greater portion of their gender than men. This is one possible reason it may seem like there is large hostility targeted specifically at women.

Women, using only the frequent amount of stories I've heard, are known for their affinity to want to insert themselves into groups they don't belong in and feel like a great injustice has been done upon them by this. There are certain groups of people that your average woman will never be able to fit in, no matter how much activism she engages in. To tie these two paragraphs together, the largest problems I've seen arise of clashes between geeks and normies, are people who want to "be part" of the group in name, but don't want to be part of the group in lifestyle and essence.

These groups are very welcoming to anyone who shows similarity to their members, but like most groups of people, will not tolerate those who wish to disrupt their bubble and way of being. It's like joining a smoker's support group, but coming in and chain smoking in everyone's faces. Then declaring that the hostility you receive is unwarranted. That it is them who should change their ways, not the malefactor.

Note that it is a particularly cruel fate to be unattractive, low status, while being intelligent enough to not only fully comprehend what they are missing but also to know the implacable foes of probability and physics that put them there. Geeks have the rawest quadrant of the distribution.

We finally carved out an enclave around the 80s where we could have a stable equilibrium with the rest of society, trading our specialized skills for goods at an arms length. But the normies greed and avrice knows no bounds. They burst into our very halls to throw us back out into the cold night. They demand we tithe all the fruits of our labours in recognition of the "natural order". They would make us beggars in our own kingdom.

Geeks are not aggressors in any us vs them sorting match. The hostility flows endlessly in one direction -- downhill -- from the haves to all the have-nots.

Meet us at the river fork every fall to trade, but do not harvest our gardens, hunt our animals, or cut down our homes for your firewood. Stay in your domain normie and we will stay in ours.

I disagree by agreeing, sort of. Geekspace is alienating, but with some notable exceptions I don't believe it's on purpose. I know loads of amazing girl geeks (we are mighty), and my anecdotal observations suggest that there might be a higher geek-to-normy ratio among people of color than there is among whites. And yet, we tend to go play among ourselves, because the white male geeks can get all weird when we try to play with them.

Not always. Not everyone. Just sometimes. Mostly not on purpose, and mostly because they don't have any practice playing with girls or people of color in the geekspace. Enough that it's not always worth doing the work of making the white male geeks be used to having girls and people of color around because we just want to go play our geeky reindeer games.

Just google for "lego girls 70s" images and there is the answer, laying bare in front of you

But what about Betty Joe with the Unix book in Wayne's World 2?

So what? I feel an "alienating atmosphere" at snooty high end boutique art galleries where people sip Champagne and talk about the nebulous genius it took for someone to throw feces at a picture of the Madonna, or whatever. They are attracted to each other and to the subject they are interested in. Sometimes you just don't belong, for whatever reason, even if you're totally drawn to the subject. That's life. Grown ups are supposed to learn to cope with it, not whine like children.

No. Grown ups are supposed to solve their problems. Solving the problems of sexual harassment and discrimination is exactly what the industry is trying to do.

If you disagree with the approach, fine. Please suggest a better way to handle the situation. If telling women to cope with it is your sole suggestion, then don't expect very many people to agree with you since women with a passion for engineering should not be driven out simply on the merit of how they were born.

The kind of soft discrimination that you're complaining about is a fact of life. Any industry who's life blood consists of relatively immature young men is going to have this kind of problem. What people like you are proposing is complete upheaval of basic behavioral tendencies to accommodate a few special cases. What exactly do you even want? Are you sure you know? If you want a social work atmosphere full personable people get into sales, tech is not the industry for you. That goes for men, women and everything in between.

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