Silicon Valley’s Rape Problem | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley’s Rape Problem

numair.medium.com

76 pointsisomorph27 comments

This person should probably find a reputable news source to tell their story to. Not to diminish the value of what they're writing and their mission, but some editorial guidance could be really useful.

The post seems to be more about the author and how good they are than the core problem they're talking about. When he starts to discuss the core issue, it's vague and I honestly don't know what's going on.

I get the sense you may not be aware of the state of "news" these days. Let's say he does find a news organization that is interested in even touching this, it's likely that he will simply be lured into exclusivity agreements that then leads to the story being locked away to protect the depraved princes and dukes of Silicon Valley.

Even if he finds some news or actual journalistic organization with some moderate reach that has not been totally compromised, the shadow censorship will totally suppress the story from even getting in front of anyone who is not already aware.

In case the allusion was not sufficient; fact of the matter is that Silicon Valley, although not exclusive by any means, is one of the major epicenters of an emerging neo-aristocracy that becomes ever more drunk on its power, control, and abuses. For its own sake, the exponential network effects of the whole technology sector really needs to be shattered and scattered. We say "diversity is our greatest strength" like a mantra, but we practice centralization of power and control in ever fewer people … a self-important and self-perpetual aristocratic parasitic class.

Maybe the ability to abuse will last centuries, as it lasted up until the American/French Revolution, but maybe it won't and the peasants will come to erase the whole aristocratic layer many of us belong to. I'd rather not find out.

That's complete nonsense. There are plenty of good journalists out there. Of course no reputable one would publish this as there's no proof and it's mostly just the author talking about himself.

I'd like some evidence with all these conspiracy theories.

Recent battles between news corps and silicon valley have shown they are on opposite sides if anything. There is no shortage of negative press regarding silicon valley.

Facebook and Twitter have already shown they're willing to suppress the distribution of news that doesn't fit their political agenda, as we saw with the Hunter Biden story. It's not really a "conspiracy theory" when they're doing it in the open in full view of everybody.

The whole world isn’t picking up on the Hunter Biden story. There are news outlets and social scenes all over the world.

Tucker Carlson has said that he had critical evidence of crime that would destroy Hunter Biden, but he doesn’t want to release it because he would be kicking an already fallen man. Even Fox has cooled on the story.

Either the story has legs or it doesn’t. Either you like Tucker Carlson and Rudy Giuliani's take on it or you don’t, as they are among the few to assert access to the evidence in question.

> I honestly don't know what's going on.

He's accusing Sean Parker of rape. He doesn't mention Parker by name, but other commenters have explained why he's clearly talking about Parker.

The accusation makes no sense: if I'm reading his vague words correctly, he's saying he was a passenger in SP's car when SP picked a girl up from the side of the road and raped her... in the car? While the author just sat there and watched? Why didn't he do anything? Why would SP think he could rape a stranger in front of a witness who knows his name and knows him well enough to be given a ride in his car?

The author then extrapolates from this alleged rape to the claim that Silicon Valley has a systemic problem with rape, without providing any evidence or reasoning why the latter follows from the former. Also, all men are evil - except this author, of course. Thank God he's here, right?

I realise that the nature of the alleged crime means it's hard to provide concrete evidence, but if this guy wants to be taken seriously he needs to drop all this insinuation and give specific accusations that form a coherent story.

This is, these days, how reporters go about finding reputable news sources to tell their stories to. Investigative journalism has always been a smaller niche than we like to imagine.

It was always the case that stories filter up to journalists. Social media is just a new way of doing that. We have an idea that journalists waited by the phone for tips and then latched on to one, but that was actually always rare.

The best way for them to boost the signal is to (ugh, I hate saying this) trend on Twitter, and then the journalists will come to you. It's ugly, but it's not all that much different from what new media have always done.

In this article, Numair Faraz says:

1. Person X offered him 0.1% of Facebook, but later screwed him out of it somehow.

2. Person X pulled up in his car next to an underaged girl riding a bicycle, and had sex with her without a condom (which, because she was underage, would be rape regardless of how willing she was or wasn't).

3. He (Numair Faraz) witnessed the rape, and convinced Person X to give the girl his phone number.

4. The girl later contacted Person X requesting money for medical services at Planned Parenthood (an abortion?), which Person X sent through an intermediary at the same company, who he reimbursed with a paper check.

5. He implies that it happened in a "faraway place", though presumably one in the United States, because Planned Parenthood was available there.

Then in this thread pbiggar says it can be inferred that Person X is Sean Parker.

I wish Numair had written these claims down in a straightforward manner, explaining exactly what happened, as I have attempted to do above, instead of writing in such an oblique and insinuating way. The latter style is becoming too common, and it makes it difficult to distinguish serious claims from vague character attacks.

But Sean Parker was very rich at the time, and given what I know of the lives of the very-rich, especially the newly-very-rich -- say, of rock stars -- then it would not be too surprising. (Not to say anything about Sean Parker specifically; my only knowledge of him comes from The Social Network.)

(Projecting the behavior of rockstar-founders-on-power-highs, onto rank-and-file SV engineers who are nowhere near these kinds of events, is something I would take issue with, but it's a small issue next to the factual claims.)

So: It seems Numair Faraz has just publicly accused Sean Parker of statutory rape 15 years ago. Are there legal next steps?

This article is like 60% talking about how awesome the author is, 30% about how everyone should be as awesome as him and 10% accusing someone without naming them and without any evidence or anything.

That's why you don't self-publish this stuff if you're an amateur. It throws under the bus anything worthwhile you might have had to say.

> I also hope Facebook won’t claim that this guy “wasn’t working for us at the time,” when everyone knew he was simply operating in stealth mode (as board member Peter Thiel was quoted as saying years later, “I don’t think [he] ever really left.”)

A google search for "i dont think [he] ever really left" [1] indicates that Peter Thiel was talking about Sean Parker when he said this.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=peter+thiel+%22I+don%E2%80%9...

The article doesn't name any names or provide any evidence whatsoever. Just lots of vague threats, implications, and rhetoric.

I would be willing to believe that there are endemic problems in this industry. But you're going to have to actually make an accusation, or you're just wasting everyone's time.

I'm seeing comments asserting that the telling of these experiences are "wasting everyone's time" and "a childish rant", but _only_ because they do not name names. That doesn't sound reasonable to me. Clearly writing about experiences has some value regardless of whether it's anonymized, and even more clearly, the angry attacks are disproportionate if the critics are saying they hinge entirely on that one difference.

Naming names to turn the wheels of justice is one way in which the piece could have value. I assume it’s the way people are gravitating towards partly because it’s otherwise so poorly written that it doesn’t have much prospect of argumentative or literary value.

Even more weird stuff that seems somewhat related he wrote back in 2017.

https://web.archive.org/web/20171018143123/https://www.numai...

If any of this is true they should go to NYT or WSJ and get proper coverage for this. It's a little light on details, and uses the word "I" quite often. Curious to see if more comes out of this.

this thing is interesting if it's Sean Parker that's being accused, note that this person has called Sean out personally a tome or two before[0]. sadly, all of this information feels true, but i don't know if it's just a personal bias at play. the link between power and a need for sexual "conquest" is something i find very odd. i wonder why the two fall together so often.

0: https://memeburn.com/2011/09/early-facebook-app-developer-cl...

Fix for thre dead link of his original post:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110924141857/http://public.num...

I submitted this to HN but I am not the author of this article. I have contacted a journalist and will keep trying until someone can authenticate the story.

this guy should start naming names if he really wants to help women. his post otherwise looks like a childish rant without any substance.

Surprised this took 4 days to make it here....

This lacks so many important details to make it seem credible. It reminds me of that old website, "Did [some famous right winger whose name I can't remember] rape and kill a woman in 1998?" which was intentionally designed to be substance-less. This just seems like it's trying to appear substantial without managing to do so.

Or maybe it really reminds me of WWE. If you want to "catch people in lies", catch people in lies; don't just say that you're going to do it.

> It reminds me of that old website, "Did [some famous right winger whose name I can't remember] rape and kill a woman in 1998?" which was intentionally designed to be substance-less.

I believe this is what you are thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck_v._Eiland-Hall

As Wikipedia notes, that actually was based on a joke from Gilbert Gottfried's segment in the Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget, where Gottfried repeatedly said that the rumors Saget had raped and killed a girl were false. That whole segment was quite funny: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2x1bwa

Edit: fixed link to Gottfried's segment.

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