Nobody wanted to involve their personal lives or details until recently when identity and identifying became the thing.
However, I will say that I first got properly exposed to tech/computing by doing FIRST robotics in high school (2017), and those competitions were very diverse. Everyone I met through FIRST (students and mentors) was very accepting of everyone, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. My college experience (classes, competition team, internships, etc) has thankfully been more of the same.
Don't conflate those jokes and offhand comments with hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful differences between basically harmless husbands joking about their wives or differences between men and women, and Andrew Tate.
It's also a poor tactic to effect change. If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable. I think you can easily imagine the difference in defensiveness each response might elicit.
Who really claims that though? Saying "black people are always late" is racist because it's a racial prejudice, but that's not an expression of hatred towards black people. I think everyone gets that.
I also agree non-hateful comments can be insulting. So we're in agreement: erasing nuance is dumb. My point is that this nuance dictates that we shouldn't group these distinct behaviours all together and respond to them the same way.
Sure, some of those things can be harmless. I agree that when calling out bad behavior you shouldn't necessarily go all the way to 100 (ofc depending on severity). The main way to gauge malice is people's reactions to a reasonable request to tone it down. Apologizing and not repeating it? Cool, that's how basically any friend group figures out where the line is drawn. Doubling down and basically saying "grow a pair"? Not ok.
There's also a difference between something like "hah, guess they were on IST" vs "typical street shitter" (using my own ethnicity as an example).
Outside of a context where the humor is understood by all like a stand-up comedy act, you aren't entitled to how other people perceive your behavior.
If you walk like a racist and talk like a racist, people are just gonna assume you're a racist.
If that's a problem for you, there's a really fucking simple solution.
Furthermore I'm entitled to argue for what I think are good practices for communicating online, just like everyone else.
A bit of pushback and people are usually super apologetic. Usually they're just aping someone else who said something counter-culture because they thought it sounded badass, and don't really believe it.
The beauty of the internet is anonymity (to a certain extent), but that doesn't mean that you can't see or hear things that exclude you.
... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.
The quote is from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon which literally has two dogs talking.
See the original image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....
'Dog' could be a placeholder, but the cartoon showed dogs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
It was newsprint, so the color is not clear.
Maybe the dog was brown:
https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1862.gif
Not that it matters much.
I agree with the quote from the Wikipedia article:
Sociologist Sherry Turkle elaborates: "You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words."
Correct. And the mistake we made was assuming that that implied they weren't making assumptions.
Not in the New Yorker it wasn't.
That comic meant a lot to me. When I was growing up, I found that most adults would treat me with condescension. On the internet, I could engage in conversation as an equal. Anonymity didn't change the prejudices that people held, but it did change my experience.
I think it was a strict step forward over the previous status quo but (not unlike the changes to American culture after military necessity broke racial segregation barriers in the military during World War II) it's not the final step.
> which is a placeholder for
... exactly. It's a placeholder; not literal.
It's a placeholder because if the New Yorker had run a comic that said "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a black man," that wouldn't have been funny at all.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....
Why might it matter? Because the rest of the world was a lot more racist and sexist, but IRC wasn’t.
No, sorry, I was there. That's the key thing people need to remember about the Old Internet.
Some of IRC was extremely racist and sexist. Almost all of the rest was "regular" racist and sexist. It was pretty closely related to 4chan culture (under-moderated by outside forces that had little power to force any particular standards upon the moderators). The magic of the medium was that since everything was text, nobody knew you were the butt of the joke and you could pretend you weren't.
But go mask-off and admit you were a woman or a minority, and oh boy. Good luck with that. Good thing it's easy to change your handle, right?
There's a reason anonymity as a virtue grew in that space: it protected people from those who hadn't left their IRL baggage behind by letting people pretend to be the "default" (which was almost always white men).
We made a mistake believing the online space wasn't the real world. It was. It was just the real world where you could pretend to be something else. That was good at the time; it let more people participate by donning masks. But we should aim for better.
... but it's also a true generalization, in the sense that if you throw a dart at a random IRC channel across all networks, you'll proabably hit one where the level of tolerated racism and sexism is at least "American standard."
> Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist
I completely agree.
And now we're doing this whole "guilty of X by technology choice".
/s
Where and when does this this neurosis stop?
I’m sorry if you had a bad time on IRC, but as someone who cut their teeth on IRC in the early 90s, and got their career started through contacts made on IRC, what you describe couldn’t be further from the kind of technical communities I participated in.
There can only be one omnipresent IRC God, and you're talking to them. You can wipe your ass with your experience for all they care.
My lord, the lack of self awareness...
I don't think the majority of people using the words were actually homophobic (I wasn't), just copying other people to "fit in" without even thinking of the possibility it was harming someone. I think it was early 2004-05 that someone private messaged me explaining that it sucks when people use the word that way and I stopped.
I don't recall much racism against black people, but I can totally see the N word being used casually in the same way in some other servers/channels.
Otherwise I can only assume that chats within all-chat appeared to be racist in nature but again, that's not something I've seen (especially unchallenged) in any of the freenode channels I frequented.