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Encountered this on Geeky Mom as I tracked through my bloglist catching up with people. I was horrified after reading Kathy Sierra’s post then began to trek through a lot of the surrounding material from blogs like Horse Pig Cow and (very soon after) even the BBC.
Two thoughts occurred to me after doing all too much reading on this – 1, that this is an utterly horrible thing to happen to anyone and its utterly right to engage the police. If you marched up to someone at a public lecture and said those things, you’d properly quite properly find yourself in substantial legal trouble. No woman would say such things without a whole lot of intentions quite apart from gender – mental disturbance, psychotic levels of hate and paranoia etc. All of which could be assigned to the (presumed) men leaving these messages, yet this is all but tolerated in the milieu in which these messages were left as accepted male behavior.
Which brings me to my second thought was, “Which sector of the industry are we dealing with here when apparently heavyweight, significant people are seemingly so implicated in one way or another in the surrounding circumstances? And a sector where the potential for this to happen has been allowed to get to this point? Wouldn’t happen in sport. Wouldn’t happen (maybe) in academia (other ways to skewer people). Wouldn’t happen in standard, common or garden marketing. What’s going on here? What is it about the ‘creative’ industry in this sector that generates this kind of behavior from cowardly, emotionally retarded males – <i>and which supports a cultural infrastructure in which this kind of attitude can thrive?</i>
Hmm. I read and enjoyed The Cluetrain Manisfesto and was shocked to discover one of the authors apparently at the heart of the whole fuss. Perhaps the fact he calls himself ‘Rageboy’ begs for deconstruction. (To be fair, perhaps the knee-jerk response to a name like that is worthy of deconstruction in its own right. But sometimes a cigar means a penis.)
So we have two things here. A subculture of passionate, engaged people who believe a little too much in their own point of view at times and express it in a variety of ways. And an unforgivably horrendous virtual assault by a stalker that must be punished.
I’m not saying that the truth is in the middle here – a crime has been committed and I don’t think we should ignore crimes on grounds of woolly relativism. But a particular peer group needs to take a good, hard look at itself. Influential bloggers? They’re interesting, inspiring reads but we aren’t talking about world peace here. We’re talking a vicious in-fight amongst a group of people who talk about selling brands. The waves this nasty incident is making say a lot of things about the blogosphere as a whole that I just don’t think are true. And Scobles shutting down his comments, albeit with the best of intentions, doesn’t help very much. When a journalist is attacked, the newspapers don’t stop printing.
So what am I saying? Hate the sin, hate the sinner – clean up the slum. Attitudes towards women in technology are part of it – but not all of it.
I haven’t put in a lot of links – type ‘Kathy Sierra’ in Technorati and you’ll get all you need.
Filed under: blogging | Tagged: Kathy Sierra, virtual violence against women
Thanks for posting something sane and balanced in an arena where people seem to be going mad. It is amazing to me that one woman’s voice can cause so much fear and hatred. I’m trying not to let the hate make me feel ill, but it is. I find it tragic that apparently educated, apparently enlightened, apparently creative people can also be thugs, bullies and sadists. I hope the police actually manage to do their job and find him or them.
“Innate mail viciousness”, sane and balanced?
OK.
Hi Charles – if you read the post, you’d hopefully be able to put the title in context. To be more explicit, men don’t have a lock on vicious behavior but a situation seems to have been set up where it’s tolerated to a surprising degree.
Maybe I should just use more boring titles.
I’m not familiar with any of the people involved in this, so I don’t know how that fits in. But it doesn’t matter who the parties are, this kind of stuff is not acceptable in any milieu. Protected speech is an important part of democracy. However speech which is directed toward someone specific and includes such violence should not be protected. There’s also a difference between violent fiction, and violent threats in the real world.
Chris Locke said that “having a negative opinion of a public figure was neither a federal offense nor an expression of misogyny.” Sure, but the things posted about Kathy Sierra were not opinions, they were threats. Misogyny is allowed; death threats are not.
I’m sad and appalled at the same time that there are people who either think this kind of thing is funny or even acceptable. I’d say it’s a kind of mental disturbance regardless of gender.
Late to this discussion, but I believe one sane thing we can all do is not allow anonymous commenting on our blogs. The culture of anonymity increases the noise level in this sort of discourse so that people become inured to it…and then it takes only the truly psycho to get our attention.
Completely agree – though it can always be spoofed (e.g. test@test.com was a post I had to delete recently).