November 2, 2022 • 52 mins
Most people recall GamerGate, but fewer are familiar with DongleGate, the coordinated online harassment campaign against a Black woman tech worker named Adria Richards that happened in 2013. Bridget charts the story of Adria Richards and why it still matters today.
The Hacker News post from the fired PlayHaven employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681
Amanda Blum's blog post about the fallout from DongleGate: https://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is Bridget Todd, and you're listening to Internet Hate Machines,
and I am here with my lovely producer, Sophie. Sophie,
how are you. I'm doing well, Bridget, How are you?
I'm doing good? And I am so excited for the
first official episode of Internet Hate Machine because we're talking
about a topic that I've kind of think about a lot,
(00:21):
and that is the saga of Adria Richards. And I
know that you know a little bit about this story
one of my favorite named topics on the internet, dongle gate,
but you know, I only really know the surface level.
So I'm really looking forward to hearing more about this
from you and more about Adria as a person. Yeah,
(00:41):
we're gonna be using the word dongle a lot in
this episode. Just two level set love that. One of
the reasons I wanted to start with Adria Richards is
because I think that she really represents an early situation
where bad actors were able to completely hijack a sensitive,
complicated situation in ways that they're still doing to this
(01:01):
very day. And I think it's a really great early
example of how when a black woman is being harassed
and attacked online, people watching will essentially fit back and
say she probably deserved it. So let's get into it.
That started the beginning. Who is Adrian Richards Well, Adrian
Richards is a black woman who has been working as
(01:23):
an engineer since about She first got her start in
technology as a network administrator and started volunteering teaching tech
skills in her spare time. And while she started working
her way up in these like successful tech startups, she
also kind of became this visible black woman in tech.
You know, she was doing a lot of media. She
had a pretty big YouTube channel with a healthy number
(01:46):
of subscribers. She celebrated ten thousand subscribers where she does
these accessible tech tutorials mixed with kind of every day
I guess lifestyle content like dating advice, And she does
a lot of content where she is calling out examples
of sexism in tech. Um, that's kind of I guess
(02:08):
her brand or her thing is these explorations of gender
and technology and the way that they intersect. Like her
personal website where she has her blog is called but
You're a Girl dot com, so you can sort of
get a sense of she's someone who is really interested
in shaking up the status quo in technology. She travels
(02:29):
to speak at these pretty big deal tech conferences where
she often is talking about things like diversity in tech
and inclusion in tech. Here's a little clip of her
speaking at one of those conferences. Any startup you're gonna
work at, it's not going to be all one gender.
If you're a woman, it's very unlikely. So you're gonna
need to work with guys. So you should be going
(02:49):
to events that have guys. And it's not that guys
don't want to help, but we have to give them
opportunities for them to be allies. So that was it,
Just a quick little clip that I think speaks to
um a little bit about what happened with her side.
Now somebody we would totally be friends with. Oh, absolutely, absolutely,
(03:09):
no question. So what I was doing research for this episode,
I really kind of enjoyed going back in time and
looking at Adria's digital life before what went down went down,
because honestly, she kind of just gives off vibes of
a black woman who is killing it, like she's really
hit her stride. Watching her talk about technology, she comes
(03:32):
off as really confident and happy and like she's in
like really walking in her power and It was exciting
to watch, but it kind of made me sad. Knowing
a little bit about what happens next, you might be
asking what happened to Adrea Richards. Adrea starts working as
a developer evangelist, which is basically, if you don't know
what that is, it's someone whose role is to work
(03:54):
with developers, help them solve problems, help them level up
in their career. She gets the job as a developer
evangelists for the email vendor sind Grid, and then she
goes to Peicon, a conference for Python users, and while
she's there, she is sitting in the main conference room
during a keynote talk, and she turns around to have
(04:17):
a conversation with some attendees behind her, having a normal
talk about some of the presentations they've seen, when she
overhears a pair of male attendees who are also developers,
making a crass joke while seated behind her. Now, the
actual nature of the joke is somewhat in dispute. A
little bit more on that later, but essentially, the crux
(04:38):
of the joke is that they're talking about dongles because
they work in tech, and the crux of the joke
is that dongle is a funny sounding word that kind
of sounds like dog, wow, brave such as just transferred
me back to you know, the seventh grade cool cool, cool. Yeah.
I mean it's it's crass and it's immature, and it's
(05:01):
like it's like, like I said, it's like very middle school.
It is very middle school. It takes me back to
a lot of text bases I've been in where that
is the love that it just it is the level
of humor that you kind of are asked to smile
through and be like ha ha, this is one percent bridging.
(05:21):
I actually don't know if you know that, like one
of my first jobs out of college, I worked in
tech for several years, and I don't think on microoff
Mike we've talked about this at all. But yeah, I
definitely know exactly what you're talking about. In those In
those scenes, especially when there's very few women around the
the nature of the jokes can sometimes be a little
(05:44):
bit off putting to say the least. Yes, exactly, and
I think that's exactly where Adrian was at as well.
So she didn't say anything in the moment, She didn't
say that this bothered her, and she explains that choice
in her blog. She writes, I didn't want to be
heckled or have my experience denied, which I also really,
(06:05):
I'm sure you do. Having worked in tech, I know
what she's talking about. I did it. She probably didn't
want to have that vibe of, oh, she's crazy, she's
over sensitive. You know you, you know you can you
kind of have a sense of maybe it's not going
to go that well if you take the route of saying, hey, guys,
knock it off. Oh my god, she's so emotional, she's
in her feelings. Why can't we just can't we just
(06:28):
be our souls? It's like, all right, exactly. So, rather
than saying something to them in the moment, she takes
out her phone, takes their picture, and tweets it, tweeting
quote not cool jokes about forking repose in a sexual
way and big dongles right behind me hashtag picon. She
(06:50):
goes on to tweet, can someone talk to these guys
about their conduct? I'm in lightning talks top right near stage,
Tin roseback hashtag picon, and then she tweets the code
of conduct for the conference, which in part says, quote
offensive jokes are not appropriate for Peicon. So initially, Adrian
said that she was wanted to ignore this, but in
(07:11):
her blog but I'm a Girl, Adria explained what triggered
her to send that tweet. She writes, I was gonna
let it go. It has been a long week, a
long month. I've been on the road since mid February
attending and speaking at conferences. Icon was my fifth and
final conference before heading home. I know it's important to
pick my battles and I don't have to be a
(07:31):
hero and in every situation, but sometimes I want to
go to a conference and be a geek. But like Popeye,
I couldn't stands it no more because of what happened.
She talks about how her company was a sponsor for
this event and when she heard them talking about dongles,
she felt blustered. Then, she writes, then it happened the trigger.
(07:55):
She's watching somebody on the main stage and he's talking
about this young Hooder's workshop that Adrian volunteered at. He
was mentioning that the Pie Ladies auction had raised ten
thousand dollars in a single night for funds that we're
going to be used to support this young Coder's Workshop initiative.
I saw a photo on the main stage of a
little girl who had been in the Young Coder's Workshop.
(08:16):
I realized I had to do something because she would
never have the chance to learn and love programming because
the ask clowns behind me would make it impossible for
her to do so. So I I remember reading this
when the whole situation was going down, and I was
very moved by what she had written. Um, I think
it's if you're if you're listening to this and thinking
(08:37):
that seems a little overdone. Fine, sure, but I guess
I'm saying that I understand what where she sort of
coming from when she wrote that. Yeah, I mean like,
I definitely have empathy for for the way that she's
feeling here. I feel like that happens to a lot
of people in the business world, and specifically within the
(08:59):
tech space, where you're in a situation where you're like, well,
I could say nothing, but you know that would be
very disappointing to child me, or to my niece, to
my nephew, to my daughter, to my son, the inner
child in me where where I'm like, okay, you know,
(09:21):
I couldn't. While this might seem small to some who's
to say that many small things. If you let it
go this time, you might let it go the next
ten times, and then it's just a habit, and then
it's a pattern, and then you're enabling. So that's exactly
what she says. In her blog, she writes about how
this incident was actually not the first time that she
(09:42):
had heard a sexualizing joke at that particular conference. She
describes how earlier during that event, in a hallway, a
guy had made a crass joke about looking under the
skirt of the table and you know, make he made
some crass long and about it, not like so it
doesn't have pubic hair, just like I like it. But
because this happened in a way, I know, really not great.
(10:09):
She says that because this happened in a hallway and
not like at a seated, you know, main stage event
while somebody's on stage talking, she actually did feel comfortable
speaking up to whoever made that joke. And I think
it's exactly what you were saying, Sophie. It sounds like
this was death by a thousand cuts for her, where
it was laugh it off, laugh it off, say something,
(10:31):
say something, and eventually she just couldn't anymore. Like I've
been there where you just hit your limit of ship
that you are willing to smile through or giggle through
or brush off to the point where you just can't anymore.
The conference staff talk to the guys who end up
being developers who made the joke. For their part, it
(10:55):
sounds like these guys handled it very well. Ticon put
out a state meant saying quote. An incident occurred involving
some inappropriate comments made during a crowded plenary session her
the state of guidelines for the attendees and staff. The
issue was reported to PIKE staff and resolved privately. Both
parties were met with in private. The comments that were
(11:16):
made were in poor taste, and the individuals involved agreed, apologized,
and no further action were taken by the staff of Pike.
No individuals were removed from a conference, no sanctions were levied,
and so honestly, it sounds like it truly could have
ended there. You know, these developers who were making this
crass joke, they they seem like they legitimately felt bad.
(11:39):
They apologized. Picon staff it sounds like they acted quickly
and it was resolved. It truly could have been there,
and honestly, throughout the entire situation, Adrian is clear both
in her writing and in her actions that she does
not want these men fired. You know, she is not
calling for any consequences were them beyond just being talked
(12:02):
to about appropriate conduct by the Picon staff, which they were,
So this truly could have just been the end of it. Yeah,
it sounds like all she really wanted to do was
come on, guys, not a time or place, do better?
Does it? It's easy for me to have a lot
of empathy for all of the individuals involved in the situation,
Like those guys shouldn't have been making that joke. It
(12:23):
does sound like it was crass and stupid. It does
sound like it was against the rules of what happened.
It's easy for me to just because I'm someone who
says things without thinking a lot, it's easy for me
to put myself in their shoes of like, oh, yes,
certainly I've said things where it comes out of my
mouth and boy I wish it hadn't. You know? For
sure somebody who's on a lot of podcasts can relate,
(12:47):
can relate. Yeah, I'm not saying that these guys are
like the worst guys ever, and they handled it very well.
Both men worked for a company called play Haven, which
was a sponsor for picon the event, and this incident
led to one, but not both of the men being fired.
Play Haven CEO Andy Yang acknowledge the firing, writing quote,
(13:11):
play Haven had an employee who was identified as making
inappropriate comments at picon, and as a company that is
dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted
a throw investigation. The results of this investigation led to
the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go.
We believe in the importance of discussing sensitive topics such
as gender and conduct, and we hope to move forward
(13:32):
with a civil dialogue based on the facts, which unfortunately
does not happen. But you know, and you might be
asking yourself, Well, HbF photographed and pointed out two men
who worked at play Haven who were having this inappropriate conversation,
So you might be asking why was only one man
fired and not the other. Play Haven went on to
(13:52):
say in their statement that they would not comment on
all the factors that contributed to our parting ways with
the one developer, So it's totally clear, you know what
is actually happening if the decision was entirely about what
happened at picon, or if something else contributed to it, Right,
this could have been a a noted behavior from this
(14:15):
person or some other reason. Yeah, that's interesting and and
kind of um, I would say, CEO and Yang actually
taking action is kind of rare, I would say, especially
at that time. So that's that's interesting to know here
as well. But yeah, I totally see what you're saying,
(14:35):
Like there could have been other things there that we
just don't know and we'll never know. But yeah, what happened, Oh,
I know what I good to what happened. I'm bombed.
It's not great. And honestly, like I I mean, I
don't know, I don't have any kind of special insight,
but I would be willing to bet just from what
(14:57):
I know about how tech companies work that play Haven
that there was some sort of information that maybe we're
not privy to that play Haven like maybe this was
a pattern, maybe there were other factors at play, and
play Haven was like, well, you know, let's just part
ways with this person and this is just another just
just one more reason why we should take that action.
(15:26):
So after Adria's tweet, everyone kind of starts responding to
what happened. Now. I absolutely do not think that Adria
thought that this was going to blow up the way
that it did, with so many people beyond the tech
conference weighing in. You know, some people are supportive of Adria,
others are supportive of the developers. And I have to say,
(15:47):
this is to be really clear, not all the people
who were not on adria side are men. There were.
I saw a lot of women weighing in and saying
that they felt like Adria was making it harder for
them as women in tech by being so are sensitive
or not just talking directly to the men, right, So
it's not it's certainly not a clear cut men on
one side, women on the other side issue. When people
(16:09):
were just sort of talking about it, expressing their their
take on it. The fire developer posted on Hacker News,
and I have to say his post, which is still up,
it's actually pretty civil. Uh. In my opinion, I do
not think that the fired developer was interested or intended
to whip up a hate mob around Adrian. I think
(16:31):
that that was not a consequence that he was expecting
or was welcoming in any way. He apologized, saying, quote, first,
I'd like to say I'm sorry. I really did not
mean to offend anyone, and I really do regret the
comment and how it made Adria feel she had every
right to report me to staff, and I defend her position,
which I think is like pretty recent. Yeah. He also
(16:54):
clarified her characterization of part of his comments. He says,
while I did make big dongle joke about a fictional
piece of hardware that identified as a male, no sexual
jokes were made about working. My friends and I had
decided that forking someone's repo is a new form of flattery,
and we were excited about one of the presenter's projects.
(17:15):
A friend said I would fork that guy's repo. The
sexual context was applied by Adria, not us, and I,
you know, I wasn't there, so I can't speak to
whether or not the forking part of that joke was
sextual or not. I will say that with jokes, oftentimes,
you know there's nuance and context between friends that maybe
(17:36):
can be easily missed when you're overhearing it. I have
no idea. I don't know. I whether I don't know
what he says. I can't read into what he's saying. Sure, yeah,
what do you think I'm like forking dongle if the
shoe fits um? But but sure, sir. Yeah, It's like
it's hard. It's hard. And what's what's funny is that
(18:00):
after what I'm sure it was like a well intentioned clarification.
Of course, people on the internet ran with that and
they were like, totally Andrea lied about what he said.
And it's like, well, I could even if even if
he is correct and she misrepresented or like misunderstood it,
it's not really a lie like that nuance is completely
stripped from the conversation when bad actors on the internet
(18:22):
get involved. Absolutely, I mean, we're out here analyzing somebody's
really bad middle school joke about gongles. Yeah, and it's
like I know what happens next, and it's like, don't
just like, don't defend your bad joke. I don't know,
like if you meant it that way or not putting
the blame on Adria. Just I don't think that was cool.
(18:44):
Like I'm not, I'm not, I'm not thrilled with that.
So this is something that I do have to take
issue with. In his post on Hacker News, he kind
of implies that Adria personally taking his photo and tweeting
it is the reason why he got fired. He it's
Adria has an audience and is a successful person of
the media. Just check out her web page linked in
(19:06):
her Twitter account or hard work and social activism speaks
for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility.
As a result of the picture she took, I was
let go from my job today, which sucks because I
have three kids and I really liked that job. She
gave me no warning. She smiled while she snapped my
picture and sealed my fate. Let this serve as a
(19:26):
message to everyone. Our actions and words, big or small,
can have serious impact. I have a question. Sure, I
looked up Adria again on Twitter before we started doing
this episode, and I'm sure it's changed since then. But
you know, at the time, do we know what her
bio was, Do we know how many followers she had?
(19:46):
Anything like that? Just as like a side note, Yeah,
I don't. It's not super clear. I think that when
he said media, I don't think that he was saying
and it does actually relate. I was gonna put this in,
but I didn't know how to say it. I think
that he was saying not that she is a member
of the media, which god, we know members of the
media are always attacked in the line. I think that
(20:08):
he was saying that she is a successful person of
the media, like she gets glowing media attention, because at
the time that was kind of her thing. I think
that basically, I guess, if I'm gonna keep it real,
this is just my opinion. I think he was trying
to sort of imply that she is someone who is
(20:29):
good at using the media and good at getting her
perspective and her name in the media for her causes.
And I think that he was kind of trying to
imply that in tweeting about his joke at this conference,
that she was perhaps intending to get media on her
side because she has a uh skilled that using media.
(20:53):
She's you know, she's a YouTuber. She's someone who like
has a name for herself and it's very visible. So
I think that he's making a nod toward her visibility,
which is sort of incumbent on media and her ability
to to be a person in media. That's what I think.
This is my opinion. Yeah, it just comes off as
like weird, weird, jealous vibes. It's just the phrasing and
(21:18):
what he said, it just comes off very well, she's
fake news, and um, why would you believe her when
she knows, like clearly she knows what she's doing here.
It just reads very Oh god, it just reads witch hunt.
I hate it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I really
struggled with how to deal with this nuance in the
(21:41):
episode because I do genuinely think the Spire developer is
trying to his best to be civil through a tough situation.
But I also think that he is using a couple
of key phrases that the audience definitely picked up on
as Oh, she was trying to like use him and
(22:01):
what he said to bolster her own career and to
boost her own profile. And the conversation around how Adrian
Richards handled this was very much steeped in. She was
really calculated, and she was doing this because she thought
it was going to, you know, empower her and boost
her own profile, and it was very like self motivated.
(22:24):
I honestly think she just tweeted it and didn't think
much of it and it blew up on her face.
If I'm being honest, just my perspective. But the way
that he writes his statement, people, what you're calling out
people definitely picked up on and ran with it. That
she is untrustworthy, that she is calculating and conniving, and
that she did this in a calculated, intentional move to
(22:46):
to cloud Chase and they're going to punish her for it.
How did she respond to his post? So that is
a great question. So she writes to his post on Hackernew,
she replies, I'm sorry to hear your employer decided not
to work with you on this, and I hope they
reconsider bring you back and deal with it constructively. So again,
(23:07):
she wasn't calling for him to be fired. If she was,
she could have easily, you know, said like this was
on you. You did this, you agree that you did it,
you should be fired. She didn't say any of that.
She was like, oh, sorry to hear, not what I
had in mind. I hope they reconsider. That's not that.
In my book, those are not the words of somebody
who is gleefully watching the takedown of somebody they're hoping
(23:29):
to clout build by tearing down, not at all. And
I think this is one of those as part of
the nuance of the conversation, because I think you could
argue that the men should not have been making these
kinds of jokes at the conference. And I also think
that it's within the realm of possibility that you could
take issue with the fact that Adria took a picture
(23:49):
of these guys and tweeted it. I'm I am a
big I think that taking pictures of people unless they're
committing an act of violence against you. I think taking
and tweeting pictures of people without their consent is like
a no no in my book. Just personally, I think
you could argue that she shouldn't have done that. Side note.
After the incident, ICON updated its attendee procedure for handling
(24:10):
harassment to encourage conference attendees to report behavior privately and
not to tweet about them publicly like Adria did, and
so their new procedures say public shaming can be counterproductive
to building a strong community. ICON does not condone nor
participate in such actions out of respect. I mean, I
think the word public shaming is such a loaded term,
(24:33):
and it is interesting to me that that is the
language that they chose to update their procedures. They said,
we don't want bad pr so let's keep these things quiet.
They didn't say they didn't. What they didn't say is
I mean, like I guess they said it prior where
they're like, we don't condone this type of thing. But
they made a public policy change that points the finger
(24:58):
again at Adria. She's consistently getting the finger pointed at her. Yeah.
Public And dare I say public shaming by POCON Maybe
a little bit, I mean I want to get into that,
but absolutely. And it's it's so funny that you bring
up this idea of how people attending a conference should
(25:18):
handle conflict. I am a longtime political organizer. I go
to a lot of like lefty progressive political conferences. At
the conferences that I go to, they will call your
ass out. Almost every single time I go to a conference,
like a net Roots or something, there is some elected
official who's being booed or bird dogged or tweeted at.
(25:40):
You know, I think Biden spoke there a couple of
years ago, and everybody was tweeting at the conference and
using the conference hashtag like oh why don't you go?
The ports of people are like like, like I came
up in a conference scene where it was expect I
totally expected that you were going to handle whatever conflicts
you had entirely publicly. So it is a little telling
(26:03):
to me that they're like, oh, no, part of our
quote of conduct is if you have a problem with somebody,
keep it on the hush hush, because it's like, well,
I don't know, I guess I feel like it shouldn't
be up to the conference to decide how I feel
it's best to handle my conflict. Like, I feel like
that's almost like a personal choice. That's it's a weird
micromanagement by the conference. I don't know. Yeah, you've definitely
(26:27):
are are somebody who spends more time at conferences than
I do. But unfortunately I was like, I was like,
I follow you on social media, um, and if you
don't follow Bridge of Fall Bridger, But yeah, that's weird.
It's anytime somebody's like, let's do this behind closed doors,
I'm like, oh, red flag. Yeah. I just feel like
(26:49):
having that as a rule that you have to agree
to in the code of conduct. Just in general, I
am not a big fan of a power structure telling
me that I can't be public about something that i've experienced.
I guess, let's put it that way totally. And so
even if you think that Adria should not have taken
the picture of these guys and tweeted it, Adria Richards
(27:10):
does not handle hr decisions at play Haven, right, and
they are the ones who decided to part ways with
this developer. Again, I have no evidence for this, but
I suspect that there might have been other reasons why
this developer was let go, particularly because that they only
fired the one developer and not the other, even when
two men were photographed. And it is really interesting to
(27:30):
meet how play Haven just allowed Adria to become this
very public scapegoat or their hiring and firing decisions. They
didn't speak up and say, hey, Adria doesn't work at
play Haven and had no you know, did not force
our hand. We made this decision. It is interesting to
me how they didn't take the flak publicly. This visible
(27:54):
black woman in technology was the one who got all
of the negative attention for their decision. And I guess
I think you know, companies just back then certainly did
not and I would argue still do not know how
to handle it when there is a big public outcry
happening around one of their employees. Had play Haven said
(28:16):
we're aware of the issue and we're taking the appropriate action.
Blah blah blah. You know, release some statement that's just like,
we know what's going on and we're gonna handle it.
None of this would have happened. You know, if people
are mad that this developer was fired, they should be
mad at play Haven, not Adria. But Adria as a
black woman, she's very visible and she represents all of
the different trigger points that make people mad. She's black,
(28:39):
she's outspoken, she's a woman, and she's very actively trying
to shake up the status quo in technology as being
this white male bros. Club, all of which makes her
an easy target when the actual decision makers are play Haven.
And it seems like people were not just angry about
the firing of this one developer, but they were angry
(29:00):
about is Age R. Richards and what she represents in technology.
She represents technology and technology spaces becoming more accommodating to
women and marginalized people. She represents women and marginalized people
having meaningful power in those spaces and feeling like they
can actually take up space in those spaces and with
that comes all the people who currently had power in
(29:23):
those spaces feeling threatened, feeling like the order that they
are used to where there on the top and have
the power, might actually be upset, and that they might
actually have to make room for people who traditionally have
not had a lot of institutional power in technology spaces.
That's what she represents. A good example of what I
mean is the fact that when this all was going down,
(29:45):
three redditors launched what they called the Feminist Defense Fund,
where they took donations in bitcoin for the fire developer,
and in their plea for donations, they write, feminism has
call us some serious changes to our culture, to our society,
into our lives. We focus on some that are effected
more than others, and we give back. Our goal is
to encourage men to speak out, to be men, to
(30:07):
not fear oppression, and enjoy their freedom of speech. Unfortunately,
in today's climate, being a man has become a financial liability.
Say the wrong thing in the wrong place, and you
can find your entire life ruined, destroyed. Feminists fought for equality,
but now they're out for our rights. They're destroying us financially.
They're trying to tear apart our families. We're saying that
(30:30):
enough is enough. No longer should men fear masculinity, No
longer should speaking up risk that man a job, a career,
or a family. It is time to rise up against
the tyranny. It is time to tell men it is
okay to speak up. We're here for you. This is
the Feminist Victims Fund. So it's so obvious, like what
they're pissed about. Oh god, crime, crime, crime, Oh god,
(30:54):
that was great. Man, read the room, my guy. Yeah,
it is like, it's so clear that they are using
this as a proxy to fight these larger kind of
culture wars issue. They don't care about this developer. They
don't care that even he agrees that joke that he
made was stupid and inappropriate for the setting. That's not
(31:16):
what they care about. They care about women, and in
this case, specifically a black woman shaking up the status
quo and technology and threatening what they see as the
way that the world in society should work. Let's get
(31:36):
into the fallout of what happened with all of this. So,
speaking of companies being really cowardly and caving to a mob,
that is pretty much what happened to Adria Richards. So
after the developer gets fired, the internet, or more specifically, fortune,
really turned on Adria and her employer sent Grid. Adria,
I have to say, is horribly, horribly harassed her website.
(32:00):
It gets a d O s attacked, which is, if
you don't know what that is, it's a denial of
service attack where essentially attackers blood a website with more
traffic than it can handle to shut it down. What
happened to Adria wasn't just people tweeting that they disagreed
with her, Nor was it just a few mean tweets
or mean comments online, which side note, Funnily enough, a
lot of the garden variety mean tweets directed at Adria
(32:22):
are still up as we speak. You know, tweets like quote,
horror cost two men their jobs in this economy, you
just made two families poor. I hope you feel good,
hypocritical bitch, or little did they know they were sitting
behind some count, or good job at being a picture
book feminist bitch? Or why are you such a count?
You know? So definitely not nice stuff. But those are
(32:45):
not even the tweets and messages and comments that I'm
talking about the harassment that Adria Richard Scott was heinous
and worse, it was coordinated. I personally witnessed many, many,
many death and rape threats that she got some of
the worst people on the internet. We're telling her in
mass that she deserved to die by suicide. They docked
(33:05):
and publicized her home address and phone number to the
point where she had to flee from her own home
for her own safety. Oh cool, they're dosing her. Yeah,
that's really scary. Fortune circulates a change dot org petition
calling for Adrian to be fired from sin grid. Meanwhile,
(33:26):
a pastebind document claims that anonymous has sin Grid's client
list and that they're harassing their customers and will continue
to do so if they don't fire her. Um here's
a bit from that post. They say ad R Richards
engaged in malicious conduct to destroy another individual's professional career
due to what she perceived as an affront to her
own extremist views from a comment that was not directed
(33:48):
at her, not meant for her to hear, and certainly
not for her to provide unwarranted input on. As such,
she should have her professional career destroyed just like her victim,
and ordered for justice to be rendered and for balance
to be restored in the universe. The Hive Minds judgment
is final. There is no appeal, no forgiveness, no forgetting. Remember,
(34:09):
real life harassment is an escalation that comes into play
based on how long the situation is allowed to play out.
It is not affected by the effectiveness of previous forms
of harassment. Even if your customers and financial backers are
dropping like flies, this will still happen if Anonymous maintains
an interest in the situation. Boxing is a term used
to define the discovery and dissemination of all personal information, included,
(34:32):
but not limited to, home address, phone numbers, credit card numbers,
your medical records, what brand of toothpaste you buy, etcetera.
If some of the more talented members of Anonymous take
interest into this, every employee of sent grid becomes a target,
starting at the top. For your reference. This is already
happening to miss Richards as per standard protocol. So basically
(34:53):
that's like a clear threat, like this is you know
whether this is legit or not. This is someone basically
trying to scare this this major tech company. So the
attacks on send grid worsen um sin Grid acknowledge that
they had suffered a denial of service attack, and so
(35:14):
you know, this is a major company and their website
traffic is essentially shut down. They're not able to have
have people go to their website, which is a pretty
big deal. And so I guess I feel like if
I was running a big company, I would not cave
to a mob that is outright threatening me. But that's
exactly what sin Grid did. Sin Grid eventually cave to
(35:36):
this mob and fired Adria, and they fired her publicly.
Cowards fucking coward ship. It's so cowardly, and so they
write on Facebook. Effective immediately, sin Grid has terminated the
employment of Adria Richards. While we are generally sensitive and
confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken
(35:58):
on a public nature, and we have taken action that
we believe is in the overall best interests of sin Grid,
its employees, and our customers. A few hours later, sent
Grid CEO Jim Franklin expanded on the company's reasons for
firing Adria, writing, sin Grid supports the right to report
and appropriate behavior whenever and wherever it occurs. What we
(36:20):
do not support was how she reported the conduct. Her
decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people
who made the comments cross the line. Publicly shaming the
offenders and bystanders was not the appropriate way to handle
the situation. And the aftermath of all of this was
that Adria had to literally go into hiding. And she
(36:43):
was someone who had this big voice online and this
big online footprint, and she essentially stopped tweeting and stopped
making videos and stopped putting our perspective out into the
world after this happened. And so, you know, I feel
like so many people, for example, the men's rights activists
who were raising money for the fired engineer, we'll talk
(37:05):
so much about things like free speech, free speech, but
they almost never talked about the fact that somebody like Adria,
who was someone who really did a lot of putting
her voice out into the world, was effectively silenced when
this harassment campaign against her began. So she she wasn't
continuing to, you know, speak up. And so when we
(37:26):
talk about whose free speech is being threatened, it's almost
never the marginalized people who have to stop speaking and
our silence when they become the targets of harassment campaigns
like Adria was. So that's basically what happened with Advia Richards.
And so there are so many takeaways here and so
many things I think that we can learn from this situation.
(37:50):
One is that I believe that Adrivia Richards situation really
ushered in this new understanding of situations that are complicated
and involve being real people being treated like tit for tat,
you know, these culture wars and identity wars, point scoring
where our guy got fired, so their guy has to
(38:10):
get fired, or this happened, so that happened. You know,
they made a black aerial in The Little Mermaid, so
now they need to make a Malcolm X movie where
Malcolm X is white. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead, bro,
try that one. Go ahead. Yeah. It's a completely reductive
and unhelpful thing that I think that dongle Gate really
(38:33):
ushered in. You know, the big rallying cry in dongle
Gate was that because the play Haven developer was fired,
that Adrian needed to be fired just like he was.
You know, as that poster put it, she should have
to have her professional career destroyed just like her victim
in order for justice to be rendered and for balance
to be restored to the universe. But in the real
(38:54):
world of complexity and nuance and adults. It's really just
not help to have these situations be viewed through this
incredibly simple, black and white binary lens. And when you do,
you are creating the conditions that are prime for bad
actors to exploit. And that brings me to my next takeaway,
(39:15):
which is bad actors. Those fuckers ruin everything. And I
feel like the situation is a great example because even
though dongle gate was obviously very gendered, I don't want
to give the impression that it was that all of
the men who did not agree with Adria taking a
picture of these guys. It's not like all of them
(39:35):
had joined in on this harassment campaign against Adria. And
there were certainly women in tech who did not agree
with Adria's actions. One of them Amanda Blum, who was
a developer who worked with Adria I r L when
she invited Adria to speak at a conference that she organized.
Um she writes in her blog post about how she
did not have a great interaction with Adria. She was like, Oh,
(39:56):
I don't really like her, but that doesn't mean that
this kind of harassment campaign against her is good. You know,
her her piece, which will link to in the show notes,
is this very measured piece about what went down, and
basically pointed out that she felt like everyone lost here.
It was just a loss for everyone, And so I
think that reasonable people could agree or disagree with what
(40:19):
Adria did, and they did agree or disagree. There was
a lot of substantive conversation online about what it means
to be a woman in tech, how men can be
allies to women in tech? Are men going to be,
you know, afraid of making whatever joke or speaking up
that they're working with women? How can women and men
(40:39):
and everybody all work together in these spaces. There was
a lot of really meaty, meaningful conversation that I think
was sparked from dongle Gate. But what people remember was
not the meaningful conversation or people like Amanda writing measured
takes about the situation. They remember the hateful mob, right,
They don't remember any of that meaningful conversation. So I
(41:02):
believe that the kind of behavior like these coordinated attacks
that we saw from Fortune actually drown out debate and discourse.
They don't make us more thoughtful, They don't push us
forward on all of the issues that we need to
make progress on They keep us all polarized and enraged
and frankly stuck having these silly circular debates about well
(41:24):
he got fired, so she should get fired. That don't
help our serve anybody. You know, an online mob like
Fortune getting involved in this situation didn't make it more clear.
It just inflamed it and polarized it. And these situations
already exist at tension points between things like race and
gender and conversations around inclusion in tech that we know
(41:45):
are kind of heated. You know, it's predated that Google
employee who kind of became an right murder after he
wrote that memo blasting diversity in tech. You know, so like,
these are conversations that are hot, that are that are
hense and you know, as someone who works in combating
miss and disinformation, this is a textbook tactic of bad
(42:08):
actors to purposely inflame conversations that are rooted in these
things that are legitimate tension and pressure points, and to
hijack those conversations and to weaponize them so that pretty
much it ensures we can never get anywhere on them.
And I think the sad part about all of this
is that it sounds like from all public accounts that
(42:28):
Adrian and the Fire Developer seems like people who were
being used as proxies in a larger kind of identity
culture war fight. In that hacker news back and forth
that they had, they seemed like two people who were
genuinely interested in coming to some kind of a conclusion
with one another. But that is simply not possible when
bad actors with an ax to grind hijack conversations and
(42:52):
are really invested in making those conversations as polarized as possible. Yeah,
I was gonna say the comments section definitely wasn't looking
to find a solution here. They were just looking to
cause more chaos and uh, make things worse for everybody.
In the Fire Developers post, there are people who are like,
(43:13):
when he apologizes for his comments, don't apologize? How is
that helpful if somebody has taken a look inward at
their own behavior and feels the need to apologize. And
this goes for pretty much all conversations. If a celebrity
is saying something on the Internet, there's always and they
apologize for something, It's always going to be that one
stand in the comments who's like Queen don't apologize like
(43:33):
we love you, you you know what I mean, I certainly do.
Another takeaway from this is that companies and institutions just
didn't know how to deal with mobs back then, and frankly,
I don't think they've gotten much better today. You know,
as fucked up as four Chune ship heads were here,
(43:55):
my real beef is actually with play Haven and sent Grid.
This was happening back in teen and maybe none of us,
and by extension, the people who run companies didn't know
how to handle it when a mob swarmed around one
of their employees. You know, play Haven was ultimately the
decider when deciding to fire that developer that Adria photographed.
They didn't have to do that, and they certainly did
(44:17):
not have to let Adria take the fall for what
was entirely their decision and no one else's. And to
that point, they didn't even if this was somebody that
that deserved to be fired for reasons we don't know about,
they didn't need to make it public and therefore point
that mob towards Adria and then just sit back and
(44:40):
say nothing as this mob pour her apart and she
had to flee her home and locked down her entire
online presence that she had been building forever, you know,
totally completely Yeah, and looking at sin Grid, I'm sure
that sin Grid, as a big tech company, loved having
a visible black woman in tech when Adrian was making
(45:01):
their company look very inclusive and forward looking. But when
that same employee was facing racialized harassment, they did not
support her. And this is sort of a side note,
pet peeve of mine. People are so fond of saying
things like, oh, support black women, champion black women, you know,
support their leadership, without acknowledging that part of supporting the
(45:24):
leadership of black women is also being honest about the
climate that a lot of black women will be coming into.
You know, if you're a visible black woman coming into
a pretty white, pretty male field, you might have a
little bit of a tougher time. And ignoring it and
pretending that is not the case is not actually supporting
black women. And so I always say, don't just support
(45:44):
black women, also work to create the conditions where black
women can actually have an equal playing field and and
thrive in the work that you want to support them in.
Um sen Grid also did not have to cave to
these coordinated four chan mob attacks that were threatening their
business via harassment and denial of service attacks, you know,
fin Grid. If I had been running sin Grid, I
(46:06):
would have said, you know, hey, people who are angry,
we hear you, but our personnel decisions are our private
business and we will handle this privately, even if they
felt like Adria deserved to be reprimanded. I think it's
pretty rich that in their statement public statement on Facebook
about her firing, that they say that, oh, we're against
(46:26):
public shaming, and Adria publicly shamed these men and then
said nothing as Adria was harassed publicly with rape and
death threats and racial slurs, and then fire her in public,
completely inflaming the very public shaming that she was going through.
It's just cowardly. And these are the exact same kind
of tactics that would go on to fuel gamer Gate,
(46:49):
you know, coordinating on message boards like Fortune to avenge
some perceived grievance around women and feminists and marginalized people
claiming power in a tech space. You know, in the
case of gamer Gate video games, I would argue that
if we had done some real collective analysis after dongle Gate,
we might not then have allowed bad actors have basically
do the exact same thing a year later with gaybor Gate.
(47:11):
I think things would have gone very differently had we
had some kind of public accounting for what actually happened,
who were the major players, and what decisions allowed those
tactics to be weaponized in that way. And I feel
like today, you know, the targets may have changed, but
the tactics are pretty much the same. You know, we
still see the same kind of thing play out. A
small handful of bad actors have pretty much used this
(47:35):
playbook to get their way, and I think they're going
to continue doing it until we do something. For example,
by now, I think that most folks listening know that
just this last week, there was a violent attack on
Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, who was attacked with a
hammer to the head while he was sleeping by an
assailant who claimed that he wanted to break Nancy Pelosi's
(47:55):
knees to send a message of fear to other Democrats,
and per of the writings of the accused attacker online,
it was gamer Gate that, you know, for lack of
a better word, radicalized him, and that he described gamer
Gate as the turning point in his own trajectory politically. Now.
I have a ton to say about this. We're gonna
do a whole other episode later this week all about this,
(48:18):
but I'll just say right now that gamer Gate provided
this connection between the cultural and the political. You know,
you're angry about women taking up space and technology and gaming,
so you use these tactics to harass and attack them
and take away their power. And it really created a
blueprint for how those same tactics could be weaponized politically
as well, which I think is exactly what we're seeing
(48:40):
right now. And maybe if when all of this was
happening with Adria Richards, if the takeaway hadn't been to
just blame her for her own harassment and to think
a little bit more clearly about how these same tactics
might be perfected and abused and weaponized on larger and
larger scales, targeting more and more people, maybe these gamer
Gate tact would not be happening as part and parcel
(49:02):
of our current political and social landscape now. You know,
things like people coordinating on Facebook pages to flood schools
with calls about teachers who they suspect of being lgbt Q,
or you know, they suspect of teaching something that they
don't like in schools, which happened to a Georgia school teacher,
Cecilia Lewis, who will talk about in a later episode
(49:22):
of this podcast. You know, that's definitely a tactic that
I see that was really refined in dongle Gate and
gamer Gate, and rather than taking some kind of action
to have that not be a tactic that is so
easily weaponized against people who are marginalized, now it's just
a tactic that we all have to live with, whether
you're marginalized or not. Now it's a Now, it's just
(49:44):
part of our political and social landscape that unfortunately, I
worry is not going to go away. In fact, is
going to become worse. It also happened recently to a
woman named Nina janko Witz, who was the former head
of the Biden administration's Disinformation When It's board, who eventually
had to resign and go into hiding after a right
wing smear campaign against her. You know, I think it
(50:07):
doesn't take that many people to really disrupt and shut
down institutions if those institutions do not know how to
handle it when one of their employees is being attacked
in this coordinated way like these women have been. And
it also is one of the reasons why, and I
know this is perhaps a bit of an unpopular opinion
(50:30):
why I think that it's not great when the internet
rallies together to like call someone's boss to get them fired,
even if I ostensibly agree with like, that person needs
to be fired, right, I definitely have seen situations on
the Internet where I'm like, oh, well, that person should
not hold the office that they hold. But I just
(50:51):
don't think that the tactic of coordinating people to call
someone's an employer or to disrupt their work for their
life is a good one because companies are cowardly and
we know that they will cave to mobs, and I
just think it turns into an easily gamified numbers game
that I know, the worst people on the Internet can
(51:12):
definitely coordinate to get a blood of angry emails or
tweets to give the impression that there is a broad
consensus where really there is none, you know, And I'm
certainly not going to act like I don't find it
cathartic when I'm being a video of a racist in
public lose their jobs. I fucking love that ship. Who doesn't. Right,
I'm not gonna say that, I I it's a good time.
(51:34):
It's a good time. I'm not going to say that
I'm like above that. But I just know that that
tactic is so easily weaponized by bad actors coordinating for
bad and so I just think it's something that as
good stewards of the Internet, we have to really be
careful when we traffic and tactics like that, because it
(51:55):
is a tactic that is well worn by bad actors,
and I don't think it's getting us to a place
that is better on the Internet. Internet Hate Machine is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, check out our website cool zone media
dot com, or find us on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Bridget Todd, and you're listening to Internet Hate Machines,
and I am here with my lovely producer, Sophie. Sophie,
how are you. I'm doing well, Bridget, How are you?
I'm doing good? And I am so excited for the
first official episode of Internet Hate Machine because we're talking
about a topic that I've kind of think about a lot,
(00:21):
and that is the saga of Adria Richards. And I
know that you know a little bit about this story
one of my favorite named topics on the internet, dongle gate,
but you know, I only really know the surface level.
So I'm really looking forward to hearing more about this
from you and more about Adria as a person. Yeah,
(00:41):
we're gonna be using the word dongle a lot in
this episode. Just two level set love that. One of
the reasons I wanted to start with Adria Richards is
because I think that she really represents an early situation
where bad actors were able to completely hijack a sensitive,
complicated situation in ways that they're still doing to this
(01:01):
very day. And I think it's a really great early
example of how when a black woman is being harassed
and attacked online, people watching will essentially fit back and
say she probably deserved it. So let's get into it.
That started the beginning. Who is Adrian Richards Well, Adrian
Richards is a black woman who has been working as
(01:23):
an engineer since about She first got her start in
technology as a network administrator and started volunteering teaching tech
skills in her spare time. And while she started working
her way up in these like successful tech startups, she
also kind of became this visible black woman in tech.
You know, she was doing a lot of media. She
had a pretty big YouTube channel with a healthy number
(01:46):
of subscribers. She celebrated ten thousand subscribers where she does
these accessible tech tutorials mixed with kind of every day
I guess lifestyle content like dating advice, And she does
a lot of content where she is calling out examples
of sexism in tech. Um, that's kind of I guess
(02:08):
her brand or her thing is these explorations of gender
and technology and the way that they intersect. Like her
personal website where she has her blog is called but
You're a Girl dot com, so you can sort of
get a sense of she's someone who is really interested
in shaking up the status quo in technology. She travels
(02:29):
to speak at these pretty big deal tech conferences where
she often is talking about things like diversity in tech
and inclusion in tech. Here's a little clip of her
speaking at one of those conferences. Any startup you're gonna
work at, it's not going to be all one gender.
If you're a woman, it's very unlikely. So you're gonna
need to work with guys. So you should be going
(02:49):
to events that have guys. And it's not that guys
don't want to help, but we have to give them
opportunities for them to be allies. So that was it,
Just a quick little clip that I think speaks to
um a little bit about what happened with her side.
Now somebody we would totally be friends with. Oh, absolutely, absolutely,
(03:09):
no question. So what I was doing research for this episode,
I really kind of enjoyed going back in time and
looking at Adria's digital life before what went down went down,
because honestly, she kind of just gives off vibes of
a black woman who is killing it, like she's really
hit her stride. Watching her talk about technology, she comes
(03:32):
off as really confident and happy and like she's in
like really walking in her power and It was exciting
to watch, but it kind of made me sad. Knowing
a little bit about what happens next, you might be
asking what happened to Adrea Richards. Adrea starts working as
a developer evangelist, which is basically, if you don't know
what that is, it's someone whose role is to work
(03:54):
with developers, help them solve problems, help them level up
in their career. She gets the job as a developer
evangelists for the email vendor sind Grid, and then she
goes to Peicon, a conference for Python users, and while
she's there, she is sitting in the main conference room
during a keynote talk, and she turns around to have
(04:17):
a conversation with some attendees behind her, having a normal
talk about some of the presentations they've seen, when she
overhears a pair of male attendees who are also developers,
making a crass joke while seated behind her. Now, the
actual nature of the joke is somewhat in dispute. A
little bit more on that later, but essentially, the crux
(04:38):
of the joke is that they're talking about dongles because
they work in tech, and the crux of the joke
is that dongle is a funny sounding word that kind
of sounds like dog, wow, brave such as just transferred
me back to you know, the seventh grade cool cool, cool. Yeah.
I mean it's it's crass and it's immature, and it's
(05:01):
like it's like, like I said, it's like very middle school.
It is very middle school. It takes me back to
a lot of text bases I've been in where that
is the love that it just it is the level
of humor that you kind of are asked to smile
through and be like ha ha, this is one percent bridging.
(05:21):
I actually don't know if you know that, like one
of my first jobs out of college, I worked in
tech for several years, and I don't think on microoff
Mike we've talked about this at all. But yeah, I
definitely know exactly what you're talking about. In those In
those scenes, especially when there's very few women around the
the nature of the jokes can sometimes be a little
(05:44):
bit off putting to say the least. Yes, exactly, and
I think that's exactly where Adrian was at as well.
So she didn't say anything in the moment, She didn't
say that this bothered her, and she explains that choice
in her blog. She writes, I didn't want to be
heckled or have my experience denied, which I also really,
(06:05):
I'm sure you do. Having worked in tech, I know
what she's talking about. I did it. She probably didn't
want to have that vibe of, oh, she's crazy, she's
over sensitive. You know you, you know you can you
kind of have a sense of maybe it's not going
to go that well if you take the route of saying, hey, guys,
knock it off. Oh my god, she's so emotional, she's
in her feelings. Why can't we just can't we just
(06:28):
be our souls? It's like, all right, exactly. So, rather
than saying something to them in the moment, she takes
out her phone, takes their picture, and tweets it, tweeting
quote not cool jokes about forking repose in a sexual
way and big dongles right behind me hashtag picon. She
(06:50):
goes on to tweet, can someone talk to these guys
about their conduct? I'm in lightning talks top right near stage,
Tin roseback hashtag picon, and then she tweets the code
of conduct for the conference, which in part says, quote
offensive jokes are not appropriate for Peicon. So initially, Adrian
said that she was wanted to ignore this, but in
(07:11):
her blog but I'm a Girl, Adria explained what triggered
her to send that tweet. She writes, I was gonna
let it go. It has been a long week, a
long month. I've been on the road since mid February
attending and speaking at conferences. Icon was my fifth and
final conference before heading home. I know it's important to
pick my battles and I don't have to be a
(07:31):
hero and in every situation, but sometimes I want to
go to a conference and be a geek. But like Popeye,
I couldn't stands it no more because of what happened.
She talks about how her company was a sponsor for
this event and when she heard them talking about dongles,
she felt blustered. Then, she writes, then it happened the trigger.
(07:55):
She's watching somebody on the main stage and he's talking
about this young Hooder's workshop that Adrian volunteered at. He
was mentioning that the Pie Ladies auction had raised ten
thousand dollars in a single night for funds that we're
going to be used to support this young Coder's Workshop initiative.
I saw a photo on the main stage of a
little girl who had been in the Young Coder's Workshop.
(08:16):
I realized I had to do something because she would
never have the chance to learn and love programming because
the ask clowns behind me would make it impossible for
her to do so. So I I remember reading this
when the whole situation was going down, and I was
very moved by what she had written. Um, I think
it's if you're if you're listening to this and thinking
(08:37):
that seems a little overdone. Fine, sure, but I guess
I'm saying that I understand what where she sort of
coming from when she wrote that. Yeah, I mean like,
I definitely have empathy for for the way that she's
feeling here. I feel like that happens to a lot
of people in the business world, and specifically within the
(08:59):
tech space, where you're in a situation where you're like, well,
I could say nothing, but you know that would be
very disappointing to child me, or to my niece, to
my nephew, to my daughter, to my son, the inner
child in me where where I'm like, okay, you know,
(09:21):
I couldn't. While this might seem small to some who's
to say that many small things. If you let it
go this time, you might let it go the next
ten times, and then it's just a habit, and then
it's a pattern, and then you're enabling. So that's exactly
what she says. In her blog, she writes about how
this incident was actually not the first time that she
(09:42):
had heard a sexualizing joke at that particular conference. She
describes how earlier during that event, in a hallway, a
guy had made a crass joke about looking under the
skirt of the table and you know, make he made
some crass long and about it, not like so it
doesn't have pubic hair, just like I like it. But
because this happened in a way, I know, really not great.
(10:09):
She says that because this happened in a hallway and
not like at a seated, you know, main stage event
while somebody's on stage talking, she actually did feel comfortable
speaking up to whoever made that joke. And I think
it's exactly what you were saying, Sophie. It sounds like
this was death by a thousand cuts for her, where
it was laugh it off, laugh it off, say something,
(10:31):
say something, and eventually she just couldn't anymore. Like I've
been there where you just hit your limit of ship
that you are willing to smile through or giggle through
or brush off to the point where you just can't anymore.
The conference staff talk to the guys who end up
being developers who made the joke. For their part, it
(10:55):
sounds like these guys handled it very well. Ticon put
out a state meant saying quote. An incident occurred involving
some inappropriate comments made during a crowded plenary session her
the state of guidelines for the attendees and staff. The
issue was reported to PIKE staff and resolved privately. Both
parties were met with in private. The comments that were
(11:16):
made were in poor taste, and the individuals involved agreed, apologized,
and no further action were taken by the staff of Pike.
No individuals were removed from a conference, no sanctions were levied,
and so honestly, it sounds like it truly could have
ended there. You know, these developers who were making this
crass joke, they they seem like they legitimately felt bad.
(11:39):
They apologized. Picon staff it sounds like they acted quickly
and it was resolved. It truly could have been there,
and honestly, throughout the entire situation, Adrian is clear both
in her writing and in her actions that she does
not want these men fired. You know, she is not
calling for any consequences were them beyond just being talked
(12:02):
to about appropriate conduct by the Picon staff, which they were,
So this truly could have just been the end of it. Yeah,
it sounds like all she really wanted to do was
come on, guys, not a time or place, do better?
Does it? It's easy for me to have a lot
of empathy for all of the individuals involved in the situation,
Like those guys shouldn't have been making that joke. It
(12:23):
does sound like it was crass and stupid. It does
sound like it was against the rules of what happened.
It's easy for me to just because I'm someone who
says things without thinking a lot, it's easy for me
to put myself in their shoes of like, oh, yes,
certainly I've said things where it comes out of my
mouth and boy I wish it hadn't. You know? For
sure somebody who's on a lot of podcasts can relate,
(12:47):
can relate. Yeah, I'm not saying that these guys are
like the worst guys ever, and they handled it very well.
Both men worked for a company called play Haven, which
was a sponsor for picon the event, and this incident
led to one, but not both of the men being fired.
Play Haven CEO Andy Yang acknowledge the firing, writing quote,
(13:11):
play Haven had an employee who was identified as making
inappropriate comments at picon, and as a company that is
dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted
a throw investigation. The results of this investigation led to
the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go.
We believe in the importance of discussing sensitive topics such
as gender and conduct, and we hope to move forward
(13:32):
with a civil dialogue based on the facts, which unfortunately
does not happen. But you know, and you might be
asking yourself, Well, HbF photographed and pointed out two men
who worked at play Haven who were having this inappropriate conversation,
So you might be asking why was only one man
fired and not the other. Play Haven went on to
(13:52):
say in their statement that they would not comment on
all the factors that contributed to our parting ways with
the one developer, So it's totally clear, you know what
is actually happening if the decision was entirely about what
happened at picon, or if something else contributed to it, Right,
this could have been a a noted behavior from this
(14:15):
person or some other reason. Yeah, that's interesting and and
kind of um, I would say, CEO and Yang actually
taking action is kind of rare, I would say, especially
at that time. So that's that's interesting to know here
as well. But yeah, I totally see what you're saying,
(14:35):
Like there could have been other things there that we
just don't know and we'll never know. But yeah, what happened, Oh,
I know what I good to what happened. I'm bombed.
It's not great. And honestly, like I I mean, I
don't know, I don't have any kind of special insight,
but I would be willing to bet just from what
(14:57):
I know about how tech companies work that play Haven
that there was some sort of information that maybe we're
not privy to that play Haven like maybe this was
a pattern, maybe there were other factors at play, and
play Haven was like, well, you know, let's just part
ways with this person and this is just another just
just one more reason why we should take that action.
(15:26):
So after Adria's tweet, everyone kind of starts responding to
what happened. Now. I absolutely do not think that Adria
thought that this was going to blow up the way
that it did, with so many people beyond the tech
conference weighing in. You know, some people are supportive of Adria,
others are supportive of the developers. And I have to say,
(15:47):
this is to be really clear, not all the people
who were not on adria side are men. There were.
I saw a lot of women weighing in and saying
that they felt like Adria was making it harder for
them as women in tech by being so are sensitive
or not just talking directly to the men, right, So
it's not it's certainly not a clear cut men on
one side, women on the other side issue. When people
(16:09):
were just sort of talking about it, expressing their their
take on it. The fire developer posted on Hacker News,
and I have to say his post, which is still up,
it's actually pretty civil. Uh. In my opinion, I do
not think that the fired developer was interested or intended
to whip up a hate mob around Adrian. I think
(16:31):
that that was not a consequence that he was expecting
or was welcoming in any way. He apologized, saying, quote, first,
I'd like to say I'm sorry. I really did not
mean to offend anyone, and I really do regret the
comment and how it made Adria feel she had every
right to report me to staff, and I defend her position,
which I think is like pretty recent. Yeah. He also
(16:54):
clarified her characterization of part of his comments. He says,
while I did make big dongle joke about a fictional
piece of hardware that identified as a male, no sexual
jokes were made about working. My friends and I had
decided that forking someone's repo is a new form of flattery,
and we were excited about one of the presenter's projects.
(17:15):
A friend said I would fork that guy's repo. The
sexual context was applied by Adria, not us, and I,
you know, I wasn't there, so I can't speak to
whether or not the forking part of that joke was
sextual or not. I will say that with jokes, oftentimes,
you know there's nuance and context between friends that maybe
(17:36):
can be easily missed when you're overhearing it. I have
no idea. I don't know. I whether I don't know
what he says. I can't read into what he's saying. Sure, yeah,
what do you think I'm like forking dongle if the
shoe fits um? But but sure, sir. Yeah, It's like
it's hard. It's hard. And what's what's funny is that
(18:00):
after what I'm sure it was like a well intentioned clarification.
Of course, people on the internet ran with that and
they were like, totally Andrea lied about what he said.
And it's like, well, I could even if even if
he is correct and she misrepresented or like misunderstood it,
it's not really a lie like that nuance is completely
stripped from the conversation when bad actors on the internet
(18:22):
get involved. Absolutely, I mean, we're out here analyzing somebody's
really bad middle school joke about gongles. Yeah, and it's
like I know what happens next, and it's like, don't
just like, don't defend your bad joke. I don't know,
like if you meant it that way or not putting
the blame on Adria. Just I don't think that was cool.
(18:44):
Like I'm not, I'm not, I'm not thrilled with that.
So this is something that I do have to take
issue with. In his post on Hacker News, he kind
of implies that Adria personally taking his photo and tweeting
it is the reason why he got fired. He it's
Adria has an audience and is a successful person of
the media. Just check out her web page linked in
(19:06):
her Twitter account or hard work and social activism speaks
for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility.
As a result of the picture she took, I was
let go from my job today, which sucks because I
have three kids and I really liked that job. She
gave me no warning. She smiled while she snapped my
picture and sealed my fate. Let this serve as a
(19:26):
message to everyone. Our actions and words, big or small,
can have serious impact. I have a question. Sure, I
looked up Adria again on Twitter before we started doing
this episode, and I'm sure it's changed since then. But
you know, at the time, do we know what her
bio was, Do we know how many followers she had?
(19:46):
Anything like that? Just as like a side note, Yeah,
I don't. It's not super clear. I think that when
he said media, I don't think that he was saying
and it does actually relate. I was gonna put this in,
but I didn't know how to say it. I think
that he was saying not that she is a member
of the media, which god, we know members of the
media are always attacked in the line. I think that
(20:08):
he was saying that she is a successful person of
the media, like she gets glowing media attention, because at
the time that was kind of her thing. I think
that basically, I guess, if I'm gonna keep it real,
this is just my opinion. I think he was trying
to sort of imply that she is someone who is
(20:29):
good at using the media and good at getting her
perspective and her name in the media for her causes.
And I think that he was kind of trying to
imply that in tweeting about his joke at this conference,
that she was perhaps intending to get media on her
side because she has a uh skilled that using media.
(20:53):
She's you know, she's a YouTuber. She's someone who like
has a name for herself and it's very visible. So
I think that he's making a nod toward her visibility,
which is sort of incumbent on media and her ability
to to be a person in media. That's what I think.
This is my opinion. Yeah, it just comes off as
like weird, weird, jealous vibes. It's just the phrasing and
(21:18):
what he said, it just comes off very well, she's
fake news, and um, why would you believe her when
she knows, like clearly she knows what she's doing here.
It just reads very Oh god, it just reads witch hunt.
I hate it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I really
struggled with how to deal with this nuance in the
(21:41):
episode because I do genuinely think the Spire developer is
trying to his best to be civil through a tough situation.
But I also think that he is using a couple
of key phrases that the audience definitely picked up on
as Oh, she was trying to like use him and
(22:01):
what he said to bolster her own career and to
boost her own profile. And the conversation around how Adrian
Richards handled this was very much steeped in. She was
really calculated, and she was doing this because she thought
it was going to, you know, empower her and boost
her own profile, and it was very like self motivated.
(22:24):
I honestly think she just tweeted it and didn't think
much of it and it blew up on her face.
If I'm being honest, just my perspective. But the way
that he writes his statement, people, what you're calling out
people definitely picked up on and ran with it. That
she is untrustworthy, that she is calculating and conniving, and
that she did this in a calculated, intentional move to
(22:46):
to cloud Chase and they're going to punish her for it.
How did she respond to his post? So that is
a great question. So she writes to his post on Hackernew,
she replies, I'm sorry to hear your employer decided not
to work with you on this, and I hope they
reconsider bring you back and deal with it constructively. So again,
(23:07):
she wasn't calling for him to be fired. If she was,
she could have easily, you know, said like this was
on you. You did this, you agree that you did it,
you should be fired. She didn't say any of that.
She was like, oh, sorry to hear, not what I
had in mind. I hope they reconsider. That's not that.
In my book, those are not the words of somebody
who is gleefully watching the takedown of somebody they're hoping
(23:29):
to clout build by tearing down, not at all. And
I think this is one of those as part of
the nuance of the conversation, because I think you could
argue that the men should not have been making these
kinds of jokes at the conference. And I also think
that it's within the realm of possibility that you could
take issue with the fact that Adria took a picture
(23:49):
of these guys and tweeted it. I'm I am a
big I think that taking pictures of people unless they're
committing an act of violence against you. I think taking
and tweeting pictures of people without their consent is like
a no no in my book. Just personally, I think
you could argue that she shouldn't have done that. Side note.
After the incident, ICON updated its attendee procedure for handling
(24:10):
harassment to encourage conference attendees to report behavior privately and
not to tweet about them publicly like Adria did, and
so their new procedures say public shaming can be counterproductive
to building a strong community. ICON does not condone nor
participate in such actions out of respect. I mean, I
think the word public shaming is such a loaded term,
(24:33):
and it is interesting to me that that is the
language that they chose to update their procedures. They said,
we don't want bad pr so let's keep these things quiet.
They didn't say they didn't. What they didn't say is
I mean, like I guess they said it prior where
they're like, we don't condone this type of thing. But
they made a public policy change that points the finger
(24:58):
again at Adria. She's consistently getting the finger pointed at her. Yeah.
Public And dare I say public shaming by POCON Maybe
a little bit, I mean I want to get into that,
but absolutely. And it's it's so funny that you bring
up this idea of how people attending a conference should
(25:18):
handle conflict. I am a longtime political organizer. I go
to a lot of like lefty progressive political conferences. At
the conferences that I go to, they will call your
ass out. Almost every single time I go to a conference,
like a net Roots or something, there is some elected
official who's being booed or bird dogged or tweeted at.
(25:40):
You know, I think Biden spoke there a couple of
years ago, and everybody was tweeting at the conference and
using the conference hashtag like oh why don't you go?
The ports of people are like like, like I came
up in a conference scene where it was expect I
totally expected that you were going to handle whatever conflicts
you had entirely publicly. So it is a little telling
(26:03):
to me that they're like, oh, no, part of our
quote of conduct is if you have a problem with somebody,
keep it on the hush hush, because it's like, well,
I don't know, I guess I feel like it shouldn't
be up to the conference to decide how I feel
it's best to handle my conflict. Like, I feel like
that's almost like a personal choice. That's it's a weird
micromanagement by the conference. I don't know. Yeah, you've definitely
(26:27):
are are somebody who spends more time at conferences than
I do. But unfortunately I was like, I was like,
I follow you on social media, um, and if you
don't follow Bridge of Fall Bridger, But yeah, that's weird.
It's anytime somebody's like, let's do this behind closed doors,
I'm like, oh, red flag. Yeah. I just feel like
(26:49):
having that as a rule that you have to agree
to in the code of conduct. Just in general, I
am not a big fan of a power structure telling
me that I can't be public about something that i've experienced.
I guess, let's put it that way totally. And so
even if you think that Adria should not have taken
the picture of these guys and tweeted it, Adria Richards
(27:10):
does not handle hr decisions at play Haven, right, and
they are the ones who decided to part ways with
this developer. Again, I have no evidence for this, but
I suspect that there might have been other reasons why
this developer was let go, particularly because that they only
fired the one developer and not the other, even when
two men were photographed. And it is really interesting to
(27:30):
meet how play Haven just allowed Adria to become this
very public scapegoat or their hiring and firing decisions. They
didn't speak up and say, hey, Adria doesn't work at
play Haven and had no you know, did not force
our hand. We made this decision. It is interesting to
me how they didn't take the flak publicly. This visible
(27:54):
black woman in technology was the one who got all
of the negative attention for their decision. And I guess
I think you know, companies just back then certainly did
not and I would argue still do not know how
to handle it when there is a big public outcry
happening around one of their employees. Had play Haven said
(28:16):
we're aware of the issue and we're taking the appropriate action.
Blah blah blah. You know, release some statement that's just like,
we know what's going on and we're gonna handle it.
None of this would have happened. You know, if people
are mad that this developer was fired, they should be
mad at play Haven, not Adria. But Adria as a
black woman, she's very visible and she represents all of
the different trigger points that make people mad. She's black,
(28:39):
she's outspoken, she's a woman, and she's very actively trying
to shake up the status quo in technology as being
this white male bros. Club, all of which makes her
an easy target when the actual decision makers are play Haven.
And it seems like people were not just angry about
the firing of this one developer, but they were angry
(29:00):
about is Age R. Richards and what she represents in technology.
She represents technology and technology spaces becoming more accommodating to
women and marginalized people. She represents women and marginalized people
having meaningful power in those spaces and feeling like they
can actually take up space in those spaces and with
that comes all the people who currently had power in
(29:23):
those spaces feeling threatened, feeling like the order that they
are used to where there on the top and have
the power, might actually be upset, and that they might
actually have to make room for people who traditionally have
not had a lot of institutional power in technology spaces.
That's what she represents. A good example of what I
mean is the fact that when this all was going down,
(29:45):
three redditors launched what they called the Feminist Defense Fund,
where they took donations in bitcoin for the fire developer,
and in their plea for donations, they write, feminism has
call us some serious changes to our culture, to our society,
into our lives. We focus on some that are effected
more than others, and we give back. Our goal is
to encourage men to speak out, to be men, to
(30:07):
not fear oppression, and enjoy their freedom of speech. Unfortunately,
in today's climate, being a man has become a financial liability.
Say the wrong thing in the wrong place, and you
can find your entire life ruined, destroyed. Feminists fought for equality,
but now they're out for our rights. They're destroying us financially.
They're trying to tear apart our families. We're saying that
(30:30):
enough is enough. No longer should men fear masculinity, No
longer should speaking up risk that man a job, a career,
or a family. It is time to rise up against
the tyranny. It is time to tell men it is
okay to speak up. We're here for you. This is
the Feminist Victims Fund. So it's so obvious, like what
they're pissed about. Oh god, crime, crime, crime, Oh god,
(30:54):
that was great. Man, read the room, my guy. Yeah,
it is like, it's so clear that they are using
this as a proxy to fight these larger kind of
culture wars issue. They don't care about this developer. They
don't care that even he agrees that joke that he
made was stupid and inappropriate for the setting. That's not
(31:16):
what they care about. They care about women, and in
this case, specifically a black woman shaking up the status
quo and technology and threatening what they see as the
way that the world in society should work. Let's get
(31:36):
into the fallout of what happened with all of this. So,
speaking of companies being really cowardly and caving to a mob,
that is pretty much what happened to Adria Richards. So
after the developer gets fired, the internet, or more specifically, fortune,
really turned on Adria and her employer sent Grid. Adria,
I have to say, is horribly, horribly harassed her website.
(32:00):
It gets a d O s attacked, which is, if
you don't know what that is, it's a denial of
service attack where essentially attackers blood a website with more
traffic than it can handle to shut it down. What
happened to Adria wasn't just people tweeting that they disagreed
with her, Nor was it just a few mean tweets
or mean comments online, which side note, Funnily enough, a
lot of the garden variety mean tweets directed at Adria
(32:22):
are still up as we speak. You know, tweets like quote,
horror cost two men their jobs in this economy, you
just made two families poor. I hope you feel good,
hypocritical bitch, or little did they know they were sitting
behind some count, or good job at being a picture
book feminist bitch? Or why are you such a count?
You know? So definitely not nice stuff. But those are
(32:45):
not even the tweets and messages and comments that I'm
talking about the harassment that Adria Richard Scott was heinous
and worse, it was coordinated. I personally witnessed many, many,
many death and rape threats that she got some of
the worst people on the internet. We're telling her in
mass that she deserved to die by suicide. They docked
(33:05):
and publicized her home address and phone number to the
point where she had to flee from her own home
for her own safety. Oh cool, they're dosing her. Yeah,
that's really scary. Fortune circulates a change dot org petition
calling for Adrian to be fired from sin grid. Meanwhile,
(33:26):
a pastebind document claims that anonymous has sin Grid's client
list and that they're harassing their customers and will continue
to do so if they don't fire her. Um here's
a bit from that post. They say ad R Richards
engaged in malicious conduct to destroy another individual's professional career
due to what she perceived as an affront to her
own extremist views from a comment that was not directed
(33:48):
at her, not meant for her to hear, and certainly
not for her to provide unwarranted input on. As such,
she should have her professional career destroyed just like her victim,
and ordered for justice to be rendered and for balance
to be restored in the universe. The Hive Minds judgment
is final. There is no appeal, no forgiveness, no forgetting. Remember,
(34:09):
real life harassment is an escalation that comes into play
based on how long the situation is allowed to play out.
It is not affected by the effectiveness of previous forms
of harassment. Even if your customers and financial backers are
dropping like flies, this will still happen if Anonymous maintains
an interest in the situation. Boxing is a term used
to define the discovery and dissemination of all personal information, included,
(34:32):
but not limited to, home address, phone numbers, credit card numbers,
your medical records, what brand of toothpaste you buy, etcetera.
If some of the more talented members of Anonymous take
interest into this, every employee of sent grid becomes a target,
starting at the top. For your reference. This is already
happening to miss Richards as per standard protocol. So basically
(34:53):
that's like a clear threat, like this is you know
whether this is legit or not. This is someone basically
trying to scare this this major tech company. So the
attacks on send grid worsen um sin Grid acknowledge that
they had suffered a denial of service attack, and so
(35:14):
you know, this is a major company and their website
traffic is essentially shut down. They're not able to have
have people go to their website, which is a pretty
big deal. And so I guess I feel like if
I was running a big company, I would not cave
to a mob that is outright threatening me. But that's
exactly what sin Grid did. Sin Grid eventually cave to
(35:36):
this mob and fired Adria, and they fired her publicly.
Cowards fucking coward ship. It's so cowardly, and so they
write on Facebook. Effective immediately, sin Grid has terminated the
employment of Adria Richards. While we are generally sensitive and
confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken
(35:58):
on a public nature, and we have taken action that
we believe is in the overall best interests of sin Grid,
its employees, and our customers. A few hours later, sent
Grid CEO Jim Franklin expanded on the company's reasons for
firing Adria, writing, sin Grid supports the right to report
and appropriate behavior whenever and wherever it occurs. What we
(36:20):
do not support was how she reported the conduct. Her
decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people
who made the comments cross the line. Publicly shaming the
offenders and bystanders was not the appropriate way to handle
the situation. And the aftermath of all of this was
that Adria had to literally go into hiding. And she
(36:43):
was someone who had this big voice online and this
big online footprint, and she essentially stopped tweeting and stopped
making videos and stopped putting our perspective out into the
world after this happened. And so, you know, I feel
like so many people, for example, the men's rights activists
who were raising money for the fired engineer, we'll talk
(37:05):
so much about things like free speech, free speech, but
they almost never talked about the fact that somebody like Adria,
who was someone who really did a lot of putting
her voice out into the world, was effectively silenced when
this harassment campaign against her began. So she she wasn't
continuing to, you know, speak up. And so when we
(37:26):
talk about whose free speech is being threatened, it's almost
never the marginalized people who have to stop speaking and
our silence when they become the targets of harassment campaigns
like Adria was. So that's basically what happened with Advia Richards.
And so there are so many takeaways here and so
many things I think that we can learn from this situation.
(37:50):
One is that I believe that Adrivia Richards situation really
ushered in this new understanding of situations that are complicated
and involve being real people being treated like tit for tat,
you know, these culture wars and identity wars, point scoring
where our guy got fired, so their guy has to
(38:10):
get fired, or this happened, so that happened. You know,
they made a black aerial in The Little Mermaid, so
now they need to make a Malcolm X movie where
Malcolm X is white. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead, bro,
try that one. Go ahead. Yeah. It's a completely reductive
and unhelpful thing that I think that dongle Gate really
(38:33):
ushered in. You know, the big rallying cry in dongle
Gate was that because the play Haven developer was fired,
that Adrian needed to be fired just like he was.
You know, as that poster put it, she should have
to have her professional career destroyed just like her victim
in order for justice to be rendered and for balance
to be restored to the universe. But in the real
(38:54):
world of complexity and nuance and adults. It's really just
not help to have these situations be viewed through this
incredibly simple, black and white binary lens. And when you do,
you are creating the conditions that are prime for bad
actors to exploit. And that brings me to my next takeaway,
(39:15):
which is bad actors. Those fuckers ruin everything. And I
feel like the situation is a great example because even
though dongle gate was obviously very gendered, I don't want
to give the impression that it was that all of
the men who did not agree with Adria taking a
picture of these guys. It's not like all of them
(39:35):
had joined in on this harassment campaign against Adria. And
there were certainly women in tech who did not agree
with Adria's actions. One of them Amanda Blum, who was
a developer who worked with Adria I r L when
she invited Adria to speak at a conference that she organized.
Um she writes in her blog post about how she
did not have a great interaction with Adria. She was like, Oh,
(39:56):
I don't really like her, but that doesn't mean that
this kind of harassment campaign against her is good. You know,
her her piece, which will link to in the show notes,
is this very measured piece about what went down, and
basically pointed out that she felt like everyone lost here.
It was just a loss for everyone, And so I
think that reasonable people could agree or disagree with what
(40:19):
Adria did, and they did agree or disagree. There was
a lot of substantive conversation online about what it means
to be a woman in tech, how men can be
allies to women in tech? Are men going to be,
you know, afraid of making whatever joke or speaking up
that they're working with women? How can women and men
(40:39):
and everybody all work together in these spaces. There was
a lot of really meaty, meaningful conversation that I think
was sparked from dongle Gate. But what people remember was
not the meaningful conversation or people like Amanda writing measured
takes about the situation. They remember the hateful mob, right,
They don't remember any of that meaningful conversation. So I
(41:02):
believe that the kind of behavior like these coordinated attacks
that we saw from Fortune actually drown out debate and discourse.
They don't make us more thoughtful, They don't push us
forward on all of the issues that we need to
make progress on They keep us all polarized and enraged
and frankly stuck having these silly circular debates about well
(41:24):
he got fired, so she should get fired. That don't
help our serve anybody. You know, an online mob like
Fortune getting involved in this situation didn't make it more clear.
It just inflamed it and polarized it. And these situations
already exist at tension points between things like race and
gender and conversations around inclusion in tech that we know
(41:45):
are kind of heated. You know, it's predated that Google
employee who kind of became an right murder after he
wrote that memo blasting diversity in tech. You know, so like,
these are conversations that are hot, that are that are
hense and you know, as someone who works in combating
miss and disinformation, this is a textbook tactic of bad
(42:08):
actors to purposely inflame conversations that are rooted in these
things that are legitimate tension and pressure points, and to
hijack those conversations and to weaponize them so that pretty
much it ensures we can never get anywhere on them.
And I think the sad part about all of this
is that it sounds like from all public accounts that
(42:28):
Adrian and the Fire Developer seems like people who were
being used as proxies in a larger kind of identity
culture war fight. In that hacker news back and forth
that they had, they seemed like two people who were
genuinely interested in coming to some kind of a conclusion
with one another. But that is simply not possible when
bad actors with an ax to grind hijack conversations and
(42:52):
are really invested in making those conversations as polarized as possible. Yeah,
I was gonna say the comments section definitely wasn't looking
to find a solution here. They were just looking to
cause more chaos and uh, make things worse for everybody.
In the Fire Developers post, there are people who are like,
(43:13):
when he apologizes for his comments, don't apologize? How is
that helpful if somebody has taken a look inward at
their own behavior and feels the need to apologize. And
this goes for pretty much all conversations. If a celebrity
is saying something on the Internet, there's always and they
apologize for something, It's always going to be that one
stand in the comments who's like Queen don't apologize like
(43:33):
we love you, you you know what I mean, I certainly do.
Another takeaway from this is that companies and institutions just
didn't know how to deal with mobs back then, and frankly,
I don't think they've gotten much better today. You know,
as fucked up as four Chune ship heads were here,
(43:55):
my real beef is actually with play Haven and sent Grid.
This was happening back in teen and maybe none of us,
and by extension, the people who run companies didn't know
how to handle it when a mob swarmed around one
of their employees. You know, play Haven was ultimately the
decider when deciding to fire that developer that Adria photographed.
They didn't have to do that, and they certainly did
(44:17):
not have to let Adria take the fall for what
was entirely their decision and no one else's. And to
that point, they didn't even if this was somebody that
that deserved to be fired for reasons we don't know about,
they didn't need to make it public and therefore point
that mob towards Adria and then just sit back and
(44:40):
say nothing as this mob pour her apart and she
had to flee her home and locked down her entire
online presence that she had been building forever, you know,
totally completely Yeah, and looking at sin Grid, I'm sure
that sin Grid, as a big tech company, loved having
a visible black woman in tech when Adrian was making
(45:01):
their company look very inclusive and forward looking. But when
that same employee was facing racialized harassment, they did not
support her. And this is sort of a side note,
pet peeve of mine. People are so fond of saying
things like, oh, support black women, champion black women, you know,
support their leadership, without acknowledging that part of supporting the
(45:24):
leadership of black women is also being honest about the
climate that a lot of black women will be coming into.
You know, if you're a visible black woman coming into
a pretty white, pretty male field, you might have a
little bit of a tougher time. And ignoring it and
pretending that is not the case is not actually supporting
black women. And so I always say, don't just support
(45:44):
black women, also work to create the conditions where black
women can actually have an equal playing field and and
thrive in the work that you want to support them in.
Um sen Grid also did not have to cave to
these coordinated four chan mob attacks that were threatening their
business via harassment and denial of service attacks, you know,
fin Grid. If I had been running sin Grid, I
(46:06):
would have said, you know, hey, people who are angry,
we hear you, but our personnel decisions are our private
business and we will handle this privately, even if they
felt like Adria deserved to be reprimanded. I think it's
pretty rich that in their statement public statement on Facebook
about her firing, that they say that, oh, we're against
(46:26):
public shaming, and Adria publicly shamed these men and then
said nothing as Adria was harassed publicly with rape and
death threats and racial slurs, and then fire her in public,
completely inflaming the very public shaming that she was going through.
It's just cowardly. And these are the exact same kind
of tactics that would go on to fuel gamer Gate,
(46:49):
you know, coordinating on message boards like Fortune to avenge
some perceived grievance around women and feminists and marginalized people
claiming power in a tech space. You know, in the
case of gamer Gate video games, I would argue that
if we had done some real collective analysis after dongle Gate,
we might not then have allowed bad actors have basically
do the exact same thing a year later with gaybor Gate.
(47:11):
I think things would have gone very differently had we
had some kind of public accounting for what actually happened,
who were the major players, and what decisions allowed those
tactics to be weaponized in that way. And I feel
like today, you know, the targets may have changed, but
the tactics are pretty much the same. You know, we
still see the same kind of thing play out. A
small handful of bad actors have pretty much used this
(47:35):
playbook to get their way, and I think they're going
to continue doing it until we do something. For example,
by now, I think that most folks listening know that
just this last week, there was a violent attack on
Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, who was attacked with a
hammer to the head while he was sleeping by an
assailant who claimed that he wanted to break Nancy Pelosi's
(47:55):
knees to send a message of fear to other Democrats,
and per of the writings of the accused attacker online,
it was gamer Gate that, you know, for lack of
a better word, radicalized him, and that he described gamer
Gate as the turning point in his own trajectory politically. Now.
I have a ton to say about this. We're gonna
do a whole other episode later this week all about this,
(48:18):
but I'll just say right now that gamer Gate provided
this connection between the cultural and the political. You know,
you're angry about women taking up space and technology and gaming,
so you use these tactics to harass and attack them
and take away their power. And it really created a
blueprint for how those same tactics could be weaponized politically
as well, which I think is exactly what we're seeing
(48:40):
right now. And maybe if when all of this was
happening with Adria Richards, if the takeaway hadn't been to
just blame her for her own harassment and to think
a little bit more clearly about how these same tactics
might be perfected and abused and weaponized on larger and
larger scales, targeting more and more people, maybe these gamer
Gate tact would not be happening as part and parcel
(49:02):
of our current political and social landscape now. You know,
things like people coordinating on Facebook pages to flood schools
with calls about teachers who they suspect of being lgbt Q,
or you know, they suspect of teaching something that they
don't like in schools, which happened to a Georgia school teacher,
Cecilia Lewis, who will talk about in a later episode
(49:22):
of this podcast. You know, that's definitely a tactic that
I see that was really refined in dongle Gate and
gamer Gate, and rather than taking some kind of action
to have that not be a tactic that is so
easily weaponized against people who are marginalized, now it's just
a tactic that we all have to live with, whether
you're marginalized or not. Now it's a Now, it's just
(49:44):
part of our political and social landscape that unfortunately, I
worry is not going to go away. In fact, is
going to become worse. It also happened recently to a
woman named Nina janko Witz, who was the former head
of the Biden administration's Disinformation When It's board, who eventually
had to resign and go into hiding after a right
wing smear campaign against her. You know, I think it
(50:07):
doesn't take that many people to really disrupt and shut
down institutions if those institutions do not know how to
handle it when one of their employees is being attacked
in this coordinated way like these women have been. And
it also is one of the reasons why, and I
know this is perhaps a bit of an unpopular opinion
(50:30):
why I think that it's not great when the internet
rallies together to like call someone's boss to get them fired,
even if I ostensibly agree with like, that person needs
to be fired, right, I definitely have seen situations on
the Internet where I'm like, oh, well, that person should
not hold the office that they hold. But I just
(50:51):
don't think that the tactic of coordinating people to call
someone's an employer or to disrupt their work for their
life is a good one because companies are cowardly and
we know that they will cave to mobs, and I
just think it turns into an easily gamified numbers game
that I know, the worst people on the Internet can
(51:12):
definitely coordinate to get a blood of angry emails or
tweets to give the impression that there is a broad
consensus where really there is none, you know, And I'm
certainly not going to act like I don't find it
cathartic when I'm being a video of a racist in
public lose their jobs. I fucking love that ship. Who doesn't. Right,
I'm not gonna say that, I I it's a good time.
(51:34):
It's a good time. I'm not going to say that
I'm like above that. But I just know that that
tactic is so easily weaponized by bad actors coordinating for
bad and so I just think it's something that as
good stewards of the Internet, we have to really be
careful when we traffic and tactics like that, because it
(51:55):
is a tactic that is well worn by bad actors,
and I don't think it's getting us to a place
that is better on the Internet. Internet Hate Machine is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, check out our website cool zone media
dot com, or find us on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Bridget Todd
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