There Are No Girls on the Internet - Devternity! Did this tech conference create fake women to look more diverse？

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00:00:40.700 Pro Society is a weekly podcast

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00:00:50.360 between books, the internet, and pop culture

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00:00:59.040 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app,

00:01:01.740 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 0.98

00:01:05.760 I'm not saying this woman doesn't exist.

00:01:08.460 I'm just saying she reads like a woman written by a man. 0.99

00:01:18.380 There Are No Girls on the Internet 0.72

00:01:19.760 is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

00:01:22.160 i'm bridget todd and this is there are no girls on the internet

00:01:29.280 so i feel like christmas has kind of come a little bit early for me because mike as you know not only

00:01:37.940 am i deeply fascinated by identity and technology but also i am deeply fascinated by my other true

00:01:45.060 love which is scams you know this about me i love a good scam i love scam content scam podcasts give

00:01:51.540 me all the scams. I mean, don't scam me, but I want to be not involved in the scam and then

00:01:57.140 hear about how the scam unfolded so I can be like, oh, that's how they did it.

00:02:01.020 Yeah, your love of scams and catfishing is legendary, no doubt.

00:02:06.600 So catfishing is a scam that I am specifically interested in. And this wild story that was

00:02:12.480 blowing up on Twitter last week involves all three, identity and technology, scams, and catfishing.

00:02:17.560 And as fascinating as I find all of these, I also think it's really a story that tells us a lot about how people actually think about marginalized folks in technology. Like, do they actually see us? When they see us, do they respect us? When they actually do include us, is that inclusion a gimmick? Is it done to take the heat off criticism? Like, why is it done?

00:02:40.100 And when they try to include us and get it so, so, so wrong, what does that tell us too?

00:02:46.800 So let's talk about DevTernity.

00:02:49.220 So DevTernity is a tech conference for developers that attendees have to pay from as little as $435 up to $870 to attend.

00:02:58.780 It was founded by Edward Sizoff in 2015.

00:03:01.780 So this conference had been called out for not having a very diverse lineup of speakers.

00:03:06.600 Like most of their speakers tended to be white men.

00:03:08.840 And to deal with that, Edwards, the organizer, allegedly decided to flesh out their lineup by tapping into the existing pool of really talented, marginalized people who have been building and shaking things up in tech for a very long time.

00:03:25.220 Oh, wait, no, no, no, that's not what he did.

00:03:26.660 That would be a normal thing to do. 0.95

00:03:28.140 What he actually did was flesh out that lineup by creating AI-generated women speakers to add to the lineup. 0.99

00:03:35.540 And as if that's not bad enough, like that's already pretty bad, it doesn't stop there.

00:03:41.360 Because in addition to creating those phony women to speak at his conference, it was also revealed that Edwards had been running this entire like fake female tech influencer catfish enterprise and had been doing so for years.

00:03:57.620 Unsurprisingly, the entire thing was full of drama.

00:03:59.620 And honestly, like, I don't think I have ever seen anything unfold quite like this in the space before.

00:04:05.380 So let's get into it.

00:04:07.040 So this all started when engineer Gurgly Orzos was looking into the lineup at DevTournity

00:04:11.960 after a couple of his colleagues were asked to speak there.

00:04:15.200 He started looking into the lineup and became a little bit suspicious of two of the women

00:04:19.660 speakers listed.

00:04:20.820 So these two women speakers had been listed as coming from a pretty prominent tech company,

00:04:25.560 Coinbase, which is like a cryptocurrency exchange platform, Anna Boyko, who was on the speaker's

00:04:30.180 page listed as a staff engineer at Coinbase, and Natalie slash Natalia, sometimes it's Natalie,

00:04:35.980 sometimes it's Natalia, Stadler, who was listed as a software craftswoman at Coinbase. So one of

00:04:41.840 these women who was listed as working at Coinbase said that she was also affiliated with Ethereum,

00:04:46.860 a type of cryptocurrency. And Gerkley was like, it's a little bit odd that somebody would be

00:04:51.460 speaking at a conference representing both Coinbase, a cryptocurrency platform, and also

00:04:57.620 a type of cryptocurrency. He was like, that didn't seem right to me. So he got suspicious and looked

00:05:02.040 into it. And that's when he found that these women did not seem to exist. They don't have any kind of

00:05:07.660 social presence beyond what appears on the conference website. Gurgley tweeted, imagine a

00:05:13.080 tech conference having no call for proposals as they reach out to speakers directly. They

00:05:18.000 successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter male speakers in tech and three women speakers. 1.00

00:05:23.920 Now imagine my surprise that two of those women are fake profiles. 1.00

00:05:28.500 They do not exist. 1.00

00:05:30.500 Nada.

00:05:31.280 So I got to really give it to Gurgley here.

00:05:33.460 He must have sniffed out that something was fishy and then like just held it, like nursed

00:05:38.200 it like a grudge and held on to it like a dog with a bone because dude did his homework. 0.98

00:05:43.860 He found web archives that go back to 2021 that list these two non-existent women as 1.00

00:05:49.380 speakers at DevTernity. 0.54

00:05:51.040 One of them also spoke, or at least was listed as a speaker, back in 2022 as well.

00:05:56.460 In the aftermath of all this, Gurgley really did some deep digging.

00:06:00.320 He found a tweet from 2021 publicly calling out the conference for having a mostly male lineup.

00:06:06.340 On August 3rd, 2021, Maddie Stratton, a director of developer relations, tweeted,

00:06:11.980 Good thing I'm not tweeting about tech this week, or else I might have to call out DevTernity for pretty much having all white dudes as speakers.

00:06:19.200 Given who they listed at the top, it doesn't surprise me at all. 0.63

00:06:22.300 So then Julia Kirshina, also known as Coding Unicorn, who calls herself one of the conference co-founders, replies,

00:06:29.900 Remember Julia's name because she is going to become important later.

00:06:33.580 Julia replies to Maddie's tweet saying,

00:06:35.520 Hi, Matt. Julia from the DevTrinity team here. Thanks for raising this.

00:06:39.840 Out of the 14 invited female speakers, three confirmed, two canceled as we had to postpone to survive COVID.

00:06:45.580 There is a lot to improve, so you can advise on how to make the lineup better.

00:06:49.420 Let's chat.

00:06:50.060 I'll send you a DM.

00:06:51.520 So this very same day that Maddie calls out DevTernity for having an all-male lineup,

00:06:56.640 August 3rd, 2021, is when DevTernity also coincidentally adds their very first fake

00:07:03.280 woman speaker. 0.99

00:07:04.700 Like I said, Gergly brought receipts.

00:07:07.300 The DevTernity conference website has a public GitHub repo.

00:07:10.720 GitHub is a place online where developers can show other folks what they're working on,

00:07:14.300 where you could see the full edit history of the conference website.

00:07:17.600 So he included a screenshot showing the specific changes to the website.

00:07:21.280 And the date of those changes confirms that Natalia Slatter,

00:07:24.860 software craftswoman at Coinbase,

00:07:26.640 was added a few hours after Maddie's complaint

00:07:29.980 of the lack of diversity of the conference.

00:07:32.240 Two hours to be exact.

00:07:33.920 In that edit, Julia, the conference co-founder,

00:07:36.640 was also added to the speaker's lineup.

00:07:38.900 So I don't know.

00:07:40.240 That seems pretty suspicious.

00:07:43.540 Like that timing, I don't know.

00:07:45.840 If you're going to make up fake people,

00:07:49.160 why have all the changes to your website be publicly on GitHub? 1.00

00:07:54.320 Gergly also found that another one of the fake women 0.99

00:07:56.860 added to the lineup's headshot was taken from

00:07:59.700 This Person Does Not Exist,

00:08:02.120 which is a site that randomly generates pictures

00:08:04.240 of non-existent people generated by AI.

00:08:07.740 Which is like pretty funny that the place where he got these pictures

00:08:11.780 really spells out what's going on.

00:08:13.720 This person does not exist.

00:08:15.680 Overall, Gurgley found four non-existent people

00:08:18.520 who are all women listed as speakers

00:08:21.440 on this conference website

00:08:23.160 since they were called out

00:08:24.380 for their lack of women speakers back in 2021.

00:08:26.860 Gurgley writes on his website,

00:08:28.300 I decided to share that this conference

00:08:29.740 advertises fake speakers and has done so for years.

00:08:32.920 This statement is easily verifiable

00:08:34.600 by anybody in the same way that I did.

00:08:36.780 I have not seen this type of deceit

00:08:38.420 at any other conference

00:08:39.540 and I've seen enough that I didn't want to keep quiet.

00:08:41.780 And honestly, like I got a major shout outs to Gurgley here.

00:08:45.520 We will throw the piece on his website with all of his receipts in the show notes for

00:08:49.620 folks to check out.

00:08:50.300 You definitely should.

00:08:51.120 But one of the questions that Gurgley does ask is that he got suspicious when he saw

00:08:57.660 this lineup and that he doesn't believe that he's the only person who got suspicious.

00:09:02.780 Like he doesn't think he was the only person to be like looking at these people up.

00:09:06.520 These women were listed as working for very prominent tech companies.

00:09:09.800 And so certainly somebody has like looked them up on LinkedIn or whatever, for whatever reason is like, I'm the only person who decided to speak up about it, who didn't want to keep quiet. And even that to me is really interesting. Like, I don't know what's really going on there, but it almost makes me wonder if the vast majority of people at this conference didn't think the women speakers were worth really paying attention to.

00:09:36.360 So let alone like investigating, throwing them into a quick Google search, whatever. Maybe they were just like prominent male name in tech, prominent male name in tech, prominent male name in tech, some useless chick, some useless chick, prominent male name in tech, prominent male name in tech.

00:09:51.720 Like maybe it didn't even register to them to be paying attention to the women speakers, what organizations they represented and what they were talking about. Maybe it didn't even register to be looking at them all that closely because like maybe they just like didn't value them in the same way.

00:10:04.700 I don't know. That's just my theory, because I do agree with Gurgley here that certainly he cannot be the first person to have uncovered this.

00:10:11.540 And it did not take a very substantial amount of digging to find out that these people weren't necessarily real.

00:10:18.300 So, like, what's going on?

00:10:19.760 I don't know. I feel like we encounter weird stuff online all the time.

00:10:23.680 And it's so easy to just chalk it up to, like, maybe it's a scam or maybe the Internet is broken or maybe I don't understand.

00:10:31.940 Yeah.

00:10:33.140 I mean, I would like to think that if I encountered this, I would have said something.

00:10:38.360 Would you have dug, like, gurgly?

00:10:41.540 I would have dug for sure.

00:10:43.180 If I had sniffed out, like, I have a lot of time on my hands, and I love to do a deep dive.

00:10:48.900 So if I had, like, sniffed out that something funky was going on, I probably would have looked into it.

00:10:53.720 I think I'm the kind of person who might have thought that I was misunderstanding something or that I was getting something wrong or misreading something.

00:11:01.640 I respect that Gurgley is the kind of person who was like, I'm taking this to social media right away because something is not right.

00:11:07.320 Yeah, I appreciate that too. Kudos to Gurgley.

00:11:11.980 Let's take a quick break.

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00:12:03.780 if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality welcome home

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00:12:22.420 I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

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00:13:09.220 And we're back. 0.99

00:13:11.720 So Gargley is pretty suspicious about some of these women speakers on the lineup.

00:13:15.640 He does some digging and decides to post about this on LinkedIn and Twitter, where the DevTernity conference founder, Edward Sizoff, first tweets in response.

00:13:25.800 So his response is probably one of the most dramatic,

00:13:29.180 but also nonsensical explanations I have ever read in my life.

00:13:33.280 It is super long.

00:13:34.740 Like, it's still up on Twitter if folks want to.

00:13:36.280 We'll link to the whole thing, but like, I'm not going to read the whole thing here.

00:13:39.420 But I will get into a couple of key bits.

00:13:41.960 So first of all, Edward says that, oh no, it is not him who has done something wrong.

00:13:46.740 He heavily implies that Gurgley must be the bad guy.

00:13:50.940 Why?

00:13:51.180 Because Gurgley took to social media to talk about this in the first place, rather than, I guess, like contacting him directly, privately, which means that Gurgley just wants attention.

00:14:02.440 He just wants clout. He's jealous. He's trying to take me down.

00:14:06.480 Edwards writes, I won't be responding directly to Mr. Orzal's accusation and won't even link to it here, given that he didn't even bother contacting me and sharing his concerns.

00:14:16.760 He went straight to socials and using the power of his social network, shared all his

00:14:22.380 assumptions without validating them, damaging my life's work and reputation.

00:14:26.920 I don't know what his intention was, but harm has been done.

00:14:30.920 Nothing good, only harm.

00:14:33.660 So yeah, it's Gurgley who is the bad guy because Gurgley decided to ask what's happening,

00:14:40.820 to use his platform on social media to ask some really good questions that need answers.

00:14:46.260 That alone is evidence of Gurgley being the bad guy and being out to get Edwards.

00:14:53.740 Edwards also uses some pretty choice language defending himself.

00:14:57.180 He writes, I'll explain to you what happened, and then you decide if my life's work and the upcoming event deserve to be ruined and I ought to be lynched.

00:15:05.700 The use of the word lynched there is a choice.

00:15:08.080 It will not be the last time he uses that word to reference what's going on in the situation.

00:15:12.640 So then he kind of gets into his explanation of what's going on, which is that basically

00:15:16.780 it was a mistake, a mistake that he realized happened, but then just like didn't have time

00:15:22.680 to fix.

00:15:23.080 He says, so he claims that Natalie's name and profile was auto-generated with a random

00:15:28.620 title, random Twitter handle, and a random picture, and that he realized that this was

00:15:33.540 happening and it was a mistake, that he intended to fix it, but then he realized that it wasn't

00:15:37.820 going to be a quick fix. And that, quote, it's better to have that demo persona while I'm

00:15:43.000 searching for replacement speakers. And first of all, I am no developer. So maybe it's not a quick

00:15:49.120 fix. Maybe it takes days to fix this. I cannot speak for whether or not that is true. It does

00:15:54.160 sound like bullshit to me, but I don't know. But I have to say, even if that is true, even if what 0.97

00:15:59.900 he said, we take him at his word, it is still, in my book, pretty deceitful because you're asking

00:16:05.700 people to pay $800 when you know the lineup that you are advertising publicly could not possibly

00:16:13.240 come to fruition? What if I'm really interested in whatever this fake person, Natalie, has to say

00:16:20.780 and her line of work and her expertise, and I spend money, I plunked down $800 to see her speak

00:16:27.660 because I'm interested in her, and you advertised her as a speaker. That would be deceitful. And 0.99

00:16:32.440 it's interesting to me how he, in his explanation, glosses over that so quickly. Yeah, the deceitfulness

00:16:39.620 here is definitely the worst part. So he does say that the conference ended up having a less

00:16:46.120 diverse than predicted lineup because these women who had agreed to speak all dropped out for

00:16:51.160 reasons that he could not control. He writes, Sandy for health issues, Julia switched to helping

00:16:56.740 the organization. You can't do both speaking and organization. Sandy and Julia didn't make it to

00:17:02.020 the final schedule, but they kept appearing on the website while I was looking for a replacement.

00:17:06.840 This partially led to an accusation that since they're not part of the schedule,

00:17:11.420 we've probably added them just to meet arbitrary diversity criterias. This statement is bold and

00:17:16.500 unfair. Sandy and Julia confirmed their participation. They should have been part

00:17:20.820 of the final schedule, but dropped out for reasons out of our control at the worst possible time.

00:17:25.700 Ask Sandy or Julia. So we ended up with only one female speaker, Chris. So while I was looking

00:17:32.000 for a last-minute replacement, hoping I'd find it, Sandy and Julia were still mentioned on the

00:17:36.920 website. So I have to say, some of these people did end up being real. Christine Howard, who is

00:17:43.640 the head of developer relations at Amazon Web Services, confirmed to 404 Media that she had

00:17:48.840 agreed to speak and that she does exist. Sandy Metz is a real person who 404 Media confirmed

00:17:55.100 did agree to speak and had to drop out because she was getting knee surgery. The conference

00:17:59.320 founder keeps repeating this like very weird point in his defense that none of the fake women ever

00:18:05.120 actually made it onto the final lineup and i don't totally know what he means there but i think that

00:18:10.540 what he is saying is that even though these women weren't actually speaking and they were listed as

00:18:17.520 speakers that they didn't actually show up to speak and so like nobody was duped but like of

00:18:23.280 course they didn't show up to speak they're not real people it sounds like he's saying that julia

00:18:28.480 had to drop out because she was going to be on the organizing committee and i've never heard of

00:18:35.360 that being a rule that like if you're on the organizing committee you can't speak at the

00:18:41.000 conference like that's just not a thing that i've ever heard so that doesn't make sense and then he

00:18:46.960 also says that she had to drop out due to circumstances beyond their control but that

00:18:53.180 circumstance was that she wanted to be an organizer rather than a speaker so like that

00:18:58.700 also doesn't make sense no none of it makes sense his entire explanation is nonsensical to me so

00:19:04.800 after this whole thing went viral on twitter edwards did remove the fake women from the website

00:19:10.060 so i guess apparently it ended up being a quicker fix than he had previously indicated like the

00:19:15.480 reason why he said that he couldn't he was aware of this mistake on the website but couldn't fix

00:19:19.600 it is because it was not a quick fix, but apparently quick enough that it could be taken

00:19:23.520 care of within a day of this going viral on Twitter.

00:19:26.560 Right.

00:19:27.020 And the fix was changing some copy on the website, which historically in most systems

00:19:31.800 is a pretty quick fix.

00:19:33.920 It would take weeks.

00:19:38.140 So lastly, from Edwards's long Twitter explanation, you know who is really at fault here?

00:19:45.940 Can you guess?

00:19:47.260 Society.

00:19:48.580 Society.

00:19:49.600 According to Edwards, specifically, cancel culture.

00:19:53.840 He tweeted, I said it was a mistake, a bug that turned out to be a feature.

00:19:58.220 I even fixed that on my website.

00:20:00.020 We're cool, right?

00:20:01.160 No, we want blood. 0.53

00:20:02.840 Let's cancel this sinner, all caps. 0.98

00:20:05.400 The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or killed someone, 0.95

00:20:10.320 but I won't defend myself because I don't feel guilty.

00:20:13.680 I did nothing terrible that I need to apologize for.

00:20:16.760 Side note, I'm not sure that Edward knows what lynching is.

00:20:19.940 Like, I would like to sit him down and ask him what he thinks it entails.

00:20:23.460 So not only is this, in my opinion, like deeply unethical behavior from the perspective of people being asked to pay up to $800 to attend this conference with a fake lineup, it also really sucks for the other speakers.

00:20:39.960 Scott Hanselman, who is a very well-respected person in the space who cares a lot about

00:20:44.380 things like inclusion and diversity in tech, was slated to speak but pulled out after all

00:20:49.220 this happened.

00:20:50.240 He tweeted, this whole conference debacle is so disappointing.

00:20:54.620 Speakers like myself, when invited to a conference, will immediately say, who all is going to

00:20:59.060 be there?

00:21:00.140 I've my rules for participation posted on my site, including an inclusive lineup, for

00:21:04.980 years.

00:21:05.840 I was duped by fake speakers also.

00:21:07.880 And so it's pretty bad when people who have made it their thing to use their, like Scott Hanselman is a white man. The fact that he is someone who is like intentionally using his privilege and his reputation and his background to try to help inclusion in the space and like do what he can to like make it more inclusive by saying, yeah, if you want me to speak at your event, it has to be inclusive.

00:21:34.100 giving that incentive for organizers to make their spaces inclusive,

00:21:37.440 it doesn't work if these organizers just lie and just make up who is going to be on the lineup.

00:21:44.080 David Heinemir Hansen, the creator of Ruby on Rails, was also slated to speak and pulled out.

00:21:49.500 And he said that he asked for his name to be removed from the lineup website, a request that was not honored.

00:21:55.600 Oof.

00:21:56.260 I mean, I have to say, if I had all of these, like, big-name, high-profile people

00:22:03.380 in the tech space dragging me like this i would just be more this is like like i had nothing to

00:22:11.160 do with this and i'm embarrassed for edwards you know like this would be mortifying to me

00:22:14.600 from what i've seen poking around at like the devternity website and uh julia's coding unicorn

00:22:21.940 instagram account it seems like they're edwards is really into devternity i mean obviously it's

00:22:27.980 his whole it seems to be his whole professional gig but it's just like the aesthetic trappings

00:22:36.160 of coding so far as i can tell like maybe there's more to it but like the sense that one gets from

00:22:42.180 looking at the social accounts uh is not that there's like deep important wisdom uh and new

00:22:51.200 stuff being revealed at this conference but it's really just aesthetics and social aspects of being

00:22:59.560 a coder or developer and so the loss of these high profile people that uh that's got to like

00:23:08.780 really sting right because it seems like the whole thing is built on uh big names and credibility and

00:23:15.700 uh star fucking so i want to get into that more in just a bit because i have picked up on what

00:23:21.120 you're saying too and i think i think it goes quite a bit deeper than that but specifically 0.98

00:23:25.360 about the devternity conference in preparing for this episode i too like poked around their website

00:23:31.540 and their social and the video like their sizzle reel that they have for the event it basically

00:23:36.680 is like devternity this is a conference people attend there are lanyards like it's like what

00:23:43.680 they're telling me is like this is definitely a tech conference that people go to like they're

00:23:49.800 not telling me what i will learn what the space feels like like why i want to show up there it's

00:23:55.560 like they're more interested in the flash and surface appearance of a slick tech conference

00:24:02.960 but it feels completely surface level yeah and maybe we can talk about the name

00:24:08.480 devternity what does that mean one might say it doesn't mean anything

00:24:13.320 one might even go further and say maybe it's a little bit fake

00:24:19.700 yeah uh but it is a real name it seems to be a blend of the words dev as in developer and

00:24:28.080 eternity as in the time period that 13 year olds will pledge their undying love

00:24:35.420 i guess it's putting those things together with a fake instagram account of a fake woman

00:24:42.000 well you don't have to worry about that for too much longer because devternity 0.84

00:24:45.480 is canceled. Several speakers started dropping out after this happened and the event was meant

00:24:52.460 to be in just a few days. So it's not happening. So even if it was just that, right, like this

00:24:57.780 would already be one of the weirdest stories I have ever heard happening at a tech conference.

00:25:02.060 But as you hinted, it does not stop there because remember Julia Christina, aka Coding Unicorn,

00:25:09.220 the conference co-founder. So Julia was slated to be a speaker at DevTernity in 2021, 2022,

00:25:16.100 and 2023. She was the person who was supposed to speak, but then moved up to be an organizer,

00:25:22.000 so she couldn't speak. We think that maybe that's BS, but whatever. She is also a pretty

00:25:27.120 established tech influencer. Her Instagram account, called Coding Unicorn, goes back to 2018.

00:25:32.960 She has 120,000 followers on her account, where her bio reads, the best coding account

00:25:39.320 on Instagram.

00:25:40.500 Hi, my name is Julia.

00:25:42.060 I am a professional software developer posting no BS coding career and productivity tips

00:25:46.780 and a Depternity fan. 0.89

00:25:49.060 She's done your basic, like, influencer stuff.

00:25:52.440 She does giveaways, raffles on her platform, all that stuff.

00:25:57.040 Her pictures show her presumably working on code and really looking hot, like showing a lot of cleavage and just generally kind of like being a tech hottie while really hyping up DevTournity events and conferences.

00:26:14.500 But, and here is the big reveal, she's not even real, it doesn't look like.

00:26:19.960 404 Media looked into it.

00:26:21.440 They found IP logs that seem to indicate Edwards inviting and then logging into an account belonging to Coding Unicorn, which is Julia's social media handle.

00:26:33.140 So basically just like logging in as her.

00:26:36.840 A YouTube video posted last year by Edwards that had five views when 404 Media accessed it showed him logged into his own email account as well as one for Coding Unicorn.

00:26:47.760 Many of Coding Unicorn's posts are just copied and pasted from Edwards' LinkedIn or Instagram

00:26:53.660 without any attribution. Edwards also pretty explicitly admits that he is the one responsible

00:27:00.000 for the Coding Unicorn account on his LinkedIn profile, saying,

00:27:04.400 I devote most of my time to growing the most popular coding account on Instagram with 120k

00:27:09.180 followers, Coding Unicorn, without elaborating on exactly what that entails. So this is pretty

00:27:15.460 confusing. I think it's time we heard from Julia herself. Hi, everybody. It's Godin' Unicorn here.

00:27:23.100 Do you want to become an awesome software developer, build a successful career,

00:27:29.040 become more productive and happy? I'm here to help. In 2020, the tech company Hashnode published

00:27:36.220 an interview with Julia on their Women in Tech blog, all about the issues that Julia faces being

00:27:41.380 a woman working in a male-dominated space. Now, the person that wrote that article has

00:27:46.300 confirmed with 404 Media that the interview was conducted via email and they never actually spoke.

00:27:52.260 Honestly, the interview kind of reads like bad hacker girl fan fiction. Here's a little taste

00:27:58.280 of it. Julia, how'd you get into tech? Nine years ago, my parents forced me to go to college and

00:28:04.140 get a computer science degree. They wanted me to find a nice, quiet office job because I was a

00:28:09.280 problem kid, a school rebel. I didn't fulfill my parents' dreams. I am still a rebel, but one with

00:28:15.980 a computer science degree. So tell me that does not sound like a fantasy version of a woman working 0.98

00:28:24.840 in tech. Like I'm a rebel. The reason why I became a programmer is because my parents were looking

00:28:31.900 for me to settle down and find a nice quiet job to stay out of trouble. Yeah, it sounds like

00:28:38.600 something from the 90s movie Hackers.

00:28:41.480 Which, by the way, I was looking at a picture of the fashions from that movie.

00:28:46.080 Matthew Lillard in the movie Hackers, like, the way that they had imagined

00:28:49.640 how computer hackers dress in that movie is really something.

00:28:54.180 I guess I'll just leave it at that.

00:28:55.180 So in this interview, when Julia is asked about gender bias in tech,

00:28:59.780 well, surprise, Julia actually thinks that it's men who suffer the most

00:29:03.880 when it comes to gender bias in tech.

00:29:06.000 She says, 0.96

00:29:07.020 I don't like seeing women as victims 1.00

00:29:08.700 because such a mindset turns men into suspects.

00:29:12.080 Men suffer from biases equal to women.

00:29:14.640 Think of job interviews.

00:29:16.360 We give too much attention to gender bias

00:29:18.140 and appreciate other cognition biases,

00:29:20.820 such as doubt avoidance,

00:29:22.280 where we make an ill decision just to avoid uncertainty

00:29:24.540 or reject a person that doesn't look nice enough. 1.00

00:29:27.520 Julia's advice for women to deal with gender bias?

00:29:30.360 Stop blaming others for being biased and prove yourself.

00:29:33.340 So yeah, it reads to me like this fantasy, fictionalized version of a woman in tech who doesn't think that there's any kind of gender bias and is not even interested in talking about it. Certainly would not say that she has faced it herself. And is only interested in improving herself. Like, that just reads like a woman invented by a man.

00:29:57.060 More after a quick break. 0.91

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00:30:20.620 about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming

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00:30:47.080 That's iHeartAdvertising.com. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to

00:30:52.480 your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club,

00:30:59.760 part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives,

00:31:03.140 and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

00:31:07.840 I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books,

00:31:11.540 the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

00:31:14.800 I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed, so obsessed.

00:31:18.520 From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments,

00:31:23.400 nothing is off the table.

00:31:24.480 It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.

00:31:32.380 Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.

00:31:41.560 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:31:47.600 See you between the pages.

00:31:54.480 Let's get right back into it.

00:31:56.680 So the evidence that links Edwards to being Julia, like catfishing as Julia,

00:32:02.540 or at least that indicates that she's not a real human, is pretty overwhelming.

00:32:07.300 Some of the images that she has posted on Instagram that show computer monitors

00:32:11.420 have her logged in under Edwards' name.

00:32:15.660 On Lobster's, a coding social media forum,

00:32:18.680 Edwards and Julia's accounts were banned multiple times for sock puppeting in 2019 and 2020.

00:32:23.660 The person who runs Lobster said,

00:32:26.180 I remember being creeped out by the effort involved and choice to use Instagram glamour shots.

00:32:30.920 It was just the one profile when I saw him,

00:32:33.380 and I'm kind of stunned that he's not just continued but multiplied his efforts.

00:32:37.500 Again, many of Julia's Instagram posts were copied word for word from Edwards' own social media accounts.

00:32:43.240 And The Verge looked into the university where Julia claims to have attended for her bachelor's degree in information technology on her LinkedIn.

00:32:50.200 And the university said that they do not indicate any records of a student with her name.

00:32:55.420 I'm also like 99% sure that it is not even the same woman in every picture.

00:33:01.000 It's like just a hot woman with dark hair and ample cleavage in every picture.

00:33:07.060 But I genuinely, like I went back to the very first post back in 2018, and I genuinely think they are different people.

00:33:13.420 The woman who is used back in 2018 when the account first starts looks very different from the woman that is used today.

00:33:21.380 They both have brown hair and ample bosom, but that is pretty much where the similarities end.

00:33:26.260 We'll put a link to a couple of pictures of Julia from her Instagram in the show notes.

00:33:30.440 And honestly, you can be the judge.

00:33:32.320 Let me know if you think this is legit, these are all the same women, or if you think something is going on. 0.94

00:33:38.120 And this is kind of complicated.

00:33:40.060 I want to make sure that I am speaking about this carefully, but we need to talk about the

00:33:46.080 way that Julia presents physically on Instagram. It's clear that he is going for a specific 0.61

00:33:52.960 kind of look with the way that Julia looks on social media. She's very conventionally

00:33:58.420 attractive. In all of her pictures, she is posed to look like... I saw somebody describe it as

00:34:03.900 almost like a booth babe kind of way, where the cleavage is very prominent. The poses are all

00:34:08.980 kind of like, I wouldn't call them sexualized, but they're definitely meant to highlight her 0.95

00:34:15.960 physicality and her looks and her figure. And it's this very specific kind of, almost like an uncanny

00:34:24.240 valley kind of hot, where she is in these very clearly posed, staged pictures that look kind of

00:34:32.500 fake, that could not possibly be depicting a real scenario where she's like really working.

00:34:38.200 This might sound minor, but one of the things about her is that she talks quite a bit about

00:34:43.260 how being a developer means that she can travel the world, doesn't have a boss, she can work

00:34:47.140 from whatever exotic locale that she wants.

00:34:49.500 So in one picture, she's meant to be working from an exotic beach of some kind, and she's

00:34:55.580 holding one of those big, giant coconuts where they just chop the top off and put a straw

00:35:02.140 in it, and then you're drinking it.

00:35:03.560 Not the small ones, the big ones.

00:35:05.200 So if you've ever had one of those, you know that they're like, they're coconuts.

00:35:09.760 And so the bottom is rounded.

00:35:12.020 It's not flat.

00:35:13.100 You couldn't put it on a table like you would a normal beverage container that has a flat

00:35:17.580 bottom.

00:35:18.080 It's rounded.

00:35:18.740 It's a coconut.

00:35:19.480 So she's holding it in one hand and working on her laptop with another.

00:35:23.040 In what world would somebody whose computer is the main thing they work on be holding

00:35:29.320 a tippy beverage that you cannot sit down while also working one-handed on their laptop. I don't

00:35:36.380 buy it. Never happening. Best case scenario, it's a risky move. Yeah, it's risky. So I feel like

00:35:43.500 Julia almost exists as this kind of fantasy woman that a man would cook up, right? Heaving cleavage, 1.00

00:35:51.000 beautiful, but also a really skilled programmer. She's not a feminist. She doesn't think that women 1.00

00:35:56.560 have any societal disadvantages because of their gender. 1.00

00:35:59.640 She has a dirty mouth and makes like pithy zingers 1.00

00:36:02.460 about how people need to worry less about convention 1.00

00:36:04.700 and worry more about leveling up their tech skills.

00:36:07.740 She describes herself as a free thinker.

00:36:10.220 In one post, she talks about her favorite podcasts.

00:36:12.960 Can you guess who she lists as one of her favorite podcasts?

00:36:17.220 Is it us?

00:36:20.100 Did we make a list?

00:36:21.180 We made the cut.

00:36:22.920 You know, we got a tech podcast here.

00:36:24.980 No, it's Joe Rogan, of course.

00:36:28.900 Famous tech podcaster, Joe Rogan.

00:36:32.180 She also likes Tim Ferriss.

00:36:34.840 Also noted developer.

00:36:37.040 And she does this thing where she photoshops herself into pictures with famous tech leaders.

00:36:42.160 Like, she has a picture of herself photoshopped with Elon Musk.

00:36:44.940 Another picture of herself photoshopped with Jeff Bezos.

00:36:48.740 We actually found the source picture and it's like she just photoshopped herself over his ex-wife.

00:36:54.420 Yeah. And it was like an iconic photo that was the go-to photo for Jeff Bezos before they got divorced. Like anyone who's seen a photo of Jeff Bezos in the 2010s, like that was it.

00:37:08.740 Yeah. You really called it. You were like, I've seen this picture before. And you found it on reverse Google image search very quickly.

00:37:15.260 Side note, if anybody ever watches the MTV show Catfish, you know that that's like when somebody who thinks they're being catfished calls Nev Schulman, pretty much the only thing he can do is like, let's reverse Google image search these pictures.

00:37:29.260 It's like the one tool in his toolbox that he has.

00:37:33.740 So if they're ever looking for a replacement host for that show, they could call us because we know how to do it too.

00:37:38.780 So I think that Julia is like this caricature of a certain type of man's dream woman or like the kind of thing that a male programmer might cook up in his head in his fantasy as a woman in tech.

00:37:53.000 You know, if you've ever seen the movie Gone Girl, it's like the cool girl persona, but for tech, right? Like, she's cool. She's not a feminist. She has a foul mouth, loves Joe Rogan, thinks your sexist jokes are really cute, loves Elon Musk. Like, I'm not saying this woman doesn't exist. I'm just saying she reads like a woman written by a man in his head.

00:38:14.620 And it really reminds me of something that an influencer with a very large male following once told me. She told me that if your audience is men, like if you're trying to curate men as your audience, and it's men who are consuming your content on Instagram, those men are imagining themselves with you.

00:38:33.120 So you can't have other men in your images. You can't have anything that would ruin the illusion that they could be with you. You can't have that in your images.

00:38:43.240 So I think whoever is running Julia's account, I think it's probably Edwards, is doing so in this way that very much lets techie guys imagine that they could be traveling the world with this beautiful, foul-mouthed, nerdy woman who only wants to talk about leveling up her tech skills while wearing a bikini, right?

00:39:03.260 Like, this Julia account is for men. Like, I think that when I first saw it, I thought like, oh, this is an account that's trying to boost representation for women in tech. Looking at it again, it's like, no, no, this is an account for men. This is an account that is trying to be a place where male programmers gather. Like, come for the cheesecake cleavage shots, stay for my pithy musings on programming and culture.

00:39:30.720 One commenter on Julia's Instagram put it really well.

00:39:34.060 They said,

00:39:34.880 I thought this group was about programming, 0.96

00:39:36.620 but it appears to be a group of horny dudes 0.98

00:39:38.920 drooling over a girl that always pose right next to a laptop,

00:39:42.720 which I thought was really funny.

00:39:45.000 So apparently me and that commenter

00:39:47.080 are not the only ones who are suspicious.

00:39:49.520 In a 2020 comment that Julia left on Hacker News,

00:39:52.860 she actually spoke to the idea of people

00:39:55.020 not thinking that she is real,

00:39:57.680 but peep how she twists this around

00:39:59.320 about making it a response to a dig 1.00

00:40:01.640 about how women can't be programmers, 0.81

00:40:03.300 not whether or not she exists at all.

00:40:06.740 In her comment on Hacker News, she writes, 0.97

00:40:08.760 as a female developer with 60K followers on Instagram,

00:40:11.640 I went through all of this. 0.99

00:40:13.240 Programmers don't look like that. 0.91

00:40:14.700 You're fake, some dude writes on your content.

00:40:16.940 Are you a model or a coder? 0.99

00:40:18.900 Bullies are not the happiest people on the planet.

00:40:21.280 Some of them have been harassed

00:40:22.460 or bullied by their parents in schools, et cetera.

00:40:24.720 I discovered the hard way when I pay back with the hate,

00:40:27.580 it makes me feel bad.

00:40:29.040 and also feeds their hate.

00:40:30.640 The hardest and probably wisest solution

00:40:32.500 is to respond with love to those unhappy folks

00:40:34.700 or not responding at all.

00:40:36.320 It's very hard, but it works.

00:40:38.040 Now, keep in mind, Julia wrote this in a comment

00:40:41.180 on another post on Hacker News.

00:40:43.600 So that means that Edwards is likely, like,

00:40:46.200 not just posting on Instagram as Julia,

00:40:49.180 but also doing interviews and comments

00:40:52.640 across the internet as Julia as well.

00:40:55.320 Whoa, this goes deep.

00:40:57.320 So I've gone through both Julia's account and Edward's account from the very beginning, did a lot of scrolling, and here is my theory about what I think is going on. This is just my opinion. I think that Edwards at some point decided that he wanted to be like an online tech influencer and market himself on social media as somebody who should be listened to when it comes to those kind of conversations.

00:41:21.280 That kind of goes back to what you were saying, Mike, about how DevTournity, it seems like a kind of shallow representation of a tech conference, right?

00:41:30.280 I think that Edwards courted for himself that tech persona guy.

00:41:35.640 Like, I see it a lot on Twitter since Elon Musk took over.

00:41:38.240 Somebody who was always trying to, like, maximize their games and, like, gamify success and always giving you, like, eight rules for productivity, eight hacks for this.

00:41:47.620 Like, things that aren't even necessarily about tech always.

00:41:50.920 I think like, like a general influencer on tech, but also life. Like that's what I think that he

00:41:57.760 wanted to be. And, or he, or he thought like, I need to do this. It'll be successful for me if I

00:42:02.340 do this. You know, not just about tech, but about what books to read, how to think about culture.

00:42:06.760 So in 2016, Edwards' Instagram is pretty normal, right? Like it's pictures of his family,

00:42:14.020 pretty normal pictures of himself, pictures of himself with like a lightsaber from Star Wars,

00:42:18.760 or with like Game of Thrones characters.

00:42:20.620 But around 2018, his pictures sort of changed.

00:42:24.860 They become a lot more polished

00:42:26.780 and a lot more influencer-y, for lack of a better word.

00:42:29.860 He really is like marketing himself as a tech luminary.

00:42:33.300 He's taking pictures of the books that he's reading.

00:42:36.380 He's, you know, in captions,

00:42:38.920 giving life advice about tech and life and leveling up.

00:42:42.720 And I think that he must have done this

00:42:44.540 for a little bit of time

00:42:45.640 and maybe not seen success or growth.

00:42:48.760 And then sometime in 2018, he creates Julia's page.

00:42:52.980 Now, the first few pictures on Julia's Instagram account, interestingly, don't show Julia's

00:42:58.140 face, right?

00:42:58.640 They're just like disembodied body parts.

00:43:00.940 Like in one, it's a close-up of her cleavage holding a book about programming called Elegant

00:43:06.340 Objects up against her chest.

00:43:07.840 In another, it's just her feet while she's like got a laptop on her lap.

00:43:12.440 In some, in many of them, she's using her hands to obscure her face or like has her

00:43:17.640 face down.

00:43:18.760 Honestly, I think that COVID was probably beneficial to these people because in a lot of the images post-COVID, you see Julia wearing a face mask.

00:43:28.520 And so I think they were like, oh, great, we've got a reason to not show her face. 0.77

00:43:32.060 And so, you know, at first I was thinking about how deeply insulting this entire thing is to women in tech.

00:43:40.040 You know, this idea that says that being a woman in tech means like wearing a bikini that says GitHub on it and showing off your body while there's like a laptop vaguely in the background or whatever.

00:43:50.540 But I also want to say that, like, not only is it incredibly insulting to women, it is also incredibly insulting to men, I think. 0.98

00:43:57.940 Like, I think that Edwards thinks that men are so horny and stupid that they won't even notice that it is not the same woman in every picture. 0.99

00:44:06.320 Like, they are so stupid and horny that if you create a fictional version of their own fantasy that is just projecting their desires back at them, they will be invested and also believe that person actually exists. 0.99

00:44:19.760 So that's a lot of effort. What do you think is getting out of all of this? 1.00

00:44:25.740 Well, first of all, I think this is partially just a good old-fashioned financial scam. 0.70

00:44:30.520 Julia is meant to hype up his own conferences and tech entities, right?

00:44:34.380 Like she has DevTournity in her bio next to a little heart.

00:44:38.220 She often wears like DevTournity shirts and talks about how much she loves the conferences.

00:44:42.540 People have to pay as much as $800 to go to these events that Julia hypes up to her

00:44:47.560 150,000 Instagram or 120,000 Instagram followers.

00:44:52.420 Edwards also sells masterclasses. 0.99

00:44:54.980 And so I think that Julia in some ways is just like having your own built-in sexy tech 1.00

00:45:00.560 influencer to hype up whatever the thing is that you're selling. And it's just like a straightforward 0.88

00:45:05.600 financial grift. But I also think it doesn't stop there because that wouldn't explain the effort

00:45:11.780 that it takes to like comment as Julia on Hacker News, right? To comment in articles as Julia,

00:45:19.180 right? Because that's a different thing. So I also think that there might be like

00:45:23.080 a kind of clout that comes with being Julia, this attractive woman in technology.

00:45:29.380 You know, I almost would feel differently if Edwards was, you know, if when he was asked to do an interview for a blog about women in tech, if he was like, oh, this is just a persona, like, I don't want to take up room, I don't want to take away a slot from another, an actual human woman in tech.

00:45:47.360 But he did those interviews specifically about being a woman in tech. And he did them as Julia. He could have, it would be pretty weird, but he could have been like, oh, well, this is what I've learned as a man running an account as a woman persona in tech. Like, there are all kinds of things he could have done that I feel like I would be looking at it a little bit less side-eye-y. But he didn't do any of those things.

00:46:09.480 And so I think there must be like an element to this that must be fun. Like it's probably fun to see your following and reach grow. Like I think that if he was unable to be a tech influencer when he's just like some guy, when he's a sexy woman, certainly it's easier to grow an audience of programmer men when you're a sexy woman.

00:46:35.060 And I think it probably is fun and intoxicating to see your following and reach grow.

00:46:40.480 So I think that Julia allowed for Edwards to be the tech influencer that he never got

00:46:44.600 to be as himself, that he never would be as himself because his musings aren't really

00:46:50.200 that novel.

00:46:51.060 They're not really that good, right?

00:46:52.940 Saying if you're listing a list of podcasts for folks to check out and top three is Joe

00:46:58.360 Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, I'm sorry, that's not really novel advice.

00:47:03.820 If the books that you're suggesting people read

00:47:05.600 are books like Atomic Habits,

00:47:07.640 I'm sorry, that book is in every airport in the country.

00:47:10.760 These are not novel takes.

00:47:12.160 This is not novel advice.

00:47:13.380 I think that he's somebody who wanted the shine

00:47:16.520 of being a tech luminary,

00:47:18.940 somebody who could give sage wisdom

00:47:21.000 that people, when he spoke, people would listen,

00:47:23.520 but I don't think he had that in him.

00:47:25.500 And so I think that doing it as Julia

00:47:27.620 was the only way that he could do it

00:47:29.920 and actually make an impact,

00:47:31.440 which is actually kind of sad when you think about it.

00:47:33.420 that way it makes a lot of sense when you say it like that and the thing that i just have to keep

00:47:38.340 wondering is what was the bigger thing for him what was the bigger piece of the motivation

00:47:45.600 was it the financial grift and cosplaying julia was just the way to get the following

00:47:54.120 that would allow him to sell tickets to like make the financial grift work or was the bigger

00:47:59.780 motivation being part of that cool kids club of tech guys who talk about their agile practices

00:48:08.860 and post changes to their website to github for some ridiculous reason if i i mean i don't we'll

00:48:19.080 have to ask edwards i would happily interview him if he wants to do the interview as julia

00:48:24.960 we'll figure that out. But no, I think it's gotta be the latter. I think that like,

00:48:33.580 especially in tech, I think that's a currency. I think getting to feel like you're somebody

00:48:38.200 who people listen to, it feels good. And I think that it's a space where, I mean,

00:48:47.440 I think it's a space where people are like, when you're a guy, a lot of guys who are like

00:48:51.180 pretty mediocre rise to get to have those kinds of platforms. And I think that he probably just

00:48:57.600 saw some of those guys and was like, why not me? And so I think it's got to be, I think the

00:49:01.940 Griff was probably a part of it, but I think, in my opinion, not the only part. And I think that,

00:49:09.620 you know, as weird of a story as this is, I do think it all goes back to this persistent myth

00:49:16.220 that there are no women in tech. It's the myth that I started this podcast to bust, you know,

00:49:23.300 like Edwards was quoted as saying that the real problem is that there are not enough women out

00:49:29.600 there that he could book to speak and that tech conferences are all chasing this very small group

00:49:35.060 of women. And that's the problem. He said, there have been thousands of events chasing the same 0.65

00:49:39.820 small subgroup of women speakers. And that to me, like that reveals to me a really just messed up 0.91

00:49:48.820 way of understanding and thinking about marginalized people in technology. If you truly believe that 0.85

00:49:55.620 how it works is there's a small handful of people that go to every conference, that speak at every,

00:50:00.620 they're on every stage and that every conference is just like booking those same people. That to me

00:50:08.520 signals that like, first of all, you don't really know the space because that's just,

00:50:13.240 it makes me laugh. But second of all, you don't really care. You don't really care about

00:50:19.620 uplifting marginalized voices. You maybe have gleaned that in 2023, you can't have a lineup

00:50:25.900 of all white men at a tech conference without somebody saying something about it. And so 0.65

00:50:29.420 you know that you need to not have people saying something about it, but you don't really care

00:50:33.540 beyond that. And I think it also shows to me that he didn't think it was worth it to do the real

00:50:39.180 work. Like somehow this elaborate catfish AI generated scam to him was less work than just

00:50:48.540 like widening your network of marginalized people. And honestly, it's like other conferences

00:50:56.480 managed to do that work of lifting up actual marginalized humans who exist in the space

00:51:02.760 without inventing fake people, right?

00:51:04.880 Valerie Phoenix, the founder of Tech by Choice,

00:51:07.080 which is a group that highlights

00:51:08.000 underestimated people in tech,

00:51:09.440 really put it well on Twitter.

00:51:10.900 Valerie says,

00:51:11.980 the last few days have felt like a slap in the face

00:51:14.100 to many of us whose experiences

00:51:15.960 are seen as cosplay for engagement.

00:51:18.940 I've dedicated countless hours

00:51:20.500 to running Tech by Choice,

00:51:21.860 a nonprofit focused on helping underrepresented groups

00:51:24.420 thrive in tech through education,

00:51:26.280 resources, and mentorship.

00:51:27.500 It's never been about engagement, status, or power.

00:51:29.960 It's about making a difference.

00:51:31.080 every grifter and catfish story we push engagement towards overshadows marginalized individuals real

00:51:37.480 struggles and victories in tech and I guess that's really how I feel like there are so many women and

00:51:45.000 trans folks and non-binary folks and queer folks and black folks and people of color in the space

00:51:50.600 that the and these kind of stunts just like further complicate that experience for us even more

00:51:57.540 This might be a bit of a tangent, but I did want to talk about it because I remember we talked about the Grace Hopper conference and how cis men showed up and like overran this conference that was specifically supposed to be a place for women in tech.

00:52:11.460 And one of the things that we did not talk about in that episode that is absolutely true that actually a listener correctly called me out on not raising in that episode is that a climate where men are taking opportunities like this away from marginalized people really also hurts gender nonconforming folks, trans folks, people who are butch or mask.

00:52:33.480 So it creates this climate where people feel like they need to be suspicious of these folks when these are the same people who should be feeling comfortable and included in these spaces, right? It creates the conditions where folks feel like even more surveilled and watched and sidelined and pushed out of these spaces where they really ought to be included.

00:52:51.440 And so stunts like this one just make it harder for actual marginalized people, humans who exist, in tech.

00:52:59.060 You know, we already have to prove we belong, prove we aren't fake, prove we are real, prove we're in tech, prove we know what we're doing, and now prove that we exist, that we're actually humans.

00:53:09.280 Like, I've actually already seen men on Twitter saying that this whole catfish thing just proves, like, what happens when people focus too much on diversity.

00:53:17.320 So this whole debacle of a man doing something bad is already being used to further marginalize and punish people who are already marginalized in tech.

00:53:27.520 Like, it never ends.

00:53:29.460 And I think it really is important that, like, inclusion is not something that you do for points or clout or to get followers to your fake account or to grift or to avoid getting called out.

00:53:40.980 It really matters.

00:53:42.160 Like, we've talked about this across several episodes.

00:53:44.680 it matters that our spaces where technology is being built include as many voices as they can

00:53:51.640 it matters for all of us and so i think that people like edwards just don't get it right they

00:53:56.920 just see it as this cosmetic thing that you can use to boost your own credibility and that it

00:54:02.460 really hurts it hurts it hurts that this is how they see us it really does it also seems like it's

00:54:08.180 not clear what edwards is actually building so the idea that like you'll build it better if you have

00:54:14.820 more diverse viewpoints in the room like you'll end up with a better product i'm not sure he would

00:54:21.640 get that because it's not clear like what he has built other than like a scammy conference yes and

00:54:29.060 i think again it goes back to your point of using the veneer of like tech bro just to build your

00:54:38.180 personal brand not to build anything real anything that matters and yeah i just i don't like it i

00:54:44.840 don't think i don't think it serves us when that is seen as a currency i don't think it serves us

00:54:48.680 so i wanted to end with a little bit of a where are they now so edwards has been pretty quiet on

00:54:55.520 Twitter after this whole thing unfolded. His last tweets are still his tweets about being

00:55:01.720 canceled and, you know, his weird explanations from November 25th. The DevTurity Conference

00:55:08.100 is canceled. As for Julia, well, on November 17th, she hinted that maybe she's reexamining

00:55:14.840 her priorities and might be spending less time on Instagram. On her last post on November 17th,

00:55:20.700 saying, I started posting less on Instagram since my life priorities have changed significantly.

00:55:25.520 or maybe I'm just getting older.

00:55:28.300 So maybe we'll be hearing a little bit less

00:55:30.340 from Julia on Instagram.

00:55:36.280 Got a story about an interesting thing in tech

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There Are No Girls on the Internet - December 06, 2023

Devternity! Did this tech conference create fake women to look more diverse？

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