00:01:31.220I'm doing good, and I am so excited for the first official episode of Internet Hate Machine,
00:01:38.140because we're talking about a topic that I kind of think about a lot, and that is the saga of Adria Richards.
00:01:45.440And I know that you know a little bit about this story.
00:01:47.640One 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.
00:02:02.640Yeah, we're going to be using the word dongle a lot in this episode just to level set.
00:02:08.580One 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 are still doing to this very day.0.89
00:02:24.220And 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 sit back and say, she probably deserved it.
00:05:23.820And in 2013, she goes to PyCon, a conference for Python users.
00:05:29.300And while she's there, she is sitting in the main conference room during a keynote talk.
00:05:35.800And she turns around to have 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.
00:05:53.480Now, the actual nature of the joke is somewhat in dispute.
00:07:37.080You know, you kind of have a sense of maybe it's not going to go that well if you take
00:07:41.800the route of saying, hey guys, knock it off. Yeah. Oh my God. She's so emotional. She's in
00:07:46.720her feelings. Oh, why can't we just, why can't we just be ourselves? It's like, all right, dudes.
00:07:53.940Exactly. So rather than saying something to them in the moment, she takes out her phone,
00:07:59.240takes their picture and tweets it. Tweeting, quote, not cool. Jokes about forking repose
00:08:06.340in a sexual way and big dongles right behind me. Hashtag PyCon. She goes on to tweet,
00:08:13.940can someone talk to these guys about their conduct? I'm in lightning talks, top right,
00:08:17.980near stage, 10 rows back, hashtag PyCon. And then she tweets the code of conduct for the conference,
00:08:23.800which in part says, quote, offensive jokes are not appropriate for PyCon.
00:08:28.680So initially, Adria had said that she was wanted to ignore this, but in her blog,
00:08:33.240but I'm a girl, Adri explained what triggered her to send that tweet. She writes,
00:09:03.240She talks about how her company was a sponsor for this event, and when she heard them talking about dongles, she felt flustered.
00:09:13.620And she writes, then it happened, the trigger.
00:09:17.360She's watching somebody on the main stage, and he's talking about this Young Coders workshop that Adria volunteered at.
00:09:23.760He was mentioning that the Pi Ladies auction had raised $10,000 in a single night for funds that were going to be used to support this Young Coders workshop initiative.
00:09:33.240I saw a photo on the main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop.
00:09:38.260I realized I had to do something because she would never have the chance to learn and love programming0.97
00:09:43.520because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.0.96
00:09:48.200So I remember reading this when the whole situation was going down and I was very moved by what she had written.0.98
00:09:56.520If you're listening to this and thinking, that seems a little overdone, fine, sure.
00:10:03.240But I guess I'm saying that I understand where she's sort of coming from when she wrote that.
00:10:10.460Yeah, I mean, like, I definitely have empathy for the way that she's feeling here.
00:10:15.220I feel like that happens to a lot of people in the business world and specifically within the tech space where you're in a situation where you're like, well, I could say nothing.
00:10:25.740but you know that would be very disappointing to child me or to my niece to my nephew to my
00:10:36.280daughter to my son the inner child in me where where I'm like okay you know I could while this
00:10:44.200might seem small to some who's to say that many small things if you let it go this time you might
00:10:51.440let it go the next 10 times. And then it's just a habit. And then it's a pattern. And then you're
00:10:56.580enabling. So that's exactly what she says. In her blog, she writes about how this incident was
00:11:02.300actually not the first time that she had heard a sexualizing joke at that particular conference.
00:11:07.960She describes how earlier during that event in a hallway, a guy had made a crass joke about
00:11:12.820looking under the skirt of a table and, you know, he made some crass longing about it not like,
00:11:20.380Like, oh, it doesn't have pubic hair, just like I like it.
00:11:23.080But because this happened in a hallway, I know that that joke is really not great.
00:11:30.080But 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.
00:11:42.460And I think it's exactly what you were saying, Sophie.
00:11:44.560It sounds like this was death by a thousand cuts for her, where it was laugh it off, laugh it off, say something, say something.
00:11:54.340And eventually she just couldn't anymore.0.98
00:11:58.120Like, I've been there where you just hit your limit of shit that you are willing to smile through or giggle through or brush off to the point where you just can't anymore.0.96
00:12:10.020So the conference staff talked to the guys who end up being developers who made the joke.0.98
00:12:15.540For their part, it sounds like these guys handled it very well.
00:12:20.360PyCon put out a statement saying, quote,
00:12:22.440An incident occurred involving some inappropriate comments made during a crowded plenary session.
00:12:28.160Per the stated guidelines for the attendees and staff, the issue was reported to PyCon 2013 staff and resolved privately.
00:12:34.800Both parties were met with in private.
00:12:36.520The comments that were made were in poor taste, and the individuals involved agreed, apologized, and no further action were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013.
00:12:45.560No individuals were removed from a conference.
00:14:58.140But, you know, and you might be asking yourself, well, HVF photographed and pointed out two men who worked at Playhaven who were having this inappropriate conversation.
00:15:08.880So you might be asking, why was only one man fired and not the other?
00:15:13.100Playhaven went on to say in their statement that they would not comment on all the factors that contributed to our parting ways with the one developer.
00:15:20.800So it's not totally clear, you know, what is actually happening, if the decision was entirely about what happened at PyCon or if something else contributed to it.
00:15:31.340Right. This could have been a noted behavior from this person or some other reason.
00:15:39.180Yeah, that's interesting. And kind of, I would say CEO Andy Yang actually taking action is kind of rare, I would say.
00:15:50.800especially at that time so that's that's interesting to note here as well but yeah I
00:15:56.200totally see what you're saying like there could have been other things there that we just don't
00:16:00.960know and we'll never know but yeah what happened oh I know what happened I'm bummed yeah it's it's
00:16:09.020not great and and honestly like I I mean I I don't know I don't have any kind of special insight but
00:16:14.920But I would be willing to bet, just from what I know about how tech companies work, that Playhaven, that there was some sort of information that maybe we're not privy to, that Playhaven, like maybe this was a pattern, maybe there were other factors at play.
00:16:31.300And Playhaven was like, well, you know, let's just part ways with this person.
00:16:36.420And this is just another, just one more reason why we should take that action.
00:17:12.780If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:17:19.220This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters,
00:17:25.360pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:17:31.340I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:17:38.520I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:17:41.560from bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments
00:17:46.540nothing is off the table it's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling
00:17:53.100characters and that is a trojan horse whether you're looking for literary deep dives smart
00:17:58.380pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much
00:18:03.120you're in the right place listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever
00:18:09.600you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held
00:18:16.980captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what
00:18:23.460should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember
00:18:29.800this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week I'm with0.97
00:18:38.660survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going
00:18:45.500to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started
00:18:52.180screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories
00:18:58.920about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:19:04.260Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:19:17.700So after Adria's tweet, everyone kind of starts responding to what happened.
00:19:23.500Now, 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.
00:19:33.860Some people are supportive of Adria. Others are supportive of the developers. And I have to say, just to be really clear, not all the people who were not on Adria's side are men. 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 oversensitive or not just talking directly to the men.
00:19:55.320So it's certainly not a clear-cut men-on-one-side, women-on-the-other-side issue when people were just sort of talking about it and expressing their take on it.
00:20:06.180The Fyre developer posted on Hacker News, and I have to say his post, which is still up, is actually pretty civil.
00:20:14.140In my opinion, I do not think that the Fyre developer was interested or intended to whip up a hate mob around Adria.
00:20:22.840I think that that was not a consequence that he was expecting or was welcoming in any way.
00:20:45.720He also clarified her characterization of part of his comments.
00:20:50.000He says, while I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece of hardware that identified as a male, no sexual jokes were made about forking.
00:20:59.700My 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.
00:21:07.800A friend said, I would fork that guy's repo.
00:21:10.860The sexual context was applied by Adria, not us.
00:21:14.580and I you know I wasn't there so I can't speak to whether or not the forking part of that joke
00:21:21.160was sexual or not I will say that with jokes oftentimes you know there's nuance and context
00:21:26.860between friends that maybe can be easily missed when you're overhearing it I have no idea I don't
00:21:32.720know if whether I don't know what he's I can't read into what he's saying uh sure yeah what do
00:21:39.240think i'm like forking dongle if the shoe fits um but but sure sir yeah it's like it's hard it's
00:21:49.080hard and what's what's funny is that after what i'm sure was like a well-intentioned clarification
00:21:55.700of course people on the internet ran with that and they were like totally adria lied about what
00:22:01.880he said and it's like well i could even if even if he is correct and she misrepresent or like
00:22:07.400misunderstood it it's not really a lie like that nuance is completely stripped from the conversation
00:22:13.360when bad actors on the internet get involved absolutely i mean we're out here analyzing
00:22:18.380somebody's really bad middle school joke about dongles yeah and it's like i know what happens
00:22:24.460next and it's like don't just like don't defend your bad joke i don't know like i'm if you meant
00:22:31.680it that way or not putting the blame on adria just i don't think that was cool like i'm not i'm not
00:24:00.200I think that 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 going to keep it real, this is just my opinion, I think he was trying to sort of imply that she is someone who is good at using the media and good at getting her perspective and her name in the media for her causes.
00:24:28.700And 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 she's skilled at using media.
00:25:02.660Yeah, it just comes off as, like, weird, weird, jealous vibes.
00:25:07.160It's just the phrasing in what he said, it just comes off very, well, she's fake news.
00:25:14.560and um why would you believe her when she knows like clearly she knows what she's doing here it
00:25:22.240just reads very oh god it just reads witch hunt I hate it yeah you're absolutely right and I I
00:25:29.200really struggled with how to deal with this nuance in the episode because I do genuinely think this
00:25:36.100fire developer is trying to his best to be civil through a tough situation but I also think that
00:25:42.580Like 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 what he said to bolster her own career and to boost her own profile.
00:25:57.900and the conversation around how adria richards handled this was very much steeped in she was0.98
00:26:07.320really calculated and she was doing this because she thought it was going to you know empower her
00:26:12.820and boost her own profile and it was very like self-motivated i honestly think she just tweeted
00:26:17.860it and didn't think much of it and it blew up in her face if i'm being honest just my perspective
00:26:22.160But 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 clout chase and they're going to punish her for it.
00:26:47.000So she writes to his post on Hacker News, 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.
00:26:58.620So, again, she wasn't calling for him to be fired.
00:27:01.380If she was, she could have easily, you know, said, like, this was on you.
00:27:14.300In my book, those are not the words of somebody who is gleefully watching the takedown of somebody they're hoping to clout build by tearing down.
00:27:25.320And I think this is one of those, it's 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.
00:27:35.080And I also think that it's within the realm of possibility that you could take issue with the fact that Adria took a picture of these guys and tweeted it.
00:27:43.520I am a big, I think that taking pictures of people, unless they're committing an act of
00:27:49.360violence against you, I think taking and tweeting pictures of people without their consent is like
00:27:53.440a no-no in my book, just personally. I think you could argue that she shouldn't have done that.
00:27:58.000Side note, after the incident, PyCon updated its attendee procedure for handling harassment
00:28:02.900to encourage conference attendees to report behavior privately and not to tweet about them
00:28:08.480publicly like Adria did. And so their new procedures say public shaming can be counterproductive to
00:28:14.300building a strong community. PyCon does not condone nor participate in such actions out of
00:28:19.460respect. I mean, I think the word public shaming is such a loaded term. And it is interesting to
00:28:27.600me that that is the language that they chose to update their procedures. They said, we don't want
00:28:32.260bad pr so let's keep these things quiet they didn't say they didn't what they didn't say is
00:28:38.460i mean like i guess they said it prior where they're like we don't condone this type of thing
00:28:42.180but they made a public policy change that points the finger again at adria she's consistently
00:28:53.660getting the finger pointed at her yeah public and and dare i say public shaming by python maybe a1.00
00:29:01.200little bit? I mean, I want to get into that, but absolutely. And it's so funny that you bring up
00:29:06.100this idea of how people attending a conference should handle conflict. I am a longtime political
00:29:14.020organizer. I go to a lot of like lefty, progressive political conferences. At the conferences that I
00:29:19.260go to, they will call your ass out. Almost every single time I go to a conference, like a Netroots0.99
00:29:26.320or something, there is some elected official who's being booed or bird dogged or tweeted
00:29:32.620You know, I think Biden spoke there a couple of years ago and everybody was tweeting at
00:29:36.880the conference and using the conference hashtag like, oh, why don't you go deport some people
00:29:41.060or like, like, like I came up in a conference scene where it was expect, I totally expected
00:29:48.840that you were going to handle whatever conflict you had entirely publicly.
00:29:53.820So it is a little telling to me that they're like, oh, no, part of our code of conduct is if you have a problem with somebody, keep it on the hush hush.
00:30:01.220Because it's like, well, I don't know.
00:30:03.420I guess I feel like it shouldn't be up to the conference to decide how I feel is best to handle my conflict.
00:30:09.460Like, I feel like that's almost like a personal choice.
00:30:12.560It's a weird micromanagement by the conference.
00:30:17.980Yeah, you definitely are somebody who spends more time at conferences than I do.
00:30:23.820But unfortunately, I was like, I was like, I follow you on social media. And if you don't follow Bridget, follow Bridget. But yeah, that's weird. Anytime somebody's like, let's do this behind closed doors. I'm like, oh, red flag.
00:30:39.600Yeah, I just feel like 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.
00:30:55.480And so even if you think that Adria should not have taken the picture of these guys and tweeted it, Adria Richards does not handle HR decisions at Playhaven, right?
00:31:05.820And they are the ones who decided to part ways with this developer.
00:31:09.600Again, I have no evidence for this, but I suspect that there might have been other reasons why this developer was let go,
00:31:15.660particularly because that they only fired the one developer and not the other, even when two men were photographed.
00:31:21.460And it is really interesting to me how Playhaven just allowed Adria to become this very public scapegoat for their hiring and firing decisions.0.50
00:31:31.380They didn't speak up and say, hey, Adria doesn't work at Playhaven and did not force our hand. We made this decision. It's just interesting to me how they didn't take the flack publicly. This visible Black woman in technology was the one who got all of the negative attention for their decision.
00:31:51.800And I guess I think, you know, companies 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.
00:32:06.440Had Playhaven said, we're aware of the issue and we're taking the appropriate action, blah, blah, blah, you know, release some statement that says like, we know what's going on and we're going to handle it.
00:32:17.260You know, if people are mad that this developer was fired, they should be mad at Playhaven, not Adria.0.99
00:32:23.760But Adria is a Black woman, she's very visible, and she represents all of the different trigger points that make people mad.
00:32:30.880She's Black, she's outspoken, she's a woman.0.66
00:32:33.340And she's very actively trying to shake up the status quo in technology as being this white male bros club.
00:32:40.880All of which makes her an easy target when the actual decision makers are Playhaven.
00:32:45.980And it seems like people were not just angry about the firing of this one developer.
00:32:51.440What they were angry about is Adria Richards and what she represents in technology.
00:32:56.880She represents technology and technology spaces becoming more accommodating to women and marginalized people.0.84
00:33:02.680She represents women and marginalized people having meaningful power in those spaces and feeling like they can actually take up space in those spaces.
00:33:11.040And with that comes all the people who currently had power in those spaces feeling threatened,
00:33:18.120feeling like the order that they're used to, where they're on the top and have the power,
00:33:22.220might actually be upset and that they might actually have to make room for people who
00:33:26.940traditionally have not had a lot of institutional power in technology spaces.0.86
00:35:10.000They care about women, and in this case, specifically a Black woman, shaking up the status quo in technology and threatening what they see as the way that the world and society should work.1.00
00:35:30.000streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iheart's twice as large1.00
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00:35:44.520can help your business think iheart streaming radio and podcasting call 844-844-iheart to get
00:35:51.320started that's 844-844-iheart if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to
00:35:57.440your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club,
00:36:04.720part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride
00:36:09.220and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week
00:36:14.400we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't
00:36:18.900stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From best-selling
00:36:24.200authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments nothing is off the
00:36:29.140table it's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a trojan
00:36:36.520horse whether you're looking for literary deep dives smart pop culture conversations or a
00:36:41.800community of readers who love to think a little too much you're in the right place listen to pro
00:36:47.160society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts see you between the
00:36:53.360pages when i was 14 years old i was kidnapped and held captive for nine months i survived and i've
00:37:01.680spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them i'm elizabeth
00:37:07.560smart and these are the survivor files i just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear
00:37:15.140saying shut up don't say anything every week i'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable
00:37:23.100I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:37:27.560I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:37:35.180They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:37:39.080But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:37:42.520They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:37:45.640Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:37:58.960Let's get into the fallout of what happened with all of this.
00:38:02.700So, speaking of companies being really cowardly and caving to a mob, that is pretty much what happened to Adria Richards.
00:38:10.360So after the developer gets fired, the internet, or more specifically 4chan,
00:38:14.640really turned on Adria and her employer, SendGrid.
00:38:18.300Adria, I have to say, is horribly, horribly harassed.
00:38:22.300Her website gets a DOS attack, which is, if you don't know what that is,
00:38:25.360it's a denial-of-service attack where essentially attackers flood a website
00:38:30.280with more traffic than it can handle to shut it down.
00:38:33.060What happened to Adria wasn't just people tweeting that they disagreed with her,
00:38:36.440Nor 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 are still up as we speak.
00:42:37.060Syngren supports the right to report an appropriate behavior whenever and wherever it occurs.
00:42:42.760What we do not support was how she reported the conduct.
00:42:46.480Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line.
00:42:51.380Publicly shaming the offenders and bystanders was not the appropriate way to handle the situation.0.63
00:42:58.300And the aftermath of all of this was that Adria had to literally go into hiding.
00:43:04.960And she was someone who had this big voice online and this big online footprint.
00:43:11.300And she essentially stopped tweeting and stopped making videos and stopped putting her perspective out into the world after this happened.
00:43:19.140And so, you know, I feel like so many people, for example, the men's rights activists who were raising money for the fired engineer, will talk so much about things like free speech, free speech.
00:43:31.400But they almost never talk 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.
00:43:45.060So she wasn't continuing to, you know, speak up.
00:43:48.220And so when we talk about whose free speech is being threatened, it's almost never the marginalized people who have to stop speaking and are silenced when they become the targets of harassment campaigns like Adria was.
00:44:02.240So that's basically what happened with Adria Richards.
00:44:05.820And so there are so many takeaways here and so many things I think that we can learn from this situation.
00:44:12.200One is that I believe that Adrian Richards' situation really ushered in this new understanding of situations that are complicated and involving 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 get fired.
00:45:57.460it's not like all of them had joined in
00:45:59.580on this harassment campaign against Adria.0.69
00:46:02.480And there were certainly women in tech who did not agree with Adria's actions.0.70
00:46:07.100One of them, Amanda Blum, who was a developer who worked with Adria IRL when she invited Adria to speak at a conference that she organized.
00:46:15.280She writes in her blog post about how she did not have a great interaction with Adria.
00:46:19.260She was like, oh, I don't really like her.
00:46:21.000But that doesn't mean that this kind of harassment campaign against her is good.
00:46:26.360You know, her piece, which we'll 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.
00:48:46.040And I think the sad part about all of this is that it sounds like from all public accounts
00:48:51.020that Adria and the Fyre developer seemed like people who were being used as proxies in a
00:48:57.120larger kind of identity culture war fight.
00:48:59.880In that hacker news back and forth that they had, they seemed like two people who were
00:49:04.980genuinely interested in coming to some kind of a conclusion with one another.
00:49:08.420But that is simply not possible when bad actors, with an axe to grind, hijack conversations and are really invested in making those conversations as polarized as possible.
00:49:19.620Yeah, I was going to say the comments section definitely wasn't looking to find a solution here.
00:49:25.060They were just looking to cause more chaos and make things worse for everybody.
00:49:31.260in the fire developers post there are people who are like when he apologizes for his comments
00:49:37.780don't apologize how is that helpful if somebody has taken a look inward at their own behavior
00:49:42.520and feels the need to apologize and this goes for pretty much all conversations if a celebrity is
00:49:48.240saying something on the internet there's always and they apologize for something there's always
00:49:51.940going to be that one stan in the comments who's like queen don't apologize like we love you you
00:49:57.520know what I mean? I certainly do. Another takeaway from this is that companies and institutions
00:50:06.660just didn't know how to deal with mobs back then. And frankly, I don't think they've gotten much
00:50:12.600better today. You know, as fucked up as 4chan shitheads were here, my real beef is actually0.99
00:50:19.200with Playhaven and SendGrid. This was happening back in 2013, and maybe none of us, and by0.98
00:50:25.160extension, the people who run companies didn't know how to handle it when a mob swarmed around
00:50:29.880one of their employees. You know, Playhaven was ultimately the decider in deciding to fire that
00:50:34.940developer that Adria photographed. They didn't have to do that. And they certainly did not have
00:50:40.240to let Adria take the fall for what was entirely their decision and no one else's. And to that
00:50:46.820point, they didn't even if this was somebody that that deserved to be fired for reasons we don't
00:50:52.120know about. They didn't need to make it public and therefore point that mob towards Adria.0.73
00:51:01.460And then just sit back and say nothing as this mob tore her apart as she had to flee her home0.98
00:51:08.160and lock down her entire online presence that she had been building forever, you know?
00:52:38.080Even if they felt like Adria deserved to be reprimanded,
00:52:41.400I think it's pretty rich that in their statement, public statement on Facebook about her firing, that they say that, oh, we're against 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.
00:53:34.420I 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.
00:53:45.400And I feel like today, you know, the targets may have changed, but the tactics are pretty much the same.
00:53:51.280You know, we still see the same kind of thing play out.
00:53:54.240A small handful of bad actors have pretty much used this playbook to get their way, and I think they're going to continue doing it until we do something.
00:54:02.960For example, by now I think that most folks listening know that just this last week,
00:54:07.480there was a violent attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi,
00:54:11.500who was attacked with a hammer to the head while he was sleeping
00:54:14.580by an assailant who claimed that he wanted to break Nancy Pelosi's knees
00:54:18.740to send a message of fear to other Democrats.
00:54:22.420And per the writings of the accused attacker online,
00:54:25.400it was Gamergate that, you know, for lack of a better word, radicalized him,
00:54:29.900And that he described Gamergate as the turning point in his own trajectory, politically.
00:54:37.580We're going to do a whole other episode later this week all about this.
00:54:41.480But I'll just say right now that Gamergate provided this connection between the cultural and the political.1.00
00:54:47.260You know, you're angry about women taking up space in technology and gaming, so you use these tactics to harass and attack them and take away their power.
00:55:24.040as part and parcel of our current political and social landscape now.
00:55:27.920You know, things like people coordinating on Facebook pages
00:55:31.040to flood schools with calls about teachers who they suspect of being LGBTQ
00:55:35.420or, you know, they suspect of teaching something that they don't like in schools,
00:55:40.120which happened to a Georgia schoolteacher, Cecilia Lewis,
00:55:43.860who we'll talk about in a later episode of this podcast.
00:55:46.100You know, that's definitely a tactic that I see
00:55:48.580that was really refined in Donglegate and Gamergate
00:55:53.620And 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.
00:56:06.440Now it's just part of our political and social landscape that, unfortunately, I worry is not going to go away.
00:56:15.620It also happened recently to a woman named Nina Jankowicz, who was the former head of the Biden administration's disinformation governance board, who eventually had to resign and go into hiding after a right wing smear campaign against her.
00:56:29.020You know, I think it 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.
00:56:45.780And it also is one of the reasons why, and I know this is perhaps a bit of an unpopular opinion, 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.
00:57:06.780I definitely have seen situations on the Internet where I'm like, oh, well, that person should not hold the office that they hold.
00:57:13.820But I just don't think that the tactic of coordinating people to call someone's an employer or to disrupt their work or their life is a good one because companies are cowardly and we know that they will cave to mobs.
00:57:27.600And I just think it turns into an easily gamified numbers game that I know the worst people on the internet can definitely coordinate to get a flood of angry emails or tweets to give the impression that there is a broad consensus where really there is none.
00:57:43.560And I'm certainly not going to act like I don't find it cathartic when I'm seeing a video of a racist in public lose their jobs.1.00
00:57:57.460I'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.
00:58:08.480And so I just think it's something that as good stewards of the Internet, we have to really be careful when we traffic in tactics like that, because it is a tactic that is well worn by bad actors.
00:58:20.860And I don't think it's getting us to a place that is better on the Internet.
00:58:27.460Internet Hate Machine is a production of Cool Zone Media.
00:58:30.980For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, check out our website, coolzonemedia.com,
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00:58:57.460abducted stalked controlled and nearly silenced these are stories about what it takes to make it
00:59:04.180out alive listen to the survivor files with elizabeth smart on the iheart radio app apple
00:59:10.300podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally
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00:59:42.880i am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos and i cannot decide if i like him or not
00:59:49.580that was a caller from my podcast therapy gecko where i speak with anonymous callers
00:59:55.360about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind.
00:59:59.960It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko.
01:00:02.860So if you're trying to get out of your own head and into someone else's,