-Title: Scattered Personal Reflections After a Tech Conference; Or, Smile More
-Date: 2020-01-01
-Category: commentary
-Tags: discourse, software industry, anecdotal
-Status: draft
-
-> _This is where the party ends
-> I can't stand here listening to you
-> And your racist friend
-> I know politics bore you
-> But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you
-> And your racist friend_
->
-> _Out from the kitchen to the bedroom to the hallway
-> Your friend apologizes, he could see it my way
-> He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking
-> Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding_
->
-> —["Your Racist Friend"](https://genius.com/4498157) by They Might Be Giants
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-_(Attention conservation notice: rambling Diary-like post that I felt like writing anyway for psychological reasons; likely not worth your time.)_
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-<em>(Also, it turns out that I got my Blerp-d9aa89fd commit bit a few weeks later, which makes me think I shouldn't publish this one—even when everything is pseudonymified, it would feel like a betrayal to publish something that could be misread as a petty snipe-attack on my/the group. As a writing exercise, it may still be worth continuing to draft it just a little bit further, so that I can go back and extract any insights into some yet-untitled future post or posts on women-and-trans-and-SJW-in-tech phenomena that <strong>isn't</strong> written in the boring/petty Diary anecdote genre.)</em>
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-<em>(I could imagine someone arguing that the fact that I make the Git repository public means that committing the draft <strong>is</strong> publishing, but I think the distinction between "posts on the blog itself, displayed proudly for all to see" and "slush text that my one or two most devoted readers might find if they notice the tiny 'Site source' link in the footer and bother rummaging through the drafts/ folder" is pretty significant. Any hypothetical adversary who wants to mine the blog for the biggest socially-unjust gaffe in a targeted attempt to destroy my real-life reputation is just going to have a field day with March 2017's ["Smart"](/2017/Mar/smart/).)</em>
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-I took half a week of vacation from my dayjob recently to crash with a friend in another city and attend the conference associated with an open-source technology I've been pretty involved with lately! It was really fun and inspiring, getting to hear all the talks and putting faces to usernames! I thought I might write a blog post about the experience and all the exciting technical things I learned!
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-This is not that post. By cowardice and convention, this is someone else's story on someone else's blog, about "Taylor Saotome-Westlake" visiting his friend "Jerrica" in "San Francisco" to attend the conference about this software called "[Blerp](https://xkcd.com/1692/)-d9aa89fd".
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-Again, the conference was great, and I had a lot of fun, but—I don't know. Some aspects of it induced me to feel a little bit stressed and a little bit sad, even though that's entirely my own fault and entirely my own problem.
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-<a href="/images/blerp-d9aa89fd_pronoun_stickers.jpg"><img src="/images/blerp-d9aa89fd_pronoun_stickers.jpg" width="300" style="float: right;"></a>
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-It started with the pronoun stickers.
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-This year, there were pronoun stickers in everyone's conference swag bags ("[...] so we can all help each other get things right. Wear them in solidarity with others too. Help us make [the conference] welcoming and inclusive for all"), including _they/them/theirs_, _ze/zir/zirs_ (!), and blanks (!!). Leaving aside [philosophical objections](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#anchor-pronoun-sticker-discourse) for a moment, I want you to consider [the mild stress this kind of thing can inflict](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/172800552516/so-i-havent-posted-about-this-since-college) on people who have [_some_ form](https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/using-gender-neutral-pronouns-could-actually-misgender-people.html) of gender-related problems but who have chosen some [set of mitigating interventions](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) other than transitioning.
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-Which sticker am I supposed to put on if I am to show solidarity? The _he/him/his_ sticker would be the obvious, straightforward choice. After all, that is, in fact, the third-person pronoun people use for me. But in a context where I'm being offered a _choice_, I _don't want_ to choose the male option, because that makes it look like I "identify" with my maleness—as if I were _cis_ in the strong sense of having a "gender identity" matching my "assigned" sex, rather than in the [weaker sense](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/cis-by-default/) of being a reactionary coward whose pathological need for a backwards-compatible social identity is preventing her from becoming her best self.
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-At the same time, I can't wear the _she/her/hers_ sticker. And I think there's a sense in which _can't_ really is a better choice of words than _don't want to_. It's not that I don't enjoy being refered to as _she_ in a context where that makes sense, like when I'm [crossplaying at a fandom convention](/tag/cosplay/), or in the Secret Blanchardian Conspiracy Chatroom, or in the ironic last sentence of the preceding paragraph. It's that, in real life, when I'm not playing dress-up and I can't hide my face behind the fog of net, _people are going to notice_ that I'm male and habitually use the English language pronoun for males on such occasions that they need to refer to me in the third person. I _could_ attach a sticker to my badge instructing them otherwise, but only in the same sense that I could tell them that black is white and cats are dogs—that is, probably not with a straight face.
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-But none of this really matters: if you don't want to wear a sticker, you can just not wear one, with no discernible social consequences. (At least, not this year!)
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-I did get asked for my pronouns once (the first day with the training sessions, by someone who I think was not yet aware of the stickers)—the only time I've been asked for pronouns when I wasn't at an explicitly social-justice oriented event (like at the local [genderqueer support group](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/), or "Introduction to Feminisms" class at the University ten years ago) or literally wearing a dress (in the cosplay repair lounge at Comic-Con). I think I handled it reasonably well?—hemming and stalling for a few seconds before giving _he_, with a disclaimer that the reason I hesitated was because I don't want to imply that I _identify_ with masculinity. The questioner, sensing my discomfort, made an effort to placate or reassure me: "Sure," the person said, nodding, "That's just what you're using right now; that's cool."
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-[in a way, it was a compliment—I wouldn't have been asked that if I had a beard]
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-The conference-proper talks were the next day. The opening keynote was on the topic of the human and community aspects of open-source development, and started with the obligatory pæan to the importance of the Code of Conduct, and that anything that made anyone feel unwelcome could be reported to conference staff—including cases where the reporter doesn't want any action to be taken. The talk itself was OK, I guess, but I was actually somewhat upset by one particular slide that quoted (as a jumping-off point for further discussion) "Every good piece of software starts with a hacker scratching their own itch," with the footnote: "Not going to cite this one because the author is a huge jerk." I recognized the quote as being from Eric S. Raymond, whose blog I read occasionally.
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-I want to explain why I found this upsetting, because the dynamic here is kind of subtle, and I don't want to be mistaken for—or for that matter, to _be_—someone who is too easily offended by a snarky footnote (really, a mere _footnote_!) in someone's presentation. Obviously, I'm not going to get in a huff over someone deliberately snubbing Eric Raymond in their own work (even if their profile also happens to mention that they work on Blerp-d9aa89fd—contra the prosecution in Opalgate, I don't consider that "representing the project"). And obviously, I would have no quarrel with the presenters harshly _criticizing_ Raymond for some specific thing he said that was bad, or choosing to quote authors they like rather than those they dislike, or even just deciding that the "itch-scratching" metaphor that they wanted to reference was sufficiently widespread as to be part of the commons and not worth attributing to anyone. But to deliberately flaunt the "if you verbatim quote someone, cite them by name" discourse norm in the context official BlerpConf opening keynote—that's a context that I _do_ consider "representing the project", speaking _ex cathedra_, and _that_ does makes me nervous.
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-If Eric Raymond is such a V\*\*\*\*mort-tier Bad Man that you're not even willing to _name_ the guy, then presumably he wouldn't be welcome to speak at the conference, either (if Eric Raymond should ever have something to say about Blerp-d9aa89fd specifically). And that ... seems Actually Bad to me?—that a celebrity with _that much_ technical credibility (author of _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_, maintainer of libpng, _&c_.) wouldn't be welcome on account of his political views (or "being a huge jerk", I guess, but forgive me if I'm suspicious that the appelation was applied solely for matters of interpersonal conduct rather than ideological transgressions).
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-[the vibe, 40-year-old men, "Wilhelm", behavioral genetics]
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-[the taxi man]
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--------
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-and get on with enjoying the conference and meeting all sorts of interesting people with exciting technical things to say!
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-On the first day, between training sessions, I sat down at the table of someone who was eloquently denouncing the hideously overcomplicated code they encountered in the "Quux-f1deb75f" community—which made sense, they explained, because the people who wrote those libraries were Trump supporters and Nazis and libertarians.
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-Oh, that's interesting, I said. Do you think there's a big correlation between political views and code quality? With a good linter to operationalize _quality_, this is potentially amenable to empirical study ...
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-At some point, the conversation paused to introduce ourselves. I gave my name as "Mark" ... and then the person asked, "What are your pronouns?"
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-[...]
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-Obviously, I would have no objection if the presentation had _harshly criticized_ Eric Raymond for some specific bad thing that he said, or if the authors had chosen to quote some author they liked rather than an author they didn't like, or if they had decided that the "itch-scratching" metaphor was sufficiently widespread as to be part of the commons and not worth attributing to anyone. But to verbatim quote
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-[...]
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-It is humbling to contemplate the possibility that the only reason I haven't suffered any consequences for my writing is simply because I'm _not important enough_ to be a target—in either direction. (That is: no one hates this blog enough to bother reversing the pseudonym and making trouble for me in real life, and, conversely, my open-source and professional work isn't notable enough for anyone to bother digging to see if I have a secret gender-heresy blog.)
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-[...]
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-<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br>
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-Curtis Yarvin
-Rod Vagg linked to Quillette
-Opal guy said trans people are delusional
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-I did a good job of—how do you say?—hiding my power level.
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-"It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole and they're showing you the door"
-think I'm an asshole and are showing me the door https://xkcd.com/1357/
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-the Uber driver who picked me up from the airport was named Omar and was from Mexico
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-he did not know any nonbinary people
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-"peering through reverent fingers"
-"but the situation is fraught"
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-My Little Pony convention was more ideologically tolerant
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-https://meteuphoric.com/2017/08/30/what-you-cant-say-to-a-sympathetic-ear/
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-"There are views we have decided are unacceptable and we will ostracize you for having them." https://twitter.com/seldo/status/714272018976284672
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-find the contributor covenant PR where someone wanted to carve out a personal Twitter exemption, and the counterargument mentioned naming the project in the profile
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-https://where.coraline.codes/blog/oscon/
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-Jerrica independently idenfitied it as a microaggression
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-https://www.nateliason.com/blog/social-disobedience
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-singular they for named individuals with an Anglosphere name or a beard in their profile photo
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-I interrupted a woman, trying to finish her sentence
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-heritability of politics actually makes sense: the moral foundations are the "true" trait, but in a particular country, that could predictably mean being a democrat
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-https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/landscapes/
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-"Politics of Process Defense" http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8120
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-https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-are-shifting-the-rest-of-their-identity-to-match-their-politics/
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-Damore lawsuit also quotes an instance of "40-something white men" (p. 43)
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-https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788
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-/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff