VeraCity

The recent hacker attacks on radical feminist websites is an example of the dominator model growing a new tentacle.

A few weeks ago, a group of anonymous hackers mounted attacks on several feminist blogs and websites. The attack was nothing new: women’s voices in general, and feminist voices in particular, are silenced daily by violence, threats, and shaming, on the Internet and in real life.

As a result of the recent attack, there are fewer radical voices on the web. A few radical feminists have taken down their blogs; some will not be reopened. Others have made their Flickr photostreams private. At least one blog and one forum are now private; a muting of voices if not an outright silencing. Going private, having to hide: the parts of the radfem community that are still intact are no longer fully open, and no longer fully a part of the human conversation on the web. 

The hackers exchange communications at some notorious sites which I have visited. (I had to shower myself and sage my computer afterwards.) They appear to be a group of sociopathic personalities whose discourse is trite, tired, and boring. A single comment from one “Anonymous” caught my attention, though, and has stuck in my mind:

“Remember, we are not political. We are not Republicans. We are not Democrats.”

I’ve been mulling this over. After all, these same hackers have also taken down gay websites. Attacking gays, attacking feminists; hmmm, seems like a political agenda to me.

But let’s suppose that Anon’s actions are motivated, as Anon seems to say, by a sort of juvenile nihilist philosophy; not by politics, and not by any desire to support big government, big corporations, and the status quo. Because Anon is a rebel kind of guy. An anarchist, perhaps. He’d never carry water for, well, anybody.

Interestingly, however, Anon never seems to take down the big sites. Walmart.com and the Pentagon are safe from his attentions. It’s not that Anon is a big fan of Walmart or the government. It’s just so much easier to attack the vulnerable. Big business and big government aren’t vulnerable on the Internet. They can afford not to be.

Small discussion boards and blogs, particularly ones that advocate unpopular points of view, are often run by individuals who put up their own funds, if they can scrape them together, and who must be their own IT departments. They can’t afford the type of security that requires the big bucks. And since they have jobs (unlike Anon, apparently), they have to put their desire to maintain an Internet presence in the balance with supporting themselves and their families. When the crunch comes and time pressures set in, it’s not the Internet presence that wins out.

So the actions of these “apolitical” hackers do have a political end: they remove unpopular, radical, fringe viewpoints from the web. Big government doesn’t have to eliminate the subversive websites; Anon will do it.

Sorry, Anon, it looks like you do carry water for the dominators. And you didn’t even realize it, you putz!

Wouldn’t it be great to have an open web, where even the most marginalized groups can be heard? The dominator model, which dictates how human organizations should operate, doesn’t like open. It doesn’t like consciousness, community, or cooperation. Like Anon, the dominator model believes in establishing “cred” by bullying others. And the dominator model extends its tentacles just about everywhere, including inside our own minds, so sometimes we don’t even know how to live by any other model.

As a feminist blogger once put it, “many ghouls of the patriarchy have slimed our brains.”Those ghouls have certainly slimed Anon’s brain.

Anon is just another tentacle that the dominator model has extruded.

So I’m wondering: how much do we want an open web? Enough to recognize a tentacle when we see one? Enough to support free access to free software, including the expensive technology and services that make sites secure? Enough to get the slime out of our own brains, and stop giving a pass to dominator-style web discourse, such as bullying and building cred?

I don’t like it that radical voices, however unpopular, are being expelled from the human conversation by online thugs. I like it even less that it’s happening with hardly any notice, and without comment by more mainstream writers.

Here’s a story about the incident at a news site. I’m not linking to any of the feminist sites that were attacked, because one of the ways Anon decides who to target next is by following links. I guess that means my voice has been muted a bit, too.

Misogyny bares its teeth on the Internet

I’ve been mulling over this post by Tara Hunt, and though it is a week old, I want to draw attention to it.

Here’s the story: Tara takes the lead in organizing a tech conference, and in the main stream press story about it, Tara is ignored and unnamed while top billing goes to co-organizer Chris Messina. Most women in technical professions can tell any number of similar tales. This is one of the great mysteries of high tech: journalists periodically comment on (and even lament) the absence of women in tech, while simultaneously acting as if the prominent tech women in the near vicinity have all donned cloaks of invisibility.

All I can say is that this is just the latest version of a very old story. It is a well-honored tradition for those who record events to ignore the contributions of activist women. Were this not so, we’d be celebrating Alice Paul Day every January 11th.

I just watched a great story of web transparency unfold. It goes like this:

A recently-minted MD–I’ll call him AsshatMD–decides he wants to blog. AsshatMD wants to blog anonymously, because he likes to insult people. In particular, he likes to bad-mouth nurses. A sampling:

Most of the Hispanic girls came from community centers managed by certified nurse midwives (CNMs), nursing “specialists” perhaps even more incompetent than CRNAs (how OB-GYNs tolerate them I do not know; they’re acerbic, ignorant and foolhardy and generally built like linebackers).

Naturally, he doesn’t want real-life nurses (or, as he calls them, “bulldogs disguised as nurses”) to read this stuff. After all, he may have to face them in person at his hospital.

In his most recent blog, AsshatMD takes to task pregnant women who have the temerity to hold opinions differing from his, particularly on the subject of how they should give birth. He makes observations such as this one: “I’m tired of having to manage precarious medical situations because New Age mothers prefer to be irresponsible [...]” by “clamoring” for natural childbirth and declining offers of anesthesia.

It follows that AsshatMD’s blog comes to the attention of a feminist blogger, who offers it as an example of, well, asshattery. AsshatMD promptly comments on the feminist blogger’s site: “This is apparently a blog which caters to rabid (and exceedingly retarded) lesbian manhaters.”

Not surprisingly, other people visiting the feminist blog begin to speculate about what might happen if AsshatMD were outed. Suppose his supervisor got wind of Asshat’s misogynistic writings? People take note of Asshat’s self-proclaimed credentials: his alma mater, the hospital where he claims to have done his residency, and so forth.

But wait! Dr. Asshat’s credentials begin to change. At 2PM he’s a physician living in Northern California who attended Cornell; by 4PM he’s a “District of Columbia” doctor from UCLA.

By 5PM, his site is down; closed for business. By 6PM, a webpage that had previously linked to his site has disappeared. AsshatMD is trying to erase his anonymous existence.

Too late, though. By this time my curiosity was piqued. I’m not sure what came over me; I’m a technical writer, not a private detective. I guess I wanted to see what I could do with Google and a laptop. So I did it–I tracked him down.

I’m not going to out AsshatMD. But it’s interesting to know that even after he had taken down his site, it took me less than an hour to find his name, including middle initial, as well as his religion, academic history, part of the country he calls home, and more. I read a short article he authored about a fraudulent “cancer curing” juice. I even found a photo of him. Oh, and by the way, I have no special technical skills in this area. I’m sure others would have had him in minutes.

To all the Asshats out there: For the sake of the reading public, please assume that anything you post on the web leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that leads, inexorably, back to sweet little old you. Maybe if the Asshats of the world understood this one truth, there would be less asshattery on the web.

We can only hope.

We just bought a brand new printer from HP. I figure we buy about one printer every two months or so, on account of my husband’s business which involves printing out hundreds of photos each month. So we know from printers.

As it happened, we were enjoying a weekend at our house in Truckee, where we go to be near, but not actually at, the ski areas. My husband suddenly decided that he needed to print something out, and he tried to connect his fairly new laptop to one of the four (count ‘em) fairly old printers we had up there. As it turned out, even the newest of our old printers did not possess a USB port. So it was off to Reno, and Best Buy.

Our first impulse was to seek out the least expensive device that would print, photocopy, and fax (not that we ever fax anything). But we were drawn, as if by printer gravity, to the latest HP model, which was advertised as “wireless network ready.”

The salesperson, who was an HP employee, was very knowledgeable. This came as something of a shock, since we frequently shop at Fry’s. Anyway, she explained all the features of the printer; especially the ink cartridges that for reasons unknown cost much less than other ink cartridges, and the tray for photo paper that is able to coexist with the regular paper tray.

Then I asked about the “wireless network ready” claim. Just how ready is this printer, I wanted to know. Do I have to connect it to a computer to configure it, or will it find the network on its own? You see, we didn’t want to buy a USB cable if we didn’t absolutely have to, because though we were ready to spend $300.00 on a printer, we wished to avoid spending $20.00 on a cable when we knew we had a couple dozen spare USB cables back in Palo Alto.

The salesperson did not pretend to know the answer to this question — another culture shock for us. She led us to a second salesperson who, she said, could explain the wireless setup.

This salesperson explained the setup using special rapid high-tech salestalk that sounds like “Yada yada yada configure yada yada yada automatic yada yada yada no problem.” And then he uttered those three little words:

It Should Work.

Hey! I wanted to yell. Come on now! I am a trained technical writer. I have more than 20 years of experience writing end-user documentation. I know the uses of the phrase, “It Should Work.”

I held my tongue, though, figuring I’d probably already embarrassed my husband enough by interrogating not one but two salespeople. We gambled (this was Reno, after all) and took the printer home, cable-less.

It Did Work.

The simple setup instructions that came with the printer let us through typing in the encryption key for our home network, and both our computers — one Mac and one Windows — found the printer immediately.

Good work, HP! Be sure to give credit to the instructional designers who came up with those setup instructions. And remember, tell your salespeople not to use those three little words.

I hear tell that Chris Matthews of MSNBC thinks women leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, have a problem because when we women raise our voices we sound “shrill” and it’s most unpleasant.

I just thought I’d point out that we’ve been listening to fatuous egotistical male morons for the past six years — I’m sure I don’t have to mention names — and it has been nearly unbearable.

I’m eager for Nancy Pelosi to raise her voice. Counting on it, in fact.

A while back I told some friends that I would, some day, write about why I have found it uncomfortable working at Flock, and within open source communities in general. I’ve been procrastinating. It’s hard to write about my feelings on this subject. That’s probably because I want anything I say about Flock and open source to be taken in a positive light, and I’m afraid that it will instead be taken as criticism that makes people feel defensive.

But recently both Eli and Lloyd also left Flock, and I think it is important to point out that while engineering departures have been rare, nearly the entire first string of people who focused on UI, communications, and community are now gone. We were excited by what we thought we could do at Flock. So what happened?

I can speak only for myself, but here’s what happened to my enthusiasm: in very short order, I realized that I would have little influence over Flock’s development as a product and as an organization. I want to be influential in whatever enterprise I am part of, and I want to develop and learn. After being part of Flock for a few months, I concluded that Flock was not going to offer me the opportunity I wanted.

It’s always hard for a non-engineer to be influential in an engineering enterprise. After 25 years of working in the computer industry, I know that. But I’ve concluded that it’s particularly difficult, ironically, for a non-engineer to make her voice heard in open source groups. Since open source projects are usually organized with an “everyone plays” philosophy, why is it so hard for non-engineers to participate?

I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I think it comes down to one thing: the people who are part of open source enterprises are on the whole less experienced than their counterparts in large, established companies. While they value diversity, open source communities are not experienced in actually working with a diverse set of people, and don’t understand the role played by process.

Open source communities are long on creativity but very short on process. In open source, process is a dirty word, bringing to mind long, tedious meetings and rules that control software development. I’m not one to advocate rigid procedures, but a degree of process is necessary for a diverse group to work together. Written specs, schedules, deliverables, feature and UI freeze dates — product development doesn’t happen without these. In the absence of process, contributors in the areas of user experience, QA, and information design can’t do their work.

People attracted to open source projects like to think of themselves as outliers: people who don’t fit a norm, and who don’t like the status quo. I was drawn to open source because I am implacably opposed to the hierarchy/dominator model of human organization, and I see open source as a force pulling in the opposite direction, toward a participation/cooperator model. I value the outside-of-the-box open source personality. But every personality has its shadow side; for open source projects, it’s the philosophy of following no process. If I could change one thing about the open source projects in which I’ve been involved, it would be to inject a good dose of the processes I know, from my experience, work well.

Because in diverse organizations, process is really just a set of agreements about how to work together.

A couple of days ago Lloyd gently pointed out that I hadn’t written anything lately.

It’s true. I have been neglecting my writing, among other things. But I am just recovering from a long bout of feeling rotten, so I have forgiven myself and I hope everyone else will, too.

In any crisis I hold together really well. I can go without sleep, race around from one responsibility to another, keeping up with everything I have to do; but then, once the crisis passes, I fall apart.

In the months leading up to my father’s passing I was able to maintain a stiff schedule of spending hours at the hospital, getting started in a new job, and keeping up with the others (daughters, husband, dog) who depend upon me.

After my dad died in July, my system rebelled, and I went through many weeks of daily migraines, severe arthritis pain in my neck, back, and hips, and terrible fatigue. I think it was my body’s way of getting back at me for all the months of little sleep, much stress, and way too much caffeine.

But I’m fine now, and I’m back to playing the piano, knitting, quilting, railing at the political news on TV, and writing.

Especially writing.

I have long been a fan of Wikipedia. It’s the first place I go for information about things high tech. I consult Wikipedia for biographical information about innovators, explanations of concepts I don’t understand, and, especially, to learn how people are using new Web terminology and slang.

So it was to Wikipedia that I turned a few weeks ago when I came across the term “disemvowel.” I was interested in the practice of disemvoweling as a tactic for blog owners and moderators to discourage trolls, and I’d noted the existence of a few plugins for disemvoweling text (including one for WordPress).

Wikipedia did not let me down; I found an article about disemvoweling that told me what I needed to know. But to my surprise, existence of this article was threatened: a message at the top informed me that it was “nominated for deletion.”

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why someone would want to delete a seemingly harmless page of information about an emerging web practice. If it couldn’t be explained in Wikipedia, then where would one go to for information about “disemvoweling”? Not the Oxford English Dictionary or Britannica, I’d bet.

So despite my effort to control my clicking finger, I found myself navigating over to the deletion discussion.

What I learned surprised me. Whatever the merits of the term disemvowel, or the Wikipedia article about it, the discussion seemed to be mainly about one individual’s personal dislike of the article’s original author. The rest of the opposition focused on the point that since “disemvoweling” comes from the universe of blogs, it may not be worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia. One person argued that blogs are “vanity presses”[*] and therefore cannot be a reliable authority for a Wikipedia article. Others maintained that the term itself is being bandied about in a very limited sphere — the blogosphere — and does not warrant Wikipedia’s attention.

I found much of the discussion diametrically opposed to my impression of what Wikipedia is. And I was surprised to find scorn for bloggers from a community that interacts in a way that’s strikingly similar to the publish/comment/response interactions one finds in the blogosphere.

(An aside: One vocal contributor to the deletion discussion commented a few times that all those voting in favor of the article were actually friends and fans of the article’s original author, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I wish to record here that I had never heard of Teresa Nielsen Hayden before reading this Wikipedia entry, and I have never read her blog.)

Could it be that the Wikipedia community is not as open and welcoming as I had thought? I consulted the rules about deleting articles. Here’s what they say:

Anyone except blocked users is welcome to participate in nominating articles for deletion or discussion of existing nominations. Participants in the deletion process should read (and be familiar with) the core Wikipedia policies of Verifiability, No Original Research and Neutral Point of View first, since deletion is based upon policy and not personal likes and dislikes.
Wikipedia Deletion Policy

This I found heartening; I could participate and vote. I read the policies and registered my “Keep” vote — and my disappointment over the tone of the discussion — on the deletion discussion page. Here’s what I wrote:

Keep: As a technical writer in the software industry, I use Wikipedia as a source for definitions and explanations of Internet jargon. I expect to find new terms in Wikipedia, and came to Wikipedia for information about “disemvoweling.” I was surprised (and disappointed) to find that the article is being considered for deletion primarily, it seems, because someone doesn’t like the author.

For the next couple of days, I checked back to see if and how the matter had been resolved. But the discussion went on and on, and I began checking less frequently.

Then a New Yorker article about Wikipedia, written by Stacy Schiff, reminded me about the disemvoweling discussion. One of the points Schiff makes is that the percentage of the Wikipedia website’s content devoted to actual articles is dropping, and the percentage devoted to discussion and arguments about content and governance is increasing. Disemvoweling is a case in point — while the article is barely a page and a half in length, the discussion of its merits is (as of this writing) 80 pages and still growing.

After reading the New Yorker article I returned to Wikipedia to see if the entry for disemvoweling had finally been blessed or banned. The entry is still there, though it has been rewritten. The deletion discussion has been deemed to have yielded “no consensus.” Wondering how that judgment had been reached, I took another look at the deletion discussion. I scrolled down to read the comments and votes recorded after I’d added my two cents. And there, attached to my “Keep” vote, was this:

Comment: Users fifth edit, only one since July 13. -Royalguard11Talk 00:51, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I’m not sure how to interpret this. Is Royalguard11 suggesting that since I’ve made only five contributions to Wikipedia, my vote doesn’t count? Royalguard11 seems to be an experienced Wikipedian, so perhaps he or she knows better than I. At any rate, the comment, and the entire deletion discussion, definitely discourages me from participating.

Should I feel disillusioned? Or just discouraged?

[*] Interestingly, in her New Yorker article about Wikipedia, Stacy Schiff writes, “Wikipedia may be the world’s most ambitious vanity press.” (Annuals of Information, “Know It All,” The New Yorker, July 31, 2006)

Today my Yale degrees were turned down by my provider of automobile insurance as proof that I am a college educated lady who deserves a lower premium.

They are a bit aged — the second one awarded in anno domini MCMLXXIX (et Universitatis Yalensis CCLXXIX) — but they’re still good. The problem is that they are in Latin, and the insurance person declared that they must be in English.

So much for a classic education.

Star Trek fans: remember those Next Generation episodes in which Data would do something out of character, and Picard would suspect Data was malfunctioning? Picard would say, “Data, perform a self-diagnosis,” and Data would search through his circuits (he was an android, oh you non-Trekkies), find the problem, and tell Geordi exactly where to perform the repair or download the patch.*

So why doesn’t my Mac tell me where to find the System Preferences?

I’m in the process of doing a rapid review of Mac Help, since I will be working on some aspect of it. My first stop was the Spotlight Help, for the simple reason that though I realized that my Mac contained something called Spotlight, and that Spotlight had something to do with finding things, I had never actually used it.

I opened the topic “Setting Preferences for Spotlight,” and read:

1. Open System Preferences and click Spotlight.

Eh? Open System Preferences? And where might I find System Preferences?

Okay, I know where to find System Preferences. But what if I was a naive user? What if I was Bart’s Mom? The instructional designer who wrote this help should have included, as part of step 1, exactly how to perform the step. So like a typically annoying new employee, I asked about this at a meeting. It turns out that it is deliberate, because the writers at Apple are faced with the same problem as Help writers everywhere: the Mac OS, unlike Commander Data, is unable to explain itself.

Normally, the writer solves a problem like this either by writing more text (”Open the Apple menu and choose System Preferences”), or by including a picture of the interface element that must be clicked. But we want less text, not more! And we don’t want to bulk up Mac Help’s footprint by including a bunch of pictures.

And most of all, we think it’s just plain silly. Why should we have to embed a picture of the System Preferences icon into the Help steps, when the darned thing is just sitting down at the bottom of the screen in the Dock, where the user can plainly see it if he or she only knew where to look?

Why isn’t the Mac smart enough to say, “You want Preferences? Wait a sec; I’ll circle the icon for you.” Or, even better, “Allow me. I’ll open it for you.”

Amusingly enough, the Mac used to do this back in the day, when Mac Help was based on Apple Guide. But the Apple Guide technology wasn’t pushed forward and is no longer used.

I think the reason why we never seem to make any headway in online help is because the Powers That Be continue to see it as a replacement for “The Book.” Even in open source projects like Flock — actually, especially Flock — the people making the decisions see online help as something external to the product. It’s like the little paper manual that comes with the refrigerator or washing machine.

But online help is not a book! Online help is the machine explaining itself. It should be like Data on Star Trek. But when the machine can’t show you where it keeps its icons, or menus, or whatever you’re trying to find — well, then it just looks like a dumb refrigerator.

——–

* Okay, sticklers, in “The Schizoid Man” Data is unable to detect the problem, due to sabotage.