Dominator Tentacles

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

Why I left open source

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.

Should I feel discouraged?

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)

No Fair!

Flock’s director of experience Will Tschumy recently shared this piece of bad news:

Some students are downloading a ring tone off the Internet that is too high-pitched to be heard by most adults. With it, high schoolers can receive text message alerts on their cell phones without the teacher knowing.

As people age, many develop what’s known as aging ear — a loss of the ability to hear higher-frequency sounds.

A New Ring Tone Teachers Can’t Hear, Some Students Are Using A High-Frequency Ring Tone In Class – CBS News

So now they’re taking advantage of our infirmities? Oh, that’s really low.

Back Home: Reflecting on China and the Dominator Model

I loved being in China. I want to return to Shanghai. I want to see what it looks like in another year, because I’ve never seen so much change taking place in one city. I’m looking forward to meeting more people there, and finding out what they think about their evolving economic and social system.

Back home, I had to gather up my family, re-pack my suitcase, and head to Houston for my nephew’s wedding. Getting back on an airplane was stressful, but being among relatives and friends has given me lots of opportunities to talk, and reflect about my trip. People ask me about the Chinese government: Could I detect its presence? Did I see a lot of soldiers and police? Is the heavy hand of Communism felt everywhere? Anywhere?

I remember as a child hearing about the few visits of westerners to China — how the guides shepherded the visitors around, and permitted them to see only certain things. In contrast, Nancy and I moved about freely. We were asked to show our passports only when checking into our hotels. I saw fewer police in Shanghai than I do in my home town. There were more guards and soldiers in Beijing, but Beijing is a capital city filled with historic landmarks, much like Washington D.C. where one also sees many guards and (especially these days) soldiers.

The only time I felt inhibited was when websites I need to access were blocked. This blog, for instance — I couldn’t update it from China. Chris Messina kindly published a couple of my posts, and the rest had to wait until I returned to California. Apparently the Chinese government blocks all access to WordPress. After a couple of days I couldn’t upload photos into my Flickr photostream, either, and I wondered if that site was blocked as well.

Coming from unlimited access to a few million noisy, chaotic, acrimonious, and informative conversations about everything under the sun, I felt weighted down by the Chinese censorship. It’s as if the information stream to which I’ve become so accustomed was suddenly dialed down. I often complain about the overwhelming amount of information on the Web, but having the volume turned down all of a sudden felt unnatural. I don’t want to be separated from what is rapidly becoming the sum total of human communication. And I don’t want anyone else to be separated from it, unless by choice.

My first reaction to being blocked was disbelief. I wrote to Chris, asking if something was wrong with WordPress’s servers. When he told me that the blockage was deliberate, I realized that despite the physical signs of development I could see all around me, this new century may not be the Chinese century. If an author in China can’t do something as simple as posting to a blog site — or using hotmail, since it has also been blocked from time to time — then the human conversation will take place without the full participation of the Chinese.

But I don’t think the story will come out that way. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I have a sense that as the Chinese economy grows, more and more Chinese people will demand full access to the world’s information stores, and that demand will prove irresistible.

Terence Mckenna once said that each bit of human progress outsmarts itself. I’m optimistic because I see the Internet as a sign that the dominator model has finally, finally outsmarted itself. Our hierarchically organized culture, where concentrated power loves to control everything, has bred a new engine of progress that is not subject to such control. The only way to grow is to get on that engine, and go where it goes.

Columnist Writes About Culture and Sexual Violence

My local paper picked up Leonard Pitt’s column this morning. I highly recommend reading it. It’s worth creating a login at the Miami Herald’s website, where you’ll find Pitt’s column.

Here’s an excerpt:

Then there’s the e-mail sent from the account of one of the lacrosse players: “Tomorrow night, after tonights show, ive decided to have some strippers over. However there will be no nudity. I plan on killing bitches as soon as they walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off.”

Doug Clark, a columnist for The News & Record in Greensboro, has expressed sympathy for the writer of that note, saying he was young and dumb and indulging in “the sort of crude talk teenage boys sometimes exchange when they’re sure no adults are listening.”

I disagree. Healthy minds of whatever age don’t harbor such fantasies. More to the point, woman-hating is hardly confined to some college kid’s e-mail. Rather, that note reflects sentiments that have seeped like sewage into our culture, showing up in that video game where you kill prostitutes and rob them, in that music video where a credit card is swiped through a woman’s backside, in the defamation and death threats that greeted the young woman who accused Kobe Bryant of raping her.

MiamiHerald.com | 04/21/2006 | Dangerous intersection: sex and race

At last, a nationally-known columnist writes about the frightening misogyny that has become part of popular culture in the U.S.

Kick Ass?

I've heard Lloyd repeatedly complain about the expression kick ass, as in, "this new desktop widget kicks ass." Lloyd thinks it's a violent-sounding description, and he doesn't like it (or anything else that hints at violence — Lloyd is a Hippie 2.0 if ever there was one).

I've never really thought much about that particular expression, but as I've often remarked to my husband, who scrambles for the Mute button during "Daily Show" breaks, I don't think today's advertising is aimed at our cohort. Sometimes I feel like the ads I find on the Web, on TV, and even in magazines mean to convince me not to buy the product.

Products are always "hot" when I'd prefer them to be cool. TV ads are always yelling at me. Can't we turn down the noise a bit, add I little white space for eye relief, and increase the content to fluff ratio?

To tell you the truth, I don't want products that kick ass. I want them to play nicely with the other gadgets at my house.

Phase Shift

Time for a reorg!

Yesterday was my last day as a regular Flock employee; possibly the last day as a regular employee of anybody. I'm re-defining myself as a consultant. Depending on business, and my sense of discipline, I should have plenty of time to spend writing my anti-dominator model rants into this blog. Hurray! And I'll also get more exercise, eat healthy food, do yoga, organize my closets, floss my teeth, and rotate my tires.

Accordingly, my blog's title has changed. I hope y'all like it.

Update

The Flock staff sat down together last Friday for an uncomfortable meeting, and I’m happy to report that it went really well.

We met to discuss culture — open source culture, mass culture, but mostly Flock’s culture. Specifically, we met to figure out what went wrong in our response to the “rape humor” thread on one of our lists. We reviewed what was written, and those who had responded to the “humor” had a chance to explain why and how they had responded.

Everyone had a chance to speak. No one was interrupted. It was as if we had an invisible talking stick. (Giggle and make New Age jokes, if you like — the talking stick system works.) For my own part, I was very relieved to hear my co-workers affirm that the thread under discussion was offensive to them just at it had been to me. And I felt understood, on this subject at least.

In the future, if offensive talk comes up in a Flock forum, Flock will have a more unified message. We’ll articulate our values more clearly.

When there’s uncomfortable subject matter to discuss, the easiest thing in the world is to duck out of it — to find other, more pressing subjects, to be distracted by the latest firedrill — anyone who has been in a long-term relationship knows the avoidance tactics! But we stayed at the table and discussed this uncomfortable topic until we understood each other.

I am very proud of us.