Kathy Sierra

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#_note-2

Kathy Sierra is a tech blogger and Java expert with a breezy, friendly, and egalitarian writing style that is both free of putdowns and open about feelings.

She was subject to systematic Internet harassment that started with a negative campaign by non-anonymous male bloggers who said they were "puncturing pretension", although there is nothing pretentious about Kathy's style.

Anonymous bloggers took their cue and soon enough Kathy was being subject to threats of rape and death.

She has issued a joint statement with the two bloggers, Robert Scoble and Chris Locke, who have somewhat gracelessly accepted responsibility for enabling the campaign. In that statement they reassert their belief in a "freedom of speech" that becomes ever more useless, stale and hollow insofar as it is used, as it was used in my experience on the www.lamma.com.HK, in the service of unfreedom, the enforcement of gender norms, and a xenophobia that is increasing world-wide.

However, Kathy's made a mistake.

She characterised her experience as an example of what happens to "women" on the Net. It isn't, if only because most posters are still male.

Instead, the Net has become a capillary way in which elites enforce power relations, by delegating the work of domination to the dominated.

Any sort of vulnerability or openness, as appears in Kathy's blogs, resists this enforcement.

I fought a battle *royale* with Seth Finkelstein to set the record straight on Ms. Sierra in Wikipedia, because originally the section on Harassment was labeled Alleged Harassment. I proved that while the legal status of the harassment was unclear (it was unclear whether she was assaulted or libeled under the law) the facts as documented in transmissions were known and proved by her, since the transmissions are a permanent record.

Lawrence Lessig points out the folly of many who suppose their electronic emails and such are some sort of speech in which they can say anything without being traced. The harassment was real, provable and traceable.

However, Kathy Sierra has done any male who uses the Internet a disservice by making her cause a female cause, since her success would mean apartheid and two sets of rules...in which women bloggers and posters would have to be treated with kid gloves, and the anger would slop over into unrestricted attacks on posters and bloggers who either appear to be male, or say they are.

This already occurs. A surface Political Correctness unleavened by old fashioned decency has created a sort of Prison Planet in which women can, rarely enough but in reality, escape censure, but the rules are enforced harshly on males.

They have to conform to a gender norm in which, for example, attempts at real clarity and a density of ideas, coupled with enough common courtesy to try to subordinate clauses to make them precise, is "verbosity", the expectation being set by male role models such as Clint Eastwood and other members of the silent brotherhoods that shoot first and ask questions later.

So, Kathy Sierra, thanks for nothing.

The typical experience I hear of people who've tried to use www.lamma.com.HK in conversation on the Central and Aberdeen ferry is that they log on, post some opinion, and are put down for having an opinion which they express sincerely, especially by two dysfunctional, and highly immoderate, "moderators", one of whom never expresses himself without any irony so generalized that he can't ever be trusted, and the other of whom hides behind ridiculous and corporate-style interpretations of rules.

This happens throughout the Internet. In recent years, Wikipedia has been overrun by convenience store clerks who eliminate any content that is in their typically uninformed viewpoint "point of view". This has, as far as I can tell at this time (I will investigate further), allowed paid agents of tobacco companies to remove health-related information from tobacco articles; people on the associate discussion pages complain that articles on Copenhagen "spit" tobacco read like adverts, yet every time tbe (neutral point of view) information is added it is removed...possibly by people working at untraced IP addresses for tobacco companies or their public relations firms.

Power, Michel Foucault observed, is exerted through capillaries of society in micro packets through such practices as medicine, the mechanics of prisons, and, it appears to me, through bullying which far from being a childhood phenomenon has been remarked to appear in all phases of life as experienced by all too many people who are shamed into silence and denial by the experience.

Yet the hounding, harassment, and bullying on the Internet is almost unremarked by the elite press, which instead prefers a plague-upon-all-you stance, regarding posters as uniform Yahoos beneath elite notice.

This is because the Internet's own system of widespread anonymous bullying and abuse performs a valuable role in a sick society.

It has managed, over the past twenty years, to enhance a system for managing public discussion in which discussants have to continually ensure, not that what they say is true, but that it stays within acceptable parameters lest they be thought of a trolls with respect to standards of discussion.

Deviance, as I have said before based on a concept developed by the anthropoligist Diane Vaughan in studying the Challenger launch disaster, is normalized as in the alcoholic's family.

For example, a "hard" Republican line on immigration is certain to lose a Republican candidate the next election by an even wider margin than Bush's incompetence already assures. Nonetheless, because a vocal minority is screaming about illegal immigration, most of the candidates except for John McCain are caving to the hardliners.

You'd think they'd look at the extrapolated numbers which show that once you take the hard line to Hispanic voters (and many other conservative Republican voters from India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere who are recent immigrants), you then lose.

But this isn't the way administrative "rationality" works. Mike Huckabee's, Mitt Romney's, and Rudy Giuliani's numbers men are focused like little laser men not on winning the election in 2008 but on getting through the primaries, after which the message will change, and they will hope that the American public will forget the extremism of the primary season.

This is deviant: it's nuts. Yet to deviate from this deviance is to be immediately dismissed by the press as a fringe nut case, and only if you're willing to hang on for dear life, as are McCain and Obama, to whatever shreds of access the press then gives you, and appear to be a crazy man and political troll, do you stand a chance.

However, in most cases in the recent past, the public finds itself presented with a choice between two deviants such as Romney and Clinton, two crazy people, two vicious people who have self-stunted into moral and then mental midgets unable to form a coherent sentence, babbling their way into high office...and dismissing the complex truth as the ravings of crazy men who need not be listened to and who can be tazered by security if they raise their voices.

This psychology didn't start with the Internet. Elements of it existed in the persecution of Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 and 1956 election for being able to construct an extempore complex sentence and a nuanced vision for America's place in the world. Elements of it existed when Richard Nixon was betrayed by his ex-friend John Kennedy who outed Nixon during the TV debate; Kennedy used information about Cuba entrusted to him by Nixon in such a way that Nixon could not respond without endangering national security, and Nixon lost, not because he was sweating under the lights, but because he had some sense of decency, which neither Kennedy, nor his thug father, nor his gangsta brothers, possessed.

But, the Internet has put this ability on steroids, and made it possible to hound and harass Kathy Sierra.

Making it some sort of feminist issue happens to trivialize it. The fact is that the ceremony of any kind of innocence or sincerity is drowned.

So, again, thanks for nothing, Kathy Sierra.