When Internet Rants Go Too Far - How Vulgar Commentary Masks Naked Power Struggles

Sometimes I have problems categorizing articles I discuss. Perhaps this item would have fit in "women & technology", but I don't think this is exclusively a "woman's problem". Since I've seen this since the days of Unix and experienced the brunt of it during the pioneering days of open source and 386BSD, I think it may belong in a broader category than that peddled by the vanishing newspapers.

A bit of background - Kathy Sierra is the author of a couple of books on Java for O'Reilly and speaks on topics in gaming. She's not a technologist in the traditional sense (no technical or scientific degree, for example, but I've known guys in sysadmin and web programming who've never taken a compiler or physics class too). She's actually a marketing guru. And her writings pretty much reflect that - a lot of talk about "passionate users" and "the brain and artificial intelligence" (nope, she's not an AI guru either, but she partnered with someone who has the credential so I assume her information is accurate) with cute diagrams and lots of upbeat self-help prose. Pretty innocuous stuff, really - the kind of stuff marketing types love to babble and customers eat up (real tech types often tune it out or despise it - you would be amazed at the "how do I get out of this meeting" creativity that goes on in the engineering office prior to another one of those "product design blue sky strategy meetings").

So why should anybody want to get all riled up at this stuff? It's not like they're talking about something real, like global warming, excuse me, global climate change, or whether multicore architectures can impel software architecture changes into parallelized threading, or even if Google is a "one-trick pony". Nope, there's not a lot of real grist for the mill here. Yet she's now canceling speaking engagements because of nasty custom websites devoted to dissing her, claims of death threats, and swirling rumors of misogyny, sexism, and conflicts with free speech. Why?

I know that lots of groups would like to focus exclusively on a "sexism" angle, and it is very true that some of the visuals seem like they came out of Abu Ghraib. Misogyny and threats of sexual violence are the ways a hostile group likes to take women out - whether on the Internet or in the workplace up close and personal (and yes, I've seen it). Women are uniquely vulnerable to such attacks. But these despicable behaviors tend to thrive when there is a consensus among the observers (either readers or publications like the NY Times in this blogger case, or among the executives and officers of a company in the workplace case) that such behavior is within the bounds of normality when it has clearly gone aberrant to reasonable outsiders.

But more importantly, the question is "Who benefits from this behavior?". When 386BSD was getting started in a small office at Berkeley with "386BSD: A Modest Proposal", there wasn't a lot of interest because there wasn't anything there yet. Gradually, as more and more people began to follow the article series Porting Unix to the 386 in Dr. Dobbs Journal and the audience became more engaged and enthused, the general good natured apathy among the "inside crowd" began to morph - some into genuine excitement that there might finally be a BSD version they could get their hands on, and some worried that an open source BSD might be too open, threatening lucrative private consulting opportunities. And finally, a few folks were just plain envious that their name wasn't on that byline month after month.

So a witches brew of envy, greed and hubris grew along with release expectations. Of course, working morning-to-night I was rather oblivious to all of this. So it was rather a shock to start getting the nasty remarks, threats of violence and smear campaigns. And yes, the stuff directed at me was often vulgar and sexual. But I wasn't the only victim - actually my husband took the brunt of the vitriol. You see, in creating an open source operating system we were both so immersed in the work that we had failed to plan well for the inevitable power struggle for control of BSD. Funny thing - we didn't even want to control BSD, but we did want to make sure that 386BSD met the needs of a very enthusiastic and positive fan base since it had our name on it. Did they do a better product themselves? Nope, it was too easy to badmouth us and 386BSD (and the fan base BTW - this was the fly in the ointment) while stealing it and slapping another name on it.

So who benefits from knocking a marketing gal talking about Java and passion? Well, all you have to do is see who joined together to take her out with those websites. They're rivals for the same audience. Why fight it out with a better product when you can just steal it and badmouth your rival?

But in retrospect, while you can steal a piece of open source simply by changing the author's name and obsfucating the code a bit, it's a lot harder to steal an audience - especially when there are other places to go where this stuff isn't happening. That's why BSD incarnations ultimately failed (after all, there was Linux too), and that is why this grab for power will also fail. It may wreck Sierra, but it also taints her tormentors.