Or, trying to be a better man in tech

Notes prompted in part by the scale of inequality offline and abuse online, most specifically against women in technology. I have no illusion that my writing at this personal site has impact, influence, but it’s important to me to write some of this down and toss a small rock in an already-swirling rapid.

• My race and gender do not complicate my position in my job and the cultural things I spend my time doing, but gender and other statuses profoundly shape the experience of others. Having listened to and read those experiences, I am more aware of my charmed life as a White Guy in Tech, conscientious about the opportunities I might help make real or unintentionally block and why it matters that I try to help: because diversity where I work makes that work better, and because it helps to improve — perhaps by an incremental margin but a difference all the same, if successful — the lives of people facing structural and deeply-entrenched inequality. This by itself is an outcome that I value.

• My own experience is richer for having a broader perspective on those of others.

  • I am better for it, and I’m trying to say that in a way that sounds as least selfish as possible: having a broader perspective is enriching, not limiting; it is not zero sum, it does not “take away” what is special about me or my life, and it makes more room for others.
  • I acknowledge that I am lucky in many ways that so many others are not: I have a good job, one that I like and which is rewarding; I have a home and supportive family; stability; safety. When I do something online (or in the office, for that matter) that activity is not marked by my race and gender the way it is for many.
  • Just as I want to be able to express myself, so should I help those around me. This is restricted in environments marked by marginalization, where we are uneasy being open and expressive.

• I wrestle with staying out of the way vs joining some conversations because I recognize that these spaces are fraught with co-optation, risk, and safety concerns – emotional and physical.

  • Flickering the Gaslight by Gersande La Fleche shows how high the stakes are. Posting here is one way to engage without claiming space in one of those ongoing conversations. Lily Benson has written a good primer on how to engage.
  • Justice Points ep# 93, “We’re Already Here” and Episode #38 of Less than or Equal (with Kahlief Adams) have powerful conversations about allies and privilege.
  • Leigh Alexander has a guide to being helpful
  • And I remind myself that whatever solidary benefit to me of participating (“being an ally”) is not the point.

• Having spent a lot of time getting advanced degrees in a field in which structural inequality is a core tenet underlaid with decades of quantitative findings, the facts of this inequality are something I have long understood. Yet I am still struck when I see it enacted by men so viciously mocking the difficulties of women in technology and culture, so quick to use violent imagery and ugly slurs against those who are outspoken and visible.

  • This is also one reason the “everybody is awful on the internet” argument is so tremendously hollow. This gets trotted out frequently in defense of awful online treatment of women (and all marginalized groups). At Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Alisha Karabinus takes apart this “notion that everyone gets threatened in gaming”:

  We cannot conflate targeted harassment of a woman (or all women) with general incivility in online discourse because not only are the bases not the same, but the impacts, too, are vastly different. In other words, we’re not talking about hurt feelings or trash talk here. We’re talking about pervasive, damaging behaviors that can impact an entire culture, and behaviors we rarely address or speak about honestly.

• Another often-used justification is that all people in geek culture feel abused, marginalized and left out. Not only does this reflect an obvious and staggering lack of empathy (justifying being abusive and awful by claiming to have at one point felt bad yourself), but it’s a weird historical artifact at a time when gaming and once-niche entertainment are multi-billion-dollar industries, and STEM training/jobs are sucking all the air out of most other kinds of education and work. Geeks are inheriting the world, gang, and it’s high time that those of us who had a hard time in school because we were interested in video games|comics|programming|computers understand that so did most everybody else, albeit for different reasons, and so many have it so much worse.

  • I have stinging memories of not feeling like I belong,¹ and I am fortunate to have found a community of like-minded BBS nerds (men and women) at a key point in my growing up.
  • Yet: However difficult my experience, it critically is fundamentally different from that of someone truly marginalized by institutional sexism, racism, or other discriminations.

• I think about things that I can do to change this space positively. I can be conscientious about making opportunities and including voices. I have some opportunity to do that where I work, and I try to do so, conscientious that my impact is greater among those I know than in a twitter conversation. Meanwhile I keep listening, though I know that’s not enough. I’m taking seriously the admonition from that Justice Points episode about amplifying good rather than boosting the conflict.

Better voices

In addition to the links noted above, here are a few starting points for more, from people who are better at this than I, and a couple of recent points of research and culture war intersections that are illustrative of what’s going on.

• Isometric: This post started out being called “How Isometric Made Me a Better Person” but that seemed too naval-gazing even for a blog post. I got to know Steve Lubitz and Brianna Wu casually back when we all hung out on App.net, and have had a great time as well as learned a lot from everybody on the show. It’s a gateway to a lot more than games; this post and the voices on these issues that I have found stem in large part from listening to it.
• The Cool Gamer Girlfriend and Permission to Try by Maddy Myers (and a related conversation on Isometric #50)
• Model View Culture is producing a lot of sharp work on these topics from a bunch of points of view: disability, hacker culture, feminism, race, more.
• Shanley’s My Statement is a scary illustration of just how bad it can be.
  • It is only one of many, many such stories, from all industries.
• Not Your Mama’s Gamer, a collective of authors behind such things as the #yesIplay tag and a ton of interesting writing (making super podcast, too).
  • NYMGamer maintains a list of recommendations for more resources
• How conservatives took over sci-fi’s most prestigious award, a glimpse into the current culture war that’s particularly emblematic of how regressive and fundamentally politically conservative so much of these attacks are.
• The 5 Biases Pushing Women Out of STEM, because it’s not as simple as a “pipeline problem.”
• How Hollywood Keeps out Women, because it’s not as simple as a “tech industry problem.”
• Mel Chua, On the diversity-readiness of STEM environments: “But I have always wondered what I might have grown up into, if I had learned STEM in an environment that was ready for me — without me having to fix it first.”

I really like the thinking that Joel Dueck is spinning up around privacy and facilitating payments to make building stuff online economically viable without ads. He proposes some legal and architectural tools, but notes that:

Focusing on the nuts and bolts of the web itself, looking for technical solutions, is not going to be enough to counteract these broader trends. And as I’ve said before, simply appealing to people to change their personal habits of internet usage is insufficient and ineffective. What is needed is a principled re-adjustment of the entire playing field — a political solution to a political problem.

Elsewhere, he remarks that if the economics of blogging do collapse¹, he will “feel as though we lost something valuable — a truly democratic chance for people to sustain their lives through the pursuit of literacy and self-expression.” I thought about this same thing this morning, and I contemplated the worth of continuing to write and post here. The “community”, such as it was, of bloggers and readers, is much changed from when I started posting to my old home blog, way back in the pre-social media days. But here I am, all the same, tapping away. For those of us who were into this before services ate everything, it’s kind of a hard habit to break.

I really like this episode of Three Moves Ahead on the 4X Genre. I haven’t played a ton of 4X games myself (my most recent experience being a whole bunch of Endless Legend a few months ago), so I’m only passingly familiar with most of the games they chat about (even Civ! I know, I know!), but this is still a really accessible conversation that touches on a lot of interesting elements of these games: Balance between the different phases of the game, the rare expertise required to build 4X mechanics, and the difficulty of innovating in storytelling within these games. They also talk about the often uncomfortable assumptions made in most 4X games, of an unspoiled world ready for exploitation and civilizing in the service of a conqueror (reflecting on the problematic “explore, exploit, expand, exterminate” label, too), and imagine a game in this style that could really explore things like postcolonial conflict.

It’s a fun and wide-ranging discussion and I’m looking forward to listening to more from Three Moves Ahead and Idle Thumbs.

The One-Minute Test

Via Jeremy Keith, a method of wrapping up a meeting by asking for concrete reactions in just a minute:

1. What was the big idea? (What was the most important thing you heard at the meeting?)

2. What was your big surprise? (What was the thing you saw or heard that surprised you the most?)
3. What’s your big question? (What’s the biggest unanswered question you have at this time?)

I’ve been in meetings that ended in a similar way and found it to be a really positive way to conclude. One spin on that final question that I have liked is to ask “who will you share this question with” or “where do you go next with this idea” — It’s very satisfying to generate a specific kind of next step that’s social and/or active, and it encourages a much more engaged conclusion that might not otherwise come out of some meetings.

The Spark File

Steven Johnson on keeping a bin of ideas, “hunches” and snippets of writing:

But this kind of inventory doesn’t quite convey the most interesting part of the experience, which is the feeling of reading through your own words describing new ideas as they are occurring to you for the first time. In a funny way, it feels a bit like you are brainstorming with past versions of yourself. You see your past self groping for an idea that now seems completely obvious five years later.

I get the same experience from occasionally going back to the scattered output of my years of blogging and notes-file-keeping: at various times using web sites, planner-mode, org-mode, Moleskines, Field Notes, and now here. What Steven has probably done more smartly is keep most of that in one place. In that time I’ve been a number of things, or at least two, having moved out of academics into the work I’m doing now.

Learning Vim in 2014

God help me, I’m learning another text editor. I’m not sure why; seemed like it could be interesting or engaging, which it is. I think it all started when vim was the available default over at tilde.club when I was heavily involved there. Maybe it’s a way to make up for having ditched emacs at work for now?

Ben McCormick’s excellent series is an introduction to the nuts and bolts as well as the philosophy – see his Vim as Art in particular on that score. I’m exploring the whole thing repeatedly as I make my way. I idly trolled on Twitter how learning Vim was like turning your text editor into an RTS. Now I think I really like that idea and the way it makes me think systematically about what I want to do with my editor. It’s cool.

It’s a nice bit of serendipity that I caught up with this piece on newsletters and the new market for specialized writing by Glenn Fleishman on the same day that stellar issues of two favorite subscription newsletters arrived in my inbox: 6 49: Focus Past Infinity by Charlie Loyd, and Metafoundry 30: Confusion Matrices by Deb Chachra.

And as it happens they’re both writing insightful things about clothes and their tight ties to our social and economic worlds: Charlie thinks a bit about supply chains; Deb, the pervasive rules that profoundly shape the meanings of women’s choices of clothing.

Some instability with my web host the past week or so prompted me to think about the state of the backups of my online spaces. I spent some time today getting backup scripts working on the host, and found that, based on the file dates, the last time I worked on this was about a year ago. Yay, me. After troubleshooting them for a little while I now have some functional backup scripts to tar up my web directories and my databases. Then I set about burning most of the morning getting my Synology to grab the backup from the host.¹

Because I’ll forget and no doubt have to do this again, I took a few notes:

• My go-to guide to remind me how to make passwordless ssh logins
• Setting up SSH logins on the synology
• I needed additional help to sort out permissions because the user home on the Synology needs to be adjusted.
• My backup itself was based on this remote backup description

With passwordless login to the Synology, and from the Synology to my host and backup server working, finally, I could test executing my backup scripts from the shell on the Synology. Lo and behold, it works! In the “Scheduled Tasks” section of the Synology control panel, I set up these scripts to execute the remote backup and periodically download the resulting files:

Runs twice weekly:

/usr/bin/ssh kaizen 'cd ~/backup-scripts; ./backup-mysql-databases; ./backup-files'

Runs weekly:

/usr/syno/bin/rsync -av --progress strongspace:arlington-backup/ /volume1/Archive/backup/kaizengarden

Why not run these daily? Because these sites don’t actually change all that much. Downloading the full backup weekly is plenty, if not outright overkill, since the most frequently-changed part of the site is all markdown files stored in dropbox and synced when I re-publish. Why not schedule the backup to run via cron on my host? Because this works, and I was already in the Synology shell experimenting, so it was easy to not have to log in to the web server. (And last time I worked on the backup scripts at the host, I remember some kind of problem with running them via cron; some kind path or environment thing interacting with tar, I think. So this got around that, too.)

I did the same for my stuff over at tilde.club, too. This didn’t require any backup script, since I just have a single directory there; I just rsync the whole relatively small thing into a backup folder on the synology here.

I’ve previously noted my Huffduffer action extension for Workflow, but it didn’t occur to me at the time to include the link to my profile at Huffduffer. So, there it is. If you’re a fellow duffer of huffs, I’d love to see what you’re saving there, too.

A few weeks ago we had a sudden reappearance of winter, but unseasonably warm weather has returned, and with it, the season for biking in the woods – which happen to be basically across the street.

Life’s pretty good, gang.

Pizzicletta is a Flagstaff gem, serving up some of the best pizza you’ll find anywhere.

And homemade gelato, like this basil and chocolate/sea salt duo.

I don’t get there often enough, but made it in last night to finish off a fine, warm spring day.

Starships, swords, and the faded grandeur of science fantasy

An annotated bibliograpy of sorts, of the role fantasy plays in science fiction. My recollection of ThunderCats, however, doesn’t quite match the author’s:

Surprisingly enough, one of the most successful and fully realized science fantasy properties of the late ’80s wound up being the ThunderCats cartoon. With supple, vibrant animation, a diverse cast of characters, and a mythos that wasn’t wholly prefabricated, ThunderCats came on strong, reveling in all the possibilities of both technology and magic — even though it served as the last whimper of the silver age of science fantasy.

Not surprisingly, Star Wars is the banner-carrier and ultimate downfall of outright science fantasy.

A different cluetrain

Charlie Stross asserts “some axioms about politics”:

13 - Security services are obeying the iron law of bureaucracy (4) when they metastasize, citing terrorism (6) as a justification for their expansion.

14 - The expansion of the security state is seen as desirable by the government not because of the terrorist threat (which is largely manufactured) but because of (11): the legitimacy of government (9) is becoming increasingly hard to assert in the context of (2), (12) is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but (3) means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of (1)) unless there’s a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.

And

Some folks (especially Americans) seem to think that their AR-15s are a guarantor that they can resist tyranny. But guns are an 18th century response to 18th century threats to democracy. Capital doesn’t need to point a gun at you to remove your democratic rights: it just needs more cameras, more cops, and a legal system that is fair and just and bankrupts you if you are ever charged with public disorder and don’t plead guilty.

Silicon Valley Could Learn a Lot From Skater Culture. Just Not How to Be a Meritocracy

Kathy Sierra responding to the latest cultural model hyped as the savior of silicon valley:

The last time skateboarding was a healthy model, the Macintosh did not exist. Skateboarding was my life. And in 1983 skate culture drove a stake through my heart.

Skateboarding can teach Silicon Valley what not to do, like a message from the future warning, “Here’s what happens when a domain in which women once thrived decides women aren’t worthy.” Yes, it’s complicated and yes, the sport became more extreme, but there’s a world of difference between a sport that says, There aren’t many women and one that adds … we made sure.

In the ’80s, skate culture devolved from a vibrant, reasonably gender-balanced community into an aggressively narrow demographic of teen boys. If you think tech has sexism issues, skate culture makes tech feel like one big Oprah show.

ISAAC ASIMOV: A lifetime of learning

An illustration of a quote from Isaac Asimov about continuing to learn and create throughout one’s life. I read the Foundation books and everything else I could find by Asimov when I was younger, and recently picked up Foundation again. It’s no exaggeration that those stories about science and science fiction hugely shaped my interests and life story.

Nuts

Dr. Drang’s response to the report that feeding peanuts to infants may reduce likelihood of developing peanut allergy captures my own mix of interest, encouragement and caution. My son has a number of serious food allergies, including peanut, and it’s not easy to manage. We would certainly wish to have been able to prevent these allergies from developing, and I watch research about potential desensitization very carefully. What people living with life-threatening food allergies need are good strategies and high levels of awareness among the public, and less misunderstanding of the severity of allergies. Dr. Drang writes:

In fact, I don’t believe the reported study turns conventional wisdom on its head at all. Most of the people I’ve met who don’t have a child with peanut allergies were already certain that the problem was, if not entirely in the heads of a group of Munchausen-by-proxy parents, then certainly due to kids being raised in environments that are too clean, too safe, and too antiseptic. For these people, it’s obvious that exposure to peanuts will toughen up a kid’s immune system, and it’s about time doctors recognize that.

A critical part of the study is the screening criteria that included only infants already at a high risk because of existing egg allergy or exczema, and that 76 screened infants were excluded because they already had strong skin test reactions. So this study tells us something, but not the whole story, about one path through which this particular allergy may develop. Unfortunately, just as Dr. Drang predicted, there are already responses like the following (from a self-identified physician) on the NEJM study:

As each of my five children has progressed through school we have seen tighter and tighter policing of what you are allowed to include in your own child’s lunch box. The research of the LEAP study team is wonderful as it may mean, as I have long suspected, that all of this molly coddling of our children’s diet has not only not made things better but has in fact made things which worse.

Not helpful.