What happened to Adria Richards since Donglegate went well over the top. When the boys at 4Chan decided to take matters into their own hands, to “pay her back” for Hank losing his job over his goofing around with a friend at PyCon, they proved that the mob can’t be controlled. As Jon Ronson’s story in Esquire reveals, the outcome has been horrible for all involved.
The only thing that could make this story sadder and more pathetic is that no lesson was learned. And yet, that is clearly the case.
Two years ago, Adria Richards was at PyCon, a tech conference, when a man behind her made sexualized jokes to another man, in violation of the conference guidelines. The jokes persisted for several minutes and at a volume much louder than a whisper, despite how they have since been mischaracterized by others. Adria’s building discomfort with the distraction led her to report them to the conference organizers. The first guideline in reporting said that identifying the person was key. Adria, thinking it would be unlikely that men would willingly identify themselves if she asked so, decided to use her smartphone—a strategy applauded for identifying street harassers and one which would later be applauded in Ferguson last year.
Adria Richards was offended by the “sexualized jokes,” or to add the detail omitted,
“What was the joke?” I asked him.
“It was so bad I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “It was about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle – a ridiculous dongle. We were giggling about that. It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”
A few moments earlier Hank and Alex had been giggling over some other Beavis and Butt-head-type tech in-joke about “forking someone’s repo”. “We’d decided it was a new form of flattery,” Hank explained. “A guy had been on stage presenting his new project and Alex said, ‘I would fork that guy’s repo.’”
Funny? Stupid? Sexualized or nerd-ualized? Who cares. Adria Richards was offended. She could have turned around and said, “hey, assholes, knock it off,” and moved on with her life. Instead, she decided that it was her duty to publicly shame Beavis and Butthead, using a “strategy” later applauded in Ferguson. Because making a dongle joke is pretty much like killing black people.
Adria took their picture and tweeted it.
Hank lost his job as a result, but found another right away. Someone (or everyone, who knows?) at 4Chan engaged in a successful DDoS attack on Richards’ employer, and she was fired. She remains unemployed two years later. All of this is wrong, absurdly disproportionate and totally unjustifiable.
And yet, the fault here is Jon Ronson’s for not telling Richards’ story the way she wanted.
Adria trusted Ronson to tell her story, to do it justice, only to have Ronson draw a false equivalence between her, a woman challenging inappropriate sexual jokes at a tech conference (at which everyone had signed a photo disclosure form), and the man who was making those inappropriate sexual jokes. And to draw a false equivalency between her, a woman challenging sexism in a professional space for technology workers, and Justine Sacco, a woman casually making racist jokes under her real name while employed as a senior director of corporate communications for tech company IAC.
All without mentioning that Adria Richards is a Black woman.
Adria Richards is a black woman. A black Jewish woman. A black Jewish woman with a Twitter account.
There is zero discussion of the power imbalance between being a white man who is exposed for making sexual jokes in a professional space, and being a Black woman who is exposed for refusing to tolerate sexual jokes in a professional space.
There is zero discussion of the differential between making a racist joke (punching down), and challenging sexist comments (punching up).
There is, however, a discussion of what Richards told Ronson at their meeting, held at the San Francisco airport because it was a “safe place,” as if Ronson might harm her if they met in private.
““Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the cafe at San Francisco Airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained. Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?”
What happened to Adria Richards was outrageous. That she was and continues to be subject to abuse in social media is similarly outrageous. That she remains incapable of seeing how she “started all this,” to the point of suggesting that the two goofy nerds behind her were telling “sexualized” dongle jokes for the purpose of “secretly seed[ing] the hate groups” strays into flaming nutjob territory.
Nothing Adria Richards did justifies the perpetuation of attacks on her. She expressed herself, and in doing so, exposed herself to a backlash. But just as jaywalking doesn’t deserve the death penalty, Adria Richards didn’t deserve what she got.
However, the denial by Richards and those who are similarly blind to the fact that escalation of ordinary interpersonal beefs into social media nuclear war reflects a terrifying lack of understanding of what went so horribly wrong here, and resulted in such horrible outcomes for everyone, but especially Adria Richards.
Hank is allowed to tell a stupid dongle joke, even if it offends Adria Richards. All that nonsense about “professional space” is merely post hoc rationalization that fools no one who doesn’t want to be fooled. Hank may well be a jerk for having done so, but he wasn’t a serial killer.
Adria Richards, on the other hand, doesn’t get to anoint herself the avenging angel of politically incorrect dongle jokes. She is certainly entitled to be offended at anything she wants, and to act upon it, if that’s what she feels compelled to do. But just as Hank doesn’t get to tell dongle jokes in public with impunity, Richards doesn’t get to shame him with impunity. The difference is that she escalated it into a social media fight that she was ill-equipped to win.
None of this justifies what happened later, and apparently is still happening. Yet, the takeaway has been lost, if not obscured by reduction to absurd ideology. If you don’t want the backlash of social media, then don’t start a war there. Don’t go unarmed to a knife fight. Don’t attack and then complain about the reaction.
Adria Richards is a black Jewish woman software engineer. Welcome to equality. It sucks. Now everyone move on, as there’s nothing left to see here. It’s time to leave Richards alone and let her get back to her life. She’s no serial killer either.
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…nerds behind her were telling “sexualized” dongle jokes for the purpose of “secretly seed[ing] the hate groups” strays into flaming nutjob territory.
My reading of the text is that Adria believes he seeded the hate groups after he got fired, not that he told the joke to seed the hate groups. It’s clear that Adria has a lot of ugly personel issues – look at the description of her childhood – but calling her a “Flaming nutjob” on the basis of that misinterpretation doesn’t make you look terribly credible.
I’m sad that I didn’t meet your “terribly credible” bar. It’s important to me that my views meet with your approval.
Minor correction: …a social media fight that [she] was…
> That she remains incapable of seeing … strays into flaming nutjob territory.
And that is the crux of the matter. The right thing for Adria to do now may very well be to lay low for awhile and “just” be a developer. For example, there are a lot of dysfunctional people in a lot of software companies, including where I work. If she can really code well, she could fit in, even if she produces a fair amount of drama at work.
The real problem comes about when the drama is visible outside the company. Adria’s preferred role apparently includes interfacing with others outside the company, and it’s hard to envision many companies embracing the baggage associated with that right at the moment. Maybe in a few years — if she’s smart enough to stop giving interviews.
There is a perspective that says one cannot blame the victim. There are problems with this perspective, because identifying the victim tends to change according to one’s perspective. There is a different perspective that sees this as poor moves all around, elevated (unintentionally) to thermonuclear war, and that everyone involved, regardless of perspective, should de-escalate.
As Richards continues to fight, which is what she does by giving interviews and seeking the support of others, she continues to fight a war that does her no good. I doubt she’s enjoying the drama, but she isn’t doing anything to end it either.
And one commenter says I’ve lost my cred on the “flaming nutjob” language. Just so you know.
Meh. The overall tone of your post was quite sympathetic all around, at least when viewed by anybody who can distinguish between the damage caused by hurtful words and the damage caused by loss of employment.
To me, “strays into flaming nutjob territory” isn’t really the same as calling someone a flaming nutjob; rather it says that she’s doing herself a tremendous disservice by continuing, as you say, to fight a war that does her no good.
At the end of the day, though, only she can decide if that disservice is outweighed by her conviction that the world must be made to understand, and, of course, the adulation she feels when surrounded by the faithful.
You read me correctly. I was just having fun by bringing Troutwaxer up. Sometimes, I write stuff just for my own amusement.
That’s good. I’d hate to think you took him too seriously about words. After all, he doesn’t even know that pustulent renders diseased redundant…
No. We’re not doing that one again. No, no, no.
Agreed with OGH. We’ve explained this to you before.
And I took it in fun. No prob.
Adria Richards was developer evangelist, which is basically glamorously sounding title for public relations. Putting it cynically, point of that job is to make company sound cool for developers by pretending you advocate for what they like.
So, it is quite possible that she can not be “just” a developer cause she is not one. And, would you hired her to another public relations position?
Off-topic: I may be slow, but I still did not deciphered what is sexual about “forking”. It is as sexual as “table”.
> So, it is quite possible that she can not be “just” a developer cause she is not one.
Sure, but I thought she claimed she was, and I’ll take such claims at face value until I’ve been shown otherwise. Obviously SHG got the same impression: “Adria Richards is a black Jewish woman software engineer.” But I have no personal knowledge of whether she’s that, or a blackface transsexual from Transylvania who can’t actually code — partly because none of it makes a real difference to me.
> And, would you hired her to another public relations position?
I would have thought the answer to that was self-evident from my comment.
> “forking”. It is as sexual as “table”.
I often fork on the table. Wait, is it table to discuss the true meaning of forking around here?
The background I found on her (I saw the software evangelist crap too, but figured she still needed an actual skill) was that she was a software engineer. That could be wrong. I’m just going on what I found.
I looked at her blog and about.me page. She frames herself to be on the consultant/speaker/trainer side of things. You can move from there back to “just techie”, but it is harder to convince prospective employers. If you spent three years mostly speaking and doing marketing research, employers will consider your previous “just” technology experiences dated (no matter what gender or controversies you have been in). First, you are loosing at “exact toolset match” game human resource managers (unfortunately) tend to play. Second, you are not building experience your competitors do and that matters a lot.
“With a background that includes working as a network administrator, technology consultant and trainer plus experience in market research, Adria’s passion is using creativity to solve to complex problems.”
Network administrator definitely is tech background, but if you want “just” a techie position, you need to market yourself in more specific tech terms (e.g. programming language, tools, systems, “portfolio” you build while unemployed, etc). Those are different career tracks with different skill sets – through both are called “software engineer” and deal with aspects of tech.
Based upon her website at present, she’s marketing herself as victim and hero of female techies, available for speaking engagements. Maybe google has a position for that, but most companies do not.
> The right thing for Adria to do now may very well be to lay low for awhile and “just” be a developer.
Is she a developer? I thought she was an evangelist. The difference matters here as if she’s a developer then this shouldn’t really cause problems. If she’s an evangelist then it makes perfect sense to fire her immediately since she has caused a problem.
However, if she’s a developer, great. Continue.
When she was fired, she was working as an evangelist. That much appears pretty clear. Whether she is also a developer (or had been a developer before becoming an evangelist) is in question. Some stories about her describe her as a developer, while her own description is too vague and fuzzy to know for sure. This suggests she was never a developer, as she wouldn’t have to dance around her qualifications.
So she is (was) a developer evangelist and is supposed to act as a go-between between her organization’s staff and outside developers and technical staff…and is surprised when she decides make a big public stink about some people who should’ve just been told to shut up (if that) , and is surprised when her employer doesn’t like it and other employers are concerned about hiring someone with a ‘victim’ mentality?
Guess what…when you make mountains out of molehills and continue to keep that mountain in the public eye, employers are going to stand a good chance of being wary about you. Do you honestly think they don’t Google the names of potential employees to see if there are risks associated with hiring them?
But victim blaming.
This is just a thought, but if Adria wanted this whole thing to blow over and go away, maybe she should stop doing press. It’s like she learned nothing from the entire event.
There you go again, blaming the victim.
From the details provided, it appears the “sexualized joke” Hank told was about another man. Perhaps a better response would have been for him to accuse her of homophobia, and see if that would get the social justice warriors’ heads to explode from conflicting outrage–sort of like the times Captain Kirk talked a computer into self-destructing in Star Trek.
That she misapprehended the joke, and maintains that it was sexualized even though Hank denies it, is water under the bridge now. Had she just confronted Hank at the time, perhaps he would have explained the joke and this never would have happened. Or perhaps she would have decided it was sexualized anyway and proceeded to twit and start a war on social media.
Either way, it wasn’t directed at her, but just within her earshot. The decision to go after Hank, rightly or wrongly, was entirely hers.
I seem to remember my grandma telling me something about glass houses and stones….
I read some of the comments on that Shakesville link you posted… Whoa.
And Aidra describes herself as “a geek whose going to change the world,” in her Disqus profile. Don’t think any of these interviews are going to cease anytime soon…
Yeah, I think that’s right. She’s enjoying the support of her tribe a little too much.
This was stupid back when it started, several years ago. Beavis and Butthead-style sniggering over “dongles” is not grounds for firing anyone or public shaming, nor is the “forking” comment. It’s maybe grounds for turning around and saying, “What are you, twelve? I’m trying to listen to the speaker, please tone it down.”
I remember helping a electronics tech inventory his tool chest once–no, that is NOT a porn euphemism–and dissolving into fits of giggles over the number of “male-female banana connectors” it had. If we had been discussing that inventory in a public space, would we have been “the bad guys”?
Exactly.