Come back, civility — the Internet misses you

It seems the suffix “gate” has a lot of life in it after all. Over the past week we’ve seen two “gate” dustups that say a lot about what’s wrong with Web.

Our first scandal out of the, er, gate involves ducks — or more specifically, the sexual organs of male waterfowl. Four years ago the National Science Foundation wrote a check for $385,000 to Yale researchers to study how sexual competition caused mallards’ members to evolve over time. Because this research was funded under the Obama Recovery Act — and probably because it also involved evolution — it turned into a duck-shaped piñata for conservative bloggers to moan about government waste.

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Given the scope of our nation’s budgetary struggles, complaining about spending $400,000 to study quackers is a bit like booking the $40,000-a-night Hefner Villa at the Palms, then complaining about the cost of peanuts in the minibar. The opportunities for juvenile humor, not to mention reckless alliteration, are almost too tempting to pass up, but I’d rather not get fired — which brings me to my next Web kerfuffle, known as Donglegate.

I spy with Twitter’s eye

Picture this: You are in an auditorium at a tech conference with a couple hundred other people. The presentation is starting to drag a bit, so you make a few sniggering asides to your buddy sitting next to you. A young woman sitting in front of you turns around, smiles, and snaps three photos of you with her phone. The next thing you know, you’re being hauled off for a serious talking to by conference sponsors. Two days later you’re fired from your job.

If it were a screenplay, this scene wouldn’t make it past the first draft. But it really happened, about 10 days ago.

Two employees of gaming company Play Haven were sitting at PyCon, the conference for developers who work with the Python programming language, when one of them made a couple of extremely dorky sexual jokes about the size of one’s dongle and the pleasure of forking. The woman in front of them, Adria Richards from email delivery company SendGrid, snapped a photo of the two, then posted it to Twitter:

She also complained about the pair to PyCon officials, who spoke to each of the dorks in turn and seemed to have settled the matter. From there, though, things went a little crazy. Somehow that tweet made it to Hacker News, where it erupted into heated discussions about whether jokes about dongles constituted yet another form of sexism in an industry infamous for it — then to Reddit, Facebook, and back to Twitter.

Richards did not help her cause by blogging about the incident the next day, describing herself as a kind of Joan of Arc for downtrodden female geeks everywhere. (That’s my interpretation anyway — you can judge for yourself.)

Still, she didn’t deserve what happened next: a predictable but sad heaping of abuse, hatred, and threats spewed directly at her Twitter account. Angry geeks took a page from Anonymous and launched a DDoS attack on the website of her employer, taking SendGrid offline for most of a day. Some rallied to Richards’ defense; others noted similar incidents in Richards’ past or unearthed examples of Richards herself engaging in sexual innuendo with a male colleague.

Tempest, meet teapot

Then things got real. One of the Play Haven developers was fired from his job for making inappropriate comments at a public conference. A day later, Richards lost her job for the way she handled the situation. (She had been responsible for developer relations — insert ironic comment here.)

All this happened because of a few jokes about dongles and forking.

If this pattern isn’t familiar to you by now, it should be. Something happens in the real world and it triggers a lizard brain reaction in a critical mass of people, whose fingers are drawn immediately to the nearest keyboard. The s**t starts flying and everyone gets splattered. Then there’s a lot of hand wringing and Post-Kerfuffle Recaps (PKRs), like the one you are now reading.

My personal 2.5 cents, for the record: Yes, the dorks should probably not be making those jokes in a public forum, but I don’t consider them sexist. As far as I can tell they weren’t demeaning to either gender; if they reinforced any stereotypes, it was about what geeky males consider to be funny.

I asked a female colleague of mine, whose response I really liked: She said the most sexist part of the whole incident is the assumption that women don’t like to joke about sex.

Richards handled it poorly but not badly enough to receive verbal abuse and physical threats. Both companies were wrong to terminate their employees, though I can see how Richards might have a hard time getting any job involving developer relations for the foreseeable future.

Where do we draw the line?

The bigger picture here, though, is that this kind of thing just can’t go on — especially as consequences spill over into the real world. Last week two people lost their jobs over some stupid online controversy. How long before someone loses their life? I think we’ve reached a tipping point in how rude people can be to each other.

Is this really why Al Gore invented the InterWebs? I don’t think so. We need a return to sanity and civility, the sooner the better.

How do we create an Internet with less crazy and more manners? Politely post your grand schemes below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Come back, civility — the Internet misses you,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.