{"id":6881,"date":"2019-09-15T18:12:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-15T22:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/?p=6881"},"modified":"2019-09-15T18:12:06","modified_gmt":"2019-09-15T22:12:06","slug":"facing-the-great-reckoning-head-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2019\/09\/15\/facing-the-great-reckoning-head-on.html","title":{"rendered":"Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Alongside Oakland Privacy and William Gibson, I received a\u00a02019 Barlow\/Pioneer Award<\/a>. I was asked to give a speech. As I reflected on what got me to this place, I realized\u00a0I needed to reckon with how I have benefited from men whose actions have helped uphold a patriarchal system that has hurt so many people.\u00a0I needed to face my past in order to find a way to create space to move forward.<\/p>\n

This is the speech I gave in accepting the award. I hope sharing it can help others who are struggling to make sense of current events. And those who want to make the tech industry to do better.<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u2014<\/p>\n

I cannot begin to express how honored I am to receive this award.\u00a0My awe of the Electronic Frontier Foundation dates back to my teenage years.\u00a0EFF has always inspired me to think deeply about what values should shape the internet. And so I want to talk about values tonight, and what happens when those values are lost, or violated, as we have seen recently in our industry and institutions.<\/p>\n

But before I begin, I would like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence out of respect to all of those who have been raped, trafficked, harassed, and abused. For those of you who have been there, take this moment to breathe. For those who haven\u2019t, take a moment to reflect on how the work that you do has enabled the harm of others, even when you never meant to.<\/p>\n

<silence><\/p>\n

The story of how I got to be standing here is rife with pain and I need to expose part of my story in order to make visible why we need to have a Great Reckoning in the tech industry. This award may be about me, but it\u2019s also not. It should be about all of the women and other minorities who have been excluded from tech by people who thought they were helping.<\/p>\n

The first blog post I ever wrote was about my own sexual assault. It was 1997 and my audience was two people. I didn\u2019t even know what I was doing would be called blogging. Years later, when many more people started reading my blog, I erased many of those early blog posts because I didn\u2019t want strangers to have to respond to those vulnerable posts.\u00a0I obfuscated my history to make others more comfortable.<\/p>\n

I was at the MIT Media Lab from 1999\u20132002. At the incoming student orientation dinner, an older faculty member sat down next to me.\u00a0He looked at me and asked if love existed. I raised my eyebrow as he talked about how love was a mirage, but that sex and pleasure were real. That was my introduction to Marvin Minsky and to my new institutional home.<\/p>\n

My time at the Media Lab was full of contradictions. I have so many positive memories of people and conversations. I can close my eyes and flash back to laughter and late night conversations. But my time there was also excruciating. I couldn\u2019t afford my rent and did some things that still bother me in order to make it all work. I grew numb to the worst parts of the Demo or Die culture.\u00a0I witnessed so much harassment, so much bullying that it all started to feel normal.\u00a0Senior leaders told me that \u201cstudents need to learn their place\u201d and that \u201cwe don\u2019t pay you to read, we don\u2019t pay you to think, we pay you to do.\u201d The final straw for me was when I was pressured to work with the Department of Defense to track terrorists in 2002.<\/p>\n

After leaving the Lab, I channeled my energy into V-Day, an organization best known for producing \u201cThe Vagina Monologues,\u201d but whose daily work is focused on ending violence against women and girls. I found solace in helping build online networks of feminists who were trying to help combat sexual assault and a culture of abuse. To this day, I work on issues like trafficking and combating the distribution of images depicting the commercial sexual abuse of minors on social media.<\/p>\n

By 2003, I was in San Francisco, where I started meeting tech luminaries, people I had admired so deeply from afar. One told me that I was \u201ckinda smart for a chick.\u201d Others propositioned me. But some were really kind and supportive. Joi Ito became a dear friend and mentor. He was that guy who made sure I got home OK. He was also that guy who took being called-in seriously, changing his behavior in profound ways when I challenged him to reflect on the cost of his actions. That made me deeply respect him.<\/p>\n

I also met John Perry Barlow around the same time. We became good friends and spent lots of time together. Here was another tech luminary who had my back when I needed him to. A few years later, he asked me to forgive a friend of his, a friend whose sexual predation I had witnessed first hand. He told me it was in the past and he wanted everyone to get along. I refused, unable to convey to him just how much his ask hurt me. Our relationship frayed and we only talked a few times in the last few years of his life.<\/p>\n

So here we are\u2026\u00a0I\u2019m receiving this award, named after Barlow less than a week after Joi resigned from an institution that nearly destroyed me after he socialized with and took money from a known pedophile. Let me be clear \u2014 this is deeply destabilizing for me.\u00a0I am here today in-no-small-part because I benefited from the generosity of men who tolerated and, in effect, enabled unethical, immoral, and criminal men.\u00a0<\/strong>And because of that privilege, I managed to keep moving forward even as the collateral damage of patriarchy stifled the voices of so many others around me.\u00a0I am angry and sad, horrified and disturbed because I know all too well that this world is not meritocratic. I am also complicit in helping uphold these systems.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s happening at the Media Lab right now is emblematic of a broader set of issues plaguing the tech industry and society more generally. Tech prides itself in being better than other sectors. But often it\u2019s not. As an employee of Google in 2004, I watched my male colleagues ogle women coming to the cafeteria in our building from the second floor, making lewd comments. When I first visited TheFacebook in Palo Alto, I was greeted by a hyper-sexualized mural and a knowing look from the admin, one of the only women around.\u00a0So many small moments seared into my brain, building up to a story of normalized misogyny.\u00a0Fast forward fifteen years and\u00a0there are\u00a0countless stories of executive misconduct and purposeful suppression of the voices of women\u00a0and sooooo many others whose bodies and experiences exclude them from the powerful elite.\u00a0These are the toxic logics that have infested the tech industry.\u00a0And, as an industry obsessed with scale, these are the toxic logics that the tech industry has amplified and normalized.\u00a0The human costs of these logics continue to grow.\u00a0Why are we tolerating sexual predators and sexual harassers in our industry? That\u2019s not what inclusion means.<\/p>\n

I am here today because I learned how to survive and thrive in a man\u2019s world, to use my tongue wisely, watch my back, and dodge bullets.\u00a0I am being honored because I figured out how to remove a few bricks in those fortified walls so that others could look in.\u00a0But this isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

I am grateful to EFF for this honor, but\u00a0there are so many underrepresented and under-acknowledged voices out there trying to be heard who have been silenced.\u00a0And they need to be here tonight and they need to be at tech\u2019s tables. Around the world, they are asking for those in Silicon Valley to take their moral responsibilities seriously.\u00a0They are asking everyone in the tech sector to take stock of their own complicity in what is unfolding and actively invite others in.<\/p>\n

And so,\u00a0if my recognition means anything, I need it to be a call to arms. We need to all stand up together and challenge the status quo. The tech industry must start to face The Great Reckoning head-on.\u00a0My experiences are all-too common for women and other marginalized peoples in tech.\u00a0And\u00a0it it also all too common for well-meaning guys to do shitty things that make it worse for those that they believe they\u2019re trying to support.<\/p>\n

If change is going to happen, values and ethics need to have a seat in the boardroom. Corporate governance goes beyond protecting the interests of capitalism.\u00a0Change also means that the ideas and concerns of\u00a0all people<\/em>\u00a0need to be a part of the design phase and the auditing of systems, even if this slows down the process.\u00a0We need to\u00a0bring back and reinvigorate the profession of quality assurance so that products are not launched without systematic consideration of the harms that might occur.\u00a0Call it security or call it safety, but it requires focusing on inclusion.\u00a0After all, whether we like it or not, the tech industry is now in the business of global governance.<\/p>\n

\u201cMove fast and break things\u201d is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society.\u00a0Taking short-cuts may be financially profitable in the short-term, but the cost to society is too great to be justified.\u00a0In a healthy society, we accommodate differently abled people through accessibility standards, not because it\u2019s financially prudent but because it\u2019s the right thing to do.\u00a0In a healthy society, we make certain that the vulnerable amongst us are not harassed into silence because that is not the value behind free speech.\u00a0In a healthy society, we strategically design to increase social cohesion because binaries are machine logic not human logic.<\/p>\n

The Great Reckoning is in front of us. How we respond to the calls for justice will shape the future of technology and society.\u00a0We must hold accountable all who perpetuate, amplify, and enable hate, harm, and cruelty.\u00a0But\u00a0accountability without transformation is simply spectacle.\u00a0We owe it to ourselves and to all of those who have been hurt to focus on the root of the problem.\u00a0We also owe it to them to actively seek to\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>build certain technologies because the human cost is too great.<\/p>\n

My ask of you is to honor me and my story by stepping back and reckoning with your own contributions to the current state of affairs.\u00a0No one in tech \u2014 not you, not me \u2014 is an innocent bystander.\u00a0We have all enabled this current state of affairs in one way or another.\u00a0Thus, it is our responsibility to take action.\u00a0How can you personally amplify underrepresented voices?\u00a0How can you intentionally take time to listen to those who have been injured and understand their perspective? How can you personally stand up to injustice so that structural inequities aren\u2019t further calcified?\u00a0The\u00a0goal shouldn\u2019t be to avoid being evil; it should be to actively do good.\u00a0But\u00a0it\u2019s not enough to say that we\u2019re going to do good; we need to collectively define \u2014 and hold each other to \u2014 shared values and standards.<\/p>\n

People can change. Institutions can change. But doing so requires all who harmed \u2014 and all who benefited from harm \u2014 to come forward, admit their mistakes, and actively take steps to change the power dynamics. It requires everyone to hold each other accountable, but also to aim for reconciliation not simply retribution.\u00a0So as we leave here tonight,\u00a0let\u2019s stop designing the technologies envisioned in dystopian novels.\u00a0We need to heed the warnings of artists, not race head-on into their nightmares.\u00a0Let\u2019s focus on hearing the voices and experiences of those who have been harmed because of the technologies that made this industry so powerful. And let\u2019s collaborate with and design alongside those communities to fix these wrongs, to build just and empowering technologies rather than those that reify the status quo.<\/p>\n

Many of us are aghast to learn that a pedophile had this much influence in tech, science, and academia,\u00a0but so many more\u00a0people face the personal and professional harm of exclusion, the emotional burden of never-ending subtle misogyny, the exhaustion from dodging daggers, and the nagging feeling that you\u2019re going crazy as you try to get through each day. Let\u2019s change the norms. Please help me.<\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

we\u2019re all taught how to justify history as it passes by
\nand it\u2019s your world that comes crashing down
\nwhen the big boys decide to throw their weight around
\nbut he said just roll with it baby make it your career
\nkeep the home fires burning till america is in the clear
\n\u2026
\ni think my body is as restless as my mind
\nand i\u2019m not gonna roll with it this time
\nno, i\u2019m not gonna roll with it this time
\n\u2014 Ani Difranco<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was recently honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Alongside Oakland Privacy and William Gibson, I received a\u00a02019 Barlow\/Pioneer Award. I was asked to give a speech. As I reflected on what got me to this place, I realized\u00a0I needed to reckon with how I have benefited from men whose actions have helped uphold a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[446,516,2128,2129],"class_list":["post-6881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-harassment","tag-media-lab","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6881"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6882,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6881\/revisions\/6882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}