Tag Archives: culture

Good reads

It’s been a loooong time since I posted some good reading.

5 Things I Learned as the Internet’s Most Hated Person | Cracked.com
"I watched every avenue of social media suddenly blow up with messages of abject hatred from thousands of strangers. For the first five days, I couldn't sleep. Every time I would start to doze off, I'd be shocked awake from half-asleep nightmares about everyone I love buying into the mob's bullshit and abandoning me. The ceaseless barrage of random people sending you disgusting shit is initially impossible to drown out — it was constant, loud, and it became my life."
They Are Not Trolls. They Are Men. | Make Me a Sammich
"By calling these people “trolls,” we are basically letting them off the hook. It’s a lot like the “boys will be boys” mentality that helps to keep rape culture thriving, but it’s also different, because boys are expected to be human. By calling these people “trolls,” we relegate them to non-human status, and we make it clear that we don’t expect them to live up to the same behavioral standards as human beings." Continue reading Good reads →

Links! Dat Social Justice

I’ve been (relatively) all over the twitter space lately on the social justice tip. I’ve started following some new and amazing folks in the last couple months, including Ashe Dryden, Julie Pagano, and Justine Arreche, who are probably the first folks I’ve followed who are specifically interested in social justice within the tech community/industry.

Mutual following of these folks led to some fun discussions with a former colleague on considerations like, “How often can I call my colleagues out on *ist behavior and still get invites out to lunch? Once in three occurrences?”

After all, no one likes a feminazi.

The first two links come from Pagano’s “101 off limits” piece, and all are great reference articles to pass around.

Don’t mistake expressing contempt for taking offense
"I’m not offended by those words. I’m contemptuous of those words, and I’m letting you know that using them just made me think less of you – less admiration, less trust, less enjoyment in your company. I don’t hold you personally in the same contempt as I do the words that you just used, at least not yet. Whether I end up doing that depends on how you react to having your word choices challenged."
Shakesville: Rape Culture 101
"It is not a definition for which they're looking; not really. It's a description. It's something substantive enough to reach out and touch, in all its ugly, heaving, menacing grotesquery."
The Male Privilege Checklist
A very… gently-written article on example of male privilege in our culture.

People, Systems, and the Game of Monopoly

A very accessible description and discussion of the system of white privilege. Love it.

From that speaker’s blog:

Women Are Not Guys | UNRAVELING THE KNOT
"But then there are things that are stranger still because we know they aren’t true even as we act as though they are. I am referring, of course, to the practice of calling women ‘guys’."

Love it, especially Thought Experiment #2.

Last but not least, how I feel after a trying day of biting my tongue:

APW 2013: Intellectualism, Anarchy, Privilege and Power

(This is the fifth in a way-too-long-running series on APW 2013.)

I am not educated on anarchy or intentional communities. I consider this a lack in my education. (Seems like reddit may have a good starting place for me.)

Dennis Fox is a psychologist from Boston who focuses on a few interesting topics: intentional communities and critical psychology.

What is critical psychology, you ask? When speaking of truths, Fox said, “current psychology’s truth is in finding ways for unhappy people to adapt to the current world, rather than in changing the current world.”

That really resonated with me.

So many of the unhappinesses we struggle with derive from trying to live in ways our society deems correct: working a 40+ hour per week job in which we produce something of “value” to society and for which we receive money and (if you’re “lucky”) fame. Then we should partake in monogamous relationships that last for years, build wealth, and strive to have bodies like those of people in magazines.

When we fail at those things, we go to psychologists, who have techniques they teach us for how to set goals, how to love ourselves within this framework, and how to persevere in doing what’s good for us.

I do hope that doesn’t sound like a rant. I don’t mean it do.

I attended a couple panels that dealt with power dynamics and/or community building, which I touched on in the previous post (regarding the sociopathy concerns). Dr. Eli Sheff focused on things like gender, racial, and sexual privilege in relationships, while Dr. Fox spoke more on changing our (individual/community) world to find our own truths.

I, of course, consider these rather related.

Being a bisexual or bi-romantic female in the poly community is a powerful thing–like having O negative blood in a friggin’ donation facility. Hell, “hot bi-babe” is a term through around a lot in podcasts and in the community.

Being the third or newcomer in a triad? A distinctly un-powerful thing.

Being legally civil unioned? Powerful, because you can “pass” and be a gentle, suburban face for polyamory. On top of that, our culture at-large values relationships with a potential for raising healthy children, and nothing screams “family stability” like being legally married. Or so they tell me.

Financial privilege and social mobility is huge when you have a lifestyle that could cost you your job. I’m very privileged in working in a field where 1) I make a fair amount of money, 2) my work environments tend to be liberal, and 3) I have the ability to get a new job pretty quickly if I lose my current one.

But I don’t want the communities I’m part of to size me (or anyone) up by those metrics.

So how do we either 1) live (safely?) outside of that to have our own truths, and/or 2) change the world around us to be more accepting of those truths?

I don’t know.

Forever and a Year Ago Linkage

Don’t ask where I’ve been. It’s been dark and full of things like strangely proud “humble views”, polka dots and stripes, mock objects, skiing, the IRS, gradients, and a strange dampness.

Still not sure where the dampness is from.

Getting back into the swing of things, have some links!

Untenable Workplace Hotshots

“When Smart People are Bad Employees” offers up three types of hotshots in the workplace:

The Heretic:
“However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company. Rather than identifying weaknesses, so that he can fix them, he looks for faults to build his case. Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons.”
The Flake:
“Then Roger changed. He would miss days of work without calling in. Then he would miss weeks of work. When he finally showed up, he apologized profusely, but the behavior didn’t stop. His work product also degraded. He became sloppy and unfocused.”
The Jerk:
“When used consistently, asinine behavior can be crippling. As a company grows, its biggest challenge always becomes communication. Keeping a huge number of people on the same page executing the same goals is never easy. If a member of your staff is a raging jerk, it may be impossible. Some people are so belligerent in their communication style that people just stop talking when they are in the room.”

I’ve seen these, if we’re to buy Horowitz’s trichotomy of troubled genius employees. According to his take, the person really has to be a genius for any of this to be applicable.

Ben Horowitz writes in the article, “You may decide that you will personally mitigate the employee’s negative attributes and keep them from polluting the overall company culture.” I don’t think that lasts long. So far, I’ve always seen there be a turning point with folks that fit the Heretic and Flake labels: there’s a point where even a stretched thin manager will realize that the impact on the culture has become greater than the value of the contributions.

Continue reading Untenable Workplace Hotshots →