Donglegate

While researching online hysteria, I came across an old story from 2013 which became prominent enough to enter the meme hall-of-fame with the nickname, Donglegate.

It all started at a presentation at the tech conference, Pycon. It seems a couple of good-old-tech-boys got a little overexcited by the subject matter (dongle hardware) and made a couple of sexual innuendo jokes. These were private but loud enough for a female attendee sitting nearby to hear. She snapped their pictures with her smartphone, tweeted, and sent a complaint to conference organizers.

Now, Pycon had previously noted that good-old-tech-boy talk can be offputting to women and discourage their participation at conferences and in STEM fields. So, the conference had policies and procedures ready for such an occasion. The offenders were identified and spoken to. Then, everyone got back to the conference.

Meanwhile, in the Twitterverse, the indicident was going viral. The genie, as they say, was out of the bottle.

An online riot ensued. One of the males was fired and his company did some online virtue-signaling to absolve themselves of any guilt-by-association. Outraged, another online mob launched a denial-of-service attack against the website of the woman's employer, and issued a statement that it would only stop when she was fired.

And that is exactly what happened. The company paid the ransom (fired their employee) and the cyberterrorists called off their attack. The company rationalized their behavior, saying the woman erred in making the incident public.

Anyway, I come here not to blame. There's more than enough blamecasting already. None of the characters in this play -- the man, the woman, the online mobs, the two companies -- acted nobly. But they did act predictably. If you really understand the players, you could absolutely predict how they would react each step of the way.

When we get all caught up in outrage and finger-pointing, all we learn is neuroticism and self-righteousness. What we need to do instead, is see this as an infinitely-looping chain of events.

Here's where my observations take me:

1. small is large once made public,
2. publicity activates crazies,
3. once the crazies are involved, everybody's all up in your business,
4. organizations are like kangaroos--to avoid harm to themselves, they'll rip you out of their pouch and toss you to the dingoes,
5. sometimes there is life outside the pouch, after being thrown to the dingoes--ask Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, or Kathleen Stock.

How best to conduct yourself depends on whether you need to stay sheltered on the inside. The more freely you speak and act, the more likely you are to be ejected. Then you have to go it alone. Being on the outside does work out for some people, but it does take courage.

It's kind of a personal risk assessment.

Further reading:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/pycon-2013-sexism-dongle-richards/