Here's an extreme example of techno culture supporting mysoginy and violence against women. This blogger, Kathy Sierra, of the blog Creating Passionate Users, has been receiving numerous death threats and threats of sexual violence, and has received very little support from the rest of the blogging community.
You can read her blog entry about this experience here:
Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)
I just wrote this reply to her...
technorati tags:hacking, hacktivism, hacktivist, hacklab, borderlandshacklab, sandiego, etech, freetech, freetech2007, etech2007, etech07, trackback url
Wow. I'm so, so sorry that this has happened to you and it just fuels me even more to continue fighting sexism and mysogyny in techno culture. You've probably never heard of me, but this past weekend I helped organize freEtech in San Diego, in response to the exclusivity, sexism and racism inherent in Etech and in the fact that it costs $1500. At freEtech we talked a lot about how sexism and racism function in techno culture and what can be done about it. Cory Doctorow, who's an editor of boingboing.net and is on the etech board, refused to post freEtech because it was too critical of Oreilly and he basically denied that there is a problem with sexism in techno culture, callimg our claims "baseless".
You can read about freEtech, read my emails to cory and read his replies here:
http://deletetheborder.org/node/2053
http://deletetheborder.org/node/2057
http://deletetheborder.org/node/2065
Hopefully we can all work together to make this culture more what we want to see, with less sexism, racism and homophobia. I hope that you can eventually find the strength and courage to continue engaging with this community, especially now that you've seen its problems. No wonder we have a huge problem with sexism in techno culture when the most famous people in that culture refuse to admit that there's a problem. Maybe next year you can come to freEtech and give a talk there.
