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Meredith L. PattersonMar 23, 2014

When Nerds Collide

My intersectionality will have weirdoes or it will be bullshit.

All photos: Len Sassaman
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“You only know a hacker respects you if he’s willing to waste his time
shooting holes in your ideas.” — Pablos Holman
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Let’s start with a thought experiment.

Imagine that Japan eliminated work visas.
People from all over the world could apply to Japanese companies,
move to Japan, and live and work there with no bureaucratic obstacles at all.
What would you expect to see happen?

There’d be a lot of applicants, to start with.
Japan has a first-world economy, robust social services, not much inflation,
and a “coolness factor” that practically guarantees there will be more
applicants than jobs, even after circular-filing the resumes of people who
don’t have the required skill sets but applied anyway because OMG JAPAN.
Out of this pool, who gets hired?

I don’t want to turn this into a just-so story,
but I strongly suspect that the accepted candidates would be rigorously polite,
aware of hierarchies of position and their own place within them,
and able to navigate the many levels of formality that the Japanese language
itself encodes. In short, people who appear to have the qualities necessary to
fit comfortably into the existing Japanese business culture.

This is great for people who already have those qualities,
not so great for people who don’t but still really want to work in Japan.
But is it unfair to them? Or is it unfair to expect Japanese managers to hire
people whose culturally acquired qualities are likely to cause discord in a
group whose established social norms are especially focused on harmony?

As an exercise for the reader, what principles do you think you could appeal to
if you wanted to change a Japanese manager’s mind?
Would more of those principles be ones that you hold, or his?
----------

Of all the sound, fury, and quiet voices of reason in the storm of controversy
about tech culture and what is to become of it,
quiet voice of reason Zeynep Tufekci’s “No, Nate,
brogrammers may not be macho, but that’s not all there is to it” moves the
discussion farther forward than any other contribution I’ve seen to date.
Sadly, though, it still falls short of truly bridging the conceptual gap
between nerds and “weird nerds.” Speaking as a lifelong member of the
weird-nerd contingent, it’s truly surreal that this distinction exists at all.
I’m slightly older than Nate Silver and about a decade younger than Paul
Graham, so it wouldn’t surprise me if either or both find it just as puzzling.
There was no cultural concept of cool nerds,
or even not-cool-but-not-that-weird nerds, when we were growing up,
or even when we were entering the workforce.
----------

That’s no longer true. My younger colleague @puellavulnerata observes that
for a long time, there were only weird nerds,
but when our traditional pursuits (programming, electrical engineering,
computer games, &c) became a route to career stability,
nerdiness and its surface-level signifiers got culturally co-opted by
trend-chasers who jumped on the style but never picked up on the underlying
substance that differentiates weird nerds from the culture that still shuns them.
That doesn’t make them “fake geeks,” boy, girl,
or otherwise — you can adopt geek interests without taking on the entire
weird-nerd package — but it’s still an important distinction.
Indeed, the notion of “cool nerds” serves to erase the very existence of
weird nerds, to the extent that many people who aren’t weird nerds themselves
only seem to remember we exist when we commit some faux pas by their standards.

Even so, science, technology, and mathematics continue to attract the same
awkward, isolated, and lonely personalities they have always attracted.
Weird nerds are made, not born, and our society turns them out at a young age.
Tufekci argues that “life’s not just high school,” but the process of
unlearning lessons ingrained from childhood takes a lot more than a cap and
gown or even a $10 million VC check,
especially when life continues to reinforce those lessons well into adulthood.
When weird nerds watch the cool kids jockeying for social position on Twitter,
we see no difference between these status games and the ones we opted out of in high school.
No one’s offered evidence to the contrary,
so what incentive do we have to play that game?
Telling us to grow up, get over it, and play a game we’re certain to lose is
a demand that we deny the evidence of our senses and an infantilising insult
rolled into one.

This phenomenon explains much of the backlash from weird nerds against
“brogrammers” and “geek feminists” alike.
(If you thought the conflict was only between those two groups,
or that someone who criticises one group must necessarily be a member of the
other, then you haven’t been paying close enough attention.)
Both groups are latecomers barging in on a cultural space that was once a
respite for us, and we don’t appreciate either group bringing its cultural
conflicts into our space in a way that demands we choose one side or the other.
That’s a false dichotomy, and false dichotomies make us want to tear our hair out.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to bits that every day the power to
translate pure thought into actions that ripple across the world merely by the
virtue of being phrased correctly draws nearer and nearer to the hands of every person alive.
I’m even more delighted that every day more and more people,
some very similar to me and others very different,
join the chorus of Those Who Speak With Machines.
But I fear for my people, the “weird nerds,” and I think I have good reason to.
Brain-computer interfaces are coming,
and what will happen to the weird nerds when we can no longer disguise our
weirdness with silence?
----------

Scratch the surface of “Silicon Valley culture” and you’ll find dozens of
subcultures beneath. One means of production unites many tribes,
but that’s about all that unites them.
At a company the size of Google or even GitHub,
you can expect to find as many varieties of cliques as you would in an
equivalently sized high school, along with a “corporate culture” that’s
as loudly promoted and roughly as genuine as the “school spirit” on display
at every pep rally you were ever forced to sit through.
One of those groups will invariably be the weirdoes.
----------

Humans are social animals, and part of what makes a social species social is
that its members place a high priority on signaling their commitment to other
members of their species. Weirdoes’ priorities are different;
our primary commitment is to an idea or a project or a field of inquiry.
Species-membership commitment doesn’t just take a back seat,
it’s in the trunk with a bag over its head.
Frame ???
Fig. 1: weirdoes signaling to other weirdoes. Used with author’s permission.
https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/442252850664456192

Not only that, our primary commitments are so consuming that they leak over
into everything we think, say, and do.
This makes us stick out like the proverbial sore thumb:
We’re unable to hide that our deepest loyalties aren’t necessarily to the
people immediately around us, even if they’re around us every day.
We have a name for people whose loyalties adhere to the field of
technology — and to the society of our fellow weirdoes who we meet and
befriend in technology-mediated spaces — rather than to the hairless apes nearby.
I prefer this term to “weird nerds,” and so I’ll use it here: hackers.

You might not consider hackers to be a tribe apart,
but I guarantee you that many — if not most — hackers themselves do.
Eric S. Raymond’s “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” whose first draft
dates to 1992, contains a litany of descriptions that speak to this:

They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded
in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient
languages now forgotten .…

The mainstream of hackerdom, (dis)organized around the Internet and by now
largely identified with the Unix technical culture,
didn’t care about the commercial services.
These hackers wanted better tools and more Internet ….

[I]nstead of remaining in isolated small groups each developing their own
ephemeral local cultures, they discovered (or re-invented)
themselves as a networked tribe.

Paul Graham has also written, with self-deprecating candor,
about the childhood experiences, the indifference to arbitrary rules,
and the unconventional priorities that lead hackers to band together,
in person when possible and online if not — like on the WELL,
which has served continuously since 1985 in one form or another as a virtual
gathering space. Long before a marketer ever uttered the phrase “social
media,” the media we built became our place-independent locus for socialising
and socialisation.

More recently, Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe explores
tribe-formation in a post-geographic,
hyperconnected milieu increasingly reminiscent of the one we live in today:
one where chosen affiliation means more than the affiliations imposed by
accident of birth or location. It’s this last bit — the way we
prioritise choice over circumstance — that’s hardest to communicate to
people who don’t experience it themselves,
like trying to explain “blue” to a cave fish.
When we try to but fail, we’re castigated just for trying,
and the wedge drives in ever deeper.
Usually the reproof comes in the form of scolding us for our “privilege” of
exercising choice at all, but this is perverse beyond belief.
The world is made better by extending the franchise of choice to everyone,
not by condemning people who couldn’t live with any of the choices on offer
and therefore made their own.

Many programmers aren’t hackers, and there isn’t a single thing wrong with that.
Literacy of any kind is a beautiful thing.
In today’s market, demand for code-literate employees far exceeds the supply,
so engineering teams contain both hackers and non-hackers.
Increasingly, the latter outnumber the former.
This is still a beautiful thing — until the latter realise there are
enough of them to push the weirdoes out, and do it.

It’s easy to forget that only 20 years ago — around the time I
graduated high school — the Internet was a ghost town compared to today.
Okay, a ghost town with a thriving university and more communal
watering holes than you could have shaken a stick at,
but next to nothing in the way of business.
Then we won the right to encrypt Net traffic with ciphers and keys
incidentally strong enough to protect credit card numbers in transit,
and suddenly e-commerce exploded. The smell of wealth attracts the power-hungry
and the job-hungry like raw meat does flies, and two bubbles later,
the pull is still as strong as ever.
(It’s as if there’s some fundamental human drive to communicate or something.)
Successive waves of subcultural immigration into the tech industry have brought
with them a myriad of social signaling dialects.
Without active effort, it’s easy to miss that between two techies,
one signifier can easily have three or more meanings,
depending entirely on how the people involved got to where they are.
----------

What sets hackers apart is our values.
Values are aspirations, ideals to live up to,
like compassion for Buddhists and feeding the hungry for Christians.
As with any cultural value system, we don’t always manage to achieve our
values, but the drive to do so is what moves us forward.
The following is not even remotely a comprehensive list — for that,
look to Steven Levy or Pekka Himanen — but each value below is a
potential source of conflict between people who adhere to it and people who
adhere to a different value system.
----------


Programming is an inherently constructivist discipline.
A constructivist is like the archetypal Missourian:
“Show me!” The very discipline of programming is founded on the
Curry-Howard isomorphism, which establishes that programs are equivalent to
proofs and vice versa. Many hacker arguments are settled only when someone
writes a proof-of-concept that unambiguously demonstrates the correctness of
their position; that’s why we call them proofs of concept.
(The word “proof” shows up in a lot of our argot:
zero-knowledge proof, proof-of-work, proof-carrying code, and so on.
This isn’t an accident. While we appreciate and often celebrate ambiguity in
wordplay and art, some matters are too important to leave mutual clarity to chance.)
Some programmers can leave constructivism at the office,
but hackers live and breathe it.

Hackers have been putting their personal freedom on the line,
not only out of curiosity but in the public interest, for decades.
Please excuse us for being a little sensitive about what the stakes can sometimes be.
We treat liberty like a muscle — it atrophies if not exercised
regularly — and as such, we grant a lot of leeway to conduct that many
find dubious at first glance. But context matters.
In 2011, Telecomix junk-faxed the entire country of Egypt.
Under normal circumstances, this would be incredibly rude at best,
even a criminal offence in some jurisdictions.
In the days after the Mubarak regime shut off access to the Internet, though,
sending dial-up login information for free accounts donated by the
hacker-founded Dutch ISP XS4ALL to every reachable machine was an act of
re-empowerment, giving a megaphone to the voices the regime wanted to suppress.

Drawing hard lines around soft situations — like banning certain topics
of discussion or kinds of humour — chafes hard against the hacker drive
to discover boundaries through practical experience.

Over time, this drive has even changed norms in our own spaces.
Forking someone else’s software project used to be considered incredibly rude.
However, the decentralised nature of distributed revision control and the
user experience that services like GitHub and Bitbucket provide are shifting
the act of altering the direction of another person’s open work into not only
something socially acceptable, but socially admirable. Why? Because it works.
(Cf. “you can’t argue with a root shell.”)


That’s censorship in the colloquial usage,
so leave the “but we’re not the government” rhetoric at the door, please.
National governments are one threat model;
workplace governance is a different threat model;
hackers are interested in self-government.
Hackers’ gut response to any kind of speech policing — amplify the
speech, as loudly and in as many places as possible — is,
in its best-known form, what gives rise to the Streisand Effect,
and is also why we react so stridently when ordered to constrain our speech
habits Or Else. This sort of amplification is attractive to power-seekers,
and the amplification of opposing ideas is anathema to them.
Fortunately for power-seekers, the Internet offers up a pool of potential
pitchfork mob participants just as readily as it delivers the gullible to 419 scammers.
This alarms us, and if you’ve ever had to keep your own controversial beliefs
quiet for fear of being dogpiled, you should understand why.

but the good name never dies of one who has done well.
Or the bad name of those who have done evil, but if their code was good,
we keep using it until something better comes along.
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who condones Hans Reiser’s murder of
his wife, but a hell of a lot of people still use his filesystem.
Even more of us felt the hairs on the backs of our necks stand up when the
prosecution argued that Reiser didn’t “act like” a grieving widower
should, whether we’d read The Stranger or not.
If you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption,
you have a hint of an idea of why this worries us.

Meanwhile, we’re all just hoping that circumstance never puts us in Andy
Dufresne’s shoes.

The idea of anathematising all of a person’s good works because of something
else they said or did is just as alien and repellent to us as our reaction is
to someone who wishes Hacker News would die because Paul Graham is kind of a
dick sometimes. My Russian coauthor Sergey Bratus points out that keeping
works by “ideologically impure” persons out of public view was instrumental
to Soviet systems of social control.
And as @puellavulnerata acutely observes,
a culture that encourages judging people unilaterally,
rather than judging their actions in context,
is one that allows socially-adept hierarchy climbers to decontextualise their
own self-serving cruelties as “necessary for the cause” and stage
witchcraft trials against the weirdoes on the margin.


Your code makes you great, not the other way around.
We don’t always live up to this value as well as we should; as evidence,
consider the sheer number of women who’ve pointed out that they feel more
accepted when presenting themselves and their work under a gender-neutral or
masculine pseudonym. In our ideal world, though,
your identity and personal history are orthogonal to your commit history.
Moreover, we want our decision procedures to consider identity when
contextually appropriate — what is a progressive stack if not a p-queue
prioritised on identity? — but not when the distinctions it introduces
only muddy the waters, or worse, refocus problem-solving effort away from the
roots of those problems.

To a person whose value system gives primacy to identity in all situations,
or who believes it’s acceptable to tell others what identities they must
choose or how to prioritise their identities, this is unthinkable.
The gulf that arises from this little gap is vast indeed.

It’s worth noting that these values cut across the left-right spectrum of
how people tend to think about politics, rather than bisecting it.
There are progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist,
conservative, liberal, and reactionary hackers,
just the same as can be said for women, bisexuals, Texans,
or engineers who aren’t hackers. (The only political identity I’ve never
seen represented natively in hackerdom is authoritarianism,
and even then we invite them to our conferences.)
This also means that we can’t always rely on the attitudes that people wear
on their sleeves. We have to watch closely,
mining the interactions we observe for actionable data the way a person on a
blind date pays attention to how their date treats the waiter.

That guy in the group who stares at you without saying anything?
He could be undressing you with his eyes,
but I’d lay better odds that he’s paying attention,
watching your actions and reactions to build a mental model of how it’s safe
to interact with you. Safe for him, that is, not you:
bitten enough times, forever shy. You can take weirdoes out of a culture that
rejects them, but taking the rejection out of a weirdo can never be a labour of
anything other than love.
----------

The effects of gentrification on minority and outsider communities are
well-studied and understood. High-status groups attract would-be members by
definition; if they were low-status,
far fewer people would want to belong to them. The question then becomes:
what responsibilities does an outsider community newly imbued with money,
status, and power have toward would-be members,
and what responsibilities do would-be members have toward the community they want to join?
----------

The assertion that we should “not be so defensive” is problematic because
it denies that hackers have anything to feel defensive toward.
People get defensive when they feel like something important to them is in
jeopardy, and our community is important to us because it’s where we find
people who share our values. These range from the epistemic to the
aesthetic — we are especially protective of the beauty of many the things
we care about, often referred to as “elegance.” For those of us who
experienced operative ostracism and public shaming,
the protectiveness that runs through the entire stack has nigh-infinite fuel to
draw from, and at times it doesn’t take much poking to turn a resource that
many of us have transmuted into a source of productivity fuel into a tactical
nuclear egghead.

Diluting that pool is frightening because it takes us back to the diasporan
times in our lives when we upheld those values alone or at most in tiny,
isolated handfuls. Many geeks can tell you stories of how they and a few
like-minded companions formed a small community that achieved something great,
only to have it taken over by popular loudmouths who considered that greatness
theirs by right of social station and kicked the geeks out by enforcing
weirdo-hostile social norms. (Consider how many hackerspaces retain their
original founders.) Having a community they built wrested away from them at the
first signs of success is by now a signaling characteristic of weirdohood.
We wouldn’t keep mentioning it if it didn’t keep happening.

I’m not claiming that’s entirely rational, because fear isn’t rational,
but it sure does explain the response to being told that our culture is broken
and must be adapted to accommodate the very people who rallied it into being by
shunning us from theirs.

We’ll start to feel less defensive when we get some indication — any
indication — that our critics understand what parts of our culture we
don’t want to lose and why we don’t want to lose them.

Asking questions rather than giving orders would be a good start,
but what I ultimately want is psychological visibility:
to know that you see what I value and appreciate why I value it,
even if your own values are different.
I’ll have that when I hear that understanding echoed in non-hackers’ words,
rather than them echoing mine — though even that would be a start.
I have yet to see an inducement toward social change that doesn’t trip
hackers’ primal fears of ostracism.
Playing on people’s fears can be an incredibly effective form of social
engineering, but when the fears you play on make people afraid of you,
you are engineering a system that creates outsiders and then silences them.

“We’re outsiders, therefore we couldn’t possibly be exclusionary” is
actually not what we’re saying. Some hackers even argue for greater
exclusivity, and curiously enough, many of those who do are also members of
minority-by-birth groups. (I’d link to examples,
but being caught between a minority-by-choice group and a minority-by-birth
group means being extra careful about expressing unpopular opinions where
anyone unsympathetic can hear you.) We’re outsiders,
even if we’re outsiders with power,
and we’re hyper-aware of the qualities that cause us to be treated as
outsiders in the first place.

If you can show us those qualities in yourself,
whether by mindblowing works of programming genius or merely by living the
values we embrace, you’re in if you want to be.

Even if you can’t, we’re not going to kick you out,
but like any other marginalised group,
we prioritise our time toward each other and our allies, so yeah,
you’re going to feel like the outsider for a change. Sucks, doesn’t it.

The criticism of Nate Silver seems to assume that he’s trying to produce
something for people who don’t necessarily share his values,
but I’m not convinced. He started out analysing baseball statistics,
turned the same tools to political statistics,
and his audience found him because elections are the final-boss evolution of
popularity contests. FiveThirtyEight may be a mass-market publication,
but that doesn’t imply that Nate’s personal values have changed any, nor should it.
He still wants to work with people who understand him,
just like anybody else does. Isn’t that what both brogrammers and geek
feminists are after as well — a culture where they feel comfortable?
Why is the onus on the outsiders who built our own spaces to understand the
insider-newcomers, and not the other way around,
particularly when the insiders are the ones colonising us?

Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to
progressive values alone won’t work.
You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values,
and nobody’s done that yet.

Consider what you’re up against: an established power structure that offers
“weird nerds” not only a place to fit in — cramped and awkward as
that space might be — but a comfortable salary for doing so.
Unlike Sinclair’s illustrative salaryman,
you can convince a hacker that a proposition her job depends on her not
understanding is true, but keep in mind what you’re offering to replace the status quo.

The mainstream tech industry offers us money, status,
and a stable (if weak) position in its idealised social hierarchy.
The voices clamouring for change offer us no money,
a social role reversal back to “disempowered outsider,” and a status
demotion to “likely sexual predator.” (The polite euphemism for this is
“creepy,” a pejorative applied indiscriminately both to those who actively
transgress other people’s boundaries and to those with the unmitigated gall
to be attracted to someone else while being funny-looking.)
Given a choice between these two, which would you side with?
It’s true that the one is confining, essentialist,
and a far cry from the best of all possible worlds,
but the other is all these things and a step backward for people who finally
got to take a step forward for once when the internet took off.

Remember, you’re dealing with constructivists here — and not just any
constructivists, but constructivists whose own lived experience yields proof
after proof that they, and their outsider norms,
will be first against the wall when the popular kids come.
Over time, we internalise these lessons,
so much so that at times we’re unaware that they’re in play.
If someone offered us a convincing alternative, we’d take it in a heartbeat,
but in its absence, we rely on the ways of being that have kept us farthest from harm.
If we recognise a pattern of “put the outsider down,” we’re going to
respond in the ways we’ve learned to protect ourselves from that:
by closing ranks.

Because of this, leading with “there are more of us than there are of you,
so you have to change to accommodate us” is, hands down,
the best way to ensure that your carefully constructed appeal will fall on deaf ears.

Just as to many women, every man is Schroedinger’s Rapist, to most outsiders,
every insider is Schroedinger’s Asshole Trying To Have Me Ostracised.
If you want to overcome that cognitive bias from outside of it — and it
is a bias, in exactly the same way that Schroedinger’s Rapist is a
cognitive bias — you’re going to have to offer more acceptance, not less.
Probably orders of magnitude more, if you want us to notice.
And you’re probably going to have to prove it repeatedly,
in the face of bitter skepticism, because not to put too fine a point on it,
we’ve all been conned by the spectre of acceptance at least once and we’re
none of us too keen on repeating that mistake.
Hell, even venture capital is only the spectre of acceptance — watch how
it vanishes into the ether when the ROI isn’t what the VCs
expected — but it sure walks and quacks like the flesh-and-blood thing if
you don’t pay more attention than you have to.

Offer hackers the real deal — a seat at this here table we built and
you’re using, rather than an unpaid internship as your carpenter/busboy/court
fool, would be a great start — and they’ll defect in throngs to your
team, but “the real deal” means changing your tactics.
If you tell me that your goal is systemic change toward radical acceptance,
and I see that you treat those you perceive as lesser-than with the same kind
of scorn and derision that pushed me toward this insular little subculture
where I feel comfortable — and I do see this, every day,
to the point where I’ve had to cull people I genuinely like from my social
media feeds because it was that or get mentally knocked back every few minutes
into the headspace I spent my K-12 years in and was only too happy to leave
—then you’ve successfully convinced me that your acceptance is not radical
and the change you want not systemic.

Inverting a power dynamic offers no consolation to people who end up on the
bottom either way, and nothing of interest to people who would rather that
power dynamic not exist in the first place.

Some of us are old enough, or have lived in the wrong places long enough,
to be all too familiar with the reformist tendency to eat its own with
deliberation and gusto. We’ll pass on that, thanks.

And that’s the bastardly crux of it all:
two groups who nominally want the same thing — a culture of
acceptance — separated by the values that lead them to that desire and
the fear that ultimately nothing will really change.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Groups that share goals but not values can
still collaborate on those goals — to tremendous effect! — but
doing so successfully requires a nuanced understanding of a value set not
one’s own, and a willingness to focus on outcomes over ideological purity
when push comes to shove. I offer you a proof by construction of this
willingness in the hacker community:
you need only observe the dazzling spectrum of political opinions to which
hackers variously subscribe, and how little those opinions matter to us when
our way of life is under attack.
----------

All we’re asking for is constructive proof that you accept us for who we are,
rather than the fact that we build your toys or that we tripped and fell into a pot of money.
The dominant culture has had two decades to demonstrate to us in copious detail
what it’s willing to offer — the good parts and the bad
ones — and now it’s your turn. Please show your work.
----------

Many thanks to @puellavulnerata, Jason Gulledge, Kaitlyn Kohlenberg,
@exiledsurfer, @shokufeyesib, and Sergey Bratus for their thoughtful
remarks on early drafts of this essay.
Thanks to exiledsurfer.