[peri]

Obviously this discussion is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS to post online, so this video is not mine and not my perspective but: #meToo, every time I, as a Cajun lady, walk into any kind of game store, tobacconist, gas station, or grocery store in the United States of America.

American friends keep saying over and over and over again that this is "unique" to American culture but I have never felt this under threat in any country I've ever been in with the possible exception of Austria/Poland between 2014-2021. I am so used to "hackers" in the MIT/CSAIL sense covering up the damage of other academics in order to protect "their own" and it's not ever been cool, and I refuse to respond to anyone who expects me to reply to anything here ever in Yiddish.

[jfengel]

It's funny that you should mention the MIT sense of the term. I was very influenced by this line from The New Hacker's Dictionary, which came out of the MIT hacking culture:

"[T]he ties many hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive — after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any more."

It has been a rather rude awakening to realize how much hacker culture is the opposite of that. They see the most powerful and intelligent people as looking like themselves, and see their exclusion of anybody else as proof that they were right about it. They believe in a "meritocracy", but define themselves what constitutes "merit", and it just happens to be the things that they're already doing.

I don't know what's actually going on in Cambridge, Mass, but Hacker News brings me every day evidence from their successors in Silicon Valley. I see so much intolerance here.

[peri]

I refuse to respond to anyone who believes esr over jwz or other pr gnus services, personally. But I never "matriculated" into MIT or CSAIL, despite having direct connections to the Fine Institutes of the Commonwealth of the People's Commeanweal de Cambervillained of Nouveaux Anglishteary Albion Perfidioux. I just picked up their trash in the 90s-2000s and failed out of my BA/BSc+MFA.

Or in more direct langauge: the Tech Model Railroad Club was not the only group that were bigger fans of safe operations of tiny tracks and switchways. SNCF and the rest of Europe use different lingo for consists and that's life and safety critical training even with duplo blocks.

[peri]

And as someone who is in a real sense a convert to Judaism not from it: I am 110% unsurprised to see this get downvoted. It is simply not safe online in many spaces where we discuss complex techincal issues, especially in games (electronic or otherwise) to center the experiences of more powerful, more affluent, less Jewish, more "properly" white perspectives.

In startups we do this every single time we choose countries with complex racial histories (like everywhere, but for example Canada and New Zealand) and then try to target for affluence or similar markets rather than serving the downtrodden. That sort of behavior embeds some negative values imo.