Shelley Powers on Ada Lovelace Day

In celebrating two uber-known bloggers, david armano recently said, "You can tell who the pioneers are from the arrows sticking out of their backs."

I thought a lot about this saying tonight. Wrinkled my brow over the connotations of words like pioneers and arrows. I've come to the conclusion that pioneers are not always -- nor often -- heroes. Often, pioneers come looking for fame and fortune, put conquest over content, rob native people of their land, their crops, their livelihood, their dignity, and sometimes their lives. Smallpox infected blankets might ring a bell. And arrows in the back might be a proper thank you.

So, pioneers have their own history book pages. I'm here to celebrate the contribution of an ancestor from the original blogosphere, the pre-historic times of online publishing, an indigenous person, one of those who came before the others, who after-settlers have tried to contain and oppress on their way up the twitter scale without success.

One woman in tech comes to mind above all for me, and that's Shelley Powers, Burning Bird, the native, not the pioneer.

Shelley is an indigenous netizen, an original woman technologist and author, photographer and activist, online and off - the earliest female tech blogger to stand up for women's issues online when there weren't many women being heard, when debates got hot and heavy and personal, the brilliant writer who talked until the men went nearly mad from her unwillingness to submit.

What Shelley has done for tech is a matter of public record and Internet lore.

What makes Shelley special is not just what she has done with and for technology, not only her many books, but the richness of her writing and photography beyond the topic of tech. She is proof that the most interesting of us in any discipline are those who have multiple dimensions.

We shout we whisper we cut we bleed we code we paint.

Visit the many dimensions of Shelley, and tell her thank you.

technorati tags: ada lovelace day, Shelley Powers, Women, Technology, Photography, Natives, Pioneers, Guts

commdisunity

damn, huh. that was 2002.

(...and one promised to quit, but never did.)

fracture, shatter, disunity, dismay.

i see your nostalgia and raise you some sadness.

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The Casualties of Casual Dismissal

Let's see if we can walk through this one more time for clarity. Even if it's just my OWN clarity.

The problem with the Lane Hartwell sub-drama, where Mike Arrington cast Shelley Powers as a woman's-issue-obsessed fascist, is that his comment, if true -- which it isn't (Shelley will rail a woman as soon as she will a man) -- would mean Shelley is "a sexist." That's a silly and careless portrayal of Shelley's role in this space. Mike later gets to the crux of his problem with Shelley, that he finds her unpleasant. Those are two pretty different things.

There were many exchanges about whether Mike's remarks were sexist or careless or wrong or what. Especially on Twitter. All well and good.

Then, Eric Rice took Mike's comment and determined that it makes Mike "a sexist," which for the record, I do not believe it does. Characterizing someone else as sexist -- which is what Mike did with Shelley -- does not make him a sexist. Do you follow me?

The other problem is that now, Mike is looking at this whole sub-drama as Shelley and Company calling him a Sexist, which again, is turning the situation around and losing track of where the "hold-on-a-minute" began.

The other other problem is that Eric Rice did call mike a sexist in his video about what boycotting TechCrunch sponsors over this, and extrapolating from there larger questions on how we show our distaste to a Web 2.0 privately-held company that steps over the line ethically. It's a good question. But it also serves to take THIS PARTICULAR discussion, which started with Lane, into the stratosphere of open-ended meandering.

Apparently Eric twittered that a boycott was in order. I was not following Eric until after all of this started, but that's a mighty serious gauntlet to be throwing down on Twitter.

During the Kathy Sierra mess, I got emails from people who were contacting MY advertisers telling them not to advertise with me because I made de*a*th thr*e*ats (forgive me for not wanting to add more to my google cache). SO I have a sensitive spot there -- You don't do that shit unless you are ready to bring in the law with all of its force.

Besides, what would a web 2.o boycott look like -- oooo i'm not using idrive oooo. Boo!

I think a boycott would be useless anyway. Because the Larger Problem is not about Mike Arrington's gender concepts. It's that the web 2.0 and tech industries are littered with isms. Tell me there's anyone who doesn't get that yet.

And the larger LARGER problem for the blogosphere and twitterspehere is that a culture is developing -- thanks in part to time-saving, fragment-tossing platforms like twitter, that by design silence dissenting voices -- we have all become easy targets for extinction, the casualties of casual dismissal.

THAT's what bothered me about this situation, about what Mike said to Shelley, about what Mike and others said about Lane without asking Lane anything, and STILL DOES bother me.

The "you're just" mantra is getting way out of hand.

It is cultish and thought canceling.

Any voice that isn't Techmeme-vetted is so easily dismissed with the wave of the hand: She always takes the woman's side; he always piles on; she's just negative; he's just a troll; she's a suck-up, he's just a fascist.

READ: Stop being unpleasant. Stop being negative. Get with the program.

What that means is that the next conversation you take part in, your role has already been assigned, and you better fit it, or you will be reminded how you are supposed to behave.

That Shit Is Wrong. It's passive aggressive game playing, and those who execute it well to exclude differing opinions and critical thought ought not wonder why their victims get pissed off.

That's what's wrong with this thing for me.

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What a comment stream would look like as a business meeting... (Hint: Not Work Safe)

saw it on crunchnotes.

{tried to leave a comment here, but it kept thinking I was spam. i tried to add 5 + 8. I really did.}

Notice how in this re-enactment of the typical, there was one important result that is also typical of these types common-if-exaggerated online non-exchanges: nothing was accomplished.

As for whether or not the women should 'stand up' and say something in this video, they could have at least landed a Shelley Powers wallop.

I thought it was funny. Plain and simple. Everyone looked like an ass neighing into an empty well, and that's pretty much what we look like these days.

j.

Highest OMG BBQ

Head to Shelley's to find out about a must-do wordpress update. NOW! (And to learn the new code word for getting off your ass and doing something quick.)

I think the Dept. of Homeland Security should add this level above terror level red: HighestOMGBBQ! - reserved for an actual emergency, not one made up to keep the population in check.

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shelley on damn interesting on Tuskegee

When people say there should be no Black History Month, I say ok, but can we have Black American Holocaust Month? No? What about never forget? Americans CRAVE to forget. We are the most forgettenist bunch of plow-ahead-without-a-tear-Protestant-work-ethic people to inhabit this magnificent orb.

To wit, Shelley looks at Damn Interesting, where Alan "Hot Pastrami" Bellows has an enlightening account of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Just one of many reasons why Black Americans sometimes find it a wee bit difficult to 'get over it.' Hey, have you ever thought or said that yourself--about slavery, about Tuskegee, about lynchings? Ever thought it while listening to a co-worker of color on a rant about politics?

If so, have you said 'get over it' that to a Jewish co-worker with relatives killed in the Holocaust? No? Why not? If you live in America, the comparison is worth thinking about.

Shelley Quotes:

In the mid-1940s, however, the recently discovered antibiotic penicillin was determined to be a safe and effective cure for syphilis, and the US government sponsored a nationwide public health program in an effort to eradicate the disease.

The researchers at Tuskegee, in a bid to preserve the fruits of their labors, kept the cure a secret from their subjects. They also supplied local doctors with lists of the participants' names, and instructed the physicians not to provide penicillin lest they interfere with a government health study. The administrators of the experiment were not interested in saving the lives of the black farmers, they were interested only in dissecting them on an autopsy table. As one of the doctors unceremoniously stated, "We have no further interest in these patients until they die.

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Few of the researchers who participated in the study ever admitted to any lapse in ethics, most of them insisting that they were merely following the directions of their superiors.

...