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Getting on the ele­va­tor this morn­ing, it turned out I should have waited. Some woman was yelling at some­one on the ele­va­tor about how he should sup­port health-care, and some ran­dom­ness about the unnamed politi­cian who’s bumper sticker adorned his jacket was so ter­ri­ble and such.

She con­tin­ued to rant at him all the way up to my floor.

On the way out the ele­va­tor, I called back that scream­ing doesn’t solve any­thing, though after get­ting bet­ter caf­feinated, I wish I had told her to treat the man like a human being.

Let me pref­ace this by stat­ing a few things: if you are going to tell me that girls are inher­ently bad at tech­nol­ogy, pro­gram­ming, or are get­ting their panties in a twist, please fuck the fuck off. I feel con­fi­dent in judg­ing you a waste of an oppor­tu­nity for a per­fectly good pair of ovary and sperm.

Secondly, I haven’t read a tran­script or seen a video, because the peo­ple rant­ing about this are seem­ingly unable to link to either, lest you judge it for yourself.

So all I have to go on is the quotes and snip­pets and attempts at con­text. It sounds like the obvi­ously poorly-delivered joke (I say so because it’s caus­ing a brou-ha-ha rather than a laugh) was meant to go some­thing like this:

1. Have you ever tried to explain your mud­dled think­ing to some­one else?
2. You know how it causes embar­rass­ment when the other per­son gives you that quiz­zled look, and you real­ize you’re an idiot?
3. As a multi-millionaire and astro­naut, I find myself embar­rassed try­ing to explain how my soft­ware works to mem­bers of the gen­der to which I’m attracted, even though my soft­ware is awesome.
4. If my soft­ware was easy to explain — thus sav­ing me the embar­rass­ment of mud­dled think­ing about design — it would also be easy for peo­ple to use.
5. Mush the last few steps together: if my soft­ware is easy to use, it’s easy to explain how it works, and I can sell it (and by exten­sion, myself) to mem­bers of the gen­der to which I’m attracted in social situations.

This is a log­i­cal pro­gres­sion, and an attempt to appeal to evo­lu­tion­ary processes in order to make a bunch of mis­fit worka­holics socially useful.

Unfortunately for him, Mark Shuttleworth is a well-socialized het­ero­sex­ual gen­tle­men from some­where other than the sub­ur­ban United States, so he’s attracted to women, and appar­ently isn’t aware that in the US, it’s not OK in polite com­pany to refer to some­one he’s inter­ested in chat­ting up at the bar a girl. It hon­estly sounds like he’s try­ing to be cute with it, but falling on his face because some peo­ple are offended when they hear about promi­nent fig­ures talk­ing about women as girls. Either that or one advan­tage of being a astro­naut is that your world is post-gendered.

Yes, I’m jeal­ous of the money and space travel. I’m also young and ambi­tious, so not too ter­ri­bly wor­ried about it.

Regardless, part of the reac­tion is defense against the asser­tion of priv­i­lege and con­trol: dudes don’t get mad when women talk about boys in those terms in our pres­ence because the matri­archy hasn’t existed for thou­sands of years and we don’t have to worry about it. The reac­tion we (boys) have is either blush­ing or strut­ting a bit, because we rec­og­nize it as a sign of selec­tion and an asser­tion of power.

And, of course, bad-assed women are very attrac­tive to guys my age — so many video games, so lit­tle time… Our great-great-grandsons, how­ever, will curse us for our blind­ness.

Conversely, ladies may bris­tle when men talk about the girls, because it’s a term of endear­ment that is inex­orably tied back to when all women, in all cir­cum­stances, were con­sid­ered girls. There’s an extremely ugly legacy lurk­ing close enough to the col­lec­tive mem­o­ries of both women and men when it comes to a man assert­ing power and show­ing signs of selection.

That’s, I think, why Mark’s com­ments are com­pared to RMS’s. Even though — at least in my third-hand decon­struc­tion — they are log­i­cally to get the audi­ence to do the right thing because of a woman’s dom­i­nance in selec­tion sit­u­a­tions, the lan­guage he is using is loaded enough to tell a dif­fer­ent narrative.

Collective mem­o­ries!? Narrative!? Holy pre­ten­tious fuck. Fuck this, who’s play­ing at the club tonight? Yeesh!

Update: Thanks to Mackenzie for post­ing the link to the video and slides.

As noted by nukeedit, the release com­ment (in the first few min­utes), has a con­nec­tion to orgasm, but it was not gen­der spe­cific, and had no con­nec­tion to hook­ers at all. Now, I’ve read Emma Goldman, and claim to under­stand it, but iter­at­ing that pre­cise chain of logic to any­thing related to sex ends up with your pro­scrip­tions effec­tively indis­tin­guish­able from moral tra­di­tion­al­ists, and results mat­ter more than inten­tions. To put it another way: dark­mat­ter may be a tool, but sex is not the enemy.

On the “girls” com­ment… (at 36:00, slide starts at 35:00) ugh. He ends up elud­ing to the fact that he’s refer­ring to “girls” as “peo­ple who don’t care about free soft­ware.” In con­text, the com­ment is actu­ally worse than it is with­out con­text. Logically, there really isn’t a way to sal­vage his com­ments as some­how dif­fer­ent from the “teach it to your grandma”, even though I don’t think that was actu­ally what he was try­ing for.

Results do mat­ter more than inten­tions. To me, as a native-born white male engi­neer in the US, the results are this: an oth­er­wise engag­ing talk on how to make FOSS not suck, which gives voice to my own thoughts from years ago about UX and code — par­tic­u­larly the inti­mate rela­tion­ship between the APIs you’re writ­ing and the UIs that can rest atop them — is com­pletely for­got­ten, and the only thing peo­ple are talk­ing about is what a com­plete cobag Mark was for jok­ing about girls.

Remember that line from An Inconvenient Truth, shortly after the ani­ma­tion of Lower Manhattan under­wa­ter, about how there are more things than just ter­ror­ism to be con­cerned about?

Turns out that’s even more pre­scient (via) than he was likely aware at the time.

[There’s a whole bunch of mean­der­ing aca­d­e­mic pon­tif­i­cat­ing and me tak­ing myself too seri­ously. About two thirds of the way down it gets really good, though. I promise. Also, the woman is now online and back in school. –JC]

So appar­ently, some­one was try­ing to take online courses, ordered the cheap­est Dell with a CD — which hap­pens to be run­ning Ubuntu — she could find, and then couldn’t get online to her courses. So she with­drew from the University, and the Linux Lusers rushed in — talk­ing about how dumb she was for not being able to slickly nav­i­gate Linux through cus­tomer sup­port in a Windows-only world, and appar­ently, this degen­er­ated into peo­ple harass­ing her on Facebook.

There are a cou­ple take­aways to this for the world at large:

1. Facebook works fine on Ubuntu (or the stu­dent in ques­tion has got­ten a dif­fer­ent Dell).
2. If you aren’t rais­ing your kid to be able to han­dle com­put­ers like a nerd, you are hand­i­cap­ping your children’s abil­ity to prosper.

Obviously, the sec­ond is the con­tro­ver­sial opin­ion. While the new impe­ri­al­ist geek over­lords are kinder, gen­tler over­lords than the rob­ber barons of the past, tech­nol­ogy is a big ugly mess. The de-facto real­ity this illus­trates is that if you are attempt­ing to live in a mod­ern­ized coun­try, but are unable to fig­ure out how to pur­chase and use a com­puter, you are fucked. Those who can­not fig­ure out how to scam Central Services to get online are des­tined to be crushed under­foot in the infor­ma­tion rev­o­lu­tion. It’s an ugly, bru­tal real­ity. Fortunately, when deal­ing with econ­omy, real­ity is what you make of it. There are a cou­ple points for the demo­c­ra­tic wing of the new masters:

1. There is a con­tin­gent of rav­ing lunatics who have decided to immi­grate to Linux as their cho­sen nationality.
2. When you smirk at the clue­less n00b, you are the sadis­tic prison guard tor­ment­ing the hap­less inmate. By mak­ing your sys­tem dif­fi­cult for oth­ers to use, you are actu­ally hurt­ing them — not only in terms of time and stress, but also in finan­cially mea­sur­able ways.

But none of that works on the real issue of this story: What was it about the Ubuntu desk­top as shipped with Dell that pre­vented her from going to school? If you haven’t already, find out why our OS didn’t work for her, pub­li­cize the prob­lems, and fix them. If it’s a tech­ni­cal prob­lem then it’s com­pletely triv­ial to fix: we’re all geeks here. If it was a more mushy social rea­son — the bureau­cratic pro­nounce­ments of over­worked sup­port staff at her Uni and ISP: you must use MS Word on Windows (because we won’t sup­port any­thing else)—then that’s some­thing we have tra­di­tion­ally sucked at, but some­thing which com­mu­nity growth could address in an indi­rect way, and B2B schmooz­ing could address in a direct way. Remember, she’s not the only one going through these dif­fi­cul­ties, she’s just the only one who’s dif­fi­cul­ties were severe enough to war­rant a news­pa­per arti­cle on it.

By select­ing Tim Geithner as his Treasury sec­re­tary, Barack Obama has opted for a fig­ure who plau­si­bly rep­re­sents change while also offer­ing a high degree of con­ti­nu­ity with both the Paulson Treasury and its Clinton admin­is­tra­tion pre-decessors. Krishna Guha, Geithner ready for top job as Treasury chief, Financial Times, 2009-11-23

How can you read that and not have visions of Homer Simpson doo-doo-dooing the cir­cus theme.

Bonus Funny: The cir­cus theme is actu­ally called “Entrance of the Gladiators” and is mil­i­tary march with a nod to the Roman Empire.