Not sure I agree with this dude’s logic, but I guess it’s good that I don’t want a job at BitTorrent. In other news, Arrington wrote something else about the women-in-tech contretemps. It’s called “Blogging And Mass Psychomanipulation.” Here is the gist:
In a post last weekend I wrote about women in tech. I feel like I’m on pretty firm ground here, since more than half of our senior staff are women, including our CEO, and we cover female entrepreneurs whenever we find them. I know exactly the post I could have written to get a super big high five from our audience. Talk big about how the problem is so prevalent, talk quietly about what we do directly to help solve it (but note how much more we must do!), and then salute the ringleaders who are making a living out of pretending to care about the issue (without, of course, pointing out that they are frauds). Seriously, I could have had you as a collective group eating out of my hand on that one. I even pointed to a couple of posts by men that did exactly that (also very experienced bloggers who know how to write a crowd pleaser when they need to).
I didn’t do that though. I wrote a different post that I intended to question some of the basic assumptions that are being made about women in technology. And I knew exactly what the comments would be like. More FU than high five, for example.
And that’s ok with me. I’d rather say what I really think than pander to the crowd. This is an issue that’s too important to use for my own popularity.
That “pander to the crowd” link is to one of his joke tweets about puppies, and how he cares about puppies: “TOO MANY PUPPIES ARE BEING KICKED. WE MUST DO SOMETHING. I CARE. DO YOU CARE? I REALLY CARE. THANK YOU.” Seemed the sarcastic version of something he’d tweeted the eve his post blew up, that had seemed genuine: “thinking I’ll delete the women in tech rant and just replace it with “I care. We need to do more.” That’ll be far less painful.” Hard to tell, though, he could have been psychomanipulating me. (And it worked!) More to the point, though, if he’d known how his commenters were going to react perhaps he could have stepped in a bit earlier to avoid this.
Anyhow, I guess he knew that this would happen all along, so either way I’m happy:
Awesome! Women talking about women’s issues. Hopefully they’ll be allowed to talk about entrepreneurship and tech, too.
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist a little psychomanipulation in there. I, too, am a master, but I, too, choose to use my power for good. OR DO I????)
In the meantime, I think Arrington’s various posts have done an amazing job of bringing people of all views out of the woodwork (which makes the Bram Cohens easier to spot) and making this issue impossible to ignore (which was the crux of my comment to the WSJ in the first place). So - all good.
