The NY Times Fires Tech Writer Quinn Norton, and It's Complicated

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: February 19, 2018 at 5:27:57 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The NY Times Fires Tech Writer Quinn Norton, and It's Complicated
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The NY Times Fires Tech Writer Quinn Norton, and It’s Complicated
> By Adam Rodgers
> Feb 14 2018
> <https://www.wired.com/story/the-ny-times-fires-tech-writer-quinn-norton-and-its-complicated/>
>
> Tuesday afternoon, The New York Times announced it was hiring an opinion writer named Quinn Norton to write about 
> “the power, culture, and consequences of technology.” Late Tuesday night, the Times fired her.
>
> Norton, a writer-activist who covered, among other things, the Occupy and Anonymous movements for WIRED in the 2000s, 
> has been an outspoken voice for hackers, the open-source and free-speech communities, and people working on digital 
> security and privacy. She has been a chronicler and target of harassment online and in the physical world, and she 
> was the romantic partner and friend of Aaron Swartz, the renowned coder and activist who committed suicide in the 
> face of a federal investigation of his activities. Norton knows the field, in other words.
>
> But even as congratulations-Twitter spun up for Norton, detective-Twitter did a double-take. People resurfaced old 
> tweets in which Norton employed derogatory terms for African Americans and gay people—words I find difficult to even 
> type, frankly, about which more in a moment—and writing where she evinced friendships with well-known neo-Nazis. This 
> took all of a couple hours, and I’ve been on enough HR-related conference calls to imagine what kinds of meetings 
> people at the Timeswere having: How did we miss this, does it matter, is she racist or is she just using racist 
> words, we hired her because she’s connected and complicated…
>
> Arguably one of the world’s experts on the ebb and flow of online communities, Norton didn’t exactly try to defend 
> herself. The use of—oy, find me a better way to say this than “the N-word,” but OK—was part of an ill-conceived 
> retweet of John Perry Barlow, who was trying to make a point about racists. Those similarly foreclosed-upon words 
> referring to gay people were sometimes, Norton said, because she herself has been active in the queer community and 
> were covered by in-group privilege, and sometimes because she was code-switching to the language of 4chan and other 
> online groups that use vile epithets like cooks use salt.
>
> Complicated. And, as Norton is a journalist covering free-speech and privacy issues online, maybe this kind of 
> language isn’t just allowed but appropriate. She’s speaking the language of the people she writes about.
>
> But what about the friends-with-Nazis thing?
>
> In particular, Norton had defended Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker (who wrote an opinion piece for WIRED in 2012) and 
> went to prison in 2013. Upon his release about a year later, Auernheimer said that he was also a white supremacist 
> and anti-Semite.
>
> Everyone is redeemable, Norton explained, and silence or disengagement make racism worse. She pointed to an article 
> she posted on Medium about talking to racists as part of fighting the good fight against them, but also keeping open 
> the lines of communication—as opposed to just, you know, punching Nazis.
>
> Anyway, the Times compounded its apparent lack of due diligence with surrender to the mob, and fired her. Here’s the 
> official statement from James Bennet, the editor of the editorial page: “Despite our review of Quinn Norton’s work 
> and our conversations with her previous employers, this was new information to us. Based on it, we’ve decided to go 
> our separate ways.”
>
> A few journalists, including a crowd of current and former WIRED staffers whom I greatly respect, criticized the 
> decision. As my colleague Steven Levy wrote, “She’s no racist or Nazi sympathizer. She’s a smart edgy writer whose 
> tweets are too easily taken out of context.” They described her as a complicated, forceful voice for the 
> underrepresented—for women, for people of color, for the poor and the technologically disenfranchised.
>
> Those he-saids got she-saided by anti-Nazi hardliners (a phrase I did not know I would need, because, come on) and, 
> especially, women of color. In Norton’s writing they saw a bad-faith ally.
>
> [snip]
>
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> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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