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

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Zach White <zwhite () darkstar frop org>
Date: Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 12:20 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] The NY Times Fires Tech Writer Quinn Norton, and It's
Complicated
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
CC: <dewayne () warpspeed com>


Dave,

For IP, if you wish.

I don't know what to think about Quinn Norton and her situation. But there
is a figure in the story I do know: Andrew Auernheimer.

I first encountered Auernheimer, or as I knew him then, weev, in the late
90's on irc. He burst into my circle of friends and immediately became a
polarizing figure. Most of us saw him for what he was then- a troll who
would say anything to get a reaction from people. He is not a hacker in the
MIT tradition, or any tradition. His sole talent lies in doing those things
that everyone else says, "I'm not touching that because that will draw the
wrong kind of attention."

But for him, there is no wrong kind of attention. I do not know if his
racist change of heart is genuine, but I have every reason to believe that
it is not, that it is a calculated move designed to draw attention to
himself. Today, without a doubt, Auernheimer is laughing about what has
happened, and gloating to anyone who will listen. He doesn't care that a
woman's career has been tarnished, or for either side of the controversy.
In fact, if this ends up ruining Ms. Norton's career that will only make
him laugh harder.

Those of us who were on the Internet during the Usenet era will remember
what few people today know: Don't feed the trolls. I hope the NY Times and
other mainstream outlets learn that lesson soon.

-Zach

On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 3:11 AM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:

> 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]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp
>
>
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