Lurking by Joanne McNeil

Author:Joanne McNeil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The publication ran vital pieces month after month. Unfortunately, a year later, a cofounder of Model View Culture left because of what she claimed was an emotionally and verbally abusive environment. While this backstory is disappointing, the writing published was typically excellent, and it remains an essential archive for critical perspectives on technology at a time when such commentary was rare.

Model View Culture was crucial context for emerging scandals, including a sexual harassment and gender discrimination case at GitHub that broke shortly after its first issue in early 2014. Julie Ann Horvath, an engineer at the code collaboration platform, spoke out about a jumble of toxic office behavior: she was targeted by a range of people, her work was routinely undermined in gendered ways, the wife of a GitHub cofounder—who was not an employee—bullied her, that cofounder was confrontational and escalated the situation, and when she turned down a co-worker’s request for a date, he ripped out some of her code, erasing her contributions to a project they collaborated on. (After an investigation, the cofounder, Tom Preston-Werner, was found to have acted inappropriately toward Horvath and he offered his resignation.) What happened at GitHub wasn’t easy for outsiders to follow, but the heap of examples—of varying graduations of misconduct—and muddled nature of it were relatable. Many women, including myself, could see experiences of their own—experiences that perhaps they were unwilling to label as harassment at the time—in Horvath’s allegations. TechCrunch, ordinarily a Silicon Valley cheerleading rag, and seldom one to rock the boat, published a remarkably sympathetic piece documenting the abuse she experienced at the company, concluding that the “situation has greater import than a single person’s struggle: Horvath’s story is a tale of what many underrepresented groups feel and experience in the tech sector.”

The story of Horvath’s exit had a long media cycle, including coverage in publications rarely concerned with Silicon Valley or its products at the time. Readers outside the tech industry learned about GitHub’s bizarre policy of “holacracy,” the so-called decentralized management structure that is a clusterfuck in practice, where no one is responsible for anything and everyone is responsible for everything. Few reporters could resist a jab at GitHub HQ’s replica of the White House Oval Office, complete with a circular carpet emblazoned with the words “The United Meritocracy of GitHub” (the company’s gift to itself after a one-hundred-million-dollar investment from Andreessen Horowitz). A year later, Ellen Pao’s gender discrimination case against her former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers went to trial, and the topic of “Women in Tech” became unavoidable. Reporters and pundits began to connect the dots to show that the industry (like every other industry, including the media) was run by white men (CEOs and brogrammers) and yet they were creating the apps and websites that shaped and structured our society and culture.

To deter scrutiny, many tech founders and insiders assumed the mantle of responsibility and attempted to diversify their teams (rather than turning to existing feminist organizers in Silicon Valley, like Double Union).

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