I don’t know where to put this… so I’m putting it here…
This is legit terrifying. And also how is this not just Peeple (Yelp for People!) redone but by techbros instead of women?
The opportunity for abuse is terrifying.
And something I don’t expect a startup group that looks like this to understand at all:
Also, don’t they look like the kind of guys that would invent a fucking bus app, thats a bus, but not dirty public transit for poors!
Not mine. I still haven’t raped or harassed anyone though.
McKinseyism. And always having the best grades.
McKinseyism is the management philosophy that basically says if you can’t measure the thing you really want to measure, measure a few other things and hope they correlate. It was invented by people who simply did not or would not understand that people lie and cheat. Even though they did it themselves.
The lack of opt-out options was what did Peeple in.
And because the creators were women, when other women pointed out the potential for abuse to women, they acquiesced and made it opt-in only. This version? With these techbros? I am not optimistic that they’ll see how frightening a person rating app could be for women. And I doubt that they’ll have mods or other any sort of structure in place to prevent abuse, because again, their privilege will make them blind to it.
I’ve always joked that 1984 came into effect when Facebook launched.
But with this app? I’m way more interested in living far away from humanity…
I mean… seriously? This is them? My god… we’re all doomed aren’t we?
Gah. I was once interviewed by a startup just like this. They rejected me, despite technical proficiency, because they didn’t like my body language. That company has long since failed. Surprise surprise.
Because women suffer abuse at a higher rate than men. 83%
And women who suffer abuse report incidents happening in the workplace. 53%
And this is the Not Feminism 101 thread, where the focus is still women.
In a system like this, women will be the canary in the coal mine.
Because abusive controlling partners will stop at nothing to destroy their former partners.
Obviously, the system can be used to hurt anyone, but my focus is on women, it usually is. 
Post deleted.
Further to this, I’m not sure this made waves outside of Canada, but this man made it his life goal to “destroy” his ex-wife. Thankfully, he was deported to Canada and she stayed in the US so she was marginally safer, but he still managed to get her fired and spread malicious gossip and lies about her to all her neighbours and family.
Imagine what a person like that would do with a people/service rating app?
Because in his case the number is >1.
More like >10.
Probably >20.
And I see he worked in the “I was drunk” excuse, but I’ll be fair to him for a very specific context and acknowledge that will make it harder for him to arrive at an accurate total.
Zero is definitely a lot easier to keep track of.
I’m beginning to think that maybe CH was right.
Maybe the only reason why I haven’t raped, or at least sexually assaulted, anybody is because I’m completely asexual.
It’s not like I was raised in a liberal household with liberal values, because it was the polar opposite of that for me growing up. It’s not like gay men are any better than straight men either, because past experience tells me they’re really not. So, I have the creeping feeling that there’s a biological, or at least societal, imperative to sexually harass other people, and I have missed out on this not because I’m a decent person (I’m not) but because of a sexual orientation that only a fraction of a percent of the population shares.
Please tell me I’m wrong.
The question is does it get results in natural selection terms?
There’s certainly a very strong urge in many people to have sex with other people. There’s a limerick about this:
“They say as life’s candle burns late/sexual passion begins to abate/and it may be it’s so, don’t ask me, I don’t know/since I’m only a hundred and eight.”
(Having said that I have an asexual relative by marriage, it can’t be that uncommon).
However, the urge to harass is surely a power thing? I tend to think that the two things are separate. There have been people of enormous drive and political power, like Alan Brooke, whose diaries show he had an extremely loving and tender relationship with his wife and wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching any other woman. And there’s Trump.
You’re wrong.
There is no biological reason, societal sure (we call that “The Patriarchy” round these parts).
And add a dash of “no repercussions” and “power corrupts” and “entitlement” and you get this tidal wave of revelations we see today.
What I still don’t understand is WHY this is happening now. We have known about this stuff for years, decades, and no one listened then, so why are they listening now? Thats what I want to know. What happened recently to make this pivot? I keep hearing about this “watershed moment” and I’m like “what is it, where was it, when did it happen?” Because the powers that be have been killing these stories for centuries, so whats changed?
I’m willing to give the net a lot of the credit.
When I started knitting (around age 5) in the 70s, the only other person I saw knit regularly was my grandmother. We would go get yarn at Eatons, but often we world be the only other shoppers in that department.
In the 80s I discovered the boutique stores and even worked part-time at one, but besides the Christmas rush we were never exactly busy. 3 shoppers at once was “busy”.
Then starting in the mid-90s mailing lists started. They were huge – 1,200 knitters on one mailing list. Even reading the digests meant skimming.
A large number of people on the lists had learned from books, had never seen another person knit before. So people started organising stitch ‘n’ bitches, resurrecting social structures from WWII. Meanwhile, blogging came into its own.
There’s been steady growth ever since. All these fragments of a movement were able to bridge geography and realise that added up, there were a lot of them.
I think it’s the same thing with these harassment cases coming forward, and the same thing (unfortunately) with the Nazis. (Although with the Nazis, the anti-Nazis are finding it easier to counter-protest, so there’s that.)
It’s a watershed because all the drops have found a way to coalesce.
I agree.
People now have an unprecedented ability to get together on single issues in a way that has never happened before. One person goes public and it comes up in Google search results. Laws of libel can’t keep up. Of course there are downsides - I think Trump is the first Internet president. I venture to think that the Internet is killing off religion pretty fast in Europe, which has upsides and downsides. But abusers can no longer be sure that someone will not out them - anonymously perhaps - beyond their ability to silence the media.
My exact first thought in answer to @MissyPants’ question. I have sometimes wondered whether things like Twitter & FB are the first external signs of the massive sentience of our society. I started to say “massive intelligence” but clearly this sentience is completely insane. But I wonder if parts of whatever it is is starting to decide that some things are impermissible. Look at the confederate flag thing, and the statues thing.
Clearly the parts that are evil are also expressing themselves. I guess all we can do is hope. This is the singularity, by the way; it’s been here for a while, but people just haven’t noticed.
Trends can have single underlying drivers, but abrupt breaks tend to be chaotic, where little things start cascades. Also, I’ve talked elsewhere about how the greatest disasters turn out to be from odd coincidences of problems, simply because single problems would have been handled. Something like this may well be the mirror of that – after all, this is a disaster from the perspective of some abusers in power.
Just from the timing, I wonder if Trump hasn’t been a…not a help, ever, but a sort of immunostimulant. Again, mirroring how Obama and then the Syrian refugees sadly helped trigger the white supremacists coming back into the spotlight. People have been gearing up to resist, to not put up with their abuses, and maybe some of that energy spilled over into not putting up with other harassers? A guess, anyway.
But I also agree with @gadgetgirl and others the net looks key. It does cut both ways, and has been a powerful tool to attack people. But those who care to can see more. Some men are starting to see what an epidemic they so easily help conceal, and women are starting to see more options to stand up to it. There are places where you see the old secret-warning networks become less secret, and more and more that a woman who comes forward might nevertheless find support from someone. The old ways of shutting victims down have been cracking, and the new ones aren’t such givens.
Christ, What an asshole
Nicely put.
I think you’re all right, it is “the 'net” - but its more than that. Its social media and its smart phones.
I’ve been online since 1995. And these types of abuses have been around longer than that. But we never had this sort of outpouring before, and we could have, easily.
But what changed is how we access and share information. Twitter and Instagram wouldn’t exist without smart phones (I did briefly use twitter on my old Nokia 3210 but I’m a weirdo). The instantaneousness of it all is thrilling and terrifying. (and fascinating)
I hope when SkyNet wakes up its benevolent.
Oh, did I not mention that one of the pens is hex-shaped (to help prevent it rolling) with ruler marks on the sides, and it also has a built-in stylus (opposite the pen end, to avoid screen accidents) that reverses into an eyeglass sized screwdrivers, and a built-in spirit level.
Your geek credential has just been upgraded.
