Two sad stories, not just one

Jon Ronson tells the story of “Hank,” who joked about “a really big dongle” and “forking someone’s repo” at a tech conference.

Another conference attendee was offended and complained to the conference organizers, including a photo of “Hank.” As a result, “Hank” lost his job. Ronson thinks this is a sad story, and I agree. So does Christina Hoff Summers, who Tweets:

Man tells innocuous joke to friend at conference. Overheard by aggrieved woman. What happened next is frightening.

And, yes, the story is pretty much as you might guess. In Ronson’s telling, the complainant is a “men’s movement” caricature of the sort of woman who uses “being offended” as a weapon and has no remorse about wrecking someone’s life for an off-color joke.

But – also in Ronson’s telling – the complainant, named Adria Richards, is then the victim of an internet lynch mob. She is subjected not only to insults but to physical threats. She, too, loses her job: the on-line mob takes down her employer’s server, and threatens to keep it down unless she is fired; the employer (not named by Ronson) complies.

And, unlike Hank, who quickly finds a new job (at a place that, conveniently for him, doesn’t employ any women), the complainant is still out of a job, and still subject to digital harassment, two years later.

Ronson skilfully uses language and selects facts to make “Hank” sound like an innocent victim, and Adria Richards like someone who was last seen knitting next to the guillotine. Naturally, Richards (as relayed by Melissa McEwan) tells the story somewhat differently: among other things, she asserts that she protested against the firing of “Hank.” She also, (quite plausibly) accuses Ronson of practicing the bait-and-switch characteristic of low-rent journalism, setting someone up for character assassination by pretending to provide a sympathetic ear.
But put that aside for the moment.

Let’s assume arguendo that Adria Richards is precisely the sort of unsympathetic character Ronson portrays. (Of course, it’s also possible that being fired and then harassed for two years might have somewhat depleted her stock of empathy.) She is also – again, by Ronson’s account – the victim of a crime, and someone who lost a great deal more for complaining about the rude jokes told by “Hank” than Hank did for telling them. But somehow Ronson and Sommers sympathize only with “Hank.” Like millions of battered women and rape victims before her, apparently Adria Richards was asking for it. How is it possible that Ronson, Sommers, and editors of Esquire, and the publishers of Ronson’s book all missed a point which was obvious even to me, based entirely on Ronson’s own account?

After all, I’m squarely in Ronson’s target audience. I’ve been the victim of enough “STFU-you-privileged-white-male” treatment to fully sympathize with someone in the position of “Hank.” My natural response to pompous unsolicited moral advice is a rude gesture; I’ve been known to respond to the two hours of dim-witted “sexual harassment” training the University of California imposes on me every year by asserting I am already expert at sexual harassment and require no further training.

But how morally challenged do you have to be not to sympathize with Adria Richards, the victim not merely of organized intolerance but of a criminal conspiracy involving extortionate threats?

There’s a broader point here, too “Hank” and Richards both lost their jobs, though neither had done anything anywhere close to violating the law, or even raised serious questions about their job performance. That was possible because of the doctrine of “employment at will,” which makes puts every (non-union, non-civil-service, untenured) employee at the complete professional mercy of his or her employer. I think professors and civil servants are somewhat over-protected against being fired for incompetence or shirking. But it seems obvious that the rest of the population is grossly under-protected against the whims - or, in Adria Richards’s case, the mere cowardice - of the kind of people who wind up working in “human resources” departments.

Comments

  1. JamesWimberley says

    "the two hours of dim-witted “sexual harassment” the University of California imposes on me every year …"
    I assume this is a Freudian typo for "dim-witted “sexual harassment training”".
    Cheer up, NYU probably has four hours.

    What's the theory behind repeating the course every year? University teachers are assumed to have memory deficits or are just generically slow learners? Armies assume that what a grunt (Br.E: squaddie) learns in boot camp stays learnt. Or is it that the party line is updated on an annual cycle, as in Stalin's Russia?

    Hear, hear on your central point. Lazy neoliberals note correctly that unions distort labour markets through featherbedding and undue job protection, and jump falsely to the conclusion that destroying them will bring about an efficient Nirvana. They ignore that employment is inherently an asymmetry of power and information. Stiglitz' and Akerlof's "efficiency wages" theory rests on one asymmetry on labour's side - employers don't know whether new hires will be conscientious, so instead of hiring they will pay bonuses and overtime to induce their better existing workers to work more, so equilibrium wages will be higher than market clearing ones and unemployment is inevitable. (I've tried to point out here the corollary that working hours will also be longer than optimal.)

    But there are larger asymmetries on the employer's side. Job applicants don't know much about the competence of top management, the honesty of the pension fund, or whether their immediate supervisors will be decent or sadists. They are also buying pigs in pokes. Unions are imperfect, but they do redress the imbalance in a crude way. Galbraith's "countervailing power" stands up well.

  2. call_me_navarro says

    as a public school teacher in texas i go through similarly repetitive trainings each year. there is, in fact, a set of 10 training videos with follow-up tests which require 16 hours to complete on topics such as blood-borne pathogens, school bus evacuation and safety, bullying prevention, and filing child protective services complaints. i have seen some of these videos for 12 consecutive years. at one time the district used our staff development time to do these trainings but for the last 4 years we have been required to do them on our own time.

    the paternalism with which teachers are treated in texas can reach remarkable lengths. in one district i taught in, the principals were required to sit us all down before we left for christmas break to remind us that it would be 6 weeks before we got paid again and that we should remember to budget our money so that it would last that extra two weeks. at that time we received paper paychecks and we could not get it until we had sat through the meeting. i went through that the three years i taught there.

  3. chuchundra says

    It's difficult for me to gin up a lot of sympathy for Richards. As far as I can tell, she still has no awareness of why what she did was wrong and she's offered no apology beyond being sorry that "Hank" was fired.

    In all the other cases that I've read about of "internet shaming gone wild", from the "white people don't get AIDs" tweet to the Arlington cemetery photo to our friend "Hank", there's some understanding what their core transgression was, even if the reaction to it was ridiculously disproportionate. Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see that from Richards.

    And, more to the point, Richards is the only one of that group who should have expected what she did would cause some kind of reaction. When you have 9000+ Twitter followers and you work in public relations, you can't argue that you had no idea your message would go beyond a small circle of friends. She clearly was expecting a big reaction, although obviously not the one she got.

  4. Dave Schutz says

    Two more stories for your collection! Curt Schilling figured out who two of the trolls making noxious remarks about his daughter were and got them fired/suspended: http://usatodayhss.com/2015/curt-schilling-lashes….

    I would somewhat criticize Sommers’ remark “Man tells innocuous joke …” and would re-write it as “Man tells mildly noxious joke to”. We are doing poorly at having a proportionate response to events like this. Even if Adria Richards is a humorless scold, the right response for HR at her firm is - you’ve roiled the waters for us, and distracted people from our product. Please don’t do it again. Same from “Hank”‘s HR person. As for the guys speculating about crude acts with Gabby Schilling, a suspension by their employers for couple-three months. Try and find a way to encourage better behavior and damp things down, rather than inflame.

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