Conversation ongoing over there, inviting anyone who wants to participate to please consider sharing their thoughts if they are willing to. If you wanna post in the original thread from your instance copy and paste the link into your instances search panel

As I said in the thread, if you aren’t comfortable posting feel free to DM me here or on matrix and I can post anonymously for you.

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    132·
    1 year ago

    This is only tangentially related, but I was recently rereading The Hackers Manifesto, and although it doesn’t mention gender, I feel like it should be amended to include it.

    http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

    This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

    It was clearly written against authority, but it was also a guiding light for netizens of the 80’s and 90’s. The internet should be free from social bias of all sorts, including sex and gender. The internet has changed a lot in the last 37 years, but the fact that we are all pseudonymous online personas has not. Ideas are what really matter here, and are the only comparator for truth and reality. Physical identity and all that comes with it is secondary. Not because it should be, but because that is the nature of online identity.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      103·
      1 year ago

      The internet should be free from social bias of all sorts, including sex and gender

      It’s not though.

      It wasn’t when that document was written, and it’s not now.

      Hiding our gender doesn’t stop the bias and it doesn’t stop us seeing the bias. All it does is make it less likely to target us specifically, because people are making incorrect assumptions about who we are.

      I nearly always use my name online and I don’t keep my gender a secret. On the few occasions I have been anonymous though, all it has meant is that people assume I’m a man, which again, is not the same thing as “no bias”

      • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        You’re absolutely right. My post was only tangentially related and does not address the core problem that women and others face online.

      • jarfil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Adding to that… I was there in the 90s, I used the electron, the switch, and the baud… and the IRC.

        My nick was gender neutral, but from time to time, I heard women comment on how unfriendly the Internet was. One day, out of curiosity, I entered a somewhat popular IRC channel with a fake nick, “natalie” IIRC… and got instantly DDOSed by something like 100+ private chat windows with all sort of “openings” from the male population.

        Yeah, the 90s are not a good model to follow in this regard. On the other hand, if you haven’t got 100+ DMs yet, maybe we’re going in the right direction after all 🤞