This is a really nice piece and very thoughtful and professional. I'm pleasantly surprised as things with titles of this sort are much more typically someone playing the victim card under circumstances where it's not possible to sort out who is "the guilty party" and who is "the real victim."
I actually clicked into it expecting to feel like "Why is this on the front page of HN?" and I don't feel that way at all.
In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all. It’s all just been feel-good profiles, so that the first critical word feels like a huge crisis. That’s a relatively new kind of situation for an artist to be in, and worth analyzing.
In addition to this, he more or less makes the point that Rodriquez is so famous because he cultivates a personal relationship to his audience or a "faux personal" -- a parasocial one -- and his fans are more invested in that than in his art per se. This is the opposite of how it usually goes in traditional art circles. Usually, the art comes first and then people become interested in the artist.
It's interesting to me because I've spent a lot of years trying to sort out how to have a "relationship to the public" -- a constructive one, a professional one. Women on the internet tend to attract a lot of drama and I've spent a lot of time trying to sort things out in a way that makes sense to me so I can try to get that down to a dull roar and I have found it helpful to see male-coded behavior as being about being raised to have "a real career," which boils down to a professional relationship to the public, to people who are not family and friends, and female-coded behavior as about personal relationships.
How do you make that professional versus personal distinction that this article touches on? How do you get people interested in your work instead of interested in some faux "personal" relationship to a woman they really don't know well but want to imagine they do for reasons I have trouble grasping?
And so this piece parallels some of my observations about gender issues. I think women get raised to have personal relationships and don't get raised to have professional lives and when we go online, we talk and behave in a way that is very personal. Other people hunger for that, want more of it, actively encourage women to do more of that and no one tells us "Honey, that's unprofessional" and if they do we tend to feel like "You're just a sexist pig trying to gatekeep me out!" and not like "Oh. I didn't realize doing X was a problem."
So it's interesting to me to see this piece and I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. I really expected this to be another internet "he said/she said" kind of thing and I'm blown away that it's not that at all and we need more of this type of analysis of how and why things sometimes go sideways on the internet. It's our only hope of having fewer such incidents.
Personal-professional relationships are stronger than professional images, especially as it becomes less and less possible to get a job without a well-placed reference from a friend who is willing to go to bat for you. Although companies in the tech industry make more effort to have "meritocratic" (in fact random, there's nothing meritocratic about trying to guess someone's project management ability using eight hours of talking to people they've never met before, spread out over days) I see this being eroded over time as everyone pulls together in our low-interest-rate where's-the-recession, it's-coming-any-day-now environment. Although hiring managers might disagree on whose friends among them should be hired, they will all silently agree that the hiring system needs to only hire friends of somebody. That's what drives the evolution of corporate process in an inexorable slide towards the equilibrium most industries have already reached, one where consultants are brought in to cover the holes left by bringing in old friends.
I think the interchangeable parts era of tech work is nearly over and we're heading into something that will look more like highly paid roles in other industries. This could do a lot for gender equality[0], or maybe destroy it[1].
[0] Discrimination can work its way into randomized panel type scenarios because biases tend to show up in averages of first impressions more than they do in long-term relationships. That's why they use an "implicit bias test" that involves flashing pictures at you, and why the "I have female friends," argument is not taken seriously by anybody. What psychologists are telling us is that discrimination is maximized in the snap judgement scenarios posed by modern hiring processes.
[1] A network of long-term professional relationships that can't be unseated by anyone that isn't taken on as an apprentice literally describes the patriarchy.
I do think there's a bright line, but it's between trying to express yourself while negotiating reasonable emotional common ground (personal) and constantly trying to prove yourself while expanding your "turf" of opinions and beliefs as far as possible (professional), which is then confused in context when people operate in one mode in an environment that really fits the other. The complementary mode swap to the one you are talking about, are the crowd who argue non-stop in the Twitter replies of people who were just having a thought and not actually planning to become a Socratic philosopher. That is the consequence of treating every interaction like it's a task-focused meeting with implied rewards for whoever comes out looking like they were on the top of it.
I actually clicked into it expecting to feel like "Why is this on the front page of HN?" and I don't feel that way at all.
In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all. It’s all just been feel-good profiles, so that the first critical word feels like a huge crisis. That’s a relatively new kind of situation for an artist to be in, and worth analyzing.
In addition to this, he more or less makes the point that Rodriquez is so famous because he cultivates a personal relationship to his audience or a "faux personal" -- a parasocial one -- and his fans are more invested in that than in his art per se. This is the opposite of how it usually goes in traditional art circles. Usually, the art comes first and then people become interested in the artist.
It's interesting to me because I've spent a lot of years trying to sort out how to have a "relationship to the public" -- a constructive one, a professional one. Women on the internet tend to attract a lot of drama and I've spent a lot of time trying to sort things out in a way that makes sense to me so I can try to get that down to a dull roar and I have found it helpful to see male-coded behavior as being about being raised to have "a real career," which boils down to a professional relationship to the public, to people who are not family and friends, and female-coded behavior as about personal relationships.
How do you make that professional versus personal distinction that this article touches on? How do you get people interested in your work instead of interested in some faux "personal" relationship to a woman they really don't know well but want to imagine they do for reasons I have trouble grasping?
And so this piece parallels some of my observations about gender issues. I think women get raised to have personal relationships and don't get raised to have professional lives and when we go online, we talk and behave in a way that is very personal. Other people hunger for that, want more of it, actively encourage women to do more of that and no one tells us "Honey, that's unprofessional" and if they do we tend to feel like "You're just a sexist pig trying to gatekeep me out!" and not like "Oh. I didn't realize doing X was a problem."
So it's interesting to me to see this piece and I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. I really expected this to be another internet "he said/she said" kind of thing and I'm blown away that it's not that at all and we need more of this type of analysis of how and why things sometimes go sideways on the internet. It's our only hope of having fewer such incidents.