Current mood:	Snarl
Entry tags:	fandom is fucking stupid, it's okay if i don't like you, jesus wept

At least SA goons are honest trolls, or, Fandom double-standards FTL
Over the years, the unspoken rule of fandom "What happens in fandom, stays in fandom." You don't contact a fan's place of employment, university, etc. unless it's serious shit -- "serious shit" meaning illegal or life-threatening, not fannish wars or bruised egos.

Apparently, not anymore.

hypersurfaces posted a con report about WisCon that focused on the obesity of the con attendees on the Something Awful board . The post is seriously unfunny and full of fail. She later had the post deleted, but it was later reposted at a related site, Something Awful Sychophant Squad.

Attendees on Wiscon discover the post, and all hell breaks loose. Massive amounts of rage, including posts (locked and the source for this didn't get caps) of several people threatening hypersurfaces about how they would hurt/STAB her if they saw her on the street. hypersurfaces is forever and ever banned from WisCon. But not content with that, people -- including badgerbag -- find her real name, her school, and write to her dean saying she was violating the schools sexual harrassment policy. I'm not posting the link because it has her real name in it, and I like my permanent account here too much to risk the ToS.

hypersurfaces real name and real info are posted all over by fen who have previously rallied against that sort of thing - because in this case, she clearly deserves it. The casual threats of violence are astounding, and now apparently people are writing her and saying they're going to hurt/kill her - using the real name/addresses so thoughtfully provided by the angry wisconners. Kudos to the mod there for at least stepping up and telling people to knock the shit out.

But nada about this behavior from fen normally so worried about community standards, like coffeeandink.

So it's okay now to post people's real names and similar information, as long as they do something that really, really pisses you off. Because they deserve it.

ETA: Clarified where hypersurfaces's post originally went up.

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sgaana
2008-05-29 05:24 pm UTC (link)

You want to sabotage all of someone's future job opportunities over this?

It's not just sabotaging someone's future job opportunities.

Look -- she didn't just do this to random fannish strangers. She did this to her own coworkers / fellow students. That's a whole other level of "bad judgement".

As an employer, I'd sure as hell want to know that about her. I don't see any evidence that she's learned any lesson from this and won't do it, or something similar, again. (Not when she was apparently saying for a while after the explosion that she wanted to be able to go to Wiscon again. For...? I mean, is it surprising that everyone would assume it's to do the same thing again? Since she retracted her "apology"?) And I don't see why I shouldn't take bad judgement exhibited in this case as indicative of her overall professionalism.

As an employer, especially in academia, I'd want to know about it for a number of reasons.

* if she does it again to fellow employees, that's a harassment suit waiting to happen, with me involved as her supervisor.

* she herself is not careful about keeping her online activity separated from her real-life identity and affiliations -- so what she does may be taken by others to be representing the institution she works for, and get it into trouble.

* she may at some point ask me for a recommendation for another job, at which point, if I don't know about this and I give her a recommendation, I have attached my reputation to hers. Of course I can repudiate later, but repudiation is always a tricky thing.

I really do believe in the bedrock fannish ideal that one's fannish activity should not be linked to you, so that non-fandom people can't form a bad opinion of you based on their misunderstanding of (and prejudices about) fannish activity.

But nobody's trying to out her *as a slash writer* in order to damage her reputation. AFAICT, they're arguing that what she did isn't innocent (but possibly damaging) fannish activity, that it *was* malicious in intent and the sort of thing that *should* objectively damage one's reputation, and they're saying that she shouldn't be able to hide behind internet anonymity to keep it from in fact damaging her reputation. (Especially when she wasn't making that much effort to hide behind internet anonymity in the first place.)

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esclaramonde
2008-05-29 09:26 pm UTC (link)

I think what it comes down to for me is if people who go to her school/coworkers are reporting it to her employer, I don't have a problem with it, because they have a horse in this race. If it's fannish people who are planning to Googlebomb her name so it will always be connected with this, I'm not. I'm an optimist, so I think she's going to work out her issues someday, and that she has probably figured out not to ever do this sort of thing again, and so I don't think she should have it follow her around forever.

I know it was malicious in intent, I'm just not sure how exactly it harms anyone's reputation. And I don't mean that in an accusatory way. I'm sure someone will explain it, and it will be obvious, and I'll feel like a tool for having said it.

(Not when she was apparently saying for a while after the explosion that she wanted to be able to go to Wiscon again. For...? I mean, is it surprising that everyone would assume it's to do the same thing again? Since she retracted her "apology"?) And I don't see why I shouldn't take bad judgement exhibited in this case as indicative of her overall professionalism.

I hadn't seen that. I still haven't seen it, really, and so much of this whole thing is basically hearsay that my head's spinning and I'm trying not to take everything at face value. Also, people grow out of this kind of bad judgement.

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sgaana
2008-05-29 09:47 pm UTC (link)

I know it was malicious in intent, I'm just not sure how exactly it harms anyone's reputation.

Well, as I said in my other comment: that seems like a credible threat with respect to the trans folks.

(To a far lesser extent, it's possible to hurt someone by outing them as a fan to an employer who isn't understanding.)

For the rest, in relation to her fellow UWers whom she targeted, "creating a hostile work/school environment"?

(Strange as it may seem... someone doing this to random pictures they find, or to strangers, seems *less* stalkery than doing it to people who you're at school with / work in the same place as. Maybe it was still really random on her part, but it *feels* less random, more targeted at people she potentially sees all the time in the work/school environment.)

I get that she didn't do all of this *directly*. (Outing people to their employer or school community, I mean.) But she set that train in motion by not being (reportedly) careful enough about anonymizing the pictures, and not anticipating, say, her fellow SA denizens hunting around for more non-anonymized pictures, etc. It's 2008, and "I didn't foresee how this would spiral out of my control!" seems like a thin excuse.

I hadn't seen that. I still haven't seen it, really, and so much of this whole thing is basically hearsay that my head's spinning and I'm trying not to take everything at face value.

You're right; it's a good point. Lord knows, MY head is swimming.

I honestly can't tell you where I saw the bit about her continuing to ask how she could go to Wiscon after she'd been banned, or asking for a "spell" she could invoke against "fat lesbians" so that she'd be allowed back into Wiscon (Badgerbag's LJ? Coffeeandink's LJ? one of those two, I think, but I couldn't swear to it, plus I think that was second-hand).

Also, people grow out of this kind of bad judgement.

Yesssss... but there was an awful lot of premeditation in all of this. That makes me hinky.

Plus, she's not some naive teen; she's in *grad school*. Yeah, I'm older and creakier than she is, but past college I really stop giving people a pass on "you'll grow out of it". (Yes, maybe they still *will* -- people do keep growing/learning. I just stop giving them a pass, is all.)

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iwanttobeasleep
2008-06-02 04:07 am UTC (link)

Strange as it may seem... someone doing this to random pictures they find, or to strangers, seems *less* stalkery than doing it to people who you're at school with / work in the same place as

I don't think that's strange at all. We expect people to act nicer around the people they see and deal with regularly than with people they'd never see again (or never see at all, for the Internet cases). It's natural, it makes life easier for everyone involved. Not only did she potentially make school/work more hostile for her coworkers/costudents, she made life more hostile for herself. If you have to be a bigoted assmonkey to make yourself feel better, you do it in ways that won't affect your life.

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zillah975
2008-05-30 12:00 pm UTC (link)

I know it was malicious in intent, I'm just not sure how exactly it harms anyone's reputation.

If I work for someone who has a hate-on for lesbians or transpeople and does not know I am one, who also happens to be a member of SA, and s/he sees my photo in that thread, that harms my reputation with my employer. Fair? No. But there it is.

Same if I have a co-worker with a hate-on for lesbians or transpeople. If I've carefully kept this information from them so as not to sabotage myself in working with this person (because hey, sometimes you just can't afford to lose a job), and they see that thread on SA, and see my photo in it, lo, suddenly they know that I am that thing they hate and dehumanize for themselves. What's that going to do to our working relationship? Nothing good.

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esclaramonde
2008-05-30 12:56 pm UTC (link)

Right. I get that. But I think it's completely unlikely - to the point of near-impossible - that anyone's employer would be on SA. I'm trying to put this in words and it's not really working, but anyway: she mentions two trans people by first name. (I think two - I shut down the tabs last night and can't find them again.) So this is over the unlikely event that their employers or coworkers should find a post in a pay-only forum (I only hold her partially responsible for the SASS post), and then that said people should recognize them from the description given. I think it's not exactly right for people who are not these potentially outed people to be bringing this to RL. (Or people who aren't people pictured/mentioned that work/study with hyperthing.) Badgerbag, who said she'd email the dean if she didn't get the SASS post taken down, is none of these people.

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	frequentmouse 2008-05-30 08:43 pm UTC (link)
	But I think it's completely unlikely - to the point of near-impossible - that anyone's employer would be on SA. I know several people of my (advanced) age who are business owners or people at the supervisor level in government employment who read SA for the lulz; I think you're overestimating the maturity of the employed. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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