EDIT: This is the article she's talking about: https://medium.com/@Brad_Glasgow/the-metoo-fueled-character-...
> Talking specifically about Brianna Wu, Loni Reeder said, “based on her political aspirations, personal assumptions, and libelous accusations against a man [Nolan Bushnell] where no complaints have been raised or filed — she made a big, unfounded noise against Nolan — and the Pioneer Award honor was withdrawn.”
> ...
> To Summarize…
> •Activists expressed prior desire to bring the #MeToo movement to the video game industry.
> •No one who has worked with Nolan Bushnell has complained of any impropriety.
> •Several past employees, including women, have come forward to speak in Bushnell’s defense.
> •Al Alcorn directly refutes Brianna Wu’s interpretation of his story.
> •All former Atari employees are telling stories that are consistent with one another.
> There were drugs, there were hot tubs, there were relationships, and none of that would fly today. But none of it indicates a culture that was hostile to women.
> Indeed, Loni Reeder and other former Atari employees recently worked on a spreadsheet in order to contradict the sexism claims being lobbed at Nolan Bushnell. According to their research, in those pre-Warner days of Atari, 36% of the workforce were women.
It's sounds like the accusations are basically a twitter political hit-job with little grounding in fact. Social media was a mistake.
The first question would be: is sexism okay if nobody minds? The immediate, modern answer has become "No." A zero-tolerance policy is being adopted by most organizations in the world, due to mounting pressure to hold people accountable for unacceptable behavior.
But it's clear that has not always been the case. If we rigidly judge all past behavior based on modern standards, we end up with cases like this. And maybe that's fine? Maybe we should judge all old actions based on modern standards, because we should continue to live by our current standards. But is this fair to the people who lived decades ago? Should we just say, they should have known better?
This second question is how other controversies have developed recently, such as the tearing down of monuments depicting people who represent injustice. We are judging their former actions based on modern-day standards. And again: maybe this is fine. But I don't think our society has come to a definite conclusion.
In any of these cases, a moderate person would perhaps try to find a common understanding and seek the best solution that weighs all the merits of each individual case. But society is not shaped by moderation. Emotional exuberance is how human society is guided, and the silent consent of the majority drives it forward. So expect more controversy for quite some time to come.
I guess I understand this from the perspective of HR, but I'm actually not sure I'm comfortable with this either.
The thing that separates rape from sex is consent. Arguably, the thing that determines whether any behavior that involves more than one person is okay or isn't is whether all parties consent. Why should a third party come in and decide for them whether behavior they consent to is acceptable?
I don't feel comfortable regulating the behavior of consenting adults. That is too close to violating their human rights.
Again, I get it if you're a company, and may be a large company that has to accommodate a number of people, some of whom might be new and might not be comfortable with these aspects of a company's culture, then it makes sense to regulate behavior for others. But it feels to me like this might bleed into other aspects of life.
> The thing that separates rape from sex is consent.
That's not true, but I'm sure a lot of people are trying to make that seem true.
> Arguably, the thing that determines whether any behavior that involves more than one person is okay or isn't is whether all parties consent.
What determines whether behavior is okay or isn't is society's moral standards. Consent is a part of this in some circumstances. You could argue that there are unwritten societal rules that we implicitly consent to as members of a society, but certainly not everything we do in society involves consent.
For example, according to law, I do not need your consent to talk to you. But it would appear that saying hello to a stranger is not considered bad behavior. Perhaps I have implicit consent to say hello to strangers? Or perhaps we just didn't need consent?
> Why should a third party come in and decide for them whether behavior they consent to is acceptable?
A lot of reasons, again, depending on the circumstance. The concept of 'informed consent' in medicine requires that a person be fully informed of the risks and consequences of a procedure before they can legally be said to have consented. This is to protect the patient as well as the surgeon. There is no consenting for assault according to federal law, which is designed to prevent difficult legal situations where someone might be said to have invited an assault. And there is the concept of 'implicit consent' when you obtain a driver's license that you will submit yourself to a chemical test for driving under the influence if a police officer has cause.
You don't really have human rights. You have human privileges.
> That's not true, but I'm sure a lot of people are trying to make that seem true.
What do you think the difference is then? And why do you think that your definition of the difference is more correct than the definition that the difference is consent?
The definition above becomes more hairy once you realize that there is no easy way to determine consent. Even if someone verbally agrees to something, you don't necessarily know if they were properly informed as to the consequences, or if they were intimidated, or misled, or felt obligated, or even if they were mentally competent at the time.
As an aside: if rape and sex are separate, does that mean rape doesn't involve sex? But sex is basically copulation. And that can certainly happen during rape. And rape can happen without copulation. So they're separate ideas, but whether they apply to one another depends on the circumstance.
So basically, the entire definition depends on the particular interpretation of two different concepts and trying to differentiate them in context. If you can establish those things with certainty, perhaps the definition is valid. But there's a lot of 'if's floating around for that to be a reliable definition.
This is why the law doesn't use the word! Instead there are laws against specific kinds of behavior that could be said to be rape, but use different terminology and apply in different ways. It's counter-productuve to cling to this one word to describe complex situations just because of the emotional weight and general ambiguity that the word carries.
At least, I presume that's what you mean...
I'm guessing something else about Atari's culture prevented the kind of problems that can crop up when you have a relaxed sexual attitude, but it isn't as easy to identify.
Would women like to return to a workplace atmosphere like early Atari's? I don't have a poll (and I hate to speak for them) but I would be very surprised if more than a small percentage of the women I know would say "yes".
Yeah, that's what it sounds like the whole truth is - there were serious problems, and those who worked at the company weren't bothered by it. #NotNolan focuses on the former, Glasgow on the latter, but the whole truth is a combination of the two. (And the Kotaku article attempts to convey both of those.)
So I'm particularly curious if there were women who weren't okay with the culture, felt uncomfortable or threatened, and left. Selecting for people who worked somewhere for a long time is naturally going to select for people who didn't have serious problems with the work culture / convinced themselves they were okay with it.
Is something a problem, let alone a serious one, if it doesn't bother those who are affected by it?
Is it even possible to have a workplace that everyone will like? Because at the time there were no strong taboos about this and everyone seems to have been enjoying themselves.
> it's a serious problem.
What's with the present tense? This is ancient history.
Nope, but if every single workplace is structured in a way that one group of people likes them all and one group of people dislikes them all, that does seem like a problem for the second group. (Also I think that describing it as just not a workplace they "like" is a poor way to describe it, but.)
I am actually of the opinion that, while I side with the opinions of the SJW folks at Google, for a Google-sized company to be so political in one direction is unfair to people of other political leanings, regardless of how strongly I disagree with those leanings. I do actually think that there should be a comparable workplace option in terms of pay and prestige for people with those political views who can't "bring their whole selves to work" at Google. I am more than happy to compete with them in the market and to recruit away any of their employees who don't hold those views, and I am extremely happy to fight via market and political means against specific policies they might seek to promote, but I don't think they should be cut out of employment entirely.
And whether you feel like a sexualized culture is an uncomfortable place to work is a lot harder to change than your political views. (Partly because it's correlated with gender a little more strongly than political views are, but even ignoring gender, it's correlated with things like base personality and sexuality and cultural upbringing.) If some people like a sexualized culture, great, I'm glad they have places to work - if all the good places to work are sexualized, I think that's a problem.
> What's with the present tense? This is ancient history.
This story started out because a present-day conference is presently considering giving an award to one of the people in this story, who is still alive, because that conference believes there's some relevance to the industry in the present that they represent.
Nobody is talking about whether to give an present-day award to Cato. Nobody is even talking about whether to give a present-day award to Nabokov, who died around the time being discussed here. If you want to call that ancient history, sure. But you can't simultaneously hold the position that this particular culture was ancient history and it's deserving of an award today.
I'm fine with the conclusion "This is not our present-day culture, and we don't think that it's appropriate for us to either endorse or condemn it, so let's focus on giving awards for present-day achievements instead" - which is more or less what ended up happening, it sounds like.
Do you think people in 1850 were "bothered" by the fact that they couldn't take regular showers?
What's that supposed to prove? That I might retroactively impose modern values in some other area? For all I know, they enjoyed having the extra free time.
That's leaving aside the question of whether the particular unknown-unknown is actually better for them, or just something we'd like to be better for them.
You devalue the views of people in 2018, but they're the ones looking in from the outside. They have a level of objectivity because they know the alternatives. They're looking at it, and saying "this would suck."
I'm a lawyer, and I've worked for women of the generation where someone could graduate top of her class in law school and be offered a secretarial position in a law firm. Back then, law firms were full of bright women who could have been lawyers, who became secretaries because that's just the way things were. Most people didn't see anything wrong with it, except the vocal minority. But ask women today, and you'll get a very different response. That's not a "cultural" difference. People back then weren't just more okay with wasting their potential. It’s just that their understanding of what is possible was circumscribed. The difference now is that people now know what's possible. "I can be a lawyer and not a secretary?" "I can work in an office without my coworkers inviting me into a hot tub?"
To look at it another way: I've never met a woman who was like "you know what I want? For it to be more okay for men to make sexual advances at work." “I think it would be great if things were like Mad Men again.” They don’t say that, because that was a state of affairs that overwhelmingly benefited men.
Literally, by all accounts, they liked it and did not view it as problematic. They didn't just "tolerate" it.
And honestly the correct adjective is probably "sexualized" not "sexist."
> You devalue the views of people in 2018, but they're the ones looking in from the outside. They have a level of objectivity because they know the alternatives. They're looking at it, and saying "this would suck."
No, they're not any more objective. If they were, they'd take the testimony of the people who where actually there more seriously, seeing as those are the facts. Instead, we get contemporary subjectivity passed off as the objective truth. The 2018s are aslo in a sense violating these Atari women by taking away their right to characterize their own experiences and lives.
The most interesting aspects of this part of Atari, by far, are left unexplored because we can't escape the rubric of 2018 gender discussions.
> I'm a lawyer, and I've worked for women of the generation where...
Did any of those women work for Atari by chance? As a lawyer you should know that you can't pull random facts out of one case to "prove" another. We are not talking about a generalization about "women of a generation," we're talking about Atari in a specific time period.
Why? Assuming the answer is 'yes', what does this change? Assuming the answer is 'no', what does this change?
If the answer is "no," that changes my belief about whether today's cultural norms against sexist workplaces are an objective good.
(Both of these changes would be small but measurable updates.)
What article did you read? Nothing linked says anything like that.
Ctrl-F "sexist" in the article linked in the grandparent comment:
no results and any quotes from any of the Atari women.
Ctrl-F "sexism" in the article linked in the grandparent comment:
one result:
> Indeed, Loni Reeder and other former Atari employees recently worked on a spreadsheet in order to contradict the sexism claims being lobbed at Nolan Bushnell.
Not that it matters, because, again, they made a game where you grab a woman's tits, and the CEO has made a big deal about the playboy environment for years.
> “There was a certain amount of sexism as far as ogling,” she said. “But that went both ways.” [emphasis mine]
You'd make a shitty historian because you can't seem to help but impose your modern POV onto historical events. These people clearly had a very different perspective than you on all of this, and their perspective is, frankly, the more important one.
If we’re talking about Confederate generals, it is worth saying that plenty of people at the time said their actions were wrong and they were defending an unjust system. Yet they did so anyway.
> Activists expressed prior desire to bring the #MeToo movement to the video game industry.
I'm not sure why this is highlighted as a bad thing. People should be free to speak up about these sorts of thing in any industry, and there's not going to be any industry totally free of incidents.
> No one who has worked with Nolan Bushnell has complained of any impropriety.
As we've seen with Weinstein, some abusers have decades of misbehavior they've managed to successfully cover up with NDAs, legal threats, and other forms of coercion.
> Several past employees, including women, have come forward to speak in Bushnell’s defense.
Again, frequently seen in cases of abusers. People spoke in defense of Weinstein, too. Trump trots out female friends and employees. Some settlements require the victims to issue a statement that they're retracting the claims. etc.
> I'm not sure why this is highlighted as a bad thing. People should be free to speak up about these sorts of thing in any industry, and there's not going to be any industry totally free of incidents.
It's not a bad thing to have the video game industry able to call out sexual harassment when it occurs. It is a bad thing to paint something as harassment that wasn't perceived as harassment by the "victims", in the name of getting #MeToo rolling in the video game industry. Essentially, it's false accusation in order to advance the movement. That's not going to end well.
The victims in the Nassar gymnastics case were largely convinced as part of the abuse that the "treatments" they were normal and legitimate.
It's entirely possible for victims to become inured to mistreatment. It's not necessarily bad for an outside person to say "hey, that sounds like it was harassment/misconduct/rape/etc. and not OK."
Again, I don't know the players here, the history, and can't evaluate either side of things. I do object to the "if the victims don't complain it can't have happened" line of thinking.
It's starting with the conclusion and stretching whatever you find to meet it, versus looking at reality and accurately describing what you find.
Whenever someone starts with a conclusion, you can't trust that their facts accurately depict reality. It's now a propaganda piece or a sales pitch, and you can only trust that it's the best thing they could find to support their agenda.
It, in and of itself, is not presented as a bad thing.
It lays the foundation for a conclusion that someone with that goal, might be less that prefect at separating it from their good-faith attempt to report accurately on a sexualized office culture.
Of course there are people who will not trust Wu's motivations. However, I'm trying to avoid that tangent by presenting a line of thought where even the most honest attempts to be fair, honest, accurate, etc... can be confounded by other motivations and it's worthwhile to bring those up. In general people are really bad at isolating multiple goals, we typically use systematic approaches and/or review from other people to minimize their influence when seeking accuracy.
"Alcorn’s hot tub board meeting story was intended to be humorous. Alcorn was remembering a time when the board of directors pissed off their attorney by handling legal documents in a pool of water. In retelling that story, an important detail was neglected — who was on the board of directors — and that detail sheds light on the tone of Bushnell’s invitation.
Who was in that meeting, alongside Bushnell and Dabney? Their wives. Paula Bushnell and Joan Dabney were board members. Now, we have a story where at least two married couples were in a hot tub with six other people and an attorney standing by, and Bushnell, married, invited his assistant to join them. Does this sound more like a friendly proposal, or something untoward?"
In particular, the casual dismissal of saying that someone "bills herself as a game designer and activist" and the off-hand reference to "former GDC Pioneer Award winner Markus 'Notch' Pearson" without mentioning Notch's strong ideological biases re social issues and the game industry, make me feel like there's something undisclosed here.
If we're going to be wary of journalists misrepresenting sources to fit an agenda, I feel like we should apply that principle consistently.
- he has skipped interviewing dissenting voices - do you have evidence of this(interviewed by other media) or do you think they have been neglected by everyone?
- he has twisted the interviews to fit the agenda - do you have evidence of the interviewees objecting to their representation, or do you think they are scared/don't care to speak up?
I don't find any of these scenarios plausible or likely, but perhaps you have more evidence than me to demonstrate that Glasgow was spinning a narrative?
Do you have a link or can you sumarize what those biases are?
I think some things he has claimed were jokes but I don't know.