#Voldemort: How do you not talk about something you’re talking about?

Why I Agree With Those Who Would Not Speak the Evil’s Name

I’m not so much afraid of the controversy that is (STILL) brewing in the gaming world.

But I have such a limited schedule due to (and I hate to use this phrasing for some reason) my disability, that I simply do not have the time to be involved as one of the warriors. I’m already attempting to be a full time champion of two different causes on a part time schedule.

Taking on a third is quite literally physically impossible for me.

And I’ve had my business operations flooded and/or effectively shut down for not doing anything but existing in the tech space as a woman of color.

Some of my youtube videos still have dozens of abusive comments by trolls, on fairly innocuous HOWTO videos, dating back to 2007. All I was trying to do was help business owners, same as anyone else in my space, like John Jantsch or Melinda Emerson (though at a much smaller scale of course).

I was light in the pockets this month. So setting up to withstand an attack based on talking about that controversy which shall not be named? I didn’t have time for that shit.

Luckily I’m not so visible and pivotal of a feminist beyond my local area (outside of being an advocate for women in business and small/medium business owners).

My crop of bad experiences led me to a tendency to work in the background of things. I don’t care as much who gets the credit as long as my checks clear. So posting this comment I made about the post to Geek Feminism that inspired my title hopefully will draw zero fire.

But What If You’re a Fucking Idiot and Those Women-Haters Decide to Care?

Should this catch someone’s attention, there’s quite literally nothing that can be done to me that is worse than life has done to me at some point.

It would never get this far of course- I would hope online trolls haven’t gotten bold enough to actually kill people yet.

But if it did? I’m not afraid to die. Especially not in the name of my beliefs. Possibly because of the immigrant culture I sprang from, I don’t have this idea that death is the final end of something for everyone.

And of course there’s my almost-unbelievable personal journey.

I’ve had 8 near-death encounters to date, and the last one in 2012 led me to believe there’s something unimaginatively beautiful out there after we die. So if the worst case scenario isn’t scary to me…

You may be wondering why I’m sharing this part of what I’m thinking.

It’s mainly because that I believe one of the ways to gain an understanding of an issue that you’re on the fence about is to experience a little of what it’s like to have that issue.

And that pep talk I just gave myself is how I have to steel my nerves on occasion, to share a controversial opinion of any kind. I have to ask myself “what’s the worst that could happen?” And if I can deal with it, then I do it.

I’m really hoping our movement to mitigate the effects of online harassment actually stops before someone gets martyred for the cause.

Not just because I hope no one ever dies as a result of online harassment (if it hasn’t happened already). But also because historically, once someone is martyred, things are done in that person’s name that really have nothing to do with that movement.

The event could be turned into a way to further erode Everyone’s rights in what would be called an effort to end online harassment or bring back online civility.

It’s how we ended up with integration instead of de-segregation…. story for another day…

The Sad Thing Is that I Even Had to THINK About Whether Sharing My Opinion Could Lead to Actual Death

Somewhere there are millions of feminists having this same discussion with themselves, is the real point of this article.

The “can I take it” conversation.

The “should I speak out” conversation.

The “is this the battle or should I focus on the war” conversation.

None of us are free if any of us have to wonder whether exercising our right to speak freely in our own spaces could bring about the end of our livelihood, job security, businesses or threaten our families.

Because they might be up in arms about feminists today. But leaving them with the power to intimidate may mean they are up in arms about people who drive blue cars tomorrow.

Plus these can’t be our only choices, to be or not to be so-called “social justice warriors”.

What Do We Do About #Voldemort?

Do you see the evil embedded in the opposing strategy? If you talk about our movement in an unfavorable light and we decide you’re important enough we will shout you down.

That is ignorant mob rule, plain and simple. It’s not democratic- even in a system where majority rules, it’s not supposed to be at the expense of the minority that isn’t ruling.

We need both an offensive and a defensive strategy for organized harassment and the system overwhelm it can cause.

Some of it may be technological.

For example, one of the attacks against me focused on flooding any new email I created with not just spam and threats, but legitimate looking emails. It would have been great if Mailstrom or Inbox had existed back then.

And even though they exist now, if this attack happened to me again, that wouldn’t be enough to stop it. I would lose revenue, opportunities and the ability to work effectively for several weeks.

Even if you weren’t living paycheck to paycheck as I was pre-Obamacare, and as most of the country is, this can devastate a small, fairly new business. Mine almost closed.

One of the Many Times Online Harassment Happened to Me and Why It was Definitely a BIG Deal

Spam is easy. You filter for it or you sign up for Gmail AND filter it. But what if someone is creating false support tickets?

What if someone has the ability to send you hundreds of false sales notifications at a time when you’re having a fairly big sale?

One of the people who was attacking me for who knows what reason, hacked into an old email account, subscribed me to literally thousands of mailing lists, and then forwarded mail from the old account to a current one.

Luckily I’ve become a fan of creating ridiculously strong unique passwords and never storing them anywhere that I can help it. Some I don’t even put into LastPass. But anyone who owns even ONE website knows that this is unsustainable and not backwards compatible to someone with a full or limited schedule.

Once I figured out that all the mails were re-directed, the solution was simple but costly – block/filter any mail forwarded from the old account. Of course then I had to figure out how to still get the mail I had intentionally forwarded from the old account, how to figure out if it was safe to even use the account again, etc.

To make the situation worse, the attack was timed to a day when I had started a high profile, very complex joint venture deal that resulted in sales and customer service inquiries at about 10 times the volume as usual. It was all set up to filter through email, and would have been fine if it was a regular day.

But those subscription blasts made it hard to figure out which emails were legitimate and which weren’t, so I had to open ALL the ones that weren’t spam or subscription. Otherwise how would I even FIND the legitimate emails in the first place, among the ones from the attack?

This was before phishing warnings in Gmail, to give you an idea.

All this searching and screening also ate into the time it would take for me to actually pinpoint and resolve WHY suddenly I was getting all this mail. I would have loved to get some temps or VAs or assistants to do it, but with what money?

That’s why I was having the sale in the first place, to be able to afford to do that kind of thing.

This attack buried some requests for me to come speak that I never saw until it was too late. Potentially powerful allies offered me opportunities via email- every now and again it still comes up in conversation.

I lost potential clients, as well as people who would have upgraded or not asked for refunds had I been able to actually do what I promised, which would have been a snap had I been able to get their emails.

By the time I knew what was happening and could explain, it was too late.

And when they escalated to hacking my PayPal account I lost actual money too.

The stolen money was recovered.

The false orders and other types of fraud were not. Add in the time I spent resolving this issue when I would have normally been creating products or getting new clients and you can see how this wasn’t just a nuisance.

And that’s ONE incident.

Going Forward We Need an Anti-Voldemort Strategy

There has to be something better to do in order to discuss this in the open besides not mentioning g-a-m-e-r-g-a-t-e in our articles.

Which is why all of us, male and female, who have experienced any serious level of harassment and survived, should be coming together to share strategies other than the same old platitudes and weak tactics.

We need to have both a prevention plan, and a protection plan for if it fails. We need to know how to quickly mobilize ourselves to speak just as loudly against companies like Intel who pull funding due to consumer pressure, just as others are ready to use these kinds of tactics to bring those organizations to their knees.

And that has to be in place before we can do things like buycott Intel when they’re threatened with boycotts. And with the facts and figures that show we are just as much of a threat to their business as the people they’re responding to on the matter.

Otherwise when we start petitions or take other actions in protest, we’re just sacrificing a personality to the cause – which organized trolls WILL make about something else.

And that’s what I was writing about, below, edited slightly for clarity and typos.

First, I just want to thank you for this post, and all of you for this site, so much. It is Oxygen.

Secondly I want to thank you for your push-back about race and women of color [in the comments].

I don’t believe the poster was malicious in their assumptions, just unaware, and some people would have jumped on that, and fallen into a heated diatribe of belief defenses. Which would have helped no one.

Third, you talked about strategies to combat harassment.

I think that is the key point: what are the effective actions to take beyond all the platitudes by people who TRULY don’t understand what is happening. I was one of those “just ignore the bully” types until I first came to internet news groups. At that point I escalated to “don’t engage with trolls”.

Then it happened to me. Multiple times. Back then I was simply a woman of color in tech and marketing. I had not made any political stances, or challenged the norm in any way outside of… being I guess. And in talking to other women and some men, I adopted the belief that this is just what happens when your visibility raises above a certain level. And I backed away from offers of actual fame and material success because of my short-lived but horrible experiences.

I think at the very root of the problem is this muddied awareness.

People know that there’s a problem.

But they think we’re overreacting.

They think we’re overreacting [partly] because people like me were lulled into the acceptance that this is what happens to everyone. It didn’t occur to me that it happens to men less and on a smaller scale.

I know lots of men that are harassed and hated on just for being famous (not internet famous, actually famous) or popular. I know zero that have [also as a part of routine harassment] received rape threats.

So while I agree with you that there’s absolutely no reason why any of us should be painting targets on our backs or jumping in front of bullets, we could be more open with the people in our immediate vicinity about the fact that these threats, even when they aren’t real (and in my case they have been) are hugely disruptive to the ability to do business, to live, to be a free sovereign person in the world.

We have some tactics to fight back, and a great many have failed upward, to the point that these groups are able to affect the advertising budgets of even companies that fight back. But we have no strategy. And you are so, so right. I’d like to include you in some conversations I’m having about this, and I’d love to join yours if it exists. Thank you all for your great work.

 

Featured image Courtesy of Flickr user tinyfroglet
https://flic.kr/p/6KeQyQ