Hackers & Hookers Party: Sexism in Tech or Piggybacking on It?

"Hacker Hideout," a "member-based community center in San Francisco for thinkers and builders; tech lovers and business moguls; students and teachers alike" running in "stealth mode" that's so stealth that no one seems to have heard of it before, is throwing a Halloween party that they have named "Hackers & Hookers!" The party amenities include diverse entertainment features such as: "Beer. Dance Floor. Shot Bar. Food Truck. Girls." Which food truck? We may never know.

As expected, someone not of their target market saw the event and went "OMFG Sexist much?" Media coverage followed. A non-apology followed that. Then the "group's" Facebook page was taken offline. A site containing photos of the space "expired." But you know what stayed up? The event listing!

There's a lot of drama at the hackerspaces in SF and I suspected that perhaps this event was being thrown by one of the people who was recently a sexual harassment problem at one of the local spaces. I decided to investigate. It turned out to be much different than I expected. There are several articles about the event, with varying research backing them up. They missed something.

This is where things got really suspicious. Buzzfeed did a reverse image search and found an AirBNB listing for the building, which is advertised as an "Awesome Hideout" named "SF Hideout." It's posted by a guy named James. It's a 2-bedroom hackerspace/ coworking facility with no wifi. Exciting! Why "SF Hideout" and not "Hacker Hideout?" Oh, I'll get there. First let's talk about James.

What the Buzzfeed author didn’t realize to do is to run a whois on Hacker Hideout's domain. It is registered to one James Blocho of the organization "Bloc Group." He has an address in Novato but a phone number with a NYC area code. (This is all public information. He didn't bother to obfuscate his contact info, which most computer savvy people would do prior to doing something controversial, but I'm generous so I redacted some. Basically, right now, we can call what looks like his cell number. Great hacker skillz, dudebro.)

Things that make me thing that dudebro isn't quite tech savvy? GoDaddy as his registrar and a Hotmail account. Nice.

Now we have two leads: James Blocho of Novato and the Bloc Group. I did a search for James Blocho and found some listings like "Founder of non-existent startup" (paraphrased) on an angel site. Whatever. Apparently, he has a "review" in a court in Marin in November. I hope justice prevails! And I found a LinkedIn profile, which coincidentally has the same profile picture as the AirBNB listing! But resized really badly!

How tech savvy is James? Take a look at the third floor kitchen! (Screenshot from AirBNB listing.) This is the point where I started to wonder if maybe the registration info for Hacker Hideout was recently changed to list James Blocho just to ruin his life but then I looked at the AirBNB reviews, which discussed James and predate this controversy. Sorry, James.

I looked up the Bloc Group and there were several different companies in various parts of the world. One stood out though: The Bloc Group NYC. For one thing, it's in NYC, just like James's phone number. For another thing, it's a nightclub promotion group in multiple cities. Coincidence? I can't tell; I got no google results mentioning both James Blocho and the Bloc Group NYC. It's a weak link. WEAK!

Now let's go back to the problematic non-apology: "We would like to start by saying it was not our intention to offend or upset anyone, but it can be hard to please the whole world and the different cultures, values and beliefs that exists."

Classic non-apology. We can't please every culture, value, and belief, and we decided that the set of women and the set of men who dislike sexism who live in the actual city in which we do business don't really count. Our target audience is brogrammers and brogrammers only.

Official "OMG make the woman do it so we don’t look so terrible" spokeslady Alexandra Hunter says (to HuffPo) "[We] were not trying to be 'brogrammers.'" That would require at least a few technical skills. You're trying to cater to brogrammers. Totally different. I get you, woman. I truly do.

The non-apology continues (bad grammar is not mine, omg):

...It seems that some disgruntled residents who decided to take advantage of the office space provided, and asked to leave, and others posting who failed to disclosed they are competitors with their own work spaces around SF, are hoping to blow the event and its intentions out of proportion.

The posts made and deleted from such people mentioned above or their friends, so no we are no going leave up biased and false statements about our intentions or about our company. 

We respect the views and concerns that have been put forth by the community and have taken down the event for review of content as we appreciate constructive feedback from our REAL members. 

Regardless of whether the people in question "asked to leave" or "were asked to leave," they basically just included the entire incestuous tech community in SF in their set of people who can't be trusted to not blow this out of proportion.

 

Now let’s go back to the interview with the token spokeslady: "the company's employees are split fairly evenly male and female, she said."

From what I can tell, we have a "company" that has a work-live space in a bad part of SF that they are running as a combo workspace/boarding house that they call a hackerspace, for which we can track down exactly 3 people involved, including 1 woman. Well, I don't know if William (the guy who lets people in) isn't an employee or if they managed to grab a second woman, maybe as a room monitor or something, but sorry, Token Female, I'm not buying it. Apparently, the event was arranged without their permission by guests or wait, not, because they stand by the event now. People only know about it because super-spy infiltrators from their competitors snuck in and snitched! But we don't really know what their business model is, which is why their competitors could be anywhere.

You know, technically speaking, I do help run a competing workspace-- for women so we don’t have to put up with bullshit like this. I'm sure that my actual motivation is to advertise how much better my space is even though it's not open to the public yet and OMFG CAN YOU PEOPLE NOT TAKE ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR BEHAVIOR? Ahem.

They say at the end of their non-apology that they were going to reevaluate the event based on the constructive feedback of their "real" members, who have never received any other mention and don't seem to exist, which resulted in a "we don't give a shit if it's sexist" verdict. OK dudebro and dudebro-enablerette.

Overall assessment: we have a guy who owns a building, probably purchased as an investment, who is now trying to get a return on that investment in any way possible. He is offering the building out in every trendy way he can. Now he is throwing a party with a food truck that he doesn't even name, with all you can drink beer and quite possibly paid female entertainment. There may or may not be a link to a "entertainment" company in NYC that looks a bit sketchy as well. Why is AirBNB listed as "SF Hideout" and the party is at "Hacker Hideout" at the same address? Rebranding. He is grasping at straws trying to make this building turn a profit. It's highly questionable if there are any actual companies involved. Alexandra Hunter, I hope you get some paychecks but as a woman in tech in SF, I should warn you, if even one paycheck is delayed, bail and call the Labor Board. James Blocho is "always up to something."

tl:dr: This isn’t sexism in tech because that would require that this be a legitimate tech company, which doesn't not seem to be the case.

Venting: Catch-22 Tech Issues

I buy my domain names from a local company that I've worked with since 2000 that gives me a decent deal and doesn't try to upsell me all the time. The only problem is that some functions have to be done manually by support and support isn't always on duty for things like "add this CNAME to my domain registration" or "obfuscate my email address." This has only been a problem recently. I can change DNS servers myself.

 I signed up for Google Apps to move petticoatdespot.com/.net/.org to blogspot. Step 1 was to get email set up. I sent my registrar the info that Google said to put in and they put it in, less than 10 minute turnaround. Seriously, Ian, Dude, you are my favorite domain registrar tech support person partly because you always seem to be the person who handles my requests and partly because you work for my only registrar. And you get shit done when you're actually at work. Maybe Ian is the only person who works there? Ian said that when I got to the next step that it would give me some other info to enter, so just respond with that when I get there and he'll add that too. Ian is helpful like that. It took about 6 hours for that to propagate to Google and in the meantime, I couldn't proceed to the next step, but "don't worry," Google says, when it propagates, I can go to the next step.

(Pictured is actually a guy named Louis, but this is how I imagine Ian: young; nerdy; not burnt out yet; not quite sure how to smile for a camera; in a black shirt with dark, chipped fingernail polish. I would totally date Dream Ian if I didn't already have an awesome, cute nerd guy of my own, who is asleep in bed with a toothache while I am out here venting like a wanker trying to not type too loudly. I can't tell though what kind of music Louis likes. He looks kind of like a prog rocker and I prefer Dream Ian to be a goth. Dream Ian wears guyliner.)

Well, it propagated but when I went to the next step, I got a mystery error. "An error occurred. If you keep getting this error, try again later." Thanks. I tried the next day. No luck. I decided to restart the browser and go back to the same page. Congratulations! You are set up! Oh, I guess Ian was wrong? Maybe? Don't let me down now, Ian!

A few days later, I set up Blogger for Petticoat Despot and tried to use the domain. The instructions said that I should add the domain and then I will get an error that will give me the information to add to the registration that I have to have done by hand at my registrar. I didn't get an error.

That's right, the instructions told me that I would get an error, then I didn't get an error, and that in itself was an error. I love computers, really, I do. Anyway, I thought that maybe the thing that I did for email had already done what the error message was going to tell me to do, so I tried the domain. DNS error, so no, that's not it. I figured that maybe what I did for email setup was interfering with blogger domain routing setup, so I sent a test email. DNS error. Darn, if that Ian guy wasn't right all along.

I got busy with other stuff. I could get along without the domain working and I couldn't figure out how to get back to that process that I was supposed to have gone through for email, so I put it off. I also couldn't figure out a way to get the info that was supposed to be in the error so I could send that to Ian either.
Now my 30 free trial of Google Apps is about to end, but no biggie. I have $5 to throw at Google to keep my blog up. I go to billing setup. I go through to the final submit button and then... ERROR!

That's it. That's all the information that the error gave me. I filled out the forms from scratch three times, same error. Then I noticed something else on the page:

Oh, finally! A link to take me back to that step that Ian said I was going to have to do! Which I now can't do because my teensy local domain registrar's employees are asleep like reasonable people. And apparently, I have to complete that step to be allowed to enter billing information so that my blog won't be disrupted.

Seriously, Google? Seriously?

The Shutdown Was Not Two-Sided and It Was Planned.

Let’s go back and talk a bit of history.

Once upon a time, the Democrats and Republicans got together and wrote a healthcare bill based on Republican ideas, because that was better than no bill at all. The Republican leaders brought the bill to their colleagues, who objected because it was a compromise and as a compromise, didn't give them 100% of their way. They said “go back and force them to compromise some more!” and they sent their leaders back with the “argument” that the previous compromise wasn't a compromise, that the Democrats had refused to negotiate.

So the Democrats said “fine. We’ll give you a few more items from your list even though you are moving the goalposts and going back on your word.” And the Republican leaders went back to the flock and the flock said “Oh hey, that worked. Let’s keep doing it!”

And so, once again, they claimed that the Democrats refused to compromise as cover for them moving the goal posts and going back on their word. The Democrats saw the writing on the wall and said “nope! You’ll just keep doing that.”

And so after months of negotiations and 6 months to read the vast majority of the bill, the bill went to a vote. The Republicans claimed that they hadn't had time to read the bill because it just came out, even though what had just come out were changes that they requested to a bill they had 6 months to read. And then they started lying about death panels and other things that quite literally are more of a problem under private health care than under public health care. The bill became a law anyway.

And then they decided that what really needed to happen is that equality in health care that had been in place since early in GW Bush’s term had to be rolled back because “religious freedom” is the freedom to force others to conform to your religion, but only if you are of the “correct” sect of the “correct” religion.
Then the LAW went before the US Supreme Court, where it was upheld as Constitutional. So back to Congress we went, to one side insisting that the subject be brought up again and again, each time blaming the other side for “refusing to compromise” by quite literally IGNORING THEIR ATTEMPT TO OVERRIDE PREVIOUS NEGOTIATIONS.

And so we came to an impasse, one that was designed on purpose years ago. You see, the Republicans want the government to be dysfunctional so that they can get their way on regulations and low taxes for the rich and fewer ways for rights to be protected under the law, something that won’t hurt them because they know that they are the ones whose rights are NEVER in question. They were elected through gerrymandering on a premise that the government should be shut down and now they have done that.

But they are doing it by throwing yet another temper tantrum and yet again pointing to the other side and claiming that it is the other side’s fault. Once again, they have tried to move the goalposts and called that “refusal to compromise.” Once again, they tried to eliminate rights of women to equality in health care as a scapegoat for their own bad behavior. The Republicans got their way and are blaming the Democrats for their own actions.

Anyone who says that this shutdown is two sided is arguing that one side should be allowed to go back on its word, force one side to compromise an infinite number of times so that the end compromise is not a compromise at all, blame the other side for disallowing infinite compromise, continue to move the goal posts while failing to take responsibility for that, and in the process, try to subjugate women.

Anyone who says that this shutdown is two sided is full of shit and needs to stop because we’re not morons.