Mile
Zero

There's nothing I'm going to write this week that's as moving, as horrifying, or as important as Kathy Sierra's take on trolls and being trolled. Sierra, who was seriously harassed and abused by Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, writes about how awful this harassment was, how common it is, and devastating it was to see Auernheimer's history of sociopathic trolling dismissed after his (admittedly flawed) prosecution for "hacking" AT&T.

But you all know what happened next. Something something something horrifically unfair government case against him and just like that, he becomes tech's "hacktivist hero." He now had A Platform not just in the hacker/troll world but in the broader tech community I was part of. And we're not just talking stories and interviews in Tech Crunch and HuffPo (and everywhere else), but his own essays in those publications. A tech industry award. His status was elevated, his reach was broadened. And for reasons I will never understand, he suddenly had gained not just status and Important Friends, but also "credibility".

Did not see that coming.

But hard as I tried to find a ray of hope that the case against him was, somehow, justified and that he deserved, somehow, to be in prison for this, oh god I could not find it. I could not escape my own realization that the cast against him was wrong. So wrong. And not just wrong, but wrong in a way that puts us all at risk. I wasn't just angry about the injustice of his case, I had even begun to feel sorry for him. Him. The guy who hates me for lulz. Guy who nearly ruined my life. But somehow, even I had started to buy into his PR. That's just how good the spin was. Even I mistook the sociopath for a misunderstood outcast. Which, I mean, I actually knew better.

And of course I said nothing until his case was prosecuted and he’d been convicted, and there was no longer anything I could possibly do to hurt his case. A small group of people — including several of his other personal victims (who I cannot name, obviously) asked me to write to the judge before his sentencing, to throw my weight/story into the "more reasons why weev should be sent to prison". I did not. Last time, for the record, I did NOTHING but support weev’s case, and did not speak out until after he’d been convicted.

But the side-effect of so many good people supporting his case was that more and more people in tech came to also... like him. And they all seemed to think that it was All Good as long as they punctuated each article with the obligatory "sure, he’s an ass" or "and yes, he's a troll" or "he's known for offending people" (which are, for most men, compliments). In other words, they took the Worst Possible Person, as one headline read, and still managed to reposition him as merely a prankster, a trickster, a rascal. And who doesn’t like a "lovable scoundrel"?

The whole post is well worth reading before Sierra possibly takes it offline. And who could blame her? Even as she was writing this, the #gamergate movement on Twitter has literally harassed women out of their homes, and yet (in an echo of weev's "hacktivism") still insists that they're all about "ethics in journalism."

For most, that's an obvious smokescreen — a way to cloak their behavior in respectability while planning their next attack. For those who claim to actually believe it, that's a declaration that writing about videogames is more important than hurting women in the worst possible ways. And there's the problem: you don't get to claim the moral high ground when you got there through the pain and suffering of other people.