Rails
Regarding the GoGaRuCo porn presentation, Damien Katz says, “Now, I don’t know what it was like to be there in attendance.” _why says, “It would be totally presumptious and ridiculous for me to try to make the call on whether the dreaded GoGaRuCo incident was offensive to female hackers. As it turns out: I’m not a woman, I wasn’t there.”
This kind of quasi-apology or quasi-concern is sickening. Is there a context in which porn would be acceptable in a technical presentation? Is there a way Matt could have led into this presentation to make it acceptable? Of course not. There can be no question that this presentation was offensive, callous and disgusting. Would it have been OK if the conference organizers had made that presentation “for men only,” or made everyone sign a waiver promising not to get offended over sexual content?
Likewise, you do not have to be a woman to understand what is offensive and disgusting about these slides. You do not have to have been there to understand the context in which this presentation was delivered. Just as you do not have to be black to detect racism or Jewish to detect anti-semitism, you just have to care about people other than you. The fact that everyone involved may have had good intentions is also irrelevant. They might all have had Asperger’s or whatever; it doesn’t matter. We have a word for this: excuses.
Even if there were no pictures, this presentation would still have been offensive. Imagine the slide: “RDBMSes: Old Whores.” Not acceptable!
If the Rails community would like to stop apologizing to people about its mistakes or hemorrhaging users, perhaps they ought to learn a little about this thing called empathy.
empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another
And if they don’t care if they’re offending you, what makes you believe they care about their userbase at all? Anybody who’s had a customer service interaction with 37Signals ought to know by now, you are just their stepping stones to their success. They see you as dollar signs and potential sycophants. Not all of Rails or its community is like that but as long as these people are leaders of the community can we really expect change?
I think we should all be asking ourselves if we want to continue to endorse this kind of behavior by using and developing on Rails or using 37Signals products.