Brotopia

by Emily Chang

  “One thing I didn’t mean to do, but I ended up doing, was setting up the culture in a way that I didn’t have to be in the office 24/7,” Mauskopf observes. “If I was working anywhere else at the time, I would have needed to quit my job.” But because Winnie allowed her to work flexibly, she didn’t have to. She officially returned to work in time to launch Winnie to the public.

  Now Mauskopf’s goal is to build a “sustainable” company. Does she believe she has to work long, hard, and smart? Yes, but with a twist. In a response to Keith Rabois and others advancing the idea that less balance is better, Mauskopf blogged that Winnie employees don’t work nights and weekends, because they know it will take a long time to solve the problem they are focused on and they don’t want to burn out. She also pointed out that many start-ups fail expressly due to burnout. “We built Winnie so that we never have to stop working, no matter what comes our way—be it a baby, a deadly disease, or just your run-of-the-mill roadblock,” Mauskopf says.

  Like Shyam Sankar, Mauskopf believes in working with great purpose; she just doesn’t think purpose must be combined with ninety-hour weeks. “By building technology to help parents, I’m allowing parents to do less busywork and put in more of their hours actually spending quality time with their children,” she says. “That’s my motivation. For me, there is no greater incentive or reward.”

  Imagine an alternate universe where even a start-up focuses on a ten-year time horizon. If more people started companies that operated like Mauskopf’s, maybe, just maybe, more women would want to work at them. Silicon Valley is inventing the next generation of products and services, she points out, and if women continue to be underrepresented, the consequences will be dire. “We’re not building for them. We’re not thinking about them in the solutions,” Mauskopf says. “Tech is the future, and an entire industry is getting left behind because they are not represented.”

  Mauskopf discovered her company could survive without her, but it took her husband’s life-threatening illness to make her realize it. Our work is important but rarely is it the most important thing in our lives. Companies usually survive just fine without your putting in those twenty extra hours when you could be eating dinner with your family, sleeping, or going for a run. By hiring employees with different lives and different work styles, tech companies could engender new perspectives and creativity. And they would give employees the ability to have a longer-term perspective, not just for their own lives, but for whatever product they’re rolling out.

  “Tech should be a really great job for women and families,” Mauskopf says. “You just need a computer. You don’t always have to be in the office. There is nothing inherent about it that should be bad for women. The other day I took Thursday and Friday off. I canceled a trip to Disneyland because Eric got sick. I took the morning off with my daughter, then came in and wrote the best code I’ve ever written.”

  8

  ESCAPE FROM TROLLTOPIA: WOMEN’S FIGHT TO SAVE THE INTERNET

  BRIANNA WU HAS BEEN tormented by online trolls for three years. It started in 2014, when Wu spoke up to defend women in the gaming industry, only to find herself plunged into a roiling controversy called Gamergate that turned her life upside down. The threats of rape and murder hurled at her online became so scary that she and her husband fled their home. To this day, they live in a new location under an alias. But sometimes the trolls still manage to track her down, and online harassment becomes an off-line ambush.

  “They found our address and smashed a window of my house. Threw a brick right through it,” Wu told me in April 2017, when I reached her by phone at a number she instructed me never to share. At the time we spoke, the window was still shattered.

  The online attacks, like the one perpetrated on Wu, began and gathered force on sites like 4chan, Twitter, and Reddit, the largely unmonitored town halls of the web. All of these sites allow or encourage anonymity and pseudonymity, as well as a laissez-faire approach to free speech, in keeping with the long-standing libertarian ethos of the internet. All of them have tolerated years of online harassment of women.

  It should be of little surprise at this point that the sites that harbor the most vicious trolls—4chan, Twitter, and Reddit included—were all started and led by white men, who aren’t usually the targets of the most vicious online harassment. Would these sites be as hostile to women today if they had been built and run by women, or at least included a meaningful number of women leaders early on?

  THE MONEY IN MISOGYNY

  Few places on the internet are more troubled by misogynistic trolling than the world of online gaming. Gaming is a billion-dollar business— much bigger than movies and rivaling TV—including an exploding generation of mobile and social games, classic PC console games, and rising categories like e-sports and virtual reality. Yet the gaming industry is also saddled with a long-standing history of violence toward and degradation of women, allowing gamers to play out dozens of dark fantasies. One of the earliest rape-simulation games, Custer’s Revenge, was released in 1982 by the game maker Mystique. The goal was to rape a Native American woman tied to a cactus, with points awarded for every thrust. More than three decades later, our most popular games feature similar scenes. In Take-Two Interactive’s monster hit Grand Theft Auto (whose fifth iteration is one of the bestselling video games of all time), players can sleep with a prostitute, then murder her. Take-Two’s CEO, Strauss Zelnick, has defended the game, saying, “It is art. And I embrace that art, and it’s beautiful art, but it is gritty.”

  Like the broader tech industry, gaming has systematically excluded women for decades. In 2016, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) reported that women make up just 22 percent of game developers, with men vastly outnumbering them in management and in powerful technical roles such as programming, software engineering, and technical design. Interestingly, the IGDA also found that men were much less likely than women to believe that diversity in the industry, and in the games it produces, was important. Indeed, women have also been poorly represented in the games themselves. As the report dryly puts it, “Women have long experienced derogatory representations of their gender in videogame content as well as a general invisibility within the wider videogame culture.”

  It’s not surprising, then, that the most notorious case of online trolling sprang out of the gaming industry and that women were the targets. Gamergate was sparked in 2014 by the peevish post of an unhappy former boyfriend of one of the gaming industry’s few female developers. “This is written almost entirely in shitty metaphors and bitter snark,” wrote Eron Gjoni, a coder in the industry. “It’s a post about an ex.” Gjoni alleged that his former girlfriend, the game developer Zoe Quinn, had slept with other people in the gaming industry while she and Gjoni were dating.

  For reasons that are still somewhat inexplicable, the missive unleashed a volcanic explosion of hate, all of it directed at Quinn, who was a feminist critic of mainstream video games. Though Gjoni never called for any kind of campaign against Quinn, a certain subset of gamers took his nine-thousand-word, she-done-me-wrong post and turned it into a rallying point from which to defend their sacred, mostly male gaming territory. They derided Quinn’s game development as basic, simplistic girl work and claimed she used sexual favors to get good reviews.

  Gjoni’s post was put up on 4chan (not by him, he would later attest in a note on his original post), an online community founded in 2003 by a then teenager named Christopher Poole. Today 4chan claims some twenty million monthly visitors, including a large population that seems to delight in wreaking havoc online. They were particularly vicious when attacking Quinn and other women in the gaming industry.

  With the 4chan members engaged in the fight, accounts sprang up across Twitter and Reddit to attack Quinn and spread the #Gamergate hashtag. The trolling expanded to target other female game developers on the premise that there was a conspiracy of women trying to ruin the industry by promoting mor
e gender equality in the games themselves and in the studios where the products are produced. The Gamergaters created and shared lists of industry women to target and torment, including Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic who rose to prominence by calling out sexism in the video game industry. The trolls even created a game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, which enabled users to punch her virtual face. The game’s creators wrote, “There’s been a disgusting large imbalance of women who get beaten up in games. Let’s add a lady . . . She claims to want equality: Well, here it is.”

  Once riled, many internet trolls have no shame. They often compete with each other to see who can be the most cruel. And as Quinn and Sarkeesian found out, they don’t limit their attacks and threats to a single individual. They will threaten family members, including children. They will also instantly direct their bile toward anyone who comes to the target’s defense.

  That is where Brianna Wu enters the story. About two months after Gjoni’s post, Wu, an established game designer, spoke out against the #Gamergate campaign, sarcastically tweeting a meme suggesting that the trolls were saving everyone from an “apocalyptic future” where women might have slightly more influence in the industry.

  That’s when all hell broke loose. Shortly after responding to the trolls on Twitter, Wu was inundated with violent, disturbing threats on her life. One series of tweets in particular stands out. “Guess what bitch, I now know where you live;” “Your mutilated corpse will be on the front page of Jezebel tomorrow;” and “If you have any kids, they’re going to die too.” As the threats piled up, Wu and her husband fled their home, crashing on friends’ couches and hiding out in extended-stay hotels. They didn’t have children to worry about, but they did spend an inordinate amount of money boarding their dog while they were on the run. Wu had a choice to make: speak up for what was right or be silenced. She chose to talk back.

  “I was angry. I was scared. I was terrified. But within all of that I was trying to reach inside myself and find that bravery to really change the industry for women,” Wu told me. She spent days documenting the dozens of death threats against her so she could provide them to law enforcement officials. At the height of the online vitriol, she hired a full-time staff member to help collect information on her harassers to share with police, but none of that was enough to bring the perpetrators to justice.

  Wu wasn’t alone. Others who spoke out in support of Quinn or even mildly criticized the trolls or the gaming industry were similarly attacked. Kellee Santiago, a female game developer who now works at Google, likened Gamergate to a witch hunt or public stoning, telling me, “It was really shocking to discover that I live in a time and place in which such animosity toward women existed.”

  TROLL ARMY ON THE MARCH

  Wu would later understand that she had been the victim of the trolling playbook, an extremely effective technique used to silence women that anonymous social-media denizens disagree with. “Find the woman and identify something in her past to distort her with,” Wu explains. “If she’s gay, attack her on that. Larger than size 12? Attack her on that. Transgender? Attack her on that. Find the spot where the woman feels the most vulnerable and make her feel unsafe until the cost of speaking out is too great.”

  Use of the troll playbook is not limited to the fans or members of the gaming industry.

  Online harassment is now one of the most disturbing problems plaguing the internet at large. Can such widespread cyber hating be chalked up to the dark side of human nature, which is simply finding a new expression on this medium? Or have the internet’s most popular sites exacerbated the problem by building their networks in a way that allows, even encourages, bad behavior rather than good? And if the latter, has so little care been given to protecting users because most of these networks have been built and run by men?

  To Brianna Wu, the answer is obvious. “If we had more women in positions of authority at Twitter, and in the gaming industry, I don’t think our industry would be so complacently terrible.”

  Evan Williams, the CEO of Medium who is most famous for co-founding Twitter, has been building websites to allow people to express themselves on the internet since the late 1990s. “Trolling used to be seen as a fringe activity,” he told me. “Many of us that built these systems are surprised there are that many people out there who are that terrible. It’s disheartening about humanity. And I don’t think anyone would have predicted whatever psychological feedback is encouraging these people.”

  I asked Del Harvey, the woman in charge of Twitter’s Trust and Safety division, whether it mattered that Twitter had been designed primarily by men.

  “It may have been a factor,” Harvey says. “There are, absolutely, aspects of being male that offer you more privilege and shelter. If you are not a member of a marginalized community in any form, you are less likely to think of those things,” she said. Not that Twitter was specifically created to transmit hate, she was quick to point out. “But it was designed by people who tend to be really optimistic—cheerful people who are thinking about really fun, optimistic things to be done with their product. They aren’t thinking, ‘How can I create a product that will allow people to send death threats really easily?’” (Del Harvey is not her real name, and she won’t say much about her own identity—expressly to minimize becoming a target herself.)

  Product managers, especially those who design consumer products, will tell you they try to be empathetic and do as much user research as possible, but at the end of the day, building these products requires making choices based on their own opinions. In tech, these choices are made mostly by men.

  Early Twitter investor Bijan Sabet believes that the relative cluelessness about the potential of online harassment has a direct connection to the industry’s gender imbalance. “These dudes aren’t getting it,” he says, “because they’re not getting harassed.”

  When I pressed Williams on this, he conceded. “We weren’t thinking about it enough,” he acknowledges. “Had we had more women on the team, maybe we would have known better.”

  By the time Dick Costolo was promoted to CEO of Twitter in 2010, Twitter’s harassment problem was already out of control. Costolo, who was brought in to make Twitter more attractive to a mainstream audience, saw curbing harassment as one of the main routes to achieving that. But he didn’t make much progress.

  “I would bang my head against the wall for days and days . . . and then I would move on to other things,” he says. “Twitter had lots of reasons why it wouldn’t be a good idea to restrict speech to prevent harassment. I was always on the side of ‘We should prohibit more things,’ and I always got pushback.”

  The pushback came because attempts to implement specific antiharassment policies bumped up against the principles the company had been founded upon. Twitter’s founders had felt it was important that users be allowed to use pseudonyms. This was partly a way of differentiating Twitter from Facebook, where real names are required. Twitter’s network is built on mostly public profiles that anyone can follow, while Facebook is built on connections that require mutual consent. More important, Williams told me the founders wanted Twitter to be a safe communication platform for political and human rights activists around the world. This was so embedded in Twitter’s DNA that free speech proponents within the company were able to resist executives’ attempts to enact policies that would infringe on that freedom.

  But while pseudonyms protect free speech, they also liberate users to behave as badly as they like, without consequence. And because tweets are public, Twitter’s design can actually amplify harassment. Even if you block someone who’s hurling insults at you, others can still see those tweets and pile on, allowing an attack to pick up at breathtaking speed. And Twitter’s rules for what it does and does not tolerate—and how it implements those rules—have been consistently inconsistent.

  “If I could go back in time, I would go back to a meeting in 2010 and say I don’t care what y
ou present me, I want this changed tomorrow. I would totally change the way I did it,” Costolo says.

  WHAT GAVE RISE TO ONLINE HATE?

  Trolling is the modern version of hateful language that has long been directed at prominent or outspoken women. Well-known suffragettes, fighting for women’s right to vote, often received vulgar, threatening letters from anonymous men.

  Trolling as we know it began in the late 1980s, just as email became a popular business tool. People immediately began to notice that there was something about communicating via computers that seemed to undermine the good manners and social norms that govern most face-to-face encounters. In 1984, a New York Times article chronicled the rise of “emotional outbursts” in “electronic mail.” “Scientists are documenting and trying to explain the surprising prevalence of rudeness, profanity, exultation and other emotional outbursts by people when they carry on discussions via computer,” the Times declared. Scientists who were interviewed observed that electronic communications “convey none of the nonverbal cues of personal conversation—the eye contact, facial expressions and voice inflections that provide social feedback and may inhibit extreme behavior.”

  “It’s amazing,” Carnegie Mellon professor Sara Kiesler told the Times, “we’ve seen messages sent out by managers—messages that will be seen by thousands of people—that use language normally heard in locker rooms.”

  Over thirty years later, vulgar discourse and threats of violence now pervade the most prominent sites on the web, including mainstream social networks. Thanks to the anonymity provided by many social-media sites, there are usually zero consequences for the offenders, either reputational or economic.

  Perhaps more remarkably still, trolling behavior has been, for many, a path toward fame and power. To take one example, we need look no further than Twitter-happy Donald Trump. In the midst of a petty feud with MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the president tweeted that he once saw “low I.Q. Crazy Mika . . . bleeding badly from a face-lift.” Like many online trolls, Trump directed one of his most offensive verbal assaults yet at a woman, and other trolls parroted his remarks with glee.