Communication often doesn’t flow like a river. Most of the time — at a certain scale — it buffers agonisingly like a night of Netflix on an East Coast train.
Meaning goes wonky, or skitters wildly off-course like a flailing live electrical wire. It happens, and we repair the damage where we can.
In many cases, it’s not what we say that counts, but what we say next.
And yesterday, my friends, we fell short.
Eight years ago, I moved from London to Newcastle, and it felt like the end of a journey. My mother was born here, and I’d spend school holidays travelling the length of the country to visit my grandmother in Walker. Long into my twenties — as I battled with a sense of who I was and what that meant — I’d pretend I was born here too, rather than in a now-shuttered hospital on a hill in Hastings.
I’ll never be from here. But it still felt like part of me.
People love this place. Give them a chance, and they’ll tell you about the beautiful sandy beaches, the landscapes, the people. There’s a joy to it. But there’s a defensiveness to love as well. Sometimes it makes us quick to lash out, and slow to address tough questions about ourselves, and the people around us. Sometimes, we need to be the people that start the difficult conversations, rather than the ones who respond to every minor perceived slight by snippishly waving around slideshows of bridges.
Which brings me — finally — to Thinking Digital 2018.
Thinking Digital has developed a reputation nationwide (and beyond?) for inspiring stories of curiosity, imagination, and ingeniuty. And when TryLife founder Paul Irwin stepped on stage at The Sage, he gave a talk that had Twitter users buzzing. A few — however — noticed he was wearing a t-shirt with a sexualised image of a woman on the front. One audience member — founder, CEO and strategy consultant Thayer Prime — was so frustrated that she briefly left the conference, returning for the later stages.
Thayer has explained her reaction in a thoughtful blogpost today. I’d recommend that you read this (first, or instead) if you want to find out more about what happened during the day, and why she felt the way she did. It’s not my place to put words in anyone’s mouth, or to vomit out an article that just gawps at individual tweets from herself and Paul. This is not the Metro website.
This piece isn’t really about them. It’s about us, and what we did — and didn’t — do.
A few years ago, Imperial College London launched an internal survey which covered bullying and harrassment. They wanted to tackle these problems in the workplace, but found out that not enough actual cases were being reported.
As a result, they’ve been running training sessions for staff for nearly a year, educating them about their role as “active bystanders”.
The idea behind this is that — when something happens — it’s not just the role of one or two people to address it. Everyone has a responsibility to challenge it. And Imperial’s trainers made it clear: This wasn’t just about cases where someone was overtly racist or slammed an anvil down on someone’s fingers for no reason. This included “micro-aggressions” that are all too common in the workplace, such as talking over people. Responding to emails from some and not others. Eye-rolling.
Because the reaction of a group is enormously important in dictating whether these behaviours flourish, or whether people who are uncomfortable feel empowered to express that.
As a community, the people who frequent Thinking Digital and the North East’s tech spaces pride themselves on being inclusive and progressive. But we don’t get to “be” that just because we say we are. And — glancing through the tweets from yesterday on #tdc18 — here are a few ways that we blew it, big time.
“He’s not a monster”
It’s amazingly naive to assume that only bad people do bad things. We are all constantly saying and doing dumb things. That doesn’t make us terrible people.
NOTE: I don’t think that what happened yesterday was The Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened™️, and I’m not calling for capital punishment. Neither is anyone else. My suspicion (and — again, not wanting to put words in Paul’s mouth) is that maybe Paul didn’t even recognise a looming issue printed to his chest.
He probably went on stage to share the story of a journey that he’s immensely proud of, and he’s frustrated that this isn’t what some are talking about today.
But what makes us decent is that when we make mistakes, we own them. And we use them to become better. Individually, and collectively.
Which generally means that people need to feel able to tell us things that bother them. And that starts with not seeing every criticism as a personal attack, or the start of a seige that requires all of our friends and a stockpile of canned goods.
There is never a good reason to go “Full Milo”.
“It’s just a t-shirt”
Firstly, if you‘re surprised that clothing is a talking point, welcome to being a woman leaving the house at any point in the last few hundred years.
And we’re not just talking about celebrity snaps. In workplaces across the country, capable professionals (again, mostly women) are being judged based on the most minute of wardrobe decisions.
Now, I’m pretty damn sure that a guy didn’t wander up on stage at Thinking Digital with a dodgy t-shirt on to antagonise people, or to make a big malicious point. It’s much more likely that it was just in his wardrobe, and he didn’t consider it would be a problem. Which means that — from the moment he dressed himself in the morning (presumably) to the moment he stepped on stage — it never occured to him or anyone around him to think about it, or how a diverse audience might possibly react.
That doesn’t make him an awful person. But it does say a lot when one group feels compelled to wade through their wardrobe to make exactly the right impression, and another gets to never give it a second thought.
“Seriously, we have bigger things to discuss”
I see you there. Sitting halfway off your chair, rapt in awe at stories of discovery and sci-fi optimism. Slumping back because you feel your flow has been disrupted by someone else’s feelings.
You’re frustrated, because you think that “big” talk has been disrupted by something “small”.
But here’s the thing: The history of progress, industry, and technology isn’t just a story of gliding, soaring wonder. It’s a history of changing ideas and perspectives, in which intelligent, visionary people have fought for a seat at the table. A history of people who — due to their gender, race, origin, or sexuality — have been denied a chance to innovate, or had their name scrubbbed from their own achievements. It’s a history of societies breaking down their irrational barriers, often sloooooooooooowly and painfully, and encouraging more and more people to shine, to everyone’s benefit.
Thinking Digital isn’t just a celebration of fancy gadgets. It’s a celebration of ideas that could inspire anyone, regardless of background.
Damn it, we are in the middle of an earnest discussion (for the umpteenth year) about the “brain drain” in regional tech and engineering, and dedicated people are pushing ahead on STEM initiatives that will help young people (particularly young girls) to consider these careers potentially “theirs”.
We don’t get to “pause” that conversation and do and say what we like for ten minutes, drown out objections, and then sneer that “the adults are talking”.
“There were naked images on screen before that. What’s the difference?”
I said before that I wasn’t going to put words in Thayer’s mouth, so forgive me this short thought-experiment:
What if it isn’t about nudity? What if Mary Whitehouse herself hasn’t risen from the grave and wandered into a conference, pointing at skin and pontificating about watersheds?
What if it’s more about the frustration of dealing with tiny pinpricks of structural sexism every day, and wandering into a community of peers that you thought stood with you — only to be jarred into a fear that maybe you were mistaken?
I’d like to think that’s not true. I’d like to think that we stand with — and for — everyone. But we have to demonstrate that. Not (always) by leading pitchfork mobs. But by listening to — and dealing with — a fellow community member’s concerns, even when they make us uncomfortable.
“It’s not a problem because the work is worthwhile”
I saw this one A LOT.
Ugh.
Okay.
Firstly, and I feel we need to stress this again, wearing a dumb t-shirt does not require us as a community to liquidate someone’s assets, shut down their company and punt them into the Wilderness of Shame with only a small spork to fend off the Poisonous Viper-Badgers. But surely we’ve got to the point now where we can distinguish between a person and their work?
Everyone in an organisation — and a community — can do or say problematic things. A manager can be a bully. A CEO can be a racist. The goddamn Galactic Charitable Prince of the Year can make flippant fat jokes that make another person feel like crap for the rest of the week. And then carry on raising funds for a well that saves hundreds of young lives.
Calling out someone on that — respectfully but firmly — is not to erase their good works, or daub them in fetid tar and feathers for the rest of eternity. It’s just what we do to make the world bearable for everybody.
And sitting quietly on the sidelines, patting yourself on the back for “seeing through” the bad stuff to the good works, or seeing “substance over style”? That’s not as much of a character reference as you think it is. Because it just means that this person — who may not even appreciate they’re doing something wrong — never gets the chance to be better.
And finally…
“She shouldn’t have said it publicly”
This is a story of a friend of mine, who I love very much. She’s an intensely-intelligent woman working in STEM, and a passionate, inspiring feminist. When she moved from London to Newcastle, I was overjoyed, and was dying to show her everything I loved about the place.
A little while ago, not long before she left, she told me something about my home that broke my heart. Every day she’d go to work, and she’d feel the little things. A lewd remark, a sexist gesture, a comment about whether she’d “found a boyfriend”, documents, publicity and policies that erased women, a co-worker talking over her in meetings, or underestimating her expertise. Things that she’d previously have jumped on each time if they’d happened in London.
But every day, she faced a choice between saying nothing, or speaking out alone. And after a while, after a thousand little pricks, she stopped mentioning it.
At its best, Newcastle and the North East is a beautiful, friendly place. But it is riddled with structural sexism, both overt and insidious. It’s not unique to this area, but it’s here — and it’s OBVIOUS. And we all know it. And this pisses me off.
For one woman, facing this crap every day, it’s almost impossible not to drown in it. There are people — people we know — in prominent positions all over this region that have not been called on their outdated behaviour, large and small. Sometimes that’s because they don’t even recognise they’re doing it. And there are people — people we love — putting up with it.
Every.
Goddamn.
Day.
Because we don’t want to have this conversation, loudly and repeatedly, until some egos are bruised and some old totems fall.
The best, most progressive communities aren’t the ones that don’t have to have these conversations. They’re the ones that constantly have these conversations, even with good people that we like, in an attempt to hold everyone to account for the principles that we hold so dear.
We’re facing a whack-a-mole with a thousand moles, and that’s too hard a game for just a few brave people to win alone. However, the game gets considerably easier when we all pick up a hammer, and start bashing this crap every time it pops up.
