Richard Stallman and the Fall of the Clueless Nerd | WIRED
►https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of-the-clueless-nerd
Par Steven Levy (auteur de “The Hackers”, 1984).
If the question was When does obliviousness become inexcusable? Selam Jie Gano had an answer. Now. Especially when it goes hand in hand with a culture where, for decades, casual sexism has not been called out. Last week MIT graduate danah boyd, accepting a well-deserved award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, unloaded on her alma mater, citing years of sexual harassment, including an inappropriate comment from Minsky. The outrage is real and justified. This is the moment for amends.
And it’s certainly a terrible moment for Richard Stallman to dismiss the pain of sexual abuse by way of a semantic argument.
Stallman keeps a running log of “political notes”—things that catch his interest, where he’ll post a link and often a comment. (That was the source of his earlier remarks on pedophilia.) On Monday, between entries on the Sacklers’ financial dealings and climate change, he slipped in a personal comment that ended an era, in many ways: “I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.” Later, the Free Software Foundation announced that its founder and president had resigned from that as well.
There are tragic threads to this Stallman story. His inability to understand the hurt that comes from insensitivity led to his expulsion from the world he knew and loved. I worry what will happen next for him. But the greater tragedy is how long it took for such behavior to become disqualifying. While Stallman is uniquely Stallman, he was also a representative of a culture that failed to welcome the women who could have led hacking, and computing, to even greater heights. Stallman is now more alone than I found him 35 years ago. But do not call him the last of his kind. More will fall as the reckoning continues.