The first day of Etech is tutorial day. My first session was supposed to be Kathy Sierra on “Creating Addictive User Experiences.” As you probably know (since the blog world is going crazy about it), Kathy had to cancel her session and her keynote because she has been receiving anonymous threats of death and sexual violence as well as some truly horrid attacks from a few other well known bloggers. There are plenty of entries out there, so I won’t get too far into it except to add my voice in support of Kathy and to counsel some caution before seeking excommunication of some of the bloggers who are tangentially involved, including one who has clearly and directly apologized for his role in facilitating the attacks by known entities.

Watching the responses reminds me a bit of the old Julian Dibbell article “Rape in Cyberspace” about the effects of sexual violence in a MOO community. These threats are much more “real” in some visceral way, but what makes me think of that article is wondering if the blog community will actually take some kind of generalized collective action against the bloggers involved. The death threats are criminal and rightly being dealt with by the police. But the other hateful words and images appear to be attributable to specific people– will they be “punished” by the A-Listers? Will they be delinked and stripped of their Google juice? Can the A-List echo chamber actually perform a punitive action?

I hope Kathy returns to blogging– if she doesn’t, she “lets them win” to some degree. It’s a sad irony that some of those involved are also loud complainers about the lack of female representation at tech conferences. Not much is uglier than people jealously savaging one of their own. Equally sad are those who wish to minimize the very real effects of violent sexual threats and imagery. How can those people look themselves in the mirror– or sit in front of their keyboards– if they really believe words to be that weightless and images that meaningless?