This is an account of the impact of "mob justice" within the Scala community, which Jon Pretty faced in 2021, and devastated his career and mental health.
At the time I was taken aback at the lack of due process, and how one-sided accounts from ex-girlfriends could be used to destroy a man.
Now, years later his story still chills me and makes me sad about the divided and sinister state of the Scala programming language community.
At the bottom it references a GitHub where people have previously added signatures against Jon Pretty - and now the maintainer says "NOTE: This repo is closed. Do not open issues; they will be summarily closed and ignored." - i.e. telling people they shouldn't even TRY to amend their signatures.
Regardless of what you think of Jon Pretty, how is this justifiable? Telling people they can't unsupport something because you're not open to issues, but also not removing it?!
To prevent things like these from happen again, you should never believe allegations of sexual misconduct. Refuse to bother about this, redirect people to the police and courts, let them do the job. Don't be like these people who put their signature on those letters - be a good person. The justice system exists for a reason.
Sorry this isn't related to the content (because I'm having difficulty reading it), but is it just me or is this font absolutely atrocious? It's way too thin in the best case, and omits the horizontal lines (e, A) in the worst case
Edit: okay, vastly different experience on phone vs desktop. Looks normal enough on the monitor except, as someone points out, the weird f and j
I'm not seeing anything in the post with any legal resolution or "proof" the accusations were false. Whatever case he had was settled out-of-court. It doesn't seem like the accusing parties were asked or agreed to take any action retracting their claims.
So, as observers, what we're left with is two people accusing someone of something and the accused saying they're innocent.
Things seem to have cooled down on the cancellation front since the peak fever of 2020 and 2021, so I don't see it as much anymore. But for a while, the rejoinder of the cancellers was always, "well, he can just find a different job" or "he got a different job, cancelled yeah right."
As if the job was all that mattered.
We are social creatures. Shunning and ostracism have a significant impact, even when happening by people we don't know, especially when it's a pile-on.
I'm not saying there's never a reason to shun someone. If people do something terrible, cut ties with them. I don't think that's what a lot of this is, though. If it was, it wouldn't happen on such flimsy evidence and it wouldn't happen to people others don't even know.
Most cancellations are a blood letting, where people are trying to feel powerful and the cancelled (or even the wronged) don't really matter.
Many, many people deserve to be shunned or ostracized.
The inverse here is that we should all be forced to like people we don't like. Well, that's stupid.
If you're an asshole then I don't want to hang out with you. Doesn't matter what, specifically, you did to be an asshole, as long as it's legitimate (not a lie).
Yes, I'm going to "shun" people I don't like. Not because I'm evil or I even want to harm them. I don't. I'm only thinking about myself - not them. Okay, I want to have a good time, so that necessarily means I can't be around people I don't like. So, there.
If that's cancellation well then, cancel me back in retaliation.
> And in that one moment, I lost most of the life I knew. I offered my resignation from my developer advocacy job because it became untenable and it was damaging my employer, even though we both knew there was no cause to terminate my employment.
So he just left his job for no reason? This seems compeletely self-inflicted. The following paragraphs are about he "had to" drop various projects - Why would you just drop everything?
I do hope that some members of the mob will reflect and repent. That they will be more hesitant next time. But unfortunately, I have a feeling that they are mostly going to double down.
Real monsters are walking free of consequence, while innocents are ruined. Society is so obsessed with moral puritanism, and completely blind to the absurd corruption at the top.
If all that energy expended on cancelling people was instead used on genuine political action, we wouldn't be in the trouble we are now at. If more people were reasonable at the time and didn't jump to conclusions, they would still have the high ground. Instead they became the boy who cried wolf.
To paraphrase an Internet aphorism, don't have personal relationships with mentally unsound people. There are many ways to ruin someone's life, cancellation is but one of them.
If someone really wants to ruin your life, they will find a way. The most effective way to avoid that is to screen your partners aggressively.
This is great advice, I’ll start applying it as soon as I figure out a universal test for “mental soundness”.
All people are imperfect. Many people act in ways that don’t make sense to me. But labeling someone “crazy” and refusing to associate with them is a big judgment to make.
Not excusing anyone who jumps at judgement, but this illustrates the importance of protecting the integrity of due process. People have over time seem many cases of due process being corrupted by money, power or just incompetence. Many times it has happened to them. Due process is often opaque, complex and lengthy so they decided to bring that in-house and make their own judgements.
I have learned to fight the instinct to judge because many times I judged very very sure of my conclusions, only to find put some time later how completely wrong I was. It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong. As a rule I try never to make a decision on the same day I receive information. You'd be surprised how much your opinion can change once you digest your info.
"Due process" did its job perfectly as it should have in the author's case. But exoneration still didn't save his life from falling apart. It's not a legal or policy issue, it is a culture issue.
I am so enraged when allegations alone cause some people to act as if they were conviction. All these people should now restore all lost things bit by bit. Lost money, job, experience, health, contacts, opinion of all people that they managed to break. Acting based solely on accusations is acting in bad, not good faith.
I have no idea who is telling the truth in this situation, and unless you are the person who has been accused or those who are the alleged victims, neither do you. For situations like this where the allegations fall short of criminal misconduct, a thorough process run by someone independent of the situation needs to a) to evaluate the claims made b) determine whether they are justified c) issue a clear and open report on what took place for the benefit of the community involved. As far as I can tell no investigation has been carried out to verify or falsify claims made by the individuals concerned.
But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women, and if what these women say is true, it would be utterly unsurprising to me. The High Court judgement in this situation is a civil matter; nobody has been "cleared" of anything.
I can't imagine not just one, but two women coming forward and making such accusations against me. People here are acting as if he is the victim, not them.
Insofar as the letter signed - UK law has it so the letter worded as it was, with the burden of proof on the signers, could be held as libel if signed - so the UK signers got caught up in their country's law, due to the accused being litigious.
One pleasing thing to me is, however casual some people's attitudes to all of this is, out of control behaviors can cause legal and PR problems for corporations, and that is a move forward that, despite ebbs and flows, will not be moved back in any substantial sense. Woe be the CEO or HR director who thinks they can ignore bad behavior.
Brutal. I’m not sure which way the truth on this lies but the reality is this not the way to go about it. Brian Clapper needs some accountability in this, I’d like to hear why he isn’t backing down or removing the repo.
Oh yes, that most tried and tested way of destroying people by accusing them of having improper sex. Remember Julian Assange anyone? And what about the Middle Ages and all the burned people? Remember that time Philip IV of France accused the Knights Templar of having sex with each other, in order to cancel them :-) ? That was a good one, though I'm sure Philip had state reasons in addition to a drunken stupor.
I can't comment on this particular case, other than by acknowledging that, sadly, this won't be the first or last mobbing. I hope that Pretty does well and that the people who rushed to condemn him never again get laid.
Yep. Sadly, it doesn't work as well on horrible rich people, even when they did literally rape children. It's like having money is insulation and grants privileges rather than noblesse oblige.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing isn’t exactly new. I nearly ended up in jail in high school because of an accusation. The only thing that stopped the school police officer from dragging me out the door in handcuffs was me knowing the principal of the school.
He was able to figure out where the rumor came from. I’d bumped into a girl during gym class and since I was a sheltered Christian kid new to public school, I didn’t know “second base” had another meaning.
I’ve also had a friend who struggled with depression kill himself after there was an accusation of him having illegal images. I don’t know if it was true. I just knew I couldn’t mourn his death while everyone I knew was celebrating it.
I also know a friend who stopped doing foster care after a child with a long history of compulsive lying and false accusations accused them of sexual abuse and CPS believed the child.
I do not know anything about this author’s situation and won’t pretend to, but I did watch a sexual misconduct accusation play out in person once. The speed at which everyone assumed the story was true and turned against the accused was basically instant.
However there were some key details about the accusation that didn’t add up. The accuser tried changing the details of the story once they realized others were noticing the problems with the claims. It also became clear that the accuser had an ulterior motive and stood to benefit from the accused being ostracized. The accuser also had developed a habit of lying and manipulation, which others slowly began to share as additional information.
This was enough to make the situation fall apart among people who knew the details. However, word spread quickly and even years later there are countless people who only remember the initial accusation. Many avoided the accused just to be safe. The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
It remains one of the weirdest social situations I’ve seen play out. Like watching someone drop a nuclear bomb on another person’s social life and then seeing how powerless they were to defend against it. In this case it didn’t extend to jobs or career. Their close social circle stuck with them. However I can still run into people years later who think the person is a creep because they heard something about him from a friend of a friend and it stuck with them.
I've seen four "in person", one very public (just purely IRL public).
I didn't see anyone (with one exception) pick sides immediately; although most people's "picked" side was "not involved". (The one exception was a community organizer who definitely has Been Through This Before).
For three of those, I did my own homework - a lot of asking around, and then a lot of conversations with both people. In the end, most of that didn't matter: the accused ended up damning themselves (or not!) pretty immediately when I talked to them about it.
> The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
Surprised he cant get a job. Just forget about these idiot friends doing the right thing, and cease and desist Github etc. get all the shit taken down then get a job cranking out Scala.
92 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 92.5 ms ] threadAt the time I was taken aback at the lack of due process, and how one-sided accounts from ex-girlfriends could be used to destroy a man.
Now, years later his story still chills me and makes me sad about the divided and sinister state of the Scala programming language community.
Regardless of what you think of Jon Pretty, how is this justifiable? Telling people they can't unsupport something because you're not open to issues, but also not removing it?!
Edit: okay, vastly different experience on phone vs desktop. Looks normal enough on the monitor except, as someone points out, the weird f and j
So, as observers, what we're left with is two people accusing someone of something and the accused saying they're innocent.
A really sad story, but also a cautionary tale.
Niche
As if the job was all that mattered.
We are social creatures. Shunning and ostracism have a significant impact, even when happening by people we don't know, especially when it's a pile-on.
I'm not saying there's never a reason to shun someone. If people do something terrible, cut ties with them. I don't think that's what a lot of this is, though. If it was, it wouldn't happen on such flimsy evidence and it wouldn't happen to people others don't even know.
Most cancellations are a blood letting, where people are trying to feel powerful and the cancelled (or even the wronged) don't really matter.
The inverse here is that we should all be forced to like people we don't like. Well, that's stupid.
If you're an asshole then I don't want to hang out with you. Doesn't matter what, specifically, you did to be an asshole, as long as it's legitimate (not a lie).
Yes, I'm going to "shun" people I don't like. Not because I'm evil or I even want to harm them. I don't. I'm only thinking about myself - not them. Okay, I want to have a good time, so that necessarily means I can't be around people I don't like. So, there.
If that's cancellation well then, cancel me back in retaliation.
So he just left his job for no reason? This seems compeletely self-inflicted. The following paragraphs are about he "had to" drop various projects - Why would you just drop everything?
Real monsters are walking free of consequence, while innocents are ruined. Society is so obsessed with moral puritanism, and completely blind to the absurd corruption at the top.
If all that energy expended on cancelling people was instead used on genuine political action, we wouldn't be in the trouble we are now at. If more people were reasonable at the time and didn't jump to conclusions, they would still have the high ground. Instead they became the boy who cried wolf.
If someone really wants to ruin your life, they will find a way. The most effective way to avoid that is to screen your partners aggressively.
All people are imperfect. Many people act in ways that don’t make sense to me. But labeling someone “crazy” and refusing to associate with them is a big judgment to make.
I have learned to fight the instinct to judge because many times I judged very very sure of my conclusions, only to find put some time later how completely wrong I was. It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong. As a rule I try never to make a decision on the same day I receive information. You'd be surprised how much your opinion can change once you digest your info.
the only fix I can think of is having a "don't shit where you eat" attitude and just keeping everything cleanly compartmentalized
Otherwise one mistake or the malignant intent of another can cause irreparable damage to my personal reputation.
But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women, and if what these women say is true, it would be utterly unsurprising to me. The High Court judgement in this situation is a civil matter; nobody has been "cleared" of anything.
In the absence of an investigation, you can read the original statements made by the women who made the accusations of wrongdoing [here](https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...) and [here](https://killnicole.github.io/statement/), and you can form your own opinion about who is telling the truth based on what little there is to go on.
EDIT: s/judgement/opinion/
Insofar as the letter signed - UK law has it so the letter worded as it was, with the burden of proof on the signers, could be held as libel if signed - so the UK signers got caught up in their country's law, due to the accused being litigious.
One pleasing thing to me is, however casual some people's attitudes to all of this is, out of control behaviors can cause legal and PR problems for corporations, and that is a move forward that, despite ebbs and flows, will not be moved back in any substantial sense. Woe be the CEO or HR director who thinks they can ignore bad behavior.
The OP article was so vague i didn't even realize i had already read about it.
I can't comment on this particular case, other than by acknowledging that, sadly, this won't be the first or last mobbing. I hope that Pretty does well and that the people who rushed to condemn him never again get laid.
He was able to figure out where the rumor came from. I’d bumped into a girl during gym class and since I was a sheltered Christian kid new to public school, I didn’t know “second base” had another meaning.
I’ve also had a friend who struggled with depression kill himself after there was an accusation of him having illegal images. I don’t know if it was true. I just knew I couldn’t mourn his death while everyone I knew was celebrating it.
I also know a friend who stopped doing foster care after a child with a long history of compulsive lying and false accusations accused them of sexual abuse and CPS believed the child.
Out of curiosity, what's the other meaning? I assume the primary one has to do with baseball bases.
However there were some key details about the accusation that didn’t add up. The accuser tried changing the details of the story once they realized others were noticing the problems with the claims. It also became clear that the accuser had an ulterior motive and stood to benefit from the accused being ostracized. The accuser also had developed a habit of lying and manipulation, which others slowly began to share as additional information.
This was enough to make the situation fall apart among people who knew the details. However, word spread quickly and even years later there are countless people who only remember the initial accusation. Many avoided the accused just to be safe. The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
It remains one of the weirdest social situations I’ve seen play out. Like watching someone drop a nuclear bomb on another person’s social life and then seeing how powerless they were to defend against it. In this case it didn’t extend to jobs or career. Their close social circle stuck with them. However I can still run into people years later who think the person is a creep because they heard something about him from a friend of a friend and it stuck with them.
I didn't see anyone (with one exception) pick sides immediately; although most people's "picked" side was "not involved". (The one exception was a community organizer who definitely has Been Through This Before).
For three of those, I did my own homework - a lot of asking around, and then a lot of conversations with both people. In the end, most of that didn't matter: the accused ended up damning themselves (or not!) pretty immediately when I talked to them about it.
Why is that strange? That's what the propaganda tells them to do - they're just doing as told: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Believe_women