The assertion that we should “not be so defensive” is problematic because it denies that hackers have anything to feel defensive toward. People get defensive when they feel like something important to them is in jeopardy, and our community is important to us because it’s where we find people who share our values. These range from the epistemic to the aesthetic — we are especially protective of the beauty of many the things we care about, often referred to as “elegance.” For those of us who experienced operative ostracism and public shaming, the protectiveness that runs through the entire stack has nigh-infinite fuel to draw from, and at times it doesn’t take much poking to turn a resource that many of us have transmuted into a source of productivity fuel into a tactical nuclear egghead.

Diluting that pool is frightening because it takes us back to the diasporan times in our lives when we upheld those values alone or at most in tiny, isolated handfuls. Many geeks can tell you stories of how they and a few like-minded companions formed a small community that achieved something great, only to have it taken over by popular loudmouths who considered that greatness theirs by right of social station and kicked the geeks out by enforcing weirdo-hostile social norms. (Consider how many hackerspaces retain their original founders.) Having a community they built wrested away from them at the first signs of success is by now a signaling characteristic of weirdohood. We wouldn’t keep mentioning it if it didn’t keep happening.

I’m not claiming that’s entirely rational, because fear isn’t rational, but it sure does explain the response to being told that our culture is broken and must be adapted to accommodate the very people who rallied it into being by shunning us from theirs.

We’ll start to feel less defensive when we get some indication — any indication — that our critics understand what parts of our culture we don’t want to lose and why we don’t want to lose them.

Asking questions rather than giving orders would be a good start, but what I ultimately want is psychological visibility: to know that you see what I value and appreciate why I value it, even if your own values are different. I’ll have that when I hear that understanding echoed in non-hackers’ words, rather than them echoing mine — though even that would be a start. I have yet to see an inducement toward social change that doesn’t trip hackers’ primal fears of ostracism. Playing on people’s fears can be an incredibly effective form of social engineering, but when the fears you play on make people afraid of you, you are engineering a system that creates outsiders and then silences them.

“We’re outsiders, therefore we couldn’t possibly be exclusionary” is actually not what we’re saying. Some hackers even argue for greater exclusivity, and curiously enough, many of those who do are also members of minority-by-birth groups. (I’d link to examples, but being caught between a minority-by-choice group and a minority-by-birth group means being extra careful about expressing unpopular opinions where anyone unsympathetic can hear you.) We’re outsiders, even if we’re outsiders with power, and we’re hyper-aware of the qualities that cause us to be treated as outsiders in the first place.

If you can show us those qualities in yourself, whether by mindblowing works of programming genius or merely by living the values we embrace, you’re in if you want to be.

Even if you can’t, we’re not going to kick you out, but like any other marginalised group, we prioritise our time toward each other and our allies, so yeah, you’re going to feel like the outsider for a change. Sucks, doesn’t it.

The criticism of Nate Silver seems to assume that he’s trying to produce something for people who don’t necessarily share his values, but I’m not convinced. He started out analysing baseball statistics, turned the same tools to political statistics, and his audience found him because elections are the final-boss evolution of popularity contests. FiveThirtyEight may be a mass-market publication, but that doesn’t imply that Nate’s personal values have changed any, nor should it. He still wants to work with people who understand him, just like anybody else does. Isn’t that what both brogrammers and geek feminists are after as well — a culture where they feel comfortable? Why is the onus on the outsiders who built our own spaces to understand the insider-newcomers, and not the other way around, particularly when the insiders are the ones colonising us?

Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet.

Consider what you’re up against: an established power structure that offers “weird nerds” not only a place to fit in — cramped and awkward as that space might be — but a comfortable salary for doing so. Unlike Sinclair’s illustrative salaryman, you can convince a hacker that a proposition her job depends on her not understanding is true, but keep in mind what you’re offering to replace the status quo.

The mainstream tech industry offers us money, status, and a stable (if weak) position in its idealised social hierarchy. The voices clamouring for change offer us no money, a social role reversal back to “disempowered outsider,” and a status demotion to “likely sexual predator.” (The polite euphemism for this is “creepy,” a pejorative applied indiscriminately both to those who actively transgress other people’s boundaries and to those with the unmitigated gall to be attracted to someone else while being funny-looking.) Given a choice between these two, which would you side with? It’s true that the one is confining, essentialist, and a far cry from the best of all possible worlds, but the other is all these things and a step backward for people who finally got to take a step forward for once when the internet took off.

Remember, you’re dealing with constructivists here — and not just any constructivists, but constructivists whose own lived experience yields proof after proof that they, and their outsider norms, will be first against the wall when the popular kids come. Over time, we internalise these lessons, so much so that at times we’re unaware that they’re in play. If someone offered us a convincing alternative, we’d take it in a heartbeat, but in its absence, we rely on the ways of being that have kept us farthest from harm. If we recognise a pattern of “put the outsider down,” we’re going to respond in the ways we’ve learned to protect ourselves from that: by closing ranks.

Because of this, leading with “there are more of us than there are of you, so you have to change to accommodate us” is, hands down, the best way to ensure that your carefully constructed appeal will fall on deaf ears.

Just as to many women, every man is Schroedinger’s Rapist, to most outsiders, every insider is Schroedinger’s Asshole Trying To Have Me Ostracised. If you want to overcome that cognitive bias from outside of it — and it is a bias, in exactly the same way that Schroedinger’s Rapist is a cognitive bias — you’re going to have to offer more acceptance, not less. Probably orders of magnitude more, if you want us to notice. And you’re probably going to have to prove it repeatedly, in the face of bitter skepticism, because not to put too fine a point on it, we’ve all been conned by the spectre of acceptance at least once and we’re none of us too keen on repeating that mistake. Hell, even venture capital is only the spectre of acceptance — watch how it vanishes into the ether when the ROI isn’t what the VCs expected — but it sure walks and quacks like the flesh-and-blood thing if you don’t pay more attention than you have to.

Offer hackers the real deal — a seat at this here table we built and you’re using, rather than an unpaid internship as your carpenter/busboy/court fool, would be a great start — and they’ll defect in throngs to your team, but “the real deal” means changing your tactics. If you tell me that your goal is systemic change toward radical acceptance, and I see that you treat those you perceive as lesser-than with the same kind of scorn and derision that pushed me toward this insular little subculture where I feel comfortable — and I do see this, every day, to the point where I’ve had to cull people I genuinely like from my social media feeds because it was that or get mentally knocked back every few minutes into the headspace I spent my K-12 years in and was only too happy to leave —then you’ve successfully convinced me that your acceptance is not radical and the change you want not systemic.

Inverting a power dynamic offers no consolation to people who end up on the bottom either way, and nothing of interest to people who would rather that power dynamic not exist in the first place.

Some of us are old enough, or have lived in the wrong places long enough, to be all too familiar with the reformist tendency to eat its own with deliberation and gusto. We’ll pass on that, thanks.

And that’s the bastardly crux of it all: two groups who nominally want the same thing — a culture of acceptance — separated by the values that lead them to that desire and the fear that ultimately nothing will really change. It doesn’t have to be this way. Groups that share goals but not values can still collaborate on those goals — to tremendous effect! — but doing so successfully requires a nuanced understanding of a value set not one’s own, and a willingness to focus on outcomes over ideological purity when push comes to shove. I offer you a proof by construction of this willingness in the hacker community: you need only observe the dazzling spectrum of political opinions to which hackers variously subscribe, and how little those opinions matter to us when our way of life is under attack.