Heather Armstrong | Peter Fletcher

Steve Yegge’s Google Rant Highlights Self-Assured Corporate Culture

October 14, 2011 by Peter Fletcher

I often use Heather Armstrong’s tirades against her bosses as a conversation starter during my social media courses. Her rants never named her bosses nor the company for whom she worked.

That didn’t stop her from being sacked!

Compare that with Steve Yegge’s rant about his employer, Google. He not only names the company but also goes on to name the big bosses. If the reaction of most people who attend my courses are anything to go by he should be sacked. But that hasn’t happened.

Instead Yegge sought advice from Google’s internal PR department, then posted a retraction of sorts on Google+. He explains that the post was meant to be seen only by his team and not the public. Of course the damage – if you’d call it that – was already done. Others on G+ had already shared his post and it was summarised and shared further on other web sites.

In a sign of their maturity and tendency towards transparency Google allowed people to leave the post published in it’s entirety. And that takes a lot of corporate self-confidence.

Here’s some of what Yegge said about Google+.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But thats not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so theres something there for everyone.

Limits and swearing

September 9, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

Armstrong describes the first time she uses the word “fuck”.

On March 12, 1997, ten minutes after opening a rejection letter from the admissions of one of BYU’s graduate programs, I stood up next to the open window of my bedroom and shouted, “FUCK!” for the first and most precious time of my life. It was a euphoric rebirth, a ceremonial exit from the womb and refutation of everything that had tethered me to what I now regard as mythical nonsense.

It’s worth noting the language about rebirth and the untethering of the self from the power operating within the church.

Sex and repression on dooce

September 9, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

Here’s a fascinating entry relating to Armstrong’s account of her first kiss. It combines a number of elements anticipated in Foucault. First, the post contains a quote from a letter Armstrong sent to a friend. Foucault would probably read this as a hupomnema or perhaps more accurately as correspondence. Letter writing is an important technology of the self in Foucault’s technologies of the self. Second, the account documents a limit moment where Armstrong’s bodily experience lead to the creation of new limits. She uses this experience as a source of reflection on her various relationships with power. Finally, she refers to her conscience at play as a result of the experience, a move anticipated in Foucault’s understanding of power and subjectivity.

Here is a quote from the post:

David kissed me in I guess what he would consider sensual fury, what I
would consider beastly uncoordination. At about midnight I pulled out of his
driveway never to see him again, well, never to see him for a long, long time. I
was really messed up from the experience even though all we did was smooch. In
the eyes of the Church, I thought, I must be a heathen, a stiffnecked wayward, a
virtual Lamanite. For about three months I lingered on the brink of
self-destruction. David was gone forever far far away in a land called Caltech.
My innocence was gone forever far far away with Nirvana as my only
witness.

And then Armstrong reflects on her subjectivity at the time:

And then I remembered just how distraught I was at that first kiss, how I seriously thought I was going to hell because my tongue had entered another human being’s mouth for purposes other than life support. And I so totally and completely don’t want my daughter to ever have to go through that sort of self-loathing.

So I’m going to keep this letter — a single-spaced account of my whole sexual non-history from ages 14-18 that is written in one whole paragraph and stretches over seven pages — and hope that when the time comes I’ll be able to teach my daughter about making healthy personal decisions about sex and about relationships, and about never using the word “uncoordination” because it DOESN’T EXIST.

A can of worms | dooce ®

August 18, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

Here’s a striking post from Heather Armstrong which begins to address the intersection between power and sexuality. Whilst Armstrong’s observations amount to a candid dislike of the Mormon church along human rights lines, her post opens up issues of how pastoral power is used in conjunction with the creation of sexual identities.

I prefer not to use such long quotes, however the manner in which Armstrong connects homosexuality, polygamy, and monogamy as a problematic for relationships of power within the church is rather striking. What is also worthy of note is the way Armstrong here carefully renegotiates a new boundary to her subject position. In previous posts she stepped back from saying anything overtly political about the church, but here she is directly critical and asserts a position whilst reinforcing a subject position that is respectful to her parents beliefs as practicing Mormons.

A can of worms | dooce ®:

“Mormons believe that polygamy will be practiced in the afterlife, and what I can’t help thinking is that when the civil right of marriage is ultimately extended to homosexuals and then to polygamists, why wouldn’t the Mormon Church start practicing it again? And when they do start practicing it again, how are the members of the church going to handle it? If Mormons truly believe their religion they have to believe that polygamy is their destiny, so why are they always trying to distance themselves from it? I think that many of them don’t want to ask themselves that question because they might be terrified of the answer: they aren’t okay with it.

It was this very issue that started me on my way out of the religion, this issue and that of the role of women in the church. I realized that I valued myself too much to ever be okay with sharing my partner with anyone else. I deserve all of him, and he deserves all of me, nothing less. I had a hard time reconciling the fact that my father (although he has a civil divorce from my mother) is married to both my mother and my step-mother in the Mormon temple, but my mother, unless she gets a temple divorce from my father, can never remarry another man in the temple. She doesn’t have the same rights as a man in the church. That isn’t okay to me.”

SPOILER ALERT: YOU CAN SUCK IT, plus Mormon Doctrine recited from memory | dooce ®

July 30, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

SPOILER ALERT: YOU CAN SUCK IT, plus Mormon Doctrine recited from memory | dooce ®: “‘We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are FIRST faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, SECOND repentance, THIRD baptism by immersion for the remission of sins, FOURTH laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost.’

That’s right. LAYING ON OF HANDS. It doesn’t get much truer than that. As a former President of Early Morning Seminary and Earner of the Young Women’s Medallion and as Someone Who Repented of Her First Kiss,…”

There’s an indication here of a key aspect of pastoral power and that is the revelation of all of a person’s truth – an important part of repentance and something that is performed in Rousseau’s Confessions – and we see Armstrong claiming to repent of her first kiss, a classic instance of revealing the tiniest truth and the shaping of an individual through the confession.

There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold | dooce ®

July 30, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold | dooce ®: “I think that’s the thing I’ve realized lately through all the reading I’ve been doing, that I didn’t have a choice. I was forced at birth into a life full of guilt and repression, a life of thinking that my eternal salvation was at risk with every thought and desire in my heart. I lived 22 years in constant fear.”

This post gets to the heart of the individualising influence of pastoral power. The care for the individuals soul in this life and the next and the creation of an individuality borne out of a personal confession that both creates and shapes the individual. As Foucault attests, the power of pastoral care is the way the individual is shaped and submitted to “a set of very specific patterns.” In Armstrong’s case these patters are those developed and dictated by the Mormon church.

Heather Armstrong (Dooce), August 2005 :: Rebecca Blood: Bloggers On Blogging

July 28, 2008 by Peter Fletcher

Heather Armstrong (Dooce), August 2005 :: Rebecca Blood: Bloggers On Blogging: “Some days I feel my website writing itself”.

What I find interesting here is Armstrong’s reference to her website having a life of its own. Such an understanding of a blog is anticipated by Foucault in that he suggests that self-writing isn’t the revealing of the self but in fact the self being expressed.