From the Editor’s Desk: Bully (Premium)

My kids and I grew up in the same town, and we went to the same public school system. And yet our experiences couldn’t have been more different.

The Dedham of today is far more diverse than the town I experienced as a child, in every way imaginable, and my kids are far more worldly and accepting of differences than I was at an early age. This benefitted my son, in particular, because of his hearing handicap: In my era, he would have been shunted off to a “skill center” and would have been a mysterious “them,” and not one of us. But Mark was mainstreamed into a school system with kids who had all kinds of mental and physical handicaps, all of whom were simply accepted by their peers. Kids are great like that. Just give them the chance to experience diversity before their parents’ biases poison their minds, and everything works out fine.

Tied to this, Mark never experienced the bullying that wasn’t just common in my era, but was curiously just accepted as a fact of life. This kind of thing is both good and bad, honestly, as it’s the gateway drug to the “everyone’s a winner” mentality that pervades modern life. But it’s good overall, of course. And I’m glad my son didn’t have to experience the type of abuse he would have as a child had he been born a generation earlier.

I don’t think much about the bullying that I experienced as a child, but when Steven and I recorded A Discussion on Neurodiversity recently, he discussed his own experiences in this regard briefly, and it all came flying back. And I realized that not only had bullying impacted me in interesting ways, but that I’d experienced bullying as an adult as well. And I’ve sadly done my fair share of bullying too.

The town I grew up in is about as suburban and normal as it can be, as it was when I was a kid. And were I to joke about “the mean streets of Dedham” with the friends I grew up with, it would result in immediate laughter. It’s not like we had street gangs, stabbings, or any overt violence. Except, of course, that we did. And while most of the bullying I experienced was of the garden variety “skinny kid with glasses” type, a few incidents stand out. Including one involving a kid in my elementary school who was so troubled and violent that he ended up in jail—well, juvenile detention, or “juvie” as we called it—and never attended our high school.

An even more dramatic example occurred when I worked at a fast food restaurant on the Dedham/Boston border as a teenager. The store had a couple of “lifers,” as we thought of them, young adults who worked there full-time and were older than my friends and me, but younger than the managers. Two of them, in particular, were scary individuals, and they liked to push the teenagers around, as bullies do. The most notable thing about them at the time was that one had a massive scar on his chest that was put there when the other one, his best friend, had stabbed him with a kitchen knife during an argument. How sweet.

I moved on from that job without any scars of my own, but I wasn’t surprised to learn a few years later that the stabber of that duo had murdered his girlfriend and was sent to prison. So I guess he really is a lifer now.

Bullying can take many forms, and it’s not always physical. When I was writing the second half of the article series that became Windows Everywhere, I experienced a strange form of PTSD when I got to the Windows 8 era because it dredged up an uncomfortable past in which I was intimately involved. I now know that then-Windows chief Steven Sinofsky had bullied me horrifically, inflicting mental damage as part of his explicit campaign to undermine my career. My crime? Though he once saw me as an ally of a sort, I had disagreed with him on the direction Windows was taking, and I became quite vocal about it.

When Sinofsky was booted out of Microsoft for his crimes, several people from the Windows team and Microsoft’s PR team reached out to me separately to apologize for the shabby treatment that was, as I had suspected, mandated by that psychopath, and they promised things that would return to normal. And Sinofsky set off to rewrite history, in part through a series of blog posts of his own that he also turned into a book, Hardcore Software. I resolved to studiously avoid reading this, knowing it would only upset me.

But before my most recent trip, I was hunting around the Kindle store, looking for something to put on my tablet, and his book was on sale. And so I bit my lip, clicked “Buy now with 1-Click,” and hoped I wouldn’t regret it. I also decided to read the book in reverse order, starting with the Windows 8 era that ends the book, in part because I wanted to get that out of the way, rather than have it looming over me the whole time.

The book is overly long and poorly edited, like everything he’s ever written, and it’s full of the history rewriting I expected to find. And yet, it’s hard not to recommend it to anyone who is a student of the history of Microsoft and Windows, as I am. For all the contorted takes on history—and reality—he was a true insider. And in reading about his abuses from his perspective—go figure, but he’s the hero of this story—I’m learning to cope with what he did to me, how his blacklisting of me left a lingering distrust of Microsoft and a suspicion of the normal outreaches it’s made ever since. What a jerk.

As a teenager maturing into a more physical presence, I had an unexpected opportunity to turn the bullying around when I ran into a former “meet me out back to fight” type in my high school bathroom and asked him if he remembered me. He was older than me but had been held back at least once, and he swore he didn’t recognize me. Then he apologized, and he ran out of there in a fashion that I found deeply satisfying. But it’s not all good. As noted, I’ve done some bullying of my own. I once fought a kid in junior high school and specifically broke his glasses, knowing from experience that that would hobble him. Terrible.

In my adult life, I’ve tried to respect whatever position I have—be it as a husband, a father, a friend, or as an author and commentator in the tech space—and not abuse others. I’ve never been physically violent, not once, but I am of course human, and so I’ve lashed out at critics. And I can be terrible to people. It took a decade or more to put my sensitivity aside and learn to not take criticism of my writing or opinions personally. And at some point, I came up with a personal definition of the term bully, which I describe as someone who is paradoxically overly sensitive about themselves, but not at all sensitive to others.

Sadly, such behavior is all too common in this always-connected online era, in part because the anonymity we feel insulates us from the people we attack. As I’ve often observed, few of the people who have gone after me online would have the guts to do so in person, not because I’m physically bigger than most, but because we have a natural respect for people who are standing right in front of us. They’re real, humans, not “them.” Not online entities that we maybe don’t even think of as people, people with real issues and fears, people who would benefit a lot more from our understanding than from our abuses.

This sounds obvious. But it’s clearly not obvious, given the behavior we see everywhere online. Including, sadly, here on Thurrott.com. I’ve already written about such topics as comment moderation and community guidelines, and though I feel these things are both obvious and common sense, people are people. And they often let emotion get the better of them, whether the attack is real or perceived, or even directed at them. (Our ability to feel insulted when someone criticizes a product they use or the company that makes it will never cease to amaze me. But this has to be tied to the human condition. I feel it sometimes too.)

If I could ask anything of you, it would be to pause for a moment before releasing vitriol against another human being here on Thurrott.com and elsewhere. To remember that they are people, just like you. That they can be happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, and that what you say, or write, can take them down dark paths they might not otherwise have traveled. I don’t agree with everyone on the site, of course. But it’s one thing to disagree with an idea, or an opinion, or to point out a factual error. It’s another thing entirely to go after that person aggressively. It’s unacceptable.

We don’t have to love each other. We don’t even have to like each other. But let’s not bully each other. We all have far too rich a history with that to ever want anyone else to feel the way we’ve felt when we were on the receiving end.