Quinn Norton is an engaging, funny, and stylish writer on technology and the odd communities that inhabit our digital world and make it so scary. She is also, to quote her own description, “a bisexual anarchist pacifist, prison abolitionist, & vegetarian. Currently I’m fretting about fair trade standards and ethical food.” What’s not to like?
Obviously that’s the question editors at the New York Times asked themselves not long ago, and they arrived at the same answer Edwin Starr reached when he wondered what war was good for: absolutely nothing. Earlier this month they decided to offer her a job on the paper’s editorial board. She decided to accept the job, thereby touching off a revolt from Times readers that resulted in her firing. It was six hours between the moment the Times announced her new job and the moment the Times let her go—in Internet time, roughly the equivalent of the Hundred Years’ War, except with more acrimony. The ejection of a slightly unconventional leftist from the opinion pages is the latest in a series of incidents that might give pause to the Times’s less excitable readers.
You would think Norton’s bisexuality, anarchism, pacifism, vegetarianism, and anti-prison activism would place her only slightly to the left of most people who take the Times as their daily meat. Indeed, her anxiety over ethical food should have been enough to seal the deal all by itself. But there were blemishes on her leftism, and Times readers quickly discovered them. A proctological probe of her Twitter feed showed that in years past she had used racial and sexual slurs and had once referred to a neo-Nazi as a “friend.” With protests spouting from various social media, the Times editors quietly backed Norton toward an open window and gave her a gentle push.
A few brave souls came to her defense. In the dimly remembered past—two years ago, let’s say—their explanations would have struck nearly all Times readers as exculpatory, and Quinn Norton, appropriately chastened, would have kept her job. Wired magazine, for instance, decreed that Norton’s ironic use of anti-gay language was covered by something called “in-group privilege,” a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card that she’d earned as a member in good standing of the “queer community.” The ugly racial talk and the Nazi friend were part of her larger evangelization efforts to racist louts. She was just code-switching, slipping into their lingo during her many attempts at online conversion.
