I wonder how the “booth babe” conversation gets started.

I imagine a group of marketing professionals sitting around a white board in a fancy conference room. There are probably women in the room too. After all, marketing is one of the few specializations in technology where women are somewhat well-represented (a blog post for another time!). And patriarchy just wouldn’t be patriarchy if women weren’t complicit in their own oppression, now would it.

I’m sure it doesn’t go down like this:

“Well, we tried giving an iPad away last time. But EVERYONE is giving away iPads now. Everyone already HAS an iPad.”

_”Or maybe we should give away a car.” _

Then some fine prodigal (seriously, go look up what prodigal really means, right now) specimen of the marketing breed says:

_”You know what. We should hire some women from a modeling agency, put them in some scanty clothing and heels, and parade them around the exhibition floor.” _

Someone else goes: “Yeah, you know what, we’ll do more than heels. We’ll put them in STILTS._” _

Someone records this on the whiteboard:

Step 1. Objectify Women.
Step 2. ?????????
Step 3. PROFIT.
Everyone gets a gold star. A req form is created for the girls and the skimpy logoed tank tops. Someone prints out data sheets for the girls to memorize on why our cloud is more cloud than their cloud, and all systems are a go.

Oh. No. You. Didn’t.

Back up. Let’s look at a few reasons why this ISN’T OK and why NO ONE should get a gold star.

The booth babe practice is unacceptable because:

1. It situates women as an object for male bonding around objectification of females.
Booth babes are presented as adorned and removed objects of heterosexual male gaze and a congress point for male socialization. You will see more conversations ABOUT booth babes than WITH booth babes, because they serve in large part as a public conversation piece, inviting voyeuristic sexist bonding around women as objects. After all, the ultimate point of booth babes is to start conversations between men- the men selling, and the men buying. The center and origination of this transaction is the female body. She serves as a novelty for men that use her as both the shiny object and broker.

2. It normalizes patriarchal displays of female sexuality in an industry that is trying to break out of male dominance.
The booth babe “dress and behavior code” is ripped straight from oppressive stereotypes of female sexuality. Booth babes wear tight, thin or not enough clothing, lots of makeup, and are encouraged - no, paid - to flirt and provoke. This display of sexuality is kept strictly within the framework that they are there for male entertainment, to sell products, to “look good” for the cameras (male gaze). End game, the sexuality is expressed as a function of economy, material gain and male pleasure rather than a realization of actual female desire. This normalizes despicable representations of female sexuality in a male-dominated industry that many men and women fight everyday to make more equal.

3. It reinforces that notion that women’s bodies can be used to sell unrelated products.
Five bucks to the first person who can explain to me what women in tanktops and stilts have to do with cloud computing. Yet booth babes, by their very existence, perpetuate the idea that it is OK to use women’s bodies to sell…. well, anything at all. Belief that this is OK - or even a successful marketing technique - is a menace to women and to the industries they contribute to.

4. It suggests that women don’t have real buying power in the technology field.
By orienting persuasion entirely towards a heterosexual male audience, “booth babes” negate the presupposition of a female buying power as an audience. In marketing blatantly aimed at a single gender, the practice effectively silences the reality or potential of a impactful female viewer. Advertising CREATES its audience as much as it serves it, and “booth babes” create an image of an entirely heterosexual male customer base. It both reinforces, reflects and creates buying power in the industry. Booth babes not only market to the technology buying base, they create an image, and a stereotype, of what that buying base is - a buying base that women aren’t a part of.

The No Booth Babe Pledge

We can argue for hours about where the lack of women in the industry gets started. We can punt blame around the court like a bunch of college kids at a drunk game of football. We can console ourselves with Carol Bartz and Marissa Mayer, whose successes obviously indicate that the supposed Glass Ceiling of Technology for Women is top-notch propaganda campaign by the pervasive institution of radical feminism in America.

Fine. Let’s talk about something we all can do, right now, to make incremental improvement towards a tech community where women are treated as equals. It’s the No Booth Babe Pledge.

I will not spend money hiring women as objects to sell my products at tradeshows. I will not work for a company that hires women as objects to sell my products at tradeshows.

( Your Signature Here )

CA Technologies, I’m looking at you. For shame.

Generations have always been defined by technology. We divide eras by technical feat-  Industrialization. Landing on the moon. The Cold War (dude, that was DEFINITELY a technical feat.) MTV.

Now we’re in a brave new world, the Facebook generation, and we give birth to infants who will never know of time before the iPad. The social web changes the mundane experiences of our lives…. the way we put together birthday parties, the way we stay in touch with long-distance friends, the way we find jobs… and get fired from them. (RE: photo sharing. Constant vigilance is the only way.) But it also defines the more profound experiences of our lives. Falling in love, falling out of love, finishing school, getting married (and divorced), having children. The lasting mark of the social web isn’t felt in transitory devices and applications that fight for momentary ascendency in the everlasting battle of the valley, but rather in how they shape core human experiences-  and death is foremost among them.

Talkin Bout My Generation
****I’m part of a new generation that won’t know death in absentia of the social graph. I never knew anyone who died before I had a profile. My first loss was my grandmother.  I had a cell phone, three kinds of instant messenger and a Friendster page, pink and purple striped hair, and more piercings than my parents knew about (sorry Mom, I know you google me, love you). I probably texted a few friends and updated my Friendster feed. Still, the social web was young, peripheral to the more intimate rituals of family grieving.
After that was high school and college- the age of MySpace and Facebook. Meth swept the Midwest and I lost friends to drugs in so many different ways. In the worst ways, I lost them in the most final ways. As time passed and I moved to Chicago, then to Prague, then to Pittsburgh, now to San Francisco, my social network became increasingly distributed, connecting me in several- sentence blurbs on activity streams to people I hadn’t talked to in months or years, people I would never again share dinner with, or even cities. In the Facebook era we travel through life amassing gigantic nets of correspondence that are simultaneously ephemeral and historical. We build digital homes for ourselves decked with pictures of our friends, memories from the past, notes passed back and forth in HTML hallways. People stay with us long after physical and temporal separation would recommend otherwise.

Somewhere along the way, that social web became the fastest, the farthest- reaching way to share when we’d lost someone. It let us touch, influence, organize an infinitely larger web of connections than could be incited by an obituary in the newspaper or the list of people you would think to call. The kid who went to karate camp in 8th grade with your sister? No one would ever think to drop him a line or invite him to the funeral. Hell, he lives across the country now and hasn’t seen her in 6 years. But they’re friends on Facebook. He’s going to part of it now.

Losing Friends… for real.
****It marked a fundamental change in my relationship with death when I found out a classmate had passed in a car accident, and I found out on a MySpace page. In many ways we weren’t so intimate that I should have expected anything else. We’d always promised to hang out, we texted back and forth a few times and once she SMSed me from winter break. She told her parents I look like an ice princess. We should hang out when we get back.
Now it all comes down to that one day when everyone goes to her profile to talk to her, and to each other, and I go to wish I’d made more effort to do that vegan lunch we’d always said we’d do. In those moments that carry into today I remember how vibrant and alive she was, how I envied her natural ease and confidence, how slim and beautiful she was, how young.

She stays with me because she streams across my social graph even now, years later. I would like to say I would remember her so often even without these apparitions. But I’d probably be lying to myself.

Digital Graves
It continues. Kids I went to elementary school with. Their photos on walls, with pages of comments: We love you, we miss you. We’re so sorry. Heroin ain’t the same without you. Nothing is the same without you. Wish you were here. Remember that day when we skipped school and the sun was out and we listened to that CD? And god, if I could have that day back. I would tell you how I really felt. I would warn you about what was going to happen.

Profiles become the digital equivalent of flower-strewn gravesites or those crosses they put up on the highway where everyone leaves notes. Every year on those awful anniversaries my feed fills up with their faces. It becomes part of our ritual of death.

These things are complicated, and neither good nor bad, but only so.

There are few things so antithetical to the finality, the severity of it than learning through a 140-character update that on more average days contains details of meals and movies, miscellany and mundanity. Yet without these tools so many of us would be left in the dark or isolated from those that share our loss, no matter how far removed. Sure it is a special kind of pain to reload those Facebook profiles, hoping that somehow they would change their status from that one last time. But at the same time it is hard to argue with anything that brings them closer to my life even after they are gone.

A Lengthy Introduction
It was a big week for geeks in the valley. Structure, Velocity, DevOpsDays left many of us running up and down the peninsula with powercords, swag and severe sleep dep. On a personal note, I got epically destroyed in the ”Give me an API or give me death” challenge, accidentally caused a Twitter argument discussion through poor hashtag handling, survived the cloud rite-of-passage that is Bitten By Squirrel without crying (ok, there were a few tears), and lived through watching Mr. Marc Benioff talk about Cloud 2.0 at Structure. (On the latter point, it should be noted that I would rather spin perpetually on a Hamster Wheel of Pain welded at the bottom of the Trough of Disillusionment, encapsulated within the very Chasm, than hear about Cloud 2.0 again.)**
I’ve attended a number of cloud-cloudy-cloudish events and meetups of late (in addition to the above, Gluecon, Google I/O, Web 2.0 expo, CloudCamps, API meetups, and etc.), and I’ve been talking to a ton of developers using, considering, implementing cloud tech, and sometimes I read stuff, like blogs, but mainly Twitter. This blog is about something I’ve seen over the past few months: the arrival and early sedimenting of a new cloud user profile, an emerging archetype- the “Rogue Clouder.”

What is the Rogue Clouder?
Devs and other IT peeps experimenting with, implementing and testing IaaS and cloud platforms at work and with work “stuff” (dolla bills, time, data, apps, workloads) but outside the purview of corporate structure. In the real world, this plays out in a number of different scenarios- running some workloads in EC2 without the boss, CIO or security team knowing; testing out a few apps on the Rackcloud without seeking any formal permissions; throwing some files up into S3 without getting sign-off; doing some early-stage deployments using a cloud abstraction API without explaining to anyone what a cloud abstraction API is- end game, it varies in commitment, scope, and ultimately in consequence.

The emergence of this user type has gotten a lot of attention- and not just because it is has enough drama and controversy to fill a Tom Clancy novel or at least a TweetDeck column-  but because it is INEVITABLE and IMPORTANT.

The Inevitability of Rogue
It’s INEVITABLE because you can buy cloud with a credit card and get it in variable amounts. Like a beer sampler plate, this permits an unprecedented ability to experiment with radical new approaches to IT. Cloud is a process innovation in the delivery of infrastructure that makes the lab rat psychotically pounding the food dispenser button look like a study in delayed gratification. Unlike previous infrastructure changes (virtualization, new server architectures, etc) that have required lots of up-front cash and elaborate processes of discovery, research and implementation, with cloud, you can just play around a little bit and then ramp up- no task force required. This obviously has enormous implications for sales cycles but also just means it changes the process of how people engage with cloud and services and tools delivered by it and with the “aaS” model. Rogue is now POSSIBLE and cloud’s seductive promises to eliminate provisioning and scalability pains- as well as to provide the enormous pleasure of massive responsiveness at the infra level (I CAN SPIN UP A SERVER ON A PLANE OMG THIS IS BETTER THAN EITHER SEX OR CANDY), means that the possible has quickly become the unavoidable.

The Importance of Rogue
It’s IMPORTANT because it indicates a new phase in the cloud market. Companies creating, distributing and selling products in the infancy of new markets- like cloud- are tasked with creating hypotheses for how adoption will happen in an unrealized and yet nonexistent customer base. This involves a lot of conversation, a lot of studying the market- but eventually it comes down to coming up with informed guesses about who is going to want it, how they are going to find it, how it is going to lead to larger adoption and how you can nurture that. This is why you saw so much discussion and debate a year ago about who you were going to sell cloud to- the CIO? The CEO? Well, at least no one proposed selling to the CISO. That would just be crazy talk.

It shows we’ve reached a new phase in the evolution of the market that we are able to form more substantiated user profiles based on user stories, data, and connecting the dots of patterns across the board and in different communities- from business audiences at Structure to developer audiences at other events. The ability to segment and analyze cloud adopters and more importantly their processes of adoption leads to a new wave of major opportunity in the market.

But the Rogue Clouder is also problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that he is hated and hunted by security teams across the globe. But don’t worry. I have reduced this problem to a Chasm Analogy. (You’re welcome).

The Rogue Chasm
Here’s the problem. Having leagues of rogue clouders inside the enterprise DOESN’T smoothly translate or transition to large-scale enterprise adoption. Unsanctioned cloud experiments aren’t just going to happily work their way up to the CEO, who shall declare: And Now, Thanks to Rogue Clouder, AKA Employee of the Month, WE CAN ALL HA__S CLOUD. No. In fact, it might be a perfect recipe for Crash and Burn if the “higher ups” start deciding that the way to deal with this problem is to squash rogue once and for all with various Death Methods such as firing and security policies.

The point is that while the cloud generation and the aaS model has theoretically enabled a new process and ramp for adoption (try a little, pay as you go, scale up when you are ready), this is not matched by process innovations inside the enterprise that accommodate progressive, sanctioned experiments in new technology. Again, the speed, ease and flexible scale of IT experimentation that we have today hasn’t existed before, and so the enterprise naturally doesn’t have a methodology for initiating, dealing, securing, evaluating results, and eventually transitioning to larger and larger levels of adoption. This leads to increased levels of isolation, siloing, and antagonism between, for example, the Rogue Clouder and the security team. And for cloud sellers especially who are hoping that bottom-up adoption started by Rogue Clouders will lead up the command chain, this should be especially troubling. Vendors have a vested interest in helping Rogue Cloud Adopters cross the internal chasm into higher levels of sanctioned adoption.

What Next?
It is my personal opinion that the emergence of this “chasm” is leading to an acceleration in conversations around internal IT processes (like agile, devops, etc.). Either way, it is important that companies, devs and everyone can safely evaluate and benefit from escalating rates of change in the space and the new opportunities they afford by implementing formal, audit-able processes for Trying New Things, Fast. I think these conversations are necessary and at greater and greater levels of maturity and formality.

I don’t have an answer to the problem, but I do know that enterprises need to evolve processes that bring the Rogue Clouder- who really isn’t trying to be disingenuous or dangerous but just trying to find better ways to do their job- under corporate purview in ways that enable SAFE and WELL CONSIDERED experimentation with things that might just have the ability to revolutionize your efficiency and speed, make you rich and allow you to buy a fleet of ponies. (Ponies are the new yacht.)

There is urgency around this for a simple reason: Abstinence-Only doesn’t work.

On Abstinence-Only Education
Abstinence-only education in the school system doesn’t work because it denies the inevitability of hormones, the ubiquitous opportunity of unsanctioned after-school congress, and the general corruption of the youth by television and music videos. Abstinence-only education doesn’t work for public cloud either: it denies the inevitability of curiosity, the ubiquitous opportunity of unsanctioned congress with EC2, and the general corruption of developers by Twitter and tech bloggers.

It is what it is. And just like you don’t want the first time you explain “The Birds and the Bees” to your teenager to be six weeks after spring formal, you don’t want the first time you have “The EC2 and S3” talk with your developers to be when you are digging through their expense reports and find a series of suspicious Amazon invoices. So while you might not be ready for a process yet, but it IS, at the very least, time for a conversation.

A Small Request
That’s all I have. Please don’t skewer me. This is my first blog and I’m emotionally fragile.

Thanks.