Julie Ann Horvath

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

While this backstory is disappointing, the writing published was typically excellent, and it remains an essential archive for critical perspectives on technology at a time when such commentary was rare. Model View Culture was crucial context for emerging scandals, including a sexual harassment and gender discrimination case at GitHub that broke shortly after its first issue in early 2014. Julie Ann Horvath, an engineer at the code collaboration platform, spoke out about a jumble of toxic office behavior: she was targeted by a range of people, her work was routinely undermined in gendered ways, the wife of a GitHub cofounder—who was not an employee—bullied her, that cofounder was confrontational and escalated the situation, and when she turned down a co-worker’s request for a date, he ripped out some of her code, erasing her contributions to a project they collaborated on.

…

was posted to Medium by Eric Kuhn (July 15, 2013). The first issue of Model View Culture, which was published in January 2014, is available online. For more context, in 2014, Astra Taylor and I co-wrote an essay for The Baffler on sexism and Silicon Valley, “The Dads of Tech.” The TechCrunch report “Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit” was authored by Alex Wilhelm and Alexia Tsotsis (March 18, 2014). GitHub hired a third-party investigator to look into Horvath’s allegations. Chris Wanstrath published the findings on the company blog on April 28, 2014 (“Follow up to the investigation results”).