There's a sudden realisation surrounding the question: "why are the most toxic white people of the 'infosec community' in such a public uproar recently?'"

Periodic flare-ups usually occur due to the toxic masculinity of an 'infosec family' comprised overwhelmingly of techie men.
Two recent incidents' tone contained a very different timbre.

First, waves of attacks against this account, reacting to a thread parodying one person's creepy selfie routine; including bigoted dog-whistle comments by aggrieved white women shouting "f*ck your 'fake diversity'"...
And now, an attack against @find_evil (who is -- despite her amusingly adopted name and avatar -- neither a man, nor a white person)...

...by both men and women attempting to mass-block and/or shout her down for confronting casual anti-Semitism in the "infosec community".
For some reason, recalling recently-heard excerpts from @GreatDismal's Burning Chrome and staring at a screen full of code...

...this realisation became clear.

In cyberpunk lore, what's now called the "infosec community" have evolved into antagonists of practically every story.
The information security industry ("infosec") is largely comprised of corporate, military and law enforcement officers explicitly and/or implicitly tasked with securing and protecting technological/financial assets.

Those assets belong to the transnational entities of cyberpunk.
In the seminal film "Hackers", the story's villain is an ex-black-hat hacker named Eugene Belfort; his handle is The Plague.

He is chief information security officer for an oil company called Ellingson Mineral. The corporate network he protects is fittingly nicknamed a 'Gibson'.
The real "infosec family" is a group of mostly upper-middleclass white men patting each other on the back for "dedication to diversity"...

...as infosec's relatively few women ineffectually shame them for episodes of misogyny you'd expect from men who've rarely met women at all.
Infosec is such an insular little subworld that the obvious appears only as a fleeting revelation: a small group of white men (and a smattering of almost exclusively white women) have somehow convinced themselves that by virtue of their nerdiness, they are a persecuted minority.
This built-in persecution anxiety is more acute than than the generic white terror of "otherness" (hatred of the brown, yellow, black, gay, trans, foreigner, and their strong women)...

...and far more sharply evident to anyone pushed toward the infosec subworld's outer margins.
The infosec community wants to play both sides: "there's no difference between infosec people and hackers!", they say.

Yes, there is: infosec people are the ones who protect corporations and send hackers to prison for the crime of using technology in unexpected ways.
Is it any surprise -- in addition to being overrun by narcs and feds -- that infosec is riddled by the kind of misogyny/misandry, racism, classism and intentional obliviousness that insulates them from the violent realities they embody and mirrors the organisations they work for?
It was always mildly disquieting to see people giving virtual hugs to their "infosec family", only to turn and bully anyone who disagreed on relative trivialities.

The "infosec community" is growing to become the villains authors like Gibson, Cadigan and Sterling warn us about.
Again, question: "why are the most toxic white people of the 'infosec community' in such a public uproar recently?'"

Answer: what you see _is_ the infosec community during momentary lapses of a recruitment-friendly facade. Take heed; their family is not yours, and never will be.
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