2014-11-06: On tolerating personal abuse
While I don't consider myself part of the science fiction community
directly (my con-going days are probably over), I do follow it across a
wide variety of blogs. There are a lot of hard conversations and
considerable soul-searching going on right now concerning an on-line
commentator in that community who had been nasty and vicious to people,
but originally for reasons that many people thought were good causes. (I
had been one of those people. It's always very, very tempting to
appreciate a good vitriolic rant from someone who shares your world view.
And very easy to lose track of the people those rants are aimed at, or the
excesses to which those rants go.)
I'm not going to go into the details of the SF community issues here,
since I have no context other than what I've read, and it's something to
work out within that community. But I've been taking it as a useful
reminder that abusive behavior is not acceptable, even if it comes from
people who are arguably on your side.
Anger is important. Anger is often how the world changes. But anger and
abuse are not the same thing.
I wrote something a little bit ago in a different context. Given that
reminder, and given some of the arguments that are going on in the free
software community as well, it seemed like a good idea to post a somewhat
edited version of it in a more public place:
None of us should be willing to continue to participate in a project in
which we're expected to tolerate being abused and attacked, and all
consequences of that abuse are our problem to deal with. It is simply not
fun, and not motivating, and not interesting, and does not lead to
us doing good work.
I say this from lots of hard-won personal experience. I was deeply
involved in Usenet governance for many years. I have made all the same
arguments that I see today in favor of "blunt" speech, vitriol, and
attacks. I have been a passionate advocate for the "free speech"
approach. I have told other people to just filter and use killfiles. I
have said that words aren't worth getting worked up about, and it's easy
to ignore people.
I was wrong.
It took a long time for me to figure out that I was wrong, not just for
other people, but for myself as well. It took me much longer to walk away
from Usenet governance for good because the environment was too toxic. It
remains one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life. It was the
best bit of self-care that I ever did.
I learned from that experience, and earlier this year, I walked away from
a job for related reasons. I enjoyed the work, the job was much
easier than the job that I have now, and I had a lot of time to
work on free software and on Debian, but the emotional environment was
toxic. (It was not as openly abusive, but it was an environment of
disrespect, hierarchical dominance games, fear, blame, and emotional
blackmail.) As a result, I've had to shift priorities considerably, but
I'm a much happier person. It's worth having less time for things that I
was previously enjoying to not to have to deal with an emotionally
negative and confrontational environment. Life is too short, and I have
the luxury of having choices.
Both of those incidents taught me that it's very easy for me to leave that
sort of situation to fester for too long, and that I underestimate how
much of an improvement it is for my quality of life to walk away from
abusive and negative emotional situations. I am belatedly learning how to
be more ready and willing to do this.
I very much understand the people who are concerned with ensuring there is
space for strongly-worded opinions and heartfelt anger.
But we have to draw a line, and that line needs to rule out emotional
abuse of people in our community even in the name of passionate polemics
about something that's important. We have to enforce that line, and if
that means ejecting people from our community, that's what we have to do.
Because, if we don't, we're also ejecting people from our
community: the quiet people, the people who are just trying to get work
done, or the people who have had past experience with abusive environments
and understand the need to bail when an environment starts going in that
direction.
I'm not going to put up with the sort of environment I put up with when
doing Big Eight newsgroup creation. I'm not saying this as some sort of
threat -- I'm saying this to try to be very clear that not standing up for
the members of our community and not supporting each other against abuse
and emotional attacks also has consequences, and will destroy that
community for a lot of us. I'm saying that I am not interested in living
in an environment of fear and blame. And one should never underestimate
the human power of giving people space and community in which they can be
comfortable, relaxed, and truly happy.
Walking the line between this stance and the "tone argument," in which
people who are being abused or disenfranchised are attacked for being
angry, is very difficult. There are some helpful rules of thumb, such as
distinguishing between punching up and punching down, but those rules of
thumb can fail or be distorted, as the SF community is learning. It's
important that people be able to express anger. It's also important that
people be able to name names and identify specific behaviors that they
believe are worthy of that anger. But when that anger escalates into
attacks, there is a real danger that passionate righteousness turns into
passionate abusiveness, a danger of losing the sense of community in our
own sense of righteousness. And that's not something we can or should
accept.
It's going to take a lot of hard work, a lot of open conversation, and a
lot of empathy and care to find that line. There are many things in the
world right now that should provoke anger, and with that anger comes power
for good. But with that anger can also come a destructive blindness. The
anger I want is the anger that drives us to change the world together,
the anger that leads to confronting others with a reflection of their own
better natures and challenging them to become better, more compassionate
people. The anger that leads a man to feed the homeless in the
true meaning of civil disobedience. Not the anger that crushes our
enemies.
2014-11-07: Another book haul
Someday there will be reviews. Also, software releases. But these posts
are much easier to write in the evening when my brain is fried. Also, the
anticipation of reading good books is delightful. The motivating reason
for this order was that Powell's was giving away $10 gift cards with an
order, so I bought books to buy more books later.
Iain M. Banks — Feersum Endjinn (sff)
Jacqueline Carey — Autumn Bones (sff)
Robert Caro — The Path to Power (non-fiction)
Keith Houston — Shady Characters (non-fiction)
Jan Morris — Hav (mainstream)
Arika Okrent — In the Land of Invented Languages (non-fiction)
I've been in a non-fiction mood lately, so lots of random non-fiction
here.
The Caro is the first volume of his huge biography of LBJ, which is
apparently one of the best biographies ever written. The other
non-fiction is less serious: one about intentionally-created languages,
and the other about the history of punctuation characters. Hav is
a travel book about a city that doesn't actually exist, so it fits
somewhat with the non-fiction theme.
2014-11-19: Interpreting the Debian init system GR
I originally posted this in a thread on debian-private, but on further
reflection it seems appropriate for a broader audience. So I'm posting it
here, as well as on debian-project.
There is quite a lot of discussion in various places about what the recent
GR result means. Some are concluding that systemd won in some way that
implies Debian is not going to support other init systems, or at least
that support for other init systems is in immediate danger. A lot of that
analysis concludes that the pro-systemd "side" in Debian won some sort of
conclusive victory.
I have a different perspective.
I think we just had a GR in which the Debian developer community said that
we, as a community, would like to work through all of the issues around
init systems together, as a community, rather than having any one side of
the argument win unambiguously and impose its views on those who disagree.
There were options on the ballot that clearly required loose coupling and
that clearly required tight coupling. The top two options did neither of
those things. The second-highest option said, effectively, that we should
feel free to exercise our technical judgement for our own packages, but
should do so with an eye to enabling people to make different choices, and
should merge their changes and contributions where possible. The highest
option said that we don't even want to say that, and would instead prefer
to work this whole thing out through discussion, respect, consensus, and
mutual support, without giving *anyone* a clear mandate or project-wide
blessing for their approach.
In other words, the way I choose to look at this GR is that the project as
a whole just voted to take away the sticks that we were using to beat each
other with.
In a way, we just chose the *hardest* option. We didn't make a
simplifying technical decision that provides clear guidance to everyone.
Instead, we made a complicating social decision that says that, sorry,
there's no short cut to avoid having to talk to each other, respect each
other's views, and try to reach workable collaborative compromises. Even
though it's really hard, even though everyone is raw and upset, that's
what the project as a whole is asking us to do.
Are we up to the challenge?
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