[Penguicon-General] Penguicon has lost its way

[Eric S. Raymond]

Penguicon has lost its way.

For those who have not been around long enough to remember, I speak
with authority on this not only because I was co-GOH at Penguicon I
with Terry Pratchett, and not only because the convention was in a
strong sense designed around my availability by its original founders
(my friends Rob Landley and Tracy Worcester), but for the *reasons* I
was an anchor GOH. That is, my many years as an SF fan, and (more
importantly) my many years of serving and shaping today's open-source
hacker culture.

Penguicon is at risk of becoming an environment that is exclusionary
and toxic - ironically, because it has bent to the demands of people
who claim to favor "inclusion" and diversity, but whose methods are
speech policing, thought policing, and the intimidation of any who
disagree with them.

Historically, SF fandom and the hacker culture have been broadly
accepting of all manner of marginalized folks in large part because of
a set of unwritten norms by which people mostly checked their politics
at the door.  We argued among ourselves vigorously, but generally
nobody was made to feel unwelcome for the sole reason of holding
unfashionable opinions or an odd lifestyle. Anyone could participate
in the hacker culture's work or SF fandom's celebrations simply by
showing up and pitching in. We had a tradition of true - not merely
rhetorical - tolerance and diversity.

Today that tradition is damaged to the point where the man who was
described as "the soul of Penguicon" by this year's con chair (Jay
Maynard, aka Tron Guy) felt compelled to state at closing ceremonies
that he felt unwelcome and won't be coming back until Penguicon
corrects course.

Myself, I was utterly horrified when I learned - too late to affect
the decision - that Coraline Ehmke had been invited as GOH. I view
this choice as signaling at best a failure to understand - and at
worst a massive and nearly unforgivable betrayal - of one of the
cultures that Penguicon claims to celebrate.

Some people reading this will already be becoming angered by this
assertion.  It is *your very certitude that is toxic*. Cultures of
openness flourish around a healthy doubt of any kind of ideologizing;
they can be destroyed by the successful promulgation of zealotry, and
the threat is no less real when the zealots have claimed that they are
about "diversity".

Cultures with real inclusion and diversity do not have to cast out
people for wrongthink. They do not get wrapped up in constant virtue
signaling. They do not have ideological purity tests. They simply
get on with treating each other decently, and when individuals
fail at this they are rebuked on an individual level by other
individuals.

Failure to understand this is is why Ehmke is toxic. Here's how I
described hacker culture tradition as I have known it over four
decades at http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918

   The hacker culture’s norm about inclusion is clear: anybody who
   can pull the freight is welcome, and twitching about things like skin
   color or shape of genitalia or what thing you like to stick into what
   thing is beyond wrong into silly.

For that *actual* tolerance, the likes of Ehmke want to substitute a
faux tolerance that is actually a not-very-well-diguised demand for
ideological and political conformity.  As I continued there:

   This is about whether we will allow “diversity” issues to be used as
   wedges to fracture our community, degrade the quality of our work, and
   draw us away from our duty.

SF fandom faces an analogous question - and, at least this year, Penguicon
blew it.  Which is why "the soul of Penguicon" might not be coming back.
And why I am here to tell you that Penguicon's leadership has blundered
down a self-destructive path.

Penguicon is now in danger of disappearing into a bubble of
politically-generated exclusion that alienates an ever-larger
proportion of the population it ought to attract.  Losing center-right
conservatives like Jay is a danger sign that you need to understand
before it's too late. By the next step, when you lose the center, it
would probably be too late to recover.

To correct course ... first, stop signing up for one side in the
U.S.'s culture wars!  That's a blunder regardless of which side you
pick.

There's a subtle but important distinction here between the regulation
of the convention's optional and private spaces and the implied public
claims it makes about how people ought to behave.  Having GLBQT-themed
panels is one thing - but trumpeting unisex bathrooms is taking a
side, implying a public normative claim. I'm not directly bothered by
them myself, and Jay isn't either (I checked with him), but many
centrists and conservatives are for reasons that are not crazy or
bigoted in their own terms.

What actual problem was declaring those bathrooms unisex solving?
Did you really need to offend all those people?  Worse, were the
unisex bathrooms *intended* to get in centrist/conservative faces, as
a kind of hostile virtue signaling?  If I can't avoid that suspicion,
neither will they - and even though I'm personally OK with the unisex
bathrooms on the object level, I'm opposed to the implied meta-level
claim of cultural hegemony.  It makes *me* feel unsafe; it makes me
worry about the next step in the politicization of the personal, and
the step after that.

I don't like having to wonder when the self-appointed commissars of
political and sexual correctness will decide that, having failed to
keep up with the latest decree of the Inner Party, *I* have committed
wrongthink and should become an un-person.  SF fandom should be a
bulwark against that kind of pressure, not an enabler of it.

Again, Ehmke: she and her SJW friends aim to wreck the hacker culture
in a similar way, via "Codes of Conduct" that may appear individually
innocuous on the object level, but which constitute a meta-level power
grab - a means to arrange ostracism for anyone who dares to disagree
with their politics or premises.  Anyone who thinks this isn't a real
threat should contemplate the OpalGate flap in 2015, or the recent
attempt to expel Larry Garfield from the Drupal project for the crime
of having a symbolically incorrect sex life (Gor-themed BDSM).

And, you know, I've already been personally accused of promoting "rape
culture" because I teach women how to shoot and fight hand-to-hand and
advocate that they should take responsibility for their own safety.
How many more turns of the "progressive" screw before that crimethink
gets me declared equivalent to a rapist and to demands that I be
expelled from the con?  Crazier SJW persecutions have already
happened; ask Sir Tim Hunt.

*Really* tolerant and diverse cultures don't behave like this. A priori
because they don't want or need to; a posteriori because if they do, they
self-destruct or become sad, repressive parodies of themselves.

Penguicon needs to find its way back to real tolerance. That means not
being a hostile environment for "the soul of Penguicon" - not (as I
fear some of you might be tempted to do) denying Jay's lived experience
by leftsplaining to him why he shouldn't be offended.  And, while I'm not
part of Donald Trump's base, I think anyone ought to be able to show
up in a MAGA hat and feel no more unwelcomed than if they were wearing
a pussy hat.  Otherwise, why are we kidding ourselves about our
"tolerance" and "diversity"?
--
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>