[Noisebridge-discuss] Sunlight may disinfect.

[Victoria Fierce]

Good and accurate writeup.

I wish I could find something I disagree with in this, but I can't, but
I'm not one to leave you twisting in the wind by saying nothing at all.

What sticks with me the most from this, as it is something I too have
thought much about in my organizing work, is the pattern you point out
of identifying a villian then pinning all of our problems on that
villian as a way to wash our own hands clean of the inconvenient truth
that maybe, just *maybe*, our problems are somewhat our fault.

It would be really really easy to look at Mitch's leaving and say "Ah,
well, it was all just $PERSON_X being a prick, so lets ban them and
move on with life." Its harder to admit that a lot of us were involved
in the sequence of events that led to this, including those of us (hi,
thats me!) who stepped back from the fray and figured Noisebridge would
be fine, its a cockroach that'll live forever, it'll become whatever
the community needs it to be, etc etc etc.

That.. didn't happen. Noisebridge is not fine. Noisebridge might be
whatever the community needs it to be, but thats only because *the
community* changes while Noisebridge says the same. I think it is
correct to say that NB has been coasting on 11 years of goodwill and
that inertia has finally burnt out. Wow, what a right though, eh?

It is a "Progressive" (read: white liberal) tactic strategy to identify
a villain and pin all your problems on them. This really confused me
when I moved here from the midwest, because I come from a world where
conspiracy theories don't get much traction unless you've got some
solid evidence backing it up.

And what good is that "evidence" if it is sequestered away in infinite
group slack DMs, private discussions impatiently working their way
through an inscruitable whisper network. Is noisebridge bad at
intersectionality and repeatedly smashing our collective hand in the
minivan door while we try to move beyond behind a white techie/hacker
majority community?

Ha ha. What an absurd question. Of course we are.

Can we pin that on our founders (who have all left)? Can we pin it on
our own culture (which, like a wiki, is editable, even when we don't
want it to be)? What about if we just blamed Capitalism (a thing none
of us claim to participate in and thus cannot possibly have brought
into the space)?

God, its so fucking lazy.

If our culture is flawed (it is), then it is *our* culture that needs
fixing. If our founders are problematic (they were), then it is *our*
founders we must work with to better ourselves as a collective. If
capitalism is to fault, then *we* must work against it, and not let it
divide *us*.

We're an anarchist collective, damnit. We're not some democratic party
apparatus where you can just -remove- someone from the social fabric
and vote in a new replacement. We don't vote on shit here for all the
reasons we forgot: because it forces us to have the difficult
conversations we need, using the words that make us afraid that someone
might not like us in the end.

Letting go of that fear that having a difficult conversation is
tantamount to social exile takes trust. Trust in our fellow
noisebridgers, that having those conversations comes from a source of
love and light and that we genuinely want to see each other be the best
damn version of ourselves we can be.

On Fri, 2019-01-25 at 16:21 -0800, Naomi Most wrote:
> Hi world,
> 
> Over the course of several mailing list posts, I'm going to expose
> some
> topics here to the mailing list which is read by 1000s of people
> worldwide,
> which is considered the environmental gauge for Noisebridge at large.
> 
> It's my hope others will join in -- especially to disagree with what
> I have
> to say, if they feel the need to do so.
> 
> Slack has been our catch-all shade structure (in every possible form
> of the
> word "shade") since 2014.  We set up the Slack back in 2014 in an
> effort to
> take our "dirty laundry" off the public internet.
> 
> Unfortunately, I see now that we've lost public accountability and a
> sense
> of our own history.  We overprivilege people with short reaction
> times and
> itchy trigger fingers, and underprivilege people who spend longer to
> consider what they say.  We've done honest conversation a disservice.
> 
> James pointed this out to me a few months ago, and it took me a few
> months
> to really understand.  Sorry for being slow on the uptake, James.
> 
> Noisebridge just went through an extremely dark period, during which
> time
> Mitch Altman decided to leave due to repeated bullying.
> 
> I just met with Mitch last night.  There is no possible way he will
> come
> back to the space.  The emotional wounds run too deep.  The bullies
> in
> question were able to key into weaknesses and make sure he felt bad
> about
> himself every time he entered the space.  As a result, even if we
> somehow
> *guaranteed* that those people wouldn't come back, he couldn't trust
> that a
> new crop of bullies wouldn't arise and do the same things.
> 
> The problem is that Noisebridge's problems aren't unique to
> Noisebridge.
> The Bay Area plays host to a particularly nasty form of social
> policing in
> which an artificial form of social harmony is prized well above Truth
> and
> Authenticity.  This problem runs across the United States and
> probably
> beyond -- and is the source of the alt-right's caricature of the Left
> as
> "snowflakes".
> 
> More people than Mitch have left.  Only Mitch has given me permission
> to
> speak his name, but at least one of those people have announced their
> leaving here on the nb-discuss Mailing List.
> 
> I want to talk about all this in a way that sticks, in a format where
> people consider their words and expose them readily to the rest of
> the
> world.  Where people feel they can criticize me and anyone else quite
> openly, because they have no stake in the game.
> 
> Noisebridge is festering, merely coasting on the hard creative work
> of more
> than a decade past.
> 
> Perhaps sunlight will disinfect.
> 
> I still believe there is a future for Noisebridge.  I believe
> Noisebridge
> is an important institution in the Bay, and I want to see if there's
> a way
> to learn from our hardships and grow stronger for it -- the way we
> always
> have.
> 
> I think that's enough for #1.
> 
> Come at me,
> Naomi
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