The Weapon

Brent Simmons has a cryptic but important post on the dangers of social media: When The Weapon Was Pointed At Me.

When Brent had his first big success, Dave Winer was there to warn him.

I should have remembered Dave Winer’s words to me from 2003, after I released NetNewsWire 1.0. I’m paraphrasing, not quoting, but they were something like this: “You’re the golden boy now. Enjoy it. They’ll turn on you later.”

This is bad for everyone – kids, especially, should not be permitted to risk editing at sites like Wikipedia – but it’s especially bad for software creators. We’ve internalized so thoroughly the notion – mistaken but partly true – that software must be intuitive and its design process should be user-centered, that the roar of the crowd and the howling of the mob both mean more than they should.

For the next six months after the pile-on I asked myself every day if I should just quit the industry. Seriously. Every day, and especially every night. I came very close.

I learned a few things. I can’t count on the public to have my back. Forget it.

This is another reason why we need better software criticism. When it comes to the arts, the crowd is seldom wise and always unreliable. In the sciences, the crowd knows next to nothing. Nastiness and ignorance are a bad combination, but one that’s become very, very familiar in social media.

I’m increasingly wondering, too, whether my friend’s speculation that Gamergate is a firestorm – a small number of vociferous people – is in fact the case. I recently wrote a modest rejoinder on a Wikipedia talk page -- a reply to a reply, and nothing I hadn’t written on that page before. It seems to have caught someone’s eye overnight: a bundle of hostile tweets, a 200-comment thread at Gamergate World Headquarters – and who knows what else?

It’s the mirror world of an Art World, the destructive, deformed mockery of something like Fluxus or Futurismo. Maybe it all is a handful of boys in a handful of basements, and an outer circle who like to watch.