Discord Archive: The Bravespace Incident

@justinmorrison, I did not like the way you spoke to me tonight and I did not like the way you treated Anh. You arrived 20 minutes late to the last meeting on an item that has been worked on for more than 4 weeks by me and many others. It has received small-c consensus to proceed in its current form at the Tuesday meeting and is less than 24 hours from completion. You came in in the last 40 minutes of the meeting and sought to change the document, the parameters of the project, the parameters of unrelated projects (gathering NB emails and contact lists? Weekly fundraising emails?) and went spinning well beyond the printed agenda. When I tried to bring you back to what has been agreed to, pointing out that more than a dozen people have made input in this project already, including several who contributed quotes, and that many others have looked at it, you said, "there are only two of us here!" a) that is not how NB works. even people who have not arrived at a particular meeting get to have their input respected and b) Anh was there! You ignored Anh almost the entire meeting and did not even say good bye when she got up to leave. I pointed out she was leaving and that I was going to walk her downstairs and look for Mark and you responded to me but continued to ignore her. Later you started to scold me for not respecting your time when I said I did not want you entering the document and erasing the full copy from it to put it in a new document nor and changing the format so we could make it easier to see the history of the developing project for folks checking in later and you got angry at me for not taking all your suggestions and wasting your 40 minutes and then you scolded me for Noisebridge not being organized enough to handle the many suggestions you were throwing out there. You then predicted the failure of the project in its current form, especially without your input which you were withdrawing because you could not bear to work with me. Wow. Usually I am the person who gets passionate and talks over people. I would say your passion was exhilarating but it will take at least 48 hours for me to get over all that. This is a request (a demand, really) for full disengagement between you and me for the next 48 hours in-person and on discord. If we see each other in the space, I am a ghost to you and you are a ghost to me. Invisible. Oh, and, I think, you should apologize to Anh, if she will accept it.

I'm willing to talk this out in person, and so will respond only briefly here, but not continually. I feel I have earned more respect than I was given during our exchange, and your attempt to control my attempted contribution was counterproductive and rude. I felt you completely disrespected my time and input, and obstructed getting any actual work done, like a usable draft of a letter with intact grammar and good structure, while insisting on repeating the same points and demanding that I listen to you, as you planned to exit, without providing a sensible explanation for your assertions. I canceled other pleasurable engagements that evening to help with this effort, drove to the library for internet access, and was the only actual collaborator present and working with you. I continued to work for some hours after you absconded. Now I'm subject to berating for struggling to get quiet time to join Jitsi on time, when your primary collaborators didn't show up at all. I will not participate in further exchange about this unless these points can be addressed In person rather than over text. It doesn't feel appropriate for you to leave a conversation, essentially hanging up on me after demanding a 10:30 deadline, which I nonetheless attempted to honor with an improved draft, and then send me an essay outlining your grievances in response to my good natured attempt to rebuild rapport and not further inflame the situation. I cannot participate in those kinds of patterns via online only communication that in my experience seem to rarely lead to resolution and almost always make things worse. So I'll see you when I see you.

Also @ellewritestales I did not consent for you to respond to my DM with a post here, and since you excluded it, I will reproduce it below:

To @ellewritestales: "You'll find meeting notes, and a revised draft in the channel. I trust we'll find space and then time to mend any friction or hard feelings from the stress of todays meeting. I trust we're both tring to contribute, and both have well validated frustrations, and both want to get a good letter out and good money in the door. Beyond this draft, I'm not sure I can be of any more help unless answers to standing questions about our platforms and services are provided. For the next round, I can certainly, with those resources enabled, be much more effective, and not leave you at the last minute to do everything. I appreciate your efforts. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18Rlgnka331rpTp7Wx1wgcfUGPj8A_Jd-31dm5ujXFh0/edit?usp=sharing"

As for Ahn : they were not in frame, and I could neither hear them or see them. They also seemed to make no offering to the exchange and could barely have found a moment when you or I were not attempting to work out what to do next. It's disingenuous for you to implicate me in somehow disregarding their presence when you were in control, with a single laptop, of what I could, from remote, appreciably perceive in the room. So I question your motives here and while I want to assume goodwill and a willingness to get work done, it seems you are simply upset and seek to make that widely known. I hope my editing of the letter was useful, otherwise I'm signing out of fundraising-wg for projects with less friction and more liberty to contribute.

Justin, you disrespected me and Anh on that call. You knew she was there, I introduced you when you arrived and she was on screen then and several times during call. How you treat people is more inportant than how you edit letters so, no, your contribution was not helpful, clouded as it was by your rudeness. Bravespace is where Noisebridgers work out differences, not private texts. I have not responded to your private text. I ignored it.

You are not addressing the issues I raised, instead playing the victim and trying to pull this out of the public channels proper for this discussion in this venue. I demand an additional week of disengagement. Reconciliation will require mediation.

I spoke with Ahn at NB yesterday to apologize and they said they did not feel offended. They also left before I did, and before Elon had input. I won't engage here on this but I welcome conversation in person. Your motivations remain unclear to me, and unproductive nor helpful to repair.

I'm happy to give you space. I disagree with your inflammatory tactics and I distrust your efforts here as being poorly considered and motivated.

When you're ready to speak in person with a third party, give me a few options for times and days and I'll do this work with you.

Stop talking to me J, not here or anywhere else. Disengage for a week, starting yesterday.

Disengaged. Means: don't respond (that's you) That doesn't mean you get to have the last word or make accusations without response. I've been respectful and responsive to your wishes Disengage means you walk away. My last message was an invitation for you to connect when you're ready. That is all. Moving along…

[Attachment: forwarded bravespace guidelines]

Disengage means leave me alone. It is not a request for you to mansplain Noisebridge to me.

Hi @ellewritestales, I'd appreciate you replacing "mansplain" with another term that isn't, you know, sexist as fuck. Sexism is frowned upon, and dare I say, _not tolerated_, at Noisebridge. Thanks for your understanding.

That is an interesting take on the term, @fineline. Most consider it an anti-sexist term used to help people who are out-of-line to understand that their behavior is falling into a mysoginistic pattern, namely condescendingly educating a woman in conversation on an issue the woman would be reasonably expected to already know, or even know better, than the person engaged in the condescension. When Rebecca Solnit described the pattern that the term was coined to describe in her essay "Men Explain Things To Me" (now in book form, let me know if you want to borrow my copy) ten years ago, it was of men who are rudely condescending to women, so, I guess, in a sense, that makes it sexist in that it has been generally applied to men but, today, in this more gender fluid time, not always. In my friendship groups, it is used for men or women and applied to others, but even to oneself. Since all of us in Western culture are saturated with the messaging of the patriarchy, correcting an individual man or woman for sexist language and actions is and should be welcome as a correction (as in, 'check your privilege.'), so thank you for making me think this out. I may be wrong. Let me think a bit on it before making a change. For instance, it will be hard to find a replacement term since no other word describes the hubris involved in responding to a woman who wrote "leave me alone" with the words, "you do not get the last word" and a long screed with quotes from an organization she has been an active participant in for more than a year in quite the same succinct way.