Disclaimers

In this collection of essays, I'm discussing what happened, in our online discussions and a few in-person meetings, up until late April. At that point, I got asked by Mitchell Baker (the chair of Mozilla) to leave a discussion. My understanding of what happened was that I was being told that by saying I felt like I was being treated as less than equal, I was hurting the community. I felt that the best thing for me to do if I couldn't speak freely about how I felt about how I was being treated was to leave the discussions. Before that, I was also beginning to feel that following the discussions was unacceptably emotionally draining for me anyway. So, it's possible that I missed out on important parts of the discussions. Nevertheless, I still have plenty to say about the portion of the discussion that I was part of.

I wrote most of this article before Mozilla released the new community participation guidelines, but nevertheless, I think that everything I talk about in this essay is still relevant. Guidelines can't instantly change culture; people have to change. Moreover, without significant personal change on the part of a significant number of individuals, it's unclear as to how such guidelines can be enforced.

Not everyone will agree with this essay. I'm sure that even many people who are close to me will find things in it to disagree with. That's okay. I'm not writing to persuade. Because I'm not writing to persuade, telling me that my tone is too hostile or that I would win over more allies if I wasn't so threatening is unnecessary. I'm not writing to win allies, and I get to decide what tone I want to use.

This is a long essay; if you read all the sections together, it's the length of a short book, somewhere around 41,000 words at my last count. Something that people often say when asked to think more about their biases is "if you don't educate me, how can I learn?" This is not the question it superficially appears to be: rather, it's a speech act that shifts responsibility for treating somebody equally from the oppressor to the oppressed (implying that oppression is the oppressed person's fault because they didn't teach the oppressor how not to be oppressive).

(If you find "oppressor" and "oppressed" to be strong words to use about interaction between people who are apparently equals, please read about why I use those words.)

Regardless, this collection of essays is my attempt to educate all of the people who ask to be educated, or who say that they just didn't know how to be respectful, so how could anyone have expected them to be respectful? You don't have to read it, but please, if you don't, don't say that nobody tried to educate you.

Why am I writing this?

• I'm writing for the same reason Chris Hedges said he was writing when an interviewer asked him, "I wonder if by calling people racist and imperialistic and illiterate, you run the risk of not being taken seriously by those you most want to reach." He said, "I'm not really interested in the impact. I'm interested in explaining as honestly as I can, regardless of the consequences, what I see." I'd be kidding you if I said I didn't care about what effect this essay has, and that I didn't hope it has one -- but the main imperative for me is to record what I've seen.
• I'm writing so that other people like me know they're not alone and that the thoughts they've had about their experiences don't mean they're deluded, or whiny, or are shamefully focused on the wrong things (which is to say, anything other than technical details).
• I'm writing so that my intense disapproval of how Mozilla leadership handled the crisis of March and April can be on the record, not lost to informal IRC /msg sessions and closed-door conversations.
• I'm writing so that people who are thinking about entering my profession know that there isn't a total code of silence when it comes to talking about cultural abuse and the way that tech cultures borrow techniques from the canon of intimate-relationship abuse in order to cover for it or maintain denial about it.
• I'm writing so I can present my thoughts in a permanent format that I've tried to make as organized and understandable as I can. By writing this essay and making it public, I can attain confidence that the ideas in it are out there and that I don't need to keep running over and over them in my head trying to come up with a better way to present them. If I know it's there and it's not going away, I can move on, and think about other things, like incremental recompilation or why tap water in San José tastes so weird.

But I'm not writing to persuade. If you disagree with me about facts, then we can have a conversation if you'd like. If you disagree with me about whether I've lived the experiences that I've lived, then I can't stop you from saying so. But in that case, I'm not going to engage with you about it. I have no interest in persuading anyone that I am human and real and have subjective experiences. I'm not interested because I know I can't do it, and I'd rather do something that I can achieve.

I'm also not writing this essay in order to advocate any single course of action about the problems I'm describing, because I don't have such a prescription. I'm writing it to reflect. If it makes you reflect too, then great; maybe you'll have more tools with which to think about what you are going to do to make things better (because it doesn't get better on its own) -- within Mozilla, if you're a Mozillan, or in your own communities, if you're not.

In social justice communities, it's customary to use trigger warnings -- abbreviated "TW:" -- for content that may cause some people to have an extremely strong and persistent emotional reaction. This entire essay may be triggering for its descriptions of emotional abuse and manipulation, as well as anti-queer rhetoric and apologism for such. In addition, I've tried to mark content that I think might cause a particularly negative reaction for some people with "Content note", a variant on "TW" that can warn for less intense reactions as well.