Cleaning Up After A Food Fight
The problem with flamewars is that everyone gets burned. As they say, fighting on the internet is for retards. Yet sometimes you still get into it. I did. I'm going to post a diary on MyDD that's about the issues at hand, but I figured that in the spirit of getting back to my autobio blog roots, I might as well write the whole thing up for y'all.
Preamble
On Monday, I engaged in a rather heated back-and-forth with Jerome Armstrong, co-author of "Crashing the Gate" and progenetor of MyDD.com, a political blog community which I frequent. Jerome is one of the real first-movers in the online poitics sphere, known in some circles as "the Blogfather" for the role he had in championing the format with/for the Dean campaign in 2002-03.
As a rule of thumb, you don't really want to pick fights with the Blogfather.
On the other hand, Jerome has some questionable habits and a rather prominent position in this world I inhabit, and to be honest I don't really believe that seniority or forst-mover status really earns anyone deference. You have a track record and a reputation, sure, but just because you did somehting first doesn't mean to do it best, or even well. You might have just been in the right place at the right time.
Furthermore, we've got a relatively short window right now before Campaign '08 ramps up in which to be constructively critical of our own operations. I didn't intend for my comment to turn into this big thing, and in fact there are plenty of other things going on now more deserving of scrutiny.
For instance, someone should ask some hard questions about the relationship between Blue State Digital and the DNC. They have shared key staff members over the past two years, which is ethically questionable even if the results have been objectively pretty good. Someone should really investigate whether the website John Edwards is currently using to support his OneCorps campaign is actually an accurate reflection of what the market can deliver for the $900,000 it reportedly garnered Plus3. Hint: not even fucking close.
Now is the time to ask these questions, because by this time next year we are going to have to campaign with what we've got. We need to make sure that campaigns are acting wisely in terms of the initiaves they pursue and the dollars they spend. We need accountability from the consulting class, and that includes internet/technology consultants.
Ideally, this new crew of professionals should be embracing this and welcoming a more open and transparent environment. It's particularly upsetting that the Blogfater doesn't seem to fit that description.
Finally I want to stress that I don't think Jerome has any nefarious political intentions. He's not a bad guy, and in the grand scheme of things we're on the same team, working in the same political movement and pushing similar technical innovations. It is in fact because of this that I posted the initial comment on MyDD that triggered everything else.
My Beef
In my humble opinion, Jerome Armstrong has a habit of taking credit for things he's been peripherially involved in, and for conveniently ignoring things which he can't claim any credit for.
Cite: mydd posts
In speaking to friends and colleagues, this attitude is reflected in real life as well as online, so I don't think it's some crazy bias on my part to bring this up.
But so what? A lot of people do this. Hell, I do it. This would be merely annoying if it weren't for the fact that a lot of people who control campaign budgets listen to what Jerome has to say. Because of this, and because we are on the same side, I do feel it's worthwhile and important to give pushback, especially because the narcissitic distortion field affects ones view of reality. As a result, poorer decisions are made.
Also, I really like MyDD. It is a great online political community, and I have a ton of respect for Stoller, Bowers and Singer for bringing that into being. I like it particularly because it's a peer community in tone, like the early days of dailykos before the natural hierarchies of something that scale emerged. I like it because there's mutual respect, and in that context Jeromes penchant for hype -- using the site as a marketing channel rather than as a community -- is all the more provocative.
The Post
In a comment asking what the big tech trends would be for 2007, Jerome mentioned OpenID -- an important and cool technical innovation which (like in most food fights) was quickly abandoned as a topic; we'll get back to it later though -- which he said, "We'll be rolling out in beta next month."
Maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but I said to myself, "that's bullshit. Campaigns need to know that OpenID is bigger than Jerome, otherwise they might just sit around and wait for his implementation or think he's the only one. I'm going to comment."
That's really how this starts. Innocent enough, eh? The self-correcting blogosphere at work. Oh man. If only it were that easy.
The Thread Begins
In response to Jerome's post I wrote this comment:
It's snarky; I'll admit that. However, the leftwing blogosphere and MyDD in particular are chock full of snark. It's how we roll. I never for a second thought that being a little uppity would really piss Jerome off like it did. At best I was hoping to take a poke at his ego, maybe make him think about using his perch to tell the bigger story rather than just hype his own work, and at the same time provide some valuable context for anyone who was listening.
This is where it gets interesting and out of hand. Very quickly, Jerome responded with a comment that was a little rude and contentious (while still nice and salesy). It read:
Uh, josh, don't be a dick. I'm obviously talking about the OpenID project on netroots.com that's going into beta this month. It's got little to do with me and more with all the bloggers that will enjoy being able to log on multiple sites.
If you want to do it instead, go ahead.
So I started to write a response to that in which I intended to try and explain my motive -- it wasn't "obvious" at all -- and also call out his use of "instead" as the close, because that's really not what all of this is about.
However, when I hit submit, it didn't work. I couldn't reply, and when I refreshed the page, I found out why: Jerome had deleted his rude comment and replaced it with something a little more witty:
omg, I offended you with syntax-- I shouldn't be surprised.
OpenID (which is rolling out this month in beta on netroots.com
Well, that's bad form. There's a preview button for a reason. I understand that Jerome is mindful of his public image and doesn't want to be seen calling his commenters dicks in public, but the thing is I read the comment. He said it to me. Message recieved. But then he retracted it, and to me in the moment that's actually more inflammatory.
So I started a new reply based on the new wittier response. And then I found THAT one didn't work either. Jerome had again deleted and reposted his response. This time he'd also edited the front-page post to include a specific mention of NetRoots which wasn't in the original, and then quoted the new information without noting anywhere that he'd added it after the fact:
In essence to the casual reader, this would make me look like an overly sensitive zealot who can't read, and also completely sidestepped the substance of my original comment. When I saw this, I got pissed.
Now, there's a great study about miscommunication [LINK] that recently came out that said you shouldn't email people when you're mad at them. This is good advice. You probably shouldn't blog either. However, I'm passionate about what i do, and this was really too much. It was such a sneaky thing to do, and made me look stupid. I couldn't let it go.
This Aggression Will Not Stand, Man
Thanks to page cache, I was able to get screenshots of the originals and upload them all to flickr. I then wrote a response that pointed out this comment-switching behavior and then basically let fly on my general grevances, outlining the danger of any site or technology or vendor becoming central, mentioning some of the schemes I'd heard before on how to profit on OpenID, and concluding with a sort of self-righteous note about his use of admin privileges. It's not my finest work, but it pretty clearly sums up my concerns.
It was also at this time that I posted on my own blog, in language that reflects the heat of the moment. My blog, unlike MyDD, is read almost exclusively by friends and family, and I did this basically to blow off steam and to give them a window into my world, not as an attempt to smear Jerome's character.
At this point there were a few other posts on MyDD. Trei/clockworks (who's also posted on my site) mentioned that he's the engineer for the project in question and that many of my concerns are, from his standpoint, unfounded. We continue to have a pretty civil conversation about this stuff, more of which I'll get into later.
A few others pop up specifically to defend Jerome, or to attack me, one of which had never commented before, another of whom has 5 or 6 comments which are spread out over the past two years. This is funny, because while these could be folks who got pulled out of the woodwork, it could also be Jerome asking other people to defend him, or even posting under another name (a.k.a. "sockpuppeting"). I have no way of knowing, but I want to call out to others that the first-time commenter is perhaps a little suspect. So I do it with a little humor: "Welcome to mydd; glad I could draw out your first comment. ;)"
This apparently pissed Jerome off even more. He responds with the following:
Shut up and quite being a dick on the site. I updated it using [], one of the joys of being a SU on scoop is that you can, instead of just editing the post, just click back and reedit it; and post it again.
Oh, and quit being a dick.
I read that and was pretty much done. I'd clearly touched a nerve. Jerome was upset and not making a lot of sense. So I went to reply to close it out, and once again discovered that the comment had been deleted and reposted. Apparently Jerome can't live with preview. But, knowing he is sensitive to his public image, I can understand why he might not want to be on record as calling me a dick twice and writing a somewhat incoherant response.
However, what he changed it to was just too sassy to ignore:
So I got the page cache of the original, uploaded to flickr, and posted my final comment on the thread:
After that, the conversation continued, somewhat more interestingly, on my own site, which I'd linked to. You can read the results of that here. Jerome's comments are revealing, if not helpful. Trei's comments are come interesting in terms of the story he tells about what they're doing on NetRoots.com.
Conclusions
It seems to me that I touched a nerve with my comment. Maybe Jerome does this switcharoo act all the time, but somehow I doubt it. It's got to be a lot of work if nothing else. I also discovered he sent me a couple of emails (which I didn't notice right away as I don't have him in my inbox and they got routed into my "not spam, but from an unknown sender" box) which were in the same semi-rude semi-coherant style.
What is actually going on with NetRoots is unclear at this point. Trei insists that it's an altrusitic volunteer project, but I have it from reliable sources that it's also part of Jerome's sales pitch. Time will tell, and in the end either way as long as it's good it's good.
I'm going to post on MyDD more about this, but I think really the upshot of this whole debacle is that we can have a conversation about openness. As a movement we're beginning to win, and we need to deal with the changes which come from success.