An open letter
Michele Kipiel PublicSeen by 71Dear fellow members,
the events that unfolded over the past few days have put our cooperative to the test, and we failed miserably.
Many voices calling for change were silenced in the past, be it by negligence or by sheer lack of commitment by those, whose position of privilege allowed to disregard such calls. By failing to listen, we became the people MLK warned us about: the white moderates who are more devoted to order than to justice.
We wasted precious time and energy in endless debates about trivial details, calling for the creation of ever new committees and processes, and we eventually lost sight of the only true reason our cooperative came to existence: to wrestle control of our social media out of the hands of the rich, white, capitalist elite.
I am writing this letter to extend my personal apologies to all the people who felt betrayed by our failure and to promise them I am here to put my energy, time, skills and reputation on the line to repair this institution and turn it into a place where they will be safe again. A place for them to call home.
But promises are not enough. Words, however strong or emotional, are but empty utterances if they are not followed by swift, honest, transparent action guided by total commitment. And, with your help, I intend to trigger a new course that will shake social.coop at the foundations and turn it into something we will be proud of for years to come.
First of all, I invite all those who revel in relativistic attitudes towards racism, sexism, homo/trans-phobia and any other form of bigotry to instantly leave the cooperative and never come back. You are not welcome, and you will never be.
Second, I propose we close down registrations for all the time it will take us to heal our cooperative. This might sound like an aggresive move, but I believe it’s the only reasonable thing to do in this diffucult moment. A joint statement will replace our homepage for the time the instance will be closed, to inform people about our struggle to improve.
Third, we will follow the advice of those fellow members who chose to weather the storm with us despite being part of those groups we failed to protect in the first place. I will not name names here, but if you have been involved in the chat, you know who I am talking about.
We shall reboot the cooperative with a core group of collaborators, deliberately chosen, and not all white men. I invite all men, including myself, to take a back seat in this process unless explicitly asked by the core group.
We shall make sure we have social infrastructure in place for handling conflict and abuse before launch, including a rock-solid code of conduct that will state our absolute rejection of any form of hate speech, racism, bigotry and *phobia front and center.
We shall grow our core user base deliberately, in small groups, and attempt to tap more diverse networks, to combat the network effects that brought social.coop on the brink of collapse
We shall make sure all the skills and resources needed to maintain the organization are in place from the start and focus on sustainability. We can never find ourselves again in the situation where a single member leaving or being overwhelmed with external responsibilities exposes the instance to the risk of downtime, poor performance or sluggish maintenance.
We will make sure at least one of the core collaborators is an experienced community manager, with previous experience handling diverse, international communities across many timezones.
I chose to stay because I believe we can do much, much better than we did so far, and because I am deeply committed to the idea of platform cooperativism as a means to achieve liberation, justice and equality for all.
At the same time I am painfully aware that my position of absolute privilege, which I am granted under the current capitalist partiarchy, puts me at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to understading the needs of those who are oppressed by the same system.
My position in the new social.coop will therefore be that of an enthusiastic contributor and ally to those who will be part of the core group and nothing more, unless explicitly asked for, as intellectual honesty demands I give up any position in which I could wield even the slightest bit of power.
With respect, hope and unchanged enthusiasm,
MK
EDIT 02/09/18: replaced "take the instance off-line" with "close down registrations" as many members reported it was misleading and suggested we were going to shut down completely.
On "not getting it." Some of our members have experience in cooperatives, and some in intersectional feminist activism, but it seems that very few have experience in both. While the two are largely compatible, the language and assumptions of those communities can be quite different.
For me it started when I saw posts that seemed to come from a different SNS culture, more combative, judgmental, polemical. Lots of use of ALL CAPS to make points. Not having been a Twitter user, it may be unfair of me to see this as typical of twitter. In any case, I had to learn lots of new terms for bad behaviour (edgelord, for example).
At the same time, one person with whom I had some dialogue, trying to understand what seemed to me to be a belligerent mode of communication, seemed to assume SC was a traditionally run instance, with admins who ran everything and needed to be held accountable, and members not responsible for admin, operations, governance, etc.
So our delay in adopting a CoC (which was actually in the process of approval and ahead of the schedule we set for ourselves) was not seen charitably as a weakness of a highly collaborative and inclusive process with multiple revisions, but as careless disregard and failure to protect members.
The other major condition that favored a blow-up was our delay in making specific proposals for equity and inclusion in operations -- something that a few of us had discussed, drafted, and set aside temporarily in order to focus on Ops Teams and the CoC.
(Note: I do not like the practice of attributing actions and views to "people" or "some people" -- it can be wildly misleading, but I don't want to put people on the spot. Ask me if you want reference to specific toots.)
This is Doug Belshaws post about the controversy surrounding him:
Many of these letters and messages are too long, and appear to me as a lot of first-world, white-people navel-gazing. They make it hard for people to get involved and are not really productive. It's a quiet "Tyranny of Structurelessness."
If we are a community and a cooperative, we have a responsibility towards others' time to be clear and to the point. I'm grateful to those who work hard at that and come up with viable solutions. Many of us work and organize AFK and are not online to follow all discussions.
After reading this whole thread, I still have no idea what all this drama is about.
I don't mean to say that the hurt is illegitimate (far from it), but just that it would be good to know what this is all about.
@nev, who is busy with IRL political stuff right now, is compiling a record of the various issues that led to the sense of crisis from which we are emerging.
Thanks so much for the response! Looking forward to that work then, will be great to read to get a better idea.
There were other simultaneous aspects:
- The straw poll for creating a steering committee, which some members objected to strongly, seeing it as a potential failure of the direct-democratic principle, and therefore a red line
- Our problems upgrading quickly to a recent version of Mastodon with the moderation features other site admins were requesting, resulted in blocks (or threats of blocks) from them
- The acrimonious atmosphere, assorted resignations, and hasty accusations of "not getting it" or "dragging feet" making some members feel unwelcome and/or unwilling to engage
- The enormously significant resignation of Mayel and his request to vacate his server space within a month (I infer this was partly because of the straw poll, but I suspect all the above contributed, and he had been trying to step away for some time.)