Public Statements: David Weingart and Worldcon 75

So, I’ve just become aware of the statement by Worldcon 75 over their parting of ways with former musical programming director David “filkerdave” Weingart. This statement was made as a necessary clarification of sorts after Mr. Weingart made a post sharing the story from his side.

I have neither skin in this game nor a horse in this race (nor even skin in a race or a horse in a game), but my impression is that the Worldcon statement aims to be fair and even-handed in a way that hardly anyone on any side of any divide will find very satisfactory, but which I think is appropriately neutral for the circumstances.

I have linked to the Worldcon statement, but I’m not linking to his, as it includes a screen shot that allows anyone with five seconds’ spare time and any inkling of how Twitter works to find either exactly the person whose name he’s redacting or someone unrelated that he has put in a very unfortunate set of crosshairs via the information he chose to release. I’ve seen enough internet detective-ing gone wrong that I have no absolutely opinion which is more likely to be the case; but in my opinion, both are deplorable.

I  don’t assume malice where foolishness will suffice, so I similarly have no opinion on whether this was careless or calculated, but either way, it’s irresponsible, and I will not point people to his statement under the circumstances. It is the impact of the actions that concerns me, not the intent of the actor. Mr. Weingart has decried people harassing the person who the information he shared leads to, but the information is still there.

When I read Mr. Weingart’s statement, I do think of other, similar situations where I have heard both sides, and so even though I don’t know the person he’s referring to and I don’t know what the person would say, my mind inevitably tries to fill in some blanks.

I think nearly every woman knows a woman who has been in those shoes, having to ask a man to back off with an ever-increasing level of bluntness while the man professes—very possibly honestly—that he doesn’t have any clue what could make her so uncomfortable, he was just… anything. He was just just. I think a lot of women have been that woman.

But as much as my mind leaps in that direction, I’m doing my best not to let it influence me here. There’s a lot of projection, and the other party in this has not to my knowledge asked for people to leap to their defense or make assumptions about them.

I don’t know David Weingart.

I do know a lot of people who know him, and who have worked with him and played with him, and I know he has a lot of support and a lot to offer any con. But having only heard his side of things, I have to say: at the point you realize it’s ridiculous and impossible to fulfill the functions of an office while abiding by principles you agreed to, you’ve actually realized it’s impossible to fulfill the functions of that office.

That’s the time to, if not step down, then at least step back. That’s when you find a partner, find a deputy, find someone who can go the places that you need to go and do the things that you need to do, without compromising the safety and peace of mind of the person you’d agreed was entitled to such.

Again, only going by his side of things… it doesn’t seem like push needed to come to shove here, especially since the all-important thing that brought him to the all-staff chat thing was so he could post a Babylon 5 video about Swedish meatballs? I’m sure there were legitimate reasons that the person in charge of music would need to interact freely with the rest of the staff, that seems obvious, but posting videos as a punchline to a light-hearted staff chat seems like a strange hill to die on?

I don’t know the other person’s side of things. I don’t want or need to know the other person’s side of things. But it seems like David Weingart knew his position was untenable, and he chose to continue hold onto it until someone else forced the issue.

I suspect the reason for this has something to do with the calculus of priority that we tend to make, in fannish and convention circles, which is: what I or this person has to offer in terms of experience, passion, and expertise is worth more than the comfort and safety of a few people. That’s how you look at a situation where you agree that a person has a right to be free of you and you realize that the position you accepted makes that impossible and you conclude that the solution is for everyone to just sort of power through anyway. You’ve made the decision that what you do for the con is more important than what you do to this individual.

I think no one would dispute to Mr. Weingart’s contributions to cons actually have been tremendously valuable. But as fannish circles and conventions embrace community standards and commitments to safety and work to be more welcoming to people from every walk of life, we really have to internalize the lesson that nobody is irreplaceable.

We need a culture where the kind of knowledge and experience that a seasoned music director brings to the table is shared more widely rather than concentrated in a few seasoned hands, where no one is ever faced with a situation of, “Well, sure, if this person is in this place, it’s going to be a problem, but who else is going to do it?”

Even if he’s 100% right that this is just bad optics, even granting he’s 100% right that the restrictions he’d have to agree to would prevent him from doing his job, we can’t agree to treat women’s (and others’) safety concerns seriously right up until the moment that it’s inconvenient. That’s not how it works.

All of this is based solely on Mr. Weingart’s charaterization of events. To read the comments from Worldcon 75’s Facebook account on their statements, there is a somewhat different picture. Where Mr. Weingart talks of innocently joining a general purpose staff chat forum, Worldcon 75 points out that he was specifically jumping on threads created by the person he’d agreed to have no contact with, posting in them multiple times. That seems to shade things a bit differently than the picture he paints, to be honest?

But again, they’re trying very had to be evenhanded, and so am I. Per his own account, David Weingart recognized that he could not function under the strictures of the principles he’d agreed to. If it’s a shame he was fired, then the shame is that he made them do it instead of finding a solution to the impasse he recognized or stepping back.

Addendum:

Wow. As I was in the process of finalizing this, Mr. Weingart posted some emails he had sitting around to validate his version of events. It includes the same screenshot, sadly, with the same telltale trail of identifying breadcrumbs. If you want to find more about this, it’s not going to be hard with Google, but I just can’t in good conscience send people there directly.

All I’ll say about the emails is: I don’t know what the takeaway we’re supposed to get from them is, but it’s not a good look. I think if I had seen them before I wrote this post, I would have taken a very different tone and tenor.

Edit: 

A previous iteration of this post spelled Mr. Weingart’s name incorrectly. I’m only slightly acquainted with him under his nomme des tubes of filkerdave and did not know his full name before. I apologize for the error.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Well, Worldcon 75 has clarified a few things.

It seems that the precipitating event was not just that David Weingart posted once in a public forum that the other staffer came into while he was posting there. The post he showed a screen shot of was him replying in a thread that the other staffer had originally made, and he continued to post a total of five times in that thread, presumably four of them after that first post which he maintains he regretted and would have deleted if he could?

It’s not clear if the one comment he shared on his blog is the first or last one, or one in the middle, but either way, these are salient details he left out of his account, and that’s troubling.

His defenders—possibly not knowing these details, as they heard his side of the thing first—have chosen to focus on the fact that it was a public forum (at least, public within Worldcon staff) and a fairly trivial, lighthearted post, wondered at what they see as the absurdity of expecting him to know that this would constitute contact.

Well, call me kooky, but replying to a post made by the person he’d agreed not to contact seems like a pretty clear-cut instance of contact to me?

I mean, with a lot of forum software, that generates an automatic notification (meaning even if the person hadn’t been active in the thread lately, they would have received a notice that the person they wished to avoid was apparently talking to them), and even in the absence of that, I think it’s generally understood that when you reply to someone’s post, you’re jumping into a conversation with them even if you’re not speaking to them directly?

Maybe he doesn’t understand that netiquette. Maybe he didn’t know who made it. There’s no point guessing about what he knew when or what he meant by it. It’s entirely possible it was done in all innocence, of course, and Worldcon in their communications with him (as divulged by him) acknowledged that the contact may have been accidental. They just wanted him to take responsibility for it. The salient portions of the email exchange, listed on his blog, is this (bolding mine, italics indicate David is quoting Worldcon’s emailed question):

1) Do you acknowledge that you broke your agreement not to interact with [name redacted] (even if accidentally)?

No. I acknowledge that interacting in that thread at that time gave the appearance of such (and, as I said previously, if there was a way to delete the comment, I’d have done so the moment I noticed). I realize this may seem like hair splitting, but I think it’s important to note the difference between accident and breaking an agreement. The latter has (and should have!) consequences. The former, not so much.

David Weingart is rejecting the framework where an accidental breach matters and insisting that accidents should not have consequences (i.e., punishments, to his thinking). He, like a lot of his defenders, seems to be treating this as a criminal matter rather than interpersonal one. Worldcon 75’s concern here is that their staff are able to function and get along, not to see justice done. Even the code of conduct they have been preparing for the con itself (and are now reprotedly prioritizing finishing ahead of schedule, to address issues like this) is about safety, not justice.

But accidental conduct can certainly have consequences for others, and there’s no reason it should not have consequences in the sense of changes made to prevent the accident from reoccuring. These consequences are not a punishment; they are consequences, but they’re not a punishment.

A lot of people are responding to Worldcon 75’s statement and clarification demanding, in effect, that they prove the charges they have made if they are going to punish David Weingart and drag his name through the mud. But he, not them, put his name out there and attached it to this mess. They can’t retract his post. They have made no accusations except that he had (possibly accidental) contact with someone he had promised not to have contact with, and the bare facts of that are not in dispute. They have levied no punishment against him; letting him go was not a fine or penalty they handed down, but the consequences of his unwillingness or inability to do the work he’d volunteered to do under the general circumstances necessitated by the situation.

And while his defenders want the con to prove that the “no contact” rules were justified, he himself had agreed that they were necessary. As he points out repeatedly, he went to the con leadership to make sure it could be arranged in the first place. He seems in his public posts to be pretty confident that it’s only because he did this that there were any rules, but I don’t think we have sufficient information to conclude this is true. Nor do we have any need or any right to be privy to what concerns the other party might have brought to the con, or what arrangements they requested for their safety.

Regardless, though, he had agreed to abide by the simple principle of no contact. He broke that in a very direct way, accident or not, and reacted defensively (bordering on hostilely in my opinion) when asked to take responsibility for that.

His defenders are saying “ALL THIS FOR A VIDEO” and “ALL THIS FOR A PUBLIC POST IN A PUBLIC FORUM” and “ALL THIS FOR A CONVERSATION ABOUT MEATBALLS”, but it seems shocking to me that they can’t understand that no contact means no contact, that he agreed to no contact, and that… well.

Again. He’s not on trial for harassment. He’s not on trial for anything. There’s no need to quantify what his apparent attention to this person was beyond the fact that it was unwanted, and that he agreed not to give it.

But when someone is accused of stalking or harassment, there’s this semantic game that they often play, where they were just. If someone is stalking someone by following them home, they are just walking on the sidewalk, and there’s not a law against walking on the sidewalk now, is there? Of course there isn’t. People walk on the sidewalk every day.

If someone is sending harassing emails… why, are we saying it’s against the law to send emails? There’s no law against sending emails. Everybody sends emails. You can’t call sending an email harassment, can you? I’m just sending emails.

The thing is: there’s no such discrete, distinct action as “stalking” or “harassment”. These things, they are patterns of behavior, and the individual behaviors that make up the patterns may be benign in a vacuum, certainly may be legal, and absent the context of them being unwanted and/or repeated and/or in some way menacing, there’s nothing wrong with them.

I’m sure some of David Weingart’s defenders are parents of children, or have themselves been children. Well, surely we have all encountered the child who, when told to keep their hands to themselves, plays the game “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you,” right?

And we all agree: there’s no rule against not touching someone.

But we all know: you can not touch someone in a way that is distinctly annoying and jerky.

None of this is to push any kind of motive on David Weingart’s specific conduct. I don’t know his heart. I don’t know his mind. I don’t know him.

But I find it ridiculous that grown adults are employing the rhetoric of “How can you kick a man out over meatballs?”, as if they honestly believed that was the issue.

In my previous post, I said Worldcon 75 has been very even-handed in their post. With the extra context they have since clarified, I will say that they have been remarkably even-handed. He replied five times in one day to a post made by the person he’d promised not to contact, on a forum he had otherwise ignored completely the whole time? That’s. Okay. They acknowledge it could have been accidental. I know stranger things have happened. But let’s be honest… that sounds deliberate, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t mean it is deliberate, of course.

But in this year of all years, no one on the internet can pretend they don’t understand the concept of “bad optics”. It looks deliberate.

And deliberate or not, it had consequences.

When he was not prepared to accept them, that, too, had consequences.

It’s a sad, unnecessary end to a sad, unnecessary story, but he has no one to blame but himself for it.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.