I really don’t intend to keep talking about this David Weingart situation, in no small part because at this time there isn’t actually any situation, just an increasingly labored post-mortem on one, but there are a few more things that came up over the weekend that I think I’m going to wrap up here under the heading of “final thoughts”.

First, there is a lot of reason to believe that there is a generational/internet literacy gap at work here. A lot of people (himself included) didn’t understand how his posts could possibly lead anyone directly to the party whose identity he was ostensibly protecting, while some of us—myself included—immediately spotted it at first glance. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that anyone reasonably internet savvy could find a person who fits the bill in five seconds.

This gap in reactions speaks to a gap in understanding of how the internet works, and in my experience, people who don’t “get” social media on that level have a hard time understanding how conduct that on the surface seems utterly benign and friendly can be menacing or creepy.

After all, it’s “only the internet”, right?

In the same vein: a few of his defenders have taken umbrage with references to Weingart’s “followers” (in the sense of social media subscribers), thinking that it’s ascribing a leadership position to him and a subordinate/minion status to them. They don’t seem to be aware that the term lacks those connotations when it is used in this fashion, dans la belle internet.

“Follower” in this sense is the one-directional version of saying that two people are “friends” on a given site. Just as being “friends” on a social site does not necessarily mean everything connoted by “friend” in a wider context, neither does saying someone is “following” someone on social media share the wider meanings of “to follow” A better synonym for “follower” than “minion” would be “subscriber”.

Why don’t we just say “subscribers”? Because that’s not the word that’s come into common usage in this context. It’s “follower”.

A similar point of contention has flourished around the use of the word “reply”.

As I noted in my previous post, David Weingart’s entry into the all-staff chat forum was to post a reply in a conversational thread started by the staffer he’d agreed to not contact in any way. Now, as he contends and no one that I have seen denies, he made his initial comment in reply to another commenter in that thread.

The pro-Weingart position seems to be that as long as he was affirmatively replying to a specific person in the thread, no one can say that he was replying to the original poster, and thus there was no contact.

But his comment (and every other comment posted into the conversation) are, perforce, also replies to the initial starting point. Not in the colloquial conversation sense, but in the internet messaging sense. It’s like replying to a comment someone else left on a Facebook post; you’re also replying to the Facebook post.

I don’t know if the software in question uses such notifications, but under a lot of systems, the originator of the thread would have received a notification of his comment, which makes the contact that much more direct.

Now, an important nuance to keep in mind: none of this necessitates or implies that the contact was intentional! No one knows what David knew about the thread, the underlying system, its organization, etc. No one knows what he intended. We only have his own report to go on there, and honestly, I see no particular reason to disbelieve him. For the heinous crime of pointing out how internet replies work, I’ve been accused of “slandering” him and “heaping calumnies” on him, but I ascribe no motivations to him and my “accusation” consists of accepting at face value his own report that he innocently posted a video to a particular thread, with the added context from Worldcon 75 about who started the conversation.

But taking both sides at face value, we’re left with the fact that in replying to another commenter on the thread, he also replied to the person who made the thread.

This might well be a case of “you get it or you don’t”. People who understand how threaded comments/internet conversations/forum posts work get it. People who don’t, don’t, and if they’re sufficiently motivated by loyalty to a friend they see as being unfairly accused, they very likely won’t.

I see this alone as reason enough to back away and simply trust that people will think what they will. Language gaps like this are not unbridgeable, but they can’t be bridged by one side. There’s a saying about horses and water that applies here, and it applies doubly so when the horse really likes the other stream on the other side of a hillock and regards drinking from this stream here as treason against the other stream.

This brings me to my second point, which is the generational gap around priorities, which we might describe as a difference in opinion of what it means to serve a community: being loyal to that community’s most prominent and loyal existing members, or attempting to serve all members and potential members of the community equally.

As an example: another prominent filker, in posting what he no doubt considers a spirited defense of David Weingart and denunciation of Worldcon 75, has said words to the effect that the con has decided the filking community is not important or welcome.

I have to say, I fully understand the impulse to stand by your friend and your fellow community member. But casting this as an anti-filking decision, a conscious decision to exclude or attack filkers, is not a good look.

What’s the implication there?

That filkers in particular should receive special dispensations when it comes to their behavior?

I mean, imagine this wasn’t your good buddy Filker Dave in question, but… well… let’s say there’s a guy who goes by Filker Knave. Filker Knave is not Filker Dave. Filker Knave is a nice enough guy, but also a genuine creep. People have been warning each other about Filker Knave for years. Heck of a filker. Nice to his friends. Stand-up guy in a lot of situations. But even his friends know better than to leave Filker Knave alone with a woman.

Not that he means any harm!

He’s just socially awkward, you know?

So Filker Knave causes problems. He causes a particular problem for a particular staffer at a particular con. The con respects Filker Knave’s contributions and expertise (he’s a stand-up guy, apart from the whole “can’t be trusted around women” thing, you know) enough that they are initially willing to accept his help and they attempt to work with him to avoid the problem coming up, but eventually, perhaps inevitably, there is a parting of ways.

But Filker Knave has friends, many of them filkers. Even filkers who don’t know him personally know his friends, and there’s a lot of rallying around when they feel their community is under attack.

Meanwhile, there’s also… Regular Knave.

Regular Knave is a lot like Filker Knave, except not a Filker. He still has friends, his friends are all sure he’s a great guy, never seen him angry, wouldn’t hurt a fly, etc. But like Filker Knave, he causes problems when left alone with women. Like Filker Knave, he comes on too strong. Like Filker Knave and a lot of Knaves, he sort of relies on a sort of rules-lawyery legalism in place of any understanding of social appropriateness or nuance. (“She wasn’t saying no.”, “But she said I could drop by any time.”, etc.) He takes what we might call “plausibly deniable liberties” where he can be seen, and does worse where he can’t.

And while Filker Knave’s friends have a certain cachet in fannish circles, being respected filkers, Regular Knave’s friends are just run of the mill attendees of no particular standing.

And like Filker Knave, he causes problems that causes the con to seek a separation from him.

According to the “defense” of David Weingart’s filking friend, a convention that commits the sin of treating a Filker Knave the same as it treats a Regular Knave is making a horrible mistake and should expect to be penalized for offenses against the community.

In other words, according to this “defense”, David Weingart should be accorded special and preferential treatment because he is an important person in fandom. He should get consideration for being A Big Deal. The safety and security of the unnamed other staffer, being not such A Big Deal, should never have been given priority over his comfort and convenience.

The choice between having Filker Knave on staff or in attendance versus having any other random person on staff or in attendance should always fall on the side of Filker Knave, because Filker Knave is a filker, and an important person, and he has friends who matter. Regular Knave, not so much.

This state of affairs is very much the way things have gone in fandom for generations, I’m sorry to say. I’m less sorry to say that we’ve been moving away from that kind of thinking. This is why I applaud Worldcon 75’s decision in this matter. It reaffirms to me my general impression that the con’s leadership has their priorities straight and is working to make fandom better, safer, and more inclusive rather than deferring to “the way things are done”.

Now this is the point where David Weingart’s defenders pop up to say, “But he’s not a knave! How dare you call him a knave! How dare you make these comparisons and cast these aspersions!”

Well, here’s the thing.

I said this on Twitter, and it was one of the first things I said about his mess: you can’t prioritize safety in your community right up until the point that it becomes inconvenient for you or your friends.

David Weingart himself thought the other person’s feelings about him were valid enough that he insisted on only working for the con to the extent that it could be guaranteed the other staffer would not come into contact with him.

You can take it up with David Weingart if you think that’s unfair. Don’t ask the con to justify David Weingart’s decision.

He eventually used the word “sanction” to describe what the con chairs were asking him to do, and he spoke of consequences in terms suggesting he saw them as punishment, but all the con was doing from start to finish was trying to ensure that the state of affairs he had stipulated as necessary (no contact between himself and the other party) was actually observed.

I have seen a number of people saying things like, “I agree with believing the victim, but this is going too far because I know you David Weingart and I know you are a good guy.” And I’m not going to disagree with them in their judgment of their friend, because I don’t know David Weingart.

But go back and look at any case where someone is accused of harassment, stalking, abuse, or worse, and you will find their friends and loved ones saying the same thing. And most of them meant it. And most of them had the same kind of direct, firsthand evidence and strong personal intuition that it is guiding David Weingart’s friends.

Now! Important! I’m not saying “Therefore, this proves that David Weingart is blah blah blah blah blah.” The fact that his friends think he’s swell doesn’t prove anything other than the fact that, like most people on this planet, he’s swell to his friends.

Everybody defending him wants to argue about what’s “actionable”, as though this were a legal proceeding and a court were doling out criminal penalties. Well, in the sense of “what is firm evidence that can be acted on”, the people in you’re life whom you are good to saying that you are good to them is not actionable in the positive direction. It’s not relevant. Not admissible.

This is a difficult situation, and a real test of the priorities of a community. Trying to prioritize safety only in cases where the danger is provably real is like deciding to buckle your seat belt only when you know you’re going to get in a car crash. That’s not how safety works. If we could know when and where a car is going to actually crash, we wouldn’t need seat belts. We would just avoid the crashes.

If there were any real way—any—to know who the “good people” are and who the “creeps” are, to know who’s upstanding and who is just reasonably charming, we wouldn’t need things like codes of conduct or behavioral agreements or mediation between two parties. We’d just keep the creeps out and trust in the good nature of everyone else.

So what we do in a situation like this is, as I said, a test. David Weingart did a really good job of dealing with it, right up until the point where he felt he was either being accused of ill-intent (he wasn’t) or being asked to accept punishment for an accident (he wasn’t).

That he failed at that point isn’t necessarily a fatal stain on his character. I honestly think both he and the con deserve a certain amount of credit for trying so hard to make this work. And while I find some aspects of his responses since then a little unsettling, I still can’t say that my image of this man I don’t directly know has been indelibly stained.

My image of the fandom community subsets that have rallied around him, though, are taking a beating.

This brings me to my final point, which is: I’ve seen at least two people be shocked and repulsed to look around and realize that they are on the same side as Vox Day in this mess. You really shouldn’t. You’re very firmly in his ideological camp. At the point where you find yourself talking about “illiberals who insist they have a right to be free from anything that offends them” (when no one, and I mean no one, has claimed “offensiveness” as an, ah, offense), you might as well be standing in line to be one of his three or four hundred numbered minions.

Worldcon 75 definitely had some PR missteps in this, though I think even that is overblown. It’s easy enough to look at the blowback they got for addressing Weingart’s post and say they should have said nothing, or left his name and details out of it while acknowledging that the separation had happened, or whatever. Well, it’s easy to litigate a hypothetical.

But we, none of us, can ever know how we would actually have reacted, had things gone differently. We don’t know how we would have reacted, only what seems like the wisest course, knowing what we know now. It’s entirely possible that some or even most of the people now saying they should have said nothing would be saying, “It’s criminally incompetent that Worldcon hasn’t issued a statement! They should be addressing David’s charges! They’re not even defending themselves, so does that mean he’s right?”

The one thing that I think we can take away from this, from a PR standpoint, is that open comments do not lead to open communication. You can’t force people to understand a nuance they’re motivated not to see. You can dump information on the internet, but you can’t make people take it in and put it together. And I say this in response to both parties that have tried to tell their side, David Weingart and Worldcon 75. You can’t control what people take away from what you put out there. If there’s something you need to put out: put it out, and be done with it.

That said, my personal takeaway in all of this is that my faith in Worldcon 75’s leadership has not been in error. When faced with a difficult test, they made a decision that shows for all the world to see that their priorities are not in placating powerful and influential members of entrenched fan communities, but in preventing conflict and ensuring safety for all members of fandom.

Oh, and one final tangential point: I should address the obvious question by the 99.9% of people reading this who have no idea what “filking” is and are wondering if they dare Google it and should turn Safe Search on first, it’s, roughly, “fannish folksongsmithery”. Imagine troubadours who go from convention to convention singing creations in the vein of Weird Al’s Star Wars songs and you won’t be that far off.

And to whatever portion of the 00.1% of the people who already knew what “filking” is feel shocked and outraged that I said that 99.9% of people on the internet don’t know what filking is: sorry, but not sorry. When you live in a pond, you think the world is water. Doesn’t make it so. If frogs are a big deal in your pond, you will tend to assume frogs are a big deal everywhere. Doesn’t make it so.

Some people are saying that this brouhaha reflects poorly on Worldcon, but let me tell you: a whole heck of a lot of people, even people who go to cons, are hearing the word “filk” for the first time in a context where its meaning sticks, and are becoming aware that a “filking community” even exists, and man, this whole mess is not representing the filking community well.

And this is really all I have to say on the subject. This post is quite long, I suspect my longest yet on this topic, because I’m making a single post rather than addressing individual points individually.

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.

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.