Jackie Danicki

Drama bores me these days, but I feel the need to say something about Ben Metcalfe dogging Mena Trott in public, then getting shy about it and claiming he was acting out of ‘compassion’. (I first read about this via David Tebbutt’s Register account of the incident, which makes Metcalfe’s actions seem more positive than Metcalfe’s own account does. For the record, here’s the speech that Metcalfe found so objectionable.) Here’s what I wrote at Metcalfe’s blog:

I wasn’t present for Mena’s speech, [but] I can imagine I probably would have at least rolled my eyes and cringed for her: Even if I totally agreed with what she said - and not having been there, I don’t know if I would or wouldn’t - I would have known it would go down like a lead balloon at Les Blogs.

If blogs have taught us anything, it is that ‘professional’ people are not one dimensional. When the COO of Sun Microsystems gets excited about blogging in a personal capacity at a conference, none of us would express shock. Neither should we be shocked when ‘professional’ people show their humanity in other ways. Indeed, we should be chuffed that they’re not putting on a slick, PR-vetted facade. I can’t believe that anyone would actually advocate the fortification of that facade of - ahem - bullshit.

Although I was angry that someone was trying to make me look foolish, my integrity told me not to do the self same thing back to her. Defending myself would ultimately mean attacking back, and I didn’t want to want Mena look a fool in return.

How noble of you. I understand from Adriana that you’re a really nice guy, Ben, but if you’ve got to tell people how much integrity you’ve got, what a no-shit kind of guy you are, and how compassionate your behaviour towards others is (after you’ve attacked them in public, that is), then your actions themselves aren’t really conveying that integrity, honesty, and compassion. Indeed, you didn’t seem too concerned about making Mena look like a fool when you were slagging off her speech as she gave it.

Again, I’m not sure if I would have agreed with Mena’s talk or not. I don’t really “care about the medium”, as Anil put it, as much as I care about what it can enable - for individuals, charities, and businesses. But I know that it’s a damn good idea not to say anything about a person on a blog - or in a blog’s comments - that you wouldn’t feel perfectly comfortable saying to their face. Somewhere in the few seconds between the public backchat and Mena calling you to account, your comfort level with blasting her changed dramatically. I think the level corrected itself; the real integrity, honesty, and compassion would be in admitting that.

Some equally sensible comments come from two people I don’t necessarily agree with a whole lot. Anil Dash - a Six Apart employee - comments at Workbench:

I don’t think the point is to always be nice, as Mena herself demonstrated. The point is to be accountable and responsible. Which I think Ben demonstrated when he stood up, by (1) not repeating “this is bullshit” and (2) asking to take the conversation offline.

Why, it’s almost as if he were saying some things are better said offline, in a format that’s not public and permanently archived, in order to be both more civil and more effective.

Funny, that.

And Dave Winer leaves this comment (which veers off-course when he criticises him for moderating comments) for Metcalfe:

I still think you’re a coward, and now you’re making excuses for it, and doing the usual coward thing — trying to shift the attention on someone else. If you were the tough guy you said you were, you would have stood up to Mena and said it was bullshit to her face. Or you could have said you’re sorry (and you still could).

I think the fact that you wouldn’t say it was bullshit when you had the mike means that you regretted saying it in the backchannel, btw. Take a look at it, and stop trashing Californians, I like Californians.

(Metcalfe’s ideas about how Americans converse are quite stunted, but he’s not letting go of them: Apparently California = America, and California is the root of all this. Go figure.)

As I said in my comment at Metcalfe’s blog, we do have a mutual friend in Miss Adriana. The only other time that he’d come up on my radar was when he got all up in Hugh McLeod’s shit. Adriana met him after that, and said that she liked him. I found this strange, since Metcalfe being nice in person didn’t seem to match with what I saw as lame online behaviour. Considering the change in his willingness to be a jerk to Mena once the format swiftly switched from (publicly readable) IRC to a ‘real life’ conversation, at least we can credit him with consistency.

And yes, I’d have absolutely no problem saying this to his face. In fact, I would love it if Adriana got us all together to talk about the difference between how we treat people online and how we treat them when we are face to face. It’s fascinating to me, as I know there are many differences in how I conduct myself online and in ‘real life’. (I’ve even had people accuse me of faking the irritated tone of my online rants, because “Someone so nice and smiley couldn’t possibly get that angry.” You wanna bet?) If Metcalfe is as big a fan of ‘rolling with the punches’ as he says he is, I think he’d be up for that discussion.

Filed under: Life