“Maybe I should just revert your reverts.”
“I hope you don’t.” She knew how to have this argument. She kept eye contact. He was young, a recent walkaway, with pent-up freak that went with the territory. There was no percentage in meeting his freak with her own.
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be constructive. The point is to find something we can be happy with. Revert-wars don’t produce that. At best, that’ll get us to spending all our time reverting each other. At worse, it’ll turn into a war to see who can make the codebase harder for the other to modify.” She had a sheet of insulating honeycomb on her workbench and the sealant was drying lumpy. She grabbed a spongy brush and spread the lumps. “You want to see this place get built? Me too. Let’s figure out how. You could start by reviewing the old discussions and checking out how the decision got made. Then make your own arguments. I promise to read them in good faith.” This was a mantra, but she tried to imbue it with sincerity. He was tweaky. She didn’t want to freak him. She didn’t even want to talk to him.
He sea-lioned her at dinner. That was before the kitchen was finished and they made do with primitive stuff, flavored, extruded, cultured UNHCR refu-scops. Scop-slop on a shingle, with everything you needed to keep going and a wide variety of flavors, but no one mistook it for food. She made space for him on the bench beside her and passed him the water jug—they were using solar pasteurizers, big black barrels that used heat-exchanging coatings to get the water up to pathogen-killing temperatures. It gave the water a flat taste. She used sprigs of mint to cover it. She offered him some from a plant she’d picked before the dinner bell rang.
He swirled it around her water and ate scop, which he’d taken in a chewy nacho-cheese briquette, so sharp-smelling it almost masked his sweaty funk. Baths were hard to come by in those days, but not that hard. She tried to think of a polite way to show him how the wash-up worked, without creating any interpretive room to construe it as a sexual invitation.
“You get that reading done?”
He nodded and chewed. “Yeah,” he said. “I ran stats on the repos. You’re an order of magnitude head of the pack, massive power-law curve. I had no idea. Seriously, respect.”
“I don’t look at stats. Which is the point. I couldn’t write the whole thing on my own, and if I could, I wouldn’t want to, because this place would suck if it was just a contest to see who could add the most lines of code or bricks to the structure. That’s a race to build the world’s heaviest airplane. What does knowing that one person has more commits than others tell you? That you should work harder? That you’re stupid? That you’re slow? Who gives a shit? The most commits in our codebase come from history—everyone who wrote the libraries and debugged and optimized and patched them. The most commits on this building come from everyone who processed the raw materials, figured out how to process the raw materials, harvested the feedstock, and—”
He held up his hands. “Okay. But come on, maybe you didn’t do all the work, but you’re doing more than anyone. Why shouldn’t the community honor that?”
“If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good at it as someone who does it for internal satisfaction. We want the best-possible building. If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgment, we invite game-playing and stats-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat everyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we’ll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”
He nodded but wasn’t convinced. She thought about saying, “I put in more work than anyone, so by your lights that means I should be in charge. As the person in charge, I say that the person who does the most shouldn’t be in charge, so there.” It made her smile, and she saw him looking embarrassed and remembered being a noob who didn’t know what she was doing or if she should be doing it, feeling judged.
“Don’t take my word for it,” she said. “Reopen the discussion, make your arguments, see if you can convince other people. Shift the consensus.”
“I’ll think about it.” She knew he wouldn’t. The idea that there wouldn’t be leaders in the race to build a leaderless society offended him in ways he wouldn’t let himself understand.
Three weeks later, they were locked in a revert-war that shook the B&B down to its literal foundations.
Jackstraw trawled every collaborative building project on the net for gamification modules. There were plenty—badges and gold stars, the works of amateur Skinners convinced you could build the ideal society the way you toilet-trained a toddler: a chart on the wall with a smiley sticker next to every poopy-diaper-free day.
The results from these experiments were impressive. If you wanted to motivate people at their most infantile level, all you needed was to hand out sweeties for good children, and make naughty ones stand in the corner. He’d put together links to videos and analytics reports from the most successful.
At first, Limpopo was careful to keep her rebuttal style to the non-antagonistic “good faith” voice that was the sure-fire winner in walkaway arguments. She’d carefully ignore the emotional freight of his words, reading them three times to ensure she caught every substantive crumb in the screeds, and replied briefly, comprehensively, and without a hint of contempt.
He didn’t know when he was beat. It was like arguing with a chatbot whose Markov chains were entangled in the paternalistic argot of prison wardens and unlicensed daycare operators. She’d calmly demolish his arguments every day from Monday to Friday, and on Saturday morning, he’d pull out Monday’s arguments again, like she wouldn’t notice.