This all happened in the commentary of code-pulls and reverts, making it more stupid. The audience for the debate grew as word spread. There was global attention, and not just from walkaways. Back in default, some people kept an eye on walkaway nets, treating them as exotic spectacle, like listening in on Al Shabaabbies complaining about the cumbersome reimbursement procedure their Wahabi paymasters imposed.
With this global audience kibitzing and sniping, Limpopo tore Jackstraw a comprehensive new asshole. She called him on every crumb of bullshit, found crashed projects where gamification had run wild, so financialized that every incentive distorted into titanic frauds that literally left structures in ruins, rotten to the mortar. They were existence proof of the terribleness of his cherished ideas. She pointed out that getting humans to “do the right thing” by incentivizing them to vanquish one another was stupid. She found videos of Skinner-trained pigeons who’d been taught to play piano through food-pellet training and pointed out that everyone who liked this envisioned himself as the experimenter—not the pigeon.
It got ugly. She’d bruised his ego, met his condescension by treating him to a slice of the assholery he’d directed her way. He lost it. Comprehensively bested, he went negative.
The problem was Limpopo’s vagina. It made her unable to understand the competitive fire that was the true motive force that kept humans going. Competition carved the gazelle as a perfect complement to the leopard. Competition whittled the fangs and leaps of the leopard into the gazelle’s inverse. Competition sorted the performers from the takers. It let the visionaries whittle their project into a masterpiece.
Limpopo’s femininity made her too weak to grasp this. She wasted time with talk-talk about making everyone happy, when the right answer was there in the data, objectively showing which path to take. He wrote about this “weakness” of hers like it was a mental illness, conjuring imaginary “four-sigma hackers” who wouldn’t contribute to the B&B if they were prohibited from publishing performance stats.
He located the origin of this dysfunction in Limpopo’s sex. She had a clutch of “alpha bitches” who kept the group in check. Her cult-like leadership of this coven extended to control over their menstrual cycles, which had undoubtedly converged on the powerful uterine signals from Limpopo’s unspeakable wet places.
Limpopo was proud of herself in that moment. She distinctly felt her mind split in two as she read the vicious attacks. One half, “Limbic Limpopo,” hyper-violent unfiltered id, snarled. It literally made her heart thud and her hands and jaws clench. When she consciously stopped it, she ached all down her neck. Limbic Limpopo wanted to kick Jackstraw in the balls. It wanted to wikify every vicious line and add [citation needed] tags to the insults, signposting them as indefensible ad hominems. Limbic Limpopo wanted to haul Jackstraw out of his bed—a bed that she had assembled and painted—and throw him out buck naked, locking the door and burning his stinky pack of gear.
But that was only half of her reaction. Long-Term Limpopo was just as insistent in her internal chorus. This made her proud. Long-Term Limpopo had always been there, but usually Limbic Limpopo shouted so loudly that she couldn’t hear Long-Term Limpopo until stupid Limbic had made a mess.
Long-Term Limpopo pointed out that the debate was a huge time-sink because the issues were complicated and boring. Getting people who wanted to build an inn to care about the reward-strategy philosophy was like getting people who were excited about a potluck dinner to care about whether the room was painted with acrylic or oil. Dinner, not the box it came in, was the point.
This was different. Getting people to care about substantive stuff was hard, but procedural issues were much simpler. As esoteric as the subject of debate was, the form of the debate—the frank misogyny, the crude insults—could be parsed from orbit. When they were arguing about applied motivational psychology, it was hard to tell whom to root for. Once he outed himself as an asshole, the issue clarified.
Long-Term Limpopo pointed out that she’d already won. All she had to do was refrain from descending to Jackstraw’s level. Even as Limbic Limpopo made her blood thunder, she gave the wheel to Long-Term Limpopo, who pointed out that this wasn’t an appropriate way to conduct a technical discussion.
The reaction was swift. Even the people who’d taken Jackstraw’s side in earlier debate hastily moved to distance themselves. The denunciations followed, and within an hour, someone called an emergency f2f meeting for on-site B&B contributors. Limpopo looked out her window and saw people grimly erecting a big spring-open tent they used when they had to shelter raw materials, while a bucket-brigade passed chairs from within the half-built B&B.
One of the B&B’s game-changing tools was “lovedaresnot,” which they’d imported from a long-defunct *-leaks collective that imploded when its leadership got outed taking money from a media conglomerate to give it preferential access to stories. The leakers had had terrible leadership, but they had a good dispute-resolution system in lovedaresnot.
The core idea was that radical or difficult ideas were held back by the thought that no one else had them. That fear of isolation led people to stay “in the closet” about their ideas, making them the “love that dares not speak its name.” So lovedaresnot (shortened to “Dare Snot”) gave you a way to find out if anyone else felt the same, without forcing you to out yourself.
Anyone could put a question—a Snot Dare—up, like “Do you think we should turf that sexist asshole?” People who secretly agreed signed the question with a one-time key that they didn’t have to reveal unless a pre-specified number of votes were on the record. Then the system broadcast a message telling signers to come back with their signing keys and de-anonymize themselves, escrowing the results until a critical mass of signers had de-cloaked. Quick as you could say “I am Spartacus,” a consensus plopped out of the system.
Poor Jackstraw hadn’t known what hit him. Dare Snot was widely publicized at the B&B, but Jackstraw lacked the humility to understand why you might use it, rather than just blamming out your Big Stupid Idea and trying to rally everyone to the barricades. There was a lot Jackstraw lacked the humility to understand. He was one of those people—almost all of them young men, though not every young man—who was so smart that he couldn’t figure out how stupid he was.
She put on fresh clothes—the new goretex printer/cutter was up, and it was a treat to step into something dry, breathable, and perfectly fitting whenever you wanted. She went to the meeting.
She didn’t have to say a word.
Ten minutes later, sputtering Jackstraw was shown the door and politely asked not to return. They filled his pack and gave him two sets of goretex top-and-bottoms. Anything less would have been unneighborly.