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.
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.