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 pot-luck 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.
[VII]
LIMPOPO’S DIRTY SECRET was that she had been scraping the B&B’s production logs and dumping them into a homebrewed analytics system she frankensteined from the world of gamified motivational bullshit. Every now and again, she’d run the logs and look at how far ahead of everyone else she was. She especially liked to look at the stats charts when she lost an argument about how something could be done.
Not because it soothed her ego. It was weirder. When Limpopo lost an argument, the fact that she’d done more than the person she lost to felt great. Being a walkaway meant honoring everyone’s contributions and avoiding the special snowflake delusion. So losing to someone over whom, in default, she’d have rank to pull made her a fucking saint. No one was a special snowflake, but she was better at not being a special snowflake than everyone.
Looking at those charts gave her almost exactly the same feeling of shame and pleasure that she got from looking at porn. It was raw self-indulgence, something that exclusively fed her most immature and selfish desires. It was catnip for Limbic Limpopo, and the more she fed that greedy maw, the more she was able to tell it to shut up and let Long-Term Limpopo drive the bus. At least, that’s what she told herself.
Now he was called Jimmy and decked out in stuff that made goretex look like uncured rat-hides stitched with dried grasses. He was enjoying himself.
“You should see the numbers,” he said to his buddies. Unlike the B&B, who came in every shade, all of his friends were whities, except for one guy, who might have been Korean. “She’s the queen of this place.” He shook his head – his neck was bull-like, to match his cartoon biceps. “Shit, Limpopo, you really are the queen. From now on, you and a guest can stay here whenever, any room in the house. Full kitchen and workshop privileges. I want you to join our board. We need someone like you.”
Etcetera had been hanging back, breathing fast at first, then slowing. She wondered if he’d do something stupidly physical. That would be a waste.
There was a narrative she was supposed to participate in, a hole Jimmy made for her to step into. Either she threw her lot in and legitimized his coup – she doubted that he’d put store in that happening – or, better, make a stand, let him humiliate her the way she’d supposedly humiliated him. The only way to win was not to play.
She stood.
He tried to draw her by talking about how they’d expand capacity by separating leeches from leaders, take care of the craphounds by giving some beds to charity every month. She stood mute.
The longer she stood, the more freaked Jimmy was. The longer she stood, the more people drifted out to find out what was up. It was like a physical replay of the old online showdown.
“He just showed up and declared it a done deal,” said Lizzie, who’d been with the B&B since the beginning, hammering surveying stakes where the network told her. “No one wanted to fight, right? He had a stupid powerpoint with our stats, scraped off the public repos, showing everyone here would go on having the same privileges we’d always had, because we were putting enough work in.”
“Yeah,” said Grandee, who was short, old, and weird, but whom Limpopo liked because he was a good listener, with something broken inside that she’d never asked about but felt protective about nonetheless. “He talked about waves of new walkaways headed this way, a massive uptick that would overwhelm us unless we had some system to allocate resources. He had videos about places where it had happened.”