The Writing Is On the Wall; This Blog is Doomed!
NEWS/OPINION — The first site-wide, open-forum discussion on specific policy proposals looks promising. If all publicized policy proposal discussions go like this, I can retire, sit back, and just enjoy this whole thing as a spectator sport!
Since the start of the Town Halls coverage, I have been quietly listing the sequelae from the SCP staff’s frantic outpouring and over-bureaucratizing efforts intended to quell site unrest with them. That list, seen on this article, is now 12 items long. At the time of the post, it was 5. We could build an impressive phylogenetic tree from all the attempts at policy change meant to fix issues that came up in the first official Town Halls. Unfortunately, we’d see that we haven’t moved from that origin point very far, if at all.
One of those new proposals (critiqued in true critter-fashion, here) is a meta-proposal; to mirror any and all O5 Command policy proposals and discussions on the main site’s forums, where users have access to comment. These are, in essence, on-going Town Halls, just writ unofficially. In one sense, nothing has changed; users have always been able to voice, and directly to staff if they wished, their issues and commentary regarding on-air policy changes and discussions. What is different now, is that the staff have at long-last given the users a seat at the table. It is an optical concession, because that is the language of their power.
And wow. The first one was certainly a doozy. My first thought is that, honestly, this is going to make my life easier. The users are now able to do my job. If this keeps up, there will be no need for these NEWS/OPINION style blog posts. I’d rather it be decentralized; I think the users cumulatively can do a better job than I can by myself, as they demonstrate here.
A bit convoluted but follow me here; the policy for mirrored policy discussions from O5 onto the main site is starting off with a policy discussion, also birthed from the Town Halls, that would aim to assuage user frustration with Staff by adopting practices that offer more transparency. In this case, there is a new team created that would essentially take meeting minutes for staff chat. Given that transparency and distrust are the issues here, you can see how attempting to populate and enact this new team might be tricky. Who will guard the guards? (It’s guards all the way down.)
Now that this is here, it is interesting to think that for so long, Staff was so apt to consider themselves uniquely trustworthy or capable of publicly-platformed commentary regarding site policy and direction. This is probably something that should have been thought of by staff prior to the boiling point; the only reason they are now is because that boiling point has been reached. Even if you turn the heat off, the water will be violently hot for a while.
That’s what we see here; people are still angry. Nowhere is the more (enjoyably) clear than with DrMagnus’ “contribution” to the thread (the non-disciplinary O5 thread about him is what drew my attention to this open forum). Claims are made that DrMagnus is a large, if not the, reason why there was such discontent among the users for Staff, the sort that necessitated the Town Halls, and emergency measures to save face in the first place.
As I said, the users do a great job with the criticism and commentary, some even dropping a few of these:
To summarize and supplement just slightly: the real problem here is that Staff hasn’t really turned off the heater. They’ve turned it onto a lower setting. They’ve tried their hardest to approach a threshold where they can still do the things they’ve always done — that is to say, retain their authority, territory, and comfort — and appease the angry mob. This is very evident in that they don’t address at all or cede any ground around the central problem, which we can call the lack of trustlessness. The problem is that there is an inordinate amount of trust baked into the structure and architecture of Staff as they have designed it; but more than in than, in the protocols that Staff create for themselves over the users. That trust has been fractured thanks to the actions of Administrators (aforementioned) and general staff via chat leaks, both within the community (Discord servers) and outside them (KiwiFarms). This has not been without significant push back in the form of censorship and false justice, meted by Staff themselves.
The SCP Staff can be thought of as a great central bank of trust™; they distribute it as they see fit in the form of sweeping changes to the site’s behavioral terms of service. They are the sole fabricators of an apparently endless supply of this trust, and ramp up the speed of its production when it benefits them. (Policy printer go brrrr.) Like all systems of accelerated entropy, they never really have the option to reverse it once it’s started. They have so over-produced their own stock of trust, and have become accustomed to a quality of life that this sort of currency affords them, that it has created a class-like tier of inequality, which the users are only just now coming to the realization of, and pushing back against; one that not that long ago, the most problematic of staff mocked like cackling hyena.
It’s as if they have fed a pretty plant that was once a pleasant part of the site’s decor, providing a functionality that made the place more enjoyable and homey. The Staff fed it more than they should have because they felt that their role in feeding it was the most important part of the site.
They fell victim to something the Russians call “Watchman’s Syndrome”; the idea that when given a small area of purview, responsibility, or authority, an individual or individuals who are prone to over-valuing themselves in that role will exaggerate a sense of duty through dramatic and excessive shows of force. In such situations, such individuals “start to exert over everyone at a tiniest provocation, and will never let go of it under any circumstances” (quoting anqxyr, seen in #site37 chat logs). (Equivalents in the English-speaking world might be the guards during the Stanford Prison Experiment, HOA presidents, or neighborhood watch participants.)
And now that plant — but worse, the task that represented it — has grown so exponentially, become so root-bound, that it has punctured through the intended confines of its vase. Somehow, the domestic vibe has become one of an overwhelming and thoroughly-square, governmental building.
The overflow of that depreciating, fiat trust is now being advanced into the Staff’s gated communities for the first time. Some members of Staff are looking down the point-blank barrel of this same weapon of bloated bureaucracy for the first time; some only considering what that might feel like for the first time too.
The policy proposal would essentially install a surveillance system into their previously private chat room and broadcast it. The debate’s intensity centers around who will be allowed to watch the screens and how the reporting will be done. Staff would obviously like some of their own to be trusted with the process, while others feel as though that is missing the point and just a continuation of the issue. A pivot point seems to be the inclusion of Junior Staff, who by definition are not really trusted by the kind of staff who would like their words to be kept classified, and who are also the closest representation in staff of actual users. (In Staff’s defense, their current vote seems to be in favor of allowing JS in on the surveillance team.)
On the one hand, you can’t really blame people for feeling uncomfortable about something impinging upon their privacy. But on the other hand, it epitomizes the hypocrisy of Staff, which is that this weapon has been trained at the entire userbase and with staff’s fingers on the hair-trigger for years. This weapon being capable of long ranges, its scope was inevitably extended not only into the community itself, but into surrounding ones, to include off-site material for disciplinary action and need-to-know sourcing of user data; a policy that at one point was controversial, but that now has long-since settled into normalcy, the pathology exhibitng a sort of paradoxical homeostasis (“the status quo”).
But when the scope is fish-lensed ever so slightly to include in the sight picture the hands of staff holding this weapon, there is outcry and paranoia from them!
So on the other hand, no one else can truly be blamed but Staff for this. It’s telling to see how they react when subjected to the same things they have comfortably subjected others towards without pause.
Also on the other hand, different chats have different components to them for reasons that Staff themselves have established. A lot of these are regulated by bureaucratically-backed protocols and that are primarily punitive, or at least peri-punitive in nature. And in comparison, staff chat has been increasingly defined by a lack of those features; it’s the one place that doesn’t have them, along with an added degree of exclusivity; these two things requested and granted in one motion by that exclusivity itself. This is not just your typical social clique chat. This is Staff. Right? This is why you get onto Staff.
The hypocrisy lies in the fact that too many Staff and for too long have simultaneously increased the standards and power they have over users in user spaces, and denied the increasing responsibility and measure of conduct that such an increase in those things costs. For numerous generations of Staff now, the idea has been to get into an exclusive clique that grants prestige. This is innately separating. For example, Staff and prospective Staff do not operate on the same fabric of spacetime as the users on SCP. For users, the site is measured in articles, and the calendar’s reset is the creation of a new series; something like a New Year’s celebration. For the Staff however, their calendar is denominated in “promotion cycles”.
Nominally, ideally, you would be getting onto Staff because you have no problem representing yourself in a role representing the community. Staff should be able to tolerate the sensitivities that come with potentially saying something that might upset those they represent; that’s called accountability and is part and parcel to the role. Without it, there’s no price tag, and you have no reason to hold any authority. It’s a sort of theft. There’s risk with the ambition; you can be elevated if you do well, and buried under microscopes if you do poorly.
Anyone who believes they are eligible and fit for Staff should ask themselves that question; “Do I have the capacity to handle the altitude here?” The Staff who are shaking in their boots because of this policy proposal shouldn’t be letting the fear and worry that they might be getting push back dictate their position or vote. They should be proud to be given the chance to speak well for others. Some of these Staffers do not have that confidence; they need that buffer of opacity. They, in their minds, can’t do their jobs if people are looking at them, which says everything in sign language right there. Staff chat is only separated from other chats in that Staff are the arbiters of disciplinary measures and unwisely choose to abandon themselves to the immunity of not having to apply the same rules to one another when none the wiser is looking. Staff have made themselves into the sort of elevated thing whereby users have reason and justification to resent them for it and are now upset that one means the other. They should have been holding themselves to this standard if they were going to enjoy the perks this entire time.
I’ll mention this too; there is a personal failing on those who are on Staff and who resist being held accountable for the things they’d like to say. Why are Staff more concerned about the ramifications of saying things that could be inflammatory, and not questioning or defending the need to say those inflammatory things in their own person in the first place? This betrays a fattening diet on staff whereby they are expectant of a perfect health check up without exercising any self-discipline. To be clear — and just a bit of advice for the younger individuals on Staff who are not yet out in the workforce — that’s what a professional is. A professional is someone who, besides being competent, has a sense of measure and utilizes a filter in their speaking in a context. That’s it. Especially with politics and roles of near-pure optics. There is no more concentrated context for this than Staff chat; or at least that’s the way it should be, and that’s what the users are demanding. It’s almost as if they don’t expect accountability for themselves while spending all the clout of being considered the local example of a professional.
There is yet another inversion here. The long-dubbed “Super Secret Staff Chat” was initially a flippant joke with regards to it being worth classification. This has now flipped into a blackbox of actual super secrets that both staff and users are quite serious about the barriers around; the former partially unwilling to reveal, and the latter completely unwilling to be kept from any longer.
10 years ago, SSSC was unofficially a sort of safe space. It was the locker room where those with a bit more responsibility and tasks than the average user could take the uniform off, so to speak — something that should happen by the way, the need to do so is in direct proportion to time spent in that uniform and how starched it is to a crease-less perfection (and Staff now starch their uniforms so heavily that they could place them on the ground and they would stand upright by themselves).
This sort of social exhaust is good for not only a worked crew like Staff, but with the rest of the community, who would ideally be taking a break from the internal struggles of writing, and finding a social catharsis therein. This is truly the claim of those Staffers who resent this policy proposal; they are correct in fact that there shouldn’t be a whole lot of policing going on. They are 100% right to be uncomfortable with and resist an invasion of privacy; it’s just that they are hypocrites, because when it is applied to them, they can’t grasp that it’s what they’ve been doing to other people.
However, the political structure and culture of brand projection that SCP has become mandates that chats be policed and to a very sharp resolution; for hurt feelings, icky words, verboten topics, censor-worthy links and materials, bad PR, etc. (The list has of course been expanded over time, recall again if you will that ironic and rhetorically-minded hyperbole involving Nazis is now worthy of a 24 hour ban.) The point is not that these things are unnecessary, but that they are wildly overgrown. Because of that, Staff cannot afford to relinquish their grip on their surveillance and control over the site’s commoner (“casual”) chats. Like the system of entropy that they are — one cloaked in the guise of orderly procession, instructional purity, and codified forethought — , they can’t move backwards. They can’t cede ground. They are like a boa constrictor who believes they are helping something stay alert by applying a tightening pressure with each breath it can manage by itself.
See then how this is Staff getting a taste of their own medicine. They are only now able to understand how bitter it is; the lack of placing one’s self in others’ shoes characteristic of poor leadership.
Instead of recognizing that the structure is not sustainable, and that the centralization and consolidation of trust needs to be converted into a trustless system (which is integral with transparency), Staff have decided to retype their existing contract guaranteeing the necessity of user trust in them, just in a different and slightly smaller font and let users vocalize over it. I sound like the broken record now, because this is one of the only major mistakes that Staff makes these days. (That’s both a good and bad thing… obviously, it’s only one thing to fix, but how much hope can you have for someone who just doesn’t learn?) Their solution to everything is not to cede ground truly, not decrease their hold on their power in the community, or re-approach their foundation. This would mean downsizing staff; not increasing it.
What they feel like they can do is what they always feel like they should do, which is insert a new node of trust and centralization into the workflow between the boundaries of the issue, a workflow that ultimately begins and ends with themselves. In doing so, they attempt to solve the problems of trust and centralization with more trust and centralization.
Now, they are getting a bit better, in that this policy has some interdependence to the moving parts and the powers granted, but the users are not really convinced because they understand the quantity of trust they are having to give the staff really isn’t changed. If it were a tax, the tax would be the same; just redistributed a bit more once out of their pockets. The users are still having to trust quite a lot in this, and the point (repeated explicitly by several users) is meant to find a way around the general userbase’s inability to trust the Staff, not adding more containment procedures to it. Meanwhile, the Staff are demonstrating how uncomfortable they are relinquishing any measure of that trust income, which makes the optics worse in a sort of death spiral of credibility. The smart ones know they have no choice but to take the handoff and try not to fumble.
So in this way, the proposal doesn’t really approach the root. It gestures towards it; and postures like it will take care of it, but the publicity stunt is captured on camera prior to that moment, and in the reality, no shoveling actually occurs.
The people I feel the worse for in this are Staff. Not because they don’t deserve this, they do. But because Staff — regardless of if its a member who will quit over this, who will hold their noses and vote for it in the affirmative, or even those who think this is a great step in the right direction (always “not sufficient to solve all the problems here, but”) — obviously can’t understand that they are getting the first small bites of what it means to take a site from a community that offers the opportunity to do something together — like write, which here seems so cosmically tangential, writing is way over there —, grow it with bureaucratic steroids so the insatiable hunger and growth of their purview has finally grown so crooked as to turn back towards themselves, and still think that the answer is to insert themselves more into the frame.
The Death of the Author gave the users a taste for democratic input and operational trustlessness; one where the domineering functions of Staff are largely reducible to a programmable smart contract of pure code. They are at the cusp of the pressure wave that is the equal and opposite reaction to a compromise with their own comfort — a comfort they let the users in on so that they could have blameless accomplices — in maintaining the surface-level optics of their brand. Now the users like that comfort too. Staff threw the boomerang over their stupendously short time horizons and this is the first frame in the video of it coming back and hitting the back of their heads. It’s the slow punch of unintended consequences. The equal and opposite force of a millimeter-tip bullet used to assassinate the integral part of their power and authority — the delayed recoil — now distributed wide and slow across their entire shoulders; the sort of injury that is not superficially evident. The sort of bruise that according to an ignorance of such an act in the greater context of law, might seem like the pathway with the least damage to a body. It’s like damaging the roots so you can say that the flower petals have no blemish.
Let it be known from an old man who has lived these things (they say wisdom is just being dumber than someone else first): any time you defer a temporary but survivable pain that is ultimately good for your character, and you think you have gotten away with it, you are wrong. Reality’s ledger is always balanced. This was and now is more apparent than ever. Whether out of a collective fear or a bleary myopia — maybe both — Staff decided upon the least damaging options but only in the immediacy of a fight-or-flight response; a relatively brief moment that has now passed. Now, the users have slipped the leash.
Somewhere in there, a spot that most of Staff will probably not get to, is the revelation that they have no one to blame for the entirety of this but themselves.
The title of this post is meant to be a little, clickbaity joke, but there is a more direct and serious message with it: the goal of anything aimed at improving something — whether this blog or SCP staff — should be the eventual obsolescence of it. In the better world it aims to usher in, the role would no longer be needed. At that point, the job is done.
© Lack of Lepers, 2021
