“I Resent You”
A translation of Gittip Founder Chad Whitacre’s open letter to Shanley Kane
Disclosure: Until yesterday, I was a Gittip user. Chad’s open letter to Shanley was one of the catalysts that led me to stop using the service, though not the only one.
Dear Shanley,
“Okay, that was polite. Nailing this letter thing so far.”
I resent you for ridiculing me, shouting at me, putting words in my mouth, reveling in inflammatory behavior, and leading me on in conversation and then cutting me off. I resent you for abusing me and others building Gittip under the guise of “criticism,” especially while using a platform that we give you for free.
“In keeping with my philosophy of openness and radical honesty, I think an open letter is a great forum in which to air every issue I’ve ever had with one of my service’s flagship users. I am also the kind of person who thinks ‘leading me on’ is an appropriate phrase to use in an ostensibly professional letter—and don’t worry, I’ll dwell on that again later.
You’ve publicly criticized my project and refused to engage with me on exactly the terms I specify. Look at all I’ve given you! The shirt off my back! A service I was going to build whether you cared about it or not! And this is how you repay me?
(Hmmm. Does that sound too much like a Disney villain? Nahhhhh.)”
I resent you for ridiculing me by saying, “guess it didn’t occur to you i maybe have plans this evening besides fixing structural problems in your company for free? lol.” First, I had just said “if it’s amenable to you,” so it clearly did occur to me that you might have had plans that evening.
“I have one legitimate, if small, grievance, and this is it: you snarked at me unfairly.”
Second, I never asked you to fix structural problems in my company for free. That was a cheap shot on your part, for the benefit of your followers. You had been shouting at me about my policy of only doing open interviews, and I was trying to work with you to find a way to have a constructive conversation together—a conversation that you asked for six months prior. Furthermore, “my company” is, as you know, an open company. That means that Gittip is a commons. That means that everyone who uses Gittip is responsible for “fixing structural problems” with Gittip. As a user of Gittip, Gittip is your company. A better interpretation is that you are asking me to fix structural problems in your company for free.
“I am either on some truly spectacular drugs or trying to publicly gaslight you.
This company I founded? It’s not my company! It’s your company! It’s your job to fix it! For free! In the name of openness! And I’m mad at you about it!”
(Annotator’s note: What.)
I resent you for shouting at me on Twitter (archive) and on GitHub.
“You hurt my feelings, so I’m going to disingenuously represent you using a few capital letters while advocating for marginalized people who use Gittip as ‘shouting at me’.”
I resent you for putting words in my mouth when you said, “Most of what I’ve seen from ‘open company’ is hubris from privileged white men who think ‘Radical transparency’ matters more than judgement,” and “Maybe your insistence on ‘radical transparency’ is alienating one of your top user bases and making them not engage with you.” As I said at the time, “radical transparency” is not a term I use. It turns out that you are the one who started talking about “radical transparency,” over a year ago, in your Open Letter to Women in Technology (cached). In a paragraph brainstorming the many tactics that could be useful in your “fucking class war,” you said: “Let’s create radical transparency and access to salary information.” So radical transparency is a good idea, until I do something that you mistake for it? No thank you.
“I’m going to quote bits of an old post out of context so I can misrepresent you, which is in no way similar to my charge against you of ‘putting words in my mouth’. I will ignore the fact that you were explicitly encouraging the use of radical transparency as a tactic against the privileged, whereas you complain about me carelessly using it with the marginalized, which is a completely different situation.
I will also ignore the fact that ‘radical transparency’, while not a term I use, is still a reasonably accurate description of my policies.”
I resent you for reveling in your inflammatory behavior by saying, after shouting at me, “Welp, I had that thing about Gittip waiting inside me for some time now. lol,” and then beginning your post on the GitHub thread in which we were processing your feedback with, “it is i, the evil shanley,” and then afterwards subtweeting something along the lines of, “it’s cute when boys think we had an argument when what really happened is i made some comments and it was intense for them.”
“How dare you use humor in a situation where you know from long, painful experience that you will be cast as the villain.”
I resent you for leading me on in conversation and then cutting me off. You said something to the effect that “it’s your turn to talk.” Then you interrupted me with, “okay look i’m not interested in being the arbiter or judge of every act you’ve taken. i shared my thoughts, and that’s it[.] i don’t want to have a dialogue about it with you.” You followed up with, “please note: just because i share my thoughts on your company doesn’t mean i’m interested in a play-by-play or discussing it with you.”
“I’m going to cast our relationship in a pseudo-sexual light by using the phrases ‘leading me on’ and ‘cutting me off’, then criticize you for updating your boundaries and not making yourself available to me when I feel entitled to your attention. This will gain me the sympathy of friendzone dwellers everywhere. It is in no way tone-deaf with regard to the fact that you are regularly harassed and threatened in sexual terms, and it is definitely not something I do regularly when speaking about activists who happen to be women.”
I resent you for abusing me under the guise of “criticism,” while using Gittip for free. You don’t pay for using Gittip; Gittip is funded on Gittip. We, who are building Gittip, freely share it with you out of a belief in Gittip’s mission, “to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.” One of our core values is a love of critique, and our main issue tracker currently has over 2,500 examples of people from diverse backgrounds respectfully engaging in thorough critiques of Gittip from every angle for over two years. There’s very little you can say about Gittip that hasn’t already been said, and you certainly don’t add any value by ridiculing, shouting at, misrepresenting, flaming, and toying with us.
“If you see issues that have gone unaddressed when others have raised them, I expect you to sit quietly and say nothing. Under no circumstances lend your voice to them so that people pay attention to them. Also, I’m going to characterize your vocal disagreement with me and advocacy for marginalized groups on my platform as abuse of me personally. And I’m going to accuse you of ‘toying with us’ without clarifying what the hell I mean by it.
My implication that you were behaving unfairly by using Gittip ‘for free’ is in no way undermined by the fact that literally everyone who uses Gittip does so ‘for free’, which is in line with my stated preference for giving my labor and resources as a free gift, or by the fact that you gifted $75 to Gittip during your time using the service.”
Shanley, you have not been one of Gittip’s “most outspoken critics,” you have been an abusive distraction to our work. I’m communicating my resentment of you to you because my resentment is my problem, and I need to express it to you in order to let go of it and get on with life. (I forgive you for your abusive behavior.)
“My resentment is my problem, so I am sharing this with the entire internet a month later so I can get over it. I could have written you an email, or talked to my therapist, or screamed into a pillow, but I thought a public hit piece would be a much more thoughtful and productive approach. It’s also a great way to demonstrate how totally I’ve forgiven you.
Then someone will point out that “forgiving” you this way makes me look like an asshole, so I will delete that line from my post without noting that I’ve made a change to the text.
I will then somehow try to frame you as the abusive one in this situation.”
Needless to say, we in the community of people building Gittip welcome your continued use of the platform. Also needless to say, we welcome your genuinely constructive participation in our ongoing efforts to build Gittip into a world-class product with a diverse community.
“Needless to say, you should feel free to ignore the utter contempt for you I’ve displayed in this letter and keep driving business and attention to my company! And now I’m going to extend something that resembles an olive branch so I look like the good guy when you very reasonably leave Gittip.”
This “translation” is less funny than my last foray into the field because I’m having a hard time finding the humor in it.
At least one then-member of the Gittip team went out of her way last month to have a respectful and polite conversation with Chad about some of the issues in his interactions with marginalized people on Gittip. Among them were the power dynamic created by his control over Gittip users’ income stream and his aggressive push toward openness in conversations even when it’s not appropriate or safe for the other party. She also encouraged him to find ways to engage with the marginalized people who are some of Gittip’s top users and promoters.
Instead, Chad posted an open screed on one of Gittip’s official channels publicly vilifying one of those users and pushing her off his service.
I can understand why Chad feels that he and his company are being attacked. I can understand the resentment he feels about being criticized. What I have a harder time understanding is why he waited until the day after harassment and abuse forced another well-known diversity advocate off of Twitter to post a public hit piece against someone known for diversity work, who has advocated for marginalized people on his platform. The exchanges with Shanley he complains about happened over a month ago. Why was now the right time to bring them back into the public eye? Does it have something to do with Chad’s recent conversations with investors?
It’s difficult to see how Chad’s letter is in keeping with Gittip’s Community Guidelines on behavior. If nothing else, the public vilification of a prominent user certainly seems to violate Wheaton’s Law. And despite Gittip users communicating directly with Chad about issues with his behavior and Gittip community members saying something to him about it, he has doubled down—making it clear that either Gittip’s conflict handling process is non-functional, or it simply doesn’t apply to him.
The timing and form of Chad’s letter and today’s painfully gaslight-y, condescending, minimizing follow-up make them part of a developing pattern of behavior that strongly suggests that Chad Whitacre is not interested in the work being done to increase diversity—either on his own platform, or in tech as a whole.
