Ugh, so let's talk about Worldcon for a minute. If you haven't been paying attention, the latest cockup is that Worldcon has Toni Weisskopf as a Guest of Honor. Toni is the editor of Baen Books. Baen has old-school bulletin board-style forum on their site called The Baen Bar.

The Baen Bar is full of racist CHUDs, of the general alt-right, boogaloo, January 6th, 2nd civil war, stockpile guns to kill brown people when the mad max apocalypse begins type. Many of the most CHUDly are forum moderators.

Now, not everyone that posts in those forums are themselves racist CHUDs. Many of them think of themselves as non-racist non-CHUDs. They do, however, like to hang out on a forum with an outspoken Nazi fan as a forum moderator, so.

As I said in a Worldcon staff meeting, because yes I'm on the staff of this convention, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. At which point some dude told me to go fuck myself and quit. Which means, I guess, he didn't like being called on his recent sleeping arrangements.

(I should point out that all opinions are my own, not that of the con, yadda yadda. I'm a relatively low-level staffer and I suspect I was mainly recruited so I would be inside the tent pissing out, not outside the tent pissing in, but whatever)

So the fact that the CHUDs at the Baen Bar have recently been posting your standard CHUDly bullshit, let's kill the libruls, January 6th truther garbage was recently brought to light. Now, I want to be clear, this is not news for anyone paying attention.

The fact that one of the bar moderators is a Nazi is not news. The fact that several of the other mods & authors at the Bar are January 6th types that stockpile guns and cream at the idea that the day may soon come where they get to shoot a Mexican for gasoline is not news.

But also, Baen Books is a major genre publisher, and Toni as the editor has had a huge, decades-long influence on the field, and though she's made some statements that might hint at CHUD-sympathies, is generally regarded as a reasonable, decent person and not herself a CHUD.

So the idea that she would be a guest of honor at the Word Science Fiction Society's annual convention is not unreasonable.

And the fact that her company's forums are a CHUD haven was seen as, you know, those wacky libertarians and their let's-never-say-day-of-the-rope-out-loud-but-we-all-know-why-we're-stockpiling-ammo fantasies are just overgrown boys circle jerking to Jane's manuals.

And they're no reflection on Toni herself.

Well, obviously January 6th put a different complexion on things. Some guy did a fairly reasonable writeup on the kinds of things the CHUDs were saying at the Bar, which got to a lot of people who weren't previously paying attention.

And because fandom likes nothing more than a feeding frenzy, this hint of chum on the water caused social media to start frothing.

Toni, for her part, released the very mealiest of mealy-mouthed nonpologies. "Freeze peach! Its not our job to tell our readers what to think! Outside agitators!" and promised to "look into things", though the general tenor of her statement told me all I need to know.

And those arguments aren't especially convincing since there are actually topics that are forbidden from discussion at the Bar, so freeze peach is in this case an obvious and transparent fig leaf. Remember, at least one of the moderators there is an actual Nazi.

By which I mean he probably doesn't have a card in his wallet, but he certainly does dress up like a Nazi and quote Nazi quotes and talk about how the Nazis weren't all that unreasonable, really, though maybe they were a bit soft about Mexican immigration.

So the question is, if she's knowingly giving white supremacists, insurrectionists, and the like a place to share thoughts with their fellow travelers, can we hold that against her? And if so, does that disqualify her from Guest of Honor membership at the Worldcon?

On the one hand, a principled stand on the idea of unrestricted free speech is not entirely without merit. On the other hand, fuck those CHUDs and their enablers. Their discourse is not fit for civil society, and they should be kicked back into the sewers from which they crawled.

But actually, I'm not really here to talk about the controversy itself, though I guess I've spent a lot of tweets talking about something I'm not really here to talk about.

No, I'm here to talk about Worldcon. See, the social media feeding frenzy has been all up in arms that Worldcon didn't immediately issue a statement roundly condemning all CHUDs and the issue of their loins, blah blah blah blah blah. Which, you know, they probably should.

But the mob demands action RIGHT NOW, and my friends, Worldcon can't do anything RIGHT NOW. It just isn't equipped to do that.

See, Worldcon isn't a big corporate convention, like Dragoncon, with lawyers and PR flacks and poor benighted social media interns.

But it's also not a small, closely held, nimble regional convention that is run by a small, close-knit team of like minded friends.

Both of those type of conventions can react quickly to things.

Worldcon is comprised solely of volunteers. It's geographically distributed all around the world. And very few Worldcons have a unified agenda at the top. Anyone can quit at any time, for any reason, and often do.

And yes, there is a chair. Sometimes that chair is a single person, sometimes it's a team. This year, it was a team and is now a single person. That person is Bill, he's a friend of mine, and he's a decent guy. But the Worldcon chair is weak. No, not Bill is weak. The chair is.

See, in many organization, the chair's job is to be a stern ship's captain, charting the course of the organization through waters calm and choppy. But that is not the Worldcon chair's job. The Worldcon chair's job is to keep the rest of the staff from strangling each other.

Worldcon operates in general as a consensus-based organization. If you violate that consensus as chair, or override it, or do something that you know will meet consensus but fail to get that consensus first, the various obstreperous cranks that staff your event will throw a fit.

And many of them will quit, and the fate of your precarious multi-million dollar, multi-year enterprise will be throw into question.

Now, does it have to be this way? It does not. When I bid to run a NASFiC, which is like Worldcon's slightly uglier younger sister, my bid was structured specifically to avoid this kind of paralysis. But Worldcon as an organization has a lot of inertia.

And my bid lost to a more conventional bid run by the usual suspects, whose convention was the least-attended NASFiC of all time by an order of magnitude, which tells you how much people actually wanted to attend that other bid vs. how much they voted to not rock the boat.

But back to Worldcon. The reason that Worldcon can't get any kind of timely response to anything is a) weak chair and b) is an all-volunteer, geographically distributed, politically- diverse-in-some-senses-of-the-word, consensus-based org, It has been for at least 50 years.

I'm not here to criticize Bill. He picked a hell of a fucking year to be a Worldcon chair, and I don't envy him the decisions he has to make. But Worldcon, structurally, is unable to be agile or decisive enough to react to situations quickly or, often, effectively.

Does it have to be this way? No, it does not. Nothing is officially stopping a winning bid by a team that has strong ideas about how to structure the event differently, in a modern, agile, responsive, decisive way.

However, do many of the people that staff Worldcon have a lot of personal investment in keeping things this way? Yes, they do. Does this establishment do their goddamn level best to strangle any greeen shoots of innovation and, when they can't, prune them to conformity? Yes.

This establishment is and has been hellbent on riding their hobby horse into the ground rather than allowing even the faintest whiff of fresh air, unless that fresh air happens to smell just like their own rank odor. Every year, I ask myself why I keep trying to change things.

Every year, my answer gets less and less satisfactory.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.