The Little Lizard’s Sorrow

Posted on December 18, 2004 in Censorship Geocaching Social Media

The fuss is over hornytoads. No, there’s not a developer poised to wipe out the last habitat of Phrynosoma (even in Texas they have not gone that far). Nor are future Republican presidents inserting firecrackers into the micro-anklosauri. Nor are they being used as lab animals. The word “hornytoad” offended a reviewer at geocaching.com so much that he/she refused to approve a cache until it was removed.

Now Texas is up in arms and preaching secession from the mother-site of the treasure hunting sport. They’re calling for the unfiring of a former geocaching.com staffsperson who resigned in a furor over some inhouse politics. (Yes, that’s what I meant.) They’re demanding the right to elect their reviewers because everyone in Texas — and across the Southwest for that matter — knows that hornytoad is what they call the little lizards — lexicographical accuracy be damned! And they’ve set up a new, clannish site where you have to know someone to get in and where caches which do not receive popular acclamation are summarily banished to the archives. (Say goodbye to backcountry caches?)

For his part, Jeremy is handling this like a typical twenty/thirty-something techie. He calls the reaction “a protest with blank signs”. He states: “The fact that there are so many “Bring 9Key back” messages seems to me that people are fired up but aren’t quite sure why. ” He invokes the spectre of “a mob mentality”. Then, when a writer complains that he’s sloughing the unhappiness off as merely “silly”, he resorts to picayune precision: “I don’t think I said my customers are silly.” Put another way, he denies the meaning and the attitude he slings about by saying “You can’t say I said that you were silly because I never used the word.”

The point that Jeremy, like many techies who have brought a successful idea to the web, can’t handle criticism. This isn’t a first time. Witness for example what happened when I suggested setting up cache events for charity. Jeremy just crashed down on the idea, saying that the rule against charity caches would never be changed. Period.

That’s how Jeremy likes to handle discussion, it appears. And he’s not alone. Jeremy epitomizes a type which has become common on the Net. If you blunder into the wrong places and don’t keep a low profile, sooner or later you’ll run into them. They brook no discontent among their ranks. When caught in an error they don’t apologize but find a way to blame it on the other side.

The word hornytoad isn’t obscene. When this issue came up, the proper response on the part of geocaching.com should have been an “oops”. But again, this is a group run by the kind of techie who wants his machine to be seen as functioning perfectly. He’s built it and now that it has arrived, he just wants to hear accolades. Instead of just stating the obvious and fixing the problem, he fights and fights and fights. The word “I’m sorry” won’t escape from his keyboard, no sir, no matter what he says or does. Anything that happens is the fault of those who complain. They didn’t follow the proper procedure. They didn’t behave nicely enough.

There are those who jump on one side or the other praising their actions. I have read commentary at Southern California Geocachers, for example, which delivers a great “good riddance” to the Texas cachers. And, for their part, the Texans have yanked out the Confederate flag and put on the gray.

I see no good and no evil in this. What I see is a convergence of human beings who just won’t talk reasonably to one another. Where I dislike Jeremy’s arrogance and silicon tower isolationism, I also dislike the Texans’ arrogance and clannishness. Some may say that this proves the impossibility of working things through via email. Others may secretly hope for the fall of the Net which, in the last election, proved to be a powerful force for mobilization of people. I continue to believe in the Net, even though I see an old pattern repeating: mistakes are made and those who make them won’t apologize. We’re stuck, it seems, on the abUSEnet. This is soc.culture.turkey of old where the taunts can be programmed into a machine and set to respond to certain key words. Except that we have human beings doing the writing and the taunting.

I’ve said elsewhere that Jeremy could easily quell the revolution by saying “We goofed”. This mind, however — I am speaking of it as a type — believes that apologies connote weakness. If the Texans were to come forward and say “OK, we’re overreacting, but so are you. The issue here is censorship of a word which is not obscene” Jeremy might well continue to counterattack. “Well, these people are a problem,” he’d say. “Why they don’t even have confidence in their own position.” Which isn’t true, of course. It would show that they have the strength to think things through and think against their own thinking, making just corrections.

The power, for now, is with Jeremy. As a user of geocaching.com, I have no intention to join the Texas Revolution as it is now called simply because I think their rating system can easily dumb down geocaching. Geocaching.com’s neutrality on the quality of the cache issue strikes me as smarter and more accomodating. The idea is to involve more people rather than make caching a sport governed by an elite. With their closed doors, the Texans are creating a self-appointed superclass of cachers. Even if they would have me as a member, I wouldn’t want to help their realize their oligarchic dream.

On the other hand, netters in general need to think about how their online communities need to work. There is too much emphasis, I think, on developing a hero-dependent culture rather than one which promotes general excellence. What I am seeing happening with Jeremy, what will happen with the Texas rebels, and what will happen again elsewhere is a product of our belief that we need alabaster monuments to guide us. Consequently, we deny imperfection and move away from being problem solvers towards being derelicts on the hoof. Improvement of how we work together becomes impossible because the heroes fear the loss of their status. It’s that old problem of those who want power versus those who want to empower. We can’t wait for a hero to resolve the problem. Instead, as John Ralston Saul observes, we as individuals need to eliminate the hero inside ourselves so that we can know it and reject it in others.

To this task, I commend Jeremy and the Texans. To end the needless suffering they are bringing into their own lives and into the lives of others, they must carry it out. In the meantime, I’ll be playing the part of the peasant or the shepherd who lives in the hills, going to geocaching.com to pick up tips on where to bring my sport. Think of me as a little lizard basking in the sun. I can get away with this as long as the bulldozers doing battle don’t wreck the habitat.