Victory for the douchebags: Not taking sides is the easiest way to help the worst guys win

I think at this point it’s safe to say, even though SXSW 2016 is still several months in the future, that SXSW’s leadership has made some considerable errors. It’s not a good day for PR when you’re a major conference/festival in the hipster tech world and you’ve got Buzzfeed and Vox both pulling out in protest of your recent actions, when you’ve got ex-NFL star Chris Kluwe’s excoriation of your cowardice going viral on Twitter, and when “dramatically announcing you’re not going to SXSW” is the new “rescinding Bill Cosby’s honorary degree”. It’s easy to point fingers at outsiders over this and I’m sure people at SXSW are doing just that right now. You could blame the charming folks at the r/KotakuInAction and their less-presentable brethren at /baph/ on 8chan, who have a distressing tendency to try to cause as much trouble as possible “for the lulz” whether or not it hurts their ostensible cause. You could join the legions of other people who’ve blamed “Twitter outrage culture” for making you guys “look bad.” You could blame any of the specific individuals who tweeted mean things. You could blame Joan Walsh, or John Scalzi, or U.S. Representative Katherine Clark. You could blame me. After biting my tongue since August I finally decided to write a long tell-all article my and others’ treatment during SXSW’s “PanelPicker” process, in hopes that it would cause some trouble for SXSW. It appears to be succeeding. But while it’s tempting to cast blame on the outraged for giving you a hard time, it bears asking what, exactly, led to all these people having something to be outraged about. In this case, as in so many others, SXSW screwed themselves over. By the time they got to the point of creating a big public stink by canceling two panels they’d already announced were approved and making sanctimonious references to the “sanctity of the big tent” as they did so, it was already too late. No one would’ve consciously chosen to be in that position. Even the lowest-level intern at SXSW must’ve known that there’s no good outcome from doing something like that. SXSW didn’t get to that quandary by making any particular decision. They did it by making a series of non-decisions. Like so many big, clueless organizations before them, SXSW screwed itself over by thinking it could always take the safest, easiest path of least resistance, the (non-)choice that pleased everyone. The problem is that that doesn’t work for serious issues where there are real stakes. I get that SXSW wants to keep things “positive,” in the shallow sense of “positive,” by which I mean generally avoiding upsetting, unpleasant conflicts and pretending things are already basically okay. It wouldn’t make a very good recruiting landscape for Goldman Sachs otherwise. And that’s fine. I really mean it, it is. Concern trolls defending SXSW’s actions keep coming up to me and my friends saying “SXSW has no obligation to host a ‘fight’ if they don’t want to.” Of course they don’t. But if they wanted to keep it light and fun and avoid stuff that might attract controversy or bum people out at the afterparties then the time to make that decision was before putting panels about the topic of Internet harassment up on the Internet to be harassed. This isn’t just them, this applies to a lot of people across the board. I can’t count how many times I’ve experienced or observed people trying to “start a dialogue” or “draw attention” to online harassment doing it in exactly the wrong way such that all they do is increase harassment. We have generally agreed-upon rules for how to report on suicide and