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This is gonna be a very meta and stream of consciousness kind of post, so I decided to blog it instead of creating a full thread for it. It's gonna be messy at places and not fully thought through but this is what's on my mind.
So yesterday I wrote my editorial on why I think a commissioner could fix the problems of the DPC. The main initial reason as to why I wrote the article wasn't to give my thoughts on the Skem/Kuku issue more room than others. I wrote it because I felt frustrated about the discussion that was going on. The community has become stuck in this... ultra-focused discussion. A microcosm where this is the only issue. We were discussing how to treat the symptom and not the cause. I wanted to see if I could make people look up and expand the discussion.
So jump forward a few hours and I had just published my article. I have a policy of never commenting on what I've written (but that doesn't mean I'm F5ing the hell out of the thread). The reason for this policy is that if someone misunderstands my writing, I should blame myself for not doing a good enough job instead of the commenter for not understanding me. Still, as the comments started ticking in I felt a rage starting to bubble up. Suddenly my article about fixing issues regarding communication had become a discussion of PC culture and freedom of speech. Not was I was aiming for. People had taken a step back but they didn't respect the confines I had given them. And that's where I stopped myself. Because that took me back to a discussion I had with SirJolt a few years back.
He brought up the subject of interpreting artistic work. No matter if it's a painting, a movie, or a book: is there a right and a wrong way to interpret what the artist had done? I jumped in head first, without giving it proper thought (as I often do, one of my biggest flaws) saying that yes, of course there is. The artist clearly had something in mind when creating his work. So if I misinterpret that, I'm doing just that: misinterpreting it. That's wrong. Now I don't fully remember the retort but I believe he countered by saying: what if I enjoyed the piece due to that misinterpretation. Does that mean I'm enjoying it wrong? We're all colored by the experiences we've had in life so why would I want to take someone's interpretation (or enjoyment) away from them by saying they're wrong?
The same applies to the editorial I wrote. Who am I to put my foot down and force people to limit the scope of the discussion? Why is my interpretation of the situation the correct one? Is the lack of communication really the root cause? What this made me realize is that while I technically may have copyright over the article, I can't control it. I don't own it. What I wrote belongs to the LiquidDota community once it's published and they're free to think and discuss whatever they feel like discussing. What I've written doesn't belong to me. And that's OK.
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It was unfortunately to be expected...people are upset over free speech issues so they tend to want to talk about it.
People might not have gotten into the Dota commissioner discussion because they feel powerless about it. Valve has run Dota like this for a very long time, there are people working there who are smart people who are in to Dota and understand the community (Wyk, Bruno, Eric Johnson)....but nothing has changed and nobody really expects it to.
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276 Posts
No, it's not OK.
Whether or not an editorial is an artistic work, it's also the beginning of a conversation. If someone hijacks a conversation to insert their pet issue (i.e. bringing up feminism ruining open democracies in response to an article about hiring a PR flack to placate China) then you have a right to be upset with them. They're not interpreting an artistic work; they're bad faith participants in the discussion.
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There's interpretation/misinterpretation, and there's a mutation that reaches metastasis to completely different tangents. While there is space to discuss the influence of PC culture on this topic, I find it completely off the rails of what was intended from discussing the role and benefits of a potential commissioner. It's transformed into people's pulpits to rant and rave about the "SJWs", even though there's very little here to do with SJWs or feminism.
I think you have a right to express a distaste with how your op-ed has been poisoned, because there's nothing worse than a writer's work being misunderstood or building a foundation for what was not intended. Reminds me of Nietzsche's work being appropriated as some intellectual godfather of Nazism, though he would have had no love for the ideology.
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This is oddly parallel to the discussion of certain racially-charged terms. When does it matter what the person meant to communicate vs when does it matter how people interpret what is said to them?
In both scenarios, beauty is in the eye of the beholder so to speak but that doesn't make bad-faith actors something that should be catered to
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I tend to agree with Phantasmal, I find editorial work shouldn't be open to subjective interpretation. If we accept that the purpose of an editorial is to analyse an occurrence and generate related discourse then actively avoiding the initial analysis in the ensuing discourse renders the editorial meaningless.
I suppose it is possible that if an editorial fails to generate the authors desired discourse it is due to being poorly written and fails to clearly convey its analysis. But in the case of the DPC op-ed you recently published I doubt that is the case. Rather, I think it is more likely readers are simply conflating the symptom and cause you've mentioned in your original post.
I imagine you would see a similar result if you were to write an op-ed suggesting policy proscription which relates to any hotly debated social issue. Frankly I am somewhat disheartened by most people's inability to differentiate between cause and effect but that is neither here nor there.
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I think part of the "problem" is that the point of the editorial wasn't that controversial to people. Of course there could be discussion around what exactly the rules be and how involved Valve should ideally be in different things. But what I think is fairly clear is that they should at least have a person who tournaments and teams are consistently able to contact. It seems pretty laughable that people say we tried to contact Valve but have had no response. I don't really see many people lining up to defend Valve in this regard.
In contrast, there is quite a lot of disagreement in terms of how serious the actions of Skem and Kuku were, what sort of punishment is sufficient, etc. The discussion is sort of going on in multiple threads at the same time and when one person brings it under your editorial it just goes on from there.
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Imo it's always like this when there's a political border-debate (or any very emotional topic for that matter), one extreme side starts pushing their opinion as aggressively as possible, then the other side feels challenged and the flamewar breaks out. Since both sides are very extreme and can't look each other in the eye they just hijack whatever threat they are talking in to continuously bring forth their argumentation while escalating the insults.
I've been on websites where people would post below animal pictures that instead of pretending to live in a beautiful world the posters of the article should talk about the immigration problems and how immigrants are ruining the country. These people want to talk about this shit all the time, they want to talk about nothing else and everything that comes up is for them just a broadcasting platform for their "great" opinion. It gives me very little hope for democratic discourse and our future.
And I agree that discussing how we deal with player related misbehaviour in general should take a higher priority than who is right and what would be acceptable punishments, but I'm talking to a wall and so were you from the beginning :/
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EPT
