The Scourge of Mob Mediocrity
This is why we can’t have nice things.
There’s a phenomenon I’ve had a considerable amount of firsthand experience with, and I think it’s likely afoot with a lot of bigger projects in the world as well. I can only really describe it as mob mediocrity; it’s a failure mode of flat democratic processes and perhaps a flaw in human nature too.
What does mob mediocrity look like? Well, it doesn’t show up until there’s something that happens—either a decision needing to be made or an addition to the project corpus that is particularly complex or ambitious—and then it magically appears. Someone in the group will take it upon themselves to attack this decision or addition, and they won’t admit it at first but their motivation is entirely because they feel slighted at the sight of it. By golly, someone else doing big things makes them feel small, and so they need to put a stop to that!
The initial strategy is of course the civil one: defeat it in reasoned debate and you win. This poses a problem if the big decision or proposal is actually good – what does the angry committee member do then? It depends on how smart they are and how much they stand to lose:
If they are wise, they take the L and drop the matter. No one’s feelings get hurt and the group can continue collaborating together.
If they are cynical and cunning, they continue the matter by deliberately drawing it out in circles to tire out and try to upset the person making the proposal. This has the added effect of annoying everyone else in the group to where they might just side with the antagoniser here by default, but really the goal is to make the productive ambitious person act out and discredit themselves so it becomes easier to attack their work and undermine their reputation in the group.
If they are dumb, or if they are cunning and simply have nothing to lose, then they resort to personal attacks. This is more common in situations where money isn’t changing hands, therefore there’s no incentive from yonder to make the antagoniser here cut the shit on pain of firing. So open source projects and volunteering initiatives are the main victims of this low-grade mud-slinging. Annoying the productive member of the group didn’t make them mad, so calling them an asshole surely will, right?
I think this happens often because people don’t even realise they’re getting caught up in it, other than the one starting the shitshow, of course. But what’s the outcome?
Regardless of who gets mad, who stays or quits, or how anyone feels about anyone else, the project gets worse. The whole theatre act I just described is 100% pure, inconsequential bullshit for the project. Only problem is, everyone fucking loves it! I mean they have to, otherwise how could they be so reliably manipulated away from acting in their own interests? They love the theatre, even though one can inductively reason that there’s a toad in the group if the theatre ever progresses past item #1 above. So the project suffers and loses, and that’s all anyone in the wider world is ever going to care about. They’re not going to read the footnotes about your petty squabbles except maybe in a project postmortem and that’s if you’re really lucky.
When people quit, the project loses help and talent and cannot advance as much as it once could.
When people stay in spite of the drama, the project becomes toxic and people stop helping each other and cooperating on tasks.
When drama starters are allowed to stay and continue starting shit, it encourages other people to also do so.
When drama starters are validated for their behaviour by other members of the project who don’t care to realise they’re caught up in a theatre act, they are emboldened to continue starting more drama, which repeats all of the above degradations.
People who do this need to be told to shut the fuck up immediately on pain of excommunication. Anyone with a brain can see what this is for what it is and understand why it’s an existential threat to making anything worthwhile with other human beings. How long are we going to be ignorant and act as if these people give a single shit about what’s best for everyone? They hate others doing things because of the feelings of inferiority it creates within them and seek to blame that on the person who is out there doing the work.
Seriously, stop tolerating this shit. Your life’s work depends on it. And maybe now you understand why there’s so many ‘quotable quotes’ about this problem.
