You have two feet. One is for learning, the other is for contributing. If you find yourself in a place where you are doing neither, it is your responsibility to respectfully use your two feet (or wheels) to go somewhere that you are. If you don’t, chances are you’re gonna be ego-fodder.
Respectfully: So, no resentment-grenades tossed over your shoulder as you flounce out.
But then, as long as I don’t reveal the details of the event, I’m allowed to rant, right? Right?
Fuck me sideways, I have had enough of this shit.
No tea, no coffee, no lunch. No attempt to get us talking with other folks. No written programme with agenda timings. Just bang, straight into some old white guy self-satisfiedly talking about other self-satisfied white guys. And it was gonna continue like this.
I’ve been around the block(heads) enough to know that while it is theoretically possible for an event to start badly and get better, we don’t live in that theoretical universe, and that if you throw good time after bad, you don’t get the sympathy from the Wife.
It’s a pity, because I suspect there were some interesting people there, but the cost of finding them was simply too high.
Whose fault is this? It’s easy (and fun, and largely right) to blame individual academics, or individual activists who put on these events (I hesitate to use the term ‘design’, because no design effort appears to have been made. But it’s also incomplete – they are simply monkey-see-monkey-do-ing. They came up seeing these meetings, and think it’s the norm (it is, it’s just that it is a – deep breath – REALLY SHIT NORM.)
So, they’re complicit, but the simplicity of the complicity can defer action.
Will I reach out and tell them any of this? I should, but I simply can’t be bothered. And the big wheel will, regardless, keep on turning.
marchudson.net 
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