I’ve given some thought recently to Ed’s bewildering obduracy in the face of almost unanimous disagreement: how can someone so obviously smart simply not get it so badly? Ed simply doesn’t know what he’s created, and so he doesn’t know what he’s trying to control. Somebody else pointed out that he’s been absent from the daily running of the board for nigh on ten years now, and that in that time it’s long since grown from being a Cecil Adams fan site to a board with a culture which derives from the columns but has long been separate.
The trouble for Ed is that the columns that the board was originally founded upon, the example that’s constantly been held up as the ideal, and so the culture that’s grown up here is one of irreverence, of knowledge, of sarcasm, of wit, of the scathing insult and the pitchy quip, and above all of the questioning of authority and demanding of cites: if you could sum up the ethos of this place in two words, they would be “Says who?”. And now we are irreverent, knowlegeable, sarcastic, and witty. We are the masters of the scathing insult and the pithy quip, and we demand cites. As the home page itself would have it, we are the “smartest, hippest people on the planet”, or at least would like to think of ourselves as such.
But now Ed has come back to take control of his creation, to impose his authority upon it once again. And he’s bewildered when he tries to impose rules that say “You can’t use these words in here” and we reply “Oh, yeah? Says who?”. Ed, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have us as the smart, hip free-thinkers you vaunt on your front page and yet expect us to come to heel when called. “Because I say so” is not a reason we are prepared to accept, and until you can come to terms with what this board is and rethink these rules, the resentment is going to continue.
And if you can’t come to terms with what this board has become and what it is and isn’t prepared to accept, then as the man* said, “There is a world elsewhere.” I don’t want to go. Nobody wants to go. We like it here. We made it what it is here. But if your new rules are going to go against everything we’ve stood for for ten years, where we can question everything but must still do what we’re told, I’d rather leave for somewhere more honest.
*Coriolanus, as it happens.