So Andrew Hussie Busted the Shit Out Of A Union
By: Holly Summit
Tags: Unions, Webcomics, Crowdfunding, Fandom, Homestuck

When Hussie talks about “the [REDACTED] narrative”, he’s drawing on a recurring theme throughout the e-mails. The backbone of Hussie’s claim is that there’s one employee who “poisoned the well” and got everyone to accept a particular narrative of the company. For instance, an e-mail at 59:33:

The poisoning process works generally like this. A person in an organization does destructive things, they know they’re going to be in trouble if it gets out, and faced with the possibility of getting blamed or having their career derailed, they work quickly to devise a counternarrative which erases all their destructive actions and redirects focus on other factors as the true cause of all the problems. This has happened a few times throughout WP history. (Gio’s source has been the most persistent example of this.) The way [REDACTED] went about it was first to forcefully deny any rumours about his behaviour. […] Since [REDACTED] put in more work socially connecting with many members of the staff, they believe him, and start listening to his counter narrative. Which is something to the effect of, this studio closed spontaneously for unfair reasons, was horribly mismanaged by [REDACTED_2] and WP, and the reason you aren’t hearing anything from them now is because they just don’t care about you. The truth of course is, as you can see from our transcripts with [REDACTED], that before his meltdown we were clearly trying to bring people back, and we would have happily communicated more with the staff if it didn’t feel like doing so would put people at risk. We were all working pretty hard to save everyone’s job for months […] Sadly the [REDACTED] incident made that impossible. But the immediate effect of the poisoning process was to split the former staff into two groups. A smaller group which wasn’t poisoned […] And a larger group which seemed to form a clique briefly after the closure. I think they all met once or twice to talk about what happened, conducting an informal post mortem amongst each other, which cemented [REDACTED]’s narrative as the truth about what happened.

So, pretty obviously, I think, [REDACTED] was engaging in some workplace organising, which is what it is when you “put in more work socially connecting with many members of the staff” in order to collectively discuss workplace grievances. All other factors considered, that is absolutely definitionally workplace organising, and Hussie’s strategy is to try to paint [REDACTED] as persona non grata, labeling him a “stalker” and accusing him of inappropriate workplace conduct etc.

In all of this, the most important thing Hussie says is at 1:06:20.

I also have no doubt that if she (the uncredited employee mentioned above) actually knew about [REDACTED]’s behaviour, she would have distanced herself quickly from him rather than embrace his narrative. I think it’s pretty likely she would have been hired back if not for getting poisoned by his influence. Seeing how this played out even years later underscored how much damage [REDACTED] did. He not only destroyed most of the work done on a million+ dollar dev cycle, he cost some people future employment consideration, and corrupted their attitude so much they went on to burn bridges unnecessarily.

That’s just a hell of a callout post to write about your own employee. Hussie’s good outcome is for other employees to distance themselves “quickly” from [REDACTED] because of his problematic behaviour. This is what he explicitly wants and moreover expects to happen. Earlier in the chain, Hussie says he doubts anyone at WP will ever talk to him again, but then he says that most of the employees were “poisoned” by him and that his account of events was well-accepted by the larger part of the former staff.

Which brings me to the point of who exactly are the people who Hussie is trying to protect. He repeatedly brings up the damage that information could do to certain individuals but he never says which individuals. In my opinion, it’s pretty obvious that it isn’t the employees who he’s worried about, who were fired without warning and effectively blacklisted (that’s what “burning bridges” means) but rather himself and other individuals he worked closely with in the upper hierarchy of the company. For instance, he mentions at exactly 1:00:00 an event in which a former employee, “Alice”, went public with some aspects of the narrative which was accepted by the majority of the former staff, who was then sent a legal threat in order to coerce her into deleting it. “Alice” is the same employee who Hussie, above, admitted to going “improperly uncredited”. (She also denies being the one who made the posts, or knowing who did.) Certainly Alice’s protection isn’t the priority here, so whose is?

When we go back to the part where Hussie acts like if Doc Scratch were a dweeby CEO and not an omniscient demigod, he continues:

“[…]many instances of transparency on the level desired by certain sectors of the fandom would unavoidably involve throwing a lot of people I’ve worked with under the bus, which is something I’ve been historically reluctant to do. This even includes cases where the people at fault did extremely damaging things, and were not particularly nice people. The way I’ve generally handled such events is to say, I could either publicly trash the person who just did a bunch of bad things, or I could try to be a little more diplomatic, put a positive spin on the new direction things are taking, and just keep moving forward while rallying efforts of everyone still remaining to repair the damage caused by destructive individuals.”

Starting 25:36, Sarah quotes a source who requested anonymity for by now obvious reasons, who “worked not at the WhatPumpkin NYC game studio, but in closer proximity to Hussie,” and “described their experience as ‘like, 10 million HR violations a day.’”

Whether Hussie is being coerced via NDA to cover things for others involved in the higher hierarchies of the various companies and studios involved, who are more well-versed in the legalities of all that than he is, or whether he’s purposely trying to protect the people he’s worked closely with, it’s pretty obvious what the silence here is meant to protect. Not the employees, but those who are actually liable for the various HR violations and labour violations, etc.

I really don’t think Hussie understands that he’s a participant in a class conflict. I think he is as repelled by formality and corporate culture as most other millennials are. He just wants to sit backwards on his chair and keep it real with us in an informal setting like some schmuck at a school presentation on drugs or bullying or whatever.

unions.

Hussie is a product of liberal ideology as much as anyone else, and the conflicts inherent to the capitalist mode of appropriation are obscure to him. Z’s analysis, as well, and the one that will doubtless become dominant over all this, which is that this all happened because Andrew Hussie himself is a bad man, is a liberal one, mired in the same ideology, which ultimately obscures the workings of the capitalist mode and therefore the actual cause of the problems. It allows us to go back to consuming products from other corporations which, not having Andrew Hussie’s moral inferiority to worry about, are supposedly potentially non-exploitative, innocent until proven guilty, so we can consume them while retaining our moral purity as defined by the consumer ideology of neoliberal capitalism.

The fact that Hussie doesn’t think of himself as a capitalist doesn’t change the fact that he is one, and because he is one, the conflict between him and the labourers he exploits rages on regardless of his personal attitude to it, even if he’s a hip millennial with shit boundaries who just has no idea how to run a company. Like, me too, though.

The point here is that employers aren’t kidnapped and threatened and sued, their private property smashed, because they’re just big old meanies. They can be quite nice. I like Andrew. I’m going to go download Psycholonials right after I publish this. But that doesn’t make a militant approach to him unjustified, because he picked this fight by having a 2.5 million dollar video game budget and employing wage labourers to make it. Any profit he makes from it will be stolen from their labour. It’s their work that makes it. They can and moreover must do whatever they want to ensure that they’re fairly compensated, not threatened, not libelled, not blacklisted, not de-credited, not fired without warning or severance.

It is not because Hussie is a bad man, but because he is a capitalist, that he gets to just decide what the narrative is around “his” company and that anyone who contradicts him on that can be fired, threatened, sued, blacklisted, that journalists can be threatened for even talking to them, etc. That’s what’s at issue here — that this was always going to happen, no matter what. It arose, as Lenin tells us, as Engels tells us, from the contradictions of capitalism, not from Hussie’s moral failings.

Homestuck didn’t become a corporatised nightmare mired in labour violations for any other reason than because that’s what capitalism does to the things we love.

Power doesn’t corrupt, it places you in intractable conflict with those below you, which sucks even if everyone involved is very nice.

The same personality flaws he had before the fundraiser played themselves out in a high-stress conflict situation where he wielded power far disproportionate to that of his entire staff even collectively. But he was the same person. I would also be in intractable conflict in that position, and personally speaking, I know I don’t have the emotional maturity to manage a multimillion dollar game development studio either. Apparently Andrew figured this out, too, because he’s distanced himself from WhatPumpkin and his more recent projects appear to be solo endeavors.

The main takeaway I want people to get from this is that capitalism sucks for reasons not related to any of the individuals involved.