So Andrew Hussie Busted A Union
Power doesn’t corrupt, it places you in intractable conflict with those below you, which sucks even if everyone involved is very nice.
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Something about Andrew Hussie in Sarah Z’s latest video comes off as extremely unlikable. For those who don’t have an hour and a half to sink into this, the gist of the video is that 2 months prior, Sarah Z (pronounced “Sarah Zed”) had done a separate video in which she discussed some well-known controversies surrounding the webcomic Homestuck, of which Hussie was the creator and writer.
Well it wasn’t really about Homestuck, it was about the company WhatPumpkin, which Hussie set up to manage branding, spin-offs, merchandising, and later on, video game development, but not the comic itself. Apparently, WhatPumpkin has had a pretty turbulent history and Sarah Z attempted to document that. Z’s negative coverage sent WhatPumpkin into a tailspin, and eventually, Andrew Hussie himself initiated an e-mail chain with Z in order to do damage control. And in my opinion he did a terrible job at this. He did a terrible job at this because he didn’t even seem to know what he was supposed to be damage controlling.
First I’m going to talk about one criticism of Z’s which I think is unfair, and then I’m going to talk about the entire rest of the video, where she doesn’t go far enough. My intention here isn’t to defend Hussie, but to contextualise the rest of this when we talk about where the issue is and why.
The meat of the issue revolves around a kickstarter which Hussie ran in 2012 for a Homestuck Adventure Game which would later become known as Hiveswap. The kickstarter, itself, is not an issue to me. As someone whose primary income source is crowdfunding, I don’t think Hussie did anything extremely out of line with the kickstarter itself. As opposed to other forms of investment, in which Hussie would be entering into a contractual agreement with some funder, or company, etc, Hussie wanted to maintain complete creative control over the project, and he was pretty up front about this from the start. Creative control does entail the right to fuck everything up and take like ten years to get a game out. In my opinion, Hussie pretty much did right by his investors. All investments carry risks, especially when you’re paying a guy with no video game development experience, and many irons in the fire already, an obscene amount of money to make a video game. A lot of these investors had about as much investment experience as Hussie had video game development experience, so none. If they’d had more, they’d have known to look for things like a contract, periodic updates about how the project is going, proof of concept, etc. Instead, they made a risky investment in which the project had little formal accountability to the funders, other than eventually getting a game out and maybe refunding them at least partially if it’s canceled, which it isn’t. Also, they did still get all the tier rewards, and while you could call them overpriced, they’re collector’s items, and that’s what makes them collectors items. Hardly some kind of grift.
From that point on, the boss of the project wasn’t the kickstarter investors but Hussie himself. The money from the kickstarter was his because he raised it and that makes him the boss. Follow?
Since he was the boss, Hussie entered an intractable conflict with his employees, a conflict he himself seems to be completely unaware of. The conflict doesn’t exist because he’s an evil evil bad man bad, but because that’s what capitalist production is. From the e-mails in the video, it’s possible to get an impression of what he might be like as a boss that corroborates what former employees have said. Apparently direct communication isn’t really the strong suit of the guy who wrote an 820,000 word webcomic — go figure. If you want to create suspense and fan engagement, then being cryptic is an extremely good way to tell a story. But as an employer you’re not supposed to be leaving staff guessing on what it is you want done.
Early on in the e-mail exchange, at around the 36 minute mark of the video, Hussie touches on similar themes to what I just said:
First of all, it needs to be said that transparency isn’t a black and white concept. There are literally thousands of facts associated with the Kickstarter and subsequent gamedev efforts. Dumping every single fact to the public would be gratuitous and very messy, so there is always going to be some level of discretion over which facts to make public. And as implied above, most of what’s informed that discretion has been either legal constraints, or concerns for the damage it could do to certain individuals, and that damage even includes concern for safety.
This is basically paraphrased from his own webcomic, where it’s said from the perspective of omniscient antagonist Doc Scratch, who, if nothing else, comes off as way less of a weasel about it:
Andrew Hussie went from being kind of an obtuse guy writing a webcomic to being kind of an obtuse guy with a 2.5 million dollar video game budget. He was not a shitty boss because of the seed of evil lurking deep in his heart. It’s important to me that everyone understand this. I was also up to some pretty problematic shit in homestuck times, but I didn’t have a 2.5 million dollar video game budget, and that’s the main difference I want everyone to be aware of. He was a shitty boss because he had no familiarity with, or appreciation for, the standards of professionalism which have evolved over the decades in the video game industry primarily for the protection of the workers in it, or rather, for the protection of the bosses in it from things like unionisation, bad PR, and lawsuits. In my opinion, it’s fairly obvious that this comes from a genuine lack of understanding, and not a conscious and malicious desire to do harm, because of the sheer scale of the shit he just openly admits to doing over the course of trying to defend himself to a youtuber with a platform of over a million viewers who openly plans to make this public, who he’s personally asking to make much of this public. For instance, Hussie says:
I know that she (“Alice”) was the one leading the charge on the credit issues because she sent us an email about it after [HiveSwap] Act 1’s release. In it she requested credit in a friendly tone, citing a few minor things appearing in Act 1 like a font design she contributed to, and small touches to characters like the gold trim on one of outfits. Probably under ordinary circumstances I would have replied to this in a friendly way, and even if her claims didn’t totally track (iirc they didn’t really, after consulting with some others), I’m sure I would have erred on the side of caution and just credited her. But this was a pretty crazy email to get because it wasn’t even long before receiving this that I saw her in public spaces saying wildly vitriolic things about me and WP, repeating the false points from the [REDACTED] narrative and such.
After consulting with the staff on it, it seemed like the team was in agreement that there wasn’t much substance to her claims, and even if there was, she’d already publicly burned the bridge with WP for anyone to be inclined to make the changes to the credits over such small points. I can at least acknowledge there’s a chance some of her influence in the NYC build leaked through to the next version in small ways, and it wouldn’t have been off base to credit her. But this is pretty much the only situation I can think of like that. No one else from the NYC team went improperly uncredited.
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.
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.
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