The Winer/Calcanis Brouhaha

There was a kerfuffle among some Internet giants a couple months back, but the vast majority of the Internet’s users didn’t know about it, and they wouldn’t have cared if they did. It popped up on a few of the sites I read, but I lacked the context to do more than read the back-and-forth. Thanks to a Twitter conversation, I finally found a video that captured the spark that set off the flame war.

At a technology conference called Gnomedex, Jason Calcanis, an Internet bigwig you’ve probably never heard of, got up to talk about the infestation of spam in our Internet lives: Email, blogs, comments, ads, etc. He thinks it’s destroying the Internet, and who can disagree? After that preamble, he started to talk about his search engine Mahalo, a human-edited search engine that I have yet to explore. From what I’ve read, Calcanis uses every opportunity to push his new business: I suppose I would too in his shoes.

Quickly, Dave Winer, another Internet giant you’ve probably never heard of, yelled out that he didn’t want to look at conference spam right then. (I think that’s what he said; the audio was focused on Calcanis.) Winer, rightly, viewed Calcanis’ abrupt switch from interesting topic to sales pitch as an example of the very thing Calcanis said we should fight.

From the video, it sounds as if half the audience shouted Winer down. Calcanis pulls an “oooookay” as the audience erupts and then proceeds as before. For days afterwards, the high-profile bloggers in attendance went back and forth about what happened. There were slams and hurt feelings and “he said, he said” blog posts all around.

I’ve met Dave, 15 years or so ago when I was a big fish in the small pond of Mac scripting. At the time, I found him to be aggressively opinionated. A lot of people, including me, found him hard to get along with. He says on his blog that he’s mellowed since our last face-to-face (or phone-to-phone, if I recall correctly), and he probably has.

But here’s the thing: He’s smart, he has interesting thoughts, and he’s often right. He’s developed many of the technologies that drive the modern Internet — blogs and RSS, to name a couple. And I get the sense that, mellowed or not, he doesn’t like conferences that waste his and the audience’s time by having some guy or gal get up on stage and just sell something. He wants to have a conversation. I don’t think he shouted out at Calcanis — whom I’ve never met — to heckle him; I think he was pointing out the obvious.

We all know people who annoy us, and we automatically tune them out when they start talking. Maybe they ramble. Maybe they’re aggressive. Maybe they’re just wacko. We never hear what they’re saying, because we erect our not-listening shields the moment they open their mouths. I wonder if the audience members, who have probably all faced Winer in various stages of being opinionated, just shut him down without listening to what he was saying. How many were thinking something similar, but acted out of habit?

I know all this is human nature, but the video got me thinking: How often do we miss important things because we tune people out?