About 20 minutes left in the evening reception, and a 20-something fella came running up to me: “You got a big problem, and you better come with me,” he said, and turning.
What first crossed my mind was someone was having a health emergency. Instead, I walked into the emptying main ballroom, where perhaps 100 people so remained. A half-dozen technology exhibitors were there, including a high-school robotics demo and a chocolate 3D printer. This was the tail-end of the closing reception of my news organization Technically’s annual conference, which itself was the close of Philly Tech Week, an open-calendar of community events we founded.
It got weird.
As I entered the ballroom, a 20-something woman jumped off the stage, throwing leaflets into the air, as I saw a dozen or so attendees watching her with confused expressions. It still wasn’t clear what had happened. A handful of people attempted to explain, when I spotted a 20-something man appearing to aggressively shove one of the robotics on display. It was an “unmanned ground vehicle” (or UGV, as opposed to a unmanned aerial vehicle or AEV, which is better known as a drone), or what is increasingly called a “robot dog.”
I approached the guy, and the young woman who was representing the robotics company, and asked what was going on. This being the end of an event with more than 500 people from 15+ states, after a week of dozens of events, I had a glass of wine in my head — apparently I had ran into the room with it, not that I remember that but credit my balance and care for booze.
Without much of a response at all, the guy swiped up at the wine glass hard enough that it flew up high enough to shatter against the ballroom wall and struck me across the face in the process. In some sense, this made what happened next easier. I didn’t even yet entirely understand what happened, but I was confident he had done enough to warrant my ejecting him from my event. I put my hands on his shoulders and said something like “well now you gotta leave,” to which he shrieked something like “get your hands off me.”
He resisted, but he was a scrawny guy, so I simply slid my arms into his armpits and lifted him up. He went limp, and started shouting. He might have spit at me too, but I can’t be sure, it was a blur as he kept screaming. I carried him like a toddler throwing a tantrum through the far more crowded lobby area, as the event was concluding. Later I heard several attendees weren’t clear if I was being funny (I have a reputation!) or not. He said lots else about me, as I removed him out, to the jeers of a few of us friends.
Only later I got the scoop of what actually happened. These were protestors that had talked the University of Pennsylvania campus, the original home of that company that was exhibiting — Ghost Robotics, which we’ve reported on plenty. The criticism is that Ghost has contracts with the Department of Defense and was accused of deploying their robots in Palestine (a claim that Ghost officials expressly deny). We knew Ghost had its critics, and so we revised a policy for exhibitors at our events, but Ghost did not break the policy.
Our DJ had handed a microphone to the other protestor who had limply identified as a member of our news organization — and yet never cut the mic as she went on. The venue had no security support, and never seemed particularly interested in what happened, though we did our own investigation. We heard from a few different law enforcement teams.
I never heard from any of the protestors beforehand. Of course no interest in an actual conversation.
To me, I run a news org, so I didn’t think twice about their protest. In truth, somewhere there’s even a kernel of their point I agree with. But boy their was one of the lamer protests I’ve ever seen: I learned most of the attendees who were still there at the point of their outburst didn’t even understand what the first protestor was saying, and the takeaway for most of the other attendees was that a protestor hit me in the face and had to be physically removed. That didn’t add to an interpretation of a firm with a military contract. Their cause took a step backward, which I regret.
(For future reference, I wrote more here, which is currently private)