I have a troll. I’ve had them before, and I’ll have them again. This one though has passed more standard comments and emails, and has shown up in person. He was there a year ago when I got struck in the face at an event by a protestor I had to remove. Now, last month, he wrote up and printed hundreds of flyers with a long missive about me. He and some others posted them up on poles around my work conference, and handed many more to the volunteers at the conference’s registration table.
I do not think about this man, but gosh, he sure does think about me — he appears to be a retiree with a lot of free time. (I’m beginning to assume he kinda has a thing for me). His attacks were fairly strange, but easy enough to dispute that I thought I’d do that here for my own well-being.
Above is the Instagram video he posted of him showing the letter he wrote. His posts don’t get much, if any engagement from anyone else, but he tags me, and I haven’t blocked him, so I still see them. Since he isn’t interested in actually talking to me, and hasn’t given me much in genuine, good-faith criticism, it may eventually make more senes for me to block him after all. But I’m trying.
Anyway, for now, here are my simple responses to his accusations against me:
- That I only care about money. I have a run an inconsistently sustainable local news org for my entire career, which is been entirely in journalism in the early digital age. I just can’t fathom who could ever say that I only care about money. He appears to be referencing this interview I recently did to argue that Philly Tech Week has had an impact, and it is true that I used economic measures to document the event series’s impact. But I also share qualitative signals of impact too, and, again, I operate a news org that produces freely available information, so I’m not sure what his stance would be.
- That I normalized fascism. Uh, so, he’s referring to this op-ed I wrote in February this year in which I argued the DOGE criticism misunderstood Elon Musk’s motivations. My argument then was that Musk wasn’t leading a coup but rather he genuinely thought he was so smart that he was going to fix everything he saw as a problem. I called it an anti-democratic attack, but that the hyperbole around a Musk coup was unfounded. Ninety dates later, Musk is out and there was no coup. That doesn’t mean they weren’t destructive, as I have personally reported, but it wasn’t a Musk coup, like I said.
- That I haven’t spoken out about Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Genocide, DOGE, Climate, Eugenics, Human rights… At some point, he just started listing terms. I run a news org that covers local tech economies. Even still, Technically has written about Gaza-adjacent issues here and here; Ukraine here and here and here and here and here and here. We’ve covered DOGE, climate, human rights, privacy and free speech plenty. He has had no effect whatsoever on our news organization, proven by that we’ve already covered much of what he mentions even though it’s fairly far off our core beat.
All in all, if forced to think of this man at all, my view he is an old-timer with too much time on his hands, and puzzlingly little understanding of what I do, considering how much attention he pays me.