Although South By Southwest has long been one of digital culture's foremost summits, recent events suggest it's time to re-assess that. SXSW's organizers have publicly foundered over some of the event's programming on online harassment—undoubtedly one of the most important and complex topics facing digital culture today. And that they've messed this up so monumentally exposes a fundamental problem with the very events that purport to champion the issue.

By now you've likely heard of GamerGate, a clutch of internet users whose primary occupation is harassing feminist activists in games and tech and keening about how "SJWs" (social justice warriors) are ruining their favorite media. Last year, in response to an editorial I wrote that was critical of video game culture's inherent sexism, they swarmed Intel with "consumer complaints" until it pulled advertisements from the site that published it (the chastened tech giant has since committed a generous $300 million to diversity initiatives). The same loosely organized "community" has hounded women from their homes and attempted to silence their talks with threats of mass violence.

GamerGate is one of the more more visible harassment campaigns in recent memory, and its fallout has emphasized the need for dialogue about online abuse and ways to support women, people of color, and other marginalized populations in a historically male-dominated digital space. And while we'd all like to know what could possess someone to send death threats over video games, you'd have to be pretty out of touch to say hey, let's hear what the harassers think about it; it's only fair!

Except that's essentially what SXSW did when it allowed a panel of GamerGaters onto its 2016 program lineup. It also cancelled a panel on overcoming harassment in games—in response to threats of harassment, which no doubt came from GamerGaters (the proposed anti-harassment panel included sociologist Katherine Cross and activist Randi Harper, two of their favorite targets). In the end SXSW canceled both panels, a widely criticized decision: Not only did it suggest a false equivalency between "both sides" of a non-debatable issue, but canceling an anti-harassment workgroup because of harassment demonstrates a profoundly shallow understanding of the topic.

A long account of the process—written by Arthur Chu, one of the panel's participants—highlights how SXSW's Reddit-style upvote/downvote "panel picker" system was perfectly suited to GamerGate's preferred modes of attack: comment-thread spamming, slander, and threats. More problematically, even before the controversy erupted, conference organizers barely paid attention to the warning signs, and refused to intervene. With Reddit under prolonged fire for cultivating a toxic community, it's hard to imagine anyone thought borrowing its toolset would go swimmingly.

Clear Voices, Deaf Ears

In fact, the cluelessness is so severe as to seem willful. This past March, a representative of SXSW emailed me to ask for my help in assembling a "GamerGate panel." He felt there would be a "glaring hole" in the program, he wrote, if GamerGate were not addressed. I advised avoiding focusing on harassers, and suggested that rather than inviting women to talk about their victimhood—GamerGate had been raging for seven months by that point, and us women in games wanted to get back to our jobs—SXSW might instead offer a forum to discuss anti-harassment and community-building, and to highlight the creations and perspectives of women and marginalized people in tech.

Clearly, the suggestion fell on deaf ears. And Chu's story makes it clear that his SXSW co-panelists' concerns about their physical safety were also ignored; it was only later threats to Hugh Forrest's "marketplace of ideas" that were deemed actionable. That's the larger problem demonstrated by debacles like these: Even though event organizers intellectually understand that diversity among their participants is crucial, and we now pay attention to racial and gender representation at tech conferences, and events routinely champion their diverse participation statistics and percentages—what difference does all this "representation" make if the things we are saying are not being heard?

That a supposedly forward-thinking conference fails so profoundly on an issue that the United Nations has decided is important enough to warrant discussion is almost unimaginable. Seemingly, bringing women and other underrepresented populations into the fold has become just another "feature" for organizers to congratulate themselves about—a bullet point in a press release.

It's worth interrogating the cultural value of the entire tech event circuit, and asking who these programs really serve: the participants and audience, or the events themselves. Just two days ago, John Sharp stepped down as co-chair of IndieCade, one of gaming's most creative and respected festivals. In his resignation letter, he lamented the fact that despite his best hopes, providing event platforms for marginalized individuals costs those creators labor and travel expenses—and ultimately offers them little in return. "By inviting a developer or critic to speak," he wrote, "are we doing them a favor? Or are we doing the organizations or ourselves a favor?"

Current reports suggest SXSW may attempt to reinstate the anti-harassment panel, and that it might even create an all-day harassment-palooza in response to the controversy. But these are decisions that protect SXSW, not anyone else. PR triage is well and good, but the damage to the panelists—who are now receiving fresh rounds of threats and harassment on social media—is already done.

Technology events continue to invite us to appear on panels and roundtables—to donate our time, effort and expertise, and sometimes even risk our own safety—but they have not listened to us on a basic level. Our experience doesn't matter to them; what does is our presence. By relying on us for the optics of diversity without protecting us or respecting what we say, they're making a bid for relevance on our backs.