Missing Stair

Missing Stair

Routing Around Damage

"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore

When a network node fails or a connection is censored, packets automatically reroute through working paths. No central authority decides this - it's distributed, automatic, resilient. The network keeps functioning.

Community social routing works this way too -- but at a huge cost.

The Missing Stair Metaphor

Imagine a house with a broken stair. Everyone who lives there knows about it. They've learned to step over it automatically. They warn newcomers: "watch out for that step." But nobody fixes it.

A missing stair is a person in a community whose harmful behavior is worked around rather than addressed.

The term originated in a 2012 blog post describing known sexual predators in social communities - people everyone knew were dangerous, but instead of removing them, the community developed workarounds:

• Don't let new women be alone with him
• Warn people privately at events
• Create buddy systems
• Just avoid him if you can

The metaphor has since been generalized to describe anyone whose repeated harmful behavior is tolerated and routed around rather than confronted.

The Range of Harm

Missing stairs exist on a spectrum:

SEVERE HARM (original usage)

• Sexual harassment or assault
• Physical violence or threats
• Predatory behavior toward vulnerable people
• Targeted harassment campaigns
• Stalking

PERSISTENT HARM

• Bullying or intimidation patterns
• Discriminatory behavior
• Abuse of power or authority
• Weaponizing community processes
• Monopolizing resources/spaces to exclude others

CHRONIC DYSFUNCTION

• Repeated conflict escalation
• Inability to collaborate constructively
• Consistent boundary violations
• Draining disproportionate community resources

The severity varies, but the pattern is the same: the community routes around the person instead of addressing the harm.

Why Routing Happens Instead of Fixing

FEAR OF CONSEQUENCES

• The person might retaliate
• The person might claim victimhood
• The confrontation could split the community
• Legal concerns (defamation, liability)
• The person is "useful" in other ways

DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY

No single person feels responsible for addressing it. Everyone assumes:

• Someone else will handle it
• Someone with more authority should act
• It's not bad enough for me to say something
• Other people seem okay with it

NORMALIZATION

The longer the routing continues:

• The behavior becomes "just how they are"
• New people learn the workarounds without questioning them
• The routing becomes invisible infrastructure
• Addressing it feels like making a big deal out of nothing

The Cost of Social Routing

BANDWIDTH EXHAUSTION

Every person who routes around the problem pays a cost:

• Remember who the problem person is
• Modify their own behavior around them
• Warn others (often repeatedly, as new people arrive)
• Absorb the extra friction and vigilance
• Manage their own feelings about the situation
• Question whether they're overreacting

This isn't one-time work. It's continuous, cumulative labor. Eventually people run out of capacity.

PACKET LOSS

Some people can't or won't do the routing work. They just leave. The community loses:

• People who had the worst interactions (often those most vulnerable)
• Contributors who encountered the problem early and bounced
• People who came with energy and left depleted
• Those who care enough to be hurt by the dysfunction

Often these are exactly the people the community can't afford to lose. The missing stair acts as a filter, selecting against certain types of people - frequently those from marginalized groups the community claims to want.

ROUTING OVERHEAD

The workarounds themselves become significant work:

• Buddy systems for events
• Informal warning networks that must be maintained
• Projects redesigned to exclude the person
• Event planning adjusted around their presence/absence
• Constant background vigilance
• Emotional labor of deciding who to warn and how

The community spends more energy managing the problem than it would take to address it directly.

BANDWIDTH MONOPOLIZATION

One person consumes disproportionate resources:

• Leadership attention and time
• Conflict resolution energy
• Community discussion cycles
• Emotional labor from multiple people simultaneously
• Physical space (if they monopolize certain areas/tools)

Legitimate community work gets deprioritized. The missing stair becomes the organizing principle.

ROUTING TABLE CORRUPTION

The informal warning system has failure modes:

• Not everyone gets warned (especially new people, marginalized people, people outside certain social circles)
• Warnings get softened ("they're just awkward" vs "they're predatory")
• Information gets lost as people leave
• The reasons for the warnings get forgotten over time
• People question whether the warnings are fair without the full context

CENSORSHIP ENFORCEMENT

The self-censorship that created the routing becomes permanent:

• "We've tolerated this for years, why act now?"
• "Everyone knows how to handle them"
• "It works fine if you just avoid X/Y/Z"
• Direct naming of the problem becomes taboo
• New people learn that questioning the workarounds isn't done

The routing is now load-bearing. Removing it feels more dangerous than keeping it.

SYSTEM CRASH

Eventually one of several things happens:

• Enough people leave that the community dies or fundamentally changes
• Someone burns out catastrophically trying to manage the situation
• The harmful person causes damage severe enough that it can't be routed around
• External pressure forces action (legal, financial, reputational)
• New leadership doesn't know/respect the routing and breaks the unspoken rules

At this point the community must either address the damage directly or accept permanent dysfunction.

Recognition: Signs of a Missing Stair

COMMUNITY-LEVEL INDICATORS

• Private warning networks exist ("don't work alone with X")
• People use careful language around certain topics/people
• Attendance patterns shift when the person is/isn't present
• Certain spaces or activities become de facto off-limits to some
• Newcomers receive warnings without context
• Long-term members have elaborate strategies for "managing" the person
• Good contributors quietly stop participating
• The community can describe the problem in detail but won't act on it

INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL INDICATORS

You might be witnessing a missing stair if you:

• Receive vague warnings about someone ("just be careful around them")
• Notice people avoiding certain situations involving this person
• Hear multiple similar stories from different people
• Feel gaslit when the person's public persona doesn't match private warnings
• See elaborate social choreography around the person
• Notice your gut reaction is being explained away by others or yourself

SEVERE HARM INDICATORS

Some specific signs that require immediate action:

• Pattern of people from marginalized groups leaving after interactions with this person
• Multiple reports of sexual harassment/assault
• Threats or intimidation
• Behavior that would be criminal outside the community context
• Targeting of vulnerable/new community members

Why Communities Protect Missing Stairs

THE EXCELLENT HACKER FALLACY (aka The Usefulness Trap)

"But they're such an excellent hacker! We can't afford to lose them!"

The person may:

• Have valuable technical skills
• Control important infrastructure or resources
• Have institutional knowledge nobody else has
• Do unglamorous work nobody else wants to do
• Bring in funding or community connections

The community performs a calculation: their contribution value vs. harm caused. But this calculation typically fails to account for:

• People already driven away by them
• Potential contributors who never showed up because of them
• Opportunity cost of their monopolization (what could happen if others could step in)
• Compound cost of routing overhead across the whole community
• Long-term community health and culture

In hacker/maker spaces, technical skill often gets weighted too heavily against social harm. "They're brilliant" becomes justification for tolerating behavior that would be unacceptable from someone less skilled.

The fallacy: assuming the work can only be done by this person, or that their contribution outweighs the damage. Often when the missing stair is finally removed, others step up and the work continues - sometimes better than before.