What happened with Raspberry Pi?

Contents

Introduction ⚓

Raspberry Pi’s marketing group did not have a good day.

It started, as it so often does, with a single Tweet (or Toot 🔗 if you’re a Mastodonian). The Raspberry Pi organization made a new hire and wanted to introduce/promote him. That’s pretty innocuous. The introduction was kind of weird, though:

We hired a policeman & it’s going really great.

Uh, weird flex but ok.

I was a #Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide covert video & audio gear. I’d disguise it as something else, like a piece of street furniture or a household item.

That’s not a particularly great fact to lead with. Mastodon is full of anti-government, anti-surveillance, tech-savvy types, as well as marginalized groups who have been repeat victims of police surveillance. Add on the touchy relationship 🔗 between police and the general public 🔗 and you have a kettle that’s right on the verge of boiling.

But that alone isn’t enough to cause a PR disaster. What is is how Raspberry Pi responded when another person brought up some very valid concerns about the announcement:

The conversation then turned towards their unprofessional response. When people started calling them out, they went on the defensive:

Apparently this isn’t an unusual tone for this account, since they’ve made some…interesting posts before:

But to get back on topic, the problem isn’t that the person they hired is ex-police. It’s not even that he has 15 years of experience building surveillance equipment (although that is certainly a problem). Rather, it’s how they responded to people’s concerns. You’d expect an official social media account to tell when a post is being received poorly and back off or even apologize, but not double down and insult the people who called you out. Maybe it’s my marketing background, maybe I give companies like these too much leeway, but it definitely feels immature and unwarranted.

I have no personal ill will towards the person they hired. Though I don’t trust him, I respect his ability to make really cool things out of really cool hardware. But as far as how Raspberry Pi treats their community and the people who helped them grow to where they are, they’ve lit that bridge on fire, and it’s gonna take a lot for them to build it back.