Mastodawn

Reporting back on this confronting interaction with the #Holepunch / #Keet community in their official #Pears channel last December 13th/14th (depending on your timezone).

https://kolektiva.social/@pospi/115714114504044153

TLDR; yes, it's another violent #DistributedWeb #DWeb community incubating hate projects and including #fascist actors.

pospi (@[email protected])

woah 😯 the #Keet community's response to cultural commentary is INTENSE. I'm out. Fix your shit & release an official statement, #BigTent #OpenSource #fascists. See Keet official "#Pear Community" group for the crazy.

kolektiva.social

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pospi Jan 14

The first response was mockery from a user by the name of 'Solar Saint': "Sounds gay". I can deal with mockery- it's a minor enough culture smell if dealt with well. But it was ignored, thus normalising the tone. And far worse was coming.

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pospi Jan 14

A user by the name of 'dmc' is where the majority of the vitriol came from.

"No. We’re not doing this. Any of it. Whether you’re left or right - fuck off with your culture wars. I’m going to deconstruct this nonsense here one time and then we can focus on building good stuff for the peers"

"Free speech as used by the far right is the same as any given subject used by any political entity that seeks to attract the disenfranchised" [continues with a lengthy diatribe on #FreeSpeech maximalism that was probably generated by AI]

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pospi Jan 14

A quick reverse image search on the avatar of 'dmc' reveals him to be https://github.com/davidmarkclements - an official Holepunch team member. So the core @holepunch_to team includes abusive people who bully away anybody who raises cultural issues. Cool.

As problematic as the #RespectabilityPolitics are, the only relevant official guidelines for the chat are "Speak freely, but always with respect. Insults or toxic language won't fly here." No admins or mods intervened or responded to David's contributions, so I can only assume that "fuck off with your culture wars" constitutes acceptable official conduct.

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pospi Jan 14

David Mark Clements seems to have some vocal fans by the names of 'Silver Surfer' and 'superwoody', and a YouTube channel where he apparently posts right-leaning recruitment through a disingenously centrist lens. I have not bothered to explore that content. I'm sure I've heard it all before.

(image via @TheDialecticalCommunist)

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pospi Jan 14

'superwoody' certainly seems like a hate actor, eagerly taking the opportunity to post Trumpist anti-progressive rhetoric-

"Free speech is actually originally left ideology the fact that it's viewed as right is truly astounding. The bad guys in history have always been the ones against #freespeech"

"The so called modern left is tantamount to Nazism, where it wants to take away people's lives for use of mere words or discussing topics it doesn't like."

(To dmc's credit, he did actually push back against the 'Nazism' comment a little, in a characteristically meandering and verbose way.)

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pospi Jan 14

The same reductive individualistic logic I have seen peddled across more or less every #DWeb community I have ever engaged with of course gets some airtime here:

"In short #Keet, Pear and #P2P is about #decentralization and that means giving power to individuals and taking it from large entities like governments and companies ie meta etc"

Sure bros, you've made your politics clear. It's all "I will not be ruled" here, "I will not rule" or the matter of what happens with that power once it has been siezed hasn't even entered awareness.

https://c4ss.org/content/56480

In suggesting that we "all work together on avoiding tyranny in all its forms", David seems completely unaware of his direct contributions to the tyranny of Pears' official channels.

From Stirner to Mussolini

Review: The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism In 1910 Luigi Fabbri and Armando Borghi abducted an anarchist woman who had shamed their friend by divorcing him. Together, they forced her into a gynecological exam so the doctor could publicly pronounce her deformed and incapable of sex. All three were prominent leaders in the Italian anarchist...

Center for a Stateless Society

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pospi

I've no interest in getting involved in another tired debate where people like David Mark Clements and his fans assert the falsehood of tech as an apolitical phenomenon. Many have said it better than me, and to loosely quote one of them: oh my sweet summer child, computers are tools which INHERENTLY amplify power 🙄

https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115877083071558201

Dare Obasanjo (@[email protected])

When people say “stop making things political”, they mean you should stop making them feel uncomfortable that the system that oppresses you benefits them.

mas.to

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pospi Jan 14

As I've already indicated, if no official response is given I will be creating strong sanctions around use of @holepunch_to software and contributing to their communities. I will no longer recommend #Keet or #Pears openly or to groups I work with, and instead take on the responsibility of warning marginalised people of their toxic culture and against engaging with them.

You have lost yourselves a fan, and created a vocal detractor.

https://kolektiva.social/@pospi/115720025399306924

pospi (@[email protected])

#Keet & #Holepunch @[email protected] teams- following up from yesterday: Pragmatically, I'll still use your software (though it makes trusting proprietary modules feel even more sketchy tbh). Yours is probably the one #TechnoFascist project I'm aware of that actually has good code & UX. And it's self sovereign, so. If your response goes further into a downward spiral of innocense & virtue instead of some amends, accountability and recovery, I'll just do what we're doing for #Holochain. Authoring politically assertive #governance processes around my collective's & partnership's use of their software, explicitly calling out the harm and creating guardrails to prevent any upstream contributions (intellectual, social or otherwise). And then we'll open source those docs, surface them everywhere, and make them easily adoptable & forkable.

kolektiva.social

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pospi Jan 14

Noteworthy that I also see people in the Pears community chat asking whether #Holepunch are part of the 'Privacy Accelerationists' group https://privacc.org and so seems pretty clear to me that #Keet's marketing is also attracting Landian #fascist #accelerationist hate actors.

I am aware that Holepunch's ~$10M in funding places them in an exponentially more powerful position than the impoverished progressive @dat_ecosystem that they've built atop of and co-opted. I also want to say that DAT's private responses to me have been exemplary in how to generatively respond to cultural issues. I hope to see people in the broader #DatEcosystem and @apereo continuing to hold that torch.

This is #OpenSource's damaging #BigTent philosophy at work yet again.

https://indieweb.social/@jaredwhite/115391398124441340

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pospi Jan 14

For context- if the concept of #accelerationism is new to you, I recommend this insightful historical account of what we're dealing with. https://julesevans.medium.com/accelerationism-amphetamine-philosophy-and-the-death-trip-bb67ff079f8

You may also find the Wikipedia pages on Nick Land and Accelerationism illuminating.

Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip

This is a story about dangerous ideas, and words’ magical power to heal and to harm. It’s about AI, Charles Manson, dubstep, Neo-Nazis, occultism, and a lot of amphetamine, but it’s mainly about…

Medium

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pospi Jan 14

To anybody in the DAT ecosystem interested in confronting these cultural problems, please feel free to reach out. Though my capacity is low, I have extensive experience understanding these toxic ideologies and their effects on marginalised communities after being a long-term contributor to #Holochain (effectively a #FarRight psyop designed to recruit progressive talent toward building software for hate actors and White Nationalist networks).

That's all for now. I may reflect more when I return from an impending whitewater rafting holiday.

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Sven Slootweg, low-spoons mode ("still kinky and horny anyway")Jan 14

@pospi @dat_ecosystem @apereo To add to the pile, I bailed out of that whole ecosystem a while ago, after Holepunch practically took over the DAT protocol (then Hypercore) while several unpleasantly sealion-y community members very insistently wanted to argue about how that's all a misconception and actually the DAT protocol is still independent and Holepunch is separate from that, but could mysteriously not answer questions like "okay so why did all the non-Holepunch documentation just disappear" at the time...

And everything I've encountered along the way pretty much matched up with your description of the dynamics there.

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pospi Jan 14

@joepie91 FWIW the non-Holepunch documentation is still there, and always has been... just loosely as README files in the `hyper*` modules now moved to be under the `holepunchto` Github org.

DAT don't have money or capacity to maintain public forks or replicas, but I'm assured that members outside Holepunch do still do this privately, in order to track improvements & modifications to the core stack as they occur. For additional context, the friend who told me this also said [quote]:

Almost all DAT ecosystem projects already built the various apps and tools before Holepunch ever existed and without the hyper stack ...they are all dead.
...which is probably great for Holepunch, because they can just capture those users and take over audiences and get rid of any meaningful competition that might not align with Holepunch's "community".