Dear colleague,

I have watched, and participated in, the debate on Twitter around LambdaConf and its approval of the application of the infamous Curtis Yarvin, aka Moldbug, to give a talk.

Now, if you were the kind of scheming social justice warrior that only exists in the fevered imagination of “GamerGaters”, and you wanted to create a bogeyman to justify an initial, minimalistic political litmus test for attending conferences that have nothing to do with politics, Curtis Yarvin is pretty much spot on who you’d create, I have to admit. He ticks all the boxes: an alleged racist (though he denies this), seems a bit fascist too, elitist, hates democracy and is one of the world’s foremost experts on writing vile, offensive political material. The consequences of putting his political ideas into practice would be terrifying — for all of us, not just non-white people — and he’s an idiot, because he wouldn’t escape those consequences himself.

Seems convincing, right?

Except that, in my opinion, the consequences of libertarianism would also be horrible. The consequences of communism would be, and have actually been, horrible — just look at Pol Pot and his backward regime of primitive agriculture in Cambodia, for example. (I mean I could also make the case that “politics as usual” in many countries, actually kills people, in terms of poverty, or air pollution— just look at China today and their smog crisis, or the less bad but still deadly pollution crisis in London — but let’s not get into that.) Do we ban all libertarians from technical conferences? All communists? All eco-primitivists? You want McCarthyism in the Scala and Haskell and Clojure communities?

The very idea is, of course, absurd.

(By the way, if you care about stopping Moldbug’s ideas and you’re in the US, you probably want to focus on straining every sinew to stop Trump getting elected president of the United States — every single alt-right and neoreactionary loon who cares about the election is in the bag for him, and not without reason. Moldbug, by contrast, would be unelectable for the rest of his life, and doesn’t even believe in democracy anyway. Just a tip.)

And it gets worse, if you go down the road of politicising technical conferences, or endorsing that politicisation. (This gets pretty absurd pretty quickly, so you might want to skip the next couple of paragraphs.) Do you want the anti-GM food activists to be able to block Monsanto employees from technical conferences? (Monsanto uses Scala.) Do you want pro-Palestinian activists to be able to block employees of companies that sell munitions to Israel from technical conferences? If there’s another financial crash — haha, sorry, naive optimism got the better of me there — I mean when there’s another financial crash — do you want a resurgent Occupy Wall Street movement to be able to block employees of banks and financial institutions, or perhaps employees of governments responsible for bailouts, from technical conferences? If Google accidentally unleashes “Skynet” (i.e. a powerful AI run amok) on the world, but somehow manages to recapture it before it kills everyone, do you want Googlers to become persona non grata at technical conferences? Even if they’re conferences about, er, AI safety? I mean that could be a pretty tough one, right — I might not want to allow Google to attend a conference that I was running if its rogue AI had just wiped out my entire family for example, but I think we can all agree that that would be an emotional overreaction based on my personal circumstances. We could go on and on. I mean that probably wouldn’t work in any of those examples — conference organisers, if they weren’t the same people as those activists, would probably just ignore the activists’ demands — but I would submit that you don’t want to open the metaphorical door an inch. It’s a bad precedent to set. Particularly if you work for a company or government that somebody, somewhere, might consider to have done something unethical. Now or in the future.

The point is not whether you think that any of those examples would be justified. I’m not interested in reading arguments for why they wouldn’t be justified. I don’t agree that your example is justified, remember? If the standard is “someone, somewhere thinks that allowing this person to attend is bad” then that’s open to abuse — and if we require two, or three, or four complainants, that’s still open to abuse. Why? Because of the examples that I’ve just given! (Or maybe you’re one of those people who don’t think any of them would be examples of abuse! If so, I’m sure you can come up with at least one example that would be abusive.)

If this sounds insane, it is.

The trouble is, it’s actually difficult to come up with an objective standard that doesn’t just exclude too many people. I mean, obviously we have to exclude all “bigots” right — right? Hold on a second! Also, what exactly is a bigot? In 2015, 40% of the US population were against gay marriage — the percentage has probably changed, but I don’t imagine it’s anywhere near zero less than one year later. To many people, including me, that makes them homophobes. Textbook homophobes. Opposed to equal legal rights for gay people. Not like “you can have your gay marriage, but don’t shove your gay kissing in my face” kind of stuff, but real “you are a 2nd-class citizen” stuff. Now here’s the awkward thing, especially for black people and their allies, who’d like to see more black people in tech: many of those homophobes are black. Is it possible that you only have 2 black attendees register to a technical conference, one of them has homophobic content on his Twitter timeline from when he was 18, someone finds it (yes, this kind of thing actually happens) and he gets banned from the conference — despite the inevitable protestations of “it was just a joke”? So you end up with a less racially diverse conference?

You’ve got to admit, it’s at least conceivable — if you extend the “safe space” you’ve effectively created (it’s a term of art in social justice), to LGBT people. And why wouldn’t you? Isn’t it only fair? How can you “privilege” one kind of oppression over another? Let’s not play oppression olympics here, people.

(Yes, I know, there will already be a less racially-diverse conference, if any black people were planning on going to LambdaConf and don’t because of this — but LambdaConf can justifiably argue that’s their personal choice and too bad.)

And it gets worse. It’s a pretty taboo subject a lot of the time, but racism doesn’t stop at the borders of the US and Europe. People in certain other countries I could name can be pretty damn racist, too. And homophobic. And anti-trans. And so on. Do you really want to decrease your conference’s international diversity? (I mean, maybe you do, if that’s the price you have to pay. I’m just asking.)

Let’s not even get into “anti-non-binary-gender-prejudice” — a word I just made up, but which will no doubt be “a thing” soon enough, if it isn’t already. (I don’t have a problem with non-gender-conforming people, by the way — I love Eddie Izzard — but I do have a problem, linguistically, with those that invent third, fourth, or 29th “genders” to describe the nature of their gender non-conformity. Genders aren’t a thing that you can have 29 of.)

But back to the subject. Don’t get me wrong. I personally am happy to talk to libertarians and communists and primitivists, but would rather not speak to Curtis Yarvin. If I were to go to LambdaConf this year, I’d probably just silently walk out when Curtis’s talk started. It would be pretty hilarious if most of the audience joined me. But I’m not going to make “who I dislike” the operative standard here — convenient as it might be for me personally, it’s obviously not a mature, adult way to deal with the problem.

I’ve been arguing for a principled stance: for admissions purposes, no discrimination whatsoever on the grounds of belief or behaviour outside of conferences — it needs some finesse, but I think it’s basically there. All you need is a good Code of Conduct — which LambdaConf already has. And common sense with regard to political discussions at a conference (unlike LambdaConf, I don’t approve of banning political discussions within the confines of a conference). I realise that’s a tad idealistic, but that’s my stance.

I suspect you still don’t agree with me. Whether you can change my mind is, presumably, besides the point — I don’t run LambdaConf. However… there might just be a way to change the minds of the LambdaConf organisers — or even a couple of ways.

The first is personal safety. I haven’t seen anyone explicitly making this argument, but if you can find a reasonable, credible way to link the shocking material you’ve unearthed to fearing for your own personal safety — not some hypothetical person who might be scared, that you’re “looking out for” in a hypothetical way, but you personally — that might work.

I have seen the opposite argument: I have seen Meredith Patterson’s tweet from last year that the idea of being scared of Curtis Yarvin is just silly — but I have reasons not to trust her judgement on social justice matters that go beyond just her being white. But I haven’t seen the “I am literally afraid that Curtis Yarvin will do me physical harm and this is justified because of X, Y, Z” argument made anywhere — and I don’t think anyone should assume that the argument is self-evident (or, for that matter, assume that LambdaConf is seeing their tweets at all — there are an awful lot of tweets about this). That’s part of social justice 101, isn’t it? Privileged people, straight white males like me and DeGoes, don’t understand the perspectives of non-white people / women / etc.? It has to be spelled out to them sometimes?

Because I think if you can convincingly make that case to the LambdaConf organisers, there is a good chance they will reconsider — despite the loss of face of publicly changing their mind and the fallout of upsetting first one side, and then the other. I really do. They seem like reasonable people.

The other thing that might work, of course — and I’m guessing this is probably easier to pull off, but you tell me — is to push the argument that no corporation in their right mind would want to be associated in the public mind with Mencius Moldbug. So, the argument goes, they’re alienating pretty much every corporate ticket-payer that is aware of this kind of stuff and thinks the connection to them would be non-tenuous (a fact that I’ve seen no evidence of LambdaConf having considered at all). It’s not a very principled argument, seeing that it’s based on no principles whatsoever beyond “avoid public relations disasters” — a purely self-interested principle — but it’s an argument. And I don’t think this would work on LambdaConf because, from what I understand, it’s a labour of love, not a profit-making entity that cares about maximising ticket sales. But perhaps it would work.

After all, if there are no professional attendees, there can’t really be a viable conference, I would have thought. Almost every Western programmer who can write an iteration, let alone a recursion, has a programming job if they want one badly enough these days.