LambdaConf, a computer programming conference to be held this May in Colorado, is reeling from the announcement that an outspoken racist and white supremacist has been invited to speak there.
The conference, which uses a blind selection process for its talks, found out recently that one of the papers it had selected for presentation was written by one Curtis Yarvin, a racist and conspiracy theorist who has filled hundreds of blog posts with cryptic defenses of Hitler, apologies for slavery, and calls for the (non-violent, I suppose) overthrow of the United States Government.
Unfortunately, instead of rescinding the invitation, as a similar programming conference did last year when they inadvertently accepted a talk from the same author, LambdaConf decided, for wildly misguided reasons, to allow Yarvin to speak.
This decision was doubly unfortunate because LambdaConf, by all accounts, had a good track record until this week, having provided a reasonable code of conduct, a commitment to diversity, scholarships, and non-gendered bathrooms. How could things have gone so wrong so quickly?
The main organizer, John De Goes, seems to have fallen prey to the notion that “freedom of speech” is something that must be extended to anyone with a repugnant viewpoint, even at a private event, rather than our right as citizens to be free of government censorship. You can read his rationalization, complete with spurious data analysis and terrible reasoning. Someone should have clued Mr. De Goes in to the fact that inviting a white supremacist speaker to speak, even on an unrelated subject, has absolutely nothing to do with freedom of expression of any kind. This person is despicable, full stop. He should not be given a microphone anywhere for any reason, and to allow him to address this conference is to broadcast to all people of color that they are unwelcome there, no matter what the code of conduct for LambdaConf may be.
What is perhaps more even more horrible is the predictably vomit-inducing reaction of the Silicon Valley tech community. We programmers often think that every problem has a simple solution, and unfortunately, that solution rarely begins in empathy. (Curious how bad the comments are on the message board of Hacker News, a project of the powerful Y Combinator startup program? See for yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
This is bizarro tech world. Of course, in real life, people of color and other marginalized groups are actually the ones who are being silenced every day. Shirley Sherrod lost her job over shit that Breitbart MADE UP and yet sniveling libertarian bros are sad that people are taking action against LambdaConf for allowing Yarvin to speak.
There are things that are rotten in Silicon Valley, and Yarvin’s anti-democratic racist fantasies are symptomatic of a larger problem. His convoluted ramblings propose a takeover of the government of the United States by (I am not making this up) technologists like Google engineers or perhaps himself, and in this very good Baffler piece, Corey Pein shows that Yarvin’s obsessions are at least in a manner shared by well-known entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel.
Thanks to many other speakers and sponsors who have withdrawn, the future of LambaConf is now in doubt. It is a great shame, since they had been doing by all accounts an exemplary job up to this point, but some breaches of trust may just be too big to fix.
