The following is a response to
Asher Wolf's Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk.
I want to extend the
hand of friendship to Asher and apologise to her for the way she has
been collectively treated, as a woman, as a single mother, by others
from different social backgrounds. She may have gone a little
overboard in her personal criticisms but the anger of her reaction is
understandable. Sexism and misogyny are real and, sadly enough, also
exist in the hacker community.
I am sympathetic that
Asher had to reach out to me for help after a previous webdesigner
had let her down with the website and it is a pity that things did
not work out again. I had completed everything else on the
specification in the contract that Asher and I agreed on apart from
'Site Customisation / Look and feel' and I was, at the time of
Asher's blog post, still waiting for feedback and more input from her
in order to proceed. As an Electronic Engineer doing a favour for a
friend I was not skilled enough to be able to work intuitively when
the only guiding information that I had from Asher regarding design
was "please make it like Penny Red's blog".
http://www.penny-red.com/
I have publicly
https://twitter.com/samthetechie/status/287211641735618560 asked
Asher for her bank details so that I can make a refund but she has
failed to get into contact with me which raises a number of
questions. It appears that her motivations for including me in her
post did not include financial remuneration or even that she was
particularly dissatisfied with my work and frankly I feel quite fed
up and misrepresented. I really wish that she had just contacted me
privately to tell me that she was unhappy, it would have been a lot
easier to resolve that way.
Asher told me on a
number of occasions that the website was low priority given the other
things that we were collaborating on at the time including
Cryptoparty, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Hackers and Occupy Sandy. It
turns out that this was a bad strategy and it would have been better
to finish the project in early November.
Asher, as a friend, how
can you conscience letting that blog post and those tweets stand when
only a couple of weeks prior to that you wrote this for my MIT
application?
“He has volunteered
countless hours with Cryptoparty. He personally founded the London
chapter of Cryptoparty, hosting successful events at both Google and
Mozilla.
Mr Carlisle has also
worked tirelessly to edit the Cryptoparty handbook, adding numerous
corrections and additions to crowd-sourced manual since it's first
publication.
In response to
Hurricane Sandy, Mr Carlisle facilitated a Cryptoparty-hosted
'Hurricane Hackers' meetup in London, and donating countless hours of
his time online to support tech efforts in the wake of storm damage
in the U.S.
Most recently, he
represented Cryptoparty at the European Commission's 'No Disconnect
Strategy Workshop for European Capability for Situational Awareness.'
Mr Carlisle is a rare
kind of individual: he spends a large proportion of his spare time
thoughtfully engaged in practical application of new technology for
the sake of human rights, creating and implementing initiatives
benefiting countless numbers of people.
He is constantly
cultivating a network of friends and colleagues throughout the world
- including journalists, technologists, thought leaders and activists
- seeking input on ways to engage technology with human rights issues
and critical feedback on his work.
It is hard not to feel
inspired when working with Samuel. He is a thoughtful, highly
intelligent young man and a pleasure to work with.”
It is a mystery to me
how someone who claims to be my friend could betray me with messages
like these:
Asher (re: European
Commission) "Not running off to do something more important than
the work I paid you to do, or busy flogging my idea to ppl in higher
echelons and taking the credit?", "When I tried to talk to
you about the E.C. issue, you rage quit the fucking conversation."
Asher "Busy
flogging the idea of Cryptoparty without my involvement. Never asked
me ANYTHING, not for a single moment of input before taking massive
steps by putting Cryptoparty near Google, Mozilla, the E.C. You just
assumed it was okay."
Asher I believe in
autonomy and I have acted above reproach and with honour in so far as
Cryptoparty is concerned. With the best intentions of the Cryptoparty
movement at my heart, I will work autonomously in order to make
progress in the absence of a centralised control structure. I
consider this to be consistent with the "Sudo Leadership",
"Excellence" and "Do-ocracy" values of the
Cryptoparty movement. Cryptoparty London has inherited a culture of
Do-ocracy, Sudo-Leadership, and Excellence from here
https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/CryptoParty#Suggested_Conduct which
derives from Noisebridge's 'Tripartite Pillars'
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Vision#Tripartite_Pillars
and, ancestrally, from the international hackspace design patterns
(from the 24th CCC in 2007,
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Design_Patterns).
Cryptoparty is about open and participative dissemination of ideas,
building community and sharing of information and techniques around
cryptography, not egos and personal agendas. I can't understand how
you claim to be the leader of a community project which you have
'quit' several times. Let's put this all behind us and remain focused
on building community, having fun and creating a safe space for
learning about the usage of crypto tools as has always been the case
at Cryptoparty London.
I wish for a sincere
apology (public or not, Asher has my email address) for the hateful
speech and threats that I received from her and others during #29c3
and the few days following because all that did was perpetuate the
violence and anger which we all need to fight against.
With regards to Asher's
application to do a panel talk at 29C3, I was very disappointed that
it was rejected. When she emailed me to say that the talk had been
rejected I was totally gutted. That was the first time that Asher and
I would have been able to meet after collaborating online for the
last 3 months (Australia / UK) and also a good time for the CCC
community and many others to hear about Cryptoparty.
We were all very
disappointed that it was not approved. So much so that the first
thing I did after arriving at the CCH building in Hamburg (this
year's venue for 29c3) was to seek out and complain to several
organisers and let them know that they really fucked up by failing to
accept the talk and get Asher to Hamburg. They unanimously agreed
that it was a mistake that they would have liked to correct.
You know, this whole
thing came at a particularly difficult time for me and I can
understand how it might have slotted into Asher's experience of men
in the system as a whole but at the same time I think it is
inappropriate and unprofessional to use that as a justification to
trigger a campaign of hatred, threats and libel. Here is an
incomplete but reflective summary of the abuse that I and others have
received as a result of this; though Asher appears to have deleted
some of the less tasteful and libellous tweets. Luckily others have
re-tweeted them so they are findable:
-
Asher: “Go to
hell Sam. You're a complete douche."
Asher: “Well
done. Your attitudes destroyed the idea of Cryptoparty for the ppl, by the ppl."
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Response
to 11. Actually I was volunteering at the conference since the 24th
December to deploy wireless routers and networking equipment to help
setup the conference and I was thrown out from the team purely as a
result of your hateful messages online.
To
highlight just what a misrepresentation this was, here is a message
from someone that met me at the conference "And thanks again
for you advice/connections at the Congress. You're such a kind,
positive force in an environment like that, finding ways of bringing
people together and treating everybody with respect and openness.
You turned every area you were in into a pocket of kindness and
productivity -- I was thoroughly impressed!""
Asher it is time that
you stop abusing your voice, reach and influence to misrepresent me
far and wide for a bit of extra coverage because many find that
bullying and exploitative. I know that I am not the only one because
others have reached out to me in private to show their support so I
am just stating that I simply deserve better than that from the
people I choose to call friends and the people I choose to work with.
I humbly suggest that
you reverse your decision to simply let Paypal keep the money because
I feel that it is disrespectful to the people that, rightly or
wrongly, supported you when you said that you were left out of pocket
as a result of things not working out.
So please invest the
time and effort to be courageous in making an example of Paypal so
that more people will feel encouraged to do the same and then, if you
wish, give the money back
https://twitter.com/Asher_Wolf/status/286663778706259968
to those who donated it that's your choice.
Being raised, against
all odds, by an amazing single-mum, I have to say, I mostly agree
with your post. But we should pool all of our resources and efforts
together and face the real problems rather than in-fighting. Women
everywhere are being treated as second class citizens, most of the
parenting automatically lies with them, whether they want it or not.
And women are also missing out in the work place and as of 2009
“women earned on average 17% less gross hourly than men in the
European Union”
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Gender_pay_gap_statistics#Gender_pay_gap_levels.
We need to stop this! We also need to take a good look at our own
community, in which people think it is fun to ridicule creeper cards,
right after yet another woman in the world (she was given the name
Damini by the people and she was from India) has been raped, used and
killed by a group of guys that I hardly consider to be human
http://en.avaaz.org/1280/india-gang-rape-war-on-women.
I really wish that
Asher and I will be able to resolve this and for our movement to set
a milestone for our agenda which features freedom of expression,
right to privacy, right to family life and civic empowerment and
engagement.
