I've spent a rather large amount of my life using the Python programming language. There's many posts on this blog about Python under the python tag. I've contributed to open source projects, run workshops, mentored people in the community, done a lot of code review and helped a number of people get jobs. I don't regret any of the time and energy I have invested in the community over the years.

I clearly remember going to PyCon Australia in 2016 in Melbourne Australia. For the most part I had a great time, met a lot of great people and learned a lot of great new information. I remember a bit of overt political activism at this event but it wasn't extreme enough to detract from the event. All in all it was one of the best conferences I've attended.

Unfortunately each year the political activism around the PyCon events and PSF became more and more overt. Every year the PyCon event became more about virtue signalling, political activism and nepotism. In many regards the focus seemed to be moving away from the core software topics that the conference was organized around and moving very much in a political direction. The focus on Python seemed to be fading, this was to the point where there was a talk about some obscure part of Ruby at one of the conferences. Giving your friends talking spots at a large conference to talk about something completely outside the scope of the conference struck many people as an annoying level of nepotism. Even more annoyingly I don't think many people actually called this out. I knew people who would have called this sort of thing out but they had mostly choose to never attend again. This is a great example of how thought bubbles form.

More annoying than the nepotism was that some of the conference organizers were using a smokescreen of pushing an "inclusivity" agenda to generate status and power for themselves. By hiding behind this people could blatantly engage in favoritism and deflect all criticisms by using this as an ideological shield.

The first time I attended a Python related conference was a number of years after the 2013 Donglegate situation. This was an early sign that the culture in tech was opening up the situation for things like Python conferences, and the Python foundation itself, to become increasingly vulnerable to a totalitarian takeover. In retrospect I wish I was aware of Donglegate earlier because it would have let me think about important questions much sooner. The word "takeover" is especially important here because the vast majority of the Python conference crowd are great people who don't actually agree with this level of totalitarianism. This however is the crux of the issue, many of these events have effectively been hijacked by a fringe politically motivated group while the silent majority stays silent. This is in large part because unsubstantiated comments posted to Twitter can cause people to lose their jobs in tech. This gives a lot of leverage to bad actors when they know they can hold this over people.

The Donglegate incident led to two people getting fired and the company that the offence taker worked at getting DDoSed which led to her getting fired. In this case Adria Richards was employed by SendGrid as a Developer Advocate, which is effectively a marketing role. So her public shaming of conference who's joke she eavesdropped on is the sort of thing that I'm sure SendGrid as a company would have seen as a liability. Its very unfortunate that the man involved here made a public apology on Hacker News in this thread because this sort of public apology emboldens the professional offence takers lurking in the shadows and gives them more power. The professional offence takers have used the power given to them by others and have increasingly used underhanded tactics to take over these conferences. It is worth remembering that offence is taken and not given. Unfortunately Adria Richards shows all the signs of a duplicitous professional offense taker, here's a Tweet of her making exactly the sort of joke she complained about at the conference. Accountability for people in "The West" making false accusations on social media was maybe at the lowest point ever during this time. People had collectively forgot why laws about slander and libel existed as the new frontier of social media was yet to be treated with the same level of seriousness as the same things occurring in the "real world". Unfortunately this disarmed a great number of people to the bad actions of the tiny minority of people who are actual sociopaths and pathological liars. We saw a fantastic example of this with the case of Amber Heard, many people just automatically jumped to her defense after she very publicly made false accusations, but the ensuing lawsuit revealed a lot of very nasty things about her that made a lot of people deeply regret their unquestioned initial support for her. The cultural significance of this trial was probably a lot larger than anyone noticed while it was still proceeding. People started to wonder if all those traditions around slander and libel might have had some merit to them after all.

Unfortunately with the Donglegate affair instead of realizing that a professional offense was taking offense someone making a joke got thrown under the bus and fired. Someone losing their job because of a comment like this at a conference will of course have a chilling effect on discourse at conferences. If people feel the need to be hyper-vigilant of their conversations at a conference for fear of potentially losing their job due to people eavesdropping on their conversations and publicly ratting them out on social media then fewer people will attend conferences. I'm not saying that the solution is necessarily to go full Chatham House Rule, but this incident made me appreciate why such an idea exists.

PyCon Au 2018 was the last straw for a lot of people for a number of reasons. A lot of people submitted talks that got turned down due to a "lack of capacity". Then when people cancelled talks the event organizers instead of filling the spaces just left the spots open in the schedule. Someone I knew was wearing one of the T-shirts with the infamous picture of Linus Torvalds raising the middle finger to Nvidia (full video here for reference). This incident was Linus Torvalds expressing his displeasure towards the anti-social behavior that Nvidia was displaying to the entire open source community at the time, a community that has made and continues to make Nvidia a lot of money. This was a rather high profile moment because a lot of people really didn't like what Nvidia was doing and Torvalds called out their parasitic behavior. While this is most certainly not the sort of T-shirt I'd wear to a conference because of the way it could be misinterpreted, the reactions from other people there were telling. Most people seemed to miss the reference, perhaps deliberately so, and more than one person assumed this had something to do with racism towards black people and minorities. What was projected here was very telling and a I saw that a lot was projected. Unlike Donglegate I saw this particular event in person and the way it was handled really sucked.

This ended up being one of the six Code of Conduct breaches mentioned on their site:

"Two incidents related to a shirt worn by an attendee. The shirt, while not outright offensive, expressed a sentiment that was not consistent with the message of acceptance and inclusion that the conference as a whole was trying to express. The wearer of the shirt was asked to cover the shirt for the remainder of the day with another garment they had available, and to refrain from wearing the shirt at the conference venue in future. An second attendee took a photo of the first attendee wearing the shirt and posted it on Twitter with the conference hashtag, along with a message that could have been interpreted as supportive of the shirt’s message. The second attendee was asked to take down the post, and was reminded that social media posts associated with the conference hashtag were expected to uphold the community spirit of inclusiveness."

The wearer of the T-shirt swore to never return to the conference and if the "second attendee" mentioned above is who I think they are they never came back to the conference again either.

A different reported code of conduct breach from the conference was far more sinister:

"A comment was made in the #random channel on the conference Slack, consisting of a link to an external website that discussing a matter some attendees may have found sensitive. Even though the post was in the #random channel, it was determined that the post was inappropriate for the general PyCon Australia audience. The post was deleted by a channel administrator, and the CoC team discussed the issue with the attendee who posted the material, asking them to consider the appropriateness of their posts in future."

The official communications channels set up for the conference are of course up to the conference organizers to decide rules for, to some degree it is their conference so they can make their rules however they want. However their conference is only possible because of the goodwill of a large community of people who have contributed to make Python what it is and people who have contributed their time, energy and/or money to the event. The idea of appointing people to selectively choose what speech is appropriate at conferences is totalitarian and is exceedingly dangerous, especially when there's almost no process or accountability for those appointed as censors. Saying that the material is something that "some attendees may have found sensitive" is a very low bar to actively suppress speech. The selective enforcement of these vague code of conduct rules have been used to effectively push out groups opposed to the group who controls the code of conduct. Banning speech in a speculative manner is a massive overreach that is not compatible with the ideals of a free society. A consistent blanket ban on discussions of "off topic" materials on these communications platforms seems more in line with a system of ethics that supports free speech. But there was no such consistency here.

I went to this conference with a number of people I'd worked with and known from the tech industry. It was telling that every single person I went to this conference with expressed displeasure about the "thought policing" undertones that were pervasive at the event and they all explicitly decided to never attend the conference again as a result. If people are trying to shut down all speech they don't explicitly approve of then it has a hugely chilling event on all speech at an event. The lack of ability for people to speak freely greatly negates the benefits of attending an event like this in the first place. The creeping totalitarianism we saw in the attitudes from some event organizers was very unsettling. I went to a lot of effort to put together a joint talk proposal in for 2019 with someone I worked with and it was rejected with zero feedback. After this experience I wasn't really enthusiastic about ever attending again but due to my involvement with Python I assessed that attending for networking reasons might still be worth it. Then in 2019 I went to PyCon USA in Cleveland Ohio and the contrast was stark, this conference was probably the best tech conference I've ever attended. I had a great time and the part of what made it so good was that there was a genuine diversity of people and viewpoints at the conference. However there were signs of political attempts to take that over that I saw at that event, including some brewing problems with the PSF that I'll get back to later.

How to exclude people who don't share your political beliefs without being upfront about it - deliberately vague codes of conduct with deliberately vague enforcement

By the time PyCon Au 2019 came around the culture wars had started to heat up and reactionaries that were against the general cluster of thinking that the conference organizers (who seemed to mostly be from the neo-Marxist cluster of ideas) were starting to get more aware of what was happening. This period in time led to more people who would be of various reactionary positions that were broadly anti-"woke" starting to become more active on social media and also engaging in more sophisticated word games to push their agenda. Playing with words was always a politician strategy and these people didn't like other people doing the same sorts of manipulative things. The vast majority of people in the community are not political extremists but you could clearly see by this point in time the political figures starting to take over. The whole reason I'm writing this article is to try to make people aware that political extremists take over conferences and events like this if they can get away with it. That's why the non-extremest majority have to keep to keep this in check. By the time 2019 rolled around an explicit ban on "wrongspeak" was made by the conference organizers, from their website:

Reported via an anonymous email, the tweets of a member of the PyCon AU paper core organiser team and committee made remarks strongly against the use of talk titles of the form “Make X great again”. The report expressed concern that this was exclusionary based on political beliefs. In response, the team drafted and published a clarifying statement: https://2019.pycon-au.org/news/inclusivity-and-political-statements/ that the MAGA political message itself was not welcome, but people of all political beliefs are. Talks with MAGA titles would not be automatically rejected, but instead authors would be required to change the title if the talks were accepted.

I have to say this is quite Orwellian indeed, if they didn't want MAGA types there - and they clearly didn't - it would be far more honest to just say they were banned rather than have this manipulative doublespeak position of claiming to be welcoming of all political beliefs. It would have been far more palatable if they were just honest about their preferred political persuasion and didn't make fake claims to be accepting of everyone because they clearly weren't.

Its now 2024 and as they say 5 years is a long time in Tech. Since 2019 we have had a pandemic, the likely start of world war 3, a hyperinflationary crisis and a massive housing crisis. We have also seen shifts within the industry, including more remote work followed by attempting to force people back to the office, outsourcing, the rise of AI assistants and a number of other significant changes. The general culture has shifted dramatically in many ways in the last few years, some good and some bad. As the culture changes people change and as people change the culture changes. Many people are changed without even realizing that they have changed. Within tech as a sector the culture has changed significantly in the last few years. The social engineering at events like PyCon are explicitly aimed at changing the culture but it seems broader demographics changes are mostly irresistible. The previous culture in tech had such a surplus of funding available such that a surplus of staff could exist who mostly would engage in political activism while on the job. Now that there's been a lot of layoffs due to a generally crappy economy many of these political activists are no longer getting money from their employers to do such activism at work.

I was at a Python User Group meetup in 2024 and the topic of PyCon Australia came up. I was thinking, maybe I could consider attending the conference again or maybe I could even propose a talk. Enough time had passed since my other talk suggestions were rejected without any feedback. And every single talk I've proposed has been rejected without feedback. The organizers clearly like to discriminate against white males (with the notable exception of their comrades^{) so it is no surprise that some of the talks would be rejected for that bigoted reason alone. This sort of discrimination is of course the pejorative of the conference organizers, they have the power to choose who they want to have present talks at their conference. The irony is that this process of discrimination is something that they'd never label as discrimination. But 5 years is enough time to get over some bitterness. I figured enough time had passed such that giving the conference another chance might be warranted, as one of the more experienced and knowledgeable people about Python in the world this is an event that I'd like to be attending provided that the event was about Python and not about political grandstanding.}

Unfortunately I came to find out that the same cluster of ideological bullshit is still being pedalled at this event. On top of all the toxic stuff from before we also have the additional toxicity of Covid 19 hysteria to deal with at the event too. And yes I use the word hysteria very deliberately because the pandemic situation is being used very deliberately to push a political agenda while disguising itself as a health agenda. If the virus was genuinely such a risk to the health of the attendees then the whole "healthcare theatre" should be avoided and the event should simply not run. And I say healthcare theatre very deliberately because these conference organizers are talking about counterfactual things like Covid "vaccines" protecting other people from getting infected. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that these "vaccines" never prevented transmission of the disease and still do not do so. Indeed some of the "vaccines" that the conference organizers would see as making a person worthy to attend have been globally recalled due to their ineffectiveness combined with side effects being worse than the disease itself. The data is overwhelmingly clear that the current Covid "vaccines" do not prevent transmission of the virus (and hence are not vaccines by the original definition of the term vaccine). What I find especially annoying in this case is that the conference organizers are trying to tell people that they should be taking some medical intervention to protect the health of others when the exact medical intervention they are championing does not protect the health of others. This Orwellian sort of speech is chilling to say the least, not to mention exceedingly anti-scientific. Politics aside this blatantly anti-factual stand from the conference organizers at a technical conference is galling, these are people that should know better. It also shows that political games are seen as more important than scientific evidence by the conference organizers.

Event attendees are required to wear masks at the event at all times, except when presenting or eating. If I can't see someone's face when talking to them there's no reason for me to go to a conference, and this is a large part of why I didn't go. I'm there to learn, not there to virtue signal. Of course this talk about Covid is entirely about exerting control over the people attending since from a clinical point of view having people masking most of the time but not all of the time is an entirely pointless exercise for preventing the spread of Covid since it spreads in the air very easily. If you genuinely needed to run an event where preventing the transmission of disease was top priority then you would have to do things like mandate the use of N95 masks all the time.

There's a genuine debate about the balances of risks for people who have compromised immune systems and how much other people should be inconvenienced to cater for those people. Making accommodations comes with the benefit of being able to include more people at events but comes with the downside of imposing costs on other people. Getting this balance right is a tough question and one that's most certainly worthy of real debate. Knowing some of the personalities involved in this case I don't think an intellectually honest discussion would be entertained let alone tolerated. And its this exact lack of tolerance for an actual scientific discussion that's the reason why a lot of people, myself included, just won't attend these conferences. This situation is an example of what Janice Fiamengo calls the "safe space ploy", the idea is that people try to create situations where "safety" is defined in such a way as to exclude all opposing viewpoints and therefore the people who hold those viewpoints. The mental framing here is very subversive and manipulative and the whole scheme relies upon the successful labelling of opposing views as being "too unsafe" to be tolerated. This sort of manipulative tactic is often chosen because explicitly coming out with an anti-free-speech position comes with much more risk than creating the same policy without being transparent about it.

The PSF banning Tim Peters

Tim Peters is someone who's spent a lot of time working on Python. Basically he's one of the core developers who's been around for almost the entire time doing all sorts of good work for the Python programming language project. In 2017 the Python Software Foundation was praising him for his efforts.

Much like the plot twist with Ivermectin, where the inventors won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 ^{and was then relentlessly demonized by non-scientists pretending to be scientists just 5 years later, there was a rapid 180 degree shift in what was considered acceptable speech in these conferences.}

This was clearly part of a naked grab at power. A grab at power that cared little for the truth and had no gratitude to those who contributed to the community. A grab at power over a community that didn't care if it destroyed the very fabric of what made this community good in the first place.

This whole situation reminded me of that bit in the George Orwell classic Animal Farm where the loyal workhorse is eventually sent to get slaughtered in the glue factory.

Frankly after seeing someone like Tim Peters being thrown under the bus my patience for this whole situation has entirely run out. This is what gave me the motivation to write this article.

Everyone has their breaking point and this was mine.