drewdevault.com

Burnout-2.md (4877B)

---
title: "Burnout and the quiet failures of the hacker community"
date: 2023-06-29
---
This has been a very challenging year for me. You probably read that I suffered
from [burnout](/2023/05/01/2023-05-01-Burnout.html) earlier in the year. In some
respects, things have improved, and in many other respects, I am still haunted.
You might not care to read this, and so be it, take your leave if you must. But
writing is healing for me. Maybe this is a moment for solidarity, sympathy, for
reflecting on your own communities. Maybe it's a vain and needlessly public
demonstration of my slow descent into madness. I don't know, but here we go.
Yesterday was my 30<sup>th</sup> birthday. 🎂 It was another difficult day for
me. I drafted a long blog post with all of the details of the events leading up
to my burnout. You will never read it; I wrote it for myself and it will only be
seen by a few confidants, in private, and my therapist. But I do want to give
you an small idea of what I've been going through, and some of the take-aways
that matter for you and the hacker community as a whole.
Here's a quote from yesterday's unpublished blog post:
> Trigger warnings: child abuse, rape, sexual harassment, suicide, pedophilia,
> torture.
You won't read the full story, and trust me, you're better off for that. Suffice
to say that my life has been consumed with trauma and strife all year. I have
sought healing, and time for myself, time to process things, and each time a new
crisis has landed on my doorstep, most of them worse than the last. A dozen
things went wrong this year, horribly wrong, one after another. I have enjoyed
no peace in 2023.
Many of the difficulties I have faced this year have been beyond the scope of
the hacker community, but several have implicated it in challenging and
confronting ways.
The hacker community has been the home I never had, but I'm not really feeling
at home here right now. A hacker community that was precious to me failed
someone I love and put my friends in danger. Rape and death had come to our
community, and was kept silent. But I am a principled person, and I stand for
what is right; I spoke the truth and it brought me and my loved ones agonizing
stress and trauma and shook our community to the core. Board members resigned.
Marriages are on the rocks. When the dust settled, I was initially uncomfortable
staying in this community, but things eventually started to get better. Until
another member of this community, someone I trusted and thought of as a friend,
confessed to me that he had raped multiple women a few years ago. I submitted my
resignation from this community last night.
Then I went to GPN, a hacker event in Germany, at the start of June. It was a
welcome relief from the stress I've faced this year, a chance to celebrate
hacker culture and a warm reminder of the beauty of our community. It was
wonderful. Then, on the last night, a friend took me aside and confided in me
that they are a pedophile, and told me it was okay because they respected the
age of consent in Germany -- which is 14. What began as a wonderful reminder of
what the hacker community can be became a PTSD episode and a reminder that rape
culture is fucking everywhere.
I don't want to be a part of this anymore. Our communities have tolerated casual
sexism and misogyny and transphobia and racism and actual fucking rapists, and
stamped down on women and queer people and brown people in our spaces with a
smile on our face and a fucked-up facsimile of tolerance and inclusion as a
cornerstone of the hacker ethic.
This destroys communities. It is destroying *our* communities. If there's one
thing I came to understand this year, it's that these problems are *pervasive*
and *silent*.
Here's what you need to do: believe the victims. Stand up for what's right. Have
the courage to remove harmful people from your environment, especially if you're
a man and have a voice. Make people feel welcome, and seen. Don't tolerate
casual sexism in the hacker community or anywhere else. Don't tolerate
transphobia or homophobia. Don't tolerate racists. If you see something, say
something. And for fuck's sake, don't bitch about that code of conduct that
someone wants to add to your community.[^rms]
[^rms]: And fuck Richard Stallman and his enablers, his supporters, and the Free
    Software Foundation's leadership as a whole. Shame on you. *Shame on you*.
I'm going to withdraw a bit from the in-person hacker community for the
indefinite future. I don't think I can manage it for a while. I have felt good
about working on my software and collaborating with my free software communities
online, albeit at a much-reduced capacity. I'm going to keep working, and
writing, insofar as I find satisfaction in it. Life goes on.
Be there for the people you love, and love more people, and be there for them,
too.