Update: Dorsey’s talk was cancelled! See the update here.
Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, ousted board member of BlueSky, and grifter extraordinaire to the tune of a $5.6B net worth, is giving a keynote at FOSDEM.
The FOSDEM keynote stage is one of the biggest platforms in the free software community. Janson is the biggest venue in the event – its huge auditorium can accommodate over 1,500 of FOSDEM’s 8,000 odd attendees, and it is live streamed to a worldwide audience as the face of one of the free and open source software community’s biggest events of the year. We’ve platformed Red Hat, the NLNet Foundation, NASA, numerous illustrious community leaders, and many smaller projects that embody our values and spirit at this location to talk about their work or important challenges our community faces.
Some of these challenges, as a matter of fact, are Jack Dorsey’s fault. In 2023 this stage hosted Hachyderm’s Kris Nóva to discuss an exodus of Twitter refugees to the fediverse. After Dorsey sold Twitter to Elon Musk, selling the platform out to the far right for a crisp billion-with-a-“B” dollar payout, the FOSS community shouldered the burden – both with our labor and our wallets – of a massive exodus onto our volunteer-operated servers, especially from victims fleeing the hate speech and harassment left in the wake of the sale. Two years later one of the principal architects of, and beneficiaries of, that disaster will step onto the same stage. Even if our community hadn’t been directly harmed by Dorsey’s actions, I don’t think that we owe this honor to someone who took a billion dollars to ruin their project, ostracize their users, and destroy the livelihoods of almost everyone who worked on it.
Dorsey is presumably being platformed in Janson because his blockchain bullshit company is a main sponsor of FOSDEM this year. Dorsey and his colleagues want to get us up to speed on what Block is working on these days. Allow me to give you a preview: in addition to posting $5B in revenue and a 21% increase in YoY profit in 2024, Jack Dorsey laid off 1,000 employees, ordering them not to publicly discuss board member Jay-Z’s contemporary sexual assault allegations on their way out, and announced a new bitcoin mining ASIC in collaboration with Core Scientific, who presumably installed them into their new 100MW Muskogee, OK bitcoin mining installation, proudly served by the Muskogee Generating Station fossil fuel power plant and its 11 million tons of annual CO2 emissions and an estimated 62 excess deaths in the local area due to pollution associated with the power plant. Nice.
In my view, billionaires are not welcome at FOSDEM. If billionaires want to participate in FOSS, I’m going to ask them to refrain from using our platforms to talk about their AI/blockchain/bitcoin/climate-disaster-as-a-service grifty business ventures, and instead buy our respect by, say, donating 250 million dollars to NLNet or the Sovereign Tech Fund. That figure, as a percentage of Dorsey’s wealth, is proportional to the amount of money I donate to FOSS every year, by the way. That kind of money would keep the FOSS community running for decades.
I do not want to platform Jack Dorsey on this stage. To that end, I am organizing a sit-in, in which I and anyone who will join me are going to sit ourselves down on the Janson stage during his allocated time slot and peacefully prevent the talk from proceeding as scheduled. We will be meeting at 11:45 AM outside of Janson, 15 minutes prior to Dorsey’s scheduled time slot. Once the stage is free from the previous speaker, we will sit on the stage until 12:30 PM. Bring a good book. If you want to help organize this sit-in, or just let me know that you intend to participate, please contact me via email; I’ll set up a mailing list if there’s enough interest in organizing things like printing out pamphlets to this effect, or even preparing an alternative talk to “schedule” in his slot.