So that everyone is kept abreast of WTF is going on.
So, after a full day and a lot of back and forth, a few very important things have come to light. I'll try to summarize them here because I've been posting primarily in the Bad Placesยฎ rather than the Good Placesโข, so that nobody's lost. So let's post on this Good Place:
- It looks like somebody from inside the Rust Project, but not with the consensus of all leadership, tried to downgrade my talk (or perhaps have it outright retracted) because they did not like the direction the compile-time work I was doing. (Learned from: jntrnr.com/why-i-left-rust/)
- The decision to downgrade my talk, once it was known I was going to talk about Compile-Time Reflection in Rust, came anywhere from 4 to 8 days before I was actually told this past Friday and had to release the blog post stepping away. However, as evidenced by much of the public statements from existing, ex, and now-ex Rust Project members, the decision to unilaterally downgrade was not known to many of them until they read my post.
- Downgrading the keynote was NEVER voted on like inviting me to do the keynote in the first place.
All in all, this reeks of someone trying to run-around the consensus of the Rust Project because they don't like Shepherd Oasis's or my work (detailed here: https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generic-compile-time-introspection-in-rust/).
I don't know how to handle this going forward. The Rust Project has effectively ultimate commit rights to rustc and all of the projects our work would touch are under the control of the organization that did this. Even if we do the work, they could effectively unwind and undo a lot of our work, or indefinitely block it with an endless slew of "reasonable concerns" from ranking project members who seem to have problems but don't want to communicate them except by taking potshots at the status of my now-gone RustConf talk.
I don't know what to do. I'm pretty lost, it's Sunday, and I have a shitload of things I still need to do, not including this whole trainwreck.
I'm also fuckin' exhausted and burnt out from doing anything Rust related AT ALL. I did this in the middle of going through extreme burnout, but forcing myself to keep fighting. This was an ostensibly bad idea, but everything felt fine until this gut punch. Now I can't pick up a fuckin' pencil, and I haven't touched the article I was SUPPOSED to be writing about Unicode this whole time.
I regret to inform you that:
- fixing widespread industrial problems, including with the oldest and most popular language in existence
- writing full frameworks people study to get good at code
- authoring and drafting full-fledged fixes to the entire encoding situation for C and C++
- editing fucking ISO/IEC 9899:2023/4
I am apparently a diversity hire. Or something!
I AM NEVER WALKING INTO THE RUST COMMUNITY FOR SHIT, EVER AGAIN.
Almost ten years ago, I left my job working on Rust at Mozilla because I perceived that there was a power struggle between project members who wanted technology to be "apolitical" (that is, in servitude to racial capitalism, an agenda cast as "apolitical" because it is politically dominant) and those of us who wanted our work to be socially and politically transformative. Relatedly, the Rust team, being part of Mozilla Research, was ultimately overseen by Brendan Eich, and I could no longer stand to indirectly report to someone who was polite to me to my face while funding a political movement whose goal is to exterminate me and everyone I care about.
It's surreal for me to see what Rust has become since its infancy, when I worked on it. I'm proud to have played a small part in creating a language that so many people find useful. I'm also sad to have been outside looking in during the years it took to make Rust a mature language. You can call that "exclusion", or you can say I should have been more willing to embrace a subordinate position. After I left Mozilla, I was busy making a living in ways that interested me less, but seemed less contingent on the whims of people who think that using gender-neutral vocabulary is extremist. Power will always strive to assimilate anything of value into itself. It's no surprise to me that the same struggle that led to my departure is still ongoing.
And to Mr. Ronacher, who I remember from my time in the project, I'm mystified by how you could decide on May 28 to accuse a Black engineer of having nothing worth listening to, and by May 29, "regret" having made that public accusation, which, apparently, you "did not want to express". If it wasn't you who wanted to express it, who did? Did you receive the world's fastest anti-racist education in that 24-hour period? Or did you already know better and say it anyway?
The problem of white supremacy in Rust, in the programming language community, in free and open-source software, in technology, in society, is structural. Real power knows how to cloak its racism in the language of courtesy and professionalism. It is not openly hostile; it does not sneer. Power clothes itself in civility, at least when anyone's looking; only from a position of civility can accusations of disrespect be leveled at anyone who exposes the racism beneath the surface. It would be a mistake to expend too much energy on calling out individuals who say the quiet part loud. Such people, after all, have a role to play, like a police officer who steps too far outside the lines and can be made an example of to show that policing is a fundamentally good institution tainted by "a few bad apples". I know all that. It's out of pure personal curiosity and not a political agenda that I ask, re: Mr. Ronacher's tweets: excuse me, but what the fuck? The sheer velocity of backpedaling leaves me completely buffaloed.
