> In March 2016, the organizers of [LambdaConf] announced that they would include neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin on the program despite widespread protest.
> LambdaConf, an annual gathering of programmers in Boulder, Colorado, has faced calls from social justice warriors to cancel a talk by Curtis Yarvin, the developer of the Urbit programming environment, due to his political views.
TL;DR LambdaConf invited a controversial speaker and people got very upset.
The whole story:
LambdaConf accepted a talk by Curtis Yarvin [0] for his work on Urbit [1][2] through a blind selection process. Before announcing the speaker list they realized this could be controversial and wrote about their decision to invite him anyway [3].
There was enormous push back on social media [4, 5], causing a number of sponsors to withdraw. An IndieGogo was set up to raise money for the conference [6] and was funded within 24 hours [7]. Soon after, a number of people co-signed a statement opposing LambdaConf's decision [8].
A controversial speaker and subsequent protests, what is inclusive and what is right. Open Bazaar vs Safe Space debate of the Conferences.
For an average person who is interested in functional programming this is a side show, but since we all are now about "Culture", this is one more phase of Culture wars.
You're not, it's just a microscopic drama that is engulfing a tiny subset of the FP world. I'm following a lot of these people and their Twitter stream has been flooded by reactions to this, which makes me think they really don't have much else to talk about.
Also at http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/11/ot47-openai/ "And a very different kind of campaign – computer science conference LambdaConf uses a blind review process to select topics for presentation. This year one of their selections was a talk on weird-namespace-software Urbit by Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug). A group of Twitter activists demanded that he be excluded from the conference for his political views. When the conference refused to capitulate, the activists started pressuring sponsors to pull out of the conference in the hopes of making the conference financially unviable. After some preliminary success, anti-censorship blog Status 451 launched a counter-campaign to get people concerned about freedom of opinion in tech to donate to LambdaConf and help make up the difference. This is usually where I’d ask you to donate, except that they reached their $15,000 goal within the first day of their campaign, they’re now 146% funded, and the only reason to give any more at this point is to give an even louder FUCK YOU to the people involved. Since that actually sounds pretty good, you can take a look at the campaign here. See also ESR’s take."
> In March 2016, the organizers of [LambdaConf] announced that they would include neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin on the program despite widespread protest.
---
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/sjws-urge-programmi...
> LambdaConf, an annual gathering of programmers in Boulder, Colorado, has faced calls from social justice warriors to cancel a talk by Curtis Yarvin, the developer of the Urbit programming environment, due to his political views.