Holochain, Moritz Bierling and the far-right

#alt-right #intelligence-gathering #threat-analysis #fascism #holochain

This information concerns the inclusion and championing of an alt-right influencer by the Holochain project, HOLO organisation and Holochain's co-founder Art Brock. These actions have resulted in Holochain's potential as a private, unstoppable & uncensorable distributed communications technology being marketed directly to an alt/far-right libertarian audience.

(Dates & times are given in a mixture of timezones; as such some dates may be a day out from those observed in the USA.)

Moritz first engaged with Holochain in 2017. Sources within the company relay that his problematic beliefs were raised as an issue (at the time he was reportedly tweeting Islamophobic content). A brief conversation was had- 3 people objected to his inclusion, but it was decided by the rest of the team (whomever was present) to ignore the problem. They subsequently employed him between Jul 2018 - Dec 2019 to undertake partnership development and a 'chief catalyst' role.

In late June 2022 members of Holochain's team were made aware of anti-trans hate speech being posted by Moritz on Twitter, via relay of a conversation between some concerned parties. After a series of mishandlings by Holochain's (then) community manager, a Scuttlebutt community member undertook some brief research on his social media presence and uncovered a swathe of harmful & hateful content (evidence summarised here). This research was first relayed on September 22 and confirmed as received by HOLO's management team on October 28.

Dozens of interventions, letters and attempts at accountability for both Moritz' inclusion (at the time he was an admin on the official dev.hc Discord) and the mishandlings of HOLO's community manager have been attempted by various parties in DWeb communities since.

On April 17th 2023, after months without visible action having been taken, a personal plea was made to Holochain's co-founder Eric Harris-Braun by pospi, one of the affected parties. In this letter, HOLO was challenged to take a stance on hate speech. Conversations ensued and those affected were reassured that the issue was being taken seriously.

Eric's initial reply contained official responses to some of the issues raised:

Regarding Art’s blog piece with Moritz. At this time we will not publish something under the company's umbrella with Mortiz’ name on it. Too many people in the organization are uncomfortable lending the implicit support that that seems to offer to the people he retweets.

Regarding Moritz as an Admin on Dev.HC. We are not yet sure that we will remove him from that position. So far he has abided by our code of conduct as our code does not include living up to any particular standard outside of discord itself. We are also not likely to get into the business of looking up people’s twitter history to make sure they fit into a certain category of person. We may take action based on people’s experiences of unsafety, like yours in this space, but we may also leave room for some conflict and discomfort. This is not yet settled for us and in this case depends in part on the outcome of conversations with him yet to be had.

Regarding your request about forming an “independent conduct committee.” I feel very disinclined to create a policing body of any form at this time. I know you have explicitly called me out for being unwilling to use my power. I have sat with this, and will continue to sit with it, but my current analysis is that though there may be a partial truth in that about me, the fuller truth that I hold, is that what will actually happen in this case is that individuals at Holo and Holochain, including myself, others on the exec team, ████████, ████████, ████████, will experience thresholds being crossed that they are unwilling to accept, and then will raise their concerns and that fact is where the locus of power will actually come from. Constituting any such body would not at this stage actually be granted the power that would satisfy you or it, and so forming it would just be setting things up for failure. There may be a time later in our development and maturation where such a board would actually work. I could be wrong about this, and nor am I “in charge of it” as the comms team are holding the decision making around how to care for the culture of our spaces. I will continue to empower them to do so.

Eric also chose to forward this letter to his co-founder Art Brock in full.

As per the permission you offered in your letter I have also shared the full text of it with Arthur and had long conversations with him about your concerns and this topic in general. Arthur has already had some conversations with Moritz about his twitter postings and some of them in semi-public settings.

On May 23rd with still no visible action, pospi chose to call Moritz out publicly on Twitter and assert a boundary about interacting with him. There was hope that bringing the conflict into the open would draw HOLO, its founders, or its community members into the conversation. It did not.

Up until at least June 9th, Moritz was still an admin of the official Dev.hc Discord despite indication having been given by HOLO that they had taken over management of that community space prior to January 20th.

On August 15th Eric revealed that he had held a private conversation with Moritz, and defended him for his "accountability and care":

The process which we have developed at Holo for dealing with situations like this includes direct conversation with the person to be banned. So, I took time at Dweb to enter into the uncomfortable, confrontational place of sitting with Moritz and talking with him directly about his social media presence and how specific tweets have harming [effects]. Moritz responded by taking responsibility for that, recognizing that he has not thought through how his exploration and sharing of what he describes as the darker side of humanity has harming consequences. He apologized to me for the harm he caused. In our process I talked through with him the consequence of the boundaries that we were putting up as a result of this, and he understood why and actually agreed with the action. To me this felt like both accountability and care.

He also compared hate speech to paying taxes, in relation to a proposed 'ban reason' message drafted for Moritz' removal from the Holochain-adjacent hREA community Discord:

If complicitness in genocide is your criteria for banning then I suppose you must ban me, and I daresay yourself. I knowingly pay my taxes to a genocidal regime. I knowingly participate in using federal currencies which are the fundamental embodiment of violence in the world. I am complicit in genocide and the indirectness of this violence makes it no less harmful.

A conversation had previously begun on July 27th in a white/male-dominated private Holochain Discord community regarding the decision by HOLO to not renew [COMMUNITY MANAGER]'s contract. This group was originally seeded by [COMMUNITY MANAGER] and its representation / inclusion problems had been discussed many times.

A reply from Art Brock on August 1st was largely about HOLO distancing itself from [COMMUNITY MANAGER]:

We have explored a number of approaches with [COMMUNITY MANAGER] to try to integrate him into team and accountability structures, but [COMMUNITY MANAGER] pretty much does all his work outside of those structures.

If he is going to do his work outside of our structures, it probably makes sense for it to happen outside of the organization.

So, [COMMUNITY MANAGER] hasn't been fired, but we don't yet have plan for his support starting in September.

On August 21st, after being alerted to this conversation by another party affected by [COMMUNITY MANAGER]'s actions, pospi entered the conversation directly. They raised concerns with their interpreted intention of the conversation to defend [COMMUNITY MANAGER]:

I can propose organizing a meeting where Holo can hear the voice of the community.

It is not lost on me that you are proposing such a meeting in an almost entirely male-dominated space which [COMMUNITY MANAGER] initially populated with all his friends.

They also confronted Art Brock directly on the matter of protecting [COMMUNITY MANAGER]:

@artbrock it's interesting (and a little hopeful) to hear you talking about [COMMUNITY MANAGER] doing "all his work outside of those [accountability] structures" when you are above all else the person who has enabled that and protected him.

On August 24th Moritz announced that he had been hired as Community Growth Manager by the Holochain-adjacent project #CoaSys https://coasys.org/

(post text:)

Oh, and I completely forgot, but...

I HAVE JOINED COASYS!

The official accouncement I'm sure will come shortly (it's only been official less than 24h), but I'll be responsible for everything to do with Ecosystem Growth & Partnerships.

So good to work again with @lucksus, @leifriksheim, and the rest of the team!

You can learn more about CoaSys' flagship project Ad4m in this YouTube presentation [transcript].

On August 25th, Arthur Brock publicly endorsed a tweet of Moritz' making claim that he & Art were 'co-stewards' of a project called Mewsfeed.

(image text:)

Arthur Brock @artbrock-
Holochain makes it easy for us to provide different solutions to the problems that social media platforms face. Come find out about what makes MewsFeed unique.

Moritz Bierling @bierlingm-
Set a reminder for my upcoming Space with @artbrock, founder of @Holochain, @H_O_L_O_, and @metacurrency, as well as my co-steward of MewsFeed, our Holochain-based micro-blogging platform!...

On August 30th they subsequently ran an X space- Launching MewsFeed: solving the hard problems of social media [transcript].

On September 7th Art replied privately to pospi's accusation regarding the protection of [COMMUNITY MANAGER]-

...talking about [COMMUNITY MANAGER] doing "all his work outside of those [accountability] structures" when you are above all else the person who has enabled that and protected him.

Simply not true. I manage developers. I'm not the executive in charge of community and growth. I've brought [COMMUNITY MANAGER] to account several times.

However his reply then seemingly took an abrupt turn to discussing the issues regarding Moritz:

You are right that we could do more to make this publicly visible. But our leadership is about as GLBTQIA+ friendly as you're going to find.

I've been non-binary and queer since 1987. I'm a sperm donor for a lesbian couple and raised my son with them.
[EXECUTIVE MEMBER]'s been a lesbian since just a few years later.
[EXECUTIVE MEMBER] has ██████████████████████████.

Frankly, that's really just the tip of the iceberg. You seem to think that us not putting identity politics in the center of our public discourse or our community activity means we don't understand or experience the issues. Sorry, but you do not have the exclusive rights to that experience, and you are lashing out at targets with quite faulty assumptions about them.

I think there's another kind of discourse for us to have, but it is difficult to get there if you're committed to the frame that you're being victimized by someone... and keep trying to pin the tail on the villain.

I have only been supportive of you and your work... and I plan to continue to be. I'm also game to do more to make some of these aspects clear and visible to provide safety and cover for other GLBTQ folks.
I strongly agreed with the reasons you shared for not making the hiring/firing of [COMMUNITY MANAGER] a public conversation. The community simply does not yet have the capacities for honesty, accountability, and vulnerability for that conversation to be fruitful.

The topic of Moritz had never been raised as a part of the original conversation.

On September 12th Moritz ran another X space- Becoming Uncancelable [transcript]. The guest was Tyler 'Harry Bergernon' of a project named 'Pluribus'.

The project describes itself as:

born from a group of Americans tired of watching their country’s innate vibrancy and dynamism begin to deaden and fade under a culture of fear imposed upon the majority of its admirable citizens by a handful of its most despicable and resolved to succeed in addressing the Cancel Culture issue where so many others have failed.

In the recording, Tyler describes his motivations for starting the project as wanting to re-platform Jordan Peterson and Louis CK. Moritz makes no challenges to this and shows tacit support for the views of Tyler.

They use 'uncancelable' as a synonym for 'resilience':

You can of course also have other forms of becoming uncancelable like for example creating a stronger relationship network or going and buying that farm and setting yourself up to have 80% of your food needs being taken care of by what you grow yourself or any number of additional mechanisms that in reality produce a kind of uncancelability that then affords you the kind of freedom and courage that you were speaking about to be able to say what you want and to speak your mind and to put it in the service of other people doing the same.

and describe their intentions to support 'right wing Twitter' financially:

like are there 10,000 people in the world that would be willing to pay 100 bucks a year for the top 1,000 accounts on right wing twitter to have 50 grand of anti-cancellation protection I think it's a pretty it's pretty easy to say yes and that's like without even counting any sort of people of significant means so I think that there's a lot of really really cool stuff that we can do down the line.

Another concerned Holochain-adjacent party undertook some research on this project, and found evidence of direct connections to a well-organised network of far-right hate funding groups, venture funds and orgs offering 'cancelation' retraining & support services, recruitment programs for anti-vaxxers, and anonymous Nazis-for-hire.

The evidence also suggests that Moritz has been a long-time associate and collaborator of these people. Moritz himself was found to have a creator profile on Pluribus, which alludes to his ongoing financial support from Art Brock (as confirmed by company insiders). He also self-certifies his refusal for introspection or evolving his harmful views:

I have been canceled multiple times and come back stronger

On September 21st this evidence was shared with Eric Harris-Braun & HOLO's management team. It was received that same day, and ignored until being prompted on Oct 12th. It has still not been acknowledged at this time of writing.

On December 1st Eric Harris-Braun responded to queries from concerned parties as to the content of a discussion held at a recent HOLO executive retreat, where executives were rumoured to have discussed 'cancel culture'.

My phrase in the conversation with █████████ "Holo does not want to participate in cancel culture" is the rough single phrase approximation of where we got to as group, but I'm quite sure that for each of us it actually means something different. In general my sense is that the core sentiment comes from the place of feeling an energy and a rhetoric in the frame of cancellation and our observation of what happens where its used, that seem only to deepen the problems at hand, and which also lead to in-fighting, and harmful rather than beneficial fracturing. At the same time in the exec retreat, we deepened our commitment to not ignore our responsibility to prevent platforming harmful content in our social media accounts, to have participation protocols in different spaces and work on continuing to improve accountability for holding to them, while not taking on that specific energy and rhetoric that doesn't feel right to us and to the staff responsible for implementing that commitment.

To their credit, he also states that

The conversation was recognized as incomplete.

This appears to currently be the most relevant official organisational positioning in regard to hate speech.

On December 13th other research on Moritz' connections was again shared with Eric Harris-Braun & HOLO's team.

A close relationship with Curt Doolittle of the Natural Law Institute was discovered, connecting Moritz directly to a potentially hyper-violent side of the far-right.

An ongoing podcasting partnership with the School Sucks Show was also revealed- "one of the longest running liberty-minded podcasts on the web". The podcast's host Brett Veinotte is a participant in The Porcupine Freedom Festival, "the largest gathering of libertarians in the world". This event is held by The Free State Project, a libertarian plot to take voting power in the state of New Hampshire. Independence and secession appear to be core motivations of this movement.

Moritz appears on this podcast as an authority on and advocate for Holochain's technology. Many of the recordings were made at the time of his employment with HOLO. Transcripts and dates can be found in the linked document; but in short Moritz' plans are communicated as:

Vaxios as a tool to end digital slavery by creating a real market for information and the means to catalyze a true information-based economy, which is in many ways the opposite of what we have today.

the reception we've gotten so far, primarily from the sort of co-op community, if you will, sort of left anarchist style communities, has been very good, particularly because we don't so much care about the financial speculation part, but more about sort of governance part. And that's what those folks care about a lot.

one of the things that we are strategically focusing on in approaching the distribution of this technology is actually taking very great care not to see the pattern of financial speculation, but instead to focus our efforts and our conversations on communities themselves that are interested in solving some particular need in their community.

A newly discovered tweet also shows proof of Art Brock's awareness of Moritz' intentions to publicise Holochain in alt-right / libertarian circles since at least December 22, 2017.

On December 14th, the ban of Moritz from the hREA Discord was finally actioned, closing off a conversation with HOLO’s management team that had begun in earnest on April 17th. The following message was sent to Moritz as agreed upon by hREA’s conduct team:

From our CoC:

The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from hREA based on their past behavior, including behavior outside hREA spaces and behavior towards people who are not in hREA.

For us misconduct extends to hate speech & amplifying White Nationalist messages in public spaces.

In this way, you are complicit in genocide. Indirect messages of hate are still directly harmful. The alt-right and the IDW (with whom you seem to consciously identify) have no place here.

Eric Harris-Braun and HOLO’s management team were notified immediately afterward.

On December 20th Eric Harris-Braun and HOLO's management team were notified that this summary document had begun circulating in "socially conscious DWeb community groups". They were also notified that information had "for some time now been shar[ed] with various grassroots antifascist organisations and global counter-terror watchdogs", including this document. It was suggested they contact Tech Against Terrorism to seek further support.

Concerned parties are still awaiting a response from Eric Harris-Braun and HOLO's executive team, and acknowledgement of the information that has been shared.

HOLO has never contributed to research efforts regarding Moritz' network, projects and affiliations.

As yet there has been no official statement from HOLO on the topic of Moritz Bierling’s inclusion, nor any public distancing.

pospi's challenges to HOLO remain the same as first stated in the April 17th letter to Eric Harris-Braun:

1. Will HOLO and Holochain, as an organisation and community, condemn fascism and all forms of supremacy including sexism, misogyny and transmisogyny, racism, classism and ableism?
2. Will HOLO and Holochain, as an organisation and community, stand with LGBTIQ+ people in their fight for recognition and human rights?
3. Will HOLO and Holochain, as an organisation and community, tolerate the presence of those who engage in hate speech and bigotry? Will it tolerate the presence of those with deep relational ties to the alt-right?

 

Authored: December 19th, 2023
Updated: December 22nd, 2023
Published: January 2nd, 2024

@pospi That's a lot of links, you had quite the patience the collect it all. There are a number of people in the "radically p2p" ecosystem that are right wing, e.g. Caleb "cjdns" is frequently posting very-libertarian thoughts on the fediverse too. And it annoys me.

I guess lately I am equally annoyed by the Right and the Left. E.g you denounce hate speech, yet one of your tweets is (emphasis mine):

If you're giving bigots a platform, I'm not interested in coming to your shitty libertarian-dominated cultural cesspool of an event.
Peace out! 🥰✨🖕

How is this not hate speech? Is it morally allowed to engage in counter-hate speech? I've seen this happen often in leftist circles: any antagonism or "problematic beliefs" (what is that even???) is immediately a red sign, but then the reaction can be as extreme as wishing death to oppressors, and that's acceptable in the circles.

Perhaps necessary to say this, as being politically moderate is easily misunderstood, but I don't support this Moritz and frankly was annoyed at the content he wrote.

@andrestaltz I hope this set of links affords us a stable starting place.

I think we should be clear that Moritz is contributing directly to the anti-trans moral panic via posts asserting that all trans people are perverts and paedophiles. Those are ideas that lead directly to physical violence in the real world. Such statements are fuel for the fire that gets trans folks beaten and murdered today, same as they got gay folks beaten and murdered in the '80s.

How is this not hate speech?

Your emphasis hasn't come though, but maybe we should look at some basic definitions. Most dictionaries talk about "expressing hate", "encouraging violence", "denigrating a person or persons" etc. Where am I doing that, exactly? It hardly seems hateful to label somebody engaging in slurs and denigrating an entire demographic of people as a bigot. I don't believe wishing death to anybody is acceptable and it seems inflammatory to bring the idea into this conversation.

Isn't it my right to set a boundary, and not participate in spaces where hatemongering against me is tolerated and platformed?

It is saddening to be edging towards #respectability-politics so soon in this conversation. Notice how I am expected to be a #model-minority and perfectly adherent to calm and amicable dialogue, even when engaging with bigots who use dehumanising language and rhetoric towards me. I must maintain my composure perfectly, even in the face of credible threats to my existence, or I get told I am doing hate speech. Funny how we try to flip that accusation back onto those affected. Meanwhile Moritz writes a waffling response that 'sounds warm' without addressing any of the points I made and lists trans people in the same breath as nazis. Well, with nods to the linked articles above, that is how fascists 'argue'.

https://www.verywellmind.com/playing-the-game-of-respectability-politics-5215862

As to "problematic beliefs"— we could start with those that are a direct incitement to physical violence: bigotry against trans people; including the idea that we are all child molesters.

It is saddening to be edging towards #respectability-politics so soon in this conversation. Notice how I am expected to be a #model-minority and perfectly adherent to calm and amicable dialogue, even when engaging with bigots who use dehumanising language and rhetoric towards me. I must maintain my composure perfectly, even in the face of credible threats to my existence, or I get told I am doing hate speech.

The avoidance of hate speech should not equate to respectability politics. This is not a matter of signalling respectability as a political effort to decrease oppression, this is a matter of crossing a line and using speech that is hateful, public, and toward a person and/or group. As an analogy, a goal in soccer is a goal no matter what player did it. It sounds strange to me that an exception should be made for oppressed groups to engage in hate speech. The definition of the act shouldn't change based on who is doing it. The act is still the same, in nature and purpose.

Your emphasis hasn't come though, but maybe we should look at some basic definitions. Most dictionaries talk about "expressing hate", "encouraging violence", "denigrating a person or persons" etc. Where am I doing that, exactly?

Yes, let's use the dictionary and clarify it.

• Hate speech: speech expressing hatred of a particular group of people
• "shitty libertarian-dominated cultural cesspool of an event"
• Shitty: cruel or unkind
• Cesspool: a filthy, evil, or corrupt place or state
• "Peace out! 🥰✨🖕"
• The Middle Finger: communicates moderate to extreme contempt, and is roughly equivalent in meaning to "fuck you", "fuck me", "shove it up your ass/arse", "up yours", or "go fuck yourself".
• Contempt: an attitude towards individuals, social groups and eventually ideologies, that evokes a sense of superiority and the right to judge, amid feelings of disgust and anger. (...) The term originated in 1393 in Old French from the Latin word contemptus meaning "scorn".

Perhaps the easiest way of seeing how it's hate speech is that if the exact same words were used against trans people, it would be a huge attack on personal character and toward social group.

I am leaving this derailleur aside, and hope that the main thread here can instead be a place for discussing the evidence at hand.