Lighthouse lab metrics, Axe, and Chrome UX Report field data for a list of sites recorded and compared over time.

A pirorum villa filius

Lighthouse lab metrics, Axe, and Chrome UX Report field data for a list of sites recorded and compared over time.

Lighthouse lab metrics, Axe, and Chrome UX Report field data for a list of sites recorded and compared over time.

Trump regime now making anti-immigrant video games for the kids

I'm somebody who's written rather extensively on generative AI ethics, and I feel there is a lot that is unethical about the current corporate climate and culture surrounding the technology. And when I write about LLMs and chatbots, I'm careful not to make judgments about the people using the end products—I don't think you're a bad person if you use ChatGPT or Claude, or whatever. What I'm discussing today is different. There is no room for debate or argument, here—only hard, absolute lines in the sand. Much of the world has become far too complacent and complicit with people (and their companies) who proclaim and hold far-right, fascist ideology. These are not image boards residing in the fringe corners of an anonymous Internet made up of people who have slipped through the cracks. No, these are wealthy people in power who are blatant and shameless in their support for those who continuously beat the drum of bigotry, xenophobia, transphobia, and cynical accelerationist hatred. Open source technology has become a culture safe for this rhetoric and ideology, with millions of dollars being invested to continue this status quo. You need to be made aware of this, and then you need to be vocal and take action. ## DHH David Heinemeier Hansson is the most well-known figurehead here. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and a Shopify board member. In September 2025, DHH published "As I remember London", mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits"—a claim that redefines "native Brit" to mean "white." Developer Jake Lazaroff details how DHH describes a Tommy Robinson march as "heartwarming," where speakers called for "remigration" (a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of non-white residents) and one speaker demanded that countries "ban halal," "ban mosques," and "ban temples." DHH invokes abuse scandals to bolster his white-nationalist rhetoric, framing non-white men as predators of "British girls," while UK data shows no such racial skew. LibreNews reaches the same conclusion. Developer Joel Drapper wrote how Ruby Central had lost a $250,000-a-year sponsorship from Sidekiq after giving DHH a speaking slot at RailsConf a few weeks later, leaving the nonprofit financially dependent on Shopify (where DHH sits on the board); Shopify then pushed Ruby Central to consolidate control rather than lose its funding. The Register and Heise both covered the fallout. But none of this has cost DHH money—if anything, he's only gained. A few weeks ago, DHH announced the Omacom Foundation to bankroll his Linux distribution, Omarchy, which is nothing more than a few vibecoded scripts on top of Arch Linux. There are twelve "Founding Patrons" pledging a million dollars apiece: * Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify * Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe * Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies * Jack Dorsey, Block Head and Chairman of Block * Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare * Brendan Iribe, Cofounder of Sesame and Oculus * Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals * Drew Houston, cofounder and co-CEO of Dropbox * Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw * Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase * Yunjie Dai, cofounder of TapTap * DHH himself. And these corporations are each contributing $100,000 a year for three years: * 1Password * 37signals A dozen of the most powerful executives in tech looked at a man who wrote that a British march calling for the deportation of non-white citizens was "heartwarming," and decided he was the person they wanted to hand a multimillion-dollar foundation to. I should also mention that the same infrastructure companies bankrolling Omarchy and Ladybird are also the backbone of the ongoing violence of U.S. deportations. This includes Amazon's AWS contracts powering ICE, Palantir building ICE's case-management system, and the use of Salesforce's tools. ## "Apolitical" Andreas Kling, founder of the Ladybird browser project (itself an Omacom-adjacent beneficiary, sponsored by Cloudflare, FUTO, Shopify, 37signals, Proton, and JetBrains), built his project's identity around refusing a documentation patch that would have made SerenityOS's manuals gender-neutral, on the grounds that gender-neutral language was "personal politics" that didn't belong in a technical project. Blogger Kate Vibber wrote how that became Ladybird's official contributing guidelines, which now bar "discussions on societal politics" outright—a policy treating the mere existence of trans contributors as more "political" than excluding them. In 2026, Kling posted in support of Charlie Kirk after Kirk's assassination and, per discussion on Lobsters, bristled at being called a fascist for it—a reaction hard to square with "apolitical," since Kirk was a movement figure who, per his own Wikipedia entry, promoted the "white genocide" conspiracy theory and criticized the Civil Rights Act. Vaxry, the developer behind the Hyprland Wayland compositor (another Omacom-funded project), was banned in 2024 by Freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team over a pattern of the Hyprland Discord enabling harassment of trans community members, including an incident where moderators changed a trans user's display name to strip their pronouns. Vaxry's own public response framed the ban as ideological overreach by "social justice warriors," while the Freedesktop side, recounted at LibreNews, describes over a year of private attempts to get him to address the toxicity before going public. Hyprland's contributing guidelines now ban "political" speech too. Enrico "metux" Weigelt forked the deprecated Xorg server into Xlibre as a rebellion against a "RedHat DEI" conspiracy he believes exists. The founding document of the project was a rant about big-tech diversity initiatives, and its code of conduct is a text file that just says "404." FUTO is a funder of Immich and is run by Eron Wolf, a friend and platformer of Curtis Yarvin, the "dark enlightenment" writer whose ideas about dismantling democracy have now found purchase in the current U.S. administration. Brendan Eich, Mozilla's co-founder and now Brave's CEO, used Brave's infrastructure to give payments to Kiwi Farms, a forum whose harassment campaigns have been linked to multiple suicides. We witness the same pattern over and over. A tech project is declared "apolitical," and defines any accommodation of marginalized contributors as a political act, and keeps the actual politics of the maintainers—nostalgia for ethnically white homogeneous cities and hostility to gender-neutral pronouns—off the table entirely. Because that's just, you know, how they feel. "Apolitical" has never meant a lack of politics. It's meant politics that current power doesn't have to defend. ## The Throughline We have been watching the fragile fury of white masculinity and hate metastasize and fester over the years, from Gamergate's harassment campaigns through years of anti-SJW cringe compilation content mills, the marking of Antifa as the enemy, the tantrum-throwing #AllLivesMatter movement, and the manufactured panic over DEI and "wokeism." You are not living in the neoliberal-Obama era where basic compassion and empathy are the default anymore. And you haven't been for a long time. Despite their cries about censorship and deplatforming, and despite their persecution fetish, these people are not on the fringe. They have board seats and sponsorships and multimillion-dollar foundations. It is no coincidence this is occuring as companies and brands return to X, as the United States votes at a Midterm election being interfered with by a sitting president, as conservatives normalize the far-right in Europe politics and culture. If you want a more thorough and longer list of people, companies, and products, then I recommend reading up on Devine Lu Linvega's Fashware list on Sourcehut, as well as Drew DeVault's list of Weird Little Guys. You may be in a position where the specific harms and rhetoric being spewed are not aimed at you, and you may have been coaxed into viewing what I'm saying here as overreaction, or as a rabid, self-righteous screed. Millions of dollars have been spent to ensure this, and it could not be further from the truth. We cannot afford to continue to shrug off the presence of these people and their projects in open source. A united stand must be taken. **Speak up on this**. Boycott aggressively. Let people know you don't support Cloudflare, Shopify, 37signals, Dell, 1Password, Framework, Block, Coinbase, Dropbox, TapTap, and any other company enabling the spread of dangerous and harmful political ideologies that will continue to result in further violence and death. And let people know the harm these companies are actively doing. We cannot allow this to continue; we must be far more proactive and assertive in our fight against the normalization of fascism and the far right. We must be willing to sacrifice ease and convenience, and we must be willing to sever all connections with these entities. It is our only way forward.

Around a month ago, I wrote an article about accessible approaches to the IndieWeb and meeting people where they are. I wrote about how writers who don't come from a technical background can utilize an already existing platform to focus solely on their writing, rather than the web development aspects of HTML and CSS. In the past couple days, there have been a couple responses to this, from Eetu of Moonwriting and Pagecord creator Olly, which was one of the platforms I initially recommended in the 4th paragraph of my article. Now, my article was itself a response to Adam's post, Hardcore IndieWeb where he explained how someone could host a site with NFS for a penny a day and went over a lot of details about making a website. It was really helpful and cool, and my response was aimed at people who'd be intimidated by such a guide and trying to explain progressive disclosure, and other possibilities of starting points. Eetu's response actually explained exactly why I think such a thing is important: > Brennan Kenneth Brown, a writer I admire, uses a ladder analogy to encourage people to learn HTML and CSS in order to eliminate dependence from platforms that could shut down any day. Yes, exactly! (Also, thank you for the kind words.) Although he later continues by writing "[t]inkering with my site is something I would rather avoid," I do not advocate for learning webweaving for the sake of tinkering. I advocate for it because the more dependencies we have, the more fragile our writing is on the web. It's awesome to have a platform where all you do is write and hit "publish" and thankfully there are multiple that exist; however, they come with trade-offs the way everything does. You either are paying money, or you're sacrificing privacy, or you'll have a lot of limits you wouldn't if you were doing things on your own. Learning to have a website of your own also has trade-offs, it's technical and time-consuming and at times, can be frustrating as hell. But one of the reasons I wrote the WEBMASTER@ manifesto is because I believe far too many people have learned helplessness when it comes to technology. Everyone is capable of learning the basics to get their own website up. There is no gatekeeping here on my part. I want everyone to use their right to create and have digital autonomy and sovereignty. My 40+ articles on the IndieWeb have been in an attempt to get people of all forms and from all backgrounds introduced to the independent web. And, likewise, if you'd rather stay on a platform instead, that's okay! But don't say I'm saying it's lesser or inferior—it isn't, and I don't think it is. There's no "right" way to IndieWeb. What I do think is that we've seen products and services shut down time or get acquired and time and time again. At the very least, ensure you have local redundant personal backups of your writing and all your important works. ## Case Study: Olly and Pagecord Regrettably, a good example of why you shouldn't be dependent on a specific platform developed in real-time in the past couple days. Olly wrote: > For me, by far the most important thing is supporting the IndieWeb ethos, not subjecting yourself to all the hassle that HTML, CSS, static sites, deployment and whatnot will bring you. I've been programming professionally since 1995 and I can assure you it is a hassle, or will be one way or another! I agree, it is a hassle, and if that's where his argument stopped, that'd be fine by me because I say the same thing. But then he continued: > If you choose the hardcore DIY approach, you're subjecting yourself to a lot of maintenance, unexplained errors and headaches that suck up a lot of time, or might require an LLM to fix it when you're stumped. Now, this is an edited version of what he wrote originally, which was that people would have to pay for an LLM to fix things when you're stumped. The IndieWeb has a general anti-genAI sentiment the way most creative subcultures do, and people pointed out that this was a weird counterargument to make. People can ask others (that's what community is all about) or simply do a web search to try to find a solution to the problem. No LLMs required. Olly himself has not made it a secret that he uses LLMs like Claude to build Pagecord. From February of this year: > Claude thinks I should scale Pagecord by switching to bare metal. It's an AI after my own hacker heart! It takes me right back to those halcyon days of racking up servers in 2012. But Olly became increasingly upset at people criticizing the original remark he made. He's subsequently deleted his Mastodon account and now is on Twitter exclusively, where he pays for a blue checkmark beside his name. It's okay to be sensitive, and it's also okay to fuck up (I've fucked up plenty worse myself) but when you're a creator with a public-facing project like Pagecord, you need to be able to handle criticism, even when it's unfair or aggressive. This is the Internet. Many marginalized folks face far worse harassment for simply existing. I think, too, if you're going to make a product and market it as "a product that is built around [IndieWeb] ethos" and call yourself an "IndieWeb builder," then being pro genAI and being a paying user of Twitter are both going to raise questions from people. Because neither of those are generally considered IndieWeb ethos—at all. Olly wrote on his blog about how "Mastodon was just as toxic as X" (and yet he seems fine being on X and not Mastodon) in response to this. Hm. I know this article I'm writing right now could be taken in bad faith, and seen as continuing to contribute to the so-called "witch hunt," but I'm not telling you to stop using Pagecord if you do use it. I don't think Olly is a bad person. Nor would I dissuade somebody from starting out with it. I still think it has a lot of cool features, which I've written previously time and time again. But it certainly _is_ good and important to be aware and mindful of how the creators of the platforms you depend on operate, and why I recommend eventually trying your hand at hosting things yourself in the first place.

A pirorum villa filius

A pirorum villa filius

Lawsuit filed by dozens of employees says people who took maternity or disability leave were disproportionately selected for layoffs

Back to the Shadows

Back to the Shadows