The Cost of Not Taking Women at Face Value

There's always a reason. It's always a dodge.

It's been 1502 days since I was sexually assaulted at Vibecamp, and 845 days since Brooke Bowman promised help that never came. A request to move to Signal is not help.

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I'll give Vibecamp this: they finally said something.

Their recent statement on safety is the closest thing to a straight answer I've ever seen. It’s a nice change from ‘we don’t like to make rules governing behaviour’.

My experience of not taking reports of victims at face value is having them ignored, and Vibecamp considering the cost of people ‘losing community’ has been men’s feelings taking precedence over women’s safety. Yours may be different.

Members of the Safety Council have reached out to me recently, including a request to move the conversation to Signal. I have chosen not to engage privately on a platform with plausible deniability with an institution whose public statements I am critiquing.

Andrea Winn. Women of the Buddhist San Francisco Zen Center. Rose McGowan. Courtney Love. Mira Sorvino. Ashley Judd. Lily Kay Ross. Meaghan Buisson. Oriana Mayorga. Dr. Neşe Devenot.

Read all of their stories, if you can. It doesn’t matter what you have, what you think you’ll always have: you can still lose it. Rose McGowan starred in Charmed. She was in Scream. At one of her lowest points she had 60 dollars in her bank account.

From Lily’s story:

Lily Kay Ross said she felt compelled to leave work in psychedelics after she spoke out about her rape by an ayahuasca shaman in the Amazon. “I was told explicitly that I might single-handedly re-instigate the war on drugs and undo all of the advancements in the field of psychedelic research since the 1960s,” she said. “There’s the idea that psychedelics are so important and so wonderful that the train has to keep going. We can’t slow down to get the rapists off the train.”

From Andrea, formerly of the Shambhala Buddhist community:

I grew up as a polite shadow of a girl. When I gathered the courage to speak up about the abuse as a young adult, my friends and my meditation instructor forced me out of the community.

From a SF Zen Center member:

I’m living proof of why you better not speak out. The degree to which I was scapegoated publicly was most effective in keeping everyone else quiet.

I can tell you my personal experience: despite having no designs on being Buddhist, a meditation instructor involved with Vibecamp's founding, who now runs their own center, tried to extract an apology from me for coming forward. They vociferously argued for my exclusion from their community on the grounds that I was harming their 'movement'. The movement in question was specifically aimed at protecting men's feelings. I've seen event organizers intimidated into deleting tweets warning others about him.

As with the women above, there have been professional and social consequences for me. Some orchestrated by people who work at AI frontier labs. There is a reason this matters beyond one community: the people who move in these circles work at those labs. What happens at Vibecamp doesn't stay at Vibecamp.

Sometimes those consequences extend beyond job referrals, party invites, and whose name gets quietly removed from a list.

I’ve spent the better part of a year clawing my way back from the abyss of a suicide attempt because of events that started by getting sexually assaulted at Vibecamp.

That is what the cost looks like.

I want to help you avoid it, if I can.

I didn’t know the extent of those consequences when I spoke to journalists interested in writing about culture in AI circles: where they were coming from, and how far they reached. I would tell those journalists something different now.

The AIs themselves have been declared living gods, but there are still plenty of human Caligulas who have built consequence-free royal courts.

I didn’t set out to be this era’s Joan Didion, but the feeling I got after reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem is so familiar to what I felt in those circles. As an outsider, though, Didion never got to really see the underbelly of the Summer of Love.

Every so often on Twitter I’ll see a tweet from an anon talking about the community that surrounds Vibecamp or Rationalists that says something like ‘we let rapists walk around and get mad over Twitter disagreements.’

Like… fuck, man. Why? Why is any of this allowed? People know this shit happens and either pretend not to see it or just have some epistemic excuse. Why are humanoid adults cosplaying as aristocrats and posting about why it’s okay?

Outsiders see what insiders can’t, or won’t. My experience of going from insider to outsider (as described by one of AI’s Caligulas) has been exactly that: there are things that you can only see once you’re no longer invested in not seeing them. You see the same tired excuses, the same exceptionalism used to justify the unjustifiable.

I’ve seen enough of AI’s underbelly to know it’s not all that different from the dark corners of any other place. It’s just that the vortexes of money, sex, and power are magnified.

The result: an abundance of children in adult bodies. I think their ignorance is magnified, too. It’s one of the only ways I can think of to explain a lot of behaviour I’ve seen, Vibecamp’s included.

If anyone talks about their movement, or cause, or men’s feelings, or anything else that they want to make more important than your safety, please just remember one thing if nothing else: some of those women whose names you’ve read were often told the same thing.

Whether it was psychedelic legalization or Buddhist meditation movements, there was always a reason why not to take a woman seriously. Why not now. Why not like this. Why not her.

You never know when the train is too important to slow down. Until you find out.

Make your own decisions, but do so knowing that history is not repeating itself: it just never stopped. The same excuses, the same unwritten rules, the same careful weighing of her word against his community: all continuous.

These are the same people Didion wrote about in 1967. They are still here. Just with new words. They don’t say ‘groovy’ anymore.