Just How Messed Up is the Tech Economy? Quite a Lot
What Betsy DuPuis' story says about the problems at Microsoft, GitHub and others
Several heads of tech companies will be hauled up to the Hill tomorrow to answer for themselves, and all the people they’ve been hurting. Mark Zuckerberg is one of them. Sheryl Sandberg has stepped aside. She was once a hero to girlbosses, and recently shot a video feminist-washing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and in the midst of all of this we’ve found out hundreds of American children are abused every single day on the platform of which she is so very proud.
Tomorrow’s hearing makes it a good time to cover some of the ways the Silicon Valley universe behaves badly in more human and less technical ways. So we turn to the story of Betsy DuPuis. I spoke to her on the phone for about two hours several weeks ago, and the following is a paraphrase of much of our conversation, though she has not pre-approved any of this. Some of this is a retread, because DuPuis has put it out there on her own Twitter account, but what I hope to do is put it in relation to some of the other odd scandals and political involvements of some of these companies. She has a keen sense of the ways in which fights about disinformation and women’s rights are deployed in cynical ways.
Tech people will hate this, but the main form misprision of treason takes in Silicon Valley is the assumption that there is a view from nowhere, tech developed in the interest of some generalized sense of world betterment. And the problem with some of this mafia-like behaviors is that they cause the same outcome as any other mafia—the good people being driven out, and valuable assets being controlled by the rascals.
I’ve written in the past that there is a difference between real tech innovation and a kind of fake version that takes advantage of people’s biases toward that sort of thing—between tech innovation and what you might call tech boosterism, in the same sense that there is a difference between science and scientism. Bhalabadra “Alex” Graveley—his parents were Hare Krishnas—with whom she was involved in 2019, seems to fall into the latter category. They met on OKCupid in July of that year, dated for three months, and maintained some contact for the next three, during which time he started to get nasty with DuPuis via text, which she has published. He was about eight years older than her.
Graveley, thereafter, continued moving up the ladder of the tech economy because of his friendship with Nat Friedman, a Charlottesville native who ran GitHub starting in 2018 before stepping away in 2021—in other words, he ran GitHub after it was acquired by Microsoft. According to DuPuis, Graveley routinely held this association over her head while they were dating, threatening to blacklist her and tell others she was crazy. In April 2020, he goes to work for GitHub, presumably because of that friendship. In November 2021, Friedman stepped away from GitHub and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Graveley to face charges of felony strangulation.
There are strong reasons to suspect all of this is related to OpenAI. Graveley’s title at the time at GitHub was chief architect of “Copilot,” which was a first big demonstration of OpenAI’s capabilities, using GPT3. One thing I would be a little concerned about is the possibility that somebody like this was moved into position to be detonated in such a way that it would lead to a sort of Israeli coup to consolidate OpenAI under Altman, but that would require further investigation.
DuPuis’ characterization of Graveley’s political outlook during the time they were dating as a kind of pop-libertarianism, and he presented himself as a Democrat. He liked Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, which suggests a psychologically-driven orientation toward politics. When they met, he had just left MobileCoin, and left the impression he had money from the acquisition of HackPad. He had a condo in San Francisco, but how wealthy he actually is is an open question—DuPuis described a situation in which they visited a Porsche dealership, he sat in a 911, and teared up saying he couldn’t afford it.
DuPuis had the impression he was not a very good programmer, and described his code as “a nightmare.” This is beyond my ability to evaluate, but she described it as overly complex and “written to be so hard to understand and he’s going to tell you it’s because you’re an idiot.” She recalls a moment in which he did not appear to know the difference between object-oriented and functional programming. He is a high-school dropout from Rochester, who claims to have taught himself to code on a Commodore.
Graveley is connected to Noisebridge, which means he is connected to Jacob Applebaum, the cyber-anarchist figure now living in Berlin, who represented Wikileaks and has been accused of all manner of sexual misconduct. Applebaum is a good example of the 2010s sensibility with respect to tech, which is at least out of date today if not cynical from the beginning. Really a weird character, he did work for Kink.com—there’s a picture of him with a Sawzall dildo in the San Francisco Armory. This is the most dangerous kind of idealism. Applebaum, of course, calls himself an anarchist.
During the time she and Graveley dated, DuPuis was working at BigCommerce. She suspects that her firing in May 2020 was related to some of these intrigues—she had been reaching out privately to get him to apologize, before going public later that year. BigCommerce’s CTO, Brian Dhatt, flew to Austin from San Francisco. Dhatt said to someone in the office that he was friends with Friedman, and was going to get them a deal on some services, and a few months later DuPuis was fired. Graveley also sued her for defamation. He has also been accused of ripping off Monero while at Mobilecoin.
Also in DuPuis’ work history, from 2017 to early 2018, is New Knowledge, which has been rebranded as Yonder. This is a deeply weird company. It was seed-funded and féted by Capital Factory, the start-up accelerator based in Austin. They built the dashboard for the Center for American Progress. Ryan Fox, one of their key figures, is ex-NSA and worked with JSOC, which has had a number of huge problems during the Global War on Terrorism. He was strongly anti-Snowden and has reportedly told people he moved into the private sector because surveillance that would be illegal in the government is legal for private companies, which speaks to a certain mindset. DuPuis was struck by the poor security practices of the company, given the pedigrees of some of its founders—she was using a personal computer.
New Knowledge is also the company that was strongly behind the claims of Russian disinformation tipping the balance of the 2016 election. Renee DiResta, their director of research, testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about this subject. Virginia’s own Senator Mark Warner pretended to be very disturbed by all this, and famous insider trader, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, also hailed their reports.
Jonathon Morgan, New Knowledge’s CEO, was involved in creating, in coordination with the German Marshall Fund, Hamilton 68, the disinformation dashboard. This is a tool Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, expressed significant skepticism toward.
While they claimed to be fighting disinformation, they were also propagating it. Their role in the Alabama senate campaign involving Roy Moore was more or less identical to the sort of things Russia’s Internet Research Agency does, as the New York Times pointed out:
As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.
The secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race, in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican, Roy S. Moore. But it was a sign that American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States.
One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
To her credit, DuPuis confronted Jonathon Morgan about this campaign, and she left the company. I have an immense amount of respect for the principle of that.
There isn’t a big difference between pretending to be Russian disinformation and imitating it, the difference is a question of intent. But what we have is a company studying Russian disinformation, giving congressional testimony related to it, while at the same time faking Russian disinformation. Booz Allen continued to give them money after this. This is another instance of the tech economy generating demand for the security services they at least claim to provide.
There are some cases relating to the tech world that raise questions about the judges and DAs in Texas, but that’ll do for now.
I have a relative working at Microsoft in Bellevue, he says that its now over 50% 'woke', and the woke don't do any real work, they just wander around campus and talk "DEI" shit
The same reason BOEING quit doing QA on their aircraft, go woke, go broke, and planes start falling out of the sky;