Titled “The Ethereum Foundation Mandate,” the document featured ethereal illustrated scenes of glowing lights and anime-style characters voyaging through dark forests. The pages featured white text against a navy blue background and were adorned with cartoon flowers, rainbows and diamonds.
And on page 11 — nestled between a winking anime woman and three yellow cats — was a suicide pledge.
Authors, maintainers, editors and distributors of “this software” would pledge to ensure the software remained free and publicly accessible, and would also vow to “take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license,” the illustration read. It was labeled “Source Seppuku License,” an apparent reference to a traditional Japanese ritual suicide.
To work in crypto you have to have a fairly high baseline separation from reality but this is impressive.
What a pathetic way to lose ~50 employees/volunteers
Wow. I’m not into kink shaming or telling people they’re have fun the wrong way, but how broken do you need to be to cosplay the Bushido code for the sake of magic money? 🤦🏻♂️
I wish people could just be grown-ups.
There’s this concept in biology called “neoteny.” It’s when adult organisms retain the physical characteristics of juveniles. Hairless bodies in humans is an example.
I think we’re seeing an accelerated psychological version of this in society. We’ve got people , including leaders, going around acting like 10-14 year olds.
comic sans?? everything about this is unhinged
Jesus Fucking Christ.
The decomposing corpse of the blockchain cult is getting even weirder than it was at the peak of the mania.
Can’t wait for Line Goes Up 2
He was always weird though.
What the fuck? Lmao, cringe anime seppuku pledge?
Crypto bros are so pathetic.
I thought it was a joke at first but no, some absolute weirdo put it in there.
The mandate’s visual aesthetic — the anime and other illustrations — reflected imagery from a controversial online figure who was known to promote “white nationalist ideology and disturbing pro-anorexia content,” according to the lawsuit.
When an Ethereum Foundation board member objected to the aesthetic, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded that “the controversialness (sic) of those aesthetics is itself part of the point,” according to the lawsuit.
After demanding that employees agree to the mandate, Bastian Aue, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, defended the suicide pledge to employees as “part of the artwork of the mandate.”
It was, he said, “a cultural reference like other elements in there. Chosen deliberately, but not meant to be taken literally.”
“We deliberately referenced white nationalism when getting you to promise suicide if you don’t do as we say, but we didn’t mean it”
That they would produce a legal document with a clause like that and in such a childish format speaks of the general sleaziness of crypto.
Looks like the funny money bros running the fucking cringeshit cult must come from 8chan.
This is on par with Aum Shinrikyo and Happy Science. Shades of Lychee Light Club.
Another reason to yell FUCK CRYPTO.
Seppuku if they don’t keep things open source? Wow that’s messed up!
Omg, leik so messed up!
It would be horrible if it was national law.
“If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,” he said, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recorded conversation between the pair.
So he doubled down instead of removing a suicide pledge? Legitimately insane. Now he’s getting sued because of it. But from his point of view it was more about asserting who was in charge. He’s insane.
I think this would be the best contract to sign. Including BS like that in it would make it easy to argue the contract is completely void. And given the timeline and threat of being fired. You can also argue it was obviously signed under duress.
Risky in the current political climate, though. We’ll see where things go from here but the side that would support slavery for life contracts still has a sitting president (who is acting a bit too calm at having just lost the house and senate).
Yeah, but any litigation about this kind of thing always takes years. So either we have new leadership, or we are already totally screwed worse than the contract.
Hence it being risky as its impossible to tell what kind of people will have authority over the decision process if it ends up in court and what their values will be. What might be ridiculous to some are exactly the kind of “gotchas” that predatory people love.
For anyone looking for the full PDF: https://ethereum.foundation/ef-mandate.pdf
What in the AI psychosis? This whole thing is bat-shit crazy.
This is the only part mentioning a license
Supported projects must pledge that they will not change their open source or copyleft license in the future. Permissive licenses are accepted, viral copyleft licenses are appreciated, but merely source-available licenses are not tolerated.
Edit: my bad. it’s in an image on page 11
Reality has gone off the rails…
The Source Seppuku license sounds moderately hilarious, I think a lot of people here on Lemmy would approve of it if crypto wasn’t involved (the people who call permissive licenses “cuck licenses”). Luckily there’s no way to legally enforce it.
The whole nazi anime lady is pretty bad though, and terminating someone for having cancer is beyond fucked.
Downvoted for paywall. Sorry.
I often run into paywalls and move on, but I didn’t see one here.
Not saying you’re wrong, but I wonder if it’s regional or something?
If I had to legally defend the foundation my main argument would be that any proposed thousand-year policy is clearly satire, and that this was actually a test to weed out those who didn’t get it.
