This is the story of what Gabriel Shipton asked me to tell people. At the time, he may have only meant the people in the chat room, but I think it’s worth relating in more detail and to a wider audience. It’s taken a little while to get here because I felt like it was necessary to finish the article about William Guy Amick (known online as “E”) first, before I could fully recount the story since he’s brought up several times. To help combat any bias, I’m setting a few guidelines for myself while telling this story.
- No spoilers or explaining the story.
- I’ll rely on archival information as much as possible, particularly AssangeDAO’s own records.
The story begins with a prologue in February 2022, when AssangeDAO finished raising funds for the auction. The NFT craze had reached a new peak, and it was a concept that I and some other members of Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) always found amusing. NFTs are simultaneously a brilliant and absolutely terrible idea. (Remember KillRoy Was Here? Hopefully not.) Internal shitposts were crafted into a shitpost manifesto by an antifascist riding high off of a scrap against a nazi march, turning phrases that I wish I’d written myself (though I can at least claim credit for suggesting Neocities). The shitpost had a simple purpose that was spelled out in the Background section.
The DDoS_DHO (dada heckling organism) is dedicated to taking the piss out of pompous grifters and frauds…
… while also raising money to support the leaking of socially relevant information.
The link went out after the AssangeDAO auction ended, both because we weren’t in a rush and we had no urge to interfere with the fundraiser – just to make fun of the method and form. While the site has aged as well as any shitpost, the only salient point for this story is the name “DDoS_DHO”, in this case the Dada Heckling Organism (although the acronym’s meaning changed every time it was invoked in the text). Which brings us to the second prologue (because no one’s stopped me from n+1 prologues yet).
A month after the auction ended, the custom Discord link for AssangeDAO no longer worked, as pointed out by a user on Twitter. AssangeDAO quickly responded that they were on it, while posting a temporary new link. Two weeks later on May 24th, the problem persisted and was helpfully documented by Tom Stairtsen a member of AssangeDAO on their forums. Stairtsen included screenshots of the Twitter profile page and the invalid Discord invite screen, shown below. On June 5, the problem remained and the community seemed to languish. “Cumulatively, this indifference reinforces the impression that AssangeDAO is dead,” Stairtsen wrote. His comment received only one reply, from prominent AssangeDAO member Rave: “I think you’re correct.”
And now after months of prologue, we arrive in mid-July 2022 at the beginning of the story Gabriel Shipton wanted me to tell you. The Discord invite link – still prominently displayed on the AssangeDAO website and Twitter account – still didn’t work. I thought this was ridiculous, and (as much as a semi-fanciful neo-dadaist collective can) the rest of DDoS_DHO agreed. Despite the wealth of resources and people available to the DAO, and perhaps somewhat because of the successful MaxBid strategy, there weren’t enough resources to maintain infrastructure. As a result, no one could join the actual Discord for AssangeDAO – but anyone with malicious intentions could easily imitate it.
So the Dada Heckling Organism decided to – once again – take the piss and make the problem impossible to ignore in the hopes that it might be finally fixed. It was simple to do: Creating a new Discord server was free and easy. Upgrading to a Nitro subscription only cost about $10, and upgrading it with more Nitro boosts to unlock all the premium features – including the ability to set custom invite links – wasn’t much more. We set the Discord link to the long unused assangedao invite code, while clearly labeling it as ours. We wanted to laugh the problem out of existence, not become one of the problems we warned of (malicious impersonators). It took less than a day for people to find it naturally, after which we announced it on Twitter. Stairtsen quickly took to AssangeDAO’s forum again.
After first working with WikiLeaks, investigative reporter Emma Best fell out with Assange in 2016, accusing him of lying about the source of the DNC email leak. In 2018, Best leaked sealed chat logs that were part of the case against Assange. Now it appears Best has set her sights on AssangeDAO Discord, threatening on Twitter what would be in effect a hostile takeover.
Stairtsen added that he had previously uninstalled Discord in disgust and wasn’t able to check, but encouraged moderators and other forum members to do so. Logan Weng, another member of AssangeDAO, responded that “Emma is right, they stopped paying attention to the DAO after they got the money.” At this point, Stairtsen also agreed that I was right, while bringing up WikiLeaks’ own broken status and presenting a complete misunderstanding of what had happened.
Of course she’s right, but does that mean she should be allowed to usurp AssangeDAO Discord as a chatroom for her Distributed Denial of Secrets website? DDoSecrets is a competitor to WikiLeaks, which Best claims is broken. She could easily create her own Discord channel, but she just wants to embarrass her old adversary Julian Assange.
At this point on Twitter, I pointed out that Stairtsen was mistaken and that I had offered to return the URL to AssangeDAO the day before. Once again, I explained that the issue was neglect and how it could be easily fixed at any time. But Stairtsen wasn’t the only one mistaken – at one point in the thread, and in the AssangeDAO discord, I said something that was apparently incorrect. Having read a statement from AssangeDAO developer Zylo (Kelly Kolisnik) that “[t]he DAO will continue to raise funds to move itself forward and pay core mods/developers,” I mistakenly believed that “continue” applied to the entire sentence, and so I incorrectly said that developers were being paid.
AssangeDAO member Rick Velvet gave a fairly cogent reply, which I’ll quote in its entirety.
Haters gonna hate.
AFAICT I rarely saw a proper community engagement that actively tried to really draft serious proposals, good ideas and have proper interest to help Julian. For many months there were misunderstandings (intentionally or unintentionally) and people that spreaded FUD and threats, which lead to less engagement from all sides. IMHO, everybody in this DAO has the opportunity to make an environment healthy and constructive, focusing on the mission and not forget why this place has been created in the first place. To free Julian and therefore to protect the future of journalism, human rights and free speech. It was not intented to be a crypto-casino for speculating gamblers and the donation that went to WAU Holland, is for me a completely different and independent topic, than the development of the DAO.
I think it’s not just 1-3 people, that are responsible for the developement of a DAO. Gabriel and people of the consensus unit work and tour hard to help Julian. It’s up to us, the community, to make this place as best as it could be. I believe that this place is still at the beginning and the sooner enthusiastic people join that actively want to fullfill the main mission and actively try to improve the DAO, the more momentum this place would get.
There always will be naysayers or people that rather focus on negativity, instead on concrete and constructive ways how to improve something.
Stairtsen dutifully noted several more updates on the AssangeDAO forums. First, that the AssangeDAO moderators had removed the Discord link from the account’s Twitter profile, where the original tweet had referred people. Unfortunately, AssangeDAO hadn’t reached out to fix the problem, or moved to fix any of the other links, including the prominently placed button on the website. A new tweet from me directed people to that, and invoked the DHO by name. Stairtsen posted a screenshot of that tweet, underlining “Dada Heckling Organism” in red for reasons that elude and tickle me.
At that point, Stairtsen finally reinstalled Discord “to see firsthand what’s going on.” In his words,
It’s true I mistook her intention as being a hostile takeover of AssangeDAO’s Discord channel. Rather, she has hijacked the prominent Discord button atop the home page of AssangeDAO’s official website, redirecting its hyperlink to her own Discord channel, DDoS_DHO—where she attacks AssangeDAO under the nom de guerre Mx. Yzptlk. (Mxyzptlk, I am informed by Wikipedia, is a trickster deity in DC Comics’ Superman adventures.) I’m no techie, but I imagine Emma’s hack could be readily corrected by a moderator at AssangeDAO.org, providing there are any who give a damn, which I very much doubt.
Now, I feel compelled to point out two things here:
- I didn’t hijack any buttons or links, and I didn’t redirect or hack anything. The website was the same as it always was.
- Stairtsen was not only correct when he wrote that Mx. Yzptlk is a trickster deity in DC Comics’ Superman adventures, in doing so he also stumbled upon the correct way to gender me.
At this point, William Amick, previously known online as “E” tried to involve himself. (Readers may remember that Amick/E is an (alleged) pedophile who infiltrated, harassed and disrupted the WikiLeaks and AssangeDAO communities. He’s currently expected to plead guilty to the Pennsylvania charges charges next month, while other charges remain pending).
As Stairtsen noted in the AssangeDAO forum, Amick brought me up in his Telegram channel without mentioning the Discord issues. In his post, Amick makes a number of accusations against me, including that I “was always an IC [Intelligence Community] plant.” Regardless of whether this was in spite of or because of my transparency about my past, he’s made similar claims about many members of AssangeDAO including Amir Taaki. Some of what he said in the post has been disputed by people like Mark Zaid, while other parts can be disproven by checking my website, and some parts simply make no sense. Only one member of AssangeDAO responded to that post, calling it “ultra right wing versus anti-Assange left cartoon behaviour. Popcorn material. Not worth mentioning.”
Logan Weng replied again to tell Stairtsen to “just wake up, they don’t care, they already got the money.” A few days later, AssangeDAO member Rave also replied again with what were, along with the comment calling Amick’s Telegram post “popcorn material,” the final replies in the forum thread.
The consensus unit should intervene and make a unilateral decision regarding this DAOs continuation IMO, unless the DAO votes to pay people to operate it functionally.
It hasn’t been all failure though – the initial fundraiser went way beyond expectations.
Time to call it. Time for an intervention.
There are assets. If the DAO was to wind up – it would have to auction the NFT which it owns and distribute those proceeds and funds it has reserved in the treasury back to its token holders.
(Note: The Clock NFT appears to have broken before Julian Assange was freed)
While the discussion on the AssangeDAO forum ended there, the story didn’t. By July 25th 2022, it had been a week and the link was still on the AssangeDAO website, and the DAO still hadn’t responded to our offers to return it. However, that afternoon AssangeDAO posted a new Discord link, which finally let people start joining their chat again. I acknowledged this in a post and congratulated AssangeDAO on doing something, but also pointed out they had a broken forum link on their website and hadn’t bothered to ask for the Discord link back.
AssangeDAO replied directly to the tweet three times in fifteen minutes. First came “Yay,” then a tweet saying that the forum link had been fixed. Then came a third tweet explaining that “the discord admin had COVID and was offline for a while unfortunately.” (Core member Silke Noa explained in the public AssangeDAO Telegram that the developer was Zylo (Kelly Kolisnik), and that he “spent months seriously ill in the hospital” after “the adverse campaigns by [Amick/E].”) The third tweet from AssangeDAO went on to say that they would like the URL back, but they would “have to pass” because they didn’t have enough server boosts.
When Zylo fixed the forum link on the AssangeDAO website, the changelog notes were “lol-fucking-emma-best” with an extended commit message of “gosh.” The problem was that it was noticed and highlighted, not that Zylo had introduced the mistake four months earlier. The problem was COVID, not that Zylo had been made into a Single Point of Failure. The problem was offering to return the custom Discord link, not that the DAO declined the offer. The problem was probably that I had no decency, or else I would’ve silently averted my eyes because the DAO had no clothes.
LOL Fucking Emma Best. Unless Zylo meant that actually was the solution..? Gosh. Probably not though.
If we could get the URL back that would be great however our discord server currently doesn’t have enough boosts to qualify for a custom link so we have to pass for now until we get more boosts.
AssangeDAO, July 25, 2022
Later that evening, AssangeDAO Quote Retweeted my earlier post that they hadn’t responded after a full week, sarcastically writing “O NO A BROKEN LINK” and that “the broken link has been now made unbroken.” Two days later, AssangeDAO created a redirect that would send people from discord.assangedao.org to the most recent Discord invite link.
With the problem as fixed as it could be and the point made, we let the Discord URL lapse, and got rid of the Discord server entirely (too much noise from too many apps). As far as I know, AssangeDAO never reclaimed the URL. At the end of June this year while in the public AssangeDAO Telegram chat, Gabriel Shipton suggested that I tell people how I allegedly “stole the DAO discord handle and then proceeded to FUD the project.” I immediately answered,
Except I didn’t steal it. The DAO stopped paying for the Discord server and lost it. I grabbed it and offered to return it. Zylo never took me up on the offer. As for FUD, I did come to the Discord and I said something wrong. Rave corrected me and I accepted that. AssangeDAO could get it back any time by boosting the Discord server’s nitro to Level 3 again. It’s not my fault the bills didn’t get paid. As for other FUD, I believe that was E/Amick (now arrested for CSAM), the DAO’s old Community Manager who doxed Stella and the children and spread theories that Stella was CIA.
Gabriel didn’t dispute anything I said, but he didn’t trust my intentions to help get things in order and accused me of having made “a career of FUDing Julian and WikiLeaks,” which I think mischaracterized the scope of my writing and the leaks I’ve helped publish, and ignores research I’ve done that benefits Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Regardless, my recounting of events went unchallenged by the AssangeDAO Telegram chat room. The closest thing to an exception was Silke Noa, who wrote that “E wasn’t the community manager,” a contention which I made sure to note along with AssangeDAO’s internal logs in the article about Amick/E.
Today, AssangeDAO is working to revitalize after Assange’s release. Some in the community want the remaining funds returned for cypherpunk activism, with proposals including revitalizing WikiLeaks, adopting a DarkLeaks-like model, or supporting the pardon effort for Assange. The DAO has a new Telegram channel (the original has messages disabled and lists Gabriel Shipton and Amick/E as the only human admins) and the AssangeDAO Forum relaunched over the weekend. Unfortunately, the custom Discord link seems to have been snatched up by scammers in June, sending anyone who types assangedao into Discord’s prompt to join a new server to the apparently fake site. As of last week their server showed over 2.5 thousand members (though an unknown number could be bots) and the verification link prompted a warning from Discord for a website that has been flagged as abusive, which the DAO has been notified of. The DAO’s actual Discord link can be found in their Twitter profile (I promise).
And that’s what Gabriel Shipton wanted me to tell you.
