A Discussion About Suicides in Science and Technology (Including Debian and the European Patent Office)
Related: People Who Cover Suicide Aren't Suicidal
OVER the years I witnessed people wanting or trying to commit suicide, but I never myself contemplated it. So my awareness of the issue is derived from things I have unfortunately witnessed/seen, not felt.
In the case of the EPO, the suicidal tendencies are a well known problem that we wrote about many times in the past. Many smart and talented people became ill - physically and/or mentally - while working in that toxic environment. Some never recovered and some ended their own lives.
In Debian, there is a long history of deaths, suicides, and mysterious disappearances (Arjen Kamphuis). A former Webhost of ours, who had worked as a Debian Developer, died in a car accident a few years ago.
Lack of sleep, sleep deprivation, stress and a lack of financial rewards (even to make ends meet) can be contributing factors. Poor diet, isolation, a lack of breaks etc. won't help, either. Health deteriorates over time.
At the moment, SPI (fronting for Debian) is trying to hijack "debian" domains that are unflattering because they speak about these issues. It has become a very dangerous attack on the Internet (Net) because they target any domain that contains the substring "debian" somewhere (there must be hundreds of sites like these).
Those of us who value the freedom of the Net (superset w.r.t. the Web) are deeply concerned. The Internet (Net) was conceived as a decentralised platform, unlike social control media (even DNS is partly decentralised or semi-federated), so what SPI does is worse than just an attack on a Free software developer. Unknowingly, or at least unwittingly, it is attacking free speech. It protects nobody except some rich people's egos.
So what is it that they're so desperate to hide? Well, it's a whole bunch of things, but one of them is the suicides (under the guise of "privacy"). We saw EPO management resorting to similar tactics in an effort to 'hide the bodies'...
This is the man who Debian (and SPI) fears the most and tries to ban:
I recently told Daniel Pocock: "The West (broadly speaking) developed regulations for working hours because of an understanding of human biology, not excluding the mind. In Techrights we cover a lot of this in relation to ILO, ILOAT, and EPO. At the EPO many workers are injured, then thrown away. Some threw themselves from the top of building, even during working hours (a form of protest). The EPO management responded by bolting the windows shut."
"Sadly," Pocock told me, "there is a subset of companies in Switzerland who run their HR like that. In some jobs it is easy for the employee to quit and find an equivalent job across the road but for more specialized jobs it is harder to find an equivalent job in a reasonable timeframe and reasonable distance because the workforce is so small here. Many people end up sick in a workplace that isn't right for them."
"That is exactly what happens in EPO (as I was told by insiders). They are stuck," I told him. "Last night I saw this in the news: Excessive Sitting Raises Risk of Early Death: Now We Know How Much" (a bit old by now).
"I think I had heard a few other permutations of the same thing already a few times," Pocock replied. "On the suicide stuff, some journalists are very resistant to publish anybody's name because they don't want to be shut out of the industry or run into lawsuits about privacy. There has to be something really notable about a suicide case for them to reveal the name. Even the Debian Day thing is not notable enough for most journalists to publish the name Frans Pop. But the story of a suicide cluster doesn't need names. As long as the journalists know who the people are and they know the story is real, they can use the term "suicide cluster" in their headline and know it is rare enough to be a notable piece of clickbait for their readers. An individual tech worker committing suicide is not rare enough these days."
"Yes, this is exactly what happened in EPO," I told him. "They use the term "suicide wave" (I think French in origin), a la France Télécom scandal."
There's a conviction [1, 2]. "He lost the appeals too IIRC," or that was my mere recollection of that. People in companies like Google and IBM, maybe even Canonical's founder, can be held legally accountable for these suicides. To them, hiring some lawyers to muzzle critics is "slush funds" well worth the "investment".
Over the next few days I plan to rerun some old articles with evidence of the correlation between work on Debian and the suicides. That needs to be seen, even if it is inconvenient to some people. █