Participation in Cancel Culture Detrimental to One's Career
A cautionary tale
I met Matt Lee in person about 2 decades ago. He lived near me. He made the cover design on the right (cover art by Etienne Suvasa).
Some years ago Matt Lee decided to participate in the attacks on the founder of the FSF (and GNU before that), RMS. It didn't go well for him. Based on stories that I heard, he couldn't handle it. Then he started censoring anyone who didn't agree with him, including me. Short fuse, bad temper.
To be clear, at one point he was an important figure at the FSF (as recently as a decade ago) and he made the Fry film (now he calls himself a "Filmmaker"). Maybe that was the pinnacle of his activism adventure.
Now he looks for a job and he no longer maintains presence in social control media sites. "Right now," says the last sentence, "I'm looking for a job."
In the past, some people who had signed the anti-RMS petition contacted us. They asked us to remove them from the text files with the lists of signatures. Perhaps they deemed this a liability - a risk in job-seeking endeavours.
A few weeks ago DHH said similar things about the few people who had signed a public letter against him. █