In 2015 in London I attended my first European Lisp Symposium. I was 21 at the time, and while this wasn't my first time abroad on my own, it was still a pretty stressful affair. I remember it still pretty clearly to that day: meeting Robert Strandh, Zach Beane, Didier Verna, Daniel Kochmański and many other people I'd previously admired from afar through many discussions on IRC. It was an important event for me, and was the first time I'd felt like I was in a group of people I could talk with about my interests and ambitions.
Last year in 2025 I was the local chair for ELS in Zürich. It was a stressful time and I don't remember much of it other than how the stage looked, the food, and me rushing all over to get supplies and take care of other emergencies. I barely talked to anyone because I was either rushing about, stressed, or too tired.
In that time, my life has changed significantly. Over the years I took on more and more organisational roles for ELS itself: remaking the website, handling the transition to a hybrid online conference, handling the live streaming on-site, and last year being local chair.
But for other parts of the broader Lisp community I gradually changed in the opposite direction: I stopped religiously reading the #lisp/#commonlisp IRC channels. I left the Lisp Discord. I stopped replying on and ultimately altogether reading the /r/lisp subreddit. I stopped blogging about what was going on both in other places and with my own projects.
All of these changes happened over time as I found myself with less tolerance for things that annoyed me and wasted my time and energy. The endless debates about why there wasn't a new standard, the constant humm-hawwing about what """the community""" should do, why Lisp wasn't more widely used if it's so great, someone starting yet another project that was already done instead of contributing to an existing implementation, and so on and so forth.
And then I found myself thinking today: "gee, I'm not very excited to go to ELS'26, huh? Whatever happened?" I've already booked my flight and hotel, and I'll be there anyway, partly because I have to for organisational reasons. But now that I'm thinking about how I feel, I can't say for certain if I will be back next year, too. Both for financial and emotional reasons.
In recent years I've found myself more and more disconnected with male-dominated spaces in general. I don't feel at home in them. I'm already not a very social person and struggle with any kind of gathering that has more than 6 people, but a lot more so still if it's mostly men. Not necessarily because I feel like I'm in any kind of danger, but simply because I don't feel like I belong. And... you know, that's sad. Obviously me leaving won't make the situation better for the other women that do attend, but that's the dilemma with all of these situations: unless the organisation creates intentional pressure to correct the situation, it will inevitably only reinforce itself.[1]
And then there's what I can, in the nicest way, only describe as "The LLM Situation," though I will be increasingly un-nice going forward. As of early this year SBCL has happily accepted patches that are authored by or with the use of LLMs, and the maintainers have rebuffed complaints about this practise. The mailing list has also gotten its fair share of useless blather by apologists and pointless drivel dreamed up by LLMs that only wastes everyone's time, to the point where I had to just stop reading it altogether. A few maintainers of other significant projects seem to also have embraced the capitalist wasteland mass exploitation machine that disguises itself as "technology."
On the other side of things as the lead developer of Shirakumo I've decided to put out a blanket ban on all of this garbage. I do not care if LLMs work at all, or if they will ever work, or whatever. The usability of LLMs is completely irrelevant. By using them you are happily handing over the single last remaining shred of your human spirit to the capitalists to help them burn everyone else and the world with it to the ground.
I think back to the impromptu "LLM roundtable" discussion that took place at the end of ELS last year, along with the usual apologist bullshit that was spread in the ELS Signal group at the time, and some of the lightning talks that were shown. And as I think about this, I am filled with trepidation about the coming conference.
Obviously I have no idea what it will be like yet, and I have no idea what the programme will be, nor what people will be there, or what the general vibe is going to be. But nevertheless, I really hope I won't have to "crash out" as the kids say. I already lost my mind last year, seemingly being the only one that wanted to hold a firm stance against this wave of shit at the time.
So what does this all mean going forward? Well, for just now, nothing. I'll continue to be in the places I have dug out myself: mastodon, the shirakumo lichat/libera channel, my patreon, and other small, purpose-driven communities. But it's very possible I'll be leaving ELS behind me permanently after this year, cutting off even the last part of the community that used to be most of my world.
Regardless, I will still be working on my Lisp projects. If nothing else, one of the nice things about the looming tower of software I've built over all these years is that I am in control of the vast majority of it, and replacing any particular part I didn't write should it get enshittified is not that big of an endeavour.
Make no mistake though: I will continue to be increasingly outspoken and annoying about political matters that I consider important and relevant, and this will also be visible in the software I write, be that in licensing, ecosystem integration, or documentation.
I hope that more people will speak out publicly about their stance. It's important to show what you stand for, even if you're just a small part. What is considered "normal" and acceptable is only ever a matter of what people get to see, regardless of how prevalent that stance is among the population. Currently people are getting to see a lot of folks proudly and loudly making trash and littering it all over the place. This normalisation is dangerous, because it makes the average joes think it's OK for them to do it too, or even that they should be doing it.
Just the same way as any other social movement, you 🫵 play a role in it, and your voice matters. Whether you use your voice for the betterment of humans, for the betterment of the ghouls feeding off of us, or silently let the ghouls feed off of us.
