Empowering Extreme Misogyny Through Bitcoin Open Source Development in Brazil
This article explores how the international open-source community is inadvertently fostering extreme misogyny in Brazil, and it begins to shed light on how we can write a different story.
“The funny thing: there were a few women online at that time, and they were using guys' names so they could feel more comfortable and less freaked out by weirdos.”
The Internet of Money Volume Three: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Funny for who? The year is 2024, and nothing has changed. This article aims to demonstrate how misogyny is not a natural emergent property of free and permissionless communities. It is being promoted, enabled, funded, and fed top-down.
It explores how the Bitcoin development ecosystem has been the perfect enabler of the manosphere and male supremacy in all their possible flavors and starts a conversation on how we can change the outcomes of our Bitcoin open-source development communities for better software and societies.
Update: Attacks on women in Bitcoin development have escalated recently, and we hope that the Bitcoin community will prioritize including and respecting women once and for all. Learn more at biohazel.github.io
Qualifying the Issue—Bitcoin and the Manosphere
The rise of Bitcoin has been accompanied by a disturbing correlation with the expansion of the manosphere—a collective of online communities dedicated to promoting hatred towards women and perpetuating male supremacy. These communities aim to liberate men from the ‘feminist delusion’ and restore a patriarchal status quo (Henshaw, 2023).
They present adherence to biological determinism and the perceived threat of a ‘feminist agenda’: threats from formal structures or institutions that seemingly privilege women over men, whether legally or concerning employment opportunities and gender parity.
The manosphere is an echo chamber where sexism and misogyny are reinforced and escalated. Like many internet rabbit holes there are countless levels to the manosphere that allow for entry levels that slowly pull individuals into deeper and more radical aspects of intense misogyny that includes male supremacy, rape culture, and deplorable thought patterns (Das, 2022; King, 2018).
Research on the manosphere generally focuses on one or more distinctive subcultures, including Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), masculinist separatists called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), Proud Boys, groups formed around misogynistic seduction techniques, called Pick-Up Artists (PUA), The Red Pill, and Incels. Many of the discussions concern misogynistic constructions of women as a threat (Wright et al., 2020).
This hegemonic masculinity may present differently across time and place. While these communities share a general concern around a perceived sense of a loss of men’s status, rights, and sense of self, they are disparate and often disagree over the precise cause and appropriate means of redressing this sense of crisis.
However, a constant is that implicit or explicit threats of violence are directed towards women in service of the hegemonic masculinity project of legitimizing patriarchy (Connell, 2005).
All the variations of the manosphere share a dehumanizing view of women, whether by treating them as objects of conquest or blaming them for their own loneliness. They often justify their behaviors and attitudes using market logic and evolutionary psychology. For them, women are essentially commodities with no intellectual value, and they hold the assumption that women are immoral and untrustworthy.
The participants of such communities are advocates for men’s rights and men’s interests, using evolutionary biology and pseudo-scientific concepts to confidently back their attitudes and agendas, which include humiliating and harassing women who try to approach their communities. In a sense, the manosphere demonstrates the dangers of misusing scientific discourses for problematic purposes.
They share a collection of idols, beliefs, and ‘self-improvement’ goals. Their beliefs about gender center around the idea that there is a surface level cultural story—that women are oppressed by patriarchy—which covers up the true nature of gender relations—that male dominance represents the natural order, which feminism is upsetting with negative consequences for everyone.
They attempt to portray men as victims of a ruthless system that favors and protects women. However, this narrative is constructed at their expense, as it ignores the privileges and advantages they have historically possessed, perpetuating systemic harm that negatively impacts true gender equality.
Valkenburgh (2021) states that the manosphere, which remains understudied within the social sciences, is a loosely connected group of anti-feminist internet communities. They manipulate and exploit women, and this dynamic is reinforced by a neoliberal ideology that commodifies women, treating them as interchangeable objects in a sexual marketplace.
The libertarian rhetoric often present in Bitcoin circles can inadvertently fuel the manosphere narrative, where toxic masculinity and hostility towards feminism find fertile ground. It all goes in the name of their freedom and against their oppressive progressism.
Brazilian Open Source Bitcoin Developers: The Red Pill
Brazil's Bitcoin developers and technologists center around particular YouTube influencers and a large community hosted on Discord, The Bitcoin Discord. It is not hard to imagine someone trying to find a community to know more about Bitcoin and ending up directed to the main square where all the technical folks gravitate.
Nowadays, I suspect it is like that in every country. Bitcoiners have a statistical chance of meeting at certain places, and algorithmic bias also plays a role.
That server feels like a large corporation, with various Bitcoin professionals: marketing, education, research, content creators, book writers, entrepreneurs, developers, recruiters... Name a famous Brazilian Bitcoin figure: the person is there.
That is today's most important aggregator and supplier of actual Brazilian Bitcoin open-source developers. It is a community that self-assembled around 2012, in the early days of Bitcoin. They know a lot, and they all know each other and work together.
However, sadly, the space is an echo chamber of the manosphere.
In Brazil, the most prominent theme is the red pill culture. Effectively, The Red Pill promises an antidote to what is regarded as modern men’s ‘slavery’ to women and an unjust social hierarchy. Indeed, in this space, feminism is broadly conflated with misandry.
This is codified through a metaphor from the film The Matrix, in which a blue pill allows the protagonist to return to his existence in the false world, and a red pill allows him to break free and learn the hard truth about reality.
The term red pill is shared across the manosphere, tying different groups together with the underlying belief that the metaphor represents a kind of libertarian heterosexuality in which men and women are rational actors seeking to maximize different kinds of gains (Gavey, 2005, Hoffman et al., 2020).
It is important to note the presence of black pill terminology among incels, which represents the additional ‘truth’ of permanent hopelessness (of having a romantic or sexual relationship) that they accept for themselves (Hoffman et al., 2020).
The Incel community also promotes and has a darkly sarcastic humor around suicide. The Brazilian Bitcoin development communities hold a mix of red pill and incel influencers, with overall machismo and women’s suppression as the dominant culture, even for those who don’t identify with a specific label or are not active in the server’s dialogues.
Within these communities, concepts of sexual harassment, pedophilia, ageism, [even zoophilia], and rape culture are taught and normalized through memes and various content (Van Valkenburgh, 2021). The content portrays women either as sexual objects or as annoying threats in humiliating positions.
They propose that men should take advantage of females’ fertile ages, which, according to them, starts at their first period as teenagers and ends at age 23, promoting pedophilic conduct and considering women above 23 years of age essentially worthless for society.
They also believe that if a woman denies sexual advances, it is a sign that men should forcefully push her into mating, as she is testing their genes for persistence. The supposed mechanism for sleeping with women is to ignore intrinsic and extrinsic emotional cues: ignore one’s own inclinations to altruism, sympathy, and generosity and ignore women’s protestations and signs of discomfort (O’Neill 2018).
They also propose that women are not born to be coders, that they should learn how to cook, and that they should be good spouses. In short, they make it clear that we are not welcome in their Bitcoin technical territories.
There is a whole ideology backing their behavior of exploitation, harassment, and consistent bullying of female developers and women in general, from subtle to more explicit ways.
Incels, often associated with extreme acts of violence, see women as adversaries who deserve to be punished for their lack of romantic or sexual interest (Hoffman et al., 2020). I was once in The Bitcoin Discord when an (apparently, incel) told me in public that a friendship between women and men is impossible.
Ging (2017) identifies that the red pill's underlying philosophy functions to ‘generate consensus and belonging among the manosphere’s divergent elements’. Journalists are becoming aware of the red pill group's involvement in social problems, characterizing it as the ‘online heart of modern misogyny’.
One powerful Brazilian influencer in Bitcoin development coined the term gynofascism, as a reality to be combated. At the very least, it is in their agenda to guarantee that women cannot attain financial freedom through Bitcoin, including the freedom that comes from technical knowledge in Bitcoin development.
They preach that a marriage is doomed to end if a woman manages to make more money than men. Holding women back from Bitcoin, therefore, is the most efficient way to guarantee their male supremacy.
With that comes their hostile, provoking, and disrespectful behavior when a female enters the scene, gradually then suddenly, subtly then radically, keeping women out of the space or in secondary, limited roles, at most serving as a front for them to not get caught in their act.
Women who are trying to find community, learn, and belong are subjected to a chamber of chronic abuse—in a gradient that goes from information withholding to public shaming.
In Bitcoin in Brazil, women are commodified not only in the sense that they are fetishized, consumed as objects from an early age, and given a quantifiable exchange value but also in the sense that their exchange value can fluctuate according to technological advancements.
The more dominance men have in Bitcoin, both as holders and developers, the cheaper women become for them to afford in every sense. Their power to intimidate women rises with their financial sovereignty. This situation is also one of the reasons why, statistically, we have virtually no women in Bitcoin development in Brazil.
These people don’t want active women in their communities precisely because they want to feel comfortable in their own plots. Any woman who attempts to question their agenda will be summarily abused before being discarded. All the women who seem able to ‘make it’ are sold to their system and profit from the suppression of all other females.
Even if you manage to join ‘moderated spaces’, you know the aggressors are still there because you've seen them in other groups, on YouTube, on Twitter, in real life, etc. When you think of an assembled team of IT professionals, it influences the demeanor, rapport, responsiveness, connection, and inner workings of men-women interactions in tech-focused groups. The dynamics of productivity are broken. The whole thing is just not safe.
I’ve witnessed a case where the only other woman in the room engaged in bullying me, mimicking the male’s behavior to belong. I’ve seen that happen twice, in two different contexts, with two different women, in a way that made me confident to qualify this group behavior as part of their mechanism. All Bitcoin development monopolists in Brazil profit from this system of women’s exploitation in all its shades.
Funding Misogyny
This dynamic of hate is sustained by circular economies, where misogynistic opportunities, goods, services, and ideologies are marketed, perpetuating the manosphere culture (Das, 2022). Books, courses, products, workshops, hacker houses, developer conferences, and developer jobs are all in a feedback loop.
Bitcoin development has misogyny embedded in it. After all, Bitcoin is the perfect enabler for a community of like-minded individuals building their own thing and despising everyone else.
It is essential to mention that although these communities are somewhat permissionless, there are central authorities, sponsors, gatekeepers, and influencers enabling and promoting the status quo. This is important to demystify, as there is a common belief in Bitcoin open-source development, which states that:
Any anonymous avatar can become a Bitcoin contributor if their code is great. This is a meritocratic system. Your gender doesn’t matter. PoW yourself through or perish trying.
The reality is far from that.
Avatars for complex permissionless systems and open-source projects don’t emerge overnight and never work alone. They are bred and trained in these communities, where they find support, mentorship, and knowledge.
And here comes the responsibility of those who export and redirect these talents, hire them, and attract and educate new members. Here, we can see the social responsibility of those injecting funds into Bitcoin's open-source development.
Bujalka, Rich, and Bender (2022) argue that thought leaders behave in a pattern within these communities.
These leaders incite fear and provide a sense of security among their audiences—in our case, through access to Bitcoin technical knowledge, access to Bitcoin conference tickets, access to developer jobs and grants, access to rare information, access to recommendations to opportunities, access to the CEO of Bitcoin.Co, access to the truth, and so forth and so on, creating a cycle that attracts material resources and ensures a consistent audience, gathering loyalty to their narratives.
They promote the need to stay vigilant for inevitable future emergent challenges, such as Bitcoin protocol changes. These threats require the viewer to remain connected in a para-social relationship to the thought leader for further guidance.
Having extracted resources from their audiences through protection offers, manosphere thought leaders can reinvest some profits into their threat promotion activities. This enables them to continue cultivating anxiety, evolving ideas, and sustaining and growing their community base at a high tempo.
Indeed, many thought leaders frequently appear as guests in each other’s videos or as supporters of each other’s content, being quick to mobilize cancel-culture and community rallying against women in general and against those who stand up to question.
They use a cycle of catastrophization and assuagement, where women and feminism are the major threats against Bitcoin development. In a panopticon where masculinity is at risk and needs to be saved, they portray themselves as the victims.
Thought leaders within these communities exploit newcomers, deepening ontological insecurity around such issues to achieve material gain through Bitcoin and Bitcoin development knowledge.
Regardless of their diverse prescriptions and manosphere flavors, each solution represents a key step in a broader feedback loop of exploitation between thought leaders and their audiences.
The sponsors of the Brazilian open-source Bitcoin development are funding and giving authority and recognition to something else. An unaware organization might believe it is helping the greater good of open-source development, but it inadvertently makes the toxic manosphere stronger and harder to contain.
Brazil is a slaughterhouse: women for sex and exploitation and men as tech talents. Here is where I pledge that we start demanding new standards in our industry. These men are confident in their crimes because important figures support them with substantial money and recognition.
This large Brazilian manosphere and its sub-communities assembled on WhatsApp or other channels are the exporters of Bitcoin core developers and developers of open-source projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Rest assured, there is women’s blood in every Brazilian line of code that gets merged, and we have to work to change that.
The gendered uses of technology by violent extremists are varied, but there is a salient pipeline of recruiting, spreading of pseudo-science and misinformation, and fundraising.
We need to recognize that the Brazilian developers' pipeline currently matches this pattern. Recent analyses have argued that, despite the disavowal of violent rhetoric by some subcommunities, the manosphere has become more extremist-oriented over time (Henshaw, 2023).
Henshaw (2023) states that it is clear that industry partnerships must continue to build beyond big tech companies, offering mentorship to smaller companies and players who may have the will—but not the resources—to root out extremist voices. However, content moderation is the greatest challenge.
Preserving Privacy and Freedom While Keeping Women Safe
Manosphere spaces have become repositories for the type of hate speech, violent rhetoric, and conspiracy theories banned by many mainstream social media platforms. Overall, the lack of content moderation in the manosphere is a substantial concern for countering violent extremism.
A related concern is the persistent presence of extremist users on mainstream social media sites and the use of outlinking to create a conduit from mainstream platforms to the decentralized sites where extremist discourse and fundraising occurs.
Here, we touch on an important point: we don’t want to promote censorship. On the other hand, it is impossible to sue Mr. Anonymous for their misogynistic crimes. How can women conquer their space in the current open-source development order? How can they be in peace?
From my point of view, moderation can come subtly in the form of manifestation, codes of conduct, and cultural inclinations. If a powerful Bitcoin development recruiter manifests in favor of the status quo, it enables it. If the same person is quiet and omissive, it is also an enabler. In the name of freedom and permissionlessness, we are breeding and building the worst of humanity around Bitcoin development and, worse yet, starting to normalize it.
Although the issue has escalated uncontrollably in Brazil, I recently discovered that it is emerging worldwide in Brazil and other Bitcoin open-source developer communities dominated by the same thought leaders/monopolists.
This trend is becoming harder to halt as Bitcoin gains strength and anti-feminist cultures hitchhike on it, leeching on its power.
We need to cultivate a new culture within the Bitcoin open-source communities, one that unequivocally stands against misogyny and promotes inclusivity and respect for all members, but especially and tirelessly pro-women’s rights and pro-feminism to the same extent to which they have been against them for over a decade.
This is complicated to do in a permissionless way, as the members bred in the Bitcoin development communities are self-confident in their worth and will try to percolate and enforce their manipulative patterns and agendas, even in groups attempting to build safe and prolific spaces for women.
They are comfortable getting away with everything and getting everything their way. This is the enabling power of Bitcoin knowledge and bitcoin as a currency. You can build and bargain anything with it.
We need a concerted effort to stop allowing and enabling the current culture to gain force by defunding it. Funding means legitimizing this movement, and we must delegitimize it. At the same time, we must support more strongly moderated communities that do not allow misogynist actors and cultures to thrive.
When I raise this issue, some thought leaders often rebuke me with, ‘Lots to build, no time for drama.’ They’ll complain that we must stop whining as we distract men from developing Bitcoin. However, from the point of view of a biologist, this issue needs to be a high priority. No good software can come from the suppression and exploitation of 50% of the potential intellectual talents alive.
On the topic of moderation, I think of the paradox of tolerance. It states that if a society's practice of tolerance includes the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them.
Karl Popper describes the paradox as arising from the fact that, to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
We also need players to speak up and support their peers when they do. We need funding, research, awareness, and education around this topic and its mechanisms of action. I believe that web accounts exposing their speeches and behaviors with screenshots can be useful, too.
In some stances, this might come at a price. For example, a female directing a Bitcoin hackathon in Brazil might find safety and support in an access-controlled, KYCed environment. However, it goes against the privacy ethos we are trying to preserve.
This is to prove how the current state of misogyny is toxic to Bitcoin development itself and the new, inclusive, and free society we are trying to build. It is easy to yell against cameras and KYC when your life and existence are not at risk.
The challenge becomes even more complicated when they centralize technical knowledge and foster a strong, scaling economy around Bitcoin. Their power to infiltrate and undermine communities trying to tell different stories is nearly absolute, primarily due to their monopolistic control.
I invite the international community of sponsors of Bitcoin open-source developers and Bitcoin development initiatives to start thinking of ways to build and demand new standards in open-source development communities as the illusion of pure freedom and pure decentralization vanishes before our eyes.
Meanwhile, I am tirelessly testing different strategies and bearing the burden of backlash until we find one that works. On behalf of every Brazilian female developer and every female developer in the world, we are grateful to the Human Rights Foundation and Chaincode Labs for supporting our mission.
I invite you to read Pocket-Sized Feminism.
Useful Definitions
Organized hate groups: Current or historical groups organized to promote ideologies including, but not limited to anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, antisemitism, fascism, male supremacy, white nationalism, or white supremacy.
Gangstalking: Is an umbrella term describing a series of techniques utilized by a group to instill mental instability within a victim with the intent to discredit, sabotage, harass, extort and even drive a victim to suicide. A victim of gangstalking can have their reputation, credibility, careers, relationships and entire life put into ruins. Techniques such as mind games, perception manipulation, organized stalking, covert harassment, constant surveillance, and possibly electronic harassment are used to push a victim to mental instability. Proving one’s targeting can be very challenging, and there is very little law enforcement support, which allows gangstalking to be extremely effective.
Dogpiling: Dogpiling is a form of harassment in which a group of people attack an individual online to intimidate or humiliate them.
“We have to make a change in our direction of how we live, a change in the direction of how we think… That’s why it is important for the small voice of indigenous people at this point to come forward. Western civilization lost the mystery, you lost the elegance, you lost the spirituality of the reality of the earth and of life itself. And when you lost that, you lost direction.”
—Oren Lyons
References
Bujalka, E., Rich, B., & Bender, S. (2022). The Manosphere as an online protection racket: How the red pill monetizes male need for security in modern society. Fast Capitalism, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202201.001
Connell, R. (2005). Masculinities (2nd Edition). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Das, S. (2022). Consumerism in the Manosphere: Profitable Hate. Journal of Social Media Studies, 5(2), 198-213.
Das, Shanti. 2022. August 6. “Inside the violent, misogynistic world of Tiktok’s new star, Andrew Tate.” The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/06/andrew-tate-violent-misogynistic-world-of-tiktok-new-star
Gavey, N. (2005). Just sex? The cultural scaffolding of rape. New York: Routledge.
Ging, D. (2019). Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 22(4), 638-657.
Henshaw, A. L. (2023). Countering the Threat of Gendered Uses of Technology by Violent Extremists. In Z. Sütalan (Ed.), Gender in Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Unravelling Masculinities, The Impact of Climate Change and Cyber Security (pp. 21-24). NATO Centre of Excellence Defence Against Terrorism.
Hoffman, B., Ware, J., & Shapiro, E. (2020). Assessing the Threat of Incel Violence. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 43(1), 1-15.
King, Andrew S. 2018. “Feminism’s Flip Side: A Cultural History of the Pickup Artist.” Sexuality & Culture, 22(1), 299-315.
O'Neill, R. (2018). Seduction: Men, masculinity and mediated intimacy. Polity Press.
Popper, K. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge.
Van Valkenburgh, S. (2021). Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 24(3), 380-397.
Wright, S., Trott, V., & Jones, C. (2020). ‘The pussy ain’t worth it, bro’: Assessing the discourse and structure of MGTOW. Information, Communication, & Society, 23(6), 908–925.