Blowing Whistles and the Violence of Silence
Our institutions are crumbling. Our systems are appropriated by open criminals and blatant extractors. Our national, political and corporate power structures are protecting money launderers, pedophiles and human traffickers— by design— and at scale. And no one is immune. If we speak up, we risk retaliation. If we bypass, we condone what is occurring in our name. If we stay silent, we are supporting the violence.
We all have a duty to speak up. To say “no”, I will not stay silent and give you cover while you commit crimes against my community, my country or our collective humanity. Watching this play out on a national and international scale is beyond frustrating and our options to howl into the void are limited. We can howl, but who is listening? Not the people we elected to speak on behalf of our communities. Not the CEOs we support with our dollars because we can’t sever their addiction tools from our lives. Not the religious gurus and spiritual “leaders” who preach presence and mindfulness in one room and engage in rape, trafficking and violent abuse once the door is closed.
Kali is here. And her flames are burning down everything that needs to burn. Period. But what I want to explore here is not the big picture corruption that rests beyond our ability to make impact. I want to speak of the willful ignorance I’ve seen for almost a decade working in crypto and I believe this applies to most of us trying to survive in corporate or large institutions during their last gasp at relevancy.
Many of us stumbled into the wild world of crypto because we believe deeply in sovereignty, privacy and decentralized power structures. And the tooling of a distributed ledger morphed into economic modalities provides, at least in concept, the type of alternative economic system many of us crave. We know capitalism is destroying our humanity and now, in 2026, the veil hiding the true externalities of capitalism has disintegrated.
In hacker spaces and devcons around the globe, rebellious nerds kept iterating and building a future they could see, but didn’t have language for just yet because the technology itself was so nascent. The audacity of believing some cypherpunks can build a mycelial network on distributed infrastructure that could hold the ground during collapse is wild and bold. And insane.
But we did it. We built it. As imperfect as it is, there is now an alternative digital economic system in place. And, unfortunately, as we built the thing, we didn’t pay close enough attention to the people who stepped into power vacuums in our industry and centralized that power for their own narcissistic intentions. Believing they, and they alone, know what’s best for the community and society at large.
This type of messianic complex is not isolated to crypto, its persistent in all technology sectors and anywhere unchecked power can hide and thrive. Young technical founders whip up some brilliant piece of tech, VCs circle around them like vultures smelling a soon to be decaying carcass and they throw God-like money at young men with absolutely no leadership abilities what so ever.
Or, someone with narcissistic personality disorders starts a “community” with tokenized incentives, and basically builds a well hidden cartel that preaches the gospel of communal building and decentralized cooperatives with equality for all and proceeds to slowly burn to the ground the very community that placed them on a pedestal in the first place. And every single board member and community leader who ignored their shadows because they all were getting kickbacks and professional advancement for staying silent is also responsible for the violence waged on the community. Extraction disguised as innovation is still extraction and that profit has a high price.
Or, foundational builders in our ecosystem take the corporate route to build a “flywheel” of sorts and crawl into bed with one of the most destructive banking systems from the robber baron era of the 1900s and sacrifices our ecosystem’s foundational technology to the Gods of IPOs and M&As. All while expanding their bags to billions and forcing employees to tow the line around the globe. Yet, those false Gods inject criminal actors into the very heart of the system with leadership’s blessing and support and at the sacrifice of the labor that made those bags worth billions in the first place. Again, this is not an uncommon occurrence, it’s a pattern. And it happens often.
There’s a large community event happening this week, just down the road, and I’m not going. I’ve attended for the past 4 years and this time, I said no. I’m done supporting the leadership of these events, communities and technology that are literally only designed to extract from the people who participate. We can lie to ourselves all we want, but at the end of the day, most of this industry is designed to sacrifice the individual while extracting their value upon the centralized altar of TVLs, TGEs and engagement farming.
And we, as an ecosystem, need to wake TF up. At the end of the day, we are responsible for the actions of the leaders in the communities where we spend our precious resources. Many of us learned to look away years ago in order to stay employed, build our professional reputations and climb our own ladders of success. Myself included. I can look back on many instances where ahisma (harm in yogic terms) occurred and I ignored it. Because the micro-trauma was subtle and didn’t directly “harm” anyone. But that’s wrong. And luckily, I’ve done the deep work of composting where I failed to use my voice over the years. And I no longer stay silent. One of the beautiful things about aging is I no longer have any fucks left to give. Not a single one.
I no longer look away. I learned many years ago to look violence and harm directly in the face and document it. This started as a necessary skill for a photojournalist covering post conflict. I learned to sit with the human impacts of absolute evil and bear witness. My ability to witness and act evolved as a highly trained tantrika yogi. My entire being is now tied to preventing ahimsa, it’s my practice.
And while the last few years of my journey in crypto and emergent tech has been wildly traumatic and physically devastating, I still hold no regrets. Even though I bore the brunt of retaliation for whistleblowing and am still unpacking that entire situation, which is shockingly still fluid and unfolding because I refused to stay silent.
I entered a deeper level of the crypto industry a few years ago because I wanted to see what resources would enable. Could a resourced community builder bake compassion into the code by supporting devs and their understanding of ego and self-awareness? I had no idea I was stepping into one of the most toxic structures possible designed to protect the company logo at all costs, including the lives of their laborers.
Speaking out against the “charismatic leader” is not what we are socially built to do. We want to belong. We want to connect. We want to be involved in beautiful communities that are moving a mission forward. And some of us cling so tightly to that vision that we are unable to speak against the corruption distorting the mission because we fear being carved out of the place where we feel we belong. This pattern is well documented in the spiritual world of gurus and cults and I studied the patterns closely at Naropa so I could learn to identify them faster in the wild.
And the charismatic leader knows this— it is how they weaponize the individual’s fundamental human need to belong against them and that weaponization is what keeps the herd silent. And that collective silence allows the violence to grow and consume the very thing the herd was clinging to in the first place. Belonging and identity through community.
And our clinging to “belonging” and “mission” at the hands of a charismatic leader blinds us to the shadows the charisma covers. Those shadows almost always connect to violence— emotional, physical or otherwise. Sure, the shadows also point to the flaws of that human and we can all have compassion for the very real trauma that triggered this person to become a charismatic leader in the first place. A leader driven by the very real insecurities and unprocessed trauma of their own past. But that doesn’t change the fact that by not speaking up and warning the community when we see the charismatic leader committing ahimsa, we are complicit to their violence.
Our entire social fabric has been shredded by these charismatic leaders, yet we remain silent because we feel we must consume the very things these leaders have captured because we believe our existence relies on their networks, their cheap goods dropped at our doorstep and their surveillance masked in convenience.
I had no fucking idea my tenure in crypto would end in whistleblowing, that the very act of protecting my community from violence would result in utter destruction (don’t worry mom, I’m rebuilding) and the corrupt entity would live on. And well, I can also make the case that this type of personal destruction is Kail’s work. I know it is, and I accept it. And I am chillin’ in her cremation grounds gathering the bones and singing them back to life all La Loba like.
But my challenge for you, dear reader, is to use your voice. Many of you reading this know exactly what I’m speaking of, it’s not hidden. And there are many instances of this situation across our ecosystem, we all see them. Many of you have stood next to the violence, witnessed its impacts, and chosen silence. I still love you, for I hold compassion for why the silence still exists. I know the path of standing against power is terrifying. I know because I’m living it and have been for years. The terror is now just my meditation buddy and my emergent yoga practice in real time.
And yet, I love my community deeply and believe our mission must be passed down to the next generations free from the violence and extraction we are all suffering under. I am sacrificing to make sure that happens. And for the other OGs in this ecosystem (and beyond) I ask you to sacrifice as well by using your voice and your platforms to demand better of those who are still in power after causing so much harm. And when power can not be brought down— fork it and build something beautiful instead.
My ask for you is to speak out. To step up. To whistleblow. To speak truth to power. To provide shelter and support for those who do use their voice (because we need it, and it matters deeply). To not look away when you see a leader lay violence upon another human- in words, actions or inactions.
