The Story So Far and Road Ahead

[For my 38th birthday today, I’m sharing two stories; the other one: “Flight PS752 Memorial Project”.] [Tweet]

On June 21, 2020, prodded by a tweet and determined by the institutional harassment that followed (which led to me quitting my job), I realized that I cannot afford to throw away my shot at righting the wrongs I see in the type industry before I retire from; I saw an opening. The choices were to fight, or to leave this industry as an engineering star but process-wise with worse than I found it in (for now, just watch that video link for 3.5 minutes from that point).

I chose to fight: “On June 21, 2020 I decided to speak out all I think without fear & filter. My mind and body have been telling me to do that for years, if not decades. And I’m finally listening to them to free from the pain.”

When I gave Facebook my notice on June 24, I had everything figured out. Since it has been three months since then and I’m just starting to see small wins, I thought I share with you all as I reflect on my original vision, and what I’m doing next.

All I wanted in 1998 was to typeset Persian text on computers.

I started my career in 2000 by joining the Free Software / Open Source movement, where I rose to recognition and acclaim by establishing a vast network of collaborators and connections to just Get Things Done™ at GNOME & Freedesktop.org; HarfBuzz came out of that among other things.

In 2010 I shifted my attention to the Type Industry and OpenType / Open Font Format. While I was again successful to establish a vast network of connections to get some things done, specially in the type-design community and with Chrome, Firefox, and Android, by large I struggled to unlock access to contributing to the font format itself. I was invited to contribute some when there was willingness by Microsoft, but otherwise I was just hitting a big black wall. The politicking was real.

In my professional fight since June 21st, I gave multiple private and then public chances to the people I am accusing of wrongdoing, to discuss and resolve the issues I was raising with them, but they all refused to. They, as well as most in the type industry, under-estimated my ability to effect change, questioned my intentions and sanity, or otherwise chose to not publicly side with me even if they agreed with my assessment.

That just made me take my fight fully into the public, which made me controversial, really controversial; but also brought me into the radar of the wider tech industry while my allegations were lingering out there failing to reach the tipping-point to be investigated.

On August 14 to provide some more material for the public opinion’s consumption, I released my 14-page parting letter from Google, “Behdad’s Story”, that I wrote on February 1st, 2019 (and the accompanying “Pay for Performance” document). Subsequently I was asked to explain, re-explain and explain again what was just there in all my previous communication. It was time to reveal more evidence. But 2020 had other plans for me yet again. Meanwhile I kept throwing more anecdotes and reconciliatory ideas into the cause. Most fell flat dead. However, I started receiving advice from multiple people outside the immediate industry.

In January this year while on vacation in Iran, I was grabbed on the streets of Tehran by four plainclothes people and detained in solitary confinement for a week and psychologically tortured by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps intelligence arm for my vast network of personal connections with Iranian freedom-fighters and internet-freedom activists in the West.

I’ve been for the most part staying silent publicly for the past ten years about the crimes the Iranian regime has been conducting, for (justified) fear of retaliation against my family in Iran as well as personal desire to visit Iran (mostly) freely.

But it was not enough for the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that I wasn’t using my mind and vast access to activists and the tech industry to advance the cause of freedom for the Iranian people and the region. It wasn’t enough for them that I was purposely keeping a blind eye to their heinous crimes.

They wanted more. They vastly under-estimated my ability and perseverance and moral-compass and tolerance for pain. So when they offered me two choices: to join the thousands suffering physically and psychologically from their abuses at the notorious Evin prison, or become an informant for them, I decides to pave my own way.

Living the trauma and resulting isolation, exacerbated by the pandemic and being abandoned by my partner, determined by the #BlackLivesMatter protests, and prodded by the IRGC’s continued pursuits since June 14, I finally published my story on August 17, which was subsequently picked up by The Guardian, NYTimes, and two dozen English, Persian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and other outlets.

When the interview-circuit was over I descended into two weeks of deep darkness. But as I rebounded and sensed my hypomania coming back keeping me up at nights again last weekend, I decided to make my next move on the professional-fight front. While I managed to figure out just who at ISO to submit my grievance to and how, I was bombarded by a new wave of harassment this time by another ones of the people I was now also accusing of wrongdoing. So I had no chance to do what I do in such situations: to talk.

So three days ago, on Sep 23, I broadcasted live the bulk of my point of view and past ten years of professional experience. The resulting 3-hour video of my slow and muffled talking is going to take a while to percolate, so I context-switched again. But already I’m seeing change.

And yes, I was manic from early June to July 25th. Bipolar people throughout history have been punching way above their weight in their (hypo-)mania episodes, fueled by the rumination that embodies the depressive episodes. This is well-documented in the literature. Get over it common culture. Don’t wish me to get well. I’m fine, given the state of world affairs.

It is the world we are in that is full of wrongs and injustices, and a vast majority that see it and just don’t do anything about it. Fix that. Because most of you can: look no further. Because we should not accept women, people of color, and other “minorities” as mere tokens at conference panels and corporate meetings. Because women and people of color, any group, need not be elevated. Just give everyone a level playing field and they will flourish. It’s even “Good for Business™”.

To summarize: With the hand I was dealt, that is how I chose to play. How are you playing yours? To my skeptics: I hope I answered some of your questions.

PS.

I know I promised to write full compensation trajectory and negotiations that made me go from 40k Toman/month in September 2000 (~$500/year), to 75k CAD/year in 2006, to over $1.5M/year in 2020 before I quit. In doing that, and in achieving technical gains I just did the same: kept rolling the wheels, cycling through a handful of different projects to keep increasing momentum in all: using success in one project to get more traction in all the others. It just took twenty years to get to where I am today where I have a voice that is sometimes heard.

Then I realized that I was rolling the wrong wheels! So I quit my job that was first and foremost showering me with more dollar bills than I had use for. As the saying goes, it wasn’t making me happy (Ironically, I quoted some of the same lyrics in the Chapter 1 opening of my MSc. os Computer Science dissertation on Preload software in 2006. Yet fourteen years later I had fallen for just that.)

So I decided to push behind a different wheel: universal freedom & justice. And in that pursuit no cause is ever too-small or too-irrelevant to me anymore.

My actions in the past three months are a result of my studies since August 2019, which started with reading tens of Twitter threads of Dr. Kelsei LeAnn as her online practice was just starting to explode (@drkelseileann who I just realized has disappeared from Twitters. Hope she is alright), as well as many many articles on the Mayo Clinic website, WebMD, and other primary mental-health medical and other resources on the web.

I had been self-medicating with alcohol for the past two decades of my life. On April 7, 2019 I quit drinking alcohol for a full 14 months. My thinking was further enhanced since August 2019 by consuming legal cannabis in Washington State, and later on by listening to Alan Watts on YouTube for countless hours until it all started to sound the same. I watched Fantastic Fungi for the first time in December and was hooked. I’m glad I did, because I had started reading Michael Pollan’s book “How to Change Your Mind” when it first came out but my attention has been way too short to read books in full for years.

After reading more about the fascinating history and field of Psychedelics I started paying attention to their re-emergence in the medical field. A few experiments with Psilocybin mushrooms and LSD opened my eyes to a world that the vast majority of us have been living fully blind to.

So when trauma hit in January and the six months that followed, as 2020 rolled down full steam with a global pandemic as well as #BlackLivesMatter resurgence in the public discourse, I was drawn more and more to the amazing potential of therapeutic Psychedelics to reduce suffering.

On that Wednesday June 24 evening after I gave my notice to Facebook, I sat down to re-assess how I see myself contributing to the greater causes I care about. I realized that all my professional life I tried to make reading on computers universally accessible, because I believe that facilitates equality.

As I pressed myself down to justify why equality matters, I realized that equality is sought as a noble goal only to the extent that it redistributes suffering equally. That is why it’s important what we make equal. For example, just an equal hiring process is not enough, because it leaves the historically disadvantaged behind and fails to redistribute suffering.

To that end, I realized that while equality of suffering is a noble goal that we should all work towards, that is not by any means all we can do. I tried to reassess suffering through the lens of what I’ve been learning about the human mind and the pursuit of higher consciousness, and their potential to end suffering, not just redistribute it.

It is insane that alcohol, and prescription drugs (current BigPharma-profit-driven wave of anti-depression and anti-anxiety medication as well as Adderall et al.) are rampant but while their side-effects are evidently worse than the problem they were being used to help with. They just depressed us completely as a society. And yet there is no change

Meanwhile, the drugs that actually accelerate healing and vastly increase compassion and creativity and clarity have been banned even from research for over 5 decades.

So on June 25 I published my “Blueprint: Eradicate Suffering” and decided to dedicate the next chapter of my life to advancing the therapeutic psychedelics cause.

I invite Larry Page and Alphabet Inc. as well as the Gates Foundation to join this cause as well. Because while longevity and eradicating disease are the way we eradicate bodily pain, Psychedelics provide the answer to eradicating psychological suffering and all types of violence. Because we don’t need to colonize other planets. We just need to take better care of the one we have occupied and almost completely destroyed.

Education reform is already underway thanks (ugh!) to the pandemic.

In the past two weeks I registered for and attended a few of the sessions at four different conferences on Psychedelics resurgence in science, medicine, the wider society (and as such business..). I’m looking forward to watching the recordings for most of the sessions over the next few weeks / months.

Next in this journey I will be reaching out to Michael Pollan, Paul Stamets, and Merlin Sheldrake to see where I can have the most impact in pursuing this extremely important cause.

I’m still hopeful to hear from Twitter on my effort to detect the IRGC’s and other oppressive regimes’ puppet accounts systematically.

Because Navid Afkari, a human, and champion wrestler, was executed just two weeks ago in Iran by tyranny as the world watched. Because Nasrin Sotoudeh, a human, and human-rights lawyer, had to be transferred to a hospital in Iran in poor conditions and at elevated risk of contracting COVID19 at the hospital after a month-long hunger strike at Tehran’s Evin prison (which I was also detained in for just a week).

Because Ali Younesi and Amirhossein Moradi and thousands others are currently detained on fabricated charges and psychologically and physically tortured daily by a rotting cancer that is not going to voluntarily change (watch just 1min right now).

Because just in 2020 in America GEORGE FLOYD WAS LYNCHED BY A WHITE POLICE OFFICER WHILE OTHERS WATCHED, AHMAUD ARBERY WAS LYNCHED BY THREE WHITE MEN, and an Iranian scientist who refused to spy for the FBI exposed his abusers.

As for how I hope the Open Font Format fight to roll out, I have ideas on how to undo the damage if my video manages to reach the tipping-point. And some of the ideas I have, that I hope will get explored, might have significant impact in the wider software / tech industry, offering a viable path forward in the debate on how / what to replace unsafe C / C++ code with safe alternatives without rewriting 50+ years of legacy open and closed source codebases.

Because rewriting everything in Rust just slows us down too much; Time is of essence. We cannot afford. I alluded to this already and really hope to get to publish “Ruzz: A Rustic C++ dialect / creole language” soon.

I hope this writing weaves together a coherent vision of my dozen or so threads I shared over the past three months on my twitter, and to answer what I’ve been doing since I moved to Edmonton to live with family and start life anew.

We are in this together for the loooooooooong run. It takes decades, hundreds, or possibly thousands of years to just undo the damage we have done to our society and planet. As Roger Waters tried to warn us in 1992: “This species has amused itself to death”. Because the Apocalypse is already HERE. But we, each individually, have to start somewhere, or otherwise nothing happens (watch the first 10.5 minutes; if you’re not hooked I give your $$ money.)

To all US citizens: do not throw away your shot at change this November. That said, there is more you can each individually do than just casting your vote. Because it’s not enough to not be racist (first half). Because, let me link to same Derrick Jansen video one more time: because with just peaceful protest and “politically-correct” language nothing’s gonna eff’ing change.

Thank you for reading. I gifted myself the chance to be read today. I hope this also answers the many of you who have been asking me how I’m doing or how my days are spent. This, and playing with my niece. In between depressive episodes that is. If you liked what you read, you can share my tweet. Don’t feel shy writing to me in private as well. Those messages are what keep me going. :-)

I like to thank Cory Doctorow. I learned a lot from his words, thinking, and actions throughout the years.

I also bought myself the present of a new domain name: behd.ad (since waiting for beh.dad didn’t get anywhere.) At some future time I will figure out how to use it best, as the last time I put a homepage together was over twenty years ago and I don’t look forward to making a new one, at least Not Yet. :))