Backpage Founder and Free Speech Warrior James Larkin Has Died
reason.com
reason.com
And people wonder why Assange is fighting so hard to beat extradition: this is a US citizen with assets, likely access to high priced lawyers and a family grounding to seem him through this and he still took his life rather than go through the steamroller that is the US Legal system.
That is says it all, really:
> "I had just come back from school in Mexico City and had been exposed to the Mexican student movement in the late 60's and early 70's and they were really serious radicals, serious revolutionaries, and a lot of them were killed in the ensuing years, murdered by the Mexican government. I realized that politics were serious," Larkin told Reason in 2018. "I felt that the paper…really had an opportunity to be politically powerful."
"Law enforcement, politicians, bureaucrats, regulatory types. They don't really understand the First Amendment," he [Larkin] added.
It's sad, freedom fighting has always had a huge risk, but running a website that the US deems not suited to exist can get you multiple life sentences, Ross Ulbricht was a prime example of this. While actual Drug lords, murders and rapists can get out etc...
I remember when I first launched my startup in fintech and it coincided with Backpage's payment issues: my first customers were actually the ladies of backpage inquiring what this whole Bitcoin thing was and how it worked because they needed it to list their ads when they pulled Visa/MC paymnets (just like at they had wikilaeks). We learned quickly how to deploy payment rails at scale almost overnight because of this.
I've seen a lot in my Life in various Industries, but this was incredibly sobering, it was not at all what I was expecting: it was mainly a string of young single mothers who had the system fail them and wanting to make rent or pay for baby supplies or food.
Most here will always cling on to their illusions that they are high risk taking disrupters because they are some foot-soldier at a FAANG or some startup with Series B, but when you put these kind of stakes in front of them them most if not all will run away and not even contemplate this as a worthy pursuit and happily live with their cognitive dissonance.
It's actually a very common theme, and why I think SV culture has decayed from it's roots in the 90s to whatever grifting-perversion it is now. Larkin would fit right along with Zimmerman or the early cypherpunks given what took place back then.
RIP, Larkin.