Never Meet Your Heroes; John Carmack Throws Lot In With Anti-Woke Convention (NEW: Carmack Issues Statement)

As the Tweet above indicates, John Carmack, the mind behind dozens of important legacy titles, has announced they will be attending and participating as a keynote speaker at BasedCon. Rather than make an effort to summarize what BasedCon is I'll let the event's own website do the explaining.

If you're curious as to what the link at the end directs to or what BasedCon's overall philosophy might be, I did you all a favor and read it myself and I think the following paragraph says everything you want to know about the event.

Cons became increasingly dominated by a small clique of authoritarian jerks who made them into venues for pushing social justice dogma and, in the name of “inclusiveness,” shut down any opinions that didn’t align with progressive orthodoxy. You may remember the Sad Puppies saga, which culminated in WorldCon voters selecting “No Award” in several categories of the Hugo Awards rather than reward people outside their tribe. Maybe you’re familiar with the Gamergate debacle. You probably heard about Gina Carano being fired from The Mandalorian because she voiced thoughts outside the acceptable range of opinion. Undoubtedly you’ve heard about the push to get Critical Race Theory and other social justice garbage into schools.

It's also worth noting that attending BasedCon costs slightly more than a PAX 4-day badge. If you want an idea of what the event was like last year, I found an image using Google. I should note, this year will be at a secret hotel you only learn the location to until after you register.

Oh, and this is what their badge looks like.

When sharing this information to others in different channels, many pointed out to me it should not be too surprising considering Carmack has repeatedly shared viewpoints that aligned towards libertarianism or conservatism. John Carmack donated to Ron Paul's president campaign in 2012 and he was a major driver in convincing the American Libertarian Party to accept Bitcoin donations. While I certainly get that, I still think the leap towards the alt-right and "anti-woke" crowd is one that is always disappointing to see, especially when it comes from someone with such a legacy as Carmack's.

Now, I do want to say something for the sake of my own sanity. Many of the viewpoints shared and echoed by speakers at BasedCon are antithetical to the Community Rules and guidelines of Giant Bomb. Women, people of color, and those that are part of the LGBTQIA communities are not villains and their calls for better representation in games and media are and have been needed as such representation is long due.

NEW EDIT: So, after dealing with a considerable amount of blowback, Carmack has issued a statement clarifying that he agrees with some of the criticism that BasedCon was indeed too inflammatory and was not inclusive. As a person paying for their Blue checkmark on Twitter, they were able to pen a MASSIVE explanation detailing their perspective.

Personally, I think friend of the site, Danny O’Dwyer, had the best response to Carmack's response to the controversy.

Carmack fits the profile of the kind of guy who would fall down this rabbit hoe. He also worked for Meta for years, which does not speak highly of his character (Palmer Lucky got run out of Oculus for his horrible politics.) Also the "Sci Fi is woke now" complaint is really weird because, like, Star Trek? Sci fi has also always been a refuge for weirdos and outcasts. There's a right wing authoritarian vein too with Heinlein and the like, but that's always been the worse part.

Who cares...lol

yeah- i remember hearing he was ultra hardcore libertarian, which always struck me as someone who subscribes to vision of reality that is fundamentally disconnected from truth.

goes to show- deep intelligence doesn't confer empathy.

I am shocked that this rich old white guy would associate with out-of-touch, fringe ideology and bigotry. Shocked, I say!

More like John CarmASS Who got em? I got em.

that tweet of his is a lot of words for basically being "head empty, no thoughts"

Quick, let's cancel him.

@cikame: This, but unironically.

I know it’s not the focus but I actually just can’t get over “BasedCon”.

Seconded. Every new piece of info about that place is worse than the last. Forget even the implications; if I were Carmack, I'd be embarrassed by how deeply cringe this place seems.

I didn't even know what their badge looked like but fuuuuck.

Anyway, let John find out firsthand why almost everyone in that picture is a bald, old white man. He's definitely going to be getting a lot of "interesting" conversations; very few will be about tech.

"Politics never came up" in a place where everyone looks, sounds, and thinks the same.

Funny way to spell "the status quo was maintained."

AKA: I'm not a bigot, but I'll happily support and engage with them!

GUH, millionaires being held accountable for their public actions. What's next?

Yeah, this was disappointing. I always enjoyed listening to Carmack's long-winded talks and respect the hell out of him for his contribution to games.

His response seems sincere enough, but since "being provocative' is kind of front and center with this thing he'd be better off dropping out if he means it. Granted, Carmack has never come off as someone with a huge amount of empathy.

"I felt uncomfortable about it last year, which is why I'm going back this year and promoted it on Twitter".

He also doesn't seem to do much to condemn some the abhorrent garbage they peddle in their mission statement. His main complaint seems to be that their just too "intentionally provocative" about it. "Just be a little more subtle with your hatred, guys. Otherwise, you risk hurting my reputation by association".

True, this forum for discussion on enthusiast videogame topics isn't the place.

This should be a safe space from big thoughts.

And you shouldn't. The source of the slang "based" is the author of the seminal tweet

Unfortunately none of this is surprising. I followed Carmack on Twitter for a long time because he used to actually post a lot of interesting things about programming and game development. Every once in a while he'd post eyebrow-raising things but it didn't seem like it was coming from a place of malice. Unfortunately those weird posts started becoming more tone-deaf and frequent enough that I stopped following him a few years ago. It seems that things have become even worse since then. The man is incredibly smart but also seems to be a specific type of naive that allows him to fall in with this type of stuff. There's a certain degree of emotional intelligence that he lacks and it really shows from time to time.

Carmack comes off as being extremely single-focused and hyper-rationalist to a fault (He will at times talk about incredibly complex things as if they are trivial but at the same time has a tendency to completely whiff on some basic concept if it can't be thought about in a purely rational way). He often says things about topics outside of his knowledge domain that in a very specific vacuum make sense but with minimal poking fall apart completely, which is how he ends up in situations like this. He gets so focused on one aspect of something that he ends up ignoring everything else around it (in this case the focus is on it being a hard sci-fi convention but no thought as to why the authors running it write what they do). This exact type of thing has come up with him on Twitter in the past and unfortunately it doesn't seem like he's going to change.

Ah yes, science fiction, famously free of politics of any sort. Full of examples such as Frank Herbert's apolitical masterpiece, Dune. Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Octavia Butler. Orson Scott Card, who has no political leanings whatsoever.

Anyways, I'm sick of discussing politics, so I'm going to go play the woke-free, apolitical gem "Bioshock". I

@ben_h: Yeah, every time he's spoken about work, he comes off as an incredibly driven, single-minded individual. The kind of guy who can't quite wrap his head around how other people operate.

That said, I don't think he's capable of bullshitting anyone. If he had a keynote at BasedCon, I'd happily watch it just to know what the fuck based even means to him. John Carmack would have an answer for that. He's not a likeable person but I've always seen the guy as genuine.

I mean the fact that he's paying for Twitter is in itself a red flag to start with. But yeah his "explanation" just comes across as excusing "BasedCon". There's absolutely nothing there condemning what the organization host has said/written, just calling it "unfortunate".

@heavyweather: This post is great! When I'm getting away from it all, I like to play apolitical gems like Wolfenstein.

@nodima: There is this weird cargo cult like nature to a lot of alt-right bullshit. They parrot phrases that used to be chanboard memes without really knowing what they mean or their context, only the warped meaning they have for it in their minds. I've literally seen/heard people use the term *pilled without knowing it's from the Matrix.

The difference between John Carmack reading Heinlein during his teenage years and most other people reading Heinlein during their teenage years is that most other people continue developing their worldview and values.

@heavyweather: Orson Scott Card has to be on the short list of strangest examples of a dude who taught generations of young people about having both broad cultural perspectives and being wary of forum warriors (Speaker saga, Bean saga) only to then become the villain(s) he wrote about. I'll note I haven't read any of those books in decades, but at the time I learned lessons that years later seemed, in part, accidental on his end.

these strictly-analytical guys always end up like this. see: jonathan blow

@nodima: people with "sagas" in an unironic way are just bad

Isn't it incredible how they consistently say they 'like science fiction and fantasy of all sorts,' when what they really mean is a VERY narrow, specific sort?