On June 5 the San Francisco court overseeing the California v. Gatalog case ordered a special round of jurisdictional discovery. The court said that while it agreed with The People of California that The Gatalog should be sent to the shadow realm, it didn’t want to do so without a “complete record.” So, from now until August the California Attorney General will send subpoenas to every Gatalog service provider, including Odysee and Digital Ocean, to complete the team’s grave encounter.
The responses to these subpoenas will reveal, for what must now be the fourth or fifth time, the naked truth of The Gatalog’s administration and operation: that the team 1) hosted their Rocket.Chat in San Francisco for at least five years, and 2) allowed each administrator to observe and record every public and private message with every 3D2A developer on the server. These facts have been public knowledge since 2021. But The Gatalog insists upon a policy of sad clown omertà . They triple down on silence every time their people and organization are exposed, subpoenaed, made, arrested — or die.
When California unalives The Gatalog later this year, it will be time for us all, including me, to support them. These new 3D file sharing laws are brazenly oppressive and unconstitutional. Even our dead will not be safe from California if they are permitted to win. But as the organization’s founder and final spokesman, I insist we take this moment to remember that from 2021 to 2026 The Gatalog attempted to institute a genre of such conformist stupidity that it nearly overcame a generation of 3D2A development and tradition. In the words of Adolph Reed Jr., the Gatalog métier was secrecy and “bearing witness” to suffering. A practice of pure gesture, and of solidarity with popular progressivism. When The New York Times emailed John Elik about his Odysee publication of the FGC-9, all he could say was the reporters had unfairly focused on the gun’s use by right wingers in Europe; that they had failed to consider its use as a left-wing tool of “liberation.” What?
The Gatalog Way of Dying means one-way secrets in the face of constant internet and state censorship. It’s almost entirely why 3D2A operates with no learning curve. “Don’t talk to journalists,” unless Rolling Stone offers you a feature. Don’t talk about what happened to JStark, or Freeman, or Ze Carioca. Moral hazard and buddy fucking is how The Gatalog recruited its “beta managers” and developers– always from an ignorant and disposable outer rank. It’s how The Gatalog hoped to skirt the law and survive itself. Until California.
We read the hollow core of this strategy in the words of Freeman1337, given earlier this year from a men’s prison in Youngstown, Ohio:
If this is what the Gatalog’s longest-serving beta manger would tell me, what would he tell Courtney Nilan?
Best not to talk about it.
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