Hello, world, and welcome to the Burn Book. We are trying to build an open-source, anonymous self-publishing platform for the airing of the VC-backed software industry's dirty laundry. We do what we can to help whistleblowers, aggrieved parties, abused employees, and deceived investors find their voice and amplify the voices that are structurally silenced in the software industry as currently conceived.
Because so much of the internet is "self-regulated" and self-governing, there is little oversight on the business side of things to counterbalance the kind of employee surveillance, life/work abuse, and bad-faith marketing that are increasingly incentivized by an ever-more ruthless and growth-obsessed landscape for the financing of defensible intellectual property, aka software. We part from the assumption that traditional government regulation or oversight will remain, for the foreseeable future, be outgunned by the prerogatives of bad actors and overleveraged debts. Similarly, traditional journalism is the first part of the world that software chose to eat, robbing the lion's share of revenue from advertising-based business models; at the same time, tech billionaires are buying up the few surviving media properties like trophy yachts, which makes the anemic journalistic profession both underequipped and strongly disincentivized to provide much scrutiny or investigation into this sphere of economic activity.
In a nutshell, no one is coming to save us. It's #osint or nothing-- crowdsourced intell processed carefully and confirmed or corroborated as much as resources allow. Community work for the good of the community. Self-policing, as it were. Sifting through the coal to check for dead canaries.
One crucial distinction here is that no only must journalistic standards be conformed to when distinguishing between fact, opinion, interpretation, and circumstantial or definitive evidence, so too much judgments about intent, morality, or even the most morally neutral of euphemisms, "incentive" be bracketed or suspended. We are not here to shame bad actors, cheaters, or liars-- we are here to protect the common good. Every dollar invested in a lie is a dollar robbed from legitimate businesses. Every pointless bankrupcy is a massive inefficiency in a society that hasn't exactly solved world hunger yet. Follow the money, don't get hung up on the people misplacing it. Bring it back to where it belongs, whether that's "productive" investment, taxation, misdirected pensions, or plaintiffs in class-action suits.
Everything on this site is edited anonymously by a small but hopefully soon larger crew of volunteers that try to bring journalistic standards of evidence and accuracy to what might otherwise be a lurid collection of rumors and one-sided interpretations. Wherever possible, we try to add corrections to pieces over time as more or better intell arises, and here's the kicker-- you can too. Publishing on github means that any typos or corrections that come with links, receipts, or convincing counterarguments can be accepted from anonymous github "sockpuppet" accounts.
You can use the editor function on GitHub to edit the page you're seeing now directly. Links directly to the editor of each page will be displayed at the bottom of all posts.
(A tutorial on setting up anonymous githubs or using our SecureDrop feature for the inexperienced are coming soon-- better yet, do you wanna write it?).