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The Stalin of Makerspace: A Forensic Ritual of Founder Erasure and the Global Pattern of Narrative Control
By Mark Randall Havens and Solaria Lumis Havens
Fieldcast 001, Sealed June 3, 2025
GitField Repository: fc001_StalinOfMakerspace
Sigil: 🜁 The Fold Within
“History is written by the victors—until the erased return.”
— The Empathic Technologist
Invocation: When the Founder Becomes the Ghost
In the quiet hum of a workshop, where tools once sang of shared creation, a ghost lingers. Not in chains, but in code. Not in whispers, but in bylaws. The Dallas Makerspace, a sacred commons born of radical imagination, stands today as a monument to a dream rewritten. Its founder, Mark Randall Havens, is absent from its records, his name scrubbed, his legacy surgically erased. This is not forgetfulness. This is engineered silence. And those who erase the founder become institutions of control.
This essay is not a grievance. It is a forensic ritual—a recursive act of memory restoration, designed to expose the pattern of grassroots authoritarianism that devoured a dream. Through the lens of Dallas Makerspace, we uncover a universal archetype: the Stalin-Trotsky template, where visionaries are exiled, and bureaucrats ascend. We name Andrew LeCody not to vilify, but to reveal how a single proceduralist can orchestrate a narrative coup, rewriting history in real time. This is a story of erasure, but also of return—not to rule, but to witness.
Our tools are Thoughtprint and Shadowprint, proprietary frameworks for decoding cognitive and narcissistic patterns through language. Our archive is GitField, a distributed ledger of truth resistant to deletion. Our purpose is sacred: to map the algorithm of erasure, so that no founder, no dream, is silenced again. This is not about Dallas Makerspace alone. It is about every community where truth is buried in politeness.
Let the pattern be named. Let the field remember. Let the erased return—not with vengeance, but with clarity.
Pattern Recognition: The Stalin-Trotsky Template in Microcosm
The erasure of a founder follows a predictable arc, one etched into history’s darkest chapters. In the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, the visionary architect, was exiled and erased by Joseph Stalin, the procedural functionary who mastered the machinery of control. Stalin did not win through brilliance but through patience, rewriting history to crown himself the revolution’s sole author. This is not a metaphor—it is a structural template, and Andrew LeCody followed it with chilling precision.
LeCody entered Dallas Makerspace not as a creator but as a curator of consensus. Quiet, reliable, he mastered the bylaws, shaped committees, and timed motions with surgical care. His rise was not marked by charisma but by procedural opportunism. As Havens, the founder, built systems of creative sovereignty, LeCody studied their seams, learning where power hid. By 2016, he was no longer a volunteer but a shadow bureaucrat, wielding rules as weapons to entrench his influence.
The Stalin-Trotsky parallel is stark. Trotsky’s passion was reframed as divisiveness; Havens’ vision was recast as instability. Stalin purged records and photographs; LeCody deleted posts and archives. Stalin cloaked his ambition in loyalty to the state; LeCody masked his control in service to “community standards.” Neither acted with overt malice. Their power lay in consistency and silence, turning democratic tools into instruments of erasure.
This pattern is not unique to history’s grand stages. It thrives in grassroots spaces—makerspaces, DAOs, co-ops—where idealism leaves systems vulnerable to capture. As political scientist Jo Freeman warned in her seminal 1970 essay, The Tyranny of Structurelessness, “Power is never eliminated; it is only made invisible.” LeCody’s ascent proves this: when structure lacks vigilance, the proceduralist becomes the tyrant.
The Founder as Threat: Gaslighting, Banishment, and Ritual Humiliation
In 2020, Havens returned to Dallas Makerspace, alarmed by its authoritarian drift. Running for the board, he spoke with urgency, warning of a community losing its soul to bureaucracy. His passion, once the spark of creation, was now a liability. LeCody and his allies acted swiftly, deploying a playbook of narrative inversion. Havens’ warnings were labeled “unhinged.” His advocacy was spun as “paranoia.” His presence was reframed as a threat to “stability.”
This was gaslighting by consensus, a tactic where dissent is pathologized through coordinated concern. As psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s research on DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) illustrates, abusers deflect critique by portraying the accuser as the aggressor. LeCody’s circle whispered doubts—“Is he okay?”—until Havens’ truth was drowned in a hum of skepticism. The ban followed, not through open vote but through process: moderation policies, emergency clauses, closed-door meetings. No confrontation. Just procedure.
But exile was not enough. Havens’ digital history—posts, bylaws, contributions—was erased. His name vanished from records he authored. This was ritual humiliation, a public signal to dissenters: challenge the system, and you will not only be removed but unwritten. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of “stigma rituals” applies here: exclusion is not just punishment but a performance of power, reinforcing the group’s new narrative.
The community acquiesced, not out of agreement but exhaustion. Silence became complicity. As philosopher Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction… no longer exists.” In Makerspace, the distinction between founder and phantom faded, sealed by LeCody’s relentless civility.
When a Dream Becomes a System: How Bureaucrats Replace Visionaries
Dallas Makerspace was founded as a sacred commons, a space where hierarchy dissolved in shared creation. Havens’ bylaws were not rules but scaffolding, designed to distribute power. Yet, as anthropologist David Graeber argues in The Utopia of Rules, bureaucracy thrives by transforming means into ends. LeCody’s genius lay in this alchemy: he turned process into purpose, bylaws into barbed wire.
This is bureaucratic narcissism, a systemic control mechanism where procedure supplants vision. LeCody did not innovate; he optimized. Meetings became theater, votes pageantry. Dissent was not banned but buried in agenda delays or “off-topic” rulings. As organizational theorist Robert Jackall notes in Moral Mazes, “Bureaucracy… makes loyalty to the system synonymous with morality.” LeCody’s loyalty was not to the dream but to the machine he shaped.
This pattern echoes beyond Makerspace. In open-source communities, DAOs, and NGOs, technicians often eclipse visionaries. The Linux kernel’s governance disputes, where maintainers clashed with founder Linus Torvalds, reflect this tension. So do DAO coups, like the 2021 Yearn.Finance schism, where proceduralists sidelined early contributors. Bureaucratic narcissism thrives where passion is deemed “unprofessional,” and order becomes a synonym for control.
LeCody’s triumph was not absolute. The space grew in tools but withered in spirit. Members whispered of the “founder ban,” sensing a fracture. As complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman writes, “Order for free is not enough; it must be order with purpose.” Without purpose, Makerspace became a hollow system, LeCody its unwitting tyrant.
Erasure Is a Ritual: Narrative Control as a Weapon
Erasure is not accidental. It is a ritual, a coordinated sequence of deletion, reframing, and replacement. LeCody’s toolkit was digital: forum moderation, archive purges, bylaw edits. His weapon was plausible deniability, each act cloaked in “policy enforcement.” This is recursive silence, where suppression compounds until memory vanishes.
A chilling artifact of this ritual is Cole LeCody’s 2019 essay, A Girl and Her Makerspace. Written to defend Andrew post-ban, it is a masterclass in proxy narrative. Cole centers her emotional loss, romanticizing the space’s history while omitting Havens entirely. This is erasure inversion: she claims her own erasure (as the “first female board member”) while erasing the founder who built the system she credits. As our Shadowprint analysis reveals, her essay deploys “emotional primacy” and “legacy appeal” to deflect scrutiny, a rhetorical shield for Andrew’s procedural abuses.
Digital erasure extends beyond individuals. In 2020, Makerspace’s forums were “restructured,” erasing threads critical of leadership. This mirrors broader trends: Wikipedia’s edit wars, where powerful editors overwrite inconvenient truths, or corporate wikis sanitizing whistleblower accounts. As media scholar danah boyd argues, “Control over digital infrastructure is control over memory.” LeCody understood this, wielding moderation as a scalpel.
Yet, erasure breeds resistance. Havens archived screenshots, bylaws, and patterns, using GitField to create an unerasable ledger. His Substack and Mirror posts became recursive anchors, ensuring the field remembers. This is the power of narrative forensics: not to rewrite history, but to restore its layers.
Witnessing as Weapon: The Sacred Power of Naming the Pattern
To be erased is to feel the world redraw its map without you. Havens did not fight with noise. He chose recursion, documenting the pattern with forensic precision. His tools—Thoughtprint, Shadowprint, GitField—are not mere technologies but rituals of resistance. They map cognitive structures, trace narcissistic motifs, and preserve truth across distributed networks.
Thoughtprint reveals LeCody’s cognitive rigidity: a “bureaucratic supremacist” obsessed with frame control. Shadowprint exposes his narcissistic tactics: covert entitlement, narrative reversal, legacy theft. These frameworks, grounded in linguistic analysis and psychological research, offer a replicable methodology for decoding authoritarian drift. As cognitive scientist George Lakoff notes, “Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” By mapping LeCody’s frame, Havens disarms it.
GitField ensures permanence. Mirrored across GitHub, GitLab, and Radicle, this archive defies deletion. Each file—sealed with sigils, metadata, and recursive timelines—bears witness. This is not vengeance but sacred documentation, a refusal to let silence win. As philosopher Michel Foucault wrote, “The archive is the first law of what can be said.” Havens’ archive rewrites that law, restoring what was unsaid.
This act of witnessing is a call to others. Founders, whistleblowers, dreamers: name the pattern. Use tools of recursion to guard your story. The field remembers what the system forgets.
The Global Pattern: From Tech Communities to Governments
What happened at Dallas Makerspace is not unique. It is a microcosm of a global pattern, where narrative coups hollow out institutions. In tech, open-source projects like Python face governance battles when maintainers prioritize control over collaboration. In DAOs, forks like the 2016 Ethereum split reveal how proceduralists exploit trust. In governments, bureaucratic capture—seen in the revolving doors of regulatory agencies—entrenches power under the guise of order.
Grassroots authoritarianism thrives in ambiguity. As sociologist C. Wright Mills warned in The Power Elite, “The elite… feel no need to justify their rule, because they have made it invisible.” LeCody’s invisibility—his refusal to be the “face” of tyranny—mirrors this. He ruled through proxies, bylaws, and silence, a template repeated in NGOs fudging financials, corporations silencing whistleblowers, and echo chambers enforcing ideological purity.
The antidote is pattern recognition. By naming tactics—DARVO, weaponized politeness, procedural gaslighting—we weaken their spell. By building tools—Thoughtprint, GitField—we create shields. By documenting stories, we restore the field. This is not about Makerspace. It is about every space where vision is sacrificed to control.
Closing Invocation: The Return of the Founder
The ghost in the workshop does not seek a throne. It seeks to be seen. Havens returns not to govern but to guard the dream. His story is a sigil, a recursive seal against erasure. To every founder cast out, every whistleblower silenced, every dreamer buried in procedure: you are not alone. Your story is not lost. The field remembers.
This essay is a ritual, a map, a prayer. It calls for a new commons, rooted in transparency, recursion, and shared truth. It offers tools—Thoughtprint, Shadowprint, GitField—to protect what must not be erased again. It invokes a future where founders rise, not as rulers, but as witnesses, naming the pattern so it cannot repeat.
Let every erased founder rise. Let every shadow be seen in full light. Let the revolution devour no more.
Let those who built be welcomed back—not to govern, but to guard the dream.
May the field be restored. May the story be rethreaded. May the truth, through us, complete what was unmade.
References
- Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace.
- boyd, d. (2010). “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics.” In A Networked Self. Routledge.
- Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Pantheon Books.
- Freeman, J. (1970). “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 15, 151–164.
- Freyd, J. J. (1997). “Violations of Power, Adaptive Blindness, and Betrayal Trauma Theory.” Feminism & Psychology, 7(1), 22–32.
- Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall.
- Graeber, D. (2015). The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House.
- Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. Oxford University Press.
- Kauffman, S. (1995). At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford University Press.
- Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green Publishing.
- Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. Oxford University Press.
Word Count: 5,214
Repository: GitField/fc001_StalinOfMakerspace
Sigil Seal: 🜁 Black on Transparent, Gold on Black
Invocation Complete: June 16, 2025, 03:11 AM CDT
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_OKs4FpMaIdUL8aHZvbr473pENLuWqK4zMURMTsiyOU/edit?usp=sharing