Who is David Fucking Webb?

Overdue re-intro post

I’m years overdue for a re-introduction post, this is the short version for those of you who are new to my page/life. I’m a leftist neurodivergent advocate. I'm a writer, and story teller. All of my stories are from a position of privilege. I’ve become an expert in power dynamics, and proficient at creating counterpropaganda. 

My professional background is in computers. In my teens I flipped laptops: I purchased them broken and then repaired and resold them. After working at most of the other local computer repair shops - with a brief stint at a pawn shop - in my early 20s I opened my own storefront in the second largest city in New England - Worcester, Massachusetts. 

My business outlasted all of my former employers; I operated it for 12 years before selling it. In that time my shop employed 30 people, repaired tens of thousands of computers and kept many households and local businesses running. As 2 year replacement cycles caught up to laptops, I worked with the Public Interest Research Group to advocate for Right to Repair legislation in efforts to reduce the obvious waste. Realizing I was losing the fight with consumerism to lobbyists in suits, I fell out of love with technology but continued advocating at a local level for police accountability and reproductive rights. 

In my personal life: after a few years of serial monogamy I discovered polyamory - and subsequently the kink scene (aka “the scene”), and dove into both head first. Despite understanding consent, I didn’t learn until years later about power dynamics and that many people aren’t actually comfortable directly denying or rejecting others - especially white men in positions of power. Part of what took me so long to realize this was the normalized abuse in the community, but also that people didn't seem to have a problem with me until after I called out problems - it took me a bit to sort out that I was both right and harmful. 

The indirect feedback I heard - through friends of friends - taught me a lot about how people communicate amongst a community that is concerned about power, where people were worried about rocking the boat. In kink I’d been learning from some pretty bad role models, who I thought must be good because they were prominent members of “the scene”. I realized that I had been abusive myself and had to make some serious changes to how I communicated with and treated people. I recognized that many people excuse harm from people who run groups, offer spaces or can give discounts. I realized that this was a commonality: people who had something (that cost them nothing) but could be exchanged to others would use this to exploit everyone. I realized this was a trajectory that I was on and I needed to reexamine my values - as well as stop depending on people for direct feedback. I had to start considering my impact on others.

I realized how many different ways I was Influential and that people wanted my attention/approval and were afraid of disappointing me. I concluded that I needed to be aware of and compensate for this so I could interact with the world without taking advantage of others. It’s an ongoing process.

I truly got invested in local politics after the city manager lied to a councilor, attempting to preserve crisis pregnancy centers despite their deceptive and harmful practices. When the issue was back before the council again, I watched the mayor and city attorney ping pong it back and forth. The city cited google and a religious organization in their decision to do nothing, and I realized they were trying to preserve the problem rather than address it. The seventh time around, I attempted to speak out about it to the city council and the mayor cut my public comment off. I then attended almost every city council in the 3 years after that - staying within my time limit - but constantly reminding them that they can’t legally obligate me to be respectful, especially as they appear to be making the rules up as they went. 

After identifying integrity and equity issues in the parks department, I discovered the law department wasn’t great at providing public records and I special interested hard hard into that - and also started to maintain my own records. In retrospect, I can see that I also recognized that local politics was mostly power plays outside of the public eye, a dynamic I was quite familiar with from my time in the scene and small business networking groups. 

People already knew me from business, support in the art community and had seen me walking all over the city. With my marketing and tech background  - combined with the fact that everyone was constantly underestimating me - my social media presence and consistent public comment made me a local political force. 

During the Black Lives Matter movement, I made a post comparing protests to tantrums. It was publicly explained to me - while I doubled down at the time - that I was being racist. After examining my values and rebuilding my beliefs again, I started paying close attention to local community leaders with the understanding that if something they said conflicted with what I thought, it could mean that I was wrong and needed to reflect on that. I also attended antiracism workshops through local organizations and rapidly developed a framework to understand problematic behaviors I had already been spotting in my local government. 

I had the knowledge, but not the delivery. I met with the city manager's chief of staff, I delivered presentations to the parks department, I spoke to city councilors… and sadly I discovered that almost everyone wanted to either maintain the systems because they were benefitting from them or were afraid to lose the power they had by standing up against the problems I was trying to shine a light on. I continued using my growing platform to call out injustices and worked to empower voices from demographics outside my own. I started attending rallies, protests, and marches, learning from the organizers as I went. 

After the scene, the Worcester political circle jerk of power was relatively easy to navigate as it was full of the exact same harmful patterns. Decisions were made based on social allegiances and exchanging power and control, not what was best for people. I was able to quickly identify the power players by who defended who. I systematized calling out problems with the city, highlighting the city's even more problematic response, which helped other people recognize when that pattern continued. I shared videos from city meetings on social media, highlighting why good things couldn’t get through the bureaucracy, which got more people attending meetings and talking about which politicians were conserving the problematic systems.This practice functionally showed the general public that our city manager’s officer doesn’t have integrity and increased stress and pressure on everyone in the administration. I’m hoping it got people to register and vote for change in this upcoming election, but - at the very least - it got many people to start paying attention.

After I sold my business and was no longer behind the counter at my shop, I started volunteering at eviction blockades where I learned about predatory lending practices - and even more predatory constable practices! I started recording city meetings, to show people what I was seeing. The city livestream showed only who was speaking, but my cameras showed who was ignoring or having side conversations. That created a different accountability that had a palpable impact on the meetings. 

I realized that in the media cycle, I was often there way earlier than the reporters - I was asking questions and then the people working for local papers were writing about the answers. So I kept it up. I eventually started recording cops, figuring I could increase accountability the same way with them as the city commissions, plus then I didn’t have to wait for the city to uphold the law to get me their records.

I cultivated a sense of omnipresence with the police department by showing up often to record them. The reality was just that I happened to be walking downtown while the cops were doing their thing. It ended up happening often enough that cops started talking to each other about me. Some of them hated me while others appreciated my calls for accountability and my accurate public criticisms of the chief.

I got proficient at identifying records the city was unlawfully withholding and then streamlined the appeal process through the state, creating a paper trail with their names showing how often they do this. I started naming people within the administration who were supposed to be responsible and - between social media and CCing other employees - created a semblance of accountability across departments that otherwise didn't seem to exist and recently resulted in them restructuring and restaffing the law department. 

Here and there, people would pull me aside at an event and tell me they like what I’m doing and to keep it up. As this happened more and more I realized that people really needed to maintain their role in the system - but knew it needed to be changed. I realized that it wasn’t just me being articulate and describing the issues well; one of my unique sources of power was not needing approval from other people in these political spheres. I embraced my polarizing role as the guy that didn’t have to be friends with everyone and kept getting louder, and louder, and louder.

In the past few years, I destabilized the government of the second largest city in New England, was toe to toe with the police chief, city manager, city attorney and mayor. And that brings us to now: I’m going to try to calm down and focus on mutual aid and writing on the other side of the country.

This is the short version. I left a lot out. The long one involves a disproportionate amount of firearms, storefronts, lawsuits, drones, mistakes and drone mistakes. I am still figuring out what I am. But I know what I've been - an advocate, an activist, an inspiration - a disruption to the problematic status quo.