- Joined
- Oct 8, 2017
Paul Wheaton is a "farmer" who runs a "sustainable community" on his land in Montana. He created and runs https://permies.com, one of the most popular permaculture websites on the internet. He offers a Permaculture Design Course on his website for anyone willing to pay some money to learn how to permaculture.
Here's a TED talk of his:
What the hell is permaculture?
Permaculture is a word yuppies invented when they rediscovered holistic gardening. A nicer way of putting it would be that it is a design methodology that describes materially autonomous and interdependent communities. If this topic legitimately interests you, that's fine, just keep in mind it's caught on already and hijacked by a lot of whackos. The primary purpose of spending money on getting a permaculture certification is to learn just enough about growing plants to convince stupid people that you know what you're talking about so you can start hawking your PDCs. As a business model, it's essentially a WOOFing scam with a multi level marketing scheme attached. The permaculture world is rife with charlatans and cultists, so I would say it's a pretty lucrative lolcow goldmine in general, but Paul Wheaton is one massive haul.
Why is he a lolcow?
He basically runs a cult if that wasn't immediately obvious. He also is Extremely Online, despite the way he presents himself, and will swiftly respond to any and all criticism. He has been known to follow people to their own forums. [crosses fingers] He also is a huge fan of making his own memes, starring himself.
He is also the owner of /r/Homestead and moderates it with an iron fist, banning anyone who says anything bad about him, or links to the website or channel of anyone who has ever said anything bad about him. He used to cause a lot of drama and confusion on reddit before people figured out which subreddits to go to. He still does on occasion.
So what's going on here?
His PDC course, like all others, is basically an unpaid labor ponzi scheme designed to prey primarily on clueless white kids. However, there are families and children living there, and yes the conditions are absolutely horrid, so this is actually a somewhat serious situation. He's pretty well known in the permaculture community, and often controversial since he has a pretty well established and maintained online presence. He often prides himself on his erratic behavior.
There are many accounts of the conditions there online, here's one of them from a well established youtube channel:
Paul Wheaton of course, responded to the video with a thread on his own website which can be seen here.
Because of his well established presence on the internet, a lot of people have fallen for his shit, and went to his property to learn stuff he claimed he had to teach them. There are still a lot of people who whiteknight him, like this weirdo who makes almost all his vids in his car, none of them ever to have actually seemed to work on his property though.
Here is a reddit post from one of the people who was on his property describing many of the problems in specific detail. I will not post the whole thing here since it is very long:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/77nm7e/two_years_under_a_permaculture_slumlord/
(all Reddit posts should be archived, if you spot one that isn't, or a link you think I should archive, please let me know, and thanks in advance!)
There is an entire subreddit of ex-WOOFers dedicated to him as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PaulWheatonWatch/
"The online representation of life at WL's is through rose-colored glasses. We all try to focus on the positive and have avoided sharing with you anything negative. The recent video posted in criticism of PW is accurate. I didn't get to meet the couple when they were here, but I don't see anything misleading about their honest portrayal of WL's. Other PDC participants have shared with us what PW really thinks of the Ants. He said to the group that, "Ants are a spikeweed pioneer species to be displaced as would the next...until the right sort are up there." This is not People Care. The intimidation through volume and posture is not People Care. I ruthlessly defended him based soley on the content he provided online. I was so goofy about permaculture, that I sold most of my belongings and moved across the country to do all the things I had been dreaming about for years. My first full day I told PW that I wanted to be an Ant, to have land to play on. He discouraged it, promised other avenues and then put up barrier after barrier. Garden gardeners? Nope. He wants money makers. Marketers. Free Laborers. He doesn't actually care about his end of the live/learn/work relationship. This post will probably be taken down pretty quick so it will be available where PW can't censor it." - On Reddit
The above quote is a good example of the average experience on his property. Paul Wheaton thinks of the people who come to work for him, and sometimes pay him to do so, as nothing more than refuse. He sees this community of people that was willing to trust him as a means to an end. It's important to keep in mind that there are families with children living on his property. Children walking around in rags, with limited access to potable water, or proper heating or food, on grounds strewn with broken glass & jagged waste, shitting and pissing where they stand because the compost toilets don't work and their parents tell them it's "fertilizing the soil".
If anyone actually did have the nerve to complain on his own website or subreddit, this was often the result:
There are also many stories about experiences on his property published in blogs, such as this one. They all corroborate largely the same abuse, especially the conditions that both adults and children are living under:
If it sounds like I'm invested in this situation somehow, or I'm "a-logging" or whatever, I'm really not. I'm honestly just describing the circumstances in stark material terms, and that's not even the beginning of it. This has been a slow burn dumpster fire for quite a while and it doesn't look like it's stopping any time soon. If it sounds that dire to you for the people involved, it probably is. Like any other cult leader, he preys on desperate people. There are people living on his property, basically as slaves, who have no where else to go. It's kind of hard to think about this and not care or feel a smidgen of sympathy, at the very least for those kids.
The more responsible side of the online permaculture community has already taken action and put the word out about the dangerous conditions of his property and his abusive behavior.
He regularly updates his website and maintains an online presence:
https://twitter.com/paulwheaton
https://www.youtube.com/user/paulwheaton12/videos
https://www.reddit.com/r/homestead/ This is the subreddit he managed to snag.
https://richsoil.com/permaculture/ His podcast is here. This is where he throws his biggest tantrums.
Here is a year old podcast of his where he brags about himself closing a road that was technically on his property and pissed off all of his neighbors in the process. He does not give a fuck, you can at least give him that.
I plan on keeping tabs on this thread and updating it when I can. I would also like to point out that the main post only covers the skeletal framework of this mess. Permies.com is about a decade old website absolutely filled to the brim with crazy, much of it directly flowing from the crap Paul posts on there. He had a prominent reddit presence at one point too, but retreated behind sockpuppets after several callout incidents. He's been posting podcasts for about five years I think, and has more than 300 at this point. A lot of his listeners took the liberty of archiving them publicly when he announced he was taking them down and putting them behind a paywall. There is just way too much crazy to sort through. I guarantee you could quickly find several crazy soundbytes from them, especially if you check out the more abstract ones with "community" oriented topics. He also had a lot of legitimately smart and relevant activists, scientists, & other various professionals on at certain points who had a lot of interesting stuff to say about horticulture.
So basically if you're really into sustainable living and that kind of stuff, and also want to pick the mind of a tyrant lolcow as his community slowly degrades around him due to his behavior then the podcasts are perfect background fodder for you.
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