Here is a more honest landscape of how prices have changed year-over-year in the U.S., based on the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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On May 14, Hawaii’s state legislature recorded an unexpected victory for opponents of corporate power: when Hawaii’s State Senate Bill 2471 goes into effect in 2027, it will be illegal for corporations to spend money to influence elections in Hawaii. This will be the first test of a legal strategy focused on state corporate charters and the powers they grant to “artificial persons.” 

Along with proposed ballot initiatives in other states like Montana, Hawaii’s new law removes political spending from the set of powers granted to corporations under state law. This novel strategy represents a creative effort to limit corporate power, and could be a model for pro-democracy advocates who should be looking for opportunities to expand the legal field of play and put the forces of reaction and oligarchy on the defensive.

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, opponents of corporate election influence have looked for ways to stem the relentless growth of corporate donations to Political Action Committees (PACs) and “dark money”—money raised by anonymous donors and purportedly spent independently of candidates. These funds are typically donated to 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations, which can accept anonymous donations, and that then funnel the funds to PACs, avoiding any transparency rules which apply to PACs and candidates. Hawaii’s law is aimed at curbing this spending by amending the law which defines the powers of for-profit corporations as well as 501(c)(4)s, and any other “artificial person” created by legal fiat—including unions and non-profits. State law generally defines the powers granted to these institutions quite broadly, but with this law Hawaii’s legislature has simply carved out political spending and explicitly removed it from the list of granted powers.

Many believed it would take a Constitutional amendment to limit corporate campaign spending given the sweeping nature of the Citizens United decision. But legal scholar Vincent Buccola argued otherwise in a 2016 paper. Buccola’s argument is that states grant powers to corporations via their corporate charters. Early in American legal history, corporate charters were granted case-by-case to specific businesses by the state legislature. Then in the nineteenth century states competed for business by adopting uniform corporate charters which granted expansive powers. But states never gave up the right to define the powers given to corporations. Hence they have the right to remove political spending from these powers. 

Buccola’s legal theory was picked up by Tom Moore of the Center for American Progress, who called it the “Corporate Power Reset.” “The Court has held that states may define, limit, or revoke corporate powers for any reason, or for no reason at all,” wrote Moore, drawing on a decision in Greenwood v. Freight Co. from 1882 which held “That body [the state legislature] need give no reason for its action in the matter.” In other words, there are essentially no Constitutional limits on a state’s ability to regulate the powers given to corporations. And this power extends to not-for-profit entities such as 501(c)(4)s, and even to corporations chartered in other states. According to Moore, the Supreme Court’s decision in Paul v. Virginia in 1869 held that states can decline to grant powers even to entities founded outside their borders.

The corporate power reset was first proposed in a state ballot initiative in Montana by a bipartisan group called the Transparent Election Initiative led by former state Commissioner of Political Practices Jeff Mangan. Mangan dubbed the ballot measure “The Montana Plan,” grounding the plan in Montana’s history of anti-corruption measures. For a full century before Citizens United, corporations were banned from spending money in Montana elections thanks to the state’s Corrupt Practices Act. 

Montana’s Corrupt Practices Act was passed in 1912 against the backdrop of a wave of Progressive Era reforms, and a series of scandals linked to Montana’s infamous “copper kings”—mining magnates such as William A. Clark, who bought himself a US Senate seat in 1899 by bribing state legislators. At the turn of the century, a group called the Montana People’s Power League formed to advocate for primary elections, the direct election of senators, and limitations on political spending. Rather than trust the compromised state legislature, the League spearheaded a direct ballot initiative to pass the Corrupt Practices Act, which, among other reforms, capped total spending on political campaigns and made corporate donations to candidates illegal.

One hundred years later, the Supreme Court ruled that Montana’s Corrupt Practices Act was inconsistent with the precedent set by the Citizens United decision—Montana law violated the free speech rights of corporations. In his dissent Justice Stephen Breyer noted the unique history of corporate consolidation and corruption in Montana. Breyer argued, drawing on the plain facts of history which should have informed the court’s decision in Citizens United, “that independent expenditures by corporations did in fact lead to corruption and the appearance of corruption in Montana.” Nevertheless, the majority ruled in an unsigned decision that the Corrupt Practices Act was unconstitutional, paving the way for a sharp expansion in corporate spending in Montana’s politics.

Independent expenditures on elections totaled more than $4 billion in 2024, and in Montana outside groups spent nearly $140 million on the US Senate race between incumbent Democrat Jon Tester and successful Republican challenger Tim Sheehy. Shock at the amounts in play in a largely rural state has driven interest in the Transparent Election Initiative and the Montana Plan. As of June the initiative has collected enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, raising hopes that this November Montana may join Hawaii as the second state to attempt to limit corporate election spending since Citizens United.

With the passage of Hawaii’s state bill, and active legislation in 14 other states, it now appears that the Montana Plan is going national. It remains to be seen how the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will view this apparent end-run around the Citizens United decision. But even if it is struck down, the initiative promises to force corporate lobbyists and their allies to defend ground previously considered safe. And the terms of this particular fight favor pro-democracy advocates, since limiting election spending polls extremely well across partisan lines. It was in the interest of politicians who benefitted from corporate spending to throw up their hands and say Citizens United was the law of the land. That may be true, but if Hawaii’s legal strategy holds up, it may no longer matter.

More broadly, the corporate power reset in Hawaii and Montana should encourage liberals and pro-democracy advocates to seek out and pursue creative legal strategies drawn from our country’s long history of disputation and reform—such as the treasure trove of proposals found in Liberal Currents’ own Reconstruction Papers. If we are to reclaim some of the victories of the Reconstruction and Progressive eras we will need to choose multiple lines of attack—to “flood the zone,” if you will—so we should be agile and entrepreneurial, looking for avenues in corporate law, tax law, election law, or whatever sources are available. When a strategy appears successful, we should replicate it relentlessly in every state. The reforms of the first Progressive Era should remind us that democracy is popular, corruption is scandalous, and structural reform is possible with persistence and creativity. Hawaii and Montana are now showing the way toward a resurgence of pro-democracy, anti-corporate, populist reform. It’s up to the rest of the country to follow.

---

Featured image is "Protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol on March 12, 2011," CC BY-SA 2.0 Lena 2011.

Explanation: What's connecting these two volcanoes? In ancient folklore, the two volcanoes, Parinacota (left) and Pomerape (right), are connected by representing a mythical prince and princess who engaged in a forbidden romance. Beneath the ground, the two peaks are not known to be connected by a common pool of hot magma, and neither volcano has erupted in the past 1000 years. Above the ground, there is usually nothing in the sky that connects them -- except if you use careful timing and look from a specific location. The featured well-planned image was captured from Bolivia in mid-April with a series of camera exposures taken on the same day and from the same location. Then, Barnard's Loop appeared to connect the volcanic peaks. Also visible in the image is the Orion Nebula in the center, the star Betelgeuse on the right, and the Rosette Nebula on the upper right.

CW: this post entails an excruciatingly-detailed breakdown of the SCP wiki’s systematic and years-long mishandling of a high-profile sex abuse case. It entails harms perpetrated against real people, many of them children, and there is neither closure nor justice at the end. I cannot stress enough that if you have enough shit on your plate, or don't want to deal with this today, or just don't want to know the dirt from a community you have no connections to, do not read further.

For my usual readers, you have my apologies. Regular content will resume posthaste.

If this has broken containment like I suspect and dread that it will, hello: feel free to peruse the backlog while you’re here.

Part 0: Preface

To my knowledge, a comprehensive overview of the Bright case and its surrounding context doesn’t exist anywhere else online. With that being the case I felt a responsibility to write it, since I'm in a position to do so and memories are short on the internet. The wheel turns, a new crisis emerges, and cortisol compresses the past into a blurry smear; People forget, the anger dulls, the people in charge stay in charge, and even four years on there are people out there who don’t know about Bright, and people who know about Bright but not about the cascading failures surrounding Bright, and people who know about both but don’t know how they fit into the greater picture.

I’m writing it for myself, too, as a way to process what happened. To get a clearer picture of how a community and a project that has been a foundational ur-text for who I am as an artist set itself on fire and started eating itself. 

This is also where I say up-front that I am not an objective observer - I've presented the facts as accurately as I can with the information I have available, but I ultimately have a significant emotional horse in the race so those facts will be presented with some editorializing and more personal asides.

I shouldn’t have to say “don’t use this post as your excuse to harass people”, but don’t use this as your excuse to harass people. You should be angry after reading this, but being angry for the right reasons doesn’t mean you get to be stupid about it. This quagmire is already bad enough.

[Of course, I'm playing the hypocrite here because this post is nigh-guaranteed to make the quagmire worse simply for existing.] 

If you have any additions or corrections, please leave them in the comments. I will be watching them like a hawk, in any case.

**

An important note: This case has not been taken to court, and as such all claims regarding Bright’s behavior remain allegations in the eyes of the law. While the evidence given to the Anti-Harassment Team remains blackboxed to protect the privacy of the victims, the publicly-available information has provided no evidence to contradict those allegations and given me no reason to doubt their veracity.

**

Since this is all going extremely Inside Baseball, here’s a list of terms and names I’m going to be using throughout.

• Bright = Former administrator of the SCP wiki. Also known as theduckman.
• Character!Bright = The character of Dr. Jack Bright
• 963 = SCP-963, Bright’s most popular article; a ruby pendant bound to Character!Bright that grants him immortality through body-hopping possession.
• The List = The List of Things Dr. Bright is Not Allowed to Do at the Foundation, a Pvt. Skippy / Mr. Welch style gag article. Originally authored by Bright and then expanded by many additional contributors.
• Mainsite = The SCP wiki proper; called O4 in the context of mirroring discussion threads between the staff and member forums.
• Offsite = Generalized / collective reference for the SCP fandom outside of the wiki and its official Discord / IRC servers (reddit, tumblr, youtube, etc).
• O5 / O5command = A side wiki that hosts the staff forum; contains policy discussion threads, voting, and disciplinary records.
• Sandbox = A side wiki used to draft articles, test formatting, etc.
• AHT = Anti-Harassment Team
• Delisting = Wherein an article is removed from public access and the site search function but not fully deleted.
• BWP = The Bright Works Project; the official staff response to deal with Bright’s body of work. Active since April of 2025.

Let’s get this done so I can worry about one less thing in my life.

Part 1: The Context

Former administrator Bright was banned from the SCP wiki in May of 2022 after an “omnibus report” of alleged serial sexual misconduct; the exact details were not released to the public for privacy reasons, but the picture that’s been put together since the initial ban is:

• The abuse had been ongoing for years and encompassed a large number of victims, many of whom were minors at the time and had been specifically targeted as such.
• Bright had used their seniority on staff to cover up their abuse, most egregiously through five years (JAN-2014 to JAN-2019) as one of the administrative contacts for the Anti-Harassment Team.
• Bright had used their widespread personal popularity as a means to groom their victims through parasocial relationships. 
• Character!Bright's inextricable link to SCP-963 and its body-hopping immortality was directly used as a vehicle to inflict Bright the author's possession fetish on others through fiction, roleplay, and cosplay.
• Bright’s body of work contained a significant amount of content that minimized / normalized Bright’s behaviors through Character!Bright; The Bright Works Project itemized these in extensive detail (link, link), and tagged 21 out of 63 pages as “problematic”; so I’ll pass on doing so here beyond saying that Bright the author repeatedly portrayed character!Bright as both a pedophile and as an integral and unremovable part of the Foundation’s command structure who regularly abused his position of authority to further his own personal ends.

**

I directly interacted with Bright maybe 2-3 times during my time on the site; I thought they were an undeservedly popular and deeply unpleasant jackass with a cringy self-insert OC, a stable of bad-to-mid edgelord articles and an obnoxiously myopic view of what the site and setting could be. I foolishly brushed off all the things easily recognized as red flags in hindsight to be the shitty “jokes” and tryhard shock horror common to an older, awful era of the internet; I rolled my eyes, thought “god these articles are terrible, why the hell does anyone give a shit when X Y and Z are right there”, went on with my life, and now find myself among the thousands suckered into believing that Bright was just a hack. 

The nature of the site lent itself to reinforcing the illusion - a good many authors, myself included at one point, tried their hand at making a better version of character!Bright, because if you don’t like something, make a version that you do like. The version people like catch on and inform new descendants, and the old versions fade into the background. Bright the author rode that reputation laundering for over a decade, letting other authors’ versions of the character overshadow their own, and it’s still ongoing: I had to confront someone who decided to wear a Dr. Bright labcoat to a convention and tried to pull "separate art from artist” in March of this year. 

Brother did you actually read Bright's stories? Do you actually know what that art was in service of? Shut the fuck up.

**

The common (if unhelpful) question in these situations is “how did no one know?”; the unfortunate answer is that people knew. They might not have known the extent, but people knew Bright was a creep.

I can still remember, and Wayback Machine for January 2010 backs me up, a section in the guide for new users where Bright directly asks for nudes. This was on the same page, mind you, as a warning to not open any links from a different user who literally did nothing but sit in IRC and post links to the grossest porn he could find and was just allowed to do that for years before he was finally banned. 

People fucking knew. I knew Bright was a creep and I was at peak social obliviousness at the time. I can’t say who knew what and how much and when and I’m not going to speculate, but speaking purely for myself I’d be hard-pressed to think of a less-surprising revelation. 

Part 2: Timeline of Events

Pre-2020 

07-JAN-2014
The wiki’s staff is re-organized into its current team-based structure; Bright is appointed as one of the Anti-Harassment Team's administrative contacts.

[I can’t find the thread announcing this to the public, and so I’m instead basing it on the page creation date of the AHT team hub (link)] 

 

2020

02-May-2020
Staffer Eskobar and user GabrielJade are permanently banned by AHT. (link)

[The AHT announcement post says only “unacceptable behavior”, and I can’t find any other hard sources. I don’t know how or where the details ended up getting shared around, but by the time the info reached the bizarrely-thorough yet wholly-unsourced TVTropes page for SCP-specific role-ending misdemeanor (link) it’s an uncited claim that they sexually harassed a minor in 2018. This does align anecdotally with what I knew of the case prior to writing this post, and what my few remaining direct contacts with the site also know, but neither I nor they can find a hard source for how this information got into our heads. The closest thing I get is a later thread (25-SEP-2021) linking to the above AHT post when talking about sexual harassment.]

03-MAY-2020 
Bright announces their retirement from staff and departure from the wiki, citing declining interest and real-life factors. (link) 

They make only 3 posts of no particular note on the wiki after this announcement, the last one on 15-MAY-2021.

[No evidence exists linking Bright’s departure with the Eskobar/GabrielJade bans, or any direct connection or collusion between the abusers in question: I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the bans either spurred Bright’s departure or accelerated pre-existing plans to leave, but this is purely my own speculation based on circumstantial evidence.]

05-MAY-2020
In response to the Eskobar / GabrielJade abuses, staff increase the minimum user age of the wiki to 18; IRC, the discord server, and staff itself are not included for reasons I was not able to find. (link)

 

2021

02-AUG-2021
Bright receives a six-month AHT ban for, quote “suggesting action against a user based off misinformation without properly fact-checking during a serious case, which resulted in erroneous judgement until corrected later” (link); this ban is delivered simultaneously with that of an AHT member named fieldstone, who was found to be “intentionally obfuscating facts of the cases in order to achieve an outcome they desired”.

25-SEP-2021
Dissenting staffers propose undoing the 18+ age requirement policy under the hideously tone-deaf name of “age unraising”; the proposal does not pass. (link)

 

2022

08-MAY-2022
Bright is permanently banned from the wiki by AHT after review of an “omnibus report” of sex abuse allegations. (link)

11-MAY-2022
Multiple Bright-penned entries on the List of Things Dr. Bright is Not Allowed to do at the Foundation are judged as directly related to Bright’s behavior and are deleted by admin fiat. (link)
 
22-AUG-2022
A second run of the 2021 “age unraising” proposal is made (link); it is voted down by a wide margin on 25-SEP-2022. (link)

27-OCT-2022
The Bright-penned tale Diary 573 is deleted by admin fiat due to containing CSA content. (link)

2023

19-FEB-2023
Moderator Siddhartha Alonne announces their retirement from staff as well as their unilateral and unauthorized deletion of the List (link). They are subsequently permabanned for abuse of staff powers. (link) 

Staff reinstate the List three hours after its deletion and put it into protected status, preventing any votes or comments from being made on it. (link)

[To my knowledge, protected status has been deployed only one other time as a way to blockade offsite harassment brigades aimed at the orbital superweapon that is also a trans homestuck fan.]

21-FEB-2023
Staff member torcsandantlers starts a general discussion thread collecting userbase and staff feedback on what should be done with the List. The thread presents a general list of potential solutions and concerns, and presents the latter as a series of questions for the general membership. (link)

02-MAR-2023
Second discussion thread regarding potential Bright List solutions. A series of specific proposals are detailed with the potential pros and cons of each. (link)

08-MAR-2023
Brief discussion thread regarding the mechanics of the List referendum. (link)

15-MAR-2023
Bright List referendum voting begins. (link)

22-MAR-2023
Referendum voting concludes with staff and user supermajority in favor of immediate deletion of the List and simple majority in favor of replacement with an explanatory splash page. The List is deleted and a placeholder splash page is added in its place.

17-APR-2023
Brief discussion on finalizing the Bright List Deletion Message (link). A staff vote on the matter occurs from 01-MAY-2023 to 10-MAY-2023; its finalized version may be read here (link).

2024

No official threads are made regarding Bright or their work during 2024.

A private project led by staff member FlyPurgatorio was ongoing during this period, though public admission of this did not occur until January 2026.

2025

07-JAN-2025
Staff member Naepic starts a discussion thread in an attempt to spur some sort of action regarding deletion of Bright’s articles (link). The situation quickly escalates; as the thread contains no concrete proposals and many users view the thread as admitting that not only is there no plan, staff hasn’t even decided if there’s going to be a plan.

11-FEB-2025
Staff member FlyPurgatorio is demoted from staff for continued antagonism towards other staffers and leaves the site; his project is abandoned with all progress lost. This information does not come to light until the Bright Works Project Q&A in January 2026 (link).

22-APR-2025
The official Bright Works Project begins, headed by administrator Queerious. (link)

An 8-phase outline of staff action is provided, quote:

1. Assess Current Proposal Drafts
2. Assess All Bright Works for Content
3. Ideate Solutions Collaboratively
4. Refine Given Solutions
5. Write/Draft Proposed Solutions
6. Draft Proposal/Discussion Post
7. Voting
8. Implementation

Responses in the thread are mixed between those thankful that there’s progress being made and communicated, and those exasperated by the fact that the provided plan is to make a plan to make another plan that will be fulfilled at an unspecified point in the future.

A BWP sandbox was made on 05 Command (link); despite containing vital information regarding the project’s status and WIP proposals, it is linked only once in the main 04 thread.

28-APR-2025: BWP Interim Update 1
Project reaches Stage 2.2, and is analyzing backlinks (ie, pages that link to a given page) for Bright’s body of work.

05-MAY-2025: BWP Update 1
Stages 1 & 2 are completed, tallying 63 pages authored by Bright with 255 backlinks among them. Stage 3 begins.

19-MAY-2025: BWP Update 2
Stage 3 is ongoing with preparation for Stage 4. A link to the BWP sandbox is provided; this is the only update that will do so, and the only one to directly mention the page at all.

02-JUN-2025: BWP Update 3
Stage 3 completed, Stage 4 (refine given solutions) begins. No further information of note.

16-JUN-2025: BWP Update 4
Stage 4 continues. No further information of note.

30-JUN-2025: BWP Update 5
Stage 4 continues. No further information of note

14-JUL-2025: BWP Update 6
Stage 4 continues. Cut-off point for new proposals; no details or names are provided for proposals under consideration.

29-JUL-2025: BWP Update 7
Stage 4 continues. “75% of the plans have been filled out”. No further information of note.

12-AUG-2025: BWP Update 8
Stage 4 completed; all proposals are outlined; no outlines are shared in the thread. Stage 5 (drafting proposals) begins.

25-AUG-2025: BWP Update 9
Stage 5 proposal drafting continues. No further information of note.

08-SEP-2025: BWP Update 10
Stage 5 proposal drafting continues. A new proposal is brought before staff for discussion, with plans to add it to the main list. No explanation of this proposal or what it would entail is provided. A 22-SEP update is promised but does not occur.

14-OCT-2025: BWP Interim Update 2
Harryblank posting on behalf of Queerious states that work on the BWP has hit a temporary standstill due to the 9000 contest and other staff duties pulling staff attention away from the project. No further information of note.

27-OCT-2025: BWP Update 11
No information of note. A 10-NOV update is promised but does not occur.

24-NOV-2025: BWP Interim Update 3
Announcement of holiday hiatus; no further information of note.

 

2026

26-JAN-2026: BWP Update 12
BWP reaches stage 5.2; four proposals have finished first drafts, and a fifth in-progress proposal has been added. These proposals are neither named nor explained in the thread.

26-JAN-2026
2h 50m after Queerious makes BWS Update 12, user ubergoober posts a thorough dissection of the selected proposals (link); they judge all but the last wholly deficient and accuse staff of ignoring, dismissing, and talking over victims who had been expressing dissatisfaction with the process and its slow progress. This proves to be the community’s breaking point, and tensions boil over into a full community riot. Angry users flood both the thread and discord server in vocal support of ubergoober and demanding immediate answers and action from staff.

The 4 proposals selected for final deliberation were:

• Adapted Deletions Threshold - All Bright-authored pages are mirrored so that the copies have reset vote counts; deletion would then proceed according to normal site policy.
• Minimal Staff Intervention - The 21 Bright-authored pages deemed Harmful in Stage 3, as well as any additions during discussion, will be delisted and set as redirects to an explanatory splash page; the rest of Bright’s corpus is left intact.
• Single Source of Truth - Adding a disclaimer to all Bright-authored works and moving the text into a collapsible on the page.
• Near Total Deletion - Bright’s most famous articles are delisted and given redirects, while the rest of the corpus is deleted.

This is the first time any of the proposals have been referenced by name in the BWP thread since it started nine months prior; I think it’s fair to assume that this is the first time a lot of people learned any details about any of the proposals, which can’t have helped the already-enormous PR issue.

26-JAN-2026
The site’s master admin DrEverettMann posts a thread titled “Treatment of Staff” (link), attempting to defuse the riot. It receives three initial responses that evening, all of which point out that Mann seems to conflate angry users’ criticisms of staff with harassment; Mann does not respond.

27-JAN-2026
Staff opens up a Q&A thread to address the ongoing riot, with a dedicated team of seven staffers fielding questions and running damage control (link). Information revealed in the thread (non-exhaustively) includes:

• Custom CS code was applied to the entire wiki (and later to O5command) to render Bright’s username as “theduckman” instead of “AdminBright”; this extended to licenseboxes.
• The case will not be escalated to law enforcement (on grounds that multiple victims had voiced their opposition to escalation, considering it likely to cause further harm)
• References to Character!Bright were removed from the O5 Command Dossier page, bringing it in line with the Personnel and Character Dossier.
• The highly-unpopular / nonviable BWP proposals were included so as to exhaust all potential options.
• The BWP sandbox was intentionally not included in the updates in an attempt to avoid potential misunderstandings caused by an in-progress document.
• Queerious was the only staff member consistently working on the BWP; all other assistance was provided on an as-available basis, rather than any individual or team being officially assigned to the project. 
• Administrator HarryBlank provides a more detailed explanation in the main discussion thread (link)
• There will be a follow-up investigation / post mortem report on both the failures of the BWP in general and staff conduct (directly naming admins Queerious and Kufat) that exacerbated the situation.
• At the time of Bright’s ban, AHT lacked the authority to remove pages except in cases of direct harassment (doxxing, etc): all articles removed after appeals to AHT were removed because AHT appealed to other mechanisms of administrative fiat to delete the article instead. 
• Staff did not fiat delete The Self Insert at the same time as Diary 573 because it (quote Mann) “doesn't have or suggest harm to minors”.
• No explanation is given as to why an alternate route to fiat deletion wasn’t taken, save that the story (quote BAD_DATA) “fell off the radar”.
• No explanation is given for why Mann's assessment of the story diverges so significantly from both the BWP analysis and public opinion. (see sidebar below)
• The Internet Outreach team did not, as of 01-FEB, have a statement prepared regarding the BWP (as a proposal had not yet been selected at that time)
• Staff’s decision to forgo immediate fiat deletion was intended to avoid a repeat of the harassment of victims that occurred in the wake of Siddharta’s deletion of the List.
• I find this reasoning about as watertight as a colander, considering that the discussion threads make it clear that staff held conversations with victims in publicly accessible discord channels.
• Not to mention how dragging the BWP out into a years-long 5-ring circus exposes more people over a longer period of time because the names of victims are given time to disseminate to the public.
• I would really like to know how keeping the work of a serial pedophile in positions of prominence without so much as a disclaimer for years protects victims.
• The Portuguese branch wiki, as of 6-FEB, had already deleted all translations of Bright’s work - no other international branches had confirmed their responses at that time.
• The character tag for Dr. Bright was removed.

**

[Since it comes up again, I’ve summarized The Self Insert here. It's a useful example of what's meant by "problematic", and a reminder that this and 20 similarly problematic pieces were kept up for 4 years after the allegations surfaced

The Self Insert was a story where Bright wrote a fictionalized version of their real-life self as a habitual user of SCP-1004 (“Factory Porn”), a cd-rom that can generate infinite pornographic videos. The only subjects directly mentioned in the article itself are scat, gore, bestiality, and pedophilia, and the “twist” is that users are inevitably drawn to this material despite there being no anomalous mental compulsion. The story ends with two Foundation staff commenting on how much Bright’s fictionalized self is masturbating to 1004, presented in such a way that the clear intent is to pass it off as humorous in a sort of “get a load of this shmuck” sort of way.]

**

28-JAN-2026: 
Administrator Kufat presents an outline of his “Root and Branch” proposal, which entailed immediate deletion of all of Bright’s works and mandated removal or replacement of Bright’s creations in derivative works. While the response is positive in the thread, it is judged to be an overreach of authorial autonomy (specifically with regards to the many works that implement a version of the Factory group-of-interest that resemble Bright’s initial version in name only) and is abandoned by the next day. (link)

31-JAN-2026
User Djoric deletes his primary canon, followed by his account, in protest of staff’s handling of the BWP. In a message left on his author page (link), he directly cites staff’s delay in deleting The Self Insert as a major factor in his decision. (This aligns with his posts in the Q&A thread from the days prior.) Judging by a couple comments from other users, the deletion of several stories popular outside the wiki triggered several angry offsite readers entering the discord and harassing users, victims, and staff.

02-FEB-2026
Administrator Pedagon receives official disciplinary action for inflammatory remarks made in the main discord server on 26-JAN; they are given a two-month censure of admin powers with no demotion and a forced recusal from any future BWP discussions or votes. (link) 

02-FEB-2026
Discussion and voting thread to select a proposal for the BWP (link): the four from Update 12 are now accompanied with Remove and Counter (the most prominent of Bright’s works will either remain with annotations contextualizing the harm caused, or be replaced with similar statements written in conjunction with victims; all other pages would be deleted)

Additionally, staff vote to blank (though not delist or delete) all remaining Bright pages as a temporary stopgap while the BWP are voted on and finalized proposals (link). The text of all affected pages is replaced with a brief explanatory notice.

17-FEB-2026
Staff voting period on BWP proposals ends with 45 of 54 votes in support of Remove and Counter. (link) 

17-FEB-2026
General discussion thread on the details of Remove and Counter (link). It is immediately beset by further angry comments from users: while it does finally present specific steps towards completion of the BWP, these steps are still not finalized, no timeline is presented, and there’s widespread discontent on the subject of potential response pieces or annotated versions.

18-FEB-2026
Administrator HarryBlank has an extended public incident in the Remove and Counter Specifics thread (link), attacking user Fish^12 over their negative comments regarding the BWP and the ongoing Remove and Counter discussion.

18-FEB-2026
After a full 24 hours of angry user response, all 52 remaining non-collaborative Bright-authored pages are blanked and delisted by admin fiat. (link)

[It has been 1382 days since Bright was banned from the SCP wiki. This action could have taken place at any point earlier in the process.]

20-FEB-2026
Official disciplinary thread for HarryBlank regarding the 18-FEB incident (link). Discussion ends on 13-MAR-2026 with a four-month censure of admin powers and no demotion.

As of 22-JUL-2026, the page remains unfinished, and has not been edited since 18-APR-2026. A Q&A post from 02-APR (link) states that the Bright List Deletion Message is slated to be retired and replaced with a redirect to this page; this has also not happened.

30-MAR-2026
Queerious resigns from staff and leaves the wiki due to harassment received over the course of the BWP. (link) 

3-APR-2026
AHT announces a change in policy (link), granting the team the ability to share selected evidence with the public; this change is accompanied by AHT bans for users Intercedent (link), PoufyPouferson (link), ubergoober (link), and VARWith(link) on a variety of charges, with special focus given to the banned persons accusing Queerious and other staff members of supporting or protecting Bright - specifically, the banned individuals are charged with pedojacketing (a term that, I am learning now, is used to refer to spurious accusations of sexual misconduct made against queer and often transfeminine persons). 

All four banned individuals were outspoken critics of staff’s handling of the crisis, being two prominent authors, the voice that started the riot, and a victim of Bright. None of the discord screenshots presented as evidence include direct accusations towards Queerious or mention her by name. All of them were taken from the night of 26-JAN, and are in line with things people would say in anger during a highly charged situation. Comments of similar intensity from other users (who were not permanently banned for those statements) may be found throughout the comment threads both before and after the riot.

Only two of the four bans above (Intercedent and poufypouferson) have attached screenshot evidence. None of the seven AHT bans logged between 03-APR and time of writing (17-JUL) have had screenshot evidence included, despite the new policy.

**

[This part of the narrative makes me absolutely furious.

[The included screenshots don’t mention Queerious at all, and Queerious never said anything remotely close to a defense of Bright or their work; the actions of other staff - most pointedly DrEverettMann (the master admin of the site, current captain of AHT, and a member of the wiki since May 2009) - feel like they're going out of their way to make themselves look guilty of something. Even with Hanlon's Razor sharpened and the most charitable read deployed (I'm still presuming that the actions of staff are the result of incompetence over malice), we’re still left with:

• Mann didn’t appoint anyone to help Queerious at any point in the nine months before the riot, leaving her to deal with an angry mob alone.
• Mann could have enacted an administrative fiat to blank and delist any or all of the more egregious Bright works at any point in this process, and didn’t do so even when the opportunity was available.
• Mann is on record downplaying the content of a particularly egregious Bright work (contrary to the BWP assessment) on a technicality that doesn't hold water, and used that as an excuse for past and present inaction. 
• Mann signed off on the AHT bans of 4 prominent BWP critics where the evidence doesn’t match the accusation, over transgressions that aren't being held against other users, and rubber-stamped a policy change that has only been used against those individuals.

Is it any wonder that people say that it feels like staff are supporting / protecting Bright? The optics on this are nightmarish. I'm sympathetic to the plight of untrained volunteers getting thrown into the deep end of a disaster, but when things reach a point where one of the best arguments for innocence is "no one actually guilty of something would drag out a cover-up for this long", that sympathy is well past its boiling point. 

No fucking wonder Bright got away with it for so long.]

**

25-APR-2026
A second BWP update thread opens, now overseen by staff member Sinking_Otter (link) 

29-MAR-2026: BWP Update 13
This update was ported over from the previous thread. 

The URLs of the 8 remaining pages now redirect to the new Bright Note. Stage 8 of the BWP is split into multiple substages, which now includes future development of annotations and response pieces. The post-mortem is being planned. The process of investigating and removing Bright’s edits to 193 articles by other authors is underway (this is technically Stage 8.2, but is hereon called Ring 2)

12-APR-2026: BWP Update 14
Ring 2 continues. Post-mortem planning continues, with no concrete information provided.

25-APR-2026: BWP Update 15
Ring 2 continues: of 193 works Bright contributed to but did not author, 140 cases have been resolved. Additionally, two admin fiats are enacted: 

• Fiat 1 allows banned users to request references to Bright in their works be removed and replaced, with the specific edits decided by staff.
• Fiat 2 allows staff to remove and replace material Bright contributed to pages made by authors who are no longer active on the site and are unable to be contacted. These changes may be altered by the authors in question if they return and wish to do so.

Post-mortem planning continues, with no concrete information provided.

09-MAY-2025: BWP Update 16
Ring 2 sits at 140/193 complete, 13 waiting final review, and 40 in-progress. Staff have begun reaching out to inactive authors for approval to remove references to character!Bright, as laid out in the previous update. Post-mortem planning continues, and now is confirmed to include a community survey regarding the BWP.

12-MAY-2026
Staffer wackdog starts a thread proposing a significant overhaul to the site’s deletion threshold that, in an attempt to slow down the rate of mainlist expansion, would lead to positively-rated articles getting deleted. (link) One of the potential executions of this proposal would apply the new criteria retroactively, leading to the deletion of hundreds of successful articles whose authors might not be around to respond.

This proposal is wildly unpopular with the userbase, who generally consider it a solution to a problem that doesn't exist (running out of slots), ineffective at addressing the problems that do exist (contest fatigue and discoverability issues), and would greatly favor established authors while disincentivizing new ones and further exacerbating the existing cut-throat popularity hustle of the site.

It is rendered a moot point two days later on 14-MAY, when staffer DrBleep proposes the creation of the Lost Series, a themed article collection existing in parallel with the mainlist (link).

[While unrelated to Bright, I include this proposal here to emphasize that the tone-deafness and staff disconnect that led to all the trouble with the BWP were neither limited to the BWP nor ameliorated by the post-riot reforms.]

23-MAY-2026: BWP Update 17
Ring 2 reaches 161/193 edits cleared. An explanation of how Ring 2 replacements are being carried out is provided: rather than doing a blanket 1:1 replacement for character!Bright, Ring 2 edits are done on a case-by-case basis and may be fulfilled with pre-existing characters from other sources or newly-made characters.

The grace period for the Inactive Authors Fiat has elapsed, and now Ring 2 works whose authors could not be contacted may be edited by staff.

06-JUN-2026: BWP Update 18
Ring 2 has fewer than 30 edits remaining; preparation for Ring 3 (works referencing or associated with character!Bright or Bright’s works that were not written by Bright) is underway. Finally, SCP-5500 is deleted under the Banned Authors Fiat after the original author (Ihp) reached out to staff.

10-JUN-2026
User Greenwolf receives a monthlong AHT ban for intimidation and explicit attempts to get another user banned from the wiki. This ban is extended to permanent on 17-JUN after investigation of further complaints that he had been deliberately intimidating users to report the Bright case to authorities. No screenshots are provided, with the provided reason being that they were inflammatory enough to post risk of further harm. (link)

21-JUN-2026: BWP Update 19
A long and fairly complex rundown of how Ring 2 edits will be made in circumstances where a work has multiple overlapping contributors. The initial survey of Ring 3 works has tagged 461 works for review.

04-JUL-2026: BWP Update 20
Staff vote passes the proposed Ring 2 expansions from the previous update. Ring 3 progress continues, with messages sent out to authors with works tagged for review.

05-JUL-2026
Staffer wackdog starts a thread proposing the creation of a dedicated PR team to review staff communications with the userbase (link); public response is predominantly negative, with many commenters viewing this as an extra layer of bureaucracy that would further distance staff from the community at large.

As of time of writing, it does not appear that this proposal has been abandoned or carried out.

18-JUL-2026
Ring 2 has “only a handful of articles” left - no explanation as to why hard numbers have been abandoned in the updates. Ring 3 continues, though many authors have not responded to the initial messages.

Post-mortem planning, we are assured, continues. No further concrete information provided.

**

This brings us up to the present. I may or may not update this timeline as new information becomes available. As it stands, the only major components remaining are the postmortem thread and any response pieces that will be written. I have my doubts that either of them will see the light of day any time soon, if at all.

Part 3: So What Now?

I don’t know. I can barely look at the thing without getting a bit queasy. My partner, blessedly removed from this quagmire and caring not a whiff for the wiki, told me that it all sounded like a toxic ex. She’s got me dead to rights on that one. I loved the place. I still love the place, even though it makes me miserable to do so and hindsight tells me plain that it wasn’t good for me. Every chance the ball could have been dropped, it was dropped. Every opportunity to right the boat was passed over. Every chance to defuse the disaster shoveled more coal on the fire. 

I don’t know. Maybe this is what it feels like to have grown up in Pripyat.

Regardless of the progress made since the riot, I think the damage is done. The people in charge of this disaster remain in charge, trust in staff is at an all-time low, tone-deaf and divisive policy proposals keep happening, staff get preferential treatment and minimal consequences for disciplinary incidents. I don't think there’s any fixing it without a total leadership turnover.

[And that’s to say nothing of Wikidot as a platform having gone fully absentee landlord and starting to break down - the wiki had to port in a discord bot just to keep the search functional. A migration project is apparently still in progress, but it's also been in progress since ~2012 with nothing to show for it.]

Even with all that, I can’t evict it from my thoughts. It’s a miraculous creative enterprise: everything on that site is freely available not just to read, but to make one's own. It will persist past the collapse of the site and fragmentation of the community, with both options looking more and more likely. There’s a part of me that wants to see that happen, to see the work of thousands of artists across two decades freed from the shadow of the community’s failures.

Maybe some day.

** 

The Bright List Deletion Message ends with the following statement, written 1016 days prior to the removal of Bright’s works:

“We don't ask here for any forgiveness; we've let you down, and it's up to us to earn back trust. A community needs not forgive its governing body, just to hold it accountable. We're all trying to do better - individually and as a whole. Please hold us to this.” 

That ship sailed and sank a long time ago. If putting this post together has proven anything, it's that trying to hold SCP wiki staff accountable doesn't do a god-damn thing.
 

Unlike most cutting lasers, femtosecond lasers don’t vaporize materials; rather, they produce such short, intense bursts of light that the affected region is ablated without having the chance to heat its surroundings. This makes them good at cutting away material without damaging the surroundings, something [Ben Krasnow] exploited to cut cross-sections of samples while still in a scanning-electron microscope.

In this case, the samples were crickets, and before imaging they had to be prepared. First, the bodies were soaked in glutaraldehyde to cross-link the proteins and stabilize the structure. Next, a series of solvent exchanges replaced the water in the bodies with a low-surface-tension solvent; this meant that during the next step, drying, surface tension wouldn’t distort the crickets’ internal structure. Finally, the insect bodies were charred under argon, which made the bodies conductive and more absorptive to laser light.

The laser itself and the scanning galvo are mounted outside the microscope, and shine in through a transparent window. To protect the detector and electron optics from a spray of ablated carbon, a servo motor swings an aluminium shutter between these and the sample while the laser is active. This caused some mysterious problems during testing: after the first ablation run, the electron microscope’s image would contain so much noise as to be unusable, but it would improve over time. As it turned out, the shutter was painted, and the other side of the paint was getting coated with charged carbon particles. This created a small capacitor which disrupted the electron optics as it discharged. Eventually, after solving this and a few other strange problems, [Ben] was able to take several time-lapse videos of the laser gradually ablating a cricket, 30 microns at a time, revealing its inner structure.

Although scanning-electron microscopes are unfortunately shard to come by, it’s still possible to restore a secondhand microscope or, as [Ben] did, build your own. Femtosecond lasers are yet more inaccessible, though they can be used to replicate themselves.

We used to worry about fire. A house fire could claim the photo albums, the letters, the dusty box of cassette tapes in the closet. We knew exactly what we were protecting, and from what. The threat was not only visible, but olfactory: you could smell smoke.

Now the threat is something else entirely: not loss through destruction, but loss through indifference. The server shuts down. The startup pivots. The platform “sunsets” a feature you’d spent years filling with memories. And just like that, a decade of your life becomes a page of 404s.

The economics of attention

I’ve been publishing on the web since 1995. I’ve watched links I wrote, links I cherished, slowly turn to dust. Not because the ideas were bad, or the writing was thin, but because someone decided a database was too expensive to maintain, or a domain registration lapsed, or a CMS migration “couldn’t prioritize” backward compatibility. 

The fragility isn’t in the medium—it’s in the economics of attention. Digital memory is fragile not because bits decay (though they do), but because someone else owns the shelf.

And it’s not just the web. Think of the photos you’ve “saved” to a cloud service that changed its terms. The videos you uploaded to a platform that no longer exists. The notes you carefully organized in an app that got acquired and shuttered. Each time, you were told you were “backing things up.” You weren’t. You were relocating them—moving your memories from your own bookshelf to a rented storage unit with a demolition clause.

The cruelty of digital loss

There’s a cruelty to the way digital loss sneaks up on you. A flooded basement announces itself. A dead hard drive grinds and whirs in protest. But a cloud account that quietly vanishes? A social graph that’s “replatformed” into oblivion? That’s a disappearance in broad daylight. You don’t even get a funeral. One day you click a link and it’s just… gone. No explanation, no elegy, just a redirect to a marketing page.

The Cloud is not a place

We need to stop pretending that “the cloud” is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them. The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”

So what do we do? We own our own domains. We keep local copies. In triplicate. We choose open formats over proprietary ones. We treat every platform as temporary, because it is. We archive not out of paranoia but out of love—love for the things we’ve made, the conversations we’ve had, the small, stubborn act of leaving a mark.

Be gardeners, not just tenants

The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not just tenants. To plant things in soil we control, and to tend them. Because if we don’t, the only record that we were here will be someone else’s ad inventory, and when the ads move on, we’ll move with them—into the quiet, unmarked graveyard of the deleted.

The post Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.