Rachel Haywire, also known as Rachel Marone, writer, and advocate for transhumanism. Activities In 2011, Haywire started the annual 'Extreme Futurist Fest' event in Los Angeles, California. The cyberpunk event combined talks on science and human enhancement, modeled after the TED conferences, with a number of live music performances and art installations. In 2012, Haywire described the event as "a 2 day arts and technology festival focusing on radical voices of the new evolution". In January 2013, Haywire started a campaign to run for the board of directors of the transhumanist organization , to which she was subsequently elected. She is also the founder of the all-female alternative music label machineKUNT Records, the "anti-conference" INSTED, the online magazine "Trigger Warning" (after trigger warnings), and the author of the autobiography "Acidexia". Advocacy Haywire has variously described herself as a "transhuman separatist" or "transhumanist militant". Haywire used to identify with the far-right neoreactionary movement, but left in 2014. Haywire's Twitter feed has been cited by news outlets such as Newsweek, Glamour, Inquisitr, , and Breitbart on the topics of social justice and domestic violence. Kickstarter controversy In 2011, Haywire started a crowdfunding campaign for her 'Extreme Futurists' project on the website Kickstarter. The project received over three hundred spam comments from Haywire's cyber stalker; in response, Kickstarter closed the project, and threatened to permanently ban Haywire from the Kickstarter platform. After Haywire's case attracted substantial media attention, Kickstarter apologized to Haywire, and said that it was not Kickstarter's policy to block projects which might be subject to abuse from third parties. However, Kickstarter did not update their community guidelines or terms of service in response to the incident, and these guidelines had no mention of comment spam or victims of cyberstalking. The technology magazine Digital Trends compared Haywire's harassment on Kickstarter to the harassment faced by feminist writer and cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, who has also funded her advocacy projects through the website.
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