Werd I/O

We live in a world where right-wing nationalism is on the rise and many governments, including the incoming Trump administration, are promising mass deportations. Trump in particular has discussed building camps as part of mass deportations. This question used to feel more hypothetical than it does today.

Faced with this reality, it’s worth asking: who would stand by you if this kind of authoritarianism took hold in your life?

You can break allyship down into several key areas of life:

• Who in your personal life is an ally? (Your friends, acquaintances, and extended family.)
• Who in your professional life is an ally? (People you work with, people in partner organizations, and your industry.)
• Who in civic life is an ally? (Your representatives, government workers, individual members of law enforcement, healthcare workers, and so on.)
• Which service providers are allies? (The people you depend on for goods and services — including stores, delivery services, and internet services.)

And in turn, can be broken down further:

• Who will actively help you evade an authoritarian regime?
• Who will refuse to collaborate with a regime’s demands?

These two things are different. There’s also a third option — non-collaboration but non-refusal — which I would argue does not constitute allyship at all. This might look like passively complying with authoritarian demands when legally compelled, without taking steps to resist or protect the vulnerable. While this might not seem overtly harmful, it leaves those at risk exposed. As Naomi Shulman points out, the most dangerous complicity often comes from those who quietly comply. Nice people made the best Nazis.

For the remainder of this post, I will focus on the roles of internet service vendors and protocol authors in shaping allyship and resisting authoritarianism.

For these groups, refusing to collaborate means that you’re not capitulating to active demands by an authoritarian regime, but you might not be actively considering how to help people who are vulnerable. The people who are actively helping, on the other hand, are actively considering how to prevent someone from being tracked, identified, and rounded up by a regime, and are putting preventative measures in place. (These might include implementing encryption at rest, minimizing data collection, and ensuring anonymity in user interactions.)

If we consider an employer, refusing to collaborate means that you won’t actively hand over someone’s details on request. Actively helping might mean aiding someone in hiding or escaping to another jurisdiction.

These questions of allyship apply not just to individuals and organizations, but also to the systems we design and the technologies we champion. Those of us who are involved in movements to liberate social software from centralized corporations need to consider our roles. Is decentralization enough? Should we be allies? What kind of allies?

This responsibility extends beyond individual actions to the frameworks we build and the partnerships we form within open ecosystems. While building an open protocol that makes all content public and allows indefinite tracking of user activity without consent may not amount to collusion, it is also far from allyship. Partnering with companies that collaborate with an authoritarian regime, for example by removing support for specific vulnerable communities and enabling the spread of hate speech, may also not constitute allyship. Even if it furthers your immediate stated technical and business goals to have that partner on board, it may undermine your stated social goals. Short-term compromises for technical or business gains may seem pragmatic but risk undermining the ethics that underpin open and decentralized systems.

Obviously, the point of an open protocol is that anyone can use it. But we should avoid enabling entities that collude with authoritarian regimes to become significant contributors to or influencers of open protocols and platforms. While open protocols can be used by anyone, we must distinguish between passive use and active collaboration. Enabling authoritarian-aligned entities to shape the direction or governance of these protocols undermines their potential for liberation.

In light of Mark Zuckerberg’s clear acquiescence to the incoming Trump administration (for example by rolling back DEI, allowing hate speech, and making a series of bizarre statements designed to placate Trump himself), I now believe Threads should not be allowed to be an active collaborator to open protocols unless it can attest that it will not collude, and that it will protect vulnerable groups using its platforms from harm. I also think Bluesky’s AT Protocol decision to make content and user blocks completely open and discoverable should be revisited. I also believe there should be an ethical bill of rights for users on open social media protocols that authors should sign, which includes the right to privacy, freedom from surveillance, safeguards against hate speech, and strong protections for vulnerable communities.

As builders, users, and advocates of open systems, we must demand transparency, accountability, and ethical commitments from all contributors to open protocols. Without these safeguards, we risk creating tools that enable oppression rather than resisting it. Allyship demands more than neutrality — it demands action.

Previous birthday posts: 45 wishes, 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things.

One. I lie in bed as Ma read Dodie Smith’s ‌The Hundred and One Dalmatians to me. It was the fifth, and last, straight time; after this, she would finally put her foot down. Outside, in the Oxford dusk, the neighborhood dogs speak to each other over fences and hedges, the starlight barking in full force. Occasionally, a bird lands on the spiraling wrought iron fire escape outside.

It’s an old book, and the Romani people are not treated well in it. Revised versions are available. And, of course, the Disney versions.

Two. Nobody seems to want to adapt the anti nuclear war science fiction sequel, though, the cowards.

Three. I borrow ‌Constellations: Stories of the Future from the library for the third time: a hardback book in a protective plastic sleeve full of stories that seem almost illicit. One of the stories, ‌Let’s Go to Golgotha! is about a time-traveling tourist agency; the participants slowly realize that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is entirely made up of people from the future. ‌Beyond Lies the Wub was Philip K Dick’s first short story; a horror tale about meat-eating and possession. ‌It’s a Good Life, about a child with godlike powers, sets up a scenario that I still regularly think about. And Vonnegut’s ‌Harrison Bergeron is, of course, a layered classic, rife with mischief.

Outside the library, there’s still a bakery selling cheap bread rolls and jam donuts. (It’s a Primark now.) The smell is intoxicating but the stories already have me.

Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. I feel disconnected from the other children on the playground: like I’m missing a magic password that they know and I don’t. There’s no one big thing, but there are lots of little things; an idiom I don’t understand here, a reference I don’t get there. As an adult, I’ll have a name for what this is and why it’s true: third culture kid. But as a child, I just know that something is off.

‌The Dark is Rising sequence soft launches as a Blyton-esque adventure in Cornwall, and then dives into a story that is deeper than any of the culture I see around me. In its tales of pagan magic that pre-date the prevailing Christianity, of green witches and Cornish folk legends, it both captivates me and informs me about the history of the place I find myself in. And then there’s Will, and the Old Ones, and a wisdom that cuts underneath the superficial nonsense that I don’t understand and suggests that something deeper is far more important.

‌When the Dark comes rising six shall turn it back; Three from the circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron; Water, fire, stone; Five will return and one go alone. I can still recite it. The Dark is still rising. There is still silver on the tree.

Ten. There’s a doorway in St Mary’s Passage, a side street in the collegic part of Oxford, that is adorned with two fawns and a lion. Down the road, a Victorian lamppost still burns, albeit with electric light. There are plenty of tourist websites and videos that explain this was the inspiration for Narnia. I mean, it makes sense. But I don’t think it’s true.

Oxford is full of portals. I would know: I was a child there. There are space ships, time machines, great wooden galleons, castles hidden in dimensions somewhere between our reality and another. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were both inspired by Shotover, an area of hilly, wooded parkland on the edge of the city. Lewis had a house adjoining the area; Tolkien lived nearby. (Years earlier, Lewis Carroll roamed the hills, too. Years later, so did I.) They’re not the same place, but rather, multiple places that exist as layers over the same ground; different angles and reflections of the same ideas. They were both Inklings, after all.

Anyway, ‌The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe tells the truth about portals. They’re everywhere. I still check every wardrobe; don’t you?

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. I consume ‌The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‌The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe and Everything‌ in successive bouts of the flu in our house on the Marston Road, a tiny, water-damaged duplex that my parents have been restoring by hand. My bed is a single red and white bunk above a writing desk, on which I’ve doodled in ballpoint pen.

At the same time, I’ve been playing the Infocom text adventure adaptation, which Douglas Adams was directly involved in. All of these tales are irreverent in a way that directly appeals to me: they poke fun at norms and the bureaucracy of stasis. The books and the game all gently break the rules of their respective forms. They see how ridiculous the world is. This is a different kind of portal: not one to a fantasy realm, but one to a realization that you’re not alone. There are people on the road ahead of you, unpicking the rigidity of the world, and they’re looking back and winking.

And all of us are subject to forces bigger than us. Adams hated the little green planet that adorns every American book and game in the series, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Irony and sarcasm aren’t just forms of wit; they’re escape hatches. At their best, they’re a way of punching up. People who say they’re the lowest are missing the point and are probably Vogons.

Fourteen. It’s not that I’m sick a lot, but grade school is like a Petri dish for colds and flus, so I’m not notsick a lot, either. I’ve finished Douglas Adams but find myself hungry for more, and can’t stomach the direct parody of less wryly satirical books. Terry Pratchett fits the bill, and ‌Mort, the story of Death’s apprentice, is my jumping-off point.

They both eat systems and norms for breakfast, but Pratchett is often more directly, pointedly satirical than Adams was; this is overt social criticism, making fun of people with power and the structures established to dance around them. Teenage me, stuck in my bunk with yet another flu while rain pounds my bedroom windows, literally an outsider while the impenetrable politics and in-groups of high school carry on without me, adores it. I start to see the power of being an outsider. The thing about being a fish out of water is that you can see the water.

‌ It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it, Pratchett writes. Right on.

Fifteen. I’m thirteen and sitting in my homeroom class. We’ve all been reading our own books, and our homeroom teacher (who also happens to be our English teacher) has asked us each to read a passage out loud to the cloud. Some of my classmates are reading The Hardy Boys; some are reading Jane Austen; some are reading Tolkien.

I read a passage of ‌Timewyrm: Exodus where the Doctor and Ace are escaping the regenerated War Chief, the villain of 1969 Doctor Who story The War Games, who has helped Hitler raise an army of Nazi zombies. The passage ends when the zombie horde is halted with explosive grenades.

A few kids who generally don’t like to read come up afterwards to ask where I got the book. They seem excited. They seem excited to talk to me. These are not people who usually want to. Maybe I just have to give them something they like.

Sixteen. I catch my reflection in a department store mirror and shudder. Is that really me? Does that really have to be me? How can I stop it?

I look around at the other kids here: slim, elegant, comfortable in their skin. Effortless. Why can’t I be them?

Being an outsider is still being an outsider. By my late teens, I feel like there’s something truly wrong with me: it’s still like there’s a secret password that everybody knows but me, but now the stakes are higher. I want to belong; I want to feel like I have intrinsic value; I can’t find or justify it.

I’m tall now, really tall, and not exactly obese, but not slim, either. More than one person I have a crush on tells me to lose weight. More than one person I have a crush on tells me that maybe I’d have a chance if we had more money or if I wasn’t so weird. I’m constantly exhausted and the wry humor that used to characterize my otherness has been replaced with despair: nothing I do matters because there’s something wrong with me. It’s a firm depression, but either nobody catches it or nobody knows what to do with it. My grades nosedive.

‌Prozac Nation doesn’t catch everything, but it gives me a window into someone who feels a bit like I do. (I can’t relate to the drugs, but I see the allure, too.) Its author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, is like a cool depressed person: someone who feels this way but is also interesting, desirable, a little bit rockstar-like.

Today, I see the ego. As a teenager, I just see the reflection.

Seventeen. I’ve been writing software for a while now. My mother taught me BASIC on our 8-bit computer when I was five; when I was thirteen, my parents gifted me the PC-compatible version of Prospero Pascal for my birthday. I’ve worked through the manual and written a few small games. My first Pascal effort was Mr A Goes For a Walk, where a letter “A” did exactly that. A year later, I’d written a fully featured ‌Sokobanclone. I’m inspired by Jeff Minter’s seminal (and utterly irreverent) ‌Llamatron and want to build with the same sensibility. Making things feels really good; seeing people enjoy things I made feels even better, and goes some way towards filling the black hole of self-doubt that still lives within me.

Someone recommends ‌Microserfs: a book which should be a warning but isn’t received as one at all. The characters here are quirky outsiders — like me! — who throw themselves into building something on their own terms. They eat flat foods that can be pushed under doors so they can keep working. They struggle with their code, their work, and their lives. And they show me that there might be a place for me.

So many Douglas Coupland books, including this one, are about the emptiness of living in late-nineties capitalism. The clue is in the word serfs, but that isn’t what hits for me. That isn’t what hits at all.

I sit in the sixth form common room, a lounge in my high school where older students can study and do homework, and devour it, as Oasis, jungle music, and mid-nineties hip hop play around me. From somewhere, there’s the smell of cheese and onion crisps. Do they qualify as flat food?

Eighteen. The common room is a harsh place, but just one of a series of harsh places that school has represented for me. Because I’m big and don’t fight back, people feel like they can verbally abuse me, hit me, kick me. It comes from nowhere, usually, and I’m left reeling. Nobody, least of all the people who run the school, seems to want to help. Even today, I see fond reminiscences of people in our school year’s Facebook group, and I think, no, that person caused me so much pain. I’m other to them — a not-person — and that makes me fair game. I’ve internalized that it’s my fault. It happens because I deserve it, and I wonder how I might change to be more acceptable.

I find some kinship in ‌Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood’s story of an artist who revisits her childhood home. There’s something in there about the protagonist being untethered from her environment and the cultureof her environment that resonates. The book diverges so far from my experiences after that, but there’s so much here about the act of creation and how it interrelates with identity.

Nineteen. I’m seven years old and at my friend Clare’s house: a typically Oxford Victorian brick home that spreads over multiple floors. Her dad, Humphrey, has an office off of the stairs that I’ve only seen a glimpse of: there’s a desk with a typewriter and while he’s a very kind man in my eyes, he absolutely does not want us to go in there. He writes for a living, which seems like a magical thing to be able to do: the way I see it, you get to tell stories all day long. You get to create.

Later, he asks me what I want for my birthday, and I’m too shy to tell him what I really want, so I say a My Little Pony. What I really want is for him to sign ‌Mr Majeika for me: a story that’s fun in itself but clearly anchored in his life, his family, his personality. I still regret being shy about that.

Twenty. Years later I find Humphrey’s official biography of JRR Tolkien at Moe’s, a chaotic used bookstore in Berkeley, and buy it immediately. I’m not particularly interested in Tolkien but I remember Humphrey fondly. It’s a portal to him; to that time; to a feeling of possibilities; to laughing while running up the stairs.

Twenty-one. ‌TVGoHome, by an online writer I like called Charlie Brooker, is exactly what I like: a spoof of mainstream culture, through parody TV listings, that doesn’t hold back. One of the fake shows from the listings is later turned into a real show. Later, the author makes a spiritual follow-on about a zombie outbreak on the set of Big Brother. It’s a natural progression but I’m amazed they let him do it.

His final form is Black Mirror, which starts with the Prime Minister and a pig and winds up in sweeping cinematic dystopias starting Mackenzie Davis, Miley Cyrus, Bryce Dallas Howard. It all starting with comic strips advertising a dusty old second-hand store in inner London, and it ended somewhere so much grander, so much more global, without compromising almost anything. The claws are intact.

The book inspires me; the rest of it, too, but later. I wonder if I can be this kind of creator too; a curator of portals for other people to step through, to take them out of the water so they can see it for what it is. Or, at least, take a swipe at the places I can’t seem to fit.

Twenty-two. I wanted a clean break, away from Oxford and the trap of who I am, but this isn’t what I was going for.

I’m in a block of student flats in Edinburgh. If a door shuts anywhere in the building, you can hear it anywhere else: the sound carries, and people are drunk late into the night, and there’s never any peace. A fierce winter wind blows at the windowpanes. The mattress is covered in shiny plastic and I can feel it through my sheets.

I’m fascinated by ‌Brave New World and its setup of totalitarianism defended by acquiescence: a world where nobody has to ban books because nobody wants to read them. A dystopia protected by distraction. From my vantage point, it seems plausible.

Sometimes, my flatmates barge into my bedroom and pile onto me. One likes to spit in my food as I’m cooking it. One inhabitant of the building tells me not to talk to him. It doesn’t feel very far away from my high school common room, as much as I wanted it to be.

Twenty-three. I’ve decided to study computer science, but immediately realized my mistake. It’s not the study of how to make tools for people that empower them in ways they weren’t before; nor is it the study of how to tell stories with new means. It’s a practice rooted in mathematics and physics, of the underlying mechanics torn from the underlying humanity that gives any of it meaning. I hate it. I truly hate it.

And yet, although every day is a slog, I decide to stick it out. I know I’ll be able to use it later on.

The British system is very far from the American liberal arts approach of allowing students to choose their major after sampling a range of subjects. Here, you effectively have to choose your major when you’re sixteen, and it’s very hard to change. There is very little opportunity to study outside of your core subject.

But I do have one elective, in my second year. I choose Forensic Medicine because I think it will be useful fuel to tell stories. I learn about how forensic pathologists use blood spatter to determine the direction of blows and what kind of weapon is used. I learn Locard’s Principle of Exchange, which dictates that every contact leaves a trace: something that seems to apply far beyond the subject. Every time you touch something, every time something touches you, a trace is left. Inspired by this principle, I decide not to attend the optional autopsy lecture, fearing that it will change me in ways I might not like.

‌Simpson’s Forensic Medicine is a grisly book, but at least it’s not advanced calculus.

Twenty-four. Twenty-five. I came to Edinburgh because it was a cultural center more than because the university had a good computer science program, although both things are true.

I’m in a tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival, chatting with Garry Trudeau. I’ve loved his comic strip, Doonesbury, since I was an early teen; I started with his late-seventies collection ‌As the Kid Goes For Broke, which was lying around my great grandparents’ house, and kept reading. It’s got its claws into the world in the way I like, but somehow made its way into the mainstream, normy Sunday comics section.

He’s a delight. We’re talking about Asterix the Gaul, a comic it turns out we both love. I can’t believe my luck.

How can I be one of these people?

Twenty-six. I’m on the streets of Glasgow, protesting the impending war in Iraq. Altogether, two million people in the UK — around 3% of its entire population — are protesting with us. Some have pre-made placards made by the usual organizations that want to spread their own agenda as well as the matter at hand; others have homemade signs. My friend carries one that simply reads, “too angry for a slogan”.

It’s clear that the war is based on bad information. The so-called “dodgy dossier” of information about “weapons of mass destruction” is so obviously fake long before it is officially revealed to be. And yet, Britain is part of the invasion, and the dossier of convenient unfacts is used to help justify George W Bush’s war effort.

I’m new to politics and I’m apoplectically angry. Chomsky’s ‌Manufacturing Consent has some of the answers I’m looking for. I don’t like the implications, but the arguments resonate.

Clawing at the status quo mainstream starts to mean something more than poking fun at the ridiculous nature of class and power imbalances. Sometimes, lives are on the line.

Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. I’ve graduated. Almost immediately, I go back to work for my university; at that time there aren’t very many software jobs in Edinburgh, and I’ve grown into the city to the extent that I don’t want to leave quite yet.

I find myself working out of an office — actually a converted broom closet with a window that doesn’t shut, directly above where they fry the chips for the study canteen — at the Moray House School of Education with a belligerent PhD candidate who resents my presence. By necessity, we start talking, and it becomes clear that we have something to share with each other. He’s knee deep in the educational technology world, where people are starting to talk about “e-portfolios”: a collection of examples of academic work that sound a lot like social media if you squint a bit. In turn, I’m a programmer, a writer, and a blogger.

We build a platform together. I call it Elgg, after the town in Switzerland the Werdmullers come from. It’s inspired by Brad Fitzpatrick’s LiveJournal but is designed to be as easy to install as WordPress. Some people seem to like it.

My first published work is a co-written chapter in ‌The Handbook of Research in ePortfolios about our work. Later, people write full-blown books about our platform.

I move back to Oxford so that I’m closer to the London software ecosystem. We rent an office above a bookstore in Summertown, down the road from a Lebanese deli and a wine bar that for some reason sells excellent croissants. Some days I’m too excited to sit still in my chair.

I’ve (co-)created something that people like, and found a community in the process. I feel prouder and happier than I have since I was a child. I feel like this was a portal worth falling through.

Twenty-nine. Ben Brown seems interesting. I’m introduced to his site Uber through an Edinburgh friend: irreverent writing with an internet sensibility. I’m heavily online at this point — blogging, but in ways that feel uncool and awkward. What Ben is doing is very different; literary in a way. It’s a precursor of publisher like The Toast and even McSweeney’s.

Ben publishes books as So New Media, an indie house co-founded with James Stegall. I buy ‌Beneath The Axis Of Evil: One Man's Journey Into The Horrors Of War by Neal Pollack. Yet another dive into the Iraq War; another clawback at the Bush / Blair continuum.

Ben’s whole enterprise is inspiring: you can go it alone now. You can maintain your voice. And you can still find an audience while leaving yourself unmoderated. In some ways, on the internet, the rougher your edges are, the easier it is for other people to latch on to you.

Years later, I meet Ben in person at XOXO (he silently sidles up to me at an X-Men arcade machine). Years after that, I buy him lunch in San Francisco. I don’t think he knows exactly what it means to me.

Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. I’m exhausted; gaining weight; my feet, for some reason, are constantly cramping up. It’s all stress. All the startup.

My partner is constantly telling me that I need to relax and take time away from work. The startup is all-encompassing; stressful; in every part of my life. My friends and family try to ban me from working past 7:30pm. She buys me my first-ever massage, which is a revelation, and suggests books for me to read.

I’d previously read ‌Maus, a graphic novel that is both autobiographical a vividly-painted portrait of the horrors of the Holocaust. It uses the visual language of comic strips but the meaning runs deep. I come from a family that was also thrust into WWII: my father is a Japanese concentration camp survivor, my (Jewish) grandfather on my mother’s side was captured by the Nazis and presumed dead. The story itself resonates with me, but the form does too: comics are a flippant visual medium, in a way, but here that’s used as an entry point for a realism that might not have hit as hard another way.

So Helen introduces me to Alan Moore: first through ‌From Hell and then ‌V for Vendetta. Unlike Maus, these are unapologetically fiction, but the use of the comics medium is similarly effective. I particularly like the way From Hell establishes a new psychogeography of London, rooting the story of Jack the Ripper in its location by adding layers and resonances that tie back to the planning of the city itself. It adds something new to places I’ve walked all my life. That’s good. I’m looking for something new.

Thirty-three. My co-founder likes to tell new people we meet that we’re not friends. More than once, he’s threatened to physically fight me: most memorably over the limitations of the OpenID specification. On a drive through the rolling Yorkshire hills, sunshine dappling the moor grass, he tells me that he’s worried about hiring women because they might get pregnant. He pulls me aside during a contract for MIT to let me know he’s in this for himself and that I should expect him to make decisions with that in mind. On a work excursion to Brighton, he refuses to eat with the rest of the team.

This is, in short, not working out.

The business threatens to move towards servicing hedge funds, and I choose to leave. One afternoon, I simply close my laptop and listen to the quiet of my house, the footsteps of pedestrians on the street outside, the swoosh of passing cars. Later, there will be worries about money and what exactly I will do next, but for that one spring afternoon, I feel weightless.

I need punctuation. A clean break.

I’ve never been to Rome in living memory. As it turns out, it’s also cheap to get there.

My then-partner and I spend ten days roaming its ancient streets, armed with the Rough Guide to Rome. “I don’t want this to end,” she says, as we eat grilled artichokes and cacio e pepe on outdoor tables set in a cobblestoned alleyway. It’s a new relationship and we’re discovering each other as well as the twists and turns of an ancient city. “Me either,” I say, and I take another bite.

Thirty-four. I’m six years old. My grandparents live with us for a little while in a grand old house in Oxford: a stone Victorian with a curved driveway and a big back garden. The kitchen has terracotta tiles. My Grandma reads ‌The Black Island to me in my bed and stays with me for a bit while I drift off to sleep.

I’m seven years old. I’m told to stay in my bedroom. My mother’s received a phone call and is crying in the living room. I’m not to go see her. I’m to wait. My Grandma had pulmonary fibrosis in her lungs; she was finding it harder and harder to breathe. And now, so suddenly, she’s gone. All the way in Texas; thousands of miles away from my mother. I can’t begin comprehend the loss but I know that if my mother was sick I would want to see her again.

Thirty-five. My parents have lived in California for years now: first to look after my Oma, and then just to live. Ma — after consistently calling her by her first name throughout my childhood, she’s Ma to me in my thirties — has retrained from an analyst for the telecommunications industry to a middle school science teacher in one of the central valley’s most impoverished districts. She loves her work in a way she never did before.

But she has a persistent cough that won’t let go.

At first we wonder if it’s just the dust of the Central Valley: almond shells and the detritus from overfarming. Maybe she just needs clean air.

It’s almost Christmas-time. I’ve wrapped a copy of ‌You Can Write Children’s Books. She would be so good at it — her writing, the way she tells stories, has always been so magical to me — and it’s so in line with what she’s turned her life to do.

In the liner, I add some written lines of my own, based on her life in Oxford:

In a house at the bottom of a hill, in a small town that rarely saw the sun, there lived a little dog who loved to play.

A few days before Christmas, we understand that she has pulmonary fibrosis. This same thief of a disease my Grandma had. We knew, in a way — my dad, in particular, knew — but the diagnosis makes it official. It’s a new cloud.

What we don’t understand:

What happens next.

What to do next.

How long she has.

Who else will get it.

Why.

Thirty-six. My sister is reading my copy of ‌Parable of the Sower to Ma. She’s perched on my parents’ bed in Santa Rosa. Outside, the sun is shining over the Sonoma hills. Somewhere, my dad is tinkering with something downstairs.

It’s been a while. My sister and I both moved to California, starting from scratch. Ma continued teaching for as long as she could; her middle school science teachers were fascinated by the oxygen tanks she began to wear on her back like a Ghostbuster. Then it became too hard and too heavy, her oxygen needs too great. I sent a Hail Mary letter to the hospital explaining how badly in need she was; her oxygen concentrators were refrigerator sized and running in parallel, her movements limited by how far her cannula tube could extend. Eventually, at the very last moment, they tried something new and cut a set of lungs down to fit her size in order to try and save her life.

The first night, I refuse to leave her side. The doctors eventually kick me out of her ICU room and I sleep in the family room down the hall. The day after happens to be the Super Bowl; she takes her first post-double-lung-transplant walk just as Beyoncé takes to the halftime stage to sing Crazy Right Now.

Now, a few years later, the drugs are taking their toll. She’s tired. She’s often ill. But she’s here. My sister likes to read to her, and she loves lying there and listening. Other times, at the dialysis she now needs because the anti-rejection drugs have killed her kidneys, she reads on a Kindle with the font size cranked practically as high as it will go.

Every day is a gift. Every contact leaves a trace. Every book is a portal out of here.

Thirty-seven. The last book Ma and I read together is ‌The Nickel Boys. It’s the kind of thing she likes to read: a story about America’s monstrous history, told with skill and resonance. We share our reflections of it; the experience of reading the same ideas. Asynchronously, sure, but together all the same.

Thirty-eight. When I move to California I land in Berkeley. I find myself a coworking space above a coffee shop: a mix of developers, academics, and artists. Most of us have a standard office desk, but one inhabitant, Hallie Bateman, has brought in an antique wooden artist’s desk that looks like it’s been dropped in from another dimension. It’s covered in paintbrushes, inks, and paper: fragments of a very different kind of professional life to the one I’m leading.

I continue to follow her work long after we share an office. When she publishes ‌What to Do When I'm Gone: A Mother's Wisdom to Her Daughter — instructions from her own mother about what to do once she dies — I buy it immediately. Back then, when Ma was still around, I could read it all the way through. I no longer can. It sits on my shelf and I sometimes think about it, but grief is like a wave, and I know it can overtake me.

Instead of asking Ma for instructions, I sit down with a tripod and a camera and I record her life story, instead.

Thirty-nine. My Aunt publishes a book about evaluating scientific evidence in the context of civil and criminal legal contexts.

I have it, of course, even though I am not a lawyer and I have no professional need for it. I remember her poring over the edit on her laptop in the downstairs bedroom in my great grandparents’ house on Cape Cod.

The last time I see her, we eat Thai food in the Tenderloin. I have no idea it’s the last time. This disease is evil.

Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two. I’m in Santa Rosa and can still hear the wheels of the pole the feeding tube hangs from wheeling across the floor; of the oxygen clicking through the cannula; of my parents talking. It will fade, eventually, but I’m haunted now, and lost.

My mother talked about being radicalized. Both my parents were Berkeley radicals, which just means that they took action on causes they cared about. I think about all those people I’ve looked up to who kept their claws sharp, who dug in, who fought for equity and didn’t compromise their values, who had a voice and used it.

I walk the Santa Rosa hills, looking at these big houses on the edge of wine country, and listen to the audiobook of ‌The Jakarta Method, which details the murder undertaken in the name of America. I re-read ‌The Handmaid’s Tale. Through ‌Caste, I’m appalled to learn that Hitler’s treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany was inspired by American Jim Crow laws.

By now I know that I won’t get the disease — or at least, not according to our current understanding of that. It’s a genetic mutation that I don’t have. But regardless, we all have limited time, and none of us know how much time we have left. Time is ticking for everyone.

I think about how I might do a better job of using my voice to make the world better. Later, I’ll start applying to jobs where I can help people speak truth to power; to work to further the work of journalism. To honor my mother — really to honor both my parents — and what she stood for in the world. I want to live up to them.

Forty-three. I allow myself to start to write again. Words, not software. It feels daunting. My cousin Sarah, who is a very successful author (and whose books, although not designed for me, have made me cry), once recommended ‌Bird By Bird. I’ve come back to it again and again: it’s about writing but also not. Its lessons are relevant to anyone who is building something big and new; anyone who is picking themselves up.

‌You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

Forty-four. The last book Ma gives me is ‌Between the World and Me: a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son. It is masterful. A portal to lived experiences I don’t have; a way in to understanding them, and through this understanding, to better understand the role I have to play, too.

It’s not the main point of the book, but one of those unknown lived experiences: having a son and the sense of responsibility that follows. I can’t imagine the fear of caring for a child while being Black in America; I can’t imagine having a child at all.

Forty-five. Erin’s labor has been two days long, difficult, and painful. Our son wasn’t breathing in the way they expected him to, so I’m standing at a table off to the side while they put a mask to him and try to get him to start. I find myself wondering if this is, somehow, the disease, this curse, out to get us again.

Eventually, after a few minutes that seem like days or years, my heart pounding in my chest all the while, he breathes normally. We’re able to return him, the doctors and me, to his waiting mother. He cries, then snuggles in. She cries with him.

I can’t believe Ma will never meet him. She’s there, of course. I remember the songs she sang to me and sing them to him; I find myself using the same words to console him and to let him know he’s loved. Maybe I won’t read him The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but I have other books in mind.

There will be new books, too, that we did not discover together but will continue our story.

Have you ever read ‌The Runaway Bunny?

“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” said his mother, “I will be a tree that you come home to.”

She is nowhere and she is everywhere. I see her in him. I see myself in him and him in me. Every contact leaves a trace. We are a continuum.

Forty-six. Donald Trump has been re-elected. The shadow of renewed nationalism, of division, of hate feels heavier than ever. The world is at, or on the brink of, war. I remember marching in Glasgow, the despair when it came to nothing. We are all in need of a refuge. We are all in need of portals out of here.

We’re lying in bed: Erin, him, and me. “Read a book?” My son asks me. Of course I read to him. Of course.

I open ‌The Story of Ferdinand and begin:

‌Once upon a time in Spain there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand. All the other little bulls he lived with would run and jump and butt their heads together, but not Ferdinand. He liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.

He snuggles into my arm and I stay with him until he falls asleep.

You know what they say: predictions are like resurgent nationalist movements. Everyone’s got one.

I missed the deadline for Nieman Lab’s always-excellent Predictions for Journalism this year, so I thought I’d share a few more bite-sized predictions about various topics I’ve written over the last year. Every prediction says more about the person making it than about the actual future; please take these in that light. I am not a soothsayer, but boy, do I have opinions.

Here are some of them:

The AI industry will continue to orient itself around its definition of AGI, regardless of its harms.

OpenAI and Microsoft’s definition of artificial general intelligence is not what you might suspect: they define it as the point where AI systems can generate at least $100 billion in profits. Given that the industry is losing billions of dollars hand over fist today, there’s a long way to go.

Closing that gap means selling in lots of different places, but the most lucrative are going to be deeper partnerships with mass-market systems, government, and military applications. For all of OpenAI’s talk about not creating AI that will make us extinct through its intelligence, I predict it and companies like it will take firmer steps towards assisting companies who might kill us through more prosaic means.

AI vendors may also look at ways to reduce the cost of sanitizing and tagging its input data — currently often outsourced overseas. They may, for example, consider using prison labor, taking cues from Finland, which has engaged in the practice for years.

Publishers will pivot to AI, with predictable results.

Lured by up-front payouts and a carefully-cultivated (and heavily paid-for) sense that they’re missing out if they’re not participating, many news publishers will be all-in on AI. It will be to their detriment.

Publishers with low-volume qualitative output will mistakenly think that their high-quality stories are more valuable to AI vendors, fundamentally misunderstanding how training data is acquired and used. They will not see the ongoing licensing premiums for their content that they might hope for.

Publishers with high-volume output will allow their stories to be used as training data. They will find that ongoing revenue suffers as a result and that those payments only temporarily addressed a downward funding trend that will continue apace.

Only the publishers who treat AI as a side issue and continue to address their fundamental value to their readers and communities will succeed.

The United States will not create a Bitcoin reserve.

Despite calls and even a pledge to the contrary, President Trump will not follow through with creating any kind of crypto reserve or an intentional stockpile of Bitcoin. It’s simply not in his interests: the US dollar is not just a currency but a global network of power and influence that he can leverage to his advantage.

But don’t rejoice quite yet, crypto-skeptics. Instead of stockpiling existing, independent cryptocurrencies, he might plausibly create a new coin with US interests in mind and with the official seal of a government endorsement, with partners drawn from his existing network. (USDC, the prevailing dollar-backed stablecoin, is issued by Circle, a private company. This would be a replacement.) The result would almost certainly be more profit for his own private interests and that of his friends, particularly as he could incentivize traditional American banks to support it as a transfer mechanism.

Threads will implement full ActivityPub integration but continue to struggle to release it in the EU.

Confounding its skeptics, Threads will release full end-to-end support for the ActivityPub specification that allows it to act as one cohesive social network with Mastodon, among other platforms. The immediate effect will be a change of the center of gravity in the Fediverse: rather than Threads being seen to integrate with Mastodon, Mastodon and every Fediverse platform will be seen as Threads-compatible. (Mastodon et al will continue to support smaller communities with specific needs; Threads will be the mass market platform on the network.)

Because of the way data is federated between systems in ActivityPub, and because of Meta’s data commitments as a large platform owner, this compatibility will not launch in the EU without major changes to the experience. Meta will endeavor to work with the authors of ActivityPub to make it easier to comply with EU data restrictions, but may be seen as trying to exert undue influence over the protocol by some in the community.

Some social media platforms will relocate from the US.

In an effort to maintain independence and avoid complying with restrictions to Section 230 and an uptick in government subpoenas under the Trump administration, some social media platforms will move their headquarters to countries that allow them to maintain more independence.

Neutral Switzerland will be a favorite. Because of a local requirement to have some Swiss ownership of countries located there, some founders will seek to go through its notoriously difficult naturalization process; there will also be an influx of repatriated Swiss tech entrepreneurs who see an opportunity in helping out.

TikTok will continue to operate, but will need to take it to the Supreme Court.

The law banning TikTok goes into effect on January 19, one day before the inauguration of the new President. It cannot comply. It’s likely, therefore, that it will take up the case and bring it to the Supreme Court. The Court may then decide that the law was written with punishing a single target in mind (TikTok alone), without a preceding trial for the claimed crimes, and could repeal it on that basis.

Bird flu will be a thing.

California has already declared a state of emergency because of its spread in cattle, and the virus has already mutated in human hosts to become more infectious. 66 people have died from it at the time of writing. On the prediction markets, the probability of a million cases by the end of the year is soaring.

Whether this becomes a global pandemic like COVID-19 will be up to governments to respond. Given the US government that will be in power when this does, inevitably, become a thing, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether the response will be science-based and adequately up to the challenge.

Long-form fiction will (continue to) rise.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the death of books. Elle Griffin’s piece No one buys books has been particularly influential. It’s also not a complete picture.

It’s absolutely true that the big publishing houses are consolidating and that there are fewer opportunities to be published by them if you don’t have an existing community. But there’s a long tail of smaller publishing houses, and self-publishing has become more than a cottage industry. The latter isn’t just hacks banging out AI-written non-fiction self-help books; there are many, many authors building genuinely great careers on their own terms. They’re not Stephen King millionaires, but they’re making a great living — particularly in genres like dark romance that big publishing houses might be less excited to touch.

In a world that is going to feel a bit more adverse (see my other predictions above), independent, interesting fiction that speaks to the needs of its audience will both find that audience and do well with it. In turn, the continued rise of ereaders will make the relative lack of placement in bookstores for those titles almost irrelevant. Fiction is undergoing the classic disruption story; it’s not dying at all.

This disruption will accelerate in 2025. There’s even an opportunity to do for long-form fiction what Substack did for newsletters, and I’d bet that someone will take it. Even without such a platform, the Kindle Direct Publishing program and services like IngramSpark (together with sales support from the likes of BookBub etc) will allow the market to continue to grow.

Unions movements will continue to grow, particularly for knowledge workers. Whether they’ll win is up in the air.

The labor movement continues to gain strength, and unions have historically high support, although actual union membership remains incredibly low. The first trend is likely to continue, particularly as AI continues to threaten the livelihoods of knowledge workers, and as the Trump administration emboldens employers to roll back benefits and DEI initiatives: they will attempt to unionize in greater numbers, with more ferocity, and more interruptions to work while they negotiate for stronger protections.

Will they win? I don’t know. Union contract negotiations can take years, so it’s hard to say what the outcome will be. If they do win, the outcome will be higher wages, stronger benefits, and better working conditions for employees. (That’s what unions do.) But historically, knowledge worker unions have had a hard time convincing colleagues to sign up; see the Alphabet Workers Union, whose membership is a tiny fraction of Alphabet’s total employment base.

What did I miss? What did I get wrong?

Those are some of my predictions for 2025. What are yours? Where do you disagree? I’d love to hear from you.

For many of us, myself included, it’s been .. a year. Rather than rehash all of that again, I thought I’d mark the end of the year by just listing some things I’ve loved. Here you go.

Books

Julia, by Sandra Newman

Not just a retelling but a complete recasting of 1984. It's helpful to consider this as a separate work: a response to 1984, in a way, rather than a layering on top or a direct sequel. It's a criticism, an extension, a modernization, and a deep appreciation for the ideas all in one - and I was hooked. There's so much I want to write about here, but I don't want to spoil it. The ending, in particular, is perfect.

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over, by Anne de Marcken

Breathtaking from start to finish. A zombie novel as carrier for something deeper, so true and so sad. I read it alone in the dark, and thought to myself, thank god, something is real.

‌Infinite Detail, by Tim Maughan

A book about what happens when the Internet goes away, yes, but there’s something much more than that: the exploration of humanity as content between advertising, the questions about what happens next post-revolution, the overlapping mysticism and open-source pragmatism, the breathing, beating characters, the class politics woven throughout.

‌Moonbound, by Robin Sloan

An adventure story that didn't quite sit in any of the categories I had for it in my head, and which frequently made me laugh out loud with its tiny details. It sits somewhere between science fiction, fantasy, satire, and a meditation on the role of stories, wrapped up in a whimsical, breezy narrative that was always a joy. I'd hoped it was leading to a more momentous ending than the one that eventually landed, but that's only because the constituent pieces were so satisfying to explore through.

TV

‌Only Murders in the Building

While cozy mysteries have been a mainstay of British TV for decades, American television has generally veered towards procedural stories that serve as propaganda pieces for law enforcement, complete with weak network television writing and story-of-the-week production values. There hasn’t been, as far as I’m aware, a really good cozy series since Murder, She Wrote — but Only Murders fits the bill. It’s as funny as anything Steve Martin and Martin Short have ever done, but also completely unthreatening: a lovely way to spend an evening.

‌Slow Horses

This ongoing tale of dysfunctional MI5 agents could have been rotten: for example, if it had intentionally glorified the security services of played into tired Cold War tropes. It doesn’t and it isn’t; frequently the worst offender in its seasons is the machinations of the government itself, and its characters are nothing like the spy tropes we’re used to. Most of all, it’s great fun, and pretty one of the best things to have come out of any streaming service.

‌Doctor Who

Look, obviously. I’m well-documented as a lifelong Whovian. But this year’s offerings were fresher than usual, if pitched down to a younger audience than the series had been aiming for recently. The two-parter finale was a ridiculous take on an almost 50-year-old story, but episodes like Boom (an anticapitalist tale about the arms trade), Dot and Bubble (which could have been one of the best Black Mirror episodes), and 73 Yards (a kind of time travel ghost story) were some of the best the show has ever delivered. It’s still the best TV show of all time, so there.

‌The Tourist

New to me this year, this had the right combination of tension and wry irony to keep me watching. I’ve been a fan of Jamie Dornan since The Fall, but Danielle Macdonald is an equal standout: some beautiful acting that makes a ridiculous premise seem real. The second season isn’t quite as good at the first, but only because some of the mystery has understandably been lost.

Articles and Blog Posts

‌We Need To Rewild The Internet, by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon

‌ Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

An important — and detailed — call to action about the future of the internet. In lots of ways it should set the tone for how we build on the internet in 2025.

‌On Being Human and “Creative”, by Heather Bryant

‌What generative AI creates is not any one person's creative expression. Generative AI is only possible because of the work that has been taken from others. It simply would not exist without the millions of data points that the models are based upon. Those data points were taken without permission, consent, compensation or even notification because the logistics of doing so would have made it logistically improbable and financially impossible.

A wonderful piece from Heather Bryant that explores the humanity — the effort, the emotion, the lived experience, the community, the unique combination of things — behind real-world art that is created by people, and the theft of those things that generative AI represents.

‌Inside Medium’s decade-long journey to find its own identity, by Ryan Broderick

‌Replacing Williams was Tony Stubblebine, who may have seemed a little random to anyone scanning the headlines at the time. At that point he was running Coach.me, a personal life coaching platform, and heading up Better Humans, a Medium partner publication dedicated to personal development. But his roots in Twitter and, thus, in Medium, go all the way to, well, before the beginning. In the mid-2000s, he was the director of engineering at Odeo, the podcasting startup that would become the launching ground for Twitter.

Tony has turned Medium around, which has been lovely to see. I have emotional but not financial skin in this game: I enjoyed my time working at Medium eight years ago, I’ve known Tony for going on 20 years, and I’m similarly a fan of Ev. But I also just think the more places there are for considered voices to find their community, the better, and Medium has an important take on how to do it well. This piece was a good introduction to all of it.

‌Why we invented a new metric for measuring readership, by Alexandra Smith

We used to measure our journalism’s reach and impact with website views, visitors, and engaged time—the methods many of our funders insisted on. But even when we included stats about our social media engagement, newsletter subscribers, and member community, our audience data reports still didn’t accurately reflect the ways we were serving people with our journalism.

In this piece, Alexandra introduced a way of measuring reach and impact for journalism that took into account the fact that audiences don’t encounter it in one place — that the internet is, in fact, fractured, and journalism often takes different forms to meet its readers where they’re at. That’s light years ahead of how most newsrooms have been thinking. This piece has shaped the conversation since it was released. It’s also thought-provoking for indieweb stalwarts like me: for lots of reasons, I think the website shouldbe the center of the universe for journalism, and ultimately you measure what matters. This approach doesn’t downplay the website but does say: what matters is the connection you make with other humans, wherever it happens.

Software

Todoist

I’m late to this party, but what an actual joy to find a todo list utility that actually works the way my brain does. The hotkeys allow me to add a task to the list whenever I need to — often mid-conversation — and then let me order them by time so I can figure out what to do next. And it’s everywhere I need it to be. No notes or complaints.

‌Surf

Flipboard’s new “browser for the social web” is ace: an app that wouldn’t have been possible with proprietary social media. Users create playlists of sources — which is to say, people and publishers, irrespective of where they happen to be publishing. You can then peruse new content by people on those playlists and filter them by links, video, other media, and so on. Not only is the signal to noise ratio far higher, but it’s far less exhausting than other social media apps. It’s now the only social app I’ll allow on my phone.

HTML and CSS

They’re still pretty great, and getting better and better! Did you know CSS has nesting now? I’ve been enjoying using it.

The Fediverse

The single most important improvement to the web in decades. Hooray!

Hardware

‌Kobo Libra Colour

Honestly, this ebook reader has changed my life. The color screen (canonically a colour screen, but I’ve been in the States for long enough that I feel compelled to discard the “u”) doesn’t matter to me all that much, but it’s responsive, has really great clarity, is light enough to read one-handed, and, most importantly of all, allows a parent of a co-sleeping toddler to read in bed without waking up his child. That last one is a gamechanger. Also, it works with library books and isn’t Amazon-bound, which were both important to me.

‌CalDigit TS4

I’d never really needed a docking station until this year. This thing’s got a bunch of ports, a huge amount of throughput, memory card support, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, and sits on my desk in perfect silence. I flip between my work laptop and my personal computers really easily. It’s perfect. Now all I need to add is a USB-C KVM switch and I’ll be able to switch between personal and work machines with one button.

Other

‌Amtrak Metropolitan Lounges

These days I travel between Philadelphia and New York City very regularly. Amtrak’s generously rewards points system means that I quickly built up enough status to gain access to its station lounges. They’re not spectacularly fancy but do come with comfortable seating and free coffee, and for that alone they’ve been a big upgrade for my commutes. A shoutout also needs to go to the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station, which improves the experience of spending time at Penn from being locked in the Backrooms to something you might actually choose to look forward to.

‌The Guardian

The only news publication I let send notifications to my phone (aside from the one I work for). The Guardian’s breaking news journalism is reliably good, and it has specialized feeds to subscribe to particular topics — not just for high-level topics like Business, but for example, specific news for the Middle East conflict or the war in Ukraine. I also appreciate The Guardian’s responsible, reader-centric approach to funding: despite being paywall-free, readers account for over half of its budget.

‌Ms. Moni

We’re reluctantly on the YouTube train with our toddler. There are a bunch of performers who are trying very hard to find audiences in the wake of the success of the likes of Ms. Rachel (who is great) and Blippi (who is like nails on a chalkboard to me, although his stablemate Meekah is a lot better). By far my favorite of the genre is Monica Ferreira: an Australian teacher and professional musician who started recording YouTube videos after experiencing chronic pain. She edits, composes, and builds the graphics for her videos herself, with high production values and no junk content. It’s been a breath of fresh air, and honestly, a relief.

What about you?

What were your favorite things from 2024? Let me know what I missed.

As part of a coaching exercise, I’ve been trying to describe what I want my life to look like. The idea is that if I’m armed a better understanding of what I’m aiming for, I’ll be able to make more informed decisions that more intentionally lead me towards my goals for my life. So far, so simple. But in practice, I’ve found it impossibly difficult: a giant question that it feels impossible to even find the right scope and parameters for, let alone answer. What do I want my life to look like? How do I want to live?

If you stare at this question for long enough, you begin to feel like you’re being asked to define the meaning of life itself. Insane. You can’t. It’s the kind of question that is easy to be flippant about but otherwise feels impossible to approach. For now, I think we can say this: all of us create our own meaning and get to decide what’s important to us. In turn, that can inform the details and decisions of our day-to-day.

Living goals are a superset of work goals, which people often talk about. I’ve written many times that my professional goal is to work on projects that have the potential to help make the world more equal and informed. But why? How does that fit into my larger, human goals?

It’s hard to talk about what I think my life should look like without talking about the context — and the country — it sits in. That means talking about America, and the framing constraints it provides to everyone who lives in it.

And to be clear, for many people, America is constraining. The country is so steeped in an exploitative culture of work that there are is no statutory minimum number of vacation days and the national minimum wage is set below a level where anyone can reasonably live. The health insurance system is predatory, and your healthcare is typically connected to your employer, making it hard to change jobs or go out on your own. Unless you’re in a handful of cities, which themselves are expensive to live in, you need to own a car to get just about anywhere. Union membership is de minimus, leading to an imbalance towards corporations and the wealthy. Homeless people have very few avenues for help. The police all carry guns, and disproportionately use them on Black people. And on top of it all, the recent resurgence of rhetoric reminiscent of the 1930s, including stadiums of people carrying placards that read “mass deportations now,” is deeply troubling. I’ve started to wonder if Americans talk about freedom so much because most of them don’t have very much of it: to many people it’s the freedom to buy and say more or less what they want, but not the freedom to define the parameters of their lives or their work.

And at the same time, for the well-off and privileged, the experience of living in America can be freeing. The benefits at the slickest San Francisco tech companies I worked at were effectively equivalent to the minimum standards that every European gets by law, but there were far better parental leave policies for non-birthing parents and a culture of free food, drink, and other services in the office. My partner works for Google and their health insurance is almost as good as universal healthcare. There’s a sense of optimism and “you can do it”; there’s abundant capital and support for founders trying something new. If you’re in the in-crowd, there’s support.

I moved to the US from Edinburgh almost fourteen years ago. It as a no-brainer, but not because I wanted to live in America: my mother was terminally ill and I wanted to be close to her, and she’d moved to California a decade prior. The move completely blew up my life in ways that were sometimes very painful, but the core decision to be closer is not one I’ve ever regretted. While her life was thankfully extended by a double lung transplant that meant we got to have many more years with her, living with a transplant is hard: the remainder of her life was a medical rollercoaster that I’m glad I was there to help with.

But in the meantime, Brexit happened: Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union. I grew up in Britain but had lived there as part of the European Union. When its EU membership was revoked, I lost the legal right to live there. My relationship to the US transformed from it being a place that I was visiting temporarily to a place I was involuntarily stuck in.

There was a lot I appreciated about living in Europe. While a lot of ink has been spilled about universal healthcare, few talk about how freeing it is to not be afraid of seeing a doctor because you know you’ll never get a bill. There’s frequent, inexpensive, integrated transit everywhere. Cities and towns are built as mixed-use communities, which means you can easily walk to all your local services and stores. There are very few guns. Far fewer people own cars because they don’t need to. The quality of life of an average person — which is not just a subjective opinion but has been measured again and again — is higher. As a British resident, I was entitled to thirty-six vacation days a year (seven weeks!) as a legal minimum.

It feels like life in America is subject to layers of permission. You can go buy food — if you have a car. You can go to the doctor — if you have adequate health insurance. You can live a reasonable life — if you don’t fall through the cracks. You can go to college — if you’re willing to take on many tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Until very recently, you even needed to hire a third-party service (or firm) to file your taxes.

To be honest, I’ve often seen my life in America as being reactive rather than proactive: I moved here in reaction to a health emergency and remain here because of a referendum that was out of my control. I’ve often felt that I don’t have autonomy, and building community has often been harder than I would have liked because of the individualistic nature of American society and the chaos of my own life.

In Europe, life is more free-range. If you need to buy food, you can walk to the store and pick some up. You can just go to the doctor. Higher education is much more affordable and grade school education is of a much higher standard. More benefits lead to more freedom, because those things are simply taken care of: you don’t have to worry about paying for them at the point of use. Although the tax burden is a little higher, you also end up paying less out of pocket in total.

Europe is also much, much safer — particularly if you’re a child. (These days I’m understandably very focused on keeping my child safe.) Between 2009 and 2018, Western Europe had fewer than ten school shootings; the United States had 288, representing 86% of the world’s total of shootings. It’s not just about the terrifying prevalence of guns: children are also three times more likely to die on the road in the US.

At the same time, I’ve come to realize that Europe is more restrictive in other ways. It’s unquestionably more racist and less diverse, for example, in part because it refuses to actually examine its culpability in racism and, in particular, the slave trade. (Ask a European about racism and they’re quite likely to reply, “we don’t have those problems here.” Yes, you do.) A healthy community, and a healthy society, must be intentionally inclusive and equitable. You can’t get there by sticking your head in the sand.

There’s also a comparative lack of funding and support for people who are trying to build something new, even if the comparatively higher level of public benefits means that bootstrapping is easier. It’s also worth calling out that since I left, those benefits have been eroded, often by conservative politicians who want to wipe public benefits in favor of so-called private efficiency. It’s nothing less than theft, but it’s an emerging reality that diminishes Europe’s attractiveness.

Traversing these two worlds has directly informed how I think about what living well means. Sometimes I’ve been too cynical about the possibilities here in the US; if I’m honest with myself, I sometimes railed against the constraints when I lived in Europe. I think I need to open my mind, regardless of my location.

I recently visited a friend who lives in a community intentionally built as a platform for environmental and social change. I’d visited plenty of intentional communities back when I lived in San Francisco, and I’d always found them superficial: places that were more oriented around performing communal living than practicing the practical reality of it.

In stark contrast, my friend’s community blew my mind open: it was the kind of place I would never have allowed myself to imagine existing in the US.

I’m going to withhold detail to safeguard their privacy, but every aspect of it felt concretely-anchored to real, genuine progress towards change while centering the joy of being a human in community. The single phrase that came to mind was that the residents were free-range: they were free to spend time with each other on a whim, as needed, without need for appointment or permission. They could simply walk to get the everyday resources they needed, including to plug into their community and commune as people. This was true for the adults, but most notably and importantly for me, it was true for the children, too. It was common there for parents to not know where their children were — but they knew they were safe.

My conceptual frame for the kinds of lifestyles that are possible in America has been permanently widened — and consequently, I have more hope that I can live a good life here. Most importantly, it gave me the vocabulary I needed in order to describe the kind of life I want to have.

So now I can say this: I want my life — and the lives of my family — to be free-range, in open community, emotionally safe, and creatively unconstrained.

Free-range

A lifestyle where physical, emotional, and logistical constraints are minimized, allowing for organic interactions and movement. Or to put it another way, a life where you need to ask permission as little as possible: an independent, creative way of being where you’re not tethered to unnecessary constraints.

For example:

• You can walk or bike to essential services.
• Children can free play both at home and in the surrounding community without worry.
• You can spontaneously visit people, take trips, or go on adventures without the predominant need to extensively plan or make appointments.
• You have time and space to create and work on personal projects that aren’t scheduled and aren’t necessarily tethered to the need to make money.
• You have the safety to know that if you don’t have salaried work for a little while, you’ll still be protected, and you’ll still have healthcare.

Counter-examples of things that are emphatically not free-range:

• Scheduling my child so that their time outside of school is highly structured and they don’t have time or space to be creative on their own terms (or be bored, which I think is really important as a spark for creative thinking in its own right).
• Structuring and scheduling your own time so you don’t have optionality.
• Car-centric living.
• Gated communities and HOAs.
• An expectation that you should do what is popular or pre-ordained by the outside mainstream as “the right way to live”.

In open community

Living in an inclusive space where relationships are intentional, resources are shared, and collaboration is encouraged.

For example:

• Neighbors borrow tools, share meals, and trade skills to reduce waste and strengthen relationships.
• Open doors and welcoming spaces where it’s normal to drop by for a chat or lend a hand without the need for formality or pre-planning.
• A community that helps each other during collective challenges, from childcare to caregiving to problem-solving.
• There are adequate communal resources like parks, libraries, and community meeting spaces. (Even pubs, in the traditional English sense, where they’re a sort of communal living room.)
• There’s a sense that no matter how adverse the outside world is, you have allies who also see it for what it is and are here for you no matter what.
• You have the space and time to care for people — parents, children, other people in your community who need it.

Counter-examples:

• Isolated living, where neighbors barely know one another or engage in meaningful connection.
• “Rugged individualism,” where everyone is expected to fend for themselves as a virtue.
• A culture of competition rather than collaboration.
• Who children can play with is closely guarded. Sleepovers are not allowed.
• You don’t have the time and space to be a caregiver because you need to be at work all the time.

Emotionally safe

Living in an inclusive environment where vulnerability is met with care and understanding, and where people feel supported to be their authentic selves. Emotional intimacy and intellectual openness are highly valued.

For example:

• People are comfortable expressing their emotions, thoughts, and opinions without fear of judgment or ridicule. This is particularly important within partnerships and families, but it’s important across communities.
• A culture that embraces diversity, respects boundaries, and fosters a sense of belonging for everyone, regardless of background or identity. People feel comfortable and safe to be themselves.
• Disagreements are addressed constructively, with empathy and a focus on understanding rather than blame.
• The community is supportive of trying new things and of failure, and help pick you up and dust you off to try again.
• Physical safety: there’s no threat of violence.

Counter-examples:

• Demanding perfection and punishing failure.
• A culture where people feel they must suppress their feelings to “keep the peace.”
• A culture with an in-crowd and an out-crowd: for example, an environment where one religion is accepted and others are frowned upon, or where the “traditional” family is venerated. Xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and transphobia all fall into this category.
• A world where being different to an accepted mainstream is frowned upon, with aggressions that range from micro to macro. People might sneer about preferred pronouns, for example, or make “I identify as …” jokes. Or they might blacklist you.

Creatively unconstrained

Having the time, resources, and mental space to pursue creative interests and projects without undue outside pressure. At work, having the autonomy to make decisions and follow your expertise, instincts, and values with minimal interference.

For example:

• Days with enough unstructured time to dream, experiment, or follow your curiosity without interruption — and both the implicit permission to do so and the common understanding that it’s not a waste of time.
• Friends, family, and communities that celebrate creativity for its own sake, regardless of output or success.
• The respect and autonomy to create a strategy and execute on it at work.
• The ability to center your values and perspective in your work.
• Prioritizing wellness and balance so your mental energy isn’t consumed by stress or logistical chaos.
• Engaging in hobbies or projects without worrying about monetizing them. For example, painting for relaxation, writing purely for self-expression, or tinkering for joy.
• Dedicated physical space to work on your projects, either alone or in collaboration with others.

Counter-examples:

• A lifestyle so busy with work or obligations that there’s no mental or physical bandwidth for creativity.
• Feeling like every creative effort must result in a product or service that generates income, or where they are dismissed as unproductive unless they have a tangible outcome.
• Avoiding creative work due to self-criticism or the societal pressure to succeed.
• Being micro-managed or edited, at work or in life.
• Being forced to work on things that are in opposition to your values.

Okay, but why these pillars in particular?

Really it’s a framing device: each one speaks to a need for time, space, relationships of care and trust, and self-direction. They pick and choose the best bits of living in my various contexts — living in Europe and America, being a startup founder, a parent, a carer — and tie them together into principles for a life that feels nurturing.

• Free-range ties to autonomy and the joy of unstructured living.
• In open community reflects a human need for connection and mutual support, without restrictions based on identity.
• Emotionally safe speaks to belonging and trust.
• Creatively unconstrained emphasizes self-expression and personal growth.

The theme of inclusivity sits across many of these. It’s important to me because of my need for community and for emotional safety: I want my friends and families to be included, regardless of their backgrounds and identities, and I want to feel safe myself, as a person with a complicated personal context and a non-standard identity.

It’s also worth calling out what’s not here: wealth, or power, or influence. Those aren’t important to me unless they’re a way to get to these pillars.

My values are simply that everyone should be able to live this sort of life, regardless of who they are or where in the world they live. Everyone deserves autonomy, connection, support, safety, and the freedom to be themselves and express themselves openly. It’s not just that I want this for me, although clearly I do: I want to work towards this being an open, shared set of living principles that are available to all.

I’ve thought a lot about helping the world get there — remember, I want to work on projects with the potential to make the world more informed and equal. But the path to helping me get there is a little different. It involves carefully choosing the projects I work on, the team cultures I take part in, how I make money, how I present myself to the world, and the people and communities I associate with.

This framework will evolve with time and feedback, shaped by new experiences and perspectives. But for now, it offers a compass — one that points toward a life that feels authentic, nurturing, and achievable.

Let’s go.