Werd I/O

[Bop Spotter]

"I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below."

As surveillance goes, I'm into it. I appreciate the commentary:

"Heard of Shot Spotter? Microphones are installed across cities across the United States by police to detect gunshots, purported to not be very accurate. This is that, but for music."

I don't give it much time before someone figures out where it is and tries to mess with it, though.

#Culture

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[Molly Lempriere and Simon Evans in CarbonBrief]

"Remarkably, the UK’s coal power phaseout – as well as the closure of some of the country’s few remaining blast furnaces at Port Talbot in Wales and Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire – will help push overall coal demand in 2024 to its lowest level since the 1600s."

The UK aims to fully decarbonize its power supplies by 2030. That involves phasing out gas power in under six years: a big milestone and an ambitious goal, and one it hopes will be a case study for other nations.

Meanwhile, the US continues to limp along, generating around 60% of its electricity from fossil fuels. In light of accelerating climate change, that's a figure we should be truly embarrassed about.

#Climate

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[Rest of World]

"Technology has transformed how we spend, study, live, eat — even how we sleep. And for the 6.75 billion people around the world who consider themselves religious, technology is also changing their faith. How people worship, pray, and commune with the divine is transforming from Seoul to Lagos."

These are amazing stories that sometimes sound like provocative satire: PETA is building robot elephants for Hindu temples, for example. Or take this app, which will narrate the Bible in your own voice, perhaps so that you can make it more accessible for your children.

Many of the examples feel a lot like startups spotting new markets without consideration for whether they should. Some are more authentic. All are continuing examples of how the internet is changing religious life all over the world.

#Technology

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[Tracy Durnell]

"Blogs coax out deeper thinking in smaller blocks. A blog gives you the space to explore and nurture ideas over time, perhaps growing so slowly you hardly notice the extent of the evolution of your thoughts till you read something you wrote a few years ago."

Everyone should blog. It's been the single most transformative tool in my career - and a huge part of my life.

Given the latter part, I needed to hear this:

"We know, when we’re reading a blog, that we’re getting a glimpse into the writer’s active psyche, a tour of their studio as it were — not hearing their thesis presentation or reading their pre-print publication; hearing from other people being people is part of the appeal of blogs."

Over the last few years I've downgraded the amount of personal writing in this space in favor of more thoughts about technology. I never quite know where the balance is, but I think there's a lot to be said for turning the dial closer to the personal.

If you haven't started yet: try it and let me know about it. I'd love to read your thoughts.

And if you know you want to start but don't know where, Get Blogging! has your back.

#Technology

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[Robin Rendle]

"Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”"

Yes. Co-signed.

Speaking of which ...

"ProPublica, the nation’s leading nonprofit investigative newsroom, is in search of a full-stack senior product engineer to lead work on our publishing systems and core website."

I'm looking for an exceptional engineer who cares about the open web to join my team. If that's you - or you know someone who fits this description - there are more details at this link. I'm here to answer any questions!

#Technology

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[Laura Hazard Owen at NiemanLab]

There are some interesting referral statistics embedded in this piece. Facebook referral traffic has fallen more than 40% over the last year; referrals from Reddit have increased by 88%.

But the focus is this:

"Search traffic, still dominated by Google search, has remained relatively steady during the period, Brad Streicher, sales director at Chartbeat, said in a panel at the Online News Association’s annual conference in Atlanta last week. Google Discover — the Google product offering personalized content recommendations via Google’s mobile apps — is increasingly becoming a top referrer, up 13% across Chartbeat clients since January 2023."

I think what's particularly notable here is the shift between kind of product. Google Search, despite the black box nature of its ever-changing algorithm, always felt like it was a part of the open web.

Discover, on the other hand, is an algorithmic recommendation product that tries to proactively give users more of what they want to read. It's much more akin to a Facebook newsfeed than it is a search index. There are likely editors behind the scenes, and a human touch to what gets surfaced. Publishers are even more in the dark about how to show up there than they were about how to rise through search engine rankings.

I'm curious about what this means for the web. Is this just an advertising / walled garden play from a company that wants to maximize advertising revenue and time on platform? Or is it a reflection of the web getting too big and too messy for many users, creating the need for a firmer hand to show them where the good content is? Is it a function of increased skittishness about an open web that might publish content and ideas that aren't brand safe? Or is it just changing user behavior in light of other apps?

Perhaps some elements of all of the above?

#Media

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[Paul Bradley Carr]

"I’ve worked at (and founded!) my fair share of billionaire-funded publications and I’ve always had a firm rule: You have to be more critical of the people writing the checks (and their cronies) than you are of anyone else. It’s the only way to offset the inherent bias of taking their money."

Paul Carr discusses quitting his column at the SF Standard because of its newfound apparent shyness when it comes to criticizing tech moguls - which is a serious journalistic flaw when you consider how important said moguls are to the culture and politics of San Francisco.

This is in the wake of fallout from its coverage of Ben Horowitz's conversion to MAGA, to which the subjects publicly objected. The SF Standard's backer, Michael Moritz, is another wealthy tech backer, who has actually been collaborating with Horowitz's partner Marc Andreessen to build a sort of city of the future on repurposed agricultural land in the North Bay.

As Paul points out, there must be a separation of church and state between editorial and business operations in a newsroom in order to maintain journalistic integrity. That doesn't seem to be something every newcomer understands.

#Media

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[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation]

Dan Kennedy picks up on a detail in Brian Stelter's Atlantic article about troubles at the Washington Post:

"The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag on the bottom line."

He goes on to sing Arc's praises, but notes that 25% of its staff were just laid off, and wonders what went wrong there.

Here's what I think happened. There were two parallel forces at play:

• Newsrooms are not natural software companies (except for their own ends).
• Content management systems are a commodity technology.

It's notable that almost every newsroom that has built its own CMS has eventually left it in favor of a platform built by someone else - most commonly WordPress. Sinking resources into building your own means spending money to solve problems that someone else has already solved, and often solved well.

Particularly in tough times for the industry, newsrooms need to be spending money on the things that differentiate them, not by reinventing perfectly good wheels. WordPress isn't zero cost - most newsrooms partner with an agency and a managed hosting provider like WordPress VIP - but it's a lot cheaper than building all those features yourself would be. And the outcome by picking an open source platform is likely higher quality.

The exception is if the way you both think about and present content is radically different to anyone else. If you're truly a beautiful and unique snowflake, then, yes, building your own CMS is a good idea. But there isn't a single newsroom out there that is unique.

Likewise, if I'm a potential customer (and, as it turns out, I am!), I don't know why I'd pick a proprietary platform that's subject to the changing business strategies of its troubled owner over an open source platform which gives me direct ownership over the code and powers a significant percentage of the web. The upside would have to be stratospherically good. Based on sales emails I get that choose to focus on Arc's AI readiness, that case isn't being made.

The outcome is a bit sad. We need newsrooms; we need journalism; we need an informed voting population. Honestly, the Arc bet was worth trying: I can see how a platform play would have been a decent investment. But that doesn't seem to be how it's panned out, to the detriment of its parent.

#Media

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[Casey Newton at Platformer]

This fantastic round-up post focuses on Platformer's decision in January to leave Substack in protest of its content policies that permitted full-throated Nazis to earn money on the platform.

With a long-term view, it's been a good strategic move:

"We’re much less vulnerable to platform shifts than we were before. I had long worried that Substack’s unprofitable business would eventually lead it to make decisions that were not in the best interest of our readers or our business. (Besides not removing literal 1930s Nazi content, I mean.)"

This is the reason publishers should publish from a website they control. Sure, you can syndicate out to meet readers where they're at, but owning your own space makes you much less subject to the whims of someone else's platform.

And even that syndication to social platforms is becoming more controllable. One hope for the future that Casey notes:

"One way I hope [Platformer] will evolve is to become part of the fediverse: the network of federated sites and apps that are built with interoperability in mind. The fediverse is built on top of protocols, not platforms, which offers us a chance to decentralize power on the internet and built a more stable foundation for media and social apps."

Ghost, the open source platform that now powers Platformer, is building fediverse support directly into its platform at a rapid pace, so this almost feels like an inevitability. The benefit will be that Platformer can reach its readers on platforms like Threads, Flipboard, and Mastodon and maintain full control over its relationships with them. That's a game-changer for publishers.

#Media

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[Matthew Hutson at Nature]

"Beyond the ability to fine-tune open models for focused applications, Kal’tsit says, another advantage of local models is privacy. Sending personally identifiable data to a commercial service could run foul of data-protection regulations. “If an audit were to happen and you show them you’re using ChatGPT, the situation could become pretty nasty,” she says."

Many organizations have similar privacy needs to these researchers, who simply can't send confidential patient data to third party services run by vendors like OpenAI. Running models locally - either directly on researcher laptops, or on researcher-controlled infrastructure - is inevitably going to be a big part of how AI is used in any sensitive context.

We have the same needs at ProPublica - unless journalists are examining public data, they shouldn't use hosted services like ChatGPT that might leak identifying information about sources, for example. Local models are a huge part of the future for us, too.

#AI

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[Kyle Orland at ArsTechnica]

"Microsoft and Constellation Energy have announced a deal that would re-open Pennsylvania's shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The agreement would let Microsoft purchase the entirety of the plant's roughly 835 megawatts of energy generation—enough to power approximately 800,000 homes—for a span of 20 years starting in 2028, pending regulatory approval."

This seems to be the new front in datacenter technology: purchasing or building entire nuclear plants in order to cover the energy cost. It is significantly better than high-emissions power from sources like coal, but it also speaks to the increased demand that new technologies like AI represent.

As ArsTechnica points out:

"Industry-wide, data centers demanded upward of 350 TWh of power in 2024, according to a Bloomberg analysis, up substantially from about 100 TWh in 2012. An IEA report expects those data center power needs to continue to rise in the near future, hitting the 620 to 1,050 TWh range by 2026."

AI is a huge and growing part of that, although let's not pretend that the internet industry overall has low emissions. We often pretend we're greener than we are, simply because we can't directly see the output - but there's a lot of work to do, and a lot of carbon footprint to own up to.

#AI

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[Tracy Durnell]

"Links — connections between ideas — are the magic system of the Internet. They power the open web, enriching online writing. Generative AI is the parasitic dark magic counterpart to the link."

I love Tracy's observation that "online, we think together", which also calls back to the original definition of the word blog ("weblog" = "we blog").

Links are context, further thought, community. Removing that context removes depth. They're inherent to the web: they're what the web is. When platforms want to strip-mine value from our work - our writing, our thinking - by lifting it away from its community and context, we need to fight back. And fight back we will.

#Technology

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[Chris Metinko at Crunchbase News]

"Last year, venture funding to Black-founded U.S. startups cratered — totaling only $699 million and marking the first time since 2016 that the figure failed to even reach $1 billion, Crunchbase data shows."

And:

"While last year did not see Black founders raise $1 billion in total, this year such founders and startups are on pace to raise less than even half-a-billion dollars. In fact, the combined total of funding to Black founders in the second half of last year and the first half this year is only $351 million."

While some of this is a reflection of the ongoing tightening in VC overall, that certainly doesn't account for a pull-back of this magnitude.

VC is often a connections-based business: investors like to have warm introductions from people they trust. It helps to be part of the in-group, and given the demographics and backgrounds of most investors, Black founders may be excluded. Open calls for pitches help, but the single biggest thing venture teams could to do widen their net and make sure they don't miss out on talented Black founders is for their own teams to be more representative. This article doesn't directly mention whether there's been progress on that front - but the numbers suggest maybe not.

#Business

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[Eva at kibty.town]

PSA for anyone who switched to Arc as their main browser (hey, that's me!): it had a giant vulnerability that the team, at the time of writing, doesn't seem to have acknowledged publicly, although it has been patched.

Aside from the lack of disclosure, perhaps the biggest ongoing concern for me is in the last few paragraphs:

"while researching, i saw some data being sent over to the server [...] this is against arc's privacy policy which clearly states arc does not know which sites you visit."

Sigh.

#Technology

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[Federal Trade Commission]

"A new Federal Trade Commission staff report that examines the data collection and use practices of major social media and video streaming services shows they engaged in vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information while failing to adequately protect users online, especially children and teens."

None of this is particularly surprising, but it's frankly nice to see the FTC see it and recommend taking action. Lina Khan is doing great work actually holding software monopolies to task.

My favorite recommendation is the first one:

"Congress should pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation to limit surveillance, address baseline protections, and grant consumers data rights;"

This should have happened years ago, and even now, getting it done will be a struggle.

This one, on the other hand, falls into the "and pigs should fly" category:

"Companies should not collect sensitive information through privacy-invasive ad tracking technologies;"

Yes, companies should not, but they will until comprehensive privacy legislation is enacted with meaningful penalties. This report is a step in the right direction; that legislation must come next.

#Technology

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[Jason Koebler at 404 Media]

"The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility."

Robyn Speer, who created the project, went so far as to say that she doesn't think "anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language used by humans." That's a big statement about the state of the web. While spam was always present, it was easier to identify and silo; AI has rendered spam unfilterable.

She no longer wants to be part of the industry at all:

"“I don't want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI,” she wrote. “OpenAI and Google can collect their own damn data. I hope they have to pay a very high price for it, and I hope they're constantly cursing the mess that they made themselves.”"

It's a relatable sentiment.

#AI

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[Myoung-Gi Chon in The Conversation]

"We found a disturbing link between work-related communication outside of regular hours and increased employee burnout. Answering emails after hours was linked to worse productivity, employees badmouthing their employers and other negative behaviors."

This is an important (if perhaps obvious) finding, but it's worth diving a little deeper and asking follow-on questions. Is it just the act of sending communications out of working hours? Or is it also an underlying organizational culture of disrespect for employees that allows such a thing to be normal?

The reason I ask is that one might be tempted to address the symptom - those out of hours emails - when there's likely something deeper to also take care of.

In the same vein, that's not to say that you shouldn't address the expectation of ubiquitous availability because the larger cultural work is still to be done. They clearly are bad in themselves, and do lead to exhaustion and burnout. But it seems to me that you have to do the bigger work, too.

#Business

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[Matt Mullenweg]

"Those of us who are makers, who create the source, need to be wary of those who would take our creations and squeeze out the juice. They’re grifters who will hop onto the next fad, but we’re trying to build something big here, something long term—something that lasts for generations."

Matt Mullenweg takes a strong stand for open source, and against companies that claim to be open but aren't quite.

Of course, not everything Automattic does is open source - its commercial operations were kicked off by the centralized Akismet anti-spam service, after all - but I agree that this clarity is useful.

It ends with a call to action: to support organizations that support ecosystems rather than abuse them. It's hard to disagree with that.

#Technology

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[Kavitha Surana at ProPublica]

"When the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy."

This story - alongside Amber Nicole Thurman's - shows that the abortion bans really are leading to preventable deaths.

"Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions."

As Kavitha Surana points out, abortion bans haven't actually led to a decrease in abortions. Instead, they've made them harder and significantly riskier. It's a worse situation all round. Deaths like these are senseless: a tragedy at the hands of a fundamentalist ideology with no basis in science.

#Democracy

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[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Mozilla is exiting the fediverse. Though the concept of the open social web, also known as the fediverse, has been picking up momentum ever since Meta last year introduced its first-ever federated app, Instagram Threads, Firefox maker Mozilla on Tuesday announced it would be ending its experiment in running a server on the fediverse. The server, Mozilla.social, today connects users with the Mastodon social network, an open source rival to Twitter/X. It will be shut down on December 17."

I wish Mozilla had taken a more ambitious approach to the fediverse, rather than running a Mastodon instance for a handful of people. An organization of its size could have prototyped different kinds of social media on the fediverse, or incubated disparate projects running on the protocol. It could even have experimented with adding social functionality directly to Firefox. Instead, precisely none of that happened, and its instance was apparently used by 270 people or so.

Sarah Perez points out that this isn't the only initiative that's been shuttered recently:

"Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down."

Mozilla itself has a lot of potential but never seems to quite realize it: it doesn't seem to be very good at building a joined-up product strategy, which has led its existence to become increasingly at risk. The vast majority of its funding (nearly 90%) has come from Google's payments to the organization in exchange for being the default search engine pick - and now that's under threat.

There's a need for a mission-driven organization with Mozilla's values that executes more fearlessly, where product voices hold more weight vs open source engineering discussions. But, right now, I don't think it exists.

#Fediverse

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[Simon Willison]

"Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos, this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company is a compelling read."

It really is fascinating. It's also really badly written, which says a lot about the priorities MrBeast instills in his team. Simon points out that video is ingrained in the culture:

"Which is more important, that one person has a good mental grip of something or that their entire team of 10 people have a good mental grip on something? Obviously the team. And the easiest way to bring your team up to the same page is to freaken video everything and store it where they can constantly reference it. A lot of problems can be solved if we just video sets and ask for videos when ordering things. [...] Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."

MrBeast will be studied for decades to come: a piece of the culture that, like him or not, is genuinely new. This document is a key to understanding what he does.

#Media

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[Media Economies Design Lab at University of Colorado Boulder]

"The Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is launching a 5-month process of mentorship and peer-to-peer learning, empowering veteran community builders to adopt emerging open social networks."

This seems like a wonderful initiative for the right people, as well as for new social networks. The incubator covers a broad set of networks that include the fediverse, Matrix, Bluesky, and Nostr.

From the site:

"Participants will meet as a full group monthly and receive ongoing, 1:1 project-specific technical support as they seed and grow new communities using open social media tools of their choosing. Participation is fully remote and all sessions will be conducted in English. All participants should commit to making strides toward community-building in open social media by the end of the program. Completion of the full program, from November 2024 to April 2025, will be compensated with a stipend of $3,500 USD."

No prior experience is needed.

I love that the Media Economies Design Lab is doing this. I'm very curious to see the cohort as it emerges!

#Fediverse

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