Werd I/O

The attack by Hamas in Israel was an atrocity: a brutal act of terrorism. The images and stories are horrifying.

Removing electricity and bombing the shit out of one of the world's most densely-populated areas, and requiring over a million people to vacate their homes at short notice when they have nowhere to go, is also not justifiable.

Killing people is never justifiable. Contravening the laws of war is never justifiable.

These opinions are not contradictory, but I'm beginning to feel in the minority for holding them.

What is unfolding is, first and foremost, a human tragedy.

And I feel both powerless to do anything to help and confronted by the desire for violence.

It’s impossibly hard to watch coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Thousands of people on both sides of the border have been killed (1,300 in Israel, 2,000 in Gaza at the time of writing); the stories that have emerged are brutal. What is known to be true seems to be different day by day.

What’s been notable for me has been the level of bloodthirst I’ve seen across social media. One Instagram account on my feed that has traditionally covered social justice topics openly cheered on Hamas’s attacks, declaring that decolonization always required violence. I unfollowed. In turn, I saw lots of discussion on Threads in particular by people who wanted to see Gaza — one of the most densely-populated areas on the planet — bombed to the ground such that there would be nobody left.

In the midst of this armchair warmongering, people are missing their loved ones. It’s a real conflict, in the context of decades of history, in which real people are being killed in terrible ways as I write this. But social media has reduced it to video game dimensions; online discussions rip it of context and turn it into performative posturing that has been largely devoid of the underlying human tragedy. Missing family members; footage of bodies in ice cream freezers; wounded children. All of these have become atoms of content to be shared and reshared in order to build social media clout.

Over on X, this dehumanization of the conflict has become particularly pronounced because of the platform’s endeavor to pay users based on social engagement. The incentive is to post shocking content that will be commented on and reshared virally, because it will lead directly to revenue for the poster. Inevitably, a lot of this content takes footage that isn’t even from this conflict and relabels it. A patchwork of pictures and video drawn from across recent history that evoke feelings about this conflict, all thrown together so someone can make a buck (or, in some cases, tens of thousands of bucks). Whereas a blue checkmark used to indicate that a user is notable in their field, you can now buy one for $8 a month. It can be next to impossible to determine what is real.

But it would be a mistake to say that this is happening on X in isolation. Even when social media posts don’t lead directly to revenue, everyone is in the clout game. More followers can lead to more cumulative engagement which can lead to more opportunities to sell in the future. Very few real brands — McDonald’s or Starbucks, say — would post so recklessly about the conflict (which is not to say they are ethical actors in other ways; it’s also worth saying that McDonald’s has donated to both sides of the conflict, and that Starbucks denounced a message of solidarity with Palestine that was published by its union). But everyone’s a personal brand now. Social media has become a literal marketplace of ideas, where peoples’ attention is drawn and monetized. And in this environment of clout and virality, no extra value is placed on truth.

None of this is exactly new. Media management has been a part of every conflict since at least the Second World War. Some disinformation from that period — carrots helping you see in the dark, for example — was absorbed so readily that it has simply become a part of our culture. In this conflict, both sides were surely aware of how footage would be played in the media. What’s different now to 80 years ago is that everyone is the media. We all have spheres of influence, and it’s not unheard of for a middle manager with an axe to bear to have more of an audience than a national newspaper with a complete set of reporters and fact-checkers. Most of our news is consumed in stackable, decontextualized pieces through our connections to individuals who we perceive to share similar opinions to us, delivered in such a way as to maximize engagement with advertisements and keep us on the platform.

None of which connects us to the underlying humanity of the people who suffer in this, or any, conflict. It disconnects us from the fact that civilians have been targeted, which is a war crime. It disconnects us from the need for the killing to stop.

This isn’t a game. It’s not like supporting a sports team. It’s not blue and black / white and gold dress. Regardless of the particulars of the war, the side we should all be on is that of preserving lives and creating a safe, inclusive, democratic environment for future generations. In a world where attention is money, it doesn’t feel like that’s where the incentives lie today.

This blog has had kind of a weird relationship with comments since I started it ten years ago. My previous blogs, in contrast, have always intentionally been spaces that can be homes for conversations. Over the years lots of people have asked me to fix this situation.

So, okay! Here’s what I’ve chosen to do:

As of today, you can comment on every blog post. I’ve chosen to use Commento, an open source comments platform. You can leave anonymous comments, authenticate independently, or use a few common SSO providers.

As an indieweb platform, the underlying Known software that powers this site supports webmentions. These haven’t displayed well on my site for a little while, so I’m committing to fixing them by next Monday, October 16. At this point every webmention that’s been sent will be displayed.

I have a lot of admiration for Eliot Peper, who has spun a career in tech into a career in writing science fiction novels rooted in the intersection of technology and society. They’re fun reads, first and foremost, but there’s always an insight into how technology is made, and what that means for the rest of us.

His latest, Foundry, is a kind of spy novel about semiconductors that takes you on a knockabout ride before arriving at a satisfying conclusion that could — if he wanted — be the start of a series that I would happily read. Along the way, small details betray an interest in just about everything. (I particularly appreciated a discussion of how people of partial-Indonesian descent are treated in the Netherlands.) His books are very much in the tradition of pageturners by authors like Michael Crichton and John Grisham. I’ve enjoyed them a lot.

One of the reasons I admire Eliot’s work is that this is absolutely where I want to take my life, too. Writing was always my first love: there was a Sliding Doors decision point where I could have chosen an English / journalism or computer science route. Despite a career in technology that has taken me to some interesting places, it’s a testament to that original love that I still don’t know if I picked the right path.

I ended up going into computers specifically because the nascent web was so perfect for storytelling. My computer science degree has been a useful bedrock for my work in software, but there was far less exploration of computing in intersection with the humanities (or any kind of humanity at all) than I would have liked. Over the last few years I’ve allowed myself to pursue my original interest, and it’s been rewarding. Lately, I’ve been getting 1:1 mentorship through The Novelry, which has helped me to overcome some imposter syndrome and put a more robust shape to the plot I’m working on. Eventually, I’d like to try for a creative writing MA, once I can demonstrate that I’m more than some computer guy.

I’ve been lucky to have people in my life who have made a living through writing stories. (I wrote about this recently with respect to opening up possibilities for our son.) My childhood friend Clare’s dad was the author and Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter. I remember being enthralled that he could sit and write stories for a living. I was similarly enthralled, years later, when my cousin Sarah became a wildly successful young adult author. (She’s just started blogging again, and it’s quite lovely and worth subscribing to.) They demonstrated that it’s possible. It’s reductive to say that you’ve just got to sit down and do it — there is a craft here, which needs practice and attention — but that is, indeed, the first step, for them and every writer.

Giving myself the permission to just sit and do that has been difficult. Blogging is second nature for me: I can take an open box on the web, pour out my thoughts, and hit publish. An intentional long-form work requires a leap of faith, a great deal more craft and editing, and significantly less of a dopamine rush from people commenting and re-sharing. It’s possible that nobody else will see what I’ve written for years. It’s equally possible that it’s terrible and very few other people will ever see it. But I’ve decided that giving myself permission to sit down and write means giving myself permission to fail at it. In turn, I’ll learn from that failure and try again, hopefully writing something better the next time. I do want it to be a work that other people enjoy, but there’s also value in allowing myself to create without needing an immediate follow-up.

In the meantime, I have huge admiration for people like Sarah, Eliot, and Humphrey, who gave themselves the space and cultivated the dedication to write.

You should check out Eliot’s work and go subscribe to Sarah’s blog.

Now, onto today’s word count.

Arc, my default browser for a year now, recently launched a set of AI-driven features. I’m finding two to be particularly useful — and one of those is problematic in a way I want to discuss. They’re worth considering because, while Arc has a relatively small userbase for now, they’re likely to come to other browsers before too long.

The first is AI-enhanced search. If I hit command-F, the browser will try and find my search term in the page as it normally would. If it can’t, it’ll answer a question about the content of the page using AI.

As an illustration, here’s Arc answering a question based on a Verge article:

The second is AI summaries of links. If you hit shift and hover over a link, it’ll tell you what the page is about. Here’s Arc previewing a link from my website:

This is both useful — I don’t necessarily want to open a new tab to look at a cited source — and potentially really problematic for a lot of the web. This isn’t unique to Arc: the feature is not markedly different from, say, ChatGPT’s browser capabilities, which is similarly problematic. Here’s ChatGPT answering questions about my website:

If you’re getting an automated summary of an information source, you’re extracting the content without thought for how that source sustains itself. For some, that will be display ads. I don’t really care for ad-driven business models, but they exist, and if a significant number of people suddenly start looking at AI summaries instead of an actual page, ad revenues will drop proportionately. For others, it’ll be donations — and AI summaries don’t have any calls to action to contribute. And some, of course, sit behind a paywall. The AI summaries appear to even summarize content that would otherwise be irretrievable without payment.

Here’s Arc summarizing a paywalled article from the Atlantic, for which I don’t have a subscription:

It’s honestly really useful for users, but not super-great for the web ecosystem or the survival of those platforms.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that browsers discontinue these sorts of features. But I do think there needs to be some consideration for platform health and ensuring that the information sources we use on the web can continue to exist. So here are some ideas:

Inline calls to action. Browsers could look for markup in the page that indicates a call to action that a user could take — for example to subscribe or to donate. This could be an ad.

A universal basic paywall. Publications register to receive aggregate payments from browsers that use their content to create summaries. (Itself problematic because it essentially requires every publisher on the web to reveal their identities — unless you use crypto, which has its own issues.)

Allow publishers to set their own summary content. Not every summary needs to be written using AI; metadata in the head could provide a publisher-written summary, giving them control over what is displayed.

A general small web publisher fund. Rather than direct micropayments, browsers pay into a general fund that small web publishers can withdraw from.

Just accept that this is what the web is now. Last but not least: passive acceptance. It’s not great, particularly when browsers are largely manufactured by tech companies like Google that already make a ton of money extracting value from the web. The drop in direct pageviews could adversely affect smaller publishers in particular. But it’s also early — perhaps it will have a different effect on site visits than I think?

But these are my opinions. I’m aware that my lens here is oriented around the perceived needs of publishers on the open web. What do you think should happen? How will the ecosystem adapt?