Werd I/O

My technology thesis is this:

All technology should punch up, not down.

It should connect the disconnected. It should empower the disempowered. It should inform the uninformed.

It should empower communities that historically have been underrepresented and underserved.

It should help people with similar needs and values to organize together in order to improve their quality of life.

It should help spread wealth and power more equitably. It should allow people to make things they could not previously make. It should let people find audiences they could not previously reach.

It should help us make a positive impact on each other, and on the planet.

It should not replace the social frameworks and safety nets that are required to ensure everybody has the ability to have a good life. It should not be a tool for wealth hoarding or rent seeking. It should not privatize the parts of peoples’ lives that were previously their own.

It should not fortify the power of people who already have it. It should not maintain the status quo.

It should not make the world less democratic. It should not make the world more dangerous. It should further mutual learning and empathy, not hate and parochialism.

It should amplify and accelerate the power of communities and of individuals, of collaboration, and of mutual aid.

It should never simply be a vehicle for power. It should never simply be a vehicle for wealth. It should always be for people.

Because that’s all we are. That’s all we can build. Networks of people, all inexorably connected.

We can all rise together, or we can all sink together. Those are our choices.

Also see: more concrete thoughts on how to build technology.

You’ve all heard about Elon Musk blaming the Anti-Defamation League for the erosion of Twitter/X’s value over the last year. Advertising revenue is down by 60%.

This, of course, has nothing at all to do with the precipitous rise in hate speech on the platform since Musk took it over, to which he has responded by threatening legal action instead of doing something about the problem.

Musk’s typically bull-in-a-china-shop approach has been winning fans. Lately we’ve taken to ending that preceding sentence with “on the right”, but these people go far beyond the tax policies and routine crustiness of store brand conservatism. His approach has been winning fans, to be clear, in communities that support literal white supremacy.

Andrew Torba, the fully-racist founder of Gab, posted on X:

In under five years we went from having every single one of our guys banned from the big tech platforms to the richest man in the world noticing, naming, and waging total war on our largest enemy while running one of those platforms. Let that sink in. Keep the faith. We are winning.

This all further cements Musk’s purchase as being part of the backlash to gains on diversity and inclusion that took place during the pandemic. I consider them all to be the last echoes of the 20th century. I will not support them, obviously.

The thing about these communities, though, is that they make everything they touch toxic. The former Twitter was famously problematic at the time, even if it was at a level that seems quaint now. They didn’t block white supremacists because they had a good, ethical heart; they were capitalists just like everyone else who runs a big platform. They knew, though, that the racists diminish the quality of the product for everyone else, and that usage and advertising revenue would be adversely affected. Which is pretty much what Musk is finding out right now (although his personal goals don’t appear to be to create a viable business, hence his lack of motivation to change).

I’d rather spend my time and energy with platforms and people that are part of building an inclusive, equal future for everyone. I don’t know that this is a widely-shared value, although I wish it was. But I also want to spend my time on platforms that are fun to use — and I’m pretty sure that’s true of most people who use social media.

I don’t want to diminish the danger — we must always be vigilant of these toxic ideals — but I’m also confident they’ll lose. These assholes will fade into obscurity soon enough.

Doc Searls writes about what he calls wide news:

Local and regional papers covered politics, government, crises, disasters, sports, fashion, travel, business, religion, births, deaths, schools, and happenings of all kinds. They had reporters assigned across all their sections. No other medium could go as wide.

Doc’s argument is that a local commons of publications can, together, create a wide news ecosystem that fulfills the same role (with potentially deeper content). I agree.

I started my career building the first website and BBS for a local paper in Oxford that carried classified ads as well as event listings, notices, and that sort of thing: all the community stuff that the internet took over from newspapers. (As it happens, it’s still around, but most are not.) It was a real community hub, to the extent that anyone could come to the office to do some word-processing or get their photocopying done: a co-working space in the midst of the paper’s offices, long before anyone knew what co-working was.

Social media — and early on, blogging in particular — has played this role of reporting widely around a community. You could click through to local blogs, or Twitter, and learn about things that happened around your town. I found this particularly useful when I visited somewhere I didn’t live: for example, on my regular visits to San Francisco, I’d check out the blogs and Upcoming to see where I should be going.

But as social media has consolidated, many of those venues have gone away. (Some were replaced by Twitter bots, which have now also gone away.) It’s also easier to discover some types of voices than others: for someone to post regularly to the internet, they need to have a certain level of free time, technical prowess, equipment at their disposal, and so on. And it’s easier for someone in an “in” crowd to be linked to and re-shared than an entirely new voice with an underrepresented perspective, who might not have the same level of systemic support.

While newspapers are obsolete technology, local newsrooms are vitally important: journalists have a remit to tell stories that might not otherwise be told. That might be a story about corruption in the local police or government (which occurs a surprising amount of the time), but it could just as easily be a story about an immigrant starting a new business, or a trend piece centered on a less-affluent part of town.

I really love what Tiny News Collective is doing here. From its website:

Have you struggled to find stories relevant to you and your community in existing media? Do you worry that lack of information keeps people from being involved in important local issues? Has it been your dream to see your community represented accurately and thoughtfully in the media?

The organization then provides the funding, technology, training, and network to get those newsrooms started. Consider Austin Vida, which reports with a Latinidad perspective from Austin, or Ang Diaryo, which reports with a lens centered on working class Filipino communities in Los Angeles.

Locally to me, Kensington Voice reports on a neighborhood in Philadelphia that normally is the subject of stories about addiction (including a New York Times piece that called it the “Walmart of Heroin”). The real, three-dimensional human beings who lived there were woefully underserved, until journalists began to report on their actual stories. These weren’t holes that social media could adequately fill; nor were they covered by the local newspaper of record.

With a skeleton team, Open Vallejo reports on the North Bay town that happens to have one of the most corrupt police forces and local governments in the country. It’s rightly won awards for its work.

I’ve fallen in love with these kinds of small, tightly-focused, non-profit newsrooms. One thing that’s missing is a way to find all the newsrooms that cover a geographic area, or a particular demographic, or other focus area. I want to be able to discover stories from newsrooms I’ve never heard of, based on their characteristics. I might have never heard of a particular newsroom in Philadelphia, but I have heard of Philadelphia, and happen to live there. It would be great if I could click through a website to find everyone publishing about communities in the city. The front page of that site — which, in essence, would be a specialized feed reader — would be better by far than any large newspaper.

To make that really viable, there needs to be a flowering of tightly-focused newsrooms — and people to fund their reporting. Crowdfunding, direct sales, or subscriptions are not always the right approach, because, for example, people in a less-affluent community are typically less able to pay, while their stories are no less valuable. Just as bloggers are less likely to write from the perspective of communities that can less afford computers, broadband internet connections, and the time to write, funding dollars must sometimes be found elsewhere. Tiny News Collective is wonderful, as I mentioned. The Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Local News Lab does great work, albeit around business innovation rather than direct funding. And there is some wider foundational support. Still, making more support available for these newsrooms would go a long way.

All of this is not to say that personal sharing and social media aren’t valuable. They clearly are, and a lot of people are reporting their perspectives and sharing what they love about their communities. We need more of this, too! One of my favorite local social media accounts is Caffs not cafes, which reports on small, independent, usually low-budget restaurants and cafes in London. Sure, it’s not breaking news, but who else would do this kind of local coverage of diverse businesses, many of which have immigrant owners?

A wide news commons, comprised of many smaller newsrooms with specific areas of focus, as well as the perspectives of individuals in the community, would improve our democracy at the local level. In doing so, it would make a big difference to how the whole country works. I’d love to see us collectively make it happen.

Dave Winer poses:

If you think of yourself as an "open source developer" please ask yourself this question. Are you as committed to freedom for people who use your software as you are to freedom for developers? Not just freedom to modify the source code, but freedom to do anything they like with the stuff they create. If not, why, and where do you draw the line?

I’m not sure if I do consider myself an open source developer these days. I don’t have the time or bandwidth to write software for myself on a regular basis in the way that I used to. I have the software I help with in my work (which is, these days, more about team dynamics and process rather than writing code); that’s about all I have time for outside of my family. I am having a lot of trouble making any time at all for my own projects.

But I used to write a lot of open source code (Elgg, Known, more contributions elsewhere). And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this subject.

I think we have to consider that the principles of the free software movement, revolutionary though they genuinely were, were also set in the same mindset that latterly saw its founder Richard Stallman spectacularly fall from grace. They are principles that deal in software development and licensing in strict isolation, outside of the social context of their use. They are code-centered, not human-centered.

Dave’s question has two angles that I’d like to discuss: one briefly, and the other at more length (because it’s more controversial in open source circles).

The first is: how easy is open source software to use, anyway? Can users do anything they like with the stuff they create? Doesn’t a commitment to user freedom also necessitate a commitment to ease of use? I think yes, but open source projects rarely have capacity for design or user experience research, and even when people with those skillsets want to contribute, projects quite often don’t know what to do with them. The tools (from GitHub on down), the culture, the mindsets are all code-first. There is no good way to open source user research or the empathy work that is a core part of software development. A code-centric approach takes the humanity out of software, and work has to be done to put people back in the center.

The second, more complicated one, is: I don’t want my software to be used to cause harm.

You could couch that in liability. Many software licenses disallow use in a nuclear facility, for example. But I want to go further. I don’t want anything I built to be used to kill people; nor to discriminate against them; nor to commit hate crimes; nor to intentionally organize or facilitate any act of violence or assault.

I think many software developers would feel the same way. But any license that incorporated clauses to this effect would fail to be recognized by the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative.

My blunt take on that is that I don’t care: clearly the principle of not causing harm is more important than recognition by some foundations (and particularly not foundations like the FSF whose leaders have been found to be so lacking in empathy). If the idea of not causing harm is outside the realm of the existing open source movement, then we need a new movement.

The word “free” in free software is famously overloaded. It’s “free as in speech, not free as in beer”. But there are many kinds of free speech, and even in America, where it’s the First Amendment to the Constitution, there are limits to it.

It’s worth considering whose freedom we value. Do we value the freedom of the people who use software, or do we also value the freedom of the people the software is used on? While the latter group doesn’t always exist, when they do, how we consider them says a lot about us and our priorities.

Take a drone used in warfare out in the field which incorporates an open source library that had originally been developed for some other purpose. The author released it under a license that dictated how it could be modified and shared. Shouldn’t they also have a right to say that you can’t use it in a bombing campaign? Open source principles say no.

Consider a police AI system that is used to pre-emptively target people who might commit a crime. Because of underlying biases both in the corpus of data the model was trained on and in the police force itself, and because of a fundamental disconnect between the Minority Report promise of this technology and what it can actually deliver, they tend to be wildly discriminatory and are essentially a new cover for racial profiling. Shouldn’t a software library author be able to opt out from being a part of this kind of system? Open source principles, once again, say no.

Or, closer to home for me, take an open source community platform that is used by neo-Nazis to publish propaganda about Jewish people, or to organize acts against specific people or organizations. The authors might have designed it for use with aid workers or in education, but open source licenses make no restriction on other uses.

Code does tend to find other uses. I once co-organized a demo day when I was at Matter Ventures, and had the privilege of chatting with Chelsea Manning, who was in attendance. I asked her what she thought; she was glowing about some ventures, but then went through a point-by-point list of which platforms on show could be used for military and surveillance purposes in the hands of the wrong investors or acquirers. It was one of the most eye-opening conversations of my life.

When an author releases code to the open source commons, they invite others to enter into a relationship with them. Those third parties can incorporate the code into their own projects under some restrictions, and modify and re-share it under others. The exact nature of how open source code may be incorporated, modified, and re-shared varies from license to license. But other restrictions are not a stretch. The author is giving their work away for free; this is not work for hire. They should have the right to restrict its use. They should not have to simply accept that someone could use their work to kill people, commit hate, perpetuate systemic injustices, or otherwise harm. There is nothing good and principled about that idea.

There is also no need for the FSF or OSI to be the sole arbiters of what is free or open source software. The only thing that really matters is how authors want to release their work, how downstream users might incorporate it, and how the rights and well-being of people it is used on are affected.

This isn’t just about warfare, systemic discrimination, or hate crimes (although those all should be enough). There are questions here about the rights of software authors, and the role of software in a just and equitable society. To limit our considerations to code is to say we don’t care about the people affected by our work. And to do good work, we must care.

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know!

Apps + Websites

Productivity

iA Presenter. I’ve been really enjoying this. It does have the unfortunate effect of reducing the time you spend faffing with slide design and font choices, which means you actually have to write the substance of your presentation. Curses! Still, despite its attempts to thwart my procrastination, it’s beautifully designed and perfect for the way I think.

Media

404 Media. A new, independent, worker-owned venture by ex-Motherboard journalists. I’m a subscriber.

Center for News, Technology & Innovation. I would love to contribute to something like this.

Technology

Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational. A really great list of foundational and/or influential writing about how to build the web, starting with Tim Berners-Lee’s Cool URIs Don’t Change post from 1998.

Datasette Cloud. Simon Willison’s Datasette now has a SaaS version that saves you having to install or set anything up. This is perfect for smaller newsrooms and orgs that are technically stretched but want to analyze data. I’m excited to see where he goes with it.

StreetPass for Mastodon. Genuinely brilliant. StreetPass finds the Mastodon accounts of people whose websites you browse, allowing you to check out their accounts and follow if you’re interested. I love it.

Books

Fiction

Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang. This tale from a deeply unreliable, envy-driven narrator is more of a sharp satire of liberal racism than its publishing industry setting. It’s at its least compelling when discussing Twitter drama, but there’s ample snark just underneath each turn of phrase, and more than enough ratcheting tension to have kept me turning the pages.

Foundry, by Eliot Peper. A knockabout spy adventure that takes a few unexpected turns and sticks a landing that had me cheering. Truly a lot of fun - I inhaled it in one sitting. As always, it’s deeply researched, but the detail only ever adds to the entertainment. (Without spoiling anything, I’m very familiar with some of the settings and cultural overtones, and they rang completely true.) There are knowing callbacks to some of Eliot’s earlier work, but this stands alone - and could be the start of a new series that I would gladly read the hell out of.

Nonfiction

Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six, by Maya Payne Smart. In turns reassuring and helpful, this was a great primer on what to do to provide a foundation to help my child eventually learn to read. If only all parenting books could be as human and equity-minded as this one is.

Notable Articles

AI

US Copyright Office wants to hear what people think about AI and copyright. I certainly have some thoughts that I will share. Imagine if you could allow an AI agent to create copyrighted works at scale with no human involvement. It would allow for an incredible intellectual property land grab.

The A.I. Surveillance Tool DHS Uses to Detect ‘Sentiment and Emotion’. Customs and Border Protection is using sentiment analysis on inbound and outbound travelers who “may threaten public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel”. That’s dystopian enough in itself, but there’s no way they could limit the trawl to those people, and claims made about what the software can do are dubious at best.

This AI Watches Millions Of Cars And Tells Cops If You’re Driving Like A Criminal. A good rule of thumb is that if technology makes something feasible, someone will do it regardless of the ethics. Here, AI makes it easy to perform warrantless surveillance at scale - so someone has turned it into a product and police are buying it.

New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl. Whether this comes to fruition with the NYT vs OpenAI or another publisher vs another LLM vendor, there will be a court case like this, and it will set important precedent for the industry. My money’s on the publishers.

School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books. Probably inevitable, but it nonetheless made my jaw drop. What an incredibly wrong-headed use of an LLM.

New York Times: Don't use our content to train AI systems. The NYT’s new terms disallow use of its content to develop any new software application, including machine learning and AI systems. It’s a shame that this has to be explicit, rather than a blanket right afforded to publishers by default, but it’s a sensible clause that many more will be including.

We need a Weizenbaum test for AI. “Weizenbaum’s questions, though they seem simple—Is it good? Do we need it?—are difficult ones for computer science to answer. They could be asked of any proposed technology, but the speed, scope, and stakes of innovation in AI make their consideration more urgent.”

AI social media videos depict missing, dead children narrating their stories. Utterly ghoulish.

Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out. I strongly disagree with this stance. Allowing your work to be mined by AI models should be opt-in only - otherwise there is no possible way for a publisher or author to apply a license or grant rights.

AI language models are rife with political biases. Different AI models have different political biases. Google’s tend to be more socially conservative - possibly in part because they were trained on books rather than the wider internet. Regardless of the cause, this is proof, again, that AI models are not objective.

In every reported case where police mistakenly arrested someone using facial recognition, that person has been Black. Black faces are overrepresented in databases used to train AI for law enforcement - and some facial recognition software used in this context fails 96% of the time. This practice is an accelerant for already deeply harmful inequities. Time to ban it.

Catching up on the weird world of LLMs. This is a really comprehensive history and overview of LLMs. Simon has been bringing the goods, and this talk is no exception.

Climate

Is Big Oil Turning on Big Auto? It makes sense that oil companies would try to frame driving a gas car as freedom. As an EV driver, I can tell you that it is not. I would prefer if we all had great, integrated public transit - but for the moment, at least, it has been an improvement in every way for me as a driver. I’ll never go back.

The true cost of climate pollution? 44% of corporate profits. I’m surprised that mandatory disclosure of carbon emissions isn’t widespread - it does seem like the prerequisite to making any change. And yeah, these companies should pay. And be forced to reduce their emissions. And be fined heavily, and prosecuted, when they don’t.

Neoclassical economists are the last people to listen to on climate change. Interesting commentary on “economic theories that have led to government by markets, fuelling financial and other shocks, and the rise of authoritarian, and even neo-fascist regimes promising citizens ‘protection’ from ‘globalised’ markets.”

Climate change is death by a thousand cuts. “Whenever someone says, “we’ll adapt to climate change,” 100% of the time it’s a rich person. Poor people never say “we’ll adapt” because they know they can’t afford it. For them, adaptation = suffering.” That’s the pull-quote for me: this won’t affect everyone equally. As always, the most vulnerable, the people who are already struggling the most, will suffer the worst of it.

Culture

Being Black in a Small Town. “When popular culture thinks of Blackness, rarely does somebody think of a tiny little town or a mountainside and the Black person who’s there. I want to be a part of revealing that this thread—that Black skin—can be even on the side of a mountain.”

How to Uphold the Status Quo: The Problem With Small Town Witch Romances. I see this as less of a problem in cozy witch fiction - which, I must be clear, I have read zero of - and more of an issue in American fiction as a whole, across all media. These books (probably) aren’t actively laundering racist ideas; they’re perpetuating cultural discrimination that is under the surface everywhere. Still, it’s incumbent on authors to understand and be accountable to the tropes they’re building with.

thoughts on the suicidal mind. This resonated with me a lot. What I’ll say is: I’m glad Winnie is in the world. I know these feelings, intimately. I don’t have much definitive to say about that. I haven’t drawn any conclusions. It’s a journey, daily.

Turn-On Found. None of this looks like it comes from 1969. Although some of the content is outdated today, the style is far more modern - this feels like something straight from the internet era. Fascinating and relentless (I couldn’t watch the whole thing).

Democracy

Supreme Risk: An Interactive Guide to Rights the Supreme Court Could Take Away. “An interactive guide to rights the Supreme Court has established — and could take away.” Published a few months ago, but completely relevant, on-point reporting (served as a fully-static web page).

Americans Rate Dallas and Boston Safest of 16 U.S. Cities. Republicans think cities are much less safe than Democrats do. San Francisco and Philadelphia (my old neighborhood and new one) are notable here: Democrats agree that they’re pretty safe, whereas Republicans seem to think they’re war zones. I think we can solidly blame conservative media propaganda for this.

Just 23% Of Americans Know The U.S. Has Failed To Pass An Internet-Era Privacy Law. Less than a quarter of Americans know they don’t have meaningful privacy protections on the internet. The first step to changing this fact might be to change this number.

The Shocking Voter Purge Crisis of Democracy Revealed. Always a good sign when a democratic movement wants to win through the will of the people rather than through obstructive election fraud.

House GOP adds dozens of anti-LGBTQ+ provisions to must-pass bills. Smuggling naked bigotry through bills that must pass to keep the government working is a deeply underhanded tactic. It’s hard to see the modern Republican Party as anything other than a party of exclusion, catering to the dregs of the twentieth century who desperately don’t want to see the world change around them.

Equality

Most students haven’t learned about LGBTQ+ issues in school, survey shows. Why the internet - as well as more traditional media like books - are a lifeline for kids hungry to learn about queer history. Of course, I’m sure the usual suspects will come for those too.

International Chess Org: Trans Women Have "No Right To Participate" In Women's Chess. This stance by the International Chess Federation is so transparently bigoted that it helps clarify other anti-trans measures happening across competitive sports. There’s nothing here about fairness; it’s all to do with conservative division and hatred.

Henrietta Lacks family to get compensation for use of her cell taken decades ago without consent. Late as it is, it’s good to see this to some kind of resolution. I hope the posthumous recognition Lacks receives includes the story of how it happened in the first place.

Health

'Horribly Unethical': Startup Experimented on Suicidal Teens on Social Media With Chatbot. Taking lean startup research techniques that were developed for basic social networks or, say, 3D avatars and transposing them to real-world domains with real consequences seems to be an ongoing trend. It’s a misunderstanding of the startup playbook that causes real harm. This is obviously unethical; it is nowhere near as “nuanced” as this CEO says it is.

Labor

Remote workers' connection to companies' missions hits record low. Remote workers feel less connected to company missions, but the big message here is that nobody really feels all that connected. There are no superficial answers here: the real differentiators are better company cultures where people feel truly valued, much stronger communication, and better missions.

NLRB Says Companies That Union-Bust Must Recognize Busted Union. A neat rule: union-busters must recognize the unions they’re trying to undermine. The union rebound continues.

Why the Hollywood strike matters to all of us. On the wage threat of AI: “Hollywood is showing us how best to take that stand: by unionizing our workplaces, and fighting for strong contracts. Now’s the time to form a union with your coworkers, and discuss what protections you’ll need to face this moment.”

Negative Space. A perfect piece on where we’re at in time. Personally, I’m not going back to the office, and I applaud greater worker power. We need to move forward.

We're now finding out the damaging results of the mandated return to the office–and it's worse than we thought. Return to Office mandates are counterproductive and destroy morale. They also make your team less productive. They’re worker-hostile and work-hostile. So why do them?

Media

Medium is for human storytelling, not AI-generated writing. Medium has made it clear that it is not a home for AI-driven content. And it’s experiencing record growth now that its recommendation engine has been re-tuned for substance, as decided by humans. This is all great news: for Medium and as an example for everyone on the web.

How We Create Custom Graphics at The Markup. I like this approach to building graphics for journalism. Management of these kinds of static assets feels like a cumulative problem, but lightweight HTML / CSS / JS is pretty portable and sandboxable. And ACF is the hidden hero behind journalism’s WordPress sites.

Society

My Caste. “Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes. I belong to OBC Category. […] I was, however, not ready to publicly declare it until I received tenure as it seemed too risky.”

Police departments pull school officers due to Minnesota restraint law. It says a lot that in areas where officers aren’t allowed to put schoolchildren in holds that restrict breathing or their ability to speak, departments take officers out of schools in protest. These laws should be in place everywhere, and police officers should not be in schools.

She Just Had a Baby. Soon She'll Start 7th Grade. There are so many stories like this one. There should never be another. And yet, we’ve rolled back the clock at the behest of religious extremists, so there will be many more. This cannot go on.

FAU Study: Perils of Not Being Attractive or Athletic in Middle School. Hey, sounds like my middle school experience! This is important for me to understand as a parent, and it’s important for schools to adapt to as de facto caregivers. These dynamics should be corrected for, not accepted.

Right-Wing Writer Richard Hanania's Racist Past Exposed. A prominent writer platformed by the New York Times and Washington Post, and championed by major figures in tech, including by Marc Andreessen and the CEO of Substack, turns out to be an actual white supremacist.

A beautiful, broken America: what I learned on a 2,800-mile bus ride from Detroit to LA. I’ve traveled across America four times: three by car and one by train. I’ve never done it by Greyhound, and I probably never will. This country’s infrastructure is falling apart and being eaten by wolves.

Startups

The State of Seed Stage Funding to Underrepresented Founders. “White women founded companies comprise 79% of reported early-stage VC dollars going to underrepresented founders and 64% of investments made into companies with underrepresented founders by deal count. Ecosystem-wide, we need to up our game by investing seed money into a broader spectrum of founders of color.”

letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new. These are the right questions to ask.

Technology

In Europe, a regulatory vise tightens around big tech. Good overview. I think European tech regulations have been broadly good, establishing the anti-competitive and pro-privacy rules that US legislators have failed to enact. If we could only all be so protected.

Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee. Good commentary on the dissonance between vendors like Microsoft banning scraping of their platforms while simultaneously releasing products that depend on scraping other peoples’ data. Some sort of commons agreement would go a long way here, but it won’t happen while platforms can get away with this one-sided relationship.

Introducing the 100-Year Plan: Secure Your Online Legacy for a Century. I’d love to understand what prompted Automattic to offer a hosting plan for $38K. On one level, I love it - it lasts for 100 years! and I love Automattic! - but I can’t justify this, and I’m not quite sure who it’s for? If this is marketing, what are the goals?

Changes to UK Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law. The UK seems to want to break international law to retain its ability to mass surveil by forcing software vendors to break their protections for users everywhere. It’s an anti-democratic approach that puts journalists and vulnerable populations at risk. It also counter-productively undermines the UK’s own technology sector.

'We're Winning': Apple Formally Endorses Right to Repair Legislation After Spending Millions Fighting It.I’m a little bit suspicious that Apple is suddenly into right-to-repair, but broadly this is good. I just wish it was a nationwide law instead of one that is limited to California. Hopefully the idea can expand to the federal level.

The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15. It costs $15 to uncover an American’s personally identifiable information illegally for potentially violent purposes. But also consider the number of entities that have access to this information legally, without any oversight. None of it should be allowable.

RSS Zero isn’t the path to RSS Joy. “RSS is not email. You don’t have to get to inbox zero!” is a correct take, in my opinion; that’s certainly how I approach my feed reader. But also, I’ve got bad news about my email inbox.

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty. Scientists are fleeing X for Mastodon, citing far-right science denialism - and far-right hate in general. I don’t exactly know what Musk thinks he’s going to be left with after all this.

An Opinionated Guide To Alt-text. A great, short guide to writing alt text to support data visualization from Jasmine Mithani.

Lamborghini teases first fully electric supercar ahead of official reveal August 18th. OK, good for them, but I’m far less excited by an electric Lambo than an electric car for $20K. Or, you know, zero-emissions buses that work as part of a functional integrated public transit system. You’re right, that does sound like science fiction.

Elon Musk's Twitter throttles links to Threads, Blue Sky and New York Times. Really, truly: there is no good reason for any media company or publisher to still be posting on X.

Announcing the Tor University Challenge. This is a worthwhile project, and would be a major win for freedom of expression and freedom from surveillance. I’d love to see more of my higher education friends take part.

How to verify your Threads account using your Mastodon profile. It’s truly beautiful to see Threads begin to embrace indieweb and federated social web protocols. This is a first step; true federation is, I’ve been assured, coming.

Why Sam Altman wants to scan two billion eyes. We’ve seen the United Nations share their biometric registration of Rohingya refugees with the Myanmar government without their consent. A private company that subcontracts services in other countries makes accountability very difficult when there are rights violations.”

Raku: A Language for Gremlins. That’s a giant “nope” from me, but your mileage may vary.

PIE failed. But it’s a failure worth celebrating and learning from. It’s very painful to see accelerators that are also vibrant community hubs shut down because of business dynamics. I’ve lived that. What I can see here is someone who cares about his community. I was never a part of PIE, but I know Rick did it for the right reasons. And I know from Matter that the community continues long after the thing itself has disappeared. The legacy is long lasting. Congratulations, Rick - on to the next thing.

How I make annotated presentations. It’s been a long time since I’ve given any talks (the pandemic put a stop to that) but I really like this approach, and I’ll do something similar in the future.

Just normal web things. Yes to all of this. These are basic functions that the web gives you almost by default. Everything on the web should let you do them.

The open source licensing war is over. I broadly agree with this rallying cry against dogmatism in open source. I think dogmatism is harmful in all parts of tech; divisive and often a kind of gatekeeping. Let authors build and release according to their needs.

How to Search for a Better Deal on Broadband. The broadband situation in America is surprisingly bad - so I love that there’s a new version of the National Broadband Map. The Markup has done a public service by taking us through it.

We lost my beloved cousin Noah this week.

I don’t have the words yet. But Noah, you were wonderful, and we all loved you so much.

Ma used to say that she liked to think of everyone who was gone having a picnic on the beach and looking down at us. I would like to imagine you there, too, arriving after sailing across the bay. I bet they all greeted you with open arms.

Even as he was getting sick, Noah wanted to find ways to be helpful. If I asked you over the last year about places where a lawyer with technical skills might help with human rights or civil engagement, it was for him.

He made his career helping defendants with hard immigration and criminal justice cases. His former colleagues at Koehler Law have posted a memorial to him. I feel like anything I post here will always be inadequate — there’s no way to cover him adequately. He was a sweet, smart man who was an important part of all of our lives. We had so much in common; so many shared points of reference. I will miss him very much.

His immediate family is asking, in lieu of flowers, to donate to the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition. I made a donation; I would love for you to join me.

I was pleased to attend the Online Journalism Awards on Saturday night. Some winning highlights included:

The 19th won a Breaking News award for its coverage of the Dobbs decision, including some really great data journalism. I’m proud of, and very happy for, my friends there. By the way, you should subscribe to data visuals reporter Jasmine Mithani’s great newsletter, data + feelings.

ProPublica won a few awards for its journalism, including on the proliferation of junk science in the justice system and on how viruses transmit from animals to people.

The Marshall Project won two awards for its work covering the American criminal justice system. Stories included a two-year investigation into abuses by correctional officers in New York State and a three-year story about mitigation specialists who help death penalty defendants by documenting their childhood traumas.

The Markup won an Excellence in Technology Reporting award for its reporting on broadband pricing across the US. I loved this reporting and directly used it to help a family member get a better broadband deal.

Every one of these finalists and winners is worth checking out. This is why I’m finding working in product and technology for non-profit news to be so rewarding: you get to support journalists who are genuinely making the world a better, more democratic place by shedding light on stories we need to know about.

News media in the US gets a lot of flak, and some of it is deserved. But the non-profit news industry in particular is doing incredible work, sometimes reporting stories for years on end, and putting every story out there for the public to read without a paywall in sight. These non-profit organizations deserve our personal and institutional support. They make our democracy better.