Werd I/O

Organizing childcare as relative newcomers to an area has been really hard. We weren’t on any daycare waiting lists before our baby was born; we don’t have the local connections that can help you figure out how to separate the good facilities from bad.

Erin’s back to work, and I’ve been primary carer for a few months now. Honestly, were it not for the financial squeeze, I’d be very happy with this arrangement: the concept of paying money to someone for the privilege of spending less time with my child so I can work more feels inherently broken. Given the choice between spending time with my baby and spending more time at work, it’s a no-brainer: he’s only going to be nine months old once in his life and I don’t want to miss a single second. But, of course, it’s not really a choice. The mortgage won’t pay itself; food doesn’t magically appear on the table. You may be shocked to hear that a career in open source and the open web has not left me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

We had high hopes for a local Montessori school with an infant program. We love Montessori: a child-led teaching philosophy that emphasizes open-ended curiosity over rote learning and rigid compartmentalization. But Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and teacher who pioneered the technique, never trademarked the name, and it turns out that Montessori education in the United States has become a free-for-all. The infant program was resistant to us touring, but we insisted. I don’t think Maria had the broom closet sized room littered with broken plastic toys that we saw in mind; I’d like to think she might have frowned upon the infant carer who left the door open while she left the room, remaking that “it’s amazing, the babies never go through the doorway”. She might have at least raised an eyebrow at the nearby school run by the same family that was closed down because inspectors found over twenty safety infractions after a child died. Being a European, she might also have wondered why parents had to pay thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of leaving their baby there.

My point is: it’s a minefield. And, while we’re not independently wealthy, we’re still luckier than many. I have no idea how most parents do it.

Work-life balance takes on a whole other meaning when kids enter the picture. It seems like this is doubly true here in the States, where the work culture is markedly less humane. I have fond memories of my parents being around most of the time: first as students, which is why I grew up in Oxford and am stuck with this accent forever, and then as entrepreneurs running their own small pre-internet media business. There was always at least one parent around when we came home from school, and there was no talk of putting us in after-school programs so they could spend more time at work. School, come to that, started at a sane time, because the learning day wasn’t designed around parents needing to get to work at 8am. I was well-rested, well-fed, and would spend my afternoons drawing and playing. Sometimes we would walk over to the playground on Aristotle Lane (again, Oxford), or visit the commonly-held meadows beyond. All for free. We didn’t have a ton of money, but so what?

It feels so far away from this world of people asking for thousands of dollars a month to place our child in a murder corridor so that we can earn enough money to pay for it all. And this is years before we have to start worrying about the active shooter drills and performative busy-ness that seem to be hallmarks of modern American schooling.

I want to recreate that feeling of endless safety and open-ended creativity for our child. I also want it for us. I need that open, secure space to be creative for my own work and development, too, and I want the same for Erin. I want us both to have a strong relationship with our son for our own well-being as much as his.

There are a few things I know I can do. I’m permanently a remote worker for the next eighteen years at least. I can set strong boundaries around my workday. I can reserve time each week for my own creative endeavors so that I can show up refreshed and happy for his. I can learn to put my fucking phone downand be present. I can find ways to move my career towards making and selling things rather than advising. I can relax about my career ambitions and get serious about my lifestyle ambitions. I can take a step back and design a life around the way I want to live.

But there are some things that are harder to change. I can’t change the need for health insurance, the lack of support for parents with younger children, or the culture of performative productivity. My wonderful cousin Jonathan Neale remarked to me recently that a society that works for its inhabitants is actually rather easy to achieve if that’s what you set out to do; we are not doing that. We’re trying to produce more and more and more, using technology to go faster and faster and push that GDP number ever higher, without considering its effect on our quality of life. We’re pushing individual achievement over community health. We’re starting our kids off at school at 7:30am and leaving them in programs until after we get home from work so that we can produce. We’re forgetting to breathe, and in turn, teaching them that it’s not okay to breathe. This is a fucked-up thing to do to any human and it’s not something I wish for our son.

Not every country is like the United States, and we could move. Perhaps, eventually, we will. For now, though, it’s off the table, and we’re in the position of trying to figure out how to design a humane life in the midst of a culture that doesn’t seem to want to let us have one.

There's still time to apply to be The 19th's next Chief Technology Officer. If the idea of working with a women-run, highly diverse, non-profit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy sounds good to you (it's a truly GREAT team), go check out the job description and apply.

I posted a link the other day to this sobering essay about how the promised migration to Mastodon didn’t go as hoped. It makes some assumptions about what people were hoping for in the first place, but if you were (as I was) hoping that this would be a moment that federated social media might become mainstream, I think its arguments are correct. I wish they weren’t.

So what does Mastodon bring to the table in addition to Twitter, that might justify someone deciding to take the plunge and move to it? There are a few unique things about the platform, but they generally fall into the broad category of “things users don’t care about”. Chief among these is decentralisation.

I’ve made this argument before: for most people, decentralization is not a selling point. For a significant number of people, not being Twitter as run by Elon Musk is a selling point. And while there are certainly arguments to be made about how decentralized networks are less likely to fall prey to the same fate, the fact of the matter is, most people don’t care. Most people don’t understand what decentralization even really is, and nor should they have to.

Decentralized protocols are infrastructure in the same way that servers are infrastructure. Nobody cares if a traditional social network is built on AWS or Google Cloud. What they care about is the community: can they follow people they’re interested in, can they engage in great conversations, potentially find an audience for the things they make, and do all of this safely and without abuse.

Mastodon has, so far, not done well on this front. People really do find it hard to use. And when they do make it on, the number of “reply guys” — people who respond in an unwanted and condescending way to peoples’ posts, particularly those written by women — is sometimes off the charts. Finally but by no means least, there’s a disturbing current of anti-Blackness that extends from the covert racism of asking people to hide their lived experiences behind a content warning to overt white supremacy. For many people, it is not a welcoming place.

Dr Johnathan Flowers, who studies the philosophy of technology, gave a great interview last year that covers this topic in detail. It’s very difficult for me to pull a representative quote out; instead, I recommend that you read or listen to the whole piece.

Indeed, when I posted the link, I got some interesting replies that expressed the sentiment: it’s good that not everyone can use Mastodon. Sometimes a higher barrier to entry leads to a better quality of community. We never wanted everyone to move over; we just wanted the right people to move over.

Not a good look when many of the people who are put off from using the community are people of color, women, the disabled, and people with few resources. I’m strongly opposed to this sentiment: I think for social media to truly be useful, it must be welcoming, inclusive, and accessible.

There’s another reason why I want user-aligned social media to be readily accessible. (I’m struggling for a good term for this, as you can tell: it’s not decentralized social media, because decentralization is just a functional means to an end. What do you call something that is inherently supportive of the people who use it and their underlying interests? Democratic? Progressive?) Social media is intrinsically involved in the very dark moment in democracy that we’re living through; it has empowered populism and the rise of a militant far right. We need the online spaces that most of us use to not be run by people who are active supporters of fascism at worst and agnostic to it at best.

Social media helped bring about Trump. Right now Elon Musk is using Twitter in the same way Rupert Murdoch uses his media empire. Facebook does not look like it is eager to avoid the mistakes of its past if it means forgoing profit. There has to be a strong, inclusive alternative to these platforms, and right now there simply isn’t one.

None of this is to say that the underlying protocols are bad. I love ActivityPub. I think they’re a fantastic way to build new platforms. And I think that’s exactly what we need: new platforms, in the human sense, built with the participation of the communities they support. It’s not nearly enough to build a functional Twitter clone. Technology is never enough.

We need to build communities in new, participative ways that ensure everyone’s voice is heard. We need to share equity. We need to ensure that people with few resources are able to onboard. We need to ensure that everyone can feel safe as they express their true selves. Otherwise, to be frank, I don’t see the point.

I think it absolutely can be done, but lately I’ve been feeling like Mastodon itself is not yet the answer. The big question, then, is: what do we do next?

If you take investment to build your product, you will one day need to find a way to repay those investors. That might be a risk that you need to take because you otherwise wouldn't be able to build the thing you want to. But it's a key part of the equation.

With no outside money, only people with copious spare time or disposable wealth can afford to build software of any complexity. I don’t see that as a desirable outcome, not just because it’s fundamentally unfair, but also because we then won’t get software built by people with a wider range of lived experiences, which means it will be less useful overall. We therefore need to have investors or grant-making institutions in the mix. Venture capital, though often maligned, has allowed a lot of services we all use to exist.

The trouble is, the need for exponential growth or revenue sometimes pit platforms against their users, which is death for a Web 2.0 business.

Web 2.0 businesses work by making their user-bases into part of the machine. They produce network effects, which means that the product becomes more valuable as more people use it. Reddit with one user is not particularly useful; Reddit with millions is a much more compelling place to converse.

For years, those user-bases have just sort of gone along with it. There have been minor skirmishes from time to time, but the utility of the platform itself has generally been enough to keep people engaging.

Twitter’s implosion changed that. Millions of people decamped from the platform to places like Mastodon — and some of them to nowhere at all. More than creating a problem for Twitter and an opportunity for anyone working on alternatives, this mass movement of users also opened the floodgates for more direct action among Web 2.0 users.

Over 87% of subreddits - the themed discussion communities that make up Reddit - went on strike this week in protest of new API policies that price most apps out of the market. When CEO Steve Huffman issued a tone-deaf internal memo suggesting that this, too, would pass, they decided to extend the action. In effect, the vast majority of the site has been shut down. Huffman lost the respect of the people who had, up to then, been willingly part of his machine.

In the old days, we talked about Web 2.0 “democratizing” industries. Blogging democratized publishing. Flickr democratized photo discovery and use. Delicious democratized … bookmarks, I guess? Because these use cases represented a move away from centralized publishing models where an elite few controlled who could be seen and heard, they were democratized, in a sense. But the platforms themselves continued to be built, run, and funded by an elite few. There was no democratization of power or equity. As has long been the case with mass media, the users were not the customers; they were the product being sold.

While there were always people who discussed these obvious harms and advocated for solutions — long-time members of the indieweb community and its cousins, for example — these were not mainstream topics. The cracks really began to show after the 2016 election, when Facebook finally caught some criticism for its flippancy towards democracy. Subsequently, stories about its role in genocide, its misrepresentation of its own engagement analytics to news organizations, and other harms became more widespread.

But while there has always been some sporadic direct action — there have been a few third-party tools that have let people delete their content and connections from Facebook, for example; LiveJournal users finally left en masse after its sale to a Russian media company which enacted homophobic and anti-politics policies — we haven’t seen anything on the level of this year’s. Millions of Twitter users quit following Elon Musk’s acquisition, and now most of Reddit is offline.

Reddit is the perfect testbed for this kind of collective user action. Each individual subreddit is controlled by a set of moderators who have the power to turn their communities off — which is exactly what they’ve done. But Reddit isn’t the only platform with this dynamic: a 2021 report by the NYU Governance Lab suggested that 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups every month. Admins of those groups have remarkable power over the Facebook platform.

This has the potential to be a radical change. Once users realized that they have power as a community, the fundamental dynamics of these platforms changes. You can no longer engage in adversarial business practices: there’s nothing wrong with making money, but it will need to be in a way that aligns with the people who give a platform its value.

Not only should that give the leadership of more established Web 2.0 businesses pause, it should inform early decisions by both investors and founders of any new collaborative platform on the internet. An adversarial business model, or a hand-wavey one like “selling data”, has the potential to deeply harm the value of a venture that depends on its users further down the road.

The health, trust, and safety of a platform’s community is paramount. The potential for collective action means that, finally, users can have some say in how the platforms they use are run. We may even see more platforms move to co-operative and community-owned models as a way to ensure that they remain aligned with their ecosystems: it’s not just good ethics, but it’s good business sense in a world where users, admins, and third-party app developers understand that they have the power to leave.

We may even see moderator’s unions, providing collective bargaining, advice, and other benefits for people who run communities across platforms. Perhaps even bonuses like negotiated healthcare that industrial unions have long provided. There’s honestly no reason why not: these people are the direct drivers of millions upon millions of dollars for platform owners. They have power; they just have to stand up and use it.

Also posted on IndieNews