Werd I/O

The other day I posed the question:

I've started two end-user open source social platforms: Elgg and Known, from the web2 desktop and mobile era respectively. Imagine I was going to create an open source community platform today. What would be different about it?

As you might imagine, I expected the answers to be broadly related to web3 and crypto: perhaps a decentralized platform where each community is interrelated and identity and reputation can be transferred.

But I really liked this reply from Colin Walker:

Everything on social networks is too easy — that's why I used to like Google+ when it launched. There was no API, no way to share something to the network from outside, everything had to be an intentional act.

There’s something really powerful about the idea of anti-virulence. Instead of optimizing around a platform’s K-Factor, we should make the conversation just hard enough to require a thoughtful reply.

The indieweb - blogging in general, actually - has this characteristic. You can’t just knock off a blog post in 10 seconds without time for your brain to kick in. It requires thought, but at the same time, you’re not writing an essay for the New Yorker. In other words, it requires just enough thought. It’s definitely the medium for me.

I wonder what a community platform that was centered around long-form thought would look like? Medium, perhaps? Or something else?

It should be obvious, but: Neil Young and Joni Mitchell’s decision to remove their content from Spotify to protest Joe Rogan’s ongoing covid disinformation is not censorship under the First Amendment or any other measure.

The First Amendment protects us from government censorship. It does not guarantee freedom from content filtering by any other entity. Spotify is not the government. A school board banning books about the Holocaust is a First Amendment issue; musicians threatening to leave a private service because of the content it hosts on one of its shows is not.

Every artist has the right to choose who and what their work is associated with. Spotify is, in effect, a private marketplace (albeit for attention). It’s completely reasonable for an artist to remove their goods from a marketplace because they don’t want to be associated with other goods made available there.

Young said exactly this in a statement on Friday:

“I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”

We all have a similar right to do what we want with our attention and our subscription dollars. If we enjoy Joe Rogan, great: we can choose to continue subscribing to Spotify. If we don’t, and consider the company’s support of misinformation that leads to unnecessary deaths to be immoral, we may wish to consider spending our money elsewhere.

If Spotify was to decide that it no longer wants to spread lies that kill people to bolster its profits, it still wouldn’t be a free speech issue. Rogan is free to keep publishing his work on the web and doubtless would find another avenue. The government is not telling him he can’t be heard, and most of his audience would likely follow him anywhere.

Activism and boycotts are a perfectly reasonable part of democratic society. You could argue that they’re a necessary part of a free market: businesses and customers have the right to make these decisions. To equate not wanting to financially support a toxic talk show with censorship is disingenuous at best.

It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty stressed out.

Someone I trust said that my writing lately has given the impression of “a man on the edge”. I think of it slightly differently - there’s a lot going on and I feel like I’m dealing with it in good humor - but I accept the idea and the intent behind it.

One of the most useful concepts I’ve been introduced to over the last couple of years is the Yerkes-Dodson curve. I’m not a psychologist, so please excuse my layman’s explanation: the idea is that we’re at peak performance when we have an optimal level of sensory arousal. Too little arousal and we’re maybe increasing our level of interest, but not in the zone yet; too much and we burn out quickly.

In contexts where there’s a lot going on, you’re already further along the curve. Because you’re nearer to burnout as a starting position, cognitive input that might ordinarily be okay has the potential to push you over the edge.

It’s a reductive explanation - again, I’m far from a psychologist - but I’ve found that it works for me. Applying this kind of structure to the process by which it all becomes too much has allowed me to think about what those cognitive inputs are, and to build in systems of control to keep myself on the straight and narrow.

I first put this to the test a couple of years ago. My mother’s condition had worsened, and I was feeling utterly overwhelmed, which was deeply affecting my performance at work.

At the same time, I’d become addicted to some game on my phone, and was traveling to and from New York a lot. I’d pick up my phone on the plane and play the game for an hour or two; depending on the day, I might play it a little in my AirBnb after work. There were a lot of notifications involved: lots of input.

In the scheme of things, the game was just a distraction. The big input was my mother’s terminally declining health, which was something that was always going to affect me psychologically, and wasn’t something I could or wanted to cut out of my life. (I can’t imagine what this would even have looked like.) Nonetheless, deleting the game dramatically improved my mental state. I was surprised, but it was undeniable: I was calmer, performed better at work, showed up more effectively for my family, and even had better sleep.

Abstracting this idea has resulted in a rudimentary system of control for my own stress. If I’m finding myself going over the edge - as happened this last week - I take stock of my inputs and reduce them. There are two more systemic solutions: find ways to become a more efficient processor of inputs (physical and mental exercise both help here), and create contexts for myself where there are fewer inputs overall.

Social media is one set of inputs. I’m going to try and take a break over the next month: removing all apps and logging myself out of the websites. It’s not that social media is bad, as such: it’s just one major set of cognitive inputs that can be removed. On the other hand, I find writing and blogging to be closer to a meditative process, so I’ll keep doing that. If I feel better at the end of the month, I’ll come back to social; otherwise I’ll leave it a little longer.

The same principle applies at work. The more chaotic and un-streamlined a process, the more cognitive inputs it produces, and the more stressed a team will be. Structure (or at least, the right amount of it) leads to predictability. Similarly, the more a process depends on ongoing meetings, the more inputs you receive during the workday. Zoom fatigue is both real and related to this principle: each meeting an input, each unscheduled meeting even more so. The more calm, reflective time I have, the more optimal my performance will be - which is, of course, different for everyone, because we all start at different places on the stress curve.

We’re still in the middle of a modern plague. Everyone’s stress level is higher than it would have been: not just because of the underlying context, but because many of us have lost family and friends. Creating conditions for our optimal well-being and performance means limiting stress, controlling our inputs, and more than anything, an intentionality that we might not have felt the need for before.

I was always a pretty good kid: good-natured, good in school, imaginative, and curious. I’d get up early every day to draw comic books before school; during the breaks between lessons on the school playground, I’d pretend I was putting on plays for astronauts. Afterwards, I’d muck about on our 8-bit computer, writing stories or small BASIC programs. I was a weird kid, for sure - nerdy long before it was cool, the third culture child of activist hippies - but relatively happy with it. I had a good childhood that I mostly remember very fondly.

Becoming a teenager also meant becoming the owner of a dark cloud that no-one else could see, which seemed to grow every day. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I would wake up some days without any energy or motivation at all. Sometimes, cycling home from my high school along the Marston Ferry Road in Oxford, a trunk road on one side and fields of cows on the other, I’d just stop. It was as if I was unable to move my feet on the pedals. I described it at the time as feeling like my blood had suddenly turned to water. There was nothing left inside me to go.

That feeling of nothingness inside me, like my fire had gone out, came into focus before I graduated from high school. I felt wrong. There was something irretrievably wrong about me - no, wrong with me - and everybody knew it, and nobody would tell me what it was.

At the same time, I discovered the internet. Whereas I’d come home as a kid to draw and write, as a teenager I’d connect to our dial-up Demon Internet connection and sync my emails and newsgroup posts before logging off again. I learned to build websites as a way to express myself. (Here’s one of my interminable and not-just-a-little-toxic teenage poetry collections, preserved for all eternity on the Internet Archive. You’re welcome.) Most importantly of all, I connected with new friends who were my age, over usenet newsgroups and IRC: two text mediums.

Somehow, when I was connecting with people over text, in a realm where nobody could see me or really knew what I looked like, I felt more free to be myself. Even when I met up with my fellow uk.people.teens posters - our collective parents were somehow totally fine with us all traveling the country to meet strangers by ourselves - I felt more like I could be confidently me, perhaps because I had already laid the groundwork of my friendships in a way that I had more control over. My family has always felt safe to me because I could just be me around them. I had a core group of very close school friends too, who I’m friends with to this day; people who I felt like didn’t judge me, and who I could feel safe around. In more recent years, some of those close friends have veered into conservative Jordan Peterson territory and anti-inclusion rhetoric, and it’s felt like a profound violation of that safety to a degree that I haven’t been able to fully explain until recently.

My connection to the internet - as in my personal connection, the emotional link I made with it - came down to that feeling of safety. I used my real name, but there was a pseudonymity to it; I was able to skate past all the artifice and pressure to conform of in-person society that had led me to feel wrong in the first place. On the web, I didn’t have that feeling. I could just be a person like everybody else. Being present in real life was effort; being online was an enormous weight off my shoulders.

Perhaps the reason I’ve come back to building community spaces again and again is because I remember that feeling of connecting for the first time and finding that the enormous cloud hanging over me was missing. That deep connection between people who have never met is still, for me, what the internet is all about. Or to put it another way, I’m constantly chasing that feeling, and that’s why I work on the internet.

Likewise, that’s what I’m looking for from my in-person connections. I want to feel like I can be me, and that I will be loved and accepted as I am. While I’ve found that in connections with all kinds of people, I’ve most often found that to be true in queer spaces: in my life, the people who have had to work to define their own identity are the most likely to accept people who don’t fit in.

It’s important to me: that deep, dark feeling of wrongness has never gone away. It’s under my skin at the office; it’s behind my eyes at family gatherings; it’s what I think about when I wake up at three in the morning. If we’re friends or family or lovers, I want to feel safe with you. I want to know that you accept me despite the wrongness, whatever the wrongness might be.

It might be that the relief the internet gave me also delayed my reconciliation with what the wrongness actually was.

When I was six years old, I cried and cried because my mother told me I wouldn’t grow up to be a woman. The feeling of not wanting to be myself has been with me as long as I can remember. I found beauty in people who were not like myself. There was much to aspire to in not being me.

Puberty gave me, to be frank, enormous mass. I was taller than everyone else, bigger than everyone else, by the time I was eleven or twelve. I towered over everyone by the time I was fourteen. I was bigger and hairier and smellier. In adulthood, the way one ex-girlfriend described it, my body isn’t just taller: it’s like someone has used the resize tool in Photoshop and just made me bigger, proportionally. I was never thin or athletic or dainty; I suddenly ballooned like the Incredible Hulk, but without the musculature.

I had felt wrong in my body before. Now, there was more of my body - a lot more - to feel wrong in.

So much of that dark cloud was my discomfort with my physicality: the meatspace experience of living as me. People started to tell me that I was easy to find in crowds, or made fun of the bouncy walk I developed as my limbs grew. They meant nothing by it, but it cut deep.

To this day, I recoil when I see a photo of myself alongside someone else. I hate it: there’s always this enormous dude ruining a perfectly good picture. It doesn’t even feel like me; it’s akin to when Sam Beckett looks into the mirror in Quantum Leap, or when Neo sees the projection of himself in The Matrix: Resurrections. The word, I’ve learned, is dysphoria.

I don’t know where to take that, or what it really means. I feel intense discomfort with my body and the physical manifestation of myself in the world. It’s not necessarily gender dysphoria - I don’t know - but it’s dysphoria nonetheless. I hate my body and it doesn’t feel like me.

What now?

The advent of the commercial internet must have been solace for a great many people in this way. It’s not unreasonable to say that it saved my life: not necessarily because I would have killed myself (although there have been times in my life, particularly when I was younger, when I’ve thought about it), but because I wouldn’t have found a way to build community and live with the authentic connections I did. I would have been hiding, fully and completely. Everyone deserves to not hide.

But because I’ve been living with one foot outside of the physical world, it’s also taken me a long time to understand that my feeling of wrongness was so tied into my physicality, and that my need to present differently was so acute.

I actually felt a little relief last year when I dyed my hair electric blue on a whim: it felt right in a way I wasn’t used to, perhaps because it was something under my control, or perhaps because it was a signal that I wasn’t the person I felt I had presented as up to then. The blue has long since faded and grown out into highlights, but some sense of the relief it brought remains. I have to wonder how I would feel if I did more to my body, and what it would take to make that dark cloud go away for good.

I think feeling good - no, feeling right - involves embracing that the feeling I’ve been experiencing my whole life is valid, and then exploring what it means in the real world. You’ve got to face it; you’ve got to give it a name.

There’s a TikTok trend that uses a line from a MGMT song to make a point about closeted queerness: ‌Just know that if you hide, it doesn't go away. It’s clear to me that the internet has been a godsend for people who don’t feel like they fit in, who need to find community that is nurturing for them, and who need to explore who they are. Removing that cognitive cloud is no small thing. But the next step is still the hardest: figuring out who you are, and finding out how to be yourself.

‌‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to Harmony Health Clinic. Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, Harmony Health Clinic “seeks to understand and serve the health and wellness needs of the medically uninsured and underserved who live in Pulaski County, by providing access to quality medical care at no cost to these patients in a private, community-based clinic, staffed by medical professional volunteers and marked by a unique atmosphere of caring, compassion, respect, dignity, and diversity.”

It describes its mission as follows:

[…] The Clinic’s founders are committed to advancing social justice through the provision of quality health care to those who are denied it by virtue of barriers such as socioeconomic status. We believe that universal access to decent health care is integral to the sanctity, development and enjoyment of life, and vital to an individual’s ability to fully realize one’s dignity and potential. Virtually every religious faith and major Christian denomination takes the position that access to decent health care is and should be recognized as a basic human right, and that the prevailing health care system in this country utterly fails to protect that right when it does not ensure adequate coverage for all Americans. Indeed, the United States of America stands virtually alone among all industrialized nations as the only country which does not provide health care coverage to all of its citizens.

As the pandemic progresses and health needs compound, I’m concerned about the impact on the most vulnerable, particularly in some of the most impoverished and unequal parts of the country. Harmony Health Clinic is one organization that is helping to alleviate these inequities.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to join me here.

I found Harmony Health Clinic through the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, which provides support for the uninsured and underinsured nationwide. I donated to them, too, and I encourage you to do the same.

Something I’ve learned over the last decade is that I have a very different relationship to place than many - perhaps even most - people.

I come by it honestly. In my nuclear family growing up, each of us had a slightly different accent, shaped by our respective journeys. My dad’s is Dutch; my mother’s was American; my sister and I sit in different places along the British-to-American spectrum, and have fluctuated along that axis throughout our lives.

Parts of my family ancestry moved by force: concentration camps in Indonesia and pogroms in Ukraine. But even on the theoretically more stable sides of my family, my forebears typically decided to move around a bunch. Even within the bounds of my own history, my childhood was spent in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Austria, and the United States.

When I came along, a tiny zygote interrupting a life among the political activists of 1970s Berkeley, my parents decided to move to Europe. I’m sure it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer for them, but they were clear on their decision: they would prefer to have a child in Europe than the United States. That pattern continued throughout my childhood: we traveled for educational opportunities, and for work. It was a privileged existence in the sense that experiencing different cultures and living in different places is privileged; we didn’t have much money, and scraped to get by.

I’ve inherited that wanderlust, and I guess a sense of willingness to be somewhere new. There’s nothing wrong with its opposite - a desire to stay and grow roots, to be deeply settled - but that understanding didn’t come easily to me. There’s something almost genetic about not wanting to be in one place forever. There’s so much world out there!

I’m not at all jealous of the folks whose families have been in the same spot for generations. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it feels like so much more might be possible. And I have to acknowledge that it’s a ridiculous stance, because so much of the traveling in my family history comes from trauma: it’s not so much that people just wanted to roam. They were forced out; their homes burned; their communities tortured and murdered. Perhaps there’s a virtue to be found in the resilience that’s a required outcome of that, but not so much in the act itself. These were atrocities.

And yet. I like to move.

Evan Prodromou wrote about this internal conflict on his blog yesterday. He’s wondering about his geographic legacy, and considering lessons from Melody Warnick’s book This is Where You Belong.

The book covers a lot of the reasons that staying put is more healthy physically and psychologically than constantly moving. It also has a number of commonsense recommendations for establishing connections to the place you’re living. Like: walk or bike more, so you see things up close. Volunteer. Meet people. Learn the history. Do what people who live there do.

To me, settling has always felt like settling: coming to a compromise agreement with the world. I feel like I need to erase that chip in my brain, and I haven’t quite found the way to do it.

I would love to settle in the sense of finding a comfortable place to rest, and in the sense of putting down real roots. I have not yet found a way to feel okay with it.

I’d like to informally join the list of technologists who support the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Here’s the full text of the bill.

Specifically, the bill would prevent “covered platforms” from prioritizing their products and services over those provided by other vendors in a way that would harm competition on that platform.

That could be interpreted to mean app stores and search engines: a “covered platform” is one that has at least 50M US-based monthly active users, at least 100K monthly active “business users”, and has either a market cap or revenues of at least $550B. It also needs to have the potential to “materially impede” access from a business to its users / customers, or to tools a business needs to service its users or customers.

It’s a good law. Neither search engine or marketplace vendors should have the ability to preference services made by that vendor over equivalent services made by others. Apple shouldn’t be able to promote Apple’s services over a startup’s on the App Store; Google shouldn’t be able to promote Google’s services on its store or in its search engine results. The result will be a better ecosystem for startups, independent projects, and software produced by co-operatives and collectives.

Similarly, the Open App Markets Act would prevent App Store providers from forcing app vendors to use the provider’s payments technology. Apple wouldn’t be able to require that subscriptions go through iTunes, for example. That’s a big change that, again, creates better terms for startups and helps to establish a more competitive ecosystem.

This is the kind of thing legislation should be doing: helping to enforce fairer markets that allow newcomers to compete with incumbents on a level playing field. I’m hopeful that these bills pass, and that they’re a precursor to real antitrust reform. In the light of today’s announcement around an overhauled merger approval process, we may be in luck.

A more competitive landscape is one where consumers have more choices and protections, and ecosystems are more open and innovative. These active steps to get there represent a change that’s been a long time coming.

I’m 90% convinced that most tech workers are going to be working remotely for the duration of 2022. Omicron has pushed out much-fanfare returns to the office, and there’s nothing to say that there won’t be another wave after that. It’s simply not safe, and it won’t be safe for some time.

Rather than playing that by ear and seeing how we go, which has resulted in an announcement about returning to the office followed by a retraction roughly every quarter, I think companies should go ahead and make the assumption. It’ll help the companies themselves make better financial decisions. For example, Google can save the $6.3M it spends on food each year and direct it elsewhere (for example, to help parents, carers, and other people who need it). But more importantly, the certainty will help employees plan their lives.

There’s a lot to be gained from being remote. Within certain parameters, I vastly prefer it: I do better work, I waste less time traveling, I eat better food and do more exercise, and feel less tired at the end of each day. Those parameters and boundaries are important, though: if work bleeds into every hour of the day because there’s no set home-time from the office, it’s a much worse experience (and everyone does worse work because they’re wiped out).

But more than that, there’s a lot to be gained from not being wishy-washy about it. Burnout happens, in part, when you work really hard but feel like you don’t have control. Left unchecked, the uncertainty and powerlessness of our covid situation can be a huge contributor to it. Removing that psychic overhead could, I think, reduce one of the most important stressful overheads of this era.

There’s a lot to work out. The pandemic has disproportionately affected people from vulnerable communities, and remote working can exacerbate those effects. We can’t ignore the equity issues with remote working - but that means leaning into them and finding real solutions that make for more equitable workplaces, rather than pretending that remote work is going away any time soon.

The best workplaces are kind, inclusive, empathetic, and responsive to their workers’ needs. That doesn’t have to mean in-person - particularly when being in-person carries the risk of contracting a disease that could affect your entire life. Let’s take that out of the equation and focus on how to make things better in our new reality. There’s no going back to normal. Not for a long time yet.

Over the last decade or two tech has become dominated by the startup: a small, new business that rapidly reinvents itself in an iterative process. Once upon a time, the aim of that process was - or at least, seemed like it was - to be as useful as possible to a well-defined target group of users. These days it feels like the aim is mostly to gain as high a valuation as possible by moving from venture capital funding round to funding round, eventually making bank through an exit event.

That startupification has had an interesting effect on tech communities. I’m from the utopian era of the web, when we all thought we could build something to connect that world, and by doing so that we would make it more peaceful. These days, it seems like people are mostly in it to make millions of dollars - which feels like an emptier, less exciting goal, to say the least. The possibilities for social change used to seem endless; now the conversation is mostly about funding rounds or financial yield. In itself, it’s boring, but it also changes who is attracted to the space: we’ve gone from a loose group of weird social idealists to being overwhelmed by a bolus of the most boring possible people. The tech workforce is becoming Wall Street in hoodies, far more concerned with the performance of their RSUs than the impact they’re having in the world.

Of course, there are still idealists: people who believe in making the world more equal and democratic, and that technology has a part to play in making it happen. The indieweb movement remains one great example of this; there are also plenty of people working on tech for good, or mission-driven endeavors where the social impact comes first. Even in companies that are a part of this financialization of tech, there are people doing great work on inclusivity, unionization, and advocacy for social responsibility. Nonetheless, at this point, these groups are in the minority.

I find that personally demotivating - it’s not why I got into the space, or why I’m excited about it - but it’s also kind of counterproductive. If you’re laser focused on helping a defined group of people, you’re more likely to build a valuable company, because you’re literally generating value. Conversely, if you’re focused on making money as a goal rather than a means to an end, you’re more likely to make shallower decisions that undermine your value. Being focused on helping your user means you’re aligned with them; being primarily focused on your financial goals means you’re primarily aligned with yourself. To put it another way, if the aim is to raise a round or make a bunch of money personally, you’re more likely to make decisions that screw your users and undermine that goal to begin with. It’s also just a selfish, stupid way to look at the world.

Remember this Apple campaign?

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

It doesn’t say here’s to the stockbrokers, is all I’m saying. Tech could use a little more crazy, a little more outside thinking, a little more equity-mindedness, and a little less greed. That’s how the world gets changed: by focusing on people, not on dollar bills.

Photo by Israel Andrade on Unsplash

‌‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to Project HOME. Based in Philadelphia, Project HOME aims to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty in the Philly area.

It describes its mission as follows:

The mission of the Project HOME community is to empower adults, children, and families to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty, to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty, and to enable all of us to attain our fullest potential as individuals and as members of the broader society. We strive to create a safe and respectful environment where we support each other in our struggles for self-esteem, recovery, and the confidence to move toward self-actualization.

Its work includes permanent, subsidized housing for individuals and families who had been homeless; learning, training, and employment; affordable healthcare services for the underserved; and K12 education for vulnerable children and teens. Its work is holistic, addressing underlying causes as well as immediate needs.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.