Skip to main content
 

The internet, addiction, and me

Sometimes it's not okay to look down from the world.

9 min read

I used to have a night-time routine. I would help my mother up the six stairs from the living room to her bedroom, give her a hug, and set her up in bed. Sometimes, if she was feeling particularly weak, I would bring her toothbrush to her with a mug of water, so that she could brush her teeth in bed.

I could hear the rolling stand that held her food pump against the hardwood floor as she moved around at night, to go to the bathroom. My dad had all the carpeting removed when they bought the house — carpets harbor dust and fungus that could inflame her lungs.

Years out from a double lung transplant, it was no longer the pulmonary fibrosis that was causing her pain: it was the anti-rejection drugs. The operation had saved her life, but it was far from a magic bullet. For eight years, she seemed to go from near-death experience to near-death experience: operations to remove scarring on her lungs, fungal infections, feeding tubes, inability to eat, nausea, pain. In 2019, we spent eleven straight weeks by her bedside. In 2020, the silver lining of the pandemic was that I no longer had to go into an office, and could spend most of my time helping to care for her. In 2021, on an awful Sunday evening in June, we lost her.

She fought for over a decade. Even at the end, she said she wasn’t ready to say goodbye. She still had life left. She didn’t want to leave us.

There are so many things I want to tell her; so many things I want to talk through with her. There’s so much I want to apologize for, too: she had told us, over and over again, that she didn’t want to die in a hospital. In some of her last lucid moments, she tried to remove the tubes on her arms. “This is not okay,” she said. Palliative care, which is supposed to be about making her as comfortable as possible, seemed in the end to be about making us as comfortable as possible. They starved her. I watched as my sedated, unconscious mother starved to death in a hospital bed.

This is not okay.

I feel compelled to go back to that hospital room, as if she’ll be waiting for me there. When I was still in San Francisco, I’d walk by the hospital and look up at the corner room, facing the trees on the hillside, hoping to see her silhouette.

I wish she would show up in my dreams, so I could at least talk to a version of her, even if I intellectually know it would just be my own projection. She hasn’t shown up there once, except as a brief staccato “oh my god, you guys” that came out of nowhere and woke me up like a nightmare.

The morning she died, I collapsed into Erin; I’m not ready, I said, over and over, as if it could change anything.

I’m not ready.

I will never be ready.

I came back to Britain for my friend’s wedding a year after her lung transplant. I didn’t stay long: whenever I went anywhere, there was always the fear that something would happen. But I’d ripped my life apart to come to California to be with her, and returning there made me feel at least a little bit connected to what my life had been. I saw my friends, I saw the places that used to be home to me. But rather than slotting back, there was a bittersweetness to everything. It had all changed, my life and theirs, and this couldn’t be home to me anymore. I was severed.

I gave a presentation about the indieweb at an Edinburgh TechMeetup where my laptop had frozen up and needed to be hard-rebooted halfway through. Afterwards, we all gathered at a nearby pub, and a prominent member of the Edinburgh tech scene said to me, “I wouldn’t have gone. I would have said, ‘sorry, Mum, you made the choice to move there’.” I couldn’t understand, and I still can’t. She had never met my mother. She would never understand who my mother was. And she misunderstood me if she thought I would ever say that. (Did I do the wrong thing?, I asked myself that night, and for years afterwards, over and over.)

Ma’s illness was genetic. We’ve lost five members of our family — people we dearly loved. Researchers were finally able to figure out how to identify the relevant mutation in the TERT gene, which eventually led to my sister and I getting cleared. But, of course, the science is evolving; there’s no complete guarantee that we are actually cleared. It will hover over us forever either way: we lost people we dearly love to this thing as recently as this summer, so any relief we might have felt was painfully hollow.

Holy shit, did it fuck me up.

I remember my first experience of really feeling different when I was around eight years old; the dawning understanding in my third-culture mind that people saw me as some kind of other. One boy used to drag me into the ditch at the side of the school playing field and just jump on me, as if he was trying to break my legs. The teachers at my school mocked me for having a German name; forty years later, the war still weighed heavily for them. I have wondered if they would have acted differently if they’d known my Jewish heritage, but honestly, I don’t think it would have mattered. I wasn’t one of them, was the thing; I was Other.

When I was a teenager, I became so tall that I often loomed over people. My new presence attracted yet more attention, and I grew to hate the looming hugeness of my body, this bounding form that people found it necessary to laugh at. I wished I could have disappeared. I wished I could have been normal. I fantasized that there was a magic word that other people knew that I didn’t, and if I could only figure out how to invoke this special incantation, I would finally feel like I was okay.

So when this happened, when I tore my life to bits at the hands of this terrible terminal disease, I felt like I deserved it. I didn’t feel like Ma deserved it; I didn’t feel like my dad deserved it; I didn’t feel like my sister deserved it; I didn’t feel like the other members of my family deserved it. Intellectually, I don’t believe in fate or karma. Nonetheless, I deserved it. Of course I did.

The internet, though. Here was a place where I could write something, or take a photo, or build some software and release it, and the world would respond. Every response was a distraction from what was actually happening. This other world, not so much a backchannel to real life as a parallel universe with its own culture and rules, could take me away, just as it had when I was a teenager. Even then, I would check for new messages relentlessly, dialing up to Demon Internet and logging in many times during a long, after-school evening. Now, decades later, the web seemed infinite, and there was always something new to say, to get involved in. It was a balm, and then an addiction, and then a distraction. A way to feel less worthless. And whereas my teenage self had needed to dial up from the desktop computer in his bedroom after school, the iPhone gave me access to it anywhere.

I wrote recently about needing to pull back from social media. It’s not the first time I’ve written a post like this: it’s been a cycle of addiction. But I don’t think I’ve ever written in depth about why I needed that back-channel. It’s sometimes easier to look down at the device in your hands than take life squarely in the face.

But that doesn’t mean the escape is reasonable, or healthy, or right. There were times over the last fifteen years when I needed to be present in the moment and I just wasn’t: when I was racking up points sharing links rather than facing up to what was happening. It made me avoidant and disconnected; untethered me from the world. It dulled my empathy and let me remove myself from it all.

This isn’t a “screens are bad” post. It is a post about being forced to reckon with what actually matters, even when it’s hard to look at.

Maybe what I’m saying doesn’t make sense to you. But when I say I want to remove myself from social media, when I don’t think it’s good for me, and when I keep coming back, this is what I mean. This is what’s happening.

Which means the indieweb isn’t just a technology movement to me. It’s a way of reclaiming more of myself. And in that light, perhaps I should just own my mind and switch it all off for good.

· Asides

 

It’s snowing again. That’s it, I’m moving to Spain.

· Statuses

 

Make better documents.

"We almost never never actually teach people how to use the ordinary tools of business communication in more effective ways. So, I'm gathering some advice that I regularly share with people, in hopes that this helps you get your messages across more effectively."

This is brilliant: something I wish was part of every computer science curriculum (and every MBA and just about everything else). Perhaps it can be?

I've been thinking a lot about how to help engineers be better storytellers, and these fundamentals are a core piece of this puzzle. There's more, of course, but you can never go wrong by making your writing concrete and ensuring you keep its audience in mind.

· Links

 

ChatGPT as a writing partner

Sometimes we all need a robot cheerleader.

2 min read

Confession: I’ve started to find ChatGPT to be useful in my fiction writing.

And now, before proceeding, I must very quickly add that I haven’t let it write a word of the story, or come up with any ideas, or engage in any ideation. That’s all me.

But writing is lonely, and conventional wisdom says that you shouldn’t share your first draft with anybody. (I agree with that: the times I’ve broken this rule have been disastrous.) So for me, a first-timer who blogs quickly but has rarely published outside of that format, the self-doubt had reached a crescendo.

Which is why I’ve started feeding passages to a generative model and asking it to provide a loose critique — then adding and editing, and asking it to provide a second one.

Here’s a response it gave me yesterday on a revision:

This revision maintains the strong atmospheric and thematic elements of the original while making significant strides in clarifying the narrative and deepening the intrigue around the Source. The interactions between [character] and [other character] are particularly effective in teasing out the central mysteries of the story.

[Further description of strengths and weaknesses omitted]

In summary, this version of the passage improves upon the original by deepening the mystery, enhancing character depth, and expanding the thematic exploration. Further refining the balance between exposition and action, clarifying the stakes, and enriching emotional and sensory descriptions will continue to elevate the narrative, drawing readers deeper into the world you've crafted.

Look, I know. I’m incredibly familiar with all the shortcomings of AI. And I know its literary feedback is not good. But there’s a kind of magic feather quality to this back-and-forth: now I feel less alone, and the feedback, however mechanical, is enough to puncture my fear that everything I’m doing is bullshit. It’s the equivalent of a mechanical Turk that sticks its thumb up from time to time and tells me I’m doing great, but also, have I remembered to show not tell? And that’s kind of what I need in the moment.

I guess what I’m saying is, sometimes I need a robot cheerleader. And I’m going to say that’s okay.

· Asides

 

Gardens and power

Power dynamics change everything.

2 min read

Manu Moreale discusses the dual use of the garden metaphor for both walled gardens and digital gardens:

It’s interesting how we’re using the same metaphor—the garden—to describe two completely different things. [The walled garden] is the embodiment of the capitalist mindset applied to the digital ecosystem driven by greed. The other is the digital manifestation of personal expression. Digital gardens are—or at least should be—a welcoming place.

It’s an insightful observation, and an illustration of the way power dynamics change everything.

Consider surveillance. We don’t want (and shouldn’t want) the government or big business to understand the nuances of our lives; our comings and goings; who we gather with; the things we say to each other behind closed doors. At the same time, we absolutely do want to understand the nuances of the lives of people with power; their comings and goings; who they gather with; the things they say to each other behind closed doors.

That’s because they have power and we do not. giving them more knowledge about our lives just cements their position; giving us more insight into them gives them more accountability to us.

So it is with gardens. If a megacorporation builds a walled garden, it’s to hem us in. If we build a walled garden, it’s to keep them out.

· Asides

 

Downpour is out!

"It would not be worth all that to make a game that is a single stupid joke. And I like games that are single stupid jokes, and so I guess I have spent a few years in the hopes that I can let more people make more of them."

Everything about this is lovely.

· Links

 

Startup pitch: Fediverse VIP

An illustrative sketch of a new service

Here’s my pitch for a fediverse product for organizations.

Think of it as WordPress VIP for the fediverse: a way for organizations to safely build a presence on the fediverse while preserving their brand, keeping their employees safe, and measuring their engagement.

We’ve established that the fediverse is large and growing: Threads has around 130M monthly users, Flipboard has 100M, Mastodon has a couple of million, and there’s a very long tail. And the network is growing, with more existing services and new entrants joining all the time. It is the future of the social web.

But the options for organizations to join are not fully aligned with organizations’ needs:

  • Flipboard is a good solution for publications to share articles directly, but not individuals to interact as first-class fediverse citizens.
  • Threads allows anyone to have an independent profile, but there’s no good organizational way to keep track of them all.
  • Mastodon allows you to establish communities, but you need to work with a hosting provider or install it yourself.
  • There’s no really great way to know that a profile really does belong to an organization. For example, on Threads, verification is at the ID level, and costs an individual $11.99 a month.
  • There’s no way to style profiles to match your brand, or to enforce brand guidelines.
  • There’s no analytics.
  • There are no brand or individual safety features like allowing safety teams to co-pilot an account if it’s suffering abuse.
  • There’s no shared inbox to manage support requests or other enquiries that come in via social media.

Fediverse VIP is a managed service that allows any brand to create individual fediverse profiles for its employees and shared ones for its publications, on its own domain, using its own brand styles, with abuse prevention and individual safety features, and with full analytics reporting.

For example, if the New York Times hypothetically signs up for Fediverse VIP, each of its reporters could have an account @reporter.name@newyorktimes.com, letting everyone know that this is a real New York Times account. If you click through to a profile, it will look like the New York Times, with custom links that click through directly to NYT content. On the back end, multiple users can contribute, edit, and schedule posts for shared accounts.

Each Fediverse VIP instance has its own analytics, so you can learn more about the content you’ve published and how it performed — and build reports that instance administrators can share with their managers. And in the unfortunate event that an account suffers abuse, a member of their staff can copilot an account and field incoming messages, or a third-party service can be brought in to help ensure everybody is safe. There are full, shared blocklists on both an individual and domain level, of course. And highly-available support and training is included.

Finally, components, libraries, and APIs are made available so that social features — including “share to fediverse” — can be deeply integrated with a brand’s existing site.

Fediverse VIP is an annual subscription, tiered according to the number of followers an instance receives. Its first market would be media companies that are having trouble figuring out how to maintain a presence and maintain both trust and audience attention in the midst of rapid change in the social media landscape.

The venture would be structured as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, and would raise traditional venture funding in order to become the way organizations maintain an institutional presence on the open social web. As part of its mission, it would seek to devote resources to make the open social web as big and as successful as possible.

This isn’t a deck; it’s more of a first-draft sketch. But I think there might be something here?

Obvious disclaimers: this is a sketch / idea, not a solicitation. Also, the New York Times is just an example and had nothing to do with this idea.

· Posts

 

The fediverse is really happening

1 min read

Threads has begun its wider beta test of publishing to the fediverse. You can follow accounts that are part of the test from Mastodon, and even see them interact with each other.

Here’s Evan Prodromou’s post on Threads, and you can see it if you search for evanprodromou@threads.net from my Mastodon instance. It’s pretty nice!

Nice is actually an understatement: I’m super-excited to see a company like Meta begin to embrace these kinds of open standards. While the Threads API itself will not allow anyone to build their own Threads app, anyone can build their own fediverse app, without asking for permission, featuring every fediverse-compatible profile as well as every profile on every other fediverse-compatible service.

The other day The 19th joined the fediverse without having to build its own integration: by maintaining a profile on Flipboard, it could automatically be followed and interacted with on Mastodon (and soon, Threads). That’s also pretty cool.

It really does feel like it’s all happening: a new social layer to the web. I’m pretty excited.

· Asides

 

Finding the best country in the world to live in

2 min read

People are sometimes a little taken aback by my criticism of the US, just as they used to be about my criticism of the UK when I lived there. In both cases, it’s not that I don’t like the place — I just see all kinds of opportunities for them to be better.

I sometimes wonder what a perfect place to live might look like. Some things I’d like to see:

  • Universal healthcare
  • A solid social safety net
  • Integrated, well-run public transit
  • Walkable cities
  • No guns
  • Progressive, inclusive policies overall

Which describes a few social democratic countries really well. But then I’d like to add:

  • Good weather
  • Delicious, fresh food
  • Affordable housing
  • No state religion (officially or effectively)
  • No monarchy
  • Permissive immigration
  • Low discrepancy between rich and poor

And it all starts to fall apart a bit more. I think there will be countries that tick all of those boxes (maybe some do already); over time more and more places will become this.

But if you leave aside the obvious ties of family and friends (not small reasons to stay in a place), and toss aside patriotism and nationalism (which are two cultural values that I genuinely think are useless), where’s the best place to be now?

· Asides

 

A socialist writer skewered the Formula One scene. Then her article vanished.

"It’s almost unheard of for a news outlet to retract an article without explanation, especially a story of this size whose accuracy has not been publicly challenged." And yet, this brilliant article was.

One pet peeve: this article describes Kate Wagner as "socialist". Not that there's anything wrong with that word or with being a socialist, but it seems to be used very freely in America on just about anyone who presents as left-of-center. Similarly, the disclaimer "I'm not a socialist but ..." seems to flow freely.

It was a good article that represented the Formula One scene with a lens that it isn't used to. There's no reason in the world why it should have been pulled. Both the event and the coverage serve as reminders of how conservative this country can unfortunately be.

· Links

 

So everyone in tech understands that when the AI readjustment happens your stocks are going through the floor, right?

· Statuses

 

Covert racism in LLMs

"Users mistake decreasing levels of overt prejudice for a sign that racism in LLMs has been solved, when LLMs are in fact reaching increasing levels of covert prejudice."

Or to put it another way: AI is wildly racist. Although it has been trained to be less overtly so, it is now covertly discriminatory. For example, if it analyzes text written in AAE rather than Standardized American English, it is more likely to assign the death penalty, penalize job applicants, and so on.

· Links

 

The App Store, Spotify, and Europe’s thriving digital music market

This is kind of a disingenuous statement from Apple, but also an example of why "consumer harm" as currently defined is not the best yardstick for anti-trust.

It's notable that Apple is calling Spotify out specifically here, with a side order of snark for the European Commission allegedly overreaching by choosing to "enforce the DMA before the DMA becomes law".

But as well-written as the argument is, it doesn't pass the sniff test. For example, this is not true: "When it comes to doing business, not everyone’s going to agree on the best deal. But it sure is hard to beat free." It's not a free deal - in-app purchases carry a 30% surcharge.

The EU is broadly a good thing for competition and for open markets; Apple has been a walled garden. Forcing it to be more open will, indeed, benefit consumers.

· Links

 

On having good taste

2 min read

I’ve heard a lot of variations of the quote, “you can’t teach taste” over the years, and haven’t thought much of it. Taste in design, in home decor, in good food, in art — it’s seemed obvious that some people are more attuned than others. Tastes are different, but some people have strong tastes and others do not.

But, of course, what is considered to be good taste is inherently about in-groups and out-groups. Why do people talk more about Paris and Rome, and less so about Seoul, Bangkok, or Istanbul? Why is Restoration Hardware revered over more accessible furniture stores (or Black-owned outlets like Ilé Ilà)?

I totally get that part of it depends on who you’re listening to, so this aside is kind of a self-own. But my point is: I don’t trust the idea of taste, and I think it’s often used as an exclusionary cudgel to separate out people and cultures that aren’t from “approved” backgrounds.

Everyone has taste. The most important thing is that they’re allowed to display and share it, and that we’re able to appreciate it.

· Asides

 

TinyLetter: looking back on the humblest newsletter platform

"That is sort of the original spirit of the internet. [...] What if we made no money? What if money wasn’t even something we were thinking about?"

A lovely tribute to TinyLetter, which was shut down recently after 14 years. It was founded by Philip Kaplan - aka Pud - who has been insanely productive for the decades since he started FuckedCompany. He's described as an entrepreneur, which he is, but everything he's made has been in his own style, under his own rules.

The author here notes that "writers could express their weirdest selves", which seems completely in keeping with that spirit. I wish more of the internet could be that.

· Links

 

Tapestry: What About?

A pretty good example of clear, transparent communication about product decisions that might not please everyone - particularly when the userbase culture is heavily steeped in open source.

I respect this: "Right now, the core of Tapestry is closed source. We have put some components up on GitHub and are also fully documenting an open API to that proprietary core. Teaching is a part of that openness."

Tapestry should be an interesting app. I'm excited to try it.

· Links

 

Feeding my Edinburgh nostalgia

2 min read

All told, I lived in Edinburgh for nearly a decade between my late teens and early thirties. I went there to study Computer Science at the University, stuck around to work in the Learning Technology department, co-founded Elgg, left for a while, and eventually came back to live with my then-partner. I lived in a student flat in Old Town, had a house in The Inch, and then later lived in a flat in Bruntsfield.

I think it’s probably changed a lot, but I miss the anarchic, artistic spirit of the place. Maybe it was because of a certain time in my life, but I felt free in ways that have been hard to come by since: I could be whoever I wanted to be, without judgment. It’s not without its flaws, of course: the weather, for one, the food for another, and by the time I left the first time I was pretty sick of a certain kind of cynical pessimism that permeated the place at the time. But it’s a progressive, lovely place to be, and were it not for some surprise events I might never have left.

All of which has me wanting to check out One Day, the Netflix show which starts and ends in the city. I was delighted when Avengers: Infinity War showcased Waverley Station and the site of my favorite baked potato shop, but I like the idea of the lightness and brightness of the city being showcased somewhere rather than as some dark, gothic backdrop (see also: the endlessly bleak but darkly inventive Trainspotting, which I charmingly showed to my parents the day before I headed up there for University).

Which other films and TV shows showcase the beautiful humanity of the place? I’m eager to feed my nostalgia.

My press pass from the year I was a film reviewer

· Asides

 

Blogging is the medium of incomplete stories

"Journalists write stories about incomplete events but there is always a mandate to write more. To write the next post that shows the breaking news. Authors write books that, when published, cannot be changed. An author can write another book, but the story is in print. No such mandate exists in blogging."

I am unashamedly a blogger, have been a blogger for over a quarter of a century, show no signs of moving away from this rather worrying disposition, and I truly love this framing.

Blogs are thinking-in-progress. A blog is never done (although you can always choose to walk away). It's lovely. I wish more people had one.

· Links

 

Some feels about my non-involvement in the fediverse

2 min read

I feel more than a twinge of regret that I’m not more involved in the current decentralized social web movement. This is where I came from, after all: I built one of the first open source social networking platforms (and one of the first social networks overall). Decentralized social networking was the ultimately vision and exactly where we wanted to take it.

So, here we are, decentralized social networking has been realized thanks to the hard work of many teams, and I’m several degrees removed from it. There are open source social networking summits that I’m not invited to — quite reasonably, but I care so much about the space and wish I could be there.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have regrets about my current direction. I’m focused on journalism in the public interest right now, which feels like an important thing to be doing in America in 2024. There are lots of technical challenges that go far beyond keeping a website online (consider what it took to obtain and analyze The IRS Files, for example).

But, also, oof, it feels weird to not be in the room and helping to push this movement forwards.

I do have a strong project idea for the space — something that would expand the fediverse and bring on a bunch of organizations who haven’t been able to join yet. So, maybe I’ll try and get that moving.

· Asides

 

Why I won't have a blogroll

2 min read

Dave Winer has been talking a bit about blogrolls lately: lists of blogs you like to read that typically sit on a sidebar or separate page of your site. I definitely used to have one, back when I had my Movable Type blog a million years ago, and I always found it a useful way to discover new people to read.

I’m kind of ambivalent about them today, though. I sat down to try and write one the other day, and realized that figuring out who to include gave me enormous anxiety. I read thousands of sources via RSS, most of which are blogs.

There’s a huge distinction in my mind between a following list — here are the people I’m actually following and reading — and a list of people who I’m choosing to highlight. The latter implies an unpublished list of people who I’m not choosing to highlight. Yikes.

I wonder how I would concretely go about building one. Would I organize them by whose writing I find interesting? How people post ebbs and flows, and what might be interesting one month might be devoid of content the next. Would I include the people who I consider to be friends or acquaintances? That kind of feels shitty and in-groupy. Would I just try and categorize blogs? There are sites for that.

So, I don’t have a blogroll, and I don’t think I’m going to build one. Instead, my Sources page is powered by my actual RSS subscriptions and updates every 5 minutes. That’s probably as close as I want to come. But, I’d love to read other peoples’ subscriptions and discover great new writers that way.

· Asides

 

Introducing asides

1 min read

I’ve set up a new post type, “asides”, on my site. I’ve been kind of worried about writing shorter thoughts here for a while, because all of my long-form blog posts make it into the newsletter in real time, and who wants to receive a 150-word email about blogrolls or whatever?

This new type of post will show up for folks who subscribe to my full feed via RSS, and it also has its own, dedicated feed. Newsletter subscribers will get the week’s thoughts collected up as a digest on Fridays.

I’m hoping this will free me up to post more regularly in a blog-like way — which, in turn, will mean that I’m more likely to capture these thoughts here than post them on some third-party site somewhere. Let’s see?

· Asides

 

Generative.

A wonderful playlist from Ethan Marcotte about the state and context of AI and its implications for labor and society. Every quote is a gem; in aggregate it's a strong argument about where we are headed.

· Links

 

Some personal updates

I write a lot about the intersection of technology and society here, and lately a lot about AI, but over the last year I’ve written a little less about what I’ve been up to. So, this post is an update about some of that. This isn’t everything, by any means — 2023 was, frankly, a hard year for lots of reasons, which included not a small amount of personal loss and trauma — but I wanted to share some broad strokes.

We’re now based in the Greater Philadelphia area, rather than San Francisco. There have been all kinds of life changes: it’s the ‘burbs, which is weird, but I’m writing this on a train to New York City, which is now easily within reach. I grew up in Oxford and could easily go to London for a day trip; now I have the same relationship with NYC. We haven’t yet brought the baby to the city, but that’s coming. (He’s not a baby anymore: we have a delightful toddler whose favorite things, somehow, are reading books and brushing his teeth.)

I joined ProPublica as Senior Director of Technology after working with the team as an advisor on contract for a while. ProPublica publishes vital American journalism: you might remember the story about Supreme Court Justices with billionaire friends that broke last year, or the story about Peter Thiel’s $5 Billion tax-free IRA. You might also have come across Nonprofit Explorer and other “news apps”. Our technology philosophy is very compatible, and it’s a lovely team. I’m hoping we can revive The Nerd Blog.

I work mostly remotely and spend a lot of my time at my desk looking like this:

The author, alone, in a Google Meet room

(Guess the books! Yes, that’s also an issue of .net — specifically, one from decades ago that showcased Elgg.)

My website is still powered by Known, and I still intend to invest time and resources into that platform. I’ve also finally accepted — between having a toddler, a demanding job, an ongoing project (more on that in a second), and other commitments — that I’m not going to be making a ton of contributions to the codebase myself anytime soon. But there’s a pot of money in the Open Collective, and I’m eager to support open source developers in adding functionality to the platform. The first stop has been adding ActivityPub support to make Known compatible with the fediverse. The next stop will be improving the import / export functionality so that it (1) functions as expected (2) is in line with other platforms.

I’ve been struggling with writing a book. I’ve had the benefit of really great 1:1 coaching through The Novelry, and was making great progress until I realized I needed to revise a major element. It’s been a slog since then: I have printouts of my first draft covered in Sharpie all over my office. My fear of being terrible at this increases with every sideways glance at the unfinished manuscript (which seems, somehow, to be staring back at me). I’m certain that as soon as I send it out into the world I’ll be ridiculed. But I’m determined to get it to the finish line, revise it, send it out, and do it again.

As painful as writing the draft has been, I also love the act of it. Writing has always been my first love, far before computers. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t claim any sort of literary excellence, in the same way that I enjoy making dinner for everyone but would never call myself a chef. I’ve got huge respect for anyone who’s gone down this road and actually succeeded (hi, Sarah, you are radically inspiring to me). It’s a craft that deserves care, attention, and practice, and stretching these muscles is as desperately uncomfortable as it is liberating. I find the whole process of it meditative and freeing, and also simultaneously like pulling every fingernail from my body.

So, uh, we’ll see if the end result is any good.

I’ve been helping a few different organizations with their work (pro bono): two non-profits that are getting off the ground, a startup, and a venture fund. Each of them is doing something really good, and I’m excited to see them emerge into the world.

Also, my universe has been rocked by this recipe for scrambled eggs. So there’s that, too.

What’s up with you?

· Posts

 

Platforms are selling your work to AI vendors with impunity. They need to stop.

Some WordPress source code

404 Media reports that Automattic is planning to sell its data to Midjourney and OpenAI for training generative models:

The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.

Various arms of Automattic made subsequent clarifications. Specifically, it seems like premium versions of WordPress’s online platform, like the WordPress VIP service that powers sites for major newsrooms, will not sell user data to AI platforms.

This feels like a direct example of my point about how the relationship between platforms and users has been redefined. It appears that free versions of hosted Automattic platforms will sell user data by default, while premium versions will not.

Reddit announced a similar deal last week, and in total has made deals worth $203M for its content. WordPress powers over 40% of the web, which, given these numbers, could lead to a significant payday for the company. Much of that is on the self-hosted open source project rather than sites powered by Automattic, but that number gets fuzzier once you consider the Jetpack and Akismet plugins.

From a platform’s perspective it seems like AI companies might look like a godsend. They have an open license to tens or hundreds of millions of users’ content, often going back years — and suddenly, thanks to AI vendors’ need for legal, structured content to train on — the real market value of that content has shot up. It wouldn’t surprise me to see new social platforms emerge that have underlying data models designed specifically in order to sell to AI vendors. Finally, “selling data” is the business model it was always purported to be.

It’s probably no surprise that publishers are a little less keen, although there have been well-publicized deals with Axel Springer and the Associated Press. The deals OpenAI is offering to news companies for their content tend to top out at $5M each, for one thing. But social platforms don’t trade on the content themselves: they’re scalable businesses because they’re building conduits for other peoples’ posts. Their core value is the software and an enormous, engaged user-base. In contrast, publishers’ core value really is the articles, art, audio, images, and video they produce; the hard-reported journalism, the unscalable art, and the slow-burning communities that emerge around those things. Publishing doesn’t scale. The rights to that work should not be given away easily. The incentives between platforms and AI vendors are more or less aligned; the incentives between publishers and AI vendors are not.

I don’t think bloggers and social video producers should give those rights away easily either. They might not be publishing companies with large bodies of work, but the integrity of what they produce still matters.

For WordPress users, it’s kind of a bait and switch.

While writers may be using the free, hosted version of a publishing platform like WordPress, they retain the moral right of authorship:

As defined by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an international agreement governing copyright law, moral rights are the rights “to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation.”

The hosted version of WordPress contains this sentence about ownership in its TOS:

We don’t own your content, and you retain all ownership rights you have in the content you post to your website.

A reasonable person could therefore infer that their content would not be licensed for an AI vendor. And yet, that seems to be on the cards.

So now what?

If every platform is more and more likely to sell user data to AI platforms over time, the only way to object is to start to use self-hosted indieweb platforms.

But every public website can also be scraped directly by AI vendors, in some cases even if they use the Robots Exclusion Protocol that has been used for decades to prevent search engine bots from indexing unauthorized content. A large platform can sue for violation of content licenses, but individual publishers are unlikely to have the means — unless they gather together and form a collective organization that can fight on their behalf.

If every public website is more and more likely to be scraped by AI vendors over time, the only way to object is to thwart the scrapers. That can be done electronically, but that’s an arms race between open source platforms and well-funded AI vendors. Joining together and organizing collectively is perhaps more effective; organizing for regulations that can actually hold vendors to account would be more effective still.

It’s time for publishers, writers, artists, musicians, and everyone who publishes cultural work for a living (or for themselves) to start working together and pushing back. The rights of the indie website are every bit as important as the rights of organizations like the New York Times that do have the funds to sue. And really, truly, it’s time for legislators to take notice of the untrustworthy, exploitative actions of these vendors and their platform accomplices.

· Posts

 

Meditations in a journalistic emergency

"The antitrusters are right. The publishers actually do need more power to maintain a workable bargaining position with the platforms, which now dominate how knowledge is transmitted over the internet."

This is a coherent argument for how the news industry needs to evolve in the face of unprecedented platform power. I think it accurately captures a lot of the power dynamics, both outside of news organizations and within them.

I thought this was an interesting point:

"Regulators should help publishers gain more bargaining power with Big Tech, but in exchange, they have to agree to payroll spending requirements that link these recouped revenues to the continued employment of journalists."

I agree with the need, but I've seen it more as for a collective bargaining entity for news organizations rather than government regulatory support. But perhaps that's the right approach, and there's an interesting hook here to prevent more catastrophic journalism layoffs at the hands of private equity owners.

· Links