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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

 

Team agreements, consensus and ongoing dialogue

This is lovely: the story of a news organization deliberately fostering a culture of care and equity.

"Mutante worked with three organizational psychologists to better understand the experiences of team members. The psychologists used multiple tools to assess the organization and align on the team’s needs. They interviewed every single person on the team and did a survey. They organized workshops, including one where they unpacked the psychology of team members’ body language when communicating with each other."

And the result is jarring in the best way:

"Mutante’s culture can be disorienting to newcomers, especially those who have been harmed from working in other places. Often, new staff are thrown off by how staff at Mutante respect each others’ working schedules, how they ask for consent and check to see if people have the capacity to help with tasks. They’re not used to colleagues negotiating timeframes that are sensitive to the capacity of the operation, or being mindful about how new work might impact existing projects."

· Links

 

Drop In Venture Funding To Black-Founded Startups Greatly Outpaces Market Decline

"The decline in capital to Black-founded companies greatly outpaces the overall decline in startup funding. While total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37% last year, funding to Black-founded startups dropped a staggering 71%, according to Crunchbase data."

As the piece points out, this may in part be because venture funds are abandoning diversity initiatives. Because so much of venture is based on networks - you usually need a warm introduction to get funded, and some partners pattern-match with founders they've backed before - people from a certain demographic are more likely to be funded.

There was a time when I thought startups were meritocratic; in reality, it tends to be rich, white people funding people from similarly rich, white backgrounds.

· Links

 

Buffer's 2023 Annual Shareholder Letter

Buffer continues to lead by example: extraordinarily transparent and willing to share information about its ups and downs. I wish more startups (and founders) would think this way.

Not only is writing well thinking well, but there's nothing to be lost by sharing in this way. It's a way to get feedback, but also to very clearly share the way they think with prospective customers and future employees.

Buffer seems to have a renewed interest in communicating in this way, and I'm grateful for the example.

And also, there's this:

"Another important shift taking place is the advent of decentralized social networks, including the Fediverse. We believe the efforts being made towards open standards for social networking are important for the Internet and the world, and we were one of the fastest to move to support Mastodon in early 2023."

· Links

 

A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to ‘Slackbot’ and stayed undetected for months

"When it was his time to leave, McKay swapped out his existing profile picture for one that resembled an angrier version of Slackbot’s actual icon. He also changed his name to “Slackbot.”" Genius.

Serious talk: this is actually a pretty common trick. You can't change your name to Slackbot in Slack, because the bot is already there, but you can use a unicode character that's visually indistinguishable from an "o". Malware and crypto scammers do something similar all the time. You'd think there would be better mitigations.

But whatever. This is hilarious. Nice work.

· Links

 

Demoted, Deleted, and Denied: There’s More Than Just Shadowbanning on Instagram

The Markup found that Instagram is removing content about Israel and Palestine:

"Our investigation found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, erratically suppressed hashtags, and denied users the option to appeal when the company removed their comments, including ones about Israel and Palestine, as “spam.”"

"[...] As TechCrunch has detailed, the platform’s moderation system seems to disproportionately suppress Palestinian users. The Markup found a few accusations of supporters of Israel feeling suppressed, but did not identify more sweeping evidence through our reporting or testing."

When these platforms become large enough to be a de facto public square, as Instagram, Facebook, and X certainly are, their moderation policies disproportionately affect public perception. It's one reason why I prefer open protocols like the fediverse, with smaller communities that each can have different moderation policies, which in aggregate offer greater choice.

As reported here, people who want to shed light on the perspectives and lived experiences of people on one side of a conflict wind up using euphemisms instead of the names of a people in order to avoid getting their content banned or deleted. That's not the kind of information source that sits at the heart of a healthy, democratic culture.

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Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies

"In one of the most viral moments from this year’s conference, conservative personality Jack Posobiec called for the end of democracy and a more explicitly Christian-focused government. While Posobiec later said his statements were partly satire, many CPAC attendees embraced his and others’ invocations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection." Believe them.

· Links

 

I don't want to live in a nationalist country.

I don't want my son to grow up in a world where nationalism is rising.

I don't want the future to be dictated by nationalism.

· Statuses

 

RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study

"Overall, the analysis found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm's financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction."

The finding is unsurprising, but good to have data. It goes on:

"Specifically, after an RTO mandate, employees' ratings significantly declined on overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management, and corporate culture. But their ratings of factors unrelated to RTO did not change, indicating that the RTO mandate was driving dissatisfaction."

· Links

 

ASCAP for AI

A musician playing an electric organ

Hunter Walk writes:

The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough cost, they implicitly prevent future competition. Not very Open.

It’s fair to say that I’ve been very critical of AI vendors and how training data has been gathered without much regard to the well-being of individual creators. But I also agree with Hunter in that establishing mandatory payments for training content creates a barrier to entry that benefits the incumbents. If you need to pay millions of dollars to create an AI model, you won’t disincentivize generative AI models overall, but you will create a situation where only people with millions of dollars can create an AI model. In this situation, the winners are likely Google and Microsoft (in the latter case, via OpenAI), with newcomers unable to break in.

To counteract this anticompetitive situation, Hunter previously suggested a safe harbor scheme:

AI Safe Harbor would also exempt all startups and researchers who have not released public base models yet and/or have fewer than, for example, 100,000 queries/prompts per day. Those folks are just plain ‘safe’ so long as they are acting in good faith.

I would add that they cannot be making revenue above a certain safe threshold, and that they cannot be operating a hosted service (or provide models that are used for a hosted service) with over 100,000 registered users. This way early-stage startups and researchers alike are protected while they experiment with their data.

After that cliff, I think AI model vendors could pay a fee to an ASCAP-like copyright organization that distributes revenue to organizations that have made their content available for training.

If you’re not familiar with ASCAP and BMI, here’s broadly how they work: when a musician joins as a member, the organization tracks when their music is used. That might be in live performances, on the radio, on television, and so on. Those users of the music — production companies, radio stations, etc — pay license fees to the organization, and the organization pays the musicians. The music users get the legal right to use the music, and the musicians get paid.

The model could apply rather directly to AI. Here, rather than one-off deals with the likes of the New York Times, vendors would pay the licensing organization, and all content creators would be compensated based on which material actually made it into a training corpus. The organization would provide tools to make it easy for AI vendors and content creators alike to provide content, report its use in AI models, and audit the composition of existing models.

I’d suggest that model owners could pay on a sliding scale that is dependent on both usage and total revenue. One component increases proportionally with the number of queries performed along a sliding scale at the model level; the other in pricing tiers associated with a vendor’s total gross revenue at the end-user level. So for example, if Microsoft used OpenAI to provide a feature in Bing, OpenAI would pay a fee based on the queries people actually made in Bing, and Microsoft would pay a fee based on its total corporate revenue. Research use would always be free for non-profits and accredited institutions, as long as it was for research or internal use only.

This model runs the risk of becoming a significant revenue stream for online community platforms, which tend to assert rights over the content that people publish to them. In this case, for example, rather than Facebook users receiving royalties for content published to Facebook that was used in an AI model, Facebook itself could take the funds. So there would need to be one more rule: even if a platform like Facebook asserts rights over the content that is published to it, it would need to demonstrate a best effort to return at least 60% of royalties to users whose work was used in AI training data.

Net result:

  • Incumbents don’t enjoy a barrier to entry from copyright payments: new entrants can build with impunity.
  • AI vendors and their users are indemnified from copyright claims against their models.
  • AI vendors don’t have to make individual deals with publishers and content creators.
  • Independent creators are financially incentivized to produce great creative and informational work — including individual creatives like artists and writers who might not otherwise have found a way to financially support their work.
  • The model shifts from one where AI vendors scrape content with no regard to the rights of the creator to one where creators give explicit consent to be included.

The AI horse has left the stable. I don’t think shutting it all down is an option, however vocal critics like myself and others might be. What we’re left with, then, is questions about how to create a healthy ecosystem, how to properly compensate creators, and how to ensure that the rights of an author are respected. This, I think, is one way forward.

· Posts

 

What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt?

"The prospect of this data, including Near’s collection of location data from sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, being sold off in bankruptcy has raised alarms in Congress." As it should - although, of course, fire sales are not the only way this data gets sold and transferred.

When a business goes under, its assets are usually put on the market, either to a sole acquirer or piecemeal. For a data broker, those assets include personal information for potentially millions of people.

The only real way to stop this is to prevent it from having been gathered in the first place. Putting controls on data transfers in a fire sale is good, but preventing it from being aggregated and centralized is better. Otherwise, inevitably, it will be misused at some point during its life.

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European human rights court says no to weakened encryption

"The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights."

This renders some of the EU's own proposed legislation illegal. More importantly, client-side scanning and backdoors become illegal in themselves, making it harder for vendors from anywhere to include those features, lest they fall foul of the law with EU users.

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US newspaper circulation 2023: Top 25 titles fall 14%

Print newspaper subscriptions of the top 25 titles continue to steeply fall. But digital subscriptions are up. Newspaper is just a technology; the journalism it carries continues to be valuable.

One concern is how to maintain accessibility: a print newspaper can be read by anyone with access to the physical object once it's been bought, while a digital subscription can generally only be accessed by its owner. How can we best ensure that the most possible people get access to in-depth journalism that's relevant to them?

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New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger: “Our industry needs to think bigger”

I'm pretty critical of the NYT's coverage these days - I wish they'd do much better on trans issues and on being more critical on America's involvement in global conflicts - but this is a fascinating, illuminating interview.

It's honestly very refreshing to see news organizations pull back and think carefully about forging their own future, in a way that partners with tech platforms but isn't beholden to them.

Two pull quotes:

"I’d say that our industry is still thinking too small, and I think that’s fair: we've been absolutely battered for 20 years. But I think our industry needs to think bigger. [...] I don’t think that our industry can or should accept that we are going to collectively be smaller than an eighth-grade streamer."

"We are going to meet our readers first off-platform. But we now know [tech companies] are powerful companies. They dominate the flow of traffic and engagement in the digital world. You need to be on them, and to find ways to partner with them, but your interests are not aligned. You should be clear-eyed on that, treat this as a professional partnership and make sure it meets clearly articulated standards."

· Links

 

Updating GOV.UK’s crown

A glimpse into a surprising design problem created by constitutional monarchy: the need to update the crown in your logo when a new King has taken the throne.

"On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the Royal Cypher in many places, for example post boxes, on police and military uniforms or on the side of official buildings."

The longer I've been away from the UK, the more surreal this kind of thing has become. I will say, though, that the new crown looks a little less like a loaf of bread that's collapsed in the oven, so there's something a bit pleasing about that.

· Links

 

Stop what you're doing and watch Breaking the News

Stills from the documentary, Breaking the News

Breaking the News, the documentary about The 19th, aired on PBS last night and is available to watch for free on YouTube for the next 90 days.

It’s both a film about the news industry and about startups: a team’s journey to show that journalism can and should be published with a more representative lens. It’s also not a puff piece: real, genuine struggles are covered here, which speak to larger conversations about race and gender that everyone needs to be having.

I worked with The 19th for a period that mostly sits directly after this film. My chin — yes, just my chin — shows up for a fraction of a second, but otherwise I’m not in it. My association with it is not why I’m recommending that you watch it.

The 19th is not a perfect workplace, in part because no such workplace exists. It has struggles like any other organization. But there was a thoughtfulness about culture and how work gets done that I’ve rarely seen elsewhere. Some of those policies were developed in direct response to workplace cultures that are prevalent in newsrooms, including narrow leadership demographics, hierarchical communication, a focus on work product rather than work process, and lack of goal-setting.

My experience was privileged, in part because of my position in the senior leadership team, but for me it was a breath of fresh air. There aren’t many places where I’ve felt calmer at work. Some of that is because of the early conversations and hard work that were captured on film here.

From the synopsis:

Who decides which stories get told? A scrappy group of women and LGBTQ+ journalists buck the white male-dominated status quo, banding together to launch The 19th*, a digital news startup aiming to combat misinformation. A story of an America in flux, and the voices often left out of the narrative, the documentary Breaking the News shows change doesn’t come easy.

You can watch the whole documentary for free here. And if you haven’t yet, go subscribe to The 19th over on its website.

· Posts

 

Social, I love you, but you’re bringing me down

A big thumbs-down made of people

This weekend I realized that I’m kind of burned out: agitated, stressed about nothing in particular, and peculiarly sleepless. It took a little introspection to figure out what was really going on.

Here’s what I finally decided: I really need to pull back from using social media in particular as much as I do.

A few things brought me here:

  1. The sheer volume of social media sites is intense
  2. Our relationship with social media has been redefined
  3. I want to re-focus on my actual goals

I’d like to talk about them in turn. Some of you might be feeling something similar.

The sheer volume of social media sites is intense

It used to be that I posted and read on Twitter. That’s where my community was; that’s where I kept up to date with what was happening.

Well, we all know what happened there.

In its place, I find myself spending more time on:

  1. Mastodon
  2. Threads
  3. Bluesky
  4. LinkedIn (really!)
  5. Facebook (I know)
  6. Instagram

The backchannel that Twitter offered has become rather more diffuse. Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky offer pretty much the same thing as each other, with a different set of people. LinkedIn is more professional; I’m unlikely to post anything political there, and I’m a bit more mindful of polluting the feed. My Facebook community is mostly people I miss hanging out with, so I’ll usually post sillier or less professionally relevant stuff there. And Instagram, until recently, was mostly photos of our toddler.

I haven’t been spending a ton of time interacting on any of them; it’s common for almost a full day to go between posts. Regardless, there’s something about moving from app to app to app that feels exhausting. I realized I was experiencing a kind of FOMO — am I missing something important?! — that became an addiction.

Each dopamine hit, each context switch, each draw on my attention pushes me further to the right on the stress curve. Everyone’s different, but this kind of intense data-flood — of the information equivalent of empty calories, no less — makes me feel awful.

Ugh. First step: remove every app from my phone. Second step: drastically restrict how I can access them on the web.

Our relationship with social media has been redefined

At this point we’re all familiar with the adage that if you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold.

It never quite captured the true dynamic, but it was a pithy way to emphasize that we were being profiled in order to optimize ad sales in our direction. Of course, there was never anything to say that we weren’t being profiled or that our data wasn’t being traded even if we were the ostensible customer, but it seemed obvious that data mining for ad sales was more likely to happen on an ad-supported site.

With the advent of generative AI, or more precisely the generative AI bubble, this dynamic can be drawn more starkly. Everything we post can be ingested by a social media platform as training data for its AI engines. Prediction engines are trained on our words, our actions, our images, our audio, and then re-sold. We really are the product now.

I can accept that for posts where I share links to other resources, or a rapid-fire, off-the-cuff remark. Where I absolutely draw the line is allowing an engine to be trained on my child. Just as I’m not inclined to allow him to be fingerprinted or added to a DNA database, I’m not interested in having him be tracked or modeled. I know that this is likely an inevitability, but if it happens, it will happen despite me. I will not be the person who willingly uploads him as training data.

So, when I’m uploading images, you might see a picture of a snowy day, or a funny sign somewhere. You won’t see anything important, or anything representative of what life actually looks like. It’s time to establish an arms-length distance.

There’s something else here, too: while the platforms are certainly profiling and learning from us, they’re still giving us more of what we pause and spend our attention on. In an election year, with two major, ongoing wars, I’m finding that to be particularly stressful.

It’s not that I don’t want to know what’s going on. I read the news; I follow in-depth journalism; I read blogs and opinion pieces on these subjects. Those things aren’t harmful. What is harmful is the endless push for us to align into propaganda broadcasters ourselves, and to accept broad strokes over nuanced discussion and real reflection. This was a problem with Twitter, and it’s a problem with all of today’s platforms.

The short form of microblogging encourages us to be reductive about impossibly important topics that real people are losing their lives over right now. It’s like sports fans yelling about who their preferred team is. In contrast, long-form content — blogging, newsletters, platforms like Medium — leaves space to explore and truly debate. Whereas short-form is too low-resolution to capture the fidelity of the truth, long-form at least has the potential to be more representative of reality.

It’s great for jokes. Less so for war.

I want to re-focus on my actual goals

What do I actually want to achieve?

Well, I’ve got a family that I would like to support and show up for well.

I’ve got a demanding job doing something really important, that I want to make sure I show up well for.

I’ve also got a first draft of a majority of a novel printed out and sitting on my coffee table with pen edits all over it. I’d really like to finish it. It’s taken far longer than I intended or hoped for.

And I want to spend time organizing my thoughts for both my job and my creative work, which also means writing in this space and getting feedback from all of you.

Social media has the weird effect of making you feel like you’ve achieved something — made a post, perhaps received some feedback — without actually having done anything at all. It sits somewhere between marketing and procrastination: a way to lose time into a black hole without anything to really show for it.

So I want to move my center of gravity all the way back to writing for myself. I’ll write here; I’ll continue to write my longer work on paper; I’ll share it when it’s appropriate.

Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend; we only have one face to maintain ownership of. Independence is the most productive, least invasive way forward.

 

IndieNews

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Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces again last year — and the gap is growing

"Americans bought 21 percent more heat pumps in 2023 than the next-most popular heating appliance, fossil gas furnaces." Quietly, the way we heat our homes is changing - and it has the potential to make a big impact.

Because heat pumps use around a quarter of the energy of a conventional furnace, and don't necessarily depend on fossil fuels at all, the aggregate energy savings could be really significant. Anecdotally (I have a steam furnace that I hate with the fire of a thousand suns), it's also just a far better system.

It might not seem like a particularly sexy technology, but there's scope to spend a little effort here on UX in the same way that Nest did for thermostats and make an even bigger impact.

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