Werd I/O

In the New York Times:

Lina Wertmüller, who combined sexual warfare and leftist politics in the provocative, genre-defying films “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties,” which established her as one of the most original directors of the 1970s, died overnight at her home in Rome, the Italian Culture Ministry and the news agency LaPresse said on Thursday. She was 93.

We’re distantly related - both Werdmüller von Elggs who colloquially dropped the “von Elgg” suffix for convenience - but I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never seen one of her movies. So tonight I plan to fix that.

Even if we weren’t on the same family tree, what an achievement: to be the first woman director to be nominated for an Academy Award. And I’ve got to admit, the combination of sexual warfare and leftist politics (the Guardian calls her films “outrageously subsersive”) really appeals to me.

Also, the New York Times again:

Ms. Wertmüller, an Italian despite the German-sounding last name,

Look, man, it’s never not going to be complicated.

My first startup produced a product called Elgg: an open source social networking platform. It’s very long in the tooth now, but it’s still being maintained by its community.

When I graduated from university, I found that there weren’t many coding jobs in Edinburgh, so found myself back inside the institution, working at the Media and Learning Technology Service. I quickly learned that everyone hated the learning technology software we were providing: certainly the students (“learners”), but also the teachers and the administrators. It wasn’t obvious to me that the people writing the software didn’t hate it.

I was an early and avid blogger, and stuck up my hand to say that people were already learning from each other all over the web in an informal way - so surely we could use a similar mechanism to help people do that in an institution. I’d been forced to share a converted broom closet as an office with a PhD candidate in learning technology, Dave Tosh, who saw the formal implications of these communities. I built a prototype, stuck it on my Elgg.net domain (the Werdmullers come from Elgg, a village in Switzerland), and we showed it to the university.

The university said, verbatim: “blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms”. They were not interested in the prototype - so I quit my job, almost on the spot, and we co-founded a startup.

We had no idea what we were doing whatsoever. There was no startup ecosystem to speak of in Edinburgh at that time, so we were left to invent it all from scratch: learning from customers, figuring out what was worth making revenue from, building, marketing, you name it. Venture capital wasn’t on our radar so we didn’t bother trying to raise. We just pulled together a business and ran it for years, growing the community and platform with it. At one point, Elgg was translated into over eighty languages.

From time to time, I’ve caught myself wishing that we’d started it in Silicon Valley. Almost certainly, we would have found a more traditional venture path for it. But I don’t know that it would have worked that way - in a way, it succeeded because we worked it out from first principles. We built the team, processes, and culture that worked for us.

A lot of founders I see today are copying processes they’ve seen in other startups verbatim: perhaps they read about the way Amazon or Google works and thought to themselves, well, it worked for them. But I don’t think that’s right (and the same is true of templatized startup frameworks like The Lean Startup). When they worked, it was because they were a good fit for the organization - but their working in one place doesn’t in any way indicate that they’ll work in another.

These days, I find myself more often than not trying to reclaim that naïvety. How can I think about building a team, a culture, and a product from first principles? How can I forget all the startup hustle culture marketing and just figure out how to build something that works?

A lot of people are trying to play-act building a startup by copying what others do. I miss the days when I didn’t know; when everything was new. I’d love to find my way back there.

I’ve been having a lot of really inspiring conversations about decentralization lately. Decentralization doesn’t require the blockchain - and pre-dates it - but the rise of blockchain technologies have allowed more people to become comfortable with the idea and why it’s valuable.

Decentralized platforms have been part of virtually my entire career. I left my first job out of university to start Elgg, a platform that allowed anyone to make an online space for their communities on their own terms. It started in education and developed an ecosystem there, before expanding to far wider use cases. Across it all, the guiding principle was that one size didn’t fit all: every community should be able to dictate not just its own features, but its own community dynamics. We were heavily involved in interoperability and federation conversations, and my biggest regret is that we didn’t push our nascent Open Data Definition forward into an ActivityStreams-like data format. To this day, though, people are using Elgg to support disparate communities across the web. Although they use Elgg’s software, the Elgg Foundation doesn’t strip-mine those communities: all value (financial and otherwise) stays with them.

Known was built on a similar principle, albeit for a world of ubiquitous connectivity where web-capable devices sit in everyone’s pocket. I use it every day (for example, to power this article), as many others do.

Much later, I was the first employee at Julien Genestoux’s Unlock, which is a decentralized protocol for access control built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Here, a piece of content is “locked” with an NFT, and you can sell or share access via keys. If a user connects to content (which could be anything from a written piece to a real-life physical event) with a key for the lock, they gain access. Because it’s an open protocol, one size once again doesn’t fit all: anyone can use the underlying lock/key mechanism to build something new. Because it’s decentralized, the owner of the content keeps all the value.

Contrast that principle with Facebook, which has been the flag-bearer for the strip-mining of communities across the web for well over a decade now. Its business model means that it’s super-easy to create a community space, which it then monetizes for all it’s worth: you even have to pay to effectively reach the people you connected with to begin with. We’ve all become familiar with the societal harms of its targeted model, but even beyond that, centralization has inherent harms. When every online interaction and discussion is templated to the same team’s design decisions (and both the incentives and assumptions behind those decisions), those interactions are inevitably shaped by those templates. It leads to what Amber Case calls the templated self. Each of those conversations consequently occurs in a form that serves Facebook (or Twitter, etc) rather than the community itself.

It’s easy to discount blockchain; I did, for many years. (It was actually DADA, one of our investments at Matter, who showed me the way.) And there’s certainly a lot that can be said about the environmental impact and more. We should talk about them now: it’s important to apply pressure to change to proof of stake and other models beyond. The climate crisis can’t be brushed aside. But we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater: blockchain platforms have created value in decentralization, and provided a meaningful alternative to invasive, centralized silos for the first time in a generation. Those things are impermanent; we won’t be talking about harmful, slow proof of work algorithms in a few years, in the same way we don’t talk about HTML 1 today.

What does it look like to build an ethical, decentralized platform for community and discourse that is also self-sustaining, using these ideas? How can we distribute equity among participants of the community rather than sucking it up into a centralized megacorporation or institutional investors? That question has been giving me energy. And there are more and more people thinking along similar lines.

Animated GIF NFTs and crypto speculation aren’t very interesting at best (at least to me), and at worst are a reflection of a kind of reductive greed that has seriously negative societal effects. But looking beyond the gold rush, the conversations I’m having remind me of the conversations I used to have about the original web. The idea of decentralization is empowering. The idea of a community supporting itself organically is empowering. The idea of communities led by peer-to-peer self-governance is empowering. The idea of movement leaders being organically supported in their work is empowering. And we’re now in a position where if we pull those threads a little more, it’s not obvious that these ideas will fail. That’s an exciting place to be.

One. So here's the deal: I didn't get to do a birthday post this year because it was the day after the attempted coup, and it just didn't feel right at the time. We're still in the aftermath - it's been a little bit over a month, and the impeachment trial is winding down - but I feel like there's been enough room now.

The thing is, "42 things I've learned" feels like a thinkpiece, and that's not really what this space is about. There's a gaping chasm between "here's what I'm thinking about" and "I! Am! A! Thought! Leader!", and I don't want to intentionally be in the second camp.

Instead, I like the idea of admissions: things I got wrong, or feel uncomfortable about, or that wouldn't ordinarily be something that most people would want to tell other people. It feels human. In the midst of the pandemic and all these other things, being human - creating community by dropping our masks and sharing more of ourselves - is all we've got.

Two. Lately I've started to tune out of long Zoom meetings, and I'm beginning to wonder if people mostly just want to have them because they're lonely.

Three. I sometimes wonder if I should be intentionally trying to build a personal brand. Some people are incredibly disciplined with how they show up online: their social media personalities entwine with their websites and mailing lists as a product; a version of themselves that they're putting out there as a way to get the right kind of jobs or to sell something later on.

That's not what I'm doing. I'm putting myself out there for connection: as one human looking for like-minded humans. That's what the promise of the internet and social media always was for me. It's not a way to sell; it's a way to build community. We have an incredible network that links the majority of people on the planet together so they can learn from each other. Using that to make a buck, while certainly possible, seems like squandering its potential. We all have to make a buck, or most of us do. But there's so much more.

The more of us we share, the more of us there is to connect to.

Four. Somehow I have all these monthly costs that I didn't have when I was younger. They just grow and grow; I feel like I'm Katamari-ing things I have to pay for. Each bill is like a tiny rope, tying me down. Everyone wants money.

Five. I took forensic medicine in my second year of university. My Director of Studies thought it was a terrible idea: I was a Computer Science student, and for reasons that I don't think stand up to sense of reason, the British system discourages breadth of knowledge. He was this fierce, Greek man who yelled at me on a number of occasions, once because I dared to arrange an appointment with him, which made me anything but more inclined to listen to his advice.

Anyway, despite his objections, I took forensic medicine for a semester. The truth was, I still wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to be a computer scientist, and I figured it would be useful knowledge for some future detective novel. (That's how I chose a lot of my formative experiences: is this something I can write about?) The class gathered several times a week in old, Victorian lecture halls, where the Edinburgh Seven had sat over a century before and learned about how to piece together the facts of a crime from the evidence found in its aftermath.

The most important thing I learned in forensic medicine was Locard's exchange principle: every contact leaves a trace. In the context of a crime, the criminal will bring something to the crime scene and leave it there; they will also take something away with them. However small, both scene and actor will be changed.

Years later I would read another version of this in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which starts with the epigraph: All that you touch you change / All that you change changes you. The root of the idea is the same. Nobody comes out of an interaction unchanged by the experience.

That's the promise of the internet for me: every contact leaves a trace. All that you touch, you change. The internet is people, the internet is community, the internet is change itself.

Six. I spent my adolescence online. I got my start on the internet on a usenet newsgroup, uk.people.teens, where you can still find my teenage posts if you search hard enough. We used to meet up all over the country, hopping on public transport to go sit in a park in Northampton, Manchester, or London.

I met my first long-term girlfriend, who is still one of my dearest friends, through this group. Even now, thousands of miles away, I talk to these people every single day. I'm lucky to know them, and it shaped me inexorably.

Virtually, I also met Terri DiSisto, the alter ego of a middle-aged assistant principal in Long Island who solicited minors for tickling videos who later became the subject of the documentary Tickled (which I still haven't seen). And decades later, I learned that there had been a pedophile stalker in the group. I guess, on balance, I was just lucky.

Seven. I sometimes lie in bed and think, "I have no idea how I got here." I mean, I have all the memories; I can recount my path; I intellectually can tell you exactly how I got here. Of course I can. But I don't always feel like I had autonomy. I feel like I've been subject to the ebbs and flows of currents. I'm just doing the best I can given the part of the vortex I find myself in today.

Eight. While I was at university, I accidentally started a satirical website that received over a million pageviews a day.

Online personality tests were beginning to spread around blogs and Livejournals. They ran the gamut from the kind of thing that might have run in Cosmopolitan (What kind of lover are you) to the purely asinine (Which Care Bear are You?). So one evening, before heading off to visit my girlfriend, I decided to write Which Horrible Affliction Are You?. It was like lobbing a Molotov cocktail into the internet and wandering away without waiting to see what happened next. By the end of the weekend, something like a quarter of a million people had taken it.

So I followed it up and roped in my friends. We slapped on some banner ads, with no real thought to how we might make money from it. MySpace approached me with a buy offer at one point, and I brushed it off as someone's practical joke.

The tests were fluff; a friend, quite fairly, accused me of being one of the people that was making the internet worse for everyone. The thing that was meaningful, though, was the forum. I slapped on a phpBB installation, and discovered that people were chatting by the end of the same evening. Once again, friendships flourished; we all met people who would stick with us for the rest of our lives. We all cut our teeth seriously debating politics - it was the post-9/11 Bush era - as well as more frivolous, studenty topics like food and dating.

There was a guy who claimed to be based out in Redding, California, who was really into Ayn Rand, presumably as a consequence of his own incredible selfishness. Another guy (who IP logs told me logged on from Arlington, Virginia) we constantly trying to turn people over to conservatism. While the former was just kind of a dick, I came to think the latter was there as part of a bigger purpose. Our little forum was on one of the 1,000 most popular sites on the internet, after all. I still quietly think some organization wanted to seed a particular ideology through internet communities, although I have no way to prove it.

All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. Every contact leaves a trace.

What if someone intentionally designs the contact and the trace?

Nine. I feel like I'm constantly living in playlists of musicians I used to enjoy, without meaningfully adding to them. What's new? What will pull me in new directions? What should I care about but don't know about yet? I don't know how to look effectively. I do know that the curated playlists, the ones created by brands looking for engagement, are probably not the way to discover what people really like.

My sister is much better at this (and many things) than me: her radio show, The Pet Door Show on Shady Pines Radio is full of new music. In this and lots of ways, I wish I could be more like her.

Ten. Despite everything, I still hold onto this really utopian view of what the internet could be. Whenever people from different contexts interact, they learn from each other. The net effect of all this learning, all these interactions, could be a powerful force for peace.

It's quixotic, because it just hasn't played out that way. At least, not always. The internet empowered genocides and hateful movements; it memed a fascist President into power and convinced millions of people that Democrats are pedophiles. It made a set of people incredibly wealthy who aren't meaningfully different to the generations of wealthy people who came before them.

The thing is, even with all this in mind, I'm not willing to let go of its promise. I don't want to let go of open communities. I fundamentally want someone in the global south to be able to log on and chat with someone in Missouri. I fundamentally want someone who is homeless to be able to log on at their local library and keep a blog or jump on Twitter. I want those voices to be heard, and I think if equity is shared and those voices really are heard, the entire world is better off for it.

The alternative is to be exclusionary: wealthy Americans talking to other wealthy Americans, and so on. It's socially regressive, but more than that, it's completely boring. The same old, same old. I want to meet people who are nothing like me. We all should.

We need to embrace the openness of the internet, but we need to do it with platforms that are designed with community health and diversity in mind, not the sort of engagement that prioritizes outrage.

I'm not sure how we do that. It will be hard. But I'm also sure that it can be done.

Eleven. I know of at least two separate people who secretly lived at the accelerator while they were going through the program because they were homeless at the time. I don't know what that says about hope and possibilities, but it says something.

Twelve. The rhetoric about misinformation and disinformation - "fake news" - scares me more than it seems to scare most people. I'm worried, with some grounds, that people will try and use this to establish "approved sources" that are automatically trusted, and that by default other sources will not be. The end result is Orwellian.

That's not to say that some speech isn't harmful and that some lies can't be weaponized. Clearly that's true. But it would be a mistake to back ourselves into a situation where certain publications - which in the US are dominated by wealthy, white, coastal men - are allowed to represent truth. What would that have looked like in the civil rights era of the fifties and sixties? Or the McCarthy era? Or during the AIDS epidemic?

The envelope of truth is always being pushed. It needs to be. The world is constantly changing, and constantly changing us.

I think the solution is better critical skills, and it could be for the platforms to present more context. Links to Fox News and OANN and disinformation sites in Macedonia absolutely need to come with surrounding discussion. Just, please, let's not lock out anyone who doesn't happen to be in the mainstream.

Words are dangerous: they can change the world. There will always be people who want to change the world for the worse. And there will always be people who want to prevent us from hearing other peoples' words because they would change the world for the better.

Thirteen. When I was in high school, I had a crush on this one girl, Lisa, who was in my theater studies class. I thought she was amazing, and I really wanted to impress her. I imagined going out with her. In retrospect, I think she might have liked me too; she would often linger to talk to me, and find innocuous ways to touch me on the shoulder as we were saying goodbye. Maybe she didn't like me like that; I wouldn't like to say for sure.

But she was far cooler than I was, and when I spoke to her, I would clam up completely, in the same way that I'd clam up completely when I spoke to anyone I liked. I'd lose my cool and start trying to nervously make jokes. By the end of high school, the shine had clearly come off, and it was very obvious that Lisa didn't like me at all. There was nothing really wrong with me, but my anxiety made me into someone worse than I was.

I was so scared that she wouldn't like me that I became someone she wouldn't like. It wasn't a fear of rejection; it was an outright assumption that she wouldn't like me in that way, because why would someone? And that assumption became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Throughout my life, anyone who liked me practically had to knock me over the head and drag me back to their cave. My history is of being completely oblivious, or scared, or both, and sometimes changing into something I'm not because I nervously think that this is something other people want.

Fourteen. This is true on its face, but it's also a parable.

Fifteen. Another girl I used to like, and knew it, explained to me that she wanted to date someone else because his house was nicer. Later, her dad told me, about where my family lived, "you'd have to be crazy to live there."

For a long time - decades - I wanted to be richer, better. I know those things are not the same. But I wanted so badly to be someone I wasn't.

Sixteen. Talking about the past is a vulnerable thing to do. Talking about people who I used to like is a particularly vulnerable thing to do. And I need to acknowledge the imbalance here, speaking as a man. In a patriarchal society, I have a power that, while I didn't ask for it, I nonetheless can't avoid, or shouldn't pretend doesn't exist.

All I can say is: I genuinely wish nothing but the best for both of them.

The reason I bring up these stories is this: I wish I hadn't spent all that time and energy wishing I was someone else. And we all have our motivations; the chips on our shoulders that drive us.

Seventeen. My utopian ideal for the internet - or rather, my utopian ideal for people, enabled by the internet - led to me founding two open source projects, which became two startups. The first, Elgg, was a community platform. The second, Idno (which became Known), was a way to self-host a feed of any kind of content authored by any number of authors.

I genuinely don't know if I did it right. Or, to put it another way, it's not a given that I got it wrong.

I'm not a born fundraiser. I didn't set out to make money, and it's pretty much my least favorite thing to try and do. What I love is learning about people and making things for them, and then watching them use those things to great effect. I want to keep doing that, and I want anything I make to keep existing, so I want to raise money. But it's hard and painful, and I don't really know if investors buy into what I'm saying or if they think I'm an idiot.

What you need to do, I've realized, is put as much of yourself out there as possible and hope that they see value in that. Trying to turn yourself into something people see value in backfires. Even when it works, you get trapped into being a version of yourself that isn't true.

Eighteen. I left Elgg because the relationship with my co-founder had become completely toxic.

"It's funny we're co-founders," he would tell people, "because we would never be friends." True enough.

Nineteen. When I left Elgg, I had a pretty ambitious idea for a way to create crowdsourced, geographic databases. You could create forms that would record geodata as well as anything else you wanted to capture, so you could send people out in the field with their smartphones to do species counts, or record light pollution, coffee shops with free WiFi, fox sightings, or anything else you wanted to do. The web had just added the JavaScript geolocation API, and iPhones had GPS for relatively accurate location recording, and overall it seemed like a pretty cool idea.

Elgg and its investors threatened to sue me for building "social software". I got a pretty nasty letter from their lawyers. So I stopped and made almost no money for over a year.

Twenty. On my very last day working for Known, I went to have a meeting with the British CEO of a well-known academia startup in San Francisco. At one point, I made a remark about our shared history with Oxford, my hometown. "Yes," he said, "but I went to the university."

Twenty-one. So you see, it's sometimes easy to wonder if you should be someone else. But it's a trap. It's always a trap.

Twenty-two. Every contact leaves a trace. I remember the interaction with that CEO like it was yesterday. I remember those conversations with my co-founder. I remember the investor who told me Known was a shit idea and I needed to stop doing it right now. I remember the guy at Medium who made fun of my code when he thought I was out of earshot.

I used to say: "I'm sorry I'm not good enough." And I used to mean it.

Twenty-three. I think I can pinpoint exactly when the switch flipped in my head. When I stopped caring so much.

For a little while, I thought I was probably going to die of a terminal disease. It wasn't hyperbole: my mother had it, my aunt died of it, and my cousin, just seven years older than me, had just died of it. We knew the genetic marker. And we knew that there was a 75% chance that either my sister or I would get it.

Of course, we both hoped that the other would be the one who wouldn't get it. When the genetic counselor told us that, against the odds, neither of us had the marker, we cried openly in her office.

I've still been spending most of my time helping to be a carer for my mother, who is dying. Maybe I broke my emotional starter motor; I might just be numb. But forgive me if I no longer give a shit about what you think of me.

Twenty-four. I don't begrudge anyone who wants to work on the internet to get rich, at least if they don't already come from money, but I don't think it's the way we make anything better for anyone.

If you want to get rich, go join Google or Facebook or one of those companies that will pay you half a million dollars a year in total compensation and feed you three times a day. But don't lie to yourself and say you're going to change the world.

Twenty-five. I've come to realize that none of the really major changes that the internet has brought about have come from startups. It's certainly true that startups have come along later and brought them to market, but the seismic changes have all either come from researchers at larger institutions (Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, for example), from individuals (Ward Cunningham and the wiki, Linus Torvalds and Linux, all the individuals who kicked off blogging and therefore social media), or from big tech companies with the resources to incubate something really new (Apple and the iPhone).

Twenty-six. That's not to say that startups don't have a place. Twitter was a startup. Facebook was a startup. So were Salesforce and Netflix and Apple and Microsoft. I've removed myself from anything Facebook owns, but I use the others just about every day. So maybe I'm being unfair, or more precisely, unfair because I'm jaded from some of my own experiences.

90% of startups fail. Some of it is luck; not all of it, however.

Twenty-seven. I wonder if changing the world is too narcissistic an ideal; part of the overstated importance that founders and technologists place in themselves. Being able to weave a virtual machine out of discrete logical notation and the right set of words can give you a false sense of importance.

Or worse, and most plausibly, it's just marketing.

Twenty-eight. Here are the things that I think will cause a startup to fail:

Culture. 65% of startups fail because of preventable human dynamics. A lot of it comes down to communication. Everything needs to be clear; nothing can linger; resentments can't fester. Because so much in a startup is ambiguous, communication internally needs to be unambiguous and out in the open. Everyone on a founding team needs to be a really strong communicator, and be able to face conflict head-on in the way that you would hope an adult should.

Hubris. Being so sure that you're going to succeed that you don't examine why you might fail - or don't even bother to find out if you're building something anyone might want.

Being the wrong people. It's not enough to want to build something. And so many people want to be entrepreneurs these days because they think it's cool. But everyone on a founding team has to bring real, hard skills to the table, and be strong on the "soft" people skills that make a community tick. You can't play at being a founder. And beware the people who want to be the boss.

Buying the bullshit. Hustle porn is everywhere, and it's wrong, in the sense that it's demonstrably factually incorrect. I guess this is a part of being the wrong people: the wrong people have excess hubris, don't communicate, and buy the bullshit.

Twenty-nine. If you're not the right person, that doesn't mean who you are isn't right. At all. But it might mean you should find something to do that fits you better. Don't bend yourself to fit the world.

Thirty. When my great grandfather arrived at Ellis Island after fleeing the White Army in Ukraine, which had torched his village and killed so many of his family, he shortened his last name to erase his Jewishness. He chose to raise a secular family.

When his son, my grandfather, was captured by the Nazis as a prisoner of war, he lied about his Jewishness to save his own life.

Sometimes wanting to be someone you're not is a small thing, like wishing someone would see value in you. Sometimes it's a big thing, like wishing someone would see value in your life.

Thirty-one. I actually really like being a part of startups. There's something beautiful about trying to create something from nothing. But in understanding myself better, I've had to create spaces that help nurture what I'm good at.

I work best when I have time to be introspective. I think better when I'm writing than when I'm on my feet in a meeting. That's not to say that I can't contribute well in meetings, but being able to sit down, write, and reflect is a force multiplier for me. I can organize my thoughts better when I have time to do that.

I also can't context switch rapidly. I secretly think that anyone who claims to do this must be lying, but I'm open to the possibility that some people are amazing context-switchers. What I know for certain is that I'm not one. I need time and space. If I don't have either, I'm not going to do my best work, and I'm not going to have a good time doing it.

Engineering ways to work well and be yourself at work is a good way to be kind to yourself, and to show up better for others. My suspicion is that burnout at work is, at least in part, an outcome of pretending to be someone else.

Thirty-two. If I start another company, I already know what it will do. I also know that it will intentionally be a small business, not a startup. Not for lack of ambition, but because always worrying about how you're going to get to exponential growth is exhausting, too.

Thirty-three. Although I intend to see the startup I'm currently at through to an exit, I also know it's not an "if". There will be another company, mostly because I'm addicted to making something new, and in need of a way to make a new way of working for myself.

Thirty-four. A company is a community and a movement. Software is one way a community can build a movement and connect with the world. It's a way of reaching out.

The counterculture is always more interesting than the mainstream. Always, by definition. Mainstream culture is not just the status quo, but the lowest common denominator of the status quo; the parts of the status quo that the majority of people with power can get behind without argument. Mainstream culture is Starbucks and American Idol. It's the norms of conformity. The counterculture offers an entirely new way to live, and beyond that, freedom from conformity.

Conformity is safe, if you happen to be someone who fits neatly into the pigeonhole templates of mainstream culture. If you don't, it can be a death sentence, whether literally or figuratively. Burnout is an outcome of pretending to be someone else.

The most interesting technology, companies, platforms, and movements are the ones that give power to people who have been disenfranchised by mainstream culture. That's how you change the world: distribute equity and amplification.

Every contact leaves a trace. Maximize contact; connect people.

Thirty-five. I've been teaching a Designing for Equity workshop with my friend Roxann Stafford for the last year. She's a vastly more experienced facilitator than me, and frankly is also vastly smarter. I've learned at least as much from her as our workshop participants have.

I've been talking about human-centered design since I left Elgg, and about design thinking since I left Matter. Roxann helped me understand how those ideas are rooted in a sort of colonialist worldview: the idea that a team of privileged people can enter someone else's context, do some cursory learning about their lived experiences, and build a better solution for their problems than they could build for themselves. The idea inherently diminishes their own agency and intelligence, but more than that, it strip mines the communities you're helping of value. It's the team that makes the money once the product is built - from the people they're trying to help, and based on the experiences they've shared.

Roxann has helped me learn that distributed equity is the thing. You've got to share ownership. You've got to share value. The people you're trying to help have to be a part of the process, and they need to have a share of the outcome.

Thirty-six. A lot of people are lonely. A lot of communities have been strip mined. I don't yet fully understand how to build a company that builds something together and does not do this. I wonder if capitalism always leads to this kind of transfer of value. How can it not?

Thirty-seven. This isn't a rhetorical question. How can it not?

If I want to sustain myself by doing work that I love that makes the world at least a little bit better, how can I do that?

What's the version of this that de-centers me? If I can make the world a little bit better, how can I do that?

Thirty-eight. A couple of years ago, Chelsea Manning came to a demo day at the accelerator I worked at. She was on the board of advisors for one of our startups - an anarchist collective that was developing a secure email service as a commercial endeavor to fund its activities. I was proud of having invested in them, and I was excited to speak with her.

As I expected, Chelsea was incredibly smart, and didn't mince words. She liked the project she was a part of, and a few others, but she thought I was naive about the impact of the market on some of the others. Patiently but bluntly, she took me through how each of them could be used for ill. Despite having had all the good intentions in the world, I felt like I had failed.

I would like to be a better activist and ally than I am.

Thirty-nine. I sometimes lie in bed and wonder how I got here. We all do, I think. But just because we're in a place, doesn't mean that place is the right one, or that the shape of the structures and processes we participate in are right. We have agency to change them. Particularly if we build movements and work together.

If the culture is oppressive - and for so many people, it is - the counterculture is imperative.

If we're pretending to be people we're not, finding ways to make space for us to be ourselves, and to help the people around us to do the same, is imperative. We all have to breathe.

Change is imperative. And change is collaborative.

Forty. I think, for now, that I am a cheerleader and an amplifier for people who make change. I think this is where I should be. I would rather de-center myself and support women and people of color who are doing the work. I want to be additive to their movements.

It's not obvious to me that I can be additive, beyond amplifying and supporting from the outside. It's not clear to me that I need to take up space or that I'd do anything but get in their way. I would like to be involved more deeply, but that doesn't mean I should be.

One of the most important things I can do is to learn and grow; not pretend to be someone I'm not, but listen to people who are leading these movements and understand what they need. Can I build those skills? Can I authentically become that person? I don't know, but I'd like to try.

Forty-one. I feel inadequate, but I need to lean into the discomfort. The cowardly thing to do would be to let inadequacy lead to paralysis.

Forty-two. In the startup realm, I'm particularly drawn to the Zebra movement. Jenn Brandel kindly asked me to read the first version of their manifesto when we were sharing space in the Matter garage; she, Mara Zepeda, Astrid Schultz, and Aniyia Williams have turned it into a movement since then.

It's a countercultural movement of a kind: in this case a community convened to manifest a new kind of collaborative entrepreneurship that bucks the trend for venture capital funding that demands exponential growth.

I'm inspired by thinkers like Ruha Benjamin and Joy Buolamwini, who are shining a light on how the tools and algorithms we use can be instruments of oppression, which in turn points to how we can build software that is not. I'm appalled by Google's treatment of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, members of its ethical AI team who were fired after Google asked for a paper on the ethics of large language processing models to be retracted. And I'm dismayed by the exclusionary discourse on platforms like Clubhouse that are implicitly set up as safe spaces for the oppressive mainstream.

Giving people who are working for real change as much of a platform as possible is important. Building platforms that could be used for movement-building is important. Building ways for people to create and connect and find community that transcends the ways they are oppressed and the places where they are oppressed is important. Building ways to share equity is important.

And in all of this, building ways for all of us to connect and learn from each other, and particularly from voices who are not a part of the traditional mainstream, is important.

All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. Every contact leaves a trace.

This is the promise of the internet: one of community, shared equity, and equality. Through those those things, I still hope we may better understand each other, and through that, find peace.

#life #tech

The power of free and open source software comes down to how it is shared. Users can pick up and modify the source code, usually at no cost, as long as they adhere to the terms of its licenses, which range from permissive (do what you like) to more restrictive (if you make modifications, you've got to distribute them under the same license). The popularity of the model has led to a transformation in the way software is built; it's not an exaggeration to say that the current tech industry couldn't exist without it. Collaborative software drives the industry.

(If you're not familiar with the concept or its nuances, I wrote a history and guide to the underlying ideas, including how it relates to projects like Linux, a few years ago, which might help.)

In my work, I've generally veered towards permissive licenses. Elgg, my first open source project, was originally released under the GPL, and then subsequently dual-released under the more permissive MIT license. Known and its plugins were released under the Apache license. While GPL is a little more restrictive, both the MIT and Apache licenses say little more than, "this software is provided as-is".

If I was to start another open source project, I'd take a different approach and use a very restrictive license. For example, the Affero GNU Public License requires that you make the source code to any modifications available even if they're just running on a server (i.e., even if you're not distributing the modified code in any other way). This means that if someone starts a web service with the code as a starting point, they must make the source code of that service available under the AGPL.

Then I'd dual-license it. If you want to use the software for free, that's great: you've just got to make sure that if you're using it to build a web service, the source code of your web service must be available for free, too. On the other hand, if you want to restrict access to your web service's source code because it forms the basis of a commercial venture, then you need to pay me for the commercial license. Everybody wins: free and open source communities can operate without commercial considerations, while I see an upside if my open source work is used in a commercial venture. The commercial license could include provisions to allow non-profits and educational institutions to use the software for free or at a low cost; the point is, it would be at my discretion.

I love free software. The utopian vision of the movement is truly empowering, and has empowered communities that would not ordinarily be able to tailor their own software platforms. But allowing commercial entities to take advantage of people who provide their work for the love of it as a bug. There's no reason in the world that a VC-funded business with millions of dollars under its belt should avoid paying people its company value integrally depends on. It's taken me a long time to come around to the idea, but restrictive licenses like the AGPL align everyone in the ecosystem and allow individual developers and well-funded startups alike to thrive.

More than that, it's a model that allows me to think I might, one day, dive head-first into free software at least one more time.

Yesterday, as part of a kick-off presentation for the year, I reminded my team: coding is less than half of an engineer's job.

An engineer's role is to engineer solutions. Writing code is certainly a part of that, but as a means to an end rather than a purpose in itself. If an elegant, scalable solution can be engineered without writing code, fantastic. Conversely, if code is written without exploration, reflection, documentation and validation, or if a solution is built to an imagined problem that doesn't really exist, we're in trouble. Communication, exploration, and collaboration are the biggest parts of the job.

Lots of people get into engineering because they love to work on code. The feeling of building something from nothing is exhilarating: I'm far from the first to note that it's similar to how artists manifest work. But that's programming (or hacking); engineering is a discipline unto itself. There's a popular conception of engineering as being a job you take if you don't want to talk to people, or don't like to write, but neither thing is true. The best engineers are highly social and write to a high standard, as well as having great coding skills. That's because engineers rigorously architect systems to meet their requirements; hackers understand the outcome of what they're trying to build, but their process is more artistic.

I think both spirits are worth embracing, but it's important to accept that they may be embodied in different people. Holding onto the joy of hacking is important; I lost it for a while, and it took literally years to get it back. But engineering requires a different kind of diligence and attention to detail. I confess that I don't think I was really, truly an engineer until I went to work for Medium - and maybe I'm still not one. I could certainly build software (Elgg, Known, Latakoo, a bunch of other things), but my process and discovery skills were underdeveloped. Some of the people I met there, and have met since, were not hackers - they built code rigorously and to a high quality, but had never really built something for the joy of it. For others, it was the opposite; some people fell in the middle. The two things sit side by side but are different.

The trick, I think, is to build the right processes such that engineers take bigger risks in their explorations, and hackers use more rigor. The goal is a creative, detail-oriented team that finds the best solution using the full weight of their diverse skills and creativity, and has fun doing it.

Back when I was running Elgg, I'd meet someone every few weeks who wanted to build a competitor to Facebook. Inevitably, they would propose to do this by copying all of Facebook's features verbatim, but (for example) without an ad ecosystem or with a different algorithm for surfacing content. All of them were doomed to fail.

These days, I'm more distant from the alternative social networking ecosystem, but it's easy to spot the same ideas. One might propose a decentralized alternative to Facebook that has all of Facebook's features, for example, and assume that people will flock to it because it's not owned by a corporation. You care about privacy and ownership, after all - if others don't, surely it's just a matter of educating them?

Aside from with a relative handful of enthusiasts, these efforts are probably all doomed to fail, too.

The thing is, privacy and ownership are important, and over the last few years we've seen our quiet worries about silos of data owned by single-point-of-failure corporations grow into a global roar about their role in supporting pogroms and undermining democracies. Nonetheless, we've learned pretty conclusively that privacy and autonomy are not virtues for everyone - actually a lesson learned again and again in the 20th century in particular - so if we want these values to be adopted, we must find another way. The stakes around getting this right have never been higher. (It would have been nice to have gotten this right in 2015 or so, but here we are.)

People, in general, want convenience from their technology, not morality. So instead of building a more ethical version of the past, we need to build a more suitable version of the future. It turns out that data silos have left room for plenty of innovation here: how many people send emails to themselves to save a note, or have had trouble AirDropping to an Android phone? Why do I have to download WhatsApp to talk to my friends in the UK? There are lots of tiny inconveniences that would be made better with openness and a user-centered model.

The same is true of online communities. An artists' community has radically different needs to an activism community, yet on the silos they're shoehorned into the same interface and set of features. Communities for people with restricted vision or motion might perhaps be the most obvious example: why should they have to struggle to use interfaces designed for others? Or better put, why can't they have an internet experience designed for them? A federated galaxy of community platforms, tailored for the specific human communities that use them and linked by Google-like sites that facilitate discovery, would be a more functional internet for many people, and would also decentralize the social web. Over time, discovery could be decentralized, too.

Whatever we're building, we never absolve ourselves from the need to understand our users as people and meet their needs. We might have our own values that we want to convey - software as polemic - but we can't simply inject them into the status quo. We've got to use our values, our intuition, and our understanding of the people we're building our software for to build something new that serves its purpose better than anything that has come before it. That, and nothing less, is the job.

I vividly remember my first day on the internet. I was sat in my teenage bedroom, staring at a bulky cathode ray tube monitor, which my dad had surrounded with spider plants in order to hopefully absorb some electromagnetic radiation. My 14.4K modem connected - loudly and slowly - to an Internet Service Provider that my mother was testing out as part of her job as a telecommunications analyst. I was already using Bulletin Board Systems and had participated in conversations on FidoNet, but this was something new.

Instead of flashy websites or apps, my first internet experience took place in a black terminal window with monotype text and a maximum width of 80 characters. There were no links, no movies, and no startups. I didn't have a connection resembling broadband, and there was no WiFi. My only guide was a location called Gopher Jewels with a menu of places I could visit.

I visited a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University, thousands of miles away from my bedroom. It told me its temperature and whether I could buy a Coke, and I still remember how it made me felt. It seems mundane, perhaps, today - but in a way, that made it cooler. I wasn't reading a speech by the President of the United States. I was connecting to a Coke machine on another continent, probably in some dusty corridor somewhere. It was like speaking to a hatstand in Antarctica; absolute magic.

Not long afterwards, I downloaded a software application called NCSA Mosaic. It let you browse something called the World Wide Web, which was kind of like Gopher, but easier to use and write content for. A developer called Marc Andreessen had proposed a new extension that allowed you to share and view inline images, which was exciting, and allowed for a new kind of experience: watching a live photo of a coffee machine at Cambridge University. Cambridge was really just down the road, but like the Coke machine, it still felt like magic. I was able to travel through space and time.

The internet wasn't about making money. It was always about sharing knowledge and connecting to people. It had its problems - notably exclusivity of access - but I fell in love with it. It seemed like a glimpse into a beautiful new future, where anyone could connect to anyone and they could collaborate and learn from each other to create new kinds of art, culture, academic work, and scientific endeavor.

The 14 year old version of myself who connected to the early commercial internet was, himself, part of something that older users called the eternal September. Prior to 1993, the internet had been overwhelmingly dominated by universities: every September, new students rolled in, temporarily lowering the quality of discourse until they learned the etiquette of communicating online. Suddenly, commercial internet service providers arrived, and September never came to an end. There was an avalanche of new users (me among them) that just kept coming.

And then some. There were roughly 14 million internet users in 1993; there are around 4.7 billion today.

The growth curve of the internet is S-shaped, as you'd expect. It took a little while to pick up steam, then skyrocketed, before reaching relative saturation. The businesses that were lucky enough to tether themselves to the high-growth middle and could keep with the pace generated billions of dollars in wealth: the Googles and Facebooks of the world were certainly filled with skilled, ambitious people, but they were also in the right place at the right time.

Which is how the internet became about making vast amounts of money. Startups could achieve enormous growth (and VC investment) just by placing a banner ad on the Yahoo homepage; Yahoo, in turn, could raise more money based on its ad growth. Meanwhile, the nature of the internet meant that businesses could grow to monopoly size faster than ever before, egged on by investors like Peter Thiel, who famously argued that competition is for losers.

This wave of unabashed capitalism washed away most of the utopian dreamers, replacing them with the kinds of bro-ey hustlers who would have worked in hedge funds if this had been the 1980s. Worse, their sudden riches came with sudden self-belief, as if the ability to make money building a website during a period of unprecedented growth somehow unlocked the secrets of the universe.

I'm not blameless: I've benefitted from this gold rush. I started my career working for universities, but Elgg, my first startup, raised a fairly modest half a million dollars after its first few, bootstrapped years. My salary at every subsequent job has been paid for, at least in part, by investor dollars. It's not, I feel compelled to point out, that investors are inherently bad: they empower a ton of really useful websites and communities to exist. It's that the Wall Street startup bros who swarm around them are no fun at all to be around, and that the investor-powered web shouldn't be the whole internet.

I very badly want to return to that utopian sensibility: that something doesn't have to make money to have value. That doesn't mean I want to go back in time: the early internet was a predominantly white, male, wealthy platform that people mostly accessed by having been admitted to an elitist institution. I want an egalitarian internet: not just one where all voices can be heard, but where everyone can help to build the fabric of the platform. The true joy of the internet is that everyone builds it together. It has very little to do with engaging with someone's ad-powered social media website.

I've come to realize that I resent the expectation that everything I make has to be profitable. Sometimes, I just want to make: one of the coolest things about software, as with writing or art, is the way you can whip something up out of nothing. I want to see what other people make too, for no other reason that it's what moves them. It's not the revenue or the valuations that make the internet special; nor is it the protocols and technologies, at least not in themselves. It's the connections and the communities. The internet is people. The internet has always been people.

I can't exactly opt out of the commercial internet: I'm far from independently wealthy and need to earn money. Nor do I exactly want to. But I do want to remember that what excites me about the internet is the quirky creativity and connectedness of the diversity of human experience. It's about empowering people to connect and to be found, in a way that transcends the superficial. And it's about reclaiming the sense of magic I felt decades ago, when a magical vending machine in a dusty corridor changed my life forever.

I was starting to write this post when we were evacuated from the fire. Miraculously, after a really rough week, we were able to move back in on Friday. The house is still intact, the electricity is back on, and although the air is toxic, air purifiers allow the inside to be comfortable. I feel awful for the thousands of families who were not so lucky.

I'm now finishing and publishing this post as a way of adding some final punctuation to this terrible week. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted ...

In the spirit of Derek Sivers, I thought I'd write a quick update about what I'm doing these days. It's not quite a "now" page in the Sivers model, but it'll do .. for now.

Where I work:

I'm Head of Engineering and Sponsor Product at ForUsAll. Understanding what ForUsAll does, and therefore what I do, requires a little bit of explanation: in the US, rather than traditional pensions, workers tend to get something called a 401(k) plan (memorably named after its tax code). A part of your pre-tax pay is sent to a fund that invests on your behalf; many employers match your contribution up to a certain level. At retirement you get to withdraw those funds; the hope is that your investments have grown in value in the interim.

They tend to be jargon-laden, badly-run, and offer web interfaces that look like they were built in Microsoft Frontpage in 1998. And that's if you even have access to one: most American workers at smaller businesses don't, and therefore have limited access to decent ways to save for retirement. ForUsAll's web platform makes it cheaper and less time-consuming for employers to run (or "sponsor") a plan. And we're working on other ways for regular people to build financial stability for themselves, even before retirement. It's not about employees at well-funded startups or Fortune 500 companies; it's everyone else.

So my role is to run the engineering team, as well as product for the employer side of the experience. It's my first fintech company, but that's not why I'm doing it - my personal mission statement continues to be to work on projects that make the world more equal, informed, and inclusive, and this fits the bill.

I'm bringing a few things to the table here: my experience building products from both an engineering and product strategy perspective, but also my design thinking and cultural development background. I'm finding that those instincts are coming in very useful, and my big self-development project is to second-guess myself less than I often have in the past. I've been given a large role in determining the future strategy of the company, and I'm trying to bring my all to it.

By the way, I'm hiring front-end engineers.

Also:

I continue to sit on the board at Latakoo, the media startup where I was the CTO and first employee. Its technology - which I helped design and build - allows networks like NBC News to easily plan stories and transmit video from the field using commodity internet connections.

Latakoo is profitable. Its cloud service is used by many of the news organizations you can think of, and its on-premise servers have found homes in their editing suites. I'm really proud to have been a part of it, and to still be able to help where I can.

I believe deeply in the importance of media in our democracy, and I'm always excited to find opportunities to help support its future. In February I helped run (with my ex-Matter colleague Roxann Stafford) a session on designing for equity as part of a Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms bootcamp organized by NewsCatalyst and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism with the Google News Initiative.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping to wind up Known's incorporated corporate entity - and its hosted service, which is still online - this tax year. This doesn't mean Known itself is winding down: the open source community continues apace, and has been funding future development through Open Collective. The Known copyrights and assets will revert to me once the closure is complete.

Beyond work:

More of my time has been spent helping to care for my mother. It's been a decade since her diagnosis, and my life has been turned completely upside down in the years since (including some time where I thought I probably had the terminal, genetic condition too). Being able to spend time with both my parents is a privilege. But it's also been very easy to put my personal life on pause. I started this year with a determination to unpause - although 2020 has sometimes had other ideas.

I'm about to start a Gotham Writers Workshop course on writing fiction. Writing has always been my first love, and I'm determined to take it more seriously. I took some Stanford writing courses over the summer and found them to be both incredibly useful and motivating. I'd been waitlisted for a two year part-time novel writing certificate, but sadly didn't make the cut. (Who can blame them - who is this tech bro anyway?) No matter; I'm finding other ways to improve my skills and get closer to my goal of actually publishing a long-form fiction book.

I came first in my group in the NYC Midnight flash fiction competition this summer; I'm waiting to see if I got into the third round.

I read a lot more than I write, and I've been trying my best to keep off the social networks. They don't, as a whole, improve my life. But the addiction is strong. I just wholesale quit Facebook and Instagram as a protest against that company's actions, and it felt pretty good.

When I thought I also probably had my mother's dyskeratosis congenita, I gained a lot of weight. I've been trying my best to lose it, through only eating during an eight hour window, improving my diet, and increasing the amount of exercise I do. We bought a treadmill so my mother could walk without having to leave the house (my dad also has mobility issues); I've been using it to regularly run 5Ks. It's nowhere near as impressive as my runner friends, but it's a world away from my last few years. I used to walk 7-8 miles a day in the course of my life in the UK, and my life in California has never worked the same way. I've lost some weight but I've got a very long way to go.

I've been thinking about how I can help mission-driven founders. I was pretty naive when I founded Known, and more so Elgg; I'd love to help people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place to avoid some of those same mistakes. Time is limited, though. So maybe an online book and/or community is the way to go.

What's next:

In 2021 I want to ...

... finish a fiction book. Whether it gets published or not is out of my hands, but I want to do the best job I can. And then prepare to do it again.

... lose that weight and continue to get healthier.

... re-find the joy in life. It's been a tough year, and I want to find a way to have more time and space that's really mine. Between work and caring it's been hard to carve out room for my own life. I wouldn't change those things for the world, but I'd like to be able to find a healthier balance.

I grew up writing. As a child, I would wake up early every morning to write stories with my plastic Parker fountain pen before school. We always had reams of paper on our dining room table, lying in wait.

I learned to code not because I loved discrete logic or the power of algorithms, but because I decided that computers could help me tell stories in a different way. For me, the best source code has a narrative flow, which in turn operates in service of the narrative of the user. Code is an expressive, creative, human medium - but only if it is used to tell a story.

Stories are important.

In a novel, the story finds its compelling core from the tension between the main character's inner goals and an important change in their external context. For example, take an alien invasion in isolation: while it's a dramatic setting, it's not particularly compelling in a vacuum. But let's zoom in on the main character. Maybe they've lost a loved one through an act of violence, which has made them want to shy away from any kind of conflict and keep to themselves. Unfortunately, now they happen to be the only person who holds the key to stopping the alien invasion - if they can only rise to the occasion.

It's a far more interesting story. An alien invasion itself isn't compelling, despite the pyrotechnics; what draws you in is the human story of someone who undergoes a personal transformation because of the invasion. We're naturally empathetic animals; we care about other people. We relate to the process of human change on a deep emotional level more than we relate to abstract ideas.

It took me a long time to understand this.

Startups, too, have a story. Just as a novel needs to be character-focused, a startup's idea alone isn't enough. Don't get me wrong, you need a smart idea - but for your startup to be a truly compelling prospect, you need to tell the human story of someone who undergoes a personal transformation because of what you've built. You have to imagine the novel of your venture.

My first venture, Elgg, was a stroke of luck. We had no idea what we were doing. Perhaps because of that, we fell back on the fundamentals of story: we tried hard to understand the internal needs of our customers and their external context, and built a product to address them at the intersection.

My second venture as a co-founder, Known, was not so lucky. Instead of centering it on real human needs, we built something that we thought should exist in the world. We centered our own desires, and I failed to get out of the way of my own ego. The result was that while Elgg is still in use, and was used by governments, non-profits, and corporations around the world, Known was never able to find escape velocity. It was intellectually driven and founded on a good idea (it's really dangerous for everyone in the world to get their news and post their social activity on just a handful of platforms), but was never able to find its emotional center. Because the story was missing, it was never truly compelling to us, let alone anyone else. So it floundered.

Imagine an accounting service. Is your heart racing yet?

Probably not. (Sorry, accountants.)

But now, let's talk about the main character. Imagine someone who owns a small business in the middle of the country. This company was already stretched thin because of widening income inequality, and now has to stretch even further to make ends meet because of the pandemic. Financial hardship means that employees sometimes don't show up for work because they can't afford to fix their car, or because childcare is out of reach for them. The business owner genuinely cares: they've been making one-time loans and running a hardship fund to bridge the gap. But if they're not careful, they'll run out of money, and everyone will be out of work - so they need to find creative ways to provide help to employees and stay in business.

This far more compelling story sits at the intersection of the top-down trends (the financial situation, the pandemic) and the bottom-up needs (business owners need to help in order to keep their employees but are having trouble finding the funds). It's a tightrope. Given enough specificity, we can be made to feel the business owner's pain.

The customer (here, the business owner) is the first character in the story. The startup (here, the accounting service) is the second. First, the customer is introduced, complete with internal need and external pressure. Then the startup is introduced: a group of humans who provide a solution for both the need and the pressure (a one-click way to help find hidden reserves of funding employee assistance programs, at a negligible cost). They meet somehow (the "discovery moment") and ride off into the sunset together, living happily ever after. The customer's pain is solved. The startup's value is proven.

Of course, if this was a pitch, the startup would have to talk about how it's going to meet millions of these customers and grow like wildfire because it meets their needs so well. In turn, it meets their needs because the product is built in service of a business strategy that is informed by empathy. It's not built to be something for everyone: it's built to service the deeply-held needs of a specific group of customers.

In my time as an early-stage investor, I saw how important that human understanding is. The founders who could get out of their own way and be led by their understanding of the people they were serving are the ones who were more likely to win. The founders and coders who thought they were the smartest people in the room and didn't try to find a deeper understanding were the ones who found themselves in trouble.

I've been both kinds of founder. It's a lesson you only need to learn once.

The key to story is that it's all about people: how they change and grow. If your novel doesn't hinge on that, nobody's going to read to the end. If your business doesn't hinge on that, nobody's going to care what you do - not even your own team. The first step is to find out who your characters are, and understand them as deeply as you can. Then, tell a specific, visceral story that your entire community can rally behind.

These days, I don't need reams of paper sitting on the dining room table, but I still wake up early to write stories. Being able to use imagination and empathy as building blocks feels like a gift. As it turns out, it's one we all have access to. We just need to read more, and care more.

Photo by Nong Vang on Unsplash

I've been continuing work on my recording life project. At this point, the questions are finalized, and I've been building the first version of the platform. The working name is Four Questions.

It's been a long time since I've built new software from scratch under my own steam. The first question I had to answer is: how will I build it?

I roll my eyes at people who are snobby about any programming stack: whatever is productive for you is the right choice. Of course, if you're running a new business, "productive for you" has to cover a lot of ideas: you need to consider if you can build stable, resilient code that supports a delightful user experience at speed, whether you can hire a great team that builds in that language, and what the infrastructure landscape looks like. But for a personal project, it's all fair game.

For this project, I've decided that I want to stretch myself a little. I don't want to build this stack in the same way I chose to build Known in 2013, or Elgg in 2003. Both of those were based on PHP, albeit in very different eras; it'd be a fast build, but kind of boring, and the hosting options are limited.

I started writing node.js code at Medium four years ago, and although my learning curve was steeper than I would have liked, I eventually fell in love with it. JavaScript has traditionally been clunky and ambiguous, but ES6 and ES7 turned it into a much more elegant, expressive language. The combination of these improvements and npm - which gives you instant access to over a million libraries - makes it a hard platform to beat. It's also incredibly easy to build automatic testing and linting with npm, including as a pre-commit hook into git.

I've also become a fan of more modern versions of React; we used it at Unlock, and I was taken with how easy it is to build genuinely reactive interfaces. The web has become a place to access applications as much as a place to access documents. A lot of older-style web apps, from earlier in this transition process, feel more like slightly interactive documents. React apps can be made to feel like a real application, with a minimum of development effort. If you don't want to build on the web using JavaScript, you do you, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. And adding Next.js allows pages to be rendered on the server, reducing the time to largest contentful paint and allowing non-JS browsers (including headless browsers) to access the content.

To node.js, Next.js and React, I've added Material-UI, which makes Google's material design framework easy to access from React.

So now my biggest question is: what should I use as the database? I'm torn between using a straight Postgres database, something like a MongoDB, Firebase, or FaunaDB. The latter is completely new to me and seems to be designed for serverless architectures, so maybe I'll try that. I'll try it and report back.

There's a lot of choice out there, and no correct answers. The downside is that setting up your development stack in 2020 is significantly more time-consuming than it ever was. The upside is that you have more choice, more developer support, and friendlier tools than ever. It's a different kind of fun to old-school web development - my first web scripts were written in Perl, and this is a universe away - but it's still definitely fun.

If you're a developer, what are you using these days?

As arbitrary as they are, these transitions provide a kind of useful punctuation - a spot to stop and breathe.

For me, I think it might be useful to reflect on where I was at the start of the previous decade, where I am now, and where I'd like to be ten years from now.

Ten years ago

I lived in Oxford, as much my hometown as anywhere is, living in the house I'd grown up in long after my family had emigrated to California. Every year, I'd head out for Christmas, saving a little time to hang out in San Francisco.

I'd just had a turbulent year: In April, I had finally left Elgg after working on it for seven years, and had been surprised to find myself at the receiving end of threats from our investors after I tried to start a new social platform with a completely different purpose. This significantly limited my options - all non-infrastructure internet software is at least a little bit social - and although I'm pretty sure I would have won a court decision, my pockets were exponentially less deep than theirs. I returned to my roots and buckled down doing work in local media instead.

Nevertheless, I had just given a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School on user-centered design, was consulting with some former television journalists who wanted to save media through entrepreneurship, and I flew out to Washington DC to work with the American Association of Colleges and Universities. All of these events were small hints of what was to come.

My mother was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. We didn't know what lay ahead; for now, it was just a persistent cough.

Today

Eight years ago, my mother phoned me to warn me that I shouldn't be shocked to see her using oxygen tanks over Christmas. It took me approximately thirty seconds to decide that I needed to move to California; practically, it took me five months. I arrived with two suitcases and the assumption that I would be here temporarily. Writing this now, I know I'm here for the long run.

She had given up her career in internet business analysis and become a middle school science teacher. Every day she went to work wearing oxygen on her back, looking a little bit like a Ghostbuster, until she couldn't anymore.

Six years ago, she had a double lung transplant. I was with my parents at their home in the central valley when they got the call, a little after midnight; they drove straight to the hospital, while I drove to Oakland to pick up my sister. I tried to raise my girlfriend on the phone, but couldn't. It was the loneliest two hours of my life.

I have persistent flashbacks of my mother sitting on a gurney outside the double doors leading to anesthesiology, telling me to be patient with my father and to look after him. We spent the night in the hospital, sleeping in the waiting room on makeshift beds made of teal vinyl-covered chairs. It wasn't clear that we would ever see her again. She emerged at 4pm the next day, unable to speak and in unfathomable pain. Eventually, I passed out in the ICU next to her, and the nurses told me to go home.

Pulmonary fibrosis is a symptom, not a disease. Your lungs scar progressively until you can't breathe. There's no cure. We didn't know what caused it, but my grandmother died of it when I was six years old, so we knew it was familial. My aunt was diagnosed too, and had lung transplants, before the side effects of immunosuppression were too much for her. Then my cousin, just a few years older than me, who left us suddenly. It was unimaginably sad.

And it was scary. It hung over all of us. I felt it acutely. A few years earlier, I had asked my girlfriend to marry me; she had deferred for a year before telling me no. Around the same time, I had ripped my life up to move to California. The country I grew up in voted to reject Europeans like me, ensuring (assuming Brexit eventually comes to pass) that I could never go back. The country I lived in elected a populist fascist as President. And it was becoming clear that I might only have a few years left. I felt destabilized and terrified. More than that, I felt worthless. I hadn't been able to build the life I wanted. I was damaged. And soon, I might be gone.

I gained a lot of weight and let my anxiety build. It was rare that I'd sleep through the night. All the while, my mother continued on her adventure, through a rollercoaster of medical crises and procedures. Often, it was like watching someone you love be systematically tortured.

Cutting-edge medical research finally caught up with my family, and we discovered that the pulmonary fibrosis was the symptom of a genetic condition called dyskeratosis congenita. At least, it probably was; we were at the edge of medical science. But the research offered hope, and I took it with both hands.

In particular, a genetic condition could be tested. The genetic counsellor warned that an adverse result could affect our insurance, our ability to buy a house; our entire futures. But my sister and I had Europe as a safety net. We had the privilege of just going back to a place with saner, more compassionate laws. And more importantly, we were told there was a 75% chance that one or both of us would have it. We had to know.

When, a year and a half ago, the genetic test came back showing that neither of us had the genetic variant, we burst into tears in the examination room. We called our parents, who also burst into tears. For my mother, the burden of knowing that she might have passed down her condition was lifted. And suddenly, I had a life ahead of me again. That same week, I had my first therapy session, and I began to rebuild.

In the midst of all of this, I had a professional adventure.

I became the hands-on CTO and first employee of Latakoo, which is still the way that NBC News sends recorded footage back to its newsrooms over commodity internet connections. (It's also the source of my only software patent.) I was the Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, serving the world's largest arts festival. I wrote a technical book on HTML5 geolocation. I co-founded Known, found investment, and did right by my investors by going to work as a senior engineer at Medium. I was a heavy participant and sometime organizer in the Indieweb community. My work showed up in the New York Times and in other people's books. I was west coast Director of Investments at Matter, a mission-driven accelerator and venture fund (going to the pub with Chelsea Manning as part of this will always be one of my favorite professional moments). I became VP of Product at Unlock, helping independent creators to make money from their work. And as I write this, I'm Head of Engineering at ForUsAll, which is trying to help people on lower incomes to build retirement savings. I'm far from being even a fraction of a millionaire, but I've had the privilege to do well, and hopefully do some good in the process.

And I've rebuilt a life in California. I have amazing people in my life - many of whom came through the Matter and Indieweb communities, for which I'm endlessly grateful. I still have my amazing friends from the UK, even if we're distant. My family is close and bound by love. It continues to suffer medical hardships. But through it all, I've been lucky.

Ten years from now

So what's next?

Thanks to the last decade's medical adventures, I'm a late bloomer. But I want to have a family, with a strong relationship built on mutual trust and intimacy at its center. If I'm really lucky, my future children will get to meet my parents; if not, I will carry their spirit and do my best to represent the best of who they were. I want a family life drawn from first principles based on creativity and love, rather than one built on established societal expectations: a progressive life created to support us as a partnership, rather than one built to make other people happy by painting by numbers.

My future children will be multi-national, as I am. Many passports, many points of view. And that's just from one side of the partnership. We'll be a mix of cultures, backgrounds, and contexts - ripe soil to grow something new.

I don't have any desire to be wealthy. I do want to be safe and comfortable. That probably means leaving the Bay Area and finding somewhere with a better quality of life to cost of living ratio. Edinburgh is the best place I've ever lived for this, but unless Scotland becomes independent and rejoins the EU, it's not somewhere I could easily go back to. Still, there's a big, wide world out there.

I want to do work that makes the world more equal, more compassionate, and more peaceful. What that means in practice is TBD, but I expect to co-found one more startup - not yet, but eventually. Almost certainly, it'll be bootstrapped and partially open source: a zebra internet / media business built with the goal of indefinite sustainability. If I'm lucky, I'll work with some of my former colleagues to make it happen.

I want to write a book. There is at least one novel in me. There is at least one non-fiction book about people working to make an impact using the internet. Ideally, I want to do this in the next year or two.

I'll also deepen my political volunteering. I began to give heavily to progressive causes, as well as canvass and campaign, over the last decade. My politics continue to be progressive as I get older, and I want to back my opinions with real, on the ground work. The current era demands it.

And I want to build a strong foundation for the rest of my life. I want to do meaningful work as part of living a meaningful life based on happiness and kindness. I want to leave the world better than I found it by showing up as well as I can through emergent strategy. At the end of it all, whether that's a few years from now or fifty, I want to look back without regret and know that I did well by the people whose lives I passed through, as well as people who I'll never meet or know. It's not about wealth; it's not about self-interest; it's about finding meaning through service, and happiness through connection.

It's been a tough decade for me. It has been for many of us. But I'm hopeful for the next one.

This morning, Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter would be funding an independent group that would develop an open standard for decentralized social networking, with the expectation that the company would use it.

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) December 11, 2019

I've been involved in decentralized social networking since 2004, when I released the first version of Elgg, the open source social networking platform. As I said in an interview with ZDNet in 2006:

I think in the future, networks or meta-networks won't be an issue: the network will be decentralised. What I'd like to see is a set of open protocols that mean you can connect to anyone, anywhere, no matter which site they happen to be using.

I still fundamentally believe in this vision. My second attempt at an open source platform, Known, uses indieweb standards to a user of a Known site to interact with any other user of any other indieweb-compatible site. Decentralization was something I looked at carefully when I was west coast Director of Investments at Matter Ventures. And it was core to the work I did with the Unlock Protocol.

There have been many other attempts. My friend Evan Prodromou created StatusNet and then the ActivityPub protocol; the latter underlies the Mastodon "fediverse" of federated social networking platforms. (Known has committed to also joining the fediverse.)

Twitter's announcement today builds on many of these efforts in spirit, but it goes its own way. I think this is probably right: whereas all of the aforementioned projects were created by hobbyists, Twitter as a company and a worldwide platform has different needs. If the goal is to run over 126 million daily active users on a decentralized platform, and for the associated platform companies to make money in the process, something new is needed.

I don't believe that this new project will come out of lengthy committee deliberations. So while it might rile long-term open standards collaborators, I think this tweet from Twitter's CTO, Parag Agrawal, bodes well:

3 - The traditionally slow and deliberate consensus-building approach to evolving standards might fail to keep up with a rapidly changing ecosystem and set of consumer needs.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) December 11, 2019

The key will be rapid iteration in the public interest, repeatedly testing not just the feasibility of such a protocol (whether you can build and maintain it at scale), but also its desirability (user risk) and viability (business risk). In other words, it's not enough to make something work. It also has to be able to win user trust, serve as the foundation of an ecosystem, and allow businesses built on the platform to become valuable. As yet, open standards processes have not shown themselves to be capable of this kind of product development.

To be clear, this kind of leadership can and does still lead to open projects released under open source licenses. That's what Twitter will need to do here.

For Twitter, there are many obvious business benefits as champion of this platform. Particularly in a world where anti-trust reform and regulation of social networks are becoming more prominent topics, getting ahead of the trend and locking in decentralized openness is smart. It could also disrupt other social networking platforms who aren't, or can't be, so forward-thinking.

Building it on a blockchain - not Ethereum, but a new, faster, purpose-built chain - may also make sense as a way to lock in both openness and the ability to build value. One interesting property of blockchains is that nodes typically have to process the whole chain; that means that as the traffic on the new protocol increases, the difficulty of processing the chain increases and the number of entities capable of processing it decreases. The value of being an entry point that processes on behalf of others increases. So there's a business in providing an easy access point for developers. But more importantly, designing the protocol from scratch allows a mutually beneficial business model to be baked in. It's not about hoarding the riches for Twitter: it's about baking an ever-increasing pie that everyone can have a slice of.

There are lots of very reasonable arguments that open communty advocates will make for this being something to be wary of. But while this move is very, very late in community terms (we've been talking about decentralization for decades), it's very early in corporate terms. The time is right for tech companies to make the shift into open protocols, in a way that allows businesses to make money, users to own their data, and a thousand new social networking interfaces to bloom. And I think that's a progressive move for the web.

Photo by Anthony Cantin on Unsplash

In 2013, my mother had a double lung transplant. The rules for recovery post-transplantation are that you can't have a bridge between you and the hospital; they don't want you to be stuck in traffic if you need emergency attention. So we rented an apartment in the Inner Sunset, where we all sat with Ma while she recovered. My Dad was there all the time as her primary carer, but nonetheless, sometimes I slept overnight on an air mattress.

As her speech returned to her and her energy increased, she told me that she wished she had a place to speak to other people who had been through the same ordeal. But at the same time, she wasn't comfortable sharing that kind of personal information on a platform like Facebook.

She was asleep a lot of the time. So in the evenings and weekends, I started to write that new platform for her. I gave it what I thought was a quirky but friendly name - idno - which spoke to identity and the id, but I also thought sounded friendly in a slightly foreign-to-everyone kind of way.

At the same time, I became involved in the IndieWeb community through Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks. And I realized that this platform could easily be modified to work with the microformats standards at the root of that movement. I built decentralized replies and commenting into the platform. That summer, I flew to IndieWebCamp Portland, and demonstrated the community's first decentralized event RSVPs. There, I met Erin Richey, and we began to collaborate on designs for the platform.

I had previously met Corey Ford, co-founder of Matter, and it turned out he was looking for startups as part of Matter's third cohort, which would begin in May 2014. Erin and I decided to collaborate (with the encouragement of Corey and Benjamin Evans, now the leader of AirBnb's anti-discrimination team) on turning Idno into a real startup. Here's the real pitch deck we used for our meeting (PDF link). The idea was to follow in WordPress's footsteps by creating a great centralized service as well as an open source, self-hosted platform for people that wanted it. For the business, the self-hosted platform would act as a marketing channel for the service; for the open source community, the business would fund development.

We were accepted into the third cohort, and quickly incorporated so we could take investment. Erin in particular felt that Idno was a crappy name, and undertook her own research on a shortlist of new ones. Her process involved figuring out which names were easily understandable if you just heard the name, and which could be easily spelled, using a battery of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Known was the very clear winner.

Everyone's favorite part of building a startup is choosing the logo. Here are a few I built that we rejected:

I think I thought the "kn-own" wordplay was cleverer than it was.

In the end, we went with this logo that Erin drew:

"It looks like the Circle K," my mother said. Still, we went with it, not least because the K in itself would work well as an icon.

I've written a lot over the years about the Matter process: suffice to say that it changed the way I think about products and startups forever, as well as, in many ways, my entire life.

While the open source community continued to grow, the startup itself didn't work as well as I had hoped, both as a business and as a high-functioning product team in its own right. Over the course of the five month program we chose to double down on individual websites over building communities, and then we decided to start with education as a go-to market. I don't think either of these things were the right decisions for a startup in retrospect, and as we presented at demo day on the stage of the Paley Center in New York, I could see disappointment written on a few faces. Here's that full pitch. If you read the initial pitch deck, you'll know that a lot changed - both for good and bad.

Known was half-acquired by Medium in a way that saw a return for Matter. (Because of Known's social media syndication capabilities, Medium did not want to acquire the software, and did not legally acquire the corporation.) One important role of a founder, which I learned from Evan Prodromou, is to be a good steward of investor value. In this case, it was important to me to also be a good steward of community value, and the deal with Medium allowed the community to continue to exist. Erin became acting CEO of the corporation and continued to work on the project. Eventually, I left Medium and joined Matter as its west coast Director of Investments. The work I did there encompasses the proudest moments of my professional career.

Fast forward to the end of the 2019, and Marcus Povey (a friend and frequent collaborator of mine, who also worked on Elgg) has picked up the community baton. Thanks to him, Known just released version 1.0. The community continues to grow. I just put together a draft roadmap for two further releases: one this summer, and one for the end of the year. These releases are free from any attempt to become a commercial entity or achieve sustainability; they're entirely designed to serve the community. They're all about strengthening the core platform, as well as increasing compatibility with the indieweb and the fediverse.

For me, the collaborative group functionality is still something I think about, but it won't be the focus of Known going forward. I'm considering an entirely new, simpler group platform (third time's a charm). Known is about creating a single stream of social content, in a way that you control, with your design and domain name. Its journey hasn't been a straight line. But I'm excited to see what the next year holds for it.

Books

This was another tough month, with three hospital visits for my mother. For this and a few other reasons, my anxiety was through the roof, and I often lay awake in bed with my heart racing. As has been true a few times this year, I found it hard to have the mental clarity to pick up a book and dive into it.

Over Thanksgiving I finally found that peace again, and as ever, I find offline reading to be meditative and nurturing.

Notable Articles

The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking". Just another example of how deeply warped by capitalism American society really is. "Ultimately, both the word jaywalking and the concept that pedestrians shouldn't walk freely on streets became so deeply entrenched that few people know this history."

New data makes it clear: Nonvoters handed Trump the presidency. Even if you hate the eventual candidate, if you have the ability, please vote in 2020.

Sea-level rise could flood hundreds of millions more than expected. "The new analysis found that about 110 million people are already living on land that falls below daily average high tides today, compared with an estimated 28 million people under the earlier models."

‘I’m gonna lose everything’. "In farm country, mental health experts say they’re seeing more suicides as families endure the worst period for U.S. agriculture in decades. Farm bankruptcies and loan delinquencies are rising, calamitous weather events are ruining crops, and profits are vanishing during Trump’s global trade disputes."

Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business. What could be more emblematic of our current era than a startup that takes blood from young people and transfuses it into the rich? It's not just its superficial ghoulishness: the power dynamics here are chilling.

Climate change deniers’ new battle front attacked. "Mann stressed that individual actions – eating less meat or avoiding air travel – were important in the battle against global warming. However, they should be seen as additional ways to combat global warming rather than as a substitute for policy reform."

The voice from our Nest camera threatened to steal our baby. And apparently these devices are commonly hacked.

Scaling in the presence of errors—don’t ignore them. Scaling is incredibly difficult, and even more so when you're dealing with a codebase that wasn't built with it in mind. Tef writes well, and I wish he was more prolific.

Everyone is admitting what they get paid to work in journalism. "A web producer for Wirecutter, the consumer review site now owned by the New York Times, makes just $45,000, according to the list. An editor at the same site with three years of experience has a salary of only $62,000. For a job based in New York City, that seems barely livable." Yes and: it encourages the otherwise-supported and independently wealthy to get into journalism, creating a demographic skew across the industry that seriously underrepresents working class points of view.

Open Source Code Will Survive the Apocalypse in an Arctic Cave. Enjoy reading through the Elgg and Known source code, future humans. Sorry about the mess.

Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism. My friend Fergus on his autism for the British Psychological Society. "If, as I’ve argued, monotropism provides a common underlying explanation for all the main features of autistic psychology, then autism is not nearly as mysterious as people tend to think. We do not need to rely on theories which explain only a few aspects of autistic cognition, with no convincing explanation for sensory hyper- and hypo-sensitivity, or the intensity of autistic interests."

“The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet” and the Cold War 2.0. "Silicon Valley imperialism also prefers to understand Eastern Europe as more corrupt than itself, playing into Cold War 2.0 mythologies. Yet from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (which revealed that Facebook was just as, if not more, culpable in skewing the 2016 US election results than Russia and its Guccifer 2.0), to ongoing abuses of artificial intelligence, machine learning, exploitation, and data colonialism being employed by Big Tech, global corruption’s technological epicenter is clearly not Romania."

The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Virtuoso Coder. A sad story told evocatively; this is more a tale of a community in Ohio than it is about tech.

Government Secrets: Why and How A Special Agent-Turned-Whistleblower Uncovered Controversial Border Surveillance Tactics. A reminder again. "“It seemed these people's rights were being infringed on,” Petonak explained. “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Everyone has rights. And just because I don't agree with your political stance on something, doesn't mean you don't have the same rights as every other person.”"

Uber plans to start audio-recording rides in the U.S. for safety. I'm of two minds. My knee-jerk reaction was that this is terrible - but having some protection against assault seems like a good idea. In many places, taxis do this automatically. The important thing is that you're told you're being recorded. (Of course, I don't trust Uber to do the right thing with these recordings.)

The Best Parenting Advice Is to Go Live in Europe. Parenting seems so much harder here, and like so many things, I don't understand why people seem to think it's okay.

Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for 'final solution'. "Baron Cohen also called for internet companies to be held responsible for their content. “It’s time to finally call these companies what they really are – the largest publishers in history. And here’s an idea for them: abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines and TV news do every day.”" Here are his words in full.

Weeknight Dinner Around the World. I loved this photo essay: 18 families around the world, sharing what they eat on a typical weeknight. Human and beautiful. (And hunger-inducing.)

Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights. From Amnesty International. "“We have already seen that Google and Facebook’s vast architecture for advertising is a potent weapon in the wrong hands. Not only can it be misused for political ends, with potentially disastrous consequences for society, but it allows all kinds of new exploitative advertising tactics such as preying on vulnerable people struggling with illness, mental health or addiction. Because these ads are tailored to us as individuals, they are hidden from public scrutiny,” said Kumi Naidoo."

White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won't act. "A Guardian analysis found longstanding Facebook pages for VDare, a white nationalist website focused on opposition to immigration; the Affirmative Right, a rebranding of Richard Spencer’s blog Alternative Right, which helped launch the “alt-right” movement; and American Free Press, a newsletter founded by the white supremacist Willis Carto, in addition to multiple pages associated with Red Ice TV. Also operating openly on the platform are two Holocaust denial organizations, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust and the Institute for Historical Review."

Dial Up! "How the Hmong diaspora uses the world’s most boring technology to make something weird and wonderful." This is so cool: underground radio for a diaspora community based on conference call technology.

The California DMV Is Making $50M a Year Selling Drivers’ Personal Information. "They included data broker LexisNexis and consumer credit reporting agency Experian. Motherboard also found DMVs sold information to private investigators, including those who are hired to find out if a spouse is cheating."

My devices are sending and receiving data every two seconds, sometimes even when I sleep. "When I decided to record every time my phone or laptop contacted a server on the internet, I knew I'd get a lot of data, but I honestly didn't think it would reveal nearly 300,000 requests in a single week." What have we built for ourselves?

Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition. "The planning materials envision a seamless system whereby a Ring owner would be automatically alerted when an individual deemed “suspicious” was captured in their camera’s frame, something described as a “suspicious activity prompt.”" What could possibly go wrong?

You can take my Dad’s tweets over my dead body. Twitter will start removing inactive accounts; that includes accounts owned by the deceased. "Big tech companies are good at a lot of things, but what they seem to lack is collective empathy and heart. When humans use the things you build and you stop treating them like humans, but rather like bits and bytes and revenue dollars, you’ve given your soul away. And maybe it’s just me getting older, but I’ve had about enough of it."

Pete Buttigieg Called Me. Here's What Happened. "But Pete Buttigieg listened, which is all you can ask a white man to do." A remarkable piece of writing.

Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in Schools. "By taking a decolonizing approach to teaching about Thanksgiving, teachers and families reject the myths of Thanksgiving and harmful stereotypes about Native peoples." Some great resources that all of us can use. I'm excited that these are the kinds of conversations we're having.

What keeps us going. 100 quotes from a cross-section of Americans on where they find meaning in life. I found this fascinating and very often alien: very often less relatable than I expected. But it's a strong portrait of a country in flux, with its anxieties written on its sleeve.

The Social Subsidy of Angel Investing. I think this cuts to the core of what makes fundraising in the Bay Area different, but I also think it's a problem. Angel investing has become a mark of social status. "In San Francisco, it’s angel investing. Other than founding a successful startup yourself, there’s not much higher-status in the Bay Area than backing founders that go on to build Uber or Stripe."

The Power is Running: A Memoir of N30. "On November 30, 1999, tens of thousands of anarchists, indigenous people, ecologists, union organizers, and other foes of tyranny converged in Seattle, Washington from around the world to blockade and shut down the summit of the World Trade Organization. The result was one of the era’s most inspiring victories against global capitalism, demonstrating the effectiveness of direct action and casting light on the machinations of the WTO." A first-hand account of that day.

Why we need to preserve black spaces in Detroit. "Detroiters are not opposed to economic development and revitalization; we're opposed to feeling uninvited in our own home. We're opposed to being told "no" for decades, for everything from mortgages to home improvement loans to development dollars, only to see that once you carve out a few portions where there are fewer of us, the property values suddenly rise."

Previously

Here's what I read in October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, and January.

I've always had a complicated relationship with revenue. Back when we were working on the fully-managed version of Elgg in 2006 or so, competing as a bootstrapped company with Ning and its $100M in funding, we differentiated ourselves by charging for our services so we could be more sustainable. A few years later, Dave Tosh and I laughed at our naïvety: "choose us, because we have a business model!"

The point, of course, is that users didn't care if we had a business model. To them, we were a service that charged money in competition with a service that didn't. Where we had won customers, it was where we had provided something unique that users needed.

It's not that revenue isn't the right path to create a sustainable business. I strongly believe that it is. It aligns services with their users and creates incentives that don't promote surveillance, predatory business practices, or monopoly strategies. The entire web - and the world - would be better if more services were revenue-bound. It's one of the major reasons I've chosen to work at Unlock.

But we have to accept that most users don't care. If there's one thing I've learned from three open source startups, it's that you can't sell on ideology. It's not that they need education on the issues. It's that everyone has things going on in their lives, and you can't expect people to care about the same things as you. There will always be a community of early adopters and enthusiasts that will be on the same page as you, but the only way to truly derisk your venture is to build something that real people actually need.

Back in the Elgg days, we were doing a lot of work with higher education, which was just beginning to discover social media. Educators were integrating Twitter into their classes - sometimes at the grade school level - and encouraging their students to sign up for commercial services. We were appalled by this, for ideological reasons: those services were free, and making money from user data. Making them a required part of a syllabus was akin to forcing students to participate in surveillance. But our pleas, and the pleas of a small number of others, fell on deaf ears.

Over a decade later, that trade-off has become much more obvious. The New York Times reported recently that facial recognition databases have been trained on the user photos uploaded to a range of free services:

The databases are pulled together with images from social networks, photo websites, dating services like OkCupid and cameras placed in restaurants and on college quads. While there is no precise count of the data sets, privacy activists have pinpointed repositories that were built by Microsoft, Stanford University and others, with one holding over 10 million images while another had more than two million.

As reported in the story, at least one database, innocuously trained on CCTV footage from a cafe in San Francisco, was then used for facial recognition technology used by the Chinese military to monitor Uighurs, an oppressed minority group who are being imprisoned in concentration camps. Of course, other facial recognition technology, notably Amazon's Rekognition database, is being used by ICE to target and deport immigrants.

Every educator who made commercial social media a part of their curriculum is culpable in adding their students to this kind of training database. Nobody who studies the space can plausibly claim ignorance of this potential. But the ideological imperative was outweighed by other pragmatic decisions.

These kinds of decisions are made every day. Do you make sure that the chocolate you buy isn't picked by child slaves? It seems like a pretty imperative idea when laid out as a blunt question like this, but I bet you don't. It would be lovely if we could rely on people to make ethical consumer decisions, but generally they won't. So the solution has to be to build ethically and to meet a user's need in the most direct way possible. Build something that people really want, and do it ethically, while not making the ethics the differentiator. You'll capture some early adopters through the ethics of your work, but you'll get the bulk of your customers by serving their self-interest.

Most crucially, if you're building something that has intrinsic value to your users, you can charge money for it and make money in a way that is in line with your values.

By now, the adage that "if you're not the customer, you're the product being sold" is pretty old hat. But it remains the case that everyone has to eat and pay for a roof over their heads, and that businesses need to make a profit. Software isn't made by magical elves who can live without being paid. Nothing is actually free. If a service isn't making enough money up-front, they have to make up the difference through other means, whether it's by placing invasive advertising, selling user datasets, making "data partnerships", or all of the above.

Arguably revenue won't be enough to stop them in itself: where profit can be made, it will be. We need strong legislative consumer protections to prevent this kind of user betrayal. But once the industry has cleaned up its act, sustainable revenue practices will need to be in place to support the services we use every day.

Today, President Trump is hosting a social media summit at the White House. Rather than inviting actual social media platforms and experts to have a substantive conversation about the real problems inherent to the medium and how we might fix them, he has chosen to gather a collection of extremists. Among them is a site called Minds - in fact the only social networking platform invited to the summit.

One of the dangers of building an open source networking platform is that anyone can use it for anything. Elgg, an open source social networking platform made by my first startup, was used for all kinds of things: we knew it was going to be a success when non-profits in Colombia began to use it to share between themselves. It's named after the small village in Switzerland that my dad's family comes from - the Werdmuller von Elggs - and I poured my heart and soul into it. Generally, I have been very proud of the things it has been used for: when learned that Oxfam was using it to train aid workers, my heart swelled.

A few years ago, Bill Ottman reached out to me because he was using it as the basis of his new social network, Minds. By that time, Elgg was long in the tooth, and a lot of changes need to be made. (It wouldn't surprise me if, today, most of the Elgg code was gone. And honestly, that would make me feel a little better.) Nonetheless, it helped them get off the ground. Last year, Minds raised a $6M Series A round from one investor, the venture arm of Overstock.com.

Yesterday, Vice reported this:

A previous Motherboard investigation found that miliant neo-Nazi groups connected to Atomwaffen Division—a violent American hate group connected to several murders—was using Minds as a platform for recruiting and spreading propaganda.

To be clear, I don't believe that Bill is a white supremacist. But it's also clear that deliberately lax moderation allows neo-Nazis to thrive on the platform and use it for recruitment. Minds describes itself as a platform for free speech: in other words, within the bounds of US law, anything goes.

Today there are concentration camps on the border. Children are dying. In the midst of this, Trump's approval ratings are at the highest point of his Presidency. This is a dangerous point in history - although, of course, not one without precedent, as groups like Never Again Action are right to point out. "The Jews will not replace us" is a common chant at right-wing marches, based on the idea that immigration is a Jewish conspiracy to replace white people.

My great grandfather fled Ukraine to avoid the White Army, which was burning Jewish villages and enacting mass killings in the region. My grandfather was captured by the Nazis. My dad and his entire immediate family were held in Japanese concentration camps, and my grandmother wailed through her nightmares every single night until the day she died.

This isn't principle; it's personal. It's personal for me, and for my friends who have been doxxed and received death threats for being feminists. It's personal for my friends who have been subject to the rapid increase in hate crimes. It's personal for my trans friends.

There's a word for people who aid Nazis: collaborators. There is nothing virtuous about standing up for the free speech of people who wish to see entire demographics of people murdered. To argue that it's "just speech" is disingenuous: words and stories have enormous power to persuade and to lead. To argue that the best way to defeat speech with more speech is similarly so: it inherently gives both sides a level platform, elevating extremism and giving it more integrity than it deserves. Scratch the surface even briefly and the subtext emerges: if inclusion and equal rights are really so great, the argument goes, surely it can defeat the opposition in debate?

These people, my argument goes, can go fuck themselves.

Recently, the white supremacist social network Gab decided to fork Mastodon, forcing that platform to release a strong statement decrying their values. I believe this was the right move. If Known or Unlock were used for hate, I would do the same. Even though it's a full ten years since I left the Elgg project, I'm finding myself writing this blog post.

I am deeply ashamed to have even a mild association with Minds. I think the free speech argument it uses is deeply flawed. I am also thinking hard about another set of principles: namely, the free software ideals that allowed Gab and Minds to adopt existing platforms in the first place.

In the same way that Minds shrugging its shoulders at the presence of hate on its platform is woefully inadequate, an open source social network shrugging its shoulders at its use by extremists is worthy of disdain. It is not enough, to say the least. If we're talking about abstract principles, the principles of human life, inclusion, and equality obviously override the principle of being able to share and freely distribute source code. Code is never more important than life. Genocide is always a bigger problem than software distribution licenses. Hopefully this is obvious.

While I accept that it runs counter to the stated principles of the free software movement, I believe we need a new set of licenses that explicitly forbid using software to facilitate hate or hate groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as "an organization that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities — has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics", which is in line with the FBI's definition.

I don't want software I write to be used by these groups. Ever. For any reason. I don't want to help them even accidentally, ever again. And I think that principle - the principle of never causing harm or facilitating hate - significantly outweighs every other one.

The saddest thing to me is that this is probably a controversial idea. But I would much rather be a part of the anti-fascist software community than the libertarian free market community if the latter absolves itself of its culpability in the spread of white supremacy.

Update: I fixed Bill's name. It's Bill Ottman. Apologies for the earlier error.

I've been building open source platforms for my entire career. It has not made me rich. Nonetheless, I'm more committed than ever to openness as an ideology, strategy, and organized response.

It took me years to realize that the startups I founded were more acts of resistance than they were ways to make money from a perceived opportunity. Elgg, my first, was entirely created because my co-founder and I believed that educational technology exploited institutions that served the public good; we open sourced it because we were appalled by the license fees these business commanded of taxpayer-funded organizations. It wasn't so much "we could make millions of dollars" as "you're looking at the million you never made".

The same pattern has continued since. Known was originally created as a way to support communities outside of the centrally-controlled Facebook ecosystem. I found work at Latakoo and Matter, two organizations anchored (albeit in different ways) in supporting the future of media in an uncertain time. And Unlock is a payments layer for the web without central control.

I'm here to tell you that running an open source project is not a path to glory. One of the important lessons we taught startups at Matter is that first-mover advantage is a myth: it's usually the second or third mover in a market that learns from the first mover in order to find success. In open source, that's particularly true, because the second and third movers can literally take your software and commercialize it. You spend money on R&D, and they can immediately turn around and use it for free.

Crypto-based projects like Unlock have a way of getting around this: the second and third movers theoretically increase the value of tokens held by the first mover, so everybody wins. There's also a growing movement to compensate the developers of open source libraries that are used as the building blocks of for-profit products and services. Still, in general, open source is not for the profit-minded.

But not everything needs to turn a profit; there is a core and growing need for software that is entirely built for the public good. Particularly now.

I'm comfortable with the idea of end-user open source platforms sitting in opposition to monopolies. In education, government, and anywhere primarily supported by public funding, it makes sense to use software that doesn't lock you in or quietly convert public funds into private equity. And as software becomes more and more ingrained into every aspect of society, we need to be asking questions about the effects of lock-in and ecosystem ownership.

I'm beginning to think of open source as operating like a union. In labor unions, corporate power is offset by organizing workers into a counterbalancing force. One worker would have a hard time counterbalancing a corporation's power, but if all the workers band together, they can influence decision-making and negotiate for better working conditions. Similarly, in the open source movement, developers all act together to build products that counterbalance the impact of high-growth platforms in order to create a better ecosystem.

(I'm pretty sure Eric Raymond, who originally coined "open source" because he felt the free software movement was associated with communism, would hate this framing. Too bad.)

I knew Elgg was going to be a success when non-profits in Colombia started to use it to share resources with each other. If it had been a centralized, subscription-only platform, and if all the available social software had been centralized, subcription-only platforms, they never would have been able to do this. But because there was an open source platform available, they could take it, run it on their own servers, and customize it for their own needs, including translating it into Spanish. In turn, other Spanish-language users could take their work and use it for their own advantage.

And, yes, some people who weren't me made a lot of money from Elgg. But for me, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. It was used to train aid workers by NGOs around the world, and by schools who otherwise didn't have the funds to run a platform of their own. That's meaningful. No, it wasn't a VC-scale business, and it didn't achieve significant recurring revenue. But that's not in any way to say that it didn't have value.

Not everything that has value has to be a high-growth business - and not being suitable for VC funding is not a value judgment. We're in an era where the impact of venture capital scale is being examined, and it's the best time in decades to find other models. If you're building something to serve people, it's important to think about how you can do so sustainably, but there are lots of different ways to do this. From the Zebra movement to the Shuttleworth Foundation, there are opportunities to find sustainability in a way that's right for the thing you're trying to create, with world-positive values.

Communities can build open source; startups can absolutely build open source; I think there's a huge part for public media and higher educational institutions to play that they as yet haven't quite lived up to. For organizations that already serve the public good, collaborating on software that serves their needs should be a no-brainer.

More than anything, I think there's value in standing in opposition to the status quo. Open source is a bottom-up, worker-led movement. The means and outputs of production are available to everybody. I think that's beautiful - and, in a world where every aspect of our lives has been packaged and monopolized for profit, a powerful force for good.

It was brought to my attention that the illustration I used for this piece was an image that traditionally is used as a symbol for racial equality. My misappropriation was unintentional, but nonetheless harmful. I'm very sorry for this thoughtless mistake.

Years ago, someone broke into my home and stole my laptops while I lay in bed upstairs. I had left them out on the dining table, and the burglar broke their way into my back garden and smashed through one of my rear windows with a brick. This was Oxford in the winter, and I had a hard plastic sheet screwed into the windowframe in lieu of real double glazing. Undeterred, they smashed and smashed until they found their way through. They didn't take my DSLR camera, which was also on the table; they didn't take my microphone, which I'd been using to record a video. They swiped the laptops, which were my livelihood, and fled.

Soon afterwards, we installed motion sensitive lights. If someone was going to enter my back garden in the middle of the night again, they would trigger the sensor and be flooded in bright white light. I couldn't afford to let this happen again.

As it turned out, the light was sensitive enough to be triggered by anything that walked through my garden. Intruders, for sure, although there never were any more. But also cats, and foxes, and hedgehogs.

Every single night, the light would click on. And every single night, I'd sit bolt upright and go to the window, my heart racing. The burglary was still in my blood, and in the air. My home, which had been a safe space, now just felt like four walls in the dirt.

Over ten years later, the sound of that brick breaking through glass is no longer ringing in my ears. Home feels safe. I've let go of the intrusion.

In my career, there have been events that felt like that break-in. The moment I decided to leave Elgg. Matter failing to raise its Fund III. And others. Each one, a brick through my window.

Everything is learning. You put up your psychological light for next time, so you can see it coming and hopefully avoid making the worst of the mistakes again. If you take the right lessons and approach each event with a learning mindset, each mistake becomes constructive growth. However unintentional your failure might have been, you fail forward towards something better and new.

Not everything that triggers your psychological light is a mistake that should lead to you sitting bolt upright with your adrenaline pumping. It's easy to be oversensitive to things that seem like they might turn into red flags. They could just as easily not, and it's important to stay open to new experiences. That's learning, too.

And over time, you have to let it go. Months later, I still find myself spending more cycles than I should thinking about Matter. That's a sign of my love for it: it was one of the most fulfilling, meaningful things I've ever done. It allowed me to use all of my skills and empathy in service of a mission-driven community that was genuinely trying to make the world more inclusive and democratic. I hope, one day, I will get to do work like that again. But while it was sad - and I'm still sad - I won't let that sadness own me.

These days, I'm doing super-interesting work at Unlock, and I'm still a part of Matter's community of alumni (after all, I went through the accelerator as a founder before I worked for it). Honestly, I'm very excited to have crossed back over the table to build mission-driven products again. It's a new approach to helping creators make money from their work, and it has the potential to change the entire web.

Done right, failure builds immunity. I know why each failure happened. I'm stronger for the experience. And I can bring that experience to help make Unlock - and everything I do in my career - as strong as possible. Rather than letting a brick through the window transform the safety of my home into flimsy walls in dirt, I can build a more resilient home. Failure isn't an excuse to turn inwards and stay low. It's a reason to be proud and build high. I've got the tools, and the energy, and the motivation. Not from a place of naïvety, but a place of knowledge and power.

It sounds ludicrous now, but back in 2014, when I cofounded Known as a startup, a lot of people were questioning whether a business even needed a website. Pockets of people - for example in the indieweb community, which I enthusiastically joined - were pointing out how short-sighted this was, but it was a minority opinion. There was Facebook and Twitter! Why would you want to have any kind of property that you fully controlled on the internet?

Fast forward to today, and most companies have seen the flaws in that argument. If your digital presence is how most of your customers find and interact with you, giving it over to some third party company with its own agenda is not going to serve you well. This morning, CNN's digital chief Meredith Artley says as much in an interview with Kara Swisher: going where your users are was a counterproductive startegy. You have to reach out to them and make spaces that they want to visit.

But my hypothesis with Known wasn't just that people would want to own their own websites again, and that we should make it as easy to publish on their own site as it is to publish on social media. It was part of it, but I had something bigger in mind.

Anyone who's building any kind of business - whether it's a media property, a brick and mortar store, a startup, or a food truck - knows that you have to understand your customers and meet their needs if you want to be successful. For most people, that means talking to them, again and again. When the New York Times first went online as part of AOL - before it even launched a website - the team took the opportunity to sit in the chat rooms and talk to people. The internet is a conversation, not a one-way broadcast medium, which the Cluetrain Manifesto tried to tell us 20 years ago. And businesses all over the world are doing their best to talk to people on social media.

But the same ownership principle applies. Just as companies realized that they need to own their online presence, they will begin realizing that the conversations they're having on third party social media platforms are templated for the benefit of those platforms. If they want to have deeper conversations, build trust and loyalty, and have a greater influence over the form of the discussion, then they need to own the conversation spaces, too. (And there's a lot to be said for not giving companies like Facebook all that insight data.)

Tools that allow companies to build their own social spaces as easily as they can build their own websites are important. It's something I learned when I built Elgg, although that platform is very bound in the desktop-based MySpace era. Anyone should be able to start a space to have a social conversation in 5 minutes, in a way that they own the data and can customize it for their needs. But while existing tools like Mighty Networks (and Slack) or forum tools like Discourse are great for what they do, there aren't any great platforms that let people actually build a site that directly fits the community they want to build. All online communities tend to look the same. If we know that the form of a converation influences its content - and it does - then it becomes clear how counter-productive a one size fits all approach really is.

And then the bigger picture is that if this idea is successful, moving from one monopolistic social network to lots of smaller communities loosely joined will make for a healthier internet.

That was the vision for Known: to let anyone build easy to use social spaces that they control, and liberate online conversation in the process. First as a startup, and now as an open source project. We were a little early, and made some (recoverable) mistakes. But it's still a mission I believe in.

We have a half gallon of eggnog in the fridge.

I'm surprised by how old it is. I don't remember it really featuring in British supermarkets, and based on its modern incarnation - Christmas drinking custard - I would have guessed that it had been invented in maybe the fifties or sixties, for an America audience. But nog was already a kind of English ale in the late 1600s. Posset, an alcoholic drink where milk was curdled with wine or ale and spiced, was mixed with egg as early as the 1300s. The word "eggnog" is first recorded as having been used in 1775, the year before the Declaration of Independence was issued.

In 1826, military cadets at West Point rioted because they were served alcohol-free eggnog. In the end, some cadets went on a mission to a tavern a couple of miles away and came back with gallon jugs of whisky, before getting boisterously drunk and wreaking havoc across the Academy. In the end, 70 cadets were arrested.

Ten years ago today, my mother told us that she'd been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the disease that at that time had killed my grandmother. She had finally got her persistent cough checked out, and gone through a series of increasingly invasive tests. And now, days before Christmas, we had the result.

The average life expectancy after an IPF diagnosis is 3 to 5 years. We didn't know what was going to happen, and typing this today, knowing this expectancy, I don't know why I didn't go through the logistical steps of moving to California to be closer to them immediately. There were things holding me back, of course - a whole life and roots and a network - but none of them were anywhere near as important. In the event, it took until she was carrying an oxygen tank on her back for me to pack two suitcases and make the jump. My grandmother had worn an oxygen tank, and then she had been gone. It was my first conscious introduction to losing a loved one, and I remember, at six years old, sitting in my bedroom while I heard my mother weeping in the living room. My grandmother had been in Austin, Texas, while we had been in Oxford, England, far away from her bedside.

Slowly, the trappings of my old life stripped away. Her diagnosis was a contributing factor to my leaving Elgg: suddenly, life was too short to deal with interpersonal bullshit. I had thought - hoped - that I was going to move with my girlfriend at the time, who I would eventually ask to marry me. That didn't happen, and it took me years to accept that it wasn't simply because I wasn't good enough. Every tie, save for those of friendship, faded. I was in California now, building a new life, trying to live while being aware, every day, of the undercurrent of tragedy that brought me here. Some days, I would attend an open data event and talk about open source. Some days, my mother would be helicoptered from a regional hospital in order to save her life.

Over time, it became clear that we're all at the forefront of familial pulmonary fibrosis; my mother was discussed at medical conferences. My mother saw symptoms in her sister, my wonderful aunt Erica, who she dragged in to see her doctors. She had two lung transplants. Over time, her son, my beautifully-spirited, generous, kind cousin, was diagnosed, too. We laid them both to rest last year and this year respectively. I think about them both every day.

My mother had a double lung transplant in 2013. I was in their home the night they got the call, the conversation soundtracked by the two refrigerator-sized oxygen concentrators running in parallel to keep her alive. Oxygen concentrators use containers of distilled water to prevent the oxygen from drying you out, and the sound is somewhere between a diesel generator and an aquarium. But suddenly, they were gone, and the torpedo-sized oxygen tanks were no longer a daily fixture. Somewhere I still have the discarded green plastic caps; one of us was going to turn them into an art project, but none of us could.

It wasn't an easy recovery. The following five years brought stomach tubes, throat surgeries, pneumonia, and dialysis. This year in particular has been one of the most difficult. There is talk of needing more surgery, but surgery is off the table. I treasure every moment. My dad is like some kind of superhero, looking after her diligently and with love, despite his own health slipping. There is sadness and stress in every day, but there's also so much love.

Research is now advanced enough to know that our familial pulmonary fibrosis is a symptom of dyskeratosis congenita, an incurable genetic condition that affects how you produce telomerase, an enzyme that protects your telomeres. These are the end-caps to your chromosomes, which shorten as you age, and with stress or illness. When you don't have the right levels of telomerase, your telomeres shorten prematurely. The effect is particularly pronounced in areas where your cells reproduce and are refreshed more frequently, like your lungs, and your bone marrow. The implications are terrifying, but there is one that isn't: it's possible to test for it.

This summer, my sister and I decided to get tested together. We were warned of the insurance implications, but Europe was our safety net; if we had the genetic marker and insurance became a problem, we would relocate to somewhere with a functional healthcare system. The probability of neither of us having it was less than 25%. I gave up meat and alcohol in preparation for having to get a lot healthier; I knew the kinds of tests they made you do to prove you could cope with a lung transplant. Mostly, I hoped that my sister wouldn't have it; I could accept my own life coming to a premature end, but not hers. She's the most amazing person I've ever met, someone I am proud and bewildered to be related to; her life ending would be like turning the lights out in the universe. But in the end, we were clear, and both of us openly wept in the genetic counselor's office.

I don't know how much time we all get as a family, but we have today. We have this Christmas. I'm so grateful for the bonus time. This week, this holiday, I'm maing a resolution to be present, in the moment. I want to remember everything.

We have a half gallon of eggnog in the fridge. I can hear my family now, awake and down in the living room. I'm going to go downstairs, pour a little eggnog in my coffee - those West Point cadets missed a trick - and join them.

The New York Times report on Facebook's ongoing data sharing relationships is quite something. The gist is that even while it claimed that its data sharing relationships had been terminated in 2015 - to users and to governments around the world - many were still active into this year. Moreover, these relationships were established in such a way as to hide the extent of the data sharing from users, possibly in contravention of GDPR and its reporting responsibilities to the FTC:

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.”

The company's own press release response to the reporting attempts to sugarcoat the facts, but essentially agrees that this happened. Data was shared with third parties during the period when the company declared that this wasn't happening, and often without user permission or understanding.
Back to the NYT article to make the implications clear:

The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

In September 2007, I flew out to Silicon Valley to participate in something called the Data Sharing Summit, organized by Marc Canter. At the time, I was working on Elgg, and we believed strongly in establishing open APIs so that people wouldn't be siloed into their social networks and web services. I met people there who have remained friends for the rest of my career. And all of us wanted open access to APIs so that users could move their data around, and so that startups wouldn't have as a high a barrier to entry into the market.

That was an ongoing meme in the industry ten years ago: open data, open APIs. It's one that has clearly informed Facebook's design and influential decisions. I certainly bought into it. And to some extent I still do, although I'd now prefer to go several steps further and architect systems with no central point of control or data storage at all. But such systems - whether centralized or decentralized - need to center around giving control to the user. Even at the Data Sharing Summit, we quickly realized that data control was a more meaningful notion than data ownership. Who gets to say what can happen to my data? And who gets to see it?

Establishing behind-the-scenes reciprocal data sharing agreements with partners breaks the implicit trust contract that a service has with its users.

Facebook clued us in to how much power it held in 2011, when it introduced its timeline feature. I managed to give this fairly asinine quote to the New York Times back then:

“We’ve all been dropping status updates and photos into a void,” said Ben Werdmuller, the chief technology officer at Latakoo, a video service. “We knew we were sharing this much, of course, but it’s weird to realize they’ve been keeping this information and can serve it up for anyone to see.”

Mr. Werdmuller, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., said the experience of browsing through his social history on Facebook, complete with pictures of old flames, was emotionally evocative — not unlike unearthing an old yearbook or a shoebox filled with photographs and letters.

My point had actually not so much been about "old flames" as about relationships: it became clear that Facebook understood everyone you had a relationship with, not just the people you had added as a friend. Few pieces dove into the real implications of having all that data in one place, because at the time it seemed like the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Some of us were harping on about it, but it was so far outside of mainstream discourse that it sounded crazy. But here we are, in 2018, and we've manifested the panopticon.

In the same way that the timeline made the implications of posting on Facebook clear, this year's revelations represent another sea change in our collective understanding. Last time - and every time there has been this kind of perspective shift - the Overton window has shifted and we've collectively adjusted our expectations to incorporate it. I worry that by next election, we'll be fairly used to the idea of extensive private surveillance (as a declared fact rather than ideological speculation), and the practice will continue. And then the next set of perspective shifts will be genuinely horrifying.

Questions left unanswered: what information is Facebook sharing with Palantir, or the security services? To what extent are undeclared data-sharing relationships used to deport people, or to identify individuals who should be closely monitored? Is it used to identify subversives? And beyond the effects of data sharing, given what we know about the chilling effects surveillance has on democracy, what effect on democratic discourse has the omnipresence of the social media feed already had - and to what extent is this intentional?

I'm done assuming good faith; I'm done assuming incompetence; I'm done assuming ignorance. I hope you are too.

Image: Elevation, section and plan of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon penitentiary, drawn by Willey Reveley, 1791, from Wikipedia

I'm getting really strong deja vu from Gro.ups 2.0 - an open source social networking platform that is now entirely implemented in JavaScript widgets.

From the Product Hunt thread:

I should also note that Grou.ps v2 is actually a set of GraphJS widgets Put on top of a gorgeous Bootstrap theme. That makes it super easy for developers to (a) come up with new templates, look & feel (b) port the social functionality to other digital assets they may have, like a mobile app, WordPress blog or website (but Not cryptocurrencies LOL)

GraphJS has been around for a little while, and is designed to be an embeddable set of widgets.

Explode was an embeddable JavaScript social network I made out of Elgg almost twelve years ago. Here's the TechCrunch article from the time:

A new open source cross-site social networking service called Explode launched today and looks like a very appealing alternative to the now Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog.  Built by UK open-source social network provider Curverider (whose primary product, Elgg, is similar to PeopleAggregator), Explode offers an embeddable widget that links out to users’ respective profile pages on any social network but allows commenting and befriending in one aggregated location.  I found Explode via Steve O’Hear’s The Social Web, one of my new favorite blogs.

What's old is truly new again. It's interesting to see people experiment with open social networks in 2018 - something I spent at least a decade of my life on. More power to them.

I've been in the business of getting people to use ideologically-driven technology for most of my career (with one or two exceptions). Leaving out the less ideologically driven positions, it goes something like this:

Elgg: We needed to convince people that, if they're going to run an online community, they should use one that allows them to store their own data anywhere, embraces open standards, and can run in any web browser (which, at the height of Internet Explorer's reign, was a real consideration).

Latakoo: In a world where journalism is experiencing severe budget cuts, we needed to persuade newsrooms that they shouldn't buy technology with astronomically expensive licenses and then literally build it into the architecture of their buildings (when I first discovered that this was happening, it took a while for my jaw to return to the un-dropped position).

Known: We needed to convince people that, if they're going to run an online community-- oh, you get the idea.

Matter: We needed to convince investors that they should put their money into startups that were designed to have a positive social mission as well as perform well financially - and that media was a sound sector to put money into to begin with.

Unlock: We need to persuade people that they should sell their work online through an open platform with no middleman, rather than a traditional payment processor or gateway.

That's a lot of ice skating uphill!

So how do you go about selling these ideas?

One of the most common ideas I've heard from other startup founders is the idea of "educating the market". If people only knew how important web standards were, or if they only knew more about privacy, or about identity, they would absolutely jump on board this better solution we've made for them in droves. We know what's best for them; once they're smarter, they'll know what's best for them too - and it's us!

Needless to say, it rarely works.

The truth comes down to this: people have stuff to do. Everyone has their own motivations and needs, and they probably don't have time to think about the issues that you hold dear to your heart. Your needs - your worries about how technology is built and used, in thise case - are not their needs. And the only way to persuade people to use a product for it to meet their deeply-held, unmet needs.

If you have limited resources, you're probably not going to pull the market to you. But if you understand the space well and understand people well, you can make a strong hypothesis about whether the market is going to come to you at some point. If you think the market is going to want what you're building two or three years out, and you can demonstrate why this is the case (i.e., it's a hypothesis founded on research, not just a hunch) - then that's a good time to start working on a product.

Which is why, while many of us were crowing over the need for web products that don't spy on you for decades, it's taken the aftermath of the 2016 election for many people to come around. Most people aren't there yet, but the market is changing, and tech companies will change their policies to match. The era of tracking won't come to an end because of activist developers like me - it'll come to an end because we failed, and Facebook's ludicrous policies (which, to be clear, aren't really different to the policies of many tech companies) reached their damaging logical conclusion, allowing everyone to see the full implications.

So if an ideology-first approach usually fails, how did we persuade people?

The truth is, it wasn't about the ideology at all. Elgg worked because people needed to customize community spaces and we provided the only platform at the time that would let them. Latakoo worked because it allowed journalists to send video footage faster and more conveniently than any other solution. Known didn't work because we allowed the ideology to become its selling point, when we should have concentrated on allowing people to build cross-device, multi-media communities  quickly and easily (the good news is that because it's open source, there's still time for it). Unlock will work if it's the easiest and most profitable way for people to make money from their work online.

You can (and should) build a tool ethically; unless you're building for a small, niche audience, you can't make ethics be the whole tool. Having deep knowledge of, and caring deeply about, the platform doesn't absolve you from the core things you need to do when you're building any product. Which, first and foremost, is this: make something that people want. Scratch their itch, not yours. Know exactly who you're building for. And make them the ultimate referee of what your product is.