Werd I/O

I’ve spent much of my career telling organizations that they should publish in a space that they control, on their own domain name.

My usual argument is that it shields you from major changes in company policy, or even from the platform you’re depending on from going out of business. If you’ve built a media business on a platform knowing that it’s been designed as a place for text-heavy media businesses, but one day it decides it’s going to be more profitable if it becomes a place for 3D immersive video, and your whole audience is locked into that platform, your media business is in trouble.

Publishing on your own site and your own domain name avoids that issue: you have full control over your underlying platform, and because you can change where your domain name points to, you can change your platform without losing any of your audience. In terms of Michael Porter’s Five Forces, this tactic reduces the power of suppliers — the platform that underpins your site — to dictate the terms of your business.

The trouble is, running your own site isn’t easy. If you’re a developer, you probably have the skills and knowledge to select an underlying platform, install it on a server, secure your infrastructure, customize it, and optimize it for discovery and sharing. If you’re a writer, you might not — and even if you are a developer, if you’re trying to start a site from scratch, all that technical administration is time taken away from working on all the stuff that makes your site special. Having a well-running platform for your site is table stakes; the core value of any site is the content itself. As any entrepreneur knows, you should spend as much time as possible on your core value: focusing on the thing that makes you unique and special will give you a better chance of success.

All of this doesn’t mean that the characteristics of a platform aren’t important. They’re very important, and can make or break a media startup, which is why Substack seemed like such a good choice for a great many people. It had everything: integrated payments, a solid recommendation engine that accelerated subscriber growth, support for using your own domain name, customized branding, optimizations for search engines and social sharing, and it just felt really good to use.

On a technical level, Substack was clearly a very good choice for independent writers trying to make a living on their own. It also stood in contrast to Medium, which had similar goals but was firmly optimized around helping people earn a living from individual articles even if they didn’t have a built-in audience (I’ll say more about Medium in a minute). Both were free to get started on, relieving writers from the technical or financial burden of setting up their own platform, but each had a different focus. On Medium, great pieces stood alone, so you could gain an audience for a thought even if you didn’t have a following; on Substack, you could build a following for your ongoing work.

Which is why it was incredibly disappointing when it became clear that the platform actively embraced and funded bigots. First came the transphobes, which a few people made a fuss about, but not enough. (If we rewrote Martin Niemöller’s famous poem for today, trans people would be the first line.) Then, most recently, it became clear that Substack was rife with actual flag-waving Nazis.

As Casey Newton pointed out in Platformer:

To be clear, there are a lot more than six bad publications on Substack: our analysis found dozens of far-right publications advocating for the great replacement theory and other violent ideologies. […] The company’s edgelord branding ensures that the fringes will continue to arrive and set up shop, and its infrastructure creates the possibility that those publications will grow quickly. That’s what matters.

That’s what made it untenable for me and a great many other publishers. Platformer, Garbage Day, Citation Needed, and ParentData are some of the titles that have moved away (or announced that they’re moving away) over the last week, and these are the high-profile tip of a much larger iceberg.

So where should writers go?

Unfortunately, I think a platform that’s completely right as an alternative to Substack doesn’t exist, which I’ll talk about in a moment. Where writers have been going fall into a few buckets:

• Buttondown, an independent newsletter platform
• Ghost, a blogging platform with built-in support for newsletters and paid subscriptions (sometimes through Ryan Singel’s excellent Outpost service)
• WordPress, the blogging platform that powers roughly a third of the web (but has poor support for newsletters and paid subscriptions)
• Biting the bullet and developing or self-hosting their own thing

My approach, because I’ve always had my own site running on Known, has been to move my newsletter to Buttondown. It’s worked really well for me, but these are all good approaches.

I’ve been a bit surprised to not hear about people moving to Medium, which has been undergoing a quiet transformation under Tony Stubblebine’s leadership over the last year. It’s certainly worth considering: revenue is up, the platform has reorganized itself around publishers and followings, it supports custom domains, writers can take their content and subscribers with them if they choose to leave, and the strategic thrash of the mid-2010s is gone. Tony and his team are genuinely hunkering down and doing the work to support writers.

A big difference with Medium is that the audience’s financial relationship is with the platform rather than a writer. On Substack, you subscribed to outlets like Platformer and Citation Needed individually; on Medium, you’re paying one of two tiers to access the full network. For readers, that’s clearly far better: you’re getting a world of writing for the same flat price. For writers, getting frictionless access to Medium’s aggregate paying userbase may help grow followers; it is clearly true, though, that you can’t bring your paid customer relationships with you if you choose to leave. On Substack, those relationships are made directly with you and depend on you having your own account with Stripe, which means you can leave and keep servicing your subscriptions without asking anyone to re-enter their payment details.

In order to really support independent media startups, particularly individual writers looking to make money from their work on their own, there are three categories of service that I wish existed:

A fully-managed direct relationship platform for writers

Any writer should be able to sign up to a service, configure their platform, and begin selling their writing directly to an audience without worrying about their writing showing up next to, or appearing to endorse, hate speech. It should be beautiful, easy to use, and friction-free.

They should be able to own their relationship with their audience to the point where if they choose to change platforms, they can take their audience with them and seamlessly start writing somewhere else. They should never have to deal with technical configuration: everything should just work. And each writer should be able to gain from network effects as the platform grows, allowing them to gain a following and build revenue more quickly.

That’s almost Medium, aside from the direct relationships. That’s almost Ghost, aside from the network effects. So close!

Indie recommendations

A lot of the focus of the indieweb and of the fediverse has been to provide an independent alternative to social media. I have no criticism of that approach! We need that! But there’s also something I’d like to see that goes beyond it.

I think we’ve assumed that social media is how we learn about new websites and articles. That’s a user experience pattern that has been inherited directly from Twitter and Facebook, which always wanted to be the way people discovered news and information. When I built the first version of Known, I had the idea of owning your own versions of social media platforms in mind.

Long before social networks, personal websites had links to other sites the authors enjoyed. Sometimes it was just called a links page. Blogs called them the blogroll. Substack’s version of this was for an author to recommend other newsletters, so when someone subscribed, they would also be asked if they’d want to subscribe to these other author-endorsed outlets. It was a superb way for writers to rapidly build a following outside of their own established networks.

The following requires some underlying protocol work, but here’s how it would work from the user side:

• As a user, I want to subscribe to an author.
• I visit their site and click to subscribe, entering my details.
• The site shows me a selection of other blogs or newsletters the author recommends.
• I agree to subscribe to those. (Not as a paying subscriber, but as someone who will receive new content as it is published.)
• I am instantly fully subscribed, without having to enter any further information on those third party sites.
• The authors of those sites know that they gained new subscribers that were referred from the recommending site.

The net result: every author can have the freedom and ownership of publishing on their own site, but with the network effects of a closed network.

Of course, even without this infrastructure, any site can already create a links page or a blogroll. I’m actively working on that.

Self-hosting that works like an iPhone

You should be able to pay for server hosting and have access to a fully-managed App Store that, just like an iPhone, lets you install new services with one click and keeps your software up-to-date. Some of those services will be free; some will be paid-for. It should be no more complicated than that, with zero exposure to the underlying server processes and scripts.

Shared hosting still hasn’t really evolved since the nineties: it’s a world of (S)FTP access, dubious control panels that don’t do much to help the user, and appalling user experiences. Virtual hosting is newer and more powerful, but you need to be a very sophisticated user to deal with containers, package managers, and so on. The former are designed for hobbyists; the latter are designed for software engineering teams. A self-hosting environment that’s optimized for non-technical individuals to own their own websites and data does not exist.

In summary

We do need a way to support great writing. It’s how we learn about the world, quite often in a way that helps inform our democratic decisions and the way we see the society around us. A world where everyone is writing for free and independent journalism has no means of financial support is not tenable or desirable, in my opinion.

I also believe that not providing financial support to literal Nazis is non-negotiable. I can’t believe that’s an argument we even have to make. This isn’t ambiguous: Nazis are bad.

The indie web should be a place where independent writers can thrive. I believe it will be. We just need a little bit more infrastructure: network effects, easy payments, removing the need for non-technical people to get involved in technical administration. The Ghost ecosystem in particular has shown us that there’s a great opportunity for this to be done well for writers.

Unlike many open source / indie web folks, I also don’t draw a hard line about hosted services like Medium, given the right features. The important thing for me is that writers can write and be heard. Anything that makes that easier — while not, again, literally funding Nazis — is fantastic in my book. The writing is what matters. Letting people connect and learn from each other — reaching people with ideas — is what the web is all about. The trick is giving them the tools and freedom to do that sustainably, on their own terms.

Previous birthday posts: 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things.

This post is in partial answer to Matt Mullenweg’s birthday request for everyone to blog, which is a lovely idea in its own right - happy birthday to you, too, Matt.

2024 feels like a good year for wishes.

—

One.

I wish the form of media was fully separate from its content.

For example: when I’m reading a book in bed, I want it to be text, on a screen (if it has to be a screen) that approximates ink on paper with a small reading light. But when I’m driving, that form is inappropriate: I’ll crash the car. I still want to make progress on my book, though, so wouldn’t it be great if I could flip to the audiobook for the duration of my journey? And then when I’m lying on the sofa later that evening, or sat at my desk, I’d just be able to pick up the book from that point, with a form that made sense for each of those situations. The desk-bound version might have sprawling video illustrations if it made sense for the content; if I’m lying in bed, I just need the text.

This partially exists today, and a lot of the technical prerequisites are in place, but there’s no great way to seamlessly switch between an audiobook and a book (or text and video, etc). It would be convenient; it would remove friction; it would improve accessibility.

Two.

I wish the interiors of homes were modular like computers are modular.

Today, if I want to install a washing machine, I have to make sure that the space is the right size, that I have the right electricity hookup, and that I have water and drainage. If I want to hang a picture, I have to hammer a nail into the wall or put up command strips that are likely to damage the paint when I take them off.

What if, instead of electricity plugs and water hookups and drainage, appliances sat in standard-size cradles that were pre-installed in your home? You would always know that an appliance could fit a given cradle, and that it would be provided with the electricity / water / drainage / air it needed.

What if you could hang pictures on the wall using something like MagSafe? Just hold them up and they’d snap into place, perfectly straight and aligned? What if that same mechanism could power light fittings and wall-mounted thin appliances, which also attached via magnets?

What if houses themselves were modular in this way, so that rooms and functions could easily be added or recombined, and what if these components were mass-produced in a way that lowered their cost?

What if you could attach modular power generation, like solar arrays, wind, and hydro, depending on your location’s characteristics?

Three.

I wish it was easier to bend space.

I don’t mean outer space. I wish I could turn on a portal and walk through and suddenly be in Rome, or Tokyo, or Leamington Spa. Think of it as a personal warp drive to go to the shops.

Sure, you would need to contend with timezone differences. As I write this, it’s 10:30am in Elkins Park, 7:30am in San Francisco, and 4:30pm in Paris. But honestly? I’d find a way to make it work.

One of the most defining features of the United States is its isolation. It’s harder to get to other places from here than it is from most places. Wouldn’t it be amazing to make those distances go away? You might have to resign yourself to open borders, of course, because there’d be no way to do customs and immigration if anyone could warp anywhere. But I bet we could make that work too.

(Would that lead to mass, global surveillance? How would it affect policing? Could you imagine trying to catch a criminal who could be literally anywhere in the world? Would we still need roads? So many questions.)

Four.

I wish for world peace.

If you’re rolling your eyes at me right now: fair. I don’t think most people would have read this far if I’d led with this. But, let’s be real: if you can overcome your cynicism for a moment, it would be pretty cool if there was world peace, no?

The thing is, world peace has all these prerequisites that would also have to be true. If you want world peace, you can’t occupy or exploit someone’s homeland. You can’t plunder their resources. You can’t have colonies or make opportunistic land grabs. You can’t exert your will through authoritarianism. The only way to have lasting peace is for everybody in the world to be able to have a good life, and for it to be generally accepted that this is a good and desirable outcome.

Which, in turn, means that people need to care about the welfare of their fellow humans who happen to live in other countries or lead wildly different lives to them. It implies not just tolerance, but a kind of love for people whose lives will always remain unseen to you. It means an end to nationalism; a sense of kinship with all people, everywhere.

It’s a big ask. And I don’t think we’ll get there. But I don’t think it’s necessarily too much to ask.

Five.

I wish there was a trustworthy, open AI engine that paid sources for their work.

Imagine you have an AI agent that is entirely yours. It tells you what you need to know (and what you might want to know), helps you interpret the world, and takes actions on your behalf. It’s a teacher, entertainer, personal assistant and thought partner.

Imagine that each business can also employ these AI agents, working behind the scenes to make their products and services better. You can interact with them via voice, text, programmatic API, and so on — whatever makes sense for the context they’re employed in.

Each agent starts with a vanilla dataset of genuinely free and open information. Then, let’s say you want to know about current events: you might add a New York Times subscription, and perhaps a subscription to a local newsroom, to your agent. If you’re a trader, you might add Bloomberg data. If you’re a pilot, you might add up to the second weather information and predictions. If you’re a venture capitalist, you might plug in market information and analysis from experts in segments you invest in.

It doesn’t happen through a private ecosystem: there’s an open standard through which AI agents discover and connect to new sources, including a mechanism for subscription payments. No one vendor controls the market; any AI engine can connect to new training data, as long as its owner agrees to the terms and pays any fees.

The journalists at the Times and the local paper, the data room at Bloomberg, the organizations providing the weather sensors and predictions, the analysts: each of these sources get paid on a subscription basis for the data used to augment each individual agent. There’s no exploitation of creators in this system; everyone is paid for their work. And through this system of plugins, users get to use an AI agent that is tailored to their needs and interests.

Six.

I wish everyone had access to healthcare.

“Having access” doesn’t just mean that it exists; it needs to be accessible. You need to be able to walk up and use it, without fear of being turned away, without fear that the financial effects of your care will be adverse, and with full bodily autonomy.

Easy-to-use, inclusive healthcare, free at the point of use. It would save so many lives. And even beyond that, it would remove a cognitive load that many people in America simply live with: a fear that something will go wrong with their health and they will ruin their lives in order to deal with it. Imagine what people could do if they weren’t afraid of having their basic needs met.

Even if you’re lucky enough to not have to worry about money, the act of having to choose health insurance, potentially figure out an HSA, pick a provider, etc, is a hassle that no-one really needs. I certainly don’t. Just make it one, continuous healthcare system.

Seven.

I think I wish we could bend time, too.

Imagine if you could hit pause and create a time bubble for yourself: a weekend temporally alone, with no requirements or restrictions looming over you. You could read a book, or do research, or bend space and go see a beautiful glacier halfway across the world. And then your bubble would end and you’d be back in the temporal world, refreshed or illuminated.

Of course, you’d continue to age in the time bubble, so you’d shorten your effective life — which is to say, the surface area of your life that interacts with everyone else. But your experiential life wouldn’t be any shorter. How you’d use this ability might depend on who you were and what you cared about; someone with loved ones or dependents might be more likely to live a temporally-aligned life, while someone without might live more of their life in a bubble. A monk might disappear into solitude and emerge - poof! - having apparently aged forty years in the blink of an eye.

It would need to be free from abuse. You can easily imagine a factory forcing its entire workforce to live in a time bubble in order to more quickly construct its products, literally working their lives away and being robbed of time with their families in the name of someone else’s profit. It would be murder, in a way.

But if it was entirely up to you? If you just needed a little more time here and there? Magic. I bet it might even make your life longer, despite everything.

Eight.

I wish we could take all the people who want to flood the web with AI-generated content and relegate them to their own mirror internet.

They wouldn’t know. They’d just be happily posting their ersatz thinkpieces at each other, giddily generating their one-sentence-per-paragraph LinkedIn updates and dumping them into the hustlenet, and we’d all be off on the real, human internet, communicating with each other in peace and tranquility.

Nine.

I wish there was a way to help build and fund end-user open source software.

Here’s how my imaginary program would work. There would be a pot of money at the center of it, managed by a foundation or an endowment of some kind, that would be ring-fenced to support software in the public interest. There would be no expectation that these projects would be self-sustaining: the fund would pay for them.

A call for applications would be made every so often. Teams could apply if they’d built an initial version. They would be expected to be able to explain the human impact of that software, and prove that it would be useful to real people. They wouldn’t get funding if they didn’t know who their users were, or hadn’t validated their product with real people.

The fund would pick six projects every cycle (perhaps every year), and guarantee a stipend that would last at least two years to work on that project. If that project continued to make a real human impact after that period, it would be renewed for another two years. In addition to releasing software, projects would be expected to transparently share their thinking, their research, and findings as they went.

Projects related to the fund, and alumni of past projects, would be expected to help each other, contribute to each other’s projects, and share their experiences. There would be a curriculum to help teams get on top of design and user experience, and to communicate effectively. The aim of the whole thing would be to make end-user open source projects more sustainable and more empathy-driven.

Ten.

I wish everyone would blog. Or write, otherwise. Or take photographs or make music or paint or sculpt or do whatever makes sense to tell their stories.

But mostly blog. I love these public journals that everyone can read. I love learning about people and what makes them excited about the world and what they’re worried about.

You should all blog. All of you. I think the world is better when everyone’s voices can be shared and heard. And I want to hear yours.

Eleven.

I wish there was a cure for dyskeratosis congenita, and for every genetic condition.

Literally one in a million people have DC. Unfortunately, I’ve been related to five of them (so far). We lost people we love to an illness that is still barely understood: my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, and two beloved cousins.

Because it’s so rare, it doesn’t achieve the funding that more common conditions receive. Some of its symptoms - pulmonary fibrosis, for example - do receive more attention, because they’re shared with other conditions. But the underlying cause remains niche.

It’s not niche to me.

And there are so many other conditions that have few sufferers overall, but where the impact on individual families is seismic. I wish there were cures. I wish that technology like CRISPR could evolve, perhaps in tandem with AI, to be able to address all of these illnesses, even when they’re rare.

Twelve.

I wish Google Maps, Apple Maps — all of the maps — took my idiosyncratic preferences into account when they drew a route.

When I ask for directions, it’s usually true that I want the roads that provide the fastest route. But sometimes, in a way that’s hard for an algorithm to predict based on logical rules, I don’t.

There’s a main road near me that leads to the Turnpike. I can take another main road to get there, or I can cut down a smaller road that takes me past the Target and the Home Depot. It’s theoretically smaller and slower, but what the mapping apps don’t know is that the route they want to take me on has a really uneven surface. I don’t want to take it; not ever. I want to go the tiny Home Depot / Target road, even though it’s worse on paper.

So, learn from me. App, you know when I ignore your advice and constantly use another road. Take the hint, please.

Because here’s the thing: I’m still relatively new to my area, I don’t always know where I’m going, and sometimes I don’t realize I’m going on the bad road until it’s too late. So I could use a little help.

Thirteen.

I wish AI-generated presenters would embrace their artificiality and really just push the boat out.

If you’re going to have a photorealistic AI newsreader, why on earth would you make them look like any other person? We have people.

The galaxy brain version of this idea is to make them into the perfect newscaster: something that could only be achieved with AI. Give them a bigger, multidimensional mouth for stronger enunciation. Give them large, resonant eyes for enhanced empathy. Give them bunny ears as a deep cut reference. Give them tentacles, because tentacles are cool.

Or perhaps you could have a sentient plasma read the news. Or the visual embodiment of the concept of gravity. Or the collective half-remembering of a song you used to know. The point is, there’s an enormous creative canvas here, and recreating an actual human being that you could have just gone ahead and hired seems like you’re leaving a creative opportunity on the table.

Fourteen.

I wish we had fully-electric, nationwide high speed rail, with satellite internet, sleeper cars, private rooms, cafes and restaurants. Let’s make them cool.

They probably couldn’t beat air travel on speed for longer distances, but they can be more comfortable, and they can let people work en route. There’s no need for them to mimic air travel in the way they do today: the space could be mixed-use, walkable, and luxurious.

Rail travel is already an experience (if you’ve never traveled coast to coast on Amtrak, you should; it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done). But it could be turned up to 11, and the speed could be turned up to 110.

Fifteen.

I wish my mother had met my son.

I wish he had her in his life.

I think about this daily.

Sixteen.

I wish we could find make all of this amazing technology without exploiting other nations, which means without conflict minerals.

We may be able to replace rare earth elements with carbon nanomaterials like graphene, which in turn can be created from raw ingredients like wood ash and even household waste. I think this is an obvious shift that’s coming down the pipe, but I wish we could be there now.

I love my iPhone; I love my electric car; I don’t want people to suffer because I own these things. I don’t want these tools to contribute to inequalities between nations. And I want everyone to be able to own one. (And I bet the relative abundance of these new materials will lead to all kinds of new amazing tech.)

Seventeen.

I wish I could find a way to be the American franchisee / importer for:

1. Gregg’s the bakers: sort of the UK’s answer to Wawa or Tim Hortons (without the gas station association). This would make a killing in places like NYC, in the same way that Pret has managed to take hold. Call me a maverick, but I think America will appreciate sausage rolls. Even the vegan ones.
2. Innocent Drinks smoothies. (I guess there would need to be a US version of the Blender, their impressively sustainable factory in Rotterdam.)
3. I was going to say Caledonian Brewing Company beers, but it turns out they’ve been shut down since I was last in Scotland. I wish the Caledonian Brewing Company was still around. C’mon.

Eighteen.

I wish for real journalism to flourish.

I’m talking about newsrooms that speak truth to power, elevate lived experiences we might not otherwise hear about, and help us understand our world in a way that allows us to make better democratic decisions, yes, but also allows us to know who we are as a country, and understand where we are as a world.

From local police departments who act above the law because they think they’ll avoid scrutiny to governments who make deals and build strategy at the expense of entire communities, more light needs to be shone.

I’m not talking about both-sidesism here — “we went to a Nazi bar and here’s why they think their ideology is great.” — although truth be told, I think this kind of anthropology does have some value as long as you don’t fall into the trap of promoting or whitewashing their ideas or presenting them without the required context, because, at least in theory, if you can understand people, you can understand how to prevent these violent ideologies from rising again. (Too many people believe that Hitler was some kind of freakish aberration and not something that could easily happen again, even in a democratic society. Even now.)

And I’m not talking about industry puff pieces (so much tech industry journalism in particular is horrible, cheerleading stuff that celebrates wealth and power; thank the gods for the Markup, 404 Media, and Platformer) or the kind of local journalism that riles up prejudices and does nothing close to speaking truth to power.

I’m talking about the kind of journalism that shines a light on corruption, prevents peoples’ suffering, and punches up in the public interest. We need more of it. It needs to flourish. Particularly in this moment; particularly this year. In service of democracy and the well-being of the vulnerable and oppressed, in the face of widespread corruption, war, the climate crisis, and the continued rise of toxic nationalism, let a thousand newsrooms bloom.

Nineteen.

I wish I didn’t have to worry about our son’s safety.

As I write this, he’s just turned sixteen months old. He’s tall for his age: in the 99th percentile for height, looking much more like a three-year-old than the barely-a-toddler he really is.

He goes to a Jewish daycare center, and I worry about anti-semitism and what people might do to find belonging in some hateful community or to service a racist notion. Not so long ago, someone threatened the local synagogues and schools and I shot out of my office to go pick him up. The police said it was not a credible threat, but who wants to take that chance?

He also lives in America, a country where people are allowed to keep AR-15s and concealed handguns in support of entirely fictional ideas like defending themselves against a despotic government, and I wonder what someone with a gun might do. Not today, but perhaps some day: a disaffected fellow student at their school, or a misguided friend picking up a weapon that their parent owns.

I wish I didn’t have to think about this every time I drop him off, but I do. I wish I didn’t have to worry about who we know — or who he knows — might have a gun. I wish we didn’t think having these weapons around us was normal. I wish we didn’t continue to normalize them. I wish all of them were gone.

Twenty.

While we’re at it, I wish we didn’t, as a society, love cars that make it impossible to see my son from the driver’s seat.

There’s nothing wrong with small cars (except for the not-insignificant baseline of things that are wrong with all cars). Bigger cars kill more pedestrians and are far more likely to kill children. I wish we could all downsize a little.

But don’t take this the wrong way: my wish is not a criticism of people who have big cars. I know some very lovely people who have them and love them. They just scare me, is all, because I’m worried someone is going to hit my child with one, and rather than pointing fingers at anyone, I’d rather the whole ecosystem of cars was a little smaller.

Twenty-One.

I wish I could take a year off and just tinker.

I’m not sure how that would work in practice. I can’t afford to, for one thing, and I’m lucky enough to actually love my work, so I’d miss it. But it would be lovely to take some downtime and focus on creative projects.

Creative projects, for me, fall into three broad buckets:

1. Writing
2. Websites
3. Software

Writing is exactly what you think: I have a book in progress, and I’d like to finish it. Then I’d like to write another one. I have some stories that I think are worth telling.

Websites are stand-alone projects like Get Blogging! that try to inform, entertain, or provide help.

And software is homegrown products like Known that I think other people might find useful.

What if there was a sort of angel investment agreement where someone gave you a salary for a year and took 40% ownership of whatever you created, with the promise that you’d spend the time actively trying to create things? Depending on who was offering, I’d probably take that.

Twenty-Two.

I wish something like DAOs had taken off.

A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is a leaderless organization managed through software, where decisions are made through voting and voting rights are conferred through ownership of cryptocurrency.

They’re flawed in two key ways:

1. They confer more power to people who already have it, because your voting share increases with the amount of cryptocurrency you buy. People with more wealth can therefore have more say — and usually do.
2. They use and depend on cryptocurrency, meaning that votes and ownership are always financial transactions.

While these flaws meant that DAOs were DOA, the idea of a leaderless organization with voting rights that are automatically enforced is interesting to me. What if we removed the financial component and overhauled the voting system to be one-member-per-vote? It might look a lot like a software-enhanced co-operative, and would be useful for everything from mutual aid to global movements to a family co-managing a house, all with enforced democracy and a careful audit trail.

Twenty-Three.

I wish we could move away from GDP as a metric for collective well-being.

Chiefly because it isn’t a metric for human well-being: it’s an imperfect measure of economic output that was designed for wartime conditions.

Amit Kapoor and Bibek Debroy in HBR:

We know now that the story is not so simple – that focusing exclusively on GDP and economic gain to measure development ignores the negative effects of economic growth on society, such as climate change and income inequality. It’s time to acknowledge the limitations of GDP and expand our measure development so that it takes into account a society’s quality of life.

So while we can talk about economic growth and hold it up as a sign of success all we want, it doesn’t at all mean that the average quality of life has gone up, or that we’ve dealt with issues like the climate crisis that will affect the quality of life of future generations.

GDP doesn’t ask if our experience as humans is improving, and it really doesn’t ask if the experience of our worst-off people is improving. I’d love to see us focus more on measuring that, rather than relying on the assumption that if the country is getting richer as a whole, everyone will see the benefit. It’s simply not true. Either we need to admit that we simply don’t create about most people’s lives, or we need to find another measure.

Twenty-Four.

I wish AI copilot for software development worked in a more literate way.

By “literate” I mean literate programming, a defined methodology where you write what you want your program to do in a descriptive, human language first, with snippets of code included almost as illustrations of their written counterparts.

Tools like GitHub Copilot let you write prompts in English, which the system then automatically replaces with an appropriate snippet of source code in the desired language. Like all AI output, it often needs a little editing, but it’s surprisingly magical.

I think AI code generation has the potential to replace software libraries in many cases. When you use a third-party library, you’re importing code that someone else has written to serve a particular function: parsing an RSS feed, say, or sorting an array of variables in a particular way. With code generation, you can prompt the engine to add RSS parsing or array sorting code, and it’ll appear as if by magic. And, unlike a library, that code will be written for you, and may be a better fit for how you want the software you’re writing to work.

There are a few limitations, beyond the usual ones that accompany all generative AI:

1. While a library author will (hopefully) continuously update their code, your AI-generated code is frozen in aspic. You’ll have to update it yourself. If everyone uses AI for a particular function, it’s also possible that those engines will never update their approach to that particular problem, because there will be no new approaches to train them on.
2. Your AI-enhanced code is generated prompt by prompt, rather than holistically in the context of the intention behind your whole project.

That second bullet is what I’m getting at here. What if an AI engine could look at a whole literate project in context?

The data engineer Frederick Giasson experimented with this and concluded that Copilot was context-aware within a file (or Jupyter notebook). What if it could take the whole project into account, with an accompanying UI that made specifying your applicable intentions, ethics, and values as well as your logical approach easy? Making these things explicit in the context of a body of source code, in a way that affects how that code is written and logically interpreted, is really interesting to me.

Twenty-Five.

I wish we had a pantheon of really positive science fiction stories to work from: takes where everything has worked out.

Star Trek is a little bit like that, but not really: the Federation is militaristic in nature, and while its participants have been drawn from disparate worlds and contexts, its culture is pretty homogenous. I don’t know that that’s what we should be aiming for.

Most of the science fiction I’ve watched or read over the last few years in particular has been willfully dystopian. Even Doctor Who, which is more fantasy than science fiction to begin with but plays with notions of whimsy and radical inclusion, has both feet set in the aftermath of a great war. The science fiction I’m writing — in part about the idea that the thing that will bring us down in the climate crisis is not the crisis itself but our need to profit from it — crosses that line too.

The problem is, as Charles Stross pointed out in Scientific American recently:

Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats.  Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and “seasteading.” Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.

We need to be able to imagine a really great future in order to get there. I think we’ve lost that muscle. We’ve ceded optimism to people who seek to create an adverse future. It’s easy to see how we got here — the world often feels oppressive — but it’s imperative that we re-find the sunlight.

There are positive science fiction movements: solarpunk, for example. I’d love to see more; I’d love to read more. Perhaps write more?

Twenty-Six.

I wish I was better at seeing my friends. Or, at least, keeping up with them.

I’ve never regretted moving to the US — supporting my terminally ill mother was a very good reason — but I’ve missed a lot of people. I made a lot of friends in the twelve years I’ve been here, and moving from California to Pennsylvania was almost the same level of severance, although the pandemic has made us all far more used to hanging out online.

There was a time, when I was much younger, when I could send a text that read:

Pub?

And an hour later I’d be hanging out with friends, having a few drinks (alcoholic and otherwise), talking about anything and everything. I really deeply miss being able to do that.

Twenty-Seven.

I wish for everyone I love to be healthy.

I wish for everyone I love to be happy.

I wish for everyone I love to be here.

Twenty-Eight.

I wish every software development team stopped to ask:

1. Who, exactly, are we building this for?
2. Is it the right thing?
3. Why do they need it?
4. How do we know?
5. If we are successful, who will be impacted?
6. How can we ensure that as many people as possible see the benefits?

There’s an idea that software is somehow outside of the human sphere, a world of discrete logic and objectivity. It’s not, and the more we acknowledge and internalize how human software actually is, the more useful and world-positive it becomes.

You don’t build software for everyone, because that’s the same as building it for no-one. You build it for specific people, serve their needs deeply, and expand from there. How do you know their needs? Because you know them, not as abstracted-away personas or vague market notions, but as real, concrete human beings who you’ve met with and understood.

Building useful software is an exercise in engineering, of course. But more than that, it’s an exercise in empathy, of human relationships, and of community. I wish that was universally acknowledged and built directly into both engineering processes and team cultures by default.

Twenty-Nine.

I wish I’d been to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This one seems particularly fixable, right? I’ve lived in the Greater Philadelphia area for a year. One of the best art museums in the country (maybe the world) is downtown. I think art is important; I like art; art makes me happy. I should have been by now.

But, of course, life happens, and there’s always something more important to do. There are chores to do for the baby, and things to do for the house, and admin stuff more generally, and work, and we need groceries, and there are other, closer trips to be had. There are so many things. And before you know it, it’s been a year, and this thing that I knew I wanted to do before I got here remains undone. And then before I know it, it’ll be another year, and another, and I’ll have blinked and life will have flowed all the way through my fingers.

It’s not really about the Philadelphia Museum of Art, of course. But it is about intentionality, and about self-care, and prioritization.

Maybe I’ll go next weekend. Unless something comes up.

Thirty.

I wish I could sing and play guitar.

My cousin Noah wrote these lovely songs for his wife, for his children, for his cousins. Music was such a core part of his life, and it became a core part of the lives of the people closest to him.

I love that spirit, and I wish I could embody that in some way. It’s not about a particular artistry or form; it’s about being able to convey the underlying emotion. In a very real way, it’s about love.

I miss Noah. I wish he was here.

Thirty-One.

I wish we could nudge our rhetoric from “trust experts” to “work with experts”.

The “trust experts” line comes from the pandemic, when skeptics and anti-vaxxers were urged to trust the scientific advice we were being given. In that context, and to that audience, I think it’s obviously right: the level of misinformation was intense, and intensely politicized, which led to real loss of life.

On the other hand, if we’re talking about smart people engaging in their own lines of informed inquiry, I think it’s safe to expand the discourse. Experts are a resource, and their expertise deserves respect. But there can also be edges to their expertise, and engaging with them may expand the knowledge frontier for both of you.

A very concrete example in my own life was my mother’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which was rapidly re-labeled to familial pulmonary fibrosis. “Pulmonary fibrosis” is the name for the symptom, not the cause; “idiopathic” means the cause was unknown. We worked with the doctors, and did our own research, read scientific papers, and arrived at the conclusion that it was dyskeratosis congenita, which then informed the hospital’s own line of inquiry. Ultimately, this was proven to be correct, but we might not have arrived at this understanding (at least on the same timeline) if we hadn’t done our own work, and if the experts hadn’t been open to working with us.

Science can be a conversation. I think medicine certainly should be. It has to be one grounded in science and fact, of course: it’s hard to have a conversation with someone who thinks a medicine can make you magnetic or that it’s part of a mass conspiracy. But I think sometimes we can be a little too hard-line in our discourse about who should be listened to and who should not.

Thirty-Two.

I wish civilization was further along than it is.

I’m typing this in my house, which is really four walls in the dirt, themselves made of different kinds of mud and stone. A great deal of heat is escaping through the windows, which are made of liquid sand that have been reshaped into thin, brittle panes.

I have to worry about whether the food I eat is good for me, and who picked it, or how it was gathered or killed. Outside in the drive, there’s a car that runs on condensed million-year-old plants, and there’s a car that runs on electricity. Both cars contain rare elements that were mined in parts of the world that have been subjugated by my part of the world so that the cars and computers and batteries can be made.

We’ve come so far, but there’s so much left to achieve. I wish we were there. I wish all food was good for me and ethically sourced, and that all my useful devices were made of good things that harmed nobody, and that everybody had the ability to own one and nobody wanted for any necessities at all except to further the collective experience of being human.

It seems silly that we have to worry about war and poverty and inequality and exploitation and hatred. We don’t need those things. Some of them were a part of early civilization but that doesn’t means they need to continue for us to succeed. That’s the sunk cost fallacy in action right there. We can build something new. I wish we would. I want to live in the future.

Thirty-Three.

I wish movies would be available on streaming on day one.

You’re probably not going to get me into a theater anytime soon. Don’t get me wrong: I love movies and the theater experience of seeing something in a room with lots of other people. It can be magical. But worrying about the pandemic, and worrying about finding a babysitter, kind of take the shine off.

I want to sit in my living room, under my fluffy blanket, with my own food and my own drinks, in the knowledge that I’m probably not going to get a serious infectious disease and that I can pause the movie if the baby wakes up.

I’d still like the option of going to the theater. Again: theaters are great. But right now, they’re not things that fit in well with my life.

I’m not alone. Just let us stream. We’ll pay.

Thirty-Four.

I wish the internet was exactly the same for everyone in every location, and that every website was equally as fast.

I wish there was full privacy and freedom from tracking built into the platform.

I wish the major conduits for sharing and learning online were collaboratively built rather than privately owned.

I wish the web in particular was about sharing and advancing knowledge, connecting people with each other’s lived experiences, supporting democracy, and improving our collective well-being.

I wish it was owned by everybody and nobody.

I wish everybody had access.

Thirty-Five.

I wish to only work in organizations that value DEI for the rest of my career. Although every organization is different, and the experience of working at them varies, it’s always a good sign.

I wish inclusion was universally seen as the obviously good thing it is, and that it was understood to be a prerequisite for responsibly building any company or institution.

Thirty-Six.

I wish there was software that could take a look at your life and show you different versions of it.

Think about those photography AI tools: things like FaceApp that, with a click of a button, can tell you what you’d look like if you were the opposite gender, or older, or younger, or a little more masculine, a little more feminine, a little better or worse looking. With a click of a button they can make you smile like you mean it, or give you a more expensive haircut.

Imagine you could push a button that said, “show me a version of myself where I was truly happy.” The software would examine your life, think for a little bit, and then give you a complete picture: a photograph of the happiest version of yourself, and a description of all the little details that add up to you. With another button, perhaps it could offer you a diff: here’s all the things that are different. And with a third, here’s how you can get to that version of your life from this one.

You could ask it what your life would look like if you were wealthy, or if you had no money at all, or if you lived alone or had a big family. It could shard you into fragments and possibilities and you could map all the different yous until you found one that looked right.

I wonder if, given the map, you’d actually follow the steps and make it to this other, hypothetical version of yourself, or if you’d stay put, safe in the knowledge that actually, you’re good where you are. I wonder, if you did take those steps and made it there, if you’d actually be in any way happier or more content, or if the knowledge of your original life and what you’d lost would invalidate it all: if those other selves are only valid in their vacuums.

I wish the software existed so we could know what was possible within our own lives. I don’t think I’d want to take the steps and get there. But the perspective? Perspective always changes everything.

Thirty-Seven.

I wish for us to be able to give our son every opportunity, every life experience, every freedom, every possible gesture of love and care.

I would love for him to have broad horizons, a non-conformist attitude, a global outlook, an inclusive heart, and a progressive mind. I would love for him to understand his radical interdependence with every other person rather than wild independence. We’re going to love him whoever he chooses to be. We’re going to show him the world.

Thirty-Eight.

I wish that everybody had the right to full self-determination for their identity.

I wish that the people I know who have had to fight so hard just to be themselves could relax, safe in the knowledge that they were safe from discrimination and harm.

I wish they knew that the identity they worked so hard to establish is how they would be known, without question or argument.

I mean, it’s just common decency.

Thirty-Nine.

I wish our personalities weren’t so siloed.

Just because I encounter someone in a business context, it doesn’t mean I only want to see the business facet of who they are. I want to learn how they think about the world: what kind of art they love, how they’re weird, what they’re proud of.

I feel that way about personal websites a lot: they tend to stick to the same form and topics. They couldbe jumping from topic to topic, exploring what they’re excited by, describing what makes them feel alive. They could be experimenting with form: a graphic novel here, spoken-word poetry there. Everyone’s public persona is the above-water tip of an iceberg of creativity and excitement that we mostly don’t let anybody else see. But that’s the stuff that really makes us human; it’s what makes us interesting and unique.

I know this is complicated for a hundred reasons, not least because it’s easier for people with privilege than people from more vulnerable or underrepresented contexts, but I feel like if we were all more comfortable to share more of ourselves, so much more would be possible. If we were more uninhibited to share our creative ideas with each other, we might see more interesting collaborations; innovations that otherwise would never have been possible. If we increase the surface area of our possible connections, we increase the chances that one of those connections hits home so deeply and meaningfully that it changes our lives.

I want you to feel free to share more of you. I want to feel free to share more of me. Let’s make a pact to give ourselves the freedom to be human, to experiment with form and creativity, to make things that don’t work, to just go for it and see what happens.

I don’t think we can do that if the form of our communications is limited to a small text box owned by some company somewhere, where the user experience has been optimized and averaged-out in order to maximize engagement and revenue. I think we need to own our communications again, stop sanding off our edges or letting people with a profit motive sand our edges off for us. Let’s be weird. Let’s whisper and shout and sing. Let’s try new shit. I wish we could all stop being beige and start being our full selves with each other. I wish we could stop trying to fit ourselves into boxes that other people have made for us. Let’s burn the boxes to the fucking ground.

Forty.

I wish I could undo many things. Just strip them from reality.

I also wish I could re-do many things. As in, have a do-over. Take another run at them and hopefully do better.

And I wish I could re-experience many things. Just live through them again, savoring every second, because I know I’ll never get those moments back, that they are perfect and fleeting and gone.

Forty-One.

I wish to be a better partner. I wish to be a better parent. I wish to be a better person. (I’ll keep working.)

Forty-Two.

I wish for a climate in balance that can support every person and every living thing on the planet.

There are so many prerequisites; so many things that have to radically change. I wish for every single decision and dramatic transformation it’ll take to get there.

Forty-Three.

I wish for mutual respect: for ourselves, for our fellow people, for the world and the ecosystem around us, regardless of proximity or origin.

Forty-Four.

I wish for community. I wish for collective empowerment. I wish for inclusion. I wish for a broad awareness of the interrelatedness of all people and all things.

Forty-Five.

I wish to continue living. I wish to live more: a long life that is vibrant, unique, kinetic, and full of light. I wish that for every single one of us.

Let’s get this out of the way first: 2024 is going to be a hard year across the board. Mass layoffs, another hottest year on record, escalating conflicts with enormous human tolls and flagrant human rights violations in Gaza and Ukraine, not just a declining media but a declining democracy, an oligarchic class that appears to actively reject any policies that might help the vulnerable communities they profit from, and a US general election with wide ramifications that nobody is looking forward to. On a macro level, the time from 2016 to now has felt like hard year after hard year, and I don’t believe it’s going to let up.

I don’t think you can make personal resolutions (or talk about tech or anything else) without acknowledging that context. Sorry to be a downer: 2023 was a difficult year, and 2024 will be too.

I like to make strong resolutions, loosely held. Life comes at you fast, and it’s better to adapt and take care of yourself in the moment than to adhere to a rigid set of intentions. But even if they end up being ultimately unfulfilled (and I always hope they won’t be), they serve as a good North Star for venturing forth into the new year. I won’t be grading myself based on whether I succeed at the end of the year; the exercise of thinking about them is valuable enough.

This last year, I bit off a little more than I could chew, particularly with respect to time management. I really value having clear, unstructured, creative time, and I didn’t leave enough space for that. So I want to pare down my expectations while trying to get healthier and focusing on the things I really care about.

So, here’s how I’m thinking about getting through 2024.

Health

In 2024 I want to increase my fitness and reduce my overall body mass.

For the first half of 2021, I managed to get myself to a point where I was running a 5K almost every day. For some runners, that’s small potatoes; for me, it was enormous. Then my mother died and I stopped caring. (She stopped telling me to go and exercise, too, which is something she did frequently.)

Running is tied up with some complicated feelings for me. I vividly remember running around my high school track on sports day, coming in near-last, my audience of fellow teenagers laughing at the “SPAM” t-shirt I’d chosen from the top of my to-wear pile. To this day, almost thirty years later, I’m scared of running outside. My 5Ks were all undertaken on a treadmill that we no longer own. (A rowing machine makes more sense for this space, so that’s what I have.)

For most of my life, I’ve been a walker: back in Oxford and Edinburgh, I would wander the city after dinner, sometimes for hours. It’s far harder, these days. Life is more complicated, and a baby at home means I can’t go out and wander with impunity. I’m not complaining — but life is different now, and does demand a different approach to exercise.

Finally, my food intake has been fairly poor for the last few years. In San Francisco, I ate out far too often. Here in Elkins Park, I tend to over-eat: having seconds, indulging in snacks, and so on. Let’s just say that the physical results have been unsurprising.

So in 2024, I want to do three things:

1. When I’m home and not sick, I want to spend at least 30 minutes on the rowing machine every day.
2. When it’s feasible, I want to spend at least 90 minutes walking every day (including the hour I spend walking to and from daycare every day).
3. I’ve had great results from the Whole30 diet in the past. I want to spend at least one 30-day period strictly following it. But then I also want to be more careful: no sweet or junk snacks, no seconds, only drinking alcohol rarely.

Stretch goal: I want to try and get comfortable running around the neighborhood (as an acceptable replacement for walking).

The overall intention is to optimize for feeling good in my body, and for improving my body’s longevity. I will not set a weight loss goal or a strict exercise target.

Reading and Learning

In 2024 I just want to keep reading and learning. Putting a number on it is utterly arbitrary but helps me remember that this is something I want to make time for.

In 2021 I read 43 books, mostly because I had a great book-or-two-a-week pace before my mother’s death. I read some books in 2022 but didn’t set a goal. Then, this year, I set a goal of 26 and read 19.

Next year I’m going to go for two books a month. 24 books. It’s a much lower goal than I might have set a few years ago, but, again: life is more complicated now. That’s totally fine and expected, but my goals should be attainable in that light.

As for learning: this last year I participated in Stanford’s Ethics, Technology + Public Policy for Practitioners course. It was transformational, and I can highly recommend it to everyone (it also comes with an enduring community of alumni). I also continued to subscribe to The Novelry, a private course for aspiring novelists that provides 1:1 feedback and coaching as well as a full audit of a completed manuscript on top of its curriculum. Again, I’ve found it to be useful and motivational.

I’ll keep up The Novelry (until I finish this book) but I’m probably not going to take another course, in the name of keeping my time sane.

Writing

I’m going to finish the damn book. And I’m going to do that by prioritizing it rather than leaving it as a thing that happens if I have enough time. It gets an hour a day until it’s done — end of story (until the story has ended).

Work

For the last few years the focus of my work has been to build empathetic, inclusive technology teams that can serve a well-defined mission. It’s been rewarding, but I’ve realized that I’m hungering for a little bit more, and for the impact of this work to be more outward-facing than inward-facing.

Building great team cultures is important, but it’s inward-looking by nature. The impact is on the happiness of the team, the way the team works, and how it relates to the rest of the organization it sits inside. I don’t want to give up doing that — I think it’s a prerequisite for doing good work, and I love supporting engineers. But I also want to renew my focus on being externally impactful.

Back in the Elgg days, I’d often discover that a non-profit was using the platform to share resources, or that someone had used it to create a site that allowed people with a social mission to accelerate what they were doing. We also got to push the web forward in important ways, for example by prototyping the first open format for data exchange between social networks. That was, frankly, exhilarating. Even now, I still learn from time to time about organizations or social movements that were able to use Elgg to become more efficient or help themselves organize or learn. Quite selfishly, I want to have that sort of impact again.

I don’t know what that looks like yet. I think it involves publishing more code, stories, and case studies at a bare minimum. But it’s enough for me to know that this is something I want to do.

Authenticity and Accountability

I haven’t always lived up to my own expectations or ideals. Sitting with that knowledge is uncomfortable. In particular, in a period of around a year after my mother’s death, I sometimes behaved in a way that makes me shudder today.

It’s all complicated, but owning that I made those decisions, without pathologizing or diminishing their effects, is important and is work that is only partially done. I need to be able to move on from that part of my life, which means completing that work, and doing it based on my own sense of ethics and equity.

And with that: I’m a people-pleaser, sometimes to the point of codependency, and it’s only been recently that I’ve understood why that is harmful. So I need to work on that, too.

All of those things will allow me to share more freely, show up better in all of my communities as myself rather than the person I think people want me to be, and move forward with real purpose.

The World

As I mentioned, it’s going to be a difficult year. In this kind of context, I think one of the imperatives is to loudly advocate for the world you actually want to inhabit.

That means being clear and uncompromising about what my values and positions actually are, and living in a way that is true to those values.

I will not support platforms that financially support Nazis or white supremacy. I’ve already cleared my newsletter from Substack and discontinued my X/Twitter account; I will watch carefully to see if other platforms I use contravene this principle.

I will not support colonial or nationalist policies or the people who espouse them. For example, I am clear that I do not support Israel’s ongoing actions in Gaza (and that it is not anti-semitic for me to say so). I am clear that I am not interested in “American interests”; instead, I am interested in global well-being.

I will always support peace over war.

I will continue to advocate for social infrastructure like socialized healthcare, integrated public transit, and welfare, and speak out against libertarianism and conservatism that seeks to undermine those needs.

I will continue to support and amplify diversity, inclusion, and distributed equity.

I will continue to support the right to vote, and democracy itself, as a fundamental human right.

I will be mindful of the environment in the midst of what is not just climate change but a climate crisis.

I will always advocate for community over individualism and care for vulnerable people over a person’s selfish interests. But I will also always advocate for individual self-expression, the ability to be an entrepreneur, and the opportunity to financially (or otherwise) succeed, as long as community and care obligations are met, and as long as opportunities are equal and equitable.

And not only is there nothing wrong with loudly saying so, not loudly proclaiming what you believe is acquiescence to the status quo.

In summary

I want to:

1. Be physically and mentally healthier
2. Be more externally impactful in my work
3. Finish my book
4. Show up more authentically in my communities
5. Stand up for what I believe in

What are your goals for 2024?

Newsletter subscribers might be surprised to see a slightly new design. I’ve moved away from Substack and back to Buttondown, an indie mailing list service. Every email will be free from now on; paid subscribers will be refunded in full.

Why? Here’s the New York Times with the story:

Under pressure from critics who say Substack is profiting from newsletters that promote hate speech and racism, the company’s founders said Thursday that they would not ban Nazi symbols and extremist rhetoric from the platform.

[…] “We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power,” he said.

I take a slightly different view.

My take is this: if a Nazi is removed from a service, their right to free speech has not been infringed. They have the ability to publish on the web or to join a service where their content is tolerated. That kind of speech is simply not allowed in that particular place.

Think of the web as a series of living rooms. If you’re in my living room, I have the right to kick you out if you start being abusive to me or other people in the room. I get to set the rules in my space so that other people can feel safe to be there. Different people have different values, so their living rooms might have different rules. But I get to set mine.

I also get to decide which rooms I want to be in, and which rooms I want to invite other people into. I don’t have any interest in hanging out in a room with Nazis, and I certainly don’t have any interest in inviting my friends to hang out there with me. If I find that the owner of the living room allows people who make me or my friends feel unsafe — or, as is true in this case, pays them to hang out there, and makes money from their presence — I can use the law of two feet to leave.

Which is what I’ve done. And if you’re still on Substack, I encourage you to do the same.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Michael B Tager’s Nazi bar story, which I’ll copy and paste in full below (now that he’s left X/Twitter and the original source is lost to time):

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you.

So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.”

and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues. “you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”

And i was like, “oh damn.”

and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

Let’s avoid frequenting Nazi bars.

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The EU has opened up an investigation into Elon Musk’s X:

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, may have broken the European Union’s tough new Digital Services Act rules, regulators said as they announced the opening of a formal investigation today. A key concern of the investigation is “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel,” the European Commission says.

What actually counts as illegal content under the Digital Services Act isn’t completely clear-cut:

What constitutes illegal content is defined in other laws either at EU level or at national level – for example terrorist content or child sexual abuse material or illegal hate speech is defined at EU level. Where a content is illegal only in a given Member State, as a general rule it should only be removed in the territory where it is illegal.

So, for example, what is considered illegal in Germany under the DSA isn’t necessarily illegal in Ireland or Poland. Service providers therefore have to keep a matrix of content rules for each EU member state, and remove any given piece of content only in the jurisdictions where it is illegal.

In addition to policing illegal content, seventeen named Very Large Online Platforms (X, Meta, YouTube, TikTok, the Apple App Store, and so on) and the two largest search engines also need to assess their impact on four broad categories of what the legislation calls systemic risk:

• “The sale of products or services prohibited by Union or national law, including dangerous or counterfeit products, or illegally-traded animals”
• “The actual or foreseeable impact of the service on the exercise of fundamental rights, as protected by the Charter, including but not limited to human dignity, freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, the right to private life, data protection, the right to non-discrimination, the rights of the child and consumer protection”
• “The actual or foreseeable negative effects on democratic processes, civic discourse and electoral processes, as well as public security”
• “Concerns relating to the design, functioning or use, including through manipulation, of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines with an actual or foreseeable negative effect on the protection of public health, minors and serious negative consequences to a person's physical and mental well-being, or on gender-based violence”

When assessing these risks, those platforms are required to consider their content and advertising algorithms, content moderation policies, terms and conditions, and data policies.

So the EU’s investigation into X isn’t just around X distributing illegal content (which it potentially is, given the proliferation of straight-up Nazi content that is illegal in at least one member country). It’s also around whether X is doing enough — and, reading between the lines, whether it’s even actively trying — to mitigate those systemic harms.

It’s also explicitly around whether the new blue checks are deceptive, given that they purport to verify a user as authentic when, in reality, anyone can pay to obtain one. (If you’re wondering if this really is deceptive, just ask Eli Lilly.)

Finally, X hasn’t allowed researchers access to the platform for auditing purposes, violating a principle of transparency which is enshrined by the Digital Services Act. Following changes to the platform, access to data for research purposes has been severely curtailed:

Social media researchers have canceled, suspended or changed more than 100 studies about X, formerly Twitter, as a result of actions taken by Elon Musk that limit access to the social media platform, nearly a dozen interviews and a survey of planned projects show. […] A majority of survey respondents fear being sued by X over their findings or use of data. The worry follows X's July lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after it published critical reports about the platform's content moderation.

Regardless of how you feel about Elon Musk and X — as regular readers know, I have my own strong feelings — I’m struck by the level of compliance required by the Act, and how I might think about that if I ran X.

If I was in Musk’s place, I think these things would be true:

• Blue checks would indicate a verified identity only. They might be paid-for, but it would not be possible to obtain one without verifying your ID. The same rule would apply for every user. (Currently, my account has a blue checkmark, but I can assure you that I don’t pay for X.)
• Researchers from accredited institutions would have access to all public data via a free research license.
• I would be careful not to personally promote or favor any political viewpoint.
• The accounts of previous rule violators like Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones would have remained banned.

I honestly don’t know how I would adhere to the illegal content rule, though. The level of human content moderation required to keep illegal content out of various jurisdictions seems very high, almost to the point of making running a service like X prohibitive.

Of course, this isn’t unique to the EU. Any country has the ability to mark content as illegal if a platform does business there. It just so happens that the EU has the strongest codification of that idea, which is going to be onerous to comply with for many companies.

Which maybe it should be. I don’t know that we gain much by having giant social platforms that seek to serve all of humanity across all nations, owned by a single private company. It’s almost impossible for a company to serve all markets well with trust and safety teams that understand local nuances, and when you underserve a market, bad things happen — as they did when Facebook under-invested in content safety in Myanmar, leading to the genocide of the Rohingya. It’s not at all that I think these platforms should be able to run as some kind of global free market with no rules; that kind of cavalier approach leads to real and sometimes widespread harms.

Instead, I think an approach where the social web is made out of smaller, more local communities, where owners and moderators are aware of local issues, may prove to be safer and more resilient. A federated social web can allow members of these communities to interact with each other, but everyone’s discourse won’t be owned by the same Delaware C Corporation. In this world, everyone’s conversations can take place on locally-owned platforms that have appropriate rules and features for their locality. It’s a more sustainable, distributed, multi-polar approach to social media.

The Digital Services Act is onerous, and I think it probably needs to be. The right for companies to do business doesn’t outweigh the right of people to be free from harm and abuse. Whether X has the ability to keep running under its rules shouldn’t be the yardstick: the yardstick should be the rules needed to protect discourse, allow vulnerable groups to communicate safely, and to protect people from harm overall.

Image by James Duncan Davidson, licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0.

I participated in this year’s NiemanLab Predictions for Journalism. My prediction is about AI flooding the web with spammy, bland content — and the techniques newsrooms will need to use to connect with their communities:

Newsrooms that commit to AI-driven storytelling as a way to cut costs while increasing output will be lost in a sea of similarly bland content and spammy marketing. Newsrooms that cling to traditional SEO and social media tactics will find that they become less and less effective in the face of more and more noise.

In contrast, the newsrooms that survive the flooding of the web are going to be the ones that report deeply, commit to diverse representation, invest in investigative journalism in the public interest, and choose to meet their communities where they’re at by doing things that don’t scale to engage them.

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, Dana Lacey predicts that publishers will embrace open source:

[Publishers] will finally see open source software as a competitive advantage, and the cheapest way to keep up with the pace of innovation. They’ll explore ways to use open source technology to combat disinformation, personalize content, and reach new audiences by tapping into global expertise.

Andrew Losowsky invites newsrooms to learn from influencers as a way of building trust:

Journalism has to rebuild itself around the real needs of our communities. To do this effectively, we first need to show up for them. We need to be more approachable and present, to ask and answer ongoing questions, to encourage and engage in discussions around what and how we cover, to show up for our communities in good times as well as bad, to reward and encourage loyalty, to create near-seamless access to our work, and to provide real, demonstrable value with everything we make. In other words, learn from influencers through the lens of engaged journalism.

Sisi Wei discusses “news mirages” — news that looks trustworthy but isn’t news at all:

Rapid developments in AI (and the billions in funding being poured into it) are making it easier and easier for bad actors to conjure these mirages using text, audio, photo, and video, using quantity to overwhelm the little oases of quality information communities manage to access.

[…] In 2024, journalists must double-down on finding, publishing, and distributing quality independent information to fill the void. It’s not enough to only dispel the illusions created by news mirages. If we only debunk misinformation without publishing quality information of our own, we have only shifted a news mirage back into a news desert.

Upasna Gautam calls for newsrooms to learn how to build product in a more agile way (which they frankly should have a long time ago):

Central to an agile environment is the core concept of iterative development cycles. These succinct sprints, spanning two to four weeks, liberate development teams from the constraints of traditional waterfall methodologies. They empower teams not just to deliver software but to orchestrate incremental improvements, enabling swift adaptation to emerging trends and seamless integration of user feedback.

Amethyst J. Davis bluntly calls for the PressForward funding initiative to prove itself to the Black press:

How are the neediest of newsrooms supposed to trust Press Forward when public and private funders involved have already tried to lock us out? We all have stories.

I know so many Black-centered newsroom leaders who’ve expressed doubt about Press Forward behind the scenes. They’ve been told they should keep their comments quiet because they’ll lose out on critical dollars.

The whole list is a check on the pulse of how the news industry is thinking. I love it, and feel very privileged to contribute. You can check it out here.