Werd I/O

My opinions on web business models have changed over time.

I agree that advertising was one of the web’s original sins, although at this point in its cultural life I’m not sure I’m prepared to say that it was the only original sin. At the same time, I’m not sure if the web would be the web without it: I wonder if it would have been as big or as ubiquitous if it had been harder for platforms to make money on it. Secure web payments weren’t a thing, so online subscriptions were difficult to achieve - and even if they hadn’t been, content with a price tag is by definition exclusionary, with a far narrower potential audience. Ads, for all their evils, kept the web open to all.

It may seem obvious, but money was, and will continue to be, important for the web. While I’d love to live in a post-capitalist, post-money society, we don’t. Asking web creators to build and share for the love of it negates their need to put roofs over their heads and pay for food. And while it’s clear that internet companies grew to be very large and amass a lot more money than an individual creator requires, the advertising these behemoth engines generated arguably fueled the web’s growth and subsequent popularity. I’m not here to defend any tech giant, and I think there’s a great deal wrong with the wealth hoarding they practice and the liberties they often take with human rights, but I don’t think we’d be having the same kind of conversation if they hadn’t existed.

Anyway, It’s a moot point, because ads were everywhere on the web, they were how it grew, and they did create the world’s largest warrantless surveillance network in the process. They weren’t the only thing: centralized web analytics and detailed customer profiling aren’t intrinsically tied to ads. But targeted advertising opened the floodgates for ubiquitous tracking across the free websites that represent most ongoing web activity.

The question isn’t “what would have been better”, but “where do we go from here”. So what now?

For a time it seemed like subscriptions, paywalls, and micropayments might be the answer. But I’ve laid the clues for why they’re not necessarily so above: they intrinsically exclude the majority of a site’s potential audience from being able to see and consume its information. And rather than precluding tracking, taking direct payment still incentivizes websites to tailor a commercial call to action.

Simply put, if you know where a potential customer has spent money on before, and what on, you’re more likely to know what could entice them to spend money with you once they’ve landed on your website or in your app. These customer insights necessitate tracking. And at the same time, not every ad needs to be targeted: advertising does not require tracking to work, and publishers tend not make more money from targeted ads.

I do think shifting to methods of direct support to the web has the potential to be part of a solution, but not inherently to itself. Paying for content and services obviously has its place, but at the same time, business models can’t possibly be one-size-fits-all. Sometimes excluding users who can’t pay is too much friction, or is converse to the mission you’re following, or is even societally harmful - imagine, for example, if the journalism required for voters to make smart democratic decisions all lay behind a paywall. Every business, every creator, everyone who wants to build community has to know what their mission is and who their audience is, and must tailor their approach accordingly.

I’ve come to really appreciate patronage models. You can see this most readily on sites like The Guardian and Wikipedia: great content served as part of a well-made product, with a clear, well-constructed ask that is hard to ignore but also easily dismissable. Neither site, to the best of my knowledge, does anything to subvert user privacy; neither site makes any limitations on who can access their pages. If you don’t have the means or the inclination to pay, you can just close the box and carry on with your day. But if you can, it’s equally as easy to throw them some money. You don’t get much in return (although there may be some tote bag style benefits) aside from the warm glow of knowing that you’ve kept a public resource online.

Here the politics of privacy turn on their head. Whereas nobody wants an ad company to know who they are or to be able to follow them around, people who purchase patronage may want to be recognized. For some, being publicly associated with a creator or community you love may be an incentive in itself. Because it’s a more direct relationship, a site may also feel that it’s in its interests to list its patrons’ names, so that community members can understand who is paying for all this. (In full disclosure, my employer, The 19th, does this.)

I’d love to see an open source patronage widget that uses a built-in web payments protocol to allow anyone with a website to be able to easily take patronage payments without going through a centralized service that could track them, optionally with a requirement to record a patron’s identity for display. This is the kind of thing I know the Unlock Protocol team, which I spent some time on, is working on.

As discussed, though, this is not a problem with a purely technological solution. I’d love to find ways to build a stronger culture of patronage across the web, which I think is tied directly up with finding ways to build stronger community. My hunch is that people with a strong, bidirectional relationship to a content creator or service will be more likely to support it.

Finally, I don’t think we get away with eradicating surveillance capitalism without legislation. Just as every market needs some rules to protect consumers and ensure companies play fair, the internet needs to be governed by real privacy laws. We’re at the foothills of a movement here: the GDPR and CCPA are two examples of what will hopefully become an international agreement about what constitutes real privacy. Because it’s much harder to build a web service that carves out privacy legislation compliance for users in a geography than just to build a service that complies for everyone, these laws have an outsized impact. We’ve seen that a free-for-all open market does not result in an environment that protects consumers from warrantless surveillance; it’s past time that these regulations became mainstream everywhere.

Brought together, I think that’s the future of paying for content and services on the web that I’d like to see:

• Robust privacy protections, worldwide
• A flexible, web-native model that leans heavily on patronage for consumer web content and services
• A way to keep content and services free at the point of use for most users
• Easy-to-use tools and protocols that allow web creators and consumer service providers to collect funds without having to engage with centralized services that could track customers

It’s clear that alignments have to change to make this a reality. For example, while it might be relatively easy to think of content that you might want to patronize, services might be a little tougher. What would Twitter or Facebook have to do to make you want to be a patron?

As a start, they would need to deliver exceptional value: not as a delivery mechanism for ads, but as communities that you’re excited for people to be a part of because they make the world better. Doesn’t that seem like a much more enlightened model than today’s engagement machines that encourage discord in order to show you more ads?

Yes, it’s a tall order, but so was the web. I believe we can reclaim the commons and build something that’s more nurturing and supportive for all of us - and that allows creators and people who build services to make a living at the same time. In fact, I think the future of the web as a medium may depend on it.

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

Open, collaborative protocols > centralized services.

Impact on people > impact on capital.

Impact on communities > impact on individuals.

Human rights > capital rights.

Distributed equity > limited ownership.

Distributing equity > adding value to exclusionary systems.

Sustainability > get-rich-quick.

Building value > building wealth.

Serving underlying human needs > prescriptiveness for one particular approach, business model, financing strategy, or underlying technology.

Listening, building, and testing > talking.

The best listeners in the room > the smartest people in the room.

Radical inclusion and empathy > radical individualism.

In the spirit of Uses This, here’s what the baby stack looks like right now, a week or two before birth:

Hardware

Uppababy Cruz. An adaptable folding stroller. What’s super-cool about it is that it supports a bassinet as well as a seat, and can also support an infant snug-seat for very little ones. Theoretically, then, the stroller can last for years, as the baby grows bigger. Although I haven’t yet had the opportunity to try it with a real life baby (soon!), it seems stunningly well-designed in a way that a lot of technology hardware isn’t. Buttons do what you think they should do, and folding it up for storage is one very simple, quick motion.

Uppababy Mesa. A car seat that was shockingly easy to install in my car. Even better, it clicks out of its base really simply, and can actually click into the Uppababy Cruz stroller. It all just works seamlessly, like an Apple ecosystem for babies. I have memories of my parents struggling with belts and braces for car seats, and that doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore. Good.

Happiest Baby SNOO. A smart bassinet. It looks and sounds like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel: it automatically soothes the baby and helps them sleep, like something aliens might do if they were raising humans on a farm. I still don’t know how I feel about it, honestly, but I’ll form a better opinion later on. If it turns out everyone hates the smart features, it also just looks like a well-made baby bed.

Hatch Rest. A combination night light and natural-sound white noise machine. I don’t know about baby, but it helps me sleep.

We have some baby wraps and carriers, but I feel like a three year old learning to put on a sweater. I get lost and I’ve got no idea which ones are good yet; I won’t until later.

Etc

Maven workshops have generally been pretty good, although I really wish there’d been more in-person time.

UCSF are, as (almost) always, brilliant.

We’ve been reading him A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the womb. Beatrix Potter, too. I’m one of those people now.

But also singing! And telling stories! And saying hello! It’s the organic, offline, really human stuff that I think is going to make a real difference.

I don’t know that any of these devices are going to be particularly all that. I’m the least excited about the SNOO and probably the most impressed by the Uppababy ecosystem. Most of all, I’ve got no idea what will happen and how it will actually be - and I’m clinging onto anything that will help me feel like I’m not completely lost.

We’ll see what happens!

Photo by Steven Abraham on Unsplash

As America becomes more diverse, and as a direct consequence more inclusive, it unfortunately makes sense that more people will come out of the woodwork suggesting that people who aren’t white and male be disenfranchised. This is a racist country, after all. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Take this radio host, name redacted. I think this messaging is unthinkably chilling:

I didn’t sign up to be part of a fight for the basics of representative democracy, but I’ve got a growing feeling that’s what we’ll all be drawn into. Christian nationalist rhetoric in particular is escalating quickly, and there’s no middle ground to be found with people who want to deny others’ right to exist with the same rights and terms as them. It would be irresponsible to downplay the risks.

How can we turn this back? And particularly given our context of diminishing resources, rapidly-progressing climate change, and off-the-charts inequality, what will life even look like five or ten years down the road?

The best part of traveling is the food.

You can learn so much from how and what people eat. The way they gather, the smell of the spices, the sizzle of oil in great pans, the delicacies that only come from the sorts of hole-in-the-wall places that locals protect with their lives.

I’ve never been a fussy eater. I explore new places like a toddler: taste buds first, every nerve in my mouth feeling out a new experience. There’s so much joy and humanity to be found in food - and in particular in the kinds of food that are cheap and accessible. Fancy restaurants are all very well (I’m not knocking the skill and artistry involved in a Michelin-starred meal) but the kind of place that can become someone’s regular joint is beguiling. The food is the basis of a relationship that forms over time.

I drove across the US twice last year. Heading east, we went the northern route, through Glacier National Park and the Montana plains. Heading west some months later, we traveled south. Every time we tried one of the headline places to eat - the tourist traps, in other words - the food paled in comparison to the places where locals went. In New Orleans, Cafe du Monde is a fun experience, but the food doesn’t compare to unpretentious spots like Stuph’D.

And just as food is tied deeply into the identity of a place, so is it tied to the identity of a person. We all have the dishes we love, which make up the fabric of us; the ingredients we enjoy, how and when we cook, if we cook at all, the smells we produce in the kitchen and the smells that attract us at the table. Whether our cooking is a whole thing or if it’s something we do regularly, it’s part of our self-image and the image we project. We need food to survive, and our relationship with it reflects us.

When people ask me where I’m from, I sometimes joke and say, “I come from the internet”. In some ways that’s true, but the joke stops here: I’m in no way from the place that produced pink sauce and baked feta pasta. Food, more than anything, links me to the places I came from.

I really learned to cook from my Oma, who brought her Indonesian dishes to California when my dad’s family emigrated in the sixties and adapted them for locally-available ingredients. She loved cooking for her family, but began to lose strength. So she gave me instructions: sayur lodeh and nasi goreng under her direction were my first adventures in mixing spices and building flavors. I grew up with these meals, regular weekday occurrences rather than exotic events, but no less delicious for it; I was pleased to learn how to reproduce them.

We ate a lot of Italian and French food, common to many American families of any origin (despite being in England): lasagna, quiches, homemade pizzas, spaghetti. But my mother’s Ukrainian Jewish ancestry led us to eat piroshki and borscht on special occasions; matzo ball soup; latkes; challah. Our meals were hearty. “Do you eat foreign food every day?!” one school friend memorable said when he came over. It wasn’t foreign to us; it was ours. “Eat, eat,” my great grandfather used to say, “it’s good for you.” Grandpa Dave was PA Joint Board manager of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America; here’s a story about a holiday complex he helped build for union workers.

Despite living in England, at no point did we eat English food, which I was left to discover as an adult. I didn’t have so much as a Sunday roast until I was in my twenties: it just wasn’t part of our culinary milieu. Of course, then I leapt on it, and writing this in California I find myself missing Yorkshire puddings and pork pies.

Locard’s exchange principle dictates that every contact leaves a trace. Although it was developed for forensic investigations, it’s equally applicable to people and migration: the places we’ve been all rub off on us, and we rub off on them. I’m a Ukrainian-Jewish-Indonesian-Swiss-Dutch-American who lived in both England and Scotland for decades. Each of those places left some trace on me, directly or via my family, and my descendants will find that they have rubbed off on them too, even if each of those ingredients has a slightly different potency to mine. They will have their own distinct identities, while also reflecting what and who came before them.

And of course, the same is true of everyone. Each of those chefs in the hole-in-the-wall joints serving food to their regulars has their own combination of ingredients that led to them. We’re all constantly leaving traces on each other, part of a tremendous, delicious mix. The more we mix and ebb and flow, the greater the tastes we may experience. To be fussy and reject new tastes, or to demand it be anglicized or made pristine, is to reject new people and other ways of life.

Taste is part of life. It’s one of the best parts of living. We are, literally and metaphorically, what we eat.

Photo by Miquel Parera on Unsplash

Well, we sold the house. A new family gets to enjoy the space, and the incredible surrounds. It’s the start of a new chapter for us, too.

I was there over the weekend, and the memories were overwhelming: the four walls of my parents’ former bedroom held newly-staged furniture for show, but I could hear the laughter, remember talking to my mother at the end of the day, could hear her feeding tube apparatus rolling across the floor. So much happened there. It’s sad to see it go, but the memories stay with us. All we’re really leaving behind is wood, stone, and plaster.

Throughout the sale, our agent Florence Sheffer was wonderful. She held our hands through the whole process, and was as fun to work with as she was knowledgable and connected. She consistently went above and beyond to help us. I’d recommend her to anyone who wants to buy or sell a home in Santa Rosa and the surrounding area.

I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing with the indieweb website that I made for the house. Probably I’ll just let the domain expire. Here it is, archived for posterity on the Internet Archive.