Werd I/O

Claire Anderson (hi Claire!) asked me to break down the economics of AI. How is it going to make money, and for whom?

In this post I’m not going to talk too much about how the technology works, and the claims of its vendors vs the actual limitations of the products. Baljur Bjarnason has written extensively about that, while Simon Willison writes about building tools with AI and I recommend both of their posts.

The important thing is that when we talk about AI today, we are mostly talking about generative AI. These are products that are capable of generating content: this could be text (for example, ChatGPT), images (eg Midjourney), music, video, and so on.

Usually they do so in response to a simple text prompt. For example, in response to the prompt ‌Write a short limerick about Ben Werdmuller asking ChatGPT to write a short limerick about Ben Werdmuller, ChatGPT instantly produced:

Ben Werdmuller pondered with glee,
“What would ChatGPT write about me?”
So he posed the request,
In a jest quite obsessed,
And chuckled at layers, level three!

Honestly, it’s pretty clever.

While a limerick isn’t particularly economically useful, you can ask these technologies to write code for you, find hidden patterns in data, highlight potential mistakes in boilerplate legal documents, and so on. (I’m personally aware of companies using it to do each of these things.)

Each of these AI products is powered by a large foundation model: deep learning neural networks that are trained on vast amounts of data. In essence, the neural network is a piece of software that ingests a huge amount of source material and finds patterns in it. Based on those patterns and the sheer amount of data involved, it can statistically decide what the outcome of a prompt should be. Each word of the limerick above is what the model has decided is the most probably likely next piece of the output in response to my prompt.

The models are what have been called stochastic parrots: their output is entirely probabilistic. This kind of AI isn’t intelligence and these models have no understanding of what they’re saying. It’s a bit like a magic trick that’s really only possible because of the sheer amount of data that’s wrapped up in the training set.

And here’s the rub: the training set is a not insignificant percentage of everything that’s ever been published by a human. A huge portion of the web is there; it’s also been shown that entire libraries of pirated books have been involved. No royalties or license agreements have been paid for this content. The vast majority of it seems to have been simply scraped. Scraping publicly accessible content is not illegal(and nor should it be); incorporating pirated books and licensed media clearly is.

Clearly if you’re sucking up everything people have published, you’re also sucking up the prejudices and systemic biases that are a part of modern life. Some vendors, like OpenAI, claim to be trying to reduce those biases in their training sets. Others, like Elon Musk’s X.AI, claim that reducing those biases is tantamount to training your model to lie. He claims to be building an “anti-woke” model in response to OpenAI’s “politically correct” bias mitigation, which is pretty on-brand for Musk.

In other words, vendors are competing on the quality, characteristics, and sometimes ideological slant of their models. They’re often closed-source, giving the vendor control over how the model is generated, tweaked, and used.

These models all require a lot of computing power both to be trained and to produce their output. It’s difficult to provide a service that offers generative AI to large numbers of people due to this need: it’s expensive and it draws a lot of power (and correspondingly has a large environmental footprint).

Between the closed nature of the models, and the computing power required to run them, it’s not easy to get started in AI without paying an existing vendor. If a tech company wants to add AI to a product, or if a new startup wants to offer an AI-powered product, it’s much more cost effective to piggyback on another vendor’s existing model than to develop or host one of their own. Even Microsoft decided to invest billions of dollars into OpenAI and build a tight partnership with the company rather than build its own capability.

The models learn from their users, so as more people have conversations with ChatGPT, for example, the model gets better and better. These are commonly called network effects: the more people that use the products, the better they get. The result is that they have even more of a moat between themselves and any competitors over time. This is also true if a product just uses a model behind the scenes. So if OpenAI’s technology is built into Microsoft Office — and it is! — its models get better every time someone uses them while they write a document or edit a spreadsheet. Each of those uses sends data straight back to OpenAI’s servers and is paid for through Microsoft’s partnership.

What’s been created is an odd situation where the models are trained on content we’ve all published, and improved with our questions and new content, and then it’s all wrapped up to us as a product and sold back to us. There’s certainly some proprietary invention and value in the training methodology and APIs that make it all work, but the underlying data being learned from belongs to us, not them. It wouldn’t work — at all — without our labor.

There’s a second valuable data source in the queries and information we send to the model. Vendors can learn what we want and need, and deep data about our businesses and personal lives, through what we share with AI models. It’s all information that can be used by third parties to sell to us more effectively.

Google’s version of generative AI allows it to answer direct questions from its search engine without pointing you to any external web pages in the process. Whereas we used to permit Google to scrape and index our published work because it would provide us with new audiences, it now continues to scrape our work in order to provide a generated answer to user queries. Websites are still presented underneath, but it’s expected that most users won’t click through. Why would you, when you already have your answer? This is the same dynamic as OpenAI’s ChatGPT: answers are provided without credit or access to the underlying sources.

Some independent publishers are fighting back by de-listing their content from Google entirely. As the blogger and storyteller Tracy Darnell wrote:

I didn’t sign up for Google to own the whole Internet. This isn’t a reasonable thing to put in a privacy policy, nor is it a reasonable thing for a company to do. I am not ok with this.

CodePen co-founder Chris Coyier was blunt:

Google is a portal to the web. Google is an amazing tool for finding relevant websites to go to. That was useful when it was made, and it’s nothing but grown in usefulness. Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website. Instead.

For small publishers, the model is intolerably extractive. Technical writer Tom Johnson remarked:

With AI, where’s the reward for content creation? What will motivate individual content creators if they no longer are read, but rather feed their content into a massive AI machine?

Larger publishers agree. The New York Times recently banned the use of its content to train AI models. It had previously dropped out of a coalition led by IAC that was trying to jointly negotiate scraping terms with AI vendors, preferring to arrange its own deals on a case-by-case basis. A month earlier, the Associated Press had made its own deal to license its content to OpenAI, giving it a purported first-mover advantage. The terms of the deal are not public.

Questions about copyright — and specifically the unlicensed use of copyrighted material to produce a commercial product — persist. The Authors Guild has written an open letter asking them to license its members’ copyrighted work, which is perhaps a quixotic move: rigid licensing and legal action is likely closer to what’s needed to achieve their hoped-for outcome. Perhaps sensing the business risks inherent in using tools that depend on processing copyrighted work to function, Microsoft has promised to legally defend its customers from copyright claims arising from their use of its AI-powered tools.

Meanwhile, a federal court ruled that AI-generated content cannot, itself, be copyrighted. The US Copyright Office is soliciting comments as it re-evaluates relevant law, presumably encompassing the output of AI models and the processes involved in training them. It remains to be seen whether legislation will change to protect publishers or further enable AI vendors.

So. Who’s making money from AI? It’s mostly the large vendors who have the ability to create giant models and provide API services around them. Those vendors are either backed by venture capital investment firms who hope to see an exponential return on their investment (OpenAI, Midjourney) or publicly-traded multinational tech companies (Google, Microsoft). OpenAI is actually very far from profitability — it lost $540M last year. To break even, the company will need to gain many more customers for its services while spending comparatively little on content to train its models with.

In the face of criticism, some venture capitalists and AI founders have latterly embraced an ideology called effective accelerationism, or e/acc, which advocates for technical and capitalistic progress at all costs, almost on a religious basis:

Technocapital can usher in the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness.

In part, it espouses the idea that we’re on the fringe of building an “artificial general intelligence” that’s as powerful as the human brain — and that we should, because allowing different kinds of consciousness to flourish is a general good. It’s a kooky, extreme idea that serves as marketing for existing AI products. In reality, remember, they are not actually intelligence, and have no ability to reason. But if we’re serving some higher ideal of furthering consciousness on earth and beyond, matters like copyright law and the impact on the environment seem more trivial. It’s a way of re-framing the conversation away from author rights and considering societal impacts on vulnerable communities.

Which brings us to the question of who’s not making money from AI. The answer is people who publish the content and create the information that allow these models to function. Indeed, value is being extracted from these publishers — and the downstream users whose data is being fed into these machines — more than ever before. This, of course, disproportionately affects smaller publishers and underrepresented voices, who need their platforms, audiences, and revenues more than most to survive.

On the internet, the old adage is that if you’re not the customer, you’re the product being sold. When it comes to AI models, we’re all both the customer and the product being sold. We’re providing the raw ingredients and we’re paying for it to be returned to us, laundered for our convenience.

I’m making some experimental updates to my newsletter:

Starting next week, this newsletter will come in several flavors:

Technology, Media, and Society: technology and its impact on the way we live, work, learn, and vote.

Late Stage: personal reflections on living and surviving in the 21st century.

The Outmap: new speculative and contemporary fiction.

Most of Technology, Media, and Society will continue to be posted on this website. I am experimenting with publishing more personal posts and fiction over there.

Prefer to subscribe via RSS? Here’s the feed URL for those posts.

I spent a little time updating my resumé, which is a process that basically sits at the top of all the things I least like to do in the world. This time around I tried to have an eye towards focus: what about the work I do might other organizations find valuable? Or to put it another way: what am I?

I grew up and went to school in the UK. At the time, the A-level system of high school credentials required you to pick a narrow number of subjects to take at 16. In contrast to the US, where university applications are more universal and you don’t pick a degree major until you’ve actually taken courses for a while, British applicants applied for a major at a particular institution. The majors available to you were a function of the A-level subjects you chose to take. In effect, 16 year olds were asked to pick their career track for the rest of their lives.

I now know that I take a kind of liberal arts approach to product and technology leadership. My interests are in how things work, for sure, but more so who they work for. I care about the mechanics of the internet, but I care more about storytelling. I’m at least as interested in how to build an empathetic, inclusive team as I am in any new technology that comes along. The internet, to me, is made of people, and the thing that excites me more than anything else is connecting and empowering them. I’ll do any work necessary to meet their needs - whether it’s programming, storytelling, research, design, team-building, fundraising, or cleaning the kitchen.

Which means, when I picked my A-levels in 1995, and when I applied for universities two years later, that it was hard to put me in a box.

My high school didn’t even offer computing as a subject, so I arranged to take it as an extra subject in my own time. The standardized tests were so archaic that they included tape drives and punchcards. Meanwhile, my interest in storytelling and literature meant that I studied theater alongside more traditional STEM subjects: something that most British universities rejected outright as being too unfocused.

I have an honors degree in computer science but I don’t consider myself to be a computer scientist. I’ve been a senior engineer in multiple companies, but my skillset is more of a technical generalist: technology is one of the things I bring together in service of a human-centered strategy. I like to bring my whole self to work, which also includes a lot of writing, generative brainstorming, and thinking about who we’re helping and how best to go about it.

Even the term human-centered feels opaque. It just means that I describe my goals and the work I do in terms of its impact on people, and like to figure out who those people are. It’s hard to help people if you don’t know who you’re helping. People who say “this is for everyone!” tend to be inventing solutions for problems and people that they only imagine exist. But there’s no cleanly concise way of saying that without using something that sounds like a buzzword.

So when I’m putting together a resumé, I don’t know exactly what to say that ties together who I am and the way I approach my work in a way that someone else can consume. Am I an entrepreneur? I have been, and loved it; I like to bring that energy to organizations I join. A product lead or an engineering manager or a design thinker? Yes, and I’ve done all those jobs. I think those lines are blurry, though, and a really good product lead has a strong insight into both engineering and design. I’ve also worked on digital transformation for media organizations and invested in startups at an accelerator — two of my favorite things I’ve ever done — and where do I put that?

In the end, I wrote:

I’m a technology and product leader with a focus on mission-driven organizations.

I’ve designed and built software that has been used by social movements, non-profits, and Fortune 500 companies. As part of this work, I’ve built strong technology and product team cultures and worked on overall business strategy as a key part of the C-suite. I’ve taught the fundamentals of building a strong organizational culture, design thinking, product design, and strategy to organizations around the world.

I’m excited to work on meaningful projects that make the world better.

I’ve yet to get feedback on this intro — I guess that’s what this post is, in part — but it feels close in a way that isn’t completely obtuse to someone who’s basing their search on a simple job description. It will still turn off a bunch of people who want someone with a more precise career focus than I’ve had, but perhaps those roles are also not a good fit for me.

Perhaps I should be running my own thing again. I promised myself that I would give myself a third run at a startup, and it’s possible that this is the only thing that really fits. At the same time, right now I’m doing contracts, and I love the people and organization I’m working with right now.

If I think of my various hats as an a la carte menu that people can pick from rather than an all-in-one take-it-or-leave-it deal, this kind of work becomes less daunting. Either way, I do think it’s a strength: even if I’m working as one particular facet officially, the others inform the work I’m doing. As I mentioned, I think it’s helpful for an engineering lead to have a product brain, and vice versa. It’s not a bad thing for either to understand design. And every lead needs to understand how to build a strong culture.

But how to wrap all of that neatly up in a bow? I’m still working on it.

You’ve all heard about Elon Musk blaming the Anti-Defamation League for the erosion of Twitter/X’s value over the last year. Advertising revenue is down by 60%.

This, of course, has nothing at all to do with the precipitous rise in hate speech on the platform since Musk took it over, to which he has responded by threatening legal action instead of doing something about the problem.

Musk’s typically bull-in-a-china-shop approach has been winning fans. Lately we’ve taken to ending that preceding sentence with “on the right”, but these people go far beyond the tax policies and routine crustiness of store brand conservatism. His approach has been winning fans, to be clear, in communities that support literal white supremacy.

Andrew Torba, the fully-racist founder of Gab, posted on X:

In under five years we went from having every single one of our guys banned from the big tech platforms to the richest man in the world noticing, naming, and waging total war on our largest enemy while running one of those platforms. Let that sink in. Keep the faith. We are winning.

This all further cements Musk’s purchase as being part of the backlash to gains on diversity and inclusion that took place during the pandemic. I consider them all to be the last echoes of the 20th century. I will not support them, obviously.

The thing about these communities, though, is that they make everything they touch toxic. The former Twitter was famously problematic at the time, even if it was at a level that seems quaint now. They didn’t block white supremacists because they had a good, ethical heart; they were capitalists just like everyone else who runs a big platform. They knew, though, that the racists diminish the quality of the product for everyone else, and that usage and advertising revenue would be adversely affected. Which is pretty much what Musk is finding out right now (although his personal goals don’t appear to be to create a viable business, hence his lack of motivation to change).

I’d rather spend my time and energy with platforms and people that are part of building an inclusive, equal future for everyone. I don’t know that this is a widely-shared value, although I wish it was. But I also want to spend my time on platforms that are fun to use — and I’m pretty sure that’s true of most people who use social media.

I don’t want to diminish the danger — we must always be vigilant of these toxic ideals — but I’m also confident they’ll lose. These assholes will fade into obscurity soon enough.

Doc Searls writes about what he calls wide news:

Local and regional papers covered politics, government, crises, disasters, sports, fashion, travel, business, religion, births, deaths, schools, and happenings of all kinds. They had reporters assigned across all their sections. No other medium could go as wide.

Doc’s argument is that a local commons of publications can, together, create a wide news ecosystem that fulfills the same role (with potentially deeper content). I agree.

I started my career building the first website and BBS for a local paper in Oxford that carried classified ads as well as event listings, notices, and that sort of thing: all the community stuff that the internet took over from newspapers. (As it happens, it’s still around, but most are not.) It was a real community hub, to the extent that anyone could come to the office to do some word-processing or get their photocopying done: a co-working space in the midst of the paper’s offices, long before anyone knew what co-working was.

Social media — and early on, blogging in particular — has played this role of reporting widely around a community. You could click through to local blogs, or Twitter, and learn about things that happened around your town. I found this particularly useful when I visited somewhere I didn’t live: for example, on my regular visits to San Francisco, I’d check out the blogs and Upcoming to see where I should be going.

But as social media has consolidated, many of those venues have gone away. (Some were replaced by Twitter bots, which have now also gone away.) It’s also easier to discover some types of voices than others: for someone to post regularly to the internet, they need to have a certain level of free time, technical prowess, equipment at their disposal, and so on. And it’s easier for someone in an “in” crowd to be linked to and re-shared than an entirely new voice with an underrepresented perspective, who might not have the same level of systemic support.

While newspapers are obsolete technology, local newsrooms are vitally important: journalists have a remit to tell stories that might not otherwise be told. That might be a story about corruption in the local police or government (which occurs a surprising amount of the time), but it could just as easily be a story about an immigrant starting a new business, or a trend piece centered on a less-affluent part of town.

I really love what Tiny News Collective is doing here. From its website:

Have you struggled to find stories relevant to you and your community in existing media? Do you worry that lack of information keeps people from being involved in important local issues? Has it been your dream to see your community represented accurately and thoughtfully in the media?

The organization then provides the funding, technology, training, and network to get those newsrooms started. Consider Austin Vida, which reports with a Latinidad perspective from Austin, or Ang Diaryo, which reports with a lens centered on working class Filipino communities in Los Angeles.

Locally to me, Kensington Voice reports on a neighborhood in Philadelphia that normally is the subject of stories about addiction (including a New York Times piece that called it the “Walmart of Heroin”). The real, three-dimensional human beings who lived there were woefully underserved, until journalists began to report on their actual stories. These weren’t holes that social media could adequately fill; nor were they covered by the local newspaper of record.

With a skeleton team, Open Vallejo reports on the North Bay town that happens to have one of the most corrupt police forces and local governments in the country. It’s rightly won awards for its work.

I’ve fallen in love with these kinds of small, tightly-focused, non-profit newsrooms. One thing that’s missing is a way to find all the newsrooms that cover a geographic area, or a particular demographic, or other focus area. I want to be able to discover stories from newsrooms I’ve never heard of, based on their characteristics. I might have never heard of a particular newsroom in Philadelphia, but I have heard of Philadelphia, and happen to live there. It would be great if I could click through a website to find everyone publishing about communities in the city. The front page of that site — which, in essence, would be a specialized feed reader — would be better by far than any large newspaper.

To make that really viable, there needs to be a flowering of tightly-focused newsrooms — and people to fund their reporting. Crowdfunding, direct sales, or subscriptions are not always the right approach, because, for example, people in a less-affluent community are typically less able to pay, while their stories are no less valuable. Just as bloggers are less likely to write from the perspective of communities that can less afford computers, broadband internet connections, and the time to write, funding dollars must sometimes be found elsewhere. Tiny News Collective is wonderful, as I mentioned. The Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Local News Lab does great work, albeit around business innovation rather than direct funding. And there is some wider foundational support. Still, making more support available for these newsrooms would go a long way.

All of this is not to say that personal sharing and social media aren’t valuable. They clearly are, and a lot of people are reporting their perspectives and sharing what they love about their communities. We need more of this, too! One of my favorite local social media accounts is Caffs not cafes, which reports on small, independent, usually low-budget restaurants and cafes in London. Sure, it’s not breaking news, but who else would do this kind of local coverage of diverse businesses, many of which have immigrant owners?

A wide news commons, comprised of many smaller newsrooms with specific areas of focus, as well as the perspectives of individuals in the community, would improve our democracy at the local level. In doing so, it would make a big difference to how the whole country works. I’d love to see us collectively make it happen.

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know!

Apps + Websites

Productivity

iA Presenter. I’ve been really enjoying this. It does have the unfortunate effect of reducing the time you spend faffing with slide design and font choices, which means you actually have to write the substance of your presentation. Curses! Still, despite its attempts to thwart my procrastination, it’s beautifully designed and perfect for the way I think.

Media

404 Media. A new, independent, worker-owned venture by ex-Motherboard journalists. I’m a subscriber.

Center for News, Technology & Innovation. I would love to contribute to something like this.

Technology

Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational. A really great list of foundational and/or influential writing about how to build the web, starting with Tim Berners-Lee’s Cool URIs Don’t Change post from 1998.

Datasette Cloud. Simon Willison’s Datasette now has a SaaS version that saves you having to install or set anything up. This is perfect for smaller newsrooms and orgs that are technically stretched but want to analyze data. I’m excited to see where he goes with it.

StreetPass for Mastodon. Genuinely brilliant. StreetPass finds the Mastodon accounts of people whose websites you browse, allowing you to check out their accounts and follow if you’re interested. I love it.

Books

Fiction

Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang. This tale from a deeply unreliable, envy-driven narrator is more of a sharp satire of liberal racism than its publishing industry setting. It’s at its least compelling when discussing Twitter drama, but there’s ample snark just underneath each turn of phrase, and more than enough ratcheting tension to have kept me turning the pages.

Foundry, by Eliot Peper. A knockabout spy adventure that takes a few unexpected turns and sticks a landing that had me cheering. Truly a lot of fun - I inhaled it in one sitting. As always, it’s deeply researched, but the detail only ever adds to the entertainment. (Without spoiling anything, I’m very familiar with some of the settings and cultural overtones, and they rang completely true.) There are knowing callbacks to some of Eliot’s earlier work, but this stands alone - and could be the start of a new series that I would gladly read the hell out of.

Nonfiction

Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six, by Maya Payne Smart. In turns reassuring and helpful, this was a great primer on what to do to provide a foundation to help my child eventually learn to read. If only all parenting books could be as human and equity-minded as this one is.

Notable Articles

AI

US Copyright Office wants to hear what people think about AI and copyright. I certainly have some thoughts that I will share. Imagine if you could allow an AI agent to create copyrighted works at scale with no human involvement. It would allow for an incredible intellectual property land grab.

The A.I. Surveillance Tool DHS Uses to Detect ‘Sentiment and Emotion’. Customs and Border Protection is using sentiment analysis on inbound and outbound travelers who “may threaten public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel”. That’s dystopian enough in itself, but there’s no way they could limit the trawl to those people, and claims made about what the software can do are dubious at best.

This AI Watches Millions Of Cars And Tells Cops If You’re Driving Like A Criminal. A good rule of thumb is that if technology makes something feasible, someone will do it regardless of the ethics. Here, AI makes it easy to perform warrantless surveillance at scale - so someone has turned it into a product and police are buying it.

New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl. Whether this comes to fruition with the NYT vs OpenAI or another publisher vs another LLM vendor, there will be a court case like this, and it will set important precedent for the industry. My money’s on the publishers.

School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books. Probably inevitable, but it nonetheless made my jaw drop. What an incredibly wrong-headed use of an LLM.

New York Times: Don't use our content to train AI systems. The NYT’s new terms disallow use of its content to develop any new software application, including machine learning and AI systems. It’s a shame that this has to be explicit, rather than a blanket right afforded to publishers by default, but it’s a sensible clause that many more will be including.

We need a Weizenbaum test for AI. “Weizenbaum’s questions, though they seem simple—Is it good? Do we need it?—are difficult ones for computer science to answer. They could be asked of any proposed technology, but the speed, scope, and stakes of innovation in AI make their consideration more urgent.”

AI social media videos depict missing, dead children narrating their stories. Utterly ghoulish.

Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out. I strongly disagree with this stance. Allowing your work to be mined by AI models should be opt-in only - otherwise there is no possible way for a publisher or author to apply a license or grant rights.

AI language models are rife with political biases. Different AI models have different political biases. Google’s tend to be more socially conservative - possibly in part because they were trained on books rather than the wider internet. Regardless of the cause, this is proof, again, that AI models are not objective.

In every reported case where police mistakenly arrested someone using facial recognition, that person has been Black. Black faces are overrepresented in databases used to train AI for law enforcement - and some facial recognition software used in this context fails 96% of the time. This practice is an accelerant for already deeply harmful inequities. Time to ban it.

Catching up on the weird world of LLMs. This is a really comprehensive history and overview of LLMs. Simon has been bringing the goods, and this talk is no exception.

Climate

Is Big Oil Turning on Big Auto? It makes sense that oil companies would try to frame driving a gas car as freedom. As an EV driver, I can tell you that it is not. I would prefer if we all had great, integrated public transit - but for the moment, at least, it has been an improvement in every way for me as a driver. I’ll never go back.

The true cost of climate pollution? 44% of corporate profits. I’m surprised that mandatory disclosure of carbon emissions isn’t widespread - it does seem like the prerequisite to making any change. And yeah, these companies should pay. And be forced to reduce their emissions. And be fined heavily, and prosecuted, when they don’t.

Neoclassical economists are the last people to listen to on climate change. Interesting commentary on “economic theories that have led to government by markets, fuelling financial and other shocks, and the rise of authoritarian, and even neo-fascist regimes promising citizens ‘protection’ from ‘globalised’ markets.”

Climate change is death by a thousand cuts. “Whenever someone says, “we’ll adapt to climate change,” 100% of the time it’s a rich person. Poor people never say “we’ll adapt” because they know they can’t afford it. For them, adaptation = suffering.” That’s the pull-quote for me: this won’t affect everyone equally. As always, the most vulnerable, the people who are already struggling the most, will suffer the worst of it.

Culture

Being Black in a Small Town. “When popular culture thinks of Blackness, rarely does somebody think of a tiny little town or a mountainside and the Black person who’s there. I want to be a part of revealing that this thread—that Black skin—can be even on the side of a mountain.”

How to Uphold the Status Quo: The Problem With Small Town Witch Romances. I see this as less of a problem in cozy witch fiction - which, I must be clear, I have read zero of - and more of an issue in American fiction as a whole, across all media. These books (probably) aren’t actively laundering racist ideas; they’re perpetuating cultural discrimination that is under the surface everywhere. Still, it’s incumbent on authors to understand and be accountable to the tropes they’re building with.

thoughts on the suicidal mind. This resonated with me a lot. What I’ll say is: I’m glad Winnie is in the world. I know these feelings, intimately. I don’t have much definitive to say about that. I haven’t drawn any conclusions. It’s a journey, daily.

Turn-On Found. None of this looks like it comes from 1969. Although some of the content is outdated today, the style is far more modern - this feels like something straight from the internet era. Fascinating and relentless (I couldn’t watch the whole thing).

Democracy

Supreme Risk: An Interactive Guide to Rights the Supreme Court Could Take Away. “An interactive guide to rights the Supreme Court has established — and could take away.” Published a few months ago, but completely relevant, on-point reporting (served as a fully-static web page).

Americans Rate Dallas and Boston Safest of 16 U.S. Cities. Republicans think cities are much less safe than Democrats do. San Francisco and Philadelphia (my old neighborhood and new one) are notable here: Democrats agree that they’re pretty safe, whereas Republicans seem to think they’re war zones. I think we can solidly blame conservative media propaganda for this.

Just 23% Of Americans Know The U.S. Has Failed To Pass An Internet-Era Privacy Law. Less than a quarter of Americans know they don’t have meaningful privacy protections on the internet. The first step to changing this fact might be to change this number.

The Shocking Voter Purge Crisis of Democracy Revealed. Always a good sign when a democratic movement wants to win through the will of the people rather than through obstructive election fraud.

House GOP adds dozens of anti-LGBTQ+ provisions to must-pass bills. Smuggling naked bigotry through bills that must pass to keep the government working is a deeply underhanded tactic. It’s hard to see the modern Republican Party as anything other than a party of exclusion, catering to the dregs of the twentieth century who desperately don’t want to see the world change around them.

Equality

Most students haven’t learned about LGBTQ+ issues in school, survey shows. Why the internet - as well as more traditional media like books - are a lifeline for kids hungry to learn about queer history. Of course, I’m sure the usual suspects will come for those too.

International Chess Org: Trans Women Have "No Right To Participate" In Women's Chess. This stance by the International Chess Federation is so transparently bigoted that it helps clarify other anti-trans measures happening across competitive sports. There’s nothing here about fairness; it’s all to do with conservative division and hatred.

Henrietta Lacks family to get compensation for use of her cell taken decades ago without consent. Late as it is, it’s good to see this to some kind of resolution. I hope the posthumous recognition Lacks receives includes the story of how it happened in the first place.

Health

'Horribly Unethical': Startup Experimented on Suicidal Teens on Social Media With Chatbot. Taking lean startup research techniques that were developed for basic social networks or, say, 3D avatars and transposing them to real-world domains with real consequences seems to be an ongoing trend. It’s a misunderstanding of the startup playbook that causes real harm. This is obviously unethical; it is nowhere near as “nuanced” as this CEO says it is.

Labor

Remote workers' connection to companies' missions hits record low. Remote workers feel less connected to company missions, but the big message here is that nobody really feels all that connected. There are no superficial answers here: the real differentiators are better company cultures where people feel truly valued, much stronger communication, and better missions.

NLRB Says Companies That Union-Bust Must Recognize Busted Union. A neat rule: union-busters must recognize the unions they’re trying to undermine. The union rebound continues.

Why the Hollywood strike matters to all of us. On the wage threat of AI: “Hollywood is showing us how best to take that stand: by unionizing our workplaces, and fighting for strong contracts. Now’s the time to form a union with your coworkers, and discuss what protections you’ll need to face this moment.”

Negative Space. A perfect piece on where we’re at in time. Personally, I’m not going back to the office, and I applaud greater worker power. We need to move forward.

We're now finding out the damaging results of the mandated return to the office–and it's worse than we thought. Return to Office mandates are counterproductive and destroy morale. They also make your team less productive. They’re worker-hostile and work-hostile. So why do them?

Media

Medium is for human storytelling, not AI-generated writing. Medium has made it clear that it is not a home for AI-driven content. And it’s experiencing record growth now that its recommendation engine has been re-tuned for substance, as decided by humans. This is all great news: for Medium and as an example for everyone on the web.

How We Create Custom Graphics at The Markup. I like this approach to building graphics for journalism. Management of these kinds of static assets feels like a cumulative problem, but lightweight HTML / CSS / JS is pretty portable and sandboxable. And ACF is the hidden hero behind journalism’s WordPress sites.

Society

My Caste. “Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes. I belong to OBC Category. […] I was, however, not ready to publicly declare it until I received tenure as it seemed too risky.”

Police departments pull school officers due to Minnesota restraint law. It says a lot that in areas where officers aren’t allowed to put schoolchildren in holds that restrict breathing or their ability to speak, departments take officers out of schools in protest. These laws should be in place everywhere, and police officers should not be in schools.

She Just Had a Baby. Soon She'll Start 7th Grade. There are so many stories like this one. There should never be another. And yet, we’ve rolled back the clock at the behest of religious extremists, so there will be many more. This cannot go on.

FAU Study: Perils of Not Being Attractive or Athletic in Middle School. Hey, sounds like my middle school experience! This is important for me to understand as a parent, and it’s important for schools to adapt to as de facto caregivers. These dynamics should be corrected for, not accepted.

Right-Wing Writer Richard Hanania's Racist Past Exposed. A prominent writer platformed by the New York Times and Washington Post, and championed by major figures in tech, including by Marc Andreessen and the CEO of Substack, turns out to be an actual white supremacist.

A beautiful, broken America: what I learned on a 2,800-mile bus ride from Detroit to LA. I’ve traveled across America four times: three by car and one by train. I’ve never done it by Greyhound, and I probably never will. This country’s infrastructure is falling apart and being eaten by wolves.

Startups

The State of Seed Stage Funding to Underrepresented Founders. “White women founded companies comprise 79% of reported early-stage VC dollars going to underrepresented founders and 64% of investments made into companies with underrepresented founders by deal count. Ecosystem-wide, we need to up our game by investing seed money into a broader spectrum of founders of color.”

letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new. These are the right questions to ask.

Technology

In Europe, a regulatory vise tightens around big tech. Good overview. I think European tech regulations have been broadly good, establishing the anti-competitive and pro-privacy rules that US legislators have failed to enact. If we could only all be so protected.

Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee. Good commentary on the dissonance between vendors like Microsoft banning scraping of their platforms while simultaneously releasing products that depend on scraping other peoples’ data. Some sort of commons agreement would go a long way here, but it won’t happen while platforms can get away with this one-sided relationship.

Introducing the 100-Year Plan: Secure Your Online Legacy for a Century. I’d love to understand what prompted Automattic to offer a hosting plan for $38K. On one level, I love it - it lasts for 100 years! and I love Automattic! - but I can’t justify this, and I’m not quite sure who it’s for? If this is marketing, what are the goals?

Changes to UK Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law. The UK seems to want to break international law to retain its ability to mass surveil by forcing software vendors to break their protections for users everywhere. It’s an anti-democratic approach that puts journalists and vulnerable populations at risk. It also counter-productively undermines the UK’s own technology sector.

'We're Winning': Apple Formally Endorses Right to Repair Legislation After Spending Millions Fighting It.I’m a little bit suspicious that Apple is suddenly into right-to-repair, but broadly this is good. I just wish it was a nationwide law instead of one that is limited to California. Hopefully the idea can expand to the federal level.

The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15. It costs $15 to uncover an American’s personally identifiable information illegally for potentially violent purposes. But also consider the number of entities that have access to this information legally, without any oversight. None of it should be allowable.

RSS Zero isn’t the path to RSS Joy. “RSS is not email. You don’t have to get to inbox zero!” is a correct take, in my opinion; that’s certainly how I approach my feed reader. But also, I’ve got bad news about my email inbox.

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty. Scientists are fleeing X for Mastodon, citing far-right science denialism - and far-right hate in general. I don’t exactly know what Musk thinks he’s going to be left with after all this.

An Opinionated Guide To Alt-text. A great, short guide to writing alt text to support data visualization from Jasmine Mithani.

Lamborghini teases first fully electric supercar ahead of official reveal August 18th. OK, good for them, but I’m far less excited by an electric Lambo than an electric car for $20K. Or, you know, zero-emissions buses that work as part of a functional integrated public transit system. You’re right, that does sound like science fiction.

Elon Musk's Twitter throttles links to Threads, Blue Sky and New York Times. Really, truly: there is no good reason for any media company or publisher to still be posting on X.

Announcing the Tor University Challenge. This is a worthwhile project, and would be a major win for freedom of expression and freedom from surveillance. I’d love to see more of my higher education friends take part.

How to verify your Threads account using your Mastodon profile. It’s truly beautiful to see Threads begin to embrace indieweb and federated social web protocols. This is a first step; true federation is, I’ve been assured, coming.

Why Sam Altman wants to scan two billion eyes. We’ve seen the United Nations share their biometric registration of Rohingya refugees with the Myanmar government without their consent. A private company that subcontracts services in other countries makes accountability very difficult when there are rights violations.”

Raku: A Language for Gremlins. That’s a giant “nope” from me, but your mileage may vary.

PIE failed. But it’s a failure worth celebrating and learning from. It’s very painful to see accelerators that are also vibrant community hubs shut down because of business dynamics. I’ve lived that. What I can see here is someone who cares about his community. I was never a part of PIE, but I know Rick did it for the right reasons. And I know from Matter that the community continues long after the thing itself has disappeared. The legacy is long lasting. Congratulations, Rick - on to the next thing.

How I make annotated presentations. It’s been a long time since I’ve given any talks (the pandemic put a stop to that) but I really like this approach, and I’ll do something similar in the future.

Just normal web things. Yes to all of this. These are basic functions that the web gives you almost by default. Everything on the web should let you do them.

The open source licensing war is over. I broadly agree with this rallying cry against dogmatism in open source. I think dogmatism is harmful in all parts of tech; divisive and often a kind of gatekeeping. Let authors build and release according to their needs.

How to Search for a Better Deal on Broadband. The broadband situation in America is surprisingly bad - so I love that there’s a new version of the National Broadband Map. The Markup has done a public service by taking us through it.

We lost my beloved cousin Noah this week.

I don’t have the words yet. But Noah, you were wonderful, and we all loved you so much.

Ma used to say that she liked to think of everyone who was gone having a picnic on the beach and looking down at us. I would like to imagine you there, too, arriving after sailing across the bay. I bet they all greeted you with open arms.

Even as he was getting sick, Noah wanted to find ways to be helpful. If I asked you over the last year about places where a lawyer with technical skills might help with human rights or civil engagement, it was for him.

He made his career helping defendants with hard immigration and criminal justice cases. His former colleagues at Koehler Law have posted a memorial to him. I feel like anything I post here will always be inadequate — there’s no way to cover him adequately. He was a sweet, smart man who was an important part of all of our lives. We had so much in common; so many shared points of reference. I will miss him very much.

His immediate family is asking, in lieu of flowers, to donate to the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition. I made a donation; I would love for you to join me.

I was pleased to attend the Online Journalism Awards on Saturday night. Some winning highlights included:

The 19th won a Breaking News award for its coverage of the Dobbs decision, including some really great data journalism. I’m proud of, and very happy for, my friends there. By the way, you should subscribe to data visuals reporter Jasmine Mithani’s great newsletter, data + feelings.

ProPublica won a few awards for its journalism, including on the proliferation of junk science in the justice system and on how viruses transmit from animals to people.

The Marshall Project won two awards for its work covering the American criminal justice system. Stories included a two-year investigation into abuses by correctional officers in New York State and a three-year story about mitigation specialists who help death penalty defendants by documenting their childhood traumas.

The Markup won an Excellence in Technology Reporting award for its reporting on broadband pricing across the US. I loved this reporting and directly used it to help a family member get a better broadband deal.

Every one of these finalists and winners is worth checking out. This is why I’m finding working in product and technology for non-profit news to be so rewarding: you get to support journalists who are genuinely making the world a better, more democratic place by shedding light on stories we need to know about.

News media in the US gets a lot of flak, and some of it is deserved. But the non-profit news industry in particular is doing incredible work, sometimes reporting stories for years on end, and putting every story out there for the public to read without a paywall in sight. These non-profit organizations deserve our personal and institutional support. They make our democracy better.

I’m over halfway through writing my book. It’s not, technically speaking, my first — I published a technical guide to the browser geolocation API a long time ago, and self-published a short novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo — but it is my first really serious attempt at a novel. As I’ve mentioned before, while I believe there’s a market for it, I don’t have representation or publishing lined up, and I don’t know how it will be received. It’s a shot in the dark in the same way a startup is a shot in the dark.

Just as a startup can be de-risked, I believe aspects of a novel can be de-risked. So much is involved in the quality of execution — whether it’s writing words or building software — but there are ways to know if you’re on the right track. In startups, the worst thing is to spend a long time creating something and then release it to the world without ever doing any research. In writing, the journey is also valuable: the process is important in itself. And because it’s unlikely that anyone’s sunk $1.5M into your writing venture (at least for your first time out), you haven’t really lost anything if it doesn’t work out. That gives you freedom to creatively experiment.

Still, it’s very much worth knowing who you’re writing for, and whether you’re creating something they’d actually like to read. Part of that is in the craft of writing itself and the vibrancy of your imagination. Part of it is just in doing some research and understanding what people like. And part of it is in speaking to experts and getting their feedback.

I’m trying to do all three, while making sure my center of gravity is firmly on the act of actually writing. I’m lucky enough to be chatting with a mentor in science fiction publishing; I’m doing audience research; I’m working on every aspect of the craft of fiction writing.

Some days that comes easily. Some days, not so much. My daily word count varies between around 250 and 1500 words, depending on how much sleep I’ve had and whatever else is going on. Our son is about to be a year old, and has all the energy and inquisitiveness of a toddler. This week, for example, childcare fell apart, so the time I have to do anything — writing, working, taking a shower — has diminished. (Not that I’m complaining: these are hours, weeks, and years with him that I’ll never get back.)

This work also represents an interesting break for me. Normally I write and publish blog posts very quickly, or post on social media almost reflexively. I’ve rarely seen an online text box I didn’t like. On the other hand, this is a long-form story with a very long gestational period — and I’m *terrified* to eventually share it. That’s another reason to make sure it goes through rounds of editing, refinement, and feedback before a larger group gets to see it. There’s something so raw and vulnerable about this that I’m simply not used to. Perhaps that’s one reason why I’ve never got this far before. But I’ve come too far now to not see what’s on the other side.

I’m thinking about diverging my website and newsletter.

Today, if you sign up to the newsletter, you get every blog post via email (although sometimes I wait until there have been several small blog posts and send them together as a digest). That means you can follow along on the web, using a feed reader, or via email, depending on what’s best for you.

These are different media, even if I don’t treat them as such. I don’t think short posts work well via email, and I’m not always convinced that longer posts work well on the blog. I think splitting them might also help with my own incentives to write: the newsletter would become more of a focused publication, whereas my website has always been a stream of consciousness of what I’m thinking about and reading right now.

What do you think?

Publishers are between a rock and a hard place as they try and figure out where to devote their time and energy. The options are:

Mastodon: My favorite network to use, but not a good fit for publishers’ existing audience models. Mastodon has no effective cross-network search and blocks browser referral data, which means audience teams have no idea how many of their readers are coming from the network. It’s big and thriving, but opaque. And the nature of the way the network software work means that if you do go viral, your servers may effectively be DDoSed.

Threads: Meta’s soon-to-be-Mastodon-compatible Twitter-a-like. There are a lot of non-technical users on the network, but again, there are problems. Referrals show up as Instagram, which once again means nobody knows how many people are clicking through. At the time of writing, Threads has no API and no web or desktop version, which means audience teams have to manually post using their phones and hope for the best.

Bluesky and ‌T2: Still invitation only and very, very small.

Post and ‌Nostr: not invitation only, but also very, very small. Post is incredibly insular to publishing folks and Nostr is largely Bitcoiners at this point.

Reddit: Not to be discounted, but there’s no way for a publisher to own a Reddit page or community. Instead, they can be active participants, helping to shepherd conversations this way and that way. Self-promoting your own posts is frowned upon.

Twitter / X: In a rapid decline and full of far-right hate speech, but still a contender. For now, its referral traffic still outweighs all of the above by an order of magnitude (potentially except for Reddit), which means publishers are having trouble giving it up despite the hate speech.

Facebook: Obviously huge and ubiquitous but pay to play if you want any volume of readers to actually see your posts.

Instagram: Heavily used but links are dependent on the Uber-awkward “link in bio” design pattern. There’s no good way to just let people click through to a story on your own website.

TikTok: Celebrated as the way Gen Z is getting its news and content. I’m skeptical — because TikTok also needs to use a “link in bio” pattern, users rarely leave the app, and publishers must rely on TikTok’s own statistics for engagement. We’ve seen this play out before.

YouTube: Heavily used and near-ubiquitous, but requires a lot of up-front investment to produce content for. Publishers effectively have to create broadcast-level TV studios to participate. It’s not an option for most smaller organizations.

This is a far more fragmented landscape than publishers had to deal with a year ago. Save perhaps for X (a situation I can’t say I’m happy about), Mastodon and Threads represent the networks with the highest ROI, but in their current incarnations provide serious barriers for most publishers.

There are, of course, two more options:

Newsletters: A newsletter, in effect, is a direct relationship between a publisher and a reader. Newsletters have the advantage that no other platform is trying to arbitrate that relationship (although a third party platform like Mailchimp may be involved). They also allow publishers to know exactly who is reading, which may allow them to build a deeper relationship over time. For example, active newsletter readers may be more likely to convert into donors to a non-profit newsroom.

RSS: It’s not dead! Lots of people use RSS, whether through stand-alone feed readers or services like Flipboard and Substack Reader. Publishers will never know exactly how many people are reading, but users tend to have a newsletter-like loyalty to their feeds. It’s also usually a free, default part of a CMS.

Finally, perhaps obviously but also for some publishers not obviously enough, a publisher should always prioritize its own website as a destination. When you own your own website, there’s never a middleman. Newsletters and RSS can both help; social media can be an on-ramp for readers to discover your site. Establishing direct relationships that can’t be destabilized by, say, some billionaire deciding to slow access to links he doesn’t like is a business imperative — and has never been more so than this year.

Syndicated to IndieNews.

It’s fun to think of the work I’ve done in terms of Taylor Swift style eras. Hey, I might not have the musical talent, good looks, or legions of fans, but the work I’ve done has required a series of overlapping re-inventions.

So, why not. In roughly reverse-chronological order, here are my Taylor Swift eras; what are yours?

Super-serious journalism supporter.

Distinctive look: open button-down shirt
Distinctive food: Austin-style breakfast taco
Distinctive activity: karaoke

I got into media through a lucky encounter with the founders of what became Latakoo, who attended a talk I gave about user-centered social network design at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2009. We collectively designed Latakoo to be an easy way for broadcast journalists to get their footage back to their newsrooms using commodity internet connections, in the video format the newsroom needed. It’s the way organizations like NBC News send much of their recorded video today.

I was the first CTO at The 19th, a non-profit newsroom reporting on gender, politics, and policy, and was an active participant in its Senior Leadership Team across all areas of organizational strategy. I’ve also contracted with other non-profit newsrooms to provide tech leadership support.

At Matter, I invested in media startups — but the cool thing about Matter’s fund structure was that the LPs were all media organizations like PRX, KQED, the Knight Foundation, the New York Times, the Associated Press, McClatchy, Tamedia, CNHI, and, yes, tronc. I got to regularly meet with teams from those organizations and (as part of the Matter team) help them through innovation problems they were encountering using a design thinking led approach. I also got to participate in their own internal innovation processes, like giving feedback as part of the KQED Lab internal accelerator.

Startup bro.

Distinctive look: branded hoodie over a t-shirt that was also branded; socks were also often branded; third wave coffee mug also featured logo
Distinctive food: kombucha on tap and espresso using the imported Italian machine
Distinctive activity: offsites

I was the Head of Engineering at ForUsAll, which was my only foray into fintech. I was drawn to it because of its original mission to help increase access to retirement savings for more people. There was a lot of pressure to raise subsequent rounds of funding, and a major culture shift as the in-person company moved to a remote-first company during the pandemic. This allowed me to hire people I ordinarily never could have, in every US timezone.

I was also a Senior Engineer at Medium on its publications team. It was my first experience working at a company that had, frankly, so much money, sometimes alongside people I’d been following for years. I got to work alongside people who had previously built fundamental tools like Gmail as well as core pieces of web technology. The change in context meant I started off terrified: everyone was so completely on top of their respective games, and I had the biggest imposter syndrome of my life. It was also, for reasons I still don’t completely understand, the most fashionably stylish team I’d ever worked with.

Open source utopian.

Distinctive look: the jeans-tshirt-and-blazer look, because we were trying to look fancy and legitimate
Distinctive food: poké, for some reason
Distinctive activity: long, long walks, sometimes to save money on transit fares

I worked with Julien Genestoux on his Unlock Protocol: a way to help independent creators make money on their own terms without a middleman. Fully open source and decentralized, the protocol has taken advantage of various blockchains as they’ve become available, allowing the protocol to become as fast and cost effective as possible. Julien and I are both open-web-first evangelists, and this attitude shows through in the project.

With Erin Richey, I built Known: a kind of social news feed that you host yourself. Any number of people can publish to a Known feed (my site is a news feed of one, but some have had hundreds or thousands). We built an award-winning site with KQED and people around the world are still using it to power their websites. For a while, Known allowed you to directly syndicate your content to third-party websites, which saw us get coverage in Wired, among other places.

With Dave Tosh, I built Elgg: an open source social networking platform that was used by the Canadian national government, Fortune 500 companies, and organizations like Greenpeace and Oxfam. It was, in retrospect, one of the first private social networks and social intranets. We built the first social network ever run at a university, and I’m particularly proud of the social movements that used it. For example, the Spanish Movimiento 15-M anti-austerity movement used Elgg to organize. We also built the first open data definition for social networks, which helped inform the subsequent design of ActivityPub.

Institutional web developer.

Distinctive look: ironed shirt and trousers
Distinctive food: university canteen food (I was kicked out of the Edinburgh MALTS canteen after hacking the menu)
Distinctive activity: inventing acronyms for things

I ran the web properties at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. The coolest thing about this job was getting to know the faculty and students; it wasn’t long before they realized that I knew a lot more about startups and web tech than a random guy in an IT department probably should. I ended up meeting visiting dignitaries and participating in MBA round-tables. They were very kind to me, and in turn, I believe I pushed the IT department forward in its relationship to the web.

And first, perhaps most improbably, I ran the web properties for what is now the St Leonard’s Land Pool at the University of Edinburgh: an Olympic-sized swimming pool set up with underwater cameras to analyze and improve the strokes and techniques of elite athletes. I started being loaned out to the Edinburgh University Media and Learning Technology Service, which is where I met Dave and started cooking up Elgg.

Proto-nerd.

Distinctive look: baggy sweatshirt, jeans, oversized glasses, leather jacket for some reason
Distinctive food: chips
Distinctive activity: putting 486 computers together

I helped build the first website for Daily Information, a local one-sheet newspaper for Oxford that included classified ads (it was possibly the first classified ad website in the world, pre-dating Craigslist) and reviews for local restaurants, movies, gigs, and theater. Before it became a website, I came on as its first BBS SysOp — my first ever job.

I ran a hypertext magazine called Spire, which I built in Windows Help Format because its capabilities at the time outstripped HTML. (We did move to the web later on.) I got to interview celebrities-to-me like Roger Ebert and Nicholas Negroponte. Distribution was via BBS initially, and then we started to be carried on the cover CDs of more professional print computer magazines (something I achieved by faxing them all in turn with a proposal, which blows my mind now). I was 15.

And I ran Rum and Monkey, a website that regularly got millions of pageviews a day and taught me all about social virality (this was 2002). I’ve written extensively about that over here.

I’ve used DeleteMe to remove my personal information from search engines and information hubs, but it hadn’t occurred to me until recently that I needed to also remove information about my home from listings sites. It turns out there are full photos, including video walkthroughs, just about everywhere. Particularly with a baby in the house, we felt uneasy about leaving these up.

USA Today has a quick guide to removing your home photos on the most popular sites, but it turns out there’s no public way to remove listing photos from MLS, the listings database that realtors use behind the scenes. You have to ask your agent nicely to do it on your behalf, which I didn’t know to do when I bought the house.

The selling agent also uploaded videos to YouTube — and there’s no defined process to remove those. I’ve had to send a nice email and hope that he has the time and inclination to remove. It would be nice if there was an automated way to remove my information there, too. (Updated to add: he very kindly removed it incredibly quickly.)

I post a lot, but keeping your personal data footprint on the internet clean is really difficult even if you don’t keep a blog or post to social media. Although other people shouldn’t post your personal information — it’s not legal, for a start — there’s no unified way to prevent them from doing so. There’s the threat of data leaks, of course, but there’s also the threat of intentional disclosure by someone who thinks what they’re doing is benign. In that way, it’s somewhere between an arms race and a losing battle: you can’t ever be sure that someone you’re dealing with in some capacity isn’t sharing more than they should about you on the web.

Searching for yourself and your other identifying information is a good way to figure out what’s out there, although the act of searching leaves its own insecure footprint. Zuckerberg was morally wrong when he said that the era of privacy is dead, but I wonder if he was, on a very practical level, correct.

I’m not a particularly vulnerable person. In contrast, for some people, these disclosures are life and death. Revealing an address or a home walkthrough has real implications for a journalist reporting on political corruption or someone fleeing their abusive partner.

We can build all the tools we want, but as I mentioned, it’s an arms race: there will always be more disclosures. Eventually this all comes down to establishing strong legal protections, and more importantly social norms, around privacy. The design of our internet tools and social networks, our standard patterns of use, and the way we think about organizing the data underlying the ways we search and share online are all organized around the principle of public-by-default. What if that all changed? How might it? And are the collateral losses — less sharing on the internet overall, fewer services around certain kinds of personal data — worth it?