Werd I/O

I don’t know that any of us need a review of the year. I’m also not up for making predictions for next year: I just don’t know what’s going to happen.

So instead, here are some hopes I have for 2022. I don’t think they’re a sure thing by any stretch, but they’re not outside the realm of plausibility. And it’s nice to hope.

I’ve separated them into topics: Society and the World, Technology, Culture, and Personal. I’d love to read yours.

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Society and the World

The end of lockdown. I think we all want this. I hope we’re able to get to a place where we can gather with our friends, spend time with our families, and live our lives without worrying about contracting or spreading a disease. To get there, we’ll need to continue to vaccinate the entire world, and hope that we don’t encounter ever more virulent strains. I don’t mind wearing a mask, but I look forward to not; I don’t mind presenting proof of vaccination, but I look forward to not.

A defense of women’s rights. The Supreme Court has the potential to effectively overturn Roe v Wade next year. Instead of that obvious step backwards, I’d love for the court to see sense (or, failing that, deliver a verdict with limited reach). Then I’d like to see us pass legislation to make sure we are never in danger of this again.

Progress on climate change. That could be (and needs to be) on multiple fronts. I’d love to see investment into viable public transport in the US: high speed rail, integrated transport, and other viable mass transit alternatives to cars and planes. But I’d also love to see more legislation - with real teeth - that forcibly curbs emissions. I’d love to see more and better renewable energy infrastructure. And it would be great to see carbon credits and trading replaced with hard limits for every business.

Technology

The decentralized web produces a non-financial killer app. I’d love to see a decentralized app that’s obviously better for regular people than a centralized equivalent. I’ve been thinking a lot about groups and discussion forums lately. In the old days, we had usenet; what would a modern, open, decentralized and peer-to-peer version of discussion threads look like? How could you incentivize multiple client apps with radically different user experiences? (If it’s not obvious already: I want to work on this.)

Technology-enabled unions. If employers want to put a stop to the great resignation, they might want to give their employees more of a voice. Unions as a concept are good for both businesses and workers. I’d love to see technology platforms that radically empower new union formation, and for business owners to embrace collective bargaining by their workforces.

The web becomes fun again. One of the things that I’ve noticed about people innovating on the blockchain is - no matter what you think about the technology - they’re having fun. I’d love to see that sense of fun return to web development as a whole. One of the problems is that a lot of our frameworks and tooling have been optimized for big, centralized businesses, and what works for Facebook probably doesn’t work for someone coding in their bedroom without the goal of building a startup. I’d love to see more easy-to-use libraries and frameworks, and for peer-to-peer style decentralization to become more prevalent through those libraries.

Integrated media. I want to read a book in bed. If I’m driving, I want to listen to the audio of that book in a way that picks up where I left off. Then when I pick up a book to read again, it picks up where the audio left off. Give me that for everything: what matters to me is the content, not the medium.

Sustainable, repairable devices. Maybe enforced by legislation. We should all have a right to repair; every manufacturer should be urged to find more sustainable process and material sourcing.

Facebook / Meta gets broken up. Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp need to be separate companies. In general, I hope to see redefined antitrust, and better enforcement of it. The industry, the media, and society will be better off for it.

Culture

More weird TV. More weird art. If I’m going to be stuck inside in lockdown, I want to watch television that takes risks. Now is the time for production companies to invest in new voices and radical stories. No more beige, sanded-down entertainment designed for mainstream audiences. The same goes for art of any kind. Bring on the outsider artists and people who put their full selves into their work.

The continued death of the mainstream. We’re all weird now, and sick of manufactured popularity that seeks to shepherd us into fitting into pre-defined consumer pigeonholes. Let’s just call it. Our interests are nuanced and varied; we’re all different. And that’s great. What’s not great? Being asked to conform to some median ideal, or enjoy things that have been produced for people who do over more nuanced work. This is a trend that’s been underway for some time; I’d love to see it accelerate.

Doctor Who returns with a woman Doctor and a regular cadence. Now the door has been opened by Jodie Whitaker, I don’t think it would be right to shut it. At the same time, I’d love for Who to finally get back to a twelve or thirteen episode annual run. I don’t think it’s been able to do this consistently since Russell T Davies’s original era as showrunner.

Personal

Rest. I spent a lot of this year wishing I could just disappear for six months. I came by it honestly. Next year I don’t want to be burned out; I want to be able to show up well for the people in my life, and work on projects with energy and creativity.

Authenticity. There’s no sense in trying to perform someone else’s version of you. It’s easy to fall into that trap in every aspect of life, and I sometimes have, but it’s a recipe for unhappiness. I want to do better at upholding myself and saying no to other people’s projections and expectations when they don’t align with mine.

Space to play. I want to have the space to work on my own projects. That’s been hard to come by for the last few years, for reasons I don’t regret: primarily, helping to care for my mother. But I want to spend more time writing, and I want to spend more time working on technology projects independent from trying to make money from them. (Quite a few people have messaged me about finishing Untitled, and I promise I will.)

Community. Somehow, I need to do better at connecting with people. That’s hard to do in a pandemic. But I miss my friends, and having grown up thousands of miles away, I’ve never been particularly great at keeping up with my extended family. Everyone needs friends; everyone needs family. This dovetails with authenticity: everyone needs a community of people who mutually like and support them for them, with no agenda or projection. I really value the people in my life I can truly be myself with.

Home. I deeply hope I can go back to the country I grew up in and see my friends and hometown before the end of the year. Let’s see.

For a while now, I've been using this drawing of me by Hallie Bateman as my avatar:

I love it, particularly because I'm a big fan of Hallie's work. But it's also not quite me, exactly: you get the same whimsical drawing no matter the topic.

I used to be a big Livejournal user. Based on the kind of writing I post here, you can probably guess that it was pretty confessional stuff: I'd share all kinds of details about my life as long-form posts. (Most of the people I was sharing with were my real-life friends.)

LJ pioneered a bunch of really great features - per-item access permissions, for one - but one of the best was the ability to change your avatar based on your mood. If you were a paying user, you could upload a whole palette of images and choose which one would represent you based on however you felt at the time.

Since then, avatars have become fixed representations of ourselves in online space, like a brand. You can expect the same image to follow someone everywhere; you immediately know who it is based on visual recognition.

But what if we don't want that? What if we want our identity to be more nuanced and faceted? What if we want our profiles to evolve as our lives do - not just our avatars but our descriptions, locations, and every nuance, up to and including our preferences? Updating every single service sounds like hard work, and it's not like most services use something like a Gravatar.

Really, everything should pull from a central digital identity, whether it's your website or some other core address. (Of course, anyone should be able to have any number of digital identities, so as to have the freedom to keep various aspects of their lives apart.) That's not how it works today; everything is siloed. Although there are all kinds of decentralized identity protocols, digital identity in the mainstream hasn't evolved far from the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s.

Imagine if you could choose an identity and present it everywhere you needed to. Online services would keep your avatar and contact details up to date; restaurants and airlines could automatically know your allergies and food preferences. You could withdraw and restrict data at any time.

All this is what the self-sovereign identity movement is all about. It's never really been made mainstream, but that doesn't mean it won't be. The first usable version won't be particularly fully-featured; it'll be simple and fun to use. And I'd love to give it a try.

In the meantime, maybe I should start using photographs of my actual face again?

Thoughts

1. It’s an obvious statement to make, but 2021 was … quite a year. Leaving aside my own personal family health journey, which I’ve written a lot about here, we saw an attempt at a fascist coup, and the second year of a pandemic that has now claimed 815,000 lives in the United States alone and millions worldwide.
2. For me, and many people, these facts were the backdrop to more pressing personal tragedies. Each life lost touches a family, for whom the effects will ripple out for generations. And beyond the direct lives lost, the pandemic pushed nearly 100 million people around the world into poverty.
3. We all deserve for shit to let up.
4. Shit is not going to let up.
5. We’re going to enter a third year of the pandemic. We have the anti-vaccination movement to thank for that, at least in part. I get that it doesn’t feel right to see the world fall in line behind these kinds of restrictions; I know I’d be upset to see them continue once the pandemic eases up. But for now, it’s how we save lives, and there’s something genuinely great about seeing people all over the world work together as a community. I haven’t met an anti-vaxxer who hasn’t come across like a selfish, petulant child.
6. Imagine how they’ll react to the acceleration of the worst effects of climate change. That’s coming, real soon.
7. How we react to the challenges ahead will define us. Can we come together as a community and work together for everyone’s benefit? Or will we squabble and argue and score cheap political points while the world burns? Will we adhere to our values, or will we succumb to fascism and nationalism as resources become more scarce?
8. I believe that Trump was a warm-up. His administration was obviously incompetent, but nonetheless almost succeeded in its aim. The next Trump, who might also literally be Trump, will not make the same mistakes.
9. In a world succumbing to conflict because resources are limited in adverse conditions, what would an authoritarian government do with surveillance capitalism? What would they do with all this connected data about each of us? History teaches us that the answer is something we should be thinking about.
10. How can we build a world where this is impossible? How can we build online infrastructure that cannot be used for ill by the worst actor? And then how can we get people to use it? These questions are worth taking very seriously right now.
11. I don’t believe the next decade will be plain sailing.
12. Anyway, hi, happy Monday.

Actions

1. This is my last thoughts and actions of the year. Next year I plan to post on social media significantly less, and to my own site significantly more. Likely this means several posts a day; RSS readers will get those in real time, but the email digests will still go out 3-4 times a week.
2. I want to seriously consider the questions above. You can’t build your way out of social problems, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t innovate or create new tools. What can we build that will empower people to build community in 2022 but will also provide freedom from surveillance?

Whatever you celebrate this December - or even if you don’t celebrate anything at all - happy holidays.

For everyone, this has been an intense year. From America’s attempted fascist coup in January to a shocking global COVID surge at the end of the year, it’s made 2020 - a year so bad they wrote songs about it - look like the warm up act. And that was just the baseline; everyone had to endure life’s inherent ups and downs on top of all this.

In all this, I’m grateful for you. Thank you to everyone who’s read, responded, reshared, and built community with me. You’ve all made my year better.

And to my friends and family: I lost my mother after a ten year fight this year, and there’s no way I would have made it through this year without you. So much love to you.

I’ve been reflecting on what the future might bring, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this. I know that 2022 will be about building, figuratively and literally. It will also be about being myself: while I always want to grow and learn, I don’t want to shave off my edges to fit into other peoples’ templates. Between COVID, climate change, and current events, the moment we’re in demands that we show up both authentically and radically, and cast off manufactured expectations to put the full weight of ourselves behind moving forward towards a safer, more equitable, inclusive future. That’s what you can expect from me, and what I hope for from you.

In the meantime, it’s all about community. As a multicultural atheist, these holidays are about togetherness more than anything else. I’ll look forward to spending time with my family and remembering my mother with love and fondness. I hope you get to spend time with the people you love this winter.

‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to the Coalition on Homelessness. Based in San Francisco, the Coalition on Homelessness “organizes homeless people and front line service providers to create permanent solutions to homelessness, while working to protect the human rights of those forced to remain on the streets.” This is particularly important in a world where some of the most wealthy inhabitants of the city are actively calling for homeless people to be forcibly relocated, and for homeless shelters to not be built in their neighborhoods.

It describes how it works as follows:

The Coalition’s organizing work is accomplished through two focused workgroups: Housing Justice and Human Rights. Our workgroups both have open meetings on a weekly basis, in which homeless people and their allies determine the policies we’ll pursue, and the strategies we’ll take to meet important goals aimed at ending homelessness, and protecting poor people while homelessness exists.

This includes work on housing justice and human rights, as well as publishing Street Sheet. It’s also worth checking out Stolen Belonging, an art project “which documents the belongings taken from homeless residents during the City’s sweeps, revealing the ways in which such thefts steal a person’s ability to belong in their community and the city.”

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.