Werd I/O

Organizing childcare as relative newcomers to an area has been really hard. We weren’t on any daycare waiting lists before our baby was born; we don’t have the local connections that can help you figure out how to separate the good facilities from bad.

Erin’s back to work, and I’ve been primary carer for a few months now. Honestly, were it not for the financial squeeze, I’d be very happy with this arrangement: the concept of paying money to someone for the privilege of spending less time with my child so I can work more feels inherently broken. Given the choice between spending time with my baby and spending more time at work, it’s a no-brainer: he’s only going to be nine months old once in his life and I don’t want to miss a single second. But, of course, it’s not really a choice. The mortgage won’t pay itself; food doesn’t magically appear on the table. You may be shocked to hear that a career in open source and the open web has not left me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

We had high hopes for a local Montessori school with an infant program. We love Montessori: a child-led teaching philosophy that emphasizes open-ended curiosity over rote learning and rigid compartmentalization. But Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and teacher who pioneered the technique, never trademarked the name, and it turns out that Montessori education in the United States has become a free-for-all. The infant program was resistant to us touring, but we insisted. I don’t think Maria had the broom closet sized room littered with broken plastic toys that we saw in mind; I’d like to think she might have frowned upon the infant carer who left the door open while she left the room, remaking that “it’s amazing, the babies never go through the doorway”. She might have at least raised an eyebrow at the nearby school run by the same family that was closed down because inspectors found over twenty safety infractions after a child died. Being a European, she might also have wondered why parents had to pay thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of leaving their baby there.

My point is: it’s a minefield. And, while we’re not independently wealthy, we’re still luckier than many. I have no idea how most parents do it.

Work-life balance takes on a whole other meaning when kids enter the picture. It seems like this is doubly true here in the States, where the work culture is markedly less humane. I have fond memories of my parents being around most of the time: first as students, which is why I grew up in Oxford and am stuck with this accent forever, and then as entrepreneurs running their own small pre-internet media business. There was always at least one parent around when we came home from school, and there was no talk of putting us in after-school programs so they could spend more time at work. School, come to that, started at a sane time, because the learning day wasn’t designed around parents needing to get to work at 8am. I was well-rested, well-fed, and would spend my afternoons drawing and playing. Sometimes we would walk over to the playground on Aristotle Lane (again, Oxford), or visit the commonly-held meadows beyond. All for free. We didn’t have a ton of money, but so what?

It feels so far away from this world of people asking for thousands of dollars a month to place our child in a murder corridor so that we can earn enough money to pay for it all. And this is years before we have to start worrying about the active shooter drills and performative busy-ness that seem to be hallmarks of modern American schooling.

I want to recreate that feeling of endless safety and open-ended creativity for our child. I also want it for us. I need that open, secure space to be creative for my own work and development, too, and I want the same for Erin. I want us both to have a strong relationship with our son for our own well-being as much as his.

There are a few things I know I can do. I’m permanently a remote worker for the next eighteen years at least. I can set strong boundaries around my workday. I can reserve time each week for my own creative endeavors so that I can show up refreshed and happy for his. I can learn to put my fucking phone downand be present. I can find ways to move my career towards making and selling things rather than advising. I can relax about my career ambitions and get serious about my lifestyle ambitions. I can take a step back and design a life around the way I want to live.

But there are some things that are harder to change. I can’t change the need for health insurance, the lack of support for parents with younger children, or the culture of performative productivity. My wonderful cousin Jonathan Neale remarked to me recently that a society that works for its inhabitants is actually rather easy to achieve if that’s what you set out to do; we are not doing that. We’re trying to produce more and more and more, using technology to go faster and faster and push that GDP number ever higher, without considering its effect on our quality of life. We’re pushing individual achievement over community health. We’re starting our kids off at school at 7:30am and leaving them in programs until after we get home from work so that we can produce. We’re forgetting to breathe, and in turn, teaching them that it’s not okay to breathe. This is a fucked-up thing to do to any human and it’s not something I wish for our son.

Not every country is like the United States, and we could move. Perhaps, eventually, we will. For now, though, it’s off the table, and we’re in the position of trying to figure out how to design a humane life in the midst of a culture that doesn’t seem to want to let us have one.

I posted a link the other day to this sobering essay about how the promised migration to Mastodon didn’t go as hoped. It makes some assumptions about what people were hoping for in the first place, but if you were (as I was) hoping that this would be a moment that federated social media might become mainstream, I think its arguments are correct. I wish they weren’t.

So what does Mastodon bring to the table in addition to Twitter, that might justify someone deciding to take the plunge and move to it? There are a few unique things about the platform, but they generally fall into the broad category of “things users don’t care about”. Chief among these is decentralisation.

I’ve made this argument before: for most people, decentralization is not a selling point. For a significant number of people, not being Twitter as run by Elon Musk is a selling point. And while there are certainly arguments to be made about how decentralized networks are less likely to fall prey to the same fate, the fact of the matter is, most people don’t care. Most people don’t understand what decentralization even really is, and nor should they have to.

Decentralized protocols are infrastructure in the same way that servers are infrastructure. Nobody cares if a traditional social network is built on AWS or Google Cloud. What they care about is the community: can they follow people they’re interested in, can they engage in great conversations, potentially find an audience for the things they make, and do all of this safely and without abuse.

Mastodon has, so far, not done well on this front. People really do find it hard to use. And when they do make it on, the number of “reply guys” — people who respond in an unwanted and condescending way to peoples’ posts, particularly those written by women — is sometimes off the charts. Finally but by no means least, there’s a disturbing current of anti-Blackness that extends from the covert racism of asking people to hide their lived experiences behind a content warning to overt white supremacy. For many people, it is not a welcoming place.

Dr Johnathan Flowers, who studies the philosophy of technology, gave a great interview last year that covers this topic in detail. It’s very difficult for me to pull a representative quote out; instead, I recommend that you read or listen to the whole piece.

Indeed, when I posted the link, I got some interesting replies that expressed the sentiment: it’s good that not everyone can use Mastodon. Sometimes a higher barrier to entry leads to a better quality of community. We never wanted everyone to move over; we just wanted the right people to move over.

Not a good look when many of the people who are put off from using the community are people of color, women, the disabled, and people with few resources. I’m strongly opposed to this sentiment: I think for social media to truly be useful, it must be welcoming, inclusive, and accessible.

There’s another reason why I want user-aligned social media to be readily accessible. (I’m struggling for a good term for this, as you can tell: it’s not decentralized social media, because decentralization is just a functional means to an end. What do you call something that is inherently supportive of the people who use it and their underlying interests? Democratic? Progressive?) Social media is intrinsically involved in the very dark moment in democracy that we’re living through; it has empowered populism and the rise of a militant far right. We need the online spaces that most of us use to not be run by people who are active supporters of fascism at worst and agnostic to it at best.

Social media helped bring about Trump. Right now Elon Musk is using Twitter in the same way Rupert Murdoch uses his media empire. Facebook does not look like it is eager to avoid the mistakes of its past if it means forgoing profit. There has to be a strong, inclusive alternative to these platforms, and right now there simply isn’t one.

None of this is to say that the underlying protocols are bad. I love ActivityPub. I think they’re a fantastic way to build new platforms. And I think that’s exactly what we need: new platforms, in the human sense, built with the participation of the communities they support. It’s not nearly enough to build a functional Twitter clone. Technology is never enough.

We need to build communities in new, participative ways that ensure everyone’s voice is heard. We need to share equity. We need to ensure that people with few resources are able to onboard. We need to ensure that everyone can feel safe as they express their true selves. Otherwise, to be frank, I don’t see the point.

I think it absolutely can be done, but lately I’ve been feeling like Mastodon itself is not yet the answer. The big question, then, is: what do we do next?

If you take investment to build your product, you will one day need to find a way to repay those investors. That might be a risk that you need to take because you otherwise wouldn't be able to build the thing you want to. But it's a key part of the equation.

With no outside money, only people with copious spare time or disposable wealth can afford to build software of any complexity. I don’t see that as a desirable outcome, not just because it’s fundamentally unfair, but also because we then won’t get software built by people with a wider range of lived experiences, which means it will be less useful overall. We therefore need to have investors or grant-making institutions in the mix. Venture capital, though often maligned, has allowed a lot of services we all use to exist.

The trouble is, the need for exponential growth or revenue sometimes pit platforms against their users, which is death for a Web 2.0 business.

Web 2.0 businesses work by making their user-bases into part of the machine. They produce network effects, which means that the product becomes more valuable as more people use it. Reddit with one user is not particularly useful; Reddit with millions is a much more compelling place to converse.

For years, those user-bases have just sort of gone along with it. There have been minor skirmishes from time to time, but the utility of the platform itself has generally been enough to keep people engaging.

Twitter’s implosion changed that. Millions of people decamped from the platform to places like Mastodon — and some of them to nowhere at all. More than creating a problem for Twitter and an opportunity for anyone working on alternatives, this mass movement of users also opened the floodgates for more direct action among Web 2.0 users.

Over 87% of subreddits - the themed discussion communities that make up Reddit - went on strike this week in protest of new API policies that price most apps out of the market. When CEO Steve Huffman issued a tone-deaf internal memo suggesting that this, too, would pass, they decided to extend the action. In effect, the vast majority of the site has been shut down. Huffman lost the respect of the people who had, up to then, been willingly part of his machine.

In the old days, we talked about Web 2.0 “democratizing” industries. Blogging democratized publishing. Flickr democratized photo discovery and use. Delicious democratized … bookmarks, I guess? Because these use cases represented a move away from centralized publishing models where an elite few controlled who could be seen and heard, they were democratized, in a sense. But the platforms themselves continued to be built, run, and funded by an elite few. There was no democratization of power or equity. As has long been the case with mass media, the users were not the customers; they were the product being sold.

While there were always people who discussed these obvious harms and advocated for solutions — long-time members of the indieweb community and its cousins, for example — these were not mainstream topics. The cracks really began to show after the 2016 election, when Facebook finally caught some criticism for its flippancy towards democracy. Subsequently, stories about its role in genocide, its misrepresentation of its own engagement analytics to news organizations, and other harms became more widespread.

But while there has always been some sporadic direct action — there have been a few third-party tools that have let people delete their content and connections from Facebook, for example; LiveJournal users finally left en masse after its sale to a Russian media company which enacted homophobic and anti-politics policies — we haven’t seen anything on the level of this year’s. Millions of Twitter users quit following Elon Musk’s acquisition, and now most of Reddit is offline.

Reddit is the perfect testbed for this kind of collective user action. Each individual subreddit is controlled by a set of moderators who have the power to turn their communities off — which is exactly what they’ve done. But Reddit isn’t the only platform with this dynamic: a 2021 report by the NYU Governance Lab suggested that 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups every month. Admins of those groups have remarkable power over the Facebook platform.

This has the potential to be a radical change. Once users realized that they have power as a community, the fundamental dynamics of these platforms changes. You can no longer engage in adversarial business practices: there’s nothing wrong with making money, but it will need to be in a way that aligns with the people who give a platform its value.

Not only should that give the leadership of more established Web 2.0 businesses pause, it should inform early decisions by both investors and founders of any new collaborative platform on the internet. An adversarial business model, or a hand-wavey one like “selling data”, has the potential to deeply harm the value of a venture that depends on its users further down the road.

The health, trust, and safety of a platform’s community is paramount. The potential for collective action means that, finally, users can have some say in how the platforms they use are run. We may even see more platforms move to co-operative and community-owned models as a way to ensure that they remain aligned with their ecosystems: it’s not just good ethics, but it’s good business sense in a world where users, admins, and third-party app developers understand that they have the power to leave.

We may even see moderator’s unions, providing collective bargaining, advice, and other benefits for people who run communities across platforms. Perhaps even bonuses like negotiated healthcare that industrial unions have long provided. There’s honestly no reason why not: these people are the direct drivers of millions upon millions of dollars for platform owners. They have power; they just have to stand up and use it.

Also posted on IndieNews

I fell into startups by accident.

There were two paths I could have gone down at university. Next to an over-posed photo taken at a digital photo booth at a branch of Boots the Pharmacist in downtown Oxford, my high school yearbook declares that I’m likely to become a journalist. On the other hand, I’d taught myself to program, and then to write HTML, and the web seemed like an exciting medium to tell stories with.

I got into the Computer Science program at the University of Edinburgh. In England, at least at the time, you effectively picked your major two years before even going to university: at sixteen years old, you were asked to choose three or four A-level subjects that you’d study exclusively until the end of high school. In turn, those subjects would dictate which degrees you were allowed to apply for. I refused to filter myself in this way, and I was still in the early stages of trying to figure out who I was, let alone what I wanted to do — a tall order for any sixteen year old, let alone a third culture kid who felt physically and socially out of sorts with the world. Edinburgh was one of the few programs that didn’t see my spread across arts and sciences as a bad thing.

I was big and I hated it. I’d grown up to be well over six feet tall, and I wasn’t skinny in the way some tall people get to be. I couldn’t (and still can’t) catch myself in the mirror without cringing. I hated every aspect of my physicality in a way that I didn’t quite have words for, and that self-loathing translated to an overwhelming awkwardness in real life. It crossed the line into self-harm, both directly and indirectly. If I was always going to be this, what was the point in throwing myself into anything?

My mother had become a financial analyst in the telecoms industry — she’d studied the split-up of AT&T and the formation of the Baby Bells as a postgraduate at Oxford — and she saw the internet revolution coming. She tried out the emerging ISPs for work, and I devoured it. I gophered around the world. When we finally got Demon Internet at home, which turned every dialed-in user into a genuine node on its network, I discovered newsgroups, and realized I could communicate with people who were roughly my age without them ever seeing me. I could be myself freely. It radically changed my life. To this day, this is the part of the internet I really care about: not protocols or code, but the ability for people to be themselves and tell their stories. The opportunity for contexts to collide, relationships of all kinds to be built, and for learning to happen between people.

Of course, computer science has almost nothing to do with that. Edinburgh is a well-renowned program, particularly in conjunction with its AI school, and I’ve benefitted from it. But at the time, I was deeply disappointed with the focus on mathematics. The part of computing I cared about more than any other was the internet, and the internet was made of people more than it was any networking technology or algorithm. I’m still not sure why I didn’t change my degree (I’m also not sure if they would have let me). Having an honors degree in CS has helped my career, but I didn’t find the meaning in it that I’d hoped to. In retrospect, I wish I’d used my US citizenship to go to a liberal arts school, but at the time I didn’t have any interest in leaving the UK.

So I got distracted. Back in high school, I’d started a hypertext computer magazine called Spire that I distributed on various bulletin board systems. For my friends, it was a way that I could get them free review copies of games; for me, making something and putting it out there was a worthwhile project in itself. At university, I transitioned it to the web, buying my first domain name in the process and setting it up on Pair Networks hosting. It wasn’t particularly well-read, but the process of building and writing it made it worth it to me. I kept up my personal homepage; I wrote a blog; I continued to write on the newsgroups and hang out on Internet Relay Chat for hours.

Sometime towards the end of my degree, I accidentally wrote a meme that spread like wildfire across the blogs. I put it up on a Friday evening, and by Sunday it had almost a hundred thousand pageviews. I’ve written this story elsewhere, but to make a long story short: I built it into a satirical site that got millions of pageviews a day, I built a community that endures to this day, and through it all, I got a taste of how powerful the web could really be. It wasn’t commercial at all — in fact, it was militantly not — but that wasn’t the point. The point for me, as always, was to connect and feel a little bit more seen.

Edinburgh has a little bit more of a technology scene now, but when I graduated there was nothing. I looked for jobs that I might find interesting. A computer magazine was interested in hiring me as a reviewer, but the pay was abysmal: just £12,000 a year, and they really wanted me to move to London to do it. I didn’t see how you could possibly afford to take a job like that and live in London if you weren’t already rich, which I wasn’t. So I ended up getting a job back at the university, working to create an educational site for professional sports coaches as part of the sports science department.

They weren’t sure where to put me, so I wound up in a converted broom closet with a window that didn’t shut, right over the canteen kitchen. The room was freezing in winter and permanently smelled of chips. Worse, it already had someone in it: a PhD student called Dave who made no secret of the fact that he resented my being there. I’d been pre-announced to the learning technology folks as a “computer scientist”, so they all thought I was some hoity-toity egotist rather than an entry-level developer who had no real idea what he was doing.

Dave was angry a lot of the time and liked to talk about it when he wasn’t playing games on the BBC Sports website. He was studying educational technology, which hadn’t really been in use even when I was doing my degree. But through him I learned all about virtual learning environments like WebCT. Later, I transitioned from the sports science department into general e-learning development, and I got more of a hands-on look, and I understood some of his frustration. The university was a pretty rigid environment, and the software was terrible. Students hated it; teachers hated it; administrators hated it; I’m not convinced that the people who wrote the software didn’t hate it. Platforms like WebCT and Blackboard, and even their open source counterpart, Moodle, were the worst: a terrible model for learning.

The web, on the other hand, was amazing. People were learning from each other all the time. It had already been changing my life for almost a decade, and now, through more accessible social media sites like LiveJournal, the benefits were spreading. Social media was informal learning, but learning nonetheless. All of this was already happening, but the actual learning technology products weren’t built with this understanding or intent. The internet had been so freeing for me — that release from my own physicality, the hooks and hangups that came from how I looked and felt in the real world — that I wished I’d had something with the same dynamics at university. I wished I’d been free there. I didn’t express this idea at the time, but that’s what drove me.

I suggested he started blogging his ideas. He was skeptical, but I somehow convinced him to start a blog — he gave it a very official-sounding name, the E-Portfolio Research and Development Community — and both post and comment on someone else’s blog almost every day. It worked, and his blog started to be accepted into the worldwide e-portfolio community. There was obviously something here for education.

Dave and I decided to build something that did take the social web into account. First, we simply described it in a very short informal paper, and put it out on Dave’s blog. The response from the community was immediate: one very well-respected analyst called it “visionary”. Another sniffily commented that it was one thing to talk about it and another to build it — which, well. Game on.

We both built a prototype; Dave’s in Macromedia Coldfusion, mine in PHP. (Even then, I don’t know that these were the right technology choices.) I can’t remember what his was called, but I put mine on a domain name I’d bought so that I would have an official-looking email address to apply for jobs with, based on the town in Switzerland my dad’s family comes from. Of the two prototypes, we decided to go with Elgg.

We first tried to give it to the university. Dave’s supervisor ran learning technology at the time; he took it to a meeting, and the response I heard back was that “blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms.” For all these years, I’ve taken Dave’s word that this is what was said, although I’ve sometimes wondered if he just didn’t want to give it to them. Either way, it appalled me enough that I quit my job.

I moved back to Oxford and into my parents’ house. They’d moved back to California to take care of my grandmother, and their plan was to rent it out; in the end we rented out the other bedroom to a friend of mine and I was lucky to be able to live in it rent-free for six months while I figured everything out. This was a big burden on them: we didn’t have a lot of money, and while the house wasn’t exactly in a great neighborhood, renting half of it didn’t cover its costs. They essentially underwrote me while I wrote the first version.

And then I had to get a job. I became the webmaster at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where my job was to revamp the website to use a new CMS and a design that had been created by a prestigious firm in London. Instead, what happened was that I very quickly started becoming a startup resource inside the school. Students came to me to talk about their work, and would invite me to their seminars. Lecturers would ask me questions. I was allowed to attend an event called Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, where people like Ev Williams (then CEO of Blogger), Reid Hoffman, and Craig Newmark would speak and share their experiences.

After kicking the tires for six months, we released Elgg as an open source project. Eventually, it was able to make enough money to employ me and Dave full-time, and I left to work on it. We were asked to help build the first version of MIT OpenCourseWare (which we eventually parted ways with), and consulted with a school district in upstate New York who wanted our expertise more than our software. But it was enough to get going with. My friendships at the Business School were so strong that I was allowed to come back the next year, with Dave alongside me. We asked Biz Stone to become an advisor, which he agreed to, and it felt like we were off to the races.

We had no idea what we were doing at any point, and we didn’t exactly get along. Our company was formed poorly; I was the CTO and Dave was the CEO because he’d looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’m going to put my foot down on this one.” I was still so unsure of myself and full of self-loathing that I just accepted it. Behind the scenes, we decided things together, and in some ways, the partnership worked; he had a kind of hubris that I lacked, and I understood the internet in a way that he didn’t. It helped that I could also build and write. At the same time, it didn’t make me feel good; Dave liked to tell people that we never would have been friends, which I think he meant as an odd couple style joke, but was hurtful every time. When we were in Cambridge to speak to MIT about OpenCourseWare, he took me aside to tell me that when push came to shove, he would be looking out for myself, and that I should do the same. It wasn’t the way I liked to think or act; we came from different worlds. I’m sure he was similarly perturbed by me: this maladjusted nerd who seemed to care much more about writing than about operating in the real world.

Elgg didn’t make anyone rich, but it was successful in a way I’m still proud of. The original version had over 80 translations and was used all over the world, including by non-profits who used it to organize resource allocation. A revamped version with a stronger architecture was used by the anti-austerity movement in Spain, by Oxfam to train aid workers, and by the Canadian government as a sort of intranet.

After a few years of bootstrapping, working almost 24/7, we accepted a modest investment from some executives at a large international bank, who were getting into startups on the side. They really wanted us to get into the fintech market, specifically around hedge funds, and maybe they were right from a business perspective: there’s a lot of money there. But it wasn’t why I’d started working on it, and it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Dave was more enthusiastic, and between that and the fact that our relationship had broken down to being almost antagonistic every day, I decided to leave. The day I shut down my laptop for the last time, I felt almost weightless: for the first time in the best part of a decade, I had no commitments. It had been weighing on me hard. I was 30 years old now, somehow, and it felt like I was emerging from a dark cave, blinking into the sunlight.

No other working experience has been exactly the same. I know a lot more, for one: I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. But I also wouldn’t take the same risks, exactly because I know more. My naïvety brought a kind of propulsion of its own; like many founders, I was fueled by pure Dunning-Kruger effect. But at the same time, there were days when I was dancing on my chair because of something that had happened. The startup brought incredible highs — the kind that can only come from something you’ve created yourself — as well as deep lows that interacted horribly with my already damaged self-image. It made me feel like I was worth something after all, but also that I wasn’t. It was a rollercoaster. And yes, despite everything, I would do it again.

I’m soliciting prompts for discussion. This piece is a part of that series.

Ryan Barrett asks:

It seems like the last 200 years or so - when we could use recorded media, photographs, audio, videos, as evidence or proof of anything - may have been a brief, glorious aberration, a detour in the timeline. Barely a blink of an eye, relative to the full history of civilization. Nice while it lasted, maybe it’s over now.

What does that mean? If true, how will we adapt? What techniques for evidence and proof from the pre-recorded-media era will we return to? What new techniques will we find, or need?

I’ll start by asking: could we? Or to put it another way: have previous assumptions we might have made about the trustworthiness of recorded media been warranted?

One of the most famous users of photo editing to alter the historical record was Stalin, who often edited people he deemed to be enemies of the state out of photographs. Portraits of the leader that hung in peoples’ homes were retouched so that they were more to his liking.

A few years later, the artist Yves Klein took photographs like this one of him hurling himself off a building. Obviously, they weren’t real: his intent was to demonstrate that the theatre of the future could be an empty room; arguably an accurate demonstration of our present.

Later still, a photo of Obama shaking hands with the President of Iran circulated widely on Republican social media — despite the fact that the event never happened.

And there are so many more. As the Guardian wrote a few years ago about Photoshop:

In fact, the lesson of the earliest fake photos is that technology does not fool the human eye; it is the mind that does this. From scissors and glue to the latest software, the fabrication of an image only works because the viewer wants it to work. We see what we wish to see.

Sometimes, we didn’t even need trickery. President Roosevelt tried to hide his disability by having the Secret Service rip the film out of anyone’s camera if they caught him in his wheelchair. Endless short men in the public eye — Tom Cruise, for example — have hid their height on camera by standing on boxes or having their counterparts stand in a hole.

Of course, the latest deepfake technology and generative AI make it cheaper and easier to create this kind of impossible media. Although it’s not new, it will become more prolific and more naturalistic than ever before.

The Brookings Institution points out that in addition to the proliferation of disinformation, there will be two more adverse effects:

• Exhaustion of critical thinking: “it will take more effort for individuals to ascertain whether information is true, especially when it does not come from trusted actors.”
• Plausible deniability: accusations of impropriety will be more easily deflected.

Trusted actors, of course, are those we already know and rely on. Most people will not think the New York Times is faking its images. So another adverse effect will be the relative inability for new sources to be taken seriously — which will particularly hurt sources from disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. For the same reason, maintaining a list of “approved” sources that we can trust is not a real solution to this problem. In addition to it censoring new and underrepresented voice, who could possibly reliably maintain this kind of list? And what will prevent them from interpreting factual data that they don’t like as disinformation?

Regarding plausible deniability, even without deepfakes, we’re already learning that many forensic evidence techniques were more limited than we were led to believe. Bite marks, hair comparisons, and blood spatter, all commonly used in cases, were shown to have a limited scientific basis and to have often been misapplied. An artifact in itself is almost never enough to prove something to be true; we simply have to ask more questions.

Context is a useful tool here. If a public figure is shown to have said something, for example, are there other corroborating sources? Were there multiple independent eyewitnesses? Is any surrounding media drawn from this one artifact, or are there other, independent stories drawn from other, separately-recorded evidence?

So the real change will need to be with respect to source analysis. We’ve been trained to be consumers of information: to trust what’s on the page or on the screen. As I tried to explain at the beginning, that was always an approach that left us open to exploitation. There is no text that should not be questioned; no source that cannot be critically examined.

Generally, I think the Guardian’s observation holds true: we see what we wish to see. The truth will have plausible deniability. We will need more information.

To be sure, technology solutions are also useful, although it will be an arms race. Intel claims to have a deepfake detector that works with 96% accuracy — which will be true until the inferred blood flow signals it uses can also be accurately faked (if that hasn’t happened already). Researchers at the University of Florida experimented with detecting audio deepfakes by modeling the human vocal tract. Again, we can expect deepfake technology to improve to a level where it surpasses this detection — and regardless, we still have to worry about the impact of false positives. We also should worry about any incentive to recreate a situation where we unquestioningly accept a source.

As IEEE Spectrum noted:

Even if a quiver of detectors can take down deepfakes, the content will have at least a brief life online before it disappears. It will have an impact. […] Technology alone can’t save us. Instead, people need to be educated about the new, nonreality-filled reality.

We will need to use all the tools at our disposal — contextual, social, and technological — to determine whether something is a true record, representative of the truth, or an outright lie. We always had to do this, but most of us didn’t. Now technology has forced our hand.

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

Apps + Websites

AI

Generative AI: What You Need To Know. “A free resource that will help you develop an AI-bullshit detector.”

Games

TimeGuessr. Fun little game that asks you to guess the place and time a series of photos were taken. My best score so far: 38,000.

Moderator Mayhem: A Content Moderation Game. This is HARD. Which is the point.

Technology

See your identity pieced together from stolen data. “Have you ever wondered how much of your personal information is available online? Here’s your chance to find out.” Really well-executed.

Books

Fiction

Severance, by Ling Ma. Though it fades out weakly, I loved this story about loss, meaning, and what it means to be an immigrant, dressed up as a science fiction novel. The science fiction is good too, and alarmingly close to the real-life global pandemic that took place a few years after it was written. This is a book about disconnection; it resonated for me hard.

Streaming

Documentary

Little Richard: I Am Everything. A well-argued documentary that does an excellent job of showing the debt every rock musician has to Little Richard - and, in turn, how rock and roll was birthed as a Black, queer medium. Joyous and revelatory.

Notable Articles

AI

‘This robot causes harm’: National Eating Disorders Association’s new chatbot advises people with disordering eating to lose weight. ““Every single thing Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder,” Maxwell wrote in her Instagram post. “This robot causes harm.””

Google Unveils Plan to Demolish the Journalism Industry Using AI. “If Google’s AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?”

Indirect Prompt Injection via YouTube Transcripts. “ChatGPT (via Plugins) can access YouTube transcripts. Which is pretty neat. However, as expected (and predicted by many researches) all these quickly built tools and integrations introduce Indirect Prompt Injection vulnerabilities.” Neat demo!

ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. “Rather than pointing to some future utopia (or robots vs. humans dystopia), what we face in dealing with programs like ChatGPT is the further relentless corrosiveness of late-stage capitalism, in which authorship is of no value. All that matters is content.”

Google Bard is a glorious reinvention of black-hat SEO spam and keyword-stuffing. “Moreover, researchers have also discovered that it’s probably mathematically impossible to secure the training data for a large language model like GPT-4 or PaLM 2. This was outlined in a research paper that Google themselves tried to censor, an act that eventually led the Google-employed author, El Mahdi El Mhamdi, to leave the company. The paper has now been updated to say what the authors wanted it to say all along, and it’s a doozy.”

OpenAI's ChatGPT Powered by Human Contractors Paid $15 Per Hour. “OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, has been paying droves of U.S. contractors to assist it with the necessary task of data labelling—the process of training ChatGPT’s software to better respond to user requests. The compensation for this pivotal task? A scintillating $15 per hour.”

Schools Spend Millions on Evolv's Flawed AI Gun Detection. “As school shootings proliferate across the country — there were 46 school shootings in 2022, more than in any year since at least 1999 — educators are increasingly turning to dodgy vendors who market misleading and ineffective technology.”

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? “The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value.”

Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI". “Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. This has profound implications for us.”

Economists Warn That AI Like ChatGPT Will Increase Inequality. “Most empirical studies find that AI technology will not reduce overall employment. However, it is likely to reduce the relative amount of income going to low-skilled labour, which will increase inequality across society. Moreover, AI-induced productivity growth would cause employment redistribution and trade restructuring, which would tend to further increase inequality both within countries and between them.”

Climate

Earth is in ‘the danger zone’ and getting worse for ecosystems and humans. “Earth has pushed past seven out of eight scientifically established safety limits and into “the danger zone,” not just for an overheating planet that’s losing its natural areas, but for well-being of people living on it, according to a new study.”

Outrage as Brazil law threatening Indigenous lands advances in congress. “Lawmakers had sent “a clear message to the country and the world: Bolsonaro is gone but the extermination [of Indigenous communities and the environment] continues,” the Climate Observatory added.”

Documents reveal how fossil fuel industry created, pushed anti-ESG campaign. “ESG’s path to its current culture war status began with an attempt by West Virginia coal companies to push back against the financial industry’s rising unease around investing in coal — which as the dirtiest-burning fuel has the most powerful and disrupting impacts on the climate.”

Petition: Global Call for the Urgent Prevention of Genocide of the Indigenous Peoples in Brazil. “As citizens from all over the world, we are uniting our voices to demand urgent justice for the indigenous peoples of Brazil.” This is urgent; please sign.

Recycled plastic can be more toxic and is no fix for pollution, Greenpeace warns. “But … the toxicity of plastic actually increases with recycling. Plastics have no place in a circular economy and it’s clear that the only real solution to ending plastic pollution is to massively reduce plastic production.”

CEO of biggest carbon credit certifier to resign after claims offsets worthless. “It comes amid concerns that Verra, a Washington-based nonprofit, approved tens of millions of worthless offsets that are used by major companies for climate and biodiversity commitments.”

New York is sinking, and its bankers could go down with it. “When discussing climate change that banker suggested that sinking cities was the biggest problem he thought the sector faced. Over 80% of the property portfolio of many banks was, he suggested, in cities where the likelihood of flooding was likely to increase rapidly.”

New York City is sinking due to weight of its skyscrapers, new research finds. “The Big Apple may be the city that never sleeps but it is a city that certainly sinks, subsiding by approximately 1-2mm each year on average, with some areas of New York City plunging at double this rate, according to researchers.”

Crypto

Narrative over numbers: Andreessen Horowitz's State of Crypto report. “The result of this approach is an incredibly shameless piece of propaganda showing the extents to which Andreessen Horowitz is willing to manipulate facts and outright lie, hoping to turn the sentiment on the crypto industry back to where retail investors were providing substantial pools of liquidity with which they could line their pockets. If anyone still believes that venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz are powerful sources of innovation and societal benefit, I hope this will give them pause.”

Culture

Jesse Armstrong on the roots of Succession: ‘Would it have landed the same way without the mad bum-rush of Trump’s presidency?’. “I guess the simple things at the heart of Succession ended up being Brexit and Trump. The way the UK press had primed the EU debate for decades. The way the US media’s conservative outriders prepared the way for Trump, hovered at the brink of support and then dived in.”

Creative Commons Supports Trans Rights. “As an international nonprofit organization, with a diverse global community that believes in democratic values and free culture, the protection and affirmation of all human rights — including trans rights — are central to our core value of global inclusivity and our mission of promoting openness and providing access to knowledge and culture.” Right on. Trans rights are human rights.

The Real Difference Between European and American Butter. “Simply put, American regulations for butter production are quite different from those of Europe. The USDA defines butter as having at least 80% fat, while the EU defines butter as having between 82 and 90% butterfat and a maximum of 16% water. The higher butterfat percentage in European butter is one of the main reasons why many consider butters from across the pond to be superior to those produced in the US. It’s better for baking, but it also creates a richer flavor and texture even if all you’re doing is smearing your butter on bread. On the other hand, butter with a higher fat percentage is more expensive to make, and more expensive for the consumer.”

Democracy

How I Won $5 Million From the MyPillow Guy and Saved Democracy. “But if more people sought truth, even when that truth is contrary to their beliefs — such as when a Republican like me destroys a Republican myth — then I think we really can save democracy in America. In fact, I think that’s the only way.”

Henry Kissinger at 100: Still a War Criminal. “Kissinger’s diplomatic conniving led to or enabled slaughters around the globe. As he blows out all those candles, let’s call the roll.”

Georgia GOP Chair: If the Earth Really Is Round, Why Are There So Many Globes Everywhere?“Everywhere there’s globes…and that’s what they do to brainwash… For me, if it is not a conspiracy, if it is, you know, ‘real,’ why are you pushing so hard? Everywhere I go, every store, you buy a globe, there’s globes everywhere—every movie, every TV show, news media, why?”

NAACP warns Black Americans against traveling to Florida because of DeSantis policies. “On Saturday, the NAACP joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino rights advocacy group, and Equality Florida, an LGBTQ rights advocacy group, in issuing Florida travel advisories.”

May Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Map. “The map of anti-trans risk has polarized into two Americas - one where trans people have full legal protections, and one where they are persecuted by the state.”

Techbro SF. “San Francisco is a dystopian hellhole caught in doomloop and it is all because everyone hates techbros. Well, we are tired of being disrespected. Therefore we are going to attack those who can’t fight back, yes, poor people.”

One year after Dobbs leak: Looking back at the summer that changed abortion. “The 19th spoke with people from across the country about those historic days: lawmakers, physicians, organizers on both sides of the abortion fight and pregnant people navigating a new world.” What a newsroom.

Health

Can Americans really make a free choice about dying? A characteristically nuanced, in-depth piece about the debate around assisted suicide.

One more dead in horrific eye drop outbreak that now spans 18 states. An actual nightmare.

Widely used chemical strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease. “A groundbreaking epidemiological study has produced the most compelling evidence yet that exposure to the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.” By as much as 70%!

Labor

Of Course We Should All be Working Less. “In 1940, the Fair Labor Standards Act reduced the workweek to 40 hours. Today, as a result of huge advances in technology and productivity, now is the time to lower the workweek to 32 hours—with no loss in pay. Workers must benefit from advanced technology, not just the 1%.”

Hollywood writers strike could impact diverse stories on TV and in film. “When Kyra Jones wrote for the ABC broadcast show “Queens,” she collected a $14,000 residuals check that helped her get through the months after the project ended and she was without work. Then last summer, she got her first residuals check for writing on the Hulu streaming show “Woke.” It was $4.”

Business Mentality. “Hi, we’re the company you work for and we care about your mental health!”

Hustle culture is over-rated. “When hustle culture is glorified, it incentivizes people to work longer hours, not because it’s a good way to get the work done, but because they want to be perceived as working long hours.”

Media

How We Reached Dairy Farm Workers to Write About Them. “The reporters’ process underscores one of our central beliefs at ProPublica: Publishing a story about injustice isn’t enough if we don’t reach the people who are directly affected.”

2023: The year equitable journalism goes mainstream. “For too long, journalism has had a laser focus on holding power to account, rather than widening its aperture to recognize the opportunity to build and share power in and with communities.”

Unconstitutional TikTok ban would open the door to press censorship. “But if we accept the arguments for banning TikTok, what might come next? The consequences are even more catastrophic. Bans on foreign news websites that track Americans’ clicks and comments? For example, the Guardian must have a gold mine of information on the millions of Americans that read it every day.”

It’s Time to Acknowledge Big Tech Was Always at Odds with Journalism. “Do we want to preserve the dominance of companies that like to act as if they are neutral communications platforms, when they also act as publishers without the responsibilities that come with that? Do we want digital behemoths to accumulate so much power that they can exploit personal data in ways that buttress their dominance and diminish the value of news media audiences?”

How we told the story of the summer Roe v. Wade fell. “We knew this wouldn’t be an easy feat to pull off. But this project, while technically reported over the past five months, benefited from years of our work covering abortion at The 19th. After working nonstop since 2021 to cover the looming fall of Roe, I had built a list of sources whose stories I knew would be instructive and illuminating. And I knew that they would trust me to do a thorough, accurate job.”

Grist and the Center for Rural Strategies launch clearinghouse for rural US coverage. “The Rural Newswire was created to help newsrooms that serve rural communities by providing a platform to both find and share stories that can be republished for free. Editors can use the Rural Newswire to source stories to syndicate, and they can also upload links to their own coverage. As part of this project, together the Center for Rural Strategies and Grist are providing $100,000 in grants to report on rural America. The grants are open to both newsrooms and freelancers.”

Elon Musk thinks he’s got a “major win-win” for news publishers with…micropayments. “In a digital universe where every news story is behind a hard paywall — one impenetrable to the non-paying reader — then a micropayments model might make sense. But that’s not the digital universe we live in.”

Society

Seniors are flooding homeless shelters that can’t care for them. “Nearly a quarter of a million people 55 or older are estimated by the government to have been homeless in the United States during at least part of 2019, the most recent reliable federal count available.” Hopelessly broken.

Letter from Jourdon Anderson: A Freedman Writes His Former Master. “Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.”

A College President Defends Seeking Money From Jeffrey Epstein. ““People don’t understand what this job is,” he said, adding, “You cannot pick and choose, because among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people. Capitalism is a rough system.””

Startups

My New Startup Checklist. Interesting to see what creating a new startup entails in 2023.

What a startup does to you. Or: A celebration of new life. “Just like having kids, you won’t understand until you do it. But if you do it, even if you “fail,” you will come out stronger than you could have ever been without it. Stronger, wiser, ready for the next thing, never able to go back to being a cog, eyes opened.”

Technology

Block Party anti-harassment service leaves Twitter amid API changes. “Announced in a blog post last night, Block Party’s anti-harassment tools for Twitter are being placed on an immediate, indefinite hiatus, with the developers claiming that changes to Twitter’s API pricing (which starts from $100 per month) have “made it impossible for Block Party’s Twitter product to continue in its current form.””

How Picnic, an Emerging Social Network, Found its Niche. “By putting a degree of financial incentive in the hands of moderators by offering them fractional ownership of the community they built through a system of “seeds,” they ultimately are able to control their community’s destiny.”

Twitter Fails to Remove Hate Speech by Blue-Check Users, Center for Countering Digital Hate Says.“Twitter is failing to remove 99 percent of hate speech posted by Twitter Blue users, new research has found, and instead may be boosting paid accounts that spew racism and homophobia.” Who would have predicted?

Power of One. “It’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.”

Social Media Poses ‘Profound Risk’ to Teen Mental Health, Surgeon General Warns. “Frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments.”

Leaked EU Document Shows Spain Wants to Ban End-to-End Encryption. “Breaking end-to-end encryption for everyone would not only be disproportionate, it would be ineffective of achieving the goal to protect children.” It would also put a great many more people at risk.

Growing the Open Social Web. “I think there are two big things that would help the Open Social Web seize this opportunity to reach scale.” A big yes to all of this.

Hype: The Enemy of Early Stage Returns. “Technology alone does not create the future. Instead, the future is the result of an unpredictable mix of technology, business, product design, and culture.”

Montana becomes first US state to ban TikTok. “Montana has became the first US state to ban TikTok after the governor signed legislation prohibiting mobile application stores from offering the app within the state by next year.” I’m willing to wager that this never comes to pass.

Many US Twitter users have taken a break from Twitter, and some may not use it a year from now. “A majority of Americans who have used Twitter in the past year report taking a break from the platform during that time, and a quarter say they are not likely to use it a year from now.”

Why elite dev teams focus on pull-request metrics. “What’s clear from this study is elite development workflows start and end with small pull request (PR) sizes. This is the best indicator of simpler merges, enhanced CI/CD, and faster cycle times. In short, PR size affects all other metrics.”

See the Neighborhoods Internet Providers Excluded from Fast Internet. “A Markup analysis revealed that the worst internet deals disproportionately fell upon the poorest, most racial and ethnically diverse, and historically redlined neighborhoods in all but two of the 38 cities in our investigation.”

How people are archiving the storytelling and community behind Black Twitter. “They see an urgency to preserving Black Twitter in a world in which Black history and Black women’s cultural labor are undervalued or unacknowledged — and where the future of Twitter seems unknown. They also want to document the racist and sexist abuse that Black women on the platform received, in part to help people dream up and create a more inclusive way of connecting that prioritizes the needs of the most marginalized.”

Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over. “In 2015, Google hatched a plan to save the mobile web by effectively taking it over. And for a while, the media industry had practically no choice but to play along.”

The UX Research Reckoning is Here. “It’s not just the economic crisis. The UX Research discipline of the last 15 years is dying. The reckoning is here. The discipline can still survive and thrive, but we’d better adapt, and quick.”

The web's most important decision. “But also, and this is important to mention, they believed in the web and in Berners-Lee. The folks making these decisions understood its potential and wanted the web to flourish. This wasn’t a decision driven by profit. It was a generous and enthusiastic vote of confidence in the global ambitions of the web.”

Blue skies over Mastodon. “One of big things I’ve come to believe in my couple of decades working on internet stuff is that great product design is always holistic: Always working in relation to a whole system of interconnected parts, never concerned only with atomic decisions. And this perspective just straight-up cannot emerge from a piecemeal, GitHub-issues approach to fixing problems. This is the main reason it’s vanishingly rare to see good product design in open source.”

I’m soliciting prompts for discussion. This piece is a part of that series.

Erlend Sogge Heggen asks:

There’s legitimate reason to be worried about Meta’s P92 project being part of a EEE play against the fediverse.

How might the fediverse community counteract this, perhaps with its own EEE strategy?

We know Meta will attempt an EEE play, but what if we play the reverse UNO card and EE(E) them instead?

Embrace: Carefully federate in a minimum-viable fashion that doesn’t overrun the existing #fediverse.

Extend: Make #NomadicIdentity a reality, so accounts can be moved effortlessly.

Extinguish: In case of misconduct, defederate and provide mass-migration assistance.

First, some quick definitions!

P92 is the codename for Meta / Facebook’s new app that will support the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon and its cousins. Users will be able to log in with their Instagram credentials, and one can potentially (but not definitely) imagine it being folded into the mainline Instagram app.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was a phrase coined internally inside Microsoft to describe its strategy with respect to the web. The idea was that the company would embrace open protocols, extend them with its own proprietary extensions, and then use its control over those extensions to extinguish competition. In particular, its plan was to do this with HTML in order to cement Internet Explorer as the web browser.

Finally, the fediverse, of course, is the community of small, independently-owned, largely non-profit social networks that interoperate using shared protocols, on which Mastodon is the largest platform.

There is legitimate concern that a company like Meta might attempt to control the fediverse. This is particularly true if they are allowed to create a uni-polar world: one where Meta is the only large company embracing these standards. In that world, Meta can throw hundreds of millions of users at the protocol, and it will instantly become its largest user.

I think it’s helpful to look at how Microsoft’s EEE strategy failed. There were arguably two main factors: antitrust risk and competition.

The Department of Justice sued Microsoft for monopolistic business practices, ultimately leading to a settlement where Microsoft capitulated to changing some of its approach in return for the DOJ dropping its desire to break up the company. It’s not clear to me that this kind of case would or could take place with respect to Meta extinguishing the fediverse; while I’m not a lawyer, I think the argument would probably be that many other social networks are available.

The other thing that hurt Microsoft’s dominance was Firefox. It was a good browser backed by a good community, but that wasn’t the deciding factor; Firefox gained market share because Google pushed it at every possible opportunity. Because Internet Explorer’s dominance was a business risk to Google, and because Firefox was built by a non-profit that was non-competitive with Google’s business, it made financial sense to try and break Microsoft’s stranglehold. Mozilla’s model was stronger than its predecessor Netscape’s had been: whereas Netscape needed to sell licenses, Mozilla’s deal with Google meant it made money every time someone used Firefox to search for something on the web. There was almost no friction to its growth strategy.

This activity led to a resurgence in a healthy ecosystem of standards-based web browsers for years — until Google decided to re-use the technique it had used on Firefox to push its own web browser. Even then, Chrome is a far better standards player than Internet Explorer ever was.

There won’t be hard evidence that Meta is adopting ActivityPub until we see its app in the wild. But if it is, that likely means that it sees the protocol as at least worth experimenting with, and maybe even as a potential threat. That’s a sign of great progress, and everyone involved in building the fediverse should feel good about it.

If Meta wants to own the fediverse, this isn’t a battle that will be primarily won with features or technology. Easy-to-use platforms, nomadic identity that easily lets you move your presence from one provider to another, and assistance will all be essential, but they’ll be table stakes. (If Meta is working on the platform today, it’s probably also too late for truly nomadic identity to make a difference.) To really stand a chance, the fediverse will need the kind of marketing and go-to-market support that Firefox enjoyed back in the day. Which may mean support from another large player that considers Meta’s ownership of the standard to be an existential risk.

It’s hard to see who that might be. Twitter is now the incompetence wing of the incompetence party. It’s highly unlikely that networks like Pinterest care. Microsoft’s platforms are tightly bound to its ecosystem, with access control at their core; I don’t see LinkedIn joining the fediverse any time soon. Google has fallen on its face every time it’s tried to build a social network, and runs YouTube as a separate entity that strongly benefits from closed ads. Salesforce might consider it a risk, as it provides social tools for businesses, which are easier to build and sell on an open social networking standard. Some of these entities might consider the fediverse to be worth exploring — but there’s no clear technology backer. Cloudflare actually did provide its own Mastodon-compatible platform that runs on its CDN, but it hasn’t seen anything like wide use. Medium has embraced Mastodon but has not deeply built support into its existing platform.

Perhaps media companies, who generally live and die on the size of their audiences, and have often been beholden to the large social networks, might find themselves interested in embracing a social networking federation where they have more say and control. The rise of the fediverse certainly is a de-risking of their business models. But I don’t think they see it yet; nor do I think they consider it their place to pick a winner. (Nor should it be, really, in practice.)

Perhaps there can be another kind of backer: an entity that sees the existential thread centralized control of social media poses to democracy itself. We’ve already seen how, left unchecked, centralized companies like Facebook incite genocides and throw elections. The fediverse can be an antidote to these trends — if we see it as a set of collaborating communities rather than simply the technology alone. The erosion of democracy, like monopolistic abuse of power, are human problems with human solutions rather than technological ones. Foundations and philanthropists may choose to provide this level of support, if they continue to see Meta as a threat to democracy.

Building features will not protect the fediverse from being extinguished, although they may provide a useful baseline. It’s going to take a whole different level of strategy, relationship-building, deal-making, and movement-building. I believe the fediverse is capable of doing this, as long as it doesn’t mistake building software for making true progress.

I think it’s important to understand that what’s happening today in social media is not because decentralization’s time has come: it’s because Twitter’s time has gone.

The core need being expressed by millions of users isn’t “get me a decentralized protocol that nobody owns where I can have my choice of algorithms and apps”. It’s “get me a platform that works consistently, with less abuse”. Sometimes it’s also appended with, “where I can build a following for me / my brand / my employer and measure my progress.”

Now, of course, as product people, we can build that with decentralized tech, which will in turn yield benefits later on as an ecosystem grows around it. And third-party app developers probably do want the assurances of an open platform. But most people do not have a nuanced view on how social media is built or how it should be governed. They know what they want for themselves.

“We’ve built the infrastructure for nuanced moderation” is not an adequate answer to people who are suffering, or who are prone to suffer, abuse. “We are making sure you have a safe space to be social” is the only answer for them. If those measures happen to work as part of a nuanced decentralized protocol, great. But either way, it’s got to happen, and it’s got to be at least as good as it would be on any other social network.

Many of us have been wanting decentralized social networking for a long time — I’ve been a part of these conversations for around twenty years. It’s tempting to feel like people finally get it. But that’s a trap and a mistake. As always, quite rightly, most people want something that works for them. If decentralized tech gets them there better than the alternative (and I think it can!) then there’s a wonderful route forward for everyone. But decentralization is not the goal. The goal is always a human experience for people who do not and should not care how the sausage gets made.

I’m soliciting prompts for discussion. This piece is a part of that series.

Hunter Walk asks, in two prompts:

What's one business model you wish consumers would get more comfortable with because it would be a net-positive for media/news/society? And similarly, what's one business model you wish media/news organization would spend more time figuring out because it would be net-positive for society?

Should America have more BBC-like funded news media? Is capitalism, democracy and stability in media just fundamentally incompatible for the US?

I’ve conflated these into one piece because I think these are interrelated questions that need to be considered together. How can news organizations find sustainability while keeping the voting public well-informed and retaining their editorial independence?

Let’s begin with the BBC, which is often held up as a model for both newsroom operations and revenue.

The BBC, of course, has traditionally been predominantly broadcast news: a term that will eventually fade from relevance as broadcast television and radio are replaced by the internet over the next decade. It was funded through the UK’s broadcast receiver tax 119 years ago, originally created for radio; as televisions also used broadcast receivers, it was expanded to that equipment when TV came online in 1936. The license fee is essentially a regressive tax which now charges households £159 (roughly $200) a year for the right to use at least one broadcast receiver.

There is no equivalent internet connection tax. Instead, assuming that a household doesn’t own a broadcast receiver, they must continue to pay the license fee if they watch or listen to any kind of live television — for example, on the BBC’s iPlayer service, on YouTube, and so on, regardless of the device they watch it on. This revenue goes to pay for the BBC’s domestic activities in the UK, while its international activities are supported by advertising and traditional licensing through BBC Worldwide, a private corporation set up to drive revenue for the public corporation.

There’s a lesser-known second public broadcaster in the UK: Channel 4 is publicly-owned but makes its revenue through commercial means. It is banned from making its own shows, and must instead re-invest its revenue into distinctive programming as a way to stimulate the creative sector in the UK. Its news program, Channel 4 News, produced by the fully-private news agency ITN, is anecdotally at least as good as the BBC’s: it doggedly broke a number of political scandals in the UK as well as the Cambridge Analytica story. (Overall, the BBC’s coverage is undeniably more expansive, across many broadcast and digital channels.)

Both entities are theoretically independent, but have experienced a fair amount of political interference over the last few years. The BBC has been a political football at the hands of the Conservative Party, which has often felt it has been too critical of its policies. Channel 4 was set to be fully-privatized by that same government, but those plans were abandoned at the beginning of this year.

In the US, the closest analogy is the Corporation for Public Broadasting, a non-profit which receives money from Congress every year and whose board is appointed by the President of the United States. It is legally required to maintain “objectivity and balance”. In turn, the CPB funds stations affiliated with NPR (a national radio non-profit) and PBS (its television equivalent) through both content grants and community service grants. In both cases, the rest of the funding is derived from donations from individuals and private foundations.

The CPB, too, has been a political football. During the most recent war in Iraq, its leadership decided that coverage was too liberal; in response, PBS aired a show headlined by Tucker Carlson for a year. That particular chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been appointed by George W Bush, was eventually forced to step down after he was found to be directly interfering with programming.

The CPB has limits. There are many non-profit newsrooms in the US that aren’t affiliated with PBS or NPR and don’t broadcast in the traditional sense. These are typically funded through a combination of foundations, gifts from high net worth individuals, and small donations from ordinary people, in reverse order of prominence.

In these cases, one source can’t exist without the others: although foundations or high net worth individuals could hold up a newsroom on their own, that newsroom would then effectively be in their pocket (or at least, they would be perceived to be). By soliciting a range of donations from different sources, non-profits can help ensure their independence both effectively and reputationally. Short of an Act of Congress, the more a newsroom is dependent on a single source of funding, the more it is likely to bend to that source’s will. To future-proof its existence — and secure a reputation for independence — a non-profit newsroom must have diversity in funding.

At the same time, public organizations like the CPB, private foundations, and mandated public-private broadcasters like the BBC are vital to maintaining a thriving news ecosystem. Consider a hypothetical newsroom serving a low-income population in what would otherwise be a news desert. In a community where people are having trouble putting food on the table, there are unlikely to be enough individual donations to a newsroom to keep the lights on. On the other hand, we know that in communities without local newsrooms, voter participation decreases and corruption increases, potentially degrading quality of life in that community even further. Corruption in one area can also lead to corruption in others, creating a larger risk to democracy overall. While this hypothetical community might not present a great profit opportunity and may not be able to financially support a newsroom in its own right, ensuring it has coverage is not unimportant.

Meanwhile, for-profit news is lagging. Buzzfeed just shut down its newsroom; well-funded newcomer The Messenger is shaping up to be the Quibi of news; once-valuable properties like Vice are filing for bankruptcy; cable news networks are beginning to look like they will say or do anything to maintain ratings. One growing trend is for for-profit news sites to either convert into non-profits or adopt non-profit business models like philanthropy. In turn, VC funding for news startups is tanking: the odds of a news startup providing the kinds of financial returns that venture capitalists need to see are vanishingly small. Experiments like the blockchain-based Civil were failures bordering on scams. And the advertising industry, at least in the US, is falling off a cliff.

I don’t think American capitalism itself is incompatible with a functioning news ecosystem. There are thousands of domestic newsrooms that, while not necessarily thriving, are at least sustaining. Revenue and audiences overall are growing. But virtually all of the newsrooms I’m talking about are non-profits. While there are outliers — The New York Times is potentially one — for-profit news has generally fared disastrously. Physical newspapers and magazines continue to die, losing 50% of their revenue over the last two decades. Even where digital outlets are not dependent on ads, paywalls prevent most people from consuming their journalism, eroding their mission to begin with — and for most outlets aren’t even that effective at generating revenue. And micropayments are science fiction at best.

There’s been a boom in non-profit local and niche news startups: around 40% of Institute for Nonprofit News members were founded after 2017, and 60% after 2012. Most of this growth has been in local media, where revenue increased by 25% last year, albeit unevenly (remember my hypothetical news desert above). INN attributes some of this to the American Journalism Project, which seems to have had a positive role in stimulating local newsroom growth since it was founded in 2019. Across the non-profit sector, the median growth in revenue for non-profit news outlets was 25% over 4 years. 40-60% of total revenue was from foundations, 30-40% from individual giving, and the last 10% or so from earned revenue sources like advertising.

This giving-based model isn’t actually limited to non-profits, although many foundations will only award grants to non-profit entities. The Lenfest Institute acts as a non-profit arm for for-profit newspapers in Philadelphia. The Guardian is one example of a for-profit newsroom that has made a success of attracting philanthropy, in part by establishing a companion non-profit to attract tax-advantaged donations (not a million miles away from the model Mozilla uses). Even its for-profit arm is held in a trust whose rules dictate that profits must be re-invested into journalism — and has made a great success out of a subscription patronage model that saw recurring donations increase by 87% in three years.

Given all this, how might we ensure a healthy news ecosystem in America?

I think we need to get comfortable with the idea that non-profits do not exist outside of capitalism. At their heart, they’re another kind of corporate entity, with a different set of rules and restrictions.

We also need to get comfortable with the idea that news will be reported by a patchwork of local and niche newsrooms rather than a single branded entity. I’m sure many people will continue to tune into PBS NewsHour, the NBC Nightly News, and Fox, but these will continue to become the equivalent of the Huffington Post, bringing wider attention to other peoples’ reporting — often with a selective bias that has driven erosion in trust in these national institutions for years. Today, the public trusts individual journalists far more than branded newsrooms — a situation that benefits smaller newsrooms that perhaps don’t have brand recognition yet.

I don’t see a world in the near future where the CPB’s remit is expanded to include independent digital newsrooms across the country, although I do wish that we’d get more comfortable with the idea of federal funding, particularly if we accept the idea that journalism is a requirement for a healthy democracy.

Lacking that, I think the 60%/30%/10% model of foundations, individual giving, and earned revenue has shown itself to be relatively robust. For this to work on a larger scale, consumers will need to get comfortable with the idea of paying for news not because access is scarce but because it’s important. Paying to ensure that reporting happens at all — perhaps not even in the place you live — will need to become more normal.

The journalism industry has experimented with lots of different models. At Matter, an accelerator for media startups where I was west coast Director of Investments, we used to precede every demo day with Clay Shirky’s 2009 quote about the declining newspaper industry that “nothing will work, but everything might”. These days, I would say that some things obviously won’t work (venture capital investment in news, for one), and that we shouldn’t seek one prevailing business model for every kind of newsroom. Industry outlets like The Information can make great money from paywalls, for example; local outlets like Mission Local probably wouldn’t.

Nonetheless, I wish the industry would spend time focusing on making individual patronage donations as easy and seamless as possible. How can that 30% become a diversified 80%? There is no dedicated OpenCollective for news: a place where I can find newsrooms to donate to that will also provide non-profit fiscal sponsorship to newsrooms so that smaller outlets don’t need to spend time and money incorporating.

Patronage has been successful for newsrooms despite the software they use to solicit donations, not because of it. Today, if I want to donate to a newsroom, I need to do it on that newsroom’s site, using whatever tool they’ve decided to adopt. If they want to let me manage my subscription in a meaningful way, they often have to build their own member portal. If they want to transparently allow the public to see exactly who has donated, they have to build that functionality themselves. These are organizations that rarely have full-time developers at all; they shouldn’t have to do any of those things. What is shared infrastructure for making patronage as simple as possible across both non-profit and for-profit newsrooms, both for readers and for the newsrooms themselves?

The news isn’t incompatible with American capitalism. But it may be incompatible with 1980s-era models and outdated delivery mechanisms. Newsrooms will need to continue to collaborate and evolve if they are to survive. And we need them to survive more than ever.

I’m going to try something new for the next few weeks. I usually write about the intersection of media, technology, and democracy, often in reaction to new developments or something that’s been in the news.

But I’d love to know what you’re interested in. So here’s the idea: until further notice, I’m taking prompts. For every prompt or question that’s within the scope of this space, I will commit to writing a post in response to it. Consider me your personal analyst - or perhaps, less charitably, your personal ChatGPT - for free. You can submit them here; if you leave your name, I’ll credit you with a link to your personal website.

Some ideas for prompts include:

• What are the biggest genuine risks posed by AI?
• What could save the non-profit news industry?
• How can open source social networks be welcoming places for vulnerable communities?
• If you were founding a startup in 2023, what would you focus on?
• What will be the year of Linux on the desktop?

But I bet you can do better than that.

Send them to me here. Let’s see how this goes.

Small print: links must be to personal websites only; prompts must be in good faith and not promotions; posts will not be revised; I may stop doing this for any reason, for example if this doesn’t work out or if it becomes popular beyond my wildest dreams.

I’ve loved every moment of working with The 19th. I was a supporter before I joined, and I’ll continue to be one afterwards. As well as well-executed journalism at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy, The 19th is a masterclass in building an equitable remote organizational culture that should serve as a model to other newsrooms and startups. (Hopefully, in part thanks to the documentary about it that will be released at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, it will be.) The CTO role is now open, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

So what’s next?

The internet is at a new crossroads. Mainstay services that have been constants for over a decade are ceding space to newcomers that challenge prevailing venture capital business models and offer equitable alternatives. The over-financialization of the web is giving way to co-operatives, collectives, and true decentralization.

This is a movement at the heart of the open web that I care very deeply about. We’re in a very unique moment in time where that movement could succeed, empowering communities everywhere - or it could topple back and be replaced by the same old extractive gatekeepers.

I began my career by building the first website for a local paper in my hometown. I co-founded Elgg, an open source social networking platform that was used by Oxfam to train aid workers as well as universities like Harvard and Stanford. I was a part of the indieweb community, helping people to own their own web presence apart from silos like Facebook - and co-founder of the indieweb platform Known, which powered KQED Teach, a site that won an award from the National Association for Media Literacy. I helped train newsrooms in human-centered design at Matter (where I also invested in mission-driven startups) and taught equitable product design workshops at the Newmark J-School.

I want to use these ideas - human-centered design, open software development, and radical collaboration - in service of the next phase of media and the open web. I want to work with organizations that are similarly motivated, and who have empathetic, inclusive remote work cultures.

What does that look like, exactly? I’m not quite sure yet. It could involve joining an organization or it could involve starting one. It could involve advising many projects or concentrating on one. It will certainly involve lots of experiments.

If this mission resonates with you and you have a Ben-shaped hole in your organization - or if you want to help support these kinds of projects and communities - let’s talk. You can always email me at ben@werd.io.

Thanks for sticking with me. Let’s find out what happens next together.