Werd I/O

My friend Carrie Tian, who works for Mailchimp, wrote aboout how their seasonal reading bingo board inspired her to create one for writing. I really love this: one of my goals for 2021 is to write a great deal more, building on the progress I made this year, and this feels like a great way to push me outside of my comfort zone.

She was kind enough to share a template, so here's mine:

Each of these squares is designed to push me a little bit. Each column has a slightly different theme:

1: Short stories in different styles and genres

2: Non-fiction essays that go a little deeper, sometimes into uncomfortable topics

3: Different media (audio, code, visual arts, multi-part email)

4-5: Novel, with some explorations into style and expression

Like Carrie, I'm doing blackout bingo and attempting to fill every square in 2021. As ever, I'll update this space with my progress.

I vividly remember my first day on the internet. I was sat in my teenage bedroom, staring at a bulky cathode ray tube monitor, which my dad had surrounded with spider plants in order to hopefully absorb some electromagnetic radiation. My 14.4K modem connected - loudly and slowly - to an Internet Service Provider that my mother was testing out as part of her job as a telecommunications analyst. I was already using Bulletin Board Systems and had participated in conversations on FidoNet, but this was something new.

Instead of flashy websites or apps, my first internet experience took place in a black terminal window with monotype text and a maximum width of 80 characters. There were no links, no movies, and no startups. I didn't have a connection resembling broadband, and there was no WiFi. My only guide was a location called Gopher Jewels with a menu of places I could visit.

I visited a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University, thousands of miles away from my bedroom. It told me its temperature and whether I could buy a Coke, and I still remember how it made me felt. It seems mundane, perhaps, today - but in a way, that made it cooler. I wasn't reading a speech by the President of the United States. I was connecting to a Coke machine on another continent, probably in some dusty corridor somewhere. It was like speaking to a hatstand in Antarctica; absolute magic.

Not long afterwards, I downloaded a software application called NCSA Mosaic. It let you browse something called the World Wide Web, which was kind of like Gopher, but easier to use and write content for. A developer called Marc Andreessen had proposed a new extension that allowed you to share and view inline images, which was exciting, and allowed for a new kind of experience: watching a live photo of a coffee machine at Cambridge University. Cambridge was really just down the road, but like the Coke machine, it still felt like magic. I was able to travel through space and time.

The internet wasn't about making money. It was always about sharing knowledge and connecting to people. It had its problems - notably exclusivity of access - but I fell in love with it. It seemed like a glimpse into a beautiful new future, where anyone could connect to anyone and they could collaborate and learn from each other to create new kinds of art, culture, academic work, and scientific endeavor.

The 14 year old version of myself who connected to the early commercial internet was, himself, part of something that older users called the eternal September. Prior to 1993, the internet had been overwhelmingly dominated by universities: every September, new students rolled in, temporarily lowering the quality of discourse until they learned the etiquette of communicating online. Suddenly, commercial internet service providers arrived, and September never came to an end. There was an avalanche of new users (me among them) that just kept coming.

And then some. There were roughly 14 million internet users in 1993; there are around 4.7 billion today.

The growth curve of the internet is S-shaped, as you'd expect. It took a little while to pick up steam, then skyrocketed, before reaching relative saturation. The businesses that were lucky enough to tether themselves to the high-growth middle and could keep with the pace generated billions of dollars in wealth: the Googles and Facebooks of the world were certainly filled with skilled, ambitious people, but they were also in the right place at the right time.

Which is how the internet became about making vast amounts of money. Startups could achieve enormous growth (and VC investment) just by placing a banner ad on the Yahoo homepage; Yahoo, in turn, could raise more money based on its ad growth. Meanwhile, the nature of the internet meant that businesses could grow to monopoly size faster than ever before, egged on by investors like Peter Thiel, who famously argued that competition is for losers.

This wave of unabashed capitalism washed away most of the utopian dreamers, replacing them with the kinds of bro-ey hustlers who would have worked in hedge funds if this had been the 1980s. Worse, their sudden riches came with sudden self-belief, as if the ability to make money building a website during a period of unprecedented growth somehow unlocked the secrets of the universe.

I'm not blameless: I've benefitted from this gold rush. I started my career working for universities, but Elgg, my first startup, raised a fairly modest half a million dollars after its first few, bootstrapped years. My salary at every subsequent job has been paid for, at least in part, by investor dollars. It's not, I feel compelled to point out, that investors are inherently bad: they empower a ton of really useful websites and communities to exist. It's that the Wall Street startup bros who swarm around them are no fun at all to be around, and that the investor-powered web shouldn't be the whole internet.

I very badly want to return to that utopian sensibility: that something doesn't have to make money to have value. That doesn't mean I want to go back in time: the early internet was a predominantly white, male, wealthy platform that people mostly accessed by having been admitted to an elitist institution. I want an egalitarian internet: not just one where all voices can be heard, but where everyone can help to build the fabric of the platform. The true joy of the internet is that everyone builds it together. It has very little to do with engaging with someone's ad-powered social media website.

I've come to realize that I resent the expectation that everything I make has to be profitable. Sometimes, I just want to make: one of the coolest things about software, as with writing or art, is the way you can whip something up out of nothing. I want to see what other people make too, for no other reason that it's what moves them. It's not the revenue or the valuations that make the internet special; nor is it the protocols and technologies, at least not in themselves. It's the connections and the communities. The internet is people. The internet has always been people.

I can't exactly opt out of the commercial internet: I'm far from independently wealthy and need to earn money. Nor do I exactly want to. But I do want to remember that what excites me about the internet is the quirky creativity and connectedness of the diversity of human experience. It's about empowering people to connect and to be found, in a way that transcends the superficial. And it's about reclaiming the sense of magic I felt decades ago, when a magical vending machine in a dusty corridor changed my life forever.

I hope to maintain three streaks and turn them into habits:

Exercise every day. No exceptions, unless I'm really sick. I've done more regular exercise over the last year than I'd managed since I moved to California, but I'd like to make it more regular, for the good of my own health.

Write every day. It doesn't have to be a complete story or a full-length essay, but I need to get something down that I'd be willing to share on something other than social media. This doesn't explicitly mean I want to post to my website every day, but I'd like to try to do that, too.

Practice thankfulness. I want to find three things I'm grateful for before I go to sleep every night. Gratitude is important, but more than anything, it's about training myself to find small joys and call them out.

And one overarching theme:

Lose the rat race. I'm not here to hustle, gain followers, be a thought leader, build wealth, work myself to death, or rise to the top of the career ladder. I want to explore ideas, tinker with stuff, reflect, make bad art, and be human. In 2021 you'll probably see more eclectic stuff in this space as a result. Sorry / not sorry.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for November.

Books

Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. A sobering, intelligent take on America's unspoken caste system, comparing it to similar systems around the world. For me, the history of how the Nazis looked to America's treatment of its Black population was particularly shocking.

Streaming

The Undoing. You know, I was skeptical, but it worked out well. It's somewhere between absolutely trash TV and a gripping thriller. And I like creepy Hugh Grant way more than I like apparently-charming Hugh Grant.

The Flight Attendant. Fresh off The Big Bang Theory, which I consider to be easily the worst television show ever made, Kaley Cuoco redeems herself in this pulpy, funny, unsettling thriller. It reminded me a bit of Run. Definitely a guilty pleasure watch - but that's kind of what I needed.

Save Yourselves! I felt personally attacked. But this hipsters-are-oblivious-of-an-alien-invasion movie is more of a roast than a takedown, and is absolutely hilarious. Recommended.

Notable Articles

Business

Justice Department Files Antitrust Lawsuit Challenging Visa’s Planned Acquisition of Plaid. “Visa’s con­cerns about Plaid un­der­pinned its de­ci­sion to buy the com­pany and pay a large rev­enue mul­ti­ple for it, the law­suit al­leges. The gov­ern­ment said Visa’s CEO de­scribed the deal as an “in­sur­ance pol­icy” to neu­tral­ize a threat to the com­pa­ny’s debit busi­ness. The law­suit quoted an­other ex­ec­u­tive who in 2019 com­pared Plaid to an is­land “vol­cano” whose cur­rent ca­pa­bil­i­ties are just “the tip show­ing above the wa­ter” and warned that “[w]hat lies be­neath, though, is a mas­sive op­por­tu­nity—one that threat­ens Visa.””

Unexpected & Inevitable. “The investor hears it and at first they don’t believe you. “Nah,” they say, as they start to argue with you whether that’s the way the world really works. Then, after a beat or two, they go, “wait, you’re right.” And after another moment, they think “fuck, that’s the only way it can be.”” I agree with Eric: this is what investors are looking for. You have an insight about the world that most people don’t, and you’re uniquely equipped to capitalize on it.

Spotify to acquire Megaphone. Megaphone is the network formerly known as Panoply. Spotify seems to be single-handedly creating value in the podcast market right now, but Apple has been quietly making acquisitions - like to keep its own ecosystem competitive.

Apple’s Shifting Differentiation. I found this exploration of Apple’s chip strategy to be really interesting. “Instead the future is web apps, with all of the performance hurdles they entail, which is why, from Apple’s perspective, the A-series is arriving just in time. Figma in Electron may destroy your battery, but that destruction will take twice as long, if not more, with an A-series chip inside!”

Women-owned businesses are struggling. Stimulus could help.. "Women and people of color were shut out of much of the initial rounds of stimulus because the program was set up to work through commercial banks. Those who didn’t have an existing relationship with a commercial bank found it harder to access the funds. And because the money ran out quickly, it left many without a lifeline."

The Double Standard of Female CEOs Moving Fast and Breaking Things. “We hold our female CEOs to impossible standards while not holding their male counterparts to high enough ones.”

The privacy fight is heading to the office. “I don't think Americans believe in privacy universally. And it's not a constitutional right. It's like, we have a right to free speech, we have a right to bear arms, we don't have a right to privacy in our federal constitution.”

Google Pay relaunch transforms it into a full-fledged financial service. Of note: “Google has co-branded banking accounts coming up in 2021. The new service, called Plex, essentially allows banks to partner with Google and use Google Pay as their own direct banking app.”

How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism. "Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after another—hoping that its gamble would pay off before disaster struck." VCs are upset about this article, but honestly, to me, it rings true.

Secret Amazon Reports Expose Company Spying on Labor, Environmental Groups. "Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements." Gross.

Hulu raises Live TV price to $65, matching YouTube TV’s latest price hike. Here’s what I can’t fathom: why people tolerate cable TV at all. Every time I dive into it, I regret it. It’s a morass of shitty ads and low-quality programs that shout at you.

Unilever NZ’s 1-year trial of a 4-day week. I'm very into this.

Culture

The Shape of a Story. A beautiful exploration of narrative plot, Moomins, allegory, and the purpose of story in navigating real-world challenges.

Zillow Surfing Is the Escape We All Need Right Now. Is it? Or is it another form of doomscrolling, searching for places we could never afford in aspiration of an unreachable life we were told we could have? Hey, I'm just asking questions here.

As ‘Doonesbury’ turns 50, Garry Trudeau picks his 10 defining strips. Doonesbury is by far the best syndicated cartoon strip. I'm a lifetime fan. I met Trudeau once, at the Edinburgh Book Festival; we talked about Asterix. Lovely man.

Who’s in the Crossword? I loved this: a data-driven exploration of representation in crossword clues, with insight into how they’re produced.

Media

Confusion at BBC as boss says staff can attend Pride marches after all. “He told staff on Friday morning they would still be allowed to attend LGBT Pride marches, providing they remained celebratory and individuals were not seen to be taking a stand on any “politicised or contested issues”.” This is a ridiculous stance.

Google funds mouthpiece of Rwandan regime. “The worst case scenario for the NGO representative, however, is that „Google is signalling that it is funding repression and supports the muzzling of free speech, the closing of political space in Rwanda and attacks on political opponents and human rights defenders.“”

Travel influencers are being paid to whitewash authoritarian regimes. “Uncritically spreading political propaganda is unethical under all circumstances and especially in the form of branded content, where the lines are very blurry, and the audience might therefore not recognize it as such.”

How a crop of startups are trying to make for-profit local news work. "Evan Smith, the CEO of the Texas Tribune, said that when launching the local politics driven news site more than a decade ago, “We decided that for-profit was a non starter and that the market had failed.”"

News publishers dial up the marketing heat on their subscription products. Subscriptions are far better than advertising as a support mechanism. And news sustainability is deeply important.

Yes, Product Thinking Can Save Journalism. Six Reasons Why News Media Need Product Thinkers. "Knight Lab’s series on product thinking in media started with a question: “Journalism Has Been Disrupted. Can Product Thinking Save It?” After more than 25 years in digital publishing -- and as the editor for the series -- I think the answer is “Yes.”"

Politics

How a C.I.A. Coverup Targeted a Whistle-blower. “The C.I.A. has corrupted F.B.I. agents to violate basic rules as to how the Department of Justice does criminal prosecutions.”

Uber and Lyft had an edge in the Prop 22 fight: their apps. “In the weeks leading up to Election Day, the companies used their respective apps to bombard riders and drivers with messages urging them to vote for Prop 22, the ballot measure.” Let’s please make this illegal.

Evidence suggests several state Senate candidates were plants funded by dark money. Just one of a litany of dirty tricks used in this election.

I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now. “Ha ha ha, they lede, who’s going to tell him? Bitch, who’s going to tell you? An illegitimate leader has got all the guns and 40% of your population is down to use them. And y’all got jokes.”

We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.. Smart suggestions for improving trust in our elections (undercutting the kind of FUD we’ve seen this month).

Trump races to weaken environmental and worker protections before January 20. Actively ghoulish.

Society

Why is Covid-19 is killing more men than women in middle age? Scientists are looking for answers not only in underlying health risks but also in biological and external factors. “Over­all, how­ever, men make up about 54% of U.S. deaths, and a sig­nif­i­cantly higher por­tion in mid­dle age. The death-cer­tifi­cate data through late Oc­to­ber show men make up nearly 66% of more than 42,000 Covid-19 deaths oc­cur­ring among peo­ple be­tween their mid-30s and mid-60s.”

Americans, Stop Being Ashamed of Weakness. "Too often in America, we are ashamed of being weak, vulnerable, dependent. We tend to hide our shame. We stay away. We isolate ourselves, rather than show our weakness."

Kamala Harris will be the first HBCU grad in the White House. “It’s not just about her being a Black woman. It’s about her being more than that, the intersectionality of who she is.”

Living With a QAnon Family as the Prophecy Crashes Down. “They’re treating it like there’s going to be an apocalypse — no matter who wins.”

Florida passes $15 minimum wage, a hike that could narrow the gender pay gap. Two important facts here: if a higher minimum wage can be passed in Florida, it can be passed just about anywhere. And it will disproportionately help women and people of color.

The new normal: Women and LGBTQ+ people are buying guns in 2020. “Although there is no official demographic breakdown of gun sales by race or gender, interviews with the gun community — new owners, sales people, analysts and activists — reveal a mounting anxiety among women and LGBTQ+ people, particularly those of color. And some are choosing to arm themselves for the first time.”

Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?. “The short summary of what I will discuss below is that Americans suffer higher death rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare mean Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.”

Performative philanthropy and the cost of silence. "Days after joining the Criminal Justice Reform department, I was warned by a senior member of the team that I should avoid pushing for grantmaking strategies that centered racial equity, as Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan did not believe race was relevant to the issue of mass incarceration. I was told that previous attempts to educate the couple on this matter had contributed to a former employee being terminated."

Less screen time and more sleep critical for preventing depression. "A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of data from the UK Biobank, involving almost 85,000 people, has found that lifestyle factors such as less screen time, adequate sleep, a better-quality diet, and physical activity strongly impact depression." Also, water is wet.

Federal government to execute first woman since 1953. It was a heinous crime, but the death penalty is a disgusting, brutal practice that is not befitting of a supposed democracy.

A dinner party killed my Dad. Please stay safe this Thanksgiving.

AMA: Racism is a threat to public health. “The AMA recognizes that racism negatively impacts and exacerbates health inequities among historically marginalized communities. Without systemic and structural-level change, health inequities will continue to exist, and the overall health of the nation will suffer.”

Period poverty: Scotland first in world to make period products free. I miss living in a progressive nation.

Technology

I became an unwanted woman in tech.“There is something innately different now about my words. They’ve not changed, but their context has entirely shifted. It’s as though I walk around now with a badge that invites dismissal and disrespect. That badge is called womanhood.”

Roam: My New Favorite Software Product. I have a Roam account but I haven’t made it work for me yet. Articles like this make me want to try harder to get on the bandwagon.

A new way to plug a human brain into a computer: Via veins. Do not want. (But future iterations might be more interesting / palatable.)

DHS Buying Cellphone Geolocation Data To Track People. "The Department of Homeland Security is purchasing consumer cellphone data that allows authorities to track immigrants trying to cross the southern border, which privacy advocates say could lead to a vast “surveillance partnership” between the government and private corporations." Hands up if you're surprised.

User Stories Not Wireframes. "User stories provide the context of what a wireframe is for. When you give user stories to a developer, you greatly increase the chances they will be thoughtful about the product and features they are implementing. When they understand the bigger picture — who is this for, what are they trying to accomplish and why are they trying to accomplish it — they can take ownership over the project."

Product Hunt requirements document. A wonderfully concise example of what a good requirements document can look like.

HP ends its customers' lives. There's a reason why the free software movement started with printer drivers. It's mind-boggling to me how HP can continue to be so antagonistic to their customers. (Inkjet printers are the worst deal in technology.)

What using AT&T’s 768kbps DSL is like in 2020—yes, it’s awful. A reminder that if you’re serving all of America, you can’t assume a high-quality broadband connection.

Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro. I’m waiting for version 2, but this is super cool.

Your Computer Isn't Yours. "This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city."

Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at Facebook, Twitter. Bleuch.

How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet. I’m not a gamer, so I was late to Discord. But it does feel like part of the future of online communities.

The iOS COVID-19 app ecosystem has become a privacy minefield. “It's hard to justify why a lot of these apps would need your constant location, your microphone, your photo library.” Relatively few of these apps use the comparatively privacy-protecting APIs developed by Apple and Google.

How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps. “A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people's personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.” This is spectacularly not okay.

We Need Mandatory Enduser APIs for Social and Search Systems. This is an older piece (from 2018) but it still holds up, and I agree with it completely.

As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever. It feels like this problem has been solved lots of times over on the internet - but it's both a huge problem and a real opportunity for the right startup.

How a young, queer Asian-American businesswoman is rethinking user safety at Twitter. “Su's goals sit at the heart of what could become a very different Twitter one day, if — and it remains a very big conditional — the company is serious about the changes it's been signaling over the last year.” Fingers crossed.

Rock-star programmer: Rivers Cuomo finds meaning in coding. The only time "rock star programmer" is an acceptable phrase.

The Secrets of Monkey Island's Source Code. A deep look into assets and code behind my favorite game of all time.

‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase. “One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees.”

Building your own website is cool again, and it's changing the whole internet. All hail the indieweb. I’m here for it.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for October.

This month I've changed my process a little: I save my links to a Notion database, export them at the end of the month, and convert them into a blog post using a small script. Instead of taking a couple of hours at the end of the month to put the post together, I save my thoughts on each link as I read it, and collation at the end (in iA Writer) takes much less time.

Streaming

The Queen's Gambit. A beautifully written, impeccably acted drama with gorgeous cinematography and superb attention to detail. I'm still working through it, but I can't recommend it enough.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. It's been pretty controversial, and it's often in hugely bad taste, but I found the broad humor at the expense of American bigotry to be cathartic. And yes, "that" Giuliani scene is everything it's been reported to be.

Seven Seconds. This new-to-me police drama based on a Russian movie is really well done: a story about police corruption and how our criminal justice system fails the people who need it the most.

Ted Lasso. Sure, it's ostensibly about sports, which isn't usually my thing. But it's also a really optimistic, funny comedy that mines a lot of humor from the cultural differences between the US and UK, which is really my thing. Very occasionally it goes broader than it needs to, particularly in its first few minutes, but there's something here for everyone.

Notable Articles

Business

How we built a $1m ARR SaaS startup. I’m always interested to read peoples’ journeys. This one is very clearly written, with lots to think about.

The end of the American internet. “80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA, there are more smartphone users in China than in the USA and western Europe combined, and the creation of venture-based startups has gone global.” This is a broadly good thing: the internet was always American-led, for better or for worse. As the platforms that dominate it become more internationally-based, it becomes less of a monoculture.

Why the Survival of the Airlines Depends on Frequent Flyer Programs. “The Financial Times pegs the value of Delta’s loyalty program at a whopping $26 billion, American Airlines at $24 billion, and United at $20 billion. All of these valuations are comfortably above the market capitalization of the airlines themselves — Delta is worth $19 billion, American $6 billion, and United $10 billion. In other words, if you take away the loyalty program, Delta’s real-world airline operation — with hundreds of planes, a world-beating maintenance operation, landing rights, brand recognition, and experienced executives — is worth roughly negative $7 billion.”

Facebook Just Forced Its Most Powerful Critics Offline. “The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the group’s website — realfacebookoversight.org — be taken offline.” Ridiculously petty.

How Clubhouse brought the culture war to Silicon Valley’s venture capital community. "I am convinced that most people in the tech world do not understand the role of a free media in a liberal society."

San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S. During Covid. “One-bedroom rents in San Francisco fell 24% and two-bedrooms were down 21%, to $2,873 and $3,931 a month, respectively.” Still way too high.

How to Stay Sane While Working at Home. “Staying happy, healthy and productive requires effort when you’re working at home. This essay provides five suggestions for keeping things on an even keel.”

The warmth/competence matrix for women, from the West Wing to the workplace. "The warmth / competence matrix is a useful tool to optimize a leader’s influence in the workplace, especially during a crisis." I found this to be a fascinating insight into how women are stereotyped and held back at work.

U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly. “The Justice Department accused Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation.” The most significant lawsuit in the tech industry since Microsoft’s own antitrust suit. Whatever happens here, it will remake the internet industry forever.

Surveillance Startup Used Own Cameras to Harass Coworkers. "The big picture for me having worked at the company is that it has opened my eyes to how surveillance can be abused by the people in power."

Reviewing Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. “Competition driven by quality reflects what antitrust and net neutrality advocates want competition to look like — i.e. the better product wins, instead of whomever owns the pipes (or the channels). But that doesn’t mean it is what competition actually does look like, even on the internet.”

Culture

Correction by Hal Maclean. We regret the error.

Work, Float, Eat, Dream: Life on the International Space Station. “You need to become an extraterrestrial person.” First-hand descriptions of what it’s like to live on the ISS. What an adventure.

A Book Of Beasts – an accumulation of things. A very sweet modern bestiary.

Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts. “Remembering her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia.”

Inside Creative Growth, the Always Inspiring Oakland-Based Incubator For Artists With Disabilities. My friend Madelyn works at Creative Growth. As well as the insightful New Yorker profile, it’s fun to see examples of the art made there. This organization is a gem, and we need more like it.

How a Revered Studio for Artists with Disabilities Is Surviving at a Distance. “As their artists endure month after month of quarantine, Creative Growth faces an extreme version of the dilemmas that other arts organizations and educational institutions have struggled with during the pandemic: if your purpose is to foster the ideal conditions for learning and making things together, how do you proceed when those conditions are suddenly impossible?”

The return of Spitting Image shows how toothless British satire has become. When I was growing up, Spitting Image was an important part of the social landscape. The satire was biting. This modern reboot sounds rubbish. In life and comedy, the rule is: always punch up.

His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them. "Doctorow says that the intention of Attack Surface wasn’t to swing in the other direction on the spectrum between “nerd triumphalism” and “nerd despair,” as he puts it. Instead, it’s to find a more nuanced middle ground, one that acknowledges that technology can win some battles, but that others must be won with human willpower and political struggle, sometimes with the aim of controlling technology’s most dangerous applications."

Noelle Stevenson Shares Her Coming Out Story in an Original Comic. This is completely lovely on every level.

Easily Diminished at the Edges by Amanda Hollander. “Fay had expected many different emotions in the wake of the aliens arriving, but she had not anticipated the ennui.”

Shonda Rhimes Is Ready to "Own Her S***": The Game-Changing Showrunner on Leaving ABC, "Culture Shock" at Netflix and Overcoming Her Fears. “Shonda Rhimes was tired of the battles. She was producing some 70 hours of annual television in 256 territories; she was making tens of millions of dollars for herself and more than $2 billion for Disney, and still there were battles with ABC. They'd push, she'd push back. Over budget. Over content. Over an ad she and the stars of her series — Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder — made for then-presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.” A fascinating portrait of an inspiring creator.

About Face. A remarkable graphic essay about authoritarian cultural signifiers, conformity, and an alarming breakdown in American society.

WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars. The film that got me - and so many other people - into computing. It’s a fundamentally ethical, anti nuclear war film.

The NYT Best-Seller List Has an Awful Lot of Right-Wing Trump-Loving Conservative Authors. ... and they’re buying their way there. This is a bigger problem than political books, but it’s clear that conservative authors in particular are purchasing legitimacy.

Media

UK gov report links local newspaper circulation and voter turnout: Absence of journalism in some areas potentially 'catastrophic'. "Government -backed research has found that for every percentage point growth in a local daily newspaper’s circulation, electoral turnout on its patch goes up by 0.37 percentage points."

James Murdoch: Rebellious Scion. “A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact.”

Kat Downs Mulder named managing editor/digital of The Washington Post. It’s exciting to see a product leader take on this kind of role in media.

The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation. “Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies.”

Facebook Stymied Traffic to Left-Leaning News Outlets. “Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein expressed frustration with Facebook in a Twitter thread Friday, explaining that the loss of traffic had “real effects” on the organization. Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue, and couldn’t fill positions or pursue certain projects as a result, she said.” No single company should ever have this kind of power.

Climate news Trump can use. “The vast majority of news stories published about Biden’s climate plan since Thursday’s presidential debate have adopted the Trump campaign’s framing of the conflict. They focus solely on Trump’s attacks on Biden’s climate plan, and ignore the fact that Trump doesn’t have a climate plan at all.” Infuriating when so much is at stake.

Politics

‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes. “Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.” Seems like a normal thing that definitely happens in a democratic society.

Is America in Decline?. A fascinating discussion between J. Bradford DeLong and Om Malik on Pairagraph, which seems like an interesting platform for intellectual debates.

The Swamp That Trump Built. “An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.”

Don’t know any COVID-19 patients who’ve died or been in the hospital? That may explain a lot. “Other research suggests that a failure to embrace COVID-19 restrictions may be fueled by a lack of empathy, in the same way that someone in rural Pennsylvania may not view urban gun violence as an urgent problem, or that those without military family members may give less thought to the ongoing toll of combat.”

As Trump Flouts Safety Protocols, News Outlets Balk at Close Coverage. “Among the concerns raised by reporters: Many flight attendants and Secret Service agents on Air Force One have not worn masks; White House aides who tested positive for the coronavirus, or were potentially exposed, are returning to work before the end of a two-week quarantine; and the campaign has instituted few restrictions at the raucous rallies that Mr. Trump is now pledging to hold on a regular basis until Election Day.”

Inside the Fall of the CDC. “How the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus.”

HHS halts a taxpayer-funded advertising effort that aimed to ‘defeat despair, inspire hope’ on the pandemic by using Santa and celebrities like Dennis Quaid. The single most insane scandal of the Trump administration. I can’t stop laughing about it. Don’t miss the audio.

Judge cites Trump tweets in restricting feds at protests. “A federal judge found Friday that tweets by President Donald Trump helped incite improper conduct by federal officers responding to racial justice demonstrations in Portland, Oregon.” Finally.

Biden Camp Cancels Austin, Texas Event After Pro-Trump ‘Ambush’ on Campaign Bus. ““We’ve got you now,” the man shouted. “You’re going to vote for Trump whether you like it or not, you’ve got no choice.”” This whole account is genuinely frightening, not just in itself, but for the implications.

Society

Stay-at-home orders cut noise exposure nearly in half. “People’s exposure to environmental noise dropped nearly in half during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to University of Michigan researchers who analyzed data from the Apple Hearing Study.”

How Teens Handled Quarantine. “The percentage of teens who were depressed or lonely was actually lower in 2020 than in 2018, and the percentage who were unhappy or dissatisfied with life was only slightly higher.” It turns out that making kids go to school at ungodly hours has a negative effect. Who knew?

8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up. “The number of poor people has grown by eight million since May, according to researchers at Columbia University, after falling by four million at the pandemic’s start as a result of a $2 trillion emergency package known as the Cares Act.”

Megan Thee Stallion: Why I Speak Up for Black Women. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Black girls weren’t inundated with negative, sexist comments about Black women? If they were told instead of the many important things that we’ve achieved?”

Exam Surveillance Tools Monitor, Record Students During Tests. “On one occasion, I was ‘flagged’ for movement and obscuring my eyes. I have trichotillomania triggered by my anxiety, which is why my hand was near my face. Explaining this to my professor was nightmarish.” It’s absurd that students are so afraid that they’re not using their real names. Abolish surveillance - at school and everywhere.

The House on Blue Lick Road. I should probably start a “weird” category. Don’t miss this link.

'We are broken': Montana health care workers battle growing Covid outbreak. “If I have to stay late after working, if it means doing it on my day off. They're not going to pass alone on my unit. Again. None of them.” Healthcare workers are superheroes and I’m grateful for all of them.

Technology

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like. A pretty great summary of working for Stripe during a period of hypergrowth from Patrick McKenzie, who famously was a successful sole operator beforehand.

SpaceX Is Building a Military Rocket to Ship Weapons Anywhere in the World. "SpaceX and the Pentagon just signed a contract to jointly develop a new rocket that can launch into space and deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world — in just one hour." We should not be uncritically cheerleading for this company.

Cory Doctorow: ‘Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists’. "Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists. In technological circles, there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it. And so you just incinerate the qualitative elements and do maths on the dubious quantitative residue that remains. This is how you get physicists designing models for reopening American schools – because they completely fail to take on board the possibility that students might engage in, say, drunken eyeball-licking parties, which completely trips up the models."

Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository. A really smart way to track changes to a website or dataset over time and commit it to git. The example, using fire data, is brilliant.

Data & Society — Good Intentions, Bad Inventions. “Lenhart and Owens break down 4 common “healthy tech” myths by explaining where they come from, what they obscure, and how we can move beyond them. Intended for those designing, developing, and regulating emerging technologies, the primer provides teams with fresh ideas for how to analyze and improve user well-being.”

When It Rains, Rotterdam’s Bikers Get To Go Through Lights Faster. “Now, when it starts to shower, the traffic lights prioritize cyclists so they don’t wait so long to cross. At the same time, car drivers need to wait a little longer, because they are inside and can stay dry.” I think this is the coolest thing.

Various first words. “The first characters sent on ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, by Charley Kline, 1969: lo – for “login,” but it crashed.”

How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier. An absolutely epic guide to the platform, with full instructions for every tip.

Something Awful, a Cornerstone of Internet Culture, Is Under New Ownership. It was (1) a hugely important source of early internet culture, (2) a cesspool.

50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong? “When I was a young scientist working on the fledgling creation that came to be known as the internet, the ethos that defined the culture we were building was characterized by words such as ethical, open, trusted, free, shared. None of us knew where our research would lead, but these words and principles were our beacon.”

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”. This is how I felt about The Social Dilemma, too. It’s an important problem that needs to be discussed. But I wouldn’t trust the people who claim to have the solutions here. Not at all.

Moxie Marlinspike Has a Plan to Reclaim Our Privacy. Moxie is a hero of mine, and Signal is one of the most important apps and projects on the internet. This portrait only increased my respect for him.

Animals Keep Evolving Into Crabs, Which Is Somewhat Disturbing. I’m ready.

Dutch Ethical Hacker Logs into Trump’s Twitter Account. The President of the United States had set his password to “maga2020!”

Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet. “Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple’s annual profits.”

Police are using facial recognition for minor crimes because they can. “Law enforcement is tapping the tech for low-level crimes like shoplifting, because there are no limits. But the tool often makes errors.”

I became an unwanted woman in tech. “There is something innately different now about my words. They’ve not changed, but their context has entirely shifted. It’s as though I walk around now with a badge that invites dismissal and disrespect. That badge is called womanhood.”

I was starting to write this post when we were evacuated from the fire. Miraculously, after a really rough week, we were able to move back in on Friday. The house is still intact, the electricity is back on, and although the air is toxic, air purifiers allow the inside to be comfortable. I feel awful for the thousands of families who were not so lucky.

I'm now finishing and publishing this post as a way of adding some final punctuation to this terrible week. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted ...

In the spirit of Derek Sivers, I thought I'd write a quick update about what I'm doing these days. It's not quite a "now" page in the Sivers model, but it'll do .. for now.

Where I work:

I'm Head of Engineering and Sponsor Product at ForUsAll. Understanding what ForUsAll does, and therefore what I do, requires a little bit of explanation: in the US, rather than traditional pensions, workers tend to get something called a 401(k) plan (memorably named after its tax code). A part of your pre-tax pay is sent to a fund that invests on your behalf; many employers match your contribution up to a certain level. At retirement you get to withdraw those funds; the hope is that your investments have grown in value in the interim.

They tend to be jargon-laden, badly-run, and offer web interfaces that look like they were built in Microsoft Frontpage in 1998. And that's if you even have access to one: most American workers at smaller businesses don't, and therefore have limited access to decent ways to save for retirement. ForUsAll's web platform makes it cheaper and less time-consuming for employers to run (or "sponsor") a plan. And we're working on other ways for regular people to build financial stability for themselves, even before retirement. It's not about employees at well-funded startups or Fortune 500 companies; it's everyone else.

So my role is to run the engineering team, as well as product for the employer side of the experience. It's my first fintech company, but that's not why I'm doing it - my personal mission statement continues to be to work on projects that make the world more equal, informed, and inclusive, and this fits the bill.

I'm bringing a few things to the table here: my experience building products from both an engineering and product strategy perspective, but also my design thinking and cultural development background. I'm finding that those instincts are coming in very useful, and my big self-development project is to second-guess myself less than I often have in the past. I've been given a large role in determining the future strategy of the company, and I'm trying to bring my all to it.

By the way, I'm hiring front-end engineers.

Also:

I continue to sit on the board at Latakoo, the media startup where I was the CTO and first employee. Its technology - which I helped design and build - allows networks like NBC News to easily plan stories and transmit video from the field using commodity internet connections.

Latakoo is profitable. Its cloud service is used by many of the news organizations you can think of, and its on-premise servers have found homes in their editing suites. I'm really proud to have been a part of it, and to still be able to help where I can.

I believe deeply in the importance of media in our democracy, and I'm always excited to find opportunities to help support its future. In February I helped run (with my ex-Matter colleague Roxann Stafford) a session on designing for equity as part of a Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms bootcamp organized by NewsCatalyst and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism with the Google News Initiative.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping to wind up Known's incorporated corporate entity - and its hosted service, which is still online - this tax year. This doesn't mean Known itself is winding down: the open source community continues apace, and has been funding future development through Open Collective. The Known copyrights and assets will revert to me once the closure is complete.

Beyond work:

More of my time has been spent helping to care for my mother. It's been a decade since her diagnosis, and my life has been turned completely upside down in the years since (including some time where I thought I probably had the terminal, genetic condition too). Being able to spend time with both my parents is a privilege. But it's also been very easy to put my personal life on pause. I started this year with a determination to unpause - although 2020 has sometimes had other ideas.

I'm about to start a Gotham Writers Workshop course on writing fiction. Writing has always been my first love, and I'm determined to take it more seriously. I took some Stanford writing courses over the summer and found them to be both incredibly useful and motivating. I'd been waitlisted for a two year part-time novel writing certificate, but sadly didn't make the cut. (Who can blame them - who is this tech bro anyway?) No matter; I'm finding other ways to improve my skills and get closer to my goal of actually publishing a long-form fiction book.

I came first in my group in the NYC Midnight flash fiction competition this summer; I'm waiting to see if I got into the third round.

I read a lot more than I write, and I've been trying my best to keep off the social networks. They don't, as a whole, improve my life. But the addiction is strong. I just wholesale quit Facebook and Instagram as a protest against that company's actions, and it felt pretty good.

When I thought I also probably had my mother's dyskeratosis congenita, I gained a lot of weight. I've been trying my best to lose it, through only eating during an eight hour window, improving my diet, and increasing the amount of exercise I do. We bought a treadmill so my mother could walk without having to leave the house (my dad also has mobility issues); I've been using it to regularly run 5Ks. It's nowhere near as impressive as my runner friends, but it's a world away from my last few years. I used to walk 7-8 miles a day in the course of my life in the UK, and my life in California has never worked the same way. I've lost some weight but I've got a very long way to go.

I've been thinking about how I can help mission-driven founders. I was pretty naive when I founded Known, and more so Elgg; I'd love to help people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place to avoid some of those same mistakes. Time is limited, though. So maybe an online book and/or community is the way to go.

What's next:

In 2021 I want to ...

... finish a fiction book. Whether it gets published or not is out of my hands, but I want to do the best job I can. And then prepare to do it again.

... lose that weight and continue to get healthier.

... re-find the joy in life. It's been a tough year, and I want to find a way to have more time and space that's really mine. Between work and caring it's been hard to carve out room for my own life. I wouldn't change those things for the world, but I'd like to be able to find a healthier balance.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for September.

Books

The City We Became, by NK Jemisen. An effervescent tale about gentrification and the soul of cities, writ large as a fantasy adventure. I listened to this as an audiobook, which transcended its form into something more like a performance.

Streaming

Teenage Bounty Hunters. By rights, nothing with a name like this should be good - but it turns out this series is a beautiful surprise. Sharply funny, particularly after the first episode or two. (Netflix.)

Raised by Wolves. I still don't know if I like it, but this science fiction epic about belief and community is like nothing I've seen before. (HBO Max.)

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US, report says. "In a timely new analysis, Michael German, a former FBI special agent who has written extensively on the ways that US law enforcement have failed to respond to far-right domestic terror threats, concludes that US law enforcement officials have been tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000, and hundreds of police officers have been caught posting racist and bigoted social media content."

The Inevitable Whitelash Against Racial Justice Has Started. "In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, white people seemingly joined Black people in their calls for justice and change. But that support was always soft. It was entirely predictable that most white people would abandon the movement long before justice was done or change achieved."

Muslim Students Are Leading A New Generation In the Fight to Free Imam Jamil Al-Amin. "Al-Amin’s legacy as a Black revolutionary targeted by state surveillance — who converted to Islam in 1971 after being incarcerated for five years in New York’s Attica Prison — and his position today as a Black Muslim political prisoner is forgotten in many circles. [...] Arshad adds that she never knew Al-Amin was targeted by COINTELPro until preparing for a surveillance workshop for Muslim Student Associations across Texas."

Society and Culture

At 31, I have just weeks to live. Here's what I want to pass on. "A life, if lived well, is long enough."

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. "We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic." Unbearably frustrating.

Comedy Wildlife Awards 2020 finalists. Lovely!

The Off-Kilter History of British Cuisine. "It was the decade of fondue parties, cheese and pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks (considered an exotic indulgence at the time), Black Forest gateau, chicken Kiev, chili con carne, Neapolitan ice cream, and the prawn cocktail. [...] Inexpert and clumsy though it may have been, Britain’s exploration of new foods was indicative of deeper currents, as Britain, its empire definitively dead and buried, re-examined its place in the world."

Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”. "I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?"

The Rise of the 3-Parent Family. My friend David Jay, who founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, on his journey as a third parent. He inspires me in so many ways.

America in 2020

Deadly Terror Networks And Drug Cartels Use Huge Banks To Finance Their Crimes. These Secret Documents Show How The Banks Profit. This is the global financial system working as designed. Revealing it is an important work of journalism that has unfortunately mostly been lost under the weight of the election. The BBC has a good overview.

We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. "Take it from us survivors and scholars of authoritarianism. This is exactly how it happens. The situation could not — could not — be any worse. The odds are now very much against American democracy surviving."

Biden campaign launches official Animal Crossing: New Horizons yard signs. I ... am not positive this is what's going to make the difference.

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. The Trump camp has denied it, of course.

saw the perfect wildfire today. A beautifully-written account of seeing the Oregon wildfires. At the time I read this, I didn't understand that I would shortly have my own experience.

A Doctor Went to His Own Employer for a COVID-19 Antibody Test. It Cost $10,984. Outrageous but unfortunately not surprising.

QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. Only lightly rebranded, mind. QAnon's relationship to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an old, racist conspiracy theory, is incredibly alarming, but also just one of the many incredibly alarming things about it.

‘We’re No. 28! And Dropping!’. "out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s."

Nothing to see here, folks. "News outlets continue to ignore climate change in articles about California's record-breaking weather." I decided to give a newspaper interview about my fire experience today for exactly this reason. I'm curious to see if my statements about climate change - which were deliberate and repeated - will make it in.

Effective Political Giving. "With less than two months left before the election, this is an explainer for the politically panicked. You're anxious, you feel the need to do something, and you have a little money to spare. Who should you give it to?"

‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. "Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women." Will they deport these witnesses too?

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Speaks for itself. Really well-done; really terrifying.

Understanding PurpleAir vs. AirNow.gov Measurements of Wood Smoke Pollution. File under: new skills we all need to have now.

‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%. "RAND found that full-time, prime-age workers in the 25th percentile of the U.S. income distribution would be making $61,000 instead of $33,000 had everyone’s earnings from 1975 to 2018 expanded roughly in line with gross domestic product, as they did during the 1950s and ’60s." Shouldn't have been too shocked.

Nearly two-thirds of US adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust. WTF.

Federal Agencies Tapped Protesters’ Phones in Portland. What's old is new again.

Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'. Using our good friend Facebook, which eagerly helped the campaign.

I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. "I lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens." Although where I'm typing this, ash is literally falling from the sky.

The FBI Is Secretly Using A $2 Billion Company For Global Travel Surveillance — The US Could Do The Same To Track Covid-19. Not completely my takeaway from this.

New York Police Planned Assault on Bronx Protesters. "New York City police planned the assault and mass arrests of peaceful protesters in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx on June 4, 2020, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The crackdown, led by the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, was among the most aggressive police responses to protests across the United States following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and could cost New York City taxpayers several million dollars in misconduct complaints and lawsuits."

Technology and Business

The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network. Maybe one that was fed some really, really stupid data.

NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal, court rules seven years on. About time.

Harassers are nice to me, and probably to you. "Simply put, if you’re in a position of power at work, you’re unlikely to see workplace harassment in front of you. That’s because harassment and bullying are attempts to exert power over people with less of it. People who behave improperly don’t tend to do so with people they perceive as having power already."

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. "Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence."

Remote Work Doesn’t Have to Mean All-Day Video Calls. Tell me more ...

Amazon Drivers Are Hanging Smartphones in Trees to Get More Work. "Someone places several devices in a tree located close to the station where deliveries originate. Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. The reason for the odd placement [is] to get a split-second jump on competing drivers."

Facebook Moves to Limit Election Chaos in November. "The social network said it would block new political ads in late October, among other measures, to reduce misinformation and interference." Utterly meaningless.

“I Have Blood On My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. “In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions.” For example, in Ethopia.

Former Facebook manager: “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook”. "Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more."

Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. One of the most shamelessly violent business ideas I've ever seen.

Poynter now offers six months paid parental leave. Here’s how it happened. I really think everyone should offer a year of equalized maternal and paternal leave, but what do I know.

Build terrible things: an edict for mid-level engineers. "Start optimizing for decision-making ability. Take on projects where you get to choose what your stack will be, what tools you’ll use, how you’re going to solve problems that come up, how much tech debt you’re going to accrue, what you’re going to build and when. You’ll do it all wrong at first, but your instincts will get better at a rate that will surprise you. You’ll fix mistakes where you can, and live with them where you can’t."

Options, Not Roadmaps. "Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We don’t set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen." A more little-a agile approach.

AVIF has landed. A pretty amazing new audio/video standard.

The Cloud. This is very how it used to be.

I'm sleep-deprived because I had to evacuate my parents from their home last night, but adrenaline is keeping me awake. We drove away as the fiery glow appeared over the hill, and a stream of fire engines, sirens blazing, sped in the other direction. The Safeway at the corner where I sometimes sneak off and buy deli counter chicken tenders is now the fire staging area. The street where I go for walks to hit my daily active calorie count has been bulldozed to try and make a barrier to stop the spread.

The ash on my car this morning was like a layer of sand; each grain, a fragment of something destroyed. The smoke hangs in the air and turns everything red. It falls in chunks, like snow.

"Fire season" is a phrase we say now. I guess there was always a prime season for wildfires, which ran from May to October, roughly, but it's only really been a part of the lexicon since the Tubbs fire tore through Santa Rosa in 2017. The air was thick with smoke then, too. We used to worry about earthquakes - "the big one" - and now we worry about heat and wind.

My mother is sitting in a chair at a chain dialysis center, receiving treatment for the side effects of drugs she takes to manage a double lung transplant she received seven years ago. She never drank or smoked; always ate right; always exercised. Genetics got her in the end, as it did my grandmother and my aunt. She listens to books and browses the web on the iPad I bought her while a refrigerator-sized machine cleans her blood. The patients sit in rows while the machines churn blood around their coils. It looks like a gothic datacenter. She sits through it with surprisingly good humor, just as she sits through her hospital visits. Last week, she was in the ER. This week, she needed a blood transfusion. Whenever some politician talks about removing protections for pre-existing conditions, dropping it into a speech because it tests well with a certain kind of conservative, I wonder how I'm supposed to keep my mother alive.

When we knew we had to get out, I booked a hotel near the dialysis center. I feel privileged to have both the means and ability to do this; it meant we could pack up, drive out, and know where we were going. The evacuation site at the Sonoma County fairgrounds, and a few others, filled up and stopped taking people late in the night. The hotel lobby began to fill with people who hadn't booked, and hoped there would be a vacancy. Elderly people in masks, often holding dogs or cats under their arms, milled about in the lobby hoping a no-show would free up a room.

The style motif of the hotel is brown. The furniture is brown; the walls are brown; the curtains are brown; the light from outside is brown. The upholstery has been designed to hide spills and dirt. Irregular brown patterns draw your eye away from what you're not supposed to see.

I spent my morning frantically trying to find food that my mother could eat before dialysis. She can't tolerate much, but her feeding tube doesn't provide enough nutrition to last through a day. Ordinarily, we find ways to cook for her, but that requires a kitchen. Takeout food, which would be my first choice in this situation, is too salty for her, or has ingredients she can't digest. The WalMart next door had been ransacked by fire evacuees; the only edible food items left were PopTarts, which aren't on my mother's menu. At Raley's, further away, we found microwaveable oatmeal and some strawberries. As I loaded the car with food, I tried my best to prevent the ash from sliding through the open doors.

We packed my mother off to dialysis, rearranging the back of my car so that her wheelchair would fit without removing the foot pedals. I bought a coffee from the Starbucks in the hotel parking lot (brown) and sat in my room, finally immersed in peaceful silence except for the 1970s hum of the air conditioner. Finally, for the first time since we rushed out of the house, I took a shower.

Logging into social media again felt as if I had peeled open a wormhole into an alternate reality. "Blockchain is what happens after Silicon Valley," read one tweet. It turns out what will really happen after Silicon Valley is scorched earth and ash from the sky. The importance of politics has escalated from differences of opinions about how we organize the economy into something closer to life and death. The tendrils of the climate emergency are snaking closer and closer to our homes. There is an out-of-control pandemic taking our loved ones. There are concentration camps on the borders and immigration raids in our communities. And there is undisguised authoritarian racism coming from the White House.

While I was offline, a company called Coinbase, where I have spent a fair amount of money over the years, made a statement about its "mission focus". It is the worst kind of bullshit. It's a disingenuous, hollow statement against placing inclusion and morality at the heart of business. It's an argument not just for the status quo, but for going backwards in time to find the old status quo. It paints Coinbase, and companies that support a similar stance, as safe places for the broey, exclusionary, overwhelmingly white masculinity that still permeates any space with money and power. It would be a hard pill to swallow at any time. It just so happens that right now, the sky is on fire and the world is succumbing to fascism. The timing is, in itself, a tell.

We learned that the 2016 Trump campaign used Facebook to actively attempt to deter 3.5 million Black Americans from voting. It doesn't matter if the ads were effective, although I would be surprised if they weren't; what matters is that the campaign had the intention, and the Facebook platform presented itself as a way to get it down. There is no way to work at Facebook without being complicit. Nor for Trump: perhaps coincidentally, Brad Parscale, the digital advisor for the 2016 campaign, was taken into custody after threatening to take his own life.

As always, there are tweets and hot takes and memes. Irregular patterns draw your eye away from what you're not supposed to see. But we can choose to focus.

The surrealism of this year invites us to not take it seriously. The horror is dream-like in its absurdity. The facts and implications are so outside the parameters of ordinary life that they seem outlandish. But the sky really is red with flame, over two hundred thousand Americans alone really are dead from the pandemic, there really are unmarked federal soldiers in our cities, people really are being swept up by ICE in the dead of night and kept in concentration camps, and the worst really may be yet to come.

We can choose to look away. That option is always available to us. But to do so is to accept our fate, and to acquiesce to those who would harm us to make a profit. Today, watching the ash continue to fall and wondering if my mother will make it through another dialysis, I'm not at all prepared to do that.

Photo by James Todd on Unsplash.

Email newsletters are only succeeding because RSS failed.

I just subscribed to Casey Newton's new tech journalism newsletter, Platformer. I appreciate his journalism, and I'm sure it'll become a regular must-read for me in the same way that Ben Thompson's Stratechery is. The tech industry needs more analytical journalism, and I'm pleased to support it.

There's an interesting platform difference between the two. When you sign up and pay for Stratechery, you can certainly opt in to receiving daily emails - and I'm sure this is how most of his subscribers read his work. But you can also get access to a private RSS feed that you can plug into your reader.

My feed reader is an important part of my morning routine, but it also serves another purpose: to keep regular subscription content out of my inbox. I have enough trouble keeping on top of my email; I'm terrible at it. Adding more messages will not help me. But I also really want to subscribe! So having all my regular subscription content in one place, away from the desolation of my inbox, is useful. (Hundreds of you are reading this post in your inbox. I'm assuming you're all better at email than me! If not, you can always subscribe to my blog via a feed reader.)

In contrast to Stratechery, Platformer uses Substack, which has made starting and subscribing to paid newsletters incredibly easy. As a subscriber, I plug in my email, hit the Apple Pay button, and I'm subscribed. It's kind of a brilliant way to support independent writers. Like RSS feeds, authors don't need to rely on social media for distribution; they have a more direct relationship with the reader. Unlike RSS feeds, it all piles into my horror show inbox.

My feed reader of choice is NewsBlur (together with the beautiful Reeder apps), in part because it allows me to forward email newsletters to an address it provides. Feedbin and a few others do this too. I have a blanket filter that removes every Substack newsletter from my inbox and sends the messages to my feed reader, where they show up alongside the blogs I subscribe to. It works for me: I get to read all of my subscriptions in one place, and leave my inbox for all of those other messages that I'll get to eventually.

It's worth imagining another world, where the string and blu tack solution I made for myself is easy for everyone. What if everyone had an easy-to-use place to read their subscription content, away from the hustle and bustle of their regular emails? What if feed subscriptions had become mainstream, and payments had become an integral part of the specification? What if every author had the ability to use the platform that Ben Thompson had to build for himself, allowing each of them to make a living from their work as easily as publishing to the web?

The technology isn't there right now, but could it be?

Every journalist, artist, app builder, musician, author, podcaster, etc, should be able to make money independently on the web. And the web should help them do that.

Of course, RSS feeds haven't failed. The entire podcasting ecosystem heavily depends on them - an $11 billion market, all depending on open feeds. Even for written content, there are millions of people like me who use them every day. People in tech love to talk about the death of Google Reader, but nobody killed RSS.

For a year, I worked with Julien Genestoux, who had previously built the Superfeedr feed subscription and distribution engine, on Unlock, a protocol for independent, decentralized payments on the web. The startup didn't quite work out, but the open source protocol continues to find use. Most importantly, I think the idea (anyone should be able to take payments from their own website without a middleman) is very strong, even if the Ethereum blockchain it depended on turned out to not quite be ready for primetime. Not to mention the ability for payments to supplant harmful targeted advertising.

I believe that Substack, the Stratechery platform, and Patreon's subscription model are all evidence of a need for a decentralized marketplace of content, monetized through easy, recurring payments that don't require a content silo. By using the same feed ecosystem that powers the whole podcasting ecosystem (and my morning content routine), adding a payments layer on top of the RSS specification itself, and then making it insanely easy to read and subscribe, we could empower a new generation of creators, readers, and reader apps.

Some technical work has been done. PodPass is a proposal for an identity layer on top of RSS for podcasts. Work is being done at the W3C on web payments. Identity and payment mechanisms are both crucial parts of providing subscriptions as a first-class layer on the web. But there's a great deal more to do technically - and a huge amount more in terms of building a coherent user experience, particularly around payments.

Here's my final "what if". What if subscription payments were built into the browser or reader, with the vendor itself taking a small cut (in the same way that Apple takes 0.15% of Apple Pay purchases)?

For example: let's say I browse to a website using Mozilla Firefox. That website has some metadata in its HTML which indicates that (1) a feed is available, and (2) there are payment tiers.

Firefox lets me know that I can subscribe to that website's content with an unobtrusive icon or notification. When I click, it shows me the tiers available. When I hit subscribe, Firefox starts to pull feed content in a built-in reader. When it pulls feeds, it identifies me in the HTTP header with a pseudonymous hash code. For the purposes of this conversation, I'm user 123456 (the same combination I have on my luggage).

When I pay, funds are sent directly to the website owner, with a small cut going to Mozilla itself, and another small cut going to WordPress, which powers the site. Funds are transferred behind the scenes in stablecoins (probably), with Mozilla providing a credit card interface to me so I don't have to know or care about crypto. It tells the website owner that I'm user 123456, and that I've paid. The website verifies the payment, and next time a feed is requested for user 123456, it adds in any paid content. Unlock did this provably, using the blockchain: anyone can build an API which verifies independently that user A has access to paid content from user B.

From the user's perspective it looks like this: they can see that a website they're on has content that can be subscribed to. When they hit "subscribe" in the browser, they're prompted to choose a tier if paid tiers exist. And then they can read content and manage their subscriptions in a built-in reader.

For users like me, my existing feed reader can do the same thing: detect paid options, and pay for them if I want. The feed reader vendor gets the cut of the funds.

Cross-device syncing is taken care of by the browser vendor: my Firefox account already keeps my bookmarks and history up to date everywhere I have Firefox installed. Chrome and Safari users have a similar mechanism. Subscriptions would piggyback on these existing accounts.

The end result is a web where any creator can make money from their content and any reader can subscribe to it, without having it further clutter an email inbox that they already resent. Because browsers, feed readers, and content management platforms take a small cut of payments, they're incentivized to innovate around the model and build new products. Browser vendors like Mozilla can stop making most of their money from search engine deals. Nobody is forced to rely on Facebook or Twitter for distribution. Targeted ads die. And the internet is more decentralized and healthier for everyone.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for August.

Books

Educated, by Tara Westover. I realized about halfway through that the abuse that seems to ahave punctuated Westover's life were not going to stop. This is a brave story, although her unwillingness to condemn the church or the core of her family's beliefs leave us to join some of the dots ourselves.

Streaming

Nice White Parents. A limited run podcast by the studio behind Serial, about the relationship between wealthy white parents and the public schools they claim to support. Eye-opening.

Mrs America. The story of the Equal Rights Amendment, rendered as a gripping, human story. There's no doubt that the feminist pro-ERA characters are in the right, but it's worth reading Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal's critical editorial about the series. It's certainly true that the financial forces backing the Stop ERA movement are underplayed.

Lovecraft Country. Just spectacular. I'm only two episodes in, but I was hooked from the first minute.

Arlo Parks. I've become absolutely addicted to her music. Perfect for long walks and late nights by myself.

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation. John Lewis wrote an editorial to be published upon his death. If you click through to just one article in this post, please make it this one.

Pollution Is Killing Black Americans. This Community Fought Back. "Black communities like Grays Ferry shoulder a disproportionate burden of the nation’s pollution — from foul water in Flint, Mich., to dangerous chemicals that have poisoned a corridor of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley — which scientists and policymakers have known for decades."

Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man's life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. "A Black Louisiana man will spend the rest of his life in prison for stealing hedge clippers, after the Louisiana Supreme Court denied his request to have his sentence overturned last week." Only one judge - the only Black person on the court - dissented, pointing out that the sentence was grossly disproportionate to the crime.

Black troops were welcome in Britain, but Jim Crow wasn’t: the race riot of one night in June 1943. "The town did not share the US Army’s segregationist attitudes. According to the author Anthony Burgess, who spent time in Bamber Bridge during the war, when US military authorities demanded that the town’s pubs impose a colour bar, the landlords responded with signs that read: “Black Troops Only”."

Revisiting an American Town Where Black People Weren’t Welcome After Dark. I'm ashamed to say that sundown towns were new to me as a concept.

‘Were your grandparents slaves?’ On the very white-dominated world of venture funding.

The Pandemic

Children May Carry Coronavirus at High Levels, Study Finds. "Infected children have at least as much of the coronavirus in their noses and throats as infected adults, according to the research. Indeed, children younger than age 5 may host up to 100 times as much of the virus in the upper respiratory tract as adults, the authors found."

A Covid Patient Goes Home After a Rare Double Lung Transplant. "The surgery is considered a desperate measure reserved for people with fatal, irreversible lung damage. Doctors do not want to remove a person’s lungs if there is any chance they will heal." I'm writing this from my parents' house, where I'm supporting my mother in the aftermath of her double lung transplant. You don't want one. Please, please, please wear a mask.

How the Pandemic Defeated America. "Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold." They need to go.

In A Twist On Loyalty Programs, Emirates Is Promising Travelers A Free Funeral If Infected With Covid. Innovative.

We thought it was just a respiratory virus. UCSF's report shows damage to the heart, gut, skin and more. The virus may weaponize our own immune systems against us.

Secret Gyms And The Economics Of Prohibition. "What Evelyn uncovered can only be described as a speakeasy gym. You know, illegal, hush hush, like the underground bars during the Prohibition era. These underground gyms appear to be popping up everywhere, from LA to New Jersey."

Trump's America

The cost of becoming a U.S. citizen just went up drastically. And asylum is no longer free. "The Trump administration announced on Friday an exorbitant increase in fees for some of the most common immigration procedures, including an 81% increase in the cost of U.S. citizenship for naturalization. It will also now charge asylum-seekers, which is an unprecedented move."

How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong. We shouldn't expect an election night this year. It'll take weeks, and there's a real possibility the election will stretch until January. But the media is set up for a big announcement.

A bipartisan group secretly gathered to game out a contested Trump-Biden election. It wasn’t pretty. Unless Biden has a landslide victory - which, to be honest, he probably won't - there may be violence on the streets and a political stalemate. In a year that's been plenty nasty already, we shouldn't expect this to go anything close to well.

With their visas in limbo, journalists at Voice of America worry that they’ll be thrown out of America. "VOA has long employed journalists who are citizens of other countries because they offer specific knowledge and expertise, including fluency in English and one or more of the 47 languages in which VOA broadcasts. In addition to their language skills, they are steeped in the history, culture and recent politics of the countries they report on, and they often have hard-to-replace sources and contacts among dissident communities." And now their visas are in jeopardy and they worry about having to leave - some to oppressive regimes.

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free. Some of the best journalism in the country is paywalled, offered up to a limited, wealthy audience, but disinformation is available to all. The effects of this disparity of information may be profound. (I like patronage models like The Guardian's.)

Trump Might Try to Postpone the Election. That’s Unconstitutional. I just have no way to gauge if this is something that is actually going to happen or if we're all just engaging in hyperbole. Reality just seems so spongey at this point. Maybe both?

The myth of unemployment benefits depressing work. "If anything, research to date suggests the federal benefit supplement has boosted macroeconomic activity and, therefore, likely supported hiring. That’s because these benefits have supported consumer spending, which in turn helps retailers, landlords and other businesses keep workers on their own payrolls." Benefits are not some drag on productivity. They boost the economy and help people in real need.

As election looms, a network of mysterious ‘pink slime’ local news outlets nearly triples in size. "The run-up to the 2020 November elections in the US has produced new networks of shadowy, politically backed “local news websites” designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data. In December 2019, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism reported on an intricately linked network of 450 sites purporting to be local or business news publications. New research from the Tow Center shows the size of that network has increased almost threefold over the course of 2020, to over 1,200 sites."

What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon. "QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information. In other words, maybe QAnon is… fun?" Also see Dan Hon's excellent deep-dive exploration of this idea.

Ronald Reagan Wasn’t the Good Guy President Anti-Trump Republicans Want You to Believe In. Ronald Reagan was a terrible President. I love that this is just the latest in a series of really high quality explorations in Teen Vogue.

The Unraveling of America. Wade Davis in Rolling Stone on the situation we find ourselves in. Not just the proximal one, but the existential situation that's been building for decades.

'Christianity Will Have Power'. "Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along."

Noam Chomsky wants you to vote for Joe Biden and then haunt his dreams. Sold.

U.S. Government Contractor Embedded Software in Apps to Track Phones. "A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal."

Postal Service warns 46 states their voters could be disenfranchised by delayed mail-in ballots. "Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted — adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest."

Society and Culture

How a Cheese Goes Extinct. "There are countless ways for a cheese to disappear. Some, like Holbrook’s, die with their makers. Others fall out of favor because they’re simply not good: one extinct Suffolk cheese, “stony-hard” because it was made only with skimmed milk, was so notoriously bad that, in 1825, the Hampshire Chronicle reported that one ship’s cargo of grindstones was eaten by rats while the neighboring haul of Suffolk cheese escaped untouched."

The Global God Divide. I'm on Team Godless. But 44% of Americans say you need to believe in God to be moral.

Indian Matchmaking Exposes the Easy Acceptance of Caste. "The pervasiveness of caste in Indian communities, even beyond the ambit of arranged marriages, has dangerous consequences for those of us born into “lower” castes."

Lilly Wachowski finally confirms that, yes, The Matrix is an allegory for the trans experience. I think this is super-cool.

Lorenzo Wilson Milam, Guru of Community Radio, Is Dead at 86. What an inspiring human being.

Bat Boy Lives! An Oral History of Weekly World News. I used to delight in seeing Weekly World News headlines when I traveled to the US. This history was fascinating to me.

‘Bel-Air’: Drama Series Take On ‘The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air’ From Morgan Cooper & Westbrook Studios Heats Up Streaming Marketplace. I cannot overstate how amazing this is.

To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab. "He was very happy to hear from the current resident of our office, and explained that it should be no problem to get the window up and running. I’d need to set up a dedicated Linux box and download some Python to control the climate logic, but it shouldn’t be that hard to debug. He was willing to help."

Dead plots. Charles Stross on plots no longer available to authors in 2020.

Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture. I'm a Swiss citizen. Sometimes I think I just might make the jump ... But a lot of what's listed here are things I recognize from Scotland, too.

“This Plane Is Not Going to Land in Cairo”: Saudi Prince Sultan Boarded a Flight in Paris. Then, He Disappeared. Surreal, and evil.

Technology

Women Are Leading Latin America’s Fintech Revolution. "Including women entrepreneurs equally could boost the global economy by $5 trillion, and companies with women founders generate 2.5x more revenue for every dollar invested than male-led companies. They also have higher stock prices and a 35 percent higher return on investment."

TikTok and the Law: A Primer (In Case You Need to Explain Things to Your Teenager). Ageism aside, this is a pretty good primer on the legal issues behind the forced TikTok sale.

TikTok and Microsoft’s Clock. "If Microsoft is able to buy the service and users of just the countries listed, how are they going to separate them from the rest of TikTok? Understatement: this sounds extremely complicated. How long will it take to do that? Weeks? Months? Will it operate as-is until that’s completed?"

Ad Industry Launches New Organization, Will Push Google And Apple On Tracking. Pfffft. Good luck with that. Doc Searls, who I hugely respect, wrote a great post on the subject, too.

Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism? "Instead, the company found that ads served to users who opted out of cookies were bringing in as much or more money as ads served to users who opted in. The results were so strong that as of January 2020, NPO simply got rid of advertising cookies altogether. And rather than decline, its digital revenue is dramatically up, even after the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic."

The Need for Speed, 23 Years Later. "The internet is faster, but websites aren't". Instead of embracing speed, we've layered our pages with more and more cruft.

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels. An exploration of UX ideas using LEGO as a cipher. Sure, why not. (It's delightful.)

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates. Oops.

Facebook Fired An Employee Who Collected Evidence Of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential Treatment. "Individuals that spoke out about the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages have also faced consequences. In one case, a senior Facebook engineer collected multiple instances of conservative figures receiving unique help from Facebook employees, including those on the policy team, to remove fact-checks on their content. His July post was removed because it violated the company’s “respectful communication policy.”" Inexcusable stuff.

Facebook algorithm found to 'actively promote' Holocaust denial. "Last Wednesday Facebook announced it was banning conspiracy theories about Jewish people “controlling the world”. However, it has been unwilling to categorise Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, a stance that [the Institute for Strategic Dialogue] describe as a “conceptual blind spot”." Understating it somewhat, I would say.

To Head Off Regulators, Google Makes Certain Words Taboo. A surely losing battle to ensure that internal communications revealed during discovery don't suggest monopoly control.

Design Docs at Google. Here heard second hand, but worth studying.

Judge Agrees to End Paramount Consent Decrees. Netflix and its cousins are now free to run movie theater chains.

Google's secret home security superpower: Your smart speaker with its always-on mics. Either super-cool or super-creepy, or maybe creepy-super-cool. Google Home has the ability to listen to your smoke alarm, or for broken glass, and then tell you about it.

tech brain. "what is tech brain? there are lots of things to point to, but if i had to come up with a thesis it would be that tech brain is a sort of constant willful reductionism: an addiction to easy answers combined with a wholesale cultural resistance to any kind of complexity."

Twitter launches new API as it tries to make amends with third-party developers. Once bitten ... but I really appreciate this new, non-advertising-centric direction.

RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users. "As the Internet increasingly mediates essential functions in societies, it has unavoidably become profoundly political; it has helped people overthrow governments, revolutionize social orders, swing elections, control populations, collect data about individuals, and reveal secrets. It has created wealth for some individuals and companies while destroying that of others. All of this raises the question: For whom do we go through the pain of gathering rough consensus and writing running code?"

A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees To Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times. Moderators Said It Didn’t Violate Any Rules. "In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.”" People are dead.

I've been writing at least a post a day during my short social media hiatus. Although I'm a little bit worried about flooding the folks who subscribe via email - it's occurred to me to limit the mailing list to a couple of days a week and send as a digest - I find it meditative. I tend to write first thing in the morning, right after reading through my feeds in Reeder. I compose on my iPad in markdown using iA Writer and then copy to my site using its "copy as HTML" function. iA Writer uses micropub, so theoretically I could publish directly, but I like the opportunity to read over the piece in context before I push the button.

As I mentioned on Monday, I've been writing more fiction, which has mostly meant fleshing out a book in Scrivener. I've also been submitting some short stories for publication - my rejection-proof skin has been thickening steadily - and taking part in a few competitions. My round one piece for the NYC Midnight flash fiction challenge placed first in its group. To be honest, I needed the encouragement - and tonight I'll move on to round two with my head held high.

I have an iPad Pro with a magic keyboard case, which is strictly for creative work. My work accounts are nowhere to be seen, and notifications are switched off across the board. You can't develop software on an iPad - at least, not really - and I don't use it for coding projects. It's just for writing and drawing. While the OS is locked down to the extent that Apple may be legally forced to open it up sometime soon, I find it makes for a pretty good distraction-free environment. It's one of the best gadget purchases I've ever made. (Who would have thought I'd be so bought into the Apple ecosystem a decade ago? Not me.)

But even more importantly, cultivating the space to write and reflect has been an important habit for me. Like regular exercise and eating well, it sets me up for the rest of the day. In a world where we're expected to be always on and instantly reactive, some nearly-offline slow thinking time has proven to be a very good thing indeed. Getting that in first, over a cup of coffee while the morning is still quiet, has been lovely.

Kevin Roose has written an alarming wakeup call in the New York Times:

Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.

While election polls typically place Democrats ahead, they were flat out wrong in 2016, in large part because of the Trump campaign's ability to dominate social media. Facebook is the joint monarch of the social media landscape with YouTube; while engagement on the former is dominated by conservative content, Trump's ads about Biden's cognitive decline have enjoyed pride of place on the latter.

Trump is a danger to the country, to democracy, and to the stability of the world. (This statement would have seemed like out-there hyperbole four years ago, but, well, please feel free to take a look back at what has happened since.) Despite this, and despite commentary from pollsters and business executives, it's not at all a given that he will lose the election.

If he does win another four years, the tech industry will not be blameless. Our focus on engagement over community, and our promotion of targeted advertising over contextual ads and other business models, has paved the way for this new kind of authoritarianism. Microtargeting of political messages on social media is theoretically simply a new frontier in political messaging; in reality it has allowed disinformation to be disseminated at scale. The irony is that this kind of behavioral advertising isn't even that lucrative for most businesses; the harms vastly outweigh the benefits.

This is not a rhetorical discussion. We have concentration camps on our borders, an uptick in hate crimes, and a prevalence of xenophobic, nationalist, and anti-science policies. The climate crisis is being ignored even as our country burns. And we are all responsible.

We're in the mist of what may be the largest civil rights movement in US history. In Belarus, inspiring protests are bringing down the authoritarian Aleksandr Lukashenko. Around the world, authoritarians and nationalists are being met with a rise in democratic political protests.

The US government has sometimes not lived up to its declared values in the face of protests. From COINTELPRO to the PRISM revelations, it is clear that it has often treated political protest as a threat, and turned to surveillance and infiltration in order to undermine it. A Nixon administration official admitted that the war on drugs was started to undermine the antiwar and civil rights movements.

We are, unfortunately, not as democratic as we might hope to be. And the situation is unlikely to have improved in the current era. In a world where it's not a given that the President will step down if he loses the election, domestic activists need a toolbox at their disposal that will keep them safe as they exercise their Constitutional rights. Around the world, activists fighting for equality and democracy need the same.

Unfortunately, the Bridgefy app that was widely used in the Hong Kong protests has been shown to be a privacy nightmare: easy to take down, compromise, and deanonymize. Choosing the wrong tool can have consequences. So what's safe?

Open source software allows anyone to view and share the source code. It can be audited by anyone who wants to verify that it is seucre and fit for purpose. The result is applications that are more trustworthy.

Here are a few auditable, open source tools that I believe activists can rely on.

Signal

Easy to use and end-to-end encrypted, Signal is recommended by both Edward Snowden and security guru Bruce Schneier. It behaves like a slick instant messaging app you might download from Google or Facebook, but you know your messages are end-to-end encrypted.

I use Signal every day to communicate with people all over the world. It just works.

It's worth saying that while the Signal protocol is also used to secure WhatsApp messages, it is technically possible for messages saved on that app to be shared with Facebook, its corporate parent. They can also be technically shared with governments and law enforcement.

Element

While Signal is best at one-to-one communication, Element is a bit like an open source, end-to-end encrypted Slack. Based on the decentralized Matrix network, which can theoretically support an infinite number of different apps, it combines a commercial quality user experience with fully open source code, a decentralized back-end, and end-to-end encryption.

Like Slack, it can be extended using bots and integrations. For example, an upload to a  SecureDrop endpoint could notify an Element channel (or a channel on any other Matrix-powered app). In the same way Slack can be turned into a notification center for commerical teams, Element or Matrix can be used to be an activist group's control center. And it runs behind Tor.

SecureDrop

Created by Aaron Swartz and currently managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, SecureDrop allows any organization to securely and anonymously accept documents.

Organizations like The New York Times, the anti-corruption NGO Global Witness, and the Center for Public Integrity run SecureDrop instances on their own infrastructure to maintain the safety and anonymity of whistleblowers. Any organization can do the same.

IPFS

The InterPlanetary File System is a censorship-resistant way to publish content on the internet without having to rely on a central provider. When used with the Tor Browser, it's anonymous, too.

IPFS's distributed architecture allows content to be published without easily being removed. Content is hosted by other IPFS users. Unlike the web, there's no central DNS registry, so domains can't be pulled down. And content at one IPFS location can easily be forked and copied to another.

A growing number of end-user IPFS apps are available.

Tor Browser

Tor is the most secure way to browse the web. It blocks trackers and prevents browser fingerprinting: the process by which tracking networks can identify you by your browser configuration alone, whether you have cookies enabled or not.

Most importantly, though, it uses the Tor network, which is designed to anonymize your internet traffic. (TOR stands for The Onion Router, and its anonymous architecture is built in layers, like an onion.) There are lots of sites that only exist on the network, and these "dark web" nodes aren't as rife with criminality as reports suggest. DuckDuckGo operates a Tor node; so does everything from Medium to Facebook. In every case, it's to establish greater security for users around the world.

Tor allowed protesters in the Arab Spring to escape censorship or retaliation, and is used to bypass China's Great Firewall. It can do the same for today's protesters. Chrome and Firefox users in free countries can download the Snowflake plugin to help host layers of the Tor network without implicating yourself.

Bitmask

Bitmask is a cross-platform VPN built specifically for activists. Most people use a VPN to create a secure connection to protected infrastructure: for example, to access production servers. Some commercial VPNs are designed to allow people to access streaming services in other countries. In both cases, anti-surveillance isn't the goal; they tend to have centralized architectures where traffic travels through servers monitored and controlled by a single company.

Conversely, Bitmask gives you access to multiple networks designed to circumvent surveillance and network monitoring. Its parent, the LEAP Encryption Access Project, wants to provide high quality encryption to everyone. (The Trump administration has considered banning end-to-end encryption.)

What else?

This list is a starting point: I'd love to hear about other software you think should be included. If you're aware of an open source, easy to use, cross-device encrypted email solution, I would particularly like to know - mostly so I can switch to it immediately.

Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

I've decided to take a short hiatus from social media - which, really, is a hiatus from learning about the world in staccato, where each dopamine hit brings a payload of horror. I want to be informed, but I want to be informed on my schedule.

I'm writing this update from Santa Rosa, which sits nestled between two raging fires. The smoke hangs thickly in the air, turning the sky red. This year seems to ratchet up month by month, the pressure slowly increasing, as if to dare us to cry that we've had enough.

Here is what my day in the pandemic looked like:

I brought an air purifier to an elderly friend in Berkeley. Then I brought a second air purifier to my sister in Richmond, who is disabled with chronic pain and spends most of her day in bed. I drove myself through the orange haze to be with my parents. My mother is weaker than she's probably ever been. She can barely walk. I made dinner for them both, and washed up, and gave her a ginger hug in bed and told her I hoped tomorrow would be a better day.

It's a lot.

I'm finding it really difficult to work on extracurricular coding in this context, so I've given up. Known is chugging along without me, which is lovely to see, and it turns out that my Life on the Ground questions don't need a software platform to empower people to share their stories. I work with code and software in my day job, and that turns out to be more than enough.

Instead, I'm writing a book. Finally. It's a pandemic cliché, I'm fully aware of it, but it's also something I've been called towards for decades. I've decided to approach it with the seriousness I would any software project: I'm learning new skills and researching the best approaches. It's not a whim - but it's also liberating to work on something that doesn't need to be a business. More than anything, it's something that's mine: an escape, a place to channel all the things I'm feeling, and something to work on that doesn't need to be about productivity. It can just be. Not a venture novel; a lifestyle novel.

There are silver linings to this pandemic. Remote work means I can support my parents without having to consider the impact on my job. I've found the mental and actual space to write. Not going into an office means I haven't been eating trash from the neighborhood for lunch, and I've been able to use some of the extra time to exercise. I'm healthier than I've been in years.

I just wish we weren't in the midst of an epidemic, and that California wasn't on fire, and that we had a compassionate government, and that police weren't murdering Black people, and that my mother wasn't dying.

Some of these things will change. The epidemic will end. The fires will be put out, and we will eventually enact laws to deal with the climate crisis. The government will leave office, and potentially go to jail. The police will be defunded and remade.

As for the last thing on the list? All I can do is be here, do my best, try and remember to take care of myself, and hope.

Firefox matters. The other major browsers are all subject to a larger corporation's business interests: Safari is built in the context of the App Store, Chrome must support Google's ad targeting business, and Edge fills a gap in the Windows ecosystem. But Firefox is here to fight for the users: it supports web standards and user privacy as public goods in their own right.

It also happens to be the best browser. It's the one I choose to make my default at home and at work, not for ideological reasons, but because it works the way I want it to. It's fast, private, functional, and more resource efficient.

Even if it wasn't, its existence would be important. In the same way that it's harmful for most people to get their news from Facebook, giving that corporation undue power over the flow of information that informs voters and underpins democratic society, it's dangerous for most of us to access the web through Chrome. In a world where so much of our lives are threaded through the web (particularly during the pandemic), giving one corporation control over the way the web works hands them the same kind of undue power.

And, of course, it's open source. Firefox is built in the open, using a community-driven approach. That alone makes it unique among the big browsers.

Mozilla is one of the few unabashed forces for good in the tech industry, which is why the news that it had laid off a quarter of its workforce hit me hard. It deserves our support.

But these two things can be true at once: Firefox is an important force for good, and it's a squandered opportunity that has not shown the way on the web as often as it should have. In service to Mozilla's desire to provide it for free - perhaps remembering the paid-for Netscape's loss to Microsoft's free Internet Explorer long ago - it has been funded by a small handful of default search engine agreements. There has been no revenue innovation; very little feature innovation that would rock the boat of those lucrative agreements.

It seems odd for a privacy-aligned, community-driven web browser to be largely funded by targeted advertising. It's also a textbook business risk: all Google needs to do is withdraw its check, and Firefox is toast. Something more diversified and reliable is clearly needed.

Mozilla's acquisition of Pocket was a foot in the door for subscription revenue models. Its new privacy-orientated VPN -  sadly not available on macOS yet - is an expansion of that strategy. But it's been executed far from perfectly, and an unanticipated revenue gap was the declared reason for Mozilla's first layoff this year, back in January.

I make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation every month, but I don't pay for Pocket (which I use every day) or the VPN product (which I can't use yet). I suspect many users are like me: we deeply appreciate Mozilla's work, but we're not that excited about the subscription products. Mozilla has done a bad job at targeting us: I'm not sure why it hasn't been possible to become a patron from within Firefox, or to pay an all-in Mozilla Subscription analogous to the rumored Apple One, but I would have jumped on those chances.

Over the last few years, the Guardian has broken even because of reader patronage. Unlike a paywalled site, where only subscribers could access content, readers like me pay to allow everyone to access its journalism. We do it because we find its existence valuable. Wikipedia is another organization that makes a patronage model work. Mozilla occupies a similar place in the world: a socially-positive organization with a minority of users who are affluent enough to pay for the rest, and will do so because they believe it's the right thing to do. There hasn't been a unified strategy to pursue this, but there should be.

There's no need to create a bazillion new revenue-generating products. A VPN is great, but there are lots of VPNs to choose from; a reading app is fine, but there are loads. There is only one community-driven vendor of privacy-preserving internet tools with a focus on keeping their users safe. Mozilla needs to focus on what it does best and do better at letting its community support it. We understand its importance, and we're here for it.

You should install Firefox today.

As a kid, when I thought about the future, becoming a software developer was not what immediately came to mind. I loved technology - I learned to write in BASIC at the same time as English - but it was always at its best when it was in service of a story. I wrote small text adventure games and built simple animations.

Those were the programs that captured my imagination, too: LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island and adventures like Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which Douglas Adams himself had helped write. They were stories, first and foremost, which happened to be enabled by technology.

I wanted to be a writer.

I still do.

The pandemic has led to many changes in my life. I spend most of my time in Santa Rosa, working remotely as the Head of Engineering for ForUsAll during the day and helping to care for my mother when I'm not behind my laptop. In some ways, I consider myself perversely lucky: her decline has coincided with a time that I'm able to work from anywhere. The hit to my personal life aside, it's worked out pretty well.

But I need something else - something that's mine, beyond the demands of my job and caring for my family. I've decided to give myself the gift of making space for my first love. I won't say exactly what I'm working on (I don't want to jinx it), but I've spent the summer taking classes and workshops on improving my plot and character skills. My aim is to have a first draft written by the end of November - and who knows what will happen after that.

It's been interesting to juxtapose the needs of plot and character with the product work I do every day. While the former is built from imagination, and the latter from research, they're oddly similar skills. Every product can be described in the framework of a three act structure; every target user has internal and external motivations that form the basis of a compelling solution.

But that's not why I'm turning my attention to writing. I'm doing it because telling stories is something I find joy in. It's not to make a living or to improve my day job. It's not even because I think I'll be good at it (because, to be absolutely honest, I don't know).

It's none of those things. It's simply because I want to - and that's more than enough. It's something I can control, that allows me to be meditative and creative, that nobody can touch. And right now in particular, that couldn't be more valuable to me.

I'm trying something new. At this point I've got hundreds of people signed up to receive these posts via my mailing list, in addition to folks who are subscribed via various feed readers or on social media. This is a little bit too close to a braodcast strategy for my liking: the internet is, after all, a conversation.

I'll be working to add more community on this site over the next few months. But for now, I'd love to start by asking you a few questions to help direct my focus and attention.

This reader survey will only take a minute or two of your time, and it helps me a great deal. Feedback is always a gift, and I would really appreciate hearing from you. Thank you!

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for July.

A few people have asked about my process. I save my interesting links into Pocket, which is integrated into Firefox, my browser of choice. (I trust Mozilla to look after me more than any other browser manufacturer.) And then on the first day of the next month, I go back and re-examine everything I've saved.

If you're receiving this post via my email list, I use Mailchimp to gather the latest content from my blog's RSS feed and send an email at 10am. This morning I reset the timer to noon so that I could get the post out today. I'll return the setting to 10am once it's out.

By the way, I never use affiliate links. This post isn't trying to sell you anything - but let me know if it's useful, or if there are ways it could be more so.

Hardware

Apple Watch 5. I've been resisting quantifying myself, and my series 3 has been broken for a long time. But we're entering the fifth month of quarantine, and I wanted to make sure I was getting the exercise I needed. The series 5 is a nice improvement - it feels a great deal more responsive - and both the VO2 max and ECG functions are really good.

Withings Thermo. Because temperature is an indicator for covid-19, measuring it early and often, and seeing the trend (which is flat for me) is useful. I'm pretty bought into the Withings universe at this point, with the blood pressure monitor and the Body+ smart scale. They're well-built, the app that links them all is equally good, and I like that they're multi-user.

Apps

Libro.fm. I've never really been into audiobooks, but I recently changed over to listen to them when I drive and work out. Podcasts have been less enticing to me recently. Unlike Audible's parent company, Libro.fm doesn't sell technology to ICE to power deportations, and it gives a portion of sales to your local independent bookstore.

Nedl. I invested in Ayinde Alayoke and his team as part of Matter. The app they've created is really cool: a way to broadcast and search the content of live, real-time audio all over the world. He's raising a new round via Wefunder, and I was proud to join.

Books

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. Nominated for this year's Hugo awards, I was invigorated by this exploration of belonging, identity, and what it means to be human. Clearly informed by our present moment, it's an argument for something better than the divisiveness and greed we find ourselves subject to.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong. Vuong's words seem to have a pulse of their own. Sad but occasionally hilarious, I recognized aspects of the immigrant struggle, and of being caught between two parallel universes (figuratively; unlike the previous book, this is not science fiction). Vuong is a poet, and that rhythm and sense of beauty shines here.

So You Want to Talk about Race, by Ijeoma Oluo. Ijeoma was the Editor at Large at The Establishment, a publication for writers marginalized by mainstream media that I was proud to support at Matter. It's taken me a long time to get to her book, which deserves its popularity. It weaves her own story with important anti-racist ideas, and I think it would make a great primer for people who are new to them, as well as an important reminder that we need to do the work for the rest of us.

Streaming

Palm Springs. Yeah, it's kind of dumb, but this 21st century Groundhog Day is also smarter than you think. I'm not sure I laughed out loud, but I had fun watching it. (Hulu.)

The Dog House: UK. All the niceness that made The Great British Bake-Off compelling viewing, directed into a show about adopting shelter dogs. It's the least demanding show you'll ever watch, and maybe also the cutest. I needed it this month. (HBO Max.)

The Act. Beautifully acted by an absolutely incredible cast (in particular, it makes Joey King seem woefully underused in everything else she's ever been in). A harrowing true story. (Hulu.)

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

What I Learned as a Young Black Political Speaker in Liberal White Austin. "What I fear that white Democrats do not understand is that Black Americans have no interest in playing team games if they do not see themselves alive on either team. Democrats offer minor reforms and change street names to Black Lives Matter Avenue. Many of them paternalistically say actions like defunding the police are unrealistic. But if I die in the best world that you can imagine, then there’s a problem with your imagination."

Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm. "Mr. Williams knew that he had not committed the crime in question. What he could not have known, as he sat in the interrogation room, is that his case may be the first known account of an American being wrongfully arrested based on a flawed match from a facial recognition algorithm, according to experts on technology and the law."

What the police really believe. "Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence."

GOP senator introduces bill to stop federal funding for schools teaching ‘1619 Project’. "Republican Sen. Tom Cotton introduced a piece of legislation on Thursday that will prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the award-winning New York Times piece The 1619 Project in K-12 schools." Imagine being this racist, or being represented by someone this racist.

McClatchy journalists absolutely can show support for Black lives. I'm glad this was cleared up, but it seems a bit silly that it was ever a question. Support for human rights is not and should not be a political issue.

Breonna Taylor Is On The Cover Of O Magazine — The First One Ever Without Oprah. Arrest the cops who murdered her.

Trump's America

Lest We Forget the Horrors: A Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes. "This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them. This list will be updated between now and the November 2020 Presidential election."

Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state. "Full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the U.S. and cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report." (Here's that report.)

Homeland Security fears widespread mask-wearing will break facial recognition software. Allow me to play my tiny violin.

Is this the beginning of Trump's Dirty War? "As if on cue, John Yoo, the legal architect of George W. Bush’s torture regime, has emerged as one of Trump’s newest advisors, helping craft legal-sounding justifications for Trump to expand his powers to dictatorial proportions." A genuinely terrifying comparison of Trump's recent actions to historical events in Argentina and elsewhere.

Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years. Right-wing extremists, not so much. As many people have said, the difference is: right-wing activists want people to die, while left-wing activists want people to have healthcare.

“Defendant Shall Not Attend Protests”: In Portland, Getting Out of Jail Requires Relinquishing Constitutional Rights. "A dozen protesters facing federal charges are barred from going to “public gatherings” as a condition of release from jail — a tactic one expert described as “sort of hilariously unconstitutional.”" But not ha ha hilarious.

Esper requires training that refers to protesters, journalists as 'adversaries'. "A mandatory Pentagon training course newly sent to the entire force and aimed at preventing leaks refers to protesters and journalists as "adversaries" in a fictional scenario designed to teach Defense Department personnel how to better protect sensitive information."

Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. By Richard Clarke! Let's not allow the people who were involved in George W Bush's administration absolve themselves of the war crimes they committed, but nonetheless, this is a remarkable editorial.

Culture and Society

Carl Reiner, Perfect. A completely lovely remembrance of Carl Reiner by Steve Martin.

It’s time for business journalism to break with its conservative past. Yes, please.

Magical Girls as Metaphor: Why coded queer narratives still have value. "From unhealthy power dynamics, such as student-teacher relationships; to biphobia, transphobia, body shaming and white beauty standards; to an over-saturation of tragic endings, “forbidden love” and coming-out narratives; I couldn’t really see myself in any of that. But as a young queer pre-teen, I did see myself and what I wanted to be in anime. Not often in yuri, surprisingly, but in magical girl anime and in idol anime."

Why Children of Men haunts the present moment. A beautifully bleak exploration of one of the best films ever made.

Q&A: The Fearless High School Newspaper Editor Covering Portland Protests. This is so incredibly cool and gives me hope for the future. "I found out that my dad has been tear gassed before, because when we were tear gassed he was like, “This is the worst tear gas I’ve ever felt.”"

When Did Recipe Writing Get So...Whitewashed? "Last year when my book was coming out, I had to take a stand against italicizing non-English words. It's a way that Western publications literally "other" non-white foods: they make them look different. But why can't dal and jollof rice and macaroni and cheese all exist in the same font style?"

Tech

Pivot to People: It’s Time to Build the New Economy. "Today’s calls for ethical, humane, responsible, regulated and beneficial technology, compounded with venture capital’s virtue signaling in solidarity with Black lives, brings us to a critical crossroads for corporate America." I really hope this is the future of the tech industry.

Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook. "The company seems to be pretty comfortable with obfuscating the truth, and that’s why people don’t trust Facebook anymore."

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. "We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."

The Adjacent User Theory. "Our success was anchored on what I now call The Adjacent User Theory. The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using the it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them."

“Hurting People  At Scale”. "As it heads into a US presidential election where its every move will be dissected and analyzed, the social network is facing unprecedented internal dissent as employees worry that the company is wittingly or unwittingly exerting political influence on content decisions related to Trump, and fear that Facebook is undermining democracy."

Regulating technology. I strongly disagree with Benedict Evans on his conclusions - long-time readers will know I'm very pro anti-trust, and buy into Tim Wu's arguments completely - but his argument is worth a read.

Twitter says it's looking at subscription options as ad revenue drops sharply. Ads are dying; payments are likely to supplant them just about everywhere. Medium was far ahead of the curve, as was Julien Genestoux with Unlock.

New Survey Reveals Dramatic Shift in Consumer Attitudes Towards Advertisements In Quarantine. I mean, let's be clear: ads suck, and they always have. In the pandemic, our tolerance for bullshit has gone way down.

HOWTO: Create an Architecture of Participation for your Open Source project. I've created two major open source projects and helped to build a third. This is a really great guide which I'm happy to endorse.

Compassionate action over empathy. On building with compassion instead of empathy. This is an important distinction that I need to internalize more. "I worry that when we fixate on empathy, we stay focused and stuck on whiteness and the guilt that millions are feeling for the first time. It’s one reason I’ll no longer recommend White Fragility. The whole book stays on white feelings without switching to privileged action."

Image "Cloaking" for Personal Privacy. "The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them." Super-smart tech.

Mischief managed. "How MSCHF managed to dominate the internet — with fun!" As I mentioned last month, I'm a fan.

Microsoft Is in Talks to Buy TikTok in U.S. Simultaneously, the President is talking about banning it and not allowing Microsoft to buy it. Apropos of nothing, Facebook is about to come out with a competitor called Reels. I'm sure the ban is completely unrelated.

A long time ago, I promised to share the blogs I subscribe to. This is that post - in service of an important question. Who else should I be subscribing to? In particular, which underheard voices should I be listening to, on any subject? Do you have a blog? Have I overlooked you? Let me know.

As with my end-of-month roundups, I've made an attempt to sort these sources into categories, but I subscribe to people, not topics. It's highly likely that people use their blogs to write in a way that defies categorization, and those are the kinds of sources I prefer.

As always: I subscribe using NewsBlur, and read using the cross-platform Reeder app. I also read email newsletters in NewsBlur, and I subscribe to many - but that can be the subject of another post.

The Business of Tech

A Smart Bear by Jason Cohen - thoughts on startups and marketing

Andrew Chen - partner at a16z

Anil Dash - CEO of Glitch and old-school blogger

A VC - Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures, writes daily

The Barefoot VC - Jalak Jobanputra, founder of Future\Perfect Ventures

Both Sides of the Table - Mark Suster, Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures

Coding VC - Leo Polovets, coder turned VC

Continuations - Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures

Crunchbase News - reporting on funding deals multiple times a day; most of them aren't of interest, but sometimes there will be a really useful insight hidden in the news

Dan Gillmor - co-founder of the News Co/Lab

Daring Fireball - John Gruber's prolific, roughly Apple-centric blog

Digidave - Dave Cohn, journalism tech innovator, currently running Advance Digital's Alpha Group

Dries Buytaert - open source pioneer and founder of Drupal; co-founder at Acquia

Benedict Evans - former analyst at a16z; I rarely agree with his societal conclusions, but he's always well thought out and insightful

Feld Thoughts - Brad Feld is co-founder of Foundry Group and TechStars

David Cohen - Managing Partner at Techstars

Hunter Walk - Partner at Homebrew

Kapor Center - one of the most important organizations for making tech more inclusive and impactful

Marco Arment - solo operator of the excellent Overcast; formerly the lead developer at Tumblr and the creator of Instapaper

Marshall Kirkpatrick - former tech journalist (who wrote about my first startup at TechCrunch), now Vice President, Influencer Relations, Analyst Relations, and Competitive Intelligence at Sprinklr

Matt Mullenweg - a founder of WordPress, CEO at Automattic

Lizard Wrangling - Mitchell Baker is Chair of the Mozilla Foundation

Chai Musings - Neeraj Mathur is my former colleague at ForUsAll, and veteran of many of Silicon Valley's iconic institutions

Obvious Startup Advice - Eric Marcoullier is a startup veteran, and this no-nonsense advice blog should be on every founder's list

Pascal Finette - Pascal is a former mentor at Matter; he works at Singularity University, where he's the Chair for Entrepreneurship & Open Innovation

Rands in Repose - Michael Lopp writes about tech leadership and was blogging in the early days

Sam Altman - former head of YC, now the CEO of OpenAI; I often disagree, but understanding Sam's kind of investor mindset is really important

Semil Shah - founder of Haystack Ventures

Signal vs Noise - the canonical corporate blog; this is absolutely how it should be done. Always smart, always insightful

The Slow Hunch - Nick Grossman is a partner at Union Square Ventures

Steve Blank - influential author of the Startup Handbook

Stratechery - I'm a paid subscriber; this is the daily tech analysis blog and newsletter, and the paid updates are absolutely worth the money

This is Going to Be BIG - Charlie O'Donnell is partner at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures

Tomasz Tunguz - VC at Redpoint who often writes about economic history

Doc Searls - author of The Intention Economy, co-founder of Customer Commons, and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto

Seth Godin - thought-provoking short pieces around marketing and motivation

The Philosophy of Tech

Amber Case - calm technology, futurism, and the human side of tech design

J. Nathan Matias - founder of the CAT (Citizens And Tech) Lab

… My heart’s in Accra - Ethan Zuckerman is a media scholar and internet activist

Andy Baio - co-founder of XOXO and Upcoming (RIP) who sits at the intersection of tech and culture in the most beautiful way. Don't miss his links blog

Tatania Mac - an indie engineer who often writes about inclusion topics and maintains Devs of Colour

Craphound - Corey Doctorow is an author and tech rights activist

Ruha Benjamin - the author of Race After Technology

Nadia Eghbal - absolutely remarkable tech researcher who wrote a book on the dynamics of open source that I'm looking forward to reading

Idle Words - Maciej Cegłowski is solo operator of Pinboard, and one of the wittiest voices in tech

Jillian C York - Director for International Freedom of Expression at the EFF

Hapgood - Mike Caulfield is an edtech innovator and arguably a whistleblower; always fascinating insights at the intersection of technology and society

Caterina Fake - co-founder of Flickr, among others

reb00ted - Johannes Ernst on tech at the intersection of fairness and sustainability

LibrarianShipwreck - originally about the future of libraries; now about the future of us

Building Tech

Smashing Magazine - in-depth articles specifically about front-end coding

Minor 9th - Simon Pearson's long-running blog about music, coding, and everything else in-between

Amy MacKinnon - web developer and thespian; usually writes about programming

gregorLove - Gregor Morrill's indieweb blog

Evan Prodromou - open source and decentralized social pioneer, now at Wikipedia

Manton Reece - founder of micro.blog

Julia Evans - software developer and tech zine publisher

Amit Gawande - a software developer in Pune, India

A List Apart - a relatively low-volume, high-signal publication about tech, coding, and the tech business

Tom MacWright - entrepreneurial coder who worked on Observable and Mapbox

Coding Horror - Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, on coding and life

Programming is Terrible - "lessons learned from a life wasted"

Ouvre Boite - Julien Genestoux on decentralization, his adventures in media, and the future of the web

Simon Willison - Simon's a successful entrepreneur, the co-creator of the Django framework, and he's now working on Datasette, a tool for exploring and publishing data

Ryan Barrett - indieweb pioneer and Head of Engineering at Color Genomics

Tantek Çelik - co-founder of the indieweb movement who works on web standards at Mozilla / the W3C, and runner

Tom Morris - coder turned legal scholar

Aaron Parecki - co-founder of the indieweb movement and among the world's most quantified selfs

Throw Out the Manual - Tim Owens on his building and hacking adventures as co-founder of Reclaim Hosting

API Evangelist - Kin Lane on the business, politics, and technology of APIs

Education and Tech

bavatuesdays - Jim Groom is the original edupunk, now the co-founder of Reclaim Hosting

CogDogBlog - Alan Levine is Vice President Community & CTO at the New Media Consortium

Discourses - Doug Belshaw sits at the intersection of open source and education

Hack Education - Audrey Watters is a brilliant writer, truth-teller, and self-proclaimed "ed-tech's Cassandra"; absolutely vital thoughts if you care even a little bit about the future of education

Iterating Toward Openness - David Wiley is the Chief Academic Officer at Lumen Learning and former Shuttleworth Fellow

Laura Ritchie - Professor of Learning and Teaching at the University of Chichester

D'Arcy Norman - Manager of the Learning Technologies group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, at the University of Calgary

Geoffrey Gevalt - former journalist and founder of the Young Writers Project

Culture & Society

Live Laugh Blog - Jenn Schiffer, Director of Community at Glitch, writes a really entertaining lifestyle blog

Nick Grant - insightful posts about depression and suicide. Definitely comes with a content warning

Every Day Fiction - daily flash fiction that never fails to improve my life

Daily Science Fiction - a new high-quality science fiction story, daily

Charlie's Diary - Edinburgh-based science fiction writer Charles Stross writes about everything with ascerbic wit and the kind of insight you'd expect from a writer of his stature

The Creative Independent - produced by Kickstarter, this is a publication about making it on your own as a creative person

Making Light - I've been reading since this was Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's personal blog in 2001, but now it's something bigger - one of the original, beautifully idiosyncratic communities on the internet

Neil Gaiman - the author of Sandman, among many, many other things

sim.show - Sim Salis interviews people from across the intellectual spectrum about life and career - among other things

adrienne maree brown - the inspirational author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism

Grasping Reality with Both Hands - Brad DeLong is professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and served in the Clinton administration

Nieman Lab's What We're Reading - a linklog keeping track of digital media, startups, the web, journalism, strategy, and the state of the world

Last week I suddenly felt horrendous: I felt deeper fatigue than I had in years, I was experiencing severe headaches, and I was finding it hard to think straight. My daily work has become a series of Zoom meetings, and I careened from scheduled event to scheduled event, hoping I could just get through it.

Of course, this being 2020, I began to worry about Covid-19. I spend most of my time right now around my immunosuppressed mother, who is not doing well completely independently of the pandemic, and I'm deeply worried that I'll somehow transmit something to her. I'm a little bit worried about the virus for myself, too, but to be honest, I have no idea what my life looks like beyond all this - not just beyond the pandemic, but also beyond my family's health journey.

I don't have Covid; I just came dangerously close to burning out.

Lately, I've learned that too many stimuli lead to my feeling physically wrecked. It's not just that the notifications, messages, and tiny dopamine hits make me feel mentally overwhelmed, but they start to push me to the right of the bell curve of physical anxiety symptoms. I need to rate-limit and sanitize my inputs, otherwise my outputs suffer.

At this point, my social media hiatus from Thanksgiving through to New Year's Day has become a tradition. I always feel better. It's got very little to do with the actual content of social media - although endless outrage is inevitably wearing, it's not like any of the outrage is actually misplaced - and more to do with the physical mechanisms of the software itself. The interaction mechanics that keep us coming back for more, designed to juice the engagement statistics, undeniably increase my anxiety - if only just a little.

Which I think would be fine if it wasn't 2020. We're in the middle of a global, deadly pandemic. My mother is dying. My father is getting older. My sister has become long-term disabled with chronic pain. I have a demanding job (which, to be clear, I love). The President of the United States continues to show his true colors as a racist and a fascist. And the blowback from the world's largest civil rights movement - a point of hope in itself - is staggering, even within my own extended family. Finally, there was an event in my extended family this week that I don't even begin to want to talk about here.

Given all this, the baseline of stress is much further to the right of the anxiety bell curve, which means that stimuli which would ordinarily be tolerable are less so. Again, it's not so much about the content of the stimuli: I've even discovered that playing Stardew Valley, a lovely little computer game about running a farm, has been sometimes too much.

I'd like to remain functional, be able to show up well at work, and support my family and friends in the way I would like. So that means cutting out stimuli.

Rather than cutting things out wholesale, I'm going to aim for moderation, at least to start. I like that Screen Time has made its way to MacOS from the iOS / iPadOS devices. Because my screen time goals sync between them, I can allocate myself 30 minutes a day for game playing, for example, and 45 minutes for social media. (Because RSS feeds and blogging are not rapid-fire, I don't feel the need to ration them.) I've also made a concerted effort to bring down my Zoom meeting load by around a third, giving me more contemplative time at work.


I recognize that talking about burnout and cognitive stamina isn't really the done thing - I think I'm supposed to be hustling? Shouldn't I be building a personal brand based on excellence and productivity? But that's exactly why I'm talking about it here. We all need to look after ourselves and each other, now more than ever. I spend a lot of my time caring for others, and it can be easy to forget self-care. But the old adage of needing to put your own oxygen mask on first is true. I need to do better at remembering that, and maybe you do too.

Here's the media I consumed and found interesting in June.

Apps

Linear. A super-powerful bug tracker designed to speed teams up. I'm using it for personal projects right now, but I might expand that. I particularly like how it connects to GitHub issues, and how it inherits just the right things from Jira's classic design, while discarding the rest.

Streaming

13th. I saw this for the first time in June - and regret being super-late to the party. The entire movie is up on YouTube. If you haven't yet, educate yourself.

Dark Season 3. If you haven't checked out Dark yet, you're missing something. Watch it in its original German with English subtitles. And maybe keep notes: its human-centered science fiction story is densely plotted to say the least. Season 3 adds a whole new dimension, literally.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I needed this. It's a giant ad for the song contest, really. Which is fine, because I happen to love the song contest. One of those objectively terrible movies that brought me a lot of joy.

Books

Blood Dazzler, by Patricia Smith. The story of Hurricane Katrina told through poetry. Blood Dazzler is heart-wrenching work. Patricia Smith is - as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, among other things - a four-time National Poetry Slam champion, and the spoken-word rhythm underlying her work is impossible to ignore.

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change. "So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform." Barack Obama on Black Lives Matter.

Black Journalists and Covering the Storm That Never Passes. "I can’t tell you how many times I, or someone on my team, has cried into their laptops over the injustices inflicted daily on black people, who have gone to bed with anxiety over what looms in the morning, in the aftermath of another violent act against our humanity."

Why So Many Police Are Handling the Protests Wrong. "Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave—and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force—wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters—it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?"

The American Nightmare. "But only the lies of racist Americans are great. Their American dream—that this is a land of equal opportunity, committed to freedom and equality, where police officers protect and serve—is a lie. Their American dream—that they have more because they are more, that when black people have more, they were given more—is a lie. Their American dream—that they have the civil right to kill black Americans with impunity and that black Americans do not have the human right to live—is a lie." Ibram X. Kendi is the author of How to Be an Antiracist.

Stop focusing on looting in Minneapolis. Be outraged that police keep killing black men. A good opinion from the LA Times editorial board. The constant commentary from people who believe property is more imporant than the murder of a community is sickening.

This Is Fascism. "The message of this federal government is unambiguous. It has been conveyed in part by Customs and Border Protection, the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S.—a force shot through with racism and tyranny, now charged with carrying out Trump’s most knee-jerk nativist impulses—which announced Sunday that it was mobilizing officers to augment police forces “confronting the lawless actions of rioters.”"

Thousands of Americans across the US are peacefully marching against police violence. A beautiful photo record of the protests.

'We Just Want to Live.' Photographers Share What They Experienced While Covering Protests Across America. More vital photo record.

How Did BlackOutTuesday Go So Wrong So Fast? I believe this was deliberately co-opted. he net result was that black voices were silenced on social media for days.

Don’t Fall for the ‘Chaos’ Theory of the Protests. "Why were peaceful protesters being tear-gassed, on national TV? Because Trump and his aides—nearly all of them men and every one of them white—had decided to punctuate his speech with a walk across Lafayette Square to a church where Trump posed, clutching a Bible. What became even clearer, though, was that the Bible-posing was not the photo op the Trump administration was aiming for; the clearing of Lafayette Square was. The video that played out on CNN’s split screen was a document of state power in action: the president, his will made manifest; the protesters, their eyes reddened from tear gas, forced to make way for the leader."

The Police Take the Side of White Vigilantes. "Who are the cops for? Over the last week, all across the country, in ways large and small, they’ve shown us." The slave catchers are living up to their legacy.

We Crunched the Numbers: Police — Not Protesters — Are Overwhelmingly Responsible for Attacking Journalists. "Police are responsible for the vast majority of assaults on journalists: over 80 percent." From the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world. "Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable." Fingers crossed.

Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. "American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth."

The Police Have Been Spying on Black Reporters and Activists for Years. I Know Because I’m One of Them. And if you're not familiar with COINTELPRO, it's worth reading up on that, too.

‘To see this, I am honored’: Brother of man killed by Seattle police reflects on time in CHAZ. "If John were here, he would be honored. All my heart and soul show this will work. The government is listening, that we have had enough. I’m proud of this."

Recall That Ice Cream Truck Song? We Have Unpleasant News For You. ""N***** Love A Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!" merits the distinction of the most racist song title in America. Released in March 1916 by Columbia Records, it was written by actor Harry C. Browne and played on the familiar depiction of black people as mindless beasts of burden greedily devouring slices of watermelon."

Elsewhere in American fascism

Dozens Of Immigrant Families Who Were Separated At The Border Likely Shouldn't Have Been, An Internal Report Found. "The inspector general's report found that 40 children were separated from their parents for at least four weeks, although one didn't see their family for more than a year."

Political Symbols at Demonstrations. "Researchers at the Tow Center and Columbia’s Journalism and Engineering schools have developed a tool that can help reporters decipher the symbols and acronyms used by political groups which may be helpful as they report on political actions now and during the election season." The far right is out in force.

A letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Pentagon policy official James Miller's resignation letter. "You have made life-and-death decisions in combat overseas; soon you may be asked to make life-and-death decisions about using the military on American streets and against Americans. Where will you draw the line, and when will you draw it?"

James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution. "Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us [...] We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children."

The Real Apprentice. "At this time, most native New Yorkers saw Trump as a bit of a joke: a fame-thirsty, tasteless rake with a history of high-end failure. He made disastrous deals, like the Plaza Hotel. His airline failed almost as soon as it began. He even found a way to go bankrupt on casinos. But on television, through careful editing—turning three hours into thirty seconds—Mark Burnett made Trump seem decisive, funny, and likeable."

How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. "Rumors of roving bands of Antifa have followed small protests all over the United States. Why are people so ready to believe them?" There's a lot of value in keeping people scared - particularly of a bogeyman that seeks to undermine your ideology.

No, Trump probably can’t list antifa as a ‘terrorist group.’ Here’s what he’s really doing. "The Trump administration is unlikely to designate antifa a terrorist group in counterterrorism law. If it did, that designation would be difficult to enforce, since antifa is not really an organization. Nor is it clear how much antifa supporters have committed actual terrorism. But Trump’s announcement could suggest that U.S. counterterrorism agencies are shifting their priorities. This is worth watching."

The U.S. Military Has a Boogaloo Problem. "Some of the largest private Facebook groups catering to the [neo-confederate] boogaloo movement have scores of members who identify as active-duty military."

‘State-sanctioned violence’: US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. "Police in America’s biggest cities are failing to meet even the most basic international human rights standards governing the use of lethal force, a new study from the University of Chicago has found."

America’s wholesome square dancing tradition is a tool of white supremacy. It turns out this information is still not widely known.

And finally, two pieces of good news from the Supreme Court: Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules; California’s ‘sanctuary’ cities rules stay in place after Supreme Court rejects Trump’s challenge.

Technology

A New iOS Shortcut Blurs Faces and Wipes Metadata for Protest Images. Neat!

IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology. I was very pleasantly surprised by this ethical stance. "In his letter, [IBM CEO] Krishna also advocated for police reform, arguing that more police misconduct cases should be put under the purview of federal court and that Congress should make changes to qualified immunity doctrine, among other measures."

The Racial Bias Built Into Photography. "Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market."

Black tech founders say venture capital needs to move past ‘diversity theater’. "There’s a dearth of black investors in venture capital’s upper echelons and little investment in start-ups with black founders".

This startup is working to bring full anonymity to the internet. Kudos to Harry Halpin and his team.

Pinwheel is the API platform for income verification that every fintech and neobank needs. Meanwhile, a quiet fintech revolution is taking place. As always, in a gold rush, you make money providing spades (building infrastructure that others can build on).

Colin Kaepernick to Join Medium Board of Directors. Kudos to Ev and everyone at Medium.

Facebook Pitched New Tool Allowing Employers to Suppress Words Like “Unionize” in Workplace Chat Product. "One Facebook employee who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity said he saw the blacklisting feature, with a suggested use case around unionization, as a clear effort to give employers the ability to exert control over employees." It would be illegal for an employer to use this, right? Right?

Facebook Groups Are Destroying America. "Dynamics in groups often mirror those of peer-to-peer messaging apps: People share, spread, and receive information directly to and from their closest contacts, whom they typically see as reliable sources. To make things easier for those looking to stoke political division, groups provide a menu of potential targets organized by issue and even location; bad actors can create fake profiles or personas tailored to the interests of the audiences they intend to infiltrate. This allows them to seed their own content in a group and also to repurpose its content for use on other platforms." I'm a little skeptical of this, but it's worth reading.

The Ghost in the Machine. "We could expect a Black programmer, immersed as she is in the same systems of racial meaning and economic expediency as the rest of her co-workers, to code software in a way that perpetuates racial stereotypes. Or, even if she is aware and desires to intervene, will she be able to exercise the power to do so?" A good exploration of the ideas in Dr Ruha Benjamin's excellent Race After Technology.

He Removed Labels That Said “Medical Use Prohibited,” Then Tried to Sell Thousands of Masks to Officials Who Distribute to Hospitals. "Using TaskRabbit and Venmo, a Silicon Valley investor and his business partner had workers repackage non-medical KN95 masks so he could sell them to Texas emergency workers." This is overt, life-threatening fraud.

How to Know You’re Not Insane (And how a Cards Against Humanity Staff Writer was fired.) My copy - acquired at XOXO in the early days - is finally finding its way into the recycling bin.

And finally

The Seven Billion Habits of Highly Effective Robots. A cute science fiction short.

Nine months ago, I joined ForUsAll as Head of Engineering. It's my first fintech company.

Long-term readers will know that I've spent most of my life in the open source web world, building one of the first white label social networking platforms, and in media, where I helped build the way journalists at networks like NBC securely send footage back to the newsroom. Every startup I've ever joined has had a strong social mission; here, in the midst of widening income inequality, we're trying to help ordinary people build a stronger financial future.

This is my personal space; opinions here, as in all of my posts, are mine alone.

Here are some things I've observed.

1. Financial technology is broken.

It's common for financial institutions to have web platforms that look like they were built in 1998. Some of them were. I'm certain that some smaller institutions are running their software on decrepit Windows servers. APIs are virtually nonexistent. Interoperability between institutions is often in the form of faxes (you read that correctly; please breathe) or checks in the mail.

Over in Europe, open banking has become an important movement. It's inevitable that institutions in the US will need to modernize to adopt similar ideas. The institutions that haven't invested in in-house technology, or don't have strong technology partnerships, are going to find themselves in very rocky waters.

Elsewhere, businesses understand that open, standard APIs are a way to build ecosystems and gain value through partnerships. They also understand that they need to build technical teams that are first-class contributors to the business. In the financial sector, a very closed, old-world view of technology is still prevelant. The institutions that can't let go of these archaic mindsets will eventually die. There's a new batch of fintech startups - ForUsAll among them, alongside the likes of Chime and Digit - that will take their place and redefine the ecosystem.

Which brings me to ...

2. Scraping is everywhere.

Plaid was recently acquired by Visa for $5.3 billion. It provides a unified auth and limited API for most institutions. Its connections are sort of flaky, but it's remarkably better than the previous status quo.

And it largely works using Puppeteer.

Because institutions don't have APIs, Plaid spends a lot of time and energy maintaining headless browsers to log into banking websites on your behalf. In order to be able to log in, it has to be saving your banking password in plain text. (Compare and contrast with a typical API, which would use secure, revokable tokens for authentication.)

If you're connecting to a bank using Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and others, you're probably saving your banking password in plain text in Plaid. Infuriatingly, because there are no APIs, let alone API standards, there's very little alternative. But it's worth saying that if you're giving credentials to a third party, many banks will absolve themselves of any liability in a data breach.

3. Operations teams are vital.

The first rule of technology on the internet is that if it looks like magic, there's probably an army of people in an office park somewhere (often the Philippines) making it happen. In the finance world, a lot of the magic isn't done by technology as much as teams of people whose role is to reconcile data and perform financial operations that can't be automated.

There's room for a kind of Financial Operations as a Service platform - but because of the sensitive data involved, the workers on demand would need to be certified, heavily insured, and security tested. You'd also lose their most important feature: the institutional knowledge about a customer that is grown when you spend time with them.

4. There's a lot of opportunity for growth.

Institutional technology myopia means there's a lot of room for innovators to enter the market and change it for the better.

But there's also a lot of opportunity to create ecosystems. Perhaps that's even how you win: create an open ecosystem that allows institutions to easily interoperate with each other in a peer-to-peer, secure way. The older institutions won't bother to connect, but the newer ones could potentially form alliances and band together. Eventually, the incumbent institutions will have to join in.

Imagine a banking system built on openness, human-centered design, software libraries, SDKs, and running code, instead of armies of Excel spreadsheets and ties behind desks.

Imagine beautiful experiences that give you full control over your money. Imagine institutions that aren't all just controlled by old, white men for their own benefit. Imagine wealth for all.

It sounds kind of good, right?

Now imagine the ecosystem that makes it all possible.

I know what you think that sounds like. I know what many readers are going to say. But trust me:

5. It's not about blockchain.

Programmable money isn't cool. You know what's cool? Money people can use.

I'm sure there will come a time when cryptocurrencies do allow the open banking ecosystem I describe above to be built. But that time isn't now. And while I'm grateful for the people working on building the financial system of 2030, we still need to drag the existing one into the 21st century.

Again: people are, today in 2020, using faxes and paper checks as forms of inter-bank communication. When technology is used, user passwords are often saved in plain text. And many of the people involved don't really see anything wrong with it. Blockchain might be one of the technologies that helps us, but the point isn't about technology; the point is what people are able to do with their money.

6. It is about wealth for all.

So that's what we need to build. We need to build the infrastructure that brings banking in line with today, in that way that the internet is so good at, where gatekeepers are crushed and ordinary people are empowered.

In the nineties, we empowered everyone to communicate. In the 2000s, we let everyone publish. In the 2010s, we put limitless knowledge in everyone's hands, wherever they were. And in the 2020s, we're going to reimagine the financial system to be an open ecosystem where anyone can innovate, for the benefit of us all. The old gatekeepers will give way to new, decentralized tapestries of value, where anyone can share, earn, and save in a way that they fully control.

The 2020s are about tearing down the same old thing and building something more equitable and agile in its place. That's the opportunity - and it's an opportunity for all of us.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Here's the media I consumed and found interesting in May.

I'm scared for the world and sick to my stomach about the injustices faced by black communities. The pressure cooker exploded in May, and it looks like June will continue this trend. I hope we can find our way to a more equal, more compassionate world where everyone can live a good life. It certainly feels like we're a long way from it now.

Apps

Stardew Valley. I'm late to the party but hopelessly addicted. It's like a cross between The Sims and The Secret of Monkey Island, with all of the humor and weirdness of the latter. Every time I think I've got a handle on it, it adds a new angle.

MSCHF. Part art project, part commercial enterprise, MSCHF releases a new drop twice a month. They're the people who brought us The Office on Slack, Jesus Shoes, and the cut up Damien Hirst painting.

Streaming

Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. A timely, pointed documentary on the 30+ African American children and young adults who disappeared or were found murdered between 1979-81. The implications are devastating and highly relevant to what's happening on our streets today.

The Invisible Man. Tense from the first minute, this is a strongly feminist movie about gaslighting that is viscerally terrifying tonally and conceptually. Elisabeth Moss is excellent.

The Valhalla Murders. A taut Icelandic murder mystery that, again, has implications beyond its premise. It sounds like there's going to be a second season; I can't wait.

The Half of It. I expect this to continue to be the most beautiful film I've seen this year. I'm inspired by director Alice Wu, who was a computer scientist working at Microsoft before she changed directions and moved into filmmaking.

Notable Articles

The Pandemic

Flattening the Truth on Coronavirus. Dave Eggers on the convoluted, contradictory advice we're being offered.

“Political Connections and Cronyism”: In Blistering Whistleblower Complaint, Rick Bright Blasts Team Trump’s Pandemic Response. "Two weeks after being pushed out of his post, the former head of a $1.5 billion federal health agency formally accuses top officials of pressuring him to approve unproven chloroquine drugs and award pricey contracts to friends of the administration."

I'm Immunocompromised and Freaking Out About the World Reopening. I'm not immunocompromised, but I have loved ones who are, and this sums up how I feel, too.

 The Curious Case of the People Who Want to “Reopen” America—But Not Wear Masks. "The lesson here is that these stories aren’t really about vaccines or bioweapons or population control. Instead, they’re meta-parables about how the people telling them see themselves and feel about their place in the world."

Life on a Screen. My friend Oliver Mahony on his life working remotely.

‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’ "The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same."

An Incalculable Loss. A remarkable, human New York Times piece on the 100,000+ lives lost to Covid-19.

Black Lives Matter

Proportionate Response. "When destroying a police precinct is a reasonable reaction."

The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe. "Plagues, revolutions, massive wars, collapsed states—these are what reliably reduce economic disparities."

How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another country. "In recent years, the international community has sounded the alarm on the deteriorating political and human rights situation in the United States under the regime of Donald Trump. Now, as the country marks 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, the former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence. The fatigue and paralysis of the international community are evident in its silence, America experts say."

The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. "The coronavirus has slowed much American police work, but the rate of police killings has remained relatively unchanged."

Black Journalists Are Exhausted. "As we’ve heard again and again, these are extraordinary times. However, it’s an especially peculiar time to be a black journalist. The pandemic has laid bare many of the same racial inequities that generations of black journalists have been covering since 1827 when the Freedom’s Journal birthed the black press. While this pandemic is unique, the waves of trauma crashing down on my community are not."

George Floyd’s brother says Trump ‘kept pushing me off’ during phone call. "Philonise Floyd says president dismissed him during a phone conversation – he ‘didn’t give me a chance to even speak’."

Politics

The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros. "How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory."

Trump Is a Superspreader—of Distraction. "An added benefit of trolling, from the President’s perspective, is that it is also diverting the attention of the nation’s many Trump-haters, for whom his prolific stupidities and public feuds offer an endless supply of new outrage."

What Trump doesn't get about his new executive order: it'd backfire. "Trump seems oblivious to the fact that his new executive order, if it were implemented, would almost certainly backfire on him personally."

Culture & Society

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months. It's far more uplifting than the book would have you believe.

The End of Meat Is Here. "If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals."

David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water". "In 2005 author David Foster Wallace delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College. This thoughtful and moving talk inspires in me feelings of grief and anger and terror and hope, a response no doubt influenced by my awareness of Wallace's suicide some 40 months later in September 2008."

Brick Lane’s Beigel Bake reveals recipe for iconic bagels for stay-at-home bakers. Oh hell yes. I miss the Beigel Bake a great deal.

A Window Onto an American Nightmare. "Homelessness afflicts nearly one in five hundred Americans. As a crisis, it’s insidious, because its victims rarely plunge toward the abyss; they slide. Maybe you’ve been couch surfing in between jobs and you overstay your welcome. Maybe you’ve been in Airbnbs while apartment hunting and the search is harder than expected. Maybe, like Hickson, you lived on the momentum of a private dream until you had a reason to put down roots."

The Overlooked Black History of Memorial Day. "Researchers have traced the earliest annual commemoration to women who laid flowers on soldiers’ graves in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., in April 1866. But historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves a year earlier, to make sure their story gets told too."

Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic. "Why is doing what literally billions of women do day after day framed as some terrible ordeal? Where is the headline “Local Man Cannot Parent Own Child”?"

The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms. Pretty.

Journalism

U.S. drops to 45 in ranking of countries based on freedom of the press. "The report calls out Trump as a ‘media-bashing enthusiast’." I mean, to say the least.

Like it or not, Google and Facebook are becoming the leading patrons of the news industry. To be clear: I don't like it at all.

How Civil Didn’t Save Journalism. "Civil indeed helped launch a handful of publications, but it fell short on its promise to solve the media industry’s problems by finding a viable, alternative funding model. This might be because Civil’s mission was always more about investigating the viability of cryptocurrency."

CNN crew released from police custody after they were arrested live on air in Minneapolis. These are dark times.

Technology

Psychicpaper. Fascinating, technical details about a serious bug in iOS. "I dubbed it “psychic paper” because, just like the item by that name that Doctor Who likes to carry, it allows you get past security checks and make others believe you have a wide range of credentials that you shouldn’t have."

Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers. Thank you, Tim Bray. The post on his blog is here.

Deno 1.0. An interesting alternative to Node that disposes of centralized package managers.

The Next Social Era is Here: Why Now Is the Time for Social Products Again. "Now is the best time in eight years to be a Founder of social/communications products, and we believe it will kick off a second wave of product-first Founders who are true artists of their craft."

The power of Open Source in the fight against COVID-19. "In every crisis, Open Source has empowered organizations to do more with less. It's great to see this play out again. Open Source teams have rallied to help and come up with some pretty incredible solutions when times are tough."

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage. "If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You'd net a clean $8 profit per pizza [insert nerdy economics joke about there is such a thing as a free lunch]." Kind of a fun story. But these food delivery startups have extremely screwy economics.

New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data. They're big enough that they can - but others will follow.

Automattic pumps $4.6M into New Vector to help grow Matrix, an open, decentralized comms ecosystem. I met the Matrix team earlier in their journey, when I was still working on Known. I tried to invest in them at Matter, because I knew this would be big, but no dice. I'm excited for their continued success.

The open podcast ecosystem is dying — here’s how to save it. Podcasting is one of the last bastions of popular openness. It is successful and vibrant because it is open. Let's keep that going.

Remote-team managers can learn a lot from open-source communities. "Instead of trying to reinvent management from first principles, we can turn to other areas with experience navigating distributed teams with individuals managing competing commitments. Open-source software communities—which also are remote communities connected by the internet—have long included the role of community managers. These are the people who tend to the health of the community, by maintaining communication, motivation, efficiency, and engagement. It’s a well-honed practice that remote managers can learn a lot from."

More and more technology companies are realizing that they're just as productive as a remote team, with lower overheads. Simultaneously, tech employees are realizing that they're better off in an environment where they don't need to commute, can eat their own food, and can spend more time with their families.

I agree. Even without a pandemic going on around me, I vastly prefer working remotely. I get more work done, spend dramatically less time in transit, eat far better, do more exercise, etc. At a time when my parents are in need of more support for health reasons, it's also allowed me to be there for them in a way that I couldn't have been if I was required to be present in an office every day.

Most people prefer their homes - and even the ones that don't are happier in coworking spaces than their own offices. What does that mean for the Bay Area?

So far, house prices have continued to rise. Here's a graph of median house sale prices in San Francisco vs last year:

And in Alameda County (which encompasses Oakland and Berkeley):

We'll see what happens - because house prices lag by at least a month, we may yet see a pandemic-related reduction - but it looks like house prices are continuing to rise.

At any rate, the median prices in April were $1.69M and $1.05M respectively. To get a mortgage on a million dollar home, you need to earn around $220,000 a year. While tech employees are disproportionately highly-paid, the average salary in the sector is $145,000 a year. Most tech workers can't afford to own their own homes. This might not be a factor for workers who are just out of college, but the vast majority of people want to own - particularly if they start a family.

So in a world where you can work remotely (or from a coworking space that you choose), why stay in the Bay Area, where you're disproportionately likely to be renting? Even the super-rich - those who can afford to buy a home for millions of dollars - would be better off fleeing north to Marin or wine country, where they'll get more for their money.

You don't have to move to the sticks to get a better life. Cities like Seattle, Portland, Austin, Madison, Boston, and Boulder are all liberal, highly educated, full of arts and culture, and cheaper than the Bay Area. Seattle and Portland are even on the same time zone and a short flight (or longer train journey) away.

The Bay Area isn't dead - far from it - but I think we'll see a tech migration away as remote work becomes more permanent. Eventually, that will depress prices. In an area of legendarily high income inequality, that's probably good for everyone.

Axios is reporting that Facebook has bought Giphy for $400M.

Giphy is the animated GIF database that powers functionality in most of the social apps you can think of. It makes money through behind-the-scenes deals to provide that functionality, although its APIs are available to anyone.

$400M sounds like a lot of money - and it is - but it's actually $200M less than its most recent valuation. When it raised $72M from investors in a Series D funding round back in 2016, the price of its shares extrapolated to a valuation of $600M. The acquisition is therefore effectively a down round: the company sold at a lower price-per-share than its most recent investors paid. While the investors who bought in during the Series D round may not be getting such a good deal, Betaworks, which incubated it, should see a nice profit.

Giphy's functionality is available in an enormous number of tools, from Tinder and Snapchat to Telegram and Signal. Facebook's own Instagram is one of them, which is the ostensible reason for the acquisition, but the net result is that the company will be aware of activity on virtually every social app in existence, including the ones with end-to-end encryption. Animated GIFs are wildly popular, in part thanks to Giphy, and a social app that doesn't offer the functionality is considered incomplete. Giphy's API calls from these apps will contain important clues about what people are talking about all over the world, across platforms - and how often each platform is being used.

What happens next? I expect the secure apps to move away from using it, as a start. Unfortunately, there is no alternative to the service, open or otherwise - it's had a cool $150M pumpted into it since inception, and it's highly unlikely that an open alternative will be able to offer its level of curation anytime soon. So we'll likely see this functionality diminish in these apps in favor of stickers, which don't require such a curated ecosystem.

The down round does suggest that VC-funded companies are going to enter some (more) choppy waters in the near future. But to be honest, while it might be embarrassing for some previously-bullish funds, some price corrections are probably not a bad thing for the industry.

Image via GIPHY, obviously.