Werd I/O

The PATRIOT Act has long been used to justify warrantless surveillance into ordinary Americans. It was a fast follow to the horrors of 9/11, but thanks to a renewal by President Bush, a four-year extension by President Obama, and an extension of important clauses in the USA Freedom Act, an entire generation is now used to the civil rights violations it authorizes.

On Wednesday, the following amendment to the reauthorized USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Ron Wyden, failed by one vote:

(C) An application under paragraph (1) may not seek an order authorizing or requiring the production of internet website browsing information or internet search history information.

Nine democrats, including San Francisco's own Diane Feinstein, voted against the amendment, effectively allowing an American's web browsing data or search history information to be surveilled without a warrant.

The definitions of web browsing information and search history are important here. "Website browsing information" means everything you do on the web, not just through a browser. It's functionally impossible to distinguish web browser activity from APIs hit by an app, say, or an Internet of Things appliance in your home. Manual web browsing is, for most people, a minority of their internet use. APIs represent at least 83% of internet traffic. Your apps and devices send API pings hundreds of times an hour, letting services know about your activity. With this data, it's possible to infer when you're home, traveling, eating, sleeping, talking to a friend, or buying something. In a world where so many of us are so heavily attached to the internet, the ability to warrantlessly scan our web activity comes close to providing barrier-less surveillance of our every move.

Correspondingly, the definition of "search history information" is vague. We immediately think of the literal text history of our search requests, which would be invasive enough; your search data can be used to figure out if you're pregnant, what you're religious views are, and who you're going to vote for. But log into your Google activity dashboard: you'll see more information about what you've watched, location information, topics Google thinks you're interested in, your news history, call and message history, and more. From raw information, Google makes inferences about who you are. That, too, can be accessed.

All of this is to say that Wyden's amendment was a good one, and the representatives who blocked it should be ashamed of themselves. The PATRIOT Act and its successor have been inevitably abused. It is legislation without appropriate checks and balances that protect civil liberties while protecting lives.

There are no great workarounds. Warrant canaries - notices published by a service provider saying that they have not received a subpeona for information - have not been legally tested, and are not definitive. In any event, they do not (and may not) notify the subject of the surveillance.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
~ Edward Snowden

The best we can do product-wise is use peer-to-peer encryption technology based on open, auditable code, and trust that there are no undisclosed security flaws. I use Signal for texting. Open VPNs like Bitmask are available. But the single biggest thing we can do is to vote out our elected representatives that consistently support surveillance.

There was talk on Monday that Amazon wanted to puchase the struggling AMC theater chain, which also happens to be the world's largest, incorporating Odeon cinemas in the UK and across Europe.

Fortune posed a question about what an Amazon buy-out would be like, suggesting that tickets could be incorporated into Amazon Prime, and that Amazon originals could be shown in real cinemas first. Both of those things could happen, but I think there's an infrastructure play that's worth paying attention to.

Digital movies are distributed to theaters using technology developed by the Digital Cinema Distribution Coalition, co-founded by Cinemark Theatres, Regal Entertainment Group, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros - and, yes, AMC. It uses satellites and high-bandwidth internet connections to send movies, trailers, and pre-show content to theaters (75% of all of them as of 2017) in Digital Cinema Package format. Notably, DCP is an outdated format that uses JPEG 2000 as its primary visual codec, in a world where 8K streaming is about to be mainstream.

If Amazon can replace this distribution mechanism with its own network and infrastructure, starting with the world's largest cinema chain and a co-owner of the incumbent, it can offer its own, more modern services over the internet. These can also include modernizing theater advertising; National CineMedia, the largest cinema advertising company, is partially controlled by AMC.

In a world where movies are moving online faster than ever before, sometimes skipping box offices entirely, some degree of consolidation between home and theaters makes sense. Services like Netflix already use Amazon for their infrastructure; with this change, most of the entertainment world would use its services. In addition, the distribution mechanisms for theaters and the home could begin to converge. By allowing theoretically anyone to use these services, the definition of what constitutes a theater could expand. And a consolidated advertising pipeline would allow campaigns to reach viewers across media.

It's a big opportunity that crosses the traditional boundaries of the movie industry, which is why a company like Amazon is well-placed to take advantage of it. What it doesn't benefit is independent theaters, which, if Amazon is successful, will need to buy into its services. The effect will be that every movie theater in the world will effectively be a part of the same dark chain, running on Amazon logistics. In turn, filmmakers will need to engage with the Amazon ecosystem if they want to reach any kind of audience at all.

A valuable question is then: what would an alternative look like that benefits independent filmmakers and cinemas, while embracing the new, streaming-forward world? Is there a way we can build open marketplaces for distribution, while taking advantage of advances in codec technology to stream high quality footage faster, and decentralizing payments? It's a different kind of technology problem, but one that increases the size of the pie for everyone, instead of locking an entire industry into one vendor's solutions. A modern technical solution is certainly better than the Digital Cinema Distribution Coalition's offerings, but an open marketplace will ensure the future success of the industry in ways that a closed one won't.

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

Like it or not, Google and Facebook are becoming the leading patrons of the news industry:

Over the next few months, Google and Facebook will, combined, spend close to a quarter billion dollars supporting local news. [...] Google said it expects its relief funds will reach at least 4,000 different publishers. Facebook has already dispersed $16 million across 200 different newsrooms.

Elsewhere in that article, Richard Gingrass, the VP of News at Google, has a telling quote: "The money we make with our advertising tools is entirely dependent on the success of publishers."

The core of Google and Faceboook's revenues depend on publishers - and as such, they've spent the best part of two decades ensuring that they are intrinsically linked to those publishers' digital strategies, in order to maximize its share of the proceeds. Without their willing participation in these two corporate ecosystems, the entire news industry loses its distribution, its revenues, and its communities.

Once upon a time, each website produced a feed of content, in one of several standard formats, which you could read with any number of readers. New content would show up in your reader as soon as it was published; depending on your app, it might be presented in a reverse-chronological list, or it might be shown to you via an algorithm that predicted what you might want to read first. In either case, the mechanics of production, monetization, distribution, and audience growth were owned by the publisher.

This is no longer the case. In the world of 2020, while production is still up to the publisher, monetization, distribution, and audience growth have all been siloed away by third parties. Publishers see a cut of monetization, but the vast majority of the value gained from distribution and audience growth is captured by the platforms.

Google Reader's closure was an important step in building this new world. Not only was Reader a great feed reading product, its APIs and infrastructure were used by many other feed readers. Suddenly, that infrastructure was gone; innovation in the feed space became a great deal harder. Meanwhile, Google redirected its investment towards its own walled garden. As Wired noted at the time:

No matter what Mountain View says about changing user habits, though, both Now and Plus do one thing: They keep you in Google's world. It's a de-emphasis of content source.

And perhaps these walled gardens do offer something of a better user experience for many users. (We could debate that. I prefer feeds.) The problem isn't so much about the principle of closed software vs open feeds. The problem is that the entire news industry has consolidated down to two points of distribution.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Michael Porter's Five Forces will have identified that Facebook and Google have outsized supplier power over the entire news industry. This influence is often wielded in ways that benefit the technology giants at the cost of publishers; consider the infamous pivot to video, which was based on incorrectly reported analytics that just happened to benefit Facebook's platform.

In turn, the news industry has an important part to play in democracy, civic life, and the health of our communities. According to one of many studies, voters in districts with less campaign coverage had a harder time making democratic decisions and were less likely to vote. Each dollar spent on investigative journalism yields multiple dollars of savings to society. A loss of local news can also actually make it harder to track the spread of infectious disease.

The news touches all of society. And all of it is in the hands of two wealthy tech companies.

So where do we go from here?

First: I believe that the news industry needs to have representation in technical circles, and have a strong influence in how new technology standards are made. The Washington Post recently joined the World Wide Web Consortium, but not all publishers are able to devote the time or staffing to do this work. A non-profit dedicated to advocating on behalf of publishers, and advising publishers on technology issues, could spread the work and the cost for the benefit of the entire industry.

Second: publishers need to buy in as first-class participants. They need to acknowledge that the world has changed, and their role in it has shifted. Technology is not their expertise - so they need to find and embrace people who can provide it with their interests at heart.

Third: anti-trust legislation must be reformed. The current legislation, which looks at pricing as an indicator of consumer welfare, makes little sense in the internet era. A monopoly that is provided free at the point of use is still a monopoly, and may still have a crushing effect on society and the economy.

Fourth: we need an uptick in grant-based funding for open technology projects. Venture capital funding has an important place in the technology ecosystem, but VCs tend to want their investments to "own" a market. Monopoly is seen as a feature, not a bug. Technology projects that are inherently anti-monopolistic are currently harder to fund. And in a world where startups are incredibly highly-funded, it can be hard to lure top-level talent to other projects.

Fifth: open technology projects need to find ways to be as usable and human-centered as their walled garden cousins. Having great principles doesn't absolve you of the requirement to solve real human needs in an elegant way.

Sixth: we have to accept that the news might not be profitable, but we need it more than ever before. It's time to accelerate innovation around models for support.

Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash

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

Apps

Untitled Goose Game. I'm late to the party, but this is super-fun with exactly my level of silly.

Novlr. I'm writing this again, and for whatever reason, I find this a better environment than Scrivener. Maybe it's something about being a web-native writer?

Drizly. Yes, I ordered delivery alcohol for the first time this month. I'm not proud of it. I'm also not not-proud of it.

Streaming

The Plot Against America. Atmospheric, unsettling, and one of the most tense last hours of television I've ever seen. Unfortunately hugely relevant.

Sex Education. Silly, in a good-natured way. I just wish everyone wasn't so incredibly posh.

Notable Articles

The Pandemic

'People are panic-buying cocaine': the drug dealer, spaceman, therapist and others on life after coronavirus. 16 very different people explain how life under Coronavirus has changed.

The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration. An infuriating interview with Richard Epstein, a Professor at New York University School of Law, who Trump administration officials have been listening to for reasons I cannot understand.

If I Wrote a Coronavirus Episode. "Tina Fey, Mike Schur, and 35 more TV writers on what their characters would do in a pandemic." Transcendantly good.

This Pandemic Is Not Your Vacation. "All over the United States, people are fleeing urban areas with high infection rates for the perceived safety and natural beauty of rural areas. [...] The virus, some people have taken to saying, “does not discriminate.” But that’s not quite true. It is putting our class and racial hierarchies in harsh relief — systems that favor the rich and the globally mobile while declaring the work of so many of the working class “essential.” Wealth is the vector. And the economically precarious will suffer because of it — whether they’re cleaning the offices of the infected in New York or checking groceries in Blaine County, Idaho."

Apricot Stone Will FaceTime You to Recreate the Restaurant Experience at Home. "At the agreed-upon day and time, Ishkhanian calls via video chat: FaceTime, Duo, or Skype. Answer and you’ll see him standing at the restaurant next to a table set with water and wine glasses. Music plays in the background as he guides you through the menu and takes your order." I can't decide if this is weird or great. Maybe both?

The Americans defying Palm Sunday quarantines: 'Satan's trying to keep us apart'. America.

Coronavirus in New York: A paramedic's diary. "There's only one patient we've seen so far who I feel wasn't Covid-19 and that's because it was a suicide. Imagine: I was there and my brain felt relief. This person's dead and it's a suicide. I felt relief that it was a regular job."

The unkindest cut: Last call for a Zabar’s lox slicer. "“Look, Len,” he said. “I love you, but you’re over 90 years old and you’re in the group that is most susceptible to the virus and if you got it, if anything happened to you, I could never forgive myself.”"

California launches nation's first disaster relief fund for undocumented immigrants. "New $125m fund will support those ineligible for federal support, but who make up 10% of the state’s workforce, largely in essential services." I'm very grateful to live in a more compassionate state than most.

"It'll all be over by Christmas". "Trump is shooting for May 1st because he's been told the economy will take 6 months to recover, minimum, and he's shooting for the November election deadline. This is laughably optimistic, even if the pandemic had burned out by May 1st: we're in Greatest Depression territory already, the hospitality sector has crashed 75%, airlines have crashed 90%, etcetera. It's not going to be back to normal by November, even if the Fairy Godmother shows up and banishes the horrid virus with a wave of her wand. Period." Let's look the crisis in the face, rather than tell stories to ourselves.

The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage Exposes Its Ignorance About the Working Class. "A reporter who thinks they hold no positions is much more dangerous than one with strong opinions, because at least the latter might have a hope of understanding what they are reporting and why. Perhaps most dangerous of all is a reporter who sees the structures of capitalism—bosses wishing they could force their workers to work through a pandemic, workers still unable to feed their families without opened businesses, immigrants pitted against native workers—and sees them as an immutable and unchallengeable fact, as inevitable as the sunrise, and just as comforting."

Lockdowns flatten the “economic curve,” too. "Cities that locked down faster in 1918 bounced back better."

Sinking feeling. "I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under."

Media & Society

The Terror Of The Umpty Ums. A lovely, and surprisingly meta, Doctor Who short story from Steven Moffat.

The Character of the Doctor Is More Important to Me Than Doctor Who Will Ever Be. More Doctor Who - this is a great encapsulation of why the show means so much to me.

The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic. What an amazing portrait. I was super into Weird Al as a kid, and I still love his attitude and irreverence. I finally got to see him live about ten years ago, and he was a revelation.

Technology

Facebook Wanted NSO Spyware to Monitor Users, NSO CEO Claims. "Facebook representatives approached controversial surveillance vendor NSO Group to try and buy a tool that could help Facebook better monitor a subset of its users, according to an extraordinary court filing from NSO in an ongoing lawsuit."

Utah attorney general suspends state contract with Banjo in light of founder’s KKK past. "The Utah attorney general’s office will suspend use of a massive surveillance system after a news report showed that the founder of the company behind the effort was once an active participant in a white supremacist group and was involved in the shooting of a synagogue."

What’s Missing From Zoom Reminds Us What It Means to Be Human. "While we’ve discovered that in many cases it can, more importantly we’ve discovered that, regardless of bandwidth and video resolution, these apps are missing the cues humans use when they communicate. While we might be spending the same amount of time in meetings, we’re finding we’re less productive, social interactions are less satisfying and distance learning is less effective. And we’re frustrated that we don’t know why."

How a handful of Apple and Google employees came together to help health officials trace coronavirus. The fascinating story of how the contact tracing apps came to be.

Here's the media I consumed and found interesting in March. We're all deep in the global pandemic, so I've decided to exclude covid-19 related media for this month - which means this list is a lot shorter, because I've basically been mainlining the news.

Apps

Houseparty. There may be serious issues with its privacy policy, so I'm not sure how long I'll continue to use it for. But it's been a lovely way to catch up with friends, often halfway across the globe. Also, my sister and I have been using it to play trivia games. It passes the time.

iA Writer. Not new to me, but I've started using it heavily. I sent a short story to a publisher, and I'm working on a few more. Its minimalist interface works well for me. (Even though it's a markdown editor, I don't use it to write markdown at all.)

Lemmings. A mobile remake of one of my favorite games. It's really good!

Streaming

Dark Waters. A gripping, beautifully-acted true story that cuts to the core of American capitalism: Dupont's efforts to hide its brazen chemical pollution.

Just Mercy. It starts a little too slow and by-the-numbers, but by the end, this story about the founding of the Equal Justice Initiative is undeniably powerful. Sometimes the unnuanced racism of the Alabama officials seems otherworldly, and that's exactly the point. There's so much work still to do.

Tiger King. Yes, I've been watching this, just like everyone else with a Netflix subscription. It's exactly the rapid descent into insanity this quarantine demanded.

Devs. Slow but deeply interesting. It reminds me a little of the excellent first season of Mr Robot. I'm not sure where it's going to go, but I'm a huge Alex Garland fan, and I'll follow him anywhere.

Notable Articles

Politics

The Man Behind Trump’s Facebook Juggernaut. "Before Parscale worked for the campaign, he was a digital marketer in San Antonio with no political experience. Referring to his work for Trump in 2016, he has said, “I was thrown into the Super Bowl, never played a game, and won.”"

Syrian Children Freeze to Death. Bombs Rain Down. And ‘Nobody Cares.’ "The Syrian government’s assault on a rebel-held province has created one of the worst humanitarian emergencies of a brutal nine-year war."

Sexism is Probably One Reason Why Elizabeth Warren Didn't Do Better. Infuriating.

Media & Society

Nine out of 10 people found to be biased against women. "Despite progress in closing the equality gap, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights."

How Living Abroad Helps You Develop a Clearer Sense of Self. Co-signed.

A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell. A photographer captured her parents waving goodbye, every visit from 1991. The result is beautiful and heartbreaking.

Are You an Anti-Influencer? "Some people have a knack for buying products that flop, supporting political candidates who lose and moving to neighborhoods that fail to thrive."

Escape Pod 723: How Did it Feel to be Eaten? I really loved this science fiction short story. (I've also been enjoying the Nature Futures archive.)

A quick trip to the library, and suddenly, all is right with the world. Libraries are one of the wonders of the modern world. We can't let them fade away.

Technology

Funding for female founders increased in 2019—but only to 2.7%. "In 2019, investment juggernaut SoftBank poured at least $5 billion into the imploding co-working company. That's about $1.5 billion more than the total VC investment in all female-founded companies combined during the same period."

The History of the URL. A fairly technical history of one of the building blocks of the modern internet.

Apple benefits from forced Uighur labor at its iPhone supplier factories in China, according to an explosive new report. Your iPhone (and mine) might be made using concentration camp labor.

The untold origin story of eBay that I lived, and the times that could have killed it. The untold story of one of the internet's most famous successes.

I'm writing this from Santa Rosa, where my parents live. I've just sequestered myself in my bedroom / home office here, ready to start the workday. But this is an unprecedented period, and I wanted to record what life is actually like under this particular quarantine. We should be blogging now more than ever, to create a historican record beyond the politicians and the numbers reported in the newspapers. Those records are important, too, both in the moment and afterwards, but they miss the intimacies of everyday life. Here are some of the details from mine; I'd love to read yours.

I always spend Sundays, at the very least, with my parents. My mother had a double lung transplant in 2013 to escape the effects of pulmonary fibrosis, a set of symptoms that progressively scar up your lungs, that were caused by dyskeratosis congenita, a genetic condition. I moved to California two years prior. It took me five seconds to make the decision: all I needed to hear was that she had to use supplementary oxygen. I'm grateful that we've had all this extra time, although the side effects of the transplant have made this a difficult seven years for her. (The median post-transplant survival rate, by the way, is 5.8 years.)

My dad spent the first years of his life in a concentration camp in Indonesia, run by the Japanese. He moved to America as a teenager, built a life up completely from scratch, was drafted into the US Army, and discovered higher education through the GI Bill. He has a PhD in Economics and advanced law degrees.

They're both fighters, obviously. But because of my dad's age and my mother's condition, they are both considered high risk individuals. Yesterday, while we were discussing how we might adjust our lifestyles to cope with the current situation, over glasses of wine for me and my dad, Governor Newsom announced that everyone aged 65+ and with a sensitive condition should stay inside. My parents have still been largely self-sufficient, mostly because my dad's full-time job is taking care of my mother. This is the first formal indication that this dynamic needs to change.

My mother took herself off for a nap, which she does every afternoon, and I begrudgingly accommpanied my dad to Home Depot for bags of concrete (a retaining wall needs some support). The roads are relatively clear, and we didn't encounter another soul in the aisles of the store. I lifted the concrete, of course, and lifted it into the garage. I was glad for the workman's gloves that my dad keeps in the back of his car.

Driving up here on Sunday morning was easy. I keep a container of Clorox bleach wipes in the car with me. I wiped down the steering wheel and the controls, and then the handles on each of the doors. When I get gas, I wipe down the pump and its buttons. If I need to go to a store, I wipe myself down with Purell first, then get the groceries or whatever it is I need, and wipe myself down afterwards. I wash my hands for 20+ seconds as soon as I enter the house (and as soon as I got here, I wiped down the front door handle). I wash my hands regularly. They feel really clean, so at least there's that. Because my mother also uses the downstairs bathroom, we wipe it down with alcohol when we're finished with it. And then more hand-washing.

She hasn't been feeling well. It's nothing to do with Covid-19 - just a part of the rollercoaster of drug interactions and microbiome changes that affect her life - but I worry about the availability of ICU beds in the months ahead. Last year, she spent over a fifth of the year in hospital, some of it in intensive care. In Italy, nurses have needed to make decisions about who receives care and who doesn't. I don't want to think too hard about it.

I have cousins who still believe that all this is overblown, and that it's some kind of media conspiracy. I worry about their safety, but I also worry about the people who think like that around us. It's not just about the virus itself; it's about idiots. I don't want somebody to kill my parents because they were cavalier. I don't want someone to accidentally make me a vector, complicit in something terrible happening to them.

It's beautiful here. The sky is clear, and the air is peaceful. If I look to my right, I see deer grazing in a field across the road from the house. I'm eating well. The company is good, and we've been keeping ourselves entertained. But I haven't been sleeping well at all.

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

Books

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, by Ruha Benjamin. Recommended to me by my friend Roxann Stafford, who used quotes from it in our session on designing for equity. It makes clear how automation can deepen discrimination, and how the appearance of algorithmic neutrality is superficial. An important read for anyone who makes software - and anyone who uses it, too.

Apps

Coda. I'm a die-hard AirTable user, and live in Google Docs. I'm not sure if I'm ready for this to replace them yet, but it's nice to have something else to experiment with, and a document platform that isn't tied into Google.

Notion. I'm not a new Notion user, but this month I doubled down as using it as my personal organizer both for work and my personal life. Its sync-everywhere design and very loose approach to structure are really working for me.

Withings Health Mate. Again, not a new app for me - but this month I bought a BPM Connect blood pressure monitor, which has already been game-changing for me. The short story is that my blood pressure is much higher than I thought it was. Knowing this and being able to easily track the trend allows me to do something about it.

Streaming

American Factory. An Oscar-winning documentary about a Chinese auto glass plant that opened in Dayton, Ohio. A deeply stressful but compelling watch.

Notable Articles

Politics

“Far and away the most disorganized place I’ve ever been a part of”: Inside Acronym’s disastrous foray into the Iowa caucuses. The Iowa caucuses were an unmitigated disaster. It sounds like this is a symptom of systemic issues at Acronym, the group that created the app at the heart of the problem.

Inside the closed-door campaigns to rewrite California privacy law, again. A fascinating glimpse into how legislation is made. We're going to see privacy legislation rolled out nationwide; tech companies are going to want a big say in how it's written.

Russia Doesn't Want Bernie Sanders. It Wants Chaos. "US officials warned Bernie Sanders that Russia is “attempting to help” his presidential campaign" - but that doesn't mean they're endorsing Bernie. It's all about finding ways to sew discord.

The Bernie Bro Narrative Erases Women Like Me. "Sanders’ base is more diverse than the angry online mob of white men people love to complain about." I wonder how many of the so-called Bernie bros are actually bots - and not from the Bernie campaign. It would be a great way to discredit him. My observation is that on the ground, it really is a diverse movement.

JP Morgan economists warn climate crisis is threat to human race. So can we do something about it, already? The irony that JP Morgan is one of the most prominent backers of fossil fuels businesses shouldn't be lost on anyone.

Trump's "Deep State" hit list. "The Trump White House and its allies, over the past 18 months, assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them — according to more than a dozen sources familiar with the effort who spoke to Axios."

Bernie Sanders isn’t a democratic socialist. He is a social democrat. While I'm an Elizabeth Warren supporter, I would be very grateful to see the social democracy model I enjoyed in Europe take hold here. It's better for everyone.

A third of Poland has now been declared an ‘LGBT-free zone’, making intolerance official. And yet, we haven't said a word about it. I'm worried that worse is to come.

Swinging the Vote? "Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark."

No Email. No WhatsApp. No Internet. This Is Now Normal Life In Kashmir. "On August 5, India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, revoked Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which granted the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir a measure of autonomy. The government split the state, a region disputed between India and Pakistan, into two territories. Supporters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party hailed the move, while Kashmiris, many of whom want to see Kashmir join Pakistan or become independent, were angered. To prevent public opposition from turning into open rebellion, India’s government detained Kashmiri politicians, arrested thousands of activists and academics, and imposed a complete communications blackout. Overnight, mobile phones and landlines stopped working, broadband lines were frozen, and text messaging stopped."

Media & Society

Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing. An old Stratechery piece that's new to me: how the future of media may be in building an audience via the web and monetizing it through alternative media forms.

The Original Renegade. "A 14-year-old in Atlanta created one of the biggest dances on the internet. But nobody really knows that."

My boyfriend’s wedding dress unveiled my own shortcomings over masculinity. "My boyfriend’s wedding dress pushed me to perform a scrupulous inventory of my deepest ideas about masculinity and helped me identify my shortfalls as a woman who wants to help rewrite gender norms. As I went through this exercise, I chatted with a handful of girlfriends about it, who could all identify their own small hang-ups with masculinity: their need for men who are bigger and taller than they are, or who are better than them at sports, or who don’t cry in front of them."

How America developed two sign languages — one white, one black. "In black sign language, a relic of segregation has become a sign of solidarity."

She Coined the Term ‘Intersectionality’ Over 30 Years Ago. Here’s What It Means to Her Today. "These days, I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other."

Work

Servant: Your role as a leader in the modern workforce. A fun article for me because Xiao Ma (Medium's Chief Architect) and Dan Pupius (CEO of Range) are both friends. But the wisdom here is real and applicable. "Range’s co-founder Dan had a very big impact on me. He used to be my manager at Medium for several years and introduced me to the concept of servant leadership. It helped me get comfortable being a leader; I didn’t want to tell people what to do, I just wanted to help and empower other people. Servant leadership helped me to see “leading” from a different perspective. In my opinion, there is no better approach to leadership. Leadership should always be servant leadership." I agree.

Founder of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods transfers business to employees. "Moore, whose mutual loves of healthy eating and old-world technologies spawned an internationally distributed line of products, responded with a gift of his own -- the whole company. The Employee Stock Ownership Plan Moore unveiled means that his 209 employees now own the place and its 400 offerings of stone-ground flours, cereals and bread mixes." I couldn't love this more.

Technology

Could this plan make Facebook obsolete? Kaliya Young is one of my favorite people in tech. And yes: the work she does will be a big part of the future of tech.

How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails. Connecting to your inbox to provide some superficial benefit (unsubscribing from newsletters, say) and then selling information about the emails you receive is a surprisingly big business.

I stumbled across a huge Airbnb scam that’s taking over London. And everywhere. I still remember finding myself in an illegal Airbnb hotel in New York for Matter Demo Day, which wasn't up to code and was both dangerous socially and physically.

Signal Is Finally Bringing Its Secure Messaging to the Masses. Everyone should be using Signal, the open source, encrypted messaging app. Highly technical users complain about a few missing features, but for most people, it's their best chance of privacy for their messaging. Bringing this to a wider audience is really good news.

WordPress’s role in a changing web. "And that’s why open source is becoming “Animal Farm”. A movement which began to fight corporate dominance is now being co-opted by corporate dominance, because projects like ours sneer at the concept, the process, and the thought of involvement."

How Legal Weed Disrupted This Flower Startup’s Supply Chain. "After the legalization vote, many of the local suppliers she’d once leaned on to provide the flowers that made up her bouquets were suddenly turning to a new crop." Fascinating to me.

A Balanced Approach to Growth: How startups can optimize and innovate their way to more growth. "To put it plainly, growing through data analysis and A/B testing isn’t the only path to future growth. While it seems obvious, I see very few startups designed for innovation, which may be the biggest driver to new growth for your business."

General Catalyst leads $6 million investment in team productivity startup Range. I'm a huge Range fan (both the people and the software). We use it every day on the ForUsAll engineering team.

Kickstarter Employees Win Historic Union Election. This is a first in tech, but I hope many more follow.

Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy. "About half predict that humans’ use of technology will weaken democracy between now and 2030 due to the speed and scope of reality distortion, the decline of journalism and the impact of surveillance capitalism. A third expect technology to strengthen democracy as reformers find ways to fight back against info-warriors and chaos."

As the Start-Up Boom Deflates, Tech Is Humbled. "Layoffs. Shutdowns. Uncertainty. After a decade of prosperity, many hot young companies are facing a reckoning." I will be delighted to not be in an industry that throws tens of millions of dollars at pizza robots anymore.

Suckers List: How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders. "Insurers are supposed to price based on risk, but Allstate’s algorithm put a thumb on the scale."

Y Combinator's Series A Guide. A useful resource if you're raising a Series A; an insightful look at how Silicon Valley works if you're not.

What is 802.11ay and what could it mean for the iPhone. Think fast transfers, augmented reality glasses, and an ecosystem of peripherals working together.

Inside a Secretive $250 Million Private Transit System Just for Techies. It's hardly secret: the buses are everywhere here. I wish big tech companies would underwrite a public transport system for all instead.

Every month in 2019, I rounded up the books and notable articles I'd read. This year, I'm expanding that to include the streaming media and apps that I meaningfully engaged with.

As ever, none of the links below are affiliate programs or were added for payment. I just want to recommend stuff I found interesting.

Books

Loving Day, by Mat Johnson. Ruthlessly honest; sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking. A wonderful novel about race, identity, and family, delivered with incredible wit and insight. I couldn't recommend it more.

White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo. I found this a difficult read, but was immediately kind of ashamed that I hadn't read it earlier. I think all white people should consider picking it up, and really thinking not just about the substance of its arguments, but the way it feels to read them. Powerful, important, but just one step on what has to be a much longer journey.

Apps

Duolingo. We have a league at work, which I fell into accidentally. When I was seven years old, we lived in Austria for a year, and I almost became fluent in German. I've always felt guilty about dropping that ability. Duolingo genuinely makes it easy to learn something new every day, and I've found those language skills coming back. It's a little buggy, but it does the job.

Blinkist. I love reading, but I find business books in particular to be kind of padded out and interminable. Often they could have quite happily been a long-form article. So for those books, I'm experimenting with using these Sparks Notes instead. So far so good. (And I can happily spend more time reading the novels and non-fiction books I want to read, instead of the ones I feel I should. No shame here.)

Streaming

Doctor Who Season 12. Jodie Whitaker is brilliant, and the whole season so far has been one of the best in years. Yes, I'm a lifelong, die-hard Whovian, but this year's stories have made me very very happy. Side note: I'm loving that a bug in Rotten Tomatoes means their description for this season reads as follows: "Alongside Sarah and Harry Sullivan, the Fourth Doctor tries to avert the genesis of the Daleks and in deep space he faces Cybermen, Vogans and the deadly Wirrn!" That Doctor Who Season 12 started its run in 1974. This one is right up there.

Star Trek: Picard. As someone who really hated the JJ Abrams Kelvin timeline movies, I'm pretty excited about Star Trek's renaissance on CBS All Access. (Some fans hated Discovery; I was emphatically not one of them.) This isn't at all Star Trek: The Next Generation, despite sharing some characters. It's something new, very much for adults, that (so far) touches on identity, personal meaning, and tolerance.

The Good Place. The first season was fine; it then evolved into the kind of show that feels comfortable discussing philosophical constructs within the bounds of a 30 minute comedy - and is smart enough to. The finale was outstanding.

Dark: Season 2. If you haven't encountered Dark yet, I'm jealous. This is intricate and literary science fiction. Just don't watch the dubbed version.

Fleabag: Season 2. I finally finished watching it in January. Season 1 was great, but honestly a bit like a smarter Peep Show (which, hey, I also love); the second season is like watching theater, in the best possible way.

The Heart. Revamped and beautiful, the new iteration of this podcast describes itself as "an audio art project about intimacy and humanity". It's edgier and more overtly queer, with a more experimental sound. And its pulse is racing. I'm really glad I kept my subscription, even when the old podcast went dead.

Notable Articles

Politics

Exclusive: Unredacted Ukraine Documents Reveal Extent of Pentagon’s Legal Concerns. “Clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.” Just one of the many sets of documents Republicans didn't want the public to see.

Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’.  They worked in 68 countries. “I’m very fearful about what is going to happen in the US election later this year, and I think one of the few ways of protecting ourselves is to get as much information out there as possible.”

Report: Trump Cited GOP Senate Impeachment Pressure As Reason to Kill Soleimani. "This would not mean Trump ordered the strike entirely, or even primarily, in order to placate Senate Republicans. But it does constitute an admission that domestic political considerations influenced his decision. That would, of course, constitute a grave dereliction of duty."

American history textbooks can differ across the country, in ways that are shaded by partisan politics. We're living in different worlds - and the way we teach perpetuates this. The  differences are shocking.

Not a Joke: Trump Is Looking Into Making Bribery Legal. It's hard to know where to look anymore.

Meet the Boy Scouts of the Border Patrol. No unsettling historical analogues here; none at all.

Andrew Yang and the New American Tories. "Yang seems to uniquely attract this kind of person — the recently established and self-regarding. His supporters include Tesla founder Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, rapper and actor Donald Glover, who threw an impromptu concert for Yang in December, Weezer lead singer Rivers Cuomo, and actor Nicolas Cage. They all in one way or another belong to a previous age, in which the pretensions of wealth and talent were given more deference."

Culture & Society

I’ve Talked With Teenage Boys About Sexual Assault for 20 Years. This Is What They Still Don’t Know. "Teenage boys are hungry for practical conversations about sex. They want to know the rules. They want to be the good guy, the stand-up, honorable dude. Their intentions might be good, but their ignorance is dangerous. Our society has begun talking a bit more openly about these issues, but that doesn’t mean teenage boys suddenly have all the information they need."

Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits. A $1,000 air filter "can raise a class’s test scores by as much as cutting class size by a third." So we should do this everywhere.

Read all about it – the truth about British colonialism. Britain is really bad at talking about the  horrors of the Empire. I love that these students set out to do something about it, Yes Men style.

The Anti-War, Pro-Animal Rights, Colonialist History of Doctor Dolittle's Creation. "Even though Lofting’s work espoused revolutionary views toward animal rights, it was regressive when it came to issues of race. The original Doctor Dolittle books are rife with racist tropes and colonialism, both in the writing and illustrations. (The Story of Doctor Dolittle features a storyline about a black prince who begs Dolittle to turn him white.)"

The Amish Keep to Themselves. And They’re Hiding a Horrifying Secret. "Over the past year, I’ve interviewed nearly three dozen Amish people, in addition to law enforcement, judges, attorneys, outreach workers, and scholars. I’ve learned that sexual abuse in their communities is an open secret spanning generations."

People are seeing ‘Cats’ while high out of their minds. These are their stories. Honestly, getting high isn't usually my thing, but I wish I'd done this.

Study: Men are more emotional than women at work. Not shocked.

How the Bay Was Built. I'm new to this: "a community archive of documents about the Bay Area, focused on race and housing" that Alexis Madrigal published last year. It's a fascinating look at the history of the Bay Area.

How 17 Outsize Portraits Rattled a Small Southern Town. The amazing, very human story of an art project that celebrated inclusion, and how it affected the residents in a small, Trump-leaning town.

Higher minimum wages are linked to lower suicide rates. People need more support, end of story.

Tech

Citizen journalism platform uses Bluetooth to bring news to media dark villages in India. This is a super-cool project in every way. I wish there was more funding and support available for these kinds of endeavors.

Students Are Campaigning to Ban Facial Recognition From College Campuses. "Students should not have to trade their right to privacy for an education, and no one should be forced to unwittingly participate in a surveillance program which will likely include problematic elements of law enforcement." Power to them. This kind of use of face recognition should be heavily regulated at the very least.

Meet The Viral Icons Of Twitter. Joke Twitter (and its close cousin, Weird Twitter) is a pretty  wonderful internet subculture that reminds me of the old-school web.

Helen Leigh: “Art shouldn’t be only for those who can afford to make it”. I'm so proud of my friend Helen. Completely inspiring.

The Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication. "How do we keep everyone in the loop without everyone getting tangled in everyone else's business? It's all in here." Some really great principles for intra-company communication. I'm in too many meetings; I don't believe that it's the same as being productive. This list appeals to me a lot.

Opera: Phantom of the Turnaround – 70% Downside. Opera (the browser company) has started making money through predatory lending. A surreal and sad result of a bad acquisition.

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It. Dystopian but inevitable. Everyone who works on this kind of software should be ashamed. And our legislature needs to catch up to our technological reality.

The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure. I very strongly think this needs to happen. Public service digital media is an important counterbalance to the exponential capitalism we see dominating the internet today.

Exclusive: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained - sources. When I posted this on Twitter I got some backlash, but no, this is a silent change to their stated policy. And it makes me trust Apple significantly less.

United States of Surveillance. "The patchwork of U.S. surveillance laws has proven ineffective at countering terrorism, instead turning citizens into suspects." A really great, in-depth overview of its history and implications.

You Are Now Remotely Controlled. "In the absence of new declarations of epistemic rights and legislation, surveillance capitalism threatens to remake society as it unmakes democracy. From below, it undermines human agency, usurping privacy, diminishing autonomy and depriving individuals of the right to combat. From above, epistemic inequality and injustice are fundamentally incompatible with the aspirations of a democratic people."

Health-Records Company Pushed Opioids to Doctors in Secret Deal With Drugmaker. Practice Fusion made a deal with a company that looks like Purdue to push a drug that looks like it was OxyContin. Imagine being the entrepreneurs or the coders who built this. They need to go to jail.

Rich people can't build social networks. Bad headline (they can and do), but an important story about a really dumb-looking new network called Column, from some Thiel associates, and a guy who is chummy with the founder of the Proud Boys. With its focus on celebrities, it's like an online Fyre Festival. MIT Technology Review has a more journalistic take on the story.

NiemanLab is publishing its annual predictions for journalism. They're all worth reading, but here are a few highlights:

Jennifer Brandel imagines a letter from 2073:

What’s interesting is that, back then, people thought of news as something that was produced and distributed out of a place. That’s why they called it a news “room.” They used to conceive of it as containable, in a single brand or physical location where a set group of people worked to pull information in from the outside and then redistribute it elsewhere, often to whoever could afford to pay for it.

Joanne McNeil suggests that blogs will have a resurgence:

Blogs offer the potential to broadcast, but not too broadly. We might even see a breakdown where newsletters begin to focus more on individual personal stories and daily digests, while blogs will fill in the gaps of all that might be written about otherwise.

Jake Shapiro describes how podcasts will build community:

Podcasting may seem like a reach medium — with significant audiences for the biggest shows — but it really shines as a depth medium. The most valuable quality is listeners’ deep connection to the voices and stories in their ears.

Heather Bryant suggests that not all journalism is worth saving:

The question of how we save journalism (meaning newsrooms) will begin to shift to how do we save journalism (meaning the process). How we answer that question will have a profound impact on the management of newsrooms, the business models we develop, the processes we adapt, and the service we provide.

Kourtney Bitterly believes transparency is the key to regaining trust:

In order to build trust, news organizations must let people in on the processes and people that bring stories to life.

Cristina Kim describes how important it is to define audiences beyond "everybody":

The truth is that when we make audio news and content — both in public radio and beyond — for an imagined “everybody,” we’re just making it for white, cisgender, heterosexual audiences of a particular class and education, and centering their experience and perspectives.

And finally, this guy suggests it's time to stop looking to tech companies (or any other kind of magic spell) to save journalism:

Here’s the bad news: No one is coming to save you. No business is going to swoop in and provide sustainable funding for newsrooms. No new technology is going to transform the way journalism supports itself forever. No big, incredible deal is going to build a strong foundation for the news. There isn’t a single magic bullet that will work for everyone. Even producing groundbreaking journalism isn’t going to suddenly turn your fortunes around.

You can read the full list here.

I came across this video from Skylark Labs today: automated identification of suspicious activity in a crowd via drone. Of course, neither the drone nor the system is really thinking: it's simply drawing on an existing corpus of data in order to draw conclusions. We already know that machine learning algorithms are often biased against black people; there is nothing to suggest that anything will be different here.

But even if these systems were completely accurate, their presence should be unwelcome to all of us.

As granular, algorithmic surveillance becomes more popular, it’s going to become more dangerous to act in a way that sits outside the expectations of dumb machine learning algorithms. You’ll attract more scrutiny from people we can’t expect to have nuance or compassion.

Even if you trust the administrators of algorithmic surveillance to be just, which based on the activities of law enforcement as we know it is a stretch, every person should have the right to an unobserved life. Without freedom from surveillance, we are not free.

People who build surveillance technologies for any purpose - whether law enforcement or advertising - are complicit in building tyranny. In 2020, we’ve got to get serious about forcing technology to protect our freedoms, through technical, social, and legislative means.

Books

The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood. A sequel to The Handmaid's Tale that deepens the story and modernizes some of its themes. Deeply feminist, utterly gripping, absolutely essential. One of the best books I read this year.

We the Corporations, by Adam Winkler. The history of corporate rights in America (and earlier), and how those rights have been used to allow corporations to resist regulation. Honestly, I found it a depressing read, but it's a well-written, important story that cuts to the core of American society.

Notable Articles

Best science fiction and fantasy books of 2019. AKA my to-read list.

A Better Internet Is Waiting for Us. "The legacy of social media will be a world thirsty for new kinds of public experiences. To rebuild the public sphere, we’ll need to use what we’ve learned from billion-dollar social experiments like Facebook, and marginalized communities like Black Twitter. We’ll have to carve out genuinely private spaces too, curated by people we know and trust."

After an Amazon Worker Was Crushed to Death by a Forklift, Regulators Helped Cover It Up. "After Amazon appealed citations and fines for the incident, Indiana governor Eric Holcomb quietly overturned those citations to lure Amazon's second headquarters to Indiana." Unforgivable.

Grinding. In startups, slow and steady wins the race - and there's almost never a magical deal or a silver bullet strategy change that will turn everything around.

Facebook Gives Workers a Chatbot to Appease That Prying Uncle. Facebook wrote a bot to help its employees figure out what to say to family members who were concerned about its activities. I'd say this is a pretty good sign it's time to take a step back and re-assess their choices.

TikTok prevented disabled users’ videos from showing up in feeds. Allegedly the policy was to protect users who had a high risk of bullying - but it seems pretty clear that there was more going on here. At any rate, the effect was alarmingly discriminatory.

McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners. "The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires. By claiming that they solve the world’s hardest problems, McKinsey shrinks the solution space to only those that preserve the status quo. And it is through this claim that the firm attracts thousands of “the best and the brightest” away from careers that actually serve the public."

How McKinsey Helped the Trump Administration Carry Out Its Immigration Policies. Savings measures McKinsey identified were sometimes seen as being too harsh on immigrants by ICE staff.

Lawyers and Scholars to LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters: Stop Helping ICE Deport People. "Lawyers, students, and scholars called on legal database providers to end their contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, and private surveillance contractor Palantir, saying the arrangements put universities and immigration lawyers in the untenable position of feeding money and even information into systems that facilitate deportation."

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring. "As you can see, it’s not possible to hit our goals, whether or not we’re biased against women at any point in the hiring process. [...] Outside of alternative education programs, the most obvious thing we can do to increase the supply of qualified women engineers is to expand our pipeline to include strong engineers who don’t hail from top schools or top companies." My first act when I took my current Head of Engineering position was to burn the hiring process.

Antitrust Revival, a Reading List. Tim Wu's list of books and articles on anti-trust reform. I believe the current anti-trust movement is one of the most important forces for equality and democracy.

Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You Are at 63? I'm excited to see 63 Up. Arguably there's never been a more ambitious documentary film series.

A letter from Larry and Sergey. Their farewell is really just a continuation of a long-term process, but it's fascinating to have followed their journey more or less from the beginning.

A Private Report Alerts Swiss Banks and Their Billionaire Customers About a Warren Presidency. Good. I really hope she gets to be President.

What the C.I.A.’s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured. These drawings should be studied by every American. This is what our country is, whether we like it or not. And we shouldn't like it at all.

Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward Gallagher. "“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators."

Emotional baggage. "Away’s founders sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment." As it turned out, this story was carefully timed to coincide with the announcement of the new CEO shortly afterwards.

Splintered Isle: A Journey Through Brexit Britain. This was eye-opening for me. Both a beautiful, human portrait, and an explanation of how unregulated capitalism paved the way for Brexit. Nationalism and xenophobia are never the answer. But this piece goes some way to better explaining how vulnerable communities could be led down that path.

Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question. "Was she the reason he was alive today?" A tale of lost love reunited, questions answered, and a horror that will continue to echo for generations.

At war with the truth. "U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress [in the war in Afghanistan]. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found. [...] A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable." Echoes of Vietnam. This is not just one article, but 2,000 pages of interviews and much more. This was a crime, and it's shocking that more hasn't been made of it.

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real. "“With each set of three books, I’ve commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day,” he explained. “I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is.”"

Still Asleep at the Wheel. "According to our analysis, 37% of the charter schools that were funded by CSP during those years either never opened (11%) or opened and then closed (26%). That figure is the result of our confirmation of the status of nearly 5000 charter schools that received funds from CSP." Charter schools are a distraction. Let's build a better public school system instead.

Made in America: White House veterans helped Gulf monarchy build secret surveillance unit. "Between 2012 and 2015, individual teams were tasked with hacking into entire rival governments, as the program’s focus shifted from counterterrorism to espionage against geopolitical foes, documents show."

Greta Thunberg Is TIME’s 2019 Person of the Year. And rightly so.

Men and white people believe the news is less reliable now than it was in the past. Women and people of color think it’s gotten more reliable. Hopefully this points to better representation.

The blood of poor Americans is now a leading export, bigger than corn or soy. " One study found that the typical blood-seller derives a third of their income from selling blood. Princeton's Kathryn Edin called the commercial blood industry the lifeblood of the $2 a day poor." People need help and we're not giving it to them.

How I Get By: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier. "The bus was late today, and it reminds me to get back to saving for a car. I used to have one, but I couldn’t keep up with my car note or insurance with my McDonald’s paycheck. I’ve been trying to save towards a car, but every time I save money, I have to use it. It feels like I'm not getting anywhere. I figure I need at least a $1,000 down payment. I had about $300 saved, but I had to use it to get groceries, pay my phone bill, and get back, and forth to work. So I’m back at zero. I’m thinking about this while I deliver meal trays to patients."

Unmasking the secret landlords buying up America. "America’s cities are being bought up, bit by bit, by anonymous shell companies using piles of cash. Modest single-family homes, owned for generations by families, now are held by corporate vehicles with names that appear to be little more than jumbles of letters and punctuation – such as SC-TUSCA LLC, CNS1975 LLC – registered to law offices and post office boxes miles away. New glittering towers filled with owned but empty condos look down over our cities, as residents below struggle to find any available housing."

How a cheap, brutally efficient grocery chain is upending America's supermarkets. I'm actually a pretty big fan of this model - particularly in a world where many Americans struggle to buy food.

How Racism Ripples Through Rural California’s Pipes. The communities where black farmworkers settled decades ago are still marked by terrible infrastructure.

Nobody Knows How Many Kids Die From Maltreatment and Abuse in the U.S. "We got around 7,000 records in response, a number that’s already slightly higher and much more detailed than the information available to the public from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System — the main source of this data since the 1980s — over the same period. But experts agree that it’s still a substantial undercount and that child fatalities may be three times higher."

A Child’s Forehead Partially Removed, Four Deaths, The Wrong Medicine — A Secret Report Exposes Health Care For Jailed Immigrants. "Immigrants held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails around the US received medical care so bad it resulted in two preventable surgeries, including an 8-year-old boy who had to have part of his forehead removed, and contributed to four deaths, according to an internal complaint from an agency whistleblower." Again: this is who we are.

It’s a Vast, Invisible Climate Menace. We Made It Visible. A pretty impressive New York Times report on vast quantities of methane gas escaping from oil and gas sites nationwide. It's invisible, so the newspaper built a camera: "To create images of methane emissions in the Permian Basin, The Times used a custom-built FLIR camera that converts infrared energy into an electronic signal to create moving pictures. The camera’s filter allows infrared wavelengths between 3.2 to 3.4 micrometers on the electromagnetic spectrum to pass through to the sensor. To visualize gas, the camera uses helium to cool down the sensor to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, around minus 200 degrees Celsius. Unlike traditional photography lenses, which are glass, the infrared images were created using metal lenses made from germanium, which is transparent at infrared wavelengths."

Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. "First, the campaign intends to repackage Trump, albeit within the narrow limits possible for a politician whose public image is already indelibly cast. The message: Sure, Trump is wild, but a disruptive character is precisely what’s needed to disrupt a failed status quo and force change. Second, the campaign will use its overwhelming financial advantage to repackage — i.e., viciously demolish — the public image of whoever becomes the Democratic nominee." I hope Trump and everything he stands for fades away quickly. But I think it's likely we get four more years of this.

Trump adviser: Expect more aggressive poll watching in 2020. "One of President Donald Trump’s top reelection advisers told influential Republicans in swing state Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states, according to an audio recording of a private event obtained by The Associated Press."

Guess Who’s Behind Facebook’s Political Ad Policy. "Peter Thiel has reportedly been lobbying Mark Zuckerberg to refrain from fact checking political ads on the platform." Thiel is a scumbag.

New disclosures to our archive of state-backed information operations. "Today, we are sharing comprehensive data about 5,929 accounts which we have removed for violating our platform manipulation policies. Rigorous investigations by our Site Integrity team have allowed us to attribute these accounts to a significant state-backed information operation on Twitter originating in Saudi Arabia."

‘Star Wars’ Fans Are Angry and Polarized. Like All Americans. "And a recent study by Morten Bay, a University of Southern California digital media researcher, revealed that over 50 percent of the venom directed on Twitter at Rian Johnson, director of “The Last Jedi,” came from the same sources as Russian election meddling."

India’s Internet shutdown in Kashmir is the longest ever in a democracy. I'm certain we'll begin to see National Internets before too long. Russia has been testing exactly this.

The Decade the Internet Lost Its Joy. "What began as cheerful anarchy was devoured by vulture capital and ruthless consolidation." I don't want to go backwards, but maybe we can find an inclusive, empathetic version of that anarchy. I hope we can. Otherwise, really, what's the point?

How Your Phone Betrays Democracy. "It is not difficult, in other words, to imagine a system of social control arising from infrastructure built for advertising. That’s why regulation is critical."

Is it Time for the U.S. Government to Drag Tech Jobs out of Silicon Valley and Into the Heartland? I'm not against it - and I do think it requires government involvement.

Predictions for Journalism 2020: Saying no to more good ideas. "I’ve yet to meet a team in a news organization that suffers from a shortage of good ideas. But I have met teams that have clogged up their roadmaps with lots of good ideas that, cumulatively, have little impact."

Predictions for Journalism 2020: Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving. "The question of how we save journalism (meaning newsrooms) will begin to shift to how do we save journalism (meaning the process)."

Building tools to bring data-driven reporting to more newsrooms. Simon Willison's JSK Fellowship project to empower data-driven journalism is inspiring. More of this, please.

Federal study confirms racial bias of many facial-recognition systems, casts doubt on their expanding use. "Facial-recognition systems misidentified people of color more often than white people, a landmark federal study released Thursday shows, casting new doubts on a rapidly expanding investigative technique widely used by law enforcement across the United States." Ban its use by law enforcement.

Washington Legislator Matt Shea Accused Of 'Domestic Terrorism,' Report Finds. "According to investigators, Shea visited the Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville for a couple of days. While there, he "developed a strategy for leadership over future Patriot Movement armed resistance against the federal government by creating" a coalition of western state leaders from Idaho, Washington, Arizona and Nevada." I would not be at all surprised to learn that this is more prevalent in the GOP than we had previously thought.

A Conversation With Rudy Giuliani Over Bloody Marys at the Mark Hotel. "As he spoke, he fixed his gaze straight ahead, rarely turning to make eye contact. When his mouth closed, saliva leaked from the corner and crawled down his face through the valley of a wrinkle. He didn’t notice, and it fell onto his sweater." Completely bizarre.

What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity. "Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. Dan — like many in high-pressure jobs — had become enmeshed not with another person, but with his career." Speaking from first-hand experience, it's a horrible trap.

We've spent the decade letting our tech define us. It's out of control. So let's take it back.

Previously

Here's what I read in November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, and January.

As much as I've made of reading this year - and the novels I've read this year have been one of the most rewarding parts of my life over the last twelve months - I love movies. I really love movies.

For some spectacle films, the act of going to the cinema still has a lot of appeal. To be honest, though, in a world of 50+ inch OLED displays and 4K streaming, it's become pretty hard to beat sitting on the sofa under a blanket with my own refreshments. The content is every bit as heart-stopping; the setting is just that little bit more comfortable. For me, the exception is the Alamo Drafthouse, which is kind of an event in itself, or something like a Dolby or an IMAX theater. I saw a few films in each, but the vast majority were at home. I don't see that changing over time. And for someone with a film habit like mine (even in my low budget student days, I was known to drop $250 on film festival tickets), paying for all these streaming services still represents a discount.

It's first and foremost about the content (whether it's art or not is sometimes debatable, although I always lean towards yes).

Here were my favorite films released this year (in order of release). What were yours?

The Hole in the Ground
Dir: Lee Cronin

One of those claustrophic, quiet little horror films that speaks to deeper insecurities - here about parenting, but also about the vulnerability inherent in any family bond.

Rural Ireland is used well here, and like many good horror movies, local folk myths are spun into quiet nightmares. The writing, direction, and performances are just so: understated but exact, which ratchets up the tension when something truly horrifying happens. And it does.

I vastly prefer intelligent, psychological horror built on human relationships to cheap gore and jump scares. This is that and more.

Captain Marvel
Dir: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

Yes, yes, I know. At the end of 2019, I feel absolutely burned-out on superhero movies, and even though Marvel films are at least good-humored and slightly anarchic, I think I'm done with them, too.

But Captain Marvel brought a few things together for me. Most importantly: it shouldn't feel refreshing to see a woman superhero in 2019, but it absolutely does. There's a twist in the middle that immediately washed away my worries that this was going to be a militaristic, gung-ho adventure, and I appreciated the compassionate subversion (and the analogy). And I'm a sucker for nineties nostalgia.

Also, the cat is pretty cool. You'll see.

Us
Dir: Jordan Peele

Get Out was a masterpiece. Here, the societal connotations are less on the nose, but there are undeniable echoes: of Othering, and the way in which the lives of the wealthy are only made possible through the suffering of vulnerable people.

Hung on some remarkable performances, particularly by Lupita Nyong'o, no detail is spared. I appreciated the Lost Boys reference, for sure, but also the resonant imagery pulled from a kaleidoscope of sources, from The Goonies through Ray Bradbury and the Bible. And throughout all of it, Jordan Peele kept my pulse pounding.

Bottom line: Us is a masterpiece too.

Knock Down the House
Dir: Rachel Lears

Everything about this documentary is grassroots: it was funded on Kickstarter and follows four women candidates running for Congress for the first time. None of them are career politicians; all of them are supported by their communities as they reach to do more.

Spoiler alert: one of them is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And she is every bit as impressive as you would expect.

However you feel about their politics (although, to be clear, I couldn't be more of an AOC fan), their stories are inspirational, gripping, and sometimes heartbreaking. I'm hoping for hundreds and hundreds more candidates like them.

Booksmart
Dir: Olivia Wilde

I was a sucker for those John Hughes high school comedies. Booksmart follows in that tradition, while dropping the sexism and male gaze of its eighties forebears. Actually, I take that back: this is way smarter than any of those movies.

I love it for its uncompromising voice and for the brilliance of its leads. Its jokes hit home but are always connected to real emotional subtext. And it's just fun. A lot of fun.

It underperformed at the box office, but that's got more to do with bad decisions by its distributor than anything in the film itself. If I had to pick just my top three movies of the year, this would be on the list somehwere.

Late Night
Dir: Nisha Ganatra

An unpretentious comedy that is unabashedly about whose voices get to be heard, and whose faces get to be seen. It's not completely perfect, but Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson are both a joy, and Kaling's script doesn't always go where you think it will. (Thompson was also excellent in this year's Years and Years on BBC One / HBO, which was easily the best thing I saw on TV.)

It's like a warm hug; a glimpse of the kind of world I'd like to see more glimpses of, while also being a funny and comforting night's entertainment.

I Am Mother
Dir: Grant Sputore

An ambitious parable about parenthood tucked into a science fiction movie about the apocalypse. One twist is obvious from the setup, but it's an act of misdirection: there are many far more important turns that you don't see coming, right up until the final moment of the film.

Some of the setting feels necessarily low budget, but the overarching themes transcend any shortcomings. It's like an episode of Black Mirror that has a lot more to say. And often, a lot more to say than you think it does.

Midsommar
Dir: Ari Aster

The final shot of this movie still lingers with me. Not because it's a frightening image in itself (it's not), but for how uplifting it ultimately is, and what that means.

I'm becoming aware that the films that have really spoken to me this year have often been a certain kind of well-made psychological horror. (Well, except for one horror film. Hang on for that one.) It's not because those are the films I've mostly seen, but the ones that have made this list are set in a kind of rootless uncertainty; that's true of Booksmart too, and some later titles like The Farewell, even if it's expressed in a different way.

There's hokiness here, and a kind of very American xenophobia too, but they're as much here on purpose as the thoughtless awfulness of the protagonist's boyfriend. It's all a cage. But one that, eventually, may burn down.

The Farewell
Dir: Lulu Wang

My sister and I went to see this movie while our mother was in hospital, at a time where we knew we wouldn't be able to see her for five hours or so. I still can't decide if it was the perfect film for that context, or the worst possible.

It's a film about grief, and about grief-to-be, when the person is still with you but you know what has to come next. And in that situation it's about finding the beauty and the humor, and giving that person the gift of love while you take the pain on for yourself.

Awkwafina is perfect, as is almost everyone in the cast. I cried and cried, and when we finally found our way to the hospital, it was with a renewed sense of what was important.

Ready or Not
Dir: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

I wasn't expecting to freaking love this so much. It was meant to be a cheesy late night watch. But it's kind of perfect.

I can't tell you what happens at the end but I really want to. It's satisfying and gross.

What I can tell you is that although it's kind of a macabre comedy thriller bordering on horror that has a lot to say about the class system. I laughed; I watched through my hands; I rooted for the hunted bride and against the rich dynasty (and selfish husband) chasing her down. And the payoff was delightful.

Also, for bonus points: I think we're all ready for an Andie MacDowell renaissance, right?

Marriage Story
Dir: Noah Baumbach

Both leads have lately passed through the Disney machine (Scarlett Johansson is a core part of the Avengers movies, while Adam Driver is the big bad in the latest Star Wars trilogy). Their acting in this small but ambitious family drama is nothing less than searing: not just potentially both of their best work, but the most immediate, truthful, and heartbreaking acting I saw in any film this year.

It's a beautiful film, both visually and in every other possible way; in turn hard to watch and impossible to look away from. Remarkable, poignant, and unmissable.

As arbitrary as they are, these transitions provide a kind of useful punctuation - a spot to stop and breathe.

For me, I think it might be useful to reflect on where I was at the start of the previous decade, where I am now, and where I'd like to be ten years from now.

Ten years ago

I lived in Oxford, as much my hometown as anywhere is, living in the house I'd grown up in long after my family had emigrated to California. Every year, I'd head out for Christmas, saving a little time to hang out in San Francisco.

I'd just had a turbulent year: In April, I had finally left Elgg after working on it for seven years, and had been surprised to find myself at the receiving end of threats from our investors after I tried to start a new social platform with a completely different purpose. This significantly limited my options - all non-infrastructure internet software is at least a little bit social - and although I'm pretty sure I would have won a court decision, my pockets were exponentially less deep than theirs. I returned to my roots and buckled down doing work in local media instead.

Nevertheless, I had just given a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School on user-centered design, was consulting with some former television journalists who wanted to save media through entrepreneurship, and I flew out to Washington DC to work with the American Association of Colleges and Universities. All of these events were small hints of what was to come.

My mother was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. We didn't know what lay ahead; for now, it was just a persistent cough.

Today

Eight years ago, my mother phoned me to warn me that I shouldn't be shocked to see her using oxygen tanks over Christmas. It took me approximately thirty seconds to decide that I needed to move to California; practically, it took me five months. I arrived with two suitcases and the assumption that I would be here temporarily. Writing this now, I know I'm here for the long run.

She had given up her career in internet business analysis and become a middle school science teacher. Every day she went to work wearing oxygen on her back, looking a little bit like a Ghostbuster, until she couldn't anymore.

Six years ago, she had a double lung transplant. I was with my parents at their home in the central valley when they got the call, a little after midnight; they drove straight to the hospital, while I drove to Oakland to pick up my sister. I tried to raise my girlfriend on the phone, but couldn't. It was the loneliest two hours of my life.

I have persistent flashbacks of my mother sitting on a gurney outside the double doors leading to anesthesiology, telling me to be patient with my father and to look after him. We spent the night in the hospital, sleeping in the waiting room on makeshift beds made of teal vinyl-covered chairs. It wasn't clear that we would ever see her again. She emerged at 4pm the next day, unable to speak and in unfathomable pain. Eventually, I passed out in the ICU next to her, and the nurses told me to go home.

Pulmonary fibrosis is a symptom, not a disease. Your lungs scar progressively until you can't breathe. There's no cure. We didn't know what caused it, but my grandmother died of it when I was six years old, so we knew it was familial. My aunt was diagnosed too, and had lung transplants, before the side effects of immunosuppression were too much for her. Then my cousin, just a few years older than me, who left us suddenly. It was unimaginably sad.

And it was scary. It hung over all of us. I felt it acutely. A few years earlier, I had asked my girlfriend to marry me; she had deferred for a year before telling me no. Around the same time, I had ripped my life up to move to California. The country I grew up in voted to reject Europeans like me, ensuring (assuming Brexit eventually comes to pass) that I could never go back. The country I lived in elected a populist fascist as President. And it was becoming clear that I might only have a few years left. I felt destabilized and terrified. More than that, I felt worthless. I hadn't been able to build the life I wanted. I was damaged. And soon, I might be gone.

I gained a lot of weight and let my anxiety build. It was rare that I'd sleep through the night. All the while, my mother continued on her adventure, through a rollercoaster of medical crises and procedures. Often, it was like watching someone you love be systematically tortured.

Cutting-edge medical research finally caught up with my family, and we discovered that the pulmonary fibrosis was the symptom of a genetic condition called dyskeratosis congenita. At least, it probably was; we were at the edge of medical science. But the research offered hope, and I took it with both hands.

In particular, a genetic condition could be tested. The genetic counsellor warned that an adverse result could affect our insurance, our ability to buy a house; our entire futures. But my sister and I had Europe as a safety net. We had the privilege of just going back to a place with saner, more compassionate laws. And more importantly, we were told there was a 75% chance that one or both of us would have it. We had to know.

When, a year and a half ago, the genetic test came back showing that neither of us had the genetic variant, we burst into tears in the examination room. We called our parents, who also burst into tears. For my mother, the burden of knowing that she might have passed down her condition was lifted. And suddenly, I had a life ahead of me again. That same week, I had my first therapy session, and I began to rebuild.

In the midst of all of this, I had a professional adventure.

I became the hands-on CTO and first employee of Latakoo, which is still the way that NBC News sends recorded footage back to its newsrooms over commodity internet connections. (It's also the source of my only software patent.) I was the Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, serving the world's largest arts festival. I wrote a technical book on HTML5 geolocation. I co-founded Known, found investment, and did right by my investors by going to work as a senior engineer at Medium. I was a heavy participant and sometime organizer in the Indieweb community. My work showed up in the New York Times and in other people's books. I was west coast Director of Investments at Matter, a mission-driven accelerator and venture fund (going to the pub with Chelsea Manning as part of this will always be one of my favorite professional moments). I became VP of Product at Unlock, helping independent creators to make money from their work. And as I write this, I'm Head of Engineering at ForUsAll, which is trying to help people on lower incomes to build retirement savings. I'm far from being even a fraction of a millionaire, but I've had the privilege to do well, and hopefully do some good in the process.

And I've rebuilt a life in California. I have amazing people in my life - many of whom came through the Matter and Indieweb communities, for which I'm endlessly grateful. I still have my amazing friends from the UK, even if we're distant. My family is close and bound by love. It continues to suffer medical hardships. But through it all, I've been lucky.

Ten years from now

So what's next?

Thanks to the last decade's medical adventures, I'm a late bloomer. But I want to have a family, with a strong relationship built on mutual trust and intimacy at its center. If I'm really lucky, my future children will get to meet my parents; if not, I will carry their spirit and do my best to represent the best of who they were. I want a family life drawn from first principles based on creativity and love, rather than one built on established societal expectations: a progressive life created to support us as a partnership, rather than one built to make other people happy by painting by numbers.

My future children will be multi-national, as I am. Many passports, many points of view. And that's just from one side of the partnership. We'll be a mix of cultures, backgrounds, and contexts - ripe soil to grow something new.

I don't have any desire to be wealthy. I do want to be safe and comfortable. That probably means leaving the Bay Area and finding somewhere with a better quality of life to cost of living ratio. Edinburgh is the best place I've ever lived for this, but unless Scotland becomes independent and rejoins the EU, it's not somewhere I could easily go back to. Still, there's a big, wide world out there.

I want to do work that makes the world more equal, more compassionate, and more peaceful. What that means in practice is TBD, but I expect to co-found one more startup - not yet, but eventually. Almost certainly, it'll be bootstrapped and partially open source: a zebra internet / media business built with the goal of indefinite sustainability. If I'm lucky, I'll work with some of my former colleagues to make it happen.

I want to write a book. There is at least one novel in me. There is at least one non-fiction book about people working to make an impact using the internet. Ideally, I want to do this in the next year or two.

I'll also deepen my political volunteering. I began to give heavily to progressive causes, as well as canvass and campaign, over the last decade. My politics continue to be progressive as I get older, and I want to back my opinions with real, on the ground work. The current era demands it.

And I want to build a strong foundation for the rest of my life. I want to do meaningful work as part of living a meaningful life based on happiness and kindness. I want to leave the world better than I found it by showing up as well as I can through emergent strategy. At the end of it all, whether that's a few years from now or fifty, I want to look back without regret and know that I did well by the people whose lives I passed through, as well as people who I'll never meet or know. It's not about wealth; it's not about self-interest; it's about finding meaning through service, and happiness through connection.

It's been a tough decade for me. It has been for many of us. But I'm hopeful for the next one.

This morning, Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter would be funding an independent group that would develop an open standard for decentralized social networking, with the expectation that the company would use it.

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) December 11, 2019

I've been involved in decentralized social networking since 2004, when I released the first version of Elgg, the open source social networking platform. As I said in an interview with ZDNet in 2006:

I think in the future, networks or meta-networks won't be an issue: the network will be decentralised. What I'd like to see is a set of open protocols that mean you can connect to anyone, anywhere, no matter which site they happen to be using.

I still fundamentally believe in this vision. My second attempt at an open source platform, Known, uses indieweb standards to a user of a Known site to interact with any other user of any other indieweb-compatible site. Decentralization was something I looked at carefully when I was west coast Director of Investments at Matter Ventures. And it was core to the work I did with the Unlock Protocol.

There have been many other attempts. My friend Evan Prodromou created StatusNet and then the ActivityPub protocol; the latter underlies the Mastodon "fediverse" of federated social networking platforms. (Known has committed to also joining the fediverse.)

Twitter's announcement today builds on many of these efforts in spirit, but it goes its own way. I think this is probably right: whereas all of the aforementioned projects were created by hobbyists, Twitter as a company and a worldwide platform has different needs. If the goal is to run over 126 million daily active users on a decentralized platform, and for the associated platform companies to make money in the process, something new is needed.

I don't believe that this new project will come out of lengthy committee deliberations. So while it might rile long-term open standards collaborators, I think this tweet from Twitter's CTO, Parag Agrawal, bodes well:

3 - The traditionally slow and deliberate consensus-building approach to evolving standards might fail to keep up with a rapidly changing ecosystem and set of consumer needs.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) December 11, 2019

The key will be rapid iteration in the public interest, repeatedly testing not just the feasibility of such a protocol (whether you can build and maintain it at scale), but also its desirability (user risk) and viability (business risk). In other words, it's not enough to make something work. It also has to be able to win user trust, serve as the foundation of an ecosystem, and allow businesses built on the platform to become valuable. As yet, open standards processes have not shown themselves to be capable of this kind of product development.

To be clear, this kind of leadership can and does still lead to open projects released under open source licenses. That's what Twitter will need to do here.

For Twitter, there are many obvious business benefits as champion of this platform. Particularly in a world where anti-trust reform and regulation of social networks are becoming more prominent topics, getting ahead of the trend and locking in decentralized openness is smart. It could also disrupt other social networking platforms who aren't, or can't be, so forward-thinking.

Building it on a blockchain - not Ethereum, but a new, faster, purpose-built chain - may also make sense as a way to lock in both openness and the ability to build value. One interesting property of blockchains is that nodes typically have to process the whole chain; that means that as the traffic on the new protocol increases, the difficulty of processing the chain increases and the number of entities capable of processing it decreases. The value of being an entry point that processes on behalf of others increases. So there's a business in providing an easy access point for developers. But more importantly, designing the protocol from scratch allows a mutually beneficial business model to be baked in. It's not about hoarding the riches for Twitter: it's about baking an ever-increasing pie that everyone can have a slice of.

There are lots of very reasonable arguments that open communty advocates will make for this being something to be wary of. But while this move is very, very late in community terms (we've been talking about decentralization for decades), it's very early in corporate terms. The time is right for tech companies to make the shift into open protocols, in a way that allows businesses to make money, users to own their data, and a thousand new social networking interfaces to bloom. And I think that's a progressive move for the web.

Photo by Anthony Cantin on Unsplash

In 2013, my mother had a double lung transplant. The rules for recovery post-transplantation are that you can't have a bridge between you and the hospital; they don't want you to be stuck in traffic if you need emergency attention. So we rented an apartment in the Inner Sunset, where we all sat with Ma while she recovered. My Dad was there all the time as her primary carer, but nonetheless, sometimes I slept overnight on an air mattress.

As her speech returned to her and her energy increased, she told me that she wished she had a place to speak to other people who had been through the same ordeal. But at the same time, she wasn't comfortable sharing that kind of personal information on a platform like Facebook.

She was asleep a lot of the time. So in the evenings and weekends, I started to write that new platform for her. I gave it what I thought was a quirky but friendly name - idno - which spoke to identity and the id, but I also thought sounded friendly in a slightly foreign-to-everyone kind of way.

At the same time, I became involved in the IndieWeb community through Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks. And I realized that this platform could easily be modified to work with the microformats standards at the root of that movement. I built decentralized replies and commenting into the platform. That summer, I flew to IndieWebCamp Portland, and demonstrated the community's first decentralized event RSVPs. There, I met Erin Richey, and we began to collaborate on designs for the platform.

I had previously met Corey Ford, co-founder of Matter, and it turned out he was looking for startups as part of Matter's third cohort, which would begin in May 2014. Erin and I decided to collaborate (with the encouragement of Corey and Benjamin Evans, now the leader of AirBnb's anti-discrimination team) on turning Idno into a real startup. Here's the real pitch deck we used for our meeting (PDF link). The idea was to follow in WordPress's footsteps by creating a great centralized service as well as an open source, self-hosted platform for people that wanted it. For the business, the self-hosted platform would act as a marketing channel for the service; for the open source community, the business would fund development.

We were accepted into the third cohort, and quickly incorporated so we could take investment. Erin in particular felt that Idno was a crappy name, and undertook her own research on a shortlist of new ones. Her process involved figuring out which names were easily understandable if you just heard the name, and which could be easily spelled, using a battery of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Known was the very clear winner.

Everyone's favorite part of building a startup is choosing the logo. Here are a few I built that we rejected:

I think I thought the "kn-own" wordplay was cleverer than it was.

In the end, we went with this logo that Erin drew:

"It looks like the Circle K," my mother said. Still, we went with it, not least because the K in itself would work well as an icon.

I've written a lot over the years about the Matter process: suffice to say that it changed the way I think about products and startups forever, as well as, in many ways, my entire life.

While the open source community continued to grow, the startup itself didn't work as well as I had hoped, both as a business and as a high-functioning product team in its own right. Over the course of the five month program we chose to double down on individual websites over building communities, and then we decided to start with education as a go-to market. I don't think either of these things were the right decisions for a startup in retrospect, and as we presented at demo day on the stage of the Paley Center in New York, I could see disappointment written on a few faces. Here's that full pitch. If you read the initial pitch deck, you'll know that a lot changed - both for good and bad.

Known was half-acquired by Medium in a way that saw a return for Matter. (Because of Known's social media syndication capabilities, Medium did not want to acquire the software, and did not legally acquire the corporation.) One important role of a founder, which I learned from Evan Prodromou, is to be a good steward of investor value. In this case, it was important to me to also be a good steward of community value, and the deal with Medium allowed the community to continue to exist. Erin became acting CEO of the corporation and continued to work on the project. Eventually, I left Medium and joined Matter as its west coast Director of Investments. The work I did there encompasses the proudest moments of my professional career.

Fast forward to the end of the 2019, and Marcus Povey (a friend and frequent collaborator of mine, who also worked on Elgg) has picked up the community baton. Thanks to him, Known just released version 1.0. The community continues to grow. I just put together a draft roadmap for two further releases: one this summer, and one for the end of the year. These releases are free from any attempt to become a commercial entity or achieve sustainability; they're entirely designed to serve the community. They're all about strengthening the core platform, as well as increasing compatibility with the indieweb and the fediverse.

For me, the collaborative group functionality is still something I think about, but it won't be the focus of Known going forward. I'm considering an entirely new, simpler group platform (third time's a charm). Known is about creating a single stream of social content, in a way that you control, with your design and domain name. Its journey hasn't been a straight line. But I'm excited to see what the next year holds for it.

I'm a fan and paid-up member of Medium, the long-form online publishing platform and reader network. I should declare that I'm not unbiased: I worked there in 2016 and know a few of the people who work on it, although the team and product have changed considerably over the last few years.

A couple of years ago they began to reverse one of the most alarming trends on the internet - independent artists losing the ability to sustainably create their work - and allowed writers to get paid for their work. It's been a roaring success, and the site is now one of the top 100 in the world. More recently still, they've brought paying publications like the Bold Italic into the fold. Although this is reminscent of a failed strategy from a few years ago that ended up really hurting publications like The Establishment, in the context of the Partner Program and Medium Memberships it makes more sense.

What Medium isn't is a generic blogging or publishing platform. It's narrowed its focus into being more like a magazine that everyone can contribute to (and I'm told that more changes are coming in the New Year). In doing so, it inevitably loses some of its early users - and it adds features like a paywall that may drive some casual readers away.

Ironically, many of the people who complain about Medium are the same people who care about surveillance capitalism. Yet the site is the biggest, boldest experiment in non-surveillance social media on the internet: a business that makes money by asking for money, and has aligned itself with its community in doing so. No, you don't build a wholly self-owned digital identity like you do on the indieweb; no, it's not a place for billions of people to put their every waking thought for free. But in building a magazine that anyone can contribute to, Medium has opened the door to a more diverse community of writers sharing their lived experiences and getting paid for it as part of a business model that promotes value over blind engagement and doesn't need to profile you all over the web.

To say that writers should make their work available for free is the height of privilege - and indeed, usually those voices are well-paid white men who make six figure salaries at technology companies. Our society is richer for having more points of view expressed, but not everyone has the time available to do free work. The net result of Medium's strategy is more writers making a living from their work, and therefore more diverse writers sharing their lived experiences. I'm all for that.

Publishing on Medium does not preclude writing on a personal website that you control. You can do both. But just as there's nothing wrong with publishing a long-form piece in a newspaper or a traditional magazine, there's nothing wrong with publishing it on Medium.

Books

This was another tough month, with three hospital visits for my mother. For this and a few other reasons, my anxiety was through the roof, and I often lay awake in bed with my heart racing. As has been true a few times this year, I found it hard to have the mental clarity to pick up a book and dive into it.

Over Thanksgiving I finally found that peace again, and as ever, I find offline reading to be meditative and nurturing.

Notable Articles

The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking". Just another example of how deeply warped by capitalism American society really is. "Ultimately, both the word jaywalking and the concept that pedestrians shouldn't walk freely on streets became so deeply entrenched that few people know this history."

New data makes it clear: Nonvoters handed Trump the presidency. Even if you hate the eventual candidate, if you have the ability, please vote in 2020.

Sea-level rise could flood hundreds of millions more than expected. "The new analysis found that about 110 million people are already living on land that falls below daily average high tides today, compared with an estimated 28 million people under the earlier models."

‘I’m gonna lose everything’. "In farm country, mental health experts say they’re seeing more suicides as families endure the worst period for U.S. agriculture in decades. Farm bankruptcies and loan delinquencies are rising, calamitous weather events are ruining crops, and profits are vanishing during Trump’s global trade disputes."

Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business. What could be more emblematic of our current era than a startup that takes blood from young people and transfuses it into the rich? It's not just its superficial ghoulishness: the power dynamics here are chilling.

Climate change deniers’ new battle front attacked. "Mann stressed that individual actions – eating less meat or avoiding air travel – were important in the battle against global warming. However, they should be seen as additional ways to combat global warming rather than as a substitute for policy reform."

The voice from our Nest camera threatened to steal our baby. And apparently these devices are commonly hacked.

Scaling in the presence of errors—don’t ignore them. Scaling is incredibly difficult, and even more so when you're dealing with a codebase that wasn't built with it in mind. Tef writes well, and I wish he was more prolific.

Everyone is admitting what they get paid to work in journalism. "A web producer for Wirecutter, the consumer review site now owned by the New York Times, makes just $45,000, according to the list. An editor at the same site with three years of experience has a salary of only $62,000. For a job based in New York City, that seems barely livable." Yes and: it encourages the otherwise-supported and independently wealthy to get into journalism, creating a demographic skew across the industry that seriously underrepresents working class points of view.

Open Source Code Will Survive the Apocalypse in an Arctic Cave. Enjoy reading through the Elgg and Known source code, future humans. Sorry about the mess.

Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism. My friend Fergus on his autism for the British Psychological Society. "If, as I’ve argued, monotropism provides a common underlying explanation for all the main features of autistic psychology, then autism is not nearly as mysterious as people tend to think. We do not need to rely on theories which explain only a few aspects of autistic cognition, with no convincing explanation for sensory hyper- and hypo-sensitivity, or the intensity of autistic interests."

“The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet” and the Cold War 2.0. "Silicon Valley imperialism also prefers to understand Eastern Europe as more corrupt than itself, playing into Cold War 2.0 mythologies. Yet from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (which revealed that Facebook was just as, if not more, culpable in skewing the 2016 US election results than Russia and its Guccifer 2.0), to ongoing abuses of artificial intelligence, machine learning, exploitation, and data colonialism being employed by Big Tech, global corruption’s technological epicenter is clearly not Romania."

The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Virtuoso Coder. A sad story told evocatively; this is more a tale of a community in Ohio than it is about tech.

Government Secrets: Why and How A Special Agent-Turned-Whistleblower Uncovered Controversial Border Surveillance Tactics. A reminder again. "“It seemed these people's rights were being infringed on,” Petonak explained. “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Everyone has rights. And just because I don't agree with your political stance on something, doesn't mean you don't have the same rights as every other person.”"

Uber plans to start audio-recording rides in the U.S. for safety. I'm of two minds. My knee-jerk reaction was that this is terrible - but having some protection against assault seems like a good idea. In many places, taxis do this automatically. The important thing is that you're told you're being recorded. (Of course, I don't trust Uber to do the right thing with these recordings.)

The Best Parenting Advice Is to Go Live in Europe. Parenting seems so much harder here, and like so many things, I don't understand why people seem to think it's okay.

Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for 'final solution'. "Baron Cohen also called for internet companies to be held responsible for their content. “It’s time to finally call these companies what they really are – the largest publishers in history. And here’s an idea for them: abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines and TV news do every day.”" Here are his words in full.

Weeknight Dinner Around the World. I loved this photo essay: 18 families around the world, sharing what they eat on a typical weeknight. Human and beautiful. (And hunger-inducing.)

Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights. From Amnesty International. "“We have already seen that Google and Facebook’s vast architecture for advertising is a potent weapon in the wrong hands. Not only can it be misused for political ends, with potentially disastrous consequences for society, but it allows all kinds of new exploitative advertising tactics such as preying on vulnerable people struggling with illness, mental health or addiction. Because these ads are tailored to us as individuals, they are hidden from public scrutiny,” said Kumi Naidoo."

White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won't act. "A Guardian analysis found longstanding Facebook pages for VDare, a white nationalist website focused on opposition to immigration; the Affirmative Right, a rebranding of Richard Spencer’s blog Alternative Right, which helped launch the “alt-right” movement; and American Free Press, a newsletter founded by the white supremacist Willis Carto, in addition to multiple pages associated with Red Ice TV. Also operating openly on the platform are two Holocaust denial organizations, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust and the Institute for Historical Review."

Dial Up! "How the Hmong diaspora uses the world’s most boring technology to make something weird and wonderful." This is so cool: underground radio for a diaspora community based on conference call technology.

The California DMV Is Making $50M a Year Selling Drivers’ Personal Information. "They included data broker LexisNexis and consumer credit reporting agency Experian. Motherboard also found DMVs sold information to private investigators, including those who are hired to find out if a spouse is cheating."

My devices are sending and receiving data every two seconds, sometimes even when I sleep. "When I decided to record every time my phone or laptop contacted a server on the internet, I knew I'd get a lot of data, but I honestly didn't think it would reveal nearly 300,000 requests in a single week." What have we built for ourselves?

Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition. "The planning materials envision a seamless system whereby a Ring owner would be automatically alerted when an individual deemed “suspicious” was captured in their camera’s frame, something described as a “suspicious activity prompt.”" What could possibly go wrong?

You can take my Dad’s tweets over my dead body. Twitter will start removing inactive accounts; that includes accounts owned by the deceased. "Big tech companies are good at a lot of things, but what they seem to lack is collective empathy and heart. When humans use the things you build and you stop treating them like humans, but rather like bits and bytes and revenue dollars, you’ve given your soul away. And maybe it’s just me getting older, but I’ve had about enough of it."

Pete Buttigieg Called Me. Here's What Happened. "But Pete Buttigieg listened, which is all you can ask a white man to do." A remarkable piece of writing.

Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in Schools. "By taking a decolonizing approach to teaching about Thanksgiving, teachers and families reject the myths of Thanksgiving and harmful stereotypes about Native peoples." Some great resources that all of us can use. I'm excited that these are the kinds of conversations we're having.

What keeps us going. 100 quotes from a cross-section of Americans on where they find meaning in life. I found this fascinating and very often alien: very often less relatable than I expected. But it's a strong portrait of a country in flux, with its anxieties written on its sleeve.

The Social Subsidy of Angel Investing. I think this cuts to the core of what makes fundraising in the Bay Area different, but I also think it's a problem. Angel investing has become a mark of social status. "In San Francisco, it’s angel investing. Other than founding a successful startup yourself, there’s not much higher-status in the Bay Area than backing founders that go on to build Uber or Stripe."

The Power is Running: A Memoir of N30. "On November 30, 1999, tens of thousands of anarchists, indigenous people, ecologists, union organizers, and other foes of tyranny converged in Seattle, Washington from around the world to blockade and shut down the summit of the World Trade Organization. The result was one of the era’s most inspiring victories against global capitalism, demonstrating the effectiveness of direct action and casting light on the machinations of the WTO." A first-hand account of that day.

Why we need to preserve black spaces in Detroit. "Detroiters are not opposed to economic development and revitalization; we're opposed to feeling uninvited in our own home. We're opposed to being told "no" for decades, for everything from mortgages to home improvement loans to development dollars, only to see that once you carve out a few portions where there are fewer of us, the property values suddenly rise."

Previously

Here's what I read in October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, and January.

Last year, on a whim, I left social media on Thanksgiving, and didn't return until January 1st. It led to massive improvements in my mental and physical health, overall happiness, attention span, and engagement with the world.

This year I've been with my mother while she spent months in the hospital, watched the world fall apart in alarming ways, and changed jobs. And I lost many people I care about, all in the space of a month. In a lot of ways, it's been the hardest, most stressful year of my life.

So I've decided to intentionally restart my social media fast this Thanksgiving. It's incredibly late this year, so that means I'm effectively taking the month of December off. That's enough to get a clean break, reset, and breathe.

I will be posting here throughout that time, and continuing to engage on the indieweb.

December also happens to be the most commercial time of the year, when advertising spend is at its highest. In a world where divisiveness and depression are being amplified by these platforms, logging off for the month also feels like a good way to respond financially to their new role in the world.

So I'm asking others: let's log off in December together. Black Friday is already Buy Nothing Day for many of us. Let's make December a month where we disengage from the attention economy - not logging off from the internet, but from the social media platforms that have led to the current era. The independent web, forums, email lists, and other closed discussion groups are fair game (with ad blockers), but let's show Facebook, Twitter, et al how we feel.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Update: This guide has been turned into an up-to-date, standalone website: Get Blogging!

I've been blogging - albeit not consistently on the same site - since 1998. That's a long time in internet years, and in human years, and over time I've conditioned out any self-editing impulse I might have. I write, hit publish, and share. Done.

Because I'm fairly prolific, friends and colleagues often ask me what the best way to start is, in two ways:

1. Their writing ethic: how to actually write and feel OK about putting it out there in the world.

2. Their platform: how to sustainably host a website that looks good and reflect on them well.

I'll take those questions in reverse order. But first, let's address something important:

What is blogging?

The short answer is: it's personal and different for everybody.

Here's what it's not: professional article writing. If you want to go through multiple rounds of editing, please do. If you want to write two thousand word epics about your topic of choice, please do. But it's also okay to write up a hundred quick words and post them without thinking twice about it.

When you blog, you're building up a body of work that represents you online. It's a gateway into your thought process more than anything else. So do what moves you - whether that's short thoughts, bookmarks you like, essays, fiction, poetry, photo albums, and so on. You do you. The only thing that's really important is that you keep doing it.

I can tie every single major advance in my career to blogging. It's been hugely important in my personal life, too. I couldn't recommend it more.

Which platform should I choose?

Let's get this out of the way: if you're looking for a platform to blog regularly, it's not Medium.

That's not a knock on Medium. I used to work there, and I still adore the platform. But you should think of it as a huge online magazine that anyone can write articles for. Shorter updates aren't really appropriate there, and pieces stand alone. It's also most effective if you put your work behind the paywall, these days, which might not gel with your blogging goals. You shouldn't feel bad about writing on Medium - but you should have your own site, too.

Don't use something that isn't designed for purpose: you could use Notion, Evernote, etc etc, but you'll run into problems later on, and you'll make life harder for your audience.

Obviously, I write on Known. I wrote it, so I enjoy it, and I can tinker with it if something doesn't make me happy. But unless you really want to configure self-hosting space and tinker with code too, for the moment I don't recommend that you use Known to blog. (Maybe I will again. Watch this space.)

Instead, my recommendation is WordPress. It just is. No, the interface is not perfectly modern. But the ecosystem is giant, there are a lot of options for customizability, and most importantly, there are apps out there that will help you manage your writing and post effectively. If you feel like spending the time and you have the ability, you can self-host. If you don't, you can use their hosted service. You'll know that a lot of the important stuff - feeds, archives, SEO - is taken care of for you.

A close second, for informal, personal sites, is Micro Blog. As they describe it, it's "the blog you will actually use": a simple service that allows you to write updates of any length via the web and native apps. It supports IndieWeb technologies out of the box (like Known does), and is compatible with the ecosystem of apps. And the people behind it are great.

Finally, if you really want something Medium-like, Ghost is a great choice. Like WordPress, you can self-host, or you can pay them to manage it for you.

Whatever you choose, buy your own domain name if you have the means: that way you can repoint your address to a different provider in the future. So if, for example, Ghost goes out of business, you can shrug your shoulders and move to WordPress without having to tell anyone about your new address.

How can I get myself to write?

Like so many things, practice makes perfect.

My recommendation is this: choose a cadence of no less than once a week, and stick to it for two months. Then see how you feel. Don't limit yourself to any particular length, and don't let yourself spend more than an hour on a post. After that hour, you're hitting publish, no matter what.

You quickly learn that, although your posts will be live on the web forever, they're also ephemeral. People move onto the next thing quickly. And - unless you're actually a terrible person - nobody is going to react badly to anything you write. If it's not a post that captures the imagination, folks will move on very quickly. If it is, it's because it's a great post. And you're almost certainly not a terrible person, so you have nothing to lose.

Here's the other thing you should do: comment on or about other people's posts at the same cadence. The internet is a conversation, not a broadcast. Weblogs are social media; you need to interact with what other people are writing.

One last thing: don't blog about your own blogging. No "I just started a blog!" or "it's been a long time since I blogged". Those are apologies of different kinds, and you have nothing to apologize about. Be bold. Put your thoughts down in writing. I believe in you.

It's a mental leap - I know it is - and an act of bravery to put your thoughts in writing. But there's nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

And ... that's it

Over time, your body of work will build, and you'll find that people are interested in surprising topics. This post on equality of outcome vs opportunity has been the most popular thing on my site for a while now, which I never could have planned or anticipated. The power is in being consistent, and keeping your site online for the long term. (I wish I could have told my 1998 self that.)

People email me about things I've written all the time. My posts have led to newspaper and magazine features. They've led to jobs. And most importantly for me, they've led to friends.

If you're starting a blog - and if you don't have one, you should start now! - I want to hear about it. Get started and email me its address. The time to start is now.

Photo by Anete Lūsiņa on Unsplash

The climate crisis is the single biggest challenge we need to face as a civilization. It's also one of the first that we need to face holistically: the entire world coming together to save our collective selves. So far, we're doing horribly.

There's been some criticism that the stories we've heard from scientists and the media so far have been too alarmist. On the contrary, I don't think they're anywhere near alarming enough. And a lot of that comes down to how these stories are framed.

I've spent a lot of my time advising founders about how to get their message across. They live in their industries every day, and they know every nuance and every implication. So when they start to tell stories about the products they've built with their blood, sweat, and tears, it's often not real or concrete enough. They make the assumption that because they understand the implications and see the problem, everyone will. A lot of pitch coaching comes down to helping them tell the story in a way that will allow others to feel the problem.

Similarly, I'm not sure climate scientists - and more importantly, the media - are telling the story in a way that will make people feel the problem enough. It's why activists like Greta Thunberg and Extiction Rebellion are so needed and so effective: these people and groups make it clear that the problem is immense, and that it will affect real people all over the world.

For example, I read a story today that reported that a one-meter sea level rise by 2300 is now inevitable. That's actually really terrible news, but it's impossible to get a handle on it from the story. What does a one-meter sea level rise really mean? And isn't 2300 literally after the entire timeline from Star Trek? (TOS, not TNG, you pedants.) It seems so far away and like something we could deal with maybe two or three generations from now.

But people will die. It might seem ghoulish to make that into drama, but honestly, that's how the message will get across. These stories sound hyperbolic exactly because the human cost is going to be unfathomably high. Their incomprehensible scale doesn't mean they're wrong. 30 years from now, 300 million people's homes will be washed away. 80 years from now, it's half a billion. And these are median estimates that only consider how many homes will be flooded. It doesn't even begin to consider thee number of people who will deal with lethal heat, or the effect on the food chain. When you put these things together, there are some credible predictions of the end of human civilization within three decades.

It's fine to report the scientific detail. We need facts and data. But let's put it in context, and assume that most people haven't been paying attention. We need to show that the threat is real and credible; that it will directly impact them; and that it will lead to war and famine that will likely exist very soon indeed.

We live in a consumerist society where everything is presented in terms of products. So, let's talk products. Tim Burton's Batman was released 30 years ago. So was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And, yes, Star Trek: The Next Generation is thirty-two years old. In less time than that, it could all be over.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Books

Save More Tomorrow, by Shlomo Benartzi. A behavioral finance approach to helping people save more. The book fails to deal with what I think are some glaring income inequality and societal context issues, but I found it interesting as a human-centered approach to finance.

Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore. My first re-read this year. So much of this comes down to getting over yourself and meeting people where they're at. What I've learned: don't try to cross the chasm before you get to the chasm.

Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, and Ron McMillan. Summary: be clear, be human, and find common ground through empathy and radical clarity. I'm on board.

I am seriously ready to read some non-business books again.

Notable Articles

The awkward questions about slavery from tourists in US South. It's shocking but not surprising to me that the culture of slavery is still woven so deeply into the fabric of the American south. ""Slavery was not that bad - it's probably the number one thing we hear," says plantation tour guide Olivia Williams." Nothing less than glossing over crimes against humanity.

How to Succeed When You’re Marginalized or Discriminated Against at Work. "Some of the best methods to manage our workloads and our careers can be locked off to marginalized people, mostly because of the way we’re perceived by other people." Tools to hack your workplace only work for the privileged.

Why It’s So Hard for Startups to Create Wealth in Europe. There's a subtext here: they're trying to operate like US startups. Europe requires a different approach - and undoubtedly has both a higher floor and a lower ceiling.

Why We Need a Working-Class Media. A dirty secret is that so many people who work in media come from upper middle class backgrounds, and their lenses are calibrated accordingly. What would the media look like if it was set up to benefit the working class?

Afghan Town’s First Female Mayor Awaits Her Assassination. "Zarifa Ghafari, who at 26 became one of Afghanistan’s first female mayors, has said that she fully expects to be assassinated." The bravery of this woman is incredible.

Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers. Because the people who don't mind killing the planet also want tech to stay deregulated.

The female price of male pleasure. "The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. [...] Research shows that 30 percent of women report pain during vaginal sex, 72 percent report pain during anal sex, and "large proportions" don't tell their partners when sex hurts."

Five Years of Tech Diversity Reports - and Little Progress. "It’s been five years since Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft first released diversity reports, revealing the companies’ workforces were overwhelmingly white or Asian men. Five years since Facebook first acknowledged it had “more work to do—a lot more,” and CEO Tim Cook wrote Apple employees a letter promising the company would be “as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing products.”" And very little progress has been made.

“It’s a Gold Rush Town”: How Artists Survive in San Francisco. Interviews with people who are still here and still surviving. I'm grateful to know artists in this area, and I'm ashamed of how hard my industry has made it for them.

Booker Prize 2019: What Happened? It turns out - this will shock you - that literary prizes may not be entirely merit based.

Death is a good way to gauge who we think deserves to live. "People die violent deaths in both the US and Nigeria – why do I fear it there and not here? Where people have little power, they become more vulnerable. [...] As I have seen it defined, structural power – or the lack thereof – is most easily measured by the probability of a person dying in unnatural circumstances, such as the shocking, yet not unforeseeable deaths of Joshua Brown, Botham Jean, and countless others."

Media amnesia and the Facebook News Tab. The media industry needs to stop believing Facebook! It is not their friends. It is not anybody's friend.

What’s Left of Condé Nast. "Condé Nast’s future is now being charted by [Anna] Wintour’s new boss, Roger Lynch, the former CEO of Pandora, the music-streaming service he ran until it was sold to SiriusXM in February."

50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420. It's crazy to think of the internet as being fifty years old. And of course, it's gone through many transformations since its inception, not least in the early nineties when commercial access became available.

Slave markets found on Instagram and other apps. And the companies behind them are doing the bare minimum to fix it.

Previously

Here's what I read in September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, and January.

Books

The Bestseller Code, by Jodie Archer and Matthew L Jockers. An analysis of bestselling narratives using NLP, sentiment analysis, and machine learning - but really a discussion of the art of narrative, backed by data. Fascinating.

Lanny, by Max Porter. A tense mystery woven from an impressionist tapestry of exceptionally well-observed rural British life; experimental and spiritual, while also pulse-poundingly real. I couldn’t put it down.

No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, by Greta Thunberg. A collection of her compelling, frank, calls to action that makes clear how powerful she is. We need her uncompromising voice.

gods with a little g, by Tupelo Hassman. Its irreverence hooked me; then it reeled me in and took me, my laughter and sobbing facets of its revealed truth. I wish I could write like this. I wish I could read like this forever. Beautiful.

Notable Articles

Can You Write a Novel as a Group? An interesting exploration of writing groups - which, like startups and just about any other group of people I can think of, often fall apart because of preventable human dynamics.

Another Network is Possible. I agree that Indymedia could and should have shown the way. There's still time.

Young people may download news apps, but they spend very little time with them. "No news app (with the exception of Reddit) was within the top 25 apps used by respondents."

I Broke The Official Jeremy Renner App By Posting The Word "Porno" On It. "The second thing you will find upon installing the app—if you have not already installed the official Jeremy Renner app, please feel free to take this parenthetical as an opportunity to do so—is that every push notification you receive through the app looks as though it is coming directly from Mr. Renner himself." What happened next is both terrible and delicious.

MIT Media Lab founder: Taking Jeffrey Epstein’s money was justified. Nicholas Negroponte could not have been more wrong here. And it's a sad indictment of him, the institution he founded, and prevalent attitudes at every institution and ... just about everywhere else. There's so much work to do.

A Shocking Number of Americans Want to 'Just Let Them All Burn'. "The impulse to share hateful rumors "are associated with 'chaotic' motivations to 'burn down' the entire established democratic 'cosmos'... This extreme discontent is associated with motivations to share hostile political rumors, not because such rumors are viewed to be true but because they are believed to mobilize the audience against disliked elites.""

That Assault Weapon Ban? It Really Did Work. Let's stop beating around the bush and reinstate an effective ban.

The Space Crone. Ursula K LeGuin's full, beautiful essay about ageing, the menopause, and facing the unknown.

‘You understand that you might have to shoot a student?’ The realities of arming teachers.

How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The story has moved on, but let's not let this drop.

How to prepare yourself for a good end of life. "In the past three years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people who have witnessed good deaths and hard ones, and I consulted top experts in end-of-life medicine. This is what I learned about how to get the best from our imperfect health care system and how to prepare for a good end of life." Unfortunately very relevant to my interests right now.

Report reveals play-by-play of first U.S. grid cyberattack. "A first-of-its-kind cyberattack on the U.S. grid created blind spots at a grid control center and several small power generation sites in the western United States, according to a document posted yesterday from the North American Electric Reliability Corp."

Running Restaurants in San Francisco Made Me Rethink Everything I Thought I Knew About Success. "Looking back to when I first started out in the restaurant industry, I had defined success as becoming established, having your restaurants, and being a pillar in your community. Now, success merely means surviving."

‘Someone’s Gotta Tell the Freakin’ Truth’: Jerry Falwell’s Aides Break Their Silence. "More than two dozen current and former high-ranking Liberty University officials and close associates of Falwell spoke to me or provided documents for this article, opening up—for the first time at an institution so intimately associated with the Falwell family—about what they’ve experienced and why they don’t think he’s the right man to lead Liberty University or serve as a figurehead in the Christian conservative movement." I don't think it's meaningful different to the rest of the Christian conservative movement, though, to be honest.

I Was Caroline Calloway. An inside story about exploitation and influencer culture.

The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained. "The key to understanding why a self-proclaimed radical feminist group would side with conservatives arguing for the right to force cisgender women into skirts at work is to understand who TERFs are and what they’ve been up to for the past 50 years. Because now, under the Trump administration and a conservative-majority Supreme Court, their alliance with these far-right groups could have lasting, widespread consequences for trans civil rights — and for the rights of women in general." I've got nothing nice to say about TERFs.

Jennifer Gunter: ‘Women are being told lies about their bodies’. "When one of Goop’s “medical experts” wrote that Gunter was “strangely confident” in her thoughts on jade eggs, she replied: “I am not strangely confident about vaginal health; I am appropriately confident because I am the expert.” Many of her statements end with similar mic drops. It is a rare moment when a gynaecologist becomes an international celebrity, and it comes on a wave of misinformation, fear and continued attacks on the bodily autonomy of women. One Goop fan called Gunter the “vaginal Antichrist”."

How Paris got a taste for second-hand style from Africa. "Unloved cast-offs sent to Togo's markets by charity shops in Europe are given a second life by a canny vintage dealer in Paris."

How To Lose A Third Of A Million Dollars Without Really Trying. A cautionary tale from the publishing industry, which is likely similar to the music industry, and elsewhere in the arts.

Revealed: catastrophic effects of working as a Facebook moderator. "A group of current and former contractors who worked for years at the social network’s Berlin-based moderation centres has reported witnessing colleagues become “addicted” to graphic content and hoarding ever more extreme examples for a personal collection. They also said others were pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day."

I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. Greta Thunberg is a superhero.

How Slack Got Ahead in Diversity. "For one thing, the company has, since 2015, proactively sought out candidates from outside traditional programmer pipelines like Stanford and MIT, recruiting through all-women’s coding camps like Hackbright, as well as programs that focus on training black and Latino programmers such as Code2040." And in doing so, is outperforming other tech companies. I'm watching this closely. These are things we should all be doing.

Trump: My Crimes Can’t Be Investigated While I’m President. Let's see about that.

Silicon Valley Goes to Therapy. "Silicon Valley is approaching its anxiety the way it knows best. So now there is on-demand therapy. Therapy metrics. Therapy R.O.I. Matching therapists with clients using the tools of online dating." Confession: I used a therapy startup to find the therapist I've been seeing for the last year, and it's been a very positive experience for me.

‘Racist’ Home Office passport system couldn’t recognise black man’s lips. "The Race Equality Foundation said it believes the system was not tested properly to see if it would work for black or ethnic minority people, calling it ‘technological or digital racism’." It's worth considering how many other systems have not been tested in this way, and what the impact of false positives could be on a person's life.

Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns. "What if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries moved away from fossil fuels?"

This is your phone on feminism. "Our devices are basically gaslighting us. They tell us they work for and care about us, and if we just treat them right then we can learn to trust them. But all the evidence shows the opposite is true."

Maria Ressa: “Facebook Broke Democracy in Many Countries around the World, Including in Mine”. "More than at any other time, political leaders have to define the values they stand for. And they have to come together and let go of the rivalries and the bitterness and the alliances of the past. I think that our opposition politicians [in the Philippines] could’ve done a better job if they understood both the role of democracy and if they stopped looking at it as a game of politics. I see the same with the Democratic Party of the United States; they’re going to self-implode before they even get to elections."

NY Fed: Minimum wage hikes didn't kill jobs. Increasing the minimum wage actually improved job numbers for lower-paid workers. An important finding to counter a common conservative talking point.

Looking back at the Snowden revelations. From a cryptographic perspective. "It might very well be that the NSA has lost a significant portion of its capability since Snowden."

A New Theory of Obesity. "“Ultraprocessed” foods seem to trigger neural signals that make us want more and more calories, unlike other foods in the Western diet."

Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair. "In the mid-1990s, female musicians topped the charts and sold out shows, but were told over and over again that no one would pay to see more than one woman onstage. Sarah McLachlan set out to prove them wrong."

You can’t be ‘impartial’ about racism – an open letter to the BBC on the Naga Munchetty ruling. "The BBC has upheld a complaint against its Breakfast presenter. As British broadcasters and journalists of colour, we demand it reconsiders."

Previously

Here's what I read in August, July, June, May, April, March, February, and January.

1. I've joined ForUsAll as Head of Engineering. It's a financial wellness company whose mission is to build a better financial future for everyone. That's important - particularly in a country with no real safety net, no real pension system, and a terrifying gap between the rich and poor. We're starting with retirement savings, and I'm particularly motivated to help people on lower incomes build a stronger future.

2. I'm immediately hiring for two roles. The first is a Front End Engineer who codes in React with Redux and also has a strong understanding and respect for web standards. The second is a DevOps Engineer who can help build and orchestrate our infrastructure, as well as help us with both Continuous Integration and Deployment. Both roles are based on-premise in downtown San Francisco, and come with the major downside that you'll need to work side by side with me every day.

Right now the engineering team is about 50% women, and I want to continue to build an intersectionally diverse group of people who genuinely care about the work they're doing. If that's you, or you know someone, reach out!

I think of the internet industry in generations. First, we had the early days of the commercial internet, when Gopher was still a thing and Windows users launched Trumpet Winsock and waited for their modem screech before they connected with the world. Then, the Netscape era; a world dominated by Yahoo and the early days of the social web. There were the corporate years between the dotcom crash and the Great Recession, powered by banner ads. And then, the iPhone and everything that came next.

We have some contenders for the next great wave - blockchain, intelligent assistants - but no definites, yet. Blockchain is still lost in its own consensus and the myth that technology built before a specific human need can still change the world. (Thank you, Unlock, for keeping real humans in mind.) Intelligent assistants have been caught by the business models of their corporate parents and are simultaneously too closed and too freaky to become real platforms. So instead, this has been the era when startups retreated into the enterprise world and made money through bringing data insights - and data-driven influence - to business interests.

When I say data, let me be clear: I mean our data. Some businesses call it Personally Identifiable Information, or PII. But it's the intimate details of our lives, taken in aggregate. Our beliefs, predictions about our intentions, and a granular record of our past actions are stored in schemas that people who have never met us believe can build a psychometric profile which will accurately foretell our future actions.

It's an inherently asymmetric state of affairs: while these companies aggregate millions or billions of profiles that predict how we'll act, we don't have a hope of profiling them. Profiling requires near-constant surveillance and combining thousands of different data sources in sophisticated ways, which can then be abused by governments or political parties that want to influence our political decisions. We don't have a hope of surveilling them.

Corporate power has traditionally been counterbalanced by a few different measures. The first is government, which is supposed to look out for the well-being of its citizens. Let's set that one to the side and hopefully come back to it sometime in the future. Another is unions: when employers had outsized influence over the lives of their employees, the labor movement organized itself in order to create better routes for advocacy. The result of the original labor movements was that we were introduced to innovations like the weekend and the eight hour day. In the modern era, they continue to advocate for stronger benefits and better pay. Not every union is great, but the idea of unions is important and generally good.

I believe the next great wave on the internet is agency. Or to put it differently: I believe the tech industry is finally finding a soul.

As individuals, our privacy has been violated, our data has been aggregated, and we've been reduced to faceless consumers at best, chum for the enterprise data machine at worst. Social media makes us unhappy and destabilizes the communities we live in. Freedom of speech - which is essential for democracy to function - is being undermined by the chilling effect of constant surveillance. (To be clear, this is different to "freedom of speech" in the Gab and Breitbart sense, which is the modern equivalent of armchair racists complaining that they can't use the N-word anymore.) Crucially, the startups that have been growing as fast as possible without regard for human well-being are beginning to fail, and fail hard. Meanwhile, the influence of high net worth negative influences like the Kochs, the Mercers, and pervasive creeps like Jeffrey Epstein are beginning to fade.

The top down trends (the influence of hateful money, the financial fortunes of some of the fastest growing startups) are combining with the bottom up trends (our own dissatisfaction with technology, a growing unease with giant tech companies) to create the conditions for more ethical startups to emerge and thrive. We're worried about the climate crisis; we're worried about our own health; we're worried about what the hell has happened to our politics; we're worried about our futures and the futures of our families and friends.

These are trends that companies like Apple have already identified and capitalized on, but we're still only at the beginning stages. The ventures that emerge will be more ethical, will protect our health, will give us agency over our data, and will once again empower us by counterbalancing corporate aggregation. This isn't a technical development - it's a social one. But I'm convinced these innovations will change the world.

Books

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell. A profoundly intelligent, intersectional analysis of addictive surveillance capitalism; ultimately a call for radical noticing and the intentional dismantling of harmful structures. Far meatier and more rewarding than the title might imply. It's becoming clear that the books which have really spoken to me this year are ones that discuss moving beyond the templates and enforced demographics of modern capitalism and finding happiness on our own terms. This book certainly joins them.

Air: Flying Machine, by G Willow Wilson and MK Perker. A riveting adventure story wrapped around a deepening exploration of how the symbols we use affect our culture and the way we experience reality. I couldn't wait to read volume 3.

Air: Pureland, by G Willow Wilson and MK Perker. Literally and figuratively beautiful, this volume disappeared into the symbology of our own past and the stories we tell about ourselves, and of religion itself. And was also ludicrously fun - exactly what I needed during a stressful time.

Once again, I hit a stressful month: my mother was admitted into hospital several times, and I also found myself looking for a new job. I find it hard to focus during these periods, so I didn't quite hit my reading goals - but I'm very glad for having at least read these.

Notable Articles

Meet ‘Bob Smith,’ The Fake Facebook Profile Memphis Police Allegedly Used To Spy On Black Activists. This is disappointing but not surprising: police spying on progressive activists is nothing new, and famously the Nixon administration's war on drugs was motivated by a fear of black and anti-war activists. This story is confirmation, alongside others like it, that this kind of targeting continues to this day.

Why Stripping U.S. Citizens of Their Passports Is a Precursor to Genocide. "Denying people their citizenship is a clear way to indicate that they should no longer expect to receive the rights of citizens. The right to a fair trial? They shouldn’t expect that. Not being investigated without just cause? Forget about it." This administration's cruelty continues at a rapid pace. I don't see this as "Trump Derangement Syndrome": it's real concern about policies with harmful effects that will be felt for generations.

Gigantic, mysterious radiation leak traced to facility in Russia. The timing was weird: it's almost like an HBO Chernobyl tie-in. But nuclear experiments are continuing, and the effects continue to be covered up. Here in the US, my father was forced to watch nuclear explosions while in the army; it wouldn't surprise me if we were still performing these kinds of experiments, too.

Three mass shootings this year began with a hateful screed on 8chan. Its founder calls it a terrorist refuge in plain sight. "Joan Donovan, the director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, said posting to 8chan before a mass shooting has become a “tactical” way for attackers to gain attention and amplify their message." And Jim Watkins, a pig farmer who currently owns the site, is unrepentant.

Staring at Giant Pieces of Sulphur. The oral history of Look Around You, one of the greatest comedies ever made. Thanks, ants. Thants.

Being basic as a virtue. "Being basic is part of the same family as being mediocre or degenerate, but I think the latter two still require some degree of self-awareness. Mediocrity is about making an active choice to say “screw it, good enough”: the decision to keep moving forward instead of trying to get that last 10%. Degeneracy carries a flavor of bird-flipping showmanship: you know what other people would think, and that’s exactly why it’s fun."

No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear. The late Toni Morrison on finding beauty and meaning in the face of chaos. "No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal." Amen.

Portland’s Antifascists Punch White Supremacists. Are They Also Helping Trump? I take issue with the headline, but this is an important portrait of a half dozen antifa activists, which dives into why they do what they do. It's worth saying that since this piece, Andy Ngo, the "journalist" who is referenced in it, has been revealed to be a collaborator with Patriot Prayer, a far right group.

Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy. A deep dive into my favorite Presidential candidate's pedagogy - she was an award-winning teacher - and how it ties into her life and her rhetoric on the road.

Schoolchildren in China work overnight to produce Amazon Alexa devices. Are we really building the future if we're letting children build our devices? The tech industry must contend with this kind of rampant exploitation - and put an end to it.

The Long and Surprising History of Roller Derby. A lot of my friends play roller derby; it's frenetic and fun to watch. But it has a long history even before its (awesome) feminist resurrection in Austin that I was completely unaware of.

When Open Source Software Comes With a Few Catches. "Smaller open source developers are fighting back against tech giants like Amazon using their code in commercial services." About time. While this goes against the principles of free software as we know them, I love the idea of building social contracts into open software licensing. It feels like an idea whose time has come.

How YouTube Radicalized Brazil. "Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine." The code we write - particularly for giant, global services like YouTube - can have profound implications for the entire world. It's not just about algorithms anymore. Maybe our teams should reflect this?

How a 'NULL' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell. Little Bobby Tables strikes again.

The end times are here, and I am at Target. "We’re just trying to get through the next day or week as we suffer through the early throes of our collective demise, hoping that we might be wrong about the whole thing." Nothing less than the American experience in 2019.

As summer camps turn on facial recognition, parents demand: More smiles, please. Call it surveillance parenting?

Venture capital funds led by people of color face more bias the better they perform, Stanford researchers find. "When a black-led venture capital firm has an impressive track record, it encounters more bias from professional investors, according to new research by Stanford scholars." The piece also notes that "fewer than 1.3 percent of the $69.1 trillion in global assets under the four major asset classes – mutual funds, hedge funds, real estate and private equity – are managed by women and people of color".

Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture. A hopeful story: Sweden's introduction of hen, a nongendered pronoun, has made a real impact on the country's culture. While it turns out that the singular they is widely assumed to be masculine in English, maybe we can do the same?

WeWork IPO Shows It’s the Most Magical Unicorn. WeWork's IPO filing reads like a work of satire. And it's complicated: "This is a company whose intricate relationships with its chief executive requires 10 pages of disclosures." Yikes.

Art Spiegelman: golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism. The Maus author's essay was removed from a Marvel Comics collection after its publisher, Ike Perlmutter, a friend of Trump, tried to remove a reference to the "Orange Skull": "when asked to kill a relatively anodyne reference to an Orange Skull I realised that perhaps it had been irresponsible to be playful about the dire existential threat we now live with, and I withdrew my introduction."

The Moochers of Middle America. "So if you really believe that Americans with higher incomes shouldn’t pay for benefits provided to those with lower incomes, you should be calling on “donor” states like New Jersey and New York to cut off places like Kentucky and let their economies collapse. And if that’s what you mean, you should let Mitch McConnell’s constituents know about it."

Beyond First Amendment Lochnerism: A Political Process Approach. "Today, however, the First Amendment’s role in the American political process has changed decisively. It can longer be described as a law that protects unpopular speakers or other politically weak actors in the Carolene Products sense. If the First Amendment could once be described as a remedy for defects in the political process, it has now as often become the cause of such defects. For today’s First Amendment is regularly deployed not to promote or facilitate political debate but to end it."

To Learn About the Far Right, Start With the ‘Manosphere’. "The idea that feminism is decadent, and is destroying Western civilization; the idea that women’s natural role is to have children, and to be subservient to men; the idea that strong men are needed to save the world through violence—all of these arguments are found across extremist websites, and in the words of shooters themselves. Anti-feminist rhetoric is a powerful gateway to violent white nationalism, and it is calculated to appeal to the demographic overwhelmingly responsible for mass shootings: young white men."

The New American Homeless. Housing insecurity is a crisis, and official statistics far underreport the extent. "Outrageous rents would be less alarming if wages were increasing at a comparable rate. But the opposite is true. Nationwide, the hourly earnings of high-wage workers rose 41 percent between 1979 and 2013; those of middle-wage workers grew only 6 percent. The pay for low-wage workers, meanwhile, decreased by 5 percent. Contrast these figures to the 138 percent annual wage growth among the top 1 percent of earners." And a disproportionate 40% of the resulting homeless are African Americans.

A new poll shows what really interests 'pro-lifers': controlling women. Are you shocked?

Jeffrey Epstein, My Very, Very Sick Pal. Probably the strangest interview you'll read this year. "I know it’s very interesting, but I’m just realizing something. I have just gotten myself into terrible trouble and everyone who knows is going to be mad at me—why the hell did I pick up the phone?"

Megan Greenwell, Like The Oakland A's Every Year, Makes An Early Exit. The editor of G/O Media's Deadspin sports blog abruptly left; this is a series of goodbyes from her current and former colleagues. Together, they paint a strong picture of a scrappy newsroom, and of the private equity firm that purchased it.

NASA Astronaut Anne McClain Accused by Spouse of Crime in Space. Potentially the first crime to have been committed in space! And weirdly, it's identity theft.

Let’s Meet Again in Five Years. "They thought college was too soon for lifelong love, so they scheduled their next date for a little later — 60 months." Beautiful, and more than a little bit Before Sunrise.

The solitary life and death of a homeless man and his dog near the 520 bridge. He lived with his dog in a tarped rowboat under a bridge. It took eight months before they found his body.

New Protest Tactics in Hong Kong. How protesters are using technology to evade the authorities and organize. Movements closer to home could learn a lot from them - and it's interesting to see them gathered in one place.

My Time at Google and After. "David was (and is) a powerful executive. His “personal life” (which apparently didn’t include his son) was off limits and since I was no longer his “personal life” it was time for me to shut up, fall in line and stop bothering him with the nuisances or demands of raising a child." David Drummond was Google's general counsel at the time, which explains a lot about its apparent attitudes towards the treatment of women.

The Misogyny of Climate Deniers. "In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”" As a man, I want to make clear that I want nothing to do with this form of masculinity, and that women like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the future.

'Where do I go?' EU citizens face legal limbo after decades in Britain. This would have been me, had I stayed. The idea that I can't easily ever move back still smarts.

The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet. To say that surveillance and Minority Report style machine learning predications are not the answer is an understatement. It's appalling enough coming from the Republicans; it's shocking to see it coming from the mouths of some Democrats.

A Week With No Tear Gas. "I can’t bear to stay and watch the fight. We came so close to a conflict-free weekend, but now it looks like it will end in violence, and be exploited by the authorities as proof that the protesters are out of control. People on Twitter have been counting down to midnight, incredulous at the idea of a weekend with no tear gas, the first since the protests started." A first-hand account of the protests in Hong Kong.

Previously

Here's what I read in July, June, May, April, March, February, and January.