Werd I/O

This is a pretty great article about the decentralized social web, which quotes Christine Lemmer-Webber, Blaine Cook, and me.

It’s in Polish, but if you don’t speak the language, the “translate” button on your browser works pretty well.

Here are the full remarks I sent Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, the author of the piece:

Social media is where people learn about the world: they discover the news, connect with each other, share the things they love and what's happening around them. We learn about art and love; about current events; and sometimes, about injustice and war — all at a global scale.

The owners of these spaces have the power to influence the global conversation to fit their business needs. Business model changes at every centralized social media company have made it harder to reach your community, but it goes beyond that. We recently saw the owner of X heavily weigh in on the US election. Previously, lapses at Facebook helped lead to genocide in Myanmar. These spaces are too important to be privately owned or to be subject to any single owner's needs or whims.

Decentralized social media divests ownership back to the people. Federated social networks are co-operatives of small communities, each with their own ownership and their own rules. Fully decentralized social networks allow users to make their own choices about how their content is moderated and presented to them. There is never a single owner who can unilaterally change the conversation; the platform is owned by everybody, just as the web itself is owned by everybody.

In answer to a question about my employer, ProPublica, its involvement in the Fediverse, and advice I might have for other publishers, I wrote:

ProPublica was already on the fediverse before I got there. That's down to Chris Morran, a member of the audience team. But, of course, I've been a strong advocate.

My main advice is: be everywhere your audience is. That does mean Mastodon and Bluesky - and we've had strong engagement on both. Use your own domain to validate your accounts and encourage your staff to join individually. By using cutting edge social media platforms and not being afraid to experiment early, ProPublica has so far bucked the downward trends that have been seen at other publications.

You can read the whole piece here.

We’ve got a new takeaway in the neighborhood, occupying a small space that was previously taken up by a pizza joint. Their opening was a bit of a saga — it seemed like they were waiting an age for permits to be approved — so it’s exciting to have them finally open.

I was also really intrigued: the owner is an award-winning chef who spends significant time supporting abused children. At the same time, their Instagram feed seemed to just be stock images of food, while there didn’t seem to be rhyme or reason to the enormous menu. Cheesesteaks sat alongside gumbo and salmon with mango salsa. I couldn’t begin to tell you what the through line was: everything seemed to have been chosen in the spirit of, “maybe they’ll buy this?”

I walked in on opening day to buy two burgers as a test order. It was chaos: the room was filled with black smoke, every surface in the kitchen was covered in ingredients that ran the gamut from spices to ready-made Belgian waffle mix, and laundry baskets full of fruit and vegetables sat on the floor. I counted seven people working in a space the size of a corner store.

Every meal seemed to be cooked one at a time. My burgers took 25 minutes to cook; they were largely ungarnished and incredibly expensive for what they were. One of them had a hair in it. The fries were pretty good but had been over-salted. The woman at the counter made sure to ask me to come back with feedback as they were just getting started.

My review so far might seem unkind, but I really want them to succeed. It would be lovely to have some decent food just down the street; while Philadelphia is rightly known for excellent restaurants, my part of the suburbs is not. So I was dismayed to read Instagram updates from the restaurant that apologized for long wait times, as well as a confusing update that I think was about not being open on Veteran’s Day and offsetting their menu options by a day as a result — though there’s no daily rotation to adjust, as far as I could tell.

Today’s update was that they’d hired more staff to make things go faster, and I’ve never seen a software analogy write itself so neatly and so clearly before. If you’ve ever been on a project that’s been falling behind, you’ll know that adding more people is a great way to fall further behind. Hiring more people when a team is struggling is often like trying to untangle a knot by adding more hands: without clear roles, it only gets messier.

I really want to tell them to focus on a small number of menu items, aimed at a specific community that they want to serve, and only grow once they’ve hit menu / eater fit. Clean out the kitchen, retain a smaller but well-trained staff, and design processes to get that food made repeatedly well in an acceptable time, and at a price that makes sense. Launching with a “this is for everyone!” mentality practically ensures that you’re releasing something for nobody at all.

It’s not my place, of course, although I probably will send them some gentle feedback about the hair in the burger at the very least. I genuinely hope they do succeed; I would like to eat there regularly. I’m cheering for them. But for now, from afar.

A question many of us are asking: how can we be as effective as possible over the next four years?

A few years ago, I made the decision to move out of tech into non-profit news, and I'm glad I'm here. It's a different environment and the learning curve has sometimes been steep, but I strongly believe in the power of mission-driven investigative journalism and journalism centered in diverse perspectives to strengthen democracy. And it sure feels like democracy could use some strengthening.

My career has been driven by building open source platforms that offer alternatives to centralized services. I believe news is in dire need of these alternatives. To reach audiences and make an impact, newsrooms are currently dependent on companies like X, Google, and Apple - and therefore subject to their changing business decisions. This particularly matters in a shifting business landscape and a new political order that may create a more adverse environment for journalism.

For technologists - engineers, product leads, designers - there is an opportunity to help build great platforms that serve both newsrooms and audiences, and therefore democracy.

For newsrooms, there is an opportunity to invest in new platforms that will give you more autonomy and help you build deeper relationships with your audience. (Hint: newsletters are great but don't go far enough - and what happens when everybody's inboxes are managed by AI? That future is coming.)

I've been trying to work on creating space to bring these groups together. More on that later. But I think this is the work: news needs to invest in platform, and platform builders need to work in news. I've often complained that journalism treats technology like something that just happens to it, rather than owning and building it; now, this lack of ownership and strategy is becoming an existential threat.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

I’d like to share a hypothesis about the Democrats. It’s about money. It might not be true — it truly is a hypothesis — but I’d like to air it out and see what you think.

We have a lot of people in America who are suffering greatly. Dick Tofel put it like this:

“For more than forty years, we have become an ever-more winner-take-all society, one in which the gap between the winners and losers has widened, particularly with respect to income, wealth, education and the advantages that accrue to all three. The Republican Party promoted this; the Democratic Party largely tolerated it.”

That electorate needs help, which means they need change, and will vote for someone who seems like they might bring about change.

The Republican base of high net worth donors (the people who, frankly, really make a difference to election campaign finances) is all-in on funding that change. The Republican version of change is aligned with their values: lower taxes, fewer regulations, fuck it, let’s send children to work.

The Democratic base of high net worth donors is not. The Democratic version of change is easily painted as “socialism”, even if it’s not really anything of the sort: stronger welfare, policies like anti-trust reform, a higher minimum wage, progressive taxation, a wealth tax for people with net worths over $100M, perhaps stronger healthcare infrastructure. There are very few very rich people who will fund this sort of change, even if it’s going to be the most effective way of helping that base electorate.

Republican change, which has manifested as essentially authoritarian fascism, is more palatable to the rich people who fund elections than Democratic change, which manifests as social programs that hurt their bottom line. As a result, Democrats drift to the right in an attempt to lure that base of donors, while Republicans stay to the right. That’s how you get to Harris campaigning with a Cheney.

The mistake is to optimize for big-tent centrism rather than helping the people who are telling you they need help. The former maybe where the money is, but it’s not where the votes are. The votes are in convincing people you’ll help them.

You need votes to win elections. But also, you need money to win elections in America.

So my core hypothesis is that the Democrats have been culturally outmaneuvered. They can’t maintain the donor base and the voter base.

If this is true, I see a few ways forward:

• Stop optimizing for money and run principled grassroots campaigns centered on helping working class people in meaningful ways, without letting go of policies around inclusion.
• Become the anti-authoritarian, anti-war party.
• Abandon the idea of “working across the aisle” in favor of the idea of working very directly with local communities and giving them a platform. Become an operating system for local organizing.
• Drop the celebrity endorsements in favor of prominent endorsements from local groups who are doing the work.
• Start organizing yesterday.

Of course, all of this is predicated on the Democrats wanting any of this. Do they care more about helping people in need than maintaining their power base in influential circles? That question matters.

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about my relatives who actively fought against nationalism as part of the resistance. What they and their colleagues did in the name of inclusion and opportunity.

That's the name of the game: a world where everyone has the same opportunity to live a good life, regardless of their race, religion, or background, with an equal, democratic say in how their country is run, and the freedom to live their life without threats of violence. If we’re not striving for that, what's the point of anything?

I’m aware that a lot of my linkblog posts have been about the state of America this week. That’s because — well, I’m sure you can figure out why. There is nothing bigger to talk about than this election. So much is at stake, and it really, truly matters.

Once Election Day is over, I’m sure I’ll be back to more or less my usual topics, barring, I don’t know, a coup attempt or an insurrection or a civil war.

I don’t know what it would look like to pretend I cared about the new Mac Mini (which is beautiful!) or the state of publicly-available developer documentation for major API services (which is atrocious!) more than the threat of fascism or the absolute abdication of responsibility in the face of this from much of the press.

I claim to write about the intersection of technology, society, and democracy, and I think it’s reasonable for “democracy” to claim the center of gravity for now. We can all go back to CSS classes and LLM vendor funding rounds a little later on.

We’ve been dealing with some intense family health events since Wednesday night, so I’m running on very little sleep and not updating much over here. I’ll be popping in from time to time, but probably not running on all cylinders for a little while.

There’s a lot to say — about WordPress, about the independent web, about media, about some of the conversations coming out of ONA — but they will need to wait. See you soon!

I have an electric car. All in, between car payments and insurance, but exclusive of the money it costs to actually charge it, I spend around $800-850 a month. That’s a ton of money!

For all that cash, I must do a lot of driving, right?

Absolutely not. I mostly work from home, take public transit into the office when I do go in, and I end up probably making eight significant journeys a month (where a “significant journey” is 25 minutes or more of total driving).

Which means each journey costs me around a hundred dollars.

It’s an insane use of funds. It makes zero sense. So I’m looking at selling my car and either switching to a lower cost model (I like driving an EV) or just going without for a while.

If I was commuting for hours a day, or going on frequent road trips, sure. But while the latter was a part of my lifestyle in California, it doesn’t seem to be a thing for me in Pennsylvania. So maybe it’s time to cut.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that I plan to vote for Kamala Harris. Just consider the alternative: who he is, what he stands for, what the world might look like if he gains another four-year term.

Last night’s debate performance may have sealed the deal for many voters. It’s hard to say exactly if this happened, but one sign is that stock in Trump Media plummeted after his debate performance, an indication that traders are spooked about his prospects.

It probably also won’t surprise long-term readers to know that Harris is too close to the American political center for me personally. As someone whose worldview is steeped in European norms, I find the American political center to be right-wing: conservative by anyone else’s standards. So I’d prefer her to be further to the left on a range of issues from fracking to immigration, and particularly on foreign policy, where she’s held what I consider to be an alarmingly militaristic stance (promising “the most lethal fighting force in the world”). I don’t entirely like that she’s a candidate Dick Cheney feels comfortable endorsing.

Still, we must take America as it is, not as we wish it to be. I want to live in an open, inclusive country where I don’t need to worry about my child succumbing to gun violence, where public transit is abundant, with functioning welfare that ensures nobody falls through the cracks, and where everyone has access to healthcare that is free at the point of use. One where its citizens care about the welfare of people from other countries as much as they care for their own neighbors. That America doesn’t exist; I might as well say that I’d like to ride Pegasus or be able to travel through time. All those things are important, but we can only get there incrementally. Harris is obviously the candidate that brings us forwards, not backwards.

Trump is the human embodiment of the dying gasps of the 20th century. He is a window through time to another era. Some people find that comforting, perhaps because they benefitted from the values of that time; others see it as a threat. Some people look back on the 1950s and think of white picket fences and charming Americana; others, myself included, think of segregation, police violence, McCarthyism, and deep-seated bigotry. It depends on your perspective — most specifically, whether you’re a white man or not.

This isn’t a partisan decision. That would involve differences in tax policy, fundamental details in how the country is run. This is a decision about culture, and what we want not just America but the world to be. Do we accept the criminal landlord who refused to rent to Black tenants, was found guilty of sexual assault, and looks up to Viktor Orbán because he is “feared”? Or do we want to be something else?

I know where I stand, and it’s worth making it clear. I’m ready for us to be past this moment in history. I’m done with listening to Trump’s endless lies and bigoted rhetoric. Obviously I’m voting for Harris.

Whoever you support, if you’re an American citizen, you should make a plan to vote in this election too. You can check your voter registration status here.

What is your ideal place to live?

I grew up in Oxford, England, which has radically colored my view of what a home can look like. It’s hardly a city at all — one girlfriend derisively called it “a village” — but sits close enough to London that you can get there in under an hour. It’s surrounded by green space.

The city itself is home one of the oldest universities in the world, around which other prominent universities, learning institutions, NGOs, and businesses have sprung up. The result is that the place is filled with bookstores, music, theater, art and culture, but even more importantly, there is a constant influx of people from all over the world: not as tourists, but as temporary residents. This diverse population has brought new ideas, cultures, cuisines, and ways of living. Being from somewhere else is completely normal.

You don’t need a car to get around. There’s adequate public transit (even if it’s getting more expensive), but it’s also incredibly walkable. Bicycle paths are everywhere, and arguably bicycles are the easiest, fastest way to get around.

Being a university town, ideas are important. Assuming they are delivered in good faith and are well-considered, diverse ideas are considered seriously. There is little dogma beyond the idea of the university itself. There are certainly no established lines that you need to arrange yourself behind.

Most of these things are true in London, too, of course, and I’ve more recently found it in cities like New York and San Francisco. New York in particular has become one of my favorite places in the world: a space where all kinds of people literally live on top of each other. It’s a vibrant space where everything feels possible, while also being one of the safest, most walkable cities in the world (with a surprising amount of green space). I don’t think I’d risk cycling around it, but people certainly do.

There are a few things that make these spaces great: green spaces, walkability, public transit. But I think the most important is their diversity, and therefore their openness to immigration and different ways of being.

The inverse describes places I don’t want to live in: car-driven spaces where people generally have the same shared heritage and the same ideas, with little public transit and low connections to the outside world.

So you’re pro-immigration?

I am, but I think of immigration as a means to an end. I’m not as much pro-immigration as I am anti-monoculture. The goal isn’t to have lots of immigrants in itself; the goal is to have a broad, inclusive society, which implies a vibrancy, and in turn requires different cultures, ideas, and ways of living to present themselves.

There’s plenty of research that shows how beneficial this can be: it pushes up wages and economic activity, and particularly for populations that are becoming older on average (that’s us), provides younger workers.

Selfishly, it’s also more comfortable for me. I don’t like monocultures in part because I am never part of one: as a third culture kid with parents who have different nationalities and grew up in a third place, I can’t be by definition. As well as white American and Northern European, my heritage is Jewish and Indonesian. Monocultures necessarily exclude me, and I don’t feel safe in them; they make me feel like an Other.

While middle class residents see a net gain, there is a growing body of evidence which may show that immigration can harm working class populations in a host location by displacing them from work and affecting their wages. That can’t be overlooked, and questions need to be asked about how they can see a net gain too. I think the solution relates to funneling more of the net gains from increased economic activity into better social programs, free education, and better social infrastructure overall.

I don’t think the goal can be to preserve monocultures. Communities do gain overall if there is immigration. Those communities are qualitatively better places to live as well as statistically more prosperous. And it’s simply not where the world is headed: global transit and communications are cheaper and more available than ever. Even if we all decided we hated immigration and wanted to be inward-facing societies forever, the cat is out of the bag. Instead, then, we need to make sure everyone sees the benefit from it.

So you’re a socialist?

It depends on your definition! I think there’s a lot to be gained from social infrastructure: public healthcare, education, and transit, social programs like welfare, and ways to life people up who fall through the cracks.

Knowing that low-income people may not always see the benefit from immigration, I think we need to provide stronger structures to lift everyone up, which include universal healthcare, accessible, high-quality education, and reliable, frequent public transit. We can fund those through stronger taxes for the wealthiest in our society (many of whom are also in favor of this), by collecting taxes from people and businesses who already owe but don’t pay, as well as efficiency gains in how we provide existing services. There’s been plenty of work to show that the numbers do add up and these are perfectly possible things to provide.

But if you’re asking me if I believe in fully centrally-planned economies? No. Everyone should be able to start a business or work for themselves, and I don’t think government is best placed to innovate.

What about crime?

Most violent crime is caused by poverty, and migrants are statistically much less likely to commit it. The stereotype of immigrant populations coming in and ruining the place is a racist myth, and increasing the base quality of life for everyone through better social infrastructure will reduce crime. Take San Francisco: although crime in the city is generally overstated by the right-wing press, a radically widened divide between rich and poor has resulted in more car break-ins, shoplifting, and similar offenses. Those are not things that would happen in a city where everyone was able to live comfortably.

The most egregious crimes are white collar, where financial losses are significant. Preventing these and effectively collecting taxes from people who should be contributing will help provide for the people who are truly feeling the squeeze.

Clearly, in any given society, there need to be sensible laws and enforcement of them. The biggest gains, though, are not created through draconian policing. They come from stronger social infrastructure that genuinely protects people. If people cannot afford to live, they will do what they need to in order to survive. Where this has to do with immigration — potentially at low income levels — more help must be provided.

What about refugees?

Europe in particular has received an influx of refugees because of ongoing wars. That can’t be an externality: if you fund a war, taking on refugees from that war is a reasonable thing to expect. That’s not a comment on whether those wars are right or wrong; it’s simply an inevitability.

Meanwhile, countries like Britain that spent centuries invading the rest of the world, often oppressing them violently, are now complaining about immigration and refugees. All I’ll say about that is that the world is interconnected: actions have consequences.

And that interconnectedness goes further. Our actions and inaction with respect to global trade and the effects of the climate crisis are also creating refugees. We’re all implicated, and of course we should have a duty to deal with the human consequences. Not only that, but I would argue we have a fundamental duty to help other human beings — while accepting that not everyone agrees. Like so much else in this conversation, it comes down to our values and priorities.

What if I like living in a monoculture?

You do you! Monocultures will always available. I’m just not interested in living in one, and the evidence shows that they will always be poorer than open, inclusive societies. I think people who vote for them thinking that it will lead to a better life for them are unfortunately mistaken.

The country where I grew up voted to legally prevent me from living there again in a referendum in 2016. It has proven to be an economic and cultural shot in the foot: Brexit was a disaster, and only 31% of Britons now say they were right to leave the EU.

Also, seeing seas of Trump supporters at conventions holding up signs saying “mass deportations now” is pretty chilling. Qualitatively, that mindset — only people like us are allowed! — is something I truly fear, not least because that always means that people like me are never allowed. That’s taken us to some dark places in the past, but it’s also simply not a recipe for a nice place to live.

So you’re playing the Nazi card?

A lot of people call people Nazis these days. In itself it’s become a cliché that can be a barrier to further discussion. I do tend to agree with Mike Godwin, the author of Godwin’s Law, who said that it does not apply to describing Trump. But I get that people are easily triggered by it.

I think there’s always, by definition, a kind of fascism inherent in wanting to live in a monoculture. Fascism deals with in-groups and out-groups; similarly, monocultures, by definition, need to maintain conformity. It’s not that people in those places are goose-stepping in militaristic parades (generally speaking), but that’s also not what Nazism is actually about. The death camps came later; it started with narrowly defining who belongs and who doesn’t belong. To put it another way, Nazism started by enforcing a monoculture: while not every monoculture leads to fascism, fascism always begins with enforcing conformity.

I’ve written a lot in the past about how I’m uncomfortable with the ideas of patriotism and nationalism. Both seem arbitrary: the idea of being proud of the place you happened to be born in is random. I think it’s better to be proud of ideas and of values. But ultimately patriotism is fairly benign: if you want to be proud of your town, state, or country somewhere that you happened to be born in or have adopted as home, whatever. It’s not my thing, but please enjoy.

Nationalism, on the other hand, describes identification with your country of origin to the exclusion or detriment of that of people from other nations. It inherently implies harm. The question of who does and doesn’t belong is actually quite complicated (I have a British accent; I have British cultural touchpoints; my hometown is Oxford; I do not hold citizenship; am I British?). In itself the question leads to a toxicity that can poison a community: in considering who belongs and who doesn’t, we needfully set ourselves up for having conversations about how to exclude people.

Similarly, the question about who is and isn’t a Nazi isn’t actually very useful, and hangs the discourse on a very superficial question. It’s also more complicated than it appears: Hitler’s policies regarding Jewish people was in part based on American Jim Crow laws. The Nazis weren’t some aberration in history: they were a part of a continuum, very much in line with what was happening elsewhere, and we’ve learned that similar ideas can crop up anywhere if the conditions are right.

So I’d rather just ask: what is the society we want to create? What are the values that are important to us? I can tell you that mine are about inclusion, a broad definition of belonging, and vibrant diversity, where social structures are intentionally created that allow everyone to live a good life, where ideas and expression are open, where there is no state violence, and where anyone can innovate or create a business if they have a good enough idea.

I don’t want to live in a monoculture, and will vote and make decisions on that basis. If you do, you should vote and make decisions on that basis. If the overwhelming will of the people is that monocultures are good, I will march, rally, protest, and vote in opposition to that idea. And should the monoculture decide that it needs to label the businesses created by people like me — or people like anyone — or to label the people themselves as Other, if it decides to forcibly deport them, if mobs or police go looking for them like they did for my ancestors, if it decides that it must put people into camps like the one my father spent the first few years of his life in, if it decides to burn down communities as was done to my great grandfather’s village, then I will fight, and fight hard, and I promise you there are many, many others who feel the same way. None of this is new.

In the end this comes down to who gets to be a part of the future, and fundamentally, I believe the future should be for everyone.

And, to bring this conversation back to its initial question, that’s my ideal place to live: somewhere that’s for everyone, culturally and ideologically.

I love hanging out in Reeder. I subscribe to thousands of feeds, and it handles them well for me. But it does make it hard for me to prune them once I’m subscribed.

I found myself looking at this screen this afternoon:

And I thought to myself: you know what? I don’t need to be subscribed to Axios. This isn’t the kind of article I’m looking to consume on a regular basis.

So, uh, how do I unsubscribe from it?

There’s nothing here that allows me to unsubscribe from the feed while I’m looking at this post. There’s also nothing that tells me which folder it’s in, so I can go looking for the feed and unsubscribe it there. I’m actually not really sure where I filed it. And I can’t search for feeds by name. Sure, I could have a better, more organized system, but really, I could use more help.

This contextual menu also doesn’t help me:

So until I go through my subscriptions folder by folder, I’m stuck reading pieces about the Harris campaign mocking Trump, which, to be honest, I really don’t care about.

Regardless, it’s my favorite feed reader. But I come up against this issue surprisingly regularly.

This proposed image for the fediverse is good; I like it a lot.

But I don't know that the combative language on this site is helpful. The Meta iconography isn't right, I agree, but there's something off about calling them “a large corporation that is joining in as late” (sic).

For one thing, Meta is early; for another, it seems to me that we want companies to participate? I don’t think seeking ideological purity is useful (and run the risks of the movement shooting itself in the foot).

Whatever you think about Meta’s goals for participating, I do also think Meta’s presence gives the network a sort of legitimacy that it was otherwise struggling to achieve. That’s a net benefit: we must grow the network.

I also agree with the point, made by Chris Messina, Manton Reece and others, that the right phrase is the social web, not the fediverse. The web is the network.

Webmentions have been broken on this blog for a little while. I’m on vacation this week, so I’m hoping to get them fixed up — as well as a few other fixes here and there.

Mostly, though, I have to admit that I’ll be taking the little one to the beach, cooking delicious food, and finding my first lobster roll of the season. I’m looking forward to it.

Every so often, a post goes around in tech circles about how news is bad and we shouldn’t pay attention to it. I think that’s ludicrous.

Today’s was a post from 2022 called The News is Information Junk Food. I think it’s a bad argument that could have poor consequences.

It was featured on Hacker News, so, gods help me, I commented there. Here’s what I said:

This is a pretty bad take.

For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom does improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information does allow them to get up to more behind our backs.

I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, much cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about.

Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues.

For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too.

Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed.

It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?

One user responded:

The key is to focus on local news: these are updates that a person can take action upon.

Seeing the latest tragedies on the other side of the world catches headlines, but rarely actionable by regular people.

To which I replied:

We all have foreign policies. For example, in the US, our government is heavily involved in Gaza and Ukraine. It's far away, but it's also highly relevant to how our representatives work on our behalf.

Should we give aid to other countries? How should we think about global society? Those things are all relevant, too.

The bottom line to my argument: Journalism is a key to understanding the world around us. We shouldn’t give ourselves excuses to look away.

This moment isn’t about partisanship, because the discussions we’re having aren’t about tax policy or the intricacies of how we interact overseas. In 2024, one candidate’s supporters are waving flags that read “mass deportations now”, while the candidate is telling them they’ll never need to vote in another election and calling for the termination of parts of the Constitution. The other candidate, while we might quibble about policy differences, is advocating for fairness and inclusivity, and, you know, continuing to have a democracy.

So I don’t have any qualms about throwing myself in for Harris and Walz. I would have voted for Biden and Harris, too, and probably also three ferrets in a trenchcoat, as long as we were sure the ferrets didn’t advocate for a white Christian nation. As it happens, I’m more aligned with Harris and Walz than I have been with any Presidential candidate maybe ever; certainly the last time I felt anything close to this excitement was when Obama was running in the wake of eight disastrous years under George W Bush. Even Obama was cautious on the campaign trail and knocked back support for marriage equality, for example.

I’m particularly excited to see us move beyond the level of discourse where we’re arguing about democracy vs not-democracy. Let’s get into the intricacies of how we can help people without homes get back on their feet, or to figure out how to help people buy their first houses; let’s talk about literacy levels and how to move ourselves away from fossil fuels without losing jobs and improving working conditions. A return to a marketplace of genuine ideas rather than ideas vs unbridled id would be an incredible step forward. I can’t wait to talk about tax policy again.

And yeah, I’m looking forward to not thinking about That Guy, the folks behind Project 2026, and their brand of nationalism for a good long time. We need to move forward. We’re not going back.

The future could be much, much brighter than it has been for almost a decade. Now we just have to win this thing.

So, the Blaugust festival of blogging is a thing. Who knew?

For anyone arriving here for the very first time Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last several years. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly.

Cool, cool. I already post very regularly, but I appreciate the spirit of this, and I’m delighted to take part.

I discovered this via Andy Piper’s post, and I like the way he’s taken a step back and (re-)introduced himself. So I’ll try and do the same.

You can learn more about me on my About page or on my narrative resumé, which collectively explain who I am and how I got here at length. Or at least, they explain the professional version of me. So perhaps this “about me” can be a little more personal.

About Me

I’m Ben Werdmuller. I’m in my mid-40s. My mother’s family are half Russian Jews whose village was burned down in pogroms conducted by the White Army, and half institutional east coast Americans who can be traced back to the Mayflower. My dad’s are Indonesian, Swiss, and Dutch: the Werdmuller von Elggs are a Swiss aristocratic family of textile merchants who were involved in the Reformation, among other things. My dad is one of the youngest survivors of Japanese concentration camps in Indonesia.

We moved around a bit when I was a kid, but the closest thing I have to a hometown is Oxford, England. These days I live in Greater Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after twelve years or so in the San Francisco Bay Area. I also lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, for close to a decade.

I see the world through a strongly internationalist lens, am fiercely pro-union and anti-war, love immigration, and believe in a strong Europe as long as it is a force for inclusive democracy and peace. I mostly align with progressive principles and emphatically reject the idea that the political center is the most reasonable — particularly in America, where the universal healthcare, gun control, and educational principles that are just accepted in most of the rest of the developed world are somehow considered to be incredibly left-wing.

I’ve lost five members of my family, including my mother, to a (so-far) incurable, genetic telomere dysfunction. Although I’m grateful to not have the genetic trait, I would gladly have exchanged it with them. It doesn’t and must not define any of their lives, but it hangs over my family. We’ve experienced a lot of loss in a short time and we miss them all terribly.

I’ve founded a handful of startups, have been the first employee at a few more, and generally find myself in CTO roles across smaller, growing organizations. A few years ago I took a sharp career turn and started leading technology in non-profit newsrooms, because I became more and more concerned about the state of the world and wanted to be on the side of strengthening democracy. These days I lead tech at ProPublica. I care a lot about supporting the fediverse and the indie web, which I see as incredibly liberating in a human way: they’re how the web should be.

I’m a lifelong Doctor Who fan. I remember watching the Daleks chase Peter Davison’s Doctor when I was very small, and I still look forward to every new story. I wrote this story about the 50th anniversary, eleven years ago now.

I care about using technology to make the world more informed and equal. If we’re not doing that, what’s the point?

About My Blog

Over time my blog has transitioned from just being my indie space to mostly talking about the intersection of tech and media. It’s led to working interesting jobs and meeting interesting people. I don’t have a ton of time to build new software or write longer work, but I’ve made reflecting here an integral part of my life. Lately I’ve been thinking about making it more personal again.

I’ve been blogging since 1998, which feels like a very long time ago, but this particular space has been going since 2013. Prior to that, I blogged at benwerd.com, which I keep online as an archive. My sites before that have been lost to time but are probably still available on the Internet Archive.

This site runs on Known. I write posts using iA Writer, and power the email version using Buttondown.

Every so often I ask readers here what they’d like me to write and think about. So I’ll ask you, too.

If you’re new here: glad to meet you! If you’re a long-time reader: thanks for sticking around.

Somehow, I need to deal with my sadness.

Do we all?

It’s like it sits just under the surface, ready to spring up. Is every adult like this? I think it must be more common than anyone talks about. It’s not even that the world is getting harder, between climate change and nationalism and war; it’s the narrowing vice of what it takes to just be alive. There’s no time, there’s no money, we’re all expected to be a part of a template that someone else has established for their own benefit. It’s maybe easier if you’re rich, because more money roughly translates to more time and more freedom, at least in America, but even the rich get trapped into their own cycles of spending and acquiescence in order to maintain their lifestyles. Even rich kids compare their lives to people who have it better. They’ve got to keep earning, somehow.

I had a conversation with a good friend recently. I told her that I felt like I was living in a branch in the timestream, and I was waiting for the world to snap back to the main timeline.

“Ben,” she patiently told me, “this is the main timeline.”

I mean, fuck.

I’m older than I think I am. That’s a common problem too, I think: finding yourself stuck in that late twenties / early thirties mindset where you’re still exploring and nothing is really set in stone yet. I’m forty-five. My next major milestone birthday is fifty. I’m fifteen years away from being sixty years old. Is it always going to feel like this? When, exactly, will I have my shit together?

I’m still dealing with the loss of my mother and everything that led up to it. It’s been thirteen years since I moved to America to be closer to her, because she needed supplementary oxygen and it wasn’t clear how long she would live for. For so much of that time, I was worried about her. The two fridge-sized oxygen concentrators running in parallel so she would have enough to breathe, the clear tubes snaking around the house as she moved; the day she had her double lung transplant, when the ICU nurses eventually had to kick me out of her room; her first steps, set perfectly to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time show; the joy of being free; the slow sadness of the drugs taking it all away from her. The nightmare trauma of palliative care and my guilt for not having done more. Wishing I’d said more to her in those final hours. Wishing I’d talked more with her overall. Feeling, despite everything I know, that I must have disappointed her, she must be mad at me, because she’s never shown up in a dream for me since.

My life hasn’t been real. It’s all a hyper-surreal collection of scenes that I’ve been disassociated from to varying degrees. After her loss, I fell into a trough of feeling like nothing at all mattered, like I was disconnected from the cause and effect of reality. It was all a dream.

It was not a dream. This is the main timeline.

One of the things about being a third culture kid — or maybe this isn’t about being a third culture kid at all, maybe it’s just about me, or maybe everyone feels this — is that however you may superficially appear to be a part of an archetype, you’re not a part of it. For all those years with a British accent, going to an English school, I was missing the cultural touchpoints and feeling of belonging. Some people are anchored in place, nationhood, nationality, their hometowns. The only feeling of belonging that really made sense to me was family: the only people who had that same background, that mix of cultural touchpoints and recognition. Losing family is about the profound hole that’s left when someone you love is suddenly gone, a real hurt, but it’s also about losing a tether: losing belonging itself.

I have always felt like I don’t really matter to anyone, except to my family. I could disappear tomorrow and, shrug. When I was younger, I convinced myself that there was some kind of magic incantation that other people knew and I didn’t; if I could just learn the password, I’d be a part of what everyone else was a part of. Until then, I wasn’t good enough. I needed to prove myself.

When I didn’t date in high school, it was because I wasn’t good enough. (All those beautiful people who did — I admired them so much. To my teenage eyes, to hook up with someone meant that they acceptedyou. What an unattainable thing for someone who didn’t feel like he belonged.) (And: Christ, why was my body so big. I hated my physicality. I wanted so badly for someone to tell me I was okay. This is still true.) Every job I didn’t get, I wasn’t good enough. When my startups didn’t hit the highs I was hoping for, I wasn’t good enough. Every mistake, I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t measure up.

I don’t measure up. I’m not good enough. Even in my chosen profession, I’ve never been in the cool developer circle, I’ve never quite made it into the in crowd. I am still scared of my body, of catching myself in the mirror. I’m still looking for the password.

This backchannel in my head is exhausting. It’s another reason to think: eh, I don’t matter, nothing I do is really that important.

The thing about being convinced that you’re in some kind of dream-world fork of reality is that you don’t face these things. The temptation is to slide and slide — nothing really matters, remember? — and pretend that one day you’ll go back to how it was before any of it started. But you have to; there is no going back; if this is a fork, it’s been worked on so long that there’s no way you could possibly rebase to the main branch. This is life.

Which brings me to: I have a son.

He’s beautiful and smart; his smile cuts through everything else. He sings the alphabet song in the back seat of the car and randomly walks up to me and says “hug” before wrapping me in an embrace. I wish my mother could have met him, is the toxic thought, but he is infused with everything that was good about her. To him, I want to be the belonging she represented to me. The belonging that my dad still represents for me. (Largely unacknowledged: I am terrified of losing him, too.)

That means I have to deal with this sadness, this untethered unreality. This has to be the main branch, because no other branch has him in it. What I do matters to him, a lot, and it will for the rest of his life.

Therapy? Yes, of course. Parts Work and reflection and perspective. I have a trauma therapist and Erin and I have a couples therapist and these things work.

But they don’t cut to the sadness. The sadness is there, always. And I have to deal with it, don’t I, because eventually it will infuse itself into my son. I don’t want him to carry it. I want him to be free of its tendrils. I want him to not feel how I feel.

I’ve been focused on the loss of belonging, and the idea of returning to a less complicated timeline. I think, though, the way to deal with the sadness is simpler, although also harder.

Ultimately, finally, I’ve got to make peace with myself.

That’s the job.

I’ll be honest: I don’t have the first clue how to do it.

And I don’t know how universal this is. Is this something that’s unique to me? Something that a lot of people quietly deal with? Is this sadness sitting just underneath everybody’s skin, or is it just an infection under mine? If it is lurking everywhere, shallowly digging its way into everyone, what can we do about it? How can we tell each other that we belong, that we’re okay, that it’s alright?

And if it’s not: please, finally, what’s the password? Not for my sake. For his.

Over time — and really, over the last few years — this personal space really has evolved to become more about tech and society and less about me. I’m going to add more “me” back. This is my space.

I didn’t post about it — what is there to say that hasn’t been said elsewhere? — but former President Trump was almost shot last week. The would-be assassin’s motive is muddy (he was a Republican), but the bullet or a sliver of glass narrowly missed him, taking a nip out of his ear. He’s been using it as political ammunition ever since, and the entire RNC, which started the following day, was in essence a stage show about toxic masculinity, featuring guests like Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan (who tore off his shirt to reveal another shirt with the Trump / Vance logo on it), and the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. At one point, during a Michigan rally following the event, Trump pulled a guy out of the crowd to remark how well-defined his arms were. His campaign, his policies, his demeanor are Idiocracy come to life.

As for his Vice Presidential candidate, I’d love to see a lot more people talking about JD Vance’s support for Curtis Yarvin, who believes in the reinstatement of slavery, in replacing the democratically elected government with a CEO king, and that Hitler was acting in self defense.

I have many differences with Joe Biden: most notably, his failure to take a strong stand against the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, and his war-faring foreign policy history throughout his career. But he’s not Donald Trump and he’s not JD Vance. Domestically, the Biden Presidency undoubtedly had some strong progressive successes over the last four years, in ways that genuinely helped vulnerable Americans. I voted for him in 2020. And certainly, were he the Democratic nominee, I would have voted for him again.

It seems almost certain that the Democratic nominee will be Kamala Harris. If that turns out to be the case, I’ll absolutely vote for her. With enthusiasm.

What I hope is that she can paint a picture of the world she wants to create. Biden never quite achieved that for me: he even memorably said to donors, that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he was elected. America needs change; it needs equity; it needs a renewed compassion, stronger safety nets, a leg up for people who need it, and a mentality that nobody should fall through the cracks. A focus on strong communities and bonds based on empathy rather than breaks for the rich and military might. A focus on a democratic, inclusive world and not just an American one. Beyond just not being Trump and not being Vance, those are my hopes for a Harris Presidency.

If you’re waiting for permission to build something, or if you want to see how well something has worked for your peers or competitors before you implement it yourself, you will never, ever innovate.

That’s the trap that news media seems to be in: nobody wants to be the first to build something new. Perhaps it’s that times are so dire that experimentation feels like too much of a risk; perhaps it’s just an extension of top-down editorial culture. But there’s nothing out-there in media technology right now. I’m aware of some stuff coming down the pipe that I’m really excited about, but the most innovative thing that’s actually been shipped is getting people to subscribe by addicting them to puzzle games. Forgive me for thinking that’s not particularly exciting.

How can the news industry break out of its shell? How can it act like technology is something that it can shape, rather than something that just happens to it? How can it put value not just in product management but actual nuts-and-bolts technical innovation?

This feels existentially important.

Thinking about it. Working on it. I know I’m not alone.

I’m, uh, very bad at task management. I wouldn’t want to pathologize, but I’ve never been a particularly organized person. I’ve always aspired to be more organized, but I’ve never found a tool or a methodology that really works for me. They were either too rigid and opinionated or brought too much overhead: I had to remember to use them, and that was enough of a blocker to not.

Over the last two months, everything has — weirdly — changed.

Someone mentioned Todoist over on Threads, and although I had a vague memory of trying it years ago and it not working for me, I decided to install it again. Maybe it was just the right time for me now, or maybe the design has evolved, but it clicked pretty much immediately.

There are two things that make it great:

1. It’s everywhere I work
2. It gets the hell out of my way

Whenever I need to remember to do something, I press a key combo — I’ve configured shift-command-T — and a modal lets me quickly tap it in using relatively natural language. That’s a similar workflow to what I’ve been doing with Alfred for years and years, so adding this new combo isn’t a giant feat of muscle memory.

Then, whenever I want to check what’s on my plate, I can bring up the app (desktop via ctrl-command-T, or phone), or click the toolbar icon in my browser to bring up the browser extension version. Because I spend most of my life in my browser, that’s particularly handy. It’s just always there.

I’ve found myself adding new tasks via modal while I’ve been in meetings, so I don’t forget to follow up. Or I’ll be in a Google Doc and add a task the same way. (There’s a way to automatically sync Google Tasks with Todoist, but I don’t use that — I’d rather have direct control over my task inbox.)

It’s made me more productive, more organized, and as a result, much less anxious. And I feel really good about it.

This post isn’t an ad, by the way. It’s just so rare that I really love a piece of software, so I thought I’d let you know.

The only goal that really matters is building a stable, informed, democratic, inclusive, equitable, peaceful society where everyone has the opportunity to live a good life. One where we care for our environment, where we champion democracy, science, education, and art, where equality for all is seen as a virtue, where truth is spoken to power, and where nobody can fall through the cracks.

Let's get there together.

I’ve spent the week in Florence, Oregon, a lovely little town on the coast. It’s a bit windy and a little cold, but as I’m fond of saying, I lived in Scotland for a decade. I can take it.

Frank Herbert came to the town in 1957 to write about the dunes overtaking it. The piece was never published, but it gave him an idea for a novel.

In 1970, a whale washed ashore here, and the Oregon State Highway Division decided to use dynamite to dislodge it. The ensuing events were not quite as planned. If you’ve never seen it, the video is legendary.

Did you know that Dune and the exploding whale beach were the same place? Well, now you do.

I want to apologize for yesterday’s rant about British politics. That kind of rhetoric isn’t big or clever, and it runs against the tone I usually try for*. Over time, this space has shifted from more personal thoughts towards more directed opinions at the intersection of tech and society, so newer readers may have been a bit confused.

I am angry, and I did take Brexit exceptionally personally. But it might have been more productive to discuss the details of why. For that, I encourage you to check out Richard Murphy’s Funding the Future, a blog about developing a fairer and sustainable economy, which has a UK focus.

* Aside from my comments about David Cameron. The guy deserves it. It's hard to aporcine blame.

On July 4th I’ll be on the beautiful Oregon coast, and I plan to have a bottle of champagne handy. Not so much because of the American Independence Day — although there’s nothing wrong with celebrating that, and I’m sure I will — but because of the British election happening on the same day.

It’s been a long fourteen years of the worst government imaginable: a Conservative Party that brought about the formidable economic and social own-goal of Brexit, an intellectual blunderbuss to the foot followed by several subsequent very practical blunderbusses to the crotch, followed by a succession of the most ineffectual, rotten-souled Prime Ministers in British history, one of whom famously had less staying power than a literal salad. It was brought into being by a coalition aided by Nick Clegg (who has since made a career of putting a shiny face on terrible things), and then pitifully trumped along in a meandering path fueled by middling opposition, middle-England small-island nationalism, and the distant, smarmy memory of Tony Blair and the Iraq War. (Here I mean lowercase T trump, which means fart, rather than uppercase T Trump, which means Trump.)

I’m not particularly excited about Keir Starmer’s Labour. It seems to be a sort of 21st century riff on John Major’s Conservative Party of the mid-nineties, presumably in an effort to reach old-school Conservative voters who are sick of the Asda own-brand lunacy of the modern incarnation of their party, knowing that actual left-wing voters have nowhere else to turn. So this isn’t me hoping for major change from him; I expect very little to actually happen. But I am absolutely psyched for the Tories to have their well-heeled posteriors handed to them and their nannies with a fork and knife, finally. It’s been a long time coming.

If it sounds like it’s personal: yes, it’s personal. I’m a European citizen who grew up in the UK and left for the US to look after a parent, assuming I’d just go back afterwards. It didn’t even occur to me that David Cameron would hold a ham-fisted referendum on European membership, and it didn’t seem to occur to him that he’d lose it and the country would vote to leave. (Ham-fisted, of course, is the way he likes it.) I took it very personally; I still take it very personally; if this post feels like I’m being unusually effluviant, please know that I am holding myself back.

I’m under no illusions of any major change, even outside of Keir Starmer’s Primark blandness. All these runts will get cushy jobs as chairmen of boards and minty after-dinner speakers. Britain is effed to infinity, and there’s only so much play you can even have within that framework, particularly considering that nobody seems to want to shift the Overton window even slightly leftwards. Heaven forbid you protect the poor and vulnerable and strive to build an inclusive society within a lasting peace. Still, the catharsis of seeing those cordyceps zombie-suits roundly voted away from the nominal seat of power, even if their ilk will continue to be the effective ruling class for evermore, will give me some superficial glee. So, champagne.

Oh, and I’m excited to see Nigel Farage get his, too.

Now, back to technology and stuff.