Werd I/O

So, yes, hi, I have a Tesla. It’s a long range Model 3 which I bought in 2021.

After a career spent working on open source and mission-drive projects — right now I work for a non-profit newsroom; once upon a time I built a social networking platform for education — it might shock you to learn that I am not rich. I have never had a significant tech company equity package; I have never seen the benefit of a significant exit. I own my own home but needed to move far away from the Bay Area to do it. I’ve done okay and I’m grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had, but I am not very wealthy. It would be really meaningful for me to bolster my income by another $2K a month and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do that lately.

The Tesla has put me in a bit of a weird situation. Even before Elon Musk threw three Hitler salutes on-stage, I couldn’t really afford to own it: the monthly cost is really high for a car that I maybe drive two to three times a week. But selling it is also hard: it’s depreciated really fast, and I’ll barely be able to pay off the loan I have on it. (A lease would have been a better deal.) It actually won’t be that easy for me to get a replacement car, even with a trade-in deal. I’d prefer to keep an electric car — they’re both better environmentally and just as a car to run and own — but we’ll see if that’s possible.

But I will sell it. Hopefully this month. I don’t want to even tacitly be associated with promoting that man or bolstering his wealth. Until then, I’ve become one of those people who has disclaimered his car, so anyone who sees it is under no impression that I am in favor of anything that’s happening in this country right now.

One sticker I don’t have: the one that says I bought this before Elon went crazy. There’s no such thing. The warning signs were always there; my car situation is a prime example of how ignoring these kinds of ethical red flags lead to real losses in the long run. I brought this on myself.

I know I’m not alone. Not everyone who owns one of these things is a wealthy Musk supporter. That doesn’t mean we should be absolved — we should have seen what we were getting into, and owning a Tesla does mean continuing to pay Musk, who is clearly a fascist, money through connectivity plans and so on — but it’s worth acknowledging that, for many people, it’s not a no-brainer to take this kind of financial hit.

Anyway, that’s the deal. I guess I’m posting this out of a sense of transparency, and a little bit out of a sense of exasperation at my own past purchasing decisions and the overwhelmingly bad present situation. Many of you will be judging me for this, and I both accept and deserve that. But here I am.

It’s Oscars day! I haven’t seen very many of the nominees this year, but of the ones I have, I need to make this recommendation:

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, nominated for best documentary picture, is brilliant. It’s an under-told part of American history, still highly relevant and ongoing today, told through the lens of its surprising intersection with the jazz musicians of the time. One of those films that I think everyone should see in order to educate themselves. It doesn’t make for a cheerful evening, but it’s all wonderfully done.

It’s available to rent on streaming services right now, and is worth it. If you don’t want to pay to rent, it will hopefully be a part of someone’s streaming library later on.

Hint: if a party is heavily supported by people who throw Nazi salutes, it might not be up to much good.

Some voters for new right-wing parties are economically worried, but blame their issues on the influx of immigrants rather than the increasing divides between rich and poor that we're seeing globally. They're looking for right-wing answers to their economic worries - racism like anti-immigrant sentiment - rather than the equitable ones that would actually present lasting solutions.

I think that's partially because the left-wing parties haven't been good at prioritizing those economic issues. Some of the liberal (rather than truly left) parties have used their embrace of other social issues like affirming peoples' identities and supporting intersectional equity (which are good things that they should have been doing!) to mask their lack of action on real economic disparity (which they should also have been working on, but isn't always as palatable to wealthy donors). 

Both are important. We can support peoples' identities and correct historic inequities while also providing real safety nets and taxing billionaires. I think you actually can't effectively do one without the other.

Of course, in addition to this, some voters are just fucking racist. Or they're anti-Islamic, transphobic, homophobic, or see the world through some other noxious hate-based lens. And, of course, you have to be at least a little bit xenophobic to be entranced by a policy based on "these people are not like us".

That's left room for the kinds of bottom-feeders who would like to see more racial stratification and believe in homogenous societies. The people who find integrated, cosmopolitan societies scary. Imagine what an underwhelming, insecure person you'd have to be to be afraid of more diversity or correcting for serious historic inequities. Widening the gene pool of ideas, of lived experiences, and, well, genes, strengthens any society.

The fact is, there's a possible, better alternative, where an equitable distribution of wealth is ensured so that nobody falls through the cracks, but I don't know that it's been offered effectively. I hope we can correct for that. I find results like today's to be deeply depressing.

For the avoidance of doubt:

All empires are bad.

All empires have always been bad.

All empires always will be bad.

The concept of empire is bad.

The prerequisites for empire are bad.

And the people who like empires — any of them — are bad.

Do not have fondness for empires.

Do not have nostalgia for them.

Empires by definition colonize and rule space — physical, figurative, or both — that might otherwise be free.

Resist the urge to romanticize empire. It was never good, and it never will be.

I was privileged to be interviewed for this week’s People and Blogs:

Hi! I’m Ben Werdmuller. I was born in the Netherlands, grew up and spent my twenties in the UK, and spent twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I live in Greater Philadelphia in a creaky old house with my partner, our two year old son, and my father. At night the pipes clang and we sometimes wonder if they’re haunted.

I love the whole series, so it’s really exciting to be included. You can read my interview here.

Inspired by Gina Trapani, Buster Benson, and others, I started to build my own Life in Weeks page from scratch. It looks pretty cool, and it’s interesting to see my life milestones presented on this scale.

But I’m not going to share it with you.

As I was building it, it became clear how much personal information I was sharing — and not just my own, but that of my parents, my sister, my partner, my child, other members of my extended family. It’s a privacy violation at best and an identity theft goldmine at worst. My life is mine, their lives are theirs, and these things don’t need to be published in public on the web.

This is, perhaps, an area of growth for me: Ben in his twenties would absolutely have published it. But our lives are like a fingerprint; unique to us. Not everything needs to be made available for free to everyone.

The code is pretty simple and the payload is lightweight (unlike Gina and Buster, I haven’t relied on Bootstrap, for example), so I’m going to find another use for it. Maybe a Life in Weeks for characters from my novel? For the web itself? I’ll think about it.

It’s a small thing, but I broke my Apple Fitness longest streak this week. That means my consecutive number of days that I’ve hit my fitness goals on my Apple Watch has been longer than it’s ever been.

Here’s why that’s meaningful: my previous longest streak was broken when my mother died, almost four years ago, after a ten-year terminal decline. For part of that time, I thought that my sister and I might have the illness too, and I’ve watched four other members of my family follow the same journey. It’s been a hard decade or two, and I haven’t been together enough to manage any kind of streak since that awful week in the hospital. Until now.

I’m not saying that nature is healing — grief is with me every single day — but it feels like, in the midst of genuine crises at home, in my family, and in the world, at least something is going right.

From time to time, people ask me if they can use the content of my posts in another venue or another format. To make that possible, today I released all the text of all my posts under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You’ll see that declaration on the footer of every page of my site.

What does that mean?

• I’m releasing the text of each post, not the images. That’s because I license most of the images myself and don’t have the legal right to re-license them.
• You can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Want to take the text and put it in a course, or another website, or an app, or a comic book? Knock yourself out.
• You can adapt the material. If you want to translate it, illustrate it, build on it — go for it.
• You can’t use it for commercial purposes under this license. I’m very open to my content being used for commercial purposes, but we need to work out the terms together.
• You need to attribute the original work. That means identifying me as the original author, linking to the original post or page, and clearly indicating if changes were made.
• You’ve got to release your version under the same license. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
• You can’t add restrictions that stop people from doing any of the above things that are permitted by the license.

Take a look at the full license text for the complete picture. In particular, note the following:

No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.

Lastly: it’s optional, but if you do use the content, I’d love to hear about it. You can always email me at ben@werd.io.

For a while now, I’ve been syndicating my posts to MSN. You can see Werd I/O’s profile over there. In some ways, this is my normiest network: whereas my Mastodon community is more technical, my Bluesky community is more political and my newsletter subscribers tend to be a mix of people from the tech and media worlds alongside people I otherwise know, MSN encompasses Windows users who the algorithm thinks should be sent my stuff.

The comments have long fascinated me: they’re incredibly right-wing. I’d initially dismissed them as being part of some influence campaign on the network, but I now see them as an important barometer of a cross-section of what the American public thinks. It’s not good news.

For example, here’s a selection of comments on the MSN version of my link blog post for The 19th’s article about USAID’s lifesaving reproductive healthcare. There’s a lot of this kind of thing:

“Women need to be responsible for their own behaviors. If they become pregnant then they need to seek and pay for their care to ensure the baby is born healthy. Just another waste of taxpayer money.”

And:

“It takes two to tango, where are all these dead beat dads? Why is the American taxpayer responsible for the entire planet? Have any of you women ever heard the word no? Not in your language? Then cross your legs. MSN doesn't like the truth. Communist sensors.”

And, bafflingly:

“How do contraceptives prevent STDs and HIV? They don’t.”

And the absolutely nihilistic but also inherently counterproductive:

“worlds overpopulated as it is.”

As well as the top-rated comment at the time of writing:

“USAID has only used a small portion of the funds for humanitarian purposes. The vast majority has been used for crazy liberal agendas that have nothing to do with humanitarian purposes. Corrupt Democrats have been caught red handed that's why they are trying to cover up what the taxpayers' funds have really been used for.”

My fear is that this is America. These comments are ill-informed, occasionally wildly racist, and light years away from the debate I’d expect to have in other forums. It’s easy to dismiss most of these people as being idiots (something I can’t easily avoid). There are almost no tolerant or left-wing voices in the mix; instead, we’re left with the kind of rhetoric you might otherwise expect to see in communities that have dismissed Fox News as being too soft.

If I’m right, which I’d prefer not to be, it doesn’t say great things about our prospects over the next four years, or for the future of the country. If this is where normie discourse is at, it’s going to be rough.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with two more comments, from other posts:

“Thank you President Trump for putting America and Americans first. When the far left crooks scream loud we know we are on target. FEAR !”

And:

“what maga when both parties just care more about a foreign country while democrats just engage in h ate speech toward the majority and republicans dont care and wont call them ra cists as they are being called that for everything.”

Oof.

Imagine being so genuinely empty as a human being that you support a regime that conducts mass deportations and runs concentration camps because they support Bitcoin.

Imagine watching the rights, freedoms, and safety of trans people being torn down over the course of 72 hours and thinking, man, I'm really glad crypto is unencumbered now.

Just soulless, ghoulish people.

I’ve written a few times about how blogging has been the single most important accelerant in my career. I mentioned this when I asked more of you to blog, in remarks about other peoples’ posts on blogging, and so on. But I’ve never actually explained how.

The arc of this journey is simple: I was a complete outsider with no money or connections, living in Scotland. Blogging allowed me to found two startups, build at least one enduring open source community, find multiple jobs, and enjoy career opportunities that otherwise would never have come my way. There is precisely zero chance that I would be doing my current job without it — or any job I’ve had since 2005.

I’ve been blogging since 1998. Because of that, I was familiar with the mechanics of what we’d later call social media very early on. I built a viral social site that was hitting millions of visits a day in my bedroom in 2001.

When I started to work in e-learning at the University of Edinburgh in 2003, I was able to immediately see the deficiencies in how people were learning and sharing online, and suggest a better alternative based on what was already happening. I collaborated with a PhD student who was studying education, and we wrote a white paper about what that might be. And then I published it on my blog, and he published it on his.

It was picked up by other bloggers in educational technology, who liked the idea. We offered it to the university, who declined (“blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms,” was the official response), so I quit my job and started building it full-time, narrating the whole journey on — you’ve guessed it — my blog. We built the platform into one that was used by universities, Fortune 500 companies, social movements, and NGOs around the world — all through word of mouth, driven by blogging.

When I left, it was my blogging that led me to be invited to speak at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Hauser School of Governance. After that talk, I met up with two of the attendees, who were journalists who saw the need for entrepreneurship to revive a flagging industry. I continued to collaborate with them, and together we built Latakoo, an enterprise video platform which continues to be the way NBC News and others gather footage and send it back to their newsrooms, in the format that each newsroom needs. Of course, I narrated the whole journey through blogging.

When I left Latakoo, it was to start Known, which could be described as a blogging platform. Because I’d been blogging heavily about an ongoing tech ethics issue at the time, it just so happened that I was quoted in the New York Times on the day that I was interviewing to be funded by Matter Ventures. It certainly didn’t hurt that Corey Ford, the General Partner, saw my name that day.

I blogged that journey too. Ultimately, Known had a small acquisition by Medium, and I continued to blog about indie web and tech ethics topics externally — and about things that Medium could be doing internally. That helped me build enduring relationships with people on the strategy team there. (“I don’t think Ben’s really an engineer,” someone accurately commented. “He could be running Medium,” they less-accurately added.)

One of the factors to Corey offering me a job at Matter was the writing I’d done around the dangers of Facebook as a single point of failure. In the wake of the 2016 election, that was significantly more clear to more people. So I joined the team, and used blogging to get the word out about what we wanted to fund.

When Matter stopped investing, I moved to Unlock Protocol — a company whose founder, Julien Genestoux, I had met through blogging and the indie web. After that, I worked at ForUsAll, which knew me through my work at Matter. I can’t draw a direct line between blogging and my work as CTO at The 19th, but there’s zero chance I would have gotten that job without everything that came before it. And then my current work as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica came from that.

Without narrating my journey, my opinions, and things I’ve built, I might still be in my starter career. Which, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with at all! But my arc has definitely been blogging-informed.

If ever there was a litmus test about who to avoid, it’s the people who see the language of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 21st Century and think, “oh, that’s problematic”.

Here is the full text:

SECTION 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

SEC. 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

SEC. 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

It’s that simple. If you or your community read this simple text — and as simple as it is, section 1’s 24-word sentence is the substance of it — and think “oh, we don’t want this,” congratulations, you are officially the baddies.

What happens next is unclear. The ERA should have been formalized as the 28th Amendment when Virginia ratified it in 2020. It should have been ratified by all the necessary states when Congress approved it in 1972, which in itself was far too late, given that it was written over a hundred years ago. It’s not the only glaring indictment of American society’s disdain for basic civil rights, not by a long shot, but it certainly is a big one.

America: just formally ratify the thing or come out and admit that you’re hoping for Gilead. There’s nothing else to say. It’s way past time.

I realized some time ago that all the ways I want America to change just bring it closer to being Europe. Like, what if we had this can-do attitude and all the good parts without the guns and with universal healthcare, real education, unprocessed food without sugar in it, a real safety net, and integrated public transit instead of car culture.

Maybe the easier path is if we all, like, move to Amsterdam.

If I could change one thing it would actually be car culture. So much is related to that: what psychologically makes it more attractive to be in a little cocoon by yourself instead of in a tram or a bus with other people, even if it makes more traffic and more pollution? Fix that, fix so much else.

I think that’s maybe why I’m so drawn to cities like New York and San Francisco: there it’s much more common to rely on shared infrastructure, to be in the same spaces as other people. The New York subway is dirty and feels old, but it’s also a genuine marvel compared to public infrastructure in much of the country.

Those, to me, are the good places in America: every kind of person is living with every other kind of person, all relying on the same bedrock of infrastructure and norms, and generally, it works and results in a much richer culture and way of life. I wish it was all like that.

I make many multiples of what I used to make when I lived in Europe, but my quality of life is worse. So many of my political opinions about what needs to change in America really boil down to, “can I have the quality of life I had until my thirties back please?” And I’d like that for every American.

When did you last look up?

What’s the best thing you’ve seen lately?

Who did you want to show it to?

Why?

Hey, it’s 2025! Happy New Year. May it be better than we hope and fear.

Here are my technology predictions for the year.

Here are my resolutions / OKRs.

Ready or not, here we go!

As a child, I freaking adored Tintin, the Belgian comic strip about a boy detective and his little white dog, Snowy. There was something intoxicating about the mix: international adventures, a growing cast of recurring characters, conspiracies, humor, hi jinx. Even the ligne claire style of drawing — cartoonish figures on more realistic, epic backgrounds — lent themselves to a feeling of scale. It heavily informed my childhood imagination, far more than other comics might have. I was into the French Asterix comics as well as American Marvel and DC offerings, but Tintin was the real deal.

Of course, it was also hyper-colonialist, and the early entries in particular are quite racist, although as a seven and eight year old, I didn’t really pick up on those threads. Tintin in the Congo goes exactly as you might expect a Belgian strip about the Democratic Republic of the Congo written in the 1930s (when it was fully under extraordinarily harsh Belgian colonial control) to go. The Shooting Star’s villain was originally an evil Jewish industrialist, and the story (written in 1941-2) even carries water for the Axis powers and originally contained a parody of the idea that fascism could be a threat to Europe. That, too, went completely over my head.

I hadn’t realized until recently that Tintin originated in a hyper conservative, pro-fascist Belgian newspaper, and continued in another conservative newspaper that freely published antisemitic opinions under Nazi occupation. The first story, which I’ve never read and wasn’t made as widely available, was a clumsy propaganda piece against the Soviet Union, and it carried on from there.

This isn’t a situation where the author’s views can be held as separate to the work. It’s all in there. Even though Tintin enters the public domain tomorrow (alongside Popeye, among others), I don’t think the right thing to do is to salvage the source material.

Which leaves a missing space. I loved those adventures, and I’d love my son to have something similar to cling to. Superhero stories aren’t it: although there’s some supernatural activity in Tintin (and aliens in one later story!), the threats and ideas are very tethered to reality. It sits in the same zone as James Bond — another colonialist relic — but unlike Bond, Tintin is just a kid. He doesn’t have the weight of the British intelligence establishment behind him. He’s got a dog and an alcoholic sea captain. There’s something infectious about that comedic, adventurous, dysfunctional dynamic.

I’d love to see new stories, with new characters, that share Hergé’s aptitude for compelling globe-trotting adventure but leave aside the outdated ties to colonialism and fascism. There are stories to be told that lean into international imbalances in a positive way: discoveries about how greedy businesses have exploited the global south, or mysteries that turn modern piracy on is head to reveal that it’s not exactly what we’ve been told it is, or the businesses and people that are profiting from climate change. Tintin had stories about oil stoppages in the advent of a war and a technological race to the moon: these sorts of themes aren’t off topic for children and can be made both exciting and factual. The global backdrop would gain so much from those ligne claire drawings and a sense of humor.

It’s not something Marvel or DC could do, with their heightened, muscle-bound heroes and newfound need to be ultra-mainstream. It’s also not something that I’ve seen in other graphic novels for children. But there’s a market there, left by the Tintin hole, and I’d love for someone to fill it.

Okay, I know, but hear me out.

If you haven’t encountered it, Red Dwarf was an 80s / 90s science fiction comedy that has definitely aged interestingly, but still has a solid fanbase. Lister, a low-ranking engineer on the mining spaceship Red Dwarf is put into stasis as punishment for smuggling his pregnant cat aboard. In the meantime, a radiation leak kills everyone else on board, and the ship’s computer, Holly, keeps him in suspended animation until the radiation dies down. When Lister is eventually revived, he discovers that the computer is senile, the cat has led to a single, highly evolved but self-absorbed descendent, and everyone is dead. To his horror, his smarmy, overbearing, deeply insecure supervisor — who caused the leak to begin with — is resurrected as a hologram. Now lost in deep space, the rest of the series loosely revolves around finding their way back to Earth.

So, look. Some of the jokes are maybe a little out of date, and even the creators were a bit embarrassed by the first season. (It really comes into its own from Red Dwarf III onwards.) But the concept is really solid. It’s a different kind of story: if you squint a bit, it shares DNA with Alien, in the sense that it’s about the lowest-ranking member of a future crew (something that’s still really rare in commercial science fiction) whose life is subjected to the whims of corporate decision-making far above him. There are also parallels that indicate the need: at the time, Red Dwarf was an antidote to more earnest genre shows like Blake’s Seven and my beloved Doctor Who. A similar positioning has worked pretty well for Deadpool, which followed a long string of superhero movies. So, like, I guess what I’m saying is, an update could work.

Okay, so they’re actually still making the show, as well as a prequel. My controversial opinion is that the existing format needs to be radically updated, and just making more of the same show that they were making in the eighties isn’t quite right. Get some fresh creators in there, make the jokes more pointed and a bit less banter-down-the-pub, re-cast it while paying tribute to the existing characters, and I think there’s something really special there.

That’s all. Please carry on. More tech commentary etc to follow.

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!