Werd I/O

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.

A sound shook Frances fully awake. Her dreams faded quickly into the cold air, her sleeping memories of San Francisco collapsing into the smell of stone and moss and rot.

There was someone in the house.

And so begins The Source, at least as the draft stands today.

What follows is an adventure that touches on accelerationism, climate change, capital, and the guilt of culpability.

I’m getting there.

Last week, without warning, my back went “crunch”.

I’ve been dealing with what feels like a painful, bruised coccyx ever since. It should heal up within a few weeks, but until then, getting up from a sitting or lying position is really hard, walking has been awkward, and I haven’t been able to pick up anything particularly heavy (like, just for example, a toddler who happens to be in the 99th percentile for his height).

I’m used to my body more or less working properly — and now it just doesn’t. It’s been unsettling. In the scheme of things, it’s much less problematic than the injuries a lot of people have to deal with, but it’s also a wake-up call.

Here’s what I think I need to do:

• Commit to radically losing some weight. My weight when I arrived in California was 196 pounds. The last time I weighed in, it was something like 260.
• Gain some strength and flexibility. Once my coccyx is healed I intend to start taking home fitness more seriously, and also (finally) get into yoga.
• Actually use my fancy standing desk. I need to spend more of my time standing rather than sitting, and aim to stand for at least 60% of my day.
• When I am sitting, I need to take my posture seriously. I’ve been sitting on a Wit SitOnIt task chair (the same kind we used to have at Matter), but I need something with more lumbar and posture support. Not least because the back support strip went “ping” a little while ago and I’ve been sitting with almost nothing behind me.

So. Changes afoot:

I’m upgrading my chair to a Herman Miller Aeron, which is stereotypical for a reason: it’s far better for posture. I managed to find it at a surplus store for a very deep discount on its eye-watering usual price.

I’ll be standing for most of my day. If you’re in a meeting with me, you can expect me to be bouncing around.

I’ll be taking more care about what I eat, mostly by trying to go for less calorie-dense food. In a significant change to my California lifestyle, I already don’t eat out much. But there’s more I can do: in particular, the more fresh vegetables I can include, the better.

I’m going to try and resume my walking habit: a long walk at night, listening to podcasts or audiobooks.

And yoga. Which I am terrified of. My relationship with my body is fraught. I’ve never been proud of it and I don’t think I can make it do very much. So as challenging as the stretching itself might be, the psychological component is pretty much the hardest thing to get over.

Unfortunately, I’m not 25 anymore. In itself, that’s a painful sentence to have to type. But here I am, firmly entering middle age, and I want to be around for a long time to come.

These changes might be challenging — both in themselves and as habits to stick to — but it’s clearly past time that I do something. My painful back is a small signal; without intervention, I expect others to follow. It’s time to get real.

Purely hypothetically, I wonder what it would take to raise enough money to build another first-class fediverse platform for the mass market.

Not because there’s anything wrong with Mastodon (or Threads or Flipboard), but I think the fediverse would be healthier with another big platform in the mix.

I love this IBM slide circa 1979, which is more relevant today than ever:

Simon Willison asked about the provenance. Jonty Wareing weighed in:

It was found by someone going through their father's work documents, and subsequently destroyed in a flood.

I spent some time corresponding with the IBM archives but they can't locate it. Apparently it was common for branch offices to produce things that were not archived.

The original source confirmed this a few years ago.

Still, it’s a really pertinent message, which is proving to be more timeless than expected.

I grew up in Britain, but I was able to be there because of my European citizenship. When I moved to the US it was because my mother was terminally ill; I’d always assumed that I would go back. When the Brexit vote happened, I took it extremely personally: in lots of ways, the British public voted to throw people like me out.

In the interim, some people have assured me that, no, it’s not people like me. After all, I have a British accent, and if you didn’t actually know, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I was British. Of course, that’s a hugely xenophobic reflex: my British accent makes me okay, but someone else’s Polish accent means that they’re not. I stand with the people who more obviously come from somewhere else; I do, too. All of us are (or, I suppose, were) an active part of British society, integral parts of communities, and so on.

Brexit was offensive, stupid, counterproductive, and xenophobic. I’m not glad that Britain has been suffering the consequences of this own-goal, because so many of my friends still live there, and so many communities are suffering. Spitefully wishing ill on people who are hurting isn’t a good look. But I certainly have no love for the people who voted for this travesty.

It’s not fun to be barred from living in the place I called home. It happened at a time in my life when it was becoming apparent that there was a terminal, genetic disease that runs in my family; multiple family members had it, and I hadn’t yet had the genetic test that suggested my sister and I weren’t going to get it. It was the same year that Trump became President on a similarly anti-immigrant platform. Overall, it was A Bad Time.

Oddly, then, I’m not unhappy to see Nigel Farage run for Prime Minister. Obviously, he’s among the worst people alive, as if the worst impulses of British society had been congealed, Doctor Who style, into a comic book villain with an angry toad for a face. Two of his children are even dual European citizens, because the hypocrisy is part of the schtick for these people. But because he’s running, he’s going to split the Conservative vote, with the hard right voting for Farage and the people who claim they’re not hard right voting for whoever the Conservative leader of the week will be on — who picked this day?! — July 4th. (It’ll be Rishi Sunak or a slowly-decomposing head of iceberg lettuce. Let’s see.)

Keir Starmer is not a giant leap of an improvement: a John Major impersonator who would have comfortably been a Tory candidate in 1995. But at least he’s not one of the guys who brought about Brexit and all of the ludicrous policies that followed. It’s something. A jab back for all the people who have been hurt over the last 14 years since hog aficionado David Cameron was first elected with the help of a last-minute coalition assist from Nick Clegg, who, of course, now leads international face-saving for Meta.

A Conservative loss is the foothills of the foothills of the foothills of the work to be done to rebuild. But it would, at least, be a baby step forward. And even then, I’m ready to be disappointed, because, really, nothing in this arena has gone well since forever, and I, for one, have lost the ability to be really optimistic.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

One of my biggest regrets is how the Known hosted service declined. The paid subscriptions came to an end, and eventually the hosting whimpered out. Behind the scenes, the database cluster was in need of more maintenance than I was able to provide.

Known itself has required more maintenance than I’ve been able to provide for quite some time. I wish I could spend more bandwidth on it, but the state of my life right now is that it’s just not possible for me to dedicate the coding time for something that isn’t paying my bills and isn’t having the impact I wanted it to.

I wish we’d sent out a strong email at the end and allowed everyone to export their data automatically. I also wish Known had import/export that was reliable so that people could explore other platforms.

After attempting to claw the time to do it myself, I’d like to hire someone to build the latter, and then apply it to everyone who had a hosted account. The export function could be built into the Known UI or as a CLI tool. If this seems like something you might be able to do, let me know.

Overall, I have a ton of regrets about Known — something for a future post (or series of posts), maybe. This site is still powered by it, though, and I know other people still use it, too. So it’s not dead — just small.

I don’t think it’s possible to morally support the ongoing bombardment of Gaza, but that’s too weak a statement. What’s happening there seems to be — based on what I’ve read through the news, what I’ve seen in video, the stories that have been sent back to us — an atrocity. The latest story, from Rafah, is of an airstrike on a civilian evacuation zone where displaced families were sheltering in tents:

Images showed the area engulfed in flames as screaming Palestinians fled for safety, with some video shared on social media showing disturbing images, including severely burned corpses and a man holding what appeared to be the headless body of a small child.

There’s nothing flippant to say about this. This isn’t sports, where you root for a team. It’s not a theoretical debate: certainly not for the families who have no way to escape, kettled as they are into a small strip of land under constant military bombardment.

The bombardment on Gaza is disproportionate and indefensible. Thirteen thousand children alone have been killed. A quarter of surviving children have acute malnutrition. There’s nowhere for them to go, and nowhere for them to get the care they need. In the face of these conditions, there must be a ceasefire. Obviously there must be a ceasefire.

Making statements like this is fraught. It sometimes seems like we’re being asked to fall into weird ideological lines that have little to do with the humanity of the people involved. Following the events of October 7, I unfollowed multiple progressive Instagram accounts that not only described the attack and kidnappings as the necessary work of de-colonization, but applauded the action. It’s clear to me that Palestine has been annexed, its land illegally settled, and its people made to suffer at the hands of increasingly-conservative Israeli policy. Protest and resistance are inevitable and justifiable. Regardless, I can’t support the killing and kidnapping of civilians, let alone accept cheerleading for it. Not ever.

By the same token, I see some people online call for an end to the state of Israel. What would that entail, exactly? Assuming it was a desirable goal, how might one go about achieving that? Dismantling it would involve unthinkable bloodshed.

Some people talk about how Hamas is the local government, and how the people there voted for them, so they deserve what’s happening to them. That it’s okay to bomb hospitals because Hamas is hiding out in them — regardless of international law related to protecting the lives of human shields.

The history, today’s political issues, and the road to a solution are far more complicated than can be conveyed by memes and soundbites. I have no solutions to the problems in this region or how to get to a lasting peace.

But some things are not complicated at all.

Don’t kill. Don’t subjugate. Don’t dehumanize. Don’t reduce lives, in all their complexity and beauty, to points and sides.

The core of this issue right now is — or should be — concern for human life. Everyone, regardless of nationality or political affiliation, should be appalled when children burn to death or are decapitated (whether they’re in an evacuation zone or not). The ruining of cities should never yield applause.

The protests on university campuses are the latest in a long line of campus anti-war protests, and I’m strongly in favor of them. Except, because of course this is true, there are people there who conflate the protest over policy with protests of anyone who is Israeli, or even anyone who is a Jew. I’ve personally heard stories of at least one person being spat on, not because of any rhetoric they were espousing, but simply because of who they were.

This all has the potential to escalate. I worry that it will. This is all already so horrific.

These are human beings. The Palestinian people are human beings. The Israeli people are human beings. Arabs are human beings. Jews are human beings. They are not their leaders; they are not their circumstances. They all - like all people - deserve to live, and live well. The death of any human being is never something to celebrate or to praise as a strategy. It’s all just endless tragedy.

Stop the killing. Find another way.