Werd I/O

What is a man?

The only answer I really care about is “whatever you want it to be”. Like all men, I’ve spent my life in a context of weirdly reductive, gender essentialist expectations - a man is physically strong, competitive, aggressive, stoic - that I couldn’t live up to because, generally speaking, that’s not what I am. Am I less of a man because I’m not aggressive, and because I prefer collaboration to competition? I don’t think so, but there are certainly plenty of people who do.

The reason this matters for me now is not my own experience. I’ve found my way to a kind of self-acceptance, although my teenage years and most of my twenties were pretty rough: a mix of hating my body and receiving hate for not being what people expected me to be. I definitely have some pretty strong character flaws (non-confrontation and people-pleasing among them), which I’m trying to work on. But I feel some degree of pride about who I am, what I’ve managed to do, and the effect I have on the communities I’m a part of. Honestly? I’m glad I don’t adhere to the gender stereotype, even if it’s also true that I couldn’t if I wanted to.

But now I’m going to have a son (or at least, a baby who will be assigned male at birth), who will be subject to all of the same pressures and expectations, even in his first few years. There will be people who will be upset if he plays with dolls; there will be people who want to direct his interests to sports and trucks and whatever-else boys are supposed to like. There’s a fine line to walk here, because if he comes to those interests naturally, there’s nothing wrong with them! And those interests shouldn’t be gendered in the first place! I don’t want to dissuade any of his interests. But I worry about him getting there through external pressure, both explicitly and implicitly. The pressure to conform to someone else’s standard can only lead to anxiety and unhappiness; not to mention the impact it has on perpetuating gender inequality, and how he shows up for other people later in life.

To be clear, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not an expert in gender, or parenting, or really anything else. But I want to show up well as a parent, and I want him to show up well in the world (which are two expressions of the same thing). I just want him to be whoever he is, without regard for who other people expect him to be. That goes for every aspect of his (or her! or their!) identity. And I want the experience of that self-expression to be better than mine was, and better than so many people’s are, without fear or friction or conflict.

I guess what I’m really saying is, I don’t care what a man is, or what a boy is. I care who my child is. And that’s all that matters.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

This morning, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it had invested $350M into Adam “WeWork” Neumann’s new startup, Flow. Whereas WeWork revolutionized the commercial real estate business and made ad-hoc office space easier for startups, Flow attempts to do the same for residential real estate.

A lot of ink has been spilled on whether it’s okay for A16Z to have invested this money given Neumann’s well-documented, disastrous track record with WeWork, in an environment where lots of other people find it hard to raise even a tiny fraction of this amount. I agree with these comments in the sense that it’s obviously unfair: a sign of an unequal system. It just is.

But for a moment, look at it from a mercenary venture capitalist’s perspective. WeWork is everywhere, which happened under Neumann’s watch - and although Neumann is not the one doing it, it’s finally approaching profitability.

And then there’s housing, which is in need of major reform. I’m not going to shed any tears at the loss of today’s batch of rental agencies and real estate management firms, which have helped hike rents up to astronomical levels, and have often lobbied for preferential legislation that hurts ordinary renters. At the same time, investment properties leave many homes completely vacant in the middle of a housing crisis that is leaving millions experiencing housing insecurity.

The trouble is, Flow is highly unlikely to help with any of that. Marc Andreessen’s announcement hints at as much:

Many people are voting with their feet and moving away from traditional economic hub cities to different cities, towns, or rural areas, with no diminishment of economic opportunity. […] The residential real estate world needs to address these changing dynamics. And yet virtually no aspect of the modern housing market is ready for these changes.

Based on these words, Flow is gentrification as a service: a way for the technorati to rent cushy spaces in lower-cost parts of the country and build community with each other without having to engage with the people who are already there. It’s not a stretch to see what the racial and socioeconomic dynamics might be here, and the effect it might have on local economies. Low-cost housing for people who need it this is not.

“Our nation has a housing crisis,” Andreessen says. But he also said this, as reported by Jerusalem Demsas over in the Atlantic:

I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.

He doesn’t care about the housing crisis. What he does care about is making money, and in Neumann, he likely sees someone who already knows the real estate market well and has the ability to grow a business in the space very quickly. I’m sure we’ll see Flow communities all over the country within the next few years.

Where will he start? We can look at public records. The New York Times points out that he’s now going to donate substantial real estate holdings to Flow. Back in January, the Wall Street Journal reported that he’d bought over a billion dollars of apartments in the South:

Entities tied to Mr. Neumann have been quietly acquiring majority stakes in more than 4,000 apartments valued at more than $1 billion in Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and other U.S. cities.

Quoted in the same article, his family office made this statement:

“Since the spring of 2020, we have been excited about multifamily apartment living in vibrant cities where a new generation of young people increasingly are choosing to live, the kind of cities that are redefining the future of living. We’re excited to play a role in that future.”

None of this dissuades me from my original suspicion: this is a place to live for the people who WeWork was originally built for. It’s for young, affluent knowledge workers who want to live somewhere cheaper but don’t care to actually know their communities. It’ll transform residential real estate in the sense that it’ll out-compete all those cookie cutter apartment buildings set up for that same market.

Andreessen is likely to make a fortune.

And what about the actual housing crisis? The one that’s making people housing-insecure?

At best it does nothing for them. At worst, it helps hike up rents in parts of the country that remain affordable. Those people, the ordinary people who make up most of the country, who are struggling to keep a roof over the heads, don’t even make it into the pitch deck.

PHOTOGRAPH BY STUART ISETT/Fortune Brainstorm TECH

I ordered new glasses recently. At some point over the last few months, I accidentally slept on my main pair and bent them out of shape; although I tried my best to put them back, they’ve been a little bit crooked ever since.

I’ve been a die-hard Zenni Optical customer for years, because their frames are affordable, relatively well-made, and can be engraved with my website address. (Yes, I’ve been wearing “werd.io” on my face for the best part of a decade.) But this adherence means I’ve been wearing the same black frames forever, and hey, why not change it up?

I wish Genusee made prescription glasses: they’re made from water bottles in Flint, Michigan, and can be recycled back into the same material stream. I like everything about their mission - but unfortunately, I need prescription glasses to see.

Sunglasses by Pala Eyewear fund eye care across Africa, but is based in the UK, so I’d need to order pairs from overseas.

Solo makes its sunglasses from repurposed wood, bamboo, cellulose acetate and recycled plastic. Great, but while they mention that their frames are prescription-ready, they don’t actually seem to offer prescriptions.

Reader, I gave up and followed the stereotypical Silicon Valley path into Warby Parker. They felt well-made, which turns out to be all I can ask for. But I’m still looking for the right place to get prescription sunglasses.

Perhaps the most sustainable route would be to get laser eye surgery and dispense with the need for glasses at all. I’ve thought about it, but to be honest, despite my understanding of the low risk involved, the idea of lasers cutting away at my eyeballs doesn’t have me running towards a surgeon with money in hand.

If you wear prescription glasses and care about the ethics of the products you buy, have you found an adequate solution? I’d love to learn from you.

Photo by Bud Helisson on Unsplash