Werd I/O

[Carl Sullivan at Flipboard]

"Flipboard has worked with local papers and websites since its inception. Now, as part of the gradual federation of our platform, we’re bringing some of those publications to the fediverse."

Flipboard turns the fediverse on for a whopping 64 US-based local and regional publications. This is big news - if you'll pardon the pun - and an enormous step forward for bringing journalism onto the fediverse. I love how easy Flipboard has made it.

I also really like this approach:

"To learn more about what fedi folks actually want when it comes to local outlets, we simply asked them. They told us the specific publications they’d like to see, and voted in a poll on the region they were most interested in. (The Midwest, it turns out!)"

Asking people is always the best approach. And as I've learned, the fediverse is full of highly-engaged, well-informed people who are hungry for great journalism.

#Fediverse

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[David Ingram at NBC News]

"Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said Thursday in her first interview that he was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine."

Her full Threads thread is worth reading. She seems to have her head screwed on correctly and comes across as a far better person than the father she disowned.

On puberty blockers, she says:

“They save lives. Let’s not get that twisted. They definitely allowed me to thrive.”

That's really the kicker with Musk's current nonsense. Lives are at stake, and while his rhetoric might soothe whatever it is inside him that is hurt by his child disowning him for being a bigot, taking it to the national policy stage and endangering vulnerable communities is far from okay.

It's also a wild distraction when the valuations of his companies are at risk. Privately, investors and partners have to be up in arms: this is not what he needs to be concentrating on. In effect, one of the world's richest men is having such a public personality crisis that it's putting the well-being of both a very vulnerable group and his wealthy backers at risk.

#Equality

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[Samantha Cole at 404 Media]

"A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films."

404 Media has linked to the spreadsheet itself, which seems to be a pretty clear list of YouTube channels and individual videos.

Google is clear that this violates YouTube's rules. The team at Runway also by necessity downloaded the videos first using a third-party tool, which itself is a violation of the rules.

This is just a video version of the kinds of copyright and terms violations we've already seen copious amounts of in static media. But Google might be a stauncher defender of its rules than most - although not necessarily for principled reasons, because it, too, is in the business of training AI models on web data, and likely on YouTube content.

#AI

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[Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge]

"Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast.

“Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.”"

No, you don't.

As I've discussed before, investors like Andreessen and Horowitz are putting concerns about crypto regulation and taxation of unrealized gains over a host of social issues that include mass deportations, an increase in death sentences, military police in our cities, and potential ends to contraception and no-fault divorce. It's myopic, selfish, and stupid.

It looks even more so in a world where Trump is reportedly already regretting appointing JD Vance as his Vice Presidential candidate and where Musk has reneged on his $45M a month pledge to a Trump PAC. They come out looking awful.

The progressive thing to do would be to starve their firm: founders who care about those issues should pledge not to let a16z into their rounds, and other VCs should refuse to join rounds where a16z is present. This is likely too much activism for Silicon Valley, but it would send the strong signal that's needed here.

The desire for profit must never trump our duty of care to society's most vulnerable. Agreeing with this statement should be a no-brainer - but we're quickly learning how many would much rather put themselves first.

#Technology

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[Anthony Robledo at USA Today]

"Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his estranged transgender daughter was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" after he was tricked into agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures."

The thing is, his daughter Vivian is perfectly happy with the decision. The thing that's causing Musk pain is not her decision to transition; it's that she's cut him off and no longer speaks to him. Interviews like this illustrate why.

That so many of his decisions are governed by this absolute loser energy says a lot. Just calm down, call your daughter, and reconcile.

As USA Today points out:

"Gender-affirming care is a valid, science-backed method of medicine that saves lives for people who require care while navigating their gender identity. Gender-affirming care can range from talk or hormone therapy to surgical intervention."

It's not done flippantly; a huge amount of care and attention is undertaken, particularly for minors. This backlash is pure conservative hokum: it does not have any scientific or factual basis. It just makes some small-minded, old-fashioned people feel uncomfortable.

#Democracy

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[Christine Hall at FOSS Force]

"The Apache Software Foundation is making changes in an attempt to right a wrong it unintentionally created when it adopted its name 25-years ago."

This is an unnecessarily awkward article (why describe the existing logo as cool in this context?!) to describe a simple premise: the Apache Software Foundation is slowly, finally, moving away from its appropriation of the Apache name and its racist use of faux Native American imagery.

For a while, it's preferred to refer to itself as ASF, and now it's going to have a much-needed logo change. That's fine, but it needs to go much further. It's past time to just rip off the Band Aid.

Still, this is far better than the obstinate response we've seen in the past to requests for change. A new logo, slight as it is, is hopefully an iteration in the right direction.

#Technology

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[Kayleigh Barber and Seb Joseph at Digiday]

"After much back and forth, Google has decided to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. Turns out all the fuss over the years wasn’t in vain after all; the ad industry’s cries have finally been heard."

Advertisers are rejoicing. In other words: this is bad.

It's possible that Chrome's "new experience" that lets users make an "informed choice" across their web browsing is really good. Sincerely, though, I doubt it. Moving this to the realm of power user preferences rather than a blanket policy for everyone means that very few people are likely to use it.

The result is going to be a continued trend of tracking users across the web. The people who really, really care will do the work to use the interface; everyone else (including people who care about privacy!) won't have the time.

All this to help save the advertising industry. Which, forgive me, doesn't feel like an important goal to me.

Case in point: Chrome's Privacy Sandbox isn't actually going away, and this is what Digiday has to say about it:

"This could be a blessing in disguise, especially if Google’s plan gets Chrome users to opt out of third-party cookies. Since it’s all about giving people a choice, if a bunch of users decide cookies aren’t for them, the APIs in the sandbox might actually work for targeting them without cookies."

A "blessing in disguise" for advertisers does not read as an actual blessing to me.

#Technology

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[Gerben Wierda at R&A IT Strategy & Architecture]

"ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two."

The distinction is indeed important: it's akin to making an easy reader version, albeit one with the odd error here and there.

This is particularly important for newsrooms and product teams that are looking at AI to generate takeaways from articles. There's a huge chance that it'll miss the main, most pertinent points, and simply shorten the text in the way it sees fit.

#AI

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[Matt Stoller]

"So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing of the family that animates this new group, not worship of the market. At Remedy Fest, Vance was explicit in his agreement with this notion, saying “I don't really care if the entity that is most threatening to that vision is a private entity or a public entity, we have to be worried about it.”"

An interesting analysis of JD Vance's economic ideas - at least as described here, I'm actually not in disagreement. The free market is cover for private rule. Lina Khan is doing a great job.

I'm less impressed with his backers Andreessen and Horowitz's ideas, which are tied up with military might and a self-interested misunderstanding of what happened in relation to the downfall of the USSR. The idea that Elizabeth Warren "hates capitalism" is nonsense. It's a very thin defense drawn from their particular mode of capitalism coming under threat of regulation.

The trouble is, as I've described, all the social policies that go along with it. Sure, try and influence both political parties to be beneficial to your businesses all you want. But if you throw mass deportations, military policing of our cities, and fascist reconstructions of government in the mix, you'd better be ready for the repercussions.

#Democracy

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[Om Malik]

"Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy."

This move says a lot about modern Apple, but more than that, it likely says a lot about the performance of Apple News.

For many news publishers Apple News pageviews are a multiple of the reads on their own websites: it's a serious source of traffic and impact. The fact that Apple is finding itself having to make changes to how it makes revenue on the platform means that the mechanism itself may be under threat.

It's never a good idea to put your trust in a third party: every publisher needs to own their relationships with their communities. The pull of Apple News has been irresistible, and Apple has seemed more trustworthy than most. This may have been a false promise, and publishers should take note.

#Technology

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[Richard J. Tofel]

"I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance of the role of the press in democratic governance—although that ought to be essential."

"[...] More subtly, a CEO without news experience may not grasp how large of an asset is newsroom morale, or how much sapping it may cost an enterprise. Such issues can become particularly tricky in a unionized environment— especially one in which there are no profits over which to haggle, either because the organization is a nonprofit, or because it is no longer profitable."

Dick Tofel was the founding general manager of ProPublica, and generally knows a thing or two about the news business.

There's a line to walk here: there's certainly risk, as Tofel describes, of picking a news CEO who is not familiar with the news business. At the same time, as I've previously lamented, the industry needs an injection of new, outside ideas. It's certainly true that the CEO must deeply understand how news works, but they also can't be to afraid to change some of those dynamics - as long as they're cognizant of the position and responsibility that journalism holds in a democracy.

Any CEO needs to be very aware of organizational culture and morale. Many news CEOs are hyper-focused on their journalism (which is good!) at the expense of thinking too deeply about culture (which is bad). Hopefully any good incoming CEO would be an expert at building culture, although most of us know that this often isn't the case.

It's complicated, in other words. But journalism is at least as important as it's ever been, and getting news leadership right is crucial.

#Media

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[Robin Berjon]

This is somewhere between a call to action and a wake-up call:

"If you wish to be moral, you have to also pay attention to whether what you're doing actually works. And the best way to do that is to set up a forcing function for it: that's what checks and balances do."

"[...] Imagination isn't just a trite word to make your heart glow in pulp-class young-adult dystopia — imagination is the ability to depict justice, to see what we ought to aspire to. It is not a gift but rather a skill to hone."

There is an inherent question here about how you can create binding systems that enforce ethical standards - but also, how you can determine which ethical standards actually lead to the outcomes you want to establish.

I think there's a lot here that can be addressed through more distributed equity. As Robin says, "anywhere a powerful entity operates it is at risk of unethical behavior and therefore must be held in check by a control mechanism". One system of control - insufficient in itself but I think still necessary - is to ensure that power is spread among more people who are more connected to the effects of that power.

Distributing equity literally means handing over the means of production not just to workers but to those impacted by the work, reconnecting the decisions to their consequences. I don't know that you can have ethical tech that is motivated by centralized power. As Robin implies: so far, it hasn't worked.

#Technology

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[Plausible Analytics]

"We’re real people who have rent to pay and mouths to feed. We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team. If we cannot capture the economic value of our work, the project will become unsustainable and die."

It's more than a little painful to see new open source businesses re-learn what I and other open source founders have learned over time.

I'm fully in support of Plausible moving to AGPL and introducing a Contributor License Agreement, but I don't believe this will be enough. Indeed, Plausible is moving to "open core" and privatizing some of the more lucrative features:

"We’re also keeping some of the newly released business and enterprise features (funnels and ecommerce revenue metrics at the time of being) exclusive to the business plan subscribers on our Plausible Analytics managed hosting."

What's particularly interesting to me is that they're maintaining source availability for these features - it's just that they're not going to be released under an open source license.

Open source purists might complain, but I believe it's better for the project to exist at all and use licensing that allows for sustainability rather than to maintain open source purity and find that the developers can't sustain themselves. I'd love for these things to be compatible, but so far, I don't believe that they are.

#Technology

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[Helene Smith at The Guardian]

"Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s top priority is simple: ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already witnessed record-breaking temperatures and wildfires."

We're deeply into the climate crisis at this point; a major city having to make major changes in order to "survive the summer" is just another example.

When you get into the detail, it's terrifying - particularly considering that we're still only at the foothills of where the crisis will lead us:

“It’s not a matter of lifestyle, or improving the quality of life; it’s about survival when 23% of the green lung around Athens has in recent years been destroyed by fires. It’s vital we have more trees, more air-conditioned community centres and more water stations on our streets and squares.”

Over time, we're going to see mass migrations and real, sustained changes to the way people live. We're also going to see a great deal of suffering. These are things we've been warned about for many decades, but the stories are transitioning from projections from climate experts to being the news headlines.

The onus is on the international community to respond to the crisis with robust energy, but we've been waiting for decades for this to really happen. Instead we get carbon trading schemes and economic deals that don't cut to the core of the problem.

There's an individual responsibility, too. These days that responsibility goes beyond making sensible choices about our own energy use (although most of us don't) and extends to voting, taking to the streets, and making it clear to our leaders that continued inaction is not acceptable.

If there isn't change, wars will be fought over this. In a certain light, they already are.

#Climate

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[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that promise — with its own newsletter as a start."

I'm certain that this is a large part of the future of how information will be disseminated on the internet - and how publishers will run subscription programs. Subscribers who use the fediverse see the benefit of rich content that they can reshare and comment on; publishers get to understand a lot more about their subscribers than they would from the web or email newsletters.

Ghost's reader will certainly be augmented by other, standalone readers that work a bit like Apple News. Its fediverse publishing capabilities will be followed by other content management systems. Notably, Automattic has been working on fediverse integration, for example, and Flipboard has been doing amazing work in this area.

I'm also convinced there's room for another fediverse-compatible social network that handles both long and short-form content in a similar way to Substack's articles and Notes. If someone else doesn't build that, I will.

#Fediverse

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[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica]

"Voucher advocates, backed by a handful of billionaire funders, are on the march to bring more red and purple states into the fold for “school choice,” their preferred terminology for vouchers. And again and again, they are running up against rural Republicans like Warner, who are joining forces with Democratic lawmakers in a rare bipartisan alliance. That is, it’s the reddest regions of these red and purple states that are putting up some of the strongest resistance to the conservative assault on public schools."

This is heartening to see: a bipartisan push against the school voucher system. Public schools are important social infrastructure that deserve significantly more investment rather than having funds siphoned away to support exclusive institutions. A free market for schools is not the way - and clearly, the communities who would be most affected by a voucher system see this too.

This also feels like one of those rare moments where some Republicans are actively practicing old-school conservatism: the kind that isn't drawn from The Handmaid's Tale. That's nice to see, and I'd love to see more of it.

"[Republican Representative] Greene believes vouchers will harm his district. It has a couple of small private schools in it or just outside it — with student bodies that are starkly more white than the district’s public schools — but the majority of his constituents rely on the public schools, and he worries that vouchers will leave less money for them."

Exactly. Not to mention a worse education.

#Education

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[Becky Chambers]

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”

I tend to read whatever the opposite of cozy science fiction is: angry and worried about the world, building tension from speculative extrapolations of what could go wrong. This, on the other hand, is science fiction that encourages you to just chill for a minute.

I don’t know if I could read a lot of this, because I am angry and worried about the world, and reading other peoples’ words along the same lines is cathartic. But the message here — that you don’t need to justify yourself, that you can just be — is soothing, and was necessary for me. And it’s all done with wit and care. What a delightful novella.

#Fiction

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[Lydia Kiesling]

It took me a long time to get through the first third of this novel. The protagonist is so vapid, her point of view so incurious and at the same time so familiarly American, against a backdrop of obvious imperialism and climate obliviousness, that it was hard to find the motivation to continue.

But I’m glad I did. This is an indictment of one character, but through her, all of America, and every country and every person that touches the interconnected hyperobject of energy, climate, and western prosperity. It’s savage, witty, and remarkably pointed: the kind of book that’s soothing to read in the modern age because no, you’re not alone, someone else is feeling this too, and their rage has manifested into something far better articulated than you could hope to muster.

Is this shared awareness enough to halt the catastrophe that we’re careening towards? Probably not. But holy shit, there’s something here, and if there’s even a chance we can pull off the total culture change that averting this crisis requires, we need to try.

The remaining two thirds sharpen to a point, an ending that will cut you without mercy. And I’m grateful for it.

#Fiction

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[Cloudflare]

"To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier."

This is really neat! Whatever you land on AI scraping, giving site owners the one-click ability to make a choice is great. Some will choose not to use this; others will hit the button. Making it this easy means it's a choice about the principles, not any kind of technical considerations. Which is what it should be.

Not every site is on Cloudflare (and some also choose not to use it because of how it's historically dealt with white supremacist / Nazi content). But many are, and this makes it easy for them. Other, similar providers will likely follow quickly.

#AI

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[Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Hadley Beeman, Daniel Appelquist, Robin Berjon, et al]

"Government engagement in digital and Internet governance is needed to deal with many abuses of this global system but it is our common responsibility to uphold the bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance that has served the world for the past half century."

A tremendously important open letter to the United Nations in light of the opaque, hierarchical process the Global Digital Compact is being developed with, and the centralized governance many of its proposals can be read to call for.

It's worth clicking through to read the list of signatories: these are people we can thank for the existence of the internet and the web at all. That they believe this is important enough to create this open letter is worth paying attention to.

#Democracy

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[Rachel Leingang at The Guardian]

"The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

I've been worried about the world my son will grow up into since before he was born. Over time, my worry has been upgraded to a fear that is becoming ever more visceral and searing. Today the volume of my fear turned up still further.

The thing is, this isn't the only thing allowing for misconduct. The President has effectively been able to commit crimes internationally with very little accountability since forever. Coups, backroom exchanges, and assassinations are all things the US has done to other countries for generations.

My hope is that (1) we come out of this more or less intact, (2) we eventually use this as an opportunity to create stronger ethical and legal rules for our leadership, wherever they act.

Whatever happens, these are truly scary times.

#Democracy

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[Jonathan Zeller at McSweeney's]

"We do not live in some tech dystopia in which our smartphones clandestinely use their mics to pick up every word we say and then feed us commercial messages based on them. The truth is simpler and not at all alarming: your phone only seems to be listening to you because it’s collecting data about every word you type, every website you visit, and, through GPS tracking, everywhere you go in the physical world."

No notes: this is pretty good.

#Technology

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[Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian]

“Art is about reaching out. So I think it’s wrong to allow one strata of society to have the most access.”

This is an older article, but it resonated with me so much that I wanted to share it immediately.

This is so important, and a sign of what we've lost:

“I went [to art school] because the government of the day paid for me to go and I didn’t have to pay them back. There was a thrusting society then, a society that tried to improve itself. Yes, of course, it cost money. But so what? It allowed people from any kind of background to learn about Shakespeare, or Vermeer.”

A culture where only the rich are afforded the space, training, and platform to make art is missing the voices that make it special.

The same goes for other spaces: newsrooms where only the wealthy can serve as journalists cannot accurately represent the people who depend on it. Technology without class diversity is myopic. Above all else, a culture of rich people is boring as hell.

Art school - like all school - should be free and available to everyone. It's tragic that it's not. We all lose out, regardless of our background.

#Culture

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[Molly White]

"I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction."

I've been struggling with this.

I'm not in favor of the 404 Media approach, which is to stick an auth wall in front of your content, forcing everyone to register before they can load your article. That isn't a great experience for anyone, and I don't think it's sustainable for a publisher in the long run.

At the same time, I think it's fair to try and prevent some bot access at the moment. Adding AI agents to your robots.txt - although, as recent news has shown, perhaps not as effective a move as it might be - seems like the right call to me.

Clearly an AI agent isn't a human. For ad hoc queries - where an agent is retrieving content from a website in direct response to a user query - it clearly is acting on behalf of a human. Is it a browser, then? Maybe? If it is, we should just let it through.

It's accessing articles as training data that I really take issue with (as well as the subterfuge of not always advertising what it is when it accesses a site). In these cases, content is copied into a corpus in a manner that's outside of its licensing, without the author's knowledge. That sucks - not because I'm in favor of DRM, but because often the people whose work is being taken are living on a shoestring, and the software is run by very large corporations who will make a fortune.

But yes: I don't think auth walls, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, or any added friction between content and audience are a good idea. These things make the web worse for everybody.

Molly's post is in response to an original by Manu Moreale, which is also worth reading.

#AI

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"Governed by an independent board of directors, the 501(c)3 charitable organization will help AP sustain, augment and grow journalism and services for the industry, as well as help fund other entities that share a commitment to state and local news."

Fascinating! And much needed.

I'm curious to learn how this fits into other fundraising efforts, like the $500M Press Forward initiative for local news that was announced last year.

I do also have a question about whether all this centralized philanthropy is sustainable. What happens to these newsrooms if the foundation dollars go away? Are they incentivized to find their own business and fundraising models, or does this create a kind of dependence that might be harmful in the long run?

My hope, of course, is that these efforts are the shot in the arm that journalism needs, and that the newsrooms which receive this funding will be sustainable and enduring. It's certainly lovely to see the support.

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