Werd I/O

[Sergey Bogdanov]

This is a story about parenting, but also about the importance of considering context inclusively. We've all heard about the Stanford marshmallow experiment, but:

"Kids from wealthier families waited longer than kids from low-income families. Not because they had more self-control, but because their environment made waiting feel safer. If you grow up knowing there will always be food on the table, waiting for an extra marshmallow isn’t a big deal. But if your life is more uncertain, grabbing what you can when you can make total sense. It’s a survival skill, not a lack of discipline."

It's not just about socioeconomic background; it's also, as the article points out, about building a culture of trust. That's important in families, but also in companies, and everywhere.

"So what’s the takeaway here? It’s simple, really: as parents, we set the tone. Our actions, promises, and reliability shape how our kids see the world. Are we building an environment where they feel safe enough to wait? Or are we teaching them that they need to grab what they can, when they can?"

What can we change to create emotional safety? How can we let them know they're protected? It really matters, in all walks of life.

#Parenting

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[Jennifer Gerson at The 19th]

Musk has been seen with his child, X Æ A-Xii (or "Lil X" for short), at press conferences. But, as Jennifer Gerson notes here, it's not just a photo op.

"Musk, a father of 12, is an avowed pronatalist, or someone who believes declining population rates are a major concern and has committed to work to remedy this by having as many children as possible. He sees part of his life’s work as repopulating the planet with as many children — and exceptional children at that — as possible."

It's also a wild double standard. Imagine the chorus of conservative mocking if a woman had done the same thing. That's not to say that children shouldn't be normalized at work - they really should - but what's happening in the current moment is hardly a symbol of radical inclusion.

"Pronatalism requires that people who are able to carry pregnancies — mostly women — be pregnant for large periods of time. These pregnancies can have a major impact on women’s participation in the workforce and economic mobility."

Finally, as Gerson points out, it's certainly worth mentioning that pro-natalists aren't just in favor of any kind of baby. They're heavy eugenicists, with a focus on certain characteristics, including retrograde ideas like potential IQ. Might this also include, in Musk's case, the 14 words? I couldn't possibly say.

#Democracy

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[Social Web Foundation]

The Social Web Foundation has joined the W3C:

"SWF joins CDT as one of the few civil society organizations that comprise the Consortium. SWF’s membership in the W3C underscores our commitment to promoting an open and federated social web, and our alignment with the W3C mission to develop web standards through community consensus that ensures the long-term growth and accessibility of technical specifications that are openly licensed."

More forward motion for the open social web as a core part of the open web itself. This is also very good news:

"In terms of concrete ongoing work, we look forward to bringing end-to-end encryption to direct messages in ActivityPub, developing groups on the social web, supporting data portability with ActivityPub, making discovery of ActivityPub objects and their authors easier."

These will all make the open social web safer, more flexible, and easier to build on for new platform entrants. Let's go.

#Fediverse

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[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

This was a very nice surprise to see:

"Automattic confirmed to TechCrunch that when the migration is complete, every Tumblr user will be able to federate their blog via ActivityPub, just as every WordPress.com user can today."

ActivityPub is the open protocol behind Mastodon and Pixelfed, among others. Threads and Ghost have also been steadily adding support.

Given the long tail of ActivityPub and the simultaneous rise of Bluesky, which is connected to the ActivityPub network via Bridgy Fed, the future of the open social web is very bright. It is the future of all social media. This is another great milestone along the road.

#Fediverse

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[Oneofthelibrarians at LibrarianShipwreck]

Some advice about how to survive this era from LibrarianShipwreck, one of my most favorite blogs on the planet:

"So, uh, it’s pretty bad out there! You are probably trying to figure out what the hell to do about it. Here are some words of advice, from wisdom gained through a couple decades in the trenches. Hope it helps."

Some of these are things that I am very bad at, including prioritizing physical health / ability. I think there's also a lot to say in favor of this:

"The Western, and especially USAian, mythos of the singularly special hero is a load of hooey. Don’t fall into that trap. Even when we occasionally do have individuals who make an outsized difference, if you need the thoughts in this post you are almost certainly not positioned to be that person. And that’s ok!"

What these times need, in other words, is co-operation, mutual aid, community, and allyship. American culture, as the piece says, is oriented around rugged individualism; while we all have individual rights, including the right to self-identity, the right to safety, the right to freedom of speech and thought, and so on, it's community that will set us free.

Jerry Springer was a cultural grenade who in some ways paved the path to where we are, but he got one thing right: he signed off every day with the mantra, "take care of yourselves, and each other." That's the spirit.

#Democracy

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[Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby in Popular Information]

The removal of banned terms on both internal and external government websites is going more stupidly than one might have expected:

"One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive environment.” The Post also found examples of words being removed that had nothing to do with DEI, such as a page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums' “diverse collections,” removing the word “diverse.”"

And:

"The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term "privilege" is used by the NSA in the context of "privilege escalation." In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to "techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.""

The whole enterprise is silly, of course, but this is an incredibly bad way to go about it. Words have meaning, and sometimes you need to use them. A global search and replace isn't a perfect way to revamp the whole apparatus of federal government.

#Democracy

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[Iker Seisdedos interviewing Judith Butler in EL PAÍS English]

Judith Butler is as on-point as ever:

"Q. It wasn’t just Trumpism. Some Democratic voices say it’s time to move beyond the issue of trans rights in areas like sports, which affect very few people.

A. You could say that about the Jews, Black people or Haitians, or any very vulnerable minority. Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?"

This is exactly it. I've also heard voices say that there should have been less discussion of racial equity: less Black Lives Matter, less 1619 Project, less discussion of systemic inequality. It's nonsense, and as Butler says, it's a road that leads us down an inevitably fascist path.

The whole interview is very much worth your time: nuanced and well-considered.

#Democracy

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[Jessica Kutz at The 19th]

USAID's defunding will lead directly to women's deaths:

"As of 2023, 67 percent of contraceptives supplied through USAID went to Africa, where some of the leading causes of death for girls and women are related to pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections like HIV. According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, if no contraceptive care is provided by USAID in 2025, that will lead to about 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,000 deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth complications."

The article goes on to detail efforts in countries like Afghanistan, Senegal, India, and Nigeria. The idea that we should simply rug-pull these efforts is ludicrous: it sends a clear message that we no longer care about the well-being of people overseas, and that we don't think their quality of life is important to us or affects us. This is an obvious, profound mistake.

#Democracy

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[Mica Rosenberg, Perla Trevizo, and Zisiga Mukulu in ProPublica, co-published with The Texas Tribune]

This is a beautifully-designed co-production between ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, illustrating the immigration policies that Donald Trump enacted on day one. These encompassed dozens of policies that were revived from his first term, as well as seven new ones that hadn't been tried before.

"In order to provide a glimpse of the enormity of the changes that are underway, ProPublica and the Tribune identified nearly three dozen of the most impactful policy changes set in motion by the orders signed on the first day. Most were pulled from the playbook of Trump’s previous presidency. Others are unprecedented."

The new ones are pretty stark, including:

"Ending and clawing back funding from organizations that support migrants: Seeks to stop or limit money to nongovernmental organizations that provide shelter and services to migrants released at the border, as well as legal orientation programs for people in immigration proceedings."

And, of course much has been written about the unconstitutionality of:

"Seeks to end birthright citizenship: Attempts to end birthright citizenship of children born to parents either illegally in the United States or under a temporary legal status, something Trump had only said he wanted to do in his first term."

It's useful to have these written in one place, in an easy-to-digest form, together with updates on what's happened since. The news can feel like a deluge, and aggregating the updates into something parseable is important.

#Democracy

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[Natalia Antelava in Coda Story]

This is a useful framework for thinking about ongoing harm.

"It was 2014, and I was standing in the ruins of Donetsk airport, when a Russian-backed rebel commander launched into what seemed like an oddly academic lecture. Between bursts of artillery fire, he explained an American political science concept: the Overton Window – a theory that describes the range of policies and ideas a society considers acceptable at any given time. Politicians can’t successfully propose anything outside this “window” of acceptability without risking their careers. “The West uses this window,” he said, smoke from his cigarette blowing into my face, “to destroy our traditional values by telling us it’s okay for me to marry a man and for you to marry a woman. But we won’t let them.”"

And that's the real, lasting impact of Trump and his worldview:

"As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine – the transformation of our societies isn’t happening by accident."

What will undoing this take? How can we shift the Overton Window back towards inclusion, communities, and compassion? How can we get to the mutualistic, integrated society we need to reach, and say goodbye to this disgustingly retrograde conservatism for good?

#Democracy

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[Dan Hon in MIT Technology Review]

The always-brilliant Dan Hon on DOGE:

"We’re seeing in real time that there are no practical technical measures preventing someone from taking a spanner to the technology that keeps our government stable, that keeps society running every day—despite the very real consequences.

So we should plan for the worst, even if the likelihood of the worst is low."

The suggestions that follow - identifying risks, working together, standing up and saying "no" - are all sensible and needed.

#Democracy

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[Gil Duran in The Nerd Reich]

Curtis Yarvin's influence is felt again:

" In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc on the United States Government (USG) over the past three weeks."

As Duran points out, none of what's happening right now is exactly new or a surprise:

"What surprises me most is how the political press generally fails to inform the public that Musk is taking a systematic approach, one that has been outlined in public forums for years. (Some press outlets, like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are owned by billionaires keenly interested in kowtowing to Musk and Trump.)"

For many people, the myth of American exceptionalism may be so deeply in their bloodstream that they simply can't imagine our institutions falling to this. But of course they can: this is the country that gave us McCarthyism and Jim Crow. it's happening in plain sight.

#Democracy

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[Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing, Annie Waldman, Brett Murphy, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg, Sebastian Rotella, Alex Mierjeski, Pratheek Rebala and Al Shaw at ProPublica]

My colleagues at ProPublica have published the largest list yet of who is actually involved in DOGE:

"While some have been public about their involvement, others have attempted to keep their roles secret, scrubbing LinkedIn pages and other sources of data. With little information from the White House, ProPublica is attempting to document who is involved and what they are doing."

This is a living document: ProPublica is still reporting. As the article points out:

"We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed below? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can."

The whole list is worth reviewing.

#Democracy

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[Caralee Adams at the Internet Archive]

The Internet Archive is always a gem, but it's been particularly important this year.

"With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million unique web pages. All this information, produced by the U.S. government—the largest publisher in the world—is preserved and available for public access at the Internet Archive.

[...] As an added layer of preservation, the 2024/2025 EOT Web Archive will be uploaded to the Filecoin network for long-term storage, where previous term archives are already stored. While separate from the EOT collaboration, this effort is part of the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project. Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) support Democracy’s Library to ensure public access to government research and publications worldwide."

This is important on multiple levels: most importantly, it means that even if the Internet Archive is attacked or shut down for any reason, these archived versions of government websites and data will remain online and accessible.

As it happens, the current administration has been pulling down datasets and redacting websites with wild abandon, so although this is a routine activity for the Archive whenever there's a change in administration, it provides a vital historical record this year. Good news for researchers, future historians, journalists, and anyone who depended on this data.

#Democracy

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[Janus Rose at 404 Media]

This is an important but hard pill to swallow:

"“The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, told 404 Media. “Whether it’s [New York Times columnist] Ross Douthat providing a sane-washing gloss on Trump’s mania or people on social media vehemently disagreeing and dunking on it, they’re legitimizing it as part of the discourse.”"

Posting is not activism. But it's both easy and cathartic to take the bait and run with it - and get approving clicks and likes in return. In sharing outrage rather than concrete real-world steps, we end up just amplifying the message.

As Janus Rose points out:

"Under this status quo, everything becomes a myopic contest of who can best exploit peoples’ anxieties to command their attention and energy. If we don’t learn how to extract ourselves from this loop, none of the information we gain will manifest as tangible action—and the people in charge prefer it that way."

Instead, co-ordinate online but manifest in the real world. Join protests, call your representatives, work for organizations that seek to uncover truth and take steps forward. Fewer hot takes; more collective action.

#Democracy

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[Alex Heath at The Verge]

And so begin the knock-on effects on companies across America:

"In a Wednesday memo to employees that I obtained (and you can read below), Google’s head of HR, Fiona Cicconi, said there will no longer be DEI hiring targets due to the company’s status as a federal contractor and recent “court decisions and US Executive Orders on this topic.” As The Wall Street Journal notes, Google also removed a line included in previous annual SEC reports saying that it’s “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do.”"

In other words, because DEI initiatives are now banned within the federal government, and because Google wants that sweet federal contractor money, it's ending the practice of overtly being inclusive as a company.

This is cowardice - and it's exactly what the Trump administration is going for. Its retrograde goals aren't simply for government; the idea is to remake the entire United States, and through changes to international relationships and the simple truth of America's global influence, the world.

#Technology

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[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub]

This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next:

“By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.”

If you take a step back, it’s remarkable that the weirdest guy from PayPal has evolved into the world’s richest and most dangerous man. This serves as a reminder of what happened.

#Technology

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[Maxwell Zeff at TechCrunch]

I know "don't be evil" is from another era of Google, but still, this rankles:

"Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week."

This dovetails with a piece from earlier this year about how AI is speeding up the military's kill chain:

"The “kill chain” refers to the military’s process of identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats, involving a complex system of sensors, platforms, and weapons. Generative AI is proving helpful during the planning and strategizing phases of the kill chain, according to [the Pentagon's Chief Digital and AI Officer]."

So AI might not be used to pull the trigger, but it is being used to identify who should be in the crosshairs. All our concerns about AI hallucinations, and particularly about bias inherent in training data and therefore outcomes, apply.

#AI

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[Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica]

From my colleagues at ProPublica:

"Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing and fining students for misbehavior."

This follows an investigation into how Illinois schools call on the police for infractions and - surprise, surprise - penalize Black students twice as often.

The police shouldn't get involved in troublesome kid stuff like truancy or vaping. That should be obvious. And, yet, here we are. This kind of police state nonsense absolutely paved the road towards where we are today.

#Democracy

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[The Guardian Editorial]

The Guardian editorial board isn't mincing words:

"Donald Trump is provoking a US constitutional crisis, claiming sweeping powers to override or bypass Congress’s control over spending in a brazen attempt to centralise financial power in the executive branch. If he succeeds, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman warns, it would be a 21st-century coup – with power slipping from elected officials’ hands. The real story hidden behind the president’s trade war, he says, is the hijacking of government. And Mr Krugman’s right."

The board is clear-eyed in this piece about the harms committed under Trump's first Presidency, both to the economy and the American people. And then comes to this critical conclusion:

"Mr Trump’s chaos isn’t confidence – it’s desperation. He’s trying to conjure power he doesn’t actually have. He is manufacturing a perception of dominance in the hope that Americans will simply accept it. The real danger is letting his illusion of power become reality."

The trick is to cut through the shock and awe.

#Democracy

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[Jameel Jaffer in The New York Times]

Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University:

"The spectacle of powerful media organizations debasing themselves before Mr. Trump has become so familiar that it is beginning to feel like scheduled programming.

[...] Mr. Trump captured the spirit of our times when he observed in December that, “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” but “in this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” Certainly, some of the nation’s most powerful media institutions seem to have concluded that it is simply not in their commercial interests to inconvenience the president, even if sparing him inconvenience means abandoning their own First Amendment rights."

As Jaffer argues, the cases being settled by ABC News, Meta, and CBS are not slam dunks for Trump. This isn't about legal details; it's about capitulating to the new President and kissing the ring. That leaves us without an effective free press to hold truth to power.

The conclusion here is on point:

"The First Amendment is just words on a page. Giving those words meaning — sustaining their promise, generation after generation — depends on a civic courage that seems, right now, to be in ominously short supply."

And that, to be honest, is terrifying.

#Democracy

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[Cathy Gellis at TechDirt]

On point:

"So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into government offices to take over computer systems where they had no legitimate authorization or entitlement needs to be understood as a cyberattack by a rogue actor. And every ounce of outrage we ever would have had if any other rogue actor had taken over critical government infrastructure needs to be mustered here, because it is just as outrageous, and as dangerous, if not more so on both fronts, because this time the threat to America’s security came from within.

[...] Meanwhile, we know little to nothing about his team. Even some names are unknown, let alone the full range of their affiliations, which we usually ask about before giving anyone access to the country’s most sensitive information. They have had zero vetting and in many cases no known security clearance (and, in the case of Musk, there were limits to his, which was already in jeopardy).

[...] They are a bunch of strangers who have essentially busted into government offices and strong-armed the career staff there into giving them access to all these systems with all this critical function and data. Systems that it has heretofore been the priority of the United States government to protect because of their sensitivity and how vulnerable the nation would be if an adversary could access them."

This is a dangerous situation and it's evolving quickly. Who knows what it will look like tomorrow, or this time next week. But it doesn't look good.

#Democracy

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[Matt Haughey]

I really like the way this guide to Signal lays it all out. As Matt Haughey explains:

"A friend of mine works in the federal government and wrote a guide for their fellow federal workers on how to use Signal. There are lots of good reasons for switching to Signal for messaging, and this does a great job of laying it all out. This friend doesn't currently have a blog, so they asked me to post it for them, and I obliged since I think it's a straightforward introduction to protecting yourself when communicating with others."

This doesn't just go into the what - it talks a little about the why for Signal, including some of the protections you'll get on Signal that you won't get anywhere else.

Take a look - and then start using it.

#Technology

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[Naseem S. Miller at the Journalist's Resource]

A massive, last-minute data preservation effort was undertaken this week as important federal datasets were taken offline:

"The new Trump administration has at least temporality halted most communications from the Department of Health and Human Services and has begun taking down government websites, including many pages that include DEI initiatives. CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey site, which monitors health behaviors of high-school students, including sexual behavior, mental health and tobacco use, is no longer available."

This is another reason why the Internet Archive is vitally important infrastructure: websites and datasets were saved, among other places, to the Wayback Machine. Teams including at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health raced to capture the data before it went dark.

These datasets include important information about health (including vaccine information); gender; climate; mortality. They enable reporting and allow us to have a clearer picture of how well our democracy is functioning. At least for now, they're now historical datasets: it's not clear that any further data will be published. Researchers, journalists, medical professionals and more will need to look elsewhere for important information that helps them do their jobs and keep us safe.

#Democracy

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[Herman Martinus]

I recognize a lot of the sentiment here. Twenty years ago, I ran an open source social networking startup and tried to differentiate ourselves by saying many of these same things.

"Bear won't sell. I'm not building this to flip it to the highest bidder. No VC funding, no external pressures, no "exit strategy." Bear is independent and will stay that way."

In practice, I don't know how much that means to very many people. For a comparable example, take a look at Mastodon vs Bluesky (not, by the way, that this is a binary choice); the latter has taken on at least thirty million dollars in VC funding but is currently thriving.

Trust is something you earn over time through your actions and decisions, and isn't a direct outcome of your funding choices. There certainly are bootstrapped companies that have stood the test of time - Esri comes to mind, among others - but there are also VC-funded companies that have proven to have longevity and have done okay by their users. (This will alienate some of my readers, but I don't think VC is inherently bad; it only becomes so when it is considered to be the only funding option and non-VC businesses are shoehorned into that structure and strategy.)

Herman effectively comes to this conclusion in the piece too:

"I've recently chatted to a few bloggers and legal professionals on what a good structure looks like for a project like this. And the common theme was that the legal structure didn't matter nearly as much as the intentions of the people running things. We've seen our fair share of open-source projects become sour (see the recent Wordpress drama) or abandoned entirely. We've seen OpenAI become ClosedAI. There's a common thread here. Trust isn't just a legal structure, but a social contract."

Additionally, I think the conclusion that small, sometimes family-owned businesses last longer is not wrong, but context is important. For a local business? Absolutely. To what extent does this make sense on a global web where every service can be available to everyone? I really badly want this to be true here too, but it's not a given that it is.

Anyway. I really love what Herman is doing with Bear, and this piece isn't a criticism of him or his service in any way. It's fantastic that he's out there doing this. My feelings are more: this is a hard road, and the answers aren't yet clear. But it's a journey that I'm very glad people are on.

#Technology

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