Werd I/O

I cleaned out my desk a little over five years ago. It feels like last week.

I was leading engineering at ForUsAll, a fintech company that seeks to make it easier for small businesses to offer retirement plans for their employees. The co-founder, David, had been wearing a mask around the office for a month; he was following the growth of COVID-19 closely. The then-CEO agreed to close the office if the number of cases in San Francisco went beyond some small threshold; when it did, we picked up our laptops and left.

Of course, we all know what happened next: lockdowns, sourdough starters, and remote working on a scale never seen before.

I prefer remote working and always have. My first startup was mostly remote: my co-founder was in Edinburgh for a while, and spent some time in Vancouver, while I was in Oxford with occasional long stretches in California. I worked at my kitchen table, drank my own coffee, and set my own hours. It was flexible depending on what was going on at the time, and undoubtedly productive. When I joined a startup based in Austin but worked from Edinburgh and Berkeley, it felt like a natural progression.

When the pandemic hit, I couldn’t wait to return to that mode of working. I had another reason to feel like working from home was a silver lining: my mother’s health had been up and down following her double lung transplant, and now I could spend more time with her. What had been a regular Sunday visit became a much longer weekly stay. My dad was the primary carer, but I could help out. Many nights, I would help her up the short flight of stairs to her bedroom, help situate her in her bed, with brushing her teeth, and so on. Working from home gave me extra time with her, and I treasured that.

More recently, it allowed me to buy a house. There was no way I could buy in the San Francisco Bay Area. For literally half the price of a two-bedroom house in a troubled part of Oakland, I could get a house that would fit my family in Pennsylvania. We walk our child to and from daycare every day, have a garden and a driveway, and, although there’s no doubt that the house needs work, generally feel safe and secure.

I’m far from alone. Working from home has been a boon for carers, parents, and anyone who felt like they weren’t able to get on the property ladder in major business hubs like San Francisco and New York. It’s spread wealth from industries like tech to neighborhoods across the country, and in turn allowed tech companies to hire from anywhere, giving them access to talent that would previously have been out of reach. According to official figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity rose.

For remote work to be successful, communication, internal processes, and norms need to be explicit. Companies that had never spent much time thinking about culture now found that they were forced to, which was a positive outcome for their employees, many of whom had been suffering in silence. A renewed focus on employee power — in conjunction with the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter — also led to a rise in unionization efforts, which also aimed to improve worker quality of life. Despite the overhead of the pandemic itself, these changes felt like they were part of a cohesive, positive movement.

So I read stories like this one in the San Francisco Standard with something like a sense of dread:

“Two years ago, I could not get anybody to go into the office a couple days a week,” said Jaimie Feliz, principal at San Francisco recruiting firm The Hire Standard. “Now, across the board, it’s pretty standard for companies to ask for a minimum of three days in office — it’s very rare to see any less than that.”

Many tech companies are suspending hiring and promotions for workers outside of their hub cities, and there’s an assumption that, over time, employees who remain outside of those hubs will be laid off.

Given the negative impacts on carers, parents, people who have bought homes outside of those hub cities, and on the productivity of those companies, this feels like a regression.

This is doubly true when you look at the underlying statistics. One of the big reasons for calls back to the office is to perform backdoor layoffs: management understands that a substantial percentage will quit. Research also suggests that it’s about control:

RTO mandates may reflect a desire among certain leaders to reassert control and authority within the organization […] This perspective highlights the role of organizational power dynamics and the potential for RTO policies to serve as instruments for reinforcing traditional hierarchical structures, at odds with the trend towards greater autonomy and flexibility facilitated by remote work.

The perceived gains aren’t evidence-based or in the best interests of company productivity; they’re more about CEO peace of mind. For companies that never stuck the landing on building intentional cultures, returning to the pre-pandemic status quo may feel reassuring.

Frustratingly, I now feel like these changes are inevitable.

Not everywhere, of course. There are some companies that have always been remote, and others have managed to establish strong hybrid cultures. But the majority will choose to simply snap back to the world as it was in 2019.

This is to their detriment: adding perspectives from across the country, and from people who would have been shut out of a traditional office job, was clearly valuable. A workforce made up only of people who can afford San Francisco’s $3,400 average rent is inherently less diverse — and less representative of the company’s customers — than one that is geographically diverse. Regardless, it is happening.

For companies that choose to stay remote, there are benefits to be made. There will be an ever-increasing workforce of potential employees who don’t want to move back to those hubs, with experience at tech companies like Google and Meta, who will be looking for new positions. That’s a competitive advantage.

On the other hand, for people who want to stay with their current employers, there are hard choices ahead. Do you move away from your comfortable house, or find ways to offload some of your caring or parental duties, in order to stay on the payroll? Depending on your salary, stock options, or tenure, there might be reasons for doing so.

But it’s not a choice I would make. I have a toddler these days, and I want to be more present, not less. I get a lot of value from in-person collaboration, but I prefer a hybrid model: I’ll gladly travel into the office for a few intense days to advance some specific goals and then go home. I’ve got little interest in doing so to make management feel at ease, but there really are some kinds of time-limited collaboration that are better in person.

I also know that some people can’t travel — for health reasons, because their caring commitments are too great, or these days, because they’re worried about their documents being stripped or suffering violence because of their identity. So even though I’m willing to travel, I don’t expect everyone else to. Even in specific, time-limited collaborations, hybrid accommodations must be made.

For these reasons, I’ve made the decision that I won’t work for a company that requires everyone to come back to the office. Should I start another company, I will not mandate that people work from the office, although I might provide one as an optional collaboration space. This is to protect my quality of life, and to ensure that I can hire the best people for each role, regardless of where they might live or what the rest of their life might look like.

It’s not a decision I take lightly. It’s limiting: it means, should I leave my current job, that there will be fewer places I can go and work. It might limit my salary and future prospects, or even the investment I can raise for a future venture. But I care about being home and present, and I care about building representative workforces.

The bottom line is this: forcing people back into offices isn’t a neutral decision. It’s a choice to exclude and disadvantage anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of what a “worker” looks like. I’m not willing to join in that discrimination.

Previous birthday posts: 45 wishes, 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things.

One. I lie in bed as Ma read Dodie Smith’s ‌The Hundred and One Dalmatians to me. It was the fifth, and last, straight time; after this, she would finally put her foot down. Outside, in the Oxford dusk, the neighborhood dogs speak to each other over fences and hedges, the starlight barking in full force. Occasionally, a bird lands on the spiraling wrought iron fire escape outside.

It’s an old book, and the Romani people are not treated well in it. Revised versions are available. And, of course, the Disney versions.

Two. Nobody seems to want to adapt the anti nuclear war science fiction sequel, though, the cowards.

Three. I borrow ‌Constellations: Stories of the Future from the library for the third time: a hardback book in a protective plastic sleeve full of stories that seem almost illicit. One of the stories, ‌Let’s Go to Golgotha! is about a time-traveling tourist agency; the participants slowly realize that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is entirely made up of people from the future. ‌Beyond Lies the Wub was Philip K Dick’s first short story; a horror tale about meat-eating and possession. ‌It’s a Good Life, about a child with godlike powers, sets up a scenario that I still regularly think about. And Vonnegut’s ‌Harrison Bergeron is, of course, a layered classic, rife with mischief.

Outside the library, there’s still a bakery selling cheap bread rolls and jam donuts. (It’s a Primark now.) The smell is intoxicating but the stories already have me.

Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. I feel disconnected from the other children on the playground: like I’m missing a magic password that they know and I don’t. There’s no one big thing, but there are lots of little things; an idiom I don’t understand here, a reference I don’t get there. As an adult, I’ll have a name for what this is and why it’s true: third culture kid. But as a child, I just know that something is off.

‌The Dark is Rising sequence soft launches as a Blyton-esque adventure in Cornwall, and then dives into a story that is deeper than any of the culture I see around me. In its tales of pagan magic that pre-date the prevailing Christianity, of green witches and Cornish folk legends, it both captivates me and informs me about the history of the place I find myself in. And then there’s Will, and the Old Ones, and a wisdom that cuts underneath the superficial nonsense that I don’t understand and suggests that something deeper is far more important.

‌When the Dark comes rising six shall turn it back; Three from the circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron; Water, fire, stone; Five will return and one go alone. I can still recite it. The Dark is still rising. There is still silver on the tree.

Ten. There’s a doorway in St Mary’s Passage, a side street in the collegic part of Oxford, that is adorned with two fawns and a lion. Down the road, a Victorian lamppost still burns, albeit with electric light. There are plenty of tourist websites and videos that explain this was the inspiration for Narnia. I mean, it makes sense. But I don’t think it’s true.

Oxford is full of portals. I would know: I was a child there. There are space ships, time machines, great wooden galleons, castles hidden in dimensions somewhere between our reality and another. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were both inspired by Shotover, an area of hilly, wooded parkland on the edge of the city. Lewis had a house adjoining the area; Tolkien lived nearby. (Years earlier, Lewis Carroll roamed the hills, too. Years later, so did I.) They’re not the same place, but rather, multiple places that exist as layers over the same ground; different angles and reflections of the same ideas. They were both Inklings, after all.

Anyway, ‌The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe tells the truth about portals. They’re everywhere. I still check every wardrobe; don’t you?

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. I consume ‌The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‌The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe and Everything‌ in successive bouts of the flu in our house on the Marston Road, a tiny, water-damaged duplex that my parents have been restoring by hand. My bed is a single red and white bunk above a writing desk, on which I’ve doodled in ballpoint pen.

At the same time, I’ve been playing the Infocom text adventure adaptation, which Douglas Adams was directly involved in. All of these tales are irreverent in a way that directly appeals to me: they poke fun at norms and the bureaucracy of stasis. The books and the game all gently break the rules of their respective forms. They see how ridiculous the world is. This is a different kind of portal: not one to a fantasy realm, but one to a realization that you’re not alone. There are people on the road ahead of you, unpicking the rigidity of the world, and they’re looking back and winking.

And all of us are subject to forces bigger than us. Adams hated the little green planet that adorns every American book and game in the series, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Irony and sarcasm aren’t just forms of wit; they’re escape hatches. At their best, they’re a way of punching up. People who say they’re the lowest are missing the point and are probably Vogons.

Fourteen. It’s not that I’m sick a lot, but grade school is like a Petri dish for colds and flus, so I’m not notsick a lot, either. I’ve finished Douglas Adams but find myself hungry for more, and can’t stomach the direct parody of less wryly satirical books. Terry Pratchett fits the bill, and ‌Mort, the story of Death’s apprentice, is my jumping-off point.

They both eat systems and norms for breakfast, but Pratchett is often more directly, pointedly satirical than Adams was; this is overt social criticism, making fun of people with power and the structures established to dance around them. Teenage me, stuck in my bunk with yet another flu while rain pounds my bedroom windows, literally an outsider while the impenetrable politics and in-groups of high school carry on without me, adores it. I start to see the power of being an outsider. The thing about being a fish out of water is that you can see the water.

‌ It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it, Pratchett writes. Right on.

Fifteen. I’m thirteen and sitting in my homeroom class. We’ve all been reading our own books, and our homeroom teacher (who also happens to be our English teacher) has asked us each to read a passage out loud to the cloud. Some of my classmates are reading The Hardy Boys; some are reading Jane Austen; some are reading Tolkien.

I read a passage of ‌Timewyrm: Exodus where the Doctor and Ace are escaping the regenerated War Chief, the villain of 1969 Doctor Who story The War Games, who has helped Hitler raise an army of Nazi zombies. The passage ends when the zombie horde is halted with explosive grenades.

A few kids who generally don’t like to read come up afterwards to ask where I got the book. They seem excited. They seem excited to talk to me. These are not people who usually want to. Maybe I just have to give them something they like.

Sixteen. I catch my reflection in a department store mirror and shudder. Is that really me? Does that really have to be me? How can I stop it?

I look around at the other kids here: slim, elegant, comfortable in their skin. Effortless. Why can’t I be them?

Being an outsider is still being an outsider. By my late teens, I feel like there’s something truly wrong with me: it’s still like there’s a secret password that everybody knows but me, but now the stakes are higher. I want to belong; I want to feel like I have intrinsic value; I can’t find or justify it.

I’m tall now, really tall, and not exactly obese, but not slim, either. More than one person I have a crush on tells me to lose weight. More than one person I have a crush on tells me that maybe I’d have a chance if we had more money or if I wasn’t so weird. I’m constantly exhausted and the wry humor that used to characterize my otherness has been replaced with despair: nothing I do matters because there’s something wrong with me. It’s a firm depression, but either nobody catches it or nobody knows what to do with it. My grades nosedive.

‌Prozac Nation doesn’t catch everything, but it gives me a window into someone who feels a bit like I do. (I can’t relate to the drugs, but I see the allure, too.) Its author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, is like a cool depressed person: someone who feels this way but is also interesting, desirable, a little bit rockstar-like.

Today, I see the ego. As a teenager, I just see the reflection.

Seventeen. I’ve been writing software for a while now. My mother taught me BASIC on our 8-bit computer when I was five; when I was thirteen, my parents gifted me the PC-compatible version of Prospero Pascal for my birthday. I’ve worked through the manual and written a few small games. My first Pascal effort was Mr A Goes For a Walk, where a letter “A” did exactly that. A year later, I’d written a fully featured ‌Sokobanclone. I’m inspired by Jeff Minter’s seminal (and utterly irreverent) ‌Llamatron and want to build with the same sensibility. Making things feels really good; seeing people enjoy things I made feels even better, and goes some way towards filling the black hole of self-doubt that still lives within me.

Someone recommends ‌Microserfs: a book which should be a warning but isn’t received as one at all. The characters here are quirky outsiders — like me! — who throw themselves into building something on their own terms. They eat flat foods that can be pushed under doors so they can keep working. They struggle with their code, their work, and their lives. And they show me that there might be a place for me.

So many Douglas Coupland books, including this one, are about the emptiness of living in late-nineties capitalism. The clue is in the word serfs, but that isn’t what hits for me. That isn’t what hits at all.

I sit in the sixth form common room, a lounge in my high school where older students can study and do homework, and devour it, as Oasis, jungle music, and mid-nineties hip hop play around me. From somewhere, there’s the smell of cheese and onion crisps. Do they qualify as flat food?

Eighteen. The common room is a harsh place, but just one of a series of harsh places that school has represented for me. Because I’m big and don’t fight back, people feel like they can verbally abuse me, hit me, kick me. It comes from nowhere, usually, and I’m left reeling. Nobody, least of all the people who run the school, seems to want to help. Even today, I see fond reminiscences of people in our school year’s Facebook group, and I think, no, that person caused me so much pain. I’m other to them — a not-person — and that makes me fair game. I’ve internalized that it’s my fault. It happens because I deserve it, and I wonder how I might change to be more acceptable.

I find some kinship in ‌Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood’s story of an artist who revisits her childhood home. There’s something in there about the protagonist being untethered from her environment and the cultureof her environment that resonates. The book diverges so far from my experiences after that, but there’s so much here about the act of creation and how it interrelates with identity.

Nineteen. I’m seven years old and at my friend Clare’s house: a typically Oxford Victorian brick home that spreads over multiple floors. Her dad, Humphrey, has an office off of the stairs that I’ve only seen a glimpse of: there’s a desk with a typewriter and while he’s a very kind man in my eyes, he absolutely does not want us to go in there. He writes for a living, which seems like a magical thing to be able to do: the way I see it, you get to tell stories all day long. You get to create.

Later, he asks me what I want for my birthday, and I’m too shy to tell him what I really want, so I say a My Little Pony. What I really want is for him to sign ‌Mr Majeika for me: a story that’s fun in itself but clearly anchored in his life, his family, his personality. I still regret being shy about that.

Twenty. Years later I find Humphrey’s official biography of JRR Tolkien at Moe’s, a chaotic used bookstore in Berkeley, and buy it immediately. I’m not particularly interested in Tolkien but I remember Humphrey fondly. It’s a portal to him; to that time; to a feeling of possibilities; to laughing while running up the stairs.

Twenty-one. ‌TVGoHome, by an online writer I like called Charlie Brooker, is exactly what I like: a spoof of mainstream culture, through parody TV listings, that doesn’t hold back. One of the fake shows from the listings is later turned into a real show. Later, the author makes a spiritual follow-on about a zombie outbreak on the set of Big Brother. It’s a natural progression but I’m amazed they let him do it.

His final form is Black Mirror, which starts with the Prime Minister and a pig and winds up in sweeping cinematic dystopias starting Mackenzie Davis, Miley Cyrus, Bryce Dallas Howard. It all starting with comic strips advertising a dusty old second-hand store in inner London, and it ended somewhere so much grander, so much more global, without compromising almost anything. The claws are intact.

The book inspires me; the rest of it, too, but later. I wonder if I can be this kind of creator too; a curator of portals for other people to step through, to take them out of the water so they can see it for what it is. Or, at least, take a swipe at the places I can’t seem to fit.

Twenty-two. I wanted a clean break, away from Oxford and the trap of who I am, but this isn’t what I was going for.

I’m in a block of student flats in Edinburgh. If a door shuts anywhere in the building, you can hear it anywhere else: the sound carries, and people are drunk late into the night, and there’s never any peace. A fierce winter wind blows at the windowpanes. The mattress is covered in shiny plastic and I can feel it through my sheets.

I’m fascinated by ‌Brave New World and its setup of totalitarianism defended by acquiescence: a world where nobody has to ban books because nobody wants to read them. A dystopia protected by distraction. From my vantage point, it seems plausible.

Sometimes, my flatmates barge into my bedroom and pile onto me. One likes to spit in my food as I’m cooking it. One inhabitant of the building tells me not to talk to him. It doesn’t feel very far away from my high school common room, as much as I wanted it to be.

Twenty-three. I’ve decided to study computer science, but immediately realized my mistake. It’s not the study of how to make tools for people that empower them in ways they weren’t before; nor is it the study of how to tell stories with new means. It’s a practice rooted in mathematics and physics, of the underlying mechanics torn from the underlying humanity that gives any of it meaning. I hate it. I truly hate it.

And yet, although every day is a slog, I decide to stick it out. I know I’ll be able to use it later on.

The British system is very far from the American liberal arts approach of allowing students to choose their major after sampling a range of subjects. Here, you effectively have to choose your major when you’re sixteen, and it’s very hard to change. There is very little opportunity to study outside of your core subject.

But I do have one elective, in my second year. I choose Forensic Medicine because I think it will be useful fuel to tell stories. I learn about how forensic pathologists use blood spatter to determine the direction of blows and what kind of weapon is used. I learn Locard’s Principle of Exchange, which dictates that every contact leaves a trace: something that seems to apply far beyond the subject. Every time you touch something, every time something touches you, a trace is left. Inspired by this principle, I decide not to attend the optional autopsy lecture, fearing that it will change me in ways I might not like.

‌Simpson’s Forensic Medicine is a grisly book, but at least it’s not advanced calculus.

Twenty-four. Twenty-five. I came to Edinburgh because it was a cultural center more than because the university had a good computer science program, although both things are true.

I’m in a tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival, chatting with Garry Trudeau. I’ve loved his comic strip, Doonesbury, since I was an early teen; I started with his late-seventies collection ‌As the Kid Goes For Broke, which was lying around my great grandparents’ house, and kept reading. It’s got its claws into the world in the way I like, but somehow made its way into the mainstream, normy Sunday comics section.

He’s a delight. We’re talking about Asterix the Gaul, a comic it turns out we both love. I can’t believe my luck.

How can I be one of these people?

Twenty-six. I’m on the streets of Glasgow, protesting the impending war in Iraq. Altogether, two million people in the UK — around 3% of its entire population — are protesting with us. Some have pre-made placards made by the usual organizations that want to spread their own agenda as well as the matter at hand; others have homemade signs. My friend carries one that simply reads, “too angry for a slogan”.

It’s clear that the war is based on bad information. The so-called “dodgy dossier” of information about “weapons of mass destruction” is so obviously fake long before it is officially revealed to be. And yet, Britain is part of the invasion, and the dossier of convenient unfacts is used to help justify George W Bush’s war effort.

I’m new to politics and I’m apoplectically angry. Chomsky’s ‌Manufacturing Consent has some of the answers I’m looking for. I don’t like the implications, but the arguments resonate.

Clawing at the status quo mainstream starts to mean something more than poking fun at the ridiculous nature of class and power imbalances. Sometimes, lives are on the line.

Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. I’ve graduated. Almost immediately, I go back to work for my university; at that time there aren’t very many software jobs in Edinburgh, and I’ve grown into the city to the extent that I don’t want to leave quite yet.

I find myself working out of an office — actually a converted broom closet with a window that doesn’t shut, directly above where they fry the chips for the study canteen — at the Moray House School of Education with a belligerent PhD candidate who resents my presence. By necessity, we start talking, and it becomes clear that we have something to share with each other. He’s knee deep in the educational technology world, where people are starting to talk about “e-portfolios”: a collection of examples of academic work that sound a lot like social media if you squint a bit. In turn, I’m a programmer, a writer, and a blogger.

We build a platform together. I call it Elgg, after the town in Switzerland the Werdmullers come from. It’s inspired by Brad Fitzpatrick’s LiveJournal but is designed to be as easy to install as WordPress. Some people seem to like it.

My first published work is a co-written chapter in ‌The Handbook of Research in ePortfolios about our work. Later, people write full-blown books about our platform.

I move back to Oxford so that I’m closer to the London software ecosystem. We rent an office above a bookstore in Summertown, down the road from a Lebanese deli and a wine bar that for some reason sells excellent croissants. Some days I’m too excited to sit still in my chair.

I’ve (co-)created something that people like, and found a community in the process. I feel prouder and happier than I have since I was a child. I feel like this was a portal worth falling through.

Twenty-nine. Ben Brown seems interesting. I’m introduced to his site Uber through an Edinburgh friend: irreverent writing with an internet sensibility. I’m heavily online at this point — blogging, but in ways that feel uncool and awkward. What Ben is doing is very different; literary in a way. It’s a precursor of publisher like The Toast and even McSweeney’s.

Ben publishes books as So New Media, an indie house co-founded with James Stegall. I buy ‌Beneath The Axis Of Evil: One Man's Journey Into The Horrors Of War by Neal Pollack. Yet another dive into the Iraq War; another clawback at the Bush / Blair continuum.

Ben’s whole enterprise is inspiring: you can go it alone now. You can maintain your voice. And you can still find an audience while leaving yourself unmoderated. In some ways, on the internet, the rougher your edges are, the easier it is for other people to latch on to you.

Years later, I meet Ben in person at XOXO (he silently sidles up to me at an X-Men arcade machine). Years after that, I buy him lunch in San Francisco. I don’t think he knows exactly what it means to me.

Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. I’m exhausted; gaining weight; my feet, for some reason, are constantly cramping up. It’s all stress. All the startup.

My partner is constantly telling me that I need to relax and take time away from work. The startup is all-encompassing; stressful; in every part of my life. My friends and family try to ban me from working past 7:30pm. She buys me my first-ever massage, which is a revelation, and suggests books for me to read.

I’d previously read ‌Maus, a graphic novel that is both autobiographical a vividly-painted portrait of the horrors of the Holocaust. It uses the visual language of comic strips but the meaning runs deep. I come from a family that was also thrust into WWII: my father is a Japanese concentration camp survivor, my (Jewish) grandfather on my mother’s side was captured by the Nazis and presumed dead. The story itself resonates with me, but the form does too: comics are a flippant visual medium, in a way, but here that’s used as an entry point for a realism that might not have hit as hard another way.

So Helen introduces me to Alan Moore: first through ‌From Hell and then ‌V for Vendetta. Unlike Maus, these are unapologetically fiction, but the use of the comics medium is similarly effective. I particularly like the way From Hell establishes a new psychogeography of London, rooting the story of Jack the Ripper in its location by adding layers and resonances that tie back to the planning of the city itself. It adds something new to places I’ve walked all my life. That’s good. I’m looking for something new.

Thirty-three. My co-founder likes to tell new people we meet that we’re not friends. More than once, he’s threatened to physically fight me: most memorably over the limitations of the OpenID specification. On a drive through the rolling Yorkshire hills, sunshine dappling the moor grass, he tells me that he’s worried about hiring women because they might get pregnant. He pulls me aside during a contract for MIT to let me know he’s in this for himself and that I should expect him to make decisions with that in mind. On a work excursion to Brighton, he refuses to eat with the rest of the team.

This is, in short, not working out.

The business threatens to move towards servicing hedge funds, and I choose to leave. One afternoon, I simply close my laptop and listen to the quiet of my house, the footsteps of pedestrians on the street outside, the swoosh of passing cars. Later, there will be worries about money and what exactly I will do next, but for that one spring afternoon, I feel weightless.

I need punctuation. A clean break.

I’ve never been to Rome in living memory. As it turns out, it’s also cheap to get there.

My then-partner and I spend ten days roaming its ancient streets, armed with the Rough Guide to Rome. “I don’t want this to end,” she says, as we eat grilled artichokes and cacio e pepe on outdoor tables set in a cobblestoned alleyway. It’s a new relationship and we’re discovering each other as well as the twists and turns of an ancient city. “Me either,” I say, and I take another bite.

Thirty-four. I’m six years old. My grandparents live with us for a little while in a grand old house in Oxford: a stone Victorian with a curved driveway and a big back garden. The kitchen has terracotta tiles. My Grandma reads ‌The Black Island to me in my bed and stays with me for a bit while I drift off to sleep.

I’m seven years old. I’m told to stay in my bedroom. My mother’s received a phone call and is crying in the living room. I’m not to go see her. I’m to wait. My Grandma had pulmonary fibrosis in her lungs; she was finding it harder and harder to breathe. And now, so suddenly, she’s gone. All the way in Texas; thousands of miles away from my mother. I can’t begin comprehend the loss but I know that if my mother was sick I would want to see her again.

Thirty-five. My parents have lived in California for years now: first to look after my Oma, and then just to live. Ma — after consistently calling her by her first name throughout my childhood, she’s Ma to me in my thirties — has retrained from an analyst for the telecommunications industry to a middle school science teacher in one of the central valley’s most impoverished districts. She loves her work in a way she never did before.

But she has a persistent cough that won’t let go.

At first we wonder if it’s just the dust of the Central Valley: almond shells and the detritus from overfarming. Maybe she just needs clean air.

It’s almost Christmas-time. I’ve wrapped a copy of ‌You Can Write Children’s Books. She would be so good at it — her writing, the way she tells stories, has always been so magical to me — and it’s so in line with what she’s turned her life to do.

In the liner, I add some written lines of my own, based on her life in Oxford:

In a house at the bottom of a hill, in a small town that rarely saw the sun, there lived a little dog who loved to play.

A few days before Christmas, we understand that she has pulmonary fibrosis. This same thief of a disease my Grandma had. We knew, in a way — my dad, in particular, knew — but the diagnosis makes it official. It’s a new cloud.

What we don’t understand:

What happens next.

What to do next.

How long she has.

Who else will get it.

Why.

Thirty-six. My sister is reading my copy of ‌Parable of the Sower to Ma. She’s perched on my parents’ bed in Santa Rosa. Outside, the sun is shining over the Sonoma hills. Somewhere, my dad is tinkering with something downstairs.

It’s been a while. My sister and I both moved to California, starting from scratch. Ma continued teaching for as long as she could; her middle school science teachers were fascinated by the oxygen tanks she began to wear on her back like a Ghostbuster. Then it became too hard and too heavy, her oxygen needs too great. I sent a Hail Mary letter to the hospital explaining how badly in need she was; her oxygen concentrators were refrigerator sized and running in parallel, her movements limited by how far her cannula tube could extend. Eventually, at the very last moment, they tried something new and cut a set of lungs down to fit her size in order to try and save her life.

The first night, I refuse to leave her side. The doctors eventually kick me out of her ICU room and I sleep in the family room down the hall. The day after happens to be the Super Bowl; she takes her first post-double-lung-transplant walk just as Beyoncé takes to the halftime stage to sing Crazy Right Now.

Now, a few years later, the drugs are taking their toll. She’s tired. She’s often ill. But she’s here. My sister likes to read to her, and she loves lying there and listening. Other times, at the dialysis she now needs because the anti-rejection drugs have killed her kidneys, she reads on a Kindle with the font size cranked practically as high as it will go.

Every day is a gift. Every contact leaves a trace. Every book is a portal out of here.

Thirty-seven. The last book Ma and I read together is ‌The Nickel Boys. It’s the kind of thing she likes to read: a story about America’s monstrous history, told with skill and resonance. We share our reflections of it; the experience of reading the same ideas. Asynchronously, sure, but together all the same.

Thirty-eight. When I move to California I land in Berkeley. I find myself a coworking space above a coffee shop: a mix of developers, academics, and artists. Most of us have a standard office desk, but one inhabitant, Hallie Bateman, has brought in an antique wooden artist’s desk that looks like it’s been dropped in from another dimension. It’s covered in paintbrushes, inks, and paper: fragments of a very different kind of professional life to the one I’m leading.

I continue to follow her work long after we share an office. When she publishes ‌What to Do When I'm Gone: A Mother's Wisdom to Her Daughter — instructions from her own mother about what to do once she dies — I buy it immediately. Back then, when Ma was still around, I could read it all the way through. I no longer can. It sits on my shelf and I sometimes think about it, but grief is like a wave, and I know it can overtake me.

Instead of asking Ma for instructions, I sit down with a tripod and a camera and I record her life story, instead.

Thirty-nine. My Aunt publishes a book about evaluating scientific evidence in the context of civil and criminal legal contexts.

I have it, of course, even though I am not a lawyer and I have no professional need for it. I remember her poring over the edit on her laptop in the downstairs bedroom in my great grandparents’ house on Cape Cod.

The last time I see her, we eat Thai food in the Tenderloin. I have no idea it’s the last time. This disease is evil.

Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two. I’m in Santa Rosa and can still hear the wheels of the pole the feeding tube hangs from wheeling across the floor; of the oxygen clicking through the cannula; of my parents talking. It will fade, eventually, but I’m haunted now, and lost.

My mother talked about being radicalized. Both my parents were Berkeley radicals, which just means that they took action on causes they cared about. I think about all those people I’ve looked up to who kept their claws sharp, who dug in, who fought for equity and didn’t compromise their values, who had a voice and used it.

I walk the Santa Rosa hills, looking at these big houses on the edge of wine country, and listen to the audiobook of ‌The Jakarta Method, which details the murder undertaken in the name of America. I re-read ‌The Handmaid’s Tale. Through ‌Caste, I’m appalled to learn that Hitler’s treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany was inspired by American Jim Crow laws.

By now I know that I won’t get the disease — or at least, not according to our current understanding of that. It’s a genetic mutation that I don’t have. But regardless, we all have limited time, and none of us know how much time we have left. Time is ticking for everyone.

I think about how I might do a better job of using my voice to make the world better. Later, I’ll start applying to jobs where I can help people speak truth to power; to work to further the work of journalism. To honor my mother — really to honor both my parents — and what she stood for in the world. I want to live up to them.

Forty-three. I allow myself to start to write again. Words, not software. It feels daunting. My cousin Sarah, who is a very successful author (and whose books, although not designed for me, have made me cry), once recommended ‌Bird By Bird. I’ve come back to it again and again: it’s about writing but also not. Its lessons are relevant to anyone who is building something big and new; anyone who is picking themselves up.

‌You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

Forty-four. The last book Ma gives me is ‌Between the World and Me: a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son. It is masterful. A portal to lived experiences I don’t have; a way in to understanding them, and through this understanding, to better understand the role I have to play, too.

It’s not the main point of the book, but one of those unknown lived experiences: having a son and the sense of responsibility that follows. I can’t imagine the fear of caring for a child while being Black in America; I can’t imagine having a child at all.

Forty-five. Erin’s labor has been two days long, difficult, and painful. Our son wasn’t breathing in the way they expected him to, so I’m standing at a table off to the side while they put a mask to him and try to get him to start. I find myself wondering if this is, somehow, the disease, this curse, out to get us again.

Eventually, after a few minutes that seem like days or years, my heart pounding in my chest all the while, he breathes normally. We’re able to return him, the doctors and me, to his waiting mother. He cries, then snuggles in. She cries with him.

I can’t believe Ma will never meet him. She’s there, of course. I remember the songs she sang to me and sing them to him; I find myself using the same words to console him and to let him know he’s loved. Maybe I won’t read him The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but I have other books in mind.

There will be new books, too, that we did not discover together but will continue our story.

Have you ever read ‌The Runaway Bunny?

“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” said his mother, “I will be a tree that you come home to.”

She is nowhere and she is everywhere. I see her in him. I see myself in him and him in me. Every contact leaves a trace. We are a continuum.

Forty-six. Donald Trump has been re-elected. The shadow of renewed nationalism, of division, of hate feels heavier than ever. The world is at, or on the brink of, war. I remember marching in Glasgow, the despair when it came to nothing. We are all in need of a refuge. We are all in need of portals out of here.

We’re lying in bed: Erin, him, and me. “Read a book?” My son asks me. Of course I read to him. Of course.

I open ‌The Story of Ferdinand and begin:

‌Once upon a time in Spain there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand. All the other little bulls he lived with would run and jump and butt their heads together, but not Ferdinand. He liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.

He snuggles into my arm and I stay with him until he falls asleep.

It’s December, somehow; the tail end of a stressful year, but also the precursor to another one that (and I’m sorry this isn’t the cheeriest prediction) somehow promises to be worse. Good times.

How do we propose to survive it?

Although I’m not a big resolutions guy, this year I think I need to set firm goals in order to get through it with intention. Sure, the primary goal (as always) is just to get through the year intact, but 2025 will also be foundational: a year where how we show up and manifest our presence sets the groundwork for everything that comes beyond. The world is changing, whether we like it or not: more Trump, more war, more division, more climate change. How we react to that, and how we choose to conduct our life, really matters.

Lists of New Year’s resolutions never really cut to the “why”: sure, you want to get fit, but where does that really get you? What’s your underlying purpose: the mission that will keep you on track? Why does any of it matter at all?

This is maybe the most LinkedIn idea ever, and maybe it’s because when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I’ve found myself thinking that, rather than resolutions, 2025 needs OKRs.

Objectives and Key Results are a management tool that was originally created by Andy Grove at Intel, but is now used in almost every tech company in almost every scenario. Here, you set a handful of top-level objectives, and then list some time-limited, measurable results for each one that will indicate that you’re on your path to achieving them. In an era where it’s going to be important to stick to our values and make progress on our goals as human beings in the face of increasing adverse pressure, I think figuring out what we need to do in order to make progress is going to be a helpful tool.

Remembering that OKRs have mostly been a tool for work, here’s an example objective with key results from Asana:

‌Objective: Become the market leader in cloud-based project management software.

Key results:

1. Increase market share from 15% to 30% by the end of the fiscal year.
2. Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 60+ by the end of Q3.
3. Launch three new product features per quarter based on user feedback and usage data.
4. Increase the free-to-paid conversion rate from 5% to 15% by the end of Q4.

In a corporate setting, this is pretty straightforward. Each objective should tie into a strategy that brings you closer to the vision for the world that your team is trying to create, which in turn is in service of a mission that defines why you exist in the world. So if you’re setting OKRs for a quarter, the hope is that each one will get you a little bit closer to creating the world you’ve set out to make, in service of that mission. If they don’t, they’re bad OKRs.

Clearly, I don’t want to set these sorts of corporate goals for my personal life; the real psycho move would be to send a Net Promoter Score survey to your friends and family. But I do think there’s value in thinking about, periodically, what your mission is (what is the purpose of your life?), your vision (what is the world that you seek to create?), your strategy and your objectives. And then figuring out what your measurable key results are that you actually want to achieve.

Is this approach a little bit over the line into management psychosis? Definitely. Could it still be useful? I think probably.

My mission is to work on and support things that make the world more equal and informed, while living a life rooted in creativity, inclusiveness, openness, and spontaneity, in opposition to competitiveness, aggression, tribalism, and conformity.

My vision is an aligned life where I and the people around me can truly be themselves, follow their passions, and do so in an environment of fairness and freedom, in an integrated community that is well-supported with transit, education, welfare, culture, and an internationalist outlook.

With those stated, without further ado, here are my OKRs for 2025:

Pivot from being a developer who writes to a writer who develops.

I’ve always identified as a developer who writes, but writing was my first love. In 2025, I want to realign my identity to reflect my actual priorities. Technology pays the bills, but writing feeds my soul — in 2025, I want to prioritize what genuinely drives me. Andy Weir and Ted Chiang, two writers who have made this leap, are inspirations to me.

This goal is about fostering a life rooted in creativity, and being true to my values and motivations.

Key results for 2025:

1. Spend an hour a day writing fiction.
2. Publish four short stories in publications where my work has never previously appeared.
3. Finish the current novel.
4. Finish a subsequent novel.
5. Limit blogging to no more than twice a week to preserve time and energy for other writing.
6. Read a minimum of two fiction novels a month.

Be an available father who intentionally expands our son’s horizons.

We have the world’s most incredible two year old. (If you also have a two year old, please don’t fight me on this. You know we all think our children are the most amazing.) I was very lucky to have parents who intentionally expanded my horizons in terms of breaking me out of a templated life: we lived in different countries, saw different ways of living, knew people from all over the world, and didn’t conform for conformity’s sake. Particularly in an era that seems to invite parochialism and a very narrow view of the world, I want to manifest the same thing for our son. I want his world to be expansive, inclusive, and far away from restrictive norms: a global outlook that values all people.

This goal is about openness and a global perspective, and prioritizing the life and prospects of our son.

Key results for 2025:

1. Take him to at least one continent he has never previously visited and make a firm plan to take him to another.
2. Take him to a museum or cultural event at least once per month.
3. Do not spend time on devices (phone or laptop) around him.
4. Read to him every night and intentionally pick stories from different cultures.

Strengthen my relationships with my friends and family.

I miss my friends. I miss my family. We are only as strong as our communities. Until the pandemic, I was pretty good about keeping up with people, but the onset of COVID-19 turned me into more of a recluse. (Moving across the country didn’t help.) I also had what I now think of as a breakdown in the year after my mother’s death — after a ten-year terminal illness which was the reason for my move to the US in the first place — and I made some decisions that I deeply regret.

This goal, at its heart, is about fostering a strong community.

Key results for 2025:

1. Make real apologies to family members I hurt or disappointed during the year after my mother’s death.
2. Reconnect with at least five friends I’ve lost touch with by scheduling regular check-ins (calls, video chats, or in-person meetups).
3. Plan at least two reunions with friends or extended family during the year.
4. Meet up with at least one friend in person per month.
5. Have one 1:1 meal or coffee with my dad every week.
6. Continue working in couples therapy to build a relationship founded on mutual understanding and emotional intimacy.

Live longer.

Somewhere around 2016, I let a combination of malaise and depression overtake me. I gained weight, I got sleepy, and I became less fit. I used to walk everywhere, and I stopped.

If this continues, I will die earlier than I want to. I don’t want to die. I want to live — particularly as an older parent of a toddler. More than anything, this goal is about being present for our son.

Key results for 2025:

1. Do one vigorous workout exercise per day, every day, except when sick or traveling.
2. Run at least one 5K per week starting mid-year.
3. Walk to all destinations if walking is an option in the time available, regardless of the weather.
4. Make a meaningful positive diet change, for example by becoming pescatarian and cutting out all processed food.
5. Eat out no more than once per month, except when traveling.
6. Don’t eat fast food, except when it’s genuinely the only option (for example, on a road trip).

Build in more freedom.

It’s easy to get caught up in a trap of your own making. The need to make more money often leads to less available time and a focus on things other than what you wanted the money to be able to do in the first place. It’s better to be free and unconstrained than to be wealthy and living a cookie-cutter life.

Similarly, it’s better to be true to yourself and your values than to bite your tongue — particularly in this upcoming era.

This goal is fundamentally about non-conformity and being true to your values: two things that are really important to me.

Key results for 2025:

1. Lower monthly living costs by at least 25%.
2. Increase available daily free time by 2 hours.
3. Do not mince words with regards to anti-fascism, internationalism, fairness, or other core values.
4. Travel for personal reasons (including just for fun!) at least once a quarter.

Do meaningful work with the potential to make the world more equal and informed.

I want to work on projects — whether by building or supporting them — that have the potential to make the world more equal and informed. I’ve found a home doing that in service of meaningful journalism that helps to strengthen democracy.

In order for this work to be meaningful to me, it has to have a strong, aligned mission, but I also need to do it with autonomy, trust, and the ability to set strategy and standards. I want to call the shots for my own work.

Key results for 2025:

1. Ship a product with the potential to make the world more informed and equal, leveraging a technology strategy that reflects my mission, which I have defined and implemented.
2. Advise and support two projects aligned with this mission, ensuring they make meaningful progress and ship to their intended audiences.
3. Define and implement at least two core technology policies at my employer.
4. Open source at least two core technology policies for any organization to use and build on.

These OKRs are my guide for 2025: a year where I want to live more intentionally, aligned with my values, and present for the things that truly matter. They’re not about perfection but about progress and purpose.

They’re also not set in stone: things happen. Life changes. They’re intended to be a North Star that guides me rather than a scaffold that constrains me. If I need to adjust them, I will. But I think it’s more useful to have these goals in mind than none at all.

These are mine. How about you? If you’re inclined to write your own OKRs for 2025, I’d love to read them.

Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash

I’m paralyzed by the world. We seem to be at a kind of crossroads.

There’s so much to be appalled by, so much to be worried about, and I worry that not saying something might be considered to be acquiescence or approval.

So, in this moment, I thought I’d actually take a step back and explain what my worldview actually is. It’s perhaps overly ambitious, but I want to declare I think is important, and what drives me to say the sorts of things I do. And, yes, these same factors also drive the decisions I make about where I work and how I build software.

As always, I would like to read yours.

My view on the world — as is true of yours, and of everybody’s — is a function of my lived experiences, and the lived experiences of the people I care about.

It’s not about leading the world; it’s about living in a peaceful one

I was born in the Netherlands, grew up in England, spent time in Austria, went to school in Scotland, and have been in the United States since my early thirties. My dad is Swiss-Dutch-Indonesian; my mother was American on one side and Ukrainian on the other. They met in Berkeley in the early seventies and were heavily active in various progressive causes as activists. My dad in particular, who was drafted into the US Army after his family moved to America as a teenager, organized Vietnam War protests in the Bay Area, and was often harassed by the police.

My parents intentionally left the US to raise me. The closest thing I have to a hometown is Oxford, famous for its universities, where academic families are constantly coming through. My peers at school came from all over the world — including from behind the iron curtain — and experiencing the different smells and tastes of peoples’ homes was completely normal.

At the same time, I was a third culture kid for almost all of my childhood and early adulthood, and identified with no national identity. I never felt any real ties to any particular geographic place for its own sake. I was raised an atheist and have never felt religious ties (even though, as a child in England, I went to a Church of England school where we were made to pray every day). What I did identify with, very strongly, was family.

My dad is one of the youngest concentration camp survivors: he spent his early years in a Japanese-run camp in Indonesia, which still colors the way he sees the world. His mother had nightmares every single night for the rest of her life; I will remember hearing her screams though the walls forever. His father, who I never got to meet, was a resistance leader who was forced to dig his own grave multiple times. I’ve heard stories about the camps and what happened afterwards for my entire life. Even when they returned to the Netherlands, Indo people like my dad’s family were an ethnic minority and treated poorly. They eventually moved to California, thanks to a local sponsor, where they ran a gas station on highway 12 in Sebastopol. My uncle was severely beaten up for daring to serve Black people. The gas station itself was routinely shot at — once killing the family dog — simply because it was run by immigrants.

My great grandfather escaped Ukraine twice. His village was destroyed by the White Army as part of vicious Pogroms. When he emigrated to the US, he secularized, changing his name in the process in order to sound less Jewish. Eventually he became the General Manager of the Pennsylvania Joint Board of the Amalgamated Shirt Workers. I’ve previously posted excerpts from my grandfather’s obituary that discuss that experience as well as my grandfather’s experience as a Jewish POW in Germany during WWII.

My grandfather, by the way, ended up translating Crime and Punishment into English, and taught in the Slavic and Eurasian Studies and History departments at the University of Texas at Austin for forty years. He met Albert Einstein, had coffee with Sylvia Plath, discussed philosophy with Hannah Arendt, and never quite realized his dream of being a poet. In the end, he married into an institutional American family: my great grandfather was a WWI test pilot and eventually became a diplomat who negotiated the US withdrawal from Haiti. (This fact of my family history is, I want to be clear, not an endorsement of the US’s behavior overseas, including in Haiti.)

So, all of this is to say: I have no interest in patriotism, let alone nationalism. It’s not a value I hold, and I’m not excited by any country having a leadership position in the world. I find flag-waving to be petty. What I care about are values: the democracy, inclusion, and co-operation that can lead to a lasting peace. I’m repelled by military strength, because I’ve seen what various militaries did to my family. I’m repelled by anti-immigrant sentiment, because I come from refugees and immigrants. I don’t like the idea of assimilation, because I’ve seen the richness inherent in lots of cultures. Forced assimilation — which is usually into a conquering culture — is tantamount to subjugation.

National exceptionalism — American exceptionalism, or European exceptionalism, come to that — is ridiculous on its face. Cold wars and imperialist foreign policies are things to avoid, not things to perpetuate. No country is the “best”, and even the idea of “a best country” is narrow-minded. No religion is the “best”; please enjoy practicing yours, but please don’t impose it on anyone else. There are definitely people who think McCarthy’s witch hunt against communism was right in spirit, even if they condemn the historical event itself — let’s just say they and I harbor some very different ideas about what an open, democratic society should look like.

Nations aren’t what’s important. Principles are. Specifically, the principles of openness, inclusion, fairness, peace, equity, and democracy.

What matters is that everyone can live a good life, wherever they are, whoever they are, and however they identify, free from threat of violence or exploitation. Ideological or national superiority aren’t useful values. What matters is the experience of being a human, everywhere. What matters is avoiding the killing and horror of war. What matters is honoring the beautiful diversity of the world.

A strong operating system for all

I was only half-joking when I compared governments to operating systems. While they certainly don’t map perfectly to actual software operating systems, I do think they provide a very similar purpose: to create a bedrock of services and infrastructure in order to ensure society runs smoothly.

What does “society runs smoothly” really mean? I’ll return to my definition above. What matters is that everyone can live a good life, wherever they are, whoever they are, and however they identify, free from threat of violence or exploitation. Freedom of expression, association, and to pursue one’s best interests are important here: what John Locke called the pursuit of happiness. To ensure the safety of that pursuit, I think John Locke’s version of a social contract — the idea that we surrender a little personal liberty in order to make evolving common agreements in the best interests of everyone — is important.

I can’t be a libertarian because I see the importance of the trade-offs here. One role of the operating system is to prevent the vulnerable from exploitation: public goods like universal healthcare, public education, and integrated public transit ensure that people who are not wealthy have the opportunity to build a great life. One of the most visceral reactions I’ve ever had in my life was discovering Ayn Rand, and then, to my horror, discovering that beyond just getting into her novels, some people actually believed in her ideology of everyone for themselves.

Healthy communities are an important part of all of our well-being. Once again: every person deserves to live a good life. We all live in a complex, interconnected network of people, and what happens to someone else also affects us. Caring for the whole network is also in our own best interests. It can’t be everyone for themselves.

It’s hopefully obvious from my definition, but I don’t think GDP (or money at all) is a great way to measure a society, either. It doesn’t say much about what an ordinary person’s experience actually is. It doesn’t measure human well-being, and that’s how we should be thinking about how well we’re doing. I’m less interested in is the stock market going up? than is being poor a death sentence? as a question — and I don’t think the first necessarily leads to a reduction in the second. More and more people agree.

One important function of the social operating system is welfare, which ensures that people don’t fall though the cracks. There are others, some of which I’ve already mentioned: education, transit, and healthcare.

I couldn’t have founded my first startup if I hadn’t had the benefit of the excellent National Health Service. Millions of PR dollars have been spent in the US to paint social infrastructure as being a bad thing, but I never once had to worry about going to the doctor under universal healthcare. I didn’t have to worry about losing health insurance when I quit my job. I could just do it. Say what you want about free markets, but I think that freedom of optionality — having broad choices regardless of income or personal net worth — comes closer to real personal freedom than a world without that kind of social infrastructure.

Here in the United States, it doesn’t come automatically: you need people to fight for you. I’ve lost five members of my family to an incurable genetic disease. One of them was my mother, who I helped care for over the course of a decade — which was, in fact, the reason I moved to the US to begin with. She was a teacher, and the great medical care she received was only possible because of the incredible negotiating power of her teacher’s union. While there should have simply been universal healthcare to look after her, their incredible negotiating power literally lengthened her life by eight years. Unions can be amazing institutions; while not every union is great, the concept of them is. And in a world without the social infrastructure to care for the vulnerable, they are vital.

This should be the purpose of the law, too: to prevent harm and exploitation, particularly of the vulnerable, in service of maintaining the ability to have a good quality of life. But the law itself, alongside tradition and the twin ideas of unity and stability, often does the opposite. It has often used as a way to maintain a status quo where vulnerable people are exploited for other peoples’ benefit.

This runs deep: some of the earliest police forces in America were slave patrols. A law that only benefits the powerful or upholds an unjust status quo is, in itself, unjust. Unity that depends on adherence to the values of the powerful (and on the silence or silencing of the vulnerable) is a sham. Stability based on prioritizing the needs of an in-group to the exclusion of others is definitionally fascism. A claim that moderate values are more reasonable only makes sense to people who don’t need more radical change in order to achieve equity.

Being awake to those injustices is not a binary: it’s not something you either are or not. It’s an ongoing, uncomfortable process of education and coming to terms. There are lots of ways to deal with and redress them, the comparative merits of which are up for discussion. What’s clear to me, though, is that dismissing their existence outright, and painting them with a reductionist brush in order to rob them of importance, is in itself a perpetuation of those injustices.

When people started talking about being “woke” and taking to the streets to demand restorative justice, I was relieved and excited. This is what moving forward looks like. In contrast, I see people harping on about the harms of “woke-ism” as being part of the dying gasps of the twentieth century: that adherence to tradition and unity and stability in service of the same old inequalities. Change is good; particularly here.

Change can also be easy. Using a preferred pronoun costs you nothing except for letting go of a tradition. The tradition, in other words, gets in the way of someone’s chosen identity being recognized. Same-sex marriage costs you nothing except for letting go of a tradition. The tradition once again gets in the way of someone being able to realize their needs. Your religious beliefs might forbid same-sex marriage; then simply don’t get same-sex married. Practice your own religion to your heart’s content, but don’t enforce your traditions on anyone else. Refer to someone as they would like to be referred; treat everybody with respect. It seems foundational. A fear of change or adherence to a tradition should not be a barrier to making the world more just or treating our fellow humans with respect.

Let’s return again to the core idea: every person deserves to live a good life. Of course, who we consider to be a “person” is important. Thomas Jefferson incorporated Locke’s version of a social contract into the Declaration of Independence, even going so far as to say that “all men are created equal,” but he famously kept slaves. These days, we might ask about our spheres of concern: do we care about people in our families? Our neighborhoods? Our towns and cities? Our churches? Our ethnicities? Our value structures? Our states? Our countries? Our regions? The world? How do we relate to people outside of those spheres?

For reasons I’ve tried to explain above, I’d love it if we considered the world to be what we care about; the welfare of a person in Gaza is just as important as the welfare of a person next door, even if we might not share a religion or care for the regime they live under. In fact, depending on their context, their welfare might be more important, because they need more help to bring them to that reasonable standard of living, free from violence and exploitation.

Because our definitions of what a good life is vary, and because no government can possibly claim to represent or understand the complete set of needs and lived experiences in its populace, participative democracy is the only equitable model for government. What’s important here: everyone can vote without hindrance, votes are fair, anyone can become a representative, decisions are actually made at the ballot box rather than in court, and there is real choice. (If there’s a candidate whose values you hate, do what you can to persuade your fellow voters to vote for someone else. That’s what democracy is.)

Those principles are core. It might surprise you to learn that I’m not inherently against the idea of billionaires, and certainly not against the idea of starting businesses and finding success in doing so. But it must be done without exploiting other people and preventing them from being able to live a good life. It must be done without perpetuating injustices, for example by eroding workers’ rights, forcing a minimum wage that is too low to live well on, lobbying for unequal laws, or fighting against their ability to negotiate for better working conditions. Can it be done without those things? I don’t know. But if it can’t, then it shouldn’t happen.

So what does this have to do with the internet?

I see the web as a platform as being rooted in the kind of internationalism I believe in. The internet itself is a physical manifestation of the idea that we are all connected.

Anyone can publish, anywhere, and be read by anyone, anywhere. That’s amazing! Anyone can start a business and find users all over the world. That’s also amazing! It’s the most borderless, open platform we’ve ever created. The potential to learn about the lives of people we would never otherwise meet, in places we would never otherwise visit, is colossal. We can share ideas and, even more importantly, build empathy globally. I couldn’t be more excited about that. That’s what keeps me building.

It’s easier to dehumanize someone you don’t know. The internet has the potential to allow everybody to become knowable. I see that as a route to peace, and to a better world where exploitation can no longer happen in the shadows.

What I’m not enthused by is the idea that the internet is here as an exercise in furthering any one country’s interests: that one nation’s worldview should trump another’s. At its best, it’s an international commons: an overtly progressive space by design.

I support the indieweb and the fediverse because those technologies harness for the benefit of the public, rather than for the profit and entrenched power of a tiny few. I see silos and centralized services as being anti-democracy, because the whims of a monarch-like figure can have a profound impact on which information we’re allowed to see. We’ve seen that most obviously recently with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, but it was previously also true of Facebook, and of every large service that aimed to intermediate peoples’ connections with each other. If one entity controls what we see and can learn about, they will abuse it, always.

I’m imperfect. Of course I am. I’ve made terrible mistakes and, from time to time, I’ve hurt people. But that doesn’t mean I can’t try.

I’ve built open source platforms for organizing educational institutions and non-profits; I’ve supported newsrooms that help to create a more informed voting population; I’ve worked in newsrooms that help speak truth to power. It’s not because I love social networking in itself, or because I want to get rich by building software.

It’s because I remember the sound of my Oma having nightmares through the walls. I see the nationalists and isolationists as trying to divide people into in-groups and out-groups. I see hoarding wealth as akin to building walls. I see conservatism as being a way to preserve the kind of bigotry that can grow and explode into the kinds of hatred that swallow whole families. Quixotic as it might be, I see connecting people as a way to help prevent it all from ever happening again.

It’s my mother’s birthday. She would be 72 today.

The week we lost her, I wrote this piece, which I re-read today.

In it, our friend Anita Hurrell remembered her like this:

One time you drove us in the van to the seaside and we ate sandwiches with cucumber in them and I thought they tasted delicious and I felt this strong sense of deep content sitting with Hannah in the back listening to her singing and humming for the whole journey. I have no idea where we went, and in my head it was nowhere in England, but rather part of the big-hearted, loving, funny, relaxed, non-conformist world of your family in my childhood - full of your laughter and your enormous kindness.

[…] I look back and see […] what a true feminist you were, how much of parenting you seemed to do much better than we do these days, how generous and homemade and fun and kind the world you and Oscar [my dad] made was.

I feel so privileged to have had that childhood. To have had a mother like her.

In the piece I read at her memorial, I said:

Before I was born, both my parents were involved in struggles to support affirmative action and tenants’ rights. She described herself as having been radicalized early on, but it’s not particularly that she was radical: she could just see past the social templates that everyone is expected to adhere to, and which perpetuate systemic injustices, and could see how everything should operate to be fairer.

That was true on every level. She wanted she and [her siblings] to all be treated equally, and would make it known if she thought the others were getting a raw deal. She tried her best to treat Hannah and I equally. If someone made a sexist or a homophobic remark around her, she would call it out. If someone was xenophobic, or unthinkingly imperialist, she would bring it up. She was outspoken - always with good humor, but always adamant about what really mattered.

When our son was born, I wrote:

The last time I saw you, just over a year ago, you were in a bed in the same institution, your donated lungs breathing fainter and fainter. I kissed you on the forehead and told you I loved you. You’d told me that what you wanted to hear was us talking amongst ourselves; to know that we’d continue without you. In the end, that’s what happened. But I miss you terribly: I feel the grief of losing you every day, and never more than when my child was born.

[…] In this worse universe that doesn’t have you in it, I’ve been intentionally trying to channel you. I’ve been trying to imagine how you would have shown up with them, and what your advice for me would have been. I’ve been trying to convey that good-humored warmth I always felt. You made me feel safe: physically, yes, but more than that, emotionally. I want to make them feel safe, too: to be who they really are.

That first piece from three days after we lost her:

I want to honor her by furthering what she put into the world. The loving, non-conformist, irreverent, equity-minded spirit that she embodied.

Her values are the right ones, I’m sure of it — her non-conformity, her progressivism, her intellectual curiosity, her fearlessness and silliness (and fearless silliness), her gameness for adventure, her internationalism, her inclusive care and love for everybody and absolute disregard for the expectations other people had for her, or for nonsense tradition, for institutions, or for money.

She is the best person I’ve ever met and could ever hope to meet. I’ve been so, deeply sad, every day, but grief isn’t enough to honor her, and I wish I’d been better at doing that.

I miss you, Ma. I love you. I’m so, so sorry.

I don’t want to call these the best books I read last year: I read plenty of other well-written, worthy contenders. But these six titles are the ones that stuck with me and left me thinking about them long after I was done; they were, in that sense, my favorites. Maybe you’ll enjoy them too.

Readme.Txt: A Memoir, by Chelsea Manning

This memoir is one of those historical documents that reveal so much about their era, both in its supertext and in small details that are in themselves revealing. As well as the story of her leaks and their aftermath, Chelsea discusses what it’s like to work in military intelligence in gut-wrenching detail.

Regardless of your opinion of her actions (she’s one of my heroes), this is an important and uncompromisingly personal record of our era.

How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu

This ostensibly science fiction novel is not what I thought it was going to be. An early chapter was so heartbreaking that I thought I would have to abandon the book; it brought up feelings of loss I hadn’t felt since my mother died.

I still don’t know if I appreciate the catharsis, but that’s what this book is: the author conjures how deeply we feel in the face of the worst horrors. It’s poetry, in a way, using science fiction as a particular kind of lens. Artful and devastating.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein

A riveting analysis of the late-stage internet era, using the parallel paths of Naomis Klein and Wolf as a device to examine the multiple realities we've constructed for ourselves.

I particularly agree with a conclusion that pulls no punches about how to correct our paths and potentially save ourselves.

Severance, by Ling Ma

I loved this story about loss, meaning, and what it means to be an immigrant, dressed up as a science fiction novel. As with ‌ How High We Go in the Dark, this is my favorite kind of science fiction: speculation as metaphor in order to talk about something far more human.

But the science fiction is good too, and alarmingly close to the real-life global pandemic that took place a few years after it was written. This is a book about disconnection; its resonance goes far beyond its original meaning.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

I know, I know — it’s on just about everybody’s list.

But this beautiful novel about work, friendship, love, and identity deserves it. I suppose it's about video games too, but not really; it could just as easily be about any creative act.

I loved Zevin's writing, the melancholy through line, and the characterizations (although they've been maligned in some reviews). For me, the work is only diminished by the knowledge that she used concepts from some real-world games (e.g., Train) without credit. Ultimately it’s tangential to the meaning of the work, but it would have been so easy to fix.

Foundry, by Eliot Peper

A knockabout spy adventure that takes a few unexpected turns and sticks a landing that had me cheering.

It’s truly a lot of fun - I inhaled it in one sitting. It's also deeply researched, in a way where the detail only ever adds to the entertainment. (Without spoiling anything, I'm very familiar with some of the settings and cultural overtones, and they rang completely true.)

There are knowing callbacks to some of Eliot's earlier work (he’s clearly building a world across his novels), but this stands alone, and could be the start of a new series that I would gladly read the hell out of.

When I was eleven years old, my family relocated to the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina for a little while while my dad taught at Duke. We home-swapped with an abortion doctor, and our temporary home was sometimes pelted with eggs. My parents asked us not to play in the rooms of the house where the windows faced the road.

I attended an elementary school straight out of an American TV show. It was all stuff I’d never seen before: the desks and chairs were those all-in-one units, all aligned in rows. There was an American flag in the classroom. The cafeteria served unrecognizable pizza, Sloppy Joes, a pulled pork concoction that resembled tuna more than anything else, and ice cream cones that had been thawed and refrozen so many times that they were chewy.

I always feel like a fish out of water, but Durham made me feel like I’d launched out of the fishbowl, hit escape velocity, and found myself in another galaxy. It was all little things, though, mostly without consequence. I refused to stand to pledge allegiance to the flag, but nobody really batted an eyelid. Everyone was really into fishing for some reason, and the first time I tried it my fishing pole ended up in a tree. Camo gear was really popular, as if everyone thought they were on some kind of battlefront. Everyone was obsessed with New Kids on the Block. And the local animals were a little more dangerous than I, coming from a place that had exactly zero venomous creatures, understood.

Generally, I think spiders are our friends; an important, benign part of our ecosystem. I’d always just picked them up and moved them if they showed up inside. Some people are irrationally afraid of them, but I’ve never been one.

So when everyone seemed terrified of a spider hanging out on a fence at school, I thought they were really silly. Which is why I walked up to the fence, lay my hand on it, and let the spider crawl on me for a while.

It was only later that I understood how dangerous a black widow spider actually is — particularly to an eleven year old. It was one of the most profoundly stupid things I ever did as a kid.

There’s no real lesson here, except perhaps to stop and listen to other people who might know more than you, even if you think you’re being silly. But I do sometimes think about what might have happened if the spider hadn’t taken kindly to me. It was one of those points where, had my luck run a little bit differently, absolutely everything could have changed.

Spider moments, let’s call them. Life is full of them. And all we can do is try to be a little less stupid and a little more prepared.

I love the indieweb carnival. Every month, a new blogger hosts a topic on their website, and everyone else is invited to post about it on theirs. Webmentions link it all together, allowing anyone to browse through all the different points of view and modes of expression. It’s lovely.

This month’s IndieWeb Carnival topic is about community and belonging, so here are some thoughts about that.

I’ve been working with a new therapist who specializes in trauma, after realizing that I wasn’t doing well at processing my mother’s death and the decade leading up to it. My parents had moved to California a decade prior to that in order to look after my Oma (grandmother). When my mother’s condition progressed to the point that she needed oxygen, my sister and I both moved continents to be closer to her. She had a double lung transplant that gave us all lots of extra time — in fact, more time than these sorts of transplant recipients get on average — but this is one of the most invasive surgeries you can do, and there were complications from the drugs, the surgery itself, the underlying condition. It was incredibly hard on her. In turn, it was hard on all of us in a way that’s been difficult to process. I realized lately, for example, that I’ve been having auditory flashbacks. I’m really hoping a specialized therapist will help.

Part of therapy is intake: giving your therapist the lowdown on who you are as a person and your general context. We’ve been going through my childhood; she asked for me to discuss any particular life events of themes that stuck in my mind.

A subset of the things that came to mind for me included:

• An entire factory floor of Albanian seamstresses lining up to pinch my cheeks while my parents looked on helplessly, unwilling to cause an international incident (this really happened)
• Living in Vienna as a seven-year-old and almost becoming fluent in German until the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down in Ukraine and we moved back to Britain because my parents were worried about the fallout
• Being a borderline third culture kid: growing up in Britain to American and Dutch / Indonesian / Swiss parents with extended stays in Austria and North Carolina
• Living with the generational aftermath of concentration camp survival (my dad is one of the youngest survivors of Japanese-run camps in Indonesia)

A few of these things made it difficult to connect to people when I was growing up. The thing about third culture kids is that they often don’t get the implicit cultural references that everyone else seems to just know: the result is that I often felt like there must be some kind of hidden password that everyone else was in on that had never been shared with me. At the same time, I’d picked up on a generational anxiety that I didn’t even know existed, which made it hard for people to connect with me. Even now, as an adult, it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t helped care for a terminally ill loved one to really understand where I’m at as a person. Quite often, I don’t even know myself.

I sometimes wonder if religion would have provided me with a stronger through-line of community, but I always remind myself that then I would have needed to believe in one. I’m pleased for people who do have a sense of belief that adds to their life. Even after a childhood of Church of England schooling (and perhaps a little bit because of it) I can’t bring myself to believe in any kind of higher power.

I don’t have the same questions about nationalism (or its cousin patriotism, which I believe sits on the same spectrum). I think putting so much identity into a place that you carry a sense of superiority over other places is so archaic, so unbelievably stupid, that I can’t bring myself to entertain it. There is no greatest country in the world, or greatest state, or greatest town. We’re all just people, and these borders are artificial divisions that serve to separate us.

Case in point: one of the biggest rug pulls of my adult life was Brexit. When I moved to the US to help care for my mother, my intention was always to move back to the UK. Five years into this journey, Britain reminded me that I didn’t really belong there: I was a European citizen, not a real British person, and I no longer had the legal right to return as anything more than a tourist. I already felt like I ripped my life apart (albeit for good reasons), and this came as a huge blow. I was born with American citizenship and can live here forever, but it’s not like I feel like I belong here. There’s a cognitive overhead to living in a country you didn’t grow up in; an ongoing tension, and a sense of loss that never really goes away. Not anything close to the palpable loss that would come a few years later, but enough to tug at your soul.

If there isn’t a place where I feel belonging, there are, at least, people. One of the important facets of family (or at least, a close one, which I’m grateful to have) is that you have shared cultural touchpoints, and shared context. I’ve said before that family is my nationality and my religion, having no use for the traditional versions of either of those things. It’s my primary community, too.

But there are others. When I first connected to the internet, back in the mid-nineties, newsgroups occupied the space that social media and web forums take up now. Not long before, someone had created one specifically for British teenagers; I logged on with my dial-up Demon Internet account, started lurking, and then eventually dove in.

There was something freeing about only being able to express myself in text, not least because I’ve always had a very hard relationship with my own physicality. I’m big, and was big early; I felt like the Incredible Hulk. There were hardly any mirrors in our house, and I’d catch myself in the full-length ones in department stores and recoil. (I still do.) On the newsgroup, I didn’t have to worry about any of that. I could just be me, without being bogged down by my pesky corporeal presence. Everyone else who posted there was kind of awkward in similar ways to me, too; the missed cultural understanding that I felt so profoundly in real life didn’t seem to matter there at all.

Eventually, we all met up in real life, and these people who I’d met through words became lifelong friends. I hosted parties at my house and traveled around the country to visit other peoples’. It was an experience I still strive to recreate; it’s what informed the communities I created later on, although I later learned it wasn’t as completely safe as I thought at the time.

As an adult, my communities have been practice-based: indieweb, for example, or the community of Matter alumni. I’m pleased to say I’ve made lifelong friends from these places: people who mean the world to me. These are people who I do have a sense of belonging with, and I’m grateful for it. And, of course, I have a new family of my own, which carries its own sense of belonging. (I’m writing this as my sick child sleeps his way through a long nap; when he wakes up, I will hug him tight.)

These days, I see my lack of geographic rootedness as a superpower. Sure, I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere, but that also means I can be anywhere. There’s no real tether to one particular place; no need to be in one location forever. And the benefit of being a permanent outsider is that I always have an outsider’s perspective: I tend to see things in a different way to the people around me. Sometimes that turns out to be valuable; sometimes it brings a little scorn. At least it’s something different.

It’s impossibly hard to watch coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Thousands of people on both sides of the border have been killed (1,300 in Israel, 2,000 in Gaza at the time of writing); the stories that have emerged are brutal. What is known to be true seems to be different day by day.

What’s been notable for me has been the level of bloodthirst I’ve seen across social media. One Instagram account on my feed that has traditionally covered social justice topics openly cheered on Hamas’s attacks, declaring that decolonization always required violence. I unfollowed. In turn, I saw lots of discussion on Threads in particular by people who wanted to see Gaza — one of the most densely-populated areas on the planet — bombed to the ground such that there would be nobody left.

In the midst of this armchair warmongering, people are missing their loved ones. It’s a real conflict, in the context of decades of history, in which real people are being killed in terrible ways as I write this. But social media has reduced it to video game dimensions; online discussions rip it of context and turn it into performative posturing that has been largely devoid of the underlying human tragedy. Missing family members; footage of bodies in ice cream freezers; wounded children. All of these have become atoms of content to be shared and reshared in order to build social media clout.

Over on X, this dehumanization of the conflict has become particularly pronounced because of the platform’s endeavor to pay users based on social engagement. The incentive is to post shocking content that will be commented on and reshared virally, because it will lead directly to revenue for the poster. Inevitably, a lot of this content takes footage that isn’t even from this conflict and relabels it. A patchwork of pictures and video drawn from across recent history that evoke feelings about this conflict, all thrown together so someone can make a buck (or, in some cases, tens of thousands of bucks). Whereas a blue checkmark used to indicate that a user is notable in their field, you can now buy one for $8 a month. It can be next to impossible to determine what is real.

But it would be a mistake to say that this is happening on X in isolation. Even when social media posts don’t lead directly to revenue, everyone is in the clout game. More followers can lead to more cumulative engagement which can lead to more opportunities to sell in the future. Very few real brands — McDonald’s or Starbucks, say — would post so recklessly about the conflict (which is not to say they are ethical actors in other ways; it’s also worth saying that McDonald’s has donated to both sides of the conflict, and that Starbucks denounced a message of solidarity with Palestine that was published by its union). But everyone’s a personal brand now. Social media has become a literal marketplace of ideas, where peoples’ attention is drawn and monetized. And in this environment of clout and virality, no extra value is placed on truth.

None of this is exactly new. Media management has been a part of every conflict since at least the Second World War. Some disinformation from that period — carrots helping you see in the dark, for example — was absorbed so readily that it has simply become a part of our culture. In this conflict, both sides were surely aware of how footage would be played in the media. What’s different now to 80 years ago is that everyone is the media. We all have spheres of influence, and it’s not unheard of for a middle manager with an axe to bear to have more of an audience than a national newspaper with a complete set of reporters and fact-checkers. Most of our news is consumed in stackable, decontextualized pieces through our connections to individuals who we perceive to share similar opinions to us, delivered in such a way as to maximize engagement with advertisements and keep us on the platform.

None of which connects us to the underlying humanity of the people who suffer in this, or any, conflict. It disconnects us from the fact that civilians have been targeted, which is a war crime. It disconnects us from the need for the killing to stop.

This isn’t a game. It’s not like supporting a sports team. It’s not blue and black / white and gold dress. Regardless of the particulars of the war, the side we should all be on is that of preserving lives and creating a safe, inclusive, democratic environment for future generations. In a world where attention is money, it doesn’t feel like that’s where the incentives lie today.

I have a lot of admiration for Eliot Peper, who has spun a career in tech into a career in writing science fiction novels rooted in the intersection of technology and society. They’re fun reads, first and foremost, but there’s always an insight into how technology is made, and what that means for the rest of us.

His latest, Foundry, is a kind of spy novel about semiconductors that takes you on a knockabout ride before arriving at a satisfying conclusion that could — if he wanted — be the start of a series that I would happily read. Along the way, small details betray an interest in just about everything. (I particularly appreciated a discussion of how people of partial-Indonesian descent are treated in the Netherlands.) His books are very much in the tradition of pageturners by authors like Michael Crichton and John Grisham. I’ve enjoyed them a lot.

One of the reasons I admire Eliot’s work is that this is absolutely where I want to take my life, too. Writing was always my first love: there was a Sliding Doors decision point where I could have chosen an English / journalism or computer science route. Despite a career in technology that has taken me to some interesting places, it’s a testament to that original love that I still don’t know if I picked the right path.

I ended up going into computers specifically because the nascent web was so perfect for storytelling. My computer science degree has been a useful bedrock for my work in software, but there was far less exploration of computing in intersection with the humanities (or any kind of humanity at all) than I would have liked. Over the last few years I’ve allowed myself to pursue my original interest, and it’s been rewarding. Lately, I’ve been getting 1:1 mentorship through The Novelry, which has helped me to overcome some imposter syndrome and put a more robust shape to the plot I’m working on. Eventually, I’d like to try for a creative writing MA, once I can demonstrate that I’m more than some computer guy.

I’ve been lucky to have people in my life who have made a living through writing stories. (I wrote about this recently with respect to opening up possibilities for our son.) My childhood friend Clare’s dad was the author and Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter. I remember being enthralled that he could sit and write stories for a living. I was similarly enthralled, years later, when my cousin Sarah became a wildly successful young adult author. (She’s just started blogging again, and it’s quite lovely and worth subscribing to.) They demonstrated that it’s possible. It’s reductive to say that you’ve just got to sit down and do it — there is a craft here, which needs practice and attention — but that is, indeed, the first step, for them and every writer.

Giving myself the permission to just sit and do that has been difficult. Blogging is second nature for me: I can take an open box on the web, pour out my thoughts, and hit publish. An intentional long-form work requires a leap of faith, a great deal more craft and editing, and significantly less of a dopamine rush from people commenting and re-sharing. It’s possible that nobody else will see what I’ve written for years. It’s equally possible that it’s terrible and very few other people will ever see it. But I’ve decided that giving myself permission to sit down and write means giving myself permission to fail at it. In turn, I’ll learn from that failure and try again, hopefully writing something better the next time. I do want it to be a work that other people enjoy, but there’s also value in allowing myself to create without needing an immediate follow-up.

In the meantime, I have huge admiration for people like Sarah, Eliot, and Humphrey, who gave themselves the space and cultivated the dedication to write.

You should check out Eliot’s work and go subscribe to Sarah’s blog.

Now, onto today’s word count.

Twenty-two years ago, I sat in the office — actually the bottom two floors of a Victorian home with creaking, carpeted floorboards and an overstuffed kitchen — at Daily Information, the local paper where I worked in Oxford. It was mid-afternoon, and I probably had Dreamweaver open; I can’t remember exactly now. I’d taken a year’s break from my computer science degree because my as-yet-undiagnosed anxiety had gotten the better of me in the wake of the death of a close friend. It was the first job I’d ever had that paid for lunch, and the remains of a wholewheat bread slice with spicy red bean paté sat on a plate beside me. Between that and the array of laser printers, the room smelled of toast and ozone.

My dad showed up and told me what had happened: the twin air strikes of September 11, 2001, the details of which are now part of our indelible cultural consciousness. For the rest of the afternoon, we tried to learn what we could, refreshing website after website on the overloaded ISBN connection. One by one, every news website went down for us under the strain of unprecedented traffic, with the exception of The Guardian. I alternated between that and a fast-moving MetaFilter thread until it was time to go home. I vividly remember sitting at the bus stop, watching the faces of all the people in the cars that drove past, thinking that the world would likely change in ways that we didn’t understand yet.

George W Bush was President of the United States: a man who previously had presided over more executions than any other Governor of the State of Texas in history (roughly one every two weeks). While the attacks themselves were obviously an atrocity, he was, in my eyes, unmistakably an evil, untrustworthy leader, and it wasn’t clear that he wouldn’t start a terrible war in response. That was the fear expressed by most of my friends in England at the time: not who was behind the attacks and why?, but what will America do? I was the only American in my friend group, but I shared the same fear.

Of course, now we all know the story of the next two decades. We invaded Iraq under false pretenses, established a major erosion of civil liberties ironically called the PATRIOT Act which granted unprecedented authorities that live on to this day, and racist anti-Muslim rhetoric cranked up to eleven. All in the name of 2,753 people who didn’t ask for any of it. Even the first responders, much lauded at the time, struggle to get the support they need.

In 2002, my parents moved back to California to look after my Oma, and I joined them for a few months. I had the whole row on my transatlantic flight to myself, which seemed strange until I remembered, mid-flight, that it was September 11, 2002 (in retrospect probably the safest day to fly in history). When I arrived, I saw that the freeways were littered with tiny American flags that had fallen off the cars they had presumably been waving from over the last year. As a metaphor, discarded disposable American flags bought to illustrate a kind of temporary superficial patriotism seemed a little on the nose.

While the roads were littered with flags, the air was still thick with fear. My parents had moved to Turlock, a small town outside of Modesto where the radio stations mostly played country music and almond dust polluted the air. There was still a feeling that the next attack could happen at any time, and if it did, why wouldn’t it be here? The dissonance between the significance of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Save-Mart in Turlock seemed to be lost on them. It could happen anywhere. It was the perfect environment for manufacturing consent for war. What did it matter that Saddam Hussein had precisely nothing to do with the attacks and that the purported weapons of mass destruction were obviously fictional? He was brown too, wasn’t he? And, boy, we needed to get revenge.

Even now, I wonder if I should be writing these opinions. In a way, September 11 has become a sacred event. And, seriously, what gives me the right to be talking about it to begin with?

But the tragedy of that day has touched all of us, everywhere. It has also been used as a cover for harms that continue to this day. The deaths of those innocent people are still used to justify erosions of civil liberties; they are still used to justify racism; they are still used to justify mass surveillance domestically and drone strikes internationally; they are still used to justify draconian foreign policies. If any lessons at all were learned from September 11, I think they were the wrong ones.

There’s an alternate universe where America as a population decided that funding and arming covert operations in foreign nations to support American aims was a bad idea. The late Robin Cook, MP, the former British Foreign Secretary, wrote in the wake of the July 7 bombings in London:

‌In the absence of anyone else owning up to yesterday's crimes, we will be subjected to a spate of articles analysing the threat of militant Islam. Ironically they will fall in the same week that we recall the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when the powerful nations of Europe failed to protect 8,000 Muslims from being annihilated in the worst terrorist act in Europe of the past generation.

[…] Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west.

The CIA, for the record, denies this. But there’s no denying the effect of American foreign policies overall, from Chile (whose US-aided coup was 50 years ago today) to Iran, let alone the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s still a mystery to some Americans why the rest of the world isn’t particularly fond of us, but it really shouldn’t be. (And it’s not, as some particularly tone deaf commentators have suggested, jealousy.)

I remember visiting Ground Zero for the first time. By that time, reconstruction was underway, but the holes were clearly visible: conspicuous voids shot through a bustling, diverse city. I think New York City is one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been to: all kinds of people living on top of each other in relative harmony. It’s alive in a way that many places aren’t. Every time I visit I feel enriched by the humanity around me. One of the reasons I live where I do now is to be closer to it.

I think New York City itself is a demonstration of the lesson we should have learned: one that’s more about cross-border co-operation and humanity than isolation and dominance. To put it another way, a lesson that’s more about love than fear. Some conservative politicians talk derisively about “New York values”, but man — if those values were actually shared by the whole nation, America would be a far better place. That was obvious in the way the city came together that day, and it’s been obvious in the way it’s held itself together since.

In contrast, I think the way America as a whole responded to the September 11 attacks directly paved the way to Trump. It enriched a right-wing populist leader and his party; it created divisive foreign policy based on a supremacist foundation; it once again marked people with a certain skin tone and a different religion as being second-class citizens; it promoted nationalism and exceptionalism; it eroded hard-won freedoms for everyone. We can thank Bush for stoking those fires.

True progress towards peace looks like a collaborative world where we consider ourselves to have kinship with everyone of all religions, skin tones, and nationalities, and where every human being’s life has inherent value. It looks like building foreign policy for the benefit of all people, not the people of one nation. It looks like true, vibrant democracy. It doesn’t look like performative flag-waving, drone strikes, religious intolerance, homogeneity, or surveillance campaigns.

Saying so shouldn’t dishonor the memories of everyone who died on that day, or everyone who died as a result of everything that followed. It also doesn’t besmirch our values. One of the greatest things about America is our freedom to hold it to account. That’s what democracy and free expression are all about. And those values — collaboration, inclusion, freedom, representation, multiculturalism, democracy, and most of all, peace — are what we should be working towards.

Doc Searls writes about what he calls wide news:

Local and regional papers covered politics, government, crises, disasters, sports, fashion, travel, business, religion, births, deaths, schools, and happenings of all kinds. They had reporters assigned across all their sections. No other medium could go as wide.

Doc’s argument is that a local commons of publications can, together, create a wide news ecosystem that fulfills the same role (with potentially deeper content). I agree.

I started my career building the first website and BBS for a local paper in Oxford that carried classified ads as well as event listings, notices, and that sort of thing: all the community stuff that the internet took over from newspapers. (As it happens, it’s still around, but most are not.) It was a real community hub, to the extent that anyone could come to the office to do some word-processing or get their photocopying done: a co-working space in the midst of the paper’s offices, long before anyone knew what co-working was.

Social media — and early on, blogging in particular — has played this role of reporting widely around a community. You could click through to local blogs, or Twitter, and learn about things that happened around your town. I found this particularly useful when I visited somewhere I didn’t live: for example, on my regular visits to San Francisco, I’d check out the blogs and Upcoming to see where I should be going.

But as social media has consolidated, many of those venues have gone away. (Some were replaced by Twitter bots, which have now also gone away.) It’s also easier to discover some types of voices than others: for someone to post regularly to the internet, they need to have a certain level of free time, technical prowess, equipment at their disposal, and so on. And it’s easier for someone in an “in” crowd to be linked to and re-shared than an entirely new voice with an underrepresented perspective, who might not have the same level of systemic support.

While newspapers are obsolete technology, local newsrooms are vitally important: journalists have a remit to tell stories that might not otherwise be told. That might be a story about corruption in the local police or government (which occurs a surprising amount of the time), but it could just as easily be a story about an immigrant starting a new business, or a trend piece centered on a less-affluent part of town.

I really love what Tiny News Collective is doing here. From its website:

Have you struggled to find stories relevant to you and your community in existing media? Do you worry that lack of information keeps people from being involved in important local issues? Has it been your dream to see your community represented accurately and thoughtfully in the media?

The organization then provides the funding, technology, training, and network to get those newsrooms started. Consider Austin Vida, which reports with a Latinidad perspective from Austin, or Ang Diaryo, which reports with a lens centered on working class Filipino communities in Los Angeles.

Locally to me, Kensington Voice reports on a neighborhood in Philadelphia that normally is the subject of stories about addiction (including a New York Times piece that called it the “Walmart of Heroin”). The real, three-dimensional human beings who lived there were woefully underserved, until journalists began to report on their actual stories. These weren’t holes that social media could adequately fill; nor were they covered by the local newspaper of record.

With a skeleton team, Open Vallejo reports on the North Bay town that happens to have one of the most corrupt police forces and local governments in the country. It’s rightly won awards for its work.

I’ve fallen in love with these kinds of small, tightly-focused, non-profit newsrooms. One thing that’s missing is a way to find all the newsrooms that cover a geographic area, or a particular demographic, or other focus area. I want to be able to discover stories from newsrooms I’ve never heard of, based on their characteristics. I might have never heard of a particular newsroom in Philadelphia, but I have heard of Philadelphia, and happen to live there. It would be great if I could click through a website to find everyone publishing about communities in the city. The front page of that site — which, in essence, would be a specialized feed reader — would be better by far than any large newspaper.

To make that really viable, there needs to be a flowering of tightly-focused newsrooms — and people to fund their reporting. Crowdfunding, direct sales, or subscriptions are not always the right approach, because, for example, people in a less-affluent community are typically less able to pay, while their stories are no less valuable. Just as bloggers are less likely to write from the perspective of communities that can less afford computers, broadband internet connections, and the time to write, funding dollars must sometimes be found elsewhere. Tiny News Collective is wonderful, as I mentioned. The Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Local News Lab does great work, albeit around business innovation rather than direct funding. And there is some wider foundational support. Still, making more support available for these newsrooms would go a long way.

All of this is not to say that personal sharing and social media aren’t valuable. They clearly are, and a lot of people are reporting their perspectives and sharing what they love about their communities. We need more of this, too! One of my favorite local social media accounts is Caffs not cafes, which reports on small, independent, usually low-budget restaurants and cafes in London. Sure, it’s not breaking news, but who else would do this kind of local coverage of diverse businesses, many of which have immigrant owners?

A wide news commons, comprised of many smaller newsrooms with specific areas of focus, as well as the perspectives of individuals in the community, would improve our democracy at the local level. In doing so, it would make a big difference to how the whole country works. I’d love to see us collectively make it happen.

As a (relatively) new parent, one of the questions that preoccupies me is: how can we show our son that anything is possible, and that he can be anything he wants to be? More specifically, how can we ensure that he knows that the templates and stereotypes laid out for him by society aren’t the only ways, or the best ways, to live a good life?

I was thinking about this last weekend at the memorial for my cousin Cort, who, among other things, sailed across the Pacific Ocean. The things he did were amazing — true adventures — but he talked about it so matter-of-factly that he made them seem like real things you could do. By simply existing and living his life how he wanted to, he broadened the horizons of the people around him, including me.

I’m grateful for all the people in my life who have lived outside of those set templates.

I remember going round to my childhood friend Clare’s house and learning that her dad had a room where he sat and wrote. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that this was something one could do, but here he was, doing it. (He asked me what I wanted for my birthday once, and I was too shy to ask for a signed copy of one of his Mr Majeika books, which I regret to this day.)

Humphrey Carpenter was the first time I became aware that using your imagination and harnessing your love of writing could be a profession, but writing surrounded me. My grandfather translated Crime and Punishment and Osip Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia into English. As a young teenager in Oxford, my after-school job turned out to be a hub for interesting characters; for example, an odd man who regularly came in to use the photocopier turned out to be Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse mysteries. And in my adult life, my cousin Sarah has built an amazing career writing young adult novels.

My parents were staunch believers in doing things their own way, including by fighting for what they believed in as Berkeley activists. I’d lived in four countries by the time I was twelve, and knew about our family history across many more. I heard my dad’s stories about being in the US Army and protesting the Vietnam War afterwards, and about his own father’s leading role in the resistance against the Japanese in Indonesia during the Second World War. I learned stories about Ukrainian Jewish villagers coming to America with nothing, Swiss textile merchants, diplomats, and avant garde film directors.

Conformity and parochialism were not on the menu. I’m grateful every day that this is the context I grew up with.

How the fuck do I live up to any of this? Let alone convey the same sense of freedom to our son?

You’d be forgiven for thinking, reading the above, that we were wealthy. We were not. There was a freedom inherent in mindset: if you were clever about it, you could do incredible things with meagre resources. But the world is less forgiving than it used to be towards people who aren’t independently wealthy. America in particular is designed to force people into a life of salaried work at the hands of another employer. Here, both your healthcare and your retirement savings are at the mercy of who you happen to be employed by; yes, you can get insurance and retirement plans independently, but they’re never as good, or as cheap.

If you already have resources, you have opportunity; otherwise, American society pushes you into pouring your labor towards someone else’s profit. Sometimes, people are tricked into a life of non-stop hustle as a way to find escape velocity — only to find that the hustle also is a grift on behalf of someone else’s profit. (Some investors I’ve spoken to speak of founder pedigree as a thing they look for; if you scratch the surface just a little, this resource independence is what it really means. You’re backable if you already have the freedom and network to build something.) Add this to the pervasive fear that sits just under the surface — of guns, of crime, of violence — and modern America seems to be set up to subjugate.

Some people share the white picket fence American dream, and I guess there’s nothing really wrong with it. But I don’t share that dream, and won’t be forced into it myself; I want our son to know, at the very least, that other dreams are available, and that he gets to choose his own adventure. He can settle in the suburbs somewhere in America with a 9-5 job, a two-car garage, and a backyard lawn. He can also live anywhere in the world, do anything he sets his mind to, and be exactly who he wants to be, whatever it happens to be. He could be President of the United States, or a revolutionary artist, or a social entrepreneur, or a spear fisherman off the coast of a small island in the Pacific. There is a multiverse of possibilities. Eleven months in, the world is his.

To really convey that well, I’ve realized, I need to be exactly who I want to be. Which is hard! The last decade was characterized by supporting my mother through a familial terminal illness, including redefining my life and moving continents to do so. We’ve lived through grief after trauma after grief after trauma, and at the same time I had to learn how to build a life and career in the US to be able to stay afloat. It was a constant state of stress and being constantly reactive to whatever was going on that felt like being trapped inside my own life. I made some very poor, harmful decisions while living in this state, as well as some other decisions that were just incredibly dumb. It hasn’t all been stupid, but I certainly haven’t emerged without regrets, and I often haven’t lived up to my own ideals.

But now I’ve got to switch gears and think about being an example for our son. You can’t convey a set of ideals without living up to them; it rings false. If I think that an untemplated life is more fulfilling (and I do!) then how can I do better to embody that and show that it’s a real possibility? How can I be Humphrey in his writing room or Corty sailing across the Pacific or my dad protesting the war in Vietnam?

If the possibilities available to you are informed by the ones you’ve been exposed to, how can I expose him to more? If the mindsets available to you are informed by the ones you’ve been exposed to, how can I show him that there isn’t one way to think or be?

Knowing that I’ll inevitably fail to live up to my ideals, what can I do to set him up well to live an amazing life?

Like I said, this is a question that preoccupies me. I don’t know what the answer is, or even if there is an answer. I hope the exploration will be enough.

I fell into startups by accident.

There were two paths I could have gone down at university. Next to an over-posed photo taken at a digital photo booth at a branch of Boots the Pharmacist in downtown Oxford, my high school yearbook declares that I’m likely to become a journalist. On the other hand, I’d taught myself to program, and then to write HTML, and the web seemed like an exciting medium to tell stories with.

I got into the Computer Science program at the University of Edinburgh. In England, at least at the time, you effectively picked your major two years before even going to university: at sixteen years old, you were asked to choose three or four A-level subjects that you’d study exclusively until the end of high school. In turn, those subjects would dictate which degrees you were allowed to apply for. I refused to filter myself in this way, and I was still in the early stages of trying to figure out who I was, let alone what I wanted to do — a tall order for any sixteen year old, let alone a third culture kid who felt physically and socially out of sorts with the world. Edinburgh was one of the few programs that didn’t see my spread across arts and sciences as a bad thing.

I was big and I hated it. I’d grown up to be well over six feet tall, and I wasn’t skinny in the way some tall people get to be. I couldn’t (and still can’t) catch myself in the mirror without cringing. I hated every aspect of my physicality in a way that I didn’t quite have words for, and that self-loathing translated to an overwhelming awkwardness in real life. It crossed the line into self-harm, both directly and indirectly. If I was always going to be this, what was the point in throwing myself into anything?

My mother had become a financial analyst in the telecoms industry — she’d studied the split-up of AT&T and the formation of the Baby Bells as a postgraduate at Oxford — and she saw the internet revolution coming. She tried out the emerging ISPs for work, and I devoured it. I gophered around the world. When we finally got Demon Internet at home, which turned every dialed-in user into a genuine node on its network, I discovered newsgroups, and realized I could communicate with people who were roughly my age without them ever seeing me. I could be myself freely. It radically changed my life. To this day, this is the part of the internet I really care about: not protocols or code, but the ability for people to be themselves and tell their stories. The opportunity for contexts to collide, relationships of all kinds to be built, and for learning to happen between people.

Of course, computer science has almost nothing to do with that. Edinburgh is a well-renowned program, particularly in conjunction with its AI school, and I’ve benefitted from it. But at the time, I was deeply disappointed with the focus on mathematics. The part of computing I cared about more than any other was the internet, and the internet was made of people more than it was any networking technology or algorithm. I’m still not sure why I didn’t change my degree (I’m also not sure if they would have let me). Having an honors degree in CS has helped my career, but I didn’t find the meaning in it that I’d hoped to. In retrospect, I wish I’d used my US citizenship to go to a liberal arts school, but at the time I didn’t have any interest in leaving the UK.

So I got distracted. Back in high school, I’d started a hypertext computer magazine called Spire that I distributed on various bulletin board systems. For my friends, it was a way that I could get them free review copies of games; for me, making something and putting it out there was a worthwhile project in itself. At university, I transitioned it to the web, buying my first domain name in the process and setting it up on Pair Networks hosting. It wasn’t particularly well-read, but the process of building and writing it made it worth it to me. I kept up my personal homepage; I wrote a blog; I continued to write on the newsgroups and hang out on Internet Relay Chat for hours.

Sometime towards the end of my degree, I accidentally wrote a meme that spread like wildfire across the blogs. I put it up on a Friday evening, and by Sunday it had almost a hundred thousand pageviews. I’ve written this story elsewhere, but to make a long story short: I built it into a satirical site that got millions of pageviews a day, I built a community that endures to this day, and through it all, I got a taste of how powerful the web could really be. It wasn’t commercial at all — in fact, it was militantly not — but that wasn’t the point. The point for me, as always, was to connect and feel a little bit more seen.

Edinburgh has a little bit more of a technology scene now, but when I graduated there was nothing. I looked for jobs that I might find interesting. A computer magazine was interested in hiring me as a reviewer, but the pay was abysmal: just £12,000 a year, and they really wanted me to move to London to do it. I didn’t see how you could possibly afford to take a job like that and live in London if you weren’t already rich, which I wasn’t. So I ended up getting a job back at the university, working to create an educational site for professional sports coaches as part of the sports science department.

They weren’t sure where to put me, so I wound up in a converted broom closet with a window that didn’t shut, right over the canteen kitchen. The room was freezing in winter and permanently smelled of chips. Worse, it already had someone in it: a PhD student called Dave who made no secret of the fact that he resented my being there. I’d been pre-announced to the learning technology folks as a “computer scientist”, so they all thought I was some hoity-toity egotist rather than an entry-level developer who had no real idea what he was doing.

Dave was angry a lot of the time and liked to talk about it when he wasn’t playing games on the BBC Sports website. He was studying educational technology, which hadn’t really been in use even when I was doing my degree. But through him I learned all about virtual learning environments like WebCT. Later, I transitioned from the sports science department into general e-learning development, and I got more of a hands-on look, and I understood some of his frustration. The university was a pretty rigid environment, and the software was terrible. Students hated it; teachers hated it; administrators hated it; I’m not convinced that the people who wrote the software didn’t hate it. Platforms like WebCT and Blackboard, and even their open source counterpart, Moodle, were the worst: a terrible model for learning.

The web, on the other hand, was amazing. People were learning from each other all the time. It had already been changing my life for almost a decade, and now, through more accessible social media sites like LiveJournal, the benefits were spreading. Social media was informal learning, but learning nonetheless. All of this was already happening, but the actual learning technology products weren’t built with this understanding or intent. The internet had been so freeing for me — that release from my own physicality, the hooks and hangups that came from how I looked and felt in the real world — that I wished I’d had something with the same dynamics at university. I wished I’d been free there. I didn’t express this idea at the time, but that’s what drove me.

I suggested he started blogging his ideas. He was skeptical, but I somehow convinced him to start a blog — he gave it a very official-sounding name, the E-Portfolio Research and Development Community — and both post and comment on someone else’s blog almost every day. It worked, and his blog started to be accepted into the worldwide e-portfolio community. There was obviously something here for education.

Dave and I decided to build something that did take the social web into account. First, we simply described it in a very short informal paper, and put it out on Dave’s blog. The response from the community was immediate: one very well-respected analyst called it “visionary”. Another sniffily commented that it was one thing to talk about it and another to build it — which, well. Game on.

We both built a prototype; Dave’s in Macromedia Coldfusion, mine in PHP. (Even then, I don’t know that these were the right technology choices.) I can’t remember what his was called, but I put mine on a domain name I’d bought so that I would have an official-looking email address to apply for jobs with, based on the town in Switzerland my dad’s family comes from. Of the two prototypes, we decided to go with Elgg.

We first tried to give it to the university. Dave’s supervisor ran learning technology at the time; he took it to a meeting, and the response I heard back was that “blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms.” For all these years, I’ve taken Dave’s word that this is what was said, although I’ve sometimes wondered if he just didn’t want to give it to them. Either way, it appalled me enough that I quit my job.

I moved back to Oxford and into my parents’ house. They’d moved back to California to take care of my grandmother, and their plan was to rent it out; in the end we rented out the other bedroom to a friend of mine and I was lucky to be able to live in it rent-free for six months while I figured everything out. This was a big burden on them: we didn’t have a lot of money, and while the house wasn’t exactly in a great neighborhood, renting half of it didn’t cover its costs. They essentially underwrote me while I wrote the first version.

And then I had to get a job. I became the webmaster at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where my job was to revamp the website to use a new CMS and a design that had been created by a prestigious firm in London. Instead, what happened was that I very quickly started becoming a startup resource inside the school. Students came to me to talk about their work, and would invite me to their seminars. Lecturers would ask me questions. I was allowed to attend an event called Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, where people like Ev Williams (then CEO of Blogger), Reid Hoffman, and Craig Newmark would speak and share their experiences.

After kicking the tires for six months, we released Elgg as an open source project. Eventually, it was able to make enough money to employ me and Dave full-time, and I left to work on it. We were asked to help build the first version of MIT OpenCourseWare (which we eventually parted ways with), and consulted with a school district in upstate New York who wanted our expertise more than our software. But it was enough to get going with. My friendships at the Business School were so strong that I was allowed to come back the next year, with Dave alongside me. We asked Biz Stone to become an advisor, which he agreed to, and it felt like we were off to the races.

We had no idea what we were doing at any point, and we didn’t exactly get along. Our company was formed poorly; I was the CTO and Dave was the CEO because he’d looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’m going to put my foot down on this one.” I was still so unsure of myself and full of self-loathing that I just accepted it. Behind the scenes, we decided things together, and in some ways, the partnership worked; he had a kind of hubris that I lacked, and I understood the internet in a way that he didn’t. It helped that I could also build and write. At the same time, it didn’t make me feel good; Dave liked to tell people that we never would have been friends, which I think he meant as an odd couple style joke, but was hurtful every time. When we were in Cambridge to speak to MIT about OpenCourseWare, he took me aside to tell me that when push came to shove, he would be looking out for myself, and that I should do the same. It wasn’t the way I liked to think or act; we came from different worlds. I’m sure he was similarly perturbed by me: this maladjusted nerd who seemed to care much more about writing than about operating in the real world.

Elgg didn’t make anyone rich, but it was successful in a way I’m still proud of. The original version had over 80 translations and was used all over the world, including by non-profits who used it to organize resource allocation. A revamped version with a stronger architecture was used by the anti-austerity movement in Spain, by Oxfam to train aid workers, and by the Canadian government as a sort of intranet.

After a few years of bootstrapping, working almost 24/7, we accepted a modest investment from some executives at a large international bank, who were getting into startups on the side. They really wanted us to get into the fintech market, specifically around hedge funds, and maybe they were right from a business perspective: there’s a lot of money there. But it wasn’t why I’d started working on it, and it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Dave was more enthusiastic, and between that and the fact that our relationship had broken down to being almost antagonistic every day, I decided to leave. The day I shut down my laptop for the last time, I felt almost weightless: for the first time in the best part of a decade, I had no commitments. It had been weighing on me hard. I was 30 years old now, somehow, and it felt like I was emerging from a dark cave, blinking into the sunlight.

No other working experience has been exactly the same. I know a lot more, for one: I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. But I also wouldn’t take the same risks, exactly because I know more. My naïvety brought a kind of propulsion of its own; like many founders, I was fueled by pure Dunning-Kruger effect. But at the same time, there were days when I was dancing on my chair because of something that had happened. The startup brought incredible highs — the kind that can only come from something you’ve created yourself — as well as deep lows that interacted horribly with my already damaged self-image. It made me feel like I was worth something after all, but also that I wasn’t. It was a rollercoaster. And yes, despite everything, I would do it again.

Before our son was born last September, I published a UsesThis-style baby stack of devices and software we were using.

He’s now nine months old, so I thought I’d revisit the list now that he’s been alive for longer than he gestated. We’ve got far more experience than we did.

Hardware

Stroller: We’re still using and loving our Uppababy Cruz v2. Its modular design made a big difference for us. We grew out of the bassinet mode, but the seat is still holding strong for daily walks — and it was incredibly useful to also be able to plug the Mesa car seat right into the stroller base for quick trips into the store etc.

Car seat: We grew out of the Uppababy Mesa, but it was great while it lasted. I loved how adjustable it was, as well as easy to install into my car (something I had a genuine fear of before the baby was born).

We’ve moved on to the Clek Foonf, which is broadly recommended as well as being fun to say — I’ll update once we know if we’re satisfied with it. But the reviews look great, and we were happy that it came with an option without nasty chemicals in the cover material.

Bed: For a while, the Happiest Baby SNOO was absolutely magical. Then, not long before he grew out of it, he became scared rather than soothed by its rocking motion (although we still used its white noise feature). It became moot, because he grew so fast that watching him in the bassinet began to resemble watching bread dough proofing out of its tin.

These days we’re on the Ikea Sundvik crib, which grows with the baby. We paired it with the Naturepedic Classic Organic Cotton Crib Mattress and have already lowered it to prevent him from falling out when he stands up.

White noise: The Hatch Rest is pretty good, and can be used both with and without an app, but he’s developed a fascination with technology and has started wanting to grab it whenever he can. I think we might be on our last few weeks of this one.

Baby monitor: The Nanit Pro has great sound and vision and connects to our smartphones on and off wifi. We use it with the stand above the bed. The app also does a great job of recording when he fell asleep and woke up, so we can plan ahead to his next nap.

Changing mat: The Keekaroo Peanut is still going strong. It’s easy to clean, does a good job of holding him in position, has a good strap, and is easy to move. We have two around the house.

High chair: The Stokke Tripp Trapp is well-made and adjustable as he grows. I wish it was a little easier to clean, but there are no nasty nooks and crannies - it just takes a wipe down after every meal. We’ve been using it both with and without the tray and we’re loving it.

Toys and Play: We’re trying to avoid screen time and toys that make noise / use electronics in favor of Montessori-inspired simple toys. I like our Lovevery Play Kits. They arrive at our door every few months; they’re made from good materials and each box is geared towards his developmental stage. They come with suggestions for when to introduce each toy and how to play with them — which, to be honest, I’ve ignored more often than not.

We use ALZiP Mat Eco Color Folder playmats to give him a safe space to play where he’s less likely to hurt himself. It’s free from harmful materials and the insides are recyclable.

Food: We like WeeSprout silicone baby spoons. Usually we just use a small Glasslock glass food storage bowl to serve him. We try and cook for him, but he absolutely adores CereBelly brain-supporting food pouches. We also add Ready Set Food powder to introduce him to common allergens.

Software

Tracking: Huckleberry is buggier than I’d like — sometimes it loses entries with no explanation — but it’s still proven to be a useful way to keep track of eating, sleeping, and diaper changes between parents. It also does a fairly good job of predicting when his nap might be based on his sleep. Like most parenting software, I dearly wish it had multi-user support. Dads look after their babies too! (We just share our credentials, which works fine unless the two of us are in different timezones.)

Food: Solid Starts has been a useful reference as we’ve begun to introduce solid food. It helps us understand not just what we can introduce, but how.

Shopping: Baby gear is expensive; doubly so if you don’t want to compromise on quality. We use GoodBuy Gear to get it second hand whenever we can. It doesn’t have everything, but when it does, it’s usually a pretty good deal.

Babycare: We’re using Care.com to find carers. It’s been a grueling process and we’re nowhere near there yet. That’s not the fault of the platform, although I wish it had more CRM-style features — hiring baby care is not dissimilar to hiring for a full-time role and I’ve found myself missing the tools I’ve used when I’ve built teams. But the carers are there, and that’s the important thing.

Elon Musk needs to complete his acquisition of Twitter by October 28 if he wants to avoid the company’s lawsuit against him. That’s really soon - a week from today as I write this post.

The network has been a part of my life more or less since it launched. I’ve been hopelessly addicted since my Elgg days, back when you could post via SMS and hashtags were but an IRC-style gleam in Chris Messina’s eye. Unlike blogging, I don’t know if it’s done anything positive for my career, but it’s certainly informed my view of the world, both for better and worse.

For a few years, it was tradition that I’d go offline for the year at around Thanksgiving, to give myself some time to recover from the cognitive load of all those notifications. I don’t think the constant dopamine rush is in any way good for you, but the site’s function as a de facto town square has also helped me learn and grow. It’s a health hazard and an information firehose; a community and an attack vector for democracy. More than even Facebook, I think it’s defined the internet’s role in democratic society during the 21st century.

But all things must come to an end. Musk has suggested that he’ll reinstate Donald Trump’s account in time for the 2024 election and gut 75% of Twitter’s workforce, impacting user security and content moderation. It turns out, though, that even without Musk’s involvement, at least a quarter of the workforce would still face layoffs that the Washington Post reported would have “possibly crippled the service’s ability to combat misinformation, hate speech and spam”. There was no good way out. Twitter as we know it is sunsetting.

So where do we go next?

The answer is almost certainly not one single place. There’s certainly the indieweb and the fediverse, as well as newcomers like DeSo and the work Bluesky is doing. But those are all technical solutions to the problem of a missing platform; focusing there misses the point that what will really be missing is a community space. The answer to that is more community spaces, each with their own governance and interaction models. The solution will be an ecosystem of loosely-joined communities, not a single software platform or website - and certainly not a service run by a single company.

Facebook is also in decline. As big tech silos diminish in stature, the all-in-one town squares we’ve enjoyed on the internet are going to start to fade from view. In some ways, it’s akin to the decline of the broadcast television networks: whereas there used to be a handful of channels that entire nations tuned into together, we now enjoy content that’s fragmented over hundreds. The same will be true of our community hangouts and conversations. In the same way that broadcast television didn’t really capture the needs of the breadth of its audience but instead enjoyed its popularity because that’s what was there at the time, we’ll find that fragmented communities better fit the needs of the breadth of diverse society. It’s a natural evolution.

It’s also one that demands better community platforms. We’re still torn between 1994-era websites, 1996-era Internet forums, and 2002-era social networks, with some video sharing platforms in-between. We could use more innovation in this space: better spaces for different kinds of conversations (and particularly asynchronous ones), better applications of distributed identities, better ways to follow conversations across all the places we’re having them. This is a time for new ideas and experimentation.

As for the near-term future of Twitter? I’m pouring one out for it. I’m grateful for its own experimentation and for the backchannel it provided to everyday life. But let’s move on.

Photo by Daddy Mohlala on Unsplash

So far, I’ve been the primary nappy-changer in my child’s world. That’s not virtue signaling or trying to make a point: it simply seems fair that, given that I’m biologically incapable of breastfeeding or carrying a child to term, I help out where I can.

Aaron Hoyland’s tweet the other day is exactly how I feel:

Putting baby change stations in the women’s washroom (and maybe the family washroom if there is one) but not the men’s washroom sends a very clear message about whose responsibility you think raising children is, and frankly, I hate it.

The world isn’t set up for equitable co-parenting. Bathrooms are one example. Don’t click through to the tweet if you’d like to skip being angry for a morning: the comments are dominated by people making excuses for dads not changing their children, or trying to argue that it’s women’s work like we’re back in the forties. A mother’s sacred duty, apparently, is to be the sole person cleaning their child.

I’m completely on board with having changing tables in every men’s bathroom. I intend to use them; please give them to me. In return, I will spend money in your establishment.

Unfortunately, this chauvanistic design mentality doesn’t stop at bathrooms. They’re everywhere. I call them “mommy defaults”.

I’ve discovered that a lot of the parenting apps we use - primarily Huckleberry, which allows us to track events like diaper changes and different kinds of feedings - don’t provide for more than one parental user account. If both parents want to track events and gain access to the log, they need to share a password. We’re not logging frivolously (our child needed to go to the ER for dehydration on their first night home), and it’s crucial that we both have access to this data.

Even the Snoo, our expensive and overtly high-tech smart bassinet, only allows for one account. If we want to track sleeping and adjust settings, we once again have to share passwords. It’s not incredibly difficult to use a shared 1Password vault, but I expect most parents default to using something easily memorable, and therefore easily hackable.

Finally, the biggest, most irritating version of this is that every provider - starting with hospitals and pediatricians - wants to have a single parental contact number. Go visit parenting forums and you’ll find message after message complaining about this, for good reason. The assumption that there’s one primary carer in parenting is deeply baked into institutional service design, and perpetuates inequality every time it arises. As the dad, I really want to take on my fair share of making appointments, dealing with administration, and otherwise caring for my child.

You can take the boy out of startups, but you can’t take startups out of the boy, apparently. My solution has been to treat our baby like a call center and set up a 24/7 virtual support line using a tool designed for that purpose. Now, we can provide a single number for text messages and calls, but we’re both essentially baby support agents. Whoever picks up first takes the call. It’s not the cheapest, but I couldn’t find an app or other solution that would allow us both to effectively be primary carers in someone’s database. Our own contact details are abstracted away.

The nice thing about this solution is that it also allows for additional caregivers. For example, I have to wonder how my friend David Jay - who is an adoptive third parent - deals with these design defaults. Families come in lots of shapes. Many people also care for children in a communal, village-like environment. Creating a baby call center allows you to bring anyone into that circle, even temporarily. Obviously, I’ve been using tools for business sales and support to achieve this, but maybe there’s a genuine startup here?

There are real cultural headwinds to overcome: just go back to those replies to Aaron’s tweet. Lots of people have lots to say about the place of fathers vs mothers, using language that isn’t far off from “a women’s place is in the kitchen”. They must be overcome, and they will be.

If you’re designing a parenting app or service, I implore you: dads are carers too. Please let us be by giving us full access to services designed to support our child. We’ll reward you with our loyalty. The dads are ready.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Dear Ma,

My child was born last Friday. I wish you could meet them.

The first time I saw their face in person (strikingly similar to their 3D ultrasound, but here, not an echo of a person but a real-life human being in front of me), they couldn’t breathe. The doctors whisked them away to a table, and I followed quickly, dumbly, the delirium from sleeplessness and from the surrealism of it all instantly snapping into pure, adrenaline-fueled presence. They put a mask on their face and applied pressure to their lungs, asking each other why they weren’t crying. Finally, there was a sound, like a tiny grunt. And then a little sigh. Finally, they opened up into a small cry; then, another, louder one. The smallest little human I’ve ever seen, finally arrived. I fell in love immediately.

The last time I saw you, just over a year ago, you were in a bed in the same institution, your donated lungs breathing fainter and fainter. I kissed you on the forehead and told you I loved you. You’d told me that what you wanted to hear was us talking amongst ourselves; to know that we’d continue without you. In the end, that’s what happened. But I miss you terribly: I feel the grief of losing you every day, and never more than when my child was born.

They’re so incredibly cute. I just want you to see.

I’ve been thinking about the cassette tape recording we have of when I was born. “It’s a baby!” you exclaimed, and we’ve always thought it was funny, because what else would it be? But I now understand that the enormity of that moment is stunning: a potential human made up of ideas and imagination, that we can only guess about, turns into a real-life human being. It’s a baby. Holy shit. Everything suddenly changes. Everything.

(I want to digitize that recording. Tapes degrade. It might even be gone already.)

You were always so good with children. Famously so. Babies loved you; children loved you. Every photo I have of you with a child is of you looking delightedly at each other, fully present in a joyful interaction. When you did your career about-face and became a schoolteacher, it was the most natural thing in the world, because it just made official what you’d always done. Of course, I saw the benefit of that care and love, too. I wish they were able to feel it directly. As it is, in this worse universe that doesn’t have you in it, I’ve been intentionally trying to channel you. I’ve been trying to imagine how you would have shown up with them, and what your advice for me would have been. I’ve been trying to convey that good-humored warmth I always felt. You made me feel safe: physically, yes, but more than that, emotionally. I want to make them feel safe, too: to be who they really are.

They have the privilege of a tightly-knit family. I can’t wait to introduce them to my dad, and to my sister, who are the best people I know. I want them to be deeply involved in their life. You will be too, through us, but I wish it could be through a hug or smiles or belly-kisses.

I guarantee you would have loved them. I guarantee they would have loved you.

Erin’s quickly turned into such a good mother, Ma. She really is; you’d love it. She’s so attentive, and smart, and worried about them, and prepared in all kinds of ways that I would never think to be. So far, we’ve made a pretty good parenting team. There’s so much to learn, so much to get better at, so much to worry about. But she’s good. It’s fun to think of them having fond memories of her in the same way I have fond memories of you.

It’s also weird to think of them thinking fondly of me in the same way I love my dad. Those bonds are strong. I have trouble thinking about anyone loving me deeply, but I know I love deeply, and my dad is one of the people I love the most, so the possibility is there. I hope I can live up to that for them. It’s scary to think about.

I remember, very early on, going on a protest march with you. As a child, I inherited your buttons and proudly wore messages to ban the bomb and embrace renewable energy. (Those slogans seem like ancient history now, but also still so relevant.) Progressive values and the value of protest were normalized for me. Living in Oxford, we were surrounded by university, and you were both life-long students, so I was raised in an environment of debate and deep thought. Because I had parents who talked about the world, both around me and to me, I had a better sense of my place in it. I want that for them, too.

We seem to be backsliding into a world where nationalism is a respected value, and where fierce individualism trumps all, even as we plunge deeper into a climate crisis whose only real solution is for us all to work together. We have to think globally, as one people, and we have to care for people on the other side of the globe as if they were our neighbor. We have to call out our own governments when they oppress others, at home or abroad, and we have to be forces for equitable, inclusive, collaborative kindness in a world that is dominated by competition and profit. We seem to have forgotten the importance of community, and of acting collectively - or, worse, rejected it, as if being an actively participative part of a fabric of interconnected souls somehow impedes our individuality. On the contrary, I think it uplifts us. In a world where we all have a duty of care for each other, we can more truly be ourselves.

I got that from you.

I wish those ideas were a given, but they’re going to have to fight for it. We’re constantly re-litigating the same arguments about religion, bodily autonomy, the climate, when we could be building on what we’ve learned to climb ever higher. Their world will have fewer resources, constrained by a heating planet. If it also continues to have widening inequality and an addiction to wealth hoarding, it will also have more conflict. It will be a worse place to live: more dangerous, more authoritarian, more brutal. “Building a better world for our children” is no longer an abstract sentiment for me, and my fear is that they will have this realization one day too: they may find himself wondering how to show up to make a safer, kinder world for their child.

We need to make more progress.

You described yourself as having been radicalized. That word means so many things: to me, your values were never radical. They were simply common sense. We need to take care of each other; we need to love our neighbors, and understand that everyone is our neighbor; we need to undo systems of oppression and inequality. You worked for affirmative action and stood up in court to establish and protect the rights of tenants over landlords. You marched and donated to causes and let your worldview be known. You were a force of light in the universe, not just for how you acted towards everyone who knew you, but how you showed up in the context of wider systems. If you were radicalized, I guess I hope I am too.

You had no time for people who didn’t care about others: hardcore conservatives, neo-reactionaries, libertarians, and fascists. You cared about fairness and inequality. You were an ardent feminist. You were an anticapitalist. You believed in true representative democracy. You continued to learn and evolve your understanding of systems of oppression. I love all of those things about you - just a fraction of all the things I love about you. I want to model that way of thinking and acting for my child.

I want them to have broad horizons, and to understand that all of this - everything - can be changed for the better. Change is inevitable; how we change is up for grabs.

You were always so flexible: so up for the adventure. You traveled thousands of miles to have me in Europe. By the time I was three years old, I’d lived in four cities. As time goes by, I’m more and more impressed by your ability and willingness to just up and leave and try something new. My life has been much better off for it. I think your life was much better off for it.

Remember living in Oxford? You had that upstairs office above Daily Information, where you’d work on predictions for the telecoms industry - you predicted the rise of cellphones, home internet, ubiquitous broadband - while our Jack Russell terrier, Tessie, would patiently sit in her bed. At noon precisely, she would walk over to you to let you know it was time to take a break, and you’d take her on a walk to Port Meadow. Both you and my dad took classes when you wanted to, often just to improve your knowledge for its own sake; you didn’t have to worry about return on investment, or healthcare or education costs for your family. It all just worked, so simply. I miss that lifestyle. I miss the peace of it all: the lack of fear that comes from real support.

So I’m now faced with a similar question to the one you must have been considering. The US is such a big country, and it contains so much, but it’s also so isolated, and by extension, so isolationist. Save for tribal nations, you can drive for thousands of miles without hitting another country. It would be easy to grow up here and have a very insular worldview: look at all the people who swear blind that “America is the best country on earth” but have never lived or spent much time anywhere else, and who consider blind patriotism to be a virtue rather than the cult-like ignorance it is.

When we build software, we learn that the settings we choose to be the defaults are incredibly impactful: those defaults permanently affect how someone will use the product you’ve made. It seems to me that this is even more true in life. Regardless of the choices they make later in life, the defaults I give my child will permanently affect their worldview. By traveling around and seeing the way different people live, not on a tour bus but immersively over time, we learn that there are lots of valid alternatives; we meet and get to know lots of ways of being, and understand that ours is not better than theirs. If we don’t, I’m worried that the way the community around us lives becomes the default, and that the rest of the world becomes a little scary. My child has multiple passports to draw on; they will have the ability to live in, or at least visit, so many places. It would be such a missed opportunity to not give them that perspective. The more easily we can all relate to people from different nations, the easier it will be to have a globally-minded, kinder world.

Make no mistake: I know you would want me to make sure they see alternatives to living like we do here, and I will make sure that I do. So much is wrong. Every school shooting is shocking, but the safety drills they make children do are almost as terrifying; the ideas that are traded as normal are so brutal. Violence is ingrained everywhere. What kind of country watches little bodies be slaughtered and refuses to take any kind of meaningful action? We still kill prisoners. The police commit murder. And we call this civilization? I don’t want my child to grow up thinking any of this is normal. They need to see that it’s a uniquely American problem by spending a lot of time outside of America.

But for all they can learn from it, international travel itself has a climate impact that is worsening the conditions that will make life harder for them over the coming decades. I don’t know how to reconcile that: I don’t think the world is better if people don’t travel. You often told stories of the times you lived in Italy, or Israel, or the UK before I was born. Your parents visited countries all over the world and often took you with them. We traveled often around Europe in particular. Maybe it’s because I inherited that background, or because our own relocations made my sense of place less tethered, but I think the ability to see the world face-to-face should be as accessible as possible.

I think you’d have a smart way to think about that, or to look at it from another angle. You might, I think rightly, point out that the bulk of the climate crisis lies in the hands of corporations and industry. That they spend time and dollars on casting the blame elsewhere. But you’d also care and worry about your own contribution: you wanted an electric car before most, you wanted solar, you supported renewable energy and the politicians who supported it.

As I write you this, my child is fast asleep, lying skin-to-skin on his mother. His face is unbothered by any stress or worry. He hardly cries. When he wakes up, I’ll check his nappy, keep him clean, and we’ll feed him. We’ll talk to him, and play with him, and sing and tell him we love him, and let him drift back off into slumber.

There are people in the world who would wish this sweetest human harm. They’re part-Jewish; they’re from more than one place; they are not being raised to believe in a religion; they are going to be raised to be in opposition to wealth hoarders and rent-seekers and nationalists, in a culture of broad, inclusive love. These would-be-objectionable traits are all the products of dead-end mindsets that should have withered away in the 20th century. With a small amount of luck they’ll live to see the first decades of the 22nd century, and I imagine those ideas still be with us then. But I hope they will be fringe by then, and I hope my child has a part to play in their demise. They do not deserve to define what the rest of us do.

I grew up knowing that my father and his family lived through a concentration camp when he was just a toddler; that my maternal grandfather was captured by the Nazis and thought dead; that my great grandfather escaped White Army pogroms in Ukraine. I heard my grandmother screaming through the walls every night as her dreams took her back. Through my family and the ripples trauma leaves across generations, I understand the consequences of hate. And I understand that the definition of “fascist” isn’t predicated on death camps and goose-stepping; it isn’t set in the early 20th century. It’s a mindset rooted in nationalism, tribalism, and the noxious idea that some people are inherently better than others. It’s an idea that did not go away at the close of the Second World War, is not limited to any nation (of course Americans can be fascist), and is so pernicious that my child and their children will both need to be aware of its toxicity, long into the future.

The period we’re living through now may be just the very beginning stages of a world with fewer resources controlled by ever-fewer people, who will use increasingly-authoriarian methods and appeals to existing divisions to try and maintain their holdings at the expense of others. Ma, the only way I can see through this is by living how you did: with kindness, by not holding back our opinions, and by active work to make everything better.

You showed me the way. I’ll try and do my best.

I love you. I miss you. I wish you were here.

Happy Labor Day to everyone who celebrates the organized labor movement today in the US. This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for August, 2022.

A note: it’s taken me a while to hit publish on this post because our son was born on September 2nd. We instantly fell in love. More on that soon. For now, please understand if my posting frequency plummets for a little while.

Books

Fiction

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan. A ton of ideas about parenting, society, and the present moment, crammed into an emotional near-future science fiction story. I wish the protagonist had been more sympathetic - but the future it paints is alarmingly plausible.

Notable Articles

Business

Workplace Productivity: Are You Being Tracked? “Two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.”

The organized labor movement has a new ally: venture capitalists. “White’s solution is to plan an “exit to community.” Once the company starts earning income, it plans to buy out its investors and give their equity to the unions it helped organize, effectively transitioning corporate control to the customer base.”

American Express' platinum-level duplicity. “American Express’ decision to begin donating to Republican objectors reflects the desire of some in the business community to put the events of January 6, 2021, behind them. That, according to an open letter recently signed by former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault and other prominent business leaders, is a big mistake.”

Varo layoffs are a sign of neobanks’ struggle to break even. ““Most American neobanks cater to lower-income customers, who previously may have incurred overdraft, [non-sufficient fund fees] and maintenance fees at big establishment banks,” Mikula told Protocol. “But these consumers also tend to be higher credit risk, making it challenging to lend to them. No U.S. neobank has built a meaningful lending business.””

Climate

California to Ban the Sale of New Gasoline Cars. “The rule, issued by the California Air Resources Board, will require that all new cars sold in the state by 2035 be free of greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide. The rule also sets interim targets, requiring that 35 percent of new passenger vehicles sold by 2026 produce zero emissions. That requirement climbs to 68 percent by 2030.”

The temperature threshold the human body can't survive. “When the wet bulb temperature gets above 95 degrees F, our bodies lose their ability to cool down, and the consequences can be deadly. Until recently, scientists didn’t think we’d cross that threshold outside of doomsday climate change scenarios. But a 2020 study looking at detailed weather records around the world found we’ve already crossed the threshold at least 14 times in the last 40 years.”

Women are working to make the clean energy transition more equitable. “Women are disproportionately facing the impacts of the climate crisis: They are more likely to be displaced by climate disasters, and due to lower-paid jobs, caregiving responsibilities and the wage gap, they have less economic means to recover and adapt to a changing climate.”

Crypto

More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake. “More than half of all reported trading volume is likely to be fake or non-economic. Forbes estimates the global daily bitcoin volume for the industry was $128 billion on June 14. That is 51% less than the $262 billion one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from multiple sources.”

Insider Trading in Cryptocurrency Markets. “We find evidence of systematic insider trading in cryptocurrency markets, where individuals use private information to buy coins prior to exchange listing announcements. Our analysis shows significant price run-ups before official listing announcements, similar to prosecuted cases of insider trading in stock markets.”

Feds Blacklist Tornado Cash, Ban Ethereum Mixing Tool in US. “In a Monday announcement, the body added the Tornado Cash website and a long list of Ethereum addresses to its Specially Designated Nationals list, banning American citizens from using the tool or transacting with these addresses.”

Pearson Sees NFT, Blockchain Helping Making Money From E-Books Sales. “The chief executive officer of Pearson Plc, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology like non-fungible tokens and the blockchain could help the company take a cut from secondhand sales of its materials as more books go online.”

Culture

Queer YA books are selling in record numbers despite bans targeting them. “Of the close to 5 million units of LGBTQ+ books sold in 2021, the biggest absolute gains in this market came from LGBTQ+ YA books, which saw an increase in sales of 1.3 million units from the previous year. Queer YA is more popular than ever — no longer a niche category, but redefining what is mainstream for teen readers.”

As list of banned books in schools grows, ‘soft’ censorship is spreading. “Free speech advocates say these practices are as troubling as bans — particularly when the books singled out overwhelmingly have themes related to race, gender and sexuality and are written by authors who are women, LGBTQ+ and/or people of color.”

Billy Bragg on the difference between the backlash to Salman Rushdie and Jerry Sadowitz. “Over the past decade or so, Rushdie has sought to return to some sort of a normal life, despite the threat hanging over him. The fact that he continued to take the stage at literary events is a tribute to his belief in freedom of expression and he has been rightly commended for his bravery.”

Doctor Who casting director: "We’re casting more disabled actors". “It’s more interesting. Also, if you can’t cast diversely on Doctor Who, what show can you do it on? It goes everywhere, on this planet and others, and you don’t want to see the same kind of people all the time. You don’t want it to be exclusively middle-class white people speaking with RP accents.”

on leading a purposeless life. “Maybe it is okay to not pursue potential and just be okay with being. Why must there be a reason for everything?” Beautiful.

Author Salman Rushdie attacked on lecture stage in New York. “He has said he is proud of his fight for freedom of expression, saying in a 2012 talk in New York that terrorism is really the art of fear.”

Interview: Jake Novak on His Infamous SNL TikTok Video. “Honestly, as horrible as the internet has been to me in the past six weeks, I have really enjoyed this hiatus. I’m getting to see my friends more and just have more meaningful experiences in real life.”

Democracy

Why I Changed My Mind on Student Debt Forgiveness. “It is simply impossible for students to work their way through college in the way previous generations could. And at the same time, states have reduced funding to their public colleges that historically allowed schools to charge low tuition prices.”

We reject the free speech-trampling rules set by J.D. Vance and Ron DeSantis for covering their rally. “Think about what they were doing here. They were staging an event to rally people to vote for Vance while instituting the kinds of policies you’d see in a fascist regime.”

John Mackey: Whole Foods CEO says ‘socialists are taking over’ schools and gun control debate. ““My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over,” the multi-millionaire organic grocery magnate said. “They’re marching through the institutions. They’re… taking over education. It looks like they’ve taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they’ve taken over the military. And it’s just continuing.””

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff leans in to being a voice for gender equity. “Emhoff is the first second gentleman to the first woman vice president, and for him, tackling gender inequality in ways big and small felt like a natural, and critical, component of creating this role. He is actively attempting to model for others what it means to be an ally in actions, not just words.”

It's Manly Man Summer at the Claremont Institute. “In a piece titled “Men and the Future of America,” Klingenstein praises senator Josh Hawley for a speech trumpeting the “masculine virtues.” And what are those? They are, according to Klingenstein, “stoicism, competitiveness, conquest, achievement and aggression.” These are qualities to be managed, not repressed, because repressing them turns them toxic, into “dysfunctional behaviors—crime, drugs, pornography, and the like.”” I find this ideology so repulsive, so baffling.

How the Claremont Institute, home to Trump lawyer John Eastman, rose and fell. “Lewis said he agreed with Claremont leaders that the country is locked in a cold civil war. “Our country is upside down,” he said. “It’s unrecognizable.” He praised the program and its focus on “the myth of systemic police racism.” […] “They’re trying to train people to take a kind of extreme populist right-wing ideology back with them to Washington.”“

After slow response, Biden administration ramps up abortion access protections. “Helen Silverstein, head of the government and law department at Lafayette College, said that the administration’s actions this week were notable because they sent a clear — if delayed — signal to the Democratic base that the executive branch is taking access to reproductive health care seriously.”

Orbán gets warm CPAC reception after 'mixed race' speech blowback. “The reaction to Orbán’s “mixed-race” remarks was “a little bit overblown,” Ede Vessey said, maintaining that the prime minister was referring to a stark clash of cultures that has taken place in some Western European countries that have accepted refugees from predominantly Muslim countries.”

Senate Judiciary holds hearing on threats to election workers. “Election officials from both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as nonpartisan officials, testified at the hearing on election workers, a workforce that has received more attention after former President Donald Trump lied about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. As Trump considers another run for office in 2024, he has repeated unfounded claims about election security that election administrators say has made their work more difficult.”

Justice Department sues Idaho over abortion ban, citing ‘medical emergency’ violation. ““The law thus places medical professionals in an impossible situation,” Gupta said. “They must either withhold stabilizing treatment required by EMTALA or risk felony prosecution and license revocation. In so doing, the law will chill providers’ willingness to perform abortions in emergency situations and will hurt patients.””

ShotSpotter Asks Court To Hold It In Contempt Rather Than Turn Over Information To Defense Lawyer. “It’s tough to say what a judge will find admissible, but ShotSpotter’s past history suggests it is willing in some cases to alter reports to justify arrests that have already occurred. If the PD contacted ShotSpotter post-arrest to get a report altered, it may show officers had no reasonable suspicion to stop the arrestee — a stop that resulted in his arrest.”

Sen. Tiara Mack says twerking video response has led to harassment, threats. ““It’s been a whirlwind. Anywhere from misogynistic comments, racist comments, classist comments,” she said. “I’ve received death threats. I’ve received emails and phone calls of people calling me the n-word. I’ve received fatphobic comments. Just everything under the sun.””

Republican candidates are changing how they handle abortion after Roe v. Wade. “Multiple Republican midterm candidates have removed from their campaign sites references to particularly strict anti-abortion stances, a shift from primary campaigning to the approaching general election and an indication of growing concern in the Republican Party over how to handle abortion policy post-Roe v. Wade.”

Health

U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline. “American Indian and Alaskan Native people have experienced a particularly precipitous drop in life expectancy since 2019, going from 71.8 to 65.2 years. This kind of loss is similar to the plunge seen for all Americans after the Spanish Flu.”

Kids Born Near Fracking Sites More Likely to Have Leukemia, Study Says. “Children who are born near fracking sites are as much as three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia later on, according to new Yale research.”

For years, Black trans women have been told their life expectancy is 35 years. That’s false. “Willis says the statistic once communicated an urgency in the community. Today, she thinks trans people need more complicated stories.”

Experts debunk monkeypox myths as misinformation spreads. “Can monkeypox spread on the subway? Can it kill like COVID-19? Experts respond to monkeypox myths and misconceptions.”

Just because some people can pretend COVID is over, doesn’t mean it actually is. “People are still dying of COVID and even more people are getting long COVID (which we’re seeing develop into myalgic encephalomyelitis for many long haulers, and trust me, you don’t want it). The CDC and Food and Drug Administration have mostly abdicated their responsibility to prevent infections, focusing only on serious illness and death, while ignoring long COVID and the impact of the virus on disabled people.”

Media

Person-Centered Terms Encourage Stigmatized Groups’ Trust in News. “Participants trusted articles that used person-centered terms for their group more than articles that used stigmatizing terms.” Understandably.

People of color at 'New York Times' get lower ratings in job reviews, union says. “While there were some fluctuation — on average, the performance of Black employees rose over the intervening years, while it declined for Latinos at the organization — white workers were consistently assessed as outperforming their peers.”

Healing Polarized Communities. “We cannot begin bridging communities beyond our newsrooms without building — and supporting — more diverse communities within our newsrooms.” So proud to work here.

Choose Your Own Literary Adventure. “The colorful recommendation chart, one of many that have rippled through the Twitter and Instagram feeds of book lovers, came from a small bookstore in Madison, Wis., called A Room of One’s Own. […] The charts seem to speak the internet’s language, one that meets people where they are by acknowledging that literature can be overwhelming, and people often don’t know where to start.”

A luxury magazine photo hid relics Cambodia says could be stolen. For me the lede here is: Architectural Digest appears to have deliberately run a photo altered to hide the fact that an article’s subject owns stolen Cambodian artifacts.

After Roe v. Wade Reversal, Readers Flock to Publications Aimed at Women. “Alexandra Smith, the audience director of The 19th, which was founded in 2020, said growth in traffic had been “exponential.” She said an increase in search traffic had continued well after the June 24 court decision, with readers now looking for information on how the decision could impact access to Plan B and IUDs. They were also looking to read about the impacts on other civil rights, such as marriage equality.” Hey, I get to work there!

Alex Jones must pay $50m for Sandy Hook hoax claim. “Despite retracting his claims about Sandy Hook, Jones has continued to use his media platform to argue the case was rigged against him and claimed that members of the jury pool “don’t know what planet they’re on”. His Infowars website depicted the judge being consumed by flames.”

Science

How a theory about transgender contagion went viral. “The problem: Overwhelming evidence shows that your child almost certainly hasn’t been duped. Although some people do reconsider or reverse their transition, once a person starts identifying as trans, it’s quite unlikely they’ll change their mind. No matter how strongly you believe that the internet, social contagion, and positive representations of transgender people turned your child trans, chances are your child disagrees.”

French Scientist's Photo of ‘Distant Star’ Was Actually Chorizo. “But a few days later, Klein revealed that the photo he tweeted was not the work of the world’s most powerful space telescope, as he had in fact tweeted a slice of chorizo sausage.”

Society

Capitalism Gives Me the Freedom to Pursue as Many Side Gigs as I Want to Pay Off My Increasing Bills And Loans. “I like to think of myself as an independent contractor who threw out his nine-to-five job for about five to nine different jobs over the course of a year, a contractor with significantly less of the legal protections established in the past hundred years or so by Congress and the Supreme Court.”

Ask Damon: I want to redistribute my slave-owning ancestor's wealth. “Anyway, if you’re sincere in your desire to attempt to right your family’s wrongs, find those descendants, show them the money and then hand it to them.”

Happiness Is Two Scales. “Instead, happiness and unhappiness are two separate, independent scales. A good life requires tackling each one separately.”

Period poverty: Scotland first in world to make period products free. “It will be for the country’s 32 councils to decide what practical arrangements are put in place, but they must give “anyone who needs them” access to different types of period products “reasonably easily” and with “reasonable dignity”.”

Why a Life-Threatening Pregnancy Complication Is on the Rise. “For African American women, simply the stress of living in America increases the risk of preeclampsia.”

Lionsgate Will Mandate Abortion Safety Protocols, CEO Says in Memo. “Thank you, Lionsgate, for being the only studio who treated this issue with the respect and urgency it deserves. There’s still work to be done, but this is a step in the right direction.”

Races are finally making room for nonbinary runners. “More races across the United States are creating divisions for nonbinary runners to compete, and in some cases, to win awards. The New York City Marathon introduced a nonbinary category last year. The Chicago Marathon also quietly added a nonbinary registration category this year, one runner said. The Boston Marathon will include a nonbinary category in 2023, though athletes say the race needs to flesh out its policy before nonbinary runners can be fully included.”

NJ police used baby DNA to investigate crimes, lawsuit claims. “The blood samples are not directly shared with law enforcement agencies. But if police are able to reliably obtain the samples through subpoena, then effectively, the disease screening process is entering all babies born in the state into a DNA database with no ability to opt out.”

Economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich. “We find tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality in both the short- and medium-term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth or unemployment.”

The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”. “By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I’ve come to see longtermism as an immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of “future value,” complete with its own “secularised doctrine of salvation.””

Facial recognition smartwatches to be used to monitor foreign offenders in UK. “Through their opaque technologies and algorithms, they facilitate government discrimination and human rights abuses without any accountability. No other country in Europe has deployed this dehumanising and invasive technology against migrants.”

Federal Judge Places County Jail Into Receivership After County Fails To Comply With Consent Decree. Mind-blowing: “A-Pod is one of four “pods” the prison is divided into. […] Because the inmates have free run of the pod, they can access the roof and escape. For whatever reason, they rarely actually escape. Instead, they leave the prison and return with contraband. No one is assigned to work A-pod because it cannot be controlled in its current state.”

Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor. “The findings show the limitations of many attempts to increase diversity — like school busing, multifamily zoning and affirmative action. Bringing people together is not enough on its own to increase opportunity, the study suggests. Whether they form relationships matters just as much.”

Technology

Opening the Pandora's Box of AI Art. “I’ve never felt so conflicted using an emerging technology as DALL-E 2, which feels like borderline magic in what it’s capable of conjuring, but raises so many ethical questions, it’s hard to keep track of them all.”

Listen up: Podcasts are coming to Twitter. What’s Odeo is new again.

Bay Area tech startup Sanas wants people to sound whiter. “Experts who spoke to SFGATE were troubled by Sanas’ emphasis on people in the Global South making themselves understood to Americans, as opposed to Americans accepting other accented voices.” Indeed.

Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues. “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”

Class action against Oracle's worldwide surveillance machine. “Oracle’s dossiers about people include names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity.”

A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal. ““This is precisely the nightmare that we are all concerned about,” Mr. Callas said. “They’re going to scan my family album, and then I’m going to get into trouble.””

Mozilla Foundation - In Post Roe v. Wade Era, Mozilla Labels 18 of 25 Popular Period and Pregnancy Tracking Tech With *Privacy Not Included Warning. “Eighteen out of 25 reproductive health apps and wearable devices that Mozilla investigated for privacy and security practices received a *Privacy Not Included warning label. These findings raise concerns in the post-Roe landscape that data could be used by authorities to determine if users are pregnant, seeking abortion information or services, or crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.”

A new jailbreak for John Deere tractors rides the right-to-repair wave. “Farmers around the world have turned to tractor hacking so they can bypass the digital locks that manufacturers impose on their vehicles. Like insulin pump “looping” and iPhone jailbreaking, this allows farmers to modify and repair the expensive equipment that’s vital to their work, the way they could with analog tractors.”

This Is the Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion. “Facebook gave police a teenager’s private chats about her abortion. Cops then used those chats to seize her phone and computer.”

OnlyFans Accused of Paying Bribes to Put Enemies on Terrorist Watchlist. “According to the suit filed earlier this year by Evans and fellow porn content creator Kelly Pierce, OnlyFans reportedly bribed Facebook employees to wrongfully place the actresses — who used OnlyFans competitor sites to sell their content — on a terrorism watchlist run by a consortium of internet companies, resulting in them being “shadowbanned” on Instagram and other social networks integral to the promotion of their content.”

Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022. “The share of teens using Facebook has declined sharply in the past decade. Today, 32% of teens report ever using Facebook, down 39 points since 2014-15, when 71% said they ever used the platform.”

Who could write protocol fiction for speculative infrastructure? “But we don’t need just design fictions. We need business model fictions, engineering feasibility study fictions, interop protocol specification fictions, investment return fictions.”

Gmail is now officially allowed to spam-proof politicians’ emails. “It’s sad that instead of simply stopping sending spam emails, Republicans engaged in a bad-faith pressure campaign — and it’s even more unfortunate that Google bought it.”

iOS Privacy: Instagram and Facebook can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser. “With 1 Billion active Instagram users, the amount of data Instagram can collect by injecting the tracking code into every third party website opened from the Instagram & Facebook app is a staggering amount.”

Ex-Twitter employee found guilty of spying on Saudi dissidents. “Abouammo was found to have used his position at Twitter to find personal details identifying critics of the Saudi monarchy who had been posting under anonymous Twitter handles, and then supplying the information to Prince Mohammed’s aide Bader al-Asaker.”

Silicon Valley engineers are quitting for climate change. “Big Tech is no longer the young upstart, and there’s a new kid in town luring away smart people looking for purpose and willing to take a chance on something new: climate tech.”

This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting. ““We are not trying to make human beings. That is not what we are trying to do.” says Hanna. “To call a day-40 embryo a mini-me is just not true.””

The Metaverse Is Not a Place. “But what if, instead of thinking of the metaverse as a set of interconnected virtual places, we think of it as a communications medium? Using this metaphor, we see the metaverse as a continuation of a line that passes through messaging and email to “rendezvous”-type social apps like Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and, for wide broadcast, Twitch + Discord. […] The interactions are not place based but happening in the ether between two or more connected people. The occasion is more the point than the place.”

Joel Kaplan’s Policy Team Sways Big Facebook Decisions Like Alex Jones Ban. “The company could have acted much earlier, one Facebook researcher wrote on the internal message board when they quit in August. The note came with a warning: “Integrity teams are facing increasing barriers to building safeguards.” They wrote of how proposed platform improvements that were backed by strong research and data had been “prematurely stifled or severely constrained … often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.””

The best part of traveling is the food.

You can learn so much from how and what people eat. The way they gather, the smell of the spices, the sizzle of oil in great pans, the delicacies that only come from the sorts of hole-in-the-wall places that locals protect with their lives.

I’ve never been a fussy eater. I explore new places like a toddler: taste buds first, every nerve in my mouth feeling out a new experience. There’s so much joy and humanity to be found in food - and in particular in the kinds of food that are cheap and accessible. Fancy restaurants are all very well (I’m not knocking the skill and artistry involved in a Michelin-starred meal) but the kind of place that can become someone’s regular joint is beguiling. The food is the basis of a relationship that forms over time.

I drove across the US twice last year. Heading east, we went the northern route, through Glacier National Park and the Montana plains. Heading west some months later, we traveled south. Every time we tried one of the headline places to eat - the tourist traps, in other words - the food paled in comparison to the places where locals went. In New Orleans, Cafe du Monde is a fun experience, but the food doesn’t compare to unpretentious spots like Stuph’D.

And just as food is tied deeply into the identity of a place, so is it tied to the identity of a person. We all have the dishes we love, which make up the fabric of us; the ingredients we enjoy, how and when we cook, if we cook at all, the smells we produce in the kitchen and the smells that attract us at the table. Whether our cooking is a whole thing or if it’s something we do regularly, it’s part of our self-image and the image we project. We need food to survive, and our relationship with it reflects us.

When people ask me where I’m from, I sometimes joke and say, “I come from the internet”. In some ways that’s true, but the joke stops here: I’m in no way from the place that produced pink sauce and baked feta pasta. Food, more than anything, links me to the places I came from.

I really learned to cook from my Oma, who brought her Indonesian dishes to California when my dad’s family emigrated in the sixties and adapted them for locally-available ingredients. She loved cooking for her family, but began to lose strength. So she gave me instructions: sayur lodeh and nasi goreng under her direction were my first adventures in mixing spices and building flavors. I grew up with these meals, regular weekday occurrences rather than exotic events, but no less delicious for it; I was pleased to learn how to reproduce them.

We ate a lot of Italian and French food, common to many American families of any origin (despite being in England): lasagna, quiches, homemade pizzas, spaghetti. But my mother’s Ukrainian Jewish ancestry led us to eat piroshki and borscht on special occasions; matzo ball soup; latkes; challah. Our meals were hearty. “Do you eat foreign food every day?!” one school friend memorable said when he came over. It wasn’t foreign to us; it was ours. “Eat, eat,” my great grandfather used to say, “it’s good for you.” Grandpa Dave was PA Joint Board manager of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America; here’s a story about a holiday complex he helped build for union workers.

Despite living in England, at no point did we eat English food, which I was left to discover as an adult. I didn’t have so much as a Sunday roast until I was in my twenties: it just wasn’t part of our culinary milieu. Of course, then I leapt on it, and writing this in California I find myself missing Yorkshire puddings and pork pies.

Locard’s exchange principle dictates that every contact leaves a trace. Although it was developed for forensic investigations, it’s equally applicable to people and migration: the places we’ve been all rub off on us, and we rub off on them. I’m a Ukrainian-Jewish-Indonesian-Swiss-Dutch-American who lived in both England and Scotland for decades. Each of those places left some trace on me, directly or via my family, and my descendants will find that they have rubbed off on them too, even if each of those ingredients has a slightly different potency to mine. They will have their own distinct identities, while also reflecting what and who came before them.

And of course, the same is true of everyone. Each of those chefs in the hole-in-the-wall joints serving food to their regulars has their own combination of ingredients that led to them. We’re all constantly leaving traces on each other, part of a tremendous, delicious mix. The more we mix and ebb and flow, the greater the tastes we may experience. To be fussy and reject new tastes, or to demand it be anglicized or made pristine, is to reject new people and other ways of life.

Taste is part of life. It’s one of the best parts of living. We are, literally and metaphorically, what we eat.

Photo by Miquel Parera on Unsplash

One. Is it even ethical to bring a child into the world right now? During their lifetime we’ll see water scarcity and an increase in global conflict as a result of climate change. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. How, in good conscience, can I bring a new human into that?

It’s an imperfect answer, but I’ve arrived at this: what would the world look like if only the people who didn’t believe in climate change had children? Yes, they’re going to need to be part of the solution, because everyone will need to be. It’s a tough ask for a human who didn’t ask to be born. But I’m confident they’ll be an asset to the future.

Two. What does nationality look like? It’s important to me, but why, exactly?

I’m a third culture kid: living in the US is the first time I’ve spent an extended time in a place where I was a citizen. I’ve written before about how I consider myself to have no nationality and no religion.

The thing is, that’s not quite right: I am a product of all the nationalities and cultures that led up to me. That I don’t exactly identify with any of them doesn’t mean that they don’t belong to me.

But that’s just me: Erin, as the mother, carries a full half of their context, and has a different background to me. How do you honor both backgrounds and contexts, while also downplaying the importance of nationality and patriotism overall?

What’s important to me is that they know they’re from multiple places, and they know that the world is their oyster. Rather than patriotism, I want them to feel proud to be human, and to feel connected to all humans. I want them to have broad horizons and an inclusively global mindset. They can do anywhere and do anything they want: the world is awash with possibilities. And at the same time, everyone, everywhere matters, and people who are more local to them do not matter more than people who are more remote. I want my child to have the privilege of openness and connectedness.

Three. I want to keep them healthy and happy. That, in itself, is incredibly daunting. What if I hurt them somehow?

Four. I’ve spent my life in front of screens. I literally learned to write on a Sinclair ZX81, writing stories that incorporated the BASIC shortcuts on its keyboard. Characters would GOTO places a lot; they would RUN; THEN they would do something else. One of my first memories is watching the animated interstitial network announcements on our little TV in Amsterdam.

What should their relationship with devices be? The going advice is that introducing screens too early can interfere with their development. And at the same time, my dad in particular deliberately allowed me to play with everything. I took apart radios; I mucked around with computers with impunity; I developed, early on, a complete lack of fear of technology. And that’s served me very well.

I’ll admit to feeling a bit judgmental of parents of those toddlers out in the world who have iPads in carry-cases. But what right do I have to feel that way? I’ve never had a child, until now. Maybe I’ll feel completely different.

And actually, I feel very strongly about tablets and phones themselves. I didn’t have a device that couldn’t be hacked until I was in my twenties. Everything could be taken apart, programmed for, adjusted. There were no games consoles in our household, and cellphones weren’t really available until I was older. I like that philosophy: open technology only. Teach them early to be a maker, not a consumer.

Five. Should I buy a domain name for them? Reserve a Twitter username? Is that self-indulgent?

Six. It’s important to make sure babies interact with a wide range of people while they’re very little, to allow them to develop an understanding that every type of face is part of their circle. Infants learn about race in their first year; by 9 months old, they recognize faces from their own race better than others. By 6 months old, they may exhibit racial bias. So it’s incredibly important that their circles are diverse.

While this cognitive wiring is established early, developmental changes obviously continue throughout childhood. For these reasons - and also just because they’re better places to live for all kinds of reasons - it’s important to be in a cosmopolitan, diverse, open-minded location. Homogenous towns and cities are not what I want, both as a person, and for my child.

Seven. No, I don’t think ideological diversity is anywhere near as important as actual intersectional diversity. And I have no intention to allow bigotry or small-mindedness to enter their worldview.

Empathy, inclusion, love, understanding, and connectedness must be core values. Change is inevitable and to be embraced. Difference is beautiful. The world is to be explored and embraced.

Eight. I like the idea and philosophy of free-range parenting. Let the child explore and learn on their own terms, for crying out loud. Let them ride bikes in the neighborhood and hang out with their friends and generally live out The Goonies.

But that seems to be out of vogue? There’s a trend of helicopter parents who schedule their child’s every moment? The idea seems repellant to me - doesn’t it mean that they miss out on developing a degree of autonomy? - but am I right to feel that way?

Nine. My parents made friends through pre-natal and baby classes - and that’s where a lot of my early friends came from, too. Everything’s online now because of covid. Where are baby-friends supposed to come from?

Ten. How do we share photos and information with family and friends without compromising on privacy? Social media sites like Instagram and Facebook will be data-mined; email feels insecure because I don’t know who will end up seeing photos and messages. The really private tools and services are too hard to use for a lot of people. What’s the best practice? What does baby infosec look like?

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash

I recently heard a story about a company that, when determining who would be laid off in a downsizing event, asked team leads to rank their teams based on who would be most likely to work on the weekend.

Mind-blowingly, while it’s obviously (or hopefully obviously) immoral, this practice appears to be legal in the US, which has at-will employment in every state. This is one of the many contrasts between European and US employment law, which were the biggest culture shock for me when I moved to the US eleven years ago. In Europe, employers must ensure that employees don’t work more than 48 hours during a week and the minimum vacation allocation beyond statutory holidays is four weeks. In America, it’s often seen as a badge of honor to work 70 hour weeks, and it’s one of the few countries in the world with 0 mandatory vacation days.

Perhaps my concerns around compassionate employment are irredeemably European, but as I’ve written before, long hours with little rest are counter-productive. Environments that want you to work weekends and evenings in addition to standard office hours tend to value performative productivity over actual results, or adhere to a kind of religious belief around work ethic. If these employers paid attention to the research and data, they wouldn’t do it.

This is perhaps even more of a problem in flexible and work from home settings. In my previous piece, I quoted a French member of Parliament:

“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

I heard recently about another company where the CEO regularly shouts at their team, and if a team lead suggests that a goal can’t be reached, retorts that they’ll find a team who can achieve it instead. These companies share a common trait: a fundamental lack of respect for the expertise and the lives of the people they’ve hired. It’s as if there’s some inherent value to this kind of work, and that the exchange of time for money obviates the need for human care.

It’s cultural. “I don’t think you should work while you have covid,” I told someone recently, mindful of the research about recovery times and long covid. “Maybe I learned the wrong lessons from my Dad,” he replied.

As well as being health and quality issues, these kinds of attitudes compound inclusion problems: only certain kinds of people can work all hours. Carers and parents, and particularly people from lower-income backgrounds, are more likely to have other commitments.

All aspects of a company’s culture are really hard to change when it’s already been set in motion. Either you care about creating a place that cares for its employees or you don’t, and these values affect the choices that are made by founders from the very first day. It’s impossible to do it bespoke, too: every aspect of a company has to pull together with the same cultural underpinnings. The entirety of a community has to pull together or resentments and friction build.

The same cultural change problem doesn’t apply in the same way across the country. While this is a uniquely American problem, not every American company behaves this way: to be frank, most of the successful ones don’t. One of the most promising aspects of the organization I’m at, The 19th, is its excellent, intentionally inclusive culture; it’s among the best, but not the first time I’ve felt valued at work. And it doesn’t take a people ops superhero to understand that people who feel valued do better work overall.

While I think these problems are best solved through legislation and unionization, competitive forces can be a useful fallback. Not everyone has the luxury of being discerning about their employer, but each of the companies I’ve mentioned is in the tech sector: a world where knowledge workers often do have the privilege of choice. Again, it doesn’t take an empath to understand that, given the choice between two otherwise similar firms, employees are more likely to choose to work at the one with a more supportive culture. It goes without saying that yelling doesn’t make for a productive workplace, but if you want to hire the best people, you’ve got to be the best place for them to work, and understand that, past a point, people are motivated by meaning, not money.

From a prospective employee standpoint, if you’re looking for a job, it helps to understand that you have every right to ask for and expect a better, more supportive culture. Having strong standards here makes the employment experience better for everyone, and helps even the worst employers understand that they need to change if they want to be successful.

But make no mistake: the onus is not on employees here. Employers - and the legislators that govern them in the United States - need to drag themselves into the twenty-first century and learn that a strong culture of support in turn makes for strong companies, and strong countries.

I pour myself another cup of coffee: two scoops into the Aeropress, a gentle pour of boiling water, a quick stir. I leave the plastic stirrer in the tube like a tombstone while the water percolates through the grounds.

Quiet mornings are hard to come by.

I had a conversation with someone recently whose entire family had contracted Covid. I found out like this: sorry if my voice goes, he said. I have Covid. I was helping him out with his work by answering some questions, but I quickly told him that he needed to rest. Give yourself the space to recover, I told him. I guess my Dad told me the wrong thing, he said.

I’ve been living in California for eleven years, and I’ve been an American citizen since I was born. There are still moments that make me wonder about the place I moved to. Some of the things that leave me wondering whether I’ll ever feel really at home here are relatively small - someone working through sickness instead of taking care of themselves, for example. And some are big.

While I was watching Ukraine win Eurovision, an 18 year old opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, murdering ten people. He live-streamed his attack on Twitch after publishing an 180-page manifesto in which he described himself as a white supremacist and an anti-Semite. He discussed replacement theory, and chose the location of his attack by researching the area with the highest percentage of Black people within driving distance. It’s a hate crime, fueled by hate speech. It was also the country’s one hundred and ninety-eighth mass shooting in 2022, on the one hundred and thirty-third day of the year.

I put on some toast and consider whether I’ll go for a walk or read my book. I just started The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel as part of a book group, and I’m also rereading Radical Candor. Outside, trees slowly sway against an unbroken blue sky.

Last week, CO2 levels exceeded 420ppm for the first time in recorded human history. I’m still thinking about a conversation where someone complained to me about having to take the bus. I routinely speak to people who believe public transport is outdated compared to road or air travel. The Cato institute says wanting to move people onto high-speed rail is “like wanting to be the world leader in electric typewriters, rotary telephones, or steam locomotives—all technologies that once seemed revolutionary but are functionally obsolete today.” It’s estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population will live under water scarcity by 2025.

I shop for wall sconces for the new house in Philly: something modern that will create enough light in the living room to offset the darkness of the walls. The walls themselves will have to be repainted white at some point, of course. But for now, there has to be something to brighten up the room.

We have too many 9-to-5-ers, someone told me about their startup a few months ago. You’ve got to hustle. I want to see people working evenings and weekends. Strangely, he was having trouble with getting people to stay motivated and complete their work.

The banality of the unkindness gets under your skin after a while. The first year, commuters stepping over homeless people seemed jarring and horrifying. By year five, it was inevitably part of life: there but not there. Someone once told me I was wrong to buy a Street Sheet from a vendor because it was begging. I make a point of carrying money to give to people who ask for it, but sometimes I forget to top it up.

A culture that is busy maintaining the base level of its hierarchy of needs has little time to spend worrying about other people. The through line between the mass shootings and the psychotic work culture and the disregard for climate and the disdain for the impoverished is a lack of regard for community. In America, we’re not all in this together, we’re all in this as individuals. Everyone is out for themselves. It’s not even about social safety nets or other legislation: those things are symptoms of a deeper distrust that seeps between people. It’s a society that has not been set up to be happy together: it is designed to leave you wanting to be rich alone.

I order some middle eastern food on DoorDash. The driver, on average, will make $15.74 per hour, which is far below the poverty line in the San Francisco Bay Area. DoorDash will take between 10-25% of my order from the independently-run restaurant, whose profit margin is often less than that. The order will likely come in plastic.

I take a sip from my coffee and wait.

Update: while I was writing this, there was another mass shooting at the Laguna Woods retirement community in Southern California. It does not and will not stop.

Hunter Walk asked people about their first concert.

My first was Tears For Fears, for a friend’s 13th birthday. It was just me and him. I wasn’t that into the band, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I loved it.

Perhaps more notably, the support band was a local group who had just changed its name to Radiohead. I remember that the singer, Thom Yorke, was very deadpan and reserved. Later, I’d see him around town a lot, always looking incredibly dour behind a pair of sunglasses while he went shopping or had a picnic with his family.

I love live music, but I haven’t felt safe to go during the pandemic. Even more recently, I’ve given up tickets to see Wet Leg and Dadi Freyr because I just didn’t want to risk it, despite being excited to see them live.

A couple of gigs that stand out to me:

I was glad I got to see Johnny Clegg on his final tour. Clegg formed the first interracial rock band in South Africa, which was illegal under the country’s apartheid rules, and told stories of their run-ins with the law as well as about the activists of the time.

I’ve seen Ani DiFranco fifteen times or so. I love the kinetic energy she brings live, and her politics - both about the world and about gender and identity - speak loudly to me.

I got to see Seasick Steve at the smallest stage at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park. He didn’t have a following in the US, so it was just a handful of us on the grass; intimate in the way great shows can be. And then he brought out John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin to play guitar with him.

And it was a treat to hear my sister’s band, Django Moves to Portland, for the first time after decades of hearing her play her songs acoustically. Her songs have always stood on their own, but the full band transformed them into something else.

How about you? What was your first concert? Which gigs have been notable for you?

This post is inspired by Donald Glover’s mildly unhinged interview with himself, which allowed him to answer questions that he would never otherwise be asked. I’m not sure that’s why I’m doing it, but it’s a different form for an entry, so let’s try it.

Let’s start here. How are you today?

That’s one of those questions where it’s not clear if the asker wants the real answer or a kind of nominal “doing okay, how about yourself”. I find myself falling into the latter, which seems to be habit I’ve picked up while I’ve been living in the States. I used to answer more honestly. Now I’m mostly always “okay”.

How am I actually doing? There’s a lot going on in my life, and in the world. I think a lot of us are struggling. I seem to have found a way to neatly compartmentalize, and I’m doing as good as any time over the last few years. I’d like to be doing better; specifically, I’d like life to be less complicated. But I’m getting through it.

What are you thinking about?

How I show up. Like I said, there’s a lot happening in the world: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate change, and the rise of modern nationalism (which I’m seeing more and more as a useful tool by people who stand to profit from us continuing to not tackle climate change). And there’s a ton happening in my own life, too; I’d hoped a little bit that I would have a quiet year after losing Ma last year, but that doesn’t seem to be on the cards.

So the question against the backdrop of all of that is: how do I show up? Not just how can I be a part of the solution rather than the problem or an amoral bystander, which I’d very much like, but also, how can I show up for the people around me? How can I show up for myself?

My mission for the work I do has long been to build projects with the potential to create a more equal and informed world. It’s how I make decisions about what to work on: if it doesn’t hit that core idea, I’m not interested. (Or if it deviates from that direction, I lose interest.) I’d rather take a pay cut and work on something driven by this mission than work for a lot of money on something that isn’t. I don’t have grand delusions about this: my friends are fond of telling me that I don’t need to save the world myself, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I just want to help make it better.

A lot of people work to simply make a living, or to build wealth for their family. How do those ideas fit into your worldview? Where’s the line for you?

I don’t begrudge anyone else’s mission or way of working (unless it’s actively harmful). My mission doesn’t have to be yours. There are a lot of people who really struggle to make ends meet, or are trying to escape generational poverty, and don’t have the luxury of making these kinds of ideological decisions. I particularly don’t begrudge that.

But here’s the thing. I didn’t grow up with a ton of money. We lived in a tiny, water-damaged house on a busy road, on a block between a petrol station and a notoriously violent pub. It turned out there was a brothel a few doors down from us. When I tell people I grew up in Oxford they tend to imagine dreaming spires and 16th century buildings, but my reality was a little more down-to-earth. My parents rebuilt that house themselves with very little money. I don’t want to say that it was terrible - it was home in a meaningful way - but it certainly wasn’t perfect.

My parents had been activists in Berkeley. My dad is one of the youngest concentration camp survivors (of a Japanese-run camp in Indonesia). He moved to the US when he was 18, and was drafted very quickly. When he came out, he protested the war in Vietnam. My mother went to court to protect tenant rights and helped fight for affirmative action. She used to talk about when she was radicalized.

So I also don’t buy that you can’t make moral decisions or be ideologically-focused when you’re poor. Some of the world’s most effective activists have been workers in poverty.

I’m not living in poverty. My parents made sure there was a computer in the house, and insisted on it being one that could be easily programmed (instead of, say, a games console). My mother taught me to code. Because of that, and because of my free University of Edinburgh education, I’ve made myself a decent career. So I’ve got no excuse. Showing up, for me, means standing up for what you believe in.

You don’t want to sit in a big tech company and collect your RSUs?

I do not.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t built Elgg. I didn’t understand money at all when I built it, but I sort of lucked into a career off the back of it. Before that I’d built a satirical website that consistently got millions of pageviews a day over a period of years, and I hadn’t figured out how to make a decent living from it. But Elgg helped push me forward.

It also made me aware of what was possible. Oxfam used Elgg to help train aid workers. Non-profits in the global south used Elgg to share resources. I accidentally made something that people found quite useful and made a fairly big impact, as one developer in a team of two. Honestly - and I know this is ego speaking here - that’s a great feeling.

The thing with a lot of those big companies is that they have detrimental effects. That RSU money was potentially earned through surveillance capitalism, or through deals with ICE and the military. I’m not eager to contribute to systems of oppression. I also think that any centralized system, if it succeeds, eventually becomes a tool for oppression.

You sound a bit holier-than-thou.

I recognize that. I’m often accused of virtue signaling. And maybe that’s a fair criticism, although I don’t think it’s the crime other people seem to think it is.

Despite everything, I’m still bought into the utopian vision of the internet. I joined because I saw the potential to communicate with people who were different to me and build community. I’m still motivated by that.

Conversely, there’s the Wall Street version of the internet where everyone’s out to make a lot of money as quickly as possible. I don’t like that version; I don’t like the people, I don’t like the mindset, and I don’t think it’s good for either the internet or the world. When so many startups fail, it starts to look like a get-rich-quick scheme centered on building monopolies that only people from wealthy backgrounds are truly able to participate in. It’s such an anti-pattern. Extrapolated to its conclusion, it’s a sort of highly-refined global oligarchy.

You’ve participated in a few startups yourself, though, right?

I have. I’ve even started two!

I love the act and feeling of building something new, and I love supporting people who do it. My first startup was kind of founded out of spite, to show the naysayers that it would work. My second one was more because I saw a need and wanted to try again. (If there’s ever a third one, it’ll be closer to that reasoning.)

I was never trying to make a billion dollar company: I was trying to build something and make it sustainable. With the benefit of hindsight, I think Elgg could have been a foundation from day one (it is one now), and Known could have been part of some kind of non-profit. The VC model has its place, but it wasn’t well-suited to either project. I’m super-grateful to the investors for both, though; I was able to spend a few extra years doing work I loved.

In truth, I think I was always trying to find my ideal working environment. I didn’t want to be working for a traditional company, and I found a lot of workplaces either too aggressive or not empathetic enough. I don’t want to feel like I’m hustling or competing with the people I’m working with; I want to feel like we’re collaborating together as an inclusive community of three-dimensional people aligned around a common mission in an emotionally safe environment.

Can startups be mission-driven in the way you need them to be?

I waver on this. Maybe? Unless you’re very lucky, you’ll eventually come to a point in your startup’s life where you’ll need to make a choice between upholding your values and making a bunch of money. Particularly when you’re responsible for peoples’ salaries, the ethics of that situation can be complicated. Do you have the right to risk peoples’ jobs and livelihoods for upholding an ideal? Do you have the right to risk an investor’s return, given the deal you made with them?

On the other hand, what if that ideal was what brought them to the startup in the first place? Then the arithmatic changes. If the team, the investors, and the founders are fully-aligned and incentivized, there’s a chance it can be mission driven. But I think the alignment is much clearer if we’re dealing with a non-profit: the investors are now grant-makers and people who donate, and nobody’s expecting to walk away with a 30X financial return.

The best startups are intentionally building the future. Definitions of the future vary wildly. Do you want to build a future of centralized wealth and privatization, or one that is equitable and distributed? The answer dictates the approach.

Weren’t you a venture capitalist?

I was, for eighteen months or so, and it was one of the best jobs of my career. Matter had funded Known, and when I went to Medium I continued to be an active part of the community. When Corey Ford asked if I’d want to come back and be part of the team, I hesitated because I didn’t know if I’d be able to do the job well. But I didn’t think anyone was going to ask me again, and particularly not for a mission-driven accelerator, so I made the jump.

The Matter team were all wonderful people, and I’m still really good friends with all of them. The Matter portfolio, similarly so: because I was a member of both sides of the community, I got to know just about everyone on an equal level.

Matter’s mission was similar to mine: to support startups with the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society. I worked very long and very hard, and loved every second of it.

It was sometimes a tricky proposition, because from a purely financial standpoint, the deal wasn’t competitive ($50,000 for 7%). But it came with five months of in-person training, a bunch of introductions, and a solid community of support. I was taught design thinking, and then taught it to the portfolio, which has been helpful every day in my career since.

Between the money and the mission, the program often attracted startups that weren’t natural fits for VC, and I wish we’d had space to experiment more with the model. Some portfolio companies began to push the envelope with revenue-based investment, and the Zebra movement was co-founded by a member of the Matter community. But more could have been done, which I think would have better served the projects.

Still, the LPs were all media companies (KQED, PRX, the Knight Foundation, the New York Times were all among them) and Matter was very far from predatory. I’m proud of the work I did there, and particularly of the people I got the chance to support and work with.

One day, I’d really like to work on something similar again: a human-centered accelerator for mission-driven projects, inspired by the Matter curriculum. Maybe even with the same colleagues. But I’d think about a very different, more mission-aligned model for funding.

Is that even possible?

Who knows, but why not try? We used to heavily quote Clay Shirky’s blog post on reviving the failing newspaper industry, which sadly is now offline. “Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for lots and lots of experiments.”

This isn’t a thing for now, but it might be a thing for later.

First, I want to do good work where I am, I want to concentrate on supporting my family, and I want to write a book.

A book? Why?

I got an interesting piece of anonymous feedback when I attempted NaNoWriMo last year: that nobody needs another piece of writing and that I should focus on work that matters. And I get it, I really do. But this one’s for me. I’m writing because I want to. I’m seeing it through because I want to.

I got into computers because you could use them to tell new, interesting kinds of stories. I got into the internet because you could more effectively tell yours, and learn about other people. Writing is my first love. I want to give it the breathing space it deserves.

Last year would have been the year, but losing Ma span me off in a different direction, as losing a parent does. This year won’t be the year either, but not because I won’t be working on it. I’ll take my time, and it’ll fit in between all the other things, but I’ll do it.

And in the meantime, yes, there’s work to do.

Speaking of: it’s time to turn my attention to something else. Thanks for the chat.

Thank you. It’s been interesting. But I might not do this again for a while.