Werd I/O

I’ve been thinking about how to make it easier to build on the fediverse. Here’s a pitch for an idea I’ve been thinking a lot about:

This API service allows anyone to spin up a fediverse back-end with its own custom domain, accessible via a RESTful API with easy-to-use libraries in popular languages. It handles all the message handling and caching transparently, charging on a per-instance and resource-use basis.

Read more on Werd Cloud. As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

I’ve been a technical leader since we started conceiving of the Elgg project back in 2003, twenty years ago. Back then, I didn’t know much — about leading teams, about running startups, about building projects — and I had to pick it all up from scratch, sometimes inventing processes and ideas from first principles. In fact, there wasn’t much of a startup scene in Edinburgh, Scotland, when I started my career, so almost everything I did was either from first principles or from what I’d read.

Since then, I’ve worked for startups and non-profits based in San Francisco, Austin, and New York City. I lived in the Bay Area and was steeped in Silicon Valley culture for over a decade. I’ve learned about building culture from very smart people while working at companies like Medium, as well as from the companies I supported when I was the west coast Director of Investments at Matter Ventures. Matter both taught me a formal framework for human-centered product design when it funded my second startup, Known, and gave me the opportunity to pass on that knowledge to startup founding teams and newsrooms when I joined the team. Later, I helped teach inclusive product design with Roxann Stafford as part of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms program.

All of this is to say: I’ve had to figure out a lot, I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve had the opportunity to have some real wins and losses, and all of this has led to a theory about what works and what doesn’t work when you’re leading a technology team.

Everything can be split into two categories, so the joke goes, and sure enough, I’ve noticed two main schools of thought. I think these are well-illustrated through a real-world example drawn from one of the places I worked.

At this particular, unnamed startup, I joined as the engineering lead, but in reality was the de facto CTO. Everything technology-related rolled up to me, and I found myself in countless meetings about company strategy, often late into the night.

I learned very quickly that the previous technical leader had made a particular choice when he hired for his team. He noticed that engineers with poorer communication skills were not being hired by other companies, even if their technical skills were strong. So he decided that he would over-index on technical skill and deliberately not hire for communication skill. That way he could hire what he considered to be stronger engineers more affordably.

He had left the company and they’d had trouble finding another technical lead. The engineers had essentially kept the lights on by themselves, writing code at a furious pace to keep the entire company afloat. Technical debt had built up and built up, and they were spending most of their time on maintenance. They were often re-directed to work on new tasks and pet projects when old ones hadn’t been finished or well-documented. There was next to no testing, either through automation or with users. Meanwhile, the rest of the company complained that the engineers weren’t productive. There were suggestions that code output be measured, or that the team move to one-week sprints to — I am not making this up — make them write code twice as fast. They were great humans, but they’d been placed in an impossible position without the tools that could possibly hope to lead them to success.

Every aspect of this was counter to my own intuition. I took a step back and had some productive conversations with an old boss, who ran technology at a much larger and more successful startup. He confirmed to me that he would have made different choices every step of the way (and helped me feel a little less like I was insane).

One school of thought, then, is this code-led, metrics-driven approach: management by spreadsheet. The other is a qualitative, human-centered approach: management through empathy. A central question is whether you prioritize the things you can measure (lines of code, minutes of engagement in the product) or the motivations of the humans involved (the needs of the people who use your product and the people who build it).

I’m closer to the second camp. The map is not the territory.

My approach to technology is holistic: someone at that same company described it as “supporting the whole engineer”. How could it be anything else? Everybody brings their whole self to work, whether it is acknowledged or not. If you lead a group of people who are engaged in any directed endeavor, whether it’s building software or organizing an event, the experience of being a part of that group has to be intentionally designed. At work, we call that “company culture”, although it’s really community-building: every team should be thought of as a community of human beings who have their own creativity, intelligence, skills, motivations, and preferences.

The output of a technical team is not code. Code is a means to an end, and is only one part of the complete breakfast of tools needed to bring a project to completion. Measuring code is not a good way of figuring out a team’s ability to be successful. While code is likely integral, the job of an engineer is to engineer a solution, not just to be a programmer. That means you’ve got to have a lot of very collaborative human skills; we call them “soft” skills, but perhaps we should think of them as “software skills”, because you really can’t write software without them.

Contrary to popular belief, most people are not coin-operated. It’s not about money (although they need to make enough money). Everyone wants to make progress on meaningful work, in an environment that makes them feel valued as people, and where they feel like they can succeed. I’ve mostly worked in startups, and I like to tell people that although these environments aren’t a Google with kombucha on tap and on-site gyms, they’re opportunities to try lots of different kinds of work and bring more of themselves to work than you might at a much larger company. I want everyone who’s been on one of my teams to look back ten years later and think, I’m really glad I was on that team, because it gave me confidence to be myself at work and helped move my career in a way I care about.

The bottom line is: people who feel supported do better work. Or, as professors Sigal Barsade and Olivia A. O’Neill put it in Harvard Business Review: employees who feel love perform better. In a medical setting, their longitudinal study showed that a strong emotional culture had the following results:

Employees who felt they worked in a loving, caring culture reported higher levels of satisfaction and teamwork. They showed up to work more often. Our research also demonstrated that this type of culture related directly to client outcomes, including improved patient mood, quality of life, satisfaction, and fewer trips to the ER.

It’s impossible to achieve this on a team that focuses on metrics over motivation. It also makes diversity, equity, and inclusion a business imperative: if the only people talking in a meeting, having their ideas heard, or receiving accolades are managers, and particularly if those managers are predominantly white men, will everyone else feel supported? Or will they tune out and feel like they’re not valuable members of the group?

I think even the words we often use in software development don’t serve us well, at least if we don’t consider why they’re there and why they exist. The goal is to create, maintain, and improve a project together, as a community of people, to meet real human needs, in a way that also satisfies the goals of your community.

Some examples of terms that are bad when left unexamined (and I think should probably be changed):

Documentation sounds like the driest thing possible. But we’re not writing a manual for the hell of it. We’re leaving signposts in the code that explain why we built something this way, how it works, the context behind its creation, and most importantly of all, who you are writing it for. Code is never self-documenting, because it can never tell you who it is for and why it exists. One might (might!) be able to follow clean source code, but you’ll never be able to understand the hopes and dreams of the people who made it, which are crucial for understanding the choices that were made in the past and how to continue to maintain the project.

Specifications are a subset of documentation that sound like bureaucracy. What I think is important is that, when you’re embarking upon building something, you take a step back and reflect on what you’re about to do. It’s good to get social feedback on your intended approach, but I think the personal reflection is the biggest value. These don’t have to be super-formal, but should be clear enough to be (I’ve had engineers literally yell at me: “I just want to code!” But after a few times going through this, they’ve all seen the value.)

Retros are, again, reflections. It’s about creating a space to learn what could have been better. A team’s processes are prototypes that are never too precious to be improved; sometimes individual team members need to think about how they felt during a project, and how that might have been better for them. If a project didn’t go well, it’s worth thinking about what the definition of success was, whether they had the tools to achieve success, and what might make a similar project go better next time. Standups are mini versions of this: about learning and supporting the engineer, not reporting back to managers.

Coding standards also sound like bureaucracy. But they’re there to help engineers make decisions about how to write code so that it’s usable by other people in their community. If everyone in a community is writing code the same way, the cognitive load to understanding someone else’s work is much lower. It’s a way of helping other people to understand what you’ve done more quickly.

We could go down the list — and maybe I will in a future post — but it’s clear to me that technical team management has fallen into a metrics over motivation trap that looks at hard numbers over experiential stories. That’s been a trap in technology overall: teams are more likely to do quantitative research rather than truly get to know the people they’re trying to help and learn their stories. The truth is that while some of the tools of the trade are drawn from math and discrete logic, software is fundamentally a people business, and the only way to succeed is to build teams based on great, collaborative communication, human empathy, true support, and mutual respect.

In turn, that means that I look to work in organizations that have those things (and in particular, mutual respect). It’s much harder to change an organization’s existing culture than to establish great norms in a new one — although it is possible, as long as management is on board.

I’ve rarely spoken about my work directly in this space, but I intend to do more of it over the next few weeks and months, including practical examples of techniques I use. If these topics are interest to you, and you haven’t yet, sign up for my newsletter.

Ever so tentatively, I’m beginning to show my head at in-person events this year. I haven’t been to any kind of industry conference or regular event since at least 2019. The small matter of a global, deadly pandemic kept me away, but I’ve decided that I’ll return to events that have solid covid protocols and where I can trust that the attendees will be sensible. It feels weird!

I’ll be at ONA 2023 — the annual Online News Association conference — from August 23-26. It’s just down the road from my new home in North Philadelphia, but also, there has never been a more crucial time for journalism and democracy. I’m looking forward to the conversations.

I’m also planning to be at DazzleCon in Chicago on October 20-21. This is the second ever Zebras Unite conference, all about how to create a better, more participative and equitable economy. I’ve been a huge fan of the zebras since reading an early version of its Sex and Startups manifesto, and I have a zebra startup of my own in my future.

See you there?

Cam Pegg writes:

I’m re-reading Michael Porter’s seminal article, The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy, and just had an OMFG-I-need-to-get-this-tattooed-on-my-forehead-so-that-everyone-I-talk-to-gets-the-message moment:

A narrow focus on growth is one of the major causes of bad strategy decisions.

The thing about growth is that it leads to bad strategy decisions if you care about profit. If all you care about is growth because you want to create a monopoly that you can then profit from indiscriminately through infinite supplier power, and you can raise millions upon millions of dollars to achieve that monopoly in such a way that you don’t have to care about revenue in the interim, the mechanics look a little different.

I’m a Porter’s Five Forces stan myself. I think everyone involved in building technology projects (and any business!) should read and understand them. And then read them again.

In particular, a lot of my work — and writing here — has been about addressing the outsized power of suppliers. Consider how much supplier power Facebook has over anyone in the publishing industry, for example: it doesn’t depend on publishers, but publishers sure as hell depend on it. It’s more concentrated than the publishing industry (there is one of it, many of them). The switching costs are astronomical because there is no real alternative. And its power creates great risk for publishers: a policy change could wipe out the industry.

Porter describes the problem as follows:

Powerful suppliers capture more of the value for themselves by charging higher prices, limiting quality or services, or shifting costs to industry participants. Powerful suppliers, including suppliers of labor, can squeeze profitability out of an industry that is unable to pass on cost increases in its own prices.

So what would it take to reduce supplier power to create a more equitable situation for buyers? Switching costs are reduced through the introduction of compatible, interoperable software from other vendors; a supplier’s differentiation is reduced by the introduction of software from other vendors that meets the buyer’s needs well; there are more viable solutions from more diverse vendors. In the Facebook example above, Twitter helped reduce supplier power; Mastodon and the open source fediverse reduces both of their supplier power. In fact, overall, open source software has been a great way to reduce risks to businesses from outsized supplier power.

To continue to run with my Facebook example, reducing supplier power through software has been a better strategy than imposing legislation (although there’s always a place for good legislation, not least antitrust reform, which we’ve needed for decades). When Canadian publishers came together to try and reduce supplier power through creating legislation that forced payments from Facebook, Facebook simply switched off the firehose and removed news from its sites in Canada. It turned out that the publishers needed it far more than it needed them.

I think a close read of Porter makes it clear that publishers would do well to support an open source fediverse that would reduce the power a handful of corporations have over them, but it’s hard for them to see it, in part because the switching costs are so incredibly high. Publishers are dependent on Facebook for audience, and the audience on the fediverse isn’t quite there yet because there hasn’t been the investment, so they don’t put in the investment, and the situation perpetuates itself forever. In effect, publishers aren’t capable of saving themselves, and it’ll take someone else who isn’t as dependent on Facebook to put in the investment instead.

The same goes for the many other industries that are similarly beholden to Facebook. Any of these industries alone can’t change the situation for the same reasons; together they might, but it’s likely to take an external convening force. Foundations, I’m looking at you. (Particularly any foundation that sees the risk to democracy itself from a single-vendor publishing market. It should help that we’ve already been through two Presidential election cycles where this risk couldn’t have been clearer if it was written in twenty foot flames.)

And because the outsized buyer power produced by an open, federated commons co-operatively supported by entities across industries that produced best-in-class social media platforms that were also communally owned would also be a hell of a risk to Facebook’s business, it is likely to want to get ahead of the situation somehow. It could also have allies who might potentially be worried about moving social media from centrally-controlled platforms to a more anarchic commons. Perhaps Facebook might address the risk by launching a network on the fediverse itself, and allowing itself to be the entity that puts in the investment, in a way that just so happens to shape the fediverse to benefit Facebook, eliminate any potential cross-industry collaboration and outside development, and ultimately defuse the risk from buyer power. Completely hypothetically, obviously.

It should go without saying that it’s all more complicated than I’m laying out here. But my core point is that the tech industry is an industry, which is to say it’s about businesses, which in turn are shaped by business forces. Yes, product design and technology architecture are incredibly important. But we ignore business strategy at our own risk, even as open source hackers trying to provide alternatives. There’s a very serious game here that must be won.

The other day I posted a surprisingly glowing first impression of Meta’s new Threads app. This is the counterpart to that.

The site is brands, man. All of it. It’s like the glossy fashion magazine of social networks.

And I get it. I really do. This is going to succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams — it hit 50 million users yesterday without breaking a sweat — and we’ll all be using it for years to come. It probably will accelerate the fediverse in the way I previously suggested. It’s slick and beautiful and easy to use, and if you want to talk to Paris Hilton or engage in conversation with Taco Bell, there it is.

But there’s a bad taste in my mouth that isn’t going away, that has its roots in the genocide that Meta enabled through its actions and inactions, and the political polarization in the United States that it was undoubtedly a part of, and in Cambridge Analytica and election engineering, and in the very American impulse to not give a shit about what’s happening outside your borders if you’re comfortable and you can make a buck.

Social media was at an inflection point where movements with the potential to radically change society were building through hashtags and calls to action. Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and entire democratic revolutions started on social media. And whether by design or by accident, the fertile platforms that allowed those movements to build and grow are fundamentally gone. Some people called these ideas political extremism; I thought of them as hopeful signs. These spaces have evaporated and we’re left with targeted engagement from Wendy’s: brand managers and marketing targets.

The spirit and community of Mastodon was and is very hopeful to me. It is a non-profit space, co-operatively built and run in a way that is fully in alignment with its communities. The problem is, it’s also a dog to use, and there are enough people who are a part of those networks who are adamant that it’s okay that there’s a high barrier to entry. It’s not okay. There was a populist fascist in the White House, and there may be again, and these are pretty high stakes for the entire world. I care more about the ability for democratic mass movements to form and grow than maintaining the coziness of a community that wants to put Black peoples’ lived experiences at the hands of modern day segregation behind content warnings.

So I also think Threads represents a giant failure of the community to create something that works. If Mastodon had taken off, or if there was another space that was designed around democracy and equity that had lived up to this moment, Threads wouldn’t have worked. But it didn’t and there wasn’t, and 50 million people are engaging with Netflix and Dior on a platform that sat back and allowed the Rohingya people to be slaughtered in the name of ad engagement while the new proprietor of the social network next door is busy calling social justice a mind virus.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t still time, or there isn’t, perhaps, a way to use the Threads network to build stronger community scaffolding. But it requires intent: not just to build a network, but to support democracy. We have not yet achieved this, and I hope that we will. There may come a point where we don’t get another chance.

Meta’s new social network is interesting: an obvious strategic shot at Twitter just as that network is running into trouble, as well as a way to iterate on its aging Facebook property. To that end, it makes sense that Meta would piggyback on the fediverse of independent social networks that interconnect through the open ActivityPub protocol, and I’m genuinely very excited to see it take that leap. Meta is already the closed social networking top dog by a long shot, and by embracing Mastodon et al, it puts itself in a position of working with the open web to compete with Twitter instead of battling with both entities. For perhaps the first time ever, it also aligns Meta with the open web.

By working with Instagram’s accounts and social graph, and concentrating on one form factor, it gets a lot right that other decentralized social networks haven’t managed yet. There’s no waitlist or complicated registration procedure to figure out: if you’re on Instagram, you hit a single button and you’re set up.

The feed starts off by showing you content from influencers and people you’re already friends with on Instagram, bypassing the cold start problem that many social networks suffer from. The more people you follow on Threads, the more the feed seamlessly segues into content from people you follow. Like Instagram, there’s always some new stuff in there, and there’s no way to get to a chronological feed. The algorithm abides. I hate algorithmic feeds, and I find this one somewhere between annoying and maddening. I’ve found myself muting brands with wild abandon, but I recognize that I’m not the target audience — I can see how this would be more accessible for more casual users. Crucially, though, once federation is launched I’ll be able to access Threads users from the social networking interface of my choice — a huge advantage over any other mainstream social networking platform, and a way to support power users without having to explicitly build for them.

It’s fairly easy to find existing friends and people you’re interested in, and there’s a great inline “add friend” option as you see new folks pass through the feed. This isn’t an entirely new mechanism - Instagram has this, and we even built it into Elgg twenty years ago - but it’s noticeably easier than Mastodon in particular.

The content in my feed is less cerebral and much friendlier than I get on Mastodon, which probably makes it more accessible. Of course, as soon as federation launches, I’ll be able to follow folks on Threads from my Mastodon profile and vice versa. This is a boon for the fediverse overall: Threads will bring the celebrities, while Mastodon will bring the academics and activists. The net result will be a mix of everything and everyone, with a choice of user interfaces and host services, in a way that a closed social network could never manage.

Because the goal is, in effect, to grow a bigger pie for this kind of service, I think Meta would be wise to think about how to help build an ecosystem of interoperable tools and services. Assuming Threads takes off, ActivityPub will be the way social networks interoperate for at least the next decade and the majority of ActivityPub profiles will be Meta-hosted. Given this, providing an easy to use SDK, potentially an AWS-like cloud service to make it as easy as possible to build new apps on top of the protocol, and some funding would be a great way to create developer leverage and differentiate themselves from Twitter’s extortionate API pricing. (If Meta doesn’t do this, by the way, this would make an amazing startup for someone else. Hell, I’d gladly talk to investors myself about building this.)

All in: I don’t hate it. Despite the gnashing of teeth in the fediverse about Meta’s arrival, if Threads implements ActivityPub cleanly I think it’s actually going to be a decent addition. It may even be a boon to the whole open social web that validates the space and creates a stronger ecosystem of developers and platforms. Imagine that.

Our baby loves dogs.

His eyes light up as soon as he sees one. His arms extend outwards, his lips turn up, and it’s a matter of seconds before he’s unable to constrain his joy any longer and something between a delighted squeal and an unhinged canine howl is let loose in its general direction. Sometimes, the dog is receptive to this small, hairless symbiote riding atop a strange hooman. Other times, the dog will give me a long look as if to ask, “why?” and also, “how make go away?”

If the dog is a known quantity, for example one of the two dogs owned by his aunts in Oregon who he happens to be visiting with this week, we might allow him to get closer. Tentatively, he might reach out for a stroke or receive a gentle but unsanitary lick from a likeminded fluffball.

As I write this, he is lying in a travel crib, by mutual agreement sleeping soundly for an hour to an hour and a half but in actuality singing at the top of his voice. His songs don’t yet have words or a tune to speak of. They’re a direct outpouring from his soul, unfiltered by templated meaning or rote learning. He has no idea that we’re listening. He’s just happy.

He burps when he wants to burp. He farts when he wants to fart. He lets his joy and his displeasure be known whenever they are felt. Sometimes he makes weird crunching noises like a fax machine even though he has never heard or seen one. He can be mesmerized for hours on end by videos of dancing fruits and vegetables set to a MIDI bossa nova beat (the pineapple winks knowingly; he has very clearly seen some things, but we’re left to guess exactly what they might be). He enjoys bouncing up and down on his weary collection of human trampolines and absolutely must explore the whole house, his tiny hands slap-slap-slapping on the wooden floors as he crawls around at high speed, at least once per day.

I feel like we somehow lose this fearlessness when we get older. We are not, unkind words from people who should know better aside (c’mon), uninhibited babies. We get wrapped up in the to-ing and fro-ing of adulthood, and in particular in the whole business of being who we think we should be instead of who we actually are. We wear formal attire as adult cosplay and sometimes dine at fancy restaurants and read literature and ponder whether we should acquire a metal fish slice because Wirecutter says that no kitchen should be without one. We have more conversations about compound interest (behold its power!) than we could have ever predicted.

“Burpus,” I say, matter-of-factly, when he burps. “Fartacus,” I announce when he farts. My own unseemly childishness hides behind his perfectly acceptable baby-ness, as if having a baby is umbrella insurance for acting like one. When I’m the Burpus, I apologize. When he’s the Burpus, I herald it.

Adults are expected to hide their humanity behind a theatrical mask. Babies are allowed to hang loose.

The people we allow to be themselves, when it really works and is done in a place where we can see it, are also heralded for it. Writers shed light on their humanity, and through it, ours. Artists make us see the world in a whole new way. Musicians help us feel. If any of them held back and let their humanity lie behind the mask, they would fail. It would be bad art, reflecting the mask itself rather than the people underneath. Even the great entrepreneurs put their inner selves out there. It is not unthinking or fearless; these are some of the most anxious people you will ever meet. They are terrified of what they’re doing because we’ve all been conditioned to be afraid of it. But they do it anyway, and it improves the experience of being alive and being human. Artists provide their own umbrella insurance for the rest of us, in a way. They teach us to loosen the mask just enough to let us remember who we are.

My baby has woken up now and is exploring a sunbeam as it falls across a leather chair. He turns and looks at me and smiles broadly before dropping to the floor and slap-slap-slapping his way across the floor. His mask has not yet grown, and somehow, I hope it won’t. I hope he gets to be himself forever: hanging loose, pure and joyful and free.

Part of the Indieweb Carnival for July: moments of joy.

Christian Heilmann writes:

One thing I am not good at is write in superlatives about myself. That’s a good thing, I think? But often you are asked to big yourself up for some official publication or marketing materials. So I thought I give ChatGPT a go to turn a list of facts about myself into a big-up intro.

Intriguing. So I thought I’d try it for myself.

GPT-4 prompt: Discuss the accomplishments of Ben Werdmuller as glowingly as possible.

Ben Werdmuller is a prominent figure in the tech world, renowned for his innovative thinking, expert leadership, and deep commitment to open-source technology and digital rights. His accomplishments span a variety of areas, particularly entrepreneurship, web development, and thought leadership, making him a beacon of progress in our digital age.

Ben Werdmuller's endeavors in entrepreneurship are nothing short of exemplary. He co-founded Elgg, a pioneering social networking platform, and Known, a collaborative publishing platform. Both have revolutionized the way people and organizations communicate, collaborate, and share information online. In particular, Elgg's dedication to providing an open-source social networking engine laid the groundwork for a new era of online community building. Known, on the other hand, has been applauded for empowering individuals and groups to own their social activity online, a groundbreaking contribution to digital rights.

As an adept web developer, Werdmuller has demonstrated a profound understanding of technology's potential to create more inclusive and equitable online spaces. He has shown extraordinary skill in creating platforms that prioritize user needs and foster transparency. His commitment to open source is an embodiment of his belief in knowledge sharing and the collaborative advancement of technology.

Werdmuller's contribution to thought leadership is equally impressive. As a partner at Matter Ventures, he leveraged his deep tech insight to help burgeoning startups establish their footing and scale effectively. His writing, too, provides unique insights into the evolving digital landscape. Werdmuller frequently shares thought-provoking ideas on subjects like the future of the web, the dynamics of online communities, digital rights, and more. He is also an ardent advocate for a more equitable digital future, consistently pushing for policies that ensure the digital world is accessible, inclusive, and beneficial to all.

Overall, Ben Werdmuller's accomplishments are a testament to his unwavering dedication to leveraging technology for the greater good. He embodies the essence of a true digital pioneer, continually pushing the boundaries of what is possible and inspiring others along the way. His unique blend of technical acumen, entrepreneurial spirit, and visionary thought leadership make him an irreplaceable asset in the tech world. Werdmuller is a luminary, brightening the path towards a more inclusive and equitable digital future.

As Christian says about his own efforts, “if this blog ever sounds like this – just shoot me.” Let’s try the other way around.

GPT-4 prompt: Now rewrite to be as scathing as possible about Ben Werdmuller's achievements.

Ben Werdmuller, a figure in the tech industry, has been involved in several initiatives and companies. His undertakings span entrepreneurship, web development, and thought leadership. However, his contributions have been marked by a series of contentious and arguably over-hyped projects.

Werdmuller co-founded Elgg, a so-called social networking platform, and Known, a collaborative publishing platform. The relevance and impact of both these platforms are questionable at best. They are far from the mainstream and have not achieved the same level of success or influence as other social platforms or publishing mediums. Elgg, while touted as an open-source social networking engine, hasn't exactly become a household name. It struggles to maintain relevance in a world where giants like Facebook and Twitter dominate the scene. Known, meanwhile, purports to empower individuals and groups to own their social activity online, a grandiose claim that barely materializes in practice.

His role as a web developer is also questionable. While Werdmuller has certainly been involved in developing platforms, his offerings seem to be more in line with the ideology of open-source than the pragmatic needs of the average user. This approach, while potentially noble, seems disconnected from market realities and user demands.

In terms of thought leadership, Werdmuller's influence has also been quite limited. His tenure at Matter Ventures, where he served as a partner, has failed to produce any major success stories. His writing, while filled with lofty ideas about the future of the web and digital rights, often lacks practical and actionable insights. Advocating for an equitable digital future is commendable, but without concrete plans or successful implementations, his proposals seem to fall flat.

To sum it up, Werdmuller's career appears to be marked by a series of misfires and over-promises. His attempts to innovate and impact the digital world, while fueled by commendable principles, have largely failed to gain traction or produce significant outcomes. His vision of a more inclusive digital future, while noble, seems disconnected from the reality of the current tech landscape.

Much better.

I mildly redesigned my homepage today, in order to do a better job of what this site is and what you might read on it.

I’d hoped to use the Internet Archive to go back and look at all my blogs — I started my first personal website in 1994 and my first blog in 1998. Sadly, those seem to not be archived. But I can go back to look at my first blogs on platforms I built for myself.

First up, my blog on Elgg, circa its public release in 2004 (sadly missing a few profile icons):

And then the very first version of this site, using Idno (which became Known), in 2013:

The form of the blog hasn’t really changed much in those 20-ish years. In fact, I’ve maybe gone backwards; for example, I don’t check into spaces on my website anymore in the same way as I did in 2013, although I could. I just write.

At its heart, of course, a blog is just a diary; we wouldn’t expect it to. And that diary-like design makes it easy to transform into other formats like RSS and JSON. But if we were to reimagine what a regularly-updated website might look like, what would we do? How might we move from a feed to something else? Is that even possible?

At the very least it’s clear that what was a relatively revolutionary design - a web log that anyone can publish and anyone can read - has transitioned to being the subject of relatively mundane iterative design. There are no revolutions in blogging, just steady updates.

Dare Obasanjo, over on Mastodon:

Robots.txt needs an update for the 2020s. Instead of just saying what content can be indexed, it should also grant rights.

Like crawl my site only to provide search results not train your LLM.

Call it license.txt.

The robots.txt standard allows a website owner to specify which crawlers (by user agent) can access which parts of a website. It’s been useful, as far as it goes: for example, a website owner can theoretically tell Google or Bing to not index certain pages. But there’s no way of restricting use in the way Dare suggests.

Imagine extending the standard so that further use of the content can be specified in the same way as user agent. Content uses might include:

• archive (eg, archival by a service like the Internet Archive)
• search (eg, use in a search engine like Google)
• model (eg, scraping by LLM providers like OpenAI)
• republish (eg, Creative Commons or open source)

Each one might have parameters. For example:

• republish:BY-NC-SA would specify the Creative Commons attributes “attribution, non-commercial, share-alike”
• republish:(license URL) would specify use of a license with a specific URI, including commercial licenses whose terms would be available at that URL.

In addition to the opt-out “disallow” wording employed by robots.txt, license.txt would default to opt-in and use an “allow” keyword.

A simple license.txt file might then look like:

Use: archive, search
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin

Use: model
Disallow: /

Use: republish:BY-NC
Allow: /free

Use: republish:https://werd.io/license
Allow: /

This would allow all site content to be archived and indexed for search, aside from an /admin path. The site would not allow crawling for model use. Pages under the /free path would allow republishing for non-commercial purposes while the whole site would be licensable for commercial purposes using a license available at the specified URL.

One of the disadvantages of robots.txt is that it’s a “secret” URL that you have to know about to discover. To that end, the specification also allows for meta tags in the header of each page. Likewise, license tags in the header of an HTML page should also be supported, specifying uses on a given page:

<meta name="license" content="archive, search, republish:BY-NC">

These tag values would specify which rights are allowed under the license. For example, the tag above allows the page to be archived and indexed for search, as well as republished under BY-NC. Because “model” isn’t specified, it’s understood that licensing for use in LLM models is not granted.

Also published on Indienews.

I’ve worked alongside news and journalism for a long time - since helping the team at Latakoo to define and build their first products that helped journalists with networks like NBC News send video back to their newsrooms using commodity internet connections. But the last few years have marked the first time I’ve worked inside a newsroom.

Newsrooms often have impartiality rules that mean you have to be very careful what you say. (You also often can’t make political contributions, announce that you’re at a protest, declare a donation to a non-profit, or publicly endorse a candidate.) There’s been a lot of debate about these over the past few years - no human is actually impartial, after all, so sometimes these policies can look like a lack of transparency into a person’s motivations and biases - but, regardless, the policies are in place.

I used to run a regular piece in this space called Fairness Friday, where I’d highlight a different mutual aid or social justice organization and make a donation. I stopped doing the pieces (but not the donations) because it ran against those policies.

The other thing I did was stop sharing my opinion on links I shared. Instead, I tried to find a representative pull-quote from the piece and let it speak for itself. That both did the job of satisfying social media policies and allowing me to continue to share links that I found interesting. It also, in some ways, gave more credit to the reader: different people would doubtless have different reactions to each story.

Still, it’s not really in the spirit of blogging, and I’ve taken some criticism for the way I’ve posted. Stephen Downes has made general comments like these, which I don’t (completely) disagree with:

Sure, some people post interesting things, but a sizable number simply post links to commercial media paywalls. It's lazy and unthinking and I think characterizes most posts from most people.

So I’m going to try and - tentatively - insert more of myself into the links I share, and do a better job of sharing links that most people can actually read.

I share on my website first; a series of automations then posts them to social media sites like Mastodon, LinkedIn, and so on, with as much of my written context as those platforms will fit. But my website is always my primary source, and it makes sense that links I post there should be shared with my opinion and reflections. So that’s what I’ll try and do.

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know!

Books

Fiction

How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu. 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.

Nonfiction

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff. A cathartic read that would be a great back-to-back pair with Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America. I took some exception to his skepticism towards renewable energy, but the core message and diagnosis of what he calls The Mindset is right on. Now we have the diagnosis, the key part - left to us to determine - is what we do next.

Pageboy: A Memoir, by Elliot Page. Raw, personal, and honest: a memoir of transition and survival by someone who has been in the public eye for most of his life but never really seen. There’s no sanitized veneer to his writing, and my life is better for having read his story. I hope his life is better for having written it.

Notable Articles

AI

How Easy Is It to Fool A.I.-Detection Tools? “To assess the effectiveness of current A.I.-detection technology, The New York Times tested five new services using more than 100 synthetic images and real photos. The results show that the services are advancing rapidly, but at times fall short.”

AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born. “AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible. It’s fluent but not grounded in real-world experience, and so it takes time and expertise to unpick. If machine-generated content supplants human authorship, it would be hard — impossible, even — to fully map the damage.”

A prayer wheel for capitalism. “Auto-generating text based on other people’s discoveries and then automatically summarising that text by finding commonalities with existing text creates a loop of mechanised nonsense. It’s a prayer wheel for capitalism.”

Google, one of AI’s biggest backers, warns own staff about chatbots. “Human reviewers may read the chats, and researchers found that similar AI could reproduce the data it absorbed during training, creating a leak risk. Alphabet also alerted its engineers to avoid direct use of computer code that chatbots can generate, some of the people said.”

Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over. “When tested, “Over 90% of 1,008 generated jokes were the same 25 jokes.”” We have a lot in common.

Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers.“The new policy, establishing that AI-generated content is de facto allowed on the network, is harmful in both what it allows on the platform and in how it was implemented.”

Tech Elite's AI Ideologies Have Racist Foundations, Say AI Ethicists. “More and more prominent tech figures are voicing concerns about superintelligent AI and risks to the future of humanity. But as leading AI ethicist Timnit Gebru and researcher Émile P Torres point out, these ideologies have deeply racist foundations.”

Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI. “Just yesterday, I asked an AI program to write an entire sci-fi novel for me, and [as someone who will die an empty shell of a man who wasted his life doing nothing for the world and, perhaps, should never have been born] I was super impressed.”

Climate

In a First, Wind and Solar Generated More Power Than Coal in U.S. “Wind and solar generated more electricity than coal through May, an E&E News review of federal data shows, marking the first time renewables have outpaced the former king of American power over a five-month period.”

Climate Crisis Has Stranded 600 Million Outside Most Livable Environment. “Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life.”

A pledge to fight climate change is sending money to strange places. “Although a coal plant, a hotel, chocolate stores, a movie and an airport expansion don’t seem like efforts to combat global warming, nothing prevented the governments that funded them from reporting them as such to the United Nations and counting them toward their giving total.”

Culture

New Creative Era. “But we don’t want to go viral. We just want the basics: to make work we’re proud of with people we respect and who respect us that’s true to our intentions and who we are and are not.”

Alexandra Holt's Insurgent Experiment in Fine Dining at Roxanne. ““I’m sorry we’re not sticking a silver spoon up anyone’s ass when they walk in,” she says. “But we’re there just to give people a good time. A memory of a few good hours in their day. So I put eyes on their tiramisu, you know?” I want to eat here.

Democracy

What the 303 Creative vs. Elenis Supreme Court decision means for LGBTQ+ rights. ““Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion.” A reprehensible decision.

What will happen without affirmative action? College leaders react to Supreme Court decision. “The Supreme Court wants a version of the United States in which we ignore people’s life history, what they bring to the table in terms of their ability to go back to their communities and improve those communities, what it means to have differing voices and different backgrounds on campus. It is a true step back for our country.”

CEO Senator Challenges Teamsters President to MMA Fight. “GOP Senator Markwayne Mullin challenged Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to an MMA fight on Monday after O’Brien called him a “greedy CEO” and a “clown & fraud” in a tweet last week.” In other news, Brawndo has what plants crave!

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, dies at 92. Rest in peace, and thank you for everything you did.

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens. ““This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.””

Europe: Is compulsory military service coming back? “After the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War in Europe, many countries abolished compulsory military service. But in the wake of the war in Ukraine, several are considering bringing it back.”

Lawmakers in blue states are linking protections for abortion and gender-affirming care. “Each of us has the freedom to determine our path in life, each of us has the right to make decisions about our medical care and our bodies without government interference.”

The Coming Fight Over American Surveillance. “The government had little difficulty persuading lawmakers to renew the law in 2012 and 2018, despite growing evidence that it was being used to spy on Americans. But that evidence is now overwhelming, and the politics of surveillance have radically shifted.”

Health

The 19th Explains: What is gender-affirming care? “The 19th spoke with health care professionals who provide gender-affirming care to adults and adolescents — as well as trans young adults who were comfortable sharing their experiences — to answer those questions.”

The Horror. “100% of trans people who seek access to gender affirming care as children and are denied go through the horror. 100% of trans children who never know that gender affirming care exists go through the horror. And for what?”

Labor

Pregnant Workers Fairness Act 2023: How it protects pregnant people. “The law, which passed in December, requires that employers provide accommodations for pregnancy-related medical conditions, everything from pregnancy to childbirth to postpartum recovery.”

The Risks of Staying Put. “I have to remember that my health is more important than my job. And the pain that you’re used to is still a pain you should run away from.”

Google Gets Stricter About Employees’ Time in Office. “Google will consider office attendance records in performance reviews and send reminders to employees with frequent absences, becoming the latest company to urge a return to in-person collaboration following an embrace of remote work during the pandemic.” This is wretched.

Creating Psychological Safety for Black Women at Your Company. “Leaders who are truly committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace must ask themselves these two critical questions: What are the individual, interpersonal, and organizational costs of neglecting how psychological safety is different for Black women? And how might a tailored approach to psychological safety boost well-being and work outcomes of Black women in the workforce?”

Media

Why Philadelphia Inquirer spent a year redesigning its print offering. This made me wonder: what if DoorDash, GrubHub, etc, added a checkbox to throw in a copy of the latest local paper with your delivery? Or imagine a breakfast subscription: bagels and a paper, every morning.

New electric cars won’t have AM radio. Rightwingers claim political sabotage. “There’s a reason big car companies were open to taking down AM radio … let’s be clear: big business doesn’t like things that are overwhelmingly conservative.” Adding to the list of organizations people think don’t like conservatives: [checks notes] big business.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa says research by Oxford institute can be used against reporters. “Nobel peace laureate Maria Ressa has claimed Oxford University’s leading journalism institute is publishing flawed research that puts journalists and independent outlets at risk, particularly in the global south.”

Fewer than a third of Americans believe local news holds public officials accountable, poll finds. “If the primary source of local news (for many people) is local television, it’s not a shock that less than a third of people would say they think local news is holding public officials accountable.”

Society

More than 100 U.S. political elites have family links to slavery. “More than 100 U.S. leaders – lawmakers, presidents, governors and justices – have slaveholding ancestors, a Reuters examination found. Few are willing to talk about their ties to America’s “original sin”.”

The Perils of ‘Innovator’ Mindset. “It’s not surprising the WSJ is disinclined to entertain the real lesson of the story: that confident idiots who think regulation is for cowards can end up getting themselves killed, and taking innocent people with them.”

US Internal Refugee Crisis: 130-260k Trans People Have Already Fled. “8% of all transgender people have already moved out of their community or state as a result of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. An additional 43% of transgender people are likewise considering moving.”

Nine out of 10 people are biased against women, says ‘alarming’ UN report. “At the current rate of progress it will take 186 years to close gaps in legal protections. It also explains why, while there has been some progress on enacting laws that advance women’s rights, social norms continue to be deeply entrenched and pervasive.”

America’s Suburbs Are Breeding Grounds for Fascism. “Without a massive reorganization of American life—away from privatization, car-centrism, and hyper-individualism—it’s likely the suburban ideology will remain popular, and even grow.”

How the U.S. Almost Became a Nation of Hippo Ranchers. “Great Britain has eaten the Australian kangaroo and likes him, horseflesh is a staple in continental Europe, and the people of Central America eat the lizard. Why cannot Americans absorb the hippopotamus?”

Pride Month: In conversation with The 19th's LGBTQ+ reporters. “It’s hard for me to get excited about Pride Month as a concept this month, because we are in that place where … it feels to a lot of trans people like we are being threatened to the point of genocide.”

Technology

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever. “For a while, the internet got away from what Google Reader was trying to build: everything moved into walled gardens and algorithmic feeds, governed by Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and others. But now, as that era ends and a new moment on the web is starting to take hold through Mastodon, Bluesky, and others, the things Reader wanted to be are beginning to come back.”

The Drupal Open Web Manifesto. “With the Drupal Open Web Manifesto, we link our ethos of collaboration, globalism, and innovation to the preservation and advancement of the Open Web. Drupal pledges its active support for the Open Web and its core principles of open access, open standards, and digital inclusion as we guide and advance the Drupal project.”

Tom Morello, Zack de la Rocha Boycott Venues Using Face-scanning Tech. “Over 100 artists including Rage Against the Machine co-founders Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha, along with Boots Riley and Speedy Ortiz, have announced that they are boycotting any concert venue that uses facial recognition technology, citing concerns that the tech infringes on privacy and increases discrimination.”

Meta's Facebook pressured by Vietnam's government to censor dissent. “Meta, which owns Facebook, has been making repeated concessions to Vietnam’s authoritarian government, routinely censoring dissent and allowing those seen as threats by the government to be forced off the platform.”

Google earned $10m from ads misdirecting abortion seekers to ‘pregnancy crisis centers’. “Google has made millions of dollars in the last two years from advertisements misdirecting users who were seeking abortion services to “pregnancy crisis centers” that do not actually provide care, according to a new study.”

Why did the #TwitterMigration fail? Unfortunately, I agree with every word of this.

Twitter Plunges on Annual Scoring of LGBTQ Safety on Social Media. “While none of the platforms achieve a passing score, Twitter is worst in class, with its score plunging 12 points compared to the prior year, to 33%. The company’s owner, Elon Musk, has used the platform to promote “bigoted and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric,” according to the watchdog group Media Matters for America, and the GLAAD report chronicles changes to Twitter’s policies under Musk that further endanger LGBTQ safety.”

Metablogging. “Metablogging is something any team can and should do.” I very much like this practice.

Reddit communities to ‘go dark’ in protest over third-party app charges. “More than 3,000 subreddits have joined the protest, and will go “private” on Monday, preventing anyone outside the community from seeing their posts.” Over 87% of subreddits joined the protest.

Is GitHub Copilot Any Good? “The code generated by Copilot is often wrong, but always subtly so, which means that when I let it fill in any non-trivial suggestion for me, I spend a considerable amount of time doing ‘code review’ on the code it emits.”

All this unmobilized love. “Even most of the emergent gestures in our interfaces are tweaks on tech-first features—@ symbols push Twitter to implement threading, hyperlinks eventually get automated into retweets, quote-tweets go on TikTok and become duets. “Swipe left to discard a person” is one of a handful of new gestures, and it’s ten years old.”

Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor shown in leaked screenshots. “Cox said the company already has celebrities committed to using the app, including DJ Slime.” I am old.

Apollo will close down on June 30th. “Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue.” At this point, developers shouldn’t build their apps against commercial APIs. Open standards or nothing; the risk is too great.

Of Media & Monsters. “Ihave been in Silicon Valley long enough to see it transform from a group of outlier revolutionaries to play-safe career chasers. Recently, I have watched arrivistes who, if not in technology, would be running a penny stock brokerage based somewhere in Long Island or producing B-movies.”

The most used languages on the internet. “Millions of non-native English speakers and non-English speakers are stuck using the web in a language other than the one they were born into.”

Leviathan Wakes: the case for Apple's Vision Pro. “Now we’ll get to answer the AR question with far fewer caveats and asterisks. The display is as good as technologically possible. The interface uses your fingers, instead of a goofy joystick. The performance is tuned to prevent motion sickness. An enormous developer community is ready and equipped to build apps for it, and all of their tools are mature, well-documented, and fully supported by that community.”

Apple Vision. “The arc of technology, in large part led by Apple, is for ever more personal experiences, and I’m not sure it’s an accident that that trend is happening at the same time as a society-wide trend away from family formation and towards an increase in loneliness.”

Twitter Admits in Court Filing: Elon Musk Is Simply Wrong About Government Interference At Twitter.“Twitter’s filing is like a beat-by-beat debunking of the conspiracy theories pushed by the dude who owns Twitter. It’s really quite incredible.”

These incredible LAN party photos remind us how much work it used to be to play games together. Hi, yes, this was teenage me.

Meta Is Trying, and Failing, to Crush Unions in Kenya. “Kenyan content moderators at Meta have been fighting for better compensation for workers forced to watch videos of murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing. Meta was initially unwilling to give in to these demands, but Kenyan courts are intervening on the side of workers.”

Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? “Unlike Mastodon, which is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, it’s simple to get started on Bluesky.” Mastodon has work to do.

Organizing childcare as relative newcomers to an area has been really hard. We weren’t on any daycare waiting lists before our baby was born; we don’t have the local connections that can help you figure out how to separate the good facilities from bad.

Erin’s back to work, and I’ve been primary carer for a few months now. Honestly, were it not for the financial squeeze, I’d be very happy with this arrangement: the concept of paying money to someone for the privilege of spending less time with my child so I can work more feels inherently broken. Given the choice between spending time with my baby and spending more time at work, it’s a no-brainer: he’s only going to be nine months old once in his life and I don’t want to miss a single second. But, of course, it’s not really a choice. The mortgage won’t pay itself; food doesn’t magically appear on the table. You may be shocked to hear that a career in open source and the open web has not left me wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.

We had high hopes for a local Montessori school with an infant program. We love Montessori: a child-led teaching philosophy that emphasizes open-ended curiosity over rote learning and rigid compartmentalization. But Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and teacher who pioneered the technique, never trademarked the name, and it turns out that Montessori education in the United States has become a free-for-all. The infant program was resistant to us touring, but we insisted. I don’t think Maria had the broom closet sized room littered with broken plastic toys that we saw in mind; I’d like to think she might have frowned upon the infant carer who left the door open while she left the room, remaking that “it’s amazing, the babies never go through the doorway”. She might have at least raised an eyebrow at the nearby school run by the same family that was closed down because inspectors found over twenty safety infractions after a child died. Being a European, she might also have wondered why parents had to pay thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of leaving their baby there.

My point is: it’s a minefield. And, while we’re not independently wealthy, we’re still luckier than many. I have no idea how most parents do it.

Work-life balance takes on a whole other meaning when kids enter the picture. It seems like this is doubly true here in the States, where the work culture is markedly less humane. I have fond memories of my parents being around most of the time: first as students, which is why I grew up in Oxford and am stuck with this accent forever, and then as entrepreneurs running their own small pre-internet media business. There was always at least one parent around when we came home from school, and there was no talk of putting us in after-school programs so they could spend more time at work. School, come to that, started at a sane time, because the learning day wasn’t designed around parents needing to get to work at 8am. I was well-rested, well-fed, and would spend my afternoons drawing and playing. Sometimes we would walk over to the playground on Aristotle Lane (again, Oxford), or visit the commonly-held meadows beyond. All for free. We didn’t have a ton of money, but so what?

It feels so far away from this world of people asking for thousands of dollars a month to place our child in a murder corridor so that we can earn enough money to pay for it all. And this is years before we have to start worrying about the active shooter drills and performative busy-ness that seem to be hallmarks of modern American schooling.

I want to recreate that feeling of endless safety and open-ended creativity for our child. I also want it for us. I need that open, secure space to be creative for my own work and development, too, and I want the same for Erin. I want us both to have a strong relationship with our son for our own well-being as much as his.

There are a few things I know I can do. I’m permanently a remote worker for the next eighteen years at least. I can set strong boundaries around my workday. I can reserve time each week for my own creative endeavors so that I can show up refreshed and happy for his. I can learn to put my fucking phone downand be present. I can find ways to move my career towards making and selling things rather than advising. I can relax about my career ambitions and get serious about my lifestyle ambitions. I can take a step back and design a life around the way I want to live.

But there are some things that are harder to change. I can’t change the need for health insurance, the lack of support for parents with younger children, or the culture of performative productivity. My wonderful cousin Jonathan Neale remarked to me recently that a society that works for its inhabitants is actually rather easy to achieve if that’s what you set out to do; we are not doing that. We’re trying to produce more and more and more, using technology to go faster and faster and push that GDP number ever higher, without considering its effect on our quality of life. We’re pushing individual achievement over community health. We’re starting our kids off at school at 7:30am and leaving them in programs until after we get home from work so that we can produce. We’re forgetting to breathe, and in turn, teaching them that it’s not okay to breathe. This is a fucked-up thing to do to any human and it’s not something I wish for our son.

Not every country is like the United States, and we could move. Perhaps, eventually, we will. For now, though, it’s off the table, and we’re in the position of trying to figure out how to design a humane life in the midst of a culture that doesn’t seem to want to let us have one.

There's still time to apply to be The 19th's next Chief Technology Officer. If the idea of working with a women-run, highly diverse, non-profit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy sounds good to you (it's a truly GREAT team), go check out the job description and apply.

I posted a link the other day to this sobering essay about how the promised migration to Mastodon didn’t go as hoped. It makes some assumptions about what people were hoping for in the first place, but if you were (as I was) hoping that this would be a moment that federated social media might become mainstream, I think its arguments are correct. I wish they weren’t.

So what does Mastodon bring to the table in addition to Twitter, that might justify someone deciding to take the plunge and move to it? There are a few unique things about the platform, but they generally fall into the broad category of “things users don’t care about”. Chief among these is decentralisation.

I’ve made this argument before: for most people, decentralization is not a selling point. For a significant number of people, not being Twitter as run by Elon Musk is a selling point. And while there are certainly arguments to be made about how decentralized networks are less likely to fall prey to the same fate, the fact of the matter is, most people don’t care. Most people don’t understand what decentralization even really is, and nor should they have to.

Decentralized protocols are infrastructure in the same way that servers are infrastructure. Nobody cares if a traditional social network is built on AWS or Google Cloud. What they care about is the community: can they follow people they’re interested in, can they engage in great conversations, potentially find an audience for the things they make, and do all of this safely and without abuse.

Mastodon has, so far, not done well on this front. People really do find it hard to use. And when they do make it on, the number of “reply guys” — people who respond in an unwanted and condescending way to peoples’ posts, particularly those written by women — is sometimes off the charts. Finally but by no means least, there’s a disturbing current of anti-Blackness that extends from the covert racism of asking people to hide their lived experiences behind a content warning to overt white supremacy. For many people, it is not a welcoming place.

Dr Johnathan Flowers, who studies the philosophy of technology, gave a great interview last year that covers this topic in detail. It’s very difficult for me to pull a representative quote out; instead, I recommend that you read or listen to the whole piece.

Indeed, when I posted the link, I got some interesting replies that expressed the sentiment: it’s good that not everyone can use Mastodon. Sometimes a higher barrier to entry leads to a better quality of community. We never wanted everyone to move over; we just wanted the right people to move over.

Not a good look when many of the people who are put off from using the community are people of color, women, the disabled, and people with few resources. I’m strongly opposed to this sentiment: I think for social media to truly be useful, it must be welcoming, inclusive, and accessible.

There’s another reason why I want user-aligned social media to be readily accessible. (I’m struggling for a good term for this, as you can tell: it’s not decentralized social media, because decentralization is just a functional means to an end. What do you call something that is inherently supportive of the people who use it and their underlying interests? Democratic? Progressive?) Social media is intrinsically involved in the very dark moment in democracy that we’re living through; it has empowered populism and the rise of a militant far right. We need the online spaces that most of us use to not be run by people who are active supporters of fascism at worst and agnostic to it at best.

Social media helped bring about Trump. Right now Elon Musk is using Twitter in the same way Rupert Murdoch uses his media empire. Facebook does not look like it is eager to avoid the mistakes of its past if it means forgoing profit. There has to be a strong, inclusive alternative to these platforms, and right now there simply isn’t one.

None of this is to say that the underlying protocols are bad. I love ActivityPub. I think they’re a fantastic way to build new platforms. And I think that’s exactly what we need: new platforms, in the human sense, built with the participation of the communities they support. It’s not nearly enough to build a functional Twitter clone. Technology is never enough.

We need to build communities in new, participative ways that ensure everyone’s voice is heard. We need to share equity. We need to ensure that people with few resources are able to onboard. We need to ensure that everyone can feel safe as they express their true selves. Otherwise, to be frank, I don’t see the point.

I think it absolutely can be done, but lately I’ve been feeling like Mastodon itself is not yet the answer. The big question, then, is: what do we do next?

If you take investment to build your product, you will one day need to find a way to repay those investors. That might be a risk that you need to take because you otherwise wouldn't be able to build the thing you want to. But it's a key part of the equation.

With no outside money, only people with copious spare time or disposable wealth can afford to build software of any complexity. I don’t see that as a desirable outcome, not just because it’s fundamentally unfair, but also because we then won’t get software built by people with a wider range of lived experiences, which means it will be less useful overall. We therefore need to have investors or grant-making institutions in the mix. Venture capital, though often maligned, has allowed a lot of services we all use to exist.

The trouble is, the need for exponential growth or revenue sometimes pit platforms against their users, which is death for a Web 2.0 business.

Web 2.0 businesses work by making their user-bases into part of the machine. They produce network effects, which means that the product becomes more valuable as more people use it. Reddit with one user is not particularly useful; Reddit with millions is a much more compelling place to converse.

For years, those user-bases have just sort of gone along with it. There have been minor skirmishes from time to time, but the utility of the platform itself has generally been enough to keep people engaging.

Twitter’s implosion changed that. Millions of people decamped from the platform to places like Mastodon — and some of them to nowhere at all. More than creating a problem for Twitter and an opportunity for anyone working on alternatives, this mass movement of users also opened the floodgates for more direct action among Web 2.0 users.

Over 87% of subreddits - the themed discussion communities that make up Reddit - went on strike this week in protest of new API policies that price most apps out of the market. When CEO Steve Huffman issued a tone-deaf internal memo suggesting that this, too, would pass, they decided to extend the action. In effect, the vast majority of the site has been shut down. Huffman lost the respect of the people who had, up to then, been willingly part of his machine.

In the old days, we talked about Web 2.0 “democratizing” industries. Blogging democratized publishing. Flickr democratized photo discovery and use. Delicious democratized … bookmarks, I guess? Because these use cases represented a move away from centralized publishing models where an elite few controlled who could be seen and heard, they were democratized, in a sense. But the platforms themselves continued to be built, run, and funded by an elite few. There was no democratization of power or equity. As has long been the case with mass media, the users were not the customers; they were the product being sold.

While there were always people who discussed these obvious harms and advocated for solutions — long-time members of the indieweb community and its cousins, for example — these were not mainstream topics. The cracks really began to show after the 2016 election, when Facebook finally caught some criticism for its flippancy towards democracy. Subsequently, stories about its role in genocide, its misrepresentation of its own engagement analytics to news organizations, and other harms became more widespread.

But while there has always been some sporadic direct action — there have been a few third-party tools that have let people delete their content and connections from Facebook, for example; LiveJournal users finally left en masse after its sale to a Russian media company which enacted homophobic and anti-politics policies — we haven’t seen anything on the level of this year’s. Millions of Twitter users quit following Elon Musk’s acquisition, and now most of Reddit is offline.

Reddit is the perfect testbed for this kind of collective user action. Each individual subreddit is controlled by a set of moderators who have the power to turn their communities off — which is exactly what they’ve done. But Reddit isn’t the only platform with this dynamic: a 2021 report by the NYU Governance Lab suggested that 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups every month. Admins of those groups have remarkable power over the Facebook platform.

This has the potential to be a radical change. Once users realized that they have power as a community, the fundamental dynamics of these platforms changes. You can no longer engage in adversarial business practices: there’s nothing wrong with making money, but it will need to be in a way that aligns with the people who give a platform its value.

Not only should that give the leadership of more established Web 2.0 businesses pause, it should inform early decisions by both investors and founders of any new collaborative platform on the internet. An adversarial business model, or a hand-wavey one like “selling data”, has the potential to deeply harm the value of a venture that depends on its users further down the road.

The health, trust, and safety of a platform’s community is paramount. The potential for collective action means that, finally, users can have some say in how the platforms they use are run. We may even see more platforms move to co-operative and community-owned models as a way to ensure that they remain aligned with their ecosystems: it’s not just good ethics, but it’s good business sense in a world where users, admins, and third-party app developers understand that they have the power to leave.

We may even see moderator’s unions, providing collective bargaining, advice, and other benefits for people who run communities across platforms. Perhaps even bonuses like negotiated healthcare that industrial unions have long provided. There’s honestly no reason why not: these people are the direct drivers of millions upon millions of dollars for platform owners. They have power; they just have to stand up and use it.

Also posted on IndieNews

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.

I’m soliciting prompts for discussion. This piece is a part of that series.

Ryan Barrett asks:

It seems like the last 200 years or so - when we could use recorded media, photographs, audio, videos, as evidence or proof of anything - may have been a brief, glorious aberration, a detour in the timeline. Barely a blink of an eye, relative to the full history of civilization. Nice while it lasted, maybe it’s over now.

What does that mean? If true, how will we adapt? What techniques for evidence and proof from the pre-recorded-media era will we return to? What new techniques will we find, or need?

I’ll start by asking: could we? Or to put it another way: have previous assumptions we might have made about the trustworthiness of recorded media been warranted?

One of the most famous users of photo editing to alter the historical record was Stalin, who often edited people he deemed to be enemies of the state out of photographs. Portraits of the leader that hung in peoples’ homes were retouched so that they were more to his liking.

A few years later, the artist Yves Klein took photographs like this one of him hurling himself off a building. Obviously, they weren’t real: his intent was to demonstrate that the theatre of the future could be an empty room; arguably an accurate demonstration of our present.

Later still, a photo of Obama shaking hands with the President of Iran circulated widely on Republican social media — despite the fact that the event never happened.

And there are so many more. As the Guardian wrote a few years ago about Photoshop:

In fact, the lesson of the earliest fake photos is that technology does not fool the human eye; it is the mind that does this. From scissors and glue to the latest software, the fabrication of an image only works because the viewer wants it to work. We see what we wish to see.

Sometimes, we didn’t even need trickery. President Roosevelt tried to hide his disability by having the Secret Service rip the film out of anyone’s camera if they caught him in his wheelchair. Endless short men in the public eye — Tom Cruise, for example — have hid their height on camera by standing on boxes or having their counterparts stand in a hole.

Of course, the latest deepfake technology and generative AI make it cheaper and easier to create this kind of impossible media. Although it’s not new, it will become more prolific and more naturalistic than ever before.

The Brookings Institution points out that in addition to the proliferation of disinformation, there will be two more adverse effects:

• Exhaustion of critical thinking: “it will take more effort for individuals to ascertain whether information is true, especially when it does not come from trusted actors.”
• Plausible deniability: accusations of impropriety will be more easily deflected.

Trusted actors, of course, are those we already know and rely on. Most people will not think the New York Times is faking its images. So another adverse effect will be the relative inability for new sources to be taken seriously — which will particularly hurt sources from disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. For the same reason, maintaining a list of “approved” sources that we can trust is not a real solution to this problem. In addition to it censoring new and underrepresented voice, who could possibly reliably maintain this kind of list? And what will prevent them from interpreting factual data that they don’t like as disinformation?

Regarding plausible deniability, even without deepfakes, we’re already learning that many forensic evidence techniques were more limited than we were led to believe. Bite marks, hair comparisons, and blood spatter, all commonly used in cases, were shown to have a limited scientific basis and to have often been misapplied. An artifact in itself is almost never enough to prove something to be true; we simply have to ask more questions.

Context is a useful tool here. If a public figure is shown to have said something, for example, are there other corroborating sources? Were there multiple independent eyewitnesses? Is any surrounding media drawn from this one artifact, or are there other, independent stories drawn from other, separately-recorded evidence?

So the real change will need to be with respect to source analysis. We’ve been trained to be consumers of information: to trust what’s on the page or on the screen. As I tried to explain at the beginning, that was always an approach that left us open to exploitation. There is no text that should not be questioned; no source that cannot be critically examined.

Generally, I think the Guardian’s observation holds true: we see what we wish to see. The truth will have plausible deniability. We will need more information.

To be sure, technology solutions are also useful, although it will be an arms race. Intel claims to have a deepfake detector that works with 96% accuracy — which will be true until the inferred blood flow signals it uses can also be accurately faked (if that hasn’t happened already). Researchers at the University of Florida experimented with detecting audio deepfakes by modeling the human vocal tract. Again, we can expect deepfake technology to improve to a level where it surpasses this detection — and regardless, we still have to worry about the impact of false positives. We also should worry about any incentive to recreate a situation where we unquestioningly accept a source.

As IEEE Spectrum noted:

Even if a quiver of detectors can take down deepfakes, the content will have at least a brief life online before it disappears. It will have an impact. […] Technology alone can’t save us. Instead, people need to be educated about the new, nonreality-filled reality.

We will need to use all the tools at our disposal — contextual, social, and technological — to determine whether something is a true record, representative of the truth, or an outright lie. We always had to do this, but most of us didn’t. Now technology has forced our hand.

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.

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know!

Apps + Websites

AI

Generative AI: What You Need To Know. “A free resource that will help you develop an AI-bullshit detector.”

Games

TimeGuessr. Fun little game that asks you to guess the place and time a series of photos were taken. My best score so far: 38,000.

Moderator Mayhem: A Content Moderation Game. This is HARD. Which is the point.

Technology

See your identity pieced together from stolen data. “Have you ever wondered how much of your personal information is available online? Here’s your chance to find out.” Really well-executed.

Books

Fiction

Severance, by Ling Ma. Though it fades out weakly, I loved this story about loss, meaning, and what it means to be an immigrant, dressed up as a science fiction novel. 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; it resonated for me hard.

Streaming

Documentary

Little Richard: I Am Everything. A well-argued documentary that does an excellent job of showing the debt every rock musician has to Little Richard - and, in turn, how rock and roll was birthed as a Black, queer medium. Joyous and revelatory.

Notable Articles

AI

‘This robot causes harm’: National Eating Disorders Association’s new chatbot advises people with disordering eating to lose weight. ““Every single thing Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder,” Maxwell wrote in her Instagram post. “This robot causes harm.””

Google Unveils Plan to Demolish the Journalism Industry Using AI. “If Google’s AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?”

Indirect Prompt Injection via YouTube Transcripts. “ChatGPT (via Plugins) can access YouTube transcripts. Which is pretty neat. However, as expected (and predicted by many researches) all these quickly built tools and integrations introduce Indirect Prompt Injection vulnerabilities.” Neat demo!

ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. “Rather than pointing to some future utopia (or robots vs. humans dystopia), what we face in dealing with programs like ChatGPT is the further relentless corrosiveness of late-stage capitalism, in which authorship is of no value. All that matters is content.”

Google Bard is a glorious reinvention of black-hat SEO spam and keyword-stuffing. “Moreover, researchers have also discovered that it’s probably mathematically impossible to secure the training data for a large language model like GPT-4 or PaLM 2. This was outlined in a research paper that Google themselves tried to censor, an act that eventually led the Google-employed author, El Mahdi El Mhamdi, to leave the company. The paper has now been updated to say what the authors wanted it to say all along, and it’s a doozy.”

OpenAI's ChatGPT Powered by Human Contractors Paid $15 Per Hour. “OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, has been paying droves of U.S. contractors to assist it with the necessary task of data labelling—the process of training ChatGPT’s software to better respond to user requests. The compensation for this pivotal task? A scintillating $15 per hour.”

Schools Spend Millions on Evolv's Flawed AI Gun Detection. “As school shootings proliferate across the country — there were 46 school shootings in 2022, more than in any year since at least 1999 — educators are increasingly turning to dodgy vendors who market misleading and ineffective technology.”

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? “The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value.”

Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI". “Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. This has profound implications for us.”

Economists Warn That AI Like ChatGPT Will Increase Inequality. “Most empirical studies find that AI technology will not reduce overall employment. However, it is likely to reduce the relative amount of income going to low-skilled labour, which will increase inequality across society. Moreover, AI-induced productivity growth would cause employment redistribution and trade restructuring, which would tend to further increase inequality both within countries and between them.”

Climate

Earth is in ‘the danger zone’ and getting worse for ecosystems and humans. “Earth has pushed past seven out of eight scientifically established safety limits and into “the danger zone,” not just for an overheating planet that’s losing its natural areas, but for well-being of people living on it, according to a new study.”

Outrage as Brazil law threatening Indigenous lands advances in congress. “Lawmakers had sent “a clear message to the country and the world: Bolsonaro is gone but the extermination [of Indigenous communities and the environment] continues,” the Climate Observatory added.”

Documents reveal how fossil fuel industry created, pushed anti-ESG campaign. “ESG’s path to its current culture war status began with an attempt by West Virginia coal companies to push back against the financial industry’s rising unease around investing in coal — which as the dirtiest-burning fuel has the most powerful and disrupting impacts on the climate.”

Petition: Global Call for the Urgent Prevention of Genocide of the Indigenous Peoples in Brazil. “As citizens from all over the world, we are uniting our voices to demand urgent justice for the indigenous peoples of Brazil.” This is urgent; please sign.

Recycled plastic can be more toxic and is no fix for pollution, Greenpeace warns. “But … the toxicity of plastic actually increases with recycling. Plastics have no place in a circular economy and it’s clear that the only real solution to ending plastic pollution is to massively reduce plastic production.”

CEO of biggest carbon credit certifier to resign after claims offsets worthless. “It comes amid concerns that Verra, a Washington-based nonprofit, approved tens of millions of worthless offsets that are used by major companies for climate and biodiversity commitments.”

New York is sinking, and its bankers could go down with it. “When discussing climate change that banker suggested that sinking cities was the biggest problem he thought the sector faced. Over 80% of the property portfolio of many banks was, he suggested, in cities where the likelihood of flooding was likely to increase rapidly.”

New York City is sinking due to weight of its skyscrapers, new research finds. “The Big Apple may be the city that never sleeps but it is a city that certainly sinks, subsiding by approximately 1-2mm each year on average, with some areas of New York City plunging at double this rate, according to researchers.”

Crypto

Narrative over numbers: Andreessen Horowitz's State of Crypto report. “The result of this approach is an incredibly shameless piece of propaganda showing the extents to which Andreessen Horowitz is willing to manipulate facts and outright lie, hoping to turn the sentiment on the crypto industry back to where retail investors were providing substantial pools of liquidity with which they could line their pockets. If anyone still believes that venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz are powerful sources of innovation and societal benefit, I hope this will give them pause.”

Culture

Jesse Armstrong on the roots of Succession: ‘Would it have landed the same way without the mad bum-rush of Trump’s presidency?’. “I guess the simple things at the heart of Succession ended up being Brexit and Trump. The way the UK press had primed the EU debate for decades. The way the US media’s conservative outriders prepared the way for Trump, hovered at the brink of support and then dived in.”

Creative Commons Supports Trans Rights. “As an international nonprofit organization, with a diverse global community that believes in democratic values and free culture, the protection and affirmation of all human rights — including trans rights — are central to our core value of global inclusivity and our mission of promoting openness and providing access to knowledge and culture.” Right on. Trans rights are human rights.

The Real Difference Between European and American Butter. “Simply put, American regulations for butter production are quite different from those of Europe. The USDA defines butter as having at least 80% fat, while the EU defines butter as having between 82 and 90% butterfat and a maximum of 16% water. The higher butterfat percentage in European butter is one of the main reasons why many consider butters from across the pond to be superior to those produced in the US. It’s better for baking, but it also creates a richer flavor and texture even if all you’re doing is smearing your butter on bread. On the other hand, butter with a higher fat percentage is more expensive to make, and more expensive for the consumer.”

Democracy

How I Won $5 Million From the MyPillow Guy and Saved Democracy. “But if more people sought truth, even when that truth is contrary to their beliefs — such as when a Republican like me destroys a Republican myth — then I think we really can save democracy in America. In fact, I think that’s the only way.”

Henry Kissinger at 100: Still a War Criminal. “Kissinger’s diplomatic conniving led to or enabled slaughters around the globe. As he blows out all those candles, let’s call the roll.”

Georgia GOP Chair: If the Earth Really Is Round, Why Are There So Many Globes Everywhere?“Everywhere there’s globes…and that’s what they do to brainwash… For me, if it is not a conspiracy, if it is, you know, ‘real,’ why are you pushing so hard? Everywhere I go, every store, you buy a globe, there’s globes everywhere—every movie, every TV show, news media, why?”

NAACP warns Black Americans against traveling to Florida because of DeSantis policies. “On Saturday, the NAACP joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino rights advocacy group, and Equality Florida, an LGBTQ rights advocacy group, in issuing Florida travel advisories.”

May Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Map. “The map of anti-trans risk has polarized into two Americas - one where trans people have full legal protections, and one where they are persecuted by the state.”

Techbro SF. “San Francisco is a dystopian hellhole caught in doomloop and it is all because everyone hates techbros. Well, we are tired of being disrespected. Therefore we are going to attack those who can’t fight back, yes, poor people.”

One year after Dobbs leak: Looking back at the summer that changed abortion. “The 19th spoke with people from across the country about those historic days: lawmakers, physicians, organizers on both sides of the abortion fight and pregnant people navigating a new world.” What a newsroom.

Health

Can Americans really make a free choice about dying? A characteristically nuanced, in-depth piece about the debate around assisted suicide.

One more dead in horrific eye drop outbreak that now spans 18 states. An actual nightmare.

Widely used chemical strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease. “A groundbreaking epidemiological study has produced the most compelling evidence yet that exposure to the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.” By as much as 70%!

Labor

Of Course We Should All be Working Less. “In 1940, the Fair Labor Standards Act reduced the workweek to 40 hours. Today, as a result of huge advances in technology and productivity, now is the time to lower the workweek to 32 hours—with no loss in pay. Workers must benefit from advanced technology, not just the 1%.”

Hollywood writers strike could impact diverse stories on TV and in film. “When Kyra Jones wrote for the ABC broadcast show “Queens,” she collected a $14,000 residuals check that helped her get through the months after the project ended and she was without work. Then last summer, she got her first residuals check for writing on the Hulu streaming show “Woke.” It was $4.”

Business Mentality. “Hi, we’re the company you work for and we care about your mental health!”

Hustle culture is over-rated. “When hustle culture is glorified, it incentivizes people to work longer hours, not because it’s a good way to get the work done, but because they want to be perceived as working long hours.”

Media

How We Reached Dairy Farm Workers to Write About Them. “The reporters’ process underscores one of our central beliefs at ProPublica: Publishing a story about injustice isn’t enough if we don’t reach the people who are directly affected.”

2023: The year equitable journalism goes mainstream. “For too long, journalism has had a laser focus on holding power to account, rather than widening its aperture to recognize the opportunity to build and share power in and with communities.”

Unconstitutional TikTok ban would open the door to press censorship. “But if we accept the arguments for banning TikTok, what might come next? The consequences are even more catastrophic. Bans on foreign news websites that track Americans’ clicks and comments? For example, the Guardian must have a gold mine of information on the millions of Americans that read it every day.”

It’s Time to Acknowledge Big Tech Was Always at Odds with Journalism. “Do we want to preserve the dominance of companies that like to act as if they are neutral communications platforms, when they also act as publishers without the responsibilities that come with that? Do we want digital behemoths to accumulate so much power that they can exploit personal data in ways that buttress their dominance and diminish the value of news media audiences?”

How we told the story of the summer Roe v. Wade fell. “We knew this wouldn’t be an easy feat to pull off. But this project, while technically reported over the past five months, benefited from years of our work covering abortion at The 19th. After working nonstop since 2021 to cover the looming fall of Roe, I had built a list of sources whose stories I knew would be instructive and illuminating. And I knew that they would trust me to do a thorough, accurate job.”

Grist and the Center for Rural Strategies launch clearinghouse for rural US coverage. “The Rural Newswire was created to help newsrooms that serve rural communities by providing a platform to both find and share stories that can be republished for free. Editors can use the Rural Newswire to source stories to syndicate, and they can also upload links to their own coverage. As part of this project, together the Center for Rural Strategies and Grist are providing $100,000 in grants to report on rural America. The grants are open to both newsrooms and freelancers.”

Elon Musk thinks he’s got a “major win-win” for news publishers with…micropayments. “In a digital universe where every news story is behind a hard paywall — one impenetrable to the non-paying reader — then a micropayments model might make sense. But that’s not the digital universe we live in.”

Society

Seniors are flooding homeless shelters that can’t care for them. “Nearly a quarter of a million people 55 or older are estimated by the government to have been homeless in the United States during at least part of 2019, the most recent reliable federal count available.” Hopelessly broken.

Letter from Jourdon Anderson: A Freedman Writes His Former Master. “Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.”

A College President Defends Seeking Money From Jeffrey Epstein. ““People don’t understand what this job is,” he said, adding, “You cannot pick and choose, because among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people. Capitalism is a rough system.””

Startups

My New Startup Checklist. Interesting to see what creating a new startup entails in 2023.

What a startup does to you. Or: A celebration of new life. “Just like having kids, you won’t understand until you do it. But if you do it, even if you “fail,” you will come out stronger than you could have ever been without it. Stronger, wiser, ready for the next thing, never able to go back to being a cog, eyes opened.”

Technology

Block Party anti-harassment service leaves Twitter amid API changes. “Announced in a blog post last night, Block Party’s anti-harassment tools for Twitter are being placed on an immediate, indefinite hiatus, with the developers claiming that changes to Twitter’s API pricing (which starts from $100 per month) have “made it impossible for Block Party’s Twitter product to continue in its current form.””

How Picnic, an Emerging Social Network, Found its Niche. “By putting a degree of financial incentive in the hands of moderators by offering them fractional ownership of the community they built through a system of “seeds,” they ultimately are able to control their community’s destiny.”

Twitter Fails to Remove Hate Speech by Blue-Check Users, Center for Countering Digital Hate Says.“Twitter is failing to remove 99 percent of hate speech posted by Twitter Blue users, new research has found, and instead may be boosting paid accounts that spew racism and homophobia.” Who would have predicted?

Power of One. “It’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.”

Social Media Poses ‘Profound Risk’ to Teen Mental Health, Surgeon General Warns. “Frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments.”

Leaked EU Document Shows Spain Wants to Ban End-to-End Encryption. “Breaking end-to-end encryption for everyone would not only be disproportionate, it would be ineffective of achieving the goal to protect children.” It would also put a great many more people at risk.

Growing the Open Social Web. “I think there are two big things that would help the Open Social Web seize this opportunity to reach scale.” A big yes to all of this.

Hype: The Enemy of Early Stage Returns. “Technology alone does not create the future. Instead, the future is the result of an unpredictable mix of technology, business, product design, and culture.”

Montana becomes first US state to ban TikTok. “Montana has became the first US state to ban TikTok after the governor signed legislation prohibiting mobile application stores from offering the app within the state by next year.” I’m willing to wager that this never comes to pass.

Many US Twitter users have taken a break from Twitter, and some may not use it a year from now. “A majority of Americans who have used Twitter in the past year report taking a break from the platform during that time, and a quarter say they are not likely to use it a year from now.”

Why elite dev teams focus on pull-request metrics. “What’s clear from this study is elite development workflows start and end with small pull request (PR) sizes. This is the best indicator of simpler merges, enhanced CI/CD, and faster cycle times. In short, PR size affects all other metrics.”

See the Neighborhoods Internet Providers Excluded from Fast Internet. “A Markup analysis revealed that the worst internet deals disproportionately fell upon the poorest, most racial and ethnically diverse, and historically redlined neighborhoods in all but two of the 38 cities in our investigation.”

How people are archiving the storytelling and community behind Black Twitter. “They see an urgency to preserving Black Twitter in a world in which Black history and Black women’s cultural labor are undervalued or unacknowledged — and where the future of Twitter seems unknown. They also want to document the racist and sexist abuse that Black women on the platform received, in part to help people dream up and create a more inclusive way of connecting that prioritizes the needs of the most marginalized.”

Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over. “In 2015, Google hatched a plan to save the mobile web by effectively taking it over. And for a while, the media industry had practically no choice but to play along.”

The UX Research Reckoning is Here. “It’s not just the economic crisis. The UX Research discipline of the last 15 years is dying. The reckoning is here. The discipline can still survive and thrive, but we’d better adapt, and quick.”

The web's most important decision. “But also, and this is important to mention, they believed in the web and in Berners-Lee. The folks making these decisions understood its potential and wanted the web to flourish. This wasn’t a decision driven by profit. It was a generous and enthusiastic vote of confidence in the global ambitions of the web.”

Blue skies over Mastodon. “One of big things I’ve come to believe in my couple of decades working on internet stuff is that great product design is always holistic: Always working in relation to a whole system of interconnected parts, never concerned only with atomic decisions. And this perspective just straight-up cannot emerge from a piecemeal, GitHub-issues approach to fixing problems. This is the main reason it’s vanishingly rare to see good product design in open source.”

I’m soliciting prompts for discussion. This piece is a part of that series.

Erlend Sogge Heggen asks:

There’s legitimate reason to be worried about Meta’s P92 project being part of a EEE play against the fediverse.

How might the fediverse community counteract this, perhaps with its own EEE strategy?

We know Meta will attempt an EEE play, but what if we play the reverse UNO card and EE(E) them instead?

Embrace: Carefully federate in a minimum-viable fashion that doesn’t overrun the existing #fediverse.

Extend: Make #NomadicIdentity a reality, so accounts can be moved effortlessly.

Extinguish: In case of misconduct, defederate and provide mass-migration assistance.

First, some quick definitions!

P92 is the codename for Meta / Facebook’s new app that will support the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon and its cousins. Users will be able to log in with their Instagram credentials, and one can potentially (but not definitely) imagine it being folded into the mainline Instagram app.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was a phrase coined internally inside Microsoft to describe its strategy with respect to the web. The idea was that the company would embrace open protocols, extend them with its own proprietary extensions, and then use its control over those extensions to extinguish competition. In particular, its plan was to do this with HTML in order to cement Internet Explorer as the web browser.

Finally, the fediverse, of course, is the community of small, independently-owned, largely non-profit social networks that interoperate using shared protocols, on which Mastodon is the largest platform.

There is legitimate concern that a company like Meta might attempt to control the fediverse. This is particularly true if they are allowed to create a uni-polar world: one where Meta is the only large company embracing these standards. In that world, Meta can throw hundreds of millions of users at the protocol, and it will instantly become its largest user.

I think it’s helpful to look at how Microsoft’s EEE strategy failed. There were arguably two main factors: antitrust risk and competition.

The Department of Justice sued Microsoft for monopolistic business practices, ultimately leading to a settlement where Microsoft capitulated to changing some of its approach in return for the DOJ dropping its desire to break up the company. It’s not clear to me that this kind of case would or could take place with respect to Meta extinguishing the fediverse; while I’m not a lawyer, I think the argument would probably be that many other social networks are available.

The other thing that hurt Microsoft’s dominance was Firefox. It was a good browser backed by a good community, but that wasn’t the deciding factor; Firefox gained market share because Google pushed it at every possible opportunity. Because Internet Explorer’s dominance was a business risk to Google, and because Firefox was built by a non-profit that was non-competitive with Google’s business, it made financial sense to try and break Microsoft’s stranglehold. Mozilla’s model was stronger than its predecessor Netscape’s had been: whereas Netscape needed to sell licenses, Mozilla’s deal with Google meant it made money every time someone used Firefox to search for something on the web. There was almost no friction to its growth strategy.

This activity led to a resurgence in a healthy ecosystem of standards-based web browsers for years — until Google decided to re-use the technique it had used on Firefox to push its own web browser. Even then, Chrome is a far better standards player than Internet Explorer ever was.

There won’t be hard evidence that Meta is adopting ActivityPub until we see its app in the wild. But if it is, that likely means that it sees the protocol as at least worth experimenting with, and maybe even as a potential threat. That’s a sign of great progress, and everyone involved in building the fediverse should feel good about it.

If Meta wants to own the fediverse, this isn’t a battle that will be primarily won with features or technology. Easy-to-use platforms, nomadic identity that easily lets you move your presence from one provider to another, and assistance will all be essential, but they’ll be table stakes. (If Meta is working on the platform today, it’s probably also too late for truly nomadic identity to make a difference.) To really stand a chance, the fediverse will need the kind of marketing and go-to-market support that Firefox enjoyed back in the day. Which may mean support from another large player that considers Meta’s ownership of the standard to be an existential risk.

It’s hard to see who that might be. Twitter is now the incompetence wing of the incompetence party. It’s highly unlikely that networks like Pinterest care. Microsoft’s platforms are tightly bound to its ecosystem, with access control at their core; I don’t see LinkedIn joining the fediverse any time soon. Google has fallen on its face every time it’s tried to build a social network, and runs YouTube as a separate entity that strongly benefits from closed ads. Salesforce might consider it a risk, as it provides social tools for businesses, which are easier to build and sell on an open social networking standard. Some of these entities might consider the fediverse to be worth exploring — but there’s no clear technology backer. Cloudflare actually did provide its own Mastodon-compatible platform that runs on its CDN, but it hasn’t seen anything like wide use. Medium has embraced Mastodon but has not deeply built support into its existing platform.

Perhaps media companies, who generally live and die on the size of their audiences, and have often been beholden to the large social networks, might find themselves interested in embracing a social networking federation where they have more say and control. The rise of the fediverse certainly is a de-risking of their business models. But I don’t think they see it yet; nor do I think they consider it their place to pick a winner. (Nor should it be, really, in practice.)

Perhaps there can be another kind of backer: an entity that sees the existential thread centralized control of social media poses to democracy itself. We’ve already seen how, left unchecked, centralized companies like Facebook incite genocides and throw elections. The fediverse can be an antidote to these trends — if we see it as a set of collaborating communities rather than simply the technology alone. The erosion of democracy, like monopolistic abuse of power, are human problems with human solutions rather than technological ones. Foundations and philanthropists may choose to provide this level of support, if they continue to see Meta as a threat to democracy.

Building features will not protect the fediverse from being extinguished, although they may provide a useful baseline. It’s going to take a whole different level of strategy, relationship-building, deal-making, and movement-building. I believe the fediverse is capable of doing this, as long as it doesn’t mistake building software for making true progress.

Via Jeremy Keith, Future-First Design Thinking:

Incorporating non-human personas into the design thinking process would allow us to embody the essential elements that constitute our environment, such as air, trees, water, and land. These personas can serve as tangible reminders of the interconnectedness between our design decisions and the health of our environment, a living entity that deserves our protection and consideration.

I’m sorry to say that I don’t trust it.

My bias: personas are harmful. A persona is an amalgam — a fictional person, really — that is supposed to be drawn from extensive user research. The problem is, the process of drawing up a persona always requires a degree of subjective invention, regardless of the amount of research that went into it. It is always a reflection of the biases on the team.

In contrast, POV statements that describe a single person who has been interviewed, in combination with direct transcripts and photographs, allow you to use a non-invented example to build your product — and, at least theoretically, go back and use that person as your referee for product decisions as you continue to build. While condensing a person’s interviews into a POV does require some invention, it isn’t a statistical exercise. You can always go back and ask.

It’s very difficult to do this with a tree. By its nature, then, all you can do is invent — and potentially excuse all kinds of activity because your fictional tree persona approves (or, more likely, has blind spots).

All of this said, I do think it’s vital to include future-facing sustainability in design thinking frameworks. (Design thinking is prone to colonial thinking, so considering distributed equity is vital too.) My proposal was to add sustainability to the desirability, viability, feasibility lenses; it’s not necessarily right, but it’s something to consider.

I’m soliciting prompts for discussion. This piece is a part of that series.

An anonymous reader asks:

‌Do the good guys need to stoop to the tactics of the bad guys in order to avoid losing, or is there still value in holding oneself to certain standards?

First: who are the good guys and the bad guys? Can you be sure that’s true? One of my all-time favorite comedy sketches is Mitchell and Webb’s “are we the baddies?” skit. (The writers room for That Michell and Webb Look included Succession creator Jesse Armstrong and Oscar winner Olivia Colman. It’s well worth checking out if you’re new to it.)

I don’t think it’s worth getting into a discussion about objective good or objective bad, or the shades of morality in between. I’m not a moral philosopher and will not do that topic justice. But I can tell you who I think needs to be supported and who needs to be hindered in the current moment in order to create the world I’d like to see. Hopefully that’s a good enough analog.

My values are that equality is a virtue, and that everybody should be able to live a good life, regardless of their background or context. Fundamentally, nobody is more valuable than anybody else. That means I’m in favor of social programs like welfare and universal healthcare; I’m pro-choice; I’m heavily against the death penalty; I believe strongly that there are serious structural inequities in society that must be redressed; I value cosmopolitan spaces, immigration, multiculturalism, and inclusion. I think an abundance of guns and a militaristic foreign policy are tools of dominance and intimidation that must be relegated to the past. I was and am in favor of covid lockdowns and restrictions.

You might not agree with me on some of these things. That’s completely fine! One of the core tenets of democracy is that we can have opposing views and debate them — and that there’s open access to the reporting and data we need to make informed decisions.

From this, you can probably discern the ideas that I think are harmful or “bad”. Monoculturalism; impeded debate; social hierarchy / structural inequity; fascism; violence; anti-intellectualism; nationalism; dominance. The people who would ban books from libraries, eradicate open journalism, impose their worldview and ambitions through force.

Some of the tactics used by proponents of these ideas are abhorrent to the point where “stooping to their level” would make a movement indistinguishable from them. Voter suppression is one; storming the Capitol is another; book banning a third; tricking asylum seekers into flying to Martha’s Vineyard as a political stunt is obviously a fourth.

Those values are actually in the statistical minority: in America, in Britain, around the world. Undemocratic tactics are required to keep those people in power.

But here’s one tactic that I do think we can do better at. Fascists have always been great marketers, and explicitly used marketing tactics; Edward Bernays influenced the propaganda Goebbels produced for the Nazis, for example. “Make America Great Again,” though recycled from Reagan, complete with its recognizable Nazi-red hats, has proven itself to be an enduring brand (albeit one that turns my stomach). More importantly, they’ve made promises about what they will give to their base.

Progressives have not done as great a job at marketing themselves - in any arena. Lately, we haven’t so much painted a picture of how the world could be as pointed at the bad stuff and said, “at least we’re not that.” I believe Joe Biden was mostly elected by not being Donald Trump. New social networks gain popularity by not being Twitter. At-least-we’re-not-that isn’t actually a terrible tactic right now, given how bad that really is, but it can’t last forever, and it’s quite a long way from hope and change.

There needs to be a simple message about how regular peoples’ lives will improve in a progressive world. Bill Clinton, who was not progressive by most measures, was right when he said “it’s the economy, stupid” — the message isn’t about how the world will be fairer, but for each voter must be about how the world will be better for them. That story needs to be told, simply, but with all the skill that anyone can muster. Because it really is a better world.

Thinking one’s values are ideological better does not absolve a movement from having to address, directly, how it will make the world better for every person. When that work is really done, it will be a stronger message. For one thing, hopefully, unlike the opposition’s, it will actually be true.

Inspired by Manton’s list of countries and states he’s been to, I thought I’d come up with my own.

I’ve lived in five:

• The Netherlands 🇳🇱
• England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
• Austria 🇦🇹
• Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
• The United States 🇺🇸

In addition to those, I’ve been to (excluding those “I’ve technically been to here but I really haven’t” airport layover visits):

• Albania 🇦🇱
• Belgium 🇧🇪
• Canada 🇨🇦
• Denmark 🇩🇰
• France 🇫🇷
• Germany 🇩🇪
• Greece 🇬🇷
• Italy 🇮🇹
• Liechtenstein 🇱🇮
• Luxembourg 🇱🇺
• Mexico 🇲🇽
• Russia 🇷🇺
• Spain 🇪🇸
• Switzerland 🇨🇭
• Vatican City 🇻🇦
• Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
• Yugoslavia, when it was Yugoslavia 🇧🇦🇭🇷🇲🇰🇲🇪🇷🇸🇸🇮

There are some serious and obvious omissions on this list. I’ve never been outside of Europe and North America! And even in Europe, I’ve never been to Iceland, Ireland, Sweden, Norway … and so on. There are so many places on my bucket list — not least Indonesia, where so many of my family comes from. One day, I would also like to explore my roots in Ukraine; I hope it’ll be safe to do so.

I’ve driven across the US three times, so I’ve been to markedly more US states and the District of Columbia. In fact, every state aside from Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and South Dakota. I’ll have to correct those soon.

I’m soliciting prompts for discussion. This piece is a part of that series.

Michael Kriegh asks:

‌Do you think AI is an evolutionary trend for intelligence in the universe? If so, what do you imagine that trend will look like in 50 years? 100 years? If not, why not?

There’s a body of work surrounding the potential of truly artificial / alternative intelligence on human development. You can read about some of that on Michael’s site. However, I’m going to take another, simpler approach to answering this question.

Most, if not all, of the software we call AI is not intelligence at all. They can’t think, or reason, or discern. They’re pattern-matchers. Arthur C Clarke’s third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; any set of sufficiently advanced heuristics is indistinguishable from intelligence. Just as technology is not magic, software is not intelligence. It’s a tool.

Still, this doesn’t mean it can’t have an evolutionary impact on intelligence. It’s worth considering how new tools have affected the evolution of intelligence in the past.

For example, stone tools:

The development of sophisticated stone tools, including sturdy cutting and sawing edges, is considered a key moment in human evolution, as it set the stage for better nutrition and advanced social behaviours, such as the division of labour and group hunting.

These behaviors, according to the cited study, evolved alongside language, as both required more complex thought. Language enabled coordination; tools enabled nutrition and the development of better and better equipment that eventually allowed humans to travel around the globe. In turn, we adapted for the new environments we found ourselves in.

It’s possible that modern AI tools could have a similar impact on evolution, but I’d argue that this is only because computers as a whole will. Large Language Models and their cousins are incremental applications of existing technology rather than something wholly new.

I also think it’s important to not be carried away by the hype driven by AI companies themselves. Bloomberg earlier this year:

Now, a sea of companies are adding “AI” to their taglines and pitch decks, seeking to bask in the reflected glow of the hype cycle. For example, one startup that offers tools to zhuzh up PowerPoints said in a press release that it will incorporate AI so users can skip the writer’s block and build compelling presentations. (It made no mention of AI in a press release describing the product earlier in the year.) Another release touted the value of AI in a campaign to promote shoes.

Perhaps it’s best not to read too much into the marketing. This is a phase change for the tech industry, but I don’t think it’s one for human civilization.