Werd I/O

I’m going to start kicking off my week with a list of thoughts and actions. Join me!

Thoughts

1. There was a time when the web was really fun: a new medium that people approached with a sense of play. Even TechCrunch, back when it was a blog run by Mike Arrington, seemed like a collection of small experiments. Now it’s like reading a list of private equity updates. That’s what happens when an industry grows up, I guess, but I miss the sense of discovery and wonder. Remember the first social network, or marveling at what Flickr was able to do with a web interface? Or being excited by what one person in their bedroom could put together?
2. The closest we have to this kind of new platform is smart contract blockchains (Ethereum, Algorand, and so on). Aspects of them are pretty cool, but the fact that money is involved creates a de facto barrier to entry. I could get into the web because it was free and because it had relatively low computing requirements. We didn’t have a lot of money. Which kids are getting into Ethereum when just the gas on a transaction is often tickling $100? $1 would have been too high a barrier for me.
3. I’m therefore really interested in the decentralization without the monetization. What does a totally free blockchain look like? Is it even possible, given the incentives in the network? Are other, non-monetary incentives possible? Does decentralization really have to bake in capitalism? Why?
4. What else is it baking in? Software carries with it all kinds of implicit cultural biases based on the predilections of the developers who build it. What would a barter-based decentralized protocol look like? Or one designed around paying forward? Or one designed to penalize wealth hoarding?
5. I’m not an economist, but lately I’ve been lucky to spend a lot of time hanging out with a former expert in east-west trade with an Oxford PhD in the subject, in addition to advanced law degrees with a specialization in contracts. He’s my dad, I should declare, but our conversations on the topic have been fascinating. I’ve tried and failed to get him to blog, but maybe one day I’ll write up one of our conversations here.

Actions

1. Last week my car was smashed into and all my devices were stolen. Replacing them was pretty quick, but replacing my backpack (a Peak Design Everyday) and getting the glass repaired on my car has been less easy. This week, both those things need to happen.
2. I spent some time today laying out some architectural diagrams for my job. I need to get some internal feedback and then put them into practice.
3. Last week, I joined the Zebras Unite co-op as an individual member. I’ve been following the zebras since literally day one, and I’m excited to help them more deeply. I need to learn how I can be most useful to the community and put myself out there. Helping people who are genuinely out to distribute equity and make the world a more equal place is a life-affirming thing to do.
4. I get to catch up with some friends (outside) this week, and hopefully see some live music. I’m looking forward to it.
5. I think I’ve got an ear infection, and not for the first time this year. I actually first noticed it months ago, but it was the day my mother died, and I’ve had other priorities since then. No more putting it off: I’ve made an appointment with an ENT doctor and hopefully we can figure it out.

Have a good week!

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for August, 2021. Once again, this is a lighter list: I spent a lot of my month with family, helping to organize my mother’s memorial. Apart from that, it's been a time for reflection rather than consumption.

Books

100 Boyfriends, by Brontez Purnell . Raw in a way that transcends honesty, these confessional short stories are full of uncomfortable life. The writing is incredible. I’m not sure what I took away, exactly, but I think it’s time for a shower.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks. Although it’s written for teachers, there are lessons here that transcend that field to be insightful for anyone in a hypothetical position of authority. Today, the topics and even its writing style are still cutting edge. When it was written a quarter century ago, it must have been incredibly radical. I wish every teacher and manager in my life had read it.

Notable Articles

Business

One Medical Employees Accuse Concierge Care Provider Of Less Focus On Patients. “Dozens of One Medical employees are trying to unionize as a response to what they say has been mismanagement of the organization’s COVID-19 response, poor working conditions for staff and, they allege, a declining focus on patients.” I’m a long-term One Medical customer and have definitely (but anecdotally) noticed this in the quality of care I’ve received over time.

Inclusive icebreakers. “To ‘break the ice’ is a metaphor for dissipating tension in a group of people who don’t know each other very well. Word Histories gives a bit of background behind the phrase, which seems to be hundreds of years old. However, there are still some common activities being used that have the opposite effect for some people – making them feel even more disconnected from the rest from the group.” An important point with some great suggestions.

VCs are financing a servant economy. “But this is more than just the most recent unicorn-bubble fad. It’s bringing us one step closer to living in a servant economy. The world’s most powerful VC investors are funding an economy where technology allows a ‘ruling class’ to command an ‘underclass’ of servants with the swipe of an app.”

Court rules California gig worker initiative is unconstitutional, a setback to Uber and Lyft. “A California judge on Friday ruled that a 2020 ballot measure exempting rideshare and food delivery drivers from a state labor law is unconstitutional because it infringes on the Legislature’s power to set workplace standards.” Great news!

The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms. “We found that lenders gave fewer loans to Black applicants than White applicants even when their incomes were high—$100,000 a year or more—and had the same debt ratios. In fact, high-earning Black applicants with less debt were rejected more often than high-earning White applicants who have more debt.” Alternative credit scores are vital - Classic FICO disproportionately harms people of color.

What If People Don’t Want A Career? “In May I ended up on Burnout TikTok, where every 5th video offered withering commentary on the futility and frustration of toiling away for long hours at a job they didn’t particularly like. I can’t find the video anymore but the one that sticks in my head was a TikToker venting about how the idealized career is — when you think about it — a raw deal. It went something like this: You devote the bulk of every day for 30-40 years in the prime of your life to various companies to make them and their shareholders money and then you get ten years near the end of your life to do what you please. Sounds like a bad arrangement.”

Crypto

Remarks Before the Aspen Security Forum by SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “Right now, large parts of the field of crypto are sitting astride of — not operating within — regulatory frameworks that protect investors and consumers, guard against illicit activity, ensure for financial stability, and yes, protect national security.”

Chelsea Manning Is Back, And Hacking Again, Only This Time For A Bitcoin-Based Privacy Startup. “Halpin asked Manning to look for security weaknesses in his new privacy project, which eventually became Nym, a Neuchâtel, Switzerland-based crypto startup. Halprin founded Nym in 2018 to send data anonymously around the Internet using the same blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin. To date, Nym has raised some $8.5 million from a group of crypto investors including Binance, Polychain Capital and NGC Ventures. The firm now employs 10 people and is using its latest round of capital to double its team size.” I’ve known Harry for a long time, and was privileged to meet Chelsea when she was an advisor to his previous startup (which we invested in at Matter). I’m excited to see this collaboration.

Culture

What Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings looked like as two Weinstein movies. “My script review became the second part of a carefully coordinated one-two punch. At that point, Ain’t It Cool was a useful platform for filmmakers who were trying to convince studio heads that there was an audience out there for serious-minded genre fare produced with all of the resources required, and it was not always an easy sell. I was happy to make the case: The scripts were great enough that Jackson deserved the chance to see them through.”

‘Bloody’ overtaken as the UK’s most popular swear word, study suggests. I’ve been self-censoring since I got to the US - people swear much less often here - but I’m being less diligent over time.

My dead dad’s journal: How I finally met a man I knew for my entire life. “It was a window into the mind of a loving father. It was a look into the fraught thought process of a deeply analytical man. A religious man who knew he was sinning. An addict who was self-aware, and still couldn’t pull himself out from the abyss. It was Jekyll talking to Hyde. Bruce Banner talking to the Hulk. And, in honor of my dad I feel I must also include: It’s Data talking to Lore.”

Feels Good Man! Pepe, copyright, and NFTs. “And then NFT craze hits, and Pepe becomes a star in the non-fungible token markets. I’ve spent countless hours in NFT platforms in the last months, every time I open a new page, there’s usually an animated Pepe waiting for me. Many NFT artists are part of the meme generation that grew up on Pepe and other memes, so these tend to feature heavily on their output (probably only beaten by Doge). Instead of fighting the trend, Furie joined the NFT revolution, and started making lots of money off Pepe “originals”, and allowing most other NFTs of Pepes to continue.”

Politics

Afghanistan Meant Nothing. A Veteran Reflects on 20 Wasted Years. “And so I sit here, reading these sad fucking articles and these horrified social media posts about the suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban and how awful it is that this is happening but I can’t stop feeling this grim happiness, like, finally, you fuckers, finally you have to face the thing Afghanistan has always been. You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into.”

Science

Atlantic Ocean currents weaken, signalling big weather changes. “The Atlantic Ocean’s current system, an engine of the Northern Hemsiphere’s climate, could be weakening to such an extent that it could soon bring big changes to the world’s weather.”

A Major Report Warns Climate Change Is Accelerating And Humans Must Cut Emissions Now. “Global climate change is accelerating and human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are the overwhelming cause, according to a landmark report released Monday by the United Nations. There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming this century, but only if countries around the world stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible, the authors warn.”

Rain falls at Greenland ice summit for first time on record. “That meltwater is streaming into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise. Already, melting from Greenland’s ice sheet --the world’s second-largest after Antarctica’s -- has caused around 25% of global sea level rise seen over the last few decades, scientists estimate. That share is expected to grow, as global temperatures increase.” We’re increasingly screwed.

Evolution is now accepted by a majority of Americans. “The level of public acceptance of evolution in the United States is now solidly above the halfway mark, according to a new study based on a series of national public opinion surveys conducted over the last 35 years.” That number is 54%, which is absolutely pathetic.

Society

Nearly half of American workers don’t earn enough to afford a one-bedroom rental. “Rents in the US continued to increase through the pandemic, and a worker now needs to earn about $20.40 an hour to afford a modest one-bedroom rental. The median wage in the US is about $21 an hour.” Some absolutely dire statistics here.

2020 Census data: The United States is more diverse and more multiracial than ever. “While the under-18 population decreased during the last decade, it is rapidly diversifying. Non-White US residents younger than 18 now make up 53% of the population among minors, up from 47% in 2010.” (NB: I don’t like the “non-white” framing; white is not the default.)

Disability Advocates Fight Ruling Allowing Electric Shock Treatment Back In Mass. Residential School. “students wear backpacks equipped with electrical stimulation devices around the clock. Workers at the residential school employ the shocks using a remote control device when the students display a range of unwanted behaviors.” WTF?

‘It’s not hard work for me’: At 101 years old, this Maine lobsterwoman still works the water. “Virginia Oliver is the oldest licensed lobsterer in Maine and possibly on the planet. But in her eyes, it’s simply what she does. Her world has changed in once-unimaginable ways since 1920, but in other ways it’s hardly changed at all.” Come for the story, stay for the amazing photo.

Afghanistan's all-girls robotics team frantically trying to flee Taliban. “Members of the team, who range in age from 12 to 18, have overcome war and other hardships to pursue their love of engineering and robotics and strike a blow for national pride. They’ve made global headlines as a symbol of a more progressive Afghanistan.”

Op-Ed: As a doctor in a COVID unit, I’m running out of compassion for the unvaccinated. Get the shot. “I can pretty much guarantee we would have never met had you gotten vaccinated because you would have never been hospitalized. All of our COVID units are full and every single patient in them is unvaccinated. Numbers don’t lie. The vaccines work.”

Feds Deliberately Targeted Black Lives Matter Protesters, A Report Says. “Movement leaders and experts said the prosecution of protesters over the past year continues a century-long practice by the federal government, rooted in structural racism, to suppress Black social movements via the use of surveillance tactics and other mechanisms.”

What I Learned While Eavesdropping on the Taliban. “When people ask me what I did in Afghanistan, I tell them that I hung out in planes and listened to the Taliban. My job was to provide “threat warning” to allied forces, and so I spent most of my time trying to discern the Taliban’s plans. Before I started, I was cautioned that I would hear terrible things, and I most certainly did. But when you listen to people for hundreds of hours — even people who are trying to kill your friends — you hear ordinary things as well.”

Parents Are Not Okay. “School is only just starting and already kids are being quarantined in mind-boggling numbers: 20,000 across the state of Mississippi, 10,000 in a single district in Tampa, Florida. They’re getting sick too, with hospitalizations of kids under 17 across the country up at least 22 percent in the past month, by the CDC’s count, and each new week sets pediatric hospitalization records for the entire pandemic.”

Technology

Electric cars have much lower life cycle emissions, new study confirms. “But Bieker’s analysis says that there is no future for internal combustion engine vehicles if we are to actually decarbonize. HEVs only reduce lifecycle emissions by about 20 percent, and PHEVs are little better in Europe (25–27 percent lower than gasoline), a little worse in China (6–12 percent lower than gasoline), and adequate in the US (42–46 percent lower than gasoline). But compared to BEVs, a PHEV will have much greater lifetime emissions in all three areas. (India has almost no PHEVs, apparently.) And the advantage of BEVs over HEVs and PHEVs only grows as the grid decarbonizes more.”

Why Silicon Valley’s Asian Americans Still Feel Like a Minority. “On her way out she asked her likely successor, a White man, if he needed help navigating the company. She says he told her, “I don’t really need to prepare that hard—the manager has my back.” [Bo] Ren was floored. She’d spent more than 100 hours preparing for the same interviews so she could prove she deserved the spot. Being White, she says, is “like having a skip pass at Disney World. I realized there is a bamboo ceiling, and I’d have to work 100 times harder.””

The voices of women in tech are still being erased. “When we look at the impact of women’s voices in tech today, we can see both that they have led calls for accountability and also that they have been literally and figuratively undervalued. From doing voiceover work that becomes the basis for voice tools that millions use, without being paid or acknowledged accordingly, or doing work on the foundational concepts of AI, women are often present in tech without being listened to.”

Global organizations urge Apple to drop child safety features. “More than 90 civil liberties organizations around the world sent a letter to Apple’s Tim Cook Thursday, urging the CEO to walk back its plans to use machine learning to automatically detect child sexual abuse material on users’ devices.” Although everybody wants to protect children, the implications are unfortunately enormous.

On TikTok, misogyny and white supremacy slip through ‘enforcement gap’. “News investigations have nevertheless revealed that TikTok is used by Islamic State militants and to promote neo-Nazism. While the platform has started releasing transparency reports with details about the content it has removed for violating its guidelines, it is not yet part of a consortium of tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube involved in an industry anti-terrorism effort to collaboratively track and review content from white supremacists and far-right militia groups.”

Why are hyperlinks blue? “As a user experience designer who has created websites since 2001, I’ve always made my links blue. I have advocated for the specific shade of blue, and for the consistent application of blue, yes, but I’ve never stopped and wondered, why are links blue? It was just a fact of life. Grass is green and hyperlinks are blue. Culturally, we associate links with the color blue so much that in 2016, when Google changed its links to black, it created quite a disruption. But now, I find myself all consumed by the question, WHY are links blue? WHO decided to make them blue? WHEN was this decision made, and HOW has this decision made such a lasting impact?”

The future needs files. “I want all OSs, including mobile ones, to properly support real files as they are amazing, inspiring, and possibly the future of how we build our digital future.”

I wrote this piece to read at my mother's memorial on Saturday, August 28. I don't want to lose it, so I'm posting it here, to my personal space.

This is terrifying to me, which is why I’ve decided to write something down. I can’t possibly hope to represent Ma well. Even finding a story to tell is incredibly hard because there are so many of them: a lifetime of happy stories from a childhood that always felt like a kind of wheatgerm-fueled adventure where we lived on our own terms in spite of what the world might have wanted from us.

I started calling her Ma as a term of endearment when I was an adult. “Mum” is too British; “Mom” doesn’t sound right coming out of my mouth. “Mom”. So I confess, I absolutely stole Ma from [our cousins] the Neales, who have similar accent difficulties, and who I admire in lots of ways.

But when we were growing up, I called her Debbie. We were a very respectful but non-hierarchical household: we called our parents by their first names, we were encouraged to take things apart and ask how things worked, and we were consulted on all kinds of things that children are not necessarily best-equipped to weigh in on - but we were trusted, and that was wonderful, and a reflection of how both my parents think and thought. It’s a mindset rooted in equality, growth, and learning.

So. What do I want you to know about Ma?

Everything. Or at least, quite a few things. But let’s start here:

I want you to know that she was really freaking smart.

In my line of work, which is working in product and engineering in the tech industry, people often say things like, “explain this like you were explaining it to your mother.” It’s obviously a completely sexist line of thinking, which is kind of a reflection of the tech industry to be honest, and I take great satisfaction in telling them that my mother taught me to program. Not only that, but she learned assembler, which is one of the most intricate ways to program.

She would sit patiently with me for hours on end, and together we’d plug source code into our 8-bit Atari. She taught me BASIC, and then later on, we moved on to more complicated languages together.

When we didn’t have the money to get the latest and greatest PC, she organized a computer club at a local business in Oxford so that I’d have access. Every Thursday night, a bunch of kids from across the city would play games, make art, learn to code, and become computer literate together under her gentle guidance.

She studied the telecommunications industry, and knew that both the internet and the mobile revolution were coming. She understood the implications, and spoke to many of the people who were making things happen. She wrote detailed analyses of the forces that would reshape much of society over the coming decades.

She took me with her to industry shows in Cannes, and as a family we went to technology conferences across Europe, where we’d go sightseeing (and I might sneak into an event or two) and she’d be running panels and conducting interviews.

She was unassuming about it; she wasn’t self-important, but if she’d been someone else, she could have become a billionaire.

Instead, she withdrew from the industry, retrained, became a middle school science teacher in one of the most impoverished towns in California, and never looked back. I don’t remember her as happy at work as when she was teaching those kids. Even when she started to get sick, she went into work every day with an oxygen tank on her back, looking like a Ghostbuster. Even when she couldn’t work anymore, she helped her school get grants and organized an educational program with NASA. She was dedicated and she loved it.

She would engage in debate about anything. It was common to see her and my dad watching a documentary or lecture on any number of obscure topics and discussing it late into the night and sometimes days later. She became fascinated by science and space. She could speak a bunch of languages and would read and analyze academic reports in languages she didn’t even know yet. She was well-read, and read voraciously - often with multiple books on the go at once, which even this year she’d alternate between during dialysis and while she was getting her tube feeds in bed - and was hungry for knowledge.

So, sure, I’ll explain it like I’m explaining it to my mother. I’ll include all the detail, know that she’ll understand the implications better than I will, and be ready for a series of informed, insightful questions - and to be, more than anything else, challenged on the ethics of it.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

I want you to know that she cared. She wasn’t just kind and forgiving, willing to see the best in absolutely everyone and go out of her way to help - although she was definitely all of those things. But more than that, she really cared deeply: about people and the intricacies of their lives, about the world, and particularly about fairness.

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

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

Later in life, when she had a little bit more money, she gave to causes she believed in: representation for women, reproductive rights, racial justice, voting rights, and the environment. She was glued to the Presidential debates, appalled by the previous guy, and was completely on top of what was going on in the world.

She was a feminist, as we all should be. She defined her own identity, dressed as she wanted to dress, acted as she wanted to act, spoke how she wanted to speak. It wasn’t that she was irreverent towards more traditional expectations; they were utterly irrelevant. As they should be.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

I want you to know that she was herself - and that self was full of life and energy and humor and movement. And I’m not just talking about her amazing trousers.

The last time I was here at the Cape, which was three years ago, we were all hanging out in the pond behind Little Lane. For some reason, there was an inflatable bull out there with us. None of us could climb on top of it: Hannah, me, Anna, I think Rachel was there, Wiley, Elise.

Ma was weak, and the lung transplant drugs were taking their toll, and she was having trouble eating food. And when she started to climb onto that bull, I’ve got to admit, I was kind of worried.

But by god, climb she did, and she was the only one of us who made it to the top of that bull. And once she’d scrambled to the top of it, she lifted her arms up in victory.

That was Ma.

We realized later that she absolutely was not supposed to be in a closed body of water as an immunosuppressed person, but whatever. There were no ill effects. She climbed the bull.

She spent the last decade scrambling to the top of the biggest metaphorical inflatable bull you’ve ever heard of. And she spent most of that decade balancing precariously on top of it with her arms held high in victory.

When Pammy gifted us the Sunfish - the same boat that they had both sailed when they were younger - it was like a key to unlocking the bay. We spent days and days tacking around the bay, finding exactly the right breeze, and making our way back to Grandmother’s Beach at high speed in a single tack. She would yell: whooooooosh! And then we’d think about tacking back to Sagelots and doing it all again.

Life was always full of those small moments of joy. Taking Tessie, our little Jack Russell Terrier, out on Port Meadow and watching her bound through the tall grass. Going out to the wildlife sanctuary outside of Turlock and seeing the birds fly through the reeds. Sneaking out and stealing a dinghy late at night from Grandmother’s Beach and oohing at the phosphorescence shimmering around our oars. Getting out the sofabed and all sitting together under the covers to watch Doctor Who or a movie on a Friday night. Sitting around the table with people she loved, picking crabs.

When she got sick, life was still full of those moments of joy. Even just a five minute walk through the park had the same energy. Just a few months ago, she got out and walked the boardwalk at Monterey. “I still have life-force in me,” she told the doctors. She loved to live.

What do I want you to know about Ma?

One last thing for now. I actually have a message to impart. Not so long ago, while she was lying in a bed on the tenth floor at UCSF, surrounded by all the tubes and hospital paraphernalia, she gave me a simple instruction:

“Tell everyone I love them.”

And she did. She loved you so much. She loved all of us so much, in a way that was open, and forgiving, and kind, and all in her own way.

I’m really glad you’re all here. She would be glad too. She was hoping to be with you all one more time.

Thank you.

On June 6, we lost my mother. The last really coherent thing she said to me was, “I love you guys”. The second-to-last thing was, “I need you”. The third-to-last thing was, “how will we get to the Cape?”

My great grandparents built a house in East Falmouth on Cape Cod around a hundred years ago. It was never supposed to last this long; it’s rickety and dusty, definitely falling apart, but it’s ours. In the meantime, developers have cut down much of the surrounding woods and replaced them with million dollar homes. They’re frustrated by our presence, and have described us as “arrogantly shabby”. Screw you, millionaires: we wear that description as a badge of pride.

The house was my mother’s favorite place in the world. It’s mine, too. Despite dialysis, feeding tubes, medicines, and a hundred other considerations, we’d spent a lot of time figuring out how to get her there one last time. I bought first class tickets so she could lie down comfortably on the flight; we figured out cars and dialysis logistics.

And then we lost her before we could get there.

When the three of us got back to my parents’ house, it was one of the first decisions we made. If Ma hadn’t had her medical issues, she would have loved to drive to Cape Cod from California. So we decided to do just that, with her ashes (and the proper permits) in tow.

We acquired a hybrid van (a 2021 Toyota Sienna), which runs about 600 miles on a tank of gas. There was talk of postponing the trip, but based on a desire to get to another family memorial, we set off in the evening two Fridays ago. We headed north to Seattle, via Portland, to avoid the worst of the summer heat. And then we headed east.

We saw a lot of America: around 4050 miles of cities, towns, countryside, and unadulterated wilderness. We learned never to eat Mexican food in Fargo, North Dakota, and that the Indian food in Philadelphia is spectacular. We were blown away by the beauty of Glacier National Park and the segregated poverty of much of the country. Throughout it all, we learned that beauty, humanity, and the progressive values of equality and shared lived experiences exist everywhere, albeit in pockets. There were Trump signs in deep Democrat country; there were radical coffee shops run by brave, non-binary progressives in the most staunchly conservative townships. As we went, I documented much of it on Instagram.

Images: Montana; a mural in Bismarck, ND; George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.

My sister planned much of the trip based around what she thought we’d all be most interested in; we made special efforts to visit Black-owned establishments and diverse neighborhoods. It’s what my mother would have been most interested in, too.

Our routine every night was the same: bring in our bags, and then bring in Ma. She stayed with us in our hotel rooms. We all spoke to her. In some way, she’s still with us. In another, there’s a hole in our lives, and a sadness that we all feel profoundly.

More than anything, it was a time for us to be together and heal. I shared a hotel room with my dad almost every night, and we would talk late into the night about what we’d seen and what we were feeling. It was necessary healing that will be long and ongoing.

We traveled across America once before, as the four of us, when I’d just graduated high school. Back then, we used paper AAA maps and picked up discount booklets for local motels from diners. Where we stayed was always hit and miss.

In contrast, this road trip was powered by technology in ways that were new for us. Our car is a hybrid, yes, but it also has traffic-aware cruise control that works a lot like a Tesla: the car slows down as the cars around it do, and follows the curves of the freeway. We used Apple CarPlay and Android Auto extensively to navigate, and made plans on a custom Google Map. I used Foursquare to find places to eat; Hannah used Yelp and Google Maps, often using gay-friendly and Black-owned filters. I booked our places to stay through apps, including the FairHotel app to look for socially responsible hotels with unionized workforces.

As I write this, we’re barreling down the freeway on the very last leg of the trip. Soon we’ll come to a stop, and the beginning of a new chapter. I don’t know what the future holds, what it looks like, or even what it’ll feel like. But I’m grateful to be a part of this family, and to have had this time. All of these things - these values, these experiences, these people - are an inexorable part of who I am. We’re an interconnected part of each other. And I’m glad we were all here.

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for July, 2021. This is a lighter list than usual because I'm in the middle of driving across the US with my family.

Books

Mexican Gothic, by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. An atmospheric horror story that was so slow burn that I was beginning to drift away, despite its intriguing subtexts about domination, colonization, and generational trauma - but then the story changed lanes at breakneck speed and I was hooked again. Smart, creepy, sensual, and unique in a way that defies all expectations.

Notable Articles

Business

Why the U.S. can’t have open banking. “As open banking sweeps the world, countries from the U.K. to Australia to Chile to Nigeria are adopting the concept, which generally includes mandates for API access to bank infrastructure and consumer rights to banking data. There’s global momentum behind it, but in the U.S. rule-making is still at an early stage. Reforms to Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the law that governs consumer access to financial data, are seemingly years away as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau weighs public comments.”

Spotify Exec Calls Artist 'Entitled' for Requesting One Penny Per Stream. “I think Taylor Swift doesn’t need .00001 more a stream. The problem is this: Spotify was created to solve a problem. The problem was this: piracy and music distribution. The problem was to get artists’ music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.”

The Church of American Startups and Capitalism. “Where startups claim to be so unique in their thinking and in what they do, they are absolutely a product of the protestant work ethic that frames America’s belief in what capitalism is. The church of business - modern American business - has become so absorbed by the cult of personality because it is easier to pray to the saints of startups than to recognize that a culture geared toward a conveyer belt of endless labor is beyond depressing.”

The World Is More Obvious Than We Want It To Be. “The adulation for the wealthy and successful is based on wanting what they have, but rarely accepts the common means through which they got it - luck, privilege, chaos and the ability and means to be persistent. Most people don’t have the time or energy to do a side hustle, and it’s an act of cruelty to guilt them into thinking that carving out a separate job on top of their other job is something they “have to” do.”

Funding To Black Startup Founders Quadrupled In Past Year, But Remains Elusive. “To be sure, much work remains to be done. Black startup entrepreneurs still received only a tiny fraction — 1.2 percent — of the record $147 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. startups through the first half of this year, Crunchbase numbers show. That compares with the more than 13 percent of the U.S. population that is Black or African American.”

Visualizing All the Vacant Office Space in San Francisco. “And employing the framework we introduced last year, there is now 12.7 Salesforce Towers, or 747 Salesforce Tower floors, worth of empty office space spread across San Francisco, which is roughly enough space to accommodate between 98,000 (based on an average, pre-Covid, density) and 131,000 (a la twitter) worker bees.”

Apple reportedly postpones in-person work until at least October. Likely the first of many.

Crypto

In bitcoin, Black entrepreneurs see a chance to rebuild generational wealth. “Building viable enterprises is possible “in a decentralized finance space,” said Evans, who teaches law at Penn State and began studying and speaking on blockchain and crypto four years ago. “No one’s standing in the way. There’s no bank. There’s no credit score. There’s no redlining. That’s transformative and very powerful.””

Culture

Self-publishing. “The corollary of this method is simple: unless you feel you can figure out how to market your book, unless you want to devote as much energy to that marketing plan as you did to its authorship and production, unless you are prepared to sustain your marketing effort through constant iteration and refinement, you probably shouldn’t self-publish.”

How the son of a homophobic politician in Nigeria became a queer OnlyFans star. “Bolu said he joined OnlyFans because he wanted to broaden the idea of what it means to be Black and gay, and show people that you can be both queer and masculine at the same time. In the first several weeks after he started using the site, he said he earned around $2,000 (he declined to share more information about his income). “I’m an exhibitionist by nature, so I feel good doing this. When I post pictures and videos of my Black, gay, muscular body, it does numbers. So, I’m going forward with that,” Bolu said.”

He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars by Grace Chan. I really enjoyed this short story in Clarkesworld about personas, fame, machine learning, and escape.

Media

Nikole Hannah-Jones Issues Statement on Decision to Decline Tenure Offer at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and to Accept Knight Chair Appointment at Howard University. “I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans.”

Politics

FACT SHEET: Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. From limits on non-competes to anti-surveillance measures to better anti-trust scrutiny, this seems like a pretty great bundle of measures.

Adam Smith to Richard Spencer: Why Libertarians turn to the Alt-Right. ″[It’s] incredibly easy for the alt-right to reach out to libertarians; they’re both already literally speaking the same language. Socialists control the media? Swap ‘Socialists’ out for ‘Cultural Marxists’ and you’re halfway to becoming the new Richard Spencer. Hillary Clinton was clearly the social justice candidate in 2016, and Trump was against it. If you’re somebody who bases their entire ideology around opposing social justice, you’re going to be drawn towards the candidate who describes Neo-Nazis as ‘very fine people’.”

Why I oppose recall of DA Chesa Boudin. “These reforms were desperately needed: disproportionate treatment of Black and Brown people in arrests, prosecutions, and lifetimes of incarceration isn’t just a trend of a few decades — it has taken place over centuries in America. Many in our LGBTQ+ community are in desperate need of criminal justice reform now.” I oppose his recall too.

Science

Study: 20% of vaccinated health workers who test positive suffer from long COVID. “Majority of 39 ‘breakthrough’ cases among 1,497 monitored were mild, but research author says persistence of symptoms among minority ‘raises concern’.”

First ‘Time Crystal’ Built Using Google’s Quantum Computer. “Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.”

Society

Emergency Department Visits for Suspected Suicide Attempts Among Persons Aged 12–25 Years Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic. “In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12–17 years, especially girls. During February 21–March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12–17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increased 3.7%.”

How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story. “It’s incredibly hard to imagine “Attack Helicopter” receiving the degree of blowback it did in a world where Twitter didn’t exist. There were discussions of the story on forums and in comment threads all over the internet, but it is the nature of Twitter that all but ensured this particular argument would rage out of control. Isabel Fall’s story has been held up as an example of “cancel culture run amok,” but like almost all examples of cancel culture run amok, it’s mostly an example of Twitter run amok.”

Cop Plays Taylor Swift Song to Block BLM Protest Video From YouTube. “Burch, confused, says, “Are we having a dance party now?” The officer eventually admits, “You can record all you want. I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.” Later, the officer, identified as Sgt. David Shelby, reiterates to Burch, “I’m playing my music so that you can’t post on YouTube.” The video [...] has been viewed more than 170,000 times since it was shared Thursday.”

Working from home might be worse for the environment than commuting. “In a white paper about the shift in energy consumption during the pandemic, Steve Cicala, an associate professor of economics at Tufts University who studies environmental and energy policy, wrote that in 2020, about a third of the U.S. workforce shifted to working from home due to the pandemic. Simultaneously, there was an almost 8% increase in residential consumption of electricity and about a 7% and 8% reduction in usage among commercial and industrial buildings, he wrote.”

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. ″“Changing our societal priorities hardly needs to be a capitulation to grim necessity,” she said. “Human activity can be regenerative and our productive capacities can be transformed. In fact, we are seeing examples of that happening right now. Expanding those efforts now creates a world full of opportunity that is also sustainable.”” Cool cool cool.

Are They Picking At Us? “Racism and xenophobia can hide under the very thin veneer of polite societal norms, like that shiny, sugary layer on a fruit tart that looks super-fake at the supermarket bakery table. I felt grateful for the refuge the community potluck table at our mosque offered. Ours was the only table in town where you could find grilled seekh kebabs, barbecue chicken, KFC hot wings, Palestinian chicken with vermicelli rice, potato salad, okra sabzi, Southern fried okra, Lahori-style fried fish, cornmeal-fried trout, fruit chaat, and, yes, even that fruit tart.”

I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax. ““It started a couple months into the pandemic with the whole anti-lockdown protests,” Bill said. “His feelings were so strong it turned into facts for him. So if he didn’t like having to wear masks it wouldn’t matter what doctors or scientists said. Anything that contradicted his feelings was wrong. So he turned to the internet to find like-minded people which led him to QAnon.””

Technology

How Underground Fiber Optics Spy on Humans Moving Above. “By shining a laser through the fiber optics, the scientists could detect vibrations from above ground thanks to the way the cable ever so slightly deformed. As a car rolled across the subterranean cable or a person walked by, the ground would transmit their unique seismic signature. So without visually surveilling the surface, the scientists could paint a detailed portrait of how a once-bustling community ground to a halt, and slowly came back to life as the lockdown eased.”

Apple founder Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement. ″“We wouldn’t have had an Apple had I not grown up in a very open technology world,” Mr Wozniak, its co-founder with Steve Jobs in the 1970s, said.” It shouldn’t even be a question.

The ugly, geeky war for web privacy is playing out in the W3C. “The W3C is under siege by an insurgency that’s thwarting browsers from developing new and important privacy protections for all web users. “They use cynical terms like: ‘We’re here to protect user choice’ or ‘We’re here to protect the open web’ or, frankly, horseshit like this,” said Pete Snyder, director of privacy at Brave, which makes an anti-tracking browser. “They’re there to slow down privacy protections that the browsers are creating.””

Police in Latin America are turning activists’ phones against them. “To break into devices more easily, a number of Latin American countries have contracted cybersecurity firms that make software allowing authorities to bypass encryption and other protections. The companies often argue that their tools help aid legitimate criminal investigations, but critics have said they’re often used by authoritarian regimes to infringe on civil rights.”

In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems Especially Distracting to Older Drivers. On car touchscreens and voice interfaces: “Researchers found that the technology created potentially unsafe distractions for all drivers, though this safety risk is more pronounced for older adults, who took longer (4.7-8.6 seconds) to complete tasks, experienced slower response times, and increased visual distractions.”

A Defunct Video Hosting Site Is Flooding Normal Websites With Hardcore Porn. “As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed.” Cool URIs don’t change, etc etc.

She exposed how Facebook enabled global political manipulation. Now she's telling her story. “Her story reveals that it is really pure luck that we now know so much about how Facebook enables election interference globally. Zhang was not just the only person fighting an entire swath of political manipulation, it also wasn’t her job. She had discovered the problem because of a unique confluence of skills and passion, then taken it upon herself, driven by an extraordinary sense of moral responsibility. To regulators around the world considering how to rein in the company, this should be a wakeup call.”

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for June, 2021.

This month, I started posting notable links to my site as I saved them. You can follow my bookmarks here (and subscribe via RSS).

Books

A Queer History of the United States, by Michael Bronski. Flawed but fascinating. Given that he encompassed such a wide range, I sometimes wished the author had slowed down and gone into more detail. Episodes that demand nuance were often not given enough, and bisexuality was barely mentioned. Still, it was an eye-opening, mind-expanding read.

Notes on Grief, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?” A pertinent read for me right now. Every word, heavy with loss and love and the rage of disbelief, resonates.

How to Love, by Thich Nhat Hanh. “In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one.” Simple, affirming, and inspirational from beginning to end.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. A sort of melancholy science fiction fairy tale about loss, love, loneliness, religious belief, and what it means to be human. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first; by the end I felt acceptance. An example of what I hope for from speculative fiction.

Streaming

Collective. I wish I’d gotten around to seeing this remarkable documentary sooner. Gripping and frustrating in equal measure, the true-life story of how a team of hero journalists uncovered massive governmental corruption in Romania demands close attention. Easily the best movie I’ve seen this year.

Bo Burnham: Inside. It wants to be something as impactful as Hannah Gadsby’s incredible Nanette, but never quite gets there. Still, I found this effective as a piece of theater more than a comedy special: a portrait of a comedian’s self-questioning and increasingly unraveling mental state during the pandemic. Burnham’s critiques and parodies of internet culture in this context are particularly spot on (perhaps excluding a piece about white women’s Instagram feeds). And honestly, the songs are great.

Harvard Justice. In 2009, Harvard televised one of its most popular courses, on political philosophy and ethics. I’ve been watching it this month on YouTube and loving it. Accessible but thought-provoking; the lecturer, Michael Sandel, is brilliant.

Notable Articles

Business

Y Combinator Entrepreneurs Say Accelerator Expelled Them Over Critiques. “Two entrepreneurs claimed Friday the startup accelerator Y Combinator kicked them out of its program for speaking publicly about misogyny and members’ efforts to circumvent COVID-19 vaccine eligibility requirements.”

The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains. “The reason that remote work is so threatening to a lot of corporate thinkers is that it largely devalues the middle management layer that corporate society is built on. When you’re in person, a middle manager can walk the floors, “keep an eye on people” and, in meetings, “speak for the group.” While this can happen over Zoom and Slack, it becomes significantly more apparent who actually did the work, because you can digitally evaluate where the work is coming from.”

Forget Going Back to the Office—People Are Just Quitting Instead. “As the pandemic clouds lift, the percentage of Americans leaving employers for new opportunities is at its highest level in more than two decades.”

The document culture of Amazon. “Reading documents is so ingrained in our culture and process that our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document. If I’m catching up on a new service or feature launch, I will find the document rather than emailing or calling the product manager.” I really love this.

Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There’s No Evidence of It. “Remote work, though, can enable ideas to bubble up from people with different backgrounds. Online, people who are not comfortable speaking up in an in-person meeting may feel more able to weigh in. Brainstorming sessions using apps like Slack can surface many more perspectives by including people who wouldn’t have been invited to a meeting, like interns or employees in other departments.”

Office and Company Culture Are Bullshit. “The big push back to the office - and the many, many, many people I’ve had contact me saying they don’t want to go back - is only about control. Company culture is industrial guilt - it’s “just what we do here” - and without an office, it becomes significantly harder to wield, because there isn’t an easy way to wield power over a distributed group of people. It’s hard to feel like you’re a fancy King that people fear the wrath of when you don’t have an office to trot around, with middle-management Lords that also get off on the authority of power and draw little satisfaction from actual work that rewards you with money.”

Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank. “Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.”

What Salaries Did Startup CEOs Earn in 2020? “Interestingly, Female CEOs were more likely to take a pay cut during the pandemic. When comparing male and female CEOs, female leaders took a 30% reduction in salary at the peak of the pandemic ($101,000 compared to $138,000 in 2019) while their male counterparts saw an increase ($146,000 compared to $143,000 in 2019).”

Crypto

Beyond Resale Royalties. So Why Is DADA Ditching Royalties? “Fast forward three years since we tried to devise a royalty standard, and now it is art and not collectibles that is bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the NFT ecosystem. Yet OpenSea is now too busy to put resources into guaranteeing resale royalties on their platform. Today, if an artwork is sold on a crypto art marketplace and resold on OpenSea, the artist does not get royalties.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Is Selling The Original Source Code For The World Wide Web as an NFT. “The work includes the original archive of dated and time-stamped files from 1990 and 1991, containing 9,555 lines of source code and original HTML documents that taught the earliest web users how to use the application. The auction item also includes an animated 30-minute video of the code being written and a digital signature from Berners-Lee himself, as well as a letter written by him over 30 years later in which he reflects on the process of creating the code and the impact it has made.”

Culture

Roxane Gay Starts Publishing Imprint With Grove Atlantic. “Roxane Gay Books will focus on underrepresented fiction, nonfiction and memoir writers, with or without agents.”

How Memes Become Money. “It’s appropriate to give credit to people for their creativity and compensate them for their labor. It’s empowering to siphon value from the social-media companies that have been making billions off our personal lives. But it’s also a kind of giving up.”

In Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance. “More than four million students received a computer between 2011 and 2015. These were exactly the years that saw the rise of a budding generation of rappers, trappers, and freestylers. The overlap is no coincidence to Sebastián Benítez Larghi, director of the sociology department at the La Plata National University. “The working classes have always had a tradition of cultural creation — urban rhythms are just more proof of that.””

Media

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. “Emails obtained by The Assembly show that UNC-Chapel Hill’s largest journalism-school donor warned against Nikole Hannah-Jones’ hiring. Their divergent views represent a new front in the debate over objectivity and the future of the field.”

An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine. “Yet for decades, our news industry has abandoned those values in coverage of Israel and Palestine. We have failed our audiences with a narrative that obscures the most fundamental aspects of the story: Israel’s military occupation and its system of apartheid.”

Pulitzer Prizes 2021: Darnella Frazier wins special citation from Pulitzer Prize board. “The board said Frazier was honored “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.””

‘We’re Going to Publish’: An Oral History of the Pentagon Papers. “So Ellsberg and I made this agreement: If I could get The Times to agree to publish the whole thing, they’d do their best to protect him. He’d give us the whole thing. He wouldn’t be publicly announced as a source.” One of the most important acts of whistleblowing and journalism of the 20th century.

Andreessen Horowitz’s ‘Future’ is a media machine. ″“We have a business to run, and we’re in the business of investing in the future and providing returns for LPs,” Wennmachers said. “So as much as I can help advance the future and the narrative of the pro case for the future … that’s what I’m trying to do. That is the goal.”″ So in other words, it’s the VC equivalent of an inflight magazine.

Newsrooms Need To Treat Coordinated Online Attacks On Reporters Like Propaganda - And Act Like They're At War. “And yes, this is a war, and it is a war being fought by the New York Post, by Fox News, and by many solo writers that have found a successful career in joining these campaigns, because outrage breeds clicks.”

Why the AP is no longer naming suspects in minor crime stories. “These minor stories, which only cover an arrest, have long lives on the internet. AP’s broad distribution network can make it difficult for the suspects named in such items to later gain employment or just move on in their lives.”

Lifting the mask. Edward Snowden launches his Substack: “Though my relationship to time fluctuates, the gravamen of my disclosures remains constant. In the past eight years, the depredations of surveillance have merely become more entrenched, with the capabilities that used to be the province of governments now in the hands of private companies, too, which employ them to track and tether us and attenuate our freedoms. This enduring danger, this compounding danger, is one of the reasons I’ve decided to lift my voice again — adding a new page to my “permanent record”...one to which I hope you subscribe.”

Linda Amster gets due recognition for work on Pentagon Papers. ″“I asked him why my name wasn’t included, and he said, ‘Well, we knew that we all might have to go to prison, and you are a woman, and we don’t want you to have to go to prison,’” Amster recalled.”

Fears for future of American journalism as hedge funds flex power. “According to a recent analysis, hedge funds or private equity firms now control half of US daily newspapers, including some of the largest newspaper groups in the country: Tribune, McClatchy and MediaNews Group.”

I am Palestinian. Here’s how Israel silences us on social media. “In 2015, Israel arrested 27-year-old Nader Halahleh and imprisoned him for seven months over seven posts on Facebook. That same year, 17-year-old Kathem Sbeih was also arrested over a Facebook post and placed in administrative detention — a policy from the British Mandate in which Israel imprisons Palestinians without charge or trial — for three months, despite being a child. By 2017, more than 300 Palestinians were detained under the pretext of incitement. For some Palestinians, just being able to post on social media under their real names is a risk too dangerous to take.”

Politics

Statement of Concern. “We [the undersigned] urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.”

Donald Trump Belief That “Reinstatement” to Office Coming: Delusional. “I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.”

Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats. “In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.”

Former NSA contractor Reality Winner, jailed for leaking secrets about Russian hacking, released early from prison. “Winner, 29, was sentenced to more than five years in prison in 2018 after she leaked classified information to The Intercept news outlet about Russia’s attempts to hack the 2016 presidential election. She pleaded guilty to leaking a classified report that detailed the Russian government’s efforts to penetrate a Florida-based voting software supplier. At the time, the sentence was the longest ever for a federal crime involving leaks to the media.” Thank you for your service.

’Nightmare Scenario’ fresh details on chaos, conflicts inside Trump’s pandemic response. “In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as White House officials debated whether to bring infected Americans home for care, President Donald Trump suggested his own plan for where to send them, eager to suppress the numbers on U.S. soil. “Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?””

Records Show Nearly 900 Secret Service Employees Got COVID. “The records show that of the 881 positive test results recorded between March 1, 2021 and March 9, 2021, the majority, 477, came from employees working as special agents, and 249 were from members of the uniformed division.”

Science

Telomerase Regulation. If we’d figured this out, my mother would have lived a normal, healthy life. It’s also an issue associated with 90% of human cancers. I strongly suspect we’ll crack it in my lifetime.

Scientists shocked as particle transforms between matter and antimatter for the first time. “The charm meson has a light and heavy version that helps distinguish between its matter and antimatter states.”

Coronavirus infections dropping where people are vaccinated, rising where they are not. In other news: Popes Catholic, bears defecating in woodland.

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong. “Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.”

Are advertisers coming for your dreams? “Now, brands from Xbox to Coors to Burger King are teaming up with some scientists to attempt something similar: “Engineer” advertisements into willing consumers’ dreams, via video and audio clips. This week, a group of 40 dream researchers has pushed back in an online letter, calling for the regulation of commercial dream manipulation.”

What Happened to the Lyme Disease Vaccine? “No human vaccines for Lyme exist. But that wasn’t always the case. Before Lyme disease shots went to the dogs, people had a safe and effective vaccine, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1998. But anti-vaccine forces claimed it was dangerous, tanked its popularity and sued it out of existence after just a few years on the market.” Meanwhile, the Lyme epidemic continues to grow.

When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray. “Moray eels can hunt on land, and footage from a recent study highlights how they accomplish this feat with a sneaky second set of jaws.” Also: perfect headline, well done.

What’s the Difference Between a ‘Borb’ and a ‘Floof’? “Let us now apply this logic. Borbs as a category heavily intersect with birbs, defined as both are by roundness. But just as every bird is not a birb, every birb is not a borb. Some birds naturally have deep chests and short necks, easily securing their borbness: chickadees, European Robins, and Bearded Tits, the last of which seems to be the poster child for the type. Other clear borbs include pigeons, thrushes, warblers, game birds, small parrots, most owls, and penguins.”

Why Is the Intellectual Dark Web Suddenly Hyping an Unproven COVID Treatment? ”While Big Tech continues to issue a confused, belated, and at times contradictory response to the problem of people using its platforms to promote health quackery, Weinstein, Heying, Taibbi, and Weiss have positioned themselves as the vanguards of intellectual freedom by, in their ways, buttressing these claims. In fact, and without, perhaps, even realizing it, they’ve acted as foot soldiers for something entirely commonplace: a politicized and pseudoscientific response to a deadly disease.”

Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out. “A simple blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer before any clinical signs or symptoms of the disease emerge in a person is accurate enough to be rolled out as a screening test, according to scientists.”

Society

Why We Are Publishing the Tax Secrets of the .001%. “Today, ProPublica is launching the first in a series of stories based on the private tax data of some of our nation’s richest citizens. We obtained the information from an anonymous source who provided us with large amounts of information on the ultrawealthy, everything from the taxes they paid to the income they reported to the profits from their stock trades.”

‘A career change saved my life’: the people who built better lives after burnout. “Among her clients, burnout is common. “We’re at a tipping point, I think, where the old world is not fit for purpose any more,” she says. “There’s this narrative in society which is that in order to be successful, you’ve got to sacrifice your health or your relationships, or things that are important to you. You’ve got to hustle. And I really don’t agree with that.””

I said I couldn’t stand Indian food. Then a Twitter friend took me to dinner. ““This is the guy,” Preet said to the owner and some friends, meaning “the guy who slagged the cuisine of our ancestors whose mind we just might change.” I smiled gamely and said I was willing to make amends. There was laughter and a lot of smiles and knowing looks. It turns out they’d been expecting me. I was not going to get away with my usual only-child behavior of a quick taste here and there. This was going to be a marathon.”

What Do Conservatives Fear About Critical Race Theory? “Increasingly, conservatism after Donald Trump has been defined by a fear that American society is on the verge of being displaced by a progressive reimagining, with woke politics and aggressive redistribution. Progressivism is defined by an equally urgent hope that it can, in fact, displace old patterns of ecological destruction and discrimination. It is interesting—and slightly ironic—that critical race theory, with its invocations of structural racism, should be so central to the policy debate right now: part of its teaching is that the patterns of American society can’t be easily dislodged by a change in manners, and that if you are snapping your fingers to make the past disappear you are only doing so in tandem with the rhythms of the past.”

She got hurt working for Amazon. Here's why she doesn't want to quit. “Amazon’s high injury rates were reported last week in a study by the Strategic Organizing Center, a labor advocacy group that used data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to analyze the rates of serious injury in fulfillment and delivery roles. The SOC is using the data to push for changes to Amazon’s notoriously long hours, strict and limited break schedules, and repetitive-motion work that can cause chronic pain. The group found that Amazon’s serious injury rate was more than double Walmart (its closest competitor) last year, and that Amazon employees take an average of one to two weeks longer to recover from these injuries than the average injured warehouse employee.”

Why We Shouldn't Be Surprised People Don't Read. “It’s more than sucking the joy out of learning - we have changed on a societal level what it means to be educated. Education has become so pragmatism-focused that it’s unsurprising that we have people that learn basically everything outside of school through a web browser - we have educated generations of kids to consciously or otherwise view knowledge as something one acquires as quickly as possible, and usually for a task.”

What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor. “For the most part, America finds the money to pay for the things it values. In recent decades, and despite deep gridlock in Washington, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East and tax cuts for the wealthy. We have also spent trillions of dollars on health insurance subsidies and coronavirus relief. It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.”

Grenfell FC: "This club is bigger than any one individual". ″“You felt the loss everywhere in those weeks,” says Rupert. “Then one day, there was a young man who came in who I felt was struggling with his mental health. He’d lost both his parents a few years prior, three months apart. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. And he’d lived in the tower. It felt like history was repeating itself. I asked him what had helped him get through the death of his parents. He said football. So we formed a football team. Right there, like that.””

The Electrification of Everything: What You Need to Know. Short answer: we’d better upgrade the grid.

How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing. “Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. As per Professor Michael Robinson (2017) of the University of Georgia, the first deaths in America of Black men at the hands of law enforcement “can be traced back as early as 1619 when the first slave ship, a Dutch Man-of-War vessel landed in Point Comfort, Virginia.””

Kids Need Freedom, Too. “The problem with a society devoted to zero risk is that kids grow up overprotected and under-socialized. They miss out on the thrilling experience of fending for themselves, crucial in forging confidence. They miss out on learning to assess risk and dealing with minimal danger without constantly deferring to an authority.” I’m excited that free-range parenting will be back in style by the time I’m a parent. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

Conservatives now use the label ‘critical race theory’ to describe any conversation about race that makes them uncomfortable. “On its face, the opprobrium misunderstands the point: CRT is less about blaming white people than interrogating systems of power and privilege. But that’s the very thing that frightens conservatives: If children recognize the culpability of systems, as opposed to individuals, they’ll also recognize societal problems require collective solutions. The myth of rugged individualism will vanish.”

'I was completely inside': Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale off Provincetown. ″“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard recalled Friday afternoon following his release from Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis.” Call me shaken.

Oregon Has Legalized Human Composting. I really wish California did this.

Abigail Disney: Why the Rich Protect Dynastic Wealth. “If your comfort requires that society be structured so that a decent percentage of your fellow citizens live in a constant state of terror about whether they’ll get health care in an emergency, or whether they can keep a roof over their family’s heads, or whether they will simply have enough to eat, perhaps the problem does not rest with those people, but with you and what you think of as necessary, proper, and acceptable.”

Fighting the pressure for pandemic personal growth. “But there’s a larger norm at work behind questions like this, and behind the greater expectation that people could use lockdown to boost their coronapreneurial profiles. An obsessive focus on productivity is “part of late-stage American capitalism,” Blustein said. “This productivity ethos has gotten transported into our hobbies, it’s gotten transported into our relationships, into our physical and mental health.””

5 pads for 2 cellmates: Menstrual products still scarce in prison. “Unable to get more than an allotted number of pads, Bozelko began reusing them. The prison’s pads were thin, she said, thinner than the pads typically sold outside, and the adhesive barely stuck to her clothes. She once saw another woman’s pad fall to the ground because the glue was so weak, so Bozelko stepped on it, hiding the pad beneath her boot to save her from humiliation. She and her cellmate received five of these pads to share among themselves every week, and asking a guard for another pad often led to a rejected request and ridicule.” Why are we so cruel?

Technology

Mass scale manipulation of Twitter Trends discovered. “We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. Between June 2015 and September 2019, we uncovered 108,000 bot accounts involved, the biggest bot dataset reported in a single paper. Our research is the first to uncover the manipulation of Twitter Trends at this scale.”

Passport. A neat solution for independent subscription media businesses. I kind of want to use it.

1997: The Year of DHTML. A nice history of DHTML and the DOM, for people (like me) who are interested in that sort of thing.

I saw millions compromise their Facebook accounts to fuel fake engagement. “During my time at Facebook, I saw compromised accounts functioning in droves in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. Most of these accounts were commandeered through autolikers: online programs which promise users automatic likes and other engagement for their posts. Signing up for the autoliker, however, requires the user to hand over account access. Then, these accounts join a bot farm, where their likes and comments are delivered to other autoliker users, or sold en masse, even while the original user maintains ownership of the account. Although motivated by money rather than politics — and far less sophisticated than government-run human troll farms — the sheer quantity of these autoliker programs can be dangerous.”

Introducing Astro: Ship Less JavaScript. Neat!

Colorado is now the 3rd US state with modern privacy legislation, with a twist. “In other words, Do Not Track – or something very much like it – is back in Colorado, and ignoring the setting, like companies did widely when Do Not Track was created, is not an option any more. The technical details will need to be figured out between now and when this provision goes into effect, which two and a half years away. So plenty of time to get this right.”

Day One at Automattic. “Day One not only nails the experience of a local blog (or journal as they call it) in an app, but also has (built) a great technical infrastructure — it works fantastic (when) offline and has a fully encrypted sync mechanism, so the data that’s in the cloud is secured in a way that even someone with access to their database couldn’t decode your entries, it’s only decrypted on your local device. Combining encryption and sync in a truly secure way is tricky, but they’ve done it.”

Apple’s emoji keyboard is reinforcing Western stereotypes. “The feature associates “Africa” with the hut emoji and “China” with the dog emoji.”

China’s tech workers pushed to their limits by surveillance software. “A Chinese subsidiary of Japanese camera maker Canon, Canon Information Technology, last year unveiled a new workspace management system that only allows smiling employees to enter the office and book conference rooms. Using so-called “smile recognition” technology, Canon said the system was intended to bring more cheerfulness to the office in the post-pandemic era.”

Gravity doesn’t work the way it used to. Some things are too heavy, and some too light. There’s a great weight, but it’s like a dark cloud; sometimes dense, sometimes not. It’s like someone took the laws of physics and put them in a blender. I’m beginning to get used to it, in the same way a new sailor gets used to walking on a ship, but the world is wrong.

Thank you to everyone who’s reached out this week. It means a lot, and I probably haven’t replied. I’m overwhelmed by everything, which means I’m not good at emails, or texts, or phone calls. I do things, but I keep having to go back to bed. The same is true of my dad and my sister: we go through the motions of coping, but underneath the surface it’s just turmoil.

I hate feeling this way, and I hate seeing the people I love most in the world feel this way, and I hate that I just want to reach out and give my mother a hug and I can’t.

If you regularly read this space, you might be wondering when I’ll get back to ethical technology. Why doesn’t he write about open source, for crying out loud?! The answer is: eventually. There are good moments, and there are bad moments, but it doesn’t feel right to get back to business. Now, above all, is a time to breathe.

We lost my mother, Deborah Monas, on Sunday evening. I was giving her a head rub; my sister Hannah held her hands; my dad Oscar and her brother Steve were at her feet.

How is this possible? The world doesn’t feel real.

When I was a small child, we used to pull out the sofabed in our postgraduate student flat and watch Doctor Who together under a blanket. What I would give for a TARDIS now: a way to correct the fabric of time and space. Clearly something is badly wrong with it.

I want to have something perfect to say, some beautiful encapsulation of who she was, but the truth is that nothing could be perfect enough. There’s no way to write a biography that isn’t an imperfect model. Nothing can adequately describe my beautiful mother: her overwhelming kindness, her sense of justice, her irreverence for tradition and institutions, the love that our house was always, always filled with.

I’ve written a lot about her health in this space. She had dyskeratosis congenita, which first expressed itself as pulmonary fibrosis. She fought it hard. When she began to use supplementary oxygen, my sister and I moved to California to be closer. The double lung transplant she received at UCSF gave us almost an extra decade of time with her, and it was a privilege to be by her side, with my dad and my sister, on this journey.

She loved reading, and both Hannah and I got to share those experiences with her. Hannah read to Ma for years: books by authors like Wade Davis, Octavia Butler, and Tommy Orange. Ma and I shared book recommendations; this year we read Caste and The Nickel Boys, among others. Even as it became harder to read in print, she picked up audiobooks, and kept going, recording what she’d read in a notebook she kept by her bed.

Years ago, we were gifted a Sunfish sailing boat by our family friend Pammy Biscoe. The two of them had sailed on it when they were much younger. Now it became her and my thing: she was happiest out on Waquoit Bay, our striped sails catching the wind just right. She called it a Whoosh. I’ll remember her in an infinity of ways, in an infinity of moments, but being out on the water with her, watching her smile as we picked up speed, is one I’ll treasure the most.

When my parents met, in Berkeley in the 1970s, she worked to fight for affirmative action and tenants’ rights. Her belief and support for progressive causes was an anchor throughout her life. We discovered this week that she had quietly made over 178 progressive donations last year alone, without any of us really knowing. A list of some of the causes she consistently supported follows at the end of this post; in lieu of flowers, we’re asking people to contribute if they have the means.

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

As she lay in her hospital bed, we read Ma messages from people who loved her throughout her life. One, from Hannah’s friend Anita Hurrell, particularly sums up our collective childhood, and the sensibility I want to take forward in my own life, inspired by my mother. I’ll end by sharing it here, with kind permission.

Dearest Deb,

One time you drove us in the van to the seaside and we ate sandwiches with cucumber in them and I thought they tasted delicious and I felt this strong sense of deep content sitting with Hannah in the back listening to her singing and humming for the whole journey. I have no idea where we went, and in my head it was nowhere in England, but rather part of the big-hearted, loving, funny, relaxed, non-conformist world of your family in my childhood - full of your laughter and your enormous kindness. Sitting on the bench in your house in Marston I recall a moment of feeling complete certainty that your pirozhki were the yummiest food that had ever been made. Staying in Wheatley when my mum and dad had gone away we ate popcorn and I felt safe even though at the time I had lost Blue Bear. I remember calling you my second mummy. I'm not sure I was always a very nice kid and was probably very ungrateful then, but now I wish I could convey how I revere you, Oscar, Ben and Hannah in my thoughts and how lucky I feel to keep your example with me. I look back and see how talented Hannah already was then when we were so little and she could just sing and sing and draw in a magic way, how cool she was (her doll Manuela had beautiful black wild curly hair while I chose Charlotte with twee clothes and ridiculous ringlets), what a true feminist you were, how much of parenting you seemed to do much better than we do these days, how generous and homemade and fun and kind the world you and Oscar made was.

You are an asset to the universe. I will always love you very much.

Anita

Causes Ma consistently supported:

ACLU - donate

Planned Parenthood - donate

Oxfam - donate

Doctors Without Borders - donate

Progressive Turnout Project - donate

NARAL Pro-Choice America - donate

314 Action Fund - donate

Stop Republicans - donate

National Democratic Training Committee - donate

End Citizens United - donate

KQED Public Media - donate

The Squad Victory Fund - donate

BOLD Democrats PAC - donate

National Bail Out - donate

Phil Arballo for Congress (CA-22) - donate

Scott Sifton for Senate (MO) - donate

Being laser-focused is a privilege reserved for people who have no real distractions in their life - or those that do, and have sociopathically chosen to ignore them.

“You could be a millionaire by the time you’re thirty,” my co-founder told me, fifteen or so years ago, as we walked out of a meeting with one of the world’s largest banks. I’d built a prototype of a kind of real-time chat system that could integrate with other software systems drawn from across an enterprise. Updates from software and humans would all flow into real-time channels that we imagined could be accessed from any remote office and any trading floor. It was a good idea (and I’m sure Slack would agree). By the next year, I was a paper millionaire: the equity I owned in the business I’d co-founded was, technically at least, worth more money than I’d ever seen in my life.

It’s all bullshit.

Up to a point, acquiring more money is a necessary evil. We all need a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. But past that, money is an empty goal that can only be at the center of a meaningless life. I’m no longer a paper millionaire, and I have no real desire to be a real one: the kind whose millions of dollars are actual, liquid cash that can be spent on things. I’ve met enough tired-looking rich people searching for something - anything - that will fill the ill-defined hole deep within themselves to know that’s not the answer.

The quest for more is a kind of prison that we make for ourselves. The idea that if we work ourselves to the bone now we can live a better life later is a convenient lie that we’ve been conditioned to tell ourselves.

Still, there are plenty of reasons to work, and to build.

As I write this, my mother is lying in a hospital bed. A build-up of fluid in her abdomen is making it increasingly hard to breathe. Later, or perhaps tomorrow, they’ll try and syphon some of it off, and run lab tests on what they’ve managed to extract in order to better determine the cause. It’s the latest event in a decade-plus journey that started with a persistent cough.

I’m trying to imagine what her life would have looked like if she (or either of my parents) had been dedicated to the amassing of wealth. Maybe we would have had a nicer car; probably we wouldn’t have lived in the tiny house down the street from a gas station when I was a teenager. But she wouldn’t have fought for tenants’ rights or affirmative action. She wouldn’t have moved thousands of miles to look after the grandmother who safely shepherded my dad through a concentration camp. She wouldn’t have changed careers mid-life to become a middle school science teacher in one of California’s poorest areas. More of my life might have been colored by, and devoted to, the acquisition of wealth. I certainly would have seen her a lot less.

My mother - like my father - made a conscious decision to live outside the mainstream template that was set out for her. Without their example, I think my life would have been correspondingly normie: a career in tech, probably, but without the mission or the meaning. Instead, I’m certain that I want to build platforms and support people with the potential of making the world more equal and equitable. And I’m certain that I want to do it within the context of a balanced life. Life is fleeting; everything can change in a moment, so it’s better to enjoy it while you can.

The lens I’ve been gifted has made me opinionated. I see decentralization as a way to lead to a more equitable society through disassembling existing hierarchies, for example, but I see straight through the people who see these ideas as a way to build a new hierarchy for their own benefit. We used to talk about abolishing gatekeepers in the early days of the web, too, until it became clear that many people just wanted to become a new kind of gatekeeper themselves.

I wrote recently about my disrespect for hustle culture. It’s not just that hustling leads to shallow products, but the whole enterprise feels like a reincarnation of Wall Street in the software realm: an endless supply of performatively masculine wantrapreneurs (the people I’m talking about do seem to virtually all be men) who are interested in software for its ability to make them a fortune rather than its ability to connect, empower, and inform. The incentives this mindset creates are unhealthy at best and, at worst, harmful to their surrounding ecosystems and communities. They extract value from communities rather than providing it.

And why? Past the point of financial safety, there’s little to be gained. Perhaps you glean some fleeting respect from the other rat racers, and from people whose own self-regard is threatened by seeing peoples’ lives deviate from the sanctioned templates, but it’s ultimately empty. It’s a way to perpetuate existing ills and inequalities when being part of a meaningful solution is within your grasp. It’s an entirely inward way to live.

Very little provides more focus than the hospital bed. When you’ve found yourself at the end of your life, how would you like to be remembered? How would you like to look back and think about what you did? Does it involve imaginary numbers on a bank account and the accumulation of status symbols and acceptance from people trapped on the same treadmill, or is there a way to live with more happiness, more pride, and more to be grateful for? Will you wish you spent more time in the office, or more time living? More time doing meaningful, lasting work, or more time making bucks?

Better is not more. It seems to me that this is a common mistake.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

I’ve been having a lot of really inspiring conversations about decentralization lately. Decentralization doesn’t require the blockchain - and pre-dates it - but the rise of blockchain technologies have allowed more people to become comfortable with the idea and why it’s valuable.

Decentralized platforms have been part of virtually my entire career. I left my first job out of university to start Elgg, a platform that allowed anyone to make an online space for their communities on their own terms. It started in education and developed an ecosystem there, before expanding to far wider use cases. Across it all, the guiding principle was that one size didn’t fit all: every community should be able to dictate not just its own features, but its own community dynamics. We were heavily involved in interoperability and federation conversations, and my biggest regret is that we didn’t push our nascent Open Data Definition forward into an ActivityStreams-like data format. To this day, though, people are using Elgg to support disparate communities across the web. Although they use Elgg’s software, the Elgg Foundation doesn’t strip-mine those communities: all value (financial and otherwise) stays with them.

Known was built on a similar principle, albeit for a world of ubiquitous connectivity where web-capable devices sit in everyone’s pocket. I use it every day (for example, to power this article), as many others do.

Much later, I was the first employee at Julien Genestoux’s Unlock, which is a decentralized protocol for access control built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Here, a piece of content is “locked” with an NFT, and you can sell or share access via keys. If a user connects to content (which could be anything from a written piece to a real-life physical event) with a key for the lock, they gain access. Because it’s an open protocol, one size once again doesn’t fit all: anyone can use the underlying lock/key mechanism to build something new. Because it’s decentralized, the owner of the content keeps all the value.

Contrast that principle with Facebook, which has been the flag-bearer for the strip-mining of communities across the web for well over a decade now. Its business model means that it’s super-easy to create a community space, which it then monetizes for all it’s worth: you even have to pay to effectively reach the people you connected with to begin with. We’ve all become familiar with the societal harms of its targeted model, but even beyond that, centralization has inherent harms. When every online interaction and discussion is templated to the same team’s design decisions (and both the incentives and assumptions behind those decisions), those interactions are inevitably shaped by those templates. It leads to what Amber Case calls the templated self. Each of those conversations consequently occurs in a form that serves Facebook (or Twitter, etc) rather than the community itself.

It’s easy to discount blockchain; I did, for many years. (It was actually DADA, one of our investments at Matter, who showed me the way.) And there’s certainly a lot that can be said about the environmental impact and more. We should talk about them now: it’s important to apply pressure to change to proof of stake and other models beyond. The climate crisis can’t be brushed aside. But we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater: blockchain platforms have created value in decentralization, and provided a meaningful alternative to invasive, centralized silos for the first time in a generation. Those things are impermanent; we won’t be talking about harmful, slow proof of work algorithms in a few years, in the same way we don’t talk about HTML 1 today.

What does it look like to build an ethical, decentralized platform for community and discourse that is also self-sustaining, using these ideas? How can we distribute equity among participants of the community rather than sucking it up into a centralized megacorporation or institutional investors? That question has been giving me energy. And there are more and more people thinking along similar lines.

Animated GIF NFTs and crypto speculation aren’t very interesting at best (at least to me), and at worst are a reflection of a kind of reductive greed that has seriously negative societal effects. But looking beyond the gold rush, the conversations I’m having remind me of the conversations I used to have about the original web. The idea of decentralization is empowering. The idea of a community supporting itself organically is empowering. The idea of communities led by peer-to-peer self-governance is empowering. The idea of movement leaders being organically supported in their work is empowering. And we’re now in a position where if we pull those threads a little more, it’s not obvious that these ideas will fail. That’s an exciting place to be.

Daniel found the door to another world the day his father died.

It sat behind the ugly painting of a hillside in France that his dad bought at a second hand shop a few years ago; he hung it proudly in his bedroom, despite Daniel’s mother’s protests. It was hanging at an angle when Daniel came to check on the house. When he straightened it, he caught a glimpse of shiny, red wood: a small square door sealed with a brass latch.

He pulled the latch and found it opened easily. Golden sunlight illuminated the dusty room; through the frame, he saw a cloudless, shimmering blue sky. Spirals of brightly-colored birds he had never seen before flew between trees. A warm breeze ran through his hair.

He shut the door with a start.

Surely he was imagining things?

Gently, he opened it again; just a crack. Again, he felt the breeze against his skin and heard the call of unfamiliar birds. It was the dead of winter, but the room was again lit in summery gold.

His heart pounded in his ears. He backed away slowly, and he kept backing away until he was locking the door, then mounting his bicycle, and finally racing home as fast as he could.

He had no idea how to process what he’d seen.

He wished there was someone he could ask about it. But his father was gone.

*

“Did you go over?” Daisy asked, wrapping her husband in a hug as soon as he walked in through the kitchen door. She had a spaghetti bolognese going on the stovetop; half-grated cheese sat on a wooden chopping board on the countertop. Simple comfort food for the end of a terrible day.

Daniel nodded wordlessly.

“How are you holding up?”

“I don’t think it’s hit me yet, to be honest,” Daniel said, after a moment. “I feel numb. He was a miserable man in some ways, and we never had a very warm relationship, but he was my Dad. Now he’s gone, there are so many things I want to ask him, and I can’t.”

Daisy kissed his forehead. Her blonde hair brushed against his face. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“I should tell Mum,” he said.

Daisy looked at him with concern. “Do you think she needs to know tonight? Will it make a difference to her?”

“No,” Daniel said, “but it’ll make a difference to me. I don’t want it hanging over everything. I need to tell her.”

Daisy pulled him in tighter. “She won’t know what you’re saying,” she said, quietly, as kindly as she could. “She’ll forget it as soon as you walk out through the door.” It felt blunt; cruel, even. But Daniel had been through enough for one day. He needed to rest.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” he told her, finally.

“I love you,” she said.

He loved her too, and told her so. He didn’t mention the door.

*

Daniel’s mother lived in a a memory care facility next to the John Radcliffe hospital, just off the ring road in east Oxford. In contrast to the hospital’s modern steel and glass, the facility’s pebble-dash walls were painted over with thick beige paint that came off in chunks at the corners. The morning sky cast the street in a dim grey, and as he walked up to the building, he shivered underneath his coat.

“I’m so sorry to hear about your Da,” Amy said after he’d signed in at the front desk. She had been the head nurse since his mother was first checked in. In some ways she was like family now: not Nurse Walsh, but Amy, the woman who had been by Daniel’s side when he first signed the forms, and when his mother’s memory had gone so far that she barely remembered who he was. His Dad hated it there, and had barely ever set foot in the building.

“Thank you,” Daniel said.

His mother sat in a big, institutional armchair upholstered in brown, wipe-clean vinyl. She was watching some daytime TV show about house-hunting in Europe on the communal flat-screen. Over the institutional smell of cleaning fluid, he could smell roses. Her perfume. Even now, with her memory mostly gone and the fabric of who she used to be torn apart by disease, she insisted on wearing it.

“Hi Mum,” he said, gently, taking care not to startle her.

She looked at him blankly.

“It’s your son,” he said. “Daniel.”

His mother smiled, but it was hard to tell if it was out of recognition.

“It’s nice to see you,” he said, smiling. She didn’t respond, and turned back to the television.

“How have you been, Mum?” He asked, sitting on a vinyl ottoman in front of her.

“I’ve been buying a house in Spain,” she said, turning back to him. Her voice carried a touch of a Russian accent; a fragment of the community of Jewish immigrants she’d grown up with in London. “It’s beautiful.”

“That’s lovely,” Daniel said.

“Yes, it makes a very nice change. I will go there with Peter in the summer.”

“That sounds nice,” Daniel said. He swallowed hard. “Mum, that’s why I’m here. I need to talk to you about Dad. About Peter.”

“My husband,” she said, smiling.

“Yes,” Daniel said, reaching out to touch her hand. “He died, Mum.”

“That cannot be. I spoke to him this morning.”

Daniel wondered if she’d really seen him in years. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but Dad’s gone.”

She looked at him, but said nothing. He thought he could see her eyes grow wider, just slightly, but he couldn’t say for sure.

“He had a heart attack,” he said. “They couldn’t save him. They tried everything.”

She remained motionless, and the two of them sat there in complete silence. After a minute or two had passed, she said, abruptly: “I think you should go.”

“Okay, Mum,” Daniel said. There was no sense in arguing. “I love you.”

She turned back to the television, soaking herself in the sunny images of southern Spain. As she watched and the conversation with her son faded into the background, a smile began to curl back onto her face.

Daniel picked himself up off the ottoman. He took a long look at his mother, took in the smell of her perfume, and noticed the way her happiness didn’t quite seem to reach her eyes.

He turned towards the exit and waved a half-hearted thank you to Amy. She nodded and gave him a sympathetic smile.

He was just about to push the door open out into the reception when his mother turned back to him and asked: “Have you found the door yet?”

*

Daniel’s father had been an academic at the university, although he had given up most of his teaching duties long ago. He sat in a small office lined with Russian literature, peering into his computer screen and slowly hunting and pecking articles for research journals. The university let him stay partially out of kindness, and partially because he had become a relatively well-known name in the field. His translation of The Brothers Karamazov had long since fallen out of fashion, but in the seventies you could buy it in any bookstore.

Now that he was dead, the university made it clear that his office needed to be cleared out within the week.

Daniel and Daisy piled his books into open boxes. When one was full, they sealed it with brown packing tape and wrote a short description across the top. Dad’s books: a completely inadequate label for a life’s work. But there was nothing else they could write; neither one of them knew much about Russian literature. The stories and traditions that he had spent his life immersed in were an unknown.

The room smelled of dusty pages, and of him.

“So what did she say?” Daisy asked, packing a heavy-looking book bound in a burgundy dust jacket.

“She told me to leave,” Daniel said.

“So she knows what happened. She understands.”

Daniel sealed up a box and piled it on top of the others. There were seven of them now, towering in one corner. “I think so,” he said, “but these days it’s hard to tell for sure.”

“Did she say anything else?”

Daniel folded together a new, empty box, and sealed up the bottom with tape. “She turned back to the television. She literally wouldn’t talk to me anymore. And that was that.”

They turned their attention back to their work, boxing up the books and the hopelessly out-of-date computer that sat on his desk. In his desk drawers, they found a handful of Rubles - bright green notes with the remains of columns illustrated across them - and a cheap, plastic compass with a loop for tying to your wrist. Beside them was a quote, scrawled in his father’s handwriting on a white notecard: “For some a prologue, for some an epilogue”.

Before long, the room was empty. Daniel knew it would be scrubbed down soon, ready for the next academic to fill it with their work, wiped clear of the memory and the smell and the spirit of his father.

It was only when they had driven away that Daniel told her what he’d seen.

*

The two of them held hands in his father’s bedroom, facing the door in the wall. A moment ago, he had opened it for her, and she had seen a beautiful blue sky. It seemed impossible - like a magic trick - but then he did it again, and again. Once he had opened and closed the door for a fourth time, both of them acknowledged that it was real.

“But what is it?” Daisy asked.

“It’s a door,” Daniel said. “To somewhere.”

“But what is it?”

“I have no idea.”

*

They sat around the small dinner table his father had kept in the kitchen, eating slices of frozen pizza and sipping at glasses of the cheap red wine they had found in the

“Well, we can’t sell the house,” Daisy said. “Not with ... that.”

“No, I suppose not,” Daniel said. “But we can’t just keep the house here, sitting empty. It’s not right.”

“I agree. I just don’t know what to do about it. What if someone breaks in and finds it?”

“We don’t know where it goes; where that place is. What if it’s dangerous? What if, when you climb through, you can’t come back? We don’t know anything.”

“Do you think we can move it?” Daisy asked.

“It’s a doorway. How can you move a doorway?”

They finished their wine in silence as the sunlight left them and the room dimmed.

After they had sat in darkness for a while, Daisy said: “we should go through it.”

*

Daniel insisted that he would be the first to climb through. The plan was that he would climb back all the way, and then go through again, to make sure it was possible and that Daisy wouldn’t be trapped there. Then, and only then, she would climb through to follow him. They would leave the door open, with a broom propped against it so that it couldn’t swing shut.

It was small and square and two thirds the way up the wall, so he found that he needed to stand on a chair to have any hope of pulling himself through. Even then, it took more arm strength than he was comfortable exerting. But he found he could grip the sides of the doorframe, and Daisy gave him a small push, which helped. Before long, he felt the sun on his back and found that his feet were planted in the greenest grass he’d ever seen.

On this side, the doorframe floated in mid-air: just a square hanging in space with Daisy inside, and behind her, the gloom of the bedroom.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “It’s actually lovely in here. Out here. Wherever here is.”

“Come back out,” Daisy beckoned.

He pulled himself back through the doorway, awkwardly landing backwards on the chair. “That was pretty good, actually.”

“Okay,” Daisy said, “now back you go, and then I’ll follow you.”

Daniel once again pulled himself through the doorframe, and then gave Daisy a hand and helped her through behind him. Her sneakers landed in the grass.

“Oh,” Daisy said, turning her head towards the sky, “this is magnificent.”

They could see now that they were on a grassy hillside on the edge of a forest. On one side, they could see the birds and the trees. On the other, if they looked back beyond the doorframe, they could see a valley stretch out below them, and beyond it, more rolling hills dotted with trees and shrubs. Flowers sprung up among the grass. There were no signs of civilization anywhere; not so much as a hedgerow. It was wild and beautiful.

“How could your father keep this a secret?” Daisy asked, smiling. She turned to Daniel, but found that he was suddenly still, his face turned ashen.

Then she heard it.

From through the doorframe, somewhere back in the house, she could hear the sound of floorboards creaking under footsteps. As she listened, she realized that each step was getting louder; the person in the house was getting closer.

“Who is it?” Daisy whispered.

“Someone must have broken in,” Daniel whispered back.

“What if they see the door?”

“I don’t think we can avoid it now.”

They crouched below the frame and looked up, hoping to see who had broken into the house without being seen themselves.

“Is he here?” an unfamiliar woman’s voice said, somewhere in the house.

“I don’t see him,” a man’s voice said.

“Fine,” the first voice said. “Find the doorway and let’s sit in wait before he comes to look at the house.”

“Right you are,” the second voice said, noticeably louder. They were getting closer still; coming up the stairs now.

“If you see him, we must use force,” the first voice said. “We know the evil that lurks in his heart. It must be stamped out.”

Daisy clasped her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide in horror. Daniel was so still that she wasn’t sure if he was still breathing.

“Who is that?” Daisy whispered.

“I don’t know,” Daniel whispered.

“I found it! Ya ponyal!” shouted a voice from somewhere behind the doorway, and they heard the sounds of running footsteps.

Suddenly, Daniel stood up, reached through the square frame back into the bedroom, and closed the door behind them. The square of red wood hung in mid-air, impossibly. Behind it, he could hear the knocking and scratching of men, desperate to break through, but for reasons he couldn’t understand, they were barred.

*

The ground was soft but dry underfoot. As they walked down into the valley, they encountered the odd mouse amidst the grass or a bird pecking at something in the ground. The sun was warm, but the air wasn’t too hot or dry. It was the perfect summer’s day, and they were trapped in it.

Daniel had tried to move the doorframe so they could take it with them, but it stayed firm, as if it was cemented in something other than thin air. In the end they decided to leave it and see if they could find civilization. In the best case, there might be another door that could take them somewhere else, back into the real world.

It wasn’t that this place wasn’t the real world - it was just, they didn’t know what it was, or where. Or even when, if they stopped to think about it.

They had been walking for hours when they came across three strange, small cottages. Each of them was built with a wooden frame, with sticks and leaves packed in with clay and covered in a mixture of lime and sand. The roofs leaned up at sheer angles and were covered in bundles of straw. At one end, a small clay chimney jutted out, with a triangular, slate chimney cap.

“Do you think they’ll have water?” Daisy asked. It had been a long, hot walk.

“I think we have to try,” Daniel said. “I hope they’re friendly.”

Nervously, Daniel walked up to the door of the closest cottage and gave it a small, polite knock. There was no answer. After a few moments, he knocked again; when nobody came to the door, he turned back to Daisy and shrugged.

“Let’s try the next one,” she said. She walked to the next-closest cottage and knocked on the door. Again, there was no answer; she waited and tried again, but once more nobody came to the door.

They were about to walk up to the door of the third cottage when it opened with a bang. A small, old woman wearing a red handkerchief around her head walked out and looked at them with fierce eyes.

“Chy mozhu ya vam dopomohty?” the woman asked, sternly, in what sounded like a Russian accent.

Daniel raised his hand in a friendly wave. “Hello,” he said.

*

The three of them sat in the old woman’s one-room cottage, drinking cups of strong, black tea. They didn’t share a common language, but Daisy seemed to have a knack for getting her intentions across through gestures and intonation. The woman’s name was Olena, and she had plenty of tea to share.

The sun outside had begun to dim, and Olena lit a small fire, which crackled in the fireplace and cast shadows that danced across the walls. She told her story as best she could, given the lack of words between them. Her husband, Ananiy, had gone to find a better home, taking her son, Andriy, with him. There was an army, or a mob of some kind - it was hard to tell through the language barrier - that was rampaging over the land and stealing peoples’ homes. Villages were burned to the ground. Entire families were obliterated.

As she spoke, Daniel recognized one word: “pogrom”.

Olena stood up to go outside; she gestured towards the fireplace and made a chopping motion. Firewood. Daniel and Daisy raised their hands and pointed to themselves instead; we’ll gather it for you. She smiled in acceptance, and the two of them left the cottage to find wood to burn.

“Did you hear her?” Daniel asked in a hushed whisper. As they walked around the cottage, they found a small pile of dry wood in a clay hut. “Pogroms. She was talking about pogroms.”

“I think she’s speaking Russian,” Daisy said.

“Is this —?”

Daisy nodded. “It seems insane, but I think we’re in the past. Like, over a hundred years ago in the past. It’s crazy, but at the same time, it must be. The pogroms in Russia were during the revolution. The White Army murdered Jews and spread propaganda that they were communists.”

“I think you’re right, but it’s more than that,” Daniel said.

“More than that?”

“It’s a lot, but yeah,” Daniel said, “more than that. I think Ananiy was my great grandfather. Ananiy and Olena were my great grandparents.”

Daisy gave him a quick hug; then, they gathered as much firewood as each of them could carry under each arm, and went back inside.

Olena laid out some woolen blankets on the floor for them to sleep under (“spaty,” she said, while gesturing emphatically towards them). She slept on a small, wooden bed in the corner under another set of blankets. The fire slowed and turned to embers, and before long they could hear the old woman’s gentle snoring.

*

In the darkness, Daisy turned to face Daniel. “How do we get back?” she whispered.

“I think we have to find our way back to the door,” Daniel said. “It seems like there’s only one way back.”

“What about Olena? What if the White Army comes to find her?”

“If she really is my great grandmother, they won’t. My great grandmother survived the pogroms and fled to join Ananiy and Andriy in London. She’ll be okay.”

“And if she isn’t?”

“I don’t know,” Daniel admitted. “I don’t think we can risk bringing her home. Into the future, I mean.”

Daisy nodded and thought for a minute. “This is all so surreal. I don’t know how we got here or how this even exists. But there’s one more thing I’ve been thinking. It’s going to sound strange, but I don’t think it can be stranger than anything else that’s happened today.”

“I think I know who the people in the house were,” Daisy whispered. “I think, somehow, it was the White Army. Or, perhaps, the ghosts of the White Army, or their descendants. The way they were talking - we know the evil that lurks in his heart. It’s such a strange thing to say. And they were speaking in Russian when they found the door. It seems so strange, but I’m scared that what I’m saying might actually be true, and they might be waiting for us whenever we go back.”

“How much time do you think has passed?” Daniel asked.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s night-time now, right? Here? And it was evening when we climbed through the door back home. If time moves at the same speed here as there - which it must do, because we heard people through the doorway - then it’s got to be early morning there by now.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying it’s time to go.”

*

“The door?” Daniel sat himself back down on the vinyl ottoman in front of his mother. “What do you know about that?”

She smiled at him like she used to, back before her illness dragged her away from the world; a smile of recognition and love. “I know all about it,” she said. “It followed him. It followed us. From where we came from, where our parents came from, and their parents, too, all the way up to us sitting here now. And it will follow you, and your children, and their children.”

“It seems so impossible,” Daniel said.

“When something bad happens, it ripples outwards. When someone is hurt, their children are hurt too, and so, too, their children. We all carry the past with us. That is what the door is. The things that hurt us follow us forever.”

“That sounds like a curse.”

“It is,” his mother said. “And it is a curse that is ten times worse if you pretend it’s not there. You will feel tired and not know why you are tired. It will pull at you and make you crazy with a thousand tiny hooks, and you will blame yourself. Trauma you inherit has no cause other than what comes through your family; you are confronted by ghosts that aren’t yours. The only way to stop the cycle - the waves of hurt that flow from generation to generation - is to face it. And that’s what the door is.”

“So I have to go through it?”

“Yes,” she said. “That won’t stop the hurt its tracks. But it will give you the power to fight it, as knowledge always does. It will give it a name, and a form.”

“I don’t understand what this means.”

“You will. I can tell you no more.”

Daniel got up and hugged his mother. “I love you, Mum,” he said.

“I love you too,” she said, turning back to the television. “Now leave me with my home in Spain.”

*

They stood, once again, in front of the door, which hung against nothingness in the dead of the night. They had folded the blankets as neatly as they could, left Olena sleeping in her bed, and made the long journey up out of the valley.

“I don’t know what’s behind this door,” Daniel said. “They might still be there. It might be dangerous. You didn’t ask for this; this isn’t a part of your family history. I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t, and it is,” Daisy said. “It’s part of my family history now because you’re my family. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t come to me from my parents; it comes to me from love. I accept it because I accept you. It’s not my family history; it’s my family future. And knowing it helps me know you a little better.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

They embraced each other, then, in the night.

“Let’s do this,” Daisy said.

Daniel pushed the door open and it swung out into his father’s bedroom. His face glowed as the morning light shone through the frame. He turned to face Daisy and smiled; then, with one swift movement, he swung himself through the square and out into the room.

A moment later, she followed him. Her feet dropped back onto the beige carpet with a thud.

They were back in the present day. Dust floated in rays of sunlight. The ugly painting sat on the floor, balanced against the wall.

The house was silent and empty, but it sang with the life of Daniel’s parents: their history; the history they brought with them; the stories they left behind.

“What now?” Daisy asked.

Wordlessly, Daniel moved forward.

#fiction

One. So here's the deal: I didn't get to do a birthday post this year because it was the day after the attempted coup, and it just didn't feel right at the time. We're still in the aftermath - it's been a little bit over a month, and the impeachment trial is winding down - but I feel like there's been enough room now.

The thing is, "42 things I've learned" feels like a thinkpiece, and that's not really what this space is about. There's a gaping chasm between "here's what I'm thinking about" and "I! Am! A! Thought! Leader!", and I don't want to intentionally be in the second camp.

Instead, I like the idea of admissions: things I got wrong, or feel uncomfortable about, or that wouldn't ordinarily be something that most people would want to tell other people. It feels human. In the midst of the pandemic and all these other things, being human - creating community by dropping our masks and sharing more of ourselves - is all we've got.

Two. Lately I've started to tune out of long Zoom meetings, and I'm beginning to wonder if people mostly just want to have them because they're lonely.

Three. I sometimes wonder if I should be intentionally trying to build a personal brand. Some people are incredibly disciplined with how they show up online: their social media personalities entwine with their websites and mailing lists as a product; a version of themselves that they're putting out there as a way to get the right kind of jobs or to sell something later on.

That's not what I'm doing. I'm putting myself out there for connection: as one human looking for like-minded humans. That's what the promise of the internet and social media always was for me. It's not a way to sell; it's a way to build community. We have an incredible network that links the majority of people on the planet together so they can learn from each other. Using that to make a buck, while certainly possible, seems like squandering its potential. We all have to make a buck, or most of us do. But there's so much more.

The more of us we share, the more of us there is to connect to.

Four. Somehow I have all these monthly costs that I didn't have when I was younger. They just grow and grow; I feel like I'm Katamari-ing things I have to pay for. Each bill is like a tiny rope, tying me down. Everyone wants money.

Five. I took forensic medicine in my second year of university. My Director of Studies thought it was a terrible idea: I was a Computer Science student, and for reasons that I don't think stand up to sense of reason, the British system discourages breadth of knowledge. He was this fierce, Greek man who yelled at me on a number of occasions, once because I dared to arrange an appointment with him, which made me anything but more inclined to listen to his advice.

Anyway, despite his objections, I took forensic medicine for a semester. The truth was, I still wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to be a computer scientist, and I figured it would be useful knowledge for some future detective novel. (That's how I chose a lot of my formative experiences: is this something I can write about?) The class gathered several times a week in old, Victorian lecture halls, where the Edinburgh Seven had sat over a century before and learned about how to piece together the facts of a crime from the evidence found in its aftermath.

The most important thing I learned in forensic medicine was Locard's exchange principle: every contact leaves a trace. In the context of a crime, the criminal will bring something to the crime scene and leave it there; they will also take something away with them. However small, both scene and actor will be changed.

Years later I would read another version of this in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which starts with the epigraph: All that you touch you change / All that you change changes you. The root of the idea is the same. Nobody comes out of an interaction unchanged by the experience.

That's the promise of the internet for me: every contact leaves a trace. All that you touch, you change. The internet is people, the internet is community, the internet is change itself.

Six. I spent my adolescence online. I got my start on the internet on a usenet newsgroup, uk.people.teens, where you can still find my teenage posts if you search hard enough. We used to meet up all over the country, hopping on public transport to go sit in a park in Northampton, Manchester, or London.

I met my first long-term girlfriend, who is still one of my dearest friends, through this group. Even now, thousands of miles away, I talk to these people every single day. I'm lucky to know them, and it shaped me inexorably.

Virtually, I also met Terri DiSisto, the alter ego of a middle-aged assistant principal in Long Island who solicited minors for tickling videos who later became the subject of the documentary Tickled (which I still haven't seen). And decades later, I learned that there had been a pedophile stalker in the group. I guess, on balance, I was just lucky.

Seven. I sometimes lie in bed and think, "I have no idea how I got here." I mean, I have all the memories; I can recount my path; I intellectually can tell you exactly how I got here. Of course I can. But I don't always feel like I had autonomy. I feel like I've been subject to the ebbs and flows of currents. I'm just doing the best I can given the part of the vortex I find myself in today.

Eight. While I was at university, I accidentally started a satirical website that received over a million pageviews a day.

Online personality tests were beginning to spread around blogs and Livejournals. They ran the gamut from the kind of thing that might have run in Cosmopolitan (What kind of lover are you) to the purely asinine (Which Care Bear are You?). So one evening, before heading off to visit my girlfriend, I decided to write Which Horrible Affliction Are You?. It was like lobbing a Molotov cocktail into the internet and wandering away without waiting to see what happened next. By the end of the weekend, something like a quarter of a million people had taken it.

So I followed it up and roped in my friends. We slapped on some banner ads, with no real thought to how we might make money from it. MySpace approached me with a buy offer at one point, and I brushed it off as someone's practical joke.

The tests were fluff; a friend, quite fairly, accused me of being one of the people that was making the internet worse for everyone. The thing that was meaningful, though, was the forum. I slapped on a phpBB installation, and discovered that people were chatting by the end of the same evening. Once again, friendships flourished; we all met people who would stick with us for the rest of our lives. We all cut our teeth seriously debating politics - it was the post-9/11 Bush era - as well as more frivolous, studenty topics like food and dating.

There was a guy who claimed to be based out in Redding, California, who was really into Ayn Rand, presumably as a consequence of his own incredible selfishness. Another guy (who IP logs told me logged on from Arlington, Virginia) we constantly trying to turn people over to conservatism. While the former was just kind of a dick, I came to think the latter was there as part of a bigger purpose. Our little forum was on one of the 1,000 most popular sites on the internet, after all. I still quietly think some organization wanted to seed a particular ideology through internet communities, although I have no way to prove it.

All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. Every contact leaves a trace.

What if someone intentionally designs the contact and the trace?

Nine. I feel like I'm constantly living in playlists of musicians I used to enjoy, without meaningfully adding to them. What's new? What will pull me in new directions? What should I care about but don't know about yet? I don't know how to look effectively. I do know that the curated playlists, the ones created by brands looking for engagement, are probably not the way to discover what people really like.

My sister is much better at this (and many things) than me: her radio show, The Pet Door Show on Shady Pines Radio is full of new music. In this and lots of ways, I wish I could be more like her.

Ten. Despite everything, I still hold onto this really utopian view of what the internet could be. Whenever people from different contexts interact, they learn from each other. The net effect of all this learning, all these interactions, could be a powerful force for peace.

It's quixotic, because it just hasn't played out that way. At least, not always. The internet empowered genocides and hateful movements; it memed a fascist President into power and convinced millions of people that Democrats are pedophiles. It made a set of people incredibly wealthy who aren't meaningfully different to the generations of wealthy people who came before them.

The thing is, even with all this in mind, I'm not willing to let go of its promise. I don't want to let go of open communities. I fundamentally want someone in the global south to be able to log on and chat with someone in Missouri. I fundamentally want someone who is homeless to be able to log on at their local library and keep a blog or jump on Twitter. I want those voices to be heard, and I think if equity is shared and those voices really are heard, the entire world is better off for it.

The alternative is to be exclusionary: wealthy Americans talking to other wealthy Americans, and so on. It's socially regressive, but more than that, it's completely boring. The same old, same old. I want to meet people who are nothing like me. We all should.

We need to embrace the openness of the internet, but we need to do it with platforms that are designed with community health and diversity in mind, not the sort of engagement that prioritizes outrage.

I'm not sure how we do that. It will be hard. But I'm also sure that it can be done.

Eleven. I know of at least two separate people who secretly lived at the accelerator while they were going through the program because they were homeless at the time. I don't know what that says about hope and possibilities, but it says something.

Twelve. The rhetoric about misinformation and disinformation - "fake news" - scares me more than it seems to scare most people. I'm worried, with some grounds, that people will try and use this to establish "approved sources" that are automatically trusted, and that by default other sources will not be. The end result is Orwellian.

That's not to say that some speech isn't harmful and that some lies can't be weaponized. Clearly that's true. But it would be a mistake to back ourselves into a situation where certain publications - which in the US are dominated by wealthy, white, coastal men - are allowed to represent truth. What would that have looked like in the civil rights era of the fifties and sixties? Or the McCarthy era? Or during the AIDS epidemic?

The envelope of truth is always being pushed. It needs to be. The world is constantly changing, and constantly changing us.

I think the solution is better critical skills, and it could be for the platforms to present more context. Links to Fox News and OANN and disinformation sites in Macedonia absolutely need to come with surrounding discussion. Just, please, let's not lock out anyone who doesn't happen to be in the mainstream.

Words are dangerous: they can change the world. There will always be people who want to change the world for the worse. And there will always be people who want to prevent us from hearing other peoples' words because they would change the world for the better.

Thirteen. When I was in high school, I had a crush on this one girl, Lisa, who was in my theater studies class. I thought she was amazing, and I really wanted to impress her. I imagined going out with her. In retrospect, I think she might have liked me too; she would often linger to talk to me, and find innocuous ways to touch me on the shoulder as we were saying goodbye. Maybe she didn't like me like that; I wouldn't like to say for sure.

But she was far cooler than I was, and when I spoke to her, I would clam up completely, in the same way that I'd clam up completely when I spoke to anyone I liked. I'd lose my cool and start trying to nervously make jokes. By the end of high school, the shine had clearly come off, and it was very obvious that Lisa didn't like me at all. There was nothing really wrong with me, but my anxiety made me into someone worse than I was.

I was so scared that she wouldn't like me that I became someone she wouldn't like. It wasn't a fear of rejection; it was an outright assumption that she wouldn't like me in that way, because why would someone? And that assumption became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Throughout my life, anyone who liked me practically had to knock me over the head and drag me back to their cave. My history is of being completely oblivious, or scared, or both, and sometimes changing into something I'm not because I nervously think that this is something other people want.

Fourteen. This is true on its face, but it's also a parable.

Fifteen. Another girl I used to like, and knew it, explained to me that she wanted to date someone else because his house was nicer. Later, her dad told me, about where my family lived, "you'd have to be crazy to live there."

For a long time - decades - I wanted to be richer, better. I know those things are not the same. But I wanted so badly to be someone I wasn't.

Sixteen. Talking about the past is a vulnerable thing to do. Talking about people who I used to like is a particularly vulnerable thing to do. And I need to acknowledge the imbalance here, speaking as a man. In a patriarchal society, I have a power that, while I didn't ask for it, I nonetheless can't avoid, or shouldn't pretend doesn't exist.

All I can say is: I genuinely wish nothing but the best for both of them.

The reason I bring up these stories is this: I wish I hadn't spent all that time and energy wishing I was someone else. And we all have our motivations; the chips on our shoulders that drive us.

Seventeen. My utopian ideal for the internet - or rather, my utopian ideal for people, enabled by the internet - led to me founding two open source projects, which became two startups. The first, Elgg, was a community platform. The second, Idno (which became Known), was a way to self-host a feed of any kind of content authored by any number of authors.

I genuinely don't know if I did it right. Or, to put it another way, it's not a given that I got it wrong.

I'm not a born fundraiser. I didn't set out to make money, and it's pretty much my least favorite thing to try and do. What I love is learning about people and making things for them, and then watching them use those things to great effect. I want to keep doing that, and I want anything I make to keep existing, so I want to raise money. But it's hard and painful, and I don't really know if investors buy into what I'm saying or if they think I'm an idiot.

What you need to do, I've realized, is put as much of yourself out there as possible and hope that they see value in that. Trying to turn yourself into something people see value in backfires. Even when it works, you get trapped into being a version of yourself that isn't true.

Eighteen. I left Elgg because the relationship with my co-founder had become completely toxic.

"It's funny we're co-founders," he would tell people, "because we would never be friends." True enough.

Nineteen. When I left Elgg, I had a pretty ambitious idea for a way to create crowdsourced, geographic databases. You could create forms that would record geodata as well as anything else you wanted to capture, so you could send people out in the field with their smartphones to do species counts, or record light pollution, coffee shops with free WiFi, fox sightings, or anything else you wanted to do. The web had just added the JavaScript geolocation API, and iPhones had GPS for relatively accurate location recording, and overall it seemed like a pretty cool idea.

Elgg and its investors threatened to sue me for building "social software". I got a pretty nasty letter from their lawyers. So I stopped and made almost no money for over a year.

Twenty. On my very last day working for Known, I went to have a meeting with the British CEO of a well-known academia startup in San Francisco. At one point, I made a remark about our shared history with Oxford, my hometown. "Yes," he said, "but I went to the university."

Twenty-one. So you see, it's sometimes easy to wonder if you should be someone else. But it's a trap. It's always a trap.

Twenty-two. Every contact leaves a trace. I remember the interaction with that CEO like it was yesterday. I remember those conversations with my co-founder. I remember the investor who told me Known was a shit idea and I needed to stop doing it right now. I remember the guy at Medium who made fun of my code when he thought I was out of earshot.

I used to say: "I'm sorry I'm not good enough." And I used to mean it.

Twenty-three. I think I can pinpoint exactly when the switch flipped in my head. When I stopped caring so much.

For a little while, I thought I was probably going to die of a terminal disease. It wasn't hyperbole: my mother had it, my aunt died of it, and my cousin, just seven years older than me, had just died of it. We knew the genetic marker. And we knew that there was a 75% chance that either my sister or I would get it.

Of course, we both hoped that the other would be the one who wouldn't get it. When the genetic counselor told us that, against the odds, neither of us had the marker, we cried openly in her office.

I've still been spending most of my time helping to be a carer for my mother, who is dying. Maybe I broke my emotional starter motor; I might just be numb. But forgive me if I no longer give a shit about what you think of me.

Twenty-four. I don't begrudge anyone who wants to work on the internet to get rich, at least if they don't already come from money, but I don't think it's the way we make anything better for anyone.

If you want to get rich, go join Google or Facebook or one of those companies that will pay you half a million dollars a year in total compensation and feed you three times a day. But don't lie to yourself and say you're going to change the world.

Twenty-five. I've come to realize that none of the really major changes that the internet has brought about have come from startups. It's certainly true that startups have come along later and brought them to market, but the seismic changes have all either come from researchers at larger institutions (Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, for example), from individuals (Ward Cunningham and the wiki, Linus Torvalds and Linux, all the individuals who kicked off blogging and therefore social media), or from big tech companies with the resources to incubate something really new (Apple and the iPhone).

Twenty-six. That's not to say that startups don't have a place. Twitter was a startup. Facebook was a startup. So were Salesforce and Netflix and Apple and Microsoft. I've removed myself from anything Facebook owns, but I use the others just about every day. So maybe I'm being unfair, or more precisely, unfair because I'm jaded from some of my own experiences.

90% of startups fail. Some of it is luck; not all of it, however.

Twenty-seven. I wonder if changing the world is too narcissistic an ideal; part of the overstated importance that founders and technologists place in themselves. Being able to weave a virtual machine out of discrete logical notation and the right set of words can give you a false sense of importance.

Or worse, and most plausibly, it's just marketing.

Twenty-eight. Here are the things that I think will cause a startup to fail:

Culture. 65% of startups fail because of preventable human dynamics. A lot of it comes down to communication. Everything needs to be clear; nothing can linger; resentments can't fester. Because so much in a startup is ambiguous, communication internally needs to be unambiguous and out in the open. Everyone on a founding team needs to be a really strong communicator, and be able to face conflict head-on in the way that you would hope an adult should.

Hubris. Being so sure that you're going to succeed that you don't examine why you might fail - or don't even bother to find out if you're building something anyone might want.

Being the wrong people. It's not enough to want to build something. And so many people want to be entrepreneurs these days because they think it's cool. But everyone on a founding team has to bring real, hard skills to the table, and be strong on the "soft" people skills that make a community tick. You can't play at being a founder. And beware the people who want to be the boss.

Buying the bullshit. Hustle porn is everywhere, and it's wrong, in the sense that it's demonstrably factually incorrect. I guess this is a part of being the wrong people: the wrong people have excess hubris, don't communicate, and buy the bullshit.

Twenty-nine. If you're not the right person, that doesn't mean who you are isn't right. At all. But it might mean you should find something to do that fits you better. Don't bend yourself to fit the world.

Thirty. When my great grandfather arrived at Ellis Island after fleeing the White Army in Ukraine, which had torched his village and killed so many of his family, he shortened his last name to erase his Jewishness. He chose to raise a secular family.

When his son, my grandfather, was captured by the Nazis as a prisoner of war, he lied about his Jewishness to save his own life.

Sometimes wanting to be someone you're not is a small thing, like wishing someone would see value in you. Sometimes it's a big thing, like wishing someone would see value in your life.

Thirty-one. I actually really like being a part of startups. There's something beautiful about trying to create something from nothing. But in understanding myself better, I've had to create spaces that help nurture what I'm good at.

I work best when I have time to be introspective. I think better when I'm writing than when I'm on my feet in a meeting. That's not to say that I can't contribute well in meetings, but being able to sit down, write, and reflect is a force multiplier for me. I can organize my thoughts better when I have time to do that.

I also can't context switch rapidly. I secretly think that anyone who claims to do this must be lying, but I'm open to the possibility that some people are amazing context-switchers. What I know for certain is that I'm not one. I need time and space. If I don't have either, I'm not going to do my best work, and I'm not going to have a good time doing it.

Engineering ways to work well and be yourself at work is a good way to be kind to yourself, and to show up better for others. My suspicion is that burnout at work is, at least in part, an outcome of pretending to be someone else.

Thirty-two. If I start another company, I already know what it will do. I also know that it will intentionally be a small business, not a startup. Not for lack of ambition, but because always worrying about how you're going to get to exponential growth is exhausting, too.

Thirty-three. Although I intend to see the startup I'm currently at through to an exit, I also know it's not an "if". There will be another company, mostly because I'm addicted to making something new, and in need of a way to make a new way of working for myself.

Thirty-four. A company is a community and a movement. Software is one way a community can build a movement and connect with the world. It's a way of reaching out.

The counterculture is always more interesting than the mainstream. Always, by definition. Mainstream culture is not just the status quo, but the lowest common denominator of the status quo; the parts of the status quo that the majority of people with power can get behind without argument. Mainstream culture is Starbucks and American Idol. It's the norms of conformity. The counterculture offers an entirely new way to live, and beyond that, freedom from conformity.

Conformity is safe, if you happen to be someone who fits neatly into the pigeonhole templates of mainstream culture. If you don't, it can be a death sentence, whether literally or figuratively. Burnout is an outcome of pretending to be someone else.

The most interesting technology, companies, platforms, and movements are the ones that give power to people who have been disenfranchised by mainstream culture. That's how you change the world: distribute equity and amplification.

Every contact leaves a trace. Maximize contact; connect people.

Thirty-five. I've been teaching a Designing for Equity workshop with my friend Roxann Stafford for the last year. She's a vastly more experienced facilitator than me, and frankly is also vastly smarter. I've learned at least as much from her as our workshop participants have.

I've been talking about human-centered design since I left Elgg, and about design thinking since I left Matter. Roxann helped me understand how those ideas are rooted in a sort of colonialist worldview: the idea that a team of privileged people can enter someone else's context, do some cursory learning about their lived experiences, and build a better solution for their problems than they could build for themselves. The idea inherently diminishes their own agency and intelligence, but more than that, it strip mines the communities you're helping of value. It's the team that makes the money once the product is built - from the people they're trying to help, and based on the experiences they've shared.

Roxann has helped me learn that distributed equity is the thing. You've got to share ownership. You've got to share value. The people you're trying to help have to be a part of the process, and they need to have a share of the outcome.

Thirty-six. A lot of people are lonely. A lot of communities have been strip mined. I don't yet fully understand how to build a company that builds something together and does not do this. I wonder if capitalism always leads to this kind of transfer of value. How can it not?

Thirty-seven. This isn't a rhetorical question. How can it not?

If I want to sustain myself by doing work that I love that makes the world at least a little bit better, how can I do that?

What's the version of this that de-centers me? If I can make the world a little bit better, how can I do that?

Thirty-eight. A couple of years ago, Chelsea Manning came to a demo day at the accelerator I worked at. She was on the board of advisors for one of our startups - an anarchist collective that was developing a secure email service as a commercial endeavor to fund its activities. I was proud of having invested in them, and I was excited to speak with her.

As I expected, Chelsea was incredibly smart, and didn't mince words. She liked the project she was a part of, and a few others, but she thought I was naive about the impact of the market on some of the others. Patiently but bluntly, she took me through how each of them could be used for ill. Despite having had all the good intentions in the world, I felt like I had failed.

I would like to be a better activist and ally than I am.

Thirty-nine. I sometimes lie in bed and wonder how I got here. We all do, I think. But just because we're in a place, doesn't mean that place is the right one, or that the shape of the structures and processes we participate in are right. We have agency to change them. Particularly if we build movements and work together.

If the culture is oppressive - and for so many people, it is - the counterculture is imperative.

If we're pretending to be people we're not, finding ways to make space for us to be ourselves, and to help the people around us to do the same, is imperative. We all have to breathe.

Change is imperative. And change is collaborative.

Forty. I think, for now, that I am a cheerleader and an amplifier for people who make change. I think this is where I should be. I would rather de-center myself and support women and people of color who are doing the work. I want to be additive to their movements.

It's not obvious to me that I can be additive, beyond amplifying and supporting from the outside. It's not clear to me that I need to take up space or that I'd do anything but get in their way. I would like to be involved more deeply, but that doesn't mean I should be.

One of the most important things I can do is to learn and grow; not pretend to be someone I'm not, but listen to people who are leading these movements and understand what they need. Can I build those skills? Can I authentically become that person? I don't know, but I'd like to try.

Forty-one. I feel inadequate, but I need to lean into the discomfort. The cowardly thing to do would be to let inadequacy lead to paralysis.

Forty-two. In the startup realm, I'm particularly drawn to the Zebra movement. Jenn Brandel kindly asked me to read the first version of their manifesto when we were sharing space in the Matter garage; she, Mara Zepeda, Astrid Schultz, and Aniyia Williams have turned it into a movement since then.

It's a countercultural movement of a kind: in this case a community convened to manifest a new kind of collaborative entrepreneurship that bucks the trend for venture capital funding that demands exponential growth.

I'm inspired by thinkers like Ruha Benjamin and Joy Buolamwini, who are shining a light on how the tools and algorithms we use can be instruments of oppression, which in turn points to how we can build software that is not. I'm appalled by Google's treatment of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, members of its ethical AI team who were fired after Google asked for a paper on the ethics of large language processing models to be retracted. And I'm dismayed by the exclusionary discourse on platforms like Clubhouse that are implicitly set up as safe spaces for the oppressive mainstream.

Giving people who are working for real change as much of a platform as possible is important. Building platforms that could be used for movement-building is important. Building ways for people to create and connect and find community that transcends the ways they are oppressed and the places where they are oppressed is important. Building ways to share equity is important.

And in all of this, building ways for all of us to connect and learn from each other, and particularly from voices who are not a part of the traditional mainstream, is important.

All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. Every contact leaves a trace.

This is the promise of the internet: one of community, shared equity, and equality. Through those those things, I still hope we may better understand each other, and through that, find peace.

#life #tech

I'm selling my frozen heart.

Or at least a representation of it. Five representations, to be specific. Five copies of my frozen heart illustration were released as non-fungible tokens, available to be purchased on OpenSea. All you need is a wallet like Metamask and a few ETH.

Credit to my friends at DADA, who dove head-first into crypto-art a few years ago. I'll admit that I was skeptical then, and they were right. It's absolutely fascinating to see how the NFT art market has exploded.

You can also make an offer on my piece Greenwashing.

#crypto #nft

I vividly remember my first day on the internet. I was sat in my teenage bedroom, staring at a bulky cathode ray tube monitor, which my dad had surrounded with spider plants in order to hopefully absorb some electromagnetic radiation. My 14.4K modem connected - loudly and slowly - to an Internet Service Provider that my mother was testing out as part of her job as a telecommunications analyst. I was already using Bulletin Board Systems and had participated in conversations on FidoNet, but this was something new.

Instead of flashy websites or apps, my first internet experience took place in a black terminal window with monotype text and a maximum width of 80 characters. There were no links, no movies, and no startups. I didn't have a connection resembling broadband, and there was no WiFi. My only guide was a location called Gopher Jewels with a menu of places I could visit.

I visited a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University, thousands of miles away from my bedroom. It told me its temperature and whether I could buy a Coke, and I still remember how it made me felt. It seems mundane, perhaps, today - but in a way, that made it cooler. I wasn't reading a speech by the President of the United States. I was connecting to a Coke machine on another continent, probably in some dusty corridor somewhere. It was like speaking to a hatstand in Antarctica; absolute magic.

Not long afterwards, I downloaded a software application called NCSA Mosaic. It let you browse something called the World Wide Web, which was kind of like Gopher, but easier to use and write content for. A developer called Marc Andreessen had proposed a new extension that allowed you to share and view inline images, which was exciting, and allowed for a new kind of experience: watching a live photo of a coffee machine at Cambridge University. Cambridge was really just down the road, but like the Coke machine, it still felt like magic. I was able to travel through space and time.

The internet wasn't about making money. It was always about sharing knowledge and connecting to people. It had its problems - notably exclusivity of access - but I fell in love with it. It seemed like a glimpse into a beautiful new future, where anyone could connect to anyone and they could collaborate and learn from each other to create new kinds of art, culture, academic work, and scientific endeavor.

The 14 year old version of myself who connected to the early commercial internet was, himself, part of something that older users called the eternal September. Prior to 1993, the internet had been overwhelmingly dominated by universities: every September, new students rolled in, temporarily lowering the quality of discourse until they learned the etiquette of communicating online. Suddenly, commercial internet service providers arrived, and September never came to an end. There was an avalanche of new users (me among them) that just kept coming.

And then some. There were roughly 14 million internet users in 1993; there are around 4.7 billion today.

The growth curve of the internet is S-shaped, as you'd expect. It took a little while to pick up steam, then skyrocketed, before reaching relative saturation. The businesses that were lucky enough to tether themselves to the high-growth middle and could keep with the pace generated billions of dollars in wealth: the Googles and Facebooks of the world were certainly filled with skilled, ambitious people, but they were also in the right place at the right time.

Which is how the internet became about making vast amounts of money. Startups could achieve enormous growth (and VC investment) just by placing a banner ad on the Yahoo homepage; Yahoo, in turn, could raise more money based on its ad growth. Meanwhile, the nature of the internet meant that businesses could grow to monopoly size faster than ever before, egged on by investors like Peter Thiel, who famously argued that competition is for losers.

This wave of unabashed capitalism washed away most of the utopian dreamers, replacing them with the kinds of bro-ey hustlers who would have worked in hedge funds if this had been the 1980s. Worse, their sudden riches came with sudden self-belief, as if the ability to make money building a website during a period of unprecedented growth somehow unlocked the secrets of the universe.

I'm not blameless: I've benefitted from this gold rush. I started my career working for universities, but Elgg, my first startup, raised a fairly modest half a million dollars after its first few, bootstrapped years. My salary at every subsequent job has been paid for, at least in part, by investor dollars. It's not, I feel compelled to point out, that investors are inherently bad: they empower a ton of really useful websites and communities to exist. It's that the Wall Street startup bros who swarm around them are no fun at all to be around, and that the investor-powered web shouldn't be the whole internet.

I very badly want to return to that utopian sensibility: that something doesn't have to make money to have value. That doesn't mean I want to go back in time: the early internet was a predominantly white, male, wealthy platform that people mostly accessed by having been admitted to an elitist institution. I want an egalitarian internet: not just one where all voices can be heard, but where everyone can help to build the fabric of the platform. The true joy of the internet is that everyone builds it together. It has very little to do with engaging with someone's ad-powered social media website.

I've come to realize that I resent the expectation that everything I make has to be profitable. Sometimes, I just want to make: one of the coolest things about software, as with writing or art, is the way you can whip something up out of nothing. I want to see what other people make too, for no other reason that it's what moves them. It's not the revenue or the valuations that make the internet special; nor is it the protocols and technologies, at least not in themselves. It's the connections and the communities. The internet is people. The internet has always been people.

I can't exactly opt out of the commercial internet: I'm far from independently wealthy and need to earn money. Nor do I exactly want to. But I do want to remember that what excites me about the internet is the quirky creativity and connectedness of the diversity of human experience. It's about empowering people to connect and to be found, in a way that transcends the superficial. And it's about reclaiming the sense of magic I felt decades ago, when a magical vending machine in a dusty corridor changed my life forever.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for November.

Books

Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. A sobering, intelligent take on America's unspoken caste system, comparing it to similar systems around the world. For me, the history of how the Nazis looked to America's treatment of its Black population was particularly shocking.

Streaming

The Undoing. You know, I was skeptical, but it worked out well. It's somewhere between absolutely trash TV and a gripping thriller. And I like creepy Hugh Grant way more than I like apparently-charming Hugh Grant.

The Flight Attendant. Fresh off The Big Bang Theory, which I consider to be easily the worst television show ever made, Kaley Cuoco redeems herself in this pulpy, funny, unsettling thriller. It reminded me a bit of Run. Definitely a guilty pleasure watch - but that's kind of what I needed.

Save Yourselves! I felt personally attacked. But this hipsters-are-oblivious-of-an-alien-invasion movie is more of a roast than a takedown, and is absolutely hilarious. Recommended.

Notable Articles

Business

Justice Department Files Antitrust Lawsuit Challenging Visa’s Planned Acquisition of Plaid. “Visa’s con­cerns about Plaid un­der­pinned its de­ci­sion to buy the com­pany and pay a large rev­enue mul­ti­ple for it, the law­suit al­leges. The gov­ern­ment said Visa’s CEO de­scribed the deal as an “in­sur­ance pol­icy” to neu­tral­ize a threat to the com­pa­ny’s debit busi­ness. The law­suit quoted an­other ex­ec­u­tive who in 2019 com­pared Plaid to an is­land “vol­cano” whose cur­rent ca­pa­bil­i­ties are just “the tip show­ing above the wa­ter” and warned that “[w]hat lies be­neath, though, is a mas­sive op­por­tu­nity—one that threat­ens Visa.””

Unexpected & Inevitable. “The investor hears it and at first they don’t believe you. “Nah,” they say, as they start to argue with you whether that’s the way the world really works. Then, after a beat or two, they go, “wait, you’re right.” And after another moment, they think “fuck, that’s the only way it can be.”” I agree with Eric: this is what investors are looking for. You have an insight about the world that most people don’t, and you’re uniquely equipped to capitalize on it.

Spotify to acquire Megaphone. Megaphone is the network formerly known as Panoply. Spotify seems to be single-handedly creating value in the podcast market right now, but Apple has been quietly making acquisitions - like to keep its own ecosystem competitive.

Apple’s Shifting Differentiation. I found this exploration of Apple’s chip strategy to be really interesting. “Instead the future is web apps, with all of the performance hurdles they entail, which is why, from Apple’s perspective, the A-series is arriving just in time. Figma in Electron may destroy your battery, but that destruction will take twice as long, if not more, with an A-series chip inside!”

Women-owned businesses are struggling. Stimulus could help.. "Women and people of color were shut out of much of the initial rounds of stimulus because the program was set up to work through commercial banks. Those who didn’t have an existing relationship with a commercial bank found it harder to access the funds. And because the money ran out quickly, it left many without a lifeline."

The Double Standard of Female CEOs Moving Fast and Breaking Things. “We hold our female CEOs to impossible standards while not holding their male counterparts to high enough ones.”

The privacy fight is heading to the office. “I don't think Americans believe in privacy universally. And it's not a constitutional right. It's like, we have a right to free speech, we have a right to bear arms, we don't have a right to privacy in our federal constitution.”

Google Pay relaunch transforms it into a full-fledged financial service. Of note: “Google has co-branded banking accounts coming up in 2021. The new service, called Plex, essentially allows banks to partner with Google and use Google Pay as their own direct banking app.”

How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism. "Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after another—hoping that its gamble would pay off before disaster struck." VCs are upset about this article, but honestly, to me, it rings true.

Secret Amazon Reports Expose Company Spying on Labor, Environmental Groups. "Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements." Gross.

Hulu raises Live TV price to $65, matching YouTube TV’s latest price hike. Here’s what I can’t fathom: why people tolerate cable TV at all. Every time I dive into it, I regret it. It’s a morass of shitty ads and low-quality programs that shout at you.

Unilever NZ’s 1-year trial of a 4-day week. I'm very into this.

Culture

The Shape of a Story. A beautiful exploration of narrative plot, Moomins, allegory, and the purpose of story in navigating real-world challenges.

Zillow Surfing Is the Escape We All Need Right Now. Is it? Or is it another form of doomscrolling, searching for places we could never afford in aspiration of an unreachable life we were told we could have? Hey, I'm just asking questions here.

As ‘Doonesbury’ turns 50, Garry Trudeau picks his 10 defining strips. Doonesbury is by far the best syndicated cartoon strip. I'm a lifetime fan. I met Trudeau once, at the Edinburgh Book Festival; we talked about Asterix. Lovely man.

Who’s in the Crossword? I loved this: a data-driven exploration of representation in crossword clues, with insight into how they’re produced.

Media

Confusion at BBC as boss says staff can attend Pride marches after all. “He told staff on Friday morning they would still be allowed to attend LGBT Pride marches, providing they remained celebratory and individuals were not seen to be taking a stand on any “politicised or contested issues”.” This is a ridiculous stance.

Google funds mouthpiece of Rwandan regime. “The worst case scenario for the NGO representative, however, is that „Google is signalling that it is funding repression and supports the muzzling of free speech, the closing of political space in Rwanda and attacks on political opponents and human rights defenders.“”

Travel influencers are being paid to whitewash authoritarian regimes. “Uncritically spreading political propaganda is unethical under all circumstances and especially in the form of branded content, where the lines are very blurry, and the audience might therefore not recognize it as such.”

How a crop of startups are trying to make for-profit local news work. "Evan Smith, the CEO of the Texas Tribune, said that when launching the local politics driven news site more than a decade ago, “We decided that for-profit was a non starter and that the market had failed.”"

News publishers dial up the marketing heat on their subscription products. Subscriptions are far better than advertising as a support mechanism. And news sustainability is deeply important.

Yes, Product Thinking Can Save Journalism. Six Reasons Why News Media Need Product Thinkers. "Knight Lab’s series on product thinking in media started with a question: “Journalism Has Been Disrupted. Can Product Thinking Save It?” After more than 25 years in digital publishing -- and as the editor for the series -- I think the answer is “Yes.”"

Politics

How a C.I.A. Coverup Targeted a Whistle-blower. “The C.I.A. has corrupted F.B.I. agents to violate basic rules as to how the Department of Justice does criminal prosecutions.”

Uber and Lyft had an edge in the Prop 22 fight: their apps. “In the weeks leading up to Election Day, the companies used their respective apps to bombard riders and drivers with messages urging them to vote for Prop 22, the ballot measure.” Let’s please make this illegal.

Evidence suggests several state Senate candidates were plants funded by dark money. Just one of a litany of dirty tricks used in this election.

I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now. “Ha ha ha, they lede, who’s going to tell him? Bitch, who’s going to tell you? An illegitimate leader has got all the guns and 40% of your population is down to use them. And y’all got jokes.”

We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.. Smart suggestions for improving trust in our elections (undercutting the kind of FUD we’ve seen this month).

Trump races to weaken environmental and worker protections before January 20. Actively ghoulish.

Society

Why is Covid-19 is killing more men than women in middle age? Scientists are looking for answers not only in underlying health risks but also in biological and external factors. “Over­all, how­ever, men make up about 54% of U.S. deaths, and a sig­nif­i­cantly higher por­tion in mid­dle age. The death-cer­tifi­cate data through late Oc­to­ber show men make up nearly 66% of more than 42,000 Covid-19 deaths oc­cur­ring among peo­ple be­tween their mid-30s and mid-60s.”

Americans, Stop Being Ashamed of Weakness. "Too often in America, we are ashamed of being weak, vulnerable, dependent. We tend to hide our shame. We stay away. We isolate ourselves, rather than show our weakness."

Kamala Harris will be the first HBCU grad in the White House. “It’s not just about her being a Black woman. It’s about her being more than that, the intersectionality of who she is.”

Living With a QAnon Family as the Prophecy Crashes Down. “They’re treating it like there’s going to be an apocalypse — no matter who wins.”

Florida passes $15 minimum wage, a hike that could narrow the gender pay gap. Two important facts here: if a higher minimum wage can be passed in Florida, it can be passed just about anywhere. And it will disproportionately help women and people of color.

The new normal: Women and LGBTQ+ people are buying guns in 2020. “Although there is no official demographic breakdown of gun sales by race or gender, interviews with the gun community — new owners, sales people, analysts and activists — reveal a mounting anxiety among women and LGBTQ+ people, particularly those of color. And some are choosing to arm themselves for the first time.”

Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?. “The short summary of what I will discuss below is that Americans suffer higher death rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare mean Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.”

Performative philanthropy and the cost of silence. "Days after joining the Criminal Justice Reform department, I was warned by a senior member of the team that I should avoid pushing for grantmaking strategies that centered racial equity, as Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan did not believe race was relevant to the issue of mass incarceration. I was told that previous attempts to educate the couple on this matter had contributed to a former employee being terminated."

Less screen time and more sleep critical for preventing depression. "A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of data from the UK Biobank, involving almost 85,000 people, has found that lifestyle factors such as less screen time, adequate sleep, a better-quality diet, and physical activity strongly impact depression." Also, water is wet.

Federal government to execute first woman since 1953. It was a heinous crime, but the death penalty is a disgusting, brutal practice that is not befitting of a supposed democracy.

A dinner party killed my Dad. Please stay safe this Thanksgiving.

AMA: Racism is a threat to public health. “The AMA recognizes that racism negatively impacts and exacerbates health inequities among historically marginalized communities. Without systemic and structural-level change, health inequities will continue to exist, and the overall health of the nation will suffer.”

Period poverty: Scotland first in world to make period products free. I miss living in a progressive nation.

Technology

I became an unwanted woman in tech.“There is something innately different now about my words. They’ve not changed, but their context has entirely shifted. It’s as though I walk around now with a badge that invites dismissal and disrespect. That badge is called womanhood.”

Roam: My New Favorite Software Product. I have a Roam account but I haven’t made it work for me yet. Articles like this make me want to try harder to get on the bandwagon.

A new way to plug a human brain into a computer: Via veins. Do not want. (But future iterations might be more interesting / palatable.)

DHS Buying Cellphone Geolocation Data To Track People. "The Department of Homeland Security is purchasing consumer cellphone data that allows authorities to track immigrants trying to cross the southern border, which privacy advocates say could lead to a vast “surveillance partnership” between the government and private corporations." Hands up if you're surprised.

User Stories Not Wireframes. "User stories provide the context of what a wireframe is for. When you give user stories to a developer, you greatly increase the chances they will be thoughtful about the product and features they are implementing. When they understand the bigger picture — who is this for, what are they trying to accomplish and why are they trying to accomplish it — they can take ownership over the project."

Product Hunt requirements document. A wonderfully concise example of what a good requirements document can look like.

HP ends its customers' lives. There's a reason why the free software movement started with printer drivers. It's mind-boggling to me how HP can continue to be so antagonistic to their customers. (Inkjet printers are the worst deal in technology.)

What using AT&T’s 768kbps DSL is like in 2020—yes, it’s awful. A reminder that if you’re serving all of America, you can’t assume a high-quality broadband connection.

Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro. I’m waiting for version 2, but this is super cool.

Your Computer Isn't Yours. "This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city."

Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at Facebook, Twitter. Bleuch.

How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet. I’m not a gamer, so I was late to Discord. But it does feel like part of the future of online communities.

The iOS COVID-19 app ecosystem has become a privacy minefield. “It's hard to justify why a lot of these apps would need your constant location, your microphone, your photo library.” Relatively few of these apps use the comparatively privacy-protecting APIs developed by Apple and Google.

How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps. “A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people's personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.” This is spectacularly not okay.

We Need Mandatory Enduser APIs for Social and Search Systems. This is an older piece (from 2018) but it still holds up, and I agree with it completely.

As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever. It feels like this problem has been solved lots of times over on the internet - but it's both a huge problem and a real opportunity for the right startup.

How a young, queer Asian-American businesswoman is rethinking user safety at Twitter. “Su's goals sit at the heart of what could become a very different Twitter one day, if — and it remains a very big conditional — the company is serious about the changes it's been signaling over the last year.” Fingers crossed.

Rock-star programmer: Rivers Cuomo finds meaning in coding. The only time "rock star programmer" is an acceptable phrase.

The Secrets of Monkey Island's Source Code. A deep look into assets and code behind my favorite game of all time.

‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase. “One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees.”

Building your own website is cool again, and it's changing the whole internet. All hail the indieweb. I’m here for it.

I took this week off so I could spend a little more time with my mother. Originally, it was also because I was in danger of burning out, and because I wanted to help get out the vote.

Today I was going to gently take her to the ocean - she can't walk far, but at least she could see the waves. It would have been a nice day for it.

Instead, this week she's had a medical procedure of some kind every single day, for five days running. She's about to have a multi-unit blood transfusion because her hemoglobin levels have plummeted. Afterwards, she'll likely want to sleep, in the same way she does after the dialysis sessions she has three times a week.

I'm very glad I'm here with my parents: I've been sheltering in place with them throughout the pandemic, which has allowed me to spend more time with them, and do what I can to help my dad, who is my mother's primary carer. This month alone events have included evacuating from a fire that miraculously stopped a block away from the house, and a mix of emergency and planned hospital visits. It's a lot, and I'm exhausted.

This is all quality time, but not the kind I was hoping for: there are fewer long talks, and far more feeding tube flushes and wound cleanings. I really hope it's not too late for those conversations. I'll be here regardless; I'm grateful for my family, and I'll take all the time I can get.

I could, however, use another vacation.

I was starting to write this post when we were evacuated from the fire. Miraculously, after a really rough week, we were able to move back in on Friday. The house is still intact, the electricity is back on, and although the air is toxic, air purifiers allow the inside to be comfortable. I feel awful for the thousands of families who were not so lucky.

I'm now finishing and publishing this post as a way of adding some final punctuation to this terrible week. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted ...

In the spirit of Derek Sivers, I thought I'd write a quick update about what I'm doing these days. It's not quite a "now" page in the Sivers model, but it'll do .. for now.

Where I work:

I'm Head of Engineering and Sponsor Product at ForUsAll. Understanding what ForUsAll does, and therefore what I do, requires a little bit of explanation: in the US, rather than traditional pensions, workers tend to get something called a 401(k) plan (memorably named after its tax code). A part of your pre-tax pay is sent to a fund that invests on your behalf; many employers match your contribution up to a certain level. At retirement you get to withdraw those funds; the hope is that your investments have grown in value in the interim.

They tend to be jargon-laden, badly-run, and offer web interfaces that look like they were built in Microsoft Frontpage in 1998. And that's if you even have access to one: most American workers at smaller businesses don't, and therefore have limited access to decent ways to save for retirement. ForUsAll's web platform makes it cheaper and less time-consuming for employers to run (or "sponsor") a plan. And we're working on other ways for regular people to build financial stability for themselves, even before retirement. It's not about employees at well-funded startups or Fortune 500 companies; it's everyone else.

So my role is to run the engineering team, as well as product for the employer side of the experience. It's my first fintech company, but that's not why I'm doing it - my personal mission statement continues to be to work on projects that make the world more equal, informed, and inclusive, and this fits the bill.

I'm bringing a few things to the table here: my experience building products from both an engineering and product strategy perspective, but also my design thinking and cultural development background. I'm finding that those instincts are coming in very useful, and my big self-development project is to second-guess myself less than I often have in the past. I've been given a large role in determining the future strategy of the company, and I'm trying to bring my all to it.

By the way, I'm hiring front-end engineers.

Also:

I continue to sit on the board at Latakoo, the media startup where I was the CTO and first employee. Its technology - which I helped design and build - allows networks like NBC News to easily plan stories and transmit video from the field using commodity internet connections.

Latakoo is profitable. Its cloud service is used by many of the news organizations you can think of, and its on-premise servers have found homes in their editing suites. I'm really proud to have been a part of it, and to still be able to help where I can.

I believe deeply in the importance of media in our democracy, and I'm always excited to find opportunities to help support its future. In February I helped run (with my ex-Matter colleague Roxann Stafford) a session on designing for equity as part of a Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms bootcamp organized by NewsCatalyst and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism with the Google News Initiative.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping to wind up Known's incorporated corporate entity - and its hosted service, which is still online - this tax year. This doesn't mean Known itself is winding down: the open source community continues apace, and has been funding future development through Open Collective. The Known copyrights and assets will revert to me once the closure is complete.

Beyond work:

More of my time has been spent helping to care for my mother. It's been a decade since her diagnosis, and my life has been turned completely upside down in the years since (including some time where I thought I probably had the terminal, genetic condition too). Being able to spend time with both my parents is a privilege. But it's also been very easy to put my personal life on pause. I started this year with a determination to unpause - although 2020 has sometimes had other ideas.

I'm about to start a Gotham Writers Workshop course on writing fiction. Writing has always been my first love, and I'm determined to take it more seriously. I took some Stanford writing courses over the summer and found them to be both incredibly useful and motivating. I'd been waitlisted for a two year part-time novel writing certificate, but sadly didn't make the cut. (Who can blame them - who is this tech bro anyway?) No matter; I'm finding other ways to improve my skills and get closer to my goal of actually publishing a long-form fiction book.

I came first in my group in the NYC Midnight flash fiction competition this summer; I'm waiting to see if I got into the third round.

I read a lot more than I write, and I've been trying my best to keep off the social networks. They don't, as a whole, improve my life. But the addiction is strong. I just wholesale quit Facebook and Instagram as a protest against that company's actions, and it felt pretty good.

When I thought I also probably had my mother's dyskeratosis congenita, I gained a lot of weight. I've been trying my best to lose it, through only eating during an eight hour window, improving my diet, and increasing the amount of exercise I do. We bought a treadmill so my mother could walk without having to leave the house (my dad also has mobility issues); I've been using it to regularly run 5Ks. It's nowhere near as impressive as my runner friends, but it's a world away from my last few years. I used to walk 7-8 miles a day in the course of my life in the UK, and my life in California has never worked the same way. I've lost some weight but I've got a very long way to go.

I've been thinking about how I can help mission-driven founders. I was pretty naive when I founded Known, and more so Elgg; I'd love to help people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place to avoid some of those same mistakes. Time is limited, though. So maybe an online book and/or community is the way to go.

What's next:

In 2021 I want to ...

... finish a fiction book. Whether it gets published or not is out of my hands, but I want to do the best job I can. And then prepare to do it again.

... lose that weight and continue to get healthier.

... re-find the joy in life. It's been a tough year, and I want to find a way to have more time and space that's really mine. Between work and caring it's been hard to carve out room for my own life. I wouldn't change those things for the world, but I'd like to be able to find a healthier balance.

I've noticed more blog posts on my feeds talking about mental health, and more tweets talking about anxiety in the face of this year's challenges. I'm certainly feeling it too. This week I've been building a contingency plan for what happens if I have to take a leave of absence from work because of my mother's health, which has been an emotionally difficult task on top of an already emotionally challenging context.

2020 as a whole is a collective trauma. The thing about serious trauma is that it ripples. Its effects are felt in the lives of the people who lived through it; not just as they live through it, but forever. And then it's felt in their children. And finally, in their children.

My father is one of the youngest survivors of the Japanese concentration camps in Indonesia. He and his older siblings were kept alive by my grandmother. As a 12 year old, my aunt snuck out of the camp and swam through the sewers to find food for them to eat. My grandmother would gather snails and secretly cook them. Around them all - my grandmother, my aunts, my toddler father - was death and brutality. People in the camp were routinely tortured and murdered.

My grandmother wailed in her sleep every night until the day she died. The trauma certainly affected her children; my father has suffered from its effects in ways that he only became consciously aware of later in life. In turn, his anxieties affected his children - partially through the effect of his actions, but there is also significant evidence that trauma can be passed down epigenetically. My dad is both younger than most of his siblings and had children later in life, but I've seen the effects of this trauma spread to the fourth and fifth generations in my aunts' branches of the family.

The implications for families that have been split up through draconian immigration policies, or suffered at the hands of trigger-happy police, or been caught by a racist criminal justice system are obvious. The trauma of poverty, too, creates epigenetic changes that span generations. But during this terrible year, more of us than ever before have seen our relatives die or had our homes destroyed at the hands of natural disasters. We've lived under a kind of fear we thought was a thing of the past.

So, no wonder we're all feeling kind of terrible. The thing is, it won't just be for the moment. The impact of 2020 - and, yes, I'm afraid to say, 2021 too - is likely to be with many of us for the rest of our lives. If we're not careful, it'll be with our children, too, and their children.

The good news is that these traumatic effects can be reversed. Exercise, intense learning, and anti-depressants can help. But that implies that we'll all need systemic help: mental wellness support and a far stronger social safety net. Without this support, the hidden effects of the pandemic (and everything else that's happened this year) may be with us for a very long time to come.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for July.

A few people have asked about my process. I save my interesting links into Pocket, which is integrated into Firefox, my browser of choice. (I trust Mozilla to look after me more than any other browser manufacturer.) And then on the first day of the next month, I go back and re-examine everything I've saved.

If you're receiving this post via my email list, I use Mailchimp to gather the latest content from my blog's RSS feed and send an email at 10am. This morning I reset the timer to noon so that I could get the post out today. I'll return the setting to 10am once it's out.

By the way, I never use affiliate links. This post isn't trying to sell you anything - but let me know if it's useful, or if there are ways it could be more so.

Hardware

Apple Watch 5. I've been resisting quantifying myself, and my series 3 has been broken for a long time. But we're entering the fifth month of quarantine, and I wanted to make sure I was getting the exercise I needed. The series 5 is a nice improvement - it feels a great deal more responsive - and both the VO2 max and ECG functions are really good.

Withings Thermo. Because temperature is an indicator for covid-19, measuring it early and often, and seeing the trend (which is flat for me) is useful. I'm pretty bought into the Withings universe at this point, with the blood pressure monitor and the Body+ smart scale. They're well-built, the app that links them all is equally good, and I like that they're multi-user.

Apps

Libro.fm. I've never really been into audiobooks, but I recently changed over to listen to them when I drive and work out. Podcasts have been less enticing to me recently. Unlike Audible's parent company, Libro.fm doesn't sell technology to ICE to power deportations, and it gives a portion of sales to your local independent bookstore.

Nedl. I invested in Ayinde Alayoke and his team as part of Matter. The app they've created is really cool: a way to broadcast and search the content of live, real-time audio all over the world. He's raising a new round via Wefunder, and I was proud to join.

Books

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. Nominated for this year's Hugo awards, I was invigorated by this exploration of belonging, identity, and what it means to be human. Clearly informed by our present moment, it's an argument for something better than the divisiveness and greed we find ourselves subject to.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong. Vuong's words seem to have a pulse of their own. Sad but occasionally hilarious, I recognized aspects of the immigrant struggle, and of being caught between two parallel universes (figuratively; unlike the previous book, this is not science fiction). Vuong is a poet, and that rhythm and sense of beauty shines here.

So You Want to Talk about Race, by Ijeoma Oluo. Ijeoma was the Editor at Large at The Establishment, a publication for writers marginalized by mainstream media that I was proud to support at Matter. It's taken me a long time to get to her book, which deserves its popularity. It weaves her own story with important anti-racist ideas, and I think it would make a great primer for people who are new to them, as well as an important reminder that we need to do the work for the rest of us.

Streaming

Palm Springs. Yeah, it's kind of dumb, but this 21st century Groundhog Day is also smarter than you think. I'm not sure I laughed out loud, but I had fun watching it. (Hulu.)

The Dog House: UK. All the niceness that made The Great British Bake-Off compelling viewing, directed into a show about adopting shelter dogs. It's the least demanding show you'll ever watch, and maybe also the cutest. I needed it this month. (HBO Max.)

The Act. Beautifully acted by an absolutely incredible cast (in particular, it makes Joey King seem woefully underused in everything else she's ever been in). A harrowing true story. (Hulu.)

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

What I Learned as a Young Black Political Speaker in Liberal White Austin. "What I fear that white Democrats do not understand is that Black Americans have no interest in playing team games if they do not see themselves alive on either team. Democrats offer minor reforms and change street names to Black Lives Matter Avenue. Many of them paternalistically say actions like defunding the police are unrealistic. But if I die in the best world that you can imagine, then there’s a problem with your imagination."

Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm. "Mr. Williams knew that he had not committed the crime in question. What he could not have known, as he sat in the interrogation room, is that his case may be the first known account of an American being wrongfully arrested based on a flawed match from a facial recognition algorithm, according to experts on technology and the law."

What the police really believe. "Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence."

GOP senator introduces bill to stop federal funding for schools teaching ‘1619 Project’. "Republican Sen. Tom Cotton introduced a piece of legislation on Thursday that will prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the award-winning New York Times piece The 1619 Project in K-12 schools." Imagine being this racist, or being represented by someone this racist.

McClatchy journalists absolutely can show support for Black lives. I'm glad this was cleared up, but it seems a bit silly that it was ever a question. Support for human rights is not and should not be a political issue.

Breonna Taylor Is On The Cover Of O Magazine — The First One Ever Without Oprah. Arrest the cops who murdered her.

Trump's America

Lest We Forget the Horrors: A Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes. "This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them. This list will be updated between now and the November 2020 Presidential election."

Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state. "Full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the U.S. and cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report." (Here's that report.)

Homeland Security fears widespread mask-wearing will break facial recognition software. Allow me to play my tiny violin.

Is this the beginning of Trump's Dirty War? "As if on cue, John Yoo, the legal architect of George W. Bush’s torture regime, has emerged as one of Trump’s newest advisors, helping craft legal-sounding justifications for Trump to expand his powers to dictatorial proportions." A genuinely terrifying comparison of Trump's recent actions to historical events in Argentina and elsewhere.

Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years. Right-wing extremists, not so much. As many people have said, the difference is: right-wing activists want people to die, while left-wing activists want people to have healthcare.

“Defendant Shall Not Attend Protests”: In Portland, Getting Out of Jail Requires Relinquishing Constitutional Rights. "A dozen protesters facing federal charges are barred from going to “public gatherings” as a condition of release from jail — a tactic one expert described as “sort of hilariously unconstitutional.”" But not ha ha hilarious.

Esper requires training that refers to protesters, journalists as 'adversaries'. "A mandatory Pentagon training course newly sent to the entire force and aimed at preventing leaks refers to protesters and journalists as "adversaries" in a fictional scenario designed to teach Defense Department personnel how to better protect sensitive information."

Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. By Richard Clarke! Let's not allow the people who were involved in George W Bush's administration absolve themselves of the war crimes they committed, but nonetheless, this is a remarkable editorial.

Culture and Society

Carl Reiner, Perfect. A completely lovely remembrance of Carl Reiner by Steve Martin.

It’s time for business journalism to break with its conservative past. Yes, please.

Magical Girls as Metaphor: Why coded queer narratives still have value. "From unhealthy power dynamics, such as student-teacher relationships; to biphobia, transphobia, body shaming and white beauty standards; to an over-saturation of tragic endings, “forbidden love” and coming-out narratives; I couldn’t really see myself in any of that. But as a young queer pre-teen, I did see myself and what I wanted to be in anime. Not often in yuri, surprisingly, but in magical girl anime and in idol anime."

Why Children of Men haunts the present moment. A beautifully bleak exploration of one of the best films ever made.

Q&A: The Fearless High School Newspaper Editor Covering Portland Protests. This is so incredibly cool and gives me hope for the future. "I found out that my dad has been tear gassed before, because when we were tear gassed he was like, “This is the worst tear gas I’ve ever felt.”"

When Did Recipe Writing Get So...Whitewashed? "Last year when my book was coming out, I had to take a stand against italicizing non-English words. It's a way that Western publications literally "other" non-white foods: they make them look different. But why can't dal and jollof rice and macaroni and cheese all exist in the same font style?"

Tech

Pivot to People: It’s Time to Build the New Economy. "Today’s calls for ethical, humane, responsible, regulated and beneficial technology, compounded with venture capital’s virtue signaling in solidarity with Black lives, brings us to a critical crossroads for corporate America." I really hope this is the future of the tech industry.

Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook. "The company seems to be pretty comfortable with obfuscating the truth, and that’s why people don’t trust Facebook anymore."

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. "We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."

The Adjacent User Theory. "Our success was anchored on what I now call The Adjacent User Theory. The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using the it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them."

“Hurting People  At Scale”. "As it heads into a US presidential election where its every move will be dissected and analyzed, the social network is facing unprecedented internal dissent as employees worry that the company is wittingly or unwittingly exerting political influence on content decisions related to Trump, and fear that Facebook is undermining democracy."

Regulating technology. I strongly disagree with Benedict Evans on his conclusions - long-time readers will know I'm very pro anti-trust, and buy into Tim Wu's arguments completely - but his argument is worth a read.

Twitter says it's looking at subscription options as ad revenue drops sharply. Ads are dying; payments are likely to supplant them just about everywhere. Medium was far ahead of the curve, as was Julien Genestoux with Unlock.

New Survey Reveals Dramatic Shift in Consumer Attitudes Towards Advertisements In Quarantine. I mean, let's be clear: ads suck, and they always have. In the pandemic, our tolerance for bullshit has gone way down.

HOWTO: Create an Architecture of Participation for your Open Source project. I've created two major open source projects and helped to build a third. This is a really great guide which I'm happy to endorse.

Compassionate action over empathy. On building with compassion instead of empathy. This is an important distinction that I need to internalize more. "I worry that when we fixate on empathy, we stay focused and stuck on whiteness and the guilt that millions are feeling for the first time. It’s one reason I’ll no longer recommend White Fragility. The whole book stays on white feelings without switching to privileged action."

Image "Cloaking" for Personal Privacy. "The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them." Super-smart tech.

Mischief managed. "How MSCHF managed to dominate the internet — with fun!" As I mentioned last month, I'm a fan.

Microsoft Is in Talks to Buy TikTok in U.S. Simultaneously, the President is talking about banning it and not allowing Microsoft to buy it. Apropos of nothing, Facebook is about to come out with a competitor called Reels. I'm sure the ban is completely unrelated.

My Oma taught me to make food. That wasn't exactly her intention: she had become too old and frail to chop vegetables and stand over a hot stove, so I did those things for her. I was her kitchen surrogate. Through her instructions and careful corrections, I learned the superficial mechanics of cooking, and the generations-deep love and attention that goes into making a meal. Indonesian food made with American ingredients. Spices and stories, stirred together. Love and sayur lodeh.

Every morning, more or less as soon as she woke up, she would begin to think about what we would eat for dinner. She would make sure we had the right ingredients, and get to work (and get me to work) hours in advance. Then we would prepare the meal, the two of us, and we would eat it all together. We would spend time together as a family in the evening. Then she would sleep, and the horrors of the concentration camp would creep into her dreams. Through the walls, I would hear her wail and cry throughout the night. Then she would wake up, and begin to think about what we would eat for dinner.

Turlock, California is a small town in the San Joaquin Valley, next door to Modesto, and about two hours west of San Francisco. The air is hot and thick with almond dust, and the last bookstore that sold more than Bibles closed years ago. When my parents moved there in 2002, every radio station played country music, and the roads were littered with disposable American flags. It was less than a year after 9/11, and the feverish patriotism that had followed the attacks was waning.

They had moved from Oxford, a university town where many of the buildings dated back to the 1500s. A steady stream of scholars from around the world made for a cosmopolitan culture, even if the institution itself was long set in its ways. The museums and art galleries were free and numerous. Countless languages could be heard on its streets. Tolkien and Radiohead were among its children. Turlock was a universe away.

But it was important to be there for Oma. Even then, the rising cost of living in the Bay Area was pushing my family out, and as they scattered to the wind, my parents moved in to provide her with a home. That's why, when I graduated from university in Edinburgh with an honors degree in Computer Science and a popular website under my belt, I found my way to Turlock, too.

My Opa died before I was born. He was a leader of the resistance against the Japanese in Indonesia, and before that, the founder of a bank. My Dad's whole family was captured; Opa was placed into a work camp, while Oma and her children were imprisoned separately.

The children survived through Oma's ingenuity. My Dad was a toddler; without her wiles and instincts, I simply wouldn't exist. While the guards weren't looking, she would gather snails from around the camp and secretly cook them. My aunt would quietly escape and swim through the sewers to gather more food. The Japanese guards were brutal. Torture and killings were commonplace in the camp. These were dangerous activities.

When they emigrated back to the Netherlands after the war, escaping the Indonesian National Revolution, their property had been stripped as part of a rejection of colonial rule. (The Dutch, it must be added, were themselves a brutal colonial power.) Eventually, they found their way to California, where they ran a gas station on Highway 12 outside of Sebastopol, and a second one in Bodega Bay, which had previously featured in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. They lived in a small mobile home, and built their lives up from scratch several times. Even when flood waters destroyed their possessions, washing away the physical evidence of their life before, they picked themselves up and started again.

My aunts' lives were interrupted; their educations permanently put on hold. Generations later, this trauma still ripples through my family, waves of hardship emanating from a central event.

My Dad was drafted during the Vietnam War era, and became a non-citizen member of the US Army. It was through this, and the GI Bill that he was able to take advantage of afterwards, that he was able to get an education. He earned degree after degree, and found himself in Berkeley, studying philosophy and leading anti-war protests. He met my mother, an upper middle class Ukrainian Jewish American from upstate New York, herself descended from a family that escaped pogroms and had been forced to build a new life from scratch.

When it became clear that they would have a child, they chose to get married and move to Europe. I was born in Rotterdam and raised in England, the product of the ebbs and flows of immigrants caught in the wake of world-changing events. The toddler who survived the concentration camp earned a PhD in Economics from Oxford.

I wouldn't exist without Oma. When they moved back to California to give her a place to live and become her carers, I was completely supportive. But beyond those first four months in Turlock, the closest place to the Bay Area my parents could afford, I didn't stay.

It was almost a decade later when my mother was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. The persistent cough that had dogged her for years took permanent hold. Her lungs began to scar up and shrivel, and she began to carry oxygen on her back. It became clear that she might not have much longer to live. There was no known cause and no known cure. It wasn't clear that a lung transplant would be possible, or that she would survive it.

So I moved to California to help look after my own parents, just as my parents had moved to look after my Oma. I wanted to be closer and help where I could. It ripped my life apart, and I found myself building it up again from two suitcases.

It's now been close to a decade. My mother often tells me what she wants me to make for dinner. I'll be her surrogate in the kitchen, mixing ingredients together to her instructions. The food I cook is made from spices and the history of all of us, our family and the families like ours, fractals of ebbs and flows of people that form the atoms of history and culture.

This is the world. We're all part of a constantly-changing map of humans caught up in each others' wake: twisting currents in the tide of generations. We are constantly moving and we have always been. All of us are immigrants. All of us belong. All of us survive through kindness and ingenuity, despite the forces of militarism, hate, and intolerance. The only constant is change. The only savior is love.

I'm dogfooding the set of questions developed for my recording life project.

1. What did you do today?

I've been spending a lot of time with my mother since the quarantine began. It happened to  coincide with her beginning to feel quite a bit worse; being able to work from home, by which I mean her home, has been a silver lining to the crisis.

The last nine years have been practice, in a way: because of the immunosuppression associated with getting a lung transplant, and because of the uncertainty over most of that time about whether I would come down with pulmonary fibrosis too, we've been rich with masks and hand sanitizer, and know what it's like to hunker down and hope for the best. Her health has been so recurrently poor that I've been on a rollercoaster of grief for the best part of a decade. You think that at some point it'll get better to deal with, but it never really does. It's like watching someone you love be endlessly tortured, hoping that at some point she'll feel better. And sometimes she does, and life is wonderful, which is just enough hope to carry on with.

The latest indignity has been internal bleeding - we don't yet know where, or how - which has left her weak and in a state of permanent discomfort. She's been too weak to go out for a walk, so we took her for a drive, instead: up through Guerneville and the Russian River, and then across through Bodega Bay, where the sun glittered on the Pacific Ocean. We drove through side streets and wondered what it would be like to have a home there, with a view of the water.

When we came back, she slept, but not before telling me she might like to eat shrimp, as long as it was from a sustainable source that didn't use slaves. Social justice is part of who she is. I hope I live up to her spirit, and it continues to live on in me.

Of course, I bought the shrimp. Later, I'll peel and clean them, and cook them with just a little bit of butter, parsely, and garlic.

2. What did you enjoy?

I loved driving down the California coastline with my parents. When we got back, Ma and I sat on the sofa together, and she rested against me, falling asleep while I gave her a head rub.

I shouldn't enjoy going to the supermarket, but I do. Usually I go to Oliver's Market, a local, employee-owned store. These days you need a mask to enter, and the signs make clear that the trolleys are sanitized. This time I splurged on some organic, local meat, as well as butter from France and Germany. I bought my dad some Fort Point KSA, which has become one of both of our favorite beers.

And before everything, I loved waking up in the crisp morning, making a cup of coffee, and reading the news (on my iPad). The air is clear and still, and everything feels peaceful. I can trick myself into thinking that life is good.

3. What did you find difficult?

It's hard to watch someone you love go through their own crisis. Both my parents are getting older, and have a harder time than they deserve. It's deeply unfair, and I'm virtually powerless; I can be present, but I can't fix any of it.

And then, of course, this wider crisis is hard for everyone. It's a difficult time.

I have some work to do that should really have been done on Friday, and there's a book I've been meaning to start for weeks. But in the end, I needed to take this weekend to decompress. I had high hopes for what I might be able to achieve during the quarantine, but they have not been matched by reality. I'm forgiving myself for this. The bar has been lowered from achieving a set of lofty goals to just getting through it all.

4. What has changed?

Ma's decline. Other than that, my life this weekend is not materially different to my life last weekend. I expect each week to be more or less the same until at least September. We just continue through the turbulence, ever onwards, until we land somewhere new.

I'm writing this from Santa Rosa, where my parents live. I've just sequestered myself in my bedroom / home office here, ready to start the workday. But this is an unprecedented period, and I wanted to record what life is actually like under this particular quarantine. We should be blogging now more than ever, to create a historican record beyond the politicians and the numbers reported in the newspapers. Those records are important, too, both in the moment and afterwards, but they miss the intimacies of everyday life. Here are some of the details from mine; I'd love to read yours.

I always spend Sundays, at the very least, with my parents. My mother had a double lung transplant in 2013 to escape the effects of pulmonary fibrosis, a set of symptoms that progressively scar up your lungs, that were caused by dyskeratosis congenita, a genetic condition. I moved to California two years prior. It took me five seconds to make the decision: all I needed to hear was that she had to use supplementary oxygen. I'm grateful that we've had all this extra time, although the side effects of the transplant have made this a difficult seven years for her. (The median post-transplant survival rate, by the way, is 5.8 years.)

My dad spent the first years of his life in a concentration camp in Indonesia, run by the Japanese. He moved to America as a teenager, built a life up completely from scratch, was drafted into the US Army, and discovered higher education through the GI Bill. He has a PhD in Economics and advanced law degrees.

They're both fighters, obviously. But because of my dad's age and my mother's condition, they are both considered high risk individuals. Yesterday, while we were discussing how we might adjust our lifestyles to cope with the current situation, over glasses of wine for me and my dad, Governor Newsom announced that everyone aged 65+ and with a sensitive condition should stay inside. My parents have still been largely self-sufficient, mostly because my dad's full-time job is taking care of my mother. This is the first formal indication that this dynamic needs to change.

My mother took herself off for a nap, which she does every afternoon, and I begrudgingly accommpanied my dad to Home Depot for bags of concrete (a retaining wall needs some support). The roads are relatively clear, and we didn't encounter another soul in the aisles of the store. I lifted the concrete, of course, and lifted it into the garage. I was glad for the workman's gloves that my dad keeps in the back of his car.

Driving up here on Sunday morning was easy. I keep a container of Clorox bleach wipes in the car with me. I wiped down the steering wheel and the controls, and then the handles on each of the doors. When I get gas, I wipe down the pump and its buttons. If I need to go to a store, I wipe myself down with Purell first, then get the groceries or whatever it is I need, and wipe myself down afterwards. I wash my hands for 20+ seconds as soon as I enter the house (and as soon as I got here, I wiped down the front door handle). I wash my hands regularly. They feel really clean, so at least there's that. Because my mother also uses the downstairs bathroom, we wipe it down with alcohol when we're finished with it. And then more hand-washing.

She hasn't been feeling well. It's nothing to do with Covid-19 - just a part of the rollercoaster of drug interactions and microbiome changes that affect her life - but I worry about the availability of ICU beds in the months ahead. Last year, she spent over a fifth of the year in hospital, some of it in intensive care. In Italy, nurses have needed to make decisions about who receives care and who doesn't. I don't want to think too hard about it.

I have cousins who still believe that all this is overblown, and that it's some kind of media conspiracy. I worry about their safety, but I also worry about the people who think like that around us. It's not just about the virus itself; it's about idiots. I don't want somebody to kill my parents because they were cavalier. I don't want someone to accidentally make me a vector, complicit in something terrible happening to them.

It's beautiful here. The sky is clear, and the air is peaceful. If I look to my right, I see deer grazing in a field across the road from the house. I'm eating well. The company is good, and we've been keeping ourselves entertained. But I haven't been sleeping well at all.

One. Today is my birthday. I’m forty-one years old. That one’s for free, phishers.

Two. My first memory is walking down a street in Amsterdam with my parents. A cobbler’s sign with wooden clogs hangs high above us. On street level, I loop and soar my red plastic aeroplane. A bigger kid with round, Dutch cheeks snatches it out of my hands and runs off with it. I haven’t yet begun to speak, and I watch as he disappears, unable to tell my parents what has happened.

Three. I like “two truths and a lie”. It’s a party game. You declare three “facts” about you, two of which are true, and the other people playing the game have to guess the lie. I always include this: when I was a small child, Albanian seamstresses lined up to pinch my cheeks, while my parents stood helplessly despite my tears, unwilling to cause an international incident. That one’s true.

Four. When I was eleven years old, my family spent the year in Durham, North Carolina. We house-swapped with an abortion doctor - a beautiful home, which would sometimes be egged, backing onto a lake full of catfish. We weren’t allowed to hang out in the front rooms of the house, just in case.

Five. We lived in Vienna when I was seven, which was also the year that Chernobyl blew. The weather forecast included rain and fallout numbers. Austria’s radioactivity was always mysteriously lower than the countries around it. We ate a lot of food imported from countries that were further away, like canned tuna and kiwi juice.

Six. I realized the other day that I’ve lived in the United States continuously for longer than I’ve continuously lived anywhere at any other time in my life. I don’t know how I feel about that.

Seven. I’m lying. I know exactly how I feel about that. It’s weird.

Eight. I don’t want to feel tethered down. But not wanting to feel tethered down is its own kind of ideological prison. Does that make sense?

Nine. I’ve learned to hate the question “where are you from?”. I always hedge and say something like: “it’s complicated, but I grew up in England.” Even that isn’t completely true. I used to say “I’m from the internet” as both a joke and a deflection, but the internet is tainted now. There’s no accepted answer because I don’t fit into any of those boxes.

Ten. Where am I from? I’m from the experiences that made me. The relationships and joy and struggle of being human. I’m not from a place. The place is irrelevant. You might as well ask me where I last bought a sandwich.

Eleven. I have a piece of paper that tells me I’m an American, among other things. Administratively, that’s true.

Twelve. I don’t know if I qualify as a real third culture kid. TCKs are people who grew up in a culture that was not theirs nor either of their parents. The definition technically fits. But often, third culture kids grew up in military families or were the children of international businesspeople, moving throughout their entire childhoods. My parents were perpetual students, but we didn’t move all that much in comparison.

Thirteen. Still, the culture I grew up in was my family’s, not my country’s (or any country’s). I don’t know how different that is to everyone else. Maybe it’s not really any different at all. But some people seem to feel rooted in what they consider to be their country of origin. They’re proud of it, even.

Fourteen. For me, home is people. It’s not a place.

Fifteen. I last bought a sandwich in downtown San Francisco, near where I work, in the pouring rain. I took it back and ate it at my desk, against all my own advice, scooping crumbs from my desk as my jeans slowly dried.

Sixteen. I’ve decided not to celebrate my birthday this year. Last year I threw a big party: live bands and an open bar in downtown Oakland. A lot more people came than I was expecting. It carried me through most of the year. I realized I have a lot of people in my life who I care about, and who care about me. That’s a good feeling: a deep affirmation. But it’s also deeply vulnerable, in a way.

Seventeen. My sandwich was the same order I used to get in Oxford, and in Edinburgh, and in Berkeley. Roast turkey with salad, mayo, mustard. It’s not the same sandwich, but it is. The idea of the sandwich is the same, even if the ingredients are drawn from different places and assembled in different ways. It’s identifiably the same turkey sandwich I always get, but my order has been reflected through the context of my current location and the experiences of the person making it. It’s an expression of my memory, sculpted through my present, and it’s an expression of the constellation of people who made the ingredients and assembled it.

Eighteen. I may be overthinking my lunch. Bear with me.

Nineteen. People are home, but life is a journey. The people you meet and know change as your life changes. The intersection of context and experience is in flux. Home isn’t a static idea. It’s always moving.

Twenty. They say that the human body refreshes itself roughly every seven years. Old cells die; new cells replace them. In reality, every part of your body is on a different cycle. In some parts of the body, it’s a day or two. Others last as long as a decade. And some cells stay with you your entire life. You’re a changing combination of old and new cells every living moment of every day, but your old body is never completely gone.

Twenty-one. The chromosomes in a cell are protected by their tips, which are called telomeres. Every time a cell divides, your telomeres get shorter. When they get too short, the cell enters a state called senescence, in which it can no longer divide. Eventually it stops functioning. 

Twenty-two. The ribonucleoprotein telomerase helps to protect your telomeres as your cells divide. In people with conditions that affect production of telomerase, their telomeres aren’t protected, and parts of their body where the cells refresh faster enter senescence sooner.

Twenty-three. Like, for example, my mother’s lungs.

Twenty-four. Most of my cells were made since I moved to California. Most of the body I had when I lived my life in England, and in Scotland, is gone.

Twenty-five. But some of it was with me when that boy stole my plane on the streets of Amsterdam, and when Chernobyl melted down, and when I had my first meaningful kiss, and when I thought I was going to die young.

Twenty-six. I’d say I’m not going to die young, but who really knows? The medical science today doesn’t think so. They have a theory about a genetic variant, which I was tested for, and don’t have. But the medical science tomorrow might disagree. 

Twenty-seven. And at any rate, there’s nothing to say that I won’t be hit by a bus, or contract a different terminal disease, or be caught in a freak accident. These things happen all the time. It would be wrong to cower in fear worrying about them, but it would also be wrong to put off all the joy and beauty of living until later. What I’ve learned is: you don’t know what’s going to happen. So while you can, live.

Twenty-eight. Deciding how to live is hard. There is more than one kind of sandwich.

Twenty-nine. What does it mean to live? People talk about living up to your potential, but how do you know what your potential is? Why do you have just one potential, instead of a galaxy of parallel potentials, or none? And who says you have to live up to any of them? It seems like a kind of trap: try and realize an externally-imposed vision of your life, in the process ignoring your own happiness and the beautiful serendipity of being human.

Thirty. I don’t want to adhere to someone else’s expectations of who I should be. I don’t want to put those same kinds of expectations on anyone else.

Thirty-one. I was never good at joining things. My friends were part of the Sea Scouts, and I didn’t want to be a part of it because they all wore a uniform, literally and figuratively. Another friend’s dad ran a children’s theater group, which I should have loved, but I was scared of it. In retrospect, I think I was scared of not fitting in, and of people laughing at me because I was different. There was precedent.

Thirty-two. Sometimes we do terrible things to each other, whether we want to or not. The best we can do is to be mindful, and to resist.

Thirty-three. I wish I could be braver, sometimes. I’m trying.

Thirty-four. Someone once told me that not wanting to be like everybody else was arrogance. By rejecting conformity, I was saying that those values weren’t good enough for me, and that I was saying I was better than people who chose to assimilate. I think about that a lot. I think about it differently: I just don’t think I’m very good at assimilation. And I don’t think anyone should have to be.

Thirty-five. I’m drawn to people who are unafraid to be themselves. Often they’re LGBTQIA+ and conformity would mean denying a fundamental truth about who they are. Or they’re a third culture kid who’s trying to find their own way. There are many other boxes to not fit into. It always takes bravery. It shouldn’t have to. But like I said, sometimes we do terrible things to each other.

Thirty-six. I value allyship more than anything. Home is people. Safe spaces are people, too. Not all people. But the right ones.

Thirty-seven. Just as cells divide, our lives and the essence of who we are are driven by change and flux. Just as my cells from a decade ago have been replaced, I’m a different person. My experiences, fears, loves, and values have refreshed, even if the core of me has been there my entire life.

Thirty-eight. We’re asked to make money, to collect material goods, to assimilate. Who is that in the interests of?

Thirty-nine. Home and safety are love are not to be found in your potential, or in conformity to what other people say you should aspire to. And we are not the same as the people in our memories. Telomerase protects cells as they refresh. Community - your family, your friends, your allies - protect the essence of who you are. 

Forty. Condos and Teslas and conspicuous consumption aren’t success. Wealth isn’t success. Safety is success, but more than that, success is happiness in your own skin, embracing life’s constant change and flux, and having a community that inspires and encourages you even when times are hard. As I turn forty-one, I’m grateful to have those things.

Forty-one. I love life. I love you. Onwards.

In 2013, my mother had a double lung transplant. The rules for recovery post-transplantation are that you can't have a bridge between you and the hospital; they don't want you to be stuck in traffic if you need emergency attention. So we rented an apartment in the Inner Sunset, where we all sat with Ma while she recovered. My Dad was there all the time as her primary carer, but nonetheless, sometimes I slept overnight on an air mattress.

As her speech returned to her and her energy increased, she told me that she wished she had a place to speak to other people who had been through the same ordeal. But at the same time, she wasn't comfortable sharing that kind of personal information on a platform like Facebook.

She was asleep a lot of the time. So in the evenings and weekends, I started to write that new platform for her. I gave it what I thought was a quirky but friendly name - idno - which spoke to identity and the id, but I also thought sounded friendly in a slightly foreign-to-everyone kind of way.

At the same time, I became involved in the IndieWeb community through Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks. And I realized that this platform could easily be modified to work with the microformats standards at the root of that movement. I built decentralized replies and commenting into the platform. That summer, I flew to IndieWebCamp Portland, and demonstrated the community's first decentralized event RSVPs. There, I met Erin Richey, and we began to collaborate on designs for the platform.

I had previously met Corey Ford, co-founder of Matter, and it turned out he was looking for startups as part of Matter's third cohort, which would begin in May 2014. Erin and I decided to collaborate (with the encouragement of Corey and Benjamin Evans, now the leader of AirBnb's anti-discrimination team) on turning Idno into a real startup. Here's the real pitch deck we used for our meeting (PDF link). The idea was to follow in WordPress's footsteps by creating a great centralized service as well as an open source, self-hosted platform for people that wanted it. For the business, the self-hosted platform would act as a marketing channel for the service; for the open source community, the business would fund development.

We were accepted into the third cohort, and quickly incorporated so we could take investment. Erin in particular felt that Idno was a crappy name, and undertook her own research on a shortlist of new ones. Her process involved figuring out which names were easily understandable if you just heard the name, and which could be easily spelled, using a battery of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Known was the very clear winner.

Everyone's favorite part of building a startup is choosing the logo. Here are a few I built that we rejected:

I think I thought the "kn-own" wordplay was cleverer than it was.

In the end, we went with this logo that Erin drew:

"It looks like the Circle K," my mother said. Still, we went with it, not least because the K in itself would work well as an icon.

I've written a lot over the years about the Matter process: suffice to say that it changed the way I think about products and startups forever, as well as, in many ways, my entire life.

While the open source community continued to grow, the startup itself didn't work as well as I had hoped, both as a business and as a high-functioning product team in its own right. Over the course of the five month program we chose to double down on individual websites over building communities, and then we decided to start with education as a go-to market. I don't think either of these things were the right decisions for a startup in retrospect, and as we presented at demo day on the stage of the Paley Center in New York, I could see disappointment written on a few faces. Here's that full pitch. If you read the initial pitch deck, you'll know that a lot changed - both for good and bad.

Known was half-acquired by Medium in a way that saw a return for Matter. (Because of Known's social media syndication capabilities, Medium did not want to acquire the software, and did not legally acquire the corporation.) One important role of a founder, which I learned from Evan Prodromou, is to be a good steward of investor value. In this case, it was important to me to also be a good steward of community value, and the deal with Medium allowed the community to continue to exist. Erin became acting CEO of the corporation and continued to work on the project. Eventually, I left Medium and joined Matter as its west coast Director of Investments. The work I did there encompasses the proudest moments of my professional career.

Fast forward to the end of the 2019, and Marcus Povey (a friend and frequent collaborator of mine, who also worked on Elgg) has picked up the community baton. Thanks to him, Known just released version 1.0. The community continues to grow. I just put together a draft roadmap for two further releases: one this summer, and one for the end of the year. These releases are free from any attempt to become a commercial entity or achieve sustainability; they're entirely designed to serve the community. They're all about strengthening the core platform, as well as increasing compatibility with the indieweb and the fediverse.

For me, the collaborative group functionality is still something I think about, but it won't be the focus of Known going forward. I'm considering an entirely new, simpler group platform (third time's a charm). Known is about creating a single stream of social content, in a way that you control, with your design and domain name. Its journey hasn't been a straight line. But I'm excited to see what the next year holds for it.

Books

This was another tough month, with three hospital visits for my mother. For this and a few other reasons, my anxiety was through the roof, and I often lay awake in bed with my heart racing. As has been true a few times this year, I found it hard to have the mental clarity to pick up a book and dive into it.

Over Thanksgiving I finally found that peace again, and as ever, I find offline reading to be meditative and nurturing.

Notable Articles

The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking". Just another example of how deeply warped by capitalism American society really is. "Ultimately, both the word jaywalking and the concept that pedestrians shouldn't walk freely on streets became so deeply entrenched that few people know this history."

New data makes it clear: Nonvoters handed Trump the presidency. Even if you hate the eventual candidate, if you have the ability, please vote in 2020.

Sea-level rise could flood hundreds of millions more than expected. "The new analysis found that about 110 million people are already living on land that falls below daily average high tides today, compared with an estimated 28 million people under the earlier models."

‘I’m gonna lose everything’. "In farm country, mental health experts say they’re seeing more suicides as families endure the worst period for U.S. agriculture in decades. Farm bankruptcies and loan delinquencies are rising, calamitous weather events are ruining crops, and profits are vanishing during Trump’s global trade disputes."

Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business. What could be more emblematic of our current era than a startup that takes blood from young people and transfuses it into the rich? It's not just its superficial ghoulishness: the power dynamics here are chilling.

Climate change deniers’ new battle front attacked. "Mann stressed that individual actions – eating less meat or avoiding air travel – were important in the battle against global warming. However, they should be seen as additional ways to combat global warming rather than as a substitute for policy reform."

The voice from our Nest camera threatened to steal our baby. And apparently these devices are commonly hacked.

Scaling in the presence of errors—don’t ignore them. Scaling is incredibly difficult, and even more so when you're dealing with a codebase that wasn't built with it in mind. Tef writes well, and I wish he was more prolific.

Everyone is admitting what they get paid to work in journalism. "A web producer for Wirecutter, the consumer review site now owned by the New York Times, makes just $45,000, according to the list. An editor at the same site with three years of experience has a salary of only $62,000. For a job based in New York City, that seems barely livable." Yes and: it encourages the otherwise-supported and independently wealthy to get into journalism, creating a demographic skew across the industry that seriously underrepresents working class points of view.

Open Source Code Will Survive the Apocalypse in an Arctic Cave. Enjoy reading through the Elgg and Known source code, future humans. Sorry about the mess.

Me and Monotropism: A unified theory of autism. My friend Fergus on his autism for the British Psychological Society. "If, as I’ve argued, monotropism provides a common underlying explanation for all the main features of autistic psychology, then autism is not nearly as mysterious as people tend to think. We do not need to rely on theories which explain only a few aspects of autistic cognition, with no convincing explanation for sensory hyper- and hypo-sensitivity, or the intensity of autistic interests."

“The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet” and the Cold War 2.0. "Silicon Valley imperialism also prefers to understand Eastern Europe as more corrupt than itself, playing into Cold War 2.0 mythologies. Yet from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (which revealed that Facebook was just as, if not more, culpable in skewing the 2016 US election results than Russia and its Guccifer 2.0), to ongoing abuses of artificial intelligence, machine learning, exploitation, and data colonialism being employed by Big Tech, global corruption’s technological epicenter is clearly not Romania."

The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Virtuoso Coder. A sad story told evocatively; this is more a tale of a community in Ohio than it is about tech.

Government Secrets: Why and How A Special Agent-Turned-Whistleblower Uncovered Controversial Border Surveillance Tactics. A reminder again. "“It seemed these people's rights were being infringed on,” Petonak explained. “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Everyone has rights. And just because I don't agree with your political stance on something, doesn't mean you don't have the same rights as every other person.”"

Uber plans to start audio-recording rides in the U.S. for safety. I'm of two minds. My knee-jerk reaction was that this is terrible - but having some protection against assault seems like a good idea. In many places, taxis do this automatically. The important thing is that you're told you're being recorded. (Of course, I don't trust Uber to do the right thing with these recordings.)

The Best Parenting Advice Is to Go Live in Europe. Parenting seems so much harder here, and like so many things, I don't understand why people seem to think it's okay.

Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for 'final solution'. "Baron Cohen also called for internet companies to be held responsible for their content. “It’s time to finally call these companies what they really are – the largest publishers in history. And here’s an idea for them: abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines and TV news do every day.”" Here are his words in full.

Weeknight Dinner Around the World. I loved this photo essay: 18 families around the world, sharing what they eat on a typical weeknight. Human and beautiful. (And hunger-inducing.)

Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights. From Amnesty International. "“We have already seen that Google and Facebook’s vast architecture for advertising is a potent weapon in the wrong hands. Not only can it be misused for political ends, with potentially disastrous consequences for society, but it allows all kinds of new exploitative advertising tactics such as preying on vulnerable people struggling with illness, mental health or addiction. Because these ads are tailored to us as individuals, they are hidden from public scrutiny,” said Kumi Naidoo."

White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won't act. "A Guardian analysis found longstanding Facebook pages for VDare, a white nationalist website focused on opposition to immigration; the Affirmative Right, a rebranding of Richard Spencer’s blog Alternative Right, which helped launch the “alt-right” movement; and American Free Press, a newsletter founded by the white supremacist Willis Carto, in addition to multiple pages associated with Red Ice TV. Also operating openly on the platform are two Holocaust denial organizations, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust and the Institute for Historical Review."

Dial Up! "How the Hmong diaspora uses the world’s most boring technology to make something weird and wonderful." This is so cool: underground radio for a diaspora community based on conference call technology.

The California DMV Is Making $50M a Year Selling Drivers’ Personal Information. "They included data broker LexisNexis and consumer credit reporting agency Experian. Motherboard also found DMVs sold information to private investigators, including those who are hired to find out if a spouse is cheating."

My devices are sending and receiving data every two seconds, sometimes even when I sleep. "When I decided to record every time my phone or laptop contacted a server on the internet, I knew I'd get a lot of data, but I honestly didn't think it would reveal nearly 300,000 requests in a single week." What have we built for ourselves?

Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition. "The planning materials envision a seamless system whereby a Ring owner would be automatically alerted when an individual deemed “suspicious” was captured in their camera’s frame, something described as a “suspicious activity prompt.”" What could possibly go wrong?

You can take my Dad’s tweets over my dead body. Twitter will start removing inactive accounts; that includes accounts owned by the deceased. "Big tech companies are good at a lot of things, but what they seem to lack is collective empathy and heart. When humans use the things you build and you stop treating them like humans, but rather like bits and bytes and revenue dollars, you’ve given your soul away. And maybe it’s just me getting older, but I’ve had about enough of it."

Pete Buttigieg Called Me. Here's What Happened. "But Pete Buttigieg listened, which is all you can ask a white man to do." A remarkable piece of writing.

Decolonizing Thanksgiving: A Toolkit for Combatting Racism in Schools. "By taking a decolonizing approach to teaching about Thanksgiving, teachers and families reject the myths of Thanksgiving and harmful stereotypes about Native peoples." Some great resources that all of us can use. I'm excited that these are the kinds of conversations we're having.

What keeps us going. 100 quotes from a cross-section of Americans on where they find meaning in life. I found this fascinating and very often alien: very often less relatable than I expected. But it's a strong portrait of a country in flux, with its anxieties written on its sleeve.

The Social Subsidy of Angel Investing. I think this cuts to the core of what makes fundraising in the Bay Area different, but I also think it's a problem. Angel investing has become a mark of social status. "In San Francisco, it’s angel investing. Other than founding a successful startup yourself, there’s not much higher-status in the Bay Area than backing founders that go on to build Uber or Stripe."

The Power is Running: A Memoir of N30. "On November 30, 1999, tens of thousands of anarchists, indigenous people, ecologists, union organizers, and other foes of tyranny converged in Seattle, Washington from around the world to blockade and shut down the summit of the World Trade Organization. The result was one of the era’s most inspiring victories against global capitalism, demonstrating the effectiveness of direct action and casting light on the machinations of the WTO." A first-hand account of that day.

Why we need to preserve black spaces in Detroit. "Detroiters are not opposed to economic development and revitalization; we're opposed to feeling uninvited in our own home. We're opposed to being told "no" for decades, for everything from mortgages to home improvement loans to development dollars, only to see that once you carve out a few portions where there are fewer of us, the property values suddenly rise."

Previously

Here's what I read in October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, and January.