Werd I/O

As part of The 19th’s non-denominational end-of-year celebration, we were asked what we were leaving behind in 2022. I gave an answer about corporate social media and Instagram in particular, but on reflection, there’s a lot more I want to leave behind.

Year ends are both arbitrary and not: a day like any other, but also, genuinely the end of our calendar and the verge of a start to a new blank page. So in that spirit of reflection and new beginnings, these are the things I’d like to leave behind as 2022 disappears behind us.

If you’re looking for an overarching theme: my aim is to become more values-led and to do a better job of standing up for what I believe in, which is somewhere I’ve sometimes been severely lacking.

Corporate social media (and Instagram in particular)

I really do want to do this, and soon. Leaving Twitter was a complete success for me: I found a much richer community in the fediverse. It certainly has some major problems to sort out, most notably that amateur instance-owners often don’t have a working understanding of social power dynamics and what racism, homophobia, and misogyny really are. I can’t gloss over those. But these feel surmountable, and conversations I’ve had with folks who may be starting instances in the new year make me feel hopeful. (For one thing, instances can be owned by the communities they support, which is clearly not the case for any large-scale corporate social media silo.)

Instagram and Facebook, maybe ironically, are my last big hold-outs. I was never a big user until I moved to the US when they became the main way I keep in touch with my friends back in Britain, and my family all over the world. But of course, that’s the gameplan: Facebook and Instagram are collectively the world’s largest peer pressure engine. And given the company’s complicity in undermining elections, facilitating genocides, algorithmically causing teen suicides, and potentially much more, I don’t want to participate anymore. Not with random pictures about my day; certainly not with pictures of my baby.

I’ve tried to leave several times, but I missed the community - which, to be specific, is the people I love but rarely get to see. But this year has been different, and I have a lot of hope for Pixelfed alongside Mastodon as ways to stay in touch without feeding the beast. (I don’t think either platform will be the final form of the fediverse, by the way, but I think they’re good enough to get going with.) Obviously, I think all of you should start blogs, too, but I understand that the barrier to entry is much higher, and not everyone thinks it’s fun to sit in front of their computer and write (or read) reflective essays.

So in 2023, I’ll keep sharing on social media, but I’ll do it on my terms, in a way that doesn’t add to the profits or network effects of a company I despise.

And no, the answer isn’t corporate alternatives like Post. It’s a nonsense solution built for people who don’t want to be challenged and I won’t engage any longer.

Helplessness

I don’t exactly know how to headline this section, but this is the big one. It could easily be called “unassertiveness” or “acquiescence”, but those ideas don’t quite cover it. They’re right, but they’re a subset of the whole.

A lot of people have to deal with a lot of things. I’ve been lucky in my life and I’m aware that I live with a lot of privilege. But I’ve also found the last few years to be very challenging personally.

In lots of ways, I’m still dealing with the loss of my mother. Her loss in itself is a crater. We cared for her for over a decade, through pulmonary fibrosis, a double lung transplant, and an intense aftermath brought about by drugs that both kept her alive and slowly killed her. I uprooted my life and moved thousands of miles to be with her. I still have flashbacks to the day of her transplant and lots beyond; she endured torture after torture after torture because, in her words, she wasn’t ready to leave us.

I used to cry and express emotion freely. I haven’t been able to do that since. Part of me is still numb; a lot of me is still grieving and adapting.

Before all that, I already suffered from deeply low self-esteem. I’ve contemplated ending my life and have made a plan a few times. Self-loathing informed my personality, and I gained a reputation for being kind in part by not being a good steward of my own boundaries. I prioritized other peoples’ needs over mine because I considered them to be much more important.

I hated conflict. I still hate conflict. The idea of someone yelling at me is scary as shit to me. It gives me a knot in my stomach. I want everyone to be happy and harmonious. Of course, in a lot of situations, everybody can’t be happy and harmonious. And if you start optimizing for harmony instead of boundaries and values, you can very easily stop standing up for the right thing.

We can debate about whether that’s a good way to look at the world or not, but the combination of a predilection for negative self-talk and a major family crisis established a pattern where I treated the world as something that happened to me rather than something I could affect. I likened it all to a turbulent flight where you just sit back and strap in, because what else can you do?

And, indeed, I stopped fighting as hard as I should have for the right thing, and I hurt people I care about by not sticking to my values.

Here’s what else you can do: you can pilot the fucking plane. It’s not as easy, but it’s often right.

When people describe me as nice or kind, which they do from time to time, I now bristle internally. It’s always intended as a compliment, but I know what has led to that, and what it allows. It’s a giant character flaw on top of a giant character flaw. It’s not just that I want to leave it behind in 2023: I have to, both for my own sanity, and for the people I care about.

This is hard for me. It’s much easier said than done. I’m having a physical stress response just typing this entry. And people who have come to depend on my acquiescence may be surprised when I don’t. But who wants to live their whole life rolling over? Especially when being compliant can turn you into a far worse person.

Related:

Tolerating parochialism

There are a lot of small-minded people in the world. For them, parochialism and xenophobia are default positions, even if they don’t realize that this is their worldview.

My full name is Benjamin Otto Werdmuller von Elgg. That might sound alien to you - surprisingly Germanic, maybe. Certainly, quite a few people have told me so, or even gone so far as to make fun of it. But it’s only funny-sounding because it sounds like it comes from somewhere else. It’s a kind of othering that’s rooted in quiet, pervasive xenophobia. It’s only the slightest sliver of non-assimilation, but that’s already too much for some people. (And, of course, I understand that this is just a fraction of the microaggressions that people of color suffer through.)

I can take it, of course, but that’s also because, as discussed, I’ve taken to burying my own needs. Where this stops hard is when the same thing is done to my child. You do not get to diminish my baby’s heritage or focus on one part of it - the white North American part, for example - as being more important than the others.

A version of this parochialism can also be found in the commonly-held but discriminatory belief that people should be happy with what they’re given. This sounds lovely until you examine it for just a fraction of a second: should people involved in civil rights or community justice movements just be happy with what they’ve been given? And given by whom? Isn’t it more equitable to support people who stand up for what’s right and fight for more inclusivity and a better life for everyone? What does not wanting that say about someone?

Let alone more overtly exclusionary stances like being anti-immigration, pro-nationalism, or pro-empire, including caring about people variably based on where they come from or expecting the world to conform to mainstream American values. They’re all harmful and they’re all tiresome. It’s a big, connected world full of beautifully varied, diverse humans and amazing places with incredible cultures, and I’m not sure I need people who find that idea challenging, scary, or in any way bad in my life.

You are what you tolerate. Enough.

Pandemic denial

It’s still happening. I’m still wearing a mask. Onwards.

Not having time for myself

I mean, there’s a certain amount of time pressure that’s created when you have a four-month-old baby. I don’t begrudge the time I spend with him at all.

But this year I read far fewer books; I spent less time writing than I intended; I did less exercise; my therapist dropped out to have her own baby and I didn’t take the time to find another one; I didn’t spend enough time with people I care about. In other words, I neglected myself, because (here’s an ongoing pattern) I didn’t give myself a high enough priority.

My needs are important, and the better I feel, the better I can show up for the people around me and the things I care about. I can be a better person. There is always something or someone that needs my attention, and there always will be. And although I need to also prioritize my baby, I need to give myself space, and do a better job of holding onto my boundaries so I can live more proactively and do the things I think are important.

And maybe that’s the theme. I need to not let go of myself, and I need to hold my needs and my values as if they’re actually important to me. They are important to me. And in 2023, I don’t want to leave myself - or the people I care about - behind.

I’m not exactly sure why we celebrate Christmas rather than Hanukkah: we’re a secular family with roots in both traditions. It’s possible that being in Northern Europe (and for my parents, North America before that) just made Christmas the easy default. Christian hegemony is another reason why defaults really matter: the reason Christianity is culturally centered in these places has a long and violent history, often at the expense of the people I’m descended from.

When my great grandfather arrived in the US in earnest, the White Army’s pogroms in Ukraine behind him, he chose to live secularly, down to shortening his last name to Anglicize it. Although it fell short of pogroms, America was not a welcoming place for Jews. Between the Klan, Henry Ford, the mass media, and associations of Jews with the bolsheviks, the interwar period was particularly hostile.

As I raise my child today, a hundred years later, it’s still not a welcoming place. A quarter of hiring managers don’t want to further Jewish candidates because “Jews have too much power and control”. I’ve personally found myself in conversations about why Kanye West - a Hitler fan - is supposedly in the right. Even among supposedly inclusive people, surprising old tropes about Jews are sometimes repeated as fact. I’ve also been told, quite politely, many times, that I’m going to Hell because I wasn’t baptized.

All of which makes me want to reclaim that Jewish heritage both for myself and for my baby. The answer here isn’t one or the other: it’s a “yes and” approach. His mother has a Christian heritage; mine includes Christianity and Judaism, as well as strong roots in the largest Muslim nation in the world. It’s also complicated for me, because, to be clear, I don’t believe in any higher power. I’m interested in holding onto the cultural traditions and the sense of belonging of the people who led to me, and to my baby; I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) assimilate into a faith I don’t hold.

I suppose really what I want is to feel more connected to my ancestors. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted when I was younger: I wanted to be my own person, undefined by someone else’s actions or traditions. My perspective has changed slightly to one of wanting to understand the traditions and beliefs of my ancestors, and perpetuate a sense of belonging to something other than an established cookie-cutter default. I want my child to feel more connected than I was; not so much to believing in a deity, but to who came before him, and their struggles.

I have a piece in Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2023:

The current landscape makes clear what has always been true: On the internet, nothing lasts forever. The most resilient choice is always the one that allows you to own your relationships with your audience and directly build community with the people who care about your work. That way, when a platform inevitably disappears, your relationship with your community remains intact.

I’m proud of it and stand by its advice.

In the same collection, my colleague Errin Haines also has a piece:

The 2024 election is also a new opportunity to challenge conventional editorial decisions about who voters are, what they look like, and what matters to them, their families and their communities. For too long, our default setting as journalists for those who have power (and this includes voters) has been white, cisgender, and male. Nearly 60 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, there is still much progress to be made to make real the promise of “one person, one vote” in our democracy.

I hope newsrooms take note.

As always, the whole collection is worth reading.

I’ve decided to stop writing about Twitter as of tonight. I’ll pour one out if the site dies or if it changes hands to a stable, ethical custodian, but for now, my commitment to not posting on the platform extends to not posting about the platform.

It’s clear that Musk is using the Trump communications playbook - own the conversation by any means necessary - and it’s all too easy to play along. So, enough.

Instead: what can we do that’s better? What should we build together?

What am I enjoying lately? What’s interesting and worth talking about in a productive way? How am I feeling? What kind of future do I want to see for me and all of us?

Onwards. Seriously.

Hours after enacting a policy to prevent users from linking to outside platforms, Twitter has reversed it and deleted the page from the policy website.

Among other laws this policy broke, it fell afoul of the European Union Digital Markets Act, which went into force in November. The fines for breaking this are steep:

Also, the EC will be able to impose penalties and fines of up to 10% of a company’s worldwide annual turnover and up to 20% of such turnover in the event of repeated infringements.

Maybe someone pointed that out to Musk, because it was all gone by dinnertime.

Meanwhile, he’s asked if he should step down as CEO in a Twitter poll, which at the time of writing he’s losing by a lot. Various people who should absolutely not be given the reigns have asked to be given the reigns. Maybe they should just run it like the Swedish Twitter account and cycle through a new CEO every month?

Updated: Twitter rescinded the policy the same day.

Twitter has banned linking to your profile on other social networks. What a completely pathetic, counterproductive policy.

Twitter can’t ban linking to any external website, so here’s the simple workaround:

• Make a page on your personal website with all your social profiles
• Link to that instead of directly to your profiles

What this policy breaks more readily is tools that let you find your existing Twitter connections on Mastodon. Perhaps this is an opportunity to rebuild a social graph from first principles, or to use other mechanisms to find your friends.

As a reminder, you can find my profiles on my homepage.

I strongly agree with Isaac Schlueter’s thoughts on funding open source software:

There are a few pitfalls that I see many of these ideas fall into, all of which seem reasonable, but lead to failure:

1. A focus on "donations" and "community" as the ideological framing.
2. A focus on getting newcomers introduced to OSS and successful.
3. Marketing primarily to developers as the consumers of the products (ie, the ones paying money).
4. Overall, making payment optional, or for something other than use of the OSS products (eg, consulting, support, etc).

I thought about going through these in turn, but really, the fourth bullet point is the key one. Don’t make it optional. If your solution is a nice-to-have or depends on altruism in some way, it’s dead in the water. People who can pay should have to pay. It’s the only way to guarantee an income.

I also think I’d add a fifth bullet: conflating all open source software into one category. Clearly, an open source encryption library designed for use as part of an application is a different kind of software to, say, WordPress. Both of the high-use open source projects I’ve co-founded, Elgg and Known, have fit into that latter category, and I don’t have a good solution for it. Even WordPress struggled financially until it figured out how to (1) sell anti-spam solutions, (2) become a custom page-builder for agencies.

It’s also a mistake to try and solve the open source funding problems in all domains at once. There are too many variables; there’s too much to consider. How can you possibly create a business model that covers all software libraries?

So let’s not. Let’s focus our attention on one particular place.

Let’s focus on GitHub.

GitHub, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, is the largest repository of open source software in the world. It has $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and 90M active users. Most projects use it as their hub.

If you’re building software as part of an enterprise, you care about picking high-quality, well-maintained libraries, and you care about security. You might want to pass a SOC audit and demonstrate that you pay attention to library updates.

If I’m an open source developer, I probably want to have the resources to be able to spend more time working on my project, and I probably want people to use what I’ve built.

Imagine you could opt into a GitHub program for each open source repository you build. You pick one of a few approved licenses; you commit to updating the library and keeping on top of issues that people file; you agree to take part in a security bug bounty program. In turn, as long as you fix any disclosed security issues within a reasonable period and don’t let the library go unmaintained, you receive funds for every enterprise GitHub user that uses your library, GitHub will add a verified icon next to your repository name, and it will promote your library to potential paying users.

This won’t please open source purists. But in this scheme, all code will remain open for anyone to use. Enterprise GitHub users will continue to pay their existing fees, and developers will pay nothing to take part, and potentially make money. GitHub, meanwhile, gets higher quality open source code in the process, will see more development activity on its site, and can make a compelling sales pitch to gain more enterprise customers.

Over time, this might lead to GitHub developing a new license where corporate users must pay for an enterprise subscription. I don’t see that as necessarily a bad thing, as long as personal, educational, and nonprofit users can continue to use the code. While fully free software has been broadly beneficial to society, it has too often led to financial gain for large companies at the expense of individual developers. It also has led to a demographic problem where only a very narrow set of people (wealthy white men, generally) can afford to build open source software, while it is often used as part of a hiring assessment process.

There’s a more equitable middle ground where the source can be open but the use is not free for those who can afford to pay. Dare I say it: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

The Guardian on the future of TV:

The plan, after years of rumour, is for all TV output to be available online only within the next 10 years or so. Broadcast channels, with their daily line-up of shows, are doomed. Programmes (originally so-called because they were “programmed”) will come into our homes as streamed, branded products, rather than being beamed to viewers on a pre-ordained timetable.

This has previously been confirmed by the BBC:

The BBC is preparing to shut down its traditional television and radio broadcasts as it becomes an online-only service over the next decade, according to the director general, Tim Davie.

In the UK two years ago, 97% of households had access to the internet. The average cost is £30 a month, which incidentally nets out at just under half of the annual license fee British antenna owners have traditionally had to pay to gain access to broadcast television. Of course, if the license fee goes away, which it may well do in a streaming-only context, the net cost is lower. And subsidies are available to pay for the cost.

Here in the US, that number was only 85% - a decrease from a year previously. Even that is an underreported statistic: many of those internet connections are terrible. Research from Microsoft indicates that over 163 million Americans don’t have broadband internet access. The average cost is around $61 a month. With no BBC iPlayer in sight, Americans then have to pay eye-watering fees to get TV access: YouTube TV, for example, is $65 a month. Considering the average US mobile phone bill is an absurd $114 per month, Americans are wildly overpaying for data, putting it far out of reach of a lot of ordinary people.

Will this picture have changed much in ten years? It’s hard to see how without a lot of legislation. ISPs are not incentivized to lower prices, particularly considering significant local monopolies:

In the US, however, just a few big companies, often without overlap, control much of the telecom industry, and the result is high prices and uneven connectivity. […] “Broadly speaking, over the last 20 years in the US, we see profits of incumbents becoming more persistent, because they are less challenged, their market share has become both larger and more stable, and at the same time, we see a lot of lobbying by incumbents, in particular to get their mergers approved or to protect their rents,” [NYU economist Thomas] Philippon told me.

There’s a lot to be gained by television moving to an internet-only standard. Access will no longer be governed by spectrum auctions or cable providers: theoretically, any organization will be able to create a channel and stand on more or less equal footing. The days of bundled cable channels - get two that you want and eighty that you don’t - will finally go away.

But for this to work, access to the internet must be made available to all. That means creating more competition in local broadband markets (or nationalizing the lot, but hell will freeze over first), ensuring that everybody has a good standard of connection, protecting net neutrality, and radically lowering prices.

If one happens without the other, we’ll create a giant information divide that will further erode democracy. Effectively, only the relatively wealthy will have access to the news. News deserts already reduce democratic participation and increase corruption:

“We already live in a polarized country, and part of that polarization stems from our digital divide and our local-news divide,” [researcher into news deserts Penelope Muse Abernathy] told me. “We have to think about how we reach people who aren’t digitally connected, and how we can support efforts that get beyond the city.”

A further move to the internet without ensuring everyone can use it will compound that problem. Without intervention, that’s likely to be exactly what happens.

This guy:

Musk’s tweet was published just after he was booed off stage at a Dave Chappelle gig. Chappelle’s transphobic material is hardly on the social justice end of the rhetorical spectrum, so it’s more about hurt feelings than substance.

Anyway. “Woke” was originally about being aware of racial subjugation, and its modern-day usage usually relates to awareness of social power imbalances around race lines. Which are not imaginary and hold entire communities back.

So, just for the record, it’s not a “mind virus”, it’s a civil rights movement, and in my view, it must succeed or nothing else matters. The goal has to be a more equal, inclusive, and educated world. I will leave considering what opposition to that idea says about a person up to the reader.

Thinking through a “share with Mastodon” button that anyone could embed on a website. It’s a harder problem than a “share with Twitter” button, because there’s no one central host, and it would be ideal to avoid creating a central location to handle these requests. (Mastodon is decentralized, after all.)

As a bonus, I think it would work for indieweb or any other decentralized social platform. Maybe any social platform at all?

This would all be easier if web intents had stuck around. Nonetheless, here’s how it might work. Let’s call it “microshare”, to sit alongside micropub:

1. User clicks button on page.
2. JS on the page detects whether the web+social URI scheme has been registered (I wish this was easier, but you can do this by making an asynchronous request and waiting for it to succeed or fail).
3. If it has, great! Just forward the user to that URI.
4. If not, ask the user what the domain of their social profile is.
5. JS (or a back-end server process) goes and fetches that base URL and looks for either a microshare metatag or an HTTP header of the form Link: <https://example.com/microshare>;; rel="microshare". (Mastodon etc would need to support this endpoint and discovery of same.)
6. If the endpoint exists, the browser opens a new tab and forwards the user to that URI with additional text and url URL string parameters populated with the name and the URL of the page being shared respectively.
7. This new page contains a button to register the URI as the handler for the web+social URI scheme. It may also either prompt the user to log in, or, if they’re already logged in, share to that social platform, with the text and URL pre-filled into the form.

There are a few issues here that I’d like to iterate on: I wish URI scheme handling and detection was easier in a browser, for one. Secondly, there’s a potential phishing attack where a malicious website could show a fake login page and harvest someone’s login credentials.

Still, what I like about it is that it uses the web’s existing capabilities and doesn’t enforce a central domain handler (or even a domain as a shim). While it seems more convoluted than a standard href link (and it is), it can be achieved on publisher websites with just a few lines of JavaScript.

I’m sure I’ve missed something important, but I wanted to kick this off as a first step. Let me know what you think!

In the grand tradition of tech people barely doing something and then turning around and giving advice as if they’re experts, I thought I’d write up some of the things I’ve learned being the parent of a three-and-a-half-month-old baby. If you’re about to be a parent, you might find this useful. If you’re already a parent, you might disagree with me. And if you don’t want to have kids or think that being a parent is a long way off for you, this might reinforce your position. As always, your mileage may vary.

It’s jazz. Jazz musicians watch each other carefully throughout their performances. There are rules that dictate how they hand off to each other, and what they play when they do - but so much is also responsive, emotionally driven, and expressive. You can be very informed; you can learn techniques; you can build routines. But the number one lesson is to listen to what your child is telling you, implicitly and explicitly. Just like everything else in life, if you try and play rote from the textbook, you won’t do well. The core skill in parenting (and most things) is empathy.

Gadgets are a crutch. There is, of course, a whole industry of people trying to sell you things to help your baby sleep or make them smarter or healthier. We have a Snoo, a kind of robot crib that responsively rocks your baby to sleep. I thought it was miraculous until one day we didn’t use it and he both fell and stayed asleep just fine. There are white noise machines and apps to quantify your baby’s feeds and diaper changes. All of it just increases your anxiety and gives you a reason to think you’re a bad parent (often so you can buy more products from the app developer). Again: the rule is to be attentive to your baby.

The advice changes and will change again. The advice parents were given when I was a baby is not the same as the advice we’re given now. Older parents look at swaddling, for example, with horror: you’re straight-jacketing your baby! Newer parents (I think rightly) think of letting babies cry it out as tantamount to abuse. Some advice was right; some was wrong. The advice we’re being given this year is guaranteed to be outdated ten years from now.

Influencer parents are the devil. There are always people who try to make their living looking like perfect parents online. It’s also always true that every baby is different and different parents have different difficulties. Just as Instagram is dangerous for a teenager’s body image, it can convey harmful messages about how mothers in particular should act.

Invest in sleepers with zips and stretchy sleeves. You’ll thank me later.

Bottles are fine. There’s so much pressure on mothers to exclusively breastfeed. It’s sometimes impossible for lots of different reasons, from contextual to biological to personal choice. Breast milk is the healthiest thing for a baby to drink - no question. But sometimes formula is okay, and whatever’s being fed, a bottle is just fine. I like bottle-feeding: because I don’t lactate, it means I get to be an active participant in feeding my child.

Sexism is endemic. A nurse - a nurse! - at our hospital congratulated us on having a boy. (“I’ve only been able to have girls.”) Another apologized to me because I would need to hold or feed the baby sometimes. So many people think that parenting is women’s work. There is criticism of mothers who want to go back to work; there is criticism of fathers who want to be active parents. I am a fully-active parent and I resent this message enormously. This is yet another realm where traditional gender roles and societal traditions, in general, are not helpful.

You must also take care of yourself. I spent the first month not doing any exercise, eating a bunch of ice cream, and waking up every two hours. It was horrible and I felt like trash all the time. Later I cut out the ice cream and built going for a walk into my routine. It made a universe of difference. I still woke up very regularly, but the exercise and better diet made me feel like I had more energy.

Assume they can understand everything. My baby is a sponge. I’m certain he knows exactly what we’re saying all of the time. As much as cleaning poop off their onesies might be a pain, or as much as you’d like to not be feeding them at 3am, they’ve got to know how wonderful they are. There need to be smiles and good times. They don’t need to be neurotic at less than a year old - and they don’t need to pick up the idea that they’re a burden. They’re not a burden, after all! You can give your child reasons to go to therapy later on. I’m sure I will.

It’s a new baby every day. Babies regenerate, Doctor Who style. Their behavior changes radically, their body changes radically. (“How are your hands suddenly so big?” is a thing I’ve said multiple times.) They literally grow overnight. Enjoy the baby you have today and look forward to the one you’ll have tomorrow.

Treat your baby like they’re immunocompromised. A lot of people will expect you to be more social with your baby than you’re comfortable with. Don’t listen. They don’t have very functional immune systems in the first few months, and covid is very much back on the rise, and RSV is becoming a huge problem. It’s okay to be very cautious with your baby’s health. Keeping them alive is your main job now.

This is the single hardest thing I’ve ever done and hope to ever do. When people said that, I kind of assumed they meant spiritually or ethically. No. It’s really hard on every level. It takes everything you’ve got, every day. And it’s completely, 100% worth it.

Over on Medium, VP Content Scott Lamb asked:

We’re curious what you think. How do you think Medium should approach AI-generated content? What are good and bad examples of AI content? What are you concerned about? What are you excited about?

Here’s how I replied:

I think my biggest ask is actually on the corpus side of AI writing generation: allow me to prevent my writing from being used as part of an AI system. Companies like OpenAI need to agree to a robots.txt-style system to prevent ingestion that can be broadly used, and then Medium needs to apply it across the board.

Work needs to be done to fingerprint AI writing, but until then, I don't think it can be identified accurately, which means it will always fall through the cracks. Instead, poor quality work - and authors who consistently publish it - should not rise in recommendations.

I wonder if there's a case to be made for creating in-house community-positive AI tools so people aren't using spammy tools from elsewhere? For example, a tool that poses interesting questions and helps an amateur author write more comprehensive original work.

One of the most meaningful pieces of work I’ve been a part of this year was The 19th’s dashboard of what abortion laws look like in every state right now, which has been updated for seven months and counting.

The genesis of the idea came from The 19th’s data visuals reporter Jasmine Mithani, who, with the future of Roe v. Wade in the balance, wanted to provide a go-to way for anyone to see the current state of abortion legislation throughout the US. When Roe was overturned by the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision in June, this became vital: sometimes legislation was changing multiple times a day. For people who needed reproductive healthcare or who worked in the space, a resource was badly needed. For citizens and voters in the US, an understanding of how their country was changing off the back of a single court ruling was imperative.

Jasmine built an at-a-glance visualization. The editorial team rallied to continuously-update the page. In product and technology, we sidestepped away from our scheduled roadmap to build tools to more easily update the page, and to support visual elements that didn’t previously exist. We built components that could be re-used later: a toolkit for storytelling nationwide changes like the one we were experiencing.

This kind of work is an example of why I’m proud to work at The 19th. The United States is experiencing a period of unprecedented change, while many of the decisions made here have a profound impact on the rest of the world. Meanwhile, most news is reported by straight, white men, narrowing its lens on a specific demographic. The 19th’s reporters live all over the country and are predominantly women and people of color. (In an organization of over fifty people, I’m one of the only cis white men.) The 19th’s focus on high-quality journalism covering politics and policy through a gender lens has been a largely missing perspective. “You're one of the few publications that reports for me and not just about me,” a reader wrote in recently.

All the reporting at The 19th is made available under a Creative Commons license, and other news outlets are encouraged to republish it for free. That’s why you’ll often see our reporting in places like The Guardian, Teen Vogue, and USA Today. Because The 19th’s lens is unfortunately unique, this republishing policy allows stories that might not be reported elsewhere to find a wider audience. And we’re going to do more: a project I’m working on is to build an open source ecosystem for non-profit software development. Newsrooms do better when they collaborate.

We’re a non-profit startup with a small budget. We don’t have large teams, and nobody is earning VC-funded salaries. Our aim is to make a big impact with a lean operation, and so far it’s been working. We’re also transparent about where our money comes from: there are no anonymous donations. You can read about every single person who has funded us here.

Like other non-profit media, we run seasonal member drives to help expand this group. The ideal is that the majority of our funding should come from small donations from individuals. We’re not there yet - but maybe you can help? Even a recurring donation of $5 makes an enormous difference and helps make news media more diverse. (And, yes, like other non-profit media, if you donate past a certain threshold, you can get some well-designed swag like tote bags.)

Thanks for considering - and for reading. It’s a privilege to work on this problem with this team in the current moment. From the moment it launched, I was glad that The 19th exists - and I’m glad to be on the team.

Lots of people have been worried about deepfakes for a while, but I think the bigger, more pressing concern is detecting AI-generated text.

I’d love to be proven wrong on this hypothesis: the only real market for long-form AI text generation on the web is to generate spam. There are other use cases, for sure, but the people who will be buying and deploying the tech in the short term want to generate huge amounts of content at scale in order to trick people into looking at ads or buying ebooks.

Fingerprinting AI-generated content will allow it to be filtered from search engine results, email inboxes, store listings, and so on. While software providers might not want to remove this content entirely, it seems generally sensible to down-rank it in comparison to human-generated content. Fingerprinting will also be useful in educational settings to prevent AI-generated plagiarism, among other places.

Ironically, the best way to do this might be through AI: what better way to identify neural net output than a neural net itself? While this might lead to false positives, I’m not going to lose a whole lot of sleep about de-ranking content that reads a lot like the output from a software model. The outcome is the same: poor quality, mass produced content is de-emphasized in favor of insightful creativity from real people.

I do think AI has lots of positive uses: for example, I’ve been using DALL-E in my own creative endeavors. It’s a great drafting tool and a way to stimulate ideas. Visual AI tools are avenues for creative expression in their own right. But spam is a problem, and the incentives to create high-volume content for commercial gain are not going away. Previously creating it was human-limited; now it’s CPU-bound. That means any enterprising spammer with a cloud can flood the internet with content as part of an arbitrage scheme. That’s the kind of thing we need to protect ourselves against.

As an employee of a non-profit newsroom, I’m not supposed to do three things: make public partisan statements, donate to political parties or causes, or declare donations. (The latter is why I stopped my long-running Fairness Friday series of posts explaining which social justice cause I’d donated to each week. The donations have continued in private.)

I’m allowed to publicly support movements and advocate for communities, which is why you’ve seen statements from me on trans rights, and you might see me support unions, for example. But most often, I’ll point to links from elsewhere - mostly established news outlets - and simply quote them.

Over time, a picture of my beliefs and ethics certainly emerges. I think even if you’ve only been reading for a week, you’ve probably got a fairly good handle on who I am and what I care about.

Still, I’ve been wondering about listing a set of beliefs, This I Believe-style, specifically to call out my biases and potential blind spots, and also just so you can explicitly know where I’m coming from as a person and filter accordingly. On one hand, it would make it easier for readers to consider anything I write and share objectively, because you’d be more aware of my subjective lens. But on the other, I wonder if that also gives people ammunition to summarily reject an idea that could have merit because they disagree with some other position I hold.

What do you think? Should a blog’s posts stand for themselves, or is it useful to have deeper dives into a person’s belief system?

One of the things that makes me proud to work at The 19th is our equity lens that pervades everything we do. While it's most obvious in our reporting, it touches every aspect of the org.

I’ve been writing a technology assessment framework that we can use when we’re evaluating services, libraries, and technologies that we might want to buy or install for use at work. (This is different to the one we use for tech we may want to build ourselves.) I haven’t been able to find one out in the wild that considers ethics as part of its rubric, but I feel strongly that it’s appropriate.

As well as details you’d expect, like cost, resources needed, and timing, I’ve been considering how to evaluate the team.

These are the questions I'm asking about the team - a subset of the whole that addresses the real people you're building a relationship with when you use their products. I'd love your feedback on them. What would you ask? What am I missing?

If you’re using a similar rubric in your place of work, would you consider sharing it?

Who

Who is the team behind this technology or product?

Is it a startup, a volunteer, a non-profit, etc?

Equity

Is the team representative of the audience we seek to serve?

Has the team made statements or endorsements that might make members of our community feel unsafe? (For example, supporting a known hate group.)

Do the terms of service allow the team to work with hateful groups and do they already?

Privacy

Is the team a good steward of our community’s privacy?

Have there been any known privacy violations? (For example, misusing personal information.)

Has the team made statements or taken action that might cause us to question its commitment to privacy?

Security

How does the team ensure the product’s security?

Have there been any known security violations? (For example, leaked data or known hacks.)

Has the team made statements or taken action that might cause us to question its commitment to security?

Democracy

Has the team undermined or influenced free and fair elections in the US or elsewhere?

Has the team’s leadership endorsed erosion of democratic rights? (For example, rolling back voting or civil rights, or endorsing neo-monarchist movements.)

Sustainability

Does the team maintain a known environmental policy? (For example, does the datacenter run on renewable energy?)

Has the team made statements that deny the impact of climate change?

This is my monthly roundup of the articles and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for November, 2022.

Streaming

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Absolutely batshit. I loved (almost) every minute. Weird Al is a treasure and must be kept safe at all costs.

My Spotify Top Songs 2022. Spotify is a problematic platform, but I love this every year, and spend a lot of the next year listening to the playlist of top songs it makes for me. This is my playlist for 2022.

Notable Articles

AI

Wordcraft Writers Workshop. “Because the language model underpinning Wordcraft is trained on a large amount of internet data, standard archetypes and tropes are likely more heavily represented and therefore much more likely to be generated. Allison Parrish described this as AI being inherently conservative. Because the training data is captured at a particular moment in time, and trained on language scraped from the internet, these models have a static representation of the world and no innate capacity to progress past the data’s biases, blind spots, and shortcomings.”

4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything. “I envisioned a massive, alien object hovering over a long-abandoned Seattle, with a burning orange sky, and buildings overgrown as nature reclaimed the city. Later that night, I spent a few hours creating the following image.” Amazing.

Business

1 in 4 hiring managers say they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants. “26% of hiring managers say they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants; the top reason for negative bias is belief Jews have too much power and control […] Respondents also wrote in a number of derogatory comments regarding how they identify an individual as Jewish. These write-in responses included: “voice,” “mannerisms,” and “they are very frugal.”” Horrifying.

Is Elon Musk a bad boss? Ask Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter workers. “But there’s plenty in the public record. Personal attacks. Union busting. A casual attitude toward factory floor injuries and other health concerns. A dismissive approach to workplace racism. And an allegation involving a horse and sexual favors.”

Legal right to request remote working to be delivered by end of the year (in Ireland). “An amendment to the bill is now expected that will allow all workers to request remote working.” In Ireland right now but expect it everywhere soon.

Venture Capital Isn’t the Problem—It’s Venture Capitalists. “Investors are more likely to place their bets on companies led by founders with elite educational backgrounds and stacked resumes, when business-related factors such as the market sector the company belongs to have a much larger effect on its financial future.”

LLY Stock Dives — Taking Novo, Sanofi With It — After Fake Twitter Account Promises Free Insulin.Honestly the fact that this led to a stock dive just makes me really sad.

Climate

COP27: Sharp rise in fossil fuel industry delegates at climate summit. “Campaign group Global Witness found more than 600 people at the talks in Egypt are linked to fossil fuels. That’s more than the combined delegations from the 10 most climate-impacted countries.”

Facing a call for climate reparations, wealthy nations propose an insurance scheme. “Advocates for loss and damage warned that insurance schemes like those promised by Global Shield are an insufficient solution to loss and damage, and they worried that such programs will distract from the demand for separate direct funding.”

Oregon tried to publicize wildfire risk. The backlash was explosive. ““A lot of people were just, you know, shocked,” Chaisson told Grist. “The big thing that people think of is, you know, the worst-case scenario, which is losing your insurance and having your property taken away.”” Obvious room for benefits for people whose homes fall in high-risk zones.

Coding

Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks. “I’ve set up a new git scraper to track the number of users on known Mastodon instances over time.” Great little tutorial on gathering data and building a really interesting graph out of it.

Crypto

ConsenSys Under Fire for Collecting MetaMask Users’ Wallet and IP Addresses. ““When you use Infura as your default RPC provider in MetaMask, Infura will collect your IP address and your Ethereum wallet address when you send a transaction,” Consensys said.”

Stephen Diehl: Crypto is the ‘commoditisation of populist anger, gambling and crime’. “In my most empathetic reading of crypto investors, look at this country — how many young people feel that they have a chance of getting on the housing ladder? A lot of them feel that they need to invest in higher-risk assets because they need higher returns.”

Interview: Fallen crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried opens up about FTX, Alameda Research, and his regrets. “It was past midnight Bahamas time, where Bankman-Fried is reportedly still located, and we went back and forth on Twitter for more than an hour.” Remarkable interview.

FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad. “The problem was in its balance sheet, which was full of snakes, and its governance, which put all the snakes there.”

Culture

'Y'all,' that most Southern of Southernisms, is going mainstream – and it's about time. “My examples push “y’all” back 225 years before the citation in the “Oxford English Dictionary,” and they show that the word appeared first in England rather than the United States.” Wait, does this mean I can use y’all in my accent? Should I?

Books We Love. NPR’s annual list of recommended books is as extensive and as beautiful as ever.

Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In. “What readers, fans and scholars often note about Butler’s work is its predictive qualities: Her vision about the climate crisis, political and societal upheaval and the brutality and consequences of power hierarchies seems both sobering and prescient.” She was brilliant. And this tribute is beautifully done.

Democracy

Republicans doubled down on anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in the midterms. It wasn’t a winning platform.“According to exit polling from LGBTQ+ advocacy organization the Human Rights Campaign and data analytics firm Catalyst, voters ranked LGBTQ+ issues as low on their list of priorities for 2022. More than half (52 percent) chose inflation, and 29 percent picked abortion. Transgender health care and participation in sports came in last on the list of issues with just 5 percent.”

‘People underestimated them’: Advocates for Black women in politics want the Democratic Party to learn from the midterms. “We need early investments for these Black women candidates – Black candidates in general – but especially for Black women, who we know receive less financial contributions than a White woman or a White man running for these positions.”

John Fetterman and Social Media: How His Campaign Built a Winning Strategy. “The entire time I was running this program, I was like, “This is going to be a presidential-[campaign] level team in the content we produce and money we raise and folks who organize.” I do think it will be an example for other campaigns. I hope what we do sets an example for the upcoming presidential cycle.”

Nick Fuentes Says the Results of the 2022 Elections Prove 'Why We Need a Dictatorship'. ““When you look at these things like abortion, it’s popular,” Fuentes added. “And you can thank the Jewish media for that. Abortion is popular, sodomy is popular, being gay is popular, being a feminist is popular, sex out of wedlock is popular, contraceptives—it’s all popular. That’s not to say it’s good. That’s not to say I like that. Popular means that people support it, which they do. It sucks, and it is what it is, but that’s why we need a dictatorship. That’s unironically why we need to get rid of all that. We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society.””

What the results of the midterms mean for women’s representation, by the numbers. “The number of women in Congress has stabilized, and next year a record-breaking number of women will serve as governor — including the first out lesbian governor in the country’s history.”

Democrats went all-in on abortion. For many, it worked. “The outcomes of these votes will drastically shape what abortion access looks like in the months and years to come.”

Progressive candidates score crucial wins in midterm elections. “With progressives growing their margins in Congress, regardless of the outcome of the remaining uncalled races, Democrats need to take note of the powerfully fought and won campaigns, driven by progressive ideals, that galvanized voters. This sends a clear message and roadmap that going into 2024 Democrats must lean into the popularity of the progressive platform, not write it off.”

Fetterman Beats Oz in Key Pennsylvania Senate Race. ““He leaned into his record as a criminal justice reformer and not away from it,” Corrigan said. “He’s brave and he was rewarded for it.””

U.S. Senate: Demings, Beasley fall short of wins in Florida and North Carolina. “It’s very disturbing that we would continue to have zero Black women senators for this next term. It’s another indicator that we are failing to be a truly democratic society.”

How Political Campaigns Use Your Phone’s Location to Target You. “Political operators have reportedly used these capabilities to target people based on church attendance, visits to specific government buildings, and as they attend political rallies. One firm even claims to have repeatedly signed up prominent campaigns wanting to target the “captive audience” in line to vote on election day, though it says it discontinued that product.”

Senator Wyden Asks State Dept. To Explain Why It’s Handing Out ‘Unfettered’ Access To Americans’ Passport Data. “The Department’s mission does include providing dozens of other government agencies with self-service access to 145 million American’s personal data. The Department has voluntarily taken on this role, and in doing so, prioritized the interests of other agencies over those of law-abiding Americans.”

Homeland Security Cops to Manufacturing Terrorists for Trump. “The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.”

How Is Slavery Still Legal? “What’s disturbing is that not only do the “tough on crime” types believe in prison slavery, but even liberals like Gavin Newsom can’t be counted on to oppose it. But it’s up to the rest of us, those with a functioning moral compass, to work to eradicate slavery once and for all.”

Health

Eli Lilly CEO says insulin tweet flap “probably” signals need to bring down cost. ““It probably highlights that we have more work to do to bring down the cost of insulin for more people,” Ricks said of the Twitter fury.” Amazing that this is what they needed.

Labor

Tech Workers Union Local 1010. This seems good.

NewsGuild-CWA strongly condemns judge and Starbucks for seeking messages between reporters and workers. “These union-busting tactics must end, and journalists’ communications with sources must be protected. Starbucks has already committed over 200 violations of the National Labor Relations Act.”

Media

Illustration.lol - Editorial illustrations from around the world. A really nice visual database of journalism illustration. Beautiful and inspiring.

How much press are you worth? “This website calculates your press value based on current reporting in America, to expose bias and to advocate for change.” I would be worth a below-average 17 stories if I went missing.

Post, the latest Twitter alternative, is betting big on micropayments for news. “Consumers have changed their behavior. They want to consume their news in their feed. And so, obviously, consumption from a feed does not work with subscription. And social media networks, with their advertising-based model, promote the worst in us because it works. I mean, the algorithms are don’t really care. They just, you know, try to achieve the engagement at any cost, right?” OK, but open, non-proprietary feed technology is available and widely used …

News Outlets Urge U.S. to Drop Charges Against Julian Assange. “In a joint open letter, The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País said the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent” that threatened to undermine the First Amendment and the freedom of the press. “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists,” the letter said. “If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.””

We Can't Depend on Platforms Anymore. “For a solid decade, many media operators thought they could build a sustainable business on the backs of the platforms. Those days are dying. Owned audiences are the future like they always should have been.” Spoiler alert: we never could depend on platforms.

Online mobs are now coming for student journalists. “Targeted online harassment has become a pervasive threat to newsrooms across the country. A 2019 survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists found that 85 percent of respondents believed their career had become less safe in the past five years and more than 70 percent said they experienced safety issues or threats as part of doing their job.”

The unbearable lightness of BuzzFeed. “In 2016, BuzzFeed stories posted on the platform had 329 million engagements; by 2018, that number had fallen to less than half. Last year, BuzzFeed posts received 29 million engagements, and this year is shaping up to be even worse.” I had no idea it had fallen so far.

Most media predicted a red wave. Here’s how The 19th got the election right. “The media missed the concerns and the motivations of many voters and failed to capture the full electorate. At The 19th, we remained focused on you.” I’m proud, as always, to work here.

Why Meta’s withdrawal from journalism will hurt local media companies. “Looking beyond LMA, any guesses on who is the largest funder of Report for America? That’s right. The Meta Journalism Project donated $6.5 million. I believe that’s a little more than 40% of the total raised to date. That means 120 reporters could go away if other funders don’t step up.” Repeat after me: don’t depend on Meta. For anything.

Farewell from Protocol. This makes me so sad. I really loved Protocol.

If You Want to Understand How Dangerous Elon Musk Is, Look Outside America. “Musk is right that the world needs a digital public square; unfortunately, he seems to have little idea that creating one involves balancing free speech against abuse, misinformation and government overreach.”

Media Companies Are Having Their Worst Year in Three Decades. “Advertising and affiliate fees are the two biggest revenue streams for most traditional media companies. Now they are both in secular decline.”

Society

What’s a Black life worth to insurance companies? “Black households were actually slightly more likely than white households to have life insurance — eight out of 10 Black households had some form of life insurance vs. seven out of 10 for whites. Yet even when incomes were similar, the median amount of life insurance coverage for white households was three times that of Black families — $150,000 vs. $50,000.”

CHARACTERISTICS - WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE. “While white supremacy culture affects us all, harms us all, and is toxic to us all, it does not affect, harm, and violate us in the same way. White supremacy targets and violates BIPOC people and communities with the intent to destroy them directly; white supremacy targets and violates white people with a persistent invitation to collude that will inevitably destroy their humanity.”

With no child tax credit and inflation on the rise, families are slipping back into poverty. “U.S. households are having to pay between $300 to $400 more each month compared to last year because of inflation. Food insecurity is rising once again. Now, advocates are pointing to a growing body of work that shows how low-income and marginalized families relied on the program to survive.”

Finding Affordable Child Care Has Never Been Harder. “America’s child-care infrastructure was broken before the pandemic, but the past few years have pushed it to the brink. Now, as more employers expect workers back in the office, a perfect storm of day-care closures, staffing shortages, and inflation have made finding affordable child care harder than ever.”

Doctor who provided abortion care to 10-year-old fights to protect medical records. “As a physician, I never imagined that I would be in the position to engage in a legal fight to protect the rights of women and girls to not have their private medical records released for political purposes. But nonetheless, I feel strongly that this fight — the fight for physicians to compassionately provide abortion care to every single person who needs their care and their patients to access safe, legal abortion care, free from fear of criminalization — is worth waging.”

Colorado Springs shooting shares eerie parallels with 1980 anti-LGBTQ+ massacre. “This past Saturday, 42 years to the day after the West Street shooting, five were murdered and 18 wounded at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ bar in Colorado Springs. A suspect, 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, is in custody and faces murder and hate crime charges. “These things don’t change,” Humm reflected. “I mean, the anti-gay atmosphere, anti-LGBTQ atmosphere is everywhere.””

Club Q shooting reshapes Trans Day of Remembrance for Colorado Springs community. “That the shooting took place on the evening before TDOR, a day honoring trans homicide victims, makes the tragedy even more painful, multiple advocacy groups said. They said the shooting is part of a bigger landscape of growing political attacks and harmful rhetoric aimed at trans people.”

How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence. “Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims.”

It Was a Bad Week for Billionaires With Delusions of Saving the World. “The money Mr. Bezos is now so magnanimously distributing was made through his dehumanizing labor practices, his tax avoidance, his influence peddling, his monopolistic power and other tactics that make him a cause of the problems of modern American life rather than a swashbuckling solution.”

Tech Titans Like Elon Musk Want to Save Earth by Having Tons of Children. “We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids.” Go ahead and tell me this isn’t white supremacy.

How I turned $15,000 into $1.2m during the pandemic – then lost it all. ““It’s about detachment,” my parents said in the end. “All the things in your life … you have to also be prepared to live without them.””

The Dangers of Context Collapse. “Context collapse itself is the phenomenon of highly-contextual information being used, purposefully or otherwise, in an ambiguous manner which leads to confusion.” Great post on a common rhetorical weapon.

Pasadena school becomes nation’s first named after Octavia Butler. “Everyone said, ’She’s a seer and she’s prescient, but she … just paid attention. She was always tuned into the climate crisis and doing research on that. It’s almost as if we’ve caught up with her finally.””

Military spouses bear the financial, logistical impact of frequent moves. “Manjarres, a nurse, said a lot of the household stress, including the moves, falls on her. Her husband’s high rank requires he leave for deployments regularly and for long periods of time, making it difficult for her to find employment at each of their stations, depending on the size of the military base and the needs of her growing children. Her husband missed her son’s whole first grade year, she said.”

Study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff. “43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list — applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard. That number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students, according to the study, with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories.” Clearly relevant in the context of revisiting affirmative action.

Startups

How to Build A Winning Paid Membership Program. “Chinese platforms have been experimenting with paid membership models for over a decade and offer new frameworks for the West to consider. They are also a great source of ideas for individual features that are universal.”

Technology

Mastodon Isn't Just A Replacement For Twitter. “The age of Big Social may be ending, as advertisers shift to platforms like TikTok and streaming video that are more like entertainment channels. For many reasons, we say: good riddance. The damage commercial social media has done to politics, relationships and the fabric of society needs undoing. As media scholar Victor Pickard suggests, “Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.””

Thinking about taking your computer to the repair shop? Be very afraid. “Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those shops also copied data onto a personal device. Devices belonging to females were more likely to be snooped on, and that snooping tended to seek more sensitive data, including both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, documents, and financial information.”

PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet. “If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way. Consign that app to oblivion.”

Defederation and governance processes. “To “keep things the way they are” is always an option, never the default. Framing this option as a default position introduces a significant conservative bias — listing it as an option removes this bias and keeps a collective evolutionary.” Some great thoughts on collective decision-making that pertain directly to open source.

How to Weave the Artisan Web. “Now, why should we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web? Oh, I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations?”

The cost of your cat pictures. “Anyone who thinks that social media sites are “public spaces” is welcome to propose that Congress gives Facebook $30,000,000,000 a year to keep up that infrastructure. Otherwise, no, it’s not. That’s $30,000,000,000 a year in private money being used to buy private property.”

Amazon Is Gutting Its Voice Assistant Alexa. “By 2018, the division was already a money pit. That year, The New York Times reported that it lost roughly $5 billion. This year, an employee familiar with the hardware team said, the company is on pace to lose about $10 billion on Alexa and other devices.” The strategy depended on Alexa users paying for goods and services through the assistant - and they just didn’t.

Word Persons and Web Persons. “It’s likely that both word persons and web persons are in the minority on the modern internet. Most people would rather read short snippets of text rather than long blog posts. Most people would rather use apps than browse the web or consume content rather than write it or create their own websites always. But hopefully there will always be room for those of us who enjoy plain text and simple HTML.”

Introducing Substack Letters. I like this quite a bit. I want to do it on my blog with someone else who’s writing on their blog.

Tanya O’Carroll v Meta; Landmark case to stop Facebook spying on us. “We shouldn’t have to give up every detail of our personal lives just to connect with friends and family online. The law gives us the right to take back control over our personal data and stop Facebook surveilling and tracking us.”

Announcing the Science Eye. Here I am debating social media content policies; meanwhile very impressive people I used to work with are building this.

We Joined Mastodon. Here’s What We Learned About Privacy and Security. “If you’ve been considering signing up for Mastodon, here are some things we have been thinking about as we take the leap.”

Slocan Statement. “The following is intended as a starting point, a first draft towards establishing a shared charter that would serve to protect, support, and enrich the nascent Fediverse.” A necessary, characteristically thoughtful start from Blaine Cook.

A guide to potential liability pitfalls for people running a Mastodon instance. “This is not about just creating a Mastodon account: it’s for people who are running a Mastodon server. If you just made an account on someone else’s server, you can safely ignore this.” This is actually great advice for anyone running an online community, on Mastodon or otherwise.

I’ve been thinking a lot. “Web people can tell you the first site they ever saw, they can tell you the moment they knew: This, This Is It, I Will Do This. And they pour themselves into the web, with stories, with designs, with pictures.” This piece on web people vs startup people resonates for me, hard.

The long-awaited US broadband internet maps are here — for you to challenge. These broadband maps are an important inclusion issue - and here we’re still talking availability rather than accessibility. Right now some of the most vulnerable in society are left offline.

Mozilla Foundation releases the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser. “Today’s announcement marks the worldwide launch of Mozilla Firefox.” 18 years ago, this saved the web.

Mysterious company with government ties plays key internet role. “Your investigative staff will collect its best evidence while users are lulled into a false sense of security afforded by web, e-mail or VOIP encryption.”

Palmer Luckey Made a VR Headset That Kills the User If They Die in the Game. “It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last.”

Signal Stories are now available on iOS and Android. “Stories are now available to everyone on Signal, allowing users of the encrypted instant messaging service to create and share images, videos, and texts that automatically expire after 24 hours.” But why?

Why is everyone leaving Twitter for Mastodon? “Mastodon feels like 2007. It’s rough around the edges, but does the job. It doesn’t work the same as Twitter. There’s no algorithm and no slick social media marketing teams targeting you. It’s a little harder to find your friends and nothing quite does what you think it will do. And I’m convinced that’s why everyone is loving it.”

Mastodon's Founder Has a Vision to Democratize Social Media. “The recent influx from Twitter, Rochko says, has been a vindication. “It is a very positive thing to find that your work is finally being appreciated and respected and more widely known,” he says. “I have been working very, very hard to push the idea that there is a better way to do social media than what the commercial companies like Twitter and Facebook allow.””

Ian Coldwater on Twitter: "Dotcom crash survivors, what is your actionable advice for people?". A great thread of advice for younger engineers in a recession, from people who survived previous tech downturns.

Mozilla Ventures: Investing in Responsible Tech. “Mozilla Ventures will be a $35M+ venture capital fund for early stage startups whose products or technologies advance one or more of the values in the Mozilla Manifesto. Privacy. Inclusion. Transparency. Accessibility. Human dignity.” YES!

Tech Policy. From the Kapor Center: “We have developed a framework for systemic change that outlines a set of nine core technology policy areas that call for expanded access to technology pathways, increased tech accountability and worker protections, and greater investment in infrastructure and innovation.”

Twitter

Twitter Thrills Far-Right Trolls by Silencing Left-Wing Voices. “Twitter was a place where communities could gather, despite harassment, because the worst hate speech was banned through content moderation. “Musk has made it clear that’s no longer part of the product,” Loder said. “The entire Twitter information security community has moved to Mastodon.” Some activists who helped create Black Twitter are already talking about how to rebuild their community on that site too.”

Bye, Twitter. “Speaking as a random was-successful-on-Twitter person, I can see no good arguments for redirecting my voice into anyone else’s for-profit venture-funded algorithm-driven engagement-maximizing wet dream.”

Twitter Blesses Extremists With Paid 'Blue Checks'. “Hatewatch’s investigation of extremists’ use of Twitter Blue, based in part on a third-party public list of paid blue-check accounts, found that white nationalists, anti-LGBTQ extremists and other far-right individuals and groups now sport what was once a symbol of credibility on the platform.”

I told my team to pause our $750K/month Twitter ads budget last week. “I’ve seen a lot of technical and ideological takes on Elon Twitter but wanted to share the marketing perspective. For background I’m a director at a medium sized b2b tech company (not in finserv anymore) running a team that deploys about $80M in ad spend/year.”

CBS News Pauses Twitter Posts 'In Light of Uncertainty' Over Platform. “In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform.”

Twitter Architecture, annotated on Miro. A whiteboard diagram of Twitter’s architecture from a photo taken by Elon Musk, annotated by Justin Hendrix, Luke Dubois and Mark Hansen. Fascinating!

There Is No Replacement for Black Twitter. “One former Twitter employee I spoke with described this next phase in grim terms: It’s “the end of Black Twitter and Black people at Twitter.”” And so far, the replacements don’t come close.

Twitter as representation of the relevance and value of “Word People” in oral culture. “It’s interesting to divide the internet into Word People and Image People because the Internet is a modern evolution of oral culture — and technological/bandwidth limitations have enabled text to serve as the leading means to transfer information online up till now.”

The lost thread. “The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.”

What’s Twitter’s Future? The Former Head of Trust And Safety Weighs In . “It was for this reason that I chose to leave the company: A Twitter whose policies are defined by edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development.”

Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter. “Twitter executives also suggested assessing the lists for diversity and inclusion issues so the cuts would not hit people of color disproportionately and to avoid legal trouble. Mr. Musk’s team brushed aside the suggestion, two people said.”

Elon Musk addresses advertisers and asks them to keep using Twitter. “Musk’s expansive plans for Twitter include adding financial products to the mix. It could begin, he said, with Twitter allowing users to pay each other through the platform, with the company setting up each user with an initial gift of $10 to test it out. Over time, Musk added, Twitter will offer the ability for users to transfer money out of its system to third-party banks — and then to market its own banking services.” Called it.

Hope for a post-Musk net. “What institutions need we create now, in this new reality? Note that I did not say what new technologies. We have lots of technologies; more than enough, thank you. What we need are human standards, norms, and means to discover and support quality and credibility, talent and utility.”

Twitter Now Asks Some Fired Workers to Please Come Back. “Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake, according to two people familiar with the moves. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.”

The addictive nature of Twitter. “Pretending Twitter is the answer to gaining respect for and engagement with my work is an addict’s excuse that removes responsibility from myself.”

Writing

Don't Just Create One Big Story, Build a Mosaic of Tiny Stories! “I often find a really good story is made up of a ton of smaller stories, like building blocks or facets, which enrich the whole by adding more random choices and disasters and discoveries that people made a long time ago. How do you go about doing this? Just look at any object or building or artifact in your world and ask yourself, “How did it get to be the way it is now?” And then pick the answer that seems the most interesting and fertile.”

Ray Bradbury on feeding your creativity. “He said that nothing is lost and you must resist the urge to throw out things that meant so much to you when you were younger. What is most important, he writes, is “the continual running after loves.””

A major developer of open source social networking software has a rather public statement about his opposition to “trans ideology” on his website. I won’t link to the statement, but I want to make my stance clear.

There is no such thing as “trans ideology,” which, as a phrase, reminds me of people talking about “the gay agenda” decades ago. It doesn’t exist. Trans people are not a threat. They are a marginalized, vulnerable group that is often denied fundamental human rights and that is currently being vilified by certain politicians and corners of the press. Transphobia is rife, unfair, and dangerous to this community. Like all bigotry, it’s also harmful and unpleasant to be around.

Trans men are men. Trans women are women. It is not a choice.

Open source software is built as (or, at least, should be built as) a community. While a person’s beliefs should be irrelevant to their ability to build software, they are not unrelated to how they show up in a community and how safe people feel communicating with them. It is essential to use an equity lens to build open source communities, ensuring they are open - structurally and emotionally - to contributions from vulnerable and underrepresented people.

A person’s politics and beliefs are their own until they choose to make them public. I would rather prioritize making the communities I am a part of more equitable, so I will not knowingly work with someone who has publicly expressed transphobic views, just as I won’t work with someone who has voiced racism, homophobia, or sexism. While these forms of bigotry don’t directly impact me because of the disproportionate power white, cisgender men like myself have in society, they certainly affect the people around me. My actions matter, particularly as I have more choices than more vulnerable people.

Some have painted acceptance of transgender people as opposed to acceptance of people with religious beliefs. It is not. It’s perfectly possible to be a Christian, for example, and to be open and inclusive to all people. I’m delighted to know many such Christians, Muslims, Jews, and people of all faiths. This supposed dichotomy is widespread and worth calling out: it’s fake and is often used as a cover for intolerance that has nothing inherently to do with religion. By helping to make communities I’m a part of open to trans people, I am not closing them to any other group other than the intolerant.

This is not simply a matter of opposing views. It’s a matter of accepting people for who they are and providing safe communities where they can do good work. There’s nothing abstract about it and it’s not a political debate.

Lastly, these statements are sometimes derisively described as “virtue signaling.” In some ways, that’s true. What I’m trying to say to my trans friends is simply this: you’re safe with me, and I care about you. I think that’s worth signaling.

I love the indieweb and what it stands for:

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

This principle is absolutely true, but on a deeper level, I’m also uncomfortable with the level of wealth hoarding and rent seeking on the modern internet. There’s no need for us all to be pouring our conversations, identities, and data into someone’s multi-billion-dollar for-profit enterprise. By owning it ourselves, we’re decentralizing the value created. While it’s not necessarily an anti-capitalist stance, it’s certainly an anti-monopoly one.

I didn’t start Known to be an indieweb platform: I initially built it, back when it was called Idno, to be a simple way to start a private community on your own terms. My intention was always to add decentralization to these communities, and I was enamored by the vision of the indieweb when I met members of the community and saw what they were building. Turning it into a way for a single person to post using the indieweb just made sense to me, and that’s how a lot of people use it - including me on my own website.

The best way to drive adoption for a web standard is to make it as easy as possible to build with. Any good web technology should be implementable inside of an afternoon, so that a casual hacker can feel like they’ve made good progress. (Too many technologies are built to be used at Facebook scale, which is needless.) HTML works this way; so does RSS. And the indieweb technologies - microformats to add machine-readable meaning to content, micropub to provide a standard way to publish, and webmention as a mechanism for decentralized replies chiefly among them - all follow this rule too. They’re easy, fault-tolerant, and are built using a very similar mindset to the web itself. I love them.

Lately I’ve been drawn into the fediverse through Mastodon - you can follow me at @ben@werd.social. The underlying technology behind the fediverse, ActivityPub, at first glance seems a little harder to implement. In fact, I was a little scared of it, because it requires a mix of light cryptography and a handful of less HTML-like document standards that seem easy to get wrong. But dig a little deeper and it’s not particularly difficult to get started with, with huge reward: connecting to a network of millions of people who are all actively having conversations.

So I’m newly-invested in implementing ActivityPub and building end-user tools that join the network. I’m excited to build things that people can use to, in turn, build something new. There are a ton of opportunities here: we’re in a particular moment where the fediverse looks like it could be the future, and the more tools and onramps we build, the more likely that becomes. That fits directly into those indieweb principles of owning your own content, and my additive principles of devolving wealth and ownership.

Luckily, it’s not a zero-sum game. I can still keep and maintain my indieweb implementations and participate in its network of blogs and personal sites, while also adding ActivityPub and widening my lens to the fediverse’s interlocking communities. I get to own my content and online identity, which means I get to choose who and what I interact with.

I have one exception. One of the indieweb’s oldest ideas, Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, is something I plan to retire in my own use. The idea is that you publish on your own site but then mirror that content to a third-party silo like Twitter, ideally with a link back to your site. But with the growth of the fediverse, I’d like to be done with doing that. I’ve already stopped publishing to Twitter, and I think Instagram and Facebook will quickly follow suit. Right now my only real syndication is to LinkedIn, and I don’t know that I want to make that network exactly central to my existence online.

So instead of Publishing on my Own Site and Syndicating Elsewhere, I plan to just Publish and Participate. I want my site to connect to the indieweb; to the fediverse; to people who are connecting via RSS; to people who are connecting via email. No more syndication to third parties. My own website sits in the center of my online identity, using open standards to communicate with outside communities.

That principle wasn’t possible when I started building Known, and I’m excited that it is now. I’m late to the party: micro.blog, for example, does this already. But better late than never. Let’s participate and embrace every open network out there - and do what we came to do, which is publish, reply, converse, and learn from each other. I can’t wait.

Speaking of The 19th:

The 19th is a non-profit newsroom that reports at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy. We were one of the only newsrooms to call this election correctly - because we listened to women and people of color.

Some pieces we’ve published include a dashboard exploring abortion legislation in the post-Roe world, coverage of nursing shortages, and an exploration of whether women will qualify for the draft.

We need your help. This Giving Tuesday, please consider donating to support our inclusive newsroom and help us keep reporting. Even a little bit helps. Thank you.

By the way, how cool is this preview image? Rena Li is a genius.

I’m doing management training today with all the other managers at The 19th. We're spending a lot of time considering how to be an anti-racist leader, which I'm finding tremendously valuable. I’m very glad to be doing this, and I’m glad for techniques and tactics to actively work towards equity.

I will never work for an organization whose leaders are not invested in DEI or consider it to be a hindrance. It says so much about what they care about and who will benefit from their work. I won’t link to them here, but there have been lots of examples lately of leaders complaining about movements for equality. I find it mind-blowing: the reddest of red flags.

I’m really glad to be working here. Equity should be distributed, not hoarded. And I’m grateful to listen and learn how to do this more effectively.

My favorite thing about Thanksgiving is the admittedly slightly hokey tradition of going around the table and saying what you’re thankful for. There’s a lot to be skeptical about - this is a holiday that celebrates colonization and the eradication of entire nations - but this one act, bringing gratitude front and center, is good.

As I write this, I want to acknowledge that my baby and I have directly benefited from the occupation of Ohlone, Wampanoag, Lenape, and Latgawa lands - and indirectly for the occupation of North America as a whole.

I have a lot to be thankful about.

This year, I’m thankful for my baby: his sly grins and the sense of humor I can already see develop give me life. He is responsible for my permanent state of absolute sleep deprivation, but also, far more importantly, for so much fun and purpose.

I’m thankful for my family and friends: my allies.

I’m thankful for all the wonderful people in my life who embody kindness, empathy, wisdom, mentorship, and knowledge.

I’m thankful that I live in a context of peace and democracy - however imperfect it might be, I did not wake up in fear of my life this morning, unlike so many other people today.

I’m thankful for my job: it’s a big deal to have found a place to do meaningful work that also happens to be full of empathetic, lovely people who genuinely care about the world and about each other. I’m thankful that it gives me space to be a three-dimensional human.

I’m thankful for the internet, and for the web. The real web, that is: the one that operates as a commons with no central ownership and is a bedrock for us all to build on, for all the definitions of building.

I’m thankful for everyone who is working towards a kinder, more equal world, even when so much is aligned around individualism over community, profit over equity, and exclusivity over inclusion. It’s often rough, thankless work, but it makes the world so much better - and it gives me hope that the world my baby grows up to inhabit might not be terrible after all.

I’m thankful to have health. I’m thankful for healthcare: for vaccines, for the miracle of transplantation, for genetic therapies, for mental health support, for ICUs and children’s ERs. I’m thankful for all the scientific research and testing that makes all of this possible.

I’m thankful you’re here. I’m thankful we’re all here, together, not just surviving but building something better.

I like Substack’s emphasis on letters between publications: a way to have an in-depth conversation between two bloggers who have a different point of view on a different topic. It reminds me a little of CJR’s Galley site, which hosted some interesting conversations.

But of course, you don’t need Substack or to be in CJR’s circle to create a conversation in this way. All you need is to have a counterpart writer, a blog or a newsletter each, and a willingness to correspond over thoughtful, long-form posts on a single topic for around three posts each.

If you want to get technical, you can even use microformats u-in-reply-to syntax and webmentions to conversationally glue the blog posts together. But the most important thing is to write and explore an idea.

It’s a lovely way to dive deep into a contentious topic, and I’d love to see more of it.

I’ve realized that I need to temper my enthusiasm for Mastodon. I worked on open source social networking platforms for a full decade of my life, and I’m very emotionally attached to this moment. I really want the fediverse to work.

I come by it honestly: I do think that a collectively-owned platform based on open protocols and an ecosystem of compatible tools - a social commons - is both more ethical and more resilient than a platform that is owned and run by a giant corporation with thousands of employees, shareholder obligations, and valuation requirements.

But my emotional involvement has led to me finding myself wanting to be reflexively defensive about its shortcomings, and this serves nobody. I’m enthusiastic about it, but many of the problems that people are bringing up are legitimate worries - and some of them may be showstoppers if they aren’t dealt with quickly.

I’m particularly concerned with moderation. In the fediverse, every server has a different set of content policies and a different team of moderators. Theoretically, this is good: people with specific needs or from vulnerable communities can find themselves posting from a more supportive context than they might find on monolithic social media. Field-specific instances, for example in genetics, can establish content policies relating to scientific accuracy that couldn’t possibly be enforceable on a monolithic site. But at the same time, this patchwork of content policies mean that moderation can be arbitrary and hard to understand.

Journalist Erica Ifill woke up this morning to find that she’d been banned from her Mastodon instance for no obvious reason. Block Party founder Tracy Chou’s content was removed from the largest instance on the grounds that criticizing patriarchy was sexism. In both cases, the action was reversed with an apology, but harm was done. An understanding of power imbalances is an important part of being a content moderator, but while software is provided to technically moderate, there are very few ecosystem resources to explain how to approach this from a human perspective. Open source software can sometimes fall into the trap of confusing code for policy, and Mastodon is no exception.

And then there’s the harassment. As caroline sinders wrote:

The blocking feature is like horror house anxiety game- I block when I see their new account, hoping I’ve now blocked all of them but knowing I probably never will. Because it’s a federated system, and you can have accounts on multiple servers, it means there’s multiple accounts I have to block to create some digital safety and distance.

All this turns the selection of an instance when you join the network into a high-stakes choice. Does the instance have the technical resources to stay online? Does it have the social resources and insight to moderate effectively? By what rules? What are the spoken and unspoken beliefs of its owners that might affect how you post and who you can reach?

Which isn’t to say that commercial services don’t have the same problem. Clearly, they do, as can clearly be illustrated by the change in content policies at Twitter under Elon Musk compared to its previous management. Not only are content policies on commercial services notoriously imperfect, but moderation there is often undertaken by low-paid workers who frequently experience PTSD.

With a commercial service, though, you’re dealing with one service provider, rather than a patchwork, and the choice is more binary: you can take it or leave it. The fediverse gives its participants more choice, and there’s correspondingly more nuance to the decisions a user must make.

It’s unwise to dismiss these issues. They disproportionately affect people from more vulnerable communities who are more likely to experience harassment, both from admins and from other users. At their worst, they can represent real threats to physical safety; at best, they make the platform hard to trust for someone trying to use it as a basis for sharing and discussion. Mastodon has been the home for some queer communities for some time, but it’s notable that women and people of color have often had a bad experience.

I think the fediverse needs some real investment in online safety beyond what’s been done so far. Incremental approaches are probably the most feasible, rather than trying to get to the perfect thing more quickly.

Here are some suggestions as a subset of what might be useful:

A free course for moderators, with certification. Take the course - which should stress inclusion and power dynamics - in your own time. Then get a verified certification that admins can place on their Mastodon profiles. New Mastodon users could search for instances that have trained admins. Mastodon instances could actively solicit participation from potential moderators who have passed the course. (Perhaps there could be levels: for example, basic, intermediate, and advanced.)

Search that highlights moderators. The identities and beliefs of an instance’s moderators are so important that they should be placed front and center when selecting a new instance. In one recent example, I’m aware of a journalist picking an instance only to discover that its owner was notoriously transphobic. Some users might prefer instances run by women or people of color.

Standardized content policies. Content policies that can be built using pre-defined blocks, in the same way that Creative Commons licenses can be chosen based on your needs. These could be advertised in a machine-readable way, so that new users can more easily search for instances that meet their needs. Better user interfaces could be built around selection, like a wizard that asks the new user about themselves and what they care about.

Instance ratings. Right now an instance is often defederated by other instances for bad behavior, but there’s no equivalent for new users. Reviews on instances could help users pick the right one.

Shared, themed blocklists. Shared blocklists for both users and instances would make the process of removing harmful content far easier for admins. Here, if my instance blocked another instance for hosting racist content, every other instance subscribed to my racism blocklist would also block that instance.) Similarly, if I blocked a user for racism, every other user subscribed to my racism blocklist would block them too. The reverse would be true if they blocked an instance or a user, too.

These are some ideas, but experts who have worked in harassment and user security would likely have others. These are skills that are badly in demand.

Please don’t mistake this post: I’m very bullish on the fediverse. I’d love for you to follow me at https://werd.social/@ben. But particularly for those of us who have been waiting for this moment for a very long time, it’s important that we temper our excitement with an understanding of the work that still needs to happen, and that there’s much to do if we’re to create a network that is welcoming to everyone.