Werd I/O

One thing that might be over is the conflation of venture-funded technology companies with organizations in the public interest. There was a time when companies like Twitter could be confused with public squares or other public works. Now, with the possible exception of Medium, I don’t think there’s a single example of venture funding being used in the public interest left. Any remaining names from that era (Flickr etc) have long since been bought back and taken fully-private.

On one hand, this is a real shame: a fundamental breakdown of what the promise of startups once was declared to be. I even was funded by, and then was part of, a fund that explicitly used the language of venture capital to be a positive force for change. Matter, too, is gone, and I’m still sad about it.

On the other hand, I think it’s a useful clarification. One could even consider it a moral correction. The commons that the web represents is an amazing collaboration of people sharing their voices from all over the world. It’s a force for good. But every venture-scale tech company exists to make money for its shareholders. It is unambiguously a force for profit. These are not the same thing, and when the going gets tough, finance and business show their true faces.

I’m in no way arguing that a force optimized for profit is in itself a good thing. But it’s at least an honest thing. We know what it is and can name it, and can make better decisions as a result of that clarity. We know that Facebook is a company that turns a blind eye to genocide because that’s the best thing for its bottom line. We know that Twitter’s culture is going to go the way of Tesla’s - “the worst place I’ve ever worked” is a common refrain - and that leadership will potentially support people who perpetuate fascism because it will be profitable. We know that when people show us who they are, we should believe them.

I’m also not arguing that all businesses are fundamentally anti-human. Clearly, there are small businesses, Public Benefit Corporations, and co-operatives that are ethical and kind. I’m just no longer convinced that an exponential business can also be humanist. There’s something of the Ayn Rand mercenary objectivist in all of them, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing for the internet at large to be reminded of that. If nothing else, it helps more people realize that they need to self-organize to create alternatives.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Lots has been written about whether Elon Musk can sustain Twitter based on the amount he’s saddled it with.

In the New York Times:

The $44 billion acquisition was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. To do the deal, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, loaded about $13 billion in debt on the company, which had not turned a profit for eight of the past 10 years.

[…] Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.

Assuming it’s not all some kind of ludicrous tax avoidance scheme, the most convincing argument I’ve seen about how he might overcome this was in Fortune:

If you want more evidence that Musk’s Twitter purchase is a payments play, look at some the people he has brought in to help him: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao; David Sacks, another PayPal Mafia member who is deeply involved in crypto; as well as Sriram Krishnan, who invests for a16z Crypto and who has an Ethereum address in his Twitter handle. Does this sound like the makings of a political and media operation—or one for payments?

If Twitter really is a way to bootstrap an international frictionless payments network - and it’s kind of an outside chance - I can see an argument for the numbers beginning to work. He’s already declared that he’ll quintuple revenue while reducing Twitter’s reliance on advertising. I don’t think charging $20/month for verification will bring that in. Payments might.

There’s a clue here in Twitter’s history, too: what if this had been Jack Dorsey’s plan, and he just couldn’t quite pull it off with the company’s board? That would explain his strategy to split CEO duties with the payments company formerly known as Square, his continued voting ownership in the newly-private Twitter, and the allyship between him and Musk.

There are still unanswered questions here: how does Bluesky fit in, for example? (I think it’s probably a red herring.)

Regardless of Twitter’s future as an actual community to participate in - it’s gone downhill, fast - I’m fascinated by what will happen next to the company. I’m not bullish, but there’s much more underlying strategy here than meets the eye.

I’m really heartened to see old-school blogging have a mini-resurgence. I’ve got no idea if it’ll stick, but for now, my feed reader is aglow with posts that run the gamut from quick thoughts to long-form essays, often illustrated with personal photographs. More of this, please. Much more of this.

My favorite social network ever, by a long shot, is LiveJournal. Not only did Brad and co establish many of the norms that we now take for granted, but it was built around blogging: every post was a written piece. The comments were excellent, and everyone was contributing their own original work instead of reposting memes.

Blogs + readers approximates this, although the commenting situation is too fragmented. Commenting isn’t quite right in the indieweb, either: I’m hankering for long threaded discussions rather than Twitter-style replies. I think we’ll get there, though, and this is so much of a step forward from the social media morass.

More! More! More!

If you receive my posts via email, you’re now getting them through Substack. Nothing should substantially change, but they’ll look a little different.

This is the fourth newsletter platform I’ve used for my writing: MailChimp, ConvertKit, and Buttondown all preceded it. This new change - which, let’s be clear, is an experiment - is already a little different. That’s because, unlike the others, Substack is more of a social network than a newsletter platform whose main competitor is very clearly Medium.

(Worth declaring: I worked at Medium from 2016-2017 and consider its current CEO Tony Stubblebine to be a friend. I’ve also been publicly critical of Substack’s laissez-faire editorial strategy.)

Substack’s main draws are very similar to Medium’s: you can make money from your writing; it will provide a beautiful, easy-to-use interface; it will find you readers. The mechanics of how it does that are different, though, and worth thinking about in the context of social network design.

First, the money.

This is the big carrot for new writers. (Content from my website will remain free, by the way.) Medium sets you up with the partner network: subscribers pay a flat $5 a month through its site. Funds are then allocated based on the fraction of each paying user’s attention you attract.

That means you can work on a big piece of writing that you think will attract a lot of attention and get paid for it without a lot of business preparation. Medium’s paywall is leaky, so non-members will be able to read and help to promote it.

While Medium’s financial model is content-centric, Substack’s is personality-based. Readers opt in to subscribe to a publisher, just as they would any newsletter. But publishers can opt to establish payment tiers that give subscribers access to premium posts if they pay more money. Attention doesn’t come into it: a subscriber either believes you’re worth paying a monthly fee for or they don’t.

The other trick is that, on Substack, publishers have to sign up separately to Stripe in order to gather payments. That means Stripe handles Know Your Customer requirements on behalf of Substack. Between Stripe fees and Substack’s 10% take, the publisher is left with a little over 85% of subscription fees - which is a significantly better deal than many places on the web.

Using revenue as a lens, then, whether you choose Medium or Substack depends on whether you have a following who might pay for your work. If you do great work, or are working on a single, amazing piece of writing, but don’t have a following, Medium is clearly the better choice. If you already have a community or want to put in the work of building a following, Substack might have the edge right now.

Second, the interface.

Medium’s writing interface is still the best, hands down. The attention to detail is superb, from font kerning through to embedding.

Substack’s is more utilitarian, but is still cleanly designed and distraction-free. Because of its email origins, there’s no way it can possibly do some of the fancy embedding tricks that Medium is able to.

I’ve long written using iA Writer no matter where it’s going, but Medium’s interface remains much more enticing to me. There’s also an API and - crucially, excitingly - a way to import posts from your personal blog and have the canonical link set to your blog’s URL. That feature feels specifically built for me, and I love it.

Finally, the community.

Both platforms will find you readers, albeit in different ways.

Again, Medium’s model is content-centric: it will show you posts it thinks you’ll find useful or interesting, no matter who they’re by. The algorithm automatically promotes content inside implicit communities of interest. It will also try and show you content by people you know, however, partially by connecting to your Twitter network.

Substack’s is very personality-focused. It does the same Twitter trick as Medium: your followers from elsewhere who are already on Substack will know about your Substack feed. But it also operates using a system of direct recommendations; every Substack publisher directly suggests other publishers to follow. It’s relationship-based rather than algorithmic: one can imagine asking a publisher if they’d consider recommending you. Medium’s algorithm is more of a black box (because it’s likely being tweaked every day).

Both services now offer a feed. Medium’s, as discussed, is algorithmically-ordered so as to optimize for serendipity: you’ll discover new content you didn’t know you wanted to read. Substack’s is much more like a traditional feed reader, in that you’ll read the latest content from people you’re subscribed to. (In fact, beautifully, it is a feed reader: you can bring your own RSS feeds from elsewhere.) Substack has traditional blog-style comments and hearts; Medium has claps to indicate attention and the concept of stories that follow stories rather than threaded comments. Both have merit, although Substack’s approach is considerably more straightforward.

Why choose?

I don’t: I’m a happy user of both, while also publishing on my own site first in the indieweb tradition. I am, if you’re interested, experimenting with a unique, native Substack about my work writing a book. And you can follow me on Medium.

Moving to a community-based newsletter is strategic for me. I want to continue to build a following so I can share the work I’m doing. Moving away from a straight newsletter platform is also financially beneficial: services like ConvertKit cost real money every month to operate. You can get started on both Medium and Substack for free.

I’m having trouble shaking today from my bones, so consider this post an attempted exorcism.

As I sit down to write, this was a day when a man broke into the Speaker of the House’s home in San Francisco, armed with a hammer, with the apparent intent of attacking her. When she turned out to be in the capital, he violently attacked her husband Paul, fracturing his skull.

This was also a day in which, following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, use of white supremacist, misogynist, and homophobic language quintupled on the platform, while exiled white supremacists on alternative social networks bragged about having won.

Whatever you think about Nancy Pelosi’s politics, hopefully we can agree that breaking into her home and attacking her with a hammer is not the right way to go about challenging them. It’s obviously unhinged. But it is also reflective of a downgrading of democracy as a part of right-wing discourse. It sits on a spectrum with neoreactionaries like Peter Thiel who want to replace representative democracy with an authoritarian monarchy based on corporate plutocracy: something that sounds like an idea from a Philip K Dick novel but is increasingly, troublingly, mainstream.

Musk’s takeover of Twitter was welcomed by these communities because of his stated commitment to free speech. Of course, there’s a particular kind of speech that they care about: nobody was being banned from Twitter for calling for small government or lower taxes. Nobody was banned for arguing against marriage equality on a legal or social basis. It was hate speech and hate speech alone. The free speech that matters to these communities is the kind that allows them to demean people they see as lesser.

The thing about these ideas is that, although the people who wield this rhetoric are loud, they’re unpopular, and becoming more unpopular as time goes on. When polls claim that subsets of the population yearn for life as it was in the 1950s, they call these movements out for what they are: the dying gasps of the dregs of the 20th century, exhaled by wounded egos desperate for something that will make themselves feel more than they are. America’s demographics are becoming more diverse over time. For the pathetic, this is threatening.

It’s in this context of diminishing white supremacy that we see figures starting to argue against representative democracy. Of course they are: as their numbers dwindle, democracy is not a system they can win. The big lie of a thrown election is an ego-saving device that helps them believe they’re not shrinking away from prominence. But shrinking they are. So they need to find other ways of holding power: monarchy and insurrection.

And as their desperation rises, ugly old ideas rear their heads again. We hear again and again about “globalists” and “globalist conspiracies”. For the longest time, I didn’t understand what people meant by this term in the negative sense: considering peoples at a global level in a connected world seems like common sense. But, of course, with a heavy heart, I now understand that it refers to people who have an allegiance to some kind of world order that supersedes their allegiance to their country, which is an accusation that has long been levied at Jews. And correspondingly, there is the return of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory which posits that non-white immigrants are being brought into the country to replace white voters, often by you-know-who. And, yes, finally, the conspiracy theories about “groomers” are little more than reheated blood libel.

It’s not all anti-semitism. There’s an increasing number of people arguing against universal suffrage, as if women voting has somehow brought about their woes. Anti-Asian violence is on the rise. And of course, America has a rich seam of anti-Blackness that runs throughout.

Why, though? What’s the point of all this hate? In the end, it comes down to the maintenance of wealth and power. The bigotry always benefits someone. Just follow the money, whether it’s to fossil fuel companies that underwrite climate change denial, plutocrats who seek to cultivate their own political power, or companies that profit from modern day slavery through prison labor and worse. Hate is manipulation, same as it ever was.

“Cry liberal tears,” white supremacist edgelords yell from anonymous accounts. The anger is palpable, as if they’ve somehow been personally oppressed by policies that asked them not to practice outright bigotry. These people are not geniuses. There’s a sense of revenge behind their words: as if inclusive voices are personally responsible for their diminishing communities rather than the passage of time and their own actions. In choosing to deeply identify themselves with stagnation rather than change, they’ve doomed themselves. Change always wins. And the promoters of this hateful stagnation aren’t in it to help them at all.

It’s surreal to see ideas that bubbled to the surface and almost brought global civilization down a hundred years ago recycled on national TV and in the national discourse. What they’ll learn, though, is that they cannot win - not because they will face stiff opposition, although they will, but because their ideas don’t have legs to stand on. Alex Jones was ordered to pay almost $1 billion to the parents of Sandy Hook victims not because of any unfairness, but because he knowingly peddled bullshit that caused real harm. They will soon find, too, that Elon Musk is far from their savior: already, he has realized that he needs to capitulate to advertisers for his newly-acquired platform to survive. The dalliance with the disingenuous “free speech” crowd was in itself a ruse. Having saddled it with a billion dollars a year in interest payments alone, he is well aware that he needs to make it as mainstream as it comes. In turn, the people who find comfort in hate speech will find that they don’t have the allies they thought they did.

Which leaves the kinds of people who attack politicians with hammers and bring automatic weapons to pizza parlors and force their way into the Capitol building with guns and banners where they always were: as marks for people who manipulate their powerlessness for their own ends.

I don’t feel sorry for them: it’s a pathetic group that falls back to hate rather than positive action. By falling for the scam, their lot in life can only possibly get worse. Through their gullibility and violent conclusions, they put us all at risk.

But my real ire is reserved for the manipulators: the people playing power games. And those people, the plutocrats that think nothing of promoting hate to cement and grow their own power, are where my real worry lies, too.

Photo: United States Capitol outside protesters with US flag, by Tyler Merbler

I get multiple emails a day asking to pay to place a post on my website.

As of today, here’s the message I’m replying with:

Thanks for reaching out.

I don't accept paid posts on my website as such. I'm considering adding a monthly sponsor, which would give you an ad in the sidebar and at the bottom of the newsletter for the duration of the month, as well as the ability to publish a post at the beginning of the month. At the end of the month I would also write a post to thank you. All posts also go to my newsletter subscribers.

The cost for this is currently $2000. To get started with this, let me know a little more about the product you want to promote.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not writing here to make money, but if people keep asking, I’ll make them a deal.

I made a website that only works if you’re smiling at it.

(Caveat: it doesn’t seem to work on iPhone very well, and I’m not sure about Android, but I’ve tested it across browsers on desktop and iPad.)

Behind the scenes it uses face-api.js to identify your emotion from your webcam, and then applies the result to a CSS opacity filter on an absolutely positioned div. It’s a simple use of a little JavaScript, but it feels freaky - particularly as you continue to read the page, your face forced into a false grin that feels more and more of a burden as time goes on.

I wanted to make two points: that our operating systems will almost certainly be able to adapt to our human context as time goes on at a native level, and that emotional tracking feels invasive.

Other versions might show different content depending on your emotion or on what it thinks your gender is (which, of course, is also a problematic idea).

I stuck it on a domain that I acquired to make a different, dumber joke - Web 8: The Ocho - but it felt like a good home. We’re not that far away from this kind of invasive technology. It may seem horrible to us now, but the Overton window will have been dragged in that direction little by little in the meantime, so when it arrives we’ll likely accept it without question.

Over the last week I’ve found myself, many times, wanting to phone my mother. “I should tell Ma,” I’ll think, and it’ll take me a beat to remember. I can’t tell Ma. Ma’s gone.

In the little library nook that sat in the corner of my primary school classroom, 35 years ago, there was a book about ghosts. I devoured it. There were tales of ghosts of actors who still haunted theaters, and of ladies in stately homes. One of the chapters was about a phenomenon where someone would have a wholly real interaction with a loved one, there in the room with them, only to find they’d died far away the same night. I was fascinated with that idea, and internalized it far more deeply than I thought I had, because I realized when Ma died that some part of me thought I’d get to speak to her one more time.

I speak to her every day, of course. But I’m speaking to a figment; a version of her in my memory, which in turn has to also be me. In a way, it’s a trick I’m playing on myself, perhaps to make it easier, although I’m not sure that it really does.

I go on long walks, often late at night, to get some exercise but also to order my thoughts. Sometime last year, I was walking through the hills near my parents’ house, and the wind picked up from nowhere and ran through my hair. I stood still for a moment, goosebumps running up my skin, and for a moment I could have sworn it was her.

I’m supposed to be a sensible adult, whatever that means, but I’m still the kid who got up to draw comic books an hour before school, I’m still the kid who feels a kind of magic beating behind the earthly mundane, and I’m certainly still the kid who hopes to catch a glimpse of a ghost so he can see his mother again.

I find that child, a version of whom lives inside all of us, to be more interesting, more endearing, and more alive than the middle aged skinsuits we wear that claim to care deeply about MAUs and ARR and our IRAs. That child - this private version of ourselves - is driven by curiosity and whimsy and the wonder of possibilities. That child knows that magic exists, in some form, if they can only find out how to use it. And they love, so much. The trick is to let them breathe.

Regardless of what happens after the Elon Musk acquisition (if it even still goes through!), I’ve been thinking a lot about the effect social media - and particular, Twitter - has had on me, and how to change my relationship to it.

Alongside the sentiments of a lot of power users, I think I need to either leave Twitter permanently or significantly downgrade my involvement. Here’s why:

I don’t think it’s healthy (for me) to be this connected.

It’s a newsfeed on steroids: a dopamine rush of everything that could possibly be happening. It’s not just a backchannel to life, it’s a backchannel to everybody’s life, including their ids. If something important has happened, it’s there, instantly. If something unimportant has happened, it’s there, instantly. It’s all there, all of the time.

It’s good to be informed. But when it turns into an addiction - as it has for me, partially because of my own personality traits and partially because of the platform’s design - being informed can turn into a cognitive load that clouds other tasks.

A timeboxed learning activity - reading a book, checking out my feeds, skimming a newspaper, listening to a podcast, etc - is unambiguously healthy. An activity you feel compelled to do hundreds of times a day, like a smoker, is not. I’m not necessarily saying that it’s like this for everyone; I’m certainly saying it’s like this for me.

The reality Twitter connects me to is heightened.

Social media’s tendency to amplify extremely emotive events and content is well-documented.

Twitter famously has a “main character”, the dunkee of the day, who can vary from a noxious politician to someone unaware of their relative wealth and privilege. I’m not railing against “cancel culture” here - typically, these people deserve some (or quite a bit of) scorn. But I’m not sure I need or want to see the pile-ons, and I worry that the energy devoted to the main character actually hides the activity some of the worst actors in society, who go about their toxic days virtually undetected.

I have no interest in tone policing the internet, and there’s a lot of excellent work that’s come out of Twitter organizing: I think MeToo and Black Lives Matter are two very clear forces for good that started as hashtags to gather like minds. I want to see those communities, know about their work, and see how I can help. These days, I feel like I can better do that by reading articles, joining communities, and taking a more analytical approach.

It’s not necessarily a better approach for everyone. But for me: if I don’t control my inputs, I feel overloaded and my ability to make sound judgments is impaired.

In a world where content moderation is scaled back and far-right-wing accounts are reinstated, I can’t imagine any of this will get better.

The FOMO of not being on Twitter is bullshit.

I’m afraid of leaving Twitter for two reasons: because I might miss something from someone, and because someone might miss something from me. In other words, I feel like I need to be on the platform to stay informed for the good of myself, and to let people know about the work I’m doing for the good of my career.

The most informative page on Twitter for me is Twitter Blue’s Top Articles, which is a lot like the Nuzzl service it bought a few years a go: a list of the top links people I’m following (and the people they’re following) have posted.

The most fun is, of course, the main stream. But I’m finding that I can connect with most people in other, calmer ways: notably through their blogs and newsletters. I love the people I follow on Twitter, and I have no qualms about adding them to my subscriptions. I want to read everyone’s long-form thoughts - and even their short-form thoughts, when they’ve been posted with just enough friction to prevent them from being a firehose of id.

Do I think people would miss me? Not as such, but I do think my website would have fewer readers to begin with. Twitter is easily my single biggest referrer today. This is another argument for downgrading my involvement rather than disappearing entirely, but I’m hopeful that this dynamic will change. I’d love for there to be a new way to discover people to read and interact with. But also, I suspect that if I focus on a different approach, I’ll find communities elsewhere.

Discourse on Twitter tends to follow a power law because its circles of influence follow a power law. So my suspicion is that smaller communities will also be more interesting: more radical, perhaps, and certainly more different from one another.

Social media platforms have done a lot of work to make themselves feel like (and maybe be?) the place to see and be seen. I have to wonder if that’s akin to cigarette companies associating their product with being cool. Cigarettes are a lucrative product; so are social media boosts that help you be seen by more people.

I want to concentrate again.

Maybe this is all this post had to say: I hate the feeling of being distracted. Social media pushes me to the right of the Yerkes-Dodson graph, impeding my cognitive performance and getting in the way of the things I want to do. It’s a genuine addiction: something to be kicked.

I’ve found it noticeable that when I take time away from social, my concentration span regrows. I also just have more time to spend thinking about other things. In a world where I have increasing commitments, finding ways to make the way I use my time more impactful feels important for me. I’m raising a child; I’m doing a job I love; I’m writing a book. I’m not sure that leaves much time for getting angry on the internet.

Which brings me to, finally:

Social media is not the internet.

There’s so much more out there. The web remains a sea of interconnected ideas, across a kaleidoscope of forms and sources. Spending most of my time on just a handful of billion dollar sites squanders the possibilities and runs contrary to my values. There’s so much to be said for diversifying inputs, but there are only so many hours. It makes sense to economize.

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about how I use my computer, and why I’m so dissatisfied with the experience. Here’s what I think, in a nutshell:

My computer, as currently set up, is application-centric (or, if I wanted to be really uncharitable, brand-centric). If I want to save a note, I’ve got to load Obsidian. If I want to save a to-do, I go to my browser and open Google Tasks. If I want to write a blog post, I open iA Writer. And so on.

Yuck. That’s a lot of excess cognitive load for no reason.

What I really want is a user-centered desktop. If I want to save a note, I enter a key combination and a window appears for just as long as I need to save it, superimposed on whatever else I’m doing; then it disappears. I want to be able to choose which app I use to save my notes, in the same way I choose my default web browser. But I don’t want to have to associate “notes” (or “tasks” or “posts”) with the name of the application, let alone go and load it.

Some of this is already possible for me, with a little work. Alfred is one of the first things I install on any new computer, and Workflows were designed for this kind of idea.

But at the same time, not every application supports the idea of transient creator interfaces: the floating “create” modal that allows me to save a note or make a change for as long as it’s useful and then disappears. Some apps, like Mem, have made a selling point of providing one - but I wish it was a default, integrated part of the operating system.

A reasonable shortcut might be a simple editor app that provides the create modal for all apps, with different template presets (notes, posts, tasks, etc), that then is designed to sync what you’ve written with other applications, whether directly or in conjunction with Alfred. It could also take command line input.

Does something like this exist? Am I missing something obvious?

A lot of people ask me how to get started blogging. I figure a lot more are going to want to know how as the major social media sites start to fade. So I made you a guide!

Get Blogging! is your easy-to-use guide to starting to blog. It covers picking a platform (free, paid, or self-hosted) and reading what other people have to say. I expect to build on it over time. But for now: please give me feedback, and share it with anyone you think might want to start a blog!

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

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

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

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

So where do we go next?

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

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

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

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

Photo by Daddy Mohlala on Unsplash

Every single day, I receive at least one email asking if I’ll accept cash for adding a link to someone’s website in an old post.

I won’t. Not ever. Please stop asking.

I can imagine a world where, if my website and newsletter became more of a full-time endeavor, I’d accept patronage. Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy are two personal blogs that have weekly sponsors; I don’t mind this at all as a reader. Maybe I’d consider that.

But if your goal is to juice Google’s algorithm by spammily adding links in authoritative old posts, the answer is always no. If you have to promote your site using these techniques, their quality is probably very low, and my site will suffer as a result of linking to them; the amount of money is also not worth me considering.

I’m not opposed to making money from my site. But if I do that, I want to do it in a way that’s above board, aligned with my community, and that is worthwhile for everyone involved. In the meantime, I’m just going to keep writing for me.

Over in Platformer, Casey Newton reports that MailChimp’s CEO Ben Chestnut left after writing an ill-advised email about sharing personal pronouns during onboarding:

“Now, everything is incredibly politicized,” he said in the email. “I am finding that peeps are no longer motivated by meaningful work – they are motivated to make political statements. They are using company time and company resources to win a game, against their opponents, in a game that is raging in their minds and on social media.”

Needless to say, I think he missed the point.

It’s not some kind of game, although it might feel that way to someone whose demographics and background mean he’s never had to feel the brunt of systemic injustices. What’s actually happening is that groups of people whose identities have been historically suppressed and oppressed are now feeling free to express who they are. In turn, they’re engaging in mutual support: declaring personal pronouns is a simple, courteous way of saying that you’re welcoming to diverse identities. This isn’t to win points; it’s part of creating a more supportive environment for everyone, as opposed to one designed around the narrow demographic of people who have dominated mainstream business and culture at the expense of everyone else for generations.

In the case of pronouns, the correct pronoun to use is not always obvious, and it’s always safer and more courteous to use self-reported pronouns than trying to guess. And it matters: in transgender youth in particular, acceptance of gender was correlated with one-third lower odds of a past-year suicide attempt. Giving people the space to declare theirs - and normalizing it across a community like a workplace or school - is a very low-effort way to protect the health and well-being of people who need it.

More generally, I’m fed up of people who consider “woke” to be some kind of fad or societal affliction. It’s a welcome, progressive change that simply means you’re awake to the injustices of the past and want to correct them in the future. It’s worth considering what kind of person would find that to be a bad thing.

For the record, my pronouns are he/him.

We’re hosting a conversation about the future of the workforce, in-person in Austin, Texas, and streaming online everywhere. It’s free to register and attend.

Here’s more about the event:

From the Great Resignation to the Great Reshuffle, our working lives have transformed during the pandemic — especially in terms of the economic and social dynamics. Some business sectors, as well as nonprofits and media organizations, have embraced change while others have fought against new policies.

COVID-19 has ushered in some new options, like flexible time off and hybrid work schedules. Remote work isn’t perfect for everyone, but it offers a reprieve for those who’ve felt alienated by inaccessible workspaces, where gender and racial microaggressions can proliferate.

Are the shifting norms of the last few years here to stay — or will large businesses continue to push for a return to pre-pandemic “normal?” How can business leaders balance economic growth and emerging technologies with the rights and needs of workers? The 19th is gathering business and policy leaders who think deeply about labor to discuss the future of the workforce.

Check out our speakers and sign up here.

I tend to get my links from three sources: my feed subscriptions, links I find on social media (particularly using Twitter Blue’s excellent “top articles from people you follow” feature), and stuff that people send me directly.

If I read something and find it particularly interesting, I’ll save it to a Notion database I’ve got set up. Mostly I do this because the Notion web clipper and iOS app makes life really easy for me.

Then the bookmarks get synced in a few different ways:

• To my website using Micropub
• To Buffer for scheduled sending to Twitter

The sync itself is via Zapier right now, but when I get time I’ll replace with my own script.

I used to post directly to Twitter, but I realized that there’s no need to post there at the same time I save to my site. Because I tend to read my feeds in batches, Buffer helps me avoid posting floods of links to my Twitter account at once. It also gives me a little wiggle room if something goes wrong (eg if the sync accidentally triggers when I’m halfway through writing a description).

At the end of the month, I take my links from the Notion database and use a simple script to turn them into a formatted post, which I edit in iA Writer before publishing to my site using its micropub feature.

The end result:

• I have a searchable database of my bookmarks
• I reliably share them to my website
• I get to publish a round-up post at the end of the month, which is one of my favorite things

It sounds like a lot, but I really enjoy the process I’ve set up: it’s easy for me, and does everything I need it to.

At The 19th, we’re running our annual community survey. If you’ve read a story on The 19th, or if you’re a woman or LGBTQ+ person, or are interested in policy and democracy news that affects women and LGBTQ+ people, we’d love to hear from you.

Complete our annual survey and you’ll be entered to win one of four $50 gift cards as a small token of our appreciation for your time.

It’ll take just a few minutes of your time. Get started here.

Last week, I asked you about your fiction-reading habits as part of my research for a personal project I’m working on.

I also ran a separate survey on Google Surveys - getting in just before that service shuts down next month - to get a sense of what the average web visitor reads.

Although I expected this community to diverge from overall web visitors in key ways, I was surprised - but perhaps shouldn’t have been - by where it didn’t.

Here’s the biggest headline: traditional, paper books are still by far the best way for an author to reach even a technical audience. Most people across all audiences discover books via traditional bookstores, word of mouth, and the library - so if you’re limiting yourself to self-published ebooks, you’re missing out in a big way. More on that in a moment.

Blog readers like to read fiction far more than the average person.

First, some overall numbers:

The average American reads twelve books a year: a number that includes non-fiction titles. And only 59% of Americans read fiction books at all.

In contrast, over three quarters of you read more than ten fiction books a year; a sixth of you read more than fifty. This is fiction only: a subset of all the books you read. Although I didn’t connect this to demographic data or questions about what respondents read outside of fiction, I expect these stats hold up for the communities of most similar blogs.

No surprise: tech blog readers like science fiction. The world at large loves mystery and romance.

Everyone loves genre fiction - but which genres are sharply divergent.

This community is far and away most interested in science fiction and speculative fiction (1 in 4), with fantasy coming in at a close second (almost 1 in 5). 10% of folks said they read literary and historical fiction each, followed by mystery (and “cozy mystery”, which is a distinct sub-category). 3% of the community reads romance novels.

On the web as a whole, the numbers are very different. Almost 40% of respondents read mystery novels; 30% read romance; fantasy and horror are read by around a quarter of web visitors who filled in the survey. Only one in five web visitors read science fiction. Literary and historical fiction was in line with respondents from this community at 10% each.

Blog readers find their books offline.

About 20% of respondents from this community get their books through their local library - roughly the same percentage as the number who get them from Amazon. 15% get their books from traditional bookstores, and another 15% get them second hand. Other sources (including other stores, like Apple Books) came in at very small percentages.

A much higher percentage of the wider web gets their books via Amazon - around 40%. Only 10% of them get their books from a bookstore.

These latter statistics are closer to what I expected to see across the board, but blog readers are far more likely to go to independent bookstores, visit their local library, and borrow books from friends and family. So while this community is more technically-inclined, its book consumption is actually more offline than the general public.

We find our books through word of mouth.

Almost 40% of readers in this community preferred to learn about books through friends and family. Booktok doesn’t reach us: only 1% saw recommendations via TikTok. Social media, on the other hand, represented 25% (even if only 5% followed up on recommendations from blogs). 12% of respondents learned about books via Goodreads.

In both sets, around 12% got their recommendations from displays in physical bookstores. But whereas only 4% of this community said they learned through Amazon recommendations, 25% of general website visitors listed it as a main source. Only 6% of general website visitors learned about books from Goodreads.

Paper books still rule.

Finally, across both datasets, paper books rule supreme: 60% for the general public and for blog readers alike.

In both cases, about 20% read their books specifically on Amazon’s Kindle platform. About 10% “read” via an audiobook platform (mostly Audible, which is also owned by Amazon). And even among my open source forward community, only around 1% read using alternative ebook platforms.

I was genuinely surprised by this: I thought I’d see much higher ebook usage in my blog community. But it turns out that we all love the tangible look and feel of a book, and I strongly suspect that those of us who stare at a screen all day are more than happy to read on something else.

Reading between the lines:

This audience values books and the traditional book ecosystem. We like libraries and independent bookstores; we like the smell of a book. Anecdotally, I suspect we’re also suspicious of Amazon and of books that haven’t gone through a publisher’s vetting process. That also means it’s harder to get an independently-published book into our hands.

But libraries and independent bookstores are also more likely to carry and highlight books from small presses. These startup and independent publishers could be a really great way to reach readers with similar reading habits to those in this community. Of course, the big presses could be great too - but are potentially harder to get published by.

Based on this first set of quantitative results, my hypothesis is that it’s better to publish your book with a traditional press and then double down on both social media and independent bookstore promotion. That’s the marketing: I also believe that literary science fiction with a strong mystery component is the kind of fiction that would speak to this audience.

My next step is to double down on this hypothesis, identify my key assumptions, and go out and test them with some qualitative interviews.

More on that soon.

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

JP Morgan cancelled Kanye West’s bank accounts following his anti-semitic remarks today.

Over the last few years, a raft of “free speech” social networks have emerged as an alternative to the content policies enacted by companies like Twitter. They take very public anti “cancel culture” stances. But what does that really mean?

Using observer accounts, I took a peek at each of the main ones to see how this particular piece of news went down. Here I will issue a content warning: posts on these sites, including those run by mainstream political operators, are extremely disturbing.

Truth Social is owned by the Trump Media and Technology Group, which in turn is chaired by former President Donald Trump. There, an account with over 50,000 followers (10% of its Daily Active Users) states:

Truth Social has around 2 million users.

Gab was founded in 2016 as the first right-wing alternative social network. The founder (who has 3.7 million followers) writes:

In response to a post that asks "who runs JP Morgan Chase?" hundreds of users respond with some variation of "the Jews".

Gab has around 4 million users.

Minds was founded in 2011 and originally built on top of Elgg, the open source social networking framework I co-founded. While it was originally created as an alternative to surveillance capitalism, its anti-banning stance caused it to provide a home to white supremacists banned from mainstream networks in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. (Indeed, Trump had invited its founders to the White House alongside the founders of the networks listed above in 2019.)

Over there, a popular post states:

Minds has over two million users.

GETTR is another conservative Twitter clone, this time founded by a former Trump aide. Here the anti-semitism is less overt, although a few comments from fringe accounts did talk about “the satanic Jews”, which was a trope on the other networks.

GETTR also has around 4 million users.

Parler, which also emerged during the Trump era, is hopelessly unusable. I couldn’t figure out how to search for content on it, when it even managed to log me in.

Parler claims to have a million users, but I don't know how.

It’s not a partisan statement to say that I find these comments to be utterly chilling both in terms of their content and their effective endorsement by large-scale backers that include the former President of the United States.

I’m also deeply unhappy with how my open source code was used to build Minds. I don’t believe its founders to be anti-semites, but I do think that tolerance of this kind of hatred is not anything approaching the virtue that they think it is. While these sorts of hateful ideas can certainly be countered by better ones, it’s also certainly true that alternative social networking sites have been used to plan undemocratic insurrections and hate crimes that led to real harm.

Mainstream social networks, particularly Facebook, are not off the hook here: banning anti-semitism does not absolve you of complicity in genocide elsewhere. Twitter also has its fair share of discoverable posts that espouse anti-semitic tropes. But these other networks are remarkable for their concentration: whereas these ideas are a tiny fringe on Facebook and Twitter, they’re how these other networks support themselves. You go to an alt network because you’ve been banned - or you’re worried you will be banned - from a traditional one. This concentration of extremists is why much of the insurrection was able to be openly organized on networks like Gab.

The Southern Poverty Law Center noted as such in its The Year in Hate & Extremism Report 2021:

Hate groups and other extremists do not solely rely on mainstream social media platforms to spread their message — they are increasingly using “alt-tech” platforms that are often advertised as “free speech” alternatives to places like Twitter and Facebook. On these platforms, users don’t have to worry about content moderation. These include video platforms like Bitchute and Odysee and social media sites like Gab.

And there does seem to be a growing, violent movement lurking here. Incidents of antisemitism in America hit an all-time high in 2021. I’m certain that this is in no small part because overtly racist town squares have become easier than ever to be a part of. These networks have millions of users, are growing, encourage real hate crime, and have ringing endorsements from people who have held the highest office in the land. We overlook them as sideshows at our peril.

For a new project, I’d love to understand how you read fiction. In particular, I’d love to know what your favorite topics are, which books you particularly love, and how you discover new books to read.

So I put together a short, anonymous survey. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to fill out, and it would really help me. All questions are completely optional, and it would be useful to me even if you just filled out one.

I’ll follow up with results in a future post. Thank you!

I’ll follow Doctor Who anywhere - I’ve been a fan since I was five years old - but the trailer for the BBC Centennial episode left me cold, even despite the welcomed presence of Ace and Tegan.

It’s had some criticism, and there were some clunkers (hello, Kerblam), but I’ve broadly enjoyed this era: an optimistic Doctor, a renewed focus on inclusion and kindness, a family-friendliness that doubtless brought in new kids. Season twelve in particular was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the mystery that The Timeless Children brought back to the character’s origins. The execution could sometimes have been tighter, but it was all good. I’ll follow this show anywhere.

What I wish, though, is that they’d embrace some smaller stories. Classic Who was often structured like a mystery novel: something weird was happening, and the Doctor would have to get to the bottom of what was causing it. Often there were multiple contenders, like potential murderers in an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes story. The survival of the world didn’t need to be at stake; it could be creepy and self-contained in its own right. The stories could still talk about big topics, but they didn’t need to be bombastic to be effective.

That’s true across a lot of modern reboots. The myriad Star Treks, for example, seem to feel the need to be action-packed movies instead of the idea-led potboilers of the past. I think producers think they need to do this to get past our shorter attention spans, but they’re missing the point: our quality filters are higher than they ever were, and the way to keep our attention is to give us tightly-written, compellingly-acted, humanistically-directed drama. Some of the best modern television - Succession, Severance, Slow Horses - do understand this, but clearly not everyone got the memo.

I’ll absolutely watch, probably multiple times, and I’ll probably love it. But I do wish we’d swap flash back for substance. Maybe I’m just getting old.

January, 2030.

After a long journey, I finally climb into my rental car. It’s a nice ride: comfortable bucket seats with built-in heaters, plenty of leg room, good visibility on all sides, and a large dashboard screen.

As soon as I get in, the car notices I’m sitting in the driver’s seat and springs to life. The seat itself has already adjusted itself for my height and usual driving position. The car checks the rental car record and sees that I’m an authorized driver: I have the ability to turn on the engine and drive. The dashboard is illuminated with my operating system and choice of gauges, which follows me into every car I drive. The car’s underlying hardware and firmware provides a standard API - CarTalk, like the old radio show - and handles low-level self-driving and safety controls. In turn, my portable identity, represented by my phone or other identity-compatible hardware, provides the UI and user preferences on top of those APIs.

Five years from now, in 2035, gasoline-powered cars will be banned in most major markets. But the market is already way ahead of that milestone: well over half of all cars sold today are electric. Although sky-high gasoline prices are a huge factor in this, the availability of personalized interfaces like the one I’m using are another strong reason. You can’t get personalization like this on a legacy car: the APIs just aren’t there. Electric wins because it’s a more modern, streamlined experience.

The mirrors are all pre-adjusted; I’m ready to go. I manually drive out of the lot and onto the freeway. I don’t expect to be driving for long, and like to be in control. In practice, self-driving is still mostly the domain of fleet vehicles like freight trucks, light rail, and buses, although it’s a handy thing to turn on for very long drives, in the same way that people used to use cruise control.

*

October, 2022.

For the last year and change, I’ve driven a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, a variant of the cheapest model of Tesla. This is in no way an endorsement of Elon Musk or the way the company is run: my mother wanted one, I put one on order, and when it arrived after she died I decided to keep it. I’ll probably exchange it sometime in the next year or two, particularly when the ID. Buzz comes out in the US. But given the state of the world, environmentally and geopolitically, I’ll never go back to a gasoline-powered car.

I’m not a high-end car guy by nature: my previous ride was a second hand ex-rental Hyundai Elantra. I actually resent the fact that I need to own a car at all, and would vastly prefer just to use public transit in the way I did before I moved here. But a car is necessary here, at least for now.

Still, the Tesla is undeniably fun to drive, and I really do like that it’s emission-free (and that I don’t have to pay high gas prices). Even simple features were magic to me: adaptive cruise control, for example, which I now know is at least an option across most new cars sold in the last few years. But it’s far smoother and more performant than anything I’ve previously owned.

It’s also given me an insight into this simple fact: Tesla is going to be absolutely dead within a few years unless it radically changes strategy.

The Tesla has its own integrated operating system. Even if you’ve never driven one, you’ve probably seen the iPad-like touchscreen display. Never mind that the interface keeps changing every few software versions and the text is surprisingly unreadable; it’s also substandard compared to, say, Apple CarPlay.

You’re expected to use voice commands for just about everything, because most features are so buried in convoluted menus that finding the control while you’re driving would be life-threatening. But the voice assistant also stinks. I find myself adopting a fake American accent to get it to understand me, and finding the right command can feel like playing a text adventure game circa 1985. Even opening the glovebox is like this. (What do you call a glovebox? If it’s not “glovebox”, you may find getting it open harder than you’d like.)

Finally, there’s no App Store. Whereas I can bring my relevant apps along for the ride in most other modern cars, the Tesla limits me to whatever the manufacturers thought would be useful. I have to use Tesla’s map; Tesla’s entertainment options; Tesla’s features. Were they streets ahead of everyone else’s, that might be reasonable, but they’re not.

Tesla and a few other manufacturers are vying to be the Apple of cars: a full-stack ecosystem that just works. I’ve found no fault with the hardware (although others have), and I find the proprietary charging network to be convenient and slick. But the software layer almost feels like an afterthought.

Getting the car serviced is also problematic. You can take most cars to your neighborhood mechanic. A lot of people have one they trust, that they’ve built up a relationship with over a period of years. In contrast, Tesla requires you to use its own network of repair shops, limiting you to their availability and price. That model works to some extent for Apple because an iPhone bricking is generally not life-threatening (and even then, a general right to repair is looming). In the US at least, people depend on cars to live - and losing control of one on the road is a life and death situation. The context is wildly different.

What Tesla did succeed at is showing everyone how software could be integrated with a car. And it will be, very quickly. The next version of Apple CarPlay is multi-screen and can take over an entire dashboard. New vehicles will have this capability built in, and legislative pressure from territories like the EU will force these APIs to be open and standard, in the same way that On Board Diagnostics II was made mandatory. Already, startups are setting themselves up as the standard API across all EV brands, demonstrating the need for standardization. Finally, charging stations will also inevitably be standardized.

In a world where everyone can bring their apps and experience on their phone, where electric vehicles are commonplace, and where everyone can use every EV charger, I don’t know where Tesla differentiates. The result will be something similar to the car market today. Rather than buying into a set of competing ecosystems, consumers will find that every car is an able receptacle for the apps and identities they carry with them. A combination of legacy and new car manufacturers will be forced to compete on the best possible hardware platform, based on safety, range, and user experience alone. In turn, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto will also face competitors based on user preferences, because they won’t be able to lock manufacturers into their standards either. In effect, the right to repair will extend to onboard software.

*

January 2030.

We have a lot of the same problems we used to have. Roads are congested because of under-investment in mass transit solutions. Climate change continues because of industrial causes, and not enough power generation comes from renewable sources. The politics of fuel are as complicated and fraught as ever.

But personal carbon footprints in car-centric countries like the United States are markedly down. Cars have gone through an evolutionary step change and are now transport platforms in a way they never were before. There are even beginning to be applications that swarm cars through mesh networks - ad-hoc caravans - that increase group efficiency while also providing network effects for car manufacturers.

As ever, we’re inching towards being better. It’s not a revolution; just another step change. Which is what, at its heart, technology always does.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Two website updates:

Inspired by Dave Winer’s FeedLand, I now publish a live view of my sources at sources.werd.io. I start every day with my feeds, and this page is powered by those exact same subscriptions. So as I curate my list, the page at sources.werd.io will update automatically, and you can see what I’m reading.

Behind the scenes, this is a small Node script that polls the NewsBlur API and outputs a static HTML file every five minutes. For now, it ignores my mailing list subscriptions, which I also read through NewsBlur, mostly because some of those are paid and I don’t want to expose private content.

As always, if you know of a source that should be added to the list, let me know! I love discovering new sources to read - and particularly new personal blogs.

Speaking of: the second thing I did was resurrect my website at benwerd.com. When I moved hosting providers a while back, I failed to bring it back online, but this is an archive of every blog post I made between 2004 and 2013. It’s powered by WordPress, which I also upgraded in the process, so the design is a little different - but the content’s all there. Here are some highlighted posts from that era of my writing.

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

Apps + Websites

AI

Have I Been Trained? I plugged my own face into the site, and sure enough, I’m part of the training set. It also showed me pictures of my friends. Feels weird. See if you can generate something involving me?

Games

Return to Monkey Island. A splendid, absolutely fitting sequel. Nostalgic, funny, fresh, engrossing: everything I wanted it to be.

Indieweb

Meridian. Meridian is a developer platform that finds places based on a user’s latitude and longitude - and is open source and distributed, so doesn't leak user location to a third party.

Books

Nonfiction

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez. A very personal exploration of a facet of history that still has so many unheard stories. The portion set in England pulls no punches, in a way that makes me want to force all my friends there to read this. I learned so much, and felt so much: it does its job and more.

Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe. A heartfelt memoir that I wish more kids had access to. Its place to the top of banned book lists is a travesty. I was surprised how emotional I found it; the last few pages brought me to tears unexpectedly. I find this kind of raw honesty to be very inspiring.

Streaming

Radio

The Liz Truss BBC Local Radio Interviews. Fantastic job by BBC local radio interviewers. Terrifying listening, straight out of The Thick of It.

Music

Kat White - In the Eye of the Owl. Years ago, I commissioned a song about capybara for this lovely animal-themed children’s album. And now I get to listen to it with my actual child. Magic.

Podcasts

Book Exploder. A podcast that could have been made just for me. What I found most striking in all of these author accounts is how personal these book projects all are. Writing is a detailed exercise in craft, but also a phenomenal act of empathy.

Notable Articles

Business

eBay exec sentenced in cyberstalking attack on Natick couple. “The couple said they were sent disturbing items, including live bugs, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath and a book about coping with the loss of a spouse.”

One of the Hottest Trends in the World of Investing Is a Sham. On ESGs: “Instead of measuring the risks that environmental and social developments pose to companies, raters and investors should measure the risks to humanity posed by companies.”

Climate

Climate change is turning the trees into gluttons. “Although other factors like climate and pests can somewhat affect a tree’s volume, the study found that elevated carbon levels consistently led to an increase of wood volume in 10 different temperate forest groups across the country. This suggests that trees are helping to shield Earth’s ecosystem from the impacts of global warming through their rapid growth.”

Patagonia Founder Gives Away the Company to Fight Climate Change. “Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.”

New technique shows old temperatures were much hotter than thought. “Meckler’s warmer temperatures suggest that CO2’s capacity to warm during that time in Earth’s past was higher than was found in earlier studies. “This would lead to a higher climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2,” the paper says.”

Culture

Hundreds Of Authors Ask Publishers To Stop Attacking Libraries. “Tons of authors, including some very big names like Neil Gaiman, saying that the publishers need to not just stop going after libraries, but especially that they need to stop doing so in the name of authors.”

‘We can continue Pratchett’s efforts’: the gamers keeping Discworld alive. “Not only does it feature most of the key locations, from the city of Ankh-Morpork to areas such as Klatch and the Ramtops, it has seven guilds, player-run shops, and countless quests and adventures featuring many of the Discworld’s most notable characters. It even has its own newspaper.”

Artist receives first known US copyright registration for latent diffusion AI art. “In what might be a first, a New York-based artist named Kris Kashtanova has received US copyright registration on their graphic novel that features AI-generated artwork created by latent diffusion AI.”

Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools. “Some groups appear to feed off work to promote diverse books, contorting those efforts to further their own censorious ends. They have inverted the purpose of lists compiled for teachers and librarians interested in introducing a more diverse set of reading materials into the classroom or library.” Despicable.

How ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ Finally, After 43 Years, Got Completed. “The problem with the theatrical cut was, simply, it wasn’t done. It feels long and slow because the movie hadn’t been edited properly. Scenes that may only last two or three seconds too long, or literally one frame, add up over the course of a movie to make it feel long. Now, after 1500 or so edits, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a film that finally feels properly paced, looks stunning, and, after long last, no longer keeps the viewer at arm’s length.”

Human Capital. “TED was for bearing hearts, not souls.” A fun short story from the world of Reap3r.

Food Means Home. A recipe book collated by 30 unaccompanied minor asylum seekers. Just completely lovely.

The Reactionary Geeks Are Mad About 'Rings of Power'. “The refrain “Go woke, go broke” offers a tidy summary of this argument, wokeness gone mad being a useful euphemism for a demand like “resegregate popular entertainment,” which might turn people off.”

Democracy

Maggie Haberman: A Reckoning With Donald Trump. “I was curious when Trump said he had kept in touch with other world leaders since leaving office. I asked whether that included Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and he said no. But when I mentioned North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, he responded, “Well, I don’t want to say exactly, but …” before trailing off. I learned after the interview that he had been telling people at Mar-a-Lago that he was still in contact with North Korea’s supreme leader, whose picture with Trump hung on the wall of his new office at his club.”

Most Republicans Support Declaring the United States a Christian Nation. “Fully 61 percent of Republicans supported declaring the United States a Christian nation. In other words, even though over half of Republicans previously said such a move would be unconstitutional, a majority of GOP voters would still support this declaration.”

The smoking gun in Martha's Vineyard. “Migrants from Venezuela were provided with false information to convince them to board flights chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). The documents suggest that the flights were not just a callous political stunt but potentially a crime.”

DHS built huge database from cellphones, computers seized at border. “The rapid expansion of the database and the ability of 2,700 CBP officers to access it without a warrant — two details not previously known about the database — have raised alarms in Congress about what use the government has made of the information, much of which is captured from people not suspected of any crime. CBP officials told congressional staff the data is maintained for 15 years.”

American Democracy doesn’t need saving — it needs creating. “But when we shift our perspective and begin to see our task as creating and cultivating democracy, more accessible and meaningful options become available to ordinary people and the institutions that represent them and are meant to serve them.”

I was arrested after asking "who elected him?" at the proclamation of King Charles. “What other freedoms can be suppressed in the name of monarchy? Who else will be arrested under the vile Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act?”

A Black protester voiced anger at police in South Carolina. She got 4 years in prison. “You have people who stormed the Capitol, who led to the death of law enforcement, who tried to overturn an election and fracture democracy. And they’re getting two months, three months, six months. And Brittany Martin gets four years.”

Health

I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health. “If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.”

Media

Axios's 'Smart Brevity' and Questionable Book-Selling Tactics. “The intrigue: An internal Axios memo encouraged each employee to buy six copies of the trio’s new book. Workers could then get those purchases expensed by the company—a practice that could cost Axios more than $70,000, according to Defector.” Savage.

Inside podcasters' explosive audience growth. “Each time a player taps on one of these fleeting in-game ads—and wins some virtual loot for doing so—a podcast episode begins downloading on their device. The podcast company, in turn, can claim the gamer as a new listener to its program and add another coveted download to its overall tally.”

Americans see media as critical to democracy, 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll says. “An increasingly diverse country does not see itself reflected in the media. Communities of color, LGBTQ+ people and marginalized groups are still underrepresented in both who covers the news and what news is covered.”

How we know journalism is good for democracy. “When respondents have the least information, candidates of color—particularly Black candidates—are disadvantaged, among respondents across party, ideological, and racial attitude lines.”

Welcome to the new Verge. “We also thought about where we came from and how we built The Verge into what it is today. And we landed on: well shit, we just need to blog more.” Love.

Make Your Voter Guide ICONIC. “This kind of user-friendly experience is something we keep dreaming that more newsroom voter guides will feature.”

Science

Scientists Have Bad News About All These Energy Efficient LEDs. “Focusing on the suppression of melatonin — the hormone that regulates sleep cycles — star visibility, and insects’ response to light, the researchers found that all categories were negatively affected. The level of melatonin suppression in humans has gone up since 2013, stars are less visible, and the insects’ response to light was unnaturally altered.”

Society

Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. “The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. […] Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.”

California's dead will have a new burial option: Human composting. “This new law will provide California’s 39 million residents with a meaningful funeral option that offers significant savings in carbon emissions, water and land usage over conventional burial or cremation.”

More US Employers Are Trapping Workers in a New Form of Indentured Servitude. “Bosses in industries such as retail, health care and logistics are reverting to an old tactic and trapping people in miserable jobs by threatening to saddle them with debt if they quit. Workers across the United States in fields ranging from nursing to trucking have been discouraged from leaving jobs they hate or can’t afford to keep because employers vow to charge them for training costs if they quit before an arbitrary deadline.”

‘Reverse Freedom Rides’ echo DeSantis Martha’s Vineyard migrant flights. Fascinating piece about the racist history of “reverse freedom rides” to Cape Cod that are now echoed by Ron DeSantis’s policies in Florida. I’ve been going to the Cape my entire life and I’m ashamed to say I had no idea.

Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people. “The rich in the US are exceptionally rich — the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia.”

Lindsey Graham's national abortion ban has exceptions that won't work, experts say. “But exceptions for the life of the pregnant person are notoriously difficult to receive; physicians have said the requirement of providing abortions only in an emergency can force them to wait until a patient is in dire condition before providing them needed care. And the rape and incest exceptions written into the bill — much like the ones that exist in a handful of state abortion bans — are nominal at best, sexual violence and abortion policy experts said. They require reporting and paperwork that does not occur in the majority of sexual assault cases.”

U.S. Approval of Labor Unions at Highest Point Since 1965. This feels like a sign of progress to me (and also a sign that ordinary workers need help).

Netherlands Plans to Launch Slavery Apology Fund for Awareness Projects. “The fund will be announced after the nation officially apologizes for its role in slavery by the end of this year or the beginning of next year, according to people familiar with the matter. It may be as big as 200 million euros ($204 million), the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

Technology

Elon Musk’s Texts Shatter the Myth of the Tech Genius. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

Rohingya seek reparations from Facebook for role in massacre. “But a new and comprehensive report by Amnesty International states that Facebook’s preferred narrative is false. The platform, Amnesty says, wasn’t merely a passive site with insufficient content moderation. Instead, Meta’s algorithms “proactively amplified and promoted content” on Facebook, which incited violent hatred against the Rohingya beginning as early as 2012.”

Facebook Report: Censorship Violated Palestinian Rights. “Meta deleted Arabic content relating to the violence at a far greater rate than Hebrew-language posts, confirming long-running complaints of disparate speech enforcement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The disparity, the report found, was perpetuated among posts reviewed both by human employees and automated software.”

US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data. “Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic.”

Pentagon reviews psychological operations amid Facebook, Twitter complaints. “The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.”

The Internet We Could Have Had. “The internet we do have, however, is figured much differently. It is figured as a tool of political domination. It is the apotheosis of the forms of domination secretly hidden inside the stories of progress and liberation. It is capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and environmental destruction all rolled into one hideous hydra whose heads are Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, Cook, with Musk and Thiel at the ass end.”

Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men. “Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s. However, for contributors who are outsiders to a project and their gender is identifiable, men’s acceptance rates are higher. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.”

How a news investigation shed light on potential patient privacy violations. “The health system said the tracking tool was intended to help track the success of a promotional campaign to connect more patients to its MyChart patient portal, which involved Facebook advertisements. But it was configured improperly, which allowed Meta to obtain patient information such as email addresses, phone numbers, computer IP addresses, contact information and appointment details.”

WordPress+IndieWeb as the OS of the Open Social Web. Nice indieweb thoughts and presentation. As an aside, I’ve added Hypothesis annotations to my site, inspired by Ton’s site.

5th Circuit Rewrites A Century Of 1st Amendment Law To Argue Internet Companies Have No Right To Moderate. “It effectively says that companies no longer have a 1st Amendment right to their own editorial policies. Under this ruling, any state in the 5th Circuit could, in theory, mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content. It could, in theory, allow a state to mandate that any news organization must publish opinion pieces by politicians. It completely flies in the face of the 1st Amendment’s association rights and the right to editorial discretion.”

Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3. “A surprising thing about working with GPT-3 in this way is that your prompt itself becomes important IP. It’s not hard to imagine future startups for which the secret sauce of their product is a carefully crafted prompt.”

It's hard to imagine better social media alternatives, but Scuttlebutt shows change is possible. “Because it’s not a company, Scuttlebutt doesn’t need to make a profit. There is no persuasive design trying to keep you hooked, no advertising, and it doesn’t collect, process or sell users’ personal data. Instead, data are stored and controlled on users’ own devices.”

Quality Is Systemic. “If your team is producing defective code, consider that it may not be because they all suck at their jobs. It’s probably because the environment isn’t allowing them to produce quality software.”

Launch House, a tech startup incubator, sold entrepreneurs on the promise of community. This is a cult.

Take Care of Your Blog. “There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away.”

Jack Dorsey’s Former Boss Is Building A Decentralized Twitter. “It’s not about machine learning, or AI, generating the perfect viral media, it’s about groups of people getting together and finding meaning with each other.” Rabble is doing important work.

My relationship to the internet falls into a few distinct eras:

Down the rabbit hole (1994-1999)

• Connecting to other teenagers on Usenet and IRC
• Learning HTML and building my first websites
• Building a thriving local news website in 1994, complete with classified ads
• Writing small shareware games and setting them loose on the network
• Releasing an internet magazine about technology and interviewing celebrities who had literally no idea I was fifteen years old
• Starting to blog
• Choosing to study computer science at university purely because of my love of the internet

Building community (2000-2004)

• Maintaining my own website but mostly posting on Livejournal, multiple times a day
• Accidentally creating a very popular website that gets millions of pageviews a day, with no real idea what to do with it - but it’s real cool
• Letting the lines blur and meeting a bunch of people in real life that I’ve been speaking to online
• Graduating and going to work on edtech for the university because there’s no substantial internet industry in Edinburgh in 2002

Building a career (2004-2009)

• Realizing that all edtech absolutely stinks and everyone involved resents it at best, but people are learning from each other on the emerging social web, so maybe let’s use those same principles to help people really learn?
• Building a prototype, offering it to the university, getting laughed out of the office
• Quitting and starting my first startup
• Building an open source social networking platform that’s translated into multiple languages and used all over the world
• Developing my underlying principles of distributed ownership, un-predatory business models through open source, and avoiding centralized lock-in
• Raising money and having a terrible experience with investors, falling out with my co-founder in the process

Media (2010-2015)

• Leaving my startup to save my sanity
• Going to work as first employee of a tech company for the first time, in an industry I care about but have no experience in (news)
• Building a tool that NBC News (among others) uses to send video back to the newsroom, and learning a ton in the process
• Becoming part of the indieweb, a community that’s completely in line with the principles I developed in the previous era
• Going back to found my second startup - another open source communications platform
• Learning about design thinking and raising money for the startup
• Winning awards with our customers

Getting serious (2016-2018)

• Acquihired by Medium
• First time working in a big VC-backed startup with insane amounts of money, a whisky shelf, and kombucha on tap
• Wake up one day to realize I’ve lost my love for the internet without: without the scrappiness and the punk sensibility of building something better than what all those rich people can manage, the joy for me is gone
• But also, maybe it’s everything going on in the world - Brexit in particular hits me hard
• Become a VC at the firm that funded my last startup, end up teaching other startups and media companies how to approach problems using design thinking
• Re-codify my principles: I want to work on projects with the potential to create a more informed, more equal world
• Become first employee at a blockchain-related startup

Life happens (2019-2021)

• My mother’s terminal illness becomes the primary concern
• I don’t have time or mental energy to build interesting things on the internet anymore
• I take a job that is not really what I’m here in the world to do, but it’ll keep me going while everything else is happening (and I meet some lovely people while I'm there)

Reinvigorated (2022-)

• Hired by The 19th, fully in line with my principles!
• Experimenting with networked technology in new ways
• Building projects in my spare time
• Baby arrives! I get to think about what kind of world we’re building for him
• Excited for everything again
• Let’s see what happens?

How does your relationship to the internet break down? How do you feel about it today?