Werd I/O

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

Books

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, by Susan Kuklin. I wanted to like this, but I can’t recommend it. Granted, it’s almost a decade old, and the discourse has evolved since then. But the author leaves gender essentialism and some stories that verge on abuse unaddressed. It’s great that these teenagers’ stories are told verbatim, but it’s not great to miss out on the nuanced commentary that they demand. I love the idea and I hope someone executes it better than this.

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, by Mikki Kendall. A heartfelt argument for truly intersectional feminism. Occasionally challenging in the way that helps you stretch and learn, and overall a vision of what the politics of the future need to look like. As an introduction, it’s near-perfect, and I want to send it to quite a few people I know.

Notable Articles

Business

The Worst Thing You Can Do At Work After Another Mass Shooting Is Nothing. ““You can’t do ‘business as usual’ after a tragic event, which is something that many employers do and fail to prioritize the needs of their staff during such a difficult time,” said Katheryn Perez, a California-based psychotherapist. “The needs and humanity of your staff should take priority over anything.””

SpaceX Paid $250,000 to a Flight Attendant Who Accused Elon Musk of Sexual Misconduct. “The flight attendant told her friend that the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder asked her to come to his room during a flight in late 2016 “for a full body massage,” the declaration says. When she arrived, the attendant found that Musk “was completely naked except for a sheet covering the lower half of his body.” During the massage, the declaration says, Musk “exposed his genitals” and then “touched her and offered to buy her a horse if she would ‘do more,’ referring to the performance of sex acts.””

Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation. “In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas. By contrast, when it comes to selecting which idea to pursue, we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective (and preliminary evidence that they may be more effective) than in-person groups.” Flaring? Bad over video. Focusing? Just fine.

Climate

April sets record for highest CO2 levels in human history. “Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached the highest levels on record for any calendar month during April, averaging 420 parts per million (ppm) for the first time since observations began in 1958, according to new data.”

Covid

The Normalization of "Working Through Covid". “But I am here to say — to myself as much as any of you faced with this decision — that this is line of thinking is morally bankrupt. It has productivity culture brainworms. It is evidence of the most toxic scarcity mindset, and one of the most pernicious side-effects of the spread of “flexible” work.”

Covid's toll in U.S. reaches 1 million deaths, a once unfathomable number. “The United States on Wednesday surpassed 1 million Covid-19 deaths, according to data compiled by NBC News — a once unthinkable scale of loss even for the country with the world’s highest recorded toll from the virus.”

Crypto

From Argentina to Nigeria, people saw Terra as more stable than local currency. They lost everything. “The apparent security of stablecoins has made them attractive to people in countries that experience high inflation or currency devaluations, such as Argentina, Iran, and Nigeria. The UST crash, which has hit other crypto assets, shattered that illusion. Valeria is one of more than a dozen people Rest of World  spoke with, from countries including Argentina, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, and Nigeria, who invested in UST — the third-largest stablecoin — and its accompanying Luna token, and who said they have now lost tens of thousands of dollars in savings.”

There is a moral case against crypto. ““We” are not, in fact all going to make it — in a negative-sum or even zero-sum game, that’s impossible. The people using this line might, but that’s because they got in before everyone else. They are relying on the “greater fool” — which they hope includes you, dear reader — continuing to believe these lies and perpetuating their dishonest schemes.”

Cautionary Tales from Cryptoland. “It’s a compelling pitch; I’ll give them that. But crypto has so far been enormously successful at taking wealth from the average person or the financially disadvantaged and “redistributing” it to the already wealthy.”

Coinbase admits users may lose crypto if exchange goes bankrupt. “Coinbase said in its earnings report Tuesday that it holds $256 billion in both fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies on behalf of its customers. Yet the exchange noted that in the event it ever declared bankruptcy, “the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings.” Coinbase users would become “general unsecured creditors,” meaning they have no right to claim any specific property from the exchange in proceedings. Their funds would become inaccessible.” Uhh.

Culture

Want to make it in the music industry? You better go viral on TikTok. Halsey: “Basically I have a song that I love that I wanna release ASAP but my record label won’t let me. I’ve been in this industry for 8 years and I’ve sold over 165 million records. And my record company is saying that I can’t release it unless they can fake a viral moment on TikTok. Everything is marketing. And they are doing this to basically every artist these days. I just wanna release music, man. And I deserve better tbh. I’m tired.”

Filtered for ownership. “Incredible to think of ownership as being so arbitrary. Implies that we could have completely different configurations of ownership, moral frameworks around it, feelings around it.” A fun exploration of several different ownership conundrums.

Yep, I created the new AVATAR font. “Like any self-respecting type designer, I’ve seen the SNL Papyrus skit, and I usually watch it again whenever someone sends me a link (which is pretty often). I do believe it’s Ryan Gosling’s finest performance. But unlike many type nerds, I think Papyrus is actually a pretty cool-looking font, and must admit that it wasn’t a bad fit for the original AVATAR logo, despite also appearing on Shakira merch and off-brand tea.”

Fiction Fodder

NASA Sponsored Researcher Suggests It Might Be Possible to Change the Laws of Physics. “In an extremely cosmic-brain take, University of Rochester astrophysics professor Adam Frank suggests that a civilization could advance so much that it could eventually tinker with the fundamental laws of physics.”

Media

Online retail images reveal skin tone discrepancies. “Their study, “Computing Colorism: Skin Tone in Online Retail Imagery,” published March 13 in Visual Communication, found that still images of models had statistically lighter skin tones than in videos of the same product and model. They also found evidence of “tokenism” – that is, many of the websites had one model who was considerably darker-skinned than the others”

Doctor Who: Ncuti Gatwa to replace Jodie Whittaker, BBC announces. “The Scottish actor, who was born in Rwanda, starred as Eric Effiong in Netflix’s hugely popular Sex Education about the socially awkward high school student Otis (Asa Butterfield) and his sex therapist mother Jean (Gillian Anderson). He will become the first black actor to play the title role full-time.” With no shade to the current era, which I’ve enjoyed very much, I can’t wait.

‘Wipe Jews Off the Face of the Earth’: Racism and Antisemitic Slurs of Viral YouTuber Exposed. “Watson uses a string of racist and homophobic epithets and claims that he is sick of “media f—t activists” sticking signs “up in my face trying to get me to join the gay ft Palestinian cause. I don’t give a shit about Israel and Palestine. I care about white people. Not sand n—r Jew P—i f—t c—s”.”

Politics

Why is the GOP escalating attacks on trans rights? Experts say the goal is to make sure evangelicals vote. “In the 2018 midterms, the Human Rights Campaign, with polling firm Catalyst, found that people they dubbed “equality voters,” those whose support for LGBTQ+ rights strongly influenced their voting choices, made up 29 percent of the electorate. White evangelicals made up 26 percent of the vote.” This is going to be an increasingly losing strategy over time.

Inflation’s biting. Roe’s fraying. Dems are still trying to connect with voters. “When Porter gave an emotional speech about how inflation has been hitting her family for months during a private House Democratic Caucus meeting last week, she said it seemed like the first time the personal toll of high consumer prices had sunk in for some lawmakers in the room.”

Former Pentagon chief Esper says Trump wanted to shoot protesters. “Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper charges in a memoir out May 10 that former President Trump said when demonstrators were filling the streets around the White House following the death of George Floyd: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?””

What you need to know about the Title 42 policy that sends migrants to Mexico. “The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that it plans to end Title 42 on May 23 because COVID-19 cases have decreased and vaccines are widely available. But that date is now in question because of Republican-led lawsuits aimed at keeping the policy in place.”

Fed judiciary says yes to free PACER searches. Here are the details so far. “Federal judiciary policymakers have approved a plan to eliminate costly fees for online docket searches amid debate in Congress about whether to force the court system to make its PACER electronic court record system free for the general public.” RIP Aaron Swartz.

Science

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? “So Lindqvist decided to look at overall mortality rates, and the results were shocking. Over the 20 years of the study, sun avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.”

Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives. “This study provides evidence that cats link a companion’s name and corresponding face without explicit training.”

Researchers Pinpoint Reason Infants Die From SIDS. “Previously, parents were told SIDS could be prevented if they took proper precautions: laying babies on their backs, not letting them overheat and keeping all toys and blankets out of the crib were a few of the most important preventative steps. So, when SIDS still occurred, parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death.”

Society

The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives. “The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis, just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.”

All Aboard Germany's Gas-Saving Summer of Super-Cheap Trains. “For the three months of summer starting June 1, a month’s travel ticket will cost just 9 euros ($9.56) a month for all subways, buses, trams and regional trains. This will slash the cost of public transit to almost token levels.” Way to make me homesick for Europe.

Guns have become the top injury-related cause of death for U.S. kids. “School shootings have become tragically common in the U.S., but constitute only a small fraction of gun deaths among children.”

Current Causes of Death in Children and Adolescents in the United States. “Since 2016, that gap has narrowed, and in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in that age group.” Guns are now the leading cause of death for children in the United States.

329 years later, last Salem 'witch' who wasn't is pardoned. “Massachusetts lawmakers on Thursday formally exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., clearing her name 329 years after she was convicted of witchcraft in 1693 and sentenced to death at the height of the Salem Witch Trials.”

Vast majority of Americans don’t want Supreme Court decisions on marriage, contraception overturned, new poll shows. “An exclusive The 19th/Momentive poll of more than 8,000 Americans revealed strongly held opinions on maintaining Supreme Court precedent on cases rooted in the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of personal liberty.”

What abortion restrictions and laws look like in every state in the US - right now. “The 19th created this dashboard to centralize updates on the status of abortion rights in each state in this moment. While we will continue our extensive, in-depth coverage of the shifting abortion access landscape, this tool provides us with a way to share breaking news and how it affects access in each state.”

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy: Our Maternal Death Rates Are Only Bad If You Count Black Women. “In an interview with Politico, the following words came out of Cassidy’s mouth: “About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear. Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.””

Fetus-powered street lamps? Republicans ramp up outrageous anti-abortion lies ahead of Roe's demise. ““In places like Washington D.C.,” fetuses are “burned to power the light’s of the city’s homes and streets,” claimed Catherine Glenn Foster, who had, just minutes before, sworn not to lie under oath. The GOP-summoned witness let loose the wild and utterly false accusation that municipal electrical companies are powered by incinerated fetuses.”

How inequities make the baby formula shortage worse for many families. “In the meantime, parents have begun stockpiling if they can – and rationing when they can’t. Much of the burden is falling on households that need financial assistance: The White House noted that people on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) account for about half of all infant formula purchases. Parents who work lower-income jobs often need to rely on formula more because their jobs do not allow for them to establish breastfeeding easily – assuming a parent can produce enough milk to begin with.”

American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century. “ICE has used face recognition technology to search through the driver’s license photographs of around 1 in 3 (32%) of all adults in the U.S. The agency has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 (74%) adults and tracks the movements of cars in cities home to nearly 3 in 4 (70%) adults. When 3 in 4 (74%) adults in the U.S. connected the gas, electricity, phone or internet in a new home, ICE was able to automatically learn their new address. Almost all of that has been done warrantlessly and in secret.”

New poll captures how people with disabilities feel about abortion. “The Data for Progress national poll indicates that 55 percent of non-disabled people and 53 percent of people with disabilities believe that abortion should be legal in most circumstances, which largely reflects recent data from other polling firms.”

Leaked Supreme Court draft abortion decision could stop patients from seeking the procedure. “The leaked ruling is certain to embolden conservative-led states eager to restrict access to the procedure. And it will discourage patients from seeking abortions that, under current law, they are constitutionally entitled to, experts said.”

Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows. “No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.”

Canadian astronauts no longer free to rob and kill with abandon in space or on the moon. “The amendment explicitly states that Canadian criminal jurisdiction will apply to the lunar station itself, and any “means of transportation” to the station. And just in case, “on the surface of the moon.””

Technology

Microsoft’s Verified ID could create digital privacy issues. “As part of Verified ID, individuals would be able to get digital credentials that prove where they work, what school they graduated from, which bank account they have — and, perhaps more controversially, whether they’re in good health according to their doctor.” It supports DIDs, interestingly.

If Tech Fails to Design for the Most Vulnerable, It Fails Us All. “The reality is that making better, safer, less harmful tech requires design based on the lived realities of those who are most marginalized. These “edge cases” are frequently ignored as being outside of the scope of a typical user’s likely experiences. Yet they are powerful indicators for understanding the flaws in our technologies.”

In Extremely Confusing Twist, Facebook Says It Isn’t Building a Metaverse After All. “Facebook’s dream of the metaverse, a VR hellscape stuffed with annoying ads and screeching children, is as incoherent and confusing as ever after reading an 8,000 word essay by Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at Facebook’s parent company Meta.” Honestly can’t believe I’m living in a reality where Nick Clegg of all people is in a position to describe the future.

Bada Bing, Bada Boom: Microsoft Bing’s Chinese Political Censorship of Autosuggestions in North America. “We analyzed Microsoft Bing’s autosuggestion system for censorship of the names of individuals, finding that, outside of names relating to eroticism, the second largest category of names censored from appearing in autosuggestions were those of Chinese party leaders, dissidents, and other persons considered politically sensitive in China.” Including here in the US.

We Need to Take Back Our Privacy. “That data becomes an even more powerful form of surveillance when it is combined with other data. A woman who regularly eats sushi and suddenly stops, or stops taking Pepto-Bismol, or starts taking vitamin B6 may be easily identified as someone following guidelines for pregnancy. If that woman doesn’t give birth she might find herself being questioned by the police, who may think she had an abortion.”

Taking a Break from Social Media Makes you Happier and Less Anxious. “At the end of this week, the researchers found “significant between-group differences” in well-being, depression, and anxiety, with the intervention group faring much better on all three metrics. These results held even after control for baseline scores, as well as age and gender.”

Apple discontinues the iPod after 20 years. “While Apple may be done with making dedicated music players, the company says that “the spirit of iPod lives on” in all of its devices that play music, such as the iPhone, iPad, and HomePod Mini.”

Israel Arrests 9 for 'AirDrop' of Crash Images Aboard Plane. “A taxiing plane returned to the gate at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on Tuesday after photos of aviation disasters popped up on passengers’ phones - sent, Israeli authorities believe, by nine people on board using the iPhone “AirDrop” function.”

Data Broker Is Selling Location Data of People Who Visit Abortion Clinics. “A location data firm is selling information related to visits to clinics that provide abortions including Planned Parenthood facilities, showing where groups of people visiting the locations came from, how long they stayed there, and where they then went afterwards, according to sets of the data purchased by Motherboard.”

“That’s really why you join a startup,” someone said to me recently, over a phone call. “For the financial upside.”

I retained my composure, but I found it more jarring than I let on: I’ve never joined a startup for the financial upside. Should I have?

I made some kind of tempered comment about it being okay to want to make a Steve Jobsian dent in the universe. For me, it’s not even about that: Steve Jobs was famously an asshole to his employees, a die-hard capitalist who would jettison people who he felt didn’t live up to his singular vision. I don’t find that inspiring, and I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with being inspired by someone who doesn’t treat people around them well.

For me, it’s always been about community and social change. The internet has transformed the way we communicate, do business, and live our lives on a fundamental level. It’s hard to remember a world before we could order anything on Amazon, or access virtually all human knowledge through a screen - but it’s only been a few decades. The ubiquitous internet is only really as old as the iPhone 3G: thirteen years of high-speed change. It’s been no time at all.

I love technology. It’s in my blood: I learned to write words and code at the same time. I love programming, and I love trying new technologies. Well-designed hardware and software is still like magic to me. But together with the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, came a brand of highly-centralized, unfettered capitalism. Companies like Uber intentionally decimated markets and livelihoods by staying one step ahead of changing legislation. Hard-won liberties like the eight hour workday were bulldozed through the gig economy. These are things that are hard to love.

I’m far from a libertarian. Maybe it’s the European in me - I went to university for free, depended on free healthcare, and was delighted by the quality of both - but strong safety nets and protection from poverty and violence seem to me like fundamental tenets of a well-functioning society. To me, a financially efficient market is not the same as an optimal one; rather than focusing on growth, we should be optimizing for inclusion, care, empathy, and quality of life.

There’s always been an underlying libertarianism in tech. But the internet’s exponential growth brought in a kind of coin-operated mentality that’s slowly become the prevailing culture. Some people got rich very, very quickly, so there was an influx of people who wanted to get rich quick too. For them, safety nets and regulations were just barriers to “innovation”; in this context, innovation just meant finding ways to make money more quickly through software. Through their lens, a high-speed global communications network seems like little more than a way to build hyper-effective monopolies. Even the modern decentralization movement, which to its credit is partially about making monopolies impossible, is largely fueled by greed.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I’m far from the only technologist who sits far from that mindset. Just as unions provide a much-needed worker-oriented counter-force to leadership and capital, there’s room for communities in tech that push for more utopian ideals. They may be underfunded in comparison, but they’re passionate, they’re smart, and they affect the trajectory of the whole internet.

The startups I’ve founded have been direct reactions to centralized tendencies. Elgg, an open source white label community platform, was originally designed as a response to proprietary learning management systems that cost taxpayer-funded universities millions of dollars through predatory business models. It later became a way for people to run communities that weren’t subject to Facebook’s rules and surveillance. Known was in some ways a second run at that idea: a way for anyone to run their own social profile, or a profile for a group, that was fully under their control. I saw early that dependence on sites like Facebook had the potential to undermine democracy, and this was my attempt to do something about it.

I’ve never joined a startup because I wanted to get rich. I’ve usually joined because I saw major social problems that I wanted to help solve: in news-gathering, in sustainability for independent creators, in financial safety. I’ve never been alone, but I’ve always been in the minority: communities of people who see a problem that the industry at large doesn’t seem to care about at best, or at worst wants to exploit for financial gain. Those are the people I’m grateful to work alongside.

Another person told me recently that I had given them the confidence to renegotiate a work situation based on their values. They hadn’t previously thought it was possible to do work in this industry and stay true to their principles; I had shown them that it was at least possible to fight for them. That gives me hope. It’s another good reason to make the choices I do.

“That’s really why you join a startup,” that first person told me over the phone. “For the financial upside.” Respectfully, I have to disagree.

A British friend asked me what the deal with the American attitude towards guns was. To an outside eye, and to many inside eyes, it’s ludicrous. A lot of people, quite reasonably, can’t understand why Americans won’t come together and pass gun control legislation - particularly now that guns are the largest cause of death for children.

This was my answer. I’d love to read yours:

It's a great question, and one I struggle with too, even after living here for 11 years. Here's my take. Sorry for Bensplaining, but this is also helping me sort out my own thoughts.

The first thing to understand about America is that it's best thought of as 50 countries federated together into a union of rough consensus, rather than one coherent nation. If they were independent, gun control would be relatively easy in 60-70% of them. New York and California: fine. Texas: not so much.

But that's not how it was set up. And in particular, the constitution of the union had a badly-worded amendment (15 years after the original document) that can be construed to codify gun ownership. Not only that, but because America had a kind of colonizer attitude from the beginning, taking land both from indigenous people and from other colonies, as well as hunting for food in newly-established settlements, guns became a core part of American culture. Movies and advertising helped cement the idea that you need a gun for self-defense.

(Defense against whom in the 20th century, one might ask? There's a racist component here for sure. Even now, when violence is brought up, people talk about places like the south side of Chicago. Hey, who lives there?)

More recently, since Reagan or so, gun control has become a part of the Republican platform, alongside issues like abortion, because they've found it's a way to rile up the base. Even though, like abortion, a majority of Americans go the other way on it, there's enough legislative friction to make it an issue - and enough Americans who feel strongly about it, mostly in rural-dominated states, to drive more electoral support. Unlike abortion, that second amendment means it's almost impossible to enact real legislation.

I don't think we can repeal the second amendment in my lifetime. I do think we can re-enact an assault weapons ban and create stronger controls akin to having a driving license. I think that will help. But changing the culture completely is a generational effort.

Startupland is about to experience its first downturn since the 2008 recession. I realized today that many founders and startup employees were literal children when they last had to live through a bear market: for thirteen straight years, tech companies have been growing and growing. They’ve never seen or had to prepare for a slump.

It was a startling realization: to me, that feels like yesterday. (I’m older than I think I am.) I was at the tail end of my first startup at the time. We’d taken investment but had been cashflow positive for years first; because we were insulated from the worst of it, I had a panic-free front row seat. For a little while, funding dried up. Services consolidated or went away entirely. And in the meantime, free and open source projects - WordPress in particular - thrived.

The introduction of the iPhone catalyzed the consumer tech industry out of its trough. Rather than carrying on with business as usual, the companies that did well in 2009 were the ones who took advantage of the new always-on internet to create new kinds of services. They were differentiated from the failed dotcoms that came before: services like Flickr gave way to apps like Instagram. It was a genuinely new way of thinking. For a little while, even Facebook struggled to get to grips with the new web.

This week, Y Combinator sent a strongly-worded note to its portfolio of startups:

Regardless of your ability to fundraise, it’s your responsibility to ensure your company will survive if you cannot raise money for the next 24 months.

For a generation of startups used to spending money with wild abandon, partially because investors have implicitly encouraged the strategy of using capital as a moat, pivoting to business fundamentals may be too difficult. Even if founders can pivot their strategies, many of their employees were lured by lifestyle perks and the prestige of working for a growing company with name recognition in the community. If the startup hasn’t worked on a deeply-held reason to work there - something that makes the work meaningful; a nurturing community of people that values them as people - founders may find that retention is harder than they would like.

Still, I don’t think there’s any other way out. While the 2008 slump happened to coincide with the iPhone, I don’t see a similar paradigm shift coming for tech this time round. Crypto has already crashed, and although it will probably rebound, investment there has slowed. The metaverse is vaporware at best. The promise of an ambient web powered by augmented reality devices is years away.

So the biggest paradigm shift may simply be a return to reality: a vibe shift to profit. Valuations will be calculated based on revenue rather than hype. Some companies will make it; many more won’t.

In a world driven by revenue, the way to survive is to provide a service that people find valuable enough to pay for, aligned with their needs and interests.

Almost by definition, many of the companies that won’t make it through leaner times are the greediest: the startups created to feed their founders’ desire to make money rather than to deeply serve their customers or overhaul a predatory industry. Their coin-operated philosophies often extend to treating their employees like fungible resources who should be grateful to work there. I don’t think I’ll spend much time crying over them.

On the other hand, I’m excited for the companies who can double down on their customers and on their employees. The founders who can create real value for the people they’re trying to serve, and curate an empathetic community of thoughtful builders to do so, are the ones who are most likely to win. That’s what the tech industry is at its best, and that’s what will survive.

When my mother was still alive, she was very concerned about her impact on the planet. She very badly wanted an electric car, and was interested in getting a Tesla. For lots of reasons, my parents weren’t able to buy one. So I put myself on the list for a Model 3: specifically so she would be able to get to and from her dialysis appointments in one.

It was delivered a month after she died. I could have canceled my appointment, but I decided to keep driving it. Honestly, although the self-driving capability is nonsense and the software is low quality, it’s a very nice ride. I really enjoy driving it.

The company’s CEO is making it less and less tenable to keep doing so. From Elon Musk’s will-he-won’t-he Twitter acquisition to comments about politics, social justice, and the media, he’s not an easy man to like. And now revelations that he offered to buy a SpaceX flight attendant a horse if she would perform sex acts on him make it even harder.

Teslas have great range and an excellent charging network. They’re not much more expensive than a Honda Civic and help wean drivers away from gasoline. But they also come with a kind of social baggage that is hard to look past. By association, I now appear to be okay with Musk’s actions. I am not.

When someone tells you who they are, the adage goes, believe them. The on-board software includes a boom box mode and a fart machine: stuff more at home in an adolescent’s fantasy arsenal than in a car driven by adults. As it turns out, this immaturity runs dangerously deep.

So what now? Surely the board at Tesla has to be considering having Musk removed. It would be the right thing to do. Otherwise, I’m going to get rid of the car (perhaps in favor of an ID. Buzz) and I’ll encourage other Tesla drivers to do the same.

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

Quiet mornings are hard to come by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I take a sip from my coffee and wait.

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

It’s American mother’s day.

They say nothing prepares you for losing a parent. Theoretically, I should have been prepared: ten years of pulmonary fibrosis, a double lung transplant, a rollercoaster of ups and downs that took me away from my life in Scotland and made me a part-time carer. From 2011 to 2021, her journey was my journey. Still, her loss ripped a hole from me. I’ve wondered if it was so profound because of that extra time; I’ll never know. Thankfully, I have nothing to compare it to.

I’m pretty good at putting on the appearance of holding it together. At best, it’s a sort of mask, but a magical one that only I know I’m wearing. I’m still not sure I know what grief is, exactly, and maybe it’s different for everyone: my flavor is a feeling of being untethered, like I’ve found myself in a parallel universe where everything is wrong. There’s no way back; no leap home. The only way through is forwards, and I resent it.

By far the worst part is the expectation of coping. Because I’m wearing that magical mask, I look more or less like an adult human being who is getting through his day. But because I’m untethered, because I feel this new distance between me and the world, I’ve been operating without a rudder. I’ve been alternately numb and in pain, and looking for things to make me feel anything else. I’ve been deeply unhappy with my life - all of it - but it’s hard to figure out what to change, or how, when a bomb won’t stop going off. I’d hoped to have time and space to breathe this year, a way to regroup, but there’s less than I’d hoped.

People expect men to cope; to be stoic; to just get on with it. And I am. But I want to disappear. I had this giant loss, and the world has carried on regardless, and I’m expected to carry on with it. I resent that. It’s driven a wedge between me and everything. Above all, it feels incredibly lonely.

I know my father and my sister feel their own versions of this, too, and I’ve been spending a lot of time with them. Family is powerful at a time like this. We understand each other.

Ma saw good in everyone and was able to cut through bullshit with a word. I can hear her say “oh for goodness sake” and tell me what I just need to go and do to give myself that space. I’m even doing some of them - I’ll write more about work in particular before too long - but there’s so much that feels askew.

My parents taught me to have wide horizons and not to be bound by the norms of the mainstream. It was an important lesson, but also one that ruined me for a “normal” life: I haven’t had a normal career, and I wouldn’t feel satisfied living in the same place forever. There are so many adventures to be had out in the world, both figurative and literal. We only get to live once, and life is fleeting. You’ve just got to go for it. Live big. Nothing is really that scary.

And maybe that’s the lesson. If everything feels wrong, if everything is askew, I need to spend the time to figure it out and forge a life that works for me. My worst tendency is to erode my own boundaries to make other people happy: self-destruction in kindness’s clothing. She was always worried about that, and I should have paid more attention.

I miss her. The usual platitude is that she’s right here, in me. But that’s only true if I live up to her; if I live up to myself. I’ve got to be my own tether and find my own happiness; build a life where there is no mask.

If your mother is still with you, I hope you can find a way to hug her and hold her close. If not today, then soon.

She was never really into Mother’s Day. It was a Hallmark holiday to her. But it feels like a good time to say that I miss her, and I miss everything she meant to me. And I’m still figuring out what happens next.

I got to see Along for the Ride, the Netflix film based on Sarah Dessen’s novel of the same name. It was written and directed by Sofia Alvarez, who previously wrote the adaptation of To All the Boys I’ve Loved before. I’m not the target audience, but I loved it: breezy, fun, and awash with a kind of teenage nostalgia I’m here for all day.

But I also have to disclose this: Sarah is my cousin. She babysat me, and I got to see her career bloom. She’s inspiring to me as a human being first, and a writer second.

Writing, as I’ve mentioned here from time to time, is my first love. If I could figure out how to do that as a living, I would; I got into technology as a way to tell stories, not because I’m particularly excited by the discrete logic and how the components fit together. Programming is a means to an end. Every project I’ve started has been about storytelling of some kind.

Sarah’s been kind enough to share some writing tips along the way. The biggest one is something I’ve been bad at: just write. I’ve entered writing competitions and have published stories, but it’s always taken a surprising amount of effort for me to give myself permission to take it seriously. I think that’s because it’s something I want to do for myself, rather than something other people want me to do. Given the choice between nurturing my own needs and making someone else happy, I’ll usually pick the latter. In other words, I don’t take it seriously because I don’t take myself seriously.

So I’m in awe of people like Sarah who have the drive to make it happen. She’s a very talented writer who has built up a dedicated audience of people who love her work. Creating that work is hard: a novel is not a small undertaking, and building a story with emotional resonance that keeps the reader turning the page is a rare skill.

There’s a whole generation of predominantly women who have grown up with her books now. People have tattoos. That’s amazing.

At around the sixteen minute mark in the movie, Sarah leaves the Clementine’s boutique: a tiny cameo that I know she was nervous about. The girls say, “thank you, Sarah”. It’s a sweet moment if you know to look for it.

Every so often, Sarah will ask me how my writing is coming along. I don’t claim to have anything approaching her takent or dedication, but before too long, I hope to give her an answer that makes me proud. Thank you, Sarah.

We’re living through a notable period of history. This week’s Supreme Court leak is a lot: an early opinion by a noted constitutional originalist on the court which indicates that Roe v Wade will be overturned.

For people with a uterus in particular, this decision carries much emotional weight. It’s an emotive topic that speaks directly to their agency over their own bodies, after two long years of a global pandemic that disproportionately affected women and people of color, set against a backdrop of rising nationalism and discrimination. Injustice against tragedy against injustice.

It’s been a lot, yet many businesses want those same people to leave politics at the door, seeing these discussions as an inconvenient distraction that could divide offices and undermine performance. It’s a lot to ask for, and belies a position rooted in privilege: an obliviousness to how heavy this issue is, and how much of an effect the discussion necessarily has. If you feel like you’re being subjugated, the ask to ignore that subjugation for eight hours a day in support of someone else’s profits is offensive. Doubly so when those who profit are not subject to the same restrictions.

Those situations are discriminatory to people from vulnerable communities and harmful to almost everyone. If injustice must be compartmentalized away, the only possible outcome is a reinforcement of the status quo.

It’s important to make space for team members who need to take care of themselves; to reflect; to care. It’s important to feel like you can bring your whole self to work, and to feel like work is a safe place to be. It’s important to have the time and space to process in order to progress. A workplace that doesn’t make these allowances will always create psychological friction. In a world where every knowledge worker is working from their own space, letting their workplace into their homes, that’s even more important.

While the leak has been confirmed as real, it’s not necessarily a reflection of the final Supreme Court decision. As of writing this today, abortion is still legal. But that’s not the point: it’s the simple fact of the conversation that, for many, is an assault. And enforcing a denial of that fact is an assault again.

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

Books

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World, by Tom Burgis. Fascinating but also narrow: in this true life tale of global kleptocracy, all the players in the west are amoral at worst, while the real thieves are in the former Soviet Union. Still, there’s a lot to learn from the author’s research, and enough here to embarrass the banks and moneymen who made it all possible.

Notable Articles

Business

Rise of women in tech leadership. “Women in tech are gaining ground as the technology industry—or at least its largest players—makes slow but steady progress in shrinking its gender gap, and women in tech leadership are making the fastest advances.” Lots of work still to do, but good!

LinkedIn’s ‘career break’ feature can help normalize resume gaps. “LinkedIn users can classify their time away from paid work as one of 13 “types” of career breaks — including bereavement, career transition, caregiving, full-time parenting and health and well-being — and add details about what led to the career break and what they’ve done during the break.” I think this is good?

The Things We Did Not Do While Reaching $2M ARR. “A list of things tech startups usually go through that we did not.”

The Rise of the Triple Peak Day. “Findings from Microsoft and its researchers suggest that the 9-to-5 workday is fading in an age of remote and hybrid work and more flexible hours. That pattern was first spotted early in the pandemic, when Microsoft Teams chats outside the typical workday increased more than in any other time segment, particularly between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.” This is not okay.

Returning To The Office Is Creating The Great Reckoning. “Despite the endless pablum about “leadership” in business, those who lead - bosses, managers, and so on - by and large are not the ones doing the work, to the point that many of them have only the most tangential understanding of the tasks they’re demanding other people complete.”

Amazon Workers on Staten Island Vote to Unionize. “The win on Staten Island could herald a new era for labor unions in the United States, which saw the portion of workers in unions drop last year to 10.3 percent, the lowest rate in decades, despite widespread labor shortages and pockets of successful labor activity.”

Covid

75% of US children have now had COVID, up from 44% due to omicron. “About a third of all children in the country were newly infected during the omicron wave. Together, the data showcase just how poorly the country has done at shielding children—including those not yet eligible for vaccination—from the pandemic virus.”

Crypto

On anti-crypto toxicity. “If you feel the urge to “cyberbully” someone in crypto, direct it at the powerful players behind crypto projects that are actively taking advantage of the vulnerable. Or, just as reasonably, direct it at the powerful tech executives, venture capitalists, elected representatives, and lobbyists who have contributed to the untenable situation we find ourselves in.”

Gwyneth Paltrow, Mila Kunis are pushing women to invest in NFTs. “But they’re also buying into an unpredictable market that some theorize has already peaked. Most NFTs don’t sell and only a small group of people are responsible for the vast quantity of NFT trading, said Mason Nystrom, an analyst for Messari Capital.”

Culture

Donald Glover Interviews Donald Glover. “I mean farming everything. Talent, ideas, moments. You ever heard of Bauhaus?”

the html review. “The html review is an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web.”

Star Trek: Picard to Reunite Next Generation Cast for Season 3. Let’s be real: I will watch the hell out of this.

Return to Monkey Island. A new sequel from Ron Gilbert, following canonically from Monkey Island 2? Sign. Me. Up.

I would like to be paid like a plumber. “I explained this to Kurt but I thought I’d better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It’s the band’s fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it’s a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.” Steve Albini makes his pitch to Nirvana to help make In Utero.

Media

The L.A. Riots Were 30 Years Ago. I’m Still Trying to Understand Them. “But my editor, who was white, removed all references to King’s race from the story’s opening paragraphs.”

From the Arab Spring to Russian censorship: a decade of internet blackouts and repression. “Over the last six months, Rest of World spoke to more than 70 technologists, telecomms experts, activists, and journalists from around the world to track how governments’ control over the internet has grown and evolved during the past decade. Their testimony shows that the free, open, global internet is under severe threat.”

Let’s make journalism work for those not born into an elite class. ““Most news coverage isn’t created with people experiencing poverty in mind,” Heather Bryant, a journalist and founder of Project Facet, has said. That is frequently made clear when outlets want to run sensitive and authentic stories concerning class.”

White newspaper, Black city. “After years of sluggish progress, there’s something to be said about how journalists are growing more willing to publicly air the dirty laundry of their own publications in the name of making them better. While new journalism organizations are radically redefining what it means to reflect the communities they serve, it’s unclear if older institutions can truly reckon with their failures.”

How Silicon Valley is helping Putin and other tyrants win the information war. ““The power that Facebook has is scary. The way it is using it is even scarier,” a Russian journalist, who did not want to be named due to security concerns, told me. Her account was suspended after she was reported to Facebook by numerous accounts accusing her of violating community standards.”

Bitch Comes to a Close. Just a complete bummer.

BBC Staff Exodus: Women of Color Exhausted from Fighting Broken System. “At least 15 women of color have left the BBC in the last year saying they are “exhausted” from fighting a system that “is not systemically built to support anyone who is different,” a Variety investigation has uncovered.”

Politics

Supreme Court Denies Equal Rights To Puerto Ricans — Again. ““Equal treatment of citizens should not be left to the vagaries of the political process,” Sotomayor wrote. “Because residents of Puerto Rico do not have voting representation in Congress, they cannot rely on their elected representatives to remedy the punishing disparities suffered by citizen residents of Puerto Rico under Congress’ unequal treatment.””

Older women voters will likely play a big role in the midterm elections. ““Women over 50+ may not only be the decision makers in their households, they may also be the decision makers of the midterm elections,” Margie Omero, principal at GBAO, a public opinion research firm, said in a statement accompanying the poll results.”

Science

Alzheimer’s May Be Caused by Cell Phones, Scientists Say. “According to a press release on the research, most scientists agree that Alzheimer’s is caused by excess calcium buildup in the brain. And pulsed electronically generated electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted from cell phones, the study says, may be causing or worsening that calcium buildup.”

Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy. “In Frequency’s first clinical study, the company saw statistically significant improvements in speech perception in some participants after a single injection, with some responses lasting nearly two years.”

Society

Brooklyn Public Library Launches Campaign Against State Book Bans. “The Books UnBanned campaign provides youth ages 13 to 21 with online access to banned books.” Just superb.

Black principals receive leadership training, support through new initiatives. “Studies link Black principals, especially women, to better academic performance. New initiatives aim to train and support them.”

Stop matching lone female Ukraine refugees with single men, UK told. “The UN refugee agency has called on the UK government to intervene to stop single British men from being matched up with lone Ukrainian women seeking refuge from war because of fears of sexual exploitation.” Gross.

Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed: How she will change the Supreme Court. “The Senate on Thursday voted 53-47 to confirm Jackson’s historic nomination to the nation’s highest court. Though Jackson will not change the court’s conservative majority, she will change the court. Her presence is set to create the first all-women liberal wing of the court, whose dissenting opinions are expected to outline their vision for a more just country and possibly influence future Supreme Court rulings.”

Oklahoma’s legislature approves total abortion ban. “This June, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that examines the constitutionality of a 15-week abortion ban. Many observers believe the court, which has a large conservative majority, will use that case to overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing states to restrict access to the procedure as much as they wish.”

Technology

As Western social media apps leave Russia, Snap’s Zenly hangs on. “If you’re a restaurant chain, you’re either selling Subway sandwiches in Russia or not. You’re either selling a Rolls-Royce or not. It’s not as straightforward for the tech platforms.”

Applied for Student Aid Online? Facebook Saw You. “For millions of prospective college students, applying online for federal financial aid has also meant sharing personal data with Facebook, unbeknownst to them or their parents, The Markup has learned. This information has included first and last names, email addresses, and zip codes.”

Some Thoughts On Twitter. “I continue to believe that a single person owning one of the most important communications protocols of the internet is a bad idea, but maybe it can be a bridge to something better.”

Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms. “In its ruling, the Supreme Court narrowed what constitutes a violation of the CFAA as those who gain unauthorized access to a computer system — rather than a broader interpretation of exceeding existing authorization, which the court argued could have attached criminal penalties to “a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity.””

Jeff Bezos is worth $160bn – yet Congress might bail out his space company. “Who will, overall, be benefiting from space exploration? Will it be a handful of billionaires or will it be the people of our country and all of humanity?”

Lyft asked if this driver needed help. He was already dying. “Lyft says it’s worked hard to develop security features to keep drivers safe. In addition to the texts the company sends, Lyft also has 24/7 safety teams and partners with ADT, so drivers can use the Lyft app to contact the security company and get emergency services sent to their location. But Philpotts’ story is a case study not only in how those safety features fail in real life-and-death situations, but also in how Lyft itself fails the families of drivers who are hurt or killed on the job.”

Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models. “Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier. On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a mechanism for changing the classification of any input, with only a slight perturbation.”

Ukraine using ClearviewAI facial recognition to identify Russian war dead. “In another conversation, a stranger sent a message to a Russian mother saying her son was dead, alongside a photo showing a man’s body in the dirt — face grimacing and mouth agape. The recipient responded with disbelief, saying it wasn’t him, before the sender passed along another photo showing a gloved hand holding the man’s military documents.” Grim.

A Web Renaissance. “So if we have the tech, then why hasn’t it happened already? The biggest thing that may be missing is just awareness of the modern web’s potential. Unlike the Facebooks and Googles of the world, the open, creative web doesn’t have a billion-dollar budget for promoting itself. Years of control from the tech titans has resulted in the conventional wisdom that somehow the web isn’t “enough”, that you have to tie yourself to proprietary platforms if you want to build a big brand or a big business.”

Pipedream Malware: Feds Uncover 'Swiss Army Knife' for Industrial System Hacking. “On Wednesday, the Department of Energy, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the NSA, and the FBI jointly released an advisory about a new hacker toolset potentially capable of meddling with a wide range of industrial control system equipment.”

Police Records Show Women Are Being Stalked With Apple AirTags Across the Country. “Of the 150 total police reports mentioning AirTags, in 50 cases women called the police because they started getting notifications that their whereabouts were being tracked by an AirTag they didn’t own. Of those, 25 could identify a man in their lives—ex-partners, husbands, bosses—who they strongly suspected planted the AirTags on their cars in order to follow and harass them. Those women reported that current and former intimate partners—the most likely people to harm women overall—are using AirTags to stalk and harass them.”

Hunter Walk asked people about their first concert.

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

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

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

A couple of gigs that stand out to me:

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

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

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

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

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

Amidst all this talk about the future of Twitter pending a still-theoretical Elon Musk acquisition, some people have been asking whether there’s a viable alternative they could move to immediately.

Inevitably, some of the obvious decentralized projects have been suggested. The most notable is Mastodon, a federated social network that might as well be a full Twitter clone, albeit based on the ActivityPub standard.

I have nothing against Mastodon. I’ve been using it for years, alongside my other social networks. The community there is a little nerdier, and certainly quieter. Twitter is where the action is; Mastodon has so far been for the handful of enthusiasts who want to experiment with federation. Even among them, a hefty percentage simply syndicate content from their Twitter accounts.

Since the Elon Musk news broke, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko reports that the network has grown by 84,579 users. That’s great, but hardly a drop in the bucket when you consider Twitter’s 330 million monthly active users. It’s possible we’re at the beginning of a larger move, but it’s more likely that these users represent a spike in new sign-ups that will settle down to something closer to their usual level.

Although it’s a decentralized network with no corporate owner, Mastodon is fundamentally no better than Twitter from an end user perspective. In some ways, it’s a little bit worse: the username scheme is necessarily more complicated and harder to understand, there aren’t any anti-harassment protections for vulnerable communities, and the news feed is less likely to immediately show you content you’re interested in. That’s if you even get that far: you’ve got to pick a home server and one of multiple client apps.

Again: I’m not knocking Mastodon (or any decentralized project). It’s an important step towards a web that is not under the corporate control of a handful of companies.

What I am knocking is the design approach of emulating Twitter. While Twitter has tweets, Mastodon has toots; while Twitter has a 280 character limit, Mastodon has 500. The two networks have fundamentally the same content and interaction models, with what amount to slightly different settings. I say tweet, you say toot: let’s call the whole thing off.

“Twitter, but decentralized” is an example of a solution to a problem that has been defined in technical or ideological terms, but doesn’t come from a direct user need. As ideological proponents of decentralization, we might want the user to need federated Twitter, we might think they need it, but without a deep understanding of the users, all we’re doing is projecting our hopes and dreams onto them. Is their need decentralized Twitter, is it a network where they can connect to breaking news but also feel safe from abuse, or is it something else entirely?

The only true approach is to go back to a well-defined, core group of users, and learn from them holistically. Instead of making a problem to solve from whole cloth, we should start with the real-life points of view of a number of real people. (Not market segments; not invented personas; real-life humans who are representative of who you want the users to be.)

[Name], a [description], needs a way to [verb] in order to [surprising insight].

These POVs can only be arrived at through getting to know those people - and are the first step in a long human-centered design process that must encompass not just the product being made, but the structure of the organization that makes it. You can make a decentralized tool, but if the underlying organization is a C-Corp that could be bought by a billionaire, the effectiveness of your solution to a problem created by another C-Corp that was bought by a billionaire is limited. And if you want to build a platform where diverse, vulnerable communities feel safe, you’d better give them a say in running it.

We are never absolved from doing the hard work of deeply working with real people in order to serve them. A technology-first approach never wins. When 86% of Americans get their news via the internet, and when the platforms providing that news are owned by a very small handful of commercial companies and an even smaller gaggle of rich men, this isn’t a problem we get to half-ass.

Whether he ultimately does or not, the idea of Musk owning Twitter is a problem. The solution is not “Twitter but decentralized”, or a protocol, or an open standard, although it might potentially incorporate any of those things. The solution is something new that more deeply serves its target users better than they have been served before. The technology is secondary to the need, always.

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

Let’s start here. How are you today?

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

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

What are you thinking about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do not.

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

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

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

You sound a bit holier-than-thou.

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

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

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

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

I have. I’ve even started two!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weren’t you a venture capitalist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that even possible?

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

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

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

A book? Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

While I don’t think the guy who runs racist factories is necessarily the right person to buy a prominent social media company in order to “save democracy”, he’s right about one thing: if Twitter is to truly be a public square, the algorithm needs to be open sourced.

Over the years, there’s been a lot of chat about algorithms: how they’re designed to keep you on social media sites by filtering your feed for the kind of content that you want to see and interact with, rather than just showing you the reverse chronological list of all content you’ve subscribed to. It’s the mechanism that causes Facebook Pages to have to pay to have their posts actually reach their communities; it creates filter bubbles; it exacerbates power laws that help people with large communities reach even more people.

When we’re talking about algorithms on Twitter, though, the subtext is around the work the company has done on harassment and abuse. Accounts that regularly post hate speech are kicked off the platform, keeping vulnerable communities safer and making interactions on the site less toxic for everybody. To some (hint: their demographics are usually not the ones targeted for violence by these kinds of accounts) these are simply “differences of opinion”. That’s the kind of content that would be reinstated in a world with an open source algorithm. Don’t want nationalists on your feed? Use an algorithm that hides them.

And sure, maybe. The web as a whole works a bit like that, after all: if you’re not a white nationalist, don’t visit Stormfront or Truth Social. Those sites exist as niche underbellies where disaffected racists can spew their hatred without being disturbed by the rest of us. When that content crosses the line into illegality - at least, the content that’s observable, which is likely the tip of the iceberg - theoretically the police get involved. (The police themselves have a white supremacy problem, hence the theoretically.)

But speech isn’t simply speech. Speech has the power to organize, to rally, to build movements and cause both great positive change and great harm. Free speech maximalists like to quote Brandeis’s principle that the way to counter harmful speech is with more, positive speech. But past a certain point, once speech has brought together movements and those movements have taken to the streets, the way to counter it has been with armies and force. Long before that point, it’s doxxed activists, invited pipe bomb attacks at abortion clinics, and led to a man firing an AR-15 rifle in a family pizza joint. Racism and violence are not harmless differences of opinion; they are a cancer.

The First Amendment restricts the government’s power to limit speech and assembly. However, tweets are stored on Twitter; they’re entirely in the domain of a private company. Private companies have the right to make rules about what happens on their systems, at least until they become a common carrier. The content that is restricted on Twitter is not restricted in America; other sites exist where it can be posted. That those sites are markedly less popular - and that most hosting providers want to avoid any association with them, as is their right - says a lot about where American hearts generally really lie. When Twitter imposed stronger content moderation, the site began to grow faster.

Musk’s call for open algorithms is not unproblematic, for the reasons I’ve described. But if that’s what he really wants, the solution is a fully-decentralized protocol for social media: one that, like the web, isn’t owned by anybody, so there’s no central organization that can made decisions about allowable content or how the algorithm works. Everyone will be able to choose their own algorithm. It just won’t quite go how he, or other members of the nationalist-aligned, think it will.

As a web user, you probably use a web browser every day. There are tens or even hundreds to choose from, but you probably have never considered using Puffin or Redcore. Most likely, you’ve heard of three or four: Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge (which you might think of as Internet Explorer, even though they’re not the same), and Safari. You might not even know that Edge and Chrome have the same browser engine.

If social media becomes fully decentralized, there will be a handful of “social media browsers” (we’ll probably know them by another name) that people will ultimately used. They’ll compete on providing the friendliest experience and the least toxic environment. If there are other browsers that cater specifically to the nationalist experience, it’s likely that the mainstream browsers will refuse to peer, blocking access to them outright. This has already happened: most Mastodon instances refused to peer with Gab. For its part, Google removes listings to comply with local law, for example to remove Nazi sites in Germany.

That’s not to say that open sourcing is a bad thing: it’s a great thing. That choice between algorithms, the customization of how you receive content, would be a major boon for consumers. Making social media more like the web is a win for everyone.

But there’s no world where nationalists get what they want. If Twitter turns down the dial on its content moderation, the community becomes more toxic and turns more people away. A nationalist-friendly alternative will never become mainstream, as Gab, Truth Social, Minds, etc, have already shown us. If the community turns en masse to a decentralized, open source alternative, any broadly successful entry point to that network will need to incorporate a friendly experience that includes community protections.

Because what they want is for their ideology to be mainstream, and for their words to be heard as loudly as possible. In a world where most Americans support diversity - and where diversity is part of the fundamental DNA of the nation - that message is only going to spread so far. In America, you have the right to free speech, but you do not have the right to be heard. For that, your message actually has to resonate.

Elon is right to want to open source, but he’s wrong about the implications. The world is moving in a more inclusive, more compassionate direction, and there’s no going back. Nationalism and traditionalism are firmly party of the 20th century, and that is becoming an increasingly long time ago.

As part of the ongoing mid-life crisis that brought me electric blue hair and a new car, I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo. Of course, if I’m going to mark my body, I’d like it to be the most meaningful (and potentially the nerdiest) image possible.

I have parameters. Given my family history, and the history of the twentieth century, I’d rather not use any kind of barcode, QR code (can you imagine?), or identifier. I also don’t really want words or any kind of quote. I thought about a waveform of my mother’s voice, but honestly, I don’t think she would have approved, and it feels a little like the 21st century equivalent of drawing “mom” in a heart. I qualify for a semicolon tattoo, but I don’t want one of those either.

Maybe an and gate? A symbol representing Earthseed’s God is change? A TARDIS? It all feels very stereotypical.

Maybe I’m just too fickle. It seems so permanent, and the me I am now is not the same person I’ll be in two, five, twenty years. On the other hand, I like the idea of marking life like rings in a tree.

Do you have a tattoo? Is it meaningful to you? What did you get?

Startup culture as popularly described is a sham. You can read all the books you want on the subject, but the most successful companies build their culture from the ground up based on the same kind of learning cycle that they use on their customers. To succeed, you’re going to have to attract the best people - people who have a ton of options, many of which probably pay better than you do - and you’re going to have to find ways to keep them there.

Particularly in today’s market, if you’re not treating people well, they’re going to find something better. If you create a hustle-rich, competitive, aggressive environment that makes people feel like they’re under attack, they’re going to go find a place where they don’t. If you create a culture of long hours peppered with inflexible meetings, you’re going to lose the parents and carers who likely also happen to be your most experienced colleagues (as well as one where women, who largely still bear the brunt of parenting, are less likely to feel welcome). Your culture has to be one of deeply-held respect: not just of the expertise of every employee, but of what they bring as a three-dimensional human, and of their lives outside of work. If you think of people as a fungible resource, they’re going to feel it.

There’s no glory in working nights and weekends, and there’s nothing laudable about asking people to do so. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. All your employees have lives beyond work. None of them are anywhere near as invested - in the literal, company-ownership sense, but also emotionally - as you are. As a founder, you might be burning the candle at both ends, but when the startup exits, you have the most to gain. Generous options help here, but if employees don’t feel like they have a strong say in the direction of the company, they’re little more than a lottery ticket from their perspective; a get-rich-quick scheme. If they lose trust in you, if they don’t have enough options to make a meaningful difference in their lives even in the event of an exit, or if the option price is so high that executing them is out of reach, or if there aren’t meaningful triggers, any kind of motivating factor that options could have brought is lost.

Even for founders, those long days come with diminishing returns: most knowledge workers can muster six hours of focused work at best. After that, anyone’s work is low-quality. In a small team, that means you’ve got to focus on building the smallest, simplest thing you can: a clearly-defined plan you know you can execute well with the time, team, and resources at your disposal. Because all of those things come at a premium, built-in ways to fail fast and learn quickly are incredibly important. A growth mindset and a nimble approach are more important than an “agile” one: paint-by-numbers scrum ceremonies aren’t going to save you, but short work sprints built around learning loops might.

That also means optimizing your workday for flow: removing meetings and interruptions so people can actually get work done. (Talking in meetings isn’t work; at best it’s a tactical huddle, and at worst it’s the performance of doing work.) As Steve Galevski put it in HBR a few years ago:

By cultivating a flow-friendly workplace and introducing a shorter workday, you’re setting the scene not only for higher productivity and better outcomes, but for more motivated and less-stressed employees, improved rates of employee acquisition and retention, and more time for all that fun stuff that goes on outside of office walls, otherwise known as life.

People have to think and reflect on their work to do it at a high quality. To be able to do that, they need time, emotional safety, and rest. If you create an environment of constant interruptions, long hours, and a lack of emotional safety, you’re shooting yourself in the foot and then some. Yet that’s exactly what a lot of startup porn advocates for, and where work has begun to go during the pandemic: a world where you can’t escape work, with numerous interruptions, long hours, and an underlying aggressive culture of hustle.

What modern startup employees are looking for is an inclusive place where they can do great work, live well, be treated with respect, and be compensated accordingly. It’s not hard, as long as you stop to really think and care about them. The catch is that many founders don’t.

Rewriting software from scratch is usually a terrible idea. But I’m thinking about it.

The Known open source codebase is now 9 years old; a PHP kludge that I wrote while my mother was recovering from a double lung transplant still powers my site and many others. It became the foundation of my second startup, and is still an open source project today. But there were a number of years when I didn’t pay attention to the codebase, and there’s a lot to unpick.

Meanwhile, the hosting landscape has completely changed. It used to be that you’d buy some space with a shared host and upload files via (S)FTP; these days virtual hosts are commonplace and getting easier to use. There are one-click installation buttons for Heroku and other hosts.

I’d like to clean PHP Known up, and I’m trying my best in between all the other things that are going on in my life. Probably that should mostly be about getting to another stable release: a lot of the architecture has been changed (by other developers) and a lot of users are having trouble installing it. So bringing that back to accessibility would be nice.

I also want to fix import / export, so that people can take their Known content and use it elsewhere. A lot of folks, rightly, would like to migrate to WordPress or Ghost in particular. They should be able to do that with ease.

But I also like the idea of going back to basics with Idno, the underlying platform, and thinking about it again. The original core idea was that you could create a stream of arbitrary content, set fine-grained permissions on it, and both post to it and consume from it in a bunch of different ways. If you wanted to post via the web, great; via a webhook, API endpoint or common standard like Micropub, also great. Likewise, reading via the web, JSON, RSS, MRSS, ActivityStreams, and so on would all be easily possible. Permissions would limit both reading and writing to a customizable set of people, from everyone on the internet down to one person.

That’s not really where Known ended up going, but I still find that potentially interesting as a project. Instead of PHP, I’d be more inclined to write it as a Node service these days (or use it to learn something I’m less familiar with, like Go).

I wish I had more time to work on these sorts of projects. But it’s something I’d love to figure out how to fit in: I want to clean Known up, and return to Idno as a way to write scalable streams of arbitrary content. In the meantime, it’s fun to think about.

I just (almost) got phished! It’s a little embarrassing, but I’m hopeful that sharing this will help others.

I got a pretty call on our landline (yes, we still have one) telling us we were about to have our power disconnected for non-payment. They had our address, PG&E account number, and account name.

To deal with the issue quickly, they had me call a separate 877 billing number. It sounded like PG&E: they had the call system set up and a convincing-sounding address check.

We genuinely had a late payment, because the account was in my mother’s name, and I didn’t get the notification. So I asked to make an emergency payment to prevent the disconnection. Everything up to this point sounded legitimate, except that they hadn’t seen my previous payment in their account system - and I just brushed it off as being a legacy business not having its shit together. Because PG&E is legendarily awful, I was prepared for the information they gave me to not quite add up. Were it a professional, modern organization, it would have been harder to convince me.

It was only when they tried to get me to Zelle a payment to an individual that I became suspicious, asked some verification questions, and disconnected the call. Even then, I didn’t consider it beyond the bounds of possibility that PG&E had a super-janky payment system for emergency payments, so I was worried. But yes, to date, the power has not been disconnected.

I didn’t give them any payment or personal information. But they clearly had some of mine already, so I’m going to be checking my accounts and resetting some details.

I’ve been involved in a few projects that involve sensitive information and vulnerable communities (and a few others that involve potentially large sums of money). My own security stance directly affects the people I’m involved with. These attackers just wanted some money, but there are others who could easily want to harm others by getting through me. This was a wake-up call that wherever I think I’m at with my security mindset and practices, I need to do more.

Obviously, I feel like an idiot. It also made me realize how much PG&E’s shoddiness added to my vulnerability. If I felt that it was a company I could trust to do the right thing, I would have cottoned on far earlier in the process. But when a company already feels like a scam when it’s operating its day-to-day business, it’s really hard to distinguish an imposter. It’s another reason for every company to operate at a very high quality, and to only pick very high quality suppliers (and to not allow undemocratic monopolies in California’s energy markets).

Happy birthday, Ma. I miss you.

This time last year I booked an AirBnb in Pacific Grove, right on the bay, because you had talked about wanting to visit Monterey and be by the water. It was a hard trip for you, but I’m so glad we did it.

I’m so glad we did a lot of things.

During the pandemic, I was with you most of the time. We had a ritual at the end of the night where I would help you walk up the six steps to your bedroom, help you into bed, and then help you brush your teeth if you weren’t feeling strong enough to do it in the bathroom. Sometimes, I would lie on the bed and we’d talk, although I know it eventually got too hard to hold up a conversation. I treasured those times. Most of all, I think about the hug we’d have at the top of the stairs; the feeling of your skin as I kissed your head.

I’m glad for the walks we would take in the small park near the house. I’d drive you down and pack your rolling walker with the built-in seat, and we’d stroll together, at your pace. Sometimes we’d just walk to the end of the road and back. But we’d talk and be together, just us. You’d ask me to time how long it took to get to the corner, and it was always shorter than you expected. You were so strong.

And even when you were tired and struggling, you were my mother. You worried that I worked too hard, and spent too long at work. At the time, I was frustrated with you; I’d fought hard to build a career from nothing. But what you were saying came from a place of love, and you were right. I’d fallen into a trap that a lot of people fall into, and you could see it. You worried about my health, my well-being, and my future, even when you had so much else to worry about.

I hear your advice every day. I try and live up to it and carry it with me. The last year has been untethered: after ten years of that journey with you, everything feels wrong. It’s like one of those movies where the protagonist wakes up and the world has changed around them in unsettling ways, but here there’s no key; there’s no way to get back. The mirror dimension is the world now. I’ve made weird knee-jerk decisions just to fill the void. I haven’t been exercising. I sleep poorly. I’m trying to practice what you wanted for me - it was all about being healthy, living a good life, standing up for myself and setting good boundaries - but right now I feel like I’m not there. I’m trying.

When we were lying on your bed, we talked a lot about how you wanted your death to go. We were all very clear about what you wanted, and I’m so sorry that it didn’t happen that way. You didn’t want to be in the hospital, surrounded by tubes and machines. You wanted to be in your home, surrounded by us. The hospital worked with us to bend the covid restrictions so we could all be with you, but we couldn’t take you home. You needed too much oxygen; I don’t remember if we explained that to you, but I hope we did. “It’s all happening so fast,” you told us. That last week was a waking nightmare and I wish I’d been smarter in it.

What happened next, in palliative care, will be with me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know how it would be. I don’t know if I (we) could have steered those last days to be different, but it was exactly what you didn’t want, and I’m going to be sorry forever. You were there for me in so many ways for so many years and then, when it really counted, I couldn’t give you what you needed. You didn’t have agency in the way you left. It’s unforgivable. I don’t know if I will ever get to a point where I can forgive myself, or if I should.

I hoped I would dream about you; that I’d get to talk to you in some form, even if I knew it was more me than you. I have dreamt about you, but every time, even now, you’ve been in pain. I just want to tell you I love you one more time. I want to tell you I’m sorry.

I have all these videos of you. We recorded your life story over a few different sessions, which I’m afraid to say I still haven’t stitched into one video and shared with everyone. Maybe I’ll do that today; it seems like a fitting celebration of your life. I have videos of you at your singing recitals - it’s still incredible to me that you joined a singing class post lung transplant. I even have two videos, one before your lung transplant and one more recently, of you telling me you love me. I’m glad to have them, and to hear your voice and remember. But playing them also feels like listening to an echo: another ripple from a giant hole that has been torn out of the universe.

You were so game. You made the decision to move to Europe when you were pregnant, because that would be a better place to raise a baby. You gave birth in a foreign country where you didn’t really speak the language, thousands of miles away from your family. And it worked; it all worked out. You moved to England and made Oxford your home, only moving back to California so you could help care for my Oma. I felt so privileged to do the same to help care for you; you had shown me the way. Life is an adventure: it’s exciting. We’re capable of doing, and dealing with, so much. A good life means building and enjoying and thriving on your own terms, not consuming some template that other people have set out for you. There’s no comfort in sameness.

You were amazing. So many people have families that value conformity, or wealth, or tradition. Mine valued humanity, ethics, and building a meaningful life from first principles. You modeled that for me incredibly from the moment I was born. My horizons were broad and my world was big. No idea was off-limits to discuss; nothing was off-limits to explore; you never told me to follow a set path or do something because that was just how it was done. You were never parochial; never petty or small-minded. You fought for equality before I was born, literally on the streets and in courtrooms, and fought for it in everything you did as I grew up. You were smart and fierce and kind and silly and patient and loving.

Thank you. I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry.

One of the things a realtor will often do for you when you’re selling a house is to set up a website for it. It’s often built by the people who take the photos, and is created to a set template. It turns out there are a handful of services that exist to do just that: host a single-page site that showcases your home.

We’re selling our family home in Santa Rosa - the one my parents lived in for a decade - and I’m a web developer. Don’t get me wrong, these are nice sites, and we’ll probably set one up. But I’m also going to set up my own. Because of course I am. It sounds like fun, and I want to have fun with it, but wouldn’t it be great if it brought in the buyer?

I’m giving myself a few restrictions:

It’ll be a hand-rolled static site. No frameworks for the HTML, JS, or CSS, and no pre-set templates: just me, a text editor, and some design tools. It’s a home with shared ownership - everyone gets a say on the content and design - but I’m going to build it.

It needs to get an A for SEO, site performance, and security.

And it needs to be up over the next two weeks. There’s a lot going on, so this is a bit of a challenge.

Wish me luck. And hey, if you’re in the market for a three bedroom, two and a half bathroom single-family home in the heart of wine country …

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for March, 2022. This was an intense month, so a shorter list than usual.

Streaming Media

Severance. My kind of science fiction: darkly satirical, with a dramatic vice that closes with each new episode. Really beautifully done.

Notable Articles

Business

Epic Games Acquires Bandcamp as 'Fortnite' Maker Expands Into Music. “Bandcamp will play an “important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more,” the games company said. According to Bandcamp, under its revenue model artists receive net an average of 82% of every sale.” Fascinating!

Equal Pay Day: What can transparency laws do to the gender pay gap? “After years of little progress toward pay equity, more and more states and localities are passing pay transparency laws that eliminate the secrecy around salaries and could be a powerful tool for eliminating the gender pay gap.”

More Employees Are Saying That Tesla’s Factory Is Horrifically Racist. “One single mother said she was excited to work for Tesla but was fired because she made a complaint about Black workers being call the N-word on the assembly line. According to the report originally published in the LA Times, other employees were also called racial slurs and insults and penalized for telling management.”

Climate

In a US first, California will pilot solar-panel canopies over canals. “India already has solar panels over canals, but the mile-long Project Nexus in California’s San Joaquin Valley will be the first of its kind in the US.” Go Turlock!

Crypto

Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets. “We must take strong steps to reduce the risks that digital assets could pose to consumers, investors, and business protections; financial stability and financial system integrity; combating and preventing crime and illicit finance; national security; the ability to exercise human rights; financial inclusion and equity; and climate change and pollution.”

Ukraine Is Selling NFTs to Finance Its Military. “While it might seem like a weird attempt to gin up funds, Ukraine claims to have raised more than $54 million so far through cryptocurrency donations in order to help fund war and relief efforts in the embattled country. So there’s definitely something to be said for jumping on the crypto train to raise money.”

The (Edited) Latecomer's Guide to Crypto. “Here, a group of around fifteen cryptocurrency researchers and critics have done what the New York Times apparently won’t.”

Exxon Mobil reportedly gets in on Bitcoin mining. “Exxon Mobil has begun a pilot program to set up Bitcoin miners at an oil well in North Dakota. The project reportedly runs off 18 million ft³ of natural gas that would otherwise be flared.” Oh, great.

Culture

MC Hammer ‘Will Beat Yo' Ass’—and Other Hard Tales of the MTV-Friendly Rapper. “Serch claims the $50,000 hit was confirmed by fellow Def Jam artist Eric B., and was supposed to be carried out by the Los Angeles crips. In a later interview, Serch said fear and anger over the incident has never left him.”

Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” Adjusted for Late-Stage Capitalism . “Working 8 to 6, but they call you after hours / Barely gettin’ by, lots of crying in the shower / You might prequalify, won’t even hurt your credit / Ran out of sick days—well, I hope y’all don’t catch it”

Grimes Reveals Y, Her New Baby Daughter With Elon Musk, in Cover Interview. Come for the secret baby, stay for an interview that makes Grimes seem like a pretty cool person.

The case for induction cooking. “But for all the sexiness of cooking with gas (a concept bolstered by aggressive lobbying and advertising from the natural gas industry), it has been shown to be catastrophic for the environment, emitting potent greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere. Worse, a recent study demonstrated that 75 percent of these emissions occur when the stove is off.” This is mostly about how amazing induction is for cooking - I’m envious.

Notable Sandwiches #20: The British Rail Sandwich. “The British Rail sandwich is not really a sandwich at all, but rather a category of sandwiches—modest constructions of hard-boiled egg, cheese and tomato, pressed luncheon meat, tongue, boiled ham, cucumber, prawns, etc., offered on the trains traversing Britain’s many kilometers of railway, particularly (though not exclusively) during the four-and-a-half decades in which it was operated by the her majesty’s government.” Ah, memories.

Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing. “When Will Smith stormed onto the Oscar stage to strike Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife’s short hair, he did a lot more damage than just to Rock’s face. With a single petulant blow, he advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community.”

Media

Google is releasing an open source harassment filter for journalists . “Harassment Manager also lets users download a standalone report containing abusive messages; this creates a paper trail for their employer or, in the case of illegal content like direct threats, law enforcement. For now, however, there’s not a standalone application that users can download. Instead, developers can freely build apps that incorporate its functionality and services using it will be launched by partners like the Thomson Reuters Foundation.”

Politics

California reparations for slavery descendants only. “After more than six hours of debate Tuesday, California’s reparations task force voted that only Black Californians who can prove a direct lineage to enslaved ancestors will be eligible for the statewide — and first-in-the nation — initiative to address the harms and enduring legacy of slavery.” Progress.

Science

Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank. “Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two daily alcohol units, and become stronger as alcohol intake increases.” Drinking any amount of alcohol shrinks your brain.

Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery. “An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof.” Nightmare fuel.

Crows possess higher intelligence long thought primarily human. “Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.”

Society

How COVID pressure led single moms to turn to coliving with other adults. “The move to cohabitation eased a significant amount of pressure for Villagomez-Morales at a time when parents, but especially single parents, were being squeezed on all sides — by child care, loss of work and extreme burnout. That, mixed with a housing market that has become increasingly inhospitable to low-wage people, and especially moms, has more single parents looking into the benefits of cohabitation to ride out the pandemic.”

After George Floyd’s murder, police built a secretive surveillance machine that lives on. “We found evidence of a complex engine of surveillance tailor-made for keeping close tabs on protesters and sharing that information among local and federal agencies, regardless of whether the subjects were suspected of any wrongdoing.”

Tatiana Perebyinis and two children identified as those seen dead in viral Lynsey Addario photo from Ukraine. “Photos flashing on his Twitter feed showed four people lying next to a World War II memorial just outside Kyiv after they were fired on by the Russian military. One of them was his wife, and two were his children.” Pure horror.

Mark and Lily Osler: Governor’s order on transgender youth cruel, short-sighted. “Because Gov. Abbott has moved to threaten transgender kids by criminalizing the kind of support they need, it’s time for Lily and me to tell this part of our family story and to address the harm Gov. Abbott is doing.”

In most states, over half of all women of color earn less than a living wage. “In nine states, 50 percent or more of all women workers are earning less than $15 an hour. But in 40 states, 50 percent or more of all women of color — Black women, Latinas, Native American women and Asian American and Pacific Islander women — are earning below a living wage. In 23 states, 60 percent or more of all women of color have hourly earnings under $15.”

What Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination means to Black women. “At the start of this week’s hearing, The 19th spoke to people who gathered on the steps of the high court about what her historic journey to the most powerful bench in the United States means.”

These Companies Are Clamoring for Women's Dollars As They Help Tank Pro-Women Legislation. “Companies clamoring for women’s dollars are making huge donations to politicians and political action committees specifically designed to tank legislation aiming to lift women and families out of poverty, according to new research obtained by Jezebel.”

Technology

Twitter Wants to Reinvent Itself, by Merging the Old With the New. “Now, over a decade later, Twitter is reversing course. The company is pursuing the sort of decentralization Mr. [Blaine] Cook championed. It is funding an independent effort to build a so-called open protocol for social media. It is also weaving cryptocurrency into its app, and opening up to developers who want to build custom features for Twitter.” Quite a lovely piece about decentralization.

The web is for everyone: Our vision for the evolution of the web. “We believe to make the web a better place we need to focus our work on these nine areas.” From Mozilla.

EU's Digital Markets Act will require Apple to open iMessage. “European regulators on Thursday revealed their plan to rein in the anti-competitive practices of Big Tech and fundamentally remake how some of the world’s most powerful companies do business. The rules, which target tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google, are far-reaching and would have huge ramification for those companies’ software and services.” Good.

Is tech still failing Black communities? Data says yes. “There was just a 1% increase in representation of Black workers in technical roles at large tech companies between the years of 2014 and 2021, according to the report titled State of Tech Diversity: The Black Tech Ecosystem.”

Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok. “In October, Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii. In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok.”

Note: I've been using the term "outsider art" incorrectly, and didn't realize it was problematic. I've lightly edited this piece and will be mindful of this going forward. I apologize to the artists I incorrectly categorized.

I bought a Jean Smith painting the other day.

Jean is the lead singer of Mecca Normal, which was one of the early riot grrrl bands (see also: Bikini Kill). More recently, she’s started to make her paintings available online for a hundred dollars each in support of opening the Free Artist Residency for Progressive Social Change. Daily, she posts a painting, and commenters try and buy one.

She could easily sell them for multiples of the asking price, but this is more interesting: accessible, sold directly, and as indie as it comes.

As the New York Times wrote a few years ago:

For once, social media is helping a creative economy be more equitable. The artist earns what she wishes to earn, with plenty left over to give away. And for less than it would cost to frame a dorm-room poster, you can have a daily encounter with the sublime.

I’d vastly prefer this than some establishment art setup, with all its attendant schmoozing and gatekeeping. It’s one reason why I’m also a big fan of the Creative Growth Art Center. For me, good art changes perspectives and lets you think about the world from a new angle; it’s hard to do that if it comes squarely from the mainstream.

And for me, it has to be physical. Is digital art interesting? Sure. But I’m so embedded in the digital that I’m fascinated with the physicality of physical work. My friend Sadie makes these incredible stained glass pieces, which come straight from the heart, and sometimes literally are hearts. They’re beautiful, and they bend light and cast shadows and take up space.

I’m so wrapped up in virtual space that people who can have this sort of effect on real space are magicians to me. I love it, and I suppose I’m a little bit envious, too. But I’m lucky to be able to collect their work and support what they do, at least in a small way. The openness and bravery it takes to create art is an inspiration to me, and the pieces themselves are often transformative. I’m grateful to have that in my life.

I’m loathe to criticize NFTs in themselves, because people are genuinely creating in that space (and on blockchains that don’t have a negative climate effect). But it’s not really for me. Instead, I’m excited to receive a genuine Jean Smith canvas, or a genuine Sadie Robison sculpture. I’m delighted by the underlying humanity and awed by the skill. And I’m always looking for more.

AI tools let you write articles very quickly without adding much value.

The software analyses existing content and then rewrites the information in a way that’s meant to be engaging or makes it easy for search engines to find.

But when you read an article written by AI, you can tell that it’s lacking something. There’s no real emotion or understanding of the subject.

If you want to create content that converts, it needs to be relatable and emotionally engaging. You need to show your customers that you understand their struggles and are willing to help them solve their problems.

AI-generated articles and videos are growing in popularity. They are cheap to make and easy to scale. But they will never be able to tell stories that matter.

The most obvious use case for AI is to create fake news. Spam content has been a problem on the internet since the beginning of the World Wide Web. The need for scale pushed automated bots to generate posts, which were then filled with ads.

AI takes this to the next level, by making it easier and cheaper to create fake news than it is to write real news.

But who cares about fake news? It's not like people read it. Nobody believes it!

The problem with AI-generated articles isn't that they are fake, but that they are mediocre. The purpose of writing is not just about sharing your thoughts with others; it's about adding value.

AI-generated articles are not the future of journalism. They are content spam.

For the past year, I’ve been writing articles on Medium. Some of them have become pretty popular. However, over time, I have come to resent the platform because it promotes content written by AI.

Medium is not alone in this problem. It’s a systemic problem that affects all platforms that allow machine-generated content to be posted unchecked.

Writing 1000 articles in 30 seconds is the type of thing that makes VCs and journalists excited about “AI-first” companies and how these companies will “disrupt” a traditional industry like publishing.

But for the rest of us, we need to be worried about our media ecosystem getting filled with this type of content. And we need tools that recognize content written by AI and mark them as such or as spam.

This entire blog post was written by an AI writing tool.

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

Apps + Websites

Globle. Like Wordle but for countries. “Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.” Good fun, but I am not good at this.

Nerdle - the daily numbers game. Another Wordle alternative. I was daunted at first, but it’s pretty fun! The need for equations to resolve mathematically adds a really satisfying extra dimension.

Books

Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism, by Elsa Sjunneson. A frank, and often wryly funny, account of life as a Deafblind woman. Some of her experiences were familiar to me, at least second-hand; the account of hearing aids squealing at the wrong moment made me think of someone very dear to me who happens to be Deaf. The author is a self-described activist, and the passages discussing ableism and capitalist healthcare were as searing, pointed, and brilliant as the passages describing her experiences were human. I loved every moment of getting to know her.

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself, by Melody Beattie. Far more religious than I’d like, and decidedly dated, but it hits the nail on the head more often than it doesn’t. My own codependence is not a result of a relationship with an alcoholic, but the symptoms, discussion of internal self-talk, and potential solutions feel relevant and sometimes confronting. I’m late to my own diagnosis, and the ideas here feel like a part of the solution.

Streaming

Wet Leg - Oh No (Official Video). I love Wet Leg. Their latest song is all about social media addiction and (like everything else they’ve done) it’s brilliant.

Notable Articles

Business

The McNamara Fallacy – measurement is not understanding. “The McNamara Fallacy is to presume that (A) quantitative models of reality are always more accurate than other models; (B) the quantitative measurements that can be made most easily must be the most relevant; and (C) factors other than those currently being used in quantitative metrics must either not exist or not have a significant influence on success. This flawed approach to reasoning is also known as the quantitative fallacy.” Worth also mentioning here that the Vietnam War was deeply misguided in its own right and that the US committed atrocities in the name of fighting a boogieman that didn’t make any sense. The underlying message here - keep research human - is paramount.

Workers for Frozen Food Giant Amy’s Kitchen Allege Unsafe Conditions at Bay Area Factory. And Amy’s has hired a firm to squash worker attempts to form a Union. Really disappointing.

Why More VCs May Want To Back Your Bootstrapped Company. But should you take the money?

The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency. “But what those who had turned on their cameras didn’t know was that some of the others in the meeting weren’t real people. Yes, they were listed as participants. Some even had active email accounts and LinkedIn profiles. But their names were made up and their headshots belonged to other people.”

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness. “Within the workplace, we know that happier employees are more likely to emerge as leaders, earn higher scores on performance evaluations, and tend to be better teammates. We also know, based on substantial research, that happier employees are healthier, have lower rates of absenteeism, are highly motivated to succeed, are more creative, have better relationships with peers, and are less likely to leave a company. All of these correlates of happiness significantly influence a company’s bottom line.”

Waterstones acquires Blackwell’s, the UK’s biggest independent bookseller. Very, very sad to see Blackwell’s purchased - by the hedge fund that owns Barnes and Noble, no less.

Climate

Indonesia Is Switching Capital Cities Because the Old One Is Sinking Into the Ocean. “The flooding, pollution, sinking earth and congestion have gotten so catastrophic, in fact, that the country is switching capital cities altogether. Yes, seriously: the government is packing up and moving the country’s capital to the island of Borneo, according to the Associated Press.”

Crypto

The Sick, Refreshing Honesty of Web3. “From the start, online businesses have presented themselves as making culture, even as they really aimed to build financial value. Now, at last, the wealth seeking is printed on the tin.”

North Korea: Missile programme funded through stolen crypto, UN report says. “North Korean cyber-attacks have stolen millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency to fund the country’s missile programmes, a UN report briefed to media says.” Oops?

The Human Web. “Web3 will succeed, or fail, to the extent that it solves human problems, to the extent that it makes navigating Web0 more tractable—not to the extent that it monetizes everything conceivable, or enables a small number of people to make a financial killing.”

Culture

The Radical Woman Behind “Goodnight Moon”. “Brown helped create a new type of children’s literature that provided both aural and visual feasts. Her books—including “Goodnight Moon,” which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year—delighted, surprised, and sometimes disturbed.”

Book Renovation. “Anyway, right now, I’m working on the revision of Book 2 of the Great Cities. A friend asked me how to do revisions, so I figured I might as well lay out my process here. Note that this is my process; as with all other writing advice, you should look at many methods and then choose or customize something that works best for you. So here goes.” Some lovely writing advice from none other than NK Jemisin.

Inspired by gravity. “Today, being weird online means one of two things. Either you’re trying to get there before other people do, not missing an opportunity, changing the rules to your advantage. That’s the excitement some folks feel right now: they feel like it’s possible to rewrite gravity.”

A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It? “Monahan reassured me that it’s okay not to survive the shift. We all have permission to stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable, and if that’s in 2016 or 2012 or 2010, that’s fine.” How about 1997? Asking for a friend.

No-knead Gatorade bread. “After placing the cast-iron pot into the oven, the distinct smell of grape-flavored Gatorade wafted through the apartment. I do not know how if there are words in the human language to describe the emotions I was feeling. We were essentially enveloped in sublimated grape Gatorade, breathing it in, along with the gentle scent of baking bread. You guys should really try doing this.”

I'm common as muck and spent £150 in a Michelin star restaurant to see if it was worth it. “I’ve never grown up thinking of food as anything other than fuel to get through the day. I grew up on free school meals (chips and gravy, for the most part). As an adult, celebratory meals out are spent at Toby Carvery, where the all-you-can-eat roasters fill all of my requirements for a happy time.” This is quite lovely.

Media

‘We’ll keep reporting, whatever the risk from the junta,’ say Myanmar’s journalists. “A year after the coup, the military continues to egregiously restrict media freedoms across the country and attempts to terrorise journalists into silence. Nearly all the journalists who were working in Myitkyina before the coup have fled. Many are unable to continue reporting at all.”

Want to Make Real Progress in Newsroom DEI? Audience Engagement is Essential. “What does a truly inclusive culture look like? Most newsrooms think of diversity and inclusion work primarily as an internal affair — being respectful to everyone in the organization and treating everyone within that sphere equally. But inclusion work can’t succeed in a bubble.” Useful insights and tactics for improving newsroom DEI - which improves democracy for all of us.

We are deeply and profoundly sorry: For decades, The Baltimore Sun promoted policies that oppressed Black Marylanders; we are working to make amends. “Instead of using its platforms, which at times included both a morning and evening newspaper, to question and strike down racism, The Baltimore Sun frequently employed prejudice as a tool of the times. It fed the fear and anxiety of white readers with stereotypes and caricatures that reinforced their erroneous beliefs about Black Americans.”

Documenting and Debunking Dubious Footage from Ukraine’s Frontlines. “With every alleged provocation a potential pretext for conflict, Bellingcat has decided to track and detail such claims as well as the circumstances surrounding them.”

Politics

Boris Johnson Is a Liar. “The first thing you need to know about Boris Johnson is he’s a liar.” This is brilliant: Jonathan Pie explains Johnson to the New York Times in video. Easily the best thing the Opinion page has ever done.

House approves bill to end forced arbitration of MeToo claims. “The U.S. House on Monday approved a bill that would ban mandatory arbitration in sexual harassment and assault cases brought by workers, consumers and even nursing home residents, queuing the measure up for Senate passage and President Joe Biden’s signature.”

How thousands of text messages from Mark Meadows and others reveal new details about events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack. “If POTUS allows this to occur… we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.” Remarkable.

An antifascist’s position on Ukraine. “While Russia holds culpability for bringing us to the brink of war, America likewise holds culpability for creating a long-term ecosystem where peace and diplomacy seem impossible, and where war, either now or later, is destined to break out.”

Facebook Allows Praise of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. “Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.”

Science

Reading on a smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension. “In this study, we investigated the cause for comprehension decline when reading on a smartphone by simultaneously measuring respiration and brain activity during reading in 34 healthy individuals. We found that, compared to reading on a paper medium, reading on a smartphone elicits fewer sighs, promotes brain overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, and results in reduced comprehension.”

The International Space Station to be retired and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. “NASA said that commercially operated space platforms would replace the ISS as a venue for collaboration and scientific research.” Ugh.

America’s most widely consumed cooking oil causes genetic changes in the brain. “Used for fast food frying, added to packaged foods, and fed to livestock, soybean oil is by far the most widely produced and consumed edible oil in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In all likelihood, it is not healthy for humans.”

Society

American Capitalism Needs a Reboot. “Enda Brophy, associate professor of the labor studies program at Simon Fraser University, says there’s more frustration with capitalism as a system now than at any time since perhaps the 1960-’70s. “Significantly, poll after poll tells us that younger generations and millennials above all have highly negative opinions of capitalism and highly positive opinions around socialism and trade unions,” Brophy said. “People are quitting jobs as they never have before and labor organizing is growing in unexpected industries.””

Forced sterilization is legal in 31 states, new report shows. “According to the report from the National Women’s Law Center, 17 states allow the permanent, surgical sterilization of children with disabilities. The report is written in plain language, designed to be understood by at least some of the people impacted most by these laws.”

Furries Are Leading the War Against a Book-Banning Mississippi Mayor. “Last week, a Mississippi mayor tried to strong-arm a local library into banning some books. The result was swift, and in retrospect, entirely predictable: A group of furries got on Twitter to do something about it.” Lovely!

Exposed documents reveal how the powerful clean up their digital past using a reputation laundering firm. “Now, documents viewed by Rest of World shed light on the reputation management industry, revealing how Eliminalia and companies like it may use spurious copyright claims and fake legal notices to remove and obscure articles linking clients to allegations of tax avoidance, corruption, and drug trafficking. The Elephant case may be one of thousands just like it.”

States propose bills on restricting LGBTQ+ school curriculum. “The White House denounced Florida’s bill in an emailed statement on Tuesday, adding that the legislation “is not an isolated action,” as more Republican lawmakers “take actions to regulate what students can or cannot read, what they can or cannot learn, and most troubling, who they can or cannot be.”” A really troubling trend: an onslaught of bigoted bills that will further isolate queer youth.

Abortion ban in Texas still causing surges at clinics in nearby states. “In Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Louisiana and southern Nevada, clinics have all continued to see a dramatic surge in patients, representatives told The 19th, with some treating more than twice the number of people they saw before the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8 took effect in September.”

Oh, God, how it hurts to write this. “I came to this black wall again to see and touch your name, and as I do I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother’s heart. A heart broken 15 years ago today, when you lost your life in Vietnam.” War is evil and must be avoided.

San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam, D.A. Boudin says. “San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she was alerted to the alleged practice this weekend, and that she has submitted an inquiry to the City Attorney’s Office to draft legislation to prevent DNA evidence — or any sort of evidence collected from a victim’s rape kit — to be used for anything other than investigating that rape itself.”

Ukrainian refugees are already being driven out by the Russian invasion. “EU countries might be more open to absorbing Ukrainians fleeing the wrath of their adversary. But there might also be more willingness to accept Ukrainians because they are white, European, and majority Christian, revealing the “troubling rise of nationalist movements rooted in fear of the other,””

Technology

Google Fonts lands website privacy fine by German court. “The unauthorized disclosure of the plaintiff’s dynamic IP address by the defendant to Google constitutes a violation of the general right of personality in the form of the right to informational self-determination according to § 823 Para. 1 BGB.” Embedding Google resources like fonts as a GDPR violation: wow.

Letter to the US Senate Judiciary Committee on App Stores. “I am Bruce Schneier, a longtime security technologist, author, speaker, and thinker; and author of many books, papers, and articles on the topic both Internet security and privacy. I currently teach cybersecurity policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. I am writing in support of S.2992 and S.2710, which are attempts to redress the power of dominant technology firms.”

Tesla drivers say their cars are making random stops. ““My wife has requested that I don’t use cruise control or autopilot while she’s in the car, as we experienced an unwarranted, aggressive automatic braking episode which caused great pressure against her pregnant belly on a previous road trip,” one driver said in their report.” I drive a Tesla Model 3 and don’t use cruise control or autopilot for exactly this reason: it stops randomly. It’s relatively rare, but one time is one time too many.

Europe’s crackdown on those annoying consent banners is a huge deal. “For one thing, [...] American lawmakers and regulators have often looked at the “consent spam” polluting Europe and pointed to it as one of the worst consequences of GDPR. This new decision [...] exposes that spam to be a violation of the law, not a fulfillment of it.”

Humanitarian organizations keep getting hacked because they can’t spend to secure data. “What we see over and over again is that humanitarians are being expected to hold some of the most sensitive data in the world of the most vulnerable people in the world and have the resources of mall cops to protect against the cyber hacking equivalent of Delta Force.”

Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising? ““The use of personal data in advertising is already tightly regulated by existing legislation,” [IAB Europe Director] Mroczkowski said, apparently referencing the GDPR, which regulates data privacy in the EU generally. He further noted that the new rules “risk undermining” existing law and “the entire ad-supported digital economy.”” Let’s be totally clear: the ad-supported digital economy is not worth protecting.

Why the balance of power in tech is shifting toward workers. “Concerns and anger over tech companies’ impact in the world is nothing new, of course. What’s changed is that workers are increasingly getting organized. Whether writing public letters, marching in protest, filing lawsuits, or unionizing, the labor force that makes the corporate tech world run is finding its voice, demanding a future in which companies do better and are held more responsible for their actions.”

Radio station snafu in Seattle bricks some Mazda infotainment systems. “The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions, and it seems that Mazda’s infotainment system of that generation needs an extension (and not a header) to tell what a file is. No extension, no idea, and the system gets corrupted.” And now those Mazdas are stuck on the station forever. At least it’s NPR!

How Fresh Grads with Zero Experience Get Hired as Senior Engineers. “What greeted me when I walked into their luxury apartment were flies circling around piles of unwashed dishes and utensils in the kitchen. When I stepped into the bathroom, I saw urine on the floor. Each room had bunk beds in it.”

That broken tech/content culture cycle. “Here’s how you do it. […] Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to this insistence on being solely a “neutral” tech company in every aspect of decision-making, policy, hiring and operations, except for your public advertising, where the message is entirely about creativity and expression.”

What using RSS feeds feels like. “To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.” Yes, this exactly. I love RSS.

Surveillance Too Cheap to Meter. “Even ignoring the fact that lawmakers have generally made the collection of surveillance data a requirement for mobile network licenses, it would cost the telcos more money to stop the surveillance of their customers than to continue doing it.”

Bionic Eye Patients Are Going Blind Again After Manufacturer Decides They’re Obsolete. “Currently, Second Sight is planning to merge with Nano Precision Medical, another biotechnology company, to stave off complete financial ruin. However, it doesn’t have any plans to support their bionic eye patients — and likely never will again.”

My journey down the rabbit hole of every journalist’s favorite app. “Otter and its competitors, which include Descript, Rev, Temi and the U.K.-based Trint, are digital warehouses whose advantages of speed and convenience are bracketed by what experts say can be lax privacy and security protections that may endanger sensitive text and audio data, the identities of reporters and the potentially vulnerable sources they contact.”

I have no capslock and I must scream. “In a near future, a team of desktop computer designers are looking at the latest telemetry and updating the schematics of the hardware-as-a-service self-assembling nanohardware.”

A Long Bet Pays Off. “The bet, to be revisited a decade and a year later, would be whether the URL of their wager at Long Bets would survive to a point in the semi-distant future.” And it did!

Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team. “I think I’ve come up with a novel hack for the challenge of getting your company to financially support the open source projects that it uses: reach out to the maintainers and offer them generous speaking fees for remote talks to your engineering team.” This is really smart!

Twitter is sharing safety tips in Ukrainian — including how to delete your account. “On Wednesday night, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Twitter’s Safety team began sharing tips in Ukrainian for how users in the country can cover their digital tracks to help keep themselves safe. That included details for deleting their accounts entirely.”

Here’s how I think about software development:

All code is an assumption until it meets its real-life context: its user, real-world data, the situation it’ll be used in.

The goal in a startup should be to prove all your core assumptions as quickly as possible. Whereas in an agency setting, say, or perhaps even in a larger company, there’s a defined deliverable, code in a startup is never done: you’re constantly iterating on it to get closer and closer to the right fit for its context.

You could spend months or years meticulously developing the perfect codebase before release, but the truth is, no matter how many automated tests you run, no matter how much QA you’ve built in, you won’t know if it really works until a real user uses it. That’s true of websites, applications, back-end server demons, you name it. If you’ve spent all that time writing code and it’s not the right thing - well, then you’ve probably wasted a ton of time and money.

Before the internet era, that was the only way software could be written. A company would work hard on a release, which might even then be shrink-wrapped and sent to stores. These days, we’re constantly connected, and software (whether it’s on the web or not) can be continually updated. Some of the best platforms I’ve worked on have released multiple times a day. The internet gives developers superpowers.

The right thing to do, then, is to write the simplest, smallest thing you can, get it out there, learn from how people are using it, and iterate quickly. This iterative feedback loop is at the heart of agile development, but it’s also just good common sense: you always want to shorten feedback loops as far as you can. The question is always: what’s the shortest distance to proving or disproving your assumption?

Otherwise you’ll end up chasing perfection in silence. In the worst case, your product might not even get released: the context will likely change during a long development process, which means you’ll need to continually adjust the code until you get there. Then the world changes again, and you have to adjust again, and so on and so on and so on. The world will always change - that’s a given - so it’s better to release early and often.

Every software developer in a startup needs to have an inherent comfort with imperfection and a mindset of “failing fast”.

That’s true of every aspect of startups, of course. The core proposition, the underlying business models, the culture, the team - all of those things need to be tested early and iterated upon until you find the right thing. The best startups deeply ingrain these learning loops so that everyone is iterating quickly. The worst just spin their wheels forever.

To do that effectively, you have to let go of your ego. Yes, you’re smart: your insights and past experience will inform how you react to new information. But you can’t operate in a vacuum. Even the smartest people in the world need to approach problems with a growth mindset and let the people they’re trying to build for be the ultimate arbiter on whether they’re building the right thing. Nobody can sit in an enclosed room and come up with the right thing all or most of the time. Whether you’re in the C-suite, an individual contributor, or an intern, you’ve got to figure out how to test your ideas in the real world as quickly as possible.

And then learn, grow, and repeat.