Werd I/O

It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty stressed out.

Someone I trust said that my writing lately has given the impression of “a man on the edge”. I think of it slightly differently - there’s a lot going on and I feel like I’m dealing with it in good humor - but I accept the idea and the intent behind it.

One of the most useful concepts I’ve been introduced to over the last couple of years is the Yerkes-Dodson curve. I’m not a psychologist, so please excuse my layman’s explanation: the idea is that we’re at peak performance when we have an optimal level of sensory arousal. Too little arousal and we’re maybe increasing our level of interest, but not in the zone yet; too much and we burn out quickly.

In contexts where there’s a lot going on, you’re already further along the curve. Because you’re nearer to burnout as a starting position, cognitive input that might ordinarily be okay has the potential to push you over the edge.

It’s a reductive explanation - again, I’m far from a psychologist - but I’ve found that it works for me. Applying this kind of structure to the process by which it all becomes too much has allowed me to think about what those cognitive inputs are, and to build in systems of control to keep myself on the straight and narrow.

I first put this to the test a couple of years ago. My mother’s condition had worsened, and I was feeling utterly overwhelmed, which was deeply affecting my performance at work.

At the same time, I’d become addicted to some game on my phone, and was traveling to and from New York a lot. I’d pick up my phone on the plane and play the game for an hour or two; depending on the day, I might play it a little in my AirBnb after work. There were a lot of notifications involved: lots of input.

In the scheme of things, the game was just a distraction. The big input was my mother’s terminally declining health, which was something that was always going to affect me psychologically, and wasn’t something I could or wanted to cut out of my life. (I can’t imagine what this would even have looked like.) Nonetheless, deleting the game dramatically improved my mental state. I was surprised, but it was undeniable: I was calmer, performed better at work, showed up more effectively for my family, and even had better sleep.

Abstracting this idea has resulted in a rudimentary system of control for my own stress. If I’m finding myself going over the edge - as happened this last week - I take stock of my inputs and reduce them. There are two more systemic solutions: find ways to become a more efficient processor of inputs (physical and mental exercise both help here), and create contexts for myself where there are fewer inputs overall.

Social media is one set of inputs. I’m going to try and take a break over the next month: removing all apps and logging myself out of the websites. It’s not that social media is bad, as such: it’s just one major set of cognitive inputs that can be removed. On the other hand, I find writing and blogging to be closer to a meditative process, so I’ll keep doing that. If I feel better at the end of the month, I’ll come back to social; otherwise I’ll leave it a little longer.

The same principle applies at work. The more chaotic and un-streamlined a process, the more cognitive inputs it produces, and the more stressed a team will be. Structure (or at least, the right amount of it) leads to predictability. Similarly, the more a process depends on ongoing meetings, the more inputs you receive during the workday. Zoom fatigue is both real and related to this principle: each meeting an input, each unscheduled meeting even more so. The more calm, reflective time I have, the more optimal my performance will be - which is, of course, different for everyone, because we all start at different places on the stress curve.

We’re still in the middle of a modern plague. Everyone’s stress level is higher than it would have been: not just because of the underlying context, but because many of us have lost family and friends. Creating conditions for our optimal well-being and performance means limiting stress, controlling our inputs, and more than anything, an intentionality that we might not have felt the need for before.

I was always a pretty good kid: good-natured, good in school, imaginative, and curious. I’d get up early every day to draw comic books before school; during the breaks between lessons on the school playground, I’d pretend I was putting on plays for astronauts. Afterwards, I’d muck about on our 8-bit computer, writing stories or small BASIC programs. I was a weird kid, for sure - nerdy long before it was cool, the third culture child of activist hippies - but relatively happy with it. I had a good childhood that I mostly remember very fondly.

Becoming a teenager also meant becoming the owner of a dark cloud that no-one else could see, which seemed to grow every day. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I would wake up some days without any energy or motivation at all. Sometimes, cycling home from my high school along the Marston Ferry Road in Oxford, a trunk road on one side and fields of cows on the other, I’d just stop. It was as if I was unable to move my feet on the pedals. I described it at the time as feeling like my blood had suddenly turned to water. There was nothing left inside me to go.

That feeling of nothingness inside me, like my fire had gone out, came into focus before I graduated from high school. I felt wrong. There was something irretrievably wrong about me - no, wrong with me - and everybody knew it, and nobody would tell me what it was.

At the same time, I discovered the internet. Whereas I’d come home as a kid to draw and write, as a teenager I’d connect to our dial-up Demon Internet connection and sync my emails and newsgroup posts before logging off again. I learned to build websites as a way to express myself. (Here’s one of my interminable and not-just-a-little-toxic teenage poetry collections, preserved for all eternity on the Internet Archive. You’re welcome.) Most importantly of all, I connected with new friends who were my age, over usenet newsgroups and IRC: two text mediums.

Somehow, when I was connecting with people over text, in a realm where nobody could see me or really knew what I looked like, I felt more free to be myself. Even when I met up with my fellow uk.people.teens posters - our collective parents were somehow totally fine with us all traveling the country to meet strangers by ourselves - I felt more like I could be confidently me, perhaps because I had already laid the groundwork of my friendships in a way that I had more control over. My family has always felt safe to me because I could just be me around them. I had a core group of very close school friends too, who I’m friends with to this day; people who I felt like didn’t judge me, and who I could feel safe around. In more recent years, some of those close friends have veered into conservative Jordan Peterson territory and anti-inclusion rhetoric, and it’s felt like a profound violation of that safety to a degree that I haven’t been able to fully explain until recently.

My connection to the internet - as in my personal connection, the emotional link I made with it - came down to that feeling of safety. I used my real name, but there was a pseudonymity to it; I was able to skate past all the artifice and pressure to conform of in-person society that had led me to feel wrong in the first place. On the web, I didn’t have that feeling. I could just be a person like everybody else. Being present in real life was effort; being online was an enormous weight off my shoulders.

Perhaps the reason I’ve come back to building community spaces again and again is because I remember that feeling of connecting for the first time and finding that the enormous cloud hanging over me was missing. That deep connection between people who have never met is still, for me, what the internet is all about. Or to put it another way, I’m constantly chasing that feeling, and that’s why I work on the internet.

Likewise, that’s what I’m looking for from my in-person connections. I want to feel like I can be me, and that I will be loved and accepted as I am. While I’ve found that in connections with all kinds of people, I’ve most often found that to be true in queer spaces: in my life, the people who have had to work to define their own identity are the most likely to accept people who don’t fit in.

It’s important to me: that deep, dark feeling of wrongness has never gone away. It’s under my skin at the office; it’s behind my eyes at family gatherings; it’s what I think about when I wake up at three in the morning. If we’re friends or family or lovers, I want to feel safe with you. I want to know that you accept me despite the wrongness, whatever the wrongness might be.

It might be that the relief the internet gave me also delayed my reconciliation with what the wrongness actually was.

When I was six years old, I cried and cried because my mother told me I wouldn’t grow up to be a woman. The feeling of not wanting to be myself has been with me as long as I can remember. I found beauty in people who were not like myself. There was much to aspire to in not being me.

Puberty gave me, to be frank, enormous mass. I was taller than everyone else, bigger than everyone else, by the time I was eleven or twelve. I towered over everyone by the time I was fourteen. I was bigger and hairier and smellier. In adulthood, the way one ex-girlfriend described it, my body isn’t just taller: it’s like someone has used the resize tool in Photoshop and just made me bigger, proportionally. I was never thin or athletic or dainty; I suddenly ballooned like the Incredible Hulk, but without the musculature.

I had felt wrong in my body before. Now, there was more of my body - a lot more - to feel wrong in.

So much of that dark cloud was my discomfort with my physicality: the meatspace experience of living as me. People started to tell me that I was easy to find in crowds, or made fun of the bouncy walk I developed as my limbs grew. They meant nothing by it, but it cut deep.

To this day, I recoil when I see a photo of myself alongside someone else. I hate it: there’s always this enormous dude ruining a perfectly good picture. It doesn’t even feel like me; it’s akin to when Sam Beckett looks into the mirror in Quantum Leap, or when Neo sees the projection of himself in The Matrix: Resurrections. The word, I’ve learned, is dysphoria.

I don’t know where to take that, or what it really means. I feel intense discomfort with my body and the physical manifestation of myself in the world. It’s not necessarily gender dysphoria - I don’t know - but it’s dysphoria nonetheless. I hate my body and it doesn’t feel like me.

What now?

The advent of the commercial internet must have been solace for a great many people in this way. It’s not unreasonable to say that it saved my life: not necessarily because I would have killed myself (although there have been times in my life, particularly when I was younger, when I’ve thought about it), but because I wouldn’t have found a way to build community and live with the authentic connections I did. I would have been hiding, fully and completely. Everyone deserves to not hide.

But because I’ve been living with one foot outside of the physical world, it’s also taken me a long time to understand that my feeling of wrongness was so tied into my physicality, and that my need to present differently was so acute.

I actually felt a little relief last year when I dyed my hair electric blue on a whim: it felt right in a way I wasn’t used to, perhaps because it was something under my control, or perhaps because it was a signal that I wasn’t the person I felt I had presented as up to then. The blue has long since faded and grown out into highlights, but some sense of the relief it brought remains. I have to wonder how I would feel if I did more to my body, and what it would take to make that dark cloud go away for good.

I think feeling good - no, feeling right - involves embracing that the feeling I’ve been experiencing my whole life is valid, and then exploring what it means in the real world. You’ve got to face it; you’ve got to give it a name.

There’s a TikTok trend that uses a line from a MGMT song to make a point about closeted queerness: ‌Just know that if you hide, it doesn't go away. It’s clear to me that the internet has been a godsend for people who don’t feel like they fit in, who need to find community that is nurturing for them, and who need to explore who they are. Removing that cognitive cloud is no small thing. But the next step is still the hardest: figuring out who you are, and finding out how to be yourself.

I’ve added two links to the bottom of every page on my website.

The first is to the IndieWeb webring: a directory of personal websites from people who are a part of the indieweb movement. These sites run the gamut of topics, but they’re mostly personal profiles from people who like to write on the web. Just like me! (You can click the left or right arrows to get to a random site.)

The second is to Blogroll.org, which I learned about from a post on Winnie Lim’s site. It’s exactly what you’d expect from the name: a categorized list of blogs. I love it and I’m glad it exists.

I want more of you to blog. Please write about your personal experiences! I want to read them! And doing it on your personal space is far better than simply tweeting, or using something like Facebook or (shudder) LinkedIn, simply because you can be more long-form, and build up a corpus of writing that really represents you. And sure, yes, Medium is fine. But I want to read what you have to say, and other people do too.

‌‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to Harmony Health Clinic. Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, Harmony Health Clinic “seeks to understand and serve the health and wellness needs of the medically uninsured and underserved who live in Pulaski County, by providing access to quality medical care at no cost to these patients in a private, community-based clinic, staffed by medical professional volunteers and marked by a unique atmosphere of caring, compassion, respect, dignity, and diversity.”

It describes its mission as follows:

[…] The Clinic’s founders are committed to advancing social justice through the provision of quality health care to those who are denied it by virtue of barriers such as socioeconomic status. We believe that universal access to decent health care is integral to the sanctity, development and enjoyment of life, and vital to an individual’s ability to fully realize one’s dignity and potential. Virtually every religious faith and major Christian denomination takes the position that access to decent health care is and should be recognized as a basic human right, and that the prevailing health care system in this country utterly fails to protect that right when it does not ensure adequate coverage for all Americans. Indeed, the United States of America stands virtually alone among all industrialized nations as the only country which does not provide health care coverage to all of its citizens.

As the pandemic progresses and health needs compound, I’m concerned about the impact on the most vulnerable, particularly in some of the most impoverished and unequal parts of the country. Harmony Health Clinic is one organization that is helping to alleviate these inequities.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to join me here.

I found Harmony Health Clinic through the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, which provides support for the uninsured and underinsured nationwide. I donated to them, too, and I encourage you to do the same.

Something I’ve learned over the last decade is that I have a very different relationship to place than many - perhaps even most - people.

I come by it honestly. In my nuclear family growing up, each of us had a slightly different accent, shaped by our respective journeys. My dad’s is Dutch; my mother’s was American; my sister and I sit in different places along the British-to-American spectrum, and have fluctuated along that axis throughout our lives.

Parts of my family ancestry moved by force: concentration camps in Indonesia and pogroms in Ukraine. But even on the theoretically more stable sides of my family, my forebears typically decided to move around a bunch. Even within the bounds of my own history, my childhood was spent in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Austria, and the United States.

When I came along, a tiny zygote interrupting a life among the political activists of 1970s Berkeley, my parents decided to move to Europe. I’m sure it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer for them, but they were clear on their decision: they would prefer to have a child in Europe than the United States. That pattern continued throughout my childhood: we traveled for educational opportunities, and for work. It was a privileged existence in the sense that experiencing different cultures and living in different places is privileged; we didn’t have much money, and scraped to get by.

I’ve inherited that wanderlust, and I guess a sense of willingness to be somewhere new. There’s nothing wrong with its opposite - a desire to stay and grow roots, to be deeply settled - but that understanding didn’t come easily to me. There’s something almost genetic about not wanting to be in one place forever. There’s so much world out there!

I’m not at all jealous of the folks whose families have been in the same spot for generations. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it feels like so much more might be possible. And I have to acknowledge that it’s a ridiculous stance, because so much of the traveling in my family history comes from trauma: it’s not so much that people just wanted to roam. They were forced out; their homes burned; their communities tortured and murdered. Perhaps there’s a virtue to be found in the resilience that’s a required outcome of that, but not so much in the act itself. These were atrocities.

And yet. I like to move.

Evan Prodromou wrote about this internal conflict on his blog yesterday. He’s wondering about his geographic legacy, and considering lessons from Melody Warnick’s book This is Where You Belong.

The book covers a lot of the reasons that staying put is more healthy physically and psychologically than constantly moving. It also has a number of commonsense recommendations for establishing connections to the place you’re living. Like: walk or bike more, so you see things up close. Volunteer. Meet people. Learn the history. Do what people who live there do.

To me, settling has always felt like settling: coming to a compromise agreement with the world. I feel like I need to erase that chip in my brain, and I haven’t quite found the way to do it.

I would love to settle in the sense of finding a comfortable place to rest, and in the sense of putting down real roots. I have not yet found a way to feel okay with it.

I’d like to informally join the list of technologists who support the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Here’s the full text of the bill.

Specifically, the bill would prevent “covered platforms” from prioritizing their products and services over those provided by other vendors in a way that would harm competition on that platform.

That could be interpreted to mean app stores and search engines: a “covered platform” is one that has at least 50M US-based monthly active users, at least 100K monthly active “business users”, and has either a market cap or revenues of at least $550B. It also needs to have the potential to “materially impede” access from a business to its users / customers, or to tools a business needs to service its users or customers.

It’s a good law. Neither search engine or marketplace vendors should have the ability to preference services made by that vendor over equivalent services made by others. Apple shouldn’t be able to promote Apple’s services over a startup’s on the App Store; Google shouldn’t be able to promote Google’s services on its store or in its search engine results. The result will be a better ecosystem for startups, independent projects, and software produced by co-operatives and collectives.

Similarly, the Open App Markets Act would prevent App Store providers from forcing app vendors to use the provider’s payments technology. Apple wouldn’t be able to require that subscriptions go through iTunes, for example. That’s a big change that, again, creates better terms for startups and helps to establish a more competitive ecosystem.

This is the kind of thing legislation should be doing: helping to enforce fairer markets that allow newcomers to compete with incumbents on a level playing field. I’m hopeful that these bills pass, and that they’re a precursor to real antitrust reform. In the light of today’s announcement around an overhauled merger approval process, we may be in luck.

A more competitive landscape is one where consumers have more choices and protections, and ecosystems are more open and innovative. These active steps to get there represent a change that’s been a long time coming.

I’m 90% convinced that most tech workers are going to be working remotely for the duration of 2022. Omicron has pushed out much-fanfare returns to the office, and there’s nothing to say that there won’t be another wave after that. It’s simply not safe, and it won’t be safe for some time.

Rather than playing that by ear and seeing how we go, which has resulted in an announcement about returning to the office followed by a retraction roughly every quarter, I think companies should go ahead and make the assumption. It’ll help the companies themselves make better financial decisions. For example, Google can save the $6.3M it spends on food each year and direct it elsewhere (for example, to help parents, carers, and other people who need it). But more importantly, the certainty will help employees plan their lives.

There’s a lot to be gained from being remote. Within certain parameters, I vastly prefer it: I do better work, I waste less time traveling, I eat better food and do more exercise, and feel less tired at the end of each day. Those parameters and boundaries are important, though: if work bleeds into every hour of the day because there’s no set home-time from the office, it’s a much worse experience (and everyone does worse work because they’re wiped out).

But more than that, there’s a lot to be gained from not being wishy-washy about it. Burnout happens, in part, when you work really hard but feel like you don’t have control. Left unchecked, the uncertainty and powerlessness of our covid situation can be a huge contributor to it. Removing that psychic overhead could, I think, reduce one of the most important stressful overheads of this era.

There’s a lot to work out. The pandemic has disproportionately affected people from vulnerable communities, and remote working can exacerbate those effects. We can’t ignore the equity issues with remote working - but that means leaning into them and finding real solutions that make for more equitable workplaces, rather than pretending that remote work is going away any time soon.

The best workplaces are kind, inclusive, empathetic, and responsive to their workers’ needs. That doesn’t have to mean in-person - particularly when being in-person carries the risk of contracting a disease that could affect your entire life. Let’s take that out of the equation and focus on how to make things better in our new reality. There’s no going back to normal. Not for a long time yet.

Over the last decade or two tech has become dominated by the startup: a small, new business that rapidly reinvents itself in an iterative process. Once upon a time, the aim of that process was - or at least, seemed like it was - to be as useful as possible to a well-defined target group of users. These days it feels like the aim is mostly to gain as high a valuation as possible by moving from venture capital funding round to funding round, eventually making bank through an exit event.

That startupification has had an interesting effect on tech communities. I’m from the utopian era of the web, when we all thought we could build something to connect that world, and by doing so that we would make it more peaceful. These days, it seems like people are mostly in it to make millions of dollars - which feels like an emptier, less exciting goal, to say the least. The possibilities for social change used to seem endless; now the conversation is mostly about funding rounds or financial yield. In itself, it’s boring, but it also changes who is attracted to the space: we’ve gone from a loose group of weird social idealists to being overwhelmed by a bolus of the most boring possible people. The tech workforce is becoming Wall Street in hoodies, far more concerned with the performance of their RSUs than the impact they’re having in the world.

Of course, there are still idealists: people who believe in making the world more equal and democratic, and that technology has a part to play in making it happen. The indieweb movement remains one great example of this; there are also plenty of people working on tech for good, or mission-driven endeavors where the social impact comes first. Even in companies that are a part of this financialization of tech, there are people doing great work on inclusivity, unionization, and advocacy for social responsibility. Nonetheless, at this point, these groups are in the minority.

I find that personally demotivating - it’s not why I got into the space, or why I’m excited about it - but it’s also kind of counterproductive. If you’re laser focused on helping a defined group of people, you’re more likely to build a valuable company, because you’re literally generating value. Conversely, if you’re focused on making money as a goal rather than a means to an end, you’re more likely to make shallower decisions that undermine your value. Being focused on helping your user means you’re aligned with them; being primarily focused on your financial goals means you’re primarily aligned with yourself. To put it another way, if the aim is to raise a round or make a bunch of money personally, you’re more likely to make decisions that screw your users and undermine that goal to begin with. It’s also just a selfish, stupid way to look at the world.

Remember this Apple campaign?

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

It doesn’t say here’s to the stockbrokers, is all I’m saying. Tech could use a little more crazy, a little more outside thinking, a little more equity-mindedness, and a little less greed. That’s how the world gets changed: by focusing on people, not on dollar bills.

Photo by Israel Andrade on Unsplash

‌‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to Project HOME. Based in Philadelphia, Project HOME aims to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty in the Philly area.

It describes its mission as follows:

The mission of the Project HOME community is to empower adults, children, and families to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty, to alleviate the underlying causes of poverty, and to enable all of us to attain our fullest potential as individuals and as members of the broader society. We strive to create a safe and respectful environment where we support each other in our struggles for self-esteem, recovery, and the confidence to move toward self-actualization.

Its work includes permanent, subsidized housing for individuals and families who had been homeless; learning, training, and employment; affordable healthcare services for the underserved; and K12 education for vulnerable children and teens. Its work is holistic, addressing underlying causes as well as immediate needs.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

Last year, I drove across the country, twice.

We were always going to go to the east coast. One of the last clear things my mother said to me, over a Zoom link to the hospital because I wasn’t allowed into her room because of covid protocols (until her situation got a lot worse), was, “how am I going to get to [my great grandparents’ house on Cape Cod]?”

I promised her that we would get her there. In the event, we brought her ashes.

Driving all together for one more road trip - an extension of journeys we’d taken when I was a kid - felt like the right thing to do. It was meaningful time for the three of us, and it was a sort of resolution on my promise, even if it was not the way any of us wanted it to happen.

It’s a beautiful country. It’s troubled and full of people who are hurting, and it has a terrible history. But man. The landscape is breathtaking; the perseverance of people who build amazing things despite it all is inspiring.

On the road trip back, my sister and I took a southerly route. While we were in the South, we deliberately only ate at Black-owned establishments. It was clear that the racial politics of places like Alabama are still set in the distant past, and we saw the owners of some of these establishments suffer both systemic and direct abuse (they were also the friendliest places with by far the best food we tried). We visited the Greenwood District in Tulsa and saw that the aftermath of the race massacre is ongoing. We saw that plaques commemorating Dr King’s work are often kept at arms length.

It was also clear that the country isn’t blue or red; it’s purple. There were progressive people fighting hard for equality everywhere we went. And there was the opposite. It would be disingenuous to say they’re just different; one is pushing towards justice, and the other is pushing against it. I believe justice will win, but it’s been a long, hard struggle.

I don’t necessarily recommend going on a road trip during a pandemic. (We were careful, were in a lull, tested frequently, and did not get covid.) But I do recommend traveling the country when it’s safe. It’s eye-opening, and a good reminder of how much of a bubble places like San Francisco really are.

I hope to do it again, and to see more, once the pandemic is over. I want to hear the music of New Orleans in full swing; I want to visit bars and hang out in restaurants and hear the stories that are hard to get to in a world of social distancing and health protocols. Hopefully it’s soon.

If you’d asked me a few years ago who won the browser wars, I would have said open standards: web pages were finally opening and rendering well no matter which browser you chose to use. There was a significant choice between rendering engines, chromes, and parent companies to pick from, and although there were some differences in how quickly new HTML features were picked up or exactly how quickly pages rendered, the web itself continued to work.

This year, I’m finding that websites increasingly break if I’m using Firefox. Sometimes, it’s something small, like a page failing to give me Apple Pay as a way to check out if I’m not using Safari. Increasingly, though, it’s meaningful: navigation doesn’t function or forms don’t submit.

This has to mean that engineers aren’t testing in Firefox anymore, and in turn that businesses aren’t prioritizing it. Because every other major browser is now using Webkit or Blink (itself a Webkit fork), that means web browser rendering has effectively become a monoculture.

That’s a bummer for me, because I’ve been a die-hard Firefox user since its release. But it’s also a real problem for the web. Firefox is the last mass-market open source web browser project: built by volunteers and a non-profit with diverse stakeholders in mind. The alternatives are all run by large corporations with philosophies based on lock-in: Google, Apple, and Microsoft, respectively. And only Google and Apple control the engines.

The saving grace is that only one of those companies - Google - is an advertising firm. Apple has wisely staked its reputation on privacy and security (even if it often doesn’t live up to those ideals). The modern Microsoft is really about creating better work experiences, and Edge correspondingly may have a similar approach to security - but as long as its browser rendering engine is controlled by Google, it’ll be optimized for displaying ads.

Clearly, most browser vendors have decided it’s not financially viable to create their own rendering engine. That’s a shame, and a missed opportunity. The web is nothing more than a set of standards, and there’s leeway for interpretation between implementations. If it weren’t for the Webkit / Blink split in 2013, there would effectively be a monopoly over the web.

At any rate, I’m going to pour one out for Firefox. It was a major force for good on the web, and therefore in the world; I’d love to see it come back faster, slimmer, and with renewed vigor. Until then, I need my web pages to work.

I slept for over ten hours last night, which felt like a miracle after a very long, stressful week. There’s a lot going on, and a lot going wrong, so the act of breathing and resting feels good. And biologically necessary.

My targeted ads lately have been focused on art, I guess because I’ve been clicking around a lot of outsider artists. But instead of the interesting work by emerging talents that I would like to see, I’m seeing a ton of direct to consumer startups selling things that they think other startup bros would like.

It’s horrifying.

I mean, sure, I’ll just ignore the art and move on. But I feel really bad for this next generation of kids who really believes that if they just hustle a little bit harder, if they spend their entire lives sweating and working and building, their lives will improve. There is a minority chance that it will lead them to more wealth, which is probably what they think they want. There’s also a majority chance that it will ruin the relationships in their lives and lead to them waking up in their early thirties burned out and alone.

There’s a whole get-rich-quick side to hustle culture that doesn’t even make sense according to its own internal logic: you’ll get rich in a compressed time by burning the candle at both ends and making your life shorter through stress and aggravation.

Okay, great. Then what? Are you going to retire? Concentrate on gardening? Or are you going to find, perhaps, that you’re addicted to the lifestyle you’ve created for yourself, and that you’re dependent on validation from the thing you do to make a living, such that if that thing ever goes away, you’re lost?

To be clear, I enjoy (meaningful) work: I like building things, and I like the feeling of incrementally pushing the world closer to an ideal that I would like to see. There’s a kind of egotism in it for sure (why should I be pushing the world towards my values?), but also a feeling of purpose and achievement. What I’m not into is the sense that you need to lose a piece of yourself to be competitive, or even to be valid in doing what you’re doing. You only get one life, and so much is more important than work.

It’s always worth considering why these messages are put out; who supports them; who really benefits if you follow their advice; and what happens if you choose to live another way. It’s propaganda, and propaganda always serves a central purpose.

Life for you, your community, your relationships, and your communal well-being. There’s no need to work yourself to the bone and potentially push yourself to an earlier death in order to make someone richer. Even if that person is you.

I mean, fuck off.

Today is my birthday. Last year I wrote 42 admissions: things I feel uncomfortable about that are worth discussing. In the end, I posted it a little after my actual birthday, because it turns out there are more important things to talk about during an insurrection. It’s a piece of writing I’m proud of, and I don’t think I would do it justice by revisiting the format.

This year I want to talk about things. Specifically, things I or we could build, that probably don’t exist yet, but might be feasible to achieve. Some of them will be bad ideas; some of them good. I’ve been thinking about some of them for a very long time; others are brainstormed in the moment. Some are big and all-encompassing; some could be side projects. Some are software; some are not. You might like some and hate others. Some or all might not be viable; you’re free to use any of them, but do so at your own risk. I’m leaving them unnamed.

(Yes, the name of this post is a reference. If you get it, kudos, you’re old too. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules.)

One.

A website, and later book, interviewing the people who work on tech for good. Who is using the internet to make the world more equitable, to empower the underserved, and build a safer future?

I’m not talking about ex-Facebook executives trying to greenwash their careers, or people like me in startup land, but the activists and hackers who might not ordinarily get coverage. What drives them? How did they get started? What are they excited about? How can we help them?

Two.

LinkedIn but for things you’re proud of, your hopes, and your dreams: like a resumé for your emotions.

Like LinkedIn, anyone could make one and keep it public, as a de facto work profile. Unlike LinkedIn, the center of gravity is not your money-making potential, but rather your humanity.

Three.

A unified service that will take away most of the really annoying bureaucracies involved in American life that residents of other countries take for granted.

A single payment covers healthcare and disability insurance, saves for retirement, and - assuming you’re a normal wage worker - will file your taxes on your behalf. If you’ve been working for a certain amount of time, payments are free for a while if you lose your job, so you don’t need to mess with COBRA. And anyone can use it, whether your employer provides it as a benefit or not.

You interact with the product through the year instead of doing your taxes etc every twelve months, so all the decisions involved in filing your taxes and choosing healthcare become very low-friction.

Four.

Urban gardens as a service. Come together as a community, rent or buy space as a collective, and then either do what you will with it or go through a step by step introductory process to developing and running one. The service manages space, roles, rotations, and keeps track of what planting needs to be done when. You can even buy and sell seeds.

Five.

Coworking trains. Cross the country between LA, San Francisco, Seattle and the northeast corridor via Chicago in first class quality train cars that have satellite internet, onboard entertainment, great food, coworking areas, a bar, and unlimited coffee. Available as single tickets or as a travel pass; each traveler defaults to a room with a single bed and small desk area, but larger rooms are available.

Six.

21st century telehealth for seniors, including a dedicated video device to book a session and talk to a doctor, and optional medical alert wearables that also track health metrics.

Seven.

Smart speakers / intelligent assistants for the Deaf. Embedded in hearing aids (perhaps in conjunction with smart glasses) and other devices around the home, the smart speakers can be activated by touch or voice, and can take input via signing or traditional speech.

Eight.

Tiny house drones. Forget delivery drones; what about home robots that bring you stuff inside your own home? For example, what if they could find your glasses or car keys and bring them to you? Tired: tiles and AirTags that let you know where these things are. Wired: technology that brings them to you, which is what you really wanted to begin with.

Nine.

GitHub for holistic software design. Rather than a code-centric environment, a software project tool that elevates points of view, research, and ethical considerations to the same importance as code, as well as ensuring that designers, writers, etc are not second class citizens in comparison to engineers.

Ten.

Audio diaries to share with close friends and family. Leave long-form messages like voicemail that people you choose to can listen to. It’s not about social media likes or clout; it’s about hearing your friend’s voice, even if they’re far away and in another timezone.

Eleven.

Artfinder for radical outsider art.

Twelve.

An ad profiling fuzzer. Don’t want advertising networks to know too much about you? Me either. This tool will go out and pretend to be you, confusing the hell out of any advertising network that might seek to figure out who you are. You continue to use the services you know and love, while they know a great deal less about you.

Thirteen.

A “link in bio” service for Instagrammers, TikTokers and other influencers that ramps up to literally a fully-featured personal website with HTML they can directly modify, import/export, and relocate.

Fourteen.

A service that will have hard conversations over the phone on a customer’s behalf, using deepfake technology to simulate their voice. (Okay, this is terrible, but it’s at least a little bit tempting.)

Fifteen.

A service that provides a searchable activity stream for all updates across an organization’s cloud activities: Google Drive, OneDrive, Figma, GitHub, etc. On managed devices, this can also include their local file activities in apps like Microsoft Word. As well as full-text search, activities can be segmented by team / user and categorized into folders. And the real magic happens with a “send to” button that will take files from one service (eg a Figma wireframe) and send it to another (eg Google Slides).

Sixteen.

An easy, free way to report a company for bad business practices to local, state, and federal watchdogs.

Seventeen.

An app that automatically takes a percentage of stock market or crypto returns and donates them to the charities / non-profits of your choice, and then provides an easy-to-use tax summary at the end of the year.

Eighteen.

An easy-to-use app-based service to facilitate interest-based friendships for people in retirement, with zero condescension and first-class UX / UI sensibilities.

Nineteen.

Outsourced solar panels: pay for solar to be installed on sunny, clear land, in order to generate power to the grid and offset your power use in places where you can’t get panels installed directly. For example, if you rent your home, you probably can’t install renewable energy directly, but using this service, you could still own power generation elsewhere. Panels are fully managed, with maintenance and replacement included.

Twenty.

Communal living rooms that anyone can use, segmented into spaces that you pay for by the time you sit in them. Imagine a British pub without the booze (but you can bring your own booze): a place to gather with friends without someone waiting on you or urging you to move on so they can get another cover. Maybe (but not definitely) drinks and snacks would be available.

Twenty-one.

“Can I pick your brain” as a service. Yes you can; I’d love to have that conversation; and here’s my rate.

Twenty-two.

A way to manage pods of families. In quarantine, that means checking on safety, organizing playdates, and so on. Post-quarantine, it means sharing food and resources, helping each other with childcare, and becoming a kind of decentralized co-operative community.

Twenty-three.

A joint bank account for married partners, designed from the ground up with a UX to make it easy to share and navigate costs, payments, and expenses.

Twenty-four.

A proof of stake cryptocurrency where the transaction fees and a portion of staking rewards are automatically donated to progressive causes, including to fight climate change and its effects around the world.

Twenty-five.

Patreon for activists.

Twenty-six.

Science-based horoscopes. Instead of depending on astrology, you add a bunch of details about yourself to a system, and it builds a detailed projection that is used to power advice that can be delivered at scale. It’s still astrology in a way, and the content is written in a similar fashion (with a focus on coaching: here’s how to prepare yourself for the world), but now it’s based on some factual data points and real research.

Twenty-seven.

Two words: cake subscription.

Twenty-eight.

Upwork for apprenticeships. You fill out a profile and are able to take on work that also trains you to do that role in the future. In turn, employers are led through how to run and manage a good apprenticeship, and are rated on their performance. In contrast to internships, apprenticeships have a structured training plan, which the platform helps the employer to create.

Twenty-nine.

People in chronic pain or with other certain kinds of disabilities often can’t work consistent hours and don’t have the ability to perform certain manual tasks, but are nonetheless very highly skilled. Let’s build a platform that allows them to take on work according to their ability, and allows employers to make use of their expertise.

Thirty.

ProductHunt for (progressive) political bills, organizations, and endeavors.

Thirty-one.

Affordable satellite internet for people in rural areas, bundled with a streaming box preloaded with subscriptions to news services.

Thirty-two.

A wearable device that detects cortisol levels in your sweat and then lets you work with a personal coach to reduce your stress levels, as well as providing automated suggestions. For example, if your stress levels always rise during a particular scheduled meeting, it may be helpful for the device to draw your attention to that fact, so you can mitigate the stress in the future.

Thirty-three.

Codeacademy for ethical product design.

Thirty-four.

A technology union for smaller newsrooms. In exchange for a membership fee, the union sits in standards organizations like the W3C and advocates on behalf of newsroom interests. It also funds open source and practical research work that all newsrooms can pragmatically benefit from, and helps with issues like infosec that all newsrooms need to be aware of.

Thirty-five.

Virtual meet and greets for celebrities. Sign up for a package and join a scheduled, intimate Zoom with one of your heroes. A lot like the meet and greets at fan conventions, but without any worries about covid, and in a way that’s far more convenient and accessible for both the celebrity and their fans. A moderator is on hand to filter out abuse.

Thirty-six.

A virtual scrum master for small teams, which provides automated prompts and structure for recurring ceremonies, in order to help them stay on track.

Thirty-seven.

An automated smart pasta maker that puts together ravioli and other complicated filled pastas from scratch. Just pour in the ingredients.

Thirty-eight.

A Jane Jacobs score for communities. A live and frequently-updated measure of not just walkability, but how severed and fragmented a community is, based on its topology and the amenities and community centers available within subdivisions. This data would then be available via a web interface and an API that could in turn be plugged into sites like Zillow.

Thirty-nine.

Moderated community AMAs with people who lived through major historical events. For example: an AMA with a holocaust survivor, a firefighter who was there on 9/11, someone who was wrongly imprisoned through extraordinary rendition, and so on. Moderation is obviously key here, but allowing open conversation helps the history stay alive. An archive of the conversation stays open in perpetuity.

Forty.

A way to apply for jobs through proactive take-home projects. Rather than sit through screening calls etc, spend an hour or two working on a project that the prospective employer defines. Each applicant does the same project, which is then made available to the employer in an anonymized way. The result is that applicants who might not look perfect on paper are able to show what they can do, and employers get a better idea of how applicants think and work straight from the beginning.

Forty-one.

Big mouth billy bass: the inter-room intercom system.

Forty-two.

A structured process to determine your mission in life, your vision for what you want your life to be like, and the concrete steps to get there, in a way that provides space for serendipity and joy. Knowing that visions and strategies change, but missions change less often, you can make better decisions by asking yourself if an opportunity furthers your mission or getting closer to your vision. A little bit of structure goes a long way.

Forty-three.

Advisory as a service for any kind of startup. It’s like a mini accelerator, with payment either up-front or in equity, or a combination of the two (although payment in equity requires further evaluation and is discretionary). Sign up for a five month package and get a dedicated 1:1 session every two weeks, with email support and customized workshops for your team.

It’s only been a year since the attempted fascist coup by a coalition of the stupid. I don’t know how long it’ll be until the next time someone tries this.

Two things are particularly remarkable to me. The first is that it’s only been a year; it seems like decades ago, maybe, like something that happened in another era of human civilization. Were there rotary phones back then? Did people travel by zeppelin? So much has happened since then.

The second, of course, is that the right wing - press and political party, all wrapped up in a hateful, thick-headed bolus - is so adamant that this wasn’t an attempted coup, that there’s nothing to see here. That’s not what virtually any of them said on the day, but their political base is so far gone that the only thing they can do is go along with it. What does it say about our society when huge swathes of people can’t call a coup a coup? What does it say when some of those people are backed by millions of dollars in advertising or PACs?

The Donald Trump era isn’t over. The man himself probably is: a self-absorbed icon of cheap reality television who spent his time in the White House pushing a button for soda like a rat in a psychology experiment. But he was just the fake-tanned face for a movement that had already been growing and still lies malignantly under the surface of American society. Just this week, a technology executive in Utah was revealed to have sent an email around to his network claiming that vaccines were an extermination plot by the Jews. It sounds absurd; like something from a bad satire. Its obvious, wretched idiocy is matched only by the implications of its reality. There are millions of people who think like him, waiting for a leader to represent them.

Just as racism isn’t limited to people who use the n-word, this fascism is creeping and initially innocuous. Yes, it sits in the minds of people who wear Holocaust t-shirts and dress up in horns and furs to invade Congress. But it also sits in the minds of people who are unsettled with those who are different to them; who fear change; who believe we should all follow the same template of norms and roles; who are unsettled by the existence of trans people or Black Lives Matter or marriage equality. (The opposite of fascism is diversity.) Critical race theory is terrifying to them because it asks us to re-evaluate the American ubermensch; to them, the fact that our view of America’s founding was shaped by white supremacist values is best left unexamined.

The politicians and journalists who stoke this fear aren’t doing it out of some deep-seated conviction. They’re cheap opportunists, out to make a profit. They’re empty souls who will do anything to chase money and validation. They see a market and will take advantage of it.

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” ~ Hannah Arendt

The soul-defying emptiness that defines American capitalism in this era is going to lead us to some very dark, very unpleasant places. My biggest worry is that the events of January 6, 2021 are a kind of foreshadowing. It’s not just that this was a terrible event, which it clearly was; it’s also that it was a terrible hint of what we can expect in our future if we’re not vigilant, if we’re not outspoken, and if we don’t change course significantly.

In the world we find ourselves in, there’s no space for silence; silence is, in effect, acquiescence. It says that there’s nothing worth speaking out or being impolite about. (Nice people made the best Nazis.) Alarm is justified. Proactivity is justified. Speaking out about the ludicrous events of last year is justified. It’s imperative for all of us that this movement is stopped in its tracks.

Photo by Blink O'fanaye, released under a CC license

It’s really easy to be cynical about upcoming technology.

Blockchain? Environmentally disastrous, full of terrible libertarians, NFTs are being used to launder money in huge numbers.

VR? You have to wear a giant thing on your face, it gives people motion sickness and nausea, all the commentary on the metaverse is nonsensical.

I believe each of those points! But I’m also worried about being overly conservative: everything has to change, and will continue changing. It’s important to understand the underlying trends if you’re going to participate in any way - which, as a technology professional, both want and have to. We can yell about the web in 2004 all we like, but it’s 2022, and the world has moved on.

I feel like I’ve written enough about blockchain, but there are silver linings: particularly in popular acceptance of decentralization and federated trust. I found this Twitter thread to be a good, nuanced take on the subject.

On VR: the technology is getting exponentially better. Yes, virtual reality demos have been laughable. But what if there was something here? What if the headsets reached the kind of quality and lightness that removed the screen door effect? What if they overcame the motion sickness problem? What if mixed reality and virtual reality became indistinguishable? Of course we won’t see the world that maximalists suggest, but that’s not to say there won’t be a bunch of good and interesting applications.

There’s a lot to tear down, and as always, there are a bunch of charlatans in tech. Criticism certainly has its place, and the tech press in particular has historically not been critical enough. But as technologists we need to imagine what might be possible.

Sure, these visions for the future aren’t right. But that’s not enough. The real work is to imagine what could be right, and what could be made possible, while staying true to our values and ethics. That’s a lot harder, but if we get it right, it’s a lot more rewarding. If we get to a point where the only people doing innovation on the internet are the people whose values we dislike, we’re in trouble.

I spent a lot of my early career in educational technology. My work “origin story”, such as it is, is that I started to work on virtual learning environments in 2002, realized that everyone involved (teachers, administrators, learners, potentially the developers) absolutely despised them, then applied the principles of the nascent social web to the space.

What I only began to appreciate more recently is how important enterprise education is: particularly when it comes to the certifications required to do business in well-regulated industries. For example, to get SOC 2 certified on an ongoing basis, you really have to run frequent security training for every employee, and do deeper training for every engineer. Keeping a record of who has taken and passed those training modules has a lot of value to a business who might be audited.

Informal learning doesn’t really fit into this model. Yes, you learn better from your peers, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that immersive, holistic teaching is more valuable educationally, but that’s not why companies run the training. They run the training to de-risk themselves, but more than that, to prove that they have de-risked themselves. Quantifiable grades, scores, and access records are mandatory in this context. They’re the product more than the actual education is.

The trouble is, that’s how we tend to think about education in a wider context, too. Ultimately, we don’t care so much about actually educating people. We care about showing that we have educated people. It’s not about holistically helping to give people the tools to really succeed in life - or, God forbid, furthering human knowledge - but much more about showing that we’ve hit our Key Performance Indicators for society and de-risked our communities. Stats and analytics are performance; it’s about covering your ass by showing you did your due diligence, the actual effect of your work be damned.

Goodhart’s Law goes as follows: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. When our goal is to have a certain percentage of A grades instead of to fully and comprehensively educate, our methods change accordingly. We let people slip through the cracks and we start to build systemic, one-size-fits-all approaches. On the other hand, if our goal is to educate, we might well find that a measure or approach that works for one student doesn’t work for another.

A mistake I made in my early career was thinking that people who made the financial decisions generally wanted to educate rather than engage in a performative demonstration of having educated. While the former is usually, gratifyingly true of actual educators, the people who control the purse-strings very often want the latter. I was naive and over-idealistic, and just didn’t get it.

Understanding that would have helped me put better tools in the hands of educators, as well as build a stronger non-profit or business to supply them sustainably. Maybe ironically, I didn’t know enough to do that. C’est la vie.

This year I’m interested in taking on some advisory roles. These could look like informal advisor relationships, or, for the right organizations, they could look like more formal board positions.

I have a demanding day job, but I like the idea of helping a wider set of companies - and particularly those that have the potential to make the world more equal and informed.

I’ve been on several sides of the startup table:

I was a founder twice, and CEO once (so far).

I’ve been the technical and product lead multiple times.

I was the west coast Director of Investments at Matter Ventures, an early-stage accelerator and VC firm.

Some of my favorite meetings at Matter started out as investment or product strategy sessions, and wound up as discussions about database optimization. I’m able to bring both technical and business experience to bear - and I’d love to.

Although I’ve had formal advisors in the past, and currently sit on a board, I don’t know how to go about making myself available in this way. So I thought I’d just put it out there.

If you’re interested, get in touch: ben@benwerd.com.

Thoughts

1. I can’t believe that CES is still happening in person.
2. In November, I drove back to California from the east coast with my sister: a risky move during a pandemic. We took precautions and managed not to contract anything nasty. But the diciest part of our trip, by far, was Las Vegas.
3. It’s not a classy place, but I’ve sometimes enjoyed Vegas. During the pandemic it’s pretty close to hell on Earth. There are crowds of people. Worse, there are crowds of people who don’t mind being in crowds.
4. CES is tied with SXSW for me as an event I don’t want to attend again if I can possibly help it. The crowds; the commercialism; the soullessness. In a resurgence of the pandemic, I couldn’t imagine contemplating it.
5. What a thing to do in honor of crappy new gadgets and TVs that can display NFTs.
6. What a perfect example of the risks people are asked to endure in the name of making money. Capitalism over life.
7. Every time I’ve sent someone wishes for the new year, or they’ve sent wishes to me, it’s included an end to the pandemic. Truth be told, I’ve not had a terrible time of it (at least, not because of covid), but it’s still trying. I want to see my friends and family. I want to travel back to the country I grew up in. I want to see new places.
8. I have two bucket list items when the pandemic finally lifts. I want to visit Japan, because I’ve never been - all over the country, ideally, traveling on its marvelous trains. And I want to visit Indonesia, where my father was born, ideally with him.
9. I want to see more.
10. I do not want to go to fucking CES.

Actions

1. I’m back on the exercise train. Today is my first real run of the year after some brisk hikes. I’m thinking about adding weights to the mix.
2. It’s time to really throw myself into the project I’ve been working on so we can release it. It’s been a journey, and I’m excited for people to use it.
3. After buying a house in Philadelphia, I’m planning some trips over there to get everything in order. I find it really exciting, but also daunting.

Matt Mullenweg asks people to blog for his birthday. It’s a lovely idea! And I might as well use his post to discuss one of my resolutions for the new year.

I’m going to post reflections on my own site at least once a day. As I’ve mentioned before, email subscribers will still receive updates every other day as a digest; RSS feed subscribers will get them in real time. They also post in real time to my Facebook page, my Twitter autoposting account, and micro.blog.

I love blogging and I wish more of you would do it. Sharing my reflections lets me put them in order, which in itself is valuable to me, but I love reading your replies and other peoples’ reflections. This earliest form of social media is, for me, the deepest and most interesting: a decentralized sphere of diverse voices, all publishing on the same playing field. It’s what the internet is all about.

A blog is just a journal: a web log of what you’re thinking and doing. You can keep a log about anything you like; it doesn’t have to be professional or money-making. In fact, in my opinion, the best blogs are personal. There’s no such thing as writing too much: your voice is important, your perspective is different, and you should put it out there.

And then, please, let me know about it.

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

Books

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. This was a groundbreaking, genre-defining book when it was written, and some of the ideas remain outstanding. Reading it this year was an exercise in uncovering paelofuture: interesting in historical context, but almost completely lacking in the human context I need to really dig into a story. I’m going to alienate a bunch of science fiction fans by saying so, but I didn’t enjoy it at all.

All about Love: New Visions, by bell hooks. A complicated book. On one hand, it’s full of really important insights into the nature of loving that I think every adult should read and understand. (You should read it!) On the other, she’s sometimes too emphatic about ideas that need challenging: in particular, I was struck by her reductive opinions about Monica Lewinsky and her putting the onus on her gay sister to deal with their parents’ homophobia. Her insistence that religion is a required moral authority also doesn’t land with me. Regardless, when this book rings true, it does so deeply, in a way that permeates the soul.

Pemmican Wars, by Katherena Vermette, Donovan Yaciuk, and Scott B. Henderson. Shades of Kindred here: a graphic novel about a fostered Métis teen girl who slips through time to Canada’s colonial past during a history lesson. It’s slight, but the art and writing are evocative. I wish there was more character development, but perhaps that will come in later volumes. This volume plants the seeds for a story to come.

Red River Resistance, by Katherena Vermette, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk. The story being drawn here is important and needs to be told. I wish there were more pages: at times the book feels like a series of impressionistic vignettes rather than continuous plot. But I’m still hooked, and I’m curious to see where this is going. There’s not enough about Echo in the mix for me; we learn about Canada’s sordid past with respect to its indigenous peoples, but not enough about how that connects to the present. I assume that’s coming in future volumes.

Northwest Resistance, by Katherena Vermette, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk. It’s all starting to come together, with an almost Quantum Leap style twist. The narrative is less impressionistic, too: there’s more detail here than in previous volumes, and we’re learning more about Echo. Intriguing, magical, and instructive about Canada’s genocidal past.

Road Allowance Era, by Katherena Vermette, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk. Easily the best of the series. The narrative comes together, and Echo realizes she can control her time travel ability, as well as the poignant source of her ability. The atrocities continue, too, and the book does a great job of contextualizing them both emotionally and historically. The central conceit works really well throughout, in the same way it did for Octavia Butler in Kindred.

Streaming Media

Don’t Look Up. A genuinely great movie about climate change, without ever really being about climate change. Hilarious, sobering, deeply affecting, cynical, and smart. I loved every moment.

Notable Articles

Business

Playing Startup Versus Building a Company. “Figuring out how to build and run a business isn’t easy—and a lot of the moves you need to make aren’t intuitive. However, too many people approach it by just copying what it seems like everyone else is doing without taking a hard look at what your actual goals are and really learning how to go about the job of Founder and CEO. They’re “playing startup” as opposed to actually building a company.”

Google will fire unvaccinated employees. “Workers who haven’t complied with the vaccine mandate — by either sending in proof of vaccination or qualifying for a religious or medical exemption from Google — will go on paid leave for 30 days starting Jan. 18. They had until Dec. 3 to send proof of vaccination or to apply for an exemption. Google won’t accept testing as an alternative to vaccination, according to a company memo cited by CNBC.”

Covid

Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. “Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden. That’s according to a new analysis by NPR that examines how political polarization and misinformation are driving a significant share of the deaths in the pandemic.”

Secret Investigation Documents Reveal How The CDC’s First COVID Test Failed In The Pandemic’s Early Days. “In the US, the responsibility for developing a test fell to the CDC. [...] The team tasked with developing the nation’s first test was in the tiny RVD lab, which included four smaller procedure rooms, all located on the seventh floor of Building 18 at the CDC headquarters. In January 2020, the RVD lab was staffed by nine people — only three of whom were full-time employees.”

When COVID patients get new lungs, sould vaccine status matter? “About one in 10 lung transplants in the United States now go to COVID-19 patients, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS. The trend is raising questions about the ethics of allocating a scarce resource to people who have chosen not to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.” Healthcare should save everybody’s life, regardless of choices. But this is such a frustrating trend.

Laclede County, MO Health Department stops COVID work. “The local health department of a rural southern Missouri county is halting its COVID-19 response efforts after Attorney General Eric Schmitt wrote agencies this week demanding they drop mitigation measures.” It’s like they’re actively trying to kill people.

Trump White House made 'deliberate efforts' to undermine Covid response, report says. “Birx also told the panel that Atlas and other Trump officials “purposely weakened CDC’s coronavirus testing guidance in August 2020 to obscure how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country,” the report said. The altered guidance recommended that asymptomatic people didn’t need to get tested, advice that was “contrary to consensus science-based recommendations,” it said, adding, “Dr. Birx stated that these changes were made specifically to reduce the amount of testing being conducted.”

US Army Creates Single Vaccine Against All COVID & SARS Variants, Researchers Say. “Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as from previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide.”

Crypto

Is web3 bullshit? “The hazy vision of new decentralized internet, built on the blockchain, to succeed the “Web 2.0″ of Google and Facebook seems to be reaching a threshold of ambient cultural awareness such that non-tech pundits, news-engaged normies, magazine editors, uncles, online attention-seekers etc., feel the need to weigh in on the question.” This is a great round-up of different perspectives on the topic: from enthusiasts to cynics, and everything in between.

Smart Contract Bug Results in $31 Million Loss. “The basic problem is that the code is the ultimate authority — there is no adjudication protocol — so if there’s a vulnerability in the code, there is no recourse. And, of course, there are lots of vulnerabilities in code. To me, this is reason enough never to use smart contracts for anything important. Human-based adjudication systems are not useless pre-Internet human baggage, they’re vital.”

New Study on NFTs Deflates the "Democratic" Potential for the Medium. “Ten percent of NFT buyers and sellers make as many transactions as the remaining 90 percent, it found, suggesting high concentration in the NFT marketplace. This statistic suggests that decentralized marketplaces have given way to more specialized platforms, which have come to occupy similar roles as gallerists and brand names in the non-crypto economy. The study also revealed that the average sale price of three-quarters of NFTs is just $15; meanwhile, only 1% of NFTs sell for over $1,594.” This seems like a pretty standard power law distribution, which I’m not sure why crypto would be exempt from.

How Cryptocurrency Revolutionized the White Supremacist Movement. “Hatewatch identified and compiled over 600 cryptocurrency addresses associated with white supremacists and other prominent far-right extremists for this essay and then probed their transaction histories through blockchain analysis software. What we found is striking: White supremacists such as Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents, race pseudoscience pundit Stefan Molyneux, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, and Don Black of the racist forum Stormfront, all bought into Bitcoin early in its history and turned a substantial profit from it.”

Melania Trump Launches an NFT and Blockchain Venture Based on Solana. “The former first lady of the USA – Melania Trump – will join the cryptocurrency universe by releasing her non-fungible token platform. The first NFTs, called “Melania’s Vision,” will be available to purchase for a limited period around the Christmas holidays.” Oh no.

The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive. “It’s tempting to say they suck the way everything sucks now, but it’s more like how one particular strain of American aesthetics has sucked for the last 20 years. NFTs are the human capacity for visual expression as understood by the guy at the vape store.” This piece is so beautifully brutal.

Web3/Crypto: Why Bother? “A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it – something people try to convey, albeit poorly, by saying it is “decentralized.””

Culture

Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It). In general I don’t agree that movies have become less easy to understand - I have no trouble with Christopher Nolan dialogue, for example, and I don’t get why people can’t understand Tom Hardy - but this is an interesting look into the industry and how the different pieces fit together.

Michael Sheen turns himself into a 'not-for-profit' actor. “But when I came out the other side, I realised I could do this kind of thing and, if I can keep earning money, it’s not going to ruin me.” This is the coolest thing.

‘They were a bit abrasive’: how kids’ TV Clangers secretly swore. “The Clangers were briefly drawn into this combative arena in a special one-off episode called Vote for Froglet, in which Postgate tried to persuade the planet’s residents of the virtues of the two-party system. After a snap election, with the Soup Dragon running on the “free soup for all” ticket, the Clangers were unconvinced and stuck with their enlightened autonomous collective.”

Acclaimed author bell hooks dies at 69 . Rest in power, bell hooks. What an intellectual, moral, literary force. If you haven’t read her work, please do. It’ll change the way you see the world.

Love Actually Child Star Labels Festive Romcom Cheesy And Sexist: 'I Think It's A S*** Film'. “I think it’s aged badly. All the women in it are sort of passive objects. I think that there was an article describing them as passive objects to be acquired.”

Coldplay will stop making music in 2025, lead singer Chris Martin announces. Why wait?

Betty White, a TV Fixture for Seven Decades, Is Dead at 99. Such a loss; such a life.

Media

Nobel winner: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’. “Ressa has spent much of the last four years trying to point out that none of this is happening in isolation and that the “assault on truth” is doing the same to western democracies as it has done to her country. Muratov is even more gloomy. “It’s terrifying that countries that have been living in a democracy for so many years are rolling towards a dictatorship. That’s just a terrifying thought.””

Number of journalists behind bars reaches global high. “It’s been an especially bleak year for defenders of press freedom. CPJ’s 2021 prison census found that the number of reporters jailed for their work hit a new global record of 293, up from a revised total of 280 in 2020. At least 24 journalists were killed because of their coverage so far this year; 18 others died in circumstances too murky to determine whether they were specific targets. China remains the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the third year in a row, with 50 behind bars. Myanmar soared to the second slot after the media crackdown that followed its February 1 military coup. Egypt, Vietnam, and Belarus, respectively, rounded out the top five.”

Politics

Trump social media company claims to raise $1bn from investors. “Donald Trump’s new social media company and its special purpose acquisition company partner said on Saturday the partner had agreements for $1bn in capital from institutional investors.” I don’t believe them.

How Donald Trump Could Subvert the 2024 Election. “Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.” A well-reported, frankly terrifying story.

Trump called aides hours before Capitol riot to discuss how to stop Biden victory. “Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.”

Kanye West publicist pressed Georgia election worker to confess to bogus fraud charges. “Weeks after the 2020 election, a Chicago publicist for hip-hop artist Kanye West traveled to the suburban home of Ruby Freeman, a frightened Georgia election worker who was facing death threats after being falsely accused by former President Donald Trump of manipulating votes. [...] She said she was sent by a “high-profile individual,” whom she didn’t identify, to give Freeman an urgent message: confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail.”

Kanye West’s 'Independent' Campaign Was Secretly Run by GOP Elites. “The Kanye 2020 campaign committee did not even report paying some of these advisers, and used an odd abbreviation for another—moves which campaign finance experts say appear designed to mask the association between known GOP operatives and the campaign, and could constitute a violation of federal laws.” Kanye believe it?

Society

Man donated his body to science; company sold $500 tickets to his dissection. “But instead of being delivered to a research facility, David Saunders’ body ended up in a Marriott Hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon, where http://deathscience.org/ held an “Oddities and Curiosities Expo.” At the October 17 event, members of the public sat ringside from 9 am to 4 pm—with a break for lunch—to watch David Saunders’ body be carefully dissected. Tickets for the dissection sold for up to $500 per person.” Horrifying.

“This Is Blackface”: White Actors Are Playing Black Characters In Virtual Reality Diversity Training. “One employee described the use of white actors in Black roles as “a really tough thing for a lot of us to stomach.” Two raised concerns about white actors mimicking Black dialect while acting as Black characters. Three independently described an incident in which a white simulation specialist used the n-word while acting as an avatar of color. That actor now trains other simulation specialists. Employees also raised concerns about the visual creation of Mursion’s avatars, citing lack of variation in the skin tone, hair, and facial features of their characters of color, and about the company’s failure to promote and support women employees of color.”

Women may soon qualify for the draft. Here’s what you need to know. ″“This overall lack of strong support, though, illustrates what we call benevolent sexism, which is a sexism that rests on paternalistic beliefs: ‘Women need protection, and their skills are nurturers, not fighters. We need to protect them from war so as to not corrupt their virtue and purity and inhibit them from fulfilling their duties as wives and mothers,’” Chod said. “This was the same argument made in the 19th and early-20th centuries to bar women from voting.””

New Zealand plans to make it illegal for kids to buy cigarettes — for life. “People aged 14 and under in 2027 will never be allowed to purchase cigarettes in the Pacific country of five million, part of proposals unveiled on Thursday that will also curb the number of retailers authorized to sell tobacco and cut nicotine levels in all products.” Wait, we can do this?

Peter Thiel’s Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge University Revealed . “Their common concern was the increasing threat from the advancement of a ‘liberal’ agenda to traditional Christian religious and theological beliefs – including an unnerving fascination with race science.” Lots to digest here.

The Anti-Abortion Movement Could Reduce Abortions if It Wanted To. “Why would groups that want to end abortion not support the most efficient way to make abortions less common? The answer is that their mission extends beyond abortion and into the regulation of sex, gender roles and the family. Contraception and abortion are tied together because both offer women the freedom to have sex for pleasure in or outside of marriage, and both allow women greater control over their lives and futures. The “pro-life” goal isn’t an end to abortion. It’s to establish another means of controlling women.”

About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated. I’m one of them, and it’s still weird to me to be in a minority (vs the UK, where some polls have over 50% of respondents not identifying with any faith). There’s nothing wrong with being religious, but there’s nothing wrong with not being religious, too. I’d love to have better representation of that in this country.

FDA permanently allows medication abortion pills through mail. “The Thursday announcement upholds a decision from April to temporarily suspend federal requirements that had previously required in-person purchase of abortion pills from a clinic, hospital or medical office.” Trump challenged it; I’m glad this has gone through.

Technology

Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them. “Millions of crime predictions left on an unsecured server show PredPol mostly avoided Whiter neighborhoods, targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods. [...] “No one has done the work you guys are doing, which is looking at the data,” said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University who is a national expert on predictive policing. “This isn’t a continuation of research. This is actually the first time anyone has done this, which is striking because people have been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for this technology for a decade.””

US rejects calls for regulating or banning ‘killer robots’. “Speaking at a meeting in Geneva focused on finding common ground on the use of such so-called lethal autonomous weapons, a US official balked at the idea of regulating their use through a “legally-binding instrument”.” It may seem laughable now, but technology improvements will make this feasible very shortly. Internationally agreed upon protections would be smart.

Hackers Are Spamming Businesses’ Receipt Printers With ‘Antiwork’ Manifestos. ““Someone is using a similar technique as ‘mass scanning’ to massively blast raw TCP data directly to printer services across the internet,” Morris told Motherboard in an online chat. “Basically to every single device that has port TCP 9100 open and print a pre-written document that references /r/antiwork with some workers rights/counter capitalist messaging.”” I love this.

The Popular Family Safety App Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users. “Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it.” This should be illegal.

This Swiss Firm Exec Is Said To Have Operated A Secret Surveillance Operation. “The co-founder of a company that has been trusted by technology giants including Google and Twitter to deliver sensitive passwords to millions of their customers also operated a service that ultimately helped governments secretly surveil and track mobile phones, according to former employees and clients.”

A mysterious threat actor is running hundreds of malicious Tor relays. “Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users. [...] at one point, there was a 16% chance that a Tor user would connect to the Tor network through one of KAX17’s servers, a 35% chance they would pass through one of its middle relays, and up to 5% chance to exit through one.”

An Open Letter to Mr. Mark Zuckerberg: A Global Call to Act Now on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Science. “We do not believe that the methodologies seen so far meet the high scientific standards required to responsibly investigate the mental health of children and adolescents. Although nothing in the leaks suggests that social media causes suicide, self-harm, or mental illness, these are serious research topics. This work, and the tools you are using should not be developed without independent oversight. Sound science must come before firm conclusions are drawn or new tools are launched. You and your organisations have an ethical and moral obligation to align your internal research on children and adolescents with established standards for evidence in mental health science.”

Kickstarter plans to move its crowdfunding platform to the blockchain. “Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is making a big bet on the blockchain, announcing plans to create an open source protocol “that will essentially create a decentralized version of Kickstarter’s core functionality.” The company says the goal is for multiple platforms to embrace the protocol, including, eventually, http://kickstarter.com/.” The word “eventually” is doing a lot of work here! But it’s a way more and more startups will try and expand - by creating a bigger pie and being the owners of the way their market business is conducted. They get to stay clear of antitrust regulations while literally owning the market. Will it take years for this to happen? Yes. Is it near-inevitable? Also yes.

Reimagining projections for the interactive maps era. “We have put a lot of thought into making this feature feel seamless and natural, so that our customers could adopt it on all kinds of map apps by adding one line of code. Let’s take a deep dive into why we did it, and how it works under the hood.” Superb work from the Mapbox team.

I blew $720 on 100 notebooks from Alibaba and started a Paper Website business. “TLDR; I started a business that lets you build websites using pen & paper. In the process I went viral on Twitter, made $1,000 in two days, and blew $720 on 100 paper notebooks from Alibaba.”

The Asymmetry of Open Source. “With the recent revival of the discussion about sustaining open source spurred on by multiple severe CVEs in a popular logging library, and with so many hot takes clamoring for more funding—some calling on companies, others on maintainers—I wanted to write about the problem and its solutions more holistically, as I have spent many years thinking about this from my own experience with both failing and succeeding… a perspective that I hope some of you will find helpful.” An excellent list of open source funding techniques.

Reporter likely to be charged for using "view source" feature on web browser. “The reporter discovered that the source code of the website contained Social Security numbers of educators. The reporter alerted the state about the social security numbers. After the state removed the numbers from the web page, the Post-Dispatch reported the vulnerability. Soon after, Governor Parson, “who has often tangled with news outlets over reports he doesn’t like, announced a criminal investigation into the reporter and the Post-Dispatch.”” Idiocy.

‌‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to Bread and Roses Community Fund. Based in Philadelphia, the fund is “a multiracial and cross-class community of donors, community organizers, and other allies of movements for change coming together around a shared goal of radically transforming individuals and society.”

It describes its mission as follows:

Bread & Roses believes in change, not charity. We organize donors at all levels to support community-based groups in building movements for racial, social, and economic justice. We support movements and their leaders through fundraising, grantmaking, capacity building, and convening.

‌We believe that a better world is possible. Since 1977, Bread & Roses has inspired people to take collective action and create real change in their communities, the Philadelphia region, and beyond. We raise money through donations of all sizes and make grants using a democratic, community-led decision-making process. Our grants go to local groups working for good schools, fewer prisons, better jobs, a safe environment, quality health care, and more.

Its work includes funds for racial and economic justice fund, environmental justice, criminal justice reform, opportunities, equitable public spaces, and equitable neighborhood recovery from the pandemic.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

I don’t know that any of us need a review of the year. I’m also not up for making predictions for next year: I just don’t know what’s going to happen.

So instead, here are some hopes I have for 2022. I don’t think they’re a sure thing by any stretch, but they’re not outside the realm of plausibility. And it’s nice to hope.

I’ve separated them into topics: Society and the World, Technology, Culture, and Personal. I’d love to read yours.

—

Society and the World

The end of lockdown. I think we all want this. I hope we’re able to get to a place where we can gather with our friends, spend time with our families, and live our lives without worrying about contracting or spreading a disease. To get there, we’ll need to continue to vaccinate the entire world, and hope that we don’t encounter ever more virulent strains. I don’t mind wearing a mask, but I look forward to not; I don’t mind presenting proof of vaccination, but I look forward to not.

A defense of women’s rights. The Supreme Court has the potential to effectively overturn Roe v Wade next year. Instead of that obvious step backwards, I’d love for the court to see sense (or, failing that, deliver a verdict with limited reach). Then I’d like to see us pass legislation to make sure we are never in danger of this again.

Progress on climate change. That could be (and needs to be) on multiple fronts. I’d love to see investment into viable public transport in the US: high speed rail, integrated transport, and other viable mass transit alternatives to cars and planes. But I’d also love to see more legislation - with real teeth - that forcibly curbs emissions. I’d love to see more and better renewable energy infrastructure. And it would be great to see carbon credits and trading replaced with hard limits for every business.

Technology

The decentralized web produces a non-financial killer app. I’d love to see a decentralized app that’s obviously better for regular people than a centralized equivalent. I’ve been thinking a lot about groups and discussion forums lately. In the old days, we had usenet; what would a modern, open, decentralized and peer-to-peer version of discussion threads look like? How could you incentivize multiple client apps with radically different user experiences? (If it’s not obvious already: I want to work on this.)

Technology-enabled unions. If employers want to put a stop to the great resignation, they might want to give their employees more of a voice. Unions as a concept are good for both businesses and workers. I’d love to see technology platforms that radically empower new union formation, and for business owners to embrace collective bargaining by their workforces.

The web becomes fun again. One of the things that I’ve noticed about people innovating on the blockchain is - no matter what you think about the technology - they’re having fun. I’d love to see that sense of fun return to web development as a whole. One of the problems is that a lot of our frameworks and tooling have been optimized for big, centralized businesses, and what works for Facebook probably doesn’t work for someone coding in their bedroom without the goal of building a startup. I’d love to see more easy-to-use libraries and frameworks, and for peer-to-peer style decentralization to become more prevalent through those libraries.

Integrated media. I want to read a book in bed. If I’m driving, I want to listen to the audio of that book in a way that picks up where I left off. Then when I pick up a book to read again, it picks up where the audio left off. Give me that for everything: what matters to me is the content, not the medium.

Sustainable, repairable devices. Maybe enforced by legislation. We should all have a right to repair; every manufacturer should be urged to find more sustainable process and material sourcing.

Facebook / Meta gets broken up. Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp need to be separate companies. In general, I hope to see redefined antitrust, and better enforcement of it. The industry, the media, and society will be better off for it.

Culture

More weird TV. More weird art. If I’m going to be stuck inside in lockdown, I want to watch television that takes risks. Now is the time for production companies to invest in new voices and radical stories. No more beige, sanded-down entertainment designed for mainstream audiences. The same goes for art of any kind. Bring on the outsider artists and people who put their full selves into their work.

The continued death of the mainstream. We’re all weird now, and sick of manufactured popularity that seeks to shepherd us into fitting into pre-defined consumer pigeonholes. Let’s just call it. Our interests are nuanced and varied; we’re all different. And that’s great. What’s not great? Being asked to conform to some median ideal, or enjoy things that have been produced for people who do over more nuanced work. This is a trend that’s been underway for some time; I’d love to see it accelerate.

Doctor Who returns with a woman Doctor and a regular cadence. Now the door has been opened by Jodie Whitaker, I don’t think it would be right to shut it. At the same time, I’d love for Who to finally get back to a twelve or thirteen episode annual run. I don’t think it’s been able to do this consistently since Russell T Davies’s original era as showrunner.

Personal

Rest. I spent a lot of this year wishing I could just disappear for six months. I came by it honestly. Next year I don’t want to be burned out; I want to be able to show up well for the people in my life, and work on projects with energy and creativity.

Authenticity. There’s no sense in trying to perform someone else’s version of you. It’s easy to fall into that trap in every aspect of life, and I sometimes have, but it’s a recipe for unhappiness. I want to do better at upholding myself and saying no to other people’s projections and expectations when they don’t align with mine.

Space to play. I want to have the space to work on my own projects. That’s been hard to come by for the last few years, for reasons I don’t regret: primarily, helping to care for my mother. But I want to spend more time writing, and I want to spend more time working on technology projects independent from trying to make money from them. (Quite a few people have messaged me about finishing Untitled, and I promise I will.)

Community. Somehow, I need to do better at connecting with people. That’s hard to do in a pandemic. But I miss my friends, and having grown up thousands of miles away, I’ve never been particularly great at keeping up with my extended family. Everyone needs friends; everyone needs family. This dovetails with authenticity: everyone needs a community of people who mutually like and support them for them, with no agenda or projection. I really value the people in my life I can truly be myself with.

Home. I deeply hope I can go back to the country I grew up in and see my friends and hometown before the end of the year. Let’s see.

For a while now, I've been using this drawing of me by Hallie Bateman as my avatar:

I love it, particularly because I'm a big fan of Hallie's work. But it's also not quite me, exactly: you get the same whimsical drawing no matter the topic.

I used to be a big Livejournal user. Based on the kind of writing I post here, you can probably guess that it was pretty confessional stuff: I'd share all kinds of details about my life as long-form posts. (Most of the people I was sharing with were my real-life friends.)

LJ pioneered a bunch of really great features - per-item access permissions, for one - but one of the best was the ability to change your avatar based on your mood. If you were a paying user, you could upload a whole palette of images and choose which one would represent you based on however you felt at the time.

Since then, avatars have become fixed representations of ourselves in online space, like a brand. You can expect the same image to follow someone everywhere; you immediately know who it is based on visual recognition.

But what if we don't want that? What if we want our identity to be more nuanced and faceted? What if we want our profiles to evolve as our lives do - not just our avatars but our descriptions, locations, and every nuance, up to and including our preferences? Updating every single service sounds like hard work, and it's not like most services use something like a Gravatar.

Really, everything should pull from a central digital identity, whether it's your website or some other core address. (Of course, anyone should be able to have any number of digital identities, so as to have the freedom to keep various aspects of their lives apart.) That's not how it works today; everything is siloed. Although there are all kinds of decentralized identity protocols, digital identity in the mainstream hasn't evolved far from the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s.

Imagine if you could choose an identity and present it everywhere you needed to. Online services would keep your avatar and contact details up to date; restaurants and airlines could automatically know your allergies and food preferences. You could withdraw and restrict data at any time.

All this is what the self-sovereign identity movement is all about. It's never really been made mainstream, but that doesn't mean it won't be. The first usable version won't be particularly fully-featured; it'll be simple and fun to use. And I'd love to give it a try.

In the meantime, maybe I should start using photographs of my actual face again?

Thoughts

1. It’s an obvious statement to make, but 2021 was … quite a year. Leaving aside my own personal family health journey, which I’ve written a lot about here, we saw an attempt at a fascist coup, and the second year of a pandemic that has now claimed 815,000 lives in the United States alone and millions worldwide.
2. For me, and many people, these facts were the backdrop to more pressing personal tragedies. Each life lost touches a family, for whom the effects will ripple out for generations. And beyond the direct lives lost, the pandemic pushed nearly 100 million people around the world into poverty.
3. We all deserve for shit to let up.
4. Shit is not going to let up.
5. We’re going to enter a third year of the pandemic. We have the anti-vaccination movement to thank for that, at least in part. I get that it doesn’t feel right to see the world fall in line behind these kinds of restrictions; I know I’d be upset to see them continue once the pandemic eases up. But for now, it’s how we save lives, and there’s something genuinely great about seeing people all over the world work together as a community. I haven’t met an anti-vaxxer who hasn’t come across like a selfish, petulant child.
6. Imagine how they’ll react to the acceleration of the worst effects of climate change. That’s coming, real soon.
7. How we react to the challenges ahead will define us. Can we come together as a community and work together for everyone’s benefit? Or will we squabble and argue and score cheap political points while the world burns? Will we adhere to our values, or will we succumb to fascism and nationalism as resources become more scarce?
8. I believe that Trump was a warm-up. His administration was obviously incompetent, but nonetheless almost succeeded in its aim. The next Trump, who might also literally be Trump, will not make the same mistakes.
9. In a world succumbing to conflict because resources are limited in adverse conditions, what would an authoritarian government do with surveillance capitalism? What would they do with all this connected data about each of us? History teaches us that the answer is something we should be thinking about.
10. How can we build a world where this is impossible? How can we build online infrastructure that cannot be used for ill by the worst actor? And then how can we get people to use it? These questions are worth taking very seriously right now.
11. I don’t believe the next decade will be plain sailing.
12. Anyway, hi, happy Monday.

Actions

1. This is my last thoughts and actions of the year. Next year I plan to post on social media significantly less, and to my own site significantly more. Likely this means several posts a day; RSS readers will get those in real time, but the email digests will still go out 3-4 times a week.
2. I want to seriously consider the questions above. You can’t build your way out of social problems, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t innovate or create new tools. What can we build that will empower people to build community in 2022 but will also provide freedom from surveillance?

Whatever you celebrate this December - or even if you don’t celebrate anything at all - happy holidays.

For everyone, this has been an intense year. From America’s attempted fascist coup in January to a shocking global COVID surge at the end of the year, it’s made 2020 - a year so bad they wrote songs about it - look like the warm up act. And that was just the baseline; everyone had to endure life’s inherent ups and downs on top of all this.

In all this, I’m grateful for you. Thank you to everyone who’s read, responded, reshared, and built community with me. You’ve all made my year better.

And to my friends and family: I lost my mother after a ten year fight this year, and there’s no way I would have made it through this year without you. So much love to you.

I’ve been reflecting on what the future might bring, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this. I know that 2022 will be about building, figuratively and literally. It will also be about being myself: while I always want to grow and learn, I don’t want to shave off my edges to fit into other peoples’ templates. Between COVID, climate change, and current events, the moment we’re in demands that we show up both authentically and radically, and cast off manufactured expectations to put the full weight of ourselves behind moving forward towards a safer, more equitable, inclusive future. That’s what you can expect from me, and what I hope for from you.

In the meantime, it’s all about community. As a multicultural atheist, these holidays are about togetherness more than anything else. I’ll look forward to spending time with my family and remembering my mother with love and fondness. I hope you get to spend time with the people you love this winter.