Werd I/O

It's my birthday. I was originally going to write one of those reflective pieces along the lines of "here's 42 things I've learned" or "version 42.0" or some Douglas Adams reference, but given everything that's been going on in the world, and my mother's decline in the next room, I just can't.

I believe that the Trump presidency has been a dying gasp of the 20th century. I'm really hopeful that the events of this month are the dying gasp.

If that turns out to be true, there's a lot to look forward to. If not, then there's a lot to be worried about. As of right now, the future is in the balance.

Hey, where was this insurrection organized?

Where? On a social network, you say? Which one?

Oh wow. I bet the CEO is hurrying to ensure its platform doesn’t undermine democracy!

What’s that? Oh. Oh.

So I bet their employees must be walking out in droves!

What’s that?

I see, I see.

So I bet its users are leaving en masse?

What?

Oh, right. Right, of course not.

.

I've got less than zero sympathy for companies like Facebook which argue they will be hurt by greater user privacy provisions. If your business model depends on building surveillance infrastructure and aggregating as much information as possible about peoples' private lives, your business does not deserve to survive. Apple's greater privacy provisions aren't anti-competitive; they're pro human rights.

Privacy is a human right. Surveillance has a chilling effect on free speech and freedom of association, which we consider to be fundamental tenets of democracy. Sure, you can make a bunch of money by learning everything you can about an individual and selling access to their attention. But not everything that is profitable should be permissible.

The European GDPR has turned out to be a very useful piece of legislation. It's very difficult for internet services to divide out their infrastructure between European users and everyone else, so in effect, those provisions have typically been applied for every user. The California Consumer Privacy Act has a similar effect, not least because most major internet services are based here. But we need a federal privacy law, and an international understanding that privacy is a human right that must be upheld on the internet as well as everywhere else.

Facebook claims that a reduction in its advertising capabilities will hurt small businesses. It's a disingenuous argument. Facebook has consistently adjusted its newsfeed algorithm to reduce the reach of organic pages; it's now often around 3%, forcing brands to advertise in order to reach their followers. If Facebook didn't depend on targeted advertising for revenue, it wouldn't have had the incentive to adjust its algorithm in this way, and small businesses wouldn't be hurt. Even more importantly, it might have reacted differently to pogroms in Myanmar, election manipulation, and the well-being of its moderators, among other things.

Surveillance capitalism has undermined democracy all over the world, and created a global infrastructure that authoritarian governments could previously only have dreamed of.

It's coming to an end. It's inevitable. GDPR, the CCPA, and emerging privacy legislation all over the world will make this kind of tracking untenable. Apple isn't standing alone here; it's merely a little bit ahead of the curve. This oncoming trend means that architectures and services that protect your privacy aren't just good for users: they're a good investment.

The Wayne Gretzky quote is a cliché at this point, but every technology investor needs to skate where the puck is going. (The really great ones figure out trends that few others have seen.) The puck, in this case, is heading square on for greater privacy. This doesn't necessarily mean a reduction in ad-based businesses: as it turns out, non-tracking ads are generally about as lucrative as personalized ads. I think we'll see a mix. But does mean a reduction in tracking infrastructure, and a major sea change in the way we think about monetizing consumer technology.

Founders love to answer questions about revenue with, "we'll sell the data". It's never been a great answer. But in the new, privacy-enabled internet, selling data won't be as possible. This is good and right. Instead, I'm hopeful that we'll see a return to user-centric architectures and user experiences, and a decline in user-hostile practices like tracking. After all, we're here to build solutions for people, and to improve their lives with technology. Eroding democracy and human rights by making a profit by any means necessary shouldn't be something we aspire to do; it's also something founders who don't care about the well-being of their users shouldn't have the ability to do without severe repercussions.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Yesterday, as part of a kick-off presentation for the year, I reminded my team: coding is less than half of an engineer's job.

An engineer's role is to engineer solutions. Writing code is certainly a part of that, but as a means to an end rather than a purpose in itself. If an elegant, scalable solution can be engineered without writing code, fantastic. Conversely, if code is written without exploration, reflection, documentation and validation, or if a solution is built to an imagined problem that doesn't really exist, we're in trouble. Communication, exploration, and collaboration are the biggest parts of the job.

Lots of people get into engineering because they love to work on code. The feeling of building something from nothing is exhilarating: I'm far from the first to note that it's similar to how artists manifest work. But that's programming (or hacking); engineering is a discipline unto itself. There's a popular conception of engineering as being a job you take if you don't want to talk to people, or don't like to write, but neither thing is true. The best engineers are highly social and write to a high standard, as well as having great coding skills. That's because engineers rigorously architect systems to meet their requirements; hackers understand the outcome of what they're trying to build, but their process is more artistic.

I think both spirits are worth embracing, but it's important to accept that they may be embodied in different people. Holding onto the joy of hacking is important; I lost it for a while, and it took literally years to get it back. But engineering requires a different kind of diligence and attention to detail. I confess that I don't think I was really, truly an engineer until I went to work for Medium - and maybe I'm still not one. I could certainly build software (Elgg, Known, Latakoo, a bunch of other things), but my process and discovery skills were underdeveloped. Some of the people I met there, and have met since, were not hackers - they built code rigorously and to a high quality, but had never really built something for the joy of it. For others, it was the opposite; some people fell in the middle. The two things sit side by side but are different.

The trick, I think, is to build the right processes such that engineers take bigger risks in their explorations, and hackers use more rigor. The goal is a creative, detail-oriented team that finds the best solution using the full weight of their diverse skills and creativity, and has fun doing it.

Back when I was running Elgg, I'd meet someone every few weeks who wanted to build a competitor to Facebook. Inevitably, they would propose to do this by copying all of Facebook's features verbatim, but (for example) without an ad ecosystem or with a different algorithm for surfacing content. All of them were doomed to fail.

These days, I'm more distant from the alternative social networking ecosystem, but it's easy to spot the same ideas. One might propose a decentralized alternative to Facebook that has all of Facebook's features, for example, and assume that people will flock to it because it's not owned by a corporation. You care about privacy and ownership, after all - if others don't, surely it's just a matter of educating them?

Aside from with a relative handful of enthusiasts, these efforts are probably all doomed to fail, too.

The thing is, privacy and ownership are important, and over the last few years we've seen our quiet worries about silos of data owned by single-point-of-failure corporations grow into a global roar about their role in supporting pogroms and undermining democracies. Nonetheless, we've learned pretty conclusively that privacy and autonomy are not virtues for everyone - actually a lesson learned again and again in the 20th century in particular - so if we want these values to be adopted, we must find another way. The stakes around getting this right have never been higher. (It would have been nice to have gotten this right in 2015 or so, but here we are.)

People, in general, want convenience from their technology, not morality. So instead of building a more ethical version of the past, we need to build a more suitable version of the future. It turns out that data silos have left room for plenty of innovation here: how many people send emails to themselves to save a note, or have had trouble AirDropping to an Android phone? Why do I have to download WhatsApp to talk to my friends in the UK? There are lots of tiny inconveniences that would be made better with openness and a user-centered model.

The same is true of online communities. An artists' community has radically different needs to an activism community, yet on the silos they're shoehorned into the same interface and set of features. Communities for people with restricted vision or motion might perhaps be the most obvious example: why should they have to struggle to use interfaces designed for others? Or better put, why can't they have an internet experience designed for them? A federated galaxy of community platforms, tailored for the specific human communities that use them and linked by Google-like sites that facilitate discovery, would be a more functional internet for many people, and would also decentralize the social web. Over time, discovery could be decentralized, too.

Whatever we're building, we never absolve ourselves from the need to understand our users as people and meet their needs. We might have our own values that we want to convey - software as polemic - but we can't simply inject them into the status quo. We've got to use our values, our intuition, and our understanding of the people we're building our software for to build something new that serves its purpose better than anything that has come before it. That, and nothing less, is the job.

I'd love to see more of you blog.

A friend of mine recently asked me how I write so much: to him, writing was a daunting task involving staring at a blank screen while he overcame his fear of revealing his inner thoughts. I guess, for me, what it comes down to is that I've lost any fear of looking stupid, mostly through enough repetitive practice of absolutely being stupid online.

Writing is a muscle. Imagine running for the first time: that first run is painful, halting. But once you've done it for a week, it's a little bit easier. A month: easier still. And once you've done it for years, it's like second nature. A part of you. I've been blogging since 1998; at this point, it's just a part of me.

Imagine what the internet would be like if everyone shared how they thought about the world, commercial value be damned. I don't buy the idea that only some people have thoughts worth reading (if I did, I wouldn't be writing this, because I'd almost certainly not be among that group). Everyone has something of value to contribute to our cumulative human experience.

What I get in return is that I feel less alone. When you put yourself out there, and are honest, you tend to find like-minded people, or people who have some honest reaction to your ideas. If you put up a wall, the most people can react to is that façade. So it's best to be you. As it happens, every single meaningful career acceleration I've ever had can be connected back to my blogging. More importantly, I've made a bunch of friends.

So, I think you should blog, too. It doesn't matter where. WordPress, Ghost, Medium, Where.as, Micro.blog, Where.as, Substack, a public Notion page - wherever is comfortable for you. (I co-founded a platform called Known, which I happily still use, mostly for the satisfaction of working with something I helped make.)

And then you should tell me about it. And tell the world. I want to read what you think, and the world does too. We're all richer for sharing out human experiences together.

A couple of years ago, I realized I wasn't reading books anymore. I was reading a ton - mostly stuff on the web - but I hadn't managed to physically open a book and read it cover to cover. I was ashamed, and immediately made a resolution: that year, I would read fifty books.

It was obviously an arbitrary number: more or less one or week, with room for a little bit of slippage. But having that North Star meant that I read more eclectically and adventurously, and although I didn't quite hit fifty, I read an order of magnitude more than I had the previous year, discovering a host of authors in the process. (Incidentally, this effort was also the origin of my reading roundups every month, which I've also found to be useful retrospectives.)

2020 was a mess, and no more needs to be said about that. Most of the books I "read" were audiobooks, via Libro.fm, which largely replaced my podcast listening. It was hard, for most of the year, to bring my brain to a calm enough place to read words on a page at length.

This year, though, I've decided to revive my 50-book goal. I have a different reason: too often, the last thing I look at when I go to bed is a screen. My intention is to build the very normal and common habit of reading a book before going to sleep, instead of, for example, falling down a web rabbithole or checking Twitter. And I miss the eclectic, long-form thinking that can only be found in books.

It's rare that I'm able to get into a business book: these often feel like overlong blog posts that have been padded out for the prestige of having a publication under the author's belt. Some people pride themselves on only reading these, but I think this limitation forces you to miss out on the wealth of human experience. Fiction is more than a diversion; it's an experimental playground for empathy and human thought. It's weird to me that some people have a stigma around it. Conversely, I don't want to lock myself off from reading business books, and there's certainly a lot to learn. I just think that if something could be a blog post, it should be.

My mother is also an avid reader. Largely confined to her bed, she devours books on her Kindle (because the font size can be increased to satisfy her failing eyesight) and on Audible. Sometimes, when she's stuck in dialysis or having a particularly bad day, my sister will FaceTime her and read to her over a call. When she's done, she records her review in one of those hardback notebooks filled with close-lined paper, and moves immediately onto the next one.

I also feel the need to record what I've read, with some kind of a brief review of how I found it. My equivalent of a notebook is Notion, which I already use to keep track of my bookmarks. I've altered my reading database to keep track of books now, too. It's occurred to me to write a Known plugin to keep track of my reading on this website, and maybe I will, but this seemed like the fastest path to getting into a good habit. Notion has good data exports, and an API is finally coming, so I feel confident I can move my data elsewhere if I ever need or want to. Once the Notion API is out, I'm thinking I'll wire it up to Known as a linkblog, so people who are interested enough can follow my reading as I record it.

I'm also going to post on Goodreads. Although it's getting long in the tooth, and it's controversially retiring its API, it's where a lot of people share their reading and discover new books. So I'll be using that for the time being, mostly so I can discover new titles to read from my friends. Although Goodreads is owned by Amazon, I buy all my books using Bookshop, to avoid giving them any serious money (and to support local booksellers). For now, I'm telling myself that this is an acceptable compromise.

The books themselves? Mostly on paper. My Kindle has been unused for years, and I'm honestly not sure if it even works anymore. And I like the feel of reading a paper book. I realize how selfish this is: billions of trees are cut down to make books, and the environmental impact is non-trivial. The environmental impact of an e-reader is also non-trivial, but as long as you don't upgrade it every year and read 30-40 books a year, you break even. So although one of my goals is to get away from ending each day looking at a screen, I think I need to find a non-DRM encumbered reader with an e-ink screen that I can keep for years, and switch to that. If you're using one, I'd love to hear your recommendations.

Of course, the most important question is: what are you reading? What books have stood out to you that you think I should check out? In all these layers of technology - as with the internet itself - the only things that really matter are the words and ideas, and the authors behind them. I'd love to hear your recommendations.

 Photo by Ben White on Unsplash.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for the final month of the hell-year.

Books

Intimations, by Zadie Smith. Six personal, revealing essays about living in the pandemic. Real; insightful; human.

The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury. A classic, of course, but new to me. I love the way he melds a very folksy, warm linguistic approach with mind-bending, often horrifying ideas.

Streaming

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Anchored by two astonishing performances, this does feel like a filmed play rather than a movie in itself, but is no worse for it. Chadwick Boseman is remarkable; Viola Davis's complete transformation even more so.

Soul. Just about as good a movie as Pixar has ever made - which is to say, it's very good indeed. I'm not sure what kids get out of it, but the themes of parenting and what it means to really live come through loud and clear.

Notable Articles

Business

Corporate Reporting in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. “Company managers specifically consider machine readers, as well as humans, when preparing disclosures.” An interesting new world, where human-readable articles are actually designed for artificial intelligence readers, approaches. SEO was our first toe-dip. Now it's maybe just Robot Reader Optimization?

Investing in Moov: Open Source Financial Services Building Blocks. I really like this approach. Open source + a modular structure will empower just about everyone in the financial services ecosystem, and in turn makes Moov a good investment.

How This CEO Creates an Internal Culture With a “Crazy Focus” on Good Storytelling. "When we have communication issues within the company or with our customers and prospects, it all comes back to the fact that we didn't spend enough time trying to understand the story." I love everything about this.

Death of an Open Source Business Model. I've spent a huge amount of my career - well over a decade - on open source businesses. This all rings true to me, and is an important reminder (unfortunately).

Big Tech risks big fines, and even break-up, under Europe's new content and antitrust rules. I’m not against it.

The Making of a Dumpster Fire. Now this is marketing.

Czech Startup Founders Turn Billionaires Without VC Help. I like this a lot. I use JetBrains personally, but had no idea that this was how the company was built. Inspiring.

Culture

Andrew Bird’s Cozy Melancholy. Andrew Bird is the absolute best.

Why Is Publishing So White?. “There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color.” Which is shown clearly in this very revealing, well-presented data.

Whatever Happened to ______ ?. “There are studies showing that some men “feel insecure” — to put it mildly, and possibly euphemistically — when a woman earns more than her male spouse. What those articles aren’t saying is that a woman’s life may be in danger if she outpaces a male partner in her chosen career, tipping the scales away from tattered patriarchal mythology.” A sad, beautifully-written account of one such story in the arts.

every tv show I have binge-watched since march: part one. “My conclusion is that Buffy is a television show about a beautiful young queer witch named Willow trying and failing to leave her toxic hometown friend group, and the ways in which being unable to let go of the people we loved in our youth who are no longer able to have healthy relationships with us can warp us and turn us evil.”

Media

Mapping Black Media. “We’re offering a map and directory of nearly 300 community media outlets across the U.S. that primarily serve Black communities across the diaspora.”

Substack launches an RSS reader to organize all your newsletter subscriptions. Yes! I welcome new RSS readers with open arms.

A contentious local election revealed an information gap. High school reporters stepped up to fill it.. One of those heartwarming stories that is actually kind of dystopian - local news is vital for democracy - but still, I’m a big fan of this.

'I figured I'd give it a year': Arthur Sulzberger Jr on how the New York Times turned around. “Paul Goldberger, a longtime Times architecture critic and one of the paper’s wisest observers, said the most relevant description of Sulzberger Jr’s philosophy could be found in an Italian novel, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.””

True equity means ownership. "For far too long, newsroom leaders have been wringing their hands over how to serve Black and brown communities. How many diversity initiatives, recruitment efforts, and implicit-bias trainings do we have to endure without the follow-through?"

Why on Earth Is Someone Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts?. “Whoever the thief is, he or she knows how publishing works, and has mapped out the connections between authors and the constellation of agents, publishers and editors who would have access to their material.” Kind of fascinating as a mystery.

Politics

Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered months ago to sell the U.S. more vaccine doses.. "Before Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine was proved highly successful in clinical trials last month, the company offered the Trump administration the chance to lock in supplies beyond the 100 million doses the pharmaceutical maker agreed to sell the government as part of a $1.95 billion deal months ago."

Rejecting Opposition From Judiciary, House Passes Bill to Make PACER Free. "The U.S. House on Tuesday passed bipartisan legislation that would make PACER free for the public, handing a win to transparency advocates despite the federal judiciary’s opposition to the bill." Thinking of Aaron Swartz.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping: The Full(est Possible) Story. If you dig into it, the story gets no less remarkable and crazy.

Society

'Juno' Star Elliot Page Announces He Is Transgender. "Hi friends, I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot. I feel lucky to be writing this. To be here. To have arrived at this place in my life."

New report reveals alleged horrors of sex testings in international sports. Absolutely horrifying story, including forced operations.

'Nobody knows': Experts baffled by mystery illness in India. Extremely troubling.

The pandemic was already testing me. Then a man covered in Nazi tattoos showed up in my ER. “We all saw. The symbols of hate on his body outwardly and proudly announced his views. We all knew what he thought of us. How he valued our lives. But our job was to value his.”

Sharrows, the bicycle infrastructure that doesn’t work and nobody wants. I grew up cycling, and really wish I could feel safe doing it here. I just don't. I've known one person who sadly died in a cycling incident, and many more who have been seriously hurt. We need to take back our cities from cars.

How one woman is building the future for Google in Silicon Valley. I’d say it’s the other way around: one woman is building the future of Silicon Valley on behalf of Google. I’m excited to see this come to fruition, although I wish this kind of thing could be government-driven.

Texas Wedding Photographers Have Seen Some $#!+. "The photographer who got sick after shooting the COVID-positive groom said her experiences throughout the pandemic have left her a little depressed. She recalled one conversation from that wedding, before she left the reception. “I have children,” she told a bridesmaid, “What if my children die?” The bridesmaid responded, “I understand, but this is her wedding day.”"

Tax cuts for rich don't 'trickle down,' study of 18 countries finds. "Large tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality and don't fuel economic growth or cut unemployment, a new paper by academics from the London School of Economics and King's College London says." Ya don't say.

Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's. “Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.”

The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable. “The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence.” Just an absolute punch in the gut.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro. “Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world?” And she still seems to be neck-deep in his gravitational pull.

Technology

Web Conversations With the Year 2000. It’s funny because it’s true. I thought we’d be in such a different place.

Web Conversation From the Other Side. A more serious rewrite of Paul Ford’s other piece. Both are worth reading side by side.

Command Line Interface Guidelines. “These are what we consider to be the fundamental principles of good CLI design.” Well-researched and smartly presented.

How our data encodes systematic racism. “What is the difference between overpolicing in minority neighborhoods and the bias of the algorithm that sent officers there? What is the difference between a segregated school system and a discriminatory grading algorithm? Between a doctor who doesn’t listen and an algorithm that denies you a hospital bed?”

Social Networking 2.0. A vital piece about the future of the internet. It’s surreal seeing pieces in the more mainstream / less radical tech business sphere talking about things many of us were advocating over ten years ago. But I’m glad we got here.

Firefox Was Always Enough. I agree with all of this. I'm a die-hard Firefox user, for all the reasons that make Mozilla great, and none of the reasons that have caused it problems.

Wildfire smoke is loaded with microbes. Is that dangerous?. I worry about this: having been evacuated for a wildfire, and helping to care for a parent who had to have a lung transplant, this is a confluence of worries. (Filing this under “technology” because I don’t have a “science” category. I should fix this for next month.)

Zoom helped China suppress U.S. calls about Tiananmen, prosecutors allege. Horrendous.

Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian. "Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life."

Creating Decentralized Social Media Alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. A reasonable overview, although it necessarily skips out on some detail. This is where I’ve spent much of my career, and honestly, I’m eager to go back. The time is right.

Inside India’s booming dark data economy. “Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale.”

Taking a Fresh Look at APIs Across All the United States Federal Agencies. Super-interesting!

I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t write a reflective look back on this year.

This was a year of unprecedented deaths, racist police brutality, political turmoil, and the sheer misery of people all over the world losing their loved ones and finding their families torn apart. If we felt less than that, it was because of our privilege, not because it wasn't there.

I've got nothing glib to say; no "top 5 learnings"; nothing to soften the blow. It's been a terrible year, certainly, but I'd go further: it's been catastrophic, in the truest sense of that word.

I do have one hope for 2021, and it's this: I hope we don't pretend this never happened and carry on as before. When the pandemic is over - which it will, technically be, although its aftermath will continue for generations - I hope we continue to cut through the performative bullshit that was the hallmark of modern life in the before times, and that we all care about each other just a little bit more.

If there's one thing a world crippled by a highly infectious disease should have taught us, it's that we're all connected. How we treat each other matters. The quality of life of everyone matters. If we can internalize that lesson, deeply and truly, then maybe we can avoid the worst of this when it inevitably happens again. And it will certainly make for a better world for all of us.

My friend Carrie Tian, who works for Mailchimp, wrote aboout how their seasonal reading bingo board inspired her to create one for writing. I really love this: one of my goals for 2021 is to write a great deal more, building on the progress I made this year, and this feels like a great way to push me outside of my comfort zone.

She was kind enough to share a template, so here's mine:

Each of these squares is designed to push me a little bit. Each column has a slightly different theme:

1: Short stories in different styles and genres

2: Non-fiction essays that go a little deeper, sometimes into uncomfortable topics

3: Different media (audio, code, visual arts, multi-part email)

4-5: Novel, with some explorations into style and expression

Like Carrie, I'm doing blackout bingo and attempting to fill every square in 2021. As ever, I'll update this space with my progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope to maintain three streaks and turn them into habits:

Exercise every day. No exceptions, unless I'm really sick. I've done more regular exercise over the last year than I'd managed since I moved to California, but I'd like to make it more regular, for the good of my own health.

Write every day. It doesn't have to be a complete story or a full-length essay, but I need to get something down that I'd be willing to share on something other than social media. This doesn't explicitly mean I want to post to my website every day, but I'd like to try to do that, too.

Practice thankfulness. I want to find three things I'm grateful for before I go to sleep every night. Gratitude is important, but more than anything, it's about training myself to find small joys and call them out.

And one overarching theme:

Lose the rat race. I'm not here to hustle, gain followers, be a thought leader, build wealth, work myself to death, or rise to the top of the career ladder. I want to explore ideas, tinker with stuff, reflect, make bad art, and be human. In 2021 you'll probably see more eclectic stuff in this space as a result. Sorry / not sorry.

The most important thing in any team, product, company, or community is kindness. And with it, empathy. Any bias towards action, energy, or insight doesn't matter if you don't have that.

That's the post.

I believe in the independent web - which was born thirty years ago today - more than any other technology.

Earlier today, I shared an update with collaborators, advisors, and investors in Known. Here's what's up:

Recently, I filed paperwork to officially dissolve Known, Inc, the Delaware C-Corporation. It is expected that this will be complete by the end of the year. It was one of the most personally rewarding journeys of my life, and I’m grateful for every moment. But it’s long past time to shut down the company.

I’ve come to an arrangement where I will purchase all of the intellectual property currently held by Known, Inc. As well as source code, the name, websites, domain names, logos, etc, this includes the hosted service, which has not taken revenue or new users in years, but continues to support a modest number of bloggers. I will take more of a direct role in keeping that online, at least until there is a viable, self-serve offramp for users to move to other providers. I hope to work with the open source community to create this.

I’ll also spend more of my time working on the open source project. The rise of platforms like Substack - and Medium’s recent transformation - indicates a need for a platform for people to host their own content online. WordPress is a website builder with an ecommerce industry built around it; Ghost has become focused on corporate and commercial blogging; I’m excited for Known to be a more personal platform for hobbyists and enthusiasts.

Honestly, I’m also excited to work on it without any pressure to make money or find sustainability. Known will not be my job or a source of any income. In fact, I expect to donate more to the Open Collective monetarily as well as spending more of my time. I'm excited to concentrate on supporting the needs of the community.

(As well as import / export, my priorities include ditching Bootstrap, revisiting the interface, improving indieweb interoperability, and experimenting with how to better bring the principles of human-centered design into the open source development process. But that’ll be a conversation for elsewhere.)

Cross-posted to IndieNews.

Writing was my first love. It's still far and away the thing I most love to do. While a lot of people I know love technology on a deep level and nerd out on the intricacies of protocols and stacks, I got into this game to tell stories. I'm excited by choices of words and narrative structure. In the process, I've learned to love technology too, but it's always been secondary. Technology is the medium; stories are the message.

It's been a rough year for everyone. For me, 2020 has come at the end of a handful of really rough years. In 2019, I spent eleven weeks by my mother's hospital bed. In 2018, the job of my dreams laid me off and it was overwhelmingly likely that I had a terminal, genetic disease. In 2016, the country I grew up in voted to not allow me to live there anymore. I've been living in a maelstrom of grief and stress for quite a while.

So I decided I needed a gift for myself. This year, despite a demanding job and the need to help care for my mother, I decided I was going to allow myself to spend time on writing. I enrolled myself in some workshops, two writing classes, and a competition.

To my surprise, I'm through to the finalist round of the competition. The feedback I've received from my writing class has been constructive and positive. I thought I was giving myself space to do something I love - and I was. But it also gave me a rush of confidence that I didn't anticipate. I'm a more confident writer as a result.

In 2021, I've lined up my second of two classes. I've also built up enough of a body of short story work to submit for publication. These will not be my first-ever submissions, nor my first publications, but I'm confident that I'm a better writer than I was in January. And my goal by the end of 2021 will be to complete my first novel.

Most of all, I'm happy to have embraced my meandering, creative interests. I'm in awe of people who go deep on their love of technology, but that isn't me. I've accepted that, and am confidently moving in a slightly different direction.

NiemanLab just released its predictions for journalism 2021. I was delighted to be asked to contribute. My piece is about the open web:

“In place of the monolithic super-platforms that were the hallmark of using the internet over the last decade, we’ll see smaller, independent publications and websites that address the needs of their communities more closely.”

Read the full piece here - and don't forget to check out the whole set.

Over on Twitter, Andy Sparks asked repeat founders what they wished they knew at the beginning of their first company. It's a great question. I've co-founded two startups and been the first employee at a few more. In particular, I knew nothing at the beginning of the first one. It's all been a learning curve since then.

Here are my answers, which will hopefully help a first-time founder or two get up and running a little faster:

Execution is everything, so every founder must bring a concrete skill to the table. Everyone must have something they can do for the company on an ongoing basis. A lot of people think it's enough to have a great idea. It's not: it's all about how you execute on that idea. If there's a founder who doesn't have a meaningful way of rolling up their sleeves and bringing your collective vision to life, they're dead weight. Examples of a meaningful skill: engineering, design, marketing, sales. Examples of a meaningless attribute: having an MBA, wanting to be the boss, being a scrum master.

And because execution is everything, don't outsource it. Your technical skillset should be in-house. So should your design, sales, and marketing. You don't want to lose that expertise or have it locked up in a contracting organization. If your founding team isn't able to rise to these tasks, fix that first.

Your co-founder is your partner. Like any lifelong relationship, you need to choose wisely. Forget how you interact at the best of times; how do you get along when things are going badly?

Every member of your early team is a co-founder. Whether in name or not, every single person you hire is an entrepreneur. Treat them as such - and only hire people you would trust to operate in that capacity. That includes their skillset, but also their demeanor. How do they cope with risk? Can they disagree without fighting with each other? Human dynamics are the most important part of any business (and any community).

As a founding team, your job is to de-risk the business. Constantly. That means with respect to whether people want what you're making; whether it can be a viable business; whether you can build it in a scalable way with the time, team, and resources potentially at your disposal. If you run out of money, you're adding risk. If you don't have a product, you've added risk. If you're building something you don't know if people want, you're adding risk. Understand your risks and continually bring them down to as close to zero as possible.

Culture is key. Set it early. Culture is a set of norms that define how you think about problems, look after your colleagues, and collaborate at work. It can't be an afterthought. A company with a sales-orientated culture will be able to solve different problems to one with an introspective, design-orientated culture, and will attract different kinds of people. Culture also defines how inclusive you are, and what kind of behavior is tolerated at the workplace. As you grow, it will affect how the company solves problems in a scalable way: the founding team can't always build everything, so you need to make sure you're setting the groundwork for the right approach to be taken without you.

I vastly prefer teams with the following cultural attributes: human-centered rather than building problems without understanding their user deeply; introspective and collaborative rather than extroverted and competitive; inclusive and empathetic; a no-blame ethos that encourages failure and quickly accepts when a tactic isn't working. Aggressive, overwhelmingly male workplaces are not the place for me, and it's never the kind of organization I seek to build.

The price of blind, positive thinking is death. You have to acknowledge evidence. If you ignore it because your beautiful idea just has to work - well, you're basically dead already. Conversely, you have to be guarded against being dissuaded without evidence, too. Your smarts, creativity, and experience are important, but can't operate in a vacuum. Get data and act on it.

Focus intently on what makes you special. There are so many things that go into running a startup - from the legalities of forming a business and raising money to orchestrating servers and building product - that you shouldn't try and do it all from scratch. Don't off-road except for the stuff that really matters. Use off the shelf services; be a Delaware C-Corp (or PBC); don't build your own front-end framework or create your own database engine. Keep it simple, so that you can spend your time on the core service that sets you apart - and to make it easier for others who work with you. Investors need to do less diligence on a Delaware C Corp; if you use React rather than your home-spun framework, more developers will be able to get up and running faster; etc.

Throw out "if you build it, they will come". It's not about hunkering down and building something cool. It's about creating value through solving someone's problem really well, in a way that they probably could never have conceived.

Throw out the lean startup. Really. Qualitative learning and building deep relationships is far more important than false doors and statistical analysis. Technology is all about people. Get to know them well.

A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A hundred thousand dollars. If you want to build a venture-funded startup in particular, you'll need to make sure the market is worth billions of dollars. That doesn't mean you should try and take on the whole market on day one. A bunch of founders say their product is "for everyone" - and it doesn't work at all. How can you possibly sell to everyone? It's far more effective to pick a small, niche group, solve their needs, and grow from there.

Pay attention to sales cycles. Who is the customer? How do they buy? One startup I worked on aimed to help people run academic courses. One possible customer could have been universities - but you needed to sell to the procurement office and be evaluated for the next academic year. At its worst, the sales cycle was 18 months, by which time the startup could be dead. Meanwhile, people running private communities were unconstrained and could sign up at any time. Testing and selling was far faster, and within the scope of a cash-strapped early-stage startup.

Ignore hustle porn. Articles about venture funding and building venture funded businesses, including this one, are typically little more than junk food. Read them, but you're not absolved from making your own decisions. Every business is different, and stories are not always reality. Just like following an influencer's perfect life on Instagram, you may find that the details are different to what has been presented. Throw out the performative bullshit: you're here to build a business, not to look the part.

Photo by LagosTechie on Unsplash

I'm trying to spend some time to reflect on this absurd, terrible year, paying particular attention to my role in it, and the things I can control in the future.

Honestly, for much of the year, it's been a case of just trying to stay afloat: the cognitive load of the pandemic + helping to care for my terminally ill mother + a demanding full-time job + extracurricular academic study has often been overwhelming. I end my days exhausted, and I'm acutely aware of mistakes I've made in the course of my work - particularly over the last month. I have some apologies to make today.

All the more reason to proceed with intention.

For me, a large part of thinking about the future is finding ways to reduce that overwhelming cognitive load. I've been trying to do too much, in the midst of an unprecedented scenario. That has also affected my goals: I ended last year with the stated intention to become more politically active and help with the election, which didn't happen.

On the other hand, I wanted to spend more time on writing, and I did manage to achieve this, through taking courses and participating in competitions. I'm excited to take that forward next year - not for any productive reason, but because it gives me joy. In these times, joy is all-important. When things are hard or going badly, it's easy to be cynical or grumpy. I want to progress with empathy and joy.

I also, quietly, fell back in love with the internet. I'm not sure when it happened, but I find myself thinking about the possibilities again. There are so many ways to support communities, break down barriers, and create new opportunities. I'm still utterly sick of the people who see tech as little more than a payday and want to approach the industry like Wall Street - the hustlers and grifters - but I'm finding them to be easier to ignore.

Trump's decline has given me some peace, too. The day the results became apparent, I felt a sense of overwhelming calm that I'd forgotten I was capable of. This gives me some more capacity to actually be human.

I'm still sorting through everything that happened this year, both globally and personally. It will be some time before I'm able to sort out my goals for the next year. But these are interesting things to think about.

How are you thinking about next year? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I've been telling people for years how valuable Slack is, but I didn't own a single share. Alas.

Congratulations to everyone who gained from this acquisition. Slack is a great company that does things the right way: a revenue-based business that grew by providing genuine social value to the companies it served. And its twenty seven billion dollar sale price shows how much value there is to be gained from facilitating communities.

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

Books

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

Streaming

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

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

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

Notable Articles

Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture

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

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

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

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

Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remember the day I realized who I wanted to be very clearly. I was sat in the Matter San Francisco garage, watching a panel of entrepreneurs from previous cohorts give advice to the current set of six startups who were about to graduate from the program. As I listened to the advice from the sidelines, as a member of the Matter team rather than a founder, an overwhelming sadness began to take hold.

It shouldn't have: Matter was a dream job that allowed me to support a particular kind of mission-driven startup founder. I loved every minute of it. But at my core, there was a part of me that missed building. Through supporting these 75 companies, I understood the mistakes I'd made more deeply, and knew I could do better next time.

I also knew myself better than I had the two times I'd been a co-founder. The truth is, I have a problem with authority: I hate being told what to do, and I'm not interested in perpetuating existing hierarchies. Starting my own businesses has been a way to create a working environment that's mine and mine alone, in a way that being an employee or a contractor never could be. I get to set the culture; I get to set the mission. It's a very individualist way of looking at work, but I'm not sure I can be different. Establishing a protective bubble that allows me to think in the way I need to has been important. It's a double-edged sword: external accountability also turns out to be important, and is harder to come by when you work for yourself.

I didn't go out and become a founder again. Instead, I've found a way to give myself creative space by working on side projects, which are never businesses and sometimes have nothing to do with technology at all. That doesn't mean I won't eventually start something new, but it takes the emotional pressure off a little. I get to work on something that's entirely mine, on my own time, with nobody telling me I should do it a different way, and without the pressure of it having to raise money or be self-sustaining. I've found it to be a very good balance, and it often helps my day job work.

Ultimately, the reasons I felt misgivings during the Matter panel were tied up in my identity. I am a founder: I make things using effort and creativity. That's not a million miles away from being an artist. But it's very different to being someone who has spent a long time going deep on a single career path serving other peoples' businesses. That might be where I am, but it's not how I see myself, and it doesn't cut to the core of the work I do. I've learned I'd rather earn half as much money to have twice as much freedom.

I've found it useful to bring that attitude to work. I'm in service of a mission that I've bought into, but take a critical eye to the vision and strategy. Is it the right thing for the people I want to help? Is it meaningful to work on? Is it intellectually honest? Going in and treating the company as if it was my startup to shape by definition means I'm unlikely to go with the flow, for better or worse.

I suspect most founders are the same.

As many of you know, I spent a couple of years as west coast Director of Investments at Matter, an early-stage startup accelerator supporting entrepreneurs with the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society. Before I worked there, I went through the program as the co-founder of Known. It's a community I still care deeply about and keep in touch with as much as I can.

It's the weekend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and I thought I would round up some of the deals being offered by some of these companies. These aren't affiliate links, nobody asked me to write this, and I don't gain anything from promoting them, although I do have a small amount of carry in Matter's second fund.

Creative Action Network is offering 21% off and free shipping on orders of $50 or more. They work with independent artists to create campaigns for great causes like EarthJustice, the Dream Corps and Sunrise Movement. I have a bunch of their stuff. Read more.

Aconite's beautiful iOS HoloVista game is on sale for $2.99. NME called it an intoxicating journey to another world. Star, Nadya, and their team have created an incredible experience unlike anything I've played before. Check it out.

Motherly is running a Black Friday sale in its store. Motherly is a lifestyle brand for modern women who choose to be parents. Its store contains some lovely, comforting items for parents of both babies and children, including 20% off a SNOO sleeper.

Also:

It's not on sale, but KweliTV is a low price every month. It's a streaming service for global black stories that have not received the distribution they deserved, available for your smart TV platform of choice. I'm a subscriber and you should be too.

Build great things by understanding people really well and serving their needs deeply, not treating them as anonymous numbers on a spreadsheet and turning knobs to see what moves the needle in the way you want.

That's it. That's the post.

I was awake in the early hours of the morning, staring at nothing, my heart racing. It was a bit like The Queen's Gambit, except instead of a chessboard on the ceiling, there was a kanban board, with a huge backlog of things I knew I'd failed to do.

This morning, I got up, turned my ceiling kanban board into a real one in Notion, and got to work. The world feels more manageable in the cold light of day. I'm making progress.

I'm not sure how to deal with the things that don't quite fit on a task list. You can't drag life from column to column or build it into a database. You've got to live it. Or at least, that's what I've always thought.

I'm more of an intuitive thinker than a planner. I always have been. I go off-recipe when I cook; I meander when I travel; I play with my code. Sometimes it works out and I discover things I never would have encountered otherwise; sometimes it doesn't, and I find myself in a mess of my own making. But I've started to write scripts for the hard stuff, and to my horror, it really helps.

I was stressed out about having to give difficult feedback to a colleague, but I wrote out what I was going to say ahead of time in detail, and it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be. I had to spend a day cold calling customers - an introvert's worst nightmare - but having my script in front of me meant my numbers were startlingly high.

Perhaps the most important thing is that writing the script is a way to cut through the fear. Getting something down in writing works: it's a step in the right direction. Then comes editing, and iteration. Which is far better than staring at the ceiling at 3am beating yourself up for being behind.

I want to unlearn the definition of "disruption".

Disruption in the Clayton Christensen sense is all about removing an incumbent business from its perch by reaching an audience it has overlooked and growing from there. It's about building a business by out-competing another business. As far as business goes, it's good strategy, but it doesn't do much to change the status quo. You may have out-innovated someone else's company, but the rules of business remain in place.

The thing is, the rules of business aren't working. The systems we have in place depend on outrageous inequality and are enforced by police who gun down people in the street with relative impunity. They incentivize keeping millions of people homeless so that others can grow wealthier. They enforce a widening divide between people who are inside the system and people who are locked out in such a way that the only way to beat the system for your own well-being is to perpetuate it.

Originally, the web was a movement. It's hard to remember now, but allowing everyone to publish was a major social change; giving everyone a voice was a new idea that many people argued (and continue to argue) against. Previously, publishing was a privilege that was bestowed by a circle of predominantly white men. Now, any old riff-raff (or to put it another way, anyone regardless of whether or not they had received permission) could stick up a website and be read by millions. It was a revolution.

It was that revolution - not the ability to make money or the opportunity to create new businesses - that made me fall in love with the web.

Of course, what came next was hardly revolutionary. The existing gatekeepers fell, and were replaced with yet more gatekeepers, who used the global nature of the web to become bigger and more powerful than their predecessors. The excitement of empowering communities all over the world gave way to a wave of people who were excited about building bigger companies and generating more wealth than ever before. The incumbent structures were disrupted in favor of yet more of the same old business.

I want to return to that revolutionary spirit and reclaim the web's radical core.

That doesn't mean I want to turn back the clock. The web movement was, itself, predominantly white and male. As a direct outcome, it tended to overlook the abuse and systemic oppression overwhelmingly experienced by women, communities of color, and LGBTQIA+ communities. As a whole, it was Euro-centric and dismissive of the global south. It's not revolutionary if the same old faces are in charge: the only way the movement can succeed is through radical inclusion. Leadership must be open to people of all backgrounds and contexts; ownership of the process, as well as its outcomes, must be truly democratic.

But we badly need to get back to the business of disrupting global capitalism itself, in order to create something that truly works for everyone. To do so, we must be informed by the past, but ready to build something genuinely new. In the same way that allowing everyone to publish radically changed the cultural landscape forever, we need to change nothing less than who is allowed to be an owner of the processes that run the world. The flow of money; the flow of political power; the flow of permission. Speech was just the first step.

This North Star of real, radical change is the definition of disruption I want to be governed by. I want to help create a more democratic, more equal world, where authority is devolved to all of us. It's not about getting rich. It's about sharing power.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash