Werd I/O

The question is a trope of the modern age. We were promised flying cars half a century ago; where are they?

Every so often someone even tries to answer that question. Passenger drones, manned quadcopters, and even jetpacks have tried to bring this 1950s vision of the future to life.

The truth is, they're all doomed to fail. Flying cars are the modern equivalent of a faster horse. They're not what we really want. It's not the right question.

Go deeper. Ask why we want flying cars. To get there faster? Avoid traffic? Have a greater sense of freedom? Feel like we're living in the future?

If we find those questions and solve for them, we're likely to arrive at more interesting solutions. Less commuting; more geographic diversity; new kinds of mass transit; ideas we haven't conceived of yet.

It's a far more interesting, and more fruitful, way to look at the world. The science fiction of the past can give us hints about how we might solve these deeper needs, but they don't absolve us of having to discover them.

When she was twelve years old, my aunt escaped from the concentration camp where her mother and siblings were interned. She swam through the sewers, found food, and returned. My grandmother collected snails and cooked them out of sight of the Japanese guards. Around them, people were tortured and killed on a daily basis.

On paper, the Allies won the war. For my family, it continued to rage.

To this day, trauma has rippled from generation to generation. That simple act of ripping my aunts from their lives mid-education has led to cycles of poverty and misery that continue to this day. Some of my family, like my father, were able to break the cycle. Some were not. The recent history of my family runs the gamut from stability to crime and heroin addiction. At every end of the spectrum, a culture of anxiety - you've got to be safe; get an education because they can't take that away from you - underpinned every choice.

Joe Biden has won the Presidency. The cruelest policies of the Trump administration will likely come to an end; we will need to be vigilant and apply pressure so that the long tail of cruelty is replaced by a dogma of inclusion and care.

For some families, the effects of the Trump administration will be felt not just for years, but for generations. Family separation, willful mismanagement of the pandemic, and sanctioned police brutality have created centers of trauma that are difficult to escape from. These are Trump's victims. For them, regardless of the result of this election, Trump won.

They will need help to escape the cycle. We owe it to them because we did this to them. Regardless of their nationality or context, they are our responsibility.

The real work begins now. It starts by setting things right. And then we start to build the society we actually want.

We all know this, but today is life or death for a great many people. The stakes are sky high. I don’t know what will happen afterwards, but I do know I’ve been waiting for today for four very long years.

And I have hope.

If you're an American, you've been bombarded by messages urging you to vote. Over a hundred million people have already taken advantage of early and distance voting. If you're reading this and you have the right to vote in this election, you probably have. I have too.

So I'm not going to tell you to vote. It's too late for that.

My father is a concentration camp survivor. I remember my grandmother's nightmares. I see the generational ripples of trauma in my family that continue to this day. Trump's rhetoric of nationalist division has already created those ripples for an untold number of families. The caravans of armed supporters, the racist police brutality, the Blue Lives Matter flag as a fascist symbol - all of these things will grow into something worse if left unchecked. There is no way to support Trump in 2020 and not be a fascist. There is no way for Trump to win and not further transform America into a fascist country.

This is what's at stake. All we can do now is cross our fingers and see what happens.

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

This month I've changed my process a little: I save my links to a Notion database, export them at the end of the month, and convert them into a blog post using a small script. Instead of taking a couple of hours at the end of the month to put the post together, I save my thoughts on each link as I read it, and collation at the end (in iA Writer) takes much less time.

Streaming

The Queen's Gambit. A beautifully written, impeccably acted drama with gorgeous cinematography and superb attention to detail. I'm still working through it, but I can't recommend it enough.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. It's been pretty controversial, and it's often in hugely bad taste, but I found the broad humor at the expense of American bigotry to be cathartic. And yes, "that" Giuliani scene is everything it's been reported to be.

Seven Seconds. This new-to-me police drama based on a Russian movie is really well done: a story about police corruption and how our criminal justice system fails the people who need it the most.

Ted Lasso. Sure, it's ostensibly about sports, which isn't usually my thing. But it's also a really optimistic, funny comedy that mines a lot of humor from the cultural differences between the US and UK, which is really my thing. Very occasionally it goes broader than it needs to, particularly in its first few minutes, but there's something here for everyone.

Notable Articles

Business

How we built a $1m ARR SaaS startup. I’m always interested to read peoples’ journeys. This one is very clearly written, with lots to think about.

The end of the American internet. “80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA, there are more smartphone users in China than in the USA and western Europe combined, and the creation of venture-based startups has gone global.” This is a broadly good thing: the internet was always American-led, for better or for worse. As the platforms that dominate it become more internationally-based, it becomes less of a monoculture.

Why the Survival of the Airlines Depends on Frequent Flyer Programs. “The Financial Times pegs the value of Delta’s loyalty program at a whopping $26 billion, American Airlines at $24 billion, and United at $20 billion. All of these valuations are comfortably above the market capitalization of the airlines themselves — Delta is worth $19 billion, American $6 billion, and United $10 billion. In other words, if you take away the loyalty program, Delta’s real-world airline operation — with hundreds of planes, a world-beating maintenance operation, landing rights, brand recognition, and experienced executives — is worth roughly negative $7 billion.”

Facebook Just Forced Its Most Powerful Critics Offline. “The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the group’s website — realfacebookoversight.org — be taken offline.” Ridiculously petty.

How Clubhouse brought the culture war to Silicon Valley’s venture capital community. "I am convinced that most people in the tech world do not understand the role of a free media in a liberal society."

San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S. During Covid. “One-bedroom rents in San Francisco fell 24% and two-bedrooms were down 21%, to $2,873 and $3,931 a month, respectively.” Still way too high.

How to Stay Sane While Working at Home. “Staying happy, healthy and productive requires effort when you’re working at home. This essay provides five suggestions for keeping things on an even keel.”

The warmth/competence matrix for women, from the West Wing to the workplace. "The warmth / competence matrix is a useful tool to optimize a leader’s influence in the workplace, especially during a crisis." I found this to be a fascinating insight into how women are stereotyped and held back at work.

U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly. “The Justice Department accused Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation.” The most significant lawsuit in the tech industry since Microsoft’s own antitrust suit. Whatever happens here, it will remake the internet industry forever.

Surveillance Startup Used Own Cameras to Harass Coworkers. "The big picture for me having worked at the company is that it has opened my eyes to how surveillance can be abused by the people in power."

Reviewing Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. “Competition driven by quality reflects what antitrust and net neutrality advocates want competition to look like — i.e. the better product wins, instead of whomever owns the pipes (or the channels). But that doesn’t mean it is what competition actually does look like, even on the internet.”

Culture

Correction by Hal Maclean. We regret the error.

Work, Float, Eat, Dream: Life on the International Space Station. “You need to become an extraterrestrial person.” First-hand descriptions of what it’s like to live on the ISS. What an adventure.

A Book Of Beasts – an accumulation of things. A very sweet modern bestiary.

Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts. “Remembering her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia.”

Inside Creative Growth, the Always Inspiring Oakland-Based Incubator For Artists With Disabilities. My friend Madelyn works at Creative Growth. As well as the insightful New Yorker profile, it’s fun to see examples of the art made there. This organization is a gem, and we need more like it.

How a Revered Studio for Artists with Disabilities Is Surviving at a Distance. “As their artists endure month after month of quarantine, Creative Growth faces an extreme version of the dilemmas that other arts organizations and educational institutions have struggled with during the pandemic: if your purpose is to foster the ideal conditions for learning and making things together, how do you proceed when those conditions are suddenly impossible?”

The return of Spitting Image shows how toothless British satire has become. When I was growing up, Spitting Image was an important part of the social landscape. The satire was biting. This modern reboot sounds rubbish. In life and comedy, the rule is: always punch up.

His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them. "Doctorow says that the intention of Attack Surface wasn’t to swing in the other direction on the spectrum between “nerd triumphalism” and “nerd despair,” as he puts it. Instead, it’s to find a more nuanced middle ground, one that acknowledges that technology can win some battles, but that others must be won with human willpower and political struggle, sometimes with the aim of controlling technology’s most dangerous applications."

Noelle Stevenson Shares Her Coming Out Story in an Original Comic. This is completely lovely on every level.

Easily Diminished at the Edges by Amanda Hollander. “Fay had expected many different emotions in the wake of the aliens arriving, but she had not anticipated the ennui.”

Shonda Rhimes Is Ready to "Own Her S***": The Game-Changing Showrunner on Leaving ABC, "Culture Shock" at Netflix and Overcoming Her Fears. “Shonda Rhimes was tired of the battles. She was producing some 70 hours of annual television in 256 territories; she was making tens of millions of dollars for herself and more than $2 billion for Disney, and still there were battles with ABC. They'd push, she'd push back. Over budget. Over content. Over an ad she and the stars of her series — Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder — made for then-presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.” A fascinating portrait of an inspiring creator.

About Face. A remarkable graphic essay about authoritarian cultural signifiers, conformity, and an alarming breakdown in American society.

WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars. The film that got me - and so many other people - into computing. It’s a fundamentally ethical, anti nuclear war film.

The NYT Best-Seller List Has an Awful Lot of Right-Wing Trump-Loving Conservative Authors. ... and they’re buying their way there. This is a bigger problem than political books, but it’s clear that conservative authors in particular are purchasing legitimacy.

Media

UK gov report links local newspaper circulation and voter turnout: Absence of journalism in some areas potentially 'catastrophic'. "Government -backed research has found that for every percentage point growth in a local daily newspaper’s circulation, electoral turnout on its patch goes up by 0.37 percentage points."

James Murdoch: Rebellious Scion. “A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact.”

Kat Downs Mulder named managing editor/digital of The Washington Post. It’s exciting to see a product leader take on this kind of role in media.

The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation. “Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies.”

Facebook Stymied Traffic to Left-Leaning News Outlets. “Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein expressed frustration with Facebook in a Twitter thread Friday, explaining that the loss of traffic had “real effects” on the organization. Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue, and couldn’t fill positions or pursue certain projects as a result, she said.” No single company should ever have this kind of power.

Climate news Trump can use. “The vast majority of news stories published about Biden’s climate plan since Thursday’s presidential debate have adopted the Trump campaign’s framing of the conflict. They focus solely on Trump’s attacks on Biden’s climate plan, and ignore the fact that Trump doesn’t have a climate plan at all.” Infuriating when so much is at stake.

Politics

‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes. “Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.” Seems like a normal thing that definitely happens in a democratic society.

Is America in Decline?. A fascinating discussion between J. Bradford DeLong and Om Malik on Pairagraph, which seems like an interesting platform for intellectual debates.

The Swamp That Trump Built. “An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.”

Don’t know any COVID-19 patients who’ve died or been in the hospital? That may explain a lot. “Other research suggests that a failure to embrace COVID-19 restrictions may be fueled by a lack of empathy, in the same way that someone in rural Pennsylvania may not view urban gun violence as an urgent problem, or that those without military family members may give less thought to the ongoing toll of combat.”

As Trump Flouts Safety Protocols, News Outlets Balk at Close Coverage. “Among the concerns raised by reporters: Many flight attendants and Secret Service agents on Air Force One have not worn masks; White House aides who tested positive for the coronavirus, or were potentially exposed, are returning to work before the end of a two-week quarantine; and the campaign has instituted few restrictions at the raucous rallies that Mr. Trump is now pledging to hold on a regular basis until Election Day.”

Inside the Fall of the CDC. “How the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus.”

HHS halts a taxpayer-funded advertising effort that aimed to ‘defeat despair, inspire hope’ on the pandemic by using Santa and celebrities like Dennis Quaid. The single most insane scandal of the Trump administration. I can’t stop laughing about it. Don’t miss the audio.

Judge cites Trump tweets in restricting feds at protests. “A federal judge found Friday that tweets by President Donald Trump helped incite improper conduct by federal officers responding to racial justice demonstrations in Portland, Oregon.” Finally.

Biden Camp Cancels Austin, Texas Event After Pro-Trump ‘Ambush’ on Campaign Bus. ““We’ve got you now,” the man shouted. “You’re going to vote for Trump whether you like it or not, you’ve got no choice.”” This whole account is genuinely frightening, not just in itself, but for the implications.

Society

Stay-at-home orders cut noise exposure nearly in half. “People’s exposure to environmental noise dropped nearly in half during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to University of Michigan researchers who analyzed data from the Apple Hearing Study.”

How Teens Handled Quarantine. “The percentage of teens who were depressed or lonely was actually lower in 2020 than in 2018, and the percentage who were unhappy or dissatisfied with life was only slightly higher.” It turns out that making kids go to school at ungodly hours has a negative effect. Who knew?

8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up. “The number of poor people has grown by eight million since May, according to researchers at Columbia University, after falling by four million at the pandemic’s start as a result of a $2 trillion emergency package known as the Cares Act.”

Megan Thee Stallion: Why I Speak Up for Black Women. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Black girls weren’t inundated with negative, sexist comments about Black women? If they were told instead of the many important things that we’ve achieved?”

Exam Surveillance Tools Monitor, Record Students During Tests. “On one occasion, I was ‘flagged’ for movement and obscuring my eyes. I have trichotillomania triggered by my anxiety, which is why my hand was near my face. Explaining this to my professor was nightmarish.” It’s absurd that students are so afraid that they’re not using their real names. Abolish surveillance - at school and everywhere.

The House on Blue Lick Road. I should probably start a “weird” category. Don’t miss this link.

'We are broken': Montana health care workers battle growing Covid outbreak. “If I have to stay late after working, if it means doing it on my day off. They're not going to pass alone on my unit. Again. None of them.” Healthcare workers are superheroes and I’m grateful for all of them.

Technology

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like. A pretty great summary of working for Stripe during a period of hypergrowth from Patrick McKenzie, who famously was a successful sole operator beforehand.

SpaceX Is Building a Military Rocket to Ship Weapons Anywhere in the World. "SpaceX and the Pentagon just signed a contract to jointly develop a new rocket that can launch into space and deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world — in just one hour." We should not be uncritically cheerleading for this company.

Cory Doctorow: ‘Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists’. "Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists. In technological circles, there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it. And so you just incinerate the qualitative elements and do maths on the dubious quantitative residue that remains. This is how you get physicists designing models for reopening American schools – because they completely fail to take on board the possibility that students might engage in, say, drunken eyeball-licking parties, which completely trips up the models."

Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository. A really smart way to track changes to a website or dataset over time and commit it to git. The example, using fire data, is brilliant.

Data & Society — Good Intentions, Bad Inventions. “Lenhart and Owens break down 4 common “healthy tech” myths by explaining where they come from, what they obscure, and how we can move beyond them. Intended for those designing, developing, and regulating emerging technologies, the primer provides teams with fresh ideas for how to analyze and improve user well-being.”

When It Rains, Rotterdam’s Bikers Get To Go Through Lights Faster. “Now, when it starts to shower, the traffic lights prioritize cyclists so they don’t wait so long to cross. At the same time, car drivers need to wait a little longer, because they are inside and can stay dry.” I think this is the coolest thing.

Various first words. “The first characters sent on ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, by Charley Kline, 1969: lo – for “login,” but it crashed.”

How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier. An absolutely epic guide to the platform, with full instructions for every tip.

Something Awful, a Cornerstone of Internet Culture, Is Under New Ownership. It was (1) a hugely important source of early internet culture, (2) a cesspool.

50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong? “When I was a young scientist working on the fledgling creation that came to be known as the internet, the ethos that defined the culture we were building was characterized by words such as ethical, open, trusted, free, shared. None of us knew where our research would lead, but these words and principles were our beacon.”

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”. This is how I felt about The Social Dilemma, too. It’s an important problem that needs to be discussed. But I wouldn’t trust the people who claim to have the solutions here. Not at all.

Moxie Marlinspike Has a Plan to Reclaim Our Privacy. Moxie is a hero of mine, and Signal is one of the most important apps and projects on the internet. This portrait only increased my respect for him.

Animals Keep Evolving Into Crabs, Which Is Somewhat Disturbing. I’m ready.

Dutch Ethical Hacker Logs into Trump’s Twitter Account. The President of the United States had set his password to “maga2020!”

Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet. “Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple’s annual profits.”

Police are using facial recognition for minor crimes because they can. “Law enforcement is tapping the tech for low-level crimes like shoplifting, because there are no limits. But the tool often makes errors.”

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.”

I took this week off so I could spend a little more time with my mother. Originally, it was also because I was in danger of burning out, and because I wanted to help get out the vote.

Today I was going to gently take her to the ocean - she can't walk far, but at least she could see the waves. It would have been a nice day for it.

Instead, this week she's had a medical procedure of some kind every single day, for five days running. She's about to have a multi-unit blood transfusion because her hemoglobin levels have plummeted. Afterwards, she'll likely want to sleep, in the same way she does after the dialysis sessions she has three times a week.

I'm very glad I'm here with my parents: I've been sheltering in place with them throughout the pandemic, which has allowed me to spend more time with them, and do what I can to help my dad, who is my mother's primary carer. This month alone events have included evacuating from a fire that miraculously stopped a block away from the house, and a mix of emergency and planned hospital visits. It's a lot, and I'm exhausted.

This is all quality time, but not the kind I was hoping for: there are fewer long talks, and far more feeding tube flushes and wound cleanings. I really hope it's not too late for those conversations. I'll be here regardless; I'm grateful for my family, and I'll take all the time I can get.

I could, however, use another vacation.

I've spent a few hours here and there over the last few months building a text adventure game.

I grew up with adventure games. The Secret of Monkey Island was foundational for me: an irreverent point and click story with an anarchic sense of humor that completely appealed to my twelve year old self. Slide across a telegraph wire using a rubber chicken with a pulley in  the middle? Sure. (Sorry for the spoiler.)

But long before SCUMM caught my imagination, I spent many hours with interactive fiction games written by companies like Infocom.

Douglas Adams was co-author of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game. (You can play a version of it on the BBC website.) It was every bit as funny and confounding as the books, and it worked because it was described entirely with prose.

Graham Nelson's Inform language is an expressive way to build these kinds of interactive fiction games. It's a programming language built for writers, which is fascinating in itself: you define the world using complete, declarative sentences. Emily Short in particular has done amazing work with the language, which is now on its seventh version.

And I thought I'd much around with it. It's a work in progress in the truest sense of the word; far more exploration than game. Almost every dream I have is set in a consistent universe, with a dream London, a dream Edinburgh, and so on, and I thought it would be fun to set it there.

For now, it lives at ben.lol, a domain name I bought for silly experiments, and should work on every browser. I'll keep playing around with it.

Let me know what you think!

Like many people, 2020 has creatively consumed me. It's hard to give your undivided attention to something, or put yourself in a truly creative flow, when so much is going on. The sheer onslaught of new information - some newly jaw-dropping story seems to be showing up four to six times a day - puts my brain in a reactive mode. Instead of being inventive and generative, I'm constantly aghast. I'm hopeful that it will be possible to re-find a sort of mental peace once the election has been and gone, but I'm also a realist. The pandemic will continue; the political clown show will continue; children have been permanently separated from their parents, creating an entire, lost Trump generation; we will not right all the wrongs of the last four years overnight.

I've been thinking it would be an interesting exercise to force myself into a generative mode about the future. Instead of reacting to the onslaught of awfulness and saying this is what I don't want, which is almost a default biological reaction, what if we deliberately and proactively painted a picture of a possible future and said this is what I want?

It's a surprisingly hard thing to do. Even thinking about the form of it - is it a manifesto? a short story? - brings difficult choices. But if we're to be truly successful at building a better world, we need to have a strong idea of what that vision for the future really is.

I think speculative fiction can carry us a long way. But even in this creative realm, it's commonplace to paint dystopias: Black Mirror warnings of what could be rather than optimistic visions of what we might aspire to. I would love to read explorations of utopia, but aside from some facets of Star Trek (which, let's call it out, is united by a militaristic Federation), I don't know where to begin to look.

Rather than a complete imagining of this better future, perhaps it's helpful to start with principles. What is the guiding North Star that will help us make decisions about which paths to take?

I've long had a professional mission: I want to work on products that make the world more equal, informed, and kind. But that's a different exercise to defining principles that guide a positive vision of the future.

This is my attempt to define those - or at least, my representation of how I'm thinking about principles for the future today. I would love to read yours.

Principles for the future: Life, Fairness, Autonomy, and Forward Motion

Life

Everyone - regardless of their background, character, geography, and context - should be able to live a good life.

Not every American, or every person in whichever nation you happen to be reading this from; every person.

Nobody should experience poverty; everyone should have a home; everyone should have enough food to eat; everyone should have the opportunity to receive a great education; nobody should succumb to curable disease; everyone should have mobility. This is the foundation of a society that can provide a good life for all.

These things should not be provided by private businesses. I believe we need private businesses, but ability to make a profit at scale is not the same thing as being able to provide a fundamental societal foundation. Those things should be provided by a democratically elected government and upheld by an implicit social contract.

Taxation as part of this social contract is a reasonable funding mechanism. Societies with higher levels of progressive taxation turn out to result in a higher quality of life, in part because basic human rights are taken care of. The important thing is not the money you have in your pocket; it's your experience of living.

Wealth is not a shorthand for well-being.

The progress of the world should be measured by the experience of the people living in it rather than their wealth. In turn, we should measure the success of our nations by the quality of the experience of living in them, rather than their output. GDP, which has become a sort of shorthand for national success, was designed to be a measure of wartime productivity and is far less well-suited to domestic life. We need a better model, and a better measure.

For example, the Human Development Index and Gross National Happiness are great steps in this direction. There are other alternative indexes that are worth considering, although I suspect there will need to be a new, humanist measure to guide us. We do need some measure in order to gauge our successes and failures. This measure must be developed in an inclusive way, with ownership shared by communities across society, so as not to privilege one group over another.

Take the climate crisis: GDP doesn't disincentivize pollution, or directly incentivize cleaning up the environment. (It will, later on, when it is much too late.) A quality of life index would take into account the billions of people who are already feeling the effects of climate change.

It would incentivize public art, and underwriting culture, and providing amazing services, and help for people who need it.

Finally, GDP incentivizes building economic markets, whereas quality of life is method agnostic. All that matters is that we are continually improving the experience of being a human.

Fairness

Equity is a fundamental human value. Everyone should have equitable access to opportunities and resources.

Equity is giving everyone what they need to be successful; equality is treating everyone the same regardless of their context. In other words, mere equality perpetuates existing inequities. It isn't always enough.

Imagine if government was truly representative: not just geographically, but intersectionally.

Imagine if everyone had access to the same level of education, regardless of their context. Then imagine if people who didn't come from generational educational success could receive extra help with the implicit ideas and skills, as well as baseline financial resources, that some people arrive at an institution already possessing. All for free. Imagine if everyone could have the opportunity to do well. Imagine how this wider gene pool of ideas would, in turn, benefit all of us.

I believe strongly that private schools and universities shouldn't exist. Finland, which has one of the highest test scores in the world (as well as one of the highest quality of life rankings), does so well precisely because it prioritizes equity. (There are independent schools, but they're state subsidized, too.)

Imagine if everyone had the same opportunities once they entered the workforce. Imagine if maternity and paternity leave were equalized, eliminating tired old arguments for not promoting women. Imagine if the collective paid parental leave was 480 days, as it is in Sweden, allowing for healthier relationships within families with less economic hardship.

Imagine if salaries were required to be published ahead of time, eliminating both the need for negotiation and the possibility of women and people of color being paid less for the same job. (Finland goes a step further and publishes everyone's taxable income once a year.) Imagine if company boards reflected societal diversity. Imagine if conversations about justice were permitted and encouraged at work.

Imagine if businesses did not depend on workers earning poverty-level wages, in any country. Imagine if resources were fairly traded.

Black Lives Matter is needed to undo centuries of generational, institutional discrimination. Likewise, feminism is a crucial ideology of restorative justice. Imagine if these ideas - restorative justice, generational healing, compassion - were core societal values. Imagine, in turn, if misogyny, racism, colonialism, and the broad spectrum of bigotry that has held so many people back were finally thrown to the fire.

In short, imagine if we built our institutions, systems, and processes to uphold fairness for all, rather than to uphold profit or benefit for some. It's not about ensuring equality of outcome (although, of course, everyone has the right to live a good life); it's about ensuring equity of opportunity.

Imagine if we all punched up instead of down.

Autonomy

Everyone has the right to make decisions for themselves and act on them, subject to the social contract we all make with each other.

That means women have the right to choose what they do with their bodies. Abortion must be legal.

That means rather than criminalizing drug addicts, we should provide help.

That means free speech and creative human expression are imperatives - until my speech is in service of rallying others to harm. It means that the right to protest is also an imperative. Sedition is always a bogus charge; government is never a protected group.

That means privacy and freedom from surveillance are human rights.

That means sex workers should be protected rather than demonized.

That means there should be complete freedom of religion (or freedom to practice no religion) - until that religion is used to invade someone else's autonomy, or to create unfair rules elsewhere in society, or to diminish someone else's quality of life.

That means what consenting adults do with each other is not your business, whether in private or public; nor is their decision to marry, for example.

That means you should wear a mask, as it protects others, just as you should wear a seatbelt, because it protects others.

That means building participative, inclusive, democratic governments rather than authoritarian institutions.

That means everyone should have the opportunity and ability to own and maintain property.

That means valuing diversity and inclusion.

That means allowing broad immigration between countries. Ideally you should be able to choose to live in the country whose values most closely align with your own.

That means enacting peaceful, globally democratic foreign policy.

That means accepting that some people will do things that you will not like - and, as long as it does not cause harm, upholding this as an important value by which we can all live.

It also means ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to make their own decisions and act on them. It implies a non-aggressive approach to policing, and a community-orientated approach to justice.

Forward motion

We should use our resources, creativity, and expertise to rapidly improve quality of life, fairness, and autonomy.

Basic human needs should be the responsibility of an intersectionally inclusive, democratically-elected government so we can concentrate on advancing human society rather than providing the basics.

By effectively measuring quality of life, inclusive teams should receive support to perform rapid, human-centered experiments within their communities in order to quickly determine how that quality of life can be improved.

Universities and research centers should be well-funded - not just for STEM activities, but also for humanities and cultural research. As this research is publicly funded, it should then be made publicly available, so everyone can benefit from its findings.

Exploration of the universe, and of our own planet, should similarly be owned by all of us. By making the fruits of human endeavor public, we can allow everyone to build on it, snowballing human progress.

Entrepreneurship has an important part to play. Innovation is a driver for progress. We should create a world where everyone has the ability to be an entrepreneur (not just the rich and well-connected), can be supported in doing so, and can build on a rich body of public research to help them succeed.

We should all own the process and the fruits of our communal progress. We should react to harms quickly, and continuously work to improve everyone's quality of life. We should have the space to seek our own individual goals, while valuing the goals of our communities. We should be there for each other.

We should tell stories about the future and try to make them real.

What's next?

This is clearly an incomplete set of principles. They're mine, as written over a set of days in October, 2020. But I think my next step is to stress test them by building a set of possible futures; to tell those utopian stories.

Perhaps your next step could be to build your own set of principles, and use them to tell your own stories. We can build on each other's ideas, as well as the ideas of diverse authors and futurists, to envision the world we want.

And then, of course, we build it.

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

In California, anyone can put an initiative on the ballot that amends the state constitution, proposes a bond measure, or even changes legislation - as long as you acquire the minimum number of signatures of support. As a result, there are always an eclectic set of propositions on every California statewide ballot. This year, there are twelve.

Particularly because there are a few ballot initiatives this year that touch on my areas of expertise, I thought it might be useful to discuss how I'm thinking about each one in public. This is one progressive technologist's voter guide; if you have alternative opinions, I'd love to hear them.

Proposition 14 - Yes

A "yes" vote authorizes $5.5 billion in bonds earmarked for stem cell research in the state, extending previous funding that was created by an initiative in 2004.

Critics say that the original initiative was created when there was a ban on federal stem cell research, and this has now outlived its usefulness. I disagree. The existing funding was mostly used across UC campuses, including UCSF, and has funded ground-breaking research and treatments, including for spina bifida and Parkinson's disease.

UCSF is one of the most important medical research institutions in the world, and I believe we should continue to allow this funding.

Proposition 15 - Yes

A "yes" vote increases funding for schools, public colleges, and local government services by increasing taxes on certain kinds of commercial and industrial property. The taxes are limited in scope and will mostly be paid by large, wealthy corporations, while providing tax exemptions for small businesses. This seems like a broadly positive amendment.

Proposition 16 - Yes

In 1996, affirmative action when hiring for public employment, public education, and public contracting was banned through another state proposition. This ballot initiative repeals that rule and allows diversity to be considered in the hiring process.

If this proposition passes, the state will be clear to start enacting affirmative action and diversity-based hiring initiatives, helping to make public positions more representative of the population.

Proposition 17 - Yes

Currently, people on parole for felony convictions don't have the right to vote. This constitutional amendment would give them that ability by restoring the right to vote once their prison term has been completed.

Felony disenfranchisement is one of the most shameful aspects of criminal justice in the United States, which disproportionately affects marginalized people. The right to vote is a crucial part of any democracy. 19 other states return this right once a prison sentence is completed; we should do the same.

Proposition 18 - Yes

If you're going to be 18 at the time of an election, and therefore can vote in it, but you're only 17 at the time of the primary, this amendment would let you vote in the primary.

Without this amendment, 18 year olds effectively only get to participate in half of the election. I'm in favor.

Proposition 19 - No

This amendment would allow residents over 55, with disabilities, or who had to flee natural disasters to transfer their property tax assessments to more expensive properties three times. It also prevents these beneficial tax assessments from being carried over to inherited properties (either from parents or grandparents) when the inheritor doesn't use it as their primary residence.

On one hand, I'm in favor of closing the inheritance loophole, which disproportionately benefits wealthy families. I also want to help the over 55s, people with disabilities, and victims of natural disasters.

On the other, it's sponsored by realtor associations. For them, it's a cash windfall. It has the side effect of persisting existing inequalities. As the Los Angeles Times editorial board says: "Proposition 19 would just expand the inequities in California’s property tax system. It would grossly benefit those who were lucky enough to buy a home years ago and hold onto it as values skyrocketed. It would give them a huge tax break and greater buying power in an already expensive real estate market. It would skew tax breaks further away from people who don’t own a home or who may be struggling to buy one."

On balance, I'm voting "no".

Proposition 20 - No

This state statute adds crimes to the list for which early parole is restricted - and removes the incentive to join rehabilitation programs, which is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. My vote is a hard "no".

Proposition 21 - Yes

This would allow local government to impose rent control on buildings that were first occupied 15 years ago, except when it's owned by a landlord that owns no more than two buildings in total. In other words, small, independent landlords are not affected; large private sector builders are.

Contrary to a recently-popular narrative, rent control works. It doesn't constrain housing supply and it helps keep rents low, allowing a significant percentage of families to remain in their homes where it is enacted. It protects lower-income people. And it makes our cities more diverse.

Proposition 22 - No

Uber has spent $50 million to promote this statute; Lyft has spent $48 million; DoorDash $47 million; Instacart $27 million; Postmates $10 million. Allowing their gig workers to be classified as private contractors protects their businesses.

That's because their businesses heavily depend on paying gig workers poverty pay with no benefits.

Labor rights were hard-won. At a time when more people are struggling, it's absurd to allow this kind of backslide. In addition to removing protections that these workers are entitled to by law, proposition 22 would also remove their right to organize.

If a business can only succeed because it treats people badly, it's a bad business. Hard pass.

Proposition 23 - No

If this statute passes, dialysis clinics will need to have an attending physician or nurse practitioner. They will also need to report information about infections, and won't be able to turn people away based on type of insurance.

I care deeply about the state of dialysis centers. Three times a week, my mother spends half her day in one. She reports that the staff want to unionize, but are afraid to. They're underpaid and overworked. One of her dialysis technicians lives in a tent.

And yet.

I heavily support unionization of dialysis centers. I would support a statute that mandated reporting of infection data. I support not being able to turn people away because of insurance. But I can't back the physician requirement. Despite sounding good, it wouldn't actually result in a meaningful increase to the quality of care.

Worse than that, it appears to be a tactic by the healthcare workers' union to blackmail dialysis companies into accepting unionization. Unionization is important and could really help these workers! But using the state initiative system as a pressure tactic is an unfortunate tactic. I'm voting "no".

Proposition 24 - No

Privacy is core to a free society. We have accidentally built a global surveillance apparatus as part of building business models that depend on building detailed profiles on each one of us. In the wake of Europe's GDPR, which forced tech companies worldwide to change their practices, California passed the CCPA. It's a great step forward that will be joined by other state laws, and ultimately form the basis of federal protections.

In contrast, this statute is fundamentally disingenuous. In the guise of increasing protections, it actually makes exemptions and cuts out requirements for companies like Facebook. It creates a loophole for credit agencies. It allows for digital redlining, allowing credit agencies and assessors to penalize people of color. And it allows privacy to be demoted to an add-on paid-for service tier, rather than a core right that everyone can enjoy.

For me, perhaps the most important changes are jurisdictional. Currently, the CCPA applies to any Californian resident, wherever they happen to be. Proposition 24 erodes this protection and allows privacy to be violated as soon as the resident physically leaves the state. It also removes the ability for you to tell your web browser to let every site know not to sell your data; under Prop 24, you would need to manually let every site know.

I can't endorse it or vote for it.

Proposition 25 - No

Cash bail is discriminatory. American judges are set higher bail amounts for Black individuals, despite their being more likely to come from lower-income backgrounds, meaning they are far more likely to serve pretrial time. Cash bail must go.

Unfortunately, it's just one symptom of a system that is, in itself, discriminatory. It's not enough to remove cash bail; we also have to make sure it's replaced by a system that also removes the underlying systemic discrimination. The cash requirement is a problem, but our racist criminal justice system is the underlying tragedy.

For people who don't understand it, software can seem like a magically unbiased system. It's a computer, after all, which doesn't hold its own opinions. How can it possibly be biased?

Of course, software is written by people, and is a reflection of their biases, beliefs, and blind spots. Additionally, machine learning as popularly implemented is an algorithm that depends on an enormous corpus of information about choices that humans have made in the past. The machine simply extrapolates and makes new decisions based on those choices. It's as biased as the data is - and if that data comes from our criminal justice system, it's very biased indeed.

So replacing cash bail with a predictive algorithm isn't just a bad idea - it's a spectacularly harmful one that entrenches racist biases in a way that makes them beyond reproach.

Software must never make judicial decisions. The truth is, it can't: the decisions are instead made with impunity by the people who write it, often unscrutinized, and by the people who are responsible for the underlying data.

Proposition 25 must not be allowed to pass, and all measures and legislation like it must be soundly defeated.

Photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash

I was starting to write this post when we were evacuated from the fire. Miraculously, after a really rough week, we were able to move back in on Friday. The house is still intact, the electricity is back on, and although the air is toxic, air purifiers allow the inside to be comfortable. I feel awful for the thousands of families who were not so lucky.

I'm now finishing and publishing this post as a way of adding some final punctuation to this terrible week. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted ...

In the spirit of Derek Sivers, I thought I'd write a quick update about what I'm doing these days. It's not quite a "now" page in the Sivers model, but it'll do .. for now.

Where I work:

I'm Head of Engineering and Sponsor Product at ForUsAll. Understanding what ForUsAll does, and therefore what I do, requires a little bit of explanation: in the US, rather than traditional pensions, workers tend to get something called a 401(k) plan (memorably named after its tax code). A part of your pre-tax pay is sent to a fund that invests on your behalf; many employers match your contribution up to a certain level. At retirement you get to withdraw those funds; the hope is that your investments have grown in value in the interim.

They tend to be jargon-laden, badly-run, and offer web interfaces that look like they were built in Microsoft Frontpage in 1998. And that's if you even have access to one: most American workers at smaller businesses don't, and therefore have limited access to decent ways to save for retirement. ForUsAll's web platform makes it cheaper and less time-consuming for employers to run (or "sponsor") a plan. And we're working on other ways for regular people to build financial stability for themselves, even before retirement. It's not about employees at well-funded startups or Fortune 500 companies; it's everyone else.

So my role is to run the engineering team, as well as product for the employer side of the experience. It's my first fintech company, but that's not why I'm doing it - my personal mission statement continues to be to work on projects that make the world more equal, informed, and inclusive, and this fits the bill.

I'm bringing a few things to the table here: my experience building products from both an engineering and product strategy perspective, but also my design thinking and cultural development background. I'm finding that those instincts are coming in very useful, and my big self-development project is to second-guess myself less than I often have in the past. I've been given a large role in determining the future strategy of the company, and I'm trying to bring my all to it.

By the way, I'm hiring front-end engineers.

Also:

I continue to sit on the board at Latakoo, the media startup where I was the CTO and first employee. Its technology - which I helped design and build - allows networks like NBC News to easily plan stories and transmit video from the field using commodity internet connections.

Latakoo is profitable. Its cloud service is used by many of the news organizations you can think of, and its on-premise servers have found homes in their editing suites. I'm really proud to have been a part of it, and to still be able to help where I can.

I believe deeply in the importance of media in our democracy, and I'm always excited to find opportunities to help support its future. In February I helped run (with my ex-Matter colleague Roxann Stafford) a session on designing for equity as part of a Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms bootcamp organized by NewsCatalyst and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism with the Google News Initiative.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping to wind up Known's incorporated corporate entity - and its hosted service, which is still online - this tax year. This doesn't mean Known itself is winding down: the open source community continues apace, and has been funding future development through Open Collective. The Known copyrights and assets will revert to me once the closure is complete.

Beyond work:

More of my time has been spent helping to care for my mother. It's been a decade since her diagnosis, and my life has been turned completely upside down in the years since (including some time where I thought I probably had the terminal, genetic condition too). Being able to spend time with both my parents is a privilege. But it's also been very easy to put my personal life on pause. I started this year with a determination to unpause - although 2020 has sometimes had other ideas.

I'm about to start a Gotham Writers Workshop course on writing fiction. Writing has always been my first love, and I'm determined to take it more seriously. I took some Stanford writing courses over the summer and found them to be both incredibly useful and motivating. I'd been waitlisted for a two year part-time novel writing certificate, but sadly didn't make the cut. (Who can blame them - who is this tech bro anyway?) No matter; I'm finding other ways to improve my skills and get closer to my goal of actually publishing a long-form fiction book.

I came first in my group in the NYC Midnight flash fiction competition this summer; I'm waiting to see if I got into the third round.

I read a lot more than I write, and I've been trying my best to keep off the social networks. They don't, as a whole, improve my life. But the addiction is strong. I just wholesale quit Facebook and Instagram as a protest against that company's actions, and it felt pretty good.

When I thought I also probably had my mother's dyskeratosis congenita, I gained a lot of weight. I've been trying my best to lose it, through only eating during an eight hour window, improving my diet, and increasing the amount of exercise I do. We bought a treadmill so my mother could walk without having to leave the house (my dad also has mobility issues); I've been using it to regularly run 5Ks. It's nowhere near as impressive as my runner friends, but it's a world away from my last few years. I used to walk 7-8 miles a day in the course of my life in the UK, and my life in California has never worked the same way. I've lost some weight but I've got a very long way to go.

I've been thinking about how I can help mission-driven founders. I was pretty naive when I founded Known, and more so Elgg; I'd love to help people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place to avoid some of those same mistakes. Time is limited, though. So maybe an online book and/or community is the way to go.

What's next:

In 2021 I want to ...

... finish a fiction book. Whether it gets published or not is out of my hands, but I want to do the best job I can. And then prepare to do it again.

... lose that weight and continue to get healthier.

... re-find the joy in life. It's been a tough year, and I want to find a way to have more time and space that's really mine. Between work and caring it's been hard to carve out room for my own life. I wouldn't change those things for the world, but I'd like to be able to find a healthier balance.

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

Books

The City We Became, by NK Jemisen. An effervescent tale about gentrification and the soul of cities, writ large as a fantasy adventure. I listened to this as an audiobook, which transcended its form into something more like a performance.

Streaming

Teenage Bounty Hunters. By rights, nothing with a name like this should be good - but it turns out this series is a beautiful surprise. Sharply funny, particularly after the first episode or two. (Netflix.)

Raised by Wolves. I still don't know if I like it, but this science fiction epic about belief and community is like nothing I've seen before. (HBO Max.)

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US, report says. "In a timely new analysis, Michael German, a former FBI special agent who has written extensively on the ways that US law enforcement have failed to respond to far-right domestic terror threats, concludes that US law enforcement officials have been tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000, and hundreds of police officers have been caught posting racist and bigoted social media content."

The Inevitable Whitelash Against Racial Justice Has Started. "In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, white people seemingly joined Black people in their calls for justice and change. But that support was always soft. It was entirely predictable that most white people would abandon the movement long before justice was done or change achieved."

Muslim Students Are Leading A New Generation In the Fight to Free Imam Jamil Al-Amin. "Al-Amin’s legacy as a Black revolutionary targeted by state surveillance — who converted to Islam in 1971 after being incarcerated for five years in New York’s Attica Prison — and his position today as a Black Muslim political prisoner is forgotten in many circles. [...] Arshad adds that she never knew Al-Amin was targeted by COINTELPro until preparing for a surveillance workshop for Muslim Student Associations across Texas."

Society and Culture

At 31, I have just weeks to live. Here's what I want to pass on. "A life, if lived well, is long enough."

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. "We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic." Unbearably frustrating.

Comedy Wildlife Awards 2020 finalists. Lovely!

The Off-Kilter History of British Cuisine. "It was the decade of fondue parties, cheese and pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks (considered an exotic indulgence at the time), Black Forest gateau, chicken Kiev, chili con carne, Neapolitan ice cream, and the prawn cocktail. [...] Inexpert and clumsy though it may have been, Britain’s exploration of new foods was indicative of deeper currents, as Britain, its empire definitively dead and buried, re-examined its place in the world."

Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”. "I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?"

The Rise of the 3-Parent Family. My friend David Jay, who founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, on his journey as a third parent. He inspires me in so many ways.

America in 2020

Deadly Terror Networks And Drug Cartels Use Huge Banks To Finance Their Crimes. These Secret Documents Show How The Banks Profit. This is the global financial system working as designed. Revealing it is an important work of journalism that has unfortunately mostly been lost under the weight of the election. The BBC has a good overview.

We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. "Take it from us survivors and scholars of authoritarianism. This is exactly how it happens. The situation could not — could not — be any worse. The odds are now very much against American democracy surviving."

Biden campaign launches official Animal Crossing: New Horizons yard signs. I ... am not positive this is what's going to make the difference.

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. The Trump camp has denied it, of course.

saw the perfect wildfire today. A beautifully-written account of seeing the Oregon wildfires. At the time I read this, I didn't understand that I would shortly have my own experience.

A Doctor Went to His Own Employer for a COVID-19 Antibody Test. It Cost $10,984. Outrageous but unfortunately not surprising.

QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. Only lightly rebranded, mind. QAnon's relationship to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an old, racist conspiracy theory, is incredibly alarming, but also just one of the many incredibly alarming things about it.

‘We’re No. 28! And Dropping!’. "out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s."

Nothing to see here, folks. "News outlets continue to ignore climate change in articles about California's record-breaking weather." I decided to give a newspaper interview about my fire experience today for exactly this reason. I'm curious to see if my statements about climate change - which were deliberate and repeated - will make it in.

Effective Political Giving. "With less than two months left before the election, this is an explainer for the politically panicked. You're anxious, you feel the need to do something, and you have a little money to spare. Who should you give it to?"

‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. "Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women." Will they deport these witnesses too?

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Speaks for itself. Really well-done; really terrifying.

Understanding PurpleAir vs. AirNow.gov Measurements of Wood Smoke Pollution. File under: new skills we all need to have now.

‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%. "RAND found that full-time, prime-age workers in the 25th percentile of the U.S. income distribution would be making $61,000 instead of $33,000 had everyone’s earnings from 1975 to 2018 expanded roughly in line with gross domestic product, as they did during the 1950s and ’60s." Shouldn't have been too shocked.

Nearly two-thirds of US adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust. WTF.

Federal Agencies Tapped Protesters’ Phones in Portland. What's old is new again.

Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'. Using our good friend Facebook, which eagerly helped the campaign.

I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. "I lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens." Although where I'm typing this, ash is literally falling from the sky.

The FBI Is Secretly Using A $2 Billion Company For Global Travel Surveillance — The US Could Do The Same To Track Covid-19. Not completely my takeaway from this.

New York Police Planned Assault on Bronx Protesters. "New York City police planned the assault and mass arrests of peaceful protesters in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx on June 4, 2020, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The crackdown, led by the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, was among the most aggressive police responses to protests across the United States following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and could cost New York City taxpayers several million dollars in misconduct complaints and lawsuits."

Technology and Business

The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network. Maybe one that was fed some really, really stupid data.

NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal, court rules seven years on. About time.

Harassers are nice to me, and probably to you. "Simply put, if you’re in a position of power at work, you’re unlikely to see workplace harassment in front of you. That’s because harassment and bullying are attempts to exert power over people with less of it. People who behave improperly don’t tend to do so with people they perceive as having power already."

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. "Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence."

Remote Work Doesn’t Have to Mean All-Day Video Calls. Tell me more ...

Amazon Drivers Are Hanging Smartphones in Trees to Get More Work. "Someone places several devices in a tree located close to the station where deliveries originate. Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. The reason for the odd placement [is] to get a split-second jump on competing drivers."

Facebook Moves to Limit Election Chaos in November. "The social network said it would block new political ads in late October, among other measures, to reduce misinformation and interference." Utterly meaningless.

“I Have Blood On My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. “In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions.” For example, in Ethopia.

Former Facebook manager: “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook”. "Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more."

Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. One of the most shamelessly violent business ideas I've ever seen.

Poynter now offers six months paid parental leave. Here’s how it happened. I really think everyone should offer a year of equalized maternal and paternal leave, but what do I know.

Build terrible things: an edict for mid-level engineers. "Start optimizing for decision-making ability. Take on projects where you get to choose what your stack will be, what tools you’ll use, how you’re going to solve problems that come up, how much tech debt you’re going to accrue, what you’re going to build and when. You’ll do it all wrong at first, but your instincts will get better at a rate that will surprise you. You’ll fix mistakes where you can, and live with them where you can’t."

Options, Not Roadmaps. "Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We don’t set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen." A more little-a agile approach.

AVIF has landed. A pretty amazing new audio/video standard.

The Cloud. This is very how it used to be.

I'm sleep-deprived because I had to evacuate my parents from their home last night, but adrenaline is keeping me awake. We drove away as the fiery glow appeared over the hill, and a stream of fire engines, sirens blazing, sped in the other direction. The Safeway at the corner where I sometimes sneak off and buy deli counter chicken tenders is now the fire staging area. The street where I go for walks to hit my daily active calorie count has been bulldozed to try and make a barrier to stop the spread.

The ash on my car this morning was like a layer of sand; each grain, a fragment of something destroyed. The smoke hangs in the air and turns everything red. It falls in chunks, like snow.

"Fire season" is a phrase we say now. I guess there was always a prime season for wildfires, which ran from May to October, roughly, but it's only really been a part of the lexicon since the Tubbs fire tore through Santa Rosa in 2017. The air was thick with smoke then, too. We used to worry about earthquakes - "the big one" - and now we worry about heat and wind.

My mother is sitting in a chair at a chain dialysis center, receiving treatment for the side effects of drugs she takes to manage a double lung transplant she received seven years ago. She never drank or smoked; always ate right; always exercised. Genetics got her in the end, as it did my grandmother and my aunt. She listens to books and browses the web on the iPad I bought her while a refrigerator-sized machine cleans her blood. The patients sit in rows while the machines churn blood around their coils. It looks like a gothic datacenter. She sits through it with surprisingly good humor, just as she sits through her hospital visits. Last week, she was in the ER. This week, she needed a blood transfusion. Whenever some politician talks about removing protections for pre-existing conditions, dropping it into a speech because it tests well with a certain kind of conservative, I wonder how I'm supposed to keep my mother alive.

When we knew we had to get out, I booked a hotel near the dialysis center. I feel privileged to have both the means and ability to do this; it meant we could pack up, drive out, and know where we were going. The evacuation site at the Sonoma County fairgrounds, and a few others, filled up and stopped taking people late in the night. The hotel lobby began to fill with people who hadn't booked, and hoped there would be a vacancy. Elderly people in masks, often holding dogs or cats under their arms, milled about in the lobby hoping a no-show would free up a room.

The style motif of the hotel is brown. The furniture is brown; the walls are brown; the curtains are brown; the light from outside is brown. The upholstery has been designed to hide spills and dirt. Irregular brown patterns draw your eye away from what you're not supposed to see.

I spent my morning frantically trying to find food that my mother could eat before dialysis. She can't tolerate much, but her feeding tube doesn't provide enough nutrition to last through a day. Ordinarily, we find ways to cook for her, but that requires a kitchen. Takeout food, which would be my first choice in this situation, is too salty for her, or has ingredients she can't digest. The WalMart next door had been ransacked by fire evacuees; the only edible food items left were PopTarts, which aren't on my mother's menu. At Raley's, further away, we found microwaveable oatmeal and some strawberries. As I loaded the car with food, I tried my best to prevent the ash from sliding through the open doors.

We packed my mother off to dialysis, rearranging the back of my car so that her wheelchair would fit without removing the foot pedals. I bought a coffee from the Starbucks in the hotel parking lot (brown) and sat in my room, finally immersed in peaceful silence except for the 1970s hum of the air conditioner. Finally, for the first time since we rushed out of the house, I took a shower.

Logging into social media again felt as if I had peeled open a wormhole into an alternate reality. "Blockchain is what happens after Silicon Valley," read one tweet. It turns out what will really happen after Silicon Valley is scorched earth and ash from the sky. The importance of politics has escalated from differences of opinions about how we organize the economy into something closer to life and death. The tendrils of the climate emergency are snaking closer and closer to our homes. There is an out-of-control pandemic taking our loved ones. There are concentration camps on the borders and immigration raids in our communities. And there is undisguised authoritarian racism coming from the White House.

While I was offline, a company called Coinbase, where I have spent a fair amount of money over the years, made a statement about its "mission focus". It is the worst kind of bullshit. It's a disingenuous, hollow statement against placing inclusion and morality at the heart of business. It's an argument not just for the status quo, but for going backwards in time to find the old status quo. It paints Coinbase, and companies that support a similar stance, as safe places for the broey, exclusionary, overwhelmingly white masculinity that still permeates any space with money and power. It would be a hard pill to swallow at any time. It just so happens that right now, the sky is on fire and the world is succumbing to fascism. The timing is, in itself, a tell.

We learned that the 2016 Trump campaign used Facebook to actively attempt to deter 3.5 million Black Americans from voting. It doesn't matter if the ads were effective, although I would be surprised if they weren't; what matters is that the campaign had the intention, and the Facebook platform presented itself as a way to get it down. There is no way to work at Facebook without being complicit. Nor for Trump: perhaps coincidentally, Brad Parscale, the digital advisor for the 2016 campaign, was taken into custody after threatening to take his own life.

As always, there are tweets and hot takes and memes. Irregular patterns draw your eye away from what you're not supposed to see. But we can choose to focus.

The surrealism of this year invites us to not take it seriously. The horror is dream-like in its absurdity. The facts and implications are so outside the parameters of ordinary life that they seem outlandish. But the sky really is red with flame, over two hundred thousand Americans alone really are dead from the pandemic, there really are unmarked federal soldiers in our cities, people really are being swept up by ICE in the dead of night and kept in concentration camps, and the worst really may be yet to come.

We can choose to look away. That option is always available to us. But to do so is to accept our fate, and to acquiesce to those who would harm us to make a profit. Today, watching the ash continue to fall and wondering if my mother will make it through another dialysis, I'm not at all prepared to do that.

Photo by James Todd on Unsplash.

We evacuated on Sunday night.

I had a whole other blog post drafted, about what I've been doing lately. Perhaps I should have known it was tempting fate, because just as I was getting it ready to publish, we realized the fire was going to come over the hill and into the neighborhood.

I've been spending most of my quarantine with my parents in Santa Rosa. My mother's health has been failing badly, and I want to help; more than that, I want to be there with my parents. The pandemic's silver lining has been that I can work remotely and therefore spend more time with them. I've sat on my mother's bed while we've sung lullabies; I've stroked her head while she suffered through stomach pains; I've flushed her feeding tubes; I've listened to podcasts and watched TV with her.

The fire got incredibly close, and at the time of writing has taken quite a few homes in the neighborhood. I took this photo from the back door just as we were about to leave:

I'm glad everyone is safe, but I'm worried about the irreplaceable things. We have so many photographs, books, objects with sentimental value. I deeply hope the fire spares them.

This year has been a shock. I also don't think it'll be the last year like it. The climate emergency is here for all of us; it's just not evenly distributed yet. Wherever you are, please consider voting in a candidate that will help reverse the damage.

I appreciated Fred Wilson's post today about USV's thesis on expanding access to knowledge, wellness, and capital. He also talks about universal basic income as a way to get there. It's a useful lens to think about the future, although perhaps inevitably, I see it a slightly different way.

Despite being a natural born American citizen, I grew up in a European context, went to state schools, and went to university for free. (I was actually part of the last cohort of university students to do so; the year afterwards, universities started to charge a whopping £1300 per year, except in Scotland.) I understand that free college does not entrench existing income disparities; my fellow students came from a very broad range of backgrounds and contexts.

Coming from that context, I don't see government services as monopolies in the business sense. They're services in the civil sense: social infrastructure for all. For example, I'm not sure we would want to have multiple police forces competing for business in a capitalist market (however we feel about our current ones). Or take healthcare: every time I walk into a doctor's office in the US I miss the simplicity and safety of the NHS.

So I go the other way. I strongly believe that private schools shouldn't exist, which is an alien idea to some. Every child should have the same opportunities. Every college should be free. Private schools, and private colleges, entrench existing power networks. Why shouldn't a kid who happened to be born poor, or in the wrong neighborhood, have access to them? It's not like rich people don't have a thousand other ways to convey privilege to their offspring - but at least access to the same institutions would give everyone else a fighting chance.

"School choice" has a racist history, and a racist present. It's not something we should knowingly advocate for without understanding and actively fighting to undermine its foundation in segregation.

Similarly, universal basic income that doesn't sit alongside other mechanisms for economic justice and support is just a way to undermine those kinds of programs. It's not either/or: all schools should be free and everyone should have access to a basic income. College should be available to all and a monthly stipend would have great ROI for the economy. We don't get to absolve ourselves of providing opportunities throughout society by simply cutting a check. In a vacuum, UBI is that most American idea: discrimination in the guise of equity.

With state support, we will still have a great market economy: one where everyone can start a business or participate in one. In fact, it'll be better, because more people will have access to networks and training. Providing social infrastructure isn't an anti-capitalist idea; it's an anti-racist, anti-discrimination one. It allows more people to access the resources they need to participate, rather than disproportionately shutting out people of color and people from poorer backgrounds. And if you don't think that's where we should be heading, I'm not sure we have much to say to each other.

Email newsletters are only succeeding because RSS failed.

I just subscribed to Casey Newton's new tech journalism newsletter, Platformer. I appreciate his journalism, and I'm sure it'll become a regular must-read for me in the same way that Ben Thompson's Stratechery is. The tech industry needs more analytical journalism, and I'm pleased to support it.

There's an interesting platform difference between the two. When you sign up and pay for Stratechery, you can certainly opt in to receiving daily emails - and I'm sure this is how most of his subscribers read his work. But you can also get access to a private RSS feed that you can plug into your reader.

My feed reader is an important part of my morning routine, but it also serves another purpose: to keep regular subscription content out of my inbox. I have enough trouble keeping on top of my email; I'm terrible at it. Adding more messages will not help me. But I also really want to subscribe! So having all my regular subscription content in one place, away from the desolation of my inbox, is useful. (Hundreds of you are reading this post in your inbox. I'm assuming you're all better at email than me! If not, you can always subscribe to my blog via a feed reader.)

In contrast to Stratechery, Platformer uses Substack, which has made starting and subscribing to paid newsletters incredibly easy. As a subscriber, I plug in my email, hit the Apple Pay button, and I'm subscribed. It's kind of a brilliant way to support independent writers. Like RSS feeds, authors don't need to rely on social media for distribution; they have a more direct relationship with the reader. Unlike RSS feeds, it all piles into my horror show inbox.

My feed reader of choice is NewsBlur (together with the beautiful Reeder apps), in part because it allows me to forward email newsletters to an address it provides. Feedbin and a few others do this too. I have a blanket filter that removes every Substack newsletter from my inbox and sends the messages to my feed reader, where they show up alongside the blogs I subscribe to. It works for me: I get to read all of my subscriptions in one place, and leave my inbox for all of those other messages that I'll get to eventually.

It's worth imagining another world, where the string and blu tack solution I made for myself is easy for everyone. What if everyone had an easy-to-use place to read their subscription content, away from the hustle and bustle of their regular emails? What if feed subscriptions had become mainstream, and payments had become an integral part of the specification? What if every author had the ability to use the platform that Ben Thompson had to build for himself, allowing each of them to make a living from their work as easily as publishing to the web?

The technology isn't there right now, but could it be?

Every journalist, artist, app builder, musician, author, podcaster, etc, should be able to make money independently on the web. And the web should help them do that.

Of course, RSS feeds haven't failed. The entire podcasting ecosystem heavily depends on them - an $11 billion market, all depending on open feeds. Even for written content, there are millions of people like me who use them every day. People in tech love to talk about the death of Google Reader, but nobody killed RSS.

For a year, I worked with Julien Genestoux, who had previously built the Superfeedr feed subscription and distribution engine, on Unlock, a protocol for independent, decentralized payments on the web. The startup didn't quite work out, but the open source protocol continues to find use. Most importantly, I think the idea (anyone should be able to take payments from their own website without a middleman) is very strong, even if the Ethereum blockchain it depended on turned out to not quite be ready for primetime. Not to mention the ability for payments to supplant harmful targeted advertising.

I believe that Substack, the Stratechery platform, and Patreon's subscription model are all evidence of a need for a decentralized marketplace of content, monetized through easy, recurring payments that don't require a content silo. By using the same feed ecosystem that powers the whole podcasting ecosystem (and my morning content routine), adding a payments layer on top of the RSS specification itself, and then making it insanely easy to read and subscribe, we could empower a new generation of creators, readers, and reader apps.

Some technical work has been done. PodPass is a proposal for an identity layer on top of RSS for podcasts. Work is being done at the W3C on web payments. Identity and payment mechanisms are both crucial parts of providing subscriptions as a first-class layer on the web. But there's a great deal more to do technically - and a huge amount more in terms of building a coherent user experience, particularly around payments.

Here's my final "what if". What if subscription payments were built into the browser or reader, with the vendor itself taking a small cut (in the same way that Apple takes 0.15% of Apple Pay purchases)?

For example: let's say I browse to a website using Mozilla Firefox. That website has some metadata in its HTML which indicates that (1) a feed is available, and (2) there are payment tiers.

Firefox lets me know that I can subscribe to that website's content with an unobtrusive icon or notification. When I click, it shows me the tiers available. When I hit subscribe, Firefox starts to pull feed content in a built-in reader. When it pulls feeds, it identifies me in the HTTP header with a pseudonymous hash code. For the purposes of this conversation, I'm user 123456 (the same combination I have on my luggage).

When I pay, funds are sent directly to the website owner, with a small cut going to Mozilla itself, and another small cut going to WordPress, which powers the site. Funds are transferred behind the scenes in stablecoins (probably), with Mozilla providing a credit card interface to me so I don't have to know or care about crypto. It tells the website owner that I'm user 123456, and that I've paid. The website verifies the payment, and next time a feed is requested for user 123456, it adds in any paid content. Unlock did this provably, using the blockchain: anyone can build an API which verifies independently that user A has access to paid content from user B.

From the user's perspective it looks like this: they can see that a website they're on has content that can be subscribed to. When they hit "subscribe" in the browser, they're prompted to choose a tier if paid tiers exist. And then they can read content and manage their subscriptions in a built-in reader.

For users like me, my existing feed reader can do the same thing: detect paid options, and pay for them if I want. The feed reader vendor gets the cut of the funds.

Cross-device syncing is taken care of by the browser vendor: my Firefox account already keeps my bookmarks and history up to date everywhere I have Firefox installed. Chrome and Safari users have a similar mechanism. Subscriptions would piggyback on these existing accounts.

The end result is a web where any creator can make money from their content and any reader can subscribe to it, without having it further clutter an email inbox that they already resent. Because browsers, feed readers, and content management platforms take a small cut of payments, they're incentivized to innovate around the model and build new products. Browser vendors like Mozilla can stop making most of their money from search engine deals. Nobody is forced to rely on Facebook or Twitter for distribution. Targeted ads die. And the internet is more decentralized and healthier for everyone.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a force for good who transformed America for the better. She fought for justice, and particularly the rights of women, for her entire life. She was inspiring and impactful; dedicated and fiercely intelligent; a genuinely good person who single-handed lay became one of the cornerstones of our modern democracy.

"When I'm sometimes asked 'When will there be enough (women on the Supreme Court)?' and my answer is: 'When there are nine.' People are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

She was an example for all of us. May she have paved the way for many more women to follow.

It's unfortunate that her many accomplishments and her remarkable legacy are overshadowed by our current political situation. Nonetheless, we are forced to consider what will happen now she's gone. Mitch McConnell, ever the ghoulishly ethics-free opportunist, used his statement on Justice Ginsburg's passing to promise a Republican-appointed replacement. Ignoring the obvious hypocrisy of this idea (compare this to his statement on Garland's nomination in 2016), we have to consider what America will look like after decades of not just a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives, but one dominated by this kind of conservative: nationalist verging on fascist, with a desire to undo women's rights and remake the nation to fit an evangelical model.

If you're an American citizen, please check that you're registered to vote - and then make sure you do so. Our democracy can't take four more years of this.

I'm pretty conflicted about The Social Dilemma.

On one hand, anything that contributes to the discourse around the harms knowingly committed in the name of engagement should be applauded. My friend David Jay works at the Center for Humane Technology as their Head of Mobilization, and was involved in this film; I know the people who work there are coming from a genuine place. I think that is admirable.

On the other hand, I'll confess to some pretty hard reservations about tech bros who make their fortune at companies like Facebook and then issue mea culpas. The harmful impact of platforms like Facebook were knowable; I know because I, and people like me, knew them well. In 2004, when Facebook was just graduating from being a way to rate the relative attractiveness of women on campus, I was building decentralized social platforms with community health in mind. There were many people like me who understood that creating a centralized place controlled by a single corporate entity for most of the world would get their information was incredibly problematic. It was and is antithetical to both the web and democracy itself.

So coders have been working on these problems, but this isn't really about software. Crucially, the people who have been at the receiving end of these harms have not been silent. Women - particularly women of color - have been sounding the alarm about these harms for years. That we're listening to men who worked to build these systems of abuse, rather than the people who have been calling out the problems this whole time, says a lot about who and what we value. It's not a problem we can code our way out of.

These conversations are vital. But let's be clear: they have been happening this whole time. If they're new to you, you've been listening to the wrong people. And we should consider whether we want to allow the tech bros who created this problem to whitewash their past.

Being a founder is hard! There are so many things you need to stay on top of. Here are 10 things that every founder, investor, and startup employee needs to know in 2020.

ICE is mass-sterilizing women. "When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp," one detainee told Project South.

It's genocide as defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

... and it's nothing new. The US has forcibly sterilized over 70,000 prisoners. In 2017, one Tennessee judge offered repeat offenders reduced jail time if they had surgery to prevent them from procreating. Just fifty years ago, around 25% of Native American women and 35% of Puerto Rican women were forcibly sterilized.

There is a surge of covid-19 cases in ICE camps. "You can either be a survivor or die."

23% of 18 to 39 year olds in the US think the Holocaust is a myth. And almost two-thirds of them aren't aware that 6 million Jews were killed in it.

White supremacist groups are up 55% since 2017. The number of anti-LGBTQ hate groups increased by 43%.

One-third of active duty troops and over half of minority service members have seen white supremacy in the ranks. It rose from 22% the year before.

The FBI has documented that white supremacist groups they investigate often have active links to law enforcement officials. "Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere."

Chad Wolf, who oversees the Department of Homeland Security and therefore ICE, watered down language in a report that warned of the threat from white supremacists. We know this from a whistleblower who was punished for non-compliance: "When Murphy refused to implement the changes as directed, [Deputy Secretary] Cuccinelli and Wolf stopped the report from being finished, the source said."

Changes to immigration won't be fully undone by the next President. "Because of the intense volume and pace of changes the Trump administration enacted while in office, even if we have a new administration, Trump will continue to have had an impact on immigration for years to come."

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Every startup goes through the trough of sorrow. I've found it to be a useful way to describe the period that comes after initial enthusiasm and before things start to work out. It turns out it's quite a useful metaphor for non-startup life, too.

There are lots of drawings of it out there on the internet. Here's my interpretation:

Every new big endeavor comes with an initial rush of enthusiasm. You're elated by the possibilities. This is going to be amazing!

Then reality sets in, and the deep slide. "Oh fuck," you'll ask yourself. "What do I do now?"

And that's when you start to experiment. You have to. The thing you thought would work probably won't. Your initial ideas are probably wrong. The story you told yourself during that initial rush of enthusiasm was just that: a story.

You could stay in this trough of sorrow. Many startups, and many people embarking on creative projects, do just that. They cling too needily to their initial idea, or are ineffective in their experimentation. They run out of steam. Sometimes, when more than one person is involved, they start to fight with each other. (65% of early-stage startups fail because of preventable human dynamics. I would bet that more fail because they run out of hope.)

You've got to be willing to experiment more rapidly than you're probably comfortable with, using real people (not aggregate statistics or sales figures) as the arbiter of what will work. You've got to be willing to make decisions based on horribly imperfect, qualitative data. You've got to be willing to take a leap of faith. And you've got to be more invested in the journey than in the end product.

Then maybe - just maybe - you'll make it.

I've been through the trough of sorrow for virtually every startup I've ever worked at: the two I founded, the two where I was first employee, and the one with a hundred million dollars in the bank. Some made it; some didn't.

I've also been through the trough of sorrow for every creative project I've ever made. For some of them, I was able to persevere and make it work; others, I abandoned.

It's about experimentation, it's about luck, it's about treating yourself and your team well, and it's about being able to let go of your precious ideas. If you treat the endeavor as a fait accompli, or go about it as you might in a large organization where you've already found your feet, you will certainly fail. On the other hand, if you embrace a spirit of creative curiosity, there's everything to play for.

I use Range every day with my team - so I was delighted to chat with them about resilience at work.

Culture is the most important thing in any team. By a mile. Your collective norms, beliefs, and practices will define how everyone acts and reacts, how safe they feel to be themselves at work, and as a direct result, how high quality the work itself is.

You'll hear about my own journey, and most importantly, how creating a high-performing team means supporting the whole human.

You can read the whole interview here.

Happy Labor Day. While the rest of the world celebrates its labor movements on May Day, America chose its date to disassociate with a massacre of labor protesters by police in 1886. A further protest in Chicago's Haymarket Square devolved two days later: a bomb was exploded by an unknown person and killed a police officer, and the cops again indiscriminately opened fire. Ultimately, socialists were blamed, as they always are, and the country succumbed to martial law.

The one country to have not chosen May Day to commemorate what became known as the Haymarket Affair is the one it happened in. The reason we drink beer and eat summer picnic food on Labor Day instead of considering its meaning is not an accident: it was a deliberate choice to bury the past and redirect our energy towards a holiday that celebrates "the dignity of work".

What insane, radical, unworkable idea were the protesters taking to the streets to advocate? It turns out it was the eight hour workday - something we think of as more or less normal today. In the cold light of 2020, it's hard to imagine guns being drawn over a 40-hour workweek.

Of course, that's how it works: what seemed radical then is normal now. What seems radical now will be completely normal in the future. While Labor Day itself is less a celebration of the labor movement and more a commemoration of an attempt to diffuse it, history shows that it tends to resist that diffusion. The march towards equality is not inevitable, but it has been unstoppable.

Unions are an important part of that struggle: a counter-balancing force to corporate power that allows workers to organize together and meaningfully negotiate for better working conditions. While not every union is good, the idea of unions is very good. 65% of Americans continue to support unions, but only 10% are actually a member of one. Meanwhile, the stagnation of worker wages is directly connected to the decline of unions.

I have no doubt that unions have been intentionally scuppered since at least 1974, when the Taft-Hartley Act banned sympathy boycotts and made "right to work" laws possible. But they've also been in need of the kind of change and innovation we've seen in other organizations over the last few decades. What does it mean to have a union for a remote workforce? Or for gig workers? And how does the idea of a union change when everyone is connected by the internet and can communicate instantly with one another?

Kati Sipp's excellent site Hack the Union has been expertly covering these kinds of changes for years. I think it's also time for technologists - particularly open source and decentralization advocates - to think about how their skills could be brought to bear in order to create new kinds of transparent unions.

Movements like Occupy Wall Street and modern anti-fascists use a headless, non-hierarchical leadership structure rooted in transparency and consensus, making them harder to infiltrate or eradicate. What if unions learned from them and used tools inspired by Open Collective to organize dues in the open?

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) were created to take this leaderless approach and apply it to new kinds of businesses. Here, a blockchain is used to keep track of "who" is a member (using pseudonymous tokens instead of real-world identities), who can vote, and items put to a vote. Resources can be allocated based on what the organization decides. Instead of leaders, rules are maintained by code.

While DAOs were built to support a kind of libertarian ideal for business, what if they could be harnessed to support modern unions? The privacy and anonymity of individual members could be maintained while allowing any member to vote. Available resources could be inspected by anybody. There would be little potential for embezzlement and corruption, because of the unbreakable rules governing resource allocation, and membership could be spread organically.

I'm not a blockchain zealot, and there's no hard need for a potential solution for unions to be decentralized in this way. (Crypto-unions are just one suggestion.) What I think is needed is a conversation about how best to organize in the 21st century, so that the labor movement can continue its good work, so that worker rights can improve, and wages can break free of their stagnation. What's needed is a stronger opposite force to corporate power that allows ordinary working people to once again have a voice. The result will be to break more people out of poverty and create a more equal society for all.

In the meantime, enjoy your lobster rolls.

Photo from the Kheel Center archive.

On her podcast, Miranda Pacchiana has opened up about the aftermath of her lawsuit against her brother Adam Savage for sexual abuse.

Miranda is my cousin, and I believe her. I think her statement is an act of bravery; the impact on her has been significant, which she discusses in the episode. I know some of you know Adam, have been employed by him, or have friends and family who do. It's a difficult thing to think about, let alone discuss. All I ask is that you listen to her story.

I've noticed more blog posts on my feeds talking about mental health, and more tweets talking about anxiety in the face of this year's challenges. I'm certainly feeling it too. This week I've been building a contingency plan for what happens if I have to take a leave of absence from work because of my mother's health, which has been an emotionally difficult task on top of an already emotionally challenging context.

2020 as a whole is a collective trauma. The thing about serious trauma is that it ripples. Its effects are felt in the lives of the people who lived through it; not just as they live through it, but forever. And then it's felt in their children. And finally, in their children.

My father is one of the youngest survivors of the Japanese concentration camps in Indonesia. He and his older siblings were kept alive by my grandmother. As a 12 year old, my aunt snuck out of the camp and swam through the sewers to find food for them to eat. My grandmother would gather snails and secretly cook them. Around them all - my grandmother, my aunts, my toddler father - was death and brutality. People in the camp were routinely tortured and murdered.

My grandmother wailed in her sleep every night until the day she died. The trauma certainly affected her children; my father has suffered from its effects in ways that he only became consciously aware of later in life. In turn, his anxieties affected his children - partially through the effect of his actions, but there is also significant evidence that trauma can be passed down epigenetically. My dad is both younger than most of his siblings and had children later in life, but I've seen the effects of this trauma spread to the fourth and fifth generations in my aunts' branches of the family.

The implications for families that have been split up through draconian immigration policies, or suffered at the hands of trigger-happy police, or been caught by a racist criminal justice system are obvious. The trauma of poverty, too, creates epigenetic changes that span generations. But during this terrible year, more of us than ever before have seen our relatives die or had our homes destroyed at the hands of natural disasters. We've lived under a kind of fear we thought was a thing of the past.

So, no wonder we're all feeling kind of terrible. The thing is, it won't just be for the moment. The impact of 2020 - and, yes, I'm afraid to say, 2021 too - is likely to be with many of us for the rest of our lives. If we're not careful, it'll be with our children, too, and their children.

The good news is that these traumatic effects can be reversed. Exercise, intense learning, and anti-depressants can help. But that implies that we'll all need systemic help: mental wellness support and a far stronger social safety net. Without this support, the hidden effects of the pandemic (and everything else that's happened this year) may be with us for a very long time to come.

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

Books

Educated, by Tara Westover. I realized about halfway through that the abuse that seems to ahave punctuated Westover's life were not going to stop. This is a brave story, although her unwillingness to condemn the church or the core of her family's beliefs leave us to join some of the dots ourselves.

Streaming

Nice White Parents. A limited run podcast by the studio behind Serial, about the relationship between wealthy white parents and the public schools they claim to support. Eye-opening.

Mrs America. The story of the Equal Rights Amendment, rendered as a gripping, human story. There's no doubt that the feminist pro-ERA characters are in the right, but it's worth reading Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal's critical editorial about the series. It's certainly true that the financial forces backing the Stop ERA movement are underplayed.

Lovecraft Country. Just spectacular. I'm only two episodes in, but I was hooked from the first minute.

Arlo Parks. I've become absolutely addicted to her music. Perfect for long walks and late nights by myself.

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation. John Lewis wrote an editorial to be published upon his death. If you click through to just one article in this post, please make it this one.

Pollution Is Killing Black Americans. This Community Fought Back. "Black communities like Grays Ferry shoulder a disproportionate burden of the nation’s pollution — from foul water in Flint, Mich., to dangerous chemicals that have poisoned a corridor of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley — which scientists and policymakers have known for decades."

Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man's life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago. "A Black Louisiana man will spend the rest of his life in prison for stealing hedge clippers, after the Louisiana Supreme Court denied his request to have his sentence overturned last week." Only one judge - the only Black person on the court - dissented, pointing out that the sentence was grossly disproportionate to the crime.

Black troops were welcome in Britain, but Jim Crow wasn’t: the race riot of one night in June 1943. "The town did not share the US Army’s segregationist attitudes. According to the author Anthony Burgess, who spent time in Bamber Bridge during the war, when US military authorities demanded that the town’s pubs impose a colour bar, the landlords responded with signs that read: “Black Troops Only”."

Revisiting an American Town Where Black People Weren’t Welcome After Dark. I'm ashamed to say that sundown towns were new to me as a concept.

‘Were your grandparents slaves?’ On the very white-dominated world of venture funding.

The Pandemic

Children May Carry Coronavirus at High Levels, Study Finds. "Infected children have at least as much of the coronavirus in their noses and throats as infected adults, according to the research. Indeed, children younger than age 5 may host up to 100 times as much of the virus in the upper respiratory tract as adults, the authors found."

A Covid Patient Goes Home After a Rare Double Lung Transplant. "The surgery is considered a desperate measure reserved for people with fatal, irreversible lung damage. Doctors do not want to remove a person’s lungs if there is any chance they will heal." I'm writing this from my parents' house, where I'm supporting my mother in the aftermath of her double lung transplant. You don't want one. Please, please, please wear a mask.

How the Pandemic Defeated America. "Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold." They need to go.

In A Twist On Loyalty Programs, Emirates Is Promising Travelers A Free Funeral If Infected With Covid. Innovative.

We thought it was just a respiratory virus. UCSF's report shows damage to the heart, gut, skin and more. The virus may weaponize our own immune systems against us.

Secret Gyms And The Economics Of Prohibition. "What Evelyn uncovered can only be described as a speakeasy gym. You know, illegal, hush hush, like the underground bars during the Prohibition era. These underground gyms appear to be popping up everywhere, from LA to New Jersey."

Trump's America

The cost of becoming a U.S. citizen just went up drastically. And asylum is no longer free. "The Trump administration announced on Friday an exorbitant increase in fees for some of the most common immigration procedures, including an 81% increase in the cost of U.S. citizenship for naturalization. It will also now charge asylum-seekers, which is an unprecedented move."

How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong. We shouldn't expect an election night this year. It'll take weeks, and there's a real possibility the election will stretch until January. But the media is set up for a big announcement.

A bipartisan group secretly gathered to game out a contested Trump-Biden election. It wasn’t pretty. Unless Biden has a landslide victory - which, to be honest, he probably won't - there may be violence on the streets and a political stalemate. In a year that's been plenty nasty already, we shouldn't expect this to go anything close to well.

With their visas in limbo, journalists at Voice of America worry that they’ll be thrown out of America. "VOA has long employed journalists who are citizens of other countries because they offer specific knowledge and expertise, including fluency in English and one or more of the 47 languages in which VOA broadcasts. In addition to their language skills, they are steeped in the history, culture and recent politics of the countries they report on, and they often have hard-to-replace sources and contacts among dissident communities." And now their visas are in jeopardy and they worry about having to leave - some to oppressive regimes.

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free. Some of the best journalism in the country is paywalled, offered up to a limited, wealthy audience, but disinformation is available to all. The effects of this disparity of information may be profound. (I like patronage models like The Guardian's.)

Trump Might Try to Postpone the Election. That’s Unconstitutional. I just have no way to gauge if this is something that is actually going to happen or if we're all just engaging in hyperbole. Reality just seems so spongey at this point. Maybe both?

The myth of unemployment benefits depressing work. "If anything, research to date suggests the federal benefit supplement has boosted macroeconomic activity and, therefore, likely supported hiring. That’s because these benefits have supported consumer spending, which in turn helps retailers, landlords and other businesses keep workers on their own payrolls." Benefits are not some drag on productivity. They boost the economy and help people in real need.

As election looms, a network of mysterious ‘pink slime’ local news outlets nearly triples in size. "The run-up to the 2020 November elections in the US has produced new networks of shadowy, politically backed “local news websites” designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data. In December 2019, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism reported on an intricately linked network of 450 sites purporting to be local or business news publications. New research from the Tow Center shows the size of that network has increased almost threefold over the course of 2020, to over 1,200 sites."

What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon. "QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information. In other words, maybe QAnon is… fun?" Also see Dan Hon's excellent deep-dive exploration of this idea.

Ronald Reagan Wasn’t the Good Guy President Anti-Trump Republicans Want You to Believe In. Ronald Reagan was a terrible President. I love that this is just the latest in a series of really high quality explorations in Teen Vogue.

The Unraveling of America. Wade Davis in Rolling Stone on the situation we find ourselves in. Not just the proximal one, but the existential situation that's been building for decades.

'Christianity Will Have Power'. "Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along."

Noam Chomsky wants you to vote for Joe Biden and then haunt his dreams. Sold.

U.S. Government Contractor Embedded Software in Apps to Track Phones. "A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal."

Postal Service warns 46 states their voters could be disenfranchised by delayed mail-in ballots. "Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted — adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest."

Society and Culture

How a Cheese Goes Extinct. "There are countless ways for a cheese to disappear. Some, like Holbrook’s, die with their makers. Others fall out of favor because they’re simply not good: one extinct Suffolk cheese, “stony-hard” because it was made only with skimmed milk, was so notoriously bad that, in 1825, the Hampshire Chronicle reported that one ship’s cargo of grindstones was eaten by rats while the neighboring haul of Suffolk cheese escaped untouched."

The Global God Divide. I'm on Team Godless. But 44% of Americans say you need to believe in God to be moral.

Indian Matchmaking Exposes the Easy Acceptance of Caste. "The pervasiveness of caste in Indian communities, even beyond the ambit of arranged marriages, has dangerous consequences for those of us born into “lower” castes."

Lilly Wachowski finally confirms that, yes, The Matrix is an allegory for the trans experience. I think this is super-cool.

Lorenzo Wilson Milam, Guru of Community Radio, Is Dead at 86. What an inspiring human being.

Bat Boy Lives! An Oral History of Weekly World News. I used to delight in seeing Weekly World News headlines when I traveled to the US. This history was fascinating to me.

‘Bel-Air’: Drama Series Take On ‘The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air’ From Morgan Cooper & Westbrook Studios Heats Up Streaming Marketplace. I cannot overstate how amazing this is.

To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab. "He was very happy to hear from the current resident of our office, and explained that it should be no problem to get the window up and running. I’d need to set up a dedicated Linux box and download some Python to control the climate logic, but it shouldn’t be that hard to debug. He was willing to help."

Dead plots. Charles Stross on plots no longer available to authors in 2020.

Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture. I'm a Swiss citizen. Sometimes I think I just might make the jump ... But a lot of what's listed here are things I recognize from Scotland, too.

“This Plane Is Not Going to Land in Cairo”: Saudi Prince Sultan Boarded a Flight in Paris. Then, He Disappeared. Surreal, and evil.

Technology

Women Are Leading Latin America’s Fintech Revolution. "Including women entrepreneurs equally could boost the global economy by $5 trillion, and companies with women founders generate 2.5x more revenue for every dollar invested than male-led companies. They also have higher stock prices and a 35 percent higher return on investment."

TikTok and the Law: A Primer (In Case You Need to Explain Things to Your Teenager). Ageism aside, this is a pretty good primer on the legal issues behind the forced TikTok sale.

TikTok and Microsoft’s Clock. "If Microsoft is able to buy the service and users of just the countries listed, how are they going to separate them from the rest of TikTok? Understatement: this sounds extremely complicated. How long will it take to do that? Weeks? Months? Will it operate as-is until that’s completed?"

Ad Industry Launches New Organization, Will Push Google And Apple On Tracking. Pfffft. Good luck with that. Doc Searls, who I hugely respect, wrote a great post on the subject, too.

Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism? "Instead, the company found that ads served to users who opted out of cookies were bringing in as much or more money as ads served to users who opted in. The results were so strong that as of January 2020, NPO simply got rid of advertising cookies altogether. And rather than decline, its digital revenue is dramatically up, even after the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic."

The Need for Speed, 23 Years Later. "The internet is faster, but websites aren't". Instead of embracing speed, we've layered our pages with more and more cruft.

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels. An exploration of UX ideas using LEGO as a cipher. Sure, why not. (It's delightful.)

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates. Oops.

Facebook Fired An Employee Who Collected Evidence Of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential Treatment. "Individuals that spoke out about the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages have also faced consequences. In one case, a senior Facebook engineer collected multiple instances of conservative figures receiving unique help from Facebook employees, including those on the policy team, to remove fact-checks on their content. His July post was removed because it violated the company’s “respectful communication policy.”" Inexcusable stuff.

Facebook algorithm found to 'actively promote' Holocaust denial. "Last Wednesday Facebook announced it was banning conspiracy theories about Jewish people “controlling the world”. However, it has been unwilling to categorise Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, a stance that [the Institute for Strategic Dialogue] describe as a “conceptual blind spot”." Understating it somewhat, I would say.

To Head Off Regulators, Google Makes Certain Words Taboo. A surely losing battle to ensure that internal communications revealed during discovery don't suggest monopoly control.

Design Docs at Google. Here heard second hand, but worth studying.

Judge Agrees to End Paramount Consent Decrees. Netflix and its cousins are now free to run movie theater chains.

Google's secret home security superpower: Your smart speaker with its always-on mics. Either super-cool or super-creepy, or maybe creepy-super-cool. Google Home has the ability to listen to your smoke alarm, or for broken glass, and then tell you about it.

tech brain. "what is tech brain? there are lots of things to point to, but if i had to come up with a thesis it would be that tech brain is a sort of constant willful reductionism: an addiction to easy answers combined with a wholesale cultural resistance to any kind of complexity."

Twitter launches new API as it tries to make amends with third-party developers. Once bitten ... but I really appreciate this new, non-advertising-centric direction.

RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users. "As the Internet increasingly mediates essential functions in societies, it has unavoidably become profoundly political; it has helped people overthrow governments, revolutionize social orders, swing elections, control populations, collect data about individuals, and reveal secrets. It has created wealth for some individuals and companies while destroying that of others. All of this raises the question: For whom do we go through the pain of gathering rough consensus and writing running code?"

A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees To Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times. Moderators Said It Didn’t Violate Any Rules. "In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.”" People are dead.

The App Store is a problem.

As bought into the Apple ecosystem as I am - to be clear, its devices and operating systems are by far the best I've ever used - the way it polices its software ecosystem has become a barrier to innovation.

I don't really care about Fortnight, and I'm on the fence about whether allowing effectively another App Store inside an App Store is a good idea. But removing a developer's ability to publish anything on a platform, regardless of whether it breaks the rules or not, seems like a big problem to me. And the rules around payments are worse.

If your app uses in-app payments of any kind, Apple takes a 30% cut. These payments can only be for virtual goods: you'll notice that if you take a Lyft ride or order a pizza, you'll be redirected to either enter your credit card or use Apple Pay for payment. (Apple takes a 0.15% cut of Apple Pay payments, regardless of the card you use.) The trick is that you can't use this latter method of payment if you could have used in-app payments: if you ask for a credit card for a digital good, but still allow the user to pay in-app, Apple still wants its 30%.

This is unequivocally digital rent-seeking. There's literally no reason for Apple to do this, except to bolster the estimated $50B it made last year from the App store. It's one major reason why it's the most valuable company in the world, with a $2.13 trillion market cap as of Friday.

It's a gatekeeper rather than a driver of innovation. As Francisco Tolmasky pointed out, Apple's App Store rules wouldn't have allowed for the invention of the web browser. There are likely many other inventions that would have been amazing on mobile and tablet devices that will never see the light of day because they fall afoul of some rule or other.

Similarly, it's been disheartening to see these rules start to bleed over into macOS. That OS contains a technology - literally called Gatekeeper - that prevents apps from running unless they're associated with an authorized developer ID. By default, the latest version will only open apps that have been notarized by Apple, which involves some extra software-driven checks in XCode. The only way to run an app that doesn't at least have a developer ID is to open up system preferences and reassure Gatekeeper that it's all going to be okay, on an individual basis - but macOS deliberately doesn't make it clear that you can do this.

Getting a developer ID costs a flat $99 a year. This heavily excludes developers from less wealthy regions of the world, as well as open source projects. And I strongly suspect that the rules will tighten up again - either formally or through interface changes - in the next version of macOS.

These are our devices; we bought them. We should be able to run the software we want on them. Anything else is heavily disempowering at best, and a barrier to trade and innovation at worst. And developers like Epic are experiencing firsthand where the chips fall.

I'm looking for an entrepreneurial front-end engineer to help with our work at ForUsAll. Our mission is to help all Americans build a brighter financial future, a click at a time.

We heavily use React, Redux, and supporting packages like Storybook, Jest, and Styled Components. We're beginning to use more Node and Puppeteer, too.

Most importantly, you're a great communicator with a product mindset. We're a small team that uses human-centered processes to make product decisions - something you would be heavily involved in.

This is one of the most diverse engineering teams I've ever worked with, and people from all contexts and backgrounds are encouraged to get in touch. Your school or degree (including whether you have one) will not be evaluated, but you do have to be resident in the US and be legally permitted to work here.

If you have questions or want to get in touch, email me at my ForUsAll address: ben.werdmuller@forusall.com.