Werd I/O

I've been writing at least a post a day during my short social media hiatus. Although I'm a little bit worried about flooding the folks who subscribe via email - it's occurred to me to limit the mailing list to a couple of days a week and send as a digest - I find it meditative. I tend to write first thing in the morning, right after reading through my feeds in Reeder. I compose on my iPad in markdown using iA Writer and then copy to my site using its "copy as HTML" function. iA Writer uses micropub, so theoretically I could publish directly, but I like the opportunity to read over the piece in context before I push the button.

As I mentioned on Monday, I've been writing more fiction, which has mostly meant fleshing out a book in Scrivener. I've also been submitting some short stories for publication - my rejection-proof skin has been thickening steadily - and taking part in a few competitions. My round one piece for the NYC Midnight flash fiction challenge placed first in its group. To be honest, I needed the encouragement - and tonight I'll move on to round two with my head held high.

I have an iPad Pro with a magic keyboard case, which is strictly for creative work. My work accounts are nowhere to be seen, and notifications are switched off across the board. You can't develop software on an iPad - at least, not really - and I don't use it for coding projects. It's just for writing and drawing. While the OS is locked down to the extent that Apple may be legally forced to open it up sometime soon, I find it makes for a pretty good distraction-free environment. It's one of the best gadget purchases I've ever made. (Who would have thought I'd be so bought into the Apple ecosystem a decade ago? Not me.)

But even more importantly, cultivating the space to write and reflect has been an important habit for me. Like regular exercise and eating well, it sets me up for the rest of the day. In a world where we're expected to be always on and instantly reactive, some nearly-offline slow thinking time has proven to be a very good thing indeed. Getting that in first, over a cup of coffee while the morning is still quiet, has been lovely.

Kevin Roose has written an alarming wakeup call in the New York Times:

Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.

While election polls typically place Democrats ahead, they were flat out wrong in 2016, in large part because of the Trump campaign's ability to dominate social media. Facebook is the joint monarch of the social media landscape with YouTube; while engagement on the former is dominated by conservative content, Trump's ads about Biden's cognitive decline have enjoyed pride of place on the latter.

Trump is a danger to the country, to democracy, and to the stability of the world. (This statement would have seemed like out-there hyperbole four years ago, but, well, please feel free to take a look back at what has happened since.) Despite this, and despite commentary from pollsters and business executives, it's not at all a given that he will lose the election.

If he does win another four years, the tech industry will not be blameless. Our focus on engagement over community, and our promotion of targeted advertising over contextual ads and other business models, has paved the way for this new kind of authoritarianism. Microtargeting of political messages on social media is theoretically simply a new frontier in political messaging; in reality it has allowed disinformation to be disseminated at scale. The irony is that this kind of behavioral advertising isn't even that lucrative for most businesses; the harms vastly outweigh the benefits.

This is not a rhetorical discussion. We have concentration camps on our borders, an uptick in hate crimes, and a prevalence of xenophobic, nationalist, and anti-science policies. The climate crisis is being ignored even as our country burns. And we are all responsible.

While the pandemic certainly accelerated it, the housing crisis in America has been, in large part, the result of interest rates being held at zero for years.

I'm far from an economist, but here's my attempt to explain the process:

Low interest rates encourage speculation. It's essentially Santa Claus for investors: loans become incredibly cheap, so they have more net cashflow to deploy on riskier investments in order to pursue higher returns.

They have a similar effect on the stock market: deliberate changes to interest rates, rather than any kind of natural effect, are one of the main reasons the market has risen steadily for the last few decades. Of course, this stock market performance mostly benefits wealthier people, who then have more capital to deploy on riskier investments.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that low interest rates drive higher inflation, reducing the value of the dollar and therefore the real value of the national debt.

In this environment of increased speculation, investors put more money into housing, and prices are driven up. This is great news for people who already own their own home, who also feel the Santa Claus effect. They receive enormous cash windfalls when they sell their homes, and they can get those low-interest loans using their inflated home values as collateral. But it's an absolute disaster for everyone else.

As home prices are driven up, it becomes harder and harder for people who aren't already on the ladder to buy in. This is more pronounced in some communities than others: historical racial disparities mean that people of color are much less likely to own their own home and see the benefit of this appreciation. Across ethnicities, most younger generations can't afford to buy a home, and those that do generally get help from parents already on the property ladder.

As more people rent, multi-family homes become more valuable investments, which encourages more speculation, and creates more value for people who already have wealth. And so the cycle continues.

Unfortunately, Bloomberg suggests that the interest rate may again be held at zero for five or more years. If this happens, we can expect home prices to continue to rise, and this raging inequality to deepen.

This will also have a profound (and deserved) effect on cities like San Francisco. In a world where remote working is not just accepted but required, and millennial workers can't afford to buy homes in these regions, they're going to find their way to more affordable markets very quickly. People on my team have asked me about the possibility of leaving the San Francisco area, and I'm sure this is a story that's rapidly repeating across the industry. It's impossible to drive through a residential area in San Francisco and not see multiple U-Haul trucks. The historic exodus will continue.

I've got skin in this game. I'm 41 years old and don't own my home. It's beyond time that I had a place of my own - but the Bay Area is looking like a worse and worse place to settle. I want to live in a diverse, progressive community where people across multiple industries and lifestyles can afford to live. That's going to be somewhere much cheaper.

I had hoped that we'd see some housing price depreciation, but it looks like policies will go the other way, regardless of who is the President next year. We've all got to prepare accordingly.

In the US, you normally have to be an accredited investor to invest in private companies like startups. In practice, this has meant that you've needed to earn $200K a year for the last two years running, or have a net worth of at least a million dollars excluding the value of your home. It's not quite as simple as this: some crowdfunding has been allowed for a while, and if a startup is raising under a million dollars, it could include non-accredited investors under some circumstances. Nonetheless, the effective rule has been: only rich people can buy into startups.

The SEC announced an expansion to that definition today. As an alternative to being rich, you can also be considered to be accredited if you've achieved Series 7, 65, or 82 certification. These exam-based certifications respectively qualify you to sell securities, provide general investment advice, or transact securities on behalf of clients.

Taking a Series 65 exam costs $175. It wouldn't surprise me if investment platforms started subsidizing that price in order to make it easier for individuals to invest in startups, making back the total from a cut in investment proceeds.

Of course, investing in startups is eye-wateringly risky, and nobody should ever invest more money than they can comfortably lose. Nonetheless, for many investors from less high net worth backgrounds, the barrier to getting into the market has been lowered. Particularly for women founders and founders from communities of color, this may be a good thing. (Increased speculation, on the other hand, may not be.)

I used to have a simple ethical stance that influenced my career choices: I wouldn't work for a defense or arms company, and I wouldn't work for a bank.

In both cases, the idea was that I didn't want my work to result in someone's death. For defense or weapons, the connection to death is obvious. For banks, my argument was that traditional banking institutions work in a predatory way that actively harms people in poverty, worsening their situation at best, and exploiting it at worst.

While I stand by both lines, this stance is a little too simple. What about challenger banks, for example? Particularly those which seek to upend the status quo and provide real help for people who need it? What about other technology companies that provide essential technology platforms that are used to profile immigrants or activists? What about companies that further - or simply choose to ignore - gaping racial disparities?

My computer science degree taught me many things. I learned how to diagram finite state automata like nobody's business; I've got a pretty good handle on how to analyze the cost effectiveness of an algorithm; I got my head around Prolog, C, Java, and XSLT. While I believe we learned about ethical considerations around artificial intelligence - the trolley problem, for example - I don't recall being taught about the ethics of our own actions.

Over the last few years, it's become a more accepted idea that software is the reflection of the people who build it: engineering, product, and business decisions are all made by humans who use their own value systems and understanding of their ethical context. Omidyar Network's Ethical OS is one response to this challenge, allowing organizations to make better decisions as they build products. The Center for Humane Technology has, to its credit, also been refining its approach to advocating for ethics, having launched amidst some deserved criticism. These endeavors, as well as the work of inclusion-minded organizations like Code2040, Women Who Code, Techqueria, Trans*H4ck and others, represent a great deal of progress. Of course, there's significantly more progress that still needs to be made.

But there are relatively few resources centered around making ethical decisions as an individual. How might you choose your next job in an ethical way? What kind of work should an engineer - or a product manager, designer, marketer, etc - feel comfortable doing? What are the codes of ethics we should live by and look for among our peers?

Ethics is, of course, a widespread area of study, and there are plenty of endeavors outside of tech to figure out how to apply them. Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics hosts a framework for considering ethical decisions that is probably a good starting point. But I've found very little that dives specifically into the ethical challenges for individuals posed by building software on the internet. Not only do you need a framework for asking the right questions, which the Markkula Center's work helps provide, but you need to have the insight and knowledge to truly understand the implications of your work.

A few years ago, Chelsea Manning attended the New York demo day for Matter, the values-based accelerator where I was Director of Investments. She was on the board for Rewire, a startup that was attempting to build an easy-to-use encrypted email solution for journalists and activists. We had worked hard to select teams that we believed had the potential to make the world more informed, inclusive, and empathetic. Chelsea is very smart indeed, and doesn't hold her opinions back; I was eager to get her feedback on the teams.

It was a shock to me when she explained which technologies could be used for surveillance, which could be used for weapons, and so on. The teams were absolutely not building technology for those use cases, but at the hands of the wrong investors or acquirers, they could be used to cause harm. She was right. While we had invested in some genuinely incredible people, I realized I hadn't done enough to discuss the implications of the work the teams were doing and ensure that it was impossible for them to cause harm in the wrong hands. Intention is not enough. I consider this to be one of the most important conversations of my life.

A similar conversation might be enlightening for engineers who build facial recognition software that is used by ICE to scan DMV records to build a corpus of data that can be used to track immigrants. Or those who build modern payday loans that plunge low income people into debt traps. Or machine learning algorithms that predict "high risk renters", locking in historic racial disparities. Or engineers who find themselves agreeing with James Damore's outrageous Google memo. And we need to be having these conversations more openly, so that we can improve understanding and share knowledge and insights that will help everyone in the industry make better decisions.

Ethical challenges are subjective and non-deterministic, and it's difficult to build a hard and fast framework that encompasses them - which is a hard pill to swallow for engineers, who are used to living in a deterministic universe built out of discrete logic and testable outcomes. My "don't build weapons, don't work for a bank" rules simply don't cut it. It's tempting to reduce my stance to a pat motto like "do no harm", but like its obvious cousin "do no evil", too much wiggle room is left for work that could have less than positive implications.

There's no alternative to assessing each opportunity on its own terms and asking the right ethical questions, although we can help each other by making those assessments public and learning from each other. We need to be doing that for everything we assess, from job opportunities to business models to technology architectures. Technology is not amoral; neither is business. And we all have a responsibility to do the right thing.

We're in the mist of what may be the largest civil rights movement in US history. In Belarus, inspiring protests are bringing down the authoritarian Aleksandr Lukashenko. Around the world, authoritarians and nationalists are being met with a rise in democratic political protests.

The US government has sometimes not lived up to its declared values in the face of protests. From COINTELPRO to the PRISM revelations, it is clear that it has often treated political protest as a threat, and turned to surveillance and infiltration in order to undermine it. A Nixon administration official admitted that the war on drugs was started to undermine the antiwar and civil rights movements.

We are, unfortunately, not as democratic as we might hope to be. And the situation is unlikely to have improved in the current era. In a world where it's not a given that the President will step down if he loses the election, domestic activists need a toolbox at their disposal that will keep them safe as they exercise their Constitutional rights. Around the world, activists fighting for equality and democracy need the same.

Unfortunately, the Bridgefy app that was widely used in the Hong Kong protests has been shown to be a privacy nightmare: easy to take down, compromise, and deanonymize. Choosing the wrong tool can have consequences. So what's safe?

Open source software allows anyone to view and share the source code. It can be audited by anyone who wants to verify that it is seucre and fit for purpose. The result is applications that are more trustworthy.

Here are a few auditable, open source tools that I believe activists can rely on.

Signal

Easy to use and end-to-end encrypted, Signal is recommended by both Edward Snowden and security guru Bruce Schneier. It behaves like a slick instant messaging app you might download from Google or Facebook, but you know your messages are end-to-end encrypted.

I use Signal every day to communicate with people all over the world. It just works.

It's worth saying that while the Signal protocol is also used to secure WhatsApp messages, it is technically possible for messages saved on that app to be shared with Facebook, its corporate parent. They can also be technically shared with governments and law enforcement.

Element

While Signal is best at one-to-one communication, Element is a bit like an open source, end-to-end encrypted Slack. Based on the decentralized Matrix network, which can theoretically support an infinite number of different apps, it combines a commercial quality user experience with fully open source code, a decentralized back-end, and end-to-end encryption.

Like Slack, it can be extended using bots and integrations. For example, an upload to a  SecureDrop endpoint could notify an Element channel (or a channel on any other Matrix-powered app). In the same way Slack can be turned into a notification center for commerical teams, Element or Matrix can be used to be an activist group's control center. And it runs behind Tor.

SecureDrop

Created by Aaron Swartz and currently managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, SecureDrop allows any organization to securely and anonymously accept documents.

Organizations like The New York Times, the anti-corruption NGO Global Witness, and the Center for Public Integrity run SecureDrop instances on their own infrastructure to maintain the safety and anonymity of whistleblowers. Any organization can do the same.

IPFS

The InterPlanetary File System is a censorship-resistant way to publish content on the internet without having to rely on a central provider. When used with the Tor Browser, it's anonymous, too.

IPFS's distributed architecture allows content to be published without easily being removed. Content is hosted by other IPFS users. Unlike the web, there's no central DNS registry, so domains can't be pulled down. And content at one IPFS location can easily be forked and copied to another.

A growing number of end-user IPFS apps are available.

Tor Browser

Tor is the most secure way to browse the web. It blocks trackers and prevents browser fingerprinting: the process by which tracking networks can identify you by your browser configuration alone, whether you have cookies enabled or not.

Most importantly, though, it uses the Tor network, which is designed to anonymize your internet traffic. (TOR stands for The Onion Router, and its anonymous architecture is built in layers, like an onion.) There are lots of sites that only exist on the network, and these "dark web" nodes aren't as rife with criminality as reports suggest. DuckDuckGo operates a Tor node; so does everything from Medium to Facebook. In every case, it's to establish greater security for users around the world.

Tor allowed protesters in the Arab Spring to escape censorship or retaliation, and is used to bypass China's Great Firewall. It can do the same for today's protesters. Chrome and Firefox users in free countries can download the Snowflake plugin to help host layers of the Tor network without implicating yourself.

Bitmask

Bitmask is a cross-platform VPN built specifically for activists. Most people use a VPN to create a secure connection to protected infrastructure: for example, to access production servers. Some commercial VPNs are designed to allow people to access streaming services in other countries. In both cases, anti-surveillance isn't the goal; they tend to have centralized architectures where traffic travels through servers monitored and controlled by a single company.

Conversely, Bitmask gives you access to multiple networks designed to circumvent surveillance and network monitoring. Its parent, the LEAP Encryption Access Project, wants to provide high quality encryption to everyone. (The Trump administration has considered banning end-to-end encryption.)

What else?

This list is a starting point: I'd love to hear about other software you think should be included. If you're aware of an open source, easy to use, cross-device encrypted email solution, I would particularly like to know - mostly so I can switch to it immediately.

Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

I've decided to take a short hiatus from social media - which, really, is a hiatus from learning about the world in staccato, where each dopamine hit brings a payload of horror. I want to be informed, but I want to be informed on my schedule.

I'm writing this update from Santa Rosa, which sits nestled between two raging fires. The smoke hangs thickly in the air, turning the sky red. This year seems to ratchet up month by month, the pressure slowly increasing, as if to dare us to cry that we've had enough.

Here is what my day in the pandemic looked like:

I brought an air purifier to an elderly friend in Berkeley. Then I brought a second air purifier to my sister in Richmond, who is disabled with chronic pain and spends most of her day in bed. I drove myself through the orange haze to be with my parents. My mother is weaker than she's probably ever been. She can barely walk. I made dinner for them both, and washed up, and gave her a ginger hug in bed and told her I hoped tomorrow would be a better day.

It's a lot.

I'm finding it really difficult to work on extracurricular coding in this context, so I've given up. Known is chugging along without me, which is lovely to see, and it turns out that my Life on the Ground questions don't need a software platform to empower people to share their stories. I work with code and software in my day job, and that turns out to be more than enough.

Instead, I'm writing a book. Finally. It's a pandemic cliché, I'm fully aware of it, but it's also something I've been called towards for decades. I've decided to approach it with the seriousness I would any software project: I'm learning new skills and researching the best approaches. It's not a whim - but it's also liberating to work on something that doesn't need to be a business. More than anything, it's something that's mine: an escape, a place to channel all the things I'm feeling, and something to work on that doesn't need to be about productivity. It can just be. Not a venture novel; a lifestyle novel.

There are silver linings to this pandemic. Remote work means I can support my parents without having to consider the impact on my job. I've found the mental and actual space to write. Not going into an office means I haven't been eating trash from the neighborhood for lunch, and I've been able to use some of the extra time to exercise. I'm healthier than I've been in years.

I just wish we weren't in the midst of an epidemic, and that California wasn't on fire, and that we had a compassionate government, and that police weren't murdering Black people, and that my mother wasn't dying.

Some of these things will change. The epidemic will end. The fires will be put out, and we will eventually enact laws to deal with the climate crisis. The government will leave office, and potentially go to jail. The police will be defunded and remade.

As for the last thing on the list? All I can do is be here, do my best, try and remember to take care of myself, and hope.

Firefox matters. The other major browsers are all subject to a larger corporation's business interests: Safari is built in the context of the App Store, Chrome must support Google's ad targeting business, and Edge fills a gap in the Windows ecosystem. But Firefox is here to fight for the users: it supports web standards and user privacy as public goods in their own right.

It also happens to be the best browser. It's the one I choose to make my default at home and at work, not for ideological reasons, but because it works the way I want it to. It's fast, private, functional, and more resource efficient.

Even if it wasn't, its existence would be important. In the same way that it's harmful for most people to get their news from Facebook, giving that corporation undue power over the flow of information that informs voters and underpins democratic society, it's dangerous for most of us to access the web through Chrome. In a world where so much of our lives are threaded through the web (particularly during the pandemic), giving one corporation control over the way the web works hands them the same kind of undue power.

And, of course, it's open source. Firefox is built in the open, using a community-driven approach. That alone makes it unique among the big browsers.

Mozilla is one of the few unabashed forces for good in the tech industry, which is why the news that it had laid off a quarter of its workforce hit me hard. It deserves our support.

But these two things can be true at once: Firefox is an important force for good, and it's a squandered opportunity that has not shown the way on the web as often as it should have. In service to Mozilla's desire to provide it for free - perhaps remembering the paid-for Netscape's loss to Microsoft's free Internet Explorer long ago - it has been funded by a small handful of default search engine agreements. There has been no revenue innovation; very little feature innovation that would rock the boat of those lucrative agreements.

It seems odd for a privacy-aligned, community-driven web browser to be largely funded by targeted advertising. It's also a textbook business risk: all Google needs to do is withdraw its check, and Firefox is toast. Something more diversified and reliable is clearly needed.

Mozilla's acquisition of Pocket was a foot in the door for subscription revenue models. Its new privacy-orientated VPN -  sadly not available on macOS yet - is an expansion of that strategy. But it's been executed far from perfectly, and an unanticipated revenue gap was the declared reason for Mozilla's first layoff this year, back in January.

I make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation every month, but I don't pay for Pocket (which I use every day) or the VPN product (which I can't use yet). I suspect many users are like me: we deeply appreciate Mozilla's work, but we're not that excited about the subscription products. Mozilla has done a bad job at targeting us: I'm not sure why it hasn't been possible to become a patron from within Firefox, or to pay an all-in Mozilla Subscription analogous to the rumored Apple One, but I would have jumped on those chances.

Over the last few years, the Guardian has broken even because of reader patronage. Unlike a paywalled site, where only subscribers could access content, readers like me pay to allow everyone to access its journalism. We do it because we find its existence valuable. Wikipedia is another organization that makes a patronage model work. Mozilla occupies a similar place in the world: a socially-positive organization with a minority of users who are affluent enough to pay for the rest, and will do so because they believe it's the right thing to do. There hasn't been a unified strategy to pursue this, but there should be.

There's no need to create a bazillion new revenue-generating products. A VPN is great, but there are lots of VPNs to choose from; a reading app is fine, but there are loads. There is only one community-driven vendor of privacy-preserving internet tools with a focus on keeping their users safe. Mozilla needs to focus on what it does best and do better at letting its community support it. We understand its importance, and we're here for it.

You should install Firefox today.

I've been worrying a lot about the United States Postal Service. This week we've seen sorting machines removed from post offices; post boxes removed from Democratic-leaning areas of Republican-run states; and the President of the United States openly admit he wants to defund the service in order to put postal voting in jeopardy. All this in the middle of a pandemic, when the Democratic base is more likely to be worried (for very good reasons) about going to a polling place to vote.

I had a conversation the other day with a conservative who openly told me that democracy needed to be replaced. I don't know how many conversations like this are happening behind the scenes, away from other peoples' eyes, but I found it alarming to the core. It's not just that democracy is the declared defining value of this country, although it is; it's that we're so far past being able to find any kind of consensus that the conversation is turning away from it. The President himself isn't particularly subtle about his predilections. I have no doubt that there is a solid contingent of conservatives who would prefer to do away with democracy itself than allow Trump to be a one-term President, and I'm certain that Trump is among their number.

Perhaps - hopefully - this conversation was an outlier. The fact remains that our primary means for voting this November is being dismantled with very little outcry. The President's demonstrably false claims about mail voter fraud have been largely unchallenged. And in a year that saw unmarked federal officers under illegally-appointed leadership wreak unchecked havoc on civil rights protests, not to mention the deadly mishandling of the nation's Covid-19 outbreak, it's more important that citizens have their votes counted than ever.

What can we do?

First, if you're a citizen, you need to make sure you're registered to vote. Even if you think you are, it's worth checking, and it's worth doing the same for your loved ones.

Second, call your representative. Let them know that saving the post office is a priority for you. The American Postal Workers Union has a great resource.

Third, and most importantly: vote. Vote your conscience, vote your ideals, but preferably, vote out this anti-democratic, fascist administration.

Fourth, be public about where you stand. Declare what you stand for. This year is not a good time for silence.

For the record, here's what I stand for:

I stand for socialized healthcare, free education, radical criminal justice reform, defunding the police, establishing a strong social safety net, bringing mass shootings to an end, solving the climate crisis, a democratic foreign policy, and a global, cosmopolitan, educated society where anyone can live well regardless of their background, ethnicity, orientation, or religion. A world where poverty is not a death sentence and everyone has the potential to do well - but nobody does badly. An end to the exploitation of the super-poor, and therefore the existence of the super-rich.

I stand for equal rights and opportunities for all, a guiding light based on compassion rather than capitalism, and an understanding that America is just one country on a very big planet.

I stand against concentration camps, border walls, unmarked federal forces curtailing the freedom to protest, theocracy,  police brutality, American exceptionalism, traditional gender roles and "traditional values", corruption, racism, homophobia, sexism, capital punishment, privatized infrastructure, mass incarceration, and anti-intellectualism. The garbage culture of the current administration.

We're not going to get to where we need to be overnight. But of the choices available to us, only one will get us closer.

It's past time to turn around and start heading in the right direction.

I believe we can get there. I really do.

But we've got to work for it.

Photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash

As a kid, when I thought about the future, becoming a software developer was not what immediately came to mind. I loved technology - I learned to write in BASIC at the same time as English - but it was always at its best when it was in service of a story. I wrote small text adventure games and built simple animations.

Those were the programs that captured my imagination, too: LucasArts adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island and adventures like Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which Douglas Adams himself had helped write. They were stories, first and foremost, which happened to be enabled by technology.

I wanted to be a writer.

I still do.

The pandemic has led to many changes in my life. I spend most of my time in Santa Rosa, working remotely as the Head of Engineering for ForUsAll during the day and helping to care for my mother when I'm not behind my laptop. In some ways, I consider myself perversely lucky: her decline has coincided with a time that I'm able to work from anywhere. The hit to my personal life aside, it's worked out pretty well.

But I need something else - something that's mine, beyond the demands of my job and caring for my family. I've decided to give myself the gift of making space for my first love. I won't say exactly what I'm working on (I don't want to jinx it), but I've spent the summer taking classes and workshops on improving my plot and character skills. My aim is to have a first draft written by the end of November - and who knows what will happen after that.

It's been interesting to juxtapose the needs of plot and character with the product work I do every day. While the former is built from imagination, and the latter from research, they're oddly similar skills. Every product can be described in the framework of a three act structure; every target user has internal and external motivations that form the basis of a compelling solution.

But that's not why I'm turning my attention to writing. I'm doing it because telling stories is something I find joy in. It's not to make a living or to improve my day job. It's not even because I think I'll be good at it (because, to be absolutely honest, I don't know).

It's none of those things. It's simply because I want to - and that's more than enough. It's something I can control, that allows me to be meditative and creative, that nobody can touch. And right now in particular, that couldn't be more valuable to me.

I'm trying something new. At this point I've got hundreds of people signed up to receive these posts via my mailing list, in addition to folks who are subscribed via various feed readers or on social media. This is a little bit too close to a braodcast strategy for my liking: the internet is, after all, a conversation.

I'll be working to add more community on this site over the next few months. But for now, I'd love to start by asking you a few questions to help direct my focus and attention.

This reader survey will only take a minute or two of your time, and it helps me a great deal. Feedback is always a gift, and I would really appreciate hearing from you. Thank you!

Every so often, I'm asked to look over a startup pitch deck. I'm no longer investing, but if I have bandwidth and I think the elevator pitch is interesting, I'm happy to provide advice.

The team slide is, of course, the most important part of any pitch, because the people in your team are the most important part of any startup. Lately, I've seen the same problem again and again.

Here's a lesson I learned a long time ago, the hard way: in a startup, everyone has to bring something important to the table that meaningfully pushes the organization forward. The people who just want to tell people what to do, or who are there because having a startup is cool, add burn, slow you down, and reduce your chances for success.

That might sound like obvious advice, but over the years, I've encountered a lot of people who want to play-act working on a startup. They performatively hustle and talk the talk, looking and sounding the part, but when the rubber meets the road, they fall flat. They have the political and interpersonal skills, but they can't build.

Having an idea is not bringing to the table; neither is running a meeting; nor is strategy alone. You've got to make and build, bringing all of your skills and creativity together to actually create something from more or less nothing. Crafting a concrete experience is bringing something to the table. Building a process to repeatably sell is bringing something to the table. Writing and maintaining code is bringing something to the table. Telling other people what to do is not. And you've got to make sure those dynamics, that bias towards action and focus on execution, is a core part of your company culture and how you think about running the business.

It can get nasty. Sometimes, I've even seen non-builders actively try and subjugate the makers in an organization in order to cover for their own shortcomings. In larger companies, organizational politics are an inevitable if uncomfortable part of life, but these kinds of games can kill a startup very quickly. (65% of startups fail because of preventable human dynamics.) Founders need to watch for the politicians and the talkers, and optimize for the people who are not just willing and able to get their hands dirty, but willing and able to make that their entire job.

One of the most common mistakes I've seen in people who move from larger organizations to found startups is to build an organization out of people managers, and then outsource the making part. In effect, the blood and sweat and DNA of your service gets outsourced, while the only people in the office are talkers. It's absurd, and it belies a dismissive attitude towards building things that is orthogonal to success. At one startup I met, someone referred to the engineering team as "the back-room guys". Who would want to join that team?

If your team isn't able to make meaningful progress without outsourcing its work, it's the wrong team. That might not be true when you have a larger corporation's resources at your disposal - although I'm not convinced that it's not - but it's certainly true when you need to build something at speed.

Here's how it came out in the people slide of one deck I recently read. The entire founding team had MBAs and high-level management backgrounds, with no other applicable skills. (The best way to list those is describe what you've built in the past.) Inevitably, the team slide also proudly declared which schools they had graduated from. It couldn't be a bigger red flag: there was nothing to say they could actually build the startup they were proposing. Nobody had ever designed a user experience or written a line of code. To reiterate, it's not alone. This was far from the first startup I've seen - or the hundredth - that had the same problem.

The bottom line is: if you can't say definitively why you're the right team to build (not ideate, not strategize, not pitch, but build) this startup, then you need to stop kidding yourself and find something else to do. It's harsh advice, but in an environment where entrepreneurs are the new rock stars, a lot of people seem to want to cut corners and get famous (such as it is) without putting in the work. The truth is, there are no corners to be cut, and a startup made of people managers will inevitably fail. There is no alternative to building.

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

A few people have asked about my process. I save my interesting links into Pocket, which is integrated into Firefox, my browser of choice. (I trust Mozilla to look after me more than any other browser manufacturer.) And then on the first day of the next month, I go back and re-examine everything I've saved.

If you're receiving this post via my email list, I use Mailchimp to gather the latest content from my blog's RSS feed and send an email at 10am. This morning I reset the timer to noon so that I could get the post out today. I'll return the setting to 10am once it's out.

By the way, I never use affiliate links. This post isn't trying to sell you anything - but let me know if it's useful, or if there are ways it could be more so.

Hardware

Apple Watch 5. I've been resisting quantifying myself, and my series 3 has been broken for a long time. But we're entering the fifth month of quarantine, and I wanted to make sure I was getting the exercise I needed. The series 5 is a nice improvement - it feels a great deal more responsive - and both the VO2 max and ECG functions are really good.

Withings Thermo. Because temperature is an indicator for covid-19, measuring it early and often, and seeing the trend (which is flat for me) is useful. I'm pretty bought into the Withings universe at this point, with the blood pressure monitor and the Body+ smart scale. They're well-built, the app that links them all is equally good, and I like that they're multi-user.

Apps

Libro.fm. I've never really been into audiobooks, but I recently changed over to listen to them when I drive and work out. Podcasts have been less enticing to me recently. Unlike Audible's parent company, Libro.fm doesn't sell technology to ICE to power deportations, and it gives a portion of sales to your local independent bookstore.

Nedl. I invested in Ayinde Alayoke and his team as part of Matter. The app they've created is really cool: a way to broadcast and search the content of live, real-time audio all over the world. He's raising a new round via Wefunder, and I was proud to join.

Books

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. Nominated for this year's Hugo awards, I was invigorated by this exploration of belonging, identity, and what it means to be human. Clearly informed by our present moment, it's an argument for something better than the divisiveness and greed we find ourselves subject to.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong. Vuong's words seem to have a pulse of their own. Sad but occasionally hilarious, I recognized aspects of the immigrant struggle, and of being caught between two parallel universes (figuratively; unlike the previous book, this is not science fiction). Vuong is a poet, and that rhythm and sense of beauty shines here.

So You Want to Talk about Race, by Ijeoma Oluo. Ijeoma was the Editor at Large at The Establishment, a publication for writers marginalized by mainstream media that I was proud to support at Matter. It's taken me a long time to get to her book, which deserves its popularity. It weaves her own story with important anti-racist ideas, and I think it would make a great primer for people who are new to them, as well as an important reminder that we need to do the work for the rest of us.

Streaming

Palm Springs. Yeah, it's kind of dumb, but this 21st century Groundhog Day is also smarter than you think. I'm not sure I laughed out loud, but I had fun watching it. (Hulu.)

The Dog House: UK. All the niceness that made The Great British Bake-Off compelling viewing, directed into a show about adopting shelter dogs. It's the least demanding show you'll ever watch, and maybe also the cutest. I needed it this month. (HBO Max.)

The Act. Beautifully acted by an absolutely incredible cast (in particular, it makes Joey King seem woefully underused in everything else she's ever been in). A harrowing true story. (Hulu.)

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

What I Learned as a Young Black Political Speaker in Liberal White Austin. "What I fear that white Democrats do not understand is that Black Americans have no interest in playing team games if they do not see themselves alive on either team. Democrats offer minor reforms and change street names to Black Lives Matter Avenue. Many of them paternalistically say actions like defunding the police are unrealistic. But if I die in the best world that you can imagine, then there’s a problem with your imagination."

Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm. "Mr. Williams knew that he had not committed the crime in question. What he could not have known, as he sat in the interrogation room, is that his case may be the first known account of an American being wrongfully arrested based on a flawed match from a facial recognition algorithm, according to experts on technology and the law."

What the police really believe. "Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of American policing — and how it justifies racist violence."

GOP senator introduces bill to stop federal funding for schools teaching ‘1619 Project’. "Republican Sen. Tom Cotton introduced a piece of legislation on Thursday that will prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the award-winning New York Times piece The 1619 Project in K-12 schools." Imagine being this racist, or being represented by someone this racist.

McClatchy journalists absolutely can show support for Black lives. I'm glad this was cleared up, but it seems a bit silly that it was ever a question. Support for human rights is not and should not be a political issue.

Breonna Taylor Is On The Cover Of O Magazine — The First One Ever Without Oprah. Arrest the cops who murdered her.

Trump's America

Lest We Forget the Horrors: A Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes. "This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them. This list will be updated between now and the November 2020 Presidential election."

Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state. "Full-time minimum wage workers cannot afford a two-bedroom rental anywhere in the U.S. and cannot afford a one-bedroom rental in 95% of U.S. counties, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual “Out of Reach” report." (Here's that report.)

Homeland Security fears widespread mask-wearing will break facial recognition software. Allow me to play my tiny violin.

Is this the beginning of Trump's Dirty War? "As if on cue, John Yoo, the legal architect of George W. Bush’s torture regime, has emerged as one of Trump’s newest advisors, helping craft legal-sounding justifications for Trump to expand his powers to dictatorial proportions." A genuinely terrifying comparison of Trump's recent actions to historical events in Argentina and elsewhere.

Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years. Right-wing extremists, not so much. As many people have said, the difference is: right-wing activists want people to die, while left-wing activists want people to have healthcare.

“Defendant Shall Not Attend Protests”: In Portland, Getting Out of Jail Requires Relinquishing Constitutional Rights. "A dozen protesters facing federal charges are barred from going to “public gatherings” as a condition of release from jail — a tactic one expert described as “sort of hilariously unconstitutional.”" But not ha ha hilarious.

Esper requires training that refers to protesters, journalists as 'adversaries'. "A mandatory Pentagon training course newly sent to the entire force and aimed at preventing leaks refers to protesters and journalists as "adversaries" in a fictional scenario designed to teach Defense Department personnel how to better protect sensitive information."

Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. By Richard Clarke! Let's not allow the people who were involved in George W Bush's administration absolve themselves of the war crimes they committed, but nonetheless, this is a remarkable editorial.

Culture and Society

Carl Reiner, Perfect. A completely lovely remembrance of Carl Reiner by Steve Martin.

It’s time for business journalism to break with its conservative past. Yes, please.

Magical Girls as Metaphor: Why coded queer narratives still have value. "From unhealthy power dynamics, such as student-teacher relationships; to biphobia, transphobia, body shaming and white beauty standards; to an over-saturation of tragic endings, “forbidden love” and coming-out narratives; I couldn’t really see myself in any of that. But as a young queer pre-teen, I did see myself and what I wanted to be in anime. Not often in yuri, surprisingly, but in magical girl anime and in idol anime."

Why Children of Men haunts the present moment. A beautifully bleak exploration of one of the best films ever made.

Q&A: The Fearless High School Newspaper Editor Covering Portland Protests. This is so incredibly cool and gives me hope for the future. "I found out that my dad has been tear gassed before, because when we were tear gassed he was like, “This is the worst tear gas I’ve ever felt.”"

When Did Recipe Writing Get So...Whitewashed? "Last year when my book was coming out, I had to take a stand against italicizing non-English words. It's a way that Western publications literally "other" non-white foods: they make them look different. But why can't dal and jollof rice and macaroni and cheese all exist in the same font style?"

Tech

Pivot to People: It’s Time to Build the New Economy. "Today’s calls for ethical, humane, responsible, regulated and beneficial technology, compounded with venture capital’s virtue signaling in solidarity with Black lives, brings us to a critical crossroads for corporate America." I really hope this is the future of the tech industry.

Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook. "The company seems to be pretty comfortable with obfuscating the truth, and that’s why people don’t trust Facebook anymore."

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. "We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."

The Adjacent User Theory. "Our success was anchored on what I now call The Adjacent User Theory. The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using the it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them."

“Hurting People  At Scale”. "As it heads into a US presidential election where its every move will be dissected and analyzed, the social network is facing unprecedented internal dissent as employees worry that the company is wittingly or unwittingly exerting political influence on content decisions related to Trump, and fear that Facebook is undermining democracy."

Regulating technology. I strongly disagree with Benedict Evans on his conclusions - long-time readers will know I'm very pro anti-trust, and buy into Tim Wu's arguments completely - but his argument is worth a read.

Twitter says it's looking at subscription options as ad revenue drops sharply. Ads are dying; payments are likely to supplant them just about everywhere. Medium was far ahead of the curve, as was Julien Genestoux with Unlock.

New Survey Reveals Dramatic Shift in Consumer Attitudes Towards Advertisements In Quarantine. I mean, let's be clear: ads suck, and they always have. In the pandemic, our tolerance for bullshit has gone way down.

HOWTO: Create an Architecture of Participation for your Open Source project. I've created two major open source projects and helped to build a third. This is a really great guide which I'm happy to endorse.

Compassionate action over empathy. On building with compassion instead of empathy. This is an important distinction that I need to internalize more. "I worry that when we fixate on empathy, we stay focused and stuck on whiteness and the guilt that millions are feeling for the first time. It’s one reason I’ll no longer recommend White Fragility. The whole book stays on white feelings without switching to privileged action."

Image "Cloaking" for Personal Privacy. "The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them." Super-smart tech.

Mischief managed. "How MSCHF managed to dominate the internet — with fun!" As I mentioned last month, I'm a fan.

Microsoft Is in Talks to Buy TikTok in U.S. Simultaneously, the President is talking about banning it and not allowing Microsoft to buy it. Apropos of nothing, Facebook is about to come out with a competitor called Reels. I'm sure the ban is completely unrelated.

A long time ago, I promised to share the blogs I subscribe to. This is that post - in service of an important question. Who else should I be subscribing to? In particular, which underheard voices should I be listening to, on any subject? Do you have a blog? Have I overlooked you? Let me know.

As with my end-of-month roundups, I've made an attempt to sort these sources into categories, but I subscribe to people, not topics. It's highly likely that people use their blogs to write in a way that defies categorization, and those are the kinds of sources I prefer.

As always: I subscribe using NewsBlur, and read using the cross-platform Reeder app. I also read email newsletters in NewsBlur, and I subscribe to many - but that can be the subject of another post.

The Business of Tech

A Smart Bear by Jason Cohen - thoughts on startups and marketing

Andrew Chen - partner at a16z

Anil Dash - CEO of Glitch and old-school blogger

A VC - Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures, writes daily

The Barefoot VC - Jalak Jobanputra, founder of Future\Perfect Ventures

Both Sides of the Table - Mark Suster, Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures

Coding VC - Leo Polovets, coder turned VC

Continuations - Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures

Crunchbase News - reporting on funding deals multiple times a day; most of them aren't of interest, but sometimes there will be a really useful insight hidden in the news

Dan Gillmor - co-founder of the News Co/Lab

Daring Fireball - John Gruber's prolific, roughly Apple-centric blog

Digidave - Dave Cohn, journalism tech innovator, currently running Advance Digital's Alpha Group

Dries Buytaert - open source pioneer and founder of Drupal; co-founder at Acquia

Benedict Evans - former analyst at a16z; I rarely agree with his societal conclusions, but he's always well thought out and insightful

Feld Thoughts - Brad Feld is co-founder of Foundry Group and TechStars

David Cohen - Managing Partner at Techstars

Hunter Walk - Partner at Homebrew

Kapor Center - one of the most important organizations for making tech more inclusive and impactful

Marco Arment - solo operator of the excellent Overcast; formerly the lead developer at Tumblr and the creator of Instapaper

Marshall Kirkpatrick - former tech journalist (who wrote about my first startup at TechCrunch), now Vice President, Influencer Relations, Analyst Relations, and Competitive Intelligence at Sprinklr

Matt Mullenweg - a founder of WordPress, CEO at Automattic

Lizard Wrangling - Mitchell Baker is Chair of the Mozilla Foundation

Chai Musings - Neeraj Mathur is my former colleague at ForUsAll, and veteran of many of Silicon Valley's iconic institutions

Obvious Startup Advice - Eric Marcoullier is a startup veteran, and this no-nonsense advice blog should be on every founder's list

Pascal Finette - Pascal is a former mentor at Matter; he works at Singularity University, where he's the Chair for Entrepreneurship & Open Innovation

Rands in Repose - Michael Lopp writes about tech leadership and was blogging in the early days

Sam Altman - former head of YC, now the CEO of OpenAI; I often disagree, but understanding Sam's kind of investor mindset is really important

Semil Shah - founder of Haystack Ventures

Signal vs Noise - the canonical corporate blog; this is absolutely how it should be done. Always smart, always insightful

The Slow Hunch - Nick Grossman is a partner at Union Square Ventures

Steve Blank - influential author of the Startup Handbook

Stratechery - I'm a paid subscriber; this is the daily tech analysis blog and newsletter, and the paid updates are absolutely worth the money

This is Going to Be BIG - Charlie O'Donnell is partner at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures

Tomasz Tunguz - VC at Redpoint who often writes about economic history

Doc Searls - author of The Intention Economy, co-founder of Customer Commons, and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto

Seth Godin - thought-provoking short pieces around marketing and motivation

The Philosophy of Tech

Amber Case - calm technology, futurism, and the human side of tech design

J. Nathan Matias - founder of the CAT (Citizens And Tech) Lab

… My heart’s in Accra - Ethan Zuckerman is a media scholar and internet activist

Andy Baio - co-founder of XOXO and Upcoming (RIP) who sits at the intersection of tech and culture in the most beautiful way. Don't miss his links blog

Tatania Mac - an indie engineer who often writes about inclusion topics and maintains Devs of Colour

Craphound - Corey Doctorow is an author and tech rights activist

Ruha Benjamin - the author of Race After Technology

Nadia Eghbal - absolutely remarkable tech researcher who wrote a book on the dynamics of open source that I'm looking forward to reading

Idle Words - Maciej Cegłowski is solo operator of Pinboard, and one of the wittiest voices in tech

Jillian C York - Director for International Freedom of Expression at the EFF

Hapgood - Mike Caulfield is an edtech innovator and arguably a whistleblower; always fascinating insights at the intersection of technology and society

Caterina Fake - co-founder of Flickr, among others

reb00ted - Johannes Ernst on tech at the intersection of fairness and sustainability

LibrarianShipwreck - originally about the future of libraries; now about the future of us

Building Tech

Smashing Magazine - in-depth articles specifically about front-end coding

Minor 9th - Simon Pearson's long-running blog about music, coding, and everything else in-between

Amy MacKinnon - web developer and thespian; usually writes about programming

gregorLove - Gregor Morrill's indieweb blog

Evan Prodromou - open source and decentralized social pioneer, now at Wikipedia

Manton Reece - founder of micro.blog

Julia Evans - software developer and tech zine publisher

Amit Gawande - a software developer in Pune, India

A List Apart - a relatively low-volume, high-signal publication about tech, coding, and the tech business

Tom MacWright - entrepreneurial coder who worked on Observable and Mapbox

Coding Horror - Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, on coding and life

Programming is Terrible - "lessons learned from a life wasted"

Ouvre Boite - Julien Genestoux on decentralization, his adventures in media, and the future of the web

Simon Willison - Simon's a successful entrepreneur, the co-creator of the Django framework, and he's now working on Datasette, a tool for exploring and publishing data

Ryan Barrett - indieweb pioneer and Head of Engineering at Color Genomics

Tantek Çelik - co-founder of the indieweb movement who works on web standards at Mozilla / the W3C, and runner

Tom Morris - coder turned legal scholar

Aaron Parecki - co-founder of the indieweb movement and among the world's most quantified selfs

Throw Out the Manual - Tim Owens on his building and hacking adventures as co-founder of Reclaim Hosting

API Evangelist - Kin Lane on the business, politics, and technology of APIs

Education and Tech

bavatuesdays - Jim Groom is the original edupunk, now the co-founder of Reclaim Hosting

CogDogBlog - Alan Levine is Vice President Community & CTO at the New Media Consortium

Discourses - Doug Belshaw sits at the intersection of open source and education

Hack Education - Audrey Watters is a brilliant writer, truth-teller, and self-proclaimed "ed-tech's Cassandra"; absolutely vital thoughts if you care even a little bit about the future of education

Iterating Toward Openness - David Wiley is the Chief Academic Officer at Lumen Learning and former Shuttleworth Fellow

Laura Ritchie - Professor of Learning and Teaching at the University of Chichester

D'Arcy Norman - Manager of the Learning Technologies group in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, at the University of Calgary

Geoffrey Gevalt - former journalist and founder of the Young Writers Project

Culture & Society

Live Laugh Blog - Jenn Schiffer, Director of Community at Glitch, writes a really entertaining lifestyle blog

Nick Grant - insightful posts about depression and suicide. Definitely comes with a content warning

Every Day Fiction - daily flash fiction that never fails to improve my life

Daily Science Fiction - a new high-quality science fiction story, daily

Charlie's Diary - Edinburgh-based science fiction writer Charles Stross writes about everything with ascerbic wit and the kind of insight you'd expect from a writer of his stature

The Creative Independent - produced by Kickstarter, this is a publication about making it on your own as a creative person

Making Light - I've been reading since this was Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's personal blog in 2001, but now it's something bigger - one of the original, beautifully idiosyncratic communities on the internet

Neil Gaiman - the author of Sandman, among many, many other things

sim.show - Sim Salis interviews people from across the intellectual spectrum about life and career - among other things

adrienne maree brown - the inspirational author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism

Grasping Reality with Both Hands - Brad DeLong is professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and served in the Clinton administration

Nieman Lab's What We're Reading - a linklog keeping track of digital media, startups, the web, journalism, strategy, and the state of the world

I almost titled this blog post "dick-swinging isn't leadership".

Toxic masculinity is highly prevalent in business culture. If we accept that one of the primary roles of a manager is to create the conditions for your team to do your best work, it's something that we need to watch out for and put a stop to early. Speaking for myself, it's also exhausting: I'd rather work on a team that is empathetic, compassionate, and collaborative than one that is competitive, unemotional, and aggressive.

It's important to distinguish toxic masculinity from masculinity: I'm not at all saying that men can't be empathetic, compassionate, and collaborative. Those are certainly qualities I try (however imperfectly) to cultivate in myself. I'm also not buying into the malformed idea of gender essentialism, which posits that some qualities are fixed and core to women and men. Nonetheless, a lot of men have been conditioned to believe they need to be stoic and competitive; that dominance is a positive characteristic. The go-to insult of the anti-feminist alt-right is "cuck": a man who is perceived to be weak or servile. It's an idea that hurts men as much as women, and is one of the reasons that men commit suicide 3-4 times more often than women.

Because of historic inequities that may take generations to untangle, men still dominate boardrooms, and we bring our underdeveloped emotional intelligence with us. We talk over women and question their competence (although this is finally beginning to change). Men also tend to underestimate people who bring a more collaborative energy: someone who isn't aggressive, or is even less self-assured or simply an introvert, is likely to have less space to contribute during meetings, and may be regarded less highly overall within the company. Collaboration and creativity suffer.

It compounds when two subscribers to toxic masculinity clash (whether they're conscious or unconscious subscribers doesn't matter). Tempers will rise, recriminations rebound, and voices are raised. It creates a culture where disagreements are frowned upon, or where people who shy away from visceral conflict are less able to contribute.

The solution isn't that people who are more conflict-averse should become more assertive. It certainly isn't that women should become more like men, or that everyone should learn the skills of toxic masculinity. The only path towards creating a collaborative working environment is to respect everyone in the room, intentionally give them equal footing to speak. As Franklin Hu puts it:

It’s the meeting moderator’s job to both create a psychologically safe environment and ensure that participants have an equal opportunity to contribute. Shaping the environment that meetings happen in helps to lower the barrier for people to contribute in meetings by hopefully eliminating entire classes of extrinsic factors that may dissuade individuals.

By creating an inclusive culture, and specifically calling out toxic masculinity when we see it, we can ensure everyone can contribute, build a more highly-functioning team, improve our company's prospects, and have a better time at work.

I grew up writing. As a child, I would wake up early every morning to write stories with my plastic Parker fountain pen before school. We always had reams of paper on our dining room table, lying in wait.

I learned to code not because I loved discrete logic or the power of algorithms, but because I decided that computers could help me tell stories in a different way. For me, the best source code has a narrative flow, which in turn operates in service of the narrative of the user. Code is an expressive, creative, human medium - but only if it is used to tell a story.

Stories are important.

In a novel, the story finds its compelling core from the tension between the main character's inner goals and an important change in their external context. For example, take an alien invasion in isolation: while it's a dramatic setting, it's not particularly compelling in a vacuum. But let's zoom in on the main character. Maybe they've lost a loved one through an act of violence, which has made them want to shy away from any kind of conflict and keep to themselves. Unfortunately, now they happen to be the only person who holds the key to stopping the alien invasion - if they can only rise to the occasion.

It's a far more interesting story. An alien invasion itself isn't compelling, despite the pyrotechnics; what draws you in is the human story of someone who undergoes a personal transformation because of the invasion. We're naturally empathetic animals; we care about other people. We relate to the process of human change on a deep emotional level more than we relate to abstract ideas.

It took me a long time to understand this.

Startups, too, have a story. Just as a novel needs to be character-focused, a startup's idea alone isn't enough. Don't get me wrong, you need a smart idea - but for your startup to be a truly compelling prospect, you need to tell the human story of someone who undergoes a personal transformation because of what you've built. You have to imagine the novel of your venture.

My first venture, Elgg, was a stroke of luck. We had no idea what we were doing. Perhaps because of that, we fell back on the fundamentals of story: we tried hard to understand the internal needs of our customers and their external context, and built a product to address them at the intersection.

My second venture as a co-founder, Known, was not so lucky. Instead of centering it on real human needs, we built something that we thought should exist in the world. We centered our own desires, and I failed to get out of the way of my own ego. The result was that while Elgg is still in use, and was used by governments, non-profits, and corporations around the world, Known was never able to find escape velocity. It was intellectually driven and founded on a good idea (it's really dangerous for everyone in the world to get their news and post their social activity on just a handful of platforms), but was never able to find its emotional center. Because the story was missing, it was never truly compelling to us, let alone anyone else. So it floundered.

Imagine an accounting service. Is your heart racing yet?

Probably not. (Sorry, accountants.)

But now, let's talk about the main character. Imagine someone who owns a small business in the middle of the country. This company was already stretched thin because of widening income inequality, and now has to stretch even further to make ends meet because of the pandemic. Financial hardship means that employees sometimes don't show up for work because they can't afford to fix their car, or because childcare is out of reach for them. The business owner genuinely cares: they've been making one-time loans and running a hardship fund to bridge the gap. But if they're not careful, they'll run out of money, and everyone will be out of work - so they need to find creative ways to provide help to employees and stay in business.

This far more compelling story sits at the intersection of the top-down trends (the financial situation, the pandemic) and the bottom-up needs (business owners need to help in order to keep their employees but are having trouble finding the funds). It's a tightrope. Given enough specificity, we can be made to feel the business owner's pain.

The customer (here, the business owner) is the first character in the story. The startup (here, the accounting service) is the second. First, the customer is introduced, complete with internal need and external pressure. Then the startup is introduced: a group of humans who provide a solution for both the need and the pressure (a one-click way to help find hidden reserves of funding employee assistance programs, at a negligible cost). They meet somehow (the "discovery moment") and ride off into the sunset together, living happily ever after. The customer's pain is solved. The startup's value is proven.

Of course, if this was a pitch, the startup would have to talk about how it's going to meet millions of these customers and grow like wildfire because it meets their needs so well. In turn, it meets their needs because the product is built in service of a business strategy that is informed by empathy. It's not built to be something for everyone: it's built to service the deeply-held needs of a specific group of customers.

In my time as an early-stage investor, I saw how important that human understanding is. The founders who could get out of their own way and be led by their understanding of the people they were serving are the ones who were more likely to win. The founders and coders who thought they were the smartest people in the room and didn't try to find a deeper understanding were the ones who found themselves in trouble.

I've been both kinds of founder. It's a lesson you only need to learn once.

The key to story is that it's all about people: how they change and grow. If your novel doesn't hinge on that, nobody's going to read to the end. If your business doesn't hinge on that, nobody's going to care what you do - not even your own team. The first step is to find out who your characters are, and understand them as deeply as you can. Then, tell a specific, visceral story that your entire community can rally behind.

These days, I don't need reams of paper sitting on the dining room table, but I still wake up early to write stories. Being able to use imagination and empathy as building blocks feels like a gift. As it turns out, it's one we all have access to. We just need to read more, and care more.

Photo by Nong Vang on Unsplash

It's impossible to ignore.

Federal agents dressed in military gear have been bundling protesters into unmarked vehicles (allegedly rented from Enterprise) in Portland, with additional reports from Chicago and San Diego. The White House has announced that they'll be rolling these troops out nationwide.

Reports suggest that these agents are run by the Department of Homeland Security under the same law that allows the Federal Protective Service (also a DHS agency) to protect federal facilities. ICE, CBP, and FPS are now effectively a federal political police force, operating at the whim of the President.

At the same time, the President told Fox News this weekend that he isn't necessarily going to accept the result of the election if he loses, in part because of mail-in ballots. He's been drumming the mail-in ballot line for months now, despite there being no evidence of voter fraud using this method. We're in the middle of a pandemic: of course there will be an increase in mail-in voting. It's certainly how I plan to do it. By seeding the idea that this kind of voting is fraudulent in a year when a huge proportion of votes will be cast this way, the administration opens the door to deny the outcome of the election.

Such an act would be the end of the American experiment. America depends on the government making way for its constitutionally-elected successor; without this mechanism, there is no democracy, and there is no representation. The richest country in the world, with by far the world's largest military, would be under the direct control of Donald Trump.

It sounds like science fiction. It rhymes with a Philip K Dick story. But here we are.

"It can't happen here" doesn't carry any weight anymore, if it ever did. It is. It would be easy to dismiss the rhetoric as bluster if it weren't for the troops in our cities, the concentration camps on our borders, and the corrupt profiteering eating away at our institutions.

Which isn't to say that those institutions were in any way perfect. I think people like to believe in the theory that Trump is a Russian asset because they like to think that nothing like this could be American. But this is a country of Jim Crow and domestic assassinations; it's the country that aided in the Iranian revolution and paid Osama bin Laden to build an army. This kind of fascism is as American as apple pie (which is to say, invented in Europe and coated with a little extra sugar). I'm not, to be clear, saying that Trump isn't necessarily a foreign asset. But it certainly isn't a given that he is; divisiveness and bigotry have been a part of the culture since the Europeans invaded.

I can see a few possible futures, all unfolding like a slow-motion train wreck.

In the first, Trump wins the election fair and square, and considers his re-election to be a mandate. Don't discount it.

In the second, he loses to Biden, and concedes. People with a sense of human decency everywhere rejoice. And then either the Democrats rapidly undo as much of the last four years as they can, or disappointingly squander those first two years in power as its conservative wing desperately fights against the improvements demanded by its progressive wing.

In the third, he loses to Biden and doesn't concede. This is the one where America ends. At the point where an election is meaningless, democracy is meaningless. The modern day version of the Reichstag passing the Enabling Act under the threat of the gun is passing emergency powers under the threat of information about our representatives being made public.

I would like to be wrong.

I would also like all this to be over.

I would like to not be thinking about what to do if the third future comes to pass.

But it's very hard to ignore, and to concentrate on the details of the rest of our lives while this unfolds as we stand by, powerless.

We're not quite powerless, of course. We can still vote (and we must). We can support institutions like the ACLU that fight for our freedoms. We can support journalism, which more than ever is the vital connective tissue for democratic society. We can march. And we can use our own voices, in our own spaces and with our own communities, to raise the alarm.

The European Court of Justice just struck down a key data-sharing deal between the US and EU because the US sees fit to spy on the world.

Privacy Shield was a mechanism that allowed US tech companies to operate in the EU using a blanket agreement. By creating a compliant privacy policy and self-certifying, they could operate within Europe's tighter personal data protection environment. It operated like a kind of safe harbor program: there was no need to create a privacy policy specifically for EU residents, and companies that complied with its principles could assume that they were operating within the law. GDPR fines start at the higher of 10 million Euros or 2% of the company's worldwide revenues in the preceding year, so this was both a legally and financially meaningful protection.

It was knocked down on Thursday because of America's mass surveillance programs.

In November, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order which, among other things, made it clear that US privacy law would only protect US citizens and "lawful permanent residents" (in other words, surveillance of non-citizens living elsewhere or undocumented immigrants is permitted):

Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.

This was effectively a clarification of existing policy rather than a new regulation. Because agencies like the NSA have historically had no restrictions on collecting data about overseas foreigners, tech companies that transmitted personal data into the US would be exposing that data to broad surveillance in violation of EU law. As we know from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, those surveillance powers are often used on US citizens too, and information sharing between the US and UK allowed intelligence agencies to skirt around privacy laws in both countries.

While undoubtedly imperfect, GDPR had a very positive side effect: although it only pertained to EU residents, its effects were felt worldwide. It's not feasible to create one data storage protocol for one set of users and another for others, so in effect, at many tech companies, all user data was held in a way that complied with the legislation.

Here, too, the effects are likely to be felt worldwide. In addition to the existing compelling moral case, there's now a strong business case for international corporations to push for an end to mass surveillance: the loss of Privacy Shield is a real risk to their bottom lines. As privacy activist Max Schrems, who originally brought the case, put it:

As the EU will not change its fundamental rights to please the NSA, the only way to overcome this clash is for the US to introduce solid privacy rights for all people – including foreigners. Surveillance reform thereby becomes crucial for the business interests of Silicon Valley.

Mass surveillance is a human rights abuse that has a measurable chilling effect on free speech and democracy. Surveillance capitalism has long been a go-to business model for tech startups, although this has been slowly changing during the last few years, in part because of pressure surrounding human rights abuses by agencies like ICE, but also because targeted advertising turns out to be less valuable than hoped. Anything that further aligns the business community with an individual's human right to privacy is good news.

Meanwhile, US legislators continue to work to erode our privacy. The EARN IT Act will pressure tech companies to eliminate end-to-end encryption so that communications can be directly surveilled. It serves as a stark contrast to the Privacy Shield ruling, and a reminder of the wildly divergent priorities on either side of the Atlantic.

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

Back in April, I tweeted this about how I thought Covid-19 would go down over the next few months:

My working assumptions: we’re not leaving lockdown until the end of August / beginning of September, and there will be a second wave after this, because it’ll still be too early. We’ll see layoffs even at seemingly wealthy companies. Social distancing until at least 2022.

At the time, people were telling me that I should prepare to be in lockdown for maybe another month (so, until two months ago). There had been lots of talk about everything being up and running for Easter (April 12), or for Memorial Day (May 25). My tweet looked like doom-saying pessimism.

If anything, my assessment now seems overly optimistic. The World Health Organization is now saying we'll have it under control in 3 to 5 years; Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says we won't have a vaccine until 2021 (which in itself is very fast); almost 40% of healthcare executives think a vaccine won't be made available to all until 2022. Social distancing is likely to be with us for some time to come, and with it, a real change to the way all of us live. This will be true all over the world, but particularly in the United States, where leadership and our own hubris have continued to spectacularly fail us.

Here in the US, 73% of companies plan to keep at least some workers permanently remote; 30 million people lost their jobs because of the pandemic; at the time of writing we're in the last week of the $600/week of federal unemployment benefits (unless Congress extends this help). No matter what happens next, the effect of this era will be felt for generations.

Unfortunately, this is particularly true in communities of color. Indigenous and Black Americans are five times more likely than white Americans to be hospitalized because of the virus. Hispanic or Latinx Americans are four times more likely than white Americans.

We should have been mentally preparing ourselves for a long pandemic this whole time. Assuming these figures hold, the following is true for the foreseeable:

We are not going back to the office.

We are not going to resume the same kind of social activities we're used to.

We are not going to conferences, or to the movies, or to conventions.

We are going to need to adapt.

It's difficult to imagine how we would have coped before the internet. For the last few decades, it's slowly become ingrained in all of our lives. For the last few months, it's become the way all of our lives can operate: famously through Zoom (which is now worth 78X its revenue), but also Slack, Facebook, and all of the apps and services that keep us in touch with each other. All of these services were created long before Covid; it's going to be interesting to see the services people create to cope with the specific challenges of the pandemic. I am hopeful that while some of those services will be startups, others will be open source collectives of people who want to help.

It's also difficult to imagine how our current systems of care can cope. A pandemic makes clear that we are, as individuals, only as healthy as we are as a society: if lots of people have a deadly, infectious disease, I'm more likely to get it too, no matter what healthcare plan I'm on. It's in all of our interests to establish a genuine social care system that allows everyone to be safe and healthy - and in a world where millions of people continue to lose their jobs every month, it's vitally important that this safety net isn't tied to employment. Healthcare must be a human right. Housing must be a human right, with strong tenant protections. Food must be a human right. The fallacy that every single thing needs to be a free market must come to an end.

We're going through a period of major change, and we're still only on the first foothills. There's a long, hard road ahead. Surviving the next few years will mean covering new ground, and redefining a great deal of how society works.

Most importantly, we will need to finally learn to work together.

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

As a manager, I believe my primary role is to create the conditions for my team to do their best work. I'm a proponent of servant leadership. That's become even more important this year, for obvious reasons: we're in the middle of a pandemic that has also had significant economic effects. We're all working remotely (which I've done for over a decade, but is new for this company); we all have significant extra stresses in our lives.

I've always felt that one of the opportunities for smaller startups is to provide stronger professional development. Whereas other, richer companies can provide eye-watering salaries and kombucha on tap, smaller ventures have the ability to provide more flexibility in support of an employee's personal goals. The result can be a level-up in skills and experience that is far in excess of what might be possible in a more rigid organization of thousands of people. By working at very small startups, I've been able to get my hands dirty working in an interdisciplinary way, and I've developed a mindset of action over discussion; I don't think my career would have been possible without this experience. I want to provide that to the people who I support.

There's no great manual for this, although I consider myself to always be learning. Here are some things I've found useful, which I'm putting out as a request for feedback as much as anything else. I'd love to learn what other managers have found useful, and I'd love for thoughts on the techniques I've been using.

I'm a happy user of Range, which helps us plan our days, check in with each other, and understand each other a little bit better. We've found that it also helps to have live standups every day, and we have a tactical meeting every week, but the Range updates are a low-friction, high-empathy way to keep everyone on the same page about the work going on.

The 1:1 has become the most important way for me to support each member of the team. I make sure that I spend time with every engineer on my team; the space is theirs to bring up anything that's important to them, and I've often found myself helping with external factors that might also be affecting their work. I want to support the whole human, and it's often stretched me as a person.

How you show up in this framework is incredibly important. As a servant leader, it's much more about being a coach than, for example, being a teacher or a micromanager. This year, I found Ed Batista's course The Art of Self-Coaching to be really useful; normally it's a part of Stanford's MBA program, but a version was made available to all because of the pandemic. It's helped me formalize some thoughts around growth vs fixed mindsets in particular, as well as be more self-aware about how my own thoughts and feelings affect my team and my work.

They own the agenda. I always start a 1:1 by asking what's top of mind for them. Sometimes, the resulting discussion can take up the whole meeting; occasionally it'll overflow into follow-ons. I'll sometimes prod with questions like "what are you excited about?" and "what are you worried about?", which will reveal topics that hadn't readily risen to the surface.

A while back, I asked everyone to work on a professional development plan. I've seen a lot of development plans that are just about identifying what someone wants to learn, or how someone can improve, without really touching on the "why" of it. Particularly for younger engineers, that might not be something they've thought too deeply about, so I wanted to create a better framework for figuring that out.

Here's a lightly redacted version of the template I came up with. If it's helpful to you, please feel free to adapt and use it (I'm also very interested in feedback). It asks the owner to think about what their mission at their work is - what do they want to achieve over the course of their career? It specifically offers my own mission, as well as another sample mission, as examples. Following this, it asks about their goals - where do they want to be a few years from now? Again, I offer examples, including for myself. And finally, it asks what the tactical next steps are towards getting there. (This is analogous to the mission, vision and strategy of a company.)

That mission and vision might not involve working at the company forever; the colleague might want to found a startup, for example. That's completely okay. The answers to each of these things might not come readily; that's an opportunity for us to work together to figure it out. But once we have some of those answers, particularly to the tactical next steps, I make sure to refer to them during every 1:1. Are we making progress towards these goals together? What else can I do to help?

Finally, I'll sometimes use a feedback exercise I learned at Matter. This is something that's been harder to reproduce while we've all been remote; I'm planning on building a lightweight web tool to support it. But in person, I've found it to be very useful in a variety of situations. The jist is: on 6 Post-Its, you provide feedback for yourself (3 supportive items, 2 things you'd change, and 1 item that reflects how you're feeling about your work), and then you do the same for the other person. Then you provide that feedback for the other person, who has also provided feedback for themselves and for you. Because everyone is being vulnerable and taking care to be mindful of how they express themselves, the exercise results in a kind of radical honesty that's usually hard to achieve at work. It has the power to clear the air, identify opportunities for real growth, and find wins that you might not realize existed. I love it.

You may have noticed that despite being a product and engineering leader, almost none of this is directly to do with product and engineering. I've certainly got opinions on how to, for example, run brainstorms and retros; I've also got opinions on how to think about building software. We often talk about those things in these conversations. But the core of being a manager is about supporting the people you work with. That's more about the touchy-feely human stuff than anything else.

If you have resources, ideas, or feedback on any of the above, I'd love to hear them. I'm always learning, and I could always do better.

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

Last week I suddenly felt horrendous: I felt deeper fatigue than I had in years, I was experiencing severe headaches, and I was finding it hard to think straight. My daily work has become a series of Zoom meetings, and I careened from scheduled event to scheduled event, hoping I could just get through it.

Of course, this being 2020, I began to worry about Covid-19. I spend most of my time right now around my immunosuppressed mother, who is not doing well completely independently of the pandemic, and I'm deeply worried that I'll somehow transmit something to her. I'm a little bit worried about the virus for myself, too, but to be honest, I have no idea what my life looks like beyond all this - not just beyond the pandemic, but also beyond my family's health journey.

I don't have Covid; I just came dangerously close to burning out.

Lately, I've learned that too many stimuli lead to my feeling physically wrecked. It's not just that the notifications, messages, and tiny dopamine hits make me feel mentally overwhelmed, but they start to push me to the right of the bell curve of physical anxiety symptoms. I need to rate-limit and sanitize my inputs, otherwise my outputs suffer.

At this point, my social media hiatus from Thanksgiving through to New Year's Day has become a tradition. I always feel better. It's got very little to do with the actual content of social media - although endless outrage is inevitably wearing, it's not like any of the outrage is actually misplaced - and more to do with the physical mechanisms of the software itself. The interaction mechanics that keep us coming back for more, designed to juice the engagement statistics, undeniably increase my anxiety - if only just a little.

Which I think would be fine if it wasn't 2020. We're in the middle of a global, deadly pandemic. My mother is dying. My father is getting older. My sister has become long-term disabled with chronic pain. I have a demanding job (which, to be clear, I love). The President of the United States continues to show his true colors as a racist and a fascist. And the blowback from the world's largest civil rights movement - a point of hope in itself - is staggering, even within my own extended family. Finally, there was an event in my extended family this week that I don't even begin to want to talk about here.

Given all this, the baseline of stress is much further to the right of the anxiety bell curve, which means that stimuli which would ordinarily be tolerable are less so. Again, it's not so much about the content of the stimuli: I've even discovered that playing Stardew Valley, a lovely little computer game about running a farm, has been sometimes too much.

I'd like to remain functional, be able to show up well at work, and support my family and friends in the way I would like. So that means cutting out stimuli.

Rather than cutting things out wholesale, I'm going to aim for moderation, at least to start. I like that Screen Time has made its way to MacOS from the iOS / iPadOS devices. Because my screen time goals sync between them, I can allocate myself 30 minutes a day for game playing, for example, and 45 minutes for social media. (Because RSS feeds and blogging are not rapid-fire, I don't feel the need to ration them.) I've also made a concerted effort to bring down my Zoom meeting load by around a third, giving me more contemplative time at work.


I recognize that talking about burnout and cognitive stamina isn't really the done thing - I think I'm supposed to be hustling? Shouldn't I be building a personal brand based on excellence and productivity? But that's exactly why I'm talking about it here. We all need to look after ourselves and each other, now more than ever. I spend a lot of my time caring for others, and it can be easy to forget self-care. But the old adage of needing to put your own oxygen mask on first is true. I need to do better at remembering that, and maybe you do too.

Here's the media I consumed and found interesting in June.

Apps

Linear. A super-powerful bug tracker designed to speed teams up. I'm using it for personal projects right now, but I might expand that. I particularly like how it connects to GitHub issues, and how it inherits just the right things from Jira's classic design, while discarding the rest.

Streaming

13th. I saw this for the first time in June - and regret being super-late to the party. The entire movie is up on YouTube. If you haven't yet, educate yourself.

Dark Season 3. If you haven't checked out Dark yet, you're missing something. Watch it in its original German with English subtitles. And maybe keep notes: its human-centered science fiction story is densely plotted to say the least. Season 3 adds a whole new dimension, literally.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I needed this. It's a giant ad for the song contest, really. Which is fine, because I happen to love the song contest. One of those objectively terrible movies that brought me a lot of joy.

Books

Blood Dazzler, by Patricia Smith. The story of Hurricane Katrina told through poetry. Blood Dazzler is heart-wrenching work. Patricia Smith is - as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, among other things - a four-time National Poetry Slam champion, and the spoken-word rhythm underlying her work is impossible to ignore.

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change. "So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform." Barack Obama on Black Lives Matter.

Black Journalists and Covering the Storm That Never Passes. "I can’t tell you how many times I, or someone on my team, has cried into their laptops over the injustices inflicted daily on black people, who have gone to bed with anxiety over what looms in the morning, in the aftermath of another violent act against our humanity."

Why So Many Police Are Handling the Protests Wrong. "Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave—and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force—wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters—it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?"

The American Nightmare. "But only the lies of racist Americans are great. Their American dream—that this is a land of equal opportunity, committed to freedom and equality, where police officers protect and serve—is a lie. Their American dream—that they have more because they are more, that when black people have more, they were given more—is a lie. Their American dream—that they have the civil right to kill black Americans with impunity and that black Americans do not have the human right to live—is a lie." Ibram X. Kendi is the author of How to Be an Antiracist.

Stop focusing on looting in Minneapolis. Be outraged that police keep killing black men. A good opinion from the LA Times editorial board. The constant commentary from people who believe property is more imporant than the murder of a community is sickening.

This Is Fascism. "The message of this federal government is unambiguous. It has been conveyed in part by Customs and Border Protection, the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S.—a force shot through with racism and tyranny, now charged with carrying out Trump’s most knee-jerk nativist impulses—which announced Sunday that it was mobilizing officers to augment police forces “confronting the lawless actions of rioters.”"

Thousands of Americans across the US are peacefully marching against police violence. A beautiful photo record of the protests.

'We Just Want to Live.' Photographers Share What They Experienced While Covering Protests Across America. More vital photo record.

How Did BlackOutTuesday Go So Wrong So Fast? I believe this was deliberately co-opted. he net result was that black voices were silenced on social media for days.

Don’t Fall for the ‘Chaos’ Theory of the Protests. "Why were peaceful protesters being tear-gassed, on national TV? Because Trump and his aides—nearly all of them men and every one of them white—had decided to punctuate his speech with a walk across Lafayette Square to a church where Trump posed, clutching a Bible. What became even clearer, though, was that the Bible-posing was not the photo op the Trump administration was aiming for; the clearing of Lafayette Square was. The video that played out on CNN’s split screen was a document of state power in action: the president, his will made manifest; the protesters, their eyes reddened from tear gas, forced to make way for the leader."

The Police Take the Side of White Vigilantes. "Who are the cops for? Over the last week, all across the country, in ways large and small, they’ve shown us." The slave catchers are living up to their legacy.

We Crunched the Numbers: Police — Not Protesters — Are Overwhelmingly Responsible for Attacking Journalists. "Police are responsible for the vast majority of assaults on journalists: over 80 percent." From the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world. "Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable." Fingers crossed.

Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. "American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth."

The Police Have Been Spying on Black Reporters and Activists for Years. I Know Because I’m One of Them. And if you're not familiar with COINTELPRO, it's worth reading up on that, too.

‘To see this, I am honored’: Brother of man killed by Seattle police reflects on time in CHAZ. "If John were here, he would be honored. All my heart and soul show this will work. The government is listening, that we have had enough. I’m proud of this."

Recall That Ice Cream Truck Song? We Have Unpleasant News For You. ""N***** Love A Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!" merits the distinction of the most racist song title in America. Released in March 1916 by Columbia Records, it was written by actor Harry C. Browne and played on the familiar depiction of black people as mindless beasts of burden greedily devouring slices of watermelon."

Elsewhere in American fascism

Dozens Of Immigrant Families Who Were Separated At The Border Likely Shouldn't Have Been, An Internal Report Found. "The inspector general's report found that 40 children were separated from their parents for at least four weeks, although one didn't see their family for more than a year."

Political Symbols at Demonstrations. "Researchers at the Tow Center and Columbia’s Journalism and Engineering schools have developed a tool that can help reporters decipher the symbols and acronyms used by political groups which may be helpful as they report on political actions now and during the election season." The far right is out in force.

A letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Pentagon policy official James Miller's resignation letter. "You have made life-and-death decisions in combat overseas; soon you may be asked to make life-and-death decisions about using the military on American streets and against Americans. Where will you draw the line, and when will you draw it?"

James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution. "Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us [...] We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children."

The Real Apprentice. "At this time, most native New Yorkers saw Trump as a bit of a joke: a fame-thirsty, tasteless rake with a history of high-end failure. He made disastrous deals, like the Plaza Hotel. His airline failed almost as soon as it began. He even found a way to go bankrupt on casinos. But on television, through careful editing—turning three hours into thirty seconds—Mark Burnett made Trump seem decisive, funny, and likeable."

How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. "Rumors of roving bands of Antifa have followed small protests all over the United States. Why are people so ready to believe them?" There's a lot of value in keeping people scared - particularly of a bogeyman that seeks to undermine your ideology.

No, Trump probably can’t list antifa as a ‘terrorist group.’ Here’s what he’s really doing. "The Trump administration is unlikely to designate antifa a terrorist group in counterterrorism law. If it did, that designation would be difficult to enforce, since antifa is not really an organization. Nor is it clear how much antifa supporters have committed actual terrorism. But Trump’s announcement could suggest that U.S. counterterrorism agencies are shifting their priorities. This is worth watching."

The U.S. Military Has a Boogaloo Problem. "Some of the largest private Facebook groups catering to the [neo-confederate] boogaloo movement have scores of members who identify as active-duty military."

‘State-sanctioned violence’: US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. "Police in America’s biggest cities are failing to meet even the most basic international human rights standards governing the use of lethal force, a new study from the University of Chicago has found."

America’s wholesome square dancing tradition is a tool of white supremacy. It turns out this information is still not widely known.

And finally, two pieces of good news from the Supreme Court: Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules; California’s ‘sanctuary’ cities rules stay in place after Supreme Court rejects Trump’s challenge.

Technology

A New iOS Shortcut Blurs Faces and Wipes Metadata for Protest Images. Neat!

IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology. I was very pleasantly surprised by this ethical stance. "In his letter, [IBM CEO] Krishna also advocated for police reform, arguing that more police misconduct cases should be put under the purview of federal court and that Congress should make changes to qualified immunity doctrine, among other measures."

The Racial Bias Built Into Photography. "Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market."

Black tech founders say venture capital needs to move past ‘diversity theater’. "There’s a dearth of black investors in venture capital’s upper echelons and little investment in start-ups with black founders".

This startup is working to bring full anonymity to the internet. Kudos to Harry Halpin and his team.

Pinwheel is the API platform for income verification that every fintech and neobank needs. Meanwhile, a quiet fintech revolution is taking place. As always, in a gold rush, you make money providing spades (building infrastructure that others can build on).

Colin Kaepernick to Join Medium Board of Directors. Kudos to Ev and everyone at Medium.

Facebook Pitched New Tool Allowing Employers to Suppress Words Like “Unionize” in Workplace Chat Product. "One Facebook employee who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity said he saw the blacklisting feature, with a suggested use case around unionization, as a clear effort to give employers the ability to exert control over employees." It would be illegal for an employer to use this, right? Right?

Facebook Groups Are Destroying America. "Dynamics in groups often mirror those of peer-to-peer messaging apps: People share, spread, and receive information directly to and from their closest contacts, whom they typically see as reliable sources. To make things easier for those looking to stoke political division, groups provide a menu of potential targets organized by issue and even location; bad actors can create fake profiles or personas tailored to the interests of the audiences they intend to infiltrate. This allows them to seed their own content in a group and also to repurpose its content for use on other platforms." I'm a little skeptical of this, but it's worth reading.

The Ghost in the Machine. "We could expect a Black programmer, immersed as she is in the same systems of racial meaning and economic expediency as the rest of her co-workers, to code software in a way that perpetuates racial stereotypes. Or, even if she is aware and desires to intervene, will she be able to exercise the power to do so?" A good exploration of the ideas in Dr Ruha Benjamin's excellent Race After Technology.

He Removed Labels That Said “Medical Use Prohibited,” Then Tried to Sell Thousands of Masks to Officials Who Distribute to Hospitals. "Using TaskRabbit and Venmo, a Silicon Valley investor and his business partner had workers repackage non-medical KN95 masks so he could sell them to Texas emergency workers." This is overt, life-threatening fraud.

How to Know You’re Not Insane (And how a Cards Against Humanity Staff Writer was fired.) My copy - acquired at XOXO in the early days - is finally finding its way into the recycling bin.

And finally

The Seven Billion Habits of Highly Effective Robots. A cute science fiction short.

Nine months ago, I joined ForUsAll as Head of Engineering. It's my first fintech company.

Long-term readers will know that I've spent most of my life in the open source web world, building one of the first white label social networking platforms, and in media, where I helped build the way journalists at networks like NBC securely send footage back to the newsroom. Every startup I've ever joined has had a strong social mission; here, in the midst of widening income inequality, we're trying to help ordinary people build a stronger financial future.

This is my personal space; opinions here, as in all of my posts, are mine alone.

Here are some things I've observed.

1. Financial technology is broken.

It's common for financial institutions to have web platforms that look like they were built in 1998. Some of them were. I'm certain that some smaller institutions are running their software on decrepit Windows servers. APIs are virtually nonexistent. Interoperability between institutions is often in the form of faxes (you read that correctly; please breathe) or checks in the mail.

Over in Europe, open banking has become an important movement. It's inevitable that institutions in the US will need to modernize to adopt similar ideas. The institutions that haven't invested in in-house technology, or don't have strong technology partnerships, are going to find themselves in very rocky waters.

Elsewhere, businesses understand that open, standard APIs are a way to build ecosystems and gain value through partnerships. They also understand that they need to build technical teams that are first-class contributors to the business. In the financial sector, a very closed, old-world view of technology is still prevelant. The institutions that can't let go of these archaic mindsets will eventually die. There's a new batch of fintech startups - ForUsAll among them, alongside the likes of Chime and Digit - that will take their place and redefine the ecosystem.

Which brings me to ...

2. Scraping is everywhere.

Plaid was recently acquired by Visa for $5.3 billion. It provides a unified auth and limited API for most institutions. Its connections are sort of flaky, but it's remarkably better than the previous status quo.

And it largely works using Puppeteer.

Because institutions don't have APIs, Plaid spends a lot of time and energy maintaining headless browsers to log into banking websites on your behalf. In order to be able to log in, it has to be saving your banking password in plain text. (Compare and contrast with a typical API, which would use secure, revokable tokens for authentication.)

If you're connecting to a bank using Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and others, you're probably saving your banking password in plain text in Plaid. Infuriatingly, because there are no APIs, let alone API standards, there's very little alternative. But it's worth saying that if you're giving credentials to a third party, many banks will absolve themselves of any liability in a data breach.

3. Operations teams are vital.

The first rule of technology on the internet is that if it looks like magic, there's probably an army of people in an office park somewhere (often the Philippines) making it happen. In the finance world, a lot of the magic isn't done by technology as much as teams of people whose role is to reconcile data and perform financial operations that can't be automated.

There's room for a kind of Financial Operations as a Service platform - but because of the sensitive data involved, the workers on demand would need to be certified, heavily insured, and security tested. You'd also lose their most important feature: the institutional knowledge about a customer that is grown when you spend time with them.

4. There's a lot of opportunity for growth.

Institutional technology myopia means there's a lot of room for innovators to enter the market and change it for the better.

But there's also a lot of opportunity to create ecosystems. Perhaps that's even how you win: create an open ecosystem that allows institutions to easily interoperate with each other in a peer-to-peer, secure way. The older institutions won't bother to connect, but the newer ones could potentially form alliances and band together. Eventually, the incumbent institutions will have to join in.

Imagine a banking system built on openness, human-centered design, software libraries, SDKs, and running code, instead of armies of Excel spreadsheets and ties behind desks.

Imagine beautiful experiences that give you full control over your money. Imagine institutions that aren't all just controlled by old, white men for their own benefit. Imagine wealth for all.

It sounds kind of good, right?

Now imagine the ecosystem that makes it all possible.

I know what you think that sounds like. I know what many readers are going to say. But trust me:

5. It's not about blockchain.

Programmable money isn't cool. You know what's cool? Money people can use.

I'm sure there will come a time when cryptocurrencies do allow the open banking ecosystem I describe above to be built. But that time isn't now. And while I'm grateful for the people working on building the financial system of 2030, we still need to drag the existing one into the 21st century.

Again: people are, today in 2020, using faxes and paper checks as forms of inter-bank communication. When technology is used, user passwords are often saved in plain text. And many of the people involved don't really see anything wrong with it. Blockchain might be one of the technologies that helps us, but the point isn't about technology; the point is what people are able to do with their money.

6. It is about wealth for all.

So that's what we need to build. We need to build the infrastructure that brings banking in line with today, in that way that the internet is so good at, where gatekeepers are crushed and ordinary people are empowered.

In the nineties, we empowered everyone to communicate. In the 2000s, we let everyone publish. In the 2010s, we put limitless knowledge in everyone's hands, wherever they were. And in the 2020s, we're going to reimagine the financial system to be an open ecosystem where anyone can innovate, for the benefit of us all. The old gatekeepers will give way to new, decentralized tapestries of value, where anyone can share, earn, and save in a way that they fully control.

The 2020s are about tearing down the same old thing and building something more equitable and agile in its place. That's the opportunity - and it's an opportunity for all of us.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Journalist James McLeod examined the data gathered about him by the app for Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee chain:

From my home to my office to a Blue Jays game at Rogers Centre, even all the way to Morocco, where I travelled on vacation last June, the company’s app silently logged my coordinates and relayed them back to its corporate servers.

The app uses tracking technology by Radar Labs, which is also used by a host of other retail apps, including Burger King and DryBar. Users opt into data collection when they begin using the app.

The Supreme Court has held that cellphone location data is generally protected by the Fourth Amendment. That means that law enforcement needs to get a warrant before it can tap this information. The court case actually dealt with cell carrier data, rather than data stored by services like Radar Labs, Facebook, or Foursquare, so between this discrepancy and the ominous word "generally", there's certainly some wiggle room.

The President recently called for anti-fascists to be designated as terrorists. Although legal scholars seem to agree that this isn't going to be possible, this call provides a call to action for law enforcement to focus on protesters (rather than white supremacists, who are the largest domestic terrorism threat).

Geofence warrants allow police to sweep up information from any cellphone that happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. While protests are protected under the Constitution of the United States, many have tried to paint the current civil rights marches as riots, even though violent activity has often been instigated by police. These clashes allow them to obtain blanket rights to search phones that were present during a protest - and of course, in a world where data is in the cloud, they don't need physical access to the device to do so. Republicans like Matt Gaetz have called for surveillance to be stepped up.

Further warrants are possible to obtain from sympathetic judges. The fact is, though, that a lot of location data is available on the open market in a semi-anonymized form - law enforcement can obtain it like any other customer. It's possible to reverse engineer this data to determine an individual's actions and associations over time. This information can and is used to spy on and harass activists.

So when a coffee chain gathers data in this way, presumably for its own commercial intelligence, it is also feeding into a broader surveillance apparatus that can be used to track protesters, determine associations between people, and stifle dissent.

I don't believe that anyone at Tim Hortons is intentionally trying to create a police state - but actions are more important than intentions. It's now up to them, and everyone who builds technology, to do the right thing.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

So far, these are the organizations I've donated to this month:

NAACP
NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Alameda County Community Food Bank
Black Family and Child Services
Peoples' Breakfast
Freedom Fund
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment
Official George Floyd Memorial Fund
Equal Justice Initiative
Southern Poverty Law Center
ACLU

I'm interested in recommendations for other justice organizations. And if you have the means, I encourage you to join me.