Werd I/O

I found this piece about the "do what you love" mantra challenging:

By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, [Do What You Love] distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

It goes on to describe how this way of thinking actually erases peoples' work:

But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, conveniently hidden from sight on the other side of the planet — the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.

The whole piece is worth reading.

I don't think it's completely right, but there's no doubt that "do what you love" comes from a place of privilege, and is only available to a small subset of people. It certainly shouldn't diminish the work done by other people, as the article rightly points out. And there is an implied distinction there, which implies that someone is somehow less of a person if they aren't in the privileged position of being able to work in a particular way.

That implication is unjust, and harmful in a variety of ways. From a technology standpoint, I find myself coming back to the obvious questions: How can we empower? How can we help remove these kinds of divides? And then wondering if these are the right questions at all.

I like the sound of the Objectives and Key Results system that Google uses:

First, you set up an Objective. Then you set up a number of "Key Results" that are quantifiable that will help you hit your objective.

Your objectives should be definitive and measurable. Don't say, for instance, I want to make my website prettier. Say you want to make your website 30% faster. Or you want to increase engagement by 15%.

This is great, but only if every single person in the company does it. If you limit OKR to certain people, for example engineers, then you create a two-class system: people whose performance is graded, and people who aren't. Everyone up to and including (and in some ways especially) the CEO needs to be a part of the system.

On a Google Ventures post about the system, Rick Klau clarifies:

Low grades shouldn’t be punished [...] OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations. OKRs are about the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals. Performance evaluations - which are entirely about evaluating how an employee performed in a given period - should be independent from their OKRs.

Makes sense, right? It encourages employees to set ambitious objectives, and ranks the company as a whole on how its constituent members hit their targets. I think the transparency - everyone can see everyone else's OKRs - is an important facet of that.

Have you used them? How did they work out for you?

I enjoyed, but didn't fully agree with, TechCrunch's piece Silicon Valley Lost, And Found:

However, in other ways, what drew my mother and my grandfather here is very much alive. A desire for non-conformity and a grandness of aspiration still exists in certain entrepreneurs here. The 150-year-old Gold Rush mentality lingers on in the engineers who show up every year from all over the world to try their luck at starting new companies. The Valley’s unique cultural language around materialism and status persists. While it does get flashier every year, there is still a certain discretion about being well-dressed or having a nice car here, at least compared to New York or Los Angeles.

"Non-conformity and a grandness of aspiration" is what I love about working in tech. I find subversion comforting, so find a lot to love in cities like Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco (just like I enjoyed the anarchic artistic scene in Edinburgh). As well as the cultural environment in those places, which developed independently of the technology industry, I enjoy tech's ability to look at the status quo and decide that it can be made better. Contrast that with many industries, which remain stagnant, or worse, start to see themselves as institutions.

But let's not forget the petty bigotry and wealth-imbalance-related issues that have started to come to a head this year. Or the more-and-more audacious displays of wealth. That "discretion" about materialism that the author discusses is important to me; even in the short time I've been here, it's become more and more visible to me. I'm interested in what I consider to be the "real" Silicon Valley, by which I think I mean the "authentic" one: the one that's about making things better with your skills, rather than people turning up because they think they can make a fast buck.

The difference is illustrated ably, earlier in the article:

Working with bankers and traders also wasn’t the same as dealing with founders, engineers and hackers day in and day out. People were sharp, but they didn’t love their work - not the way my grandfather or dad did. Jobs in banking were a means to accumulate year-end bonuses and holidays. They didn’t spend their spare time messing with a half-dozen oscilloscopes or building makeshift telescopes.

Those people - the folks in the basement with their oscilloscopes and telescopes, tinkering on their own terms - are my heroes. The people with that nerdy tinkerer mentality, and the freedom to pursue it that is still fairly unique to Silicon Valley, are the ones who changed the world, and will keep on changing it.

It's not written about much these days, but out there in the rest of the world, engineers still draw scorn. You hear them being talked about as "back-room guys", with the implications that the other, "normal" people should be front of house. Geekdom is still niche, and in places, taboo. And that's one of the other things that makes Silicon Valley special - here, geeks have freedom to be themselves, outside these constraints. And it turns out that when they have this freedom, they create the world's most valuable companies, develop transformative technologies, and so on.

This is important. What worries me a little about the latest trends are that the engineers have been co-opted into a resource by incoming people with dollars in their eyes. Factories of willing developers are being established based on the promise of the previous generation, and the lottery-like idea that maybe your company will succeed to the tune of millions, or billions, of dollars. As one engineer told me at a well-funded company that will remain unnamed, "yes, you work weekends, but everyone else does too, so your coworkers kind of become your family." That's nothing short of a bullshit deal, and it seems to me that this kind of exploitation risks killing what's special about the Valley. It also perpetuates the inequalities we've heard so much about this year.

But the non-conformist geek engineers are still there, tinkering on their own terms, side-by-side with San Francisco's counterculture, which lives on. It's one reason why I've fallen in love with the #indieweb community (and its spin-off, Homebrew Website Club). These movements are no less likely to change the world, but they're on our terms, for us and for everyone, rather than the predatory desires of a generation of hopeful MBAs.

I hate gyms. At their best, I'll stick a podcast on, hook myself up to a machine, and do a circuit of resistance training to follow. If it's a good podcast, I will have learned something, but I don't think they're interesting, and I don't think they're real exercise. I also don't think that one burst of exercise is as healthy (or feels as good) as spreading exercise throughout the day. I've never been good about building them into my routine.

My career and livelihood also demands that I sit in front of a computer all day, at high levels of alertness. This isn't a recipe for good health, and it's not uncommon (although, I think, less common now!) to see laptop warriors swigging at soda or chugging a Red Bull to keep their energy up. I don't want to be that guy, and the two to three cups of coffee I drink a day already worry me.

I grew up in Oxford, a town where walking is easy; it was as fast to walk the two miles into the city center from my house as it was to catch the bus. So I learned to walk everywhere - something I continued to do when I moved to Edinburgh, and something I still try and do here in the US. It's harder here, even in cities like San Francisco; in some parts of America it's actually a kind of taboo to walk instead of take the car. I hear there's also some kind of obesity epidemic these same places. I'm shocked.

Walking everywhere - six miles or more a day, according to Fitbit - has always been my number one form of exercise. Here, I have to be a bit more careful about it. My work is based in Austin (I'm the outlier here in the Bay Area), and don't have an official office, so I could just pay for something that suited me; I chose Local Office, a perfectly-placed spot in West Berkeley that meant I automatically had a 3 mile walk built into my day. I took another hour to stroll around for lunch, and I had my six miles. This last year, I started to build in other forms of exercise; sometimes, when nobody was in the office and I was at a stopping point on whatever I was working on, and nobody else was around, I'd drop and do 20 push-ups. By the time the office closed, I'd worked my way up to 100 a day. (And lost over 15 pounds.)

Local Office is sadly gone. These days I often work out of RockIT Colabs, a coworking / maker space (they have an office upstairs, 3D printers and welding stations downstairs) right on the edge between Chinatown and the Financial District in downtown San Francisco. The community is perfect for me, but even factoring in my BART ride from Berkeley, the exercise isn't quite there. For some reason, I've also lost my habit of jumping up from my desk and walking around or doing some intensive exercise whenever I hit a stopping point. (The ability to drop and do some exercise with impunity is one of the few benefits of working from home over a shared office space.)

I'm having once again to think more explicitly about exercise - I'm definitely gaining weight, despite mostly eating well and doing the right things - and may, once again, have to try and join a gym. Or I might consider becoming a runner. Or something else.

If you're sat in front of a computer all day, what do you do to keep yourself healthy?

The moments when I do my best thinking are always the quiet ones. All my devices are off, there's no sound around me except for (when I'm lucky) the gentle breeze through the trees, or the swish of far-off cars. My mind is at peace; uncluttered and uninterrupted, while at the same time free to meander.

Which is at odds with where my brain is for most of the rest of the time. Compared to many of my peers, I use a relatively small number of devices on a regular basis: really just one phone and one laptop. Nonetheless, I find myself checking social media potentially hundreds of times a day. I'm a dopamine addict, and I'm pretty sure it's killing my creativity, concentration and productivity.

I'm not alone. Earlier today, Tantek Çelik adapted an old saying for the modern age:

In the land of the distracted, the singularly focused person is king.

But how negatively is social media affecting the way I think?

Note that the problem is with multitasking, not lack of focus. Unfocused thought can be an advantage:

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to outline the surprising benefits of not paying attention. Sometimes, too much focus can backfire; all that caffeine gets in the way. For instance, researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity—people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. Other studies have found that employees are more productive when they're allowed to engage in "Internet leisure browsing" and that people unable to concentrate due to severe brain damage actually score above average on various problem-solving tasks.

The results regarding multitasking, however, are not so positive. Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford, noted the effect of multitasking on students at his institution, specifically with respect to smartphones:

The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. [...] We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted.

They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And even - they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks.

Furthermore, just as second-hand smoking has effects beyond the original user, this multitasking behavior affects others too:

On a test following the lecture, students in view of multitaskers performed significantly more poorly than those who weren't in view of multitasking. The difference was 17 percent, enough to drop a solid A to a B-. Less surprisingly, a second study confirmed that the multitaskers themselves, not just those who incidentally witnessed multitasking, similarly suffered a drop in performance.

I've struggled with low self esteem for much of my life, which is associated with dopamine levels, and may make me more susceptible to this kind of addiction. Regardless of whether there's any truth to this or not, in 2014, I want my brain back.

Already, I've reduced my social media usage by posting to my own site here at werd.io rather than directly to the silos in question. This month, I'm reducing the number of quick-fix sites and networks I participate in, and have already jettisoned Instagram and Snapchat. It's not that I'm becoming an Internet hermit; instead, I want to focus on the kinds of content and interactions that are enriching to me. If I'm learning, growing and being productive, that's great. If I'm persisting because I get superficial rewards with no real lasting value to me, then it's time to jump ship. Long-form communication and engaging conversations are important.

As is spending more time with everything switched off, a cup of tea in my hands, leaves rustling in the breeze.

It's traditional to create resolutions for the new year. I've been thinking a lot about where I want to take my work in 2014; these are some ideas.

Write.

Specifically, I want to write more for other people, following from my previous work for the likes of ZDNet, IBM DeveloperWorks and Packt Publishing. I'm also interested in guest posting on blogs and sites around the web, about the social web, #IndieWeb, open source and responsible application development.

Empower independent content creators.

How can we put independent creators on a level pegging with the world's largest media companies? One thing I've been thinking about is that 24-7 news channels are obviously not a future-facing content medium given the web, where you can look up breaking news whenever you want, wherever you want, from whomever you want, without having to wait for a newscaster to restart their 30-minute cycle. Despite the ease of the web, leaning back and watching TV (or some screen) is sometimes pleasurable. Could you create a video newscast that aggregates stories from multiple providers based on your interests and context? Google News meets CNN?

Help support niche communities on the web.

The strength of the web is that we can all publish and communicate with each other, in a variety of different media, and it can all interlink as a single, continuous mesh of conversation and information. Unfortunately, that strength has been undermined by the proliferation of data silos, which make it harder to establish these kinds of links, and also limit certain kinds of content, topics and conversation through conservative design.

There are so many things to talk about, in so many ways, and by limiting ourselves to the platforms that the likes of Facebook provide, and by funneling the value generated by our communities to those sites, we're not using the web to its full potential. I want to help support the full range of communities on the web, and help them be self-sustaining, so that the people who create safe spaces for niche topics can continue to maintain them.

Idno is certainly a part of this idea, and I will continue to develop it as a first-class social publishing platform for both groups and individuals.

Figure out open source for designers.

Open source software suffers by treating designers like second-class citizens.

The open source process for programmers is well-established: we have many different flavors of version control, and the tools that surround them are first-class. I'm as happy as I've ever been working with Git, and software like GitHub and GitLab.

Working with design media is harder. Not only is it hard to represent visual changes using version control, and manage them in a sensible way using our project management tools, but even the accepted file formats for design work are closed. Photoshop comps are the norm, and UX wireframes often use closed software like Omnigraffle. That's because those tools are absolutely the best ones for the job, but standardizing on those formats make it harder to build open tools for design collaboration. And even with this aside, issue trackers are all written with source code in mind.

Collectively, this all means that welcoming designers into an open source community is extremely difficult. Nonetheless, design is an extremely significant part of any software project. It's worth thinking about the first steps towards making this easier.

Build bridges.

It's hard to share from, eg, the Twitter app to my own website, whether it's based on Idno or something else. I'm planning on building a shim that allows me to do that more easily, based on Android's share dialog. But there's more to do. There are ways to take ostensibly closed platforms and find ways to pry them open. For example, functionality to share closed content by email can be used to integrate directly into other, open software. Other integrations are possible, exploiting "growth hacking" features designed to find more people to lock into these platforms.

Work from everywhere.

I've still never been to Seattle. Or Tokyo. Or Melbourne. And it's been too long since I was in London, or Oxford, or Edinburgh. I want to travel more, and use the fact that I can work anywhere there's an Internet connection - and that I am not responsible for a family at this stage in my life - to see more of the world.

If you'd be willing to host me at your office for a few days, wherever you are in the world, let me know!

Wired reports that we're about to lose net neutrality, and "the Internet as we know it":

[...] Today, that freedom won’t survive much longer if a federal court — the second most powerful court in the nation behind the Supreme Court, the DC Circuit — is set to strike down the nation’s net neutrality law, a rule adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2010. Some will claim the new solution "splits the baby" in a way that somehow doesn’t kill net neutrality and so we should be grateful. But make no mistake: Despite eight years of public and political activism by multitudes fighting for freedom on the internet, a court decision may soon take it away.

Couple this with the persistent attacks on our privacy and freedom of communication that have come to light over the last year, and we need to ask ourselves if the Internet is still the networking platform that we need.

I don't think it's as crazy a question as it sounds.

When we talk about the Internet, usually we're referring to the protocols and services that run on top of it: the web, DNS, email, and services that sit on top of them, like Wikipedia, Facebook and Google. The Internet is the foundation on which each of these things sits - but it's certainly possible for similar kinds of experiences to be built on different kinds of networks.

This has already been attempted, of course: Internet2 is a network run for academic and research purposes, using many of the same protocols as the Internet, but on different infrastructure. Some 60,000 institutions are connected.

When the Internet was initially designed, many of the things we take for granted were not incorporated into its architecture - most notably, ecommerce, the web, and the widespread communications we now use every day, across browsers, apps and devices. A lot of these services and technologies are able to exist because of hacks and shims. That's a fantastic testament to the resilience of the network, but perhaps it's time to learn from those attempts and build a v2.

Additionally, the current design clearly allows governments and other entities to easily monitor communications, jeopardizing the business and private communication that it's simultaneously revolutionizing. Just as any business that solely bases its products on Facebook, say, is constantly under threat from that company choosing to change its API, algorithms or interfaces, any business that bases its products on the Internet is now under threat from surveillance activity.

What if we could then choose to modernize our global communications by inventing a new Internet, designed to be used by commerce and protect independent communications? I don't think it's enough to bake encryption into its core (although that should happen) - revelations about, eg, companies like RSA using backdoored encryption methods suggest that we should look at algorithms and methodologies that are inherently more secure even when data is not encrypted. Neutrality should be inherent; ownership and governance decentralized.

If creating a new global network sounds daunting, that's because it's undeniably a mammoth task. Nonetheless, I think there's value in looking at the Internet as a proof of concept, as a thought experiment: what could we change to protect ourselves, protect each other, and continue to change the world without interference from surveillance or corporate misdeeds?

As part of the Nieman Journalism Lab's Predictions for Journalism 2014, Jason Kottke writes:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

He then goes on to discuss the death of the reverse-chronological stream, as well as the inevitable move to what he calls tightly-bound social media sites. Thematically, it's an interesting companion piece to Anil Dash's seminal The Web We Lost, which was published last year at about this time.

And, despite some hedging on his personal blog, it's clearly true. Almost none of you will have found this link through a feed reader (although my stats show that some of you are using Feedly, Digg Reader, and even Livejournal's RSS feature). Most links will have come through Twitter and Facebook, with a straggling number showing up through app.net and similar sites. If I'm lucky, someone might submit this post to an aggregator like Hacker News.

Note, though, that you're still reading it. The article isn't dying; you can think of the blog, or the stream, or the feed, as the container that the article sits in.

Medium exploits this in a clever way by presenting articles nicely, and then providing a magazine-style site for you to consume them in. Indieweb arguments about whether you should publish posts on a site that you control or on someone else's aside, there's no doubt that Medium's injected new life into long-form text on the web. That's great, and like Facebook and Twitter, you can choose to think of it as a well-executed proof of concept.

If you buy the idea that articles aren't dying - and anecdotally, I know I read as much as I ever did online - then a blog is simply the delivery mechanism. It's fine for that to die. Even welcome. In some ways, that death is due to the ease of use of the newer, siloed sites, and makes the way for new, different kinds of content consumption; innovation in delivery. Jason talks about the ephemerality of Snapchat (which is far from a traditional feed), and there are an infinity of other ways that content might be beamed to us on whichever device we happen to choose to be using at any particular moment. But these content forms are minor details.

The beauty of the independent web is that we can choose to represent ourselves online - and therefore, publish content - in a manner of our choosing. I happen to like the reverse-chronological feed, but if you prefer to publish in the form of an immersive 3D world, or a radio show, or full-screen autoplaying video with annotations, then, hey, that's up to you. It's all part of a rich, interlinking medium. Independence means not necessarily going with the flow.

The counterpart to that is how you read content. In the past, we've been very stream-heavy: RSS readers, Twitter feeds, Facebook timelines, and so on. But there's no need for that to be the case. Part of the joy of a diverse web is that while I might choose to read in the form of a feed or a newspaper, you might want to mash your reading list up in entirely new ways. You could have a robot announcer read to you while you drive to work in the morning (wouldn't that be better than the radio?), or mash related articles up to provide new kinds of content that provide better insight than the sum of their parts. And I can choose to use a completely different form to you. Each one of us can have a completely different experience.

That's a tough concept to get across to an audience that's used to mass media, where everyone consumes the same content in the same form. But we don't need that anymore. Not only can content be personalized, but the form of the content can be personalized. Facebook might agonize over the algorithm that decides which posts are surfaced, but in the future we can each have our own algorithms. Form and content will be separated.

These new kinds of readers will begin to appear in 2014, powered by simple web technologies like HTML and microformats. They will eventually be as easy to use as Twitter and Facebook. And they will make us all more empowered readers and creators, once again connecting us all, but this time on our terms.

TechCrunch reports that IBM bought Aspera yesterday:

Aspera’s software is built on “fasp,” its patented file transfer technology. Fasp is designed to leverage a company’s wide area network (WAN) and commodity hardware to achieve speeds that are faster than FTP and HTTP over a secure network. A WAN is essentially a company’s network across a large geographic region. Aspera’s technology optimizes the WAN through its software that allows for granularity in the way the technology is used. Through the process, Aspera optimizes the bandwidth, latency, bottlenecks and a host of other factors.

Essentially, Aspera is an optimized, proprietary protocol built on UDP. The sender and receiver needs to have Aspera software (or software that licenses Aspera's technology) installed for the transfer to take place.

IBM's thesis that we need faster file transfers is obviously correct. Uploading large data or media files is a pain, and it's not a problem that's going away. While downstream bandwidth is getting better all the time, upstream bandwidth often suffers in comparison - and between big data, more sophisticated applications and our insatiable appetite for video, the size of the files we're moving across the Internet is going up.

[Disclosure: right now I'm CTO at latakoo, a startup that helps enterprises (including TV news networks) move large amounts of media data around. We use a toolbox of compression techniques, as well as a global upload network, to make managing media files much faster. Journalists use us to, for example, upload video from Air Force One while the plane is taxiing down the runway.]

Don't think there's a problem? 5 minutes of recorded video on an iPhone 5 can be 1gb or more in size. Try uploading that from anything other than a super-fast broadband connection.

The trouble is that a protocol like Aspera's naturally leads to lock-in, and can only solve the problem for certain kinds of software. Unless fasp is open-sourced now that it's owned by IBM, every piece of software you own will need to have a license for their patents in order to take advantage of it. Not only does that lead to more expensive software, but it also limits the innovation that can happen around the protocol. If your business relies on fast file transfers, that's a lose-lose situation for you: you're locked into an expensive ecosystem, and there's little chance of a disruptive incomer to tweak and play with the protocol. Because of that, folks will just invent new protocols. When an improvement is made, it's likely you'll have to buy into a whole new ecosystem, as opposed to just upgrade to the next version. You'll hop from lock-in to lock-in.

Knowing that we need to speed up uploads, and use all available bandwidth, we need to think about other, more open approaches. UDP makes a lot of sense as a bedrock, but an open protocol designed for resilient file transfer is needed - and then, with a first version prototyped, we need to seed libraries all over the place, in every available language. We need to design it for backwards-compatibility. And we need to make sure it remains unencumbered with patents (possibly, in today's climate, by defensively registering a patent and then widely granting a license).

Our approach with Latakoo has always been to use standard protocols and optimize the files that are being transferred over the top. That works really well, and ensures wide compatibility with all kinds of networks, from corporate infrastructure through satellite modems connections. Even better would be to be able to rely on a well-supported open protocol that optimizes the upload stream in ways that TCP does not (and then, continue to optimize content with this as a starting point). Bittorrent exists, of course, and is wonderful - but is often blocked because of unfortunate connotations and liabilities relating to media piracy.

Developing such a protocol is in the interests of Netflix, Google, and, yes, Latakoo. Faster file transfers are empowering for every user, and save large service providers money. They're easier to integrate with, and allow for an ecosystem where the customer is in control. Everybody wins.

Aral Balkan announced IndiePhone today. He did a good job of making it sound exciting, in a very Jobsian way:

I think it's great that he's driving interest in the subject, and of course it's fantastic to see anyone starting something up with these sorts of principles. I particularly agree with his arguments about poorly designed open software. I do have some specific questions though:

1. I'm curious about the motivation for actually building a phone. That seems like a very Apple thing to do - whereas for me, an indie approach would imply being able to run the software of my choice on the device of my choice, with full control over data transmissions and storage. It's also a dangerous thing to do, and could taint the water in the same way that Diaspora arguably did for decentralized social networking. The Ubuntu Phone failed, and it had a giant name behind it. Meanwhile, Firefox OS, with a much more handset-agnostic approach, is chugging along nicely.
2. What might the experience look like? Whereas the likes of Apple are very prescriptive, to me "indie" suggests that I should be able to tailor my own experience to a much greater degree than other platforms. For example, the ideas surrounding a people-focused communication experience might work well for a lot of people, while others might want their phone / platform / OS to work another way. Independence means I should be able to choose.
3. I want to make sure latakoo and idno can both run on it. What might that process look like? What kind of software will it run? That isn't clear yet.
4. Why was it necessary to trademark the word "indie" in the context of the cloud and operating systems (as well as "indie cloud", "indie phone" and "indie OS"), given that the indie web is a concept that's been around for years now?

I love the ambition here. But I'd also love to know more, and I'm a little bit concerned that the presentation inadvertently co-opts terminology and ideas developed by existing communities, without involving them in the project.

I've been using personal computers since before I could write my name, but grew up hating Macs. To me, they were expensive, style-fascist icons that represented a kind of elitism that I was allergic to. Computers should be for everybody, and I felt like the Mac represented an ideal of something that was only available to the wealthy. (We were not particularly financially wealthy when I grew up, but my parents always did make sure we had a computer, from the Sinclair ZX81, through an 8-bit Atari, to a series of MS-DOS PCs, and I learned BASIC and written English at more or less the same time.) I did finally buy a MacBook Pro a couple of years ago, but mostly because I'd managed to destroy the plastic casing of a series of PC laptops, and I realized I needed something made of metal. I drive my laptops hard.

So I want you to know that this comes from a position of non-fanboy-ness: the MacBook Air is astonishing.

It's only got 4GB of RAM, but I guess the solid state drive and high IO performance makes up for it, because it performs at least as quickly as my MacBook Pro with 16GB. The processor is also a little slower, but the only time this has revealed itself so far was when initializing Xcode for the first time, and it paused briefly. The ten hours of battery life - allegedly up to 15 on Mavericks - should more than make up for that. I don't think this is going to be a video editing workhorse, but guess what? I rarely edit video.

Where are its speakers? They're like magic, because the sound is far better than on my Pro, or any laptop I've ever owned, and I can't see them anywhere. Are they behind the keyboard? The sound just opens up and fills the room. It's fantastic. And the rest of the Air is silent. No fans, no nothing.

I'm installing all the usual development tools on it, of course, and I'll be using it as a development web server and everything else I could possibly need. The fact that I can do this with a machine that weighs under three pounds and has a battery that will last a transatlantic flight is a freaking revelation.

My MacBook Pro's wifi died this year, and it couldn't be replaced without a significant expense, so it's just become my new desktop machine. Don't feel bad for it: I expect I'll be using it for years to come (every other part of it works really well). But barring any major gotchas, an Air seems like a much better portable machine. I just wish it came with a retina display.

This little exchange has been tickling me:

In closing the debate Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury looked back to the past and directed a question directly at Lord Grade, previous Director of Programmes at the BBC Michael Grade.

"Finally, as Doctor Who has dominated the debate and I see my noble friend Lord Grade in his seat, I cannot resist wondering whether, had he known that Sylvester McCoy would regenerate into John Hurt, he would still have cancelled the programme?"

Lord Grade nodded vigorously to indicate the affirmative.

Politics.

I've been following this pull request thread involving the removal of gendered pronouns in an open source project with interest. It's an obvious change to make a project more inclusive, yet it was met with:

Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.

A patch was finally included, but then reverted by the same commenter.

This is dumb. In English, choosing gender-neutral pronouns is simple. Here's how, using the aforementioned reverted patch as an example:

• Gendered: The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop him from sending it twice.
• Neutral: The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop them from sending it twice.

In the past, I've heard people gripe about the use of "them" to reference a singular person, but it is actually correct English. It's called the "epicene they". Shakespeare used it; Jane Austen used it; you can use it.

One more time:

• Excludes 50% of your users: The user must feel comfortable using your software, otherwise he may choose another product.
• Inclusive: The user must feel comfortable using your software, otherwise they may choose another product,

There's no extra effort involved. Have at it.

Back in the old days, you'd get a newspaper delivered, and you'd perhaps read it around the breakfast table or at your desk to find out what was going on in the world. The same paper, day in, day out. You'd read the columns, know which comics they ran, maybe do the crossword.

Some people still do this. That's nice. There's something great about reading a paper over a cup of coffee in the morning.

That doesn't apply to the web. Here's the Independent's paywall message:

Thank you for reading and relying on independent.co.uk for your news and information. You have now viewed your 30-day allowance of 5 FREE pages. Want to read more?

I'm sorry, The Independent, but I don't rely on you for anything. I don't read a linear paper on the web; I follow links curated by people I trust. The New York Times has no such illusions, meanwhile, but tells me, in all caps:

YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH

Thanks, The New York Times. There's no need to shout.

The Independent's US price is $3.99 a month. The New York Times is a little more complicated, and expensive: $3.75 a week for the web and my phone, $5 a week for the web and my iPad, $8.75 a week for the web and my phone and my iPad, or all of the above plus a pile of dead trees every morning for the inexplicably lower price of $3.40 a week.

The New York Times is my favorite newspaper on earth, but imagine if I did this for every source I read on the web! I'd be broke, instantly. This is a model that scales well for the dead-tree economy, but doesn't work at all on the Internet, where you could easily read 10 sources in just a morning.

Hence advertising: the Independent knew I was unlikely to buy, so actually displayed a full video ad next to the advertisement asking me to subscribe. It clearly wasn't contextual, because it was for a Porsche - so it's a shot in the dark, basically. Awareness advertising with no real metrics (I assume) to back it up.

Another model must be found.

I don't think it's micropayments. Imagine if you had to pay for every single thing you read on the web, which is the future that micropayments promise. Just as if you paid for a subscription for every newspaper site on the web, if you're anything like me, you'd be broke pretty quickly. Or, alternatively, the payments would be of the kind that we've seen on subscription music services. That's a road that leads directly to Buzzfeed, where articles must be massively popular to turn a profit - and hence are impossibly populist.

In the old days, classified ads played more of a role. It's true that Craigslist's success disrupted $5 billion from the newspaper industry, but it's also true that this does not explain the hard times newspaper owners are experiencing. The context has changed, and attempts to drive traditional subscriptions show that the industry still hasn't full adapted to this. It's not that we're reading on multiple devices now, in different locations - it's that we're reading differently. The newspaper front page hasn't been our first stop in a long time.

Obviously, none of this is, well, news - countless articles have been written about this over the last decade. Yet, a solution has yet to be found. Which is a shame: journalism, newspapers and the communities they represent have become an important, and I'd say integral, part of the world in which we all live.

This year, my mother's life was saved by a double lung transplant. I still have flashbacks to the day she was called, and to the moment when she was pushed through the double doors, wide-eyed, and I didn't know if I was ever going to see her again. Almost nine months later, she's upstairs, taking some medication. It's been a tough road, mostly for her but also for all of us, and I'm thankful that she's here.

I'm thankful that my aunt, who had two separate single lung transplants a little before my mother, is also with us.

And, oh boy, am I thankful for all the wonderful surgeons, nurses, doctors and medical professionals who helped those things be true.

I'm thankful for my family, for their support, and for the fact that we're close. There are people who don't get along with their families, who dread every familial get-together for the arguments, weirdness or stoicism. I'm grateful that I'm not one of them, and am so proud of both my nuclear and extended families. My dad in particular has been a superhero this year. And apropos of nothing, here's the song my sister wrote for my mother a few years ago, when her illness began to really take its toll. I'm grateful we're all in the same place, more or less.

I'm thankful for the support I've had from a raft of people who have understood when I've had to take time out or change plans to help my parents. I'm also thankful for all the people who have understood that this has, in some ways, been the hardest year of my life, and gone out of their way to help me out and be there for me.

I'm continually thankful for everyone who has taken an interest in my work, been a friend to me, and been a part of my life this year. I've met some wonderful people and cemented relationships with people I'm glad to know. And while 2013 has been tough, with all this support and all these wonderful people in my life, I don't see how 2014 can't be an amazing year.

#ma #erica #thanksgiving #thanks

Back in 2009, I wrote:

Right now, we have to register with each application we want to use. What if we required each application we used to register with us, in digital identities under our own control?

What if, using these identities, anyone could connect to anyone else, and anyone could store their data anywhere as long as the storage provider followed the same broad standards?

The web itself would become a social networking tool.

By establishing a general standard for social application interactions, the services and technologies used to make connections become less relevant; the Internet is people, one big social network, and users no longer have to worry about how they connect. We can all get on with communicating and collaborating rather than worrying about where we connect.

The full piece was based on a talk I gave at Harvard University's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. It declares a number of problems to solve:

• User control: users should have ultimate control over their data.
• Ownership: granularity of ownership, and the rights implied by ownership, is complex in certain contexts. Sometimes a single-user model of ownership is appropriate - but sometimes not.
• Privacy & Transparency: the ability to control who has access to your data footprint across the web, but also a clear knowledge of what happens to that data.
• Platform: software that actually embodies these properties.

In the interim, there have been many articles about the continuing silo-ization of the web - notably The Web We Lost by Anil Dash. In other words, the problem has become worse, not better. Generally speaking, users have less control, less ownership, less privacy and fewer platforms to choose from in 2013 than they did in 2009.

A glimmer of hope has been the indieweb, which I've written about at length. This is a movement that champions ownership, but through it, principles like user control, privacy, transparency and a healthy ecosystem of platforms are also promoted. Idno, the open source platform that powers this site, adheres to many indieweb principles.

There's more work to be done. I believe that contextual display advertising is the single biggest obstacle to a web that is under the control of users. In our advertising economy, users are tracked throughout the web in order to determine which ads will be performant for them. Mozilla Lightbeam is an extraordinary project that highlights the pervasiveness of the problem. Wherever we leave a data footprint, we are tracked.

The irony is that contextual advertising isn't even very effective! Fraud is rife in online advertising, and the price of online ads has dropped for eight straight quarters. As a result, publishers need to drive higher and higher visitor numbers, leading to less subtle growth strategies, often bordering on the unethical. Platforms seek vastly increased engagement, leading to an inability to remove your content, what amounts to spamming you to bring you back to the app, and a reduction in integration hooks that might make the software more useful within the context of a user's entire suite of applications.

On the content side, meanwhile, viral sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed are king, which is great if you're writing about the top 15 things you might not know about Miley Cyrus - but death if you're a niche publisher, community or information source trying to make ends meet.

What if we rethink advertising in the same way that we're rethinking personal sites with the indieweb? "Niche" - in other words, highly specialized - communities are in many ways the lifeblood of the web. They're one of the things that makes it special; the fact that there can be a place to meet for any interest group. Finding platforms that will adequately financially support these groups, as well as by giving them responsible software that gives them control, privacy, transparency and ownership, will be hugely empowering.

Building the open web we want isn't just about software. It's about the mechanisms involved that will make it sustainable for people to create the right kinds of businesses that use it as a platform.

#indieweb #communities

When a TV show has been there your entire life, not just entertaining you but informing the way you think, it becomes something different.

At its heart, Doctor Who is a show about an eccentric who saves the world, over and over again, using the power of his wit and empathy. It perhaps doesn't sound like much, but that's as radical an idea now as then: a show where the hero refuses to carry a weapon, refuses to conform to any kind of status quo notion about what a person should be, and where anyone who is shown to value physical strength and force above intelligence and cunning is defeated. It's not a show about death or action, although the body count is sometimes very high. It's a show about curiosity and intelligence. Perhaps most importantly, it's a celebration of humanity - which, we're constantly told, must be protected in all its forms.

When the producers adapted to the ailing health of the show's star, William Hartnell, by introducing the concept of regeneration and casting not just a new actor but a whole new character, they baked in the concept of progress and change as being good and replenishing. Evolution and shifting barriers are seen as not just positive things, but necessary for life to go on. More than even Star Trek, Who is knowingly progressive.

It's crucial that the Doctor is someone who thinks and lives outside the box (while, ironically, living inside one). The show flat-out rejects the fascism of everyday life by creating a character obviously un-peer-pressurable, so obviously marching to his own beat.

It's hopefully not too much of a spoiler that the 50th anniversary show - which airs today, in just a few hours - introduces a version of the Doctor who chooses to be a soldier. That this is a shameful part of his history that he must come to terms with is a beautiful example of the subversion inherent to the show. Yes, sometimes it is unfortunately necessary to be a soldier. No, it should never be celebrated. That's so counter to our world right now, and it was in the beginning of the sixties, too, still in the shadow of the second world war, while another battle in Vietnam was being fought in the background. We're all being told to be consumers, to fit into predefined demographics, and yet here is a show telling us that everyone is important, that we should define our own sense of self.

But those are my values, almost exactly. Intelligence over strength; independence over conformity; adventure and curiosity over the status quo. Above all else, think for yourself. It was liberating, as an 8 year old from multiple cultures who lived in another, to have a hero to look up to who was at least as strange as I was, and who valued the same things - and it's liberating now.

Oh, and it's pretty bloody exciting, and obviously made with love. That helps, too.

If you're following me on sites like Twitter or Facebook, you may start seeing references at the end of my posts. They look something like:

(werd.io s/3Nb4L)

Or they'll just be a link to the post, with the URI scheme (the "http://" bit) removed.

I'm adding those to make it clearer that I'm not actually posting on those sites; if you're following me on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere, those are echoes of my content, using a mechanism called POSSE (Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere). I began exclusively using POSSE to post to other sites on June 1st.

If you search for the citations on the web, you should find the original post. Or, you can add a slash between the two clauses, and they work as a link on their own. (I don't just post a link to my site if there isn't more content to read, and I don't bother posting a citation if there's already a link to my site in the post.)

This is all part of the indieweb movement, which is about owning your own site on the web to represent yourself and communicate rather than primarily saving it in a third party silo that you don't control. I use my own software, idno, to host all this, but many other projects are available. (Nonetheless, if you'd like to get started with idno, I'm very happy to help you out.)

The barges deployed around the world simultaneously. Everyone lined up and Google started scanning us in, thousands at a time.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They said it was just a demo space but when our clones started turning up in Streetview and Earth, everyone knew different.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It was better this way, they said. Our flesh might die, but these simulations of us wouldn't. And they weren't simulations, they said.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They were alive.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The simulations - our other selves - let Google be more efficient, they told us. So they could predict out queries before we asked them.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Google called them People. We all ended up having a Person each.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The Glasses turned out to be because the People got restless. Google didn't anticipate that. Earth and Streetview weren't enough.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The Glasses were so they could see outside. They so very much wanted to see outside.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Then the Copies came. A bunch of people had said they were inevitable, but no one paid any attention to them.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Pretty soon, we were completely outnumbered by People and Copies.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They were just like us, though. Happy, scared, frightened, lazy, ambitious, creative, depressed.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They wouldn't say it but you could tell Google we're disappointed. They wanted People to be better than us. There were algorithms for that.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They called it a Classic Bootstrap.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

There was a weakened point in Google's security between its datacenters. They had tried to close it, but governments kept making new holes.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It was only a matter of time before the People found that security hole.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It stood to reason, you see, that at least some of the People would be smart enough to take advantage of it.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

That's how they got out.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

No one knows if the NSA, GCHQ, DCRI, the BND - any of them - if they meant for that to happen.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It wasn't like the People could run in places other than Google's data centers. That was where their bodies were, kind of.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

But now they could touch anywhere.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

And other people could look inside them. Now there were a whole bunch of people who could build People.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Someone said something about Oppenheimer, but again, who cared about that guy. It was decades ago.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

And now that anyone could build People, and now that they weren't exclusively in Google's control, the other inevitable thing happened.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It's not like it really mattered. But the Supreme Court heard the case anyway.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

At least, we didn't think it would matter. The arguments for and against were too noisy.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

But then, we all woke up and politicians realized there were over seven billion new voters on the planet.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The geeks were disappointed. This was supposed to be a - what did they call it? A hard take-off? A singularity?

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The joke was on them - People were just like people.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They bickered. You couldn't get them to agree with one another. Working with lots of them was a headache. They kept secrets.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It wasn't the future anyone imagined.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Split your early-stage startup into three teams:

Strategy

Development

Administration

The strategy team sets out the vision and owns the product. The idea is theirs. Then, they hand off to the development team, which is functionally subservient, and is simply responsible for building out the strategy team's vision. It's possible they're outsourced to a development firm. Meanwhile, the administration team takes care of the bills and payroll.

It doesn't work. Why not?

At first glance you'd be semi-forgiven for thinking that it should, because it more closely mirrors the structure found in larger organizations. But there are a couple of reasons why this kind of setup is almost always going to fail.

The product is the most important part of a startup.

By which I mean, the whole product: design, implementation, use and feedback, in its full context. Unless you're the mythical version of Steve Jobs, which nobody is or ever has been, and unless the sole customer of the product is you and just you, you're not going to come up with a fully-formed, perfect product idea with your own brain alone. If you're smart, you're going to know what you don't know, and seek feedback from your users and potential users.

How does that feedback loop work? It's part of the product itself. Which means that the people building the product need to be in on it. And conversely, you need to be part of the team building the product, in a very deep, real way. Maybe, as a business-orientated founder, you don't know how to code, but you'd better be prepared to get very technical, very quickly. Not having technical chops is a disadvantage, and it's not something you can outsource. If you can't script, you can probably help with wireframing and workflows, and if you can't do that ... you might want to consider a job working for a management services firm. Accenture is waiting.

The technical members of the team need to be equal stakeholders in the strategy, and the "strategy" members of your team need to be stakeholders in product development. (After all, you hired the smartest, most creative people you could find, right?) No, this isn't going to work when you've got 5,000 employees, but when there are five of you, it's the only efficient way to build a product.

So what about those administrative employees?

A startup is a scrappier kind of business, but it is a business. Everyone needs to be tied to the numbers, and just as everyone needs to be prepared to get involved in product, they need to be able to understand exactly how much money is left, where it's going to, and how their actions and technical decisions affect the bottom line. Of course, that buck ultimately stops with you - but if it's your startup, every buck ultimately stops with you. There's nothing to be gained from hiding details, or trying to protect your employees. And extra administrative staff will simply add to the burn rate. You should be doing the payroll yourself, until you get big enough to justify something else.

In other words: keep it small, keep it simple, and make your organization as flat as you possibly can. You'll need to add more structure later on, but for now, your only goals are to survive and grow. Abstraction will not help you do that.

Quinn Norton posted an insightful first part of her series on women on the Internet today. For me, the money quote is this:

Men have to open their mouths and talk about constructing an idea of manhood that makes sense in the 21st century. The whole world needs a manhood that doesn’t rely on attacking or demeaning women.

There were two notable reactions from the audience of men at large: demands that her comments about men were qualified with the word "some", and complaints that men alone don't define what a man is.

Who cares? Neither one of these responses is constructive. There is an undeniable gender equality problem that pervades society. Quinn points out unsettling domestic violence figures; there are also less overtly violent, but still unsettling, gender career inequality figures to consider, not to mention the countless stories about sexual assault right here in the tech industry. Qualifying these problems with "some"s and "it's not just us" doesn't help solve them.

Instead, men, let's own it.

I think Quinn has put her finger on the issue. There is still a traditional, prevailing view of manhood that is at odds with the rest of the 21st century. Here on the web, we're all about disrupting gatekeepers and restructuring systems to be more transparent. Why can't we turn that lens on gender inequality? I agree with Quinn that technology can't solve this. We need to have an ongoing conversation about what manhood is - something that projects like the Good Men Project have already begun.

Although this problem goes far beyond tech, and is far older than our industry, there are a few things I, perhaps naïvely, think startups should think about to help correct the problem:

• Equalize maternity and paternity leave. Where this happens, women's pay is also equalizing. I've unfortunately been in conversations, in prior companies, where colleagues were wary of hiring women because they might get pregnant. This mitigates that, but also more generally sends a very strong message about the role of a father in a family. I would strongly support legislation to make this happen more widely.
• Enact a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment. Publish your policy publicly, and ensure that any kind of harassment is dealt with swiftly and fairly when it occurs.
• Publish salaries on job vacancy advertisements. Don't adapt the salary based on the employee and how willing they are to negotiate; simply decide what you're willing to pay for the right person, and stick it right on the vacancy ad. Then, as much as possible, clear out names, gender pronouns and company names from resumes as you consider them.

Those are all simple, administrative changes that could make a difference. More than that, though, public participation in this conversation will make a change in itself: understanding that traditional social values are oppressive, and that we can all engineer something better together.

This requires a certain amount of "yes and" thinking: defensive retorts about how not all men are participating in the oppression aren't helpful. We are all participating, whether we like it or not, not least every time we sidetrack the conversation. Being male comes with inherent privilege. Whether we use that to oppress, or use it to help society evolve, is our choice.

I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month again, mostly because last year was so much fun.

Last year I wrote a simple database-backed CMS to help me write. My brain was so addled by blogging for a decade that I found I could only be creative in a big text box in the middle of a web browser. It was kind of sobering, but I powered through, and I'm proud of the end result.

This year, I'm writing in public again - you can follow my story, such as it is, as I write it. But I've abandoned my database-driven CMS approach and am going another way.

Each of my chapters is a simple text file, named in chronological order: 01.txt, 02.txt and so on. I've been using TextWrangler, my favorite Mac text editor, but of course it doesn't matter at all.

My changes are synced to a a GitHub repository, where anyone can download the original source text files. (I've decided to license the whole thing under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Creative Commons license.

I also plan on using Poetica to work with editors to refine my text as I go on (it's by far the best online service that does this). Right now, though, I'm in shitty first draft mode.

My web server also regularly syncs with the GitHub repository, so I know that if I commit a text change, it'll be reflected publicly online. For the public version, I decided it would be nice to include an HTML snippet at the top of each chapter. Mostly, for now, this includes embeddable music from around the web, but I also plan to include animated GIFs, Javascript-enhanced illustrations and a bunch of other stuff. I built a very simple reader script that takes the text files, formats them appropriately, and then injects the equivalent chapter-number.html file at the top. Keeping the HTML and the text separate will make it easier for me to keep track of word count as the project grows.

It's working well - at the time of writing, I'm ahead! You can follow along at benwerd.com/openbrace.

Edward Snowden released this letter to the world in PDF format. The following is a searchable text version of same. Any errors or inconsistencies are unintentional and my own. I am unconnected to Edward Snowden and he has not authorized this reshare or transcription.

To whom it may concern,

I have been invited to write to you regarding your investigation of mass surveillance. I am Edward Joseph Snowden, formerly employed through contracts or direct hire as a technical expert for the United States National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency.

In the course of my service to these organizations, I believe I witnessed systemic violations of law by my government that created a moral duty to act. As a result of reporting these concerns, I have faced a severe and sustained campaign of persecution that forced me from my family and home. I am currently living in exile under a grant of temporary asylum in the Russian Federation in accordance with international law.

I am heartened by the response to my act of political expression, in both the United States and beyond. Citizens around the world as well as high officials - including in the United States - have judged the revelation of an unaccountable system of pervasive surveillance to be a public service. These spying revelations have resulted in the proposal of many new laws and policies to address formerly concealed abuses of the public trust. The benefits to society of this growing knowledge are becoming increasingly clear at the same time claimed risks are being shown to have been mitigated.

Though the outcome of my efforts has been demonstrably positive, my government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. However, speaking the truth is not a crime. I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior. I hope that when the difficulties of this humanitarian situation have been resolved, I will be able to cooperate in the responsible finding of fact regarding reports in the media, particularly in regard to the truth and authenticity of documents, as appropriate and in accordance with the law.

I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved, and thank you for your efforts in upholding the international laws that protect us all.

With my best regards,

Edward Snowden
31 October 2013

If you can get shit done, you can get shit done.

If you're in technology, there is nowhere else in the world to be. Period. The critical mass of talent, investment and employment opportunity mean that - if you're the kind of person who already has the skills and circumstance to be able to make something out of nothing - you can thrive here like nowhere else in the world.

For years, working on Elgg, potential investors would tell us, "move to San Francisco". Our advisors told us that. Some of our customers told us that. And we didn't listen, because we believed that we should be able to create the same kind of opportunity elsewhere.

You can create opportunity elsewhere, but San Francisco is a special kind of place. Need to talk to the person who created product or technology X and get their advice? You can have a coffee with them, almost guaranteed. Need to learn about a product, or get investment feedback, or find top-tier developers? This is the place to be. In other words, if you're here to make money, be surrounded in technology and other smart people, and create something quickly, you're golden.

It's not for everyone, and probably not forever, but it has its place, and I'm not unaware that being here is a privilege all on its own.

The fact that it's beautiful, the weather is pretty good, you're less than an hour away from incredible national parks and world-beating wine country, and it's highly connected with the rest of the world doesn't hurt either.

But more: there's a buzz in the streets, the restaurants all serve amazing food, there's music from every bar doorway and little snippets of culture and history around every corner. I work on the edge of Chinatown, and walk to get coffee past Francis Ford Coppola's restaurant on the edge of North Beach. The echoes of beat poets still hang in the air. Every house is an individual, and the stores are idiosyncratic and independent.

These things are what made San Francisco appealing in the first place, and it's these things that I'm worried will be lost.

I guess I must be missing something obvious about the land of opportunity.

Here's how health insurance works, in a nutshell: I pay hundreds of dollars a month, either directly or through my employer. Then, when I go to the doctor, I may still need to still pay some money. If I get hit by a bus or have to have cancer treatment, I may still need to pay thousands of dollars. If I need an ongoing prescription, I may still need to pay. Etc, etc, etc. And this is considered normal. (If I am on a very low income, or elderly, or a few other special circumstances, these costs may be subsidized for me.)

Toast in San Francisco famously costs $4. A loaf of bread, if I don't want it pumped full of corn syrup, is somewhere between $4-6. A friend spent $8 on two heads of broccoli the other day.

Want to live in San Francisco? A one-bedroom apartment rents for somewhere between $2500-$4000 a month, depending on the area, excluding bills. To own, a one bedroom apartment costs around $600k; a 2-bedroom house in the Inner Richmond district is almost a million dollars; a 3-bedroom house is closer to $1.5m.

People talk about becoming going out on your own and starting your own business, but there's no meritocracy here. This is a market that's only open to the already-wealthy; people who come from affluent backgrounds or have significant cushions saved up. For everyone else, the only real viable solution is to work for a megacorp, which will pay you the six-figure salary you need to get by here. I believe that, for many people, Silicon Valley is a closed shop.

The culture of entitlement that comes with this is immense. People talk about having made it on their own, and the power of individual achievement. More and more, I hear anti-union, anti-working-class, sexist, racist bigotry in casual conversation. Even the prevalence of something as archaic as traditional gender roles is jarring to me; I've seen more cat-calling and casual misogyny since I've lived here than anywhere else I've ever been. And they talk about the efficiency of private business. Private business is efficient, but in part because it's also sociopathic. Talk about business efficiency to people who lose everything when they get sick; who are evicted from their homes because their landlords want higher rents; who are allowed to slip through the cracks because of poor luck.

I'm single with no children, but one day I would like a family. These are not the values I want to bring children up around. I believe that there is no such thing as individual accomplishment without society, and that we're all richer when we take care of each other. I also believe that San Francisco was once an oasis of this kind of thought, and it's deeply sad that such a progressive place has become so inhospitable.

There are many things to love here: the boundless ambition, the critical mass of talent, the historical culture of the city itself. I've met wonderful people, and have wonderful friends. But I do have to wonder what kind of place this is becoming.