Werd I/O

I’m learning that I cannot write at night. Many writers do their best work once everyone else has gone to bed when the house is quiet; I, on the other hand, am a ragged, sorry mess.

This is a bit of a turnaround for me: I wrote the first version of Elgg in the evenings, usually logging off at a little past 1am. But the rigors of parenting an infant have meant that I’ve become a morning person by force.

So right now I’ve really got two options: wake up really early, and write before everyone else wakes up. (After I’ve made my first cup of coffee, obviously.) Or carve out time and write during baby’s first nap, which is usually somewhere between one to two hours. The latter has been working out pretty well for me lately, but I’ve also been booking calls during that slot.

New rule, then, at least while I’m the primary carer for our son (perhaps it’ll change if we start sending him to daycare or hire a nanny). The morning slot is for writing. The afternoon slots can be used for calls. I need to make that first naptime sacrosanct, otherwise I’m never going to finish this thing.

And I’d like to finish this thing.

A quick reminder: if your favorite service has added generative AI to its core functionality, that means it’s almost certainly also added sending your data to an AI service. Depending on which service that is, that may include sending your data across borders and adding personal information to a training corpus.

It’s worth noting that companies like Google internally ban sending sensitive data to AI services. You should too — particularly if you deal with peoples’ personal information. This functionality can seem magical, but it’s not without cost. As with any technology, it’s important to consider the real implications before making it a part of your business.

My post about AI in the newsroom applies to any small organization. And if you have questions about how you might take advantage of the technology, or what the issues might be, I’m here for you. As always, you can send me an email at ben@werd.io.

Fiction writers are popularly split into two camps: plotters and pantsters. Whereas plotters work closely on a detailed outline before they ever begin a word, iterating on the plot again and again so that it’s tight and hits the right themes, pantsters have a concept in mind, fill their heads with research and ideas, and then just start writing.

I’ve tried really hard to be a plotter, but try as I might, I’ll always be a pantster: in writing, work, and life. In fact, the more I try to plot and create the perfect plan, the less likely I am to actually start writing and see how it feels. The act of creation involves emotion as well as craft; the more I worry about the perfection of my plan, the more I lose creative momentum. The more I iterate, the more the joy seeps through my fingers, until I’m left with a lifeless skeleton that I don’t have the will to carry on with — and I’m still none the wiser about whether my outline would have ever worked.

Some people have the confidence and internal fortitude to build a plan and stick to it; I do not. I self-question like it’s an Olympic sport. In order to overcome this, I need my internal excitement to outweigh my hesitations. Emotional momentum — the kind of excitement that makes you want to dance on your chair because you love the process of what you’re doing so much — is the only way I can get any work out the door.

Doing work imperfectly requires a different kind of confidence. The actor Richard Kind talks about having the confidence to know you’re good at what you do. You can’t just think it speculatively; you’ve got to know it, which means (if you’re anything like me) you’ve got to trick yourself into knowing it.

There are two things I couldn’t have done my first startup without. The first is universal healthcare. (Entrepreneurship is entirely a more brutal proposition without a social safety net.) The second is absolute blind naïvety. If I’d known what I was doing in any way, there’s no way I would have done it. But because I didn’t know enough to ask some of the questions I should have considered, I did it, and it worked. Instead, when a problem arose, we found a way around it, often from first principles.

It’s not that being naïve magically made the problems go away; it’s that we had emotional and intellectual momentum, and we had the confidence to know that we could overcome problems that arose. We weren’t blind: we had a North Star, knew broadly what we were trying to achieve, and had a good understanding of the people we were building for. But we weren’t dead set on doing it a particular way. We kept an open mind. And that’s how we ended up building software that was originally built for higher education but found use at organizations like Oxfam, in social movements like the Spanish 15-M anti-austerity movement, and at Fortune 500 companies. We didn’t know any of that was going to happen ahead of time, but we scrappily adapted and grew. We were pantsters.

I’m trying hard to finish a novel, and do it seriously. It’s hard work, and although there are some similarities to finishing any large creative project, the craft involved is very different to building software. I’m also a very different person to the naïve kid who built a social network twenty years ago. For one thing, I don’t have anywhere near as much free time. For another, my self-doubt is so much better informed.

It’s taken me too long to realize that I have to work on is that emotional momentum. At least for the first draft. It’s not the only thing, and I’m prepared to work hard chiseling whatever comes out into something palatable. But first, the excitement, the creative flow, the momentum, the force.

And when I build that next big software project from scratch, I’ll have to re-learn it then, too.

I’m disproportionately frustrated by news websites that don’t provide an RSS feed. Sure, most provide an email newsletter these days, and that will suit many users. (It also suits the publisher just fine, because now they know exactly who is subscribing.) But while it’s been around for a long time, RSS isn’t the niche technology many people seem to think it is.

I start every day by reading my feeds in Reeder: a popular way for Apple users to keep on top of new content from their favorite sites. There are plenty of alternatives for every platform you can think of. On top of all the easy-to-use open news readers that are available, apps like Apple News also use a dialect of RSS behind the scenes. It is the standard way for websites to let people read updates.

It’s also a way for publishers to free themselves just a little bit more from the proprietary social media ecosystem. If most users learn about content they’re interested in from Facebook, publishers are beholden to Facebook. If most users learn about new stories from open web standards like RSS, publishers aren’t beholden to anybody. They have full control — no engagement from the partnerships team required.

It’s very cheap to support. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, it comes free out of the box; there’s no email inbox to clog up; and not allowing people to subscribe directly is hostile to both the user and the publisher. Hell, if you really want to, you can even run ads in the feed.

So, please: I want to read your articles. Spend half a day of developer time and set up a feed for every site you run.

Thank you.

Ryan discusses the differences between the fediverse and the AT Protocol:

One core difference between the fediverse and the AT Protocol seems to be that AT decouples many key building blocks – identity, moderation, ranking algorithms, even your own data to some degree – from your server. The fediverse, on the other hand, ties them all to your server and sees that as a desirable feature.

I’m probably being a bit presumptuous, but I think there’s actually a difference between a European and American mindset here. (Mastodon is headquartered in Germany while Bluesky is rooted in San Francisco and Austin.)

The fediverse prioritizes communities: each community instance has its own rules, culture, and potentially user interface. You find a community that you’re aligned with first and foremost, and your activity is dictated by that.

The AT Protocol is much more individualistic. You bring your own identity support, moderation, ranking algorithms, interface, etc. You’re using someone’s space to be able to access the network, but ultimately your choices are yours rather than an outcome of which collaborative community you’ve opted to join.

I think both models are good. I like the fediverse’s emphasis on community. I also think by not emphasizing granular community rules early on, Bluesky has the luxury of being able to build community across the whole network more cohesively. I’m glad both exist.

Google is adding to Brand Indicators for Message Identification:

Building upon that feature, users will now see a checkmark icon for senders that have adopted BIMI. This will help users identify messages from legitimate senders versus impersonators.

So in other words, Gmail will show a blue checkmark for email domains that have logged a registered trademark, bought a Verified Mark Certificate, and set up DMARC.

I hate this!

Although this method avoids Google itself from being a central authority, it demands that senders (1) have a verifiable registered trademark, (2) pay well over a thousand dollars for a Verified Mark Certificate.

This heavily disadvantages small vendors, sole operators, and anyone who can’t afford to drop a couple of thousand dollars on their email domain. The effect is to create an aura of legitimacy for larger organizations at the expense of individuals and smaller shops. It also heavily advantages certificate vendors, who are already running what amounts to be shakedown scam across the whole internet.

It’s an unequal, annoying policy, made worse by the realization that Gmail is likely to add routing rules that advantage BIMI-enabled messages in the future. Bah, humbug.

I’m focusing on the intersection of technology, media, and democracy. Subscribe by email to get every update.

It’s genuinely refreshing to see how non-profit newsrooms have been embracing the open web and the spirit of collaboration over competition. These are often resource-strapped organizations shedding light on underreported stories, many of which are local or apply to vulnerable communities. They’re usually donation-supported rather than paywalled, and the primary goal is to get the journalism out and serve the public. They’re public service organizations first and foremost.

You’ve probably seen newsrooms like The 19th, ProPublica, Grist, and The Texas Tribune. What you might not have noticed is that each of them makes their articles available under an Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives Creative Commons license, such that anyone can republish them on their own sites. Publisher by publisher, a nascent ecosystem for open news content is being built.

There are a few carve-outs: often photos are not re-licensable, so republishable content usually comes without illustrations. There’s also often an analytics pixel included in the content so that newsrooms can measure their reach and report back to their funders.

And the reach can be significant. By making their content available under an open license, these newsrooms can find audiences far beyond their websites: major outlets like PBS, USA Today, the Washington Post, and more are all actively republishing stories.

Because of the turnaround time involved in one outlet reporting on and publishing a story to their site, and another discovering it, re-illustrating it, and publishing it on their own site, this mechanism hasn’t been particularly applicable to breaking news. But there’s a lot of potential in gathering feeds from open publishers and creating a kind of republishing newswire, which could speed up this process and streamline the ability for these newsrooms to reach other publishers and audiences.

Grist just announced Rural Newswire, which is exactly that: a collection of publishers reporting on rural America that make their content available under a Creative Commons license. The site contains a filterable, RSS-powered feed with “republish” buttons next to each story. It’s the first site like this I think I’ve seen, but I know more are coming — and, of course, there’s nothing stopping third parties from creating their own. Each RSS feed is publicly available and instructions for republishing are provided by each site.

The result is a de facto co-operative of non-profit news organizations, working together to build a commons that makes the country more informed. It’s a way that open content licensing and open source ideas are really working to strengthen democracy. It’s the kind of thing that gives me hope for the future.

I’m focusing on the intersection of technology, media, and democracy. Subscribe by email to get every update.

By now, you’ve been exposed to Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and GPT-4. It seems a lot like magic: a bot that seems to speak like a human being, provides confident-sounding answers, and can even write poetry if you ask it to. As an advance, it’s been compared in significance to the advent of the web: a complete paradigm shift of the kind that comes along very rarely.

I want to examine their development through the lens of a non-profit newsroom: specifically, I’d like to consider how newsrooms might think about LLMs like ChatGPT, both as a topic at the center of reporting, as well as a technology that presents dangers and opportunities internally.

I’ve picked newsrooms because that’s the area I’m particularly interested in, but also because they’re a useful analogue: technology-dependent organizations that need to move quickly but haven’t always turned technology into a first-class competence. In other words, if you’re not a member of a non-profit newsroom, you might still find this discussion useful.

What are generative AI and Large Language Models?

Generative AI is just an umbrella term for algorithms that have the ability to create new content. The ones receiving attention right now are mostly Large Language Models: probability engines that are trained to predict the next word in a sentence based on a very large corpus of written information that has often been scraped from the web.

That’s important to understand because when we think of artificial intelligence, we often think of android characters from science fiction movies: HAL 9000, perhaps, or the Terminator. Those stories have trained us to believe that artificial intelligence can reason like a human. But LLMs are much more like someone put the autocomplete function on your phone on steroids. Although their probabilistic models generate plausible answers that often look like real intelligence, the algorithms have no understanding of what they’re saying and are incapable of reasoning. Just as autocomplete on your phone sometimes gets it amazingly wrong, LLM agents will sometimes reply with information that sounds right but is entirely fictional. For example, the Guardian recently discovered that ChatGPT makes up entire news articles.

It’s also worth understanding because of the provenance of the datasets behind those models. My website — which at the time of writing does not license its content to be re-used — is among the sites scraped to join the corpus; if you have a site, it may well be too. There’s some informed conjecture that these scraped sites are joined by pirated books and more. Because LLMs make probabilistic decisions based on these corpuses, in many ways their apparent intelligence could be said to be derived from this unlicensed material. There’s no guarantee that an LLM’s outputs won’t contain sections that are directly identifiable as copyrighted material.

This data has often been labeled and processed by low-paid workers in emerging nations. For example, African content moderators just voted to unionize in Nairobi.

Finally, existing biases that are prevalent in the corpus will be reiterated by the agent. In a world where people of color are disproportionately targeted by police, it’s dangerous to use an advanced form of autocomplete to determine who might be guilty of a crime — particularly as a software agent might be more likely to be incorrectly assumed to be impartial. As any science fiction fan will tell you, robots are supposed to be logical entities who are free from bias; in reality they’re only as unbiased as their underlying data and algorithms.

In other words, content produced by generative AI may look great but is likely to be deeply, sometimes dangerously flawed.

Practically, the way one interacts with them is different to most software systems: whereas a standard system might have a user interface with defined controls, a command line argument structure, or an API, you interact with an LLM agent through a natural language prompt. Prompt engineering is an emergent field.

Should I use LLMs to generate content?

At the beginning of this year, it emerged that CNET had been using generative AI to write whole articles. It was a disaster: riddled with factual errors and plodding, mediocre writing.

WIRED has published a transparent primer on how it will be using the technology.

From the text:

The current AI tools are prone to both errors and bias, and often produce dull, unoriginal writing. In addition, we think someone who writes for a living needs to constantly be thinking about the best way to express complex ideas in their own words. Finally, an AI tool may inadvertently plagiarize someone else’s words. If a writer uses it to create text for publication without a disclosure, we’ll treat that as tantamount to plagiarism.

For all the reasons stated above, using AI to generate articles from scratch, or to write passages inside a published article otherwise written by a human, is not likely to be a good idea.

The people who will use AI to generate articles won’t surprise you: spammers will be all over it as a way to cheaply generate clickbait content without having to hire writers. The web will be saturated with this kind of low-quality, machine-written content — which means that it will be incumbent on search engines like Google to filter it out. Well-written, informative, high-quality writing will rise to the top.

There’s another danger, too, for people who are tempted to use LLMs to power chat-based experiences, or to use them to process user-generated content. Because LLM agents use natural language prompts with little distinction between the prompt and the data the LLM is acting on, prompt injection attacks are becoming a serious risk.

And they’re hard to mitigate. As Simon Willison points out in the above link:

To date, I have not yet seen a robust defense against this vulnerability which is guaranteed to work 100% of the time. If you’ve found one, congratulations: you’ve made an impressive breakthrough in the field of LLM research and you will be widely celebrated for it when you share it with the world!

Finally, let’s not forget that unless you’re running an LLM on your own infrastructure, all your prompts and outputs are being saved on a centralized service where your data almost certainly will be used for further training the model. There is little to no expectation of privacy here (although some models are beginning to offer enterprise subscriptions that promise but don’t demonstrate data privacy).

Then what can I use LLMs for?

Just as autocomplete can be really useful even if you’d never use it to write a whole essay that you’d show to anyone else, LLMs have lots of internal uses. You can think of them as software helpers that add to your process and potentially speed you up, rather than a robot that will take your job tomorrow. Because they’re helping you build human-written content rather than you publishing their machine-written output, you’re not at risk of violating someone’s copyright or putting a falsehood out into the world unchecked. Prompt injection attacks are less hazardous, assuming you trust your team and don’t expose agents to unchecked user-generated content.

Some suggestions for how LLMs can be used in journalism include:

• Suggesting headlines
• Speeding up transformations between media (for example, articles to short explainers, or to scripts for a video)
• Automatic transcription from audio or video into readable notes (arguably the most prevalent existing use of AI in newsrooms)
• Extracting topics (that can then be linked to topic archive pages)
• Discovering references to funders that must be declared
• Suggesting ideas for further reporting
• Uncovering patterns in data provided by a source
• Community sentiment analysis
• Summarizing large documents

All of these processes can sit within a content management system or toolset as just another editing tool. They don’t do away with the journalist or editor: they simply provide another tool to help them to do their work. In many cases they can be built as CMS add-ons like WordPress plugins.

Hosting is another matter. When newsrooms receive sensitive leaks or information from sources, interrogating that data with a commercial, centrally-hosted LLM may not be advisable: doing so would reveal that sensitive data to the service provider. Instead, newsrooms likely to receive this kind of information would be better placed to run their own internal service on their own infrastructure. This is potentially expensive, but it also carries another advantage: advanced newsrooms may also be able to build and train their own corpus of training data rather than using more generic models.

Will LLMs be a part of the newsroom?

Of course — but beware of the hype machine. This kind of AI is a step forward in computing, but it is not a replacement for what we already use. Nor is it going to be the job-destroyer or civilization-changer some have predicted it to be (including VCs, who currently have a lot to lose if AI doesn’t live up to its frothily declared potential).

It’s another creative ingredient. A building block; an accelerator. It’s just as if — imagine that — autocomplete was put on steroids. That’s not nothing, but it’s not everything, either. There will be plenty of really interesting tools designed to help newsrooms do more with scant resources, but I confidently predict that human journalists and editors will still be at the center of it all, doing what they do best. They’ll be reporting, with a human eye — only faster.

I’m focusing on the intersection of technology, media, and democracy. Subscribe by email to get every update.

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know!

Books

Nonfiction

Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond. More of a searing polemic than its predecessor; I nonetheless wish it could be required reading. Perhaps the work Desmond describes isn’t possible - but it is the work that needs to be done in order to end poverty in America. Its impossibility is a symptom of an ugliness that cuts to the country’s core.

Notable Articles

AI

"the secret list of websites". “Google is a portal to the web. Google is an amazing tool for finding relevant websites to go to. That was useful when it was made, and it’s nothing but grown in usefulness. Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website. Instead.”

ChatGPT is taking ghostwriters’ jobs in Kenya. “Collins now fears that the rise of AI could significantly reduce students’ reliance on freelancers like him in the long term, affecting their income. Meanwhile, he depends on ChatGPT to generate the content he used to outsource to other freelance writers.”

AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google. “Okay, now here’s the problem: if Ghostwriter977 simply uploads “Heart on my Sleeve” without that Metro Boomin tag, they will kick off a copyright war that pits the future of Google against the future of YouTube in a potentially zero-sum way. Google will either have to kneecap all of its generative AI projects, including Bard and the future of search, or piss off major YouTube partners like Universal Music, Drake, and The Weeknd.”

See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart. “Also high on the list: a notorious market for pirated e-books that has since been seized by the U.S. Justice Department. At least 27 other sites identified by the U.S. government as markets for piracy and counterfeits were present in the data set.”

Google Bard AI Chatbot Raises Ethical Concerns From Employees. “In February, one employee raised issues in an internal message group: “Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch.” The note was viewed by nearly 7,000 people, many of whom agreed that the AI tool’s answers were contradictory or even egregiously wrong on simple factual queries.”

Sony World Photography Award 2023: Winner refuses award after revealing AI creation. “In a statement shared on his website, Eldagsen admitted he had been a “cheeky monkey”, thanking the judges for “selecting my image and making this a historic moment”, while questioning if any of them “knew or suspected that it was AI-generated”. “AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this,” he continued. “They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.””

How WIRED Will Use Generative AI Tools. “This is WIRED, so we want to be on the front lines of new technology, but also to be ethical and appropriately circumspect. Here, then, are some ground rules on how we are using the current set of generative AI tools. We recognize that AI will develop and so may modify our perspective over time, and we’ll acknowledge any changes in this post.”

A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America. “In fact, Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threats made by one swatter in particular who has weaponized computer generated voices. Known as “Torswats” on the messaging app Telegram, the swatter has been calling in bomb and mass shooting threats against highschools and other locations across the country.”

Publishers create task forces to oversee AI programs. ““My CEO is fucking obsessed with AI… but I’m not totally convinced,” said one publishing executive on the condition of anonymity.”

We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics. “We should be shouting this message from the rooftops: ChatGPT will lie to you.”

ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding. “But the question for responsible news organisations is simple, and urgent: what can this technology do right now, and how can it benefit responsible reporting at a time when the wider information ecosystem is already under pressure from misinformation, polarisation and bad actors.”

Clearview AI scraped 30 billion images from Facebook and other social media sites and gave them to cops: it puts everyone into a 'perpetual police line-up'. “A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company’s CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a “perpetual police line-up,” even for people who haven’t done anything wrong.”

What if Bill Gates is right about AI? “So as an exercise, let’s grant his premise for a moment. Let’s treat him as an expert witness on paradigm shifts. What would it mean if he was right that this is a fundamental new paradigm? What can we learn about the shape of AI’s path based on the analogies of previous epochs?”

Business

The EU Suppressed a 300-Page Study That Found Piracy Doesn’t Harm Sales. “The European Commission paid €360,000 (about $428,000) for a study on how piracy impacts the sales of copyrighted music, books, video games, and movies. But the EU never shared the report—possibly because it determined that there is no evidence that piracy is a major problem.”

Online Ads Are Serving Us Lousy, Overpriced Goods. “The products shown in targeted ads were, on average, roughly 10 percent more expensive than what users could find by searching online. And the products were more than twice as likely to be sold by lower-quality vendors as measured by their ratings by the Better Business Bureau.”

Climate

Is PFAS pollution a human rights violation? These activists say yes. ““We live in one of the richest nations in the world, yet our basic human rights are being violated,” Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, said in a statement. “We refuse to be a sacrifice zone. Residents here are sick and dying and we continue to lack equitable access to safe water in our region, or the necessary health studies to truly understand the impact from our chronic PFAS exposures.””

Climate Fiction Will Not Save Us. “What these examples reveal, too, is that all fiction is political, even if just by turning away from this and deciding to show us that instead. But it is not a policy map, which isn’t a failing so much as a condition of most fiction as an art form having other obligations to fulfill than, say, those embodied by a scientist, who does not make things up for a living (even though the two warring conditions may coexist in the same person).”

Culture

How Philly Cheesesteaks Became a Big Deal in Lahore, Pakistan. “Pakistan’s fast-food boom of the 1990s and 2000s overlapped with a rise in Pakistanis traveling to the U.S. for study, work, business and immigration. As a result, many of the food establishments launched in Pakistan at the turn of the millennium were brimming with ideas that those visiting the U.S. brought back with them. The cheesesteak was one of these.”

Judy Blume is reaching a new generation — even as her books are targeted by bans. “Blume’s books are still considered trailblazing for the way they talked about burgeoning sexuality without judgment, and the everyday lives of young people as complicated, difficult and worthy of attention, experts said. The same could be said of so many of the books routinely censored today. The book ban surge in school districts across the country “can be depressing on any given day,” Finan said. Which is why, he stressed, Blume matters so much right now.”

Tiny Technicalities: The Pronoun Update. “The trouble is: the very people that most feel a need to escape are the ones that need to escape from the negativity, from having their identity and their body not recognized. Is that really “gender activism”, or is it just people who are being forced to take part in a convoluted political discussion, the bottom line of which should be simple: people should get to be who they really are, and people should get to be happy with their identities and their lives.”

Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul. “Paul Dochney, who is 35, does not, in fact, look like a mutant Jack Nicholson. He has soft features and a gentle disposition and looks something like a young Eugene Mirman. It’s difficult to say what I expected to find sitting across from me, but it wasn’t this. Looking at him, you’d never presume that this was the person who made candle purchasing a matter of financial insecurity.”

Jerry Craft drew a positive Black story in 'New Kid.' Then the bans began. “The ALA director says about 40 percent of the challenges are to “100 titles or more at one time” rather than an individual title challenged by a lone concerned parent. “What we’re seeing is political advocacy groups trying to suppress the voices of marginalized groups and prevent students the access to different viewpoints.””

The Costs of Becoming a Writer. “I am aware that focusing on individual responsibility can obscure the reality of broken systems. That neither my parents nor I am to blame for what they were up against. That it was always going to be beyond my capacity to provide and pay for all their care out of pocket when they had significant medical needs and, for many years, no healthcare coverage. But I was—I am—their only child, and I not only wanted but expected to be of more help to them. I didn’t know that we would run out of time.“

Jackson Heights: The neighbourhood that epitomises New York. I adore New York City. This is why.

Democracy

A Pharmacist Is Helping Clear the Way for Lethal Injections. “I conclude that they did experience extreme pain and suffering through the execution process.”

Courts Are Beginning to Prevent the Use of Roadside Drug Tests. “Each of the cases had relied on the results of chemical field test kits used by corrections officers at nearby state prisons. The kits indicated crumbs and shreds of paper that guards found on the inmates contained heroin and amphetamine. But a state forensic laboratory later analyzed the debris utilizing a far more reliable test and found no trace of illegal drugs. The defendants were factually innocent.”

Ranked-choice voting is growing – along with efforts to stop it. “”Entrenched interests are recognizing that they would like to stop ranked-choice voting from moving forward because it has such a profound impact in shifting power dynamics,” said Joshua Graham Lynn, chief executive officer of RepresentUs, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for democracy-related policy. “They, of course, benefit from the power dynamics the way they are.””

Americans are demanding change on guns ahead of Election 2024. “Some lawmakers offer only thoughts and prayers, and others insist that something must be done. But the unrelenting toll of gun violence across the country has resulted in incremental change at best in a sharply partisan Congress and inaction more broadly, particularly in red states. The nation’s status quo is unacceptable to many Americans, while talks of reform only affirm others’ commitment to the Second Amendment.”

French publisher arrested in London on terrorism charge. “A French publisher has been arrested on terror charges in London after being questioned by UK police about participating in anti-government protests in France.” Scandalous.

ICE Records Reveal How Agents Abuse Access to Secret Data. “ICE investigators found that the organization’s agents likely queried sensitive databases on behalf of their friends and neighbors. They have been investigated for looking up information about ex-lovers and coworkers and have shared their login credentials with family members. In some cases, ICE found its agents leveraging confidential information to commit fraud or pass privileged information to criminals for money.”

Oklahoma officials recorded talking about killing reporters and complaining they can no longer lynch Black people. “The governor of Oklahoma has called for the resignations of the sheriff and other top officials in a rural county after they were recorded talking about “beating, killing and burying” a father/son team of local reporters — and lamenting that they could no longer hang Black people with a “damned rope.””

Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From GOP Donor. “These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.”

ICE Is Grabbing Data From Schools and Abortion Clinics. “The outlier cases include custom summonses that sought records from a youth soccer league in Texas; surveillance video from a major abortion provider in Illinois; student records from an elementary school in Georgia; health records from a major state university’s student health services; data from three boards of elections or election departments; and data from a Lutheran organization that provides refugees with humanitarian and housing support.”

Labor

Discrimination against moms is rampant in workplaces. “Moms are still often laid off while on parental leave, pushed out of workplaces and subjected to stereotypes about their competency. But with few legal protections, attorneys say most cases go unreported.”

CEO Celebrates Worker Who Sold Family Dog After He Demanded They Return to Office. “In a virtual town hall last week, the CEO of a Utah-based digital marketing and technology company, who is forcing employees to return to the office, celebrated the sacrifice of a worker who had to sell the family dog as a result of his decisions. He also questioned the motives of those who disagreed, accusing some of quiet quitting, and waxed skeptical on the compatibility of working full time with serving as a primary caregiver to children.”

How Important Is Paternity Leave? “Maternity leave should still be our top policy priority in the U.S. However, paternity leave is an important next step. In the shorter term, for individuals and companies, these results are worth considering. Flexibility for overlapping leave in the short term, and concentrated father time in the first year, both appear to have positive impacts.”

Julie Su prioritized workers long before U.S. Labor Department nomination. “The press called it the great resignation. Many of our low-wage worker members are calling it the great revolution.”

Media

How newsrooms pay journalist-coders today. “The overall findings from the recent survey showed changes in demographics and priorities for the news nerd community. We hope that the salary data can now serve as one piece of the puzzle to improve equity in newsroom culture.”

Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama. “While the finale unfolds, Murdoch is trying to prove he has one last act in him. But his erratic performance, which has thrown his personal life and media empire into disarray, has left even those in his orbit wondering if he’s lost the plot.”

NPR to stop using Twitter, says account's new label misleading. “National Public Radio (NPR) will no longer post content to its 52 official Twitter feeds in protest against a label by the social media platform that implies government involvement in the U.S. organization’s editorial content.”

Why KCRW is leaving Twitter — and where else to find us. “Twitter has falsely labeled NPR as “state-affiliated media.” It’s a term the platform applies to propaganda outlets in countries without a free press, a guaranteed right in the United States. This is an attack on independent journalism, the very principle that defines public media. Twitter has since doubled down on the label, which is outrageous and further undermines the credibility of the platform.”

Why journalists can't quit Twitter. “For the moment, though, Musk has learned the same lesson Jack Dorsey did: Twitter is extremely hard to kill. And for the journalists who have come to rely on it, there is almost no indignity they won’t suffer to get their fix.”

Science

The ‘invented persona’ behind a key pandemic database. “Bogner’s apparent alter ego is only one of many concerning findings about his life and the way he runs GISAID that emerged during a Science investigation involving interviews with more than 70 sources, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and reviews of hundreds of emails and dozens of documents. Scientists and funders have also started to ask hard questions about Bogner and his creation, because GISAID’s mission could hardly be more critical: to prevent, monitor, and fight epidemics and pandemics.”

Society

Blocked Crossings Force Kids to Crawl Under Trains to Get to School. “Lamira Samson, Jeremiah’s mother, faced a choice she said she has to make several times a week. They could walk around the train, perhaps a mile out of the way; she could keep her 8-year-old son home, as she sometimes does; or they could try to climb over the train, risking severe injury or death, to reach Hess Elementary School four blocks away.” A close schoolfriend of mine died when he crossed under a train, and these photos made my heart stop.

Why Silicon Valley is bringing eugenics back. “We can debate whether Musk knows what he’s doing here — it’s obvious he thinks he’s much brighter than he is — but he’s very clearly laundering eugenicist and white nationalist views. When he refers to “smart” people needing to have more “smart” kids, he’s suggesting that IQ — a deeply flawed concept in itself — is passed through genetics, and when he warns about the crumbling of civilization, it’s hard not to hear the deeply racist concerns about the decline of the white race that have become far too common in recent years.”

Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close. “In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.”

Nonprofits Led by People of Color Get Less Funding Than Others. “Nonprofits that serve people of color or are led by nonwhite executive directors have a harder time getting the funding they need than other organizations, increasing their financial hardships.”

Coloring the Past. “The following images are originally from 1897-1973. After noticing how much more responsive audiences are to color photos, Eli decided to work on past images from queer and trans history. During a time when politicians can openly argue trans people did not exist until 2015, it is important to use reminders like these that we have always been here.”

Technology

Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options. “There have been a bunch of attempts at filling the void left by an unstable and untrustworthy Twitter, and it’s been fascinating to watch how it’s all played out over these past six months. I’ve actually enjoyed playing around with various other options and exploring what they have to offer, so wanted to share a brief overview of current (and hopefully future options) for where people can go to get their Twitter-fix without it being on Twitter.”

Google Authenticator finally, mercifully adds account syncing for two-factor codes. “IT employees must be crying tears of joy.”

Smartphones With Popular Qualcomm Chip Secretly Share Private Information With US Chip-Maker.“During our security research we found that smart phones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm. This data is sent without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution. This is possible because the Qualcomm chipset itself sends the data, circumventing any potential Android operating system setting and protection mechanisms. Affected smart phones are Sony Xperia XA2 and likely the Fairphone and many more Android phones which use popular Qualcomm chips.

The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social. “Social media is, in many ways, becoming less social. The kinds of posts where people update friends and family about their lives have become harder to see over the years as the biggest sites have become increasingly “corporatized.” Instead of seeing messages and photos from friends and relatives about their holidays or fancy dinners, users of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat now often view professionalized content from brands, influencers and others that pay for placement.”

Parler Shut Down by New Owner: ‘A Twitter Clone’ for Conservatives Is Not a ‘Viable Business’. ““No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,” Arlington, Va.-based digital media company Starboard said in announcing Friday that it had acquired Parler.”

GitHub Accelerator: our first cohort and what's next. “The projects cover a wide range of potential open source business models, and while many of the maintainers are looking for a way to sustain their open source work full-time, they have differing goals for what financial stability could look like for them. We’re here to help support projects testing new ways to bring in durable streams of funding for open source—and to help share those learnings back with the community.”

Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best. “You know this is a very bad response to this question, right? You’re aware that you’ve blundered into this. You should just say no. And I’m wondering what’s keeping you from just saying no.”

Feedly launches strikebreaking as a service. “In a world of widespread, suspicionless surveillance of protests by law enforcement and other government entities, and of massive corporate union-busting and suppression of worker organizing, Feedly decided they should build a tool for the corporations, cops, and unionbusters.”

Elon Musk seeks to end $258 billion Dogecoin lawsuit. “Elon Musk asked a U.S. judge on Friday to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.” Related: Twitter’s logo changed to Doge as soon as this story broke - almost as if Musk wanted to bury it.

I removed Feedly from my Get Blogging resource for people who want to read and write blogs.

If you’d like to read blogs, there are some great other feed readers recommended in the list. I start every morning with Reeder and NewsBlur.

Molly White has written a great summary of why I can’t endorse Feedly anymore:

In a world of widespread, suspicionless surveillance of protests by law enforcement and other government entities, and of massive corporate union-busting and suppression of worker organizing, Feedly decided they should build a tool for the corporations, cops, and unionbusters.

I cannot support union-busting in any form, and it’s very disappointing to see a tool like Feedly attempt to capitalize on corporations who would like to engage in this activity. So it’s gone from the list, and I’d like to suggest: while they offer this product and cater to this market, please don’t use Feedly.

It’s been a long time since I’ve run a survey. If you have 30 seconds, I’d love to know which technology and business topics are interesting to you - and how you’re thinking about tackling them. Every question is optional and anonymous - but if you have time, include your email address and I may follow up with you for a discussion and a small gift as a token of appreciation for your time.

You don’t have to be a regular reader of this site to respond to the survey. All opinions matter to me!

Click here to take the community survey - it will take no more than 30 seconds. Thank you!

I’ll discuss what I learned in a future post.

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I’m focusing on the intersection of technology, media, and democracy. Subscribe by email to get every update.

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know!

Apps + Websites

Culture

Antilibraries – Catalogues and catacombs of books unread. “In short: an antilibrary is that collection of books you know a bit about, but have not read, and the latent potential of all the wonders they may hold. We can extend the same idea to other media, too — essays, films, websites, and so on — anything you might learn from.”

Society

Anti-Racist Starter Pack. A list of anti-racist books, articles, documentaries, podcasts, and interviews.

Technology

Podcast Standards Project. “The Podcast Standards Project is a grassroots industry coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcasting ecosystem for both listeners and creators.”

Books

Fiction

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. A beautiful novel about work, friendship, love, and identity. I suppose it’s about video games too, but not really; it could just as easily be about any creative act. I loved Zevin’s writing, the melancholy story, and even the characters (although they’ve been maligned elsewhere). For me, the work is only diminished by the knowledge that she used concepts from some real-world games (e.g., Train) without credit. It would have been so easy to fix.

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older. A delight from beginning to end: a cozy murder mystery set on rings around Jupiter, where humanity lives on great platforms linked by trains, centering on two women who rekindle an old romance as they get to the bottom of the crime. If that doesn’t sound like fun, I don’t know what to tell you.

Notable Articles

AI

How I used GPT-4 to code an idea into to a working prototype. “I used GPT-4 to code a command line tool that summarizes any web page. It felt wonderful to collaborate with AI like this.” I wonder if I could use this with my RSS feeds?

Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT. “Note, for all the seemingly sophisticated thought and language, the moral indifference born of unintelligence. Here, ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation. It summarizes the standard arguments in the literature by a kind of super-autocomplete, refuses to take a stand on anything, pleads not merely ignorance but lack of intelligence and ultimately offers a “just following orders” defense, shifting responsibility to its creators.”

Business

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank hit women- and minority-owned start-ups the hardest. “Silicon Valley Bank was one of the few that would give venture-backed start-ups led by women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people a line of credit. After the bank’s collapse, they are now being hit the hardest.”

Climate

Rising groundwater threatens clean air and water across the US. “As Earth warms, groundwater — long seen as an immutable resource — is in flux. Most often, climate change is associated with a decrease in groundwater, fueled by worsening drought and evaporative demand. But in some areas, this water is actually creeping higher, thanks to rising sea levels and more intense rainfall, bringing a surge of problems for which few communities are prepared.”

EU countries approve 2035 phaseout of CO2-emitting cars. “The EU law will require all new cars sold to have zero CO2 emissions from 2035, and 55% lower CO2 emissions from 2030, versus 2021 levels. The targets are designed to drive the rapid decarbonisation of new car fleets in Europe.”

A spill outside Philadelphia adds to the growing list of chemical accidents this year. “Only three months into the year, there have already been 50 incidents resulting in chemical spills or fires around the United States, according to the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters. Such incidents occur roughly once every two days, the Guardian estimated in a recent analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data spanning several years.” This one directly affected me; I did buy water.

Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late. “The comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, but boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.”

Culture

Your reading should be messy. “After years of treating my books as if they ought to be preserved in a museum, I now believe that you should honor the books by breaking them. Read them all so messily! Fold them, bend them, tear them! Throw them into your backpack or leave them open in Jenga-like towers by the side of your bed. Don’t fret about stains or torn edges or covers left dangling off the spine after years of reading.”

Judge Decides Against Internet Archive. “What fair use does not allow, however, is the mass reproduction and distribution of complete copyrighted works in a way that does not transform those works and that creates directly competing substitutes for the originals. Because that is what IA has done with respect to the Works in Suit, its defense of fair use fails as a matter of law.”

To All the Novels I Never Published. “William Faulkner wrote two failed novels (his words) before he famously gave up writing for other people and began to write just for himself. The books he wrote after that volta are the ones that students still read for classes around the world.”

Press conference statement: Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive. “The Internet is failing us. The Internet Archive has tried, along with hundreds of other libraries, to do something about it. A ruling in this case ironically can help all libraries, or it can hurt.”

THE EDITORIAL PROCESS! “At one of these gatherings, we were having celebration cake in the room, but first, said my Los Angeles agent, we should light a candle of gratitude. She did so and it set off the fire alarm system. This too is part of The Editorial Process.”

Democracy

Daniel Ellsberg, the Man Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Scared. “The media as a whole has never really investigated the secrecy system and what it’s for and what its effects are. For example, the best people on declassification outside the media, the National Security Archive, month after month, year after year, put out newly disclosed classified information that they have worked sometimes three or four years, 10 years, 20 years to make public. Very little of that was justified to be kept from the public that long, if at all.”

The Uniquely American Future of US Authoritarianism. “Nearly half of Republicans say they would prefer “strong, unelected leaders” over “weak elected ones,” according to a September Axios-Ipsos poll, and around 55 percent of Republicans say defending the “traditional” way of life by force may soon become necessary. About 61 percent of Republicans don’t believe the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at George W. Bush says his only regret is he "only had two shoes". “Al-Zaidi says he didn’t throw his shoes in a moment of uncontrolled anger, but that he had actually been waiting for just such an opportunity since the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion. He said Bush had suggested that the Iraqi people would welcome U.S. forces with flowers, which left him looking for an adequate reply.”

Health

How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain. “The problem with loneliness seems to be that it biases our thinking. In behavioral studies, lonely people picked up on negative social signals, such as images of rejection, within 120 milliseconds — twice as quickly as people with satisfying relationships and in less than half the time it takes to blink. Lonely people also preferred to stand farther away from strangers, trusted others less and disliked physical touch.”

Here’s the full analysis of newly uncovered genetic data on COVID’s origins. “The full analysis provides additional compelling evidence that the pandemic coronavirus made its leap to humans through a natural spillover, with a wild animal at the market acting as an intermediate host between the virus’s natural reservoir in horseshoe bats and humans.”

Labor

Non-Disparagement Clauses Are Retroactively Voided, NLRB’s Top Cop Clarifies. “The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board issued a clarifying memo on Wednesday regarding the “scope” of a February ruling by the federal agency’s board that said employers cannot include blanket non-disparagement clauses in their severance packages, nor demand laid-off employees keep secret the terms of their exit agreements.”

Bandcamp Employees Unionize for Fairer Conditions. ““Many of us work at Bandcamp because we agree with the values the company upholds for artists: fair pay, transparent policies, and using the company’s social power to uplift marginalized communities,” says Cami Ramirez-Arau, who has worked as a Support Specialist at Bandcamp for two years. “We have organized a union to ensure that Bandcamp treats their workers with these same values.””

Media

The death of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act – but might other new legislation emerge?“Such simple devices as robots.txt, “noindex,” and password protection could wall off any news media web page from search engines. But no media companies were doing that, because they WANT the traffic delivered by search engines. So it has always been clear that the media recognized the value of being seen by search engines.”

Newsrooms Ponder Whether To Pay For Twitter Blue Checks. “As a company, we do not think it’s a wise use of resources to pay for individuals to retain a blue checkmark that is no different from anyone else’s — an amateur medical expert, Elon stan, or otherwise — who is simply willing to pay the fee for a blue check.”

Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery. “The Scott Trust is deeply sorry for the role John Edward Taylor and his backers played in the cotton trade. We recognise that apologising and sharing these facts transparently is only the first step in addressing the Guardian’s historical links to slavery. In response to the findings, the Scott Trust is committing to fund a restorative justice programme over the next decade, which will be designed and carried out in consultation with local and national communities in the US, Jamaica, the UK and elsewhere, centred on long-term initiatives and meaningful impact.”

The Iraq War Began 20 Years Ago Today. Phil Donahue's MSNBC Show Was One Of The First Casualties.“The story I heard was that Welch had called to complain after he had been playing golf with some buddies and they began asking why MSNBC had some “anti-war kooks” on the air. I was never able to officially confirm the story, but the fact MSNBC employees believed it is an indication of the pressure they felt to conform to the national narrative.” Conforming to a “national narrative” is exactly what journalism should not be doing.

Why L.A. podcast firm Maximum Fun is going employee-owned. “On Monday, Thorn — who has co-owned Maximum Fun with his wife since it was incorporated 2011 — announced his company would become a workers cooperative, a novel business model in the podcast industry, but one that has been tried by many small businesses including bakeries and pizza places. The ownership will be shared equally by at least 16 people, including Thorn, the company said.”

Why the Press Failed on Iraq. “As the Bush administration began making its case for invading Iraq, too many Washington journalists, caught up in the patriotic fervor after 9/11, let the government’s story go unchallenged.”

Negativity drives online news consumption. “The tendency for individuals to attend to negative news reflects something foundational about human cognition—that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli across many domains.”

No, my Japanese American parents were not 'interned' during WWII. They were incarcerated. “In a historic decision aimed at accuracy and reconciliation, the Los Angeles Times announced Thursday that it would drop the use of “internment” in most cases to describe the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.” Let’s call them what they were: concentration camps.

The Messenger, a Media Start-Up, Aims to Build a Newsroom Fast. ““I remember an era where you’d sit by the TV, when I was a kid with my family, and we’d all watch ‘60 Minutes’ together,” said Mr. Finkelstein, who comes from a wealthy New York publishing family. “Or we all couldn’t wait to get the next issue of Vanity Fair or whatever other magazine you were interested in. Those days are over, and the fact is, I want to help bring those days back.”” Narrator: those days are not coming back.

Here’s how The Washington Post verified its journalists on Mastodon. “A small cross-disciplinary team of engineers worked together to add a feature so journalists at The Washington Post could link their Mastodon profiles from The Post’s website and verify themselves on the social network.”

Society

Trans students meet with education leaders to discuss fight against anti-LGBTQ+ bills. ““I don’t really feel safe anymore. I used to feel safe,” said Maya, a 12-year-old trans girl who traveled to Washington D.C., from Texas with her mom for the meeting.”

Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation. “In absence of time-consuming commutes, remote workers—particularly those living with children—are spending more time on childcare and housework. This increased flexibility and time helped boost birth rates over the pandemic, specifically for wealthier or more educated women.”

Nashville Shooting Fuels the Right’s Engine of Anti-Trans Hate. “The stakes felt especially high for me to get this story right, because right now, we are working in a media and political environment that is saturated with misinformation and extremist rhetoric about transgender people. I feel very supported by my editor and my colleagues at The 19th News, but I know that most transgender people working in the media either do not have any support or are simply not given full-time employment.”

Nashville shooting suspect’s gender sets attack apart from most mass shootings. “Amid the confusion, several conservative and far-right media personalities have used the reported identity of the shooter as an opportunity to shift the conversation away from gun control and onto restricting gender-affirming care for transgender people, or simply to focus on anti-trans rhetoric.”

Women are less likely to buy electric vehicles than men. Here's why. “Given the current legislative and judicial situation in our country and my home state of Texas, as a LGBT woman it could be important for me to drive hundreds of miles without even stopping for gasoline, much less a charging station that might not be available.”

MY FIFTY YEARS WITH DAN ELLSBERG. “I think it best that I begin with the end. On March 1, I and dozens of Dan’s friends and fellow activists received a two-page notice that he had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and was refusing chemotherapy because the prognosis, even with chemo, was dire. He will be ninety-two in April.”

Texas denied abortions to these women when their lives were in danger. Now they’re suing the state.“Zurawski, along with the other three plaintiffs who spoke in Austin, told The 19th that she had long supported abortion rights. But none of these women ever expected to become the public representatives of what it means to lose access to this procedure.”

Remembering Judy Heumann, mother of the disability rights movement. “I believe more and more that our movement can’t be isolated. That we need to be part of a changing world. We have to look at issues like global warming and the environment. I think you have to be in a position where you’re ahead of the game and not trying to catch up to a game that keeps changing.”

SOMATIC DATA. “I remember the first time I felt a statistic with my body. I don’t remember a single other thing: how I learned it, where I was or my age at the time. I remember seeing 2.6 percent of the United States identified as multiracial and my whole body reacted.”

Back to Plimouth Plantation. “When the museum changed its name, rather quietly, in June 2020, Wampanoag observers noted that while this name change purportedly signaled a renewed commitment to the representation of Wampanoag history, it also resulted in the removal of the word “Wampanoag” from much of the museum’s literature.”

Technology

The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet. “We believe this moment, when people are so dissatisfied with the platforms that have dominated for the past decade-and-a-half, presents a unique opportunity to build a digital public sphere where people and communities with different preferences and purposes can participate accordingly.”

The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet. “Banning TikTok is not, as lawmakers claimed in the hearing, a sign that we’re about to get real tech reform. It will almost certainly be a PR move that lets some of the same politicians who profess outrage at TikTok get back to letting everyone from Comcast to the DMV sell your personal information, looking the other way while cops buy records of your movements or arrest you using faulty facial recognition.”

Antisemitic tweets soared on Twitter after Musk took over, study finds. ““We’re seeing a sustained volume of antisemitic hate speech on the platform following the takeover,” said Jacob Davey, who leads research and policy on the far-right and hate movements at ISD.”

Decentralized Social Media Rises as Twitter Melts Down. ““You basically lose your entire social graph to go [to another social network], which is a super high wall,” says Tim Chambers, Principal and Co-Founder of Dewey Digital and administrator of the Mastodon server indieweb.social. “However, when things become sufficiently chaotic on platforms as Twitter is seeing now, that is a force strong enough to incite such migrations.””

Believe it or not, the Amish are loving electric bikes. “It’s a lot quicker to jump on your bike and go into town than it is to bring your horse into the barn, harness it to the buggy, and go. It’s a lot quicker and you travel faster too.”

Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine. “Here’s the best printer in 2023: the Brother laser printer that everyone has. Stop thinking about it and just buy one. It will be fine!”

Silicon Valley Bank bailout implies tech startups are too big to fail. “Here we have a sector full of self-styled free thinkers — brought to its knees by groupthink. Risk-takers who valorize failure — as long as someone else is footing the bill. Meritocrats who couldn’t hack it on their own. Mavericks who scoff at the political establishment until they desperately need it.”

Annoying password rules like frequent mandatory changes actually make us less secure, and should be abolished. “The sched­uled-re­place­ment pol­icy is one of a num­ber of poor or in­ef­fec­tive pass­word prac­tices that make log­ging into sites, apps and ser­vices more com­pli­cated and an­noy­ing than ever.”

Protocol-Based Social Media Is Having A Moment As Meta, Medium, Flipboard, And Mozilla All Get On Board. “All that said, this much activity in the last few weeks shows that protocol-based social media is having a moment. I’m not saying that it’s the moment that inevitably leads to a bigger shift in how we view the internet, because it could still all come crashing down. But, something’s happening, and it’s pretty exciting.”

Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network. “Building a decentralized social network could let Meta experiment with an app that pushes back on standard criticisms of Facebook and Instagram. Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work.”

Elon Musk's Compelling Case for Worst Human of 2023. “In a turn of events that must have come as a surprise to absolutely no one, it turns out that the employee Elon was abusing for his amusement was an actual human being. His name is Haraldur Thorleifsson, and he has a fascinating backstory, a very real disability, and a fairly wicked sense of humor.”

Signal is for everyone, and everyone is different. “In addition to the structural, material variances across devices and infrastructure, there are also significant differences in how people prefer to communicate. There is no one global norm for how people talk to each other.”

Medium wants you to pay $5 a month to join its Mastodon server. “Additional perks include access to hand-picked account recommendations for users to follow, and the “professionally-operated” stability of the http://me.dm/ instance. TechCrunch reports that Medium has its own Trust and Safety team directly handling moderation, and is running the instance on its own infrastructure.” This is super-cool.

It's time to take back control of what we read on the internet. “These developments underscore a stark reality: As long as we rely on social-media sites to curate what we read, we allow them to control what we read, and their interests are not our interests. Fortunately, there already exists a long-standing alternative that provides users with what social media does not deliver: RSS.”

Police Are Getting Help From Social Media Sites to Prosecute People for Abortion. “All the angst directed social media services for being a pawn in law enforcement’s game seems misdirected to me. Social media is in fact a pawn in that game.”

Twitter insiders: We can't protect users from trolling under Musk. “Current and former employees of the company tell BBC Panorama that features intended to protect Twitter users from trolling and harassment are proving difficult to maintain, amid what they describe as a chaotic working environment in which Mr Musk is shadowed by bodyguards at all times. I’ve spoken to dozens, with several going on the record for the first time.”

The Fediverse is Already Dead. ““The Fediverse” needs to end, and I don’t think anything should replace it. Speak instead about communities, and prioritize the strength of those communities. Speak about the way those communities interact, and don’t; the way they form strands and islands and gulfs. I’ve taken to calling this the Social Archipelago.”

Biden's national cybersecurity strategy advocates tech regulation, software liability reform. “The strategy calls for critical infrastructure owners and operators to meet minimum security standards, to expose software companies to liability for flaws in their products and for the U.S. to use all elements of its national power to prevent cyberattacks before they happen.”

ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender. “One fired Google employee told me succeeding in tech depends on “keeping your mouth shut to everything that’s disturbing.” Otherwise, you’re a problem. “Almost every senior woman in computer science has that rep. Now when I hear, ‘Oh, she’s a problem,’ I’m like, Oh, so you’re saying she’s a senior woman?””

Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash

I’m focusing on the intersection of technology, media, and democracy. Subscribe by email to get every update.

When I was the west coast Director of Investments at Matter Ventures, an early-stage accelerator for media startups with the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society, I co-hosted our podcast. Every week, we’d feature a new interview with a media or startup leader, recorded in front of an audience of entrepreneurs.

They’re all still online, and the conversations are every bit as relevant today. Here are some of my favorites:

Morgan DeBaun, CEO of Blavity: ‌Morgan DeBaun is the CEO and co-founder of Blavity. Together with her co-founders, Morgan figured out how to build a media business that isn’t dependent on a conventional advertising model while also elevating the voices of populations too often shut out of the media — all with a constant focus on mission, on the needs of her audience, and on prototyping toward success. They’ve reinvented media in the spirit of FUBU — for us by us — for a new generation. Inclusion is about more than representation of creators: it’s about owning the means of production, too.

Rebecca Kaden, managing partner, Union Square Ventures: ‌Rebecca is the fourth partner ever to join Union Square Ventures and their first female partner. She spent nearly six years at Maveron prior to USV, and when she sat down with Pete Mortensen, our Director of Program in San Francisco, they shared their experiences about how having a background in liberal arts and journalism can be a superpower in venture capital, especially with early stage startups. Rebecca gets to the heart of how important it is for entrepreneurs to find the right fit when it comes to funding—and it starts with understand the human side of investors.

Jennifer Brandel, CEO of Hearken: ‌Jennifer Brandel, CEO of Hearken and Matter Four entrepreneur, joined us in New York City where she and Roxann Stafford, our Director of Program there, sat down to talk about her “Drunken Walk” as an entrepreneur who really sought to change the way journalists tell stories. Hearken has turned journalism on its head by actually bringing audiences into the reporting process. It provides journalists the tools they need to ask people what they want to know before going out into the field. Hearken really opens up newsrooms to find out the real questions in their communities and create more inclusive content.

Caitlin Kalinowski, currently Head of AR Glasses Hardware at Meta: ‌Caitlin Kalinowski has been a designer at the forefront of cutting-edge technology for over a decade. She got her start at Apple as one of the lead designers on the MacBook Air before she left for Facebook. Now, she is the Head of Product Design at Oculus VR. Caitlin shared her Six Steps to Product Prototyping with a group of Matter Seven entrepreneurs in San Francisco. The talk included everything from advice about how to iterate to how important it is to train people to give negative feedback. The tools she uses as a designer are really aligned with the design thinking process (yes, it’s called that for a reason) that Matter entrepreneurs learn in our 20 week accelerator program.

Jane Metcalfe, CEO at NEO.LIFE: ‌Jane Metcalfe is the founder of NEO.LIFE, an online publication that makes sense of the neobiological revolution. Previously, she co-founded WIRED. As well as WIRED Magazine, the group owned HotBot, the internet’s fastest search engine at the time, invented the banner ad, won numerous awards, and practically invented online publishing. Most importantly, it put a human face on the technology revolution and the people who drove it. In this talk, recorded live in front of an audience of Matter Seven entrepreneurs in San Francisco, Jane discusses building a team packed with world-class talent and giving them the space to do their best work — as well as the role of media in transforming how the world sees entire industries.

Raju Narisetti, currently Leader, Global Publishing at McKinsey: ‌Raju Narisetti is the CEO of Gizmodo Media Group. His journey is inspiring: from a dairy salesman to the head of a digital media group at the heart of Univision. He speaks with Roxann Stafford, Matter's Director of Program in New York, in a fireside chat recorded live with Matter Seven media entrepreneurs. Raju's experience speaks to what we acknowledge at Matter; there is no straight line to success and importance of being true to yourself. Everyone fails forward throughout their careers, and the risks Raju took and the things Raju wished he had done go to show that all of us can embrace imperfection, state our assumptions, test them, and learn.

In our house, Ms. Rachel of Songs For Littles has become a celebrity. She’s also the first YouTuber I’ve looked forward to new videos from since the year the service started - not so much for me, but for our little one, who is enthralled by every word.

The last YouTuber I really followed was lonelygirl15, the fictional web series that started by passing itself off as a vlog but quickly revealed itself to be a darkly dramatic thriller with ARG tendencies about a creepy religious cult (albeit filmed on a shoestring). I’ve never quite trusted a YouTube series since, and it wouldn’t completely surprise me to spot oblique references to Aleister Crowley in the background of one of Ms. Rachel’s songs.

Lately, Ms. Rachel has come under fire from some quarters for mentioning featured songwriter Jules’ preferred pronouns:

Ms. Rachel began receiving backlash early this year because of her work with Jules. As previously mentioned, Jules is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns … and that is essentially the full extent of the “controversy.” People who identify as “traditional” parents began commenting on Ms. Rachel’s videos and posting on TikTok that they could no longer continue following her because she included Jules in the videos. Many slammed her for introducing “they/them” pronouns to children and stated that Jules’ mere appearance was “enough” for them to turn on Ms. Rachel.

The whole thing is obviously tiresome: the same people who always complain about declaring preferred pronouns are making a fuss again, as if it’s anything but a considerate thing to do.

What’s more remarkable is that Ms. Rachel, alongside her collaborators like Jules, has become a major media personality in a very short time: one whose choices draw criticism from conservative spaces. She’s not affiliated with major any media organization; a Master’s student in childhood education who makes videos from her home using commodity equipment.

That gives me a little bit of hope in this new normal of book banning and militant activism for “traditional” (read: regressive) values. It’s not that Ms. Rachel is notably progressive - although I would be very happy if she was - but she can call her own creative shots as an independent and still find a large audience. As our cultural landscape declines further, this independence will be a great thing.

For a period of about a year, and really after my mother’s death in 2021, I made a series of impulsive, very hurtful decisions that (to say the least) don’t live up to the values I talk about every day, and which I genuinely hold dear. As part of this hypocrisy I hurt people I care about very much.

Not writing about it doesn’t mean I’m not sorry about it. My whole life isn’t written on this blog and I’m not a public figure. It’s something that will rightly stay with me for the rest of my life: a way in which I let everyone around me down and caused real harm. My primary responsibility is to my family, and I’m trying to repair those relationships, but it will take years, if it’s even possible at all.

I’m also working on multiple kinds of therapy. There’s an underlying - cowardice? mental block? codependence? - that has meant sometimes I’ve found it difficult to make decisions or take actions that, while correct and ethical, would have made other people unhappy. There’s a split here: I can take those actions at work without fear, but in my personal life, something holds me back in order to manage peoples’ feelings, sometimes to the point of lying. I’m 44 years old and this has had a major impact on my whole life, as well as the people around me who have always had a right to expect better, particularly based on the work I do and what I care about.

There’s a lot I can’t and won’t say in this space, to protect the well-being of people I have already hurt. It will never suffice, and I suspect nothing ever really will (not that this will stop me from trying), but I am truly very sorry.

I had a revelation about the book I’m writing at about midnight last night: something that elevates the whole idea and ties it together in a way that I didn’t think I’d even been looking for. It makes the idea more resonant for me, which is what I need to emotionally follow through with a project. I’ve been struggling, and I hope this extra motivational push will help me. It turns it from something I think is a good idea to something that is intensely personal for me. It answers the question why should I write this? in a way that isn’t just because.

This led me to thinking about the software projects I’ve built. It’s all well and good to say that you need to build something that people want - which, of course you do - but that doesn’t answer the question of why you will follow through with it. Why is it meaningful to you?

I’ve worked on many things, but probably the two most prominent projects were something called Elgg and something called Known. Elgg was an open source social networking engine, built for higher education, which was originally inspired by LiveJournal: a place where anyone could post to as big or as small an audience as they wanted, and converse, using any media. Known was more of a publishing platform: something like a decentralized, self-hosted Tumblr that allowed you to build a stream of content that any number of people could contribute to. Perhaps by coincidence, I build them a decade apart.

When I worked on Elgg I had a giant chip on my shoulder. I was much younger, and high school was still relatively fresh in my mind. There, teachers had laughed at my ambitions, and more so, at me. I wanted to prove that I was capable of doing something smart and meaningful. More than that, as a third culture kid, I constantly felt out of sorts: posting online had allowed me to show more of myself and find friends. Creating a platform that allowed other people to do the same also carried the hope that I would meet more people through it. Through the software I made, I hoped I would be seen. It won awards, was translated into many languages, and became relatively influential. Because it was fully open source, any organization could pick it up and use it for free. I felt good about it, and it felt like I had done something good that in some ways justified my existence. My photo is on my high school’s alumni website: I showed those teachers.

In some ways, that motivation carried me through Known, too, although with a new chip: although in the early days I’d written every line of code and designed the core mechanic, I hadn’t been the CEO of Elgg. What if I was? How would that feel? What other choices would be possible? As it turned out, it did not feel good, and I don’t think that particular chip was enough to hang a company off of. Elgg introduced the idea of social media to a higher education context - and then NGOs, followed by corporations. Known didn’t really break any new ground; I wonder now if I just wanted to see what happened if I did it again in a different context. I met people through both projects, but one felt like a company - something that could, theoretically, grow and live beyond me - and the other was always just a project. The personal resonance that Elgg had for me could be felt by others. It’s not that Known wasn’t meaningful for me, but Elgg was on another level, in part because I was in another place in my life.

My next project is a book, not a software product. I’m unapologetic about that. I’m sure I will build another software platform afterwards; I think, eventually, I may even have another startup in me. But regardless of the form or the nature of the project, I think that personal resonance really matters. People notice if you’re just trying to make either a point or a buck; if it’s something that really matters to you, that will come through in the quality of your work, the conviction of your arguments, and the time and effort you spend on it. We’re all human, and creating work that resonates with each other is the best we can hope to do.

Axios reports that Facebook - sorry, Meta - is putting the metaverse on the back burner:

This week the firm announced a massive second round of layoffs. It recently killed off its Portal platform. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg, while not disavowing his metaverse dream, sounds more eager to talk about AI.

[…] “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”

My working model for Facebook’s growth is that it is closely tied to the growth of the internet: as more and more people came online, Facebook was there to help them connect with each other. When the internet was new, there wasn’t much in the way of nuanced mainstream criticism of it as a platform. People were excited to connect and share and a minority thought it was the devil. There wasn’t much in-between.

These days, though, most people are already online. The internet isn’t new or exciting: it’s a utility that just about everybody has. Correspondingly, the ways society interacts with and on the internet have become more nuanced and thoughtful, just as the ways in which people have interacted with any media have always evolved.

Meta isn’t that thoughtful or nuanced a company, and this change in how the internet works in the context of most people’s lives has laid this lack of vision bare. The concept of the metaverse was driven by the hype over web3. Now that crypto has become less popular, many of the same people are excited about AI. In turn, AI will face a downturn, and they’ll be on to the next thing. This is expected and normal for the kinds of cash-driven charlatans who have swarmed Silicon Valley since venture capital rose to prominence, but it’s more surprising for the leadership of a multi-billion-dollar company. I’d expect it to have more vision, and it just doesn’t.

To be a little charitable to it, perhaps Meta is subject to the same kinds of winds that led to its layoffs. We know that layoffs aren’t helpful or profitable, but we also know that shareholders want to see them if other companies are doing them. So it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that shareholders may also see other companies pivot to web3 or AI and want Meta to do it too. A strong enough vision - something that carries shareholders and employees alike along - could counteract these expectations, but in the absence of that, the company is flotsam and jetsam to the hype cycle.

Meta didn’t invent social networking, and it didn’t invent the best social networking platform. It was in the right place at the right time, and was smart enough to buy Instagram when mobile internet was in its relative infancy. I’m sure it can be profitable off the base of those platforms for a long time to come. But at the same time, it’s not clear to me that lightning can strike twice for it without major leadership changes. Not when its strategy seems to be “throw shit at the wall”, and certainly not when the shit it’s throwing is the same shit everyone else is throwing.

I’ve been publicly critical of the company for 19 years now, but I want to make clear that there are lots of very talented people who work for it. Running a platform at this sort of scale requires a unique set of technology chops; it also requires all kinds of social and legislative infrastructure that other tech companies can barely even imagine. It’s not like it’s easy. And that’s how it found itself facilitating a genocide. Every single one of those people deserves stronger leadership. The internet does too: whether we like it or not, Meta has a leading role in how the internet develops, and it has not risen to that challenge. Over time, that will become clearer and clearer. It will be interesting to see what happens to it in the long term.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Revisiting my grandfather’s obituary:

‌But this is not Sidney’s first obituary. In May 1945 when he returned home from a four-month internment as a POW in Hitler’s Germany, the twenty-year old Sidney was surprised to find that his hometown Pennsylvania newspaper had published an account of his death at the hand of German troops during the Battle of the Bulge in December of the previous year. Considering that some 75,000 American soldiers did perish during that battle, that Sidney was in fact on the front lines, and that the German soldiers were reportedly under orders to take no prisoners, this was not an irrational conclusion; however, it turned out to be an erroneous one. Sidney was one of the lucky few who were captured, shipped to Germany and survived starvation, disease and Allied bombing of the prison camps until being liberated by General Patton’s army.

‌[…] Sidney’s father David Monas had first emigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1913, primarily to avoid conscription in the Tsar’s army. David found work in a clothing factory, where he caught the attention of early union organizers due to his ability to communicate in Yiddish, Russian, and English. Following the 1917 revolution in Russia, David and his brother Harry traveled the long way via Japan and Siberia back to Ukraine, arriving in the midst of the Russian Civil War. David was promptly elected to the local soviet; but when the notoriously anti-Semitic White Army began to close in on their region, David, Harry and David’s new wife Eva emigrated/escaped once again to the United States. After an unsuccessful attempt to run a paint business in Brooklyn, David had a long and successful career as a union organizer and ultimately General Manager of the Pennsylvania Joint Board of the Amalgamated Shirt Workers.

I’ve been very lucky to live in a time of relative peace: going to war is not something I’ve ever had to worry about. I hope our child experiences the same. I hope every child, one day, can experience the same.

At this point I’m not sure how helpful it is to be publicly outraged over Fox News. There’s the catharsis of it, sure, but I’m increasingly of the mind that we shouldn’t give it oxygen.

Lately it’s been their redefinition of the word “woke” and, this week, the ludicrous idea that Silicon Valley Bank imploded because of DEI initiatives. It’s also been the revelation, through leaks related to their voting machines lawsuit, that they don’t mean what they say and privately hate Donald Trump. These people are unprincipled charlatans who prey on their audience, but we know that; we’ve always known that.

And maybe it’s worth saying, again and again, because we don’t want anyone to forget that basic truth. I don’t want to argue for letting them get away with it. But they also are getting away with it, and in some ways I think the better solution is to do our own thing and show and tell that it’s better.

We’re all imperfect. Over the last year, I’ve been more imperfect than most. But all of us, however imperfect, can stand up and craft our own message - not just in response to Fox News or bigotry, but in a future-facing way that paints the future we actually want to live in. I think that’s powerful, and crucially, will change more minds.

A People’s History of Twitter, put on by Better Platform, runs tomorrow: a short, free, online event about who depended on Twitter, how it worked for good and bad, and what those communities should do now. It’s moderated by Wagatwe Wanjuki and Jacky Alciné, two people you should be following if you’re not already; some really great speakers are involved. I’ve been speaking with the organizers for a long time and hugely respect their intentions.

RSVP over on their website.

I’m pretty excited about Automattic’s acquisition of Matthias Pfefferle’s ActivityPub plugin. I believe it will remain open source, but by acquiring the copyright to the code and hiring its developer to work on open web projects, Automattic is sending a signal about what it considers to be important.

The federated social web - here I’m talking about the idea, not specific protocols - has the potential to replace the building blocks of version one blogging. It covers subscriptions, comments / replies, notifications, and other interactivity in a way that pure website comments and trackbacks could not. ActivityStreams is potentially also an iteration on RSS, albeit not one that makes RSS obsolete. Making these technologies easily available to over a third of the web is a big deal.

These are ideas that federated social web communities, the indieweb, and others have been working on for a very long time. There are a plurality of solutions right now - and more importantly, a plurality of communities who are excited about the prospects. While startupland is going through some turbulence at the hands of mass layoffs and bank implosions, I’d go so far as to say that we might be heading into a new golden age for the web.

Check out the ActivityPub WordPress plugin - and while you’re at it, check out other plugins Matthias has worked on, including IndieWeb, Webmention, and WebSub.

A lot of ink has been spilled over the demise of Silicon Valley Bank. I’ve never banked with them, and the current crisis doesn’t affect me directly today, but at least three of my prior employers were customers. While it was a regional bank, its collapse is the second-largest bank failure in US history.

Because SVB was an FDIC-insured bank, depositors’ first $250K are safe. But startups tend to have far more than that on hand. VC firms, depending on the firm, are likely to too (although a lot of their funds are wrapped up in commitments for future capital calls). For some, payroll alone may rapidly exceed $250K, threatening their ability to do business. Many companies may move their money from other regional players into national banks, creating more instability.

The FDIC levies premiums on its members and uses the proceeds to cover the depositors at failed banks, in a similar vein to most insurance companies. There’s no taxpayer involvement and no funding from the federal budget. But, of course, some people - VC investors, for example, whose fund returns are about to see major dings - would like the government to make depositors 100% whole. That could mean diving deeper into the FDIC insurance fund, jeopardizing depositors at other banks that might collapse; it could mean finding an emergency buyer, which normally-libertarian VCs like David Sacks have called for; or it could mean a bailout, which would necessitate taxpayer participation.

Benchmark Capital General Partner Eric Vishria:

“If SVB depositors aren’t made whole, then corporate boards will have to insist their companies use two or more of the BIG four banks exclusively. Which will crush smaller banks. AND make the too big to fail problem way worse.”

The thing is, this problem was exacerbated by Trump-era deregulation that was pushed by VCs and, notably, Silicon Valley Bank itself.

Representative Katie Porter:

“The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was totally avoidable. In 2018, Wall Street pushed a deregulation bill that allowed banks like SVB to take reckless risks. It passed, even as I and many others warned of the risks. I am writing legislation to reverse that law, S. 2155.”

That’s probably one part of the solution: re-establish regulations that protect depositors at smaller banks. Silicon Valley as a whole needs to learn to lose its anti-regulation bias; while it’s certainly true that government is bad at understanding technology, that doesn’t mean it’s bad at understanding societal risk. Banks in Silicon Valley shouldn’t get to skirt safety protections because the industry has a culture of taking risks in the name of innovation. As we’re seeing, that risk can have real adverse effects outside of the industry.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman:

“SVB's senior management made a basic mistake. They invested short-term deposits in longer-term, fixed-rate assets. Thereafter short-term rates went up and a bank run ensued. Senior management screwed up and they should lose their jobs.”

High risk can lead to high reward, but it shouldn’t necessarily lead to that, particularly when you’ve lobbied hard for a reduction in the rules that were in place to protect ordinary people. On those grounds, I don’t think a bailout of SVB makes sense.

On the other hand, the people who really need and deserve financial support are the vulnerable groups who are put in jeopardy by payroll failures: not the entrepreneurs or senior engineers making high six figure salaries, but the people who make the lunches, clean the offices, and work in administrative positions. They’ve been put in a terrible position by risky strategies carried out in the name of greed. Over time, Silicon Valley will be just fine, but the impact to a low income family of not getting paid for a cycle or three can be profound. Job losses may also affect immigrant workers, who may not be able to secure other employment, putting their visas in jeopardy.

There’s potentially more to come. CNN:

US banks were sitting on $620 billion in unrealized losses (assets that have decreased in price but haven’t been sold yet) at the end of 2022, according to the FDIC.

In all this, it’s worth remembering: innovation is not constrained to Silicon Valley, technology business models are not constrained to venture capital, and innovation doesn’t depend on a lack of constraints. I think SVB’s collapse is one more factor in an ongoing changing of the laws of physics in Silicon Valley; one that will not necessarily be for the worse.

I’m working on creating a list of metadata formats that a web publisher absolutely must support. These are formats that provide structured information in order to help with one of the following use cases:

• Help platforms to display rich previews when a link from the publisher is shared
• Help search engines to figure out what to display in results, and which information is helpful
• Help third-party clients to interact with web page data in some way (for example to extract information about an event that might be hosted on the publisher’s site)

These might include:

• Microformats 2
• Schema.org using embedded JSON+LD
• Open Graph protocol
• Twitter cards (although they’re becoming less relevant these days for obvious reasons)

Additionally, I’ve been thinking about subscription feed formats and standards that a publisher needs to support in order to help users and third-party software platforms to learn about new content.

These might include:

• RSS with WebSub
• MRSS for syndication to other media properties (like Yahoo News)
• h-feed
• ActivityStreams / ActivityPub

What am I missing?

And more importantly, how can we streamline?

This is my monthly roundup of the articles I found interesting. Here’s my list for February, 2023: a shorter list because it’s been a very hard month for lots of reasons.

Notable Articles

AI

Sci-Fi Mag Pauses Submissions Amid Flood of AI-Generated Short Stories. “The rise of AI-powered chatbots is wreaking havoc on the literary world. Sci-fi publication Clarkesworld Magazine is temporarily suspending short story submissions, citing a surge in people using AI chatbots to “plagiarize” their writing.”

AI-Generated Voice Firm Clamps Down After 4chan Makes Celebrity Voices for Abuse. “In one example, a generated voice that sounds like actor Emma Watson reads a section of Mein Kampf. In another, a voice very similar to Ben Shapiro makes racist remarks about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a third, someone saying “trans rights are human rights” is strangled.”

Climate

Disasters displaced more than 3M Americans in 2022. “More than 3 million adults were forced to evacuate their homes in the past year because of a natural disaster, according to a new Census Bureau tally that marks a rare federal effort to assess the uprooting caused by hurricanes, floods and other events. The Census Bureau estimate far exceeds other counts of U.S. evacuees and reflects the uncertainty about how much disruption disasters and climate change are causing. Census figures show that 3.4 million adults were displaced in 2022, or 1.4 percent of the U.S. adult population.”

Crypto

Sam Bankman-Fried is not a child. “SBF is being extended the benefit of the doubt that many are not so lucky to get. He is affluent, white, male, and accused of white-collar crimes, and so he is granted the charitable characterization of a naive boy. Meanwhile, the perception that Black children, particularly those accused of violent crimes, are adult criminals has earned its own term: adultification bias.”

The Celsius examiner's report: a picture of fraud and incompetence. “For some reason, Pillay stops short of outright stating that “Celsius was a Ponzi scheme”, but the facts speak for themselves.”

Culture

‘The Last of Us’ Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation. “Here, we may rightly speak of interactivity: One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game. In fact, The Last of Us suggested that care, by definition, means choosing to have no choice, holding onto another person so tightly their survival becomes an inescapable necessity.”

The Mobile Phones of Doctor Who – The Motherlode of Props. “If you’re a Doctor Who fan - I promise that this post is going to please you greatly!” Reader, it did.

Don’t write this, write that. “Yet despite all of this, I don’t believe you can ignore the audience. You can’t aim at them, you can’t change to suit an imaginary audience in the hope of getting a real one. But writing is not for writers, it is for readers and if they are not in your mind in some way, I think your writing becomes self-indulgent.”

In ‘The Last of Us,’ a survivor of the AIDS crisis saw his partner's death honored. ““As I’m watching it, I’m like, ‘Oh my god,’ [‘The Last of Us’ co-showrunner] Craig Mazin wrote this piece that just made me feel like someone saw me and Robert,” he said. “Somehow Mazin wrote this piece of art that reflected not just the life that Robert and I had, a falling in love in this dystopian time, but the lives of so many of my friends who also found loves that they loved and lost.””

Democracy

Biden, Sanders, Haley and the state of the 2024 presidential race. “I wanted to hear from some of the women I talk to about politics on their takeaways and what the week portends for the upcoming election cycle as both parties attempt to turn voters’ attention to the 2024 race. Their conclusion? The state of the union is incredibly fractious.”

How much Biden talked about abortion, LGBTQ+ rights. “During his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, President Joe Biden devoted more words to abortion and fewer to LGBTQ+ rights in 2023 than in previous years, spending 72 and 35 words, respectively, on the topics out of a nearly 7,300-word speech.”

A Mass. bill would cut prison time for organ donations. An advocate is calling the measure 'unethical and depraved.'. ““They’re a marginalized group in society, highly stigmatized and extremely vulnerable,” Cox said in an interview. “And so to incentivize the selling of your body parts in exchange for the most precious commodity in the world — which is time on this earth, and your freedom — was just so appalling.””

Health

One in Ten Lung Transplants Go to Covid-19 Patients: Here’s What We Know. “According to data from the United Network for Organ Transplants (UNOS), in the U.S., about one in 10 lung transplants now go to COVID-19 patients. [...] COVID seems to cause very severe pneumonia in some patients, leading to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and even leading to pulmonary fibrosis in some patients.”

Media

Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust. “Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles, blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis.”

Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less. “As it turned out, not enough people were migrating off Twitter and onto the same platforms as Grimes for it to be a sufficient replacement. On Mastodon, she has a much smaller and less diverse community that didn’t let her obtain the same level of reporting. Likewise, the 40,000 followers she has accumulated over the past 15 years on Twitter weren’t gonna migrate overnight either.”

Build a reputation instead of a personal brand. “I find myself drawn more to what individuals are writing than publications; if others are like me, all the publications who treat their staff as disposable and interchangeable will be in for a rough ride when they try to replace them all with AI churn content. […] I read my first Ed Yong article because I was interested in COVID; his thoughtful writing and reporting earned my trust, so I started following him on Twitter — not The Atlantic.”

Journalistic Lessons for the Algorithmic Age. “Before I go, I wanted to share the lessons I learned building a newsroom that integrated engineers with journalists and sought to use a new model for accountability journalism: the scientific method.”

'I wiped my eyes and wrote the facts'. “As a reporter, I felt tasked with the duty of accurately representing this funeral and the vile circumstances that led to it. As a Black reporter, I felt a duty to bear witness to his unjust death and the burden of grief that came with it.” This edition of The 19th’s weekly newsletter is breathtakingly written. Yet another reason I’m proud to work there.

Media's Money Problem. “Low pay and grueling hours mean barriers to entry that skew journalism toward a certain demographic — white and male. It’s impossible to do your best work shining light on the activities of elected officials when you make $12 an hour and those same elected officials are organizing social media campaigns to put you out of work altogether. And it’s impossible to cover the needed range and depth of stories when you are overworked and underpaid and understaffed.”

Science

Lost Letters Show Erasure Of DNA Heroine. “It was Franklin who was sabotaged. Three times her pivotal results were shared by male scientists with other male scientists without her permission and behind her back — once when a PhD student gave Wilkins the picture, once when Wilkins showed it to Watson and again when a grant administrator showed a summary of her work to Crick.”

Squid skin inspires novel “liquid windows” for greater energy savings. “The idea of a building that can learn, that can adjust this dynamic array on its own to optimize for seasonal and daily changes in solar conditions, is very exciting for us.” No kidding!

Society

L.A.’s Scoring System for Subsidized Housing Gives Black and Latino People Experiencing Homelessness Lower Priority Scores. “An analysis of more than 130,000 VI‑SPDAT surveys taken in the Los Angeles area as far back as 2016 found that White people received scores considered “high acuity”—or most in need—more often than Black people, and that gap persisted year over year.”

How abortion data rates will change after Dobbs. “We find that there’s really, really significant levels of underreporting to the point where really, most survey data on abortion is is not useful, which is a real challenge because that’s a lot of how social science researchers collect data”

Safety Systems Gone Wrong. “Why do we tolerate a police system - ostensibly a public safety system - that kills more Americans than aviation does, with some cops walking around indifferent to safety? And yet we’re petrified about two airplanes getting too close.”

‘They need to see’: RowVaughn Wells on what it means to attend Biden’s State of the Union address. “For the first time at a State of the Union address on Tuesday night, the mother of a Black man killed by police will be a guest of the first lady of the United States. Other parents with similar tragedies will be in attendance as the guests of members of the House of Representatives; they will be visible reminders of the parade of unarmed Black Americans who have lost their lives, representing families calling for change in the wake of tragedy.”

Advocates mark the 30th anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act. “Advocates 30 years ago saw the passage of FMLA as the beginning, not the end, of what was possible at the federal level. But while hundreds of millions have benefited from the program, the United States remains the only wealthy nation without any national, guaranteed paid leave policy three decades on.”

Child care crisis is causing parents to leave their jobs or get fired, study shows. “Of the parents surveyed, 26 percent quit their jobs because of child care problems and 23 percent were fired. The number of parents who were fired or had their pay reduced is three times as high as it was just five years ago. The rate of parents quitting has doubled since 2018.“

Where is abortion legal? Almost half of all Americans aren’t sure, new poll shows. “Half of women are unsure if medication abortion is legal in their state, and a third don’t know if they are allowed to access emergency contraceptive pills, new polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found.”

Technology

There's a reason why there's no United States version of NLNet. “There’s a reason why there’s no United States version of NLNet - that’d encourage public services built by people using public dollars. That’d run counter to organizations like Microsoft, Accenture, IBM, Amazon and the like who make money by siloing government infrastructure and forcing citizens to accept sub-par solutions (that other groups have to hack around).”

Tech's Elite Hates Labor. “I believe that a worryingly large amount of the most powerful people in technology have seen the growth of workers’ rights as a symptom of a broken market.”

Fediverse Funding Opportunities. “At the moment, there’s funding for a handful of micro-grants (non-profit) or micro-investments (for-profit) up to ~$30k each. If your project needs greater funding, please submit it anyway; things can (and probably will) change quickly, and your proposal will help make the case for larger allocations to the fediverse.”

Blame the CEO for Tech Layoffs at Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Amazon. “Any executive who participates in decision-making that leads to hundreds or thousands of people losing their jobs should be the one leading them out the door. Pichai and other tech CEOs shouldn’t be making $280 million a year or even $1 million a year — they should be fired for poorly managing some of the largest companies in the world.”

Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power. “Workers in an industry that had long been famously union-agnostic at best had been forming bonds, organizing and developing solidarity. Layoffs of this scale and suddenness can be a blow to that process. […] If there’s one thing that firing people in a large-scale and seemingly random way accomplishes, it’s instilling a sense of precarity, even fear, in those who remain.”

The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok. “This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”

I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer. “Long term, I want this model to grow beyond me and become a known professional path. This experiment is both easier and harder for me than it will be for those after me: easier because I have an extensive personal network and the financial means to safely take risks; harder because it’s uncharted territory for both me and the clients and because there’s a lack of legal, administrative, and marketing tools. I hope that as things progress the barriers will lower, making the model accessible to more and more people.” Inspiring!

ShotSpotter Employees Not Only Have The Power To Alter Gunshot Reports, But Do It Nearly 10% Of The Time. “ShotSpotter’s human techs don’t just alter reports to distinguish things like a car’s backfiring from a suspected criminal’s gun firing. They also alter determinations and gunshot locations to better serve the needs of law enforcement agencies that interact with them.”

So, I live in Philly now.

Or to be more specific, Elkins Park, which is an area in Cheltenham Township, just on the other side of Philadelphia’s northern border. If you’ve read Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, you’re already familiar.

I know comparatively little about the area, although I’ve had family in Pennsylvania for generations. My great aunt lived here in the city for a very long time and still misses it; my grandfather spent his early years a few hours away in Bangor.

I’m excited to learn, meet new people, and try new things. As the parent of a six month old and someone who still believes the pandemic exists, I’m not particularly excited to go to group events, but I’d love recommendations for things you think I should be doing.