Werd I/O

I tend to get my links from three sources: my feed subscriptions, links I find on social media (particularly using Twitter Blue’s excellent “top articles from people you follow” feature), and stuff that people send me directly.

If I read something and find it particularly interesting, I’ll save it to a Notion database I’ve got set up. Mostly I do this because the Notion web clipper and iOS app makes life really easy for me.

Then the bookmarks get synced in a few different ways:

• To my website using Micropub
• To Buffer for scheduled sending to Twitter

The sync itself is via Zapier right now, but when I get time I’ll replace with my own script.

I used to post directly to Twitter, but I realized that there’s no need to post there at the same time I save to my site. Because I tend to read my feeds in batches, Buffer helps me avoid posting floods of links to my Twitter account at once. It also gives me a little wiggle room if something goes wrong (eg if the sync accidentally triggers when I’m halfway through writing a description).

At the end of the month, I take my links from the Notion database and use a simple script to turn them into a formatted post, which I edit in iA Writer before publishing to my site using its micropub feature.

The end result:

• I have a searchable database of my bookmarks
• I reliably share them to my website
• I get to publish a round-up post at the end of the month, which is one of my favorite things

It sounds like a lot, but I really enjoy the process I’ve set up: it’s easy for me, and does everything I need it to.

At The 19th, we’re running our annual community survey. If you’ve read a story on The 19th, or if you’re a woman or LGBTQ+ person, or are interested in policy and democracy news that affects women and LGBTQ+ people, we’d love to hear from you.

Complete our annual survey and you’ll be entered to win one of four $50 gift cards as a small token of our appreciation for your time.

It’ll take just a few minutes of your time. Get started here.

Last week, I asked you about your fiction-reading habits as part of my research for a personal project I’m working on.

I also ran a separate survey on Google Surveys - getting in just before that service shuts down next month - to get a sense of what the average web visitor reads.

Although I expected this community to diverge from overall web visitors in key ways, I was surprised - but perhaps shouldn’t have been - by where it didn’t.

Here’s the biggest headline: traditional, paper books are still by far the best way for an author to reach even a technical audience. Most people across all audiences discover books via traditional bookstores, word of mouth, and the library - so if you’re limiting yourself to self-published ebooks, you’re missing out in a big way. More on that in a moment.

Blog readers like to read fiction far more than the average person.

First, some overall numbers:

The average American reads twelve books a year: a number that includes non-fiction titles. And only 59% of Americans read fiction books at all.

In contrast, over three quarters of you read more than ten fiction books a year; a sixth of you read more than fifty. This is fiction only: a subset of all the books you read. Although I didn’t connect this to demographic data or questions about what respondents read outside of fiction, I expect these stats hold up for the communities of most similar blogs.

No surprise: tech blog readers like science fiction. The world at large loves mystery and romance.

Everyone loves genre fiction - but which genres are sharply divergent.

This community is far and away most interested in science fiction and speculative fiction (1 in 4), with fantasy coming in at a close second (almost 1 in 5). 10% of folks said they read literary and historical fiction each, followed by mystery (and “cozy mystery”, which is a distinct sub-category). 3% of the community reads romance novels.

On the web as a whole, the numbers are very different. Almost 40% of respondents read mystery novels; 30% read romance; fantasy and horror are read by around a quarter of web visitors who filled in the survey. Only one in five web visitors read science fiction. Literary and historical fiction was in line with respondents from this community at 10% each.

Blog readers find their books offline.

About 20% of respondents from this community get their books through their local library - roughly the same percentage as the number who get them from Amazon. 15% get their books from traditional bookstores, and another 15% get them second hand. Other sources (including other stores, like Apple Books) came in at very small percentages.

A much higher percentage of the wider web gets their books via Amazon - around 40%. Only 10% of them get their books from a bookstore.

These latter statistics are closer to what I expected to see across the board, but blog readers are far more likely to go to independent bookstores, visit their local library, and borrow books from friends and family. So while this community is more technically-inclined, its book consumption is actually more offline than the general public.

We find our books through word of mouth.

Almost 40% of readers in this community preferred to learn about books through friends and family. Booktok doesn’t reach us: only 1% saw recommendations via TikTok. Social media, on the other hand, represented 25% (even if only 5% followed up on recommendations from blogs). 12% of respondents learned about books via Goodreads.

In both sets, around 12% got their recommendations from displays in physical bookstores. But whereas only 4% of this community said they learned through Amazon recommendations, 25% of general website visitors listed it as a main source. Only 6% of general website visitors learned about books from Goodreads.

Paper books still rule.

Finally, across both datasets, paper books rule supreme: 60% for the general public and for blog readers alike.

In both cases, about 20% read their books specifically on Amazon’s Kindle platform. About 10% “read” via an audiobook platform (mostly Audible, which is also owned by Amazon). And even among my open source forward community, only around 1% read using alternative ebook platforms.

I was genuinely surprised by this: I thought I’d see much higher ebook usage in my blog community. But it turns out that we all love the tangible look and feel of a book, and I strongly suspect that those of us who stare at a screen all day are more than happy to read on something else.

Reading between the lines:

This audience values books and the traditional book ecosystem. We like libraries and independent bookstores; we like the smell of a book. Anecdotally, I suspect we’re also suspicious of Amazon and of books that haven’t gone through a publisher’s vetting process. That also means it’s harder to get an independently-published book into our hands.

But libraries and independent bookstores are also more likely to carry and highlight books from small presses. These startup and independent publishers could be a really great way to reach readers with similar reading habits to those in this community. Of course, the big presses could be great too - but are potentially harder to get published by.

Based on this first set of quantitative results, my hypothesis is that it’s better to publish your book with a traditional press and then double down on both social media and independent bookstore promotion. That’s the marketing: I also believe that literary science fiction with a strong mystery component is the kind of fiction that would speak to this audience.

My next step is to double down on this hypothesis, identify my key assumptions, and go out and test them with some qualitative interviews.

More on that soon.

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

JP Morgan cancelled Kanye West’s bank accounts following his anti-semitic remarks today.

Over the last few years, a raft of “free speech” social networks have emerged as an alternative to the content policies enacted by companies like Twitter. They take very public anti “cancel culture” stances. But what does that really mean?

Using observer accounts, I took a peek at each of the main ones to see how this particular piece of news went down. Here I will issue a content warning: posts on these sites, including those run by mainstream political operators, are extremely disturbing.

Truth Social is owned by the Trump Media and Technology Group, which in turn is chaired by former President Donald Trump. There, an account with over 50,000 followers (10% of its Daily Active Users) states:

Truth Social has around 2 million users.

Gab was founded in 2016 as the first right-wing alternative social network. The founder (who has 3.7 million followers) writes:

In response to a post that asks "who runs JP Morgan Chase?" hundreds of users respond with some variation of "the Jews".

Gab has around 4 million users.

Minds was founded in 2011 and originally built on top of Elgg, the open source social networking framework I co-founded. While it was originally created as an alternative to surveillance capitalism, its anti-banning stance caused it to provide a home to white supremacists banned from mainstream networks in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. (Indeed, Trump had invited its founders to the White House alongside the founders of the networks listed above in 2019.)

Over there, a popular post states:

Minds has over two million users.

GETTR is another conservative Twitter clone, this time founded by a former Trump aide. Here the anti-semitism is less overt, although a few comments from fringe accounts did talk about “the satanic Jews”, which was a trope on the other networks.

GETTR also has around 4 million users.

Parler, which also emerged during the Trump era, is hopelessly unusable. I couldn’t figure out how to search for content on it, when it even managed to log me in.

Parler claims to have a million users, but I don't know how.

It’s not a partisan statement to say that I find these comments to be utterly chilling both in terms of their content and their effective endorsement by large-scale backers that include the former President of the United States.

I’m also deeply unhappy with how my open source code was used to build Minds. I don’t believe its founders to be anti-semites, but I do think that tolerance of this kind of hatred is not anything approaching the virtue that they think it is. While these sorts of hateful ideas can certainly be countered by better ones, it’s also certainly true that alternative social networking sites have been used to plan undemocratic insurrections and hate crimes that led to real harm.

Mainstream social networks, particularly Facebook, are not off the hook here: banning anti-semitism does not absolve you of complicity in genocide elsewhere. Twitter also has its fair share of discoverable posts that espouse anti-semitic tropes. But these other networks are remarkable for their concentration: whereas these ideas are a tiny fringe on Facebook and Twitter, they’re how these other networks support themselves. You go to an alt network because you’ve been banned - or you’re worried you will be banned - from a traditional one. This concentration of extremists is why much of the insurrection was able to be openly organized on networks like Gab.

The Southern Poverty Law Center noted as such in its The Year in Hate & Extremism Report 2021:

Hate groups and other extremists do not solely rely on mainstream social media platforms to spread their message — they are increasingly using “alt-tech” platforms that are often advertised as “free speech” alternatives to places like Twitter and Facebook. On these platforms, users don’t have to worry about content moderation. These include video platforms like Bitchute and Odysee and social media sites like Gab.

And there does seem to be a growing, violent movement lurking here. Incidents of antisemitism in America hit an all-time high in 2021. I’m certain that this is in no small part because overtly racist town squares have become easier than ever to be a part of. These networks have millions of users, are growing, encourage real hate crime, and have ringing endorsements from people who have held the highest office in the land. We overlook them as sideshows at our peril.

For a new project, I’d love to understand how you read fiction. In particular, I’d love to know what your favorite topics are, which books you particularly love, and how you discover new books to read.

So I put together a short, anonymous survey. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to fill out, and it would really help me. All questions are completely optional, and it would be useful to me even if you just filled out one.

I’ll follow up with results in a future post. Thank you!

I’ll follow Doctor Who anywhere - I’ve been a fan since I was five years old - but the trailer for the BBC Centennial episode left me cold, even despite the welcomed presence of Ace and Tegan.

It’s had some criticism, and there were some clunkers (hello, Kerblam), but I’ve broadly enjoyed this era: an optimistic Doctor, a renewed focus on inclusion and kindness, a family-friendliness that doubtless brought in new kids. Season twelve in particular was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the mystery that The Timeless Children brought back to the character’s origins. The execution could sometimes have been tighter, but it was all good. I’ll follow this show anywhere.

What I wish, though, is that they’d embrace some smaller stories. Classic Who was often structured like a mystery novel: something weird was happening, and the Doctor would have to get to the bottom of what was causing it. Often there were multiple contenders, like potential murderers in an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes story. The survival of the world didn’t need to be at stake; it could be creepy and self-contained in its own right. The stories could still talk about big topics, but they didn’t need to be bombastic to be effective.

That’s true across a lot of modern reboots. The myriad Star Treks, for example, seem to feel the need to be action-packed movies instead of the idea-led potboilers of the past. I think producers think they need to do this to get past our shorter attention spans, but they’re missing the point: our quality filters are higher than they ever were, and the way to keep our attention is to give us tightly-written, compellingly-acted, humanistically-directed drama. Some of the best modern television - Succession, Severance, Slow Horses - do understand this, but clearly not everyone got the memo.

I’ll absolutely watch, probably multiple times, and I’ll probably love it. But I do wish we’d swap flash back for substance. Maybe I’m just getting old.

January, 2030.

After a long journey, I finally climb into my rental car. It’s a nice ride: comfortable bucket seats with built-in heaters, plenty of leg room, good visibility on all sides, and a large dashboard screen.

As soon as I get in, the car notices I’m sitting in the driver’s seat and springs to life. The seat itself has already adjusted itself for my height and usual driving position. The car checks the rental car record and sees that I’m an authorized driver: I have the ability to turn on the engine and drive. The dashboard is illuminated with my operating system and choice of gauges, which follows me into every car I drive. The car’s underlying hardware and firmware provides a standard API - CarTalk, like the old radio show - and handles low-level self-driving and safety controls. In turn, my portable identity, represented by my phone or other identity-compatible hardware, provides the UI and user preferences on top of those APIs.

Five years from now, in 2035, gasoline-powered cars will be banned in most major markets. But the market is already way ahead of that milestone: well over half of all cars sold today are electric. Although sky-high gasoline prices are a huge factor in this, the availability of personalized interfaces like the one I’m using are another strong reason. You can’t get personalization like this on a legacy car: the APIs just aren’t there. Electric wins because it’s a more modern, streamlined experience.

The mirrors are all pre-adjusted; I’m ready to go. I manually drive out of the lot and onto the freeway. I don’t expect to be driving for long, and like to be in control. In practice, self-driving is still mostly the domain of fleet vehicles like freight trucks, light rail, and buses, although it’s a handy thing to turn on for very long drives, in the same way that people used to use cruise control.

*

October, 2022.

For the last year and change, I’ve driven a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, a variant of the cheapest model of Tesla. This is in no way an endorsement of Elon Musk or the way the company is run: my mother wanted one, I put one on order, and when it arrived after she died I decided to keep it. I’ll probably exchange it sometime in the next year or two, particularly when the ID. Buzz comes out in the US. But given the state of the world, environmentally and geopolitically, I’ll never go back to a gasoline-powered car.

I’m not a high-end car guy by nature: my previous ride was a second hand ex-rental Hyundai Elantra. I actually resent the fact that I need to own a car at all, and would vastly prefer just to use public transit in the way I did before I moved here. But a car is necessary here, at least for now.

Still, the Tesla is undeniably fun to drive, and I really do like that it’s emission-free (and that I don’t have to pay high gas prices). Even simple features were magic to me: adaptive cruise control, for example, which I now know is at least an option across most new cars sold in the last few years. But it’s far smoother and more performant than anything I’ve previously owned.

It’s also given me an insight into this simple fact: Tesla is going to be absolutely dead within a few years unless it radically changes strategy.

The Tesla has its own integrated operating system. Even if you’ve never driven one, you’ve probably seen the iPad-like touchscreen display. Never mind that the interface keeps changing every few software versions and the text is surprisingly unreadable; it’s also substandard compared to, say, Apple CarPlay.

You’re expected to use voice commands for just about everything, because most features are so buried in convoluted menus that finding the control while you’re driving would be life-threatening. But the voice assistant also stinks. I find myself adopting a fake American accent to get it to understand me, and finding the right command can feel like playing a text adventure game circa 1985. Even opening the glovebox is like this. (What do you call a glovebox? If it’s not “glovebox”, you may find getting it open harder than you’d like.)

Finally, there’s no App Store. Whereas I can bring my relevant apps along for the ride in most other modern cars, the Tesla limits me to whatever the manufacturers thought would be useful. I have to use Tesla’s map; Tesla’s entertainment options; Tesla’s features. Were they streets ahead of everyone else’s, that might be reasonable, but they’re not.

Tesla and a few other manufacturers are vying to be the Apple of cars: a full-stack ecosystem that just works. I’ve found no fault with the hardware (although others have), and I find the proprietary charging network to be convenient and slick. But the software layer almost feels like an afterthought.

Getting the car serviced is also problematic. You can take most cars to your neighborhood mechanic. A lot of people have one they trust, that they’ve built up a relationship with over a period of years. In contrast, Tesla requires you to use its own network of repair shops, limiting you to their availability and price. That model works to some extent for Apple because an iPhone bricking is generally not life-threatening (and even then, a general right to repair is looming). In the US at least, people depend on cars to live - and losing control of one on the road is a life and death situation. The context is wildly different.

What Tesla did succeed at is showing everyone how software could be integrated with a car. And it will be, very quickly. The next version of Apple CarPlay is multi-screen and can take over an entire dashboard. New vehicles will have this capability built in, and legislative pressure from territories like the EU will force these APIs to be open and standard, in the same way that On Board Diagnostics II was made mandatory. Already, startups are setting themselves up as the standard API across all EV brands, demonstrating the need for standardization. Finally, charging stations will also inevitably be standardized.

In a world where everyone can bring their apps and experience on their phone, where electric vehicles are commonplace, and where everyone can use every EV charger, I don’t know where Tesla differentiates. The result will be something similar to the car market today. Rather than buying into a set of competing ecosystems, consumers will find that every car is an able receptacle for the apps and identities they carry with them. A combination of legacy and new car manufacturers will be forced to compete on the best possible hardware platform, based on safety, range, and user experience alone. In turn, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto will also face competitors based on user preferences, because they won’t be able to lock manufacturers into their standards either. In effect, the right to repair will extend to onboard software.

*

January 2030.

We have a lot of the same problems we used to have. Roads are congested because of under-investment in mass transit solutions. Climate change continues because of industrial causes, and not enough power generation comes from renewable sources. The politics of fuel are as complicated and fraught as ever.

But personal carbon footprints in car-centric countries like the United States are markedly down. Cars have gone through an evolutionary step change and are now transport platforms in a way they never were before. There are even beginning to be applications that swarm cars through mesh networks - ad-hoc caravans - that increase group efficiency while also providing network effects for car manufacturers.

As ever, we’re inching towards being better. It’s not a revolution; just another step change. Which is what, at its heart, technology always does.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Two website updates:

Inspired by Dave Winer’s FeedLand, I now publish a live view of my sources at sources.werd.io. I start every day with my feeds, and this page is powered by those exact same subscriptions. So as I curate my list, the page at sources.werd.io will update automatically, and you can see what I’m reading.

Behind the scenes, this is a small Node script that polls the NewsBlur API and outputs a static HTML file every five minutes. For now, it ignores my mailing list subscriptions, which I also read through NewsBlur, mostly because some of those are paid and I don’t want to expose private content.

As always, if you know of a source that should be added to the list, let me know! I love discovering new sources to read - and particularly new personal blogs.

Speaking of: the second thing I did was resurrect my website at benwerd.com. When I moved hosting providers a while back, I failed to bring it back online, but this is an archive of every blog post I made between 2004 and 2013. It’s powered by WordPress, which I also upgraded in the process, so the design is a little different - but the content’s all there. Here are some highlighted posts from that era of my writing.

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for September, 2022.

Apps + Websites

AI

Have I Been Trained? I plugged my own face into the site, and sure enough, I’m part of the training set. It also showed me pictures of my friends. Feels weird. See if you can generate something involving me?

Games

Return to Monkey Island. A splendid, absolutely fitting sequel. Nostalgic, funny, fresh, engrossing: everything I wanted it to be.

Indieweb

Meridian. Meridian is a developer platform that finds places based on a user’s latitude and longitude - and is open source and distributed, so doesn't leak user location to a third party.

Books

Nonfiction

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez. A very personal exploration of a facet of history that still has so many unheard stories. The portion set in England pulls no punches, in a way that makes me want to force all my friends there to read this. I learned so much, and felt so much: it does its job and more.

Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe. A heartfelt memoir that I wish more kids had access to. Its place to the top of banned book lists is a travesty. I was surprised how emotional I found it; the last few pages brought me to tears unexpectedly. I find this kind of raw honesty to be very inspiring.

Streaming

Radio

The Liz Truss BBC Local Radio Interviews. Fantastic job by BBC local radio interviewers. Terrifying listening, straight out of The Thick of It.

Music

Kat White - In the Eye of the Owl. Years ago, I commissioned a song about capybara for this lovely animal-themed children’s album. And now I get to listen to it with my actual child. Magic.

Podcasts

Book Exploder. A podcast that could have been made just for me. What I found most striking in all of these author accounts is how personal these book projects all are. Writing is a detailed exercise in craft, but also a phenomenal act of empathy.

Notable Articles

Business

eBay exec sentenced in cyberstalking attack on Natick couple. “The couple said they were sent disturbing items, including live bugs, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath and a book about coping with the loss of a spouse.”

One of the Hottest Trends in the World of Investing Is a Sham. On ESGs: “Instead of measuring the risks that environmental and social developments pose to companies, raters and investors should measure the risks to humanity posed by companies.”

Climate

Climate change is turning the trees into gluttons. “Although other factors like climate and pests can somewhat affect a tree’s volume, the study found that elevated carbon levels consistently led to an increase of wood volume in 10 different temperate forest groups across the country. This suggests that trees are helping to shield Earth’s ecosystem from the impacts of global warming through their rapid growth.”

Patagonia Founder Gives Away the Company to Fight Climate Change. “Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.”

New technique shows old temperatures were much hotter than thought. “Meckler’s warmer temperatures suggest that CO2’s capacity to warm during that time in Earth’s past was higher than was found in earlier studies. “This would lead to a higher climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2,” the paper says.”

Culture

Hundreds Of Authors Ask Publishers To Stop Attacking Libraries. “Tons of authors, including some very big names like Neil Gaiman, saying that the publishers need to not just stop going after libraries, but especially that they need to stop doing so in the name of authors.”

‘We can continue Pratchett’s efforts’: the gamers keeping Discworld alive. “Not only does it feature most of the key locations, from the city of Ankh-Morpork to areas such as Klatch and the Ramtops, it has seven guilds, player-run shops, and countless quests and adventures featuring many of the Discworld’s most notable characters. It even has its own newspaper.”

Artist receives first known US copyright registration for latent diffusion AI art. “In what might be a first, a New York-based artist named Kris Kashtanova has received US copyright registration on their graphic novel that features AI-generated artwork created by latent diffusion AI.”

Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools. “Some groups appear to feed off work to promote diverse books, contorting those efforts to further their own censorious ends. They have inverted the purpose of lists compiled for teachers and librarians interested in introducing a more diverse set of reading materials into the classroom or library.” Despicable.

How ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ Finally, After 43 Years, Got Completed. “The problem with the theatrical cut was, simply, it wasn’t done. It feels long and slow because the movie hadn’t been edited properly. Scenes that may only last two or three seconds too long, or literally one frame, add up over the course of a movie to make it feel long. Now, after 1500 or so edits, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a film that finally feels properly paced, looks stunning, and, after long last, no longer keeps the viewer at arm’s length.”

Human Capital. “TED was for bearing hearts, not souls.” A fun short story from the world of Reap3r.

Food Means Home. A recipe book collated by 30 unaccompanied minor asylum seekers. Just completely lovely.

The Reactionary Geeks Are Mad About 'Rings of Power'. “The refrain “Go woke, go broke” offers a tidy summary of this argument, wokeness gone mad being a useful euphemism for a demand like “resegregate popular entertainment,” which might turn people off.”

Democracy

Maggie Haberman: A Reckoning With Donald Trump. “I was curious when Trump said he had kept in touch with other world leaders since leaving office. I asked whether that included Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and he said no. But when I mentioned North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, he responded, “Well, I don’t want to say exactly, but …” before trailing off. I learned after the interview that he had been telling people at Mar-a-Lago that he was still in contact with North Korea’s supreme leader, whose picture with Trump hung on the wall of his new office at his club.”

Most Republicans Support Declaring the United States a Christian Nation. “Fully 61 percent of Republicans supported declaring the United States a Christian nation. In other words, even though over half of Republicans previously said such a move would be unconstitutional, a majority of GOP voters would still support this declaration.”

The smoking gun in Martha's Vineyard. “Migrants from Venezuela were provided with false information to convince them to board flights chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). The documents suggest that the flights were not just a callous political stunt but potentially a crime.”

DHS built huge database from cellphones, computers seized at border. “The rapid expansion of the database and the ability of 2,700 CBP officers to access it without a warrant — two details not previously known about the database — have raised alarms in Congress about what use the government has made of the information, much of which is captured from people not suspected of any crime. CBP officials told congressional staff the data is maintained for 15 years.”

American Democracy doesn’t need saving — it needs creating. “But when we shift our perspective and begin to see our task as creating and cultivating democracy, more accessible and meaningful options become available to ordinary people and the institutions that represent them and are meant to serve them.”

I was arrested after asking "who elected him?" at the proclamation of King Charles. “What other freedoms can be suppressed in the name of monarchy? Who else will be arrested under the vile Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act?”

A Black protester voiced anger at police in South Carolina. She got 4 years in prison. “You have people who stormed the Capitol, who led to the death of law enforcement, who tried to overturn an election and fracture democracy. And they’re getting two months, three months, six months. And Brittany Martin gets four years.”

Health

I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health. “If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.”

Media

Axios's 'Smart Brevity' and Questionable Book-Selling Tactics. “The intrigue: An internal Axios memo encouraged each employee to buy six copies of the trio’s new book. Workers could then get those purchases expensed by the company—a practice that could cost Axios more than $70,000, according to Defector.” Savage.

Inside podcasters' explosive audience growth. “Each time a player taps on one of these fleeting in-game ads—and wins some virtual loot for doing so—a podcast episode begins downloading on their device. The podcast company, in turn, can claim the gamer as a new listener to its program and add another coveted download to its overall tally.”

Americans see media as critical to democracy, 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll says. “An increasingly diverse country does not see itself reflected in the media. Communities of color, LGBTQ+ people and marginalized groups are still underrepresented in both who covers the news and what news is covered.”

How we know journalism is good for democracy. “When respondents have the least information, candidates of color—particularly Black candidates—are disadvantaged, among respondents across party, ideological, and racial attitude lines.”

Welcome to the new Verge. “We also thought about where we came from and how we built The Verge into what it is today. And we landed on: well shit, we just need to blog more.” Love.

Make Your Voter Guide ICONIC. “This kind of user-friendly experience is something we keep dreaming that more newsroom voter guides will feature.”

Science

Scientists Have Bad News About All These Energy Efficient LEDs. “Focusing on the suppression of melatonin — the hormone that regulates sleep cycles — star visibility, and insects’ response to light, the researchers found that all categories were negatively affected. The level of melatonin suppression in humans has gone up since 2013, stars are less visible, and the insects’ response to light was unnaturally altered.”

Society

Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. “The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. […] Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.”

California's dead will have a new burial option: Human composting. “This new law will provide California’s 39 million residents with a meaningful funeral option that offers significant savings in carbon emissions, water and land usage over conventional burial or cremation.”

More US Employers Are Trapping Workers in a New Form of Indentured Servitude. “Bosses in industries such as retail, health care and logistics are reverting to an old tactic and trapping people in miserable jobs by threatening to saddle them with debt if they quit. Workers across the United States in fields ranging from nursing to trucking have been discouraged from leaving jobs they hate or can’t afford to keep because employers vow to charge them for training costs if they quit before an arbitrary deadline.”

‘Reverse Freedom Rides’ echo DeSantis Martha’s Vineyard migrant flights. Fascinating piece about the racist history of “reverse freedom rides” to Cape Cod that are now echoed by Ron DeSantis’s policies in Florida. I’ve been going to the Cape my entire life and I’m ashamed to say I had no idea.

Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people. “The rich in the US are exceptionally rich — the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia.”

Lindsey Graham's national abortion ban has exceptions that won't work, experts say. “But exceptions for the life of the pregnant person are notoriously difficult to receive; physicians have said the requirement of providing abortions only in an emergency can force them to wait until a patient is in dire condition before providing them needed care. And the rape and incest exceptions written into the bill — much like the ones that exist in a handful of state abortion bans — are nominal at best, sexual violence and abortion policy experts said. They require reporting and paperwork that does not occur in the majority of sexual assault cases.”

U.S. Approval of Labor Unions at Highest Point Since 1965. This feels like a sign of progress to me (and also a sign that ordinary workers need help).

Netherlands Plans to Launch Slavery Apology Fund for Awareness Projects. “The fund will be announced after the nation officially apologizes for its role in slavery by the end of this year or the beginning of next year, according to people familiar with the matter. It may be as big as 200 million euros ($204 million), the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

Technology

Elon Musk’s Texts Shatter the Myth of the Tech Genius. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

Rohingya seek reparations from Facebook for role in massacre. “But a new and comprehensive report by Amnesty International states that Facebook’s preferred narrative is false. The platform, Amnesty says, wasn’t merely a passive site with insufficient content moderation. Instead, Meta’s algorithms “proactively amplified and promoted content” on Facebook, which incited violent hatred against the Rohingya beginning as early as 2012.”

Facebook Report: Censorship Violated Palestinian Rights. “Meta deleted Arabic content relating to the violence at a far greater rate than Hebrew-language posts, confirming long-running complaints of disparate speech enforcement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The disparity, the report found, was perpetuated among posts reviewed both by human employees and automated software.”

US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data. “Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to a powerful internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic.”

Pentagon reviews psychological operations amid Facebook, Twitter complaints. “The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.”

The Internet We Could Have Had. “The internet we do have, however, is figured much differently. It is figured as a tool of political domination. It is the apotheosis of the forms of domination secretly hidden inside the stories of progress and liberation. It is capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and environmental destruction all rolled into one hideous hydra whose heads are Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, Cook, with Musk and Thiel at the ass end.”

Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men. “Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s. However, for contributors who are outsiders to a project and their gender is identifiable, men’s acceptance rates are higher. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.”

How a news investigation shed light on potential patient privacy violations. “The health system said the tracking tool was intended to help track the success of a promotional campaign to connect more patients to its MyChart patient portal, which involved Facebook advertisements. But it was configured improperly, which allowed Meta to obtain patient information such as email addresses, phone numbers, computer IP addresses, contact information and appointment details.”

WordPress+IndieWeb as the OS of the Open Social Web. Nice indieweb thoughts and presentation. As an aside, I’ve added Hypothesis annotations to my site, inspired by Ton’s site.

5th Circuit Rewrites A Century Of 1st Amendment Law To Argue Internet Companies Have No Right To Moderate. “It effectively says that companies no longer have a 1st Amendment right to their own editorial policies. Under this ruling, any state in the 5th Circuit could, in theory, mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content. It could, in theory, allow a state to mandate that any news organization must publish opinion pieces by politicians. It completely flies in the face of the 1st Amendment’s association rights and the right to editorial discretion.”

Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3. “A surprising thing about working with GPT-3 in this way is that your prompt itself becomes important IP. It’s not hard to imagine future startups for which the secret sauce of their product is a carefully crafted prompt.”

It's hard to imagine better social media alternatives, but Scuttlebutt shows change is possible. “Because it’s not a company, Scuttlebutt doesn’t need to make a profit. There is no persuasive design trying to keep you hooked, no advertising, and it doesn’t collect, process or sell users’ personal data. Instead, data are stored and controlled on users’ own devices.”

Quality Is Systemic. “If your team is producing defective code, consider that it may not be because they all suck at their jobs. It’s probably because the environment isn’t allowing them to produce quality software.”

Launch House, a tech startup incubator, sold entrepreneurs on the promise of community. This is a cult.

Take Care of Your Blog. “There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away.”

Jack Dorsey’s Former Boss Is Building A Decentralized Twitter. “It’s not about machine learning, or AI, generating the perfect viral media, it’s about groups of people getting together and finding meaning with each other.” Rabble is doing important work.

My relationship to the internet falls into a few distinct eras:

Down the rabbit hole (1994-1999)

• Connecting to other teenagers on Usenet and IRC
• Learning HTML and building my first websites
• Building a thriving local news website in 1994, complete with classified ads
• Writing small shareware games and setting them loose on the network
• Releasing an internet magazine about technology and interviewing celebrities who had literally no idea I was fifteen years old
• Starting to blog
• Choosing to study computer science at university purely because of my love of the internet

Building community (2000-2004)

• Maintaining my own website but mostly posting on Livejournal, multiple times a day
• Accidentally creating a very popular website that gets millions of pageviews a day, with no real idea what to do with it - but it’s real cool
• Letting the lines blur and meeting a bunch of people in real life that I’ve been speaking to online
• Graduating and going to work on edtech for the university because there’s no substantial internet industry in Edinburgh in 2002

Building a career (2004-2009)

• Realizing that all edtech absolutely stinks and everyone involved resents it at best, but people are learning from each other on the emerging social web, so maybe let’s use those same principles to help people really learn?
• Building a prototype, offering it to the university, getting laughed out of the office
• Quitting and starting my first startup
• Building an open source social networking platform that’s translated into multiple languages and used all over the world
• Developing my underlying principles of distributed ownership, un-predatory business models through open source, and avoiding centralized lock-in
• Raising money and having a terrible experience with investors, falling out with my co-founder in the process

Media (2010-2015)

• Leaving my startup to save my sanity
• Going to work as first employee of a tech company for the first time, in an industry I care about but have no experience in (news)
• Building a tool that NBC News (among others) uses to send video back to the newsroom, and learning a ton in the process
• Becoming part of the indieweb, a community that’s completely in line with the principles I developed in the previous era
• Going back to found my second startup - another open source communications platform
• Learning about design thinking and raising money for the startup
• Winning awards with our customers

Getting serious (2016-2018)

• Acquihired by Medium
• First time working in a big VC-backed startup with insane amounts of money, a whisky shelf, and kombucha on tap
• Wake up one day to realize I’ve lost my love for the internet without: without the scrappiness and the punk sensibility of building something better than what all those rich people can manage, the joy for me is gone
• But also, maybe it’s everything going on in the world - Brexit in particular hits me hard
• Become a VC at the firm that funded my last startup, end up teaching other startups and media companies how to approach problems using design thinking
• Re-codify my principles: I want to work on projects with the potential to create a more informed, more equal world
• Become first employee at a blockchain-related startup

Life happens (2019-2021)

• My mother’s terminal illness becomes the primary concern
• I don’t have time or mental energy to build interesting things on the internet anymore
• I take a job that is not really what I’m here in the world to do, but it’ll keep me going while everything else is happening (and I meet some lovely people while I'm there)

Reinvigorated (2022-)

• Hired by The 19th, fully in line with my principles!
• Experimenting with networked technology in new ways
• Building projects in my spare time
• Baby arrives! I get to think about what kind of world we’re building for him
• Excited for everything again
• Let’s see what happens?

How does your relationship to the internet break down? How do you feel about it today?

I’ve long been a member of the indieweb, a community based around encouraging people to own their spaces on the web rather than trusting their content to centralized services that may spy on them, use their content for their own ends, or randomly go out of business. Indieweb technologies do a good job of undercutting supplier power over identity online without imposing a single technological approach, business model, or product.

I believe strongly in the indieweb principles of distributed ownership, control, and independence. For me, the important thing is that this is how we get to a diverse web. A web where everyone can define not just what they write but how they present is by definition far more expressive, diverse, and interesting than one where most online content and identities must be squished into templates created by a handful of companies based on their financial needs. In other words, the open web is far superior to a medium controlled by corporations in order to sell ads. The former encourages expression; the latter encourages consumerist conformity.

Of course, these same dynamics aren’t limited to the web, and this conflict didn’t originate there. Yes, a website that you control for your own purposes has far more possibilities than one controlled by corporations for their financial gain. A web full of diverse content and identities is richer and fuller. But you can just as easily swap out the word “website” for “life”: a life that you control for your own purposes has far more possibilities than one controlled by corporations for their financial gain, too. A world full of diverse people is richer and fuller.

Consider identity. There are a set of norms, established over centuries, over how we describe ourselves; we’re expected to fit into boxes around gender, religion, orientation, and so on. But these boxes necessarily don’t describe people in full, and depending on your true identity, may be uncomfortably inaccurate. So these days, it’s becoming more acceptable to define your own gender (and accompanying descriptive pronouns), orientation, personality, etc - and rightly so. Once again it comes down to the expressive self vs the templated self. There’s no need to keep ourselves to the template, so if it doesn’t fit, why not shed it? Who wrote these templates anyway? (The answer, of course, is the people who they fit most cleanly, and who would benefit the most from broad adherence.) People talk about “identity politics”, but they’re the politics of who gets to define who you are. You should.

I’ve been thinking a lot about radicalism lately. While there have been protests over the last few years over racial inequality, systemic injustices, reproductive rights, and the rise of Christian nationalism, most people have been relatively docile. These are changes that either affect you today or will affect you soon, so the relative quiet has seemed strange to me. But the answer is obvious: I mean, who has the time? Really, who?

The most pervasive templates going are the ones that seek to define how people create a life for themselves, enforced by a context that makes it impossible to do just about anything else. Millions upon millions of people get up at the crack of dawn to go to work, commute in their cars for an hour a day, put in their hours, potentially go to a second job and do the same, and then go to bed to do it all again the next day. It’s sold as the right way to do things, but when the pay you take home barely covers your costs, and when you’re forced to work until you die, there’s very little life left. It’s an exploitative culture that enforces conformity, and in doing so is inherently undemocratic. A thriving democracy is one where citizens can express themselves, protest for what they think is right, and enact change through building community - which is impossible if everyone has no time to do anything but work, and is too scared that they will lose their jobs to break conformity. This way of living isn’t for us; in the same way that the web is templated to the decisions made by big corporations like Facebook so they can sell more ads, the way we live is templated to the needs of large financial interests, too.

Who should get to choose how you live? You should. But just as many people argue for the conformist vision of identity, there are scores of people ready to argue that the exploitative version of labor is the right one.

Let’s continue to use the web as an analogy. It’s an open platform, run in the public interest by a changing group of people, on which we can build our own identities, profiles, content, tools, and businesses. Standards are established through a kind of social contract between entities. This is the way I see government, too: contrary to, say, a libertarian view of the world, I think we need a common infrastructure to build on top of. Representative democratic government is (assuming an engaged electorate and free and open elections) an expression of the will of the people. More than that, it’s infrastructure for us to build on: a common layer built in the public interest, upon which we can grow and build. A platform.

What’s a part of that platform has a direct relationship to what can be built. If the web didn’t define links, we’d spend all our time thinking of new ways to build them. But the web does define links, and we can spend our time building much more advanced interfaces and specifications because we don’t have to worry about them. If government didn’t provide roads, we’d have to spend our time worrying about what basic transit links looked like; the same goes for public transport, education, or healthcare. We can reach for the stars and be far more ambitious when our basic needs are taken care of. But those needs must be open and in the public interest, rather than proprietary and designed for profit. (What would the web look like if link tags had been owned by AOL rather than by the commons?)

Perhaps it’s a tortured analogy, but in a way it’s not an analogy at all: the way the web evolved is a reflection of the larger societal dynamics around it. We can create an indieweb movement, and our websites may be free and open. But the real work is to create a free and open culture that serves everyone, where everyone has the right and freedom to be themselves, and where we can all reach for the stars together.

The principles of openness, collaboration, independence, expression, and distributed ownership are not just about software. Really they’re not about software at all. At their best, they’re a glimpse at what a different kind of life might look like. One where everyone can be free.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

My sister Hannah Werdmuller hosts a new music show, Pet Door Show, on Shady Pines Radio every Thursday from 2-4pm (5-7pm ET, 10pm-midnight UK time). She describes it as “a unique, cross-genre playlist of new music by independent, under-the-radar artists from all over the world” - and Hannah’s eye for equity really shines through. All the music is new and underheard, and it’s all beautiful.

She puts a ton of work into it: it reminds me of John Peel’s old BBC show in both form and quality. There’s lots of really excellent new music I definitely never would have heard otherwise.

The best way to listen is live on shadypinesradio.com, but there’s a collection of old shows over on Mixcloud. It’s all fully-licensed, so musicians are compensated appropriately.

I mean it: it’s really, really great. Worried you’ll miss it? Click here to add it to your calendar. If you download the Shady Pines Radio app from shadypinesradio.com and subscribe to Pet Door Show, you can also receive a mobile notification when it’s on.

I asked OpenAI to write me outlines for some genres of novels, all set in the same post-apocalyptic commune in California. Here they are, verbatim. Prompts in bold are mine; the AI wrote everything else.

Write an outline for a horror novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

The Last Resort

A group of survivors band together in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, vowing to start anew in a remote commune in California.

But as they settle into their new life, they realize that the outside world is not as dead as they thought.

Strangers begin to show up at their doorstep, seeking shelter from the harsh conditions.

At first the newcomers are welcomed, but as their numbers grow, the commune members start to realize that they might not be the only ones left alive.

And as supplies start to run low, the group must decide whether to open their doors to the outside world… or close them for good.

As tensions mount, the commune is forced to confront the dark secrets hiding in their own ranks.

And when they finally come face to face with the true nature of the outside world, they realize that the real horror is only just beginning.

Write an outline for a zombie novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

The novel opens with the protagonist, a young woman named Scout, waking up from a dream in which she is being chased by a horde of zombies.

Scout lives in a post-apocalyptic commune in California that is slowly being overrun by zombies.

The commune's leader, a man named Elias, is Scout's lover and the father of her child.

Elias is a cold and distant man who is more interested in the survival of the commune than in the people who live there.

Scout is torn between her love for Elias and her desire to protect her child from the dangers of the outside world.

When the commune is finally overrun by zombies, Scout is forced to flee with her child.

They are pursued by zombies and Elias, who is determined to get his hands on the child.

Scout and her child eventually find refuge in a safe haven, but not before Elias catches up to them.

In the final confrontation, Elias is killed and Scout and her child are left to rebuild their lives in the safety of the haven.

Write an outline for a young adult novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

The novel follows a group of teens who have grown up in a post-apocalyptic commune in California. The commune is a safe haven for survivors of a nuclear war that wiped out most of the world. The teens have never known anything else, and they are content with their lives. However, when a group of newcomers arrives at the commune, the teens start to question everything they know. The newcomers are from a different part of the world and they have a different way of life. The teens are intrigued and start to explore the new ways of life. They soon realize that the world is much bigger than they thought, and that there is more to life than just surviving.

Write an outline for a literary fiction novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

The novel follows the story of a group of survivors who band together in the aftermath of a global apocalypse. They set up a commune in the California desert, where they struggle to build a new society while battling the elements and fighting off raiders. Through their trials and tribulations, they come to realize that the world is not what it once was, and that they must work together if they want to survive.

Write an outline for a romantic novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

In the wake of a devastating global war, a small group of survivors band together to create a commune in the remains of California. Through hard work and determination, they are able to create a self-sustaining society, but not without cost. The commune is constantly under threat from raiders and other groups seeking to take what they have built. But the biggest threat to their way of life comes from within, as tensions begin to rise between those who want to maintain the status quo and those who yearn for something more.

As the commune begins to unravel, two people emerge as the leaders of the two factions. On one side is Sarah, a young woman who believes that the commune can be a force for good in the world and that they should reach out to other survivors. On the other side is Aaron, a man who is convinced that the only way to protect the commune is to cut themselves off from the outside world.

As the two sides clash, Sarah and Aaron find themselves drawn to each other, even as they realize that their relationship could tear the commune apart. But with the commune on the brink of collapse, they must choose whether to save it or follow their hearts.

Write an outline for a humorous novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

The world has ended, but a group of Californians have survived and formed a commune.

They are a self-sufficient community, but they are also bizarre and quirky.

They have to deal with the everyday challenges of post-apocalyptic life, but they also have to deal with the fact that they are living in close quarters with a bunch of weirdos.

They manage to get by, but just barely. And they do it all with a sense of humor.

Write an outline for a crime fiction novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

Life in the commune is hard, but it's the only life Kate knows. She's never known anything else.

The commune is run by a ruthless leader who will do anything to keep everyone in line.

There are rumors of a rebellion brewing, and Kate finds herself at the center of it.

She's not sure if she wants to be a part of the rebellion, or if she just wants to stay alive.

With the commune's leader on one side and the rebels on the other, Kate has to choose sides.

She's not sure who to trust, but she knows she has to make a choice.

Kate has to decide whether to fight for the life she knows, or risk everything for a chance at something better.

Write an outline for a children's novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

The novel follows a group of children who live in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

The commune is a safe haven for the children, who are able to live and work together in harmony.

However, when the outside world begins to intrude on their peaceful existence, the children must band together to protect their way of life.

Along the way, they learn about the value of cooperation, teamwork, and self-sacrifice.

In the end, the children are able to triumph over the forces that threaten their commune, and they emerge stronger and more united than ever before.

Write an outline for a magical fantasy novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

In a post-apocalyptic world, a group of survivors come together to form a commune in California.

The commune is a magical place, where the residents can use their powers to help the community thrive.

However, not everyone is happy with the commune. Some people want to exploit its power for their own gain, while others believe that the commune is a sign of the end times.

As the commune faces challenges from both within and without, the residents must band together to protect their home.

Along the way, they will discover new powers, make new friends, and battle enemies old and new.

Ultimately, the commune will face its biggest challenge when a group of powerful outsiders threatens to destroy it.

But with the power of magic on their side, the residents of the commune will fight back and prove that they can build a new world from the ashes of the old one.

Write an outline for a Russian novel set in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

The novel opens with the protagonist, a young woman, waking up in a post-apocalyptic commune in California.

She has no memories of her life before the apocalypse, and is taken in by the commune's leader, a woman known as The Mother.

The protagonist quickly learns that the commune is a safe haven for survivors of the apocalypse, and that they are constantly under threat from raiders.

The commune is self-sufficient, with a garden, livestock, and a small store of supplies.

The protagonist begins to settle into life at the commune, making friends and helping with the daily tasks.

However, the peace is shattered when the commune is attacked by raiders.

The Mother is killed and the commune is destroyed.

The protagonist is captured by the raiders and taken to their base.

The raiders are a group of survivors who have banded together and live by raiding other communities.

The protagonist is forced to work for the raiders, and soon becomes one of their deadliest members.

The novel ends with the protagonist leading a raid on her former commune, killing all of the survivors.

This is an edited version of a piece I wrote a few years ago elsewhere, which I’m now updating and publishing here. At the time, I was working on understanding what might be an interesting evolution of retirement plans.

The 401(k) was created by accident as a result of tax reform in the late seventies. Section 401(k) of the 1978 Revenue Act allowed employees to defer bonus or stock option compensation without incurring taxes. An enterprising benefits consultant suggested that this could be a good way for companies to provide a retirement savings account — essentially a hack on top of the Revenue Act clause — and the rest is history. When the IRS declared that ongoing salary deductions could be put into these savings accounts a couple of years later, the race was on.

By the mid eighties, over half of all the large firms in America offered a 401(k). Today, the 401(k) is simply how retirement plans are done.

There was a simple reason for the change. Even though the returns for employees were less certain than a traditional pension plan, they were far cheaper and more predictable for employers. This was a double-edged sword: on one hand, employees didn’t have the security they had previously enjoyed. On the other, more employers could provide retirement plans at all.

The net effect, however, is that employees are essentially bribed to take part in the stock market in the name of protecting their retirements. As we’ve seen, the dynamics of the stock market are not necessarily in their favor — and as it turns, out, most people saving for retirement don’t get to choose where their money goes.

In practice, the 401(k) is a support plan for fossil fuels, arms companies, and all kinds of heinous shit.

Clearly, retirement plans need regulation in order to protect the ordinary people who are trusting their futures to them. But the legislation that governs 401(k)s, ERISA, actually makes it hard for providers to let people invest in anything other than that default basket of heinous goods. ESGs — Environmental, Social, and Governance investments — are difficult to add to a retirement plan’s lineup. The Trump administration made it even harder for a retirement plan to add them.

Care about climate change? You’re shit out of luck.

Don’t want to invest in arms? You’re shit out of luck.

Private prisons? You get the idea.

If you want to save for retirement based on your values in a 401(k) plan, you’ll more than likely find you can’t. And most of the traditional target date funds contain companies that you’d probably be upset to know you were investing in. Some plans let you open a brokerage window and pick your own investments instead of the default funds, but it’ll cost you more.

The total AUM in these retirement plans is north of $28 trillion, while the total US stock market value is somewhere around $85 trillion. In other words, a third of the markets are invested in by people who don’t have full control over their investments. While, clearly, segments like private prisons are a small portion of an individual’s retirement investments, in aggregate these allocations represent enormous sums. Investments on the public markets prop up the share price of these companies, incentivizing investments in harmful industries. Investment advisors are financially incentivized to keep you within this system, perpetuating the harm. And even when these plans work, they only work for the relatively wealthy people who have the financial access and means to contribute to their maximum levels.

What’s the solution? If we have to move forward with 401(k)s and similar products, we need to allow more sustainable investments to be part of a lineup, while maintaining strong consumer protections. Eventually, we need to move to a world where everyone can invest directly into their communities instead, through public means, in an inclusive way. That will take real change, and real will. I’m not sure if that’s a place we’ll get to, but it’s something I’d love to see.

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

I’ve changed my website around to reflect that, at least for the time being, I’m doing more bookmark-saving and posting of short notes than long-form writing.

I was actually inspired, of all things, by The Verge redesigning its website to be more blog-like. I’m constantly sharing links to stuff I find interesting, but they’ve been buried on my site until my end-of-month roundup posts. This change makes them much more prominent. Honestly, the essence of the web is really about linking out to what you find useful or interesting, so this is kind of a return to web basics.

As a technical by-product, RSS subscribers will also receive these link posts as they’re published. Hopefully that’s not too disruptive.

I spent a couple of hours making an adjustment to the stock Known template Market Street (which I’ve used on my site for years) in order to allow for more compact posting of notes, links, and photos. The new one’s called Cornmarket Street, after the main shopping street in my hometown, and I like it more than I thought I would. I can easily imagine adding more content types over time: I’ve never posted links to hardware I like, for example, but I’m an unabashed tech nerd, so there might be a place for that. Lately I’ve been loving the Fujifilm X-T4, after my friend Jesse Vincent suggested that I wouldn’t regret getting a new camera to capture photos of my baby. He was super-right, as usual.

On that subject, I’m also wondering what to do with my parenting content. Should I keep posting them here? I’m sort of feeling shy to, although there’s a lot I could write about. Is the same site that hosts my thought about web business models really the place I also want to write about disastrous midnight diaper changes? I’m still thinking about it.

Anyway, it’s the first time I’ve changed my site up for a few years, and I like it. Let me know what you think.

My colleagues at The 19th just launched our first nationwide poll:

In the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, The 19th and SurveyMonkey teamed up to conduct a poll to find out what women, particularly women of color, and LGBTQ+ people think about politics, politicians and policy.

It’s an important survey, and there were some interesting findings.

For example, 70% of Americans don’t trust politicians to make abortion policy:

That distrust spans the political aisle: 70 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of Democrats said politicians were insufficiently informed about abortion. It was also consistent across men, women and gender-nonconforming Americans.

LGBTQ+ Americans are more likely to experience healthcare discrimination:

Twenty-four percent of LGBTQ+ Americans said they had been blamed for their health problems while visiting a health care provider, compared with 9 percent of non-LGBTQ+ people. For LGBTQ+ and gender-nonconforming people, or those who said their gender was not male or female in addition to being LGBTQ+, that number jumped to 40 percent.

There’s significantly more to explore. You can read more over on the 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll homepage. And the full data is available to explore over on SurveyMonkey’s site.

So far, I’ve been the primary nappy-changer in my child’s world. That’s not virtue signaling or trying to make a point: it simply seems fair that, given that I’m biologically incapable of breastfeeding or carrying a child to term, I help out where I can.

Aaron Hoyland’s tweet the other day is exactly how I feel:

Putting baby change stations in the women’s washroom (and maybe the family washroom if there is one) but not the men’s washroom sends a very clear message about whose responsibility you think raising children is, and frankly, I hate it.

The world isn’t set up for equitable co-parenting. Bathrooms are one example. Don’t click through to the tweet if you’d like to skip being angry for a morning: the comments are dominated by people making excuses for dads not changing their children, or trying to argue that it’s women’s work like we’re back in the forties. A mother’s sacred duty, apparently, is to be the sole person cleaning their child.

I’m completely on board with having changing tables in every men’s bathroom. I intend to use them; please give them to me. In return, I will spend money in your establishment.

Unfortunately, this chauvanistic design mentality doesn’t stop at bathrooms. They’re everywhere. I call them “mommy defaults”.

I’ve discovered that a lot of the parenting apps we use - primarily Huckleberry, which allows us to track events like diaper changes and different kinds of feedings - don’t provide for more than one parental user account. If both parents want to track events and gain access to the log, they need to share a password. We’re not logging frivolously (our child needed to go to the ER for dehydration on their first night home), and it’s crucial that we both have access to this data.

Even the Snoo, our expensive and overtly high-tech smart bassinet, only allows for one account. If we want to track sleeping and adjust settings, we once again have to share passwords. It’s not incredibly difficult to use a shared 1Password vault, but I expect most parents default to using something easily memorable, and therefore easily hackable.

Finally, the biggest, most irritating version of this is that every provider - starting with hospitals and pediatricians - wants to have a single parental contact number. Go visit parenting forums and you’ll find message after message complaining about this, for good reason. The assumption that there’s one primary carer in parenting is deeply baked into institutional service design, and perpetuates inequality every time it arises. As the dad, I really want to take on my fair share of making appointments, dealing with administration, and otherwise caring for my child.

You can take the boy out of startups, but you can’t take startups out of the boy, apparently. My solution has been to treat our baby like a call center and set up a 24/7 virtual support line using a tool designed for that purpose. Now, we can provide a single number for text messages and calls, but we’re both essentially baby support agents. Whoever picks up first takes the call. It’s not the cheapest, but I couldn’t find an app or other solution that would allow us both to effectively be primary carers in someone’s database. Our own contact details are abstracted away.

The nice thing about this solution is that it also allows for additional caregivers. For example, I have to wonder how my friend David Jay - who is an adoptive third parent - deals with these design defaults. Families come in lots of shapes. Many people also care for children in a communal, village-like environment. Creating a baby call center allows you to bring anyone into that circle, even temporarily. Obviously, I’ve been using tools for business sales and support to achieve this, but maybe there’s a genuine startup here?

There are real cultural headwinds to overcome: just go back to those replies to Aaron’s tweet. Lots of people have lots to say about the place of fathers vs mothers, using language that isn’t far off from “a women’s place is in the kitchen”. They must be overcome, and they will be.

If you’re designing a parenting app or service, I implore you: dads are carers too. Please let us be by giving us full access to services designed to support our child. We’ll reward you with our loyalty. The dads are ready.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Dear Ma,

My child was born last Friday. I wish you could meet them.

The first time I saw their face in person (strikingly similar to their 3D ultrasound, but here, not an echo of a person but a real-life human being in front of me), they couldn’t breathe. The doctors whisked them away to a table, and I followed quickly, dumbly, the delirium from sleeplessness and from the surrealism of it all instantly snapping into pure, adrenaline-fueled presence. They put a mask on their face and applied pressure to their lungs, asking each other why they weren’t crying. Finally, there was a sound, like a tiny grunt. And then a little sigh. Finally, they opened up into a small cry; then, another, louder one. The smallest little human I’ve ever seen, finally arrived. I fell in love immediately.

The last time I saw you, just over a year ago, you were in a bed in the same institution, your donated lungs breathing fainter and fainter. I kissed you on the forehead and told you I loved you. You’d told me that what you wanted to hear was us talking amongst ourselves; to know that we’d continue without you. In the end, that’s what happened. But I miss you terribly: I feel the grief of losing you every day, and never more than when my child was born.

They’re so incredibly cute. I just want you to see.

I’ve been thinking about the cassette tape recording we have of when I was born. “It’s a baby!” you exclaimed, and we’ve always thought it was funny, because what else would it be? But I now understand that the enormity of that moment is stunning: a potential human made up of ideas and imagination, that we can only guess about, turns into a real-life human being. It’s a baby. Holy shit. Everything suddenly changes. Everything.

(I want to digitize that recording. Tapes degrade. It might even be gone already.)

You were always so good with children. Famously so. Babies loved you; children loved you. Every photo I have of you with a child is of you looking delightedly at each other, fully present in a joyful interaction. When you did your career about-face and became a schoolteacher, it was the most natural thing in the world, because it just made official what you’d always done. Of course, I saw the benefit of that care and love, too. I wish they were able to feel it directly. As it is, in this worse universe that doesn’t have you in it, I’ve been intentionally trying to channel you. I’ve been trying to imagine how you would have shown up with them, and what your advice for me would have been. I’ve been trying to convey that good-humored warmth I always felt. You made me feel safe: physically, yes, but more than that, emotionally. I want to make them feel safe, too: to be who they really are.

They have the privilege of a tightly-knit family. I can’t wait to introduce them to my dad, and to my sister, who are the best people I know. I want them to be deeply involved in their life. You will be too, through us, but I wish it could be through a hug or smiles or belly-kisses.

I guarantee you would have loved them. I guarantee they would have loved you.

Erin’s quickly turned into such a good mother, Ma. She really is; you’d love it. She’s so attentive, and smart, and worried about them, and prepared in all kinds of ways that I would never think to be. So far, we’ve made a pretty good parenting team. There’s so much to learn, so much to get better at, so much to worry about. But she’s good. It’s fun to think of them having fond memories of her in the same way I have fond memories of you.

It’s also weird to think of them thinking fondly of me in the same way I love my dad. Those bonds are strong. I have trouble thinking about anyone loving me deeply, but I know I love deeply, and my dad is one of the people I love the most, so the possibility is there. I hope I can live up to that for them. It’s scary to think about.

I remember, very early on, going on a protest march with you. As a child, I inherited your buttons and proudly wore messages to ban the bomb and embrace renewable energy. (Those slogans seem like ancient history now, but also still so relevant.) Progressive values and the value of protest were normalized for me. Living in Oxford, we were surrounded by university, and you were both life-long students, so I was raised in an environment of debate and deep thought. Because I had parents who talked about the world, both around me and to me, I had a better sense of my place in it. I want that for them, too.

We seem to be backsliding into a world where nationalism is a respected value, and where fierce individualism trumps all, even as we plunge deeper into a climate crisis whose only real solution is for us all to work together. We have to think globally, as one people, and we have to care for people on the other side of the globe as if they were our neighbor. We have to call out our own governments when they oppress others, at home or abroad, and we have to be forces for equitable, inclusive, collaborative kindness in a world that is dominated by competition and profit. We seem to have forgotten the importance of community, and of acting collectively - or, worse, rejected it, as if being an actively participative part of a fabric of interconnected souls somehow impedes our individuality. On the contrary, I think it uplifts us. In a world where we all have a duty of care for each other, we can more truly be ourselves.

I got that from you.

I wish those ideas were a given, but they’re going to have to fight for it. We’re constantly re-litigating the same arguments about religion, bodily autonomy, the climate, when we could be building on what we’ve learned to climb ever higher. Their world will have fewer resources, constrained by a heating planet. If it also continues to have widening inequality and an addiction to wealth hoarding, it will also have more conflict. It will be a worse place to live: more dangerous, more authoritarian, more brutal. “Building a better world for our children” is no longer an abstract sentiment for me, and my fear is that they will have this realization one day too: they may find himself wondering how to show up to make a safer, kinder world for their child.

We need to make more progress.

You described yourself as having been radicalized. That word means so many things: to me, your values were never radical. They were simply common sense. We need to take care of each other; we need to love our neighbors, and understand that everyone is our neighbor; we need to undo systems of oppression and inequality. You worked for affirmative action and stood up in court to establish and protect the rights of tenants over landlords. You marched and donated to causes and let your worldview be known. You were a force of light in the universe, not just for how you acted towards everyone who knew you, but how you showed up in the context of wider systems. If you were radicalized, I guess I hope I am too.

You had no time for people who didn’t care about others: hardcore conservatives, neo-reactionaries, libertarians, and fascists. You cared about fairness and inequality. You were an ardent feminist. You were an anticapitalist. You believed in true representative democracy. You continued to learn and evolve your understanding of systems of oppression. I love all of those things about you - just a fraction of all the things I love about you. I want to model that way of thinking and acting for my child.

I want them to have broad horizons, and to understand that all of this - everything - can be changed for the better. Change is inevitable; how we change is up for grabs.

You were always so flexible: so up for the adventure. You traveled thousands of miles to have me in Europe. By the time I was three years old, I’d lived in four cities. As time goes by, I’m more and more impressed by your ability and willingness to just up and leave and try something new. My life has been much better off for it. I think your life was much better off for it.

Remember living in Oxford? You had that upstairs office above Daily Information, where you’d work on predictions for the telecoms industry - you predicted the rise of cellphones, home internet, ubiquitous broadband - while our Jack Russell terrier, Tessie, would patiently sit in her bed. At noon precisely, she would walk over to you to let you know it was time to take a break, and you’d take her on a walk to Port Meadow. Both you and my dad took classes when you wanted to, often just to improve your knowledge for its own sake; you didn’t have to worry about return on investment, or healthcare or education costs for your family. It all just worked, so simply. I miss that lifestyle. I miss the peace of it all: the lack of fear that comes from real support.

So I’m now faced with a similar question to the one you must have been considering. The US is such a big country, and it contains so much, but it’s also so isolated, and by extension, so isolationist. Save for tribal nations, you can drive for thousands of miles without hitting another country. It would be easy to grow up here and have a very insular worldview: look at all the people who swear blind that “America is the best country on earth” but have never lived or spent much time anywhere else, and who consider blind patriotism to be a virtue rather than the cult-like ignorance it is.

When we build software, we learn that the settings we choose to be the defaults are incredibly impactful: those defaults permanently affect how someone will use the product you’ve made. It seems to me that this is even more true in life. Regardless of the choices they make later in life, the defaults I give my child will permanently affect their worldview. By traveling around and seeing the way different people live, not on a tour bus but immersively over time, we learn that there are lots of valid alternatives; we meet and get to know lots of ways of being, and understand that ours is not better than theirs. If we don’t, I’m worried that the way the community around us lives becomes the default, and that the rest of the world becomes a little scary. My child has multiple passports to draw on; they will have the ability to live in, or at least visit, so many places. It would be such a missed opportunity to not give them that perspective. The more easily we can all relate to people from different nations, the easier it will be to have a globally-minded, kinder world.

Make no mistake: I know you would want me to make sure they see alternatives to living like we do here, and I will make sure that I do. So much is wrong. Every school shooting is shocking, but the safety drills they make children do are almost as terrifying; the ideas that are traded as normal are so brutal. Violence is ingrained everywhere. What kind of country watches little bodies be slaughtered and refuses to take any kind of meaningful action? We still kill prisoners. The police commit murder. And we call this civilization? I don’t want my child to grow up thinking any of this is normal. They need to see that it’s a uniquely American problem by spending a lot of time outside of America.

But for all they can learn from it, international travel itself has a climate impact that is worsening the conditions that will make life harder for them over the coming decades. I don’t know how to reconcile that: I don’t think the world is better if people don’t travel. You often told stories of the times you lived in Italy, or Israel, or the UK before I was born. Your parents visited countries all over the world and often took you with them. We traveled often around Europe in particular. Maybe it’s because I inherited that background, or because our own relocations made my sense of place less tethered, but I think the ability to see the world face-to-face should be as accessible as possible.

I think you’d have a smart way to think about that, or to look at it from another angle. You might, I think rightly, point out that the bulk of the climate crisis lies in the hands of corporations and industry. That they spend time and dollars on casting the blame elsewhere. But you’d also care and worry about your own contribution: you wanted an electric car before most, you wanted solar, you supported renewable energy and the politicians who supported it.

As I write you this, my child is fast asleep, lying skin-to-skin on his mother. His face is unbothered by any stress or worry. He hardly cries. When he wakes up, I’ll check his nappy, keep him clean, and we’ll feed him. We’ll talk to him, and play with him, and sing and tell him we love him, and let him drift back off into slumber.

There are people in the world who would wish this sweetest human harm. They’re part-Jewish; they’re from more than one place; they are not being raised to believe in a religion; they are going to be raised to be in opposition to wealth hoarders and rent-seekers and nationalists, in a culture of broad, inclusive love. These would-be-objectionable traits are all the products of dead-end mindsets that should have withered away in the 20th century. With a small amount of luck they’ll live to see the first decades of the 22nd century, and I imagine those ideas still be with us then. But I hope they will be fringe by then, and I hope my child has a part to play in their demise. They do not deserve to define what the rest of us do.

I grew up knowing that my father and his family lived through a concentration camp when he was just a toddler; that my maternal grandfather was captured by the Nazis and thought dead; that my great grandfather escaped White Army pogroms in Ukraine. I heard my grandmother screaming through the walls every night as her dreams took her back. Through my family and the ripples trauma leaves across generations, I understand the consequences of hate. And I understand that the definition of “fascist” isn’t predicated on death camps and goose-stepping; it isn’t set in the early 20th century. It’s a mindset rooted in nationalism, tribalism, and the noxious idea that some people are inherently better than others. It’s an idea that did not go away at the close of the Second World War, is not limited to any nation (of course Americans can be fascist), and is so pernicious that my child and their children will both need to be aware of its toxicity, long into the future.

The period we’re living through now may be just the very beginning stages of a world with fewer resources controlled by ever-fewer people, who will use increasingly-authoriarian methods and appeals to existing divisions to try and maintain their holdings at the expense of others. Ma, the only way I can see through this is by living how you did: with kindness, by not holding back our opinions, and by active work to make everything better.

You showed me the way. I’ll try and do my best.

I love you. I miss you. I wish you were here.

Happy Labor Day to everyone who celebrates the organized labor movement today in the US. This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for August, 2022.

A note: it’s taken me a while to hit publish on this post because our son was born on September 2nd. We instantly fell in love. More on that soon. For now, please understand if my posting frequency plummets for a little while.

Books

Fiction

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan. A ton of ideas about parenting, society, and the present moment, crammed into an emotional near-future science fiction story. I wish the protagonist had been more sympathetic - but the future it paints is alarmingly plausible.

Notable Articles

Business

Workplace Productivity: Are You Being Tracked? “Two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.”

The organized labor movement has a new ally: venture capitalists. “White’s solution is to plan an “exit to community.” Once the company starts earning income, it plans to buy out its investors and give their equity to the unions it helped organize, effectively transitioning corporate control to the customer base.”

American Express' platinum-level duplicity. “American Express’ decision to begin donating to Republican objectors reflects the desire of some in the business community to put the events of January 6, 2021, behind them. That, according to an open letter recently signed by former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault and other prominent business leaders, is a big mistake.”

Varo layoffs are a sign of neobanks’ struggle to break even. ““Most American neobanks cater to lower-income customers, who previously may have incurred overdraft, [non-sufficient fund fees] and maintenance fees at big establishment banks,” Mikula told Protocol. “But these consumers also tend to be higher credit risk, making it challenging to lend to them. No U.S. neobank has built a meaningful lending business.””

Climate

California to Ban the Sale of New Gasoline Cars. “The rule, issued by the California Air Resources Board, will require that all new cars sold in the state by 2035 be free of greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide. The rule also sets interim targets, requiring that 35 percent of new passenger vehicles sold by 2026 produce zero emissions. That requirement climbs to 68 percent by 2030.”

The temperature threshold the human body can't survive. “When the wet bulb temperature gets above 95 degrees F, our bodies lose their ability to cool down, and the consequences can be deadly. Until recently, scientists didn’t think we’d cross that threshold outside of doomsday climate change scenarios. But a 2020 study looking at detailed weather records around the world found we’ve already crossed the threshold at least 14 times in the last 40 years.”

Women are working to make the clean energy transition more equitable. “Women are disproportionately facing the impacts of the climate crisis: They are more likely to be displaced by climate disasters, and due to lower-paid jobs, caregiving responsibilities and the wage gap, they have less economic means to recover and adapt to a changing climate.”

Crypto

More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake. “More than half of all reported trading volume is likely to be fake or non-economic. Forbes estimates the global daily bitcoin volume for the industry was $128 billion on June 14. That is 51% less than the $262 billion one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from multiple sources.”

Insider Trading in Cryptocurrency Markets. “We find evidence of systematic insider trading in cryptocurrency markets, where individuals use private information to buy coins prior to exchange listing announcements. Our analysis shows significant price run-ups before official listing announcements, similar to prosecuted cases of insider trading in stock markets.”

Feds Blacklist Tornado Cash, Ban Ethereum Mixing Tool in US. “In a Monday announcement, the body added the Tornado Cash website and a long list of Ethereum addresses to its Specially Designated Nationals list, banning American citizens from using the tool or transacting with these addresses.”

Pearson Sees NFT, Blockchain Helping Making Money From E-Books Sales. “The chief executive officer of Pearson Plc, one of the world’s largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology like non-fungible tokens and the blockchain could help the company take a cut from secondhand sales of its materials as more books go online.”

Culture

Queer YA books are selling in record numbers despite bans targeting them. “Of the close to 5 million units of LGBTQ+ books sold in 2021, the biggest absolute gains in this market came from LGBTQ+ YA books, which saw an increase in sales of 1.3 million units from the previous year. Queer YA is more popular than ever — no longer a niche category, but redefining what is mainstream for teen readers.”

As list of banned books in schools grows, ‘soft’ censorship is spreading. “Free speech advocates say these practices are as troubling as bans — particularly when the books singled out overwhelmingly have themes related to race, gender and sexuality and are written by authors who are women, LGBTQ+ and/or people of color.”

Billy Bragg on the difference between the backlash to Salman Rushdie and Jerry Sadowitz. “Over the past decade or so, Rushdie has sought to return to some sort of a normal life, despite the threat hanging over him. The fact that he continued to take the stage at literary events is a tribute to his belief in freedom of expression and he has been rightly commended for his bravery.”

Doctor Who casting director: "We’re casting more disabled actors". “It’s more interesting. Also, if you can’t cast diversely on Doctor Who, what show can you do it on? It goes everywhere, on this planet and others, and you don’t want to see the same kind of people all the time. You don’t want it to be exclusively middle-class white people speaking with RP accents.”

on leading a purposeless life. “Maybe it is okay to not pursue potential and just be okay with being. Why must there be a reason for everything?” Beautiful.

Author Salman Rushdie attacked on lecture stage in New York. “He has said he is proud of his fight for freedom of expression, saying in a 2012 talk in New York that terrorism is really the art of fear.”

Interview: Jake Novak on His Infamous SNL TikTok Video. “Honestly, as horrible as the internet has been to me in the past six weeks, I have really enjoyed this hiatus. I’m getting to see my friends more and just have more meaningful experiences in real life.”

Democracy

Why I Changed My Mind on Student Debt Forgiveness. “It is simply impossible for students to work their way through college in the way previous generations could. And at the same time, states have reduced funding to their public colleges that historically allowed schools to charge low tuition prices.”

We reject the free speech-trampling rules set by J.D. Vance and Ron DeSantis for covering their rally. “Think about what they were doing here. They were staging an event to rally people to vote for Vance while instituting the kinds of policies you’d see in a fascist regime.”

John Mackey: Whole Foods CEO says ‘socialists are taking over’ schools and gun control debate. ““My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over,” the multi-millionaire organic grocery magnate said. “They’re marching through the institutions. They’re… taking over education. It looks like they’ve taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they’ve taken over the military. And it’s just continuing.””

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff leans in to being a voice for gender equity. “Emhoff is the first second gentleman to the first woman vice president, and for him, tackling gender inequality in ways big and small felt like a natural, and critical, component of creating this role. He is actively attempting to model for others what it means to be an ally in actions, not just words.”

It's Manly Man Summer at the Claremont Institute. “In a piece titled “Men and the Future of America,” Klingenstein praises senator Josh Hawley for a speech trumpeting the “masculine virtues.” And what are those? They are, according to Klingenstein, “stoicism, competitiveness, conquest, achievement and aggression.” These are qualities to be managed, not repressed, because repressing them turns them toxic, into “dysfunctional behaviors—crime, drugs, pornography, and the like.”” I find this ideology so repulsive, so baffling.

How the Claremont Institute, home to Trump lawyer John Eastman, rose and fell. “Lewis said he agreed with Claremont leaders that the country is locked in a cold civil war. “Our country is upside down,” he said. “It’s unrecognizable.” He praised the program and its focus on “the myth of systemic police racism.” […] “They’re trying to train people to take a kind of extreme populist right-wing ideology back with them to Washington.”“

After slow response, Biden administration ramps up abortion access protections. “Helen Silverstein, head of the government and law department at Lafayette College, said that the administration’s actions this week were notable because they sent a clear — if delayed — signal to the Democratic base that the executive branch is taking access to reproductive health care seriously.”

Orbán gets warm CPAC reception after 'mixed race' speech blowback. “The reaction to Orbán’s “mixed-race” remarks was “a little bit overblown,” Ede Vessey said, maintaining that the prime minister was referring to a stark clash of cultures that has taken place in some Western European countries that have accepted refugees from predominantly Muslim countries.”

Senate Judiciary holds hearing on threats to election workers. “Election officials from both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as nonpartisan officials, testified at the hearing on election workers, a workforce that has received more attention after former President Donald Trump lied about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. As Trump considers another run for office in 2024, he has repeated unfounded claims about election security that election administrators say has made their work more difficult.”

Justice Department sues Idaho over abortion ban, citing ‘medical emergency’ violation. ““The law thus places medical professionals in an impossible situation,” Gupta said. “They must either withhold stabilizing treatment required by EMTALA or risk felony prosecution and license revocation. In so doing, the law will chill providers’ willingness to perform abortions in emergency situations and will hurt patients.””

ShotSpotter Asks Court To Hold It In Contempt Rather Than Turn Over Information To Defense Lawyer. “It’s tough to say what a judge will find admissible, but ShotSpotter’s past history suggests it is willing in some cases to alter reports to justify arrests that have already occurred. If the PD contacted ShotSpotter post-arrest to get a report altered, it may show officers had no reasonable suspicion to stop the arrestee — a stop that resulted in his arrest.”

Sen. Tiara Mack says twerking video response has led to harassment, threats. ““It’s been a whirlwind. Anywhere from misogynistic comments, racist comments, classist comments,” she said. “I’ve received death threats. I’ve received emails and phone calls of people calling me the n-word. I’ve received fatphobic comments. Just everything under the sun.””

Republican candidates are changing how they handle abortion after Roe v. Wade. “Multiple Republican midterm candidates have removed from their campaign sites references to particularly strict anti-abortion stances, a shift from primary campaigning to the approaching general election and an indication of growing concern in the Republican Party over how to handle abortion policy post-Roe v. Wade.”

Health

U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline. “American Indian and Alaskan Native people have experienced a particularly precipitous drop in life expectancy since 2019, going from 71.8 to 65.2 years. This kind of loss is similar to the plunge seen for all Americans after the Spanish Flu.”

Kids Born Near Fracking Sites More Likely to Have Leukemia, Study Says. “Children who are born near fracking sites are as much as three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia later on, according to new Yale research.”

For years, Black trans women have been told their life expectancy is 35 years. That’s false. “Willis says the statistic once communicated an urgency in the community. Today, she thinks trans people need more complicated stories.”

Experts debunk monkeypox myths as misinformation spreads. “Can monkeypox spread on the subway? Can it kill like COVID-19? Experts respond to monkeypox myths and misconceptions.”

Just because some people can pretend COVID is over, doesn’t mean it actually is. “People are still dying of COVID and even more people are getting long COVID (which we’re seeing develop into myalgic encephalomyelitis for many long haulers, and trust me, you don’t want it). The CDC and Food and Drug Administration have mostly abdicated their responsibility to prevent infections, focusing only on serious illness and death, while ignoring long COVID and the impact of the virus on disabled people.”

Media

Person-Centered Terms Encourage Stigmatized Groups’ Trust in News. “Participants trusted articles that used person-centered terms for their group more than articles that used stigmatizing terms.” Understandably.

People of color at 'New York Times' get lower ratings in job reviews, union says. “While there were some fluctuation — on average, the performance of Black employees rose over the intervening years, while it declined for Latinos at the organization — white workers were consistently assessed as outperforming their peers.”

Healing Polarized Communities. “We cannot begin bridging communities beyond our newsrooms without building — and supporting — more diverse communities within our newsrooms.” So proud to work here.

Choose Your Own Literary Adventure. “The colorful recommendation chart, one of many that have rippled through the Twitter and Instagram feeds of book lovers, came from a small bookstore in Madison, Wis., called A Room of One’s Own. […] The charts seem to speak the internet’s language, one that meets people where they are by acknowledging that literature can be overwhelming, and people often don’t know where to start.”

A luxury magazine photo hid relics Cambodia says could be stolen. For me the lede here is: Architectural Digest appears to have deliberately run a photo altered to hide the fact that an article’s subject owns stolen Cambodian artifacts.

After Roe v. Wade Reversal, Readers Flock to Publications Aimed at Women. “Alexandra Smith, the audience director of The 19th, which was founded in 2020, said growth in traffic had been “exponential.” She said an increase in search traffic had continued well after the June 24 court decision, with readers now looking for information on how the decision could impact access to Plan B and IUDs. They were also looking to read about the impacts on other civil rights, such as marriage equality.” Hey, I get to work there!

Alex Jones must pay $50m for Sandy Hook hoax claim. “Despite retracting his claims about Sandy Hook, Jones has continued to use his media platform to argue the case was rigged against him and claimed that members of the jury pool “don’t know what planet they’re on”. His Infowars website depicted the judge being consumed by flames.”

Science

How a theory about transgender contagion went viral. “The problem: Overwhelming evidence shows that your child almost certainly hasn’t been duped. Although some people do reconsider or reverse their transition, once a person starts identifying as trans, it’s quite unlikely they’ll change their mind. No matter how strongly you believe that the internet, social contagion, and positive representations of transgender people turned your child trans, chances are your child disagrees.”

French Scientist's Photo of ‘Distant Star’ Was Actually Chorizo. “But a few days later, Klein revealed that the photo he tweeted was not the work of the world’s most powerful space telescope, as he had in fact tweeted a slice of chorizo sausage.”

Society

Capitalism Gives Me the Freedom to Pursue as Many Side Gigs as I Want to Pay Off My Increasing Bills And Loans. “I like to think of myself as an independent contractor who threw out his nine-to-five job for about five to nine different jobs over the course of a year, a contractor with significantly less of the legal protections established in the past hundred years or so by Congress and the Supreme Court.”

Ask Damon: I want to redistribute my slave-owning ancestor's wealth. “Anyway, if you’re sincere in your desire to attempt to right your family’s wrongs, find those descendants, show them the money and then hand it to them.”

Happiness Is Two Scales. “Instead, happiness and unhappiness are two separate, independent scales. A good life requires tackling each one separately.”

Period poverty: Scotland first in world to make period products free. “It will be for the country’s 32 councils to decide what practical arrangements are put in place, but they must give “anyone who needs them” access to different types of period products “reasonably easily” and with “reasonable dignity”.”

Why a Life-Threatening Pregnancy Complication Is on the Rise. “For African American women, simply the stress of living in America increases the risk of preeclampsia.”

Lionsgate Will Mandate Abortion Safety Protocols, CEO Says in Memo. “Thank you, Lionsgate, for being the only studio who treated this issue with the respect and urgency it deserves. There’s still work to be done, but this is a step in the right direction.”

Races are finally making room for nonbinary runners. “More races across the United States are creating divisions for nonbinary runners to compete, and in some cases, to win awards. The New York City Marathon introduced a nonbinary category last year. The Chicago Marathon also quietly added a nonbinary registration category this year, one runner said. The Boston Marathon will include a nonbinary category in 2023, though athletes say the race needs to flesh out its policy before nonbinary runners can be fully included.”

NJ police used baby DNA to investigate crimes, lawsuit claims. “The blood samples are not directly shared with law enforcement agencies. But if police are able to reliably obtain the samples through subpoena, then effectively, the disease screening process is entering all babies born in the state into a DNA database with no ability to opt out.”

Economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich. “We find tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality in both the short- and medium-term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth or unemployment.”

The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”. “By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I’ve come to see longtermism as an immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of “future value,” complete with its own “secularised doctrine of salvation.””

Facial recognition smartwatches to be used to monitor foreign offenders in UK. “Through their opaque technologies and algorithms, they facilitate government discrimination and human rights abuses without any accountability. No other country in Europe has deployed this dehumanising and invasive technology against migrants.”

Federal Judge Places County Jail Into Receivership After County Fails To Comply With Consent Decree. Mind-blowing: “A-Pod is one of four “pods” the prison is divided into. […] Because the inmates have free run of the pod, they can access the roof and escape. For whatever reason, they rarely actually escape. Instead, they leave the prison and return with contraband. No one is assigned to work A-pod because it cannot be controlled in its current state.”

Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor. “The findings show the limitations of many attempts to increase diversity — like school busing, multifamily zoning and affirmative action. Bringing people together is not enough on its own to increase opportunity, the study suggests. Whether they form relationships matters just as much.”

Technology

Opening the Pandora's Box of AI Art. “I’ve never felt so conflicted using an emerging technology as DALL-E 2, which feels like borderline magic in what it’s capable of conjuring, but raises so many ethical questions, it’s hard to keep track of them all.”

Listen up: Podcasts are coming to Twitter. What’s Odeo is new again.

Bay Area tech startup Sanas wants people to sound whiter. “Experts who spoke to SFGATE were troubled by Sanas’ emphasis on people in the Global South making themselves understood to Americans, as opposed to Americans accepting other accented voices.” Indeed.

Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues. “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”

Class action against Oracle's worldwide surveillance machine. “Oracle’s dossiers about people include names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity.”

A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal. ““This is precisely the nightmare that we are all concerned about,” Mr. Callas said. “They’re going to scan my family album, and then I’m going to get into trouble.””

Mozilla Foundation - In Post Roe v. Wade Era, Mozilla Labels 18 of 25 Popular Period and Pregnancy Tracking Tech With *Privacy Not Included Warning. “Eighteen out of 25 reproductive health apps and wearable devices that Mozilla investigated for privacy and security practices received a *Privacy Not Included warning label. These findings raise concerns in the post-Roe landscape that data could be used by authorities to determine if users are pregnant, seeking abortion information or services, or crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.”

A new jailbreak for John Deere tractors rides the right-to-repair wave. “Farmers around the world have turned to tractor hacking so they can bypass the digital locks that manufacturers impose on their vehicles. Like insulin pump “looping” and iPhone jailbreaking, this allows farmers to modify and repair the expensive equipment that’s vital to their work, the way they could with analog tractors.”

This Is the Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion. “Facebook gave police a teenager’s private chats about her abortion. Cops then used those chats to seize her phone and computer.”

OnlyFans Accused of Paying Bribes to Put Enemies on Terrorist Watchlist. “According to the suit filed earlier this year by Evans and fellow porn content creator Kelly Pierce, OnlyFans reportedly bribed Facebook employees to wrongfully place the actresses — who used OnlyFans competitor sites to sell their content — on a terrorism watchlist run by a consortium of internet companies, resulting in them being “shadowbanned” on Instagram and other social networks integral to the promotion of their content.”

Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022. “The share of teens using Facebook has declined sharply in the past decade. Today, 32% of teens report ever using Facebook, down 39 points since 2014-15, when 71% said they ever used the platform.”

Who could write protocol fiction for speculative infrastructure? “But we don’t need just design fictions. We need business model fictions, engineering feasibility study fictions, interop protocol specification fictions, investment return fictions.”

Gmail is now officially allowed to spam-proof politicians’ emails. “It’s sad that instead of simply stopping sending spam emails, Republicans engaged in a bad-faith pressure campaign — and it’s even more unfortunate that Google bought it.”

iOS Privacy: Instagram and Facebook can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser. “With 1 Billion active Instagram users, the amount of data Instagram can collect by injecting the tracking code into every third party website opened from the Instagram & Facebook app is a staggering amount.”

Ex-Twitter employee found guilty of spying on Saudi dissidents. “Abouammo was found to have used his position at Twitter to find personal details identifying critics of the Saudi monarchy who had been posting under anonymous Twitter handles, and then supplying the information to Prince Mohammed’s aide Bader al-Asaker.”

Silicon Valley engineers are quitting for climate change. “Big Tech is no longer the young upstart, and there’s a new kid in town luring away smart people looking for purpose and willing to take a chance on something new: climate tech.”

This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting. ““We are not trying to make human beings. That is not what we are trying to do.” says Hanna. “To call a day-40 embryo a mini-me is just not true.””

The Metaverse Is Not a Place. “But what if, instead of thinking of the metaverse as a set of interconnected virtual places, we think of it as a communications medium? Using this metaphor, we see the metaverse as a continuation of a line that passes through messaging and email to “rendezvous”-type social apps like Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and, for wide broadcast, Twitch + Discord. […] The interactions are not place based but happening in the ether between two or more connected people. The occasion is more the point than the place.”

Joel Kaplan’s Policy Team Sways Big Facebook Decisions Like Alex Jones Ban. “The company could have acted much earlier, one Facebook researcher wrote on the internal message board when they quit in August. The note came with a warning: “Integrity teams are facing increasing barriers to building safeguards.” They wrote of how proposed platform improvements that were backed by strong research and data had been “prematurely stifled or severely constrained … often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.””

It’s late in the evening and we’re in the hospital while our son slowly makes his way to birth. I’m a sea of emotions, but one of the biggest is the feeling of uselessness: just as I couldn’t carry the baby, I can’t help take on the pain of contractions or the exertion of birth itself. I’m here to help in any way I can, but sometimes there isn’t any way to do that. I’m a supporter, standing by, and doing so in awe.

Everything is about to change. Everyone says that and I can intellectualize it, but it’s not the same as actually experiencing that seismic shift in what it means to be alive. It’s so weird to be on the cusp of the unknown in a profound way. Tomorrow, it all looks different.

I feel so unready. We haven’t finalized a name. We haven’t figured out how really anything will work. But it’s happening, and I’m not sure anyone can really feel ready for this, even if they think they are.

Will I show up well for him? Will I be the person he needs me to be? I hope so. My friend Jessica Want says that you have to parent yourself while you’re parenting a child, and that makes sense to me. There’s so much learning and growing I need to do. I need to be a better person in so many ways so that I can be the person I want to be for him.

I know this: he will be better than me. I’m excited for that. I’m excited to be there to help and support him, and to be the wind at his back as he grows and comes into his own, even while I feel utterly unequipped to do so.

For now, I’ve hooked up the hospital TV to a rotation between the ISS live feed and a live feed from a cat rescue in LA. And we wait, one person in increasing discomfort, one hoping he’s doing everything he can to help, one waiting to reveal himself to the world.

My opinions on web business models have changed over time.

I agree that advertising was one of the web’s original sins, although at this point in its cultural life I’m not sure I’m prepared to say that it was the only original sin. At the same time, I’m not sure if the web would be the web without it: I wonder if it would have been as big or as ubiquitous if it had been harder for platforms to make money on it. Secure web payments weren’t a thing, so online subscriptions were difficult to achieve - and even if they hadn’t been, content with a price tag is by definition exclusionary, with a far narrower potential audience. Ads, for all their evils, kept the web open to all.

It may seem obvious, but money was, and will continue to be, important for the web. While I’d love to live in a post-capitalist, post-money society, we don’t. Asking web creators to build and share for the love of it negates their need to put roofs over their heads and pay for food. And while it’s clear that internet companies grew to be very large and amass a lot more money than an individual creator requires, the advertising these behemoth engines generated arguably fueled the web’s growth and subsequent popularity. I’m not here to defend any tech giant, and I think there’s a great deal wrong with the wealth hoarding they practice and the liberties they often take with human rights, but I don’t think we’d be having the same kind of conversation if they hadn’t existed.

Anyway, It’s a moot point, because ads were everywhere on the web, they were how it grew, and they did create the world’s largest warrantless surveillance network in the process. They weren’t the only thing: centralized web analytics and detailed customer profiling aren’t intrinsically tied to ads. But targeted advertising opened the floodgates for ubiquitous tracking across the free websites that represent most ongoing web activity.

The question isn’t “what would have been better”, but “where do we go from here”. So what now?

For a time it seemed like subscriptions, paywalls, and micropayments might be the answer. But I’ve laid the clues for why they’re not necessarily so above: they intrinsically exclude the majority of a site’s potential audience from being able to see and consume its information. And rather than precluding tracking, taking direct payment still incentivizes websites to tailor a commercial call to action.

Simply put, if you know where a potential customer has spent money on before, and what on, you’re more likely to know what could entice them to spend money with you once they’ve landed on your website or in your app. These customer insights necessitate tracking. And at the same time, not every ad needs to be targeted: advertising does not require tracking to work, and publishers tend not make more money from targeted ads.

I do think shifting to methods of direct support to the web has the potential to be part of a solution, but not inherently to itself. Paying for content and services obviously has its place, but at the same time, business models can’t possibly be one-size-fits-all. Sometimes excluding users who can’t pay is too much friction, or is converse to the mission you’re following, or is even societally harmful - imagine, for example, if the journalism required for voters to make smart democratic decisions all lay behind a paywall. Every business, every creator, everyone who wants to build community has to know what their mission is and who their audience is, and must tailor their approach accordingly.

I’ve come to really appreciate patronage models. You can see this most readily on sites like The Guardian and Wikipedia: great content served as part of a well-made product, with a clear, well-constructed ask that is hard to ignore but also easily dismissable. Neither site, to the best of my knowledge, does anything to subvert user privacy; neither site makes any limitations on who can access their pages. If you don’t have the means or the inclination to pay, you can just close the box and carry on with your day. But if you can, it’s equally as easy to throw them some money. You don’t get much in return (although there may be some tote bag style benefits) aside from the warm glow of knowing that you’ve kept a public resource online.

Here the politics of privacy turn on their head. Whereas nobody wants an ad company to know who they are or to be able to follow them around, people who purchase patronage may want to be recognized. For some, being publicly associated with a creator or community you love may be an incentive in itself. Because it’s a more direct relationship, a site may also feel that it’s in its interests to list its patrons’ names, so that community members can understand who is paying for all this. (In full disclosure, my employer, The 19th, does this.)

I’d love to see an open source patronage widget that uses a built-in web payments protocol to allow anyone with a website to be able to easily take patronage payments without going through a centralized service that could track them, optionally with a requirement to record a patron’s identity for display. This is the kind of thing I know the Unlock Protocol team, which I spent some time on, is working on.

As discussed, though, this is not a problem with a purely technological solution. I’d love to find ways to build a stronger culture of patronage across the web, which I think is tied directly up with finding ways to build stronger community. My hunch is that people with a strong, bidirectional relationship to a content creator or service will be more likely to support it.

Finally, I don’t think we get away with eradicating surveillance capitalism without legislation. Just as every market needs some rules to protect consumers and ensure companies play fair, the internet needs to be governed by real privacy laws. We’re at the foothills of a movement here: the GDPR and CCPA are two examples of what will hopefully become an international agreement about what constitutes real privacy. Because it’s much harder to build a web service that carves out privacy legislation compliance for users in a geography than just to build a service that complies for everyone, these laws have an outsized impact. We’ve seen that a free-for-all open market does not result in an environment that protects consumers from warrantless surveillance; it’s past time that these regulations became mainstream everywhere.

Brought together, I think that’s the future of paying for content and services on the web that I’d like to see:

• Robust privacy protections, worldwide
• A flexible, web-native model that leans heavily on patronage for consumer web content and services
• A way to keep content and services free at the point of use for most users
• Easy-to-use tools and protocols that allow web creators and consumer service providers to collect funds without having to engage with centralized services that could track customers

It’s clear that alignments have to change to make this a reality. For example, while it might be relatively easy to think of content that you might want to patronize, services might be a little tougher. What would Twitter or Facebook have to do to make you want to be a patron?

As a start, they would need to deliver exceptional value: not as a delivery mechanism for ads, but as communities that you’re excited for people to be a part of because they make the world better. Doesn’t that seem like a much more enlightened model than today’s engagement machines that encourage discord in order to show you more ads?

Yes, it’s a tall order, but so was the web. I believe we can reclaim the commons and build something that’s more nurturing and supportive for all of us - and that allows creators and people who build services to make a living at the same time. In fact, I think the future of the web as a medium may depend on it.

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

Open, collaborative protocols > centralized services.

Impact on people > impact on capital.

Impact on communities > impact on individuals.

Human rights > capital rights.

Distributed equity > limited ownership.

Distributing equity > adding value to exclusionary systems.

Sustainability > get-rich-quick.

Building value > building wealth.

Serving underlying human needs > prescriptiveness for one particular approach, business model, financing strategy, or underlying technology.

Listening, building, and testing > talking.

The best listeners in the room > the smartest people in the room.

Radical inclusion and empathy > radical individualism.

In the spirit of Uses This, here’s what the baby stack looks like right now, a week or two before birth:

Hardware

Uppababy Cruz. An adaptable folding stroller. What’s super-cool about it is that it supports a bassinet as well as a seat, and can also support an infant snug-seat for very little ones. Theoretically, then, the stroller can last for years, as the baby grows bigger. Although I haven’t yet had the opportunity to try it with a real life baby (soon!), it seems stunningly well-designed in a way that a lot of technology hardware isn’t. Buttons do what you think they should do, and folding it up for storage is one very simple, quick motion.

Uppababy Mesa. A car seat that was shockingly easy to install in my car. Even better, it clicks out of its base really simply, and can actually click into the Uppababy Cruz stroller. It all just works seamlessly, like an Apple ecosystem for babies. I have memories of my parents struggling with belts and braces for car seats, and that doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore. Good.

Happiest Baby SNOO. A smart bassinet. It looks and sounds like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel: it automatically soothes the baby and helps them sleep, like something aliens might do if they were raising humans on a farm. I still don’t know how I feel about it, honestly, but I’ll form a better opinion later on. If it turns out everyone hates the smart features, it also just looks like a well-made baby bed.

Hatch Rest. A combination night light and natural-sound white noise machine. I don’t know about baby, but it helps me sleep.

We have some baby wraps and carriers, but I feel like a three year old learning to put on a sweater. I get lost and I’ve got no idea which ones are good yet; I won’t until later.

Etc

Maven workshops have generally been pretty good, although I really wish there’d been more in-person time.

UCSF are, as (almost) always, brilliant.

We’ve been reading him A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the womb. Beatrix Potter, too. I’m one of those people now.

But also singing! And telling stories! And saying hello! It’s the organic, offline, really human stuff that I think is going to make a real difference.

I don’t know that any of these devices are going to be particularly all that. I’m the least excited about the SNOO and probably the most impressed by the Uppababy ecosystem. Most of all, I’ve got no idea what will happen and how it will actually be - and I’m clinging onto anything that will help me feel like I’m not completely lost.

We’ll see what happens!

Photo by Steven Abraham on Unsplash

As America becomes more diverse, and as a direct consequence more inclusive, it unfortunately makes sense that more people will come out of the woodwork suggesting that people who aren’t white and male be disenfranchised. This is a racist country, after all. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Take this radio host, name redacted. I think this messaging is unthinkably chilling:

I didn’t sign up to be part of a fight for the basics of representative democracy, but I’ve got a growing feeling that’s what we’ll all be drawn into. Christian nationalist rhetoric in particular is escalating quickly, and there’s no middle ground to be found with people who want to deny others’ right to exist with the same rights and terms as them. It would be irresponsible to downplay the risks.

How can we turn this back? And particularly given our context of diminishing resources, rapidly-progressing climate change, and off-the-charts inequality, what will life even look like five or ten years down the road?

The best part of traveling is the food.

You can learn so much from how and what people eat. The way they gather, the smell of the spices, the sizzle of oil in great pans, the delicacies that only come from the sorts of hole-in-the-wall places that locals protect with their lives.

I’ve never been a fussy eater. I explore new places like a toddler: taste buds first, every nerve in my mouth feeling out a new experience. There’s so much joy and humanity to be found in food - and in particular in the kinds of food that are cheap and accessible. Fancy restaurants are all very well (I’m not knocking the skill and artistry involved in a Michelin-starred meal) but the kind of place that can become someone’s regular joint is beguiling. The food is the basis of a relationship that forms over time.

I drove across the US twice last year. Heading east, we went the northern route, through Glacier National Park and the Montana plains. Heading west some months later, we traveled south. Every time we tried one of the headline places to eat - the tourist traps, in other words - the food paled in comparison to the places where locals went. In New Orleans, Cafe du Monde is a fun experience, but the food doesn’t compare to unpretentious spots like Stuph’D.

And just as food is tied deeply into the identity of a place, so is it tied to the identity of a person. We all have the dishes we love, which make up the fabric of us; the ingredients we enjoy, how and when we cook, if we cook at all, the smells we produce in the kitchen and the smells that attract us at the table. Whether our cooking is a whole thing or if it’s something we do regularly, it’s part of our self-image and the image we project. We need food to survive, and our relationship with it reflects us.

When people ask me where I’m from, I sometimes joke and say, “I come from the internet”. In some ways that’s true, but the joke stops here: I’m in no way from the place that produced pink sauce and baked feta pasta. Food, more than anything, links me to the places I came from.

I really learned to cook from my Oma, who brought her Indonesian dishes to California when my dad’s family emigrated in the sixties and adapted them for locally-available ingredients. She loved cooking for her family, but began to lose strength. So she gave me instructions: sayur lodeh and nasi goreng under her direction were my first adventures in mixing spices and building flavors. I grew up with these meals, regular weekday occurrences rather than exotic events, but no less delicious for it; I was pleased to learn how to reproduce them.

We ate a lot of Italian and French food, common to many American families of any origin (despite being in England): lasagna, quiches, homemade pizzas, spaghetti. But my mother’s Ukrainian Jewish ancestry led us to eat piroshki and borscht on special occasions; matzo ball soup; latkes; challah. Our meals were hearty. “Do you eat foreign food every day?!” one school friend memorable said when he came over. It wasn’t foreign to us; it was ours. “Eat, eat,” my great grandfather used to say, “it’s good for you.” Grandpa Dave was PA Joint Board manager of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America; here’s a story about a holiday complex he helped build for union workers.

Despite living in England, at no point did we eat English food, which I was left to discover as an adult. I didn’t have so much as a Sunday roast until I was in my twenties: it just wasn’t part of our culinary milieu. Of course, then I leapt on it, and writing this in California I find myself missing Yorkshire puddings and pork pies.

Locard’s exchange principle dictates that every contact leaves a trace. Although it was developed for forensic investigations, it’s equally applicable to people and migration: the places we’ve been all rub off on us, and we rub off on them. I’m a Ukrainian-Jewish-Indonesian-Swiss-Dutch-American who lived in both England and Scotland for decades. Each of those places left some trace on me, directly or via my family, and my descendants will find that they have rubbed off on them too, even if each of those ingredients has a slightly different potency to mine. They will have their own distinct identities, while also reflecting what and who came before them.

And of course, the same is true of everyone. Each of those chefs in the hole-in-the-wall joints serving food to their regulars has their own combination of ingredients that led to them. We’re all constantly leaving traces on each other, part of a tremendous, delicious mix. The more we mix and ebb and flow, the greater the tastes we may experience. To be fussy and reject new tastes, or to demand it be anglicized or made pristine, is to reject new people and other ways of life.

Taste is part of life. It’s one of the best parts of living. We are, literally and metaphorically, what we eat.

Photo by Miquel Parera on Unsplash