Werd I/O

I spent a lot of my early career in educational technology. My work “origin story”, such as it is, is that I started to work on virtual learning environments in 2002, realized that everyone involved (teachers, administrators, learners, potentially the developers) absolutely despised them, then applied the principles of the nascent social web to the space.

What I only began to appreciate more recently is how important enterprise education is: particularly when it comes to the certifications required to do business in well-regulated industries. For example, to get SOC 2 certified on an ongoing basis, you really have to run frequent security training for every employee, and do deeper training for every engineer. Keeping a record of who has taken and passed those training modules has a lot of value to a business who might be audited.

Informal learning doesn’t really fit into this model. Yes, you learn better from your peers, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that immersive, holistic teaching is more valuable educationally, but that’s not why companies run the training. They run the training to de-risk themselves, but more than that, to prove that they have de-risked themselves. Quantifiable grades, scores, and access records are mandatory in this context. They’re the product more than the actual education is.

The trouble is, that’s how we tend to think about education in a wider context, too. Ultimately, we don’t care so much about actually educating people. We care about showing that we have educated people. It’s not about holistically helping to give people the tools to really succeed in life - or, God forbid, furthering human knowledge - but much more about showing that we’ve hit our Key Performance Indicators for society and de-risked our communities. Stats and analytics are performance; it’s about covering your ass by showing you did your due diligence, the actual effect of your work be damned.

Goodhart’s Law goes as follows: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. When our goal is to have a certain percentage of A grades instead of to fully and comprehensively educate, our methods change accordingly. We let people slip through the cracks and we start to build systemic, one-size-fits-all approaches. On the other hand, if our goal is to educate, we might well find that a measure or approach that works for one student doesn’t work for another.

A mistake I made in my early career was thinking that people who made the financial decisions generally wanted to educate rather than engage in a performative demonstration of having educated. While the former is usually, gratifyingly true of actual educators, the people who control the purse-strings very often want the latter. I was naive and over-idealistic, and just didn’t get it.

Understanding that would have helped me put better tools in the hands of educators, as well as build a stronger non-profit or business to supply them sustainably. Maybe ironically, I didn’t know enough to do that. C’est la vie.

This year I’m interested in taking on some advisory roles. These could look like informal advisor relationships, or, for the right organizations, they could look like more formal board positions.

I have a demanding day job, but I like the idea of helping a wider set of companies - and particularly those that have the potential to make the world more equal and informed.

I’ve been on several sides of the startup table:

I was a founder twice, and CEO once (so far).

I’ve been the technical and product lead multiple times.

I was the west coast Director of Investments at Matter Ventures, an early-stage accelerator and VC firm.

Some of my favorite meetings at Matter started out as investment or product strategy sessions, and wound up as discussions about database optimization. I’m able to bring both technical and business experience to bear - and I’d love to.

Although I’ve had formal advisors in the past, and currently sit on a board, I don’t know how to go about making myself available in this way. So I thought I’d just put it out there.

If you’re interested, get in touch: ben@benwerd.com.

Thoughts

1. I can’t believe that CES is still happening in person.
2. In November, I drove back to California from the east coast with my sister: a risky move during a pandemic. We took precautions and managed not to contract anything nasty. But the diciest part of our trip, by far, was Las Vegas.
3. It’s not a classy place, but I’ve sometimes enjoyed Vegas. During the pandemic it’s pretty close to hell on Earth. There are crowds of people. Worse, there are crowds of people who don’t mind being in crowds.
4. CES is tied with SXSW for me as an event I don’t want to attend again if I can possibly help it. The crowds; the commercialism; the soullessness. In a resurgence of the pandemic, I couldn’t imagine contemplating it.
5. What a thing to do in honor of crappy new gadgets and TVs that can display NFTs.
6. What a perfect example of the risks people are asked to endure in the name of making money. Capitalism over life.
7. Every time I’ve sent someone wishes for the new year, or they’ve sent wishes to me, it’s included an end to the pandemic. Truth be told, I’ve not had a terrible time of it (at least, not because of covid), but it’s still trying. I want to see my friends and family. I want to travel back to the country I grew up in. I want to see new places.
8. I have two bucket list items when the pandemic finally lifts. I want to visit Japan, because I’ve never been - all over the country, ideally, traveling on its marvelous trains. And I want to visit Indonesia, where my father was born, ideally with him.
9. I want to see more.
10. I do not want to go to fucking CES.

Actions

1. I’m back on the exercise train. Today is my first real run of the year after some brisk hikes. I’m thinking about adding weights to the mix.
2. It’s time to really throw myself into the project I’ve been working on so we can release it. It’s been a journey, and I’m excited for people to use it.
3. After buying a house in Philadelphia, I’m planning some trips over there to get everything in order. I find it really exciting, but also daunting.

Matt Mullenweg asks people to blog for his birthday. It’s a lovely idea! And I might as well use his post to discuss one of my resolutions for the new year.

I’m going to post reflections on my own site at least once a day. As I’ve mentioned before, email subscribers will still receive updates every other day as a digest; RSS feed subscribers will get them in real time. They also post in real time to my Facebook page, my Twitter autoposting account, and micro.blog.

I love blogging and I wish more of you would do it. Sharing my reflections lets me put them in order, which in itself is valuable to me, but I love reading your replies and other peoples’ reflections. This earliest form of social media is, for me, the deepest and most interesting: a decentralized sphere of diverse voices, all publishing on the same playing field. It’s what the internet is all about.

A blog is just a journal: a web log of what you’re thinking and doing. You can keep a log about anything you like; it doesn’t have to be professional or money-making. In fact, in my opinion, the best blogs are personal. There’s no such thing as writing too much: your voice is important, your perspective is different, and you should put it out there.

And then, please, let me know about it.

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for December, 2021.

Books

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. This was a groundbreaking, genre-defining book when it was written, and some of the ideas remain outstanding. Reading it this year was an exercise in uncovering paelofuture: interesting in historical context, but almost completely lacking in the human context I need to really dig into a story. I’m going to alienate a bunch of science fiction fans by saying so, but I didn’t enjoy it at all.

All about Love: New Visions, by bell hooks. A complicated book. On one hand, it’s full of really important insights into the nature of loving that I think every adult should read and understand. (You should read it!) On the other, she’s sometimes too emphatic about ideas that need challenging: in particular, I was struck by her reductive opinions about Monica Lewinsky and her putting the onus on her gay sister to deal with their parents’ homophobia. Her insistence that religion is a required moral authority also doesn’t land with me. Regardless, when this book rings true, it does so deeply, in a way that permeates the soul.

Pemmican Wars, by Katherena Vermette, Donovan Yaciuk, and Scott B. Henderson. Shades of Kindred here: a graphic novel about a fostered Métis teen girl who slips through time to Canada’s colonial past during a history lesson. It’s slight, but the art and writing are evocative. I wish there was more character development, but perhaps that will come in later volumes. This volume plants the seeds for a story to come.

Red River Resistance, by Katherena Vermette, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk. The story being drawn here is important and needs to be told. I wish there were more pages: at times the book feels like a series of impressionistic vignettes rather than continuous plot. But I’m still hooked, and I’m curious to see where this is going. There’s not enough about Echo in the mix for me; we learn about Canada’s sordid past with respect to its indigenous peoples, but not enough about how that connects to the present. I assume that’s coming in future volumes.

Northwest Resistance, by Katherena Vermette, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk. It’s all starting to come together, with an almost Quantum Leap style twist. The narrative is less impressionistic, too: there’s more detail here than in previous volumes, and we’re learning more about Echo. Intriguing, magical, and instructive about Canada’s genocidal past.

Road Allowance Era, by Katherena Vermette, Scott B. Henderson, and Donovan Yaciuk. Easily the best of the series. The narrative comes together, and Echo realizes she can control her time travel ability, as well as the poignant source of her ability. The atrocities continue, too, and the book does a great job of contextualizing them both emotionally and historically. The central conceit works really well throughout, in the same way it did for Octavia Butler in Kindred.

Streaming Media

Don’t Look Up. A genuinely great movie about climate change, without ever really being about climate change. Hilarious, sobering, deeply affecting, cynical, and smart. I loved every moment.

Notable Articles

Business

Playing Startup Versus Building a Company. “Figuring out how to build and run a business isn’t easy—and a lot of the moves you need to make aren’t intuitive. However, too many people approach it by just copying what it seems like everyone else is doing without taking a hard look at what your actual goals are and really learning how to go about the job of Founder and CEO. They’re “playing startup” as opposed to actually building a company.”

Google will fire unvaccinated employees. “Workers who haven’t complied with the vaccine mandate — by either sending in proof of vaccination or qualifying for a religious or medical exemption from Google — will go on paid leave for 30 days starting Jan. 18. They had until Dec. 3 to send proof of vaccination or to apply for an exemption. Google won’t accept testing as an alternative to vaccination, according to a company memo cited by CNBC.”

Covid

Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. “Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden. That’s according to a new analysis by NPR that examines how political polarization and misinformation are driving a significant share of the deaths in the pandemic.”

Secret Investigation Documents Reveal How The CDC’s First COVID Test Failed In The Pandemic’s Early Days. “In the US, the responsibility for developing a test fell to the CDC. [...] The team tasked with developing the nation’s first test was in the tiny RVD lab, which included four smaller procedure rooms, all located on the seventh floor of Building 18 at the CDC headquarters. In January 2020, the RVD lab was staffed by nine people — only three of whom were full-time employees.”

When COVID patients get new lungs, sould vaccine status matter? “About one in 10 lung transplants in the United States now go to COVID-19 patients, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS. The trend is raising questions about the ethics of allocating a scarce resource to people who have chosen not to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.” Healthcare should save everybody’s life, regardless of choices. But this is such a frustrating trend.

Laclede County, MO Health Department stops COVID work. “The local health department of a rural southern Missouri county is halting its COVID-19 response efforts after Attorney General Eric Schmitt wrote agencies this week demanding they drop mitigation measures.” It’s like they’re actively trying to kill people.

Trump White House made 'deliberate efforts' to undermine Covid response, report says. “Birx also told the panel that Atlas and other Trump officials “purposely weakened CDC’s coronavirus testing guidance in August 2020 to obscure how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country,” the report said. The altered guidance recommended that asymptomatic people didn’t need to get tested, advice that was “contrary to consensus science-based recommendations,” it said, adding, “Dr. Birx stated that these changes were made specifically to reduce the amount of testing being conducted.”

US Army Creates Single Vaccine Against All COVID & SARS Variants, Researchers Say. “Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as from previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide.”

Crypto

Is web3 bullshit? “The hazy vision of new decentralized internet, built on the blockchain, to succeed the “Web 2.0″ of Google and Facebook seems to be reaching a threshold of ambient cultural awareness such that non-tech pundits, news-engaged normies, magazine editors, uncles, online attention-seekers etc., feel the need to weigh in on the question.” This is a great round-up of different perspectives on the topic: from enthusiasts to cynics, and everything in between.

Smart Contract Bug Results in $31 Million Loss. “The basic problem is that the code is the ultimate authority — there is no adjudication protocol — so if there’s a vulnerability in the code, there is no recourse. And, of course, there are lots of vulnerabilities in code. To me, this is reason enough never to use smart contracts for anything important. Human-based adjudication systems are not useless pre-Internet human baggage, they’re vital.”

New Study on NFTs Deflates the "Democratic" Potential for the Medium. “Ten percent of NFT buyers and sellers make as many transactions as the remaining 90 percent, it found, suggesting high concentration in the NFT marketplace. This statistic suggests that decentralized marketplaces have given way to more specialized platforms, which have come to occupy similar roles as gallerists and brand names in the non-crypto economy. The study also revealed that the average sale price of three-quarters of NFTs is just $15; meanwhile, only 1% of NFTs sell for over $1,594.” This seems like a pretty standard power law distribution, which I’m not sure why crypto would be exempt from.

How Cryptocurrency Revolutionized the White Supremacist Movement. “Hatewatch identified and compiled over 600 cryptocurrency addresses associated with white supremacists and other prominent far-right extremists for this essay and then probed their transaction histories through blockchain analysis software. What we found is striking: White supremacists such as Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents, race pseudoscience pundit Stefan Molyneux, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, and Don Black of the racist forum Stormfront, all bought into Bitcoin early in its history and turned a substantial profit from it.”

Melania Trump Launches an NFT and Blockchain Venture Based on Solana. “The former first lady of the USA – Melania Trump – will join the cryptocurrency universe by releasing her non-fungible token platform. The first NFTs, called “Melania’s Vision,” will be available to purchase for a limited period around the Christmas holidays.” Oh no.

The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive. “It’s tempting to say they suck the way everything sucks now, but it’s more like how one particular strain of American aesthetics has sucked for the last 20 years. NFTs are the human capacity for visual expression as understood by the guy at the vape store.” This piece is so beautifully brutal.

Web3/Crypto: Why Bother? “A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it – something people try to convey, albeit poorly, by saying it is “decentralized.””

Culture

Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It). In general I don’t agree that movies have become less easy to understand - I have no trouble with Christopher Nolan dialogue, for example, and I don’t get why people can’t understand Tom Hardy - but this is an interesting look into the industry and how the different pieces fit together.

Michael Sheen turns himself into a 'not-for-profit' actor. “But when I came out the other side, I realised I could do this kind of thing and, if I can keep earning money, it’s not going to ruin me.” This is the coolest thing.

‘They were a bit abrasive’: how kids’ TV Clangers secretly swore. “The Clangers were briefly drawn into this combative arena in a special one-off episode called Vote for Froglet, in which Postgate tried to persuade the planet’s residents of the virtues of the two-party system. After a snap election, with the Soup Dragon running on the “free soup for all” ticket, the Clangers were unconvinced and stuck with their enlightened autonomous collective.”

Acclaimed author bell hooks dies at 69 . Rest in power, bell hooks. What an intellectual, moral, literary force. If you haven’t read her work, please do. It’ll change the way you see the world.

Love Actually Child Star Labels Festive Romcom Cheesy And Sexist: 'I Think It's A S*** Film'. “I think it’s aged badly. All the women in it are sort of passive objects. I think that there was an article describing them as passive objects to be acquired.”

Coldplay will stop making music in 2025, lead singer Chris Martin announces. Why wait?

Betty White, a TV Fixture for Seven Decades, Is Dead at 99. Such a loss; such a life.

Media

Nobel winner: ‘We journalists are the defence line between dictatorship and war’. “Ressa has spent much of the last four years trying to point out that none of this is happening in isolation and that the “assault on truth” is doing the same to western democracies as it has done to her country. Muratov is even more gloomy. “It’s terrifying that countries that have been living in a democracy for so many years are rolling towards a dictatorship. That’s just a terrifying thought.””

Number of journalists behind bars reaches global high. “It’s been an especially bleak year for defenders of press freedom. CPJ’s 2021 prison census found that the number of reporters jailed for their work hit a new global record of 293, up from a revised total of 280 in 2020. At least 24 journalists were killed because of their coverage so far this year; 18 others died in circumstances too murky to determine whether they were specific targets. China remains the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the third year in a row, with 50 behind bars. Myanmar soared to the second slot after the media crackdown that followed its February 1 military coup. Egypt, Vietnam, and Belarus, respectively, rounded out the top five.”

Politics

Trump social media company claims to raise $1bn from investors. “Donald Trump’s new social media company and its special purpose acquisition company partner said on Saturday the partner had agreements for $1bn in capital from institutional investors.” I don’t believe them.

How Donald Trump Could Subvert the 2024 Election. “Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.” A well-reported, frankly terrifying story.

Trump called aides hours before Capitol riot to discuss how to stop Biden victory. “Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.”

Kanye West publicist pressed Georgia election worker to confess to bogus fraud charges. “Weeks after the 2020 election, a Chicago publicist for hip-hop artist Kanye West traveled to the suburban home of Ruby Freeman, a frightened Georgia election worker who was facing death threats after being falsely accused by former President Donald Trump of manipulating votes. [...] She said she was sent by a “high-profile individual,” whom she didn’t identify, to give Freeman an urgent message: confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail.”

Kanye West’s 'Independent' Campaign Was Secretly Run by GOP Elites. “The Kanye 2020 campaign committee did not even report paying some of these advisers, and used an odd abbreviation for another—moves which campaign finance experts say appear designed to mask the association between known GOP operatives and the campaign, and could constitute a violation of federal laws.” Kanye believe it?

Society

Man donated his body to science; company sold $500 tickets to his dissection. “But instead of being delivered to a research facility, David Saunders’ body ended up in a Marriott Hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon, where http://deathscience.org/ held an “Oddities and Curiosities Expo.” At the October 17 event, members of the public sat ringside from 9 am to 4 pm—with a break for lunch—to watch David Saunders’ body be carefully dissected. Tickets for the dissection sold for up to $500 per person.” Horrifying.

“This Is Blackface”: White Actors Are Playing Black Characters In Virtual Reality Diversity Training. “One employee described the use of white actors in Black roles as “a really tough thing for a lot of us to stomach.” Two raised concerns about white actors mimicking Black dialect while acting as Black characters. Three independently described an incident in which a white simulation specialist used the n-word while acting as an avatar of color. That actor now trains other simulation specialists. Employees also raised concerns about the visual creation of Mursion’s avatars, citing lack of variation in the skin tone, hair, and facial features of their characters of color, and about the company’s failure to promote and support women employees of color.”

Women may soon qualify for the draft. Here’s what you need to know. ″“This overall lack of strong support, though, illustrates what we call benevolent sexism, which is a sexism that rests on paternalistic beliefs: ‘Women need protection, and their skills are nurturers, not fighters. We need to protect them from war so as to not corrupt their virtue and purity and inhibit them from fulfilling their duties as wives and mothers,’” Chod said. “This was the same argument made in the 19th and early-20th centuries to bar women from voting.””

New Zealand plans to make it illegal for kids to buy cigarettes — for life. “People aged 14 and under in 2027 will never be allowed to purchase cigarettes in the Pacific country of five million, part of proposals unveiled on Thursday that will also curb the number of retailers authorized to sell tobacco and cut nicotine levels in all products.” Wait, we can do this?

Peter Thiel’s Free Speech for Race Science Crusade at Cambridge University Revealed . “Their common concern was the increasing threat from the advancement of a ‘liberal’ agenda to traditional Christian religious and theological beliefs – including an unnerving fascination with race science.” Lots to digest here.

The Anti-Abortion Movement Could Reduce Abortions if It Wanted To. “Why would groups that want to end abortion not support the most efficient way to make abortions less common? The answer is that their mission extends beyond abortion and into the regulation of sex, gender roles and the family. Contraception and abortion are tied together because both offer women the freedom to have sex for pleasure in or outside of marriage, and both allow women greater control over their lives and futures. The “pro-life” goal isn’t an end to abortion. It’s to establish another means of controlling women.”

About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated. I’m one of them, and it’s still weird to me to be in a minority (vs the UK, where some polls have over 50% of respondents not identifying with any faith). There’s nothing wrong with being religious, but there’s nothing wrong with not being religious, too. I’d love to have better representation of that in this country.

FDA permanently allows medication abortion pills through mail. “The Thursday announcement upholds a decision from April to temporarily suspend federal requirements that had previously required in-person purchase of abortion pills from a clinic, hospital or medical office.” Trump challenged it; I’m glad this has gone through.

Technology

Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them. “Millions of crime predictions left on an unsecured server show PredPol mostly avoided Whiter neighborhoods, targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods. [...] “No one has done the work you guys are doing, which is looking at the data,” said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University who is a national expert on predictive policing. “This isn’t a continuation of research. This is actually the first time anyone has done this, which is striking because people have been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for this technology for a decade.””

US rejects calls for regulating or banning ‘killer robots’. “Speaking at a meeting in Geneva focused on finding common ground on the use of such so-called lethal autonomous weapons, a US official balked at the idea of regulating their use through a “legally-binding instrument”.” It may seem laughable now, but technology improvements will make this feasible very shortly. Internationally agreed upon protections would be smart.

Hackers Are Spamming Businesses’ Receipt Printers With ‘Antiwork’ Manifestos. ““Someone is using a similar technique as ‘mass scanning’ to massively blast raw TCP data directly to printer services across the internet,” Morris told Motherboard in an online chat. “Basically to every single device that has port TCP 9100 open and print a pre-written document that references /r/antiwork with some workers rights/counter capitalist messaging.”” I love this.

The Popular Family Safety App Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users. “Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it.” This should be illegal.

This Swiss Firm Exec Is Said To Have Operated A Secret Surveillance Operation. “The co-founder of a company that has been trusted by technology giants including Google and Twitter to deliver sensitive passwords to millions of their customers also operated a service that ultimately helped governments secretly surveil and track mobile phones, according to former employees and clients.”

A mysterious threat actor is running hundreds of malicious Tor relays. “Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users. [...] at one point, there was a 16% chance that a Tor user would connect to the Tor network through one of KAX17’s servers, a 35% chance they would pass through one of its middle relays, and up to 5% chance to exit through one.”

An Open Letter to Mr. Mark Zuckerberg: A Global Call to Act Now on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Science. “We do not believe that the methodologies seen so far meet the high scientific standards required to responsibly investigate the mental health of children and adolescents. Although nothing in the leaks suggests that social media causes suicide, self-harm, or mental illness, these are serious research topics. This work, and the tools you are using should not be developed without independent oversight. Sound science must come before firm conclusions are drawn or new tools are launched. You and your organisations have an ethical and moral obligation to align your internal research on children and adolescents with established standards for evidence in mental health science.”

Kickstarter plans to move its crowdfunding platform to the blockchain. “Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is making a big bet on the blockchain, announcing plans to create an open source protocol “that will essentially create a decentralized version of Kickstarter’s core functionality.” The company says the goal is for multiple platforms to embrace the protocol, including, eventually, http://kickstarter.com/.” The word “eventually” is doing a lot of work here! But it’s a way more and more startups will try and expand - by creating a bigger pie and being the owners of the way their market business is conducted. They get to stay clear of antitrust regulations while literally owning the market. Will it take years for this to happen? Yes. Is it near-inevitable? Also yes.

Reimagining projections for the interactive maps era. “We have put a lot of thought into making this feature feel seamless and natural, so that our customers could adopt it on all kinds of map apps by adding one line of code. Let’s take a deep dive into why we did it, and how it works under the hood.” Superb work from the Mapbox team.

I blew $720 on 100 notebooks from Alibaba and started a Paper Website business. “TLDR; I started a business that lets you build websites using pen & paper. In the process I went viral on Twitter, made $1,000 in two days, and blew $720 on 100 paper notebooks from Alibaba.”

The Asymmetry of Open Source. “With the recent revival of the discussion about sustaining open source spurred on by multiple severe CVEs in a popular logging library, and with so many hot takes clamoring for more funding—some calling on companies, others on maintainers—I wanted to write about the problem and its solutions more holistically, as I have spent many years thinking about this from my own experience with both failing and succeeding… a perspective that I hope some of you will find helpful.” An excellent list of open source funding techniques.

Reporter likely to be charged for using "view source" feature on web browser. “The reporter discovered that the source code of the website contained Social Security numbers of educators. The reporter alerted the state about the social security numbers. After the state removed the numbers from the web page, the Post-Dispatch reported the vulnerability. Soon after, Governor Parson, “who has often tangled with news outlets over reports he doesn’t like, announced a criminal investigation into the reporter and the Post-Dispatch.”” Idiocy.

‌‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to Bread and Roses Community Fund. Based in Philadelphia, the fund is “a multiracial and cross-class community of donors, community organizers, and other allies of movements for change coming together around a shared goal of radically transforming individuals and society.”

It describes its mission as follows:

Bread & Roses believes in change, not charity. We organize donors at all levels to support community-based groups in building movements for racial, social, and economic justice. We support movements and their leaders through fundraising, grantmaking, capacity building, and convening.

‌We believe that a better world is possible. Since 1977, Bread & Roses has inspired people to take collective action and create real change in their communities, the Philadelphia region, and beyond. We raise money through donations of all sizes and make grants using a democratic, community-led decision-making process. Our grants go to local groups working for good schools, fewer prisons, better jobs, a safe environment, quality health care, and more.

Its work includes funds for racial and economic justice fund, environmental justice, criminal justice reform, opportunities, equitable public spaces, and equitable neighborhood recovery from the pandemic.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

I don’t know that any of us need a review of the year. I’m also not up for making predictions for next year: I just don’t know what’s going to happen.

So instead, here are some hopes I have for 2022. I don’t think they’re a sure thing by any stretch, but they’re not outside the realm of plausibility. And it’s nice to hope.

I’ve separated them into topics: Society and the World, Technology, Culture, and Personal. I’d love to read yours.

—

Society and the World

The end of lockdown. I think we all want this. I hope we’re able to get to a place where we can gather with our friends, spend time with our families, and live our lives without worrying about contracting or spreading a disease. To get there, we’ll need to continue to vaccinate the entire world, and hope that we don’t encounter ever more virulent strains. I don’t mind wearing a mask, but I look forward to not; I don’t mind presenting proof of vaccination, but I look forward to not.

A defense of women’s rights. The Supreme Court has the potential to effectively overturn Roe v Wade next year. Instead of that obvious step backwards, I’d love for the court to see sense (or, failing that, deliver a verdict with limited reach). Then I’d like to see us pass legislation to make sure we are never in danger of this again.

Progress on climate change. That could be (and needs to be) on multiple fronts. I’d love to see investment into viable public transport in the US: high speed rail, integrated transport, and other viable mass transit alternatives to cars and planes. But I’d also love to see more legislation - with real teeth - that forcibly curbs emissions. I’d love to see more and better renewable energy infrastructure. And it would be great to see carbon credits and trading replaced with hard limits for every business.

Technology

The decentralized web produces a non-financial killer app. I’d love to see a decentralized app that’s obviously better for regular people than a centralized equivalent. I’ve been thinking a lot about groups and discussion forums lately. In the old days, we had usenet; what would a modern, open, decentralized and peer-to-peer version of discussion threads look like? How could you incentivize multiple client apps with radically different user experiences? (If it’s not obvious already: I want to work on this.)

Technology-enabled unions. If employers want to put a stop to the great resignation, they might want to give their employees more of a voice. Unions as a concept are good for both businesses and workers. I’d love to see technology platforms that radically empower new union formation, and for business owners to embrace collective bargaining by their workforces.

The web becomes fun again. One of the things that I’ve noticed about people innovating on the blockchain is - no matter what you think about the technology - they’re having fun. I’d love to see that sense of fun return to web development as a whole. One of the problems is that a lot of our frameworks and tooling have been optimized for big, centralized businesses, and what works for Facebook probably doesn’t work for someone coding in their bedroom without the goal of building a startup. I’d love to see more easy-to-use libraries and frameworks, and for peer-to-peer style decentralization to become more prevalent through those libraries.

Integrated media. I want to read a book in bed. If I’m driving, I want to listen to the audio of that book in a way that picks up where I left off. Then when I pick up a book to read again, it picks up where the audio left off. Give me that for everything: what matters to me is the content, not the medium.

Sustainable, repairable devices. Maybe enforced by legislation. We should all have a right to repair; every manufacturer should be urged to find more sustainable process and material sourcing.

Facebook / Meta gets broken up. Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp need to be separate companies. In general, I hope to see redefined antitrust, and better enforcement of it. The industry, the media, and society will be better off for it.

Culture

More weird TV. More weird art. If I’m going to be stuck inside in lockdown, I want to watch television that takes risks. Now is the time for production companies to invest in new voices and radical stories. No more beige, sanded-down entertainment designed for mainstream audiences. The same goes for art of any kind. Bring on the outsider artists and people who put their full selves into their work.

The continued death of the mainstream. We’re all weird now, and sick of manufactured popularity that seeks to shepherd us into fitting into pre-defined consumer pigeonholes. Let’s just call it. Our interests are nuanced and varied; we’re all different. And that’s great. What’s not great? Being asked to conform to some median ideal, or enjoy things that have been produced for people who do over more nuanced work. This is a trend that’s been underway for some time; I’d love to see it accelerate.

Doctor Who returns with a woman Doctor and a regular cadence. Now the door has been opened by Jodie Whitaker, I don’t think it would be right to shut it. At the same time, I’d love for Who to finally get back to a twelve or thirteen episode annual run. I don’t think it’s been able to do this consistently since Russell T Davies’s original era as showrunner.

Personal

Rest. I spent a lot of this year wishing I could just disappear for six months. I came by it honestly. Next year I don’t want to be burned out; I want to be able to show up well for the people in my life, and work on projects with energy and creativity.

Authenticity. There’s no sense in trying to perform someone else’s version of you. It’s easy to fall into that trap in every aspect of life, and I sometimes have, but it’s a recipe for unhappiness. I want to do better at upholding myself and saying no to other people’s projections and expectations when they don’t align with mine.

Space to play. I want to have the space to work on my own projects. That’s been hard to come by for the last few years, for reasons I don’t regret: primarily, helping to care for my mother. But I want to spend more time writing, and I want to spend more time working on technology projects independent from trying to make money from them. (Quite a few people have messaged me about finishing Untitled, and I promise I will.)

Community. Somehow, I need to do better at connecting with people. That’s hard to do in a pandemic. But I miss my friends, and having grown up thousands of miles away, I’ve never been particularly great at keeping up with my extended family. Everyone needs friends; everyone needs family. This dovetails with authenticity: everyone needs a community of people who mutually like and support them for them, with no agenda or projection. I really value the people in my life I can truly be myself with.

Home. I deeply hope I can go back to the country I grew up in and see my friends and hometown before the end of the year. Let’s see.

For a while now, I've been using this drawing of me by Hallie Bateman as my avatar:

I love it, particularly because I'm a big fan of Hallie's work. But it's also not quite me, exactly: you get the same whimsical drawing no matter the topic.

I used to be a big Livejournal user. Based on the kind of writing I post here, you can probably guess that it was pretty confessional stuff: I'd share all kinds of details about my life as long-form posts. (Most of the people I was sharing with were my real-life friends.)

LJ pioneered a bunch of really great features - per-item access permissions, for one - but one of the best was the ability to change your avatar based on your mood. If you were a paying user, you could upload a whole palette of images and choose which one would represent you based on however you felt at the time.

Since then, avatars have become fixed representations of ourselves in online space, like a brand. You can expect the same image to follow someone everywhere; you immediately know who it is based on visual recognition.

But what if we don't want that? What if we want our identity to be more nuanced and faceted? What if we want our profiles to evolve as our lives do - not just our avatars but our descriptions, locations, and every nuance, up to and including our preferences? Updating every single service sounds like hard work, and it's not like most services use something like a Gravatar.

Really, everything should pull from a central digital identity, whether it's your website or some other core address. (Of course, anyone should be able to have any number of digital identities, so as to have the freedom to keep various aspects of their lives apart.) That's not how it works today; everything is siloed. Although there are all kinds of decentralized identity protocols, digital identity in the mainstream hasn't evolved far from the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s.

Imagine if you could choose an identity and present it everywhere you needed to. Online services would keep your avatar and contact details up to date; restaurants and airlines could automatically know your allergies and food preferences. You could withdraw and restrict data at any time.

All this is what the self-sovereign identity movement is all about. It's never really been made mainstream, but that doesn't mean it won't be. The first usable version won't be particularly fully-featured; it'll be simple and fun to use. And I'd love to give it a try.

In the meantime, maybe I should start using photographs of my actual face again?

Thoughts

1. It’s an obvious statement to make, but 2021 was … quite a year. Leaving aside my own personal family health journey, which I’ve written a lot about here, we saw an attempt at a fascist coup, and the second year of a pandemic that has now claimed 815,000 lives in the United States alone and millions worldwide.
2. For me, and many people, these facts were the backdrop to more pressing personal tragedies. Each life lost touches a family, for whom the effects will ripple out for generations. And beyond the direct lives lost, the pandemic pushed nearly 100 million people around the world into poverty.
3. We all deserve for shit to let up.
4. Shit is not going to let up.
5. We’re going to enter a third year of the pandemic. We have the anti-vaccination movement to thank for that, at least in part. I get that it doesn’t feel right to see the world fall in line behind these kinds of restrictions; I know I’d be upset to see them continue once the pandemic eases up. But for now, it’s how we save lives, and there’s something genuinely great about seeing people all over the world work together as a community. I haven’t met an anti-vaxxer who hasn’t come across like a selfish, petulant child.
6. Imagine how they’ll react to the acceleration of the worst effects of climate change. That’s coming, real soon.
7. How we react to the challenges ahead will define us. Can we come together as a community and work together for everyone’s benefit? Or will we squabble and argue and score cheap political points while the world burns? Will we adhere to our values, or will we succumb to fascism and nationalism as resources become more scarce?
8. I believe that Trump was a warm-up. His administration was obviously incompetent, but nonetheless almost succeeded in its aim. The next Trump, who might also literally be Trump, will not make the same mistakes.
9. In a world succumbing to conflict because resources are limited in adverse conditions, what would an authoritarian government do with surveillance capitalism? What would they do with all this connected data about each of us? History teaches us that the answer is something we should be thinking about.
10. How can we build a world where this is impossible? How can we build online infrastructure that cannot be used for ill by the worst actor? And then how can we get people to use it? These questions are worth taking very seriously right now.
11. I don’t believe the next decade will be plain sailing.
12. Anyway, hi, happy Monday.

Actions

1. This is my last thoughts and actions of the year. Next year I plan to post on social media significantly less, and to my own site significantly more. Likely this means several posts a day; RSS readers will get those in real time, but the email digests will still go out 3-4 times a week.
2. I want to seriously consider the questions above. You can’t build your way out of social problems, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t innovate or create new tools. What can we build that will empower people to build community in 2022 but will also provide freedom from surveillance?

Whatever you celebrate this December - or even if you don’t celebrate anything at all - happy holidays.

For everyone, this has been an intense year. From America’s attempted fascist coup in January to a shocking global COVID surge at the end of the year, it’s made 2020 - a year so bad they wrote songs about it - look like the warm up act. And that was just the baseline; everyone had to endure life’s inherent ups and downs on top of all this.

In all this, I’m grateful for you. Thank you to everyone who’s read, responded, reshared, and built community with me. You’ve all made my year better.

And to my friends and family: I lost my mother after a ten year fight this year, and there’s no way I would have made it through this year without you. So much love to you.

I’ve been reflecting on what the future might bring, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this. I know that 2022 will be about building, figuratively and literally. It will also be about being myself: while I always want to grow and learn, I don’t want to shave off my edges to fit into other peoples’ templates. Between COVID, climate change, and current events, the moment we’re in demands that we show up both authentically and radically, and cast off manufactured expectations to put the full weight of ourselves behind moving forward towards a safer, more equitable, inclusive future. That’s what you can expect from me, and what I hope for from you.

In the meantime, it’s all about community. As a multicultural atheist, these holidays are about togetherness more than anything else. I’ll look forward to spending time with my family and remembering my mother with love and fondness. I hope you get to spend time with the people you love this winter.

‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to the Coalition on Homelessness. Based in San Francisco, the Coalition on Homelessness “organizes homeless people and front line service providers to create permanent solutions to homelessness, while working to protect the human rights of those forced to remain on the streets.” This is particularly important in a world where some of the most wealthy inhabitants of the city are actively calling for homeless people to be forcibly relocated, and for homeless shelters to not be built in their neighborhoods.

It describes how it works as follows:

The Coalition’s organizing work is accomplished through two focused workgroups: Housing Justice and Human Rights. Our workgroups both have open meetings on a weekly basis, in which homeless people and their allies determine the policies we’ll pursue, and the strategies we’ll take to meet important goals aimed at ending homelessness, and protecting poor people while homelessness exists.

This includes work on housing justice and human rights, as well as publishing Street Sheet. It’s also worth checking out Stolen Belonging, an art project “which documents the belongings taken from homeless residents during the City’s sweeps, revealing the ways in which such thefts steal a person’s ability to belong in their community and the city.”

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to the Community Justice Project. Based in Miami, the Community Justice Project supports “organizing for racial justice and human rights with innovative legal work.”

It describes its mission as follows:

‌We are community lawyers. In our legal work we collaborate closely with community organizers and grassroots groups in low-income communities of color because we believe that a more democratic, more just and more equal society can only truly come about through grassroots organizing and social movement. We are a part of that social movement in South Florida and strive to support organizing through our varied and often innovative legal work.

Its work includes racial justice, police brutality, immigration defense, economic justice, and capacity building for social justice organizations.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

I’ve got the more-intense cold that’s been doing the rounds, and I hate it. Of course, I’d much prefer to have this than COVID: as annoying as it is now, there shouldn’t be any long-term effects, and I’m not heading to the hospital any time soon. So I consider myself lucky.

We hit 800,000 US COVID deaths this week. Almost 1 in 6 people in the country have contracted it. It’s the third largest killer after cancer and heart disease - which itself is an improvement on the beginning of the year, when it was the number one cause of death.

I’m mad at myself for catching a cold: if I caught this, I could have caught something much worse. I’m lucky enough to be triple-Pfizer-vaccinated (and donate to COVAX so more of the world can be), and I’m masked in public. But the risk isn’t zero, to myself or others: as bad as I’d feel catching COVID, I’d feel worse passing it onto someone else.

I’d really like this pandemic to end. But unlike the world presented in this famously awful Atlantic article, we can’t pretend that it has. I’m looking forward to a world without masks, where we can gather again and build community in person, but it isn’t here quite yet. Hopefully next year.

One of the most striking facets of the metaverse is that it doesn’t exist and nobody can agree on how to define it, but there are a lot of people who are really excited about it. And because so many people are excited about it, the hype itself may generate the platform. It’s like if a collective delusion was capable of birthing a tangible thing.

A ton of marketing dollars have been poured into generating this hype, but it’s in some ways arbitrary. Virtual reality has been around for a very long time and has never really taken hold in the markets; seeding this excitement allows those investments to finally come to fruition.

Imagine, though, if the same hype machine was directed elsewhere. What if we were excited to build a Star Trek future instead of a Ready Player One future? A post-money society where information and resources are ubiquitous and communities collaborate to push the boundaries of human experience and boldly go where no-one has gone before?

Or what about a cyberpunk future, where every piece of hardware is repairable and endlessly remixable into new devices?

You can’t sell headsets or NFTs that way, of course, so there’s little incentive for anyone to market this alternative future in the same way the metaverse has been. But we do need competing visions of the future that challenge hyper-commercial interests. The narratives we tell about the future really matter. The metaverse is a top-down, highly-financed commercial vision, which has partially gained popularity because its ill-defined nature allows everyone to pin their own imagination on it. We would all benefit from an alternative, bottom-up, collaborative vision that trades commerce for community.

Thoughts

1. My high school yearbook said that I was likely to become a journalist. Aside from a brief foray into film reviewing (one of the best gigs I’ve ever had), that didn’t happen. Instead, I was sucked into software development as a way to tell stories.
2. There’s a huge gulf between writing code as a self-directed creative endeavor and writing it as an act of engineering as part of a business. I learned the former, and then I had to learn the latter all over again as a distinct discipline.
3. But, as it turns out, they’re not distinct. The act of writing software for fun can lead you down paths you never would have explored as a professional endeavor. Visualizations, hardware hacking, game-writing, toys and gizmos with no ROI and no reason for being at all except for fun give you skills and insights that could, if you wanted, also be used for work.
4. Code is poetry, as someone smart once said.
5. Play and work have an integral relationship. But play requires space that we don’t often think to provide: physical, temporal, and mental. You have to start with the intention to include play. At work, you need to make it an inseparable part of your culture. Particularly in highly competitive environments, that’s not something that people tend to think to do.
6. Highly competitive environments are counter-productive overall.
7. I’m in awe of people who have retained that sense of naïve fun: of building something for the art of it, whether to explore, tell a story, or reveal something about ourselves. Keeping hold of that sense of play is a hard thing to do when the world around you is urging you to be productive, to make money, to financially succeed. Those goals are ultimately empty, and yet.
8. I want to spend more time playing; making things for the art of it; exploring what might be possible. Art is one of the best aspects of human civilization, and making it is freeing. It’s innately human. And that’s something I wish more of us could spend more time being.

Actions

1. It’s a big deadline week. There’s a lot to keep on top of, and I’m doing my best to be helpful. The best way I can do that is by providing the right environment, and making sure everyone has the resources they need.
2. I also woke up this morning with a giant cold, so I need to also take care of myself. Lots of tea.
3. I owe so many people so many emails.
4. And I need to finish my Christmas shopping. But that should be fine, right? Christmas is a month or two away? Right? Right?
5. In the spirit of play, I want to restart work on Untitled, my fiction work in progress. I had to stop while driving across country - it was just too much - but I really want to finish the story.

In the New York Times:

Lina Wertmüller, who combined sexual warfare and leftist politics in the provocative, genre-defying films “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties,” which established her as one of the most original directors of the 1970s, died overnight at her home in Rome, the Italian Culture Ministry and the news agency LaPresse said on Thursday. She was 93.

We’re distantly related - both Werdmüller von Elggs who colloquially dropped the “von Elgg” suffix for convenience - but I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never seen one of her movies. So tonight I plan to fix that.

Even if we weren’t on the same family tree, what an achievement: to be the first woman director to be nominated for an Academy Award. And I’ve got to admit, the combination of sexual warfare and leftist politics (the Guardian calls her films “outrageously subsersive”) really appeals to me.

Also, the New York Times again:

Ms. Wertmüller, an Italian despite the German-sounding last name,

Look, man, it’s never not going to be complicated.

ActivityPub is the protocol standard of the Fediverse: a set of interoperable, open source social networking platforms that notably includes Mastodon and Write.as. It’s the closest we have to a vibrant, distributed social networking ecosystem.

Known has supported Indieweb standards since the beginning, but Fediverse has been notably missing. I think that’s a big omission, but also not something I’ve had bandwidth to fix. I’d love to have more time and space to work on Known, but try as I might, I just don’t.

Today I added a substantial Gitcoin bounty to this work, which will be funded by the Known OpenCollective. My hope is that a developer can help us add this functionality. Today the bounty is funded in USD, but I’d be happy to exchange that for a proof of stake crypto bounty on request.

My first startup produced a product called Elgg: an open source social networking platform. It’s very long in the tooth now, but it’s still being maintained by its community.

When I graduated from university, I found that there weren’t many coding jobs in Edinburgh, so found myself back inside the institution, working at the Media and Learning Technology Service. I quickly learned that everyone hated the learning technology software we were providing: certainly the students (“learners”), but also the teachers and the administrators. It wasn’t obvious to me that the people writing the software didn’t hate it.

I was an early and avid blogger, and stuck up my hand to say that people were already learning from each other all over the web in an informal way - so surely we could use a similar mechanism to help people do that in an institution. I’d been forced to share a converted broom closet as an office with a PhD candidate in learning technology, Dave Tosh, who saw the formal implications of these communities. I built a prototype, stuck it on my Elgg.net domain (the Werdmullers come from Elgg, a village in Switzerland), and we showed it to the university.

The university said, verbatim: “blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms”. They were not interested in the prototype - so I quit my job, almost on the spot, and we co-founded a startup.

We had no idea what we were doing whatsoever. There was no startup ecosystem to speak of in Edinburgh at that time, so we were left to invent it all from scratch: learning from customers, figuring out what was worth making revenue from, building, marketing, you name it. Venture capital wasn’t on our radar so we didn’t bother trying to raise. We just pulled together a business and ran it for years, growing the community and platform with it. At one point, Elgg was translated into over eighty languages.

From time to time, I’ve caught myself wishing that we’d started it in Silicon Valley. Almost certainly, we would have found a more traditional venture path for it. But I don’t know that it would have worked that way - in a way, it succeeded because we worked it out from first principles. We built the team, processes, and culture that worked for us.

A lot of founders I see today are copying processes they’ve seen in other startups verbatim: perhaps they read about the way Amazon or Google works and thought to themselves, well, it worked for them. But I don’t think that’s right (and the same is true of templatized startup frameworks like The Lean Startup). When they worked, it was because they were a good fit for the organization - but their working in one place doesn’t in any way indicate that they’ll work in another.

These days, I find myself more often than not trying to reclaim that naïvety. How can I think about building a team, a culture, and a product from first principles? How can I forget all the startup hustle culture marketing and just figure out how to build something that works?

A lot of people are trying to play-act building a startup by copying what others do. I miss the days when I didn’t know; when everything was new. I’d love to find my way back there.

Every Friday I highlight a new social justice organization, inspired by the VC Fred Wilson’s Funding Friday posts about crowdfunding projects.

This week I donated to MADRE, an organization dedicated to working “with women leaders who protect and provide for communities facing war and disaster. Together, we build skills, strengthen local organizations, advance progressive movements, and advocate for rights.”

Its work includes ending gender violence, advancing climate justice, building a just peace by supporting women, and advocating for a more equitable foreign policy.

If you have the means, please join me in donating here.

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Based in Jackson, Mississippi, JWHO provides important women’s health services to its community, including abortions. It is the clinic at the center of the current Supreme Court case that threatens to overturn Roe v Wade and rob 65 million women of their right to choose. It is also the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi.

It describes its mission as follows:

‌Jackson Women’s Health Organization (JWHO) offers affordable abortion care to women living in Mississippi and/or traveling to the state of Mississippi.

‌Our commitment is to provide confidential health care to women in a safe and professional environment. It is our conviction to respect a woman’s reproductive choices specifically regarding a woman’s right to control whether she wants to become a parent or not.

The clinic provides vital services for its community, and its fight will have a disproportionate effect on the human rights of women across America. There are few more important battles today.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for November, 2021. It’s a little shorter than normal because I spent a portion of the month offline.

Notable Articles

Business

Research: People prefer friendliness, trustworthiness in teammates over skill competency. “People who are friendly and trustworthy are more likely to be selected for teams than those who are known for just their skill competency and personal reputation, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.” File under “no shit, Sherlock”: if you’ve got to work with someone every day, you want them to be kind and trustworthy, regardless of how good they actually are at their job. Ideally, you want both; if you can only have one, the person who’s a better human will and should win out every time.

Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent. “Tech companies based in San Francisco and Seattle have “innovation hubs” whose primary role is to create a place that talent that hasn’t been able to get a visa to the US. We’ve also started to see this in places like Lagos and Buenos Aires. Nigerian developers can work alongside startups in Berlin and London, while Argentinian developers work as consultants for companies based in the US. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this now that remote work is more widely accepted by companies worldwide.” This is a really positive change.

Putting Post Growth Theory Into Practice. “The Post Growth Entrepreneurship Incubator helps founders break free from traditional business models and implement sustainable non-extractive practices. […] We promote cross-subsidizing charity with our businesses, and we’re trying to offer an alternative for startup founders who want to bring their activist, artistic, spiritual business ideas to life without selling out in the commercial startup ecosystem. Too much of the startup ecosystem uses the Silicon Valley model of ‘capital, scale, exit.’ Instead we’re promoting: bootstrapping, flat growth, and non-extraction.”

Theranos patient says blood test came back with false positive for HIV. “Erin Tompkins, who got her blood drawn from a Theranos device at a Walgreens in Arizona, said the test misdiagnosed her as having an HIV antibody, sending her into a panic.”

Crypto

The Token Disconnect. “Silicon Valley ran dry on large breakthroughs in software, so we decided to invent the “blockchain”, a simulacrum of innovation that organically fermented from the anti-institutional themes in the Western zeitgeist to spawn an absurdly large asset bubble with absolutely nothing at the center. There is no there there, and crypto morphed into a pure speculative mania which attracted a fanatic quasi-religious movement fueled by gambling addiction and the pseudo-intellectual narrative economics of the scheme. All conversation around crypto is now simply the sound and fury of post-hoc myth making to rationalize away the collective incoherence of the bubble in a near perfect exemplar of the motivated reasoning of economic determinism.” Sharing because it’s an interesting take; I don’t necessarily agree with everything here.

Culture

Appalling Monica Lewinsky Jokes—And the Comedians Who’ve Apologized. “But in the two-plus decades since those jokes were made, some comedians have taken responsibility for their cruel comedy. Ahead, a rundown of some of the hosts and comedy programs that targeted Lewinsky and Tripp—and the parties who have since publicly taken responsibility for their hurtful barbs over the years.”

Belgian gallery uses art after being turned down by artist. “The friendly stranger who clocked the familiar image asked the gallery about it, and a representative allegedly claimed they’d been in touch with Bateman and worked something out. Bateman searched her email and found a permission request from the gallery, dated in March—which she had politely declined and promptly forgotten about. Somehow, what the gallery had taken away from the exchange was that it could just use her work anyway.” I used to share an office with Hallie and have followed her journey. (My current Twitter avatar - a picture of me - was drawn by her.) This gallery’s actions were a very unfair devaluation of the value of her work and her rights as an artist.

Conservative MP Nick Fletcher Blames Crime On Female Doctor Who. Doesn’t he look tired?

Media

The global streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage. “Training a new generation of translators to meet this supply issue in certain translation hot spots will take time, and most importantly, better compensation, said Lee, whose company Iyuno-SDI operates in over 100 languages and routinely clocks in over 600,000 episodes of translations every year. Lee said that roughly one in 50 applicants are able to pass Iyuno-SDI’s translator qualification exam. “I don’t think we’re happy with even 10% or 15% of who we work with,” he said. “We just have no other options because there’s just not enough professional translators.””

Danny Fenster, U.S. Journalist in Myanmar, Gets 11 Years in Jail. “The sentence seemed to be the latest signal that Myanmar’s military, which seized power in February, would not bow to pressure, including sanctions, from the United States and other countries. The State Department has repeatedly called for Mr. Fenster’s release.” Imprisoned by a despotic regime and failed comprehensively by the US.

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation. “An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.”

Politics

Secret recordings of NRA officials after Columbine school shooting show strategy. “In addition to mapping out their national strategy, NRA leaders can also be heard describing the organization’s more activist members in surprisingly harsh terms, deriding them as “hillbillies” and “fruitcakes” who might go off script after Columbine and embarrass them.”

It’s not ‘polarization.’ We suffer from Republican radicalization. “The polarization argument too often treats both sides as equally worthy of blame, characterizing the problem as a sort of free-floating affliction (e.g., “lack of trust”). This blurs the distinction between a Democratic Party that is marginally more progressive in policy positions than it was a decade ago, and a Republican Party that routinely lies, courts violence and seeks to define America as a White Christian nation.”

Spotsylvania School Board orders libraries to remove 'sexually explicit' books. Here’s why this is of note: ”“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”” Holy shit.

Science

Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law following LSE report findings. “Octopuses, crabs and lobsters will receive greater welfare protection in UK law following an LSE report which demonstrates that there is strong scientific evidence that these animals have the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm.”

What would health experts do? 28 share their holiday plans amid Covid-19. “To try to gauge where things stand, we asked a number of infectious diseases experts about the risks they are willing to take now, figuring that their answers might give us a sense of whether we’re making our way out of the woods.”

Society

Gresham High students speak out against school resource officers. “Group member Stasia recalled being accused of carrying drugs by a staff member. “I was told that I would end up like Breonna Taylor if I had a substance on me that I shouldn’t have had,” Stasia said, referencing a Black woman killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky.” Police officers and guns don’t belong in schools. Period.

38% of US adults believe government is faking COVID-19 death toll. “The finding is likely unsettling to the surviving loved ones of the nearly 756,000 Americans who have already died of COVID-19. It also squares with previous survey results from KFF showing that personally knowing someone who became severely ill or died of COVID-19 was one of the strongest motivators for convincing unvaccinated people to get vaccinated.”

Experience: I taught two dogs to fly a plane. “I have trained a 190kg boar to pretend to attack an actor, a cat to plunge shoulder-deep into water as if catching a fish and a cockatoo to winch up a bucket, take out a coin and drop it into a piggy bank. But when a TV company asked if I could teach a dog to fly a plane, I faced the toughest challenge of my career.”

Work is no longer the meaning of life for some Americans. “Before the coronavirus pandemic, nearly one quarter of all Americans said that they find meaning and purpose in their lives because of their work and their jobs. Now, that number has declined by more 9% in a new Pew research study, affirming anecdotal stories about the American population’s increasing disinterest in participating in the labor market.” To be honest: good.

ICU is full of the unvaccinated – my patience with them is wearing thin. “Translating this to the choice not to take the vaccine, however, I find my patience wearing thin. I think this is for a number of reasons. Even if you are not worried about your own risk from Covid, you cannot know the risk of the people into whose faces you may cough; there is a dangerous and selfish element to this that I find hard to stomach.”

The abolitionist history of pumpkin pie and Thanksgiving. “The Northern farmer, just by existing, was a natural-born abolitionist, she argued. Pumpkin pie and Thanksgiving were celebrations of a better, more godly way of agriculture without the institution of slavery.”

Since the Thanksgiving Tale Is a Myth, Celebrate It This Way. “It was the Wampanoag in 1621 who helped the first wave of Puritans arriving on our shores, showing them how to plant crops, forage for wild foods and basically survive. The first official mention of a “Thanksgiving” celebration occurs in 1637, after the colonists brutally massacre an entire Pequot village, then subsequently celebrate their barbaric victory.”

Why overly kind and moral people can rub you up the wrong way. “All this means that altruistic behaviour can make us walk a metaphorical tightrope. We need to balance our generosity perfectly, so that we are seen as cooperative and good, without arousing the suspicion that we are acting solely for the status.”

Hanukkah’s darker origins feel more relevant in time of rising antisemitism, intense interest in identity. ““The old message of 15 or 20 years ago was: It’s all about unity. Now it’s all about identity and difference. The Jewish story is in conflict between sameness and difference. On the one hand, our grandparents fought so hard for us to fit in, to pass, quote-unquote. We want that, but we’re conflicted. Now someone views me as ‘White,’ and it’s like: ‘No, I’m Jewish.’”” Lots to think about here, including with respect to my own identity.

The English turned Barbados into a slave society. Now, after 396 years, we’re free. “Prof Hilary Beckles, a Barbadian historian, the current vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and a leading figure in the push by Caribbean islands to secure reparations, sums it up best. “Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonised by Britain’s ruling elites,” he writes. “They made their fortunes from sugar produced by an enslaved, ‘disposable’ workforce, and this great wealth secured Britain’s place as an imperial superpower and caused untold suffering.””

Technology

Tracy Chou's life as a tech activist: abuse, and optimism. “As an Asian-American woman who has spent much of her career calling out the gender inequities and racism embedded in Silicon Valley, Chou is all too familiar with this sort of abuse and harassment. Since 2013, when she famously urged tech companies to share data on women in technical roles, the 34-year-old software engineer has been a key figure in the industry’s prolonged reckoning with its culture of exclusion. But whatever progress she’s made has come at great personal cost—especially as her Twitter following has ballooned to more than 100,000 accounts. “In doing this diversity and inclusion activism work,” she says, “I built more of a profile that then exposed me to more harassment.””

Why you should prioritise quality over speed in design systems. “Speed for the sake of speed means nothing. If our design systems don’t ultimately lead to better quality experiences, we’re doing it wrong.” Not just design systems.

U.S. Treasury Is Buying Private App Data to Target People. “Two contracts obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with The Intercept by Tech Inquiry, a research and advocacy group, show that over the past four months, the Treasury acquired two powerful new data feeds from Babel Street: one for its sanctions enforcement branch, and one for the Internal Revenue Service. Both feeds enable government use of sensitive data collected by private corporations not subject to due process restrictions. Critics were particularly alarmed that the Treasury acquired access to location and other data harvested from smartphone apps; users are often unaware of how widely apps share such information.”

'Dog phone' could help lonely pooches call owners. ““Whatever form that takes, we’ve taken another step towards developing some kind of ‘dog internet’, which gives pets more autonomy and control over their interaction with technology,” she added.”

Thoughts

1. Jack Dorsey is stepping down as CEO of Twitter. Wow. Whichever origin story you’ve heard, he had a huge part of its beginnings, as well as (obviously) its current direction.
2. Under Jack, Twitter has consistently added crypto functionality and strategies, from Bitcoin tipping to Project Bluesky, and a new team led by Tess Rinearson. I wonder if that will persist, or if his interest in the space will be limited to Square (where he’s still CEO).
3. I hold a modest amount of Twitter stock - purchased in the open market - and the news made the value jump. I wonder how that feels for Jack as a person.
4. I think decentralization (but not cryptocurrencies) holds the future for Twitter. If it can be the place both facilitating and surfacing conversations on the web, that’s Google-level powerful. I’m not sure being a social network in itself is quite as valuable, both in the social and financial senses.
5. I continue to appreciate how the discourse around decentralization has changed as a result of the rise of crypto. It’s important to understand that they’re not the same thing: crypto is a subset of decentralization. (Also, not all cryptocurrencies are truly decentralized.) Conflating the two is a problem. Whatever you think about crypto, it’s a technical and organizational approach, not a catch-all tool that can fix everything.
6. Regardless of what happens to it next, Twitter is my favorite social network. I have interesting conversations there; I’ve met new people at a scale I haven’t met elsewhere; I have a lot of exposure to new ideas. There’s a lot of vitriol, too, but I’ve found it easier to filter out over time.
7. That doesn’t mean that controlling the vitriol on the platform generally isn’t important - and it could even be the most important thing for the future of the company, given the effect community health has had on growth.
8. How does controlling for community health work in a decentralized environment? It’s a much harder problem, but still one that affects Twitter’s bottom line, regardless of its underlying architecture. Legally it may have different requirements depending on that architecture, but the user experience requirements are always a vital part of the growth of any ecosystem.
9. If Twitter is doubling down on decentralization, this makes providing community health tools in the decentralization space one of the most valuable problems to solve right now.
10. If Twitter isn’t going to continue moving in this direction, I'm not sure where it’s going to go.

Actions

1. After some travel and some extended time on the east coast, I’m hunkering down and thinking about the future. There’s a lot on the table. Somehow it’s now only a few weeks to Christmas (and zero days to Hanukkah), which makes planning for 2022 imperative.
2. I’ve really got to get back on the health train. My loss this summer is no longer an excuse, and my mother would not want me to be unhealthy on her account.

Every so often I see a thread from an engineer worried about their career prospects now that they’re over 40. It’s always confronting to me: it forces me to remember that I’m over 40, for one thing. But I also don’t feel old; objectively speaking, I don’t think it is particularly old. It’s all a matter of perspective.

In January, I’ll be 43. It’s been a particularly strange decade: ten years ago I moved to California, not to work on a fancy startup or engage in the tech industry, but to be with my mother because I thought she was going to die. In the end, she had a double lung transplant, and we had many bonus years with her. As tumultuous as they were, I’m very grateful for that time.

We also figured out a lot more about her disease during that time, and I was able to take a DNA test to determine that I didn’t have the same genetic variant. The science isn’t completely settled, and I plan to take regular telomere length tests to make sure I’m as healthy as I hope I am. (I haven’t because, honestly, I’m a bit scared to, but I’ve decided that’s not a good enough reason.)

At the same time, I was the cofounder of an open source startup, worked at a heavily-funded VC-backed company, was a mission-driven investor, and worked in crypto. I went to the pub with Chelsea Manning and got to teach journalists from all over the world. I’ve met so many people who I feel lucky are part of my life.

But the decade was always about the health of my immediate family more than it was about any of those things, as grateful as I am for them. Perhaps that’s why I feel so confronted by these over-40 threads: the last time I really felt in control of my time and my destiny, I was 30. And I still feel like I have a huge amount of my life ahead of me. Hopefully, I do. Hopefully, so does everyone who posts those kinds of thoughts.

The biggest thing to have changed for me is that I’m much more comfortable with my position in my working life. I don’t feel the need to make millions of dollars; I don’t feel the need to prove my worth to anyone. I created a bunch of value and discovered it didn’t really matter. I built platforms used by formidable organizations and discovered it didn’t really matter. I’m lucky to be comfortable.

These days, I just want to do meaningful, ethical work and enjoy the journey as I building a good life. That’s it. That’s all there needs to be. And that’s great.

May everyone worrying about their age with so much ahead of them find the same peace.

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. Based in Scandia, MN, NAFSA supports Native communities nationally with advocacy, education, and networking as they revitalize their indigenous food systems.

It describes its mission as follows:

Through our efforts and programs, we bring stakeholders and communities together to advocate and support best practices and policies that enhance dynamic Native food systems, sustainable economic development, education, trade routes, stewardship, and multi-generational empowerment.

We work to put the farmers, wild-crafters, fishers, hunters, ranchers, and eaters at the center of decision-making on policies, strategies and natural resource management.

Its work includes collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants (vital work when many seeds are protected by intellectual property legislation that favors corporations) and culinary mentorship.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

As an adult in the UK whose immediate family lived thousands of miles away in California, I sometimes threw Thanksgiving dinner parties. I think my friends were confused about why I did this on a Thursday night, but whatever; we had fun.

When I joined my parents in California, we had a traditional meal: turkey and its vegetarian equivalent, the various sides, and most importantly, us being together. Like many families, we went around the table, taking turns to explain what we were thankful for. My mother, who depending on the year was in various states of supplementary oxygen use, post-transplant care, tube-feeding, and overall discomfort, would always tear up and say she was thankful for us. We’d all come together - my sister and I both uprooting and moving to California - because she was sick, and we were a unit, getting through this together.

This is the first year we’re doing it without her. Today is the first major holiday without her. Next week will mark six months without her.

Like most holidays, Thanksgiving is complicated. The traditional story, of course, is based on a harmful lie. Even the post-Lincoln history of its celebration in the US is complicated, although a story I can get much more behind. But I choose to think of it as a time to reflect and be thankful, and hopefully be in the company of people I’m thankful for.

This has been the worst year of my life, bar none. I’m grieving; I still have regular nightmares about that last week in the hospital; the pandemic still rages; even outside of the black hole at the center of my life, it was hard in other ways that in any other year would have been challenging by themselves. And all of this makes gratitude that much more important.

I’m thankful for my family: immediate, extended, and found. I get to have so many incredible people in my life. Community and connectedness are what make life meaningful, and I couldn’t have made it through this year without any of them. So many people have gone out of their way to help us.

This has been an exceptionally tough year for my immediate family, and I’m particularly thankful for them. My mother: everything she was, everything she taught us, everything she still is through us. My sister: the smartest, funniest, best person I know. My father: who gave so much of himself, and gives so much of himself, and cares so deeply about fairness.

This year I’ve also driven across the full breadth of the United States - twice. I visited 38 states. I saw how racist monuments were still enshrined. I saw the proprietors of a Black-owned restaurant in New Orleans (we deliberately only ate at Black-owned establishments in the South) be racially abused by a visitor. I paid my respects at the Greenwood District in Tulsa, the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and learned about the difficulties the community still endured. I paid my respects at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis. I saw entire neighborhoods condemned by racist city planning.

There’s a lot of work to do, and across the country, the hardest work of building a future that supports all of us seems to be mostly done by the most oppressed. I’m thankful for these communities, activists, neighborhood groups, and families who, despite it all, and often despite the rest of us, are doing the most to overcome this country’s violent nature and brutal past. They are who will make America great, and the world great. Building a world with systems that support inclusion, equality, and a better life for everyone is the work of building the future.

Finally, we’re still in this pandemic. Like many of us, I’ve known people who died, and I’ve known people who came close to it. I’ve also had cause to know people who refused vaccinations, fought against the simple, kind act of wearing a mask in public, and mocked the idea of coming together collectively for the better good. While traveling around the country, I saw many signs imploring store visitors to not assault people who asked them to wear a mask or social distance. I’m thankful for all the people who did the right thing, and who were decent in the face of a global catastrophe.

I hope you’re safe and well. I’m grateful that I am. Today will be hard, but I’m glad to be with my family. On we go.