Werd I/O

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 California Environmental Justice Alliance. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Abolitionist Law Center describes its mission as follows:

The California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) is a statewide, community-led alliance that works to achieve environmental justice by advancing policy solutions. We unite the powerful local organizing of our members in the communities most impacted by environmental hazards – low-income communities and communities of color  – to create comprehensive opportunities for change at a statewide level. CEJA builds the power of communities across California to create policies that will alleviate poverty and pollution.

Particularly in the wake of the UN climate change report, climate change and establishing environmental justice is the key issue of our time. Low-income communities, and disproportionately people of color, will be the worst hit by climate change. Organizations like CEJA are crucial to solve the underlying problems and advocate for the vulnerable.

CEJA's campaigns include climate justice, advancing energy equity in California, and establishing green zones.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

#justice

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 Abolitionist Law Center. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Abolitionist Law Center describes its mission as follows:

The Abolitionist Law Center is a public interest law firm inspired by the struggle of political and politicized prisoners, and organized for the purpose of abolishing class and race based mass incarceration in the United States.

I became aware of the ALC through its Director of Operations, Dustin McDaniel, who was also the lead investigator of the organization’s report into exposure to toxic waste at a Pennsylvania state correctional institution.

Its programs include ending solitary confinement, supporting the political rights of the incarcerated, healthcare rights, and perhaps most importantly, releasing people from prison.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Joe Piette is of the release of Debbie Africa, which the ALC worked on.

#justice

On June 6, we lost my mother. The last really coherent thing she said to me was, “I love you guys”. The second-to-last thing was, “I need you”. The third-to-last thing was, “how will we get to the Cape?”

My great grandparents built a house in East Falmouth on Cape Cod around a hundred years ago. It was never supposed to last this long; it’s rickety and dusty, definitely falling apart, but it’s ours. In the meantime, developers have cut down much of the surrounding woods and replaced them with million dollar homes. They’re frustrated by our presence, and have described us as “arrogantly shabby”. Screw you, millionaires: we wear that description as a badge of pride.

The house was my mother’s favorite place in the world. It’s mine, too. Despite dialysis, feeding tubes, medicines, and a hundred other considerations, we’d spent a lot of time figuring out how to get her there one last time. I bought first class tickets so she could lie down comfortably on the flight; we figured out cars and dialysis logistics.

And then we lost her before we could get there.

When the three of us got back to my parents’ house, it was one of the first decisions we made. If Ma hadn’t had her medical issues, she would have loved to drive to Cape Cod from California. So we decided to do just that, with her ashes (and the proper permits) in tow.

We acquired a hybrid van (a 2021 Toyota Sienna), which runs about 600 miles on a tank of gas. There was talk of postponing the trip, but based on a desire to get to another family memorial, we set off in the evening two Fridays ago. We headed north to Seattle, via Portland, to avoid the worst of the summer heat. And then we headed east.

We saw a lot of America: around 4050 miles of cities, towns, countryside, and unadulterated wilderness. We learned never to eat Mexican food in Fargo, North Dakota, and that the Indian food in Philadelphia is spectacular. We were blown away by the beauty of Glacier National Park and the segregated poverty of much of the country. Throughout it all, we learned that beauty, humanity, and the progressive values of equality and shared lived experiences exist everywhere, albeit in pockets. There were Trump signs in deep Democrat country; there were radical coffee shops run by brave, non-binary progressives in the most staunchly conservative townships. As we went, I documented much of it on Instagram.

Images: Montana; a mural in Bismarck, ND; George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.

My sister planned much of the trip based around what she thought we’d all be most interested in; we made special efforts to visit Black-owned establishments and diverse neighborhoods. It’s what my mother would have been most interested in, too.

Our routine every night was the same: bring in our bags, and then bring in Ma. She stayed with us in our hotel rooms. We all spoke to her. In some way, she’s still with us. In another, there’s a hole in our lives, and a sadness that we all feel profoundly.

More than anything, it was a time for us to be together and heal. I shared a hotel room with my dad almost every night, and we would talk late into the night about what we’d seen and what we were feeling. It was necessary healing that will be long and ongoing.

We traveled across America once before, as the four of us, when I’d just graduated high school. Back then, we used paper AAA maps and picked up discount booklets for local motels from diners. Where we stayed was always hit and miss.

In contrast, this road trip was powered by technology in ways that were new for us. Our car is a hybrid, yes, but it also has traffic-aware cruise control that works a lot like a Tesla: the car slows down as the cars around it do, and follows the curves of the freeway. We used Apple CarPlay and Android Auto extensively to navigate, and made plans on a custom Google Map. I used Foursquare to find places to eat; Hannah used Yelp and Google Maps, often using gay-friendly and Black-owned filters. I booked our places to stay through apps, including the FairHotel app to look for socially responsible hotels with unionized workforces.

As I write this, we’re barreling down the freeway on the very last leg of the trip. Soon we’ll come to a stop, and the beginning of a new chapter. I don’t know what the future holds, what it looks like, or even what it’ll feel like. But I’m grateful to be a part of this family, and to have had this time. All of these things - these values, these experiences, these people - are an inexorable part of who I am. We’re an interconnected part of each other. And I’m glad we were all here.

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for July, 2021. This is a lighter list than usual because I'm in the middle of driving across the US with my family.

Books

Mexican Gothic, by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. An atmospheric horror story that was so slow burn that I was beginning to drift away, despite its intriguing subtexts about domination, colonization, and generational trauma - but then the story changed lanes at breakneck speed and I was hooked again. Smart, creepy, sensual, and unique in a way that defies all expectations.

Notable Articles

Business

Why the U.S. can’t have open banking. “As open banking sweeps the world, countries from the U.K. to Australia to Chile to Nigeria are adopting the concept, which generally includes mandates for API access to bank infrastructure and consumer rights to banking data. There’s global momentum behind it, but in the U.S. rule-making is still at an early stage. Reforms to Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the law that governs consumer access to financial data, are seemingly years away as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau weighs public comments.”

Spotify Exec Calls Artist 'Entitled' for Requesting One Penny Per Stream. “I think Taylor Swift doesn’t need .00001 more a stream. The problem is this: Spotify was created to solve a problem. The problem was this: piracy and music distribution. The problem was to get artists’ music out there. The problem was not to pay people money.”

The Church of American Startups and Capitalism. “Where startups claim to be so unique in their thinking and in what they do, they are absolutely a product of the protestant work ethic that frames America’s belief in what capitalism is. The church of business - modern American business - has become so absorbed by the cult of personality because it is easier to pray to the saints of startups than to recognize that a culture geared toward a conveyer belt of endless labor is beyond depressing.”

The World Is More Obvious Than We Want It To Be. “The adulation for the wealthy and successful is based on wanting what they have, but rarely accepts the common means through which they got it - luck, privilege, chaos and the ability and means to be persistent. Most people don’t have the time or energy to do a side hustle, and it’s an act of cruelty to guilt them into thinking that carving out a separate job on top of their other job is something they “have to” do.”

Funding To Black Startup Founders Quadrupled In Past Year, But Remains Elusive. “To be sure, much work remains to be done. Black startup entrepreneurs still received only a tiny fraction — 1.2 percent — of the record $147 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. startups through the first half of this year, Crunchbase numbers show. That compares with the more than 13 percent of the U.S. population that is Black or African American.”

Visualizing All the Vacant Office Space in San Francisco. “And employing the framework we introduced last year, there is now 12.7 Salesforce Towers, or 747 Salesforce Tower floors, worth of empty office space spread across San Francisco, which is roughly enough space to accommodate between 98,000 (based on an average, pre-Covid, density) and 131,000 (a la twitter) worker bees.”

Apple reportedly postpones in-person work until at least October. Likely the first of many.

Crypto

In bitcoin, Black entrepreneurs see a chance to rebuild generational wealth. “Building viable enterprises is possible “in a decentralized finance space,” said Evans, who teaches law at Penn State and began studying and speaking on blockchain and crypto four years ago. “No one’s standing in the way. There’s no bank. There’s no credit score. There’s no redlining. That’s transformative and very powerful.””

Culture

Self-publishing. “The corollary of this method is simple: unless you feel you can figure out how to market your book, unless you want to devote as much energy to that marketing plan as you did to its authorship and production, unless you are prepared to sustain your marketing effort through constant iteration and refinement, you probably shouldn’t self-publish.”

How the son of a homophobic politician in Nigeria became a queer OnlyFans star. “Bolu said he joined OnlyFans because he wanted to broaden the idea of what it means to be Black and gay, and show people that you can be both queer and masculine at the same time. In the first several weeks after he started using the site, he said he earned around $2,000 (he declined to share more information about his income). “I’m an exhibitionist by nature, so I feel good doing this. When I post pictures and videos of my Black, gay, muscular body, it does numbers. So, I’m going forward with that,” Bolu said.”

He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars by Grace Chan. I really enjoyed this short story in Clarkesworld about personas, fame, machine learning, and escape.

Media

Nikole Hannah-Jones Issues Statement on Decision to Decline Tenure Offer at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and to Accept Knight Chair Appointment at Howard University. “I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans.”

Politics

FACT SHEET: Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. From limits on non-competes to anti-surveillance measures to better anti-trust scrutiny, this seems like a pretty great bundle of measures.

Adam Smith to Richard Spencer: Why Libertarians turn to the Alt-Right. ″[It’s] incredibly easy for the alt-right to reach out to libertarians; they’re both already literally speaking the same language. Socialists control the media? Swap ‘Socialists’ out for ‘Cultural Marxists’ and you’re halfway to becoming the new Richard Spencer. Hillary Clinton was clearly the social justice candidate in 2016, and Trump was against it. If you’re somebody who bases their entire ideology around opposing social justice, you’re going to be drawn towards the candidate who describes Neo-Nazis as ‘very fine people’.”

Why I oppose recall of DA Chesa Boudin. “These reforms were desperately needed: disproportionate treatment of Black and Brown people in arrests, prosecutions, and lifetimes of incarceration isn’t just a trend of a few decades — it has taken place over centuries in America. Many in our LGBTQ+ community are in desperate need of criminal justice reform now.” I oppose his recall too.

Science

Study: 20% of vaccinated health workers who test positive suffer from long COVID. “Majority of 39 ‘breakthrough’ cases among 1,497 monitored were mild, but research author says persistence of symptoms among minority ‘raises concern’.”

First ‘Time Crystal’ Built Using Google’s Quantum Computer. “Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.”

Society

Emergency Department Visits for Suspected Suicide Attempts Among Persons Aged 12–25 Years Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic. “In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents aged 12–17 years, especially girls. During February 21–March 20, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6% higher among girls aged 12–17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12–17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increased 3.7%.”

How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story. “It’s incredibly hard to imagine “Attack Helicopter” receiving the degree of blowback it did in a world where Twitter didn’t exist. There were discussions of the story on forums and in comment threads all over the internet, but it is the nature of Twitter that all but ensured this particular argument would rage out of control. Isabel Fall’s story has been held up as an example of “cancel culture run amok,” but like almost all examples of cancel culture run amok, it’s mostly an example of Twitter run amok.”

Cop Plays Taylor Swift Song to Block BLM Protest Video From YouTube. “Burch, confused, says, “Are we having a dance party now?” The officer eventually admits, “You can record all you want. I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.” Later, the officer, identified as Sgt. David Shelby, reiterates to Burch, “I’m playing my music so that you can’t post on YouTube.” The video [...] has been viewed more than 170,000 times since it was shared Thursday.”

Working from home might be worse for the environment than commuting. “In a white paper about the shift in energy consumption during the pandemic, Steve Cicala, an associate professor of economics at Tufts University who studies environmental and energy policy, wrote that in 2020, about a third of the U.S. workforce shifted to working from home due to the pandemic. Simultaneously, there was an almost 8% increase in residential consumption of electricity and about a 7% and 8% reduction in usage among commercial and industrial buildings, he wrote.”

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. ″“Changing our societal priorities hardly needs to be a capitulation to grim necessity,” she said. “Human activity can be regenerative and our productive capacities can be transformed. In fact, we are seeing examples of that happening right now. Expanding those efforts now creates a world full of opportunity that is also sustainable.”” Cool cool cool.

Are They Picking At Us? “Racism and xenophobia can hide under the very thin veneer of polite societal norms, like that shiny, sugary layer on a fruit tart that looks super-fake at the supermarket bakery table. I felt grateful for the refuge the community potluck table at our mosque offered. Ours was the only table in town where you could find grilled seekh kebabs, barbecue chicken, KFC hot wings, Palestinian chicken with vermicelli rice, potato salad, okra sabzi, Southern fried okra, Lahori-style fried fish, cornmeal-fried trout, fruit chaat, and, yes, even that fruit tart.”

I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax. ““It started a couple months into the pandemic with the whole anti-lockdown protests,” Bill said. “His feelings were so strong it turned into facts for him. So if he didn’t like having to wear masks it wouldn’t matter what doctors or scientists said. Anything that contradicted his feelings was wrong. So he turned to the internet to find like-minded people which led him to QAnon.””

Technology

How Underground Fiber Optics Spy on Humans Moving Above. “By shining a laser through the fiber optics, the scientists could detect vibrations from above ground thanks to the way the cable ever so slightly deformed. As a car rolled across the subterranean cable or a person walked by, the ground would transmit their unique seismic signature. So without visually surveilling the surface, the scientists could paint a detailed portrait of how a once-bustling community ground to a halt, and slowly came back to life as the lockdown eased.”

Apple founder Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement. ″“We wouldn’t have had an Apple had I not grown up in a very open technology world,” Mr Wozniak, its co-founder with Steve Jobs in the 1970s, said.” It shouldn’t even be a question.

The ugly, geeky war for web privacy is playing out in the W3C. “The W3C is under siege by an insurgency that’s thwarting browsers from developing new and important privacy protections for all web users. “They use cynical terms like: ‘We’re here to protect user choice’ or ‘We’re here to protect the open web’ or, frankly, horseshit like this,” said Pete Snyder, director of privacy at Brave, which makes an anti-tracking browser. “They’re there to slow down privacy protections that the browsers are creating.””

Police in Latin America are turning activists’ phones against them. “To break into devices more easily, a number of Latin American countries have contracted cybersecurity firms that make software allowing authorities to bypass encryption and other protections. The companies often argue that their tools help aid legitimate criminal investigations, but critics have said they’re often used by authoritarian regimes to infringe on civil rights.”

In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems Especially Distracting to Older Drivers. On car touchscreens and voice interfaces: “Researchers found that the technology created potentially unsafe distractions for all drivers, though this safety risk is more pronounced for older adults, who took longer (4.7-8.6 seconds) to complete tasks, experienced slower response times, and increased visual distractions.”

A Defunct Video Hosting Site Is Flooding Normal Websites With Hardcore Porn. “As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed.” Cool URIs don’t change, etc etc.

She exposed how Facebook enabled global political manipulation. Now she's telling her story. “Her story reveals that it is really pure luck that we now know so much about how Facebook enables election interference globally. Zhang was not just the only person fighting an entire swath of political manipulation, it also wasn’t her job. She had discovered the problem because of a unique confluence of skills and passion, then taken it upon herself, driven by an extraordinary sense of moral responsibility. To regulators around the world considering how to rein in the company, this should be a wakeup call.”

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 NDN Collective. Based in Rapid City, South Dakota, NDN Collective describes its mission as follows:

NDN Collective is an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power. Through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building and narrative change, we are creating sustainable solutions on Indigenous terms.

As part of a journey to bring my mother's ashes to New England (which I'll write about soon in another post), I've been traveling through Montana and North Dakota. I've been profoundly struck by the level of poverty experienced by Native American communities there. Native Americans suffered a genocide at the hands of European colonizers, and have experienced generational injustices that continue to this day.

NDN Collective's restorative justice work includes climate justice and racial equity campaigning, as well as an important campaign to regain Indigenous land ownership. It has played a key part in campaigns against oil pipelines on Indigenous land. The Collective also makes grants and impact-orientated loans and investments.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Joe Piette.

#justice

Inspired by Fred Wilson’s Funding Fridays, which highlight a new crowdfunding campaign that he’s contributed to every week, I decided to start a series of my own. This isn’t a knock on him: I genuinely enjoy those posts. But I also felt like there was room for something else.

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

This week, I’m donating to Southerners on New Ground. Based in Atlanta, SONG describes its mission as follows:

We build membership (or our base) as a way to build the skills, connection and leadership of thousands of Southern rural LGBTQ people of color, immigrant people and working class people – united together in the struggle for dignity and justice for all people. In order to transform the South we must build our collective power, our people power, which comes from thousands and thousands of us uniting to make the South the home our communities need it to be.

Its work includes bail reform, Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming leadership work, and electoral justice. It’s all good stuff.

I donated, became a member, and offered to use my tech skills for community members who need them. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Nathania Johnson

#justice

1. It will be decentralized. The way to compete with Facebook is not to compete with its model. Decentralization empowers users in a way that Facebook can’t, while also undermining its core business model.

2. It won’t be a decentralized version of something we already know. It’s not enough to build a “decentralized Facebook / Twitter / TikTok / whatever”. While there’s a core that’s attracted to the ethos of decentralization, it can’t be the core value prop for most users. It’s got to bring something new in itself.

3. It won’t be a monoculture. Lots of different clients written by lots of different teams with lots of different user experiences.

4. It doesn’t have to be web-based. As much as we love the web, we shouldn’t be constrained by having to build web-first. Apps like TikTok - and before it, Instagram - have shown that you can take advantage of native app platforms first, and use web for discovery second.

5. We can’t solve identity. There will never be a single identity that we use across the web. Instead, there may be open protocols that allow us to auth with different providers.

6. It won’t be built by an existing tech company. (Although it’s possible it could be built by a spinoff or protected internal team of one.) And it might not be built by a company at all: it’s likely to start as an open source collaboration, or even as a co-operative.

7. It won’t be built by an existing standards body. And any attempt to build standards-first will fail.

8. The ecosystem will be simpler than you imagine. The technologies that succeed will allow new developers to get up and running in an afternoon, armed with great documentation, easy-to-use libraries, and simple underlying protocols.

9. It won’t be based on blockchain. But there’s nothing to say that you won’t be able to bring your own ENS domain, etc, if you want.

10. It has to solve harassment and abuse. Any new network that doesn’t solve harassment and abuse will be co-opted by right wing groups and trolls, killing any nascent community before it has had a chance to get off the ground.

My mother used to regularly tell me that I needed to work less; that she didn’t understand why I went for the positions I did; that it sounded like hell to her.

At the time, I didn’t respond well, although I mostly kept my grumbling to myself. Did I have the only parents who didn’t want their child to succeed? I was working hard to try and build a good life for myself by doing work that hopefully was ethical - why wasn’t that enough?

It was only more recently that I realized how much she was looking out for me. From her perspective, I was on a treadmill, part of a kind of grind culture that promotes hard work as a good in itself. I had intense days, and was spending a lot of my time thinking about the work even when I wasn’t at my desk. It’s certainly a life choice, but it’s not necessarily the same as living.

From the outside, you could reasonably describe my parents as radicals. They met at Berkeley in the seventies, after all, with everything that suggests: they fought for renters’ rights, against the unjust war in Vietnam, and for affirmative action. They lived collectively with people who also wanted progressive change. But I think the radical label is in itself unjust: it’s a derogatory way of saying, “these people live outside the accepted template”.

The accepted templates for living - the social norms by which many of us govern our lives and set our goals - weren’t created collaboratively from the bottom up. They were engineered to help create a certain kind of worker; the protestant work ethic, in particular, was intentionally developed to help colonize the New World. They create a deep drive to become wealthy, and a corresponding deep unhappiness when this isn’t achieved. For most people, it’s an illusion: the carrot is a mirage, always just out of reach. You work hard because that’s what you think a good life is, and enrich someone else’s life in the process. You work hard in the hope that someone with more wealth and power than you will grant you worthiness: a promotion, a raise, investment. Meanwhile, the stick is the social pressure to conform to the model.

In tech, I’ve met a lot of people who are motivated by the idea that they’ll get rich. And some of them, to be clear, absolutely do get rich. There’s probably more of a chance of that than in many industries, although to be clear, the people who already have wealth and power will generate more than you in the process. But leaving inequitous power laws aside, when you get a big, fat check at the tail end of an acquisition or IPO, what happens then? Do you suddenly become happy? Is your life worthwhile? Or do you find yourself trapped on that treadmill, either in order to maintain that lifestyle or to quieten the internal voice you’ve developed that tells you to keep working? I’ve noticed that of all the millionaires and billionaires I’ve met - and I’ve met quite a few now - none has radically changed their life. Even the billionaires, who have more means than any of us will ever see, go back to the office day after day. Despite their unfathomable wealth, they’re as trapped as anyone else.

Almost nine out of ten young people say that they would love to be a social media influencer: someone who posts on social networks to a large audience in exchange for money. Once again, this isn’t a goal that appeared from nowhere: it was engineered. Influencers grind to build larger and larger audiences in the hope that someone with greater wealth and power - in this case the network owners, brand owners, and so on - will grant them special powers. It’s a well-designed hamster wheel to encourage people to add value to the centrally-owned network. However much the influencers make, however many followers they have, the network will always have more wealth and power.

How do we unlearn this? How do we break out of these templates, designed as they are to harness our power in order to enrich other people?

The Matrix is a flawed movie, but its central metaphor is radical (if unsubtle) by the definition I’ve established. In its universe, everyone has been harnessed to be a battery in service of a more powerful entity, while an illusion has been carefully crafted to keep them in place. The story breaks down when it starts to talk about a chosen one, Neo, who is uniquely suited to break the illusion and set everybody free: rather than needing to rely on some kind of superpowered vanguard of the revolution, we’re all capable of breaking through. The more of us that break free of the templates that have been set out for us, the more power we all have.

Decentralization is a powerful concept. It’s not about protocols or technologies (although some tools may be created using particular embodiments of these). It’s also not just about individual empowerment. It’s about community empowerment: flattening hierarchies and giving people the ability to exist on their own terms, negotiating through a democratic, collaborative process rather than in subjugation to centralized wealth. Rather than anti-capitalist, it allows for a more granular competitive marketplace. It doesn’t preclude representative democracy - and therefore, it can exist alongside single-payer healthcare, social security, government, and all the social infrastructure we collectively need to live well - but it does sit in opposition to oligarchy.

To reiterate: representative government is not centralization of power, and we should beware of anyone who would prefer to reduce representative democracy and replace it with deregulated markets that encourage oligarchy. We should also beware of anyone who does not want the most vulnerable in society to be protected. Finally, we should beware of people who believe freedom does not involve getting to define our own identities or love who we want to. Those are not people who have our best interests at heart. Removing oligarchies doesn’t mean removing social protections or perpetuating an oppressive status quo.

That’s the core ideal: to move away from an oligarchic system to one where there is little centralization of wealth and undemocratic power. A world that is more equal and more free. One where we all get to choose how we live our lives; how we define ourselves; how we set our goals and decide what a good life is. Those things are too important to be dictated to us by people who need us to maintain their wealth and power.

As this radical future becomes more possible, we should resist voices that want to water it down into the same old templates; the same old hierarchical forces and cultural norms that sap our energy and strip mine our communities. The movement can be one for equity and equality, but we have to keep our eye on the goal.

At the end of last week, I encouraged readers to ask me anything related to my work. I wasn’t sure if anyone actually would, but I was curious about what kinds of questions people had.

I got a surprising number of questions! So much so that I think I’m going to make it a series. Let’s open it up: you can ask me a question about anything, and I’ll do my best to answer in a future post.

Here are my answers to the questions I’ve received so far. Questions have been edited for spelling, punctuation, and grammar only.

Burnout is common in our industry. What is your approach to avoid or recover from burnout?

My take on burnout in tech is that it usually happens when we are disempowered to make decisions that relate to our workload. For example, if you’re a developer, it might be because you’re being asked to build something at speed with ill-defined specifications and an unrealistic deadline. (We’ve all been there.) Or you might have a dysfunctional work culture. Or just be completely swamped.

Those things go together: a company’s dysfunctional culture might encourage you to work over the weekend, or pressure you to make commitments to deliver something that hasn’t even been defined yet. It might feel utterly Sisyphean: you’re working hard at the best of your ability but the nature of the workplace or changing goalposts makes success impossible. This is incredibly common in dysfunctional tech workplaces where non-engineers are empowered to make decisions about engineering without deeply understanding the problem - often while declaring, “it should be easy!”

I’ve also found myself burned out because of external factors. Being a part-time carer for my mother, for example, was something I felt privileged to be able to do. But maintaining the energy to do that and a demanding job wasn’t always possible. (I always, for what it’s worth, prioritized my mother’s care.) For many people, just having to live in the society we do, with its biases and prejudices, can be a really legitimate source of burnout.

I always start by talking to my manager, if I can, about my concerns. But particularly in a dysfunctional workplace, it might be hard to achieve any change. My coping strategies have been threefold:

Immediate: Intentional breathing exercises really help. So does, well, exercise: either going for a run or a really long walk out in the world. I’ve also found that constantly having a book on the go has been really helpful; the act of reading is, in itself, meditative. There’s a reason I mostly don’t read books that are directly related to work.

Proximate: Take a damn vacation. Back when I lived in the UK, I would try to take three week vacations: typically I’d only start to really relax and decompress during the third week. In the US, which is a more psychotically workaholic culture, this tends to be frowned upon. So I always say to my team: know when your next vacation is. Not taking vacations isn’t a strength; it’s a character flaw.

Long-term: Get out.

I feel comfortable giving this answer in tech, which is the context the question gave, but I don’t take this privilege lightly. I know it’s not something everyone can do. But I’d rather have a sustainable position that doesn’t burn me out but pays less well than one that leaves me ragged and has a higher salary. I’ll do better work; chances are, I’ll do more mission-driven work, too. Like any dysfunctional relationship, sometimes it can’t be saved.

Check out Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry (and follow it on Instagram): it’s such a great collection of condensed wisdom, deployed to free us from the treadmill many of us have been conditioned to put ourselves on.

What do you look for in deciding whether a startup is worthy of investment?

I have to give two caveats here.

The first is that I’m not an active investor right now. I actually get quite a bit of dealflow, and I still have a small carry interest in Matter’s second fund. But I’m not making any new investments.

The second is that no startup is worthy of investment: it’s not a value judgment. There are plenty of startups, projects, and endeavors that are incredibly valuable, but don’t happen to fit a venture-scale investment thesis - or just one investor’s particular thesis. Because investment is an informed bet that a fund’s money will grow while invested in a startup’s equity - and not a grant, gift, or value judgment - everything comes down to how that investor thinks about becoming more informed.

I invested at a very early stage. At this point in a startup’s life, the thing that matters most is the team: who they are, what they’re capable of, and most of all, how they think.

I don’t care where someone went to school or what degree they earned, if any. (I feel the same way about hiring, for what it’s worth.) Their skills are important: I’m probably not going to invest in a tech company that can’t build software, for example, or doesn’t have domain knowledge relating to the problem they’re trying to solve. And their mindset is even more important than that. Can they identify their assumptions and de-risk them quickly, finding a well-defined core community to focus on first? Or are they quixotically ploughing ahead powered by blind belief, refusing to contemplate that they might fail, while declaring that “this is for everyone”? The latter mindset is really common and absolutely deadly.

I care deeply about societal effects and wouldn’t invest if I thought something was potentially harmful. I was also careful to source a pool of startups with diverse founders. Everyone was evaluated according to the same criteria. Nonetheless, a more diverse pool naturally led to a more diverse portfolio. Not only is supporting diverse founders the right thing to do, a wider set of perspectives can more effectively solve a broader range of problems.

And then there’s the big question: do I believe in the problem the team is trying to solve? Can they make me believe in it? Do I believe that other investors will also believe?

After that, there’s math, and there are logistics. Is the potential market size of the startup big enough to support the sort of financial growth the fund needs? Is the capitalization table (the list of who owns how many shares) clean enough to invest in? (Red flags here include people who are no longer involved in the company owning a potentially controlling interest.) Is it a legal entity that can be invested in easily - not just by me, but by future investors - and does it own all the IP? Are there debts? And so on.

This is a pretty narrow set of criteria. So it’s not that a startup is worthy of investment as such: it has to run such a tight gauntlet of restrictions that it just might not fit into the template.

Personally? I’m hoping to bootstrap my next startup. It’s genuinely nothing against VC: I’m just not sure I want to commit to a venture-scale market size, and I’m not sure I want to be beholden to investor commitments. Call me a control freak.

What’s next? (Big picture—technology trends)

There are a lot of trends I could be interested in. Here are some I actually am:

Ambient computing. Broad adoption of 5G is starting to mean broadband-quality internet in more and more places outside the home. These enable a new set of devices and experiences that go far beyond just the laptop / tablet / phone paradigms we’ve been tied to for decades. Moreover, as we move from one context to another, we’ll expect our services to seamlessly follow us. How do we build this future while maintaining personal privacy and freedom from advertising?

Human-centered data. The aforementioned future requires that all our data can be pooled together and kept under our control. We’re going to see an end to data that is locked up in silos belonging to individual services. A lot of investors call these customer data platforms because of the implications for commerce; I think the implications go far beyond.

Decentralization. Blockchain isn’t the trend: it’s a technology, in the same way that the web is a trend and CSS is a technology. Decentralization doesn’t need to depend on blockchains, although they’ve captured the zeitgeist right now because of the earnings potential. My interest continues to be in the potential to empower co-operatives, collectives, and other alternatives to centralized wealth and power structures. I’ve been a part of efforts to do this for as long as I’ve had a tech career; what’s super-cool is that mainstream interest it now enjoys.

The creator economy. There was a time, not so long ago, when I thought this was all about influencers, which I’m explicitly not interested in. But empowering individual creators - artists, writers, independent journalists - to make money on their own terms from their own sites and experiences? Sign me up.

And some trends I’m not:

Self-driving cars. Say it quietly, but I think this might be a red herring? I can easily imagine self-driving mass carriers though: think anything that has a set route along well-maintained roadways, like a bus, a sort of longer, rail-less tram, or a cargo truck transporting goods between distribution centers.

Machine learning. Again: call it a technique or a technology, but not necessarily a trend in itself. It’s too often described in magical terms that downplay the inherent problems both in its use and prerequisite data collection.

Audio rooms. See: Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, whatever the Facebook thing is called. Someone took panels, which are the worst part of every conference, and turned them into a 24/7 product? Great.

VR. Maybe I need to be more of a gamer, but I don’t see this becoming more than niche.

What’s scary and what should we be doing about it? (Are we?)

Two growing trends genuinely scare me:

Global warming. We’re not doing nearly enough about this. Like many people, I’m worried about the focus on individual responsibility vs widespread industrial change. To be clear, both are necessary - particularly as we live in a representative democracy - but the onus of change can’t be placed on individuals over the industrial forces that are ultimately responsible for so much of the underlying pollution.

We’ve got to change the way society works, and we’ve got to make and enforce far stronger rules. A lot of global climate policy amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And I think ideas like carbon trading just perpetuate the problems we need to solve. We need massive, government-led change, and we need it decades ago.

Rent-seeking. Just about everything is available on a subscription basis these days, with true ownership diminishing. The effect in housing is well-documented: generations of people are being more or less locked out of home ownership. But it’s also true in everything from software to cars. The effect is to create a stratum of wealthy property owners, whose property continues to expand and grow in value, and a much bigger one of less wealthy people who are forced to pay rent on an increasing number of things. The property owners get to set the terms by which their property is rented; the renters must abide by them.

We’ve always had a disparity in rule-making, where the wealthy held more of the cards, but it grows the more the gulf between property owners and renters widens. A lot of this situation has been enabled by the tech industry, VC-enabled business models, and the desire to maximize recurring revenue at all costs. I don’t see this trend slowing down, let alone reversing, but it only leads to widespread poverty and, with it, unrest.

What’s exciting and promising and what should we doing about it? (Are we?)

Decentralization! Renewable energy! Better mass transit! A move away from selfish individualism to a better collective future! Better societal infrastructure!

I’m also really excited about remote working. Being able to work in your own home empowers people who couldn’t necessarily make it to an office before; it also spreads wealth across the country and potentially across the world. Everyone’s comfortable with it after a year of doing it; in my opinion all of the reasons to go back into an office come down to personal preference rather than it being inherently better.

Consequently, when we look back a decade or so from now, I think we’ll find that tech companies which have embraced remote working after the pandemic will do far better than those that don’t. They’ll be more attractive, they’ll attract a broader set of candidates, and they’ll have solved communication problems that allow them to work more efficiently.

Do I want to go back to an office? I do not. And there are a lot of people who feel the same.

You once wrote a blog post suggesting that a 4th 'bubble’, sustainability, be added to the traditional design thinking bubbles of 'desirability, feasibility, viability’. I found this while researching Design Thinking for Social Innovation for a presentation I was doing. I explored it with the audience, themselves all heavily vested and involved in Social Innovation, but the resulting debate led us to the conclusion that if the existing 3 bubbles are used appropriately, then the 4th is not needed, and that between 'Desirability' and 'Viability', Sustainability is covered. My question is, have you explored this further in your work, have you since changed your perspective, and have you encountered further widespread support (for or against) your thoughts on this?

I agree that if the existing three principles are used appropriately, the fourth is not needed. That’s a big “if”. I think, in most cases, that it’s important to have a model to explicitly consider these issues. It’s possible to have a desirable, viable product that you can feasibly build - if you only evaluate first-order effects - that also has negative societal effects. Some teams understand that sustainability is baked right into desirability, viability, and feasibility once you evaluate how the product sits in its context over time; for others, calling it out directly as part of the model may be helpful. And it may not be possible for a product team to properly evaluate in which group they sit: some may think they don’t need it, while in reality they could still benefit.

In teaching our Designing for Equity session in the Google News Initiative / Newmark School / News Catalyst Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms course, Roxann Stafford and I talk about reframing from building a Minimum Viable Product to Maximum Distributed Equity. While this isn’t a direct continuation of the Sustainability idea, it lives on the same spectrum. It’s not that maximum distributed equity is the only lens you should use; it does, however, force conversations and design thinking that would not occur if you didn’t evaluate it intentionally. Some teams might think (and often say so, vocally) that they don’t need to explicitly consider equity; generally, they’re wrong. It’s something we all need to work on, and naming it helps us remember to consider it carefully.

Can you share your thoughts on where you see crypto going in the future and projects / possibilities to keep an eye on?

I see a few things as inevitable:

Moving away from proof of work. Possibly legislatively. These algorithms, and their environmental effects, are absurd. Great proof of concept, well done, now let’s move on. I think proof of stake is a great v2, and I’m sure there will be something better in the future.

Stronger smart contracts. Again, Ethereum was a pretty fantastic proof of concept here. But let’s keep an eye on Algorand, Polkadot, and others that are pushing the envelope of what can be built.

Privacy. I don’t see a network that is completely public as being desirable. Privacy is a prerequisite for democratic freedom.

Blockchain as part of a delicious, decentralized breakfast. Right now, as described above, blockchain is often considered to be the trend in itself. It’s just one decentralized technology; it wasn’t the first and won’t be the last. It also has enduring limitations. We’ll do more off-chain than we do on-chain, and making that more seamless will be part of building the decentralized future.

Should I code indieweb or fediverse protocols?

Yes.

Longer answer: it depends on what you’re trying to build! The indieweb and the fediverse are two complementary ideas. Both are sets of protocols that allow people to communicate with each other from their independent websites and platforms. Neither is a monoculture. So I don’t see it as a debate: start with the experience you want to build for the user, work backwards to figure out the best way to build it, and go from there.

"Specialists know everything about nothing, generalists know nothing about everything". Should person attempt/claim to be a full-stack developer+ops+dba+tester, or welcome specialists within a broad team/community/church? In my opinion we should foster mutual co-ed training to raise cultural awareness without claiming expertise in every field. What ever happened to brown bag lunch sessions as bite-sized learning?

Speaking as an unashamed technical generalist:

My answer to most questions about engineering approaches like this is that it comes down to the human context. There’s the perfect situation, and then there’s the one you’re actually in.

So the answer to this question depends on the organization you’re a part of, and what you’re trying to do. In a larger company, you’re more able to have people who occupy specialities and can go deep on those. In a smaller one - let’s say a three-person startup - you’re forced to be a generalist, whether you like it or not. It’s not so much about what you claim to be as what you have to do in order to get the job done.

Given this reality, should there be cross-team collaboration and learning? Absolutely. We should do better at that as an industry. As an engineering leader, I should also be better at doing this within my own team; in all honesty, I haven’t found a way to effectively replicate brown bag lunches / continuous group education in a remote context, and it’s something we all need.

I am guilty of debugger-based development to muddle towards an eventual solution. Is there any hope for this repentant sinner?

You’d be surprised which engineers write code by using console.log all over the place. Just do what works for you. We all code differently, and coding sucks for everyone. Wear it proudly.

That said: I can’t overstate the utility of automated testing. It’s not a fun habit to get into, but it’s so much better than having to go back and add them later on. You don’t need to engage in test driven development (where writing the tests comes first), but you really should write those tests. Every language you write in has a test framework; use it.

Patterns and interfaces = good, over-engineering (ability to change DB etc but seldom required) = bad. Newbies always overwork the latest read/fad instead of pragmatism. Do cyclomatics etc help dictate the tipping point?

Pragmatism is learned, and the opposite comes from nervousness. The solution is not to apply more metrics to force the issue, in my opinion. It’s about laying out good team / project principles.

Engineers often overlook the “soft stuff”: team principles, coding culture, communication, and conveying why we do things. They’re crucial. The non-deterministic aspects of engineering are at least as important as the algorithms and data structures. This is one of those questions: how much abstraction is too much abstraction? The answer will vary depending on the needs of the project you’re working on.

If there is a hard and fast rule, I think it’s around readability and flexibility of architecture, and speed of execution. Abstractions shouldn’t interfere with ease of comprehension: too abstract and you may have to learn to play four dimensional chess just to figure out how it all fits together. Not abstract enough, and you may find your architecture is largely defined by the structure of external services or libraries. There’s a sweet spot in the middle.

Finally, of course, spending your time on building abstracted interfaces that you don’t have an obvious use case for is just yak shaving. Ship that code.

Should you be a polyglot language speaker [coder] or accept that your favorite language/framework/OS/protocol/Db is good enough to meet your requirements?

Again, this is a fuzzier, less-deterministic question than it appears. It depends!

You should use the best language for fulfilling your requirements. Probably, that’s the language you already know rather than one you need to learn. At the same time, not everything is interchangeable: Ruby on Rails is not like-for-like with Node, for example. They work in different ways (one’s a framework, for one thing), and therefore some tasks can be done better with Node than Rails. They have different ecosystems of libraries and supporting documentation, and so on. Whether it’s worth switching to a technology you’re not an expert in yet depends on how much better it’s likely to be.

Nobody can be an expert in every language and framework, so there’s always going to be some level of shoehorning requirements into what you already know, and there’s always going to be some level of learning something new.

An unsatisfying answer if you’re looking for something deterministic, perhaps, but it’s an insight into why programming is both super-fun and terrible.

There are many open source software packages but the huge time it takes to assess whether they’re good/bad/ugly is largely wasted. How do you find the right package before you build? Then how do you best keep it updated [or replace it] without finding yourself in dependency hell?

First assess: do you need an external library to begin with? Every addition does create a dependency. The story behind left-pad is a great example of why care is needed.

Then it’s about social proof. Who wrote it? How many people are using it? When was the source code repository last updated? Is it active or abandoned? Is the maintainer a jerk? Are there reviews or tutorials on the web?

Don’t forget to assess if the license it’s distributed under is compatible with your project. Are you legally allowed to incorporate it?

This kind of due diligence takes a little time, but it’s worth it. And a little friction means you don’t end up adding libraries to your code without thinking about it, which is probably a good thing.

As for dependency hell: there are plenty of useful tools that can keep your projects up to date. As a GitHub user, I like Dependabot, alongside its dependency graph tools. I’m not even remotely interested in keeping my dependencies current manually. Who has the time? But this is another reason to maintain robust automated tests: because an automated update could break your code, it’s important to have a test suite that Dependabot (etc) can test its updates against.

...

Those questions were fun to answer. I’d love to do this again in a future post; ask me anything at this link and I’ll do my best to answer in the future.

Let’s try something a little bit different.

I’m the Head of Engineering at a Series B startup based in San Francisco. I’ve previously been a startup founder in both San Francisco and Edinburgh, Scotland. I’ve started two major open source projects and worked in the early stages of a third. I was the geek in residence at the world’s largest arts festival. And as Director of Investments at a mission-driven accelerator, I invested in 24 startups and supported a portfolio of 75, as well as teaching a design thinking based curriculum.

I’ve also written and self-published a novel, as well as a published non-fiction tech book; been a W3C invited expert; worked on multiple open culture projects; and taught equity in product design to local newsrooms from all over the world. Long ago, when the universe was young, I built some of the first viral web content.

What can I answer for you? For example, is there anything you’re wondering about pitches; open source software; building mission-driven projects; building a team; ethics in software development; etc?

Nothing’s off-limits (except for confidential customer information). Here’s how it’ll work: ask a question anonymously on this form, and as long as it’s related to one of the topics above, I’ll answer every question as honestly as I can in my next post.

That's assuming I get any questions, anyway. Ask me a question!

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

This month, I started posting notable links to my site as I saved them. You can follow my bookmarks here (and subscribe via RSS).

Books

A Queer History of the United States, by Michael Bronski. Flawed but fascinating. Given that he encompassed such a wide range, I sometimes wished the author had slowed down and gone into more detail. Episodes that demand nuance were often not given enough, and bisexuality was barely mentioned. Still, it was an eye-opening, mind-expanding read.

Notes on Grief, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?” A pertinent read for me right now. Every word, heavy with loss and love and the rage of disbelief, resonates.

How to Love, by Thich Nhat Hanh. “In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one.” Simple, affirming, and inspirational from beginning to end.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. A sort of melancholy science fiction fairy tale about loss, love, loneliness, religious belief, and what it means to be human. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first; by the end I felt acceptance. An example of what I hope for from speculative fiction.

Streaming

Collective. I wish I’d gotten around to seeing this remarkable documentary sooner. Gripping and frustrating in equal measure, the true-life story of how a team of hero journalists uncovered massive governmental corruption in Romania demands close attention. Easily the best movie I’ve seen this year.

Bo Burnham: Inside. It wants to be something as impactful as Hannah Gadsby’s incredible Nanette, but never quite gets there. Still, I found this effective as a piece of theater more than a comedy special: a portrait of a comedian’s self-questioning and increasingly unraveling mental state during the pandemic. Burnham’s critiques and parodies of internet culture in this context are particularly spot on (perhaps excluding a piece about white women’s Instagram feeds). And honestly, the songs are great.

Harvard Justice. In 2009, Harvard televised one of its most popular courses, on political philosophy and ethics. I’ve been watching it this month on YouTube and loving it. Accessible but thought-provoking; the lecturer, Michael Sandel, is brilliant.

Notable Articles

Business

Y Combinator Entrepreneurs Say Accelerator Expelled Them Over Critiques. “Two entrepreneurs claimed Friday the startup accelerator Y Combinator kicked them out of its program for speaking publicly about misogyny and members’ efforts to circumvent COVID-19 vaccine eligibility requirements.”

The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains. “The reason that remote work is so threatening to a lot of corporate thinkers is that it largely devalues the middle management layer that corporate society is built on. When you’re in person, a middle manager can walk the floors, “keep an eye on people” and, in meetings, “speak for the group.” While this can happen over Zoom and Slack, it becomes significantly more apparent who actually did the work, because you can digitally evaluate where the work is coming from.”

Forget Going Back to the Office—People Are Just Quitting Instead. “As the pandemic clouds lift, the percentage of Americans leaving employers for new opportunities is at its highest level in more than two decades.”

The document culture of Amazon. “Reading documents is so ingrained in our culture and process that our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document. If I’m catching up on a new service or feature launch, I will find the document rather than emailing or calling the product manager.” I really love this.

Do Chance Meetings at the Office Boost Innovation? There’s No Evidence of It. “Remote work, though, can enable ideas to bubble up from people with different backgrounds. Online, people who are not comfortable speaking up in an in-person meeting may feel more able to weigh in. Brainstorming sessions using apps like Slack can surface many more perspectives by including people who wouldn’t have been invited to a meeting, like interns or employees in other departments.”

Office and Company Culture Are Bullshit. “The big push back to the office - and the many, many, many people I’ve had contact me saying they don’t want to go back - is only about control. Company culture is industrial guilt - it’s “just what we do here” - and without an office, it becomes significantly harder to wield, because there isn’t an easy way to wield power over a distributed group of people. It’s hard to feel like you’re a fancy King that people fear the wrath of when you don’t have an office to trot around, with middle-management Lords that also get off on the authority of power and draw little satisfaction from actual work that rewards you with money.”

Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank. “Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.”

What Salaries Did Startup CEOs Earn in 2020? “Interestingly, Female CEOs were more likely to take a pay cut during the pandemic. When comparing male and female CEOs, female leaders took a 30% reduction in salary at the peak of the pandemic ($101,000 compared to $138,000 in 2019) while their male counterparts saw an increase ($146,000 compared to $143,000 in 2019).”

Crypto

Beyond Resale Royalties. So Why Is DADA Ditching Royalties? “Fast forward three years since we tried to devise a royalty standard, and now it is art and not collectibles that is bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the NFT ecosystem. Yet OpenSea is now too busy to put resources into guaranteeing resale royalties on their platform. Today, if an artwork is sold on a crypto art marketplace and resold on OpenSea, the artist does not get royalties.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Is Selling The Original Source Code For The World Wide Web as an NFT. “The work includes the original archive of dated and time-stamped files from 1990 and 1991, containing 9,555 lines of source code and original HTML documents that taught the earliest web users how to use the application. The auction item also includes an animated 30-minute video of the code being written and a digital signature from Berners-Lee himself, as well as a letter written by him over 30 years later in which he reflects on the process of creating the code and the impact it has made.”

Culture

Roxane Gay Starts Publishing Imprint With Grove Atlantic. “Roxane Gay Books will focus on underrepresented fiction, nonfiction and memoir writers, with or without agents.”

How Memes Become Money. “It’s appropriate to give credit to people for their creativity and compensate them for their labor. It’s empowering to siphon value from the social-media companies that have been making billions off our personal lives. But it’s also a kind of giving up.”

In Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance. “More than four million students received a computer between 2011 and 2015. These were exactly the years that saw the rise of a budding generation of rappers, trappers, and freestylers. The overlap is no coincidence to Sebastián Benítez Larghi, director of the sociology department at the La Plata National University. “The working classes have always had a tradition of cultural creation — urban rhythms are just more proof of that.””

Media

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. “Emails obtained by The Assembly show that UNC-Chapel Hill’s largest journalism-school donor warned against Nikole Hannah-Jones’ hiring. Their divergent views represent a new front in the debate over objectivity and the future of the field.”

An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine. “Yet for decades, our news industry has abandoned those values in coverage of Israel and Palestine. We have failed our audiences with a narrative that obscures the most fundamental aspects of the story: Israel’s military occupation and its system of apartheid.”

Pulitzer Prizes 2021: Darnella Frazier wins special citation from Pulitzer Prize board. “The board said Frazier was honored “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.””

‘We’re Going to Publish’: An Oral History of the Pentagon Papers. “So Ellsberg and I made this agreement: If I could get The Times to agree to publish the whole thing, they’d do their best to protect him. He’d give us the whole thing. He wouldn’t be publicly announced as a source.” One of the most important acts of whistleblowing and journalism of the 20th century.

Andreessen Horowitz’s ‘Future’ is a media machine. ″“We have a business to run, and we’re in the business of investing in the future and providing returns for LPs,” Wennmachers said. “So as much as I can help advance the future and the narrative of the pro case for the future … that’s what I’m trying to do. That is the goal.”″ So in other words, it’s the VC equivalent of an inflight magazine.

Newsrooms Need To Treat Coordinated Online Attacks On Reporters Like Propaganda - And Act Like They're At War. “And yes, this is a war, and it is a war being fought by the New York Post, by Fox News, and by many solo writers that have found a successful career in joining these campaigns, because outrage breeds clicks.”

Why the AP is no longer naming suspects in minor crime stories. “These minor stories, which only cover an arrest, have long lives on the internet. AP’s broad distribution network can make it difficult for the suspects named in such items to later gain employment or just move on in their lives.”

Lifting the mask. Edward Snowden launches his Substack: “Though my relationship to time fluctuates, the gravamen of my disclosures remains constant. In the past eight years, the depredations of surveillance have merely become more entrenched, with the capabilities that used to be the province of governments now in the hands of private companies, too, which employ them to track and tether us and attenuate our freedoms. This enduring danger, this compounding danger, is one of the reasons I’ve decided to lift my voice again — adding a new page to my “permanent record”...one to which I hope you subscribe.”

Linda Amster gets due recognition for work on Pentagon Papers. ″“I asked him why my name wasn’t included, and he said, ‘Well, we knew that we all might have to go to prison, and you are a woman, and we don’t want you to have to go to prison,’” Amster recalled.”

Fears for future of American journalism as hedge funds flex power. “According to a recent analysis, hedge funds or private equity firms now control half of US daily newspapers, including some of the largest newspaper groups in the country: Tribune, McClatchy and MediaNews Group.”

I am Palestinian. Here’s how Israel silences us on social media. “In 2015, Israel arrested 27-year-old Nader Halahleh and imprisoned him for seven months over seven posts on Facebook. That same year, 17-year-old Kathem Sbeih was also arrested over a Facebook post and placed in administrative detention — a policy from the British Mandate in which Israel imprisons Palestinians without charge or trial — for three months, despite being a child. By 2017, more than 300 Palestinians were detained under the pretext of incitement. For some Palestinians, just being able to post on social media under their real names is a risk too dangerous to take.”

Politics

Statement of Concern. “We [the undersigned] urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.”

Donald Trump Belief That “Reinstatement” to Office Coming: Delusional. “I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.”

Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats. “In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.”

Former NSA contractor Reality Winner, jailed for leaking secrets about Russian hacking, released early from prison. “Winner, 29, was sentenced to more than five years in prison in 2018 after she leaked classified information to The Intercept news outlet about Russia’s attempts to hack the 2016 presidential election. She pleaded guilty to leaking a classified report that detailed the Russian government’s efforts to penetrate a Florida-based voting software supplier. At the time, the sentence was the longest ever for a federal crime involving leaks to the media.” Thank you for your service.

’Nightmare Scenario’ fresh details on chaos, conflicts inside Trump’s pandemic response. “In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as White House officials debated whether to bring infected Americans home for care, President Donald Trump suggested his own plan for where to send them, eager to suppress the numbers on U.S. soil. “Don’t we have an island that we own?” the president reportedly asked those assembled in the Situation Room in February 2020, before the U.S. outbreak would explode. “What about Guantánamo?””

Records Show Nearly 900 Secret Service Employees Got COVID. “The records show that of the 881 positive test results recorded between March 1, 2021 and March 9, 2021, the majority, 477, came from employees working as special agents, and 249 were from members of the uniformed division.”

Science

Telomerase Regulation. If we’d figured this out, my mother would have lived a normal, healthy life. It’s also an issue associated with 90% of human cancers. I strongly suspect we’ll crack it in my lifetime.

Scientists shocked as particle transforms between matter and antimatter for the first time. “The charm meson has a light and heavy version that helps distinguish between its matter and antimatter states.”

Coronavirus infections dropping where people are vaccinated, rising where they are not. In other news: Popes Catholic, bears defecating in woodland.

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong. “Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.”

Are advertisers coming for your dreams? “Now, brands from Xbox to Coors to Burger King are teaming up with some scientists to attempt something similar: “Engineer” advertisements into willing consumers’ dreams, via video and audio clips. This week, a group of 40 dream researchers has pushed back in an online letter, calling for the regulation of commercial dream manipulation.”

What Happened to the Lyme Disease Vaccine? “No human vaccines for Lyme exist. But that wasn’t always the case. Before Lyme disease shots went to the dogs, people had a safe and effective vaccine, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1998. But anti-vaccine forces claimed it was dangerous, tanked its popularity and sued it out of existence after just a few years on the market.” Meanwhile, the Lyme epidemic continues to grow.

When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray. “Moray eels can hunt on land, and footage from a recent study highlights how they accomplish this feat with a sneaky second set of jaws.” Also: perfect headline, well done.

What’s the Difference Between a ‘Borb’ and a ‘Floof’? “Let us now apply this logic. Borbs as a category heavily intersect with birbs, defined as both are by roundness. But just as every bird is not a birb, every birb is not a borb. Some birds naturally have deep chests and short necks, easily securing their borbness: chickadees, European Robins, and Bearded Tits, the last of which seems to be the poster child for the type. Other clear borbs include pigeons, thrushes, warblers, game birds, small parrots, most owls, and penguins.”

Why Is the Intellectual Dark Web Suddenly Hyping an Unproven COVID Treatment? ”While Big Tech continues to issue a confused, belated, and at times contradictory response to the problem of people using its platforms to promote health quackery, Weinstein, Heying, Taibbi, and Weiss have positioned themselves as the vanguards of intellectual freedom by, in their ways, buttressing these claims. In fact, and without, perhaps, even realizing it, they’ve acted as foot soldiers for something entirely commonplace: a politicized and pseudoscientific response to a deadly disease.”

Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out. “A simple blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer before any clinical signs or symptoms of the disease emerge in a person is accurate enough to be rolled out as a screening test, according to scientists.”

Society

Why We Are Publishing the Tax Secrets of the .001%. “Today, ProPublica is launching the first in a series of stories based on the private tax data of some of our nation’s richest citizens. We obtained the information from an anonymous source who provided us with large amounts of information on the ultrawealthy, everything from the taxes they paid to the income they reported to the profits from their stock trades.”

‘A career change saved my life’: the people who built better lives after burnout. “Among her clients, burnout is common. “We’re at a tipping point, I think, where the old world is not fit for purpose any more,” she says. “There’s this narrative in society which is that in order to be successful, you’ve got to sacrifice your health or your relationships, or things that are important to you. You’ve got to hustle. And I really don’t agree with that.””

I said I couldn’t stand Indian food. Then a Twitter friend took me to dinner. ““This is the guy,” Preet said to the owner and some friends, meaning “the guy who slagged the cuisine of our ancestors whose mind we just might change.” I smiled gamely and said I was willing to make amends. There was laughter and a lot of smiles and knowing looks. It turns out they’d been expecting me. I was not going to get away with my usual only-child behavior of a quick taste here and there. This was going to be a marathon.”

What Do Conservatives Fear About Critical Race Theory? “Increasingly, conservatism after Donald Trump has been defined by a fear that American society is on the verge of being displaced by a progressive reimagining, with woke politics and aggressive redistribution. Progressivism is defined by an equally urgent hope that it can, in fact, displace old patterns of ecological destruction and discrimination. It is interesting—and slightly ironic—that critical race theory, with its invocations of structural racism, should be so central to the policy debate right now: part of its teaching is that the patterns of American society can’t be easily dislodged by a change in manners, and that if you are snapping your fingers to make the past disappear you are only doing so in tandem with the rhythms of the past.”

She got hurt working for Amazon. Here's why she doesn't want to quit. “Amazon’s high injury rates were reported last week in a study by the Strategic Organizing Center, a labor advocacy group that used data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to analyze the rates of serious injury in fulfillment and delivery roles. The SOC is using the data to push for changes to Amazon’s notoriously long hours, strict and limited break schedules, and repetitive-motion work that can cause chronic pain. The group found that Amazon’s serious injury rate was more than double Walmart (its closest competitor) last year, and that Amazon employees take an average of one to two weeks longer to recover from these injuries than the average injured warehouse employee.”

Why We Shouldn't Be Surprised People Don't Read. “It’s more than sucking the joy out of learning - we have changed on a societal level what it means to be educated. Education has become so pragmatism-focused that it’s unsurprising that we have people that learn basically everything outside of school through a web browser - we have educated generations of kids to consciously or otherwise view knowledge as something one acquires as quickly as possible, and usually for a task.”

What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor. “For the most part, America finds the money to pay for the things it values. In recent decades, and despite deep gridlock in Washington, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East and tax cuts for the wealthy. We have also spent trillions of dollars on health insurance subsidies and coronavirus relief. It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.”

Grenfell FC: "This club is bigger than any one individual". ″“You felt the loss everywhere in those weeks,” says Rupert. “Then one day, there was a young man who came in who I felt was struggling with his mental health. He’d lost both his parents a few years prior, three months apart. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. And he’d lived in the tower. It felt like history was repeating itself. I asked him what had helped him get through the death of his parents. He said football. So we formed a football team. Right there, like that.””

The Electrification of Everything: What You Need to Know. Short answer: we’d better upgrade the grid.

How You Start is How You Finish? The Slave Patrol and Jim Crow Origins of Policing. “Policing in southern slave-holding states followed a different trajectory—one that has roots in slave patrols of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and police enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. As per Professor Michael Robinson (2017) of the University of Georgia, the first deaths in America of Black men at the hands of law enforcement “can be traced back as early as 1619 when the first slave ship, a Dutch Man-of-War vessel landed in Point Comfort, Virginia.””

Kids Need Freedom, Too. “The problem with a society devoted to zero risk is that kids grow up overprotected and under-socialized. They miss out on the thrilling experience of fending for themselves, crucial in forging confidence. They miss out on learning to assess risk and dealing with minimal danger without constantly deferring to an authority.” I’m excited that free-range parenting will be back in style by the time I’m a parent. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

Conservatives now use the label ‘critical race theory’ to describe any conversation about race that makes them uncomfortable. “On its face, the opprobrium misunderstands the point: CRT is less about blaming white people than interrogating systems of power and privilege. But that’s the very thing that frightens conservatives: If children recognize the culpability of systems, as opposed to individuals, they’ll also recognize societal problems require collective solutions. The myth of rugged individualism will vanish.”

'I was completely inside': Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale off Provincetown. ″“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard recalled Friday afternoon following his release from Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis.” Call me shaken.

Oregon Has Legalized Human Composting. I really wish California did this.

Abigail Disney: Why the Rich Protect Dynastic Wealth. “If your comfort requires that society be structured so that a decent percentage of your fellow citizens live in a constant state of terror about whether they’ll get health care in an emergency, or whether they can keep a roof over their family’s heads, or whether they will simply have enough to eat, perhaps the problem does not rest with those people, but with you and what you think of as necessary, proper, and acceptable.”

Fighting the pressure for pandemic personal growth. “But there’s a larger norm at work behind questions like this, and behind the greater expectation that people could use lockdown to boost their coronapreneurial profiles. An obsessive focus on productivity is “part of late-stage American capitalism,” Blustein said. “This productivity ethos has gotten transported into our hobbies, it’s gotten transported into our relationships, into our physical and mental health.””

5 pads for 2 cellmates: Menstrual products still scarce in prison. “Unable to get more than an allotted number of pads, Bozelko began reusing them. The prison’s pads were thin, she said, thinner than the pads typically sold outside, and the adhesive barely stuck to her clothes. She once saw another woman’s pad fall to the ground because the glue was so weak, so Bozelko stepped on it, hiding the pad beneath her boot to save her from humiliation. She and her cellmate received five of these pads to share among themselves every week, and asking a guard for another pad often led to a rejected request and ridicule.” Why are we so cruel?

Technology

Mass scale manipulation of Twitter Trends discovered. “We found that 47% of local trends in Turkey and 20% of global trends are fake, created from scratch by bots. Between June 2015 and September 2019, we uncovered 108,000 bot accounts involved, the biggest bot dataset reported in a single paper. Our research is the first to uncover the manipulation of Twitter Trends at this scale.”

Passport. A neat solution for independent subscription media businesses. I kind of want to use it.

1997: The Year of DHTML. A nice history of DHTML and the DOM, for people (like me) who are interested in that sort of thing.

I saw millions compromise their Facebook accounts to fuel fake engagement. “During my time at Facebook, I saw compromised accounts functioning in droves in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. Most of these accounts were commandeered through autolikers: online programs which promise users automatic likes and other engagement for their posts. Signing up for the autoliker, however, requires the user to hand over account access. Then, these accounts join a bot farm, where their likes and comments are delivered to other autoliker users, or sold en masse, even while the original user maintains ownership of the account. Although motivated by money rather than politics — and far less sophisticated than government-run human troll farms — the sheer quantity of these autoliker programs can be dangerous.”

Introducing Astro: Ship Less JavaScript. Neat!

Colorado is now the 3rd US state with modern privacy legislation, with a twist. “In other words, Do Not Track – or something very much like it – is back in Colorado, and ignoring the setting, like companies did widely when Do Not Track was created, is not an option any more. The technical details will need to be figured out between now and when this provision goes into effect, which two and a half years away. So plenty of time to get this right.”

Day One at Automattic. “Day One not only nails the experience of a local blog (or journal as they call it) in an app, but also has (built) a great technical infrastructure — it works fantastic (when) offline and has a fully encrypted sync mechanism, so the data that’s in the cloud is secured in a way that even someone with access to their database couldn’t decode your entries, it’s only decrypted on your local device. Combining encryption and sync in a truly secure way is tricky, but they’ve done it.”

Apple’s emoji keyboard is reinforcing Western stereotypes. “The feature associates “Africa” with the hut emoji and “China” with the dog emoji.”

China’s tech workers pushed to their limits by surveillance software. “A Chinese subsidiary of Japanese camera maker Canon, Canon Information Technology, last year unveiled a new workspace management system that only allows smiling employees to enter the office and book conference rooms. Using so-called “smile recognition” technology, Canon said the system was intended to bring more cheerfulness to the office in the post-pandemic era.”

My plan for my mother’s Christmas present this year was to write her a novel. Despite her failing eyesight, she devoured books: I bought her a Kindle, which allowed her to increase the font size to an almost comical level, and an iPad, which she used to listen to audiobooks. The one year I finished NaNoWriMo, she followed along every day. It wasn’t a particularly great piece of writing, but she read it with a mother’s pride. So I wanted to do that again.

Yesterday marked three weeks since her passing. Processing this new reality is going to be a long journey. I’m not okay, but I’m okay-presenting: I can emulate a fully-functional human when I need to. I don’t want to perform that emulation for loved ones, but nobody else needs to know that I pull over to the side of the road to ugly cry or can barely manage to sleep through the night. I miss her terribly, and I will always miss her terribly.

I’m still planning on writing that novel.

Writing has always been the thing I love to do most. It’s not that I’m necessarily good at it, although I also don’t think I’m bad; it’s more that it puts me into a kind of meditative state that gives me the tools to process the world. Some people are really great social thinkers. I need to put my ideas down in words.

My grandfather, Sidney Monas, translated Crime and Punishment into English. My cousin, Sarah Dessen, is a famous and talented young adult author whose novel Along for the Ride is being adapted by Netflix. Another cousin, Jonathan Neale, has written beautiful novels and progressive non-fiction histories. I’m not looking for the literary impact or success of any of them; I just want to have the mental stillness to sit down and tell a story, and to develop the skills to do that well.

Still, the startup side of me is interested in how people get to do this full-time. The indie author DC Kalbach makes a solid salary from self-publishing on Kindle Unlimited. Elle Griffin is going to serialize her novel behind a Substack subscription. My friend Yoko Oji Kikuchi makes her living through supporters of her art on Patreon. These seem like idyllic existences to me, but also difficult: each requires a rhythm of sustained creativity to maintain.

For now, I’m lucky to be able to think about making stuff without having to worry about its financial sustainability - or even if it’s good. (To be clear, I hope that it’s good.) I’ve got my draft going in Ulysses, and I’m making solid progress. Who knows what will happen next - and in lots of ways, it doesn’t matter, as long as I keep working on it. This will be the last you hear about it until you read it.

The one thing that does matter, if I’m truly honest with myself, is this: I just wish its intended audience was here to read it.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I’m convinced that one reason Americans embrace the cryptocurrency ideal of “programmable money” is that the domestic banking system is such an unmitigated disaster. Some of the features crypto enables - near-instant cross-institutional transfers with low fees, for example, or comprehensive API access to banking features like balances and transactions - are enjoyed by traditional banking customers elsewhere in the world.

When I first moved to California and needed to pay rent for the first time, I did what I’d always done: set up an automatic scheduled transfer with my bank. When the bank printed out a check and mailed it to my landlady, a week late no less, I couldn’t believe it. Surely checks were obsolete? Why wouldn’t they just transfer the money?

This year, a full decade later, I moved a balance from one retirement account to another: perhaps not a huge amount by Peter Thiel standards, but still, a non-trivial sum. And yes, the same thing happened: the original institution printed out a check and mailed it to me. Then I needed to mail that check, with a cover letter with written instructions, to the receiving institution. It’s a broken, stupid process that doesn’t appear to have meaningfully changed since the seventies.

America’s federated approach creates lots of these kinds of inefficiencies. My assumption is that there are now so many companies and business models that have grown up to take advantage of the gaps and inconsistencies that it’s now grievously hard to smooth them over. This same underlying business pattern has been repeated over and over here: for example, while citizens of other countries can often file taxes without having to submit a return or paying for a processor, the US tax system is famously kept complicated and expensive through lobbying by Intuit, the owner of TurboTax.

Similarly, while open banking has been a fantastic innovation elsewhere - regulations now force banks to share data and interoperate across the UK and Europe, for example - it hasn’t yet gained a foothold in the US. As The Financial Brand reports, the way financial applications are forced to work in the United States is genuinely jaw-dropping:

Screen scraping technology has been around since the early days of the internet (and of online banking) and remains in active use, but comes with a number of problems. Most important of these, from financial institutions’ perspective, is giving login credentials to a third party without setting strict limits on that access, which is neither elegant nor ideal. But even companies known for their use of APIs, such as Plaid, have resorted to screen scraping when API connections were not possible.

Programmable money can be seen as a great way to force the issue. Suddenly banks are no longer competing just with each other, but with an internet-native, cross-border set of currencies that allow a new generation of connected applications to be built without asking for anyone’s permission. DeFi platforms have lower fees because they can operate on the protocol level; more importantly, anyone can build and launch one. There’s no need to ask for permission. There’s also no incentive to keep the workings of their platforms private, so they’re typically fully open source and auditable by any third party who cares to check.

That’s going to create serious competitive pressure for traditional banks. As DeFi adoption continues to grow, they’ll need to do more and more to compete: on the fee and flexibility level for end-user customers, but also on the platform level for partners. Banks have real competitive advantages too, like FDIC insurance and real humans who sit in regional branches or answer the phones, but this will need to be combined with a newfound openness. Because cryptocurrencies can be thought of as protocols that you can build on top of, the traditional banking system needs to move in that direction too; because crypto is permissionless and transparent, banks will need to find ways to lower barriers to partnering with them. Today’s situation, where APIs are hard to find or restricted to high-paying partners, will become a thing of the past. Alternatively, the banks will.

If I was working for a bank (which I’m not), I’d be finding ways to build open banking protocols with others in my industry, using open source principles. I’d be creating a non-profit technology custodian to create a neutral territory for the various institutions to collaborate: a W3C for banking. I’d be hiring fantastic technologists, technology advocates, and communicators to develop protocols, build libraries, and drive adoption. And I’d be doing it yesterday.

None of this is to say that crypto is going away. Even if the banks innovate appropriately in the face of this new-found competition (best case) or crypto becomes subject to Intuit-style regulatory lobbying to hinder the competition (realistic case), the horse has bolted from the stable. Trillions of dollars are invested in cryptocurrencies. A new generation of financial applications is absolutely inevitable: it’s already here. And crucially, I think consumers - real people with average incomes, who have long been underserved by the rigidity and biases of the traditional banking system - will benefit.

Disclosure: I work for ForUsAll, a retirement provider that allows participants to invest in crypto in participating plans, but this post was written independently and does not represent my employer.

Photo by Tim Evans on Unsplash

While I’ve been away from work, we’ve made some big announcements about something I’ve been helping to work on for a while as Head of Engineering.

Over in Fortune:

The platform, called Alt 401(k), will allow workers in participating companies to transfer up to 5% of their [401(k)] account balances into a Coinbase-traded cryptocurrency window. They will have over 50 cryptocurrencies to choose from as investment vehicles. ForUsAll says it also plans to monitor allocations, alerting employees when their overall cryptocurrency allocation exceeds 5% of their portfolio.

In the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Ramirez said participants who invest in cryptocurrency must acknowledge having read disclosures explaining it is a volatile asset. “Our guidance is not to be day trading anything, whether a stock or crypto,” he added.

‌[...] ForUsAll said it plans to eventually add small allocations to other alternative investments, including private equity, venture capital, and real estate.

In Barron’s:

Crypto may provide an incentive for people to put more money into their retirement plans, says Paul Selker, president of Spark Street Digital, a webcast production company.

“If the opportunity to put this tiny little slice of crypto into the portfolio makes them increase their contribution overall, they win. It almost doesn’t matter what happens to crypto,” said Selker. ForUsAll is the 401(k) plan provider for Spark Street’s 14 employees.

In The Motley Fool:

Now it is worth reiterating that ForUsAll only plans to let plan participants put up to 5% of their money into cryptocurrency. And that alone speaks to its speculative nature. It's also a responsible way to introduce cryptocurrency investing to people who may be excited to dabble in it, but don't really know much about it other than it's in the news a lot.

In USA Today:

Crypto investing is virtually nowhere to be found in 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts at the moment. But while financial advisers remain cautious about cryptocurrencies, they may be ready to embrace them due to client demand, according to the 2021 Trends in Investing Survey, conducted by the Journal of Financial Planning and the Financial Planning Association.

In the delightfully-named Benzinga:

“For too long, too many Americans haven’t had the same access to alternative investments that wealthy and professional investors have had. Our mission is to provide every American with the tools necessary to build a brighter financial future, and making these alternatives more readily available is a key step towards that,” said Jeff Schulte, CEO of ForUsAll.

Brett Tejpaul, Head of Institutional Coverage at Coinbase, added to this, “When we created our institutional platform, our initial focus was making cryptocurrency accessible to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals.”

“The next evolution is to broaden our reach and we are thrilled to be working with ForUsAll, the leading 401k technology platform, to expand access to cryptocurrency through 401ks,” Tejpaul added.

To learn more, head over to the ForUsAll site.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Gravity doesn’t work the way it used to. Some things are too heavy, and some too light. There’s a great weight, but it’s like a dark cloud; sometimes dense, sometimes not. It’s like someone took the laws of physics and put them in a blender. I’m beginning to get used to it, in the same way a new sailor gets used to walking on a ship, but the world is wrong.

Thank you to everyone who’s reached out this week. It means a lot, and I probably haven’t replied. I’m overwhelmed by everything, which means I’m not good at emails, or texts, or phone calls. I do things, but I keep having to go back to bed. The same is true of my dad and my sister: we go through the motions of coping, but underneath the surface it’s just turmoil.

I hate feeling this way, and I hate seeing the people I love most in the world feel this way, and I hate that I just want to reach out and give my mother a hug and I can’t.

If you regularly read this space, you might be wondering when I’ll get back to ethical technology. Why doesn’t he write about open source, for crying out loud?! The answer is: eventually. There are good moments, and there are bad moments, but it doesn’t feel right to get back to business. Now, above all, is a time to breathe.

We lost my mother, Deborah Monas, on Sunday evening. I was giving her a head rub; my sister Hannah held her hands; my dad Oscar and her brother Steve were at her feet.

How is this possible? The world doesn’t feel real.

When I was a small child, we used to pull out the sofabed in our postgraduate student flat and watch Doctor Who together under a blanket. What I would give for a TARDIS now: a way to correct the fabric of time and space. Clearly something is badly wrong with it.

I want to have something perfect to say, some beautiful encapsulation of who she was, but the truth is that nothing could be perfect enough. There’s no way to write a biography that isn’t an imperfect model. Nothing can adequately describe my beautiful mother: her overwhelming kindness, her sense of justice, her irreverence for tradition and institutions, the love that our house was always, always filled with.

I’ve written a lot about her health in this space. She had dyskeratosis congenita, which first expressed itself as pulmonary fibrosis. She fought it hard. When she began to use supplementary oxygen, my sister and I moved to California to be closer. The double lung transplant she received at UCSF gave us almost an extra decade of time with her, and it was a privilege to be by her side, with my dad and my sister, on this journey.

She loved reading, and both Hannah and I got to share those experiences with her. Hannah read to Ma for years: books by authors like Wade Davis, Octavia Butler, and Tommy Orange. Ma and I shared book recommendations; this year we read Caste and The Nickel Boys, among others. Even as it became harder to read in print, she picked up audiobooks, and kept going, recording what she’d read in a notebook she kept by her bed.

Years ago, we were gifted a Sunfish sailing boat by our family friend Pammy Biscoe. The two of them had sailed on it when they were much younger. Now it became her and my thing: she was happiest out on Waquoit Bay, our striped sails catching the wind just right. She called it a Whoosh. I’ll remember her in an infinity of ways, in an infinity of moments, but being out on the water with her, watching her smile as we picked up speed, is one I’ll treasure the most.

When my parents met, in Berkeley in the 1970s, she worked to fight for affirmative action and tenants’ rights. Her belief and support for progressive causes was an anchor throughout her life. We discovered this week that she had quietly made over 178 progressive donations last year alone, without any of us really knowing. A list of some of the causes she consistently supported follows at the end of this post; in lieu of flowers, we’re asking people to contribute if they have the means.

I want to honor her by furthering what she put into the world. The loving, non-conformist, irreverent, equity-minded spirit that she embodied.

As she lay in her hospital bed, we read Ma messages from people who loved her throughout her life. One, from Hannah’s friend Anita Hurrell, particularly sums up our collective childhood, and the sensibility I want to take forward in my own life, inspired by my mother. I’ll end by sharing it here, with kind permission.

Dearest Deb,

One time you drove us in the van to the seaside and we ate sandwiches with cucumber in them and I thought they tasted delicious and I felt this strong sense of deep content sitting with Hannah in the back listening to her singing and humming for the whole journey. I have no idea where we went, and in my head it was nowhere in England, but rather part of the big-hearted, loving, funny, relaxed, non-conformist world of your family in my childhood - full of your laughter and your enormous kindness. Sitting on the bench in your house in Marston I recall a moment of feeling complete certainty that your pirozhki were the yummiest food that had ever been made. Staying in Wheatley when my mum and dad had gone away we ate popcorn and I felt safe even though at the time I had lost Blue Bear. I remember calling you my second mummy. I'm not sure I was always a very nice kid and was probably very ungrateful then, but now I wish I could convey how I revere you, Oscar, Ben and Hannah in my thoughts and how lucky I feel to keep your example with me. I look back and see how talented Hannah already was then when we were so little and she could just sing and sing and draw in a magic way, how cool she was (her doll Manuela had beautiful black wild curly hair while I chose Charlotte with twee clothes and ridiculous ringlets), what a true feminist you were, how much of parenting you seemed to do much better than we do these days, how generous and homemade and fun and kind the world you and Oscar made was.

You are an asset to the universe. I will always love you very much.

Anita

Causes Ma consistently supported:

ACLU - donate

Planned Parenthood - donate

Oxfam - donate

Doctors Without Borders - donate

Progressive Turnout Project - donate

NARAL Pro-Choice America - donate

314 Action Fund - donate

Stop Republicans - donate

National Democratic Training Committee - donate

End Citizens United - donate

KQED Public Media - donate

The Squad Victory Fund - donate

BOLD Democrats PAC - donate

National Bail Out - donate

Phil Arballo for Congress (CA-22) - donate

Scott Sifton for Senate (MO) - donate

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for May, 2021.

Books

Wintering, by Katherine May. Unmistakably written from a position of privilege, I nonetheless found this book to be a kind of warm hug; the written equivalent of a cup of hot chocolate on an icy day. I did find myself occasionally irritated by how carefree this supposedly troublesome life actually was, but mostly I found myself yearning to live in the Love, Actually world she seems to inhabit.

PET, by Akwaeke Emezi. Slight but heavy: a fantasy story with strong themes about ethics, family, history, and the line between good and evil - all drawn together with strong characters and beautiful prose. For me, the epilogue let the story down a little bit with emotion that didn't quite ring true. Nonetheless, I'm quickly learning that I'll follow Akwaeke Emezi anywhere.

While Justice Sleeps, by Stacey Abrams. This was closer to a Dan Brown or John Grisham novel than I’d anticipated: a taut thriller that occasionally stretches plausibility but is a lot of fun from beginning to end. It turns out Stacey Abrams can do it all. I hope there’s a movie.

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir, by Jenn Shapland. Infused with longing and written with an eye for poetry, this is a personal exploration of the boundary between love and possession: between lovers, between queer people and communities not ready to accept them, between a long-dead author and her biographer. I found it thought-provoking, sad, and in some ways, triumphant: a suppressed love story finally taking flight. May we all have the courage and the freedom to be and love as ourselves.

The Coming Insurrection, by Comité Invisible. “Power is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its codes and its technologies. Power is the organization of the metropolis itself.” I don’t agree with all of the conclusions about what to do next, but the descriptions of the problems that must be overcome here ring true. Perhaps oddly, I made connections with Emergent Strategy; the two arrive at very similar ideas about decentralization and the power of hierarchy-less organizing through very different lenses.

Ms. Marvel Vol. 1: No Normal, by G. Willow Wilson. Super-fun, and refreshing in lots of ways. There are some broad characterizations here, but hey, it’s a comic book. I loved it, and hope the TV show is even half as charming.

Streaming

His House. Superficially a horror movie, His House serves as a layered metaphor for the immigrant experience. It's expertly built on every level - both the real-life horror and the supernatural scares had me watching from behind a cushion - but comes into its own in its final act.

Notable Articles

Business

How Basecamp blew up. "This account is based on interviews with six Basecamp employees who were present at the meeting, along with a partial transcript created by employees. Collectively, they describe a company whose attempt to tamp down on difficult conversations blew up in its face as employees rejected the notion that discussions of power and justice should remain off limits in the workplace. And they suggest that efforts to eliminate disruptions in the workplace by regulating internal speech may cause even more turmoil for a company in the long run."

Looking for (more of) a new kind of startup…. "There’s a new and important kind of startup that’s become wildly successful the last few years. These startups, for which we still lack a good name, look to their customers like a direct replacement to some large, familiar incumbent, but uses technology to provide a strictly superior offering."

Forced Entrepreneurs. "Conventional wisdom suggests labor market distress drives workers into temporary self-employment, lowering entrepreneurial quality. Analyzing employment histories for 640,000 U.S. workers, we document graduating college during a period of high unemployment does increase entry to entrepreneurship. However, compared to voluntary entrepreneurs, firms founded by forced entrepreneurs are more likely to survive, innovate, and receive venture-backing. Explaining these results, we confirm labor shocks disproportionately impact high-earners and these same workers start more successful firms. Overall, we document untapped entrepreneurial potential across the top of the income distribution and demonstrate the role of recessions in reversing this missing entrepreneurship."

Poor in Tech. “I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I made more there than I’d ever made before; a daring amount I had been afraid to ask for during the offer process. I discovered through misadventure that I still made less than any of the executive assistants, or the receptionist. I was, in fact, the lowest-paid person in the building including the interns. I hadn’t known what was possible, so I couldn’t even think to ask for what I was worth to them.” This resonated for me hard.

You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup. My experience is different to this - but it's definitely an interesting read. What this piece doesn't really discuss is meaningful work, and getting to work cross-functionally, which is something that's much easier in an early-stage startup than another company. I like to use my whole self: go broad rather than narrow and deep. Big companies typically want you to do the latter.

'FIND THIS FUCK:' Inside Citizen’s Dangerous Effort to Cash In On Vigilantism. "Frame and the entirety of the Citizen apparatus had spent a whole night putting a bounty on the head of an innocent man." This company - and this CEO in particular - sounds absolutely deranged.

A Worker-Owned Cooperative Tries to Compete With Uber and Lyft. "The Drivers Cooperative, which opened for business in New York this week, is the most recent attempt. The group, founded by a former Uber employee, a labor organizer and a black-car driver, began issuing ownership shares to drivers in early May and will start offering rides through its app on Sunday." Hell yes.

The Abusive Corporation's New Tool: Wellness and Mental Health. "If a job is making you commute an hour each way and having you work ridiculous hours with no extra compensation for it, but also giving you free counseling, they’re not really that concerned with your mental health. They’re just concerned with you finding a way to cope with the oftentimes unfair conditions they’re putting you under, and doing so in a way that’s significantly more affordable than making your life better and paying you more money."

Crypto

The Tether Ponzi Scheme. “Tether is a fraud on the scale of Madoff or Enron and we’re in the middle of a bubble for the history books.”

Bitcoin’s most recent adopters are working-class migrants. "Salgado is now part of a growing number of Latin Americans using cryptocurrency to transfer money from the United States south of the Rio Grande. They represent a new wave of crypto users who are not tech enthusiasts or white-collar financiers but rather working-class people whose livelihoods depend on a technology that is often seen as experimental."

Teens Controlling Multi-Million-Dollar DeFi Protocols Are Not Playing Around. "Jai Bhavnani, 19, David Lucid, 20, and Jack Lipstone, who just turned 20, founded Rari Capital in April 2020, less than a month after the founders’ home state of California went into COVID lockdown. That was also shortly after Bhavnani graduated from the college preparatory school which ties together six of the seven members of the Rari team."

A country's worth of power, no more!. I'm excited to see Ethereum move to proof of stake. Its smart contract platform has a lot of potential - but not if it is environmentally disastrous. It's nice to hear that the change is so close.

How Iran Uses Bitcoin Mining to Evade Sanctions and “Export” Millions of Barrels of Oil. "Exact figures are very challenging to determine, but Elliptic estimates that Iran-based miners account for approximately 4.5% of all Bitcoin mining." Interesting detail: Mosques get free electricity in Iran, so it turns out some of them have been illicitly mining coin.

UK police raided a shady Bitcoin mining facility they thought was a weed farm. "Naturally, officers were convinced they were looking at the "telltale" signs of a cannabis factory. But, when they busted in to the site on May 18th, they found a bank of 100 specialized bitcoin miners instead."

Culture

Stacey Abrams Contains Multitudes. "Abrams went on to write seven more Selena Montgomery books (one of which, “Never Tell,” is in development with CBS), as well as two nonfiction works under her own name, while pursuing her day jobs as a tax lawyer, business owner, state lawmaker, candidate for governor and voting-rights advocate, to name a few."

1988: P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A.. Text adventures as a medium for protest in Soviet Czechoslovakia: "Soon the shared games “became a fully-fledged means of communication within a subculture of young geeks, like 8-bit chain letters or, perhaps, social media of the early digital era”: an internet that existed mostly on magnetic tapes shoved into school backpacks and zipping around the country on buses and bicycles. While literature and music was heavily censored by the government and could not be legally distributed by amateurs, software was not on the radar of the Party or its secret police at all. The authorities had not yet realized that the computer could be a medium for expression."

The one where writing books is not really a good idea. An interesting exploration into making money through serial fiction - which is something I plan to try in the future.

Gross Viral Food Videos Like Spaghetti-Os Pie Are Connected to This Guy. I'd been wondering.

Sinead O’Connor Remembers Things Differently. "O’Connor saw herself as a protest-singing punk. When she ascended to the top of the pop charts, she was trapped. “The media was making me out to be crazy because I wasn’t acting like a pop star was supposed to act,” she told me. “It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison. You have to be a good girl.” And that’s just not Sinead O’Connor."

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: An Explainer. “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is the grandest, most delightful, most ambitious MGM technicolor musical that was ever based on the story of a mass rape.”

The Linda Lindas on their viral song Racist, Sexist Boy: ‘It’s good to let the anger out and scream’. "The video of Mila and her three teenage bandmates that make up the Linda Lindas screaming “You are a racist, sexist BOYYYY!” is taken from a rage-filled live performance inside the LA public library for AAPI Heritage Month. Overnight, the clip became one of the most cathartic and energizing songs to come out of the pandemic." The Linda Lindas are so great.

How to Write Creative Fiction: Umberto Eco's Four Rules. “Fictional characters live in an incomplete—or, to be ruder and politically incorrect—handicapped world. But when we truly understand their fate, we begin to suspect that we too, as citizens of the here and now, frequently encounter our destiny simply because we think of our world in the same way that fictional characters think of theirs. Fiction suggests that perhaps our view of the actual world is as imperfect as the view that fictional characters have of their world.”

Media

Scroll is joining Twitter!. Absolutely huge news in medialand. And Tony told me that Scroll still has a commitment to the open web.

Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows. “"The 'Disinformation Dozen' produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts.”

Lovely eulogies to Fleet Street’s John Kay, but they overlook one important fact. "In this more sensitive era, there are presumably good reasons why anyone new to Kay will have finished the prominent Sun and Evening Standard pieces unaware of the existence of Kay’s first wife, Harue, whom he killed in 1977."

'On The Media' Co-Host Bob Garfield Fired Over Bullying Complaints. "Garfield’s termination follows two investigations into his conduct. The first, an internal investigation conducted last year, “resulted in disciplinary action, a warning about the potential consequences if the behavior continued, and a meaningful opportunity to correct it,” New York Public Radio said in a statement. The organization said a second, more recent outside probe found Garfield had again violated the anti-bullying policy."

Stunned: UNC Hussman Faculty Statement on Nikole Hannah-Jones by Hussman Faculty. "Failure to tenure Nikole Hannah-Jones in her role as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism is a concerning departure from UNC’s traditional process and breaks precedent with previous tenured full professor appointments of Knight chairs in our school. This failure is especially disheartening because it occurred despite the support for Hannah-Jones’s appointment as a full professor with tenure by the Hussman Dean, Hussman faculty, and university. Hannah-Jones’s distinguished record of more than 20 years in journalism surpasses expectations for a tenured position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism."

John Oliver places fake sponsored content on to local news: ‘Far too easy’. "The “Venus Veil” also got airtime on KVUE Austin’s sponsored show airing immediately after Thursday evening news, and an in-person showing on Denver’s Mile High Living. “None of this was nearly difficult enough to get on to TV, and it wasn’t even that expensive,” Oliver mused; the Denver Mile High in-person segment cost $2,800, KVUE Austin cost $2,650 and ABC 4 Utah cost $1,750. “It was all shockingly affordable and sadly, on some stations, didn’t even look that out of place,” he said." That is affordable. Can I place segments on how great single-payer healthcare is?

Politics

Pentagon Surveilling Americans Without a Warrant, Senator Reveals. "The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard."

Rise of a megadonor: Thiel makes a play for the Senate. “The largesse has transformed Thiel, an early Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder, into an outsize figure in the fight for control of the 50-50 Senate, providing fuel to two longtime associates who embrace his populist-conservative views. Top Republicans have expressed astonishment at the size of the donations and say they’ve turned Vance and Masters — who’ve never before run for elected office and will have to overcome primary rivals with far longer political resumes — into formidable contenders in the blink of an eye.”

Risk of Nuclear War Over Taiwan in 1958 Said to Be Greater Than Publicly Known. "When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was. [...] Mr. Ellsberg said he also had another reason for highlighting his exposure of that material. Now 90, he said he wanted to take on the risk of becoming a defendant in a test case challenging the Justice Department’s growing practice of using the Espionage Act to prosecute officials who leak information." Daniel Ellsberg is one of my heroes.

Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favoring an unjust status quo. Amen. “Centrists in the antebellum era were apathetic or outright resistant to ending slavery in the US and then in the decades before 1920 to giving women the vote. The civil rights movement was not nearly as popular in its time as moderates who like the more polite quotes from Martin Luther King Jr think it was.” It is not a moral stance.

Science

The Pastry A.I. That Learned to Fight Cancer. "In Japan, a system designed to distinguish croissants from bear claws has turned out to be capable of a whole lot more."

Mammals can breathe through anus in emergencies. "Although the side effects and safety need to be thoroughly evaluated in humans, our approach may offer a new paradigm to support critically ill patients with respiratory failure."

Researchers force two mice to hang out and induce FOMO in a third. "So the researchers generated “synchronized interbrain activity” by stimulating two mice with 5-Hz tonic (continuous) stimulation for five minutes and desynchronized activity by stimulating other pairs of mice with 25-Hz bursting stimulation for five minutes. About twice as many of the synchronized mice chose to socialize with each other—grooming, sniffing, etc.—as the desynchronized mice did. When two mice were synchronized into a 5-Hz pair and a third mouse got the 25-Hz burst, the pair shunned the desynchronized third. The researchers conclude that “imposed interbrain synchrony shapes social interaction and social preference in mice.”"

Neural implant lets paralyzed person type by imagining writing. "This week, the academic community provided a rather impressive example of the promise of neural implants. Using an implant, a paralyzed individual managed to type out roughly 90 characters per minute simply by imagining that he was writing those characters out by hand."

Society

New Study Estimates More Than 900,000 People Have Died Of COVID-19 In U.S.. "The analysis comes from researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who looked at excess mortality from March 2020 through May 3, 2021, compared it with what would be expected in a typical nonpandemic year, then adjusted those figures to account for a handful of other pandemic-related factors."

Take profit out of jail calls. Make it free to talk to loved ones behind bars. “I spend more than $100 every month to hear my son’s voice for just 15 minutes a day, time I split with his children. And I spend hundreds more to get him everything he needs inside: real food, basic toiletries, fresh linens and clean socks. I often have to choose between utility bills and supporting him, a choice no mother should ever have to make.”

Seeing the Real Faces of Silicon Valley. “For many midlevel engineers and food truck workers and longtime residents, a region filled with extremes has become increasingly inhospitable.”

Long working hours killing 745,000 people a year, study finds. “The research found that working 55 hours or more a week was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared with a working week of 35 to 40 hours.”

White People Never Supported Racial Equality; They Just Said They Did. “It was a fad. White people love Black people like they love TikTok dances and acid-washed jeans and liberty and justice for all. Have you never seen a white woman cry on cue or a Democrat campaigning in a Black barbershop? You really believed that shit? Even after the most white people in the history of America voted for a white nationalist authoritarian?”

We Need To Get Real About How the Pandemic Will End . "We seem to be holding onto the comforting fiction that we will eventually get around to vaccinating people in countries that have so far either had success keeping out the pandemic completely, or have had small outbreaks before, while they just keep up mitigating a little longer. I do not believe that the story we tell ourselves is realistic."

Remains of 215 children found at former indigenous school site in Canada. “The remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found at the site of a former residential school for indigenous children, a discovery Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described as heartbreaking on Friday.” The absolute horror - and this isn’t an isolated case.

Technology

What's Salesforce?. This is a pretty good overview for engineers! I've lost count of the times I've needed to answer the exact same question.

Berkshire Hathaway’s Stock Price Is Too Much for Computers. When stock prices get larger than 32-bit integers.

Some experiences with neutral technology. "Sometimes I look at my phone and think: I’m looking through a portal to California. My phone will never feel quite as part of the world as it does under Californian skies lit by the Californian sun. Here in London, or anywhere else really, my phone will always very slightly shimmer with an otherworldly light."

Facebook is still censoring groups fighting the military coup in Myanmar. “Following the February 1 coup d’état in Myanmar, activists, pro-democracy campaigners, and even supporters of the remnants of the NLD government, are asking for that ban to be rescinded. After a dramatic reshuffling of the political landscape, the ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) are no longer opponents of the democratically-elected government, but core members of the resistance to the new government. They say that Facebook’s moderation is now penalizing the broader anti-coup movement because of its loose association with groups proscribed by the last government, which in turn is limiting their ability to organize and communicate.”

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud. "In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data."

Google Chrome testing RSS-powered 'Follow' button, feed. Yes please.

How the cookie poisoned the Web. "Today our poisoned minds can hardly imagine having native capacities of our own that can operate at scale across all the world’s websites and services. To have that ability would also be at odds with the methods and imperatives of personally targeted advertising, which requires cookies and other tracking methods. One of those imperatives is making money: $Trillions of it."

Twitter's revved-up product focus piques publisher, advertiser interest. "After years of criticism for being slow-footed and indecisive, Twitter has finally started to spread its wings, shipping a torrent of product changes this year." I'm really bullish on Twitter - and I like it considerably more than Facebook.

US Soldiers Expose Nuclear Weapons Secrets Via Flashcard Apps. This isn't in any way the fault of the flashcard apps, which are clearly being used for effective learning. But someone needs to teach soldiers better infosec practices.

Secret Chats Show How Cybergang Became a Ransomware Powerhouse. ““Any doofus can be a cybercriminal now,” said Sergei A. Pavlovich, a former hacker who served 10 years in prison in his native Belarus for cybercrimes. “The intellectual barrier to entry has gotten extremely low.””

Being laser-focused is a privilege reserved for people who have no real distractions in their life - or those that do, and have sociopathically chosen to ignore them.

“You could be a millionaire by the time you’re thirty,” my co-founder told me, fifteen or so years ago, as we walked out of a meeting with one of the world’s largest banks. I’d built a prototype of a kind of real-time chat system that could integrate with other software systems drawn from across an enterprise. Updates from software and humans would all flow into real-time channels that we imagined could be accessed from any remote office and any trading floor. It was a good idea (and I’m sure Slack would agree). By the next year, I was a paper millionaire: the equity I owned in the business I’d co-founded was, technically at least, worth more money than I’d ever seen in my life.

It’s all bullshit.

Up to a point, acquiring more money is a necessary evil. We all need a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. But past that, money is an empty goal that can only be at the center of a meaningless life. I’m no longer a paper millionaire, and I have no real desire to be a real one: the kind whose millions of dollars are actual, liquid cash that can be spent on things. I’ve met enough tired-looking rich people searching for something - anything - that will fill the ill-defined hole deep within themselves to know that’s not the answer.

The quest for more is a kind of prison that we make for ourselves. The idea that if we work ourselves to the bone now we can live a better life later is a convenient lie that we’ve been conditioned to tell ourselves.

Still, there are plenty of reasons to work, and to build.

As I write this, my mother is lying in a hospital bed. A build-up of fluid in her abdomen is making it increasingly hard to breathe. Later, or perhaps tomorrow, they’ll try and syphon some of it off, and run lab tests on what they’ve managed to extract in order to better determine the cause. It’s the latest event in a decade-plus journey that started with a persistent cough.

I’m trying to imagine what her life would have looked like if she (or either of my parents) had been dedicated to the amassing of wealth. Maybe we would have had a nicer car; probably we wouldn’t have lived in the tiny house down the street from a gas station when I was a teenager. But she wouldn’t have fought for tenants’ rights or affirmative action. She wouldn’t have moved thousands of miles to look after the grandmother who safely shepherded my dad through a concentration camp. She wouldn’t have changed careers mid-life to become a middle school science teacher in one of California’s poorest areas. More of my life might have been colored by, and devoted to, the acquisition of wealth. I certainly would have seen her a lot less.

My mother - like my father - made a conscious decision to live outside the mainstream template that was set out for her. Without their example, I think my life would have been correspondingly normie: a career in tech, probably, but without the mission or the meaning. Instead, I’m certain that I want to build platforms and support people with the potential of making the world more equal and equitable. And I’m certain that I want to do it within the context of a balanced life. Life is fleeting; everything can change in a moment, so it’s better to enjoy it while you can.

The lens I’ve been gifted has made me opinionated. I see decentralization as a way to lead to a more equitable society through disassembling existing hierarchies, for example, but I see straight through the people who see these ideas as a way to build a new hierarchy for their own benefit. We used to talk about abolishing gatekeepers in the early days of the web, too, until it became clear that many people just wanted to become a new kind of gatekeeper themselves.

I wrote recently about my disrespect for hustle culture. It’s not just that hustling leads to shallow products, but the whole enterprise feels like a reincarnation of Wall Street in the software realm: an endless supply of performatively masculine wantrapreneurs (the people I’m talking about do seem to virtually all be men) who are interested in software for its ability to make them a fortune rather than its ability to connect, empower, and inform. The incentives this mindset creates are unhealthy at best and, at worst, harmful to their surrounding ecosystems and communities. They extract value from communities rather than providing it.

And why? Past the point of financial safety, there’s little to be gained. Perhaps you glean some fleeting respect from the other rat racers, and from people whose own self-regard is threatened by seeing peoples’ lives deviate from the sanctioned templates, but it’s ultimately empty. It’s a way to perpetuate existing ills and inequalities when being part of a meaningful solution is within your grasp. It’s an entirely inward way to live.

Very little provides more focus than the hospital bed. When you’ve found yourself at the end of your life, how would you like to be remembered? How would you like to look back and think about what you did? Does it involve imaginary numbers on a bank account and the accumulation of status symbols and acceptance from people trapped on the same treadmill, or is there a way to live with more happiness, more pride, and more to be grateful for? Will you wish you spent more time in the office, or more time living? More time doing meaningful, lasting work, or more time making bucks?

Better is not more. It seems to me that this is a common mistake.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

I’m fully-vaccinated today: I got my second Pfizer jab two weeks ago. According to new guidance from the CDC, I can go without a mask in most situations. The official CDC page is really clear, and reporting has been generally good. I feel safe - but like many people, I will still choose to wear one, even in situations where I am not required to, for a while.

A lot of people aren’t so lucky. In India, where I have friends and coworkers, everyone I speak to seems to have lost a friend or relative. The official numbers woefully undercount the dead: conservative estimates put it at twice the official number, and I’ve heard as high as ten times.

Broken medical supply chains have left families to source oxygen for themselves; even empty oxygen canisters, which can be refilled, are in short supply. My friend Padmini Ray Murray has set up a COVID-19 and oxygen supply resource page for Bangalore, and is helping to crowdsource oxygen availability in the region.

Meanwhile, the United States has been hoarding vaccines, while countries like India may not get vaccinated until 2023. COVAX, a global vaccine initiative, has been underfunded, and rich countries didn’t arm it with the vaccine supplies it needed. Manufacturing capacity is bottlenecked. And even though some countries (including, to its credit, the US) have agreed to waive vaccine patent rights, the tests and technology transfers involved are also bottlenecked. More help is needed, and quickly; without meaningful assistance, vaccine waivers and COVAX pledges start to look more like PR for rich countries than an actual effort to vaccinate the world.

Some have argued that vaccine patent waivers should not be issued, because of the effect on innovation. I, and others, think this falls squarely into the bucket of solvable problems: information sharing mechanisms and economic incentives can be provided in other ways. The focus right now must be on saving lives, not saving capitalism.

It’s also common in a global crisis for the burden to be placed on individuals: in this case, there are plenty of community fundraisers for COVAX. I’ve donated and, if you have the means, I recommend that you do too: buying a single dose for someone in need costs $7. But the focus should be on governments and large corporations to donate and help as much as they can; our focus should be at least as much on pressuring them to do the right thing as convincing our friends and neighbors to put some money in.

I have both friends and family who still don’t believe that COVID-19 is a real threat; who don’t trust the vaccine; who don’t believe in the science or the reporting. In the midst of a genuinely global crisis, not having the real-world effect of watching your friends and family succumbing to the disease is a kind of privilege. Elsewhere, they would not have the luxury of being so ignorant.

And I wouldn’t have the luxury of feeling the freedom I do today. I’m excited to be able to see my friends again; to travel; to eat at a restaurant; to gather and share and be social. I hope the whole world is able to share in this freedom. We are no more deserving than they are.

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

My favorite working environments have all been like liberal arts colleges: spaces where people were trying to do their best work, often quietly, with a great deal of introspection. Here, people asked questions about how they could do meaningful work that uplifted and empowered communities.

The worst - multiple startups - have been aggressively confrontational, where the emphasis was on hustling to get people in the door by any means necessary.

My friend Roxann Stafford introduced me to this great quote from the labor organizer General Baker:

You keep asking how do we get the people here? I say, what will we do when they get here?

While it’s true that the Field of Dreams user acquisition strategy doesn’t work - even if you build it, they won’t necessarily come, so you’d better figure out how to reach out to the right people - it can only be a fragment of the product strategy. If you let hustle culture take over the entire business, you run the risk of spending all your time on how to get people there, and comparatively little on what you’ll do when they arrive. At best, you’ll end up with a superficial product; at worst, a disingenuous one. You might find yourself accidentally creating a culture where it’s okay to say just about anything to get people in the door.

The thing is, when you’re running out of money, or when you don’t have any to begin with, getting more is an imperative. As much as money is a pain in the ass, it’s necessary to keep the lights on, and to grow.

Newsrooms used to have a way to deal with this: a firewall between editorial and advertising departments. Because the value of a news publication is in the information it provides, regardless of financial influence, the need to make money has been kept siloed away. When, latterly, some newsrooms began to remove this firewall and allow financial considerations to affect the content of their coverage, the quality of their reporting (and public trust thereof) noticeably declined.

The same is true in software. When hustle culture becomes the product, the incentive to provide real, deep value to your community of users is undermined. You’ll deliver worse products. That isn’t to say that sales and marketing are not valuable: they’re absolutely vital. But a startup (or a project, or a traditional business) can’t let sales and marketing drive the ship. It’s the product team’s job to build something that deeply serves a need, including by identifying the first community of people to understand, co-design with, and serve.

Marketing, in the traditional sense, is the act of understanding that market and positioning a product to reach it (although it’s often reductively conflated with advertising). The sales folks - the hustlers - close the deals. These things are important parts of a complete, delicious breakfast, but they can’t be the whole breakfast.

Nothing absolves you from building a meaningful product, obsessing over every detail, and taking care in its craft and design. It’s hard to do that if your whole focus is on leads. Why do you exist? Who are you helping? How? These questions can’t just be a story you tell - they have to be your deeply-held reason for existing.

You keep asking how do we get the people here? I say, what will we do when they get here?

That’s the question that matters.

Photo by Garrhet Sampson on Unsplash

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day. I’d planned to publish this post then, but my mother was in the in ER. (She's out now; the rollercoaster continues.)

A functional, free press is a vital part of the foundation of democracy, right alongside free and open elections. It's impossible to have an educated voting populace without it - and you can't have a democracy without educated voters. It's incredibly important to have people out there dedicated to uncovering the truth and speaking truth to power.

According to Reporters Without Borders, the US ranks 44th in the world for press freedom. During Trump's last year in office, nearly 400 journalists were assaulted on the job, and over 130 were detained. Only 40% of Americans trust the media; among conservatives, the figure is considerably worse.

To control a populace, authoritarians first seek to undermine the press. The Nazi-era term for this was Lügenpresse, which literally translates to lying press. The Trump-era term was lifted almost verbatim: fake news. It continues to do harm.

As well as in the broader societal sphere, this discourse extends to industry: in tech, we’ve had our own anti-press movements that seek to undermine free and fair reporting. It’s always abhorrent.

Which isn’t to say that the press shouldn’t be criticized: oversight of journalism is also journalism, and conversations about the nature of reporting are important. No institution can be unassailable, and no journalist can be above reproach. I particularly welcome conversations about diversity and equity in newsrooms and how the demographics of reporting staff affect the stories they produce. Journalists are imperfect, because everyone is imperfect; regardless, they should have unfettered access to information and receive protection under the law. The work they do makes freedom and democracy possible.

Similarly, whistleblowers. We depend on people who are willing to call out wrongdoing. Daniel Ellsberg revealing the Pentagon Papers allowed Americans to understand the full scope of the Vietnam War for the first time. Edward Snowden allowed Americans to understand that they were the subjects of illegal mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning allowed Americans to understand war crimes that were committed in their names. Each of them faced severe repercussions; each of them allowed American voters to better understand the actions of their government.

In the midst of the “fake news” culture war, there’s been a lot of talk about how to battle misinformation. One of those tactics has sometimes been to promote certain, trusted publications. The intention is noble: there’s no doubt in my mind that the New York Times is more trustworthy than InfoWars, for example. But the unintended effect is to shut out new publications that haven’t managed to build a reputation yet - and in particular, new publications that might be run by people of color, who are underrepresented in establishment media. It also has the effect of potentially discrediting whistleblower accounts that can’t find purchase in mainstream publications, creating an “approved news” that can unintentionally obscure important facts.

Instead, I’m more excited - albeit with some reservations - by software projects that add context on a story by showing how other outlets have reported it. I’m committed to an open web that allows anyone to publish, even if that means tolerating the InfoWars and Epoch Times dumpster fires alongside more legitimate sources. Context and critical reasoning are key.

The press isn’t glamorous; it’s not always convenient or comfortable. But it’s absolutely crucial for a functional democracy and a free society. Because power is at stake, there will always be people who want to undermine or control journalism - and our job as democratic citizens is to refuse to allow them.

I’m grateful for the press. I’m grateful for democracy. Let’s be vigilant.

This is my monthly roundup of the media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for April, 2021.

Books

Captain America Vol. 1: Winter In America, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. To be honest, I was expecting more. Ta-Nehisi Coates is such a brilliant writer, but this volume felt minimalist to the point of being abstracted away from the drama. It does set up the story for a little more, but not enough more. Still, it felt good to read a comic book again - it’s been quite a while.

Suite for Barbara Loden, by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon. I read it in one sitting, mesmerized by the writing and the articulation of a recognizable kind of sadness. This is the kind of book I would write if I was brave enough: almost certainly not as skillfully, but with an intention to gather the dark corners of solitude and weaving it into poetry. The translation is superb; I wish I could read it in its original French.

Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart. Immersive and real. I could smell Glasgow in every page. The desperation of these well-rounded characters trying to survive through post-industrial poverty, and the moments of human beauty despite it all, ring true. The writing is excellent; the heart at the center of it all beats strong.

Streaming

Nomadland. Naturalistic to the point that fiction and reality are blurred. Frances McDormand gives an impressive performance as always, but what really stands out are the real-life characters drawn into the story. Their lives are written across their faces; tragic but defiant.

The Father. Anchored by kaleidoscopic writing and nuanced performances, we see one man’s dementia play out from all sides. The set is a character in itself, reflecting slips of memory and a rapidly unraveling relationship with time. Watching it from the context of my own parents’ - albeit very different - failing health was tough. One of those films where quiet recognition leaves you cathartically weeping alone in the dark.

The Mitchells vs. The Machines. I guffawed. A lot. Packed full of in-jokes, this has everything you’d expect from the people who made Into the Spider-Verse and The LEGO Movie. A+, five stars.

Notable Articles

Business

The Mysterious Case of the F*cking Good Pizza. “Suddenly, I was seized by a need to get to the bottom of a matter that felt like a glitch in the fabric of my humdrum pandemic existence: Where did these clickbait restaurant brands come from, even if they didn’t seem to technically exist? And why did delivery marketplaces across the U.S., and countries around the world, suddenly seem to be flooded with them?”

The Wrong Kind of Splash. Om on Unsplash: “I was a fan up until last evening when I got an email announcing that the company was being acquired by none other than Getty Images. Hearing this was like a red hot spike through the eyes. A startup whose raison d’être was to upend draconian and amoral companies like Getty Images was going to now be part of Getty. Even after I have had time to process it, the news isn’t sitting well with me.”

Let Your Employees Ask Questions. “But you also have to recognize that as a founder, you’re empowered to fuck things up. If you spend three months chasing a market that turns outs to be a dead end, nobody is going to fire you. You own the place. If someone does that at a large company, they’re maybe getting fired. And your employees will bring that reticence to your startup. So, early on, plan on providing feedback and answering a lot of questions about how you want things to get done.”

Investing in Firefly Health. This announcement caught my attention for this: “Health insurance is undergoing a rapid cycle of unbundling and repackaging. Vertically-integrated “payviders” (groups that both pay for services, like an insurer would, and administer those services, like a provider would) are emerging as a new standard, and provider networks are being recontoured as virtual-first care models take root.” I have some thoughts on what the ultimate “payvider” would be - but I wonder if these sorts of services will help get America more comfortable with the idea of a real healthcare system.

How Index Funds May Hurt the Economy. "In recent decades, the whole economy has gone on autopilot. Index-fund investment is hyperconcentrated. So is online retail. So are pharmaceuticals. So is broadband. Name an industry, and it is likely dominated by a handful of giant players. That has led to all sorts of deleterious downstream effects: suppressing workers’ wages, raising consumer prices, stifling innovation, stoking inequality, and suffocating business creation. The problem is not just the indexers. It is the public markets they reflect, where more chaos, more speculation, more risk, more innovation, and more competition are desperately needed."

If You Love Us, Pay Us: A letter from Sean Combs to Corporate America. "Corporations like General Motors have exploited our culture, undermined our power, and excluded Black entrepreneurs from participating in the value created by Black consumers. In 2019, brands spent $239 billion on advertising. Less than 1% of that was invested in Black-owned media companies. Out of the roughly $3 billion General Motors spent on advertising, we estimate only $10 million was invested in Black-owned media. Only $10 million out of $3 billion! Like the rest of Corporate America, General Motors is telling us to sit down, shut up and be happy with what we get."

Amazon Workers Defeat Union Effort in Alabama. "The company’s decisive victory deals a crushing blow to organized labor, which had hoped the time was ripe to start making inroads." Pretty disappointing.

Why Can’t American Workers Just Relax?. “Alarmed by the toll of increasingly nonexistent boundaries between work and home during the pandemic, a growing number of nations want to help their citizens unplug when they’re done with work. In the last few months, several governments, including Canada, the E.U., Ireland, and even Japan—which invented the word karoshi, for death by overwork—announced they’re considering “right to disconnect” laws. Similar laws are already on the books in Argentina, Belgium, Chile, France, Ireland, Italy, the Philippines, and Spain.” Some great links to movements for better working conditions here.

Personal Reflection: Empathy In The Workplace. "The best empathetic leaders are frequently grounded in authentic emotional connectivity with those on their team and beyond. Empathy in this context conveys sincere optimism about how “we can make it through life’s challenges together” and gives others the sense of “team” at a time when they feel most vulnerable and alone. Positive corporate culture creates this emotional support in the organization that goes well beyond tackling corporate objectives."

Six fun remote team building activities. Range is leading the way on organizational culture. This is so great. I bought a SnackMagic box for my team.

Changes at Basecamp. This is a shockingly regressive move from Basecamp, a company that literally wrote the book on building team culture. While "paternalistic benefits" like gym memberships are arguable, not being able to discuss societal context or give feedback to your peers in a structured way paves the way for a monoculture that excludes entire demographics of people. Basecamp's workers should unionize. This is the exact opposite of what an inclusive, empathetic company should be doing.

An Open Letter to Jason and David. "Anyways, it appears your reaction to the pleas and asks to recognize that Basecamp already represents a diversity of experiences and that we want the company’s software and policies to do the same has once again been lacking and disproportionate. But what’s particularly disappointing is the direction of your reaction. The oppressive direction. The silencing direction."

Culture

1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A wonderful look back on one of the best games ever made, co-authored by Douglas Adams himself.

Non-Fungible Taylor Swift. “To put it another way, while we used to pay for plastic discs and thought we were paying for songs (or newspapers/writing or cable/TV stars), empowering distribution over creators, today we pay with both money and attention according to the direction of creators, giving them power over everyone. If the creator decides that their NFTs are important, they will have value; if they decide their show is worthless, it will not.”

Media

Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack. “Danny Lavery had just agreed to a two-year, $430,000 contract with the newsletter platform Substack when I met him for coffee last week in Brooklyn, and he was deciding what to do with the money.” Some notable details here about Substack’s behind the scenes deals.

NPR will roll out paid subscriptions to its podcasts. Worth saying that PRX's founder Jake Shapiro now works at Apple on podcasts. This is a good partnership, and I trust Jake to maintain an open ecosystem.

SiriusXM Is Buying ‘99% Invisible,’ and Street Cred in Podcasting. "Under the new arrangement, “99% Invisible” will remain available at no cost on all platforms supported by ads. But the parties may explore exclusive partnerships for some products down the line. In addition to a large catalog of free podcasts that are available on all platforms, Stitcher sells a premium service offering special features from podcasts it has a relationship with — including ad-free listening, early access and bonus content — for $4.99 per month."

Politics

Justice Dept. Inquiry Into Matt Gaetz Said to Be Focused on Cash Paid to Women. “A Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments, according to people close to the investigation and text messages and payment receipts reviewed by The New York Times.”

Yellen calls for a global minimum corporate tax rate. I think I'm in favor of this? But it seems difficult to implement in practice.

What Georgia’s Voting Law Really Does. “The New York Times analyzed the state’s new 98-page voting law and identified 16 key provisions that will limit ballot access, potentially confuse voters and give more power to Republican lawmakers.”

Big Tech Is Pushing States to Pass Privacy Laws, and Yes, You Should Be Suspicious. “The Markup reviewed existing and proposed legislation, committee testimony, and lobbying records in more than 20 states and identified 14 states with privacy bills built upon the same industry-backed framework as Virginia’s, or with weaker models. The bills are backed by a who’s who of Big Tech–funded interest groups and are being shepherded through statehouses by waves of company lobbyists.”

Science

COVID was bad for the climate. “To keep global warming under 2°C, we’d need sustained emissions reductions in this range every year for the next 20-30 years. The pandemic has been hugely disruptive, but it’s still temporary, and all signs point to a strong recovery. The drop in emissions was largely caused by lockdown, not persistent structural changes that will persist for decades to come.”

Finding From Particle Research Could Break Known Laws of Physics. “Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle called a muon is disobeying the laws of physics as we thought we knew them, scientists announced on Wednesday.” So exciting!

A Surprising Number Of Sea Monster Sightings Can Be Explained By Whale Erections. Today I learned.

American Honey Is Radioactive From Decades of Nuclear Bomb Testing. "The world’s nuclear powers have detonated more than 500 nukes in the atmosphere. These explosions were tests, shows of force to rival nations, and proof that countries such as Russia, France, and the U.S. had mastered the science of the bomb. The world’s honey has suffered for it. According to a new study published in Nature Communications, honey in the United States is full of fallout lingering from those atmospheric nuclear tests."

Flu Has Disappeared Worldwide during the COVID Pandemic. ““There’s just no flu circulating,” says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades. The U.S. saw about 600 deaths from influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season. In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago.”

Society

Estimates and Projections of COVID-19 and Parental Death in the US. "The number of children experiencing a parent dying of COVID-19 is staggering, with an estimated 37,300 to 43,000 already affected. For comparison, the attacks on September 11, 2001, left 3000 children without a parent."

Clearview AI Offered Thousands Of Cops Free Trials. “A controversial facial recognition tool designed for policing has been quietly deployed across the country with little to no public oversight. According to reporting and data reviewed by BuzzFeed News, more than 7,000 individuals from nearly 2,000 public agencies nationwide have used Clearview AI to search through millions of Americans’ faces, looking for people, including Black Lives Matter protesters, Capitol insurrectionists, petty criminals, and their own friends and family members.”

What an analysis of 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection tells us . "Nor were these insurrectionists typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges."

Reflexive McLuhanism. "To paraphrase Churchill: First we shape X, then X shapes us. If a defining characteristic of humanity is making and using tools, then a defining characteristic of society is being shaped by those same tools."

‘My full name is Tanyaradzwa’: the stars reclaiming their names. "Names are important and they have meaning, said the cultural historian and campaigner Patrick Vernon, whether that is familial significance or the time or day someone was born, for example. “The fact that people still feel they have to change or anglicise their names, and water down their heritage to fit in or succeed within the dominant culture, says we’ve still got a long way to go.”"

My Son, the Organ Donor. "My son’s vital organs saved four lives. His skin and other tissue donations will go on to help countless others. His strong heart now vigorously thumps inside the chest of a teenage boy." Please consider signing up to be a donor.

How to Name Your Black Son in a Racist Country. "And then warn him. Inform your son that he will likely be the only Tyrone in the cohort of 100 Americans and that there will be white people in his cohort who think gentrification is a good thing and who do not read. Let him know that those white people are not worth his time and that he should make a group chat with the six other Black folks in his cohort because he will regret not doing so later."

Get Ready for Blob Girl Summer. "So many people have died this year, millions, and I have survived to take into my body a miraculous shot that is the very flower of medical science, a code written in my genome to lock out the great threat. And I, imbibing this, have the temerity to not even be sexy. If Vaxxed Girl Summer is meant to be a kind of pan-cultural Rumspringa I ought to be someone that transcends schlubhood under its thrilling aegis. And yet."

Technology

NFT Canon. “The a16z NFT Canon is a curated list of readings and resources on all things NFTs, organized from the big picture, what NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are and why they matter... to how to mint, collect, and do more with them -- including how they play into various applications such as art, music, gaming, social tokens, more.”

Asian Americans in tech say they face ‘a unique flavor of oppression’. “Diversity training was "half-assed, whitewashed," she said. No one said the words "white supremacy" or "institutionalized racism."”

Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence. “My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home.” Nice proof of concept.

Google wins copyright clash with Oracle over computer code. “In siding with Google, Breyer wrote that, assuming for the sake of argument that the lines of code can be copyrighted, Google’s copying is nonetheless fair use. The fair-use doctrine permits unauthorized use of copyrighted material in some circumstances, including when the copying “transforms” the original material to create something new.” An important win in for Google at the Supreme Court.

Target CIO Mike McNamara makes a cloud declaration of independence. It makes sense that Target would want to move away from AWS, and their approach avoids lock-in to any cloud provider. All of this is made possible by free and open source software tools.

At Dynamicland, The Building Is The Computer. "Instead of simulating things like paper and pencils inside a computer, Realtalk grants computational value to everyday objects in the world. The building is the computer. Space is a first-class entity — a building block of computation. Digital projectors, cameras, and computers are inconspicuously attached to the ceiling rafters, creating space on tables and walls for projects and collaboration. Most of the software is printed on paper and runs on paper. But the deeper idea is that when the system recognizes any physical object, it becomes a computational object." Magical.

Signal adopts MobileCoin, a crypto project linked to its own creator Moxie Marlinspike. "Security expert Bruce Schneier thinks it’s an incredibly bad idea that “muddies the morality of the product, and invites all sorts of government investigative and regulatory meddling: by the IRS, the SEC, FinCEN, and probably the FBI.” He thinks the two apps—crypto and secure communications—should remain separate. In his mind, this is going to ruin Signal for everyone."

After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again. "After I quit, I promised myself to never love a job again. Not in the way I loved Google. Not with the devotion businesses wish to inspire when they provide for employees’ most basic needs like food and health care and belonging. No publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be."

Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens. “The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico, and much of Latin America.”

DoJ used court order to thwart hundreds of Microsoft Exchange web shells. “In an unprecedented move, the Department of Justice used a court order to dismantle ‘hundreds’ of web shells installed using Exchange Server vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft six weeks ago.” A court order that allowed the FBI to go in and pre-emptively patch compromised systems. Fascinating.

Australian firm Azimuth unlocked the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone for the FBI. “Azimuth specialized in finding significant vulnerabilities. Dowd, a former IBM X-Force researcher whom one peer called “the Mozart of exploit design,” had found one in open-source code from Mozilla that Apple used to permit accessories to be plugged into an iPhone’s lightning port, according to the person.”

Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app's perspective. "Cellebrite makes software to automate physically extracting and indexing data from mobile devices. They exist within the grey – where enterprise branding joins together with the larcenous to be called “digital intelligence.” Their customer list has included authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and China; death squads in Bangladesh; military juntas in Myanmar; and those seeking to abuse and oppress in Turkey, UAE, and elsewhere. A few months ago, they announced that they added Signal support to their software." This is a genuinely incredible blog post.

Why not faster computation via evolution and diffracted light. "What is the ultimate limit of computational operations per gram of the cosmos, and why don’t we have compilers that are targeting that as a substrate? I would like to know that multiple." Inspiring and mind-bending in that way that many genuinely new ideas are: connecting multiple existing ideas to create something fresh. A really great blog post.

University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired. "Computer scientists at the University of Minnesota theorized they could sneak vulnerabilities into open-source software – but when they tried subverting the Linux kernel, it backfired spectacularly."

Read Facebook's Internal Report About Its Role In The Capitol Insurrection. "From the earliest Groups, we saw high levels of Hate, VNI, and delegitimization, combined with meteoric growth rates — almost all of the fastest growing FB Groups were Stop the Steal during their peak growth. Because we were looking at each entity individually, rather than as a cohesive movement, we were only able to take down individual Groups and Pages once they exceeded a violation threshold. We were not able to act on simple objects like posts and comments because they individually tended not to violate, even if they were surrounded by hate, violence, and misinformation. After the Capitol Insurrection and a wave of Storm the Capitol events across the country, we realized that the individual delegitimizing Groups, Pages, and slogans did constitute a cohesive movement."

Yesterday, Jason Fried, Basecamp’s CEO, shared an internal memo he’d written about changes at the company. In it, he details how political discussions are no longer acceptable at work, and how benefits he considers to be “paternalistic” - like gym memberships and farmer’s market shares - are being removed.

It’s weird to me that this is coming from a company that literally wrote the book on culture. I’ve always thought of Basecamp (and its predecessor, 37 Signals) as being the yardstick for how to run a great company. This blog post completely blew that out of the water.

Conor Muirhead, a designer at Basecamp, later noted that political discussion was limited to two opt-in spaces: a space called “Civil Solace”, and a recently-formed DEI council. He notes that it was rare for these discussions to spill out of those spaces, although they did when, for example, “folks shared thoughts on how mocking people’s non-anglo names is a stepping stone towards racism”.

As Annalee Flower Horne rightly pointed out, “here's a thing about banning political discussions from a space because they're divisive: that does not resolve the division. It just says if you feel marginalized or unsafe here, keep it to yourself, we don't want to hear it.” Indeed, the predominantly white, male discourse - the one that is still dominant - is not usually considered to be “political”, while equity for marginalized people usually is. The effect is to further marginalize people of color in particular.

Regarding “paternalistic benefits”, Fred Wilson points out that “If you care about the mental and physical well-being of your team, I believe it makes sense to support them by investing in that. Companies can do that tax efficiently and employees cannot. Paying employees more so that they can then make these investments personally sounds rational but I don’t believe it will be as effective as company-funded programs that employees can opt into or not.” Because these benefits enjoy a special tax status, removing them disproportionately affects lower paid workers.

Something must have happened behind the scenes at Basecamp to force this change. The smart money’s on management becoming uncomfortable with changes requested, and power gathered, by the DEI council. But if you don’t want to make those changes, why have the council to begin with, except as a superficial gesture?

Basecamp was emboldened by Coinbase, which previously enacted a similar policy. It’s a regressive trend that more tech companies, led by men who are already predisposed to this narrower worldview, are likely to follow. This is particularly true in the post-Trump era, when the stakes (from a privileged perspective) seem lower.

For many of them, it’s an intentional roll back of the clock. Code2040 CEO Emeritus Karla Monterroso shared that “I will never forget a Latinx VP at a big tech company telling me that one of their VC’s (big name) told him at a board meeting that they had become an inhospitable place for white men and they needed to fix that.”

The solution, for now, is to call it out, and for those of us with privilege to pledge never to work for (or start) an organization with these policies. Diversity and inclusion is more important than ever. And leaders who care about the culture of their companies should once again take note of the Basecamp team: this time as a lesson in what not to do.

I’ve been lucky to get some productive, actionable criticism on my short stories, both from writing classes I’ve been a part of and journals I’ve submitted to.

The most common criticism goes something like this: “your line to line writing is solid, but you let the idea become the story”. In other words, rather than letting the story stand on its own feet, I fall into the trap of treating it like a kind of argument with a point I want to drive home.

I’m pretty sure I’ve developed this habit from 23 years of opinionated blogging: I write regular posts that try and argue for a particular worldview, or a way of doing things. Even if you’re a newcomer, you’ve probably noticed that I talk quite a bit about decentralization, data ownership, and the dangers of centralized data silos as a means to build concentrated wealth. I care about those things, and I’d love for more people to join me.

It’s served me pretty well as a way to write on my website, but it doesn’t really work for stories. The underlying idea can certainly inform how the story is written - and it should - but the narrative needs to be driven by its characters. Stories are about telling “true lies” that shine a light on some aspect of being human. In genre fiction that will often be accompanied by an exploration of an overt idea, but if, for example, a science fiction story is just about the science and not about how real human characters live and breathe in a world where that science is true, the story will suck.

It’s a trap and I’m learning to get over it.

Here’s the thing: I’ve realized that I fall into the exact same trap in my technology work, too. I’m often so wrapped up in an idea I care about - scroll up for a list of some of them - that I let it subsume the most important thing about any technology project. Just as a story needs to be driven by human characters (or proxies for human characters; I’m not arguing against Redwall here), technology products need to be driven by the people who use them. It’s not about your story as a creator; it’s about their story as a user.

It’s an ego thing, in a way. In both cases, I become so excited by the idea that I let myself become the character: the person expressing the idea, either in prose or code. The trick, the real art of it, is to inform the story with your ideas, but to center the character. Their journey is the all-important thing, and if an idea doesn’t fit with that journey, it doesn’t belong there.

Like I said: it’s a trap and I’m learning to get over it. And I strongly suspect I’m not alone.

You serve the reader by telling a human story; you serve the user by serving their story. It’s not about educating them, or forcing them around to your point of view. Whether you’re shining a light on the human condition or making a tool to make a part of it easier, it’s about service. Our goal should be to disappear and let the work speak for itself.

I’ve been having a lot of really inspiring conversations about decentralization lately. Decentralization doesn’t require the blockchain - and pre-dates it - but the rise of blockchain technologies have allowed more people to become comfortable with the idea and why it’s valuable.

Decentralized platforms have been part of virtually my entire career. I left my first job out of university to start Elgg, a platform that allowed anyone to make an online space for their communities on their own terms. It started in education and developed an ecosystem there, before expanding to far wider use cases. Across it all, the guiding principle was that one size didn’t fit all: every community should be able to dictate not just its own features, but its own community dynamics. We were heavily involved in interoperability and federation conversations, and my biggest regret is that we didn’t push our nascent Open Data Definition forward into an ActivityStreams-like data format. To this day, though, people are using Elgg to support disparate communities across the web. Although they use Elgg’s software, the Elgg Foundation doesn’t strip-mine those communities: all value (financial and otherwise) stays with them.

Known was built on a similar principle, albeit for a world of ubiquitous connectivity where web-capable devices sit in everyone’s pocket. I use it every day (for example, to power this article), as many others do.

Much later, I was the first employee at Julien Genestoux’s Unlock, which is a decentralized protocol for access control built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Here, a piece of content is “locked” with an NFT, and you can sell or share access via keys. If a user connects to content (which could be anything from a written piece to a real-life physical event) with a key for the lock, they gain access. Because it’s an open protocol, one size once again doesn’t fit all: anyone can use the underlying lock/key mechanism to build something new. Because it’s decentralized, the owner of the content keeps all the value.

Contrast that principle with Facebook, which has been the flag-bearer for the strip-mining of communities across the web for well over a decade now. Its business model means that it’s super-easy to create a community space, which it then monetizes for all it’s worth: you even have to pay to effectively reach the people you connected with to begin with. We’ve all become familiar with the societal harms of its targeted model, but even beyond that, centralization has inherent harms. When every online interaction and discussion is templated to the same team’s design decisions (and both the incentives and assumptions behind those decisions), those interactions are inevitably shaped by those templates. It leads to what Amber Case calls the templated self. Each of those conversations consequently occurs in a form that serves Facebook (or Twitter, etc) rather than the community itself.

It’s easy to discount blockchain; I did, for many years. (It was actually DADA, one of our investments at Matter, who showed me the way.) And there’s certainly a lot that can be said about the environmental impact and more. We should talk about them now: it’s important to apply pressure to change to proof of stake and other models beyond. The climate crisis can’t be brushed aside. But we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater: blockchain platforms have created value in decentralization, and provided a meaningful alternative to invasive, centralized silos for the first time in a generation. Those things are impermanent; we won’t be talking about harmful, slow proof of work algorithms in a few years, in the same way we don’t talk about HTML 1 today.

What does it look like to build an ethical, decentralized platform for community and discourse that is also self-sustaining, using these ideas? How can we distribute equity among participants of the community rather than sucking it up into a centralized megacorporation or institutional investors? That question has been giving me energy. And there are more and more people thinking along similar lines.

Animated GIF NFTs and crypto speculation aren’t very interesting at best (at least to me), and at worst are a reflection of a kind of reductive greed that has seriously negative societal effects. But looking beyond the gold rush, the conversations I’m having remind me of the conversations I used to have about the original web. The idea of decentralization is empowering. The idea of a community supporting itself organically is empowering. The idea of communities led by peer-to-peer self-governance is empowering. The idea of movement leaders being organically supported in their work is empowering. And we’re now in a position where if we pull those threads a little more, it’s not obvious that these ideas will fail. That’s an exciting place to be.