Werd I/O

If you're saving for retirement in the United States - or you want to be - I'd love about 30 seconds of your time.

Here's a very short survey form. Heads up that it does ask for your contact details - but if you're squeamish about that, feel free to write 'n/a' or 'anonymous@company.com' for those details. It's the data that really matters.

Thank you!

I'm not quite an indieweb zealot - you can find me on Twitter and other social networks over the web - but I've been writing on my own site since 1998 (albeit not one consistent, continuous site - I change it up every decade or so), and it's become a core part of who I am, how I think, and how I represent myself online.

You might have noticed - email subscribers certainly did - that I've turned up the volume on my posting this year. So far in January, that's meant a post a day in my personal space. The feedback has generally been good, but a few email subscribers did complain. I totally get it. Nobody wants their inboxes to clog up; the calculus might be different if this was a business newsletter with actionable insights, but that's not what this is. More than anything, I'm hoping to spark a conversation with my posts.

There are a few things I'm thinking about doing. The first is dropping the frequency of the emails, and thinking about them as more of a digest. You'd get one on Thursday, and one on Sunday (or something like that). Obviously, RSS / h-feed / JSON-feed subscribers (hi!) would still receive posts in real time. Maybe there would also be an email list for people who did want to receive posts as I wrote them.

The second thing I'm thinking about doing is taking this posting frequency and putting it on Medium for the rest of the month, with a regular summary post over here. This is a controversial thing for someone who's so deep into indieweb and the open web to suggest, but there are a few reasons for trying this. Mostly I want to see how the experience compares. I worked at Medium in 2016, and posted fairly regularly there during that time and while I was at Matter Ventures, but the platform has evolved significantly since then.

So that's what I'm going to do to start. For the remainder of January, I'll be posting on Medium daily, with summary listings posted here semi-regularly. Then I'll return here in February and let you know what I discovered.

You can follow me on Medium over here.

One of my favorite pieces of software is Apple photo search. If you've got an iPhone, try it: great searches to try are "animal selfie", "bird", "ice cream", or "cake".

What's particularly amazing about these searches is that the machine learning is performed on-device. In fact, Apple provides developer tools for on-device machine learning in any app across its platforms. There's no cloud processing and the privacy issues related to that. The power to identify which photos are a selfie with your cat lies in the palm of your hand.

Not everyone can afford a top-end iPhone, but these represent the leading edge of the technology; in the near future, every phone will be able to perform rapid machine learning tasks.

Another thing my phone does is connect to 5G networks. 5G has a theoretical maximum bandwidth speed of 10gbps, which is faster than the kind of home cable internet you might get from a company like Comcast. In practice, the networks don't quite work that way, but we can expect them to improve over time. 5G networks will allow us to have incredibly fast internet virtually anywhere.

Again: not every phone supports 5G. But every phone will. (And, inevitably, 6G is around the corner.)

Finally, my phone has roughly the same amount of storage as my computer, and every bit as fast. Not everyone has 256GB of storage on their phone - but, once again, everyone will.

On the internet, we mostly deal with clients and servers. The services we use are powered by data centers so vast that they sometimes have their own power stations. Technology startup founders have to consider the cost of virtualized infrastructure as a key part of their plans: how many servers will they need, what kinds of databases, and so on.

Meanwhile, the client side is fairly thin. We provide small web interfaces and APIs that connect from our server infrastructure to our devices, as if our devices are weak and not to be trusted.

The result is a privacy nightmare: all our data is stored in the same few places, and we usually just have to trust that nobody will peek. (It's fair to assume that somebody is peeking.) It also represents a single point of failure: if just one Amazon datacenter in Virginia encounters a problem, it can seem like half the internet has gone down. Finally, the capabilities of a service are limited by the throughput of low-powered virtualized servers.

But the world has changed. We're addicted to these tiny devices that happen to have huge amounts of storage, sophisticated processors, and incredibly fast, always-on connectivity. I think it's only a matter of time before someone - potentially Apple, potentially someone exponentially smaller than Apple - uses this to create an entirely new kind of peer to peer application infrastructure.

If I'm in the next room to you and I send you a Facebook message, the data finds its way to Facebook's datacenter and back to you. It's an incredibly wasteful process. What if the message just went straight to you over peer to peer wifi (or whatever connection method was most convenient)? And what if there was a developer kit that made it easy for any engineer to really easily build an application over this opportunistic infrastructure without worrying about the details?

Lately I've been obsessed with this idea. The capabilities of our technology have radically changed, but our business models and architectural paradigms haven't caught up. There's an exciting opportunity here - not just to be disruptive, but to create a more private, more immediate, and more dynamically functional internet.

I'm nearing the end of my first week on the Whole30 diet. I'm still not what sure I think about it: which foods are allowed and which aren't feels a bit arbitrary, and the very fact that the diet has a logo and a trademark is off-putting. On the other hand, maybe it's my imagination, but I feel a lot better. I'm certainly eating a great deal more vegetables.

I've also been better about doing exercise before work so far this year. Usually that's involved running, but I've been doing some weight training, as well as long, brisk walks and push-ups every day. The result is that I'm more alert during the day, and feel free to relax and read / write during the evening. (Whole30's ban on alcohol helps here, too. I had fallen into a pattern of drinking a glass of wine or two most evenings in 2020.)

I suffer from anxiety, bouts of depression, and historically really low self-esteem. At my lowest, I made a plan - never followed - to end my life. Shallow self-confidence has sometimes led me to bad places and poor choices. It's frequently led me to sleepless nights and their subsequent, zombie-like days. I've spent much of my life feeling like I must be physically abhorrent; like there's something horribly wrong with me that nobody wanted to tell me about. As a kid, I was over six feet tall when I was thirteen, and I didn't so much as date until I was twenty-one. Those feelings of inferiority have never really left me.

By rights, the pandemic should have made me feel worse. We were all locked inside; I spent a great deal more time caring for my terminally ill mother as she precipitously declined. The goals I had for my life were out of reach. It should have been a miserable time.

And it was, in lots of ways, but it also gave me something important. I could be in my own space, rather than commuting to work. I was not expected to show up in a certain way. All the worries I used to have about the impression I was casting in the real world - worries that I resented having terribly - evaporated. Instead, I could just be me.

I gave myself permission to write more than blog posts. On a whim, I entered a flash fiction competition, and placed first in the initial round. I enrolled in workshops and courses and continued to practice. Today, I have a regular practice of writing every day.

I ran more than I'd run in my entire life leading up to that point combined: at least two 5Ks a week, which for many people isn't all that much, but for me was an enormous step up. Towards the end of the year, I had some conversations about stressful things that had been building up as reservoirs of bad feeling that were threatening to spill over.

Somewhere in all of this, my self-esteem crept up, and my anxiety started to diminish. I felt less awful about my body and found that the stressful conversations went well. The darkness is not necessarily gone for good; anyone who suffers from depression knows that the cloud can re-emerge at any time. I also don't think it's just because I started to do exercise and did some writing; I think those things were reflections of something else.

Self-respect is something that requires practice and investment, and somewhere during last year, I made the decision to spend the time. It wasn't esteem, as such, at least at first, but I decided that I was worth spending time on. Writing and exercise weren't things that would make other people like me. They were just for me. And a switch flipped, without me realizing it, that allowed me to know that was okay.

In a lot of ways, I feel like a different person going into 2021. I'm full of gratitude, and excited for the future. We're still in an awful, deadly pandemic; I still have the trauma of watching my mother deal with her illness. But in lots of ways, I can meet those challenges with more energy.

There are ups and downs. I had a blip before Christmas where I still felt incredibly low. But generally speaking, every day is a small progression in the right direction. Things are looking up.

It's really easy to assume that the world around us is fixed and absolute. The way we do things is the way things are done. The internet works the way it does. The market is the market. People behave how people behave.

One of my superpowers has traditionally been that I'm an outsider: I'm an off-kilter third culture kid who doesn't really fit into anyone's community, which means I see everything from a slightly different angle. Often that's allowed me to see absurdities that other people can't see, and ask questions that other people might not have asked. Sometimes, they're painfully naive. But naivety and optimism can lead to interesting new places.

Lately I've had a few conversations that have made me realize that my perspective has settled in a bit more than I'm comfortable with; I feel like my horizons have closed in a little bit. It's been a sobering realization. Narrower horizons lead to safer, more timid decisions; a small island mentality where a smaller set of possible changes are considered and new ideas are more likely to be met with a pessimistic "that'll never work". It's a toxic way to think that creeps up on you.

It's not enough to invent new things for our current context - there's a lot to be gained from reconsidering that context entirely. Why are things the way they are? Do they have to be? What would be better?

Chris Messina's website subtitle used to be "All of this can be made better. Are you ready? Begin." I've thought about that phrase a lot over the years. It's an inspiring mission statement and a great way to think. It also requires that you feel some ownership or ability - permission - to change the way things work.

People come to this in different ways. I think it helps to have seen broader change manifested, but it's not a prerequisite. It certainly helps to have been in an environment filled with broader, change-oriented thinking. If you live in a world of conservative stagnation, you're much more likely to feel the same way. But, of course, plenty of people from those sorts of environments emerge to change the world.

And it turns out that people lose it in different ways, too. I'm grateful for conversations with smart people who challenged my thinking and encouraged me to take a step back.

For me, right now, this is wrapped up in the fabric of what I do. Why do we have to use the software and protocol models we've used for decades? What does it look like to think beyond APIs and browsers, clients and servers? What if, knowing what we know today, something radically different could be better? Do we need to depend on vast datacenters owned by megacorporations, or can we do away with them altogether?

It's worth asking the questions: how could you broaden your thinking? What in your life do you consider to be immovable that might not be? What does thinking bigger and putting everything on the table look like for you?

I have a longstanding bet that we're moving to an ambient computing world: one where the computer is all around us, interacting with us in whatever way is convenient to us at the time. Smart speakers, high-spec smartphones, natural language intelligent assistants, augmented reality glasses, wearables with haptic feedback, and interactive screens aren't individual technologies in themselves, but all part of a contiguous ambient cloud with your digital identity at the center. In this vision of the future, whoever controls the ecosystem controls the next phase of computing. Ideally, it's an open system with no clear owner, but that won't happen by itself.

A lot of the reports coming out of (virtual) CES this year involve augmented reality of one kind or another. Lots of different companies have new models of AR glasses, which are becoming a little bit more like something you'd actually want to put on your face with each passing year; Sony also has a pretty cool sounding (but ruinously expensive) spatial display that looks like examining a 3D object through a window.

Throughout all this, Apple is pretty quiet. Even though Siri is objectively the worst digital assistant, it was early to the market, and signaled an intention to pursue a vision for ambient computing that has since been followed up with the Apple Watch, AirPods, and HomePods. It has filed patents for AR glasses. And I have a strong suspicion - with no inside knowledge whatsoever - that it's planning on doing something interesting around audio. Podcasts are cool, but evolving what podcasts can be in an ambient computing world is cooler. Whereas most companies are concentrating on iterating the technology, companies like Apple rightly think about the human experience of using it, and elegantly figuring out its place at the intersection of tech and culture. It won't be the first company to come out with a technology, but it may be the first to make it feel human.

If this is the way the world is going - and remember, it's only a bet - it has enormous implications for other kinds of applications. We're still largely wedded to a monitor-keyboard paradigm that was invented long before the moon landing; most of your favorite apps and services amount to sitting in front of a rectangular display and lightly interacting with it somehow. An ambient paradigm demands that we pay close attention to calm tech principles so that we are not cognitively overloaded, jibing with our perception of reality rather than stealing our engagement completely. The main job of the internet is to connect people; what does that look like in an ambient environment? What does it mean for work? For fintech? For learning? And given that all we have is our perception of reality, who do we trust with augmenting it?

Anyway, Norm Glasses will make everyone look like the main character in a John Hughes movie, and I'm kind of here for it.

I'm hiring for two roles. I'm looking for product leaders with hands-on mission-driven startup experience, and for back-end engineers who have both written in Ruby on Rails and scripted headless browsers in a production environment as part of their work. In both cases, I'm looking for people who have experience in these roles in other startups.

Here's how I think about hiring: more than anything else, I'm building a community of people who are pulling together for a common cause. Each new person should add a new perspective and set of skills, and also be ready to productively evolve the culture of the community itself. That means intentionally hiring people with diverse backgrounds who embody our core values.

Some values - like being empathetic and collaborative, or being great at both written and verbal communication - are absolute requirements. Because I'm building a community, I need people who get on well with others, who share my desire for inclusivity, and can work in a group. A high EQ is an enormous asset for an engineer. Other values may evolve over time, as people propose new ideas that change the way we all work - perhaps based on processes they've seen working well at places they've worked in the past. Anyone who joins the community should have the ownership to improve it.

ForUsAll is changing the way people save for retirement. We have radically ambitious goals for 2021, centered around helping people find financial stability in ways that are still very new. I'll write about them when we're ready, but for now, the key is to find people who are motivated by a strong social mission and by creating something new, and who enjoy the fast-changing nature of startups. I believe in healthy work-life integration, treating people with kindness, and a human-centered, empathetic approach - all while we're building cool stuff with energy and creativity.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, and you're located in the US, reach out. I'd love to chat with you.

The power of free and open source software comes down to how it is shared. Users can pick up and modify the source code, usually at no cost, as long as they adhere to the terms of its licenses, which range from permissive (do what you like) to more restrictive (if you make modifications, you've got to distribute them under the same license). The popularity of the model has led to a transformation in the way software is built; it's not an exaggeration to say that the current tech industry couldn't exist without it. Collaborative software drives the industry.

(If you're not familiar with the concept or its nuances, I wrote a history and guide to the underlying ideas, including how it relates to projects like Linux, a few years ago, which might help.)

In my work, I've generally veered towards permissive licenses. Elgg, my first open source project, was originally released under the GPL, and then subsequently dual-released under the more permissive MIT license. Known and its plugins were released under the Apache license. While GPL is a little more restrictive, both the MIT and Apache licenses say little more than, "this software is provided as-is".

If I was to start another open source project, I'd take a different approach and use a very restrictive license. For example, the Affero GNU Public License requires that you make the source code to any modifications available even if they're just running on a server (i.e., even if you're not distributing the modified code in any other way). This means that if someone starts a web service with the code as a starting point, they must make the source code of that service available under the AGPL.

Then I'd dual-license it. If you want to use the software for free, that's great: you've just got to make sure that if you're using it to build a web service, the source code of your web service must be available for free, too. On the other hand, if you want to restrict access to your web service's source code because it forms the basis of a commercial venture, then you need to pay me for the commercial license. Everybody wins: free and open source communities can operate without commercial considerations, while I see an upside if my open source work is used in a commercial venture. The commercial license could include provisions to allow non-profits and educational institutions to use the software for free or at a low cost; the point is, it would be at my discretion.

I love free software. The utopian vision of the movement is truly empowering, and has empowered communities that would not ordinarily be able to tailor their own software platforms. But allowing commercial entities to take advantage of people who provide their work for the love of it as a bug. There's no reason in the world that a VC-funded business with millions of dollars under its belt should avoid paying people its company value integrally depends on. It's taken me a long time to come around to the idea, but restrictive licenses like the AGPL align everyone in the ecosystem and allow individual developers and well-funded startups alike to thrive.

More than that, it's a model that allows me to think I might, one day, dive head-first into free software at least one more time.

In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown eloquently describes a model for decentralized leadership in a world of ever-changing emergent patterns. Heavily influenced by the philosophy laid out in Octavia Butler's Earthseed novels - God is change - it describes how the way we show up in the face of change, embodying the world we wish to manifest, can influence it for the better. It's a uniquely non-linear manifesto.

Our model for communities and change right now is intensely linear. Despite the democratizing promise of the internet, we have fallen back on a broadcast model of influencers and audiences: a small number of people create content and the rest of us consume it. Although, technically speaking, anyone can publish, the truth is that platforms assume we're here to listen - and they've been built with those assumptions in mind. Influencers broadcast; followers follow; platforms make money by facilitating the engagement. It's how Ellen Degeneres's selfie got millions of retweets, and how Donald Trump parlayed his Twitter account into a Presidency. (See if you can do the same.)

A broadcast model creates a direct line from anyone with power to everyone. Theoretically, that's a beautiful, democratizing thing; in practice, it turns the protocols and assumptions underlying the broadcast medium itself into the ultimate influencer. Everyone who is trying to reach an audience falls into patterns that they know will improve their reach; they game the algorithms, which are really reflections of the values and ideas of the teams which created them. Influencers like Donald Trump game the minds of engineers and product managers in San Francisco in order to game the world.

Ideas are at their best when filtered through communities and movements that each have their own values and mechanics. Before social media, this is how it worked. Swirling, emergent patterns evolve from the interdynamics of these communities. As opposed to social media's linear broadcast model, this intercommunity model is more like a fractal: the interrelations between tiny communities form larger communities, which in turn interrelate as larger communities of people, and so on. There's no magical bullhorn that lets you skip ahead and reach the world: you've got to influence your friends and family, who then reach other friends and families, who then reach their wider local communities. Each of these communities has a different set of norms and values; organic, internal rules and dynamics that govern them. In the process, the people in these communities at each level become influencers in themselves, carrying on the message. It's harder work, but more profoundly impactful.

This is a healthier model for the internet, too. Rather than community platforms that tend towards global scale, we need to build global infrastructure that can support tiny communities that work in different ways. Ideas can still spread; links still get shared; memes are made. But they do so organically, in a more equal way that prioritizes the decentralized, community-driven nature of human society, rather than one that seeks to make us all into followers of a handful of global influencers. We need to create a reflection of adrienne maree brown's view of the world, not Donald Trump's.

In doing so, it's important to understand that "local" doesn't mean "geographically local" on the internet. It can, but doesn't have to. "Local" can also mean focused communities of interest of all different kinds. Everybody's experience of the internet then becomes a unique-to-them set of overlapping communities on different platforms. My argument is absolutely not that the internet should not be global infrastructure, and that we shouldn't be able to share ideas with people from everywhere: I believe that's a crucial part of human progress. My argument is that the internet should be more fragmented and that holding our conversations, making our connections, and discovering our knowledge from a very small handful of platforms with a limited set of models for community governance is a vulnerability.

Furthermore, I believe it's inevitable. As we've seen this week (as well as all the weeks leading up to now), it's not tenable for companies like Twitter and Facebook to be the owners of the global discourse. As much as we shouldn't want that, and lawmakers are galvanizing around the problems that have arisen, I don't think they want that, either. In fact, the only people who aren't aligned with this need are the influencers who want to have the world at their disposal.

So what do these new platforms and communities look like? The truth is, there's everything to play for.

I'm still processing the events of this week: the obvious buffoonery of the Q mob contrasts starkly with reports of an intention to hang the Vice President, cable ties brought into the Capitol to detain hostages, and the obvious white supremacist flags that were flown both inside and out. One popular T-shirt worn on Wednesday read "Camp Auschwitz: work brings freedom"; another read 6MWE, for "6 Million [Jews] Wasn't Enough".

This riot was unmistakably instigated by President Trump at an address immediately prior, and who later told the insurrectionists: "We love you. You're very special. Go home" (an echo of his infamous call for the Proud Boys to "stand by and stand down", and declaring that a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville had "very fine people on both sides"). Since then, we've seen a number of resignations from inside his government, which at this late stage could be seen as just taking an extra week's vacation.Twitter forced him to take down some posts, and Facebook banned him indefinitely. Apple is about to ban the right-wing app Parler unless it adds a moderation policy within 24 hours.

It's too little, far too late. It's not brave to quit an administration after spending four years inside it perpetuating hate (particularly when it might just be a way to avoid having to vote on invoking the 25th Amendment). It's not brave to ban a fascist government leader from your media platform following a high-profile event after allowing him to incite hatred for at least as long. It's not taking a stand to suddenly ban an app heavily used by white supremacists when it's been used to organize hate groups for its entire existence. All of these things should be done, but they should have been done long ago.

I don't believe it's fair to assume that all of these technology companies only just realized that these organizations were dangerous. Instead, I think it's just that it became untenable to tolerate them. The thing about hate groups and hate-filled conspiracy theories like QAnon is that they're very highly engaged: they use platforms for hours and they click on ads. Then-CEO of CBS Les Moonves famously said about Trump before the 2016 election: "it may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS". The same is true for every tech company that subsists on ad engagement dollars. Not only did targeted advertising help Trump win in 2016, but every targeted ad platform and every advertising-powered TV network profited from the hatred and division that Trump incited. Just this week, the former CEO of ad-tech firm Steelhouse called the Capitol insurrection "a rocket ship" for Twitter and Facebook's ad businesses. They were going to hang the Vice President! Such engagement!

So, yes: leave the Trump administration, by all means. Ban him from your platforms. Remove the apps that insurrectionists used to organize the storming of the Capitol (and are reportedly using to organize another event around the inauguration). But you don't win brownie points for that. You don't get to walk away with your head held high. You put your own profit over the health of the country, the health of the people who have died as a direct result of the Trump administration's policies, and the cause of global democracy. You shouldn't get to sleep soundly at night. You're culpable. And as much as you might try and wash your hands of it in the final weeks of this nightmare, you deserve to have it follow you for the rest of your lives.

It's my birthday. I was originally going to write one of those reflective pieces along the lines of "here's 42 things I've learned" or "version 42.0" or some Douglas Adams reference, but given everything that's been going on in the world, and my mother's decline in the next room, I just can't.

I believe that the Trump presidency has been a dying gasp of the 20th century. I'm really hopeful that the events of this month are the dying gasp.

If that turns out to be true, there's a lot to look forward to. If not, then there's a lot to be worried about. As of right now, the future is in the balance.

Hey, where was this insurrection organized?

Where? On a social network, you say? Which one?

Oh wow. I bet the CEO is hurrying to ensure its platform doesn’t undermine democracy!

What’s that? Oh. Oh.

So I bet their employees must be walking out in droves!

What’s that?

I see, I see.

So I bet its users are leaving en masse?

What?

Oh, right. Right, of course not.

.

I've got less than zero sympathy for companies like Facebook which argue they will be hurt by greater user privacy provisions. If your business model depends on building surveillance infrastructure and aggregating as much information as possible about peoples' private lives, your business does not deserve to survive. Apple's greater privacy provisions aren't anti-competitive; they're pro human rights.

Privacy is a human right. Surveillance has a chilling effect on free speech and freedom of association, which we consider to be fundamental tenets of democracy. Sure, you can make a bunch of money by learning everything you can about an individual and selling access to their attention. But not everything that is profitable should be permissible.

The European GDPR has turned out to be a very useful piece of legislation. It's very difficult for internet services to divide out their infrastructure between European users and everyone else, so in effect, those provisions have typically been applied for every user. The California Consumer Privacy Act has a similar effect, not least because most major internet services are based here. But we need a federal privacy law, and an international understanding that privacy is a human right that must be upheld on the internet as well as everywhere else.

Facebook claims that a reduction in its advertising capabilities will hurt small businesses. It's a disingenuous argument. Facebook has consistently adjusted its newsfeed algorithm to reduce the reach of organic pages; it's now often around 3%, forcing brands to advertise in order to reach their followers. If Facebook didn't depend on targeted advertising for revenue, it wouldn't have had the incentive to adjust its algorithm in this way, and small businesses wouldn't be hurt. Even more importantly, it might have reacted differently to pogroms in Myanmar, election manipulation, and the well-being of its moderators, among other things.

Surveillance capitalism has undermined democracy all over the world, and created a global infrastructure that authoritarian governments could previously only have dreamed of.

It's coming to an end. It's inevitable. GDPR, the CCPA, and emerging privacy legislation all over the world will make this kind of tracking untenable. Apple isn't standing alone here; it's merely a little bit ahead of the curve. This oncoming trend means that architectures and services that protect your privacy aren't just good for users: they're a good investment.

The Wayne Gretzky quote is a cliché at this point, but every technology investor needs to skate where the puck is going. (The really great ones figure out trends that few others have seen.) The puck, in this case, is heading square on for greater privacy. This doesn't necessarily mean a reduction in ad-based businesses: as it turns out, non-tracking ads are generally about as lucrative as personalized ads. I think we'll see a mix. But does mean a reduction in tracking infrastructure, and a major sea change in the way we think about monetizing consumer technology.

Founders love to answer questions about revenue with, "we'll sell the data". It's never been a great answer. But in the new, privacy-enabled internet, selling data won't be as possible. This is good and right. Instead, I'm hopeful that we'll see a return to user-centric architectures and user experiences, and a decline in user-hostile practices like tracking. After all, we're here to build solutions for people, and to improve their lives with technology. Eroding democracy and human rights by making a profit by any means necessary shouldn't be something we aspire to do; it's also something founders who don't care about the well-being of their users shouldn't have the ability to do without severe repercussions.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Yesterday, as part of a kick-off presentation for the year, I reminded my team: coding is less than half of an engineer's job.

An engineer's role is to engineer solutions. Writing code is certainly a part of that, but as a means to an end rather than a purpose in itself. If an elegant, scalable solution can be engineered without writing code, fantastic. Conversely, if code is written without exploration, reflection, documentation and validation, or if a solution is built to an imagined problem that doesn't really exist, we're in trouble. Communication, exploration, and collaboration are the biggest parts of the job.

Lots of people get into engineering because they love to work on code. The feeling of building something from nothing is exhilarating: I'm far from the first to note that it's similar to how artists manifest work. But that's programming (or hacking); engineering is a discipline unto itself. There's a popular conception of engineering as being a job you take if you don't want to talk to people, or don't like to write, but neither thing is true. The best engineers are highly social and write to a high standard, as well as having great coding skills. That's because engineers rigorously architect systems to meet their requirements; hackers understand the outcome of what they're trying to build, but their process is more artistic.

I think both spirits are worth embracing, but it's important to accept that they may be embodied in different people. Holding onto the joy of hacking is important; I lost it for a while, and it took literally years to get it back. But engineering requires a different kind of diligence and attention to detail. I confess that I don't think I was really, truly an engineer until I went to work for Medium - and maybe I'm still not one. I could certainly build software (Elgg, Known, Latakoo, a bunch of other things), but my process and discovery skills were underdeveloped. Some of the people I met there, and have met since, were not hackers - they built code rigorously and to a high quality, but had never really built something for the joy of it. For others, it was the opposite; some people fell in the middle. The two things sit side by side but are different.

The trick, I think, is to build the right processes such that engineers take bigger risks in their explorations, and hackers use more rigor. The goal is a creative, detail-oriented team that finds the best solution using the full weight of their diverse skills and creativity, and has fun doing it.

Back when I was running Elgg, I'd meet someone every few weeks who wanted to build a competitor to Facebook. Inevitably, they would propose to do this by copying all of Facebook's features verbatim, but (for example) without an ad ecosystem or with a different algorithm for surfacing content. All of them were doomed to fail.

These days, I'm more distant from the alternative social networking ecosystem, but it's easy to spot the same ideas. One might propose a decentralized alternative to Facebook that has all of Facebook's features, for example, and assume that people will flock to it because it's not owned by a corporation. You care about privacy and ownership, after all - if others don't, surely it's just a matter of educating them?

Aside from with a relative handful of enthusiasts, these efforts are probably all doomed to fail, too.

The thing is, privacy and ownership are important, and over the last few years we've seen our quiet worries about silos of data owned by single-point-of-failure corporations grow into a global roar about their role in supporting pogroms and undermining democracies. Nonetheless, we've learned pretty conclusively that privacy and autonomy are not virtues for everyone - actually a lesson learned again and again in the 20th century in particular - so if we want these values to be adopted, we must find another way. The stakes around getting this right have never been higher. (It would have been nice to have gotten this right in 2015 or so, but here we are.)

People, in general, want convenience from their technology, not morality. So instead of building a more ethical version of the past, we need to build a more suitable version of the future. It turns out that data silos have left room for plenty of innovation here: how many people send emails to themselves to save a note, or have had trouble AirDropping to an Android phone? Why do I have to download WhatsApp to talk to my friends in the UK? There are lots of tiny inconveniences that would be made better with openness and a user-centered model.

The same is true of online communities. An artists' community has radically different needs to an activism community, yet on the silos they're shoehorned into the same interface and set of features. Communities for people with restricted vision or motion might perhaps be the most obvious example: why should they have to struggle to use interfaces designed for others? Or better put, why can't they have an internet experience designed for them? A federated galaxy of community platforms, tailored for the specific human communities that use them and linked by Google-like sites that facilitate discovery, would be a more functional internet for many people, and would also decentralize the social web. Over time, discovery could be decentralized, too.

Whatever we're building, we never absolve ourselves from the need to understand our users as people and meet their needs. We might have our own values that we want to convey - software as polemic - but we can't simply inject them into the status quo. We've got to use our values, our intuition, and our understanding of the people we're building our software for to build something new that serves its purpose better than anything that has come before it. That, and nothing less, is the job.

I'd love to see more of you blog.

A friend of mine recently asked me how I write so much: to him, writing was a daunting task involving staring at a blank screen while he overcame his fear of revealing his inner thoughts. I guess, for me, what it comes down to is that I've lost any fear of looking stupid, mostly through enough repetitive practice of absolutely being stupid online.

Writing is a muscle. Imagine running for the first time: that first run is painful, halting. But once you've done it for a week, it's a little bit easier. A month: easier still. And once you've done it for years, it's like second nature. A part of you. I've been blogging since 1998; at this point, it's just a part of me.

Imagine what the internet would be like if everyone shared how they thought about the world, commercial value be damned. I don't buy the idea that only some people have thoughts worth reading (if I did, I wouldn't be writing this, because I'd almost certainly not be among that group). Everyone has something of value to contribute to our cumulative human experience.

What I get in return is that I feel less alone. When you put yourself out there, and are honest, you tend to find like-minded people, or people who have some honest reaction to your ideas. If you put up a wall, the most people can react to is that façade. So it's best to be you. As it happens, every single meaningful career acceleration I've ever had can be connected back to my blogging. More importantly, I've made a bunch of friends.

So, I think you should blog, too. It doesn't matter where. WordPress, Ghost, Medium, Where.as, Micro.blog, Where.as, Substack, a public Notion page - wherever is comfortable for you. (I co-founded a platform called Known, which I happily still use, mostly for the satisfaction of working with something I helped make.)

And then you should tell me about it. And tell the world. I want to read what you think, and the world does too. We're all richer for sharing out human experiences together.

A couple of years ago, I realized I wasn't reading books anymore. I was reading a ton - mostly stuff on the web - but I hadn't managed to physically open a book and read it cover to cover. I was ashamed, and immediately made a resolution: that year, I would read fifty books.

It was obviously an arbitrary number: more or less one or week, with room for a little bit of slippage. But having that North Star meant that I read more eclectically and adventurously, and although I didn't quite hit fifty, I read an order of magnitude more than I had the previous year, discovering a host of authors in the process. (Incidentally, this effort was also the origin of my reading roundups every month, which I've also found to be useful retrospectives.)

2020 was a mess, and no more needs to be said about that. Most of the books I "read" were audiobooks, via Libro.fm, which largely replaced my podcast listening. It was hard, for most of the year, to bring my brain to a calm enough place to read words on a page at length.

This year, though, I've decided to revive my 50-book goal. I have a different reason: too often, the last thing I look at when I go to bed is a screen. My intention is to build the very normal and common habit of reading a book before going to sleep, instead of, for example, falling down a web rabbithole or checking Twitter. And I miss the eclectic, long-form thinking that can only be found in books.

It's rare that I'm able to get into a business book: these often feel like overlong blog posts that have been padded out for the prestige of having a publication under the author's belt. Some people pride themselves on only reading these, but I think this limitation forces you to miss out on the wealth of human experience. Fiction is more than a diversion; it's an experimental playground for empathy and human thought. It's weird to me that some people have a stigma around it. Conversely, I don't want to lock myself off from reading business books, and there's certainly a lot to learn. I just think that if something could be a blog post, it should be.

My mother is also an avid reader. Largely confined to her bed, she devours books on her Kindle (because the font size can be increased to satisfy her failing eyesight) and on Audible. Sometimes, when she's stuck in dialysis or having a particularly bad day, my sister will FaceTime her and read to her over a call. When she's done, she records her review in one of those hardback notebooks filled with close-lined paper, and moves immediately onto the next one.

I also feel the need to record what I've read, with some kind of a brief review of how I found it. My equivalent of a notebook is Notion, which I already use to keep track of my bookmarks. I've altered my reading database to keep track of books now, too. It's occurred to me to write a Known plugin to keep track of my reading on this website, and maybe I will, but this seemed like the fastest path to getting into a good habit. Notion has good data exports, and an API is finally coming, so I feel confident I can move my data elsewhere if I ever need or want to. Once the Notion API is out, I'm thinking I'll wire it up to Known as a linkblog, so people who are interested enough can follow my reading as I record it.

I'm also going to post on Goodreads. Although it's getting long in the tooth, and it's controversially retiring its API, it's where a lot of people share their reading and discover new books. So I'll be using that for the time being, mostly so I can discover new titles to read from my friends. Although Goodreads is owned by Amazon, I buy all my books using Bookshop, to avoid giving them any serious money (and to support local booksellers). For now, I'm telling myself that this is an acceptable compromise.

The books themselves? Mostly on paper. My Kindle has been unused for years, and I'm honestly not sure if it even works anymore. And I like the feel of reading a paper book. I realize how selfish this is: billions of trees are cut down to make books, and the environmental impact is non-trivial. The environmental impact of an e-reader is also non-trivial, but as long as you don't upgrade it every year and read 30-40 books a year, you break even. So although one of my goals is to get away from ending each day looking at a screen, I think I need to find a non-DRM encumbered reader with an e-ink screen that I can keep for years, and switch to that. If you're using one, I'd love to hear your recommendations.

Of course, the most important question is: what are you reading? What books have stood out to you that you think I should check out? In all these layers of technology - as with the internet itself - the only things that really matter are the words and ideas, and the authors behind them. I'd love to hear your recommendations.

 Photo by Ben White on Unsplash.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for the final month of the hell-year.

Books

Intimations, by Zadie Smith. Six personal, revealing essays about living in the pandemic. Real; insightful; human.

The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury. A classic, of course, but new to me. I love the way he melds a very folksy, warm linguistic approach with mind-bending, often horrifying ideas.

Streaming

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Anchored by two astonishing performances, this does feel like a filmed play rather than a movie in itself, but is no worse for it. Chadwick Boseman is remarkable; Viola Davis's complete transformation even more so.

Soul. Just about as good a movie as Pixar has ever made - which is to say, it's very good indeed. I'm not sure what kids get out of it, but the themes of parenting and what it means to really live come through loud and clear.

Notable Articles

Business

Corporate Reporting in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. “Company managers specifically consider machine readers, as well as humans, when preparing disclosures.” An interesting new world, where human-readable articles are actually designed for artificial intelligence readers, approaches. SEO was our first toe-dip. Now it's maybe just Robot Reader Optimization?

Investing in Moov: Open Source Financial Services Building Blocks. I really like this approach. Open source + a modular structure will empower just about everyone in the financial services ecosystem, and in turn makes Moov a good investment.

How This CEO Creates an Internal Culture With a “Crazy Focus” on Good Storytelling. "When we have communication issues within the company or with our customers and prospects, it all comes back to the fact that we didn't spend enough time trying to understand the story." I love everything about this.

Death of an Open Source Business Model. I've spent a huge amount of my career - well over a decade - on open source businesses. This all rings true to me, and is an important reminder (unfortunately).

Big Tech risks big fines, and even break-up, under Europe's new content and antitrust rules. I’m not against it.

The Making of a Dumpster Fire. Now this is marketing.

Czech Startup Founders Turn Billionaires Without VC Help. I like this a lot. I use JetBrains personally, but had no idea that this was how the company was built. Inspiring.

Culture

Andrew Bird’s Cozy Melancholy. Andrew Bird is the absolute best.

Why Is Publishing So White?. “There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color.” Which is shown clearly in this very revealing, well-presented data.

Whatever Happened to ______ ?. “There are studies showing that some men “feel insecure” — to put it mildly, and possibly euphemistically — when a woman earns more than her male spouse. What those articles aren’t saying is that a woman’s life may be in danger if she outpaces a male partner in her chosen career, tipping the scales away from tattered patriarchal mythology.” A sad, beautifully-written account of one such story in the arts.

every tv show I have binge-watched since march: part one. “My conclusion is that Buffy is a television show about a beautiful young queer witch named Willow trying and failing to leave her toxic hometown friend group, and the ways in which being unable to let go of the people we loved in our youth who are no longer able to have healthy relationships with us can warp us and turn us evil.”

Media

Mapping Black Media. “We’re offering a map and directory of nearly 300 community media outlets across the U.S. that primarily serve Black communities across the diaspora.”

Substack launches an RSS reader to organize all your newsletter subscriptions. Yes! I welcome new RSS readers with open arms.

A contentious local election revealed an information gap. High school reporters stepped up to fill it.. One of those heartwarming stories that is actually kind of dystopian - local news is vital for democracy - but still, I’m a big fan of this.

'I figured I'd give it a year': Arthur Sulzberger Jr on how the New York Times turned around. “Paul Goldberger, a longtime Times architecture critic and one of the paper’s wisest observers, said the most relevant description of Sulzberger Jr’s philosophy could be found in an Italian novel, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.””

True equity means ownership. "For far too long, newsroom leaders have been wringing their hands over how to serve Black and brown communities. How many diversity initiatives, recruitment efforts, and implicit-bias trainings do we have to endure without the follow-through?"

Why on Earth Is Someone Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts?. “Whoever the thief is, he or she knows how publishing works, and has mapped out the connections between authors and the constellation of agents, publishers and editors who would have access to their material.” Kind of fascinating as a mystery.

Politics

Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered months ago to sell the U.S. more vaccine doses.. "Before Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine was proved highly successful in clinical trials last month, the company offered the Trump administration the chance to lock in supplies beyond the 100 million doses the pharmaceutical maker agreed to sell the government as part of a $1.95 billion deal months ago."

Rejecting Opposition From Judiciary, House Passes Bill to Make PACER Free. "The U.S. House on Tuesday passed bipartisan legislation that would make PACER free for the public, handing a win to transparency advocates despite the federal judiciary’s opposition to the bill." Thinking of Aaron Swartz.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping: The Full(est Possible) Story. If you dig into it, the story gets no less remarkable and crazy.

Society

'Juno' Star Elliot Page Announces He Is Transgender. "Hi friends, I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot. I feel lucky to be writing this. To be here. To have arrived at this place in my life."

New report reveals alleged horrors of sex testings in international sports. Absolutely horrifying story, including forced operations.

'Nobody knows': Experts baffled by mystery illness in India. Extremely troubling.

The pandemic was already testing me. Then a man covered in Nazi tattoos showed up in my ER. “We all saw. The symbols of hate on his body outwardly and proudly announced his views. We all knew what he thought of us. How he valued our lives. But our job was to value his.”

Sharrows, the bicycle infrastructure that doesn’t work and nobody wants. I grew up cycling, and really wish I could feel safe doing it here. I just don't. I've known one person who sadly died in a cycling incident, and many more who have been seriously hurt. We need to take back our cities from cars.

How one woman is building the future for Google in Silicon Valley. I’d say it’s the other way around: one woman is building the future of Silicon Valley on behalf of Google. I’m excited to see this come to fruition, although I wish this kind of thing could be government-driven.

Texas Wedding Photographers Have Seen Some $#!+. "The photographer who got sick after shooting the COVID-positive groom said her experiences throughout the pandemic have left her a little depressed. She recalled one conversation from that wedding, before she left the reception. “I have children,” she told a bridesmaid, “What if my children die?” The bridesmaid responded, “I understand, but this is her wedding day.”"

Tax cuts for rich don't 'trickle down,' study of 18 countries finds. "Large tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality and don't fuel economic growth or cut unemployment, a new paper by academics from the London School of Economics and King's College London says." Ya don't say.

Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's. “Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.”

The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable. “The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence.” Just an absolute punch in the gut.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro. “Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world?” And she still seems to be neck-deep in his gravitational pull.

Technology

Web Conversations With the Year 2000. It’s funny because it’s true. I thought we’d be in such a different place.

Web Conversation From the Other Side. A more serious rewrite of Paul Ford’s other piece. Both are worth reading side by side.

Command Line Interface Guidelines. “These are what we consider to be the fundamental principles of good CLI design.” Well-researched and smartly presented.

How our data encodes systematic racism. “What is the difference between overpolicing in minority neighborhoods and the bias of the algorithm that sent officers there? What is the difference between a segregated school system and a discriminatory grading algorithm? Between a doctor who doesn’t listen and an algorithm that denies you a hospital bed?”

Social Networking 2.0. A vital piece about the future of the internet. It’s surreal seeing pieces in the more mainstream / less radical tech business sphere talking about things many of us were advocating over ten years ago. But I’m glad we got here.

Firefox Was Always Enough. I agree with all of this. I'm a die-hard Firefox user, for all the reasons that make Mozilla great, and none of the reasons that have caused it problems.

Wildfire smoke is loaded with microbes. Is that dangerous?. I worry about this: having been evacuated for a wildfire, and helping to care for a parent who had to have a lung transplant, this is a confluence of worries. (Filing this under “technology” because I don’t have a “science” category. I should fix this for next month.)

Zoom helped China suppress U.S. calls about Tiananmen, prosecutors allege. Horrendous.

Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian. "Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life."

Creating Decentralized Social Media Alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. A reasonable overview, although it necessarily skips out on some detail. This is where I’ve spent much of my career, and honestly, I’m eager to go back. The time is right.

Inside India’s booming dark data economy. “Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale.”

Taking a Fresh Look at APIs Across All the United States Federal Agencies. Super-interesting!

I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t write a reflective look back on this year.

This was a year of unprecedented deaths, racist police brutality, political turmoil, and the sheer misery of people all over the world losing their loved ones and finding their families torn apart. If we felt less than that, it was because of our privilege, not because it wasn't there.

I've got nothing glib to say; no "top 5 learnings"; nothing to soften the blow. It's been a terrible year, certainly, but I'd go further: it's been catastrophic, in the truest sense of that word.

I do have one hope for 2021, and it's this: I hope we don't pretend this never happened and carry on as before. When the pandemic is over - which it will, technically be, although its aftermath will continue for generations - I hope we continue to cut through the performative bullshit that was the hallmark of modern life in the before times, and that we all care about each other just a little bit more.

If there's one thing a world crippled by a highly infectious disease should have taught us, it's that we're all connected. How we treat each other matters. The quality of life of everyone matters. If we can internalize that lesson, deeply and truly, then maybe we can avoid the worst of this when it inevitably happens again. And it will certainly make for a better world for all of us.

My friend Carrie Tian, who works for Mailchimp, wrote aboout how their seasonal reading bingo board inspired her to create one for writing. I really love this: one of my goals for 2021 is to write a great deal more, building on the progress I made this year, and this feels like a great way to push me outside of my comfort zone.

She was kind enough to share a template, so here's mine:

Each of these squares is designed to push me a little bit. Each column has a slightly different theme:

1: Short stories in different styles and genres

2: Non-fiction essays that go a little deeper, sometimes into uncomfortable topics

3: Different media (audio, code, visual arts, multi-part email)

4-5: Novel, with some explorations into style and expression

Like Carrie, I'm doing blackout bingo and attempting to fill every square in 2021. As ever, I'll update this space with my progress.

I vividly remember my first day on the internet. I was sat in my teenage bedroom, staring at a bulky cathode ray tube monitor, which my dad had surrounded with spider plants in order to hopefully absorb some electromagnetic radiation. My 14.4K modem connected - loudly and slowly - to an Internet Service Provider that my mother was testing out as part of her job as a telecommunications analyst. I was already using Bulletin Board Systems and had participated in conversations on FidoNet, but this was something new.

Instead of flashy websites or apps, my first internet experience took place in a black terminal window with monotype text and a maximum width of 80 characters. There were no links, no movies, and no startups. I didn't have a connection resembling broadband, and there was no WiFi. My only guide was a location called Gopher Jewels with a menu of places I could visit.

I visited a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University, thousands of miles away from my bedroom. It told me its temperature and whether I could buy a Coke, and I still remember how it made me felt. It seems mundane, perhaps, today - but in a way, that made it cooler. I wasn't reading a speech by the President of the United States. I was connecting to a Coke machine on another continent, probably in some dusty corridor somewhere. It was like speaking to a hatstand in Antarctica; absolute magic.

Not long afterwards, I downloaded a software application called NCSA Mosaic. It let you browse something called the World Wide Web, which was kind of like Gopher, but easier to use and write content for. A developer called Marc Andreessen had proposed a new extension that allowed you to share and view inline images, which was exciting, and allowed for a new kind of experience: watching a live photo of a coffee machine at Cambridge University. Cambridge was really just down the road, but like the Coke machine, it still felt like magic. I was able to travel through space and time.

The internet wasn't about making money. It was always about sharing knowledge and connecting to people. It had its problems - notably exclusivity of access - but I fell in love with it. It seemed like a glimpse into a beautiful new future, where anyone could connect to anyone and they could collaborate and learn from each other to create new kinds of art, culture, academic work, and scientific endeavor.

The 14 year old version of myself who connected to the early commercial internet was, himself, part of something that older users called the eternal September. Prior to 1993, the internet had been overwhelmingly dominated by universities: every September, new students rolled in, temporarily lowering the quality of discourse until they learned the etiquette of communicating online. Suddenly, commercial internet service providers arrived, and September never came to an end. There was an avalanche of new users (me among them) that just kept coming.

And then some. There were roughly 14 million internet users in 1993; there are around 4.7 billion today.

The growth curve of the internet is S-shaped, as you'd expect. It took a little while to pick up steam, then skyrocketed, before reaching relative saturation. The businesses that were lucky enough to tether themselves to the high-growth middle and could keep with the pace generated billions of dollars in wealth: the Googles and Facebooks of the world were certainly filled with skilled, ambitious people, but they were also in the right place at the right time.

Which is how the internet became about making vast amounts of money. Startups could achieve enormous growth (and VC investment) just by placing a banner ad on the Yahoo homepage; Yahoo, in turn, could raise more money based on its ad growth. Meanwhile, the nature of the internet meant that businesses could grow to monopoly size faster than ever before, egged on by investors like Peter Thiel, who famously argued that competition is for losers.

This wave of unabashed capitalism washed away most of the utopian dreamers, replacing them with the kinds of bro-ey hustlers who would have worked in hedge funds if this had been the 1980s. Worse, their sudden riches came with sudden self-belief, as if the ability to make money building a website during a period of unprecedented growth somehow unlocked the secrets of the universe.

I'm not blameless: I've benefitted from this gold rush. I started my career working for universities, but Elgg, my first startup, raised a fairly modest half a million dollars after its first few, bootstrapped years. My salary at every subsequent job has been paid for, at least in part, by investor dollars. It's not, I feel compelled to point out, that investors are inherently bad: they empower a ton of really useful websites and communities to exist. It's that the Wall Street startup bros who swarm around them are no fun at all to be around, and that the investor-powered web shouldn't be the whole internet.

I very badly want to return to that utopian sensibility: that something doesn't have to make money to have value. That doesn't mean I want to go back in time: the early internet was a predominantly white, male, wealthy platform that people mostly accessed by having been admitted to an elitist institution. I want an egalitarian internet: not just one where all voices can be heard, but where everyone can help to build the fabric of the platform. The true joy of the internet is that everyone builds it together. It has very little to do with engaging with someone's ad-powered social media website.

I've come to realize that I resent the expectation that everything I make has to be profitable. Sometimes, I just want to make: one of the coolest things about software, as with writing or art, is the way you can whip something up out of nothing. I want to see what other people make too, for no other reason that it's what moves them. It's not the revenue or the valuations that make the internet special; nor is it the protocols and technologies, at least not in themselves. It's the connections and the communities. The internet is people. The internet has always been people.

I can't exactly opt out of the commercial internet: I'm far from independently wealthy and need to earn money. Nor do I exactly want to. But I do want to remember that what excites me about the internet is the quirky creativity and connectedness of the diversity of human experience. It's about empowering people to connect and to be found, in a way that transcends the superficial. And it's about reclaiming the sense of magic I felt decades ago, when a magical vending machine in a dusty corridor changed my life forever.

I hope to maintain three streaks and turn them into habits:

Exercise every day. No exceptions, unless I'm really sick. I've done more regular exercise over the last year than I'd managed since I moved to California, but I'd like to make it more regular, for the good of my own health.

Write every day. It doesn't have to be a complete story or a full-length essay, but I need to get something down that I'd be willing to share on something other than social media. This doesn't explicitly mean I want to post to my website every day, but I'd like to try to do that, too.

Practice thankfulness. I want to find three things I'm grateful for before I go to sleep every night. Gratitude is important, but more than anything, it's about training myself to find small joys and call them out.

And one overarching theme:

Lose the rat race. I'm not here to hustle, gain followers, be a thought leader, build wealth, work myself to death, or rise to the top of the career ladder. I want to explore ideas, tinker with stuff, reflect, make bad art, and be human. In 2021 you'll probably see more eclectic stuff in this space as a result. Sorry / not sorry.

The most important thing in any team, product, company, or community is kindness. And with it, empathy. Any bias towards action, energy, or insight doesn't matter if you don't have that.

That's the post.

I believe in the independent web - which was born thirty years ago today - more than any other technology.

Earlier today, I shared an update with collaborators, advisors, and investors in Known. Here's what's up:

Recently, I filed paperwork to officially dissolve Known, Inc, the Delaware C-Corporation. It is expected that this will be complete by the end of the year. It was one of the most personally rewarding journeys of my life, and I’m grateful for every moment. But it’s long past time to shut down the company.

I’ve come to an arrangement where I will purchase all of the intellectual property currently held by Known, Inc. As well as source code, the name, websites, domain names, logos, etc, this includes the hosted service, which has not taken revenue or new users in years, but continues to support a modest number of bloggers. I will take more of a direct role in keeping that online, at least until there is a viable, self-serve offramp for users to move to other providers. I hope to work with the open source community to create this.

I’ll also spend more of my time working on the open source project. The rise of platforms like Substack - and Medium’s recent transformation - indicates a need for a platform for people to host their own content online. WordPress is a website builder with an ecommerce industry built around it; Ghost has become focused on corporate and commercial blogging; I’m excited for Known to be a more personal platform for hobbyists and enthusiasts.

Honestly, I’m also excited to work on it without any pressure to make money or find sustainability. Known will not be my job or a source of any income. In fact, I expect to donate more to the Open Collective monetarily as well as spending more of my time. I'm excited to concentrate on supporting the needs of the community.

(As well as import / export, my priorities include ditching Bootstrap, revisiting the interface, improving indieweb interoperability, and experimenting with how to better bring the principles of human-centered design into the open source development process. But that’ll be a conversation for elsewhere.)

Cross-posted to IndieNews.

Writing was my first love. It's still far and away the thing I most love to do. While a lot of people I know love technology on a deep level and nerd out on the intricacies of protocols and stacks, I got into this game to tell stories. I'm excited by choices of words and narrative structure. In the process, I've learned to love technology too, but it's always been secondary. Technology is the medium; stories are the message.

It's been a rough year for everyone. For me, 2020 has come at the end of a handful of really rough years. In 2019, I spent eleven weeks by my mother's hospital bed. In 2018, the job of my dreams laid me off and it was overwhelmingly likely that I had a terminal, genetic disease. In 2016, the country I grew up in voted to not allow me to live there anymore. I've been living in a maelstrom of grief and stress for quite a while.

So I decided I needed a gift for myself. This year, despite a demanding job and the need to help care for my mother, I decided I was going to allow myself to spend time on writing. I enrolled myself in some workshops, two writing classes, and a competition.

To my surprise, I'm through to the finalist round of the competition. The feedback I've received from my writing class has been constructive and positive. I thought I was giving myself space to do something I love - and I was. But it also gave me a rush of confidence that I didn't anticipate. I'm a more confident writer as a result.

In 2021, I've lined up my second of two classes. I've also built up enough of a body of short story work to submit for publication. These will not be my first-ever submissions, nor my first publications, but I'm confident that I'm a better writer than I was in January. And my goal by the end of 2021 will be to complete my first novel.

Most of all, I'm happy to have embraced my meandering, creative interests. I'm in awe of people who go deep on their love of technology, but that isn't me. I've accepted that, and am confidently moving in a slightly different direction.