Werd I/O

NiemanLab just released its predictions for journalism 2021. I was delighted to be asked to contribute. My piece is about the open web:

“In place of the monolithic super-platforms that were the hallmark of using the internet over the last decade, we’ll see smaller, independent publications and websites that address the needs of their communities more closely.”

Read the full piece here - and don't forget to check out the whole set.

Over on Twitter, Andy Sparks asked repeat founders what they wished they knew at the beginning of their first company. It's a great question. I've co-founded two startups and been the first employee at a few more. In particular, I knew nothing at the beginning of the first one. It's all been a learning curve since then.

Here are my answers, which will hopefully help a first-time founder or two get up and running a little faster:

Execution is everything, so every founder must bring a concrete skill to the table. Everyone must have something they can do for the company on an ongoing basis. A lot of people think it's enough to have a great idea. It's not: it's all about how you execute on that idea. If there's a founder who doesn't have a meaningful way of rolling up their sleeves and bringing your collective vision to life, they're dead weight. Examples of a meaningful skill: engineering, design, marketing, sales. Examples of a meaningless attribute: having an MBA, wanting to be the boss, being a scrum master.

And because execution is everything, don't outsource it. Your technical skillset should be in-house. So should your design, sales, and marketing. You don't want to lose that expertise or have it locked up in a contracting organization. If your founding team isn't able to rise to these tasks, fix that first.

Your co-founder is your partner. Like any lifelong relationship, you need to choose wisely. Forget how you interact at the best of times; how do you get along when things are going badly?

Every member of your early team is a co-founder. Whether in name or not, every single person you hire is an entrepreneur. Treat them as such - and only hire people you would trust to operate in that capacity. That includes their skillset, but also their demeanor. How do they cope with risk? Can they disagree without fighting with each other? Human dynamics are the most important part of any business (and any community).

As a founding team, your job is to de-risk the business. Constantly. That means with respect to whether people want what you're making; whether it can be a viable business; whether you can build it in a scalable way with the time, team, and resources potentially at your disposal. If you run out of money, you're adding risk. If you don't have a product, you've added risk. If you're building something you don't know if people want, you're adding risk. Understand your risks and continually bring them down to as close to zero as possible.

Culture is key. Set it early. Culture is a set of norms that define how you think about problems, look after your colleagues, and collaborate at work. It can't be an afterthought. A company with a sales-orientated culture will be able to solve different problems to one with an introspective, design-orientated culture, and will attract different kinds of people. Culture also defines how inclusive you are, and what kind of behavior is tolerated at the workplace. As you grow, it will affect how the company solves problems in a scalable way: the founding team can't always build everything, so you need to make sure you're setting the groundwork for the right approach to be taken without you.

I vastly prefer teams with the following cultural attributes: human-centered rather than building problems without understanding their user deeply; introspective and collaborative rather than extroverted and competitive; inclusive and empathetic; a no-blame ethos that encourages failure and quickly accepts when a tactic isn't working. Aggressive, overwhelmingly male workplaces are not the place for me, and it's never the kind of organization I seek to build.

The price of blind, positive thinking is death. You have to acknowledge evidence. If you ignore it because your beautiful idea just has to work - well, you're basically dead already. Conversely, you have to be guarded against being dissuaded without evidence, too. Your smarts, creativity, and experience are important, but can't operate in a vacuum. Get data and act on it.

Focus intently on what makes you special. There are so many things that go into running a startup - from the legalities of forming a business and raising money to orchestrating servers and building product - that you shouldn't try and do it all from scratch. Don't off-road except for the stuff that really matters. Use off the shelf services; be a Delaware C-Corp (or PBC); don't build your own front-end framework or create your own database engine. Keep it simple, so that you can spend your time on the core service that sets you apart - and to make it easier for others who work with you. Investors need to do less diligence on a Delaware C Corp; if you use React rather than your home-spun framework, more developers will be able to get up and running faster; etc.

Throw out "if you build it, they will come". It's not about hunkering down and building something cool. It's about creating value through solving someone's problem really well, in a way that they probably could never have conceived.

Throw out the lean startup. Really. Qualitative learning and building deep relationships is far more important than false doors and statistical analysis. Technology is all about people. Get to know them well.

A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A hundred thousand dollars. If you want to build a venture-funded startup in particular, you'll need to make sure the market is worth billions of dollars. That doesn't mean you should try and take on the whole market on day one. A bunch of founders say their product is "for everyone" - and it doesn't work at all. How can you possibly sell to everyone? It's far more effective to pick a small, niche group, solve their needs, and grow from there.

Pay attention to sales cycles. Who is the customer? How do they buy? One startup I worked on aimed to help people run academic courses. One possible customer could have been universities - but you needed to sell to the procurement office and be evaluated for the next academic year. At its worst, the sales cycle was 18 months, by which time the startup could be dead. Meanwhile, people running private communities were unconstrained and could sign up at any time. Testing and selling was far faster, and within the scope of a cash-strapped early-stage startup.

Ignore hustle porn. Articles about venture funding and building venture funded businesses, including this one, are typically little more than junk food. Read them, but you're not absolved from making your own decisions. Every business is different, and stories are not always reality. Just like following an influencer's perfect life on Instagram, you may find that the details are different to what has been presented. Throw out the performative bullshit: you're here to build a business, not to look the part.

Photo by LagosTechie on Unsplash

I'm trying to spend some time to reflect on this absurd, terrible year, paying particular attention to my role in it, and the things I can control in the future.

Honestly, for much of the year, it's been a case of just trying to stay afloat: the cognitive load of the pandemic + helping to care for my terminally ill mother + a demanding full-time job + extracurricular academic study has often been overwhelming. I end my days exhausted, and I'm acutely aware of mistakes I've made in the course of my work - particularly over the last month. I have some apologies to make today.

All the more reason to proceed with intention.

For me, a large part of thinking about the future is finding ways to reduce that overwhelming cognitive load. I've been trying to do too much, in the midst of an unprecedented scenario. That has also affected my goals: I ended last year with the stated intention to become more politically active and help with the election, which didn't happen.

On the other hand, I wanted to spend more time on writing, and I did manage to achieve this, through taking courses and participating in competitions. I'm excited to take that forward next year - not for any productive reason, but because it gives me joy. In these times, joy is all-important. When things are hard or going badly, it's easy to be cynical or grumpy. I want to progress with empathy and joy.

I also, quietly, fell back in love with the internet. I'm not sure when it happened, but I find myself thinking about the possibilities again. There are so many ways to support communities, break down barriers, and create new opportunities. I'm still utterly sick of the people who see tech as little more than a payday and want to approach the industry like Wall Street - the hustlers and grifters - but I'm finding them to be easier to ignore.

Trump's decline has given me some peace, too. The day the results became apparent, I felt a sense of overwhelming calm that I'd forgotten I was capable of. This gives me some more capacity to actually be human.

I'm still sorting through everything that happened this year, both globally and personally. It will be some time before I'm able to sort out my goals for the next year. But these are interesting things to think about.

How are you thinking about next year? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I've been telling people for years how valuable Slack is, but I didn't own a single share. Alas.

Congratulations to everyone who gained from this acquisition. Slack is a great company that does things the right way: a revenue-based business that grew by providing genuine social value to the companies it served. And its twenty seven billion dollar sale price shows how much value there is to be gained from facilitating communities.

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

Books

Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. A sobering, intelligent take on America's unspoken caste system, comparing it to similar systems around the world. For me, the history of how the Nazis looked to America's treatment of its Black population was particularly shocking.

Streaming

The Undoing. You know, I was skeptical, but it worked out well. It's somewhere between absolutely trash TV and a gripping thriller. And I like creepy Hugh Grant way more than I like apparently-charming Hugh Grant.

The Flight Attendant. Fresh off The Big Bang Theory, which I consider to be easily the worst television show ever made, Kaley Cuoco redeems herself in this pulpy, funny, unsettling thriller. It reminded me a bit of Run. Definitely a guilty pleasure watch - but that's kind of what I needed.

Save Yourselves! I felt personally attacked. But this hipsters-are-oblivious-of-an-alien-invasion movie is more of a roast than a takedown, and is absolutely hilarious. Recommended.

Notable Articles

Business

Justice Department Files Antitrust Lawsuit Challenging Visa’s Planned Acquisition of Plaid. “Visa’s con­cerns about Plaid un­der­pinned its de­ci­sion to buy the com­pany and pay a large rev­enue mul­ti­ple for it, the law­suit al­leges. The gov­ern­ment said Visa’s CEO de­scribed the deal as an “in­sur­ance pol­icy” to neu­tral­ize a threat to the com­pa­ny’s debit busi­ness. The law­suit quoted an­other ex­ec­u­tive who in 2019 com­pared Plaid to an is­land “vol­cano” whose cur­rent ca­pa­bil­i­ties are just “the tip show­ing above the wa­ter” and warned that “[w]hat lies be­neath, though, is a mas­sive op­por­tu­nity—one that threat­ens Visa.””

Unexpected & Inevitable. “The investor hears it and at first they don’t believe you. “Nah,” they say, as they start to argue with you whether that’s the way the world really works. Then, after a beat or two, they go, “wait, you’re right.” And after another moment, they think “fuck, that’s the only way it can be.”” I agree with Eric: this is what investors are looking for. You have an insight about the world that most people don’t, and you’re uniquely equipped to capitalize on it.

Spotify to acquire Megaphone. Megaphone is the network formerly known as Panoply. Spotify seems to be single-handedly creating value in the podcast market right now, but Apple has been quietly making acquisitions - like to keep its own ecosystem competitive.

Apple’s Shifting Differentiation. I found this exploration of Apple’s chip strategy to be really interesting. “Instead the future is web apps, with all of the performance hurdles they entail, which is why, from Apple’s perspective, the A-series is arriving just in time. Figma in Electron may destroy your battery, but that destruction will take twice as long, if not more, with an A-series chip inside!”

Women-owned businesses are struggling. Stimulus could help.. "Women and people of color were shut out of much of the initial rounds of stimulus because the program was set up to work through commercial banks. Those who didn’t have an existing relationship with a commercial bank found it harder to access the funds. And because the money ran out quickly, it left many without a lifeline."

The Double Standard of Female CEOs Moving Fast and Breaking Things. “We hold our female CEOs to impossible standards while not holding their male counterparts to high enough ones.”

The privacy fight is heading to the office. “I don't think Americans believe in privacy universally. And it's not a constitutional right. It's like, we have a right to free speech, we have a right to bear arms, we don't have a right to privacy in our federal constitution.”

Google Pay relaunch transforms it into a full-fledged financial service. Of note: “Google has co-branded banking accounts coming up in 2021. The new service, called Plex, essentially allows banks to partner with Google and use Google Pay as their own direct banking app.”

How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism. "Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after another—hoping that its gamble would pay off before disaster struck." VCs are upset about this article, but honestly, to me, it rings true.

Secret Amazon Reports Expose Company Spying on Labor, Environmental Groups. "Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements." Gross.

Hulu raises Live TV price to $65, matching YouTube TV’s latest price hike. Here’s what I can’t fathom: why people tolerate cable TV at all. Every time I dive into it, I regret it. It’s a morass of shitty ads and low-quality programs that shout at you.

Unilever NZ’s 1-year trial of a 4-day week. I'm very into this.

Culture

The Shape of a Story. A beautiful exploration of narrative plot, Moomins, allegory, and the purpose of story in navigating real-world challenges.

Zillow Surfing Is the Escape We All Need Right Now. Is it? Or is it another form of doomscrolling, searching for places we could never afford in aspiration of an unreachable life we were told we could have? Hey, I'm just asking questions here.

As ‘Doonesbury’ turns 50, Garry Trudeau picks his 10 defining strips. Doonesbury is by far the best syndicated cartoon strip. I'm a lifetime fan. I met Trudeau once, at the Edinburgh Book Festival; we talked about Asterix. Lovely man.

Who’s in the Crossword? I loved this: a data-driven exploration of representation in crossword clues, with insight into how they’re produced.

Media

Confusion at BBC as boss says staff can attend Pride marches after all. “He told staff on Friday morning they would still be allowed to attend LGBT Pride marches, providing they remained celebratory and individuals were not seen to be taking a stand on any “politicised or contested issues”.” This is a ridiculous stance.

Google funds mouthpiece of Rwandan regime. “The worst case scenario for the NGO representative, however, is that „Google is signalling that it is funding repression and supports the muzzling of free speech, the closing of political space in Rwanda and attacks on political opponents and human rights defenders.“”

Travel influencers are being paid to whitewash authoritarian regimes. “Uncritically spreading political propaganda is unethical under all circumstances and especially in the form of branded content, where the lines are very blurry, and the audience might therefore not recognize it as such.”

How a crop of startups are trying to make for-profit local news work. "Evan Smith, the CEO of the Texas Tribune, said that when launching the local politics driven news site more than a decade ago, “We decided that for-profit was a non starter and that the market had failed.”"

News publishers dial up the marketing heat on their subscription products. Subscriptions are far better than advertising as a support mechanism. And news sustainability is deeply important.

Yes, Product Thinking Can Save Journalism. Six Reasons Why News Media Need Product Thinkers. "Knight Lab’s series on product thinking in media started with a question: “Journalism Has Been Disrupted. Can Product Thinking Save It?” After more than 25 years in digital publishing -- and as the editor for the series -- I think the answer is “Yes.”"

Politics

How a C.I.A. Coverup Targeted a Whistle-blower. “The C.I.A. has corrupted F.B.I. agents to violate basic rules as to how the Department of Justice does criminal prosecutions.”

Uber and Lyft had an edge in the Prop 22 fight: their apps. “In the weeks leading up to Election Day, the companies used their respective apps to bombard riders and drivers with messages urging them to vote for Prop 22, the ballot measure.” Let’s please make this illegal.

Evidence suggests several state Senate candidates were plants funded by dark money. Just one of a litany of dirty tricks used in this election.

I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now. “Ha ha ha, they lede, who’s going to tell him? Bitch, who’s going to tell you? An illegitimate leader has got all the guns and 40% of your population is down to use them. And y’all got jokes.”

We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.. Smart suggestions for improving trust in our elections (undercutting the kind of FUD we’ve seen this month).

Trump races to weaken environmental and worker protections before January 20. Actively ghoulish.

Society

Why is Covid-19 is killing more men than women in middle age? Scientists are looking for answers not only in underlying health risks but also in biological and external factors. “Over­all, how­ever, men make up about 54% of U.S. deaths, and a sig­nif­i­cantly higher por­tion in mid­dle age. The death-cer­tifi­cate data through late Oc­to­ber show men make up nearly 66% of more than 42,000 Covid-19 deaths oc­cur­ring among peo­ple be­tween their mid-30s and mid-60s.”

Americans, Stop Being Ashamed of Weakness. "Too often in America, we are ashamed of being weak, vulnerable, dependent. We tend to hide our shame. We stay away. We isolate ourselves, rather than show our weakness."

Kamala Harris will be the first HBCU grad in the White House. “It’s not just about her being a Black woman. It’s about her being more than that, the intersectionality of who she is.”

Living With a QAnon Family as the Prophecy Crashes Down. “They’re treating it like there’s going to be an apocalypse — no matter who wins.”

Florida passes $15 minimum wage, a hike that could narrow the gender pay gap. Two important facts here: if a higher minimum wage can be passed in Florida, it can be passed just about anywhere. And it will disproportionately help women and people of color.

The new normal: Women and LGBTQ+ people are buying guns in 2020. “Although there is no official demographic breakdown of gun sales by race or gender, interviews with the gun community — new owners, sales people, analysts and activists — reveal a mounting anxiety among women and LGBTQ+ people, particularly those of color. And some are choosing to arm themselves for the first time.”

Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?. “The short summary of what I will discuss below is that Americans suffer higher death rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare mean Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.”

Performative philanthropy and the cost of silence. "Days after joining the Criminal Justice Reform department, I was warned by a senior member of the team that I should avoid pushing for grantmaking strategies that centered racial equity, as Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan did not believe race was relevant to the issue of mass incarceration. I was told that previous attempts to educate the couple on this matter had contributed to a former employee being terminated."

Less screen time and more sleep critical for preventing depression. "A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of data from the UK Biobank, involving almost 85,000 people, has found that lifestyle factors such as less screen time, adequate sleep, a better-quality diet, and physical activity strongly impact depression." Also, water is wet.

Federal government to execute first woman since 1953. It was a heinous crime, but the death penalty is a disgusting, brutal practice that is not befitting of a supposed democracy.

A dinner party killed my Dad. Please stay safe this Thanksgiving.

AMA: Racism is a threat to public health. “The AMA recognizes that racism negatively impacts and exacerbates health inequities among historically marginalized communities. Without systemic and structural-level change, health inequities will continue to exist, and the overall health of the nation will suffer.”

Period poverty: Scotland first in world to make period products free. I miss living in a progressive nation.

Technology

I became an unwanted woman in tech.“There is something innately different now about my words. They’ve not changed, but their context has entirely shifted. It’s as though I walk around now with a badge that invites dismissal and disrespect. That badge is called womanhood.”

Roam: My New Favorite Software Product. I have a Roam account but I haven’t made it work for me yet. Articles like this make me want to try harder to get on the bandwagon.

A new way to plug a human brain into a computer: Via veins. Do not want. (But future iterations might be more interesting / palatable.)

DHS Buying Cellphone Geolocation Data To Track People. "The Department of Homeland Security is purchasing consumer cellphone data that allows authorities to track immigrants trying to cross the southern border, which privacy advocates say could lead to a vast “surveillance partnership” between the government and private corporations." Hands up if you're surprised.

User Stories Not Wireframes. "User stories provide the context of what a wireframe is for. When you give user stories to a developer, you greatly increase the chances they will be thoughtful about the product and features they are implementing. When they understand the bigger picture — who is this for, what are they trying to accomplish and why are they trying to accomplish it — they can take ownership over the project."

Product Hunt requirements document. A wonderfully concise example of what a good requirements document can look like.

HP ends its customers' lives. There's a reason why the free software movement started with printer drivers. It's mind-boggling to me how HP can continue to be so antagonistic to their customers. (Inkjet printers are the worst deal in technology.)

What using AT&T’s 768kbps DSL is like in 2020—yes, it’s awful. A reminder that if you’re serving all of America, you can’t assume a high-quality broadband connection.

Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro. I’m waiting for version 2, but this is super cool.

Your Computer Isn't Yours. "This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city."

Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at Facebook, Twitter. Bleuch.

How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet. I’m not a gamer, so I was late to Discord. But it does feel like part of the future of online communities.

The iOS COVID-19 app ecosystem has become a privacy minefield. “It's hard to justify why a lot of these apps would need your constant location, your microphone, your photo library.” Relatively few of these apps use the comparatively privacy-protecting APIs developed by Apple and Google.

How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps. “A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people's personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.” This is spectacularly not okay.

We Need Mandatory Enduser APIs for Social and Search Systems. This is an older piece (from 2018) but it still holds up, and I agree with it completely.

As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever. It feels like this problem has been solved lots of times over on the internet - but it's both a huge problem and a real opportunity for the right startup.

How a young, queer Asian-American businesswoman is rethinking user safety at Twitter. “Su's goals sit at the heart of what could become a very different Twitter one day, if — and it remains a very big conditional — the company is serious about the changes it's been signaling over the last year.” Fingers crossed.

Rock-star programmer: Rivers Cuomo finds meaning in coding. The only time "rock star programmer" is an acceptable phrase.

The Secrets of Monkey Island's Source Code. A deep look into assets and code behind my favorite game of all time.

‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase. “One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees.”

Building your own website is cool again, and it's changing the whole internet. All hail the indieweb. I’m here for it.

I remember the day I realized who I wanted to be very clearly. I was sat in the Matter San Francisco garage, watching a panel of entrepreneurs from previous cohorts give advice to the current set of six startups who were about to graduate from the program. As I listened to the advice from the sidelines, as a member of the Matter team rather than a founder, an overwhelming sadness began to take hold.

It shouldn't have: Matter was a dream job that allowed me to support a particular kind of mission-driven startup founder. I loved every minute of it. But at my core, there was a part of me that missed building. Through supporting these 75 companies, I understood the mistakes I'd made more deeply, and knew I could do better next time.

I also knew myself better than I had the two times I'd been a co-founder. The truth is, I have a problem with authority: I hate being told what to do, and I'm not interested in perpetuating existing hierarchies. Starting my own businesses has been a way to create a working environment that's mine and mine alone, in a way that being an employee or a contractor never could be. I get to set the culture; I get to set the mission. It's a very individualist way of looking at work, but I'm not sure I can be different. Establishing a protective bubble that allows me to think in the way I need to has been important. It's a double-edged sword: external accountability also turns out to be important, and is harder to come by when you work for yourself.

I didn't go out and become a founder again. Instead, I've found a way to give myself creative space by working on side projects, which are never businesses and sometimes have nothing to do with technology at all. That doesn't mean I won't eventually start something new, but it takes the emotional pressure off a little. I get to work on something that's entirely mine, on my own time, with nobody telling me I should do it a different way, and without the pressure of it having to raise money or be self-sustaining. I've found it to be a very good balance, and it often helps my day job work.

Ultimately, the reasons I felt misgivings during the Matter panel were tied up in my identity. I am a founder: I make things using effort and creativity. That's not a million miles away from being an artist. But it's very different to being someone who has spent a long time going deep on a single career path serving other peoples' businesses. That might be where I am, but it's not how I see myself, and it doesn't cut to the core of the work I do. I've learned I'd rather earn half as much money to have twice as much freedom.

I've found it useful to bring that attitude to work. I'm in service of a mission that I've bought into, but take a critical eye to the vision and strategy. Is it the right thing for the people I want to help? Is it meaningful to work on? Is it intellectually honest? Going in and treating the company as if it was my startup to shape by definition means I'm unlikely to go with the flow, for better or worse.

I suspect most founders are the same.

As many of you know, I spent a couple of years as west coast Director of Investments at Matter, an early-stage startup accelerator supporting entrepreneurs with the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society. Before I worked there, I went through the program as the co-founder of Known. It's a community I still care deeply about and keep in touch with as much as I can.

It's the weekend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and I thought I would round up some of the deals being offered by some of these companies. These aren't affiliate links, nobody asked me to write this, and I don't gain anything from promoting them, although I do have a small amount of carry in Matter's second fund.

Creative Action Network is offering 21% off and free shipping on orders of $50 or more. They work with independent artists to create campaigns for great causes like EarthJustice, the Dream Corps and Sunrise Movement. I have a bunch of their stuff. Read more.

Aconite's beautiful iOS HoloVista game is on sale for $2.99. NME called it an intoxicating journey to another world. Star, Nadya, and their team have created an incredible experience unlike anything I've played before. Check it out.

Motherly is running a Black Friday sale in its store. Motherly is a lifestyle brand for modern women who choose to be parents. Its store contains some lovely, comforting items for parents of both babies and children, including 20% off a SNOO sleeper.

Also:

It's not on sale, but KweliTV is a low price every month. It's a streaming service for global black stories that have not received the distribution they deserved, available for your smart TV platform of choice. I'm a subscriber and you should be too.

Build great things by understanding people really well and serving their needs deeply, not treating them as anonymous numbers on a spreadsheet and turning knobs to see what moves the needle in the way you want.

That's it. That's the post.

I was awake in the early hours of the morning, staring at nothing, my heart racing. It was a bit like The Queen's Gambit, except instead of a chessboard on the ceiling, there was a kanban board, with a huge backlog of things I knew I'd failed to do.

This morning, I got up, turned my ceiling kanban board into a real one in Notion, and got to work. The world feels more manageable in the cold light of day. I'm making progress.

I'm not sure how to deal with the things that don't quite fit on a task list. You can't drag life from column to column or build it into a database. You've got to live it. Or at least, that's what I've always thought.

I'm more of an intuitive thinker than a planner. I always have been. I go off-recipe when I cook; I meander when I travel; I play with my code. Sometimes it works out and I discover things I never would have encountered otherwise; sometimes it doesn't, and I find myself in a mess of my own making. But I've started to write scripts for the hard stuff, and to my horror, it really helps.

I was stressed out about having to give difficult feedback to a colleague, but I wrote out what I was going to say ahead of time in detail, and it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be. I had to spend a day cold calling customers - an introvert's worst nightmare - but having my script in front of me meant my numbers were startlingly high.

Perhaps the most important thing is that writing the script is a way to cut through the fear. Getting something down in writing works: it's a step in the right direction. Then comes editing, and iteration. Which is far better than staring at the ceiling at 3am beating yourself up for being behind.

I want to unlearn the definition of "disruption".

Disruption in the Clayton Christensen sense is all about removing an incumbent business from its perch by reaching an audience it has overlooked and growing from there. It's about building a business by out-competing another business. As far as business goes, it's good strategy, but it doesn't do much to change the status quo. You may have out-innovated someone else's company, but the rules of business remain in place.

The thing is, the rules of business aren't working. The systems we have in place depend on outrageous inequality and are enforced by police who gun down people in the street with relative impunity. They incentivize keeping millions of people homeless so that others can grow wealthier. They enforce a widening divide between people who are inside the system and people who are locked out in such a way that the only way to beat the system for your own well-being is to perpetuate it.

Originally, the web was a movement. It's hard to remember now, but allowing everyone to publish was a major social change; giving everyone a voice was a new idea that many people argued (and continue to argue) against. Previously, publishing was a privilege that was bestowed by a circle of predominantly white men. Now, any old riff-raff (or to put it another way, anyone regardless of whether or not they had received permission) could stick up a website and be read by millions. It was a revolution.

It was that revolution - not the ability to make money or the opportunity to create new businesses - that made me fall in love with the web.

Of course, what came next was hardly revolutionary. The existing gatekeepers fell, and were replaced with yet more gatekeepers, who used the global nature of the web to become bigger and more powerful than their predecessors. The excitement of empowering communities all over the world gave way to a wave of people who were excited about building bigger companies and generating more wealth than ever before. The incumbent structures were disrupted in favor of yet more of the same old business.

I want to return to that revolutionary spirit and reclaim the web's radical core.

That doesn't mean I want to turn back the clock. The web movement was, itself, predominantly white and male. As a direct outcome, it tended to overlook the abuse and systemic oppression overwhelmingly experienced by women, communities of color, and LGBTQIA+ communities. As a whole, it was Euro-centric and dismissive of the global south. It's not revolutionary if the same old faces are in charge: the only way the movement can succeed is through radical inclusion. Leadership must be open to people of all backgrounds and contexts; ownership of the process, as well as its outcomes, must be truly democratic.

But we badly need to get back to the business of disrupting global capitalism itself, in order to create something that truly works for everyone. To do so, we must be informed by the past, but ready to build something genuinely new. In the same way that allowing everyone to publish radically changed the cultural landscape forever, we need to change nothing less than who is allowed to be an owner of the processes that run the world. The flow of money; the flow of political power; the flow of permission. Speech was just the first step.

This North Star of real, radical change is the definition of disruption I want to be governed by. I want to help create a more democratic, more equal world, where authority is devolved to all of us. It's not about getting rich. It's about sharing power.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

The question is a trope of the modern age. We were promised flying cars half a century ago; where are they?

Every so often someone even tries to answer that question. Passenger drones, manned quadcopters, and even jetpacks have tried to bring this 1950s vision of the future to life.

The truth is, they're all doomed to fail. Flying cars are the modern equivalent of a faster horse. They're not what we really want. It's not the right question.

Go deeper. Ask why we want flying cars. To get there faster? Avoid traffic? Have a greater sense of freedom? Feel like we're living in the future?

If we find those questions and solve for them, we're likely to arrive at more interesting solutions. Less commuting; more geographic diversity; new kinds of mass transit; ideas we haven't conceived of yet.

It's a far more interesting, and more fruitful, way to look at the world. The science fiction of the past can give us hints about how we might solve these deeper needs, but they don't absolve us of having to discover them.

When she was twelve years old, my aunt escaped from the concentration camp where her mother and siblings were interned. She swam through the sewers, found food, and returned. My grandmother collected snails and cooked them out of sight of the Japanese guards. Around them, people were tortured and killed on a daily basis.

On paper, the Allies won the war. For my family, it continued to rage.

To this day, trauma has rippled from generation to generation. That simple act of ripping my aunts from their lives mid-education has led to cycles of poverty and misery that continue to this day. Some of my family, like my father, were able to break the cycle. Some were not. The recent history of my family runs the gamut from stability to crime and heroin addiction. At every end of the spectrum, a culture of anxiety - you've got to be safe; get an education because they can't take that away from you - underpinned every choice.

Joe Biden has won the Presidency. The cruelest policies of the Trump administration will likely come to an end; we will need to be vigilant and apply pressure so that the long tail of cruelty is replaced by a dogma of inclusion and care.

For some families, the effects of the Trump administration will be felt not just for years, but for generations. Family separation, willful mismanagement of the pandemic, and sanctioned police brutality have created centers of trauma that are difficult to escape from. These are Trump's victims. For them, regardless of the result of this election, Trump won.

They will need help to escape the cycle. We owe it to them because we did this to them. Regardless of their nationality or context, they are our responsibility.

The real work begins now. It starts by setting things right. And then we start to build the society we actually want.

We all know this, but today is life or death for a great many people. The stakes are sky high. I don’t know what will happen afterwards, but I do know I’ve been waiting for today for four very long years.

And I have hope.

If you're an American, you've been bombarded by messages urging you to vote. Over a hundred million people have already taken advantage of early and distance voting. If you're reading this and you have the right to vote in this election, you probably have. I have too.

So I'm not going to tell you to vote. It's too late for that.

My father is a concentration camp survivor. I remember my grandmother's nightmares. I see the generational ripples of trauma in my family that continue to this day. Trump's rhetoric of nationalist division has already created those ripples for an untold number of families. The caravans of armed supporters, the racist police brutality, the Blue Lives Matter flag as a fascist symbol - all of these things will grow into something worse if left unchecked. There is no way to support Trump in 2020 and not be a fascist. There is no way for Trump to win and not further transform America into a fascist country.

This is what's at stake. All we can do now is cross our fingers and see what happens.

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

This month I've changed my process a little: I save my links to a Notion database, export them at the end of the month, and convert them into a blog post using a small script. Instead of taking a couple of hours at the end of the month to put the post together, I save my thoughts on each link as I read it, and collation at the end (in iA Writer) takes much less time.

Streaming

The Queen's Gambit. A beautifully written, impeccably acted drama with gorgeous cinematography and superb attention to detail. I'm still working through it, but I can't recommend it enough.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. It's been pretty controversial, and it's often in hugely bad taste, but I found the broad humor at the expense of American bigotry to be cathartic. And yes, "that" Giuliani scene is everything it's been reported to be.

Seven Seconds. This new-to-me police drama based on a Russian movie is really well done: a story about police corruption and how our criminal justice system fails the people who need it the most.

Ted Lasso. Sure, it's ostensibly about sports, which isn't usually my thing. But it's also a really optimistic, funny comedy that mines a lot of humor from the cultural differences between the US and UK, which is really my thing. Very occasionally it goes broader than it needs to, particularly in its first few minutes, but there's something here for everyone.

Notable Articles

Business

How we built a $1m ARR SaaS startup. I’m always interested to read peoples’ journeys. This one is very clearly written, with lots to think about.

The end of the American internet. “80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA, there are more smartphone users in China than in the USA and western Europe combined, and the creation of venture-based startups has gone global.” This is a broadly good thing: the internet was always American-led, for better or for worse. As the platforms that dominate it become more internationally-based, it becomes less of a monoculture.

Why the Survival of the Airlines Depends on Frequent Flyer Programs. “The Financial Times pegs the value of Delta’s loyalty program at a whopping $26 billion, American Airlines at $24 billion, and United at $20 billion. All of these valuations are comfortably above the market capitalization of the airlines themselves — Delta is worth $19 billion, American $6 billion, and United $10 billion. In other words, if you take away the loyalty program, Delta’s real-world airline operation — with hundreds of planes, a world-beating maintenance operation, landing rights, brand recognition, and experienced executives — is worth roughly negative $7 billion.”

Facebook Just Forced Its Most Powerful Critics Offline. “The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the group’s website — realfacebookoversight.org — be taken offline.” Ridiculously petty.

How Clubhouse brought the culture war to Silicon Valley’s venture capital community. "I am convinced that most people in the tech world do not understand the role of a free media in a liberal society."

San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S. During Covid. “One-bedroom rents in San Francisco fell 24% and two-bedrooms were down 21%, to $2,873 and $3,931 a month, respectively.” Still way too high.

How to Stay Sane While Working at Home. “Staying happy, healthy and productive requires effort when you’re working at home. This essay provides five suggestions for keeping things on an even keel.”

The warmth/competence matrix for women, from the West Wing to the workplace. "The warmth / competence matrix is a useful tool to optimize a leader’s influence in the workplace, especially during a crisis." I found this to be a fascinating insight into how women are stereotyped and held back at work.

U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly. “The Justice Department accused Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation.” The most significant lawsuit in the tech industry since Microsoft’s own antitrust suit. Whatever happens here, it will remake the internet industry forever.

Surveillance Startup Used Own Cameras to Harass Coworkers. "The big picture for me having worked at the company is that it has opened my eyes to how surveillance can be abused by the people in power."

Reviewing Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. “Competition driven by quality reflects what antitrust and net neutrality advocates want competition to look like — i.e. the better product wins, instead of whomever owns the pipes (or the channels). But that doesn’t mean it is what competition actually does look like, even on the internet.”

Culture

Correction by Hal Maclean. We regret the error.

Work, Float, Eat, Dream: Life on the International Space Station. “You need to become an extraterrestrial person.” First-hand descriptions of what it’s like to live on the ISS. What an adventure.

A Book Of Beasts – an accumulation of things. A very sweet modern bestiary.

Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts. “Remembering her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia.”

Inside Creative Growth, the Always Inspiring Oakland-Based Incubator For Artists With Disabilities. My friend Madelyn works at Creative Growth. As well as the insightful New Yorker profile, it’s fun to see examples of the art made there. This organization is a gem, and we need more like it.

How a Revered Studio for Artists with Disabilities Is Surviving at a Distance. “As their artists endure month after month of quarantine, Creative Growth faces an extreme version of the dilemmas that other arts organizations and educational institutions have struggled with during the pandemic: if your purpose is to foster the ideal conditions for learning and making things together, how do you proceed when those conditions are suddenly impossible?”

The return of Spitting Image shows how toothless British satire has become. When I was growing up, Spitting Image was an important part of the social landscape. The satire was biting. This modern reboot sounds rubbish. In life and comedy, the rule is: always punch up.

His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them. "Doctorow says that the intention of Attack Surface wasn’t to swing in the other direction on the spectrum between “nerd triumphalism” and “nerd despair,” as he puts it. Instead, it’s to find a more nuanced middle ground, one that acknowledges that technology can win some battles, but that others must be won with human willpower and political struggle, sometimes with the aim of controlling technology’s most dangerous applications."

Noelle Stevenson Shares Her Coming Out Story in an Original Comic. This is completely lovely on every level.

Easily Diminished at the Edges by Amanda Hollander. “Fay had expected many different emotions in the wake of the aliens arriving, but she had not anticipated the ennui.”

Shonda Rhimes Is Ready to "Own Her S***": The Game-Changing Showrunner on Leaving ABC, "Culture Shock" at Netflix and Overcoming Her Fears. “Shonda Rhimes was tired of the battles. She was producing some 70 hours of annual television in 256 territories; she was making tens of millions of dollars for herself and more than $2 billion for Disney, and still there were battles with ABC. They'd push, she'd push back. Over budget. Over content. Over an ad she and the stars of her series — Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder — made for then-presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.” A fascinating portrait of an inspiring creator.

About Face. A remarkable graphic essay about authoritarian cultural signifiers, conformity, and an alarming breakdown in American society.

WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars. The film that got me - and so many other people - into computing. It’s a fundamentally ethical, anti nuclear war film.

The NYT Best-Seller List Has an Awful Lot of Right-Wing Trump-Loving Conservative Authors. ... and they’re buying their way there. This is a bigger problem than political books, but it’s clear that conservative authors in particular are purchasing legitimacy.

Media

UK gov report links local newspaper circulation and voter turnout: Absence of journalism in some areas potentially 'catastrophic'. "Government -backed research has found that for every percentage point growth in a local daily newspaper’s circulation, electoral turnout on its patch goes up by 0.37 percentage points."

James Murdoch: Rebellious Scion. “A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact.”

Kat Downs Mulder named managing editor/digital of The Washington Post. It’s exciting to see a product leader take on this kind of role in media.

The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation. “Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies.”

Facebook Stymied Traffic to Left-Leaning News Outlets. “Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein expressed frustration with Facebook in a Twitter thread Friday, explaining that the loss of traffic had “real effects” on the organization. Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue, and couldn’t fill positions or pursue certain projects as a result, she said.” No single company should ever have this kind of power.

Climate news Trump can use. “The vast majority of news stories published about Biden’s climate plan since Thursday’s presidential debate have adopted the Trump campaign’s framing of the conflict. They focus solely on Trump’s attacks on Biden’s climate plan, and ignore the fact that Trump doesn’t have a climate plan at all.” Infuriating when so much is at stake.

Politics

‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes. “Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.” Seems like a normal thing that definitely happens in a democratic society.

Is America in Decline?. A fascinating discussion between J. Bradford DeLong and Om Malik on Pairagraph, which seems like an interesting platform for intellectual debates.

The Swamp That Trump Built. “An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.”

Don’t know any COVID-19 patients who’ve died or been in the hospital? That may explain a lot. “Other research suggests that a failure to embrace COVID-19 restrictions may be fueled by a lack of empathy, in the same way that someone in rural Pennsylvania may not view urban gun violence as an urgent problem, or that those without military family members may give less thought to the ongoing toll of combat.”

As Trump Flouts Safety Protocols, News Outlets Balk at Close Coverage. “Among the concerns raised by reporters: Many flight attendants and Secret Service agents on Air Force One have not worn masks; White House aides who tested positive for the coronavirus, or were potentially exposed, are returning to work before the end of a two-week quarantine; and the campaign has instituted few restrictions at the raucous rallies that Mr. Trump is now pledging to hold on a regular basis until Election Day.”

Inside the Fall of the CDC. “How the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus.”

HHS halts a taxpayer-funded advertising effort that aimed to ‘defeat despair, inspire hope’ on the pandemic by using Santa and celebrities like Dennis Quaid. The single most insane scandal of the Trump administration. I can’t stop laughing about it. Don’t miss the audio.

Judge cites Trump tweets in restricting feds at protests. “A federal judge found Friday that tweets by President Donald Trump helped incite improper conduct by federal officers responding to racial justice demonstrations in Portland, Oregon.” Finally.

Biden Camp Cancels Austin, Texas Event After Pro-Trump ‘Ambush’ on Campaign Bus. ““We’ve got you now,” the man shouted. “You’re going to vote for Trump whether you like it or not, you’ve got no choice.”” This whole account is genuinely frightening, not just in itself, but for the implications.

Society

Stay-at-home orders cut noise exposure nearly in half. “People’s exposure to environmental noise dropped nearly in half during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to University of Michigan researchers who analyzed data from the Apple Hearing Study.”

How Teens Handled Quarantine. “The percentage of teens who were depressed or lonely was actually lower in 2020 than in 2018, and the percentage who were unhappy or dissatisfied with life was only slightly higher.” It turns out that making kids go to school at ungodly hours has a negative effect. Who knew?

8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up. “The number of poor people has grown by eight million since May, according to researchers at Columbia University, after falling by four million at the pandemic’s start as a result of a $2 trillion emergency package known as the Cares Act.”

Megan Thee Stallion: Why I Speak Up for Black Women. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Black girls weren’t inundated with negative, sexist comments about Black women? If they were told instead of the many important things that we’ve achieved?”

Exam Surveillance Tools Monitor, Record Students During Tests. “On one occasion, I was ‘flagged’ for movement and obscuring my eyes. I have trichotillomania triggered by my anxiety, which is why my hand was near my face. Explaining this to my professor was nightmarish.” It’s absurd that students are so afraid that they’re not using their real names. Abolish surveillance - at school and everywhere.

The House on Blue Lick Road. I should probably start a “weird” category. Don’t miss this link.

'We are broken': Montana health care workers battle growing Covid outbreak. “If I have to stay late after working, if it means doing it on my day off. They're not going to pass alone on my unit. Again. None of them.” Healthcare workers are superheroes and I’m grateful for all of them.

Technology

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like. A pretty great summary of working for Stripe during a period of hypergrowth from Patrick McKenzie, who famously was a successful sole operator beforehand.

SpaceX Is Building a Military Rocket to Ship Weapons Anywhere in the World. "SpaceX and the Pentagon just signed a contract to jointly develop a new rocket that can launch into space and deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world — in just one hour." We should not be uncritically cheerleading for this company.

Cory Doctorow: ‘Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists’. "Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists. In technological circles, there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it. And so you just incinerate the qualitative elements and do maths on the dubious quantitative residue that remains. This is how you get physicists designing models for reopening American schools – because they completely fail to take on board the possibility that students might engage in, say, drunken eyeball-licking parties, which completely trips up the models."

Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository. A really smart way to track changes to a website or dataset over time and commit it to git. The example, using fire data, is brilliant.

Data & Society — Good Intentions, Bad Inventions. “Lenhart and Owens break down 4 common “healthy tech” myths by explaining where they come from, what they obscure, and how we can move beyond them. Intended for those designing, developing, and regulating emerging technologies, the primer provides teams with fresh ideas for how to analyze and improve user well-being.”

When It Rains, Rotterdam’s Bikers Get To Go Through Lights Faster. “Now, when it starts to shower, the traffic lights prioritize cyclists so they don’t wait so long to cross. At the same time, car drivers need to wait a little longer, because they are inside and can stay dry.” I think this is the coolest thing.

Various first words. “The first characters sent on ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, by Charley Kline, 1969: lo – for “login,” but it crashed.”

How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier. An absolutely epic guide to the platform, with full instructions for every tip.

Something Awful, a Cornerstone of Internet Culture, Is Under New Ownership. It was (1) a hugely important source of early internet culture, (2) a cesspool.

50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong? “When I was a young scientist working on the fledgling creation that came to be known as the internet, the ethos that defined the culture we were building was characterized by words such as ethical, open, trusted, free, shared. None of us knew where our research would lead, but these words and principles were our beacon.”

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”. This is how I felt about The Social Dilemma, too. It’s an important problem that needs to be discussed. But I wouldn’t trust the people who claim to have the solutions here. Not at all.

Moxie Marlinspike Has a Plan to Reclaim Our Privacy. Moxie is a hero of mine, and Signal is one of the most important apps and projects on the internet. This portrait only increased my respect for him.

Animals Keep Evolving Into Crabs, Which Is Somewhat Disturbing. I’m ready.

Dutch Ethical Hacker Logs into Trump’s Twitter Account. The President of the United States had set his password to “maga2020!”

Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet. “Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple’s annual profits.”

Police are using facial recognition for minor crimes because they can. “Law enforcement is tapping the tech for low-level crimes like shoplifting, because there are no limits. But the tool often makes errors.”

I became an unwanted woman in tech. “There is something innately different now about my words. They’ve not changed, but their context has entirely shifted. It’s as though I walk around now with a badge that invites dismissal and disrespect. That badge is called womanhood.”

I took this week off so I could spend a little more time with my mother. Originally, it was also because I was in danger of burning out, and because I wanted to help get out the vote.

Today I was going to gently take her to the ocean - she can't walk far, but at least she could see the waves. It would have been a nice day for it.

Instead, this week she's had a medical procedure of some kind every single day, for five days running. She's about to have a multi-unit blood transfusion because her hemoglobin levels have plummeted. Afterwards, she'll likely want to sleep, in the same way she does after the dialysis sessions she has three times a week.

I'm very glad I'm here with my parents: I've been sheltering in place with them throughout the pandemic, which has allowed me to spend more time with them, and do what I can to help my dad, who is my mother's primary carer. This month alone events have included evacuating from a fire that miraculously stopped a block away from the house, and a mix of emergency and planned hospital visits. It's a lot, and I'm exhausted.

This is all quality time, but not the kind I was hoping for: there are fewer long talks, and far more feeding tube flushes and wound cleanings. I really hope it's not too late for those conversations. I'll be here regardless; I'm grateful for my family, and I'll take all the time I can get.

I could, however, use another vacation.

I've spent a few hours here and there over the last few months building a text adventure game.

I grew up with adventure games. The Secret of Monkey Island was foundational for me: an irreverent point and click story with an anarchic sense of humor that completely appealed to my twelve year old self. Slide across a telegraph wire using a rubber chicken with a pulley in  the middle? Sure. (Sorry for the spoiler.)

But long before SCUMM caught my imagination, I spent many hours with interactive fiction games written by companies like Infocom.

Douglas Adams was co-author of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game. (You can play a version of it on the BBC website.) It was every bit as funny and confounding as the books, and it worked because it was described entirely with prose.

Graham Nelson's Inform language is an expressive way to build these kinds of interactive fiction games. It's a programming language built for writers, which is fascinating in itself: you define the world using complete, declarative sentences. Emily Short in particular has done amazing work with the language, which is now on its seventh version.

And I thought I'd much around with it. It's a work in progress in the truest sense of the word; far more exploration than game. Almost every dream I have is set in a consistent universe, with a dream London, a dream Edinburgh, and so on, and I thought it would be fun to set it there.

For now, it lives at ben.lol, a domain name I bought for silly experiments, and should work on every browser. I'll keep playing around with it.

Let me know what you think!

Like many people, 2020 has creatively consumed me. It's hard to give your undivided attention to something, or put yourself in a truly creative flow, when so much is going on. The sheer onslaught of new information - some newly jaw-dropping story seems to be showing up four to six times a day - puts my brain in a reactive mode. Instead of being inventive and generative, I'm constantly aghast. I'm hopeful that it will be possible to re-find a sort of mental peace once the election has been and gone, but I'm also a realist. The pandemic will continue; the political clown show will continue; children have been permanently separated from their parents, creating an entire, lost Trump generation; we will not right all the wrongs of the last four years overnight.

I've been thinking it would be an interesting exercise to force myself into a generative mode about the future. Instead of reacting to the onslaught of awfulness and saying this is what I don't want, which is almost a default biological reaction, what if we deliberately and proactively painted a picture of a possible future and said this is what I want?

It's a surprisingly hard thing to do. Even thinking about the form of it - is it a manifesto? a short story? - brings difficult choices. But if we're to be truly successful at building a better world, we need to have a strong idea of what that vision for the future really is.

I think speculative fiction can carry us a long way. But even in this creative realm, it's commonplace to paint dystopias: Black Mirror warnings of what could be rather than optimistic visions of what we might aspire to. I would love to read explorations of utopia, but aside from some facets of Star Trek (which, let's call it out, is united by a militaristic Federation), I don't know where to begin to look.

Rather than a complete imagining of this better future, perhaps it's helpful to start with principles. What is the guiding North Star that will help us make decisions about which paths to take?

I've long had a professional mission: I want to work on products that make the world more equal, informed, and kind. But that's a different exercise to defining principles that guide a positive vision of the future.

This is my attempt to define those - or at least, my representation of how I'm thinking about principles for the future today. I would love to read yours.

Principles for the future: Life, Fairness, Autonomy, and Forward Motion

Life

Everyone - regardless of their background, character, geography, and context - should be able to live a good life.

Not every American, or every person in whichever nation you happen to be reading this from; every person.

Nobody should experience poverty; everyone should have a home; everyone should have enough food to eat; everyone should have the opportunity to receive a great education; nobody should succumb to curable disease; everyone should have mobility. This is the foundation of a society that can provide a good life for all.

These things should not be provided by private businesses. I believe we need private businesses, but ability to make a profit at scale is not the same thing as being able to provide a fundamental societal foundation. Those things should be provided by a democratically elected government and upheld by an implicit social contract.

Taxation as part of this social contract is a reasonable funding mechanism. Societies with higher levels of progressive taxation turn out to result in a higher quality of life, in part because basic human rights are taken care of. The important thing is not the money you have in your pocket; it's your experience of living.

Wealth is not a shorthand for well-being.

The progress of the world should be measured by the experience of the people living in it rather than their wealth. In turn, we should measure the success of our nations by the quality of the experience of living in them, rather than their output. GDP, which has become a sort of shorthand for national success, was designed to be a measure of wartime productivity and is far less well-suited to domestic life. We need a better model, and a better measure.

For example, the Human Development Index and Gross National Happiness are great steps in this direction. There are other alternative indexes that are worth considering, although I suspect there will need to be a new, humanist measure to guide us. We do need some measure in order to gauge our successes and failures. This measure must be developed in an inclusive way, with ownership shared by communities across society, so as not to privilege one group over another.

Take the climate crisis: GDP doesn't disincentivize pollution, or directly incentivize cleaning up the environment. (It will, later on, when it is much too late.) A quality of life index would take into account the billions of people who are already feeling the effects of climate change.

It would incentivize public art, and underwriting culture, and providing amazing services, and help for people who need it.

Finally, GDP incentivizes building economic markets, whereas quality of life is method agnostic. All that matters is that we are continually improving the experience of being a human.

Fairness

Equity is a fundamental human value. Everyone should have equitable access to opportunities and resources.

Equity is giving everyone what they need to be successful; equality is treating everyone the same regardless of their context. In other words, mere equality perpetuates existing inequities. It isn't always enough.

Imagine if government was truly representative: not just geographically, but intersectionally.

Imagine if everyone had access to the same level of education, regardless of their context. Then imagine if people who didn't come from generational educational success could receive extra help with the implicit ideas and skills, as well as baseline financial resources, that some people arrive at an institution already possessing. All for free. Imagine if everyone could have the opportunity to do well. Imagine how this wider gene pool of ideas would, in turn, benefit all of us.

I believe strongly that private schools and universities shouldn't exist. Finland, which has one of the highest test scores in the world (as well as one of the highest quality of life rankings), does so well precisely because it prioritizes equity. (There are independent schools, but they're state subsidized, too.)

Imagine if everyone had the same opportunities once they entered the workforce. Imagine if maternity and paternity leave were equalized, eliminating tired old arguments for not promoting women. Imagine if the collective paid parental leave was 480 days, as it is in Sweden, allowing for healthier relationships within families with less economic hardship.

Imagine if salaries were required to be published ahead of time, eliminating both the need for negotiation and the possibility of women and people of color being paid less for the same job. (Finland goes a step further and publishes everyone's taxable income once a year.) Imagine if company boards reflected societal diversity. Imagine if conversations about justice were permitted and encouraged at work.

Imagine if businesses did not depend on workers earning poverty-level wages, in any country. Imagine if resources were fairly traded.

Black Lives Matter is needed to undo centuries of generational, institutional discrimination. Likewise, feminism is a crucial ideology of restorative justice. Imagine if these ideas - restorative justice, generational healing, compassion - were core societal values. Imagine, in turn, if misogyny, racism, colonialism, and the broad spectrum of bigotry that has held so many people back were finally thrown to the fire.

In short, imagine if we built our institutions, systems, and processes to uphold fairness for all, rather than to uphold profit or benefit for some. It's not about ensuring equality of outcome (although, of course, everyone has the right to live a good life); it's about ensuring equity of opportunity.

Imagine if we all punched up instead of down.

Autonomy

Everyone has the right to make decisions for themselves and act on them, subject to the social contract we all make with each other.

That means women have the right to choose what they do with their bodies. Abortion must be legal.

That means rather than criminalizing drug addicts, we should provide help.

That means free speech and creative human expression are imperatives - until my speech is in service of rallying others to harm. It means that the right to protest is also an imperative. Sedition is always a bogus charge; government is never a protected group.

That means privacy and freedom from surveillance are human rights.

That means sex workers should be protected rather than demonized.

That means there should be complete freedom of religion (or freedom to practice no religion) - until that religion is used to invade someone else's autonomy, or to create unfair rules elsewhere in society, or to diminish someone else's quality of life.

That means what consenting adults do with each other is not your business, whether in private or public; nor is their decision to marry, for example.

That means you should wear a mask, as it protects others, just as you should wear a seatbelt, because it protects others.

That means building participative, inclusive, democratic governments rather than authoritarian institutions.

That means everyone should have the opportunity and ability to own and maintain property.

That means valuing diversity and inclusion.

That means allowing broad immigration between countries. Ideally you should be able to choose to live in the country whose values most closely align with your own.

That means enacting peaceful, globally democratic foreign policy.

That means accepting that some people will do things that you will not like - and, as long as it does not cause harm, upholding this as an important value by which we can all live.

It also means ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to make their own decisions and act on them. It implies a non-aggressive approach to policing, and a community-orientated approach to justice.

Forward motion

We should use our resources, creativity, and expertise to rapidly improve quality of life, fairness, and autonomy.

Basic human needs should be the responsibility of an intersectionally inclusive, democratically-elected government so we can concentrate on advancing human society rather than providing the basics.

By effectively measuring quality of life, inclusive teams should receive support to perform rapid, human-centered experiments within their communities in order to quickly determine how that quality of life can be improved.

Universities and research centers should be well-funded - not just for STEM activities, but also for humanities and cultural research. As this research is publicly funded, it should then be made publicly available, so everyone can benefit from its findings.

Exploration of the universe, and of our own planet, should similarly be owned by all of us. By making the fruits of human endeavor public, we can allow everyone to build on it, snowballing human progress.

Entrepreneurship has an important part to play. Innovation is a driver for progress. We should create a world where everyone has the ability to be an entrepreneur (not just the rich and well-connected), can be supported in doing so, and can build on a rich body of public research to help them succeed.

We should all own the process and the fruits of our communal progress. We should react to harms quickly, and continuously work to improve everyone's quality of life. We should have the space to seek our own individual goals, while valuing the goals of our communities. We should be there for each other.

We should tell stories about the future and try to make them real.

What's next?

This is clearly an incomplete set of principles. They're mine, as written over a set of days in October, 2020. But I think my next step is to stress test them by building a set of possible futures; to tell those utopian stories.

Perhaps your next step could be to build your own set of principles, and use them to tell your own stories. We can build on each other's ideas, as well as the ideas of diverse authors and futurists, to envision the world we want.

And then, of course, we build it.

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

In California, anyone can put an initiative on the ballot that amends the state constitution, proposes a bond measure, or even changes legislation - as long as you acquire the minimum number of signatures of support. As a result, there are always an eclectic set of propositions on every California statewide ballot. This year, there are twelve.

Particularly because there are a few ballot initiatives this year that touch on my areas of expertise, I thought it might be useful to discuss how I'm thinking about each one in public. This is one progressive technologist's voter guide; if you have alternative opinions, I'd love to hear them.

Proposition 14 - Yes

A "yes" vote authorizes $5.5 billion in bonds earmarked for stem cell research in the state, extending previous funding that was created by an initiative in 2004.

Critics say that the original initiative was created when there was a ban on federal stem cell research, and this has now outlived its usefulness. I disagree. The existing funding was mostly used across UC campuses, including UCSF, and has funded ground-breaking research and treatments, including for spina bifida and Parkinson's disease.

UCSF is one of the most important medical research institutions in the world, and I believe we should continue to allow this funding.

Proposition 15 - Yes

A "yes" vote increases funding for schools, public colleges, and local government services by increasing taxes on certain kinds of commercial and industrial property. The taxes are limited in scope and will mostly be paid by large, wealthy corporations, while providing tax exemptions for small businesses. This seems like a broadly positive amendment.

Proposition 16 - Yes

In 1996, affirmative action when hiring for public employment, public education, and public contracting was banned through another state proposition. This ballot initiative repeals that rule and allows diversity to be considered in the hiring process.

If this proposition passes, the state will be clear to start enacting affirmative action and diversity-based hiring initiatives, helping to make public positions more representative of the population.

Proposition 17 - Yes

Currently, people on parole for felony convictions don't have the right to vote. This constitutional amendment would give them that ability by restoring the right to vote once their prison term has been completed.

Felony disenfranchisement is one of the most shameful aspects of criminal justice in the United States, which disproportionately affects marginalized people. The right to vote is a crucial part of any democracy. 19 other states return this right once a prison sentence is completed; we should do the same.

Proposition 18 - Yes

If you're going to be 18 at the time of an election, and therefore can vote in it, but you're only 17 at the time of the primary, this amendment would let you vote in the primary.

Without this amendment, 18 year olds effectively only get to participate in half of the election. I'm in favor.

Proposition 19 - No

This amendment would allow residents over 55, with disabilities, or who had to flee natural disasters to transfer their property tax assessments to more expensive properties three times. It also prevents these beneficial tax assessments from being carried over to inherited properties (either from parents or grandparents) when the inheritor doesn't use it as their primary residence.

On one hand, I'm in favor of closing the inheritance loophole, which disproportionately benefits wealthy families. I also want to help the over 55s, people with disabilities, and victims of natural disasters.

On the other, it's sponsored by realtor associations. For them, it's a cash windfall. It has the side effect of persisting existing inequalities. As the Los Angeles Times editorial board says: "Proposition 19 would just expand the inequities in California’s property tax system. It would grossly benefit those who were lucky enough to buy a home years ago and hold onto it as values skyrocketed. It would give them a huge tax break and greater buying power in an already expensive real estate market. It would skew tax breaks further away from people who don’t own a home or who may be struggling to buy one."

On balance, I'm voting "no".

Proposition 20 - No

This state statute adds crimes to the list for which early parole is restricted - and removes the incentive to join rehabilitation programs, which is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. My vote is a hard "no".

Proposition 21 - Yes

This would allow local government to impose rent control on buildings that were first occupied 15 years ago, except when it's owned by a landlord that owns no more than two buildings in total. In other words, small, independent landlords are not affected; large private sector builders are.

Contrary to a recently-popular narrative, rent control works. It doesn't constrain housing supply and it helps keep rents low, allowing a significant percentage of families to remain in their homes where it is enacted. It protects lower-income people. And it makes our cities more diverse.

Proposition 22 - No

Uber has spent $50 million to promote this statute; Lyft has spent $48 million; DoorDash $47 million; Instacart $27 million; Postmates $10 million. Allowing their gig workers to be classified as private contractors protects their businesses.

That's because their businesses heavily depend on paying gig workers poverty pay with no benefits.

Labor rights were hard-won. At a time when more people are struggling, it's absurd to allow this kind of backslide. In addition to removing protections that these workers are entitled to by law, proposition 22 would also remove their right to organize.

If a business can only succeed because it treats people badly, it's a bad business. Hard pass.

Proposition 23 - No

If this statute passes, dialysis clinics will need to have an attending physician or nurse practitioner. They will also need to report information about infections, and won't be able to turn people away based on type of insurance.

I care deeply about the state of dialysis centers. Three times a week, my mother spends half her day in one. She reports that the staff want to unionize, but are afraid to. They're underpaid and overworked. One of her dialysis technicians lives in a tent.

And yet.

I heavily support unionization of dialysis centers. I would support a statute that mandated reporting of infection data. I support not being able to turn people away because of insurance. But I can't back the physician requirement. Despite sounding good, it wouldn't actually result in a meaningful increase to the quality of care.

Worse than that, it appears to be a tactic by the healthcare workers' union to blackmail dialysis companies into accepting unionization. Unionization is important and could really help these workers! But using the state initiative system as a pressure tactic is an unfortunate tactic. I'm voting "no".

Proposition 24 - No

Privacy is core to a free society. We have accidentally built a global surveillance apparatus as part of building business models that depend on building detailed profiles on each one of us. In the wake of Europe's GDPR, which forced tech companies worldwide to change their practices, California passed the CCPA. It's a great step forward that will be joined by other state laws, and ultimately form the basis of federal protections.

In contrast, this statute is fundamentally disingenuous. In the guise of increasing protections, it actually makes exemptions and cuts out requirements for companies like Facebook. It creates a loophole for credit agencies. It allows for digital redlining, allowing credit agencies and assessors to penalize people of color. And it allows privacy to be demoted to an add-on paid-for service tier, rather than a core right that everyone can enjoy.

For me, perhaps the most important changes are jurisdictional. Currently, the CCPA applies to any Californian resident, wherever they happen to be. Proposition 24 erodes this protection and allows privacy to be violated as soon as the resident physically leaves the state. It also removes the ability for you to tell your web browser to let every site know not to sell your data; under Prop 24, you would need to manually let every site know.

I can't endorse it or vote for it.

Proposition 25 - No

Cash bail is discriminatory. American judges are set higher bail amounts for Black individuals, despite their being more likely to come from lower-income backgrounds, meaning they are far more likely to serve pretrial time. Cash bail must go.

Unfortunately, it's just one symptom of a system that is, in itself, discriminatory. It's not enough to remove cash bail; we also have to make sure it's replaced by a system that also removes the underlying systemic discrimination. The cash requirement is a problem, but our racist criminal justice system is the underlying tragedy.

For people who don't understand it, software can seem like a magically unbiased system. It's a computer, after all, which doesn't hold its own opinions. How can it possibly be biased?

Of course, software is written by people, and is a reflection of their biases, beliefs, and blind spots. Additionally, machine learning as popularly implemented is an algorithm that depends on an enormous corpus of information about choices that humans have made in the past. The machine simply extrapolates and makes new decisions based on those choices. It's as biased as the data is - and if that data comes from our criminal justice system, it's very biased indeed.

So replacing cash bail with a predictive algorithm isn't just a bad idea - it's a spectacularly harmful one that entrenches racist biases in a way that makes them beyond reproach.

Software must never make judicial decisions. The truth is, it can't: the decisions are instead made with impunity by the people who write it, often unscrutinized, and by the people who are responsible for the underlying data.

Proposition 25 must not be allowed to pass, and all measures and legislation like it must be soundly defeated.

Photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash

I was starting to write this post when we were evacuated from the fire. Miraculously, after a really rough week, we were able to move back in on Friday. The house is still intact, the electricity is back on, and although the air is toxic, air purifiers allow the inside to be comfortable. I feel awful for the thousands of families who were not so lucky.

I'm now finishing and publishing this post as a way of adding some final punctuation to this terrible week. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted ...

In the spirit of Derek Sivers, I thought I'd write a quick update about what I'm doing these days. It's not quite a "now" page in the Sivers model, but it'll do .. for now.

Where I work:

I'm Head of Engineering and Sponsor Product at ForUsAll. Understanding what ForUsAll does, and therefore what I do, requires a little bit of explanation: in the US, rather than traditional pensions, workers tend to get something called a 401(k) plan (memorably named after its tax code). A part of your pre-tax pay is sent to a fund that invests on your behalf; many employers match your contribution up to a certain level. At retirement you get to withdraw those funds; the hope is that your investments have grown in value in the interim.

They tend to be jargon-laden, badly-run, and offer web interfaces that look like they were built in Microsoft Frontpage in 1998. And that's if you even have access to one: most American workers at smaller businesses don't, and therefore have limited access to decent ways to save for retirement. ForUsAll's web platform makes it cheaper and less time-consuming for employers to run (or "sponsor") a plan. And we're working on other ways for regular people to build financial stability for themselves, even before retirement. It's not about employees at well-funded startups or Fortune 500 companies; it's everyone else.

So my role is to run the engineering team, as well as product for the employer side of the experience. It's my first fintech company, but that's not why I'm doing it - my personal mission statement continues to be to work on projects that make the world more equal, informed, and inclusive, and this fits the bill.

I'm bringing a few things to the table here: my experience building products from both an engineering and product strategy perspective, but also my design thinking and cultural development background. I'm finding that those instincts are coming in very useful, and my big self-development project is to second-guess myself less than I often have in the past. I've been given a large role in determining the future strategy of the company, and I'm trying to bring my all to it.

By the way, I'm hiring front-end engineers.

Also:

I continue to sit on the board at Latakoo, the media startup where I was the CTO and first employee. Its technology - which I helped design and build - allows networks like NBC News to easily plan stories and transmit video from the field using commodity internet connections.

Latakoo is profitable. Its cloud service is used by many of the news organizations you can think of, and its on-premise servers have found homes in their editing suites. I'm really proud to have been a part of it, and to still be able to help where I can.

I believe deeply in the importance of media in our democracy, and I'm always excited to find opportunities to help support its future. In February I helped run (with my ex-Matter colleague Roxann Stafford) a session on designing for equity as part of a Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms bootcamp organized by NewsCatalyst and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism with the Google News Initiative.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping to wind up Known's incorporated corporate entity - and its hosted service, which is still online - this tax year. This doesn't mean Known itself is winding down: the open source community continues apace, and has been funding future development through Open Collective. The Known copyrights and assets will revert to me once the closure is complete.

Beyond work:

More of my time has been spent helping to care for my mother. It's been a decade since her diagnosis, and my life has been turned completely upside down in the years since (including some time where I thought I probably had the terminal, genetic condition too). Being able to spend time with both my parents is a privilege. But it's also been very easy to put my personal life on pause. I started this year with a determination to unpause - although 2020 has sometimes had other ideas.

I'm about to start a Gotham Writers Workshop course on writing fiction. Writing has always been my first love, and I'm determined to take it more seriously. I took some Stanford writing courses over the summer and found them to be both incredibly useful and motivating. I'd been waitlisted for a two year part-time novel writing certificate, but sadly didn't make the cut. (Who can blame them - who is this tech bro anyway?) No matter; I'm finding other ways to improve my skills and get closer to my goal of actually publishing a long-form fiction book.

I came first in my group in the NYC Midnight flash fiction competition this summer; I'm waiting to see if I got into the third round.

I read a lot more than I write, and I've been trying my best to keep off the social networks. They don't, as a whole, improve my life. But the addiction is strong. I just wholesale quit Facebook and Instagram as a protest against that company's actions, and it felt pretty good.

When I thought I also probably had my mother's dyskeratosis congenita, I gained a lot of weight. I've been trying my best to lose it, through only eating during an eight hour window, improving my diet, and increasing the amount of exercise I do. We bought a treadmill so my mother could walk without having to leave the house (my dad also has mobility issues); I've been using it to regularly run 5Ks. It's nowhere near as impressive as my runner friends, but it's a world away from my last few years. I used to walk 7-8 miles a day in the course of my life in the UK, and my life in California has never worked the same way. I've lost some weight but I've got a very long way to go.

I've been thinking about how I can help mission-driven founders. I was pretty naive when I founded Known, and more so Elgg; I'd love to help people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place to avoid some of those same mistakes. Time is limited, though. So maybe an online book and/or community is the way to go.

What's next:

In 2021 I want to ...

... finish a fiction book. Whether it gets published or not is out of my hands, but I want to do the best job I can. And then prepare to do it again.

... lose that weight and continue to get healthier.

... re-find the joy in life. It's been a tough year, and I want to find a way to have more time and space that's really mine. Between work and caring it's been hard to carve out room for my own life. I wouldn't change those things for the world, but I'd like to be able to find a healthier balance.

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

Books

The City We Became, by NK Jemisen. An effervescent tale about gentrification and the soul of cities, writ large as a fantasy adventure. I listened to this as an audiobook, which transcended its form into something more like a performance.

Streaming

Teenage Bounty Hunters. By rights, nothing with a name like this should be good - but it turns out this series is a beautiful surprise. Sharply funny, particularly after the first episode or two. (Netflix.)

Raised by Wolves. I still don't know if I like it, but this science fiction epic about belief and community is like nothing I've seen before. (HBO Max.)

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US, report says. "In a timely new analysis, Michael German, a former FBI special agent who has written extensively on the ways that US law enforcement have failed to respond to far-right domestic terror threats, concludes that US law enforcement officials have been tied to racist militant activities in more than a dozen states since 2000, and hundreds of police officers have been caught posting racist and bigoted social media content."

The Inevitable Whitelash Against Racial Justice Has Started. "In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, white people seemingly joined Black people in their calls for justice and change. But that support was always soft. It was entirely predictable that most white people would abandon the movement long before justice was done or change achieved."

Muslim Students Are Leading A New Generation In the Fight to Free Imam Jamil Al-Amin. "Al-Amin’s legacy as a Black revolutionary targeted by state surveillance — who converted to Islam in 1971 after being incarcerated for five years in New York’s Attica Prison — and his position today as a Black Muslim political prisoner is forgotten in many circles. [...] Arshad adds that she never knew Al-Amin was targeted by COINTELPro until preparing for a surveillance workshop for Muslim Student Associations across Texas."

Society and Culture

At 31, I have just weeks to live. Here's what I want to pass on. "A life, if lived well, is long enough."

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. "We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic." Unbearably frustrating.

Comedy Wildlife Awards 2020 finalists. Lovely!

The Off-Kilter History of British Cuisine. "It was the decade of fondue parties, cheese and pineapple chunks on cocktail sticks (considered an exotic indulgence at the time), Black Forest gateau, chicken Kiev, chili con carne, Neapolitan ice cream, and the prawn cocktail. [...] Inexpert and clumsy though it may have been, Britain’s exploration of new foods was indicative of deeper currents, as Britain, its empire definitively dead and buried, re-examined its place in the world."

Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”. "I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?"

The Rise of the 3-Parent Family. My friend David Jay, who founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, on his journey as a third parent. He inspires me in so many ways.

America in 2020

Deadly Terror Networks And Drug Cartels Use Huge Banks To Finance Their Crimes. These Secret Documents Show How The Banks Profit. This is the global financial system working as designed. Revealing it is an important work of journalism that has unfortunately mostly been lost under the weight of the election. The BBC has a good overview.

We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying. "Take it from us survivors and scholars of authoritarianism. This is exactly how it happens. The situation could not — could not — be any worse. The odds are now very much against American democracy surviving."

Biden campaign launches official Animal Crossing: New Horizons yard signs. I ... am not positive this is what's going to make the difference.

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. The Trump camp has denied it, of course.

saw the perfect wildfire today. A beautifully-written account of seeing the Oregon wildfires. At the time I read this, I didn't understand that I would shortly have my own experience.

A Doctor Went to His Own Employer for a COVID-19 Antibody Test. It Cost $10,984. Outrageous but unfortunately not surprising.

QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded. Only lightly rebranded, mind. QAnon's relationship to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an old, racist conspiracy theory, is incredibly alarming, but also just one of the many incredibly alarming things about it.

‘We’re No. 28! And Dropping!’. "out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s."

Nothing to see here, folks. "News outlets continue to ignore climate change in articles about California's record-breaking weather." I decided to give a newspaper interview about my fire experience today for exactly this reason. I'm curious to see if my statements about climate change - which were deliberate and repeated - will make it in.

Effective Political Giving. "With less than two months left before the election, this is an explainer for the politically panicked. You're anxious, you feel the need to do something, and you have a little money to spare. Who should you give it to?"

‘Like an Experimental Concentration Camp’: Whistleblower Complaint Alleges Mass Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Center. "Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women." Will they deport these witnesses too?

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Speaks for itself. Really well-done; really terrifying.

Understanding PurpleAir vs. AirNow.gov Measurements of Wood Smoke Pollution. File under: new skills we all need to have now.

‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%. "RAND found that full-time, prime-age workers in the 25th percentile of the U.S. income distribution would be making $61,000 instead of $33,000 had everyone’s earnings from 1975 to 2018 expanded roughly in line with gross domestic product, as they did during the 1950s and ’60s." Shouldn't have been too shocked.

Nearly two-thirds of US adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust. WTF.

Federal Agencies Tapped Protesters’ Phones in Portland. What's old is new again.

Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'. Using our good friend Facebook, which eagerly helped the campaign.

I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. "I lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens." Although where I'm typing this, ash is literally falling from the sky.

The FBI Is Secretly Using A $2 Billion Company For Global Travel Surveillance — The US Could Do The Same To Track Covid-19. Not completely my takeaway from this.

New York Police Planned Assault on Bronx Protesters. "New York City police planned the assault and mass arrests of peaceful protesters in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx on June 4, 2020, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The crackdown, led by the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, was among the most aggressive police responses to protests across the United States following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and could cost New York City taxpayers several million dollars in misconduct complaints and lawsuits."

Technology and Business

The Entire Universe Might Be a Neural Network. Maybe one that was fed some really, really stupid data.

NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal, court rules seven years on. About time.

Harassers are nice to me, and probably to you. "Simply put, if you’re in a position of power at work, you’re unlikely to see workplace harassment in front of you. That’s because harassment and bullying are attempts to exert power over people with less of it. People who behave improperly don’t tend to do so with people they perceive as having power already."

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. "Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence."

Remote Work Doesn’t Have to Mean All-Day Video Calls. Tell me more ...

Amazon Drivers Are Hanging Smartphones in Trees to Get More Work. "Someone places several devices in a tree located close to the station where deliveries originate. Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. The reason for the odd placement [is] to get a split-second jump on competing drivers."

Facebook Moves to Limit Election Chaos in November. "The social network said it would block new political ads in late October, among other measures, to reduce misinformation and interference." Utterly meaningless.

“I Have Blood On My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation. “In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions.” For example, in Ethopia.

Former Facebook manager: “We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook”. "Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more."

Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. One of the most shamelessly violent business ideas I've ever seen.

Poynter now offers six months paid parental leave. Here’s how it happened. I really think everyone should offer a year of equalized maternal and paternal leave, but what do I know.

Build terrible things: an edict for mid-level engineers. "Start optimizing for decision-making ability. Take on projects where you get to choose what your stack will be, what tools you’ll use, how you’re going to solve problems that come up, how much tech debt you’re going to accrue, what you’re going to build and when. You’ll do it all wrong at first, but your instincts will get better at a rate that will surprise you. You’ll fix mistakes where you can, and live with them where you can’t."

Options, Not Roadmaps. "Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We don’t set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen." A more little-a agile approach.

AVIF has landed. A pretty amazing new audio/video standard.

The Cloud. This is very how it used to be.

I'm sleep-deprived because I had to evacuate my parents from their home last night, but adrenaline is keeping me awake. We drove away as the fiery glow appeared over the hill, and a stream of fire engines, sirens blazing, sped in the other direction. The Safeway at the corner where I sometimes sneak off and buy deli counter chicken tenders is now the fire staging area. The street where I go for walks to hit my daily active calorie count has been bulldozed to try and make a barrier to stop the spread.

The ash on my car this morning was like a layer of sand; each grain, a fragment of something destroyed. The smoke hangs in the air and turns everything red. It falls in chunks, like snow.

"Fire season" is a phrase we say now. I guess there was always a prime season for wildfires, which ran from May to October, roughly, but it's only really been a part of the lexicon since the Tubbs fire tore through Santa Rosa in 2017. The air was thick with smoke then, too. We used to worry about earthquakes - "the big one" - and now we worry about heat and wind.

My mother is sitting in a chair at a chain dialysis center, receiving treatment for the side effects of drugs she takes to manage a double lung transplant she received seven years ago. She never drank or smoked; always ate right; always exercised. Genetics got her in the end, as it did my grandmother and my aunt. She listens to books and browses the web on the iPad I bought her while a refrigerator-sized machine cleans her blood. The patients sit in rows while the machines churn blood around their coils. It looks like a gothic datacenter. She sits through it with surprisingly good humor, just as she sits through her hospital visits. Last week, she was in the ER. This week, she needed a blood transfusion. Whenever some politician talks about removing protections for pre-existing conditions, dropping it into a speech because it tests well with a certain kind of conservative, I wonder how I'm supposed to keep my mother alive.

When we knew we had to get out, I booked a hotel near the dialysis center. I feel privileged to have both the means and ability to do this; it meant we could pack up, drive out, and know where we were going. The evacuation site at the Sonoma County fairgrounds, and a few others, filled up and stopped taking people late in the night. The hotel lobby began to fill with people who hadn't booked, and hoped there would be a vacancy. Elderly people in masks, often holding dogs or cats under their arms, milled about in the lobby hoping a no-show would free up a room.

The style motif of the hotel is brown. The furniture is brown; the walls are brown; the curtains are brown; the light from outside is brown. The upholstery has been designed to hide spills and dirt. Irregular brown patterns draw your eye away from what you're not supposed to see.

I spent my morning frantically trying to find food that my mother could eat before dialysis. She can't tolerate much, but her feeding tube doesn't provide enough nutrition to last through a day. Ordinarily, we find ways to cook for her, but that requires a kitchen. Takeout food, which would be my first choice in this situation, is too salty for her, or has ingredients she can't digest. The WalMart next door had been ransacked by fire evacuees; the only edible food items left were PopTarts, which aren't on my mother's menu. At Raley's, further away, we found microwaveable oatmeal and some strawberries. As I loaded the car with food, I tried my best to prevent the ash from sliding through the open doors.

We packed my mother off to dialysis, rearranging the back of my car so that her wheelchair would fit without removing the foot pedals. I bought a coffee from the Starbucks in the hotel parking lot (brown) and sat in my room, finally immersed in peaceful silence except for the 1970s hum of the air conditioner. Finally, for the first time since we rushed out of the house, I took a shower.

Logging into social media again felt as if I had peeled open a wormhole into an alternate reality. "Blockchain is what happens after Silicon Valley," read one tweet. It turns out what will really happen after Silicon Valley is scorched earth and ash from the sky. The importance of politics has escalated from differences of opinions about how we organize the economy into something closer to life and death. The tendrils of the climate emergency are snaking closer and closer to our homes. There is an out-of-control pandemic taking our loved ones. There are concentration camps on the borders and immigration raids in our communities. And there is undisguised authoritarian racism coming from the White House.

While I was offline, a company called Coinbase, where I have spent a fair amount of money over the years, made a statement about its "mission focus". It is the worst kind of bullshit. It's a disingenuous, hollow statement against placing inclusion and morality at the heart of business. It's an argument not just for the status quo, but for going backwards in time to find the old status quo. It paints Coinbase, and companies that support a similar stance, as safe places for the broey, exclusionary, overwhelmingly white masculinity that still permeates any space with money and power. It would be a hard pill to swallow at any time. It just so happens that right now, the sky is on fire and the world is succumbing to fascism. The timing is, in itself, a tell.

We learned that the 2016 Trump campaign used Facebook to actively attempt to deter 3.5 million Black Americans from voting. It doesn't matter if the ads were effective, although I would be surprised if they weren't; what matters is that the campaign had the intention, and the Facebook platform presented itself as a way to get it down. There is no way to work at Facebook without being complicit. Nor for Trump: perhaps coincidentally, Brad Parscale, the digital advisor for the 2016 campaign, was taken into custody after threatening to take his own life.

As always, there are tweets and hot takes and memes. Irregular patterns draw your eye away from what you're not supposed to see. But we can choose to focus.

The surrealism of this year invites us to not take it seriously. The horror is dream-like in its absurdity. The facts and implications are so outside the parameters of ordinary life that they seem outlandish. But the sky really is red with flame, over two hundred thousand Americans alone really are dead from the pandemic, there really are unmarked federal soldiers in our cities, people really are being swept up by ICE in the dead of night and kept in concentration camps, and the worst really may be yet to come.

We can choose to look away. That option is always available to us. But to do so is to accept our fate, and to acquiesce to those who would harm us to make a profit. Today, watching the ash continue to fall and wondering if my mother will make it through another dialysis, I'm not at all prepared to do that.

Photo by James Todd on Unsplash.

We evacuated on Sunday night.

I had a whole other blog post drafted, about what I've been doing lately. Perhaps I should have known it was tempting fate, because just as I was getting it ready to publish, we realized the fire was going to come over the hill and into the neighborhood.

I've been spending most of my quarantine with my parents in Santa Rosa. My mother's health has been failing badly, and I want to help; more than that, I want to be there with my parents. The pandemic's silver lining has been that I can work remotely and therefore spend more time with them. I've sat on my mother's bed while we've sung lullabies; I've stroked her head while she suffered through stomach pains; I've flushed her feeding tubes; I've listened to podcasts and watched TV with her.

The fire got incredibly close, and at the time of writing has taken quite a few homes in the neighborhood. I took this photo from the back door just as we were about to leave:

I'm glad everyone is safe, but I'm worried about the irreplaceable things. We have so many photographs, books, objects with sentimental value. I deeply hope the fire spares them.

This year has been a shock. I also don't think it'll be the last year like it. The climate emergency is here for all of us; it's just not evenly distributed yet. Wherever you are, please consider voting in a candidate that will help reverse the damage.

I appreciated Fred Wilson's post today about USV's thesis on expanding access to knowledge, wellness, and capital. He also talks about universal basic income as a way to get there. It's a useful lens to think about the future, although perhaps inevitably, I see it a slightly different way.

Despite being a natural born American citizen, I grew up in a European context, went to state schools, and went to university for free. (I was actually part of the last cohort of university students to do so; the year afterwards, universities started to charge a whopping £1300 per year, except in Scotland.) I understand that free college does not entrench existing income disparities; my fellow students came from a very broad range of backgrounds and contexts.

Coming from that context, I don't see government services as monopolies in the business sense. They're services in the civil sense: social infrastructure for all. For example, I'm not sure we would want to have multiple police forces competing for business in a capitalist market (however we feel about our current ones). Or take healthcare: every time I walk into a doctor's office in the US I miss the simplicity and safety of the NHS.

So I go the other way. I strongly believe that private schools shouldn't exist, which is an alien idea to some. Every child should have the same opportunities. Every college should be free. Private schools, and private colleges, entrench existing power networks. Why shouldn't a kid who happened to be born poor, or in the wrong neighborhood, have access to them? It's not like rich people don't have a thousand other ways to convey privilege to their offspring - but at least access to the same institutions would give everyone else a fighting chance.

"School choice" has a racist history, and a racist present. It's not something we should knowingly advocate for without understanding and actively fighting to undermine its foundation in segregation.

Similarly, universal basic income that doesn't sit alongside other mechanisms for economic justice and support is just a way to undermine those kinds of programs. It's not either/or: all schools should be free and everyone should have access to a basic income. College should be available to all and a monthly stipend would have great ROI for the economy. We don't get to absolve ourselves of providing opportunities throughout society by simply cutting a check. In a vacuum, UBI is that most American idea: discrimination in the guise of equity.

With state support, we will still have a great market economy: one where everyone can start a business or participate in one. In fact, it'll be better, because more people will have access to networks and training. Providing social infrastructure isn't an anti-capitalist idea; it's an anti-racist, anti-discrimination one. It allows more people to access the resources they need to participate, rather than disproportionately shutting out people of color and people from poorer backgrounds. And if you don't think that's where we should be heading, I'm not sure we have much to say to each other.

Email newsletters are only succeeding because RSS failed.

I just subscribed to Casey Newton's new tech journalism newsletter, Platformer. I appreciate his journalism, and I'm sure it'll become a regular must-read for me in the same way that Ben Thompson's Stratechery is. The tech industry needs more analytical journalism, and I'm pleased to support it.

There's an interesting platform difference between the two. When you sign up and pay for Stratechery, you can certainly opt in to receiving daily emails - and I'm sure this is how most of his subscribers read his work. But you can also get access to a private RSS feed that you can plug into your reader.

My feed reader is an important part of my morning routine, but it also serves another purpose: to keep regular subscription content out of my inbox. I have enough trouble keeping on top of my email; I'm terrible at it. Adding more messages will not help me. But I also really want to subscribe! So having all my regular subscription content in one place, away from the desolation of my inbox, is useful. (Hundreds of you are reading this post in your inbox. I'm assuming you're all better at email than me! If not, you can always subscribe to my blog via a feed reader.)

In contrast to Stratechery, Platformer uses Substack, which has made starting and subscribing to paid newsletters incredibly easy. As a subscriber, I plug in my email, hit the Apple Pay button, and I'm subscribed. It's kind of a brilliant way to support independent writers. Like RSS feeds, authors don't need to rely on social media for distribution; they have a more direct relationship with the reader. Unlike RSS feeds, it all piles into my horror show inbox.

My feed reader of choice is NewsBlur (together with the beautiful Reeder apps), in part because it allows me to forward email newsletters to an address it provides. Feedbin and a few others do this too. I have a blanket filter that removes every Substack newsletter from my inbox and sends the messages to my feed reader, where they show up alongside the blogs I subscribe to. It works for me: I get to read all of my subscriptions in one place, and leave my inbox for all of those other messages that I'll get to eventually.

It's worth imagining another world, where the string and blu tack solution I made for myself is easy for everyone. What if everyone had an easy-to-use place to read their subscription content, away from the hustle and bustle of their regular emails? What if feed subscriptions had become mainstream, and payments had become an integral part of the specification? What if every author had the ability to use the platform that Ben Thompson had to build for himself, allowing each of them to make a living from their work as easily as publishing to the web?

The technology isn't there right now, but could it be?

Every journalist, artist, app builder, musician, author, podcaster, etc, should be able to make money independently on the web. And the web should help them do that.

Of course, RSS feeds haven't failed. The entire podcasting ecosystem heavily depends on them - an $11 billion market, all depending on open feeds. Even for written content, there are millions of people like me who use them every day. People in tech love to talk about the death of Google Reader, but nobody killed RSS.

For a year, I worked with Julien Genestoux, who had previously built the Superfeedr feed subscription and distribution engine, on Unlock, a protocol for independent, decentralized payments on the web. The startup didn't quite work out, but the open source protocol continues to find use. Most importantly, I think the idea (anyone should be able to take payments from their own website without a middleman) is very strong, even if the Ethereum blockchain it depended on turned out to not quite be ready for primetime. Not to mention the ability for payments to supplant harmful targeted advertising.

I believe that Substack, the Stratechery platform, and Patreon's subscription model are all evidence of a need for a decentralized marketplace of content, monetized through easy, recurring payments that don't require a content silo. By using the same feed ecosystem that powers the whole podcasting ecosystem (and my morning content routine), adding a payments layer on top of the RSS specification itself, and then making it insanely easy to read and subscribe, we could empower a new generation of creators, readers, and reader apps.

Some technical work has been done. PodPass is a proposal for an identity layer on top of RSS for podcasts. Work is being done at the W3C on web payments. Identity and payment mechanisms are both crucial parts of providing subscriptions as a first-class layer on the web. But there's a great deal more to do technically - and a huge amount more in terms of building a coherent user experience, particularly around payments.

Here's my final "what if". What if subscription payments were built into the browser or reader, with the vendor itself taking a small cut (in the same way that Apple takes 0.15% of Apple Pay purchases)?

For example: let's say I browse to a website using Mozilla Firefox. That website has some metadata in its HTML which indicates that (1) a feed is available, and (2) there are payment tiers.

Firefox lets me know that I can subscribe to that website's content with an unobtrusive icon or notification. When I click, it shows me the tiers available. When I hit subscribe, Firefox starts to pull feed content in a built-in reader. When it pulls feeds, it identifies me in the HTTP header with a pseudonymous hash code. For the purposes of this conversation, I'm user 123456 (the same combination I have on my luggage).

When I pay, funds are sent directly to the website owner, with a small cut going to Mozilla itself, and another small cut going to WordPress, which powers the site. Funds are transferred behind the scenes in stablecoins (probably), with Mozilla providing a credit card interface to me so I don't have to know or care about crypto. It tells the website owner that I'm user 123456, and that I've paid. The website verifies the payment, and next time a feed is requested for user 123456, it adds in any paid content. Unlock did this provably, using the blockchain: anyone can build an API which verifies independently that user A has access to paid content from user B.

From the user's perspective it looks like this: they can see that a website they're on has content that can be subscribed to. When they hit "subscribe" in the browser, they're prompted to choose a tier if paid tiers exist. And then they can read content and manage their subscriptions in a built-in reader.

For users like me, my existing feed reader can do the same thing: detect paid options, and pay for them if I want. The feed reader vendor gets the cut of the funds.

Cross-device syncing is taken care of by the browser vendor: my Firefox account already keeps my bookmarks and history up to date everywhere I have Firefox installed. Chrome and Safari users have a similar mechanism. Subscriptions would piggyback on these existing accounts.

The end result is a web where any creator can make money from their content and any reader can subscribe to it, without having it further clutter an email inbox that they already resent. Because browsers, feed readers, and content management platforms take a small cut of payments, they're incentivized to innovate around the model and build new products. Browser vendors like Mozilla can stop making most of their money from search engine deals. Nobody is forced to rely on Facebook or Twitter for distribution. Targeted ads die. And the internet is more decentralized and healthier for everyone.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a force for good who transformed America for the better. She fought for justice, and particularly the rights of women, for her entire life. She was inspiring and impactful; dedicated and fiercely intelligent; a genuinely good person who single-handed lay became one of the cornerstones of our modern democracy.

"When I'm sometimes asked 'When will there be enough (women on the Supreme Court)?' and my answer is: 'When there are nine.' People are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

She was an example for all of us. May she have paved the way for many more women to follow.

It's unfortunate that her many accomplishments and her remarkable legacy are overshadowed by our current political situation. Nonetheless, we are forced to consider what will happen now she's gone. Mitch McConnell, ever the ghoulishly ethics-free opportunist, used his statement on Justice Ginsburg's passing to promise a Republican-appointed replacement. Ignoring the obvious hypocrisy of this idea (compare this to his statement on Garland's nomination in 2016), we have to consider what America will look like after decades of not just a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives, but one dominated by this kind of conservative: nationalist verging on fascist, with a desire to undo women's rights and remake the nation to fit an evangelical model.

If you're an American citizen, please check that you're registered to vote - and then make sure you do so. Our democracy can't take four more years of this.