Werd I/O

I grew up writing. As a child, I would wake up early every morning to write stories with my plastic Parker fountain pen before school. We always had reams of paper on our dining room table, lying in wait.

I learned to code not because I loved discrete logic or the power of algorithms, but because I decided that computers could help me tell stories in a different way. For me, the best source code has a narrative flow, which in turn operates in service of the narrative of the user. Code is an expressive, creative, human medium - but only if it is used to tell a story.

Stories are important.

In a novel, the story finds its compelling core from the tension between the main character's inner goals and an important change in their external context. For example, take an alien invasion in isolation: while it's a dramatic setting, it's not particularly compelling in a vacuum. But let's zoom in on the main character. Maybe they've lost a loved one through an act of violence, which has made them want to shy away from any kind of conflict and keep to themselves. Unfortunately, now they happen to be the only person who holds the key to stopping the alien invasion - if they can only rise to the occasion.

It's a far more interesting story. An alien invasion itself isn't compelling, despite the pyrotechnics; what draws you in is the human story of someone who undergoes a personal transformation because of the invasion. We're naturally empathetic animals; we care about other people. We relate to the process of human change on a deep emotional level more than we relate to abstract ideas.

It took me a long time to understand this.

Startups, too, have a story. Just as a novel needs to be character-focused, a startup's idea alone isn't enough. Don't get me wrong, you need a smart idea - but for your startup to be a truly compelling prospect, you need to tell the human story of someone who undergoes a personal transformation because of what you've built. You have to imagine the novel of your venture.

My first venture, Elgg, was a stroke of luck. We had no idea what we were doing. Perhaps because of that, we fell back on the fundamentals of story: we tried hard to understand the internal needs of our customers and their external context, and built a product to address them at the intersection.

My second venture as a co-founder, Known, was not so lucky. Instead of centering it on real human needs, we built something that we thought should exist in the world. We centered our own desires, and I failed to get out of the way of my own ego. The result was that while Elgg is still in use, and was used by governments, non-profits, and corporations around the world, Known was never able to find escape velocity. It was intellectually driven and founded on a good idea (it's really dangerous for everyone in the world to get their news and post their social activity on just a handful of platforms), but was never able to find its emotional center. Because the story was missing, it was never truly compelling to us, let alone anyone else. So it floundered.

Imagine an accounting service. Is your heart racing yet?

Probably not. (Sorry, accountants.)

But now, let's talk about the main character. Imagine someone who owns a small business in the middle of the country. This company was already stretched thin because of widening income inequality, and now has to stretch even further to make ends meet because of the pandemic. Financial hardship means that employees sometimes don't show up for work because they can't afford to fix their car, or because childcare is out of reach for them. The business owner genuinely cares: they've been making one-time loans and running a hardship fund to bridge the gap. But if they're not careful, they'll run out of money, and everyone will be out of work - so they need to find creative ways to provide help to employees and stay in business.

This far more compelling story sits at the intersection of the top-down trends (the financial situation, the pandemic) and the bottom-up needs (business owners need to help in order to keep their employees but are having trouble finding the funds). It's a tightrope. Given enough specificity, we can be made to feel the business owner's pain.

The customer (here, the business owner) is the first character in the story. The startup (here, the accounting service) is the second. First, the customer is introduced, complete with internal need and external pressure. Then the startup is introduced: a group of humans who provide a solution for both the need and the pressure (a one-click way to help find hidden reserves of funding employee assistance programs, at a negligible cost). They meet somehow (the "discovery moment") and ride off into the sunset together, living happily ever after. The customer's pain is solved. The startup's value is proven.

Of course, if this was a pitch, the startup would have to talk about how it's going to meet millions of these customers and grow like wildfire because it meets their needs so well. In turn, it meets their needs because the product is built in service of a business strategy that is informed by empathy. It's not built to be something for everyone: it's built to service the deeply-held needs of a specific group of customers.

In my time as an early-stage investor, I saw how important that human understanding is. The founders who could get out of their own way and be led by their understanding of the people they were serving are the ones who were more likely to win. The founders and coders who thought they were the smartest people in the room and didn't try to find a deeper understanding were the ones who found themselves in trouble.

I've been both kinds of founder. It's a lesson you only need to learn once.

The key to story is that it's all about people: how they change and grow. If your novel doesn't hinge on that, nobody's going to read to the end. If your business doesn't hinge on that, nobody's going to care what you do - not even your own team. The first step is to find out who your characters are, and understand them as deeply as you can. Then, tell a specific, visceral story that your entire community can rally behind.

These days, I don't need reams of paper sitting on the dining room table, but I still wake up early to write stories. Being able to use imagination and empathy as building blocks feels like a gift. As it turns out, it's one we all have access to. We just need to read more, and care more.

Photo by Nong Vang on Unsplash

It's impossible to ignore.

Federal agents dressed in military gear have been bundling protesters into unmarked vehicles (allegedly rented from Enterprise) in Portland, with additional reports from Chicago and San Diego. The White House has announced that they'll be rolling these troops out nationwide.

Reports suggest that these agents are run by the Department of Homeland Security under the same law that allows the Federal Protective Service (also a DHS agency) to protect federal facilities. ICE, CBP, and FPS are now effectively a federal political police force, operating at the whim of the President.

At the same time, the President told Fox News this weekend that he isn't necessarily going to accept the result of the election if he loses, in part because of mail-in ballots. He's been drumming the mail-in ballot line for months now, despite there being no evidence of voter fraud using this method. We're in the middle of a pandemic: of course there will be an increase in mail-in voting. It's certainly how I plan to do it. By seeding the idea that this kind of voting is fraudulent in a year when a huge proportion of votes will be cast this way, the administration opens the door to deny the outcome of the election.

Such an act would be the end of the American experiment. America depends on the government making way for its constitutionally-elected successor; without this mechanism, there is no democracy, and there is no representation. The richest country in the world, with by far the world's largest military, would be under the direct control of Donald Trump.

It sounds like science fiction. It rhymes with a Philip K Dick story. But here we are.

"It can't happen here" doesn't carry any weight anymore, if it ever did. It is. It would be easy to dismiss the rhetoric as bluster if it weren't for the troops in our cities, the concentration camps on our borders, and the corrupt profiteering eating away at our institutions.

Which isn't to say that those institutions were in any way perfect. I think people like to believe in the theory that Trump is a Russian asset because they like to think that nothing like this could be American. But this is a country of Jim Crow and domestic assassinations; it's the country that aided in the Iranian revolution and paid Osama bin Laden to build an army. This kind of fascism is as American as apple pie (which is to say, invented in Europe and coated with a little extra sugar). I'm not, to be clear, saying that Trump isn't necessarily a foreign asset. But it certainly isn't a given that he is; divisiveness and bigotry have been a part of the culture since the Europeans invaded.

I can see a few possible futures, all unfolding like a slow-motion train wreck.

In the first, Trump wins the election fair and square, and considers his re-election to be a mandate. Don't discount it.

In the second, he loses to Biden, and concedes. People with a sense of human decency everywhere rejoice. And then either the Democrats rapidly undo as much of the last four years as they can, or disappointingly squander those first two years in power as its conservative wing desperately fights against the improvements demanded by its progressive wing.

In the third, he loses to Biden and doesn't concede. This is the one where America ends. At the point where an election is meaningless, democracy is meaningless. The modern day version of the Reichstag passing the Enabling Act under the threat of the gun is passing emergency powers under the threat of information about our representatives being made public.

I would like to be wrong.

I would also like all this to be over.

I would like to not be thinking about what to do if the third future comes to pass.

But it's very hard to ignore, and to concentrate on the details of the rest of our lives while this unfolds as we stand by, powerless.

We're not quite powerless, of course. We can still vote (and we must). We can support institutions like the ACLU that fight for our freedoms. We can support journalism, which more than ever is the vital connective tissue for democratic society. We can march. And we can use our own voices, in our own spaces and with our own communities, to raise the alarm.

The European Court of Justice just struck down a key data-sharing deal between the US and EU because the US sees fit to spy on the world.

Privacy Shield was a mechanism that allowed US tech companies to operate in the EU using a blanket agreement. By creating a compliant privacy policy and self-certifying, they could operate within Europe's tighter personal data protection environment. It operated like a kind of safe harbor program: there was no need to create a privacy policy specifically for EU residents, and companies that complied with its principles could assume that they were operating within the law. GDPR fines start at the higher of 10 million Euros or 2% of the company's worldwide revenues in the preceding year, so this was both a legally and financially meaningful protection.

It was knocked down on Thursday because of America's mass surveillance programs.

In November, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order which, among other things, made it clear that US privacy law would only protect US citizens and "lawful permanent residents" (in other words, surveillance of non-citizens living elsewhere or undocumented immigrants is permitted):

Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.

This was effectively a clarification of existing policy rather than a new regulation. Because agencies like the NSA have historically had no restrictions on collecting data about overseas foreigners, tech companies that transmitted personal data into the US would be exposing that data to broad surveillance in violation of EU law. As we know from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, those surveillance powers are often used on US citizens too, and information sharing between the US and UK allowed intelligence agencies to skirt around privacy laws in both countries.

While undoubtedly imperfect, GDPR had a very positive side effect: although it only pertained to EU residents, its effects were felt worldwide. It's not feasible to create one data storage protocol for one set of users and another for others, so in effect, at many tech companies, all user data was held in a way that complied with the legislation.

Here, too, the effects are likely to be felt worldwide. In addition to the existing compelling moral case, there's now a strong business case for international corporations to push for an end to mass surveillance: the loss of Privacy Shield is a real risk to their bottom lines. As privacy activist Max Schrems, who originally brought the case, put it:

As the EU will not change its fundamental rights to please the NSA, the only way to overcome this clash is for the US to introduce solid privacy rights for all people – including foreigners. Surveillance reform thereby becomes crucial for the business interests of Silicon Valley.

Mass surveillance is a human rights abuse that has a measurable chilling effect on free speech and democracy. Surveillance capitalism has long been a go-to business model for tech startups, although this has been slowly changing during the last few years, in part because of pressure surrounding human rights abuses by agencies like ICE, but also because targeted advertising turns out to be less valuable than hoped. Anything that further aligns the business community with an individual's human right to privacy is good news.

Meanwhile, US legislators continue to work to erode our privacy. The EARN IT Act will pressure tech companies to eliminate end-to-end encryption so that communications can be directly surveilled. It serves as a stark contrast to the Privacy Shield ruling, and a reminder of the wildly divergent priorities on either side of the Atlantic.

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

Back in April, I tweeted this about how I thought Covid-19 would go down over the next few months:

My working assumptions: we’re not leaving lockdown until the end of August / beginning of September, and there will be a second wave after this, because it’ll still be too early. We’ll see layoffs even at seemingly wealthy companies. Social distancing until at least 2022.

At the time, people were telling me that I should prepare to be in lockdown for maybe another month (so, until two months ago). There had been lots of talk about everything being up and running for Easter (April 12), or for Memorial Day (May 25). My tweet looked like doom-saying pessimism.

If anything, my assessment now seems overly optimistic. The World Health Organization is now saying we'll have it under control in 3 to 5 years; Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says we won't have a vaccine until 2021 (which in itself is very fast); almost 40% of healthcare executives think a vaccine won't be made available to all until 2022. Social distancing is likely to be with us for some time to come, and with it, a real change to the way all of us live. This will be true all over the world, but particularly in the United States, where leadership and our own hubris have continued to spectacularly fail us.

Here in the US, 73% of companies plan to keep at least some workers permanently remote; 30 million people lost their jobs because of the pandemic; at the time of writing we're in the last week of the $600/week of federal unemployment benefits (unless Congress extends this help). No matter what happens next, the effect of this era will be felt for generations.

Unfortunately, this is particularly true in communities of color. Indigenous and Black Americans are five times more likely than white Americans to be hospitalized because of the virus. Hispanic or Latinx Americans are four times more likely than white Americans.

We should have been mentally preparing ourselves for a long pandemic this whole time. Assuming these figures hold, the following is true for the foreseeable:

We are not going back to the office.

We are not going to resume the same kind of social activities we're used to.

We are not going to conferences, or to the movies, or to conventions.

We are going to need to adapt.

It's difficult to imagine how we would have coped before the internet. For the last few decades, it's slowly become ingrained in all of our lives. For the last few months, it's become the way all of our lives can operate: famously through Zoom (which is now worth 78X its revenue), but also Slack, Facebook, and all of the apps and services that keep us in touch with each other. All of these services were created long before Covid; it's going to be interesting to see the services people create to cope with the specific challenges of the pandemic. I am hopeful that while some of those services will be startups, others will be open source collectives of people who want to help.

It's also difficult to imagine how our current systems of care can cope. A pandemic makes clear that we are, as individuals, only as healthy as we are as a society: if lots of people have a deadly, infectious disease, I'm more likely to get it too, no matter what healthcare plan I'm on. It's in all of our interests to establish a genuine social care system that allows everyone to be safe and healthy - and in a world where millions of people continue to lose their jobs every month, it's vitally important that this safety net isn't tied to employment. Healthcare must be a human right. Housing must be a human right, with strong tenant protections. Food must be a human right. The fallacy that every single thing needs to be a free market must come to an end.

We're going through a period of major change, and we're still only on the first foothills. There's a long, hard road ahead. Surviving the next few years will mean covering new ground, and redefining a great deal of how society works.

Most importantly, we will need to finally learn to work together.

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

As a manager, I believe my primary role is to create the conditions for my team to do their best work. I'm a proponent of servant leadership. That's become even more important this year, for obvious reasons: we're in the middle of a pandemic that has also had significant economic effects. We're all working remotely (which I've done for over a decade, but is new for this company); we all have significant extra stresses in our lives.

I've always felt that one of the opportunities for smaller startups is to provide stronger professional development. Whereas other, richer companies can provide eye-watering salaries and kombucha on tap, smaller ventures have the ability to provide more flexibility in support of an employee's personal goals. The result can be a level-up in skills and experience that is far in excess of what might be possible in a more rigid organization of thousands of people. By working at very small startups, I've been able to get my hands dirty working in an interdisciplinary way, and I've developed a mindset of action over discussion; I don't think my career would have been possible without this experience. I want to provide that to the people who I support.

There's no great manual for this, although I consider myself to always be learning. Here are some things I've found useful, which I'm putting out as a request for feedback as much as anything else. I'd love to learn what other managers have found useful, and I'd love for thoughts on the techniques I've been using.

I'm a happy user of Range, which helps us plan our days, check in with each other, and understand each other a little bit better. We've found that it also helps to have live standups every day, and we have a tactical meeting every week, but the Range updates are a low-friction, high-empathy way to keep everyone on the same page about the work going on.

The 1:1 has become the most important way for me to support each member of the team. I make sure that I spend time with every engineer on my team; the space is theirs to bring up anything that's important to them, and I've often found myself helping with external factors that might also be affecting their work. I want to support the whole human, and it's often stretched me as a person.

How you show up in this framework is incredibly important. As a servant leader, it's much more about being a coach than, for example, being a teacher or a micromanager. This year, I found Ed Batista's course The Art of Self-Coaching to be really useful; normally it's a part of Stanford's MBA program, but a version was made available to all because of the pandemic. It's helped me formalize some thoughts around growth vs fixed mindsets in particular, as well as be more self-aware about how my own thoughts and feelings affect my team and my work.

They own the agenda. I always start a 1:1 by asking what's top of mind for them. Sometimes, the resulting discussion can take up the whole meeting; occasionally it'll overflow into follow-ons. I'll sometimes prod with questions like "what are you excited about?" and "what are you worried about?", which will reveal topics that hadn't readily risen to the surface.

A while back, I asked everyone to work on a professional development plan. I've seen a lot of development plans that are just about identifying what someone wants to learn, or how someone can improve, without really touching on the "why" of it. Particularly for younger engineers, that might not be something they've thought too deeply about, so I wanted to create a better framework for figuring that out.

Here's a lightly redacted version of the template I came up with. If it's helpful to you, please feel free to adapt and use it (I'm also very interested in feedback). It asks the owner to think about what their mission at their work is - what do they want to achieve over the course of their career? It specifically offers my own mission, as well as another sample mission, as examples. Following this, it asks about their goals - where do they want to be a few years from now? Again, I offer examples, including for myself. And finally, it asks what the tactical next steps are towards getting there. (This is analogous to the mission, vision and strategy of a company.)

That mission and vision might not involve working at the company forever; the colleague might want to found a startup, for example. That's completely okay. The answers to each of these things might not come readily; that's an opportunity for us to work together to figure it out. But once we have some of those answers, particularly to the tactical next steps, I make sure to refer to them during every 1:1. Are we making progress towards these goals together? What else can I do to help?

Finally, I'll sometimes use a feedback exercise I learned at Matter. This is something that's been harder to reproduce while we've all been remote; I'm planning on building a lightweight web tool to support it. But in person, I've found it to be very useful in a variety of situations. The jist is: on 6 Post-Its, you provide feedback for yourself (3 supportive items, 2 things you'd change, and 1 item that reflects how you're feeling about your work), and then you do the same for the other person. Then you provide that feedback for the other person, who has also provided feedback for themselves and for you. Because everyone is being vulnerable and taking care to be mindful of how they express themselves, the exercise results in a kind of radical honesty that's usually hard to achieve at work. It has the power to clear the air, identify opportunities for real growth, and find wins that you might not realize existed. I love it.

You may have noticed that despite being a product and engineering leader, almost none of this is directly to do with product and engineering. I've certainly got opinions on how to, for example, run brainstorms and retros; I've also got opinions on how to think about building software. We often talk about those things in these conversations. But the core of being a manager is about supporting the people you work with. That's more about the touchy-feely human stuff than anything else.

If you have resources, ideas, or feedback on any of the above, I'd love to hear them. I'm always learning, and I could always do better.

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

Last week I suddenly felt horrendous: I felt deeper fatigue than I had in years, I was experiencing severe headaches, and I was finding it hard to think straight. My daily work has become a series of Zoom meetings, and I careened from scheduled event to scheduled event, hoping I could just get through it.

Of course, this being 2020, I began to worry about Covid-19. I spend most of my time right now around my immunosuppressed mother, who is not doing well completely independently of the pandemic, and I'm deeply worried that I'll somehow transmit something to her. I'm a little bit worried about the virus for myself, too, but to be honest, I have no idea what my life looks like beyond all this - not just beyond the pandemic, but also beyond my family's health journey.

I don't have Covid; I just came dangerously close to burning out.

Lately, I've learned that too many stimuli lead to my feeling physically wrecked. It's not just that the notifications, messages, and tiny dopamine hits make me feel mentally overwhelmed, but they start to push me to the right of the bell curve of physical anxiety symptoms. I need to rate-limit and sanitize my inputs, otherwise my outputs suffer.

At this point, my social media hiatus from Thanksgiving through to New Year's Day has become a tradition. I always feel better. It's got very little to do with the actual content of social media - although endless outrage is inevitably wearing, it's not like any of the outrage is actually misplaced - and more to do with the physical mechanisms of the software itself. The interaction mechanics that keep us coming back for more, designed to juice the engagement statistics, undeniably increase my anxiety - if only just a little.

Which I think would be fine if it wasn't 2020. We're in the middle of a global, deadly pandemic. My mother is dying. My father is getting older. My sister has become long-term disabled with chronic pain. I have a demanding job (which, to be clear, I love). The President of the United States continues to show his true colors as a racist and a fascist. And the blowback from the world's largest civil rights movement - a point of hope in itself - is staggering, even within my own extended family. Finally, there was an event in my extended family this week that I don't even begin to want to talk about here.

Given all this, the baseline of stress is much further to the right of the anxiety bell curve, which means that stimuli which would ordinarily be tolerable are less so. Again, it's not so much about the content of the stimuli: I've even discovered that playing Stardew Valley, a lovely little computer game about running a farm, has been sometimes too much.

I'd like to remain functional, be able to show up well at work, and support my family and friends in the way I would like. So that means cutting out stimuli.

Rather than cutting things out wholesale, I'm going to aim for moderation, at least to start. I like that Screen Time has made its way to MacOS from the iOS / iPadOS devices. Because my screen time goals sync between them, I can allocate myself 30 minutes a day for game playing, for example, and 45 minutes for social media. (Because RSS feeds and blogging are not rapid-fire, I don't feel the need to ration them.) I've also made a concerted effort to bring down my Zoom meeting load by around a third, giving me more contemplative time at work.


I recognize that talking about burnout and cognitive stamina isn't really the done thing - I think I'm supposed to be hustling? Shouldn't I be building a personal brand based on excellence and productivity? But that's exactly why I'm talking about it here. We all need to look after ourselves and each other, now more than ever. I spend a lot of my time caring for others, and it can be easy to forget self-care. But the old adage of needing to put your own oxygen mask on first is true. I need to do better at remembering that, and maybe you do too.

Here's the media I consumed and found interesting in June.

Apps

Linear. A super-powerful bug tracker designed to speed teams up. I'm using it for personal projects right now, but I might expand that. I particularly like how it connects to GitHub issues, and how it inherits just the right things from Jira's classic design, while discarding the rest.

Streaming

13th. I saw this for the first time in June - and regret being super-late to the party. The entire movie is up on YouTube. If you haven't yet, educate yourself.

Dark Season 3. If you haven't checked out Dark yet, you're missing something. Watch it in its original German with English subtitles. And maybe keep notes: its human-centered science fiction story is densely plotted to say the least. Season 3 adds a whole new dimension, literally.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I needed this. It's a giant ad for the song contest, really. Which is fine, because I happen to love the song contest. One of those objectively terrible movies that brought me a lot of joy.

Books

Blood Dazzler, by Patricia Smith. The story of Hurricane Katrina told through poetry. Blood Dazzler is heart-wrenching work. Patricia Smith is - as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, among other things - a four-time National Poetry Slam champion, and the spoken-word rhythm underlying her work is impossible to ignore.

Notable Articles

Black Lives Matter

How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change. "So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform." Barack Obama on Black Lives Matter.

Black Journalists and Covering the Storm That Never Passes. "I can’t tell you how many times I, or someone on my team, has cried into their laptops over the injustices inflicted daily on black people, who have gone to bed with anxiety over what looms in the morning, in the aftermath of another violent act against our humanity."

Why So Many Police Are Handling the Protests Wrong. "Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave—and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force—wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters—it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?"

The American Nightmare. "But only the lies of racist Americans are great. Their American dream—that this is a land of equal opportunity, committed to freedom and equality, where police officers protect and serve—is a lie. Their American dream—that they have more because they are more, that when black people have more, they were given more—is a lie. Their American dream—that they have the civil right to kill black Americans with impunity and that black Americans do not have the human right to live—is a lie." Ibram X. Kendi is the author of How to Be an Antiracist.

Stop focusing on looting in Minneapolis. Be outraged that police keep killing black men. A good opinion from the LA Times editorial board. The constant commentary from people who believe property is more imporant than the murder of a community is sickening.

This Is Fascism. "The message of this federal government is unambiguous. It has been conveyed in part by Customs and Border Protection, the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S.—a force shot through with racism and tyranny, now charged with carrying out Trump’s most knee-jerk nativist impulses—which announced Sunday that it was mobilizing officers to augment police forces “confronting the lawless actions of rioters.”"

Thousands of Americans across the US are peacefully marching against police violence. A beautiful photo record of the protests.

'We Just Want to Live.' Photographers Share What They Experienced While Covering Protests Across America. More vital photo record.

How Did BlackOutTuesday Go So Wrong So Fast? I believe this was deliberately co-opted. he net result was that black voices were silenced on social media for days.

Don’t Fall for the ‘Chaos’ Theory of the Protests. "Why were peaceful protesters being tear-gassed, on national TV? Because Trump and his aides—nearly all of them men and every one of them white—had decided to punctuate his speech with a walk across Lafayette Square to a church where Trump posed, clutching a Bible. What became even clearer, though, was that the Bible-posing was not the photo op the Trump administration was aiming for; the clearing of Lafayette Square was. The video that played out on CNN’s split screen was a document of state power in action: the president, his will made manifest; the protesters, their eyes reddened from tear gas, forced to make way for the leader."

The Police Take the Side of White Vigilantes. "Who are the cops for? Over the last week, all across the country, in ways large and small, they’ve shown us." The slave catchers are living up to their legacy.

We Crunched the Numbers: Police — Not Protesters — Are Overwhelmingly Responsible for Attacking Journalists. "Police are responsible for the vast majority of assaults on journalists: over 80 percent." From the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world. "Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable." Fingers crossed.

Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop. "American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth."

The Police Have Been Spying on Black Reporters and Activists for Years. I Know Because I’m One of Them. And if you're not familiar with COINTELPRO, it's worth reading up on that, too.

‘To see this, I am honored’: Brother of man killed by Seattle police reflects on time in CHAZ. "If John were here, he would be honored. All my heart and soul show this will work. The government is listening, that we have had enough. I’m proud of this."

Recall That Ice Cream Truck Song? We Have Unpleasant News For You. ""N***** Love A Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!" merits the distinction of the most racist song title in America. Released in March 1916 by Columbia Records, it was written by actor Harry C. Browne and played on the familiar depiction of black people as mindless beasts of burden greedily devouring slices of watermelon."

Elsewhere in American fascism

Dozens Of Immigrant Families Who Were Separated At The Border Likely Shouldn't Have Been, An Internal Report Found. "The inspector general's report found that 40 children were separated from their parents for at least four weeks, although one didn't see their family for more than a year."

Political Symbols at Demonstrations. "Researchers at the Tow Center and Columbia’s Journalism and Engineering schools have developed a tool that can help reporters decipher the symbols and acronyms used by political groups which may be helpful as they report on political actions now and during the election season." The far right is out in force.

A letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Pentagon policy official James Miller's resignation letter. "You have made life-and-death decisions in combat overseas; soon you may be asked to make life-and-death decisions about using the military on American streets and against Americans. Where will you draw the line, and when will you draw it?"

James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution. "Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us [...] We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children."

The Real Apprentice. "At this time, most native New Yorkers saw Trump as a bit of a joke: a fame-thirsty, tasteless rake with a history of high-end failure. He made disastrous deals, like the Plaza Hotel. His airline failed almost as soon as it began. He even found a way to go bankrupt on casinos. But on television, through careful editing—turning three hours into thirty seconds—Mark Burnett made Trump seem decisive, funny, and likeable."

How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The US. "Rumors of roving bands of Antifa have followed small protests all over the United States. Why are people so ready to believe them?" There's a lot of value in keeping people scared - particularly of a bogeyman that seeks to undermine your ideology.

No, Trump probably can’t list antifa as a ‘terrorist group.’ Here’s what he’s really doing. "The Trump administration is unlikely to designate antifa a terrorist group in counterterrorism law. If it did, that designation would be difficult to enforce, since antifa is not really an organization. Nor is it clear how much antifa supporters have committed actual terrorism. But Trump’s announcement could suggest that U.S. counterterrorism agencies are shifting their priorities. This is worth watching."

The U.S. Military Has a Boogaloo Problem. "Some of the largest private Facebook groups catering to the [neo-confederate] boogaloo movement have scores of members who identify as active-duty military."

‘State-sanctioned violence’: US police fail to meet basic human rights standards. "Police in America’s biggest cities are failing to meet even the most basic international human rights standards governing the use of lethal force, a new study from the University of Chicago has found."

America’s wholesome square dancing tradition is a tool of white supremacy. It turns out this information is still not widely known.

And finally, two pieces of good news from the Supreme Court: Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules; California’s ‘sanctuary’ cities rules stay in place after Supreme Court rejects Trump’s challenge.

Technology

A New iOS Shortcut Blurs Faces and Wipes Metadata for Protest Images. Neat!

IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology. I was very pleasantly surprised by this ethical stance. "In his letter, [IBM CEO] Krishna also advocated for police reform, arguing that more police misconduct cases should be put under the purview of federal court and that Congress should make changes to qualified immunity doctrine, among other measures."

The Racial Bias Built Into Photography. "Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market."

Black tech founders say venture capital needs to move past ‘diversity theater’. "There’s a dearth of black investors in venture capital’s upper echelons and little investment in start-ups with black founders".

This startup is working to bring full anonymity to the internet. Kudos to Harry Halpin and his team.

Pinwheel is the API platform for income verification that every fintech and neobank needs. Meanwhile, a quiet fintech revolution is taking place. As always, in a gold rush, you make money providing spades (building infrastructure that others can build on).

Colin Kaepernick to Join Medium Board of Directors. Kudos to Ev and everyone at Medium.

Facebook Pitched New Tool Allowing Employers to Suppress Words Like “Unionize” in Workplace Chat Product. "One Facebook employee who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity said he saw the blacklisting feature, with a suggested use case around unionization, as a clear effort to give employers the ability to exert control over employees." It would be illegal for an employer to use this, right? Right?

Facebook Groups Are Destroying America. "Dynamics in groups often mirror those of peer-to-peer messaging apps: People share, spread, and receive information directly to and from their closest contacts, whom they typically see as reliable sources. To make things easier for those looking to stoke political division, groups provide a menu of potential targets organized by issue and even location; bad actors can create fake profiles or personas tailored to the interests of the audiences they intend to infiltrate. This allows them to seed their own content in a group and also to repurpose its content for use on other platforms." I'm a little skeptical of this, but it's worth reading.

The Ghost in the Machine. "We could expect a Black programmer, immersed as she is in the same systems of racial meaning and economic expediency as the rest of her co-workers, to code software in a way that perpetuates racial stereotypes. Or, even if she is aware and desires to intervene, will she be able to exercise the power to do so?" A good exploration of the ideas in Dr Ruha Benjamin's excellent Race After Technology.

He Removed Labels That Said “Medical Use Prohibited,” Then Tried to Sell Thousands of Masks to Officials Who Distribute to Hospitals. "Using TaskRabbit and Venmo, a Silicon Valley investor and his business partner had workers repackage non-medical KN95 masks so he could sell them to Texas emergency workers." This is overt, life-threatening fraud.

How to Know You’re Not Insane (And how a Cards Against Humanity Staff Writer was fired.) My copy - acquired at XOXO in the early days - is finally finding its way into the recycling bin.

And finally

The Seven Billion Habits of Highly Effective Robots. A cute science fiction short.

Nine months ago, I joined ForUsAll as Head of Engineering. It's my first fintech company.

Long-term readers will know that I've spent most of my life in the open source web world, building one of the first white label social networking platforms, and in media, where I helped build the way journalists at networks like NBC securely send footage back to the newsroom. Every startup I've ever joined has had a strong social mission; here, in the midst of widening income inequality, we're trying to help ordinary people build a stronger financial future.

This is my personal space; opinions here, as in all of my posts, are mine alone.

Here are some things I've observed.

1. Financial technology is broken.

It's common for financial institutions to have web platforms that look like they were built in 1998. Some of them were. I'm certain that some smaller institutions are running their software on decrepit Windows servers. APIs are virtually nonexistent. Interoperability between institutions is often in the form of faxes (you read that correctly; please breathe) or checks in the mail.

Over in Europe, open banking has become an important movement. It's inevitable that institutions in the US will need to modernize to adopt similar ideas. The institutions that haven't invested in in-house technology, or don't have strong technology partnerships, are going to find themselves in very rocky waters.

Elsewhere, businesses understand that open, standard APIs are a way to build ecosystems and gain value through partnerships. They also understand that they need to build technical teams that are first-class contributors to the business. In the financial sector, a very closed, old-world view of technology is still prevelant. The institutions that can't let go of these archaic mindsets will eventually die. There's a new batch of fintech startups - ForUsAll among them, alongside the likes of Chime and Digit - that will take their place and redefine the ecosystem.

Which brings me to ...

2. Scraping is everywhere.

Plaid was recently acquired by Visa for $5.3 billion. It provides a unified auth and limited API for most institutions. Its connections are sort of flaky, but it's remarkably better than the previous status quo.

And it largely works using Puppeteer.

Because institutions don't have APIs, Plaid spends a lot of time and energy maintaining headless browsers to log into banking websites on your behalf. In order to be able to log in, it has to be saving your banking password in plain text. (Compare and contrast with a typical API, which would use secure, revokable tokens for authentication.)

If you're connecting to a bank using Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and others, you're probably saving your banking password in plain text in Plaid. Infuriatingly, because there are no APIs, let alone API standards, there's very little alternative. But it's worth saying that if you're giving credentials to a third party, many banks will absolve themselves of any liability in a data breach.

3. Operations teams are vital.

The first rule of technology on the internet is that if it looks like magic, there's probably an army of people in an office park somewhere (often the Philippines) making it happen. In the finance world, a lot of the magic isn't done by technology as much as teams of people whose role is to reconcile data and perform financial operations that can't be automated.

There's room for a kind of Financial Operations as a Service platform - but because of the sensitive data involved, the workers on demand would need to be certified, heavily insured, and security tested. You'd also lose their most important feature: the institutional knowledge about a customer that is grown when you spend time with them.

4. There's a lot of opportunity for growth.

Institutional technology myopia means there's a lot of room for innovators to enter the market and change it for the better.

But there's also a lot of opportunity to create ecosystems. Perhaps that's even how you win: create an open ecosystem that allows institutions to easily interoperate with each other in a peer-to-peer, secure way. The older institutions won't bother to connect, but the newer ones could potentially form alliances and band together. Eventually, the incumbent institutions will have to join in.

Imagine a banking system built on openness, human-centered design, software libraries, SDKs, and running code, instead of armies of Excel spreadsheets and ties behind desks.

Imagine beautiful experiences that give you full control over your money. Imagine institutions that aren't all just controlled by old, white men for their own benefit. Imagine wealth for all.

It sounds kind of good, right?

Now imagine the ecosystem that makes it all possible.

I know what you think that sounds like. I know what many readers are going to say. But trust me:

5. It's not about blockchain.

Programmable money isn't cool. You know what's cool? Money people can use.

I'm sure there will come a time when cryptocurrencies do allow the open banking ecosystem I describe above to be built. But that time isn't now. And while I'm grateful for the people working on building the financial system of 2030, we still need to drag the existing one into the 21st century.

Again: people are, today in 2020, using faxes and paper checks as forms of inter-bank communication. When technology is used, user passwords are often saved in plain text. And many of the people involved don't really see anything wrong with it. Blockchain might be one of the technologies that helps us, but the point isn't about technology; the point is what people are able to do with their money.

6. It is about wealth for all.

So that's what we need to build. We need to build the infrastructure that brings banking in line with today, in that way that the internet is so good at, where gatekeepers are crushed and ordinary people are empowered.

In the nineties, we empowered everyone to communicate. In the 2000s, we let everyone publish. In the 2010s, we put limitless knowledge in everyone's hands, wherever they were. And in the 2020s, we're going to reimagine the financial system to be an open ecosystem where anyone can innovate, for the benefit of us all. The old gatekeepers will give way to new, decentralized tapestries of value, where anyone can share, earn, and save in a way that they fully control.

The 2020s are about tearing down the same old thing and building something more equitable and agile in its place. That's the opportunity - and it's an opportunity for all of us.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Journalist James McLeod examined the data gathered about him by the app for Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee chain:

From my home to my office to a Blue Jays game at Rogers Centre, even all the way to Morocco, where I travelled on vacation last June, the company’s app silently logged my coordinates and relayed them back to its corporate servers.

The app uses tracking technology by Radar Labs, which is also used by a host of other retail apps, including Burger King and DryBar. Users opt into data collection when they begin using the app.

The Supreme Court has held that cellphone location data is generally protected by the Fourth Amendment. That means that law enforcement needs to get a warrant before it can tap this information. The court case actually dealt with cell carrier data, rather than data stored by services like Radar Labs, Facebook, or Foursquare, so between this discrepancy and the ominous word "generally", there's certainly some wiggle room.

The President recently called for anti-fascists to be designated as terrorists. Although legal scholars seem to agree that this isn't going to be possible, this call provides a call to action for law enforcement to focus on protesters (rather than white supremacists, who are the largest domestic terrorism threat).

Geofence warrants allow police to sweep up information from any cellphone that happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. While protests are protected under the Constitution of the United States, many have tried to paint the current civil rights marches as riots, even though violent activity has often been instigated by police. These clashes allow them to obtain blanket rights to search phones that were present during a protest - and of course, in a world where data is in the cloud, they don't need physical access to the device to do so. Republicans like Matt Gaetz have called for surveillance to be stepped up.

Further warrants are possible to obtain from sympathetic judges. The fact is, though, that a lot of location data is available on the open market in a semi-anonymized form - law enforcement can obtain it like any other customer. It's possible to reverse engineer this data to determine an individual's actions and associations over time. This information can and is used to spy on and harass activists.

So when a coffee chain gathers data in this way, presumably for its own commercial intelligence, it is also feeding into a broader surveillance apparatus that can be used to track protesters, determine associations between people, and stifle dissent.

I don't believe that anyone at Tim Hortons is intentionally trying to create a police state - but actions are more important than intentions. It's now up to them, and everyone who builds technology, to do the right thing.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

So far, these are the organizations I've donated to this month:

NAACP
NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Alameda County Community Food Bank
Black Family and Child Services
Peoples' Breakfast
Freedom Fund
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment
Official George Floyd Memorial Fund
Equal Justice Initiative
Southern Poverty Law Center
ACLU

I'm interested in recommendations for other justice organizations. And if you have the means, I encourage you to join me.

Please watch. It's just six minutes and forty-six seconds of your time.

Black lives matter. Black equality matters. Black opportunities matter. Black justice matters.

My Oma taught me to make food. That wasn't exactly her intention: she had become too old and frail to chop vegetables and stand over a hot stove, so I did those things for her. I was her kitchen surrogate. Through her instructions and careful corrections, I learned the superficial mechanics of cooking, and the generations-deep love and attention that goes into making a meal. Indonesian food made with American ingredients. Spices and stories, stirred together. Love and sayur lodeh.

Every morning, more or less as soon as she woke up, she would begin to think about what we would eat for dinner. She would make sure we had the right ingredients, and get to work (and get me to work) hours in advance. Then we would prepare the meal, the two of us, and we would eat it all together. We would spend time together as a family in the evening. Then she would sleep, and the horrors of the concentration camp would creep into her dreams. Through the walls, I would hear her wail and cry throughout the night. Then she would wake up, and begin to think about what we would eat for dinner.

Turlock, California is a small town in the San Joaquin Valley, next door to Modesto, and about two hours west of San Francisco. The air is hot and thick with almond dust, and the last bookstore that sold more than Bibles closed years ago. When my parents moved there in 2002, every radio station played country music, and the roads were littered with disposable American flags. It was less than a year after 9/11, and the feverish patriotism that had followed the attacks was waning.

They had moved from Oxford, a university town where many of the buildings dated back to the 1500s. A steady stream of scholars from around the world made for a cosmopolitan culture, even if the institution itself was long set in its ways. The museums and art galleries were free and numerous. Countless languages could be heard on its streets. Tolkien and Radiohead were among its children. Turlock was a universe away.

But it was important to be there for Oma. Even then, the rising cost of living in the Bay Area was pushing my family out, and as they scattered to the wind, my parents moved in to provide her with a home. That's why, when I graduated from university in Edinburgh with an honors degree in Computer Science and a popular website under my belt, I found my way to Turlock, too.

My Opa died before I was born. He was a leader of the resistance against the Japanese in Indonesia, and before that, the founder of a bank. My Dad's whole family was captured; Opa was placed into a work camp, while Oma and her children were imprisoned separately.

The children survived through Oma's ingenuity. My Dad was a toddler; without her wiles and instincts, I simply wouldn't exist. While the guards weren't looking, she would gather snails from around the camp and secretly cook them. My aunt would quietly escape and swim through the sewers to gather more food. The Japanese guards were brutal. Torture and killings were commonplace in the camp. These were dangerous activities.

When they emigrated back to the Netherlands after the war, escaping the Indonesian National Revolution, their property had been stripped as part of a rejection of colonial rule. (The Dutch, it must be added, were themselves a brutal colonial power.) Eventually, they found their way to California, where they ran a gas station on Highway 12 outside of Sebastopol, and a second one in Bodega Bay, which had previously featured in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. They lived in a small mobile home, and built their lives up from scratch several times. Even when flood waters destroyed their possessions, washing away the physical evidence of their life before, they picked themselves up and started again.

My aunts' lives were interrupted; their educations permanently put on hold. Generations later, this trauma still ripples through my family, waves of hardship emanating from a central event.

My Dad was drafted during the Vietnam War era, and became a non-citizen member of the US Army. It was through this, and the GI Bill that he was able to take advantage of afterwards, that he was able to get an education. He earned degree after degree, and found himself in Berkeley, studying philosophy and leading anti-war protests. He met my mother, an upper middle class Ukrainian Jewish American from upstate New York, herself descended from a family that escaped pogroms and had been forced to build a new life from scratch.

When it became clear that they would have a child, they chose to get married and move to Europe. I was born in Rotterdam and raised in England, the product of the ebbs and flows of immigrants caught in the wake of world-changing events. The toddler who survived the concentration camp earned a PhD in Economics from Oxford.

I wouldn't exist without Oma. When they moved back to California to give her a place to live and become her carers, I was completely supportive. But beyond those first four months in Turlock, the closest place to the Bay Area my parents could afford, I didn't stay.

It was almost a decade later when my mother was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. The persistent cough that had dogged her for years took permanent hold. Her lungs began to scar up and shrivel, and she began to carry oxygen on her back. It became clear that she might not have much longer to live. There was no known cause and no known cure. It wasn't clear that a lung transplant would be possible, or that she would survive it.

So I moved to California to help look after my own parents, just as my parents had moved to look after my Oma. I wanted to be closer and help where I could. It ripped my life apart, and I found myself building it up again from two suitcases.

It's now been close to a decade. My mother often tells me what she wants me to make for dinner. I'll be her surrogate in the kitchen, mixing ingredients together to her instructions. The food I cook is made from spices and the history of all of us, our family and the families like ours, fractals of ebbs and flows of people that form the atoms of history and culture.

This is the world. We're all part of a constantly-changing map of humans caught up in each others' wake: twisting currents in the tide of generations. We are constantly moving and we have always been. All of us are immigrants. All of us belong. All of us survive through kindness and ingenuity, despite the forces of militarism, hate, and intolerance. The only constant is change. The only savior is love.

Here's the media I consumed and found interesting in May.

I'm scared for the world and sick to my stomach about the injustices faced by black communities. The pressure cooker exploded in May, and it looks like June will continue this trend. I hope we can find our way to a more equal, more compassionate world where everyone can live a good life. It certainly feels like we're a long way from it now.

Apps

Stardew Valley. I'm late to the party but hopelessly addicted. It's like a cross between The Sims and The Secret of Monkey Island, with all of the humor and weirdness of the latter. Every time I think I've got a handle on it, it adds a new angle.

MSCHF. Part art project, part commercial enterprise, MSCHF releases a new drop twice a month. They're the people who brought us The Office on Slack, Jesus Shoes, and the cut up Damien Hirst painting.

Streaming

Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children. A timely, pointed documentary on the 30+ African American children and young adults who disappeared or were found murdered between 1979-81. The implications are devastating and highly relevant to what's happening on our streets today.

The Invisible Man. Tense from the first minute, this is a strongly feminist movie about gaslighting that is viscerally terrifying tonally and conceptually. Elisabeth Moss is excellent.

The Valhalla Murders. A taut Icelandic murder mystery that, again, has implications beyond its premise. It sounds like there's going to be a second season; I can't wait.

The Half of It. I expect this to continue to be the most beautiful film I've seen this year. I'm inspired by director Alice Wu, who was a computer scientist working at Microsoft before she changed directions and moved into filmmaking.

Notable Articles

The Pandemic

Flattening the Truth on Coronavirus. Dave Eggers on the convoluted, contradictory advice we're being offered.

“Political Connections and Cronyism”: In Blistering Whistleblower Complaint, Rick Bright Blasts Team Trump’s Pandemic Response. "Two weeks after being pushed out of his post, the former head of a $1.5 billion federal health agency formally accuses top officials of pressuring him to approve unproven chloroquine drugs and award pricey contracts to friends of the administration."

I'm Immunocompromised and Freaking Out About the World Reopening. I'm not immunocompromised, but I have loved ones who are, and this sums up how I feel, too.

 The Curious Case of the People Who Want to “Reopen” America—But Not Wear Masks. "The lesson here is that these stories aren’t really about vaccines or bioweapons or population control. Instead, they’re meta-parables about how the people telling them see themselves and feel about their place in the world."

Life on a Screen. My friend Oliver Mahony on his life working remotely.

‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’ "The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same."

An Incalculable Loss. A remarkable, human New York Times piece on the 100,000+ lives lost to Covid-19.

Black Lives Matter

Proportionate Response. "When destroying a police precinct is a reasonable reaction."

The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe. "Plagues, revolutions, massive wars, collapsed states—these are what reliably reduce economic disparities."

How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another country. "In recent years, the international community has sounded the alarm on the deteriorating political and human rights situation in the United States under the regime of Donald Trump. Now, as the country marks 100,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, the former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence. The fatigue and paralysis of the international community are evident in its silence, America experts say."

The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police. "The coronavirus has slowed much American police work, but the rate of police killings has remained relatively unchanged."

Black Journalists Are Exhausted. "As we’ve heard again and again, these are extraordinary times. However, it’s an especially peculiar time to be a black journalist. The pandemic has laid bare many of the same racial inequities that generations of black journalists have been covering since 1827 when the Freedom’s Journal birthed the black press. While this pandemic is unique, the waves of trauma crashing down on my community are not."

George Floyd’s brother says Trump ‘kept pushing me off’ during phone call. "Philonise Floyd says president dismissed him during a phone conversation – he ‘didn’t give me a chance to even speak’."

Politics

The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros. "How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory."

Trump Is a Superspreader—of Distraction. "An added benefit of trolling, from the President’s perspective, is that it is also diverting the attention of the nation’s many Trump-haters, for whom his prolific stupidities and public feuds offer an endless supply of new outrage."

What Trump doesn't get about his new executive order: it'd backfire. "Trump seems oblivious to the fact that his new executive order, if it were implemented, would almost certainly backfire on him personally."

Culture & Society

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months. It's far more uplifting than the book would have you believe.

The End of Meat Is Here. "If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals."

David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water". "In 2005 author David Foster Wallace delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College. This thoughtful and moving talk inspires in me feelings of grief and anger and terror and hope, a response no doubt influenced by my awareness of Wallace's suicide some 40 months later in September 2008."

Brick Lane’s Beigel Bake reveals recipe for iconic bagels for stay-at-home bakers. Oh hell yes. I miss the Beigel Bake a great deal.

A Window Onto an American Nightmare. "Homelessness afflicts nearly one in five hundred Americans. As a crisis, it’s insidious, because its victims rarely plunge toward the abyss; they slide. Maybe you’ve been couch surfing in between jobs and you overstay your welcome. Maybe you’ve been in Airbnbs while apartment hunting and the search is harder than expected. Maybe, like Hickson, you lived on the momentum of a private dream until you had a reason to put down roots."

The Overlooked Black History of Memorial Day. "Researchers have traced the earliest annual commemoration to women who laid flowers on soldiers’ graves in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., in April 1866. But historians like the Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight have tried to raise awareness of freed slaves who decorated soldiers’ graves a year earlier, to make sure their story gets told too."

Masculinity As Radical Selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the Maskless Men of the Pandemic. "Why is doing what literally billions of women do day after day framed as some terrible ordeal? Where is the headline “Local Man Cannot Parent Own Child”?"

The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms. Pretty.

Journalism

U.S. drops to 45 in ranking of countries based on freedom of the press. "The report calls out Trump as a ‘media-bashing enthusiast’." I mean, to say the least.

Like it or not, Google and Facebook are becoming the leading patrons of the news industry. To be clear: I don't like it at all.

How Civil Didn’t Save Journalism. "Civil indeed helped launch a handful of publications, but it fell short on its promise to solve the media industry’s problems by finding a viable, alternative funding model. This might be because Civil’s mission was always more about investigating the viability of cryptocurrency."

CNN crew released from police custody after they were arrested live on air in Minneapolis. These are dark times.

Technology

Psychicpaper. Fascinating, technical details about a serious bug in iOS. "I dubbed it “psychic paper” because, just like the item by that name that Doctor Who likes to carry, it allows you get past security checks and make others believe you have a wide range of credentials that you shouldn’t have."

Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers. Thank you, Tim Bray. The post on his blog is here.

Deno 1.0. An interesting alternative to Node that disposes of centralized package managers.

The Next Social Era is Here: Why Now Is the Time for Social Products Again. "Now is the best time in eight years to be a Founder of social/communications products, and we believe it will kick off a second wave of product-first Founders who are true artists of their craft."

The power of Open Source in the fight against COVID-19. "In every crisis, Open Source has empowered organizations to do more with less. It's great to see this play out again. Open Source teams have rallied to help and come up with some pretty incredible solutions when times are tough."

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage. "If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You'd net a clean $8 profit per pizza [insert nerdy economics joke about there is such a thing as a free lunch]." Kind of a fun story. But these food delivery startups have extremely screwy economics.

New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data. They're big enough that they can - but others will follow.

Automattic pumps $4.6M into New Vector to help grow Matrix, an open, decentralized comms ecosystem. I met the Matrix team earlier in their journey, when I was still working on Known. I tried to invest in them at Matter, because I knew this would be big, but no dice. I'm excited for their continued success.

The open podcast ecosystem is dying — here’s how to save it. Podcasting is one of the last bastions of popular openness. It is successful and vibrant because it is open. Let's keep that going.

Remote-team managers can learn a lot from open-source communities. "Instead of trying to reinvent management from first principles, we can turn to other areas with experience navigating distributed teams with individuals managing competing commitments. Open-source software communities—which also are remote communities connected by the internet—have long included the role of community managers. These are the people who tend to the health of the community, by maintaining communication, motivation, efficiency, and engagement. It’s a well-honed practice that remote managers can learn a lot from."

Yes, America is burning, and it has always been burning.

And then, in the middle of a pandemic and a financial crisis, with millions of people suddenly out of work and unable to so much as greet each other for fear of contracting a deadly illness, a Minneapolis Police Officer called Derek Chauvin holds his knee down on George Floyd's neck until he becomes unresponsive, and then continues to hold it there for another two minutes and fifty-three seconds.

And this event that rips a man away from his community and the people who love him is just the latest in a long series of killings of black men and boys by police across the country.

And these killings are just another part of the systemic, generational horror that black families have had to endure since before the inception of this country.

And it is no surprise, given the atrocities and indignities faced by them and their ancestors, long lines of families and children, people with hopes and dreams with their necks held down by countless knees, that people have had enough.

And it is no surprise that they march, and that they protest, and that they rise up.

And it is no surprise that our institutions burn, because if this was you, and your history, and your oppression, wouldn't you want to burn it down too?

And it is no surprise, too, that the white supremacists, dressed in Hawaiian shirts that betray their lack of reverence for this horror, march too, and incite violence, seeking to spark a second civil war in order to reassert their own generational power.

And it should not be a surprise, though it might surprise some who have not been watching carefully, that the police drove SUVs into crowds of people, pepper sprayed the elderly in the face, and arrested and shot at journalists who were reporting the violence to their fellow citizens.

And it is no surprise, finally, that the President of the United States, who is sworn to uphold his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, nonetheless, in the midst of all this, quotes word for word a famous call to violence from a racist police chief from the 1960s.

And we - none of us - can avoid making a choice. We can look away and do nothing, or we can help to overcome them and help this country to, for the first time, fully realize its promise.

And the people who look away are in effect supporting the white supremacists and the perpetuators of these horrors, and are one with them.

And the people who help will never be able to help enough, but if they listen, and if they lend their privilege and resources in support of the preservation of black lives, and they let black communities lead, it will be something.

And America will still be burning, but perhaps, over time, if we put value and sweat into building inclusion and equality, it will burn a little less.

...

If you're wondering what to do, here is an open source list of bail funds to donate to.

More and more technology companies are realizing that they're just as productive as a remote team, with lower overheads. Simultaneously, tech employees are realizing that they're better off in an environment where they don't need to commute, can eat their own food, and can spend more time with their families.

I agree. Even without a pandemic going on around me, I vastly prefer working remotely. I get more work done, spend dramatically less time in transit, eat far better, do more exercise, etc. At a time when my parents are in need of more support for health reasons, it's also allowed me to be there for them in a way that I couldn't have been if I was required to be present in an office every day.

Most people prefer their homes - and even the ones that don't are happier in coworking spaces than their own offices. What does that mean for the Bay Area?

So far, house prices have continued to rise. Here's a graph of median house sale prices in San Francisco vs last year:

And in Alameda County (which encompasses Oakland and Berkeley):

We'll see what happens - because house prices lag by at least a month, we may yet see a pandemic-related reduction - but it looks like house prices are continuing to rise.

At any rate, the median prices in April were $1.69M and $1.05M respectively. To get a mortgage on a million dollar home, you need to earn around $220,000 a year. While tech employees are disproportionately highly-paid, the average salary in the sector is $145,000 a year. Most tech workers can't afford to own their own homes. This might not be a factor for workers who are just out of college, but the vast majority of people want to own - particularly if they start a family.

So in a world where you can work remotely (or from a coworking space that you choose), why stay in the Bay Area, where you're disproportionately likely to be renting? Even the super-rich - those who can afford to buy a home for millions of dollars - would be better off fleeing north to Marin or wine country, where they'll get more for their money.

You don't have to move to the sticks to get a better life. Cities like Seattle, Portland, Austin, Madison, Boston, and Boulder are all liberal, highly educated, full of arts and culture, and cheaper than the Bay Area. Seattle and Portland are even on the same time zone and a short flight (or longer train journey) away.

The Bay Area isn't dead - far from it - but I think we'll see a tech migration away as remote work becomes more permanent. Eventually, that will depress prices. In an area of legendarily high income inequality, that's probably good for everyone.

Dan Crenshaw, who represents Texas's second congressional district, published a pretty partisan op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week. In it, following a series of misrepresentations of liberal policy positions on the crisis, he offers:

It is time to reopen America in a smart and deliberate fashion and stop calling people murderers because they want to get back to work. The American people are responsible enough to live free and confront risk. Let them do so.

You might recall his Texan senate colleague Dan Patrick's suggestion that we should sacrifice the elderly to get the economy moving. Sacrificing lives to get back to work seems to be a common argument among Texas Republicans.

Still, there's a good reason why these arguments will be attractive to a lot of people: people are really hurting right now.

I'm one of the lucky 37% of Americans whose job can be done from home; the majority do not have this luxury. There have been 38.6 million unemployment claims over the last eight weeks, bringing the unemployment rate to 17.2% as of last week. This in a country that has arguably the worst worker protections in the developed world, and the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare. America is a brutal place to live through a pandemic.

In this environment, it makes sense that a lot of people feel they need to get back to work. Without a steady paycheck, and with no social safety net to fall back on Americans are much more likely to fall into homelessness than citizens of most countries. It's an utterly dire situation, brought about by a steady erosion in workers' rights, and rising income inequality over decades. Around 133,000 deaths a year are caused by individual poverty in the United States - a number that will surely get worse as more people lose their livelihoods.

But going slow to go fast works for pandemics, too.

Research into the 1918 Spanish flu indicates that cities which implemented stronger measures to contain the outbreak didn't perform worse during the pandemic, and performed better than other areas once the pandemic was over. The pandemic, not the lockdown, is the source of economic collapse: the Wall Street Journal, a conservative-leaning newspaper that published Crenshaw's op-ed, reported last month that economies without lockdowns were freefalling too.

If there's a choice at all, it's not between locking down and a thriving economy; the economy will nosedive either way. The choice comes down to how many people we want to die along the way. (Spoiler alert: the number of people you should be okay with dying is zero.)

Americans are dying at a rate of one 9/11 every one to two days. People of color are particularly at risk. The US death toll has eclipsed every other country's death toll in absolute terms (although it's currently 12th in the world per capita). The government's own estimates imply a death toll anywhere between 300,000 and 1.8 million Americans without shelter in place orders - and many statisticians believe they've been lowballed.

People aren't stupid. In an environment where hundreds of thousands of people are dying, most Americans are not going to start eating at restaurants, gathering in large groups, or going back to work in crowded offices. They're not going to take flights if they can help it, or go on lavish holidays. Polls show that most Americans don't want to reopen at all. And all this before the predicted second wave, which will cause a spike in the number of deaths and depress the economy further.

Abandoning lockdowns when the death rate is still rising will damage the economy more than continuing the quarantine. It will also potentially kill millions of people with lives, loved ones, hopes and dreams. Which should probably be the primary concern for anyone who isn't absolutely soullessly dead inside.

If we don't tackle the source of the problem rather than the symptoms, the economy will be depressed for years, and many people will needlessly die. Nobody in any party should want that. So let's go to the source, and put some more faith in science and innovation.

Researchers are curently trialling a Covid-19 test that will report results in 20 minutes, without being sent to a lab. If it works, we'll all be able to test ourselves on a regular basis, and self-quarantine if we get a positive result. Even if it doesn't work, reliable, slower tests are available, and there are some promising early results from vaccine trials (even if scientists, wisely, are urging for caution).

As Keith Humphreys at Stanford writes, widespread testing has controlled the virus in countries like Germany, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. But embracing these kinds of testing programs requires putting a confidence in government that doesn't come easily to Americans. It's not a part of America's DNA, for the same reason that we haven't managed to create a safety net or establish universal healthcare like every other developed nation.

If one was feeling particularly jaded, one might argue that caring for other members of our communities wasn't part of American culture. But it is. This is a compassionate country, full of people who energetically do care about each other. I believe we can do this.

Provable, widespread testing holds the key to opening up in the shorter term, and vaccinations will help in the medium to longer term. We will need to prove that we have been tested recently in order to go back to work. Once vaccinations are available, we'll need to prove that we've had one to combat this year's strain. The key isn't in a gung-ho belief in American risk-taking; it's in our ability to rise to the challenge and find a cure.

We also need to finally accept that the conditions experienced by the most disadvantaged in our society affect all of us. We need to provide stronger social support. We need to follow the advice of the American College of Physicians and enact universal healthcare, bringing American standards up to meet the rest of the world. We need to become community-minded, rather than ruthlessly individualistic, once again.

I'm over this pandemic. I hate being locked down. I want to see my friends and loved ones, and I want to go back to the office. But I want to do it right: in a way that establishes a true path forward and brings us all back to health for good. Widespread testing, investment towards a vaccine, and true social support while we wait for safety. That's the only way forward.

Photo by United Nations COVID-19 Response.

In a business, and particularly in early-stage startups, there can be enormous pressure to go as fast as you can. In these environments, making fast decisions, and pushing code or building a design to get to the closest stated objective, is prioritized over a more contemplative process.

Famously, Facebook put it this way: "Move fast and break things." Get your code out there, big picture be damned. A few bugs here and there, or mounting technical debt, are acceptable collateral. Over at OKCupid, CEO Mike Maxim put it in strategic terms: "we can’t sacrifice forward momentum for technical debt."

Six years ago, Facebook moved away from this motto to the far less catchy "move fast with stable infra". As Mark Zuckerberg explained at the time, "what we realized over time is that it wasn't helping us to move faster because we had to slow down to fix these bugs and it wasn't improving our speed." Moving code around quickly so you can close out a Jira or GitHub ticket quickly and move onto the next thing isn't anywhere near as helpful as it feels. The right thing to do is take a step back and ask questions about what you're doing with a bigger picture in mind.

"There were plenty of cases where people would rush software out the door and learn something, but never put that learning back into the program. That analogy was borrowing money, thinking that you never have to pay it back."
~ Ward Cunningham

The same is true outside of product development. A 2010 study published in Harvard Business Review found that teams that took time to slow down, consider the impact of what they are doing, and have debate within the team moved faster - perhaps counterintuitively - than those that concentrated on running as fast as possible.

It's not enough to write code, build a design, or make a decision. To be effective, you need to think about how your decisions affect your community: your team, your customers, the other teams in your company. Software development is a people business more than anything else, and your decisions, fundamentally, should make the next set of similar decisions easier. 

Are you designing a page, or are you designing a way to empower your team to design subsequent, similar pages in the right way?

Are you fixing a bug, or are you taking the time to make sure this kind of bug never shows up again?

Are you just building a new feature, or are you also laying the groundwork for subsequent, similar features?

Are you making a strategic decision, or are you hardening the principles and process by which future strategic decisions will be made?

Are you doing work for yourself, or are you empowering your colleagues?

There are certainly more questions to ask. Hemant Taneja, Managing Director of General Catalyst, has some excellent questions that every management team should ask themselves. The core questions for each business, and each team, will vary.

Velocity is not the same as effectiveness. By stopping to think about how we can be more effective in our work and decisionmaking, we can move faster, have a better working life, and do better work.

Slow down. Think about what you're doing. Build for systems and principles, not individual goals. You'll get there faster.

Axios is reporting that Facebook has bought Giphy for $400M.

Giphy is the animated GIF database that powers functionality in most of the social apps you can think of. It makes money through behind-the-scenes deals to provide that functionality, although its APIs are available to anyone.

$400M sounds like a lot of money - and it is - but it's actually $200M less than its most recent valuation. When it raised $72M from investors in a Series D funding round back in 2016, the price of its shares extrapolated to a valuation of $600M. The acquisition is therefore effectively a down round: the company sold at a lower price-per-share than its most recent investors paid. While the investors who bought in during the Series D round may not be getting such a good deal, Betaworks, which incubated it, should see a nice profit.

Giphy's functionality is available in an enormous number of tools, from Tinder and Snapchat to Telegram and Signal. Facebook's own Instagram is one of them, which is the ostensible reason for the acquisition, but the net result is that the company will be aware of activity on virtually every social app in existence, including the ones with end-to-end encryption. Animated GIFs are wildly popular, in part thanks to Giphy, and a social app that doesn't offer the functionality is considered incomplete. Giphy's API calls from these apps will contain important clues about what people are talking about all over the world, across platforms - and how often each platform is being used.

What happens next? I expect the secure apps to move away from using it, as a start. Unfortunately, there is no alternative to the service, open or otherwise - it's had a cool $150M pumpted into it since inception, and it's highly unlikely that an open alternative will be able to offer its level of curation anytime soon. So we'll likely see this functionality diminish in these apps in favor of stickers, which don't require such a curated ecosystem.

The down round does suggest that VC-funded companies are going to enter some (more) choppy waters in the near future. But to be honest, while it might be embarrassing for some previously-bullish funds, some price corrections are probably not a bad thing for the industry.

Image via GIPHY, obviously.

The PATRIOT Act has long been used to justify warrantless surveillance into ordinary Americans. It was a fast follow to the horrors of 9/11, but thanks to a renewal by President Bush, a four-year extension by President Obama, and an extension of important clauses in the USA Freedom Act, an entire generation is now used to the civil rights violations it authorizes.

On Wednesday, the following amendment to the reauthorized USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Ron Wyden, failed by one vote:

(C) An application under paragraph (1) may not seek an order authorizing or requiring the production of internet website browsing information or internet search history information.

Nine democrats, including San Francisco's own Diane Feinstein, voted against the amendment, effectively allowing an American's web browsing data or search history information to be surveilled without a warrant.

The definitions of web browsing information and search history are important here. "Website browsing information" means everything you do on the web, not just through a browser. It's functionally impossible to distinguish web browser activity from APIs hit by an app, say, or an Internet of Things appliance in your home. Manual web browsing is, for most people, a minority of their internet use. APIs represent at least 83% of internet traffic. Your apps and devices send API pings hundreds of times an hour, letting services know about your activity. With this data, it's possible to infer when you're home, traveling, eating, sleeping, talking to a friend, or buying something. In a world where so many of us are so heavily attached to the internet, the ability to warrantlessly scan our web activity comes close to providing barrier-less surveillance of our every move.

Correspondingly, the definition of "search history information" is vague. We immediately think of the literal text history of our search requests, which would be invasive enough; your search data can be used to figure out if you're pregnant, what you're religious views are, and who you're going to vote for. But log into your Google activity dashboard: you'll see more information about what you've watched, location information, topics Google thinks you're interested in, your news history, call and message history, and more. From raw information, Google makes inferences about who you are. That, too, can be accessed.

All of this is to say that Wyden's amendment was a good one, and the representatives who blocked it should be ashamed of themselves. The PATRIOT Act and its successor have been inevitably abused. It is legislation without appropriate checks and balances that protect civil liberties while protecting lives.

There are no great workarounds. Warrant canaries - notices published by a service provider saying that they have not received a subpeona for information - have not been legally tested, and are not definitive. In any event, they do not (and may not) notify the subject of the surveillance.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
~ Edward Snowden

The best we can do product-wise is use peer-to-peer encryption technology based on open, auditable code, and trust that there are no undisclosed security flaws. I use Signal for texting. Open VPNs like Bitmask are available. But the single biggest thing we can do is to vote out our elected representatives that consistently support surveillance.

There was talk on Monday that Amazon wanted to puchase the struggling AMC theater chain, which also happens to be the world's largest, incorporating Odeon cinemas in the UK and across Europe.

Fortune posed a question about what an Amazon buy-out would be like, suggesting that tickets could be incorporated into Amazon Prime, and that Amazon originals could be shown in real cinemas first. Both of those things could happen, but I think there's an infrastructure play that's worth paying attention to.

Digital movies are distributed to theaters using technology developed by the Digital Cinema Distribution Coalition, co-founded by Cinemark Theatres, Regal Entertainment Group, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros - and, yes, AMC. It uses satellites and high-bandwidth internet connections to send movies, trailers, and pre-show content to theaters (75% of all of them as of 2017) in Digital Cinema Package format. Notably, DCP is an outdated format that uses JPEG 2000 as its primary visual codec, in a world where 8K streaming is about to be mainstream.

If Amazon can replace this distribution mechanism with its own network and infrastructure, starting with the world's largest cinema chain and a co-owner of the incumbent, it can offer its own, more modern services over the internet. These can also include modernizing theater advertising; National CineMedia, the largest cinema advertising company, is partially controlled by AMC.

In a world where movies are moving online faster than ever before, sometimes skipping box offices entirely, some degree of consolidation between home and theaters makes sense. Services like Netflix already use Amazon for their infrastructure; with this change, most of the entertainment world would use its services. In addition, the distribution mechanisms for theaters and the home could begin to converge. By allowing theoretically anyone to use these services, the definition of what constitutes a theater could expand. And a consolidated advertising pipeline would allow campaigns to reach viewers across media.

It's a big opportunity that crosses the traditional boundaries of the movie industry, which is why a company like Amazon is well-placed to take advantage of it. What it doesn't benefit is independent theaters, which, if Amazon is successful, will need to buy into its services. The effect will be that every movie theater in the world will effectively be a part of the same dark chain, running on Amazon logistics. In turn, filmmakers will need to engage with the Amazon ecosystem if they want to reach any kind of audience at all.

A valuable question is then: what would an alternative look like that benefits independent filmmakers and cinemas, while embracing the new, streaming-forward world? Is there a way we can build open marketplaces for distribution, while taking advantage of advances in codec technology to stream high quality footage faster, and decentralizing payments? It's a different kind of technology problem, but one that increases the size of the pie for everyone, instead of locking an entire industry into one vendor's solutions. A modern technical solution is certainly better than the Digital Cinema Distribution Coalition's offerings, but an open marketplace will ensure the future success of the industry in ways that a closed one won't.

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

Like it or not, Google and Facebook are becoming the leading patrons of the news industry:

Over the next few months, Google and Facebook will, combined, spend close to a quarter billion dollars supporting local news. [...] Google said it expects its relief funds will reach at least 4,000 different publishers. Facebook has already dispersed $16 million across 200 different newsrooms.

Elsewhere in that article, Richard Gingrass, the VP of News at Google, has a telling quote: "The money we make with our advertising tools is entirely dependent on the success of publishers."

The core of Google and Faceboook's revenues depend on publishers - and as such, they've spent the best part of two decades ensuring that they are intrinsically linked to those publishers' digital strategies, in order to maximize its share of the proceeds. Without their willing participation in these two corporate ecosystems, the entire news industry loses its distribution, its revenues, and its communities.

Once upon a time, each website produced a feed of content, in one of several standard formats, which you could read with any number of readers. New content would show up in your reader as soon as it was published; depending on your app, it might be presented in a reverse-chronological list, or it might be shown to you via an algorithm that predicted what you might want to read first. In either case, the mechanics of production, monetization, distribution, and audience growth were owned by the publisher.

This is no longer the case. In the world of 2020, while production is still up to the publisher, monetization, distribution, and audience growth have all been siloed away by third parties. Publishers see a cut of monetization, but the vast majority of the value gained from distribution and audience growth is captured by the platforms.

Google Reader's closure was an important step in building this new world. Not only was Reader a great feed reading product, its APIs and infrastructure were used by many other feed readers. Suddenly, that infrastructure was gone; innovation in the feed space became a great deal harder. Meanwhile, Google redirected its investment towards its own walled garden. As Wired noted at the time:

No matter what Mountain View says about changing user habits, though, both Now and Plus do one thing: They keep you in Google's world. It's a de-emphasis of content source.

And perhaps these walled gardens do offer something of a better user experience for many users. (We could debate that. I prefer feeds.) The problem isn't so much about the principle of closed software vs open feeds. The problem is that the entire news industry has consolidated down to two points of distribution.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Michael Porter's Five Forces will have identified that Facebook and Google have outsized supplier power over the entire news industry. This influence is often wielded in ways that benefit the technology giants at the cost of publishers; consider the infamous pivot to video, which was based on incorrectly reported analytics that just happened to benefit Facebook's platform.

In turn, the news industry has an important part to play in democracy, civic life, and the health of our communities. According to one of many studies, voters in districts with less campaign coverage had a harder time making democratic decisions and were less likely to vote. Each dollar spent on investigative journalism yields multiple dollars of savings to society. A loss of local news can also actually make it harder to track the spread of infectious disease.

The news touches all of society. And all of it is in the hands of two wealthy tech companies.

So where do we go from here?

First: I believe that the news industry needs to have representation in technical circles, and have a strong influence in how new technology standards are made. The Washington Post recently joined the World Wide Web Consortium, but not all publishers are able to devote the time or staffing to do this work. A non-profit dedicated to advocating on behalf of publishers, and advising publishers on technology issues, could spread the work and the cost for the benefit of the entire industry.

Second: publishers need to buy in as first-class participants. They need to acknowledge that the world has changed, and their role in it has shifted. Technology is not their expertise - so they need to find and embrace people who can provide it with their interests at heart.

Third: anti-trust legislation must be reformed. The current legislation, which looks at pricing as an indicator of consumer welfare, makes little sense in the internet era. A monopoly that is provided free at the point of use is still a monopoly, and may still have a crushing effect on society and the economy.

Fourth: we need an uptick in grant-based funding for open technology projects. Venture capital funding has an important place in the technology ecosystem, but VCs tend to want their investments to "own" a market. Monopoly is seen as a feature, not a bug. Technology projects that are inherently anti-monopolistic are currently harder to fund. And in a world where startups are incredibly highly-funded, it can be hard to lure top-level talent to other projects.

Fifth: open technology projects need to find ways to be as usable and human-centered as their walled garden cousins. Having great principles doesn't absolve you of the requirement to solve real human needs in an elegant way.

Sixth: we have to accept that the news might not be profitable, but we need it more than ever before. It's time to accelerate innovation around models for support.

Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash

I wrote a piece for the ForUsAll blog on how and why we built tools to help ordinary people navigate the CARES Act. It encompasses why I joined the team, and how we were able to help during this moment:

With the pandemic came the looming shadow of a deep recession, skyrocketing unemployment, and an increasing number of people who can’t pay for basic essentials like food and housing. We set out to help people find their way to financial safety in the way we always have: with a mission-driven, scalable, technology solution, built with empathy and a desire to help the most vulnerable.

Read more here.

I'm dogfooding the set of questions developed for my recording life project.

1. What did you do today?

I've been spending a lot of time with my mother since the quarantine began. It happened to  coincide with her beginning to feel quite a bit worse; being able to work from home, by which I mean her home, has been a silver lining to the crisis.

The last nine years have been practice, in a way: because of the immunosuppression associated with getting a lung transplant, and because of the uncertainty over most of that time about whether I would come down with pulmonary fibrosis too, we've been rich with masks and hand sanitizer, and know what it's like to hunker down and hope for the best. Her health has been so recurrently poor that I've been on a rollercoaster of grief for the best part of a decade. You think that at some point it'll get better to deal with, but it never really does. It's like watching someone you love be endlessly tortured, hoping that at some point she'll feel better. And sometimes she does, and life is wonderful, which is just enough hope to carry on with.

The latest indignity has been internal bleeding - we don't yet know where, or how - which has left her weak and in a state of permanent discomfort. She's been too weak to go out for a walk, so we took her for a drive, instead: up through Guerneville and the Russian River, and then across through Bodega Bay, where the sun glittered on the Pacific Ocean. We drove through side streets and wondered what it would be like to have a home there, with a view of the water.

When we came back, she slept, but not before telling me she might like to eat shrimp, as long as it was from a sustainable source that didn't use slaves. Social justice is part of who she is. I hope I live up to her spirit, and it continues to live on in me.

Of course, I bought the shrimp. Later, I'll peel and clean them, and cook them with just a little bit of butter, parsely, and garlic.

2. What did you enjoy?

I loved driving down the California coastline with my parents. When we got back, Ma and I sat on the sofa together, and she rested against me, falling asleep while I gave her a head rub.

I shouldn't enjoy going to the supermarket, but I do. Usually I go to Oliver's Market, a local, employee-owned store. These days you need a mask to enter, and the signs make clear that the trolleys are sanitized. This time I splurged on some organic, local meat, as well as butter from France and Germany. I bought my dad some Fort Point KSA, which has become one of both of our favorite beers.

And before everything, I loved waking up in the crisp morning, making a cup of coffee, and reading the news (on my iPad). The air is clear and still, and everything feels peaceful. I can trick myself into thinking that life is good.

3. What did you find difficult?

It's hard to watch someone you love go through their own crisis. Both my parents are getting older, and have a harder time than they deserve. It's deeply unfair, and I'm virtually powerless; I can be present, but I can't fix any of it.

And then, of course, this wider crisis is hard for everyone. It's a difficult time.

I have some work to do that should really have been done on Friday, and there's a book I've been meaning to start for weeks. But in the end, I needed to take this weekend to decompress. I had high hopes for what I might be able to achieve during the quarantine, but they have not been matched by reality. I'm forgiving myself for this. The bar has been lowered from achieving a set of lofty goals to just getting through it all.

4. What has changed?

Ma's decline. Other than that, my life this weekend is not materially different to my life last weekend. I expect each week to be more or less the same until at least September. We just continue through the turbulence, ever onwards, until we land somewhere new.

Here's the media I consumed and found interesting in April.

Apps

Untitled Goose Game. I'm late to the party, but this is super-fun with exactly my level of silly.

Novlr. I'm writing this again, and for whatever reason, I find this a better environment than Scrivener. Maybe it's something about being a web-native writer?

Drizly. Yes, I ordered delivery alcohol for the first time this month. I'm not proud of it. I'm also not not-proud of it.

Streaming

The Plot Against America. Atmospheric, unsettling, and one of the most tense last hours of television I've ever seen. Unfortunately hugely relevant.

Sex Education. Silly, in a good-natured way. I just wish everyone wasn't so incredibly posh.

Notable Articles

The Pandemic

'People are panic-buying cocaine': the drug dealer, spaceman, therapist and others on life after coronavirus. 16 very different people explain how life under Coronavirus has changed.

The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration. An infuriating interview with Richard Epstein, a Professor at New York University School of Law, who Trump administration officials have been listening to for reasons I cannot understand.

If I Wrote a Coronavirus Episode. "Tina Fey, Mike Schur, and 35 more TV writers on what their characters would do in a pandemic." Transcendantly good.

This Pandemic Is Not Your Vacation. "All over the United States, people are fleeing urban areas with high infection rates for the perceived safety and natural beauty of rural areas. [...] The virus, some people have taken to saying, “does not discriminate.” But that’s not quite true. It is putting our class and racial hierarchies in harsh relief — systems that favor the rich and the globally mobile while declaring the work of so many of the working class “essential.” Wealth is the vector. And the economically precarious will suffer because of it — whether they’re cleaning the offices of the infected in New York or checking groceries in Blaine County, Idaho."

Apricot Stone Will FaceTime You to Recreate the Restaurant Experience at Home. "At the agreed-upon day and time, Ishkhanian calls via video chat: FaceTime, Duo, or Skype. Answer and you’ll see him standing at the restaurant next to a table set with water and wine glasses. Music plays in the background as he guides you through the menu and takes your order." I can't decide if this is weird or great. Maybe both?

The Americans defying Palm Sunday quarantines: 'Satan's trying to keep us apart'. America.

Coronavirus in New York: A paramedic's diary. "There's only one patient we've seen so far who I feel wasn't Covid-19 and that's because it was a suicide. Imagine: I was there and my brain felt relief. This person's dead and it's a suicide. I felt relief that it was a regular job."

The unkindest cut: Last call for a Zabar’s lox slicer. "“Look, Len,” he said. “I love you, but you’re over 90 years old and you’re in the group that is most susceptible to the virus and if you got it, if anything happened to you, I could never forgive myself.”"

California launches nation's first disaster relief fund for undocumented immigrants. "New $125m fund will support those ineligible for federal support, but who make up 10% of the state’s workforce, largely in essential services." I'm very grateful to live in a more compassionate state than most.

"It'll all be over by Christmas". "Trump is shooting for May 1st because he's been told the economy will take 6 months to recover, minimum, and he's shooting for the November election deadline. This is laughably optimistic, even if the pandemic had burned out by May 1st: we're in Greatest Depression territory already, the hospitality sector has crashed 75%, airlines have crashed 90%, etcetera. It's not going to be back to normal by November, even if the Fairy Godmother shows up and banishes the horrid virus with a wave of her wand. Period." Let's look the crisis in the face, rather than tell stories to ourselves.

The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage Exposes Its Ignorance About the Working Class. "A reporter who thinks they hold no positions is much more dangerous than one with strong opinions, because at least the latter might have a hope of understanding what they are reporting and why. Perhaps most dangerous of all is a reporter who sees the structures of capitalism—bosses wishing they could force their workers to work through a pandemic, workers still unable to feed their families without opened businesses, immigrants pitted against native workers—and sees them as an immutable and unchallengeable fact, as inevitable as the sunrise, and just as comforting."

Lockdowns flatten the “economic curve,” too. "Cities that locked down faster in 1918 bounced back better."

Sinking feeling. "I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under."

Media & Society

The Terror Of The Umpty Ums. A lovely, and surprisingly meta, Doctor Who short story from Steven Moffat.

The Character of the Doctor Is More Important to Me Than Doctor Who Will Ever Be. More Doctor Who - this is a great encapsulation of why the show means so much to me.

The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic. What an amazing portrait. I was super into Weird Al as a kid, and I still love his attitude and irreverence. I finally got to see him live about ten years ago, and he was a revelation.

Technology

Facebook Wanted NSO Spyware to Monitor Users, NSO CEO Claims. "Facebook representatives approached controversial surveillance vendor NSO Group to try and buy a tool that could help Facebook better monitor a subset of its users, according to an extraordinary court filing from NSO in an ongoing lawsuit."

Utah attorney general suspends state contract with Banjo in light of founder’s KKK past. "The Utah attorney general’s office will suspend use of a massive surveillance system after a news report showed that the founder of the company behind the effort was once an active participant in a white supremacist group and was involved in the shooting of a synagogue."

What’s Missing From Zoom Reminds Us What It Means to Be Human. "While we’ve discovered that in many cases it can, more importantly we’ve discovered that, regardless of bandwidth and video resolution, these apps are missing the cues humans use when they communicate. While we might be spending the same amount of time in meetings, we’re finding we’re less productive, social interactions are less satisfying and distance learning is less effective. And we’re frustrated that we don’t know why."

How a handful of Apple and Google employees came together to help health officials trace coronavirus. The fascinating story of how the contact tracing apps came to be.

I've been continuing work on my recording life project. At this point, the questions are finalized, and I've been building the first version of the platform. The working name is Four Questions.

It's been a long time since I've built new software from scratch under my own steam. The first question I had to answer is: how will I build it?

I roll my eyes at people who are snobby about any programming stack: whatever is productive for you is the right choice. Of course, if you're running a new business, "productive for you" has to cover a lot of ideas: you need to consider if you can build stable, resilient code that supports a delightful user experience at speed, whether you can hire a great team that builds in that language, and what the infrastructure landscape looks like. But for a personal project, it's all fair game.

For this project, I've decided that I want to stretch myself a little. I don't want to build this stack in the same way I chose to build Known in 2013, or Elgg in 2003. Both of those were based on PHP, albeit in very different eras; it'd be a fast build, but kind of boring, and the hosting options are limited.

I started writing node.js code at Medium four years ago, and although my learning curve was steeper than I would have liked, I eventually fell in love with it. JavaScript has traditionally been clunky and ambiguous, but ES6 and ES7 turned it into a much more elegant, expressive language. The combination of these improvements and npm - which gives you instant access to over a million libraries - makes it a hard platform to beat. It's also incredibly easy to build automatic testing and linting with npm, including as a pre-commit hook into git.

I've also become a fan of more modern versions of React; we used it at Unlock, and I was taken with how easy it is to build genuinely reactive interfaces. The web has become a place to access applications as much as a place to access documents. A lot of older-style web apps, from earlier in this transition process, feel more like slightly interactive documents. React apps can be made to feel like a real application, with a minimum of development effort. If you don't want to build on the web using JavaScript, you do you, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. And adding Next.js allows pages to be rendered on the server, reducing the time to largest contentful paint and allowing non-JS browsers (including headless browsers) to access the content.

To node.js, Next.js and React, I've added Material-UI, which makes Google's material design framework easy to access from React.

So now my biggest question is: what should I use as the database? I'm torn between using a straight Postgres database, something like a MongoDB, Firebase, or FaunaDB. The latter is completely new to me and seems to be designed for serverless architectures, so maybe I'll try that. I'll try it and report back.

There's a lot of choice out there, and no correct answers. The downside is that setting up your development stack in 2020 is significantly more time-consuming than it ever was. The upside is that you have more choice, more developer support, and friendlier tools than ever. It's a different kind of fun to old-school web development - my first web scripts were written in Perl, and this is a universe away - but it's still definitely fun.

If you're a developer, what are you using these days?