Werd I/O

I’m not exactly sure why we celebrate Christmas rather than Hanukkah: we’re a secular family with roots in both traditions. It’s possible that being in Northern Europe (and for my parents, North America before that) just made Christmas the easy default. Christian hegemony is another reason why defaults really matter: the reason Christianity is culturally centered in these places has a long and violent history, often at the expense of the people I’m descended from.

When my great grandfather arrived in the US in earnest, the White Army’s pogroms in Ukraine behind him, he chose to live secularly, down to shortening his last name to Anglicize it. Although it fell short of pogroms, America was not a welcoming place for Jews. Between the Klan, Henry Ford, the mass media, and associations of Jews with the bolsheviks, the interwar period was particularly hostile.

As I raise my child today, a hundred years later, it’s still not a welcoming place. A quarter of hiring managers don’t want to further Jewish candidates because “Jews have too much power and control”. I’ve personally found myself in conversations about why Kanye West - a Hitler fan - is supposedly in the right. Even among supposedly inclusive people, surprising old tropes about Jews are sometimes repeated as fact. I’ve also been told, quite politely, many times, that I’m going to Hell because I wasn’t baptized.

All of which makes me want to reclaim that Jewish heritage both for myself and for my baby. The answer here isn’t one or the other: it’s a “yes and” approach. His mother has a Christian heritage; mine includes Christianity and Judaism, as well as strong roots in the largest Muslim nation in the world. It’s also complicated for me, because, to be clear, I don’t believe in any higher power. I’m interested in holding onto the cultural traditions and the sense of belonging of the people who led to me, and to my baby; I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) assimilate into a faith I don’t hold.

I suppose really what I want is to feel more connected to my ancestors. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted when I was younger: I wanted to be my own person, undefined by someone else’s actions or traditions. My perspective has changed slightly to one of wanting to understand the traditions and beliefs of my ancestors, and perpetuate a sense of belonging to something other than an established cookie-cutter default. I want my child to feel more connected than I was; not so much to believing in a deity, but to who came before him, and their struggles.

I have a piece in Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2023:

The current landscape makes clear what has always been true: On the internet, nothing lasts forever. The most resilient choice is always the one that allows you to own your relationships with your audience and directly build community with the people who care about your work. That way, when a platform inevitably disappears, your relationship with your community remains intact.

I’m proud of it and stand by its advice.

In the same collection, my colleague Errin Haines also has a piece:

The 2024 election is also a new opportunity to challenge conventional editorial decisions about who voters are, what they look like, and what matters to them, their families and their communities. For too long, our default setting as journalists for those who have power (and this includes voters) has been white, cisgender, and male. Nearly 60 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, there is still much progress to be made to make real the promise of “one person, one vote” in our democracy.

I hope newsrooms take note.

As always, the whole collection is worth reading.

I’ve decided to stop writing about Twitter as of tonight. I’ll pour one out if the site dies or if it changes hands to a stable, ethical custodian, but for now, my commitment to not posting on the platform extends to not posting about the platform.

It’s clear that Musk is using the Trump communications playbook - own the conversation by any means necessary - and it’s all too easy to play along. So, enough.

Instead: what can we do that’s better? What should we build together?

What am I enjoying lately? What’s interesting and worth talking about in a productive way? How am I feeling? What kind of future do I want to see for me and all of us?

Onwards. Seriously.

Hours after enacting a policy to prevent users from linking to outside platforms, Twitter has reversed it and deleted the page from the policy website.

Among other laws this policy broke, it fell afoul of the European Union Digital Markets Act, which went into force in November. The fines for breaking this are steep:

Also, the EC will be able to impose penalties and fines of up to 10% of a company’s worldwide annual turnover and up to 20% of such turnover in the event of repeated infringements.

Maybe someone pointed that out to Musk, because it was all gone by dinnertime.

Meanwhile, he’s asked if he should step down as CEO in a Twitter poll, which at the time of writing he’s losing by a lot. Various people who should absolutely not be given the reigns have asked to be given the reigns. Maybe they should just run it like the Swedish Twitter account and cycle through a new CEO every month?

Updated: Twitter rescinded the policy the same day.

Twitter has banned linking to your profile on other social networks. What a completely pathetic, counterproductive policy.

Twitter can’t ban linking to any external website, so here’s the simple workaround:

• Make a page on your personal website with all your social profiles
• Link to that instead of directly to your profiles

What this policy breaks more readily is tools that let you find your existing Twitter connections on Mastodon. Perhaps this is an opportunity to rebuild a social graph from first principles, or to use other mechanisms to find your friends.

As a reminder, you can find my profiles on my homepage.