Werd I/O

I love the indieweb carnival. Every month, a new blogger hosts a topic on their website, and everyone else is invited to post about it on theirs. Webmentions link it all together, allowing anyone to browse through all the different points of view and modes of expression. It’s lovely.

This month’s IndieWeb Carnival topic is about community and belonging, so here are some thoughts about that.

I’ve been working with a new therapist who specializes in trauma, after realizing that I wasn’t doing well at processing my mother’s death and the decade leading up to it. My parents had moved to California a decade prior to that in order to look after my Oma (grandmother). When my mother’s condition progressed to the point that she needed oxygen, my sister and I both moved continents to be closer to her. She had a double lung transplant that gave us all lots of extra time — in fact, more time than these sorts of transplant recipients get on average — but this is one of the most invasive surgeries you can do, and there were complications from the drugs, the surgery itself, the underlying condition. It was incredibly hard on her. In turn, it was hard on all of us in a way that’s been difficult to process. I realized lately, for example, that I’ve been having auditory flashbacks. I’m really hoping a specialized therapist will help.

Part of therapy is intake: giving your therapist the lowdown on who you are as a person and your general context. We’ve been going through my childhood; she asked for me to discuss any particular life events of themes that stuck in my mind.

A subset of the things that came to mind for me included:

• An entire factory floor of Albanian seamstresses lining up to pinch my cheeks while my parents looked on helplessly, unwilling to cause an international incident (this really happened)
• Living in Vienna as a seven-year-old and almost becoming fluent in German until the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down in Ukraine and we moved back to Britain because my parents were worried about the fallout
• Being a borderline third culture kid: growing up in Britain to American and Dutch / Indonesian / Swiss parents with extended stays in Austria and North Carolina
• Living with the generational aftermath of concentration camp survival (my dad is one of the youngest survivors of Japanese-run camps in Indonesia)

A few of these things made it difficult to connect to people when I was growing up. The thing about third culture kids is that they often don’t get the implicit cultural references that everyone else seems to just know: the result is that I often felt like there must be some kind of hidden password that everyone else was in on that had never been shared with me. At the same time, I’d picked up on a generational anxiety that I didn’t even know existed, which made it hard for people to connect with me. Even now, as an adult, it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t helped care for a terminally ill loved one to really understand where I’m at as a person. Quite often, I don’t even know myself.

I sometimes wonder if religion would have provided me with a stronger through-line of community, but I always remind myself that then I would have needed to believe in one. I’m pleased for people who do have a sense of belief that adds to their life. Even after a childhood of Church of England schooling (and perhaps a little bit because of it) I can’t bring myself to believe in any kind of higher power.

I don’t have the same questions about nationalism (or its cousin patriotism, which I believe sits on the same spectrum). I think putting so much identity into a place that you carry a sense of superiority over other places is so archaic, so unbelievably stupid, that I can’t bring myself to entertain it. There is no greatest country in the world, or greatest state, or greatest town. We’re all just people, and these borders are artificial divisions that serve to separate us.

Case in point: one of the biggest rug pulls of my adult life was Brexit. When I moved to the US to help care for my mother, my intention was always to move back to the UK. Five years into this journey, Britain reminded me that I didn’t really belong there: I was a European citizen, not a real British person, and I no longer had the legal right to return as anything more than a tourist. I already felt like I ripped my life apart (albeit for good reasons), and this came as a huge blow. I was born with American citizenship and can live here forever, but it’s not like I feel like I belong here. There’s a cognitive overhead to living in a country you didn’t grow up in; an ongoing tension, and a sense of loss that never really goes away. Not anything close to the palpable loss that would come a few years later, but enough to tug at your soul.

If there isn’t a place where I feel belonging, there are, at least, people. One of the important facets of family (or at least, a close one, which I’m grateful to have) is that you have shared cultural touchpoints, and shared context. I’ve said before that family is my nationality and my religion, having no use for the traditional versions of either of those things. It’s my primary community, too.

But there are others. When I first connected to the internet, back in the mid-nineties, newsgroups occupied the space that social media and web forums take up now. Not long before, someone had created one specifically for British teenagers; I logged on with my dial-up Demon Internet account, started lurking, and then eventually dove in.

There was something freeing about only being able to express myself in text, not least because I’ve always had a very hard relationship with my own physicality. I’m big, and was big early; I felt like the Incredible Hulk. There were hardly any mirrors in our house, and I’d catch myself in the full-length ones in department stores and recoil. (I still do.) On the newsgroup, I didn’t have to worry about any of that. I could just be me, without being bogged down by my pesky corporeal presence. Everyone else who posted there was kind of awkward in similar ways to me, too; the missed cultural understanding that I felt so profoundly in real life didn’t seem to matter there at all.

Eventually, we all met up in real life, and these people who I’d met through words became lifelong friends. I hosted parties at my house and traveled around the country to visit other peoples’. It was an experience I still strive to recreate; it’s what informed the communities I created later on, although I later learned it wasn’t as completely safe as I thought at the time.

As an adult, my communities have been practice-based: indieweb, for example, or the community of Matter alumni. I’m pleased to say I’ve made lifelong friends from these places: people who mean the world to me. These are people who I do have a sense of belonging with, and I’m grateful for it. And, of course, I have a new family of my own, which carries its own sense of belonging. (I’m writing this as my sick child sleeps his way through a long nap; when he wakes up, I will hug him tight.)

These days, I see my lack of geographic rootedness as a superpower. Sure, I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere, but that also means I can be anywhere. There’s no real tether to one particular place; no need to be in one location forever. And the benefit of being a permanent outsider is that I always have an outsider’s perspective: I tend to see things in a different way to the people around me. Sometimes that turns out to be valuable; sometimes it brings a little scorn. At least it’s something different.

In the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz writes about how influencers creating news content directly on modern social networks are outstripping traditional news sites in popularity:

News consumption hit a tipping point around the globe during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, with more people turning to social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram than to websites maintained by traditional news outlets.

[…] “There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older,” Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said in the report, which is based on an online survey of roughly 94,000 adults in 46 national markets, including the United States.

The trouble is, of course, that creators and publications who publish directly on social media platforms are putting themselves at the mercy of the business decisions and policy whims of those companies. The history of the internet is packed with stories of publications that fell afoul of algorithmic or business changes at tech companies which earned their trust. The phrase “pivot to video” — an artifact of when Facebook enticed publishers to create more video on its platforms using falsified metrics — will still elicit a wince from newsroom product teams. Even more recently, Twitter’s journey over the last year serves as a potent warning about how platforms can devolve, potentially bringing dependent publications down with them.

But that’s doesn’t mean Taylor or the Reuters Institute report she cites are wrong. There are two key factors at play here: a loss of trust in journalistic institutions in favor of individuals, and a change in expectations around where to find content on the internet.

The loss of trust in institutions has been ongoing for decades, and in some cases is well-earned. It’s also part of a shift in trust from brands to individuals overall. That’s been accelerated by social media in part, but really comes down to human dynamics. Influencers tend to be more representative of audience demographics than news institutions, which still skew older, richer, whiter, and male. They’re more likely to more closely represent the views of younger people. It’s fundamentally easier to trust a real person who is representative of your communities than some faceless organization that represents the more traditional values of the older audience members who are more likely to pay for subscriptions or make a donation.

Fixing the trust gap is not about technology. It means hiring (far) more diverse journalists and managers, surfacing the faces of journalists, and more closely representing the concerns of younger and more diverse communities.

Currently, the website represents the faceless institution while social media represents the human individual. Consider the logo on the masthead, the walls of text, the lack of human presence. That’s not to say that’s what a website has to look like — the web is a blank canvas with infinite possibilities — but that’s what most news websites have chosen to look like today, as holdovers from the newspaper front page as designed in the 1600s. It’s due an overhaul that takes our trust in the individuals behind news into account and puts journalists front and center. News websites have not evolved much, while social media has transformed itself completely over the last decade. There’s a lot of ground to be gained by actually innovating on the website itself.

But then you still have to reach people.

Bloggers, who were widely maligned by journalistic institutions when they surged to brief popularity a few decades ago, spearheaded the flip from institutions to influencers. There has been a minor but influential blogging resurgence, enabled by WordPress, Substack, and Medium; regardless, the form of the blog itself has hardly remained a mainstream force. It’s great for niche news and commentary (consider Stratechery’s hold on the tech industry, for example, or Molly White’s excellent reporting work on crypto) but not necessarily for news designed for a mainstream audience.

Publications tend to try and own their relationships with their audiences by setting up email newsletters: a way to measure engagement and understand who their readers are without having to enter a payment relationship. The trouble is, Gen Z sees email as some archaic technology that they don’t really want to use, preferring social media and instant messaging.

There’s no getting away from the fact that, today, a majority of internet users discover their news through social platforms. They’re hearing about it on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, where they’re consuming it natively, and a minority is clicking through to publisher websites from the other social networks.

This isn’t a given or a force of nature. It depends on the kind of news (and therefore the characteristics of its target community), and where publishers overall are choosing to post content. I’m aware of one major newsroom that has actually increased social media clickthroughs to its own website over the last year, bucking the trend by at least experimenting with every network from TikTok to Mastodon. Call this strategy “meeting people where they’re at” — and where they’re at is a more fractious social media landscape than it was a year ago. If newsrooms are sticking to the same networks they were publishing to a few years ago, no wonder their clickthroughs are down. The changes in the social media landscape do not, in themselves, need to be a reason to post directly to social media instead of an environment controlled by the publisher: there is no need to cede full control of a publisher’s online presence to another company. A website will outlive every social media platform.

Which isn’t to say that changes to digital strategy don’t need to be made. The article is still the basic unit of journalism, which is a holdover from newspapers: there’s no platform reason why it can’t be more interactive experiences instead (although this clearly would require staffing newsrooms with different skillsets). Those experiences need to be easily shareable on social media, because news sites tend not to be destinations in themselves. SEO, still a big cost center for many newsrooms, is not anywhere near as important as having a thriving social media team that posts, shares, and replies wherever community members can be found. (We’re a quarter century out from The Cluetrain Manifesto and the core message of markets are conversations doesn’t seem to have quite landed yet.)

In other words:

• Technology changes are not as important as ensuring the newsroom reflects your community editorially and demographically.
• People are always more trustworthy than brands.
• Nothing absolves publishers from building community (not “audience”, which implies a one-way relationship), across the social media landscape and beyond.
• Publishers (through their individual journalists and personalities) should be everywhere their community is.
• Social media platforms are therefore unavoidable but also not to be trusted.
• The central importance of the website doesn’t mean that the form and content of the website doesn’t need to evolve.
• Newsrooms should build their product (their website, apps, direct messaging, social media presences) to directly meet their community’s needs, based on (1) being representative of that community and (2) making active listening and learning a core part of how they work.

Should publishers build community on platforms owned by third parties or publish to a space fully under their control? The answer is an emphatic “yes”: you have to do both. Social media platforms are ephemeral — they are hugely popular but will appear and disappear — while your website is forever. Your digital strategy has to encompass both the near term and the long term.

The internet in 2024 will not work like the internet did in 2019 (and certainly not like the web in 2009 or news publishing in 1969). You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect it to keep working — particularly if you’re not interrogating why those tactics used to work in the first place. Every publisher needs to think for themselves and find a set of core principles to adhere to instead of a set of core tactics.

“When you are finished changing, you are finished.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

So let’s change.

I’ve been thinking about Sam Lessin’s latest deck about the future of venture capital and its implications about the future of how technology is funded and built. Sam is General Partner at Slow Ventures and partner to Jessica Lessin, founder of tech industry publication The Information.

It’s certainly worth reading if you’re in the industry (although be aware that it’s a DocSend link that requires that you provide your email address to proceed). I don’t always agree with Sam — in particular, he recently wrote a piece about banning TikTok because of pro-Palestinian content that I vehemently disagree with. But there are some claims in this deck that, if true, will be seismic.

He first sets the stage for how VC has turned into a kind of assembly line over the last twenty years:

With clarity and manufactured consistency of what late-stage VCs had to 'roll off the line' to sell to the public market, it became possible for the whole ecosystem to reverse-engineer and standardize the metrics companies needed to be worth at different stages and 'peg' valuations to those stages for intermediate products.

This trend towards startup standardization, measurement, and 'legibility' at all stages allowed the VC factory run way more efficiently and dramatically scale up. It allowed different funds to specialize in different stages of startup production - doing just one step - and passing the goods along for markups.

This is a clear description of the venture capital funding ladder: from pre-seed to seed, then through early equity funding rounds, then to growth rounds, and out into acquisition and the public markets. As Lessin says, individual funds and ecosystems developed around each of these stages. It was like a factory line in a way, but also a bit like a Ponzi scheme: the way early stage investors made money was by later stage investors putting money in.

At each stage, Limited Partners — high net-worth individuals, pension funds, and so on — put a certain amount of their money into a venture capital fund with the expectation that they would see a return within a pre-determined timeframe (often ten years). VCs typically made a 2% management fee and then took 20% of the profit once the fund reached maturity.

The trouble was, most of the companies constructed this way didn’t succeed in the public markets. The model described above worked fairly well for the inward-facing market of investors, and sometimes created services that people used, but it didn’t actually create the value necessary to justify those valuations. This — together with a reformed market landscape in the wake of the pandemic — means that the formulae investors used to calculate valuations are meaningless. There’s no factory-ready set of calculations to use. Every company is different.

Every company was always different, and valuations could never be paint-by-number, but it’s become harder to maintain the appearance of set standards.

Lessin also points out that the factory model also allowed absolutely unscalable non-tech companies to get the tech treatment: direct to consumer products, electric scooters, networks of doctor’s offices, and so on were all VC-funded using the same metrics designed for software, despite not being software at all. These companies didn’t do well at all and trust was eroded.

There are lots of reasons why this happened, which Lessin doesn’t touch on: once limited partners have put money into a fund, the investor needs to deploy capital from that fund on investments within the timing of the fund. These investments have to come from somewhere, and it becomes harder and harder to find the right kind of software deals the more competition there is. In a 0% interest (“ZIRP”) environment that hosted an explosion of VC funds that were all competing for founders, investors often hustled hard to get any deals at all. There were simply more funds than viable software companies to support.

All this and a renewed government interest in enforcing anti-trust rules means that acquisitions (which were how many funds really made their money) have slowed. And because LPs didn’t get their money back from previous funds, they’re not re-investing in new ones. And potential founders aren’t leaving big tech companies, because layoffs and a more uncertain economic environment means they might not get their jobs back if their startups fail.

What Lessin does say — in, for me, the most interesting part of the deck — is that this dynamic is still going on, and is behind the current AI boom. He characterizes investor interest in AI as a somewhat desperate attempt to maintain the venture investing status quo:

But what of generative Al you say! Well, this is what you call wishful thinking... a clear example of a narrative generated out of desperation in the VC community vs. good sense. The Al startup opportunity is largely a mirage of thirsty investors trying to cling to an old way of doing things after similar spun up stories on Metaverse (and yes in its peak froth moment Crypto) didn't play out, and the last narrative around ‘on demand services' mostly crumbled.

It’s an extending / sustaining innovation, Lessin argues: one that allows incumbents (Microsoft, for example) to make higher profits rather than providing opportunities to new players in the marketplace. There are no moats: no way for startups to maintain a lead because there are no network effects and everything is open source. On top of this, the startups are so overpriced because of the concentration in investor activity that they would need to be phenomenally successful to provide a reasonable return. If any of these turn out to be the case, investors in AI startups will not see the returns they’re hoping for.

Remember, this doesn’t mean AI isn’t necessarily useful in itself: it’s simply an argument that it might not be a good fit for new startups or for venture capital investment. Whether a venture is suitable for VC funding is not a value judgment on it in overall. Nonetheless, it’s an enormous statement.

Instead of pursuing the “factory” model of startups that require lots of rounds of funding, Lessin suggests that small investors should put their money into more capital-efficient businesses: small business platforms, communities, and business-to-business platforms with low expenditures. In other words, communities that are built slowly and can be revenue-driven without having to grow to monopoly size. The world where investors can aggressively fund a tech company until its competitors are dead, regardless of its own profitability, is gone.

I see this as largely positive: this is a world where people are more aligned with the services they use, and where revenue rather than exploitation is central. It remains to be seen how accurate it will be for the market at large, but I consider it notable and exciting that investors like Lessin are coming around to thinking along these lines.

Expensify’s experiment to use craft coffees and a free cocktail bar to lure employees back to the office failed spectacularly:

If the best office in the entire planet can't compete with the local coffee shop, the tightly-closed Pandora's box of "work from anywhere" has burst open, and will never be resealed. No amount of begging or coercion is going to work in the long run: the businesses that demand it are fighting a losing war of attrition against an infinite universal energy. You heard it here folks: the office is dead.

This isn’t where every company has ended up on this issue. Most large tech companies in particular are demanding a return to the office, for a few reasons.

The first, although not the main reason, is that a lot of very large companies have real estate portfolios that are now sitting mostly-empty, which will drive down prices when leases come up for renewal, in turn jeopardizing the value of commercial real estate holdings. (Boo hoo.)

The second is a belief — more religious than fact-based — that workers are more productive in the office than if they work from home. (Research tends to show the opposite.)

And the third is ostensibly about company culture:

In a 2022 Korn Ferry survey of 15,000 global executives, two-thirds agreed that corporate culture accounts for more than 30% of their company’s market value. Many leaders, the report notes, believe that a strong culture can only be established and maintained “if everyone is — at least some of the time — occupying the same workplace.”

Culture is important — the core issue on most teams — and I’ll come back to that issue. There’s a subtext here, too, about power. The essential flip is between an employer-controlled environment and a worker-controlled environment. In the former, employees can be observed and their behavior influenced. In the latter, not so much.

This balance of power, at least for knowledge workers, is what has flipped forever. Nobody’s willingly going back to an environment of predominant employer control — at least not without significant concessions.

I wrote a flippant post on Mastodon:

You really want to get people back to the office? Forget free cocktails. Think free daycare, six month parental leave, 25 days vacation + holidays, extensive carer benefits for those who need them, the expectation that you’ll stay home and rest rather than work if you’re sick, flexible hours, further help with the enormous cost of living in the cities you operate in.

Oh, and test and require vaccination proof for everyone.

The response was really strong. Americans overwhelmingly responded with, “Yes! And also retrofit offices to have better ventilation.” Europeans, meanwhile, overwhelmingly responded with, “This would actually be an erosion of my rights; aim higher.” — a good reminder that the working conditions Americans are used to are not the norm virtually anywhere else in the world.

The crux of what I was trying to say is that the balance of power has been in favor of employers; working from home has been much-needed freedom for employees (albeit granted by necessity rather than benevolence). It’s still not truly in balance, and the benefits I discussed should be provided regardless of whether a workforce works from home or from the office — but if a full return to office is on the table, worker benefits, rights, and protections should be too.

And that’s the crux of changes to company culture, too. When employers say “culture” they often mean “norms”: when people show up for work, how they dress, notions of professed work ethic, and so on. These are all cultural elements that benefit the office. But there are also “softer” cultural elements that are a hard requirement for functioning well as a community in any context, that are even more important when workers are not in constant contact with each other.

In a remote environment, communication skills, inclusion, empathy, feeling supported, and connectedness all become vital. It’s easy to feel isolated or unsupported when you’re working from your kitchen table and conversations need to be scheduled video calls. It’s easy to not know what’s happening, understand the team’s goals, or not realize that your colleague is having a hard time this week and isn’t able to be fully present. Many of these things were implicit and unspoken when everyone was in the same room. Not addressing them explicitly was already to the detriment of a company’s culture; it was never optional. But now that everyone is distributed, its importance is amplified.

It turns out that very few employers know how to adapt to that.

It’s worth considering ideas of formal and informal communication in work contexts. Everyone knows that the real benefits at work-related conferences aren’t the sessions, but the hallway track: the conversations people informally have on the side. In my early-career work in higher education, I used to argue that learning was dependent on friendship and study groups that are formed at colleges: the informal spaces where people learn and share knowledge together.

Relationships and ambient information are built in workplaces in the same way. Building a company culture is a lot like building any community. Everyone needs to feel supported, through both hard actions (providing inclusive benefits, tools, processes, policies) and soft gestures (trust, openness, vulnerability, transparency, empathy). There need to be spaces for reflection, and there has to be room for being messily human. Everyone has to feel valued because they are valued, both in word and action. And in turn, it turns out that having increased power, agency, connectedness, support, and trust will make them happier and more productive.

There are tools for this, but they’re different tools. I believe strongly in journaling inside a company, for example: a way of modeling transparent communication, quiet reflection, and vulnerability. The best place I’ve seen this work is Medium, which has a private version of its site (called Hatch) run as an intranet for employees. It’s a beautiful space that runs the gamut from engineering specs to personal introductions and introspection. As Marcin Wishary wrote a few years ago:

It’s so good it feels like a perk. It forces us to be thoughtful about our product and about our company. It makes everyone a better writer/explainer/storyteller. It keeps the relevant ideas and thoughts afloat, as they don’t just die in individual mailboxes.

It’s not a surprise that when the then-CTO of Medium moved on, it was to found Range, a sort of operating system for team communication.

These are hundreds of similar ideas — some of them formal tools, some of them informal practices — that can help with building a strong remote team culture. It’s completely possible, if employers can bring themselves to understand that they have to do the work, and to internalize Expensify’s finding that the previous status quo is never coming back.

No matter which way you cut it or which tools you use, remote work does depend on trust in your employees, more devolved power and distributed equity, high transparency, and great, bi-directional communication. If those are challenging to an organization, there just might be deeper problems that need to be addressed.

ProPublica is hiring a senior web developer.

You’re familiar with ProPublica’s reporting even if you’re not sure about the name. They’re the newsroom that reported on Justice Clarence Thomas’s close relationship with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow; on TurboTax’s misleading practices that coerce low income tax filers into paying for its product; on Illinois schools collaborating with local police to issue tickets for minor misbehavior. It’s won major journalism prizes including the Pulitzer, had an outsize impact on American democracy, and shown the way for non-profit news.

The product team is a small group of creative technologists that provide the website, data, and infrastructure platform for this journalism to be published. It’s a remote team (although applicants must be in the United States) with an option to be in-person in New York City. Go apply here and say I sent you.