Ben Werdmuller

Four-month sleep regression is go!

A full two-thirds of incoming phone calls to my cell are salespeople looking to find an executive at some company called Known that is different to the one I started. People thought we'd do badly on SEO and we didn't; on the other hand, these sales databases are killing me.

I'm really excited about what seems to be an uptick in tech-related co-operatives. Co-ops are a brilliant organizational tool and (done right) a way to build distribution of equity into an organization's core. One member, one vote. More, please.

You don't need to stay on a platform whose CEO just amplified a man hours after he said he loved Hitler.

Overlooking that because you think you need audience is not the pragmatic decision you think it is.

And you can certainly get reach elsewhere.

Beginning to think I should ban myself from (1) posting (2) buying anything during overnight feeds.

They called Reagan the Teflon President, which is appropriate because manufacturing his legacy decimated entire communities.

I find it very emotionally hard when my baby is sad. I wish I could fix it for him. Poor little guy.

"Feedback is a gift but not a demand for change," I tell my infant son, thinking I'm being very funny.

I really hate the pushback against “woke”. Modern civil rights movements have felt like real progress that has been a long time coming. The backlash is disappointing and regressive. We do live in a fundamentally unequal society; it’s past time we did something to change it.

Someone keeps trying to sign up to my newsletter with my own email address. That's not how it works! But also, it's got me worried that there's a weird bug somewhere on my website. Let me know if you're trying to subscribe and it's not working.

Let’s just say I’ll be very excited when my baby can sleep through the night.

They sell boy pacifiers and girl pacifiers. Our baby is biologically male, and - this will shock you!! - sucks on girl pacifiers. The whole thing is ridiculous; even more ridiculously, some people would actually care about this.

The best TV show ever made is 59 years old today. Happy birthday, Doctor Who.

Should we all start sending Elon weekly email updates about our work?

Asking what will replace Twitter is missing the point. It’ll be Substack and Mastodon and WordPress and Hive and Post and Tumblr and weird blogs and god knows what else. And that’s beautiful! It’s all the web. A monopoly on conversation is not the goal.

The value of a tool is not the money it can make for its creators.

Join us for our last event of the year. Free and online as always.

We’re talking with leaders who are taking bold actions, both locally and nationally, to develop equitable and sustainable communities that are more livable and adaptable for the most vulnerable groups. We’ll learn from them about the steps we can take, individually, to make a difference where we live now — and which ideas are scalable for broad impact.

Speakers include:

Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Secretary of Transportation
Leah Thomas, Author and Advocate, "The Intersectional Environmentalist"
Jenny Wu, Managing Director of Development, Jonathan Rose Companies

#event #sustainability

https://19thne.ws/decevent

I’m on the waitlist and I’m interested to try it, but I’m super-skeptical about Post. It sounds like they’re trying to drop a fully-established social network designed around newsy influencers. Every successful network has always grown a community organically.

Matt Mullenweg has reportedly committed to add ActivityPub to Tumblr. This is a huge deal. Exactly what I hoped to see: a growing federation of social platforms, all committing to work with each other. It’s happening.

I disabled syndication to Twitter. I won't be posting there regularly. I'm not closing my account, but I locked it down, and a lot would need to change for me to return.

I can’t imagine the horror of being in a situation with an active shooter. Nor the bravery of the person who subdued him. Nor the pain of losing a loved one to an act of hate just for being who they were. The act is sick; the existence and availability of these weapons is sick.

My career mission: to work on projects with the potential to make the world more equal and informed. Which should tell you a lot about where I will and won’t spend my energy.

Unpopular opinion: I'm not sure "unity" is something we should aspire to as such. We should aspire to be inclusive and free from hate. But within that, I aspire to a kaleidoscope of contexts, religions, and POVs with a representative democratic structure that serves us all.

Or to put it another way: the idea that there should be a prevailing patriotism or one dominant religion is undemocratic to the point of being regimented. Diversity will set us free.

I made two concrete life decisions this week. Keeping them to myself, but I'll probably reference this post in the future.

Twitter had 7500 staff to begin with. Then Musk fired a lot, dropping the total to 3700. Now 1200 have opted to take severance, leaving the total at 2500. Do I have that right? I wonder what that looks like across teams?