Werd I/O

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for February, 2022.

Apps + Websites

Globle. Like Wordle but for countries. “Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.” Good fun, but I am not good at this.

Nerdle - the daily numbers game. Another Wordle alternative. I was daunted at first, but it’s pretty fun! The need for equations to resolve mathematically adds a really satisfying extra dimension.

Books

Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism, by Elsa Sjunneson. A frank, and often wryly funny, account of life as a Deafblind woman. Some of her experiences were familiar to me, at least second-hand; the account of hearing aids squealing at the wrong moment made me think of someone very dear to me who happens to be Deaf. The author is a self-described activist, and the passages discussing ableism and capitalist healthcare were as searing, pointed, and brilliant as the passages describing her experiences were human. I loved every moment of getting to know her.

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself, by Melody Beattie. Far more religious than I’d like, and decidedly dated, but it hits the nail on the head more often than it doesn’t. My own codependence is not a result of a relationship with an alcoholic, but the symptoms, discussion of internal self-talk, and potential solutions feel relevant and sometimes confronting. I’m late to my own diagnosis, and the ideas here feel like a part of the solution.

Streaming

Wet Leg - Oh No (Official Video). I love Wet Leg. Their latest song is all about social media addiction and (like everything else they’ve done) it’s brilliant.

Notable Articles

Business

The McNamara Fallacy – measurement is not understanding. “The McNamara Fallacy is to presume that (A) quantitative models of reality are always more accurate than other models; (B) the quantitative measurements that can be made most easily must be the most relevant; and (C) factors other than those currently being used in quantitative metrics must either not exist or not have a significant influence on success. This flawed approach to reasoning is also known as the quantitative fallacy.” Worth also mentioning here that the Vietnam War was deeply misguided in its own right and that the US committed atrocities in the name of fighting a boogieman that didn’t make any sense. The underlying message here - keep research human - is paramount.

Workers for Frozen Food Giant Amy’s Kitchen Allege Unsafe Conditions at Bay Area Factory. And Amy’s has hired a firm to squash worker attempts to form a Union. Really disappointing.

Why More VCs May Want To Back Your Bootstrapped Company. But should you take the money?

The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency. “But what those who had turned on their cameras didn’t know was that some of the others in the meeting weren’t real people. Yes, they were listed as participants. Some even had active email accounts and LinkedIn profiles. But their names were made up and their headshots belonged to other people.”

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness. “Within the workplace, we know that happier employees are more likely to emerge as leaders, earn higher scores on performance evaluations, and tend to be better teammates. We also know, based on substantial research, that happier employees are healthier, have lower rates of absenteeism, are highly motivated to succeed, are more creative, have better relationships with peers, and are less likely to leave a company. All of these correlates of happiness significantly influence a company’s bottom line.”

Waterstones acquires Blackwell’s, the UK’s biggest independent bookseller. Very, very sad to see Blackwell’s purchased - by the hedge fund that owns Barnes and Noble, no less.

Climate

Indonesia Is Switching Capital Cities Because the Old One Is Sinking Into the Ocean. “The flooding, pollution, sinking earth and congestion have gotten so catastrophic, in fact, that the country is switching capital cities altogether. Yes, seriously: the government is packing up and moving the country’s capital to the island of Borneo, according to the Associated Press.”

Crypto

The Sick, Refreshing Honesty of Web3. “From the start, online businesses have presented themselves as making culture, even as they really aimed to build financial value. Now, at last, the wealth seeking is printed on the tin.”

North Korea: Missile programme funded through stolen crypto, UN report says. “North Korean cyber-attacks have stolen millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency to fund the country’s missile programmes, a UN report briefed to media says.” Oops?

The Human Web. “Web3 will succeed, or fail, to the extent that it solves human problems, to the extent that it makes navigating Web0 more tractable—not to the extent that it monetizes everything conceivable, or enables a small number of people to make a financial killing.”

Culture

The Radical Woman Behind “Goodnight Moon”. “Brown helped create a new type of children’s literature that provided both aural and visual feasts. Her books—including “Goodnight Moon,” which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year—delighted, surprised, and sometimes disturbed.”

Book Renovation. “Anyway, right now, I’m working on the revision of Book 2 of the Great Cities. A friend asked me how to do revisions, so I figured I might as well lay out my process here. Note that this is my process; as with all other writing advice, you should look at many methods and then choose or customize something that works best for you. So here goes.” Some lovely writing advice from none other than NK Jemisin.

Inspired by gravity. “Today, being weird online means one of two things. Either you’re trying to get there before other people do, not missing an opportunity, changing the rules to your advantage. That’s the excitement some folks feel right now: they feel like it’s possible to rewrite gravity.”

A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It? “Monahan reassured me that it’s okay not to survive the shift. We all have permission to stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable, and if that’s in 2016 or 2012 or 2010, that’s fine.” How about 1997? Asking for a friend.

No-knead Gatorade bread. “After placing the cast-iron pot into the oven, the distinct smell of grape-flavored Gatorade wafted through the apartment. I do not know how if there are words in the human language to describe the emotions I was feeling. We were essentially enveloped in sublimated grape Gatorade, breathing it in, along with the gentle scent of baking bread. You guys should really try doing this.”

I'm common as muck and spent £150 in a Michelin star restaurant to see if it was worth it. “I’ve never grown up thinking of food as anything other than fuel to get through the day. I grew up on free school meals (chips and gravy, for the most part). As an adult, celebratory meals out are spent at Toby Carvery, where the all-you-can-eat roasters fill all of my requirements for a happy time.” This is quite lovely.

Media

‘We’ll keep reporting, whatever the risk from the junta,’ say Myanmar’s journalists. “A year after the coup, the military continues to egregiously restrict media freedoms across the country and attempts to terrorise journalists into silence. Nearly all the journalists who were working in Myitkyina before the coup have fled. Many are unable to continue reporting at all.”

Want to Make Real Progress in Newsroom DEI? Audience Engagement is Essential. “What does a truly inclusive culture look like? Most newsrooms think of diversity and inclusion work primarily as an internal affair — being respectful to everyone in the organization and treating everyone within that sphere equally. But inclusion work can’t succeed in a bubble.” Useful insights and tactics for improving newsroom DEI - which improves democracy for all of us.

We are deeply and profoundly sorry: For decades, The Baltimore Sun promoted policies that oppressed Black Marylanders; we are working to make amends. “Instead of using its platforms, which at times included both a morning and evening newspaper, to question and strike down racism, The Baltimore Sun frequently employed prejudice as a tool of the times. It fed the fear and anxiety of white readers with stereotypes and caricatures that reinforced their erroneous beliefs about Black Americans.”

Documenting and Debunking Dubious Footage from Ukraine’s Frontlines. “With every alleged provocation a potential pretext for conflict, Bellingcat has decided to track and detail such claims as well as the circumstances surrounding them.”

Politics

Boris Johnson Is a Liar. “The first thing you need to know about Boris Johnson is he’s a liar.” This is brilliant: Jonathan Pie explains Johnson to the New York Times in video. Easily the best thing the Opinion page has ever done.

House approves bill to end forced arbitration of MeToo claims. “The U.S. House on Monday approved a bill that would ban mandatory arbitration in sexual harassment and assault cases brought by workers, consumers and even nursing home residents, queuing the measure up for Senate passage and President Joe Biden’s signature.”

How thousands of text messages from Mark Meadows and others reveal new details about events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack. “If POTUS allows this to occur… we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.” Remarkable.

An antifascist’s position on Ukraine. “While Russia holds culpability for bringing us to the brink of war, America likewise holds culpability for creating a long-term ecosystem where peace and diplomacy seem impossible, and where war, either now or later, is destined to break out.”

Facebook Allows Praise of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. “Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.”

Science

Reading on a smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension. “In this study, we investigated the cause for comprehension decline when reading on a smartphone by simultaneously measuring respiration and brain activity during reading in 34 healthy individuals. We found that, compared to reading on a paper medium, reading on a smartphone elicits fewer sighs, promotes brain overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, and results in reduced comprehension.”

The International Space Station to be retired and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. “NASA said that commercially operated space platforms would replace the ISS as a venue for collaboration and scientific research.” Ugh.

America’s most widely consumed cooking oil causes genetic changes in the brain. “Used for fast food frying, added to packaged foods, and fed to livestock, soybean oil is by far the most widely produced and consumed edible oil in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In all likelihood, it is not healthy for humans.”

Society

American Capitalism Needs a Reboot. “Enda Brophy, associate professor of the labor studies program at Simon Fraser University, says there’s more frustration with capitalism as a system now than at any time since perhaps the 1960-’70s. “Significantly, poll after poll tells us that younger generations and millennials above all have highly negative opinions of capitalism and highly positive opinions around socialism and trade unions,” Brophy said. “People are quitting jobs as they never have before and labor organizing is growing in unexpected industries.””

Forced sterilization is legal in 31 states, new report shows. “According to the report from the National Women’s Law Center, 17 states allow the permanent, surgical sterilization of children with disabilities. The report is written in plain language, designed to be understood by at least some of the people impacted most by these laws.”

Furries Are Leading the War Against a Book-Banning Mississippi Mayor. “Last week, a Mississippi mayor tried to strong-arm a local library into banning some books. The result was swift, and in retrospect, entirely predictable: A group of furries got on Twitter to do something about it.” Lovely!

Exposed documents reveal how the powerful clean up their digital past using a reputation laundering firm. “Now, documents viewed by Rest of World shed light on the reputation management industry, revealing how Eliminalia and companies like it may use spurious copyright claims and fake legal notices to remove and obscure articles linking clients to allegations of tax avoidance, corruption, and drug trafficking. The Elephant case may be one of thousands just like it.”

States propose bills on restricting LGBTQ+ school curriculum. “The White House denounced Florida’s bill in an emailed statement on Tuesday, adding that the legislation “is not an isolated action,” as more Republican lawmakers “take actions to regulate what students can or cannot read, what they can or cannot learn, and most troubling, who they can or cannot be.”” A really troubling trend: an onslaught of bigoted bills that will further isolate queer youth.

Abortion ban in Texas still causing surges at clinics in nearby states. “In Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Louisiana and southern Nevada, clinics have all continued to see a dramatic surge in patients, representatives told The 19th, with some treating more than twice the number of people they saw before the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8 took effect in September.”

Oh, God, how it hurts to write this. “I came to this black wall again to see and touch your name, and as I do I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother’s heart. A heart broken 15 years ago today, when you lost your life in Vietnam.” War is evil and must be avoided.

San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam, D.A. Boudin says. “San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she was alerted to the alleged practice this weekend, and that she has submitted an inquiry to the City Attorney’s Office to draft legislation to prevent DNA evidence — or any sort of evidence collected from a victim’s rape kit — to be used for anything other than investigating that rape itself.”

Ukrainian refugees are already being driven out by the Russian invasion. “EU countries might be more open to absorbing Ukrainians fleeing the wrath of their adversary. But there might also be more willingness to accept Ukrainians because they are white, European, and majority Christian, revealing the “troubling rise of nationalist movements rooted in fear of the other,””

Technology

Google Fonts lands website privacy fine by German court. “The unauthorized disclosure of the plaintiff’s dynamic IP address by the defendant to Google constitutes a violation of the general right of personality in the form of the right to informational self-determination according to § 823 Para. 1 BGB.” Embedding Google resources like fonts as a GDPR violation: wow.

Letter to the US Senate Judiciary Committee on App Stores. “I am Bruce Schneier, a longtime security technologist, author, speaker, and thinker; and author of many books, papers, and articles on the topic both Internet security and privacy. I currently teach cybersecurity policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. I am writing in support of S.2992 and S.2710, which are attempts to redress the power of dominant technology firms.”

Tesla drivers say their cars are making random stops. ““My wife has requested that I don’t use cruise control or autopilot while she’s in the car, as we experienced an unwarranted, aggressive automatic braking episode which caused great pressure against her pregnant belly on a previous road trip,” one driver said in their report.” I drive a Tesla Model 3 and don’t use cruise control or autopilot for exactly this reason: it stops randomly. It’s relatively rare, but one time is one time too many.

Europe’s crackdown on those annoying consent banners is a huge deal. “For one thing, [...] American lawmakers and regulators have often looked at the “consent spam” polluting Europe and pointed to it as one of the worst consequences of GDPR. This new decision [...] exposes that spam to be a violation of the law, not a fulfillment of it.”

Humanitarian organizations keep getting hacked because they can’t spend to secure data. “What we see over and over again is that humanitarians are being expected to hold some of the most sensitive data in the world of the most vulnerable people in the world and have the resources of mall cops to protect against the cyber hacking equivalent of Delta Force.”

Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising? ““The use of personal data in advertising is already tightly regulated by existing legislation,” [IAB Europe Director] Mroczkowski said, apparently referencing the GDPR, which regulates data privacy in the EU generally. He further noted that the new rules “risk undermining” existing law and “the entire ad-supported digital economy.”” Let’s be totally clear: the ad-supported digital economy is not worth protecting.

Why the balance of power in tech is shifting toward workers. “Concerns and anger over tech companies’ impact in the world is nothing new, of course. What’s changed is that workers are increasingly getting organized. Whether writing public letters, marching in protest, filing lawsuits, or unionizing, the labor force that makes the corporate tech world run is finding its voice, demanding a future in which companies do better and are held more responsible for their actions.”

Radio station snafu in Seattle bricks some Mazda infotainment systems. “The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions, and it seems that Mazda’s infotainment system of that generation needs an extension (and not a header) to tell what a file is. No extension, no idea, and the system gets corrupted.” And now those Mazdas are stuck on the station forever. At least it’s NPR!

How Fresh Grads with Zero Experience Get Hired as Senior Engineers. “What greeted me when I walked into their luxury apartment were flies circling around piles of unwashed dishes and utensils in the kitchen. When I stepped into the bathroom, I saw urine on the floor. Each room had bunk beds in it.”

That broken tech/content culture cycle. “Here’s how you do it. […] Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to this insistence on being solely a “neutral” tech company in every aspect of decision-making, policy, hiring and operations, except for your public advertising, where the message is entirely about creativity and expression.”

What using RSS feeds feels like. “To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.” Yes, this exactly. I love RSS.

Surveillance Too Cheap to Meter. “Even ignoring the fact that lawmakers have generally made the collection of surveillance data a requirement for mobile network licenses, it would cost the telcos more money to stop the surveillance of their customers than to continue doing it.”

Bionic Eye Patients Are Going Blind Again After Manufacturer Decides They’re Obsolete. “Currently, Second Sight is planning to merge with Nano Precision Medical, another biotechnology company, to stave off complete financial ruin. However, it doesn’t have any plans to support their bionic eye patients — and likely never will again.”

My journey down the rabbit hole of every journalist’s favorite app. “Otter and its competitors, which include Descript, Rev, Temi and the U.K.-based Trint, are digital warehouses whose advantages of speed and convenience are bracketed by what experts say can be lax privacy and security protections that may endanger sensitive text and audio data, the identities of reporters and the potentially vulnerable sources they contact.”

I have no capslock and I must scream. “In a near future, a team of desktop computer designers are looking at the latest telemetry and updating the schematics of the hardware-as-a-service self-assembling nanohardware.”

A Long Bet Pays Off. “The bet, to be revisited a decade and a year later, would be whether the URL of their wager at Long Bets would survive to a point in the semi-distant future.” And it did!

Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team. “I think I’ve come up with a novel hack for the challenge of getting your company to financially support the open source projects that it uses: reach out to the maintainers and offer them generous speaking fees for remote talks to your engineering team.” This is really smart!

Twitter is sharing safety tips in Ukrainian — including how to delete your account. “On Wednesday night, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Twitter’s Safety team began sharing tips in Ukrainian for how users in the country can cover their digital tracks to help keep themselves safe. That included details for deleting their accounts entirely.”

Here’s how I think about software development:

All code is an assumption until it meets its real-life context: its user, real-world data, the situation it’ll be used in.

The goal in a startup should be to prove all your core assumptions as quickly as possible. Whereas in an agency setting, say, or perhaps even in a larger company, there’s a defined deliverable, code in a startup is never done: you’re constantly iterating on it to get closer and closer to the right fit for its context.

You could spend months or years meticulously developing the perfect codebase before release, but the truth is, no matter how many automated tests you run, no matter how much QA you’ve built in, you won’t know if it really works until a real user uses it. That’s true of websites, applications, back-end server demons, you name it. If you’ve spent all that time writing code and it’s not the right thing - well, then you’ve probably wasted a ton of time and money.

Before the internet era, that was the only way software could be written. A company would work hard on a release, which might even then be shrink-wrapped and sent to stores. These days, we’re constantly connected, and software (whether it’s on the web or not) can be continually updated. Some of the best platforms I’ve worked on have released multiple times a day. The internet gives developers superpowers.

The right thing to do, then, is to write the simplest, smallest thing you can, get it out there, learn from how people are using it, and iterate quickly. This iterative feedback loop is at the heart of agile development, but it’s also just good common sense: you always want to shorten feedback loops as far as you can. The question is always: what’s the shortest distance to proving or disproving your assumption?

Otherwise you’ll end up chasing perfection in silence. In the worst case, your product might not even get released: the context will likely change during a long development process, which means you’ll need to continually adjust the code until you get there. Then the world changes again, and you have to adjust again, and so on and so on and so on. The world will always change - that’s a given - so it’s better to release early and often.

Every software developer in a startup needs to have an inherent comfort with imperfection and a mindset of “failing fast”.

That’s true of every aspect of startups, of course. The core proposition, the underlying business models, the culture, the team - all of those things need to be tested early and iterated upon until you find the right thing. The best startups deeply ingrain these learning loops so that everyone is iterating quickly. The worst just spin their wheels forever.

To do that effectively, you have to let go of your ego. Yes, you’re smart: your insights and past experience will inform how you react to new information. But you can’t operate in a vacuum. Even the smartest people in the world need to approach problems with a growth mindset and let the people they’re trying to build for be the ultimate arbiter on whether they’re building the right thing. Nobody can sit in an enclosed room and come up with the right thing all or most of the time. Whether you’re in the C-suite, an individual contributor, or an intern, you’ve got to figure out how to test your ideas in the real world as quickly as possible.

And then learn, grow, and repeat.

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I donated to Equality Texas. Based in Austin, Equality Texas “works to secure full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Texans through political action, education, community organizing, and collaboration.”

It describes its work as follows:

‌Equality Texas is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, serving as the largest nonpartisan statewide political advocacy organization working for the elimination of discrimination targeting the LGTBQ+ community. This work occurs primarily within, but not limited to, odd-numbered years when the Texas Legislature is in session. During the session, Equality Texas works to advance the rights of LGBTQ+ Texans alongside pro-equality legislators and protects LGBTQ+ Texans from legislative attacks.

I wrote a little about the adverse situation trans kids are facing in Texas earlier this week. Equality Texas is helping through political change, media advocacy, a crisis fund, education, and more.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

I’m not remotely qualified to talk about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in any level of competent detail, but I am qualified to discuss my feelings about it.

These things seem to rarely be fought on real principles; instead, war puts ordinary peoples’ lives on the line in the name of political and financial dominance. It’s always an atrocity. That this, or any, conflict couldn’t be resolved without killing innocent people is a failure on every level: diplomatic, moral, human.

I’m not sure there’s a single leadership voice out there that can be trusted. Russia’s interests largely relate to energy and economic supremacy. Ukraine has aligned itself with NATO but also has allowed literal Nazi battalions to join its national forces. The US has a famously self-interested foreign policy and would prefer Ukraine was allied to it, and that, ideally, it was the only global superpower.

When I say they can’t be trusted, I mean it in two ways: the first is that we can’t believe anything they say. The second is that I don’t trust them to not spill blood in service of those interests. The conflict may be on the level of Russia’s temporary invasion of Georgia (a war that involved war crimes), or it could be more. I’m a computer programmer, not by any means an expert in international relations, so I’m a little bit scared and trying to read what I can.

I’ve noticed some voices that seem to be excited for a reconfigured Cold War - hey, nostalgia is big right now - which doesn’t, to me, seem like what we should want either. The fact that Russia and the US were at loggerheads for a significant portion of the 20th century doesn’t mean they should always be. Which doesn’t in any way make apologies Russia’s behavior or hardline political stance: I’m not arguing in favor of Russia here. I’m really just hoping that everyone can be smart and that all parties come to the table looking for equitable, collaborative peace rather than 20th century style dominance.

I can dream.

Regardless, people will lose their lives, and many more will lose their homes. There’s nothing good or noble about war. There’s nobody to root for except for the people who will be collateral in the face of conflict conducted in the name of someone else’s wealth and power. It’s not a sports game with teams and scores, although the TV news will report on it as such. It’s just death and human suffering.

And my biggest worry is that nobody with power really cares about that.

Anyway, I suppose I should do some computer programming.

NBC News:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is calling on “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to report the parents of transgender minors to state authorities if it appears the minors are receiving gender-affirming medical care.

Trans kids and their supportive parents need to be protected. This is the kind of brutal statement that - toothless as it might be legally - has real world effects that endanger lives. It’s obvious, noxious bigotry, as reckless as it is stupid.

As the New Republic points out:

Genital surgery, in almost all cases, is only available to adults. But this basic factual error is only the beginning—if also the foundation—of the problems with Paxton’s stigma-fueling decision.

The implication that parents of trans children, and the people who provide gender-affirming services, are “definitionally abusers” is horrifying. It derives from a mindset that should have no place in the 21st century, and one that is not limited to Texas.

In the face of this kind of rhetoric, I think it’s important for everyone to be vocal. Write your representatives, post on your own sites, and if you can, give to organizations doing important work on the ground. (I gave to Equality Texas and would love other suggestions.) This backwards dogma must be stopped in its tracks.

This is far more than “culture wars”, although we hear this phrase a lot. It comes down to protecting the lives of children. Trans children and their families are vulnerable, and need our support.

They say grief ebbs and flows and sneaks up on you unexpectedly, and lately I’ve been missing my mother a lot.

Today my phone showed me memories from this time last year. I was glad to see them, but they also made me cry.

It’s been, what, eight months? Close to a year. And I feel nothing close to okay. So much has happened. But even if I hadn’t, there’s a giant hole in my life. Everything feels wrong, like I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. I don’t know when I’ll feel anchored or right again, but I’m certainly not there now.

Every day I want to tell her something, or ask her advice, or hear what she has to say. I often think that I will, until I remember. It’s awful. Selfishly, I still need her. And I just miss her presence.

She’s here, of course. Just not in the way I would like.

The only way is forwards. Unfortunately.

One of my firmest beliefs about the web as it emerged was that it could be a force for peace: learning happens, I argued, when contexts collide. People who didn’t know or understand each other would meet, talk, and connect. We would all have a deeper understanding, rooted in justice and empathy.

A lot of ink has been spilled over the incorrectness of that original utopian vision for the web, but I’m still not sure that belief was entirely wrong: the internet helped give birth to restorative justice movements like Black Lives Matter, and movements for justice around the world, which I truly believe are a prerequisite for a just peace.

It did, however, undeniably also bring together some of the darkest aspects of society: bigotry, nationalism, violence. It helped hate find hate; white supremacist organizations and thinkers were able to grow their communities too. Propagandists were able to share mis and dis-information swiftly for their own ends. Viral content became an integral part of statecraft, movement-building, and the manufacturing of consent.

Nationalism is a fundamentally toxic idea that can only lead to division. The simple idea that humans who were born inside one arbitrary diplomatic division are somehow superior to those who were born inside another is ridiculous on its face, and archaic to the core. We’re all part of one single, connected open graph; the internet should have shown us that. Everyone is connected to everyone else. We’re all just people, doing our best, trying to live our lives.

That we should fight each other based on where we were born or where we live or which deity we choose to believe in is absurd 17th century stuff. And the thing is, the people who sew these divisions know that. They’re created in the name of profit: to help secure energy rights, or a section of coastline that empowers a trading route, or to boost the shares of some corporation or other. It all comes down to cynical manipulation in order to establish dominance.

Faced with this landscape of internet-enhanced manipulation, those of us who build platforms for information and sharing have a choice to make. It’s not dissimilar to the choices made with respect to disrupting any incumbent industry. We can either choose to put a nice new face on existing power dynamics, or we can disrupt them entirely. A fintech company must decide whether it should works with incumbent banks and simply provide a shiny app that sits on top of the existing financial system, or build an entirely new system that serves people better. An information company must decide whether it should work with the existing dynamics of power, or build an entirely new system in service of truth and justice. Not nationalistic truth or justice, in service of a single nation’s interests above others, but truth or justice in the name of all people.

The web is for everyone.

That’s the only way it works.

It will have reached its potential when we can look at each other, or think of another country, and see the humans in their individual beauty and nuance over any tribal allegiance; when we can consider them all to be neighbors, and when their well-being is important to us.

Conversely, if that never happens, if we think in terms of diplomatic friends and foes and choose to accept the dehumanization of those our leaders deem to be the latter, then it will have failed, and maybe even made the world worse.

The internet is people. It’s all about interrelatedness and interdependence. We’re all connected. And if we can’t see that, I don’t know what hope there is for us.