Werd I/O

[Molly Redden and Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented]

"A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term."

Russell Vought directed the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump administration, and is likely to be back again for the next one. The rhetoric here dovetails with Trump's own and paints a bleak picture of what the future might hold.

As always, I'm grateful to my colleagues at ProPublica who have been bringing these topics to light.

#Democracy

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[Heather Bryant]

A characteristically sharp piece on the Washington Post's spiked Presidential endorsement and ensuing fallout from Heather Bryant:

"Good journalism is not unique to the Washington Post. Or the L.A. Times. Or the New York Times. Or any other specific organization. Their historical reach and influence is unique, but not necessarily the quality of their work. [...] If you venerate an institution to the point where you refrain from holding it accountable, what are you teaching it but that it can do what it wants without consequence?"

I strongly agree with this message. News is an industry in trouble, but we must not confuse ourselves: the thing we need to protect is speaking truth to power and an informed voting population - the act of journalism itself - and not necessarily the incumbent institutions themselves. The latter must be held accountable, and canceling subscriptions is one of the few levers we have.

I canceled my subscription. If you're still a subscriber, you should make your own mind up - but bear in mind that it is a way to take action and be noticed in the face of a pretty appalling publisher decision.

#Media

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[Ghost]

"Last week we officially started the ActivityPub private beta and sent invitations to our first 3 publishers to start testing things out. This was the first big milestone we've been working toward for months, and it felt great to get there! 🚀"

The Ghost team continues to build their ActivityPub integration in the open. It's really fun to see.

This update goes into the kinds of bugs you discover when you start showing your work to early adopters, and I love the joyul attitude here. I also particularly love the animated preview of the ActivityPub-aware profile viewer.

It's all coming together nicely - and it looks like it'll be one of the slickest Fediverse apps out there. I can't wait.

#Fediverse

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[Manuel Roig-Franzia and Laura Wagner at The Washington Post]

"An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two people who were briefed on the sequence of events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision to no longer publish presidential endorsements was made by The Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to four people who were briefed on the decision."

What an act of absolute cowardice.

Later that same day, Donald Trump met with executives from Bezos-owned Blue Origin. Perhaps it's a coincidence, but the twin events illustrate the danger of this kind of ownership of a paper that is supposed to publish independent journalism.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's joint statement is pertinent:

“We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 12 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”

#Media

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[Jan Diehm and Michelle Pera-McGhee at The Pudding]

"To illustrate how difficult it is to get abortion care, we built a maze for each state where the difficulty is calculated by the state’s abortion policies."

What an incredible use of the web as a platform. These stories - even in more progressive, pro-human states like California - reveal that the process is harder and trap-filled than it should be. Of course, in anti-human states like Texas, it's significantly harder to the point of impossibility.

The Pudding is killing it. Just absolutely A-plus work for story after story. This one is a particular highlight.

#Democracy

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[Anne Helen Petersen]

"The best indication of the health of an industry like journalism isn’t who excels there, because the answer is obvious: work robots who come from some sort of family money. To understand just how broken media is, look at who leaves the field — or who dares not pursue it. Because this much I know is true: it’s not because they’re soft."

Anne Helen Petersen makes some welcome, sharp observations about newsroom attitudes to work. In many ways, journalism is behind even tech in terms of reckoning with its own culture and having empathy for the people who push for better working conditions. The idea that they're too soft is absurd: they simply can't make ends meet and deserve to be supported at work, as everyone does.

Fundamentally, this needs to seep in - not just in practice, but in spirit:

"These media executives understand unions as a coddling mechanism, when what they’re really trying to do is make the field sustainable. For the current generation of journalists, sure, but also for the journalists to come."

The advantages to producing a sustainable working environment are obvious and enormous. Inclusive, diverse environments with multiple perspectives that allow newsrooms to resonate with broader audiences aren't some kind of nice-to-have: doing this intentionally is good for business.

The system is broken. Younger entrants are showing how to fix it. Listen to them, for crying out loud. The goal is surely to speak truth to power and ensure everyone has the ability to make informed democratic decisions, not to preserve an industry as-is. Change isn't just inevitable: it's survival.

#Media

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[Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users]

An important announcement from Bluesky:

"We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, and others."

Bluesky is quick to point out that it will continue to not use blockchains or crypto, and that they will "not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)".

Instead, this may be an indication that blockchain investors are interested in other forms of decentralization; Bluesky is talking about adding voluntary paths to revenue for creators, so there may be some way to make a return there. (I'd been wondering what the business model would be, in order to justify these funding rounds.)

Bluesky's CEO Jay Graber previously worked on ZCash, a cryptocurrency based on Bitcoin's codebase, so has some clout in that community, but this may have implications for other projects and companies that want to raise money. (Another investor is True Ventures, which previously heavily backed Automattic; those implications are also interesting.)

Another important note: Bluesky's had some flak in the past for not federating. But this announcement notes that there are over a thousand other personal data servers, which is a solid achievement.

#Technology

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[Jon Hicks]

I love this sort of thing:

"Usborne's The Detective’s Handbook and The Guide to the Supernatural captivated my imagination in equal measure. This site is an imagined combination of those books – an engaging thematic prompt for me to overcome the quandary of 'what to draw?'. The order and frequency of new chapters will be random - the intention is to have a bit of fun with it!"

The web needs more whimsy, and this is so incredibly well-executed. (Well, maybe not incredibly - Jon Hicks's work is reliably amazing.)

Absolutely I plugged this into my feed reader so I can follow along. I'm already delighted.

#Culture

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[Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism]

File this under "good, but I can't believe this wasn't already banned":

"Sweeping changes to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines aimed at cleaning up the polluted, confusing world of online product reviews went into effect on Monday, meaning the federal agency is now allowed to levy civil penalties against bad actors who knowingly post product reviews and testimonials deemed misleading to American consumers."

Regardless of the fact that they should obviously have never been allowed, fake reviews, including AI-generated reviews, are now definitively not. This also includes people who buy star ratings and followers (which, as a practice, is I think far more prevalent than we might realize).

Because this is a US law, and the internet is what it is, we can probably expect a lot of these activities to now take place overseas, on other platforms.

#Technology

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[Joseph Cox at 404 Media]

Without needing a warrant, police can track ordinary peoples' smartphone locations - including people who travel out of state to get abortion procedures. The implications are troubling:

"“Warrantless law enforcement access to digital information related to reproductive health care, including location data, threatens reproductive freedom,” Ashley Emery, senior policy analyst, reproductive health and rights at the non-profit the National Partnership for Women & Families, told 404 Media. “If law enforcement can bypass court approval needed to obtain sensitive data and instead use this new surveillance tool to track pregnant people and build cases against them, the implications for abortion and pregnancy criminalization are alarming. This risk is especially salient for Black women, brown women, and low-income women, who are already over-surveilled and over-policed.”"

The tracking crosses states and is made possible by the cellphone networks themselves as part of what are shockingly lenient data sharing policies overall. Because of the jurisdiction, and the complicated way this data becomes available, the only surefire way to solve this problem is with a federal privacy law that protects our data.

At the very least it should need a warrant - but really, this sort of tracking shouldn't be possible at all. Without strong technical and legal protections against sharing, all our cellphones (this problem is not limited to smartphones) can be used as tracking devices to understand our whereabouts, who we're gathering with, and potentially more. We're all highly-dependent on them at this stage, but it's worth questioning whether we should be.

#Democracy

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[Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Audrey Ash, Kyung Lah, Anna-Maja Rappard, Casey Tolan, Lou Robinson and Byron Manley at CNN]

"More than 1,000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups reviewed by CNN, along with an analysis of campaign finance data and interviews with dozens of contributors and their family members, show how deceptive political fundraisers have victimized hundreds of elderly Americans and misled those battling dementia or other cognitive impairments into giving away millions of dollars — far more than they ever intended."

Some of these are for Democrats, but most are for Republicans, who use an array of dark patterns including pre-selected checkboxes and misleading UI elements to convince donors to pay far more than originally intended.

The problem is most acute for elderly donors, and particularly for those with dementia, but there are plenty of other people who have been misled. It's a giant problem that stems from something everyone who's worked in tech will be familiar with: a focus on pushing success metrics up and to the right above all else.

There needs to be stronger regulation here, but of course, politicians aren't necessarily incentivized to push it. The best option would likely be for dark patterns overall to be more highly-regulated - after all, these same techniques are often used by lenders, insurance providers, subscription services, and more.

There's an even sadder story lurking here, too, which is more to do with a lack of the support and infrastructure for elder-care that these politicians should be providing:

"Forensic geriatrician Kathryn Locatell said what Richard Benjamin felt each time he received a “thank you” message or made a donation is the same “dopamine hit” a lot of elderly Americans are seeking. And the solicitations are crafted in a way that intentionally suck elderly donors into their web, providing “a feeling of belonging to a thrilling, special club.”"

In other words, if these people weren't so lonely and isolated to begin with, they might be less susceptible to this and other scams. That feels like an important problem worth solving, too, and one that should be tackled universally, for every person who needs it, regardless of means. Instead, the people who claim to want to help them end up persuading them to part with sometimes tens of thousands of dollars they can't afford to spend. It's nothing short of an abuse of power.

#Democracy

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[Timothy Snyder]

Timothy Snyder on the seriousness of the Trump-Vance deportation plans and their implications:

"Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers. People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples. Denunciation then becomes a culture. If you are Latino, expect to be denounced at some point, and expect special attention from a government that will demand your help to find people who are not documented. This is especially true if you are a local civic or business leader."

The proposal itself has echoes in some of the worst policies of the worst governments of the past. To see arenas of people giddily waving "mass deportations now" signs is genuinely chilling, and it's not reasonable to dismiss this as electioneering. (Even as electioneering, it establishes a despicable us-and-them division that is unabashedly fascist.)

But Timothy Snyder is right here to go a get step further and ask what the impact would be on communities. Some people will inevitably be willing collaborators; others will not want to make a scene or hurt their own community standing and will become de facto collaborators. And the effect will be to establish a new normal that will be incredibly difficult culturally to turn back from.

"The deep purpose of a mass deportation is to establish a new sort of politics, a politics of us-and-them, which means (at first) everyone else against the Latinos. In this new regime, the government just stokes the fears and encourages the denunciations, and we expect little more of it."

It's sickening to think that this is an America that some people actively, intentionally want. If they win, I genuinely don't know what happens next.

Personally, I can't wait for an election that's fought on tax policy or infrastructure or the nuances of government. Right now, here in 2024, it seems like a big ask.

#Democracy

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[Samantha Lai and Yoel Roth at Tech Policy Press]

"Decentralized social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. However, over two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter sparked an exodus of users seeking new homes on the social web, federated platforms remain ill-equipped to meet the threats of abuse, harassment, coordinated manipulation, and spam that have plagued social media for years. Given the porous nature of decentralized services, these limitations will not just affect individual servers, but reverberate through the social web."

Most major decentralized and federated platforms don't have the necessary tooling "for scalable management of harmful content and conduct — or even the enforcement of their own rules."

For some, of course, this is by design: the same version of "free speech" which animates Elon Musk and in effect prevents speech from anyone except for in-groups and the loud and powerful. To have truly free speech - where people from vulnerable communities can have a voice and real debate can be held without threat of violence - there must be trust and safety and moderation.

The piece rightly calls out IFTAS for the great work it's doing in this area. More must be done - which in part means convincing federated communities that these ideas are important.

Unfortunately a common attitude is that "we don't have these problems" - a common refrain when your bias makes you blind to your lack of inclusion. As many Black users found when they joined Mastodon and were asked to hide the details of their lived experiences under content warnings, or when people told them that these were American-only experiences (which, of course, they aren't), a predominantly white and male Fediverse that seeks to maintain the status quo rather than learning and growing can be quite a conservative place.

This is an important piece, and an important finding, which everyone working on decentralized tech should pay attention to.

#Fediverse

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[Hannah Devlin, Tom Burgis, David Pegg and Jason Wilson at The Guardian]

Quite a disturbing new startup coming to light in The Guardian:

“The footage appears to show experimental genetic selection techniques being advertised to prospective parents. A Heliospect employee, who has been helping the company recruit clients, outlined how couples could rank up to 100 embryos based on “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants”, including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.”

Eugenics is a discredited, troubling idea, and the startup’s claims are akin to junk science, even if the underlying data was drawn from UK Biobank, which seems like a great resource when used for good. Still, the startup is clearly out there offering its services, while using a regulatory arbitrage strategy (operating between jurisdictions to exploit legal differences and finding ways to exploit loopholes in the law) that isn’t a million miles away from techniques used by startups like Uber, and throwing up all kinds of ethical questions in the process.

A major figure in the startup is Jonathan Anomaly (his real name), who has been advocating for “liberal eugenics” for some time:

“Anomaly is a well-known figure in a growing transatlantic movement that promotes development of genetic selection and enhancement tools, which he says should not be confused with coercive state-sponsored eugenics. “All we mean by [liberal eugenics] is that parents should be free and maybe even encouraged to use technology to improve their children’s prospects once it’s available,” he told the podcast The Dissenter.”

Of course, eugenics isn’t controversial or unethical solely when it’s forcibly done by the government. As the article notes:

“Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, in California, said: “One of the biggest problems is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics.” The rollout of such technologies, she said, “reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.”

Enough ink has been spilled on science fiction stories that describe the effects of exactly this startup’s mission that the founders should have understood they were building a biotech torment nexus: something that was described in fiction as a technology that must never be built for the good of humanity, lest we fall victim to both intended and unintended consequences. Regardless, if someone can build it, they eventually will, and here we are.

There’s a related ethical question raised here, which related to who, exactly, should have access to biological research data. It turns out that UK Biobank also gave access to its database to a race science group. Should it have? Or should there be ethical safeguards on these databases? I’m more inclined to say that knowledge bases should be as open access as possible, but the implications for use by eugenicists and racist groups are pretty dire.

#Technology

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[Kirsten Eddy at Pew Research Center]

The lede is a little buried here behind some pretty shocking top-line stats:

"Today, 37% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites. This is nearly on par with the 40% of Republicans who express this level of trust in national news organizations."

"[...] Adults under 30 are now nearly as likely to have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites (52%) as from national news organizations (56%)."

Okay, but what's fascinating is that both groups trust local news outlets a great deal more. These have been systemically underfunded and are often run on a shoestring, but there's something about the local voice that really matters.

My suspicion - which is really just a hunch, so take it with a pinch of salt - is that it's because local news outlets don't tend to deal as much with abstract partisan politics. They're not going to comment on what Trump said now, or perceived shortcomings in the Harris campaign.

But, of course, local politics really matters. So it's interesting to think about what might happen if there's more investment in the space - something that initiatives like Tiny News Collective, the American Journalism Project and The Lenfest Institute are already thinking hard about. We need diverse, mission-driven outlets like Open Vallejo and Mission Local to spring up across the country.

My question as a technologist is how platforms, and more pointedly, open protocols can support these newsrooms. How can technology help great local journalists find the reach and make the impact they need, on their terms? And how can journalists, technologists, and product thinkers work together to shine a light on local politics and improve life in communities across the country?

#Media

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[Cory Doctorow]

Cory Doctorow discusses how he reads writers like Molly White:

"This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power."

I agree. I start every day in my RSS reader (I maintain a very simple live list of my subscriptions over here) and it's one of the best tools I use. I rarely miss a news story from a publisher I care about - whether that's a newsroom, an individual, or an organization. And nobody's getting in the way to try and predict what I should be interested in.

RSS is free, open, well-established, and easy to use. More people should be using it. Even you.

#Technology

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[Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica]

"For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society. Yet Crusius hadn’t denied climate change at all. Instead, he seemed to claim its impacts were themselves arguments justifying his violence."

Abrahm Lustgarten has written a sobering piece about the far right's embrace of climate change as a root for anti-immigrant and eugenicist sentiments. We can see this playing out among conservative groups across the country: in a world where resources are becoming more scarce, preserving "white European ideals and beliefs" becomes a part of "preserving the purity of [America's] ecology".

Ecofascism has been with us for a long time, and unfortunately has long been a subset of climate movements. But as the planet heats up and climate discussions become less hypothetical and more immediate, these conversations are becoming louder, too.

#Climate

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[Dries Buytaert]

"I'm excited to share an experiment I've been working on: a solar-powered, self-hosted website running on a Raspberry Pi."

Lovely!

The key seems to be a Voltaic 50-watt panel and 18 amp-hour battery, which run to around $300 in total. That's not a lot of money for something that can theoretically run in perpetuity.

I've been wanting to make my own website run on fully green energy for a long time, and it's hard to find a web host that does this directly rather than through trading carbon credits, which I'm deeply suspicious of. (The exception is Iceland, where geothermal energy is common.)

I wonder what it would take to productize something like this and make it an all-in-one home server solution? Or to put your wifi router and modem on solar? (Assuming your whole house isn't on solar, that is, which mine sadly isn't.)

This also seems fair:

"It may seem unconventional, but I believe it's worth considering: many websites, mine included, aren't mission-critical. The world won't end if they occasionally go offline. That is why I like the idea of hosting my 10,000 photos on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi."

I feel the same way.

#Technology

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[James Salanga at The Objective]

"Layoffs in journalism since 2022 have disproportionately impacted people of marginalized genders and people of color, according to a new report from the Institute of Independent Journalists (IIJ). It collects data from a survey with 176 journalist respondents who had undergone a layoff or buyout since 2022."

This mirrors the impact of layoffs in tech, and likely other industries. In 2023, Prism reported that:

"Recent surveys have found that women, people of color, disabled workers, and other marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by mass layoffs in tech despite being underrepresented in the industry. According to Harvard Business Review, companies rely heavily on position and tenure when deciding on cuts, which translates to wiping out “most or all of the gains they’ve made in diversity.”"

This is damning in itself, but also suggests that many diversity gains were in positions closer to entry level than management level.

The irony for journalism is that it's the diverse members of newsrooms who can help them find broader audiences by ensuring that diverse perspectives are represented both in coverage and in management decisions. For a declining industry, it's a self-sabotaging thing to do. But, again, it says a lot about the demographics of the people who make the decisions.

#Media

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[Mathew Ingram]

Mathew Ingram's overview of the WordPress drama continues to be updated with new information. The hole just seems to be getting deeper and deeper. As he says: it's a mess.

"It's pretty clear that Matt sees what he is doing as protecting WordPress, and forcing a no-good corporation to cough up some dough after years of taking advantage of the community (he says he has been trying to negotiate with WP Engine for more than a year now, while WP Engine says it gives back to WordPress in a number of ways.) To some observers like me, however — and to some other longtime members of the WordPress ecosystem — it looks like Matt has dragged the WordPress community into a legal mess with a variety of unforeseen and potentially serious consequences."

I still don't fully understand what prompted this sea change in how Matt has addressed the wider community, including WP Engine. I have this ongoing sense that there's another shoe left to drop, whether it's relating to stalling revenue at Automattic and pressure from its board (pure conjecture on my part, to be clear), or something else entirely. Without some strong motivating factor this just seems to be self-sabotage.

At this point I'm really curious to see what's next. All this drama has also made it clear that for the kind of CMS WordPress is - more of a framework than an out-of-the-box solution at this point, but with a strong ready-made editing and administration experience - there aren't many alternatives. That's not to denegrate other projects like Drupal, etc, because I think they're different kinds of CMSes. Ghost is much more narrowly focused, too. I think if WordPress had a real competitor in its space, this might all be playing out differently.

(If I was WP Engine and had run out of options to de-escalate, I'd be going ahead and forking WordPress right now. And what a mess that would be.)

#Technology

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