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US finalizes rule to effectively ban Chinese vehicles, which could include Polestar

[Andrew J. Hawkins at The Verge]

I think this is the wrong kind of protectionism:

"The Biden administration finalized a new rule that would effectively ban all Chinese vehicles from the US under the auspices of blocking the “sale or import” of connected vehicle software from “countries of concern.” The rule could have wide-ranging effects on big automakers, like Ford and GM, as well as smaller manufacturers like Polestar — and even companies that don’t produce cars, like Waymo."

I would much rather see a ban on vehicles that spy on you, regardless of who manufactures them. The rule as it stands provides very uneven protection, and allows domestic vehicle manufacturers to conduct significant surveillance over their customers. Legislators should just ban the practice outright, and conduct inspections to ensure that it's the case across the board.

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Free Our Feeds

[Free Our Feeds]

The non-profit social media foundation space is really heating up. Which is not a bad thing!

Enter Free our Feeds:

"It will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.

Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen."

The names involved in this particular venture are really fascinating. Nabiha Syed is the ED of the Mozilla Foundation and is joined by Mark Surman, its President; Robin Berjon has done some of the most important writing and thinking in this space, particularly with respect to governance; Eli Pariser is an experienced activist who co-founded Avaaz and used to run MoveOn; Mallory Knodel is the ED of the ActivityPub-centric Social Web Foundation.

And then the signatories to the letter are people like Jimmy Wales, Mark Ruffalo, Cory Doctorow, Roger McNamee, Shoshana Zuboff and Audrey Tang.

So the Social Web Foundation is ActivityPub-centric and Free Our Feeds is AT Protocol-centric. My (figurative) money is increasingly on A New Social, which posits that all these individual protocols and sub-networks will ultimately be universally addressable as one social internet, and is backing tools to help make that happen.

It's all wonderful. It's all such a great change from the old model - and in a week where Zuckerberg went "full Musk", the timing couldn't be better.

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The people should own the town square

[Mastodon]

Mastodon is growing up:

"Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

[...] We are in the process of a phased transition. First we are establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship. We are taking the time to select the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe. Then we will determine which other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and sustainability."

Eugen, Mastodon's CEO, will not be the leader of this new entity, although it's not yet clear who will be. He's going to focus on product instead.

Another note, right at the end of this announcement: the non-profit seeks to grow its annual budget to €5 million. That's a big increase from current levels, but is absolutely needed. It sounds like plans are in place to make that happen.

I'm excited for everyone involved; everyone who uses Mastodon; everyone on the web. Greater competition through a truly federated solution with decentralized ownership is good for everyone. I can't wait to see what happens next.

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Content Policy on the Social Web

[Social Web Foundation]

The Social Web Foundation's statement about Meta's moderation changes is important:

"Ideas matter, and history shows that online misinformation and harassment can lead to violence in the real world.

[...] Meta is one of many ActivityPub implementers and a supporter of the Social Web Foundation. We strongly encourage Meta’s executive and content teams to come back in line with best practices of a zero harm social media ecosystem. Reconsidering this policy change would preserve the crucial distinction between political differences of opinion and dehumanizing harassment. The SWF is available to discuss Meta’s content moderation policies and processes to make them more humane and responsible."

This feels right to me. By implication: the current policies are inhumane and irresponsible. And as such, worth calling out.

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DoJ releases its Tulsa race massacre report over 100 years after initial review

[Adria R Walker at The Guardian]

A full century after the Bureau of Investigation blamed the Tulsa race massacre on Black men and claimed that the perpetrators didn't break the law, the DoJ has issued an update:

"“The Tulsa race massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps.”"

Every one of the perpetrators is dead and can no longer be prosecuted. But this statement seeks to correct the record and ensure that the official history records what actually happened. There's value in that, even if it comes a hundred years too late.

It's worth also checking out Greenwood Rising, which will be the first to tell you that discrimination against Black citizens of the town and the descendants of the race riot has been ongoing.

The Tulsa race massacre "was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence". Calling it a stain on our history would paint it as a one-off; instead, it's part of a continuum of hate, violence, and discrimination.

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The indie web should be a universe of discovery

The Norrington Room, from Wikimedia Commons

In Oxford, my hometown, the flagship Blackwell’s bookshop looks like any ordinary bookstore at ground level. But if you go down a set of stairs, you find yourself in the Norrington Room: one of the largest rooms full of books in the world. The shelves expand out around you to encompass almost every possible subject: three miles of bookshelves, holding hundreds of thousands of books.

As in any good bookstore, tables are set out where the knowledgable booksellers (and Blackwell’s has some of the most informed and knowledgable booksellers in the world) have curated interesting titles. But you also have the ability to peruse any book, at your leisure. The Norrington Room doesn’t have a coffee shop or sell music, but there are comfy chairs where you can enjoy the books and read.

The modern version of Google search has been optimized for fast answers: a search query. But that’s not the only kind of search that’s valuable. It’s not an experiential search. I had a conversation with capjamesg the other day that put this into focus: he’s very smartly thinking about the next decade of useful tools for the indieweb. And on an internet that’s focused on transactional answers, we agreed that an experiential web was missing.

The indieweb should feel like the Norrington Room: an expansive world of different voices, opinions, modes of expression, and art that you can explore, peruse, or have curated for you. It’s not about any particular goal aside from the goal of being enriched by people sharing their lived experiences, creativity, and expertise. It’s a journey of discovery, conversation, and community, not a journey of extraction.

Curators and linkblogs are one part of it. Webrings like the indieweb webring scratch the surface of it. Blog directories like ooh.directory and blogrolls are part of it. But I feel like we’re missing something else. I’m not sure what that is! But I sure wish we had the equivalent of knowledgable booksellers — indie tummelers, perhaps — to guide us and help intentionally build community.

Norrington Room photo from Wikimedia Commons, shared under a CC share-alike license.

Syndicated to IndieNews.

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Is Ignorance Bliss?

[Jared White]

I've been thinking about this paragraph since I read it:

"In times past, we would worry about singular governmental officials such Joseph Goebbels becoming a master of propaganda for their cause. Today’s problem is massively scaled out in ways Goebbels could only dream of: now everyone can be their own Goebbels. Can someone please tell me what the difference is between an “influencer” holding a smartphone and…a propagandist? Because I simply can’t see the distinction anymore."

This brings me back to Renee DiResta's Invisible Rulers: whoever controls the memes controls the universe.

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Building an open web that protects us from harm

We live in a world where right-wing nationalism is on the rise and many governments, including the incoming Trump administration, are promising mass deportations. Trump in particular has discussed building camps as part of mass deportations. This question used to feel more hypothetical than it does today.

Faced with this reality, it’s worth asking: who would stand by you if this kind of authoritarianism took hold in your life?

You can break allyship down into several key areas of life:

  • Who in your personal life is an ally? (Your friends, acquaintances, and extended family.)
  • Who in your professional life is an ally? (People you work with, people in partner organizations, and your industry.)
  • Who in civic life is an ally? (Your representatives, government workers, individual members of law enforcement, healthcare workers, and so on.)
  • Which service providers are allies? (The people you depend on for goods and services — including stores, delivery services, and internet services.)

And in turn, can be broken down further:

  • Who will actively help you evade an authoritarian regime?
  • Who will refuse to collaborate with a regime’s demands?

These two things are different. There’s also a third option — non-collaboration but non-refusal — which I would argue does not constitute allyship at all. This might look like passively complying with authoritarian demands when legally compelled, without taking steps to resist or protect the vulnerable. While this might not seem overtly harmful, it leaves those at risk exposed. As Naomi Shulman points out, the most dangerous complicity often comes from those who quietly comply. Nice people made the best Nazis.

For the remainder of this post, I will focus on the roles of internet service vendors and protocol authors in shaping allyship and resisting authoritarianism.

For these groups, refusing to collaborate means that you’re not capitulating to active demands by an authoritarian regime, but you might not be actively considering how to help people who are vulnerable. The people who are actively helping, on the other hand, are actively considering how to prevent someone from being tracked, identified, and rounded up by a regime, and are putting preventative measures in place. (These might include implementing encryption at rest, minimizing data collection, and ensuring anonymity in user interactions.)

If we consider an employer, refusing to collaborate means that you won’t actively hand over someone’s details on request. Actively helping might mean aiding someone in hiding or escaping to another jurisdiction.

These questions of allyship apply not just to individuals and organizations, but also to the systems we design and the technologies we champion. Those of us who are involved in movements to liberate social software from centralized corporations need to consider our roles. Is decentralization enough? Should we be allies? What kind of allies?

This responsibility extends beyond individual actions to the frameworks we build and the partnerships we form within open ecosystems. While building an open protocol that makes all content public and allows indefinite tracking of user activity without consent may not amount to collusion, it is also far from allyship. Partnering with companies that collaborate with an authoritarian regime, for example by removing support for specific vulnerable communities and enabling the spread of hate speech, may also not constitute allyship. Even if it furthers your immediate stated technical and business goals to have that partner on board, it may undermine your stated social goals. Short-term compromises for technical or business gains may seem pragmatic but risk undermining the ethics that underpin open and decentralized systems.

Obviously, the point of an open protocol is that anyone can use it. But we should avoid enabling entities that collude with authoritarian regimes to become significant contributors to or influencers of open protocols and platforms. While open protocols can be used by anyone, we must distinguish between passive use and active collaboration. Enabling authoritarian-aligned entities to shape the direction or governance of these protocols undermines their potential for liberation.

In light of Mark Zuckerberg’s clear acquiescence to the incoming Trump administration (for example by rolling back DEI, allowing hate speech, and making a series of bizarre statements designed to placate Trump himself), I now believe Threads should not be allowed to be an active collaborator to open protocols unless it can attest that it will not collude, and that it will protect vulnerable groups using its platforms from harm. I also think Bluesky’s AT Protocol decision to make content and user blocks completely open and discoverable should be revisited. I also believe there should be an ethical bill of rights for users on open social media protocols that authors should sign, which includes the right to privacy, freedom from surveillance, safeguards against hate speech, and strong protections for vulnerable communities.

As builders, users, and advocates of open systems, we must demand transparency, accountability, and ethical commitments from all contributors to open protocols. Without these safeguards, we risk creating tools that enable oppression rather than resisting it. Allyship demands more than neutrality — it demands action.

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The Good, The Bad, And The Stupid In Meta’s New Content Moderation Policies

[Mike Masnick in TechDirt]

Mark Zuckerberg is very obviously running scared from the incoming Trump administration:

"Since the election, Zuckerberg has done everything he can possibly think of to kiss the Trump ring. He even flew all the way from his compound in Hawaii to have dinner at Mar-A-Lago with Trump, before turning around and flying right back to Hawaii. In the last few days, he also had GOP-whisperer Joel Kaplan replace Nick Clegg as the company’s head of global policy. On Monday it was announced that Zuckerberg had also appointed Dana White to Meta’s board. White is the CEO of UFC, but also (perhaps more importantly) a close friend of Trump’s."

He then announced a new set of moderation changes.

As Mike Masnick notes here, Facebook's moderation was terrible and has always been terrible. It tried to use AI to improve its moderation at scale, with predictable results. It simply hasn't worked, and that's often harmed vulnerable communities and voices in the process. So it makes sense to take a different approach.

But Zuckerberg is trying to paint these changes as being pro free speech, and that doesn't ring true. For example, trying to paint fact-checking as censorship is beyond stupid:

"Of course, bad faith actors, particularly on the right, have long tried to paint fact-checking as “censorship.” But this talking point, which we’ve debunked before, is utter nonsense. Fact-checking is the epitome of “more speech”— exactly what the marketplace of ideas demands. By caving to those who want to silence fact-checkers, Meta is revealing how hollow its free speech rhetoric really is."

This is all of a piece with Zuckerberg's rolling back of much-needed DEI programs and his suggestion that most companies need more masculine energy. It's for show to please a permatanned audience of one and avoid existential threats to his business.

I would love to read the inside story in a few years. For now, we've just got to accept that everything being incredibly dumb is all part of living in 2025.

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Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash

[Rae Morey at The Repository]

The bananas activity continues over at Automattic / Matt Mullenweg's house:

"Members of the fledgling WordPress Sustainability Team have been left reeling after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg abruptly dissolved the team this week.

[...] The disbandment happened after team rep Thijs Buijs announced in Making WordPress Slack on Wednesday that he was stepping down from his role, citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created on Christmas Eve asking for suggestions to create WordPress drama in 2025."

Meanwhile, a day earlier, Automattic announced that it will ramp down its own contributions to WordPress:

"To recalibrate and ensure our efforts are as impactful as possible, Automattic will reduce its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project. This is not a step we take lightly. It is a moment to regroup, rethink, and strategically plan how Automatticians can continue contributing in ways that secure the future of WordPress for generations to come. Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress."

This is a genuinely odd thing to do. Yes, it's true that Automattic is at a disadvantage in the sense that it contributes far more to the open source project than other private companies. Free riders have long been a problem for open source innovators. But it's also why the company exists. I have questions about the balance of open source vs proprietary code in Automattic's future offerings. That's important because WordPress is the core value of its products and the open source core guarantees freedom from lock-in.

Is there a proprietary CMS coming down the wire? Is this bizarre board activity behind the scenes? Is something else going on? This whole situation still feels to me like there's another shoe ready to drop - and the longer it goes on, the bigger that shoe seems to be. I hope they don't completely squander the trust and value they've been building for decades.

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Indonesia kicks off ambitious $45b free meal plan

[Natasya Salim, Najma Sambul, and Bill Birtles at ABC News]

This is something that every nation should provide. It's really impressive that Indonesia is putting it into action:

"Indonesia has launched a transformative free meal program designed to combat malnutrition and support underprivileged communities.

Championed by President Prabowo Subianto, the initiative aims to provide nutritious meals to almost 83 million Indonesians by 2029, focusing initially on school children and pregnant women."

Over here, this would likely be dismissed as socialism, because how dare we simply provide for people who need it? (The horror!) But the bet is that it will lead to greater growth and prosperity, not least because of investment in the ecosystem itself:

"On the other hand, Mr Prabowo called the program one of the main drivers of economic growth, saying it would eventually add an estimated 2.5 million jobs and spur demand for local produce."

Over in the Financial Times, they additionally note:

"Prabowo, who took office in October, has touted the programme as a solution to improve children’s nutrition and boost local economies — which he hopes will have a ripple effect on economic growth and development in the world’s fourth most-populous country.

“This is a long-term investment in human capital,” said Dadan Hindayana, head of the newly created national nutrition agency, which will oversee the free meals programme. "

There will be a lot of people incentivized to not make this work. But it should. And we should be looking to this as leadership; we should be following suit.

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Meta’s Free Speech Grift

[Jason Kottke]

Jason nails what the supposed focus on free speech by Meta and others is really about:

"What Zuckerberg and Meta have realized is the value, demonstrated by Trump, Musk, and MAGA antagonists, of saying that you’re “protecting free speech” and using it as cover for almost anything you want to do. For Meta, that means increasing engagement, decreasing government oversight and interference, and lowering their labor costs (through cutting their workforce and strengthening their bargaining position vs labor) — all things that will make their stock price go up and increase the wealth of their shareholders."

It's a grift, pure and simple. One that happens to help them curry favor with the incoming President and his fan-base.

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Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors

[Arno Rosenfeld at the Forward]

The Heritage Foundation is out to "identify and target" Wikipedia editors, using antisemitism as a cover:

"Employees of Heritage, the conservative think tank that produced the Project 2025 policy blueprint for the second Trump administration, said they plan to use facial recognition software and a database of hacked usernames and passwords in order to identify contributors to the online encyclopedia, who mostly work under pseudonyms. It’s not clear exactly what kind of antisemitism the Wikipedia effort, which has not been previously reported, is intended to address. But in recent months some Jewish groups have complained about a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions."

Given that Wikipedia has also been under attack from Elon Musk and other right-wing figures, multiple groups should archive multiple snapshots of its content before major changes are made (or worse) to the encyclopedia. Wikipedia currently provides a full history of edits as part of its core software, but there are no guarantees about what might be required by the administration in the future.

I'd also strongly consider donating to support it to help it weather any future assaults on truth.

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46 books

A library

Previous birthday posts: 45 wishes, 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things.


One. I lie in bed as Ma read Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians to me. It was the fifth, and last, straight time; after this, she would finally put her foot down. Outside, in the Oxford dusk, the neighborhood dogs speak to each other over fences and hedges, the starlight barking in full force. Occasionally, a bird lands on the spiraling wrought iron fire escape outside.

It’s an old book, and the Romani people are not treated well in it. Revised versions are available. And, of course, the Disney versions.

Two. Nobody seems to want to adapt the anti nuclear war science fiction sequel, though, the cowards.

Three. I borrow Constellations: Stories of the Future from the library for the third time: a hardback book in a protective plastic sleeve full of stories that seem almost illicit. One of the stories, Let’s Go to Golgotha! is about a time-traveling tourist agency; the participants slowly realize that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is entirely made up of people from the future. Beyond Lies the Wub was Philip K Dick’s first short story; a horror tale about meat-eating and possession. It’s a Good Life, about a child with godlike powers, sets up a scenario that I still regularly think about. And Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron is, of course, a layered classic, rife with mischief.

Outside the library, there’s still a bakery selling cheap bread rolls and jam donuts. (It’s a Primark now.) The smell is intoxicating but the stories already have me.

Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. I feel disconnected from the other children on the playground: like I’m missing a magic password that they know and I don’t. There’s no one big thing, but there are lots of little things; an idiom I don’t understand here, a reference I don’t get there. As an adult, I’ll have a name for what this is and why it’s true: third culture kid. But as a child, I just know that something is off.

The Dark is Rising sequence soft launches as a Blyton-esque adventure in Cornwall, and then dives into a story that is deeper than any of the culture I see around me. In its tales of pagan magic that pre-date the prevailing Christianity, of green witches and Cornish folk legends, it both captivates me and informs me about the history of the place I find myself in. And then there’s Will, and the Old Ones, and a wisdom that cuts underneath the superficial nonsense that I don’t understand and suggests that something deeper is far more important.

‌When the Dark comes rising six shall turn it back; Three from the circle, three from the track; Wood, bronze, iron; Water, fire, stone; Five will return and one go alone. I can still recite it. The Dark is still rising. There is still silver on the tree.

Ten. There’s a doorway in St Mary’s Passage, a side street in the collegic part of Oxford, that is adorned with two fawns and a lion. Down the road, a Victorian lamppost still burns, albeit with electric light. There are plenty of tourist websites and videos that explain this was the inspiration for Narnia. I mean, it makes sense. But I don’t think it’s true.

Oxford is full of portals. I would know: I was a child there. There are space ships, time machines, great wooden galleons, castles hidden in dimensions somewhere between our reality and another. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were both inspired by Shotover, an area of hilly, wooded parkland on the edge of the city. Lewis had a house adjoining the area; Tolkien lived nearby. (Years earlier, Lewis Carroll roamed the hills, too. Years later, so did I.) They’re not the same place, but rather, multiple places that exist as layers over the same ground; different angles and reflections of the same ideas. They were both Inklings, after all.

Anyway, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe tells the truth about portals. They’re everywhere. I still check every wardrobe; don’t you?

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. I consume The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe and Everything in successive bouts of the flu in our house on the Marston Road, a tiny, water-damaged duplex that my parents have been restoring by hand. My bed is a single red and white bunk above a writing desk, on which I’ve doodled in ballpoint pen.

At the same time, I’ve been playing the Infocom text adventure adaptation, which Douglas Adams was directly involved in. All of these tales are irreverent in a way that directly appeals to me: they poke fun at norms and the bureaucracy of stasis. The books and the game all gently break the rules of their respective forms. They see how ridiculous the world is. This is a different kind of portal: not one to a fantasy realm, but one to a realization that you’re not alone. There are people on the road ahead of you, unpicking the rigidity of the world, and they’re looking back and winking.

And all of us are subject to forces bigger than us. Adams hated the little green planet that adorns every American book and game in the series, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Irony and sarcasm aren’t just forms of wit; they’re escape hatches. At their best, they’re a way of punching up. People who say they’re the lowest are missing the point and are probably Vogons.

Fourteen. It’s not that I’m sick a lot, but grade school is like a Petri dish for colds and flus, so I’m not notsick a lot, either. I’ve finished Douglas Adams but find myself hungry for more, and can’t stomach the direct parody of less wryly satirical books. Terry Pratchett fits the bill, and Mort, the story of Death’s apprentice, is my jumping-off point.

They both eat systems and norms for breakfast, but Pratchett is often more directly, pointedly satirical than Adams was; this is overt social criticism, making fun of people with power and the structures established to dance around them. Teenage me, stuck in my bunk with yet another flu while rain pounds my bedroom windows, literally an outsider while the impenetrable politics and in-groups of high school carry on without me, adores it. I start to see the power of being an outsider. The thing about being a fish out of water is that you can see the water.

‌ It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it, Pratchett writes. Right on.

Fifteen. I’m thirteen and sitting in my homeroom class. We’ve all been reading our own books, and our homeroom teacher (who also happens to be our English teacher) has asked us each to read a passage out loud to the cloud. Some of my classmates are reading The Hardy Boys; some are reading Jane Austen; some are reading Tolkien.

I read a passage of Timewyrm: Exodus where the Doctor and Ace are escaping the regenerated War Chief, the villain of 1969 Doctor Who story The War Games, who has helped Hitler raise an army of Nazi zombies. The passage ends when the zombie horde is halted with explosive grenades.

A few kids who generally don’t like to read come up afterwards to ask where I got the book. They seem excited. They seem excited to talk to me. These are not people who usually want to. Maybe I just have to give them something they like.

Sixteen. I catch my reflection in a department store mirror and shudder. Is that really me? Does that really have to be me? How can I stop it?

I look around at the other kids here: slim, elegant, comfortable in their skin. Effortless. Why can’t I be them?

Being an outsider is still being an outsider. By my late teens, I feel like there’s something truly wrong with me: it’s still like there’s a secret password that everybody knows but me, but now the stakes are higher. I want to belong; I want to feel like I have intrinsic value; I can’t find or justify it.

I’m tall now, really tall, and not exactly obese, but not slim, either. More than one person I have a crush on tells me to lose weight. More than one person I have a crush on tells me that maybe I’d have a chance if we had more money or if I wasn’t so weird. I’m constantly exhausted and the wry humor that used to characterize my otherness has been replaced with despair: nothing I do matters because there’s something wrong with me. It’s a firm depression, but either nobody catches it or nobody knows what to do with it. My grades nosedive.

Prozac Nation doesn’t catch everything, but it gives me a window into someone who feels a bit like I do. (I can’t relate to the drugs, but I see the allure, too.) Its author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, is like a cool depressed person: someone who feels this way but is also interesting, desirable, a little bit rockstar-like.

Today, I see the ego. As a teenager, I just see the reflection.

Seventeen. I’ve been writing software for a while now. My mother taught me BASIC on our 8-bit computer when I was five; when I was thirteen, my parents gifted me the PC-compatible version of Prospero Pascal for my birthday. I’ve worked through the manual and written a few small games. My first Pascal effort was Mr A Goes For a Walk, where a letter “A” did exactly that. A year later, I’d written a fully featured Sokobanclone. I’m inspired by Jeff Minter’s seminal (and utterly irreverent) Llamatron and want to build with the same sensibility. Making things feels really good; seeing people enjoy things I made feels even better, and goes some way towards filling the black hole of self-doubt that still lives within me.

Someone recommends Microserfs: a book which should be a warning but isn’t received as one at all. The characters here are quirky outsiders — like me! — who throw themselves into building something on their own terms. They eat flat foods that can be pushed under doors so they can keep working. They struggle with their code, their work, and their lives. And they show me that there might be a place for me.

So many Douglas Coupland books, including this one, are about the emptiness of living in late-nineties capitalism. The clue is in the word serfs, but that isn’t what hits for me. That isn’t what hits at all.

I sit in the sixth form common room, a lounge in my high school where older students can study and do homework, and devour it, as Oasis, jungle music, and mid-nineties hip hop play around me. From somewhere, there’s the smell of cheese and onion crisps. Do they qualify as flat food?

Eighteen. The common room is a harsh place, but just one of a series of harsh places that school has represented for me. Because I’m big and don’t fight back, people feel like they can verbally abuse me, hit me, kick me. It comes from nowhere, usually, and I’m left reeling. Nobody, least of all the people who run the school, seems to want to help. Even today, I see fond reminiscences of people in our school year’s Facebook group, and I think, no, that person caused me so much pain. I’m other to them — a not-person — and that makes me fair game. I’ve internalized that it’s my fault. It happens because I deserve it, and I wonder how I might change to be more acceptable.

I find some kinship in Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood’s story of an artist who revisits her childhood home. There’s something in there about the protagonist being untethered from her environment and the cultureof her environment that resonates. The book diverges so far from my experiences after that, but there’s so much here about the act of creation and how it interrelates with identity.

Nineteen. I’m seven years old and at my friend Clare’s house: a typically Oxford Victorian brick home that spreads over multiple floors. Her dad, Humphrey, has an office off of the stairs that I’ve only seen a glimpse of: there’s a desk with a typewriter and while he’s a very kind man in my eyes, he absolutely does not want us to go in there. He writes for a living, which seems like a magical thing to be able to do: the way I see it, you get to tell stories all day long. You get to create.

Later, he asks me what I want for my birthday, and I’m too shy to tell him what I really want, so I say a My Little Pony. What I really want is for him to sign Mr Majeika for me: a story that’s fun in itself but clearly anchored in his life, his family, his personality. I still regret being shy about that.

Twenty. Years later I find Humphrey’s official biography of JRR Tolkien at Moe’s, a chaotic used bookstore in Berkeley, and buy it immediately. I’m not particularly interested in Tolkien but I remember Humphrey fondly. It’s a portal to him; to that time; to a feeling of possibilities; to laughing while running up the stairs.

Twenty-one. TVGoHome, by an online writer I like called Charlie Brooker, is exactly what I like: a spoof of mainstream culture, through parody TV listings, that doesn’t hold back. One of the fake shows from the listings is later turned into a real show. Later, the author makes a spiritual follow-on about a zombie outbreak on the set of Big Brother. It’s a natural progression but I’m amazed they let him do it.

His final form is Black Mirror, which starts with the Prime Minister and a pig and winds up in sweeping cinematic dystopias starting Mackenzie Davis, Miley Cyrus, Bryce Dallas Howard. It all starting with comic strips advertising a dusty old second-hand store in inner London, and it ended somewhere so much grander, so much more global, without compromising almost anything. The claws are intact.

The book inspires me; the rest of it, too, but later. I wonder if I can be this kind of creator too; a curator of portals for other people to step through, to take them out of the water so they can see it for what it is. Or, at least, take a swipe at the places I can’t seem to fit.

Twenty-two. I wanted a clean break, away from Oxford and the trap of who I am, but this isn’t what I was going for.

I’m in a block of student flats in Edinburgh. If a door shuts anywhere in the building, you can hear it anywhere else: the sound carries, and people are drunk late into the night, and there’s never any peace. A fierce winter wind blows at the windowpanes. The mattress is covered in shiny plastic and I can feel it through my sheets.

I’m fascinated by Brave New World and its setup of totalitarianism defended by acquiescence: a world where nobody has to ban books because nobody wants to read them. A dystopia protected by distraction. From my vantage point, it seems plausible.

Sometimes, my flatmates barge into my bedroom and pile onto me. One likes to spit in my food as I’m cooking it. One inhabitant of the building tells me not to talk to him. It doesn’t feel very far away from my high school common room, as much as I wanted it to be.

Twenty-three. I’ve decided to study computer science, but immediately realized my mistake. It’s not the study of how to make tools for people that empower them in ways they weren’t before; nor is it the study of how to tell stories with new means. It’s a practice rooted in mathematics and physics, of the underlying mechanics torn from the underlying humanity that gives any of it meaning. I hate it. I truly hate it.

And yet, although every day is a slog, I decide to stick it out. I know I’ll be able to use it later on.

The British system is very far from the American liberal arts approach of allowing students to choose their major after sampling a range of subjects. Here, you effectively have to choose your major when you’re sixteen, and it’s very hard to change. There is very little opportunity to study outside of your core subject.

But I do have one elective, in my second year. I choose Forensic Medicine because I think it will be useful fuel to tell stories. I learn about how forensic pathologists use blood spatter to determine the direction of blows and what kind of weapon is used. I learn Locard’s Principle of Exchange, which dictates that every contact leaves a trace: something that seems to apply far beyond the subject. Every time you touch something, every time something touches you, a trace is left. Inspired by this principle, I decide not to attend the optional autopsy lecture, fearing that it will change me in ways I might not like.

Simpson’s Forensic Medicine is a grisly book, but at least it’s not advanced calculus.

Twenty-four. Twenty-five. I came to Edinburgh because it was a cultural center more than because the university had a good computer science program, although both things are true.

I’m in a tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival, chatting with Garry Trudeau. I’ve loved his comic strip, Doonesbury, since I was an early teen; I started with his late-seventies collection As the Kid Goes For Broke, which was lying around my great grandparents’ house, and kept reading. It’s got its claws into the world in the way I like, but somehow made its way into the mainstream, normy Sunday comics section.

He’s a delight. We’re talking about Asterix the Gaul, a comic it turns out we both love. I can’t believe my luck.

How can I be one of these people?

Twenty-six. I’m on the streets of Glasgow, protesting the impending war in Iraq. Altogether, two million people in the UK — around 3% of its entire population — are protesting with us. Some have pre-made placards made by the usual organizations that want to spread their own agenda as well as the matter at hand; others have homemade signs. My friend carries one that simply reads, “too angry for a slogan”.

It’s clear that the war is based on bad information. The so-called “dodgy dossier” of information about “weapons of mass destruction” is so obviously fake long before it is officially revealed to be. And yet, Britain is part of the invasion, and the dossier of convenient unfacts is used to help justify George W Bush’s war effort.

I’m new to politics and I’m apoplectically angry. Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent has some of the answers I’m looking for. I don’t like the implications, but the arguments resonate.

Clawing at the status quo mainstream starts to mean something more than poking fun at the ridiculous nature of class and power imbalances. Sometimes, lives are on the line.

Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. I’ve graduated. Almost immediately, I go back to work for my university; at that time there aren’t very many software jobs in Edinburgh, and I’ve grown into the city to the extent that I don’t want to leave quite yet.

I find myself working out of an office — actually a converted broom closet with a window that doesn’t shut, directly above where they fry the chips for the study canteen — at the Moray House School of Education with a belligerent PhD candidate who resents my presence. By necessity, we start talking, and it becomes clear that we have something to share with each other. He’s knee deep in the educational technology world, where people are starting to talk about “e-portfolios”: a collection of examples of academic work that sound a lot like social media if you squint a bit. In turn, I’m a programmer, a writer, and a blogger.

We build a platform together. I call it Elgg, after the town in Switzerland the Werdmullers come from. It’s inspired by Brad Fitzpatrick’s LiveJournal but is designed to be as easy to install as WordPress. Some people seem to like it.

My first published work is a co-written chapter in The Handbook of Research in ePortfolios about our work. Later, people write full-blown books about our platform.

I move back to Oxford so that I’m closer to the London software ecosystem. We rent an office above a bookstore in Summertown, down the road from a Lebanese deli and a wine bar that for some reason sells excellent croissants. Some days I’m too excited to sit still in my chair.

I’ve (co-)created something that people like, and found a community in the process. I feel prouder and happier than I have since I was a child. I feel like this was a portal worth falling through.

Twenty-nine. Ben Brown seems interesting. I’m introduced to his site Uber through an Edinburgh friend: irreverent writing with an internet sensibility. I’m heavily online at this point — blogging, but in ways that feel uncool and awkward. What Ben is doing is very different; literary in a way. It’s a precursor of publisher like The Toast and even McSweeney’s.

Ben publishes books as So New Media, an indie house co-founded with James Stegall. I buy Beneath The Axis Of Evil: One Man's Journey Into The Horrors Of War by Neal Pollack. Yet another dive into the Iraq War; another clawback at the Bush / Blair continuum.

Ben’s whole enterprise is inspiring: you can go it alone now. You can maintain your voice. And you can still find an audience while leaving yourself unmoderated. In some ways, on the internet, the rougher your edges are, the easier it is for other people to latch on to you.

Years later, I meet Ben in person at XOXO (he silently sidles up to me at an X-Men arcade machine). Years after that, I buy him lunch in San Francisco. I don’t think he knows exactly what it means to me.

Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. I’m exhausted; gaining weight; my feet, for some reason, are constantly cramping up. It’s all stress. All the startup.

My partner is constantly telling me that I need to relax and take time away from work. The startup is all-encompassing; stressful; in every part of my life. My friends and family try to ban me from working past 7:30pm. She buys me my first-ever massage, which is a revelation, and suggests books for me to read.

I’d previously read Maus, a graphic novel that is both autobiographical a vividly-painted portrait of the horrors of the Holocaust. It uses the visual language of comic strips but the meaning runs deep. I come from a family that was also thrust into WWII: my father is a Japanese concentration camp survivor, my (Jewish) grandfather on my mother’s side was captured by the Nazis and presumed dead. The story itself resonates with me, but the form does too: comics are a flippant visual medium, in a way, but here that’s used as an entry point for a realism that might not have hit as hard another way.

So Helen introduces me to Alan Moore: first through From Hell and then V for Vendetta. Unlike Maus, these are unapologetically fiction, but the use of the comics medium is similarly effective. I particularly like the way From Hell establishes a new psychogeography of London, rooting the story of Jack the Ripper in its location by adding layers and resonances that tie back to the planning of the city itself. It adds something new to places I’ve walked all my life. That’s good. I’m looking for something new.

Thirty-three. My co-founder likes to tell new people we meet that we’re not friends. More than once, he’s threatened to physically fight me: most memorably over the limitations of the OpenID specification. On a drive through the rolling Yorkshire hills, sunshine dappling the moor grass, he tells me that he’s worried about hiring women because they might get pregnant. He pulls me aside during a contract for MIT to let me know he’s in this for himself and that I should expect him to make decisions with that in mind. On a work excursion to Brighton, he refuses to eat with the rest of the team.

This is, in short, not working out.

The business threatens to move towards servicing hedge funds, and I choose to leave. One afternoon, I simply close my laptop and listen to the quiet of my house, the footsteps of pedestrians on the street outside, the swoosh of passing cars. Later, there will be worries about money and what exactly I will do next, but for that one spring afternoon, I feel weightless.

I need punctuation. A clean break.

I’ve never been to Rome in living memory. As it turns out, it’s also cheap to get there.

My then-partner and I spend ten days roaming its ancient streets, armed with the Rough Guide to Rome. “I don’t want this to end,” she says, as we eat grilled artichokes and cacio e pepe on outdoor tables set in a cobblestoned alleyway. It’s a new relationship and we’re discovering each other as well as the twists and turns of an ancient city. “Me either,” I say, and I take another bite.

Thirty-four. I’m six years old. My grandparents live with us for a little while in a grand old house in Oxford: a stone Victorian with a curved driveway and a big back garden. The kitchen has terracotta tiles. My Grandma reads The Black Island to me in my bed and stays with me for a bit while I drift off to sleep.

I’m seven years old. I’m told to stay in my bedroom. My mother’s received a phone call and is crying in the living room. I’m not to go see her. I’m to wait. My Grandma had pulmonary fibrosis in her lungs; she was finding it harder and harder to breathe. And now, so suddenly, she’s gone. All the way in Texas; thousands of miles away from my mother. I can’t begin comprehend the loss but I know that if my mother was sick I would want to see her again.

Thirty-five. My parents have lived in California for years now: first to look after my Oma, and then just to live. Ma — after consistently calling her by her first name throughout my childhood, she’s Ma to me in my thirties — has retrained from an analyst for the telecommunications industry to a middle school science teacher in one of the central valley’s most impoverished districts. She loves her work in a way she never did before.

But she has a persistent cough that won’t let go.

At first we wonder if it’s just the dust of the Central Valley: almond shells and the detritus from overfarming. Maybe she just needs clean air.

It’s almost Christmas-time. I’ve wrapped a copy of You Can Write Children’s Books. She would be so good at it — her writing, the way she tells stories, has always been so magical to me — and it’s so in line with what she’s turned her life to do.

In the liner, I add some written lines of my own, based on her life in Oxford:

In a house at the bottom of a hill, in a small town that rarely saw the sun, there lived a little dog who loved to play.

A few days before Christmas, we understand that she has pulmonary fibrosis. This same thief of a disease my Grandma had. We knew, in a way — my dad, in particular, knew — but the diagnosis makes it official. It’s a new cloud.

What we don’t understand:

What happens next.

What to do next.

How long she has.

Who else will get it.

Why.

Thirty-six. My sister is reading my copy of Parable of the Sower to Ma. She’s perched on my parents’ bed in Santa Rosa. Outside, the sun is shining over the Sonoma hills. Somewhere, my dad is tinkering with something downstairs.

It’s been a while. My sister and I both moved to California, starting from scratch. Ma continued teaching for as long as she could; her middle school science teachers were fascinated by the oxygen tanks she began to wear on her back like a Ghostbuster. Then it became too hard and too heavy, her oxygen needs too great. I sent a Hail Mary letter to the hospital explaining how badly in need she was; her oxygen concentrators were refrigerator sized and running in parallel, her movements limited by how far her cannula tube could extend. Eventually, at the very last moment, they tried something new and cut a set of lungs down to fit her size in order to try and save her life.

The first night, I refuse to leave her side. The doctors eventually kick me out of her ICU room and I sleep in the family room down the hall. The day after happens to be the Super Bowl; she takes her first post-double-lung-transplant walk just as Beyoncé takes to the halftime stage to sing Crazy Right Now.

Now, a few years later, the drugs are taking their toll. She’s tired. She’s often ill. But she’s here. My sister likes to read to her, and she loves lying there and listening. Other times, at the dialysis she now needs because the anti-rejection drugs have killed her kidneys, she reads on a Kindle with the font size cranked practically as high as it will go.

Every day is a gift. Every contact leaves a trace. Every book is a portal out of here.

Thirty-seven. The last book Ma and I read together is The Nickel Boys. It’s the kind of thing she likes to read: a story about America’s monstrous history, told with skill and resonance. We share our reflections of it; the experience of reading the same ideas. Asynchronously, sure, but together all the same.

Thirty-eight. When I move to California I land in Berkeley. I find myself a coworking space above a coffee shop: a mix of developers, academics, and artists. Most of us have a standard office desk, but one inhabitant, Hallie Bateman, has brought in an antique wooden artist’s desk that looks like it’s been dropped in from another dimension. It’s covered in paintbrushes, inks, and paper: fragments of a very different kind of professional life to the one I’m leading.

I continue to follow her work long after we share an office. When she publishes What to Do When I'm Gone: A Mother's Wisdom to Her Daughter — instructions from her own mother about what to do once she dies — I buy it immediately. Back then, when Ma was still around, I could read it all the way through. I no longer can. It sits on my shelf and I sometimes think about it, but grief is like a wave, and I know it can overtake me.

Instead of asking Ma for instructions, I sit down with a tripod and a camera and I record her life story, instead.

Thirty-nine. My Aunt publishes a book about evaluating scientific evidence in the context of civil and criminal legal contexts.

I have it, of course, even though I am not a lawyer and I have no professional need for it. I remember her poring over the edit on her laptop in the downstairs bedroom in my great grandparents’ house on Cape Cod.

The last time I see her, we eat Thai food in the Tenderloin. I have no idea it’s the last time. This disease is evil.

Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two. I’m in Santa Rosa and can still hear the wheels of the pole the feeding tube hangs from wheeling across the floor; of the oxygen clicking through the cannula; of my parents talking. It will fade, eventually, but I’m haunted now, and lost.

My mother talked about being radicalized. Both my parents were Berkeley radicals, which just means that they took action on causes they cared about. I think about all those people I’ve looked up to who kept their claws sharp, who dug in, who fought for equity and didn’t compromise their values, who had a voice and used it.

I walk the Santa Rosa hills, looking at these big houses on the edge of wine country, and listen to the audiobook of The Jakarta Method, which details the murder undertaken in the name of America. I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale. Through Caste, I’m appalled to learn that Hitler’s treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany was inspired by American Jim Crow laws.

By now I know that I won’t get the disease — or at least, not according to our current understanding of that. It’s a genetic mutation that I don’t have. But regardless, we all have limited time, and none of us know how much time we have left. Time is ticking for everyone.

I think about how I might do a better job of using my voice to make the world better. Later, I’ll start applying to jobs where I can help people speak truth to power; to work to further the work of journalism. To honor my mother — really to honor both my parents — and what she stood for in the world. I want to live up to them.

Forty-three. I allow myself to start to write again. Words, not software. It feels daunting. My cousin Sarah, who is a very successful author (and whose books, although not designed for me, have made me cry), once recommended Bird By Bird. I’ve come back to it again and again: it’s about writing but also not. Its lessons are relevant to anyone who is building something big and new; anyone who is picking themselves up.

‌You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

Forty-four. The last book Ma gives me is Between the World and Me: a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son. It is masterful. A portal to lived experiences I don’t have; a way in to understanding them, and through this understanding, to better understand the role I have to play, too.

It’s not the main point of the book, but one of those unknown lived experiences: having a son and the sense of responsibility that follows. I can’t imagine the fear of caring for a child while being Black in America; I can’t imagine having a child at all.

Forty-five. Erin’s labor has been two days long, difficult, and painful. Our son wasn’t breathing in the way they expected him to, so I’m standing at a table off to the side while they put a mask to him and try to get him to start. I find myself wondering if this is, somehow, the disease, this curse, out to get us again.

Eventually, after a few minutes that seem like days or years, my heart pounding in my chest all the while, he breathes normally. We’re able to return him, the doctors and me, to his waiting mother. He cries, then snuggles in. She cries with him.

I can’t believe Ma will never meet him. She’s there, of course. I remember the songs she sang to me and sing them to him; I find myself using the same words to console him and to let him know he’s loved. Maybe I won’t read him The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but I have other books in mind.

There will be new books, too, that we did not discover together but will continue our story.

Have you ever read The Runaway Bunny?

“If you become a bird and fly away from me,” said his mother, “I will be a tree that you come home to.”

She is nowhere and she is everywhere. I see her in him. I see myself in him and him in me. Every contact leaves a trace. We are a continuum.

Forty-six. Donald Trump has been re-elected. The shadow of renewed nationalism, of division, of hate feels heavier than ever. The world is at, or on the brink of, war. I remember marching in Glasgow, the despair when it came to nothing. We are all in need of a refuge. We are all in need of portals out of here.

We’re lying in bed: Erin, him, and me. “Read a book?” My son asks me. Of course I read to him. Of course.

I open The Story of Ferdinand and begin:

‌Once upon a time in Spain there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand. All the other little bulls he lived with would run and jump and butt their heads together, but not Ferdinand. He liked to sit just quietly and smell the flowers.

He snuggles into my arm and I stay with him until he falls asleep.

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Mark Zuckerberg: Fact-Checking on Meta Is Too "Politically Biased"

[Alex Weprin at The Hollywood Reporter]

I don't think this is a great thing at all:

"Meta will also move its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, with content review to be based in Texas. “As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said."

Its lack of effective moderation previously led to aiding and abetting an actual genocide in Myanmar; there's a reason why trust and safety on large online platforms evolved in the way it did. The idea that Texas is somehow a politically-neutral place to run these teams from is also completely laughable.

A funny thing about cries about censorship on social platforms is that they all seem to relate to people wanting to be abusive to vulnerable people who are already systemically oppressed. I guess we're allowing more of that now. This really is a new era of prosperity!

Of course, this is a move to placate the incoming President, which is likely just one of many. It's, in many ways, pathetic to see. It's just business, they'll shrug and tell you. Well, just business and peoples' lives.

[Link]

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👀

1 min read

When did you last look up?

What’s the best thing you’ve seen lately?

Who did you want to show it to?

Why?

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Being More Like Republicans

[A.R. Moxon at The Reframe]

An interesting election mortem and post-mortem, from an arguably refreshing perspective:

"Here's what I think is going on: Our system is foundationally built to devour human beings in order to enrich the already wealthy, and it's moved so far down that road that a critical mass of people now understand this, for the very good reason that they are now being devoured."

"[...] We're in a time when most people understand we are in a systemic fight, and so most people want a fighter—and, to the perceptions of most people, Trump and the Republicans are fighting, and Democrats are not."

Perhaps I'm including this link here because it's cathartic, or because it's because I happen to agree with the premise that the Democrats are trying to be centrists again even though being centrists doesn't at all work for them and shouldn't work for them. I don't think it'll change anything; I don't think I'll be anything but disappointed. But, anyway, here this piece is. It would be nice to not be in the position we're in, and it would be nice to have politicians who will genuinely make this a more progressive country that will fight for the people who really need it. I'm not holding my breath.

[Link]

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Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

[Things we learned about LLMs in 2024]

Simon's overview of what happened in the LLM space during 2024 is genuinely excellent. For example, on the environmental impact:

"Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are all spending billions of dollars rolling out new datacenters, with a very material impact on the electricity grid and the environment. There’s even talk of spinning up new nuclear power stations, but those can take decades.

Is this infrastructure necessary? DeepSeek v3’s $6m training cost and the continued crash in LLM prices might hint that it’s not. But would you want to be the big tech executive that argued NOT to build out this infrastructure only to be proven wrong in a few years’ time?"

His comparison to the railway bubbles of the late 1800s and the UK's railway mania is inspired, and a helpful way to think about what's happening. (I will say that similar claims were made about the crypto space: that the resulting infrastructure would be useful even after the crashes. Is it?)

There's also an important lesson about how the prevalence of slop isn't actually making training LLMs harder, despite frequent claims to the contrary.

The whole piece is very much worth your time.

[Link]

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How a Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias

[Joshua Kaplan at ProPublica]

This ought to be a movie:

"Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah."

This long-read about John Williams's work to infiltrate right wing militias is vividly told. It's inspired other reporting at ProPublica, but now it's time to tell the story of the mole who brought the information forward.

It's also a good reminder that many of the people who participated in the Capitol riot weren't just misled civilians: they were members of dangerous, armed, right-wing militias. These are the people that Trump would like to pardon:

"Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them."

That understanding is important. This is a good piece to get started with.

[Link]

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Twenty twenty five

1 min read

Hey, it’s 2025! Happy New Year. May it be better than we hope and fear.

Here are my technology predictions for the year.

Here are my resolutions / OKRs.

Ready or not, here we go!

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Tintin and the fascists

On the need for new adventures

4 min read

Tintin and Snowy

As a child, I freaking adored Tintin, the Belgian comic strip about a boy detective and his little white dog, Snowy. There was something intoxicating about the mix: international adventures, a growing cast of recurring characters, conspiracies, humor, hi jinx. Even the ligne claire style of drawing — cartoonish figures on more realistic, epic backgrounds — lent themselves to a feeling of scale. It heavily informed my childhood imagination, far more than other comics might have. I was into the French Asterix comics as well as American Marvel and DC offerings, but Tintin was the real deal.

Of course, it was also hyper-colonialist, and the early entries in particular are quite racist, although as a seven and eight year old, I didn’t really pick up on those threads. Tintin in the Congo goes exactly as you might expect a Belgian strip about the Democratic Republic of the Congo written in the 1930s (when it was fully under extraordinarily harsh Belgian colonial control) to go. The Shooting Star’s villain was originally an evil Jewish industrialist, and the story (written in 1941-2) even carries water for the Axis powers and originally contained a parody of the idea that fascism could be a threat to Europe. That, too, went completely over my head.

I hadn’t realized until recently that Tintin originated in a hyper conservative, pro-fascist Belgian newspaper, and continued in another conservative newspaper that freely published antisemitic opinions under Nazi occupation. The first story, which I’ve never read and wasn’t made as widely available, was a clumsy propaganda piece against the Soviet Union, and it carried on from there.

This isn’t a situation where the author’s views can be held as separate to the work. It’s all in there. Even though Tintin enters the public domain tomorrow (alongside Popeye, among others), I don’t think the right thing to do is to salvage the source material.

Which leaves a missing space. I loved those adventures, and I’d love my son to have something similar to cling to. Superhero stories aren’t it: although there’s some supernatural activity in Tintin (and aliens in one later story!), the threats and ideas are very tethered to reality. It sits in the same zone as James Bond — another colonialist relic — but unlike Bond, Tintin is just a kid. He doesn’t have the weight of the British intelligence establishment behind him. He’s got a dog and an alcoholic sea captain. There’s something infectious about that comedic, adventurous, dysfunctional dynamic.

I’d love to see new stories, with new characters, that share Hergé’s aptitude for compelling globe-trotting adventure but leave aside the outdated ties to colonialism and fascism. There are stories to be told that lean into international imbalances in a positive way: discoveries about how greedy businesses have exploited the global south, or mysteries that turn modern piracy on is head to reveal that it’s not exactly what we’ve been told it is, or the businesses and people that are profiting from climate change. Tintin had stories about oil stoppages in the advent of a war and a technological race to the moon: these sorts of themes aren’t off topic for children and can be made both exciting and factual. The global backdrop would gain so much from those ligne claire drawings and a sense of humor.

It’s not something Marvel or DC could do, with their heightened, muscle-bound heroes and newfound need to be ultra-mainstream. It’s also not something that I’ve seen in other graphic novels for children. But there’s a market there, left by the Tintin hole, and I’d love for someone to fill it.

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Predictions for tech, 2025

2025: Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash

You know what they say: predictions are like resurgent nationalist movements. Everyone’s got one.

I missed the deadline for Nieman Lab’s always-excellent Predictions for Journalism this year, so I thought I’d share a few more bite-sized predictions about various topics I’ve written over the last year. Every prediction says more about the person making it than about the actual future; please take these in that light. I am not a soothsayer, but boy, do I have opinions.

Here are some of them:

The AI industry will continue to orient itself around its definition of AGI, regardless of its harms.

OpenAI and Microsoft’s definition of artificial general intelligence is not what you might suspect: they define it as the point where AI systems can generate at least $100 billion in profits. Given that the industry is losing billions of dollars hand over fist today, there’s a long way to go.

Closing that gap means selling in lots of different places, but the most lucrative are going to be deeper partnerships with mass-market systems, government, and military applications. For all of OpenAI’s talk about not creating AI that will make us extinct through its intelligence, I predict it and companies like it will take firmer steps towards assisting companies who might kill us through more prosaic means.

AI vendors may also look at ways to reduce the cost of sanitizing and tagging its input data — currently often outsourced overseas. They may, for example, consider using prison labor, taking cues from Finland, which has engaged in the practice for years.

Publishers will pivot to AI, with predictable results.

Lured by up-front payouts and a carefully-cultivated (and heavily paid-for) sense that they’re missing out if they’re not participating, many news publishers will be all-in on AI. It will be to their detriment.

Publishers with low-volume qualitative output will mistakenly think that their high-quality stories are more valuable to AI vendors, fundamentally misunderstanding how training data is acquired and used. They will not see the ongoing licensing premiums for their content that they might hope for.

Publishers with high-volume output will allow their stories to be used as training data. They will find that ongoing revenue suffers as a result and that those payments only temporarily addressed a downward funding trend that will continue apace.

Only the publishers who treat AI as a side issue and continue to address their fundamental value to their readers and communities will succeed.

The United States will not create a Bitcoin reserve.

Despite calls and even a pledge to the contrary, President Trump will not follow through with creating any kind of crypto reserve or an intentional stockpile of Bitcoin. It’s simply not in his interests: the US dollar is not just a currency but a global network of power and influence that he can leverage to his advantage.

But don’t rejoice quite yet, crypto-skeptics. Instead of stockpiling existing, independent cryptocurrencies, he might plausibly create a new coin with US interests in mind and with the official seal of a government endorsement, with partners drawn from his existing network. (USDC, the prevailing dollar-backed stablecoin, is issued by Circle, a private company. This would be a replacement.) The result would almost certainly be more profit for his own private interests and that of his friends, particularly as he could incentivize traditional American banks to support it as a transfer mechanism.

Threads will implement full ActivityPub integration but continue to struggle to release it in the EU.

Confounding its skeptics, Threads will release full end-to-end support for the ActivityPub specification that allows it to act as one cohesive social network with Mastodon, among other platforms. The immediate effect will be a change of the center of gravity in the Fediverse: rather than Threads being seen to integrate with Mastodon, Mastodon and every Fediverse platform will be seen as Threads-compatible. (Mastodon et al will continue to support smaller communities with specific needs; Threads will be the mass market platform on the network.)

Because of the way data is federated between systems in ActivityPub, and because of Meta’s data commitments as a large platform owner, this compatibility will not launch in the EU without major changes to the experience. Meta will endeavor to work with the authors of ActivityPub to make it easier to comply with EU data restrictions, but may be seen as trying to exert undue influence over the protocol by some in the community.

Some social media platforms will relocate from the US.

In an effort to maintain independence and avoid complying with restrictions to Section 230 and an uptick in government subpoenas under the Trump administration, some social media platforms will move their headquarters to countries that allow them to maintain more independence.

Neutral Switzerland will be a favorite. Because of a local requirement to have some Swiss ownership of countries located there, some founders will seek to go through its notoriously difficult naturalization process; there will also be an influx of repatriated Swiss tech entrepreneurs who see an opportunity in helping out.

TikTok will continue to operate, but will need to take it to the Supreme Court.

The law banning TikTok goes into effect on January 19, one day before the inauguration of the new President. It cannot comply. It’s likely, therefore, that it will take up the case and bring it to the Supreme Court. The Court may then decide that the law was written with punishing a single target in mind (TikTok alone), without a preceding trial for the claimed crimes, and could repeal it on that basis.

Bird flu will be a thing.

California has already declared a state of emergency because of its spread in cattle, and the virus has already mutated in human hosts to become more infectious. 66 people have died from it at the time of writing. On the prediction markets, the probability of a million cases by the end of the year is soaring.

Whether this becomes a global pandemic like COVID-19 will be up to governments to respond. Given the US government that will be in power when this does, inevitably, become a thing, I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether the response will be science-based and adequately up to the challenge.

Long-form fiction will (continue to) rise.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the death of books. Elle Griffin’s piece No one buys books has been particularly influential. It’s also not a complete picture.

It’s absolutely true that the big publishing houses are consolidating and that there are fewer opportunities to be published by them if you don’t have an existing community. But there’s a long tail of smaller publishing houses, and self-publishing has become more than a cottage industry. The latter isn’t just hacks banging out AI-written non-fiction self-help books; there are many, many authors building genuinely great careers on their own terms. They’re not Stephen King millionaires, but they’re making a great living — particularly in genres like dark romance that big publishing houses might be less excited to touch.

In a world that is going to feel a bit more adverse (see my other predictions above), independent, interesting fiction that speaks to the needs of its audience will both find that audience and do well with it. In turn, the continued rise of ereaders will make the relative lack of placement in bookstores for those titles almost irrelevant. Fiction is undergoing the classic disruption story; it’s not dying at all.

This disruption will accelerate in 2025. There’s even an opportunity to do for long-form fiction what Substack did for newsletters, and I’d bet that someone will take it. Even without such a platform, the Kindle Direct Publishing program and services like IngramSpark (together with sales support from the likes of BookBub etc) will allow the market to continue to grow.

Unions movements will continue to grow, particularly for knowledge workers. Whether they’ll win is up in the air.

The labor movement continues to gain strength, and unions have historically high support, although actual union membership remains incredibly low. The first trend is likely to continue, particularly as AI continues to threaten the livelihoods of knowledge workers, and as the Trump administration emboldens employers to roll back benefits and DEI initiatives: they will attempt to unionize in greater numbers, with more ferocity, and more interruptions to work while they negotiate for stronger protections.

Will they win? I don’t know. Union contract negotiations can take years, so it’s hard to say what the outcome will be. If they do win, the outcome will be higher wages, stronger benefits, and better working conditions for employees. (That’s what unions do.) But historically, knowledge worker unions have had a hard time convincing colleagues to sign up; see the Alphabet Workers Union, whose membership is a tiny fraction of Alphabet’s total employment base.

What did I miss? What did I get wrong?

Those are some of my predictions for 2025. What are yours? Where do you disagree? I’d love to hear from you.

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Tech pace layers

[Ryan Barrett]

Ryan Barrett takes Stewart Brand's Pace Layering and adapts it to model technology progress:

"I’ve been a fan of Stewart Brand‘s Pace Layering for decades now. Really great framework for thinking about how different ecosystems and emergent forces interact. I’ve been thinking about a tech version of it for the better part of a year, and I finally took advantage of the holiday break to bang out a rough draft. Thoughts?"

My thoughts are that this is helpful. It's also a good way to think about where you want to be in the stack as a person: product is this kind of messy, unstable squiggle of a progress line, whereas the underlying CS, standards, and components provide relative stability. It's as much of a guide to where to orient your tech career as it is to how the whole system works.

[Link]

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Massive VW Data Leak Exposed 800,000 EV Owners’ Movements, From Homes To Brothels

[Thanos Pappas at CarScoops]

There are a few different levels to this story about the VW Group's terrible cybersecurity:

"According to a new report from Germany, the VW Group stored sensitive information for 800,000 electric vehicles from various brands on a poorly secured and misconfigured Amazon cloud storage system—essentially leaving the digital door wide open for anyone to waltz in. And not just briefly, but for months on end."

Much of this data was precise location information for hundreds of thousands of vehicles - all stored in a misconfigured S3 bucket.

So, obviously, it's incredibly damning that a company the size of VW left its sensitive data on an S3 bucket in this way. But it's not great - at all - that the company was storing this information at all.

One of the challenges of modern cars (this issue isn't limited to EVs) is that they're fully connected and phone home to their manufacturers. It isn't just VW that keeps track of the locations of the vehicles it makes; it's every car manufacturer. If there's a connectivity option for the car, the car is being tracked.

This data can be used in all kinds of ways: for example, it could be used as an additional revenue stream by selling it to data brokers, whose customers could use it for use cases that run the gamut from ad targeting to law enforcement.

The headline here is provocative, but the impact of these sorts of disclosures isn't limited to people who travel to brothels. Activists, politicians, and journalists are three more groups who are at risk from always-on tracking. And one can imagine this kind of data being used to demonstrate that someone drove to get reproductive healthcare, for example.

Nobody should be able to obtain this level of personal tracking about any private person. That it was accidentally released on an S3 bucket is almost incidental.

[Link]

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Stuff I loved in 2024

Some of my favorite things from 2024.

For many of us, myself included, it’s been .. a year. Rather than rehash all of that again, I thought I’d mark the end of the year by just listing some things I’ve loved. Here you go.

Books

Julia, by Sandra Newman

Not just a retelling but a complete recasting of 1984. It's helpful to consider this as a separate work: a response to 1984, in a way, rather than a layering on top or a direct sequel. It's a criticism, an extension, a modernization, and a deep appreciation for the ideas all in one - and I was hooked. There's so much I want to write about here, but I don't want to spoil it. The ending, in particular, is perfect.

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over, by Anne de Marcken

Breathtaking from start to finish. A zombie novel as carrier for something deeper, so true and so sad. I read it alone in the dark, and thought to myself, thank god, something is real.

Infinite Detail, by Tim Maughan

A book about what happens when the Internet goes away, yes, but there’s something much more than that: the exploration of humanity as content between advertising, the questions about what happens next post-revolution, the overlapping mysticism and open-source pragmatism, the breathing, beating characters, the class politics woven throughout.

Moonbound, by Robin Sloan

An adventure story that didn't quite sit in any of the categories I had for it in my head, and which frequently made me laugh out loud with its tiny details. It sits somewhere between science fiction, fantasy, satire, and a meditation on the role of stories, wrapped up in a whimsical, breezy narrative that was always a joy. I'd hoped it was leading to a more momentous ending than the one that eventually landed, but that's only because the constituent pieces were so satisfying to explore through.

TV

Only Murders in the Building

While cozy mysteries have been a mainstay of British TV for decades, American television has generally veered towards procedural stories that serve as propaganda pieces for law enforcement, complete with weak network television writing and story-of-the-week production values. There hasn’t been, as far as I’m aware, a really good cozy series since Murder, She Wrote — but Only Murders fits the bill. It’s as funny as anything Steve Martin and Martin Short have ever done, but also completely unthreatening: a lovely way to spend an evening.

Slow Horses

This ongoing tale of dysfunctional MI5 agents could have been rotten: for example, if it had intentionally glorified the security services of played into tired Cold War tropes. It doesn’t and it isn’t; frequently the worst offender in its seasons is the machinations of the government itself, and its characters are nothing like the spy tropes we’re used to. Most of all, it’s great fun, and pretty one of the best things to have come out of any streaming service.

Doctor Who

Look, obviously. I’m well-documented as a lifelong Whovian. But this year’s offerings were fresher than usual, if pitched down to a younger audience than the series had been aiming for recently. The two-parter finale was a ridiculous take on an almost 50-year-old story, but episodes like Boom (an anticapitalist tale about the arms trade), Dot and Bubble (which could have been one of the best Black Mirror episodes), and 73 Yards (a kind of time travel ghost story) were some of the best the show has ever delivered. It’s still the best TV show of all time, so there.

The Tourist

New to me this year, this had the right combination of tension and wry irony to keep me watching. I’ve been a fan of Jamie Dornan since The Fall, but Danielle Macdonald is an equal standout: some beautiful acting that makes a ridiculous premise seem real. The second season isn’t quite as good at the first, but only because some of the mystery has understandably been lost.

Articles and Blog Posts

We Need To Rewild The Internet, by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon

‌ Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

An important — and detailed — call to action about the future of the internet. In lots of ways it should set the tone for how we build on the internet in 2025.

On Being Human and “Creative”, by Heather Bryant

‌What generative AI creates is not any one person's creative expression. Generative AI is only possible because of the work that has been taken from others. It simply would not exist without the millions of data points that the models are based upon. Those data points were taken without permission, consent, compensation or even notification because the logistics of doing so would have made it logistically improbable and financially impossible.

A wonderful piece from Heather Bryant that explores the humanity — the effort, the emotion, the lived experience, the community, the unique combination of things — behind real-world art that is created by people, and the theft of those things that generative AI represents.

Inside Medium’s decade-long journey to find its own identity, by Ryan Broderick

‌Replacing Williams was Tony Stubblebine, who may have seemed a little random to anyone scanning the headlines at the time. At that point he was running Coach.me, a personal life coaching platform, and heading up Better Humans, a Medium partner publication dedicated to personal development. But his roots in Twitter and, thus, in Medium, go all the way to, well, before the beginning. In the mid-2000s, he was the director of engineering at Odeo, the podcasting startup that would become the launching ground for Twitter.

Tony has turned Medium around, which has been lovely to see. I have emotional but not financial skin in this game: I enjoyed my time working at Medium eight years ago, I’ve known Tony for going on 20 years, and I’m similarly a fan of Ev. But I also just think the more places there are for considered voices to find their community, the better, and Medium has an important take on how to do it well. This piece was a good introduction to all of it.

Why we invented a new metric for measuring readership, by Alexandra Smith

We used to measure our journalism’s reach and impact with website views, visitors, and engaged time—the methods many of our funders insisted on. But even when we included stats about our social media engagement, newsletter subscribers, and member community, our audience data reports still didn’t accurately reflect the ways we were serving people with our journalism.

In this piece, Alexandra introduced a way of measuring reach and impact for journalism that took into account the fact that audiences don’t encounter it in one place — that the internet is, in fact, fractured, and journalism often takes different forms to meet its readers where they’re at. That’s light years ahead of how most newsrooms have been thinking. This piece has shaped the conversation since it was released. It’s also thought-provoking for indieweb stalwarts like me: for lots of reasons, I think the website shouldbe the center of the universe for journalism, and ultimately you measure what matters. This approach doesn’t downplay the website but does say: what matters is the connection you make with other humans, wherever it happens.

Software

Todoist

I’m late to this party, but what an actual joy to find a todo list utility that actually works the way my brain does. The hotkeys allow me to add a task to the list whenever I need to — often mid-conversation — and then let me order them by time so I can figure out what to do next. And it’s everywhere I need it to be. No notes or complaints.

Surf

Flipboard’s new “browser for the social web” is ace: an app that wouldn’t have been possible with proprietary social media. Users create playlists of sources — which is to say, people and publishers, irrespective of where they happen to be publishing. You can then peruse new content by people on those playlists and filter them by links, video, other media, and so on. Not only is the signal to noise ratio far higher, but it’s far less exhausting than other social media apps. It’s now the only social app I’ll allow on my phone.

HTML and CSS

They’re still pretty great, and getting better and better! Did you know CSS has nesting now? I’ve been enjoying using it.

The Fediverse

The single most important improvement to the web in decades. Hooray!

Hardware

Kobo Libra Colour

Honestly, this ebook reader has changed my life. The color screen (canonically a colour screen, but I’ve been in the States for long enough that I feel compelled to discard the “u”) doesn’t matter to me all that much, but it’s responsive, has really great clarity, is light enough to read one-handed, and, most importantly of all, allows a parent of a co-sleeping toddler to read in bed without waking up his child. That last one is a gamechanger. Also, it works with library books and isn’t Amazon-bound, which were both important to me.

CalDigit TS4

I’d never really needed a docking station until this year. This thing’s got a bunch of ports, a huge amount of throughput, memory card support, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, and sits on my desk in perfect silence. I flip between my work laptop and my personal computers really easily. It’s perfect. Now all I need to add is a USB-C KVM switch and I’ll be able to switch between personal and work machines with one button.

Other

Amtrak Metropolitan Lounges

These days I travel between Philadelphia and New York City very regularly. Amtrak’s generously rewards points system means that I quickly built up enough status to gain access to its station lounges. They’re not spectacularly fancy but do come with comfortable seating and free coffee, and for that alone they’ve been a big upgrade for my commutes. A shoutout also needs to go to the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station, which improves the experience of spending time at Penn from being locked in the Backrooms to something you might actually choose to look forward to.

The Guardian

The only news publication I let send notifications to my phone (aside from the one I work for). The Guardian’s breaking news journalism is reliably good, and it has specialized feeds to subscribe to particular topics — not just for high-level topics like Business, but for example, specific news for the Middle East conflict or the war in Ukraine. I also appreciate The Guardian’s responsible, reader-centric approach to funding: despite being paywall-free, readers account for over half of its budget.

Ms. Moni

We’re reluctantly on the YouTube train with our toddler. There are a bunch of performers who are trying very hard to find audiences in the wake of the success of the likes of Ms. Rachel (who is great) and Blippi (who is like nails on a chalkboard to me, although his stablemate Meekah is a lot better). By far my favorite of the genre is Monica Ferreira: an Australian teacher and professional musician who started recording YouTube videos after experiencing chronic pain. She edits, composes, and builds the graphics for her videos herself, with high production values and no junk content. It’s been a breath of fresh air, and honestly, a relief.

What about you?

What were your favorite things from 2024? Let me know what I missed.

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