Ben Werdmuller

Erin and I stood at the front of the room, our seven-minute pitch slides for Known still projected above us. At the wooden table in front of us, investors and media executives prepared to give us unfiltered feedback about what we’d just presented to them. Beyond them, an audience of entrepreneurs, more investors, and other enthusiasts were raising their hands.

“Does your excitement outweigh your hesitations?” Corey Ford asked the Matter audience. A spattering of hands shot up; most of the audience did not raise theirs.

At Matter, Design Reviews were a big deal: a structured, safe way to find out what investors and potential customers actually thought about your business. You would pitch; then the audience would vote on a handful of questions; then the panel would weigh in.

Corey took a beat before asking his next question, microphone in hand. “Does this venture have the potential to change media for good?” A few more hands shot up this time.

“Does this venture have the potential to raise investment? If not, does it have the potential to raise alternative funding?” No hands.

The panel eviscerated us.

I’d started writing the first version of Known while my mother recovered from her double lung transplant. My mother wanted people to talk to about her experiences, but she didn’t trust the likes of Facebook to host those conversations. I’d built the platform to provide an alternative. I cared about the platform deeply; I cared about the idea of communities that didn’t yield their data to one of a handful of centralized services even more.

Indieweb and open social web people seemed excited. But I couldn’t tell the story in a way that resonated with people who weren’t a part of those worlds. This was 2014, before Cambridge Analytica or the genocide in Myanmar. The most common question I was asked was, “what’s wrong with Facebook?”

A decade later, nobody’s asking that question. We’ve all seen what’s wrong. The centralized social web has failed us; its owners treat their platforms as a way to spread propaganda and further entrench their power, often at the expense of democracy. Mark Zuckerberg likens himself to a Roman emperor even while his policies fail community after community. Under Elon Musk, X has been reinvented as a firehose of toxicity. Users are hungry for alternatives.

In my previous posts in this series, I discussed what I would do if I ran Bluesky and Mastodon. But now let’s zoom out: what if I started fresh?

There are several ways you could approach building a new open social web platform. You could hope to be remembered for building a great open protocol, as Tim Berners-Lee is, but I believe today’s need is more acute. Few people were asking for the web in 1989; it emerged anyway, changing peoples’ minds, habits, and culture. For its first decade, it was a slow-burning movement. In 2025, great harms are being done to vulnerable communities, and the profits from centralized platforms are used in part to fuel global fascism. Building a great protocol isn’t enough to get us where we need to go. We need to adopt a different mindset: one of true service, where we build an alternative to serve people’s direct needs today.

I think these principles are important:

• Any new product must be laser-focused on solving people’s needs. The technical details — protocols, languages, architecture, approach — are all in service of creating a great solution to real human problems.
• The perfect can never be allowed to obstruct the good. Ideological purity is next to impossible. The important thing is to build something that’s better than what we have today, and continue iterating towards greatness.
• Everyone who works on such a platform must be able to make a good living doing so. Or to put it another way, nobody should be financially penalized for working on the open social web.
• The platform must be sustainable. If you’re making something people rely on, you owe it to them to ensure it can last.

In his post Town squares, backyards, better metaphors, and decentralised networks, Anders Thoresson points out that social media and social networks are two different things that have sometimes been conflated. Social media is the proverbial global town square. A social network is the web of relationships between people; these might span apps, the web, and in-person conversations alike.

As I wrote in my 2008 piece The Internet is people:

Let’s reclaim a piece of language: a social network is an interconnected system of people, as I’ve suggested above. The websites that foster social networks are simply social networking tools. A social network doesn’t live on the Web, but a website can help its members communicate and share with each other.

I believe there’s enormous value to be found in building new platforms to support social networks in particular. The goal shouldn’t be to try and gather everyone in the world around a particular voice or algorithmic spectacle, as X now does with Elon Musk’s account and ideas; it should be to support networks of people and help them connect with each other on their terms.

From the same piece:

The idea of a social networking tool is to make that network communicate more efficiently, so anything that the tool does should make it easier for that network to talk to each other and share information. The tool itself shouldn’t attempt to create the network – although that being said, new network connections may arise through a purpose. Most of us have made new contacts on Flickr or Twitter, for example, because we enjoyed someone’s content.

Compare and contrast with Meta’s latest strategy to fill its platforms with AI-generated users, literally creating the network.

If I were starting from scratch — grounded in these principles, and committed to serving real human networks — here’s what I’d build.

As I hinted at in my if I ran Mastodon piece, I believe there is a need for a private-by-default, federated platform designed for groups that already know each other or are actively building trust. Think mutual aid groups, local advocacy orgs, artist collectives, parent groups, cooperatives, or even small media orgs with deeply engaged communities.

On this platform, anyone can build a group with its own look and feel, set of features, rules, and norms. As a user, I can join any number of groups with a single account, and read updates on a dashboard where I can easily switch between types of content (long-form vs short-form), modes of engagement (conversations vs published pieces), and categories (topics, timely updates vs evergreen).

Because it embraces the open social web, a user can connect to these groups using any compatible profile, and if a user doesn’t like the dashboard that the platform provides, perhaps because they don’t like how it prioritizes or filters content, they can choose another one made by someone else. Over time, groups can be hosted by multiple platform providers — and users will still be able to interact, collaborate, and share content as if they were on the same system.

Let’s say I’m part of three very different communities: a neighborhood mutual aid group, a nonprofit newsroom, and a writing collective. On this platform, each has its own space, with its own tone, style, and boundaries.

The local mutual aid group uses their space to coordinate grocery drop-offs, ride shares, and emergency needs. Everything is private, and posts are tagged by urgency. There’s a shared resource library and a microblogging space for check-ins. Members can signal availability without having to explain.

The newsroom uses its space to share behind-the-scenes updates with engaged readers, collect community tips, and publish previews of investigations. It connects directly with their existing WordPress site and lets audience editors manage conversations without needing a developer.

The writing collective is weird and messy and fun. It has a public-facing stream of essays and poetry, but also a rotating “writing prompt room” and a long-form thread space that acts like a slow-moving group zine. It’s run as a co-op, and contributors vote on changes to how it’s governed. The writing is mostly private for its members, but every so often the group makes a piece available for the outside world.

Each of these groups lives in its own lane and can be accessed individually on the web, but I choose to keep up to date on all of them from a dashboard that reflects how I think and what I care about. I can configure it, but it also learns from my use over time, and even suggests new groups that I might want to be a part of. It also lets me search for people I know or ideas I want to hear more about and surfaces groups relevant to both. The dashboard is available on the web and as a clean, responsive mobile app with a best-in-class consumer-grade design.

Because it’s all built on the open social web, I can take my identity and content with me if I ever leave. If there’s a dashboard by another company that works better for me (or fits my ideals better, for example by not learning from my use automatically), I can switch to it seamlessly. If I want, I can move my profile and memberships to an account hosted by another provider. Even if I don’t do those things, I can connect other apps to my account that give me new insights about the content and conversations I’m interested in — for example to highlight breaking news stories, surface group events I might be interested in, or to give me extra moderation powers for communities I run.

Here’s the bit that might make open social web purists upset: all of this would be built by a for-profit public benefit company and run as a hosted service. At launch, there would be no open source component.

Gasp! I can already read the Mastodon replies to this post. But rather than a betrayal of open social web values, I see these things as a way to better support the needs of the platform and the values of the space. This isn’t about profit above all else. It’s about aligning incentives to support a healthy, values-driven product, and making that alignment resilient over time. (Don’t worry, I’ll get back to open source below.)

So far, most open source self-hosted platforms have prioritized engineering efforts. Resources haven’t been available for researchers, designers, trust and safety teams, or for dedicated staff to foster partnerships with other projects. Those things aren’t nice-to-haves: they’re vital for any service to ensure that it is fit for purpose for its users, a delightful experience to use, and, crucially for any social platform, safe for vulnerable users to participate in. Building a financial model in from the start improves the chances of those things being available. If we want great design, we need to pay designers. If we want a safe, healthy community, we need to pay a trust and safety team. And so on.

In order to pay for the teams that make it valuable, the platform will charge for non-core premium features like SSO and integrations, offer a hands-on enterprise concierge service, and take a cut from marketplace transactions inside groups. Most importantly, the business model isn’t based on reach, surveillance, or ads; the values of the business are aligned with the communities it hosts.

In its earliest stages, every platform needs to reduce the feedback loop between its users and builders as much as possible. Incubating it internally until the basic interaction models, look and feel, and core feature-set are right will allow that to happen faster. I’ve found in the past that open source communities can muddy that feedback loop in the earliest stages of a project: there are people who will cheerlead something because it’s open source and not because the product works for them in itself. There are also other people who will relentlessly ask for esoteric features that benefit only them — or will be abusive or disrespectful in the open source community itself. None of these is what you want if your focus is on building something useful.

Finally, something happens when you release a project under an open source license: anyone can use it. It’s a permissive ethos that sits at the core of the movement, but it also has a key downside for open source social platforms: someone may take a platform you’ve put a great deal of work into and use it for harm. There is nothing to stop someone from taking your code and using it to support Nazis, child abuse, or to organize other kinds of real-world violence. In contrast, a hosted product can be vigilant and remove those communities.

By not releasing an open source project at first, the business has a chance to seed the culture of the platform. It can provide the resources, support, and vigilance needed to make sure the space is inclusive, respectful, and safe. Once the platform has matured and there are thriving, healthy communities, that’s when we can release a reference codebase — not as a symbolic gesture, but as a foundation others can build on without compromise. That moment would come once the platform has proven its core use case, the community culture is thriving, and the financial base is strong enough to support long-term governance.

In the meantime, because it’s all based on open social web protocols, other developers could have been building their own participating open source community platforms, dashboards, and libraries.

Last thing: I haven’t mentioned where I would run this from. Vulnerable communities are under attack in many parts of the world, notably the US, and it isn’t clear that data will be safe from subpoenas or other legal threats. So the business would be headquartered in Switzerland, a traditional home for neutral parties and a jurisdiction that offers stronger protections for user data. While starting it would require raising investment — and, perhaps, grants for starting a mission-driven high-tech business from Switzerland, the EU, and elsewhere — it would not aim to be a venture-scale business, and would operate largely independently from the US tech ecosystem. It would inclusively hire talent from all over the world and offer hybrid work: remotely but with the opportunity to come to Zurich and collaborate in-person as the need arose.

It would, of course, be a business that invested heavily in DEI, with strong benefits. These policies would allow a more diverse staff to collaborate on building it, ensuring that a greater array of perspectives were involved in its design. This isn’t just morally correct: along with the choice of location and business model, it represents a commitment to resilience.

Resilience, I hope you’ll agree, is something we need in abundance.

I began this series by asking how I’d run someone else’s platform. But the real question is: what should we build now, and how do we build it together? What are the mindsets that will provide a true alternative? And how can we ensure it succeeds?

If any of this resonates, I’d love to chat. You can always email me at ben@werd.io or on Signal at benwerd.01.

Previously in this series: if I ran Bluesky Product and if I ran Mastodon. Subscribe to get every post via email.

Photo by Renzo D'souza on Unsplash

This is the second part in a three-part series. Part one was about Bluesky. To make sure you get part three, make sure you’re subscribed.

In 2011, I sat on a panel at SXSW Interactive with Blaine Cook, the former Twitter CTO who had demonstrated an decentralized integration with the social media platform Jaiku, and Christian Sandvig, who at the time was the founder of the Center for People and Infrastructures at the University of Illinois.

The argument I presented was that social media sites are, at their core, search engines: people want to search for their friends’ names and topics they’re interested in, and are generally not excited to remember the URI of someone’s identity. Any decentralized social media network is going to need to create a great search experience if it wants to win users from centralized services. That search experience is not necessarily where the networks need to start, but it is where they need to end up.

As evidence, I brought up the time that the tech news website ReadWriteWeb briefly outranked Facebook for the search term “facebook login” and received thousands of very confused visitors wondering why their favorite site had changed. People weren’t typing “facebook dot com” into their browsers; they were searching for Facebook.

It was not well-received by the decentralization community in the audience. “People know how to use URLs,” someone said, disdainfully. “That’s how browsers work.”

Fourteen years later, in Ghost’s latest update about joining the ActivityPub network, they noted:

Many people have requested a more comprehensive search function, and are confused about the lack of username autocomplete, or why - when they search for keywords like "news" or "pugs" - nothing comes up. This problem exists across almost every ActivityPub product out there.

There is a long-standing disconnect between the technical assumptions of the open source decentralized web community and the expectations of mainstream users. The result has often been products that feel exciting and powerful for technical early adopters and mystifying to everyone else.

Earlier this year, Mastodon revealed that it was hiring a new CEO and moving to a new non-profit entity. In the spirit of my previous post about how I’d approach Bluesky’s product strategy, I want to explore how I’d think about Mastodon, too. What would I do if I was the CEO of Mastodon?

In practice, Mastodon is actually three entities: the new, European-based non-profit; its original, German non-profit, which is now a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary; and a US 501(c)3 that is primarily used to allow it to fundraise from American sources. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to treat it like one cohesive whole, headquartered in Europe, although there may be nuances to how each one is led.

It describes its mission like this:

To replace centralised platforms with robust social networking software that is inherently decentralised, open source and fully interoperable, with a commitment to privacy.

It has also described its mission like this:

To create the tools and digital spaces where people can build authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms or corporate monopolies.

These are different! The first explicitly calls to replace the existing social networking landscape with decentralized, open source software. The second one is less combative; instead of replacing the existing ecosystem, it implies an alternative ecosystem, free from exploitation and monopoly control.

Mastodon’s declared “vision” is:

To reimagine the social media landscape, one that is inclusive, diverse, user driven and supports dialogue.

Vision statements describe the world an organization wants to create. They’re not frivolous. The most famous one in software is Microsoft’s, which was a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software. This concreteness of vision allowed Microsoft to make strategic decisions clearly: would a proposed strategy potentially lead it to this world, or would it not?

By this definition, Mastodon’s declared “vision” reads more like another mission: well-intentioned, but still focused on what it opposes, not what it aims to build.

The implication is some confusion over the difference between Mastodon’s reason for being (its why) and its immediate goals (its what and how). The first step to establishing a robust direction for Mastodon is to clear this up. We need to define:

• The mission: why Mastodon exists
• The vision: what world it intends to create, in service to that mission
• The strategy: how, concretely, it will take its next steps to get there

If I was stepping into the CEO’s shoes, here’s what I would propose. The following revised statements are inspired by Mastodon’s existing three mission statements, as well as Mozilla’s mission statement:

Mission: To ensure the social web is a commons that is open, accessible, decentralized, and safe for all.

Vision: A world where everyone can easily join and create authentic, constructive online communities that are free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms, or corporate monopolies.

Strategy: To build and steward the world’s best decentralized, open source community platform, based on the ActivityPub protocol.

I suspect people on the Mastodon team might bristle at “the world’s best”; like many highly-principled people, it’s not their style to be competitive. My point is to help the team aim high: it’s not enough to build an open source, decentralized community platform, although that’s a significant achievement in itself. It’s got to be really good.

Of course, those statements — really good, the world’s best — are subjective. They invite probing into what it means to be great.

My mission and vision statements imply certain characteristics. Here’s what I think are the minimum requirements for Mastodon to be a viable decentralized platform for communities; these things aren’t what will make it great, but what it needs to provide in order to exist at all.

• Open source: anyone can view, modify, and re-share its code. Development is maintained with a participatory approach that actively invites contributions from outside the core organization.
• Decentralized: based on an open protocol that allows anyone on one Mastodon instance to communicate with anyone on another, with a coherent and consistent user experience across the network.
• Permissionless: anyone can use Mastodon without signing an agreement with the Mastodon organization. Mastodon cannot prevent someone from using the software, and the software does not rely on centralized services provided by Mastodon itself.
• Safe: the platform includes infrastructure for communities to manage moderation, prevent abuse, and establish effective trust and safety norms.
• Usable: the platform follows modern UX patterns, is mobile-friendly, accessible, and easy to onboard onto across devices and user skill levels.
• Searchable: users can find relevant people, resources, and conversations across the network with ease and precision.
• Discoverable: users can find and join communities that match their interests.

But meeting the table stakes isn’t enough. If Mastodon is going to set the standard — not just participate — in the next era of social media, it needs to offer something more than principled infrastructure. It needs to be the platform people want to use.

From the beginning, Mastodon has worn its values on its sleeve. When you click through from the website to sign up, you’re presented with a plurality of different servers to start from, all with different owners who have signed a server covenant that attempts to keep users safe and ensure a decent baseline experience. This is a principled approach: nobody could accuse Mastodon of trying to maintain a monopoly over the network. On the other hand, before they can get started with reading, posting, and sharing on the network, users need to consider which server owner is trustworthy and can meet their needs. This user experience — principled but hard to understand — is where many users drop off, never to return.

For users that really care about decentralization, the need to make this up-front choice is a sign that Mastodon is ideologically aligned. But for everyone else, it’s a sign that the team doesn’t care about their experience.

The same goes for features like quote-posting: the ability to reshare someone’s post with your own commentary added. This originally emerged organically from Twitter’s userbase; people were doing it themselves before Twitter turned it into a core feature. It’s become a key part of Bluesky’s platform, and has been a longtime Mastodon feature request. But quote-posts can also be a vector for abuse, so the team is undergoing a careful process to implement it that might take years.

For users that want Mastodon to be as safe as possible, this approach could demonstrate that the team really cares about their needs. For everyone else, it’s a sign that they shouldn’t expect the features that have become normal elsewhere.

People who deeply care about safety and decentralization see Mastodon as responsive and aligned. Others might see it as slow, frustrating, and lacking baseline social features. To thrive, Mastodon needs to overcome this dissonance.

I think the key is in its role as a community platform. Every Mastodon server is its own community, with its own norms, settings, standards, and ideals. We should stop calling them instances or servers, and treating them as homogenous nodes in a wider network. Instead, we should describe each Mastodon site as being a community in itself.

Mastodon should be the WordPress of decentralized communities.

Each Mastodon-powered community should have its own look and feel — and its own distinct features. Mastodon’s greatest strength isn’t in being a single network — it’s in being an ecosystem of communities, each with its own identity, design, tooling, and norms.

One of the challenges of the current signup process is that every Mastodon community looks and acts more or less the same. Right now, choosing a server often means parsing descriptions and guessing which admin seems trustworthy. Instead, every community should feel alive with its own personality: not just a hostname and a set of rules, but a clear sense of what it's for and who it's for, and an experience and set of features that match this purpose.

What if:

• A community for climate scientists featured up-to-date live dashboards and research highlights?
• A queer art collective could display an evolving digital gallery of its members’ work?
• A Black-led tech community could feature tools for job support, mentorship, and organizing?

Decentralization is flexibility: one size does not need to fit all. In this world, the decision about whether or not to enable quote-posting, join network-wide search, or let news websites know they’ve been linked to is devolved to individual community owners, not the platform owners themselves. The decision about whether to build a large, expansive fediverse or keep it small and safe is devolved too: any community owner can decide how locked down or opened up their space should be, because it’s their space.

The ability to theme Mastodon also means the ability to brand it. Today, every paid Medium subscriber can have an account on its Mastodon community, but that community looks like Mastodon, not Medium. The Newsmast Foundation’s community looks exactly the same. The ability to deeply customize a Mastodon community allows organizations with deeper pockets to adopt the platform in a way that adheres to their existing standards. These users are more likely to invest in customizations — and in doing so, help grow the broader ecosystem.

Mastodon should treat its own flagship community, mastodon.social, as a living testbed — a place to experiment, learn from user behavior, and refine the experience. That’s the community space that Mastodon itself owns. It can try new themes, run experiments with new features, and, yes, make it the default community new users try, so they can get a handle on what Mastodon is and how it works before they potentially move to another community. All with a best-in-class mobile app experience.

So far, I’ve described a world where Mastodon communities are:

• Visually distinct: with themes and branding that reflect their identity and vibe.
• Feature-extended: with plugins or integrations tailored to the needs of a specific group — whether that’s custom moderation workflows, polls, discussion threads, or event coordination.

But remember our vision statement? All of this only matters if it’s easy. So we also need to add:

• Easy to spin up: where launching and running your own Mastodon community is as simple as starting a blog.

The mission can’t be met if only technical people can create and run Mastodon communities. Part of the task of lowering this barrier to entry is about infrastructure: the underlying platform needs to be able to run simply on any number of hosting providers. Mastodon could also offer a turnkey service — similar to WordPress.com — that abstracts away the hosting layer entirely for non-technical users. Not only will this bring more people onto the network, but accessible hosted services will serve as an avenue to bring in funding.

Another part of the task is about running a healthy community: moderation, abuse prevention, and trust and safety. Some communities are equipped to provide this themselves, but others simply cannot. Mastodon can provide conduits to both paid and volunteer services to help communities keep themselves safe.

Finally, there are the legal implications of running a community: adhering to local regulations and protecting community owners from undue risk. Just as newsletter platforms help writers comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, and WordPress.com makes handling DMCA takedowns straightforward, Mastodon can offer built-in tools and guidance to help communities stay legally compliant in their jurisdictions — without requiring every community owner to become a lawyer.

WordPress has built a valuable ecosystem of plugin authors, theme designers, and infrastructure providers, who all gain as the ecosystem grows. The same can be true of Mastodon if it embraces its role as a movement-defining layer of a vibrantly diverse social web.

That means supporting an ecosystem where:

• It’s easy for developers to build and monetize plugins, themes, and integrations.
• Service providers, including Mastodon itself, can offer hosting, customization, moderation, or legal compliance as value-adds.
• Organizations — from local newsrooms to global NGOs — can create spaces that reflect their missions and identities without starting from scratch.

In that vision, Mastodon is no longer just a destination. It’s a foundation: a public utility for self-governed, interest-driven communities across the world. Some might be tiny and personal; others might grow large and influential.

But all of them would benefit from a shared protocol, a shared codebase, and a shared commitment to making the web better — without requiring lock-in or top-down control.

That’s the opportunity: not just to build a platform, but to unlock a new era for the social web — one where communities are in charge.

And that’s where I’d start if I ran Mastodon.

Previously in this series: if I ran Bluesky Product. Next up: if I was starting a new platform. Subscribe to get them all via email.

I realized I misspoke in today’s piece about Bluesky product strategy. In it, I said this:

I’m generally not bullish about creator economy services.

What I meant to say is that I’m generally not bullish about venture-funded creative economy services. It’s the need for venture scale and sky-high valuations that makes these a tough nut to crack. In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with these businesses at all; Medium’s turnaround demonstrates how well it can be done, and I have endless admiration for what the Ghost team has managed to achieve and build.

I’m sorry for my lack of precision here! I didn’t mean to throw the whole space under the bus. But I stand by my skepticism that these businesses can reach venture scale.

A lifetime or two ago, Biz Stone was showing me and my co-founder around South Park in San Francisco. The Twitter office was sat there, a weird building with glass bricks across the road from what would later be the Instagram office. We grabbed a coffee at Caffe Centro and talked social media; two founders talking shop with a member of our advisory board.

He was particularly excited about the Twitter API. At the time, over 80% of Twitter’s traffic wasn’t driving through the website: it was through third-party apps that used the API to create entirely new experiences on top of the platform. Around the same time, unbeknownst to me, Blaine Cook was internally demonstrating interoperability between Twitter and Jaiku, another social network, establishing the first decentralized link between two unrelated social networking sites.

Of course, we know what happened next. Twitter realized that the proliferation of the API was actively blocking its ability to make money through advertising, and radically locked it down in favor of its own experiences. Blaine’s adventure in decentralized social networking was shut down for the same reason. Subsequently, a lot of people made a lot of money. And, you know, some other stuff involving the future of democracy happened, too.

What happens when you build, well, the opposite of that?

Bluesky’s origins lie in that moment when Twitter turned away from the open social web. It is both a user-friendly social media site and an open protocol that could underpin all social media sites. Like Twitter, it has built a lively community of engaged people who talk in real time about anything that hits the zeitgeist, from current events to pop culture. It has a growing ecosystem of third-party apps and services. And it has venture investors who, ultimately, will need to see it make money and raise its valuation so that they can make a return. Unlike Twitter, it has no way of turning off its openness in order to do so.

Recently, the company advertised for a new Head of Product. Whoever assumes this position will have quite a job ahead of them: growing the protocol and the social app together in symbiosis. Nobody has ever tried to build a highly-valuable tech company this way before; it’s new ground. I think it’s a very positive experiment — we need people to be able to make money doing the right thing — but it is an experiment.

I’m not applying for the job, but I think it’s interesting to consider how one might go about it.

The first paragraph of that job description is interesting for what it prioritizes:

Our mission is to build an open protocol for public conversation. We give users more choice, developers more freedom, and creators more control. The Bluesky app is a gateway to a more human-centered social web, and we’re looking for the right strategist to shape its future.

The mission isn’t to build a social network: it’s to build an open protocol for public conversation. (Emphasis on the protocol.) The vision is a world where everyone is in control of their social presence. From the About Bluesky FAQ:

We want modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, when anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs.

The strategy is to build a central tool based on the protocol — the Bluesky app — and use it as a way to grow the reach and influence of the protocol, and further these open ideals. In some ways, the app is a means to an end: a way to understand what the community needs, ensure that the protocol provides it, and shorten the feedback loop between the company and its users. It’s also its best chance to make revenue in the short term.

Bluesky is not currently self-sustaining. In order to continue to do this work, it will need to continue to raise more money and prove that it can generate revenue.

Currently, its venture investors are largely drawn from the world of decentralization: either people who are friendly to the ideals of the open web or come from decentralized spaces like crypto. That mission alignment is going to be harder to maintain the larger the funding rounds get; mission-driven investments are more common in earlier, smaller rounds, and later-stage institutional investors don’t typically back companies for their ideals.

The norms of venture capital dictate that it will also likely need to raise more money in a subsequent round so as to maintain investor enthusiasm: raising a similar amount as the last round, or a lower amount, could be seen as a sign to VCs that the company is struggling. So Bluesky the company needs to quickly prove to investors that it and its protocol can make them a meaningful financial return.

Providing strong investor returns and maintaining the ideals of an open social web is a very ambitious needle to thread. Where to begin?

It’s no secret that Bluesky is going to introduce a subscription layer. It sounds like this will come in two parts:

1. A Twitter Blue style subscription called Bluesky+ that will give users profile customizations, higher-quality video uploads, and post analytics, among other features.
2. Creator monetization tools that will allow creators to “get paid right on Bluesky and any other platforms built on their open AT Protocol ecosystem”.

The first will obviously sit as part of Bluesky’s own service; while features like analytics will obviously draw on the protocol, these are really features that improve the experience of using the app itself. Speaking personally, I can’t say that I care that much about profile customizations or video uploads — although I know that these will be draws for some users — but I can certainly see a reason why an organization might want to pay for brand analytics. It makes sense as a place to start.

The second is interesting for the way it’s described. I’m generally not bullish about venture-funded creator economy services: Substack, which has kind of become the flag-bearer for creative economy services, is not profitable, and Patreon has had real trouble reaching sustainability. Medium is profitable, but only after Tony Stubblebine radically shifted the company away from high-growth VC dynamics (and cut a ton of unnecessary costs).

So if Bluesky was pinning its future on a creator subscription play, that wouldn’t grab me at all — but that’s not what’s going on here. The “… and any other platforms built on the AT Protocol ecosystem” demands my attention. This is the future of Bluesky as a platform and a company.

One analogy you could use (and Bluesky has used) to describe Bluesky’s app on its protocol is GitHub: git is an open protocol for collaborating on software development, but GitHub’s implementation is so good and so seamless that almost every software development team uses it. You absolutely could use GitLab, Codeberg, Gitea, or any number of others, but they’re considered to be the long tail to the market. Similarly, Bluesky’s app is going to be the best social experience on the protocol, even if there are many others.

But you could also use Android as an analogy. The open source mobile operating system is largely developed by Google, and Google’s implementation is the one most people use: most Android phones use its Play store, its payments system, and its discovery layer. You don’t have to — many others are available — but if you’re an app developer, you’re probably going to write your software for Google’s ecosystem.

There’s a credible exit from GitHub in that you could move your development to Codeberg. There’s a credible exit from the Google ecosystem in that you could move to the Amazon ecosystem, the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem, or open source ecosystems like Aptoide. You’re not locked in, even if Google’s ecosystem is the most convenient for most users.

There will be a credible exit from Bluesky’s social app on its protocol: other social apps will be available. But this principle also goes for tertiary services. Bluesky will clearly provide payments over the protocol, taking a cut of every transaction; others will be available, but theirs will be the easiest way to pay and accept payments on the network. You’ll be able to discover apps that run on the protocol any number of ways, but Bluesky’s discovery mechanisms will be the best and the most convenient. There will be any number of libraries that help you build on the protocol, but Bluesky’s will be the best and easiest for developers — and, of course, they will have strong links to Bluesky’s default services. Each of these is a potential revenue stream.

The goal here is to grow the AT Protocol network to be as big as possible. Anyone will be able to permissionlessly build on that platform, but Bluesky’s services will be there to provide the best-in-class experience and de facto defaults, ensuring that its revenues grow with the protocol, but not in a way that locks in users.

This principle also answers a few questions people have had about the community:

• Why did crypto investors put money into Bluesky when the company itself has stated it won’t become a crypto company?
  The company’s own payment systems are likely to run off credit cards, taking a standard transaction. But clearly, crypto is another option, particularly in nations that might not be well-served by credit card companies, and crypto networks can step in to provide alternative payment mechanisms. By establishing the notion of decentralized subscriptions, Bluesky creates a ready-made bedrock for those payments.
• How will VC investors see the financial return they need without Bluesky necessarily having to let go of its principles?
  The company actually becomes more valuable as more people use its open protocol: the bigger the network is, the greater the addressable market available to its services. It needs developers to build tools, services, and experiences that its own team wouldn’t produce. It also needs them to address markets that it itself cannot, allowing the possibility for local control of app experiences. (Imagine if developers in Myanmar could have easily created their own Facebook with their own local trust and safety.) It will then serve them with easy payments, great libraries, and perhaps other services like analytics and even dedicated hosting.

Clearly, there’s work to do on both the protocol and the app. For one thing, payments become more valuable if scarcity is introduced: people may be more likely to pay for content if it is not otherwise available. That means adding features like per-item access permissions — which also help vulnerable communities that might not feel comfortable posting on the completely open protocol today. Discovery and trust and safety on the app can still be improved. But these things are intrinsic to creating a valuable ecosystem and best-in-class tools that sit upon it.

Perhaps ironically, this vision comes closer to building an “everything app” than will ever be possible in a closed ecosystem. That’s been Elon Musk’s longtime goal for X, but Bluesky’s approach, in my opinion, is far more likely to succeed. It’s not an approach that aims to build it all themselves; it’s a truly open social web that we can all build collaboratively. What Musk is branding, Bluesky may build.

To be sure, this isn’t a Twitter clone play. If Bluesky succeeds, it won’t be because it tried to beat Twitter at its own game. It’ll be because it stayed open, built the right tools, and helped others do more than it could do alone. That’s not just a better app. It’s a better kind of company.

This is the first post in a three-part series. Next up: Mastodon. Subscribe to get them all via email.

Photo by __ drz __ on Unsplash.

As I write this, I’m flying home from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Now in its 19th year, it’s an annual meeting of newsrooms, journalists, and news professionals from all over the world.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was blown away by the whole event.

Perugia in itself is a beautiful city: ancient, cobblestoned alleyways weave their way between the old city walls, revealing unexpected views, storefronts, restaurants, street vendors, and gardens. These days, I’m settled into a sedentary life in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I found myself walking a great deal more than I would even in a city like New York. The Italian tradition is to eat dinner far later than in America, so it was the norm for me to find my way back to my hotel far past midnight, buzzing from interesting conversations throughout the day. My legs were sore; I was hopelessly jet-lagged; I wandered dark alleyways in the vague hope that I was heading in the right direction; it was fantastic.

There’s something about that far-removed context, the beautiful surroundings, the breadth of journalists present, and our collective physical state that led to more honest conversations. At most conferences, I always have the sense that someone is out to sell me something; here, when someone attempted a pitch it stuck out like a sore thumb. The sense that people were holding back to maintain their newsrooms’ professional reputations and appease their comms teams was also mercifully missing.

In the panels and talks, people were willing to share their failures at least as readily as their successes, and I was particularly taken by a panel on AI deepfake detection that went into the computer science and discussed the practicalities, rather than gearing itself for a surface-level introductory audience.

The pure journalism track — which comprises almost all of the Festival — was similarly wonderful. A panel about media censorship in Israel and Ukraine didn’t shy away from the details, revealing a more complex situation in Ukraine in particular than I’ve been hearing from the US press, alongside some specifics about Israeli censorship that I found very surprising. (They have a direct WhatsApp chat with the censor! Who gives them a thumbs up or a thumbs down on stories before publication!)

This year, for the first time, the Festival also held a Product track. The News Product Alliance, where I participate in an AI advisory group, helped to shape it — and I was honored to participate in one of its panels.

My session, with Damon Kiesow and Upasna Gautam (both brilliant people in the field who I felt privileged to present alongside), was about ensuring we use technology in ways that are aligned with our values. As we put it in our description, “every design choice, paywall adjustment, build/buy evaluation, or marketing campaign carries a potential risk of violating journalistic ethics or harming reader trust” — and that’s before you take on the issue of newsrooms trying to model themselves on Silicon Valley business models:

“Social is radically transforming. Search is flatlining. AI continues to rapidly change the web. News organizations that relied on unearned audience windfalls to drive programmatic advertising revenues are in similar straits. It is time for local news organizations to return to their roots: serving local readers and local advertisers and giving up on the dreams of limitless scale and geographic reach which is the pipedream of Silicon Valley and the bête noire of local sustainability.”

Upasna shared a succinct, powerful summary of our key takeaways afterwards on Threads:

1) The false promise of scale:

• Journalism has always been innovative but adopting Silicon Valley’s values of scale, surveillance, and extraction was a false shortcut.
• Tech platforms succeed by commodifying attention but journalism succeeds by earning trust.
• When we embed vendor platforms without scrutiny, we don’t just adopt the tool, but the business model, the values, and the blind spots.

2) There is no such thing as neutral software:

• Software is not neutral. It’s a creative work, just like journalism. It’s shaped by the priorities, privileges, and politics of the people who build it.
• Tech decisions can enable serious harm when teams optimize for growth without understanding community impact.
• It’s not enough to ask if a tool works. We must ask: Who built it? Who benefits? Whose values does it encode?

3) Assumptions are the first ethical risk:

• The highest-leverage activity we have is to relentlessly challenge assumptions. Assumptions hide risks, and audience value should be the north star of every system we build.
• Ask not just what we’re building, but why and for whom. Does it create real value for our audience?
• Systems thinking is a necessity. If you don’t understand how your paywall, CMS, personalization engine, and editorial goals connect, you’re building on sand.

The message seemed to resonate with the room, and plenty of interesting conversations with newsrooms of all sizes followed. My most controversial idea was that newsrooms should join together, as governments and higher educational institutions have in the past, to build open source software that supports newsroom needs and safeguards the duty of care we have to our sources, journalists, and readers in ways that big tech platforms tend not to. To many people in today’s news industry, it feels like a giant leap — but it is possible, and products like the French and German government project Docs are showing the way.

While the Festival now has a Product track, it’s still sorely missing a true Technology track. These are different things: Product is about addressing problems from a human-centered perspective — and using technology to solve them where it makes sense. That’s a mindset journalism urgently needs to embrace. But it hasn’t yet made enough space for the people who make the technology: not Silicon Valley tech companies, but engineers and other technologists who should be treated as domain experts and involved at every level of newsroom strategy, not relegated to a backroom office and handed a list of product requirements. Newsrooms still seem wary of bringing hard technology skills into their strategic circles. That’s extremely shortsighted: every newsroom today lives or dies on the web.

But there were technologists and open source projects in attendance. Notably, representatives from the Mastodon and Bluesky teams were at the Festival. The Newsmast Foundation was also present, incisively taking part in conversations to help newsrooms onboard themselves onto both of them. I got to hang out with them all, connecting with people I’d spoken with but never interacted with in person. Mastodon has undergone a transformation, has doubled its team, and is working on smoothing out some of its rough edges, while not letting go of its core ethos. It’s also beginning to position itself as a European alternative to American social media platforms, with a community-first values system and new services to directly help organizations join the network.

Bluesky, on the other hand, has done an able job of bringing journalists onto its existing social app, and is now hard at work explaining why its underlying protocol matters. Both want to engage with newsrooms and journalists and do the right thing by them. They each have something different to prove: Mastodon that it can be usable and accessible, and Bluesky that it can provide a return to its investors and truly decentralize while holding onto its values. I’m rooting for both of them.

These platforms’ messages dovetail with my own: news can own the platforms that support them. Lots of people at the Festival were worried about the impact of US big tech on their businesses — particularly in a world where tech moguls seem to be aligning themselves with a Presidential administration that has positioned itself as being adversarial to news, journalists, sources, and, arguably, the truth. The good news is that the technology is out there, the values-aligned technologists are out there, and there’s a strong path forward. The only thing left is to follow it.

The world is full of darkness. So much is going wrong. Experts agree that America has succumbed to right-wing authoritarianism; call it fascism or something else, these are extraordinarily difficult times.

This post is a break from all of that. At least kind of.

In this piece, I will try and convince you that Doctor Who is the best TV show ever made, explain to you why it matters, and why it’s particularly important in our current context. In a time when cruelty and fear dominate headlines, it’s worth celebrating a show that insists on the power of kindness, intellect, and hope.

Bear with me. Let’s go.

First, a primer: what is Doctor Who?

You’ve probably heard of Doctor Who, but you might not have watched much or any of it. That’s okay.

The core of every story is this: there is a problem, somewhere in time and space. There might be vampires in Venice in 1580; a plot afoot to steal the Mona Lisa in modern-day Paris in order to fund time travel experiments; a society of pacifists on a far-away planet locked in a generations-long war with warlike, genocidal racists. The Doctor, a strange traveler who carries no weapons, helps solve the problem using intelligence and empathy. They bring along friends who are our “in” to the story, but who also remind the Doctor what it means to be human.

There’s a lot of backstory, but unlike other science fiction shows, it doesn’t matter all that much. There’s canon and history, but it’s constantly evolving. And because it’s squarely aimed at a whole-family audience, and is almost but not quite an anthology show, it’s accessible, fun, and very diverse in its approach. One story might be incredibly silly; the next might be a tense thriller. If you don’t like the tone of the one you’re watching, the next one might be a better fit.

There are a few more constants, but not many: The Doctor’s time and space machine, the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), is stuck as a 1963-era British police box on the outside, and is radically bigger on the inside; every time they die they are “regenerated” in a new body; they stole the TARDIS and fled their people.

Oh, and it’s been running since November 23, 1963: 62 years and counting. It’s the longest-running science fiction show in the world — which makes its accessibility and freshness all the more remarkable. In its original run, it launched the career of authors like Douglas Adams. And in its most recent incarnation, it’s been an early career-launcher for actors like Andrew Garfield, Daniel Kaluuya, Carey Mulligan, Felicity Jones, and Karen Gillan.

Okay, fine. So that’s what the show is. Why does it matter?

Subversive from day one

In 1963, the world was only eighteen years out from the end of World War II. The end of the Holocaust and the closing of the camps was as close as the release of Spider-Man 3 is to us now. Enoch Powell, who would later give the notoriously noxious “rivers of blood” anti-immigrant speech, was the Minister for Health. Homosexuality was illegal.

Waris Hussein, a gay, immigrant director, helmed An Unearthly Child, a story about a teenage girl who obviously didn’t fit in and the teachers who were worried about her. (If the subtext to this story isn’t intentional in the writing, it certainly emerges in the direction.) In the end, her grandfather turned out to be a time traveler who lived in a police box that was more than meets the eye, and the rest is history.

The very next story was about a society of pacifists, the Thals, who were locked in a struggle with a race of genocidal maniacs, the Daleks. It’s a more complicated story than you might expect: in the end, the Doctor and companions help the Thals win by teaching them that sometimes you need to use violence to defeat fascism. The morality of it isn’t straightforward, but it’s an approach that was deeply rooted in recent memories of defeating the Nazis, and that had a lot to say about a Britain that was already seeing the resurgence of nationalism. In a show for the whole family!

When the main actor, William Hartnell, fell into ill health, the show could have come to an end. Instead, the writers built in a contrivance, regeneration, that allowed the Doctor to change actors when one left. In turn, the show itself was allowed to evolve. It was created by necessity rather than as some grand plan, but in retrospect laid the groundwork for Doctor Who to remain relevant for generations.

By the 1980s, the show was still going strong — and still slyly subversive. In The Happiness Patrol, the Doctor faces off against a villainous regime obsessed with mandatory cheerfulness, clearly modeled on Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. The episode includes thinly veiled references to the miners’ strike and the inequality many Britons faced under her leadership.

It also didn’t shy away from queerness. One male character leaves the main antagonist for another man, and at one point, the TARDIS is painted pink.

Eventually, it was canceled, in part because the BBC controller at the time, Conservative-leaning Michael Grade, hated it. (The Thatcher thing, and that Colin Baker, one of the last actors to play the Doctor in the classic run, was in a romantic relationship with Grade’s ex-wife, probably didn’t help.)

When it came off the air in 1989, scriptwriters and fans alike began to write novels under a Virgin Books New Adventures banner that took the subtext of the show and made it text. They told complex stories that could never have been televised — they weren’t as family-friendly, and didn’t fit within a 1980s BBC budget. But they collectively expanded the lore and the breadth of the show.

Subversive on its return

One of those New Adventures authors was Russell T Davies, a TV writer who had started with children’s shows like Dark Season, Why Don’t You?, and Children’s Ward, and moved on to creating adult fare like Queer as Folk and The Second Coming, a tale about the second coming of Christ that happened to feature up-and-coming film star Christopher Ecclestone. He spent years lobbying the BBC to bring Doctor Who back, and in 2005, they acquiesced. There had been one other attempt at a revival — and American co-production with Fox — which had understood the letter but not the spirit of the show.

From the start, the reboot was vital and contemporary. The human companion, Rose, was a teenager from an unapologetically working class family; a major theme of the show was that everyone was special, and that openness, inclusivity, and empathy, rather than wealth and status, were prerequisites for living a good life. This was a theme that would later be revisited to great effect with Catherine Tate’s Donna Noble: that ordinary people become extraordinary not because they’ve been chosen, but because they care.

In 2005, the Iraq War was underway; there was an increase in state surveillance and a stepped-up fear of immigration in the wake of 9/11. America in particular was under the helm of a right-wing theocratic administration. In contrast, Doctor Who stood up to say that everyone was beautiful, our differences were to be celebrated. Christopher Ecclestone’s Doctor had been through an unseen war and was scarred, traumatized, and determined that everyone should live.

The new series was able to play with sexuality and gender norms. Captain Jack, a pansexual time traveler, slotted right into the narrative. Characters casually mentioned changing genders or having same-sex spouses without it being the subject of the episode. In every episode, alongside the exciting story of the week, the show normalized and celebrated diversity.

It was unashamedly political. In one of my favorite episodes, Turn Left, the Doctor is missing and Britain is suffering in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. England becomes “only for the English”; Donna Noble watches in horror as her neighbors are taken away to a labor camp. “That’s what they called them the last time,” her grandfather ruefully notes. It was an important callback in 2008, at the tail end of the second Bush administration, and it’s only grown in importance now.

Again: this is a family show.

Anchored in good, accessible storytelling

You might be forgiving for thinking, based on my argument so far, that Doctor Who is a heavy-handed, ideology-first show. What a bore. The good news is that this couldn’t be further from the truth: it’s a genuinely fun, accessible romp with award-winning storytelling that ranks among the best of science fiction. It rules.

At the time of writing, it’s received 163 awards and been nominated for 411. That includes BAFTA awards (the British Oscars); Hugos (the annual literary award for best science fiction works of the year); National Television Awards; Nebula Awards; and so on. It’s well-regarded as some of the best writing, anywhere.

And, of course, it’s also deeply weird, in the best ways. There are haunted libraries with flesh-eating shadows. Star whales ferrying orphaned humanity across the galaxy. A sentient sun. A race of aliens that live in television signals. Some episodes are space operas; others are bottle dramas; some are screwball comedies with robot Santas. Occasionally, it’ll make you cry over a character who appeared for five minutes and then died nobly to save a moon that turned out to be an egg.

At its best, Doctor Who manages to be profoundly silly and heartbreakingly sincere in the same breath. It lets you believe that logic and love can coexist. That monsters are sometimes just scared people. That sometimes scared people can become monsters — and that they can still be saved.

There have been missteps, of course, as you’d expect from anything this experimental. Some come from changing expectations; there are certainly some racial stereotypes in the 1960s/70s episodes that did not age well. More recently, there was an era of the show where Rosa Parks was robbed of agency as an activist. In the same season, an apparent critique of Amazon-style capitalism led into a bizarre statement from the Doctor, who announced: “The systems aren't the problem. How people use and exploit the system, that's the problem.” And writers made queer people and people of color expendable.

It wasn’t the best, to be honest, but the show has ably course corrected. More recently, trans and non-binary characters have become central — all while expanding the narrative canvas of the show under a refreshed budget and a focus on new viewers. Ncuti Gatwa as the first openly queer Doctor is a revelation, full of joy and life. It’s as brilliant as it ever was.

Why it matters now

The world hasn’t gotten any less terrifying since Doctor Who first aired in 1963. If anything, the monsters feel closer, less metaphorical. They’re holding office. Writing curriculum. Rewriting history.

But that’s exactly why this show endures.

Because Doctor Who doesn’t promise us a perfect future — it promises us people who will fight for one. It shows us a universe where the best tool you can carry is your mind, your heart, and your ability to listen. Where change is baked into the story, and where survival requires transformation.

It’s a story that insists on second chances. That redemption is possible. That the most powerful force in the universe might just be compassion.

And in a world that tells us to numb out, shut down, or look away — Doctor Who dares to say: be curious. Be brave. Try to be nice, but always be kind.

It’s great television.

But also, maybe that’s how we save each other.

Get started

If you’re Who-curious, here are a few places to start:

Blink (2007). A gripping, self-contained episode with an innovative narrative loop that happens to star Carey Mulligan.

‌Rose (2005). The first episode of the revived show. Why not begin at the beginning?

‌The Eleventh Hour (2010). Matt Smith’s first story as the Doctor. Guest stars include Olivia Coleman as a barking alien. Positively cinematic.

It’s time to try something new.

Starting today, you can support my writing on Patreon. I’ll never put up a paywall for my blog or newsletter; in effect, by supporting, you’re helping to continue to make it available for everyone.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• At $5/month or more, your name will be listed as a “thank you” on a supporters page on my website.
• At $25/month or more, your name will also link to your website from the supporters page, and you’ll receive a linked “thank you” credit at the bottom of each newsletter.
• At $100/month or more, you’ll get a linked name and static logo at the top of every newsletter, and a linked “thank you” at the bottom of every page on my website. (I’ve limited the number of supporters at this tier.)

The site you link to must be yours, safe, legal, and not an affiliate page. I won’t allow gambling, adult sites, or anything designed to abuse the trust of the reader.

This is an experiment! If it doesn’t work out, I’ll remove the Patreon but ensure that everybody receives the acknowledgment they’ve paid for.

Here’s what I like about this model: there are no paywalls and there’s no user tracking involved, and there are no penalties for people who don’t have the means to support. It helps me with my server costs, but otherwise, everything stays the same.

But if you have concerns, I’d love to hear them. As always, you can shoot me an email at ben@werd.io.

Inadvertently, the other day, I became one of those people.

My team and I were sitting together as part of a week-long summit; some attendees were in New York City, while others attended remotely. I was taking them through the principles that I believe are important for developing software for our newsroom: a laser focus on the needs of a real user, building the smallest thing we can and then testing and iterating from there, shortening feedback loops, and focusing on the most targeted work we can that will meaningfully make progress towards our goals.

And then I said it:

“I see our team as a startup.”

Oof. It wasn’t even the first time the words had left my mouth. Or the second or the third.

One of my colleagues very kindly gave me feedback in a smaller session afterwards. She pointed out that this has become a cliché in larger organizations: a manager will say “we act like a startup” but then will do nothing of the sort. In fact, almost nobody in these settings can agree on what a startup even is.

And even if they did, the environment doesn’t allow it. Big companies don’t magically “act like a startup”. The layers of approval, organizational commitments, and big-org company culture are all inevitably still intact — how could they not be? — and the team is supposed to nebulously “be innovative” as a kind of thin corporate aspiration rather than an achievable, concrete practice. The definitions, resources, culture, and permission to act differently from the rest of the organization simply aren’t there. At best it’s naivety; at worst it’s a purposeful, backhanded call for longer hours and worse working conditions.

But when I said those words, I wasn’t thinking about corporate culture. I was remembering something else entirely.

I often think back to a conference I attended in Edinburgh — the Association for Learning Technology’s annual shindig, which that year was held on the self-contained campus of Heriot-Watt University. There, I made the mistake of criticizing RDF, a technology that was the darling of educational technologists at the time. That was why a well-regarded national figure in the space stood up and yelled at me at the top of his voice: “Why should anyone listen to you? You’re two guys in a shed!”

The thing is, we were two guys in a shed. With no money at all. And, at the time, I was loving it.

A few years earlier, I quit my job because I was certain that social networking platforms were a huge part of the future of how people would learn from each other and about the world. My co-founder and I didn’t raise funding: instead, we found customers early on and gave ourselves more time by earning revenue. Neither one of us was a businessman; we didn’t know what we were doing. We had to invent the future of our company — and do it with no money. It felt like we were willing it into existence, and we were doing it on our own terms. Nobody could tell us what to do; there was nobody to greenlight our ideas except our customers. It was thrilling. I’ve never felt more empowered in my career.

There is no way to recapture that inside of a larger organization. And nobody should want to.

The most important difference is that we owned the business. Each of us held a 50% share. Yes, we worked weird hours, pulled feats of technical gymnastics, and were working under the constant fear of running out of money, but that was a choice we made for ourselves — and if the business worked, we’d see the upside. That’s not true for anyone who can be described as an “employee” rather than a “founder”. Even if employees hold stock in the company, the stake is always orders of magnitude smaller; their ability to set the direction of the company, smaller still.

Another truth is that almost nobody has done this. If you’ve worked in larger institutions for most of your career, you’ve never felt the same urgency. If you’ve never bootstrapped a startup, the word might conjure up memories of two million dollar raises and offices in SoMA. Maybe a Series C company with hundreds of people on staff. Or Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, backstabbing his way to riches. In each case, the goal is to grow the company, make your way to an IPO or an exit, and be a good steward of investor value. In places like San Francisco, that’s probably a more common startup story than mine. But it’s an entirely different adventure.

So instead of using the word “startup” and somehow expecting people to innately connect with my lived experience on a wholesale basis, what do I actually want to convey? What do I think is important?

I think it’s these things:

• Experiment-driven: The team has autonomy to conceive of, design, run, and execute on the results of repeated, small, measurable experiments.
• Human-centered: The team has their “customers” (their exact users) in mind and is trying to solve their real problems as quickly as possible. Nobody is building a bubble and spending a year “scratching their own itch” without knowing if their user will “buy” it.
• Low-budget: The team is conscious about cost, scope, and complexity. There’s no assumption of infinite time, money, or attention. That constraint is a feature, not a bug.
• Time-bound: The team is focused on quick wins that move the needle quickly, not larger projects with far-off deadlines (or no deadline at all).
• Outcome-driven: The point is to help the user, not to spend our time doing one activity or sticking to a known area of expertise. If buying off the shelf fits the budget and gets us there faster, then that’s what we do. If it turns out that the user needs something different, then that’s what we build. Quickly.

That’s what I was trying to say. Not that we’re a startup — but that we can and should work in a way that’s fast, focused, and grounded in real human needs. We don’t need the mythology or the branded T-shirts. We just need the mindset — and the permission.

I cleaned out my desk a little over five years ago. It feels like last week.

I was leading engineering at ForUsAll, a fintech company that seeks to make it easier for small businesses to offer retirement plans for their employees. The co-founder, David, had been wearing a mask around the office for a month; he was following the growth of COVID-19 closely. The then-CEO agreed to close the office if the number of cases in San Francisco went beyond some small threshold; when it did, we picked up our laptops and left.

Of course, we all know what happened next: lockdowns, sourdough starters, and remote working on a scale never seen before.

I prefer remote working and always have. My first startup was mostly remote: my co-founder was in Edinburgh for a while, and spent some time in Vancouver, while I was in Oxford with occasional long stretches in California. I worked at my kitchen table, drank my own coffee, and set my own hours. It was flexible depending on what was going on at the time, and undoubtedly productive. When I joined a startup based in Austin but worked from Edinburgh and Berkeley, it felt like a natural progression.

When the pandemic hit, I couldn’t wait to return to that mode of working. I had another reason to feel like working from home was a silver lining: my mother’s health had been up and down following her double lung transplant, and now I could spend more time with her. What had been a regular Sunday visit became a much longer weekly stay. My dad was the primary carer, but I could help out. Many nights, I would help her up the short flight of stairs to her bedroom, help situate her in her bed, with brushing her teeth, and so on. Working from home gave me extra time with her, and I treasured that.

More recently, it allowed me to buy a house. There was no way I could buy in the San Francisco Bay Area. For literally half the price of a two-bedroom house in a troubled part of Oakland, I could get a house that would fit my family in Pennsylvania. We walk our child to and from daycare every day, have a garden and a driveway, and, although there’s no doubt that the house needs work, generally feel safe and secure.

I’m far from alone. Working from home has been a boon for carers, parents, and anyone who felt like they weren’t able to get on the property ladder in major business hubs like San Francisco and New York. It’s spread wealth from industries like tech to neighborhoods across the country, and in turn allowed tech companies to hire from anywhere, giving them access to talent that would previously have been out of reach. According to official figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity rose.

For remote work to be successful, communication, internal processes, and norms need to be explicit. Companies that had never spent much time thinking about culture now found that they were forced to, which was a positive outcome for their employees, many of whom had been suffering in silence. A renewed focus on employee power — in conjunction with the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter — also led to a rise in unionization efforts, which also aimed to improve worker quality of life. Despite the overhead of the pandemic itself, these changes felt like they were part of a cohesive, positive movement.

So I read stories like this one in the San Francisco Standard with something like a sense of dread:

“Two years ago, I could not get anybody to go into the office a couple days a week,” said Jaimie Feliz, principal at San Francisco recruiting firm The Hire Standard. “Now, across the board, it’s pretty standard for companies to ask for a minimum of three days in office — it’s very rare to see any less than that.”

Many tech companies are suspending hiring and promotions for workers outside of their hub cities, and there’s an assumption that, over time, employees who remain outside of those hubs will be laid off.

Given the negative impacts on carers, parents, people who have bought homes outside of those hub cities, and on the productivity of those companies, this feels like a regression.

This is doubly true when you look at the underlying statistics. One of the big reasons for calls back to the office is to perform backdoor layoffs: management understands that a substantial percentage will quit. Research also suggests that it’s about control:

RTO mandates may reflect a desire among certain leaders to reassert control and authority within the organization […] This perspective highlights the role of organizational power dynamics and the potential for RTO policies to serve as instruments for reinforcing traditional hierarchical structures, at odds with the trend towards greater autonomy and flexibility facilitated by remote work.

The perceived gains aren’t evidence-based or in the best interests of company productivity; they’re more about CEO peace of mind. For companies that never stuck the landing on building intentional cultures, returning to the pre-pandemic status quo may feel reassuring.

Frustratingly, I now feel like these changes are inevitable.

Not everywhere, of course. There are some companies that have always been remote, and others have managed to establish strong hybrid cultures. But the majority will choose to simply snap back to the world as it was in 2019.

This is to their detriment: adding perspectives from across the country, and from people who would have been shut out of a traditional office job, was clearly valuable. A workforce made up only of people who can afford San Francisco’s $3,400 average rent is inherently less diverse — and less representative of the company’s customers — than one that is geographically diverse. Regardless, it is happening.

For companies that choose to stay remote, there are benefits to be made. There will be an ever-increasing workforce of potential employees who don’t want to move back to those hubs, with experience at tech companies like Google and Meta, who will be looking for new positions. That’s a competitive advantage.

On the other hand, for people who want to stay with their current employers, there are hard choices ahead. Do you move away from your comfortable house, or find ways to offload some of your caring or parental duties, in order to stay on the payroll? Depending on your salary, stock options, or tenure, there might be reasons for doing so.

But it’s not a choice I would make. I have a toddler these days, and I want to be more present, not less. I get a lot of value from in-person collaboration, but I prefer a hybrid model: I’ll gladly travel into the office for a few intense days to advance some specific goals and then go home. I’ve got little interest in doing so to make management feel at ease, but there really are some kinds of time-limited collaboration that are better in person.

I also know that some people can’t travel — for health reasons, because their caring commitments are too great, or these days, because they’re worried about their documents being stripped or suffering violence because of their identity. So even though I’m willing to travel, I don’t expect everyone else to. Even in specific, time-limited collaborations, hybrid accommodations must be made.

For these reasons, I’ve made the decision that I won’t work for a company that requires everyone to come back to the office. Should I start another company, I will not mandate that people work from the office, although I might provide one as an optional collaboration space. This is to protect my quality of life, and to ensure that I can hire the best people for each role, regardless of where they might live or what the rest of their life might look like.

It’s not a decision I take lightly. It’s limiting: it means, should I leave my current job, that there will be fewer places I can go and work. It might limit my salary and future prospects, or even the investment I can raise for a future venture. But I care about being home and present, and I care about building representative workforces.

The bottom line is this: forcing people back into offices isn’t a neutral decision. It’s a choice to exclude and disadvantage anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of what a “worker” looks like. I’m not willing to join in that discrimination.

Much of the last decade or two of the tech industry has been dominated by the idea of the cloud: the simple, powerful idea that all of your applications and data can be accessed from any device with an internet connection. Enterprise businesses around the world have decommissioned server rooms in favor of subscribing to services maintained by other people, reducing overheads of all kinds. Even companies that once built and operated vast datacenters now rely on cloud providers. At the same time, cloud services have helped individuals save money upfront (even if subscriptions often cost more in the long run) and have taken the need for installation and troubleshooting out of the picture. Overall, cloud services have saved lots of people huge amounts of time and money.

But this convenience comes with trade-offs, some of which have become more apparent over time.

• You only ever rent: There’s no real ownership, and vendors can modify, discontinue, or increase prices at will.
• Privacy concerns: Because your data and activity pass through the provider’s infrastructure, they can be easily monitored, tracked, or even resold.
• Jurisdictional constraints: Your data often resides in the provider’s chosen region, subjecting it to local laws, which may not align with your needs.
• Downtime and dependence: If your cloud provider goes down, so does your access — sometimes across multiple services.
• Vendor lock-in: Moving away from a cloud provider can be complex and expensive, discouraging competition and user control.

These trade-offs become even riskier when your work involves sensitive information. When software and infrastructure are controlled by the same entity, it not only enables easy monitoring and resale of your data but also makes it a prime target for subpoenas. Courts can compel a cloud service provider to produce your data, often without your involvement.

If your work involves sensitive personal information, for example of patients or sources, that could put their privacy and safety at risk. That might be particularly problematic in a situation where, for example, you work on reproductive health issues, and your software is hosted in a jurisdiction that has abortion bans. This risk extends across professions: journalists protecting sources, lawyers safeguarding client data, and healthcare providers managing patient records all face heightened exposure when their software, data, and infrastructure are all controlled by the same party.

At the same time, moving away from the convenience of the cloud is not really an option for most organizations. To date, most have opted to pay for more expensive enterprise contracts, which promise greater data protections alongside features like stronger audit logs and SSO. These provide some legal protections, but still amount to little more than an enforced promise: the vendor physically can inspect your data in most cases, you’re just paying them extra so that they’ll promise not to. These contracts also don’t address jurisdictional issues: if the vendor is based in Texas, your use of their platform is still subject to Texan law. The power dynamics at play remain unaddressed.

This is also problematic when you consider the increasing popularity of LLMs. If you’re dealing with sensitive or proprietary information, you probably don’t want an AI model to be trained on your data. You can pay vendors like OpenAI to promise that they won’t look at your data or train their models on it — but, again, you need to take their word for it.

If we want to retain the benefits of cloud software without its fundamental risks, we need a different model: one that restores control to users and organizations rather than vendors.

• Retain the ease of deployment, access, and collaboration that makes cloud software so appealing.
• De-couple software and infrastructure so that the company making the software is not the company that hosts the software.
• Allow customers to pick an infrastructure host in the jurisdiction of their choice.
• Ensure that data is encrypted at rest and in transit, so that even the hosting provider cannot access it.

Self-hosted cloud software is, of course, absolutely a thing that already exists. Some of it is even end-to-end encrypted. But it’s also largely free and open source, and requires a fair amount of configuration and maintenance from an organization’s IT department. There’s nothing wrong with open source software (I ran two open source startups!), but the complexity of configuration and lack of clear business model can introduce problems for both the customer and the vendor. Vendors like Cloudron are making this easier for open source software — and they should serve as a model for what could come next.

Some cloud infrastructure providers, like AWS, already host marketplaces of software you can install. The trick is, you usually have to decide which kinds of virtual servers to use — are you going to go for an m3.medium or a t2.xlarge? — and then consider how your private cloud will be configured. AWS also offers self-hosting for LLM models through Amazon Bedrock, but the same problems present themselves. There’s a lot of technical overhead which many organizations can’t easily address — and in stark contrast to a cloud offering like Google Workspace, which is completely turn-key.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. What if we could combine the ease of cloud-based software with the control and flexibility of locally managed applications?

Consider an iPhone: here, your software runs on your device, wherever it might be, but is seamlessly downloaded from an App Store on demand. Some of that software is free; some of it is paid-for, either as a one-off or on a subscription basis. The underlying operating system is a variant of the FreeBSD UNIX system with significant proprietary additions, including some sophisticated sandboxing, but you wouldn’t know it, and you certainly don’t need to configure anything: you request an app, and zip!, there it is on your phone.

Consider this user journey:

• The customer signs up to a certified provider in the jurisdiction of their choice. There are providers tailored for different levels of customer and different industries.
• They add their payment information.
• They choose the software they want to provide to their organization from an App Store accessed through the provider. As soon as they install it, it is near-instantly available to them.
• They can make it available to every user in their organization or a subset of users.
• For every user for whom it is available, the app shows up on a web-based dashboard. It can also be configured to automatically show up in providers like Okta.
• They never have to care about the speed or capacity of the underlying hardware: they just pay for a recurring license to the software.
• They never have to care about configuring or upgrading the software: as soon as they select it, it’s available. Customers can opt for updates to be pushed out automatically, or they can hold back non-security updates for more testing.

The App Store distributes revenue to the vendor and the hosting provider, and takes a cut for itself. Apps are charged for on a predictable, monthly, per-seat basis, with each app able to set its own prices. As is the case with a phone App Store, the store itself does some vetting of each application, certifying it for security and a set of core rules that each app must abide by. Unlike a phone App Store, it also does vetting and certification of the hosting provider itself, reducing the customer’s need to undertake security auditing.

Because every hosting provider associated with an App Store would necessarily need to adhere to the same open standards, the customer could move providers easily. They’d just sign up to another hosting provider associated with the App Store and migrate their apps. The App Store itself would handle the rest, dealing with migrating block storage, databases, and so on behind the scenes.

This model isn’t just about redistributing power from giant cloud vendors to customers. It’s about enabling organizations that deal with sensitive data to more easily use the cloud to begin with. It makes it easier to know that there is an enforced separation between an LLM and its training infrastructure. And it creates new opportunities for vendors that might not be in a position to offer their own cloud infrastructure, too. It lowers the barrier to both privacy and innovation for everyone involved.

Existing cloud providers aren’t incentivized to build this. It’ll take a new entrant or someone willing to make a big bet. The technology to do this already exists. The only question is: who will build it first?

If it’s you, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve seen a lot of this sentiment lately, and can relate:

I miss being excited by technology. I wish I could see a way out of the endless hype cycles that continue to elicit little more than cynicism from me. The version of technology that we’re mostly being sold today has almost nothing to do with improving lives, but instead stuffing the pockets of those who already need for nothing. It’s not making us smarter. It’s not helping heal a damaged planet. It’s not making us happier or more generous towards each other. And it’s entrenched in everything — meaning a momentous challenge to re-wire or meticulously disconnect.

Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.

It’s perhaps hard to remember now, but in the early nineties, finding an audience really meant being discovered and highlighted by a small number of very rich publishing companies (or record labels, etc) who were most often not representative of their audiences. The web was a revolution: anyone could publish their words, their music, or their art, without asking anyone for permission, and they could find their communities equally permissionlessly.

The web, of course, didn’t turn out to be quite as utopian as the promise. The truth is, the people who could afford to publish on the early web were also from a narrow, relatively wealthy demographic. To make publishing accessible to most people (who didn’t, quite reasonably, want to learn HTML or pay for or configure a domain name and hosting), we needed a set of easy-to-use publishing platforms, which in turn became centralized single points of failure and took the place of the old gatekeepers. Replacing publishers with Facebook wasn’t the original intention, but that’s what happened. And in the process, the power dynamics completely shifted.

The original web was inherently about redistribution of power from a small number of gatekeepers to a large number of individuals, even if it never quite lived up to that promise. But the next iteration of the web was about concentrating power in a small set of gatekeepers whose near-unlimited growth potential tended towards monopoly. There were always movements that bucked this trend — blogging and the indie web never really went away — but they were no longer the mainstream force on the internet. And over time, the centralized platforms disempowered their users by monopolizing more and more slices of everyday life that used to be free. The open, unlimited nature of the web that was originally used to distribute equity was now being used to suck it up and concentrate it in a handful of increasingly-wealthy people.

For the people who were attracted to the near-unlimited wealth hoarding and rent-seeking potential, this new web was incredibly exciting. Conversely, for those of us who were attracted by the power redistribution more than the technology itself, it was incredibly disheartening. The reason we got involved in the first place had all but evaporated.

For a while, decentralization did become a hot topic. Unfortunately, this was more about avoiding the trappings of traditional banking — crucially, including avoiding regulatory controls — than it was about distributing power. The actual equity redistribution was mostly an illusion; although there certainly were people with their hearts in the right place in the movement, the people who truly gained from blockchain and cryptocurrencies were libertarian grifters who saw potential in moving money away from the prying eyes of regulatory oversight and saw banking regulations designed to protect people as being unnecessarily restrictive. Blockchain wore the clothes of power redistribution, but rather than empowering a large number of people, it enriched very few, often at other people’s expense.

I do think the brief popularity of blockchain helped bring attention to decentralization, which was useful. I don’t know that as much attention would have been paid to the new crop of decentralized social networks like Mastodon and BlueSky, for example, had Web3 not previously seeded some of the core ideas in a more mainstream consciousness. The web3 community was also the most successful at, for example, embedding identity in the browser. It wasn’t valueless as a movement, but it fell far short of the hype.

Which brings us to AI, the current hotness. Like any software technology, it’s being sold to us as an empowering tool. But the broad perception is that it’s anything but: models are trained, unpaid, on the work of artists, writers, and researchers, who are already relatively low-paid, in order to build value for a small handful of vendors who are making deals worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Or as one commenter put it:

The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from skill the ability to access wealth.

If you think this is hyperbole, consider Marc Benioff’s comments about not hiring any more software engineers in 2025:

“We’re not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30% – to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering.”

Whether you care about software engineering jobs or not, the same dynamics are underway for writers, artists, and any other creative job. Even the productivity gains that are being realized through use of AI tools are benefiting a small number of wealthy companies rather than individuals. This is the exact opposite of the power redistribution that led to so many people seeing such promise in the web.

It’s very hard to get excited about technology that redistributes wealth and power in favor of people who already have it.

The trajectory of the web — starting as a tool for redistributing power and becoming one that entrenches it — was not inevitable. It was the result of specific choices: business models that prioritized monopolization, technologies designed for centralization, and a relentless focus on extracting value rather than creating it. If we want a different future, we have to make different choices.

What does an alternative look like? It starts with software designed for people rather than for capital. The web once thrived on protocols instead of platforms — email, RSS, blogs, personal websites — before closed networks turned users into data sources. We are now seeing efforts to return to that ethos. The Fediverse, open-source publishing tools, community-run platforms, and decentralized identity projects all point to a path where individuals have more control over their online lives. They aren’t perfect, but they represent a fundamental shift in intention: building systems that work for people instead of on them.

The first wave of the web was decentralized by default but only accessible to a small number of people. The second wave was more accessible but centralized by profit motives. If there is to be a third wave, it will have to be intentional: built with equity and accessibility as core values, not an afterthought. That’s a hard road, because open and ethical technology doesn’t attract billion-dollar investments the way extractive models do. But if history has shown anything, it’s that the web’s greatest strength is in the people who believe it can be better. The real question is not whether more equitable software is possible: it’s whether enough of us are willing to build it.

For many of us, the social movement, rather than the underlying technology, was always the point. We need that movement more than ever before. Hopefully building it is something that more of us can get excited about.

Photo: Tim Berners-Lee's tweet "This is for everyone" at the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Ask a CTO is an irregular column where I answer anonymous questions from a technical leadership perspective. You can ask questions using this form.

I have two answers to two questions this time around:

Security vs. productivity

Where do you draw the line between security and productivity? What are the drawbacks of totally locking down user workstations and onerous password, 2FA, convoluted permissions and never-ending zero trust implementations?

Security and productivity don’t have to be at odds: they should reinforce each other. They’re not at different ends of a continuum.

The purpose of IT is to support everyone’s work by empowering them to use technology efficiently and safely. Therefore, any good IT strategy is rooted in service design.

Anyone who builds a product needs to consider the user journey of the person they want to use it: their individual steps from discovering the product through to becoming a dedicated user. IT service delivery is a product, too, and the people who provide it need to consider the work journey of its recipients just as carefully. Consider their jobs to be done: the stuff they need to do, the workarounds they’ve created for themselves, the things they’re studiously avoiding doing. And understand that everyone’s role has different requirements: only a few people need access to payroll, for example, and engineers really need access to install their own libraries and developer tools.

There’s also got to be a “why” for everything that’s implemented: the worst IT policies are created by people who do something because they think they should, perhaps because they perceive that other people are doing them. Do you really need to rotate your passwords every 90 days? (I’ll spare you a search: the answer is no.)

And you need to be open to the idea that you’ve got it wrong. Nobody knows their work better than the people who are doing it. Security policies exist for a reason: unchecked software installs or poor password practices can put the whole organization at risk. But the way those policies are designed and enforced makes all the difference. IT departments lock down workstations in part so that people don’t install random software that might turn out to be harmful; they’d better also have a friendly process for helping people to install software that isn’t part of their core supported offerings but turns out to be needed for someone to do their job.

All these elements need to be in place: well-considered user journeys for every role, a considered reason for everything you’ve implemented, great training and bedside manner, and an openness to change, in partnership with a strong understanding of the risks and the products and approaches that might address them. Once these things are there, a good IT strategy should actually improve productivity rather than get in its way, even as it implements security procedures like managed devices, MFA, least privilege security, zero trust, SSO, and so on.

A good password manager makes passwords and MFA easier than manually typing credentials. Good SSO just requires a touch to seamlessly log in. Good IT support is a ubiquitous, friendly presence with good bedside manner. Good device management means that you don’t have to worry about keeping your machine up to date. Those things are all necessary for good security, but they also take out steps to common workflows and, once they become a habit, are easier for most users than life without them.

Conversely, if you don’t implement these things from a human-centered perspective, people are going to resent the changes, and you run the risk of getting in the way of people’s work. When that happens, they’ll try to work around you, and your entire organization is less secure. Security really depends on everyone being aligned, which in turn depends on an IT department being laser-focused on being of service.

Keeping up with the Joneses

How do you decide which trends are worth adopting?

There are three things you need to know, in order of importance:

• What is your organization’s mission, vision, and strategy? In other words, what are your goals? What are your problems to solve?
• What are the jobs to be done of the individual people in your organization? Where are the points of friction in their workdays?
• What are the emerging trends? What are the pros, cons, ethical considerations, and potential risks of a new technology or approach?

I’ll start with the last first. It’s good to be informed, but that means cutting through marketing and sales excitement to understand the underlying nuances. Many new technologies — and certainly the ones high-profile enough to become “trends” — have an attendant hype cycle. The first step to parsing coverage is understanding that the hype cycle exists; the second is to find voices you trust and listen to their commentary.

My feed reader is loaded with thousands of subscriptions not just because I like blogging and RSS (although I do!), but because these voices keep me informed. Many of them will disagree with each other, and some of them come from perspectives that are very different to my own; these different angles allow me to construct my own informed opinion. I don’t rely on TechCrunch or similar sites for trend analysis because they tend to amplify hype rather than provide nuanced perspectives. Instead, I filter through relevant connections whose opinions I trust.

But it all comes down to those organizational goals and the problems you need to solve. Implementing any technology for technology’s sake is a fool’s game: it all has to be in service of your organizational strategy or improving the working lives of the people who implement it. Does it address your strategic problems? Does it reduce friction for your colleagues? How?

That can be more complex than it sounds. For example, if your goas include hiring top-tier engineers, that isn’t just about salary: it’s also about the tools and environment you provide. A company that invests in high-end hardware, flexible work policies, or a strong internal developer experience may attract better talent than one that skimps on these details. A company that has an open mind about AI may be more attractive to investors than one that takes a more dogmatic approach. And so on.

Finally, ethical risk is organizational risk. It’s important to understand the ethical considerations and impacts of a new technology as a core part of its pros and cons. Overlooking the dubious ethics of a team or a technology’s environmental footprint is likely to lead to problems down the road, even if the technology may seem like it’s super-popular today. These things have a tendency to manifest as real speed bumps down the road.

Stay focused on your goals, cut through the hype by listening to diverse experts, understand the risks, stay human-centered, and always think for yourself.

Ask a CTO

Do you have questions that you’d like a technical leader to answer? You can ask questions using this form. I’ll try to answer in a future post.

#askacto

Last month I asked to hear from trans-friendly employers who sponsor visas, and provided a simple form for interested employers to reach out. In the process, I heard from many individuals: people who were hoping to find new employment in another country, and people who worked for companies that were aligned, who were encouraging their bosses to fill in the form.

A quick reminder before we dive in: I’m not providing formal legal or financial advice. I’m just trying to point people in the right direction and provide some ideas for relocation for people who want it.

The bad news

Here’s the bad news: today, that form sits empty. While the post was shared far and wide, not a single person has filled it in.

I think there are a few reasons for this. First and foremost, in the current environment, being listed in such a database presents a significant risk, particularly if you’re doing business with US entities. In an environment where the administration is firing employees and cutting contracts for even the barest mention of support for trans people, there’s every reason to believe that the current administration will penalize people and organizations who work with trans people.

So, that’s not great. I’m very sorry to everyone who got their hopes up that I would be able to make direct connections.

The good news

The good news: some countries actively sponsor visas, welcome trans people, and are hiring.

In my personal conversations with people, what jumped out again and again was that emigrating to the Netherlands was a viable route for many people — and particularly those with tech skills (engineering, IT, product management, design, research, and so on).

Reasons include:

• Dutch tech companies tend to sponsor visas. (Look for job vacancies written in English and/or on boards like Tech Me Abroad and Relocate.me.)
• You can relocate with a self-employment visa if you have a skilled background, can demonstrate at least one Dutch-based contract or that you’ll start a tech-based business, and can show that you’ll independently make €1,613 (~$1,700) per month.
• The DAFT visa lowers the barrier to entry for US entrepreneurs who can commit to invest €4,500 (~$4,700).
• The Netherlands is a progressive country, even given its current right-wing government.
• 90-93% of Dutch people speak English fluently.

The Netherlands is also kind of just a neat country: excellent social safety net, great support for culture and the arts, good connectivity to other European countries, and a strong grant support network for mission-driven tech. Amsterdam is a first-class cosmopolitan city, but other centers in the Netherlands are not to be sniffed at, and the country is so small that you can easily take public transit from one to another in less time than it might take you to commute to work by car in the US.

It is not, however, perfect. Much like the US, the Netherlands has had its own racial reckoning; unlike the US, the discourse has often centered on the idea that racism doesn’t happen there. That’s a rich claim from a society where racist tropes like Zwarte Piet are still commonplace, and where women of color are often marginalized. There’s work to be done — although it’s worth asking if this is truly any worse than the US.

Not everybody can relocate, and not everybody has these skills. I’m aware that this is a privileged route that not everybody can take advantage of. It would be better if there was a defined route for everybody who needed to find a safer place to live; it would be better still if a safe place to live was the place they already call home. This situation is sick and sad, and I truly wish that everything was different.

It also comes with an attendant cost. It’s estimated that moving to the Netherlands will set you back between $6-10K. That’s a lot less than one might expect, but it’s obviously a significant barrier for many people. Unfortunately, very little financial support exists for these moves. If you know of grants, mutual aid funds, or community resources that help trans people relocate, please share them. Funding and guidance from those who’ve navigated the process could make all the difference.

Please reach out

In the meantime, I’ll keep looking. If you are a company in a country that is safe for trans people, and you’re looking to hire people from the US who need visa sponsorship, please fill out this form or reach out to me via email. I’m not giving up.

For the last few years, AI vendors have had an interesting marketing playbook: they’ve described the potential power of the technologies as being so great that it could lead to an artificial general intelligence that could either kill humanity or leave us behind and head for the stars. We ignore its power at our peril.

As it turned out, OpenAI and Microsoft’s definition of “artificial general intelligence” was that the technologies would reach one hundred billion dollars in revenue. It wasn’t tied to capabilities around reasoning, and did not, in actuality, relate to a Terminator future. It just meant that they’d be making a lot of money from it. All the talk of humanity-destroying intelligence and the existential questions that derived from it just served to draw attention to their services. The awe inspired by the tales they were weaving would, they hoped, lead to more signed contracts, more subscribers, more dollars on their balance sheets. People would treat the technologies as being insanely powerful even if they weren’t, and that would be enough.

A decade or more ago, a new ride-sharing service called Uber started to supplant taxi services in major cities like San Francisco. While taxi services were typically licensed, often at great cost to the individual drivers, Uber drivers operated without any such restrictions. It was illegal in many cities, but the company intentionally created workarounds to prevent police, city officials, and taxi firms from gathering evidence. A tool nicknamed Greyball allowed them to tag users who they decided were trying to conduct a sting on the service. Those users would see fake cars, and their drivers would cancel quickly. In the midst of this disinformation, it became hard to gather real evidence and make a case.

Eventually, despite its illegality, Uber became saturated in each market. Cities found themselves either acquiescing or making regulatory deals with the company. Uber had evaded the authorities while growing quickly, and it became widely used. It was clear that cities were going to have trouble shutting it down, so they ultimately adjusted to accept its existence. Law enforcement had been too slow; Uber had outrun and outmaneuvered it, and now it was here to stay.

The same playbooks that have allowed high-growth tech companies to become effective monopolies in America are now being used on American governance itself.

Donald Trump is not a king and does not have the right to wield absolute power. He and his parties control all three branches of government, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are all Republican-dominated, but avenues for objection, checks on his power, and levers to limit his reach remain. But that doesn’t necessarily matter: Donald Trump is acting like a king. He is restructuring the government as if he were one, making statement after statement to reinforce that image. Much of it is hot air: things that will never come to pass. But just as if AI vendors pretend all-powerful artificial intelligence exists, people will act as if it does, I believe Trump’s CEO king act is designed to make us act as if there are no checks or limits on his abilities. We are meant to gaze in awe, and his critics to feel despondent, so that he can cement his imaginary powers for real and conduct his illegal business with impunity regardless of the regulations.

DOGE, which subsumed the USDS to become the awkwardly-named United States Department of Government Efficiency Service, is running ahead of regulations with the same gusto that Uber did during its early years. It should go without saying that inviting recent high school graduates and early twenty-somethings with no security clearance to wantonly access the personal data of every American, and to alter the source code that controls core government services, is illegal. It’s so outlandish that it sounds absolutely bizarre when you describe it out loud, like something from a speculative fiction fever dream, but it’s happening in plain sight. There are plenty of rules in place to prevent their activities from taking place. But who is going to catch up to them?

Eventually, DOGE will either be stopped or face regulatory restrictions on its activities and reach. But by then, it will be too late: the code will be altered, the personal information will be revealed, the funding spigot to core government services will have withered them on the vine. Legal objections have peppered up everywhere, but the cogs of justice are far slower than a bunch of entrepreneurial kids with the keys to the city. Lawmakers and civil rights organizations can shake their fists and say it’s illegal, but it’s done. DOGE isn’t just evading oversight: it’s moving fast and breaking things on a scale even Uber never dreamed of. It’s governance as a high-growth startup, where rule-breaking isn’t a side effect — it’s the entire strategy.

The important thing isn’t so much who is doing it as what is being done. Much has been made of the fact that Elon Musk is unelected, which is true: he is a private citizen with highly personal motives doing this work under dubious auspices. But the events of the last few weeks would be heinous even if they were conducted directly by elected officials acting in good faith. Stopping Musk from doing these things is a good idea, but the core problem is the acts, not the man.

The question, then, is what we do next.

In the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie points out that this wasn’t what brought most Trump voters to the polls:

For as much as some of Trump’s and Musk’s moves were anticipated in Project 2025, the fact of the matter is that marginal Trump voters — the voters who gave him his victory — did not vote for any of this. They voted specifically to lower the cost of living. They did not vote, in Musk’s words, for economic “hardship.” Nor did they vote to make Musk the co-president of the United States or to give Trump the power to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do anything that benefits the American people. They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number.

One task is to pierce the reality distortion field of Trump’s court in the eyes of his opponents. We don’t live in a full-scale dictatorship (at least, not yet). All of this can be stopped. His power is limited, and can be curtailed. And at the center of it all, he is a small-minded former reality TV star with a tiny worldview who eats his steak overcooked and throws his plate at the wall when he’s having a tantrum. The emperor has no clothes, and those that oppose him must see that clearly. The bigger task is revealing that fact to the more reasonable of the people who elected him: people for whom the cost of living is more important than enacting some kind of perverse revenge on inclusive society.

Then I believe the next task is to build an alternative, not in reaction to Trump, but in itself, based on upholding core values and improving everybody’s quality of life. One of the challenges of being aghast at what is going on is that American institutions really have underserved the American people, and have often caused real harm overseas. It’s easy — and correct — to be worried about what it means to suddenly encourage the entire CIA to resign, but it’s an awkward rhetorical position to be put in to defend the institution. The CIA has a long history of arguably criminal behavior: conducting undemocratic coups, assassinating world leaders, and violating human rights in our name.

The status quo doesn’t work. The American people have made that clear. So it’s on us to invent something new. What does it mean to create a truly inclusive, peaceful, democratic society? What does it mean to have a peaceful foreign policy? What does it mean to focus on improving quality of life rather than an economic metric that encourages monopolies and billionaires while letting ordinary people suffer?

The playbooks of OpenAI, Uber, and others have long been countered by other modes of operating. Hockey-stick growth is not the only way to build software and serve people who need help. Co-operation, mutual aid, and collective collaboration have effectively re-made software, and through it the world, and we’re now seeing the fruit of that through movements like the open social web. High-growth tech has the flashy marketing moves and the attendant hype cycle, but quietly, other movements have been steadily building. The same is true for America.

As Bouie says in his piece:

Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

Anything less will set us up for yet another Trump and yet another Musk.

I believe this is correct, and offer this idea for consideration:

The people with the ideas that can best save America are the people who are currently being pushed out of it. This is not a coincidence. Black women, trans activists, communities built on radical inclusion and emergent strategies, worker’s groups and communities bound in solidarity have created modes of communication and support that have transformed American society of the better. These are people for whom the shock and awe of a smoke and mirrors campaign does not work; who cannot be convinced to fit into a template designed to force people into being someone else’s profit engine; who have demonstrated the unstoppable nature of peer to peer mutual aid. It makes them dangerous. It also makes them more powerful than the dying gasp of the twentieth century we’re seeing sputter out before us.

We should listen to them: people who are often at the edges even though they deserve to sit at the center of society. They often see harms perpetuated before everybody else; they often see the solutions first, too. It’s not that it’s on them to save everybody else. It’s that they’ve been sounding the alarm and telling us what to do for decades, and nobody has been listening. It’s about time we did.

The same playbooks that have created monopolies, crushed labor rights, and gamed regulations are now being used to gut democratic governance itself. But these playbooks have always had an alternative: one rooted in cooperation, mutual aid, and community-driven solutions. That alternative exists; it’s just been drowned out by billionaires and venture-backed empire-builders. It’s time to listen to the people who have been building it all along.

I’ve been a technical leader a few times: CTO and Director of Technology at two nonprofit newsrooms; technical lead at five tech companies of varying sizes; investor and advisor in early-stage startups.

I’ve enjoyed reading Ask a Manager for years, and it occurred to me that a similar column for technical leadership might be interesting. So: let’s try it!

Ask me a question:

Ask a question anonymously and I’ll try to give you an impartial answer. This might be technical advice, questions about people leadership, questions about trends — or anything you wish you could ask experienced technical leadership.

Sounds good? Great. Submit a question to Ask a CTO by filling in this form.

By submitting a question, you agree that I can publish your questions and my answers here and/or in other media. Also, it should go without saying, but this is for entertainment purposes only. I am not actually your CTO, and you need to make your own technical decisions.

I’ll answer the first questions next week.

#askacto 

Okay, friends. Here’s what we’re going to do. It’s not going to take long.

Let’s install Signal.

Signal is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted instant messaging app. When you message someone with Signal, nobody can intercept your conversation to learn what you’re saying. It’s very easy to use and completely free.

Unlike WhatsApp (which is owned by Meta) and Telegram (which doesn’t encrypt messages by default), Signal is fully open-source, doesn’t store metadata, and is designed for privacy first.

Navigate to the Get Signal page on the Signal website.

Signal needs to be installed on your phone first. Choose the version that makes sense for you: iPhone or Android.

The cool part is that, once you’re logged in, Signal will tell you which of the people in your contacts are already using it, and as more sign up, they’ll just show up in your Signal contacts list over time.

I recommend also setting up a Signal username. Navigate to your Signal app’s settings pane, click on your profile, and then create a username. Then you don’t need to reveal your phone number to new contacts you want to chat with: you can just tell them your username.

Finally, Signal conversations can be set to auto-delete. I recommend that you do this. Four weeks is comfortable; one week is very safe.

My Signal username is benwerd.01. Once you’re signed up, send me a message to let me know you did it.

It’s time for a password manager.

Do you use the same password for every service? Or maybe you have an easy-to-remember formula for each one — something like the name of the service with the vowels replaced by numbers?

Those passwords are easy to guess and break into. It’s time to install a password manager.

1Password is the best-in-class password manager. You can install it on every device you own.

It’s really cheap to sign up. Set up your account, and then install the apps for your desktop, your phone, and your web browser.

Then, when you sign up for a new account, use 1Password’s suggested passwords instead of inventing your own:

When you go back to sign into a service, 1Password will show that you have a login for it, and logging in is one-click:

So not only are your credentials more secure, it’s actually easier to log in. You don’t need to struggle to remember what your password is anymore.

The passwords are encrypted, so nobody else, including 1Password itself, can ever see them.

Using a saved set of credentials is incredibly simple:

And so is creating and saving a new password:

A VPN is a great idea.

Do me a favor: whenever you’re on public wifi — that is to say, an internet connection that isn’t your home or your workplace — run your internet connection through an encrypted VPN. This will make your internet activities harder to track and harder to intercept.

A VPN encrypts your internet traffic, which protects you from eavesdropping on public WiFi and makes it harder for advertisers to track you. However, it’s worth saying that it doesn’t make you completely anonymous — your online accounts and browsing habits still matter. (We’ll get to your social media accounts next.)

Mullvad is a great VPN choice for the privacy-conscious, but can be a little harder to use. (In particular, because it doesn’t ever want to know who you are, it assigns you a numeric account ID and charges on a time-based pay as you go basis.) ExpressVPN may be easier to use if you’re less technically-inclined. In both cases, you sign up, install an app, and simply turn it on and off from the app’s UI.

Let’s make your social media more secure.

Social media is a magnet for harassment, doxing, stalkers and worse. In fact, one of the biggest vectors for attacks of all kinds on the internet is your social media accounts. If you haven’t locked them down in the right ways, you run the risk of sharing more than you intended with strangers, or even losing your account altogether to a hacker. Keeping all the settings straight is a real pain.

Block Party comes as an extension for the browser of your choice. Install it, sign up, and it’ll look at your social media accounts in turn and make informed suggestions about how you can lock them down for better privacy — and better mental wellness. Better yet, it gives you one-click options to make those settings changes itself.

One quick tune-up later, and your social media is safer and better for you. Which can’t be bad.

And that’s it for now.

I’ve given you four quick steps that dramatically improve your online security. None of these take long, but they can make a huge difference.

If you found this useful, feel free to share it with a friend who could use a digital security boost. Let’s make the internet safer — one smart step at a time.

The 19th celebrated its fifth birthday yesterday. CEO Emily Ramshaw’s reflective post is quite lovely, but also announces a very bold strategy:

On our fifth anniversary, we’re launching our first-ever endowment campaign, with a goal of raising $20 million over the next three years to protect our financial sustainability indefinitely. We’re getting started with a leadership gift of $2 million from Cindy and Greg Kozmetsky in honor of Greg’s mother, Ronya Kozmetsky, who was a tireless advocate for women in business, for equal access to education and for democracy. In recognition of this gift and her legacy, The 19th is thrilled to establish the Ronya Kozmetsky Legacy Fund for Representative Journalism.

I think that’s pretty neat — a really radical approach to independence — and something that other non-profit newsrooms (like ProPublica, where I currently work) should take note of. It’s also something that I think other non-profits should think about; what would it look like to have a Fediverse endowment, for example?

I was its first-ever CTO, so I’ve also sort of got an inside view, albeit one that is now a year or two out of date. Not only is The 19th’s mission (to report at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy) very obviously more vital than ever before, but I have been very impressed with how the organization itself is run.

Although every organization has its frictions and growing pains (and my view in the senior leadership team was not necessarily the same as the perspective elsewhere in the org chart), it is one of the most intentional cultures I’ve ever had the pleasure of being a part of. While many organizations have coasted or allowed their culture to organically evolve without much design, I felt like the details at The 19th were connected, nurturing, and leagues above most American workplaces. I’ve often joked that the best American benefits packages just approximate European legal minimums, but this was the closest I’ve ever come in the US to hit that standard. That’s particularly important in a place that seeks to inclusively employ reporters from diverse communities.

All of which is to say: if you get a chance, you should support The 19th. And I dearly hope that more organizations in media, tech, and beyond follow its model.

I was out buying eggs when I saw a video of Elon Musk giving a Hitler salute at the inauguration.

In the movies, this stuff is highlighted and separated: punctuation in itself instead of an event that you see in the background of your everyday life. Hannah Arendt talked about “the banality of evil” in the context of Eichmann, one of the core organizers of the Holocaust, telling prosecutors that he was just doing his job. But banality pervades. Sometimes, you need to buy eggs. And sometimes, when you get back in the car and pick up your phone, you get a notification about the richest man in the world signaling his intentions on the world stage.

There has subsequently been much discussion about whether it really was a Nazi salute. It’s insultingly stupid. Even if he truly didn’t intend to throw three successive Sieg Heils, he certainly knows what one is, and most of us have enough self awareness not to accidentally look like a Nazi on national television. He had to know what he was doing. It was a deliberate Nazi salute. The act itself, and the subsequent denials, serve to normalize fascism; just another banal event for you to scroll past on your phone.

Still, these conversations serve a purpose. It’s worth noticing who wants to downplay the Nazism, which, after all, is not “just” manifested in the world’s richest man doing a Hitler salute on national TV. Make no mistake, Musk’s salute was a clear signal, but it’s far from the only one. It’s part of a broader pattern of normalization, visible in policies and actions designed to dismantle rights and embolden oppression.

Will they also downplay executive orders that repeal important civil rights gains from sixty years ago (as an appellate court simultaneously reinstates a Jim Crow era voter suppression law, with doubtless more to follow), or encouraging employees to inform on their colleagues?

Or decimating rights and protections for transgender people, preparing for mass deportations including by removing protections for schools and churches from raids, pardoning January 6 extremists who vow revenge on their perceived enemies, or deploying the military as internal law enforcement in border states?

Or freezing scientific research at the NIH and thereby putting universities and research organizations at risk, or attempting to end Constitutionally-protected birthright citizenship?

“Optimistic and celebrating,” Mark Zuckerberg said, on the same night that Musk Sieg Heiled the room three times. “I’m not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways,” Sam Altman said. Microsoft put out a statement saying that “the country has a unique opportunity to pursue […] the foundational ideas set for AI policy during President Trump’s first term”.

And those are public figures in technology. My Facebook feed, and likely yours, is loaded with acquaintances and extended family members who welcome the change; one on mine welcomed “the return to logic and reason”. My LinkedIn feed is worse, with many business leaders echoing Zuckerberg’s “optimistic” language, and some calling the Nazi salute into question.

We’ve tumbled into a deep, dark hole, and, as it turns out, many of us are glad to be there.

It’s just not always clear who.

Though dated in some ways, this 1941 Harper’s Magazine article still resonates. The question then was, “Who goes Nazi?” Who is going to be a sympathizer or even a collaborator with a regime that seeks to subjugate, deport, and, as it turned out in the 1940s, kill so many people?

And to be clear, collaboration doesn’t require slapping on an armband and goose-stepping behind a demagogue. Nice people made the best Nazis, as Naomi Shulman wrote eight years ago:

My mother was born in Munich in 1934, and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves. When things got ugly, the people my mother lived alongside chose not to focus on “politics,” instead busying themselves with happier things. They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.

The question now is not a million miles away. Who will support? Who will collaborate? Who will decide that they are “not political” and look away as millions of people are harmed? Who will make excuses for it all? Who secretly welcomes the push for theocracy, for in-groups and out-groups, for “traditional” values that prioritize rigid gender roles, segregation, and oligarchy? Who, in other words, is safe?

Are you “optimistic” about the new regime? Will you be complicit?

When someone needs help — when ICE comes after them, or worse — will you look away, or worse, cheer them on? Or will you be a point of safety for someone who needs it?

And what about when it gets worse? Because, left unchecked, it will.

In the face of rising fascism, what kind of person are you? What kind of person do you want to be?

Nobody should have to move to another country to be themselves.

However, I’ve spoken to multiple people who feel they need to move away from the US in order to avoid harms caused by the new administration’s executive orders that target trans people. Exactly how to do this is sometimes opaque and feels difficult.

If you are actively hiring for positions in a company that is friendly to transgender people, in a country that is safe for transgender people, and you are willing to sponsor visas for people seeking to emigrate for these positions, I would like to hear from you.

If this is you, please enter your details here, and I’ll make them available on a public, open source website soon.

If you’re unsure which countries are considered to be safe for transgender people, and if your country is one, Rainbow Relocation has a reasonable list, and others are available.

To be clear: I want trans people to feel safe here in the United States, and I want them to be here. But I also understand peoples’ need to feel safe in the current moment. I am not urging people to move, but I would like to make life easier for people who want to. I’m making this request in the spirit of assistance, because I’ve already been asked.

I am also probably not the right person to put this together! But I didn’t see anyone else doing it. If you are from a reputable organization that supports transgender safety in a professional way, and you would like to take ownership of this list or collaborate, or if you are already doing something like this and I missed it, please email me at ben@benwerd.com.

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.

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.

Syndicated to IndieNews.

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.

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.

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.

As part of a coaching exercise, I’ve been trying to describe what I want my life to look like. The idea is that if I’m armed a better understanding of what I’m aiming for, I’ll be able to make more informed decisions that more intentionally lead me towards my goals for my life. So far, so simple. But in practice, I’ve found it impossibly difficult: a giant question that it feels impossible to even find the right scope and parameters for, let alone answer. What do I want my life to look like? How do I want to live?

If you stare at this question for long enough, you begin to feel like you’re being asked to define the meaning of life itself. Insane. You can’t. It’s the kind of question that is easy to be flippant about but otherwise feels impossible to approach. For now, I think we can say this: all of us create our own meaning and get to decide what’s important to us. In turn, that can inform the details and decisions of our day-to-day.

Living goals are a superset of work goals, which people often talk about. I’ve written many times that my professional goal is to work on projects that have the potential to help make the world more equal and informed. But why? How does that fit into my larger, human goals?

It’s hard to talk about what I think my life should look like without talking about the context — and the country — it sits in. That means talking about America, and the framing constraints it provides to everyone who lives in it.

And to be clear, for many people, America is constraining. The country is so steeped in an exploitative culture of work that there are is no statutory minimum number of vacation days and the national minimum wage is set below a level where anyone can reasonably live. The health insurance system is predatory, and your healthcare is typically connected to your employer, making it hard to change jobs or go out on your own. Unless you’re in a handful of cities, which themselves are expensive to live in, you need to own a car to get just about anywhere. Union membership is de minimus, leading to an imbalance towards corporations and the wealthy. Homeless people have very few avenues for help. The police all carry guns, and disproportionately use them on Black people. And on top of it all, the recent resurgence of rhetoric reminiscent of the 1930s, including stadiums of people carrying placards that read “mass deportations now,” is deeply troubling. I’ve started to wonder if Americans talk about freedom so much because most of them don’t have very much of it: to many people it’s the freedom to buy and say more or less what they want, but not the freedom to define the parameters of their lives or their work.

And at the same time, for the well-off and privileged, the experience of living in America can be freeing. The benefits at the slickest San Francisco tech companies I worked at were effectively equivalent to the minimum standards that every European gets by law, but there were far better parental leave policies for non-birthing parents and a culture of free food, drink, and other services in the office. My partner works for Google and their health insurance is almost as good as universal healthcare. There’s a sense of optimism and “you can do it”; there’s abundant capital and support for founders trying something new. If you’re in the in-crowd, there’s support.

I moved to the US from Edinburgh almost fourteen years ago. It as a no-brainer, but not because I wanted to live in America: my mother was terminally ill and I wanted to be close to her, and she’d moved to California a decade prior. The move completely blew up my life in ways that were sometimes very painful, but the core decision to be closer is not one I’ve ever regretted. While her life was thankfully extended by a double lung transplant that meant we got to have many more years with her, living with a transplant is hard: the remainder of her life was a medical rollercoaster that I’m glad I was there to help with.

But in the meantime, Brexit happened: Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union. I grew up in Britain but had lived there as part of the European Union. When its EU membership was revoked, I lost the legal right to live there. My relationship to the US transformed from it being a place that I was visiting temporarily to a place I was involuntarily stuck in.

There was a lot I appreciated about living in Europe. While a lot of ink has been spilled about universal healthcare, few talk about how freeing it is to not be afraid of seeing a doctor because you know you’ll never get a bill. There’s frequent, inexpensive, integrated transit everywhere. Cities and towns are built as mixed-use communities, which means you can easily walk to all your local services and stores. There are very few guns. Far fewer people own cars because they don’t need to. The quality of life of an average person — which is not just a subjective opinion but has been measured again and again — is higher. As a British resident, I was entitled to thirty-six vacation days a year (seven weeks!) as a legal minimum.

It feels like life in America is subject to layers of permission. You can go buy food — if you have a car. You can go to the doctor — if you have adequate health insurance. You can live a reasonable life — if you don’t fall through the cracks. You can go to college — if you’re willing to take on many tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Until very recently, you even needed to hire a third-party service (or firm) to file your taxes.

To be honest, I’ve often seen my life in America as being reactive rather than proactive: I moved here in reaction to a health emergency and remain here because of a referendum that was out of my control. I’ve often felt that I don’t have autonomy, and building community has often been harder than I would have liked because of the individualistic nature of American society and the chaos of my own life.

In Europe, life is more free-range. If you need to buy food, you can walk to the store and pick some up. You can just go to the doctor. Higher education is much more affordable and grade school education is of a much higher standard. More benefits lead to more freedom, because those things are simply taken care of: you don’t have to worry about paying for them at the point of use. Although the tax burden is a little higher, you also end up paying less out of pocket in total.

Europe is also much, much safer — particularly if you’re a child. (These days I’m understandably very focused on keeping my child safe.) Between 2009 and 2018, Western Europe had fewer than ten school shootings; the United States had 288, representing 86% of the world’s total of shootings. It’s not just about the terrifying prevalence of guns: children are also three times more likely to die on the road in the US.

At the same time, I’ve come to realize that Europe is more restrictive in other ways. It’s unquestionably more racist and less diverse, for example, in part because it refuses to actually examine its culpability in racism and, in particular, the slave trade. (Ask a European about racism and they’re quite likely to reply, “we don’t have those problems here.” Yes, you do.) A healthy community, and a healthy society, must be intentionally inclusive and equitable. You can’t get there by sticking your head in the sand.

There’s also a comparative lack of funding and support for people who are trying to build something new, even if the comparatively higher level of public benefits means that bootstrapping is easier. It’s also worth calling out that since I left, those benefits have been eroded, often by conservative politicians who want to wipe public benefits in favor of so-called private efficiency. It’s nothing less than theft, but it’s an emerging reality that diminishes Europe’s attractiveness.

Traversing these two worlds has directly informed how I think about what living well means. Sometimes I’ve been too cynical about the possibilities here in the US; if I’m honest with myself, I sometimes railed against the constraints when I lived in Europe. I think I need to open my mind, regardless of my location.

I recently visited a friend who lives in a community intentionally built as a platform for environmental and social change. I’d visited plenty of intentional communities back when I lived in San Francisco, and I’d always found them superficial: places that were more oriented around performing communal living than practicing the practical reality of it.

In stark contrast, my friend’s community blew my mind open: it was the kind of place I would never have allowed myself to imagine existing in the US.

I’m going to withhold detail to safeguard their privacy, but every aspect of it felt concretely-anchored to real, genuine progress towards change while centering the joy of being a human in community. The single phrase that came to mind was that the residents were free-range: they were free to spend time with each other on a whim, as needed, without need for appointment or permission. They could simply walk to get the everyday resources they needed, including to plug into their community and commune as people. This was true for the adults, but most notably and importantly for me, it was true for the children, too. It was common there for parents to not know where their children were — but they knew they were safe.

My conceptual frame for the kinds of lifestyles that are possible in America has been permanently widened — and consequently, I have more hope that I can live a good life here. Most importantly, it gave me the vocabulary I needed in order to describe the kind of life I want to have.

So now I can say this: I want my life — and the lives of my family — to be free-range, in open community, emotionally safe, and creatively unconstrained.

Free-range

A lifestyle where physical, emotional, and logistical constraints are minimized, allowing for organic interactions and movement. Or to put it another way, a life where you need to ask permission as little as possible: an independent, creative way of being where you’re not tethered to unnecessary constraints.

For example:

• You can walk or bike to essential services.
• Children can free play both at home and in the surrounding community without worry.
• You can spontaneously visit people, take trips, or go on adventures without the predominant need to extensively plan or make appointments.
• You have time and space to create and work on personal projects that aren’t scheduled and aren’t necessarily tethered to the need to make money.
• You have the safety to know that if you don’t have salaried work for a little while, you’ll still be protected, and you’ll still have healthcare.

Counter-examples of things that are emphatically not free-range:

• Scheduling my child so that their time outside of school is highly structured and they don’t have time or space to be creative on their own terms (or be bored, which I think is really important as a spark for creative thinking in its own right).
• Structuring and scheduling your own time so you don’t have optionality.
• Car-centric living.
• Gated communities and HOAs.
• An expectation that you should do what is popular or pre-ordained by the outside mainstream as “the right way to live”.

In open community

Living in an inclusive space where relationships are intentional, resources are shared, and collaboration is encouraged.

For example:

• Neighbors borrow tools, share meals, and trade skills to reduce waste and strengthen relationships.
• Open doors and welcoming spaces where it’s normal to drop by for a chat or lend a hand without the need for formality or pre-planning.
• A community that helps each other during collective challenges, from childcare to caregiving to problem-solving.
• There are adequate communal resources like parks, libraries, and community meeting spaces. (Even pubs, in the traditional English sense, where they’re a sort of communal living room.)
• There’s a sense that no matter how adverse the outside world is, you have allies who also see it for what it is and are here for you no matter what.
• You have the space and time to care for people — parents, children, other people in your community who need it.

Counter-examples:

• Isolated living, where neighbors barely know one another or engage in meaningful connection.
• “Rugged individualism,” where everyone is expected to fend for themselves as a virtue.
• A culture of competition rather than collaboration.
• Who children can play with is closely guarded. Sleepovers are not allowed.
• You don’t have the time and space to be a caregiver because you need to be at work all the time.

Emotionally safe

Living in an inclusive environment where vulnerability is met with care and understanding, and where people feel supported to be their authentic selves. Emotional intimacy and intellectual openness are highly valued.

For example:

• People are comfortable expressing their emotions, thoughts, and opinions without fear of judgment or ridicule. This is particularly important within partnerships and families, but it’s important across communities.
• A culture that embraces diversity, respects boundaries, and fosters a sense of belonging for everyone, regardless of background or identity. People feel comfortable and safe to be themselves.
• Disagreements are addressed constructively, with empathy and a focus on understanding rather than blame.
• The community is supportive of trying new things and of failure, and help pick you up and dust you off to try again.
• Physical safety: there’s no threat of violence.

Counter-examples:

• Demanding perfection and punishing failure.
• A culture where people feel they must suppress their feelings to “keep the peace.”
• A culture with an in-crowd and an out-crowd: for example, an environment where one religion is accepted and others are frowned upon, or where the “traditional” family is venerated. Xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and transphobia all fall into this category.
• A world where being different to an accepted mainstream is frowned upon, with aggressions that range from micro to macro. People might sneer about preferred pronouns, for example, or make “I identify as …” jokes. Or they might blacklist you.

Creatively unconstrained

Having the time, resources, and mental space to pursue creative interests and projects without undue outside pressure. At work, having the autonomy to make decisions and follow your expertise, instincts, and values with minimal interference.

For example:

• Days with enough unstructured time to dream, experiment, or follow your curiosity without interruption — and both the implicit permission to do so and the common understanding that it’s not a waste of time.
• Friends, family, and communities that celebrate creativity for its own sake, regardless of output or success.
• The respect and autonomy to create a strategy and execute on it at work.
• The ability to center your values and perspective in your work.
• Prioritizing wellness and balance so your mental energy isn’t consumed by stress or logistical chaos.
• Engaging in hobbies or projects without worrying about monetizing them. For example, painting for relaxation, writing purely for self-expression, or tinkering for joy.
• Dedicated physical space to work on your projects, either alone or in collaboration with others.

Counter-examples:

• A lifestyle so busy with work or obligations that there’s no mental or physical bandwidth for creativity.
• Feeling like every creative effort must result in a product or service that generates income, or where they are dismissed as unproductive unless they have a tangible outcome.
• Avoiding creative work due to self-criticism or the societal pressure to succeed.
• Being micro-managed or edited, at work or in life.
• Being forced to work on things that are in opposition to your values.

Okay, but why these pillars in particular?

Really it’s a framing device: each one speaks to a need for time, space, relationships of care and trust, and self-direction. They pick and choose the best bits of living in my various contexts — living in Europe and America, being a startup founder, a parent, a carer — and tie them together into principles for a life that feels nurturing.

• Free-range ties to autonomy and the joy of unstructured living.
• In open community reflects a human need for connection and mutual support, without restrictions based on identity.
• Emotionally safe speaks to belonging and trust.
• Creatively unconstrained emphasizes self-expression and personal growth.

The theme of inclusivity sits across many of these. It’s important to me because of my need for community and for emotional safety: I want my friends and families to be included, regardless of their backgrounds and identities, and I want to feel safe myself, as a person with a complicated personal context and a non-standard identity.

It’s also worth calling out what’s not here: wealth, or power, or influence. Those aren’t important to me unless they’re a way to get to these pillars.

My values are simply that everyone should be able to live this sort of life, regardless of who they are or where in the world they live. Everyone deserves autonomy, connection, support, safety, and the freedom to be themselves and express themselves openly. It’s not just that I want this for me, although clearly I do: I want to work towards this being an open, shared set of living principles that are available to all.

I’ve thought a lot about helping the world get there — remember, I want to work on projects with the potential to make the world more informed and equal. But the path to helping me get there is a little different. It involves carefully choosing the projects I work on, the team cultures I take part in, how I make money, how I present myself to the world, and the people and communities I associate with.

This framework will evolve with time and feedback, shaped by new experiences and perspectives. But for now, it offers a compass — one that points toward a life that feels authentic, nurturing, and achievable.

Let’s go.