Ben Werdmuller

A company is little more than a community of people pulling together in an organized way to achieve the same mission and vision. Like many communities, there are leaders who adjudicate and set direction, and there are norms to follow. Underlying it all, there is the culture of the community: the cues that dictate how it behaves, what its true goals are, and which norms are adhered to as the community grows.

In startups, there's often a cultural belief that if you're not burning the candle at both ends - if you're not pulling 18 hour days and working on the weekends - you're not trying hard enough. "All the high performers here work late," someone once told me in my first week at one startup. It was the reddest of red flags.

Most knowledge workers can muster up to 4 to 6 hours of really productive work a day. After that, you get into make-work; the going through the motions, non-reflective phoning-it-in work that isn't going to rock anybody's world. Likewise, constant interruptions, eg on Slack, through random calls, or half hour meetings sprinkled throughout the day, interrupt flow state and dramatically drop productivity and well-being.

With more free time between working hours and more room for reaching a flow state when they're at work, these workers have more time for reflection, introspection, and rest. We all do better work when we have more time to think about it; we all do better work when we're well-rested.

Beyond these matters of productivity, it's important to consider what kind of community culture you're building: one focused on building the right things and moving forward, or one focused on performatively keeping seats warm. Even more importantly: it's worth asking what kind of person you're optimizing for.

Remote working during the pandemic has amplified biases against working mothers. Only 8% of companies have revised their productivity expectations to account for the challenges of parenting at home during lockdown. Women still tend to carry the heaviest load of parenting; women are more likely to be carers; women are judged more harshly on their productivity. As the Brookings Institution concisely described the problem, "COVID-19 is hard on women because the U.S. economy is hard on women, and this virus excels at taking existing tensions and ratcheting them up.."

Zebra co-founder Mara Zepeda observed this effect in the startup communities she's a part of:

In the last year, it's men that magically have the time to keep showing up for the meetings, working late on that proposal. The selection bias of who has the time, and how easy it is to just shrug this new reality off...I see how easy it is to become blind to who's being left out.

Setting a norm of longer working hours isn't just bad management: it's a literal dick move, ensuring that your startup and your community will be dominated by mostly younger, predominantly white dudes with few personal ties outside of work.

If you're still wondering why that matters - if the advantages aren't obvious - you don't have a company or a community that I'm interested in taking part in. But, sure, if you need to have the benefits of being welcoming to 51% of the global population, let's spell them out: more gender-diverse companies are more profitable, more collaborative, and better at employee retention. And it's easier to hire if you're welcoming to more people.

Women need to be well-represented at all levels, but it's still relatively rare to have a gender-diverse board of directors, or even C-suite. Which is exactly why we still see people making the mistake of focusing on performative productivity instead of creating a culture to support the collaborative work that really matters.

As a manager, I want to see the work get done - collaboratively, in a non-toxic environment that supports people in doing their best work. I want there to be room for creativity and reflection. I want a diversity of contexts to be well-represented. I want people who will push back on each other's blind spots. And I want to share ownership. It's not just the right thing to do; it's also the path to success.

#work

I've spent over half my career at the intersection of technology and media. I believe journalism is the bedrock of a well-functioning democracy. Given the choice between tech companies and news organizations, I'll support the latter every time. I'm well-documented as being an advocate for antitrust reform and an opponent of Facebook's policies. And yet, I don't at all get the lawsuits from local media against Facebook and Google. Help me out here.

There have been attempts at legislation all over the world to force sites like Google News to pay publications for the right to link to them. Not only does that fundamentally undermine the web, but consider the effect of extrapolation - should science journals have to pay for the right to cite other papers, for example?

The latest lawsuit alleges that Facebook and Google engaged in anti-competitive activity in order to fix advertising prices. Which seems plausible - but it wouldn't have affected local news in itself. It would affect the entire internet. That doesn't and shouldn't prevent news organizations from filing suit, but the surrounding rhetoric is bizarre - as if the rise of the internet is something that these companies inflicted on the news industry.

I've got bad news for these organizations: the internet was going to happen anyway. There is no lawsuit that will prevent its continued growth. It's like yelling at the rise of television; the only way to respond is to actually engage with it.

Newspaper is a technology, in the same way the web is a technology. It does not have an inherent right to survive. What's important is keeping journalism alive: speaking truth to power and empowering voters with the information they need to make well-informed decisions. The form that takes will change over time, and news organizations need to be able to experiment and innovate to adapt to a changing context.

In fact, the internet presents an immense opportunity for local news: a way to transform from a broadcast model, where information is conveyed from an ivory tower, to a conversational model, where news organizations curate an informed conversation with their communities. Companies like Hearken can help news organizations facilitate these conversations, and enact the internal culture change needed to maintain them.

The choice really is: adapt or die. It's certainly true that organizations need help if they're going to adapt. It's not a slam dunk; it's a difficult climb. But some seem to want to try and claw back the past instead of building the future, and that's a real shame.

#media

This morning I was asked why I like startups, as opposed to co-operatives or any other kind of organization that builds software or technology. It's a fair question: I'm hardly a free market capitalist (in that I care very much about providing a social safety net and have no interest in small government), and much of my work has been a poor fit for venture capital.

First, some clarifications:

Being a startup and being a co-operative aren't mutually exclusive. The definition of a startup is an organization that is still trying to figure out what it will be - whether that's a Delaware C-Corporation with a board or an anarchist collective is up for grabs. For it to be venture investable, it would probably need to be the C-Corp, because that's what venture capitalists expect; if it's finding sustainability on its own terms, it could be anything.

I'm certainly interested in the mechanics of how an organization that builds technology can find its way to sustainability. Sometimes you can get something off the ground without taking anyone else's money, but there are some ideas that require expensive development, and people come with different financial contexts. Particularly in the US, where commercial necessities like health insurance push the cost of living higher than places like Europe, some investment is often required to give you the time and space to do a project justice. Venture capital is the version of this that has the highest profile in the popular imagination, but it's far from the only way. Revenue-sharing continues to grow in popularity. The Zebra movement is inspiring. And for some mission-driven projects, grants are available. You can have non-profit startups. It's all valid.

So, understanding that startups don't have to be venture funded C-Corporations, why am I into them?

The short answer is: because they're exciting.

I'm not excited by the financial fundamentals of the venture treadmill (make your stock progressively worth more so that people who bought in earlier can make a profit). I'm also not excited by building something to get rich. But like I said, that's not actually core to the definition of a startup, and there's something fundamentally appealing about people coming together to figure out the nature of the problem they're trying to solve, and then finding creative ways to solve it, all the while testing to see if they've got it right.

In the same vein, I'm not excited by coding for its own sake. I'm just not. I'm excited about solving human problems with technology, scrappily, with a mixture of every interdisciplinary skillset you can bring to bear. For me, technology is only really interesting when it finds its way into someone's hands, and the core mission of a true startup is to make something as useful as possible while also ensuring you can keep making it.

If I can work on that kind of mission full time? Make it not just a hobby, but a full-time job where I get to make something that I devised that becomes useful to more and more people? That sounds like heaven to me.

It's not about hockey-stick growth. It's not about finding an exit. It's not about being a financial vehicle. It's about building something meaningful, using all the skill and creativity you can muster, and getting to keep doing it. That's why I like startups.

#startups

1. Don't lie to your customers.

2. Don't lie to your team.

3. Spinning is lying.

4. Intentional omissions are lying.

5. If you find that you must lie or spin to sell your product, go back and build a product that actually matches your talk.

6. If you lie, people will find out.

7. All business is relationship-based.

8. Trust is core to every relationship.

9. Lies are kryptonite to trust.

10. Don't lie to your customers.

11. Don't lie to your team.

#work

A few weeks ago, I went to the doctor with an ear infection. It turns out it was probably to do with my AirPods Pro, which fit just a little bit too snugly into my ear canal. (After some Googling, I've learned that this is actually a surprisingly common reaction. Boo, hiss.) I've been banned from wearing earbuds for the foreseeable future. I loved the simplicity of my AirPods, but I've had to figure something else out.

My first thought was to look at AirPods Max, because apparently I'm a sucker for Apple to the point where even causing a biological risk to my hearing isn't that big a deal. But they take over six weeks to deliver. I also spend, on average, four to five hours in video calls every single day (yes, it's everything you think it is, and as productive as you worry it isn't). So I needed to find something fast.

I settled on the Bose NC 700 HPs. They're noise-canceling (check), wireless (check), have a microphone (check), and work pretty well within the Apple ecosystem (check). The price tag is a little bit on the eye-watering side, but given how much use I would get out of them, I figured it would be worth it.

So far: audio quality is beautiful. I want to fall asleep listening to music on them. Noise canceling works really well. But the bluetooth connectivity and the microphone both need a bunch of work. I'm constantly having to re-pair with my devices (I have a work laptop, a home laptop, a phone and a tablet) and people are continually telling me that the microphone is too quiet. So the bottom line is, for my use case, that it needs work. I can use the built-in system microphone, but for an audio device that comes in at just under $400, I really shouldn't have to. I've also had feedback that the ear cushions wear out really fast. I haven't noticed that yet, but I've only had them for a few weeks.

I'd love feedback and advice. What do you use? Do you have anything you really love? Does what I'm looking for even exist? Or am I doomed to follow Apple everywhere? Let me know.

#work #tech

I'm starting to see a bunch of startups that offer to speed you up by completing your work using GPT-3. It's a hell of a promise: start writing something and the robot will finish it off for you. All you've got to do is sand off the edges.

Imagine if the majority of content was made like this. You set a few key words and the topic, and then a machine learning algorithm finishes off the work, based on what it's learned from the corpus of data underpinning its decisions, which happens to be the sum total of output on the web. When most content is actually made by machine learning, the robot is learning from other robots; rinse and repeat until, statistically speaking, almost all content derives from robot output, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of human thought and emotion.

Would it be gibberish? I'd like to think so. I'd like to assume that it would lose all sense of meaning and the original topics would fade out, as photocopies of photocopies do as the series goes on. But what if it's not? What if, as the human fades out, the content makes more sense, and new, more logical structures emerge from the biological static? Would we stop creating? Would we destroy the robots? Or would we see these things as separate and different, almost as if software had a culture of its own?

What if a robot learned how to be a human based on data gathered on the behavior of every connected human in the world? That data exists; it's just not centralized yet. What if, then, we started to build artificial humans whose behaviors were based on that machine learning corpus? Eventually, when the artificial humans vastly outnumber natural humans, and new artificial humans are learning to be human from older artificial humans, what behaviors would emerge? How would they change across the generations? Would they devolve into gibberish, or turn into something new?

What if we were all cyborgs, a combination of robot and human? Imagine if we had access to the sum total of all human knowledge virtually any time we wanted, and access to the form of that data changed the way we behaved. And then new humans would learn to be human from the cyborgs, and become cyborgs themselves, using hardware and software designed by other cyborgs, which in turn would change their behavior even more. What does that look like after generations? Does it devolve into gibberish? Or does it turn into something completely new?

#ai #tech

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for January, 2021: a month that included an armed coup attempt, my 42nd birthday, and the start of a new Presidency.

Books

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer. Fascinating, searing and insightful, but also set in its ways. It was originally published in 1951, and some of Hoffer’s perspective has not stood the test of time; however, the parallels he draws about mass movements around the world absolutely do, and I found it hard not to think about the current rise of Trumpian nationalism as he laid out his argument.

The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. Spectacular science fiction ideas drawn from real imagination, woven into a nonsensical story with wooden, unbelievable characters that often stray into sexist tropes. It turns out I care about the latter more.

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, Volume 1), by Philip Pullman. It’s absolutely magical to read a fantasy universe set in an alternate version of my hometown. I felt a waterfall of emotions, from homesickness to wonder. I’ve never read His Dark Materials, to my shame, and this has me very much wanting to go and read that trilogy before I continue with this one. But the last third is much weaker, and contains a narrative choice I won’t spoil but really didn’t need to be there. Not a perfect book, then, but for the first two thirds, it was moving in that direction.

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, by Laila Lalami . This series of dynamic first-person perspectives on the conditions of citizenship placed on the majority of people in this country who don’t happen to be white, male, or straight should be required reading for every American. It culminates in a manifesto of sorts that paints a picture of the sort of country we should be building. The only point of departure I have with the author is her apparent belief that faith makes a person more ethical; I simply don’t believe this to be the case. Nonetheless, this is her truth, and it’s related in a direct, dynamic way that adds a great deal to the discourse of what it means to be an American.

The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. A lovely feel-good read. I occasionally felt like the author was over-stressing obvious conclusions, but that’s because the premise of depression leading to constant agonizing over past regrets is pretty much where I live. It left me, like its protagonist, eager to go out and live. Sure, you could unkindly describe it as Quantum Leap for people with depression. But honestly? Even that synopsis sounds great to me.

Streaming

Revolution of the Daleks. After the year we had, I really needed a solid Doctor Who special. And this was it: from great character development to a “fuck the police” subtext, this is the subversive show I love. I’m looking forward to more later this year, as soon as they finish filming during the pandemic (apparently they don’t quite know when that will be yet).

Locked Down. It was critically panned, and the subject matter is the definition of “too soon”, but I enjoyed this weird little movie. It’s neither a romantic comedy nor a heist movie, but it rhymes with both. It reminded me of a quirky novel.

chez baldwin. A Spotify playlist based on records found in James Baldwin’s home in France. Sublime.

Notable Articles

Business

How Google workers secretly built a union. I’m deeply pro-union, and excited to see more unionization in tech.

Vons, Pavilions to Fire “Essential Workers,” Replace Drivers with Independent Contractors. This is what we get for passing Proposition 22.

Imagine a Hiring Process Without Resumes. “Open hiring shifts resources to invest in workers, rather than finding ways to exclude them. Most important, this approach allows companies to build more resilient businesses and address one of today’s greatest social challenges: providing economic opportunities for people often viewed as unemployable.”

World's richest person Elon Musk to dedicate wealth to Mars colony. “And lest you think a trip to Mars is too pricey for most people, Musk has said he intends for there to be "loans available for those who don't have money," and jobs on the Red Planet for colonists to pay off their debts. Some critics say Musk's plans resemble an interplanetary form of indentured servitude.” You don’t say.

Seed Investments in Insurrection. “Some investors who rewrite the history of innovation. They forget that taxpayers funded the creation of the internet and contributed to pharmaceutical discoveries. They call for the end of regulations except for the ones that incentivize them to invest through tax benefits regular people don’t get. They want the government off their backs except when it comes to making sure no one builds affordable housing down the street from them.”

Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish. “People stop taking values seriously when the public rewards (and consequences) don’t match up. We can say that our culture requires treating each other with respect, but all too often, the openly rude high performer is privately disciplined, but keeps getting more and better projects. It doesn’t matter if you docked his bonus or yelled at him in private. When your team sees unkind people get ahead, they understand that the real culture is not one of kindness.”

Expensify CEO David Barrett: ‘Most CEOs are not bad people, they're just cowards’. “My opinion is a little bit different. I think this idea of "Oh, we're apolitical," I think that's kind of bullshit. I think there's no such thing in a democracy as being apolitical. Every action you take is your position. I think that a large number of these tech companies, by saying, "Oh, we're apolitical," that's a very convenient way of saying, "No, I'm voting for the status quo. I support the current administration, and I'm not going to take actions to do anything about it because it's actually good for business." I think it's actually pretty cynical.”

Why You Should Practice Failure. “We learn from our mistakes. When we screw up and fail, we learn how not to handle things. We learn what not to do.” All opportunities for growth.

Why I wouldn’t invest in open-source companies, even though I ran one. “The question then is: Is open-source a better business strategy than a more conventional, proprietary tech model? And the answer - at least to me - is a resounding "No". The ratio of failed OS businesses to successful ones is worse than in prop-tech; revenue kicks in much later, business model pivots are hampered by community resistance, and licensing issues leave OS businesses vulnerable throughout their lifetime. Instead, why not do what traditional businesses are doing, sell a product, and simply charge for the value it provides?” AKA “the exact same mistake I made twice.”

Making Twitter a better home for writers. It's super-interesting to see Twitter enter the paid newsletter space. Lots of interesting places to go with this.

Speaker Rider for Meaningfully Inclusive Events. Let's please all start using this.

Tractors won't be fully autonomous anytime soon — but not because they can't be. It’s interesting to think about the long term effects of autonomous farming. I don’t believe we can switch to this without much stronger social safety nets in place. I can also see a world where low-wage workers end up working behind computers, policing the decisions made by machine learning systems.

Culture

How about finding new books by mapping who thanks who. I love this idea. I wonder if a company other than Amazon or Google could pull it off?

A full accounting of the one hundred and fifty tales that make up the entirety of the thousand and one tales. This is a lovely writing project. It makes me want to do something similar - you know, with all my copious free time.

Three Things Cameron Couldn't Tell You, by Michael Haynes. I loved this short story.

Media

The mafia turns social media influencer to reinforce its brand. “Southern Italy’s mob bosses embrace digital platforms as a way to spread their message.” I’m excited to see the TikTok dances.

A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation. “What if every piece of journalism helped the public understand whether old or new power dynamics and values were at play?”

The Day Without News. If only.

Using printed QR codes for links in books. I love these examples, and the idea. URLs on the printed page have always sucked. Including QR codes inline can be beautiful, and simultaneously less obtrusive.

Open letter from Laura Poitras. “On Monday, November 30, 2020, I was fired from First Look Media, an organization I co-founded. My termination came two months after I spoke to the press about The Intercept’s failure to protect whistleblower Reality Winner and the cover-up and lack of accountability that followed, and after years of raising concerns internally about patterns of discrimination and retaliation.”

Apple is reportedly considering a podcast subscription service. Okay, but I want them to be compatible with my podcast player, and not have to use Apple's.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Journalism in Emerging Economies and the Global South. "Taking a deep dive into the critical challenges faced by the profession, the report examines issues including the pandemic’s impact on the personal safety and welfare of journalists, the structure of newsrooms and disruption to business models, the proliferation of fake news, and surging threats to media freedom. The study also identifies best practice and innovative approaches that have been developed as a response to the challenges of COVID-19."

Misinformation went down after Twitter banned Trump. By 73%. So there’s that.

Is there room for small, niche streaming services?. Take the quiz: how many streaming services are real and how many are fake? I got 6 out of 13 right.

Politics

The NDAA bans anonymous shell companies. The NDAA, which passed after this post was written, “includes a measure known as the Corporate Transparency Act, which undercuts shell companies and money laundering in America. The act requires the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The measure also increases penalties for money laundering and streamlines cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.”

Trump pressures Georgia's Raffensperger to overturn his defeat in extraordinary call. Just astonishing.

Same Elections, Different Americas. “Donald Trump will likely get away with massive election fraud. Crystal Mason got five years for one vote.”

I’m in a roomful of people 'panicked that I might inadvertently give away their location'. A remarkable account of the Capitol insurrection. I was surprised at how emotional my reaction to reading this was - there were tears. We came so close to something much worse.

What it was like for a reporter to be evacuated from the U.S. Capitol. “Back in the Capitol, police began a room-by-room search to find senators, staff and reporters who had been left behind. One senior GOP aide, who has an office not far from the Senate floor, said he took a steel rod and barricaded his door when the pro-Trump mob approached. For what seemed like 20 minutes, he said, rioters banged on his door, trying to break in.”

The other reason Facebook silenced Trump? Republicans just lost their power. "It has not escaped my attention that the day social media companies decided there actually IS more they could do to police Trump's destructive behavior was the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them."

Madness on Capitol Hill. ““This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.””

Who decides when there are helicopters? Experts weigh in on National Guard monitoring protests. “It sets an incredibly troubling precedent when we think about what it might mean if any time there’s a protest you might have military surveillance helicopters there.”

First Amendment and free spech: When it applies and when it doesn't. “Let's look at some common First Amendment arguments, illuminated and debunked by constitutional experts.”

Lisa Montgomery becomes first woman to be executed by federal government since 1953. Stomach-turning. The death penalty is the opposite of justice. It’s just cold-blooded murder, committed by the state in our names.

Alt-Right Groups and Personalities Involved In Last Week’s Capitol Riot Received Over $500K In Bitcoin From French Donor One Month Prior. This is a remarkable story in every possible way.

Secret Service paid $3,000 a month for a bathroom near Jared and Ivanka’s D.C. home. One of 2021’s gifts is not having to care about these awful people anywhere near as much.

Self-styled militia members planned Capitol storming in advance of Jan. 6. “In charging papers, the FBI said that during the Capitol riot, Caldwell received Facebook messages from unspecified senders updating him of the location of lawmakers. When he posted a one-word message, “Inside,” he received exhortations and directions describing tunnels, doors and hallways, the FBI said. Some messages, according to the FBI, included, “Tom all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3floors down,” and “Go through back house chamber doors facing N left down hallway down steps.” Another message read: “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas,” the FBI added.” Holy crap.

Biden’s climate plan emphasizes environmental justice. You know, I’d like to take a minute and appreciate how nice it is to read a headline about something that someone did in government and think, “that’s great”. It’s been quite a while.

Science

How researchers are making do in the time of Covid. “To gauge how researchers in different fields are managing, Knowable Magazine spoke with an array of scientists and technical staff—among them a specialist keeping alive genetically important strains of fruit flies, the maintenance chief of an astronomical observatory working to keep telescopes safe and on standby during the lockdown, and a pediatrician struggling to manage clinical trials for a rare genetic disease.”

Society

Working From Bed Is Actually Great. “Those with chronic illness or disabilities say that they hope that, much as the way the pandemic has made companies more open to remote work, the stigma around working from bed will also be broken.”

What If You Could Do It All Over?. “Most of us aren’t haunted so acutely by the people we might have been. But, perhaps for a morning or a month, our lives can still thrum with the knowledge that it could have been otherwise.” This is a sickness that I know very, very well. A really interesting exploration.

Meet the gun-toting ‘Tenacious Unicorns’ in rural Colorado (Queers, alpacas and guns). “How a transgender-owned alpaca ranch in Colorado foretells the future of the rural queer West.” I love this so much.

The imminent possibility of UFOs. The truth is out there.

The Retirement Crisis for Women of Color. "In fact, women of color are more likely to fall into poverty in retirement because they are less likely than white women to have retirement plans available through their employer, says Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, an associate professor at Boston College and research fellow at the Center for Retirement Research. It’s rare for workers to be able to save substantial amounts of money for retirement outside of those plans, creating inequality in who can save for the future."

The Ways We're Suppressed. "The cruelty of American Society isn’t simply in its unfairness, but in the fact that your fellow people actively support and canvas for said unfairness. They want to keep it the same way because it’s a way of justifying their own privilege - many people can’t face the fact that they got lucky two, or three, or a hundred times over, because luck suggests that their hard work wasn’t part of it. They’re people who are babies - so fragile on the inside that they can’t see that, yes, they worked hard and got stuff, but there were advantages along the way, and that acknowledging said advantages doesn’t discount the work they did."

Recompose, the first human-composting funeral home in the U.S., is now open for business. I’m fully 100% in.

Technology

Regulation is coming in 2021. Here’s how Big Tech is preparing for it. “The open internet. Section 230. China. Internet access. 5G. Antitrust. When we asked the policy shops at some of the biggest and most powerful tech companies to identify their 2021 policy priorities, these were the words they had in common.”

Downloading meditation apps and rethinking meetings: How tech leaders changed in 2020. “We asked a number of leaders across the tech world to reflect a bit on a crazy year, and to tell us a few things they've learned, what's changed, and how they're bringing the new normal into 2021. Here's what they told us.”

Feature Prioritizing: Ways To Reduce Subjectivity And Bias. Some good ideas to improve design sessions and avoid structural biases. I’m looking forward to putting them into practice.

Tech legislation to watch in 2021. Useful round-up of legislation on the cards for the coming year. I’m particularly hopeful for a nationwide privacy law.

On Online. “At first, the internet was where I found other people like me, people I hadn’t yet found in real life. They were on Diaryland and LiveJournal, being honest about what was going on in their lives and tooling around with HTML and CSS. Usually we liked the same music. We exchanged images of different artists, when images were hard to find. It was a place of solace. Now I can’t tweet a damn thing without someone I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, saying something in reply that mocks me, insults me, suggests total lack of awareness of the circumstances of my life, etc., etc. It’s not the place it once was, where we were vulnerable, honest, and seeking connection. Now, it feels like we are only seeking righteousness and/or a perfect aesthetic. It’s boring. I’m not the first to point this out.”

DALL·E: Creating Images from Text. Legitimately one of the most amazing technology demos I’ve ever seen. Click into the examples and see what I mean.

The continuing rise of private virtual neighbourhoods. “Perhaps what we’re seeing is the disentangling of social media back into social and media: newsletters and podcasts are best understood as being part of the media spectrum, even if many of them are smaller and have community spaces attached. And Discord space, Slack spaces, etc, these virtual neighbourhoods are pure social.”

A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?. “In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.” Frankly, neither man comes off very well.

Archivists Are Mining Parler Metadata to Pinpoint Crimes at the Capitol. “Using a massive 56.7-terabyte archive of the far-right social media site Parler that was captured on Sunday, open-source analysts, hobby archivists, and computer scientists are working together to catalog videos and photos that were taken at the attack on the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday.”

Federal Front Door. “Recent research has made clear what many folks have personally experienced: The federal government needs to improve how it interacts with the public. Enter the Federal Front Door, an initiative to improve public-government interactions across the board.”

Everything Old is New Part 2: Why Online Anonymity Matters. A really useful list of resources about why anonymity matters online, and why using real names is not the solution to online abuse.

Facing Forward. A really lovely reminder of another era of creativity in software design.

Turning off your camera in video calls could cut carbon emissions by 96%. “A new study from Purdue University in the US estimates that an hour of videoconferencing or streaming emits between 150 and 1000 grams of carbon dioxide. It also uses up to 12 litres of water and an area of land around the size of an iPad mini.” It’s rare to see the environmental impact of the internet industry discussed, but it’s important.

China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub. "With GitHub in the crosshairs of Chinese censors, Beijing is backing Gitee as its official hub, an open-source institution tailored for a closed internet." Fascinating, not least because Gitee really just looks like a GitHub clone.

New WhiteHouse.gov. Hooray for a bilingual White House homepage again - and on WordPress!

‘The Big Shift’: Internal Facebook Memo Tells Employees to Do Better on Privacy. "Facebook VP Andrew Bosworth tells colleagues that privacy matters more than the product experience." If they can reform the company around privacy and the human rights of their users, I might even re-join. Color me skeptical, though.

‘For Some Reason I’m Covered in Blood’: GPT-3 Contains Disturbing Bias Against Muslims. Yet again, algorithms carry the bias of their sources.

Make Boring Plans. "Since we often end up in the land of novel technology, we owe it to ourselves and our customers to be boring in other ways. And the most important way that a Platform team can be boring is by writing boring plans." This is fantastic.

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. "Moving to a world where protocols and not proprietary platforms dominate would solve many issues currently facing the internet today. Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services, allowing whichever ones work best to succeed, without having to resort to outright censorship for certain voices. It would allow end users to determine their own tolerances for different types of speech but make it much easier for most people to avoid the most problematic speech, without silencing anyone entirely or having the platforms themselves make the decisions about who is allowed to speak."

Facebook and Apple Are Beefing Over the Future of the Internet. "On Thursday morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a speech explaining his company’s upcoming privacy changes, which will ban apps from sharing iPhone user behavior with third parties unless users give explicit consent. And he made plain that these new policies were designed at least in part with Facebook in mind." Let's be clear: rightly so.

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