Ben Werdmuller

I learned my uncle, my father's older brother, died the other day: my cousin reached out to me and asked if I'd heard the news. I hadn't. He'd passed away on my birthday, and I had no idea.

A fair amount has been written about the grief of being a third culture kid (TCK). You grow up in a country you're not from, and that your parents are not from. For me, that meant growing up in the UK (which I am not a citizen of) to a Swiss-Dutch-Indonesian father and a Ukrainian-American mother. We traveled around a fair amount - a year in Vienna here, a year in Durham, NC there - but it was nothing like the experiences of army brats, who grow up uprooting their lives every couple of years. I was lucky to have a consistent set of friends throughout my childhood, even if sometimes I wrote to them over long distances.

TCKs often form attachments to people over places, which is certainly true for me. Adult TCKs rarely repatriate successfully, and while we feel like we can relate to many different kinds of people, few people relate to our experiences. As much as people might want me to assimilate, I never will, even if I wanted to (which, admittedly, I don't). The same goes for our blood: although my nuclear family is arguably closer for having had to be each other's allies in a series of strange cultures, my extended family doesn't always feel as close.

I grew up thousands of miles from my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. We saw each other every couple of years, and we have a lot of love for each other, but I always felt a weird sort of distance, too. It's hard to have the same depth of relationship as cousins who live in the same country and see each other many times a year when you come from what might as well be another planet, and see each other every few years at best.

I've been in California for a decade, and while I want to be closer, I don't know how to be. Like any relationship, I need to put in the work and reach out - we can all text - but patterns were set in motion decades ago.

I am resolving to try and do better, but it's impossible to patch over every gap. My uncle lived in Zurich. No matter where I am, I'll have family who is in some other universe, who I'd love to be closer to. I have family I dearly love who live in Melbourne, Australia, where I've never been. We're all aliens to each other. Aliens who love each other, but aliens nonetheless.

So, there's where the grief comes from. Connectedness is important to all people. But when your network of loved ones is spread out across countries, cultures, and universes of understanding, you can never connect enough, and you'll always wish you had more.

The truth is, I didn't really know him. Not well. But I wish I had.

Here are the final two pieces I published on Medium this month:

8 simple ways to get the most out of today. A guide to living well in the pandemic. (Hint: I don't take self-help pieces seriously.)

Your 401(k) hates you. The way we all save for retirement in America needs serious reform - for our own benefit, for the planet, and for a more equitable society.

So what's the outcome?

I'm predisposed to like Medium. I worked there in 2016, I know the team well, and I know they're doing everything for the right reasons. I also deeply respect Ev. But I pre-date its current Partner Program strategy. I've written pieces about the startup ecosystem that have made me hundreds of dollars each on its network, but that was several years ago, and I wasn't sure what its current dynamics were.

Each piece on Medium received roughly the same viewers that I would get on my blog. There was a small Medium network boost, but it generally accounted for 10-20% of readers, and I didn't notice a meaningful follower increase over time (which would, if I kept it up, snowball my readership). I made about $10 from partner program revenue.

It's a really beautiful interface to write in (and always has been), which is both a help and a hindrance: it discourages bloggy content, and encourages longer-form pieces, which are more time consuming to produce. I suspect if I lowered the volume and went for a handful of higher-quality pieces a month, I would do better on the network. That stands to reason: I've always thought of Medium as a magazine that anyone can contribute to, which is a concept that lends itself to a certain kind of content.

My plan, then, is this. I'm returning to posting in this space. If I write something long-form that I'd like to be compensated for, which I plan to do a few times a month, I reserve the right to post it on Medium (although I may also experiment with other platforms and my own experiments, as well as returning to the Unlock decentralized paywall).

I've added an anonymous feedback form to my website, which will stay online. You can always leave me feedback and let me know what you're interested in. You can also always just email me. I'd love this to be more of a conversation. I'm also thinking about how to build community into the site itself (and, spoiler alert, any site itself) - stay tuned.

To everyone who shared feedback over the last few weeks, including the folks who complained about not being able to get through the Medium paywall, thank you. And thank you, as always, for reading. It means a lot.

As I mentioned, I've been experimenting with writing on Medium instead of my personal space for the second half of January. Here are some pieces you might have missed:

Where I want to work: what are the characteristics of a healthy workplace? Which values matter?

Do no harm: what does it mean to work with the goal of not making the world worse? Is it enough to simply say that you want to do no harm?

How to startup like a bro: "Get a Patagonia vest and make sure you’ve got a couple of pairs of AirPods. When one pair runs out of battery, mid-conversation maybe, just swap them out with the next one. It pays to be prepared." Satire's a dead horse, but I'm flogging it anyway.

Here's what I earned from my tech career: a history of what I've earned from my career in technology.

The whole-employee professional development plan: I open sourced the professional development plan I use with my team. Here's a guide to using it.

And more personally:

Ma: how working remotely in the pandemic allowed me to care for my mother.

Pulmonary fibrosis and me: the story of how I learned I probably wasn't terminally ill.

If you're saving for retirement in the United States - or you want to be - I'd love about 30 seconds of your time.

Here's a very short survey form. Heads up that it does ask for your contact details - but if you're squeamish about that, feel free to write 'n/a' or 'anonymous@company.com' for those details. It's the data that really matters.

Thank you!

I'm not quite an indieweb zealot - you can find me on Twitter and other social networks over the web - but I've been writing on my own site since 1998 (albeit not one consistent, continuous site - I change it up every decade or so), and it's become a core part of who I am, how I think, and how I represent myself online.

You might have noticed - email subscribers certainly did - that I've turned up the volume on my posting this year. So far in January, that's meant a post a day in my personal space. The feedback has generally been good, but a few email subscribers did complain. I totally get it. Nobody wants their inboxes to clog up; the calculus might be different if this was a business newsletter with actionable insights, but that's not what this is. More than anything, I'm hoping to spark a conversation with my posts.

There are a few things I'm thinking about doing. The first is dropping the frequency of the emails, and thinking about them as more of a digest. You'd get one on Thursday, and one on Sunday (or something like that). Obviously, RSS / h-feed / JSON-feed subscribers (hi!) would still receive posts in real time. Maybe there would also be an email list for people who did want to receive posts as I wrote them.

The second thing I'm thinking about doing is taking this posting frequency and putting it on Medium for the rest of the month, with a regular summary post over here. This is a controversial thing for someone who's so deep into indieweb and the open web to suggest, but there are a few reasons for trying this. Mostly I want to see how the experience compares. I worked at Medium in 2016, and posted fairly regularly there during that time and while I was at Matter Ventures, but the platform has evolved significantly since then.

So that's what I'm going to do to start. For the remainder of January, I'll be posting on Medium daily, with summary listings posted here semi-regularly. Then I'll return here in February and let you know what I discovered.

You can follow me on Medium over here.

One of my favorite pieces of software is Apple photo search. If you've got an iPhone, try it: great searches to try are "animal selfie", "bird", "ice cream", or "cake".

What's particularly amazing about these searches is that the machine learning is performed on-device. In fact, Apple provides developer tools for on-device machine learning in any app across its platforms. There's no cloud processing and the privacy issues related to that. The power to identify which photos are a selfie with your cat lies in the palm of your hand.

Not everyone can afford a top-end iPhone, but these represent the leading edge of the technology; in the near future, every phone will be able to perform rapid machine learning tasks.

Another thing my phone does is connect to 5G networks. 5G has a theoretical maximum bandwidth speed of 10gbps, which is faster than the kind of home cable internet you might get from a company like Comcast. In practice, the networks don't quite work that way, but we can expect them to improve over time. 5G networks will allow us to have incredibly fast internet virtually anywhere.

Again: not every phone supports 5G. But every phone will. (And, inevitably, 6G is around the corner.)

Finally, my phone has roughly the same amount of storage as my computer, and every bit as fast. Not everyone has 256GB of storage on their phone - but, once again, everyone will.

On the internet, we mostly deal with clients and servers. The services we use are powered by data centers so vast that they sometimes have their own power stations. Technology startup founders have to consider the cost of virtualized infrastructure as a key part of their plans: how many servers will they need, what kinds of databases, and so on.

Meanwhile, the client side is fairly thin. We provide small web interfaces and APIs that connect from our server infrastructure to our devices, as if our devices are weak and not to be trusted.

The result is a privacy nightmare: all our data is stored in the same few places, and we usually just have to trust that nobody will peek. (It's fair to assume that somebody is peeking.) It also represents a single point of failure: if just one Amazon datacenter in Virginia encounters a problem, it can seem like half the internet has gone down. Finally, the capabilities of a service are limited by the throughput of low-powered virtualized servers.

But the world has changed. We're addicted to these tiny devices that happen to have huge amounts of storage, sophisticated processors, and incredibly fast, always-on connectivity. I think it's only a matter of time before someone - potentially Apple, potentially someone exponentially smaller than Apple - uses this to create an entirely new kind of peer to peer application infrastructure.

If I'm in the next room to you and I send you a Facebook message, the data finds its way to Facebook's datacenter and back to you. It's an incredibly wasteful process. What if the message just went straight to you over peer to peer wifi (or whatever connection method was most convenient)? And what if there was a developer kit that made it easy for any engineer to really easily build an application over this opportunistic infrastructure without worrying about the details?

Lately I've been obsessed with this idea. The capabilities of our technology have radically changed, but our business models and architectural paradigms haven't caught up. There's an exciting opportunity here - not just to be disruptive, but to create a more private, more immediate, and more dynamically functional internet.

I'm nearing the end of my first week on the Whole30 diet. I'm still not what sure I think about it: which foods are allowed and which aren't feels a bit arbitrary, and the very fact that the diet has a logo and a trademark is off-putting. On the other hand, maybe it's my imagination, but I feel a lot better. I'm certainly eating a great deal more vegetables.

I've also been better about doing exercise before work so far this year. Usually that's involved running, but I've been doing some weight training, as well as long, brisk walks and push-ups every day. The result is that I'm more alert during the day, and feel free to relax and read / write during the evening. (Whole30's ban on alcohol helps here, too. I had fallen into a pattern of drinking a glass of wine or two most evenings in 2020.)

I suffer from anxiety, bouts of depression, and historically really low self-esteem. At my lowest, I made a plan - never followed - to end my life. Shallow self-confidence has sometimes led me to bad places and poor choices. It's frequently led me to sleepless nights and their subsequent, zombie-like days. I've spent much of my life feeling like I must be physically abhorrent; like there's something horribly wrong with me that nobody wanted to tell me about. As a kid, I was over six feet tall when I was thirteen, and I didn't so much as date until I was twenty-one. Those feelings of inferiority have never really left me.

By rights, the pandemic should have made me feel worse. We were all locked inside; I spent a great deal more time caring for my terminally ill mother as she precipitously declined. The goals I had for my life were out of reach. It should have been a miserable time.

And it was, in lots of ways, but it also gave me something important. I could be in my own space, rather than commuting to work. I was not expected to show up in a certain way. All the worries I used to have about the impression I was casting in the real world - worries that I resented having terribly - evaporated. Instead, I could just be me.

I gave myself permission to write more than blog posts. On a whim, I entered a flash fiction competition, and placed first in the initial round. I enrolled in workshops and courses and continued to practice. Today, I have a regular practice of writing every day.

I ran more than I'd run in my entire life leading up to that point combined: at least two 5Ks a week, which for many people isn't all that much, but for me was an enormous step up. Towards the end of the year, I had some conversations about stressful things that had been building up as reservoirs of bad feeling that were threatening to spill over.

Somewhere in all of this, my self-esteem crept up, and my anxiety started to diminish. I felt less awful about my body and found that the stressful conversations went well. The darkness is not necessarily gone for good; anyone who suffers from depression knows that the cloud can re-emerge at any time. I also don't think it's just because I started to do exercise and did some writing; I think those things were reflections of something else.

Self-respect is something that requires practice and investment, and somewhere during last year, I made the decision to spend the time. It wasn't esteem, as such, at least at first, but I decided that I was worth spending time on. Writing and exercise weren't things that would make other people like me. They were just for me. And a switch flipped, without me realizing it, that allowed me to know that was okay.

In a lot of ways, I feel like a different person going into 2021. I'm full of gratitude, and excited for the future. We're still in an awful, deadly pandemic; I still have the trauma of watching my mother deal with her illness. But in lots of ways, I can meet those challenges with more energy.

There are ups and downs. I had a blip before Christmas where I still felt incredibly low. But generally speaking, every day is a small progression in the right direction. Things are looking up.

It's really easy to assume that the world around us is fixed and absolute. The way we do things is the way things are done. The internet works the way it does. The market is the market. People behave how people behave.

One of my superpowers has traditionally been that I'm an outsider: I'm an off-kilter third culture kid who doesn't really fit into anyone's community, which means I see everything from a slightly different angle. Often that's allowed me to see absurdities that other people can't see, and ask questions that other people might not have asked. Sometimes, they're painfully naive. But naivety and optimism can lead to interesting new places.

Lately I've had a few conversations that have made me realize that my perspective has settled in a bit more than I'm comfortable with; I feel like my horizons have closed in a little bit. It's been a sobering realization. Narrower horizons lead to safer, more timid decisions; a small island mentality where a smaller set of possible changes are considered and new ideas are more likely to be met with a pessimistic "that'll never work". It's a toxic way to think that creeps up on you.

It's not enough to invent new things for our current context - there's a lot to be gained from reconsidering that context entirely. Why are things the way they are? Do they have to be? What would be better?

Chris Messina's website subtitle used to be "All of this can be made better. Are you ready? Begin." I've thought about that phrase a lot over the years. It's an inspiring mission statement and a great way to think. It also requires that you feel some ownership or ability - permission - to change the way things work.

People come to this in different ways. I think it helps to have seen broader change manifested, but it's not a prerequisite. It certainly helps to have been in an environment filled with broader, change-oriented thinking. If you live in a world of conservative stagnation, you're much more likely to feel the same way. But, of course, plenty of people from those sorts of environments emerge to change the world.

And it turns out that people lose it in different ways, too. I'm grateful for conversations with smart people who challenged my thinking and encouraged me to take a step back.

For me, right now, this is wrapped up in the fabric of what I do. Why do we have to use the software and protocol models we've used for decades? What does it look like to think beyond APIs and browsers, clients and servers? What if, knowing what we know today, something radically different could be better? Do we need to depend on vast datacenters owned by megacorporations, or can we do away with them altogether?

It's worth asking the questions: how could you broaden your thinking? What in your life do you consider to be immovable that might not be? What does thinking bigger and putting everything on the table look like for you?

I have a longstanding bet that we're moving to an ambient computing world: one where the computer is all around us, interacting with us in whatever way is convenient to us at the time. Smart speakers, high-spec smartphones, natural language intelligent assistants, augmented reality glasses, wearables with haptic feedback, and interactive screens aren't individual technologies in themselves, but all part of a contiguous ambient cloud with your digital identity at the center. In this vision of the future, whoever controls the ecosystem controls the next phase of computing. Ideally, it's an open system with no clear owner, but that won't happen by itself.

A lot of the reports coming out of (virtual) CES this year involve augmented reality of one kind or another. Lots of different companies have new models of AR glasses, which are becoming a little bit more like something you'd actually want to put on your face with each passing year; Sony also has a pretty cool sounding (but ruinously expensive) spatial display that looks like examining a 3D object through a window.

Throughout all this, Apple is pretty quiet. Even though Siri is objectively the worst digital assistant, it was early to the market, and signaled an intention to pursue a vision for ambient computing that has since been followed up with the Apple Watch, AirPods, and HomePods. It has filed patents for AR glasses. And I have a strong suspicion - with no inside knowledge whatsoever - that it's planning on doing something interesting around audio. Podcasts are cool, but evolving what podcasts can be in an ambient computing world is cooler. Whereas most companies are concentrating on iterating the technology, companies like Apple rightly think about the human experience of using it, and elegantly figuring out its place at the intersection of tech and culture. It won't be the first company to come out with a technology, but it may be the first to make it feel human.

If this is the way the world is going - and remember, it's only a bet - it has enormous implications for other kinds of applications. We're still largely wedded to a monitor-keyboard paradigm that was invented long before the moon landing; most of your favorite apps and services amount to sitting in front of a rectangular display and lightly interacting with it somehow. An ambient paradigm demands that we pay close attention to calm tech principles so that we are not cognitively overloaded, jibing with our perception of reality rather than stealing our engagement completely. The main job of the internet is to connect people; what does that look like in an ambient environment? What does it mean for work? For fintech? For learning? And given that all we have is our perception of reality, who do we trust with augmenting it?

Anyway, Norm Glasses will make everyone look like the main character in a John Hughes movie, and I'm kind of here for it.

I'm hiring for two roles. I'm looking for product leaders with hands-on mission-driven startup experience, and for back-end engineers who have both written in Ruby on Rails and scripted headless browsers in a production environment as part of their work. In both cases, I'm looking for people who have experience in these roles in other startups.

Here's how I think about hiring: more than anything else, I'm building a community of people who are pulling together for a common cause. Each new person should add a new perspective and set of skills, and also be ready to productively evolve the culture of the community itself. That means intentionally hiring people with diverse backgrounds who embody our core values.

Some values - like being empathetic and collaborative, or being great at both written and verbal communication - are absolute requirements. Because I'm building a community, I need people who get on well with others, who share my desire for inclusivity, and can work in a group. A high EQ is an enormous asset for an engineer. Other values may evolve over time, as people propose new ideas that change the way we all work - perhaps based on processes they've seen working well at places they've worked in the past. Anyone who joins the community should have the ownership to improve it.

ForUsAll is changing the way people save for retirement. We have radically ambitious goals for 2021, centered around helping people find financial stability in ways that are still very new. I'll write about them when we're ready, but for now, the key is to find people who are motivated by a strong social mission and by creating something new, and who enjoy the fast-changing nature of startups. I believe in healthy work-life integration, treating people with kindness, and a human-centered, empathetic approach - all while we're building cool stuff with energy and creativity.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, and you're located in the US, reach out. I'd love to chat with you.

The power of free and open source software comes down to how it is shared. Users can pick up and modify the source code, usually at no cost, as long as they adhere to the terms of its licenses, which range from permissive (do what you like) to more restrictive (if you make modifications, you've got to distribute them under the same license). The popularity of the model has led to a transformation in the way software is built; it's not an exaggeration to say that the current tech industry couldn't exist without it. Collaborative software drives the industry.

(If you're not familiar with the concept or its nuances, I wrote a history and guide to the underlying ideas, including how it relates to projects like Linux, a few years ago, which might help.)

In my work, I've generally veered towards permissive licenses. Elgg, my first open source project, was originally released under the GPL, and then subsequently dual-released under the more permissive MIT license. Known and its plugins were released under the Apache license. While GPL is a little more restrictive, both the MIT and Apache licenses say little more than, "this software is provided as-is".

If I was to start another open source project, I'd take a different approach and use a very restrictive license. For example, the Affero GNU Public License requires that you make the source code to any modifications available even if they're just running on a server (i.e., even if you're not distributing the modified code in any other way). This means that if someone starts a web service with the code as a starting point, they must make the source code of that service available under the AGPL.

Then I'd dual-license it. If you want to use the software for free, that's great: you've just got to make sure that if you're using it to build a web service, the source code of your web service must be available for free, too. On the other hand, if you want to restrict access to your web service's source code because it forms the basis of a commercial venture, then you need to pay me for the commercial license. Everybody wins: free and open source communities can operate without commercial considerations, while I see an upside if my open source work is used in a commercial venture. The commercial license could include provisions to allow non-profits and educational institutions to use the software for free or at a low cost; the point is, it would be at my discretion.

I love free software. The utopian vision of the movement is truly empowering, and has empowered communities that would not ordinarily be able to tailor their own software platforms. But allowing commercial entities to take advantage of people who provide their work for the love of it as a bug. There's no reason in the world that a VC-funded business with millions of dollars under its belt should avoid paying people its company value integrally depends on. It's taken me a long time to come around to the idea, but restrictive licenses like the AGPL align everyone in the ecosystem and allow individual developers and well-funded startups alike to thrive.

More than that, it's a model that allows me to think I might, one day, dive head-first into free software at least one more time.

In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown eloquently describes a model for decentralized leadership in a world of ever-changing emergent patterns. Heavily influenced by the philosophy laid out in Octavia Butler's Earthseed novels - God is change - it describes how the way we show up in the face of change, embodying the world we wish to manifest, can influence it for the better. It's a uniquely non-linear manifesto.

Our model for communities and change right now is intensely linear. Despite the democratizing promise of the internet, we have fallen back on a broadcast model of influencers and audiences: a small number of people create content and the rest of us consume it. Although, technically speaking, anyone can publish, the truth is that platforms assume we're here to listen - and they've been built with those assumptions in mind. Influencers broadcast; followers follow; platforms make money by facilitating the engagement. It's how Ellen Degeneres's selfie got millions of retweets, and how Donald Trump parlayed his Twitter account into a Presidency. (See if you can do the same.)

A broadcast model creates a direct line from anyone with power to everyone. Theoretically, that's a beautiful, democratizing thing; in practice, it turns the protocols and assumptions underlying the broadcast medium itself into the ultimate influencer. Everyone who is trying to reach an audience falls into patterns that they know will improve their reach; they game the algorithms, which are really reflections of the values and ideas of the teams which created them. Influencers like Donald Trump game the minds of engineers and product managers in San Francisco in order to game the world.

Ideas are at their best when filtered through communities and movements that each have their own values and mechanics. Before social media, this is how it worked. Swirling, emergent patterns evolve from the interdynamics of these communities. As opposed to social media's linear broadcast model, this intercommunity model is more like a fractal: the interrelations between tiny communities form larger communities, which in turn interrelate as larger communities of people, and so on. There's no magical bullhorn that lets you skip ahead and reach the world: you've got to influence your friends and family, who then reach other friends and families, who then reach their wider local communities. Each of these communities has a different set of norms and values; organic, internal rules and dynamics that govern them. In the process, the people in these communities at each level become influencers in themselves, carrying on the message. It's harder work, but more profoundly impactful.

This is a healthier model for the internet, too. Rather than community platforms that tend towards global scale, we need to build global infrastructure that can support tiny communities that work in different ways. Ideas can still spread; links still get shared; memes are made. But they do so organically, in a more equal way that prioritizes the decentralized, community-driven nature of human society, rather than one that seeks to make us all into followers of a handful of global influencers. We need to create a reflection of adrienne maree brown's view of the world, not Donald Trump's.

In doing so, it's important to understand that "local" doesn't mean "geographically local" on the internet. It can, but doesn't have to. "Local" can also mean focused communities of interest of all different kinds. Everybody's experience of the internet then becomes a unique-to-them set of overlapping communities on different platforms. My argument is absolutely not that the internet should not be global infrastructure, and that we shouldn't be able to share ideas with people from everywhere: I believe that's a crucial part of human progress. My argument is that the internet should be more fragmented and that holding our conversations, making our connections, and discovering our knowledge from a very small handful of platforms with a limited set of models for community governance is a vulnerability.

Furthermore, I believe it's inevitable. As we've seen this week (as well as all the weeks leading up to now), it's not tenable for companies like Twitter and Facebook to be the owners of the global discourse. As much as we shouldn't want that, and lawmakers are galvanizing around the problems that have arisen, I don't think they want that, either. In fact, the only people who aren't aligned with this need are the influencers who want to have the world at their disposal.

So what do these new platforms and communities look like? The truth is, there's everything to play for.

I'm still processing the events of this week: the obvious buffoonery of the Q mob contrasts starkly with reports of an intention to hang the Vice President, cable ties brought into the Capitol to detain hostages, and the obvious white supremacist flags that were flown both inside and out. One popular T-shirt worn on Wednesday read "Camp Auschwitz: work brings freedom"; another read 6MWE, for "6 Million [Jews] Wasn't Enough".

This riot was unmistakably instigated by President Trump at an address immediately prior, and who later told the insurrectionists: "We love you. You're very special. Go home" (an echo of his infamous call for the Proud Boys to "stand by and stand down", and declaring that a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville had "very fine people on both sides"). Since then, we've seen a number of resignations from inside his government, which at this late stage could be seen as just taking an extra week's vacation.Twitter forced him to take down some posts, and Facebook banned him indefinitely. Apple is about to ban the right-wing app Parler unless it adds a moderation policy within 24 hours.

It's too little, far too late. It's not brave to quit an administration after spending four years inside it perpetuating hate (particularly when it might just be a way to avoid having to vote on invoking the 25th Amendment). It's not brave to ban a fascist government leader from your media platform following a high-profile event after allowing him to incite hatred for at least as long. It's not taking a stand to suddenly ban an app heavily used by white supremacists when it's been used to organize hate groups for its entire existence. All of these things should be done, but they should have been done long ago.

I don't believe it's fair to assume that all of these technology companies only just realized that these organizations were dangerous. Instead, I think it's just that it became untenable to tolerate them. The thing about hate groups and hate-filled conspiracy theories like QAnon is that they're very highly engaged: they use platforms for hours and they click on ads. Then-CEO of CBS Les Moonves famously said about Trump before the 2016 election: "it may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS". The same is true for every tech company that subsists on ad engagement dollars. Not only did targeted advertising help Trump win in 2016, but every targeted ad platform and every advertising-powered TV network profited from the hatred and division that Trump incited. Just this week, the former CEO of ad-tech firm Steelhouse called the Capitol insurrection "a rocket ship" for Twitter and Facebook's ad businesses. They were going to hang the Vice President! Such engagement!

So, yes: leave the Trump administration, by all means. Ban him from your platforms. Remove the apps that insurrectionists used to organize the storming of the Capitol (and are reportedly using to organize another event around the inauguration). But you don't win brownie points for that. You don't get to walk away with your head held high. You put your own profit over the health of the country, the health of the people who have died as a direct result of the Trump administration's policies, and the cause of global democracy. You shouldn't get to sleep soundly at night. You're culpable. And as much as you might try and wash your hands of it in the final weeks of this nightmare, you deserve to have it follow you for the rest of your lives.

It's my birthday. I was originally going to write one of those reflective pieces along the lines of "here's 42 things I've learned" or "version 42.0" or some Douglas Adams reference, but given everything that's been going on in the world, and my mother's decline in the next room, I just can't.

I believe that the Trump presidency has been a dying gasp of the 20th century. I'm really hopeful that the events of this month are the dying gasp.

If that turns out to be true, there's a lot to look forward to. If not, then there's a lot to be worried about. As of right now, the future is in the balance.

Hey, where was this insurrection organized?

Where? On a social network, you say? Which one?

Oh wow. I bet the CEO is hurrying to ensure its platform doesn’t undermine democracy!

What’s that? Oh. Oh.

So I bet their employees must be walking out in droves!

What’s that?

I see, I see.

So I bet its users are leaving en masse?

What?

Oh, right. Right, of course not.

.

I've got less than zero sympathy for companies like Facebook which argue they will be hurt by greater user privacy provisions. If your business model depends on building surveillance infrastructure and aggregating as much information as possible about peoples' private lives, your business does not deserve to survive. Apple's greater privacy provisions aren't anti-competitive; they're pro human rights.

Privacy is a human right. Surveillance has a chilling effect on free speech and freedom of association, which we consider to be fundamental tenets of democracy. Sure, you can make a bunch of money by learning everything you can about an individual and selling access to their attention. But not everything that is profitable should be permissible.

The European GDPR has turned out to be a very useful piece of legislation. It's very difficult for internet services to divide out their infrastructure between European users and everyone else, so in effect, those provisions have typically been applied for every user. The California Consumer Privacy Act has a similar effect, not least because most major internet services are based here. But we need a federal privacy law, and an international understanding that privacy is a human right that must be upheld on the internet as well as everywhere else.

Facebook claims that a reduction in its advertising capabilities will hurt small businesses. It's a disingenuous argument. Facebook has consistently adjusted its newsfeed algorithm to reduce the reach of organic pages; it's now often around 3%, forcing brands to advertise in order to reach their followers. If Facebook didn't depend on targeted advertising for revenue, it wouldn't have had the incentive to adjust its algorithm in this way, and small businesses wouldn't be hurt. Even more importantly, it might have reacted differently to pogroms in Myanmar, election manipulation, and the well-being of its moderators, among other things.

Surveillance capitalism has undermined democracy all over the world, and created a global infrastructure that authoritarian governments could previously only have dreamed of.

It's coming to an end. It's inevitable. GDPR, the CCPA, and emerging privacy legislation all over the world will make this kind of tracking untenable. Apple isn't standing alone here; it's merely a little bit ahead of the curve. This oncoming trend means that architectures and services that protect your privacy aren't just good for users: they're a good investment.

The Wayne Gretzky quote is a cliché at this point, but every technology investor needs to skate where the puck is going. (The really great ones figure out trends that few others have seen.) The puck, in this case, is heading square on for greater privacy. This doesn't necessarily mean a reduction in ad-based businesses: as it turns out, non-tracking ads are generally about as lucrative as personalized ads. I think we'll see a mix. But does mean a reduction in tracking infrastructure, and a major sea change in the way we think about monetizing consumer technology.

Founders love to answer questions about revenue with, "we'll sell the data". It's never been a great answer. But in the new, privacy-enabled internet, selling data won't be as possible. This is good and right. Instead, I'm hopeful that we'll see a return to user-centric architectures and user experiences, and a decline in user-hostile practices like tracking. After all, we're here to build solutions for people, and to improve their lives with technology. Eroding democracy and human rights by making a profit by any means necessary shouldn't be something we aspire to do; it's also something founders who don't care about the well-being of their users shouldn't have the ability to do without severe repercussions.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Yesterday, as part of a kick-off presentation for the year, I reminded my team: coding is less than half of an engineer's job.

An engineer's role is to engineer solutions. Writing code is certainly a part of that, but as a means to an end rather than a purpose in itself. If an elegant, scalable solution can be engineered without writing code, fantastic. Conversely, if code is written without exploration, reflection, documentation and validation, or if a solution is built to an imagined problem that doesn't really exist, we're in trouble. Communication, exploration, and collaboration are the biggest parts of the job.

Lots of people get into engineering because they love to work on code. The feeling of building something from nothing is exhilarating: I'm far from the first to note that it's similar to how artists manifest work. But that's programming (or hacking); engineering is a discipline unto itself. There's a popular conception of engineering as being a job you take if you don't want to talk to people, or don't like to write, but neither thing is true. The best engineers are highly social and write to a high standard, as well as having great coding skills. That's because engineers rigorously architect systems to meet their requirements; hackers understand the outcome of what they're trying to build, but their process is more artistic.

I think both spirits are worth embracing, but it's important to accept that they may be embodied in different people. Holding onto the joy of hacking is important; I lost it for a while, and it took literally years to get it back. But engineering requires a different kind of diligence and attention to detail. I confess that I don't think I was really, truly an engineer until I went to work for Medium - and maybe I'm still not one. I could certainly build software (Elgg, Known, Latakoo, a bunch of other things), but my process and discovery skills were underdeveloped. Some of the people I met there, and have met since, were not hackers - they built code rigorously and to a high quality, but had never really built something for the joy of it. For others, it was the opposite; some people fell in the middle. The two things sit side by side but are different.

The trick, I think, is to build the right processes such that engineers take bigger risks in their explorations, and hackers use more rigor. The goal is a creative, detail-oriented team that finds the best solution using the full weight of their diverse skills and creativity, and has fun doing it.

Back when I was running Elgg, I'd meet someone every few weeks who wanted to build a competitor to Facebook. Inevitably, they would propose to do this by copying all of Facebook's features verbatim, but (for example) without an ad ecosystem or with a different algorithm for surfacing content. All of them were doomed to fail.

These days, I'm more distant from the alternative social networking ecosystem, but it's easy to spot the same ideas. One might propose a decentralized alternative to Facebook that has all of Facebook's features, for example, and assume that people will flock to it because it's not owned by a corporation. You care about privacy and ownership, after all - if others don't, surely it's just a matter of educating them?

Aside from with a relative handful of enthusiasts, these efforts are probably all doomed to fail, too.

The thing is, privacy and ownership are important, and over the last few years we've seen our quiet worries about silos of data owned by single-point-of-failure corporations grow into a global roar about their role in supporting pogroms and undermining democracies. Nonetheless, we've learned pretty conclusively that privacy and autonomy are not virtues for everyone - actually a lesson learned again and again in the 20th century in particular - so if we want these values to be adopted, we must find another way. The stakes around getting this right have never been higher. (It would have been nice to have gotten this right in 2015 or so, but here we are.)

People, in general, want convenience from their technology, not morality. So instead of building a more ethical version of the past, we need to build a more suitable version of the future. It turns out that data silos have left room for plenty of innovation here: how many people send emails to themselves to save a note, or have had trouble AirDropping to an Android phone? Why do I have to download WhatsApp to talk to my friends in the UK? There are lots of tiny inconveniences that would be made better with openness and a user-centered model.

The same is true of online communities. An artists' community has radically different needs to an activism community, yet on the silos they're shoehorned into the same interface and set of features. Communities for people with restricted vision or motion might perhaps be the most obvious example: why should they have to struggle to use interfaces designed for others? Or better put, why can't they have an internet experience designed for them? A federated galaxy of community platforms, tailored for the specific human communities that use them and linked by Google-like sites that facilitate discovery, would be a more functional internet for many people, and would also decentralize the social web. Over time, discovery could be decentralized, too.

Whatever we're building, we never absolve ourselves from the need to understand our users as people and meet their needs. We might have our own values that we want to convey - software as polemic - but we can't simply inject them into the status quo. We've got to use our values, our intuition, and our understanding of the people we're building our software for to build something new that serves its purpose better than anything that has come before it. That, and nothing less, is the job.

I'd love to see more of you blog.

A friend of mine recently asked me how I write so much: to him, writing was a daunting task involving staring at a blank screen while he overcame his fear of revealing his inner thoughts. I guess, for me, what it comes down to is that I've lost any fear of looking stupid, mostly through enough repetitive practice of absolutely being stupid online.

Writing is a muscle. Imagine running for the first time: that first run is painful, halting. But once you've done it for a week, it's a little bit easier. A month: easier still. And once you've done it for years, it's like second nature. A part of you. I've been blogging since 1998; at this point, it's just a part of me.

Imagine what the internet would be like if everyone shared how they thought about the world, commercial value be damned. I don't buy the idea that only some people have thoughts worth reading (if I did, I wouldn't be writing this, because I'd almost certainly not be among that group). Everyone has something of value to contribute to our cumulative human experience.

What I get in return is that I feel less alone. When you put yourself out there, and are honest, you tend to find like-minded people, or people who have some honest reaction to your ideas. If you put up a wall, the most people can react to is that façade. So it's best to be you. As it happens, every single meaningful career acceleration I've ever had can be connected back to my blogging. More importantly, I've made a bunch of friends.

So, I think you should blog, too. It doesn't matter where. WordPress, Ghost, Medium, Where.as, Micro.blog, Where.as, Substack, a public Notion page - wherever is comfortable for you. (I co-founded a platform called Known, which I happily still use, mostly for the satisfaction of working with something I helped make.)

And then you should tell me about it. And tell the world. I want to read what you think, and the world does too. We're all richer for sharing out human experiences together.

A couple of years ago, I realized I wasn't reading books anymore. I was reading a ton - mostly stuff on the web - but I hadn't managed to physically open a book and read it cover to cover. I was ashamed, and immediately made a resolution: that year, I would read fifty books.

It was obviously an arbitrary number: more or less one or week, with room for a little bit of slippage. But having that North Star meant that I read more eclectically and adventurously, and although I didn't quite hit fifty, I read an order of magnitude more than I had the previous year, discovering a host of authors in the process. (Incidentally, this effort was also the origin of my reading roundups every month, which I've also found to be useful retrospectives.)

2020 was a mess, and no more needs to be said about that. Most of the books I "read" were audiobooks, via Libro.fm, which largely replaced my podcast listening. It was hard, for most of the year, to bring my brain to a calm enough place to read words on a page at length.

This year, though, I've decided to revive my 50-book goal. I have a different reason: too often, the last thing I look at when I go to bed is a screen. My intention is to build the very normal and common habit of reading a book before going to sleep, instead of, for example, falling down a web rabbithole or checking Twitter. And I miss the eclectic, long-form thinking that can only be found in books.

It's rare that I'm able to get into a business book: these often feel like overlong blog posts that have been padded out for the prestige of having a publication under the author's belt. Some people pride themselves on only reading these, but I think this limitation forces you to miss out on the wealth of human experience. Fiction is more than a diversion; it's an experimental playground for empathy and human thought. It's weird to me that some people have a stigma around it. Conversely, I don't want to lock myself off from reading business books, and there's certainly a lot to learn. I just think that if something could be a blog post, it should be.

My mother is also an avid reader. Largely confined to her bed, she devours books on her Kindle (because the font size can be increased to satisfy her failing eyesight) and on Audible. Sometimes, when she's stuck in dialysis or having a particularly bad day, my sister will FaceTime her and read to her over a call. When she's done, she records her review in one of those hardback notebooks filled with close-lined paper, and moves immediately onto the next one.

I also feel the need to record what I've read, with some kind of a brief review of how I found it. My equivalent of a notebook is Notion, which I already use to keep track of my bookmarks. I've altered my reading database to keep track of books now, too. It's occurred to me to write a Known plugin to keep track of my reading on this website, and maybe I will, but this seemed like the fastest path to getting into a good habit. Notion has good data exports, and an API is finally coming, so I feel confident I can move my data elsewhere if I ever need or want to. Once the Notion API is out, I'm thinking I'll wire it up to Known as a linkblog, so people who are interested enough can follow my reading as I record it.

I'm also going to post on Goodreads. Although it's getting long in the tooth, and it's controversially retiring its API, it's where a lot of people share their reading and discover new books. So I'll be using that for the time being, mostly so I can discover new titles to read from my friends. Although Goodreads is owned by Amazon, I buy all my books using Bookshop, to avoid giving them any serious money (and to support local booksellers). For now, I'm telling myself that this is an acceptable compromise.

The books themselves? Mostly on paper. My Kindle has been unused for years, and I'm honestly not sure if it even works anymore. And I like the feel of reading a paper book. I realize how selfish this is: billions of trees are cut down to make books, and the environmental impact is non-trivial. The environmental impact of an e-reader is also non-trivial, but as long as you don't upgrade it every year and read 30-40 books a year, you break even. So although one of my goals is to get away from ending each day looking at a screen, I think I need to find a non-DRM encumbered reader with an e-ink screen that I can keep for years, and switch to that. If you're using one, I'd love to hear your recommendations.

Of course, the most important question is: what are you reading? What books have stood out to you that you think I should check out? In all these layers of technology - as with the internet itself - the only things that really matter are the words and ideas, and the authors behind them. I'd love to hear your recommendations.

 Photo by Ben White on Unsplash.