Ben Werdmuller

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for the final month of the hell-year.

Books

Intimations, by Zadie Smith. Six personal, revealing essays about living in the pandemic. Real; insightful; human.

The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury. A classic, of course, but new to me. I love the way he melds a very folksy, warm linguistic approach with mind-bending, often horrifying ideas.

Streaming

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Anchored by two astonishing performances, this does feel like a filmed play rather than a movie in itself, but is no worse for it. Chadwick Boseman is remarkable; Viola Davis's complete transformation even more so.

Soul. Just about as good a movie as Pixar has ever made - which is to say, it's very good indeed. I'm not sure what kids get out of it, but the themes of parenting and what it means to really live come through loud and clear.

Notable Articles

Business

Corporate Reporting in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. “Company managers specifically consider machine readers, as well as humans, when preparing disclosures.” An interesting new world, where human-readable articles are actually designed for artificial intelligence readers, approaches. SEO was our first toe-dip. Now it's maybe just Robot Reader Optimization?

Investing in Moov: Open Source Financial Services Building Blocks. I really like this approach. Open source + a modular structure will empower just about everyone in the financial services ecosystem, and in turn makes Moov a good investment.

How This CEO Creates an Internal Culture With a “Crazy Focus” on Good Storytelling. "When we have communication issues within the company or with our customers and prospects, it all comes back to the fact that we didn't spend enough time trying to understand the story." I love everything about this.

Death of an Open Source Business Model. I've spent a huge amount of my career - well over a decade - on open source businesses. This all rings true to me, and is an important reminder (unfortunately).

Big Tech risks big fines, and even break-up, under Europe's new content and antitrust rules. I’m not against it.

The Making of a Dumpster Fire. Now this is marketing.

Czech Startup Founders Turn Billionaires Without VC Help. I like this a lot. I use JetBrains personally, but had no idea that this was how the company was built. Inspiring.

Culture

Andrew Bird’s Cozy Melancholy. Andrew Bird is the absolute best.

Why Is Publishing So White?. “There’s a correlation between the number of people of color who work in publishing and the number of books that are published by authors of color.” Which is shown clearly in this very revealing, well-presented data.

Whatever Happened to ______ ?. “There are studies showing that some men “feel insecure” — to put it mildly, and possibly euphemistically — when a woman earns more than her male spouse. What those articles aren’t saying is that a woman’s life may be in danger if she outpaces a male partner in her chosen career, tipping the scales away from tattered patriarchal mythology.” A sad, beautifully-written account of one such story in the arts.

every tv show I have binge-watched since march: part one. “My conclusion is that Buffy is a television show about a beautiful young queer witch named Willow trying and failing to leave her toxic hometown friend group, and the ways in which being unable to let go of the people we loved in our youth who are no longer able to have healthy relationships with us can warp us and turn us evil.”

Media

Mapping Black Media. “We’re offering a map and directory of nearly 300 community media outlets across the U.S. that primarily serve Black communities across the diaspora.”

Substack launches an RSS reader to organize all your newsletter subscriptions. Yes! I welcome new RSS readers with open arms.

A contentious local election revealed an information gap. High school reporters stepped up to fill it.. One of those heartwarming stories that is actually kind of dystopian - local news is vital for democracy - but still, I’m a big fan of this.

'I figured I'd give it a year': Arthur Sulzberger Jr on how the New York Times turned around. “Paul Goldberger, a longtime Times architecture critic and one of the paper’s wisest observers, said the most relevant description of Sulzberger Jr’s philosophy could be found in an Italian novel, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.””

True equity means ownership. "For far too long, newsroom leaders have been wringing their hands over how to serve Black and brown communities. How many diversity initiatives, recruitment efforts, and implicit-bias trainings do we have to endure without the follow-through?"

Why on Earth Is Someone Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts?. “Whoever the thief is, he or she knows how publishing works, and has mapped out the connections between authors and the constellation of agents, publishers and editors who would have access to their material.” Kind of fascinating as a mystery.

Politics

Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered months ago to sell the U.S. more vaccine doses.. "Before Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine was proved highly successful in clinical trials last month, the company offered the Trump administration the chance to lock in supplies beyond the 100 million doses the pharmaceutical maker agreed to sell the government as part of a $1.95 billion deal months ago."

Rejecting Opposition From Judiciary, House Passes Bill to Make PACER Free. "The U.S. House on Tuesday passed bipartisan legislation that would make PACER free for the public, handing a win to transparency advocates despite the federal judiciary’s opposition to the bill." Thinking of Aaron Swartz.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping: The Full(est Possible) Story. If you dig into it, the story gets no less remarkable and crazy.

Society

'Juno' Star Elliot Page Announces He Is Transgender. "Hi friends, I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot. I feel lucky to be writing this. To be here. To have arrived at this place in my life."

New report reveals alleged horrors of sex testings in international sports. Absolutely horrifying story, including forced operations.

'Nobody knows': Experts baffled by mystery illness in India. Extremely troubling.

The pandemic was already testing me. Then a man covered in Nazi tattoos showed up in my ER. “We all saw. The symbols of hate on his body outwardly and proudly announced his views. We all knew what he thought of us. How he valued our lives. But our job was to value his.”

Sharrows, the bicycle infrastructure that doesn’t work and nobody wants. I grew up cycling, and really wish I could feel safe doing it here. I just don't. I've known one person who sadly died in a cycling incident, and many more who have been seriously hurt. We need to take back our cities from cars.

How one woman is building the future for Google in Silicon Valley. I’d say it’s the other way around: one woman is building the future of Silicon Valley on behalf of Google. I’m excited to see this come to fruition, although I wish this kind of thing could be government-driven.

Texas Wedding Photographers Have Seen Some $#!+. "The photographer who got sick after shooting the COVID-positive groom said her experiences throughout the pandemic have left her a little depressed. She recalled one conversation from that wedding, before she left the reception. “I have children,” she told a bridesmaid, “What if my children die?” The bridesmaid responded, “I understand, but this is her wedding day.”"

Tax cuts for rich don't 'trickle down,' study of 18 countries finds. "Large tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality and don't fuel economic growth or cut unemployment, a new paper by academics from the London School of Economics and King's College London says." Ya don't say.

Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's. “Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.”

The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable. “The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence.” Just an absolute punch in the gut.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro. “Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world?” And she still seems to be neck-deep in his gravitational pull.

Technology

Web Conversations With the Year 2000. It’s funny because it’s true. I thought we’d be in such a different place.

Web Conversation From the Other Side. A more serious rewrite of Paul Ford’s other piece. Both are worth reading side by side.

Command Line Interface Guidelines. “These are what we consider to be the fundamental principles of good CLI design.” Well-researched and smartly presented.

How our data encodes systematic racism. “What is the difference between overpolicing in minority neighborhoods and the bias of the algorithm that sent officers there? What is the difference between a segregated school system and a discriminatory grading algorithm? Between a doctor who doesn’t listen and an algorithm that denies you a hospital bed?”

Social Networking 2.0. A vital piece about the future of the internet. It’s surreal seeing pieces in the more mainstream / less radical tech business sphere talking about things many of us were advocating over ten years ago. But I’m glad we got here.

Firefox Was Always Enough. I agree with all of this. I'm a die-hard Firefox user, for all the reasons that make Mozilla great, and none of the reasons that have caused it problems.

Wildfire smoke is loaded with microbes. Is that dangerous?. I worry about this: having been evacuated for a wildfire, and helping to care for a parent who had to have a lung transplant, this is a confluence of worries. (Filing this under “technology” because I don’t have a “science” category. I should fix this for next month.)

Zoom helped China suppress U.S. calls about Tiananmen, prosecutors allege. Horrendous.

Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian. "Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life."

Creating Decentralized Social Media Alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. A reasonable overview, although it necessarily skips out on some detail. This is where I’ve spent much of my career, and honestly, I’m eager to go back. The time is right.

Inside India’s booming dark data economy. “Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale.”

Taking a Fresh Look at APIs Across All the United States Federal Agencies. Super-interesting!

I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t write a reflective look back on this year.

This was a year of unprecedented deaths, racist police brutality, political turmoil, and the sheer misery of people all over the world losing their loved ones and finding their families torn apart. If we felt less than that, it was because of our privilege, not because it wasn't there.

I've got nothing glib to say; no "top 5 learnings"; nothing to soften the blow. It's been a terrible year, certainly, but I'd go further: it's been catastrophic, in the truest sense of that word.

I do have one hope for 2021, and it's this: I hope we don't pretend this never happened and carry on as before. When the pandemic is over - which it will, technically be, although its aftermath will continue for generations - I hope we continue to cut through the performative bullshit that was the hallmark of modern life in the before times, and that we all care about each other just a little bit more.

If there's one thing a world crippled by a highly infectious disease should have taught us, it's that we're all connected. How we treat each other matters. The quality of life of everyone matters. If we can internalize that lesson, deeply and truly, then maybe we can avoid the worst of this when it inevitably happens again. And it will certainly make for a better world for all of us.

My friend Carrie Tian, who works for Mailchimp, wrote aboout how their seasonal reading bingo board inspired her to create one for writing. I really love this: one of my goals for 2021 is to write a great deal more, building on the progress I made this year, and this feels like a great way to push me outside of my comfort zone.

She was kind enough to share a template, so here's mine:

Each of these squares is designed to push me a little bit. Each column has a slightly different theme:

1: Short stories in different styles and genres

2: Non-fiction essays that go a little deeper, sometimes into uncomfortable topics

3: Different media (audio, code, visual arts, multi-part email)

4-5: Novel, with some explorations into style and expression

Like Carrie, I'm doing blackout bingo and attempting to fill every square in 2021. As ever, I'll update this space with my progress.

I vividly remember my first day on the internet. I was sat in my teenage bedroom, staring at a bulky cathode ray tube monitor, which my dad had surrounded with spider plants in order to hopefully absorb some electromagnetic radiation. My 14.4K modem connected - loudly and slowly - to an Internet Service Provider that my mother was testing out as part of her job as a telecommunications analyst. I was already using Bulletin Board Systems and had participated in conversations on FidoNet, but this was something new.

Instead of flashy websites or apps, my first internet experience took place in a black terminal window with monotype text and a maximum width of 80 characters. There were no links, no movies, and no startups. I didn't have a connection resembling broadband, and there was no WiFi. My only guide was a location called Gopher Jewels with a menu of places I could visit.

I visited a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University, thousands of miles away from my bedroom. It told me its temperature and whether I could buy a Coke, and I still remember how it made me felt. It seems mundane, perhaps, today - but in a way, that made it cooler. I wasn't reading a speech by the President of the United States. I was connecting to a Coke machine on another continent, probably in some dusty corridor somewhere. It was like speaking to a hatstand in Antarctica; absolute magic.

Not long afterwards, I downloaded a software application called NCSA Mosaic. It let you browse something called the World Wide Web, which was kind of like Gopher, but easier to use and write content for. A developer called Marc Andreessen had proposed a new extension that allowed you to share and view inline images, which was exciting, and allowed for a new kind of experience: watching a live photo of a coffee machine at Cambridge University. Cambridge was really just down the road, but like the Coke machine, it still felt like magic. I was able to travel through space and time.

The internet wasn't about making money. It was always about sharing knowledge and connecting to people. It had its problems - notably exclusivity of access - but I fell in love with it. It seemed like a glimpse into a beautiful new future, where anyone could connect to anyone and they could collaborate and learn from each other to create new kinds of art, culture, academic work, and scientific endeavor.

The 14 year old version of myself who connected to the early commercial internet was, himself, part of something that older users called the eternal September. Prior to 1993, the internet had been overwhelmingly dominated by universities: every September, new students rolled in, temporarily lowering the quality of discourse until they learned the etiquette of communicating online. Suddenly, commercial internet service providers arrived, and September never came to an end. There was an avalanche of new users (me among them) that just kept coming.

And then some. There were roughly 14 million internet users in 1993; there are around 4.7 billion today.

The growth curve of the internet is S-shaped, as you'd expect. It took a little while to pick up steam, then skyrocketed, before reaching relative saturation. The businesses that were lucky enough to tether themselves to the high-growth middle and could keep with the pace generated billions of dollars in wealth: the Googles and Facebooks of the world were certainly filled with skilled, ambitious people, but they were also in the right place at the right time.

Which is how the internet became about making vast amounts of money. Startups could achieve enormous growth (and VC investment) just by placing a banner ad on the Yahoo homepage; Yahoo, in turn, could raise more money based on its ad growth. Meanwhile, the nature of the internet meant that businesses could grow to monopoly size faster than ever before, egged on by investors like Peter Thiel, who famously argued that competition is for losers.

This wave of unabashed capitalism washed away most of the utopian dreamers, replacing them with the kinds of bro-ey hustlers who would have worked in hedge funds if this had been the 1980s. Worse, their sudden riches came with sudden self-belief, as if the ability to make money building a website during a period of unprecedented growth somehow unlocked the secrets of the universe.

I'm not blameless: I've benefitted from this gold rush. I started my career working for universities, but Elgg, my first startup, raised a fairly modest half a million dollars after its first few, bootstrapped years. My salary at every subsequent job has been paid for, at least in part, by investor dollars. It's not, I feel compelled to point out, that investors are inherently bad: they empower a ton of really useful websites and communities to exist. It's that the Wall Street startup bros who swarm around them are no fun at all to be around, and that the investor-powered web shouldn't be the whole internet.

I very badly want to return to that utopian sensibility: that something doesn't have to make money to have value. That doesn't mean I want to go back in time: the early internet was a predominantly white, male, wealthy platform that people mostly accessed by having been admitted to an elitist institution. I want an egalitarian internet: not just one where all voices can be heard, but where everyone can help to build the fabric of the platform. The true joy of the internet is that everyone builds it together. It has very little to do with engaging with someone's ad-powered social media website.

I've come to realize that I resent the expectation that everything I make has to be profitable. Sometimes, I just want to make: one of the coolest things about software, as with writing or art, is the way you can whip something up out of nothing. I want to see what other people make too, for no other reason that it's what moves them. It's not the revenue or the valuations that make the internet special; nor is it the protocols and technologies, at least not in themselves. It's the connections and the communities. The internet is people. The internet has always been people.

I can't exactly opt out of the commercial internet: I'm far from independently wealthy and need to earn money. Nor do I exactly want to. But I do want to remember that what excites me about the internet is the quirky creativity and connectedness of the diversity of human experience. It's about empowering people to connect and to be found, in a way that transcends the superficial. And it's about reclaiming the sense of magic I felt decades ago, when a magical vending machine in a dusty corridor changed my life forever.

I hope to maintain three streaks and turn them into habits:

Exercise every day. No exceptions, unless I'm really sick. I've done more regular exercise over the last year than I'd managed since I moved to California, but I'd like to make it more regular, for the good of my own health.

Write every day. It doesn't have to be a complete story or a full-length essay, but I need to get something down that I'd be willing to share on something other than social media. This doesn't explicitly mean I want to post to my website every day, but I'd like to try to do that, too.

Practice thankfulness. I want to find three things I'm grateful for before I go to sleep every night. Gratitude is important, but more than anything, it's about training myself to find small joys and call them out.

And one overarching theme:

Lose the rat race. I'm not here to hustle, gain followers, be a thought leader, build wealth, work myself to death, or rise to the top of the career ladder. I want to explore ideas, tinker with stuff, reflect, make bad art, and be human. In 2021 you'll probably see more eclectic stuff in this space as a result. Sorry / not sorry.

The most important thing in any team, product, company, or community is kindness. And with it, empathy. Any bias towards action, energy, or insight doesn't matter if you don't have that.

That's the post.

I believe in the independent web - which was born thirty years ago today - more than any other technology.

Earlier today, I shared an update with collaborators, advisors, and investors in Known. Here's what's up:

Recently, I filed paperwork to officially dissolve Known, Inc, the Delaware C-Corporation. It is expected that this will be complete by the end of the year. It was one of the most personally rewarding journeys of my life, and I’m grateful for every moment. But it’s long past time to shut down the company.

I’ve come to an arrangement where I will purchase all of the intellectual property currently held by Known, Inc. As well as source code, the name, websites, domain names, logos, etc, this includes the hosted service, which has not taken revenue or new users in years, but continues to support a modest number of bloggers. I will take more of a direct role in keeping that online, at least until there is a viable, self-serve offramp for users to move to other providers. I hope to work with the open source community to create this.

I’ll also spend more of my time working on the open source project. The rise of platforms like Substack - and Medium’s recent transformation - indicates a need for a platform for people to host their own content online. WordPress is a website builder with an ecommerce industry built around it; Ghost has become focused on corporate and commercial blogging; I’m excited for Known to be a more personal platform for hobbyists and enthusiasts.

Honestly, I’m also excited to work on it without any pressure to make money or find sustainability. Known will not be my job or a source of any income. In fact, I expect to donate more to the Open Collective monetarily as well as spending more of my time. I'm excited to concentrate on supporting the needs of the community.

(As well as import / export, my priorities include ditching Bootstrap, revisiting the interface, improving indieweb interoperability, and experimenting with how to better bring the principles of human-centered design into the open source development process. But that’ll be a conversation for elsewhere.)

Cross-posted to IndieNews.

Writing was my first love. It's still far and away the thing I most love to do. While a lot of people I know love technology on a deep level and nerd out on the intricacies of protocols and stacks, I got into this game to tell stories. I'm excited by choices of words and narrative structure. In the process, I've learned to love technology too, but it's always been secondary. Technology is the medium; stories are the message.

It's been a rough year for everyone. For me, 2020 has come at the end of a handful of really rough years. In 2019, I spent eleven weeks by my mother's hospital bed. In 2018, the job of my dreams laid me off and it was overwhelmingly likely that I had a terminal, genetic disease. In 2016, the country I grew up in voted to not allow me to live there anymore. I've been living in a maelstrom of grief and stress for quite a while.

So I decided I needed a gift for myself. This year, despite a demanding job and the need to help care for my mother, I decided I was going to allow myself to spend time on writing. I enrolled myself in some workshops, two writing classes, and a competition.

To my surprise, I'm through to the finalist round of the competition. The feedback I've received from my writing class has been constructive and positive. I thought I was giving myself space to do something I love - and I was. But it also gave me a rush of confidence that I didn't anticipate. I'm a more confident writer as a result.

In 2021, I've lined up my second of two classes. I've also built up enough of a body of short story work to submit for publication. These will not be my first-ever submissions, nor my first publications, but I'm confident that I'm a better writer than I was in January. And my goal by the end of 2021 will be to complete my first novel.

Most of all, I'm happy to have embraced my meandering, creative interests. I'm in awe of people who go deep on their love of technology, but that isn't me. I've accepted that, and am confidently moving in a slightly different direction.

NiemanLab just released its predictions for journalism 2021. I was delighted to be asked to contribute. My piece is about the open web:

“In place of the monolithic super-platforms that were the hallmark of using the internet over the last decade, we’ll see smaller, independent publications and websites that address the needs of their communities more closely.”

Read the full piece here - and don't forget to check out the whole set.

Over on Twitter, Andy Sparks asked repeat founders what they wished they knew at the beginning of their first company. It's a great question. I've co-founded two startups and been the first employee at a few more. In particular, I knew nothing at the beginning of the first one. It's all been a learning curve since then.

Here are my answers, which will hopefully help a first-time founder or two get up and running a little faster:

Execution is everything, so every founder must bring a concrete skill to the table. Everyone must have something they can do for the company on an ongoing basis. A lot of people think it's enough to have a great idea. It's not: it's all about how you execute on that idea. If there's a founder who doesn't have a meaningful way of rolling up their sleeves and bringing your collective vision to life, they're dead weight. Examples of a meaningful skill: engineering, design, marketing, sales. Examples of a meaningless attribute: having an MBA, wanting to be the boss, being a scrum master.

And because execution is everything, don't outsource it. Your technical skillset should be in-house. So should your design, sales, and marketing. You don't want to lose that expertise or have it locked up in a contracting organization. If your founding team isn't able to rise to these tasks, fix that first.

Your co-founder is your partner. Like any lifelong relationship, you need to choose wisely. Forget how you interact at the best of times; how do you get along when things are going badly?

Every member of your early team is a co-founder. Whether in name or not, every single person you hire is an entrepreneur. Treat them as such - and only hire people you would trust to operate in that capacity. That includes their skillset, but also their demeanor. How do they cope with risk? Can they disagree without fighting with each other? Human dynamics are the most important part of any business (and any community).

As a founding team, your job is to de-risk the business. Constantly. That means with respect to whether people want what you're making; whether it can be a viable business; whether you can build it in a scalable way with the time, team, and resources potentially at your disposal. If you run out of money, you're adding risk. If you don't have a product, you've added risk. If you're building something you don't know if people want, you're adding risk. Understand your risks and continually bring them down to as close to zero as possible.

Culture is key. Set it early. Culture is a set of norms that define how you think about problems, look after your colleagues, and collaborate at work. It can't be an afterthought. A company with a sales-orientated culture will be able to solve different problems to one with an introspective, design-orientated culture, and will attract different kinds of people. Culture also defines how inclusive you are, and what kind of behavior is tolerated at the workplace. As you grow, it will affect how the company solves problems in a scalable way: the founding team can't always build everything, so you need to make sure you're setting the groundwork for the right approach to be taken without you.

I vastly prefer teams with the following cultural attributes: human-centered rather than building problems without understanding their user deeply; introspective and collaborative rather than extroverted and competitive; inclusive and empathetic; a no-blame ethos that encourages failure and quickly accepts when a tactic isn't working. Aggressive, overwhelmingly male workplaces are not the place for me, and it's never the kind of organization I seek to build.

The price of blind, positive thinking is death. You have to acknowledge evidence. If you ignore it because your beautiful idea just has to work - well, you're basically dead already. Conversely, you have to be guarded against being dissuaded without evidence, too. Your smarts, creativity, and experience are important, but can't operate in a vacuum. Get data and act on it.

Focus intently on what makes you special. There are so many things that go into running a startup - from the legalities of forming a business and raising money to orchestrating servers and building product - that you shouldn't try and do it all from scratch. Don't off-road except for the stuff that really matters. Use off the shelf services; be a Delaware C-Corp (or PBC); don't build your own front-end framework or create your own database engine. Keep it simple, so that you can spend your time on the core service that sets you apart - and to make it easier for others who work with you. Investors need to do less diligence on a Delaware C Corp; if you use React rather than your home-spun framework, more developers will be able to get up and running faster; etc.

Throw out "if you build it, they will come". It's not about hunkering down and building something cool. It's about creating value through solving someone's problem really well, in a way that they probably could never have conceived.

Throw out the lean startup. Really. Qualitative learning and building deep relationships is far more important than false doors and statistical analysis. Technology is all about people. Get to know them well.

A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A hundred thousand dollars. If you want to build a venture-funded startup in particular, you'll need to make sure the market is worth billions of dollars. That doesn't mean you should try and take on the whole market on day one. A bunch of founders say their product is "for everyone" - and it doesn't work at all. How can you possibly sell to everyone? It's far more effective to pick a small, niche group, solve their needs, and grow from there.

Pay attention to sales cycles. Who is the customer? How do they buy? One startup I worked on aimed to help people run academic courses. One possible customer could have been universities - but you needed to sell to the procurement office and be evaluated for the next academic year. At its worst, the sales cycle was 18 months, by which time the startup could be dead. Meanwhile, people running private communities were unconstrained and could sign up at any time. Testing and selling was far faster, and within the scope of a cash-strapped early-stage startup.

Ignore hustle porn. Articles about venture funding and building venture funded businesses, including this one, are typically little more than junk food. Read them, but you're not absolved from making your own decisions. Every business is different, and stories are not always reality. Just like following an influencer's perfect life on Instagram, you may find that the details are different to what has been presented. Throw out the performative bullshit: you're here to build a business, not to look the part.

Photo by LagosTechie on Unsplash

I'm trying to spend some time to reflect on this absurd, terrible year, paying particular attention to my role in it, and the things I can control in the future.

Honestly, for much of the year, it's been a case of just trying to stay afloat: the cognitive load of the pandemic + helping to care for my terminally ill mother + a demanding full-time job + extracurricular academic study has often been overwhelming. I end my days exhausted, and I'm acutely aware of mistakes I've made in the course of my work - particularly over the last month. I have some apologies to make today.

All the more reason to proceed with intention.

For me, a large part of thinking about the future is finding ways to reduce that overwhelming cognitive load. I've been trying to do too much, in the midst of an unprecedented scenario. That has also affected my goals: I ended last year with the stated intention to become more politically active and help with the election, which didn't happen.

On the other hand, I wanted to spend more time on writing, and I did manage to achieve this, through taking courses and participating in competitions. I'm excited to take that forward next year - not for any productive reason, but because it gives me joy. In these times, joy is all-important. When things are hard or going badly, it's easy to be cynical or grumpy. I want to progress with empathy and joy.

I also, quietly, fell back in love with the internet. I'm not sure when it happened, but I find myself thinking about the possibilities again. There are so many ways to support communities, break down barriers, and create new opportunities. I'm still utterly sick of the people who see tech as little more than a payday and want to approach the industry like Wall Street - the hustlers and grifters - but I'm finding them to be easier to ignore.

Trump's decline has given me some peace, too. The day the results became apparent, I felt a sense of overwhelming calm that I'd forgotten I was capable of. This gives me some more capacity to actually be human.

I'm still sorting through everything that happened this year, both globally and personally. It will be some time before I'm able to sort out my goals for the next year. But these are interesting things to think about.

How are you thinking about next year? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I've been telling people for years how valuable Slack is, but I didn't own a single share. Alas.

Congratulations to everyone who gained from this acquisition. Slack is a great company that does things the right way: a revenue-based business that grew by providing genuine social value to the companies it served. And its twenty seven billion dollar sale price shows how much value there is to be gained from facilitating communities.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for November.

Books

Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. A sobering, intelligent take on America's unspoken caste system, comparing it to similar systems around the world. For me, the history of how the Nazis looked to America's treatment of its Black population was particularly shocking.

Streaming

The Undoing. You know, I was skeptical, but it worked out well. It's somewhere between absolutely trash TV and a gripping thriller. And I like creepy Hugh Grant way more than I like apparently-charming Hugh Grant.

The Flight Attendant. Fresh off The Big Bang Theory, which I consider to be easily the worst television show ever made, Kaley Cuoco redeems herself in this pulpy, funny, unsettling thriller. It reminded me a bit of Run. Definitely a guilty pleasure watch - but that's kind of what I needed.

Save Yourselves! I felt personally attacked. But this hipsters-are-oblivious-of-an-alien-invasion movie is more of a roast than a takedown, and is absolutely hilarious. Recommended.

Notable Articles

Business

Justice Department Files Antitrust Lawsuit Challenging Visa’s Planned Acquisition of Plaid. “Visa’s con­cerns about Plaid un­der­pinned its de­ci­sion to buy the com­pany and pay a large rev­enue mul­ti­ple for it, the law­suit al­leges. The gov­ern­ment said Visa’s CEO de­scribed the deal as an “in­sur­ance pol­icy” to neu­tral­ize a threat to the com­pa­ny’s debit busi­ness. The law­suit quoted an­other ex­ec­u­tive who in 2019 com­pared Plaid to an is­land “vol­cano” whose cur­rent ca­pa­bil­i­ties are just “the tip show­ing above the wa­ter” and warned that “[w]hat lies be­neath, though, is a mas­sive op­por­tu­nity—one that threat­ens Visa.””

Unexpected & Inevitable. “The investor hears it and at first they don’t believe you. “Nah,” they say, as they start to argue with you whether that’s the way the world really works. Then, after a beat or two, they go, “wait, you’re right.” And after another moment, they think “fuck, that’s the only way it can be.”” I agree with Eric: this is what investors are looking for. You have an insight about the world that most people don’t, and you’re uniquely equipped to capitalize on it.

Spotify to acquire Megaphone. Megaphone is the network formerly known as Panoply. Spotify seems to be single-handedly creating value in the podcast market right now, but Apple has been quietly making acquisitions - like to keep its own ecosystem competitive.

Apple’s Shifting Differentiation. I found this exploration of Apple’s chip strategy to be really interesting. “Instead the future is web apps, with all of the performance hurdles they entail, which is why, from Apple’s perspective, the A-series is arriving just in time. Figma in Electron may destroy your battery, but that destruction will take twice as long, if not more, with an A-series chip inside!”

Women-owned businesses are struggling. Stimulus could help.. "Women and people of color were shut out of much of the initial rounds of stimulus because the program was set up to work through commercial banks. Those who didn’t have an existing relationship with a commercial bank found it harder to access the funds. And because the money ran out quickly, it left many without a lifeline."

The Double Standard of Female CEOs Moving Fast and Breaking Things. “We hold our female CEOs to impossible standards while not holding their male counterparts to high enough ones.”

The privacy fight is heading to the office. “I don't think Americans believe in privacy universally. And it's not a constitutional right. It's like, we have a right to free speech, we have a right to bear arms, we don't have a right to privacy in our federal constitution.”

Google Pay relaunch transforms it into a full-fledged financial service. Of note: “Google has co-branded banking accounts coming up in 2021. The new service, called Plex, essentially allows banks to partner with Google and use Google Pay as their own direct banking app.”

How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism. "Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after another—hoping that its gamble would pay off before disaster struck." VCs are upset about this article, but honestly, to me, it rings true.

Secret Amazon Reports Expose Company Spying on Labor, Environmental Groups. "Dozens of leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements." Gross.

Hulu raises Live TV price to $65, matching YouTube TV’s latest price hike. Here’s what I can’t fathom: why people tolerate cable TV at all. Every time I dive into it, I regret it. It’s a morass of shitty ads and low-quality programs that shout at you.

Unilever NZ’s 1-year trial of a 4-day week. I'm very into this.

Culture

The Shape of a Story. A beautiful exploration of narrative plot, Moomins, allegory, and the purpose of story in navigating real-world challenges.

Zillow Surfing Is the Escape We All Need Right Now. Is it? Or is it another form of doomscrolling, searching for places we could never afford in aspiration of an unreachable life we were told we could have? Hey, I'm just asking questions here.

As ‘Doonesbury’ turns 50, Garry Trudeau picks his 10 defining strips. Doonesbury is by far the best syndicated cartoon strip. I'm a lifetime fan. I met Trudeau once, at the Edinburgh Book Festival; we talked about Asterix. Lovely man.

Who’s in the Crossword? I loved this: a data-driven exploration of representation in crossword clues, with insight into how they’re produced.

Media

Confusion at BBC as boss says staff can attend Pride marches after all. “He told staff on Friday morning they would still be allowed to attend LGBT Pride marches, providing they remained celebratory and individuals were not seen to be taking a stand on any “politicised or contested issues”.” This is a ridiculous stance.

Google funds mouthpiece of Rwandan regime. “The worst case scenario for the NGO representative, however, is that „Google is signalling that it is funding repression and supports the muzzling of free speech, the closing of political space in Rwanda and attacks on political opponents and human rights defenders.“”

Travel influencers are being paid to whitewash authoritarian regimes. “Uncritically spreading political propaganda is unethical under all circumstances and especially in the form of branded content, where the lines are very blurry, and the audience might therefore not recognize it as such.”

How a crop of startups are trying to make for-profit local news work. "Evan Smith, the CEO of the Texas Tribune, said that when launching the local politics driven news site more than a decade ago, “We decided that for-profit was a non starter and that the market had failed.”"

News publishers dial up the marketing heat on their subscription products. Subscriptions are far better than advertising as a support mechanism. And news sustainability is deeply important.

Yes, Product Thinking Can Save Journalism. Six Reasons Why News Media Need Product Thinkers. "Knight Lab’s series on product thinking in media started with a question: “Journalism Has Been Disrupted. Can Product Thinking Save It?” After more than 25 years in digital publishing -- and as the editor for the series -- I think the answer is “Yes.”"

Politics

How a C.I.A. Coverup Targeted a Whistle-blower. “The C.I.A. has corrupted F.B.I. agents to violate basic rules as to how the Department of Justice does criminal prosecutions.”

Uber and Lyft had an edge in the Prop 22 fight: their apps. “In the weeks leading up to Election Day, the companies used their respective apps to bombard riders and drivers with messages urging them to vote for Prop 22, the ballot measure.” Let’s please make this illegal.

Evidence suggests several state Senate candidates were plants funded by dark money. Just one of a litany of dirty tricks used in this election.

I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now. “Ha ha ha, they lede, who’s going to tell him? Bitch, who’s going to tell you? An illegitimate leader has got all the guns and 40% of your population is down to use them. And y’all got jokes.”

We Need Election Results Everyone Can Believe In. Here’s How.. Smart suggestions for improving trust in our elections (undercutting the kind of FUD we’ve seen this month).

Trump races to weaken environmental and worker protections before January 20. Actively ghoulish.

Society

Why is Covid-19 is killing more men than women in middle age? Scientists are looking for answers not only in underlying health risks but also in biological and external factors. “Over­all, how­ever, men make up about 54% of U.S. deaths, and a sig­nif­i­cantly higher por­tion in mid­dle age. The death-cer­tifi­cate data through late Oc­to­ber show men make up nearly 66% of more than 42,000 Covid-19 deaths oc­cur­ring among peo­ple be­tween their mid-30s and mid-60s.”

Americans, Stop Being Ashamed of Weakness. "Too often in America, we are ashamed of being weak, vulnerable, dependent. We tend to hide our shame. We stay away. We isolate ourselves, rather than show our weakness."

Kamala Harris will be the first HBCU grad in the White House. “It’s not just about her being a Black woman. It’s about her being more than that, the intersectionality of who she is.”

Living With a QAnon Family as the Prophecy Crashes Down. “They’re treating it like there’s going to be an apocalypse — no matter who wins.”

Florida passes $15 minimum wage, a hike that could narrow the gender pay gap. Two important facts here: if a higher minimum wage can be passed in Florida, it can be passed just about anywhere. And it will disproportionately help women and people of color.

The new normal: Women and LGBTQ+ people are buying guns in 2020. “Although there is no official demographic breakdown of gun sales by race or gender, interviews with the gun community — new owners, sales people, analysts and activists — reveal a mounting anxiety among women and LGBTQ+ people, particularly those of color. And some are choosing to arm themselves for the first time.”

Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?. “The short summary of what I will discuss below is that Americans suffer higher death rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare mean Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.”

Performative philanthropy and the cost of silence. "Days after joining the Criminal Justice Reform department, I was warned by a senior member of the team that I should avoid pushing for grantmaking strategies that centered racial equity, as Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan did not believe race was relevant to the issue of mass incarceration. I was told that previous attempts to educate the couple on this matter had contributed to a former employee being terminated."

Less screen time and more sleep critical for preventing depression. "A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of data from the UK Biobank, involving almost 85,000 people, has found that lifestyle factors such as less screen time, adequate sleep, a better-quality diet, and physical activity strongly impact depression." Also, water is wet.

Federal government to execute first woman since 1953. It was a heinous crime, but the death penalty is a disgusting, brutal practice that is not befitting of a supposed democracy.

A dinner party killed my Dad. Please stay safe this Thanksgiving.

AMA: Racism is a threat to public health. “The AMA recognizes that racism negatively impacts and exacerbates health inequities among historically marginalized communities. Without systemic and structural-level change, health inequities will continue to exist, and the overall health of the nation will suffer.”

Period poverty: Scotland first in world to make period products free. I miss living in a progressive nation.

Technology

I became an unwanted woman in tech.“There is something innately different now about my words. They’ve not changed, but their context has entirely shifted. It’s as though I walk around now with a badge that invites dismissal and disrespect. That badge is called womanhood.”

Roam: My New Favorite Software Product. I have a Roam account but I haven’t made it work for me yet. Articles like this make me want to try harder to get on the bandwagon.

A new way to plug a human brain into a computer: Via veins. Do not want. (But future iterations might be more interesting / palatable.)

DHS Buying Cellphone Geolocation Data To Track People. "The Department of Homeland Security is purchasing consumer cellphone data that allows authorities to track immigrants trying to cross the southern border, which privacy advocates say could lead to a vast “surveillance partnership” between the government and private corporations." Hands up if you're surprised.

User Stories Not Wireframes. "User stories provide the context of what a wireframe is for. When you give user stories to a developer, you greatly increase the chances they will be thoughtful about the product and features they are implementing. When they understand the bigger picture — who is this for, what are they trying to accomplish and why are they trying to accomplish it — they can take ownership over the project."

Product Hunt requirements document. A wonderfully concise example of what a good requirements document can look like.

HP ends its customers' lives. There's a reason why the free software movement started with printer drivers. It's mind-boggling to me how HP can continue to be so antagonistic to their customers. (Inkjet printers are the worst deal in technology.)

What using AT&T’s 768kbps DSL is like in 2020—yes, it’s awful. A reminder that if you’re serving all of America, you can’t assume a high-quality broadband connection.

Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro. I’m waiting for version 2, but this is super cool.

Your Computer Isn't Yours. "This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city."

Parler, Backed by Mercer Family, Makes Play for Conservatives Mad at Facebook, Twitter. Bleuch.

How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet. I’m not a gamer, so I was late to Discord. But it does feel like part of the future of online communities.

The iOS COVID-19 app ecosystem has become a privacy minefield. “It's hard to justify why a lot of these apps would need your constant location, your microphone, your photo library.” Relatively few of these apps use the comparatively privacy-protecting APIs developed by Apple and Google.

How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps. “A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people's personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.” This is spectacularly not okay.

We Need Mandatory Enduser APIs for Social and Search Systems. This is an older piece (from 2018) but it still holds up, and I agree with it completely.

As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever. It feels like this problem has been solved lots of times over on the internet - but it's both a huge problem and a real opportunity for the right startup.

How a young, queer Asian-American businesswoman is rethinking user safety at Twitter. “Su's goals sit at the heart of what could become a very different Twitter one day, if — and it remains a very big conditional — the company is serious about the changes it's been signaling over the last year.” Fingers crossed.

Rock-star programmer: Rivers Cuomo finds meaning in coding. The only time "rock star programmer" is an acceptable phrase.

The Secrets of Monkey Island's Source Code. A deep look into assets and code behind my favorite game of all time.

‘Tokenized’: Inside Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase. “One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees.”

Building your own website is cool again, and it's changing the whole internet. All hail the indieweb. I’m here for it.

I remember the day I realized who I wanted to be very clearly. I was sat in the Matter San Francisco garage, watching a panel of entrepreneurs from previous cohorts give advice to the current set of six startups who were about to graduate from the program. As I listened to the advice from the sidelines, as a member of the Matter team rather than a founder, an overwhelming sadness began to take hold.

It shouldn't have: Matter was a dream job that allowed me to support a particular kind of mission-driven startup founder. I loved every minute of it. But at my core, there was a part of me that missed building. Through supporting these 75 companies, I understood the mistakes I'd made more deeply, and knew I could do better next time.

I also knew myself better than I had the two times I'd been a co-founder. The truth is, I have a problem with authority: I hate being told what to do, and I'm not interested in perpetuating existing hierarchies. Starting my own businesses has been a way to create a working environment that's mine and mine alone, in a way that being an employee or a contractor never could be. I get to set the culture; I get to set the mission. It's a very individualist way of looking at work, but I'm not sure I can be different. Establishing a protective bubble that allows me to think in the way I need to has been important. It's a double-edged sword: external accountability also turns out to be important, and is harder to come by when you work for yourself.

I didn't go out and become a founder again. Instead, I've found a way to give myself creative space by working on side projects, which are never businesses and sometimes have nothing to do with technology at all. That doesn't mean I won't eventually start something new, but it takes the emotional pressure off a little. I get to work on something that's entirely mine, on my own time, with nobody telling me I should do it a different way, and without the pressure of it having to raise money or be self-sustaining. I've found it to be a very good balance, and it often helps my day job work.

Ultimately, the reasons I felt misgivings during the Matter panel were tied up in my identity. I am a founder: I make things using effort and creativity. That's not a million miles away from being an artist. But it's very different to being someone who has spent a long time going deep on a single career path serving other peoples' businesses. That might be where I am, but it's not how I see myself, and it doesn't cut to the core of the work I do. I've learned I'd rather earn half as much money to have twice as much freedom.

I've found it useful to bring that attitude to work. I'm in service of a mission that I've bought into, but take a critical eye to the vision and strategy. Is it the right thing for the people I want to help? Is it meaningful to work on? Is it intellectually honest? Going in and treating the company as if it was my startup to shape by definition means I'm unlikely to go with the flow, for better or worse.

I suspect most founders are the same.

As many of you know, I spent a couple of years as west coast Director of Investments at Matter, an early-stage startup accelerator supporting entrepreneurs with the potential to create a more informed, inclusive, and empathetic society. Before I worked there, I went through the program as the co-founder of Known. It's a community I still care deeply about and keep in touch with as much as I can.

It's the weekend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and I thought I would round up some of the deals being offered by some of these companies. These aren't affiliate links, nobody asked me to write this, and I don't gain anything from promoting them, although I do have a small amount of carry in Matter's second fund.

Creative Action Network is offering 21% off and free shipping on orders of $50 or more. They work with independent artists to create campaigns for great causes like EarthJustice, the Dream Corps and Sunrise Movement. I have a bunch of their stuff. Read more.

Aconite's beautiful iOS HoloVista game is on sale for $2.99. NME called it an intoxicating journey to another world. Star, Nadya, and their team have created an incredible experience unlike anything I've played before. Check it out.

Motherly is running a Black Friday sale in its store. Motherly is a lifestyle brand for modern women who choose to be parents. Its store contains some lovely, comforting items for parents of both babies and children, including 20% off a SNOO sleeper.

Also:

It's not on sale, but KweliTV is a low price every month. It's a streaming service for global black stories that have not received the distribution they deserved, available for your smart TV platform of choice. I'm a subscriber and you should be too.

Build great things by understanding people really well and serving their needs deeply, not treating them as anonymous numbers on a spreadsheet and turning knobs to see what moves the needle in the way you want.

That's it. That's the post.

I was awake in the early hours of the morning, staring at nothing, my heart racing. It was a bit like The Queen's Gambit, except instead of a chessboard on the ceiling, there was a kanban board, with a huge backlog of things I knew I'd failed to do.

This morning, I got up, turned my ceiling kanban board into a real one in Notion, and got to work. The world feels more manageable in the cold light of day. I'm making progress.

I'm not sure how to deal with the things that don't quite fit on a task list. You can't drag life from column to column or build it into a database. You've got to live it. Or at least, that's what I've always thought.

I'm more of an intuitive thinker than a planner. I always have been. I go off-recipe when I cook; I meander when I travel; I play with my code. Sometimes it works out and I discover things I never would have encountered otherwise; sometimes it doesn't, and I find myself in a mess of my own making. But I've started to write scripts for the hard stuff, and to my horror, it really helps.

I was stressed out about having to give difficult feedback to a colleague, but I wrote out what I was going to say ahead of time in detail, and it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be. I had to spend a day cold calling customers - an introvert's worst nightmare - but having my script in front of me meant my numbers were startlingly high.

Perhaps the most important thing is that writing the script is a way to cut through the fear. Getting something down in writing works: it's a step in the right direction. Then comes editing, and iteration. Which is far better than staring at the ceiling at 3am beating yourself up for being behind.

I want to unlearn the definition of "disruption".

Disruption in the Clayton Christensen sense is all about removing an incumbent business from its perch by reaching an audience it has overlooked and growing from there. It's about building a business by out-competing another business. As far as business goes, it's good strategy, but it doesn't do much to change the status quo. You may have out-innovated someone else's company, but the rules of business remain in place.

The thing is, the rules of business aren't working. The systems we have in place depend on outrageous inequality and are enforced by police who gun down people in the street with relative impunity. They incentivize keeping millions of people homeless so that others can grow wealthier. They enforce a widening divide between people who are inside the system and people who are locked out in such a way that the only way to beat the system for your own well-being is to perpetuate it.

Originally, the web was a movement. It's hard to remember now, but allowing everyone to publish was a major social change; giving everyone a voice was a new idea that many people argued (and continue to argue) against. Previously, publishing was a privilege that was bestowed by a circle of predominantly white men. Now, any old riff-raff (or to put it another way, anyone regardless of whether or not they had received permission) could stick up a website and be read by millions. It was a revolution.

It was that revolution - not the ability to make money or the opportunity to create new businesses - that made me fall in love with the web.

Of course, what came next was hardly revolutionary. The existing gatekeepers fell, and were replaced with yet more gatekeepers, who used the global nature of the web to become bigger and more powerful than their predecessors. The excitement of empowering communities all over the world gave way to a wave of people who were excited about building bigger companies and generating more wealth than ever before. The incumbent structures were disrupted in favor of yet more of the same old business.

I want to return to that revolutionary spirit and reclaim the web's radical core.

That doesn't mean I want to turn back the clock. The web movement was, itself, predominantly white and male. As a direct outcome, it tended to overlook the abuse and systemic oppression overwhelmingly experienced by women, communities of color, and LGBTQIA+ communities. As a whole, it was Euro-centric and dismissive of the global south. It's not revolutionary if the same old faces are in charge: the only way the movement can succeed is through radical inclusion. Leadership must be open to people of all backgrounds and contexts; ownership of the process, as well as its outcomes, must be truly democratic.

But we badly need to get back to the business of disrupting global capitalism itself, in order to create something that truly works for everyone. To do so, we must be informed by the past, but ready to build something genuinely new. In the same way that allowing everyone to publish radically changed the cultural landscape forever, we need to change nothing less than who is allowed to be an owner of the processes that run the world. The flow of money; the flow of political power; the flow of permission. Speech was just the first step.

This North Star of real, radical change is the definition of disruption I want to be governed by. I want to help create a more democratic, more equal world, where authority is devolved to all of us. It's not about getting rich. It's about sharing power.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

The question is a trope of the modern age. We were promised flying cars half a century ago; where are they?

Every so often someone even tries to answer that question. Passenger drones, manned quadcopters, and even jetpacks have tried to bring this 1950s vision of the future to life.

The truth is, they're all doomed to fail. Flying cars are the modern equivalent of a faster horse. They're not what we really want. It's not the right question.

Go deeper. Ask why we want flying cars. To get there faster? Avoid traffic? Have a greater sense of freedom? Feel like we're living in the future?

If we find those questions and solve for them, we're likely to arrive at more interesting solutions. Less commuting; more geographic diversity; new kinds of mass transit; ideas we haven't conceived of yet.

It's a far more interesting, and more fruitful, way to look at the world. The science fiction of the past can give us hints about how we might solve these deeper needs, but they don't absolve us of having to discover them.

When she was twelve years old, my aunt escaped from the concentration camp where her mother and siblings were interned. She swam through the sewers, found food, and returned. My grandmother collected snails and cooked them out of sight of the Japanese guards. Around them, people were tortured and killed on a daily basis.

On paper, the Allies won the war. For my family, it continued to rage.

To this day, trauma has rippled from generation to generation. That simple act of ripping my aunts from their lives mid-education has led to cycles of poverty and misery that continue to this day. Some of my family, like my father, were able to break the cycle. Some were not. The recent history of my family runs the gamut from stability to crime and heroin addiction. At every end of the spectrum, a culture of anxiety - you've got to be safe; get an education because they can't take that away from you - underpinned every choice.

Joe Biden has won the Presidency. The cruelest policies of the Trump administration will likely come to an end; we will need to be vigilant and apply pressure so that the long tail of cruelty is replaced by a dogma of inclusion and care.

For some families, the effects of the Trump administration will be felt not just for years, but for generations. Family separation, willful mismanagement of the pandemic, and sanctioned police brutality have created centers of trauma that are difficult to escape from. These are Trump's victims. For them, regardless of the result of this election, Trump won.

They will need help to escape the cycle. We owe it to them because we did this to them. Regardless of their nationality or context, they are our responsibility.

The real work begins now. It starts by setting things right. And then we start to build the society we actually want.

We all know this, but today is life or death for a great many people. The stakes are sky high. I don’t know what will happen afterwards, but I do know I’ve been waiting for today for four very long years.

And I have hope.

If you're an American, you've been bombarded by messages urging you to vote. Over a hundred million people have already taken advantage of early and distance voting. If you're reading this and you have the right to vote in this election, you probably have. I have too.

So I'm not going to tell you to vote. It's too late for that.

My father is a concentration camp survivor. I remember my grandmother's nightmares. I see the generational ripples of trauma in my family that continue to this day. Trump's rhetoric of nationalist division has already created those ripples for an untold number of families. The caravans of armed supporters, the racist police brutality, the Blue Lives Matter flag as a fascist symbol - all of these things will grow into something worse if left unchecked. There is no way to support Trump in 2020 and not be a fascist. There is no way for Trump to win and not further transform America into a fascist country.

This is what's at stake. All we can do now is cross our fingers and see what happens.

This is my monthly roundup of the tech and media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for October.

This month I've changed my process a little: I save my links to a Notion database, export them at the end of the month, and convert them into a blog post using a small script. Instead of taking a couple of hours at the end of the month to put the post together, I save my thoughts on each link as I read it, and collation at the end (in iA Writer) takes much less time.

Streaming

The Queen's Gambit. A beautifully written, impeccably acted drama with gorgeous cinematography and superb attention to detail. I'm still working through it, but I can't recommend it enough.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. It's been pretty controversial, and it's often in hugely bad taste, but I found the broad humor at the expense of American bigotry to be cathartic. And yes, "that" Giuliani scene is everything it's been reported to be.

Seven Seconds. This new-to-me police drama based on a Russian movie is really well done: a story about police corruption and how our criminal justice system fails the people who need it the most.

Ted Lasso. Sure, it's ostensibly about sports, which isn't usually my thing. But it's also a really optimistic, funny comedy that mines a lot of humor from the cultural differences between the US and UK, which is really my thing. Very occasionally it goes broader than it needs to, particularly in its first few minutes, but there's something here for everyone.

Notable Articles

Business

How we built a $1m ARR SaaS startup. I’m always interested to read peoples’ journeys. This one is very clearly written, with lots to think about.

The end of the American internet. “80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA, there are more smartphone users in China than in the USA and western Europe combined, and the creation of venture-based startups has gone global.” This is a broadly good thing: the internet was always American-led, for better or for worse. As the platforms that dominate it become more internationally-based, it becomes less of a monoculture.

Why the Survival of the Airlines Depends on Frequent Flyer Programs. “The Financial Times pegs the value of Delta’s loyalty program at a whopping $26 billion, American Airlines at $24 billion, and United at $20 billion. All of these valuations are comfortably above the market capitalization of the airlines themselves — Delta is worth $19 billion, American $6 billion, and United $10 billion. In other words, if you take away the loyalty program, Delta’s real-world airline operation — with hundreds of planes, a world-beating maintenance operation, landing rights, brand recognition, and experienced executives — is worth roughly negative $7 billion.”

Facebook Just Forced Its Most Powerful Critics Offline. “The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the group’s website — realfacebookoversight.org — be taken offline.” Ridiculously petty.

How Clubhouse brought the culture war to Silicon Valley’s venture capital community. "I am convinced that most people in the tech world do not understand the role of a free media in a liberal society."

San Francisco Apartment Rents Crater Up to 31%, Most in U.S. During Covid. “One-bedroom rents in San Francisco fell 24% and two-bedrooms were down 21%, to $2,873 and $3,931 a month, respectively.” Still way too high.

How to Stay Sane While Working at Home. “Staying happy, healthy and productive requires effort when you’re working at home. This essay provides five suggestions for keeping things on an even keel.”

The warmth/competence matrix for women, from the West Wing to the workplace. "The warmth / competence matrix is a useful tool to optimize a leader’s influence in the workplace, especially during a crisis." I found this to be a fascinating insight into how women are stereotyped and held back at work.

U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly. “The Justice Department accused Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation.” The most significant lawsuit in the tech industry since Microsoft’s own antitrust suit. Whatever happens here, it will remake the internet industry forever.

Surveillance Startup Used Own Cameras to Harass Coworkers. "The big picture for me having worked at the company is that it has opened my eyes to how surveillance can be abused by the people in power."

Reviewing Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. “Competition driven by quality reflects what antitrust and net neutrality advocates want competition to look like — i.e. the better product wins, instead of whomever owns the pipes (or the channels). But that doesn’t mean it is what competition actually does look like, even on the internet.”

Culture

Correction by Hal Maclean. We regret the error.

Work, Float, Eat, Dream: Life on the International Space Station. “You need to become an extraterrestrial person.” First-hand descriptions of what it’s like to live on the ISS. What an adventure.

A Book Of Beasts – an accumulation of things. A very sweet modern bestiary.

Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts. “Remembering her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia.”

Inside Creative Growth, the Always Inspiring Oakland-Based Incubator For Artists With Disabilities. My friend Madelyn works at Creative Growth. As well as the insightful New Yorker profile, it’s fun to see examples of the art made there. This organization is a gem, and we need more like it.

How a Revered Studio for Artists with Disabilities Is Surviving at a Distance. “As their artists endure month after month of quarantine, Creative Growth faces an extreme version of the dilemmas that other arts organizations and educational institutions have struggled with during the pandemic: if your purpose is to foster the ideal conditions for learning and making things together, how do you proceed when those conditions are suddenly impossible?”

The return of Spitting Image shows how toothless British satire has become. When I was growing up, Spitting Image was an important part of the social landscape. The satire was biting. This modern reboot sounds rubbish. In life and comedy, the rule is: always punch up.

His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them. "Doctorow says that the intention of Attack Surface wasn’t to swing in the other direction on the spectrum between “nerd triumphalism” and “nerd despair,” as he puts it. Instead, it’s to find a more nuanced middle ground, one that acknowledges that technology can win some battles, but that others must be won with human willpower and political struggle, sometimes with the aim of controlling technology’s most dangerous applications."

Noelle Stevenson Shares Her Coming Out Story in an Original Comic. This is completely lovely on every level.

Easily Diminished at the Edges by Amanda Hollander. “Fay had expected many different emotions in the wake of the aliens arriving, but she had not anticipated the ennui.”

Shonda Rhimes Is Ready to "Own Her S***": The Game-Changing Showrunner on Leaving ABC, "Culture Shock" at Netflix and Overcoming Her Fears. “Shonda Rhimes was tired of the battles. She was producing some 70 hours of annual television in 256 territories; she was making tens of millions of dollars for herself and more than $2 billion for Disney, and still there were battles with ABC. They'd push, she'd push back. Over budget. Over content. Over an ad she and the stars of her series — Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder — made for then-presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.” A fascinating portrait of an inspiring creator.

About Face. A remarkable graphic essay about authoritarian cultural signifiers, conformity, and an alarming breakdown in American society.

WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars. The film that got me - and so many other people - into computing. It’s a fundamentally ethical, anti nuclear war film.

The NYT Best-Seller List Has an Awful Lot of Right-Wing Trump-Loving Conservative Authors. ... and they’re buying their way there. This is a bigger problem than political books, but it’s clear that conservative authors in particular are purchasing legitimacy.

Media

UK gov report links local newspaper circulation and voter turnout: Absence of journalism in some areas potentially 'catastrophic'. "Government -backed research has found that for every percentage point growth in a local daily newspaper’s circulation, electoral turnout on its patch goes up by 0.37 percentage points."

James Murdoch: Rebellious Scion. “A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact.”

Kat Downs Mulder named managing editor/digital of The Washington Post. It’s exciting to see a product leader take on this kind of role in media.

The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation. “Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies.”

Facebook Stymied Traffic to Left-Leaning News Outlets. “Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein expressed frustration with Facebook in a Twitter thread Friday, explaining that the loss of traffic had “real effects” on the organization. Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue, and couldn’t fill positions or pursue certain projects as a result, she said.” No single company should ever have this kind of power.

Climate news Trump can use. “The vast majority of news stories published about Biden’s climate plan since Thursday’s presidential debate have adopted the Trump campaign’s framing of the conflict. They focus solely on Trump’s attacks on Biden’s climate plan, and ignore the fact that Trump doesn’t have a climate plan at all.” Infuriating when so much is at stake.

Politics

‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes. “Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.” Seems like a normal thing that definitely happens in a democratic society.

Is America in Decline?. A fascinating discussion between J. Bradford DeLong and Om Malik on Pairagraph, which seems like an interesting platform for intellectual debates.

The Swamp That Trump Built. “An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.”

Don’t know any COVID-19 patients who’ve died or been in the hospital? That may explain a lot. “Other research suggests that a failure to embrace COVID-19 restrictions may be fueled by a lack of empathy, in the same way that someone in rural Pennsylvania may not view urban gun violence as an urgent problem, or that those without military family members may give less thought to the ongoing toll of combat.”

As Trump Flouts Safety Protocols, News Outlets Balk at Close Coverage. “Among the concerns raised by reporters: Many flight attendants and Secret Service agents on Air Force One have not worn masks; White House aides who tested positive for the coronavirus, or were potentially exposed, are returning to work before the end of a two-week quarantine; and the campaign has instituted few restrictions at the raucous rallies that Mr. Trump is now pledging to hold on a regular basis until Election Day.”

Inside the Fall of the CDC. “How the world’s greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus.”

HHS halts a taxpayer-funded advertising effort that aimed to ‘defeat despair, inspire hope’ on the pandemic by using Santa and celebrities like Dennis Quaid. The single most insane scandal of the Trump administration. I can’t stop laughing about it. Don’t miss the audio.

Judge cites Trump tweets in restricting feds at protests. “A federal judge found Friday that tweets by President Donald Trump helped incite improper conduct by federal officers responding to racial justice demonstrations in Portland, Oregon.” Finally.

Biden Camp Cancels Austin, Texas Event After Pro-Trump ‘Ambush’ on Campaign Bus. ““We’ve got you now,” the man shouted. “You’re going to vote for Trump whether you like it or not, you’ve got no choice.”” This whole account is genuinely frightening, not just in itself, but for the implications.

Society

Stay-at-home orders cut noise exposure nearly in half. “People’s exposure to environmental noise dropped nearly in half during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to University of Michigan researchers who analyzed data from the Apple Hearing Study.”

How Teens Handled Quarantine. “The percentage of teens who were depressed or lonely was actually lower in 2020 than in 2018, and the percentage who were unhappy or dissatisfied with life was only slightly higher.” It turns out that making kids go to school at ungodly hours has a negative effect. Who knew?

8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up. “The number of poor people has grown by eight million since May, according to researchers at Columbia University, after falling by four million at the pandemic’s start as a result of a $2 trillion emergency package known as the Cares Act.”

Megan Thee Stallion: Why I Speak Up for Black Women. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Black girls weren’t inundated with negative, sexist comments about Black women? If they were told instead of the many important things that we’ve achieved?”

Exam Surveillance Tools Monitor, Record Students During Tests. “On one occasion, I was ‘flagged’ for movement and obscuring my eyes. I have trichotillomania triggered by my anxiety, which is why my hand was near my face. Explaining this to my professor was nightmarish.” It’s absurd that students are so afraid that they’re not using their real names. Abolish surveillance - at school and everywhere.

The House on Blue Lick Road. I should probably start a “weird” category. Don’t miss this link.

'We are broken': Montana health care workers battle growing Covid outbreak. “If I have to stay late after working, if it means doing it on my day off. They're not going to pass alone on my unit. Again. None of them.” Healthcare workers are superheroes and I’m grateful for all of them.

Technology

What Working At Stripe Has Been Like. A pretty great summary of working for Stripe during a period of hypergrowth from Patrick McKenzie, who famously was a successful sole operator beforehand.

SpaceX Is Building a Military Rocket to Ship Weapons Anywhere in the World. "SpaceX and the Pentagon just signed a contract to jointly develop a new rocket that can launch into space and deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world — in just one hour." We should not be uncritically cheerleading for this company.

Cory Doctorow: ‘Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists’. "Technologists have failed to listen to non-technologists. In technological circles, there’s a quantitative fallacy that if you can’t do maths on it, you can just ignore it. And so you just incinerate the qualitative elements and do maths on the dubious quantitative residue that remains. This is how you get physicists designing models for reopening American schools – because they completely fail to take on board the possibility that students might engage in, say, drunken eyeball-licking parties, which completely trips up the models."

Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository. A really smart way to track changes to a website or dataset over time and commit it to git. The example, using fire data, is brilliant.

Data & Society — Good Intentions, Bad Inventions. “Lenhart and Owens break down 4 common “healthy tech” myths by explaining where they come from, what they obscure, and how we can move beyond them. Intended for those designing, developing, and regulating emerging technologies, the primer provides teams with fresh ideas for how to analyze and improve user well-being.”

When It Rains, Rotterdam’s Bikers Get To Go Through Lights Faster. “Now, when it starts to shower, the traffic lights prioritize cyclists so they don’t wait so long to cross. At the same time, car drivers need to wait a little longer, because they are inside and can stay dry.” I think this is the coolest thing.

Various first words. “The first characters sent on ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, by Charley Kline, 1969: lo – for “login,” but it crashed.”

How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier. An absolutely epic guide to the platform, with full instructions for every tip.

Something Awful, a Cornerstone of Internet Culture, Is Under New Ownership. It was (1) a hugely important source of early internet culture, (2) a cesspool.

50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong? “When I was a young scientist working on the fledgling creation that came to be known as the internet, the ethos that defined the culture we were building was characterized by words such as ethical, open, trusted, free, shared. None of us knew where our research would lead, but these words and principles were our beacon.”

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”. This is how I felt about The Social Dilemma, too. It’s an important problem that needs to be discussed. But I wouldn’t trust the people who claim to have the solutions here. Not at all.

Moxie Marlinspike Has a Plan to Reclaim Our Privacy. Moxie is a hero of mine, and Signal is one of the most important apps and projects on the internet. This portrait only increased my respect for him.

Animals Keep Evolving Into Crabs, Which Is Somewhat Disturbing. I’m ready.

Dutch Ethical Hacker Logs into Trump’s Twitter Account. The President of the United States had set his password to “maga2020!”

Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet. “Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple’s annual profits.”

Police are using facial recognition for minor crimes because they can. “Law enforcement is tapping the tech for low-level crimes like shoplifting, because there are no limits. But the tool often makes errors.”

I became an unwanted woman in tech. “There is something innately different now about my words. They’ve not changed, but their context has entirely shifted. It’s as though I walk around now with a badge that invites dismissal and disrespect. That badge is called womanhood.”

I took this week off so I could spend a little more time with my mother. Originally, it was also because I was in danger of burning out, and because I wanted to help get out the vote.

Today I was going to gently take her to the ocean - she can't walk far, but at least she could see the waves. It would have been a nice day for it.

Instead, this week she's had a medical procedure of some kind every single day, for five days running. She's about to have a multi-unit blood transfusion because her hemoglobin levels have plummeted. Afterwards, she'll likely want to sleep, in the same way she does after the dialysis sessions she has three times a week.

I'm very glad I'm here with my parents: I've been sheltering in place with them throughout the pandemic, which has allowed me to spend more time with them, and do what I can to help my dad, who is my mother's primary carer. This month alone events have included evacuating from a fire that miraculously stopped a block away from the house, and a mix of emergency and planned hospital visits. It's a lot, and I'm exhausted.

This is all quality time, but not the kind I was hoping for: there are fewer long talks, and far more feeding tube flushes and wound cleanings. I really hope it's not too late for those conversations. I'll be here regardless; I'm grateful for my family, and I'll take all the time I can get.

I could, however, use another vacation.

I've spent a few hours here and there over the last few months building a text adventure game.

I grew up with adventure games. The Secret of Monkey Island was foundational for me: an irreverent point and click story with an anarchic sense of humor that completely appealed to my twelve year old self. Slide across a telegraph wire using a rubber chicken with a pulley in  the middle? Sure. (Sorry for the spoiler.)

But long before SCUMM caught my imagination, I spent many hours with interactive fiction games written by companies like Infocom.

Douglas Adams was co-author of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game. (You can play a version of it on the BBC website.) It was every bit as funny and confounding as the books, and it worked because it was described entirely with prose.

Graham Nelson's Inform language is an expressive way to build these kinds of interactive fiction games. It's a programming language built for writers, which is fascinating in itself: you define the world using complete, declarative sentences. Emily Short in particular has done amazing work with the language, which is now on its seventh version.

And I thought I'd much around with it. It's a work in progress in the truest sense of the word; far more exploration than game. Almost every dream I have is set in a consistent universe, with a dream London, a dream Edinburgh, and so on, and I thought it would be fun to set it there.

For now, it lives at ben.lol, a domain name I bought for silly experiments, and should work on every browser. I'll keep playing around with it.

Let me know what you think!

Like many people, 2020 has creatively consumed me. It's hard to give your undivided attention to something, or put yourself in a truly creative flow, when so much is going on. The sheer onslaught of new information - some newly jaw-dropping story seems to be showing up four to six times a day - puts my brain in a reactive mode. Instead of being inventive and generative, I'm constantly aghast. I'm hopeful that it will be possible to re-find a sort of mental peace once the election has been and gone, but I'm also a realist. The pandemic will continue; the political clown show will continue; children have been permanently separated from their parents, creating an entire, lost Trump generation; we will not right all the wrongs of the last four years overnight.

I've been thinking it would be an interesting exercise to force myself into a generative mode about the future. Instead of reacting to the onslaught of awfulness and saying this is what I don't want, which is almost a default biological reaction, what if we deliberately and proactively painted a picture of a possible future and said this is what I want?

It's a surprisingly hard thing to do. Even thinking about the form of it - is it a manifesto? a short story? - brings difficult choices. But if we're to be truly successful at building a better world, we need to have a strong idea of what that vision for the future really is.

I think speculative fiction can carry us a long way. But even in this creative realm, it's commonplace to paint dystopias: Black Mirror warnings of what could be rather than optimistic visions of what we might aspire to. I would love to read explorations of utopia, but aside from some facets of Star Trek (which, let's call it out, is united by a militaristic Federation), I don't know where to begin to look.

Rather than a complete imagining of this better future, perhaps it's helpful to start with principles. What is the guiding North Star that will help us make decisions about which paths to take?

I've long had a professional mission: I want to work on products that make the world more equal, informed, and kind. But that's a different exercise to defining principles that guide a positive vision of the future.

This is my attempt to define those - or at least, my representation of how I'm thinking about principles for the future today. I would love to read yours.

Principles for the future: Life, Fairness, Autonomy, and Forward Motion

Life

Everyone - regardless of their background, character, geography, and context - should be able to live a good life.

Not every American, or every person in whichever nation you happen to be reading this from; every person.

Nobody should experience poverty; everyone should have a home; everyone should have enough food to eat; everyone should have the opportunity to receive a great education; nobody should succumb to curable disease; everyone should have mobility. This is the foundation of a society that can provide a good life for all.

These things should not be provided by private businesses. I believe we need private businesses, but ability to make a profit at scale is not the same thing as being able to provide a fundamental societal foundation. Those things should be provided by a democratically elected government and upheld by an implicit social contract.

Taxation as part of this social contract is a reasonable funding mechanism. Societies with higher levels of progressive taxation turn out to result in a higher quality of life, in part because basic human rights are taken care of. The important thing is not the money you have in your pocket; it's your experience of living.

Wealth is not a shorthand for well-being.

The progress of the world should be measured by the experience of the people living in it rather than their wealth. In turn, we should measure the success of our nations by the quality of the experience of living in them, rather than their output. GDP, which has become a sort of shorthand for national success, was designed to be a measure of wartime productivity and is far less well-suited to domestic life. We need a better model, and a better measure.

For example, the Human Development Index and Gross National Happiness are great steps in this direction. There are other alternative indexes that are worth considering, although I suspect there will need to be a new, humanist measure to guide us. We do need some measure in order to gauge our successes and failures. This measure must be developed in an inclusive way, with ownership shared by communities across society, so as not to privilege one group over another.

Take the climate crisis: GDP doesn't disincentivize pollution, or directly incentivize cleaning up the environment. (It will, later on, when it is much too late.) A quality of life index would take into account the billions of people who are already feeling the effects of climate change.

It would incentivize public art, and underwriting culture, and providing amazing services, and help for people who need it.

Finally, GDP incentivizes building economic markets, whereas quality of life is method agnostic. All that matters is that we are continually improving the experience of being a human.

Fairness

Equity is a fundamental human value. Everyone should have equitable access to opportunities and resources.

Equity is giving everyone what they need to be successful; equality is treating everyone the same regardless of their context. In other words, mere equality perpetuates existing inequities. It isn't always enough.

Imagine if government was truly representative: not just geographically, but intersectionally.

Imagine if everyone had access to the same level of education, regardless of their context. Then imagine if people who didn't come from generational educational success could receive extra help with the implicit ideas and skills, as well as baseline financial resources, that some people arrive at an institution already possessing. All for free. Imagine if everyone could have the opportunity to do well. Imagine how this wider gene pool of ideas would, in turn, benefit all of us.

I believe strongly that private schools and universities shouldn't exist. Finland, which has one of the highest test scores in the world (as well as one of the highest quality of life rankings), does so well precisely because it prioritizes equity. (There are independent schools, but they're state subsidized, too.)

Imagine if everyone had the same opportunities once they entered the workforce. Imagine if maternity and paternity leave were equalized, eliminating tired old arguments for not promoting women. Imagine if the collective paid parental leave was 480 days, as it is in Sweden, allowing for healthier relationships within families with less economic hardship.

Imagine if salaries were required to be published ahead of time, eliminating both the need for negotiation and the possibility of women and people of color being paid less for the same job. (Finland goes a step further and publishes everyone's taxable income once a year.) Imagine if company boards reflected societal diversity. Imagine if conversations about justice were permitted and encouraged at work.

Imagine if businesses did not depend on workers earning poverty-level wages, in any country. Imagine if resources were fairly traded.

Black Lives Matter is needed to undo centuries of generational, institutional discrimination. Likewise, feminism is a crucial ideology of restorative justice. Imagine if these ideas - restorative justice, generational healing, compassion - were core societal values. Imagine, in turn, if misogyny, racism, colonialism, and the broad spectrum of bigotry that has held so many people back were finally thrown to the fire.

In short, imagine if we built our institutions, systems, and processes to uphold fairness for all, rather than to uphold profit or benefit for some. It's not about ensuring equality of outcome (although, of course, everyone has the right to live a good life); it's about ensuring equity of opportunity.

Imagine if we all punched up instead of down.

Autonomy

Everyone has the right to make decisions for themselves and act on them, subject to the social contract we all make with each other.

That means women have the right to choose what they do with their bodies. Abortion must be legal.

That means rather than criminalizing drug addicts, we should provide help.

That means free speech and creative human expression are imperatives - until my speech is in service of rallying others to harm. It means that the right to protest is also an imperative. Sedition is always a bogus charge; government is never a protected group.

That means privacy and freedom from surveillance are human rights.

That means sex workers should be protected rather than demonized.

That means there should be complete freedom of religion (or freedom to practice no religion) - until that religion is used to invade someone else's autonomy, or to create unfair rules elsewhere in society, or to diminish someone else's quality of life.

That means what consenting adults do with each other is not your business, whether in private or public; nor is their decision to marry, for example.

That means you should wear a mask, as it protects others, just as you should wear a seatbelt, because it protects others.

That means building participative, inclusive, democratic governments rather than authoritarian institutions.

That means everyone should have the opportunity and ability to own and maintain property.

That means valuing diversity and inclusion.

That means allowing broad immigration between countries. Ideally you should be able to choose to live in the country whose values most closely align with your own.

That means enacting peaceful, globally democratic foreign policy.

That means accepting that some people will do things that you will not like - and, as long as it does not cause harm, upholding this as an important value by which we can all live.

It also means ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to make their own decisions and act on them. It implies a non-aggressive approach to policing, and a community-orientated approach to justice.

Forward motion

We should use our resources, creativity, and expertise to rapidly improve quality of life, fairness, and autonomy.

Basic human needs should be the responsibility of an intersectionally inclusive, democratically-elected government so we can concentrate on advancing human society rather than providing the basics.

By effectively measuring quality of life, inclusive teams should receive support to perform rapid, human-centered experiments within their communities in order to quickly determine how that quality of life can be improved.

Universities and research centers should be well-funded - not just for STEM activities, but also for humanities and cultural research. As this research is publicly funded, it should then be made publicly available, so everyone can benefit from its findings.

Exploration of the universe, and of our own planet, should similarly be owned by all of us. By making the fruits of human endeavor public, we can allow everyone to build on it, snowballing human progress.

Entrepreneurship has an important part to play. Innovation is a driver for progress. We should create a world where everyone has the ability to be an entrepreneur (not just the rich and well-connected), can be supported in doing so, and can build on a rich body of public research to help them succeed.

We should all own the process and the fruits of our communal progress. We should react to harms quickly, and continuously work to improve everyone's quality of life. We should have the space to seek our own individual goals, while valuing the goals of our communities. We should be there for each other.

We should tell stories about the future and try to make them real.

What's next?

This is clearly an incomplete set of principles. They're mine, as written over a set of days in October, 2020. But I think my next step is to stress test them by building a set of possible futures; to tell those utopian stories.

Perhaps your next step could be to build your own set of principles, and use them to tell your own stories. We can build on each other's ideas, as well as the ideas of diverse authors and futurists, to envision the world we want.

And then, of course, we build it.

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash