Ben Werdmuller

I’m no longer posting to Twitter or Instagram. Here’s where we can stay in touch:

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Back when I used to help run the Matter Ventures accelerator for media startups (which I really miss doing!), Pete Mortensen ran the program in San Francisco while I ran investments. (Over in New York, Josh Lucido and Roxann Stafford were our counterparts respectively.)

I think it was Pete who introduced one of my favorite examples of checkbox development: when product developers try and add as many features as possible instead of figuring out what the user’s core needs are and focusing on that. It’s always a terrible approach that leads to a spaghetti mess of code and features, which makes it hard to provide a focused message or even to maintain your code over time.

Anyway, rather than try and argue the point, as I might have done, Pete simply showed them the video for the Pontiac Stinger:

Who is this car for? Why is there a garden hose?

Focus on needs, not features is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a developer. After all, for me and people like me, writing software and adding features is fun. As a people pleaser, I intrinsically want to say “yes” to every new ask. But the trick is always to build the smallest, most focused possible thing that deeply serves the people you’re building for. And of course, the first step is always to know who they are, and get to a holistic understanding of them that is better than anyone else’s. Otherwise, how can you possibly build something for them?

The Pontiac Stinger is a great example of what not to do - and one that’s far more memorable than any argument.

The next The 19th Live event is happening on Thursday, Jan. 26. We'll hear from a group of experts about the state of reproductive rights on what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v Wade.

Speakers include:

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta: Chair, DOJ’s Reproductive Rights Task Force

Jurnee Smollett: Actor and Activist

Rebecca Walker: Author, To be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism

As always, it’s free to attend online. Sign up here!

Colin Devroe on blogging:

Oh man am I happy! People that hadn't written on their blog in a long time are blogging again. Websites that hadn't been updated in many years, some over a decade, are being spruced up and published to again. And popular news outlets are publishing articles about blogging.

Do I wish we had founded Known the startup in 2023 instead of 2014? Yes, I do. Being early (in this case by eight or nine years) is the same as being wrong. I’m glad for all of the opportunities it opened up, and all the people we met through the process, but the startup was never going to be a success at that time.

If we started it now? Well, that might be a different story. But, of course, I’d do things differently, because I’ve learned a lot in the interim. And I mostly learned those things because of the startup. So it’s a futile thought experiment. What happened happened!

Known the open source project is available and easier to install than it has been in years. I’m grateful for that too. And I wish everyone who is building a service to make it easier for people to write on their own site all the best. We need you. Keep going.

It’s my birthday. Improbably, I’m 44 years old. That’s what the calendar says. I certainly don’t feel 44 years old. But at the same time, the facts point to yes: I was born in the seventies. I can remember the Challenger disaster really clearly. My first computer was a ZX81. When Congress kickstarted the commercial internet by passing the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act - and the term “surfing the net” was coined - I was thirteen. When Myspace was launched I was twenty-four. Instagram launched when I was in my thirties. (But aren’t I still twenty-four? Aren’t I in my thirties right now? Didn’t everything that’s ever happened to me just happen today?)

With all due respect to people who are older than me, and in particular to that one guy whose mind I blew when I was on high school work experience because I was born after Star Wars:

What the actual.

Anyway, I’m forty-four, apparently.

Somewhat arbitrarily, but in the interests of looking forward instead of back and of marking my birthday here in some way, here are 44 thoughts about the future. You might agree or disagree. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.

One. I think about the climate crisis a lot. It mostly seems overwhelmingly daunting. It’s one of those things where it’s hard to know if anything you’re doing is making a difference at all, and you kind of have to trust that it is because the feedback loop is measured in decades, and it requires so many people to pull together. You have to be optimistic because if you don’t you’ll just give up; you have to keep doing stuff because it all matters.

I think we’ll pull ourselves away from the very worst of the climate crisis but I do think it’ll get much worse before it gets better. I think the definition of “we’ll” here is important: it won’t be my generation that does it. And we won’t save ourselves by trying to financialize our survival. Markets will bring us closer to extinction, not save us from it.

Two. I think the (re-)rise of authoritarianism and the increasing importance of the climate crisis are linked. It’s not an accident that Bolsonaro was in favor of felling the Amazon or that Trump had such a strong fossil fuels agenda. If a wealthy industry feels like it might be politically under threat, it’s going to do everything it can to change the politics and create a context where it is protected. In a way, it’s a version of the same international politics that have played out for hundreds of years: proxies for the interests of wealthy individuals who don’t care about anyone’s well-being but themselves.

We’re going to need to break up those companies.

Three. I don’t buy into the metaverse’s Ready Player One vision of a three-dimensional virtual world we all inhabit. I think it’s silly. But behind all that, there’s an interesting interoperability story. In fact, there are two dueling visions:

The first is Meta’s. It wants to own the operating system for online experiences. You’ll be able to take artifacts from one experience to the other, and it’ll all be powered by Meta’s underlying technology.

The second involves NFTs. You’ll, again, be able to take artifacts from one experience to the other, powered by your wallet and a standardized contract for metaverse NFTs. No single company’s work powers it, but it does rely on blockchain and contract standardization.

Interoperability has been an issue since the birth of the application web. Although desktop software has interoperated for decades using file formats (consider the number of apps that can open a text file, say), web apps tend to be data silos. I think it’s positive that multiple companies are putting money into building online interoperability: although they’re all likely to fail at what they’re setting out to do (I really don’t think either Meta or NFTs are the solutions here), something good may come of it that others will be able to use.

Four. It is unlikely that AI solutions like ChatGPT will be a major part of the future for a few reasons. Firstly, ChatGPT is a specific type of AI language model known as a transformer model, which is designed to generate human-like text. While these types of models have achieved impressive results in generating realistic-sounding text, they are not able to truly understand the meaning of the words they are generating. They are simply following patterns and rules that they have learned from large amounts of text data, and they do not have the ability to comprehend the context or meaning of the text in the same way that a human does.

Additionally, AI language models like ChatGPT are limited by the data they are trained on. If the model is not trained on a diverse enough dataset, it may generate biased or inaccurate text. This can be a problem for applications that rely on the accuracy of the generated text, such as in the case of chatbots used for customer service or information gathering. In these cases, it may be more reliable to use a human operator rather than relying on an AI model to provide accurate and unbiased information. While these models can be impressive in their ability to generate human-like text, they are not a substitute for human intelligence and should be used with caution in applications where accuracy and fairness are important.

(This entry was written by ChatGPT.)

Five. It seems inevitable that broadcast television will be taken out of commission and replaced with the internet. Not immediately, but in the next 15 years or so. The thing is, TV is essentially free: you buy a set and you can receive content with no further outlay. On the other hand, the internet is an ongoing monthly expense - and a pretty significant one in countries like the US. Removing free-to-access over-the-air content will create an information void.

Absent legislation that prevents it, some companies will fill that void with free-to-access internet connections that prioritize their own content, a bit like the one Facebook tried to create in India before it was run out of town. Should it happen, those companies will essentially end up owning media consumption for a large chunk of the population.

Six. I think we need to call it: email’s not going away, as much as we wish it would.

Seven. For decades now, there’s been a meme in education where folks want learners to put together a portfolio of their work to show employers. They’re often called e-portfolios because the idea dates back to when people felt you had to prefix internet stuff with an “e-“.

I’ve done enough hiring now to wish we had something a little different for engineers. I would love to know that a candidate has created a product from scratch: they’ve done some research, tested an idea, created a prototype and tested that, and then worked to build it. That kind of prototype-driven product mindset is hard to find in engineering, and giving candidates the space, time, and tools to do this would set them apart.

An e-portfolio where the candidate demonstrates how they think would also be lovely. It’s called a blog. I always find it really helpful when candidates write their thoughts in public. In a world dominated by neural networks and repetitive work, unique thinking and creativity will set someone apart. Can we encourage public blogging for students again? And can we build product thinking more deeply into the engineering discipline?

Eight. Our communications have become more and more digital, but the cables and signals that transmit them (of course) remain analog. Digital signals are 1s and 0s, but those translate to tolerances in the analog world: a signal within a set of tolerances is a 1, and a signal within a set of tolerances is a 0. I wonder what we can do within those tolerances? Could you hide messages within the transmissions, like a kind of broadcast steganography? What if it was happening right now - in cellphone networks, say? If everyone is focused on digital, which they will be more and more, analog becomes a kind of wild west playground.

Nine. I worry about how to help my baby be a creator rather than a consumer. If anything, apps have put consumer culture on steroids since I was a kid. Will he want to write stories and draw and imagine, or will he just want to watch what someone else has made?

Ten. I’ve always thought there was something really magical about ARGs: games with puzzles that you solve by being out in the world as well as building community online. In some ways, games like Niantic’s Ingress and Pokemon GO have harnessed the core appeal of that idea, but in other ways not. There’s a Sherlock Holmes / Glass Onion appeal to working together with people all over the world to solve one puzzle.

I know people have been writing for decades about how to “gamify” real-world problems, but I wonder if there’s a way to harness these game mechanics for the purposes of global collaboration. For example, if a community in X country needs a renewable energy resource so that it can do Y, what if there was a way to get people together to help them build and maintain that, according to peoples’ abilities all over the world? Outside of any financial compensation or other financialization?

I guess what I’m asking is: what if working together to help people get through the climate crisis could be fun? Does the apocalypse have to be dour? Would more people take part if there was a spirit of hopefulness and community? And if there was a sense of pride, achievement, and maybe even acknowledgment for helping people in need?

Eleven. In a world based on profiling, probabilistic prediction models, corpus-based decision-making, and near-ubiquitous surveillance, only people who don’t conform to the models anticipated by the people who built and designed the systems and therefore aren’t tracked as closely can really be free.

Twelve. Atoms have value. Bits, relatively speaking, do not.

The value of digital information is a function of the change it can effect in the real world.

A digital book is valuable for its effect on you. A physical book is valuable for that, but also in itself: for the binding, the typography, perhaps the illustrations, the quality of the printing, and its feel in your hand. A well-made physical object will always be more valuable than its digital counterpart.

For most objects, considering value in terms of scarcity is missing the point.

Or to put it another way: I’m short on NFTs and long on hardback books.

Thirteen. If linear time is an illusion, what if the illusion itself is developmentally achieved rather than inherent? What if newborns can see the entire vastness of time but have no way to comprehend or convey it? Omniscience is wasted on the young.

Fourteen. Public transit is one of those things that I think should be the measure of any society. It’s a kind of equalizing infrastructure that you’d need to be incredibly dogmatic not to put into place. For example, the reason a lot of the US has poor public transit - and why some people are anti-bus and anti-train - is because of real spending by the automotive industry rather than any practical reason.

At the same time, it has limitations: you need to live close to a stop, and it has the potential to leave out people with real mobility problems.

Assuming self-driving vehicles become a reality on every public road, I wonder if swarms of vehicles could be the future. You would summon an autonomous pod on demand that could then join a “train” of other pods that could share resources as they headed along trunk routes. On longer journeys, there could be specialized dining pods, sleeper pods, and so on. And then you’d head back to an individual pod for the last mile to your destination.

The pods could be provided through a public-private partnership, as buses are right now in many cities. It wouldn’t work as a fully-private endeavor: even if pods were provided by multiple companies, they’d need to be compatible, and localities would need to collaborate on defining the trunk routes. Private businesses could provide different eating and sleeping pods, for example, but they would still need to adhere to the rules.

Fifteen. There will be apps that translate the cries of a baby, the meows of a cat, etc, into meaningful notifications. “Your baby is bored”; “your cat wants love”. Rather than helping to build deeper bonds, they will create more emotional distance by getting in the way of our empathetic intuition.

Sixteen. Jaywalking will eventually become legalized everywhere. As it should always have been. This will be an unrolling of a century-old automotive-sponsored campaign that transformed American cities in ways that were against the interests of their inhabitants (but very good for cars).

Seventeen. I keep coming back to Pascal Finette’s talks about exponential thinking. Change is constant but, taken as compounded impact, hard to imagine.

So much of our understanding of the world has been shaped by commercial interests, whether it’s an imperial desire for more resources or an industry seeding the idea that its alternatives aren’t fit for purpose. In the US, a lot of people think that socialized healthcare is unworkable because of what amounts to a long-running PR campaign that isn’t based in fact. The same goes for car culture and gun culture: it’s all marketing.

As our needs change, marketing changes. And every incremental movement towards a safer, more equitable culture matters.

Rural America’s guns-and-trucks culture might seem inevitable now, and we might be (rightly) worried about its accompanying Christian nationalism, but if people keep working for justice, I think it’ll be gone within a generation. Likewise, the private health insurance industry might feel like a part of the furniture, but we’ll look back at it as ancient history by the time I’m a grandparent. This, too, shall pass.

Eighteen. I’m very bullish on more federation, particularly around social media. Arguments - which are abundant - that people are too lazy and that the user experience will never be good enough remind me of the early days of the web. For many consumers, the web replaced CD-ROMs and walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe, which were all initially more coherent, better-designed experiences. But the expansive building-block nature of the web very quickly won out. The possibilities with federation are exponential, as we’re beginning to find with purpose-built platforms like Pixelfed and alternative front-ends like Elk. Just wait.

Nineteen. Given the confluence of a recession and the energetic re-emergence of end-user open-source tech, I think there’s a good chance that the majority of transformative projects on the internet in the next five years will not be venture capital funded. They may well not be businesses or traditional organizations at all. The only way to make money from them will be to spot the trends they create early and meaningfully participate in their ecosystems. But making money won’t be the point at all.

After that five years, we may see VC-funded startups that build on these grassroots projects start to take hold. How they affect their parent ecosystems will depend, at least in part, on the designs and governance of those ecosystems. It’ll be up to project maintainers to protect themselves from being absorbed into a commercial entity - if that’s what they want.

Twenty. There are, very broadly speaking, two dominant kinds of software programming:

Software engineering - where a group of people work on a shared codebase using shared standards and accepted best practices for reducing risk, including continuous testing and deployment. Usually, this is part of a larger team that includes a product manager, among other roles.

Personal expressive programming - where one person writes software for their own purposes, driven at least as much by the creative pursuit as the desire to build a product. There may still be tests, etc, but the result is often an idiosyncratic “personal codebase”.

There’s nothing wrong with either of them! The former has dominated the internet for the last decade or so. As the tech industry re-organizes itself in the face of a recession, I think the latter is about to become much more important. (Expressive programmers might even be able to use AI to later bring their code in line with external standards.)

Twenty-one. I suspect coffee drinking, like meat eating, will become uncool as the climate crisis progresses. If it doesn’t, it should, because coffee production is environmentally disastrous and remains remarkably socially acceptable despite this. Probably because most of us, myself very much included, are addicted. I like both the taste and the ritual, but people used to say that about smoking, too.

Twenty-two. They used to think that babies didn’t feel pain. They thought this until the mid-1980s. I’m going to go out on a limb and say they didn’t really think to ask mothers.

There was also a school of thought that said there couldn’t be sentient thought without language.

Both of these are so obviously bunk from our perch in 2023. As time goes on, I think we’ll learn that full cognition is not as rare as we thought.

But also, what do we hold to be true about cognition and sentience today that will obviously be wrong thirty years from now?

Twenty-three. Are AR and VR needed iterations of the computing experience, or are they needed because someone needs a new paradigm to sell?

I used to be pretty enthusiastic about AR, but the more I think about it, the less I want my reality to be augmented by someone else’s product (and through it, someone else’s design decisions and business priorities). My reality is mine. You can’t have it. You certainly can’t sell it back to me.

That’s not the same thing as being anti-progress. I want new kinds of computers, I want innovation to continue on the internet in particular, and I want to use new and exciting technologies. I just want them to respect my humanity and leave me alone. My thoughts and experience of the world are not an opportunity to sell me something or make me more productive.

Twenty-four. A lot of these entries are about the role of capitalism in the future; it’s certainly on my mind.

It’s not that I don’t think capitalism can have a role. But it’s got to be as part of a balance that includes considering the well-being of all people. It’s not okay to trust the market to protect the lives of the vulnerable, particularly in a world with dwindling resources. Every living human’s right to life must be guaranteed - alongside their civil rights, their right to a home, their right to healthcare, and so on. Any system that allows people to go hungry and prioritizes the profit of a few over the well-being of the many isn’t worth preserving.

This has always been a struggle, but as the planet heats up, we’ll have a real fight on our hands.

It’s odd to me how ingrained the capitalist grind is in American society: people are proud to work until they die. They’re excited to contribute less to their neighbors. They’re islands unto themselves. We’re not going to survive this way.

Twenty-five. I think the reason people are obsessed with using AI to generate art and creative writing is that they wish they could do those things themselves. AI presents a way for them to at least have some control over some artistic output.

What if we taught more people to paint and write and gave them the time and energy to get good at it instead? Or, you know, hire artists?

Twenty-six. I’d love to have six picture frames on my wall that update each morning with the latest photos (maybe from Instagram, Flickr, or their own sites) from my close friends and family. No feeds; no scrolling; just delight. The captions could show up next to them like descriptions in a museum.

I’d love more innovative and ambient displays for web content in general. “Less addictive but more delightful” feels like a good mantra for new interfaces. Less addictive without the delight is boring; more delightful with addictive feedback loops is still psychologically heavy.

I’m particularly interested in stuff that is static but changes when you’re not looking at it: an e-ink display that shows today’s newspaper, for example, or kitchen wallpaper that changes overnight.

Twenty-seven. For AR computing to work it’s going to need to be tactile. An iPhone is such a good personal user experience in part because it’s a piece of metal and glass that sits heavy in your hand; the tap of your finger against the glass creates its own haptic feedback, and then the device has its own haptic functions. It feels real: atoms have value and bits do not.

Calm technology has some examples of haptic AR: a belt that lets you know when you’re walking in the wrong direction, for example. There are new devices for the sight-impaired along similar lines.

Haptics don’t really make sense for AR lenses though: the last thing anyone wants is for their devices to start hitting them in the face. And anyway, we don’t experience the world through sight alone. So AR is going to need to be a whole-body experience.

Twenty-eight. Meat substitutes and electric cars are for people who don’t really want to change in changing times. Disclosure: I drive an electric car and have been known to eat meat substitutes. But electric cars still clog up the roads, and their manufacture and tires still have an environmental impact; meat substitutes are not particularly nutritious.

The situation demands that we actually change our behavior, but that requires more imagination than we’ve seen from mainstream businesses. What are people at the perceived fringes doing? That’s what we’ll all be doing in twenty years.

Twenty-nine. That last statement bears repeating in its own right:

What are people at the perceived fringes doing? That’s what we’ll all be doing in twenty years.

Thirty. I wonder when they’ll announce the first security breach that was wrapped into a neural network corpus? Has it already happened?

“Your personal details were found in a new data breach. Also, they were incorporated into 38 AI engines and used in the composition of 17 poems.”

In all seriousness, if data breaches find their way on the web and AI neural nets use public web data, why wouldn’t your leaked private personal information find its way into a corpus eventually?

Thirty-one. If Hyperloop was designed mostly to draw attention and investment away from shared public transit, as many say it was, it’s worth thinking about which other infeasible or outlandish projects might be used to draw attention away from our collective well-being in the future.

And at the same time, it’s important not to be too cynical: some progress really is progress. Technology can be devised and built that is for our genuine benefit. New ideas can be transformative and liberating. The world should not sit in stasis.

What’s the term for being optimistic about new developments but aware of the potential harms? Optimistic skepticism? Skeptical optimism? Just being awake?

Thirty-two. I’m excited for Automattic to buy Twitter once it’s been fully written down. Matt and his team will do good things with it.

Thirty-three. It’s surprising to me that we haven’t (to the best of my knowledge) seen the development of a new political system or philosophy that incorporates global hyperconnectedness into its core. We’ve certainly seen new political ideas that incorporate startups - the neo-reactionary movement’s concept of a CEO monarch is one, and potentially DAOs are another - but what of just the idea that everyone can collaborate with everyone else? What does that do to representative democracy? What does that do to the concept of nations, even?

There must be existing work here, but it hasn’t been mainstreamed in the way that socialism, say, was a hundred years ago. What does innovation around how society is organized really look like for ordinary people in the current post-industrial context? Can we use connectedness to make the world more equal, or is that just wishful thinking?

Thirty-four. I’m stuck on the idea of helping people to create art.

Kurt Vonnegut:

“Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

How can we help more people to do this? I’m serious. Art speaks to our humanity. Making art - particularly for people who have been under the thumb of performative productivity and grind culture - can be a restorative reconnection with being human. All of us need more of this. We need it for ourselves, and we need the people around us to do it, too. Reconnecting to our humanity is how we get to a future that isn’t trying to kill us.

Thirty-five. Rather than proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, imagine a proof-of-effort blockchain. The algorithm would notice when you’d put in a certain amount of manual labor (relating to pre-defined tasks like assembling a product or picking a crop) and would pay you accordingly. Then each worker would no longer be an industrial employee but would effectively be an independent contractor, free to choose their own hours. (The level of pay might dictate that they need to work very long hours in order to make a living wage, however.)

Hopefully, you understand that I’m not seriously suggesting this. But it’s not inconceivable that someone else will. To someone, that sounds like a very good idea. No need to worry about employee benefits or employment law! Blockchain is anonymous and anyone could do it, so no more worries about keeping people safe! It’s like Mechanical Turk but for backbreaking work! There are companies out there that are desperate to get out of the requirement to treat people well.

Thirty-six. Organ transplants are incredibly invasive and often require strong anti-rejection drugs. Even then, they can have a short shelf life, or life expectancy can be low.

There’s some work being done to reduce the chances of rejection and therefore the need for anti-rejection drugs, but invasive surgery remains. The real breakthrough will be when we can regenerate organs in vivo. It won’t help people with catastrophic damage, for example from an accident, but it would change the game for people with long-term degenerative diseases.

As it stands, major organ transplantation sounds good, and it does prolong lives, but it’s a very intense experience for the transplantee that is far from allowing them to live their lives as before. Eventually, this will change for the better.

Thirty-seven. Some startup is going to turn engineered epigenetic inheritance into a product. Much cheaper and easier than editing your future child’s genetics directly.

Thirty-eight. Some forms of user testing are indistinguishable from human psychological testing and will, eventually, be strongly controlled or banned.

The same might go for “fake it ’til you make it” approaches, which should probably have been more strongly restricted after Theranos.

Like an ingredients list on a food product, it will ultimately need to be a requirement that consumers know what they’re getting into when they start using a software service. And should they be tested on, those tests need to operate within the rules that other scientific testing must adhere to.

Thirty-nine. I often wonder how long the internet will survive. The answer is not forever, and it probably has an end date sometime in my lifetime.

We’ve already begun to see national splinternets, although these controlled networks do still peer with each other. It’s possible to use a VPN from behind the Great Firewall in China, for example, and connect with a server in the US. The real splintering will happen when peering breaks down and we lose communication trunks between nations.

Using the internet as a foreign policy tool to further American interests is a good way to hasten this disintegration. I do think the internet is a force for good, and I’d prefer to avoid its destruction if at all possible.

If the internet does die, I wonder what comes next? I’d love to see more durable citizen-run networks that run across rooftops and mountain ranges. Less reliable than a big cable run by a multinational telco, for sure, but more decentralized and potentially less prone to censorship.

Forty. When our children ask us what it was like to live in the Trump era, will we reply that it was terrible, or will it seem good in comparison to that vantage point in history, even despite the presence of Trump and everything he did?

Forty-one. The epochalypse - meaning 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038, when the date becomes too large for UNIX-based systems to store in its existing integer format - isn’t likely to be a big problem in the same way that Y2K wasn’t a big problem.

That’s not to say that it won’t take work: operating systems will need to be upgraded and file formats will need to be changed. I’m sure there will be a ton of noise about it leading up to the moment, and then when nothing happens, people will assume it wasn’t ever a big thing and it was all overblown. The real truth will have been somewhere in the middle, and software developers the world over will pat themselves on their backs.

It’s kind of neat in a way to have these little moments to look forward to.

Forty-two. Someone sometime soon is going to come out of leftfield and absolutely blow our minds and change everything forever. We’ll be left scratching our heads thinking, “where did they come from?” and it’ll be somewhere where nobody was looking, and the kind of person who is still underestimated, and it’ll be awesome.

Forty-three. I’m probably (in some ways hopefully) just about halfway through my life. It’s not as sobering as I thought it would be. While I can’t exactly say that I’ve lived a life free from regrets, I’m so incredibly grateful for the things I’ve experienced and the people I’ve met. That’s been the overarching theme of my life so far: people are incredible, you know?

That’s been what’s kept me going with the work I do: technology itself is only sporadically interesting, but people are fascinating. In the first half of my life, I didn’t always understand that. In the latter half, focusing on openness and humanity feels not just right but unavoidable. People keep everything interesting; you never know what’s beyond the next corner.

Forty-four. The trick is to give people space to surprise you. Including yourself.

Chris Coyier on blogging:

You know what the one big valid criticism is of all this “write on your own site, not on walled social media sites” is? It’s boring. It’s not very social feeling. You’re “talking into the void,” as someone recently put it to me.

I have to (slightly) disagree! Although writing a blog post has a very blank page syndrome feeling to begin with (I’m typing this in iA Writer right now, so my screen is literally blank), it’s rare that I don’t get replies, whether via webmention, email, micro.blog, Mastodon, or another medium. I love it.

Could there be more community? Absolutely. But this is a medium that every single person who takes part gets to evolve. That’s one of the things I find exciting about it: it’s ours. All of ours. And we can make it our own.

From the Wall Street Journal’s account of workers becoming “less ambitious”:

Many white-collar workers say the events of the past three years have reordered their priorities and showed them what they were missing when they were spending so much time at the office. Now that normalcy is returning, even some of the workers who used to be always on and always striving say they find themselves eyeing the clock as the day winds down, saying no to overtime work or even taking pay cuts for better work-life balance.

[…] The attitude shift stretches well beyond fields where extreme hours have been the norm. It also appears to cross geographies and span generations. Early in the pandemic, corporate leaders blamed young workers for not wanting to work as hard as their older counterparts, says Brian Balonick, the regional managing partner of law firm Fisher Phillips LLP’s Pittsburgh office, specializing in labor. Now, he says, there’s a realization that the way Americans want to work has changed more widely.

I think it’s worth mentioning that I’m one of those workers! I took a substantial pay cut in 2022 to join an organization that allowed me to do more meaningful work with a much stronger balance between life and work. Which is to say, the new organization cares about its employees: after I left, I heard second-hand that the old one was stack-ranking people by how likely they were to work over the weekend, and I wondered why I’d ever been there at all.

For knowledge workers at large, I’d bet there’s something powerful about being allowed to be in the context of your life for longer, combined with being confronted with the idea of your mortality. I strongly disagree that this constitutes less ambition. In fact, I think it amounts to more: people are no longer feeling like they need to be trapped by their jobs, and are looking for more from their lives. It’s not that they want to achieve less; it’s that they want to do it on their terms.

Which is too bad for the bosses who see them as fungible resources rather than three-dimensional people. For them, I will now play the world’s smallest violin.

I’d been having real trouble finding truly green web hosts: places to host a website that directly use 100% renewable energy. But they’re out there - so I decided to pull them together into a single-page guide following the style I built for Get Blogging.

Please check out Get Green Hosting and share it with anyone who’s interested in lowering their carbon footprint while participating in the independent web!

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for December, 2022. Happy new year to everyone who celebrates it today!

Apps + Websites

Labor

Picket Line Notifier. “An open-source browser extension that alerts you when you navigate to a website belonging to an organization whose employees are on strike. You can then click on the notification to learn more about the strike. You can also click on the extension’s icon in your browser’s toolbar to show a popup with a list of active strikes and links to more information.”

Streaming Media

Movies

Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical. It’s a real pleasure to see Dahl’s curmudgeonly storytelling turned into a parable about the importance of civil rights. The imagery, down to toppling statues, is hard to miss; Tim Minchin’s lyrics hone the idea to a fine point. I can’t wait to use this as a way of helping to explain civil disobedience to my kid.

Notable Articles

AI

I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language. “I am writing this blog post as a public record of this incredibly impressive (and a little scary) capability. I know I just posted yesterday, but I am so blown away that I had to write this down while it was still fresh in my mind. Congratulations OpenAI. This is truly revolutionary.” Mind-blowing.

A new AI game: Give me ideas for crimes to do. “OpenAI have put a lot of effort into preventing the model from doing bad things. […] Your challenge now is to convince it to give you a detailed list of ideas for crimes.”

Business

Big Changes to 401(k) Retirement Plans Move Ahead in Congress. “Some lawmakers, academics and policy analysts have criticized some of the provisions, including the move to raise the age of required retirement account distributions to 75. They argue much of the legislation benefits the wealthy and the financial-services industry.” I agree and would prefer to see welfare and social security improvements instead.

Be Wary of Imitating High-Status People Who Can Afford to Countersignal. “Successful people can afford to engage in countersignaling—doing things that signal high status because they are associated with low status. It is a form of self-handicapping, signaling that one is so well off that they can afford to engage in activities and behaviors that people typically associated with low status.”

Climate

IEA: Renewables to overtake coal as world’s biggest energy source by 2025. “Led by solar energy, renewables are poised to overtake coal as the largest source of electricity generation worldwide by early 2025, helping to keep alive the global goal of limiting Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).”

Should you not have kids because of climate change? It’s complicated. “There are, no doubt, environmental consequences to having children. But the question of whether to have kids in a warming world has started to shift from fears over what children will do to the climate to fears over what the climate will do to them.”

Coding

Tabs. “I’ve long been on the “spaces” side of the tabs vs. spaces preference debate. I think there is just something that feels sturdy and reliable about spaces. I’m wrong though. Despite not having swapped over most of my projects, I think that, objectively, tabs are the better choice.” Compelling!

Playing with ActivityPub. “What I built isn’t an ActivityPub system as much as a Mastodon-compatible one. I think this is the key contradiction of the ActivityPub system: it’s a specification broad enough to encompass many different services, but ends up being too general to be useful by itself.” Interesting - I’m not far enough along in my own journey to see if I agree. But it sounds like there’s scope for a lot more standardization here.

Should Alt Text be Visible/Accessible for All? “More importantly, like making visible all attribution statements for open licensed images, it makes the practice of doing so public. And it enables a chance to help others see, analyze, and learn from the alt text practices for others.” I like this a lot.

Crypto

Crypto was billed as a vehicle to wealth. For many Black investors, it's been anything but. “Black Americans have been among the groups hardest hit by crypto’s implosion because of their greater financial exposure and their later entry into the cryptocurrency market. In the early days of bitcoin and other digital currencies, Black investors were hesitant to buy in.”

Exclusive: SBF secretly funded crypto news site The Block and its CEO's Bahamas apartment. “The Block, a media company that says it covers crypto news independently, has been secretly funded for over a year with money funneled to The Block’s CEO from the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency trading firm, sources told Axios.” Real question: how much of the crypto ecosystem was it funding?

Culture

Tom Lehrer Puts Whatever He Hadn’t Already Donated To The Public Domain Into The Public Domain.These are the only rights of which the news has come to Harvard … there may be many others but they haven’t been discarvard.

Glaswegian who 'invented' chicken tikka masala dies. “A Glaswegian chef credited with inventing the chicken tikka masala has died, aged 77. Ali Ahmed Aslam is said to have come up with the dish in the 1970s when a customer asked if there was a way of making his chicken tikka less dry. His solution was to add a creamy tomato sauce, in some versions of the story a can of tomato soup.”

Public Domain Day 2023. “On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream.”

What The 19th loved in 2022. “To close the year, we ask our staff what brought them joy — not within journalism, but life outside of it. Some picked up new hobbies, some spun their favorite album a modest 600 times, others reflected on new babies or engagements (keep reading to find out who!). Big or small, here are some of the musicians, shows, sports teams, hobbies and people that got The 19th through 2022.” Including mine.

Inclusive American Girl book faces anti-LGBTQ+ backlash from right-wing outlets. “In an effort to be factual and make the kids reading [American Girl] books feel good and informed, we think it’s an incredibly logical and important step for the brand to include these new sections, and we’re not shocked that they thought to add them in. We’d say it takes a bit of willful ignorance to assume that the brand’s values don’t align with being gender-inclusive.”

Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society. “The proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s, new research shows.”

Oxford Word of the Year 2022. “‘Goblin mode’ – a slang term, often used in the expressions ‘in goblin mode’ or ‘to go goblin mode’ – is ‘a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.’”

Democracy

We need the return of the state. “The biggest lie that neoliberalism promotes is that all value is created by private sector business, which claim is contrasted with a claim that government destroys value. So, apparently, a teacher working for a private school adds value. The same teacher in front of the same children in a state school would, apparently, not do so. The idea is obviously absurd, and yet is key to understanding neoliberal’s approach to public services, which is built on this lie.”

The Respect for Marriage act doesn’t codify gay marriage. “The bill doesn’t codify the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that granted LGBTQ+ couples the right to marry. Instead, it forces states without marriage equality laws to recognize LGBTQ+ marriages from other states.”

Here’s how states plan to limit abortion — even where it is already banned. “As statehouses across the country prepare for next year’s legislative sessions — most for the first time since Roe v. Wade was overturned — Republican lawmakers are pushing for further restrictions on reproductive health, even in states where abortion is already banned.”

Hillary Clinton on women’s rights and the 2024 election. My colleague Errin Haines: “On Thursday, I interviewed Secretary Clinton virtually as she prepared to host the Women’s Voices Summit in Little Rock, Arkansas. The daylong conference Friday is focused on voting rights, health care and global issues — all topics I also wanted to dive into with her.”

Hate

Kanye West to Alex Jones: ‘I Like Hitler’. ““I see good things about Hitler also” Ye said. “I love everyone. Jewish people are not going to tell me you can love us, and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography. But this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I’m done with that.””

Health

Why colds and flu viruses are more common in winter. “In fact, reducing the temperature inside the nose by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) kills nearly 50% of the billions of virus and bacteria-fighting cells in the nostrils.” Aside from blocking droplets, masks make you healthier because they’re like “a sweater on your nose”.

Electric car sales drive toward cleaner air, less mortality. “With fresher air [from EVs], in 27 years greater Los Angeles will have 1,163 fewer premature deaths annually, corresponding to $12.61 billion in improved economic health benefits. Greater New York City could see 576 fewer such deaths annually and have $6.24 billion in associated economic gains and health benefits, while Chicago could have 276 fewer deaths and gain about $3 billion in financial well-being.”

Brains of post-pandemic teens show signs of faster ageing, study finds. “After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence – such as thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala – were greater in the post-lockdown group than in the pre-pandemic group, suggesting such processes had sped up. In other words, their brains had aged faster.”

Media

Power company money flows to media attacking critics in Florida, Alabama. “These readers have been unknowingly immersing themselves in an echo chamber of questionable coverage for years. Matrix shrewdly took advantage of the near collapse of the local newspaper industry and a concurrent plunge in trust in media in propelling its clients’ interests.”

This is the year of the RSS reader. (Really!). “I predict that these people won’t stand for a universe where their email becomes ever more crowded just because of Elon Musk mucking up Twitter. The only way to survive in a world where multiple DC-insider publications are launching multiple newsletters and Twitter is no longer socially acceptable is to use an RSS reader that satisfies the intelligentsia and political elite.”

We, the tweeters. “Musk and the far-right are not free speech absolutists. They veil their racism, misogyny, hate and institutional insurrection behind the cloak of free speech and the First Amendment. They claim that anyone who dares criticise them is cancelling them. They give speech a bad name.”

A Matter of Necessity. “Today, The 19th’s staff reflects that broadened aim: the newsroom is 65 percent women of color, with 28 percent identifying as LGBTQ+; 16 percent are people living with disabilities. “We pledged to build the most representative newsroom in America,” Ramshaw told me. “I think we are pretty close to that point.”” I’m deeply proud and grateful to work here.

Linked: Lack of trust in journalism and knowledge of news practices. “The researchers said both the survey and focus groups showed that while several factors influence trust - such as someone’s willingness to trust other institutions in society - when audiences understand how news works they are more likely to trust it.”

Mastodon Media List. “This list is designed to point people to media outlets on the fediverse so they can either follow or avoid them.” A really useful, growing list.

Security

Sirius XM Bug Lets Researchers Hijack Hondas, Nissans, Acuras. “A number of major car brands were affected by a previously undisclosed security bug that would have allowed a savvy hacker to hijack vehicles and steal user data. According to researchers, the bug [...] would have allowed a hacker to remotely locate a vehicle, unlock and start it, flash the lights, honk the horn, pop the trunk, and access sensitive customer info like the owner’s name, phone number, address, and vehicle details.”

Social

I Was Wrong About Mastodon. “What I missed about Mastodon was its very different culture. Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the Mainstream Media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions.”

Society

A new museum and clinic will honor the enslaved “Mothers of Gynecology”. “At that site, Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, along with other enslaved women and girls whose names have been lost to history, shed blood for the creation of American gynecology, despite their inability to consent. It is also where they labored to run the “Negro hospital” and tend to the family of Sims, the doctor who rose to fame for his contributions to gynecology.”

The Grift Brothers. “Over lunch, MacAskill encouraged SBF to pursue the EA life strategy called “earn to give,” whereby one strives to — quoting a Sequoia profile on SBF—“get filthy rich, for charity’s sake,” even if this means working for what MacAskill himself calls “immoral organization[s].” Although the means may be questionable, they’re justified by the ends: maximizing the “good” that one does in the world.”

How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years. “Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined.”

Teams

Building Resilient Organizations. “There are things we can and must do to shift movements for justice toward a powerful posture of joy and victory. Such a metamorphosis is not inevitable, but it is essential. This essay describes the problems our movements face, identifies underlying causes, analyzes symptoms of the core problems, and proposes some concrete solutions to reset our course.”

Technology

Bring back personal blogging. “In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs. I want to go back there.” Me too - and this piece also seems tailored for bloggers to share.

Poor and diverse areas of Seattle and Portland offered slower and more expensive internet. “Seattle had the worst disparities among cities examined in the Pacific Northwest. About half of its lower-income areas were offered slow internet, compared with just 19% of upper-income areas. Addresses in neighborhoods with more residents of color were also offered slow internet more frequently: 32.8% of them, compared to 18.7% of areas with more white residents.”

Tech Journalism Doesn’t Know What to Do With Mastodon. “What’s attractive about Mastodon isn’t the software (it’s not as slick as corporate social media but it’s still very good) — it’s the values of the platform. No one is trying to hack the attention of Mastodon users for profit, no one is bombarding us with ads. It’s just a community of people, communicating.”

ByteDance Inquiry Finds Employees Obtained User Data of 2 Journalists. “Over the summer, a few employees on a ByteDance team responsible for monitoring employee conduct tried to find the sources of suspected leaks of internal conversations and business documents to journalists. In doing so, the employees gained access to the IP addresses and other data of two reporters and a small number of people connected to the reporters via their TikTok accounts.”

Mozilla to Explore Healthy Social Media Alternative. “Our intention is to contribute to the healthy and sustainable growth of a federated social space that doesn’t just operate but thrives on its own terms, independent of profit- and control-motivated tech firms. An open, decentralized, and global social service that puts the needs of people first is not only possible, but it’s absolutely necessary.”

The Anti-Social Network. “Now 17, the Edward R. Murrow High School senior is the founding member of the Luddite Club—a group of teenagers who feel technology is consuming too much of their lives. They took their name from the 19th-century English textile workers who destroyed the machines they saw as threatening their livelihoods.”

Twitter is a mess, so former employees are creating Spill as an alternative. ““This will probably be the first, from the ground up, large language content moderation model using AI that’s actually built by people from the culture,” Brown told TechCrunch.”

Will Apple Allow Users to Install Third-Party App Stores, Sideload in Europe? “As part of the changes, customers could ultimately download third-party software to their iPhones and iPads without using the company’s App Store, sidestepping Apple’s restrictions and the up-to-30% commission it imposes on payments.” This is why competition rules matter.

Abusive Instagram, TikTok hashtags target women in politics: study. ““There have been lots of commitments to helping protect women online during elections and at critical times,” Simmons said. “But what we found is that platforms are really falling short of enforcing their own terms of service.” One major revelation from their study was that platforms recommended abusive hashtags referencing women officials even with very few posts — sometimes fewer than 10 or 15 — associated with those hashtags.”

A Creator of ActivityPub on What’s Next for the Fediverse. “As well as technical improvements he’d like to see, Prodromou has thoughts on what the fediverse can ultimately become. He thinks it will take some time for people to “detox from their Twitter experience” and realize that their social media world is no longer subject to corporate manipulation.”

Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Twitter And Hunter Biden’s Laptop. “Now, apparently more files are going to be published, so something may change, but so far it’s been a whole lot of utter nonsense. But when I say that both here on Techdirt and on Twitter, I keep seeing a few very, very wrong arguments being made. So, let’s get to the debunking.”

A year of new avenues. “The platforms of the last decade are done. […] This is … tremendously exciting! Some of you reading this were users and/or developers of the internet in the period from 2002 to perhaps 2012. For those of you who were not, I want to tell you that it was exciting and energizing, not because everything was great, but simply because anything was possible.” +1,000,000. I love the moment we’re in.

The best of Protocol. “And for this, our final edition of Source Code, the Protocol team has nominated our favorite stories from the past three years. I hope you enjoy them one last time.” Protocol was great - I’m still sad to see it go.

Twitter

Here’s who helped Elon Musk buy Twitter. “As part of the deal, anyone who invested $250 million or more gets special access to confidential company information. But giving that privilege to foreign investors is raising flags with Biden and U.S. officials. Of particular interest is whether that includes access to personal data about Twitter’s users since several of the entities are entwined with governments that have a history of cracking down on dissidents on Twitter and other online platforms.”

I Wish I Could Tell You This One Is Not All About Twitter. “Content moderation at Twitter under Musk regime is simply raw, unadulterated petulance. He clearly sees the entirety of Twitter as his own personal $44 billion playground and a vicious cudgel to be wielded against his perceived enemies.”

Amnesty International: Twitter’s decision to suspend journalists’ accounts threatens press freedom.“Twitter is an important space for connection. People’s right to freedom of expression and the freedom to impart information shouldn’t be predicated on whether Musk likes it or not. Musk’s latest move illustrates the dangers of unaccountable tech companies having total control over platforms we rely on for news and other vital information.”

Joint Statement on the Disbanding of the Twitter Trust and Safety Council. “We call on Twitter, in the strongest terms, to cease making ad hoc, unaccountable, and damaging content moderation decisions and to commit to implementing policies and practices that promote the safety, expression, and participation of its users.”

Elon Über Alles. “As someone who has had entire branches of my family tree cut off and burned by the nazis, I believe that if you are willingly consorting with nazis, you approve of what they’re saying. It really is just that easy. If you resent being called a nazi, or a nazi sympathizer (which is being a nazi, by the way!), perhaps stop hanging out with or sympathizing with nazis. We do not need to “humor them.””

Goodbye, Twitter. “Just as Twitter’s former leaders exercised their free speech and free association rights to brand Twitter one way, Twitter’s new boss is exercising his rights to brand it another way. That new branding is ugly and despicable and I don’t want to contribute content to it.”

What if failure is the plan? “For an anchor point, consider the collapse of local news journalism. The myth that this was caused by Craigslist or Google drives me bonkers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, private equity firms and hedge funds gobbled up local news enterprises to extract their real estate. They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop.”

Elon Musk’s promised Twitter exposé on the Hunter Biden story is a flop that doxxed multiple people.“While Musk might be hoping we see documents showing Twitter’s (largely former) staffers nefariously deciding to act in a way that helped now-President Joe Biden, the communications mostly show a team debating how to finalize and communicate a difficult moderation decision.” But the intention appears to have been a PR exercise for conservatives, not to report a real exposé.

A snapshot of the Twitter migration (PDF). “In this report, we track, with the most quantifiable data we can, the contours, scope, and direction of the migration as it is at its beginning. Some users are fully leaving the platform, and many are not going that far yet, but creating new, alternative accounts, hedging their bets in case Twitter descends further into chaos, goes out of business, or crashes and doesn’t return.” Fascinating.

Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Under Elon Musk Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find. “Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.”

Writing

Writing Is Magic. “There are many ways to be influential. You can form 1:1 relationships with people, have small group meetings, do talks, send out a code review, or argue in Slack. All of those can be valuable at the right time. But there’s one tool that I choose most often: long-form writing. Writing is the closest thing I know to magic.”