Ben Werdmuller

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.”

As part of The 19th’s non-denominational end-of-year celebration, we were asked what we were leaving behind in 2022. I gave an answer about corporate social media and Instagram in particular, but on reflection, there’s a lot more I want to leave behind.

Year ends are both arbitrary and not: a day like any other, but also, genuinely the end of our calendar and the verge of a start to a new blank page. So in that spirit of reflection and new beginnings, these are the things I’d like to leave behind as 2022 disappears behind us.

If you’re looking for an overarching theme: my aim is to become more values-led and to do a better job of standing up for what I believe in, which is somewhere I’ve sometimes been severely lacking.

Corporate social media (and Instagram in particular)

I really do want to do this, and soon. Leaving Twitter was a complete success for me: I found a much richer community in the fediverse. It certainly has some major problems to sort out, most notably that amateur instance-owners often don’t have a working understanding of social power dynamics and what racism, homophobia, and misogyny really are. I can’t gloss over those. But these feel surmountable, and conversations I’ve had with folks who may be starting instances in the new year make me feel hopeful. (For one thing, instances can be owned by the communities they support, which is clearly not the case for any large-scale corporate social media silo.)

Instagram and Facebook, maybe ironically, are my last big hold-outs. I was never a big user until I moved to the US when they became the main way I keep in touch with my friends back in Britain, and my family all over the world. But of course, that’s the gameplan: Facebook and Instagram are collectively the world’s largest peer pressure engine. And given the company’s complicity in undermining elections, facilitating genocides, algorithmically causing teen suicides, and potentially much more, I don’t want to participate anymore. Not with random pictures about my day; certainly not with pictures of my baby.

I’ve tried to leave several times, but I missed the community - which, to be specific, is the people I love but rarely get to see. But this year has been different, and I have a lot of hope for Pixelfed alongside Mastodon as ways to stay in touch without feeding the beast. (I don’t think either platform will be the final form of the fediverse, by the way, but I think they’re good enough to get going with.) Obviously, I think all of you should start blogs, too, but I understand that the barrier to entry is much higher, and not everyone thinks it’s fun to sit in front of their computer and write (or read) reflective essays.

So in 2023, I’ll keep sharing on social media, but I’ll do it on my terms, in a way that doesn’t add to the profits or network effects of a company I despise.

And no, the answer isn’t corporate alternatives like Post. It’s a nonsense solution built for people who don’t want to be challenged and I won’t engage any longer.

Helplessness

I don’t exactly know how to headline this section, but this is the big one. It could easily be called “unassertiveness” or “acquiescence”, but those ideas don’t quite cover it. They’re right, but they’re a subset of the whole.

A lot of people have to deal with a lot of things. I’ve been lucky in my life and I’m aware that I live with a lot of privilege. But I’ve also found the last few years to be very challenging personally.

In lots of ways, I’m still dealing with the loss of my mother. Her loss in itself is a crater. We cared for her for over a decade, through pulmonary fibrosis, a double lung transplant, and an intense aftermath brought about by drugs that both kept her alive and slowly killed her. I uprooted my life and moved thousands of miles to be with her. I still have flashbacks to the day of her transplant and lots beyond; she endured torture after torture after torture because, in her words, she wasn’t ready to leave us.

I used to cry and express emotion freely. I haven’t been able to do that since. Part of me is still numb; a lot of me is still grieving and adapting.

Before all that, I already suffered from deeply low self-esteem. I’ve contemplated ending my life and have made a plan a few times. Self-loathing informed my personality, and I gained a reputation for being kind in part by not being a good steward of my own boundaries. I prioritized other peoples’ needs over mine because I considered them to be much more important.

I hated conflict. I still hate conflict. The idea of someone yelling at me is scary as shit to me. It gives me a knot in my stomach. I want everyone to be happy and harmonious. Of course, in a lot of situations, everybody can’t be happy and harmonious. And if you start optimizing for harmony instead of boundaries and values, you can very easily stop standing up for the right thing.

We can debate about whether that’s a good way to look at the world or not, but the combination of a predilection for negative self-talk and a major family crisis established a pattern where I treated the world as something that happened to me rather than something I could affect. I likened it all to a turbulent flight where you just sit back and strap in, because what else can you do?

And, indeed, I stopped fighting as hard as I should have for the right thing, and I hurt people I care about by not sticking to my values.

Here’s what else you can do: you can pilot the fucking plane. It’s not as easy, but it’s often right.

When people describe me as nice or kind, which they do from time to time, I now bristle internally. It’s always intended as a compliment, but I know what has led to that, and what it allows. It’s a giant character flaw on top of a giant character flaw. It’s not just that I want to leave it behind in 2023: I have to, both for my own sanity, and for the people I care about.

This is hard for me. It’s much easier said than done. I’m having a physical stress response just typing this entry. And people who have come to depend on my acquiescence may be surprised when I don’t. But who wants to live their whole life rolling over? Especially when being compliant can turn you into a far worse person.

Related:

Tolerating parochialism

There are a lot of small-minded people in the world. For them, parochialism and xenophobia are default positions, even if they don’t realize that this is their worldview.

My full name is Benjamin Otto Werdmuller von Elgg. That might sound alien to you - surprisingly Germanic, maybe. Certainly, quite a few people have told me so, or even gone so far as to make fun of it. But it’s only funny-sounding because it sounds like it comes from somewhere else. It’s a kind of othering that’s rooted in quiet, pervasive xenophobia. It’s only the slightest sliver of non-assimilation, but that’s already too much for some people. (And, of course, I understand that this is just a fraction of the microaggressions that people of color suffer through.)

I can take it, of course, but that’s also because, as discussed, I’ve taken to burying my own needs. Where this stops hard is when the same thing is done to my child. You do not get to diminish my baby’s heritage or focus on one part of it - the white North American part, for example - as being more important than the others.

A version of this parochialism can also be found in the commonly-held but discriminatory belief that people should be happy with what they’re given. This sounds lovely until you examine it for just a fraction of a second: should people involved in civil rights or community justice movements just be happy with what they’ve been given? And given by whom? Isn’t it more equitable to support people who stand up for what’s right and fight for more inclusivity and a better life for everyone? What does not wanting that say about someone?

Let alone more overtly exclusionary stances like being anti-immigration, pro-nationalism, or pro-empire, including caring about people variably based on where they come from or expecting the world to conform to mainstream American values. They’re all harmful and they’re all tiresome. It’s a big, connected world full of beautifully varied, diverse humans and amazing places with incredible cultures, and I’m not sure I need people who find that idea challenging, scary, or in any way bad in my life.

You are what you tolerate. Enough.

Pandemic denial

It’s still happening. I’m still wearing a mask. Onwards.

Not having time for myself

I mean, there’s a certain amount of time pressure that’s created when you have a four-month-old baby. I don’t begrudge the time I spend with him at all.

But this year I read far fewer books; I spent less time writing than I intended; I did less exercise; my therapist dropped out to have her own baby and I didn’t take the time to find another one; I didn’t spend enough time with people I care about. In other words, I neglected myself, because (here’s an ongoing pattern) I didn’t give myself a high enough priority.

My needs are important, and the better I feel, the better I can show up for the people around me and the things I care about. I can be a better person. There is always something or someone that needs my attention, and there always will be. And although I need to also prioritize my baby, I need to give myself space, and do a better job of holding onto my boundaries so I can live more proactively and do the things I think are important.

And maybe that’s the theme. I need to not let go of myself, and I need to hold my needs and my values as if they’re actually important to me. They are important to me. And in 2023, I don’t want to leave myself - or the people I care about - behind.

I’m not exactly sure why we celebrate Christmas rather than Hanukkah: we’re a secular family with roots in both traditions. It’s possible that being in Northern Europe (and for my parents, North America before that) just made Christmas the easy default. Christian hegemony is another reason why defaults really matter: the reason Christianity is culturally centered in these places has a long and violent history, often at the expense of the people I’m descended from.

When my great grandfather arrived in the US in earnest, the White Army’s pogroms in Ukraine behind him, he chose to live secularly, down to shortening his last name to Anglicize it. Although it fell short of pogroms, America was not a welcoming place for Jews. Between the Klan, Henry Ford, the mass media, and associations of Jews with the bolsheviks, the interwar period was particularly hostile.

As I raise my child today, a hundred years later, it’s still not a welcoming place. A quarter of hiring managers don’t want to further Jewish candidates because “Jews have too much power and control”. I’ve personally found myself in conversations about why Kanye West - a Hitler fan - is supposedly in the right. Even among supposedly inclusive people, surprising old tropes about Jews are sometimes repeated as fact. I’ve also been told, quite politely, many times, that I’m going to Hell because I wasn’t baptized.

All of which makes me want to reclaim that Jewish heritage both for myself and for my baby. The answer here isn’t one or the other: it’s a “yes and” approach. His mother has a Christian heritage; mine includes Christianity and Judaism, as well as strong roots in the largest Muslim nation in the world. It’s also complicated for me, because, to be clear, I don’t believe in any higher power. I’m interested in holding onto the cultural traditions and the sense of belonging of the people who led to me, and to my baby; I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) assimilate into a faith I don’t hold.

I suppose really what I want is to feel more connected to my ancestors. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted when I was younger: I wanted to be my own person, undefined by someone else’s actions or traditions. My perspective has changed slightly to one of wanting to understand the traditions and beliefs of my ancestors, and perpetuate a sense of belonging to something other than an established cookie-cutter default. I want my child to feel more connected than I was; not so much to believing in a deity, but to who came before him, and their struggles.

I have a piece in Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2023:

The current landscape makes clear what has always been true: On the internet, nothing lasts forever. The most resilient choice is always the one that allows you to own your relationships with your audience and directly build community with the people who care about your work. That way, when a platform inevitably disappears, your relationship with your community remains intact.

I’m proud of it and stand by its advice.

In the same collection, my colleague Errin Haines also has a piece:

The 2024 election is also a new opportunity to challenge conventional editorial decisions about who voters are, what they look like, and what matters to them, their families and their communities. For too long, our default setting as journalists for those who have power (and this includes voters) has been white, cisgender, and male. Nearly 60 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, there is still much progress to be made to make real the promise of “one person, one vote” in our democracy.

I hope newsrooms take note.

As always, the whole collection is worth reading.

I’ve decided to stop writing about Twitter as of tonight. I’ll pour one out if the site dies or if it changes hands to a stable, ethical custodian, but for now, my commitment to not posting on the platform extends to not posting about the platform.

It’s clear that Musk is using the Trump communications playbook - own the conversation by any means necessary - and it’s all too easy to play along. So, enough.

Instead: what can we do that’s better? What should we build together?

What am I enjoying lately? What’s interesting and worth talking about in a productive way? How am I feeling? What kind of future do I want to see for me and all of us?

Onwards. Seriously.

Hours after enacting a policy to prevent users from linking to outside platforms, Twitter has reversed it and deleted the page from the policy website.

Among other laws this policy broke, it fell afoul of the European Union Digital Markets Act, which went into force in November. The fines for breaking this are steep:

Also, the EC will be able to impose penalties and fines of up to 10% of a company’s worldwide annual turnover and up to 20% of such turnover in the event of repeated infringements.

Maybe someone pointed that out to Musk, because it was all gone by dinnertime.

Meanwhile, he’s asked if he should step down as CEO in a Twitter poll, which at the time of writing he’s losing by a lot. Various people who should absolutely not be given the reigns have asked to be given the reigns. Maybe they should just run it like the Swedish Twitter account and cycle through a new CEO every month?

Updated: Twitter rescinded the policy the same day.

Twitter has banned linking to your profile on other social networks. What a completely pathetic, counterproductive policy.

Twitter can’t ban linking to any external website, so here’s the simple workaround:

• Make a page on your personal website with all your social profiles
• Link to that instead of directly to your profiles

What this policy breaks more readily is tools that let you find your existing Twitter connections on Mastodon. Perhaps this is an opportunity to rebuild a social graph from first principles, or to use other mechanisms to find your friends.

As a reminder, you can find my profiles on my homepage.

I strongly agree with Isaac Schlueter’s thoughts on funding open source software:

There are a few pitfalls that I see many of these ideas fall into, all of which seem reasonable, but lead to failure:

1. A focus on "donations" and "community" as the ideological framing.
2. A focus on getting newcomers introduced to OSS and successful.
3. Marketing primarily to developers as the consumers of the products (ie, the ones paying money).
4. Overall, making payment optional, or for something other than use of the OSS products (eg, consulting, support, etc).

I thought about going through these in turn, but really, the fourth bullet point is the key one. Don’t make it optional. If your solution is a nice-to-have or depends on altruism in some way, it’s dead in the water. People who can pay should have to pay. It’s the only way to guarantee an income.

I also think I’d add a fifth bullet: conflating all open source software into one category. Clearly, an open source encryption library designed for use as part of an application is a different kind of software to, say, WordPress. Both of the high-use open source projects I’ve co-founded, Elgg and Known, have fit into that latter category, and I don’t have a good solution for it. Even WordPress struggled financially until it figured out how to (1) sell anti-spam solutions, (2) become a custom page-builder for agencies.

It’s also a mistake to try and solve the open source funding problems in all domains at once. There are too many variables; there’s too much to consider. How can you possibly create a business model that covers all software libraries?

So let’s not. Let’s focus our attention on one particular place.

Let’s focus on GitHub.

GitHub, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, is the largest repository of open source software in the world. It has $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and 90M active users. Most projects use it as their hub.

If you’re building software as part of an enterprise, you care about picking high-quality, well-maintained libraries, and you care about security. You might want to pass a SOC audit and demonstrate that you pay attention to library updates.

If I’m an open source developer, I probably want to have the resources to be able to spend more time working on my project, and I probably want people to use what I’ve built.

Imagine you could opt into a GitHub program for each open source repository you build. You pick one of a few approved licenses; you commit to updating the library and keeping on top of issues that people file; you agree to take part in a security bug bounty program. In turn, as long as you fix any disclosed security issues within a reasonable period and don’t let the library go unmaintained, you receive funds for every enterprise GitHub user that uses your library, GitHub will add a verified icon next to your repository name, and it will promote your library to potential paying users.

This won’t please open source purists. But in this scheme, all code will remain open for anyone to use. Enterprise GitHub users will continue to pay their existing fees, and developers will pay nothing to take part, and potentially make money. GitHub, meanwhile, gets higher quality open source code in the process, will see more development activity on its site, and can make a compelling sales pitch to gain more enterprise customers.

Over time, this might lead to GitHub developing a new license where corporate users must pay for an enterprise subscription. I don’t see that as necessarily a bad thing, as long as personal, educational, and nonprofit users can continue to use the code. While fully free software has been broadly beneficial to society, it has too often led to financial gain for large companies at the expense of individual developers. It also has led to a demographic problem where only a very narrow set of people (wealthy white men, generally) can afford to build open source software, while it is often used as part of a hiring assessment process.

There’s a more equitable middle ground where the source can be open but the use is not free for those who can afford to pay. Dare I say it: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

The Guardian on the future of TV:

The plan, after years of rumour, is for all TV output to be available online only within the next 10 years or so. Broadcast channels, with their daily line-up of shows, are doomed. Programmes (originally so-called because they were “programmed”) will come into our homes as streamed, branded products, rather than being beamed to viewers on a pre-ordained timetable.

This has previously been confirmed by the BBC:

The BBC is preparing to shut down its traditional television and radio broadcasts as it becomes an online-only service over the next decade, according to the director general, Tim Davie.

In the UK two years ago, 97% of households had access to the internet. The average cost is £30 a month, which incidentally nets out at just under half of the annual license fee British antenna owners have traditionally had to pay to gain access to broadcast television. Of course, if the license fee goes away, which it may well do in a streaming-only context, the net cost is lower. And subsidies are available to pay for the cost.

Here in the US, that number was only 85% - a decrease from a year previously. Even that is an underreported statistic: many of those internet connections are terrible. Research from Microsoft indicates that over 163 million Americans don’t have broadband internet access. The average cost is around $61 a month. With no BBC iPlayer in sight, Americans then have to pay eye-watering fees to get TV access: YouTube TV, for example, is $65 a month. Considering the average US mobile phone bill is an absurd $114 per month, Americans are wildly overpaying for data, putting it far out of reach of a lot of ordinary people.

Will this picture have changed much in ten years? It’s hard to see how without a lot of legislation. ISPs are not incentivized to lower prices, particularly considering significant local monopolies:

In the US, however, just a few big companies, often without overlap, control much of the telecom industry, and the result is high prices and uneven connectivity. […] “Broadly speaking, over the last 20 years in the US, we see profits of incumbents becoming more persistent, because they are less challenged, their market share has become both larger and more stable, and at the same time, we see a lot of lobbying by incumbents, in particular to get their mergers approved or to protect their rents,” [NYU economist Thomas] Philippon told me.

There’s a lot to be gained by television moving to an internet-only standard. Access will no longer be governed by spectrum auctions or cable providers: theoretically, any organization will be able to create a channel and stand on more or less equal footing. The days of bundled cable channels - get two that you want and eighty that you don’t - will finally go away.

But for this to work, access to the internet must be made available to all. That means creating more competition in local broadband markets (or nationalizing the lot, but hell will freeze over first), ensuring that everybody has a good standard of connection, protecting net neutrality, and radically lowering prices.

If one happens without the other, we’ll create a giant information divide that will further erode democracy. Effectively, only the relatively wealthy will have access to the news. News deserts already reduce democratic participation and increase corruption:

“We already live in a polarized country, and part of that polarization stems from our digital divide and our local-news divide,” [researcher into news deserts Penelope Muse Abernathy] told me. “We have to think about how we reach people who aren’t digitally connected, and how we can support efforts that get beyond the city.”

A further move to the internet without ensuring everyone can use it will compound that problem. Without intervention, that’s likely to be exactly what happens.

This guy:

Musk’s tweet was published just after he was booed off stage at a Dave Chappelle gig. Chappelle’s transphobic material is hardly on the social justice end of the rhetorical spectrum, so it’s more about hurt feelings than substance.

Anyway. “Woke” was originally about being aware of racial subjugation, and its modern-day usage usually relates to awareness of social power imbalances around race lines. Which are not imaginary and hold entire communities back.

So, just for the record, it’s not a “mind virus”, it’s a civil rights movement, and in my view, it must succeed or nothing else matters. The goal has to be a more equal, inclusive, and educated world. I will leave considering what opposition to that idea says about a person up to the reader.

Thinking through a “share with Mastodon” button that anyone could embed on a website. It’s a harder problem than a “share with Twitter” button, because there’s no one central host, and it would be ideal to avoid creating a central location to handle these requests. (Mastodon is decentralized, after all.)

As a bonus, I think it would work for indieweb or any other decentralized social platform. Maybe any social platform at all?

This would all be easier if web intents had stuck around. Nonetheless, here’s how it might work. Let’s call it “microshare”, to sit alongside micropub:

1. User clicks button on page.
2. JS on the page detects whether the web+social URI scheme has been registered (I wish this was easier, but you can do this by making an asynchronous request and waiting for it to succeed or fail).
3. If it has, great! Just forward the user to that URI.
4. If not, ask the user what the domain of their social profile is.
5. JS (or a back-end server process) goes and fetches that base URL and looks for either a microshare metatag or an HTTP header of the form Link: <https://example.com/microshare>;; rel="microshare". (Mastodon etc would need to support this endpoint and discovery of same.)
6. If the endpoint exists, the browser opens a new tab and forwards the user to that URI with additional text and url URL string parameters populated with the name and the URL of the page being shared respectively.
7. This new page contains a button to register the URI as the handler for the web+social URI scheme. It may also either prompt the user to log in, or, if they’re already logged in, share to that social platform, with the text and URL pre-filled into the form.

There are a few issues here that I’d like to iterate on: I wish URI scheme handling and detection was easier in a browser, for one. Secondly, there’s a potential phishing attack where a malicious website could show a fake login page and harvest someone’s login credentials.

Still, what I like about it is that it uses the web’s existing capabilities and doesn’t enforce a central domain handler (or even a domain as a shim). While it seems more convoluted than a standard href link (and it is), it can be achieved on publisher websites with just a few lines of JavaScript.

I’m sure I’ve missed something important, but I wanted to kick this off as a first step. Let me know what you think!

In the grand tradition of tech people barely doing something and then turning around and giving advice as if they’re experts, I thought I’d write up some of the things I’ve learned being the parent of a three-and-a-half-month-old baby. If you’re about to be a parent, you might find this useful. If you’re already a parent, you might disagree with me. And if you don’t want to have kids or think that being a parent is a long way off for you, this might reinforce your position. As always, your mileage may vary.

It’s jazz. Jazz musicians watch each other carefully throughout their performances. There are rules that dictate how they hand off to each other, and what they play when they do - but so much is also responsive, emotionally driven, and expressive. You can be very informed; you can learn techniques; you can build routines. But the number one lesson is to listen to what your child is telling you, implicitly and explicitly. Just like everything else in life, if you try and play rote from the textbook, you won’t do well. The core skill in parenting (and most things) is empathy.

Gadgets are a crutch. There is, of course, a whole industry of people trying to sell you things to help your baby sleep or make them smarter or healthier. We have a Snoo, a kind of robot crib that responsively rocks your baby to sleep. I thought it was miraculous until one day we didn’t use it and he both fell and stayed asleep just fine. There are white noise machines and apps to quantify your baby’s feeds and diaper changes. All of it just increases your anxiety and gives you a reason to think you’re a bad parent (often so you can buy more products from the app developer). Again: the rule is to be attentive to your baby.

The advice changes and will change again. The advice parents were given when I was a baby is not the same as the advice we’re given now. Older parents look at swaddling, for example, with horror: you’re straight-jacketing your baby! Newer parents (I think rightly) think of letting babies cry it out as tantamount to abuse. Some advice was right; some was wrong. The advice we’re being given this year is guaranteed to be outdated ten years from now.

Influencer parents are the devil. There are always people who try to make their living looking like perfect parents online. It’s also always true that every baby is different and different parents have different difficulties. Just as Instagram is dangerous for a teenager’s body image, it can convey harmful messages about how mothers in particular should act.

Invest in sleepers with zips and stretchy sleeves. You’ll thank me later.

Bottles are fine. There’s so much pressure on mothers to exclusively breastfeed. It’s sometimes impossible for lots of different reasons, from contextual to biological to personal choice. Breast milk is the healthiest thing for a baby to drink - no question. But sometimes formula is okay, and whatever’s being fed, a bottle is just fine. I like bottle-feeding: because I don’t lactate, it means I get to be an active participant in feeding my child.

Sexism is endemic. A nurse - a nurse! - at our hospital congratulated us on having a boy. (“I’ve only been able to have girls.”) Another apologized to me because I would need to hold or feed the baby sometimes. So many people think that parenting is women’s work. There is criticism of mothers who want to go back to work; there is criticism of fathers who want to be active parents. I am a fully-active parent and I resent this message enormously. This is yet another realm where traditional gender roles and societal traditions, in general, are not helpful.

You must also take care of yourself. I spent the first month not doing any exercise, eating a bunch of ice cream, and waking up every two hours. It was horrible and I felt like trash all the time. Later I cut out the ice cream and built going for a walk into my routine. It made a universe of difference. I still woke up very regularly, but the exercise and better diet made me feel like I had more energy.

Assume they can understand everything. My baby is a sponge. I’m certain he knows exactly what we’re saying all of the time. As much as cleaning poop off their onesies might be a pain, or as much as you’d like to not be feeding them at 3am, they’ve got to know how wonderful they are. There need to be smiles and good times. They don’t need to be neurotic at less than a year old - and they don’t need to pick up the idea that they’re a burden. They’re not a burden, after all! You can give your child reasons to go to therapy later on. I’m sure I will.

It’s a new baby every day. Babies regenerate, Doctor Who style. Their behavior changes radically, their body changes radically. (“How are your hands suddenly so big?” is a thing I’ve said multiple times.) They literally grow overnight. Enjoy the baby you have today and look forward to the one you’ll have tomorrow.

Treat your baby like they’re immunocompromised. A lot of people will expect you to be more social with your baby than you’re comfortable with. Don’t listen. They don’t have very functional immune systems in the first few months, and covid is very much back on the rise, and RSV is becoming a huge problem. It’s okay to be very cautious with your baby’s health. Keeping them alive is your main job now.

This is the single hardest thing I’ve ever done and hope to ever do. When people said that, I kind of assumed they meant spiritually or ethically. No. It’s really hard on every level. It takes everything you’ve got, every day. And it’s completely, 100% worth it.