Ben Werdmuller

We’re hosting a conversation about the future of the workforce, in-person in Austin, Texas, and streaming online everywhere. It’s free to register and attend.

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From the Great Resignation to the Great Reshuffle, our working lives have transformed during the pandemic — especially in terms of the economic and social dynamics. Some business sectors, as well as nonprofits and media organizations, have embraced change while others have fought against new policies.

COVID-19 has ushered in some new options, like flexible time off and hybrid work schedules. Remote work isn’t perfect for everyone, but it offers a reprieve for those who’ve felt alienated by inaccessible workspaces, where gender and racial microaggressions can proliferate.

Are the shifting norms of the last few years here to stay — or will large businesses continue to push for a return to pre-pandemic “normal?” How can business leaders balance economic growth and emerging technologies with the rights and needs of workers? The 19th is gathering business and policy leaders who think deeply about labor to discuss the future of the workforce.

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I tend to get my links from three sources: my feed subscriptions, links I find on social media (particularly using Twitter Blue’s excellent “top articles from people you follow” feature), and stuff that people send me directly.

If I read something and find it particularly interesting, I’ll save it to a Notion database I’ve got set up. Mostly I do this because the Notion web clipper and iOS app makes life really easy for me.

Then the bookmarks get synced in a few different ways:

• To my website using Micropub
• To Buffer for scheduled sending to Twitter

The sync itself is via Zapier right now, but when I get time I’ll replace with my own script.

I used to post directly to Twitter, but I realized that there’s no need to post there at the same time I save to my site. Because I tend to read my feeds in batches, Buffer helps me avoid posting floods of links to my Twitter account at once. It also gives me a little wiggle room if something goes wrong (eg if the sync accidentally triggers when I’m halfway through writing a description).

At the end of the month, I take my links from the Notion database and use a simple script to turn them into a formatted post, which I edit in iA Writer before publishing to my site using its micropub feature.

The end result:

• I have a searchable database of my bookmarks
• I reliably share them to my website
• I get to publish a round-up post at the end of the month, which is one of my favorite things

It sounds like a lot, but I really enjoy the process I’ve set up: it’s easy for me, and does everything I need it to.

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Last week, I asked you about your fiction-reading habits as part of my research for a personal project I’m working on.

I also ran a separate survey on Google Surveys - getting in just before that service shuts down next month - to get a sense of what the average web visitor reads.

Although I expected this community to diverge from overall web visitors in key ways, I was surprised - but perhaps shouldn’t have been - by where it didn’t.

Here’s the biggest headline: traditional, paper books are still by far the best way for an author to reach even a technical audience. Most people across all audiences discover books via traditional bookstores, word of mouth, and the library - so if you’re limiting yourself to self-published ebooks, you’re missing out in a big way. More on that in a moment.

Blog readers like to read fiction far more than the average person.

First, some overall numbers:

The average American reads twelve books a year: a number that includes non-fiction titles. And only 59% of Americans read fiction books at all.

In contrast, over three quarters of you read more than ten fiction books a year; a sixth of you read more than fifty. This is fiction only: a subset of all the books you read. Although I didn’t connect this to demographic data or questions about what respondents read outside of fiction, I expect these stats hold up for the communities of most similar blogs.

No surprise: tech blog readers like science fiction. The world at large loves mystery and romance.

Everyone loves genre fiction - but which genres are sharply divergent.

This community is far and away most interested in science fiction and speculative fiction (1 in 4), with fantasy coming in at a close second (almost 1 in 5). 10% of folks said they read literary and historical fiction each, followed by mystery (and “cozy mystery”, which is a distinct sub-category). 3% of the community reads romance novels.

On the web as a whole, the numbers are very different. Almost 40% of respondents read mystery novels; 30% read romance; fantasy and horror are read by around a quarter of web visitors who filled in the survey. Only one in five web visitors read science fiction. Literary and historical fiction was in line with respondents from this community at 10% each.

Blog readers find their books offline.

About 20% of respondents from this community get their books through their local library - roughly the same percentage as the number who get them from Amazon. 15% get their books from traditional bookstores, and another 15% get them second hand. Other sources (including other stores, like Apple Books) came in at very small percentages.

A much higher percentage of the wider web gets their books via Amazon - around 40%. Only 10% of them get their books from a bookstore.

These latter statistics are closer to what I expected to see across the board, but blog readers are far more likely to go to independent bookstores, visit their local library, and borrow books from friends and family. So while this community is more technically-inclined, its book consumption is actually more offline than the general public.

We find our books through word of mouth.

Almost 40% of readers in this community preferred to learn about books through friends and family. Booktok doesn’t reach us: only 1% saw recommendations via TikTok. Social media, on the other hand, represented 25% (even if only 5% followed up on recommendations from blogs). 12% of respondents learned about books via Goodreads.

In both sets, around 12% got their recommendations from displays in physical bookstores. But whereas only 4% of this community said they learned through Amazon recommendations, 25% of general website visitors listed it as a main source. Only 6% of general website visitors learned about books from Goodreads.

Paper books still rule.

Finally, across both datasets, paper books rule supreme: 60% for the general public and for blog readers alike.

In both cases, about 20% read their books specifically on Amazon’s Kindle platform. About 10% “read” via an audiobook platform (mostly Audible, which is also owned by Amazon). And even among my open source forward community, only around 1% read using alternative ebook platforms.

I was genuinely surprised by this: I thought I’d see much higher ebook usage in my blog community. But it turns out that we all love the tangible look and feel of a book, and I strongly suspect that those of us who stare at a screen all day are more than happy to read on something else.

Reading between the lines:

This audience values books and the traditional book ecosystem. We like libraries and independent bookstores; we like the smell of a book. Anecdotally, I suspect we’re also suspicious of Amazon and of books that haven’t gone through a publisher’s vetting process. That also means it’s harder to get an independently-published book into our hands.

But libraries and independent bookstores are also more likely to carry and highlight books from small presses. These startup and independent publishers could be a really great way to reach readers with similar reading habits to those in this community. Of course, the big presses could be great too - but are potentially harder to get published by.

Based on this first set of quantitative results, my hypothesis is that it’s better to publish your book with a traditional press and then double down on both social media and independent bookstore promotion. That’s the marketing: I also believe that literary science fiction with a strong mystery component is the kind of fiction that would speak to this audience.

My next step is to double down on this hypothesis, identify my key assumptions, and go out and test them with some qualitative interviews.

More on that soon.

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

JP Morgan cancelled Kanye West’s bank accounts following his anti-semitic remarks today.

Over the last few years, a raft of “free speech” social networks have emerged as an alternative to the content policies enacted by companies like Twitter. They take very public anti “cancel culture” stances. But what does that really mean?

Using observer accounts, I took a peek at each of the main ones to see how this particular piece of news went down. Here I will issue a content warning: posts on these sites, including those run by mainstream political operators, are extremely disturbing.

Truth Social is owned by the Trump Media and Technology Group, which in turn is chaired by former President Donald Trump. There, an account with over 50,000 followers (10% of its Daily Active Users) states:

Truth Social has around 2 million users.

Gab was founded in 2016 as the first right-wing alternative social network. The founder (who has 3.7 million followers) writes:

In response to a post that asks "who runs JP Morgan Chase?" hundreds of users respond with some variation of "the Jews".

Gab has around 4 million users.

Minds was founded in 2011 and originally built on top of Elgg, the open source social networking framework I co-founded. While it was originally created as an alternative to surveillance capitalism, its anti-banning stance caused it to provide a home to white supremacists banned from mainstream networks in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. (Indeed, Trump had invited its founders to the White House alongside the founders of the networks listed above in 2019.)

Over there, a popular post states:

Minds has over two million users.

GETTR is another conservative Twitter clone, this time founded by a former Trump aide. Here the anti-semitism is less overt, although a few comments from fringe accounts did talk about “the satanic Jews”, which was a trope on the other networks.

GETTR also has around 4 million users.

Parler, which also emerged during the Trump era, is hopelessly unusable. I couldn’t figure out how to search for content on it, when it even managed to log me in.

Parler claims to have a million users, but I don't know how.

It’s not a partisan statement to say that I find these comments to be utterly chilling both in terms of their content and their effective endorsement by large-scale backers that include the former President of the United States.

I’m also deeply unhappy with how my open source code was used to build Minds. I don’t believe its founders to be anti-semites, but I do think that tolerance of this kind of hatred is not anything approaching the virtue that they think it is. While these sorts of hateful ideas can certainly be countered by better ones, it’s also certainly true that alternative social networking sites have been used to plan undemocratic insurrections and hate crimes that led to real harm.

Mainstream social networks, particularly Facebook, are not off the hook here: banning anti-semitism does not absolve you of complicity in genocide elsewhere. Twitter also has its fair share of discoverable posts that espouse anti-semitic tropes. But these other networks are remarkable for their concentration: whereas these ideas are a tiny fringe on Facebook and Twitter, they’re how these other networks support themselves. You go to an alt network because you’ve been banned - or you’re worried you will be banned - from a traditional one. This concentration of extremists is why much of the insurrection was able to be openly organized on networks like Gab.

The Southern Poverty Law Center noted as such in its The Year in Hate & Extremism Report 2021:

Hate groups and other extremists do not solely rely on mainstream social media platforms to spread their message — they are increasingly using “alt-tech” platforms that are often advertised as “free speech” alternatives to places like Twitter and Facebook. On these platforms, users don’t have to worry about content moderation. These include video platforms like Bitchute and Odysee and social media sites like Gab.

And there does seem to be a growing, violent movement lurking here. Incidents of antisemitism in America hit an all-time high in 2021. I’m certain that this is in no small part because overtly racist town squares have become easier than ever to be a part of. These networks have millions of users, are growing, encourage real hate crime, and have ringing endorsements from people who have held the highest office in the land. We overlook them as sideshows at our peril.

For a new project, I’d love to understand how you read fiction. In particular, I’d love to know what your favorite topics are, which books you particularly love, and how you discover new books to read.

So I put together a short, anonymous survey. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to fill out, and it would really help me. All questions are completely optional, and it would be useful to me even if you just filled out one.

I’ll follow up with results in a future post. Thank you!

I’ll follow Doctor Who anywhere - I’ve been a fan since I was five years old - but the trailer for the BBC Centennial episode left me cold, even despite the welcomed presence of Ace and Tegan.

It’s had some criticism, and there were some clunkers (hello, Kerblam), but I’ve broadly enjoyed this era: an optimistic Doctor, a renewed focus on inclusion and kindness, a family-friendliness that doubtless brought in new kids. Season twelve in particular was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the mystery that The Timeless Children brought back to the character’s origins. The execution could sometimes have been tighter, but it was all good. I’ll follow this show anywhere.

What I wish, though, is that they’d embrace some smaller stories. Classic Who was often structured like a mystery novel: something weird was happening, and the Doctor would have to get to the bottom of what was causing it. Often there were multiple contenders, like potential murderers in an Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes story. The survival of the world didn’t need to be at stake; it could be creepy and self-contained in its own right. The stories could still talk about big topics, but they didn’t need to be bombastic to be effective.

That’s true across a lot of modern reboots. The myriad Star Treks, for example, seem to feel the need to be action-packed movies instead of the idea-led potboilers of the past. I think producers think they need to do this to get past our shorter attention spans, but they’re missing the point: our quality filters are higher than they ever were, and the way to keep our attention is to give us tightly-written, compellingly-acted, humanistically-directed drama. Some of the best modern television - Succession, Severance, Slow Horses - do understand this, but clearly not everyone got the memo.

I’ll absolutely watch, probably multiple times, and I’ll probably love it. But I do wish we’d swap flash back for substance. Maybe I’m just getting old.

January, 2030.

After a long journey, I finally climb into my rental car. It’s a nice ride: comfortable bucket seats with built-in heaters, plenty of leg room, good visibility on all sides, and a large dashboard screen.

As soon as I get in, the car notices I’m sitting in the driver’s seat and springs to life. The seat itself has already adjusted itself for my height and usual driving position. The car checks the rental car record and sees that I’m an authorized driver: I have the ability to turn on the engine and drive. The dashboard is illuminated with my operating system and choice of gauges, which follows me into every car I drive. The car’s underlying hardware and firmware provides a standard API - CarTalk, like the old radio show - and handles low-level self-driving and safety controls. In turn, my portable identity, represented by my phone or other identity-compatible hardware, provides the UI and user preferences on top of those APIs.

Five years from now, in 2035, gasoline-powered cars will be banned in most major markets. But the market is already way ahead of that milestone: well over half of all cars sold today are electric. Although sky-high gasoline prices are a huge factor in this, the availability of personalized interfaces like the one I’m using are another strong reason. You can’t get personalization like this on a legacy car: the APIs just aren’t there. Electric wins because it’s a more modern, streamlined experience.

The mirrors are all pre-adjusted; I’m ready to go. I manually drive out of the lot and onto the freeway. I don’t expect to be driving for long, and like to be in control. In practice, self-driving is still mostly the domain of fleet vehicles like freight trucks, light rail, and buses, although it’s a handy thing to turn on for very long drives, in the same way that people used to use cruise control.

*

October, 2022.

For the last year and change, I’ve driven a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, a variant of the cheapest model of Tesla. This is in no way an endorsement of Elon Musk or the way the company is run: my mother wanted one, I put one on order, and when it arrived after she died I decided to keep it. I’ll probably exchange it sometime in the next year or two, particularly when the ID. Buzz comes out in the US. But given the state of the world, environmentally and geopolitically, I’ll never go back to a gasoline-powered car.

I’m not a high-end car guy by nature: my previous ride was a second hand ex-rental Hyundai Elantra. I actually resent the fact that I need to own a car at all, and would vastly prefer just to use public transit in the way I did before I moved here. But a car is necessary here, at least for now.

Still, the Tesla is undeniably fun to drive, and I really do like that it’s emission-free (and that I don’t have to pay high gas prices). Even simple features were magic to me: adaptive cruise control, for example, which I now know is at least an option across most new cars sold in the last few years. But it’s far smoother and more performant than anything I’ve previously owned.

It’s also given me an insight into this simple fact: Tesla is going to be absolutely dead within a few years unless it radically changes strategy.

The Tesla has its own integrated operating system. Even if you’ve never driven one, you’ve probably seen the iPad-like touchscreen display. Never mind that the interface keeps changing every few software versions and the text is surprisingly unreadable; it’s also substandard compared to, say, Apple CarPlay.

You’re expected to use voice commands for just about everything, because most features are so buried in convoluted menus that finding the control while you’re driving would be life-threatening. But the voice assistant also stinks. I find myself adopting a fake American accent to get it to understand me, and finding the right command can feel like playing a text adventure game circa 1985. Even opening the glovebox is like this. (What do you call a glovebox? If it’s not “glovebox”, you may find getting it open harder than you’d like.)

Finally, there’s no App Store. Whereas I can bring my relevant apps along for the ride in most other modern cars, the Tesla limits me to whatever the manufacturers thought would be useful. I have to use Tesla’s map; Tesla’s entertainment options; Tesla’s features. Were they streets ahead of everyone else’s, that might be reasonable, but they’re not.

Tesla and a few other manufacturers are vying to be the Apple of cars: a full-stack ecosystem that just works. I’ve found no fault with the hardware (although others have), and I find the proprietary charging network to be convenient and slick. But the software layer almost feels like an afterthought.

Getting the car serviced is also problematic. You can take most cars to your neighborhood mechanic. A lot of people have one they trust, that they’ve built up a relationship with over a period of years. In contrast, Tesla requires you to use its own network of repair shops, limiting you to their availability and price. That model works to some extent for Apple because an iPhone bricking is generally not life-threatening (and even then, a general right to repair is looming). In the US at least, people depend on cars to live - and losing control of one on the road is a life and death situation. The context is wildly different.

What Tesla did succeed at is showing everyone how software could be integrated with a car. And it will be, very quickly. The next version of Apple CarPlay is multi-screen and can take over an entire dashboard. New vehicles will have this capability built in, and legislative pressure from territories like the EU will force these APIs to be open and standard, in the same way that On Board Diagnostics II was made mandatory. Already, startups are setting themselves up as the standard API across all EV brands, demonstrating the need for standardization. Finally, charging stations will also inevitably be standardized.

In a world where everyone can bring their apps and experience on their phone, where electric vehicles are commonplace, and where everyone can use every EV charger, I don’t know where Tesla differentiates. The result will be something similar to the car market today. Rather than buying into a set of competing ecosystems, consumers will find that every car is an able receptacle for the apps and identities they carry with them. A combination of legacy and new car manufacturers will be forced to compete on the best possible hardware platform, based on safety, range, and user experience alone. In turn, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto will also face competitors based on user preferences, because they won’t be able to lock manufacturers into their standards either. In effect, the right to repair will extend to onboard software.

*

January 2030.

We have a lot of the same problems we used to have. Roads are congested because of under-investment in mass transit solutions. Climate change continues because of industrial causes, and not enough power generation comes from renewable sources. The politics of fuel are as complicated and fraught as ever.

But personal carbon footprints in car-centric countries like the United States are markedly down. Cars have gone through an evolutionary step change and are now transport platforms in a way they never were before. There are even beginning to be applications that swarm cars through mesh networks - ad-hoc caravans - that increase group efficiency while also providing network effects for car manufacturers.

As ever, we’re inching towards being better. It’s not a revolution; just another step change. Which is what, at its heart, technology always does.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Two website updates:

Inspired by Dave Winer’s FeedLand, I now publish a live view of my sources at sources.werd.io. I start every day with my feeds, and this page is powered by those exact same subscriptions. So as I curate my list, the page at sources.werd.io will update automatically, and you can see what I’m reading.

Behind the scenes, this is a small Node script that polls the NewsBlur API and outputs a static HTML file every five minutes. For now, it ignores my mailing list subscriptions, which I also read through NewsBlur, mostly because some of those are paid and I don’t want to expose private content.

As always, if you know of a source that should be added to the list, let me know! I love discovering new sources to read - and particularly new personal blogs.

Speaking of: the second thing I did was resurrect my website at benwerd.com. When I moved hosting providers a while back, I failed to bring it back online, but this is an archive of every blog post I made between 2004 and 2013. It’s powered by WordPress, which I also upgraded in the process, so the design is a little different - but the content’s all there. Here are some highlighted posts from that era of my writing.