Ben Werdmuller

My opinions on web business models have changed over time.

I agree that advertising was one of the web’s original sins, although at this point in its cultural life I’m not sure I’m prepared to say that it was the only original sin. At the same time, I’m not sure if the web would be the web without it: I wonder if it would have been as big or as ubiquitous if it had been harder for platforms to make money on it. Secure web payments weren’t a thing, so online subscriptions were difficult to achieve - and even if they hadn’t been, content with a price tag is by definition exclusionary, with a far narrower potential audience. Ads, for all their evils, kept the web open to all.

It may seem obvious, but money was, and will continue to be, important for the web. While I’d love to live in a post-capitalist, post-money society, we don’t. Asking web creators to build and share for the love of it negates their need to put roofs over their heads and pay for food. And while it’s clear that internet companies grew to be very large and amass a lot more money than an individual creator requires, the advertising these behemoth engines generated arguably fueled the web’s growth and subsequent popularity. I’m not here to defend any tech giant, and I think there’s a great deal wrong with the wealth hoarding they practice and the liberties they often take with human rights, but I don’t think we’d be having the same kind of conversation if they hadn’t existed.

Anyway, It’s a moot point, because ads were everywhere on the web, they were how it grew, and they did create the world’s largest warrantless surveillance network in the process. They weren’t the only thing: centralized web analytics and detailed customer profiling aren’t intrinsically tied to ads. But targeted advertising opened the floodgates for ubiquitous tracking across the free websites that represent most ongoing web activity.

The question isn’t “what would have been better”, but “where do we go from here”. So what now?

For a time it seemed like subscriptions, paywalls, and micropayments might be the answer. But I’ve laid the clues for why they’re not necessarily so above: they intrinsically exclude the majority of a site’s potential audience from being able to see and consume its information. And rather than precluding tracking, taking direct payment still incentivizes websites to tailor a commercial call to action.

Simply put, if you know where a potential customer has spent money on before, and what on, you’re more likely to know what could entice them to spend money with you once they’ve landed on your website or in your app. These customer insights necessitate tracking. And at the same time, not every ad needs to be targeted: advertising does not require tracking to work, and publishers tend not make more money from targeted ads.

I do think shifting to methods of direct support to the web has the potential to be part of a solution, but not inherently to itself. Paying for content and services obviously has its place, but at the same time, business models can’t possibly be one-size-fits-all. Sometimes excluding users who can’t pay is too much friction, or is converse to the mission you’re following, or is even societally harmful - imagine, for example, if the journalism required for voters to make smart democratic decisions all lay behind a paywall. Every business, every creator, everyone who wants to build community has to know what their mission is and who their audience is, and must tailor their approach accordingly.

I’ve come to really appreciate patronage models. You can see this most readily on sites like The Guardian and Wikipedia: great content served as part of a well-made product, with a clear, well-constructed ask that is hard to ignore but also easily dismissable. Neither site, to the best of my knowledge, does anything to subvert user privacy; neither site makes any limitations on who can access their pages. If you don’t have the means or the inclination to pay, you can just close the box and carry on with your day. But if you can, it’s equally as easy to throw them some money. You don’t get much in return (although there may be some tote bag style benefits) aside from the warm glow of knowing that you’ve kept a public resource online.

Here the politics of privacy turn on their head. Whereas nobody wants an ad company to know who they are or to be able to follow them around, people who purchase patronage may want to be recognized. For some, being publicly associated with a creator or community you love may be an incentive in itself. Because it’s a more direct relationship, a site may also feel that it’s in its interests to list its patrons’ names, so that community members can understand who is paying for all this. (In full disclosure, my employer, The 19th, does this.)

I’d love to see an open source patronage widget that uses a built-in web payments protocol to allow anyone with a website to be able to easily take patronage payments without going through a centralized service that could track them, optionally with a requirement to record a patron’s identity for display. This is the kind of thing I know the Unlock Protocol team, which I spent some time on, is working on.

As discussed, though, this is not a problem with a purely technological solution. I’d love to find ways to build a stronger culture of patronage across the web, which I think is tied directly up with finding ways to build stronger community. My hunch is that people with a strong, bidirectional relationship to a content creator or service will be more likely to support it.

Finally, I don’t think we get away with eradicating surveillance capitalism without legislation. Just as every market needs some rules to protect consumers and ensure companies play fair, the internet needs to be governed by real privacy laws. We’re at the foothills of a movement here: the GDPR and CCPA are two examples of what will hopefully become an international agreement about what constitutes real privacy. Because it’s much harder to build a web service that carves out privacy legislation compliance for users in a geography than just to build a service that complies for everyone, these laws have an outsized impact. We’ve seen that a free-for-all open market does not result in an environment that protects consumers from warrantless surveillance; it’s past time that these regulations became mainstream everywhere.

Brought together, I think that’s the future of paying for content and services on the web that I’d like to see:

• Robust privacy protections, worldwide
• A flexible, web-native model that leans heavily on patronage for consumer web content and services
• A way to keep content and services free at the point of use for most users
• Easy-to-use tools and protocols that allow web creators and consumer service providers to collect funds without having to engage with centralized services that could track customers

It’s clear that alignments have to change to make this a reality. For example, while it might be relatively easy to think of content that you might want to patronize, services might be a little tougher. What would Twitter or Facebook have to do to make you want to be a patron?

As a start, they would need to deliver exceptional value: not as a delivery mechanism for ads, but as communities that you’re excited for people to be a part of because they make the world better. Doesn’t that seem like a much more enlightened model than today’s engagement machines that encourage discord in order to show you more ads?

Yes, it’s a tall order, but so was the web. I believe we can reclaim the commons and build something that’s more nurturing and supportive for all of us - and that allows creators and people who build services to make a living at the same time. In fact, I think the future of the web as a medium may depend on it.

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

Open, collaborative protocols > centralized services.

Impact on people > impact on capital.

Impact on communities > impact on individuals.

Human rights > capital rights.

Distributed equity > limited ownership.

Distributing equity > adding value to exclusionary systems.

Sustainability > get-rich-quick.

Building value > building wealth.

Serving underlying human needs > prescriptiveness for one particular approach, business model, financing strategy, or underlying technology.

Listening, building, and testing > talking.

The best listeners in the room > the smartest people in the room.

Radical inclusion and empathy > radical individualism.

In the spirit of Uses This, here’s what the baby stack looks like right now, a week or two before birth:

Hardware

Uppababy Cruz. An adaptable folding stroller. What’s super-cool about it is that it supports a bassinet as well as a seat, and can also support an infant snug-seat for very little ones. Theoretically, then, the stroller can last for years, as the baby grows bigger. Although I haven’t yet had the opportunity to try it with a real life baby (soon!), it seems stunningly well-designed in a way that a lot of technology hardware isn’t. Buttons do what you think they should do, and folding it up for storage is one very simple, quick motion.

Uppababy Mesa. A car seat that was shockingly easy to install in my car. Even better, it clicks out of its base really simply, and can actually click into the Uppababy Cruz stroller. It all just works seamlessly, like an Apple ecosystem for babies. I have memories of my parents struggling with belts and braces for car seats, and that doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore. Good.

Happiest Baby SNOO. A smart bassinet. It looks and sounds like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel: it automatically soothes the baby and helps them sleep, like something aliens might do if they were raising humans on a farm. I still don’t know how I feel about it, honestly, but I’ll form a better opinion later on. If it turns out everyone hates the smart features, it also just looks like a well-made baby bed.

Hatch Rest. A combination night light and natural-sound white noise machine. I don’t know about baby, but it helps me sleep.

We have some baby wraps and carriers, but I feel like a three year old learning to put on a sweater. I get lost and I’ve got no idea which ones are good yet; I won’t until later.

Etc

Maven workshops have generally been pretty good, although I really wish there’d been more in-person time.

UCSF are, as (almost) always, brilliant.

We’ve been reading him A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the womb. Beatrix Potter, too. I’m one of those people now.

But also singing! And telling stories! And saying hello! It’s the organic, offline, really human stuff that I think is going to make a real difference.

I don’t know that any of these devices are going to be particularly all that. I’m the least excited about the SNOO and probably the most impressed by the Uppababy ecosystem. Most of all, I’ve got no idea what will happen and how it will actually be - and I’m clinging onto anything that will help me feel like I’m not completely lost.

We’ll see what happens!

Photo by Steven Abraham on Unsplash

As America becomes more diverse, and as a direct consequence more inclusive, it unfortunately makes sense that more people will come out of the woodwork suggesting that people who aren’t white and male be disenfranchised. This is a racist country, after all. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Take this radio host, name redacted. I think this messaging is unthinkably chilling:

I didn’t sign up to be part of a fight for the basics of representative democracy, but I’ve got a growing feeling that’s what we’ll all be drawn into. Christian nationalist rhetoric in particular is escalating quickly, and there’s no middle ground to be found with people who want to deny others’ right to exist with the same rights and terms as them. It would be irresponsible to downplay the risks.

How can we turn this back? And particularly given our context of diminishing resources, rapidly-progressing climate change, and off-the-charts inequality, what will life even look like five or ten years down the road?

The best part of traveling is the food.

You can learn so much from how and what people eat. The way they gather, the smell of the spices, the sizzle of oil in great pans, the delicacies that only come from the sorts of hole-in-the-wall places that locals protect with their lives.

I’ve never been a fussy eater. I explore new places like a toddler: taste buds first, every nerve in my mouth feeling out a new experience. There’s so much joy and humanity to be found in food - and in particular in the kinds of food that are cheap and accessible. Fancy restaurants are all very well (I’m not knocking the skill and artistry involved in a Michelin-starred meal) but the kind of place that can become someone’s regular joint is beguiling. The food is the basis of a relationship that forms over time.

I drove across the US twice last year. Heading east, we went the northern route, through Glacier National Park and the Montana plains. Heading west some months later, we traveled south. Every time we tried one of the headline places to eat - the tourist traps, in other words - the food paled in comparison to the places where locals went. In New Orleans, Cafe du Monde is a fun experience, but the food doesn’t compare to unpretentious spots like Stuph’D.

And just as food is tied deeply into the identity of a place, so is it tied to the identity of a person. We all have the dishes we love, which make up the fabric of us; the ingredients we enjoy, how and when we cook, if we cook at all, the smells we produce in the kitchen and the smells that attract us at the table. Whether our cooking is a whole thing or if it’s something we do regularly, it’s part of our self-image and the image we project. We need food to survive, and our relationship with it reflects us.

When people ask me where I’m from, I sometimes joke and say, “I come from the internet”. In some ways that’s true, but the joke stops here: I’m in no way from the place that produced pink sauce and baked feta pasta. Food, more than anything, links me to the places I came from.

I really learned to cook from my Oma, who brought her Indonesian dishes to California when my dad’s family emigrated in the sixties and adapted them for locally-available ingredients. She loved cooking for her family, but began to lose strength. So she gave me instructions: sayur lodeh and nasi goreng under her direction were my first adventures in mixing spices and building flavors. I grew up with these meals, regular weekday occurrences rather than exotic events, but no less delicious for it; I was pleased to learn how to reproduce them.

We ate a lot of Italian and French food, common to many American families of any origin (despite being in England): lasagna, quiches, homemade pizzas, spaghetti. But my mother’s Ukrainian Jewish ancestry led us to eat piroshki and borscht on special occasions; matzo ball soup; latkes; challah. Our meals were hearty. “Do you eat foreign food every day?!” one school friend memorable said when he came over. It wasn’t foreign to us; it was ours. “Eat, eat,” my great grandfather used to say, “it’s good for you.” Grandpa Dave was PA Joint Board manager of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union of America; here’s a story about a holiday complex he helped build for union workers.

Despite living in England, at no point did we eat English food, which I was left to discover as an adult. I didn’t have so much as a Sunday roast until I was in my twenties: it just wasn’t part of our culinary milieu. Of course, then I leapt on it, and writing this in California I find myself missing Yorkshire puddings and pork pies.

Locard’s exchange principle dictates that every contact leaves a trace. Although it was developed for forensic investigations, it’s equally applicable to people and migration: the places we’ve been all rub off on us, and we rub off on them. I’m a Ukrainian-Jewish-Indonesian-Swiss-Dutch-American who lived in both England and Scotland for decades. Each of those places left some trace on me, directly or via my family, and my descendants will find that they have rubbed off on them too, even if each of those ingredients has a slightly different potency to mine. They will have their own distinct identities, while also reflecting what and who came before them.

And of course, the same is true of everyone. Each of those chefs in the hole-in-the-wall joints serving food to their regulars has their own combination of ingredients that led to them. We’re all constantly leaving traces on each other, part of a tremendous, delicious mix. The more we mix and ebb and flow, the greater the tastes we may experience. To be fussy and reject new tastes, or to demand it be anglicized or made pristine, is to reject new people and other ways of life.

Taste is part of life. It’s one of the best parts of living. We are, literally and metaphorically, what we eat.

Photo by Miquel Parera on Unsplash

Well, we sold the house. A new family gets to enjoy the space, and the incredible surrounds. It’s the start of a new chapter for us, too.

I was there over the weekend, and the memories were overwhelming: the four walls of my parents’ former bedroom held newly-staged furniture for show, but I could hear the laughter, remember talking to my mother at the end of the day, could hear her feeding tube apparatus rolling across the floor. So much happened there. It’s sad to see it go, but the memories stay with us. All we’re really leaving behind is wood, stone, and plaster.

Throughout the sale, our agent Florence Sheffer was wonderful. She held our hands through the whole process, and was as fun to work with as she was knowledgable and connected. She consistently went above and beyond to help us. I’d recommend her to anyone who wants to buy or sell a home in Santa Rosa and the surrounding area.

I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing with the indieweb website that I made for the house. Probably I’ll just let the domain expire. Here it is, archived for posterity on the Internet Archive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about redesigning my website, or even moving platforms. That’s a bit of an emotional decision, because my website runs on Known, a codebase I mostly wrote myself, and started while I was taking care of my mother post-lung-transplant. It’s the reason I’m connected to the indieweb community, and the Matter community, and a lot of people I care deeply about. All those things are separable from this codebase now, but it got me there, and I’m hugely grateful for that.

The design is looking a little long in the tooth: I can make tweaks, and would commit them upstream into the open source project for other people to use, but I think there’s something to be said for starting again completely, knowing what I know now.

If I had unlimited time and energy - which, sadly isn’t my situation; time and energy are both in very short supply right now - I’d rebuild Known in something like Node, with a cleaner codebase. For now, I think I’ll live with it, and clean what I can.

Incidentally, I also cleaned up my public Obsidian site at werd.cloud. I intend to do more with non-linear, unbloggy writing there.

What is a man?

The only answer I really care about is “whatever you want it to be”. Like all men, I’ve spent my life in a context of weirdly reductive, gender essentialist expectations - a man is physically strong, competitive, aggressive, stoic - that I couldn’t live up to because, generally speaking, that’s not what I am. Am I less of a man because I’m not aggressive, and because I prefer collaboration to competition? I don’t think so, but there are certainly plenty of people who do.

The reason this matters for me now is not my own experience. I’ve found my way to a kind of self-acceptance, although my teenage years and most of my twenties were pretty rough: a mix of hating my body and receiving hate for not being what people expected me to be. I definitely have some pretty strong character flaws (non-confrontation and people-pleasing among them), which I’m trying to work on. But I feel some degree of pride about who I am, what I’ve managed to do, and the effect I have on the communities I’m a part of. Honestly? I’m glad I don’t adhere to the gender stereotype, even if it’s also true that I couldn’t if I wanted to.

But now I’m going to have a son (or at least, a baby who will be assigned male at birth), who will be subject to all of the same pressures and expectations, even in his first few years. There will be people who will be upset if he plays with dolls; there will be people who want to direct his interests to sports and trucks and whatever-else boys are supposed to like. There’s a fine line to walk here, because if he comes to those interests naturally, there’s nothing wrong with them! And those interests shouldn’t be gendered in the first place! I don’t want to dissuade any of his interests. But I worry about him getting there through external pressure, both explicitly and implicitly. The pressure to conform to someone else’s standard can only lead to anxiety and unhappiness; not to mention the impact it has on perpetuating gender inequality, and how he shows up for other people later in life.

To be clear, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not an expert in gender, or parenting, or really anything else. But I want to show up well as a parent, and I want him to show up well in the world (which are two expressions of the same thing). I just want him to be whoever he is, without regard for who other people expect him to be. That goes for every aspect of his (or her! or their!) identity. And I want the experience of that self-expression to be better than mine was, and better than so many people’s are, without fear or friction or conflict.

I guess what I’m really saying is, I don’t care what a man is, or what a boy is. I care who my child is. And that’s all that matters.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

This morning, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it had invested $350M into Adam “WeWork” Neumann’s new startup, Flow. Whereas WeWork revolutionized the commercial real estate business and made ad-hoc office space easier for startups, Flow attempts to do the same for residential real estate.

A lot of ink has been spilled on whether it’s okay for A16Z to have invested this money given Neumann’s well-documented, disastrous track record with WeWork, in an environment where lots of other people find it hard to raise even a tiny fraction of this amount. I agree with these comments in the sense that it’s obviously unfair: a sign of an unequal system. It just is.

But for a moment, look at it from a mercenary venture capitalist’s perspective. WeWork is everywhere, which happened under Neumann’s watch - and although Neumann is not the one doing it, it’s finally approaching profitability.

And then there’s housing, which is in need of major reform. I’m not going to shed any tears at the loss of today’s batch of rental agencies and real estate management firms, which have helped hike rents up to astronomical levels, and have often lobbied for preferential legislation that hurts ordinary renters. At the same time, investment properties leave many homes completely vacant in the middle of a housing crisis that is leaving millions experiencing housing insecurity.

The trouble is, Flow is highly unlikely to help with any of that. Marc Andreessen’s announcement hints at as much:

Many people are voting with their feet and moving away from traditional economic hub cities to different cities, towns, or rural areas, with no diminishment of economic opportunity. […] The residential real estate world needs to address these changing dynamics. And yet virtually no aspect of the modern housing market is ready for these changes.

Based on these words, Flow is gentrification as a service: a way for the technorati to rent cushy spaces in lower-cost parts of the country and build community with each other without having to engage with the people who are already there. It’s not a stretch to see what the racial and socioeconomic dynamics might be here, and the effect it might have on local economies. Low-cost housing for people who need it this is not.

“Our nation has a housing crisis,” Andreessen says. But he also said this, as reported by Jerusalem Demsas over in the Atlantic:

I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton … Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.

He doesn’t care about the housing crisis. What he does care about is making money, and in Neumann, he likely sees someone who already knows the real estate market well and has the ability to grow a business in the space very quickly. I’m sure we’ll see Flow communities all over the country within the next few years.

Where will he start? We can look at public records. The New York Times points out that he’s now going to donate substantial real estate holdings to Flow. Back in January, the Wall Street Journal reported that he’d bought over a billion dollars of apartments in the South:

Entities tied to Mr. Neumann have been quietly acquiring majority stakes in more than 4,000 apartments valued at more than $1 billion in Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and other U.S. cities.

Quoted in the same article, his family office made this statement:

“Since the spring of 2020, we have been excited about multifamily apartment living in vibrant cities where a new generation of young people increasingly are choosing to live, the kind of cities that are redefining the future of living. We’re excited to play a role in that future.”

None of this dissuades me from my original suspicion: this is a place to live for the people who WeWork was originally built for. It’s for young, affluent knowledge workers who want to live somewhere cheaper but don’t care to actually know their communities. It’ll transform residential real estate in the sense that it’ll out-compete all those cookie cutter apartment buildings set up for that same market.

Andreessen is likely to make a fortune.

And what about the actual housing crisis? The one that’s making people housing-insecure?

At best it does nothing for them. At worst, it helps hike up rents in parts of the country that remain affordable. Those people, the ordinary people who make up most of the country, who are struggling to keep a roof over the heads, don’t even make it into the pitch deck.

PHOTOGRAPH BY STUART ISETT/Fortune Brainstorm TECH

I ordered new glasses recently. At some point over the last few months, I accidentally slept on my main pair and bent them out of shape; although I tried my best to put them back, they’ve been a little bit crooked ever since.

I’ve been a die-hard Zenni Optical customer for years, because their frames are affordable, relatively well-made, and can be engraved with my website address. (Yes, I’ve been wearing “werd.io” on my face for the best part of a decade.) But this adherence means I’ve been wearing the same black frames forever, and hey, why not change it up?

I wish Genusee made prescription glasses: they’re made from water bottles in Flint, Michigan, and can be recycled back into the same material stream. I like everything about their mission - but unfortunately, I need prescription glasses to see.

Sunglasses by Pala Eyewear fund eye care across Africa, but is based in the UK, so I’d need to order pairs from overseas.

Solo makes its sunglasses from repurposed wood, bamboo, cellulose acetate and recycled plastic. Great, but while they mention that their frames are prescription-ready, they don’t actually seem to offer prescriptions.

Reader, I gave up and followed the stereotypical Silicon Valley path into Warby Parker. They felt well-made, which turns out to be all I can ask for. But I’m still looking for the right place to get prescription sunglasses.

Perhaps the most sustainable route would be to get laser eye surgery and dispense with the need for glasses at all. I’ve thought about it, but to be honest, despite my understanding of the low risk involved, the idea of lasers cutting away at my eyeballs doesn’t have me running towards a surgeon with money in hand.

If you wear prescription glasses and care about the ethics of the products you buy, have you found an adequate solution? I’d love to learn from you.

Photo by Bud Helisson on Unsplash

One. Is it even ethical to bring a child into the world right now? During their lifetime we’ll see water scarcity and an increase in global conflict as a result of climate change. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. How, in good conscience, can I bring a new human into that?

It’s an imperfect answer, but I’ve arrived at this: what would the world look like if only the people who didn’t believe in climate change had children? Yes, they’re going to need to be part of the solution, because everyone will need to be. It’s a tough ask for a human who didn’t ask to be born. But I’m confident they’ll be an asset to the future.

Two. What does nationality look like? It’s important to me, but why, exactly?

I’m a third culture kid: living in the US is the first time I’ve spent an extended time in a place where I was a citizen. I’ve written before about how I consider myself to have no nationality and no religion.

The thing is, that’s not quite right: I am a product of all the nationalities and cultures that led up to me. That I don’t exactly identify with any of them doesn’t mean that they don’t belong to me.

But that’s just me: Erin, as the mother, carries a full half of their context, and has a different background to me. How do you honor both backgrounds and contexts, while also downplaying the importance of nationality and patriotism overall?

What’s important to me is that they know they’re from multiple places, and they know that the world is their oyster. Rather than patriotism, I want them to feel proud to be human, and to feel connected to all humans. I want them to have broad horizons and an inclusively global mindset. They can do anywhere and do anything they want: the world is awash with possibilities. And at the same time, everyone, everywhere matters, and people who are more local to them do not matter more than people who are more remote. I want my child to have the privilege of openness and connectedness.

Three. I want to keep them healthy and happy. That, in itself, is incredibly daunting. What if I hurt them somehow?

Four. I’ve spent my life in front of screens. I literally learned to write on a Sinclair ZX81, writing stories that incorporated the BASIC shortcuts on its keyboard. Characters would GOTO places a lot; they would RUN; THEN they would do something else. One of my first memories is watching the animated interstitial network announcements on our little TV in Amsterdam.

What should their relationship with devices be? The going advice is that introducing screens too early can interfere with their development. And at the same time, my dad in particular deliberately allowed me to play with everything. I took apart radios; I mucked around with computers with impunity; I developed, early on, a complete lack of fear of technology. And that’s served me very well.

I’ll admit to feeling a bit judgmental of parents of those toddlers out in the world who have iPads in carry-cases. But what right do I have to feel that way? I’ve never had a child, until now. Maybe I’ll feel completely different.

And actually, I feel very strongly about tablets and phones themselves. I didn’t have a device that couldn’t be hacked until I was in my twenties. Everything could be taken apart, programmed for, adjusted. There were no games consoles in our household, and cellphones weren’t really available until I was older. I like that philosophy: open technology only. Teach them early to be a maker, not a consumer.

Five. Should I buy a domain name for them? Reserve a Twitter username? Is that self-indulgent?

Six. It’s important to make sure babies interact with a wide range of people while they’re very little, to allow them to develop an understanding that every type of face is part of their circle. Infants learn about race in their first year; by 9 months old, they recognize faces from their own race better than others. By 6 months old, they may exhibit racial bias. So it’s incredibly important that their circles are diverse.

While this cognitive wiring is established early, developmental changes obviously continue throughout childhood. For these reasons - and also just because they’re better places to live for all kinds of reasons - it’s important to be in a cosmopolitan, diverse, open-minded location. Homogenous towns and cities are not what I want, both as a person, and for my child.

Seven. No, I don’t think ideological diversity is anywhere near as important as actual intersectional diversity. And I have no intention to allow bigotry or small-mindedness to enter their worldview.

Empathy, inclusion, love, understanding, and connectedness must be core values. Change is inevitable and to be embraced. Difference is beautiful. The world is to be explored and embraced.

Eight. I like the idea and philosophy of free-range parenting. Let the child explore and learn on their own terms, for crying out loud. Let them ride bikes in the neighborhood and hang out with their friends and generally live out The Goonies.

But that seems to be out of vogue? There’s a trend of helicopter parents who schedule their child’s every moment? The idea seems repellant to me - doesn’t it mean that they miss out on developing a degree of autonomy? - but am I right to feel that way?

Nine. My parents made friends through pre-natal and baby classes - and that’s where a lot of my early friends came from, too. Everything’s online now because of covid. Where are baby-friends supposed to come from?

Ten. How do we share photos and information with family and friends without compromising on privacy? Social media sites like Instagram and Facebook will be data-mined; email feels insecure because I don’t know who will end up seeing photos and messages. The really private tools and services are too hard to use for a lot of people. What’s the best practice? What does baby infosec look like?

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash

This is one of those times I can’t believe I get to work at The 19th. We’re putting on a free event on voter equality with a roster of very smart speakers headlined by Stacey Abrams, in partnership with Live Nation Women and Teen Vogue, live in Atlanta or free to watch afterwards online.

Go register!

If you’re subscribing via email, heads up that I’m thinking about changing my newsletter engine, possibly to Buttondown. You shouldn’t see anything particularly different - and if you’re subscribing via RSS, nothing will change at all. But, to be honest, I’ll be paying a lot less money for a lot more power.

As always, I really appreciate it when people share around my posts, or let me know if they’ve disagreed with something I’ve written. Your time and attention are limited; thanks for sticking around.

I recently heard a story about a company that, when determining who would be laid off in a downsizing event, asked team leads to rank their teams based on who would be most likely to work on the weekend.

Mind-blowingly, while it’s obviously (or hopefully obviously) immoral, this practice appears to be legal in the US, which has at-will employment in every state. This is one of the many contrasts between European and US employment law, which were the biggest culture shock for me when I moved to the US eleven years ago. In Europe, employers must ensure that employees don’t work more than 48 hours during a week and the minimum vacation allocation beyond statutory holidays is four weeks. In America, it’s often seen as a badge of honor to work 70 hour weeks, and it’s one of the few countries in the world with 0 mandatory vacation days.

Perhaps my concerns around compassionate employment are irredeemably European, but as I’ve written before, long hours with little rest are counter-productive. Environments that want you to work weekends and evenings in addition to standard office hours tend to value performative productivity over actual results, or adhere to a kind of religious belief around work ethic. If these employers paid attention to the research and data, they wouldn’t do it.

This is perhaps even more of a problem in flexible and work from home settings. In my previous piece, I quoted a French member of Parliament:

“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

I heard recently about another company where the CEO regularly shouts at their team, and if a team lead suggests that a goal can’t be reached, retorts that they’ll find a team who can achieve it instead. These companies share a common trait: a fundamental lack of respect for the expertise and the lives of the people they’ve hired. It’s as if there’s some inherent value to this kind of work, and that the exchange of time for money obviates the need for human care.

It’s cultural. “I don’t think you should work while you have covid,” I told someone recently, mindful of the research about recovery times and long covid. “Maybe I learned the wrong lessons from my Dad,” he replied.

As well as being health and quality issues, these kinds of attitudes compound inclusion problems: only certain kinds of people can work all hours. Carers and parents, and particularly people from lower-income backgrounds, are more likely to have other commitments.

All aspects of a company’s culture are really hard to change when it’s already been set in motion. Either you care about creating a place that cares for its employees or you don’t, and these values affect the choices that are made by founders from the very first day. It’s impossible to do it bespoke, too: every aspect of a company has to pull together with the same cultural underpinnings. The entirety of a community has to pull together or resentments and friction build.

The same cultural change problem doesn’t apply in the same way across the country. While this is a uniquely American problem, not every American company behaves this way: to be frank, most of the successful ones don’t. One of the most promising aspects of the organization I’m at, The 19th, is its excellent, intentionally inclusive culture; it’s among the best, but not the first time I’ve felt valued at work. And it doesn’t take a people ops superhero to understand that people who feel valued do better work overall.

While I think these problems are best solved through legislation and unionization, competitive forces can be a useful fallback. Not everyone has the luxury of being discerning about their employer, but each of the companies I’ve mentioned is in the tech sector: a world where knowledge workers often do have the privilege of choice. Again, it doesn’t take an empath to understand that, given the choice between two otherwise similar firms, employees are more likely to choose to work at the one with a more supportive culture. It goes without saying that yelling doesn’t make for a productive workplace, but if you want to hire the best people, you’ve got to be the best place for them to work, and understand that, past a point, people are motivated by meaning, not money.

From a prospective employee standpoint, if you’re looking for a job, it helps to understand that you have every right to ask for and expect a better, more supportive culture. Having strong standards here makes the employment experience better for everyone, and helps even the worst employers understand that they need to change if they want to be successful.

But make no mistake: the onus is not on employees here. Employers - and the legislators that govern them in the United States - need to drag themselves into the twenty-first century and learn that a strong culture of support in turn makes for strong companies, and strong countries.