Ben Werdmuller

AI tools let you write articles very quickly without adding much value.

The software analyses existing content and then rewrites the information in a way that’s meant to be engaging or makes it easy for search engines to find.

But when you read an article written by AI, you can tell that it’s lacking something. There’s no real emotion or understanding of the subject.

If you want to create content that converts, it needs to be relatable and emotionally engaging. You need to show your customers that you understand their struggles and are willing to help them solve their problems.

AI-generated articles and videos are growing in popularity. They are cheap to make and easy to scale. But they will never be able to tell stories that matter.

The most obvious use case for AI is to create fake news. Spam content has been a problem on the internet since the beginning of the World Wide Web. The need for scale pushed automated bots to generate posts, which were then filled with ads.

AI takes this to the next level, by making it easier and cheaper to create fake news than it is to write real news.

But who cares about fake news? It's not like people read it. Nobody believes it!

The problem with AI-generated articles isn't that they are fake, but that they are mediocre. The purpose of writing is not just about sharing your thoughts with others; it's about adding value.

AI-generated articles are not the future of journalism. They are content spam.

For the past year, I’ve been writing articles on Medium. Some of them have become pretty popular. However, over time, I have come to resent the platform because it promotes content written by AI.

Medium is not alone in this problem. It’s a systemic problem that affects all platforms that allow machine-generated content to be posted unchecked.

Writing 1000 articles in 30 seconds is the type of thing that makes VCs and journalists excited about “AI-first” companies and how these companies will “disrupt” a traditional industry like publishing.

But for the rest of us, we need to be worried about our media ecosystem getting filled with this type of content. And we need tools that recognize content written by AI and mark them as such or as spam.

This entire blog post was written by an AI writing tool.

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for February, 2022.

Apps + Websites

Globle. Like Wordle but for countries. “Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.” Good fun, but I am not good at this.

Nerdle - the daily numbers game. Another Wordle alternative. I was daunted at first, but it’s pretty fun! The need for equations to resolve mathematically adds a really satisfying extra dimension.

Books

Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism, by Elsa Sjunneson. A frank, and often wryly funny, account of life as a Deafblind woman. Some of her experiences were familiar to me, at least second-hand; the account of hearing aids squealing at the wrong moment made me think of someone very dear to me who happens to be Deaf. The author is a self-described activist, and the passages discussing ableism and capitalist healthcare were as searing, pointed, and brilliant as the passages describing her experiences were human. I loved every moment of getting to know her.

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself, by Melody Beattie. Far more religious than I’d like, and decidedly dated, but it hits the nail on the head more often than it doesn’t. My own codependence is not a result of a relationship with an alcoholic, but the symptoms, discussion of internal self-talk, and potential solutions feel relevant and sometimes confronting. I’m late to my own diagnosis, and the ideas here feel like a part of the solution.

Streaming

Wet Leg - Oh No (Official Video). I love Wet Leg. Their latest song is all about social media addiction and (like everything else they’ve done) it’s brilliant.

Notable Articles

Business

The McNamara Fallacy – measurement is not understanding. “The McNamara Fallacy is to presume that (A) quantitative models of reality are always more accurate than other models; (B) the quantitative measurements that can be made most easily must be the most relevant; and (C) factors other than those currently being used in quantitative metrics must either not exist or not have a significant influence on success. This flawed approach to reasoning is also known as the quantitative fallacy.” Worth also mentioning here that the Vietnam War was deeply misguided in its own right and that the US committed atrocities in the name of fighting a boogieman that didn’t make any sense. The underlying message here - keep research human - is paramount.

Workers for Frozen Food Giant Amy’s Kitchen Allege Unsafe Conditions at Bay Area Factory. And Amy’s has hired a firm to squash worker attempts to form a Union. Really disappointing.

Why More VCs May Want To Back Your Bootstrapped Company. But should you take the money?

The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency. “But what those who had turned on their cameras didn’t know was that some of the others in the meeting weren’t real people. Yes, they were listed as participants. Some even had active email accounts and LinkedIn profiles. But their names were made up and their headshots belonged to other people.”

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness. “Within the workplace, we know that happier employees are more likely to emerge as leaders, earn higher scores on performance evaluations, and tend to be better teammates. We also know, based on substantial research, that happier employees are healthier, have lower rates of absenteeism, are highly motivated to succeed, are more creative, have better relationships with peers, and are less likely to leave a company. All of these correlates of happiness significantly influence a company’s bottom line.”

Waterstones acquires Blackwell’s, the UK’s biggest independent bookseller. Very, very sad to see Blackwell’s purchased - by the hedge fund that owns Barnes and Noble, no less.

Climate

Indonesia Is Switching Capital Cities Because the Old One Is Sinking Into the Ocean. “The flooding, pollution, sinking earth and congestion have gotten so catastrophic, in fact, that the country is switching capital cities altogether. Yes, seriously: the government is packing up and moving the country’s capital to the island of Borneo, according to the Associated Press.”

Crypto

The Sick, Refreshing Honesty of Web3. “From the start, online businesses have presented themselves as making culture, even as they really aimed to build financial value. Now, at last, the wealth seeking is printed on the tin.”

North Korea: Missile programme funded through stolen crypto, UN report says. “North Korean cyber-attacks have stolen millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency to fund the country’s missile programmes, a UN report briefed to media says.” Oops?

The Human Web. “Web3 will succeed, or fail, to the extent that it solves human problems, to the extent that it makes navigating Web0 more tractable—not to the extent that it monetizes everything conceivable, or enables a small number of people to make a financial killing.”

Culture

The Radical Woman Behind “Goodnight Moon”. “Brown helped create a new type of children’s literature that provided both aural and visual feasts. Her books—including “Goodnight Moon,” which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year—delighted, surprised, and sometimes disturbed.”

Book Renovation. “Anyway, right now, I’m working on the revision of Book 2 of the Great Cities. A friend asked me how to do revisions, so I figured I might as well lay out my process here. Note that this is my process; as with all other writing advice, you should look at many methods and then choose or customize something that works best for you. So here goes.” Some lovely writing advice from none other than NK Jemisin.

Inspired by gravity. “Today, being weird online means one of two things. Either you’re trying to get there before other people do, not missing an opportunity, changing the rules to your advantage. That’s the excitement some folks feel right now: they feel like it’s possible to rewrite gravity.”

A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It? “Monahan reassured me that it’s okay not to survive the shift. We all have permission to stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable, and if that’s in 2016 or 2012 or 2010, that’s fine.” How about 1997? Asking for a friend.

No-knead Gatorade bread. “After placing the cast-iron pot into the oven, the distinct smell of grape-flavored Gatorade wafted through the apartment. I do not know how if there are words in the human language to describe the emotions I was feeling. We were essentially enveloped in sublimated grape Gatorade, breathing it in, along with the gentle scent of baking bread. You guys should really try doing this.”

I'm common as muck and spent £150 in a Michelin star restaurant to see if it was worth it. “I’ve never grown up thinking of food as anything other than fuel to get through the day. I grew up on free school meals (chips and gravy, for the most part). As an adult, celebratory meals out are spent at Toby Carvery, where the all-you-can-eat roasters fill all of my requirements for a happy time.” This is quite lovely.

Media

‘We’ll keep reporting, whatever the risk from the junta,’ say Myanmar’s journalists. “A year after the coup, the military continues to egregiously restrict media freedoms across the country and attempts to terrorise journalists into silence. Nearly all the journalists who were working in Myitkyina before the coup have fled. Many are unable to continue reporting at all.”

Want to Make Real Progress in Newsroom DEI? Audience Engagement is Essential. “What does a truly inclusive culture look like? Most newsrooms think of diversity and inclusion work primarily as an internal affair — being respectful to everyone in the organization and treating everyone within that sphere equally. But inclusion work can’t succeed in a bubble.” Useful insights and tactics for improving newsroom DEI - which improves democracy for all of us.

We are deeply and profoundly sorry: For decades, The Baltimore Sun promoted policies that oppressed Black Marylanders; we are working to make amends. “Instead of using its platforms, which at times included both a morning and evening newspaper, to question and strike down racism, The Baltimore Sun frequently employed prejudice as a tool of the times. It fed the fear and anxiety of white readers with stereotypes and caricatures that reinforced their erroneous beliefs about Black Americans.”

Documenting and Debunking Dubious Footage from Ukraine’s Frontlines. “With every alleged provocation a potential pretext for conflict, Bellingcat has decided to track and detail such claims as well as the circumstances surrounding them.”

Politics

Boris Johnson Is a Liar. “The first thing you need to know about Boris Johnson is he’s a liar.” This is brilliant: Jonathan Pie explains Johnson to the New York Times in video. Easily the best thing the Opinion page has ever done.

House approves bill to end forced arbitration of MeToo claims. “The U.S. House on Monday approved a bill that would ban mandatory arbitration in sexual harassment and assault cases brought by workers, consumers and even nursing home residents, queuing the measure up for Senate passage and President Joe Biden’s signature.”

How thousands of text messages from Mark Meadows and others reveal new details about events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack. “If POTUS allows this to occur… we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.” Remarkable.

An antifascist’s position on Ukraine. “While Russia holds culpability for bringing us to the brink of war, America likewise holds culpability for creating a long-term ecosystem where peace and diplomacy seem impossible, and where war, either now or later, is destined to break out.”

Facebook Allows Praise of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. “Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.”

Science

Reading on a smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension. “In this study, we investigated the cause for comprehension decline when reading on a smartphone by simultaneously measuring respiration and brain activity during reading in 34 healthy individuals. We found that, compared to reading on a paper medium, reading on a smartphone elicits fewer sighs, promotes brain overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, and results in reduced comprehension.”

The International Space Station to be retired and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. “NASA said that commercially operated space platforms would replace the ISS as a venue for collaboration and scientific research.” Ugh.

America’s most widely consumed cooking oil causes genetic changes in the brain. “Used for fast food frying, added to packaged foods, and fed to livestock, soybean oil is by far the most widely produced and consumed edible oil in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In all likelihood, it is not healthy for humans.”

Society

American Capitalism Needs a Reboot. “Enda Brophy, associate professor of the labor studies program at Simon Fraser University, says there’s more frustration with capitalism as a system now than at any time since perhaps the 1960-’70s. “Significantly, poll after poll tells us that younger generations and millennials above all have highly negative opinions of capitalism and highly positive opinions around socialism and trade unions,” Brophy said. “People are quitting jobs as they never have before and labor organizing is growing in unexpected industries.””

Forced sterilization is legal in 31 states, new report shows. “According to the report from the National Women’s Law Center, 17 states allow the permanent, surgical sterilization of children with disabilities. The report is written in plain language, designed to be understood by at least some of the people impacted most by these laws.”

Furries Are Leading the War Against a Book-Banning Mississippi Mayor. “Last week, a Mississippi mayor tried to strong-arm a local library into banning some books. The result was swift, and in retrospect, entirely predictable: A group of furries got on Twitter to do something about it.” Lovely!

Exposed documents reveal how the powerful clean up their digital past using a reputation laundering firm. “Now, documents viewed by Rest of World shed light on the reputation management industry, revealing how Eliminalia and companies like it may use spurious copyright claims and fake legal notices to remove and obscure articles linking clients to allegations of tax avoidance, corruption, and drug trafficking. The Elephant case may be one of thousands just like it.”

States propose bills on restricting LGBTQ+ school curriculum. “The White House denounced Florida’s bill in an emailed statement on Tuesday, adding that the legislation “is not an isolated action,” as more Republican lawmakers “take actions to regulate what students can or cannot read, what they can or cannot learn, and most troubling, who they can or cannot be.”” A really troubling trend: an onslaught of bigoted bills that will further isolate queer youth.

Abortion ban in Texas still causing surges at clinics in nearby states. “In Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Louisiana and southern Nevada, clinics have all continued to see a dramatic surge in patients, representatives told The 19th, with some treating more than twice the number of people they saw before the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8 took effect in September.”

Oh, God, how it hurts to write this. “I came to this black wall again to see and touch your name, and as I do I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother’s heart. A heart broken 15 years ago today, when you lost your life in Vietnam.” War is evil and must be avoided.

San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam, D.A. Boudin says. “San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she was alerted to the alleged practice this weekend, and that she has submitted an inquiry to the City Attorney’s Office to draft legislation to prevent DNA evidence — or any sort of evidence collected from a victim’s rape kit — to be used for anything other than investigating that rape itself.”

Ukrainian refugees are already being driven out by the Russian invasion. “EU countries might be more open to absorbing Ukrainians fleeing the wrath of their adversary. But there might also be more willingness to accept Ukrainians because they are white, European, and majority Christian, revealing the “troubling rise of nationalist movements rooted in fear of the other,””

Technology

Google Fonts lands website privacy fine by German court. “The unauthorized disclosure of the plaintiff’s dynamic IP address by the defendant to Google constitutes a violation of the general right of personality in the form of the right to informational self-determination according to § 823 Para. 1 BGB.” Embedding Google resources like fonts as a GDPR violation: wow.

Letter to the US Senate Judiciary Committee on App Stores. “I am Bruce Schneier, a longtime security technologist, author, speaker, and thinker; and author of many books, papers, and articles on the topic both Internet security and privacy. I currently teach cybersecurity policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. I am writing in support of S.2992 and S.2710, which are attempts to redress the power of dominant technology firms.”

Tesla drivers say their cars are making random stops. ““My wife has requested that I don’t use cruise control or autopilot while she’s in the car, as we experienced an unwarranted, aggressive automatic braking episode which caused great pressure against her pregnant belly on a previous road trip,” one driver said in their report.” I drive a Tesla Model 3 and don’t use cruise control or autopilot for exactly this reason: it stops randomly. It’s relatively rare, but one time is one time too many.

Europe’s crackdown on those annoying consent banners is a huge deal. “For one thing, [...] American lawmakers and regulators have often looked at the “consent spam” polluting Europe and pointed to it as one of the worst consequences of GDPR. This new decision [...] exposes that spam to be a violation of the law, not a fulfillment of it.”

Humanitarian organizations keep getting hacked because they can’t spend to secure data. “What we see over and over again is that humanitarians are being expected to hold some of the most sensitive data in the world of the most vulnerable people in the world and have the resources of mall cops to protect against the cyber hacking equivalent of Delta Force.”

Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising? ““The use of personal data in advertising is already tightly regulated by existing legislation,” [IAB Europe Director] Mroczkowski said, apparently referencing the GDPR, which regulates data privacy in the EU generally. He further noted that the new rules “risk undermining” existing law and “the entire ad-supported digital economy.”” Let’s be totally clear: the ad-supported digital economy is not worth protecting.

Why the balance of power in tech is shifting toward workers. “Concerns and anger over tech companies’ impact in the world is nothing new, of course. What’s changed is that workers are increasingly getting organized. Whether writing public letters, marching in protest, filing lawsuits, or unionizing, the labor force that makes the corporate tech world run is finding its voice, demanding a future in which companies do better and are held more responsible for their actions.”

Radio station snafu in Seattle bricks some Mazda infotainment systems. “The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions, and it seems that Mazda’s infotainment system of that generation needs an extension (and not a header) to tell what a file is. No extension, no idea, and the system gets corrupted.” And now those Mazdas are stuck on the station forever. At least it’s NPR!

How Fresh Grads with Zero Experience Get Hired as Senior Engineers. “What greeted me when I walked into their luxury apartment were flies circling around piles of unwashed dishes and utensils in the kitchen. When I stepped into the bathroom, I saw urine on the floor. Each room had bunk beds in it.”

That broken tech/content culture cycle. “Here’s how you do it. […] Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to this insistence on being solely a “neutral” tech company in every aspect of decision-making, policy, hiring and operations, except for your public advertising, where the message is entirely about creativity and expression.”

What using RSS feeds feels like. “To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.” Yes, this exactly. I love RSS.

Surveillance Too Cheap to Meter. “Even ignoring the fact that lawmakers have generally made the collection of surveillance data a requirement for mobile network licenses, it would cost the telcos more money to stop the surveillance of their customers than to continue doing it.”

Bionic Eye Patients Are Going Blind Again After Manufacturer Decides They’re Obsolete. “Currently, Second Sight is planning to merge with Nano Precision Medical, another biotechnology company, to stave off complete financial ruin. However, it doesn’t have any plans to support their bionic eye patients — and likely never will again.”

My journey down the rabbit hole of every journalist’s favorite app. “Otter and its competitors, which include Descript, Rev, Temi and the U.K.-based Trint, are digital warehouses whose advantages of speed and convenience are bracketed by what experts say can be lax privacy and security protections that may endanger sensitive text and audio data, the identities of reporters and the potentially vulnerable sources they contact.”

I have no capslock and I must scream. “In a near future, a team of desktop computer designers are looking at the latest telemetry and updating the schematics of the hardware-as-a-service self-assembling nanohardware.”

A Long Bet Pays Off. “The bet, to be revisited a decade and a year later, would be whether the URL of their wager at Long Bets would survive to a point in the semi-distant future.” And it did!

Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team. “I think I’ve come up with a novel hack for the challenge of getting your company to financially support the open source projects that it uses: reach out to the maintainers and offer them generous speaking fees for remote talks to your engineering team.” This is really smart!

Twitter is sharing safety tips in Ukrainian — including how to delete your account. “On Wednesday night, as Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Twitter’s Safety team began sharing tips in Ukrainian for how users in the country can cover their digital tracks to help keep themselves safe. That included details for deleting their accounts entirely.”

Here’s how I think about software development:

All code is an assumption until it meets its real-life context: its user, real-world data, the situation it’ll be used in.

The goal in a startup should be to prove all your core assumptions as quickly as possible. Whereas in an agency setting, say, or perhaps even in a larger company, there’s a defined deliverable, code in a startup is never done: you’re constantly iterating on it to get closer and closer to the right fit for its context.

You could spend months or years meticulously developing the perfect codebase before release, but the truth is, no matter how many automated tests you run, no matter how much QA you’ve built in, you won’t know if it really works until a real user uses it. That’s true of websites, applications, back-end server demons, you name it. If you’ve spent all that time writing code and it’s not the right thing - well, then you’ve probably wasted a ton of time and money.

Before the internet era, that was the only way software could be written. A company would work hard on a release, which might even then be shrink-wrapped and sent to stores. These days, we’re constantly connected, and software (whether it’s on the web or not) can be continually updated. Some of the best platforms I’ve worked on have released multiple times a day. The internet gives developers superpowers.

The right thing to do, then, is to write the simplest, smallest thing you can, get it out there, learn from how people are using it, and iterate quickly. This iterative feedback loop is at the heart of agile development, but it’s also just good common sense: you always want to shorten feedback loops as far as you can. The question is always: what’s the shortest distance to proving or disproving your assumption?

Otherwise you’ll end up chasing perfection in silence. In the worst case, your product might not even get released: the context will likely change during a long development process, which means you’ll need to continually adjust the code until you get there. Then the world changes again, and you have to adjust again, and so on and so on and so on. The world will always change - that’s a given - so it’s better to release early and often.

Every software developer in a startup needs to have an inherent comfort with imperfection and a mindset of “failing fast”.

That’s true of every aspect of startups, of course. The core proposition, the underlying business models, the culture, the team - all of those things need to be tested early and iterated upon until you find the right thing. The best startups deeply ingrain these learning loops so that everyone is iterating quickly. The worst just spin their wheels forever.

To do that effectively, you have to let go of your ego. Yes, you’re smart: your insights and past experience will inform how you react to new information. But you can’t operate in a vacuum. Even the smartest people in the world need to approach problems with a growth mindset and let the people they’re trying to build for be the ultimate arbiter on whether they’re building the right thing. Nobody can sit in an enclosed room and come up with the right thing all or most of the time. Whether you’re in the C-suite, an individual contributor, or an intern, you’ve got to figure out how to test your ideas in the real world as quickly as possible.

And then learn, grow, and repeat.

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I donated to Equality Texas. Based in Austin, Equality Texas “works to secure full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Texans through political action, education, community organizing, and collaboration.”

It describes its work as follows:

‌Equality Texas is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, serving as the largest nonpartisan statewide political advocacy organization working for the elimination of discrimination targeting the LGTBQ+ community. This work occurs primarily within, but not limited to, odd-numbered years when the Texas Legislature is in session. During the session, Equality Texas works to advance the rights of LGBTQ+ Texans alongside pro-equality legislators and protects LGBTQ+ Texans from legislative attacks.

I wrote a little about the adverse situation trans kids are facing in Texas earlier this week. Equality Texas is helping through political change, media advocacy, a crisis fund, education, and more.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

I’m not remotely qualified to talk about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in any level of competent detail, but I am qualified to discuss my feelings about it.

These things seem to rarely be fought on real principles; instead, war puts ordinary peoples’ lives on the line in the name of political and financial dominance. It’s always an atrocity. That this, or any, conflict couldn’t be resolved without killing innocent people is a failure on every level: diplomatic, moral, human.

I’m not sure there’s a single leadership voice out there that can be trusted. Russia’s interests largely relate to energy and economic supremacy. Ukraine has aligned itself with NATO but also has allowed literal Nazi battalions to join its national forces. The US has a famously self-interested foreign policy and would prefer Ukraine was allied to it, and that, ideally, it was the only global superpower.

When I say they can’t be trusted, I mean it in two ways: the first is that we can’t believe anything they say. The second is that I don’t trust them to not spill blood in service of those interests. The conflict may be on the level of Russia’s temporary invasion of Georgia (a war that involved war crimes), or it could be more. I’m a computer programmer, not by any means an expert in international relations, so I’m a little bit scared and trying to read what I can.

I’ve noticed some voices that seem to be excited for a reconfigured Cold War - hey, nostalgia is big right now - which doesn’t, to me, seem like what we should want either. The fact that Russia and the US were at loggerheads for a significant portion of the 20th century doesn’t mean they should always be. Which doesn’t in any way make apologies Russia’s behavior or hardline political stance: I’m not arguing in favor of Russia here. I’m really just hoping that everyone can be smart and that all parties come to the table looking for equitable, collaborative peace rather than 20th century style dominance.

I can dream.

Regardless, people will lose their lives, and many more will lose their homes. There’s nothing good or noble about war. There’s nobody to root for except for the people who will be collateral in the face of conflict conducted in the name of someone else’s wealth and power. It’s not a sports game with teams and scores, although the TV news will report on it as such. It’s just death and human suffering.

And my biggest worry is that nobody with power really cares about that.

Anyway, I suppose I should do some computer programming.

NBC News:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is calling on “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to report the parents of transgender minors to state authorities if it appears the minors are receiving gender-affirming medical care.

Trans kids and their supportive parents need to be protected. This is the kind of brutal statement that - toothless as it might be legally - has real world effects that endanger lives. It’s obvious, noxious bigotry, as reckless as it is stupid.

As the New Republic points out:

Genital surgery, in almost all cases, is only available to adults. But this basic factual error is only the beginning—if also the foundation—of the problems with Paxton’s stigma-fueling decision.

The implication that parents of trans children, and the people who provide gender-affirming services, are “definitionally abusers” is horrifying. It derives from a mindset that should have no place in the 21st century, and one that is not limited to Texas.

In the face of this kind of rhetoric, I think it’s important for everyone to be vocal. Write your representatives, post on your own sites, and if you can, give to organizations doing important work on the ground. (I gave to Equality Texas and would love other suggestions.) This backwards dogma must be stopped in its tracks.

This is far more than “culture wars”, although we hear this phrase a lot. It comes down to protecting the lives of children. Trans children and their families are vulnerable, and need our support.

They say grief ebbs and flows and sneaks up on you unexpectedly, and lately I’ve been missing my mother a lot.

Today my phone showed me memories from this time last year. I was glad to see them, but they also made me cry.

It’s been, what, eight months? Close to a year. And I feel nothing close to okay. So much has happened. But even if I hadn’t, there’s a giant hole in my life. Everything feels wrong, like I’ve stumbled into an alternate universe. I don’t know when I’ll feel anchored or right again, but I’m certainly not there now.

Every day I want to tell her something, or ask her advice, or hear what she has to say. I often think that I will, until I remember. It’s awful. Selfishly, I still need her. And I just miss her presence.

She’s here, of course. Just not in the way I would like.

The only way is forwards. Unfortunately.

One of my firmest beliefs about the web as it emerged was that it could be a force for peace: learning happens, I argued, when contexts collide. People who didn’t know or understand each other would meet, talk, and connect. We would all have a deeper understanding, rooted in justice and empathy.

A lot of ink has been spilled over the incorrectness of that original utopian vision for the web, but I’m still not sure that belief was entirely wrong: the internet helped give birth to restorative justice movements like Black Lives Matter, and movements for justice around the world, which I truly believe are a prerequisite for a just peace.

It did, however, undeniably also bring together some of the darkest aspects of society: bigotry, nationalism, violence. It helped hate find hate; white supremacist organizations and thinkers were able to grow their communities too. Propagandists were able to share mis and dis-information swiftly for their own ends. Viral content became an integral part of statecraft, movement-building, and the manufacturing of consent.

Nationalism is a fundamentally toxic idea that can only lead to division. The simple idea that humans who were born inside one arbitrary diplomatic division are somehow superior to those who were born inside another is ridiculous on its face, and archaic to the core. We’re all part of one single, connected open graph; the internet should have shown us that. Everyone is connected to everyone else. We’re all just people, doing our best, trying to live our lives.

That we should fight each other based on where we were born or where we live or which deity we choose to believe in is absurd 17th century stuff. And the thing is, the people who sew these divisions know that. They’re created in the name of profit: to help secure energy rights, or a section of coastline that empowers a trading route, or to boost the shares of some corporation or other. It all comes down to cynical manipulation in order to establish dominance.

Faced with this landscape of internet-enhanced manipulation, those of us who build platforms for information and sharing have a choice to make. It’s not dissimilar to the choices made with respect to disrupting any incumbent industry. We can either choose to put a nice new face on existing power dynamics, or we can disrupt them entirely. A fintech company must decide whether it should works with incumbent banks and simply provide a shiny app that sits on top of the existing financial system, or build an entirely new system that serves people better. An information company must decide whether it should work with the existing dynamics of power, or build an entirely new system in service of truth and justice. Not nationalistic truth or justice, in service of a single nation’s interests above others, but truth or justice in the name of all people.

The web is for everyone.

That’s the only way it works.

It will have reached its potential when we can look at each other, or think of another country, and see the humans in their individual beauty and nuance over any tribal allegiance; when we can consider them all to be neighbors, and when their well-being is important to us.

Conversely, if that never happens, if we think in terms of diplomatic friends and foes and choose to accept the dehumanization of those our leaders deem to be the latter, then it will have failed, and maybe even made the world worse.

The internet is people. It’s all about interrelatedness and interdependence. We’re all connected. And if we can’t see that, I don’t know what hope there is for us.

An interesting juxtaposition in my feedreader today:

On one hand:

For its final value, Zuckerberg added “Meta, Metamates, Me” to the list, pushing the company's metaverse rebrand one step further. He said this one relates to “the sense of responsibility we have for our collective success and to each other as teammates.”

And on the other:

“The work that we do is a kind of mental torture,” one current Sama employee that works as an outsourced Facebook content moderator told TIME, who like others who spoke to the magazine did so on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or job loss. “Whatever I am living on is hand-to-mouth. I can’t save a cent. Sometimes I feel I want to resign. But then I ask myself: what will my baby eat?”

So Meta employees should ask themselves: who gets to be a Metamate? And what does that answer say about the company they work for?

I’ve been really enjoying Rick Klau’s series on OKRs. Rick worked at Google on Product and then at GV as Partner, and is now California’s Chief Technology Innovation Officer.

This week on OKRs as institutional memory:

In the absence of OKRs, an organization’s mistakes made and lessons learned are locked in people’s heads. New team members struggle to get up to speed with what the veterans already know; “this is the way we do things” can feel mercurial and opaque.

Last week on squirrels:

Is the idea related to one of the few things we’re focused on as a company? If we pursued the squirrel, would we make a meaningful impact on one or more of the metrics we agreed to influence? Does this squirrel matter, right now, to the work we’re doing?

On the danger of setting “true / false” OKRs:

What if you launched v1 of the product and it sucked? What if you develop a roadmap for some big idea and… nothing happened? The fatal flaw in committing to OKRs like these is that you can get a great score on the OKR when it’s time to grade yourselves, and fail to achieve much (or, worse: actively do damage to your organization).

The whole series is worth following and subscribing to. His blog is one of my favorite subscriptions, and if you’re a technology operator in any capacity, it’s a must-read.

Every job I’ve had has been a kind of dojo. At every position, I’ve had the privilege of meeting and working with a bunch of smart, interesting people; I’ve got to work on disparate products with real-world applications; and I’ve learned a lot about new markets and industries.

But they’ve also stretched me personally in important ways. Here’s one way of breaking it down, from the very beginning.

As a SysOp at Daily Information, I ran a BBS and later one of the first classified websites - but ended up doing lots of very different things that crossed development, computer repair, visual design, sales, and more. It was an idiosyncratic small business that was run out of a Victorian house in North Oxford and I loved every second. I learned to flexibly wear different hats and move from role to role to role as needed, as needed. For an introverted kid who was scared to talk on the phone, let alone make a cold call, that was a pretty big deal. (I learned how to make a pretty decent G&T, too.)

As a learning technologies developer at the University of Edinburgh, I learned how to explain complicated technical ideas to a non-technical audience. I was immersed in the web, and I quickly realized that my colleagues were not. Helping them through the new internet world became pretty important for them, and for me. I gave my first ever presentation here, and saw connections between the emerging web and the potential for facilitating learning that no-one else had seen yet. (I also hacked the cafeteria menu to get the lowest-cost possible meal and was banned.)

As a web administrator at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, I learned about navigating corporate structures and helping advocate for agile ways of working. I became a go-to resource across the School for internet startup knowledge - by the end of my time there, MBA students were stopping by the IT department to chat with me.

As co-founder of Elgg, I learned how to bootstrap a business, build an open platform from scratch, seen an open source community, run events, do marketing, and more than anything else, how to identify assumptions and work from first principles. I had no idea about how investment worked or how to think about valuations; I had no idea about team dynamics or how to build a company culture; I didn’t know what user-centered design was; I wasn’t sure how to run a team remotely. I learned all of these things. I hired and fired my first person, and hated it.

As CTO at Latakoo I learned a lot more about leading a team and interfacing with non-technical management. I also learned about how to build for legacy industries - I’d done that in education, but broadcast television was a new universe for me. I helped build a pitch deck and give an investment pitch to investors for the first time. I also had my first VC experience on Sand Hill Road.

As co-founder of Known, I learned formal design thinking and user research. I built more pitch decks and investment documents than I ever had in my life. I gave design thinking workshops and learned how to be a formal consultant. And I engaged in acquisition talks for the first time - a very different kind of sales.

As a senior engineer at Medium, I learned about software development in a much larger team for a much higher-scale product. My software development skills were pushed much further than they’d been in the past. I worked with formal product management and had a very different class of problems to solve. And honestly, got over my nervousness and some of my imposter syndrome: chatting with Ev, who I held in very high regard, was initially terrifying. The people I worked with had been on very different, much more high profile journeys. I spent the first three months sleeping very little, but eventually decided that I belonged.

As Director of Investments at Matter, I had to become an extrovert. I took over a thousand startup pitches, sometimes over continuous twelve hour days. I taught design thinking bootcamps and held strategy opening hours for dozens of disparate startups. I attended industry dinners and tried to represent the organization well. But most of all, I evaluated the teams and business strategies for many, many startups run by all kinds of different founders; I read their legal docs and understood their structures; I evaluated founder mindsets; I got to know many incredible people. I invested in them, and was there for them as best I could. It was my first (and last) job ever that didn’t involve coding: instead, I was a human standing with other humans, using my experience to be the wind at their backs.

As VP Product Development at Unlock, I re-learned being a software developer, and learned blockchain decentralization for the first time. I coded apps that ran on Ethereum and attended industry events. I learned about DAOs and gas and all the rest of it. It transformed how I think about the internet - and I did it during some of the heaviest personal struggles of my life, so I learned (imperfectly) how to juggle these things, too.

As Head of Engineering at ForUsAll, I’ve learned a lot about the importance of culture and structure. I’ve managed a larger team than I’ve worked with in the past, and have navigated a variety of human issues that have been very challenging. I’ve also played the part of a formal product owner in a very different way, writing formal product specs, Jira stories, and sprint plans, as well as working with engineers to build new architectures and refactor technical debt. I’ve also learned a lot about how to think about cultural change within a larger organization: ForUsAll is on the journey from being a financial services organization to an empathetic, scalable tech startup. And on top of that, I’ve learned a ton about how finance works, and the underlying mindsets required to navigate a whole new set of legacy infrastructure and ideas.

Looking back to the beginning of my career, I wouldn’t have imagined getting to where I am now: the things I’ve learned have pushed and pulled me into a whole new person. I’m grateful for all of it, and I’m excited to keep learning. It would be a sad thing to join a team and not learn or be pulled in these ways.

I wonder if finding meaning is like finding your keys: it’s not going to come to you when you’re looking for it, but maybe it’ll sneak up on you.

I’m a little envious of people who have made religion a part of their lives: the cultural structures of organized belief seem to be aligned to help you create and find meaning. There’s a sense of spiritual laws of the universe that you can follow to understand what you’re meant to do while you’re here, and (depending on the religion) there’s a sense that there’s a whole other world when you leave this one, that potentially goes on forever. Earth is just a testing ground before your real life begins.

I don’t have religion, and I’ve struggled to find real meaning. The best I’ve arrived at is that I want to feel like I’m useful. I care a lot about equality and fairness, so I want to work on projects that make the world more equal and fair. I feel like centralized wealth is antithetical to those ideals, so I want to work in ways that share equity rather than allow people to hoard it. I believe that collectives and communities and more than the sum of their individual parts. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

A chronic self-questioner, I’ve re-examined this ethical philosophy over and over again, and found that it’s right for me. I do think it’s morally correct. But I also think there’s a certain amount of self-justification involved, too: as in, my feeling the need to justify my presence in the world. Why do I deserve to be here? Why should I exist? This ethical structure is one way I can answer that question and sleep at night.

But why should we need meaning at all?

Lately I’ve come to realize that I display classic signs of co-dependency. Most people don’t feel guilty for putting value on their own needs or asserting themselves; I do, and so do people who have been diagnosed as being co-dependent. Although the idea of co-dependency was originally developed through the study of alcoholism and substance abuse, I don’t have a history of those things in my family; instead, I think I came by it through over a decade of caring for my terminally ill mother, and from the intergenerational effects of the concentration camp.

My whole life, people have told me I was “nice”. It feels good. But it’s also the direct effect of not putting enough value on my own needs; of not being assertive enough. The feedback loop of being rewarded for being nice compounds the problem over time: although everybody who has ever told me this has done it with love and good intentions, it’s ultimately a reward for not being assertive.

I read Codependent No More, one of the classic texts on the subject, and although it’s frequently uncomfortably close to the bone, I also found it a bit wanting for my needs. It’s overtly about alcoholism, and is also far more religious than I am. It talks about getting to a healthier place through dependence on a higher power, and I simply can’t bring myself to believe in one. I wish there was something like a recovery program designed for people who don’t have that framework for meaning or belief in something beyond the physical universe.

Nonetheless, it was helpful. There was a passage that hit unexpectedly close to home, which talked about not wanting to end your life not because you enjoyed life and saw potential in the future, but solely out of guilt for its effect on other people. That is how I feel. It is not how I want to feel. I want to feel like life in itself is joyful and meaningful and worth continuing, and I just don’t. I want to run away from it, and find myself in some alternative mirror universe where there aren’t the same pressures and guilts and currents. I don’t want things to stay the same, and I feel guilty about change. I’m set in sadness like aspic.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in no danger of hurting myself. I’ve had friends die by suicide, and I’m not interested in inflicting that pain on others. There is definitely an allure to ctrl-alt-deleting myself, but only in a vacuum, as a thought experiment. We’ve just got to keep swimming: there’s no alternative.

If we’ve got to keep swimming, and if the status is not quo, and there’s a dynamic I’ve identified that is inhibiting real change, then changing that dynamic becomes the paramount thing to do.

I need to work on myself, in order to undo my codependent traits and build a new bedrock of self-worth. (A major blocker: I find it hard to believe that you can both be a good person and put yourself first. I know, I know.) In parallel, I need to make sure I’m in a situation where I feel like the people in my life - all of them, in every facet - are looking out for my interests and well-being as much as I’m looking out for theirs. Transactional relationships, which are about what one party can provide to the other, are the enemy of healthy self-worth and well-being. They’ve got to go.

Then there’s this other question: who actually am I? If codependence has become a deeply ingrained part of my personality, which it seems like it has, what does my personality look like when I strip it away? That’s terrifying to me. What if it’s bad?

But what if it’s not? The single biggest piece of feedback I get at work is that I need to be more assertive and do better at holding people to account. There are real-world effects to holding back that go far beyond my own boundaries. Being an effective leader, or an effective anything at work, means setting boundaries based on your expertise and being clear about what’s needed. Being an effective and happy human being means setting boundaries based on your emotional and practical needs. Being more assertive - not being an asshole, but just having those boundaries and standing by them - doesn’t make you a worse person, it makes you more effective. In the right people, with the right relationships, those qualities build respect, not animosity. And the wrong people, the wrong relationships are just that: wrong.

Intellectually, I know this. The thing I need to work on is helping my heart, my nervous system, my cowardly lizard brain, to follow through. I know in my head that my needs are important; I also feel the adrenaline, the cortisol, the feeling in my stomach that tells me something bad is going to happen when I do.

It’s pathetic. I feel pathetic. Other people find this so easy. But that feeling too, the self-flagellation, has go to go. There’s a reason there’s a name for this; it’s a thing, a mental condition, a way of thinking, that people actively suffer from and have to work to get better from.

I’m trying.

I want to build things, and write things, and create and love and find joy in the small beauties of everyday life. I don’t want to feel like my life is sort of built like a trap and that I’m a bad person for wanting to escape it.

I know there’s meaning to be found; more than meaning, I’m looking for satisfaction and belonging. I want to know that it’s right that I’m here, that it’s okay for me to take up space, that I have value in myself.

I’m trying.

This is one of those pieces that probably very few people want to read: you’re here for open source and tech utopianism and how we can all do better on the internet. But this is how I figure out what to do, where I am, how to be; it helps me to put it down in writing. And if this resonates for someone, somewhere, and encourages them to look up the symptoms for codependence and find a way to health, or even just helps them feel a little less alone, then it’ll have been a good thing.

People in tech, in the workforce, in the professional world are still people. We’re all human. I don’t think it does any of us anything but a disservice to try and paper that over. If we put ourselves out there, we can build community, find help, share ideas, and do better together.

Not that I need to justify this piece or anything. Just so you know.

This is not really what it’s for, but I’ve been having fun building an interconnected personal website using Obsidian.

These are personal notes that anyone can read. So, for example, you can read my thoughts on the software development process, and also religion and nationality. Yes, it’s super-idiosyncratic, and it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s been a long time since I’ve had any kind of homepage that isn’t a blog (my personal text adventure aside), and this is a nice way to go about it. Obsidian makes it really easy.

Behind the scenes it’s just a set of markdown files, so if I decide to stop using Obsidian or change the way I host the site, I can do that without fear of losing any data. But I’m happy to be using Obsidian Publish and Sync and to be supporting the project.

Also, Werd Cloud is a fun name, and I’m excited I got the domain.

Let me know what you think!

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I’m donating to Montgomery Pride United. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, Montgomery Pride United hosts “support groups, supply emergency food, hygiene products, masks & clothing, facilitate community education, provide senior services, host sexual wellness workshops, offer mental health support, and accommodate community gatherings for progressive groups” - a much-needed service in the Deep South.

Its programs include an Emergency Resource Program that provides “resources for LGBTQ+ individuals in need of food, shelter, medical services, or any other help to ensure their safety, health, and stability”, as well as a grief and loss support group, support for LGTBQIA+ youth, a free pantry, and more.

On my journey across the US last year, Alabama was by far the most oppressively conservative place I visited. Providing these services is a vital lifeline.

I donated. If you have the means, please join me here.

Does my excitement outweigh my hesitations?

Who benefits financially or reputationally from my work?

Does this project have the potential, if successful, of helping me succeed in my personal mission?

Does this project make the world better? What does it meaningfully change?

How likely is it to succeed, given the top-down trends, the team, and available resources? Is it worth trying anyway?

Who is the user or customer? Can you describe them or picture them?

Is the culture of the team empathetic, blame-free, and inclusive?

Why was it started? For personal gain or something bigger?

If there are already people on the team, why did they join? If there are existing investors or backers, why did they make that choice?

Why me? Why this team?

Does this project fit in with my life and life plan?

Can I grow here? Can everyone?

Will I be happy and healthy while working on this project? Will everyone?

Will I be respected? Will everyone?

Is it financially viable for me? Is it financially viable for everyone?

Is this team equitable and diverse? Do the answers to these questions reflect this?

If working on this project replaces working on another project, are the answers to these questions markedly better on this one?

After asking these questions, does my excitement still outweigh my hesitations?

The more distributed a team gets, the more important great communication becomes.

Distributed can mean many things:

• Geographically - not in the same place
• Temporally - either not in the same timezone or on the same schedule
• Organizationally - the organization might have grown to a point where people aren’t organically all working with each other anymore, or areas of focus are otherwise disparate
• Philosophically - areas of work are so different that there are entirely different mindsets, contexts, and modes of working at play

In most cases, it’s likely to be more than one of the above. For example, a team that works remotely is geographically distributed, may be temporally distributed, and depending on the size of the organization, may also be organizationally and philosophically distributed.

How do you stay on the same page with a team that has one or more of these properties?

A synchronous communication tool like Slack can be useful in some circumstances, but there’s a ceiling to the help you can get from it when people are in radically different timezones. Similarly, it’s hard to hop on a meeting to hash something out with someone who’s six hours offset from you. It’s not that you can’t talk - but you have to plan to do so.

Even without that temporal distribution, it’s interruptive to use synchronous tools. This is where philosophical and organizational distribution comes into play: they may not say so, but if you interrupt an engineer to have a quick meeting several times a day, they will be quietly plotting your demise. Their way of working requires long periods of deep focus in a way that some other roles may not. You’d better make sure those synchronous meetings are planned and predictable.

The truth is, every team is distributed, even if they’re in the same room. You can even think about temporal distribution as looking back at work that was done six months ago: you can hardly have a Slack conversation with your past self to understand what on earth you were thinking.

Luckily, we have a centuries-old method for sharing information across time and space. There are two important verbs to consider: reading and writing.

Writing is a core skill for everyone on every team. Being able to lay out your ideas, reasoning, and intention in complete sentences with empathy and depth isn’t a nice-to-have: it’s the only way to convey your thinking in an enduring way. Diagrams and illustrations can be additive, but aren’t a replacement for a well-written description. Similarly, rough notes don’t cut it: you might think they make sense in context, but months down the line, the context is stripped.

Reading is also a core skill. You can write all you want, but if that documentation is simply falling into a void, it’s useless. Active reading - the act of reading with an intention to understand and reuse the information - is a skill that every knowledge worker needs to develop.

Both of these skills must be intentionally developed as part of the culture of the team. A culture of thoughtful reading and writing as a natural part of building a product reduces dependence on interruptive, expensive synchronous communication, improves mutual understanding of the work being undertaken, and provides space for reflection on the approach before diving into execution.

As part of a software team, I believe each of these is an important written document:

• The product spec - a concrete, human-centered description of what the product is through the lens of the real people it’s being built for, what their problems are, and why this product will be effective in solving them. This document is designed for feedback from business teams and the engineering team that will be taking on the work.
• The engineering spec - a description of how the engineer intends to go about building it. This includes the technical goals, but also the non-goals: what’s intentionally being left out of the build. This document is designed for feedback from other engineers and the product team.
• Stories - concrete descriptions of atomic pieces of work, derived from the product spec, with well-defined acceptance criteria. These stories may embed illustrations or designs, but an illustration or design is not a story. Stories are usually wrapped up in an epic, a kind of meta-story that describes the arc of the work.
• Tasks - descriptions of the individual engineering tasks involved in building a story.

Each of these is designed for an audience in order to solicit feedback, which will then be used to improve the description; more feedback is sought, and so on. Iterative loops of feedback, testing, and improvement are the core pattern of software development.

Not everyone is a natural writer, or will be a native speaker of the written language of the team. Reading lots of documents with different structures also undeniably carries a cognitive load. Templates can help here: pre-defined headings and document structures that allow authors to fill in the blanks if they need to, and allow readers to more quickly find the information they’re seeking. In teams I run, I always make sure there are templates and examples to choose from.

In a tiny team, you can often get around having this level of description: you talk about it, you do the work, you check in with each other organically. But as the team becomes more distributed, this becomes less possible; context is lost and inefficiencies grow between the gaps. You can’t have everyone checking in with everyone all the time. Nobody would get anything done; meetings with lots of people are expensive; synchronous meetings tend to favor extroverts.

Like all elements of team culture, it’s important to intentionally create it early: the culture you create at the beginning will inform what happens when you grow. Because this inflection point is an inevitability in a growing team, setting a culture of strong asynchronous communication and documentation early will prevent problems later on. Like all elements of culture, that means you need to intentionally hire for it, intentionally train for it, and intentionally lead by example.

Photo by Lagos Techie on Unsplash

I am not looking for a new Head of Engineering position right now. I’ve been approached both directly and by a number of executive recruiters, and I’m flattered, but I’m not considering opening a process with any new companies.

If you’re looking for an advisor or board member on tech, product, or startups, I am potentially open to help in that way on a part-time basis. I’m mostly interested in mission-driven organizations, and need to be careful to avoid conflicts of interest.

Thank you!

I don’t think the web could happen again.

A public-minded developer, operating in a public service research institution, built an open knowledge-base with no eye on profit or even productizing it. Because of its openness and simplicity, it spread to other like-minded researchers, and then beyond. It wasn’t a product or a startup or a business, and nobody tried to build one around it until much later.

The foundations of the web are pure. And they changed the world.

I wonder what kinds of conditions would need to be true for another platform to be built in a similar way? Lots of people have tried, but none of them have the purity of participation for the love of it that the web has. Even Tim Berners-Lee’s own subsequent attempts are a startup.

Why have we lost that community-hacker sensibility? How can we get it back?

One answer might be that we don’t have the right kinds of research organizations. TBL’s work at CERN was kind of a fluke that happened at the right point in the development of personal computing. There are design organizations, and R&D organizations, but all of them are looking to productize. There’s nobody just jamming on openness platforms with significant institutional support.

Imagine if he’d built the web while trying to test the principles of product design. Desirability: well, who knew if anyone would use the web? Where would that kind of user research have taken him? Viability: it was inherently unviable; just a server living on a NeXT box. Feasibility: who on earth would think that a global hypertext network is feasible? Instead, albeit with a great deal of thought, effort, and skill, he just did it.

Did he hope or expect it would make him a billionaire? No. Did he hope or expect it to get major traction in the way that it has? Also no.

I love startups; I do. I enjoy watching people make things that serve real problems and turn them into sustainable flywheels. But not everything has to be a business, or financialized in any way. Those things are not prerequisites for impact or success. They’re just one way to go about it. The web shows us that there are others, and that purity of thought and intention go a very long way indeed.