Ben Werdmuller

My friends at Shady Pines Radio are running a fundraiser to cover their costs for 2022.

It’s been really fun watching Callie and Brian build this station. When they moved to Portland a few years ago, they converted the basement of their house into a recording studio; as well as recording a bunch of really great live music performances, they’ve been running an independent radio station with an eclectic mix of independent DJs as a way to connect the independent music scene during the pandemic. (Disclosure: my sister runs a weekly show featuring new independent artists, which reminds me a little of John Peel’s old BBC show. You should check it out.)

I spend a lot of my time immersed in startups and high-growth media endeavors; Shady Pines Radio is a labor of love, more a community than anything else. It’s all put together with a high degree of professionalism and skill, but also with obvious passion. I’m really inspired by what they’ve built, and how they’re continuing to build.

One aspect of this has been music licensing. It’s an independent station, but it’s not pirate radio: everything is fully-licensed and above board. That takes a fair amount of money, which is funded by the community (hence the fundraiser). Not only is it honest, it’s pure in a way that most media startups could never hope to achieve.

Before the pandemic, they ran a series of events - open mics, shows - that were popular gathering points. The pandemic made that impossible, but it’s been great to see how they’ve taken their skill for community organizing and brought it online. All the things you need to do to bring people together in real life translate very well to the internet. The tools are different, the communication is remote, but the people and connections are very much the same.

I’m listening right now. Hit the Play button on the website to join me, or grab the apps for iOS and Android. And if you like it, maybe knock them a few bucks?

This is what makes the web so special: communities led by people out of love. Callie and Brian’s work makes me really happy, and is an example of why I’m still in love with the internet.

‌‌I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new 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 HealthRIGHT 360. Based in San Francisco, HealthRIGHT 360 provides “integrated medical, dental, behavioral health outpatient and residential treatment, and re-entry services” regardless of cost in 11 counties across California. Particularly during the ongoing pandemic, this work is vital.

It describes its mission as follows:

HealthRIGHT 360 gives hope, builds health, and changes lives for people in need. We do this by providing compassionate, integrated care that includes primary medical, mental health, substance use disorder treatment and re-entry services.

A growing number of agencies are part of the program, including the Lyon-Martin Health Services and Women’s Community Clinic, which provides “primary medical care, sexual and reproductive health care, and mental health services for women, gender non-conforming people, and transgender people of all gender identities and sexual orientations”.

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

This year I’ve directly hired for lots of different engineering positions and skillsets: in particular, Ruby on Rails, React, DevOps, and QA. In the process, I’ve read through thousands of resumes. Some patterns and anti-patterns have become clear.

I can’t speak for any other Head of Engineering or recruiter, but here’s a short guide to getting your resume noticed by me. Perhaps these ideas will help you with other people who are hiring, too.

Your resume is a story about you.

I’m a real human being who will read your resume from top to bottom. I’d love to understand a little about you before I dive into your history: in particular, what’s driven you in your career so far, and what you’re looking for from your next position.

It’s best to avoid clichés. “I’m passionate about building high quality software as part of a dynamic team” doesn’t tell me anything at all. On the other hand, “I’m excited about cryptocurrency’s potential to disrupt centralized finance” or “I’m concerned about the widening wealth gap and want to work on projects that help the underserved” both speak volumes. Don’t be afraid to be specific and personal.

I hire for mindset as much as I hire for specific skills, so the more I can learn about you, the better. Are you empathetic, a great communicator, a team player, ego-free, and excited to grow? Those are things I really want to know.

It’s got to be legible.

Any good story needs to be read. That means using clear language with complete sentences, set in a layout that’s easily parsed.

In left-to-right languages, left-aligned text is easier to read. Pay attention to your typeface, line height and headings. You don’t have to be a designer, but keeping your layout consistent, simple and readable demonstrates attention to detail. Similarly, you don’t have to be a great writer, but full sentences and easy-to-follow text demonstrate clear communication.

By the way, I don’t mind how you set your resume up. Most people use a word processor, but I’ve seen plenty of LaTeX typesetting, and I’m always impressed when I see well-written HTML. Whatever works for you is great.

Use as many pages as you need.

Some people ask for a one-page resume. I’d rather you took the time and space you need to represent yourself well. If it’s five pages long, I promise I’ll read all five pages (as long as they’re relevant).

I always follow your links.

Whether you’re using HTML or have sent me a PDF, I’m going to follow any link you give me to demonstrate your work. The more the merrier.

I don’t care where, or if, you went to school.

There are some people who specifically look for a “top 20” school or a prestigious CS course. I’m not one of them.

Particularly in a world where college costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend, only some people can take this journey. Even if you have the money or can get a scholarship, you might have had to be a carer for your family. Or you might just have taken a non-standard path through life. Why would I penalize you for that?

I care about what you can do, not whether you’ve conformed to an approved career path.

Don’t worry about “culture fit”.

Culture fit is one of the pervasive, bad ideas in tech hiring. Instead, I like to ask the question: what new perspective will this candidate bring to our team? If you can convey that in your background or work experience, that’s fantastic.

I like context.

A list of skill keywords doesn’t tell me much. Some candidates draw a little progress bar next to each one to show their relative proficiency; that tells me a little more, but it also feels like a character sheet from some technology-themed roleplaying game. It doesn’t let me know how you’ve used those skills.

After your introductory description, the work experience section of your resume is the most most important. I’d love to understand the work you did at each position, and this is an opportunity to discuss the technologies involved. Please do namecheck them here, but do it as part of a description of what that work involved.

I’m not an algorithm, and I’m not keyword searching your resume. I am interested in the technologies you’re proficient in, and how you used them in context. Again: tell me a story.

Finally: skip the photo.

Some people like to include a photo of themselves to give their resume more human character. I appreciate the thought, but please don’t do this.

I don’t want to select candidates based on what they look like, and no employer should. For the same reason, I typically like to conduct interviews over voice, not video (except for pair programming sessions, where some video sharing is necessary).

It’s about how you think and who you are, not how you appear.

*

Looking for an engineering position? ForUsAll is hiring. We’re looking for Ruby on Rails and DevOps engineers, as well as product managers and a host of other roles.

To illustrate why geographic ecosystems are important, I used to tell a story of three cities. It went something like this:

I founded my first startup in Edinburgh, Scotland. At the time, there was no startup ecosystem at all: there was no money, and no culture of support. Everyone told us, “it’ll never work; why don’t you go and get a real job?”

The second startup I joined was founded in Texas. There, it was possible to raise money, and everyone was super-enthusiastic. But there wasn’t a ton of local knowledge, and expectations from investors about involvement in an internet startup were not clear.

The third startup was founded in San Francisco. There, there was money, enthusiasm, and a ton of deep knowledge.

The story had a satisfying sort of Goldilocks and the Three Bears structure, but here’s the thing: while it may have been true back then, when I experienced those things, it simply isn’t today. It also misses some important nuance.

Let’s take them in turn:

Edinburgh now has a pretty decent, if small, startup ecosystem. There’s money, expertise, and a few success stories (FanDuel and Skyscanner are two). There was always a deep computer science community centered around the university, and they’ve done a good job building an entrepreneurial culture around it.

Austin, Texas is now considered a startup hub. It’s got a rich seam of investors and tech talent, and industry people are moving there in droves. (The company I joined over a decade ago, Latakoo, is doing well, too.)

And San Francisco’s startup story is well-documented, but the depth of expertise is a double edged sword: it has been less welcoming to startups that want to take an alternative funding route, or that sit outside of established patterns. Its success has led to a degree of conformity, unfortunately, and rapidly rising costs have made it inhospitable to the communities that defined its culture, including its anarchic hacker scene.

We’ve all become familiar with working remotely - something I’ve personally done for over ten years of my career - and as such, our geographic centers are decentralizing. Founders can find support and investment, as well as an experienced team, from anywhere. There’s no need to pay a premium or to go without needed expertise.

Today, if I were to tell that story, it would be far different. There’s no need to be in San Francisco or anywhere else. All that matters is how you execute on your idea.

I think about this when people talk about Miami as a blockchain hub, as they’ve been doing for a while. Yes, there will be some interesting events on the beach there if you’re into that space. But there’s no need to live there. You can be anywhere, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.

For me, the smart move is to find somewhere nice, with a diverse community of generally-progressive people, low property values, great food, and good transit links. Make your base there; put down roots. And then use this incredible global communications network we’ve all built - this “internet” thing is really worth checking out - to stay in touch and build communities with people all over the world.

San Francisco? Miami? Austin? Edinburgh? It doesn’t matter. Pick what makes sense for your lifestyle and values, and work from there.

I’ve been trying to find an internal blogging solution for my team and have been coming up empty. Can there really be no good internal blogging product?

For our intranet, we use Atlassian Confluence - it’s a bit clunky, but it’s more or less worked as a semi-wiki. But its blogging tool doesn’t cut the mustard in a few key ways: most importantly because there’s no aggregator, so if you want to encourage everyone to post reflectively, you’ve got to click from profile to profile to profile if you want to read their posts. Yuck.

At the same time, I don’t really want to self-host my own thing or create a whole new set of credentials. I want a managed solution that allows people to log in using their existing SSO credentials (so accounts can easily be provisioned and deprovisioned), be presented with a feed of the latest posts, perhaps in a way that can be filtered by team, and then have the ability to easily post their own content.

The irony is that this sounds a lot like Known (or even the original version of Elgg), if it was set up in sandbox mode. Maybe there’s still room for a product of that form factor: a way to easily post reflective updates inside of a company, with a chronological social feed and live replies below each post, and aggregated insights for administrators about how the tool is being used.

I’d rather buy something off the shelf and give it to my team than build it. But I’m having real trouble figuring out what that is. So maybe I do need to build it. Again.

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

Books

This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. A treatise on love and conflict wrapped up in beautiful, occasionally wryly hilarious prose and a science fiction conceit. It took me a little while for this to hook me, but when it did, I found myself wanting a lot more. It stops just as the story becomes really interesting; an appetizer rather than a full meal.

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World, by Vincent Bevins. If every American - and every citizen of a first world nation - could read and understand this, it would make the world a better place. An illuminating, aggravating portrait of how the US used murder to further its interests around the world, and how that has affected modern culture everywhere. It should be required reading. Please get yourself a copy.

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.

Streaming

A Hero. A nuanced morality play. Occasionally the protagonist’s poor decisions stretch credulity, but there’s a lot to think about here; nobody is out to cause harm, but the plot spirals nonetheless. The writing, direction, and cinematography are masterful but never anything less than subtle. Beautifully done.

Notable Articles

Business

VCs with Ignorant Views on Race Have No Place in Venture Capital. No founder or investor should work with anyone like this. But please note: he’s not just a VC, he’s the founder of Palantir. Which assumptions do Palantir’s products and services - famously sold to law enforcement and more - have baked into them?

The touchy-feely groups where CEOs learn to emote. A lot of my work style is indirectly inspired by the Stanford “Touchy Feely” class - it was what led to a lot of Matter’s culture, which I’ve found enormously helpful. This might sound like ridiculous stuff on the face of it, but it really works, and it’s a way to get to a kinder business culture.

Hybrid Tanked Work-Life Balance. Here’s How Microsoft Is Trying to Fix It. “While initially this seemed like the best way for teams to stay connected, we’ve since realized that these non-stop video calls, emails, and chats have turned into digital overload, and we see the well-being impacts in our Microsoft employee surveys. Between April and November 2020, employees’ satisfaction with work-life balance dropped by 13 percentage points.”

How to quit like a boss. “The goal of this post is to summarise some patterns and anti-patterns, so that in the future you or I can leave our roles in the most professional and positive way possible. The content is applicable to people in a wide range of companies, at different levels of seniority, but is probably most directed at mid-career types.”

The 5 Stages of Burnout. This, unfortunately, all sounds familiar to me.

YC’s $500,000 Standard Deal. Wowzers. It’s going to be hard for other accelerators to compete with this. (Matter invested one tenth of this amount.)

Building American Dynamism. I do not subscribe to the future this a16z piece paints. The future is for and by the public, not locked up in private businesses.

Three words popping up in LinkedIn job listings. “LinkedIn has been watching how different keywords correlate to engagement on company posts, and which words have been appearing more often in job listings on the site. The terms “flexibility,” “well-being” and “culture” all appear in LinkedIn posts more often than they did in 2019, LinkedIn revealed Tuesday in its 2022 Global Talent Trends Report. Company posts that use those terms also attract more engagement, LinkedIn found.” Shocking nobody but important to highlight.

Backlash as US billionaire dismisses Uyghur abuse. “Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya is under fire for saying that he - and most Americans - “don’t care” about abuses against the Uyghur minority in China. [...] Boston Celtics Forward Enes Kanter, who has been outspoken about human rights issues and campaigned on behalf of the forced labour law, was among those condemning the comments. “When genocides happen, it is people like this that let it happen,” he wrote.”

When Microsoft Office Went Enterprise. “Practically, any time someone tries to take on two conflicting perspectives in one product, the product comes across as a compromise. It is neither one nor the other, but a displeasing mess. The hope I had at the start was that by deprioritizing our traditional retail-customer focus on personal productivity at the start of the release, we avoided the messy middle. We succeeded at that, but I was struggling with how unsatisfying this felt.”

Let’s stop saying these two things. “When I hear “drinking the Kool-Aid”, I think about Leo Ryan, Jackie Speier, and 900+ dead followers of Jim Jones. [...] If your white grandfather was eligible to vote prior to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, you were eligible to vote. When you talk about being grandfathered in, that’s what you’re referring to.”

Your Startup’s Management Training Probably Sucks — Here’s How to Make it Better. “When you’re a really small startup, co-founder drama is the likely company-killer. But as your org gets larger, the thing that often tanks the company is waiting too long to bring on competent management.”

Covid

Utah tech company founder claims COVID vaccine part of extermination plot by 'the Jews'. “The founder and chair of Entrata, a Silcon Slopes tech firm, sent an email to a number of tech CEOs and Utah business and political leaders, claiming the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a plot by “the Jews” to exterminate people.” I wonder how many other people quietly hold similar views?

What older people and caregivers need to know about omicron. “The 19th spoke with a wide range of experts about what older people and family caregivers should know about the risk omicron poses to seniors, as well as best practices to keep loved ones safe.”

‘Menace to public health’: 270 doctors criticize Spotify over Joe Rogan’s podcast. “The letter was first reported by Rolling Stone, which quoted Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago school of public health, calling Rogan “a menace to public health” for airing anti-vaccine ideology.”

A paperwork hurdle for trans people: COVID-19 vaccine cards. “Mahoney is one of several trans and nonbinary people who told The 19th they feel like they are being put in stressful situations where they are required to out themselves, or use their deadname. Some also feel like they are being left out of data collection on COVID-19 vaccination entirely — that transgender people are an afterthought.”

Neil Young demands Spotify remove his music over Joe Rogan vaccine misinformation. “In an open letter to his manager and record label that was posted to his website and later taken down, Young wrote: “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them. Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.””

Overworked Pharmacy Employees Are the Covid Pandemic’s Invisible Victims. “Bloomberg spoke with a dozen current and former Walgreens and CVS pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation. More responded to Bloomberg’s reporting request via email and text messages, detailing crushing workloads in sparsely staffed stores.”

Crypto

My first impressions of web3. “This was surprising to me. So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification.” Moxie Marlinspike, creator of Signal, dives into web3.

Andy Warhol, Clay Christensen, and Vitalik Buterin walk into a bar. “Bill Gates once said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” That doesn’t mean to rush out and buy the latest meme stock, meme coin, or overpriced NFT. But it does mean that it’s important to engage with the social, legal, and economic implications of crypto. The world advances one bubble at a time. What matters is that what’s left behind when the bubble pops makes the world richer in possibilities for the next generation to build on.”

The NFT Art World Wouldn't Be the Same Without This Woman's Nightmares. “While she’s not able to discuss financial specifics, her compensation, she says, “was definitely not ideal.” However, she insists, she’s grateful for the experience and the entryway to a realm she can no longer imaging living without.”

Why Bored Ape Yacht Club is Racist and Started by Neo Nazis. “Knowing the history of alt-right/4chan types in crypto I started looking into it. I found what I believe to be definitive evidence that the group behind the creation of these images are neo-nazis. Here is how I have arrived at this conclusion.”

Culture

Pet Door Show’s Up-and-Coming Artists You Should Know in 2022. My sister’s epic list of new, independent artists that are worth a listen. Amazing as always.

Bambi: cute, lovable, vulnerable ... or a dark parable of antisemitic terror? “Far from being a children’s story, Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and dangerous precariousness of Jews and other minorities in what was then an increasingly fascist world, the new translation will show. In 1935, the book was banned by the Nazis, who saw it as a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe and burned it as Jewish propaganda.”

Superheroes create cultural acceptance for popular oligarchy. “What does the current popularity of comic book superheroes, in culture, do? It reinforces the idea of a hierarchy of human, with the ubermensch as its apex. The superhero makes things alright without being asked. It looks after us, it protects, it cleans up the streets. It’s a parental role. [...] It says that the superhero is someone other – it ain’t us. And that’s a good thing, it says.”

Vegan Babybel Cheese Is Here at Last. “Instead of the classic red wax featured in the dairy version, the mini vegan cheese wheels are wrapped in peelable green wax. The cheese snack is made from a blend of coconut oil and starch and contains calcium as well as vegan-friendly vitamin B12.” Honestly, this seems kind of great?

Caffs Not Cafes finds the magic in London’s old school joints. “The page functions as a hub of London’s best local eateries and their delicious dishes, celebrating these spots in all their day-to-day glory. Many of them have distinct shopfronts, too, which 30-year-old Rangaswami never fails to point out, often via poetic captions about the history of hot dogs, old school cash registers or musings over what a chip shop might say if it could talk.” Quite lovely.

Breaking the mold. “Merch is so often seen as the death knell of a media property, the maggots hatching in the corpse of art - but a lot of the time, the exact opposite is true. Some of the most beloved media properties of Millennial childhoods were, in one way or another, made by toys.” A great breakdown of franchise toys and their cultural impact.

Media

If American democracy is going to survive, the media must make this crucial shift. “Much of this work has been impressive. And yet, something crucial is missing. For the most part, news organizations are not making democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the public.”

BBC licence fee to be abolished in 2027 and funding frozen. “The culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is expected to confirm that the cost of an annual licence, required to watch live television and access iPlayer services, will remain at £159 until 2024 before rising slightly for the following three years. She said this would be the end of the current licence fee funding model for the BBC, raising doubts about the long-term financial future and editorial independence of the public service broadcaster under a Conservative government.” This is big news - while the license fee is a regressive tax, the BBC’s status as a public broadcaster has been important. It’s, broadly speaking, a force for good. What happens now?

Joe Rogan and the problem of false balance. “To illustrate this, I want to talk briefly about Joe Rogan, because a Facebook post about him is what inspired this article. Full disclosure, I am, to say the least, not a fan of Rogan. In my opinion he is (to quote a friend of mine), “a dumb person’s idea of a smart person” (which to be clear, does not automatically mean that anyone who likes him is dumb). He frequently makes claims that are nonsense, and he uses his podcast to give a voice to all manner of quacks and conspiracy theorists.”

Politics

Capitol rioters called Nancy Pelosi's office looking for a 'lost and found' for items they left behind on January 6, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin. “And when they were told that they were trespassing and invading the Capitol, they said the president invited them to be there. They didn’t have any kind of subtle understanding of the separation of powers. They just thought that the number one person in the US government had invited them to be there, and therefore they had a right.”

Biden has nominated 8 Black women to become appellate judges. “As of Wednesday, with the selection of Arianna J. Freeman for the 3rd Circuit, the president has nominated eight Black women to the 13 U.S. Courts of Appeals. Five have been confirmed, most recently on Thursday, when Judge Holly A. Thomas cleared Senate approval to join the 9th Circuit. If the remaining three are confirmed, Biden would have doubled the total number of Black women to ever serve on federal appeals courts from eight to 16.”

Kamala Harris drove within several yards of pipe bomb at DNC headquarters during Capitol riot. “Then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris drove within several yards of a pipe bomb lying next to a bench outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters on January 6, 2021, and remained inside the DNC for nearly two hours before the bomb was discovered, according to multiple law enforcement officials familiar with the situation.”

Science

Scientists Train Goldfish To Drive On Land In Tiny Cars. “Not only were the fish able to reach the targets, but they could overcome obstacles, dead ends and wrong turns, and weren’t fooled by false targets laid out by the researchers. Their FOV Formula One demonstrates that the navigational skills of fish aren’t dependent on a watery environment, and that something more universal may be at play in deciding how we find our way.”

How bad are gas stoves? I ran some experiments to find out. “Every year more damning evidence piled up. In 2013 another meta-analysis confirmed the results of the 1993 meta-analysis. But this time, researchers were more specific and pointed to gas stoves in particular as the likely cause of respiratory illness. They concluded, “Children living in a home with gas cooking have a 42% increased risk of having current asthma.”” I love cooking with gas, but it may be time to change.

What the Discovery of an Extra Artery Means for Human Evolution. ““The study demonstrates that humans are evolving at a faster rate than at any point in the past 250 years,” said Teghan Lucas, lead author of the study and an archaeologist at Flinders University, in a press release. In fact, Lucas predicts that the median artery will continue to be a common occurrence in the human forearm far into the future.”

Society

The Last Time the Suez Canal Was Blocked a Utopian Communist Micronation Was Formed at Sea. “The last time ships got stuck in the Suez Canal, they were there for eight years. From 1967 to 1975, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, 14 ships were stranded in the Great Bitter Lake, a salt lake connected to the canal. Unable to leave, the crews, dubbed the “Yellow Fleet” because of the desert sand that eventually covered them, developed their own society at sea. This society developed its own postal service and stamps, and held a version of the Olympics in 1968.”

Rampant caste-based harassment means Dalits like me are silenced on social media. “Even today, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in India are dominated by dominant castes. In fact, I quit Instagram last year because I could not relate to the elite, high-resolution world of the dominant castes. Given the lack of diverse voices, caste slurs are rampant on social media in India. Many caste names are casually used as curse words.”

Notes From the End of a Very Long Life by New York's Oldest. “At the end of each year, I asked the elders if they were glad to have lived it. Did the year have value to them? Always the answer was the same, even from those, including Ruth, who had said during the year that they were ready to go, that they wished for an end sooner rather than later. Yes, they said, yes, it was worth living.”

Oh, 2022! SF author Charlie Stross’s stock take of where we are this year. Come for the cogent commentary on covid - stay for the link to the absolutely batshit community about quantum Bible changes. Insightful as always.

Who owned slaves in Congress? A list of 1,700 enslavers in Senate, House history. “More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records.” Amazing work; a vital database. An important and troubling part of America’s history. Slavery is core to what it is.

Look around you. The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarized. “Whether it comes to the climate emergency or systemic racism, the migrant crisis or the ongoing pandemic, so much turns on whether we can acknowledge and accept the intertwining of our separate lives. But it’s not just our homes that are styled now like defensive fortresses.” A superb portrait of modern American society.

Black mothers in MLK Jr.'s neighborhood will receive monthly cash payments. “The program, which will launch early this year in King’s neighborhood, will send monthly payments of $850 to 650 Black women over two years, making it one of the largest guaranteed income programs to date. Guaranteed income — the concept of sending people cash payments with no strings attached — was featured in King’s 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” in which he argued that sometimes the simplest idea could be the most effective in ending poverty.”

How a Married Undercover Cop Having Sex With Activists Killed a Climate Movement. “In 2003, Kennedy had been sent undercover by an elite unit in London’s Metropolitan Police Service to gather intelligence on activists like Wilson. He spent seven years living a double life: He was a fearless organizer who had a shadowy backstory as a cocaine runner, but he was also a cop with a family in Ireland.” I suspect this is more common than we realize. Activists are often targeted for intelligence gathering, and this is a good way to do it over time. It’s morally repugnant, of course.

Patriot Front Fascist Leak Exposes Nationwide Racist Campaigns. “The detailed inner workings and patterns of operation of fascists in the neo-Nazi organization Patriot Front have come to light after a massive leak from their chat servers. The exposed communications show coordination with their leader Thomas Rousseau to deface murals and monuments to Black lives across the United States, and intimate struggles to bolster morale through group activities like hiking and camping.”

San Francisco Police Illegally Spying on Protesters. “It’s feels like a pretty easy case. There’s a law, and the SF police didn’t follow it.”

The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle. “A hot water bottle is a sealable container filled with hot water, often enclosed in a textile cover, which is directly placed against a part of the body for thermal comfort. The hot water bottle is still a common household item in some places – such as the UK and Japan – but it is largely forgotten or disregarded in most of the industrialised world. If people know of it, they usually associate it with pain relief rather than thermal comfort, or they consider its use an outdated practice for the poor and the elderly.” I loved this piece about the history of hot water bottles. (They’re great!)

Faster internet speeds linked to lower civic engagement in UK. “Volunteering in social care fell by more than 10% when people lived closer to local telecoms exchange hubs and so enjoyed faster web access. Involvement in political parties fell by 19% with every 1.8km increase in proximity to a hub. By contrast, the arrival of fast internet had no significant impact on interactions with family and friends.” This feels solvable to me.

On pronouns and shades of pink. “An accusation of virtue signalling often feels, to me, the same kind of denial of solidarity as the old “if you think people should pay more tax, write a cheque to the Treasury yourself”. Individualising the social must be something the left resists the right in doing, for the left to have any real meaning.”

My heart bursts with pain. “These extracts are from letters written by victims of the Holocaust during their final days. Needless to say, their messages are desperately sad. But they should never be forgotten.”

Full-time transgender workers among lowest paid LGBTQ+ people in US. “The HRC found that trans men and nonbinary or gender-nonconforming people earn 70 cents for every dollar the typical worker earns, while trans women earn 60 cents to that dollar, based on responses from roughly 6,800 LGBTQ+ workers last spring.”

Technology

2021: A Year of Resilience in Tech. “2021 was another big year for tech workers organizing for a greater say at their workplaces. This year, more workers took action to build lasting, enforceable structures to protect their rights. Across multiple industries, it was a record year for unionizing, and tech was no exception.”

Wordle Is a Love Story. “But since Wordle was built originally for just Mr. Wardle and Ms. Shah, the initial design ignored a lot of the growth-hacking features that are virtually expected of games in the current era. While other games send notifications to your phone hoping you’ll come back throughout the day, Wordle doesn’t want an intense relationship.” Just really lovely.

The anti-muslim Bulli Bai app is just the latest in GitHub’s list of moderation failures in India. “While GitHub quickly took down the app, following massive social media backlash, this is the second time in seven months that the platform has been used to target Muslim women in India. In mid-2021, a similar web application called “Sulli Deals” was hosted on Github to trade Muslim women without their consent. The app was online for weeks before it was taken down.”

Jan. 6 launched a wave of anti-content moderation bills in America. “Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies took an unprecedented step last year when they banned a sitting U.S. president from their platforms in the wake of the attack on the Capitol. Since that day, Republican legislators in more than half the country have introduced their own unprecedented wave of bills that aim to prevent tech platforms from taking that very kind of action.”

Happy 10th Birthday, Bridgy! Wow. Time flies. Bridgy is such an important part of the indieweb ecosystem. Thank you to Ryan and everyone who’s worked on it.

Google Had Secret Project to ‘Convince’ Employees ‘That Unions Suck’. “A National Labor Relations Board ruling sheds light on a highly secret anti-union campaign at Google, that a top executive explicitly described as an initiative to “convince [employees] that unions suck.”” Gross.

Using Foreign Nationals to Bypass US Surveillance Restrictions. “What’s most interesting to me about this new information is how the US used the Australians to get around domestic spying laws.” The US and GCHQ have a similar arrangement, I think?

Google's Alleged Scheme to Corner the Online Ad Market. “The document provides unprecedented insight into how Google allegedly misled advertisers and publishers for years by manipulating auctions in its own favor using inside information. As one employee put it in a newly revealed internal document, Google’s public claim about second-price auctions were “untruthful.””

Why companies are hiring sci-fi writers to imagine the future. OK, how do I get to do this for a living?!

Over 40 small tech companies just stood up to Apple and Google. “The Act, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Chuck Grassley, would keep large platforms like Apple and Google from excluding competitor products. Specifically, it prohibits businesses from using a companies’ data to compete against it, biasing search results against competitors, or requiring other companies to buy their own services for preferential placement. It also keeps companies from preventing interoperability.”

The baseline for web development in 2022. “The baseline for web development in 2022 is: low-spec Android devices in terms of performance, Safari from two years before in terms of Web Standards, and 4G in terms of networks. The web in general is not answering those needs properly, especially in terms of performance where factors such as an over-dependence on JavaScript are hindering our sites’ performance.”

Welcome to the Link-in-Bio Economy. “By and large, these linking tools are making money through a swirl of paid-subscription programs and commissions on the transactions that happen inside the link-in-bio. Whether that is enough to sustain a profitable business isn’t clear, but it’s easy to envision a future in which link-in-bios become even more ubiquitous, something like the new personal website in the TikTok age. When you stumble across an influencer and want to know what their deal is, your first stop will be their link-in-bio.”

Searching for Susy Thunder. “There were ways to use the rules to break the rules. The older she got, the more she saw the polygraph as a lesson, revealing, to her, the hidden truth of the world: that everything is a system, and every system can be cracked.” A genuinely amazing, beautifully-written portrait of an important hacker and so much more.

The IRS Should Stop Using Facial Recognition. “Though [ID.me] asserts that “significant benefits” come from the use of one-to-one facial recognition, the company fails to adequately address its known harms or deeply engage with specific findings that indicate substantial racial bias.”

The New York Times Purchases Wordle. “Wordle was acquired for an undisclosed price in the low seven figures.” BRB, getting to work on building a viral word game ...

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.

I’m a long-time Notion user: my linkblog is based on it (with new links posted to my site via Micropub), and I use it for everything from tasks to shopping lists. But so far, it hasn’t been quite right for me. It’s slow, and perhaps too structured both in form and editor.

I tried Roam Research, for a while, but the interconnected personal wiki approach isn’t right for me either. It’s not structured enough somehow: getting started has been incredibly hard for me. I don’t fully understand how to get the most out of it, perhaps.

In my fiction writing, I really like Ulysses: an app that provides just enough structure for long projects. I’ve been able to map the story circle into a template there, and it’s been a pretty good framework for building up a plot. I have work to do to improve my writing, but (particularly in comparison to Scrivener, which gets in my way) provides me the kind of light-weight support I’m looking for. Its super-responsive index-cards-and-markdown approach works well with the way I think.

What kind of life-and-work note-taking app will work for me? As part of my ongoing quest, I’m trying out Obsidian. It’s got a beautiful interface and is super-fast in the way that Ulysses is. It’s also unstructured in the way that Roam is, so I’m having the same sorts of difficulties, but I’m finding that if I ignore the mindmap graph view and the “daily notes” feature, I can get somewhere. I also absolutely love that it’s based on local text files, so I get to keep all my data.

Why do I need something like this? I want to keep notes about ideas, people, and companies I encounter. There are so many situations where I find myself thinking, “I wish I could remember that thing that did that thing” - and having an outboard brain where I can not just remember those details but also how I felt about them could be useful. My blog is that in a way, but it’s less an intentional knowledge-base than a record of what I’m thinking about. I’d love to start intentionally building up the former.

I’ve been thinking about it as a private set of notes, but I also wonder if I should be doing this thinking in public. Clearly I can’t keep notes on companies I’ve met privately and publish them to the world, but there’s something to be said for making more general notes and analysis available. One of the benefits of blogging as openly as I do - perhaps the benefit - has been finding similarly-minded people and building community. I’ve often said (because it’s true) that every job opportunity since my very first startup can be directly tracked back to blogging. Would putting a knowledge-base out there help me do that more efficiently? Or would it be counterproductive?

Anyway, I’m experimenting with Obsidian, but maybe I’ll think about doing something more public.

If you use a personal note-taking app - particularly if you make your notes public - what have you found to work for you?

This weekend, while I was out for a walk, my Apple Watch sent me a notification - actually buzzed my arm to let me know - that I was unfit. I had two reactions: firstly, how rude, and secondly, how bad did the situation have to be for it to proactively tell me?

I spent the first half of last year running every day and eating well. I lost a bunch of weight, but most importantly, I felt better: I had more energy and was sleeping better. I’d worked hard on it, and it hadn’t been easy. But then, halfway through the year, my mother died and I gave myself a pass. I haven’t paid real attention to my health since then.

Until now. I weighed myself and took my blood pressure, and discovered that both were higher than they’d been in a very long time. I already know that my ability to exercise and recover is far worse than it used to be.

There’s only so long I can let trauma be a pass for taking care of myself. So I’m starting clean: re-starting the running, re-starting the food regime. Not because I want to get thinner, but because I want to be healthy, because I want to feel better, and because I want to stick around.

I’m not mad at myself for letting myself get back to this state. I know why it happened. Nevertheless, now is the time to do something.

As annoying as that buzz on my arm was: I’m grateful that it gave me the push to take a further look.

The other day I posed the question:

I've started two end-user open source social platforms: Elgg and Known, from the web2 desktop and mobile era respectively. Imagine I was going to create an open source community platform today. What would be different about it?

As you might imagine, I expected the answers to be broadly related to web3 and crypto: perhaps a decentralized platform where each community is interrelated and identity and reputation can be transferred.

But I really liked this reply from Colin Walker:

Everything on social networks is too easy — that's why I used to like Google+ when it launched. There was no API, no way to share something to the network from outside, everything had to be an intentional act.

There’s something really powerful about the idea of anti-virulence. Instead of optimizing around a platform’s K-Factor, we should make the conversation just hard enough to require a thoughtful reply.

The indieweb - blogging in general, actually - has this characteristic. You can’t just knock off a blog post in 10 seconds without time for your brain to kick in. It requires thought, but at the same time, you’re not writing an essay for the New Yorker. In other words, it requires just enough thought. It’s definitely the medium for me.

I wonder what a community platform that was centered around long-form thought would look like? Medium, perhaps? Or something else?

It should be obvious, but: Neil Young and Joni Mitchell’s decision to remove their content from Spotify to protest Joe Rogan’s ongoing covid disinformation is not censorship under the First Amendment or any other measure.

The First Amendment protects us from government censorship. It does not guarantee freedom from content filtering by any other entity. Spotify is not the government. A school board banning books about the Holocaust is a First Amendment issue; musicians threatening to leave a private service because of the content it hosts on one of its shows is not.

Every artist has the right to choose who and what their work is associated with. Spotify is, in effect, a private marketplace (albeit for attention). It’s completely reasonable for an artist to remove their goods from a marketplace because they don’t want to be associated with other goods made available there.

Young said exactly this in a statement on Friday:

“I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”

We all have a similar right to do what we want with our attention and our subscription dollars. If we enjoy Joe Rogan, great: we can choose to continue subscribing to Spotify. If we don’t, and consider the company’s support of misinformation that leads to unnecessary deaths to be immoral, we may wish to consider spending our money elsewhere.

If Spotify was to decide that it no longer wants to spread lies that kill people to bolster its profits, it still wouldn’t be a free speech issue. Rogan is free to keep publishing his work on the web and doubtless would find another avenue. The government is not telling him he can’t be heard, and most of his audience would likely follow him anywhere.

Activism and boycotts are a perfectly reasonable part of democratic society. You could argue that they’re a necessary part of a free market: businesses and customers have the right to make these decisions. To equate not wanting to financially support a toxic talk show with censorship is disingenuous at best.

It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty stressed out.

Someone I trust said that my writing lately has given the impression of “a man on the edge”. I think of it slightly differently - there’s a lot going on and I feel like I’m dealing with it in good humor - but I accept the idea and the intent behind it.

One of the most useful concepts I’ve been introduced to over the last couple of years is the Yerkes-Dodson curve. I’m not a psychologist, so please excuse my layman’s explanation: the idea is that we’re at peak performance when we have an optimal level of sensory arousal. Too little arousal and we’re maybe increasing our level of interest, but not in the zone yet; too much and we burn out quickly.

In contexts where there’s a lot going on, you’re already further along the curve. Because you’re nearer to burnout as a starting position, cognitive input that might ordinarily be okay has the potential to push you over the edge.

It’s a reductive explanation - again, I’m far from a psychologist - but I’ve found that it works for me. Applying this kind of structure to the process by which it all becomes too much has allowed me to think about what those cognitive inputs are, and to build in systems of control to keep myself on the straight and narrow.

I first put this to the test a couple of years ago. My mother’s condition had worsened, and I was feeling utterly overwhelmed, which was deeply affecting my performance at work.

At the same time, I’d become addicted to some game on my phone, and was traveling to and from New York a lot. I’d pick up my phone on the plane and play the game for an hour or two; depending on the day, I might play it a little in my AirBnb after work. There were a lot of notifications involved: lots of input.

In the scheme of things, the game was just a distraction. The big input was my mother’s terminally declining health, which was something that was always going to affect me psychologically, and wasn’t something I could or wanted to cut out of my life. (I can’t imagine what this would even have looked like.) Nonetheless, deleting the game dramatically improved my mental state. I was surprised, but it was undeniable: I was calmer, performed better at work, showed up more effectively for my family, and even had better sleep.

Abstracting this idea has resulted in a rudimentary system of control for my own stress. If I’m finding myself going over the edge - as happened this last week - I take stock of my inputs and reduce them. There are two more systemic solutions: find ways to become a more efficient processor of inputs (physical and mental exercise both help here), and create contexts for myself where there are fewer inputs overall.

Social media is one set of inputs. I’m going to try and take a break over the next month: removing all apps and logging myself out of the websites. It’s not that social media is bad, as such: it’s just one major set of cognitive inputs that can be removed. On the other hand, I find writing and blogging to be closer to a meditative process, so I’ll keep doing that. If I feel better at the end of the month, I’ll come back to social; otherwise I’ll leave it a little longer.

The same principle applies at work. The more chaotic and un-streamlined a process, the more cognitive inputs it produces, and the more stressed a team will be. Structure (or at least, the right amount of it) leads to predictability. Similarly, the more a process depends on ongoing meetings, the more inputs you receive during the workday. Zoom fatigue is both real and related to this principle: each meeting an input, each unscheduled meeting even more so. The more calm, reflective time I have, the more optimal my performance will be - which is, of course, different for everyone, because we all start at different places on the stress curve.

We’re still in the middle of a modern plague. Everyone’s stress level is higher than it would have been: not just because of the underlying context, but because many of us have lost family and friends. Creating conditions for our optimal well-being and performance means limiting stress, controlling our inputs, and more than anything, an intentionality that we might not have felt the need for before.