Ben Werdmuller

Whatever you celebrate this December - or even if you don’t celebrate anything at all - happy holidays.

For everyone, this has been an intense year. From America’s attempted fascist coup in January to a shocking global COVID surge at the end of the year, it’s made 2020 - a year so bad they wrote songs about it - look like the warm up act. And that was just the baseline; everyone had to endure life’s inherent ups and downs on top of all this.

In all this, I’m grateful for you. Thank you to everyone who’s read, responded, reshared, and built community with me. You’ve all made my year better.

And to my friends and family: I lost my mother after a ten year fight this year, and there’s no way I would have made it through this year without you. So much love to you.

I’ve been reflecting on what the future might bring, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this. I know that 2022 will be about building, figuratively and literally. It will also be about being myself: while I always want to grow and learn, I don’t want to shave off my edges to fit into other peoples’ templates. Between COVID, climate change, and current events, the moment we’re in demands that we show up both authentically and radically, and cast off manufactured expectations to put the full weight of ourselves behind moving forward towards a safer, more equitable, inclusive future. That’s what you can expect from me, and what I hope for from you.

In the meantime, it’s all about community. As a multicultural atheist, these holidays are about togetherness more than anything else. I’ll look forward to spending time with my family and remembering my mother with love and fondness. I hope you get to spend time with the people you love this winter.

‌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 the Coalition on Homelessness. Based in San Francisco, the Coalition on Homelessness “organizes homeless people and front line service providers to create permanent solutions to homelessness, while working to protect the human rights of those forced to remain on the streets.” This is particularly important in a world where some of the most wealthy inhabitants of the city are actively calling for homeless people to be forcibly relocated, and for homeless shelters to not be built in their neighborhoods.

It describes how it works as follows:

The Coalition’s organizing work is accomplished through two focused workgroups: Housing Justice and Human Rights. Our workgroups both have open meetings on a weekly basis, in which homeless people and their allies determine the policies we’ll pursue, and the strategies we’ll take to meet important goals aimed at ending homelessness, and protecting poor people while homelessness exists.

This includes work on housing justice and human rights, as well as publishing Street Sheet. It’s also worth checking out Stolen Belonging, an art project “which documents the belongings taken from homeless residents during the City’s sweeps, revealing the ways in which such thefts steal a person’s ability to belong in their community and the city.”

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

‌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 the Community Justice Project. Based in Miami, the Community Justice Project supports “organizing for racial justice and human rights with innovative legal work.”

It describes its mission as follows:

‌We are community lawyers. In our legal work we collaborate closely with community organizers and grassroots groups in low-income communities of color because we believe that a more democratic, more just and more equal society can only truly come about through grassroots organizing and social movement. We are a part of that social movement in South Florida and strive to support organizing through our varied and often innovative legal work.

Its work includes racial justice, police brutality, immigration defense, economic justice, and capacity building for social justice organizations.

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

I’ve got the more-intense cold that’s been doing the rounds, and I hate it. Of course, I’d much prefer to have this than COVID: as annoying as it is now, there shouldn’t be any long-term effects, and I’m not heading to the hospital any time soon. So I consider myself lucky.

We hit 800,000 US COVID deaths this week. Almost 1 in 6 people in the country have contracted it. It’s the third largest killer after cancer and heart disease - which itself is an improvement on the beginning of the year, when it was the number one cause of death.

I’m mad at myself for catching a cold: if I caught this, I could have caught something much worse. I’m lucky enough to be triple-Pfizer-vaccinated (and donate to COVAX so more of the world can be), and I’m masked in public. But the risk isn’t zero, to myself or others: as bad as I’d feel catching COVID, I’d feel worse passing it onto someone else.

I’d really like this pandemic to end. But unlike the world presented in this famously awful Atlantic article, we can’t pretend that it has. I’m looking forward to a world without masks, where we can gather again and build community in person, but it isn’t here quite yet. Hopefully next year.

One of the most striking facets of the metaverse is that it doesn’t exist and nobody can agree on how to define it, but there are a lot of people who are really excited about it. And because so many people are excited about it, the hype itself may generate the platform. It’s like if a collective delusion was capable of birthing a tangible thing.

A ton of marketing dollars have been poured into generating this hype, but it’s in some ways arbitrary. Virtual reality has been around for a very long time and has never really taken hold in the markets; seeding this excitement allows those investments to finally come to fruition.

Imagine, though, if the same hype machine was directed elsewhere. What if we were excited to build a Star Trek future instead of a Ready Player One future? A post-money society where information and resources are ubiquitous and communities collaborate to push the boundaries of human experience and boldly go where no-one has gone before?

Or what about a cyberpunk future, where every piece of hardware is repairable and endlessly remixable into new devices?

You can’t sell headsets or NFTs that way, of course, so there’s little incentive for anyone to market this alternative future in the same way the metaverse has been. But we do need competing visions of the future that challenge hyper-commercial interests. The narratives we tell about the future really matter. The metaverse is a top-down, highly-financed commercial vision, which has partially gained popularity because its ill-defined nature allows everyone to pin their own imagination on it. We would all benefit from an alternative, bottom-up, collaborative vision that trades commerce for community.

Thoughts

1. My high school yearbook said that I was likely to become a journalist. Aside from a brief foray into film reviewing (one of the best gigs I’ve ever had), that didn’t happen. Instead, I was sucked into software development as a way to tell stories.
2. There’s a huge gulf between writing code as a self-directed creative endeavor and writing it as an act of engineering as part of a business. I learned the former, and then I had to learn the latter all over again as a distinct discipline.
3. But, as it turns out, they’re not distinct. The act of writing software for fun can lead you down paths you never would have explored as a professional endeavor. Visualizations, hardware hacking, game-writing, toys and gizmos with no ROI and no reason for being at all except for fun give you skills and insights that could, if you wanted, also be used for work.
4. Code is poetry, as someone smart once said.
5. Play and work have an integral relationship. But play requires space that we don’t often think to provide: physical, temporal, and mental. You have to start with the intention to include play. At work, you need to make it an inseparable part of your culture. Particularly in highly competitive environments, that’s not something that people tend to think to do.
6. Highly competitive environments are counter-productive overall.
7. I’m in awe of people who have retained that sense of naïve fun: of building something for the art of it, whether to explore, tell a story, or reveal something about ourselves. Keeping hold of that sense of play is a hard thing to do when the world around you is urging you to be productive, to make money, to financially succeed. Those goals are ultimately empty, and yet.
8. I want to spend more time playing; making things for the art of it; exploring what might be possible. Art is one of the best aspects of human civilization, and making it is freeing. It’s innately human. And that’s something I wish more of us could spend more time being.

Actions

1. It’s a big deadline week. There’s a lot to keep on top of, and I’m doing my best to be helpful. The best way I can do that is by providing the right environment, and making sure everyone has the resources they need.
2. I also woke up this morning with a giant cold, so I need to also take care of myself. Lots of tea.
3. I owe so many people so many emails.
4. And I need to finish my Christmas shopping. But that should be fine, right? Christmas is a month or two away? Right? Right?
5. In the spirit of play, I want to restart work on Untitled, my fiction work in progress. I had to stop while driving across country - it was just too much - but I really want to finish the story.