Ben Werdmuller

‌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.

In the New York Times:

Lina Wertmüller, who combined sexual warfare and leftist politics in the provocative, genre-defying films “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties,” which established her as one of the most original directors of the 1970s, died overnight at her home in Rome, the Italian Culture Ministry and the news agency LaPresse said on Thursday. She was 93.

We’re distantly related - both Werdmüller von Elggs who colloquially dropped the “von Elgg” suffix for convenience - but I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never seen one of her movies. So tonight I plan to fix that.

Even if we weren’t on the same family tree, what an achievement: to be the first woman director to be nominated for an Academy Award. And I’ve got to admit, the combination of sexual warfare and leftist politics (the Guardian calls her films “outrageously subsersive”) really appeals to me.

Also, the New York Times again:

Ms. Wertmüller, an Italian despite the German-sounding last name,

Look, man, it’s never not going to be complicated.

ActivityPub is the protocol standard of the Fediverse: a set of interoperable, open source social networking platforms that notably includes Mastodon and Write.as. It’s the closest we have to a vibrant, distributed social networking ecosystem.

Known has supported Indieweb standards since the beginning, but Fediverse has been notably missing. I think that’s a big omission, but also not something I’ve had bandwidth to fix. I’d love to have more time and space to work on Known, but try as I might, I just don’t.

Today I added a substantial Gitcoin bounty to this work, which will be funded by the Known OpenCollective. My hope is that a developer can help us add this functionality. Today the bounty is funded in USD, but I’d be happy to exchange that for a proof of stake crypto bounty on request.

My first startup produced a product called Elgg: an open source social networking platform. It’s very long in the tooth now, but it’s still being maintained by its community.

When I graduated from university, I found that there weren’t many coding jobs in Edinburgh, so found myself back inside the institution, working at the Media and Learning Technology Service. I quickly learned that everyone hated the learning technology software we were providing: certainly the students (“learners”), but also the teachers and the administrators. It wasn’t obvious to me that the people writing the software didn’t hate it.

I was an early and avid blogger, and stuck up my hand to say that people were already learning from each other all over the web in an informal way - so surely we could use a similar mechanism to help people do that in an institution. I’d been forced to share a converted broom closet as an office with a PhD candidate in learning technology, Dave Tosh, who saw the formal implications of these communities. I built a prototype, stuck it on my Elgg.net domain (the Werdmullers come from Elgg, a village in Switzerland), and we showed it to the university.

The university said, verbatim: “blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms”. They were not interested in the prototype - so I quit my job, almost on the spot, and we co-founded a startup.

We had no idea what we were doing whatsoever. There was no startup ecosystem to speak of in Edinburgh at that time, so we were left to invent it all from scratch: learning from customers, figuring out what was worth making revenue from, building, marketing, you name it. Venture capital wasn’t on our radar so we didn’t bother trying to raise. We just pulled together a business and ran it for years, growing the community and platform with it. At one point, Elgg was translated into over eighty languages.

From time to time, I’ve caught myself wishing that we’d started it in Silicon Valley. Almost certainly, we would have found a more traditional venture path for it. But I don’t know that it would have worked that way - in a way, it succeeded because we worked it out from first principles. We built the team, processes, and culture that worked for us.

A lot of founders I see today are copying processes they’ve seen in other startups verbatim: perhaps they read about the way Amazon or Google works and thought to themselves, well, it worked for them. But I don’t think that’s right (and the same is true of templatized startup frameworks like The Lean Startup). When they worked, it was because they were a good fit for the organization - but their working in one place doesn’t in any way indicate that they’ll work in another.

These days, I find myself more often than not trying to reclaim that naïvety. How can I think about building a team, a culture, and a product from first principles? How can I forget all the startup hustle culture marketing and just figure out how to build something that works?

A lot of people are trying to play-act building a startup by copying what others do. I miss the days when I didn’t know; when everything was new. I’d love to find my way back there.

Every Friday I highlight a new social justice organization, inspired by the VC Fred Wilson’s Funding Friday posts about crowdfunding projects.

This week I donated to MADRE, an organization dedicated to working “with women leaders who protect and provide for communities facing war and disaster. Together, we build skills, strengthen local organizations, advance progressive movements, and advocate for rights.”

Its work includes ending gender violence, advancing climate justice, building a just peace by supporting women, and advocating for a more equitable foreign policy.

If you have the means, please join me in donating here.