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 Rogue Retreat. Based in Medford, OR, Rogue Retreat offers support and housing for the homeless in its local area, including a pioneering community of local homes. It describes its mission as follows:

Rogue Retreat provides affordable housing/shelter and case management to homeless individuals and families in Jackson and Josephine Counties, Oregon, to teach them the skills they need to live independently.

I was struck and moved to donate by this piece on police criticism of its facilities on NPR last year:

"It is just another enabling mechanism for the homeless, the transients and the displaced people here," [Police Chief] Johnson told the board in February 2019. "When you create something and enable people, you're going to attract more."

Johnson goes on to say that there’s another solution for people who are struggling with mental health and drug addiction: incarceration. I can’t imagine a more counter-productive, harmful attitude for someone in his position to have (color me disappointed but not surprised), which makes me even more appreciative of the work being done.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Facebook is reportedly betting the future of the company on the metaverse, changing the name of its umbrella company in the process. Meanwhile, supposedly NFTs are the revenue model for the metaverse, making $2.6bn in sales in the first six months of 2021 alone.

This is all well and good, but what the hell is the metaverse?

The complicated answer is: it depends on who you're talking to.

The metaverse as most people are talking about it right now is something to do with an interconnected set of virtual worlds, which may or may not be accessible via virtual reality (hence Facebook’s interest: after all, they own Oculus). The idea is that they’d be interoperable to the point where these worlds can lead to each other, and where you can bring objects from space to space - theoretically represented via NFTs.

This particular vision of the metaverse is probably not accurate. It depends on a few different important prerequisites: virtual reality becoming not just mainstream but near-ubiquitous for more than just games (when this is far from true even for games today), NFTs evolving to become truly powerful object primitives for interoperability rather than cartoon pictures of apes that are sometimes used for money laundering, and enough people buying into this new version of the internet that they build worlds, objects, and applications with wild abandon.

Another version of the metaverse is a “digital overlay for our reality” - or as I’ve often described social media, a backchannel for real life. Here, rather than interconnected worlds, we’re maybe talking about something closer to digital platforms that add value to reality. This fits a little closer to Facebook, which could already be thought of in this way.

The thing is, none of these platforms exist. It’s a wishful, top-down version of a future internet that is little more than vaporware today. Moreover, although some of the technologies in play this time round are novel, the overall vision has been around for a long time. It’s a bit like a flying car: something we’ve been promised forever but has never quite come to fruition.

Which isn’t to say that it’s a completely fruitless endeavor. There are lots of good things that could come out of a push for the metaverse. The most obvious of them is interoperability: while internet platforms have operated as silos to date, an interconnected metaverse depends on true interoperability. Those worlds have to work together, and those objects have to be moveable from place to place. The financial incentives also have to be aligned with keeping the platform open. That means building real, open technologies to allow those things to happen, which may well enable other kinds of applications that we haven’t conceived of yet.

Still, when people talk about the metaverse online right now, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t exist. Unlike the web, say, it’s not a thing. Facebook is clearly serious about it, and lots of money has been thrown at projects like Decentraland. But it’s highly likely that if you ask twelve people to define what the metaverse is, you’ll get twelve different definitions. In that sense, the metaverse is science fiction: the stuff of aspiration.

I’d put money on the actual future of the internet being something that nobody really predicted, emerging from an unexpected place. That’s part of why the internet is such an empowering platform to work on. But again - there’s a lot of value in plugging away at a mission, even if it turns out that most of that value is in the journey rather than the end result. I don’t think the metaverse is a real outcome - frankly, it just smells too much of BS to me - but the protocols, communities, and business models it leads to may be.

I’m fascinated to find out what Facebook’s definition of the metaverse is. I’m also interested to see which challengers enter into the market with a strong, competing vision. Most of all, of course, I’m interested to see what actually happens, and what the future of the platform we all use turns out to be.

I got mine well before the new batch of redesigned MacBook Pros, but my 13” M1 machine is by far the best computer I’ve ever owned. It’s responsive, the keyboard is great, and the battery life is long enough that I sometimes forget the thing has a battery at all.

As an engineer, I wish it leaned a little heavier on the Pro side. In particular, the lack of adequate virtualization means it’s not a suitable device for some kinds of development. That’s a real bummer!

I’m sure it’s not a permanent situation: the stacks we used virtualization to test and code on will be replaced by something that’s more ARM-compatible. For now, though, it’s a blocker. There are times when I can’t test directly in the cloud - right now, for example, I’m publishing this on in-flight WiFi - and spinning up a local environment is the only real choice.

Still, it’s generally superb, and I’m looking forward to using mine for many years to come. (I’m not even that jealous of the new machines with a selection of actual ports.) Highly recommended and worth the money.

Thoughts

1. I remember on my very first startup, my co-founder (the CEO) worried that we weren’t cool enough. We were building a white label community platform that was beginning to be used inside large organizations to share information: what would become a multi-billion dollar business. And we were doing it in a way that would allow companies to keep their internal information secure. But at the time, consumer social web startups were cool, and we lost focus by trying to chase that dream. The worry was more about the image of being a startup than creating something financially viable and doing it the right way.
2. The startup community is absolutely chock full of posturing bullshit. A lot of this is the fault of VC hustle porn: raising money is celebrated. Having a great launch on Product Hunt seems awesome. Being able to tell regular people about your startup and having them recognize your brand is a milestone.
3. But none of these things are the same as building an actually-successful business. Marketing and sales are important, of course, but if your entire effort is blustering and creating the right kind of external-facing energy, you’ll lose. There are plenty of those kinds of companies, but they’re not real: instead they’re sort of play-acting being a startup.
4. You’ve got to ship. That means knowing how to build software that solves real problems and doing it, again and again and again, without losing focus.
5. Another symptom of play-acting is just talking about what you’ll do instead of doing it, as if brainstorming or strategizing is as valuable a task as the act of making.
6. Brainstorming and strategizing set the stage for the real work. They are not the real work.
7. If you’re more worried about how you appear than the substance of what you do, you’ll want to spend most of your time on talk. Often founders like this will outsource the act of making as an afterthought, devaluing the skill and action of making in the culture of their organization. They want to be the ones who dictate what gets done without doing any of it.
8. And of course, the people who make are on the hook for actually producing in this environment, and will receive the flak when it doesn’t happen, with little of the kudos when it does.
9. This is what we call an abusive relationship.
10. Not every maker can be a founder, but every founder should have a maker’s mindset.

Actions

1. I’m in the process of shutting down a bunch of my cloud services (or at least, reducing them to their free tiers) and replacing them with home-spun alternatives. I used csvskit to take my large AirTable databases and turn them into local tables, saving me hundreds of dollars a month. More of this to come.
2. I’m heading back to the west coast for a wedding. The trip is going to be a bit complicated, and I’m still trying to figure out the logistics.
3. I’m also closing out my time in Cape Cod at the end of the month. I’ve been here since early August, in the house my great grandparents built. It’s been cathartic and wonderful to be here, but real life calls. I need to start packing up and preparing.
4. We got here by road-tripping east; while my dad is going to fly back, my sister and I are planning to road-trip west. It’ll be a completely different kind of trip, and I can’t wait. Exactly when we do this, I’m still not sure, so there’s planning to be done. But it will happen.