Werd I/O

[Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post]

I adore The 19th. It's making big moves, and that's good news for everyone.

"What [Emily] Ramshaw and fellow co-founder Amanda Zamora started in January 2020 — a newsroom with just one reporter and no website — has grown into a digital operation that has raised nearly $60 million and employs 55 people. And in a sign of its growing ambitions, the 19th has now hired veteran news executive LaSharah Bunting, CEO of the Online News Association, as its first vice president, a role created to build up the 19th’s fundraising and budget operations."

It's also grown an endowment, which allows it to have a safety net and continue to grow and experiment. The ambition for the endowment to underwrite the newsroom's operations is meaningful: this would represent a fund designed to allow reporting on gender, politics, and policy to be undertaken sustainably. I don't know of any other similar fund in media.

Not mentioned here but extremely relevant: the amazing work Alexandra Smith, its Chief Strategy Officer, has been doing to redefine how to think about audience and reach on a fragmented web.

These are all signs of a forward-thinking newsroom that isn't content to simply accept the status quo - and, crucially, plans to stick around.

#Media

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[Paul Graham]

"In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it."

Please forgive the Paul Graham link: this is a genuinely good point about running companies. And I don't think it's limited to startups: the dichotomy isn't between "founder mode" and "manager mode", but between purposeful companies built to be communities aiming at a focused goal and institutions that can move slower and less efficiently.

Skip-level meetings should be normal. Flat hierarchies are good. Everyone in a company should have the ability to have the ear of the CEO if they need it - and, likewise, the CEO should be able to freely talk to anyone in a company. A good idea can come from anyone; people with exceptional talent can show up anywhere on the org chart. Less regimentation and less bureaucracy allow those people to flourish - and, in turn, allow the organization to make better choices.

It's also a representation of what matters to an organization. Hierarchies emerge from people who care about hierarchy and chains of command; flatness emerges from people who just care about getting stuff done. The latter, in my view, always makes for a better place to work.

#Startups

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[Ghost]

"It's a simple thing, but it's kind of a big deal. With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond."

This is a big step: a Ghost publication puts something out on the web, and then anyone on any ActivityPub-compatible network (Flipboard, Mastodon, micro.blog, soon Threads) can respond and the publisher can see it straight from their dashboard.

This is not just limited to Ghost: any platform can implement this using ActivityPub without asking anyone for permission. And they will. Expect to see this functionality across both publishing and social networks within the next few years. Anyone who doesn't have this functionality will be left out - it'll more be about the level of sophistication with which they implement it, and the nuances of how they make it right for their respective userbases.

The web, finally, is becoming social. Let's go.

#Fediverse

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[Matt Webb]

"The EU may (or may not) be making technology policy missteps, but they are gently and patiently promoting a certain way of life which feels globally very, very special, and fundamentally counter to the hypercapitalism found elsewhere." 

I love Europe, and this is a large part of why. It's not the business environment or any ability to enrich myself in a measurable way; it's not about the politics, which are going in directions that I'm not always on board with (I think it's falling off a dangerous cliff with respect to press freedom, for example); instead it's about the lifestyle, which is in my opinion markedly better.

The bottom line is that I want to live like a European, not an American. I don't want to own a car; I don't want to have to pay for healthcare; I don't want to care about my 401(k) or work hard to avoid sugar in my food. I don't want to work ten hour days. That might be anathema to some Americans - what's wrong with hard work, after all? - but, objectively, it's killing us.

This, too, feels incredibly right:

"A company that makes not too much profit but is the collective endeavour of many people is a good company, surely? Or rather, it occupies as many people as it requires and allows those people to enjoy a relaxed life."

Co-signed to infinity.

[Link]

[Robin Rendle]

Robin Rendle on Sarah Jeong's article about the implications of the Pixel 9's magic photo editor in The Verge:

"But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of this product. There are only shady applications for it."

Robin's point is that the core use case - adding things that never happened to a photograph with enough fidelity and cues that you could easily be convinced that they did - has no positive application. And as such, it should probably be illegal.

My take is that the cat is out of the bag. The societal implications aren't good - at all - but I don't think banning the technology is practical. So, instead, we have to find a way to live with it.

As Sarah Jeong says in the original article:

"The default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after."

In this world, what constitutes evidence? How do we prove visual evidentiary truth?

There may be a role for journalism and professional photographers here. Many newsrooms, including the Associated Press, have joined the Content Authenticity Initiative, which aims to provide programmatically-provable credentials to photographs used by a publication. This will be an arms race, of course, because there are incentives for a nefarious actor to develop technical circumventions.

Ultimately, the biggest counter to this problem as a publisher is going to be building a community based on trust, and for an end-user is finding sources you can trust. That doesn't help in a legal context, and it doesn't help establish objective truth. But it's something.

#AI

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[Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams]

"After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose perpetrators never spent a day behind bars."

These pictures, now published by the New Yorker, were covered up and obstructed for almost 20 years, presumably in an effort to present an image of America as a benevolent intervener. They are graphic and disturbing in themselves, and revealing of the real impact of America's impact overseas.

As Common Dreams notes:

"The Haditha massacre was part of countless U.S. war crimes and atrocities committed during the ongoing so-called War on Terror, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in at least half a dozen countries since 2001. One of the reasons why the Haditha massacre is relatively unknown compared with the torture and killings at the U.S. military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq is that photos of the former crime have been kept hidden for decades."

One of the reasons this kind of sunlight is important is so that Americans can be aware of what its military foreign policy is truly enabling in the rest of the world. I hope we can change tacks and become a genuine force for peace and international democracy, but I don't believe that's where we are or where we have been.

As always, I recommend Vincent Bevins's excellent book The Jakarta Method to help understand what has been done in our name. I wish it could be taught to every American citizen.

#Democracy

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[Nolen Royalty]

"On June 26th 2024, I launched a website called One Million Checkboxes (OMCB). It had one million global checkboxes on it - checking (or unchecking) a box changed it for everyone on the site, instantly."

This story gets deeper from here: how he found a community of teenagers secretly writing to each other in binary using the checkboxes in the site is lovely.

#Technology

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[Aaron Ross Powell]

""First, there’s what I’ve referred to in the past as the “Quillette Effect.” Because we believe our own ideas are correct (or else we wouldn’t believe them), we tend to think that people who share our ideas are correct, as well." This whole piece is worth your time."

This whole piece is worth your time: a dive into why some of Silicon Valley's leaders seem to be disappearing down an ideological morass, using AI model collapse as an analogy. These are ideas that turn to themselves again and again to infinity.

There's a lot to be said for getting out of Silicon Valley and seeing the bubble from the outside. But you've really got to do that for yourself - or have something really catastrophic do it for you.

"The problem with model collapse is, once it goes too far, it’s difficult to correct. The solution to model collapse is to train on better data. But accomplishing that, and undoing the rapidly radicalizing right-wing ideology of these titans of the Valley, means undoing the structural causes of that self-referential and self-reinforcing cascade. And that’s no easy task."

I have no idea what would bring that about.

#Democracy

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[Emily Peck at Axios]

"70% of Americans said they approved of unions, per Gallup's most recent poll, conducted in August."

This represents a giant change in American society: labor unions haven't been this popular since 1967. But at the same time, union membership is at a record low, at just 10%.

In other words, Americans want unions but aren't typically members. We're likely to see more and more union organization attempts over the next few years, and workplaces that are unionized may have competitive advantages over workplaces that aren't in terms of attracting workers.

Because unions have been so suppressed, managers likely also need a refresher (or a from-scratch lesson) in terms of what is legal and illegal when it comes to dealing with unions in the workplace.

Bottom line: they're not going away. And likely quite the opposite. Whatever your position on unions (I think they're an important force for worker rights), they are going to increasingly be a part of the organizational landscape.

#Labor

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[Heather Bryant]

Arguing that it's harder to just be a human online, Heather Bryant has published an online participation disclaimer:

"The following disclaimer applies to participation in discourse as it relates to my individual experience as a human being in a global online community and the collective communication occurring therein. This disclaimer is intended to acknowledge the complexities, challenges and sometimes human incompatibility with discourse occurring at potentially global scale."

Honestly, this disclaimer feels universal: it's something that I would feel comfortable posting on my own site or linking to. It's both very complete and a little bit sad: these things should be commonly understood. In some ways, these clauses are obvious. But by naming them, Heather is making a statement about what it means to participate in online discourse, and what the experience of that actually is for her.

It's worth reflecting on everything here, but in particular the "some things for some people" and "spheres of relevance" sections hit home for me. It's a commonly-held nerd fallacy (forgive me for using that term) that everything is for everyone, and that everything is relevant for comment. The conversational equivalent of inviting people from multiple facets of your life to the same party and assuming it'll all go great.

It's worth asking: if you had such a disclaimer, would it be any different? What do you wish was commonly understood?

#Media

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[tante]

Tante responds to Amazon's claim that using its internal AI for coding saved 4500 person years of work:

"Amazon wants to present themselves as AI company and platform. So of course their promises of gains are always advertising for their platform and tools. Advertising might have a tendency to exaggerate. A bit. Maybe. So I heard."

He makes solid points here about maintenance costs given the inevitably lower-quality code, and intangibles like the brain drain effect on the team over time. And, of course, he's right to warn that something that works for a company the size of Amazon will not necessarily (and in fact probably won't) make sense for smaller organizations.

As he points out:

"It’s the whole “we need to run Microservices and Kubernetes because Amazon and Google do similar things” thing again when that’s a categorically different problem pace than what most companies have to deal with."

Right.

#AI

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[The 19th]

"To understand how the anti-trans agenda could reshape all of our lives, The 19th set out to examine how the laws and rhetoric behind it are impacting Americans."

My friends at The 19th dive into how the wave of anti-trans legislation and rhetoric is impacting American life.

This is a vital conversation: 177 anti-transgender bills have become law since 2021. The country has been swept into a red wave of bigotry.

These laws have implications for everyone. As The 19th describes its rationale behind this series:

"To understand how the anti-trans agenda could reshape all of our lives, our reporters have set out to examine how anti-trans laws are impacting the lives of Americans, whether or not they are trans. The goal is to connect the dots that will show how these laws, intended to target a small minority, are rewriting the future for all of us, and for generations to come. This is the Toll of America’s Anti-Trans War."

#Democracy

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[Ingrid Melander and Guy Faulconbridge at Reuters]

"[Telegram founder] Durov, who has dual French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was arrested as part of a preliminary police investigation into allegedly allowing a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegram and a lack of cooperation with police."

At face value, this seems like an enormous deal: the idea that a social network operator should be arrested for not moderating and not cooperating with the police seems like a precedent with implications for a great many platforms.

Telegram has been blocked in Russia since 2018. While it's unlikely to be blocked as such in the EU, it's plausible to see a world where it's removed from app stores and made harder to access.

Decentralized platform builders in particular will be watching this carefully: what does this mean for people who are building censorship-resistant and governance-free platforms overall?

Of course, at the same time, we may not have all the information yet. We'll have to watch and see.

#Technology

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[Martin SFP Bryant at The New Stack]

"How do you get started if you want to integrate your own software with ActivityPub? [Evan] Prodromou has written a new book on this very topic, and we caught up with him to explore the practicalities of linking up with the fediverse."

I'm convinced that ActivityPub is the underlying standard that all future social software will be built on. Evan is one of the founding parents of the fediverse, and this article is a great overview. His new book will be an invaluable resource for everyone who wants to embark upon this journey.

#Fediverse

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[George Hammond at the Financial Times]

"Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up incubator that launched Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe and Coinbase, is backing a weapons company for the first time, entering a sector it has previously shunned."

Specifically, its a low-cost cruise missile startup, which the Financial Times reports would be suitable for use in a potential war between the US and China. The cruise missiles are 10x smaller and 10x cheaper than today's alternatives, but presumably still murder people.

Also from the article:

"There is “a very interesting situation where geopolitical heat and the end of zero-interest rate policies have made people become more pragmatic,” said the founder of one start-up that was in the same group of YC-funded companies as Ares. [...] “People support builders doing cool, hard stuff.”"

Very interesting indeed. Certainly, you can make money by selling weapons of war. But should you? And in what world is killing people "cool stuff"?

Silicon Valley's origins are in large part military, of course, so this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. But for a while there, in the wake of the this-is-for-everyone radical inclusion of the web (which was not a military creation), it seemed like tech was heading in a different direction. It's disappointing to see that this was ephemeral at best.

#Technology

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[Tara Tarakiyee]

"I want to talk about three examples I see of cracks that are starting to form which signal big challenges in the future of OSS."

I had a knee-jerk initial reaction to this post - what open source bubble?! - but Tara Tarakiyee makes some important points here about our dependence on open source code and how that might change over time.

The through line to all of them is about money. The OSI's new "open source AI" definition is loose because AI vendors likely couldn't make money otherwise (although whether they can make money anyway is still up for debate); source-available licenses have become prevalent because it's easier to sell commercial licenses and therefore make a living building software; much open source software was precariously funded through European Commission Next Generation Internet grants, which are now evaporating.

While we can stand for pure open source values all we like, the people who build open source software need to make a living: food must go on the table and they need a roof over their heads. Ideally their compensation would extend beyond those basic necessities.

This has been the perennial problem for open source: how can it be sustainable for the people who build it? We're not launching into a post-monetary Star Trek future any time soon. In the meantime, people need to be paid for their work, or open source runs the risk of being a hobbyist-only endeavor.

People won't pay for software that they don't need to pay for. I suspect open-core, which opens the core of a software platform while monetizing high-value extensions, is the best answer we can hope for. But even that might not be realistic.

#Technology

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[Andy Jassy on LinkedIn]

Andy Jassy on using Amazon Q, the company's generative AI assistant for software development, internally:

"The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real)."

"The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains."

Of course, Amazon is enormous, and any smaller business will need to scale down those numbers and account for efficiencies that may have occurred between engineers there.

Nevertheless, these are incredible figures. The savings are obviously real, allowing engineers to focus on actual work rather than the drudgery of upgrading Java (which is something that absolutely nobody wants to spend their time doing).

We'll see more of this - and we'll begin to see more services which allow for these efficiency gains between engineers across smaller companies, startups, non-profits, and so on. The dumb companies will use this as an excuse for reductions in force; the smart ones will use it as an opportunity to accelerate their team's productivity and build stuff that really matters.

#AI

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[The 404 Media team]

"In the last year, we learned that the technical infrastructure exists now for even non-technical journalists to build a sustainable site that can receive money from subscribers. [...] If you are a journalist reading this thinking about going out on their own: the tech is there for you to do so with very little know-how needed."

404 Media has been a new shining light in technology journalism. That it's worked out for them, having invested a thousand dollars each at the outset, is delightful.

And then there's this:

"The biggest challenge that we face is discoverability. To the extent possible, we don’t want to have to rely on social media algorithms, search engines that don’t index us properly and which are increasingly shoving AI answers into their homepages, and an internet ecosystem that is increasingly polluted by low-quality AI spam."

So to counter that, they're building community. Which just so happens to be what every single newsroom should also be doing.

Here's to another year of 404.

#Media

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[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge]

"A federal judge has blocked the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements that make it difficult for workers to join their employers’ rivals or launch competing businesses. The ruling prevents the FTC’s ban on noncompete agreements from taking effect on September 4th, though the agency could still appeal the decision."

This is such a blow. Non-competes are already illegal in California; they're inherently anti-worker and are also very clearly a hindrance to innovation.

Hopefully the FTC appeals. The judge's argument that it would cause "irreparable harm" is nonsense: any business that has to protect itself by not allowing its workforce to go work for a competitor is obviously not competitive at what it does. Instead, businesses should seek to do good work and create conditions so that workers don't want to leave in the first place. The solution is a better workplace, not legal restrictions that prevent people from finding a different employer.

#Business

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[Erin Kissane]

"Back in the fall, I wrote about a research project I was diving into with Darius Kazemi. Now, after a few months of prepping and conducting interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers about how they govern their parts of the network and then many more months of analyzing and writing up what we found, we’re releasing our findings. We found so much."

This is an impressively in-depth report by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi, which has some important conclusions about how moderation can work in a federated system (including the not-insignificant conclusion that it can work). There's room for more tooling, and better communication between instances - but this is all doable stuff.

The shorter satellite documents - opportunities for funders and developers who want to serve this ecosystem and a quick-start guide to fediverse governance - are super helpful, too.

#Fediverse

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[Open Society Foundations]

"In February 2024, the Open Society Foundations issued a call for applications for a convening in which selected participants would share their visions of an AI-mediated future."

I thought this, from the concluding observations, was telling:

"Participants were generally reluctant or unable to articulate exactly how AI might transform the information ecosystem. [...] Relatively few submitted scenarios described an AI-driven transformation in specific detail, and it was clear that many participants who were convinced that AI would fundamentally restructure the information ecosystem also had no specific point of view on how that might occur."

In other words, while many people in journalism see that this set of technologies may transform their industry, and are potentially excited or terrified that it will, they have no idea how that will happen. This is the very definition of hype: one can imagine people proclaiming that blockchain, or push notifications, or RealMedia, or WebTV might do the same.

It's not that there are no uses for AI (just like it's not that there are no uses for blockchain). It will find its way into end-user applications, underpin newsroom tools, and power data-driven newsroom investigations, without a doubt. But the hype far exceeds that, and will eventually, inevitably, deflate.

In the meantime, journalists are not as worried about the technologies themselves as who controls them:

"Throughout the application process and workshop discussions, it became clear that much of the conversation was not actually about AI, nor about journalism, nor about the current or future information ecosystem, but instead about power. It was clear that power, and the potential for transfers of power from one group to another, was the explicit or implicit subject of many of the submitted scenarios as well as the five final scenarios that were distilled from the workshop."

Technologists, in turn, were blind to these power dynamics, while simultaneously predicting more dramatic changes. There's a fundamental truth here: it's ultimately about money, and who controls the platforms that allow readers to read about the world around them.

Same as it ever was: that's been the struggle on the web since its inception. AI just shifts the discussion to a new set of platforms.

#AI

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[Alexander Saeedy and Dana Mattioli at The Wall Street Journal]

"The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis."

"[...] The banks haven’t been able to offload the debt without incurring major losses—largely because of X’s weak financial performance—leaving the loans stuck on their balance sheets, or “hung” in industry jargon. The resulting write-downs have hobbled the banks’ loan books and, in one case, was a factor that crimped compensation for a bank’s merger department, according to people involved with the deal."

Let that sink in.

It's not like this was unpredictable: it was obvious that Elon Musk was not going to turn Twitter into a roaring success. While Twitter was, at its heart, a media company, Musk's direction has been a muddle of three sometimes-competing priorities: his long-held desire to create X, an "everything" app; his desire to build his own brand in an effort to boost his own equity and therefore wealth, sometimes in ways that got him in trouble with the SEC; and his desire to influence global politics.

There's no three-dimensional chess being played here; this likely isn't an intentional plan by Musk to write off the debt. It's simply narcissistic mismanagement, and one has to wonder how this will affect his businesses at Tesla and SpaceX in the longer term. There will come a time when shareholders declare that enough is enough - although given that they approved his ludicrous pay deal, perhaps that time isn't coming soon.

#Technology

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[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge]

"“Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future,” Procreate said on the new AI section of its website. “We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.”"

This is a company that knows its audience: the lack of concern for artist welfare demonstrated by AI vendors has understandably not made the technology popular with that community. Adobe got into trouble with its userbase for adding those generative AI features.

It's a great way for Procreate to deepen its relationship with artists and take advantage of Adobe's fall from grace. There's also something a bit deeper here: if work created with generative AI does run into copyright trouble at the hands of current and future lawsuits, work created with Procreate will be clean of those issues.

#AI

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[Surveillance Watch: They Know Who You Are]

"Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations."

This is a volunteer-driven, well-cited database of global surveillance companies and how they interrelate. It's very well-executed: a pleasure to use, and the visualizations show clearly how data is extracted to companies across the globe, skirting local privacy regulations in the process.

#Privacy

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[Anuj Ahooja and Sean Tilley at We Distribute]

"Starting today, Flipboard will let users search for and follow accounts from across the Fediverse from the comfort of their own dashboards. [...] This new feature isn’t just limited to Mastodon or PixelFed, but includes Threads profiles that opted in to Fediverse Sharing, such as MKBHD, Molly Jong-Fast, and Nilay Patel. You won’t need to have a Threads account to cross this boundary, but will still be able to see what your favorite creators are up to. This is a neat way of letting people dip their toes into the wider network, without needing to fully commit to it on day one."

This is the power of the open social web: you can follow someone who's publishing on social network A from social network B, and interact with them as if they were on the same network. Everyone can choose which social platforms that fit them best without having to sacrifice reach or the ability to follow people they care about.

Flipboard has been a leader in this space, and this is a major step forward. It, Threads, Mastodon, Ghost, Micro.blog and others are pushing the social web forward by embracing these standards - and there's a lot more to come. No company and no developer needs to ask anyone permission to join the network; they can opt to support the protocols and - boom! - they're in.

Every media company and every individual publisher should be jumping on this. I could not be more excited about the possibilities.

#Fediverse

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