A Shield Against Enshittification
I’ve noticed a lot of talk about hyperlinks lately. A post from Nilay Patel initially caught my attention yesterday and it was followed by a wonderful article from Anil Dash about the ways corporate social media platforms like Substack work hard to co-opt open protocols and keep users inside their respective walled gardens. Key to his argument is the fact that people are now referring to their email newsletters as “their Substacks.” Dash writes:
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Email is email. Writing is writing. Personally, I’ve worked hard to establish a POSSE approach to publishing my thoughts on the internet. The way it works is this: I publish everything on this website, where I own the domain and the content that lives here, and then I choose how and where that content gets delivered. You like email newsletters? Cool, that’s an option. Are you old school and want to subscribe via RSS? Yup. Do you spend your time on Mastodon or Bluesky? Posts hit those platforms as well. I even do this for shorter, in the moment posts that appear as if I’m posting from within the platform itself. This way of working is my attempt to shield myself from the eventual enshittification that is inevitable on any platform that needs to create a return for investors1.
A lot of folks are really enjoying their time on Bluesky right now. They’re harkening back to their glory days of early Twitter when the firehose still existed, reverse chron was the only feed, influencers hadn’t been born yet, and the social web was like the Wild West. I’ll admit, I am caught up in the nostalgia a bit too.
Bluesky is is a corporation, however, and it’s raising a lot of money from private equity. Eventually the platform will need to generate revenue and there are really only a few ways to do that in the context of social media. All of those ways will typically make platforms worse for users.
Hopefully I’m wrong and Bluesky becomes a social platform that honors its users at scale. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts, but I’m not holding my breath. If and when enshittification does come to Bluesky, and there is a mass exodus to the next big social platform, at least the POSSE philosophy will have served me well.
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This is why my heart still belongs to Mastodon. It’s completely decentralized and servers are maintained by individual admins. This environment does bring onboarding, usability and discovery challenges, however. ↩︎
Slow Web Now
I’ve spent the last week detached and disconnected from political discourse. This is different for me. I’m normally extremely pugged in and engaged but I just can’t follow this train wreck of a transition. I can’t watch the news. The podcasts in my queue remain unheard. My initially-deactivated accounts on corporate social media platforms are now officially nuked. I’ve muted certain words on Mastodon to keep the one remaining feed I actively monitor friendly and chill.
Several friends and family members have asked me in recent days what I think about the election results. The truth is that I am not yet ready or able to talk about it. I just can’t go there. I realize how privileged that is. I realize how others, who actively live the fight and endure assaults on their rights each day, don’t have this luxury.
Mentally, I think this is the only way I’m going to be able to handle what I fear is just going to get worse.
And while I hope I may find the strength to tap back in and rejoin the fight someday, I’ve taken comfort in this slower life – and this slower web – recently. Without the constant onslaught of negativity and endless doomscrolling, I’ve found time and space to write more. I’ve been able to connect with thoughts in more substantive and reflective ways than I typically do. Of course I’m getting out on the trails, but I’ve also started a strength training program. I finished a book. And started another. I’ve been binging The Diplomat, which while political, lands far enough outside of reality to feel like fiction.
I’m also rediscovering at a deeper level the personal independent web that exists below the corporate surface of the internet. This website is emblematic of it. Thousands of other homegrown websites exchange hyperlinks to form it. Some of my favorite discoveries lately are Erin Kissane’s new Wreckage/Salvage, Naz Hamid’s wonderful site, Ben Pobjoy’s newsletter chronicling his epic adventures on foot, The Shrediverse, Cory Dransfeldt’s wonderfully built and artisanal corner of the web, Craig Mod’s Roden and Ridgeline, Robin Sloan, and of course indieweb staples like The Marginalian and Kottke.
All of this is convincing me to build out a blogroll-type list here. Maybe I will. But for now I’ll continue to bask in and admire the slowness and thoughtfulness of the hand-crafted web. The slow web. If you have a site or newsletter or post somewhere free from surveillance capitalism, hit me up. I’d love to check out your stuff.
Finished reading: Small Game by Blair Braverman 📚
An intense story of a group of survivalists selected for a Survivor-like reality show that ultimately goes off the rails. The group must not only survive in the wilderness, but also among themselves.
An Open Letter to Amerika
I’ve spent most of today trying to rationalize the irrational as I attempt to understand how we ended up here. Political scholars will study this for years and I surely have no answers. Yes, the price of milk and eggs is high. Yes, illegal immigration is a problem that needs to be resolved. But shouldn’t we as humans, collectively as a nation, insist on some level of decency from our leaders? Shouldn’t our kids be able to aspire to be like people in positions of power such as the President of the United States? I say yes, but unfortunately a majority of voters disagree. The people have spoken. Amerika has spoken.
Amerika, you made a sexual predator the most powerful man in the world. How do I explain that to my daughter?
Amerika, your new president believes school shootings are just a way of life that we should get used to. How can I convey safety when my kids are scared to go to school?
Amerika, you reinstalled as president a serial adulterer who payed off a porn star to remain quiet about an affair. How can you just hold your nose and cast that vote anyway?
Amerika, you condoned the behavior of an insurrectionist who incited a mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, injuring several and killing a police officer. How can you reconcile that on your conscience?
Amerika, you have emboldened and elevated the worst human qualities and this choice will have unknown consequences for years – maybe decades – to come.
Amerika, I can’t understand your choice but I do hope the cost of eggs comes down for you.
Greetings from the Epicenter
This election cycle has been difficult to weather. I’m speaking for myself when I say this, but it’s also been a common sentiment in discussions with friends and family. Here in Western Pennsylvania, where pundits believe the race may be decided tomorrow, you can’t go five minutes or literally anywhere in your normal daily activities without seeing a political advertisement.
They’re on the airwaves and in the streaming feeds, they’re along the highways, they’re in people’s yards, they’re coming in via text message, they’re in the sky and they’re knocking on front doors.
This election is important. I get it. But for someone who’s been engaged in the political process for decades and someone who’s never missed a vote (even odd-year local elections) since 1996, this is the first time I can remember being completely saturated, mentally exhausted and emotionally beat down with election-based content.
I made decisions on these races months ago. I wish there would have been some way to opt-out of the onslaught, short of becoming an off-the-grid recluse for the past few weeks.
Finished reading: Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano 📚
I really enjoyed this one. It’s definitely not a light-hearted story, but I found myself identifying with the protagonist and his post-traumatic journey. I also found the narrative flow to be engaging. Thanks to Jilly for recommending it to me.
The Algorithm Takes Hold
As we made the journey to our seats in peanut heaven at Acrisure Stadium the other night before the Monday Night Football game, I noticed something interesting out of the corner of my eye. Out beyond the open end of the stadium near the point of confluence, a swarm of drones lit up the night sky.
At first the drones appeared to be making elegant geometric designs. I thought it was cool and I couldn’t remember the Steelers ever making use of drones in their pre-game program. I paused to watch for a moment and then the designs began to morph into words. First Madame Vice President and then Madame President. Next the drones resolved into the Harris Walz logo.
I thought to myself, “What a subversive and smart advertising tactic!” with just enough time to grab my phone and snap a photo. When we got to the seats, there was still about 30 minutes before kickoff so I posted the photo here on my website with the caption: Harris Walz drone game is on point at tonight’s Steelers game! As with all posts on the site, the image and caption were syndicated to Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads. I then put my phone down and enjoyed watching my Pittsburgh Steelers beat those Giants in primetime.
Throughout the evening, I checked Mastodon a couple of times (per usual) to find a few friends had favorited the drone post. I don’t actively use Bluesky or Threads and I don’t have those applications installed on my phone, so the fact that the post went out to those platforms escaped me in the moment.
I usually try to check in on Bluesky and Threads replies once per day, so when I opened Threads on my laptop the next morning, I found the drone post had gone somewhat viral. At the time of this writing the post has 93K views, 12.4K likes, 246 replies and 292 reposts. Numbers of this scale are new to me. I’ve never had more than a dozen likes or replies to a post on any platform. Somehow the algorithm found this particular post, latched onto it and carried it across the Threads ecosystem.
A quick dive into the replies (I don’t recommend it) surfaces some of the worst of humanity. The comments trend toward distasteful, border on offensive and come from a wide-range of perspectives including crypto bots and MAGA trolls. There is even one commenter who claims it didn’t happen and asserts that I photoshopped the Harris Walz logo into the image.
While Meta and Threads talk about embracing the Fediverse and have taken some steps to walk the walk, their use of and reliance on algorithms alongside ActivityPub troubles me. What was it about this particular post that invited the algorithm to take hold? Was there something about the image itself? Or the caption? Or was it simply the network effect and extrapolation?
Whatever the cause, the experience raises some questions for me about my intention for cross-posting from this site. For now, I think I will disable Threads cross-posting because I’m not interested in going viral due to an algorithm boost. I write and publish as a method of capturing moments, and engaging in meaningful dialog with people about the topics that interest me. Threads does not seem like the place for that kind of interaction.
Toward Collective Action
I have school-age kids. Enabling stricter gun laws and eliminating mass shootings from our society is a top issue for me this election, ranked only behind preserving democracy and the U.S. Constitution. Thank you to The Verge for having the guts to publish this piece when other spineless & fear-clouded media companies refuse to take a position on this election:
It should be easy for Vance to imagine a world in which school shootings don’t happen — that is the pre-Heller world he grew up in! — but fixing the problem of school shootings requires admitting that a collective action problem exists. It requires admitting that the current policy solution — sending kids to school with fucking Kevlar in their backpacks — is less effective than restricting gun ownership in any meaningful way. He cannot do that. Trump cannot do that. Trumpism cannot allow that debate to happen.
The op-ed closes with this passage:
It is time to stop denying the essential nature of the problems America faces. It is time to insist that we use the power of our democracy the way it’s intended to be used. And it is far past time to move beyond Donald Trump…A vote for Harris is a vote for the future. It is a vote for solving collective action problems. It is a vote for working together, instead of tearing our world to shreds.
Only one candidate is interested in solving collective action problems. Harris is the candidate. And The Verge is the type of journalism we need to help carry the message forward.
This is awesome for Pittsburgh! Allegheny County has cut the ribbon on a new outdoor bouldering park, offering more than 6,000 square feet of mixed-ability problems and walls up to 15 feet high. I love climbing indoors at Iron City Boulders, but I will definitely be pulling up to this new spot.
Today is the annual Twinkie Roast at REI, where employees all over the country sacrifice golden snack cakes to the gods in exchange for a cold and snowy winter. It’s 80º here in Pittsburgh today, so I’m not lighting my fire pit, but I will toast one over my grill later. Bring on winter!
An Agent from Anthropic
AI startup Anthropic yesterday announced an update to the Claude 3.5 Sonnet large language model that brings a new feature called ‘computer use’ to the forefront of the user experience. Available to developers via the API, users can now direct Claude to use computers like people – surveying open windows and performing operations like moving the mouse cursor, clicking links and buttons, and drafting text.
This is a huge development in the AI space, and one that Anthropic’s rivals in the space are pursuing with great priority. While the tech is nascent, slow and error-prone, the potential is immense. Casey Newton writing for Platformer:
But to use another phrase popular among the AI crowd, the agent that Anthropic released today is as bad as this kind of software will ever be. From this moment on, AI will no longer be limited to what can be typed inside a box. Which means it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking outside that box, too.
I’ve never been a huge proponent or advocate for AI1 , but it’s impossible to deny the impact and influence on our daily lives in the wake of developments like this.
Several months ago, I began using both Claude and ChatGPT to understand how I might use LLMs to improve my professional workflows. Personally, I’ve found Claude to be a better fit for my use cases, which are specific to product management duties such as synthesizing user feedback, analyzing value and impact, and specifying acceptance criteria in technical terms.
With advancements like Anthropic’s ‘computer use’ happening so rapidly in the AI space, it’s daunting to think about what might be coming at us next. One might say the future is already here. I might say we’re perpetually living in it.
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I do not use AI to write or develop the content on this website. ↩︎
The Web Needs Words
Ryan Broderick writing in yesterday’s Garbage Day about the state of the social web as it relates to text-first platforms like Bluesky, Xitter and Threads:
Unless something truly miraculous happens, it is reasonable to assume that every day there will be fewer people reading words on the internet than there were the day before.
I hope this won’t be the case and will do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t. The fundamental building blocks of the web are words and hyperlinks. Both must have a place in perpetuity if the web is to function as it was intended, as we want and need it to.
The web needs words.
Thriving as a Practice
Beck Tench is a designer and researcher who studies the way technology impacts our lives at Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving. Her mission is simple: begin to understand what it means for young people to thrive in this increasingly digital and connected world.
I’ve been a fan of Beck’s work since we initially crossed paths more than a decade ago, when we both focused on building compelling digital experiences for museums. I worked primarily with art museums and she worked primarily with science museums. We both brought a healthy sense of skepticism to the task of infusing cultural experiences with technology, and held a high regard of professional respect for each other’s approach to digital mindfulness. In fact, we collaborated twice (1, 2) and each conversation ranks as a personal highlight during my time in the museum sector.
While we haven’t kept in touch, I’ve been following Beck’s professional journey through her newsletter, Making Thriving Visible. And while everything she writes is interesting to me, I found her most recent update to be extremely profound. In it, Beck uses the analogy of a tiger named Mohini – who was conditioned by zookeepers to exist within an uncaged 12' x 12' space – to explain the way digitally-enabled grind culture was negatively impacting her mindset and happiness.
Through likening her situation to Mohini’s experience, Beck came to the realization that she was not thriving. She made some impactful changes and now considers the definition of thriving in a whole new light:
I am beginning to see thriving, digitally or otherwise, as a practice. It’s not a destination. It isn’t static. We can be thriving and things can change. We can change. If Mohini had ventured out of her 12x12 self-imposed cage… if she had explored the trees and hills and plants and pond, would she have started to notice the exhibit fence? Would she have wondered what was on the other side?
Thriving as a practice. I can get behind that, and I think to some extent I’m subconsciously working on it. The mindful changes I’ve made in my digital and professional footprint are evidence, but after reading Beck’s piece I am going formalize my thriving practice by creating a reflection and future visioning routine.
If you’re interested in digital mindfulness, I highly recommend Beck’s newsletter. You can subscribe via Substack, or via RSS (like I do) to avoid any surveillance capitalism that may be associated with the delivery platform.
Cory Doctorow loves RSS. So do I. His ode to the decades-old syndication protocol is a perspective we need right now as we attempt to avoid the enshitification of the web. And I never thought to use RSS for email newsletters! Super smart!
Garbage Day for Crazy Uncles
Ryan Broderick has some theories in today’s Garbage Day newsletter about why Republican disinformation isn’t completely gumming up the works this time around:
Is it because the media has gotten institutionally smarter about giving these stories oxygen? Is it because industry-wide layoffs have gutted newsrooms across the country and now there’s just fewer reporters to throw at stupid shit editors saw on Twitter/X? Is it because cable news audiences are literally dying off? Is it because Facebook has gotten rid of news content? Who knows, but things have changed in that regard.
It’s a little bit of all of this, I think. The media has gotten smarter about fanning the flames, but I hope we have too. If we haven’t gotten smarter, than maybe we’ve gotten tired of hearing about these disinformation narratives at every online turn. I mean, that’s a primary reason for my not using social media these days. Broderick continues:
The online pathways that the right wing have relied on since 2015 to, not just win elections, but shape America’s national discourse are gone. And it’s almost entirely because pathologically annoying conservatives pushed everyone else out. All of the viral energy around Walz might turn into something that America’s various horrible uncles might ramble about incoherently at the Thanksgiving table in a few weeks — if Harris wins, I guess — but unless a Republican operative Mr. Magoo’s themselves into a real scoop about Walz’s past, none of this is really going to move the needle.
This is right. We are now able to see our collective crazytown uncles and their wild theories as simply weird. And because the theories are not sucking the life out of our social fabric, we have the choice to participate with it. Or not. I choose the latter.
As an aside, Garbage Day is consistently one of the few email newsletters I read from top to bottom. The way Broderick weaves thoughtful and astute sociological observations against a backdrop of social media dumpster fires and the political hellscape we find ourselves in on the reg is a thing of beauty. Highly recommended.
The Kids Are Alright
A few articles about the shopping habits of Gen Z have caught my attention over the past few days. As someone who works in retail technology – leading a team that focuses on sales floor operations – I keep a close eye on consumer trends. These two pieces, published within days of each other in separate outlets, are interesting to me because they reinforce a singular thesis: digital natives enjoy shopping in physical stores.
Modern Retail sets the stage with reference to an ICSC study that highlights the social nature of shopping for young people:
Sixty percent of the ICSC survey’s Gen Z respondents said they visit malls to socialize or meet friends even if they don’t need something specific, 60% also said they would rather spend money on experiences than material items, and 70% said retail centers and stores have done a good job designing things for Gen Z members to enjoy together.
This is interesting. I think the social experience created inside a store flys under the radar of most retailers. This is natural because we’re primarily business-minded and transactional in nature. Creating an environment for social connection on our sales floors not only meets this need for young customers, but it creates opportunity for connection points among all in-store customers. If you can do that well, it’s a big step toward creating community.
To my surprise, a few days after reading the Modern Retail article I stumbled upon a similar piece in The Guardian about how bookshops are suddenly cool1 with Gen Z and Millennials. Some of the same themes are reinforced here, notably how physical space can foster community and a growing aversion to algorithmic recommendations:
“I think it’s kind of a misconception that younger people want to do everything online or only care about how things look on social media,” Grace Gooda, the manager at Morocco Bound in Bermondsey tells me. “In our experience … it creates a relationship where they trust our recommendations and might take home something they wouldn’t have seen advertised elsewhere.”
This deeper connection is what really makes physical bookshops appeal to many younger readers. “Bookshops aren’t just places to buy books, they’re places of community, of gathering and this is something that’s actively fostered by so many bookshops,” Ash, 29, from Yorkshire, says. “Speaking to staff to get book recommendations is often a path into hearing more about the community aspects of bookshops, too – it’s often more than just a book recommendation.”
When I think about how these threads apply to my daily work at REI, I think there is relevance here. We already do a great job of showcasing the knowledge & expertise of our store employees, but we can definitely do more to foster human connection in our stores – inclusive of employee-to-customer and customer-to-customer experiences. My world (store technology) can play an important role in this effort, but it will take a truly collaborative effort across all store teams to create compelling experiences for the next generation of outdoor enthusiasts.
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Bookshops have always been cool in the mind of the Gen X author. ↩︎