Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.

I had forgotten about this great danah boyd talk from SXSW in 2010. I was discussing the idea of ephimerality and its place in the open, social, indie web this morning at an IndieWeb/Mastdon meetup at XOXO Fest when Kevin Marks brought up danah’s work.

Social networks have broken many technologies that built into our socio-cultural fabric and we have broadly failed to account for this. For example, the four properties danah cites in her dissertation: persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability. None of these properties exist if you meet someone for a conversation at a coffee shop. None of these properties exist if you meet someone at a party. None of these properties exist if you meet someone at a community meeting. Each of those settings is open and public, and yet the interactions that exist there are broady ephimeral. True, each of these interactions may generate more permanent artifacts (a personal journal, a text conversation with a friend, a newspaper article about an event), but no one expects a simple search in 10 years can pull up the exact comment an individual made during these interactions.

The term “publish” is used a lot in web technology because it represents what happens when we share on the web. We publish content. Most of the content published on the web today, however, is not meant to be published. Most people feel like they are just talking. Our collective interpretation of the context of the social web for a long time was wrong. Two trends— opting out all together and increasingly performative use of social media— are both conscious, sensible responses to realizing how the web really operates today.

The early internet was better at community. It was harder to search across any and all communities, which led to poor discoverability. Human moderation breaks down once communities exceed a certain size and pace, leading to burn out and the destruction of vibrant communitiites. And the lack of persistence, which was theoretically possible but practically a crap shoot¹, helped to create safety. If you found your pocket of subculture of the internet, you could learn the rules and become a part of comprehensible community. It was discoverable enough to bring people together who felt alone and rarely found common interest in real life, but hidden enough (and boring enough) to feel more like meeting together to talk at the local library or coffee shop. We meet in public, but we operate under shared rules and assumptions as a community. We may have URLs and data on a server, but that data is precious to us and not about a record of our relationships for the universe.

That the web was more inclusive and discoverable than “real life” is the feature we have turned into a bug with powerful search and centralized platforms that create no barrier to community entry.

What I remember from my earliest writing on the internet, whether in chat rooms or on LiveJournal, was how powerful it was to be vulnerable with a community. And while the early days of publishing on the web coincided with the heightened emotions of being a young teenager, I still find it difficult to replicate the vulnerability, safety, and catharsis of the early web. As a closeted introvert, I always found it hard to find supportive community in person, but I used to thrive at finding that online.

I love the world of blogs. I love reading personal writing and opinions. I love choosing whose writing, photos, and videos I get to see. I love having flexibility of how and when I read those things using tools like RSS. I love the idea of having a canonical space in my control tied to my identity for what I do online. But as I pull away from the current social web in favor of these features of the old web, there are so many features I miss. I miss the safety of a conversational, but obscure community. I miss the easy, bidirectional discoverability of people who share my interests. And I miss the incidental discovery of amazing stuf that centralized social media excels at.

The popularity of community Slacks/Discords, the increasing push toward closed Facebook groups, the popularity of Snapchat and Instagram Stories, I think, demonstrates a struggle to find some of these old features of the web. But I fear the incentives are just not aligned right on this issue— big tech does better pushing toward those new features of digital spaces, and it will be complicated, hardwork to build technology platforms that both allow for some of the common features of in-person social interactions and succeed at having mass appeal.

Maybe I’ll just have to learn how to make friends the old fashion way. Does anyone still do that?

A little jazzy/post-rock situation, via r/postrock.

When you say, “Ooof, alright” three times in 5 mins it’s probably time to step away from the keyboard.

Also, new key cap day.

There was a stat that we have half as many households with children today as in the 1970s. That seemed over stated to me, so I searched for where the statistic came from. According to Reuters, we have indeed seen the number of households with two married adults and children decrease in half from 40% of all households to 20% of households. However, there has been an increase in single parent families and the population of children in the US has increased over 15% sinced 1970.

The shift to smaller households (2.6 members v. 3.1), both from having more single person household and fewer married couples with children, who themselves have fewer children, are part of what’s driving the end of the suburbs. But I hope the suburbs are also dying because they represent a totally unsustainable cost structure.

And maybe, just maybe, information technology clobbered so many of our informal, personal relationships that we can’t stand the idea of also isolating ourselves in single family homes and lose the informal interactions that living in an urban city provides.

Fiction writers often create story bibles to keep track of characters, their back story, and world building history and information. It might include timelines, both for the events of the story and events in characters’ pasts that influence the story. This helps to ensure a consistent story world.

After the failure of the movies that shall not be named, I hoped we’d see an end to the concept of prequels, but lately it seems like there’s an explosion of prequels.

So what’s the problem with prequels? Why do they always disappoint?

A good author starts their story at the most interesting point. Good fiction is rarely a biography of its characters, starting at the beginning and covering the most mundane details of their lives. Stories always start in the middle, and they start in the best middle, just as the most interesting events unfold that lead to change. ¹ If the good part of the story occurred sometime and somewhere else, that’s the book that would have been written.

The problem is that story bibles are incredible, rich texts. An author who falls in love with their own story falls in love with the world it occurs in and the people who inhabit it. It can become easy for both writers and fans to forget that the story bible exists in service of another, better story rather than being the story itself.

The audience is left wanting more, the writer has so much more written out already that they are in love with, and the result is the most tedious form of commercial art, the prequel. Mystery and magic are flattened to mundane events, motivations are explained rather than discovered and experienced, and unnoticed plot holes and inconsistencies in the original work are clumsily “corrected”. ²

Prequels are what happen when we forget that writers are at their most powerful when they choose what story to tell.

Vertigo Comics is no longer. Long the “adult” imprint of DC, Vertigo was a great place for lovers of comics and graphic novels that took on deep issues with often dark or horror content.

I’m not the best person to write about what Vertigo meant, but I thought I’d share three things Vertigo printed that I have loved.

The Sandman

Of course I love Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. Linked is volume one of The Absolute Sandman, which I think is the best way to read this comic. You can’t be a fan of dark fantasy and not devour this complex mythology. You can’t be a fan of comic book art and not drown in every page. Follow the tales of the Seven Endless: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. ¹

American Vampire

A violent traipse through iconic American settings, American Vampire shows two creators, Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque at their best. ²

Y: The Last Man

Brian K. Vaughan is one of my favorite authors, and these days may be as well known from Saga as Y: The Last Man. What if there was a virus unleashed into the world that killed all males, including animals, except one man and his male monkey companion? Y: The Last Man is a great post-apocalyptic tale and a perennial recommendation from comic readers to someone who as never clicked with the genre.

Spain achieves low infrastructure construction costs in part by setting its regulations as well as internal oversight and procurement to maximize the speed of decisions.

Writes Alon Levy, revealing a fascinating way to reduce public sector project costs in his piece on The Private Sector’s Role in Transit Innovation.

Done is better than good.

A maxim he shares that I never heard before reminds me of Simple, correct, fast: in that order, something I definitely agree with when it comes to software development. This is also a lot easier for transit and infrastructure if you follow another slogan I learned from Alon, Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beto.

And of course, as a former public sector worker, everything Alon says about hiring in his piece is painfully familiar.

General indifference within HR to applicants. A Boston resident was offered a job at the MTA that required residence within New York City; as the potential hire had a partner who worked in Albany, they proposed that they should live in Poughkeepsie and the MTA hire would commute by Metro-North. HR required them to file forms stating their exact address in Poughkeepsie, never mind that they still needed to find an apartment in the area and had no reason to do so without a written job offer. The applicant was unhired and the position remained unfilled for years.

Although, I disagree with Alon’s seeming suggestion that transit agencies are best led by PhD engineers and whiteboard exercises are good hiring practices.

There has been renewed discussion recently over the role YouTube is playing shaping the ideas and views of Americans, ending in this embarassing performance by Susan Wojcicki at The Code Conference.

Although plenty of energy has been directed toward The Algorithim, a current catchall for all things scary in tech, I am delighted that our criticism of technology is finally getter a little deeper. I think we’ve turned the corner away from fighting about whether systems engineered by humans make biased decisions (of course they do), and we’ve moved on to a more insitutionalist argument against the way Big Tech, and more importantly, our government, responds.

The problem with hate speech, bullying, radicalization, and extremism on large, centralized platforms that rely on human generated content is not that we try to build tools that can manage the unrelenting firehose of data. The problem is that we refuse to regulate and enforce principals-based policies on speech. I owe this thought to Emily Bazelon who astutely pointed out, in an almost throwaway comment, that we have no problem regulating industry in all kinds of ways, except tech, except when it comes to copyright protections.

And here lies the failure of neoliberalism— we have totally failed to find ways to recognize non-economic harms of speech. With copyright, our laisse faire attitude toward regulation is gutted quickly and effectively, because of course we have to protect the economic interests of artists ¹. But when it comes to the social, cultural, and political interests, we are suddenly powerless. We are beholden only to rigid rules-based systems and our capacity to require and engaged in human judgment is stripped from us.

We can’t block bigots, hate, or harrassment because we cannot possibly identify them and they have no harm in a massive sea of endless content. We’re all supposed to believe that.

I’m glad it seems we don’t any longer. I hope we take action.

I am finally reviewing some of the pictures from our recent vacation to Spain that were shot on our Sony NER 5X instead of my iPhone XS.

A few observations on photography.

• The Sony photos still look better, mostly because they seem to do a far better job with dynamic range and noise.
• I take worse photos with the Sony camera, I think because the screen for previews is less good and difficult to see in bright lights. Additionally, the larger body means that I feel more awkward doing the work of physically moving to better frame my photos.
• It’s so freeing to take lots of pictures and delete many.
• It’s amazing what a small amount of cropping, color and light adjustments, and retouching can do for a photo. Spending 60-90s per photo makes a world of difference, and I don’t know what I’m doing at all.
• I really enjoy having true optical zoom, even with the kit lens. I think I’m going to end up either buying more lenses for the Sony or picking up a new camera soon to step up my game.

Here’s two pictures… can you tell which is which, even after processing and being resized?

The Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.

This lamb was incredible.

‪I think it’s a lot harder to serendipitously find and make connections to strangers online based on your interests and personality‬. Today’s social media is mostl;y optimizing for entertainment. But not all of us are entertainers and the best connections are reciprocal.

Yes, I’m feeling sad about Google Reader again. But also a little bit LiveJournal and internet forums and other things lost.

We may be retreating into The Dark Forest, but I miss the pseudonymous internet filled with small hidden corners and communities.

Not everyone who joined a bowling league (when people did such things) loved bowling. Many loved being with other people first and bowling came second or not at all. Being together is what mattered. The venue did not.

I miss feeling like the whole internet was a bowling ally, and it didn’t matter how much we sucked at bowling. We were just having fun together. And if that means ceding ground to a mainstream that I no longer influence, well, I already feel powerless and out of touch with that mainstream anyway. Isn’t that why those of us who remember the internet before the social giants flocked here anyway?

Earlier this year I said that my two of my most vulnerable subscriptions were Digital Ocean and Micro.blog. My reasoning was that I could just run my Hugo site using the free tier of Netlify.

Since then, Micro.blog has switched to being powered by Hugo. Today I re-did my Micro.blog to match my Hugo site, and even got all the posts on json.blog posted here.

There’s a bit less flexibility, for now, using Hugo on Micro.blog, but there’s a huge added benefit– I now have a site that works with the Micropub API. I can post from mobile using the Micro.blog app and others and use MarsEdit on my Mac instead of writing in a text editor, pushing to Git, ssh-ing into a server, pulling from git, and then building my Hugo site. Now, of course with the Netlify solution I would just have to do the first push to Github, but still, I have way easier ways to write blog posts now.

I haven’t fully decided if I’m going to shutdown micro.json.blog and just have my Micro.blog be json.blog going forward, but it’s looking fairly likely that’s where I am headed.

The AirBnB Invasion of Barcelona

AirBnB removes a lot of friction in the market. In the past, as a destination became more popular, the growth in tourism was mediated by the pace of approval and construction of new hotel rooms. Now we can activate existing housing stock when demand for tourism increases to keep prices low and space available.

I’m not convinced this is all bad. Cheaper travel is great because more people will do it. Traveling to new places and being exposed to different cultures, people, and geography are both key to building empathy and connectedness. Plus local economies benefit from the influx of money.

On the other hand, inexpensive and increased travel, along with the ease of communication facilitated by the internet, has really caused an urban sameness to settle across the globe. It is definitely true that places are losing their distinctiveness as we descend into a global elite monoculture.

And a final thought about the so-called AirBnB “problem”— every city is different. A small city that has little excess housing capacity and massive tourism has different dynamics compared to a city with declining populations and huge excesses in housing capacity.