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Chat, Slack, and the panoptic telecommute

October 13, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

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My first chat-enabled workplace was the Salon newsroom circa 2000 AD, when we were expanding like crazy and covering the chaos of the Florida Bush v. Gore election recount. Our dotcom-bubble-inflated staff, spread between SF and NY and DC, needed to stay in touch by the hour, sometimes by the minute. AIM was our channel. Though I might not have wanted to rely on AOL for any kind of secure communications, it was free and worked fine. And of course it had emoticons.

AIM’s day came and went, but the utility of connecting remote work locations with chat has become an essential service — knitting desktop and mobile device, home and office, day and night into one seamless Now of work. Skype has been a popular choice for many small and medium-sized organizations, but its owners at Microsoft neglected it over the years, and its notifications and cross-device tracking of “new since last read” grew more erratic. Recently, the startup Slack has taken off and filled this niche for a growing number of workplaces. Spiffily designed, customizable, interoperable, searchable, and efficient, it’s like chat on speed and with its own brain.

Chat is great! You get to share office camaraderie, raillery, and bad puns even when you work remotely. But it raises a whole new slew of challenges in our lives. Deployed humanely and sensibly, it can provide workers with more freedom and flexibility and employers with better results and lower costs. But too often companies and organizations adopt it as a technology of control.

On the more benign end of the spectrum, the chat system becomes a theater of availability where employees perform their presence and enthusiasm to impress or placate their managers. At the worse end, the whole thing can very quickly turn into a nightmare of surveillance and time-tracking overkill — digital Taylorism.
I recently talked with an old friend and former colleague who felt stalked by a startup-CEO boss who was using Slack to check up on employees and make sure they were available 24/7 to meet the company’s needs. Given the promise in Slack’s name of providing your worklife with a tension-reducing buffer, this was ironic. Of course, it’s also an issue with startup culture that transcends the use of particular tools. A boss who is determined to rub out the boundary between work and personal time is going to grab anything handy to make that happen. But tools like Slack can certainly streamline the process.

I think a lot of us love the flexibility and fun that chat systems provide and wouldn’t want to give it up. But we also need some way to keep work from invading every minute of every day. The simplest and most effective way for this to happen is for enlightened managers to make clear to teams exactly what sort of responsiveness and attentiveness they expect from employees using chat — so that the employees aren’t in the lousy position of trying to guess what the norm is, or outdo one another.

When I started my career at a newspaper, there were very clear understandings between management and the Newspaper Guild as to who owned which hours of my day. Every week I filled out a timecard — yes, an actual piece of cardstock — reporting my hours, and every week I basically made it up. There was no way I ever worked a normal 8-hour day. As a theater critic seeing shows, writing at night, and doing background research and reading during the day, I wasn’t in a position to draw clear lines between work and pleasure. It was all OK for me; I didn’t mind because I loved it all.

In that era, the expectations were clearly laid out but meaningless. Today, a lot of “knowledge workers” find themselves in a much tougher position: no clear expectations from their leadership and torn between a desire to do a great job and the need to preserve some time for family, personal life, all the Stuff that Isn’t Work.

We need to get much better at this — to find ways to make great tools like Slack increase, not diminish, the sum total of workplace sanity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slfFJXVAepE

Filed Under: Features, Project

Remove blindfold before embarking for utopia

September 26, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

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Crowds of tech-culture insiders, disaffected from the dominant social-networking platform and seeking a better alternative, flock to a brash newcomer’s URL and avidly post about its promise. Invites are scarce, but that only burnishes the new service’s appeal.

The year was 2004, and the name of the new service was Orkut. If you weren’t there, you might not recall that the big social network of the day was Friendster. The Google-backed experimental Orkut looked smarter, hipper, and more reliable — even though, in those pre-Twitter, pre-newsfeed days, it was wholly unclear what one would actually do there. That’s why Orkut quickly became a ghost town, filled with empty pages emblazoned with the names of tech luminaries who’d stopped visiting.

Today, the name of the new network is different, but the dynamic is awfully similar. You couldn’t click far this week without bumping into someone else who’d just discovered Ello — the new anti-Facebook — and wanted to tell you about it. Ello has a calculatedly casual aesthetic and a low-tech vibe, but the main thing about it that people like is the manifesto with which it boldly defines itself as “simple, beautiful, and ad-free.”

How did Ello take off? Here’s the sequence of events, as best I can piece it together: The site has been public at least since early July, which is when all of its “About us” posts are dated. Recently it was discovered and embraced by Facebook refugees in the LGBT community who have run afoul of Facebook’s “real name” policy.

A Monday post by Taylor Hatmaker at the Daily Dot told this story and put Ello’s name into wider circulation, from which it was picked up by a handful of tech insiders and connectors and spread very quickly through the early-adopter central nervous system (shared enthusiastically and ironically on Facebook itself). By Thursday it was in the Washington Post.

As tech-savvy writers raced to nominate, if not crown, Ello as the hot new Facebook-replacement, they ignored or downplayed their own misgivings and experience of recent history. They knew there was something problematic about putting their hope and faith in an enterprise whose structure was not especially transparent, whose code was not open-sourced, whose data was not exportable, and whose business model was opaque.

How could Ello promise never to show ads? If it had investors, weren’t they going to expect a return?

“Ello has not, to my knowledge, made this infernal bargain [i.e., taken venture-capital investment] yet, and that is an unwavering requirement for them to fulfill their stated anti-pattern,” wrote the estimable Quinn Norton. Meanwhile, Andy Baio did a little digging, and, writing in a public post on Ello itself, pointed out that the service had in fact taken nearly half a million dollars in VC investment at the start of the year.

No worries, move right along, posted someone from Ello in a comment: “Ello is privately funded, and a very large majority of Ello is owned by its 7 founders. We control the company. There’s no pressure for us to do anything we don’t want to do.”

I am certain this statement was made sincerely — as certain as I am that it is profoundly naive and fails to reckon with the voluminous sagas of countless startups that have sailed these seas before. Plenty of observers noted the parallels between Ello and the Diaspora story. If you’ve actually been there before, it’s not deja vu at all — it’s history.

So why do the otherwise savvy keep throwing themselves at new savior networks? Chiefly, I think, because there is such deep disaffection with the social-media status quo, such aching hunger for change, and so little sense of direction in how to achieve it.

This is what I meant by “The hive mind migrates.” And there sure is an awful lot of buzzing right now. But before we settle on a new site for the hive, let’s make sure it meets some basic thresholds of openness, transparency, and accountability.

Venture capital isn’t inherently evil (although its financial structure often pits the interests of founders and users against each other). The best alternative to Facebook might well turn out not to be a technical standard or a nonprofit organization but simply another private company. But such a company will have to earn our trust, not assume it. Who knows? The best alternative to Facebook could even be Ello — just not yet, not by a very long shot.

Oh, and meanwhile, Google is set to shut Orkut down on Sept. 30.


More Ello links:

  • Betabeat, which wrote about Ello back in March, talked to founder Paul Budnitz and elucidated the site’s porn-friendly stance. (Jack Smith IV, on Betabeat)
  • Seems “brands” have already found their way onto Ello, including a page for the site founder’s bicycle business. (Ben Breier, on Medium)
  • Gawker’s take: “Ello was different enough to remind me how very different things could be. I posted sentimental and uncool updates that otherwise would have gone unspoken, I wasn’t connected to anyone on my Twitter lists. It felt more like Tumblr than Facebook: intimate, when very few eyes were on you and you’re encouraged to befriend random strangers.” (Nitasha Tiku, on Gawker)
  • Aral Balkan: “I’m sorry, Paul, but by taking venture capital you have made a crucial mistake that is incompatible with the goals you set out in your manifesto and I will not support yet another venture-capital funded network only to be disappointed at the time of the inevitable exit.”

Filed Under: Features, Project

Links: “Why wouldn’t you make your own social network?”

September 22, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

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This week, for you, a roundup of observations about identity.

This is Phil Fish (Jason Kottke):

Robin Sloan connected Persson’s post with a post by Erin Kissane on how she has curtailed her use of Twitter. Here’s one of her problems with Twitter:

“The first is feeling like I’m sitting at a sidewalk cafe, speaking in a conversational voice, but having that voice projected so loudly that strangers many streets away are invited to comment on my most inconsequential statements — especially if something I say gets retweeted beyond my usual circles.”

Many moons ago, I was “subculturally important” in the small pond of web designers, personal publishers, and bloggers that rose from the ashes of the dot com bust, and I was nodding along vigorously with what Danskin, Persson, and Kissane had to say. Luckily for me, I realized fairly early on that me and the Jason Kottke who published online were actually two separate people…or to use Danskin’s formulation, they were a person and a concept. (When you try to explain this to people, BTW, they think you’re a fucking narcissistic crazy person for talking about yourself in the third person. But you’re not actually talking about yourself…you’re talking about a concept the audience has created. Those who think of you as a concept particularly hate this sort of behavior.)

The person-as-concept idea is a powerful one. People ascribe all sorts of crazy stuff to you without knowing anything about the context of your actual life. I even lost real-life friends because my online actions as a person were viewed through a conceptual lens; basically: “you shouldn’t have acted in that way because of what it means for the community” or some crap like that. Eventually (and mostly unconsciously), I distanced myself from my conceptual counterpart and became much less of a presence online.

New Pornographers’ Carl Newman: “I just want to work. I don’t think of myself as some artist” (David Daley, Salon):

I think because I’m such a music fan, I just love the idea of the myth of rock. There’s something not false — but sort of. You know, no rock star is truly themselves. It’s all a myth. From Bob Dylan to Jack White. It might become real, but I’ve always been fascinated with that and I know Dan Bejar has always dabbled in that from the get-go. I think I probably followed his lead from the beginning. I think I loved that he did that and I felt “Yeah, I’m gonna do that too. I should dabble in a lot of rock iconography.

That’s not a celebrity you’re following on Twitter, it’s an assistant (Chris Plante, The Verge):

We’re at this uncomfortable moment in which social media companies masquerade as living, breathing humans. People are companies. Companies are people. And both combine in the most boring Twitter accounts on the internet.

Memes, Selfies, Money: Why the Ice Challenge Worked (Kate Losse):

If the Ice Bucket Challenge had not been invented as a fundraising drive, it would make an excellent social media site engagement driver, because it solves the problem of getting people to post and share personal, visual content. It does so first by providing an excuse to make a video selfie– because in the age of ubiquitous cameras, the biggest hurdle to content production is self-consciousness, which can be overcome by being commanded by friends or philanthropy. Second, the ice bucket meme’s format includes a prompt to friends to create their own video selfies (this is the human equivalent of when Facebook apps used to ask you to invite people to the app before you had used it). The Ice Bucket Challenge is thus a perfect viral storm that, while generating millions of page clicks and new content for Facebook and other sites, happens happily to also generate awareness and donations for a good cause.

Interview with Evan Prodromou, lead developer of pump.io | Opensource.com:

Some people I talk to get all confused when I say you can make your own social network. “Who would want to make their own social network?” And I say, “You smoke your own ham. You built a 14-foot-high velocipede for Burning Man. Why wouldn’t you make your own social network?”

The Humbling of Social Media (Josh Marshall, TPM):

One of the oddest and I think healthiest (but also most frustrating things) things about social media is bumping into strangers with whom little communication seems possible.

I traffic mainly in the world of politics and culture. And there’s little surprising about the kind of intense political disagreement that makes it hard to have any real sort of communication. Other times it’s simple ignorance or even lack of intelligence. You find yourself in a seeming disagreement. But it’s actually not quite a disagreement because the other person doesn’t understand what you’re saying. And the thin straw of social media contact is simply too narrow to overcome the gap.

Other times – and these are maybe the most frustrating but also most important – the person’s no dummy. They’re not uneducated or ignorant in a general sense. But the points of reference, experience, the simple ‘what they’re trying to talk about’ and vice versa, is so different that real communication is very difficult or not really possible. And in any case, ‘Why am I even trying since I just randomly bumped into you in this thread?’ So why bother? What’s the point? It’s frustrating but also humbling in an important way because it brings you face to face with how parochial, limited your own experiences and points of reference are.

Maybe limited and parochial or refined and esoteric. But at the end of the day, these are other people with whom basic exchange, basic communication, is difficult. It’s exacerbated by the faceless and abrupt nature of social media communication. But it’s humbling and a good way to be humbled.

There’s Something Rotten In The State Of Social Media | TechCrunch:

Finally, within the odorous passageways of our modern social media citadels, we stumble upon another theme: enforcement.

Slowly but surely the freedoms that initially drew us into these glittering social spaces are being withdrawn, as barred gates drop into place — limiting our usage options, and controlling and constraining the social content we see.

The walled gardens shrink, getting narrower in outlook as the logic of their underlying content-filtering algorithms becomes evident.

Filed Under: Links, annotated, Project

XOXO and the fierce urgency of nice

September 17, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

“Don’t fly your drones over the goat field!”

Not your everyday conference-behavior tip, but Portland’s XOXO Festival is anything but everyday.

The green monster [photo by Scott Beale]

The green monster [photo by Scott Beale]

The festival concatenates bold tech dreams and warm organic substance into a rare alchemy, like a green flash of Now. The 2014 edition took place in a cavernous, dilapidated former iron foundry. Days before the event, its exterior was covered with bright geometric splashes of red, yellow, orange, and black. Inside, a giant hulk of a hydraulic press loomed over us — a ghost-machine of makers past.

With their exhortation, the event’s two impresarios, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, were telling us to take care that our high-tech exuberance didn’t cause any unnecessary harm to furry animals. But drones? Goats?

Last year, the festival had hosted a talk by Chris Anderson about how drones could transform agriculture by giving farmers real-time info about the state of their fields. Later he led live drone demos over the gigantic empty lot next door to the event space. Only it turned out that the lot wasn’t empty; an urban-farming showcase, it was home to a small goat herd.

Belmont Goats [photo by John Biehler]

Belmont Goats [photo by John Biehler]

Now, these goats are not Luddites — they’re on Twitter, after all. But the flying bots freaked them out. As the kissy-huggy festival name implies and its three-year tradition has embodied, XOXO is all about kindness and consideration. So this year, yes, drones were on hand for the festival once more, and some of them got some awesome aerial shots of the venue’s crazy paint job. But instead of a Great War between buzzing quadcopters and bleating quadrupeds, we had caprine-drone detente.

And it was nice! Little goats, led on leashes like pups, visited the edge of the festival’s food-truck lot, eying a dazzling array of artisanal lunch options — wood-fired pizza, gourmet PBJ, a Korean BBQ named Kim Jong Grillin’. Attendees, in turn, made the two-block trek to the goat field to pet and gawk.

The sorts of conflicts that XOXO’s impassioned speakers addressed — thorny, achy collisions of ambition and reality, creativity and commerce — are rarely so simply resolved. That this gathering dedicated to independent makers of tech and art acknowledges such conflicts at all — that here they are explored and deplored, celebrated and satirized — sets XOXO apart from the raft of tech-biz conclaves that sell you ways to monetize your dreams. People keep flocking back to the thing because it’s like a food truck for the creative soul: It comes around infrequently; it sells out all the time; and the lines can be daunting. But man, you’ll remember that meal.

Each year the XOXO Festival is well-documented by attendees (check out Kevin Marks’ excellent tweet-notes from both days of talks this year), and you could do a lot worse than hunker down with the official videos from the event once they’re posted. I can’t recall another gathering where I got something out of every single speaker’s presentation — 20-25 minute talks, no panels, no Q&A, just the distilled thoughts of smart people who’ve brought their best because they know they’re talking to their peers.

At the first XOXO two years ago, Kickstarter (which Baio helped build) was new, the world was dusting itself off from a dreadful recession, and the message was: Do what you love and the Internet will provide. It was stirring, and a lot of people said that it changed their lives.

This time, the mood was more sober, and the theme, as Baio articulated it, was less “You can do it!” than “You are not alone.” Over the summer, a young developer/artist and festival regular named Chloe Weil had killed herself. (Baio and MacMillan dedicated the event to her.) Speaker after speaker described wrestling with depression, or bankruptcy, or loneliness and doubt.

Sure, creative highs have always come with real-world lows. Lifehacker and Thinkup founder Gina Trapani offered solace to the struggling: “Someday, somehow your worst moments are going to feed your best work.” But of course success is never guaranteed — and even when you find it, don’t relax too fast.

Hank Green, the geekier half of the VlogBrothers, declared, “Moments of extreme success are depression triggers for me. Three days later I can’t get out of bed. WHAT THE FUCK?” The audience gave a round of “us, too” cheers.

Here are some themes I found coalescing in the XOXO ferment.

Personal obsessions power sustained work

When Kevin Kelly’s kids went off to college he sent them each off with a crate of tools, but he could only fit so much in the box and he wanted to give them more, so he made the Cool Tools book, a kind of latter-day Whole Earth Catalog that he self-published. “I only needed three copies,” he said, but he sold 42,000. “The rest was just gravy.”

Trapani told how she came to found Lifehacker, a site that’s all about “clever tricks to save you time, efficiency and productivity.” She’d experienced 9/11 from a Lower Manhattan office and become obsessed with the feeling that “time was running out” and she was wasting it. An original motto for the site — unused — was: “Because someday you’re going to die.”

Daring Fireball founder John Gruber started covering Apple in 2002, when the company was still an ailing underdog, not because he anticipated it would become today’s product-perfecting, profit-spouting juggernaut, but because he was obsessed with the company and needed to write about it. It wasn’t a bet; it was an infatuation.

Writer/developer Paul Ford is building a tool for collecting, annotating and crossreferencing texts called Unscroll.com. Why? Well, he’s worked on projects like this for a long time — including a visionary rethinking of the Harper’s Magazine website a decade ago that turned the archive into a time machine. But today, he says, he’s driven, at least in part, by a wish to preserve the work of his friend Leslie Harpold, a pioneering blogger who died in 2006.

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio with a message

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio with a message

Failure and success aren’t opposites — they’re more like phases

Rachel Binx makes cool stuff — including jewelry shaped by personal location graphs and greeting cards embodying animated GIFs via lenticular printing. But her attempt to launch a conference failed and her income has been spotty. The message of her bracingly honest talk: Don’t assume that having and executing great ideas leaves you immune from cash-flow woes. Still, there’s at least one bright spot: “Now,” she said, “I can write a Medium post about failure!”

Justin Hall, who started sharing his life online when the Web was young, promised to reveal all the secret moves he used to bring his site traffic from 27,000 daily visitors in 1995 to, um, 270 today. The years have tempered, but not dissolved, his youthful belief that “strangers + honesty = empathy.”

Joseph Fink, a creator of the overnight-sensation podcast Welcome to Night Vale, described how success changed the circumstances of his work. On the one hand: He could leave behind a day-job trying to sign people up for a wind-energy service. On the other hand: “Success turned my friends into my coworkers,” he said. “The relationship I had with them before is gone.” Also: “There are now thousands and thousands of people who care about what we do, and that’s genuinely terrifying.”

No one captured this notion of success and failure as two sides of one coin more cleverly than Darius Kazemi — whose domain name and twitter handle, “tiny subversions,” characterizes the kind of work he does. “HOW I WON THE LOTTERY,” his XOXO talk, is a perfect little satire of go-for-it tech-business talks that concludes with three bullet points:

  • I didn’t know what I was doing
  • I kept buying lottery tickets
  • I built a community

A summary won’t do Kazemi justice; watch the video when it’s posted.

Kevin Kelly urged us to think about more diverse definitions of success than the venture-capital-driven, scale-up-fast Internet startup economy offers. Internet startups are like pigeons, he said — the system produces them in abundance so that a few can survive. But we also want, and need, birds of paradise. Similarly, products with broad but shallow appeal prosper in the present: the hit song, the big movie, the bestseller. But a hundred years later, all these hits are gone. Stuff that gets loved passionately by a smaller following is different: It’s more likely to last.

Persistence is its own reward

Jonathan Mann, the song-a-day guy, has produced more than 2000 songs on YouTube over the last half-decade. He says that maybe 10 percent of them are good, 20 percent bad, the rest “okay.” The “good” shows up unpredictably: “A lot of the days that my favorite songs come out, it feels like I have nothing, and then it appears.”

Sometimes creativity is the result of such spontaneity — as with the punky dashed-off process that Thermals singer Hutch Harris used to write and record the raw “No Culture Icons,” which he described at XOXO to Song Exploder‘s Hrishikesh Hirway. Other times, creativity can take forever. The stop-motion video artist known as PES said he’ll spend weeks painstakingly rearranging everyday objects, frame by frame, to produce a single one- to two-minute video — like “Game Over,” a sort of meatspace cover version of classic videogames using, for instance, a little round pizza as Pac-Man and bugs as Space Invaders.

That’s crazy! Still, if that’s what you love doing, why not? Green says that as he and his brother got their YouTube show up and running, he discovered that, for all his ambition and devotion to teaching people about science, editing video is what really rings his bell. If you’re doing something you love, then the work isn’t a slog toward some distant goal; it is its own reward.

Which is why XOXO was full of people saying that they weren’t looking for exits — they just wanted to keep doing what they were doing forever. The Unscroll.com project, Ford said, is what he wants to be working on for the next 20 years. Gruber declared: “I’m going to write Daring Fireball until I fucking die.”

[Duncan Rawlinson]

Erin McKean [Photo by Duncan Rawlinson]

Independence is a myth

The XOXO crowd cherishes independence in the way that creative types do. Who wants to have funders/suits/studio execs/producers telling you what to make or how to make it?

Erin McKean, the lexicographer turned entrepreneur behind Wordnik, reminded us that no one can create alone, in a vacuum. “Unless you’re independently wealthy and incredibly reclusive, every maker is dependent on somebody.” She’s right. More accurately, “independence” here means having the autonomy to choose exactly who or what you’re going to depend on to get your work done. Will you be in the thrall of investors? Fans? Collaborators? Partners? A day job at a big company?

Understood this way, crowdfunding is less a lucky ticket out of bondage than another option with its own tradeoffs. Which means that it’s not the solution to every problem. That may be one reason that venture capital has become somewhat less of a dirty word in these precincts. Even as Jen Bekman told a familiar but sadly common tale of the Death by VC that befell her art-for-the-people site 20×200 (she has since resurrected it), and Justin Hall recounted the flameout of his Gamelayers startup, other speakers described a saner, scaled-down approach to VC underwriting that might make sense for the indie world.

Trapani’s ThinkUp, which helps users analyze their activity on social networks, is one; Ethan Diamond’s Bandcamp, which helps musicians connect directly with their fans and is now funneling $3 million a month into their pockets, is another. (Diamond said the amount of investment Bandcamp accepted was the kind of money you’d find “stuck between the seat covers of the VC’s Tesla.” The company set up office at a local public library for its first four years.)

Probably the most moving revelation of interdependence came from Golan Levin and Pablo Garcia, the founders of NeoLucida, a crowdfunded project to mass-produce a modern camera lucida device — a “prism on a stick” that projects images onto flat surfaces so you can draw them. Artist-provocateurs who used their Kickstarter email updates to deliver art-history lectures, Levin and Garcia wanted to fathom the nature of the Chinese factory that produced their devices, so they paid a visit, met the workers, and talked to them about their stories.

“What we learned in China is that all of our stuff is hand-made, even if it looks like it isn’t,” Garcia said. “There are handprints on everything.”

Anita Sarkeesian [photo by Duncan Rawlinson]

Anita Sarkeesian [photo by Duncan Rawlinson]

“You can weaponize nice”

One of the foundational principles of the XOXO worldview is that you don’t have to be an asshole to be an artist; great things can be created by nice people. McKean, who introduced herself as “the female founder of a Silicon Valley VC-backed startup that has nothing to do with fashion,” talked about being told she was “too nice,” experimenting with “bitch-face” but deciding that it just wasn’t her. “I reached back into my ancestral knowledge and realized: you can weaponize nice” — meaning, you can have the ability to “tell someone to go to hell and they’ll enjoy the trip.”

XOXO runneth over with nice. And nice can certainly make for an enjoyable, edifying weekend. If you want to change the world, however, nice is probably not enough. But “weaponized” nice — niceness organized and creative energy directed toward action? Maybe there’s your Archimedes’ lever.

You could glimpse what that might look like in the talk by Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist videogame critic whose incisive work has attracted a swarm of harassers and abuse. At XOXO Sarkeesian pointed her analytical scalpel at the dishonest methodology of her critics — no, critics isn’t the right word for them, because there seems to be no actual criticism in their response, just anger, misogyny, and lies. Sarkeesian has every right to be angry back at them, but she keeps her cool and lets the abusive comments and impersonations speak for themselves. I wouldn’t call her “nice” — more like professional and brave and determined to do her work. But this feels close to what McKean was talking about.

I suppose it was inevitable that Sarkeesian-haters and “men’s-rights” types would turn up on Twitter at the #xoxofest hashtag, claiming to be present at the conference and misquoting her talk. One guy even showed up in person, handing out leaflets and attempting to engage with festivalgoers at the goat field. Cruelty to goats!

No amount of nice is going to make a difference in this sort of conflict. You are unlikely to win a reasonable argument with a fanatic, and you probably won’t even be able to have one.

But the handful of trolls on Reddit or 4chan, seething in their ressentiment, are a nasty sideshow to a far more important process unfolding — the one where we come to accept that the intersection of art and tech is a culturally important place. A place worth defending from idiots. A place where we ought to listen when smart people tell us who’s being left out and what voices need to be heard. A place that we can renovate and change once we understand what needs to be done.

You don’t need a drone to see that. Then again, a drone might get you a better picture.

Filed Under: Features, Project

Apple Watch: A wrist too far?

September 10, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

wrist code

Watching the Apple show yesterday, as Tim Cook and company unveiled the new Apple Watch, you couldn’t help noticing how carefully, ritualistically they landed on the words “personal” and “intimate.” Steven Levy noticed this, and wrote:

Apple is one of the world’s biggest, most profitable and most powerful companies. It is a corporate Leviathan. Yet it has staked its claim on intimacy, tapping the private impulses of hundreds of millions of users.

Two ways in which the Watch gets personal: It’s backed with four sensors that both track your vital signs and can nudge and tap you. (Levy: “When it ‘pokes’ you, it’s not virtual. You feel it.”) And you can take the data from your heartbeat and share it with others — who’ll see an animated heart on their watches, throbbing in time to your actual pulse.

So what is this all about? On one level, Apple is taking a shot at Facebook. It’s saying, forget your faux friending. We are going deeper here. We are going to return the idea of digital relationships to something real. We will touch and connect hearts. (On Tuesday, Apple chose to share its own heart with Twitter by posting live tweets beneath the video stream of its product unveiling, and apparently the technical fallout from that choice led to the disastrous failure of the broadcast.)

Levy recounts the “thrilling and disturbing” implications of this ultrapersonal datasharing. The idea of “biorhythm hacking” is certainly hackle-raising. But it’s also an essentially abstract fear — creepy but not imperilling (yet). My nightmare scenario is different: It lies in the dangers of putting the marketplace on our wrists –use under eye masks when have a bad night – giving merchants a line on our pulses and access to our sensitive skin.

We’ve already witnessed how quickly smartphone notifications moved from convenience to annoyance. The Apple Watch represents the next loop of this cycle: We will invite its alerts onto our arms for their utility, and then hve to deal with a tangle of permissions and restrictions — or soon face tap overload.

It’s easy to imagine useful and convenient applications of the Apple Watch’s private wrist-tap. You’re in line at a restaurant, and instead of having to carry one of those buzzing-flashing hunks of plastic, you just await a gentle watch nudge.

“Your table is ready” sounds pretty great. But then you’re walking past a display in a store — one enhanced by an Apple iBeacon, perhaps — and your watch throbs. Its message: “Buy this toaster! It’s on sale!” Maybe not so great.

When your watch knows that your heartbeat has quickened as you stand in front of a product display (or, for that matter, as you scan a review), it knows that you are what the ad people call a “qualified prospect.” Will the companies involved be able to resist using that data?

Here, history is not on the individual’s side. Every opportunity that large public companies have had to use our data to sell us things has been grabbed. We have mumbled the occasional objection but mostly gone along with these passive transactions, in which bits and pieces of our behavioral data become imperfect but irritating marketing profiles. The Apple Watch could be an alarmingly efficient interface between the corporate and the corporeal, messaging our nervous systems and monetizing our gestures.

We don’t have to let this happen, of course. Sometimes we jealously guard the realm of the “personal” and “intimate”; other times, we casually open it to strangers. We make these choices based on whims and hunches more often than on forethought and reason.

Apple is betting that we will fall so goofily in love with its tiny gleaming bundle of silicon and sapphire that we will overlook these qualms. Based on recent experience, I would not rush to bet against the company. We might be so mesmerized by Apple’s interface magic and gadget smarts that we don’t care that it is invading our bodies. Or we might look down at our own wrists and say, “This has gone too far.”

Filed Under: Features, Project

Links: “Henry VIIIs of the Web”; social all the way down

September 6, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

Henry VIII

Big Internet (Nicholas Carr, Rough Type):

…a sense of exhaustion with what I will henceforth call Big Internet. By Big Internet, I mean the platform- and plantation-based internet, the one centered around giants like Google and Facebook and Twitter and Apple. Maybe these companies were insurgents at one point, but now they’re fat and bland and obsessed with expanding or defending their empires. They’ve become the Henry VIIIs of the web. And it’s starting to feel a little gross to be in their presence.

Why Twitter Should not Algorithmically Curate the Timeline (Zeynep Tufecki, Medium): A great exposition of the “hive mind migrates” notion.

But the bigger loss will be the networked intelligence that prizes emergence over engagement and interaction above the retweetable — which gets very boring very quickly. I know Twitter thinks it may increase engagement, but it will decrease engagement among some of its most creative segments.”

Against the “digital detox” metaphor (Dave Roberts, Grist):

I don’t have any illusions about the inherent moral/spiritual superiority of meatspace friends and interactions. I don’t view my online life as some kind of inauthentic performance in contrast to a meatspace life lived as the Real Me. I can trace a great deal of the richness in my life back to digital roots.

The fact is, all our interactions are performances, even those interactions we experience as purely internal (that internal monologue). They are all shaped by larger cultural and economic forces. That’s because human beings are social creatures, not contingently but inherently. We are always ourselves in relation to someone or something; interacting with others is how children form their sense of being separate, autonomous agents. There is no homunculus, no true, authentic, indivisible self or soul underneath all the layers of social intercourse. It’s social all the way down.

There is no self but dynamic, shifting selves, collections of dispositions and inclinations elicited by changing contexts. We are one self to our mothers, another to our friends, another to our children, another to our Twitter followers. A self that remains steady through contexts is not something we’re all born with, it’s an achievement, what we call “integrity,” from the Latin integritatem, or “wholeness.” Most people are, to one extent or another, loose bundles of fragmentary and often self-contradictory selves, none of which holds a particular claim on being “true.”

There are interesting differences among those selves, and I think there are generalizable differences between the kinds of selves we are in person and the kind we are online, but the differences have nothing to do with degrees of authenticity or “realness.” Many people, particularly introverts, the socially inept, the different or alienated, experience the internet as the first place they can express their hidden and most treasured selves. The internet offers the hope (if not always the reality) of expression freed from social and class restrictions, the chance for radical self-(re)definition.

It’s easy for generally privileged classes — like the kind of upwardly mobile professionals who find themselves at gadget-free retreats — to imagine that meatspace = authenticity. But for the subaltern, meatspace can be an oppressive and confining reality, the internet a place of community and empowerment.

inessential: Waffle on Social Media (Brent Simmons):


My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here.

The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites, blogs, RSS, irc, email.


Facebook’s algorithm — why our assumptions are wrong, and our concerns are right (Tarleton Gillespie, Culture Digitally): Yet more on the Facebook mood study, but there’s some important distinctions and arguments here.

On the one hand, we had “trusted interpersonal information conduits” — the telephone companies, the post office. Users gave them information aimed for others and the service was entrusted to deliver that information. We expected them not to curate or even monitor that content, in fact we made it illegal to do otherwise; we expected that our communication would be delivered, for a fee, and we understood the service as the commodity, not the information it conveyed. On the other hand, we had “media content producers” — radio, film, magazines, newspapers, television, video games — where the entertainment they made for us felt like the commodity we paid for sometimes with money, sometimes with our attention to ads, and it was designed to be as gripping as possible. We knew that producers made careful selections based on appealing to us as audiences, and deliberately played on our emotions as part of their design. We were not surprised that a sitcom was designed to be funny, even that the network might conduct focus group research to decide which ending was funnier A/B testing?. But we would be surprised, outraged, to find out that the post office delivered only some of the letters addressed to us, in order to give us the most emotionally engaging mail experience.  

Now we find ourselves dealing with a third category. Facebook promises to connect person to person, entrusted with our messages to be delivered to a proscribed audience now it’s sometimes one person, sometimes a friend list, sometimes all Facebook users who might want to find it. But then, as a part of its service, it provides the News Feed, which appears to be a running list of those posts but is increasingly a constructed subset, carefully crafted to be an engaging flow of material. The information coming in is entrusted interpersonal communication, but it then becomes the raw material for an emotionally engaging commodity, the News Feed. All comes in, but only some comes out.

It is this quiet curation that is so new, that makes Facebook different than anything before. And it makes any research that changes the algorithmic factors in order to withhold posts quite different from other kinds of research we know Facebook to have done, including the A/B testing of the site’s design, the study of Facebook activity to understand the dynamics of social ties, or the selective addition of political information to understand the effect on voter turnout – but would include their effort to study the power of social ties by manipulating users’ feeds.

And Facebook is complicit in this confusion, as they often present themselves as a trusted information conduit, and have been oblique about the way they curate our content into their commodity. If Facebook promised “the BEST of what your friends have to say,” then we might have to acknowledge that their selection process is and should be designed, tested, improved. That’s where this research seems problematic to some, because it is submerged in the mechanical workings of the News Feed, a system that still seems to promise to merely deliver what your friends are saying and doing. The gaming of that delivery, be it for “making the best service” or for “research,” is still a tactic that takes cover under its promise of mere delivery. Facebook has helped create the gap between expectation and reality that it has currently fallen into.

Filed Under: Links, annotated, Project Tagged With: uor

The hive mind migrates

September 3, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

empty hive

So with all this noise — all right, murmur — about a blog revival, I say, let’s talk about social networks. Because the whole discussion about blogs and social networks has always posited them as a zero-sum game: if social wins, blogs lose. And things are just way more complicated than that.

In one huge dimension, at least, the world of social networks is absolutely identical to the world of the blogosphere: Their value derives from the people who write, post, share stuff there.

Whatever is good in services like Twitter and Facebook — whatever we go there for — comes from all of us. Without people posting their thoughts and pictures and links, these platforms are nothing, nada, zilch.

There’s a whole “digital labor” conversation that tries to analyze the place of digital work in the global economy. That’s important, but I mean something far simpler: that if you and me and millions of other people stopped posting, Twitter and Facebook would spiral down towards worthlessness — a network effect in reverse.

I’m not predicting any kind of mass exodus or espousing a boycott. But there is a less dramatic sort of abandonment that happens to digital platforms more organically over time — like over-farmed turf that gradually enforces its own need to lie fallow, or hives that have served their purpose but lost their inhabitants.

Any successful community-based online enterprise — from the Well to Flickr to the fertile blog community of a decade ago to Twitter — takes off when an enthusiastic group of early adopters embraces the service and starts tinkering with it, inventing new practices and putting its functions to new uses its creators never imagined. There’s a period of excitement and delight and innovation, then a wider adoption. Cue the collective wow.

Then something happens. The early users begin to burn out, or feel neglected, or resent how the platform owner is changing things, or just chafe at problems the service has never been able to fix. Eventually, they lose the love. They start looking for a new home. If there is a hive mind at work in these matters — and there’s almost certainly not just one but many — it rouses itself and, at some critical moment, moves its energy center elsewhere.

This is a natural process, probably an inevitable one, and not cause for mourning. It is how the tech industry has worked for decades, as “developer enthusiasm” moves from one realm of technical spadework to the next.

It might be happening to Twitter right now. That’s what Alan Jacobs says: “For many of the really smart people on Twitter, it’s over.” He’s echoing Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer of the Atlantic, who wrote a “eulogy for Twitter” last April.

So yes, first, the obvious: Twitter is huge; it isn’t going anywhere. But the Twitterati are definitely restless, at least in the circles I heed. It’s a thin line between “everyone else is there so I’d better go too” and “nobody goes there anymore — it’s too crowded!” All the link-sharing trackers and analytics and tools will cease to hold our interest if the people we’re interested in move their contributions away from the platform that supports them.

This dynamic is actually heartening: It means that, in a digital environment that seems to privilege big platform owners over individual users, we have more power than we think. Another way of making the same observation can be found in Tim Carmody’s recent essay on OKCupid’s defense of its manipulation of user profiles for testing and research.

They’re all too quick to accept that users of these sites are readers who’ve agreed to let these sites show them things. They don’t recognize or respect that the users are also the ones who’ve made almost everything that those sites show. They only treat you as a customer, never a client.

This is an incredibly important point! And one that the people running today’s Web have a strong interest in blurring. In fact,this insight is so critical, so worth holding onto, that I would like to give it a label so we can’t easily forget it.

How about this? Carmody’s Law: The users of Web platforms today are also the creators of almost everything you’ll find on them.

And the inevitable corollary: They are free agents, even if they sometimes feel trapped.

So where does this leave the blogging revival? I don’t think that personal blogging will somehow become the new hotness again; you only get one lap round that track. I do think that as waves of smart people hit the limits of their frustration with Twitter and Facebook, many will look around and realize, hey, this blogging thing still makes a great deal of sense.

Filed Under: Blogging, Features, Project

“Bloggy to the core” indeed

September 2, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

bring_out_yer_dead

People are talking about blogs. Again! And not just random nameless “people” cited in some clueless trend story. Specific people are talking about reviving their actual blogs. In some cases, they are even following through.

Michael Sippey, who was so early into blogging it wasn’t even called “weblogging” back then, is doing something like what he used to do in his Obvious Filter over on Medium. Elizabeth Spiers, the original Gawker (and author, most recently, of this superb profile), promises to “write mostly badly and more often” on her personal blog. Vox Media’s Lockhart Steele, declaring that “the web ecosystem will always be bloggy at its core,” announced that he is returning to personal blogging. Susannah Breslin, whose work I first encountered in the days of the original Salon Blogs program, is back at her personal blog with some reflections on “autonomy and freedom.” Christian Crumlish, too. These are people in my universe who I know or whose work I know; look around your world and you may spot similar stirrings.

Jason Kottke noticed some of these developments, and, of course, linked. Fred Wilson, the VC blogger par excellence, noticed them, too, and wrote:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

So let’s be clear: Blogging never went away; if anything, we walked away from it. In large groups, for sure — but hardly unanimously. Many extraordinary bloggers never stopped writing.

As someone who spent several years of my life chronicling the brief but colorful history of the blog, and who within the past few months has put some serious time back into my own wee project here, I’m pleased at this ferment, however it rises — or sours.

It’s a trend! And the really fun thing about trends the second time around is that the media machine generally ignores them. The breathless bad stories all got written already a long time ago. There’s nothing novel left to mine.

Are we really going to see the reconstitution of the blogging era of a decade ago? Of course I have some more thoughts about where all this is headed. But I’ll save them for the next post.

Filed Under: Blogging, Features, Project

Links: Studying Facebook right, adjusting to the Net’s vastness

September 1, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

5625707813_cbdb4ec0a5_z

Why the Facebook Experiment is Lousy Social Science (Galen Panger, Medium): This lengthy, deep exploration of the many ways the Facebook mood experiment went wrong and how it could be improved upon also offers lots of insight into how the service is “designed to be habit-forming and addictive.”

Facebook’s hacker culture is truly something to behold, but it also means the company constantly steps in it. Facebook upsets a lot of people, and often. The culture makes the company more impervious to criticism, but in some ways also maladapted and unempathetic. And so Facebook and its culture will seemingly always be a source of tension — for us users, as well as for the people who work there…

While Facebook’s PR paints the service as an intimate portrait of our lives, keep in mind that it’s not. It’s a performance, not a well-rounded view of our friends’ struggles, travails and ups and downs. Catch yourself when you start comparing your life unfavorably to someone on Facebook, and realize it’s not the full picture.

MSR Faculty Summit 2014 Ethics Panel Recap (Mary L. Gray):

Summary of a symposium featuring these comments from Jeff Hancock, one of the authors of the Facebook mood study:

We have a metaphor for the postal service: messages are delivered without tampering from one person to the next. We have a metaphor from the newsroom: editors choose things that we think will be of interest. But there’s no stable metaphor that people hold for what the news feed is. I think this is a really important thing. I’m not sure whether this means we need to bring in an education component to help people understand that their news feeds are altered all the time by Facebook? but the huge number of e-mails about people’s frustration that researchers would change the news feed indicates that there’s just no sense that the news feed was anything other than an objective window into their social world.

Try Googling This: OKCupid founder reveals what Internet searches really say about us (Paul Kilduff, Berkeley Monthly):


PK: You’re quoted as saying you don’t want to put anything on Facebook that you wouldn’t feel comfortable with Facebook sharing with advertisers, right?

CR: Yeah, sort of. I mean, it’s not like I sit around thinking all day about what I am and I’m not going to put on Facebook. I’m not leading a monklike existence here. But I think that’s a totally good rule of thumb. It always kind of amuses me when people get mad that Facebook shares x, y, and z with advertisers. They say they’re going to do it. That’s how they make money. It’s almost like a physical fact of the world that websites share stuff with advertisers, so I’m not that excited about them knowing things about me.

The Next Generations of Facebook’s News Feed (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic): A great proposal from Nicholas Diakopoulos.

What if, instead of relying on platforms like Facebook to invisibly turn the digital knobs that make each person’s News Feed look different, Facebook users could subscribe to different algorithms — formulas designed by humans who could explain their approach?

News Feed FYI: Click-baiting (Facebook Newsroom): 


When we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through…Over time, stories with “click-bait” headlines can drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about.

Blogging Redux (Susannah Breslin):

Eventually, I found myself making $100 an hour writing Facebook updates spoken by a bottle of pink medicine manufactured by a multibillion-dollar company obsessed with engagement, branding, and PowerPoint presentations filled with colorful pie charts.

I had become a digital ghost of my former self.

I think if there is a renaissance of blogging it is in reaction to that, the invisibility imposed when you commodify yourself, an attempt to recreate something that was lost, something, one hopes, that’s more about autonomy and freedom than engagement and revenue.

Your Anonymous Posts to Secret Aren’t Anonymous After All (Kevin Poulsen, Wired):

“It’s our job to make sure people feel safe and in control,” he says. “People can’t do that on Facebook. That’s our mission, so people can put this stuff out there and not feel alone. That’s so important.”

Caudill, the hacker, is skeptical that the twin goals of sharing and anonymity can ever be resolved.

“I kind of see where they’re going with it. They’re trying to be kind of the everyman’s WikiLeaks. But at the same time it doesn’t really work that way,” says Caudill. “You can’t both try to connect with all your friends and be really social and network with everything, and that same time try to do all that anonymously. I can’t see a situation where you can have your cake and eat it too.”

waffle → Community Services (Jesper):

People are going to adjust to the vastness of the Internet and implied exposure and it’s going to happen over generations. I’m not saying they won’t. And I’m not saying that “social media” is doing a poor job today in letting people talk to each other. I am saying that there’s a huge gap for solutions and software and ideas that solve problems people actually have today, especially in a way that doesn’t create a new entity in the middle that then has to care about what everyone thinks about it and how it’s relevant, or in a way that creates a standard to avoid those kinds of entities without spending the next two decades in development hell while the world goes on without them.

Social media has come to symbolize, for me, the tyranny of having to appear relevant, visible and clean to everyone else, the inability to define my own boundaries and the uncertainty about what’s going to happen tomorrow to the fundamental structure of this tool that I’m using – all the while someone either makes money off of me or adds to the looming amorphousness trying to stay afloat.

In E-Sports, Video Gamers Draw Real Crowds and Big Money (Nick Wingfield, New York Times):

In Mr. Dager’s view, the physical barriers to becoming an e-sports athlete are far lower than for conventional sports. He lists fingers and a brain as the primary tools people need to get started. What most people lack, he said, is a singular focus on games, a willingness to clear away all other distractions.

His obsession with video games was a sore point with Mr. Dager’s parents during his teenage years, as it was for the parents of many top gamers.

“I, and many players like me, sacrificed everything,” said Mr. Dager, who is almost a senior in college but is not attending school now. “We gave up on sports and friends and school just so we can play more.”

Filed Under: Links, annotated, Project

Links: Twitter’s Iron Dome, anonymous-app dinners, secrets of Postsecret

August 22, 2014 by Scott Rosenberg

bots

Fighting spam with BotMaker (Raghav Jeyaraman, Twitter Blog): This technical description of Twitter’s realtime spam interception program sounds quite a bit like an unholy cross between the broadcast media’s seven-second delay and a missile defense system. Note, also, that “other groups at Twitter have started using BotMaker for non-spam purposes.” Once you start pre-publication review of tweets, it must just be so tempting to find new applications…

BotMaker has ushered in a new era of fighting spam at Twitter. With BotMaker, Twitter engineers now have the ability to create new models and rules quickly that can prevent spam before it even enters the system. We designed BotMaker to handle the stringent latency requirements of Twitter’s real-time products, while still supporting more computationally intensive spam rules.

BotMaker is already being used in production at Twitter as our main spam-fighting engine. Because of the success we have had handling the massive load of events, and the ease of writing new rules that hit production systems immediately, other groups at Twitter have started using BotMaker for non-spam purposes. BotMaker acts as a fundamental interposition layer in our distributed system.

Secret Users Have Started Hosting Secret Dinner Parties, and They Are Brutal (Nellie Bowles, Re/code): Reporter goes undercover to a dinner party assembled anonymously on an anonymous app and encounters an anonymous host’s musings on authenticity. I think the “I want a place where I can be raw and honest” thing has now officially become a virus — or a soundbite.

“We all end up in these silos of an expected life. I know who I am around the people I know, but anonymously? What can I be anonymously?” Kai said, talking as he finished preparations for dinner (beef stew, black rice, mint and strawberries for muddling with vodka). “I want a place where I can be raw again. Where I can be honest. Where it doesn’t always have to be vacation pictures and ‘Look how great I am.’ “

The death of privacy (Alex Preston, The Observer)

I ask Cohen about the differences between our “real” selves and those we project online…. “I agree that the online persona has become a kind of double,” he says. “But where in Dostoevsky or Poe the protagonist experiences his double as a terrifying embodiment of his own otherness (and especially his own voraciousness and destructiveness), we barely notice the difference between ourselves and our online double. I think most users of social media and YouTube would simply see themselves as creating a partial, perhaps preferred version of themselves.”

…This is the horror of social media – that it gives us the impression we are in control of our virtual identities, putting out messages that chime with our “real” selves (or some idealised version of them). In fact, there is always slippage and leakage, the subconscious asserting its obscure power. The internet can, as Cohen tells me, “provide a way of exploring and playing the multiplicity and complexity of the self”. It can also prove to us just how little control we have over how we appear. As William Boyd put it in Brazzaville Beach: “The last thing we discover in life is our effect.”

The Web is Broken and We Should Fix It (Mike Caulfield, Hapgood): One vote for Ward Cunningham’s Federated Wiki project:

There’s actually a pretty simple alternative to the current web. In federated wiki, when you find a page you like, you curate it to your own server (which may even be running on your laptop). That forms part of a named-content system, and if later that page disappears at the source, the system can find dozens of curated copies across the web. Your curation of a page guarantees the survival of the page. The named-content scheme guarantees it will be findable.

Jennifer Ouellette: The english major who taught herself calculus (Ben Lillie):

One of the wonderful things about relying on computers to help us is that if we’re not careful they’ll tell us who we really are.

PostSecret founder has a few things to say about new anonymous apps (Anne VanderMey, Fortune): Interview with Frank Warren, postcard-loving godfather of the digital confessional:

PostSecret has been around for 10 years and it has a tradition of being community-oriented. It has a certain set of values and part of that is not exploiting people’s secrets for commercial reasons. So because of that, even though the website has had over 600 million visits, I’ve never taken one dollar for a paid advertisement. And so I think that’s the kind of environment that allowed people to really trust me with secrets they wouldn’t share with anyone else.

It was a safe place. It was a non-commercial place. That got infused in the DNA of the project, and so that tradition when we created the app the app also had, kind of, the spirit of that project. It had a soul. This culture that was already there, and maybe if it hadn’t been for kind of outside parties acting maliciously, we could have gotten to a place where we could have taken flight, gotten the wheels up….

One of the things I’ve discovered through PostSecret is that when you keep a secret, it feels like this wall that divides us from others. But that’s just an illusion. If we can find the courage and the vulnerability to share our secrets in the right ways with the right people, we can discover that these walls are actually bridges that don’t just connect us with others but with our true selves.

Filed Under: Links, annotated, Project

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