phirelog

choosing friction

2025-10-11T12:20:00-04:00

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that:

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.

This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there.

I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

I am reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, slowly, in pieces, meeting over months with a book club that has become a load-bearing pillar of my intellectual community. I recommend it, the book and the book club both. Graeber and Wengrow introduced me to the idea of schismogenesis—the process of forming social divisions—which happens not by chance but through deliberate choices people make within an in-group to differentiate themselves from some out-group. The way Canadians define themselves in opposition to Americans, say. Or the way AI haters (complimentary) refuse to engage with generative AI.

It’s possible to see this with despair or derision: who are we becoming that even the use of tools and technologies has become a matter of identity? But the fun thing about reading anthropology is learning how much humans have always been Like This™. There were tribes who refused to adopt agriculture not because they didn’t know about it, but because the tribe up the road does agriculture and they’re not like them. Groups that refused to domesticate cattle because it was important to their group identity to see bulls as wild and untamed. I refuse to use generative AI because I simply don’t want to be the kind of person who uses generative AI.

The promise of AI is that it removes friction. It doesn’t matter whether it can actually fulfill that promise, it matters that the sovereign wealth funds with seemingly infinite pockets and patience for Sam Altman’s megalomania believe it can. In their ideal world, you don’t have to think about anything because an AI will do your thinking for you, and so you can fire everyone whose job it was to think. In this ideal world, they never have to think about other people at all, whose desires and needs and rights might come into conflict with their whims. I don’t know where they imagine we’ll have gone; six feet under, probably.

I quite like thinking, and I think humans should do more of it, and I think the less we do it the more our thinking muscles will atrophy. This seems bad for everyone except for authoritarians who wish we were easier to control. I also happen to think AI is quite bad at thinking and that what LLMs do is not thinking at all, but I could be wrong! It’s genuinely beside the point. I do not want the frictionless world that the political project of generative AI promises, one in which you never have to interact with a human being if you don’t want to, and therefore I would simply prefer not to be complicit in its advancement.

My refusal is a philosophical position more than it is a practical one, in the same way that my decisions not to use Amazon or Netflix or Spotify do more to introduce friction into my life in service of an abstract ideal than it does to actually engender pain for the corporate oligarchs I despise. I harbour no delusion that my individual refusal will slow AI’s death drive to destroy societal trust and goodwill any more than I believe that Jeff Bezos is personally mourning money I’m not spending in his little shoppe. But if I am not capable of withstanding even this small amount of friction in my otherwise materially comfortable life for my ideals, what discomfort would I be able to endure when it matters more?

It is not virtuous to suffer, and discomfort is not noble. But everything in my life that is worth having, love and friendship and art and community, I found by fighting my way through discomfort. Pain does not mean growth, but growth does require pain. It is so easy in our rotten modernity to choose convenience and ease, to avoid friction at all costs and tell ourselves it is self-care. I choose the friction of refusal because I worry that if I forget how to be uncomfortable, I will forget how to grow. Refusal, like acquiescence, is habit-forming.

There are probably tasks that generative AI could help me do more quickly, if I can get over my fundamental moral disagreement with the technology. Maybe I would be able to fit more things into my life if I embraced it. But more does not always mean better, and abundance is not an uncomplicated good. We express our values and identities in what we choose to make time for, and the act of being forced to give some things up so you can prioritize other things, the realization that we cannot in fact have it all, that is what gives our choices meaning in the first place.

The thing that makes art interesting is that it was created by people who could have chosen to spend their time doing literally anything else. Do you know how long it takes to write a novel? Isn’t it amazing how many people have done it anyway? Every human-authored book in the world, even the ones I think are absolute trash and not worth the paper they’re printed on, is the culmination of hundreds or maybe thousands of hours of work by someone who had something they really, really wanted to say. Those are hundreds or maybe thousands of hours they could have chosen to spend hiking or cuddling their pets or socializing with their loved ones or playing Hades, but this thing they had to say was too important to ignore. I just think that’s neat.

The problem with AI output masquerading as art is not that it’s technically inept, or even uncanny. AI media generation has come a long way in the last five years and might well continue to improve technically. The problem with AI “art” is that it was not the expression of a mortal being choosing to spend its one wild and precious life clawing its way through mediocrity to try and imperfectly communicate a feeling with other mortal beings who, by definition, can never fully comprehend it, and therefore it is fundamentally uninteresting to me.

If you can push a button and get a screenplay or a symphony or a painting at the cost of a nominal subscription fee that does not begin to cover the true expense of this technology to the world, if you did not have to at least subconsciously face your mortality and decide that the pursuit of this piece of art is what you want to spend your finite time on, if your desire to speak is not strong enough to overcome the friction of learning how to speak, is it something that needed to be said?

Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl came out last week, and people aren’t happy with it, including her fans. I liked what the independent sports outlet (I know) Defector had to say about it:

“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man,” Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot. That’s what art becomes when its primary goal is to make money: unoriginal, boring, palatable.

Good art is inefficient. Good community is inefficient, too.

My book club is constituted primarily of people I had never met—and who had never met each other—prior to this year. We inaugurated the group by reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which is a book about what happens to civil society when we opt for ease and comfort in the privacy of our homes over the friction of participating in democracy. We read that book the same way we’re reading Graeber and Wengrow now, meeting in different locations across Toronto over months, discussing one chunk at a time.

This is inefficient: trying to coordinate the schedules of half a dozen adults to consistently meet is a herculean task, and every meetup is padded with commuting time, chit-chat time, time spent ordering and eating food. We started when the days were short and the air was icy and it would have been so much easier not to commit, so easy to read by myself in the privacy of my own home, perhaps listening to the audiobook on 2x speed, or reading some AI-generated summary. Frictionless.

Authoritarianism promises a frictionless world for the right kind of people, and the adherents of authoritarianism always imagine that they themselves are the right kind of people, that the leopard will never eat their face, or better yet that they themselves are the leopards. The promise of frictionlessness often comes wearing a disguise of efficiency. You don’t have to sit through endless committees and public consultations and town halls to try to convince people of the rightness of your cause, you just bulldoze your way through the commons to build a ghastly megaspa.

I have been on many projects and teams where I have been immensely frustrated by the people I am collaborating with, and wished that I had the power to just tell them to do the thing I want them to do. The friction that the political project of AI promises to remove is, by and large, the same friction that authoritarianism promises to remove: other people. You don’t have to build a relationship with other human beings who are just as complex and contradictory as you and who will probably frustrate you in all sorts of ways, maybe by challenging your preconceptions or expecting you to follow through on your commitments. You will never have to learn to work together, to understand how to compromise, to accept that sometimes you won’t get what you want and that that’s for the best. You can just talk to an AI who will affirm the righteousness of your position.

This promised frictionlessness is not real. Of course it’s not real. Not just because OpenAI will update its engine and take away your AI girlfriend, or because the endless cash burn will catch up to the industry and you’ll be asked to to foot the bill they’ve been hiding from you all along, or because the greedy fuckers taking over our governments will use AI to justify taking away our health care and our social services until there’s nothing left but friction, or even because deep fakes will ruin any lingering semblance we still have of a consensus reality and you and I have for the most part never lived in a world without a consensus reality and cannot conceive of how difficult that actually is.

It’s not real because at the end of the day, no matter how much you try to remove yourself from the inconvenient needs of others, you are still a person. I am still a person. The friction inside our own brains is the one thing you cannot escape from. We need other people in a thousand ways big and small, and you might as well start practicing how to be needed by them, too.

Does Mark Zuckerberg strike you as a particularly happy or fulfilled person? Does Peter Thiel?

I can read any number of books all by myself (and do!), ruminating only on my own interpretation and never contending with someone who might disagree with me. Or better yet push a button and get a 10-minute AI-generated summary of that book, and push another button and get an AI-generated blog post about the insights of that book that I can throw on LinkedIn and call thought leadership. Or I can get on a subway for 45-minutes to sit in an overlit fluorescent food court and eat cheap delicious Indian food and laugh with my friends about that time that Kandiaronk totally wrecked some European colonial dummy. Which one is more frictionless? Which one makes me feel more whole?

I choose friction.

kill the metrics in your head

2025-05-30T20:11:00-04:00

Get in, loser, we’re doing an old-fashioned conversation-by-blog-post.

Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era:

The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.

It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

Then Les Orchard wrote in response that Only the Metrics Care:

The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization—metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs.

…

The point isn’t to communicate. It’s to simulate relevance in order to optimize growth. It’s all goal-tracking, A/B tests, fake doors, and dark patterns.

Both of those posts are great and you should read them, but reading them is not a prerequisite to reading this one. I just wanted to place this post in context of the conversation I’m dropping into.

A thought that I’ve been turning over in my head for a while is this: it’s quite important to know that you are heard.

We have a fucked-up relationship with attention in Western society. Probably in non-Western societies too, but this is the one I know and the only one I feel qualified to comment on. Obviously attention has been commodified by advertising economics, and the relentless pursuit of attention as measured by Engagement™ has been incredibly damaging to the social fabric. It is a cliché to say that Facebook profits off of our polarization and rage because our attention is what sells ads, and it is also true.

However, it is also incredibly fucked-up how contemptuous we-as-a-culture can be of behaviour that gets labelled as “attention-seeking”.

There’s lots of attention-seeking behaviour that is genuinely anti-social, in the sense of being detrimental to social cohesion. Logan Paul comes to mind. But “attention-seeking” is also used to dismiss a whole spectrum of behaviours that I’d actually consider quite pro-social. Protesting and all forms of so-called social justice warrior behaviour falls under this, especially if you’re a young person. (Surely the only reason the youth would agitate for a better world is for attention?) Similarly, a lot of critiques of art can carry an undertone of “who are you to think your work matters”. In other words, how dare you ask for my attention?

The dismissal that gets under my skin the most is when people who struggle with mental health engage in self-harm to cope, and are then accused of doing it for attention. It’s just a cry for help, people say. First of all, so? And second of all, right, exactly. It is a cry for help, so are you gonna help or not? Because if not then I need you to get the fuck out of the way.

Anyway. Wanting attention is not inherently a bad thing. We’re social creatures¹. We’re terrified of ostracism, of being cast out from the clan or the tribe or the club or the bandwagon. Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing is irrelevant to its being true. The social cohesion of extremist and conspiracy groups is a big part of their stickiness. Tell someone a story about why they matter and give them a group of people who believe in the same story and you can get them to do a lot of evil. (And a lot of good, too.)

There’s a loneliness epidemic that many are attempting to soothe with parasocial relationships with our favourite podcasters and streamers and now AI, and what that says to me is that so many of us live our lives unwitnessed, craving attention from anything that provides a simulacrum of reciprocity. We need attention from one another—our identities exist in context and reflection of one another—and I suspect we can no more change this than stop breathing air, which is to say that bizarre evolutionary forces might accomplish it over the course of eons but it’s sure as shit not going to affect us in our lifetimes.

It is not a bad thing to want attention. It’s quite important to know that you are heard.

Except the internet isn’t really set up to signal that someone is listening. You can only demonstrate that you’re paying attention by taking some step to express it: a like, a repost, a reply, an email, a rambly blog post. And because these things take energy, you’re not going to get a signal from the majority of the people you’re trying to reach. (And oftentimes I don’t have anything to say! I just want to wryly smile at a nice turn of phrase.)

This is a genuine problem with interactions on the internet. Weirdly, it’s a problem that analytics software was sort of trying to solve; shame it ballooned into this privacy-destroying behemoth that undergirds the global surveillance panopticon. We’ve had page counters as long as we’ve been building websites. Often, we just want to know that we’re being heard, and analytics let us measure the hearing.

About six years ago ago I decided to move my blog off of Wordpress to a static site generator. In an ongoing attempt to de-Google-ify my life and reduce my electronic footprint, I skipped installing Google Analytics, and man did I notice that absence immediately. It’s not like I was a prolific blogger using metrics to optimize building my audience or whatever, I just liked knowing it was there. The fact that, if I didn’t promote something I’d written on social media (an activity I hate) I would mostly have no idea whether any human saw it at all was so bizarre.²

Creating a thing and putting it out into the world is a vulnerable act. Not knowing how people are responding to it, even whether they’re seeing it at all, can be lonely and alienating.

I launched a new project recently, something that is extremely close to my heart and my values. I intentionally didn’t set up analytics on that project, because tracking is against the core project ethos. And honestly, it’s kind of agonizing not to know whether this thing I’ve poured so many hours into is actually reaching people or being used. Someone asked me recently what my traffic numbers were and it’s embarrassing to simply not know!

Except, I am choosing not to know³, even though I am desperate to be heard. And this tension is very important to me.

It is maybe not functionally possible to design social networked technology geared towards listening. I don’t know, I’m not that smart. But the fact that the internet doesn’t have a mechanism for listening means that we’ve invented these kludgy quantification mechanisms to try and detect attention, and it is easy, so incredibly easy there are multiple books written about this, to confuse the thing you’re measuring for the metric itself.

I want to know who is visiting my site and whether they’re returning visitors and what pages they clicked through and for how long because it gives me the illusion of knowledge and control. Maybe I’ll know my project is connecting with people if I just hit some arbitrary threshold of pageviews, subscribers, conversion rate.

But none of that will tell me the thing I actually want to know, which is: am I making a difference?

Truthfully, that may be an unanswerable question. So much of organizing is about planting seeds⁴, pushing towards a more just world against an array of seemingly insurmountable forces in the belief that all our small actions will add up to a better future.

If that is a question that can be answered, the answer will not come via clickthrough rates and visitor counts. The answer will come in conversations and in community, in personally building solidarity with the people you’re trying to reach. The seasoned labour organizer who tells me she’s using my site to keep up track of things would be a single insignificant blip on the analytics radar, if I had one. But hers is the experience that actually matters.

When you have numbers to look at, it’s easy to care only about the numbers. If we want to truly care, we gotta kill the metrics in our heads.

In the 24 hours between starting this blog post and getting ready to post it, I read a third piece by Jesse Hirsh titled A Letter From the Future - How We Won:

You stopped pretending everything needed to be explained, and instead focused on what needed to be shared.

That was the beginning.

It didn’t happen on a debate stage. It happened at libraries, community kitchens, co-ops, clinics, church basements, discord servers, pirate radio stations, and among the ruins of broken institutions.

We call it the Great Listening. It was messy. Unprofitable. And unbearably slow.

Often when I start writing I discover lots of other people are writing about similar themes quite eloquently and decide maybe I didn’t have anything new to say after all. That is still the metrics-poisoned perspective, even if it’s not directly quantified, because it is still rooted in being unique or the first or whatever. The care-ful way of looking at this is that these moments of confluence are themselves an indication that we exist in global conversation with one another, and that people are, indeed, listening.

I’m not going to deluge you with social science citations on this, because I am trying to treat this post as one volley in a casual conversation rather than an intellectual fortress to defend, but I don’t think that is a controversial statement. ↩
A couple years later I caved and installed Matomo, an open source first-party tracking tool that I could be confident isn’t leaking cookies all over the internet. I broke it a few months ago and haven’t gotten around to fixing it, and the knowledge that this post is gonna go out with no visitor stats is annoying me like an unreachable itch. ↩
This is a slight exaggeration, I know who subscribed to the newsletter and I know how much bandwidth the site consumes. But I have no idea how bandwidth translates to visits in the year of our internet-of-bots. Plus, as the project’s About page states, I genuinely don’t want your email! I want you to be able to access this info without giving me your data in return. I will likely never know if this particular goal was successful. ↩
Please appreciate how much I resisted putting a Hamliton quote here, because even though my political analysis has outgrown its worldview, I am still at heart a basic musical theatre bitch. ↩

manifesto for the toronto that could be

2025-05-05T17:55:00-04:00

Some of you know me because of a daily political newsletter project I ran in 2017-2018 centered on American politics. I am eight years older and wiser, with much more clever and original ideas, so I come to you now with a new project: a weekly political newsletter slash website centered on Toronto.

The project is called Show Up Toronto, and it launches today. The scope may be smaller geographically but it’s not any less ambitious, just more focused. My current goal is to aggregate public organizing, mutual aid, and advocacy events from around the city, so that it’s easier to discover how to get involved in organizing even if you’re not already plugged into the right social media circles. I am also actively interviewing organizers in the city for a related research project, and if you are an organizer in Toronto I would love to hear from you.

On the advice of a smart friend, I wrote a manifesto for the project to serve as my own north star, which I’m reposting below. I think it’ll be clarifying and engaging even for people who don’t live in Toronto. If you do, sign up for the newsletter or RSS feed and tell your friends.

I love Toronto. No matter who you are or want to be, there’s a community in Toronto that’s ready to embrace you. It is a city of a thousand nations.

Toronto is not always an easy city to love. The gridlock, both literal and metaphorical, can be incredibly demoralizing. It’s a city that should represent the best of what multiculturalism can be, but it’s held back by a dam of small-minded thinking and regressive politics. Between antiquated and racist zoning laws, the ghost of amalgamation haunting Lake Ontario, the greed of Bay St driving up inequality and capturing our elected representatives, our very own homegrown tech oligarchs getting in the way of genuine human connection, and a media ecosystem that feeds into moral panics about the most vulnerable among us, sometimes it’s hard not to feel a little helpless.

I believe more people are good than not. In moments of crisis, in natural disasters, when the chips are truly down, our natures shine through and most of us can’t help but want to help. I also believe that more people are scared than not. We live in scary, unprecedented times, and our fears can drive us to be people we don’t recognize, restrict our imaginations of what’s truly possible.

I believe the best way to fix this is to get off our phones and meet our neighbours in person, to talk face-to-face about our challenges and hopes. Unfortunately, that same vibrant diversity I love about Toronto can also feel overwhelming and alienating. There’s an incredible amount of good organizing work happening in Toronto, and there is a vast group of people who want to be part of that work who don’t know how to get started.

Show Up Toronto is a small part of solving this puzzle. My goal is to highlight public organizing events across the city from the hundreds of excellent groups that are already doing the boots-on-the-ground work. If you’ve ever read about something upsetting and wanted to do something about it, or gone to a protest and wondered okay now what?—I hope Show Up Toronto can be a gateway for you.

I’m not an organizer, but I’ve spent a lot of time talking to community organizers in Toronto about their work and how to get involved. I want to do my part to amplify their reach and help others benefit from my research. I also want to reclaim a little bit of our technological agency from the American monopolists who surveil and divide us, and offer a path for getting involved in what’s happening in this city even if you’re not behind the walled gardens of Instagram or Facebook.

This is not an apolitical project. There is no such thing as an apolitical project, only a project that does not acknowledge its politics. I believe in indigenous sovereignty, in bodily autonomy, in trans rights, in Palestinian liberation, in disability justice, in housing as a right and not a commodity, in climate justice, in harm reduction, in prison abolition, in wearing masks and in public health, in labour power. We don’t have to agree on all the same goals or tactics, and we don’t have to be friends. In fact, I believe it’s important for a broad-based coalition to not work in lockstep, for there to be healthy tension among us as we navigate our values. But none of us are free until all of us are free, and we leave no one behind.

If the long arc of history ever bent towards justice it’s only because ordinary people like you and I have gotten our hands dirty and pulled. If our collective power were not so frightening, the billionaires would not need to spend so much money and energy convincing us we’re powerless.

I believe in us, and I believe in Toronto. I hope you’ll roll up your sleeves and join me.

the values of work

2024-11-27T09:19:00-05:00

In October I gave a talk at Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine, a small and intimate tech conference with a big impact in the industry. It’s quite unlike any other conference I’ve been to, which is explicitly the point. I’d been hearing about the conference from friends for years, and it somehow still managed to exceed all my lofty expectations.

Monktoberfest asks that your talk be something you wouldn’t be able to hear at any other conference. Mine was about values and how they show up at work and what happens when there is a gap between your stated and enacted values. It’s a theme that percolates through a lot of my writing and something I’ve spent many sleepless nights ruminating on, and giving this talk to such a receptive, empathetic, and compassionate audience was incredibly meaningful to me.

You can watch the talk here:

Seeing as I am personally allergic to watching any YouTube videos longer than five minutes unless I absolutely have to, I’ve also included a lightly edited version of the text of the talk below.

Before I start, I need to give the traditional disclaimer that this talk is reflective only of my personal views and not those of my employer. In fact, this talk is not reflective of the views of any of my employers, past or present, which is kinda the whole problem. Hi, I’m Jenny, I’m from Toronto, and it’s not important where I work.

I’m a software engineer, but I didn’t study computer science right out of high school. I had no idea what I wanted, and for some reason the advice people give to precocious try-hards who don’t know what they want is to go to business school. Business school and I did not get along. It was well into the twenty-first century and the career center was still giving advice on things like firm handshakes and skirt length. Not only was it extremely not my speed, it probably shouldn’t have been anyone’s speed.

I remember a resume-writing workshop where they told us to put our hobbies and sports and clubs on our resumes even if it seems irrelevant, because you never know whether someone else also played lacrosse or did model UN and will hire you for it. Which, if you think about job hunting as a zero-sum Thunderdome, isn’t inherently bad advice for a bunch of scared freshmen. The problem is that we also had to take a mandatory human resources class, and there was never a flip side about how maybe you shouldn’t hire someone just because they play the same golf course as you because that’s a stupid way to build a company.

(Just in case any future employers are ~~watching~~ reading this: I like roguelike video games, sci-fi and fantasy books, and rock climbing. Please hire me, I’m great at cosplaying capitalism.)

What my school was trying to do was give us a shortcut to culture fit, though they didn’t seem to particularly care if that landed us in a good culture. When hiring panels talk about culture fit, they’re really asking things like: could I be stuck at an airport with them? Could we get a beer together? In other words: do I like them? And we like people who have similar hobbies, went to similar schools, indulge in similar vices.

All of that, though, reinforces systemic biases and harms diversity. Long after HR bans you from only recruiting from the one elite university, cultural markers like sports and leisure can still sub in as a pretty reliable signifier of class and race. Not a lot of kids living in poverty play hockey in high school because hockey equipment is hella expensive.

Culture fit gatekeeping sucks! It sucks morally (and I’m taking for granted here that you agree with me that talent comes from everywhere and everyone deserve access to good jobs). It sucks for everyone who doesn’t have the right background or pedigree, because they’re the ones shut out due to culture fit. And frankly, it also sucks for the company. If a company isn’t hiring from most of the population, it’s straight up missing out on good talent.

Not to mention, that’s how companies lock into tunnel vision. Apple is currently being sued because AirTags are being used by stalkers and domestic abusers. This is as predictable as it is ghastly. The fact that AirTags were launched without thorough safety features means that a whole array of decision-makers, from engineers to product leads to managers to the board, looked at the product and said “yep seems fine”, and anyone who did sound the alarm about abuse risk was ignored. I would wager not a lot of those decision-makers have had stalkers.

So maybe culture fit isn’t a great search criteria for hiring decisions.

At the same time, every time I’ve looked for a job, the most important thing I look at is the company culture. We’ve all experienced toxic cultures; it is soul crushing. Whereas any job I have loved, I’ve loved because the culture was so great. I’ve been lucky in my career so far in that sometimes I get to be picky about where I work, and my choice always came down to culture.

I guess what I’m saying is, hiring someone to fit into a culture is bad, but interviewing for a culture you want to fit into is…good?

The problem here, of course, is that the word culture is extremely overloaded, and if you ask five people what they think culture means you’ll get six different answers. So let’s unpack that.

Culture is the norms and values of a community.

I like this definition because it turns something amorphous into a few distinct components:

Norms are the things you do.
Values are why you do it.
And the community is who is included.

A norm describes a pattern of behaviour that’s taken for granted. You don’t really stop to think about the fact that you do it, until someone else doesn’t. People who stray from the norm are quickly nudged towards to the center, and they either adapt to it or risk consequences from the dominant group. A norm might be “we write engineering design docs for anything that will take longer than a week to build”, or “everyone should listen to customer calls, even if you don’t work in sales or support”. It could even be “we use commenters on Hacker News as a north star for our product development strategy”. (It shouldn’t be, but it could.)

Something being a norm doesn’t mean it’s good. An engineering team could have a norm of just retrying flaky tests until they pass, and everyone agrees that that’s bad, and we should probably get around to fixing those, but nothing happens, and new people are on-boarded into this being the normal way of behaving, and tests continue to flake like pastries.

A value is the thing we think of as being a capital-G Good thing. It’s the why, and it is inherently moral and prescriptive. It should be something that you’re willing to pay a cost to uphold, because not sticking to your value feels wrong somehow.

Your value could be “knowledge sharing through documentation”, which slows you down in the moment but makes your team stronger in the long term. Or it could be “ship early and often”, and the thought of polishing a product until it’s perfect instead of releasing early alphas and iterating is agonizing. A common value you see is “we don’t use tools that were not invented here”. I don’t have to agree with your values, but I can still tell that it’s the basis of something you hold dear.

How do norms and values impact “culture fit”? Well, looking at the specific way hiring for culture fit launders bias, what’s actually happening is that the org is looking for an alignment of norms. Systems want to perpetuate themselves, and they draw in people who will agree that the current way of doing things is normal. This includes tech stacks and testing philosophy at the relatively benign end, and “is this person one of us?” at the far end hiding all manner of sins.

The thing is, looking for norms isn’t just excluding people with different backgrounds. It’s also just not very useful. It doesn’t tell you all that much about what kind of person someone will be when the stakes are high and the pressure is on and you’re facing entirely novel problems. On the other hand, not only can people of all kinds of backgrounds have similar values, but core values are a much stronger foundation for figuring out what to do where there are no norms.

So. I suggest we think much less about culture fit, and much more about values alignment.

Unfortunately, values are kind of tricky to talk about. For one thing, personal values are sometimes so deeply held and so core to your understanding of the world that you might not even be able to name what they are. You just know in your gut when something doesn’t feel right.

Organizational values have the opposite problem, in that organizations are often more than happy to tell you all about their values, but it’s largely a marketing exercise. 55% of Fortune 100 companies cite “integrity” as a core value, and—I’m sorry, I read the business news—I know that’s nonsense. Companies talk about values to recruit talent, attract customers, and even claim the moral high ground against competitors (as the Wordpress community is finding out). We’ve all seen job postings from companies that say they value transparency but don’t want to tell you their salary ranges.

This quote is from a company that makes so-called productivity monitoring software.

The software lets employers install keyloggers and screen recorders on their employees’ machines. The software doesn’t make it clear to the employees that it’s surveilling everything they look at of course, but don’t worry, this is all in service of independent thought and trust.

ಠ_ಠ

So how can organizations look at values alignment when they don’t even know what they are?

It’s tempting to dismiss corporate values as being irrelevant when they’re so often co-opted for PR. But of course, organizations do still have values, often inherited from founders or early employees. They might be implicit and unspoken, and they may not be lit up in neon on company walls, but they’re deeply baked into the core assumptions of how decisions get made.

The funny thing about implicit values is that the folks inside are great at deducing what the organization actually values, regardless of what leadership says. They see first-hand the decisions being made and the behaviours that get rewarded and sanctioned. If teamwork is one of your company values, but there’s that one engineer who disappears into a cave for a few weeks or months at a time and comes back with 10,000 lines of code for a feature nobody asked for, and is then declared a genius and showered with accolades, you probably don’t actually value teamwork. If only firefighters get the glory, don’t be surprised if no one wants to work on asbestos removal.

When you’ve seen this disconnect between an organization’s stated and revealed values a few too many times, it’s easy to be jaded and think, oh I’m immune to this, this is just how it is. But even if you know intellectually that these disconnects exist, it can still be really damaging to trust when you’re actually confronted with specific examples of it happening.

I’ve worked in civic tech and non-profit and open source and all sorts of mission-driven spaces. I chose to work in these places because in my heart of hearts, I’m a huge softie and a true believer, no matter how much I try to be cynical about the improbability of ethical employment under capitalism. Hope springs eternal, and the manifesto said the right words, and I wanted to believe.

It didn’t always work out.

Increasingly there’s research that says that burnout isn’t just about working too much. It’s often much more about moral injury, a break with your values. It’s the psychic harm of not standing up for your beliefs, of watching unethical behaviour take place without doing something about it, of feeling betrayed by yourself or by someone you thought you trusted.

Like, imagine you had chosen to work at the ACLU because you really believed in its mission of protecting civil rights. And once you’re there, they turn around and hire the second-largest anti-union law firm in the country to union-bust. Turns out, civil rights didn’t include workers’ rights. The hurt left by this kind of betrayal lingers, and it cuts deepest for the people who believed in the mission the most, burns them out the hardest. When the gap between your stated values and your actual values becomes a chasm, the broken trust leaves a corrosive trail in your culture.

Whenever I’ve felt frustrated by this gap, what I really wanted to do was—metaphorically—shake the leadership and say to them: man, just admit you don’t actually care. Go install the analytics software that reports if your users are hovering 0.3 seconds over some button if you want, but stop pretending you care about privacy. You can run a company that doesn’t care about privacy, people do it all the time! But if that’s what you’re going to do, at least admit it.

As cathartic as that would be, it wouldn’t have actually accomplished anything, and not just because this is the opposite of effective communication and Marshall Rosenberg would be very disappointed in me. By and large, when I’m not fuming about the latest betrayal, I do believe that people mostly hold the values they say they do. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and everyone believes they’re acting with good intentions and making the best decision they can.

I get so mad because I’m thinking, why can’t people just do what they know is right? But honestly, is that so different from saying why can’t developers just stop writing insecure code? As we’ve painstakingly learned as an industry, you can’t improve a system by telling people to just be better at navigating the system. You need to make it hard for people to make mistakes, and you need to design the system in such a way that the right path is the easy path.

If values were easy to stick to even when the going got tough, they wouldn’t be values, they would be rationalizations. Your values should be the things you’re willing to pay a cost to uphold, even when it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable or expensive. People should have the moral courage to do the right thing. But they—we—often don’t. So then what?

If I’m at a WeWork by myself, I wear a mask. But if I’m coworking with a bunch of coworkers, and none of them are wearing masks, I’m also more likely to not wear one. I really do value public health, and sometimes I don’t value it more than I fear social ostracism. I don’t love this about myself, but it’s true. In 2020 and 2021 it was much easier to wear masks everywhere, because it was a much more prevalent behaviour. The individual cost of upholding public health has risen steeply since then.

But the fact that the cost of a moral choice can rise means it can also fall.

For example, many people value equitable compensation practices. When they find out their equally talented colleague who happens to be from a marginalized group makes less than they do, they’re genuinely upset. Some of those people might volunteer how much they make to arm their colleagues with bargaining info. But many people also wouldn’t. The social taboo against talking about money is huge, and if someone is paid significantly more than their peers, there can be all sorts of guilt and fear and shame wrapped up with that. They think, what if they get mad at me? What if I don’t deserve it? And so on. However, if you work with a bunch of people who regularly chat about compensation like it’s a no big deal, and everyone acknowledges that it’s a systemic problem and not an individual’s fault, that taboo starts to look less costly to break.

So, this is the work. The work of culture change is creating the conditions that make it easier to choose to do the right thing, to close the gap between your enacted values and your stated values.

If you’ve examined the values of your leaders and come to the conclusion that they truly hold different moral standards than you, then it’s time to leave, spiritually or literally. But sometimes, it’s not that you don’t share any values, it’s that it’s hard to stick to them. So make it easier.

Okay. Values are important. Gaps between stated values and revealed values destroy your culture. Sticking to your values is hard, so we need to change the culture to make it easier. So what are the levers available to you for making it easier?

Remember that culture is made up of norms and values. Norms are driven by values, but different values can arrive at the same behaviour. Let’s take the behaviour of writing documentation. In one org, that can be driven by the value of institutional knowledge sharing, and people write docs so they can share knowledge with their colleagues and their future selves and be assured that even if they leave, the knowledge doesn’t leave with them. In another org, the practice of documentation could be driven by the value that when something goes wrong, someone is to blame. (It’s a warped view of accountability, but I see it so often.) Documenting everything becomes the norm because everyone is trying to cover their butts and prove that there was nothing they could’ve done to prevent the incident, it’s that other team over there that didn’t do things correctly, and you can tell from the version history or whatever. These result in very different company cultures.

The fact that the same behavioural norm can have its roots in different value systems means that norms are easier to change than values. People are more willing to change their behaviour than their beliefs, because they can rationalize the new behaviour some other way until it becomes normal. And changing norms, in turn, makes it easier for others—who previously lacked the courage of their convictions—to make the right decision too.

But the fact that norms are easier to change than values also makes them more brittle.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020, companies rushed to issue statements that committed to Listening And Doing Better. They changed their display pictures, they set up ERGs, they appointed DEI leads. In the last eighteen months, after incredibly absurd fearmongering about the spectre of wokeness haunting America—frankly, I wish that were the case—and after sustained assault on trans rights and reproductive rights, we’re now watching companies roll back their DEI programs and lay off those teams and ban “political” conversation at work. For a moment, it seemed like caring about equity had a shot at becoming more normalized, especially at companies that wanted to attract top talent in a strong job market. But the norm was new and fragile, and it was still driven by the old underlying value of maximizing PR and minimizing blowback. Once the Overton window had been yanked far enough back to the right and a few hundred thousand layoffs had struck a blow against labour power, it was easy to reverse the norm before a new generation of workers who grew up with it come to expect it.

This is the catch-22 of culture change: fully integrating a new norm is difficult without changes in the underlying values, but values aren’t likely to change until the norms become normalized. Which means any culture change effort requires constant reinforcement to make sure the norms don’t regress before the values take hold.

So what does this work actually look like?

First, you gotta figure out what your organization’s values are.

No, hang on. In this house we do zero-indexing.

Step zero, you gotta figure out what your own values are. I’m throwing this out there like it’s just a casual thing but it’s easier said than done. Introspection can be scary and unsettling, and I’m not going to stand up here and tell you there’s this one weird trick to discover your core values.

Although.

My startup hot take that I also deeply believe is that you shouldn’t be allowed to start a company until you’ve been to therapy.

Therapy obviously can’t fix everything, but it’s one of the few mechanisms we’ve developed as a society in which we can be guided to build self-awareness, reflect on who we want to be, and develop skills for handling emotionally fraught situations. Being a founder is an incredibly stressful, taxing, and often lonely job, and people understandably buckle under the stress and revert to their basest instincts. You owe it to the people who depend on you for their livelihoods to figure out your own baggage and learn some coping mechanisms before you start yelling in a meeting because someone asked a question in a tone that reminded you of your parents or whatever.

Go to therapy. Figure out your values in therapy!

Then step one is you figure out what your organization’s values are.

These are the ones that are currently enacted, not the ones you wish it held. Be brutally honest, even when it’s ugly and makes you squirm, and watch for places where your values have corrupted. Is your value of being deliberate in your decision-making leading to analysis paralysis? Do you care so much about being right that you’re treating every conversation like there has to be a winner and a loser? Ask the ICs what they think the organization embodies, and cross your fingers that there’s enough trust left that they will tell you the truth. Remember, we’re experts at differentiating between what our leaders say they value and what they actually value.

Once you’ve done that, step two is deciding which values are not the values you would want for your org.

If there’s a value you’d like to change or something that’s missing, look for the day-to-day structures and processes that are either reinforcing or preventing that value, and change those.

I know a social enterprise organization that had strong values of teamwork and collaboration, except for their cut-throat sales team. The sales team had the highest turnover in the whole company, and interactions had turned increasingly toxic. When leadership sat down and really looked at the problem, they realized that compensation was a key issue. Salespeople earned individual commissions, which was very normal, but this means they were motivated to hoard leads and hide information. So, despite initial pushback, the execs switched the compensation structure to collective commission: now the team as a whole got bonuses based on how much everybody sold. The new structure even included support staff like sales coordinators and admin. This not only meant that salespeople were incentivized to help each other with strategy instead of competing, but existing customers also got better service from the support team, who were now being rewarded if the account expanded. And the people who preferred to be cut-throat got fed up and left.

Individual commission is an incredibly normal practice, and I’m not saying it’s universally bad. For this particular org, that practice harmed the culture, and prevented it from growing. So, what is your version of a norm that’s stifling growth and pulling away from your values? And how can you find your equivalent of the collective commission?

So far all of this implicitly assumes you have some sort of leadership role in the organization. What do you do if you’re an IC?

ICs obviously have a huge part to play in a company’s culture, but I’ve sadly come to believe that changing the culture purely from the bottom up, with no top-down support, is impossible. This is because accountability and reinforcement are paramount. If leadership walks past bad behaviour or even rewards it, the new norms will not take root and you’ll regress to the mean. If you’re trying to get your team to take code reviews more seriously, and one or two people consistently merge stuff with just a rubber stamp and managers don’t care, gradually everyone will fall back into a cascade of LGTMs.

This sucks, right. I want to believe in the narrative of the little guy who took on the system and won. I want to be the Katniss Everdeen of organizational culture change, which is both possible and a normal thing to want.

And the thing is, once in a while, it does work. Once in a while the stars align, and the right person has the right kind of relationships and political capital and is willing to throw themselves on the pyre over and over again, and once in a while they get through. And so it’s tempting to think that that’s the way to go, because we have control over our individual effort in a way that we have control over very little else. But I don’t think that’s a scalable strategy, because the odds of success are so low and the risks are so high.

That’s the bad news. The good news is two-fold. One is that there are many different scopes for thinking about culture: at the project level, the team level, the office level, the division level. As an IC you may not be able to change what your entire company is like, but you do still have a lot of influence over your corner of the org, and carving out one corner of safety is absolutely not nothing.

The second bit of good news is that, in my experience, often leadership does know that there’s a problem, and they seem like they’re ignoring it not because they don’t care but because they have no idea what to do. And so, suggestions might be welcome! Sustaining culture change without leadership support is improbable, but enlisting leadership support for culture change isn’t. Talk to other ICs and gather consensus and bring your concerns and suggestions as a group. If you get dismissed, well, that’s honestly also pretty revealing about what your leadership actually values.

That said, this is exactly the kind of unpaid glue work that can be a huge strain for the people taking it on. It’s also work that often falls to marginalized employees, because for them it can be a matter of surviving in the organization. It’s deeply unfair that most organizations don’t reward this work, that you have less time to ship shiny features that get promotions if you’re fixing the culture. It is a thankless role, and I’m not saying you should volunteer as tribute. But if you have to do it, whether out of necessity or because you can’t help yourself, let’s find you friends in high places who can help.

Okay. Step three of culture change is to make reflecting on your values part of your regular rituals, the quarterly kick-off and the annual planning and the hiring plans and the performance evals.

You’re not going to adhere to your values perfectly, and that’s okay, but build a habit of reflecting on them. It’s easy to lose sight of how values start to drift amidst the chaos of running a business and brush it off as not being urgent enough to prioritize. so make it part of the norm of running the business.

You can never be fully values-aligned, and probably shouldn’t be. Your values are not your coworker’s values are not your manager’s values are not your CEO’s values, no matter how much they overlap. That tension is healthy, because values themselves are imperfect too, and dogmatic adherence to anything closes you off from learning. The important thing is to regularly negotiate and navigate that tension to make sure you as a group haven’t strayed too far from each other.

Now. A prerequisite for all of these steps is that you need to figure out how to solicit and listen to feedback.

The thing I would love for all leaders to recognize is that the expected return of going to leadership with negative feedback is terrible. Risk alienating your boss for the sake of telling the truth? Why? Even if you’re not directly retaliated against, and people often are, it can still really damage your standing. If you speak up too often, you’re branded as the naysayer. If you’re part of a marginalized group raising issues about how marginalized people are treated, you’re tarred as being “political” or “biased”. And of course, most of the time the canaries in the cultural coal mine are the marginalized employees with the least standing, because they’re the ones with the least protection when the cracks start to show.

If someone is speaking up despite all that, they’re speaking up because they genuinely want to help the organization get better. That means you have to learn how to hear the message even if it’s being delivered imperfectly, even angrily, by someone who feels hurt.

I’ve been part of several organizations that had leadership AMAs, and at each one of them, there were periods of time when the questions got kind of rude and mean. The organizations were struggling through a lot of rupture and change, and the people were struggling too. In each instance, the organization responded by reducing AMAs and imposing restrictions.

Now, I don’t even necessarily think that was in and of itself the wrong response; not all venues are suitable for all forms of feedback, and it’s definitely possible to accidentally amplify negativity in an unproductive way. But in none of the situations was it ever acknowledged that these grievances didn’t just spring into being fully formed one day. They were the culmination of people having tried to raise the alarm elsewhere over and over again and being ignored, and that frustration was now boiling over. Instead of recognizing that, there was a lecture about tone and civility, things moved on, the hurt festered, and people left.

One of the key skills leaders need in these situations is to recognize when they themselves are feeling defensive because they’re feeling cornered or attacked. This is so they can choose to not react in the moment. The power differential between leadership and ICs means that when leaders lash out it’s not just a momentary conflict, it’s a signal that this is not a safe place to provide feedback. Your team learns from that. When confronted with a tough piece of feedback, you don’t need to have an answer or solution in the moment. You do need to have the emotional awareness to acknowledge the risk your team took in giving you that feedback, appreciate that it was difficult to do, and take accountability for following up with a response once you’ve had time to reflect.

Again, go to therapy.

My final thought is this. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about values in the workplace, because whether I like it or not work is a huge part of our lives. Work doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the dynamics at work are microcosms of broader social patterns. And for me, at least, work feels like a place where I actually have a little bit of agency to effect change.

I said at the beginning that culture is the norms and values of a community. Thankfully we’re mostly past the collective delusion that work is family, but a workplace is still made up of people, and it is still a community of relationships.

This community can also be a network of care if you let it.

One thing that I find comfort in when I’m struggling with burnout from mismatched values, is stepping back from the fight with the institution and finding ways to invest in my coworkers instead. Changing the culture of an organization is really difficult, even with leadership buy-in. We can’t always change the conditions at work. But we can find joy in lifting each other up, in being supportive, in sharing triumphs and solidarity and, of course, so many memes.

The thing about values is that they are prescriptions of what you find good in the world, and what you will fight to preserve and advance. Whether you have those fights at work or beyond, your relationships will form the basis of change. Your culture is the water you swim in, and if you don’t actively, intentionally tend to it, you may not like what grows in the deep. Neglecting the role of values in your culture makes it harder to see when things start to fray, and these tears will continue to pull and rip in the dark until it’s too late to repair them. It is well worth doing the work to bring them out into the light.

Many thanks, as always, to my incredibly generous community of friends and colleagues who provided feedback. I do not have a lot of experience giving talks and had a lot of trouble putting this one together, and literally over a dozen people helped me along the way. You are all wonderful.

here we go again

2024-11-06T17:00:00-05:00

I feel objectively worse than I did in 2016. We have so much more information about how bad things are going to get now, and the fascists have had eight more years to prepare for how to roll out cruelty en masse on day one. We have so much less slack in ameliorating the worst impacts of climate change, after yet another eight years of inaction. I’m terrified.

I also feel much less destabilized and paralyzed by my fear than I did in 2016. Part of it is that I’m eight years older and more resilient than I was. A bigger part is that the past eight years have more or less entirely eroded any lingering trust I still had in our institutions. This isn’t to say that we don’t hold our institutions to account. It is simply to say that they cannot be relied on. They are the tools we wield, not the shields we hide behind. The only care we have is the care we provide each other; that was true on Tuesday morning and it is still true now. The work is still here.

I’ve realized that the thing that burned me out so hard last time writing a daily newsletter keeping up on everything that was going wrong is the thing that I actively deplore in modern life: scale. I wanted to have a big impact, I wanted to reach a lot of people and change hearts and minds and push them to act. But as much as my work may have been momentarily soothing or galvanizing for people who largely already agreed with me, it stretched me incredibly thin, didn’t actually move the needle, and most importantly, didn’t build community. It is an amateur mistake to want your efforts to scale before your efforts have done anything at all. It is hubris to think one person changes anything by themselves. If this were an engineering problem I would have known to throw it out for premature optimization. All engineering problems are, at their heart, social problems.

Scale and unchecked growth ruin things. A lot of effort, both technical and social, is spent on trying to figure out how to prevent the dehumanizing effects of scale. Not a lot of effort is spent on unlearning the desire for scale. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, I am not thinking clearly enough for that. But wherever my searching takes me I’m pretty sure it’s going to be something small, something local, something with my neighbours, something offline. Start with a thing I can actually influence in my immediate geographical surroundings, and find others who have already been doing this work and show up to help.

This feels entirely irrational to say because the fascists are so good at scale. They radicalize at scale, enact control at scale, mete out violence at scale. They have the techno-oligarchs on their side, the surveillance apparatuses that seem increasingly inescapable. But there’s a little voice inside of me that says that this is precisely why we have to start small, because what else is left to trust but the things we say to one another’s face, without the disintermediation of technology? How else do we build the competing centers of power to move towards a better world except by seeing where our small personal loci of power lie and putting them together, with care and joy and compassion? If we protect even one person from the fascists, is that not an entire world?

I could very well be wrong. I’ve been wrong before and will continue to be wrong in the future. This is simply the bet I am making for today, this week, this year. You might have a different theory of change than me, which is wonderful, too. Fascism is a many-headed beast and we will need a diversity of tactics to fight it. The only thing we cannot indulge in is resignation and despair. Do not obey in advance. Do not give up in advance.

I know the stakes seem impossibly high, like the death tolls of the genocides our governments fund against our will and the gauges of our themermoters and the levels of our seas. I’m not saying everything will be okay. Many people won’t be. But the stakes have always been high, and we have always only had each other, whether we were aware of it or not. We still do.

modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics

2024-11-05T16:10:00-05:00

Omnivore is a read-later app. You know, one of those things that lets you save interesting articles you encounter throughout the day and the service will go crawl the page and download the content in a nice readable format and zap it to whatever device you wanted to zap it to, so that later when you’re not anxiously toggling between the same seven feed aggregators for fifteen seconds at a time, like maybe you’re waiting in line in the grocery store and you can’t do the NYT mini because they’re on strike and you don’t cross picket lines and god forbid you have a single second of mental silence, you can open the app and begrudgingly educate yourself on something that you alleged wanted to learn about at some point in time.

I’ve been using and ignoring read-later apps since the launch of Instapaper in 2008, because precocious little dorks who cry when they realize that they will never read all the books in the world grow up to be weary adults who transfer that Sisyphean energy to hoarding thought-provoking New Yorker longreads they will also never have time to read. Omnivore was different than the apps I had previously been using though, because it could also handle RSS feeds and gave me an email to forward newsletters to, which means that in addition to whatever ten thousand word essay about web components that I was guiltily neglecting in favour of playing Threes for the fifteen-millionth time, it could also collect all the emails and blogs I keep meaning to get around. All my informational FOMO concentrated in one area, and I get less shit in my inbox? Win-win.

I moved all my digital crap over to Omnivore on July 27th, 2024. I know this because I ran into a glitch with the import tool and had to contact the developers, so it was timestamped. On October 29th, Omnivore announced that it had been acquired by an AI company and would be shutting down on November 14th: you’ve got two weeks to get your shit out or we’re deleting the whole thing. (In their infinite magnanimity they’ve since expanded the grace period to November 30th.)

I don’t know why this specific thing is the thing that got to me but I am fucking furious. I was on Omnivore for all of three lousy months! For various professional and personal reasons I will not go into here, these have been among the most stressful three months of my entire goddamn life, I have not felt like I could catch my breath for at least six weeks, on top of which we’re all treading water like deranged ducks trying to stave off the terror of what will be swept up in the deluge when empires fall, and now you’re fucking telling me I have fifteen days to find another goddamn solution for keeping my little bits of text corralled?? We live in this godforsaken information ecosystem where more data than our puny little brains can handle in a lifetime bombard us every nanosecond, an increasing amount of it being spat out by Tormentus Scrapus™ sponsored by OpenAI and the devaluation of all creative labour, and trying to be a conscientious and thoughtful consumer of information is exhausting, not letting your entire capacity for critical thought be suborned by cascading skinner boxes of shitty incentives and UI anti-patterns takes active fucking effort, and I am trying so hard to click “reject all” on every metaphorical cookie banner in my life, and now this??

Yeah, yeah, I should’ve known better than to trust Omnivore when I found out that they didn’t have a premium option and didn’t even really have it on their roadmap to build one, because of course that is not a sustainable business model and was inevitably going to bite me in the ass. But you know what, I shouldn’t have to understand the business models of every little icon on my stupid pocket supercomputer to get through life! Why am I reading books on VC funding just to figure out what parts of my digital life will inevitably decay when the money guys get their hands on it?? And don’t tell me about enshittification, that is a thought-terminating cliche that does not actually perform useful or interesting analysis and is little more than the new “just use linux” of annoying Fediverse reply guys.

The only reason I even moved to Omnivore is because Mozilla has been systematically neglecting and underfunding Pocket for years and the app is increasingly dominated by things I did not save, the literal one job it had, and I had moved to Pocket after Instapaper first changed ownership in 2013 or whatever and I didn’t like the new owners, and I also can’t go back to Pinboard because while I used to love that dude’s writing he’s turning into a transphobic crank so fuck that, but like, why do I even know that?? Why do I know what the owner of my bookmarking service thinks?? Why do I know that that one 37signals guy is a creep and a nasty weirdo which is why I will never pay for their email service which otherwise seems pretty cool, why do I know that Brave is the homophobic browser in bed with cryptocurrency bros, why do I know that the Kagi dude thinks adding suicide prevention hotlines to search results for “how to kill yourself” is censorship, why do I know about Mr. John Wordpress’s entire extended midlife meltdown?? The modern world is unbelievably stupid, and if you don’t pay attention to the stupidity then when something bad happens someone shows up in your notifications all like, well what did you expect. I expect you to fuck off!!

One of the other options Omniverse suggests for moving off of its service is self-hosting, which is akin to telling me to go fuck myself. Self-hosting is great if your hobby is self-hosting things. Mine is not. My hobbies are reading things and drawing things and sewing things and climbing up things and feeling guilty about not writing enough things. I very much appreciate that I know how to computer well enough that I could self-host if I had to, could go fork some abandoned Obsidian plugin that hasn’t been updated in 3 years to try and make yet another rotting part of my digital ecosystem rot a little bit less slowly, but that is a terrible use of my time. I already host my own Fediverse server, if by host you mean pay someone in Europe a bunch of money to host it for me and all I have to do is ban some assholes occasionally, because at the moment I have more money than I have time and I simply do not wish to spend my one wild and precious life learning how to configure goddamn Sidekiq to optimize background processing queues just so I can offer my friends a refuge from the dillweed who turned Twitter into a Nazi bar.

Also, you know what people never talk about when they talk about self-hosting? A succession plan. If I suddenly died I don’t have any provisions for making sure the people relying on my little Hometown server aren’t suddenly left up a creek without a paddle. I am not going to host a read-later service just for myself because that would be an incredibly inefficient use of time and resources even if I did have the time and inclination to do so, but I am also not going to host anything else for my friends until I figure out what contingency plans look like. It’s on my list of things to figure out for my will, which is a very long list. This long list sits on another very long list of life TODOs that I never seem to get around to. I have wanted to figure out my will for approximately eight years, and I know that because that is how long ago I got married and we were like “ha ha we should do that soon” and then simply never did. Because life is so complicated, my guy.

I’m 35. I have loved being in my 30s, even if it largely did not look like the way I expected it to look. Being in my 30s has been so much better than being in my 20s in basically every way, with the exception that I am so much more tired now. I used to take redeye flights when I came back to the east coast from San Francisco and work a whole normal day the next day and I simply cannot do that anymore, my body will mutiny. Every way I turn I am having to scale back on my ambitions of what I can accomplish. I am simply not going to be able to maintain a suite of healthy and fulfilling friendships and nurture a loving marriage and raise a teenager I wasn’t expecting to raise and be great at all of my hobbies while also participating in direct action mutual aid and harassing my elected representatives for being shitheel cowards and working a full-time job and keeping up with new frontend frameworks in my spare time and I guess learning Rust because apparently that is the thing that will optimize my employability once AI has eaten my corner of the software world. I do not have enough time in the day. No one has enough time in the day! The thing about getting older is that it is a process of accumulation, you accumulate people and stuff and responsibilities and moral obligations, and you can only Marie Kondo yourself out of so much of it. My dentist gets on me about flossing and I want to be like, motherfucker when? I know it’s only a couple of minutes a day but do you know how few minutes we all have?? Did you know the earth is going up in flames??? And you want me to FLOSS???? And host my own read-later service????? Why is this the reality we live in?????? Butlerian jihad when???????

I don’t have a conclusion. I’m just mad, and it’s the day of the American goddamn election, and I needed to be mad at something other than politics for a couple of hours and maybe this will entertain you for a couple of minutes. I hope you’re doing as well as can be expected, and taking care of yourself, except if you’re a Trump supporter, in which case I hope you fall off a cliff, TIA.

leadership

2022-11-11T14:40:00-05:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, for no reason at all connected to the news or the state of social media or the way we’ve constructed an economic sytem that allows petulant man-children to set billions of dollars on metaphorical fire because strangers on the internet made fun of him while simultaneously pretending that homelessness is an intractable inevitability that can only be solved by brutalizing the unhoused rather than taking away those billions of dollars from aforementioned megalomaniacs.

Sorry, where was I.

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, and I’m starting to think that the single most important trait of a good leader is the ability to listen to someone who has less power than you do about the ways in which you’ve fucked up.

I realize it’s folly to distill anything as complex as leadership down to a single dimension, which is definitely not going to stop me. The literature on leadership can and has filled many an underused MBA library. I won’t pretend to have read more than half a dozen of these because business psychology books give me hives, but I did go to business school and I have been forced to sit through many an anodyne TED talk in the name of professional development, so I feel somewhat qualified to pontificate on this.

There are lots of parameters you can use to gauge someone’s effectiveness as a leader. These might include whether they inspire, whether they communicate well, whether they raise up those around them, whether they can shift between strategic and tactical thinking, whether they understand how to measure success, whether they have the executive capacity to be decisive about the right things, whether they have the courage to take risks, or any number of other impressive-sounding traits.

Different ventures will need more or less of each of these things from its leaders. But sooner or later, a leader will fuck up. Leaders are only human, and humans fuck up all the time, and the fuck-ups of leaders are proportionately that much more impactful given their structural power.

It is unreasonable and unfair to expect a leader not to make mistakes. It is, however, extremely fair to expect a leader to own up to those mistakes when they happen and to take steps to correct those mistakes. I don’t care how well you practice the tenets of servant leadership if you can’t admit when you’ve picked the wrong person to empower, or how good you are at being strategic if you’re oblivious to signals that the execution of that strategy is harming people¹.

The structure of leadership makes it difficult for you to receive high quality signals about your performance, particularly if you’re someone with significant privilege. As you advance in any given hierarchy, the people around you are more likely to look and think like you and less likely to feel the impact of any harm you cause. As you advance, the likelihood that your good opinion can improve someone’s life increases, and the incentive to risk that good opinion for the sake of telling the truth decreases. The higher up you climb, the more it takes active, daily effort to seek out the truthtellers among those you lead and to open yourself to their critiques.

If you can’t remember the last time a subordinate told you to your face that you did something wrong, it’s probably time to check to see whether you’ve surrounded yourself only with people who tell you what you want to hear. If you always have a perfectly rational reason (smart people are great at rationalizing) for why someone isn’t worth listening to, remember that the expected return of critiquing someone with power over you is generally pretty terrible, and people who do so are generally trying to help, so it’s probably time to try a little curiosity rather than immediately dismissing them. If you can’t remember ever being wrong at all, it’s probably time to—I don’t know—go to therapy or something and figure out why the prospect of admitting fault feels so threatening to your ego that you would rather run an organization aground than feel the slightest loss of pride.

Otherwise you lose all sense of perspective and end up buying a social media website in the hopes of gaining the approval of a bunch of white supremacists only for everyone on that platform to unite for the first time in sixteen years to cyberbully you.

Well, probably not that, specifically. But we all have our Twitter.

Assuming harming people wasn’t the goal. If it was, we have different issues to talk about. ↩

labour of love

2022-10-18T06:24:00-04:00

The concept of “work” is a Rorschach test, an inkblot that you can project pretty much anything onto. There are definitions that speak of a meaningless Sisyphean grind inside an oppressive and cruel economic system designed to extract the maximum possible short-term value from all its constituent parts. There are also definitions that evoke the sincere joy of putting care and attention toward something worth nurturing, and shepherding its growth through consistent, deliberate effort. Your definition of work probably says more about you than the actual concept itself.

I love work, by which I mean I love the feeling of focusing my energy toward a particular goal and watching the nebulous mist between here and there slowly thin to reveal wobbly, winding stepping stones. I love the satisfaction of a certain type of exhaustion that comes from having pitted my brain and my hands against a problem and found myself a little closer to who I want to be.

Unfortunately, the work that most of us spend the bulk of our days on is not work that fills up our self-actualization tank. Mostly, we work at a job to make money so we can pay for a place to sleep and food to eat. We work to prove that we deserve to live.

If you’re really lucky, the work you do for money is work you can find stimulation and joy in. It might even be work you love. But whatever emotion you pour into your job, you pour into an institution that’s incapable of reciprocation. You will only ever be a line on a balance sheet, part of the cost of goods sold, a capital investment into research and development. Even if you work for yourself, you only get to keep working as long as someone is buying the product or promise that you’re selling, and when you need to be cut to make some arbitrary numbers make sense, you will be. Some organizations will do it more harshly or gently than others, but the cut still inevitably knifes into the life you thought you had.

This callousness is especially painful if you work for an organization that professes to have values that align with yours and fails to live up to them. The moral injury of being betrayed by your leaders can be deeply distressing, and people often feel guilt, shame, and anger in its aftermath for having trusted someone or something untrustworthy, or for not having seen this coming and done more to prevent it. Civil rights groups hire predatory law firms to bust unions, anti-racist organizations exploit Black and Indigenous communities, champions of open source software get in bed with notorious monopolists when the money is right, and the people who joined those organizations for a cause are left wondering when exactly the paradigm shifted.

Your job won’t love you back, no matter what love you give it. But the people you work with will. Organizations know this, and the worst among them actively exploit the bonds between colleagues to extract more labour, correctly assuming that you’re more willing to tolerate bad work conditions to protect your friends. Luckily, the strength of your bonds doesn’t only serve profit and productivity; it can also be harnessed for genuine solidarity. Labour organizing is most urgently about material conditions, about safe working environments and pay equity and adequate workloads and time for rest, but at its core it is also an expression of your collective morality: how should people be treated?

Moral injuries require moral remedies, and there are so few sites for structured conversations about morality outside of organized religion or academia. Despite its imperfections, labour organizing is an organization’s best shot at such a remedy. The work of organizing can be hard and dispiriting and exhausting. You’re asked to articulate your values and to advocate for them in a way that few of us are called upon to do, and there is inevitably going to be conflict as you struggle to avoid recreating the same power structures you’re fighting against. The work can also be invigorating and inspiring, as you band together and demand the power that will let you shape your organization into an space where everyone is treated fairly. It is, I think, the best form of love you can show your coworkers.

Sometimes I think that all that love is, at its core, is a willingness to do the work. When people say “love is not enough” they mean “the emotion of love is not enough to sustain a relationship”, and of course it isn’t. The emotion cannot lift you in and out of the bathtub when you injure yourself, drive across the country with you for the sake of your dream, wrestle with hex wrenches to put together flatpack furniture for the umpteenth time. Which isn’t at all to discount the emotion: the emotion is what makes the work joyful when it’s easy and bearable when it’s hard, what makes mishaps feel like adventure and sacrifices feel like gifts. It’s even what recognizes when letting go is the better choice. But the fuel that powers the emotion after its initial ignition is the work of showing up.

Love, too, is an inkblot test, and I’m sure this definition of love tells you much more about me than I intend it to. I’ve been told that defining love by its precondition of work is bleak, but I don’t actually think it is. What better thing is there to put your work into if not love? Unyoking your love from your job—fundamentally an economic transaction—frees you up to put work into your relationships and your community, inside the workplace and out. It also, crucially, frees you up to put work into loving and caring for yourself, and pursuing the things that make you more of who you are.

The reward for this work won’t show up in a payroll ledger or get counted in the GDP, but the reciprocity of a family or a community or a planet that loves one another, and that is willing to show up to do the work, is sustaining in a way money alone cannot be. This kind of work is nothing less than an expression of optimism that what you love can and will flourish.

My generation and the next, allegedly, do not dream of labour. But labour was never the problem. The problem has always been the alienation and exploitation of labourers, the unequal burdens we are asked to carry for scraps. And while I understand, truly and deeply, the appeal of withdrawing your labour entirely in the face of this injustice, let that withdrawal be purposeful and targeted rather than nihilistic. After all, successful strikes take an enormous amount of work to organize.

As my husband is apt to remind me when I’m busy feeling sorry for myself, nothing worth having comes without commensurate effort. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some entirely unscientific cosmic law of conservation of energy that dictates this. Even things like the lottery, where someone might spend $1 on a ticket and walk away with millions, are reflective of the effort of the millions of people who each put $1 toward the pool. The work still happened even when it didn’t come from the person who reaped the reward, which is incidentally also how billionaires are spawned.

Even in a socialist utopia, someone has to harvest the crops and someone has to clean the bathroom. Refusing this work isn’t revolutionary, it’s libertarian. Many a commune has fallen apart because people forget that retreating from society doesn’t obviate the need for the dishes to be done. (That, and because few people have actually done the work to unlearn the ways in which they instinctively uphold hegemony, but that’s an entirely separate essay.) Stocking a mutual aid fridge is work. Distributing meals to your neighbours is work. Loving this planet enough to fight against the man-made systems that harm us all, instead of retreating, is the hardest work there is.

If you’ve always been sure you don’t want kids (which I have) and if you don’t believe in god or an afterlife (which I don’t), there’s not a lot of readily available answers to the question of what the meaning of life is. The only answer I’ve been able to come up with for myself is this: to ensure that my presence on this earth makes it better than if I hadn’t lived at all. Whether or not I’ll have managed to achieve that is an unknowable calculation. All I can do is try to love this stupid, cruel, wonderful, gorgeous world I’ve been given through an accident of entropy, and hope that I can give it a better than equivalent exchange.

They say that people on their deathbeds never wish they had spent more time working. I certainly believe that no one wishes, in the moments before death, that they had spent more time at the office earning a wage. But when I think about what would be weighing on my mind if I knew today were my last day to live, I suspect I’ll mostly wonder whether I’ve done enough work.

My deepest thanks to Kat, Ethan, and Jamie for reading several early drafts and providing invaluable feedback and advice.

unoriginal

2022-07-08T11:45:00-04:00

Sometimes it feels like there’s no point to writing unless I have a competely original idea. This is an impossibly high bar to clear—there aren’t no original thoughts left, but they are exceedingly rare. Often I’ll discover while researching that the core of my idea showed up in three thinkpieces within the last two weeks alone, or more likely that Ursula Franklin already figured it all out the year I was born. This mainly means that I’m not immune to the zeitgeist and that no one is immune to Ursula Franklin, but in the moment it always feels like my words are derivative and pointless.

I don’t really have a good answer for why I prize originality above all else, above craft and emotion and consistency, other than ego. Some small part of me still believes in my weakest moments that words are enough to change things, and I want to be the one to find those words.

Of course, that’s not how change actually happens, even with truly revolutionary ideas (and I certainly don’t pretend to have any of those). It’s not like there can be one perfectly constructed essay that will stir hearts and minds and everyone will applaud and think to themselves how cool and smart and pretty the author is before they sally forth to implement her policies. Ideas take careful stewardship and tireless repetition over decades or even centuries to catch on and spur people into action. If I want the things I believe in to flourish, then being one refrain in the chorus matters even if I didn’t compose the song.

Dominant western forms of storytelling don’t do a great job of portraying that kind of collective sensemaking. Most of the stories we’re told from a young age feature one person or a small group of people who made the difference, one act of bravery we’re meant to emulate. This narrative bias is a barrier to progressive social change: it’s easy to become demoralized when individual effort doesn’t have the seismic impact it does in our stories, much harder to keep faith in the immense and diffuse work required to organize and sustain a movement in the real world.

My preoccupation with originality is part of that same problem. Ultimately, I suspect I care about being original because I want to stand out from the crowd, which is the opposite of the politics I try to practice. I believe that individual snowflakes can add up to an avalanche, but that means I have to be okay with being one speck of crystallized ice amongst billions. At least it’ll still be pretty.

a meta note

2022-07-04T13:57:00-04:00

At any given point in my life I’ve wanted to be spending more time writing. This includes the tween years in which I wrote and published fanfiction every afternoon after school, undergrad when I studiously scheduled three blog posts a week despite having very little of substance to say, and that year and a half when I ran a daily newsletter that took over my life.

I’m very happy I chose not to pursue writing as a career. I’m very happy with the career that I do have, and I’m very glad that I get to keep writing for no reason other than to write. I have never pitched a publication not because I think my words are in any way precious (I desperately need an editor) but because I didn’t want to worry about anything other than the writing. I can afford not to think about the profit incentives of publishing or the imagined audience of an institution, and so I don’t.

Writing as just a hobby, though, means that I’ve never figured out how to carve out a satisfying amount of time for it. It was a thing I did for myself, which means I could always find a reason why it wasn’t as important as something else I needed to do for someone else. And because writing time was scarce, I didn’t want to spend any of it frivolously, working through anything other than Deep Ideas I’ve already been chewing on in my head for months.

I like that my thoughts come slowly. I think the writing I produce when I’m using it to figure out what I think is leagues better than the writing I do when I’m broadcasting conclusions. But it does mean that there are lots of subjects I want to explore that I discard because they’re not worth 3,000 words wrung out over 8 months, and while that’s not exactly a loss to the world I do think that prevents me from growing as a writer.

Essentially, inside me there are two wolves. One knows that the only way to get better at writing is to write more, and the other doesn’t ever want to publish anything I haven’t obsessively thought through for half a year. The second one has anxiety and should not be listened to, which is to say that I’m going to try and write more short things that may not be fully formed. Please do not yell at the anxious wolf.