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Hey CZ

Hey, I'm Cory, a writer (and other things, probably). Check out my newsletter – Design Your Zen.

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    Love the world anyway

    The world isn’t exactly lovable at the moment. Still, there are still things that are worth our time. One of them is Anand Giridharadas’s interview with Ann Heberlein. Heberlein wrote a new biography of Hannah Arendt, the wonderful political philosopher that everyone fully intends to read at some point (myself included). Anand and Ann touched on everything from evil to forgiveness to love.

    They, of course, touched on everything happening in the US right now. Heberlein summarised Trump’s talent for mobilising the masses well:

    [Donald Trump] has been exceptionally good at speaking to what Nietszche called “ressentiment,” that is, a feeling of inferiority and powerlessness, of being forgotten, despised, and invisible. ​

    The ressentiment creates hatred. Hatred towards those who are considered to be part of some kind of establishment and hatred because of perceived or real historical wrongdoing. All totalitarian movements in history, such as fascism or communism, have addressed that kind of ressentiment, and every kind of totalitarian movement in the future will do the same, regardless of political color. Despite the fact that Trump belongs in every sense of the word to the establishment — he owns economic assets; he enjoys political power and has the capacity to shape the image of our common reality — he has allied himself with the ressentiment-driven fractions of society. ​

    A dictatorship is not created overnight. A genocide or a civil war does not arise out of thin air. It requires preparation in the form of lies, propaganda, and a conscious division into “us and them,” belonging and non-belonging.

    The painful thing about this is that, despite the danger and the anxiety, we need to find ways to love the world in which we live:

    [Arendt] believes that it is a duty to love the world. Amor mundi, “love of the world,” means caring for life so that it can continue to exist. We must be able to love the world as it is, in all its brokenness and imperfection. To achieve that requires hope, hope that change is possible, hope for the future. ​

    Hope is necessary. Without hope, without the ability to imagine a life beyond its present circumstances, a person may be prone to give up. But someone who has the ability to embrace that hope may have a capacity to survive atrocities and inhumanity.

    I read a cute, albeit depressing, comic on Twitter this morning. A pastel stegosaurus laments its ability to imagine the world being crushed by a giant rock vs its inability to imagine the world becoming a “fairer, kinder place”.

    And, you know, same. Sometimes. But it’s always going to be easier to imagine some random, catastrophic event because they don’t require any effort on our part. One day, a meteor just hits us and bam, no more world. The world becoming fairer, kinder, better calls for a lot of work on all our parts. That calls for hope and it calls for love.

    Love and hope are choices. You wake up every day and rededicate yourself to both. And you try and build reasons to do it again tomorrow.

    ∞

    You don’t get to be anti-murder but pro-stabbing

    It’s been a few days since terrorists stormed the US Capitol building but it’s hard to believe it’s over. And there’s good reason for that. Rusty Foster argued as much in her excellent newsletter Today in Tabs:

    My advice is: prepare yourself. This isn’t over. Democracy didn’t win yesterday. A mob interrupted the transfer of political power, made a lot of social media content, then went home with no consequences. After the mob voluntarily released the Capitol back to the legitimate government, over 50% of the Republican House delegation voted in support of their goals. Trump still occupies the White House. The House and Senate have adjourned until after the inauguration. This isn’t over.

    Everything that happened in the Capitol sticks in your mind but this is what I keep coming back to:

    After the mob voluntarily released the Capitol back to the legitimate government, over 50% of the Republican House delegation voted in support of their goals.

    That’s incredible. People will (disingenuously) try and argue that Republicans did it the right way — by voting. But, the reality is, political leaders have systematically undermined democratic processes, turned rival politicians (and the system itself) into enemies to be destroyed, and let loose with countless dog whistles to wink-wink-nudge-nudge get violent.1

    The state has long held a monopoly on violence through things like the police and the military. Republicans have torn down the state and, rhetorically speaking, claimed the power of violence itself. It’s no wonder that it was then turned onto the physical manifestation of the state. Violence is justified in retrospect: a successful rebellion turns its perpetrators into heroic freedom fighters.2 They only become terrorists in defeat. You can’t disavow them while also supporting their goals.

    You don’t get to be anti-murder but pro-stabbing.

    1. And that’s ignoring the fact that Trump himself literally tear-gassed innocent people for a photo op and threaten Black Lives Matter protesters with violence. ↩︎

    2. Paraphrasing my intelligent and insightful partner here. ↩︎

    ∞

    Trump’s “political genius”

    Everything that has happened and will happen in the US capital stems from Donald Trump. That’s not controversial. He stoked fury and that fury turned to action, as fury so often does.

    (In this case, that action was openly planned for weeks and yet nothing was done about it. Wonder why.)

    It speaks to something Trump is incredibly good at. Unfortunately, that something is one that liberals and progressives have long found it hard to stop. Here’s journalist Isobel Hilton, talking about Trump and his supporters on Monocle 24’s fantastic Foreign Desk podcast:

    That’s his political genius. He keeps politics in a state of radical indecision because nothing is settled. It can’t move on. And his supporters are stuck in anger and denial and that is extremely destabilising. I think we’ve learned in the past four years that this is a mode of political operation that liberals find very hard to counter. If you’re faced with strong feelings based on lies, it’s very difficult to make an argument against that if you’re operating within, if you like, the norms of reality. And I don’t think that’s going to go away. And it’s going to bedevil certainly US politics, with a contagion around the world for some time.

    It isn’t something new in US politics: it wasn’t so long ago that the US and a few eager allies jumped into Iraq, missiles blazing, for a disastrous war they justified with a lie. A whole lot of people on both sides of politics where all for it and dissenters had a hard time mounting a case against, again, a straight-up fabrication. Conservatives have been a lot better at framing debates for a long time and, for whatever reason, the mainstream Left has been eager to play along.1

    That said, this dabbling with unreality has reached it’s zenith (or nadir; both work) in the West with Trump. And it’s not going anywhere. It works too well. Liberals and progressives need to figure out how they’re going to counter it when Trump, or the next Trump, pushes things even further.

    1. Nor is Trump’s brand of genius novel on the world stage. Strongmen types who peddle unreality abound throughout time and across the globe so it would be a mistake to think that this is a US-centric problem (American exceptionalism be damned). ↩︎

    ∞

    A long list of short thoughts about movies I've seen this year (2020)

    I miss the cinema. Deep seats, popcorn, an overpriced bottle of water. That particular sound of a gaggle of people chattering that’s both indistinct but entirely itself that slowly fades out as the lights dim. Group gasps and laughs. Full house or dozens of empty seats. Going to see a film in the middle of the day and being confused, genuinely confused, when you leave and there’s still daylight. I miss it all.

    2020 wasn’t a year for cinemas but it was still a year for movies. Here’s every one I watched (and 2019’s entry).

    Parasite was brilliant.

    The Lighthouse unsettling but strangely compelling and I have a newfound respect for seagulls.

    The Peanut Butter Falcon was so twee it hurt (in a good way). I almost like Shia LeBeouf now.

    The Host is surprisingly funny (in a dark way) and a great monster movie.

    Drunken Master is worth watching just to see what Chan put himself through (even though his character is basically just an asshole all the time).

    The Raid has a kill in it I’ve been thinking about for years. It was just as affecting the second time around.

    Clue was a lot more fun than I expected.

    Godzilla: King of the Monsters held up to a second viewing.

    Igby Goes Down was my favourite movie as a teen. It holds up 10+ years later.

    The Invisible Man was legitimately unnerving. I’ll now watch anything with Elisabeth Moss in it.

    Tampopo may have given me a food fetish?

    Megamind has an inexplicably good soundtrack.

    The Princess Bride was a real hole in my list of movies I’d seen. And it was good.

    Birds Of Prey is fun, charming, compelling, and legitimately underrated. Beats out Wonder Woman as a the best DC movie I’ve seen in a long time.

    Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is beautiful and engrossing.

    Knives Out is a bunch of really talented people having a lot of fun. Especially the set designer.

    Eighth Grade is a straight-up punch to the heart.

    Booksmart is fantastic “high-schoolers-try-to-party” movies. Lotta laughs, lotta heart.

    Can You Ever Forgive Me? exceeded all my expectations.

    Zombieland: Double Tap was disappointingly bland.

    Creed is another reason to love Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler.

    Creed II wasn’t as good as the first one but still great.

    High Flying Bird is a basketball movie my partner actually enjoyed.

    Attack the Block has a great cast (John Boyega is fantastic), great monster design, mix of sci-fi/comedy/social commentary, and the best slang going. Allow it.

    Princess Mononoke is a beautiful, multi-layered movie. Watching it unfurl is a joy.

    Crawl was so well constructed engineers should study it.

    You’re Next has one of my favourite leads in a slasher.

    Alien is so confident it’s intimidating.

    Aliens takes everything great about Alien and genre shifts it.

    Porco Rosso was probably made just so Miyazaki could paint clouds (and it works beautifully).

    Jennifer’s Body is uneven but does a lot of things well (and I can see why it’s a cult classic).

    Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was more fun than I expected.

    The Thing is fantastic. A real masterclass in pace, atmosphere, and body horror.

    John Wick slaps. It might be my least favourite of the three Wick movies in terms of action but it has the tightest story and the best subtle world building.

    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse does all the big and little things perfectly.

    ∞

    The iOS Photos widget makes your home screen feel like home

    Look at the photos on my phone and you’ll find the following: fleeting moments of beauty captured well, fleeting moments of beauty missed, and fleeting moments of beauty captured yet out of focus. You’ll see the big things I never want to forget and small things happening in one room that I wanted to show my partner in another room (which we both promptly forgot). You can scroll by countless holiday snaps and yet more attempts to capture the perfect sunrise with varying results with a flick of your thumb. There are so many photos of my cat, Tim, that a family member once described him, with complete sincerity, as the most “well documented” pet she had ever come across.

    My photos app, in brief, provides a view into some of the brightest moments in my life. It reveals the things I found interesting, the things I thought worthwhile, and people I love. The app collapses years of my life into a few rows of images, easily digestible. And it rarely gets opened.

    All of those pictures are for naught if they’re never seen. Thankfully, iOS 14’s Photos app widget is changing that.

    The challenge of remembering

    The details may differ but chances are you rarely look at your photos as well. How many great moments are buried within the depths of your recent photos?

    Every now and then I decide to unearth some of those moments. I square my shoulders, cast my eyes over my digital horizons, and declare that I, cory zanoni, while get my photographic shit together. And, you know, look at some photos.

    This has born some fruit. I printed off and framed some shots from a trip to Japan. Even hung them on the wall (like a hero). And it’s great! They’re a passive reminder of a fantastic trip. Walking by them each day is a treat. It has helped make my home feel more personable, more intimate.

    That passivity is key. Photos are low effort things. You rarely sit down and think, “You know, I’m going to spend an hour just reminiscin’”. Apple have done some good work here: features like Memories, which generate little videos or collections based on themes like location or people, surface jolts of nostalgia for you to view without effort. But you still need to open the app or rely on notifications to get you in there. It’s not quite the low-key passivity that makes photos a joy.

    That’s where the Photos widget in iOS 14 shines. I’ve had it on my homescreen for a few weeks and it’s a delight. There was the photo of a friend and I wearing matching t-shirts, the album from a trip to the zoo with my friends and their young daughter, a multitude of shots of partner (and, of course, the cat). I’ve messaged multiple people about the moments it has surfaced, reconnecting me with friends and strengthening the shared memories upon which great relationships are based. It makes me smile every day.

    Small moments of loveliness

    This widget, and other things like it, help change the relationship I have with my phone for the better.

    There was a time, long ago, when smartphones were a revolutionary shift in the way people interacted with the world. They collapsed distances, provided new ways of being with people, and opened troves of information.

    Now my phone is more banal. It’s an appliance. A great appliance, one I use all the time for a variety of reasons, but an appliance all the same. At its worst, when I’m at my most unguarded, it’s a black hole of attention.

    Having a small square that feeds me fantastic memories changes that relationship. My phone is the best tool I have to capture the moments that make life a treat but it’s far too easy to forget those moments were ever recorded.

    The photos widget takes all of those photos and adds them to a place I look at almost more than any other — my home screen. It’s a small thing, the widget, but the thing it facilitates is special. In the same way that covering a wall at home with photos from my trip to Japan made my home feel more like a home, this widget has made my phone feel more like my own.

    It’s a shift away from the utilitarian. The things we own, at their best, can help enrich our lives. I took all of these photos to remember something; making that easier is powerful. Your phone might be an appliance like any computer or even a TV or a fridge — but a fridge is better with some pictures and a nice magnet or two.

    ∞

    The paradox of social violence

    People keep pissing in the pool.

    There’s a deep hypocrisy at the heart of social media. Companies built the platforms. They outsourced making those platforms worthwhile to us, the users. But they didn’t provide us with the tools to moderate those platforms and they’ve walked away from the responsibility of doing it themselves.

    Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like built great swimming pools. They invited everyone over and told people to, somehow, make their own water and their own fun. And people did. They made their own water and built their own games and they had fun. Then people started pissing in the pool. They pissed at ever great volumes and viscosity.

    And the people who made the pools didn’t do anything about it.1

    No tweeter is an island

    Here’s an under-appreciated reality of social platforms: every user is dependent on every other user. Twitter, Facebook, and the like may treat you as the end user — they ask you what you’re doing, your newsfeed is yours and yours alone, populated by a myriad of things from elsewhere for your consumption and, if you deign it so, a like or a comment. But, without everyone else, you’d have nothing.

    My enjoyment of Twitter depends exclusively on the people I’ve chosen to follow. Their thoughts, their tastes define my experience. That extends to who my followers choose to follow, too — I see all their retweets and quote tweets.

    Every social media platform, like society as a whole, is a cascading layers of interdependency. But this isn’t necessarily reflected in the design of these platforms (despite presenting you with a million faces, most isolate you into a narrow feed) or, more importantly, their rules and approaches to moderation, which focus on governing the behaviour of individuals and how individuals treat each other.

    Social media platforms are an ecosystem. Each individual person matters. You don’t feel that when these companies talk about moderation, though. When someone abuses someone else, for example, there’s no sense of what that abuse means in the broader context of the ecosystem — it’s about one person acting on another. By focusing on that, you’re missing the full picture.

    Here’s how Judith Butler describes the effects of violence in society in her book The force of nonviolence (which I’ll be quoting throughout this article):

    It is not simply that an individual abrogates his or her conscience or deeply held principles in acting violently, but that certain “ties“ required for social life, that is, the life of a social creature, are imperiled by violence.

    A social media platform’s value depends on people. Every time one user attacks another, they’re not only attacking the victim. They’re attacking the point and vibrancy of the site itself.

    Soylent Tweet is people

    Here’s the problem social media platforms need to solve: they need to convince people that every person, at their core, has equal value. They need to promote, both implicitly and explicitly, equality.

    Good luck.

    Abuse on social has a few goals but it usually boils down to silencing someone. You’re trying to control the discussion and the person; you want them to stop talking or to leave permanently.

    Every platform worth its salt already prohibits violence, either in form of incitement or direct abuse. But those rules only protect people who are thought to have value to the platform.

    Look at this way: the ultimate end point of abuse is driving someone away from the site. You’ve made it untenable to stay or you’ve convinced them so thoroughly that you don’t belong. A rule saying “Don’t abuse people“ will only stop you if you think the people being abused belong. You’ll only stop abusing someone if they’ll be missed if they leave.

    Butler frames this as grievability: who will be grieved if they die. Those deemed to be grievable are protected from violence. Those who aren’t grievable? Not so much. They’re already as good as dead so no harm done if they die.

    A life has to be grievable — that is, its loss has to be conceptualisable as a loss — for an interdiction against violence and destruction to include life among those living beings to be safeguarded from violence.

    This helps us understand who social companies value. They tell you.

    Donald Trump is the obvious example. He flouts Twitter’s rules on a semi-regular basis. He creates an environment of violence by targeting different social groups and legitimises the abuse of those groups.

    And he hasn’t been banned. Not only hasn’t he not been banned, Twitter reinforced their rules around telling people to die because he was on the receiving end.

    The distinction between populations that are worth violently defending and those that are not implies that some lives are simply considered more valuable than others.

    Donald Trump is worth more than other people to Twitter. So he’s protected.

    This approach — of some people being worth grieving and others not — trickles down throughout social. Think of all the people whose abuse isn’t worth removing or the abusers who haven’t done enough to warrant recrimination. It’s clear who’s absence would be missed most.

    This distinction was built into social from day one:

    After all, if a life, from the start, is regarded as grievable, then every precaution will be taken to preserve and to safeguard that life against harm and destruction.

    Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are stupendously big. It would take a huge amount of effort and resourcing to effectively moderation. But that’s only true because they were built with a laissez-faire rule set from the start. That replicates the status quo of wider society — a place where some people are more grievable than others.

    Social platforms won’t be able to grapple with abuse and violence unless they rebuild from the ground up under the assumption that everyone is grievable. That’s the challenge.

    Dehumanisation is a feature, not a bug

    Now, to be fair to social companies, they’re swimming against the tide here.2 They’re operating in a society that has spent a lot of time and money dehumanising whole groups of people.

    How many times have media outlets or leaders implied (or just straight up said) that immigrants are monsters on their way to destroy “our way of life“? Take any marginalised group anywhere and they’ve been called less-than by a power that wants to control, subvert, or destroy them.

    It’s how people justify violence. It’s woven into the very fabric of society and how people debate.

    That’s the environment in which social platforms exist. And the way they present people, you know, real people, doesn’t help. Every person on, say, Facebook is presented as a piece of content. They arrive to you as a small profile picture and a mix of words and images. They’re pixels. All of their depth and humanness are collapsed into a thing presented and served to you to consume. They’re dehumanised by design. Who cares if you attack them? They’re not even a person. They’re just a piece of content.

    There are a lot of factors at play here. There’s the wider world where dehumanisation is an everyday rhetorical play. There’s the layout and design of social platforms. There’s a complete lack of awareness of how dependent we are on every other user of social.

    This all combines to make it unclear what’s at stake when abuse and violence runs rife.

    Without an understanding of the conditions of life and livability, and their relative difference, we can know neither what violence destroys nor why we should care.

    A victim of optimism

    We can spend all day diagnosing the root of the problems we see on social media. But one of the causes is how optimistic the companies building these platforms were about the value of “connection“ or “connectedness“. That is, they assume that the more connected the world is, the better.

    The problem: they haven’t reckoned with the fact that a core part of connection is the possibility of negativity. Yes, we’re all dependent on one another but that dependency is defined by the potential for hostility:

    That relationality is, of course, defined in part by negativity, that is, by conflict, anger, and aggression. The destructive potential of human relations does not deny all relationality, and relational perspectives cannot evade the persistence of this potential or actual destruction of social ties. As a result, relationality is not by itself a good thing, a sign of connectedness, an ethical norm to be posited over and against destruction: rather, relationality is a vexed and ambivalent field in which the question of ethical obligation has to be worked out in light of a persistent and constitutive destructive potential.

    That potential is never going away. The challenge is to build a system where it’s acknowledged, understood, and channeled:

    Indeed, when the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out.

    Let’s add another layer of complexity. We’re all dependent on each other. As such, we’re dependent on the structures that bring us together. A structure that doesn’t acknowledge how it facilitates violence on a basic level, or even react well to the violence it facilitates, will make us feel uneasy.

    We’ll feel vulnerable.

    We are never simply vulnerable, but always vulnerable to a situation, a person, a social structure, something upon which we rely and in relation to which we are exposed. Perhaps we can say that we are vulnerable to those environmental and social structures that make our lives possible, and that when they falter, so do we. To be dependent implies vulnerability: one is vulnerable to the social structure upon which one depends, so if the structure fails, one is exposed to a precarious condition.

    This precariousness can lead to a whole lot of violence, especially in a time and space where people are being systematically dehumanised and thus okay to attack. Leaders have, time and time again, harnessed a sense of vulnerability to direct a population against supposed enemies.

    People feel exposed. Leaders direct that feeling against different groups of people to gain power. Violence and abuse follow.

    Social platforms were built with the assumption that more connection is a good thing. They didn’t reckon with the realities of connection and, as such, they didn’t built systems robust enough to manage connections. That weakness left people feeling exposed, which itself can encourage yet more violence.

    To top it off, their moderation approaches explicitly and implicitly tell us who they value more and who’s worth protecting from violence. And it’s rarely those on the receiving end.

    Time for a rebuild

    I don’t have a solution here. Not a concrete one, anyway. Social platforms need to be rebuilt if they want to do away with, or even minimise, abuse and violence. They’re incapable of dealing with it as is. (You could say the same about society as a whole, if you want.)

    The fix depends on what we want: do we want social media platforms that are the same as they are now but more welcoming to vulnerable groups, more open to discussion, and less dehumanising? Or do we want platforms that radically re-imagine what a world without abuse or violence could be?

    If we want the latter, it’s not enough to say “Just ban the abusers“ (assuming that we accept that forcibly removing someone from a platform if a form of violence3). Bans make sense in our current social platforms but no amount of violence, no matter how morally just you can make it seem, can create a world without violence:

    When any of us commit acts of violence, we are, in and through those acts, building a more violent world… Quite apart from assiduous efforts to restrict the use of violence as means rather than an end, the actualisation of violence as a means can inadvertently become its own end, producting new violence, producing violence anew, reiterating the license, and licensing further violence.

    No amount of driving people off of a social media platform for “just“ reasons will stop people from driving people away from those platforms through abuse. The former just validates the latter as the ultimate way of controlling the platform.4

    Social platforms aren’t special. They’re a reflection of our own societies and a reflection of their own assumptions and tools. If they want to build spaces without abuse and violence, they can’t use abuse or violence to get there. They need a commitment to equality.

    Most forms of violence are committed to inequality, whether or not that commitment is explicitly thematised.

    It’s hard to imagine what that would look like. There’s so much violence in the world that it’s hard to see we’d get to a world without violence without using violence to get there. That’s the trick, really. That’s what keeps us stuck.

    How do you stop abuse on social, the goal of which is removing people from the platform, without forcibly removing the abusers? Maybe my wanting to find an answer to that question is my own misguided optimism.

    Social companies built swimming pools. They invited people over and told them to make their own water. Somehow, against all logic, they did. They were optimistic. But then people started pissing in the pool and social companies didn’t do anything about it.

    It’s hard to get piss out of water once it’s in there. Maybe it’s time to just build a new pool.

    1. Credit to my lovely partner for the pool analogy. ↩︎

    2. Not least of all because they’re tech companies — not moral philosophy or moral ethics companies. ↩︎

    3. There’s a difference between driving someone off, say, Twitter through abuse and banning someone for breaking rules. But the the latter is the equivalent of state-sanctioned violence. ↩︎

    4. A counterpoint: there are some amazing and lovely online communities that have been forged through moderators with hair-trigger bans. They generally, in my experience, pop up in the comment sections of websites with a niche, or at least narrow, focus. Draconian moderation policies can lead to vibrant and robust communities. The question becomes one of scale: it doesn’t. And it mightn’t work when you add layer upon layer of wildly divergent view points. It does open up a secondary question, though: are super-massive social media platforms practical? Or even desirable? Probably not, no. ↩︎

    ∞

    Things that have set off Siri (Part 2)

    Siri just wants to help. That’s all. Siri can offer a hand with a few things, sure, but their eagerness outstrips their usefulness.

    It’s easy enough to invoke Apple’s AI assistant: just say “Hey Siri” and up they pop, ready to set a timer or answer a question or whatever. But Siri often jumps the gun. Ever a keen bean, they often interject for seemingly no reason at all.

    I’ve already documented a few cases. Here’s part two of “Things that have set off Siri”.

    • “Where’s the cat?”
    • The vacuum, again. (I guess it kind of makes an Sssss sound?)
    • “What was that?”
    • “It’s such a good tweet." (Thankfully this rarely comes up.)
    • “Don’t be silly, it’s a skillet.”
    • “Siri’s bad enough as it is.” (This one hurt.)
    • The kitchen tap running.
    • “Could you throw me the tissue box please?”
    • “I’m so mad.” (Siri popping in with “I’m listening” really didn’t help.)
    • “So I said to mum…”
    • “This all sounds mighty suspicious to me.” (Siri: officially sus.)
    ∞

    “You big ugly. You too empty.”

    Ania Walwicz:

    You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.

    Ania was my poetry teacher in 2012 and 2013. No one had more energy and passion for the written word and all its creative potential. She mightn’t explain things like iambic pentameter in the course of a class but she’d convince you that you can make great things. Every student, and every piece of work they shared, was valid and worthy. She loved poetry and, if you spent some time with her, you would too.

    I wasn’t one of Ania’s students for that long but she’s left an enduring impression on me as a writer. Every now and then, I question my approach to writing (and to poetry in particular) and I remember some of the comments she made about my work. I feel undefeatable.

    Vale Ania Walwicz, 1951—2020.

    ∞

    r/IdiotsFightingThings is proof we’re failing young men

    There’s something hypnotic about watching a room full of about 20 young, white, drunk, shirtless men try to fight a couch. It invites so many questions.

    • Why are they fighting the couch?
    • Was it planned or spontaneous?
    • Why does the couch seem to be winning?
    • Why are so many of them shirtless? Did one person decide to take of their shirt and the others follow suit? Did a few of of them, simultaneously yet independently, just lose their shirts?
    • Why does every group of drunk young guys seem to have one of those floppy wicker hats?
    • Who owns this house?
    • There are a lot of other broken chairs on the floor — is the couch fight the last step in a multi-stage war against seating?
    • What are they going to sit on after breaking the couch? Is one person at this party constantly trying to get them to stop just because they’re asking themselves this same question?1

    All valid questions, none of which has an answer. But there’s a bigger one to ask: what are we doing, as a society, that leads young men to do this kind of thing?

    Yo, let’s headbutt some stuff

    r/IdiotsFightingThings is the embodiment of “boys will be boys” energy. You don’t necessarily see that sentiment in the comments — it’s more a “lol really? they did this?” kind of place — but a lot of the things shared to the subreddit are the logical end point of everyone who ever hand-waved away a young boy’s destructive behaviour with “boys will be boys”.

    There’s the young guy who walked passed a tree and then turned around to kick it. The guy who, after spilling a drink on someone else’s phone, decided to wail on the phone with this glass. The guy who casually breaks a TV because this team is losing. The guy who repeatedly tried to break a car windshield with his head. The guy who headbutted a bus stop. The guy who tried to headbutt an exit sign in a hotel corridor.

    There’s a lot of headbutting in general. It’s a real niche in r/IdiotsFightingThings.

    Now, sure, there are a lot of other kinds of idiocy going on in the sub. Some of the submissions are dumb stunts going awry. There are young kids being profoundly uncoordinated. The occasional animal being goofy. But there’s a real through line of young men being casually destructive or violent, usually with someone else’s property, either for a laugh or in response to something not going their way.

    Kick it real good

    You don’t do any of these things unless you think it’s either a good thing or an okay thing to do. Even if it’s spontaneous and you do it “without thinking”, it only happens because you’ve internalised the idea that you’re allowed to act on the world in this way. It’s also worth questioning how spontaneous or uncontrolled these sorts of things actually are: if this kind of violence is only ever directed at objects men can safely attack, chances are it’s not all that thoughtless.

    Let’s be real: these guys aren’t outliers. Chances are, you’ve known at least a few of them throughout your life. And they don’t just happen. These men are raised a certain way. They’ve learned a certain set of lessons, either explicitly or implicitly, that told them that aggression, violence, and destruction are okay for them.

    I mean, I’ve been one of these guys before, albeit on a wildly smaller scale. I’ve done some petty vandalism. I’ve once thought about getting into a fight, but didn’t follow through. I’ve hit a robotic toy dog with an acoustic guitar (with the owner’s consent).

    Every instance of my behaviour here came from a time that, really, I wasn’t happy with myself. I didn’t believe that violence was ever justified but, in my lowest moments, my behaviour didn’t reflect that. There was a wellspring of aggression inside me. It was usually directed at myself and abstract ideas of “the world” but, in unguarded moments, it came out and was directed at very particular things (and always “for a laugh”).

    Thankfully that didn’t become a defining part of my personality. But that didn’t happen by accident. I had (and have) a fantastic group of people around me who have helped me understand the parts of myself I dislike and to reject the worst parts of masculinity.

    Unfortunately, a lot of young men don’t have that in their lives. You only need to spend a little while on r/IdiotsFightingThings to see that.

    1. I’d never be at this party but, if I was at this party, this would be me. ↩︎

    ∞

    1 + 2 = wisdom: Life lessons learned while playing Threes

    Threes is one of the best games ever made. It’s a puzzle game wherein you match ones and twos to make threes, threes to make sixes, sixes to make twelves, and so on until you run out of space on the board. It exemplifies “simple to start, hard to master”.

    I’ve played Threes on and off for about six years now. It’s enthralling. It gets me in the zone like nothing else. This can be a bad thing: I’ve missed countless train, tram, and bus stops because I was playing Threes. I’ve even walked passed streets I was meant to turn down because I was lost in a game.

    It’s perfect. And perfection has a lot to teach us. Threes has things to say about a life well lived (and not just “pay attention to where you’re going”, which I refuse to learn).

    Threes is filled with life lessons. Here are a few of them.

    • It takes less time to think through a good plan than to fix problems caused by a bad plan (or no plan at all)
    • That said, you can fix a lot of mistakes if you make it your focus and think a few moves ahead
    • All big things happen because of countless small things
    • There’s pleasure to be found in tiny details, even if you’ve seen them countless times before
    • With enough experience, you’ll be able to pick when things fell apart (but that doesn’t mean you’ll always be able to see it coming in the future)
    • Starting with a boost does help, but it’s less satisfying long term
    • Luck is as much about putting yourself in position to capitalise on opportunity as it is random chance
    • Knowing when to cash out can be as important as building for the future
    • If you take risks early on, you’ll have more time and space to fix things if the risk doesn’t pan out
    • You can do everything right for a long time but, sometimes, life will just ruin you
    • You can get addicted to anything
    ∞

    Home

    Jesper (via Michael Tsai):

    The Mac gets a lot of flack from people who are nose deep in technical specifications and price matchups. What they don’t see — or aren’t interested in — is the intangible: the culture that people with big dreams and small means have made the unconventional available, the complex seemingly simple and the advanced accessible.

    […]

    The culture and the people and the shared values and what it all comes together to produce. That’s why I’m still here. You can live in many houses, but not all of them will ever feel like home. I’m upset with the landlord and the building manager who ignores leaking pipes and oiled floors catching on fire while upping the rent and turning a blind eye to hustlers running Three-card Monte, but aside from that, I love the neighborhood, I love the surroundings, I love that they value the things I do and I love what it can build over time.

    Jesper contrasts this with Windows:

    Windows is seemingly more stable in this aspect, but while I am able to live in that house, I am not able to make it my home, and it’s not for a lack of trying. Microsoft’s repeated wallpaper-stripping and ever-changing priorities make it feel like an enormous mansion under constant renovation, with uneven floors, studs poking through the walls and fundamental features left broken or half-finished since the last time they cared.

    I feel this. My MacBook Pro is on the outs. If it can be repaired, I’ll need to spend a lot of time deciding if it’s worth doing so. I have a capable PC for video games; it, combined with an iPad, handles everything I need a computer to do. I write and edit the occasional photo or video. If I squint hard enough while using iA Writer on Windows I can almost, but not quite, pretend I’m on a Mac.

    Outside of a nagging urge to make an iOS app, I have no reason to fix my MacBook Pro. And this hypothetical take on Instagram I might never make isn’t quite a compelling reason to have another computer kicking around.

    But here’s the thing: Windows isn’t home. It isn’t as comfortable as macOS or even iPadOS. The software isn’t as nice. I can’t find an RSS app I like. I’m sure there are great Windows developers somewhere but I don’t know where they’re hiding. Windows itself finds a new way to infuriate me every other week (but I’ve made that more manageable by stripping it to the bone). Text just plain looks wrong some times.

    I try to be pragmatic. I don’t need a Mac. An iPad Air and a keyboard would do me well. But I want one. I want to go home.

    ∞

    Coinbase is off base: the joys of politics at work

    Ah, politics and business. Delicious.

    A tech CEO wants to keep politics out of his workplace. That always goes over well.

    Coinbase wants to build an “open financial system” that would let anyone access cryptocurrencies, bringing “economic freedom” to the world in the process. Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, wants to keep politics out of the workplace so everyone can stay focused on the task at hand without potential division. He described his rationale in a memo on the company’s blog, supposedly in response to an employee walkout over the company’s decision to not issue a statement after the murder of George Floyd.

    The memo itself is unconvincing for a few reasons:

    1. It’s not as profound as it pretends to be.
    2. It has a useless graphic masquerading as a map of global economic freedom, but it doesn’t have a key so it’s just an oddly coloured map.
    3. Armstrong never defines economic freedom despite it being his company’s mission.
    4. It seems to rest on the assumption that all his staff lack the emotional maturity to disagree with a colleague’s world view but continue to work with them amicably.

    But, worst of all, it wraps up what is, really, a dully pragmatic allocation of resources – “Coinbase isn’t going to advocate, externally, for any issues outside our remit” – into a political statement. All while trying to gloss over the obvious: the work they’re doing has actual political ramifications.

    Bad politics

    Can Duruk, writing for The Margins, sums it up well:

    Suppose I am entirely wrong, and Coinbase is actually about creating an open financial system for the world. In that case, it’s almost farcical to argue that the company that’s now sitting at the center of this new system would not be involved in practically every single political decision in the world.

    It goes without saying the main political ideology behind most things crypto is libertarianism and this memo barely hides its author’s leanings. While I don’t generally have favorable opinions of libertarianism, I do respect their proponents’ staunch desire to be wrong at every turn about how humans operate in the real world. What I can’t really handle, however, is veiling one’s own political goals of rebuilding the entire world order, regardless of its plausibility or feasibility and then pretending there’s nothing political about it.

    The work is innately political. You can’t around that.

    It’s disingenuous to say that employees can only talk about the company’s mission when that mission is economic freedom, even if that freedom is to be achieved or helped with “infrastructure for the cryptoeconomy”. You don’t get to hire intelligent, thoughtful people and then say “nah” when their thoughts walk away from your guardrails.

    Especially when your company has benefited from people getting extracurricular at work. Here are two of the ways Coinbase is achieving it’s mission:

    Source amazing talent: We create job opportunities for top people, including those from underrepresented backgrounds who don’t have equal access to opportunities, with things like diverse slates (Rooney rule) on senior hires, and casting a wide net to find top talent.

    Fair talent practices: We work to reduce unconscious bias in interviews, using things like structured interviews, and ensure fair practices in how we pay and promote.

    Awareness of things like the importance of diversity at work and the value of unconscious bias have come from people talking about politics at work, even if they’re not working at a recruitment company (where that would be “the mission”).

    Never mind that these approaches are reflected in the mission of Black Lives Matter (the inciting incident of all this): BLM is, in part, about structural racism, which is baked into things like unconscious bias. If people within Coinbase were frustrated by the company not wanting to release a statement about the movement, then the problem isn’t politics.

    Signaling is a virtue

    That said, there’s value to what Armstrong is doing (even if I think he’s done it poorly). Companies can paint themselves into corners if they don’t think through the longterm effects of their choices and that includes political ones. They need to signal intent here as much as possible, if for no other reason than to let employees make an informed decision about how and where they work.

    Ben Thompson, in a recent post on Stratechery [$], talks about a years-old decision to not put R. Kelly’s music into playlists is having ramifications for them now that they’re the exclusive publisher of Joe Rogan’s podcast. They set a precedent with Kelly that employees think is being ignored for Rogan.

    Thompson:

    The Spotify point is precisely why I think Armstrong deserves more credit than his (many) critics on Twitter are giving him. Leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of his policy, every CEO should be thinking through these questions before they come to the forefront, and making clear to employees exactly how the company is going to approach them. Look no further than Ek and Spotify to see how making decisions in the moment, without a long-term view, can result in long-term problems.

    But, really, this is a resources problem, not a “politics in the workplace“ problem. By making it about politics, and by turning it into a public statement, Armstrong has both misread the issue and misread the room.

    ∞

    Twitter’s telling you who matters

    Every now and then, people tell you what they stand for. They don’t always mean to do it, but it happens all the same.

    Twitter does it a lot when it comes to the things they allow on their site. This time, they’ve reinforced who they think is important on their platform.

    But that’s not what they meant to say.

    Twitter has told people they can’t express hope Trump dies from COVID-19. Here’s Jason Koebler, reporting for Motherboard:

    Twitter told Motherboard that users are not allowed to openly hope for Trump’s death on the platform and that tweets that do so “will have to be removed” and that they may have their accounts put into a “read only” mode. Twitter referred to an “abusive behavior” rule that’s been on the books since April.

    “Content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against an individual is against our rules,” Twitter said in a statement.

    Twitter Comms reinforced that this rule applies to everyone – not just Trump:

    tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against anyone are not allowed and will need to be removed. this does not automatically mean suspension.

    Of course it does: it’s a rule for the whole platform, after all. But the fact that the rule exists matters less than how it’s applied. Motherboard asked about that:

    When Motherboard asked how tightly Twitter will enforce this policy with regard to Trump, it said that it “won’t take enforcement action on every Tweet. We’re prioritizing the removal of content when it has a clear call to action that could potentially cause real-world harm.” It is not clear whether Twitter believes that hoping for the death of the president can lead him to actually die, or where the line is.

    That ambiguity is what matters. It turns a hard and fast rule into something amorphous and almost useless in either encouraging the kinds of behaviour you want on a platform or discouraging the kinds of behaviour you don’t want.

    Here’s the thing about rules and moderation: they signal what you value. When you’re talking about the kinds of content you’ll remove, you’re talking about the kinds of things you want and don’t what on your platform and the things you do or don’t value. That’s obvious.

    But they’re also about the people you value (or don’t value). That’s made explicit when it comes to things like banning people or locking accounts. But it gets more subtle when you start looking at the people you want to protect.

    Which lives matter?

    Here’s another obvious statement: a whole lot of people have been wished dead on Twitter.

    Here are just a few tweets reacting to Motherboard’s article:

    Zoë Quinn:

    Is it now? The last 7 years of my life would like to have a word with you…

    Holly Green:

    Two weeks ago I reported a user who told me to hang myself and Twitter never so much as even followed up

    Leena:

    Literally cannot count the amount of times some sadsack has wished me dead on twitter.

    Looked at my Threats File (oh yes, that’s something that women have to do, that’s our price of entry) and I haven’t even recorded “wished dead” because it’s not serious enough in comparison.

    Twitter hasn’t removed posts wishing these women were dead. They haven’t suspended anyone for these tweets. And they haven’t acted on people wishing death on countless other women, or black people, or queer people, or trans people, or people belonging to any other vulnerable group you care to name.1

    And this is serious. Telling someone you wish they were dead, or that they should kill themselves, or that they need to die isn’t just an insult. It’s not the same or a more serious version of telling someone that they suck. It’s one person telling another they they’re less important, fundamentally, as a person than others. That they hold less value in the world, that their existence, because of their very being, is so worthless or even destructive to the world and society that they should remove themselves from it permanently. There’s no redemption or getting better. Nothing you can do. Better to check out now before you do more harm.

    That’s what you’re telling someone when you say they should die. And, if no one does anything to stop you saying it, then they’re telling you it’s okay to do so.

    Why now?

    Twitter have chosen now to highlight both the rule and their enforcement of that rule (and immediately walked back their ability to actually enforce it). Why? I can see two reasons:

    1. They’ve seen a sizable uptick in people wishing someone (Trump) was dead and can see how that will exacerbate the other problems of abuse and shitfighting on Twitter
    2. They value a certain someone or group more than others and now that someone or group are a bigger target for this kind of abuse

    Let’s be honest. If Twitter was really worried about Person A that Person B should die then they would’ve acted years ago. They’d monitor their platform more closely. They’d take reports more seriously. They’d do more than this.

    What this is – this comment to Motherboard, this reinforcing their rule now – is Twitter telling everyone who has been subjected to death threats (and more) that they’re less important or less valuable than Trump and his ilk.

    Yes, the rule applies to everyone. But the enforcement doesn’t. That’s what matters.

    Who gets power

    Guidelines about what people say aren’t just about what’s said. They’re about the people who are allowed to talk. Twitter has never reckoned with that side of their moderation.

    I can’t say why for sure but, if I had to guess, it’d be because doing so would fly in the face of their business model. They need as many users as possible to be successful. That’s the priority.

    Twitter is supposed to be the place where everyone can talk and join the discussion (whatever that discussion may be). Since the first part of that – the everyone – is the most important part of their business, Twitter have spent most of its existence focusing their community building and rules on the second – the discussion. They’re trying to shape and moderate what people talk about to keep ”everyone” included. In doing so, they’ve lost sight of the fact that every decision about what people can say is also about who can say it.

    When you’re building a community, you need to settle the ”who”. ”Everyone” doesn’t cut it. You can define it however you like: demographics, interests, actions (what people do or don’t do), whatever. If you don’t do anything, you end up chasing your tail when your rules don’t work and you just recreate the power dynamics of the wider world.

    And this is totally about power and who wields it. Trump himself has threatened violence on US citizens and Twitter let it ”stay accessible”2. His comment wasn’t removed. His account wasn’t suspended. Now, Twitter is rising to say that people hoping he dies – which is abstract, and not an actual threat – warrants removal.

    That’s a statement of who Twitter values. Twitter is saying that Trump is allowed to threaten people with violence but he must be protected from people wishing he was dead. But, when men (and it’s usually men) wish women were dead, they’re safe. They’re allowed to do that. And women, or black people, or queer people, or whoever it may be on the receiving end, aren’t worth protecting.

    That’s Twitter telling you who matters. Even if they didn’t mean to do so.

    1. It’s not just because the rule addressing this kind of behaviour has only been ”on the books since April”. That’s part of the issue: people have been enduring this for years. ↩︎

    2. This particular tweet is hardly novel in the pantheon of Trump’s Twitter. ↩︎

    ∞

    It’s okay to punch Nazis

    Two people are arguing. Person A starts interrupting Person B, refusing to let them make their point. Person A also repeatedly insults Person B. Eventually, Person B interrupts so they can speak. They do so in a way that insults Person A.

    If you watched all that unfold and then told someone you watched two people interrupt and insult each other, you wouldn’t be wrong. But the person you told wouldn’t have any idea what really happened.

    In the aftermath of the September 29 US Presidential Debate, we saw a string of “both sides“ headlines from major presses, describing what they saw as insults and tirades from both Trump and Biden. This is a debate where Trump called upon white supremacists to “stand back, stand by“ (which said white supremacists saw as a call to arms) and Biden asked if Trump “ever shuts up“ after a stream of rants and interruptions.

    But that’s not what some headlines reported. Media outlets resorted to both-sidesism and treated every discretion as equal:

    • “Sharp personal attacks and name calling chaotic first debate” – The New York Times (who then changed tack)
    • “Personal attacks, sharp exchanges mark turbulent first presidential debate“ – The Washington Post (who also changed their line)
    • “Trump, Biden trade barbs in first presidential debate“ – The Wall Street Journal

    They missed the context.

    Despite being a less-than-ideal way of understanding conflict, it extends to countless other areas. Take Trump himself: he routinely compares people who protest police violence and, in response to what they see as intimidation, throw things at police offers to the officers who have shot at and killed unarmed civilians.

    He’s not unique in that. You’ll see it on the news, you’ll hear it from family members. It’s pervasive and often hard to argue against.

    In this world view, people who defend themselves become equivalent to people who attack first or respond with disproportionate violence. In a world where so much manipulation and coercion happens with the threat of violence (be it implicit or explicit) – for example, Trump saying that looters will be shot – it makes it impossible for the victims to respond in turn without being labeled as part of the problem. The headline will read that they’re just as bad.

    This way of thinking is rife in the world (and it extends far beyond people in the media, even if their commitment to “both sidesism“ is a real problem). And it makes it difficult to consistently point out the problem and the steps required to solve it. It’s held back vital reforms in areas as varied as police reform and health.

    False equivalence and violence

    Family violence provides a clear, and telling, example of how this approach to viewing a problem limits our ability to understand what’s actually happening. It also illustrates how people can take this misunderstanding, politicise it, and use it against victims of violence.

    In her fantastic, harrowing book See what you made me do about domestic abuse, Jess Hill dedicates a chapter to when women use violence. In it, she details a disagreement between two parts of academia: ’family conflict’ researchers and ’violence against women’ (VAW) researchers.

    Family conflict researchers, Hill explains, “insist that in the home women are just as violent as men.“ VAW researchers, on the other hand, “rubbish claims of ’gender symmetry’ and insist that perpetrators are overwhelmingly men“.

    Both groups, says Hill, point to credible statistics to prove their point. And that there are “respected experts who have come to reasonable conclusions“ on both sides of the debate.

    One of the reasons for this, according to Hill, is the way family conflict researchers have collected and understood their data:

    Almost all the studies that ’prove’ women are as violent as men get their data via an instrument known as the Conflicts Tactics Scale, or CTS. It asks respondents to answer a series of questions: does violence occur in the relationship? How frequently does it occur? What does it look like?

    The survey frames domestic violence as an argument that gets out of control (and thus misses some of the most dangerous examples of domestic violence). It asks if either partner in the relationship has used force to settle a disagreement and, if so, what kind of force. It then ranks “forceful acts on a scale of severity“.

    But it’s not interested in why or how an act of force happened. The researcher’s job “is to record and rank each incident according to severity“. Context goes out the window. And that’s a problem when you’re trying to understand violence.

    Without context, for example, the CTS gives equal weight to a kick that barely leaves a bruise as it does to a kick that causes traumatic brain injury. The kick whose intended meaning is ’leave me alone’ is registered as equal to a kick that means ’if you try to leave the house again, I’ll break all your ribs’.

    This can lead to a distortion of the data and a misunderstanding of what’s happening:

    ’Those who have perpetrated several violent “acts“ (now matter how serious) and those who have reported committing a single act (no matter how trivial) are both defined as “violent“,’ write VAW scholars Russell and Rebecca Dobash. A woman who tries but fails to hit her partner will be recorded as ’violent’ - just as he will be if he beats her unconscious. According to the CTS, this relationship consists of one violent woman and one violent man in a situation of mutual violence.

    Now, researchers who use this approach and end up believing that men and women are equally violent in a relationship aren’t “sloppy“, according to Hill:

    It’s because their research focuses on how couples resolve arguments - calmly or violently? From the family conflict viewpoint both the man and woman above chose violence. Even if one of them had a greater impact, both are culpable, because both used violence.

    Even the best intentions can have disastrous consequences. Family conflict researchers are clearly stating their goals and their rationale. But it’s still limited and, in many ways, flawed. That hasn’t stopped “men’s rights activists“ from clinging to their results and repeatedly, loudly, and forcefully using them to derail countless discussions about the violence women face in the home and even the smallest steps to address it.

    How we understand conflict

    There’s a world of difference between violence in the home, conflict in streets, an argument on a stage, and any other example you can think of. And, in each instance, there will be a different mix of things like racism, sexism, misogyny.

    This line of thinking, this both-sidesism, exists on a continuum. It applies to the small indiscretions and the most systemic violence. Seeing it in stark examples can make it easier to see how it plays out on smaller stages.

    But, throughout them all, there will be a few constants: a desire to control; to influence; to exert power; and to claim dominance. The stakes will change but the intent will remain. It’s important to know how we understand conflict and violence. And it’s important to know how we’re trying to tell others about what happens.

    Context will always be important. We can’t reduce any conflict or violence to a simple tally or binary yes/no scale. And we can’t throw up our hands and say “well, they’re both doing it“.

    Doing so is tantamount to giving up. It’s a surrender to the status quo. And it tells the aggressor that they’re safe to keep doing what they’re doing.

    ∞

    Journalism is a team sport

    Another day, another reminder of two things:

    1. It’s financially viable — sensible, even — for some journalists to go solo
    2. More reporters going solo is, at best, a short-to-medium term solution to the news industry’s woes.

    The latest high-profile example is Casey Newton, formerly of The Verge and now of Substack-newsletter Platformer. Platformer will be a continuation of Newton’s work at The Verge, where he covered ”the collisions between tech platforms and our democracy”.

    The main goal? “Holding the world’s most powerful companies to account.” Certainly worth a few dollars a month. But the secondary goal is at least as interesting: testing (and perhaps demonstrating) the viability of a market where there are fewer traditional media companies and more indie journos doing their thing for readers that pay them directly.

    It’s a powerful proposition. And an even more powerful bit of myth making.

    Rogue reporters

    Here’s how Newton frames his vision:

    But I can’t stop thinking about a world in which we blow up media companies into their smallest constituent parts — individual reporters, aggressively working their beats, for an audience of paying customers grateful for the work — and allow them to rebuild from the ground up. A world where hundreds of new publications are born, and thousands of journalists are once again employed — in jobs that only their readers can ever take away from them.

    I’m ready to find out if such a world is possible, and to do my part to make it happen.

    To be fair, there’s a lot to like about his thought. And, credit where credit’s due, Newton’s using his sizable platform to articulate, test, and (hopefully) build out this vision.

    He also touches on something else important, and currently lacking, about the media:

    Platformer is dedicated to the proposition that the world’s most powerful companies — and everyone affected by them — deserve a publication that goes narrow and deep.

    Newton is right about the value of ”narrow and deep”. And, unfortunately, specialist journalists were among the first to go as payroll budgets cratered. They’re one of the most important, and most criminally undervalued, parts of a robust news outfit. But they’re also expensive. And, when you’re desperately trying to cover more news than you can afford to, you start to value cheaper generalists over the more experienced, but more narrow, reporters.1

    These journos — the ones who go ”narrow and deep” — are in a fantastic position to build sustainable audiences around their work. They can build passionate audiences in niche areas, some of whom will be willing to splash out a few dollars.

    And that’s great — genuinely great. Those reporters can, and do, add tremendous value to the world. But a collection of solo journos doing it themselves for small communities built around shared interest in a niche topic does not a health democracy make.2

    There are a few potential issues, though. And only one is financial.

    Diminishing returns

    Here’s a boring statement: there are a lot of people and services that ask for your subscription dollars. Only so many of those people and services will get them and even fewer will get enough of them to actually make a living.

    I do think the doom and gloom around that sentiment is overstated: somehow, against all odds, there are a lot of subscription dollars floating around the ether. And I do think some kind of sustainable ecosystem of subscription publications will emerge (and that it’ll be bigger than people expect).

    But, still, cynicism. Those dollars will likely flow on disproportionately to the bigger publications (who can thus dedicate yet more time and resources to their work). And solo publications, by nature, call for more time and more effort to promote yourself and find readers (unless you already have a platform). That means they favour people who are already financially stable, already well known, or can just afford to work what amounts to two or three full time jobs until they can go completely solo.3

    There will always be stories of the single parent of two who worked full time at the dead-end desk job but wrote great stories of an evening until they cracked the big time. And there will always be stories of passionate reporters who struck off on their own to build an audience. And there will always be yet more stories of smug young guys who ”did it on their own (just don’t look at the family money behind them)” that are used as examples of the solo model being both possible and desirable.

    But all of the above are rare. And they perpetuate a myth that, frankly, needs to die. Especially when it comes to journalism.

    In this together

    Journalism is a team sport. The best work — the most powerful, the most meaningful — comes when a room full of people or a small team work together to create something bigger than themselves.

    Sometimes, that’s a couple of reporters and an editor working together for years to break a seismic story. Sometimes, it’s a radio station pulling shifts to cover a disaster — as a former employer of mine, ABC Melbourne, did during the Black Saturday bushfires.

    But they’re just the big ones. The real value of media organisations comes from the grunt work no-one cares about and from the structure they provide to help train new journos.

    Hands up if you’ve paid any attention to your local courts lately. Or ever. What about your local council meetings?

    Chances are you haven’t. Because no one does. Because they’re boring. In the case of local council, probably deliberately so. But both are vital. And so is sending a journo along to them.

    That grunt work — the boring stuff, the court reports and the council meetings — are critical to a healthy media system. Maybe you don’t get a cracker of a story out of them very often but the stories you do get form the basis of the bigger stories down the line.

    But who’s going to pay for a newsletter dedicated to your local court system or council? Who’s going to build a viable indie press out of that?

    No one. But both are absolutely critical. And both form a foundation for a broader whole that can serve its readership well.

    Another thing no one’s going to pay for? The newsletter from a 20-year-old kid fresh out of their cadetship or degree. No contacts, no bylines, can’t tell a lede from their shoes. Those kids need to come up somewhere. And they need to develop the editorial nous required to make a great story from someone.

    That’s where institutions excel. Sure, they do foster some bad habits.4 But they also instill a lot of the habits that matter.

    Gather up

    That’s not to say there isn’t value in Newton’s world where ”hundreds of new publications are born” and more reporters take their careers into their own hands. It’s not like there are many big organisations that are doing well by them, anyway.

    But his vision does by into this ideal of rugged individualism that, to my mind, has caused more harm than good. It’s the Die Hard of journalism: the lone reporter, surrounded by bad actors and worse business models, strikes out on their own to change the world.

    Alright. Cool. Yippee-ki-yay.

    Something special happens when a publication shrinks down all the way to a single reporter’s point of view. The publication feels more trustworthy: you know who the writer is, and where they’re coming from.

    That kind of approach works great for reviews or opinion pieces. I want and value they kind of long-term relationship so I can contexualise what they’re saying.

    But I don’t trust any single reporter more than I trust, say, the ABC here in Australia or The Guardian. Because I know the codes of conduct they’re bound by and I know the editorial processes they go through. And I know that, for a lot of stories — for the stories that matter — that I won’t be getting one person’s view with all the biases, be they unexamined or otherwise, and limitations that entails.

    An informed society takes a village. And that starts with the people doing the informing.

    Variety, spice, life

    Fortunately, the model of journalism Newton’s espousing here will help in that regard in some ways.

    Ben Thomson of Statechery explains it well:

    Just because this model works for stars like Newton doesn’t mean it is exclusive to folks who could easily have jobs with traditional media companies. Indeed, I expect the greatest societal benefits from this model to be the emergence of more and more creators whose voices would have never been heard previously.

    And that’s great. More voices, more thoughts, more potential for great work. Having more people try to make a go of it has a lot of benefits, even if they don’t pan out.

    It’s in that doing — of more people throwing their hats into the ring and trying — that little communities of publishers emerge, each feeding off each other and building a place where ideas and skills evolve.

    Maybe they’ll even pool their resources together. Maybe we’ll see publishing collectives make a comeback. Not that they ever went away: collectives are nothing new, online or otherwise. But they haven’t held a lot of sway in the public consciousness for a long time.

    Artists have led the way: multiple independent artists, each doing their own thing, but operating under a loose banner and sharing resources.

    Imagine four or five indie reporters, each from adjacent fields, operating their own publication but banding together to help each other out and share subscribers. They get more than they would individually; readers learn more than they expect (another benefit of larger publications with broader remits). Maybe they can even bring younger, less well-known and experienced reporters into the fold now and then.

    Sure, it’s not as romantic or easily mythologised as a solo journo venturing into the world. But it’s the kind of future I’d like to subscribe to.

    1. The Conversation, a former employer of mine, is a good example of the value of specialists. Every article is written by an academic and edited (and usually commissioned) by a specialist journalist. The site is consistently a source of high value, timely information about the world and its doings. ↩︎

    2. If it did, subreddits would be a lot more worthwhile than they are now. ↩︎

    3. ”Afford” in this case refers to both money and time. Both are a currency. ↩︎

    4. Far too many Australian journos call every story a ”yarn” and it has to come from somewhere and that somewhere needs to be destroyed. ↩︎

    ∞

    Windows 10 ignores your default browser to launch Edge

    Microsoft have relaunched their Edge browser and they’d like you to know about it. In addition to randomly launching and pinning itself to taskbars (and being generally gross), Windows 10 is now bypassing your default browser settings for no good reason at all.1

    The Windows 10 start menu has general search functionality: hit the Windows key, type your search query and, in addition to searching your software and files, it’ll also search the internet.

    (As a fun bonus, if you search for your web browser the menu will also suggest Edge. Charming.)

    Say you decide to follow one of those web searches. Windows won’t launch your default browser. That’d be too obvious. No, it’ll pop open Edge for you. And then ask if you’d like to make Edge your default web browser.

    Really don’t see that happening any time soon. Sorry.

    1. Not that there was ever a good reason. ↩︎

    ∞

    kites can’t jive (August 2020)

    Did I even listen to any new music in August? I know I did but I’d be hard pressed to tell what any of it was. No surprise: Melbourne in its hardest coronavirus lockdown yet and, yeah, time doesn’t really exist any more.

    Still, The Beth’s dropped a new album, Jump rope gazers, and that’s cause for celebration.

    I adore The Beths. Their second albums expands on their fantastic debut without losing all the charm and personality that made it such a rush. Frontwoman Elizabeth Stokes has a real gift for humour and deft phrasing; there’s something new to fall in love with on every listen.

    Other highlights

    Super natural by Jonnie. A solo EP from one of the members of HTRK. Can’t go wrong.

    ENERGY by Disclosure. Want some bangers? Have some bangers.

    1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues by 100 gecs. More bangers but now they’re angry.

    Always was by Briggs. A deadly EP from Senator Briggs.

    ∞

    kites can’t jive (July 2020)

    I’m obsessed with Palimpsest by Protest the Hero. I was a big fan of theirs in the mid-to-late 2000s. Keiza, Fortress, and Scurrilous (the band’s first and second albums respectively) slay: a perfect combination of energising metal riffs and captivating vocals.

    But, after that, I fell off the band. Drifted away from metal as a genre. Now, nine years later, Protest the Hero have released Palimpsest (their fifth album) and I love it. It has everything I loved about their previous work and a great narrative hook: the songs are re-tellings of American history.

    Take my favourite two tracks.

    “The Fireside” presents a version of Pearl Harbor wherein the bombing provides a reason to go to war that US leaders wanted all along:

    I’ve got a job for every able-bodied man
    Munition factories for women and children
    And all we needed was a reason
    And you gave us one
    You gave us one

    “Soliloquy” is an infectious and dramatic story from the perspective of bank robber “Baby Face” Nelson:

    You can reach for your service pistol
    By the time you get it
    I’m betting that this will be over and done with
    Leave your badge and your gun
    You won’t be coming home tonight

    Well worth a spin if you’re into metal.

    Other highlights

    Expect the unexpected by 79rs Gang. Impossibly cool. The album looks to bring “New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian culture… to dance floors and block parties around the world” and it does. Just give it a spin.

    The light pack by Joey Badass. Joey cannot be stopped.

    Staying power by Emma Ruth Rundle. I love everything Rundle’s released and this is no different.

    Drop 6 by Little Simz. Simz is on fire. One of my favourite rappers in the game right now.

    Palimpsest by Protest the Hero. Protest the Hero are back with their fifth album (and their first in four years). It might be their best.

    Joy as an act of resistance by IDLES. Rock music (don’t call it punk) at it’s most vibrant and vital.

    ∞

    Tech exec wants to recreate the creepy surveillance tech from The Dark Knight

    A tech exec by the name of Chris Larsen wants to install high-def security cameras all around San Fransisco to help battle the city’s crime. He thinks that’s a good idea.

    Nellie Bowles spoke to him for the New York Times:

    In San Francisco, where many locals push for this kind of police reform, those same locals are tired of the break-ins. So how do they reconcile “defund the police” with “stop the smash and grabs”?

    Mr. Larsen believes he has the answer: Put security cameras in the hands of neighborhood groups. Put them everywhere. He’s happy to pay for it.

    There are countless reasons to have a problem with this. Pointing out that Nextdoor – a decentralised social media platform for communities – is a cesspit of racism, fear mongering, and profiling is the most glib.

    There’s no reason to think that pervasive surveillance in the hands of “neighbourhood groups” won’t be the same.

    Unfortunately, Bowles’s article doesn’t engage with any of the potential pitfalls in Larsen’s plan outside of privacy concerns. The whole thing reads more like a puff piece or an ad than a measured assessment of something that would affect the lives of everyone in the city, if Larsen follows through with his idea.

    He argued that trust [with law enforcement] will come in the form of full city camera coverage, so police can play a smaller, more subtle role. Individual vigilantism will not work, he argued, but strong neighborhoods with continuous video feeds on every corner will.

    “That’s the winning formula,” Mr. Larsen said. “Pure coverage.”

    Police do need to play a smaller role in people’s lives. But they need to be replaced with well-funded support structures, like mental health facilities, safe injecting rooms and drug rehabilitation groups, and all the other things that make up a robust safety net. That’s how you restore trust in local communities.

    Pervasive surveillance isn’t a sign of trust. Nor is it a path to it. We won’t build a healthy community by watching each other all of the time.

    ∞

    Hong Kong is the next battleground in the tech Cold War between China and the

    The Chinese Government has announced a sweeping new law for Hong Kong that aims to “crack down on opposition to Beijing”. It was drafted in “unusual secrecy” and “took effect immediately, even though the public was seeing it in full only for the first time”.

    Part of the law affects what people say online:

    The new law mandates police censorship and covert digital surveillance, rules that can be applied to online speech across the world.

    Now, the Hong Kong government is crafting web controls to appease the most prolific censor on the planet, the Chinese Communist Party.

    It functionally turns any criticism about the Chinese and Hong Kong governments into “national security data”, as

    Based on the law, the Hong Kong authorities have the remit to dictate the way people around the world talk about the city’s contested politics.

    Battle lines are being drawn:

    Many big tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zoom and LinkedIn, have said in the past two days that they would temporarily stop complying with requests for user data from the Hong Kong authorities. The Hong Kong government, in turn, has made it clear that the penalty for noncompliance with the law could include jail time for company employees.

    Meanwhile, TikTok is pulling their app from the App and Play Store rather than get into a fight – both with the Chinese Government and with public opinion – they know they can’t win:

    The move comes as TikTok parent ByteDance has looked to more clearly separate TikTok, which operates outside of China, from a similar app used within mainland China. The company has said that TikTok has not shared data with the Chinese government nor would it, a position that would be difficult — if not impossible — to maintain under the new law.

    This is another stage in the tech Cold War between China and the US but it feels like a big one. It’s a lot more ideological than whether or not Huawei can build 5G capabilities in your country.

    Companies like Facebook and Twitter have built their platforms on the importance of free speech. It sometimes feels like a fig leaf for an unwillingness or inability to monitor their sites but it nonetheless appears sincere.

    This law is a significant attack against that and it’s magnified by the streak of libertarianism that runs through Silicon Valley.

    Combine all of that with the US Government’s commitment to free speech (in the abstract, if not the practical, given the President’s view of the media) and their antipathy towards the Chinese Government and you have a situation.

    Meanwhile, China is a sizeable market for all US tech and internet companies. How much of that are they willing to risk?

    China isn’t doing anything new or surprising. They’re a world power with an authoritarian government. More than that, they’re a world power that’s reclaiming it’s previous status on the global stage – one that they feel they lost because of Western powers (which isn’t altogether incorrect). And they have the economic power to back that up.

    Every company and government that’s dependent on China for economic reasons is constantly weighing that against the actions of the Chinese Government in other areas. There are undeniable moral and ideological differences between the two groups.

    Eventually, we’ll reach a moment when the former no longer trumps the latter and decision makers in the West will have to decide what they stand for.

    Maybe I’m just biased to the importance of the internet, but it feels like we’ve taken a pretty big step towards that moment.

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