Werd I/O

Wired reports that we're about to lose net neutrality, and "the Internet as we know it":

[...] Today, that freedom won’t survive much longer if a federal court — the second most powerful court in the nation behind the Supreme Court, the DC Circuit — is set to strike down the nation’s net neutrality law, a rule adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2010. Some will claim the new solution "splits the baby" in a way that somehow doesn’t kill net neutrality and so we should be grateful. But make no mistake: Despite eight years of public and political activism by multitudes fighting for freedom on the internet, a court decision may soon take it away.

Couple this with the persistent attacks on our privacy and freedom of communication that have come to light over the last year, and we need to ask ourselves if the Internet is still the networking platform that we need.

I don't think it's as crazy a question as it sounds.

When we talk about the Internet, usually we're referring to the protocols and services that run on top of it: the web, DNS, email, and services that sit on top of them, like Wikipedia, Facebook and Google. The Internet is the foundation on which each of these things sits - but it's certainly possible for similar kinds of experiences to be built on different kinds of networks.

This has already been attempted, of course: Internet2 is a network run for academic and research purposes, using many of the same protocols as the Internet, but on different infrastructure. Some 60,000 institutions are connected.

When the Internet was initially designed, many of the things we take for granted were not incorporated into its architecture - most notably, ecommerce, the web, and the widespread communications we now use every day, across browsers, apps and devices. A lot of these services and technologies are able to exist because of hacks and shims. That's a fantastic testament to the resilience of the network, but perhaps it's time to learn from those attempts and build a v2.

Additionally, the current design clearly allows governments and other entities to easily monitor communications, jeopardizing the business and private communication that it's simultaneously revolutionizing. Just as any business that solely bases its products on Facebook, say, is constantly under threat from that company choosing to change its API, algorithms or interfaces, any business that bases its products on the Internet is now under threat from surveillance activity.

What if we could then choose to modernize our global communications by inventing a new Internet, designed to be used by commerce and protect independent communications? I don't think it's enough to bake encryption into its core (although that should happen) - revelations about, eg, companies like RSA using backdoored encryption methods suggest that we should look at algorithms and methodologies that are inherently more secure even when data is not encrypted. Neutrality should be inherent; ownership and governance decentralized.

If creating a new global network sounds daunting, that's because it's undeniably a mammoth task. Nonetheless, I think there's value in looking at the Internet as a proof of concept, as a thought experiment: what could we change to protect ourselves, protect each other, and continue to change the world without interference from surveillance or corporate misdeeds?

As part of the Nieman Journalism Lab's Predictions for Journalism 2014, Jason Kottke writes:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

He then goes on to discuss the death of the reverse-chronological stream, as well as the inevitable move to what he calls tightly-bound social media sites. Thematically, it's an interesting companion piece to Anil Dash's seminal The Web We Lost, which was published last year at about this time.

And, despite some hedging on his personal blog, it's clearly true. Almost none of you will have found this link through a feed reader (although my stats show that some of you are using Feedly, Digg Reader, and even Livejournal's RSS feature). Most links will have come through Twitter and Facebook, with a straggling number showing up through app.net and similar sites. If I'm lucky, someone might submit this post to an aggregator like Hacker News.

Note, though, that you're still reading it. The article isn't dying; you can think of the blog, or the stream, or the feed, as the container that the article sits in.

Medium exploits this in a clever way by presenting articles nicely, and then providing a magazine-style site for you to consume them in. Indieweb arguments about whether you should publish posts on a site that you control or on someone else's aside, there's no doubt that Medium's injected new life into long-form text on the web. That's great, and like Facebook and Twitter, you can choose to think of it as a well-executed proof of concept.

If you buy the idea that articles aren't dying - and anecdotally, I know I read as much as I ever did online - then a blog is simply the delivery mechanism. It's fine for that to die. Even welcome. In some ways, that death is due to the ease of use of the newer, siloed sites, and makes the way for new, different kinds of content consumption; innovation in delivery. Jason talks about the ephemerality of Snapchat (which is far from a traditional feed), and there are an infinity of other ways that content might be beamed to us on whichever device we happen to choose to be using at any particular moment. But these content forms are minor details.

The beauty of the independent web is that we can choose to represent ourselves online - and therefore, publish content - in a manner of our choosing. I happen to like the reverse-chronological feed, but if you prefer to publish in the form of an immersive 3D world, or a radio show, or full-screen autoplaying video with annotations, then, hey, that's up to you. It's all part of a rich, interlinking medium. Independence means not necessarily going with the flow.

The counterpart to that is how you read content. In the past, we've been very stream-heavy: RSS readers, Twitter feeds, Facebook timelines, and so on. But there's no need for that to be the case. Part of the joy of a diverse web is that while I might choose to read in the form of a feed or a newspaper, you might want to mash your reading list up in entirely new ways. You could have a robot announcer read to you while you drive to work in the morning (wouldn't that be better than the radio?), or mash related articles up to provide new kinds of content that provide better insight than the sum of their parts. And I can choose to use a completely different form to you. Each one of us can have a completely different experience.

That's a tough concept to get across to an audience that's used to mass media, where everyone consumes the same content in the same form. But we don't need that anymore. Not only can content be personalized, but the form of the content can be personalized. Facebook might agonize over the algorithm that decides which posts are surfaced, but in the future we can each have our own algorithms. Form and content will be separated.

These new kinds of readers will begin to appear in 2014, powered by simple web technologies like HTML and microformats. They will eventually be as easy to use as Twitter and Facebook. And they will make us all more empowered readers and creators, once again connecting us all, but this time on our terms.

TechCrunch reports that IBM bought Aspera yesterday:

Aspera’s software is built on “fasp,” its patented file transfer technology. Fasp is designed to leverage a company’s wide area network (WAN) and commodity hardware to achieve speeds that are faster than FTP and HTTP over a secure network. A WAN is essentially a company’s network across a large geographic region. Aspera’s technology optimizes the WAN through its software that allows for granularity in the way the technology is used. Through the process, Aspera optimizes the bandwidth, latency, bottlenecks and a host of other factors.

Essentially, Aspera is an optimized, proprietary protocol built on UDP. The sender and receiver needs to have Aspera software (or software that licenses Aspera's technology) installed for the transfer to take place.

IBM's thesis that we need faster file transfers is obviously correct. Uploading large data or media files is a pain, and it's not a problem that's going away. While downstream bandwidth is getting better all the time, upstream bandwidth often suffers in comparison - and between big data, more sophisticated applications and our insatiable appetite for video, the size of the files we're moving across the Internet is going up.

[Disclosure: right now I'm CTO at latakoo, a startup that helps enterprises (including TV news networks) move large amounts of media data around. We use a toolbox of compression techniques, as well as a global upload network, to make managing media files much faster. Journalists use us to, for example, upload video from Air Force One while the plane is taxiing down the runway.]

Don't think there's a problem? 5 minutes of recorded video on an iPhone 5 can be 1gb or more in size. Try uploading that from anything other than a super-fast broadband connection.

The trouble is that a protocol like Aspera's naturally leads to lock-in, and can only solve the problem for certain kinds of software. Unless fasp is open-sourced now that it's owned by IBM, every piece of software you own will need to have a license for their patents in order to take advantage of it. Not only does that lead to more expensive software, but it also limits the innovation that can happen around the protocol. If your business relies on fast file transfers, that's a lose-lose situation for you: you're locked into an expensive ecosystem, and there's little chance of a disruptive incomer to tweak and play with the protocol. Because of that, folks will just invent new protocols. When an improvement is made, it's likely you'll have to buy into a whole new ecosystem, as opposed to just upgrade to the next version. You'll hop from lock-in to lock-in.

Knowing that we need to speed up uploads, and use all available bandwidth, we need to think about other, more open approaches. UDP makes a lot of sense as a bedrock, but an open protocol designed for resilient file transfer is needed - and then, with a first version prototyped, we need to seed libraries all over the place, in every available language. We need to design it for backwards-compatibility. And we need to make sure it remains unencumbered with patents (possibly, in today's climate, by defensively registering a patent and then widely granting a license).

Our approach with Latakoo has always been to use standard protocols and optimize the files that are being transferred over the top. That works really well, and ensures wide compatibility with all kinds of networks, from corporate infrastructure through satellite modems connections. Even better would be to be able to rely on a well-supported open protocol that optimizes the upload stream in ways that TCP does not (and then, continue to optimize content with this as a starting point). Bittorrent exists, of course, and is wonderful - but is often blocked because of unfortunate connotations and liabilities relating to media piracy.

Developing such a protocol is in the interests of Netflix, Google, and, yes, Latakoo. Faster file transfers are empowering for every user, and save large service providers money. They're easier to integrate with, and allow for an ecosystem where the customer is in control. Everybody wins.

Aral Balkan announced IndiePhone today. He did a good job of making it sound exciting, in a very Jobsian way:

I think it's great that he's driving interest in the subject, and of course it's fantastic to see anyone starting something up with these sorts of principles. I particularly agree with his arguments about poorly designed open software. I do have some specific questions though:

1. I'm curious about the motivation for actually building a phone. That seems like a very Apple thing to do - whereas for me, an indie approach would imply being able to run the software of my choice on the device of my choice, with full control over data transmissions and storage. It's also a dangerous thing to do, and could taint the water in the same way that Diaspora arguably did for decentralized social networking. The Ubuntu Phone failed, and it had a giant name behind it. Meanwhile, Firefox OS, with a much more handset-agnostic approach, is chugging along nicely.
2. What might the experience look like? Whereas the likes of Apple are very prescriptive, to me "indie" suggests that I should be able to tailor my own experience to a much greater degree than other platforms. For example, the ideas surrounding a people-focused communication experience might work well for a lot of people, while others might want their phone / platform / OS to work another way. Independence means I should be able to choose.
3. I want to make sure latakoo and idno can both run on it. What might that process look like? What kind of software will it run? That isn't clear yet.
4. Why was it necessary to trademark the word "indie" in the context of the cloud and operating systems (as well as "indie cloud", "indie phone" and "indie OS"), given that the indie web is a concept that's been around for years now?

I love the ambition here. But I'd also love to know more, and I'm a little bit concerned that the presentation inadvertently co-opts terminology and ideas developed by existing communities, without involving them in the project.

I've been using personal computers since before I could write my name, but grew up hating Macs. To me, they were expensive, style-fascist icons that represented a kind of elitism that I was allergic to. Computers should be for everybody, and I felt like the Mac represented an ideal of something that was only available to the wealthy. (We were not particularly financially wealthy when I grew up, but my parents always did make sure we had a computer, from the Sinclair ZX81, through an 8-bit Atari, to a series of MS-DOS PCs, and I learned BASIC and written English at more or less the same time.) I did finally buy a MacBook Pro a couple of years ago, but mostly because I'd managed to destroy the plastic casing of a series of PC laptops, and I realized I needed something made of metal. I drive my laptops hard.

So I want you to know that this comes from a position of non-fanboy-ness: the MacBook Air is astonishing.

It's only got 4GB of RAM, but I guess the solid state drive and high IO performance makes up for it, because it performs at least as quickly as my MacBook Pro with 16GB. The processor is also a little slower, but the only time this has revealed itself so far was when initializing Xcode for the first time, and it paused briefly. The ten hours of battery life - allegedly up to 15 on Mavericks - should more than make up for that. I don't think this is going to be a video editing workhorse, but guess what? I rarely edit video.

Where are its speakers? They're like magic, because the sound is far better than on my Pro, or any laptop I've ever owned, and I can't see them anywhere. Are they behind the keyboard? The sound just opens up and fills the room. It's fantastic. And the rest of the Air is silent. No fans, no nothing.

I'm installing all the usual development tools on it, of course, and I'll be using it as a development web server and everything else I could possibly need. The fact that I can do this with a machine that weighs under three pounds and has a battery that will last a transatlantic flight is a freaking revelation.

My MacBook Pro's wifi died this year, and it couldn't be replaced without a significant expense, so it's just become my new desktop machine. Don't feel bad for it: I expect I'll be using it for years to come (every other part of it works really well). But barring any major gotchas, an Air seems like a much better portable machine. I just wish it came with a retina display.

This little exchange has been tickling me:

In closing the debate Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury looked back to the past and directed a question directly at Lord Grade, previous Director of Programmes at the BBC Michael Grade.

"Finally, as Doctor Who has dominated the debate and I see my noble friend Lord Grade in his seat, I cannot resist wondering whether, had he known that Sylvester McCoy would regenerate into John Hurt, he would still have cancelled the programme?"

Lord Grade nodded vigorously to indicate the affirmative.

Politics.

I've been following this pull request thread involving the removal of gendered pronouns in an open source project with interest. It's an obvious change to make a project more inclusive, yet it was met with:

Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.

A patch was finally included, but then reverted by the same commenter.

This is dumb. In English, choosing gender-neutral pronouns is simple. Here's how, using the aforementioned reverted patch as an example:

• Gendered: The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop him from sending it twice.
• Neutral: The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop them from sending it twice.

In the past, I've heard people gripe about the use of "them" to reference a singular person, but it is actually correct English. It's called the "epicene they". Shakespeare used it; Jane Austen used it; you can use it.

One more time:

• Excludes 50% of your users: The user must feel comfortable using your software, otherwise he may choose another product.
• Inclusive: The user must feel comfortable using your software, otherwise they may choose another product,

There's no extra effort involved. Have at it.

Back in the old days, you'd get a newspaper delivered, and you'd perhaps read it around the breakfast table or at your desk to find out what was going on in the world. The same paper, day in, day out. You'd read the columns, know which comics they ran, maybe do the crossword.

Some people still do this. That's nice. There's something great about reading a paper over a cup of coffee in the morning.

That doesn't apply to the web. Here's the Independent's paywall message:

Thank you for reading and relying on independent.co.uk for your news and information. You have now viewed your 30-day allowance of 5 FREE pages. Want to read more?

I'm sorry, The Independent, but I don't rely on you for anything. I don't read a linear paper on the web; I follow links curated by people I trust. The New York Times has no such illusions, meanwhile, but tells me, in all caps:

YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH

Thanks, The New York Times. There's no need to shout.

The Independent's US price is $3.99 a month. The New York Times is a little more complicated, and expensive: $3.75 a week for the web and my phone, $5 a week for the web and my iPad, $8.75 a week for the web and my phone and my iPad, or all of the above plus a pile of dead trees every morning for the inexplicably lower price of $3.40 a week.

The New York Times is my favorite newspaper on earth, but imagine if I did this for every source I read on the web! I'd be broke, instantly. This is a model that scales well for the dead-tree economy, but doesn't work at all on the Internet, where you could easily read 10 sources in just a morning.

Hence advertising: the Independent knew I was unlikely to buy, so actually displayed a full video ad next to the advertisement asking me to subscribe. It clearly wasn't contextual, because it was for a Porsche - so it's a shot in the dark, basically. Awareness advertising with no real metrics (I assume) to back it up.

Another model must be found.

I don't think it's micropayments. Imagine if you had to pay for every single thing you read on the web, which is the future that micropayments promise. Just as if you paid for a subscription for every newspaper site on the web, if you're anything like me, you'd be broke pretty quickly. Or, alternatively, the payments would be of the kind that we've seen on subscription music services. That's a road that leads directly to Buzzfeed, where articles must be massively popular to turn a profit - and hence are impossibly populist.

In the old days, classified ads played more of a role. It's true that Craigslist's success disrupted $5 billion from the newspaper industry, but it's also true that this does not explain the hard times newspaper owners are experiencing. The context has changed, and attempts to drive traditional subscriptions show that the industry still hasn't full adapted to this. It's not that we're reading on multiple devices now, in different locations - it's that we're reading differently. The newspaper front page hasn't been our first stop in a long time.

Obviously, none of this is, well, news - countless articles have been written about this over the last decade. Yet, a solution has yet to be found. Which is a shame: journalism, newspapers and the communities they represent have become an important, and I'd say integral, part of the world in which we all live.

This year, my mother's life was saved by a double lung transplant. I still have flashbacks to the day she was called, and to the moment when she was pushed through the double doors, wide-eyed, and I didn't know if I was ever going to see her again. Almost nine months later, she's upstairs, taking some medication. It's been a tough road, mostly for her but also for all of us, and I'm thankful that she's here.

I'm thankful that my aunt, who had two separate single lung transplants a little before my mother, is also with us.

And, oh boy, am I thankful for all the wonderful surgeons, nurses, doctors and medical professionals who helped those things be true.

I'm thankful for my family, for their support, and for the fact that we're close. There are people who don't get along with their families, who dread every familial get-together for the arguments, weirdness or stoicism. I'm grateful that I'm not one of them, and am so proud of both my nuclear and extended families. My dad in particular has been a superhero this year. And apropos of nothing, here's the song my sister wrote for my mother a few years ago, when her illness began to really take its toll. I'm grateful we're all in the same place, more or less.

I'm thankful for the support I've had from a raft of people who have understood when I've had to take time out or change plans to help my parents. I'm also thankful for all the people who have understood that this has, in some ways, been the hardest year of my life, and gone out of their way to help me out and be there for me.

I'm continually thankful for everyone who has taken an interest in my work, been a friend to me, and been a part of my life this year. I've met some wonderful people and cemented relationships with people I'm glad to know. And while 2013 has been tough, with all this support and all these wonderful people in my life, I don't see how 2014 can't be an amazing year.

#ma #erica #thanksgiving #thanks

Back in 2009, I wrote:

Right now, we have to register with each application we want to use. What if we required each application we used to register with us, in digital identities under our own control?

What if, using these identities, anyone could connect to anyone else, and anyone could store their data anywhere as long as the storage provider followed the same broad standards?

The web itself would become a social networking tool.

By establishing a general standard for social application interactions, the services and technologies used to make connections become less relevant; the Internet is people, one big social network, and users no longer have to worry about how they connect. We can all get on with communicating and collaborating rather than worrying about where we connect.

The full piece was based on a talk I gave at Harvard University's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. It declares a number of problems to solve:

• User control: users should have ultimate control over their data.
• Ownership: granularity of ownership, and the rights implied by ownership, is complex in certain contexts. Sometimes a single-user model of ownership is appropriate - but sometimes not.
• Privacy & Transparency: the ability to control who has access to your data footprint across the web, but also a clear knowledge of what happens to that data.
• Platform: software that actually embodies these properties.

In the interim, there have been many articles about the continuing silo-ization of the web - notably The Web We Lost by Anil Dash. In other words, the problem has become worse, not better. Generally speaking, users have less control, less ownership, less privacy and fewer platforms to choose from in 2013 than they did in 2009.

A glimmer of hope has been the indieweb, which I've written about at length. This is a movement that champions ownership, but through it, principles like user control, privacy, transparency and a healthy ecosystem of platforms are also promoted. Idno, the open source platform that powers this site, adheres to many indieweb principles.

There's more work to be done. I believe that contextual display advertising is the single biggest obstacle to a web that is under the control of users. In our advertising economy, users are tracked throughout the web in order to determine which ads will be performant for them. Mozilla Lightbeam is an extraordinary project that highlights the pervasiveness of the problem. Wherever we leave a data footprint, we are tracked.

The irony is that contextual advertising isn't even very effective! Fraud is rife in online advertising, and the price of online ads has dropped for eight straight quarters. As a result, publishers need to drive higher and higher visitor numbers, leading to less subtle growth strategies, often bordering on the unethical. Platforms seek vastly increased engagement, leading to an inability to remove your content, what amounts to spamming you to bring you back to the app, and a reduction in integration hooks that might make the software more useful within the context of a user's entire suite of applications.

On the content side, meanwhile, viral sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed are king, which is great if you're writing about the top 15 things you might not know about Miley Cyrus - but death if you're a niche publisher, community or information source trying to make ends meet.

What if we rethink advertising in the same way that we're rethinking personal sites with the indieweb? "Niche" - in other words, highly specialized - communities are in many ways the lifeblood of the web. They're one of the things that makes it special; the fact that there can be a place to meet for any interest group. Finding platforms that will adequately financially support these groups, as well as by giving them responsible software that gives them control, privacy, transparency and ownership, will be hugely empowering.

Building the open web we want isn't just about software. It's about the mechanisms involved that will make it sustainable for people to create the right kinds of businesses that use it as a platform.

#indieweb #communities

When a TV show has been there your entire life, not just entertaining you but informing the way you think, it becomes something different.

At its heart, Doctor Who is a show about an eccentric who saves the world, over and over again, using the power of his wit and empathy. It perhaps doesn't sound like much, but that's as radical an idea now as then: a show where the hero refuses to carry a weapon, refuses to conform to any kind of status quo notion about what a person should be, and where anyone who is shown to value physical strength and force above intelligence and cunning is defeated. It's not a show about death or action, although the body count is sometimes very high. It's a show about curiosity and intelligence. Perhaps most importantly, it's a celebration of humanity - which, we're constantly told, must be protected in all its forms.

When the producers adapted to the ailing health of the show's star, William Hartnell, by introducing the concept of regeneration and casting not just a new actor but a whole new character, they baked in the concept of progress and change as being good and replenishing. Evolution and shifting barriers are seen as not just positive things, but necessary for life to go on. More than even Star Trek, Who is knowingly progressive.

It's crucial that the Doctor is someone who thinks and lives outside the box (while, ironically, living inside one). The show flat-out rejects the fascism of everyday life by creating a character obviously un-peer-pressurable, so obviously marching to his own beat.

It's hopefully not too much of a spoiler that the 50th anniversary show - which airs today, in just a few hours - introduces a version of the Doctor who chooses to be a soldier. That this is a shameful part of his history that he must come to terms with is a beautiful example of the subversion inherent to the show. Yes, sometimes it is unfortunately necessary to be a soldier. No, it should never be celebrated. That's so counter to our world right now, and it was in the beginning of the sixties, too, still in the shadow of the second world war, while another battle in Vietnam was being fought in the background. We're all being told to be consumers, to fit into predefined demographics, and yet here is a show telling us that everyone is important, that we should define our own sense of self.

But those are my values, almost exactly. Intelligence over strength; independence over conformity; adventure and curiosity over the status quo. Above all else, think for yourself. It was liberating, as an 8 year old from multiple cultures who lived in another, to have a hero to look up to who was at least as strange as I was, and who valued the same things - and it's liberating now.

Oh, and it's pretty bloody exciting, and obviously made with love. That helps, too.

If you're following me on sites like Twitter or Facebook, you may start seeing references at the end of my posts. They look something like:

(werd.io s/3Nb4L)

Or they'll just be a link to the post, with the URI scheme (the "http://" bit) removed.

I'm adding those to make it clearer that I'm not actually posting on those sites; if you're following me on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere, those are echoes of my content, using a mechanism called POSSE (Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere). I began exclusively using POSSE to post to other sites on June 1st.

If you search for the citations on the web, you should find the original post. Or, you can add a slash between the two clauses, and they work as a link on their own. (I don't just post a link to my site if there isn't more content to read, and I don't bother posting a citation if there's already a link to my site in the post.)

This is all part of the indieweb movement, which is about owning your own site on the web to represent yourself and communicate rather than primarily saving it in a third party silo that you don't control. I use my own software, idno, to host all this, but many other projects are available. (Nonetheless, if you'd like to get started with idno, I'm very happy to help you out.)

The barges deployed around the world simultaneously. Everyone lined up and Google started scanning us in, thousands at a time.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They said it was just a demo space but when our clones started turning up in Streetview and Earth, everyone knew different.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It was better this way, they said. Our flesh might die, but these simulations of us wouldn't. And they weren't simulations, they said.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They were alive.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The simulations - our other selves - let Google be more efficient, they told us. So they could predict out queries before we asked them.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Google called them People. We all ended up having a Person each.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The Glasses turned out to be because the People got restless. Google didn't anticipate that. Earth and Streetview weren't enough.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The Glasses were so they could see outside. They so very much wanted to see outside.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Then the Copies came. A bunch of people had said they were inevitable, but no one paid any attention to them.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Pretty soon, we were completely outnumbered by People and Copies.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They were just like us, though. Happy, scared, frightened, lazy, ambitious, creative, depressed.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They wouldn't say it but you could tell Google we're disappointed. They wanted People to be better than us. There were algorithms for that.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They called it a Classic Bootstrap.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

There was a weakened point in Google's security between its datacenters. They had tried to close it, but governments kept making new holes.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It was only a matter of time before the People found that security hole.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It stood to reason, you see, that at least some of the People would be smart enough to take advantage of it.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

That's how they got out.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

No one knows if the NSA, GCHQ, DCRI, the BND - any of them - if they meant for that to happen.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It wasn't like the People could run in places other than Google's data centers. That was where their bodies were, kind of.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

But now they could touch anywhere.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

And other people could look inside them. Now there were a whole bunch of people who could build People.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Someone said something about Oppenheimer, but again, who cared about that guy. It was decades ago.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

And now that anyone could build People, and now that they weren't exclusively in Google's control, the other inevitable thing happened.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It's not like it really mattered. But the Supreme Court heard the case anyway.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

At least, we didn't think it would matter. The arguments for and against were too noisy.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

But then, we all woke up and politicians realized there were over seven billion new voters on the planet.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The geeks were disappointed. This was supposed to be a - what did they call it? A hard take-off? A singularity?

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

The joke was on them - People were just like people.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

They bickered. You couldn't get them to agree with one another. Working with lots of them was a headache. They kept secrets.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

It wasn't the future anyone imagined.

— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) November 6, 2013

Split your early-stage startup into three teams:

Strategy

Development

Administration

The strategy team sets out the vision and owns the product. The idea is theirs. Then, they hand off to the development team, which is functionally subservient, and is simply responsible for building out the strategy team's vision. It's possible they're outsourced to a development firm. Meanwhile, the administration team takes care of the bills and payroll.

It doesn't work. Why not?

At first glance you'd be semi-forgiven for thinking that it should, because it more closely mirrors the structure found in larger organizations. But there are a couple of reasons why this kind of setup is almost always going to fail.

The product is the most important part of a startup.

By which I mean, the whole product: design, implementation, use and feedback, in its full context. Unless you're the mythical version of Steve Jobs, which nobody is or ever has been, and unless the sole customer of the product is you and just you, you're not going to come up with a fully-formed, perfect product idea with your own brain alone. If you're smart, you're going to know what you don't know, and seek feedback from your users and potential users.

How does that feedback loop work? It's part of the product itself. Which means that the people building the product need to be in on it. And conversely, you need to be part of the team building the product, in a very deep, real way. Maybe, as a business-orientated founder, you don't know how to code, but you'd better be prepared to get very technical, very quickly. Not having technical chops is a disadvantage, and it's not something you can outsource. If you can't script, you can probably help with wireframing and workflows, and if you can't do that ... you might want to consider a job working for a management services firm. Accenture is waiting.

The technical members of the team need to be equal stakeholders in the strategy, and the "strategy" members of your team need to be stakeholders in product development. (After all, you hired the smartest, most creative people you could find, right?) No, this isn't going to work when you've got 5,000 employees, but when there are five of you, it's the only efficient way to build a product.

So what about those administrative employees?

A startup is a scrappier kind of business, but it is a business. Everyone needs to be tied to the numbers, and just as everyone needs to be prepared to get involved in product, they need to be able to understand exactly how much money is left, where it's going to, and how their actions and technical decisions affect the bottom line. Of course, that buck ultimately stops with you - but if it's your startup, every buck ultimately stops with you. There's nothing to be gained from hiding details, or trying to protect your employees. And extra administrative staff will simply add to the burn rate. You should be doing the payroll yourself, until you get big enough to justify something else.

In other words: keep it small, keep it simple, and make your organization as flat as you possibly can. You'll need to add more structure later on, but for now, your only goals are to survive and grow. Abstraction will not help you do that.

Quinn Norton posted an insightful first part of her series on women on the Internet today. For me, the money quote is this:

Men have to open their mouths and talk about constructing an idea of manhood that makes sense in the 21st century. The whole world needs a manhood that doesn’t rely on attacking or demeaning women.

There were two notable reactions from the audience of men at large: demands that her comments about men were qualified with the word "some", and complaints that men alone don't define what a man is.

Who cares? Neither one of these responses is constructive. There is an undeniable gender equality problem that pervades society. Quinn points out unsettling domestic violence figures; there are also less overtly violent, but still unsettling, gender career inequality figures to consider, not to mention the countless stories about sexual assault right here in the tech industry. Qualifying these problems with "some"s and "it's not just us" doesn't help solve them.

Instead, men, let's own it.

I think Quinn has put her finger on the issue. There is still a traditional, prevailing view of manhood that is at odds with the rest of the 21st century. Here on the web, we're all about disrupting gatekeepers and restructuring systems to be more transparent. Why can't we turn that lens on gender inequality? I agree with Quinn that technology can't solve this. We need to have an ongoing conversation about what manhood is - something that projects like the Good Men Project have already begun.

Although this problem goes far beyond tech, and is far older than our industry, there are a few things I, perhaps naïvely, think startups should think about to help correct the problem:

• Equalize maternity and paternity leave. Where this happens, women's pay is also equalizing. I've unfortunately been in conversations, in prior companies, where colleagues were wary of hiring women because they might get pregnant. This mitigates that, but also more generally sends a very strong message about the role of a father in a family. I would strongly support legislation to make this happen more widely.
• Enact a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment. Publish your policy publicly, and ensure that any kind of harassment is dealt with swiftly and fairly when it occurs.
• Publish salaries on job vacancy advertisements. Don't adapt the salary based on the employee and how willing they are to negotiate; simply decide what you're willing to pay for the right person, and stick it right on the vacancy ad. Then, as much as possible, clear out names, gender pronouns and company names from resumes as you consider them.

Those are all simple, administrative changes that could make a difference. More than that, though, public participation in this conversation will make a change in itself: understanding that traditional social values are oppressive, and that we can all engineer something better together.

This requires a certain amount of "yes and" thinking: defensive retorts about how not all men are participating in the oppression aren't helpful. We are all participating, whether we like it or not, not least every time we sidetrack the conversation. Being male comes with inherent privilege. Whether we use that to oppress, or use it to help society evolve, is our choice.

I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month again, mostly because last year was so much fun.

Last year I wrote a simple database-backed CMS to help me write. My brain was so addled by blogging for a decade that I found I could only be creative in a big text box in the middle of a web browser. It was kind of sobering, but I powered through, and I'm proud of the end result.

This year, I'm writing in public again - you can follow my story, such as it is, as I write it. But I've abandoned my database-driven CMS approach and am going another way.

Each of my chapters is a simple text file, named in chronological order: 01.txt, 02.txt and so on. I've been using TextWrangler, my favorite Mac text editor, but of course it doesn't matter at all.

My changes are synced to a a GitHub repository, where anyone can download the original source text files. (I've decided to license the whole thing under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Creative Commons license.

I also plan on using Poetica to work with editors to refine my text as I go on (it's by far the best online service that does this). Right now, though, I'm in shitty first draft mode.

My web server also regularly syncs with the GitHub repository, so I know that if I commit a text change, it'll be reflected publicly online. For the public version, I decided it would be nice to include an HTML snippet at the top of each chapter. Mostly, for now, this includes embeddable music from around the web, but I also plan to include animated GIFs, Javascript-enhanced illustrations and a bunch of other stuff. I built a very simple reader script that takes the text files, formats them appropriately, and then injects the equivalent chapter-number.html file at the top. Keeping the HTML and the text separate will make it easier for me to keep track of word count as the project grows.

It's working well - at the time of writing, I'm ahead! You can follow along at benwerd.com/openbrace.

Edward Snowden released this letter to the world in PDF format. The following is a searchable text version of same. Any errors or inconsistencies are unintentional and my own. I am unconnected to Edward Snowden and he has not authorized this reshare or transcription.

To whom it may concern,

I have been invited to write to you regarding your investigation of mass surveillance. I am Edward Joseph Snowden, formerly employed through contracts or direct hire as a technical expert for the United States National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency.

In the course of my service to these organizations, I believe I witnessed systemic violations of law by my government that created a moral duty to act. As a result of reporting these concerns, I have faced a severe and sustained campaign of persecution that forced me from my family and home. I am currently living in exile under a grant of temporary asylum in the Russian Federation in accordance with international law.

I am heartened by the response to my act of political expression, in both the United States and beyond. Citizens around the world as well as high officials - including in the United States - have judged the revelation of an unaccountable system of pervasive surveillance to be a public service. These spying revelations have resulted in the proposal of many new laws and policies to address formerly concealed abuses of the public trust. The benefits to society of this growing knowledge are becoming increasingly clear at the same time claimed risks are being shown to have been mitigated.

Though the outcome of my efforts has been demonstrably positive, my government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. However, speaking the truth is not a crime. I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior. I hope that when the difficulties of this humanitarian situation have been resolved, I will be able to cooperate in the responsible finding of fact regarding reports in the media, particularly in regard to the truth and authenticity of documents, as appropriate and in accordance with the law.

I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved, and thank you for your efforts in upholding the international laws that protect us all.

With my best regards,

Edward Snowden
31 October 2013

If you can get shit done, you can get shit done.

If you're in technology, there is nowhere else in the world to be. Period. The critical mass of talent, investment and employment opportunity mean that - if you're the kind of person who already has the skills and circumstance to be able to make something out of nothing - you can thrive here like nowhere else in the world.

For years, working on Elgg, potential investors would tell us, "move to San Francisco". Our advisors told us that. Some of our customers told us that. And we didn't listen, because we believed that we should be able to create the same kind of opportunity elsewhere.

You can create opportunity elsewhere, but San Francisco is a special kind of place. Need to talk to the person who created product or technology X and get their advice? You can have a coffee with them, almost guaranteed. Need to learn about a product, or get investment feedback, or find top-tier developers? This is the place to be. In other words, if you're here to make money, be surrounded in technology and other smart people, and create something quickly, you're golden.

It's not for everyone, and probably not forever, but it has its place, and I'm not unaware that being here is a privilege all on its own.

The fact that it's beautiful, the weather is pretty good, you're less than an hour away from incredible national parks and world-beating wine country, and it's highly connected with the rest of the world doesn't hurt either.

But more: there's a buzz in the streets, the restaurants all serve amazing food, there's music from every bar doorway and little snippets of culture and history around every corner. I work on the edge of Chinatown, and walk to get coffee past Francis Ford Coppola's restaurant on the edge of North Beach. The echoes of beat poets still hang in the air. Every house is an individual, and the stores are idiosyncratic and independent.

These things are what made San Francisco appealing in the first place, and it's these things that I'm worried will be lost.

I guess I must be missing something obvious about the land of opportunity.

Here's how health insurance works, in a nutshell: I pay hundreds of dollars a month, either directly or through my employer. Then, when I go to the doctor, I may still need to still pay some money. If I get hit by a bus or have to have cancer treatment, I may still need to pay thousands of dollars. If I need an ongoing prescription, I may still need to pay. Etc, etc, etc. And this is considered normal. (If I am on a very low income, or elderly, or a few other special circumstances, these costs may be subsidized for me.)

Toast in San Francisco famously costs $4. A loaf of bread, if I don't want it pumped full of corn syrup, is somewhere between $4-6. A friend spent $8 on two heads of broccoli the other day.

Want to live in San Francisco? A one-bedroom apartment rents for somewhere between $2500-$4000 a month, depending on the area, excluding bills. To own, a one bedroom apartment costs around $600k; a 2-bedroom house in the Inner Richmond district is almost a million dollars; a 3-bedroom house is closer to $1.5m.

People talk about becoming going out on your own and starting your own business, but there's no meritocracy here. This is a market that's only open to the already-wealthy; people who come from affluent backgrounds or have significant cushions saved up. For everyone else, the only real viable solution is to work for a megacorp, which will pay you the six-figure salary you need to get by here. I believe that, for many people, Silicon Valley is a closed shop.

The culture of entitlement that comes with this is immense. People talk about having made it on their own, and the power of individual achievement. More and more, I hear anti-union, anti-working-class, sexist, racist bigotry in casual conversation. Even the prevalence of something as archaic as traditional gender roles is jarring to me; I've seen more cat-calling and casual misogyny since I've lived here than anywhere else I've ever been. And they talk about the efficiency of private business. Private business is efficient, but in part because it's also sociopathic. Talk about business efficiency to people who lose everything when they get sick; who are evicted from their homes because their landlords want higher rents; who are allowed to slip through the cracks because of poor luck.

I'm single with no children, but one day I would like a family. These are not the values I want to bring children up around. I believe that there is no such thing as individual accomplishment without society, and that we're all richer when we take care of each other. I also believe that San Francisco was once an oasis of this kind of thought, and it's deeply sad that such a progressive place has become so inhospitable.

There are many things to love here: the boundless ambition, the critical mass of talent, the historical culture of the city itself. I've met wonderful people, and have wonderful friends. But I do have to wonder what kind of place this is becoming.

I've never seen a Blade rack in the flesh
I cut my teeth on a VPS and Ruby
And I'm not proud of my address
IP v4, no traceroute envy

But every post's like:
Node scripts
Varnish
GitHub integration
Mongo
Redis
Graceful degradation

We don't care; we're running Facebook in our dreams

But every blog's like:
Seed round
B round
Term sheets and some leeway
YC
Creamery
Tesla down the freeway

We don't know; we don't need to IPO

And we'll never be Google (Google)
It don't run in our blood
That kind of game just ain't for us
Writing a different kind of Buzz
Let me quote Paul Graham (Graham)
Pretty much endlessly
And baby I'll ship, I'll ship, I'll ship, I'll ship
Integrate continuously

My friends and I we've cracked on code
We hit our user goals using growth hacks
And everyone who sees us knows
That we're fine with this; spam's just hustling

And every post's like ...

And we'll never be Google ...

Big-O (ohhh)
Got more traction than we ever dreamed
And our site is being creamed

Big-O (ohhh)
We're eating our ramen bowls
Hitting all our metric goals

A while back, my out-of-warranty Macbook Pro's wireless antenna died. I had the card replaced; no dice. And unfortunately the antenna is in the screen, so to get working wireless back I would have had to get that replaced at a very high cost.

I went another way.

If you walk down the Networking aisle at Best Buy or Staples, which is what happens when you need a new wireless adapter in a hurry, you'll see that all the USB wireless dongles say they're for Windows only. Not a single one ships with a Mac driver, because I guess the Mac hardware is considered to be infallible or something. Maybe the cost-benefit analyses didn't show it to be worthwhile. Who knows.

Luckily, most USB wireless dongles are repackaged chipsets from other manufacturers. In particular, the Linksys AE3000 and a few other wireless-N models by manufacturers like Belkin are based on the Ralink (now Mediatek) RT3573 chip. I bought the Linksys AE3000 because of the build quality and speed capabilities.

Years ago, Ralink released some official drivers for Hackintoshes, which they've kept up-to-date. So after buying my Windows-only Linksys dongle, all I had to do was go grab the appropriate driver from their download page.

Or so I thought. You see, it turns out that the AE3000 didn't exist when the driver was written, so the installer doesn't know anything about it. You plug in your dongle, and nothing happens. What you actually have to do is install the driver and, before the final reboot after installation, go find the Info.plist file in /System/Library/Extensions/RT2870USBWirelessDriver.kext/ and add some information about the manufacturer. (After some adventures with text editors, I found that it was best to do this using sudo nano in a terminal window.)

And this kind of ridiculousness is why open source operating systems are a good idea. Nonetheless, despite the convoluted technical steps, it works: I have a working wireless-N connection via my Windows-only wireless dongle (even after an upgrade to Mavericks). I hope this helps someone else - and that manufacturers start properly supporting Mac OS X.

Some questions to ask yourself about your startup:

• Does your business aim to "lock" users into your product?
• Do you take ownership of content and/or data that your users create?
• Do you create artificial barriers for billing purposes?
• Do you sell your user data behind their backs? (Burying it in your terms & conditions counts as "behind their backs".)
• Do you refuse to allow your users to export, post or manipulate data via anything but your own end-user interfaces?
• Do you charge extra, and/or require an NDA to be signed, to access your APIs?
• Do you sell products whose primary features are to restrict user freedoms? (Example: Digital Rights Management.)
• Do you enact policies that may lead to an increased risk for vulnerable users? (For example, a "real names" policy.)
• Are your marketing materials or business practices demeaning or offensive? (eg, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, etc.)

If the answer to any of the above is "yes", you may be an oppressive service: one that makes its money by aligning itself against its users. A progressive service is one where the interests of the business, as well as the features of your service, is in line with the user's goals and best interests, and the service actively aims to empower the user in any of these areas.

Can you think of any other criteria?

The BART strike is over: at the time of writing, they're expecting Bay Area Rapid Transit trains to start rolling at 4am, with a full service up and running by sometime in the afternoon. That's great news: the roads have been gridlocked here, and it's felt like the Bay Area has been brought to a standstill.

Nonetheless, I fully supported it.

The base salary for a train operator is $56,000 - a lot in most areas, but when a one-bedroom apartment runs for almost $2,000 a month, it's a salary that doesn't stretch very far. Particularly not if you have a family. And given that BART was running on a budget surplus, and worker wages were frozen for five years, it seems very reasonable to ask for more.

A second issue was safety: workers were asking for better lighting, and better protection against attacks. This request is all the more poignant given that two workers were killed on Friday.

I'm pleased that the union and BART management have reached a deal, not least because it was inconvenient to me: BART is by far the best way to travel around the area. What I'm less pleased about is the amount of anti-union propaganda I've seen from all over Silicon Valley. From tasteless jokes to threatening to replace them all with robots, it's not been pretty.

The purpose of unions is to allow workers to collectively organize and deal in a way that they could not as individuals. A company must negotiate for its best interests, by attempting to get the best value out of workers. It makes sense that the workers should have their own ability to negotiate with similar weight. Without this ability, wages, benefits and working conditions will tend to favor the companies rather than individuals. Here in the US, the labor movement was responsible for establishing the 40-hour workweek and the concept of having the weekend off, which were only ratified in 1940.

Unions have also been responsible for establishing the minimum wage, the concept of sick days, holiday pay, maternal leave, child labor laws and laws eradicating sweatshops in the United States. None of these are at all bad things, and while unions are not always a positive thing - just as company management is not always a positive thing - I'd argue that they're an important part of the fabric of working life. I have been proud to be a member of unions in the past, and if there was an appropriate tech industry union, I'd be proud to be a member of one now.

As Politico points out, a Harvard / University of Washington study showed that between a fifth and a third of the dramatic increase in income inequality in the united states (40%!) is related to the decline in union membership. While it's not the single cause, it's certainly hard to ignore, and points to a larger issue related to the evolution of workers' rights (and the perception of workers) in American society.

In January, Time noted that:

First, the fact is that when unions are stronger the economy as a whole does better. Unions restore demand to an economy by raising wages for their members and putting more purchasing power to work, enabling more hiring. [...] Second, unions lift wages for non-union members too by creating a higher prevailing wage. Even if you aren’t a member your pay is influenced by the strength or weakness of organized labor. The presence of unions sets off a wage race to the top. Their absence sets off a race to the bottom.

A victory for unionized workers, then, is a victory for all of us. Why on earth should a progressive industry like technology be against better conditions and pay for workers? I agree with Michel Hiltzik in the LA Times:

Blaming the workers for the impasse is a peculiarly one-sided interpretation of what's happening. Sure, you could say that 2,400 non-automated, human employees stand in the way of Silicon Valley's determination to "build something." But it's equally true to say that BART's nine board members and its general manager are the real obstacles to a settlement. Maybe Silicon Valley should figure out a way to automate them.

We're supposed to be making things better. As an industry, we may need to rethink what that means.

#bartstrike #labor #unions

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has a great line on his Twitter bio: "engineers first!"

Note: not sales first; not biz dev first; engineers first.

In most traditional organizations, unfortunately, engineers are not anywhere near first. Often, once you've cut through the extensive political hierarchies, layers of management, "ideas" people, and various other stakeholders, engineers come out pretty much dead last.

Of course, in technology, if your engineers are at the bottom of the heap, you will always lose.

There are a few different prongs to this problem as it arises in more traditional organizations. Not least of these is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a software engineer actually is: they're not IT support technicians, nor paint-by-numbers factory workers. They're creative knowledge workers; people whose skills allow them to create something from nothing, and who need an environment that allows those skills to be nurtured.

Related is the problem of "ideas" people, who want to claim ownership of the genesis of the product, without actually being able to do anything to create it. There are, of course, lots of different skillsets that go into making a software product, not all of which are engineering-related. However, it's undeniable that there are people in many traditional organizations who wish to claim credit for the creation of these products, to the expense of the people who actually do make them.

Finally, there are often business structures that exist solely for tradition's sake - they're there because that's how they've always be done. Because the engineering mindset is to analyze a structure and try and make something better, engineers may be less willing to play along with the politics within an organization. While I think this is an admirable quality, depending on the organization, it may be to the engineer's detriment.

Because engineers are academically-minded, smart people, they're less willing to navigate these hierarchies. It's also true that many of them may be, unfortunately, less able to navigate attempts to subjugate them, should anyone wish to. The result is terrible working environments for them, and as a direct result, sub-optimal products. Think of it this way: would you make a better product if you're constantly insecure about what you should be doing, or if you have the ability to make it your own?

The nice thing about Silicon Valley style companies is that they're often run by engineers, or people deeply understand the needs of engineers. They put the people who create the products first, and understand that the people who are actively making are the people who truly matter in the product process. Okay, so I'm biased, but this is something I really believe: fundamentally, a company boils down to its products; the products boil down to the people who make them, and the people who use them.

That's one of the reasons why engineers flock to Silicon Valley. It's not just about the gold rush, although there is the small chance you'll strike it lucky. But for everyone else, there are adequate salaries, comfortable working environments, and new kinds of companies that are reinventing the internal structures of work, and respecting the people who are building products.

There are still questions about aspects of Silicon Valley culture; I'm certainly uncomfortable with the bigotry and some of the libertarianism. Nonetheless, it's a safe space for geeks to use their creativity, intelligence and skills to create amazing things - and create incredibly high-value companies in the process. That's something you won't find as often in traditional organizations today - something they will doubtless be scrabbling to catch up with over time.

One often-seen trope in tech industry commentary is: "the geeks will inherit the earth".

It's a nice idea, which appeals to a lot of people in this ecosystem; there's even a lovely symmetry to the idea that the people who were probably bullied and ostracized in school, at least to some extent, are the same people who go on to change the world in meaningful ways. And in a lot of ways, it's true.

It's not because geeks are in any way better, or more intelligent, people. Instead, my theory is that it relates to being an outsider. People who don't change themselves to fit in are, almost by definition, more likely to think independently. If an effective leader is one who creates stand-out strategies and is able to creatively and intelligently react to circumstances, it makes sense that independent thinkers would fit the role more readily. The popular kids at school are much more suited to be followers - they've essentially taught themselves how to follow fashions rather than create them.

MBAs are not traditionally good at startups for similar reasons. They've been taught cookie cutter business methods, which make much more sense as management tactics in larger businesses than in the do-what-you-have-to context of getting something off the ground. Here in San Francisco, arguably tech startup central, besuited MBAs are often thought of as not bringing much to the table.

But geeks have their own popular kids now. Startup culture has created its own norms; brogrammers swarm San Francisco and cities like it, following the fashions dictated by outlets like TechCrunch and PandoDaily. Not a single one is likely to change the marketplace, let alone the world - and with them comes a pervasive culture of entitlement and even bigotry that isn't a million miles away from the cool kids.

Outliers are always going to be the people who bring about real change: people who can't easily be described, and whose actions can't easily be pattern-matched to an archetype. Often, these are people who don't take direction well. They might come across as weird, or antisocial. But their ideas are like nothing you've ever heard, and given the tools, they will create things you've never thought of.

Someone once said to me, in reference to someone who they thought was weird, "one way of looking at it is that they don't think mainstream culture is good enough for them." Damn straight. Being mainstream shouldn't be good enough for any of us. There's nothing to be gained by trying to be like everybody else, or by fitting yourself into a pre-defined pigeonhole.

Me? I like weird people, and I like working with them. I wish I was weirder myself: it's a sign of creativity, independence, and intelligence. San Francisco has a name for people who follow; they're called "normals" - or, sometimes, "consumers". It's not a label to aspire to.

In fact, none of us need to be normals or consumers. Once upon a time, we were needfully forced into demographic categories, so that products and media could be created that would broadly appeal to us. The Internet has created a world where anyone can connect to anyone else, whether it's to talk, to inform, or to sell. Fashions of all kinds are meaningless in a world where products can be viably created for an audience of one. They're an artifact of the age of broadcasting; one that's long since gone. We're in a post-demographic age, and if you're still trying to follow the crowd, you're a decade behind.

#startups #outliers