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On the Social Web Foundation…

About nine months ago, I ran into Evan Prodromou at an event at Meta. The social media giant was telling an audience of Fediverse and decentralized social veterans about its plans for its social network product Threads – focused primarily on its quite extraordinary plans to integrate it with the wider Fediverse.

At the time, I wrote a very long blog post about the whole experience. It was a fascinating day. I learned a lot. And while I came out of the event with a little trepidation, I also had a sense that maybe this ecology had reached some kind of inflection point. It felt like the Fediverse might be about to take another leap and suddenly be available to a completely new and massive group of people.

But many of the people we met on the day had another sense too: that if that was going to happen successfully—if it was going to result in a better Fediverse for everyone—we needed a way to bring together all the major practitioners to talk about the future. We needed a way to fund and support the projects that the future success of the Fediverse might rest upon – things that were for the good of everyone, but no one was clear who should build them. We needed a way to address the problems that no one company or instance or implementer or brilliant creative technologist could solve by themselves. In essence, we needed some kind of foundation or non-profit that could help fill the gaps.

Evan and I spent much of the next few months seeing if this idea held water. We talked to well over a hundred and fifty experts and practitioners in the area asking the core questions – do you think we need a thing like this? If it existed, what would you like it to do? How should it be funded? What kind of organization should it be? And we then took all of their comments and priorities and digested them down into a clearer pitch and mission. At this stage the brilliant Mallory Knodel joined our team. And with her we then went around in a more formal way to companies and open source projects (as well as to non-profit civil society organizations who are advocating for a healthier internet) to see if we could put together some funding.

Nine months later, I’d like to introduce you to the Social Web Foundation which we launched yesterday. I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to put together. Fundamentally, its goal is pretty simple – it’s there to help the Fediverse grow in a sustainable and healthy way that benefits everyone. And it’ll do that by helping explain and communicate the Fediverse to the general public, by building industry (tech obviously, but also media etc.) engagement with the Fediverse, by creating resources to help people with design, tech and legal questions, and finally by working with protocol and product to patch any holes and gaps in the current ecology.

There’s so much more I could say about how we got here and how we’d like to help, but if you want to know more probably the best thing to do is to go and read our launch announcement and explore the site. It’s not comprehensive, but a lot of what you might be keen to know about right now is there.

Anyway, I think it’s an important thing to exist and I’m extremely proud to have been a part of getting it set up and running. It absolutely would not be here without the help of all the people who talked to us along the way, our brilliant advisors and the partner companies and non-profits who have given us their support. So thank you so much to all of you. It’s enormously appreciated.

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How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse

This is an exceptionally long post detailing pretty much everything I learned at an event shortly before Christmas at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. I’ve been delayed in writing it up because of traveling back to the UK for Christmas and other commitments – and because I wanted to capture everything. It’s roughly written, and I’ll probably edit it a bit after posting. If you have questions or comments or want me to clarify anything, DM me on Twitter @tomcoates or email me at tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org.

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to be invited to a Data Dialogue event at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. The event was designed to reach out to people in the ‘Fediverse’ community, tell us their plans for their product “Threads” and get a bit of feedback about the policy and privacy implications. 

Since that meeting, Mark Zuckerberg has announced the first part of the Threads roadmap – making it possible for people to see Threads posts within the wider Fediverse. Given that, I thought maybe it would be a good time to write about the other things I learned and some of the feedback we gave the company.

What is the ‘Fediverse’

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, the Fediverse is one approach to the question, “How can we have one (or more) social network(s) that no one company owns, for which anyone can make a client or a server, with all of them interoperating as seamlessly as possible so that they’re understandable to people who aren’t terminally online”. 

The main Fediverse approach is through projects like Mastodon – which are effectively small, local social networks that can be hosted by an individual or company, but whose users can still communicate with — and reference posts and people — using other similar networks. Most of these products are built with at least some reference to the ActivityPub protocol co-written by Evan Prodromou.

There are other approaches to this idea of a ‘public’ (that is non-privately owned) social network system or protocol. Some run on crypto tech, where people run ‘relays’ (some of which generate crypto currency for the people who run the servers in the process) but the individual user completely owns and maintains their own identity and isn’t ‘hosted’ as such. 

I co-founded a company a few years ago –  funded by Bloomberg and other VCs – focused on one of those (built on the secure scuttlebutt SSB standard). We made an iOS client called Planetary. Since I left the company it has changed its name and pivoted to another protocol. That’s why I was invited to this event. I’m not going to talk about that much, but feel free to ping me if you have any questions. 

Anyway, there are lots of reasons why people should be switching to the Fediverse – among them:

(a) that one company should not generally be the main arbiter of what is acceptable speech for half the population of the planet;

(b) the general public should have the option to communicate with their friends (or find out information) without having that experience meditated by or optimized’ by algorithms generated by other people;

(c) there are reasonable questions that can be asked about whether or not a space entirely owned by advertising-focused companies can build products that aren’t socially corrosive or promote conflict and polarization.

However, there are also lots of reasons why people tend not to switch to the Fediverse – it can be challenging to understand so the process of using it presents a little more friction to the general public, some of the clients can be a bit clunky, and it’s often unclear how individual products within the space can support themselves financially. That’s why despite several big spikes in people leaving Post-Elon Twitter (I will not be calling it ‘X’) to join (in particular) Mastodon, the number of active users for the Fediverse has generally stayed in the low millions of people. That’s about 1/2000th the volume of the people who use Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp etc. in any given month.

‘Threads’ and the Fediverse

So it was both very interesting and also a little alarming when Meta announced Threads around eight months ago – and at their launch they made it clear that their goal was for it to be part of the Fediverse. 

It was interesting because it seemed to indicate that something was finally changing in this space and that we could look forward to a world in which social networks operated a little bit more like e-mail – ie. used by billions of people, not owned by any one company, where you could choose your provider, but still connect with the entire world of other people.  

And it was a little alarming, because the current Fediverse is mostly enthusiasts and utopian individuals operating in a mostly non-corporate environment, with few (if any) algorithms and little (to no) advertising. It’s currently a space where people don’t generally have to worry about the billion-people-impacting, market-driven and perhaps dehumanizing decisions of massive companies or the fetid whims of asshole billionaires. That has tended to make the spaces much less corrosive, far less aggressive and really quite pleasant to be in.

It’s not unreasonable to wonder if such an environment can withstand the arrival of a social giant.

Anyway, after some initial excitement and dread, after eight months the Fediverse community had started to calm down a bit – mainly because it seemed like this integration was never going to happen. After all, Threads has had a very successful launch – with around a hundred and sixty million people signing up over the last few months. It is a highly active space, and its active user base is now a hundred times the size of the Fediverse with which they had claimed to want to connect. Had something changed? Was it all a bit of corporate flim flam? Was it just an attempt to market it as a more palatable and distinct alternative to Twitter that they really had no intention of following through on? Or had they maybe just changed their minds?

Well, I can report that the answer is no. They have not changed their minds. They seem to be very keen to continue to integrate Threads with the Fediverse. And at least superficially they seem to be attempting to do so carefully and in good faith. 

I have some more behind the scenes stories further down this post which I’ve heard from various players on the edges which might explain some of the motivations at the company, plus a bunch of speculation from other Fediverse attendees. And I have some concerns and questions about what they’re doing and how – both in terms of the impact I think it could have and also in terms of how it will be received by the community more widely. I also have a number of significant concerns with the Threads project itself. 

But I can report that in my opinion the teams building it and the integration seem to be decent people, trying to build something they’re excited by, wanting to be part of something new and truly federated, and wanting to be respectful and careful about how they do it. And whether or not you think their arrival in the space is a good thing, that apparent good faith and care has mitigated at least some of my concerns. 

Okay, so let’s get started with what they announced. One (hopefully final caveat), the whole thing was run under Chatham House rules, which means that I can talk about everything that happened at the event but I can’t ascribe what was said to specific people without their explicit permission. To anyone else reading this who was in attendance, you should feel free to quote me on anything I said. If you’re comfortable being attributed for anything below, then let me know (via Twitter or e-mail tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org and I’ll amend the post accordingly. 

The Product and the Roadmap

The first part of the session was focused on what their goal for Threads was and what the roadmap looked like. They started by stating the product was “a text based app for public conversation and to share your point of view on real time events” (so effectively a Twitter-clone, which we knew), where you could have “productive conversation and tune out the noise” and that it was important to them that it was “open and decentralized”. They seemed quite committed to the latter, explicitly saying things like “Threads will help people find community, no matter what app they use” and “If you don’t like the rules we are enforcing on our server, you will be able to take your followers elsewhere”.

I have some thoughts on that, which I’ll talk about later in this piece, but before that let’s talk about the roadmap they laid out, which is as follows:

• December 2023 – A user will be able to opt in via the Threads app to have their posts *visible* to Mastodon clients. People would be able to reply and like those posts using their Mastodon clients, but those replies and likes would not be visible within the Threads application. Threads users would not be able to follow or see posts published across Mastodon servers, or reply to them or like then.

• Early 2024 (Part One) –  the Like counts on the Threads app would combine likes from Mastodon and Threads users

• Early 2024 (Part Two) – replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the Threads application

• Late 2024 – A “mixed” Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them

• TBD – Full blended interoperability between Threads and Mastodon

Now there are a few bits in here I think are really interesting. Many of them make a lot of sense, but I still think will be controversial.

The first is how long this integration is going to take and where they’re starting work. I imagine there will be a bunch of people out there who think the early stages above feel like Facebook is ‘engaging’ with the fediverse in a pretty selfish way – ie. the first stage seems pretty one-sided, with Facebook pushing their content into other people’s servers, but not reciprocating.

This feels neither completely fair nor completely unfair. My first sentiment was similar – to what extent is this an integration rather than a colonization? You could view this as Facebook attempting to erase the fediverse – to take it over. After all, it’s unclear what the fediverse gets from having hundred million Facebook users pushing their content into their space without any ability to seriously reply and engage with them.

I still think that this first stage is likely to be the least popular and will drive the most discussion of Meta and whether they’re engaging in hardcore extractive and exploitative capitalism. I suspect many in the Fediverse will find this first move pretty repulsive.

On the other hand, I’ve worked in large companies. And I’ve worked with privacy and policy teams in complicated new areas (I built a product called Fire Eagle a million years ago which was pretty much the first one to handle user location data, and that triggered a good amount of terror among Yahoo’s privacy and compliance teams). 

And I’ve also had a (fairly sporadic and not always effective) place on the advisory board of the UK’s Open Rights Group. I know how hard this stuff can be and the dangers in the data and the space. Meta will have to deal with a lot of regulatory questions and privacy concerns before they can launch anything, they will have to figure out how they can engage with content and users who never signed up to their TOS and privacy policies, they’ll have to figure out what impact that will have on their other systems and business units, and they’ll have to develop a sense of the issues that campaigning groups, the FCC and the EU are likely to have with this new development. All of this stuff is a Big Deal. 

For me it makes sense they’d take this stuff slowly and carefully, and it also makes sense that they’d start off focused on what functionality they can offer their users who have signed up and opted in, before they start confronting the larger issues. It’s really the only way they could progress. And I guess they’ll just choose to suck up any negative response they get as a result.

I want to be very clear here – whether or not the way Facebook/Meta/Threads choose to handle this ends up being ethical or appropriate is really anyone’s guess at this moment – and I’m sure a bunch of people reading this have their suspicions that it won’t be. However—ethical or not—I believe they’re going to be very focused on being legally compliant and very conscious about avoiding (as they see it) the threat of further regulation. People often think large companies are more cavalier with the law than small ones. I can assure you in my experience exactly the opposite is the case. Large companies are mostly much more cautious about breaking the law, and instead invest much more of their money in trying to change the law in their direction. But that’s a story for another time.

Back to Meta’s roadmap: this project is also intensely technically difficult of course. It’s worth remembering that they didn’t build Threads out of pre-existing Mastodon open source code and they didn’t start with ActivityPub as a basis. They built it out of the Instagram codebase and community with a view to expanding that one network into this new parallel open and distributed space. As such, a bunch of core concepts and technical decisions are not directly and immediately compatible and will have to be rebuilt or redesigned to connect amicably. 

By the way, as someone who has built large products for a number of companies—including the BBC, Jawbone, Nokia and Yahoo, and run two start-ups—I have to tell you based on my limited knowledge at this point I think this roadmap is probably wildly optimistic. But I guess we’ll see.

Who was in attendance

Before I continue, I want to give you a sense of the people who were at this meeting. If I had to guess I’d say there were roughly twenty people present, falling roughly into three chunks – the first third were representatives of the Threads team, the second a group of legal, privacy and policy representatives from Meta and the rest of us were sort of roughly ‘representatives of the Fediverse’. 

As is probably obvious from a community that is specifically and self-consciously uncomfortable with monolithic organizations and wants to find a way for lots of smaller groups to cooperate, the Fediverse group was not particularly unified in our responses, nor were we representative of the ecology as a whole. There are a thousand projects and hundreds of talented and interesting people with more or less impact on the space. 

Still, some of the people present did have very, very really deep and long-standing engagements in Fediverse and ActivityPub projects. One of them said that of probably the ten most significant people trying to corral the space at the moment, three were in the room. I want to make clear that despite my deep interest in and work in the area I’m almost certainly not one of those three.

So, both a pretty serious group of people but also not representing the full range of opinions and views in the space. As ever, none of us can speak for the whole community. In fact at this point that would slightly miss the point.

Why are Meta doing this?

Anyway, despite our different perspectives, one question was clearly on everyone’s minds – Meta had talked about what Threads was and made it clear that openness and interoperability were key to the project – but they hadn’t talked about why they were doing it?

What on earth was motivating them to make this thing so – in theory – open? 

Their answer was that they simply felt it was the direction of travel for ‘social’ generally – that the area had been growing steadily, particularly post-Elon’s takeover of Twitter, but that they’d also had a lot of conversations with high profile people who build communities on their platforms and they were increasingly uncomfortable with Meta or Facebook or Instagram effectively owning their followers. They were looking for the ability to know that if they needed to they could move elsewhere. 

I’ll be blunt – I didn’t find this enormously convincing but it was interesting and I’m sure there’s some truth to it. It just didn’t feel like the whole story. We asked about the business side of things and they said obviously they were a business and moreover an advertising business, so probably that would be the way they made money in it long-term, but it wasn’t happening for a while. The representative said something along the lines of, “obviously we have a business model, and it’s fair to ask how this squares with that; the answer is we don’t actually know; there will likely be ads but not in the near future.”

After the event many of the Fediverse representatives speculated about other motives. They varied between the following:

1) Meta thinks Twitter’s part of the zeitgeist is important and powerful and are interested in that space – and they’re following Google’s response to the iPhone by promoting an open competitor they can benefit from;

2) Meta is concerned about greater regulation and are building out a space that perhaps they can still dominate but which they can make absolutely clear remains open, in order to shut down arguments (particularly from the American right) about how they’re censoring conservatives (they can move elsewhere) or antitrust laws (we’re directly creating an open environment where people can switch easily);

3) Someone down in the hierarchy doing a PM job just added in Fediverse support as a line item in a pitch deck to act as a differentiator and it’s just risen up through the ranks somehow surviving each time because many people simply didn’t know what it was. And now they have to build it; 

4) Mark Zuckerberg just hates Elon and is just doing everything he can to destroy Twitter.

I have absolutely no idea which one—or combination—of these is most accurate, but I can report one interesting story that I’ve now heard from two separate sources, one in attendance at the event and another friend in another part of the industry. According to both of them, at a hack day inside Meta someone presented this concept and a rough working prototype and said it was really interesting and exciting and that they should work on it and that it should totally be open, and that person, bizarrely, was Mark Zuckerberg himself. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s certainly interesting and it would explain a lot of the enthusiasm for the venture inside the organization.

Anyway, I don’t think that’s necessarily incompatible with the motivations above, but I did think it was interesting. Come to your own conclusions, I guess.

(A note on that: I have many issues with Mark Zuckerberg’s approach to things—he’s definitely focused on business as the first priority and social responsibility is … well, it is somewhere on the list I’m sure—but he’s an intelligent man, and an engineer, an investor in some early decentralized and distributed social tech and someone who attended, with me and many other peers, social computing FOO Camps, organized by O’Reilly Media in the early days of the social web. He knows about ActivityPub and all of these open standards and has done for years. So if he’s the one who was pushing for it – I guess I’m not surprised! What’s more interesting – and actually quite exciting – is that he thinks this might be the future of the social web!)

Godzilla & the Fediverse

Now, I mentioned above that the people we met at Meta seemed like decent, well-intentioned people attempting to do the right thing. However, this may not be enough to be a ‘good citizen’. And to understand why I think it’s worth talking briefly about the scale of the various parties. 

The community that Threads is planning to participate in is that of Mastodon servers federating with one another via Activity Pub. The estimates of this community are that there are about 9,500 separate mastodon instances participating in this ecology, with roughly 1.5 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs). This is a fairly substantial number but of course it pales in comparison to Meta more generally, which has closer to three billion active users. Or to put it another way, Mastodon users represent about 1/2000th of the number of people using Facebook/Instagram/Threads/WhatsApp etc. worldwide.

Threads itself has only been around for a few months now and it still towers over the rest of the Mastodon community in terms of users. It’s based on the Instagram user base, and Instagram users can opt in to use Threads with a single tap. Because of that—as of a recent earnings report—Meta can currently claim around 160 million total users and about 100 million MAUs for Threads alone. So, again, maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about Threads ‘integrating’ with the fediverse and instead think about Threads attempting to engage with the Fediverse without entirely crushing it in the process.

Effectively you can think of the existing Mastodon / Fediverse community as a pretty decently sized US city of people, with each server being a separate building within it. Meanwhile, Threads is an apparently friendly version of Godzilla, hundreds of times as tall as the nearest building, wanting to say hi to people, but every time it makes a move, there’s a risk its tail will kill thousands.

Or perhaps it’s more like the spaceships from Independence Day, only—you know—trying to be nice. It’s not hard to imagine that however well intentioned they’re going to be, their presence is going to be absolutely enormous and potentially catastrophic. 

Anyway, I mention all of this scale because I think it’s really important to keep it in mind when thinking of other issues that came up at the event – including how content moderation is likely to work, what kind of public education work they need to do, and what the rest of us need to think about in order to make sure that their arrival actually does open up social media, rather than completely destroy the independent communities that already exist. 

Content moderation

So let’s start off by talking about Content moderation. This was an issue that came up regularly during the day. Clearly, Meta moderates its own content on its own servers and will reserve the ability to remove that content and ban any user it wants. That is unlikely to change. 

However, the Fediverse presents some interesting challenges here. The goal of integrating with the fediverse is specifically to have Meta users’ content appear in someone else’s mastodon instance, and vice versa. 

This definitely appears to be an area that is causing them some concern and confusion – and they don’t seem to be 100% clear on how to handle it. For a start, all their users opt in to using Meta, but third party users do not. Nonetheless from the discussion it seems obvious that they’re going to have to reserve the right to exclude content and users from being cached on their servers or from being visible in their app if it breaks their rules even if it originates in another Fediverse instance. The same will presumably be true the other way around – individuals in public will be able to ban Meta’s instances from engaging with their instance or ban or block abusive Meta users.

One conversation that emerged around this was whether there was a way that Facebook could usefully open up these decisions more widely to benefit the larger community. This is an idea I’ve been keen on for a while – that an entity that is doing moderation work could open that up as a service which third parties could subscribe to. This might be a way that smaller instances could actually benefit from Meta’s presence, resulting in a better moderated space overall.

Of course the negative side of that is that Meta is not actually known for being particularly rigorous in their moderation, and in fact only has around one moderator for every 100,000 users last time I checked. Plus of course, this would entrench their already vast power as the arbiter of what is acceptable or unacceptable speech on the internet even further than it already has been. So, there are some significant risks.

Bluesky’s content tagging was mentioned during the day – they appear to have a system whereby reported content could be marked – to be crass – as more or less ‘offensive’, and then the user gets to choose what they want to see. If you’re comfortable with slurs like the n-word or the f-word being used between members of each respective community then – in theory – you could indicate so. If you weren’t comfortable with it then your community could choose to filter it out. If you wanted full access to everything no matter how vile or offensive you could choose that on your end.

There’s an obvious possible extension of this kind of approach in a distributed environment, with one (or later more) parties tagging the content, and each instance choosing what limits it placed to content visible within its bounds. I think this is a very interesting approach, and one I’d really like to see people develop more – perhaps every Mastodon instance has a plug in, subscribes to a moderation server, and pays some money towards moderation based on the number of users they look after. In return, they get a fully moderated environment, and they can tailor their settings as to what can be seen on their instance. We’re not there yet, but it’s an interesting future direction.

Another question emerged regarding users moving their content off Meta’s servers. I mentioned this possibility above – that Meta was aware that people wanted ownership of their communities, and to be able to move them to another server if they didn’t like Meta’s content moderation or monetization. An obvious question that emerged was whether or not a user who had been banned on Meta should be able to export their content and users and start up again elsewhere on their own Mastodon server. Again this appeared to be a conversation that they hadn’t quite dug into yet, but the sense I got from that was that they’d end up saying that was acceptable, but the banned user’s content would still not be visible inside Threads no matter where else they went.

Identity systems and educating the public about the Fediverse

One conversation that emerged was about the current way in which identity works in the Fediverse. Generally it’s a bit like an e-mail address. If you have your content on an instance running at example.com, and your user name is @tomcoates, then your full identity is (@)tomcoates@example.com. 

In order to make this work with the whole ecosystem, each instance (for example Threads) needs to ‘federate’ with others, or index people’s identities from different places so when someone wants to write a post that mentions me, the client can look me up and help by autocompleting my identity. Otherwise you have to know the full address of everyone you’re talking about and that’s probably beyond most of us.

This presents a few obvious questions for Threads – (a) whether they’re going to index everyone’s identity across the whole ecosystem, which could cause some problems and (b) whether or not the general public will understand the way these addresses are constructed. The indexing obviously presents some data retention issues – how do people opt in to being indexed? What are the legal implications. This stuff comes up a lot in these discussions – with search, identity and algorithmic timelines all presenting data use questions. And it’s clear that without it—and even potentially with it—this user addressing style is likely to confuse the hell out of people.

This led to various other conversations and ideas – whether or not it was Threads’ responsibility to educate people about how the system worked more generally (for example – does a user know that your content will be cached on other servers which other people may run ads against, or how the identity system functions) and whether or not other identity systems should be created. 

One option presented that has been talked about a bunch recently was using a domain name as an identity, one separate from the service you were currently using to write or consume your content. A common response to this was that this was another step into confusion and complexity. Others argued that it was impractical to try and make Threads take on the responsibility of explaining things to people and to hold their hands through the whole process, and that people would just gradually pick it up and come to understand it over time.

I want to argue exactly the opposite – that a service like Threads is very clearly going to have to explain to people how this all works. They’re going to have to find a way to make it understandable and ideally simple to the general public. And the reasons for this are twofold – regulation and bad PR.

They’re going to be legally required to write a reasonably clear Terms of Service document and Privacy policy that articulates exactly how everything works. And if the public end up not understanding what is happening, then the next time they’re hauled in front of regulators in the EU or in the US Congress they’re going to find themselves in very hot water.

I’ve written documents before explaining to people how decentralized systems work and what happens to your data and content. They are not easy things. The concepts surrounding them are tricky. It is hard to do it well. The hardest bit is to explain to people precisely how everything works (which is not that dissimilar from e-mail) but to make it sound as non-threatening as it generally really is. You have to explain to people that if you write something, it may get cached on someone else’s server and may never completely be erased from the internet, without scaring them. And explaining that the same is true of writing a post on Twitter or Facebook doesn’t generally help.

I think I’ve done a decent job of these explanatory documents in the past – I’ll post an example at some point in the near future – but it is tricky. Nonetheless, it simply has to be done.

But it’s also not such a hard thing to do. It is within the scope of human endeavor! Every single concept we take for granted today regarding the Internet and how it works was initially confusing as hell. Web addresses, cookies, user accounts, secure sign-in, privacy policies, user moderation rules, private/public accounts, using browsers, setting up e-mail, that if you send an e-mail you can’t then delete it. All of these things are things people have had to learn, and all of them started off quite hard for a member of the public to get their heads around. It was education, good interface design and clear instructions that got us to this point. And none of that will change. If Meta tomorrow set up an identity system where you chose a user name and a TLD and they said, “now you’ve made an identity that you can to login to a thousand different services” then people would start to get the hang of it. 

Still, it’s annoying work that adds friction and the general public will almost certainly start off being confused by it. Frankly, if there was any area that Meta could really help everyone with, it might be by putting its weight and presence into getting its three billion users up to speed with how the Fediverse works

Personalization and algorithms

When you sign up for Threads and follow some people, you do not by default then get dumped into a reverse chronological list of the posts they’ve written. You end up in a space that’s very similar to Instagram’s algorithmic feed. That is to say – your feed will be a mix of particularly ‘good’ (as determined by the algorithm) posts from the people you follow, mixed in with other posts from other places that the algorithm thinks you’ll like (read: engage with).

I’ve been thinking about this stuff or a while, and I have some fairly strong opinions on it. The conclusion I’ve come to is that this kind of approach is absolutely great for entertainment-style products, but actually very dangerous for news-based or informational products. TikTok is the prime example of an entertainment style product, as perhaps to a lesser extent are YouTube and Instagram. These products simply track what you watch or like and then deliver you other things that you might find delightful and interesting. A good proportion of the time the recommendations are at least fine, often they’re brilliant and 99% of the time the choices they make have little to no impact on your life or environment.

This simply isn’t true for informational or political content. In these situations the algorithm is quite capable of heavily influencing someone’s opinions and views and distorting their view of the world in a way that damages our ability to function as citizens – simply by choosing what content is put in front of them. My ‘For You’ section on Twitter is relentless in pushing right-wing messaging and commentary, even though I have no interest in it whatsoever. This is probably because I spend a bunch of time angrily debunking the worst excesses of it. The same tricks that feel honorable and positive and fun in an entertainment context (choosing things it things will get a reaction and engagement) start to feel a bit more sinister in news and political content – like the algorithm its optimized for generating fights or controversy or clickbait. It feels nasty and risks promoting division or conflict.

Meta thinks that Threads should not be fundamentally used for political commentary, but bluntly good luck enforcing or influencing that. And if it’s going to be used for those things then the presence of the algorithm is – in my opinion – a problem.

Various people spoke up about the algorithm during the meeting although it’s possibly fair to say that none of them were quite as exercised about it as I am.

I feel quite strongly that at the very least the user should be able to choose whether to use an algorithmic timeline or not, in a clear and easy to find way, without it automatically switching back after a period of time. There are some ways you can make this work in less dangerous ways – showing ‘highlights’ from your feed but giving the option to see everything for example, or having a separate algorithmic and reverse chronological feed that a user can switch between easily. And I would strongly recommend that Meta switch to one of these approaches.

In the meantime there are some very specific issues which came up during this session which are worthy of a mention – one in particular was whether or not content from third parties in the wider Fediverse should be part of this algorithmic feed. “Would they expect it?”, was one comment. “Would they be horrified by it?”, was another. 

I actually think this is a little more complicated than it initially appears – and again gets to the necessity of creating databases about people who have not opted in to Meta which I mentioned above. For Meta to be able to do recommendations of third party content means doing some kind of analysis and indexing of that content – ie. creating a profile of a user who never signed their TOS with information about them and who to recommend their content to. Quite apart from whether or not people are comfortable with that, I’m not sure what the legality of that might be from a (in particular) European GDPR perspective. I suspect if they’re careful it will be legally okay, but it still slightly sets my teeth on edge.

The final workshop

The last thing we did on the day was take a few significant groups – instance owners, Meta users and third party fediverse users – and break into work groups to answer a few questions, which I managed to rapidly capture. They were as follows:

  1. What do you think your group’s core expections are for their experiences in a federated social network environment?
  2. What do they expect of Meta vis a vis data collection and use?
  3. Are any of these expectations mutually reinforcing? Are any in tension with each other? Do they introduce any new or additional risks eg. to privacy, safety, free expression
  4. How can meta be considered a ‘good citizen in the fediverse’

I’ll be honest, these sessions were too short to be particularly useful, and I don’t know that we came up with much that was particularly interesting, but I thought it was worth posting the questions Meta were asking to give some sense of how they are at least at the moment trying to be decent citizens.

Other questions

Before I wrap up, here are a few pithy questions that people presented and the answers that Meta came back with, for the sake of completeness.

Could each person’s feed have an atom feed so people could subscribe without using the core app? 
The general sentiment in the room was effectively ‘we don’t know’, but my guess would be the answer will eventually be no. 

Would the content from third parties using Mastodon be presented as equivalent to the ‘native’ content or would it be like Apple’s blue and green iMessage bubbles?
The sentiment here was again – don’t know. Work in progress. But people obviously were keen to make sure that users understood what they were looking at.

Should Meta lead or follow in the development of the commons or the standards?
The opinion here was that it would be best for Meta to be involved but do not want to do it alone. “The real goal is not for it to be lead on all of the issues which are issues across the fediverse”.

Conclusion

My sense after this meeting was that Facebook are seriously interested in integrating Threads with the Fediverse. They do not want to crush the Fediverse. They perhaps think the future is a few large companies maintaining clients in a shared social space, where there’s also a long tail of other independent clients. This is going to weird out a bunch of people but it’s a goal I also share, so I’m okay with that. It’s worth saying that I want this world because I think it is a realpolitik alternative to one large company owning everything. I think a multi-client/company/instanced system like this would be better than now and solve a bunch of problems. But is it the utopian vision of how the world could be if we didn’t live in quite such an extractive system? Nope.

Back to Meta – I think they’re trying to engage positively, but I think that is going to be very difficult for them given the size of their userbase compared to the tiny environment they want to connect with. And I think they’re desperate for – and need – some bodies or organizations that represent the interests of the fediverse more wildly with whom they can coordinate standards and listen to desires for technical change, and can stand up for the interests of all parties. Such an organization doesn’t exist yet. Perhaps someone needs to start one.

All in all though, despite some very major misgivings here and there, overall I came out of this event much more sanguine about the way this is unfolding, a bit more optimistic about the future of the decentralized or social web, and interested to see where things go from here. I suspect we might see someone from Google or the BBC or Yahoo or Microsoft or LinkedIn make a similar move in the not so distant future. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get the interoperable shared, open social web that many of us have wanted for the last twenty plus years? Wilder things have happened. Fingers crossed?

Thanks for reading. I know it’s long and needs some editing. If you were there and want to be explicitly mentioned as an attendee, let me know – again on @tomcoates on twitter or email at tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org. It’s worth restating that these are my notes and represent what I understood from the day, and that I may have misheard or misunderstood some of the sentiments expressed. If you were there and think I left out anything important or misrepresented anything, let me know and I’ll consider a correction. Hope everyone’s having a nice day. Yours, xx Tom

Categories
Net Culture Technology

How to find me off Twitter.com

Elon Musk’s Twitter in the name of ‘Free Speech’ has just banned anyone mentioning that they have accounts on other platforms – whether that be Truth Social, Facebook, Mastodon or anywhere. 

This is an unconscionable move clearly designed to disincentivize people from leaving the platform, locking them into his ecosystem. It is petulant, childish, selfish and obnoxious, so entirely in line with our expectations of Musk’s behavior. And it is obviously completely anti-freedom of speech.

It’s also a clear and public admission that people are fleeing the platform in droves as a result of his appalling views and policies. But of course, the more he tries to trap people here, the more rapidly people will leave.

Since I’m not able to easily post my links on Twitter, I’m just going to do them on all the other places instead. So this is where I’m going:

(1) I’m moving most of my daily posting to Mastodon. The current clients are not super great and I know it’s a pain choosing a server (by default you probably want mastodon.social), but I think it’s the best option and future clients in development are far better. My address there is http://mastodon.cloud/@tomcoates – that may change in short order, but when it does, everything should transition over automatically.

(2) This is my personal blog and I haven’t been updating it very much, but I have a feeling that’s going to change relatively soon.

(3) I’m on Instagram and I use that pretty regularly, but it’s mostly just me playing with my fancy Leica or posting stories of my potting adventures, so not for everyone. https://www.instagram.com/tomcoates

(4) I’m also on Post and my username is there is @tomcoates 

If I join anything else I’ll probably update the post above, rather than make a new one.

Until a couple of years ago I was working on a product called planetary. It’s available on the App Store, and it uses a truly decentralized protocol. For various reasons I’m not on it very much and I don’t know that I can in good conscience totally recommend it, but I thought it may be interesting to some of you invested in Secure Scuttlebutt and other crypto-based social stuff.

Otherwise, let’s start this transition and go somewhere else. I’m bored to death of Musk and his poisonous drama.

Categories
Film Gay Politics Politics Television

Should gay roles be played by gay actors?

Today’s social media controversy comes courtesy of former Doctor Who show-runner Russell T Davies who has gone on record in an interview that he believes gay roles should generally be played by gay actors.

As you might expect, the response to this argument has been both immediate and strong. Some people have argued that it’s against the whole principle of acting to say that people should only play people like themselves (while obviously skipping over the obvious complexities of — or analogies to — a white actor playing a black character or a man playing a woman’s experience). Others have argued that if straight actors can’t play gay, then gay actors should not be able to play straight characters either.

In the middle of a lot of this is the same sort of generalized tedious sentiment we often get in these kinds of discussions – stuff that goes along the lines of, “it’s all political correctness gone mad” – groans about the “woke brigade”.

Now, these positions are infuriating, frustrating and wrong, but for many people why they are wrong is far from obvious. Superficially, they seems simple, commonsensical, self-evidently right. So for that reason I thought I’d go a bit above and beyond the call of duty and write a little piece explaining why subjects like these are more complex and intricate than they might initially appear, and why—in my opinion—even if it may not be desirable long-term, it is far from unreasonable to argue that gay parts should generally be played by gay actors.

I’m going to break this into three separate questions which I think have bearing on who should play which roles:

  1. Is there equality of opportunity for gay and straight actors?
  2. Can (and do) straight actors accurately portray gay people?
  3. If straight actors shouldn’t play gay, does it therefore follow that gay actors should not be able to play straight roles?

I’ll then try and wrap things up with a brief summary (you can skip to that right now if you can’t be bothered to read everything) and a brief articulation of my own opinion.

But if you’re with me for the long read, let’s jump right in…

Question 1: Is there equality of opportunity for gay and straight actors?

No. The truth is that there is not equality of opportunity for gay and straight actors, any more than there has been equality of opportunity for female actors, people of color or any other non-gay member of the LGBT community.

While it has clearly become easier for gay actors to get ahead in Hollywood or in acting generally in recent years, being gay is still often an impediment to a successful acting career at the highest levels.

It is simply true that actors who are out and proud and well known as being gay simply don’t get given straight roles as often—particularly straight leading roles—in movies or TV. Out gay actors who take on these roles are often characterized as ‘not believable’, while a straight actor who plays a gay role (at least over the last thirty years or so) is more often characterized as ‘brave’.

So here is our first argument about why gay roles should generally be played by gay people. There simply aren’t very many LGBT roles on TV or film, gay people are under- and often mis-represented, and (if they’re out) they’re often simply not allowed to play high profile non-gay roles.

Surely then, if gay actors are being purposefully excluded from many prominent straight roles, they should at least be considered preferentially for gay roles?

Question 2: Can (and do) straight actors accurately portray gay people?

Our next argument is based on the assumption that it is necessary, desirable or significant for gay people to be accurately depicted in drama. You can break this assumption into two parts – (a) that it makes for better drama to have more authentic performances, and (b) that it is morally or politically important to portray gay people in an accurate, convincing or (most importantly) non-stereotypical or discriminatory way.

I think that first part is self-evidently true most of the time and barely worth interrogating. The second part depends on whether or not gay or other LGBT people are still disadvantaged in society, experience discrimination or harassment, or are under-represented in drama. All the evidence says that they absolutely are.

Gay men generally earn less than straight men, gay people still often don’t feel comfortable express affection to their partners in public, gay teens are twice as likely to attempt suicide than straight teens, and twice as likely to ‘succeed’ when they try. Gay kids also represent 25-40% of homeless youth across the US and UK, and well over 90+% of gay kids report hearing homophobic abuse in the playground on an almost daily basis.

It seems clear to me—given this situation—that there’s an obvious imperative to try and fix things, or at least to not be complicit with them. And one obvious way to fight misinformation and discrimination against LGBT people is by attempting to represent them properly on TV and film.

This obviously does not mean by any means making every gay character a paragon of virtue. But it does mean representing gay people as they actually are—in all their range, variety and complexity—rather than resorting to stereotype or discriminatory tropes.

Which brings us to our second question – are straight actors capable of doing this?

The short answer here is yes. They absolutely can. And they sometimes do. I can name a number of films and movies where I think straight people have done tremendously good work portraying gay characters.

But as always, the devil is in the details. And the longer answer is that even today, many straight actors do not truly understand the lived experience of gay people and so — rather than depicting rounded characters that reflect real life — they either portray two-dimensional figures without any richness or understanding, or they resort to codes or symbols or stereotypes to communicate ‘gayness’.

The reality is that LGBT people often have some commonalities of experience that are often invisible or simply not understood by straight people. There’s the common experience of growing up around homophobic comments, and then coming to realize that those comments are about you. There’s the common experience of having crushes on people and knowing that you have to be completely secretive about them. There’s the common experience of lying to people around you and misleading people because you’re scared of how they’ll react if they find out the truth. There are the common experiences of coming out to friends, family, colleagues – over and over and over again as you meet new people. The common experience of someone you like making homophobic comments because they just don’t know. The common experience of not knowing how much of yourself you can reveal on the street without fear of attack. There’s the different way you meet people like yourself, the different support infrastructures you fabricate for yourself. The list goes on and on.

Not all LGBT people experience all of these things, and no doubt some experience none of them. But for most LGBT people, their path has been different from most of their straight peers and there will be things that most LGBT people experience that most straight people will not. And these things are a part of the complexity of the character and backgrounds of almost every fictional gay person.

For many straight actors, their experience of gay people will be via two unrepresentative samples, (a) their most confident out gay friends, (b) via previous representations of gay people in movies and TV. Forty years ago those representations were of sad, disillusioned, broken people who had horrible times coming out or were in the process of dying of AIDS, or ultra-camp flamboyant people with limp wrists and catch phrases. Twenty years ago they were more often than not very attractive and well-groomed men who were slightly bitchy best friends to nearby career women. Today they’re a lot better and more nuanced, but they’re still flawed. You only have to look at fantasy fiction to see that there’s still prejudice in movie making. How many daring archaeologists are gay? How many leather coat wearing space cowboys are gay? How many spies? How many secret agents?

So let’s summarize our second argument about why gay roles should generally be played by gay people: while there are a number of examples of particularly good straight actors who have very effectively played gay characters, they are uncommon and massively overwhelmed by bad ones. If you want to fix that misrepresentation (and in turn have a positive effect on the lives of gay people) then one thing you can substantively do is cast gay actors in gay roles.

Which brings us to our final question…

Question 3: Does it therefore follow that gay actors should not be able to play straight roles?

The two previous questions are, I think, fairly self-explanatory. But now we reach one that is a little more complicated to answer. The threads of this answer are already present in the two we’ve already made, but to make them clear and explicit we really need to address the most fundamental mistake people tend to make when they talk about minority groups.

So the commonly expressed position we’re investigating is superficially simple – if straight people should probably not play gay characters, then surely it’s only fair to say gay characters shouldn’t play straight?

But the basis of this position is fundamentally flawed. The argument is that we should treat both groups symmetrically — that the experiences of gay actors and straight actors — more still, gay people and straight people — are fundamentally the same but opposite, effectively equivalent and therefore if we decide on an action for one, it should necessarily apply to the other – ‘what’s good for the goose is good for the gander’.

The problem is this is simply not true. When you’re talking about minority groups in this way, the two sides are almost always not symmetrical. The two sides are in fact very different. And the logical consequence of this difference is that things that might be okay for one group might actually not be okay for another.

The best way for me to explain this is through an example and please bear with me here, because I think it will make things much clearer.

A position based on symmetry might be a bit like this: “It’s wrong to have gay bars if we don’t also have straight bars!”

Now—for the moment—I’m going to ignore the reality of the situation that there are often straight people in gay bars, and that most non-explicitly gay bars are effectively de facto straight bars containing an equally small proportion of gay people. Instead I’m going to take the position at face value – and talk about why explicitly gay bars are a thing and explicitly straight bars are not.

So here’s the first bit of asymmetry in the lives of straight and gay people. A very small proportion of people in the world are LGBT. It is strongly debated what that proportion is, but for the sake of simple maths let’s say one person in fifty is explicitly gay.

Now, one of the most common places to meet someone you end up forming a relationship with is at work. The percentage of people who meet their partners at work varies depending on who you ask, but it’s somewhere around 15-25% of relationships.

So let’s imagine an office containing fifty people with an equal gender split and one in fifty people being gay. That means the company contains 25 men, 25 women.

It follows then that if you were a straight person in that company, you would most likely meet 48 other straight people. And of those straight people, 24 or 25 of those people would be of the opposite sex.

Let’s compare that with the gay person in that company. They will most likely meet no other gay people. Probabilistically, to have a second gay person in the company, it would need to double in size to one hundred employees.

Now you have two gay people in the company, but they are just as likely to be the opposite sex from each other, and therefore incompatible. To be confident that our initial gay employee will likely meet one other gay person of the same sex at work, the company would have to be twice the size again (200 people). That would mean likely four gay people at the company in total.

In comparison, in a company of two hundred people, 196 would likely be straight. And each straight person at the company would meet 98 heterosexual people of the opposite sex.

And we’re still not done! It’s still the general assumption that people you meet are straight, and there are still a number of reasons why gay people might not be out at work. So let’s imagine only 50% of gay people come out. So now we need to double the size of the company again. We’re now in a company of four hundred people, where each straight person is associating with 196 heterosexuals of the opposite sex. The gay employee meanwhile knows one out gay person of their preferred sex.

That’s an example of an asymmetry in action. And it doesn’t just apply to workplaces, it also applies to bars, nightclubs, universities etc. Every environment that is simply representative of the general population will make it dozens to hundreds of times easier for a straight person to meet someone eligible and potentially interested than a gay person.

As a result, gay people create ‘gay clubs’ and ‘gay bars’ to meet other gay people, while straight people already have de facto straight bars all around them at all times and making them explicitly straight simply excludes gay people from 98% of society.

So how does this apply to our final concern – if straight actors shouldn’t play gay roles, does it follow that gay actors should not play straight roles?

Well, let’s look back at our first question – are gay actors given an equal shot at straight roles? The answer was no, there’s an asymmetry there. Out gay actors were less likely to get leading straight roles than straight actors were to get gay roles. Giving gay roles to gay actors starts to fix that problem, but as long as there are disproportionately few gay roles, making things equitable also means letting gay actors play straight roles.

Does the same apply to our second question? Are there asymmetries at play that mean that it’s less problematic for a gay person to play straight than vice versa? I would argue there are at least three worth mentioning:

  • An asymmetry of knowledge
  • An asymmetry of power
  • An asymmetry of number

First up – the asymmetry of knowledge – most straight people do not grow up or live in predominantly gay environments, whereas most gay people do grow up and live in predominantly straight environments. The entire world is a predominantly straight environment that gay people simply have to operate within. For this reason, gay people are much more likely to be comfortable and convincing and accurate playing straight – at least partly because they may have spend good portions of their lives doing precisely that.

Second – the asymmetry of power – unlike gay people, straight people generally do not grow experience prejudice because of their sexuality. This means that accidentally misrepresenting straight people is much less problematic. Instead of furthering or creating a negative view of all straight people, it’s more likely to simply make that character look objectionable or unpleasant.

Third – the asymmetry of number – because there are far more straight characters and straight roles, the negative effect of one misrepresentation of a straight person—among all the thousands committed to film and TV each day—is also much less pronounced or important.

Conclusion: So should gay roles be played by gay actors?

Okay, so let me bring that all together. In short, the argument I’ve made goes like this:

  • The argument is that anyone should be able to play anyone else and that if straight people can’t play gay roles, then gay actors shouldn’t play straight ones. This position sounds intuitive but is in fact wrong;
  • On the whole gay actors have fewer opportunities than straight actors, and if we’re not going to give leading straight roles to gay actors, then the least we can do is give gay roles to gay actors;
  • Straight actors often are more ignorant of the lives of gay people than gay actors are of straight people – and since accurate representation matters, gay actors are better placed to play gay roles;
  • These situations are built on asymmetries of knowledge, power and number between straight and gay people, which mean that straight actors playing gay roles are much less likely to be accurate and much more likely to be damaging than gay actors playing straight roles.

For these reasons, I think it is perfectly reasonable to make the argument that Davies’ arguments are not self-evidently wrong or hypocritical.

But I’d like to go a bit further. As I’ve argued throughout this piece, these positions are fundamentally based on asymmetries between gay and straight people. Some of those asymmetries just won’t go away – it’s very unlikely that we’ll ever see a time where there are as many gay people as straight people in the world.

But some of them can be fixed. We can make the experience of growing up gay or being gay in the world less alarming, dangerous and scary. We can make straight people more aware of the experience of being gay with more accurate representation and education. We can work to help audiences feel more comfortable with gay actors to take on straight leading roles. We can increase the number of LGBT roles in drama so that it’s truly representative. And here is where I think my position diverges a little from at least the summaries of Russell T Davies we’ve seen around in the last day or two.

Because if we do try and fix these things then at least some of these arguments will—over time—lose their potency. We actually can work towards a day where it is at least more okay for any good actor working in good faith to play gay or straight whatever their sexuality. Where we don’t have to think continually about how we make sure that gay people are represented and gay actors have equal opportunities and we genuinely can just give the right roles to the best people. We’re just not there yet. And to get there we probably have to follow a narrower and more complicated path – much like the path that Russell T Davies has mapped out.

In the meantime, we work and we push and we explain, in articles in the Radio Times or in never-ending blog posts, to those few who are willing to listen, always hoping that together we might get a little closer to that day.

Thank you for listening and goodnight xx

Categories
Politics

How to donate to US elections without getting spammed to death…

Like many people who live in America I have donated to US political candidates and campaigns. And like many people who live in America I have subsequently found my entire life suddenly and completely overwhelmed by text-messages and e-mail spam and phone calls and any number of other venal, stressy, desperate campaign messages.

Now of course by law you can unsubscribe from these things, but sometimes without realizing, it often turns out you’ve actually donated to a few different services – whether it be Act Blue or a specific campaign or to the DNC or whatever. And you have to hunt everyone one of them down to get unsubscribed. And go through a whole bunch of rigmarole and fighting and arguments to do so.

(I suppose it’s also possible that you may have donated to a Republican campaign. I find that unlikely, but if that’s the case, keep moving please, there’s nothing for you here.)

Anyway, I was so put off by the torrent of crap I got after donating many times to Barack Obama’s campaign that I spent a large amount of time getting myself off every single one of their records and lists. And then I decided I did not want to donate any more money again after that until such a point that the Democrats made it easy to choose how much spam you should get, and easy to unsubscribe. But they never did. So I didn’t donate to any political campaign in 2016. And then Trump got in and it was clearly all my fault. Lesson learned.

Anyway, this year I decided I wanted to donate again, but I wanted to do it a bit more intelligently. And after a bit of research, this is what I recommend. It’s really quite easy and non-threatening.

(1) Get a Google Voice account. This is essentially a real telephone number that you can receive texts on and can reroute to your actual phone line if you want. Use this number in everything you do with a political campaign. Then go in and change the settings to automatically go to voicemail and to not be put through to your main phone number.

You can go and check your messages and texts at any time you want. It’s a real number and it works. You’re not breaking (as far as I know) any laws or rules. You’re just keeping it off your damn main phone.

(2) Use + signs in your e-mail address. This is a sneaky little trick that allows you to tag an e-mail address you give out. If your e-mail address is (for example) chief@plasticbag.org, you can actually give out the e-mail address chief+democrats@plasticbag.org and it will 100% work. The bit after the plus is ignored by the routing systems, but is preserved when it enters your e-mail client.

That means if you do nothing, an e-mail sent to chief+democrats@plasticbag.org will end up in the mailbox of chief@plasticbag.org. You can make as many of these e-mail addresses as you like and they’ll all work.

However, the full address with the +democrats on it is still visible to your e-mail client. That means you can then set up a simple rule to mark all messages from that account as read and file them away in some hidden folder that you never look in.

I think you basically still have to provide your home address and that means they can send mail shots and the like, but to be honest, I’ve never found that interruptive or a particular problem compared to continual mail spam, text messages and phone calls.

Anyway, if you set that stuff up—and it literally takes half an hour to do it—you can then continue to donate with those details to whoever you like and you do it completely safely without having to worry about them continuing to spam the living hell out of you.

And sure, that means you also won’t see the daily begging e-mails or texts from your preferred candidate, and that probably means you won’t end up donating as much from guilt or shame or fear. And that means that your candidate will probably not get quite as much money as if you donated as normal. But if you’re anything like me, that wasn’t the option any more. The option was donate and live in rage and frustration at how often you’re harassed or give up donating forever. This feels like a reasonable compromise to me, and it has worked extremely well this election cycle.

With any luck at some point political parties will learn that relentless spam and calls and guilting people may work in the short term, but that its long term consequences are to alienate and piss of their own supporters. It seems short sighted to me. It seems like an obviously bad approach long-term. But they haven’t learned it yet, so I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do what you have to do to get through the night.

Categories
Life Photography

Lockdown Photography (Part One)

When this whole horrible COVID19 experience started—back when we thought maybe we’d be in lockdown for a few weeks, not a few months to a year—I thought to myself that at least it might be something worthy of documenting with my camera. I considered the world so changed and strange in this moment in time that no one would really understand it in the future unless people tried to capture the experience.

But the truth is, I’ve really struggled. The world generally doesn’t look transformed. It doesn’t even look abandoned in many ways. It’s more eerie than that. It just looks like a perpetual early morning before people are out on the streets. Or what Sunday afternoons used to feel like in England in the 1980s. For the most part, the visual reality of this situation conveys almost nothing of the experience of living through it. In fact, at times, while it feels desolate and strange and disconcerting—terrifying even—it looks almost idyllic.

A better photographer than I might be able to capture the feeling. But in the meantime, here’s some of the surface reality of San Francisco in April and May 2020. I’ll probably post some more in another couple of months.

One day, when basically overwhelmed by the state of things, I went for an epic walk from my home all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge and part of the way back. The walk was about four hours long, and very strange with all the streets abandoned and quiet. The Golden Gate Bridge itself was the strangest. It wasn’t deserted by any means, but compared to normal, it was fascinatingly empty.
Seeing friends has become a highly sporadic activity and everyone is being incredibly cautious. In the first time I’d seen him for at least two months, Matt suggested that we go up to Bernal Park one afternoon to play with his new drone. He brought alcohol wipes and I brought Purell so we could handle the controls without risk of disease spread. We both wore masks. It did not feel normal.
I don’t really have pictures of all the shops on Valencia boarded up. That was probably the weirdest thing – one by one all the shops disappearing, being put into some kind of suspended animation, knowing as they do it that some of them may never reopen again. It’s a hard thing to capture in a visually interesting way as well. But as time has spread, posters have started to appear that are better statements of how we’re feeling.
Dolores Park is normally packed with people, even during the week. And now it’s starting to get busier again, particularly on the weekends when the weather is good. People are taking risks in being out, and hoping that the openness will minimize the chance of contagion. For a few weeks though, it was pretty much completely empty.
Cliff’s Variety in Castro is sort of like a hardware store in drag. It sells all kinds of sensible practical things, plus feather boas and shiny chains and Bear Pride flags. Because it’s a hardware store, it counted as an essential business. But they still wanted to be really careful when opening up. There’s nothing less like the feel of the Castro than this sad, quiet, structured and orderly line. I found it deeply unsettling.
Ben and I decided we needed to get some exercise one afternoon so slogged up to Kite Hill in the Castro. At this stage, very few people had serious face masks and we were making do with scarves and pieces of fabric. The hill was busy but also really weird, everyone subdued and concerned and insular.
This *is* good news, and it’s pretty widespread around San Francisco. Some of them are really great. But it’s hard to maintain this level of positivity and optimism and it’s hard to read it and take it at face value. There’s a celebration of anything that we can do to make things feel more normal, but the desperation with which people reach for them actually makes things feel less normal, more bizarre.
Part of a long walk to get some of the anxiety out of our systems. I found this picture to sort of capture part of my feeling, part of my sense that my beautiful city is trapped in some kind of vice. I feel the same about my own heart and lungs.
Another trip up to Bernal to look at the view and exercise the demons. Looking out over the city it’s both hard to get a sense of how weird everything is but also you get this sense of hundreds of thousands of people hiding in all these little boxes. Insular, caged, worried people.
This took a while to interpret, but the short version is FUCK THIS NOISE. This particular wall was covered in anti-Trump posters, but this actually felt both clever and oddly mood-encapsulating. Fuck this noise indeed.
Categories
Random

Hello RSS Readers, can you hear me?

I’d like to ask you guys a quick favor. If you use an RSS reader to consume your online content and somehow you still find yourself subscribed to plasticbag.org after many years of abandonment and dereliction, I’d really appreciate it if you can let me know in the comments below if you see this post. If you could tell me what client or online service you’re using to consume the feed too, that would be really great.

The short background to this is that as part of my massive cleaning and reinstallation of everything, I deleted a hell of a lot of stuff from around the place, and I’m checking the error logs to see what things people are missing. At the moment, the largest number of 404 errors are coming from people looking for an index.rdf, index.xml or atom.xml file, which I’m assuming are all places I used to keep my feeds. WordPress has moved them to /feed/ and so I’ve made a few .htaccess updates to redirect everything to the right places. But of course it’s easy to make the redirects, and less easy to check that everything is coming through to everyone correctly.

Obviously, if you happen to stumble upon this post in another way and then realize that your RSS feed is not up to date, I’d also love to hear about it, but I suspect that’s a bit less likely to happen.

Categories
Life Personal Publishing

Resurfacing

It feels odd, writing your first blog post in seven years. It used to be such a large part of my life—and this blog used to be such a core part of my work and engagement with my community—that you’d think you’d never forget how to do it. I wrote here almost every day for well over a decade. It saw me through the first half of my working life, from Time Out to Brickhouse, London to America. It saw me through many of my most significant life events. And yet I’ve not done it for seven years. It feels odd. And forgotten how to do it, I think I sort of have.*

I’ve obviously been writing, don’t get me wrong! I’ve written many, many tweets in the last seven years. Around 150,000 of them, in fact, on pretty much every subject under the sun, although mostly (in recent years) #politics and #doctorwho. I’ve built up over 40,000 followers over that time, a number that I think I can get back down under a thousand if I continue to focus ardently on #politics and #doctorwho. This will have a certain circular irony to it since, if I’m honest, the ease of writing on Twitter is probably one of the reasons that I finally stopped blogging in the first place.

I’ve set up a few other Twitter accounts too. There’s @lovedsongs which publishes a list of every song I’ve given five stars to or loved on iTunes. And @houseofcoates which fairly aimlessly plugs away reporting the things that happen at my home. Just two of the many absurd things you can do with Twitter if you get bored.

I’ve also written a number of conference talks. Looking back at my dump of the old Lanyrd website, probably around thirty! Or at least maybe ten, each of which was delivered a few times. Writing those conference talks reminded me a lot of how it felt to write a decent blog post after ten years on the job. By that time I was no longer just knocking something out for fun to get a thought out of my head. I wanted them to be good. Really good. And so I wrote them to death, and focused in on them and really thought them through. Some of the conference talks I managed to write in less than one focused week of work. Some took almost a month. It had been getting that way with my blog posts by the end. And that, in a third ancillary and supportive nutshell, is yet another reason that I finally stopped blogging.

It might surprise some of you that I used to go outside. But if you don’t believe me, the conference talk I gave most recently was at the Mind The Product event in 2018. It was a keynote on the main stage at the San Francisco Symphony Hall. Get me. Main stage at Glastonbury. Crowds go wild. I three-dimensionally-rendered most of the slides using a focused brick of computronium. (I wrote that out longhand because “I 3d rendered” looked very strange indeed.) It took a really long time, and over-ran by ten full minutes. Everyone was very, very nice about it. I’m quite proud of the whole thing.

I also wrote a few things in other places over that time. I wrote a few things on Medium. I’m not sure why I chose to move to Medium, except I guess I thought it was a bit less embarrassing than writing a blog. I also thought I could just write something every so often and it might somehow find itself an audience without me having to write all the time to maintain people’s attention. Plus, of course, it makes what you write look gorgeous.

However, after roughly a decade of not writing regularly, I can testify that removing the pressure of regular content production did not make me produce fewer, higher quality thoughts, but just removed the impetus to write altogether. And that for the fourth time, is another reason why I stopped blogging.

I wrote a few things for more public spaces too. The most prominent of those was an opinion piece for NBC News that I guess I never actually billed them for (their payment system was appalling) so in principle, I guess I still own it. I might copy it over to this site in fact since they probably don’t hold the copyright. If you’re interested at all, it’s here: Trump blocked me on Twitter. But for democracy’s sake, we can’t ban him.

I should say a couple of things about that piece of writing before I move on – firstly, I didn’t write the headline. Mostly when you write things, the sub-editor writes the headline, and it is normally the distilled down and clickbaitiest possible version of what you actually might have meant. The second thing I’d like to say is that, you know, I still stand by it 85%. But, you know, when he started encouraging people to break the lockdown and go outside and give and spread disease to millions of Americans… Well, anyway.

But of course the main thing I’ve been doing over the last decade is building things. First at Yahoo, we built and launched Fire Eagle within Brickhouse and did a whole bunch of product innovation things, plus a couple of substantial but much less glamorous internal projects to do with location sharing and storage. Then after that projects like The Eatery with Aza Raskin, Up Coffee for Jawbone, projects for Nokia and Burner, doing consulting with Matt Biddulph at Product Club, then launching a better smart object UX with Thington (also built with Matt), sold to Eero a couple of years ago, followed by spending the last year and a half working on a completely decentralized alternative to Facebook and Twitter now known as Planetary.

I often find that when I’m working on something complicated my desire to write sort of dries up. I used to find these patterns where I’d spend chunks of time in strategic roles where I’d have to think a lot about an emerging subject in public, followed by times where I’d be focused on building and the writing would dry up. It’s a shame because I think the writing and the thinking helps you draw attention to the building, helps you engage people with the projects and keeps you a bit honest. It’s a good thing to think and work in public if you can do it. But for me, recently, for good or ill, it’s been mostly building and not very much writing for the last few years. And that, I suppose, is yet another reason why I stopped blogging.

So I guess the question of the moment is why have I started again? Why after seven+ years have I felt compelled to write just one more post? Is this the beginning of something more substantial?

There are probably two answers to this. The first one is purely practical. A few years ago someone managed to hack into my servers via an unpatched version of DBAdmin. And shortly after that, Google started reporting that there appeared to be content spam appearing in my blog. Shortly after that, my web host shut down access to any of my sites from outside, citing the presence of malware. And since I didn’t really know what they’d done and I didn’t have time to investigate it all thoroughly, over not very long at all every mark of my internet presence evaporated.

Which brings us to today, and this moment in time where we’re all reeling a bit from the world. A time that finds some of us trying to occupy our minds with something constructive. A moment where I finally had the time (and the desperate inclination) to back everything up and then completely purge my server, soup to nuts. And then gradually, piece at a time, when I get a moment, I’ve been putting it up online again.

Little fragments from my distant past are starting to emerge. Old fan sites like The Bomb. Weird creative projects from the past that I’m too embarrassed to link to. Websites made of many, many frames (ask your granddad). And of course, this blog. Over twenty years old, and filled with great swathes of my history. Looking at me blankly, using an off-the-shelf theme that conveys none of my feel or personality, with a little link that doesn’t blink but feels like it does saying only, “Add new post”. “Add new post.”

And hence the second answer to the question, why have I started again? Well, first up, I don’t know that I have. This could be the only new post I ever put up here. But if it is, it won’t be because I’m writing lots elsewhere. We live in a new time of isolation and fear. Twitter feels too urgent and anxious and tense right now. There’s no space to think or breathe. Facebook is filled with all the angst and pain and fury people are feeling. It’s overwhelming. Instagram is filled with people performing a perfect family lockdown experience interspersed with adverts for masks.

And suddenly, I find myself hearkening back to an earlier time of self-expression and community. The crowds have gone. There are no hordes of people waiting outside for a new post to emerge. There’s little to no pressure. Everyone’s not looking. It’s just the relics from an earlier era, posting periodically. And suddenly, maybe just for this one moment in time, that community is who I need. That community is who I miss. And talking to them in this kind of way feels right.

So I’m sorry that it’s long and vague and formless. I’m sorry that I’ve forgotten how to write … good*. I’m sorry that I haven’t posted for a very long time. But I’m here now, I have very little to say, and for some reason, goddam, I’m determined to say it.

So here’s to all you old people who still glance at blogs. Maybe this will turn up in your RSS feeds somehow. Maybe you’ll stumble upon it at some point in the future. Maybe you’ll never see it. That’s okay too. It’s not for an audience. It’s not for the attention. It’s just something I wanted to say, written down and pushed out the door to be stumbled upon by random people at some point. Just like it always was supposed to be, I guess.

It feels odd, writing your first blog post in seven years. But it’s a good kind of weird. And I’ve missed it.

* The irony here is intentional. I haven’t written long pieces for a while. I can’t tell if you’re getting the jokes.

Categories
Radio & Music

One Year Late Review: On the songs of 2017

Today our comment and review media lurch from Hot Takes to History without pausing for a moment to get a sense of what actually happened. The concept of the One Year Later Review was that we might be able to get a better understanding of what mattered and what effects it had with a little bit of distance – one year of distance in fact.

I think I first noticed the reaction-focused sense of the media in the end of year song lists that came out halfway through December—before the year had even ended. That didn’t seem to be enough time to understand or feel or assess what had just happened. It seemed so flighty and empty and vacuous. And once I recognized that I started to see it everywhere.

I think reviewing what happened a year previously in a regular fashion would give us a bit more of a sense of where we came from, a bit more context on which events ended up proving meaningful and which were just flotsam and jetsam that appeared and disappeared into nothing. I think it’s a really strong idea. I wish media organizations would consider doing something like it about all the major events.

But let’s be honest. I like the idea, but I’m not going to be the one to write them. So I’ve restricted myself to writing a few words about the songs that meant something to me a full year after the end of the year in question. It’s a fun, simple project that doesn’t take too much time. And who knows, maybe you might find something you missed from it.

(This particular review has ended up being written considerably after the fact, in May 2020 rather than (as intended) in January 2019. Please forgive me. Life got in the way.)

Charlotte Gainsbourg: Deadly Valentine

This year somehow managed to produce fewer songs that I love than most others in recent memory and yet at the same time I love them so much. And this is a prime example – Gainsbourg had been working a bit on the arty-not-catchy end of things and then suddenly this thing comes out and it is Charismatic Art Disco. It’s so damn good. The weird lyrics about marriage, the disco stomp underneath, the great loud releases of the chorus, the unconventional structures. Every single part of it makes me want to stride down the street like I own the place. Wonderful track that I listen to all the damn time.

Father John Misty: Total Entertainment Forever

Now, let’s be clear. Everyone knows what Father John Misty is like, and without question he gets more and more self-involved and performatively ‘deep’ every year. There’s a lot not to like and a lot to be bored of in his work. It’s very strongly flavored and there’s not a lot of contrast between his tracks. And yet if you look around carefully there are such bleak gems in it too. Guess what, this is one of them.

This particular gleaming chunk of value starts off looking like a comment on technology in modern life and as such it should step very heavily on one of my personal landmines (musicians complaining about the effects of technology in clumsy ignorant ways while using the shit out of it), but it turns out it’s much more about entertainment and perpetual stimulus and weirdly that makes way more sense and feels much more relatable. It’s very open about the horrors of a total entertainment culture while being quite clear that we’re all complicit with, and totally enjoying, it. That’s a narrative with a bit more nuance and elegance. And I recognize myself in it.

Plus, I mean, the language. “Bedding Taylor Swift, Every Night Inside An Oculus Rift. After Mister and the Missus, Finish dinner and the dishes…” I mean, the image is vibrant, the concept interesting, the language beautifully assembled. Seriously, the man can write and he has something to write about.

Kygo & Selena Gomez: It Ain’t Me

I’m pretty old now so I don’t have the grasp on what the kids are into, but if this is the standard of even 1/100th of the pop music they’re listening to, then wow… It’s a variant of an older Selena Gomez song, resampled and mangled, beautifully reassembled and restructured in ingenious new ways that are musically interesting and evocative. It’s also a song with a really simple, clear and clean message that’s exactly the opposite of the kind of torch songs we’re used to. Who’s going to walk you through the dark side of the morning? It ain’t me. It’s fresh and immediately classic. I love it. I absolutely love it.

St. Vincent: New York

God this year had a lot of great songs and this is without question one off the best ones. It’s without question my favorite St Vincent song, it’s also one of my favorite songs of the year and it’s probably in my top fifty songs of all time too. It’s just wonderful.

I listened to St Vincent talk about this track on Song Exploder and she revealed a few things that were very surprising to me – firstly that it was originally two songs sort of stitched together in an unholy union. You cannot tell. It feels so perfect. And secondly that it was the first song that she wrote that she felt could be someone’s favorite ever song. And she is absolutely right. It’s perfect. It moves me. I love it completely and absolutely. I could listen to a version ten times the length and I’d not get bored.

Arcade Fire: Everything Now

I’ve been pretty enthusiastic about most Arcade Fire albums over the years, but this one was a bit of a disappointment. I can’t really explain why. It just didn’t feel right. The songs felt flat and underwhelming, the insight like it was something out of a bottle. And the new sound they tried to push for was an odd fit for the band.

Which is why it’s so impressive and puzzling that the best song on the album is the one that pushes that noise the furthest into ABBA-like pop territory. A bit like Total Entertainment Forever, it’s a song about being overwhelmed by the excess of culture and content and consumption. And also like it, it accepts that we’re all complicit with it and all love it, even as we know it’s a delicious fruit with a worm at its core.

Now, wonderful as it is, it does go a bit over the top on occasions. I can’t tell if the Pan Pipes make me laugh with delight or make my eyes roll with embarrassment. It might be both of them at the same time. Maybe that makes it better? I don’t know. Take a look for yourself and tell me – is this laughably silly or laughably wonderful? I sure as hell don’t know. I just know I like it.

LCD Soundsystem: oh baby

So the band that disbanded and then rebanded once again came back with an album that was reviewed extremely positively but mostly left me cold. I don’t know that I know precisely why most of it didn’t work for me, but work for me it did not. I still love the band. I saw them live in Berkeley and they were amazing. And they played all the classics and they were all amazing. And yet somehow in the middle of the whole thing, without me even really understanding what was happening, this song swept out and blew me away.

I’m not 100% sure what it is about it that makes it so moving. It’s definitely at least partly the bass line, pulsing out like a communication from an alien lifeform. It’s definitely partly the contrast between that bass, the slightly frantic metronome like noise and the gentle, slow and dreamlike lyrics, filled with longing and regret and desire and support and love. It may be partly just the experience of being in that place at that time, feeling all the things that it wanted to talk about. It may be the break they added in the live performance or the gap that it leaves in the recorded version. I don’t know. All I know is that it is everything, and I love it.

The video is extraordinary too. Directed by Rian Johnson and starring Sissy Spacek and David Strathairn who are in love and perfecting matter transportation. It’s hard to explain, but it’s wonderful. I’m using the word too much. I don’t care. This deserves it.

Sharon Van Etten: The End of the World

Looking back at the songs I’ve chosen this year, there’s a lot of longing and sadness and emotion in them. Not many of them are particularly up beat. I’m sorry about that. Maybe I had an emo year.

This is a cover of the old classic performed by Sharon Van Etten for The Man In The High Castle TV show / soundtrack album. It feels like a rediscovered old Patsy Cline song somehow and yet immediately contemporary at the same time. A song for the moment, without doubt.

Víkingur Ólafsson: Glass – Études, No. 2

Pretty much every year I end up giving myself a bit of a cheat. And I guess this is the one for 2017. It’s a track from a newly created album playing some classic works of Philip Glass. It’s a track that I intend to learn how to play as soon as a I get a piano again, along with Reverie by Debussy. It’s not a massively complicated piece of music, it’s almost like Für Elise in that it feels like an exercise piece. But I love it so much. It’s just hypnotic and stark at the same time.

Aimee Mann: Patient Zero

I heard Aimee Mann talk about the origins of this song. She was at a party with Andrew Garfield who would end up being the new Spider-man. And she seems to have looked at him and thought to herself that he resembled nothing more than a piece of fresh meat about to be chewed up and spat out by Hollywood.

I find it a bit puzzling that she’d speak so openly about this origin for the song. It’s a sad and tragic song really and you feel like Andrew Garfield might actually find it quite a difficult song to listen to later. It feels a bit cruel, to be honest. And yet it’s also beautiful. And it’s pretty self-evidently right as well. Maybe that makes it worse.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful song, but like all beautiful songs that end up meaning a lot to you, I see a lot of myself in it and it’s come to mean something particular to me. I sometimes think about what I was expecting when I moved to America and what the reality of that has actually been. I don’t find this a particularly easy song to listen to.

Tonya Harding (in Eb major)

Okay well we’re through the year and looking back at the songs above … well, they’re not cheery, are they? Hard to know what was going on. Maybe it was a post-Trump election time of sadness and introspection?

I’m going to end with one of my favorite songs of all time, but I’m going to warn you, it’s not a fun one.

Sufjan Stevens did two versions of this song about Tonya Harding, the Olympic figure skater who had a pretty colorful backstory and got into some substantial trouble.

One of these versions is more conventional. This is the other one – the one with a gentler twinkle and a slower, more empathic pace. The other version is fine, but this one is sensationally beautiful.

It doesn’t veer away from describing the human catastrophe that she was. You get every detail of her degrading acts and the degradation she experienced as a result. And I think while that’s hard to listen to, it’s never mocking or exploitative. It communicates nothing more than empathy and a desire for understanding.

Even more, it encourages us all to see the equivalent catastrophe in all of us, and it asks us to accept that this catastrophe is part of what it means to be human. And finally it asks us to look at our own catastrophes with recognition, sympathy, respect and love.

That might make it sound cheesy, but it’s not. It’s raw. And loving. And hard. And beautiful. And tragic. And sad. And great. And uncomfortable. And they’re just some of the reasons that you should listen to it, and understand it and take it into your hearts.

And with that, I’m done. Thank you for staying with me through this retro legacy look back at 2017. And stay tuned for my One Year Later Review special for 2018 – coming soon.

Categories
Journalism Politics Social Software Technology

Trump blocked me on Twitter. But for democracy’s sake, we can’t ban him.

I was commissioned to write this Op Ed by NBC News after discussing the matter on Twitter at length. It was a fun if surprisingly hard thing to write. I never managed to get paid for it and never signed anything, so I think it’s probably okay that I republish it here. The original home on NBC News is here: Trump blocked me on Twitter.

A little over six months ago the President of the United States of America blocked me on Twitter. He or his people decided — over the course of one weekend in June — to purge those of us who had been fact-checking him online. By Monday morning, most of us were gone forever.

In a normal administration, a fairly minor micro-scandal like that might represent the high-water mark of public interest in the president’s social media life. Even in this case, there’s more to the story than perhaps meets the eye — blocking critics from official public fora could arguably be illegal — but still, I can’t imagine any previous president spending much time worrying about the effects of Twitter on their agenda.

But things have changed. Today, the censoring of President Donald Trump’s critics represents only the tiniest part of the Trump and Twitter love story — a never-ending 24/7 horror show focusing on and around a profoundly irresponsible and incompetent man’s willful and occasionally terrifying use of social media.

Let’s review: Trump — in the last year alone — has used Twitter to systematically lie to the American people, attack the very idea of the free press, undermine public trust in America’s core institutions, underplay racist terror acts, support alleged child molesters, call himself a genius, alienate America’s allies and perhaps worst of alltaunt the world’s most autocratic and unstable nuclear power.

It’s no wonder that so many activists now argue that Twitter has a moral responsibility to ban the president. At protests outside Twitter’s San Francisco offices earlier in January — protests that eventually triggered an anemic and half-hearted response from the company — activists argued that Trump’s appalling behavior had broken the company’s Terms of Use regarding abuse and harassment and should result in him being banned.

They also said that Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey — by creating a space where Trump could circumvent normal media checks and balances — had directly contributed to the president’s rise to power. Enough is enough, they argued. Ban this man.

I have a lot of sympathy with this argument. I also know some of these activists personally and they are honorable and decent people. But ultimately I believe Twitter must fight to keep Trump on the platform.

For good or ill, Twitter is one of the closest things we have today to a de facto “public space” on the internet. I believe we need such a space. And I believe over the last couple of years, under extraordinary (if deserved) pressure, Twitter has just started to really understand the full range of responsibilities that occupying such a role entails.

One of these responsibilities is to provide a space for the political discourse of a country to play itself out. These are the spaces we now use to debate the issues, to campaign and — now — even to discuss and announce policy. Ideally they wouldn’t be spaces owned by for-profit corporations, but truly public places with rights and responsibilities defined and protected by law. But the U.S. government has shown no inclination or ability to fund or build or run such places, so instead we are where we are.

And where we are is in a country where almost half of the electorate voted for Trump. He did not organize a military coup. It wasn’t a massive administrative error that secured him the job. It was, as much as some people may dispute or dislike it, the will of the people. And until such a time that he’s removed from office, if Twitter is to remain the de facto public space we all need, the will of the people matters.

I’m not going to pretend there isn’t realpolitik in play here too. Let’s face it: Banning the president from Twitter would not remove his platform, he’d simply move to Snapchat, or Facebook or Ello. And if he were banned, the partisan outcry over the decision would probably rend Twitter in half in the process, potentially killing the product and the company in the process. There are no victories there.

Because in the end, the only victories can come from the same processes that got us here. We need to take responsibility as an electorate. If we want him to stop debasing the presidency on Twitter, we need to remove him from the presidency, not remove him from Twitter. We need to support our courts in the fair implementation of the law. And we need to hold our elected representatives to account as they attempt — in turn — to keep Trump from going off the rails.

Meanwhile, there is something we can ask of Twitter. We can ask them to be clear about how they see their role in the world. We need to know what they believe in; what they stand for. We need them to demonstrate that they fully understand they’re not simply a neutral communications mechanism. Today’s Twitter is a place where business happens, elections happen, government happens — and with the arrival of Russia onto the scene — international tensions play out. We need Twitter to show us they understand this and that they’re up to that challenge.

And perhaps we can ask them one more tiny thing — to review their policies on politicians blocking or banning users engaged in legitimate, non-abusive political debate. Twitter’s own statement stood up for “necessary discussion around [politicians’] words and actions, but we can’t have that discussion if those politicians shut us down. And in this post-truth world, we need all the help we can get.

Tom Coates is an entrepreneur and technologist who has developed software products for the BBC, Time Out, Yahoo, Nokia and Jawbone among others. Over the last 20 years he’s written and spoken extensively about tech culture, social platforms, location and the Internet of Things and his work has been featured on the BBC, The Guardian, New York Times, MIT Technology Review and in the Daily Mail. His most recent project was the smart home software company Thington, which was acquired last year by eero inc.