Category: Links

Ed Z offers a really interesting history of the relationship between the press and Silicon Valley (and the tech world more generally) over the last 30 years or so. It has evolved from a press that has mostly been “on their side” to one that is far more critical these days.

To illustrate that point, one only needs to look at what’s been happening to Taylor Lorenz at Clubhouse, which Ed Z uses as his primary example. It is clear that Clubhouse won’t be doing much to stop this, especially since the harassment is coming from its largest investors. So we are forced to ride this one out, as the free press goes to war with the world of VC and I’m honestly not sure who wins.

There’s a story that Yuri was once on a sales call with a colleague talking to some potential customers about the benefits of descriptive markup and the virtues of Author/Editor. He was eloquent, and SGML and Author/Editor were in fact a pretty good fit for this particular organization, so the potential customers were very soon persuaded. They began giving the usual signs of being ready to close the deal, but Yuri kept talking, piling advantage upon advantage to the case for descriptive markup and SGML, and eventually they were practically tugging at his arms, reaching into their pockets for their checkbooks, and his colleague was making let’s wrap it up noises, and Yuri turned around, fixed them with his eye, and said But wait. There’s more.

I recently learned about the Contributions of Yuri Rubinsky, and how he was able to influence the course of XML history. His story, it seems, bleeds into the stories of many others. It is often that you will come across his name. That is often in the context of the creation of standards, on the web or otherwise.

Yuri had a thing he would say a lot. It was “But Wait, There’s More.” He would say it when he was explaining something exciting to someone new. But it turns out, according to C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, that it is an apt metaphor for the process of creating standards. Sperberg-McQueen offers two methaphors. The first is a barn raising, a group project that brings togehter many hands to bring a task to full compeltion. Then there’s community farming, an ongoing process that requires hands coming together, like barn raising, but without a clear finish line or goal. There is no completion.

The process of creating standards is like community farming. But we often treat it like barn raising. And if we were able to shift our way of thinking, it would open up new possibilities.

The business model of the Internet is interesting. There is no rule, for instance, that tech companies “move fast and break things.” Nor that growth at all costs is a reasonable goal or that a simple exchange of payment for goods or services is not possible. And yet, business on the Internet often follows the path of Spotify rather than Bandcamp.

There is an interesting history of both platforms in this piece (one tidbit: Bandcamp’s success came, in part, from people searching for music plus the word “limewire,” but opting to go to Bandcamp’s site and just paying for it. People want to pay for their music, seems to be the lesson, they just want it to be easy). But it is also a commentary on the ethos of popular web platforms. A world in which a company like Bandcamp, with its focus on tangible things like people and music, will never be able to compete with Spotify, with its focus on users and audio.

A really fascinating look at the counterculture of now and the future, whereby the youth (those pesky Gen Zers) have realized that the hegemonic forces of dominant culture are a splintered and fractured and contradictory mix of tech and culture from all sides, as opposed to the kind of Nixon era monolithic forth of the hegemony of our parents. And so, this group engages in an imagined alternate universe (climate change collapse, Bitcoin) where our digital infrastructure enters its heat death, and is replaced by something different. All of this, while engaging with one another on the very platforms that they hope to see collapse.

But it does help to explain some of the newer platforms coming to the surface, Substack, Discord and the link. They are, by design, anonymous, smaller, randomized, and restricted by design. There are many old timers like myself that are looking to the past, a more nostalgic and personal web. But the future of the web may look something that intentionally obfuscates as a way of makeshift gate keeping. In other words, platforms like Substack and Discord add friction to engaging with them, be it through actual monetization or decentralization, and this keeps people out. Busta calls this the “dark forest” of the web and it is the only way that the counter culture is able to fully resist the attention economy.

Ezra Klein at his new editorial home in the New York Times on the contradiction of a conservative, progressive California:

There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. In California, the same split political personality exists, but in reverse: We’re often symbolically liberal, but operationally conservative.

At a certain point, progressive Americans, myself included, are going to have to realize that an equitable future will require change in their own backyard. I hesitate to say it will require sacrifice, because this is not a zero-sum game and the stakes are not that high.

San Francisco is about 48 percent white, but that falls to 15 percent for children enrolled in its public schools. For all the city’s vaunted progressivism, it has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country

I was doing a bit of research on the Web Standards Project and stumbled upon this old bit of advice from 2002 from WaSP co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman. The argument hasn’t changed, even if the priorities have. If you are trying to convince clients that it is in their best interest to improve performance, or accessibility, just remember to show, don’t sell.