Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

  • Weeknotes #2

    Reading

    Articles

    I struggle a bit with what to read and when. My reading list is getting bigger and there’s no way I’ll ever get to it all. So I found some comfort in Tracey Durnell’s Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines. Especially this bit:

    Read fiction in as few sittings as possible, but take my time reading nonfiction. Immersive storytelling benefits from few interruptions. Nonfiction benefits from reading only short amounts at once and reading multiple books at once. Always have at least two nonfiction books going.

    Interesting little bit of web history, the Carl Steadman (of Suck.com fame) cookie.

    And I could always count on a few tidbits from Lara Hogan. This post from a few months ago about Finding a buddy when you’re a team of one was incredibly good, even if you’re not a team of one. I especially like the idea of soliciting feedback from third parties whenever possible.

    Books

    Bleak House chapters 31 through 34. The unthinkable occurs. Spontaneous combustion. A bit of the impossible tossed into one of the more grounded, naturalist, stories of the era.

    I picked up a recommendation for Just Keep Buying some place or another so I’ve been leafing through it. So far the most useful part is the 2x rule: if you ever feel guilty about buying something, invest the same amount.

    Watching

    Everything is content now (Patrick Wilhelms). Very true. Incidentally, Richard Linklater made the same point recently:

    Tech companies came in, and we went from film being art, with value, to it becoming content that you click on. But at the end of the day, nobody’s happy with that arrangement. Even the tech people are screaming that they’re losing billions of dollars. It’s like, this is their world that we adapted to and they’re not happy? They’re the monolithic overlords who put everyone else out of business!

    Finished Solaris. Notes incoming once I’ve had a chance ot think about it.

    Notes

    Events this week
    – 11th Football Game
    – 16th Leo’s bday

    Do the Ninjio training

  • Weeknotes #1

    Reading

    Articles

    I saw an interesting parable in a recent entry in Cory Doctrow’s Pluralistic blog. There’s a story that goes around that in the midst of his progressive reforms, a labor activist was pushing on new federal discrimination laws. According to some accounts, he responded with “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” It‘s also possible the story isn’t entirely true. Either way it’s pretty cool.

    Finally got through Ronan Farrow’s huge profile / takedown of Elon Musk in the New Yorker. It’s scary and unnerving in all the usual ways and is such an indictment of America’s major political failings it reads like satire sometimes. This about sums it up:

    In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded

    Simon Willison put up a written post of a talk I saw at WordCamp US. It’s brutally practical, which is kind of good.

    Books

    Bleak House chapters 22 through 31, where the threads are beginning to come together. In a much longer aside from the narrator, Mr Guppy starts to put the whole thing together and Lady Deadlock realizes that Esther is indeed her daughter. Richard casts off after an argument with Mr Jarndyce and Esther become ill.

    Dickens appears to excel at weaving together a compelling story and social commentary so that one never lives without the other, and so that each is made better for it. And it keeps you in.

    On to Chapter 4 of Sculpting in Time,Cinema’s destined role where Tarkovsky begins to pick apart the trajectory of cinema by viewing it through the prism of his own experience in the industry. He talks about his transition from film school to the wider world of filmmaking, and the way in which mass appeal has shaped the way in which people respond to film. But he comes back to the universal truth of cinema, that it was a tool invented to record facts, actuality, and time:

    Cinema came into being as a means of recording the very movement of reality: factual, specific, within time and unique; of reproducing again and again the moment, instant by instant, in its fluid mutability-that instant over which we find ourselves able to gain mastery by imprinting it on film.

    Watching

    Started Solaris to keep up with Tarvovsky.

    Notes

    Meal Plan this week
    Monday –
    Tuesday –
    Wednesday
    Thursday

    New todos:

  • Clubhouse, and the audio social platform

    Clubhouse is, I think it’s safe to say, going to be the next big source of social platform growth. Twitter Spaces will be a competitor there, possibly even the dominant one, but audio is clearly winning out here. Which makes sense in a year that a) had people be on video calls all day (I’m generalizing but Zoom fatigue is real) and b) where podcast growth doesn’t seem to have a stopping point. And I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with that.

    I have a problem with Clubhouse though. There is a major problem with harassment on the platform, largely because audio formats mean that you can be a little looser in what you say, and a little more performative in what you play up. Taylor Lorenz has been the biggest single target of this harassment, but Clubhouse as an inner circle of VC bros is hostile towards journalists generally. Ed Z attributes this largely to VC culture and its evolving relationship with the press, which is obviously part of it. But I think that Silicon Valley is also largely stuck in a techno-utopian view of the web and what it brings to the table. So, the just don’t like negativity, or this idea that its okay to be critical of the tech industry.

    So it will be interesting to see if the audio format goes the way of the always optimistic, branded life influencer, or if it actually becomes a medium for conversation. I suspect it will be the former.

  • Clubhouse Harassment, and Tech’s Move from Enthusiast to Industrial Press | Where’s Your Ed At

    A16Z has benefitted immensely from the positive press in its investments – in Lyft, Facebook, Zynga, Slack, Asana, and others – and watched as the press has changed from a relatively frictionless marketing channel for their investment rounds into something that requires a lot more effort, and isn’t simply an uncritical flume of people saying “damn that’s cool!”

    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.

  • But wait, there’s more! | XML Conference

    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.

  • A Tale Of Two Ecosystems: On Bandcamp, Spotify And The Wide-Open Future | NPR

    As Ek makes clear, even the COVID pandemic can be put to use by Spotify’s strategy, as can the death of an existing medium for music, “linear radio” (more commonly known as “radio”).

    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.

  • Judas and the Black Messiah

    What will stick with me — besides a performance by Daniel Kaluuya I was fully not prepared for — was the speeches. The speeches, that by all accounts, were pulled from the actual words of Fred Hampton. Rhetoric that encapsulated a moment with timeless readiness. They were treated with such reverence by the director, that you can only watch in awe when they happened. There is a lot to like in this movie, but I like that most of all.

    Dir. Shaka King
    2021

  • A New Conservatism | Foreign Affairs

    In the wake of Trump’s defeat, analysts have pondered whether his brand of populism might represent the conservative future. But this misunderstands his role. There is no discernible Trumpism independent of Trump himself.

    Writing in Foreign Affairs, former Romney advisor Oren Cass offers an alternative view on the future of conservatism, one that I don’t think other conservatives will be quick to embrace, but one that I think could have a future as the GOP moves from a majority party to a minority party fighting to exert control.

    Crass draws heavily on the most traditional of conservative thinkers, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, throughout the piece. What’s interesting to me is that he seems to think that conservatives have a place in the modern labor movement. Citing Adam Smith’s notion that “the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society, on the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin,” Crass believes that the labor movement’s embrace of the worker against the unregulated capitalist is, in fact, not incompatible with what conservatism could look like.

    I’m not saying I could ever find myself among the conservative movement, I doubt I could. But one that stands lockstep with the labor movement would be… hard to avoid.

  • Quotes about the Web

    It occurs to me that I come across quotes about the web a lot, so I think I’m going to keep track of them and then publish them from time to time.

    There’s this tweet from Vincent Bevins:

    I tweet this every few weeks but the internet absolutely does not work any more. You are corralled on to one of the few infinite-scroll brain-death experiences, and if you try to leave to actually go read something, an assault of pop-ups and broken paywalls forces you back here

    Tim Bray recently wrote about a few technologies that he was able to recognize the potential in. One of those is the web, and he recalls a time he met somebody at a conference, early in the web’s existence:

    I remember like yesterday a presentation at one of the early Web meetups, an engineering lead for a (then) big computer company. She said “This is so great. Our interfaces used to have to be full of sliders and dials and widgets or people would say we were amateurs. But now with the Web, there’s so much less you can do, but the important things are easier, and that’s what people want!” She was right.

    And Claire Evans (author of Broad Band) interviewed R.U. Sirius (not his real name) about his cyberpunk magazine of the early 1990’s, Mondo 2000. Sirius has a long arc of experience with new technology and he puts a really fine point on where the web came from, and why it took the trajectory it did:

    The aesthetics and politics of the web at the start was kind of a mix of two things: 1) American—mostly white, mostly male—boomer idealism about virtual communities and global brains and good, free, open communication that could lead toward positive change and common understanding and 2) an even more dominant Gen X sensibility of reflexive irony and evasiveness of politics and (the aforementioned) boomer idealism in favor of silly things largely unencumbered by political concerns. There was awareness, but concern seemed like an emotion that could be pushed away with ironic distancing.

    Then there’s this all-time great by writer and blogger Heather Havrilesky in an interview about Suck Magazine

    Reading Suck was like finding an eye rolling teenager with a Lit Theory degree at an IPO party and smoking clove cigarettes with him until you vomited all over your shoes

  • The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram | Document

    And maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center.

    Caroline Busta

    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.

  • California Is Making Liberals Squirm | The New York Times

    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

  • On the Rocks

    In some ways, this film feels a bit like Coppola playing the hits. But it’s filled with careful staging, elegant cinematography, unique soundscapes, and these quiet moments that elevate the charisma of Bill Murray and Rashida Jones. That’s more than enough to stand on its own

    2020

    Dir. Sofia Coppola

  • The Last Black Man in San Francisco

    A captivating and beautiful love letter to the lost days of the city of San Francisco. The story frames the conflict as a relationship between a man, his childhood, and the home he had lost. But it is, in truth, a poetic film about the beauty of friendship.

    2019

    Dir. Joe Talbot

  • Show Don’t Sell

    Take credit for what CSS has done. Don’t say: “Web standards did this” Do say: “We’ve set up a system that will automatically format the page whenever you update it.” Let the client think you’re smart and give you more business… Show don’t sell

    – Jeffrey Zeldman

    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.

  • This used to be our playground

    Design got its seat at the table, developed a business mindset, became increasingly inclusive, and finally grew up. So much to celebrate and so much distance travelled, and yet design seems relatively passive and polite; acquiescent in a build-by-numbers assembly process.

    I find myself returning to the same bit of circular thinking that Simon Collison describes in his post This used to be our playground. The web was more fun when it began. There was more experimentation, a friendlier atmosphere and creative approaches to design. Things are more, well, boring now. But, of course, the web is the plumbing for every major opeartional necessity on the planet. Its infastructure now, not a playground. But, Collison seems to argue, it can be both.

    In any case, I think this is an excellent summation of the direction that a personal site can go, and the way in which we can reclaim a bit of our personal expression. It also happens to be a great jumping off point to lots of fantastic and inspirational links.

  • WordPess.com Launches New Website Service

    Mullenweg responded to them, saying he is “100% certain this will drive more up-market consulting in the future” to consultants who handle larger projects and potentially bring more business to plugin and theme developers. He also noted that Bluehost’s full service product is a similar solution and that services like Web.com have been competing in this space for awhile.

    So WordPress is getting into the low cost website game. Or maybe not, maybe they’re just referring those services out? It is a bit hard to say. But either way, this comment from Matt Mullenweg comes off as a bit disingenous. The issue with how the service is positioned — Built by WordPress.com — is a matter of branding.

    The rest of the world outside of the WordPress community doesn’t decouple WordPress and WordPress.com, nor should they have to. So any service that Automattic launches into the ehter comes off as the official entry, so to enter a market with such slim margins and potentially crowd out the community doesn’t have a great feeling to it, even if the general point is well taken.

  • Interview with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal

    And we did a lot of work — Stacey Abrams, Latosha Brown, so many activists across the country in Arizona, Georgia, who built infrastructure — to convince people that they should give us one more shot to trust that the government will step in and do something that matters. We’ve got to deliver.

    As I keep attempting to unravel the events of last week again and again, I find myself coming to it from so many different angles. Congresswoman Jayapal lends a brand new voice in a moving and stark interview with Rebecca Traister at The Cut.

    She highlights some details I hadn’t previously known. They seemed to be aware of the threat, the representatives were given strict instructions and told to bring overnight bags. And there does appear to have been intentional oversights by law enforcement, the question is simply at what level and at what part of the system.

    But even more so, Jayapal is rallying for hope. Not the hope of the Obama era, the boundless optimism of an egalatarian neoliberal future. Jayapal’s hope is with the people she represents. She believes that the voting public has put their faith in the government this one last time. And they better damn well do something with that chance.

  • Death of an Open Source Business Model

    Mapbox found themselves in a similar position to Mongo and Redis: they were subsidizing R&D for a handful of trillion-dollar tech giants.

    In the Death of an Open Source Business Model, Joe Morrison laments at the new licensing restrictions of Mapbox, a reversal from the company’s previous business model, which he labels as “open core” (a free version of the software with paid propietary add-ons).

    Mapbox was forced into the position in an attmept to to block its use as a comercial product by cloud vendors like Amazon and Microsoft. It has followed a similar, if not slightly more permissive, route as MongoDB and Redis, who were forced to create unique licenses for some of their product offerings specifically to end the efforts of corporate competitors.Cloud killed open core.

    Cloud killed open core.

    Morrison’s conclusion is that this type of open source software can not exist alongside cloud infastructure that allows any software package to be commoditized and widely distirbuted with little effort. I disagree. It was not the cloud that killed open core. The cloud is simply servers. It was the companies that have decided to raze open source to the ground without any thought of long term consequences or community growth. It was a calculated move driven only by short-term profit gains. Cloud didn’t kill open core. Capitalism did.

  • The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

    The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner

    I find myself returning to this question a lot: can the United States ever escape its individualism? Should it? Most recently this came to mind in a small way, when I was reading over Cal Newport’s “Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” The article is interesting for a number of reasons — as a history of Merlin Mann, 43 Folders and Gettings Things Done, and a critique of mechanisms of modern industrial “knowledge work” — but it illuminates this point rather well. Through our individualism, we have cultivated a workplace environment that incentivizes autonomy and personal efficency. A greater collectivism at work, thinking of others first, may lead to a less stressful, more productive workplace for everyone. But it is not something I think we can every truly do.

  • The Education of David Stockman

    He didn’t much care for Pickle’s proposals, because the impact of the reforms stretched out over some years, whereas Stockman was looking for immediate relief. “I’m just not going to spend a lot of political capital solving some other guy’s problem in 2010″

    Greider takes us through the story of David Stockman, and the at-the-time-still-recent implementation of supply side economics by the Reagan administration. I’m not sure Stockman is all that interesting of a person. He’s a conservative from Michigan, a Methodist, traditional values type Republican that believes deeply in the free market. He’s coming into politics in the 70’s, at the tail end of Jimmy Carter. So he looks around and sees these government progrmas first set up in the era of the New Deal kind of die on the vine and become ineffectual. He sees waste.

    He becomes a congressman in Michigan and advocates for privatization and cutting back the federal budget. He’s even a rare breed of Repulican that believes in scaling back corpoarate subsidies. Before long, he’s bought into supply side economics. Democrats will derogatorily refer to it as trickle down economics. It will also be called Reaganomics once Stockman’s done with it. The idea is that if you lower income taxes, and lower corporate taxes, then you can send a signal to the markets and to private industry that the politics of the government is moving in the right direction, and this will in turn lead to greater investment and new jobs. It’s faith-based economics.

    Stockman is not the the most reound advocate of this kind of economics (that’s probably Laffer and his silly curve), but Reagan puts him in charge of blaancing the federal budget. The thing is, Reagan puts these blockades in the way, things in the budget that Stockman isn’t allowed to touch. The first is the defense budget which has to go up to 30% of the total budget. The other is social safety net programs he promised he wouldn’t cut in his campaign. that’s 50% of the budget. The crazy part is his campaign was very vague so he actually had no idea what he was gonna do.

    The first thing Stockman does is plugs the numbers from Reagan’s tax cuts into a computer and what does the computer say? That he’d have the worst debt crisis in peacetime of all time. So he changes the computer, again based on the faith that the economy will naturally follow good politics.

    And that’s basically how the administration proceeds, haphazardly and by the seat of their pants, holding fast to the idea that if you shift the political model, good economics will follow. That the programs that had been massively effective since FDR didn’t need changing, and some needed to be obliterated completely. He begins slashing any program from any department he can, ruthlessly and without prejudice. Education programs, clean energy, affordable housing, by spreading it around he creates a political environment where every cabinet member has to fall in line.

    Living this out, forty years later, is a nightmare. The safety net that once held this country high was torn to shreds by Stockman. And by the end of 1981, when this article was written, Stockman had already realized he was wrong. Nothing changed. And things only got worse.

  • Big Lessons from History

    Part of what’s made Covid dangerous is that we got so good at preventing pandemics in the last century that few people before January assumed an infectious disease would ever impact their lives. It was hard to even comprehend. The irony of good times is that they breed complacency and skepticism of warnings.

    Morgan Housel extracts lessons from the present moment by thinking like a historian rather than an analyst. For everyday people, there is a lot to learn from what we are currently going through. But it’s not how to manage a pandemic, it’s how society reacts to shared trauma.

  • In Cold Blood

    Cover of an early edition of "In Cold Blood"

    In Cold Blood

    Truman Capote

    Captivating, moving and unnerving, and often abrupt. Capote illuminates the story of a brutal murder in a small town in Kansas by taking us through each and every angle. He casts no judgement on victim or perpetrator, yet still weaves an intricate and comphrensive look at the tradgic event and it’s seismic aftershocks.

    The book doubles as a master class in suspenseful writing, and shifting point of view. Capote never stays with a single viewpoint long, but by blending them together just so, he is able to bring to life small-town paronoia, the complexity of the United States judicial system, the compassion of community, and the minds of violent sociopaths. It is an obvious template for modern day journalism, and yet still one without parallel.

  • Taking Back Our Privacy

    There’s a lot I like about Anna Wiener’s look at Moxie Marlinspike and Signal, and she frames it in a modern context couched in the beliefs of Marlinspike, who has done some great things. There’s a lot of strong assertions about privacy which are needed. But I was struck by this passage, which is kind of mentioned in passing:

    What we didn’t necessarily anticipate, when everyone was so optimistic, was how little it would change things. The dream was always that, if someone in the suburbs of St. Louis got killed by a cop, immediately everyone would know about it. At the time, it was a sort of foregone conclusion that that would be enough.” “Enough for what?” I asked. “To prevent that from happening,” he replied, flatly.

  • The Hidden Power

    I recently had a chance to go back and read Jane Mayer’s incredible profile on David Addigton, Cheney’s right-hand man during the Bush years. She outlines the power-play that Cheney and Addington engaged in, pulling from a Reagan era playbook to expand the powers of the Presidency to extralegal judicial rulings and commissions, and even to spying on U.S. citizens. An incredible read.

    Link

  • Force Maejure (2014)

    A fantastic distillation of the male ego, picked apart and dissected in a way that’s visceral and real. They really make you feel it, the arguments and the embarrassment, and the intimacy of the use of visuals and sounds adds to that.

    Details