Society

Difficult is not easy →

Published April 17  ·  All posts on Apr 17  ·  

When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they’ll drive your users to competing platforms. That’s why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees.

~ Cory Doctorow, from Pluralistic: Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital (20 Jan 2025)

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There’s a lot of value in being able to just hop onto some platform and do what you need or want to do: easily organize a group of friends, say, while not having everyone know where your baby shower will be. It turns out that building complex systems is difficult, not easy. Any time you find something is easy to do (using some piece of technology) first, marvel at that. Because doing the difficult work of building that whatever-it-is enables the other things you want to do to seem to be easy.

And the second thing should do it think about why would anyone want to do all that difficult work and perhaps you should (at least sometimes) just directly do that difficult work yourself.

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Considered →

Published April 1  ·  All posts on Apr 1  ·  

We don’t want reactions. We don’t want first impressions. We don’t want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read it over. Read it twice, three times even. Ponder. Sleep on it. Take your time to gather and present your thoughts — just like the person who pitched the original idea took their time to gather and present theirs.

~ Jason Fried, from Don’t be a knee-jerk

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Sure, a little bit of snark. The point stands. It’s so easy to raise the first objection that comes to mind. (As if that hadn’t already been thought of.) What’s harder is to read, reflect, and then put in some actual effort to reply. This level of engagement certainly isn’t necessary in every interaction, but there are many interactions that would be vastly improved by it.

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Community canvas →

Published March 25, 2025  ·  All posts on Mar 25  ·  

We have spent the last 15 years building and participating in communities and found tremendous joy in them. Based on our own experience and with the generous help of leading community builders, we have developed a framework that helps build stronger communities and make our society a bit more connected: the Community Canvas.

~ from Community Canvas

There was a time when I said “I am a community builder.” I am currently the steward of the Podcaster Community—because the people there and podcasting itself are near and dear to me. But, I’m no longer interested in communities generally. I no longer go around seeing everything as a nail that should be fixed with the community hammer. That said, I wish I had seen that work above, about 20 years ago.

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Inclination matters →

Published March 6, 2025  ·  All posts on Mar 6  ·  ,

Postrel’s argument about dynamism, evolutionary processes, and dispersed knowledge has direct relevance to technological change. She suggests that technological progress, much like biological evolution, is unpredictable and emerges through decentralized innovation rather than central planning, mirroring Hayek’s insight that no single entity can have enough knowledge to foresee or control all the variables involved in invention and innovation.

~ Lynne Kiesling, from Progress and Its Enemies

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For a long time—perhaps all of my life until just a few years ago—I would have said I was completely on team Continuous Forward Progress; I would have said that change is good simply because it implies forward progress. But now I’m really seeing the value of “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” In most situations, I’m now feeling that leaving something just as it is would be great. The article is making a point about people who are against change on principle (although I’d wager most such people haven’t thought of it as a principle) and that’s not me either. I’m perfectly fine with change. But this is nice too.

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Post-industrial →

Published January 29, 2025  ·  All posts on Jan 29  ·  

But what most energizes Walley is gathering stories that reveal the trauma left-behind industrial workers have suffered. She is also focused on how to prevent such devastating fallout, which can stoke the kind of social and political unrest that’s roiling the U.S. as mining and manufacturing jobs disappear. “This stuff is talked about through things like statistics. People don’t get a sense of what it actually felt like,” Walley says. “Conveying it through stories gives a whole different perspective.”

~ Elizabeth Svoboda, from Life and Death After the Steel Mills

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At one point, the area where I grew up was dominated by a steel mill. Then, slowly over time, it suddenly wasn’t.

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Social animal →

Published December 12, 2024  ·  All posts on Dec 12  ·  ,

It is all very well to insist that man is a “social animal”—the fact is obvious enough. But that is no justification for making him a mere cog in a totalitarian machine—or in a religious one either, for that matter. In actual fact, society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members. Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one’s own reality and of one’s ability to give himself to society—or to refuse that gift.

~ Thomas Merton

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tl;dr: It’s the lack of housing →

Published November 29, 2024  ·  All posts on Nov 29  ·  

So let’s go on a journey in which I will examine the validity of six common claims we hear about homelessness and the solution to our homelessness crisis: housing, housing, and more housing.

~ Noah Smith, from Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong

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“But wait,” I hear you protest, “it’s more nuanced than that!”

Yes, yes, okay, fine. Again, this time with more nuance:

It’s the lack of affordable housing.

And how might we solve that root cause?

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Until there’s nothing else →

Published November 24, 2024  ·  All posts on Nov 24  ·  

Jokes are fine. But not every reply chain or comment thread needs to become a place to try new bits for a never-to-be-performed standup routine.

~ Nick Heer, from Letting the Joke Overtake the Source Material

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Go read! Also, this reminds of another insight about sarcasm: You don’t say.

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Comforts →

Published August 4, 2024  ·  All posts on Aug 4  ·  , ,

Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.

~ Sebastian Junger

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Distraction →

Published July 19, 2024  ·  All posts on Jul 19  ·  , ,

The defenders of our freedom have failed to take into account our infinite appetite for distraction.

~ Aldous Huxley

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