In pandemic times, fears of waldenponding seem less applicable. It's not about building a new city or society, but a transient, protected retreat. (e.g. the Recurse Center). …It seems valuable to shield these sorts of endeavors from an environment that's increasingly hostile to knowledge work.
After each draft, I found myself asking "...why?," and I scratched them out and started over. but the truth is that that's not really what's occupying my mind these days…so, this month, as with every month, I'll give you what's actually on my mind. It's August now, and I have so few memories of doing anything this year. I've had a lot of group chats, FaceTime calls, phone calls, video calls, and even a few trips out of town, but those memories all feel translucent somehow, like I could put my hand right through them.
Writing these updates feels like trying to describe a state that's receding from me, like painting a sky full of stars that are already dead. The best online interactions I've had don't try to recreate the past, but start with the premise of disembodiment.
A pause...and then I saw him pop up on my screen, eyes warm and crinkling, smiling widely. “Ahhhhh, there you are!” he beamed, clearly thrilled to see me. It made me happy. He was right: it didn’t feel like a proper reunion until we saw each others' faces. My internet friendships look a lot like my IRL friendships, but they lack corporeality, are impossible for me to get my fingers around. When we hang out in person, our offline interactions look a lot like our online ones: talking, analyzing, processing, thinking out loud, asking questions, reflecting, words, words, words. Our brains are directly wired into one another. Our bodily expressions are confined to heart-eyes, wow, angery, cry, or whichever limited faces our messaging apps allow us to make. We blow blue bubbles at each other. We convey our emotions through slang and punctuation, express our love through memes. Robin talks about making a messaging app for his family, with a grand total of four users, and the joy of building things just for yourself, much like a home cook as opposed to a professional chef.
I don’t want to suggest that we should resist change entirely. I do think we can be thoughtful about the rate of change that we introduce. I also think it’s a choice, rather than an inevitability, to drop bombs that throw an entire ecosystem off-balance. I tend to interpret this dismissiveness as a way of saying, “We don’t want to become a ‘thing’ because ‘things’ are destroyable by outsiders.” Avoiding labels is a way of keeping hidden cities away from the colonizers, like a nomadic tribe on the move.
but they are different from social privacy. Social privacy is the expectation that we shouldn’t want to pry into each others’ lives. Defining social privacy in an online context is difficult because it’s not clear what our “public face” really is. Unlike our physical environment, our online world contains layers of our past, present, and future selves, all occupying the same timespace. We are all time travelers, navigating multiple realities at any given moment.
They’re there because they weirdly fell in love with what you’re doing, and they want to see you succeed. But we never stopped to think about whether we repeated these behaviors because they were actually good for creators, or because that’s just how Kickstarter did it. Creators sell intimacy to patrons. They sell “stuff” - perks - to customers.
Lately I’ve been feeling sort of exhausted by the familiar dance of idea propagation that manifests over coffees, dinners, Twitter, and parties in my corner of the world. A late friend and gifted programmer once told me his most creative days were spent working in a bookstore. The work wasn’t challenging, but it was meditative, and it gave him space to let his mind wander. Sometimes it feels like I can’t think in here, because people are constantly asking me to externalize my thoughts all the time. I’m not ready to externalize everything I think about. Sometimes it takes years for me to articulate what I’m trying to say. (It took me several months to figure out how to write this post, for example.) While I think my writing has gotten sharper over the years, I also can’t help but feel it’s gotten worse somehow: invoking the things I hear other people say, instead of the things I happened across in dreams, hazy days that slip away at the park, or reading some dumb fiction I found from a free box that I picked up on the side of the road. I’m not sure it’s that I want to disappear from the internet, but just to get some distance between me and the existential “publish or perish” treadmill of mining each others’ brains for pithy insights that fit into 280 characters. Mediocrity is about making an active choice to say “screw it, good enough”: the decision to keep moving forward instead of trying to get that last 10%. At first, I rationalized doing basic (and while I’m at it, degenerate) things as a form of active mental recovery. As one friend phrased it, it’s cross-training your brain to balance out the hypertrophy elsewhere. The irony has not been lost on me that I’ve written a blog post about thinking less.
That two experienced developers could hold such conflicting views on commit access belies a quiet but growing tension between past and present norms in open source. The salient issue for maintainers today is less about growing contributor numbers and more about navigating the flow of developers who are clamoring for their time. In a world where single maintainers like Dominic Tarr maintain hundreds of tiny modules, we need to reframe the question from “Why would he do that?” to “How do we design for trustless interactions?”
Viewed through this lens, Sponsors can be understood as a first, important stepping stone towards company sponsorships, which seem inevitable for GitHub given the presence of Organization accounts. Their eyes light up when they talk about specific developers. If I ask why, I tend to hear a few common responses: 1) they’re learning a specific skill, and watching that person is helpful, or 2) they’re experienced developers who just love being able to see how “the best” do it. it struck me the other day that open source is a sort of “high-latency streaming”. the relationship between a prominent GitHub developer and their audience, and a prominent Twitch streamer and their audience, is similar: they gain followers because people enjoy watching them do something in public. an additional set of motivations, which is, “I want to watch and learn from you”. A graphic artist or a blogger who’s funded on Patreon doesn’t quite have that same relationship to their audience. In those cases, I think their output – the artifacts they create – takes center stage. there are probably others who just love watching the person who makes it. With companies, open source developers are selling a product. With individuals, they’re selling themselves.
The idea that groundbreaking work is driven by individuals probably makes sense to a lot of people, yet in practice, there’s no readily available funding for individuals Sometimes, an individual just needs a check, and a vote of confidence from someone they respect, to keep going. I found that formalizing the program actually helped to decouple it from my identity. It’s either that, or just go off the radar entirely and fund opportunities privately. I hadn’t planned on giving these grants a name at all, but a friend suggested I should, because it would make it something that the recipients could be proud of and take ownership in. After seeing a few more grant cycles, I think he was right. I was surprised to learn how many applicants said that the validation mattered more than the money. If I can help validate someone’s idea, amplify their work, or connect them to others, that’s often more meaningful than capital. I think these are potentially good ideas. I think someone ought to pursue them. But when I consider what gives me energy, I realize I have no desire to scale anything up here. I like having enough skin in the game to help me think about interesting questions in philanthropy, but this isn’t my full-time focus. The process of making new ideas legible to others is emotionally taxing.
Everyone else had invested years into optimizing for the most legible version of the rules. They’d look silly if they were to admit she had found a better way of doing things. The shameless strategy feels counterintuitive, because our first instinct is to want to punish that sort of behavior. And historically, those sanctions have been effective. Punishing outlandish behavior is an important aspect of cooperative governance: it preserves social order by ensuring that we all play by the same rules. One explanation might be that it’s an expected effect of the blurring of social boundaries today. In the past, if the size of your community was finitely bounded (like a village, or an aristocratic social class), people didn’t enter or exit these communities as frequently. Under these conditions, sanctions are probably still effective. But the borders to online communities are much more fluid - perhaps even nonexistent. Under open borders, sanctions will backfire, because they just serve as a signaling boost for the transgressor, attracting outsiders who resonate with that person’s message. What’s meant to be punishment instead becomes a flare shot straight into the night sky.
We sleep, we watch Netflix, we smoke, we have sex, we laugh at cat memes and lie tangled in the sheets on a Saturday morning. On other days, we get out of bed, we comb our hair, we make witty comments in work meetings, we form mental models and test them out, we try to figure out what the world is all about, and - if we’re lucky - leave a legacy. This is what it means to be both animal and God: that particular human ability to hold both lowbrow and highbrow in a single state and, depending on the moment, dissemble and disavow knowledge of either one. Each person is part of the senseless miracle that put us not-animals-not-Gods into the universe.
