articles – 6work weeknotes

Do we have a civil duty to re-design social media platforms?

Posted on November 11, 2024 by graham

Do we have a civil duty to re-design social media platforms? Some open thoughts to start exploring the topic.

Or, to rephrase that: Is there a civil duty for civilians to design civility into our use of the social internet?

(Being deliberately aware of using the term "civil" extensively here – civility, civilian, civil as a whole. This is to draw attention to the overlap between the terms, and the ambiguity between them. Are civilians always civil? Are civilisations?)

Some fragments:

The accepted narrative is that social media profits from anger and hate, which is largely true, but risks ignoring the wider notion that we humans engage with all extremes of emotions. We remain drawn to content which inspires us, calms us, and makes us laugh as much as we are to what makes us angry. (Perhaps we just remember the negative stuff for longer.)
I started using Twitter in 2007 to keep in touch via SMS, before data was ubiquitous. A friend had moved to France, and it was genuinely exciting being able to text him for free (not 20p a message) by just using "DM" at the start of a text message.
Twitter grew rapidly from a network to an algorithm to a business, but at its heart was the idea of being able to post "interesting things", like spotting a monkey. Similarly, Flickr had its "Interestingness" algorithm which everyone in the photography scene was trying to decipher. It was clear that being connected was less important than being famous from this point. Being favourited was less important than being reposted.
This struggle to be interesting is still where we’re at now, it has become a way of life once we step into the public sphere. But we cannot separate out factually interesting from emotionally interesting content – facts confirm desires and passions are formed from observations. Second, we cannot separate out "good" interesting from "bad" interesting – for every anger-inducing content there is something funny, hopefully, shocking, cute. The dichotomy is not between good and bad, but been being entertained and bored.
So we remain stuck in this vicious loop of wanting to seek out the good stuff, but getting all the while annoyed by the bad stuff, but being unable to step away from any of it. In civil participation terms – a seemingly antiquated term? – this is akin to wandering around our local community and only engaging with the people shouting the loudest, or being the most egregious, the most unruly, the most effervescent. It is to ignore the quiet, the reliable and, very often, the people closest to us.
Local democracy in the UK (and possibly elsehere) is in a precarious place now, with local governance being hollowed out through the twin effects of austerity and the rise of alternative, privately-owned networks. It is much easier to partiicpate in global polls of no value than it is to engage with the complicated and charged landscape of local politics.
Does this represent a giving-up, then? Are we relieved that local decisions, despite not being what we would like, are actually taken out of our hands, for whatever reason?
Or is there an alternative to X as the "global town square"? Has there always been an alternative, just we never got round to giving it any attention? Is there an appetite for doing politics differently at this level – or is it too late? Are we happy with just shouting at each other from long distances.
Distance is a good way to think about it. Of the people that you know, in person, have met face-to-face, how many decisions are shared between you, that you jointly participate in? Can we map domains of influence to domains of contact in this way? Can we make democracy – co-deliberation, meaningful votes, sustainable feedback – something that we implement daily, not just take for granted?
In among all the clamour to make coutries "great" "again", we have lost what it means to be a citizen of that country. What do we expect of each other, of our representatives, of ourselves? And when people fail to meet those expectations, how can we capture that and turn it into something positive?
Instead of grunting and accepting the world as beyond help and beyond change.
How can we design our networks to give us back some faith in others?

Am I just rehashing arguments from 20 years ago? Have I missed anything? Where do we go from here? Drop me a line on Mastodon or Bluesky.

3 (years) is the Magic Number

Posted on June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 by graham

I can’t quite believe it’s been three full years since I jumped into a freelance career. Three years feels specifically like a turning point – like something is now established, rather than experimental. It’s still not a lot compared to many others, of course, but there’s definitely some significance. Three as a magic number.

Freelancing will be different for everybody, albeit with a lot of common overlap at the same time, I’ve learned. I’m ridiculously glad I joined up with The Skiff as place to work around other people: I don’t think I’d have survived this long without a small but valuable network of people treading the same road and being so happy to share.

When I took the crazy decision to make the jump, it was in an effort to take more "creative control" over the nature of my work. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure that meant, and while I’m not convinced I do now, I have realised that freelancing, for me, is about finding my place in the world. A modern world which has so much promise, but which also faces some extraordinary risks and challenges.

I’m beginning to more freely admit that I find those challenges overwhelming at times. I’ve got more concerned, not less, about the world my kids and their kids will find themselves in once my generation leaves. Solutions seem like a world away, and billionaires seem quite happy with literally starting new worlds instead of fixing the current one.

It’s hard to boil all that down into something to focus on daily, but I hugely appreciate the chance to work with organisations such as The Restart Project and Helpful Digital to support their efforts. I know Democracy, Ecology and Digital Technology don’t necessarily dovetail together. But that’s where I am, and I’ve no plans to step out of it yet.

I’m also likely to have some availability coming up over the next few months, and will be looking around to see who needs some help. If you’re after someone technical, but with a strong social drive and with an appreciation of what’s appropriate at business-level, then let’s chat.

I’m particularly interested in:

Taking on existing "brownfield" projects to get them into shape (code, but also documentation and process)
Holding projects to account for sustainability, performance, accessibility, etc.
Reviewing the environmental impact and carbon footprints of technology, and identifying improvement plans

Examples of recent work and interests include:

Overhauling a large WordPress-based product to allow much easier modification and flexibility
Website maintenance and migration to greener hosting
Lightweight carbon impact assessment for website visits
Assessment of a 7-year-old tech stack for security and other issues
Usability testing to redesign the flow of a mapping service

A lot of this stuff is hard, without easy answers. I guess that’s why I like it.

Anyway, to celebrate three years (as well as recently getting older AND moving house), I thought I’d treat myself to a new skateboard. I last bought one 20 years ago from Oddballs in Brighton. They’re still there, and purveyor of finest wheeled devices, so I couldn’t resist picking up this beauty.

Who knows where I’ll be in another three or 20 years, but at the end of the day, perhaps it’s all just about making sure we enjoy the ride.

The Use and Abuse of Job Titles

Posted on February 26, 2024 by graham

Every few months I go through some kind of seasonal cycle of trying to reinvent myself. From the outside, I’m fairly sure nothing much changes, but I think it’s good to avoid trapping your own identity inside too much routine, so I don’t feel like it’s wasted time. The modern world thrives on progress and change, and it can be a very useful exercise to regularly review our own understanding of it – and how we see our place and role within it, both globally and locally.

This is especially so now that I’m freelance. A friend pointed me at Amy Hupe’s talk on the meaning of work recently, where she looks at the finding one’s purpose, and the challenge of moving away from more formal workplace feedback structures – clear titles, role progression, annual reviews, and so on. Understanding myself might be very different to how clients, partners and others see me, but it’s also the core which drives the reason for doing anything. Values, beliefs, principles – reflecting is just a way to make some kind of sense about why we make any single decision about our own life.

Over on Mastodon, I half-joked about trying out a different job title each day, to see how each one felt. The first was "Software Engineer and Digital Existentialist", and I kind of like that, in a semi-pretentious way. I don’t know which half is more vague though, but I do know which one is more acceptable, professionally. Use familiar words, and people will be more accepting, and carry on talking about something else. Maybe that’s not a good thing in a world which needs fresh, unexpected skills though? Maybe the use of disruptive job titles is a way to promote different paradigms and approaches to work in others?

Coincidentally, Pilita Clark also posted an article in the FT (paywalled) on The menace of the overblown job title, looking briefly at how words such as "Lead", "Manager" and "Global" are proliferating in many sectors (often instead of greater role clarity, or remuneration). And perhaps herein lies the difference between titles we give ourselves versus titles others hand to us. Is all of this just signalling, and if so, how best to achieve cohesive signalling that speaks to both our own inner self, and to others?

I’ll be thinking more about this over the coming week, as people keep asking me what I "actually do". Honestly, right now – as with the last few years of freelancing, and the 20 years of work before that – I’m still figuring it out myself. I know "technology" is fascinating and something I enjoy doing, to the point where I could happily call it "techne" instead. I know "making things better" is also in the mix, especially for the generations which come after us. Those are fundamental and immovable.

Anyway, I’ll post properly soon, but if you do know what I do and need some help with old code, frustrating websites, techical debt, carbon footprints, or changing the world of the future, then do get in touch. I have some availability coming up from next month, and would love to chat.

Refreshing my personal manifesto

Posted on February 1, 2024 by graham

That’s January done with. So it was time to write a new manifesto for myself. It deals with capitalism, change, technology and fear. If it helps inspire others, that’s good too, but a manifesto should, I think, be a personal statement first. I’d rewrite a fresh one every week if I could – turning thoughts into words is an act of orientation.

Don’t know about you, but I always feel swept along by the crashing waves at the start of the year. All the pent-up turmoil of the general Advent season converts into some kind of post-event frenzy of revolutions and hope for the run up to summer.

I’m coming to the tail end of a few projects this month and am staring through the telescope to see what lies ahead. It’s been a while since I visited that space, so it feels like a good time to reassert my own assumptions. Why am I here? Is this what I want to be doing? Am I taking on undue risks? Re-centre. Re-ground. Re-focus.

January is busy. February is when the real reflection begins in earnest.

So a manifesto felt like a good place to start. Short, scattered thoughts distilled into a reference guide for the soul. Near automatic-writing about as close to the raw ideas as you can get, while still making some kind of sense.

Turns out I’m still thinking about "empty technology" alongside greentech. I find it hard to believe we’ll ever become a sustainable society if we’re only focusing on replacing the technology and the materials, without changing our mindset.

A long time ago, I wrote:

"Technelogos [sic] establishes technology as a tool to rebind and reconnect things above all else, in order to rediscover those connections more consciously."

I know this is still important, but the path can be hard sometimes. Or maybe I’m just looking too much.

The manifesto is here.

Unfeeling the net: Are killer apps killing me?

Posted on January 24, 2024 by graham

So yeah, I disappeared from blogging for a few months.

And, to be kind of honest, I’ve not been "feeling the net" as much since taking a break from it over Christmas time.

I mean, I’ve been here, lurking and present, chatting with a few people here and there and getting on with work. But let’s dig in a bit here – what I mean when I say "feeling the net" is about the engagement with the zeitgeist, the pervading culture around internet usage that everyone seems to undergo, from when they wake up to when they go to sleep. And possibly beyond that too.

I’ve recently been looking ahead a few months again, sussing out possible projects and future routes for the year. Some of that has meant treading back into some of the online/offline networks that I’ve mentally-muted for a while. And while I can see value in these networks (they wouldn’t exist if they didn’t provide social capital of course), I find I’m really … sensitive to the nature of these spaces. Not one particular space – more the overarching patterns of how these spaces operate. Busy, busy, busy. Hyperbusy.

It feels as if we’ve developed a certain social vocabulary around how we expect social media to work, in the same way that we have certain learned patterns for user interfaces, as well as offline behaviour. And it also feels like we – as a collective userbase – have largely sleptwalked into this new substrate of modern life, only noticeable once we take time out from it for a while.

As a userbase, our experience is formed around this need to connect to each other. But that central nugget is then shaped and guided by mass data observation, the need to extract profit from the network, a genuine desire to build communities from networks, and interfaces which are inherently fragmented.

(It’s complicated, of course. I could dig into any of those factors for at least a few pages, but that’s not something for now. This was meant to be a short post to clear the mind.)

Post. Read. Like. Share. Comment. Repeat. Effects on the individual. Effects on the collective. I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time, and keep coming back to it. It doesn’t sit well with me, even after 20+ years.

Because, in short, net culture is killing me a little. ("Killer app", haha.) It’s tiring to jump from one world-changing topic to another within the single flick of a scroll-wheel. It’s exhausting getting pinged by eight different threads inside a minute. It’s not good to be anxious about someone messaging you with a random personal fear at 11pm that they need you to sort out. (The last one hasn’t happened to me, but it’s certainly not an uncommon tale for people.)

It’s hard defending my own energy against all of that.

Right now, my core social tech is relatively basic (ie. without going super-niche). I have email, with some decent (and manual) filtering going on. I have Discord and Signal for a few close contacts, and for some good (read "still distracting, but inspiring") Community chatter. I have WhatsApp for a few local groups because that’s where they organise things (parents, sports club). I have Slack for clients. My RSS reader is currently broken, and needs fixing because I like feeds, but I’m not missing it as much as I thought I would.

OK, that seems like a lot already. But the key thing is they’re all there for a reason – and I know what the reason is. That feels like a world away from what I experience when I go out into places like LinkedIn, Twixxer, Mastodon, news sites, etc.

And secondly, the key difference is about how much I can curate my own experience, from the people involved, to the content itself, to the interface. Anything that decides what I should see and how I see it moves me away from that, distracts me from my own needs. Disempowers me. Divides me.

Anyway, that’s what I’m feeling today. I’m posting this on my blog, for my own brain. Not for the likes, not for the comments, not for boosting company shares. (Oh hey, "Share this" vs "Share value", lol.)

I’d like to form smaller networks around me; pop-up communities that only exist in real-time, tiny mailing lists that last a month, flash chats where everyone is silent, that kind of thing. I should get better at that. Watch this space? Or get in touch.

Featured image is some business cards I made by hand last week. In this age of AI-generated works, algorithmic content feeds and shoulders-upward communication, paper and pen seems like a rebellious act.

Personal Mini-Metrics: 1. An introduction

Posted on May 12, 2023 by graham

This post thinks through the idea of lightweight use of metrics for personal reflection and focus. It comes out of a week of daynotes – writing small notes each day – which was inspired in turn by Justin Pickard’s post on binnacles and ships’ logs as a form of taking progress, combined with my own background in data for policy making plus an interest in approaches such as OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, to provide some form of rallying post to bind together time and people. So I’m aware this is, in many ways, nothing new and there are certainly plenty of "habit tracker" apps out here which cover similar ground.

Thinking back, it also ties in with growing up around the practice of confession within a Catholic setting, and the ideas of "safe" personal reflection spaces and quantification of ritual (X Hail Mary’s, Y rosary beads, etc), merging with Michel Foucault’s discussion of honesty and parrhesia – the art and practice of an "authentic" or "bold" form of speech – in Fearless Speech, and from there directly (IMHO) to the modern day rituals of things like regular retrospectives in agile methodologies, and weeknoting. Bullet journalling fits in here too, and I especially like its explicit use of paper as a medium of record.

To tie it all together then, how do these rituals of reflection and spaces for honesty feed into a more personal, meaningful idea of almost hyperlocal metrics? That is, how can I talk about this idea with an air of universal practicalism, yet maintain the notion that the configuration and usage of personal data is entirely a subjective one? And – to offer something different to many other practices – is it possible to stop the data nerd in me thinking too much, and keep the process to something as minimalist as possible?

Perhaps the answer lies in metric theory as a guiding principle, but its application as an intentionally private endeavour, even if worked out in a more public setting such as an open blog. That is, we can learn from each other and from history about what generally works or doesn’t for data, but ultimate responsibility for entering into the practice, crafting something useful, actually reflecting, and "adjusting course" (or changing it significantly) comes down to our own self. We are the captain of our own ship, even if the ship has been built by others, nautical knowledge comes from thousands of years of exploration, and the winds are forever out of our control.

At its heart, a mini-metrics practice should be "lightweight" in the sense that it encourages regular reflection, to bind together our own self-narrative through time. That is, its main purpose is not to generate data or blogposts, but to reconnect our own imagination with our own memory, in a way that has been disrupted by the constant interruption of the attention economy.

Furthermore, the process should grow our own sense of self-awareness, in order to "merely" ascertain our own place in the world. While we should not set out to judge and criticize ourselves, there will be times when reflection may generate either a flash of realisation that ties back in with a sense of weakness and humility, and equally times when we will achieve a sense of pride. (Mental note: Perhaps either of these states of realisation should trigger a re-orientation, and a re-scoping of needs, goals and metrics?)

With that written down, I’ll come back to thoughts on running mini metrics another time, but suggestions and thoughts very welcome. I’m at scribe@mastodon.sdf.org.