It's my third week since leaving my corporate job, and my brain still has a lot of corporate clutter in my head to clear out. Thankfully, that clutter is being removed at a steady rate, day by day—and each week that goes by I can feel more space in my mind to put mental models and thoughts for pursuits much more fruitful than chasing hype in enterprise technology.
I wanted to get my blog online at the end of last week, but ended up frustrated with the way that Ghost has implemented some things. Software, in a way, is sort of like politics: we often rely on how other people have modeled the domain for which the software exists as a tool. Publishing tools like the one I'm using for this site are designed by humans who, hopefully, use the software as well as build it, that way they can empathize with the needs of users and maximize the software's utility.
The same goes for laws: we want politicians who understand people's day to day lives in order to support legislation that has a positive material effect on everyday people. When software and laws are written by people who set out to generate revenue (either for themselves or for their corporate donors) rather than solve a public problem, the ways in which their "solutions" provide utility for the majority of people leaves a lot to be desired.
Thursday I got my new template all cleaned up, in enough of a "this is ready for the world" state that I feel comfortable loading up my essays that I wanted to have ready for my soft launch and finally—finally!—get this blog online. I've accepted that this blog will just grow and evolve over time, and that it's okay to get it out in the shape it's in right now and let it become what it will become.
Embracing the structure of a self-defined schedule, and the chaos of prioritizing the moments rather than the motion; focus on my reading and writing and talking, rather than worrying about where I'll be in three or six or mine months.
There's some hesitation with launching something like this, but I'm old enough to know now that the hesitation is a self-inflicted illusion, a byproduct of too many years of pushing metaphorical boulders up the Mountain of Commoditized Creativity. In Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future (1985), the main character goes back in time and discovers, among other things, that his dad used to write science fiction.
His dad's response to him wanting to read his stories—tucked into the beginning of this scene—surely resonates with anyone who creates things for a living.
With age comes experience, of course, even if that experience is nothing more complicated that Just Get Your Stuff Out There And Keep Going. No longer being employed and only working for myself means that I'm not just turning to a new chapter in life, I'm switching reading spots and material entirely.
Thoughts from this week
- I'm 99% convinced that any news article talking about how undecided voters might decide to vote is just a cheap way to sell ad revenue; undecided is synonymous with civically disengaged—and a civically disengaged electorate is how electorally engaged radical groups gain power.
- The TikTok political content creator spectrum will always suffer from the Problem of Popular Platform Political Distribution: if you're anywhere on the left of the political axis, your audience will always be mostly comprised of people to your political right. This is especially true in an age where misinformation and disinformation are virtually synonymous with typical social media content.
- Creator call-out culture leads many people to election season infighting. There's a time and place to call people out—and there's a time and place to focus on the bigger picture. Right now, we need to focus on keeping the car on the road. Once we're safe from veering off the cliff, we can start debating about directions and stops along the way.
- Don't get too hung up on election polls. No pollster wants to make a bad call because it's professionally embarrassing to make mistakes in our society (which is a whole other rabbit hole to go down in a future essay), and the safest path for anyone who is too afraid to be wrong in public is to make the race extremely close. I'm working on an essay about the polls for next week that will include an interactive poll simulator that helps explain why it's pointless to watch the polls right now. Our energies would be more well utilized if we instead just disconnected for a couple minutes—read a physical book, write with a pen—and remember that it's impossible to account for the variability of human behavior given the context of what's at stake in 2024.
Around the net
- Thomas Frank compares the Occupy Wall Street movement to the Tea Party movement:
Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupy’s evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate.
- Gabriel Debenedetti's interview with political strategist David Plouffe, who was wrong about calling the 2016 election a sure-win for Clinton, exposes a stark difference in how Democrats are viewing this upcoming election in comparison—while sharing what a lot of people are seeing from the Republican presidential candidate:
At the end of the day, he’s not a great asset at the close of the campaign, because he’s unhinged, he’s increasingly unstable, he’s giving Soviet-style multi-hour speeches that make little sense. And so I think his campaign doesn’t want him anywhere near a debate stage; they may not even want him on things like the CNN or Univision town halls. We’ll see. I think he’s going to be pretty constrained here in the end, basically speaking to the converted.
Gabriel Debenedetti
Plouffe brings up a lot of polling and talks about how tight the race is being a function of the electorate we have. Polling only shows a small window into the electorate; a relative handful of "likely voters" is sampled from the entire population and we are to infer that changes in polling represent changes in likely election outcomes. This is not the case—and I've got an essay in the works to help explain this.
- Josh Marshall inquires why Elon Musk would be funding surgically-targeted disinformation about the Democratic presidential candidate:
If these said “paid for by Harris for President” you’d have a straight up campaign finance violation. But that’s not what they’re doing. So I don’t think the Musk group is doing anything illegal here.
The one part of this I’m not sure about, however, is the texts. Texts, like the US mail and phone calls, come under specific regulatory and even legal frameworks. In some cases, it’s not enough to be technically accurate in the way I’m describing above. If you’re trying to impersonate someone that can be enough to get you in trouble. That’s very different from a website in which you can say basically anything.
This issue of Weekender, along with everything else I've worked on this week, would not be possible without you. I left my corporate job at the beginning of October 2024 to focus on my work—video essays on TikTok, written essays here on my blog, and open-source development of social technologies. Thanks to your generous support, I'm able to do this full-time. I am and will always be grateful for you and the opportunities your support has empowered me to explore.
—Jesse