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A couple of housekeeping things: I’ve been pretty busy lately! 

1. I gave a keynote at RStudio’s 2021 Conference. You can find all the slides here and it’ll be up on RStudio shortly! https://twitter.com/vboykis/status/1352630279387676673
2. I gave an interview for Coralie’s Parenting in Tech project project https://twitter.com/cco_app/status/1352184845104009217

On to the newsletter!

Portrait of a Young Man, Antonello da Messina, 1478

It’s a cloudy winter day, and you’re looking out from your loft in TriBeCa, finger languidly hovering over the “ORDER” button on Postmates. You’re between two Zoom calls, one that’s the final work call for the day, and one that’s a birthday party for your aunt in Westchester. You are tired to death of Zoom calls and of 2020, but you’re even more tired of the grind. 

You wish you’d taken the ride on the options train at that startup you worked at just out of college, back in the day. You’d be a millionaire by now. You could buy that house up in Saugerties, fix it up. You could have a vegetable garden. You wouldn’t need to do Postmates every day, and you damn sure wouldn’t need to write code. Maybe you’d take up woodworking. 

You idly google your ex-co-founders. What are they up to now? Looks like one had to testify in front of Congress for mishandling customer data in that data breach last year. One got in hot water last week because he suggested on a supposedly off-the-record Clubhouse chat that he doesn’t care about ethics in AI. The other one doesn’t leave much of a trace online (he was your ops guy), but from what you do see, it looks like he’s been caught up in some Eastern European anonymous user content farm manipulation. 

Is it even worth it? Not for less than $50 mil all on the table, you decide. If you could go back in time, now, knowing what you know, what would you do? 

All of a sudden, the Zoom conference call’s sound warps around you, the room spins, and you’re travelling through a time wormhole. You come out of the wormhole, your head spinning. The odors of the worn-down ranch-style house in Palo Alto assault you. You are, somehow, back in 2011. You walk, incredulous, through the house, the same three bedrooms, gruesomely partitioned into halves with makeshift mattresses on the floor. The same Matrix posters, the same soft California evening light reflecting off the neglected pool in the back yard. 

You walk into the kitchen, which was also the conference room, and find yourself sitting down to the same MDF Ikea table, littered with half-full sodas and Hot Pocket wrappers. Awolnation blasts from an unseen speaker on an unseen laptop you are sure is open to the Rails codebase.  The three boys at the table look up at you. 

“It’s time to build,” says Chad, taking a bite of the pizza stuck to the side of the table. 

You orient yourself, trying to remember.   “What are we building,” you ask. 

They all look at you like you have two heads. “Bassbook,” Paul says. “We’re going to build a social network that connects people based on the music they listen to. You know, the thing we’ve been building for the past five months.”

You remember this. This was all you lived and breathed for a year. Bassbook. Free music. Free knowledge. And maybe, hookups. At least, that was all the dream. 

But now, you have actually travelled back in time from 2021 and, from your vantage point, a social network looks like a Bad Idea. You are armed with the gift of Knowledge. You know about Cambridge Analytica, about the Pinterest lawsuit, about Project Dragonfly, about Google and the Nothing, the $1 billion Rubik’s Cube, the Experian Data Breach, the Google AI controversy, the Whatsapp thing, the other Whatsapp thing, It’s Time to Build, and the 10k people in San Francisco. 

You know where social media will lead, and you know about the dangers of storing user data and manipulating user data. You know about the controversies, the fines, and, now, the looming government regulatory oversight programs. 

You don’t want any of that smoke whatsoever. 

“It’s gonna be off the hook. We just spin up this Rails app and watch the users come in,” says Paul. 

“You see the numbers Facebook is doing? We can do better,” says Preston, hyping him up. 

Uneasily, you tug on your Vans cap. “I don’t think that’s such a great idea.”

Chad, Paul, and Preston turn to look at you, really seeing you for the first time.  “What’s wrong, bro?”  Paul reaches under the table for a stale, open can of Red Bull and mixes it with his Gatorade, taking a minute to sniff it the way a sommelier might before gulping it down. 

“I just don’t think it’s going to go to a good place,” you say hesitantly, not sure where even to begin.  Should you tell them about humans being Web Scale? 

“Are you afraid of taking money,” Preston says. “Because my dad can easily float us $50 grand as a starting point.” He picks a stale Dorito off the table and throws it in his mouth. “I also know a great lawyer.

“No,” you say, taking a swig of the Red Bull that Paul passes you. It tastes like death. “It’s not about the money. I just don’t know about the societal impact of all this stuff.”

They look at you like you’ve now grown a third head. “Societal impact? What the hell are you on?”

“I mean, we should probably think about some of this stuff before we get going. How are we going to track the data? What are some of the moderation guidelines you put in place? How about the ethics of all of it? 

Chad, Paul, and Preston give each other a glance that you can’t read. The moment turns into a lifetime. Chad turns to you. “If you want out, just say so. We’re on a rocket ship. We don’t have time for this.” This meaning you. 

They frog march you out of the kitchen, out past the TV forever looping Breaking Bad reruns,  and then, suddenly, open the screen door and throw you, clothes on, into the pool. They go back to the whiteboard laughing. “Let us know when you’re ready to commit, bro,” they say, shutting the sliding door against the late-night insects. 

As soon as you hit the water, you’re jerked forward through a tunnel, back to the present day, and you’re back in front of your Zoom meeting once again. Everyone is silent, watching you in the tiny hell squares. “Sorry,” you murmur. “I was on mute. Where were we?”

I was so stupid, you think. I could have phrased it differently, I could have stopped them. If I get a chance to next time, I’ll go back and stop the creation of WhatsBook. 

As you’re thinking about this, your phone rings, bringing you back to the present. 

“Hey man, is it you?” It’s Preston. He’s a millionaire from WhatsBook.  “I’m starting this new thing. I thought you might be interested.”

“What is it,” you say warily.

“It’s totally above board. It’s this AI thing. Only not like that,” he says, immediately hearing the hesitation on your side of the line. “There’s no facial recognition or anything. This is all above board.”

“No more music,” you laugh.

“Nah man, too much studio red tape. This is much easier. What we’re doing is creating a totally new holistic online experience. Everyone and everything is strictly online now. So we have a club that we’re running on Zoom. It’s very exclusive, and you can only get in if you pay. You pay for everything in the club with Bitcoin, like you can pay to listen to music on Spotify, and if you pay more than anyone else, your song plays. You can pay for private rooms, for drinks to be delivered to your apartment in real life, for everything. And everything is anonymous. That’s the crazy part about it. You could be partying with millionaires. We call it Studio 256.”

You don’t know much about Bitcoin, but you probably know enough. “This sounds like fraud,” you say,  hesitantly.

“No way. It’s just a way for people to meet each other during the pandemic. And it’s a cool way for society to level people since you usually only interact with those in different social classes than you. Here, if you earn enough Bitcoin, you can participate. And you can earn Bitcoin the club, too, by playing popular songs, or by dancing, or by doing stuff that other people give you Bitcoin for. It’s all totally fun, all totally above board.”

He says above board too many times for your liking. 

“And the data?”

“We don’t keep it ourselves. We have no idea who you are. That’s the beauty of it, man! No need to deal with user data!”

“I’m in, 100”  you say, the relief palatable in your voice. You finally get the chance to contribute to something of value, something good, something pure. Just helping people to pass the pandemic. 

Thirteen months later, you and Preston are on the front page of Hacker News for Studio 256 housing an alleged harasser who won’t stop playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” in the club at an obnoxiously high volume, over and over again, creating a hostile environment, someone who you can never get off the platform since all the users are anonymous.

Studio 256 immediately empties and you are left $100k short. 

You sigh and start practicing your LeetCode so you can get back to the safety of corporate Zooms and zero liability. 

****

What would you do if you had a second chance to recreate the internet? That’s the question I find myself asking all the time. Let’s say I had a ground floor shot at being at Facebook. What would I have done differently? It’s obvious that I wouldn’t make it about advertising.

But if there was no advertising, there would be no money for Facebook, which means it would never survive as a company.  Which means all the good it’s done like connect people with rare diseases to share information, form parenting support groups,  and connect small businesses with the community would be gone, too. It wouldn’t have connected me with some of my best friends, or allowed me to find after-school events for my daughter. (Back in the days when there were events.) Facebook is more than a misinformation machine, it’s also a marketplace, a place to share pictures. I can tell how vaccination is going in my area by checking Facebook. 

We live, as always, in the age of the great cross-hatch. Social networks are largely this big, horrible thing, but they also have very real positives. 

How can you tell, when you’re starting a company, which of these things the company will be? Will your notetaking company, Evernote, be a place to store all of humanity’s knowledge, or will it be awful arbiter of secrets great and small in case it accidentally opens everyone’s notes. Will your work communication platform, Slack, be a positive boost of productivity, allowing people to work remotely, or will it be this huge octopus, tentacles reaching through all your devices to make you work off the clock? Will 

We don’t know until we file the articles of incorporation and set forth. 

Sure, we can guess. We can set up guardrails. That doesn’t at all excuse thinking these things through as we work. “It’s hopeless, so we shouldn’t even try.”  But, there is a compound tragedy in this wonderful, terrible last fifteen years in technology. The tragedy is this: we humans are terrible at predicting things. (Don’t tell the data scientists.) 

We can asymptotically approach reality, to an extent. But,  all models are terrible, George Box said. We don’t even fully understand numbers. And we for sure we don’t know for sure what the future will hold. And, what’s worse we are terrible at understanding how systems will interact. If we decide to track users, what will happen and what won’t? If we decide to track some users? We are, in a way, always trying to understand the beginning and end of this meme: 

How do you get from Zuck trying to start a social network to pick up co-eds to the fall of democracy? And what happens five years from now? We don’t have big enough of a neural net to model the predicted possibilities. 

And the second tragedy is that all companies must fight the market to survive. Companies start as babies, when the odds are entirely stacked against them, and, at the beginning, they don’t have the luxury of making decisions based on ethics or guidelines or frameworks. They are hungry and blind, and they must go after the money. 

If you don’t believe me, read Shoe Dog or The Making of Prince of Persia or The Great Beanie Baby Bubble or Skunkworks or Super Pumped or any one of the foundational books about how companies grow and thrive. There are some that take the very hard path of pursuing ethics first, but at the cost of growth later. Almost no one, especially anyone working on money borrowed against them, can afford to do this. 

This is not an excuse for big companies acting like marauders. But it’s just an observation that most companies don’t start this way that we want them to, with a balanced deliberation.  They start in a desperate panic to survive, with a bunch of compromises that they forget, with unarchetected data, with “we’ll fix this later.” because if they laid this out at the beginning, they’d never get off the ground. 

What do we do about this, these two fundamental laws of physics and capital? Knowing what we know now, how can we fix the internet going forward? 

I’m not a prophet, just a rando with a newsletter. 

But it’s 2021, you’re sitting at your desk, Preston is on the other end of the line. “It’s time to build,” he says again. 

What will we say?

What I’m reading lately: 

1. No meetings. This is very similar to how Automattic works. 
2. Interview with Max Levchin. (Previously in Normcore on him) 
3. From Russia with free Shipping 
4. Artificial intelligence is a house divided (AI previously in Normcore)
5. The high price of mistrust
6. All about Wattpad
7. Ghost knowledge
8. Congress basically says YouTube needs to shut down its recsys (YouTube recsys previously in Normcore)
9. ML tools 2021
10. Michael Scott
11. The Overstory (it’s good! There are trees!)