BlogmyQuery – BMQ

I know of a man who owns land in Montana. His dream is to prove a theory about design. For a small sum of money, you can lease some of this land — about a week’s worth of San Francisco rent will get you an acre for a year. Build a house. Plant a garden. Raise some pigs. And you can use his tractors, too.

But you can only do these things under his rules. His rules are somewhat strange to most people. You cannot use paint. You must listen to 200+ rambling podcasts. You cannot import compost from outside the property. You cannot use plywood. You can’t smoke pot. His dream, his rules. It has been slow recruiting people to join his effort. But that’s okay. It’s his rules, and he wants a community after his own design. He has chosen exactly what he wants his community to look like: people like him.

Can you imagine having an acre of land for cheaper than a week’s rent in San Francisco?

There has been much hand-wringing in the software community as of late as to what role product companies have in shaping their communities. Reddit struggled with hate groups organizing themselves in their forums. Because if we kick one group out, where does it end? Facebook has become the place that foreign powers manipulate US elections through advertising. Because what is the difference between opinion and facts, anyway? And Twitter, of course, has become a favorite home of white supremacists and nazis. Because you’ve got to be objective. In each of these cases, the companies have vehemently defended the rights of these obviously-bad people to use their service, while the vast majority of their users tell them to kick these obviously-bad people out. “It’s complicated,” they claim. A silly excuse for a company with thousands of highly creative intelligent people.

Despite what the executives of these companies may say, this shit is not complicated. Your community is what you make it. If you choose to make no rules, you have still made a rule. If you choose to give nazis a voice, you have chosen to make your community nazi-friendly. Rebranding that decision under the guise of free speech or objectivity makes no sense. When you make an environment friendly for nazis, it is a nazi-friendly environment regardless of the reasons it happens to be friendly for them.

There is this dream often used as justification. A digital platform that connects all with absolute freedom of speech. A modern day utopia of radical ideas being exchanged in a completely free environment. Executives say they have a moral responsibility to make this idealistic dream a reality. It’s a very Ayn Rand idea. It is important to remember that Ayn Rand wrote fiction.

In the real world, we often sacrifice our ideals because of the messy nature of reality. Capitalism… except for those subsidies. Freedom of religion… except no suicide cults. Second amendment rights… except no automatic weapons. For every ideal, there is always a reality. A reality where you have to draw the line — a subjective line — in order to preserve our morality, integrity, and way of life.

Your community is exactly what you make it. The man in Montana has lost members of his community because of his rules. Twitter has lost members of its community because of their rules, too. In fact it’s much worse — good natured people aren’t so much leaving as they’re getting poisoned and becoming toxic. The only thing worse than losing a user is turning them into a toxic user.

Twitter believes that somehow allowing everything means they’ve created an environment that’s friendly for everyone. But often times it’s important for a community not to have a person in it. Imagine a party with ten of your best friends. Now imagine a party with ten of your best friends and one nazi.

That is the really important thing about communities: they are made both of what you include and what you exclude, and each of those have equal weight. Not having a particular person is just as meaningful as having a particular person. It is the same with music: without rests, music is just noise.

I’ve long thought that product designers make their jobs seem far more complicated than they really are. Industry leaders act as if every decision is irreversible and of ultimate importance. But it’s not that complicated. It’s not some kind of tenth dimensional ethical chess, it’s just a lot of messy work that requires constant recalibration. You can have an open community and still kick out nazis. You just kick out the nazis. How can you call it an open community if you don’t allow nazis? Because you don’t want fucking nazis in your house. That’s it.

And maybe that decision will come back to bite them. But for science’s sake — can that potential consequence really be worse than having nazis in your house?

I know of a man who owns land in Montana. His dream is to prove a theory about design. For a small sum of money, you can lease some of this land — about a week’s worth of San Francisco rent will get you an acre for a year. Build a house. Plant a garden. Raise some pigs. And you can use his tractors, too.

But you can only do these things under his rules. His rules are somewhat strange to most people. You cannot use paint. You must listen to 200+ rambling podcasts. You cannot import compost from outside the property. You cannot use plywood. You can’t smoke pot. His dream, his rules. It has been slow recruiting people to join his effort. But that’s okay. It’s his rules, and he wants a community after his own design. He has chosen exactly what he wants his community to look like: people like him.

Can you imagine having an acre of land for cheaper than a week’s rent in San Francisco?

There has been much hand-wringing in the software community as of late as to what role product companies have in shaping their communities. Reddit struggled with hate groups organizing themselves in their forums. Because if we kick one group out, where does it end? Facebook has become the place that foreign powers manipulate US elections through advertising. Because what is the difference between opinion and facts, anyway? And Twitter, of course, has become a favorite home of white supremacists and nazis. Because you’ve got to be objective. In each of these cases, the companies have vehemently defended the rights of these obviously-bad people to use their service, while the vast majority of their users tell them to kick these obviously-bad people out. “It’s complicated,” they claim. A silly excuse for a company with thousands of highly creative intelligent people.

Despite what the executives of these companies may say, this shit is not complicated. Your community is what you make it. If you choose to make no rules, you have still made a rule. If you choose to give nazis a voice, you have chosen to make your community nazi-friendly. Rebranding that decision under the guise of free speech or objectivity makes no sense. When you make an environment friendly for nazis, it is a nazi-friendly environment regardless of the reasons it happens to be friendly for them.

There is this dream often used as justification. A digital platform that connects all with absolute freedom of speech. A modern day utopia of radical ideas being exchanged in a completely free environment. Executives say they have a moral responsibility to make this idealistic dream a reality. It’s a very Ayn Rand idea. It is important to remember that Ayn Rand wrote fiction.

In the real world, we often sacrifice our ideals because of the messy nature of reality. Capitalism… except for those subsidies. Freedom of religion… except no suicide cults. Second amendment rights… except no automatic weapons. For every ideal, there is always a reality. A reality where you have to draw the line — a subjective line — in order to preserve our morality, integrity, and way of life.

Your community is exactly what you make it. The man in Montana has lost members of his community because of his rules. Twitter has lost members of its community because of their rules, too. In fact it’s much worse — good natured people aren’t so much leaving as they’re getting poisoned and becoming toxic. The only thing worse than losing a user is turning them into a toxic user.

Twitter believes that somehow allowing everything means they’ve created an environment that’s friendly for everyone. But often times it’s important for a community not to have a person in it. Imagine a party with ten of your best friends. Now imagine a party with ten of your best friends and one nazi.

That is the really important thing about communities: they are made both of what you include and what you exclude, and each of those have equal weight. Not having a particular person is just as meaningful as having a particular person. It is the same with music: without rests, music is just noise.

I’ve long thought that product designers make their jobs seem far more complicated than they really are. Industry leaders act as if every decision is irreversible and of ultimate importance. But it’s not that complicated. It’s not some kind of tenth dimensional ethical chess, it’s just a lot of messy work that requires constant recalibration. You can have an open community and still kick out nazis. You just kick out the nazis. How can you call it an open community if you don’t allow nazis? Because you don’t want fucking nazis in your house. That’s it.

And maybe that decision will come back to bite them. But for science’s sake — can that potential consequence really be worse than having nazis in your house?

So, what is it you do all day?

I sort of disappeared a few years ago. I had a simple but difficult decision: stay and help GitHub to help grow the company or leave and help my family when they needed help most. In the space of a couple of weeks I quit my job, packed up my belongings, and moved out of San Francisco.

Ever since then, I’ve struggled to describe how it is I spend my time to my peers. Discussing the practicalities of caring for someone with a neurological disorder is not exactly small-talk worthy, nor is it something I particularly want to discuss with strangers. There’s also the unfortunate culture in technology that devalues everything unrelated to militant capitalism. If you’re not trying to make money, what are you even doing? Now add on to that the few that saw my vulnerability as an opportunity for leverage — and indeed — leveraged the fuck out of me. It’s all added up to be an interesting couple of years.

So when people ask what it is I’m doing, I’ve mostly kept it light. I tell people I’m semi-retired. It’s not entirely untruthful — I’ve spent a lot more time outside and doing fun things — but it’s a lot less than the whole.

That being said, I’ve been working hard for the past few months to find more space for me again. Which also means I’ve been thinking more about what’s next.

A lot of people talk about passion with regards to work — that feeling of endless energy one feels when their inner desires meet application. Work no longer feels like work, and all questions of is this worth it? and am I doing the right thing? feel silly and irrelevant. I used to have a lot of passion for software. Whatever I have now is different.

I feel torn between the endless opportunities I see in software and the disgust for what our industry has become. The rational part of my brain tells me you don’t have to be like those terrible people to work in software, but the emotional side of me sees what our industry is doing in practice and doesn’t want to be associated with it at all. You can still do good work and be employed by Exxon, but at the end of the day you’re still working for the oil industry. Is that who I want to be?

I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself why I am so frustrated with our industry, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to two common themes:

• The routine manipulation of employees, gig or otherwise, through complicated legal structures (1099’d full-time employees, stock option agreements, expensive lawyers, employment/termination agreements, etc).

• The routine manipulation of customers through complicated technical structures (selling data without permission, outright spying, bricking expensive hardware to avoid liability, etc).

To work or participate in the technology industry is an exercise in minimizing manipulation (or, if you’d like to be rich, maximizing it). This feels shitty in a tremendously heavy way.

What happened to the idea of building great stuff that people are happy to pay for? What happened to the idea of treating employees as people and not legal entities to extort? Were these fantasies of a naive 20-something Kyle, or a reasonable idea of how our industry should act? Why do the needs of the corporation always seem to outweigh the needs of people? Honestly, it’s all driven me a bit crazy. But more relevant to this essay: this shitty-ness has eroded my enthusiasm for building software.

That’s a bummer.

Something I have been very enthused about as of late is permaculture, or at least many of the ideas that circle around that particular label.

What I love most about permaculture is that it transforms the laborious step-by-step annual process of contemporary gardening into systems design. Instead of remembering to water each of your plants every day, you set up systems to capture water so you don’t have to irrigate. Instead of measuring out fertilization schedules, you design plant systems that provide the nutrients each of them needs. The end result is that it makes gardening a lot more like programming. It takes more effort up front but the result is a self-sustaining system rather than one that requires re-building each year. That means this year’s effort adds onto last year’s — constant effort results in ever-increasing production. Permaculture takes this idea and applies it to all of the ways we live. How can we apply systems design and the forces of nature to design a more self-sustaining house? How can we use these principles to design our neighborhoods?

The shape of America we know today — endless rows of almond trees and corn, factory farms, tract houses, and suburbs — has always felt a bit off. We face incredible challenges in the years ahead, and these existing structures are not serving us well. Our cities are not designed for people, our homes not designed for their climate, and our farms not designed for farmers. Like a hammer who wants everything to be a nail, we are a barrel of oil designing the world with petroleum-tinted glasses. And what happens when we expand to planets that doesn’t have such abundant petroleum? Wouldn’t it be productive to practice harnessing the implicit energies of a planet?

The engineer in me can’t stop thinking there’s got to be a better way.

Many environmentalists believe the answer lies in conservation and consumer choices — reduced energy use, less intensive farming, and voting with your dollar — but I’ve never believed those strategies to be sane. You cannot deny the third world and the poor the modern conveniences the rest of us have. We achieved those conveniences with petroleum, but that’s no longer a sane path. We must find a new method for the rest of us. I also believe that a world with abundant (and excess) energy is a world in which humankind thrives and advances. To practice energy conservation on a civilization-scale is to stick our heads in the sand and refuse to grow.

I believe we can live in comfort and abundance while also living in greater harmony with nature (aka not fucking up the planet for our children). This isn’t blind environmentalist ideals — it’s working in a way that leverages nature’s built-in energies instead of fighting against them. Fresh water is scarce, yet we fill our toilets with fresh water just to defecate into it. Homeless starve on the streets, yet we plant non-bearing fruit trees along our city streets. Our homes require constant air conditioning, yet we bulldoze the trees on the southern side of our homes. All in all we’re just making a lot of bad decisions right now. I see permaculture as a framework to make better decisions through design, but for the environment.

This is a big part of what’s next for me. Last year, I became part-owner in an old high-country cattle camp / working forest near Tahoe. This is where I want to explore more of these ideas and share them with others. We’re building a place to get away from the craziness of the modern world and explore examples of living in comfort & abundance in harmony with nature. Call it part working forest (growing trees for profit), part getaway, and part laboratory.

David and Alia enjoying springtime in Leaping Daisy's meadow.

It’s called Leaping Daisy. It’ll be a while.

Despite the first half of this essay, I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t still interested in software. I’d like to think I’m just going through a rough patch in our relationship right now. Plus, Leaping Daisy sits under about seven feet of snow as we speak, so the winter leaves me with a lot of time alone with my thoughts.

For a long time, I was mostly interested in software that made money. Finding the sweet spot between customers, willingness to pay, and profitability is fun. But Venture Capital and their fleet of lawyers have become experts at warping and extorting these kinds of products. They’ve taken the fun out of making money. As such, lately my interests have been more ideological than profitable.

I’ve started and abandoned dozens of projects over the past couple of years — some silly, some ambitious, and some just plain dumb. So I’ll be honest: I’m not really sure what’s next here. I’ll say there are a few areas of interest that seem to keep popping up in my head:

• Data Ownership, Privacy, and Cloud-less Software
  It feels as though we’ve embraced the cloud a little too much the past decade or so. While there’s tremendous benefits to centralized online services, there are also a great deal of downsides. Customers rarely own their data, companies routinely cooperate with state-run surveillance programs, and privacy & security continues to be a nightmare.

  There’s a lot of room to explore software that doesn’t take these tradeoffs as laws of nature, but rather design considerations as they should be. I don’t think it’s time to abandon the cloud, but I do think it’s time to explore ways we can engineer around its weaknesses.

• Civic Engagement
  Thus far, most of the technological effort applied toward civic engagement has been centered around transparency, data, visualization, and hack-day type projects (unsupported software). While it would be reckless for me to say these types of efforts are a waste of time, they do not conform to my view of how government works in action. Psychology, emotion, and interpersonal relationships play a far greater role in shaping policy than any objective fact. Unlike many, I don’t see this as a problem or a bug. It’s just how large groups of people make decisions. We are not robots. We’re leaky bags of meat that have no inclination toward rationality.

  I want to know what happens when we take this view of humanity, leverage our skills in the soft sciences, and apply it toward civic engagement through technology. How do we take the lessons we’ve learned from social networking’s success to strengthen community bonds? How do we build better relationships between representatives and their constituents? Doesn’t it feel a little silly that we still have to call our representative (and talk to an intern) to voice our opinions? As it stands now, Facebook knows more about a district’s opinions and beliefs than its congressional representative does.

• Tools for People
  More than ever, it feels as if the term “software” is an extremely poor description of the field as it exists in the real world. It seems more and more that we have three separate industries: tools for developers, tools for large corporations, and junk food for everyone else. Tools for developers are pretty good and steadily improving. Tools for corporations (think inventory software, check-in systems, etc) are made of anger and frustration. And then there’s the FarmVilles, Facebooks, Snapchats, and Snapchat Clones that dominate person-hours spent using software. I still find that most non-developers just use Excel (Google Spreadsheets) or exist in a constant state of frustration with their software tools.

  We’ve been very successful creating junk food for normal people, but we haven’t been very successful in creating software that helps normal people get stuff done. Software-as-a-tool has always been the way I envision software working best. Not software that maximizes use, but software that maximizes utility.

If you’ve got some interesting projects you think I should check out, let me know (kyle@warpspire.com is probably best). Note: if you’re funded for purposes other than defrauding VC firms, think phone calls are fantastic, or think that the words stock or options are enticing, I am probably not your target audience right now.

Oh, and hi everyone! It’s been a while. I’ve missed publishing, and I hope I can find time for more of it again.

So, what is it you do all day?

I sort of disappeared a few years ago. I had a simple but difficult decision: stay and help GitHub to help grow the company or leave and help my family when they needed help most. In the space of a couple of weeks I quit my job, packed up my belongings, and moved out of San Francisco.

Ever since then, I’ve struggled to describe how it is I spend my time to my peers. Discussing the practicalities of caring for someone with a neurological disorder is not exactly small-talk worthy, nor is it something I particularly want to discuss with strangers. There’s also the unfortunate culture in technology that devalues everything unrelated to militant capitalism. If you’re not trying to make money, what are you even doing? Now add on to that the few that saw my vulnerability as an opportunity for leverage — and indeed — leveraged the fuck out of me. It’s all added up to be an interesting couple of years.

So when people ask what it is I’m doing, I’ve mostly kept it light. I tell people I’m semi-retired. It’s not entirely untruthful — I’ve spent a lot more time outside and doing fun things — but it’s a lot less than the whole.

That being said, I’ve been working hard for the past few months to find more space for me again. Which also means I’ve been thinking more about what’s next.

A lot of people talk about passion with regards to work — that feeling of endless energy one feels when their inner desires meet application. Work no longer feels like work, and all questions of is this worth it? and am I doing the right thing? feel silly and irrelevant. I used to have a lot of passion for software. Whatever I have now is different.

I feel torn between the endless opportunities I see in software and the disgust for what our industry has become. The rational part of my brain tells me you don’t have to be like those terrible people to work in software, but the emotional side of me sees what our industry is doing in practice and doesn’t want to be associated with it at all. You can still do good work and be employed by Exxon, but at the end of the day you’re still working for the oil industry. Is that who I want to be?

I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself why I am so frustrated with our industry, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to two common themes:

• The routine manipulation of employees, gig or otherwise, through complicated legal structures (1099’d full-time employees, stock option agreements, expensive lawyers, employment/termination agreements, etc).

• The routine manipulation of customers through complicated technical structures (selling data without permission, outright spying, bricking expensive hardware to avoid liability, etc).

To work or participate in the technology industry is an exercise in minimizing manipulation (or, if you’d like to be rich, maximizing it). This feels shitty in a tremendously heavy way.

What happened to the idea of building great stuff that people are happy to pay for? What happened to the idea of treating employees as people and not legal entities to extort? Were these fantasies of a naive 20-something Kyle, or a reasonable idea of how our industry should act? Why do the needs of the corporation always seem to outweigh the needs of people? Honestly, it’s all driven me a bit crazy. But more relevant to this essay: this shitty-ness has eroded my enthusiasm for building software.

That’s a bummer.

Something I have been very enthused about as of late is permaculture, or at least many of the ideas that circle around that particular label.

What I love most about permaculture is that it transforms the laborious step-by-step annual process of contemporary gardening into systems design. Instead of remembering to water each of your plants every day, you set up systems to capture water so you don’t have to irrigate. Instead of measuring out fertilization schedules, you design plant systems that provide the nutrients each of them needs. The end result is that it makes gardening a lot more like programming. It takes more effort up front but the result is a self-sustaining system rather than one that requires re-building each year. That means this year’s effort adds onto last year’s — constant effort results in ever-increasing production. Permaculture takes this idea and applies it to all of the ways we live. How can we apply systems design and the forces of nature to design a more self-sustaining house? How can we use these principles to design our neighborhoods?

The shape of America we know today — endless rows of almond trees and corn, factory farms, tract houses, and suburbs — has always felt a bit off. We face incredible challenges in the years ahead, and these existing structures are not serving us well. Our cities are not designed for people, our homes not designed for their climate, and our farms not designed for farmers. Like a hammer who wants everything to be a nail, we are a barrel of oil designing the world with petroleum-tinted glasses. And what happens when we expand to planets that doesn’t have such abundant petroleum? Wouldn’t it be productive to practice harnessing the implicit energies of a planet?

The engineer in me can’t stop thinking there’s got to be a better way.

Many environmentalists believe the answer lies in conservation and consumer choices — reduced energy use, less intensive farming, and voting with your dollar — but I’ve never believed those strategies to be sane. You cannot deny the third world and the poor the modern conveniences the rest of us have. We achieved those conveniences with petroleum, but that’s no longer a sane path. We must find a new method for the rest of us. I also believe that a world with abundant (and excess) energy is a world in which humankind thrives and advances. To practice energy conservation on a civilization-scale is to stick our heads in the sand and refuse to grow.

I believe we can live in comfort and abundance while also living in greater harmony with nature (aka not fucking up the planet for our children). This isn’t blind environmentalist ideals — it’s working in a way that leverages nature’s built-in energies instead of fighting against them. Fresh water is scarce, yet we fill our toilets with fresh water just to defecate into it. Homeless starve on the streets, yet we plant non-bearing fruit trees along our city streets. Our homes require constant air conditioning, yet we bulldoze the trees on the southern side of our homes. All in all we’re just making a lot of bad decisions right now. I see permaculture as a framework to make better decisions through design, but for the environment.

This is a big part of what’s next for me. Last year, I became part-owner in an old high-country cattle camp / working forest near Tahoe. This is where I want to explore more of these ideas and share them with others. We’re building a place to get away from the craziness of the modern world and explore examples of living in comfort & abundance in harmony with nature. Call it part working forest (growing trees for profit), part getaway, and part laboratory.

David and Alia enjoying springtime in Leaping Daisy's meadow.

It’s called Leaping Daisy. It’ll be a while.

Despite the first half of this essay, I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t still interested in software. I’d like to think I’m just going through a rough patch in our relationship right now. Plus, Leaping Daisy sits under about seven feet of snow as we speak, so the winter leaves me with a lot of time alone with my thoughts.

For a long time, I was mostly interested in software that made money. Finding the sweet spot between customers, willingness to pay, and profitability is fun. But Venture Capital and their fleet of lawyers have become experts at warping and extorting these kinds of products. They’ve taken the fun out of making money. As such, lately my interests have been more ideological than profitable.

I’ve started and abandoned dozens of projects over the past couple of years — some silly, some ambitious, and some just plain dumb. So I’ll be honest: I’m not really sure what’s next here. I’ll say there are a few areas of interest that seem to keep popping up in my head:

• Data Ownership, Privacy, and Cloud-less Software
  It feels as though we’ve embraced the cloud a little too much the past decade or so. While there’s tremendous benefits to centralized online services, there are also a great deal of downsides. Customers rarely own their data, companies routinely cooperate with state-run surveillance programs, and privacy & security continues to be a nightmare.

  There’s a lot of room to explore software that doesn’t take these tradeoffs as laws of nature, but rather design considerations as they should be. I don’t think it’s time to abandon the cloud, but I do think it’s time to explore ways we can engineer around its weaknesses.

• Civic Engagement
  Thus far, most of the technological effort applied toward civic engagement has been centered around transparency, data, visualization, and hack-day type projects (unsupported software). While it would be reckless for me to say these types of efforts are a waste of time, they do not conform to my view of how government works in action. Psychology, emotion, and interpersonal relationships play a far greater role in shaping policy than any objective fact. Unlike many, I don’t see this as a problem or a bug. It’s just how large groups of people make decisions. We are not robots. We’re leaky bags of meat that have no inclination toward rationality.

  I want to know what happens when we take this view of humanity, leverage our skills in the soft sciences, and apply it toward civic engagement through technology. How do we take the lessons we’ve learned from social networking’s success to strengthen community bonds? How do we build better relationships between representatives and their constituents? Doesn’t it feel a little silly that we still have to call our representative (and talk to an intern) to voice our opinions? As it stands now, Facebook knows more about a district’s opinions and beliefs than its congressional representative does.

• Tools for People
  More than ever, it feels as if the term “software” is an extremely poor description of the field as it exists in the real world. It seems more and more that we have three separate industries: tools for developers, tools for large corporations, and junk food for everyone else. Tools for developers are pretty good and steadily improving. Tools for corporations (think inventory software, check-in systems, etc) are made of anger and frustration. And then there’s the FarmVilles, Facebooks, Snapchats, and Snapchat Clones that dominate person-hours spent using software. I still find that most non-developers just use Excel (Google Spreadsheets) or exist in a constant state of frustration with their software tools.

  We’ve been very successful creating junk food for normal people, but we haven’t been very successful in creating software that helps normal people get stuff done. Software-as-a-tool has always been the way I envision software working best. Not software that maximizes use, but software that maximizes utility.

If you’ve got some interesting projects you think I should check out, let me know (kyle@warpspire.com is probably best). Note: if you’re funded for purposes other than defrauding VC firms, think phone calls are fantastic, or think that the words stock or options are enticing, I am probably not your target audience right now.

Oh, and hi everyone! It’s been a while. I’ve missed publishing, and I hope I can find time for more of it again.

In a few weeks time, iOS 9 will launch with Safari Content Blocker. This technology allows the general public to use content blockers (better known as ad-blockers) on their iPhones. It’s kind of a big deal. Ad-blockers allow users to remove annoying advertisements from web pages in real time. It’s as if the ads don’t exist. A lot of publishers think this spells the end of online content, as publishers will no longer be able to earn enough revenue to support their staff.

I think they’re probably mostly right. Online advertising won’t be a viable business model for long. Many existing publishers will go out of business. It will be a difficult time for many in the industry. But I don’t think the web is going to suffer with a little less content. We’ll do just fine. Online advertising is on its way out as a viable business plan.

But there’s a twist in this story. It’s ad-supported publishers that created the market for the ad-blockers which are spelling their doom. It’s kind of poetic if you think about it.

Loglo

I remember the first time I read Snow Crash and came upon the idea of loglo:

As the sun sets, its red light is supplanted by the light of many neon logos emanating from the franchise ghetto that constitutes this U-Stor-It’s natural habitat. This light, known as loglo, fills in the shadowy corners of the unit with seedy, oversaturated colors.

That passage gave me chills. This wasn’t so much fiction as much as an amplified view of what is already happening. Today, many American freeways are lined with bright, colorful LED advertisements that give the landscape a supernatural coloring. I remember my city once had to issue regulations for brightness after several accidents were caused near a particularly bright ad.

A similar story has been playing out online. The only touch of color and animation on most publisher’s websites are advertisements. The ads are bright, loud, and everything the content is not. They have become so egregious that they often overwhelm articles, creating an environment where content fades into an infinite sea of ads.

Loglo lights the streets of Snow Crash. Content floats upon an ad-sea online.

Annoying

Newspapers have had ads for a long time. They’re usually in black & white (unless the whole page is color) and they sit in their little boxes next to the content. There exist many situations where ads are fine. But online, it’s a different story. Ads expand, pushing your content out of the way, automatically playing video & sound, forcing you to interact with them to continue. All in all, ads have been as annoying as technically possible, and there’s a lot that’s technically possible now. With this technical race comes a severe performance handicap on our computers. Much of our processing power and battery life today is spent rendering ads, not doing the work we set out to do.

Under the surface, they have intruded deep into our personal lives, robbing us of our privacy. Ad networks have built complicated mechanisms to track us and store information about our personal lives. How old are you? Do you own a home? What’s your income? Ad networks collect this type of information and share it — with a fee — to other companies without our consent.

The saddest part is how deceiving ads have become. They deceive in message, claiming the improbable/impossible (one weird trick…), and they deceive in appearance, pretending not to be an ad. There is little quality control in advertisements, and deception is the name of the game in majority. Ads are downright predatory to anyone who isn’t tech-savvy (and even then…).

Publishers play their part too. They constantly seek new ways to inject advertising in & around their content — whether it be turning the entire background into an ad, or disguising advertisements as journalism via native advertising. When users stop paying attention to the low-quality ads, publishers blame the users for “forcing” them to implement more invasive ads. Publishers have complete control over these decisions, and they have decided again and again to turn their environment into a user-hostile one.

FALSE DICHOTOMY

Much of the discussion around ads from publishers has been something along the lines of: we don’t like ads, but we gotta pay the bills and only the annoying ones do that. You will suffer ads, or you will not have content. They call this a compromise, but it is one made for the users without their agreement.

Life finds a way.

Users have been complaining about online ads for decades and publishers have refused to listen. So users fixed the problem themselves. First came pop-up blockers, and now come content-blockers. If you won’t give us a decision, we won’t give you one. You can put ads in your content, we’ll just filter your content.

Publishers forced this hand. Ad-blockers would not be popular today had ads not gotten so bad. Users are so frustrated they will do anything to get rid of them. That is not how your customers should feel about your primary revenue stream.

The customer is always right

I don’t think we’re done with this discussion. Publishers will continue to force a hostile environment on their customers and customers will find a way to get around it. Ad-blockers might be the talking point of today, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see paywalls be the talking point of tomorrow. Hint: we’ve already seen this play out with music & video. I don’t think it’s going to end in publisher’s favor.

And this is kind of the thing: customers always win. Businesses serve at the pleasure of their customers. It is easy to fall into the idea that customers need you as a business owner, but history has proven otherwise. You need your customers, and if you don’t respect that dynamic, you will lose them.

Publishers that listen to their customers will continue to thrive.

This sucks for publishers

I have to sympathize with the publishers. I’m sure a lot of them feel like they’re forced into a corner. There aren’t many good examples of publishers succeeding without annoying ads. It’s easy to come up with an idea for compelling content, much harder to come up with a revenue plan to afford it. Many have been struggling to find a way to pay their employees as piracy, ad-blockers, and crashing ad engagement rates have destroyed their revenue streams. It’s hard to be a publisher today.

But times change. Sometimes your business model becomes invalid as the world changes. This is the nature of The Innovator’s Dilemma — any business who wants to survive must be willing to cannibalize their dying products as the world changes. Preventing death is a losing battle. This sucks for business owners. It means a lot of hard work and often means the end of their business (and the beginning of new ones).

I sympathize with publishers, but I do not feel bad for them. Publishers accelerated the death of their business model by repeatedly refusing to listen to their customers. They will die, and they will have deserved it.

A couple of weeks ago I caved. For the first time in two decades of browsing online, I installed an ad-blocker. The web is a lot more pleasant. I find myself enjoying a lot more articles. My computer feels faster. Battery life seems infinite. My only regret was that I didn’t join in on the ad-blocking bandwagon earlier. For the first time in a long time, I’m able to soak up & appreciate the web. And wasn’t that kind of the point of being a publisher?