Prompt: My point in The Future of the Internet was that power and stability and goodness can come from a loosely governed space that welcomes contributions from anywhere and yet is still remarkably trustworthy. But if we're not careful, the very popularity of that space will attract people who are up to no good. Those bad apples will in turn have the authorities in their wake chasing them—and Burning Man won't ever be the same. That was my worry. And I think, to a huge extent, I was right.  A big part of the audience for my book were people who were skeptical of authority. They thought, “We can take care of ourselves. Leave us alone.” I wanted to make the point that trying to have all of the caretaking be self-care wouldn’t be great once we started to welcome people into the environment who were not particularly nerdy. For them, the internet wouldn’t be a whimsical place. It'd be a place that's like their bank account—it would have all of their private correspondence, and so on. There would be much more at stake should something go wrong.  That has been borne out, sadly. And there have not been huge strides in self-governance to forestall the kind of corporate enclosure that I was worried about.

Response: What I didn't quite take into account, however—although I hinted at it—was that states would eventually wise up. And I don’t just mean generic regulators eager to get data that would help them solve crimes or whatever, but states up to no good—states looking to make trouble in other states. I didn’t foresee how valuable it could be to a country like Russia—which, after all, only has a GDP the size of Italy—to have a building full of people out to make trouble on the internet.  At that point, do you still not want to let the authorities in? Who else is going to get other states to stand down?  State actors certainly matter, but they do seem like small fry alongside big platforms like Facebook and Google. Corporate enclosure of the internet means that corporations, rather than governments, now have the most power to shape and suppress opinion online. How do we respond to that? Government is the usual entity we look to when it comes to concentrations of power, because it makes laws and has a monopoly on the use of force. That's why the Bill of Rights protects individual rights as against the government. But even the civil liberties organizations most known for hewing to that line, like the ACLU, are starting to get nervous about accretions of private power, and how they might affect our lives.  If I have a message for my fellow citizens that's perfectly legal and that they might like to see, it’s no solace to me if it’s a private company rather than the government that prevents me from distributing that message.


Prompt: This gets back to the difference between now and ten years ago. It’s no longer a straightforward battle between the proponents and opponents of free speech. That doesn’t fully account for what’s going on right now, with private concentrations of power determining who gets to speak and how they speak.

Response: But breaking up those concentrations of power doesn’t always solve the problem. The Nazis may move to Gab if Gab is there to welcome them. Decentralization lets people with a common set of interests come together and create their own communities. But that’s going to carry its own costs. If breaking up the concentrations of power doesn’t always solve the problem, what are the better solutions? What do you see as the most promising path forward? Antitrust has been watered down in the past twenty years. But I think the antitrust toolkit has a lot of remedies that can make sense if you're willing to acknowledge a problem.  I've encouraged Facebook to make it possible for anybody to produce their own personalized News Feed. Then I can have my recipe and share it with you. Then not everything is resting on Facebook’s shoulders to produce the perfect News Feed for everyone. Why would we ever think they could do that?  That kind of decentralization solves a lot of the problems I worry about. It doesn't solve the filter bubble problem—in fact, it may make it worse, because I can share a recipe with you that only shows us the world we want. And it doesn't solve the problem of enabling groups to conspire to do bad things off in a corner.  But I think it's important for us to be clear about not only what the problems are but what the tradeoffs are. Often when you solve one problem, you make another one worse.  Think of the twentieth-century media architecture. There wasn't a whole lot to recommend it, but there were some benefits. If you were a lazy news consumer, you would tend to only be subjected to stuff that, for better or worse, was already mainstream. There wouldn't be a John Bircher bellowing at you at 7 PM on CBS. Of course, there was the problem of “manufactured consent”—to shape mass opinion, all you had to do was co-opt those networks. But there’s something to be said for an era where you had to go to some extremes to find extremism. Now, in a Google search, a press release from some astroturf organization is on par with a deeply researched piece from the New York Times. There’s something deeply wrong about that.


Prompt: How can government help solve some of these problems while navigating the tradeoffs? How are other countries dealing with this? Certainly the Europeans have less compunction when it comes to government decision-making about content. And that includes laws against hate speech that would flunk First Amendment tests here. If you set your location on Twitter to Germany, there's fewer Nazis, because the display of Nazi artifacts and sentiments is illegal in Germany. And there it is—problem solved! If we want fewer Nazis on Twitter, let's all just move to Germany without having to move!  That’s an interesting example of government forcing a technical fix. What are some other technical fixes that platforms are trying, or should try? Above all, companies don’t want to be in the content-judging business. So they will try to use telltales that aren’t content. They'll say, “It looks like the same content is appearing in multiple places at once, and it’s coming from a range of IP addresses that we have previously identified as bots running an orchestrated campaign.” And they’ll crack down on it. This isn't judging content, but it will have the impact of restricting content.  I think that’s a promising avenue. But it's worth realizing that it involves a tradeoff with privacy. Companies are going to have to retain more data about the linkages between content and source so that they can make those judgments over the period of weeks and months that might be needed to go after increasingly sophisticated bots.

Response: How do the engineers working for these companies fit into this? How do you see their role? There’s an old concept of a “learned profession.” It means that people who inhabit certain roles require a lot of training because they can have significant social impact. They have special responsibilities—not only to those they might be working with directly, but to society at large.  Software engineering should be considered one of those professions. It’s a little weird that cosmetologists have to get licensed before they can brush somebody’s hair for money, but nothing equivalent exists for engineers.


Prompt: I’m not suggesting that we should make people get a license before they can start coding. But if you're coding some feature of Facebook, you are potentially affecting a lot of lives and a lot of speech. Getting engineers to recognize that ethical moment seems really important—as does building structures that enable them to send up a flare if they see something weird that gives their spidey-sense a tingle.  Lawyers have been around long enough that legal ethics are a bit more cut-and-dried. Law has a classic ethical framework around compliance where we know where the boundaries are, and the point is to train people in those boundaries. Your client hands you a smoking gun and asks you to put it in a drawer—can you do that? No, you can’t do that.  Software engineering isn’t like that. Engineers might feel their spidey-sense tingling, but we won’t always know what the right answer is. That’s why the crucial thing is to create layers of safe publicity, so that daring to surface a problem as a company or as an engineer does not subject them to corporate or professional suicide. We need to build systems that let us be honest about our problems.

Response: It reminds me of airline pilots, who are permitted to disclose mistakes they made on a flight without being penalized for them. That system exists because the value of disclosure outweighs the value of accountability. Figuring out the right titration between disclosure and accountability will be important for helping engineers think about what they’re building and how it might be used.


Prompt: There’s clearly a whole lot of thinking and writing that will have to be done to map out these problems, and to develop potential solutions. And it’s reasonable to expect that a lot of that thinking and writing will be done by people working at universities and think tanks. But that raises a question: many of the scholars and the institutes exploring these issues have close links to, and in some cases receive substantial funding from, the tech industry. In mid-2017 we saw a stark reminder of this when the think tank New America expelled its Open Markets group for being overly critical of Google, one of its main funders.

Response: How do you manage these concerns at Berkman, and how do you think others should manage them? I think you have to depend on the professional tenets of people at think tanks and universities. There are astroturf organizations that are designed to present and launder industry views. There are other organizations that purport to want to get it right, create a culture of wanting to get it right, and hire serious people with relevant training.  Still, will they bite the hand that feeds them? It’s a good incentives question. But I see it as a real puzzle rather than as a cause for castigation.


Prompt: Ten years ago, most of what we were interested in was on the open web. It was at the other end of a URL. Even if it was on a private website, you could scrape it—and you could worry later about whether you were violating the terms of service.  That's not the world we live in now. Stuff is inside apps—it's not scrapable. The interesting behaviors happen on Facebook and Twitter. So establishing a firm and long-term relationship between those who want to dispassionately study those behaviors and the private entities that have all the data is a huge imperative for me.  It requires walking through a minefield. On the one hand, if all you're doing is calling out the companies—well, it's their data, and they're not going to want to share it with you. On the other hand, if you get too close to them then you get the data but you don't always go where it follows.  You've got to get up every morning and figure out how to navigate that. It’s not pure, but that's the reality we're in. And I like having a diverse ecosystem that includes people who say, “I would never walk in the doors of Facebook. Forget it, NDA or no NDA, I'm not going to talk to them.” Great. Fine. You should be weighing in with what you see.  It's just, also, somebody ought to get the data! “Is there a volunteer among us who's ready to get sullied in order to do that?” How did you start writing code? I went to a perfectly fine public school in Texas. We had a computer science course, but the teacher didn’t know anything about programming. We had a textbook, though, and if you were sufficiently self-motivated, you could work through the exercises and then take the AP exam. Fortunately there were a few of us who really liked to code. So we got together and taught the course ourselves. We all passed the exam, and it helped me get into an elite institution for college.

Response: What did arriving at that elite institution look like? It was weird. There was a big cultural gap. I resented my family for not having prepared me for the experience. There were all these kids who went to private schools who were years ahead of me in math. I was angry that I didn’t get those opportunities, and that came out as resentment towards my parents for awhile.


Prompt: I remember going to my college girlfriend’s parents’ house and feeling intimidated by the food they ate and the way they talked. But I also knew I wanted to emulate it. Throughout college, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that nobody could say I wasn’t supposed to be there. That was the particular form that impostor syndrome took for me: it wasn’t about the fear of not being a good programmer, but the fear of not belonging.

Response: The path that college put me on created some distance between me and my parents, though. They have never been anything but proud of me, but they stopped understanding me sometime in college. And in the years since, the gaps between our worlds continue to grow wider. To this day, when I call my mom on the weekend, she still asks me if I’m off that day, because she doesn’t know that people only work Monday through Friday in offices. That’s just not context that she has—and I didn’t have it either before I left for college. My stepdad says if I ever wanted to move back home I could find work because there’s a local guy who fixes computers.


Prompt: Apart from the culture shock, what was college like? The school where I went wasn’t friendly to failure. It was a meat grinder. When you walked through campus around finals week you saw kids sitting on the ground crying. Still, it’s the kind of place where you make connections that end up mattering a lot later. You meet people who will go on to start companies in Silicon Valley, or who will become higher-ups at bigger firms. It’s also the kind of place where recruiters track you from freshman year, have dinner with you at department-sponsored events—that sort of thing.

Response: That industry interest made me feel special. And when I became a teaching assistant for a computer science course, that interest intensified. I had to do a work-study as part of my financial aid, and it was either serving food in the cafeteria or teaching computer science. But teaching paid well—$15 an hour, which blew my mind, since my high school job had paid $4 an hour plus tips.


Prompt: Plus the job was super fun, and the industry attention felt great. Big firms would come in and lavish the teaching assistants with gifts—embarrassing gifts. Sometimes we would go buy cheap tricycles and ride them down a steep hill and play a sort of human Mario Kart. Microsoft found out about it and bought us the highest-quality tricycles available. I think it’s actually gotten worse since I’ve left. These days companies send stretch Hummer limos to pick kids up for fancy dinners.

Response: So you must’ve been pretty well set up for a job in tech by the time you graduated. After I graduated I had a few options of places to work. I chose an older, more established company. That ended up being one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I spent two years there while my friends were jumping on rocket ships. Then I decided to start a startup with somebody I knew from school.


Prompt: My cofounder and I had been talking for several months about doing our own thing. In college, everybody was expected to go start a startup—that expectation had been drilled pretty deep into us. We lived in a big house with a bunch of friends, and we turned an extra room into an office. We had a really nice routine. We worked there every day, and tried to prototype things very quickly.

Response: This was around 2009, when mobile apps were taking off. It was the era of “SoLoMo”—“social local mobile.” The iPhone had changed everything: there had been programming platforms for phones before, but they were garbage. Everyone wanted to build something for the App Store. The tech giants were way behind the curve, however—the Facebook mobile app was horrible, for example. It seemed possible that the bigger players just weren’t going to make it on mobile, and that created opportunities for startups like us.


Prompt: So we tried to build a bunch of different apps. None of them found a huge amount of success. But the last one we tried, a social app for making plans with friends, did well enough to get some attention from TechCrunch and other places in the tech press. It was fun, but scary. Because we always knew that if one of the tech giants got their shit together, they could eat our lunch if they wanted to. I remember waking up one day and seeing a new product announcement from Facebook that I was convinced would put us out of business. I ran to my cofounder’s room, freaking out. It turned out we were fine. Still, I had that feeling of “Holy shit, we’re fucked” a lot. We lived in constant fear of getting scooped.

Response: But you didn’t. Not exactly. But after a year, we were still living off our savings. It was clear that we either needed to get funding, get a job, or get acquired. Around this time, we went to an up-and-coming company to ask them whether they would give us access to their private API. They said, essentially, “No way. You’re a tiny company that doesn’t matter.” But they also said they’d be interested in acquiring us. We were very surprised to hear that. We didn’t even really know what it meant. But we decided to pursue it.


Prompt: What they were offering is what Silicon Valley calls a “talent acquisition.” They wanted to buy the company, but they weren’t going to take our technology. They weren’t going to take our code. They just wanted to get the two of us working for them. They put me and my cofounder through an interview process, and it was the same standard interview process I’d already been through before. But at the end of it, they made an offer with a slightly different format. It was clear that we were talking to people who worked in their mergers and acquisitions (M&A) department rather than in recruiting. Those people have the authority to write bigger checks, and they’re supposed to be thinking about what the company is going to need a little further down the line.

Response: We were very green, so we didn’t know what a good offer looked like. But we did know that we should go get at least one competing offer, to see what our options were. So, using our network of contacts from college, we reached out to somebody who had the ear of a few VPs at a bigger company that made similar acquisition offers. We said, “Hey, we have this offer from one of your competitors. They’re moving fast. Can we start a conversation with you?” Recruiters famously don’t make the process very fast for people. You can do an interview and not hear back for a month, for instance. It’s frustrating for most people coming in the front door. But it’s very different if you have an offer from a competitor. An offer from a competitor is always the best way to get their attention, even if they have ignored you in the past. And doubly so through the M&A route.


Prompt: How old were you at the time? Twenty-three. This was all very new to me. Even with some experience in the industry, I had no idea how corporations worked. No one in my family worked for a corporation. So we went into the bigger company and did a presentation for several directors. They found it interesting, because we were thinking about the same problems that they needed to be thinking about. Because the big companies missed the boat on mobile, they were willing to write checks to make up for that gap. That’s probably the biggest phase of talent acquisition that I’ve seen in my career. Although maybe today acquisitions around AI could rival it now.

Response: They liked our product enough to make an offer. But their offer was many multiples larger than the first one we’d received. They were a larger company, with more money to spend. They were also more frightened of smaller competitors outmaneuvering them, so they were willing to spend more. They wanted to acquire all of the assets of our company for a particular price and then wind the company down. The price they proposed was pretty high. And being a young kid with lots of student loan debt, I was blown away by the seriousness of that number. That’s the main thing I remember.


Prompt: How did they decide how much the assets were worth? It was a charade. Our assets weren’t actually worth anything. We had a rounding error number of users. Our service was not wildly popular by any means. So they valued the assets pretty arbitrarily—this chunk of code is worth this many millions of dollars.

Response: You said the smaller company wanted to acquire you as a way to hire you and your cofounder, but wasn’t interested in your technology or your code. What about the bigger company? They were planning to throw away every line of code. There was nothing that they were actually acquiring besides us. Then why buy your code if they’re just going to throw it away? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just hire you, instead of hiring you and buying your code? Sometimes the big tech companies acquire startups to acquire their technology, and sometimes they do it just to prevent those startups from becoming competitors. In our case, it was the latter.


Prompt: Even if a big company is not directly threatened by a startup as a competitor currently, the thinking is that if they need to buy them later, they’re going to pay a lot more for it. So they might as well buy the startup as early as possible to nip it in the bud. Our startup was pre-funding, so they could get away with paying us much less. We didn’t have any investors they had to satisfy.

Response: But acquiring our assets was also a way to justify paying us a lot. If they’re only going to pay you 2x the normal salary, then that can take the form of a very nice job offer. But if they’re going to pay you more like 8x or 10x, it breaks the whole idea of salary bands, which is how big companies organize compensation by experience level. So buying your assets is the backdoor—it’s a way to get away with paying certain people much more.


Prompt: As far as what they’re buying—yes, they’re avoiding paying more for a potential competitor later. But the inherent value in a talent acquisition comes from acknowledging that most projects in software fail. Finding a team that can actually ship something that gets out the door is rare. Even at big companies, most projects will not see the light of day. So to find a group of people that have managed to build something—even if it’s small, even if it’s humble—means they’re probably a team that works well together. So they’re worth a premium. That’s the theory behind it, at least.

Response: Also, they could make us sign a contract that locked us in for a long time. The deal to acquire our startup was a lump of cash and a job offer. We had to take both together. About half of the payment came up front, in the form of the cash. And the rest would come to us through salary and stock-based compensation on a vesting schedule over the course of four years.


Prompt: Sure, I could’ve showed up on day one and quit. And they would’ve been angry at me, but I still would’ve been able to pay off my student loans. However, I would’ve been leaving a lot of money on the table. Were you excited? Paying off your student loans must’ve felt pretty good. I was very excited and very terrified. I didn’t want to screw it up. The deal was complicated. There were hundreds of pages of legal documents that I felt very overwhelmed by. We had to pay a lawyer fifty thousand dollars to make sure everything was airtight. My parents didn’t understand it, and to this day don’t understand it. My friends in tech were happy—some of them had been through this experience before.

Response: But it changed my life. I went from being basically broke—my next rent payment would have emptied out my savings account, not to mention my student loans—to not having to worry about money anymore. So that was great. How did it feel to go from running a startup to working for a big company? It was intimidating, but there were some really positive aspects. As an engineer, I learned a lot. I felt like I was finally learning how to actually write software. I would go home and read the company’s internal wikis for hours. I was so excited about working there that I read documentation every weekend for a year, actually.


Prompt: But coming in as a talent acquisition, you’re also expected to be a thought leader. You’re expected to inject the company with new ideas. It’s an informal role—it’s not reflected in your title. But that’s why management has paid a premium for you. So my cofounder and I started to materialize what we thought this company needed, and assembled a team of people to work on it. The fact that we could come in and substantially change product direction—that we could create and staff and launch a project—was due to the fact that the company had paid extra for us. Leadership assumed we knew something.

Response: Failing Up, Down, and Sideways You said that most projects in software fail. Why is that? Because you never know what’s going to work. Market timing is everything: something that makes perfect sense two years from now, or made sense two years ago, might fail today for no good reason. Everything changes so fast: the technology stack, consumer demand, even the fundamental capabilities of these devices.


Prompt: I mean, everything I’ve ever worked on has failed. I’ve worked on some ambitious projects at several of these big companies, and none of them have succeeded. But I’ve still been rewarded and promoted. And I think that’s a good thing about Silicon Valley. Failure isn’t looked down upon, which is a positive aspect of tech culture.

Response: When you fail inside a big company, does it still feel like failure? The average time spent on a team is well under two years at most of these big companies. So when a company wants to change direction and abandon a product, people usually don’t take it that hard because they weren’t planning on being there for very long anyway.


Prompt: On some teams, however, that’s not the case. I’m currently on a team that has been working on something for several years. And it’s failing. We have been launching small representative parts of our product but users aren’t using them. This is partly a problem with what constitutes success within a big company: if you launch a product with a million users, it’ll get killed because a million users is nothing. That’s one of the reasons that big companies have trouble innovating, because achieving a 1 percent gain in users of your main product will win every time over launching a new product with a much smaller user base. I mean, a million users would be a rocketship success for an early startup. For a big company, it’s a drop in the bucket. That’s why big companies tend to get stagnant, because they’ll always prioritize growing the main product over funding experimental ventures.

Response: Anyway, on my team, failure has really depleted our energy. We’re demoralized because we’ve been grinding for a long time on something that just isn’t taking off. It used to be one of the best teams I’ve ever been on—but within a period of six months, we’ve become very unproductive. We have no direction.


Prompt: That sounds like burnout. People get burned out not because they’re working too hard but because they’re not feeling rewarded by the work they’re doing. They get burned out because they believe their work has no impact. On my team, since we know it’s only a matter of time before leadership kills our product, people are burning out left and right.

Response: At work, there are certain things you have to do. But what the company is really paying you for is to come up with new things to do. They’re paying for your creativity. When I’m burned out, I’m still doing the things I have to do—I’m filing the TPS reports—but I’m not coming up with new things to do. Burnout is when the creative part of your work is dead. There’s a muscle I go to flex and it’s just not there.


Prompt: What about in the startup world? Failure must look different inside a startup. If you launch a startup that goes out of business, no one thinks you wasted your time. People still revere a founder whose company has failed, even to a fault. Plus, because there’s always more money being pumped into tech, it’s a soft landing for almost anyone whose startup fails.

Response: That changes depending on what you’re working on and the time period, of course. For instance, I don’t think if your social app failed today you would have a nice acquisition offer waiting for you, unless you knew the potential acquirers on a personal level. And that ends up being the major way that the opportunities for “failing upwards” are not distributed equally.


Prompt: Who is allowed to fail, and who gets to fail upwards? Your startup wasn’t failing exactly, but it sounds like the social network that you acquired in college was the determining factor in your ability to land acquisition offers. Definitely. In our case, that was the main thing. We didn’t have an impressive piece of technology or an impressive user base. But we did have social capital.

Response: There are other ways to acquire social capital. If your startup gets press attention, that raises its acquisition price. If you have a really stellar team, that’s another way to fail upwards. You could assemble a dozen excellent engineers to work on a very hard problem and then fail at that problem. But you found a dozen engineers that can work together without killing each other and maybe even manage to ship something. That’s worth a lot.


Prompt: On the one hand, Silicon Valley seems to revere entrepreneurialism. On the other hand, the industry is increasingly dominated by a handful of big companies—companies that, as you’ve explained, frequently acquire startups and burn down all their assets to ensure they don’t become competitors. How do you make sense of that contradiction between the cult of the founder and the increasingly monopolistic structure of tech? The funding model for startups is venture capital. And venture capital is a hits-driven business: you expect the vast majority of your investments to fail, so the ones that succeed have to succeed on a massive scale. Venture capital is risky, and it requires a lot of money.

Response: Until relatively recently, tech companies didn’t have enough money to compete with venture capitalists. But now they do. Today, you have four or five tech giants with cash piles big enough to really push people around. And this has only happened in the last decade or so—it wasn’t like that in the early 2000s after the first dot-com crash.


Prompt: But the incentives of a VC firm are different from those of a tech giant, right? The former is giving you capital to help you grow into a bigger company, whereas the latter is buying you to make sure you don’t grow into a bigger company. Right. But again, the tech giant is also buying you because you’re a founder who has had some amount of success. The reverence for the founder might sound silly, but it’s based on something real, which is that it’s really hard to measure why a company is successful.

Response: There are too many factors at play: market timing, staffing decisions, choices about the technology stack. It’s impossible to know why a particular startup succeeds. So you find something to control for, and that’s the people. That’s why big tech companies like to bet on founders. This is something I’ve noticed in my career: there are people who are just very effective, and the things they touch seem to work. And most people aren’t like that.


Prompt: How have your views of the acquisition experience, and of the tech industry more broadly, changed over time? I felt I was succeeding while the acquisition was happening. I had worked hard and I was being rewarded for it. The system was working. But today I look back and think of it as a failure. Why didn’t I work on something more challenging? Why didn’t I take a bigger swing? At the time, I thought I was working on something groundbreaking. Now, with some hindsight and maturity, I think I just got lucky doing something small.

Response: I definitely feel like this was a silly chapter in my life. I’m very glad I got to pay off my student loans. But I don’t feel good about the work. In fact I feel pretty embarrassed about it. It’s not that I consider myself a failure for not having built a successful business. The failure I feel is more personal: it’s that I spent my time on building a small social app instead of something that would have been more meaningful.


Prompt: What would’ve been more meaningful? I could have worked on something that actually had a positive impact on society. Or I could’ve set out to solve a problem that had more interesting technology behind it. Making the World A Better Place What do you think changed your mind? Because you didn’t feel that way at first.

Response: I think it was seeing more of the industry, spending time at these big companies, and observing certain things. One of those had to do with bias. Silicon Valley has been under attack for the past several years for having a lot of bias in its compensation practices around gender and race. As a result, the big companies have tried to standardize the way they pay people. They’ll break compensation into salary bands that are supposed to match an employee’s level. So if you’re at a certain level, your pay falls somewhere within the corresponding salary band. Which means that if a man and a woman are in the same band, they’re going to be paid roughly the same.


Prompt: That’s supposed to help correct gendered pay discrepancies. But it doesn’t really work, because there are all sorts of escape hatches built in. Salary bands only cover your salary. There’s lots of other ways that people get paid. As we discussed, talent acquisition is one of them. Talent acquisition gives companies a way to pay a premium to people who have more social capital. But that’s not the only way that people are rewarded unequally. There’s also the sign-on bonus. The sign-on bonus in Silicon Valley today can easily be a hundred thousand dollars. Even for somebody coming off their first job, or maybe even right out of school, it can be upwards of fifty thousand dollars. And the recruiters have a lot of leeway in setting that number. Then there’s your annual bonus, which is a percentage of your salary at most companies. Finally, there’s your stock-based compensation.

Response: When you take an offer at a company, you’re given either stock options or grants of shares in the company. Those options or grants vest over a four-year schedule. And there’s really no restriction on how high that can go. So for a lot of people, a majority of total compensation comes from stock. Salary typically tops out at around $200,000 or $250,000 at a big company. But it wouldn’t be surprising to be given another $100,000 in stock grants. If you’re joining a company early on, that stock, by the time you’re done vesting it, could be more like a million dollars.


Prompt: What about ageism in the industry? Silicon Valley tends to be very young. Does that worry you as you get older? I don’t know where all the old programmers go. They must go somewhere. It is a little worrisome. I’m in my thirties, and I feel like I have less energy. I’m an iOS developer and I haven’t learned Swift. Five years ago, definitely ten years ago, the day Swift was announced I would have become an expert on it. And I just don’t have that energy now.

Response: So it sounds like issues around equity and bias played a determining role in changing how you think about the industry. Well, come to think of it, those are issues I’ve only come to understand in the past few years. I think what really shifted my thinking about my success was observing that most of the startups that are getting crazy amounts of venture capital aren’t solving interesting problems. There is a lot of money going into squeezing more ad dollars out of users, and getting more attention and eyeballs. Yo is a good example. My app wasn’t much dumber than Yo. And they got millions of dollars of funding.


Prompt: I also felt like people were becoming founders and investors not because they wanted to solve problems that would help humanity but because they wanted to be in the Silicon Valley scene. They wanted the cultural cachet. They wanted to go to the parties. That was disillusioning to me, because I had really bought into the ideology that building a business was the best way to make the world a better place. That was something that was drilled into my head at my elite college. I had completely bought into it.

Response: But over the years, as I saw what products were being funded and built, I felt disappointed. It changed how I thought about my own success. I wasn’t actually solving problems—I was just riding a wave of ridiculous overinvestment in social apps. So your own success started to feel more like a failure—not a personal failure, perhaps, but the failure of the industry more broadly.


Prompt: Recently, you’ve actually had a number of high-level people in Silicon Valley express some degree of disillusionment as well. Early Facebook investor Sean Parker, among others, seems to regret his role in building a platform he now considers psychologically damaging. How do you see this disillusionment playing out more broadly in the industry? Get wealthy and solve the world’s problems—this was the message that I absorbed early on. You couldn’t do one without the other, the argument went, so don’t feel bad about becoming rich. The profit motive is the only way that we can possibly solve problems at scale.

Response: I truly believed that. And it remains a widespread belief in the industry, and in the engineering departments of elite institutions. But to move forward, I think we are going to have to challenge that belief very directly. That’s why I’m skeptical of some of these newfound regrets expressed by Sean Parker and others. I don’t think they’re actually attacking the core notion that the profit motive is the best way to make the world a better place. They still believe they can centralize large amounts of capital in these massive corporations and pay themselves well and solve the world’s problems. I think there are some inherent tradeoffs that they’re not yet acknowledging.


Prompt: Sean Parker is also a billionaire. Do you see rank-and-file tech workers expressing  doubts about what they’re building as well? When you’re an engineer, you’re constantly being told to do things that are clearly not good for the user. If you’re building any kind of app or platform that makes its money from advertising, you are trying to maximize “time spent”—how long a user spends with your product. Time spent is considered a proxy for value delivered to the user, because if your product wasn’t useful, the user wouldn’t be using it.

Response: Here’s how it typically works. An order comes down from on high: the board says to increase revenue. What’s the best way the management team knows to increase revenue? To increase time spent. So they issue the order, which gets percolated down the tree, and now everyone is working on increasing time spent. This means making the product more addictive, more absorbing, more obtrusive. And it works: the user starts spending more time with the product.


Prompt: But every worker knows this is bad. Every engineer and designer knows this is awful. They’re not happy making these features. But they can’t argue with the data. The engineer and the designer who care about the user don’t want to put these features out in the world. But the data says those features are increasing time spent—which means they’re good. Because more time spent means selling more advertising, which means making more money.

Response: And so long as you’re working for an advertising company, what other metric besides time spent could there be? So long as you’re working for a company, what other metric besides profit could there be? That’s a similar question. You can make small surface-level improvements here and there. But you’re not going to tackle the core problem until you tackle the profit motive.


Prompt: The directives to increase metrics like time spent come from above, but the actual work is being done by tech workers on the ground. And they’re doing this work because their performance is measured by whether or not they moved that metric and whether or not they implemented those features—even if they know they’re bad for users.

Response: But there’s no way they can push back on it. They can talk about it—in their company Slack, in their public forums, at their all-hands meetings. They can express a lot of malaise about it. But they can’t argue against the experiment succeeding, because you can’t argue against increased profits. You could imagine different structures of the company that might not have this problem. You could imagine a world where these companies empower rank-and-file workers to make certain decisions themselves, and give users a voice in those decisions. Workers and users could together decide what metrics to optimize for, and what kind of technology they want to build.


Prompt: One of the first things I learned after learning how to write software was how to write tests for that software. First you wrote code to perform a certain task—say, find the square root of a number. Then you wrote more code to test whether the first piece of code did what you wanted. Does the function return the correct value? Is two the square root of four? I thought this type of testing was ridiculous. If you wrote buggy software, why would the software you wrote to check that software be any less buggy? That happened to me a lot: I’d spend twenty minutes trying to figure out why my tests said my programs were broken only to realize that the tests themselves were broken.

Response: Yet what I found even more troubling was that in order to write effective tests, a programmer had to know all of the ways that a piece of software could fail in order to write tests for those cases. If she forgot the square root of -1 was undefined, she’d never write a test for it. But, obviously, if you knew where your bugs were, you’d just fix them. Errors typically hide in the places we forget to look.


Prompt: My first employer, the online dating site OkCupid, didn’t harp on testing either. In part, this was because our company was so small. Only seven fellow engineers and I maintained all the code running on our servers—and making tests work was time-consuming and error-prone. “We can’t sacrifice forward momentum for technical debt,” then-CEO Mike Maxim told me, referring to the cost of engineers building behind-the-scenes tech instead of user-facing features. “Users don’t care.” He thought of testing frameworks as somewhat academic, more lofty than practical.

Response: Instead, the way we kept from breaking the site was to push updates to small subsets of users and watch what happened. Did anything crash? Did lag increase? Were users reporting new problems? The idea was that the best way to discover errors was to expose software to real site traffic and respond quickly with a patch or rollback if necessary.


Prompt: Perhaps this was a sensible methodology for a small engineering team. But when I first started at OkCupid, I found it terrifying. About four months in, I was assigned to build a feature that would highlight the interests that members listed on their profiles—things like “Infinite Jest,” “meditation,” “The Dirty Projectors”—for OkCupid staff to see. Because this was an internal feature that users wouldn’t be able to access, the stakes were low.

Response: Still, I was paranoid about breaking the site, and procrastinated. My boss, then-Director of Engineering David Koh, started to notice. “I know it’s intimidating,” he told me at the end of work one day, “but you just have to pull the trigger and launch the code. Soon you’ll do it without even thinking.” He told me to push my update the next day, when he’d be out of the office.


Prompt: I was nervous to make a change without David there to save me if anything went wrong. But, admittedly, my update was pretty dinky. The next morning, just to cover my tail, I asked Mike the CEO, who was also OkCupid’s best engineer, to take a look at my code. “You only added a few functions,” he said, reading through my lines on his monitor. “Looks fine.” I felt silly taking up his time for something so insignificant.

Response: So I launched my new code for a fraction of our users and watched the statistics. All seemed well. I pushed my changes out to the rest of the site and went for a snack. When I came back, everything was most definitely not fine. The site had slowed to a crawl, and then became completely non-responsive. From the back corner of our single-floor office, the head of operations yelled, “The servers are on fire. What the hell’s going on?” “It must’ve been me,” Mike shouted back. Mike and I had both deployed code at almost exactly the same time, a development no-no since when something broke (like now), you didn’t know who to blame. But when Mike reversed his change to no effect, he was stuck. It wouldn’t be long before the OkCupid servers became so unresponsive we wouldn’t even be able to connect to them to push our fixes.


Prompt: #Panic #Freakout By lunch, we still hadn’t saved the site. OkCupid users were starting to notice on Twitter: “@okcupid how am I supposed to get my daily dose of crushing rejection and emotional humiliation if your site is down????” “Okcupid stops working over lunch hour, NYC wonders if we’re committed to the people in our phones from now on, panic in the streets” “@okcupid How can I continue to be ignored by the females of the world if they don’t know where I am to ignore me?! #panic #freakout” The more time that passed, the more confident I became, by process of elimination, that I’d taken down the site. I read through every file I’d changed—the lines of code I’d written and even the ones I hadn’t. Then, finally, I found the error. It looked something like this: If (the database throws an error) { do nothing } This was a bug, and I hadn’t even written it. I had just triggered it. But it was a bad bug, one that, under the right circumstances—circumstances that I’d unfortunately created—would not only crash the OkCupid servers but also spew radioactive garbage into our caches and database, making recovery especially difficult. I was horrified.

Response: How could such a tiny change have such an outsized impact on the site? “That same story happened so many different times,” my old boss David told me. “Someone launched a small, relatively innocuous change that did one of the millions of unexpected things it could have done, which then happened to break some part of the site, and then bring it all down—sometimes bring it down to the point where we couldn’t recover it for hours.” When I saw him in the office the morning after I’d broken the site, totally mortified, he consoled me by saying that site outages were just the cost of relying on such a small engineering team.


Prompt: But even large companies are susceptible to meltdowns caused by seemingly innocuous actions. In February 2017, Amazon accidently brought down swaths of the internet when one of its employees, trying to debug the company’s S3 service, entered a command incorrectly. Because hundreds of thousands of companies use S3 to store data, the error took down tons of sites, including Quora, Giphy, and Slack. Ironically, Amazon’s own S3 status indicator relied on S3, which is why it incorrectly reported that the service was working just fine during the outage.

Response: Tangled Webs For most businesses, however, a software crash is not a death knell. If you’re not building self-driving cars, storing sensitive information, or supporting the data backbone of the internet, it may not matter if an error interrupts your service. It’s okay, for example, if a free online dating site goes down for an hour or half a day. In fact, it might even be better for business to trade off bugginess for forward momentum—the ethos behind Facebook’s old mantra “move fast and break things.” When you allow yourself to build imperfect systems, you start to work differently—faster, more ambitiously. You know that sometimes your system will go down and you’ll have to repair it, but that’s okay. “The fact that it’s easy to fix things means you end up with this methodology where you think, ‘Let’s get a broken thing out there as fast as possible that does sort of what we want, and then we’ll just fix it up,’” says David. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since preventing errors is inherently difficult. “Even if you spend a whole bunch of time trying to make something that’s perfect, you won’t necessarily succeed,” he explains.


Prompt: OkCupid was a complex site. Had we tried to make it perfect, it might not have come to exist in the first place. But software is built on top of other software. You’re working not just with your own code but with code from your coworkers and from third-party software libraries. If these dependencies are buggy or complicated or behave in non-intuitive ways, errors may seep into the software that relies on them.

Response: Take the Equifax data breach, which leaked some 147.9 million Americans’ private information in September 2017. Equifax was vulnerable to attack not because of a bug introduced by one of its own engineers, but rather because of a bug in the code that Equifax’s software was built on top of—a popular open-source framework called Apache Struts.


Prompt: That bug had existed in Struts since 2008 but had gone unnoticed until 2017, when Apache finally released a patch. Until they installed the patch, the tens of thousands of companies that used Struts—including banks and government agencies—were hackable. Yet Equifax didn’t install the patch until two months after Apache released it. Why the delay? According to testimony by Equifax executives before the House Energy and Commerce committee, the problem was twofold: first, the employee whose job it was to report that a patch was necessary didn’t. Second, an error in a software script meant to flag known vulnerabilities in Equifax’s software stack failed.

Response: Yet even if Equifax had tried to install the patch, it wouldn’t have been an easy update. As Ars Technica reported, the patch was difficult to install and could break existing systems, possibly introducing new bugs. That helps explain why, according to the software vendor Sonotype, some 46,557 companies downloaded vulnerable versions of Struts even after the patch came out.


Prompt: Perhaps Equifax’s security procedures were sloppy and its breach completely preventable. Yet it’s easy for me to imagine a future bug with similarly catastrophic consequences that’s not so easy to blame on incompetence. Most complex software today is composite, consisting of interwoven modules written by many different programmers and maybe even many different organizations. The higher these code towers grow, the more difficult it becomes to understand how their various components interact.

Response: Pessimism of the Intellect It’s for this reason that my own bug at OkCupid was so bad. I had written a function that asked the database to give me data that didn’t exist. It should’ve returned an error, stopping the program. But because of a bug in one of my dependencies—the bug I found reading through the code on the day of the crash—my program didn’t error out, but instead kept chugging along as if nothing were wrong. It kept consuming more and more memory, which eventually ate into almost every program running on our servers. That’s why the OkCupid site slowed down to the point of becoming unusable.


Prompt: Perhaps the worst part of figuring out how I’d crashed OkCupid was that I was still too green to know how to fix it. All I could do was sit at my desk twiddling my thumbs in solidarity while my coworkers rebuilt what I’d destroyed. We stayed in the office until 9 PM. From then on, I came to appreciate how unexpectedly far fractures in a system can travel.

Response: “I heard you had an exciting day yesterday,” my boss David said the next morning. Mortified, I was sure I’d be fired. But I wasn’t, and instead I spent the next three months anxiously trying to prove to my coworkers that I wasn’t totally incompetent. I never brought the site down again, perhaps because my code-launching senses were heightened by a PTSD-induced adrenaline rush.


Prompt: Maybe I’m still scarred or just generally pessimistic, but on the whole, I tend to think that all sufficiently large, complex software is prone to this kind of meltdown. It’s almost certainly impossible to prevent all bugs, and since code is composite, it’s even harder to reason about the consequences of those bugs. A successful developer today needs to be as good at writing code as she is at extinguishing that code when it explodes.

Response: The failure of the open-source movement is ultimately a failure of imagination. Let’s back up a bit. When I talk about the “failure” of the open-source movement, I don’t simply mean that systemic underfunding of crucial open-source projects has led to incidents like the Heartbleed saga, whereby a vulnerability in an important software library called OpenSSL undermined the integrity of a large part of the internet. Nor am I referring to the low adoption of open-source software on the consumer side. Those are certainly failures, but they are minor in comparison to the one that looms over the entire movement. Open source’s biggest failure is philosophical. And it is rooted in what we normally think of as open source’s greatest success.


Prompt: In recent decades, open source has proliferated on the production side—how software is developed, deployed, and maintained. Much of the technological infrastructure that underpins our digital world now relies on open-source tooling. We’ve even reached a point where corporations are frequently choosing open-source software over proprietary alternatives. What’s more, they’re publicly extolling its virtues: they’re sponsoring conferences and allowing their developers to work on popular projects. Indeed, many employers now consider past contributions to open-source projects a de facto requirement for getting hired.

Response: So hasn’t the movement succeeded, then? If startups that have built their businesses on open-source software can raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital? If a company like Microsoft, which once positioned itself as the enemy of open source, is now funding key projects? That depends on what you think open source is fundamentally for. For some, open source is about making software less buggy and more robust by widening the pool of possible contributors. For others, it’s about giving users—at least the more technically skilled ones—more control over the software they use. For the most cynical, it’s a way to dupe people into working for free.


Prompt: But I always thought there was something more to open source—something more radical, something worth fighting for. Free as in Freedom For me, the best parts of the open-source movement were always the remnants of the “free software movement” from which it evolved. During the early days of the movement in the 1980s, best captured by Richard Stallman’s book Free Software, Free Society, there were no corporate conferences featuring branded lanyards and sponsored lunches. Instead, it was all about challenging the property rights that had granted software companies so much power in the first place. Stallman himself was possibly the movement’s best-known evangelist, traveling around the world to preach about software freedom and the evils of applying patent law to code.

Response: Stallman lent the movement an unorthodox, anti-establishment tone. He framed the argument for free software in moral terms, positioning it as not only technically but ethically superior to proprietary software, which he saw as a “social problem.” And he practiced what he preached: in his personal life, Stallman went to great lengths to avoid using proprietary software, even to the point of not owning a cell phone.


Prompt: But it wasn’t until the free software movement shed its rebellious roots and rebranded as the more business-friendly “open-source movement” that it really took off. One of the most crucial figures in this effort was Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who built his business empire by identifying the pieces of the free software movement that could be commodified. Suddenly, corporations that had previously considered open source to be dangerously redolent of “communism” were starting to see its value, both as a way of building software and as a recruitment tactic. From there, an entire ecosystem of virtue-signaling opportunities sprang up around the marriage of convenience between the corporate world and open source: conference and hackathon sponsorships, “summers of code,” libraries released under open licenses but funded by for-profit corporations.

Response: If that counts as a victory, however, it was a pyrrhic one. In the process of gaining mainstream popularity, the social movement of “free software”—which rejected the very idea of treating software as intellectual property—morphed into the more palatable notion of “open source” as a development methodology, in which free and proprietary software could happily co-exist. The corporations that latched onto the movement discovered a useful technique for developing software, but jettisoned the critique of property rights that formed its ideological foundation.


Prompt: Yet it was precisely the weakness of that foundation that made the free software movement vulnerable to co-optation in the first place. The movement’s greatest limitation was its political naivete. Even as it attacked the idea of software as property, it failed to connect its message to a wider analysis that acknowledged the role of property rights within a capitalist framework. Free software pioneers like Stallman tended to approach the issue from an individualized perspective, drawn from the 1970s-1980s hacker culture that many of them came from: if you could change how enough hackers wrote and used software, you could change the world. This highly personalized model of social change proposed an individual solution to a structural problem, which necessarily neglected the wider social context.

Response: Still, it’s not entirely fair to blame the founders of free software for having their movement hijacked. They were facing difficult odds: the neoliberal consensus of the last few decades has meant that the benefits of technological development have largely flowed to corporations, under the aegis of a strong intellectual property regime. As the free software movement came up against these prevailing economic forces, its more contentious aspects were watered down or discarded. The result was “open source”: a more collaborative method of writing software that bore few traces of its subversive origins.


Prompt: Which is a shame, because the movement had the potential to be so much more. Free software arose out of the desire to decommodify data, to contest the idea of treating information as property. Of course, the movement’s ability to fulfill this desire was hampered by a lack of political analysis and historical context. Crucially, free software advocates neglected to recognize information as simply the latest battlefield in a centuries-old story of capital accumulation, as capital discovers new engines of profit-making and new areas of our common life to enclose. Still, there was something there: glimmers of a recognition that property is the enemy of freedom.

Response: How to Set Software Free Recently, it feels like we’ve reached a turning point when it comes to public sentiment about tech.  More and more people are questioning the power that technology companies have over our lives, our economies, and our democracies. Pundits and politicians are casting about frantically for solutions: better regulation; a code of ethics for engineers, more diverse workforces. Unfortunately, these are mostly window-dressing solutions that don’t address the imbalance of power at the root of the problem. But maybe a more radical approach was there all along, hiding in plain sight, within the history of tech itself.


Prompt: In his 2004 book The Hacker Manifesto, media theorist McKenzie Wark coins the term “vectoralist class” to refer to those who profit from commodifying information. This process is enforced by intellectual property restrictions to prevent sharing, resulting in an artificial scarcity of a non-scarce good. Given that property rights originally developed under conditions of scarcity, it feels somewhat odd, from a consumer perspective, to apply those same rights to non-scarce goods which can be replicated at zero marginal cost. As a result, initiatives for “digital rights management” are typically unpopular among the public, straining consumer expectations of ownership by imposing restrictions on what you can do with the songs, movies, or e-books you have paid for.

Response: There is a tension, then, between what makes sense to consumers and what is required by capital, as strong intellectual property regimes are needed to secure profits for the vectoralist class despite their unpopularity among users. The standard justification for this state of affairs is that it’s the only way to ensure that content creators can make a living. But this merely deploys content creators as a human shield to distract from the sheer unnaturalness of this extremely lucrative system, one in which the bulk of the profits are accruing to corporations, not content creators.


Prompt: Fortunately, there is an alternative. You can see the beginnings of it in commons-based movements like open access journals, Creative Commons licensing, and open-source software, which Wark calls the “gift economy.” These movements have flourished partly because they correlate with the common-sense idea that “information wants to be free,” and despite their limitations, they still hint at a deeper revelation. As Wark writes: …the vectoralist class quite rightly sees in the gift a challenge not just to its profits but to its very existence. The gift economy is the virtual proof for the parasitic and superfluous nature of vectoralists as a class.

Response: Seen in that vein, the radical undertones of open source didn’t just come out of nowhere, and they’re not unique to software. Instead, open source is simply a response to the very real contradictions that abound when property rights are applied to information. Where it fails is by offering an easy way out—by creating a microcosm, itself commodified, that suspends intellectual property conventions on a small scale, without ever presenting a viable alternative to the wider intellectual property regime required under capitalism.


Prompt: Perhaps it’s time to move beyond the corporate-friendly veneer of the open-source movement and resurrect its free software roots, paired with an understanding of the broader economic context. The gift economy, of which the open source movement is a crucial part, shows us that property rights are not necessary for driving innovation, and so there is no need for the vectoralist class—no need for the pantheon of technology corporations that attempt to commodify every aspect of our lives in order to enrich a select few. We should try to imagine a world without them, in which the technologies that shape our common life belong to us in common, and are harnessed for the purpose of benefiting society and not hoarding wealth.

Response: The biggest obstacle to building such a world is the question of how contributors will get paid, and it’s one that frequently comes up in the open-source software world today. If contributors are unable to sell their code, how can they make a living? The solution isn’t to sweep this under the rug by assuming contributors will have other sources of income—that’ll only produce a contributor ecosystem that amplifies the demographic biases of the wider economy. A more compelling vision, grounded in a materialist analysis of the conditions of production, would be a world where no one needs to get paid for these contributions because their material needs are taken care of through other means.


Prompt: Now, this isn’t exactly a small project—it would require a complete reimagining of the relations of production. The only way to set information “free” is to restructure the economy such that information production can be free, with contributors no longer needing to get paid for their work because crucial goods like housing, transport and food are available as free public services. In other words, truly decommodifying information will require decommodifying the things we need to survive in order to produce that information. To make markets less dominant in software, we must make them less dominant everywhere else.

Response: Luxurious Code This is why the struggle to set information free is not just a technical matter—it has to involve a broader political struggle. The challenges faced by the original free software movement are merely the tip of the iceberg. If you take the core tenets of free software to their logical conclusion, you end up with a desire to reverse all kinds of commodification by transforming property rights in their entirety. As a result, today’s open source communities have the potential to serve as gateways to a more radical politics, one that pushes for the decommodification of not just information but also the material resources needed to sustain the production of information.


Prompt: What’s needed, then, is a leap of faith: from feeling gratitude towards corporations for funding open-source projects to questioning why we allow these corporations to amass the wealth that enables them to do so in the first place. What’s needed is a movement to resist the commodification of information in all its forms—whether that’s software, content, or using personal data to increase product sales through targeted advertising—and diminishing the power of these corporate giants in the process.

Response: The open-source movement could—and should—be more than just another way to develop code. Fulfilling its radical potential will involve expanding the scope of the movement by linking it with a broader struggle for decommodification. This will require a massive political battle, challenging not just individual corporations and institutions but the neoliberal state itself.


Prompt: Ultimately, there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between the idea of free information and the existence of corporations that profit from its commodification. The battle to make information free is the battle for an entirely different world, one characterized by public luxury—an abundance of commons, and a corresponding dearth of parasitic corporations extracting rent by enclosing ones and zeroes. The open-source movement opens a crack in the economic edifice, but only a small one; if it wants to be anything more, it’ll need to embrace a bolder vision for reclaiming the commons. Only then can it reclaim its long-buried emancipatory soul.

Response: Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic located in Central Asia, does not have a long history of nationhood. It does not have a long history of the peaceful transfer of power either. After gaining its independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan saw its first two presidents ousted from power by riots in 2005 and 2010. That’s why the 2017 presidential election was historic: for the first time, power was peacefully transferred from one popularly elected president to another. This was not only a first for Kyrgyzstan, but for the entire ex-Soviet region of Central Asia.


Prompt: Even so, the elections were fraught with controversy. While their outcome wasn’t predetermined, they weren’t free from foul play either. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe issued a report that described voter intimidation, vote-buying, and government pressure on local journalists. Human Rights Watch pointed to defamation cases brought against independent media outlets, as well as restrictions on public gatherings at central locations.

Response: These incidents are representative of a broader culture of corruption in Kyrgyzstan. While Kyrgyzstan is a poor country, with gross national income per capita of $1,100 in 2016, vast sums of money are being laundered on their way to offshore accounts. In one period, from January to July 2005, these transactions totaled a staggering $6 billion. The shady businesses involved in these deals thrive on the blurring of lines between organized crime, industry, and government. Corruption is so endemic in Kyrgyzstan, in fact, that it isn’t merely an issue but a whole mode of governance. The scholar Johan Engvall calls the Kyrgyz state an investment market, where people run for public office because it is profitable.


Prompt: The profitability of political power in Kyrgyzstan is why those who possess it will deploy any number of dirty tricks to hold onto it. One of these is the use of so-called “administrative resources” to promote the government’s preferred candidate. These include a range of tactics, from putting pressure on civil servants to hiring groups of men to intimidate voters at polling stations. Buying votes with cash is also common. While vote-buying is available to every candidate, the government has access to greater funds and greater manpower, and enjoys a layer of protection from the judiciary.

Response: In the 2017 election, however, corruption also came in a newly digital form. Former prime minister Sooronbay Jeenbekov, the ruling elite’s chosen candidate, won the race in part through an unfair advantage he gained by accessing voters’ private data. The scandal became popularly known as “Samaragate,” after the name of the site that hosted Jeenbekov’s system for tracking and influencing voters.


Prompt: In a country where corruption is deeply embedded in government structures, Jeenbekov’s move came as no surprise. Still, his use of data to swing the election adds an interesting twist to a familiar theme. The story of Samaragate is a cautionary tale of how data can be manipulated for anti-democratic ends—a story that resonates far beyond Kyrgyzstan.

Response: Data for Votes The story of Samaragate begins in September 2017, a month prior to the election, when an obscure website called samara.kg began managing the private data of Kyrgyz citizens. Formerly owned by a real estate agency, the site migrated to a government-owned server that month, a fact which was confirmed by the famous computer scientist Paul Vixie. And this server contained detailed information on about two million Kyrgyz citizens, including biometrical data, passport numbers, and personal tax reference numbers—out of a total population of only six million.


Prompt: A day before the election, an anonymous hacktivist who goes by the handle “suppermario12” hacked into the samara.kg server. Suppermario12 moved the domain to their own server, so that anyone who tried to access the site for the next ten hours saw a video that explained the mechanics of how Jeenbekov was using samara.kg to influence the outcome of the election. They also leaked information gathered from the server to journalists at several local news outlets, including the site Kloop.kg, which ran an extensive investigative report.

Response: How did the samara.kg system work? Previously, so-called “campaigners” had to go door-to-door to buy votes. Often, jaded Kyrgyz citizens would take the cash regardless of whether they were actually registered to vote. Samara.kg helped campaigners eliminate this problem by making it easier to check someone’s eligibility to vote. Since 2015 only citizens who have submitted their biometrical data can vote in Kyrgyzstan. Samara.kg had a copy of all this data, which campaigners used to ensure that the votes they were buying were genuine. Samara.kg also tracked which voters had already voted, preventing citizens from selling their vote multiple times.


Prompt: The ruling elite built samara.kg to get Jeenbekov elected, and he remains in power. Still, the fallout from the scandal may come back to haunt the government. Rinat Tuhvatshin, executive director of Kloop Media, who was summoned and questioned by Kyrgyz security services for three hours for his team’s investigation into Samaragate, is convinced of it. If the country’s current leadership is pushed out, a new round of leaders may use Samaragate “as some sort of leverage against people who were formerly in power… [S]ome new president will say: ‘Ok, what do we have on Samara? Let’s use it against our predecessors.’” Medet Tiulegenov, a professor of international and comparative politics at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, says the scandal’s implications are even broader. The samara.kg story “has wide ramifications for democratic development in Kyrgyzstan,” he says. Biometrics were supposed to strengthen the integrity of elections. Instead, they have been used to undermine it: The country has developed electoral procedures that minimize electoral fraud mostly due to the introduction of biometric identification of voters and voting with electronic scanners. Samaragate, however, puts in question this achievement. Moreover, a new challenge to civil society might be the difficulty of tracking and monitoring possible manipulations of electoral data in the future.

Response: Digital Distortion Samaragate is just one example of how technology can warp elections, especially in fragile democracies. There are many more cases—most of which will not make it into local news, much less receive global attention—of governments in poor countries using technology to distort the democratic process—not only in Central Asia but in countries like the Philippines, Myanmar, and Cambodia. And these cases are unlikely to be addressed in any meaningful way.


Prompt: In the Philippines, for example, Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016 in large part due to his groundbreaking Facebook campaign. Since becoming president, he has used the same platform to manipulate public opinion with “fake news” and crack down on critics, including journalist Maria Ressa. Ressa has urged Mark Zuckerberg to address the issue. Instead, in November 2017, Facebook announced a partnership with the Duterte government to build underwater cables for high-speed internet.

Response: Biometric data raises additional concerns. Several countries, including the Philippines, Venezuela, and Iraq, already connect bank accounts and voter registration to biometrics. It is impossible to guarantee that states will not misuse this data as the Kyrgyz government did. And electoral interference is likely to be the least of it—biometrics have the potential to greatly increase a government’s ability to surveil and repress its citizens. To take one example, China is currently collecting biometric data on everyone aged twelve to sixty-five in the region of Xinjiang.


Prompt: In the United States, revelations about surveillance, fake news, and Russian influence are finally starting a public conversation about the dark side of technology. The European Union is implementing a comprehensive privacy law to protect the personal data of its citizens. Yet, while these initiatives are important and should be pursued, citizens in lesser developed nations are often overlooked and excluded from the global discussion about digital rights. If technology is to be democratic, it should work in everyone’s interests, not only those who happen to live in rich countries.

Response: Did you just work a particularly shitty shift at Walmart? Visit walmart-blows.com to vent about your boss. Had an especially crappy experience flying United? Go to Untied.com to blow off some steam. This was the promise of the “gripe site,” a fixture of an earlier era of the web. Often using the format CompanyName-sucks.com, gripe sites allowed people to anonymously complain about companies. Nowadays, gripe sites are digital refuse. Their old URLs lead to 404s or ancient HTML pages. Indeed, the very idea of having a website dedicated to griping about a single company feels antiquated in an age where we have websites like Yelp, Glassdoor, Twitter, and Facebook to meet our griping needs.


Prompt: But the rise and fall of gripe sites are an important chapter in the history of the internet. Gripe sites were far more than a place to complain. Rather, they offered a lively, anonymous outlet for consumers and workers to criticize corporate power, and even to organize against it. As a result, they faced an onslaught of attacks from companies. Gripe sites were the flashpoint for intense legal and regulatory battles—battles that boiled down to a confrontation between two conflicting visions of the internet’s purpose. Who owns the internet, and what is it for? This was the core question in the war over gripe sites, and one that remains no less urgent today.

Response: Talking Shit In 2004 there were around 7,800 .com websites that included company names and derisive slang verbs like “sucks” or “blows.” They were so popular in the early 2000s that Forbes even published several annual “Top Corporate Hate Websites” articles, ranking gripe sites on criteria like “ease of use, frequency of updates, number of posts, hostility level, relevance, and entertainment value.” Where did all these sites come from? Gripe site founders were often motivated by specific grievances. The creator of WalMart-Blows.com said he created it because he was “pissed off at Wal-Mart… for their crappy customer service and for treating their employees like s–t.” Bradley Jones ran a Radio Shack for seven years and launched his gripe site, RadioShackSucks.com, after suing the company for refusing to renew his contract and opening up a competing franchise down the street from his location.


Prompt: These gripers felt that the existing institutional routes for redress weren’t effective. By making their complaints public, they hoped to shame the company into making improvements or, at the very least, find solace in sharing their irritation with others. And it turned out that many people did share their irritation—especially workers. The single most active group of gripers were the company’s employees themselves. They gathered on gripe sites to commiserate about how much their job sucked—anonymously and out of earshot of the boss. This was especially useful for workers who worked different shifts or at different franchise locations. Gripe sites brought these atomized workers together. It functioned as an online water cooler that facilitated candid conversations about their workplace conditions.

Response: Moreover, these conversations often touched on the need for collective action to improve their situation. Talk of labor rights dominated gripe sites, especially those of major retail and food service companies like McDonald’s, Lowes, and Walmart. On Walmart-Blows.com, the most frequented forum was the “Employee Department,” where popular threads bore titles like “Unionization,” “Piss Poor Wages?,” and “1-800 Sick Call.” As gripe sites became places for worker empowerment, however, bosses came to see them as a threat and discouraged their employees from using them. As one user on RadioShackSucks.com claimed, “My boss threatened to fire me if I ever went on this site. He said the DO [District Office] would do it, no questions asked.” Sticks and Stones Management was right to fear gripe sites. They could hurt companies in very concrete ways.


Prompt: In 2004, a group of store managers brought a class action lawsuit against RadioShack for failing to pay them overtime. Both RadioShack and the law firm representing the underpaid employees recognized the role that RadioShackSucks.com played in quickly encouraging 3,300 current or former employees to join. RadioShackSucks.com even linked to the site of the law firm, encouraging visitors to see if they were eligible for the suit.

Response: Labor unions latched onto the gripe site model as well. UNITE HERE and the Teamsters targeted the anti-union company Cintas with a website called CintasExposed.org. Recognizing gripe sites’ ability to bring workers and consumers together, the unions encouraged Cintas clients to vent about their bad experiences—“Tell your Cintas story”—and read through experiences posted by others. The site also described how clients could file complaints against Cintas and cancel their contracts with the company.


Prompt: But gripe sites didn’t need to help mobilize lawsuits and consumer campaigns in order to hurt companies. They could also make corporations sweat merely by existing. From a branding perspective, gripe sites were a nightmare. Much of a company’s value is based on their brand’s reputation. On the web, however, almost anyone could register a domain name and build a website that damaged that reputation. Every post by gripers served to chip away at a company’s brand—and by extension its profits.

Response: The Empire Strikes Back As companies recognized the danger of gripe sites, they developed an arsenal of tactics to fight back. The first step was usually to hire a cyber-monitoring firm. These companies would trawl through websites to look for threats to a client’s reputation. Once they found a damaging website, the client’s law firm would send the site’s owner a cease-and-desist letter.


Prompt: The letters typically claimed several serious violations and demanded that the site be taken down to avoid a lawsuit. It is unknown how many sites folded at this point. Most gripe site owners had neither the time nor the money to conduct an intense legal fight. But many of them were up for a battle, and even posted the cease-and-desist letters to their site for fellow gripers to laugh about.

Response: If the company took the gripe site owner to court, they would usually bring hundreds of pages of “evidence” claiming several legal violations in the hopes that one would stick. The three most common claims were libel, trademark violation, and cybersquatting. This technique of aggressive litigating deployed by companies is a textbook example of a SLAPP. A SLAPP is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation and, as the name suggests, SLAPPs are designed to silence critics by forcing them to focus their time and money on legal defense.


Prompt: A few states have tried to pass laws to curb SLAPPs, but it is difficult to demonstrate that a lawsuit is a SLAPP since companies rarely explicitly state that their intentions are to intimidate. This difficulty is compounded in the case of anti-gripe site SLAPPs, since courts take trademark laws very seriously and are unlikely to see suits as frivolous. Equipped with trademark laws, companies were able to—at least temporarily—rein in criticism through long and expensive lawsuits.

Response: Yet despite the significant legal firepower that corporations assembled, courts would often end up siding with the owner of the gripe site. Sometimes these suits could even backfire, as a company’s attempt to silence criticism led to increased attention for the gripe site. This was the case with ihateryanair.co.uk, a gripe site devoted to RyanAir. After a British court ruled that it had to be taken down, its owner transferred its contents to ihateryanair.org, a “generic top-level domain” (gTLD) not under British jurisdiction.


Prompt: To forgo this game of cat-and-mouse, as well as the legal fees associated with filing all those lawsuits, companies eventually turned to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a US-based nonprofit that oversees the Domain Name System (DNS). In fact, ICANN’s controversial Trademark Clearinghouse has given corporations their most powerful weapon in their war against gripe sites.

Response: Companies can submit their trademarks to the Clearinghouse, which will then deter the registration of domain names that come too close to those trademarks. If someone tries to register a domain name with a gTLD like .com, .org, or .net that contains words linked to someone’s entry in the Trademark Clearinghouse—GoogleSucks.com, for example—then they will receive a warning that discourages them from continuing. The trademark holder will also be notified. ICANN doesn’t currently block such registrations entirely, but establishing a mechanism for doing so remains a high-priority item for industry.


Prompt: In 2015, ICANN released the new .sucks gTLD, creating an exciting opportunity to reinvigorate gripe sites. However, this potential was quickly squelched by ICANN’s Trademark Clearinghouse, which broadly prevented anyone but the companies themselves from registering domain names under the .sucks gTLD that contained their trademarks. Many companies took advantage of the opportunity to buy up their .sucks domain: for example, Apple.sucks redirects to their feedback page.

Response: ICANN has proven a very effective ally for corporations seeking to silence critical speech. With ICANN’s help, corporations can neutralize gripe sites by preventing them from ever being registered in the first place. Commodify Your Gripe Today, many are rightfully pessimistic about the internet’s ability to serve emancipatory politics. But the story of gripe sites reveals a forgotten kernel of emancipatory potential. By enlisting ICANN to protect their brands, however, companies eroded that potential—and an opportunity for democratic dissent, not to mention labor and consumer organizing, was lost.


Prompt: In her book No Logo, Naomi Klein reflected on early instances of anti-gripe site lawsuits along with other forms of what she called “copyright and trademark harassment.” She wrote that the underlying message behind these suits was “that culture is something that happens to you… It is not something in which you participate, or to which you have the right to respond.” Gripe sites present us with a lost moment in the history of the internet when people had the power to critically respond to companies on platforms they managed themselves—and companies told them to shut up.

Response: We now have many more opportunities to gripe on social media. But platforms like Yelp and Facebook and Twitter are owned and managed by corporations, not by users. When we criticize United Airlines on Facebook, we are making money for Facebook. Online griping has been monetized and defanged. We can complain more freely than ever before—but only because our complaints generate value for a handful of big companies. It’s never been easier to talk shit, because it’s never been more lucrative to let us do so.


Prompt: The metaphors we use to describe the internet matter. In the 1990s, as the internet gained steam in the United States, one metaphor reigned supreme: “the information superhighway.” Bill Gates, for one, wasn’t a fan. “The highway metaphor isn’t quite right,” he wrote in 1995. It put too much emphasis on infrastructure—the material stuff and institutions that make the internet work. It evoked governments and implied that they should have a hand in maintaining it.

Response: “A metaphor I prefer,” Gates continued, “is the market.” The internet wasn’t a highway at all, he argued, but more like the New York Stock Exchange—a supposedly self-organizing system generated by individuals pursuing their own interests. It would facilitate “friction-free capitalism” and realize the dream of Adam Smith’s “ideal market.” Since 1995, this laissez-faire vision of the internet has helped produce our digital world. Generations of digital capitalists embraced the internet and found innumerable ways to monetize its growth: selling access, leveraging its reach to move goods, marketing gadgets to tap into it more easily. Recently, however, digital capitalism has coalesced around one business model in particular: data extraction. Social media, search engines, and email accounts come for free in exchange for personal data that the platforms monetize.


Prompt: This data has been called “the new oil.” It’s an apt metaphor for the tech industry, in the sense that data is a lucrative and highly speculative commodity. It’s even more appropriate when you consider the many crises produced by oil. What tradeable thing is more politically fraught, has launched more wars, or inflicts greater ecological damage? The oil metaphor, much like Gates’s vision of the internet as a free market, restricts our imagination about what the internet could be. We need metaphors that center the internet’s role as a commons, and emphasize not merely its technical organization but its political and economic underpinnings.

Response: One possibility is the utility. What if we saw platforms, internet service providers, and other critical components of the network as utilities? What if we treated them as critical infrastructures—similar to the systems that provide our electricity, our water, and our public transit? What if we organized them as institutions outside of the market, subject to democratic rule and public accountability? This idea has been gaining traction recently, but it’s not new. In fact, the “information utility” has a long history, one that predates not just Gates’s laissez-faire internet, but the internet itself. That history offers valuable lessons for today, as a rising tide of public anger towards the tech industry creates new opportunities for imagining a radically different digital future.


Prompt: When the Utility Was the Future In 1964, the MIT business school professor Martin Greenberger wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The Computers of Tomorrow.” Greenberger was part of a generation of management thinkers writing in the early 1960s who foresaw the importance of the computer to the American economy. He believed that computing power could soon become as ubiquitous as electrical power, driven by a new technology he had seen firsthand at MIT called “time-sharing.” In the 1960s, computers came in the form of “mainframes”: enormous room-size machines. The innovation of time-sharing was that it divided the computing resources of a single mainframe among multiple terminals, which could be located in a single lab, or linked up miles away. This enabled multiple users to use the same computer simultaneously. We tend to associate “personal” computing with microprocessors: smaller chips that made desk-scale, individually owned and operated computers possible. But throughout the 1960s, the spread of interactive and user-oriented computing was associated with a utility model made possible through time-sharing.

Response: Utility computing exploded in the second half of the decade. Some companies sold dial-in access to data storage and programming environments. Others, including large providers like General Electric, offered on-demand services like ready-made programs for accounting, financial planning, and project management. Meanwhile, railroads, airlines, and financial institutions that had bought expensive mainframes for their own purposes sold “spare” time in regional secondary markets.


Prompt: This utility model made computing far more accessible to businesses. Because buying or renting a mainframe was so costly, few firms could afford them. With time-sharing, companies could suddenly buy computing time by the hour rather than rent a $300,000 per year machine from IBM. By the end of the 1960s, the utility model as an idea was pervasive. Some predicted it wouldn’t be long until even households would subscribe to these on-demand computer services. Dialing in from a small desktop terminal, users would store data, word process, and communicate without owning any of the actual hardware to do it.

Response: So when Greenberger wrote about the information utility, he wasn’t imagining some wholly new technology of the future—he was proposing a change to the technology of the present. The computer utilities of his day remained private and largely regional. Greenberger wanted a different kind of utility, one that was both public and national.


Prompt: Greenberger was no radical: his information utility was to serve “free enterprise,” the banking sector, and the financial markets. Computers were to function as infrastructure for the flow of capital. Once computers were ubiquitous, he envisioned, the work of determining credit-worthiness, setting the Federal Reserve interest rate, and supervising stock markets would become the domain of computer systems.

Response: The computer infrastructure Greenberger imagined embodied the politics of mid-century liberalism. He wanted to build a digital system that could modernize industry, and fulfill the fantasy of a harmonized, technocratically managed national economy. Still, he envisioned computing as a commons under public control. Such a utility couldn’t be left in the hands of an unregulated monopoly. It demanded robust oversight for the same reasons that any capital-intensive utility did: because only regulation could guarantee universal access, keep costs fair, and ensure the infrastructure was maintained.


Prompt: Community Infrastructure Elsewhere, the possibilities of the utility sparked a more revolutionary aspiration: to create information services that supported communities and social movements, rather than businesses and markets. This was the dream at ONE, an experimental urban community founded in 1970 in San Francisco. Its members were artists and technical workers; largely college-educated, white, and in their late twenties. As an early prospectus for the community noted, their generation had come of age at a time when the demand for skilled labor seemed infinite. They emphasized the “utilization of industrial surplus,” a surplus that Cold War America was producing a lot of: armies of technical workers and warehouses full of computing machines.

Response: ONE happily gathered both in support of their fledgling community. Among the haul: a surplus XDS-940 mainframe from the San Francisco-based insurance conglomerate Trans-America. The XDS was tailor-made for utility computing—for being shared among users through time-sharing. Soon, the communalists of ONE put the machine to work on a number of projects, including a system called Community Memory. Coming online in August 1973, Community Memory functioned as a digital bulletin board for the Bay Area. It consisted of a teletype terminal on the third floor of Leopold’s Records in Berkeley that anyone could come in and use. The machine used a modem to connect to the XDS over a phone line, and users could enter commands to add or retrieve listings: “ADD” to contribute text, or “FIND” to search for it. Responses would then come back over the phone line and get printed out on the teletype printer.


Prompt: Community Memory anticipated many of the uses of the contemporary internet. People organized carpools, bands advertised gigs, and poets “published” their verse. In this respect, it resembled an early form of social media. But it was also a tool for community organizing. Like other radical computing groups in Chicago and Boston, ONE wanted to tap computing power for social ends: to build databases to support community activism and to research the arrangements of corporate and political power.

Response: Indeed, Community Memory was “inescapably political,” declared ONE member Michael Rossman at a 1975 conference. “Its politics,” he continued, “are concerned with people’s power—their power with respect to the information useful to them, their power with respect to the technology of information (hardware and software both).” What was revolutionary about the ONE experiment was what Rossman called its “operational politics”: that it provided computing as a public service. The democratizing possibilities of computing were inseparable from its political economy. It didn’t extract economic rent from the information utility but rather treated it as a social good—as a people’s utility.


Prompt: Collective Memory During the mid-1970s, computing underwent a rapid change. The availability of inexpensive microprocessors like the Intel 8080 helped spur a hobbyist hacking community interested in building smaller, more “personal” computers. The mainframe and the time-sharing system didn’t die with the rise of personal computing, but its centrality to the imagined future of computing—along with the politics of the information utility—faded away.

Response: In popular histories of computing, personal computers often seem like an inevitable conclusion. The model of a single-user, privately owned device became so dominant that utility computing of the time-sharing era came to seem like an aberration—a strange detour that never amounted to much. Yet more recent scholarship reveals the importance of that detour to our digital present. The historian Joy Lisi Rankin has shown how people organized around time-shared devices in schools and universities inspired the first conceptions of computing as a socially minded and community-oriented activity. The scholar Tung-Hui Hu sees the return of the old utility model in modern cloud computing.


Prompt: Still, something was lost with the rise of personal computing. One clue comes from a 1978 article by the leftist tech activist group Boston Computer Collective. Writing in the radical science magazine Science for the People, they took aim at the hollowness of the personal computing revolution, reviewing Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines, a widely circulated book celebrating that revolution.

Response: Making computers more widespread would not “pave the way towards a just society,” they argued. Smaller machines would not mean more personal power and less corporate control. “We cannot accept Nelson’s implication that a small computer must come from a relatively small manufacturer,” they wrote, “or that this supposedly small corporation will therefore hold public interest over profits.” Nor could they accept the idea that “hypermedia” and “individualized” instruction would improve the conditions of education; rather, it would likely lead to more “individualized control and standardization.” In subsequent decades, their critiques seem to have proven correct. Decentralization and personalization—watchwords of the personal computing and internet era—did not automatically serve as forces for liberation. Rather they were something of a Trojan horse: a way of making computer technology so intimate that it brought profit-making and corporate power into every aspect of our lives.