Let’s talk about how I did this, why I wanted to, and what happened.

The first thing I did was unfollow hella dudes. Mostly these were men who I don’t remember following and never posted, or people who I was following merely out of politeness’ sake, or because they were “industry luminaries” and had a reputation for being smart (which was rarely the case, I found).

The next thing I did was go through my follow list and find women whose opinions I respected or I thought were funny. Then I looked at the women that they retweeted and followed them without worrying too deeply about what they would post (or not). I figured that I could always unfollow later if their posts were distasteful or annoying or useless.

(Spoiler: I have unfollowed exactly zero of these women.)

My goal was to reach a ratio of 60/30/10 of Women/Dudes/Brands in my feed. I don’t mean this ratio applied to my “follow list”, which is a useless method, but instead to apply to the “posts I was seeing”.

(I managed to hit this ratio, but it’s actually more like 60/30/5/5 Women/Dudes/Brands/Dogs.)

Why did I want to do this? It’s based on a thing I tell all my students: Listen to music you don’t like or know.

Are you a metal head? Give Taylor Swift a spin. Listen to R&B? Try some Johnny Cash. Love country? Try some Godspeed you! Black Emperor!. Get out of your comfort zone. Hear tones you’re not used to. Listen to someone else’s story.

If you stay in one place mentally you will lay down roots. This will make you inflexible and slow. You will have fewer tools. So always seek out things you don’t know anything about and do what you can to experience them.

A lot of my life’s biggest changes have started from small changes like that. I am a big believer in will-to-power. About 30 years ago, I was a dumb teenager and depressed about something stupid, and I remember saying, “I want to change stuff but I don’t know how.” My friend Mike said, “Dude, just change your brand of cigarettes. Switch from Marlboro to Winston for a while. If you don’t like it, switch back.” I did this, and it worked: the small alteration in my routine had a larger butterfly effect.

(Man, can you believe I used to smoke cigarettes? What a world.)

When faced with a daunting task, small accomplishments lend vigor to your motivation and encourage you to do even more. A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a step, that sort of thing.

Want to expand your mind? Start with something manageable. Listen to music you aren’t familiar with. Change the layout of the furniture in your apartment. Change your brand of shampoo. Something. Make a change.

Making small changes makes leveraging larger changes easier.

I wanted to change my perspective. It was inadequate. I needed to see different points of view. I made a change.

So what happened?

First, I feel smarter. I know more today than I did a year ago.

I feel that I am better informed generally, but specifically about my industry and hobbies and their politics. A large part of this has to do with the way that men and women share knowledge.

Dude programmers and designers (including myself – I am not an innocent) share knowledge like this: “Check out this thing I wrote about $TOPIC.” Women programmers and designers share knowledge like this: “I learned a bunch of stuff about $TOPIC and I think you may find this useful.”

There’s an implication in this: Men are seeking recognition; women are seeking knowledge transfer (sadly, this this is often worded in a way that seeks permission to enact knowledge transfer). It’s a fascinating distinction.

Further: dudes, as a whole, do NOT hold nuanced opinions. I count myself in this group. I am very much a “this is the line” type of person, very black-and-white, especially when it comes to issues of justice. When you hear nothing but black-and-white opinions, your opinions tend to be black-and-white. That’s sub-optimal.

I dropped some really awful dude journalists (<cough>Glenn Greenwald</cough>) and for each one of them I followed two female journalists. I tried to skew towards more conservative journalists when possible to counteract my natural bias. I feel that this gives me a more informed, smarter opinion about politics. It definitely keeps me thinking.

Second, I’m happier. Oh man, I’m so much happier these days. A huge part of that is that Female Twitter (ugh, I hate these terms) is generally more supportive.

Let me rephrase. Not “generally more supportive”; I mean “absolutely more supportive”.

The small encouragements I get make me feel good. Even seeing someone give encouragement to someone else makes me feel good. This causes me to want to encourage others to feel good as well. It’s a virtuous cycle; the same cycle I banked heavily on when I designed the “thanks” system for Wikipedia.

A real-life side-effect that this has had in my life is that I respond to people’s posts on Facebook and Twitter with way more likes/favorites/smiles/prides/whatevers. I didn’t use to do that; now I do. I like spreading encouragement.

Another way that I am smarter is due to less raw anger in my feed. There’s less entitlement. Less shouting. There’s not always less “outrage”; there’s still plenty of that. But the outrage is tempered. More thoughtful.

Third, I think I’m funnier. Dudes, lemme tellya, women are funnier than we are. They just are.

The funny women I follow challenge my own comedy. They make me work harder for my laughs and, interestingly, they make me want to improve the calibre of my audience. It’s great.

Fourth, I’m calmer. I feel much more in control of my emotions and my responses to them.

Part of this has again to do with having less I AM STRAIGHT MAIL TESTOSTRNE GAH in my ear all day. Part of this is because women tend to talk with a more emotional language, which helps me to identify my own emotions. Being able to identify your emotions helps you get control over them.

The biggest part, though, is the presence of more nuanced opinions. Hardline outrage feeds itself, getting louder with each cycle. That’s unnerving and it fills the mind with itself. While I am a Creature of Rage, constantly being filled with Rage is a less useful tool than one would think. Rage requires a single-mindedness that is defeated by nuance.

Fifth, I have more empathy. I understand more people better.

There’s another benefit of following people who are different from you. Say you find an account run by a woman of color. About half of what she posts is interesting or related to your industry but the other half is personal shit, stuff you won’t care about, make-up and hair tips? Follow her anyway and you’ll level up your Empathy score.

You’ll pick up a lot of ambient awareness about different parts of our culture. You will learn some glory and some heartbreak from this ambient awareness. For example, I will never, ever have the problems with my hair that black women do. I just won’t. Learning about relaxer and the costs involved in hair weaves seems like something trivial – until you understand it, and then you see it as anything but trivial. Knowing these types of things makes you smarter because you see more of the game board.

I don’t think I could have done this on Facebook, by the way. Twitter allows you to be a passive observer; Facebook invites interaction. Interaction is good! I love interaction. But on Facebook, the echo chambers are too loud. I cannot easily engage in conversation with my conservative friends on either my wall or theirs. This is because there are always the Asshole Donnies. You know the ones I’m talking about, too: they exist only to inject a special brand of stifling idiocy into conversations by calling folk “cuck” or “fascist”. The ones you want to shout “shut the fuck up” at.

So here’s my lesson to you, my young apprentice: Follow more women.

I need to open this entry with a trigger warning. It isn’t possible to talk about defending against harassment without being exposed to it.

That said, here we go.

I strongly believe that I have a duty to try to prevent harm from coming to those who choose to use the things I design. This means that I need to think about the bad parts of the system, which often isn’t very pleasant.

I want to talk about Anita Sarkeesian and the horrible things that have been happening to her over the past years but first I feel like I need to establish some street credentials.

Back in the year 2011, several employees of the Wikimedia Foundation were put up on the site’s yearly fundraising banners. I was one of these people. I was a very successful banner candidate. I’ve written about this experience before but I wasn’t very expansive about the darker side.

Whenever my banner went up for a test run, I could literally feel the internet turn its attention to me like the fucking Eye of Sauron. Hundreds of tweets, LinkedIn views, Facebook posts. Pow, pow, pow. Lots of it was fun and exciting. Some of it was . . . not.

It’s a bit of a bummer to be told by random strangers that you look like a pedophile. Almost especially when they don’t know anything about you.

Back to Anita.

I don’t want to write about Gamergate or the state of the art of misogyny on the internet but I need to provide some context.

Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist game critic. She produces a series of educational videos about how sexism pervades the game industry. She does not, in any way, call for censorship or banning of topics or anything like that. She really only says, “just be aware of what’s happening here and maybe try to do better.”

For these statements, she has been continually bombarded with harassment through every possible means available to trolls on the internet.

In early 2015, she posted a blog entry detailing a single week’s worth of harassment. Scrolling through it is an inexhaustible stream of sewage and hatred. Some of it is ironically self-aware.

Let’s scroll through a miniscule amount of Anita’s harassment.

I dare you to click over and scroll through the full list. See if you can get through Monday.

Anita gets thousands of times more hatred than I ever did. I almost buckled under the weight of the sewage directed at me. I can’t imagine how strong she must be to keep going.

I’ve not been very scientific in my investigations but it appears that only about half of these accounts have been suspended or blocked. Not that such action matters much: these shit-goblins simply create a new anonymous account and let the good times roll again.

This is the face of evil. Beelzebub with the thousand eyes and mouths.

It’s a true failure on Twitter’s part. One they have acknowledged in public but (at the time of this writing) have done nothing to address.

When you design a product without understanding how it will be used for evil, you are designing poorly.

On Trolls

Let’s take a moment to understand the basic mindset of internet trolls. There are, as near as I can tell, three primary motivations that any one troll will have at a time.

Understanding these things will help you defend your users against them.

To Defeat the System

These trolls want to break the system just to break it. To do it for the lulz or the thrill of doing it. The desire to defeat systems (hacking or cracking them) is a deep part of hacker psyche. They aren’t necessarily motivated by evil but they often will open the door for others who are.

These people will find holes in your systems. They do it just to find them. But once they’ve found them, they nearly always share these holes with others.

To Subvert the System

Trolls who subvert a system intend to use it against the spirit of the system. This is often for laughs but sometimes it has very, very dark results.

In 2008, Christopher Poole was elected as the most influential person of 2008 by Time Magazine, beating out Barack Obama, because users of 4chan figured out how to game the voting software. This year’s Hugo Awards have been hijacked because someone figured out how to bend the rules to their favor. No big deal, right? No one is getting hurt, right?

Some horrible people use Secret to disseminate revenge and child porn. Secret’s not a great way to do bulk distribution of child porn, though. Embedding zip archives of this stuff into svg files and uploading them to a site like Flickr or the Wikimedia Commons may be, however. Maybe as large attachments in un-sent emails on any one of a thousand free-to-use web mailers.

To Weaponize the System

This is when your system or design is being used against you or another person in a hostile, damaging manner. This nearly always happens because of “Not Thinking It Through”.

This may not always happen directly in your product, mind. Data leakage may lead to someone being doxxed on another site, which may then lead to a swatting. Or worse.

Consider the proud young parent posting photos of their child at play to Facebook with open privacy settings. Are there things in that photo where a predator could identify the location?

Mitigation Strategies

How can you prevent your product or design or system from being abused? How can you deal with it?

Well, there’s no silver bullet on this. There are a series of strategies you can employ, though. Many will not apply. You will probably need to use multiple ones, each at differing degrees of strength or opacity.

Some of these strategies suck, but I’ll include them for completeness’ sake.

Ignore Everything

Just do jack and shit about it.

This is the worst strategy. You can do it – and some companies appear to remain successful while doing so. This is the way that car companies handle recalls: only deal when there’s sufficient blood on the pavement to affect the bottom line.

I personally find this to be odious and unethical.

Shut it Down

Just prevent anyone from doing it at all. This typically means shutting down your application entirely. It’s often a last-resort solution.

PostSecret had a short-lived application that allowed users to post their own photos and captions. It was pulled when people starting posting porn and gore because there were no features to limit this and there was insufficient moderation to work at scale.

This is not a good mitigation strategy because everyone loses.

Troll Personas

This is a strategy for understanding your weakness. Many design teams create personas for the users they want to service. The customers they want to have. Good personas are often an excellent tool for helping to understand the business needs of your product or market. These personas are almost universally nice, however, and always assume good faith on the part of the persona.

I say to you thus: you must always make at least one “troll” persona. You must learn to think like your enemy. Think about their motivations and how they will subvert your product to aid them.

Limit Feature Strength

This is reducing or intentionally crippling your product in order to protect your users.

Years ago I worked on a site that was intended as a social and games site for children. They wanted to have a chat system. Obviously, we wanted to make sure that foul language wasn’t a part of it.

It would be easy to write a series of regular expressions so that the chat catches and censors Carlin’s magic seven and all variations. It’s not so easy to catch “Hello, little girl, what time do you get out of school?” or “I am going to put you in a wood chipper.”

This is why Nintendo’s chat systems only allow you to pick from canned statements.

Banning Wrongdoers

Very simple. Have a very strong code-of-conduct and brook exactly zero violations. You must be merciless. You must not allow for rules-lawyering. Identify bad-actors and get rid of them.

Wikipedia has some editors who are simply horrible, toxic individuals. The way they conduct themselves and talk to new users drives new users away forever. They are allowed to remain because there is always some bullshit reason why the latest round of bad behavior is “okay”.

This is the type of behavior that creates gender gaps.

Educate Users

You can educate users as to the bad things that could potentially happen and things to prevent risk.

The biggest problem here is that no one wants to read a bunch of snooze-fest documentation. I didn’t join Facebook to have to take a class about it. Sometimes you can put up interstitial dialogs (like an end-user license agreement) but are you ever really sure that the user understands this?

Does the proud parent really understand that the photo of their daughter’s recital they just uploaded is geo-tagged? Did they think about the fact that they took it at the school? Do they really understand what “Friends of friends can see this” means?

Deny Anonymity

Simply prevent people from posting or using the service completely anonymously. Allowing pseudonymity is fine and even great (and recommended). Just make sure that there is a way to tie any activity back to a specific user.

Purely anonymous culture is fairly toxic so you don’t want that anywhere near you. There’s a reason moot stepped down from running 4chan. But you don’t want to force “real names”, either, because that will probably open you up to other scenarios (like dead-naming transexual people).

Access Control Systems

Give users controls over who can contact them and how. This nearly always requires both white and black lists to work along side a default setting.

Livejournal does this very well: my private posts are only readable by those I’ve set as “friends”, and I can even write elaborate rules about posting only to groups, or to specific people.

Facebook has this kind of fine control, too, but it falls apart very quickly. There are too many options and degrees of visibility and the lack of any serious group support makes managing access difficulty.

It should be terribly easy to add someone to a block list. Press-and-hold on a tweet and I can block it in one tap. Blocking someone on Secret, however, requires me to first read the offending secret (which usually contains a photo of gore or revenge porn), report it, and then I can block the user.

Shadow Reputation Systems

This is a great method but it requires a lot of research and technology. You’ll need to instrument everything in your product and identify several patterns of behavior used by your bad actors.

When your system sees someone engaging in these behaviors, you silently and secretly drop them off into the bucket. This is called shadow-banning or hell-banning.

For example, say your product is one that allows your users to rent out extra rooms in their apartments for short-term stays. If a new user joins your site and then their first several actions are to browse exclusively female profiles, you might be able to determine that they really aren’t there for the rooms but instead to creep on women. The system could then silently prevent messages they sent from arriving at their targets and they themselves may never appear in searches.

In order for shadow-bans to work, you cannot allow anonymous access to your site. You must sit behind a log-in wall. The reason is that if the banned user can see that their comments are not being seen, that they are invisible, they will know that they’ve been shadow-banned.

Ask Questions

When all is said and done, when you’ve set your ideas to paper, you have to sit down and ask yourself a very specific question:

How could this feature be exploited to harm someone?

Now, replace the word “could” with the word “will.”

How will this feature be exploited to harm someone?

You have to ask that question. You have to be unflinching about the answers, too.

Because if you don’t, someone else will.

I hated it. I hated every moment of it with a passion and fury that outmatched the heat of a thousand fiery suns.

One day, a famous film critic found it and read it. He then tweeted out a link to this review to his thousands and thousands of followers, with the words “THAT’S what I’m talking about!”

Roger had a thing for “citizen criticism”. He used me as an example of how, in the wake of the death of print journalism, that the job of being a “film critic” was granted to everyone in the age of self-publication.

I was terribly flattered at this.

And then this happened:

Well, shit. “I guess I’d better be interesting,” I thought.

So within the next week I wrote a post about how he was both wrong and right about videogames.

I always liked Roger’s reviews. I liked how he was down to earth, and how abnormally fair his reviews were. He did not compare “Halloween” against “Citizen Kane”; he compared it to “Friday the 13th.” It was fair. He did not believe that you had to have gone to film school in order to understand movies; nay, you simply had to enjoy them.

I like that perspective.

When he got cancer – and moreso after he lost his jaw – something changed within his being. I like to think that he took a long, hard look at his life, what he was doing, what he believed, and what he felt was important – and decided to become a voice for that. His posts took on a humanist, compassionate stance. He was always a bold speaker but now he was boldly standing up for things that were classically outside of the purview of a “mere” film critic.

He was a man filled with truth and righteousness and empathy and courage.

I admire him for that.

And I already miss him.

Those who know me are aware that music – of all kinds – is a big part of my identity. I have a perpetual drum track running in the back of my skull, continual chord sequences firing behind my eyes. Even if there is nothing coming out of the stereo, you can be assured that there is a soundtrack running through my life.

So which twenty-five albums altered me the most? What an interesting question – one that requires me to examine the nooks and crannies of my history.

I wanted to avoid including the same band multiple times. However, there are places where that would be impossible (as the reader will see) and in such cases I have simply noted them in a single entry.

This is in no particular order.

1) Metallica, And Justice for All. Metallica was the sound track for my junior year of high school. This should really be all Metallica albums up to Justice; we sort of listened to all of them in a shuffle and on repeat.

2) The Afghan Whigs, Gentlemen. This album has influenced my own music probably more than any other. I’d actually put all of Greg Dulli’s work on here if I could but Gentlemen is the best distillation – especially the guitar solo in Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer.

3) Jane’s Addiction, Nothing’s Shocking. While my junior year of high school was set to metal, my senior year’s soundtrack was built from what is called “alternative rock” and Jane’s Addiction was a heavy part of that. Nothing’s Shocking was my introduction to them, but Ritual de lo Habitual came out not long after that. When I was feeling full of grief for my friend Martina, I would listen to Three Days and Then She Did on repeat.

4) Queensrÿche, Operation: Mindcrime. This was my sophomore year’s soundtrack. I heard the final track first – Eyes of a Stranger played on FM 105 – and I bought the album the next day. I think I burnt a hole in the disc. I then found their previous album, Rage for Order, which also holds fond memories for me: walking in the West Virginian winter, snow crunching under my boots, crushing heavily on a girl named Barbara.

5) Skinny Puppy, Vivisect IV. In later high school, this was my introduction to “industrial” music. My friend Cliff turned me on to them one Saturday afternoon while playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

6) Kyuss, Welcome to Sky Valley. I listened to this on repeat during my drive across the country to move to San Francisco. There is no feeling like blasting desert rock while you cross the Salt Flats in Utah in the middle of August.

7) Massive Attack, Mezzanine. This album I associate with late 1999 and my time at Organic. I specifically remember walking to work one December morning listening to it and feeling very much at peace.

8) The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. My father forced me to listen to this one day when I was seventeen. It was the first I’d ever really listened to the Beatles and I had no idea that they could sound like this. My mind, focused entirely on heavy metal, was warped forever.

9) Billy Joel, The Nylon Curtain. This was the first album I ever owned that I actually intentionally purchased. I was very young and filled with an unnatural level of stress for a fourth grader and the only thing that seemed to speak to that was the album’s single, Pressure. I remember once that the principal, Mr. Walton, once tried talking to me, trying to understand what I was going through. He was a good man, struck down too early by cancer. I still listen to this album. It holds up.

10) Slayer, Reign in Blood. This was the beginning of my descent into evil. It is a perfect album. I’ve written extensively about this album before and have listened to it at least once a week every week since I first bought it, zero-day, back in 1986.

11) Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine. This is another zero-day album. I was friends with the record store owner and he suggested that I’d like it so I bought it, ear un-listened. I associate this with hanging out in Huntington’s graveyard with Shannon and Chris and Buddha. I used to see kids at the high school across the street wearing Pretty Hate Machine t-shirts think, “that album came out before you were born.”

12) Various Artists, Spawn: The Album. This is associated with my time at Sun Microsystems and a lot of my classes in Hebrew and other religious studies that I was taking at the time.

13) Ozzy Osbourne, The Ultimate Sin. This was the first heavy metal album that I actually owned (instead of having tape-duplicated from a friend’s collection). Ozzy has disavowed it and it has been deleted from his catalog, but it’s got some strong stuff. This is the soundtrack to playing Dragonlance games with Jason and Aaron and Jake – the mice in the walls.

14) Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. This album, like Gentlemen, has had a massive influence on my own music. It is like a modern symphony and only two tracks long.

15) Dio, Sacred Heart. I decided to study Latin based on the writing on the album cover (spoiler: it doesn’t make sense). It is difficult to overstate the admiration and love I hold for Ronnie James Dio, a man I mourn to this day.

16) Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction. This was junior high school and my introduction to marijuana and alcohol. This album is the root of all the bad decisions I have ever made. The band’s follow up, GNR Lies, is also special to me because it was Martina’s favorite album and I listened to it on repeat for days after her death.

17) Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV. This is me working at a golf course when I was fourteen. We snuck beers and smoked a lot of cigarettes and dope and got hella tips.

18) Dethklok, Dethalbum II. While the whole album is fun, I associate this mostly with when I was first dating my wife, Stacey, who was living in Seattle at the time. I would fly up every other weekend or so and listening to Bloodlines on repeat was how I was able to psyche myself up and over my fear of flying.

19) Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. This is the album I listened to on repeat when I moved into the first apartment I had to myself. It reminds me of liberation.

20) The Crystal Method, Vegas.
I associate this album with the late 1990s and the crazy drug-fueled time that it was. We would go clubbing almost every night (goth clubs mostly, not dens of electronica). Money and drugs flowed out of tech companies like water. IRC channel traffic was high: #meditation, #/dev/gaf, #sfgoth.

21) Pink Floyd, The Wall. This album is important for two reasons. First, the movie screwed up my little mind when I was a teenager. Second, because I coded nearly all of Elemental’s app while listening to it on repeat (which is why it’s towards the top of my last.fm profile).

22) Nirvana, Nevermind. The entire period of my college life could be summed up with this album. It came and changed the world and my direction in it; I even got my ass beat down over it. I still listen to it constantly, even today.

23) The Screaming Trees, Sweet Oblivion. This album was my favorite during my college years – even over Nevermind – and influenced all sorts of things about me.

24) White Zombie, Astro Creep: 2000. I listened to this on a pilgrimage I once made to Devil’s Tower. I was totally burnt out and needed some alone time in the desert. I learned a lot about myself on that trip.

25) Hal WIllner, Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus. This is an obscure disc. It is a tribute to the master Charles Mingus. It came into my life at the right point in time and gave me a love for . . .well. You just need to listen to it.

First, it’s pretty damned awesome. Everyone kicks an unholy amount of ass.

Second, the real “star” of this vehicle is the Hulk, especially Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner. The Hulk steals all battle scenes, and Ruffalo has all the best lines. I’m not even kidding here: I found myself giggling with glee every time the Hulk smashed things, and Bruce Banner got all of the best lines.

That’s really all I need to say. It is what you expect.

You might have seen it mentioned on various news sites.

I am very proud of our accomplishment. I want to write a bit how this went down, behind the scenes, and how I came up with the “black out” design, something I am extremely proud of.

On the afternoon of Friday the 13th, I attended my first “SOPA War Room” meeting. At this point in time, it was clear that the community wanted to do something about SOPA and PIPA. We (the Foundation) felt that it was time to start the gears turning about enacting whatever the protest action was going to be.

I was brought into the discussion because the screens needed to be designed and implemented, and, well, my title is “Senior Designer.” I was tasked with coming up with two design variants and to publish them before midnight that evening (which gave me roughly three hours time, once I was able to work on them).

During this meeting, I walked everyone though the ramifications of the design so that we were all on the same page. I knew that since time was tight I was going to have to “get it in one” and we weren’t going to be able to do a lot of futzing with it.

I recommended that we go with something that was simple and had a “statesman” like feel to it rather than something over-the-top (which I referred to as the “dragonslayer” approach).

It was about an hour after this that I got nervous. “Jellyfish in my belly” nervous, because I realized that this was going to be an historic event, and really, how often does anyone design something specifically to be historic?

So. I armed myself with the following thoughts:

1. The screen must be iconic. This image will be used in screen shots in the media and elsewhere.
2. The screen must be simple. While the issues presented are complex, they must be boiled down to easy-to-understand concepts, with room for expansion.
3. The screen must be symbolic. This is potentially a historical event.

And the following design considerations:

1. The Wikipedia “puzzle globe” image is a “busy” icon, and not appropriate for the type of statement required.
2. Simplicity over complexity.
3. Seriousness over frivolity.
4. The Wikipedia wordmark was deemed important to include.

My design philosophy is summed up as “More Kirk, less Spock.” I felt that, for this image, anything that could be deleted from the design should be.

The first image I came up with was a “white” version. It was really just a really large “W” logo, in a dark grey, and a block of text on a translucent white box set to overlay it. It didn’t feel right, though, and in a fit of inspiration I added the shadow to it.

I then sent the images around to the team for comments. We played around with the sample language a bit and I published them to the discussion on the English Wikipedia around 11:30 pm, about two and a half hours after I started.

We figured that the community would come to a vague consensus as to which direction they wanted to go within about twelve hours: do we want to go with a “light” theme or a “dark” theme was the real question.

The next morning I woke up to see that the “dark” image was leading in the polls by a factor of around 50 to 1. So, that answered that question pretty clearly, and we (Ryan Kaldari and I) began the technical implementation.

The black out screen was actually implemented through the technology we use for our fundraising banners (it’s called “CentralNotice”). We chose this method because at the time we were still assuming that it was going to be an interstitial image (so we had to load the “real” Wikipedia behind the scenes) and that it was going to be targeted to the USA (the banner system has some sophisticated Geolocation technology).

I did most of the initial html and css coding on a static page (Neil Kandalgaonkar would later do the implementation inside of CentralNotice entirely in Javascript) while Ryan worked on creating an extension to handle congressional representative lookups. We had a passable prototype by the end of day, Sunday.

I made some tweaks to the image design along the way – tweaks that I thought were minor at the time but ended up having a massive impact to the overall mood. I raised the W logo from its shadow, so that it floated, and I changed the gradient to be radial rather than linear.

Monday was a work holiday, but the Anti-SOPA team came into the office anyway. This was when the bulk of the congressional lookup feature was coded (though the superheroes I work with were coding it right up to the launch on Tuesday evening).

At four o’clock in the afternoon on Monday the consensus discussion regarding the protest was closed and we were given our marching orders: a global, “hard” blackout, 24 hours, beginning at midnight EST on Wednesday the 18th (which meant we had to launch at 9 PM local on Tuesday evening).

Monday evening’s war room time was spent on messaging: Sue Gardner wrote a blog post explaining what we were going to do and why. It was published and linked from a banner on Wikipedia and. . . instantly crashed the blog server.

Ryan Lane spent an hour heroically battling the performance issues on that server, upgrading it, adding caches, and generally hyperdriving its performance. This was a weird thing: no blog post had ever gotten more than a few hundred comments before but this one picked up a couple thousand within an hour. It took four of us operating at once to moderate the comments they were coming in so fast (as of this writing, there are almost 13,000 comments on that post).

The decision for the black out to be global and “hard” were problems for us. At the time that the decision was handed down, we had been committed to our technology choices (the train had actually left the station on Friday, to be honest). Blacking out the mobile gateway was a non-starter: that technology doesn’t do CentralNotice at all and the development time required was deemed too much.

We also made a call that there should be ways for people to get at the data if they absolutely needed to, which is why we designed in some ways to get around the black out screen (disabling Javascript, pressed ESC before it loaded, and appending ?banner=none were all ways to do this).

I’ve been asked a lot why we didn’t just point a redirect to a single “black out” screen and the answer to that is, frankly, it would have annihilated our search rankings. We felt that doing so would actually be a disservice to The Mission. Google suggested that most sites just return “503” error codes to avoid this, but Wikipedia isn’t “most sites”: we are indexed differently (Google polls the recent changes feed). We were specifically told not to do the “503” trick.

Tuesday was a blur of meetings. Meetings about messaging. Meetings about press coverage. We wrote and rewrote the text of the landing page about fifty times. Everyone who could program was working on getting the congressional lookup system working. We ran into problem after problem and worked through them. Text was being edited all the way up to the launch moment.

I was plugged into the projector. At nine pm I hit “refresh”, and this is what happened.

I work with some superheroes.

In the end, we managed to change minds. We flooded the internet with our message and people listened. We melted the phone lines on Capitol Hill. We struck a blow for the free and open internet.

And that’s something, I think.

The entire event was exhausting, exhilarating, and elating. I felt closer to The Mission in those hours than I ever have.

I had lunch today with a friend of mine who used to work for the Foundation and she told me that she’d never been prouder of us and what we do than that moment. It was a good thing to hear, and a good thing to feel.

I absolutely love this job. I want to say thank you to everyone on the planet for giving me the opportunity to do the Good Work. I am filled with gratitude, knowing that this work makes a difference.

For some weeks now I have been meaning to write about why I work at the Wikimedia Foundation and today seems as good a day as any.

Why do I work at the Foundation? It’s simple.

The future.

I am a reasonably intelligent man. Few paths of study would have been beyond my reach but I knew, somehow, that I would find the stereotypical “success” paths of medicine or law or politics unsatisfying. For a time I dabbled in the creative arts but in many ways that felt hollow because my motivations were hollow.

Greatness does not come from superficiality.

Say what you will about Wikipedia. Its community is fickle bunch, drama-laden, often harsh and hidebound. The projects have flaws, inconsistencies, and errors. It’s bureaucratic to a degree that Sam Lowry would find comforting. We are often wrong.

However, Wikipedia is not superficial.

A year ago I was working at Electronic Arts and becoming increasingly unhappy with my work there. I wrote two kinds of software: programs that made it easier to hire people and programs that made it easier to fire those same people six months later. It was a bit depressing (but certainly not as depressing as working on artificial intelligence systems for the military). The office politics were becoming toxic and I felt little agency to control my own destiny.

Then one day, out of the blue, my friend Danese Cooper initiated a Facebook chat with me. I’d known Danese for over a decade, having worked with her husband on and off (first at Sun Microsystems, where I was a “webmaster” in the late 1990s and then at Elemental Security, where I was the User Interface Lead).

She had taken the position of Chief Technical Officer at the Foundation a few months prior and was looking for a designer. While the Foundation had a few people with smatterings of design talent, they didn’t have anyone with my skill set, and would I be interested in taking a massive pay cut in order to make the world a better place?

Well now. That had a nice ring to it.

I figured that at the worst case, I’d be able to walk away in a year or two with a nice, fat top-five property on my resume. The commute was a big draw as well: I was spending upwards of two hours in the car every morning and a 15 minute train ride was very attractive. I wanted to get back into writing games, which I couldn’t do while working for a game company. And so forth.

I was focused on how this job would benefit me. I was focused on the superficialities of work.

But then, a few weeks into working at the Foundation, something wonderful happened.

I understood The Mission. I became fully aware that I was living the first line of my obituary.

The Mission can be summed thusly:

“To provide the sum of human knowledge to everyone in the world for free.”

That’s easy enough to say and easy enough to understand. But that easy understanding is feeble and, honestly, superficial. It expresses an immediacy that really isn’t there.

The power of The Mission lies in its implications.

You see, The Mission isn’t just about giving you a quick lookups for lists of Pokemon or the history of Hull, England. Those are superficialities.

The Mission is about enabling children in Pune, India learn about the world in a way that just simply would never be available to them. The Mission is about helping developmentally disabled learn for themselves. The Mission is about providing laptops to the poor in South America.

The Mission is about helping people learn another language. The Mission is about exposing people to new ideas. It’s about consensus. It’s about opening eyes and changing minds – forever.

The Mission is about telling people that there is a great big world out there, and you can learn all you want to about it. The Mission is thinking outside of the box – forever.

The Mission is about preserving our history and culture throughout time. Years from now, our descendants will be able to look back through the history and discussion pages for every article and be able to know how we understood the universe at that time.

The Mission is about giving to the future.

Wikipedia is the promise of the internet. It’s here, you know. Right now. The future. You’ve already got it, and I want to say thank you for giving it to me.

You can actually hear the capitals when people say “The Mission” when someone understands it.

All the bullshit in our lives is transient and superficial. Economic downturns, poor political schemes, bad housing investments, trends in movies, tastes in fashion, life, love, sadness and joy: they are all temporary.

The Mission is not. The Mission remains and always will. It may come to pass that Wikipedia will cease to be, but that’s okay: Wikipedia is simply part of The Mission, one way of attempting to realize it.

I’ve got The Mission now. It can’t be taken away from me.

It is easily the best film I have seen this millenium.

Future archaeologists will regard this film as Christopher Nolan’s high-water mark. I say this with melancholy and hope that my prediction is misaligned. I don’t know if anything Nolan makes again will be this collected and that fills me with mourning for masterpieces yet to be made.

Inception braids several genres together in a manner most masterful. It is a caper story and a psychological thriller, a romance tale and an action vehicle, a puzzling mystery and a con-artist yarn. I felt a brilliant dizziness watching these plates juggled, breathlessly waiting for breakage.

You see, I wanted the story to implode because I wanted to have written it.

Spoiler: I was denied the satisfaction of schadenfreude. All of the story’s shenanigens pay off in a satisfying manner.

Have I discussed what the meat of the plot yet? I haven’t? Hrm. I’m not sure it’s possible for to do so cogently. You see, Inception is about dreaming. To explain the storyline is to retell your dream from last night. Events only make sense in the context of their own timelines, realities, and dreamers.

The plot of Inception is strong and easy to follow. However, like the dream-stories it spins, Inception is more about the feeling and experience of the dreaming rather than any crude linear timeline. And why would Nolan want to talk about timelines anyway? He already did that.

The movie is filled with small hedges towards its philosophic underpinnings. At one point, the team’s “dream architect” imagines into “reality” two large mirrors facing each other, which then display an infinite number of Ellen Pages and Leonardo DiCaprios receding into the far forever,

turtles

all the way down.

None of those are the real versions of the characters. Not even the physical bodies between the mighty marbled mirrors: they, too, are figments within a dream, avatars of their sedated, sleeping selves.

That scene forms the existential seeds of the forbidden apple-of-knowledge within Inception’s Garden of Eden. The idea of disassociated reality repeats through the film, over and over again (turtles all the way down). There are some Deep Core questions concerning the nature of existence and our perception of it: are there dreams within dreams within dreams?

Nolan twists and spins the story back upon itself with this idea, creating a climax that occurs at the same time in four different realities, each running at a different speed – and does so in a way that the audience is never left to wonder “which reality is this scene occuring?”

It’s masterfully done.

I could easily spend several hundred words discussing the film in the context of other existential films (like Dark City, one of my favorites). How the movie is what I had hoped the The Matrix trilogy would have been, or how the film’s final scenes call back to Blade Runner.

However, to do so may very well dilute what Inception really is, and I don’t want to do that.

Dear reader, if you carry even the slightest degree of respect for my opinion about matters such as these, you will see this film.

And do it before someone stupidly spoils it for you.

This was an exciting time for me and the entire episode is something I hope never to forget. There is a single moment, however, that enjoys a place of solemn honor in the halls of my memory: seeing Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” with my own eyes.

It was October. We went sight-seeing. We did many things, and one of them was a handful of museums. None of the others knew much about visual art, being focused more on music, either being in bands or radio. I, however, had been studying painting for the bulk of the prior decade.

The MOMA was fairly empty, so the three of us wandered lazily through the galleries. Here and there were canvases I knew, sprinkled among works unknown. I passed these famous works, entirely non-plussed at their presence in the halls. I had studied these works for years and yet none of them held weight to me. I was disappointed at this.

I remember: someone was gawping at a Mapplethorpe print and I moved on. The next moment I was face to face with one of my favorite works of all time. Dumbstruck.

There it hang, sans pomposity, on a wall within New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

I could have reached out and touched it. Ran my fingers over the texture of the paint, made my mark upon the frame.

The perverse imp chained in my brain thought about doing so. Luckily, the idea of such a vulgar sacrilege shivered my soul and stayed my hand.

I stared at the painting for several minutes as whirls of understanding unlocked in my skull. It is a far different thing to see van Gogh’s work as textbook photograph or a low-resolution jpeg and admire its beauty than to stand before its feverish radiance.

Much of the lighter “paint” in the work isn’t paint at all. Rather, it is the yellowing canvas that peeks through the oils. Van Gogh just. . . didn’t paint there. This is something that they don’t teach you in school: that one of the most talented, innovative painters in all of history was sloppy.

I can see a manic van Gogh violently scraping the color in circles with a palette knife, the furious specter of his insanity serving as midwife to the brilliance. There is a dread music echoing through his skull, a relentless tune driving him ever forward to communicate in a language understood by no-one.

My eyes crawled over the dried texture of the oil, reading it as sheet music. I could feel the symphony within me, faintly building in volume, my pulse a staccato drum-beat. This was the Rosetta Stone to a different language, one that would push and push and push through the frail membrane of my sanity.

A glorious, fragile epiphany.

Behind me: a faint cough that shattered my reverie. I immediately cast around for one of my friends with whom I could share this experience.

“Dude! Dude! Come here! Dude, you have to see this!”

He shambled over. “What is it?”

“Dude. This is one of the most important paintings in the world. It’s one of my favorites,” I gushed.

He had the grace to look at it for a few moments before saying “huh” and wandering off, exactly as non-plussed as I was before.

I, however, was a changed person.

So, after six seasons, Lost has come to a close. The show’s finale left me conflicted in opinion and somewhat confused.

Spoilers abound. If you’re reading this, you shouldn’t care, but I don’t wanna hear any bitching.

The lover of life’s not a sinner
The ending is just a beginning
The closer you get to the meaning
The sooner you’ll know that you’re dreaming
So it’s on and on and on, oh it’s on and on and on
It goes on and on and on, heaven and hell
I can tell, fool, fool!

Lost’s biggest problem has always been one of “internal consistency” (if you click that link, I’ll see you in a couple hours). The writers were very good at introducing the mysterious as if it were normal. Sometimes, these things would eventually be explained, but most often they would simply be forgotten or be slain with retcon.

Here are some examples:

Early in the first season, the castaways discover a cave. Inside the cave they find two skeletons: one male, one female. Jack, a spinal surgeon, estimates that the bodies have been there for close to 60 years, based on the decomposition of their clothing and the bones. Who could they be? A mystery is born!

Eventually, the aspect of time travel becomes important, and the possible identities of the couple becomes an exciting question, especially given that, at one point, several characters find themselves stuck in the 1950s.

(My favorite theory was that Jack was mistaken: the bodies were only about 30 years old, and they were Rose and Bernard, who disappeared in the 1970s.)

Well if it seems to be real, it’s illusion
For every moment of truth, there’s confusion in life
Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer
And it’s on and on, on and on and on….

However, it was revealed that the bodies were Jacob’s “mother” and his brother (the Man in Black). And that they were buried in the cave over two thousand years ago. Why over two thousand years? Because Jacob and the MiB were Roman (they spoke Latin) and their “mother” was Greek. That pegs them as being from around 100 BC.

Okay, sure. Maybe Jack sucks at forensics and was off by a couple years. But that means that the island people had superhuman abilities for making textiles. On their looms. Out of palm leaves. The clothes didn’t rot inside of a damp cave on a tropical island over the course of 2,000 years.

The producers said “well, Jack just sucks at forensics”. They should have just handwaved it (“the Island did it”).

Inconsistent.

There are a ton of things like this, both large and small. CollegeHumor has a really good rundown of unanswered questions. After watching their video, I came to realize that there was only one correct explanation for the entire show that was internally consistent:

Everyone died instantly in the crash and all events are post-mortem hallucinations.

The entire show becomes an extended version of Jacob’s Ladder, wherein the protagonist is actually dead, and the entire film consists of him learning to be able to “move on” from his body.

They kind of went there anyway: the entire “Sideverse” – fully 1/12th of the entire series – ended up being a kind of purgatory-style hallucination. They were all waiting to get into Heaven, I guess, or something like that.

The official line is that “everything on the island was real; everything in the Sideverse is not”. That’s a fucking cheap cop-out, I think. The only way this works for me is if the entire Sideverse happens entirely in Jack’s mind as he lays dying in the bamboo forest.

(That scene worked really well for me, by the way, especially the bookending technique of his eyes closing.)

That said, we’re still left with the whole “consistency” problem. There are enough glitches that it feels like dream logic, which fits cleanly into the logic of a dying hallucination.

Let’s set aside the idea of trying to “explain” everything, though, and just go to the meat of what my real problem is:

The ending kind of sucked.

Here’s why:

It felt to me like the writers and showrunners had developed maybe five different possible endings for the series, any one which might have been satisfying and powerful. But they couldn’t decide on which one to use, so they just jammed elements from each one into the mix.

Say you have five flavors of ice cream: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, mint chocolate chip, and pumpkin spice. Any one of these by themselves will be delicious. Some of them can be combined (choco-vanilla, vanilla-strawberry, even choco-vanilla-strawberry) and taste good, too.

However, mixing all five together results in a kind of schizophrenic slop.

They say that lifes a carousel
Spinning fast, you’ve got to ride it well
The world is full of kings and queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
It’s heaven and hell, oh well

To be honest, 95% of my problems with the final season could be solved by simply deleting all of the sideverse. All of it. If you cut that out, the end of the story works great:

1) Pulling the “cork” will end the world. It won’t be the Smoke Monster that kills everyone, though: the world will just fall apart, starting with the Island. Smokey has it only half-right.
2) Removing the cork makes everyone mortal – the Smoke Monster, Jack, Jacob, Hurley, Desmond, Richard. So shooting SmokeyLocke will kill him (and it does – I actually loved that bit, especially since SmokeyLocke clearly didn’t expect that wrinkle).
3) Jack sacrifices himself to replace the cork.
4) Hurley is the New Boss (not the same as the Old Boss)
5) The world continues; Jack dies in the bamboo; roll credits.

I’d have been happy with just that.

It doesn’t matter, though. I really enjoyed the entire series; what I’m left with is a Sopranos style “fade to black” ending that I’ll end up talking about over beers for many years, and for that I’m thankful.

And they’ll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
Its heaven and hell, oh no!