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.

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.

Here is the Manifesto of the Antidouchebagitarian Party. I am still working on some of the language and finer points. Feel free to comment.

1) Don’t Be a Douchebag. This should be self-explanatory, but for the morons in the crowd we’ll spell it out: leave me the fuck alone. The government should only be involved in the lives of its citizens where specific issues affect the society and not the individual. In other words, unless you have a specific legal reason to be sticking your fucking schnoz into my diapers, get the fuck away.

1a) End Governmental Recognition of Marriage. The word “marriage” is not a secular term; it has deep religious connotations and the government isn’t in the business of managing people’s belief in a wizard in the sky (or lack thereof). The government should recognize “civil partnerships” and afford the rights of what we call “marriage” to those unions; those are legal partnerships. It shouldn’t care what those partnerships are for.

1b) Women Get to Choose to be Pregnant or Not. A crazy idea, I know, but we don’t live in the middle ages anymore. Terminating pregnancies is a very personal choice, and one that the government has no right talking about.

1c) Fuck Off With Criminalized Prostitution and Marijuana Use. The taxes we could get from the decriminalization of these two things alone would be gangbusters. Plus, we could regulate two industries which are high-crime (and, in the case of prostitution, possible health threats). This also reduces police and court work load.

2) Science Makes the World Better. Ever wonder why no one you know is crippled from polio? Science. Ever wonder why smallpox doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands every year? Science. Ever wonder why cancer isn’t a death sentence? Science. As a species, we have one biological advantage that allowed us to get out of the trees and stop eating a diet that consists only of bananas: our fuckin’ brains. Let’s use ’em.

2a) Fund Research. This isn’t just about medical research, but scientific research in general. Research brings in all sorts of happy stuff to our lives. We had no real practical reason to go to the moon but because of the research into that we got ball point pens and Tang. Practical science is secondary to research science; it’s a result, not a cause. Smart people understand that general research will always make a society stronger (which leads to bullet point 3).

3) Be Selfish and Greedy. Don’t take more of my money than you need. However, we are aware that when our whole society is stronger, we are stronger as individuals (since we are members of that society). So the laws of selfishness dictate that we want to enable the bulk of society to be productive, educatated, and protected. This may mean taking a lot of my money, but I also recognize I’ll get the value back in other ways.

3a) Universal Health Care is a Must Have. Why? Because if everyone has even basic wellness check-ups, we will reduce our vulnerability, as a society, to interesting things like, oh, epidemics and bacteriological terrorism. Why is this greedy and selfish? Because if you don’t get sick, you can’t infect me with your cooties, dumbass.

3b) Education Spending Should Be Paramount. Why? Because if the populace is smarter, we do smarter things as a group. That means not passing dumbass laws based on the ten commandments, for example, which makes life better for everyone. It’s selfish because a smarter populace ensures my job stability – which, in turn, ensures yours.

3c) Municipal Organization Spending Should Also Be High on the List. I’m talking cops and firemen and paramedics. We need to spend more money on the police force. I don’t mean throwing more cops at crime; I mean throwing more money to make better cops (also maybe more cops). A handful of smarter police and fire departments with modern equipment will go further than a mass of poorly trained thugs.

3d) Infrastructure Spending Should Also Be High on the List. Sitting in traffic sucks. It makes my life less fun. Let’s make my life more fun. This may require spending money. Bridges, roads, tunnels, trains, planes. Transportation is very important, but so also are things like clean water and power.

4) Lead Through Example and Not Fear. We should want to be our leaders, not fear them or the boogymen they purport to protect us from. This sort of ties into bullet point 1. Actually, it really ties into bullet point one. But I leave it as its own point because we shouldn’t be doing shit like torturing people or starting wars over oil.

4a) With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. If some group in the Congo decides to start butchering another group in the Congo, and we can stop it, we should. Because we can do it, even if others can’t. We have a moral imperative to not let people get raped and butchered. This speaks to a global society. I’d like to say we should be isolationist but I can’t: we are a global power.

4b) All For One and One For All. Civitas Romanae. This sounds stupid to say under point 4, but here goes: Fucking with one of us is fucking with all of us. This should be our foreign policy. I’m not talking about legal mumbo jumbo; I’m saying that if some stupid crew of fundies in the world decides to declare war on a citizen of our fair society, that we should step up to the plate and lay down the hammer.

4c) Don’t be Obstructionist. We are for the people. The people may not often want what we think is best for them (something we can theoretically cure with better education). Be loud, be aggressive, be inflammatory, but ultimately bend to the will of society.