I have been working from home full time for around five years. This is not my first remote-work job; I have pretty much always done this in some form or another, even when I was supposed to go to the office.

Going to an office gives your brain a strong context-switch. When you go to the office, you have: home -> commute -> office -> commute -> home. Now you don’t have travel modes, which are natural context switchers. You’ll have to adapt. It’s easy, but requires discipline.

The first and most important things are routine and distance.

Routine

You need to create a routine. This routine will include what you should call your “working hours”. Your working hours do not need to be consecutive. Spread them out in chunks if you like or do them all at once – it’s up to you. However, I’m going to tell you that you will have problems getting a straight eight hours in, and in fact will advise you not to try.

You will develop a routine. You used to have one, but it involved commuting for an hour and then sitting in an office and then commuting for another hour. Now you have those two hours back! Fill them.

My daily routine goes: Wake, Run, Shower, Coffee, Email. That brings me to about 9 am. Then: Grocery store across the street (food for the day). At eleven I take the pup out to pee. After that I begin my first “work block”.

Work blocks are usually 2 to 4 hours – enough time to handle a set of tasks. This is how you should think about working: not as “time spent on the clock” but “tasks accomplished”. You’ll have several work blocks throughout the day. Schedule them when you feel right.

Think of your day as “slots”. Sometimes slots get filled, sometimes they don’t. I have a slot for “errands that require me to get in a car”, and it goes between “running” and “groceries”.

Don’t feel bad if you work really late! You may find yourself doing work at two a.m. because why not? An important thing is that you must give yourself permission to break the norms because the norms are broken already (more on this in a bit).

Distance

The second thing that you need to create is distance – psychologically – between your “work life” and your “home life.” This is most easily accomplished by creating a “working space” – a place you go to do your work that isn’t part of the “daily routine” of your household.

Maybe you work from the guest room. Maybe on the porch. Maybe you set up your nest at the end of your dining room table. Where ever this place is it must allow you to create a “transistion”.

I used to work on my building’s roof where I could smoke cigars all day. Now I use our guest room.

Never work from your bed or your bedroom. Consider that to be a sacrosanct line and crossing it is always moving to “home life”.

Some people like going to cafes. I find that they are hit-or-miss, with lots of distractions. You do you, but in the age of COVID-19, I’d avoid them.

Take phone calls outside if you can. That helps create distance as well.

Productivity Anxiety

You may get really anxious because you don’t think you’re being productive. Ignore that shit; it’s a lie. Productivity really can’t be measured that way.

You’ll spend hours doing nothing because you’re stuck and you’ll feel shitty about it. You’ll get unstuck eventually, but until then it’s anxiety-town. This is a terrible place to be.

Here’s how to fix it: Go play a game for an hour or take a walk or vacuum the floors or cook a meal or take a yoga class.

Is this fucking off? No. No, it is not.

You have days in the office where you don’t get fuck-all done, too – only you had to pay the Commute Troll its toll.

The difference between getting nothing done at the office and getting nothing done at home is that you can fake what you think of as “productivity” in the office. You can always look busy if there are other people around.

Here’s the thing: that’s not being productive. It’s all a bias illusion. You are no more or less productive or stuck at work or at home; it’s just at home you can only compare your apparent lack of progress to yourself.

Freedom comes from realizing that this is an illusion and knowing that your brain does not stop working. It is always solving problems, always working to unstick you. It will let you know when it’s solved your problem. Trust it.

Don’t spend your “stuck” time feeling anxious. Use that time to do something useful or fun. Use it for yourself! Just do not feel guilty about it.

Procrastination

You may find that you end up taking on more and more chores around the house. Fight this impulse. It’s procrastination.

If a thing needs doing (the dishes are dirty), do it (wash them). But don’t do extra stuff (sharpen the knives). Does your bookshelf really need organizing right now? Probably not; lower the priority of that task.

Self Care

Now that you’ve got all this time you’ll find that you start filling it. It is super easy to fill up all your time with work and chores. A really important thing that you need to do is carve out an hour of time every day for yourself and only yourself.

I’m talking about “set your phone on do not disturb for an hour and do a thing.” I will play a game or run around the lake, maybe. Do the thing for yourself and only for yourself. Schedule this time if you have to.

Get dressed every day. Take a shower at least every other day. You will likely have video conference meetings, sometimes randomly, and you need to be ready for those.

Go outside at least once a day – if only to get the mail or see another human being.

Make your bed every day. Making your bed creates a psychological marker: Now is the time that the day starts. It’s time to get busy.

Buy a french press. Make your own coffee.

Substance Use

Regarding substance use: I have no advice for you. You’re at home. You know how you work best. Get the job done.

Maybe you drink a beer or two when you code. Maybe you don’t. Get the job done. Maybe you eat some marijuana gummies. Maybe you don’t. Get the job done.

I used to smoke cigars on the roof in the sun. Now I don’t.

However that works out is between you, your employers, and the Great Programmers Of Our Simulation.

Communication

You’ll find that you change the way you want to communicate with your co-workers. This is going to be different for everyone, but my experience is that people tend to avoid spammy communication systems while working from home (e.g., you’ll learn to hate Slack).

On-demand communication (things that ping you a lot) are easy to get lost in when you work in an office because it feeds into that whole “looking busy” part. How useful is the constant pinging really? Shut it off. Shut off your email and chat programs. Only open them once an hour, at best.

You will quickly learn which meetings could have been merely an email.

Good luck!

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.

The answer is, unsurprisingly, that I won. However, it ended not with a bang but with a whimper.

The fight was over in November of 2013 and I could have written about it then but decided to hold off in case there was any further legal trickery that required attention.

After serving me with a Universal Domain Name Dispute Complaint, I found myself to be luckily connected with Paul Alan Levy and Public Citizen, who decided to take my case. There was a series of emails that went back and forth between the counsel of Gaijin Entertainment and my own counsel, all of which were entertaining to read.

Paul told them “no, nothing doing, and we’ll be going to court if you persist.” At this point, Gaijin Entertainment’s legal team opted to “suspend” the UDRP complaint. Suspension of these complaints lasts for one calendar month, during which time parties are expected to come to a settlement. At the end of the month, if there has been no activity, the complaint is automatically withdrawn (though without prejudice – meaning it can be refiled), and a certain percentage of the fees are returned to the complaining party.

Eventually, Gaijin Entertainment offered a “settlement” agreement, which effectively read as follows:

• I, and all successors of the domain, recognize and acknowledge Gaijin Entertainment’s ownership and rights to the trademark “Gaijin”, worldwide;
• I, and all successors of the domain, agree not to challenge the trademark;
• I, and all successors or the domain, agree not to seek registration of the trademark “gaijin”;
• I enter a confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement regarding Gaijin Entertainment;
• I agree to place a prominent disclaimer on my website pointing visitors to the Gaijin Entertainment website;
• And that the agreement would be binding to all successors of the domain.

Unsurprisingly, our response was akin to “sit and spin”. The language was stronger, however. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess the precise vocabulary.

After another few weeks, the URDP suspension period expired and the complaint was automatically withdrawn.

I’ve heard nothing since.

Hopefully now I’ll be able to write more without fear.

Obviously, I was not going to do that. I have never operated a game development business through this domain or name. Even if I had, there exists seven years of prior art in my name. My attorney, Mike Godwin, sent them a letter stating that I was not going to entertain the idea and that they should retract their claim.

There were no further comments from Gaijin Entertainment and I thought that was the end of it.

On Friday, October 4th, Mike Godwin and I were notified that Gaijin Entertainment had filed a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) claim to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). In it they claim that I am doing damage to their trademark and seek to have the domain name stripped from me and awarded to them due to trademark violation.

I have the word “courage” tattooed on my arm. I am not going to let this happen without a fight.

Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen has agreed to represent me regarding this issue. He has asked opposing counsel to withdraw the UDRP claim.

If they do not, we will seek a declaratory judgment of non-infringement in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, taking the fight to them rather than waiting around.

Among the complaints are some interesting bullet points.

• My domain name, registered on May 22, 1995, “fully incorporates” the “Gaijin” wordmark, which was not registered until October 11, 2011.
• One of the most prominent tags within my blog is “Games” and this apparently confuses people.
• I am apparently not using the word “gaijin” correctly (note that Gaijin Entertainment is not, either, so I’m unsure why this would be a thing). For sake of explanation, I chose the word “gaijin”, meaning “foreigner” or “alien” because at the time I was studying philosophical principles regarding identity and definition – specifically about how things are defined through contrast and opposition, and therefore my own identity, from my perspective, was always and forever going to be “alien” to me (since I cannot see myself except as in opposition).
• Certain blog posts of mine have bad words in them and apparently tarnish other people’s reputations.
• My email address apparently confuses people into thinking I am an employee of their company.
• I am apparently attempting to extort $750,000.00 dollars from them. This comes from a throw-away email exchange I apparently had with one of their employees. I have never had any intention to sell the domain but if someone seriously offered me a million dollars I’d be negligent in not considering the offer. I get offers at least once a month and always for some paltry sum (like $100 dollars). Telling people to throw out a “big number” usually ends the conversations quickly.
• The fact that I show up after them in Google searches means that I am somehow diverting traffic from them.

Below is a pdf of the complaint.

Gaijin_WIPO UDRP Complaint_AS_v10 4 2013

A “first-world problem” is a difficulty which is really only felt by the privileged in this world. First-world “problems” are, in theory, issues that any citizen of a second- or third-world country will never encounter due to rank poverty or other issues due to societal infrastructure. Complaining about a first-world problems is like complaining about how much tax you have to pay: it’s a problem you want to have.

There are no “first-world problems.” There are just “problems” and their contexts.

Its usage bugs the fuck out of me and I’m going to tell you why.

First, let’s talk about how the phrase is used and the implied meanings.

Consider this exchange:

Me: “It sucks that there’s a new Starbucks opening on the block! It’s going to put my local coffee shop out of business.”
You: “Isn’t that a first-world problem?”

What you are really saying this: “There are poor people in the world who don’t even have coffee shops, or even the dream of them, so shut the fuck up and quit whining! Don’t you feel guilty for being privileged enough to even have a coffee shop?”

If I describe an issue I’m having, and you respond with “that’s a first world problem,” you are not responding in any meaningful way to the statement. You are saying instead, “what you want to talk about is stupid and we should instead consider this other thing that I want to talk about.” It is a fundamentally selfish thing to say, slathered in self-righteousness.

I am being told to shut up. It takes my (possibly very real, possibly very serious) problem and removes it from its local context, and puts it up on a much bigger stage. Suddenly my problem isn’t that serious.

It is true that, when weighed against the Grand Scale of Human Suffering, a chain coffee shop’s opening does not move the needle. I will not argue this.

I will argue that such a comparison is irrelevant.

No matter how great the tragedy, a comparison to the Holocaust will make it seem minor. Consider the above conversation, only with the volume turned up:

Me: “230,000 people were killed in the 2004 Indonesian tsunami.”
You: “Yeah, well, over six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.”

Some day the heat death of the universe is going to happen. We don’t have conversations within the context that someday everything is going to end.

When compared to the millions of starving children or people in Syria being attacked with Sarin gas, the importance of nearly every problem shrinks. That doesn’t make these problems any less real or relevant.

When insurance doesn’t pay for your child’s occupational therapy, that’s a problem we only have in the first world. It’s still a problem. The context is localized. It isn’t productive to move it out of that context.

There is a more subtle and sinister effect to the use of the phrase. It happens when we self-deprecate our own statements and ultimately harms the overall issue of recognizing privilege.

When I say, “I know this is a first-world problem but I can’t decide if I want to buy the new XBox,” I am short-circuiting a conversation about my privilege. It’s a weak nod to the fact that my problem only exists because I have enough privilege for it to be a problem.

I believe conversations about privilege are important and we should definitely be having them more often and with greater sincerity and perspective. However, the power of such a discussion lies with it not becoming trivialized.

If I handwave an acknowledgement of my privilege, am I really recognizing it? I was born in the USA, I’m male, and I’m (by all appearances) white. All of my problems are “first-world;” there is no way around this. I recognize this and I’d like to think I’m doing what I can to flatten the privilege curve but the fact is that it exists.

If we are forced to recognize privilege with every conversation it becomes rote catechism – ultimately meaningless, exercised without empathy – which is the exact opposite of what should be happening.

So we should stop using the phrase. Just stop. The key to recognizing and remembering your privilege is to not make it trivial, which is what the phrase does.

(I want to point out that ranting about this is absolutely a first-world problem. I am fully aware of the irony. It does not, however, negate my point.)

On that same afternoon, my attorney Mike Godwin sent their counsel the following email:

Dear Mr. Goldstein-Gureff,

Please be advised that my client, Brandon Harris, disputes your trademark-infringement claim in every particular.

That is the most polite way to state how vigorously we dispute your attempt to assert flat ownership of the word “gaijin,” a word so well-established in English that it is an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Currently, I’m advising my client to publicize your demand letter, so that the entire game-consuming public will be made aware of your client’s overreaching trademark assertions. In addition, we will of course continue to make clear that Brandon Harris’s website in no way gives rise to any kind of marketplace confusion of the sort that American trademark law is designed to address.

In the interests of allowing you and your client to gracefully retract your claim, we have chosen to refrain from publicizing your demand until you respond to this message, provided that you respond no later than close-of-business Monday. Since I am currently in DC, Eastern time applies.

–Mike Godwin

P.S. I understand that your clients are possibly Russian nationals. You may wish to explain to them the scope and limitations of the Lanham Act in the United States.

–MG

As the time granted to Mr. Goldstein-Gureff has expired, I am publishing this information.

The text of their letter is as follows, with contact information removed.

International Legal Counsels PC
[Contact information redacted]
Re: Trademark Infringement by Gaijin.com

Dear Mr. Harris:

Our firm represents Gaijin Entertainment Corporation (“Gaijin”). Gaijin is a well-known game development company that specializes in creating video games for various platforms (PlayStation3/Xbox 360/iOS/PC). Gaijin is the biggest independent PS3, Xbox 360 and iOS games developer in the Russia Federation and an official partner of Activision, 505 Games, Microsoft, TopWare Interactive, SouthPeak Interactive, Sony Computer Entertainment, 1C Company, Apple and many others. Gaijin’s games have received a range of media and game industry awards including such KRI Awards as “Best Simulation Game,” “Best Technology,” “Best sound” and many more. Gaijin also owns, among other intellectual property, a U.S. trademark registration “GAIJIN” (Reg. No. 4,037,227) (“Gaijin Mark”).

It came to our attention that you registered and maintain a website www.kingofnovember.com (“Infringing Website”) that infringes Gaijin Mark. By maintaining and offering to public your content via the website, i.e., Infringing Website, having the same domain as Gaijin Mark, you create consumer confusion and mistake as to the source, sponsorship and/or affiliation of the
Infringing Website and Gaijin, thereby infringing Gaijin Mark. Consequently, the main purpose of this letter is to demand that you immediately cease and desist from maintaining and offering your content via the Infringing Website or any other site having the domain substantially similar to Gaijin Mark. Gaijin also demands that you immediately transfer the Infringing Domain to Gaijin.

If you wish to amicably resolve this matter, we should hear from you not later than five days from the date of this letter regarding the demands listed above. Should we not receive your response that would be satisfactory to our client, we intend to undertake all legal actions and seek statutory and actual damages (including punitive damages and attorneys’ fees) afforded to our client under applicable law and equity, including, without limitation, pursuant to ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).

This letter is written for the purpose of bringing to an end the illegal activities described above and with a view of potential settlement of our client’s claims and may not be used by you for any other purpose whatsoever without our written consent. Our client reserves all rights granted to it by law and specifically reserves the right to withdraw any offers before they are
accepted or before any payments are made and to avail itself of any enforcement, legal action or relief available to him in law or equity. Additionally, this letter is without prejudice to all further rights our client or its publishers, licensors or licensees may have, including, without limitation, rights to injunctive relief, profits, damages, statutory damages, royalties and attorney’s fees. Should you have any questions, please address any communications regarding this matter to us as follows:

Leo V. Goldstein-Gureff, Esq.

[Contact information redacted]

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.

This year, I decided to grant my New Year’s Resolutions to the public. I’m crowdsourcing my personal improvement plan. I asked those who know me, through several venues, what I should work on in the coming year.

Clearly, not every suggestion could be (or should have been) acted upon. For example, I am a strong proponent of gun regulation. So when a friend of mine who is an advocate of gun ownership said that I should purchase a gun, I declined (seriously, how dumb do you think I am?). Other suggestions set along the lines of “travel to places that I’m afraid of” – and while that’s a great idea, I am no longer afraid of traveling anywhere.

So after we boil out all the jokes and the obviously non-tenable, what Resolutions are left that the public has granted me? There are two.

1) Write more. This was actually a touching response, given the overwhelming number of positive responses towards it. I love writing, I always have. Lately, however, I’ve felt more and more that no one really wants to listen to the things I have to say. I am humbled to discover the opposite is true. So I’m going to work towards that.

2) Further reduce the time between when something happens that perturbs your emotional state and when you return to basic equilibrium. A Resolution from my friend Jeremy and given lots of support from others. This is a powerful suggestion since I tend to respond emotionally more often than I should. It’s very clearly the most useful “growth” pattern I can apply to myself. So I’m going to do it.