I’ve been working on this website for quite a while on and off. It’s somewhat nervous-making to push the button and set the server to allow traffic in. At some point, though, you’ve just got to do it. So here we are. Cheers!

Why did I make this website? I cover most of it in my Welcome Letter, but the short answer is that I’ve come to the point where I feel I need one. Something I’ve discovered about myself over the last few years is that whatever else I’m doing, I have a fundamental need to make things. And at a certain point when you make things, you have to share them. It’s a part of the process. You don’t have to get famous or share them widely, but having an audience is a part of what it means to be art or media or whatever you want to term the things people make. In this day and age there’s no need to ask permission. The internet is the place we can all go to put things out there big or small.

You’ll notice I already have a few of those things here. The common way of launching a blog is to start with a “hello, world” post (I suppose that’s what this is. Hello!) and move on from there. But the design I had in mind for this site doesn’t work very well with fewer than about four each articles and breadcrumbs. And example content sure beats lorem ipsum any day. So even though this is the hello, world post for this blog, you’ll find a few posts that go back before it. They’re scattered back through time as thoughts struck me, and there’s certainly something odd about publishing blog posts reacting to events long gone, but there they are.

I’m not sure what this space will become over time, but I’m glad now to have a space. Hello, world.

The other day I wrote about how China Miéville’s novel, The City & The City conveys the way that the little affiliative signs we give off are more than just petty posturing. One aspect of this I didn’t address head-on is how this interacts with cultural privilege. Today I read a very well-presented article about how this sort of thing plays out in the context of trying to get more women and minorities into areas traditionally dominated by white men, and it made me regret that I didn’t cover this better in my article on the book.

Zeynep Tufekci addresses her piece on Medium at Nate Silver who recently launched his numbers-oriented news site, FiveThirtyEight.¹ Silver had bristled at the contention that his predominantly white-male outfit was a part of an exclusionary culture, stating, in short, that whatever their racial or gender makeup, they were outsiders. Tufekci goes on to analyze how this psychology works out and can lead to many of the people who (let’s give the benefit of the doubt) unintentionally reinforce cultural barriers to feel that they are above and in fact stand against such exclusion.

What interested me in the wake of writing an article on The City & The City is how the novel can be seen as an allegory of this sort of cultural segregation being taken to an extreme. Being in Beszel or Ul Qoma doesn’t place you on the social strata, though Ul Qoma is presented as ascendant and Beszel in decay. In the book, they are regarded as so separated as to be thought of as different physical locations. But think of the different worlds we do have and how we are consciously and unconsciously sorted into them. We can and do interact across social and class boundaries, but signifiers, whether chosen like clothes or inborn and unalterable like skin tone or something in between like accented speech, influence how much access you will have to them.

A citizen of Beszel capable of being a perfect chameleon has a super power. He might step into a telephone booth in Beszel and emerge in Ul Qoma with a change of clothes. Imagine how much easier it is for this person to get on in Ul Qoma than his countryman who must constantly watch his speech and way of moving to prevent Ul Qomans from unseeing him.

The goal in the real world isn’t assimilation, though. People often act as though the ideal is to be colorblind. But if different cultural backgrounds didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be nearly so big a deal to have diversity in the first place. It’s not that all those cultural signifiers are unimportant trivia elevated above their station. Rather the book drives home how these little arbitrary signs are important.

The goal, struggle sometimes, is to be aware of those signifiers. Both the ones you broadcast and how you react to those you see in others. You aren’t doing anything wrong by embracing your own cultural signifiers,² but you can’t think you’re immune to them, no matter your background or how openminded you are. Noting privilege is not an accusation. It’s when we forget about it that it becomes damning.

Speaking of Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, preliminary signs are not good. That’s unfortunate. As someone with a scientific background who is often frustrated with mainstream journalism’s tendency to abdicate responsibility for determining the truth of anything, the pitch sounds great. Silver, who gained notoriety as a statistician able to punch through conventional wisdom first in the realm of sports, then in elections, by focusing on the numbers, presents his new site as a venue to expand that approach with more staff able to cover more topics.

Focusing on numbers seems like a great way to go. Any field gathers its share of Very Serious People who know what they know and know that they’re right because, after all, they’re successful, how could they be wrong? And when they aren’t successful? Well, they were only saying what everyone else knew, too. No one serious disagreed. You can’t be mad at them without being mad at yourself. The media loves talking to these people because it’s easy. It turns out that understanding every bit of knowledge you might need to come across in the course of reporting is hard. Whereby “hard” I mean “impossible.” One easy, and better, safe, way out of this is to punt. Contact a successful, respected person and report what they say. If that position is deemed too controversial, just find another who disagrees and print both. We are rightly hungry for journalism that takes responsibility for vetting its sources and is willing to call bullshit when someone states what everyone thinks they know, but the data disproves.

Unfortunately two people I trust a great deal when it comes to using numbers to draw conclusions about the world, aren’t impressed so far. Sam Wang,¹ like Silver, has successfully tackled the task of predicting election results via aggregated polls over the last few rounds at the Princeton Election Consortium. He points out via Twitter that, “stat-worshippers are also hedgehogs.” This is a reference to Silver’s stated goal for FiverThirtyEight to be a “fox” not a “hedgehog.”²

But numbers aren’t just numbers. Interpretation matters. Knowing which numbers to chose matters. And the way you move from numbers to a conclusion matters. Paul Krugman pointed this out on his blog:

But you can’t be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. If you think the data are speaking for themselves, what you’re really doing is implicit theorizing, which is a really bad idea (because you can’t test your assumptions if you don’t even know what you’re assuming.)

I sincerely hope they get things turned around. We desperately need data driven, opinionated reporting coming from sources high profile enough to shift the conversation. But we run the risk of being even worse off than we were with bad appeals to authority if we believe that numbers immunize us from other sorts of critical thinking. There’s a reason why statistics and lying are so connected in popular imagination.

Update: Again via Sam Wang, some more specifics on the early missteps of the FiveThirtyEight crew. The Way Things Break covers some of the same ground from above, then dives into their misuse of statistics and flirtation with climate change denial via the hire of Roger Pielke Jr., who apparently has a bad habit of using statistics to argue a predetermined point while getting much of the basics wrong. Paul Raeburn at MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker blog covers how Jeff Leek, writing for FiveThirtyEight, dresses up an exercise in garbage in, garbage out and, by cloaking it in numbers, disguises it as a statistical approach to determining validity of a health news headline.

Yesterday, Facebook bought Oculus VR, the scrappy virtual reality pioneer. Oculus went from a $2.4 million Kickstarter in 2012 to single-handedly bringing VR from a bad ’90s novelty to an imminent gaming reality. The immediate reaction was, to say the least, negative. My Twitter stream filled up with a there-was-an-earthquake-in-SF sized flood of howls of no. Even the top comments on Zuckerberg’s announcement on Facebook itself are, as I write this, full of bitter disappointed snark like this and this and this or, simply, this.¹

Notch (Markus Persson), the creator of Minecraft, and one of the pillars of the indie gaming community, reacted quickly on twitter by canceling his deal with the VR company, saying, “We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.” He later expanded his reasoning on his own site. The nut is this (emphasis is his own):

Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.

Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away?

But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games.

Max Temkin, indie game magnate in his own right, and one of the minds behind Cards Against Humanity, most closely matched my own feelings on hearing the news with his post on the subject: “I join a lot of the people on Twitter who feel that this acquisition was somehow kind of sad, which is a curious emotion to feel about a social network buying a hardware startup.” He goes on:

If I had to hazard a guess, here’s what’s sad about it: Oculus was this big, open question in gaming. Just this weekend I was on Giant Bomb with Phil Fish and Zoe Quinn, and we were speculating wildly about the ways that the Rift would allow us to explore new worlds, understand body dysmorphia, and have computer sex. We hoped that Oculus could show us what was next for an art form that we love. And they did, and it sucked: Oculus will be a hobby project owned by an advertising company, used some day to collect personal information from “users” which will be sold to the highest bidder.

(For the curious, the segment he references is recorded here with the VR discussion starting at about 42 minutes in. Fair warning: includes drinking of Buckfast, swearing, discussion of teledildonics, acid, and synesthesia, before descending into a discussion of the downfall of society.)

To be sure, not all reactions were bad. Will Smith of Tested writes that Facebook buying Oculus VR is probably a good thing. In short, he points out that as Oculus had already taken on venture capital funding, this acquisition may shelter them from many threats: “As a VC-funded company, Oculus was walking a tightrope. A major mistake, one botched product release, one VC who wanted a quicker return on his investment, or even one story about VR addiction on the Today show could erase everything Oculus had built.”

With a little time to simmer down on the subject, I’ve wound up somewhere in between. I don’t trust Facebook. I can’t say I even like Facebook. Where Facebook has intersected with games, I’ve actively disliked it. So the addition of Facebook takes a little of the shine off Oculus. But the addition of Oculus might make Facebook a slightly more interesting place.

One thing that has always been interesting about Facebook is that unlike most technology startups of the last couple decades, Oculus included, they seemed determined from the beginning not to become a product to be acquired or folded into a bigger fish. They wanted to become a company. With their recent acquisitions, it’s clear they want to become a conglomerate. Something more like Disney, perhaps, even than like Google. So perhaps it’s as wrong to view this as the merger of Oculus into Facebook the product as it would be to think of Joss Whedon as making films for that animation studio that makes the Mickey Mouse cartoons.

But regardless of the practical considerations, even with the most optimistic lens, it still left me agreeing with Max Temkin from above. It makes me sad. And, yes, it is interesting to wonder why that is my reaction. His is a very good analysis of the specifics of this case, but for me, anyway, I think there’s something more general going on. I get this same kind of feeling to varying degrees whenever I see an indie startup gobbled by something bigger.

In part, I think, it’s because it represents a little death of some fraction of the indie dream. When we get invested in an independent company or artist, it’s easy—at least for those of us with creative ambitions, ourselves—to get swept up in not only the product, but the story. A small group of bright, enthusiastic, talented people bands together and makes something, not as a bullet point on some quarterly investor call, but because they believe in it. And they succeed, doing well enough to keep doing it. Well enough to live well. It’s an aspirational dream. Even if they take on funding, as long as they retain control, the idea of a group like that making the thing can be as exciting as the thing itself.

I had a little of this disappointment when Whiskey Media dissolved in 2012 and Giant Bomb moved to CBS Interactive. It was easy to imagine them in their old basement as this clubhouse of creative, opinionated people making crazy things and talking to people who make crazy things. It seemed like a nice dream to have a group of websites founded on the idea of strong editorial voice, standing against corrosive CPM advertising. It seemed like being bought by a wealthy conglomerate was the admission that the dream was over.

As it turns out (as evidenced by the totally not-approved-by-corporate tenor of the video linked above) they’ve kept their spirit pretty well so far. But it was still a shock to go from seeing videos shot in a brick basement with their own bar to a cube farm in an office tower. I can’t come up with a much better way to describe the feeling of an indie being bought out than that. The trouble is that indie dream is just that. It’s an idea. When I imagine the clubhouse in the basement, I don’t have to work out the financial realities. Or live with the apparently terrible, illness-inducing mold in the air. Staying as they were wasn’t an option, so it isn’t fair to represent the two paths as some sort of choice. What is sad, ultimately, is having to face up to the fact that it couldn’t work. That isn’t to say indies can’t thrive or that all indies who sell to bigger companies would have died otherwise. But the reality is that in many of these cases, the dream of that independent group of people making great new things without corporate overlords was only a dream. And whatever the particular reasons behind that this time, no matter how good they are, that realization sucks. And it’s sad. And it’s worth mourning.

A brief programming note: If you were subscribed to my RSS feed just now, you probably got annoyed by seeing every item come back up as unread.¹ The reason for this is I made a slight change to the way I generate the feeds which should, I hope, result in fewer future annoyances.

Basically, the RSS spec gives an opportunity to tag each item in the feed with a GUID which can by any snippet of text (optionally a permalink to the item) that uniquely identifies the post. Most readers that I’ve seen use this value to determine if a post is a new item or not. In other words, the body text can change completely, but if the GUID remains the same, it won’t appear as a new unread item in your reader.

I’ve noticed that in some feeds I subscribe to this causes problems (most particularly in Gruber’s). Sometimes he will publish a new item and then, very soon after initially publishing it, add a paragraph or fix a major problem in the post. My reader, however, will have cached the initial version, so even if I come to my reader long after he made the change, I’m unaware of the new content unless I see it on his site itself.

In an attempt to avoid this issue, I initially generated my GUIDs as the permalink plus the date of the most recent revision of the article. This has the effect of automatically pushing out a new version whenever the CMS sees the article as having been edited. This was a mistake.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the number of times I’d spot a small typo and want to go in and fix it. Suddenly I found myself wondering whether I ought to go in and capitalize something I’d accidentally put in lower case because I knew it would cause a new version of the article to appear in the feed. Sure, I’d like to have people read the fixed version, but if someone already read it, it hardly seems right to bug them with a new unread version in their reader over a change they would struggle to locate.

What I’ve done now is to add a custom field that allows me to append a version string on the end of the GUID. This way I can go in and make small fixes without triggering a new version in the feed, but if I make an update or a major factual correction, I can chose to flag the item to be pushed out fresh. I promise to be conservative with the use of this field.

This behavior still isn’t perfect. I’d love some way to make it so that minor corrections and typo fixes appear for anyone reading the article for the first time, even if the RSS reader cached it before I made the corrections, without making a new version appear as unread in someone’s reader who has already read it. But this seems like the best option given the available technology.