2014 in Writing

The main thing that motivates me to write in public is having a question about some cultural phenomenon that I want to produce an answer to. This year there were quite a few questions that I used essays to try to resolve, like: why did coffee shops suddenly turn into wood-shops? Why does media keep using the word 'brogrammer'? Why are brands getting so zany on Twitter? What is the connection between the voyeur-forward architecture of social media and the NSA's surveillance programs? Why do tech leaders keep talking about the magical future while ignoring issues in current startup culture? What's going on with Airbnb's new logo/house-sharing nation? Why are wearables so dorky and how will they need to change to be cool? Below is a list of writing I did in 2014 in response to these questions. I'm excited to see what questions I need to figure out in writing in 2015. 

A big ~~<3~~ to everyone who reads my writing.

The Male Gazed (Model View Culture)

Sex and the Startup (Model View Culture)

Speculum of the Other Brogrammer (Katelosse.tv)

Weird Corporate Twitter (The New Inquiry)

Tech Aesthetics (Aeon Magazine)

Facebook for Space? Airbnb's Weird Corporation Nationhood (Katelosse.tv)

What's in a Free Fjallraven Backpack (Katelosse.tv)

The Myth of Magical Futures (Katelosse.tv)

Silicon Valley Has a Fashion Problem (Style.com)

What Reclaimed Wood Meant (Katelosse.tv)

Finally, this essay I wrote in 2013 had many more readers in 2014, so I will include it here:

The Unbearable Whiteness of Breaking Things (Medium)

Tech <3s Fashion

Very excited to have written this feature for Style.com's Tech Week issue, about how tech is seeking the fashion world's leadership to bring wearable tech beyond the Valley.

The Myth of Magical Futures

Despite its (now frequently mocked) claims to meritocracy, Silicon Valley loves its hierarchies. However, because these hierarchies often look somewhat different than old-time corporate ones, they are often opaque to outsiders looking in. My book The Boy Kings is among other things a diagram of hierarchy as it was architected at Facebook in Facebook’s early years, where the closer one was to a Mark-Zuckerberg-when-he-started-Facebook combination of age, race, and gender qualities the higher one was in the hierarchy (a hierarchy that appears not to have changed much given the industry's recently released diversity data). In the past year tech's particular version of hierarchy has been more widely acknowledged and critiqued, and thus we are now in the situation where people as powerful as Peter Thiel are being asked to comment on tech’s diversity and misogyny problems, as in yesterday’s Reddit Ask Me Anything interview with Thiel.

Peter Thiel’s answer to misogyny in tech was that we need more women founders, and this answer struck me as interesting on a number of levels, and also somewhat opaque to someone looking into this world from outside. Why women founders? On the one hand, the possibility that a woman founder would construct the hierarchy at her company differently than Mark Zuckerberg is compelling. On the other, the idea of women founders as a solution to tech misogyny also makes existing male founders and investors unaccountable for misogyny as it exists today. Thiel is saying that he and his funded companies are not responsible for the misogynist environments they themselves have built, and furthermore, that they can’t fix them-- only a woman founder can.

This is a problem, because the misogynist hierarchies that exist in tech today are not mystical outcomes, but very real products of the values of the people involved at the formation of a company, which are investors and founders. Investors and board members in addition to founders influence everything from how much equity goes to individual employees, to perks and play budgets (which often are not evenly distributed across the company), to the construction of departments, their relative importance, and the resources accordingly allocated to them. And not coincidentally the privileged departments, on this model, tend to be those occupied by people who look most like the founder and investors (at Facebook this was product engineering, which dominated other forms of engineering, which dominated non-engineering departments, which tended to have the largest degree of race and gender diversity).

But when Thiel is arguing for more women founders he isn’t just deflecting responsibility from himself and his fellow investors. He is also doing something else that I want to unpack: he is re-inscribing a form of hierarchical thinking that is part of the reason tech is such a mess regarding diversity. That is, when Thiel points to “more women founders” as a solution, he is asking women to become founders in order to possess a status that would allow Thiel to acknowledge women in tech at all. That is, all of the women who are currently working in tech, up and down the employee stack, many at companies that Thiel may be invested in, do not seem in Thiel’s formulation to really exist to him. They do not have a seat at the table. They are not acknowledged as agents of change, or as subjects of discrimination (for example, in the AMA, Thiel cited the Bay Area “housing crisis” as a worse problem than sexism in tech, not knowing that the housing crisis disproportionately affects women and people of color because of the wage discrimination marginalized people face at work).

That is, according to Thiel’s “women founders” logic, he can only imagine women as agents/subjects if they are the founder of a company. And this, in the end, is exactly why and how tech is such a diversity disaster: because there are so many ways powerful people in the industry have of ignoring that marginalized people are working at their companies and are experiencing multiple forms of discrimination right now. This is why many powerful people in tech can only conceive moves to “change” the industry in terms of magical futures like “more women founders” or “getting young girls to code”. The women working in the industry right now are being written off in favor of these magical futures, and as long as this is the case, the now of tech (whether the now is today or twenty years from today) will be unchanged.

This is why you should be skeptical whenever you see powerful men arguing for magical future outcomes in regard to diversity. Instead, ask what they can do right now to affect discrimination in their companies. For example, what are they doing to rectify across the board pay and equity discrepancies between men and women, or white men and people of color? What do their harassment policies look like? Investors like Peter Thiel directly influence these decisions at startups they fund (even if “influence” means “failing to advise founders to avoid discriminatory practices”, which is a form of influence). So when men like Thiel speak of magical futures, we should always be asking them: what are you doing today?

Memes, Selfies, Money: Why the Ice Challenge Worked

As many have commented, at no point in recent social media memory has the difference between Facebook and Twitter been so apparent: over the past week, Twitter users have used the #Ferguson hashtag over 3.6 million times to raise awareness of protests against the police killing of unarmed Michael Brown in St. Louis, while in the same period Facebook has been dominated by videos of people performing the "Ice Bucket Challenge", where they dump ice water over their heads in exchange for avoiding making a charity donation. I've spent more time on Twitter lately, so upon learning of the ice bucket meme and its popularity, it took a minute for me to untangle the logic of the challenge. 

Since the point of the challenge is to raise money, the meme's creators probably intended the "ice" part of the challenge to be more unpleasant than donating money, and were likely surprised that dousing yourself with ice water is as popular as it is. But rather than paying money to avoid the ice water, participants endure the ice water in order to have a socially-sanctioned reason to take a video selfie (because while photo selfies are much more acceptable than they once were, the video selfie is still less common). And the design of Facebook (as opposed to Twitter) works precisely to make the video-selfie aspect of the challenge its viral draw, causing the challenge to become more of an awareness raiser than a direct way of soliciting the maximum donations (in the end, some still pay something, and the viral spread multiplies those small donations).

That's to say that Facebook is designed to make personal content-- like photos, which have driven site usage since Facebook began-- spread most rapidly. It does so by making the primary nodal interface on the site be between "friends" rather than between, say, news sources and individuals, or other sources of content and individuals. People and their images and updates are the primary content that is being served on Facebook. 

Because Facebook is so tightly defined by the transaction of personal content, it actually creates a content production issue. Unlike Twitter where one can happily share impersonal links to news (though Twitter is developing an algorithm to move closer to Facebook's more opaque, personal model), the Facebook user must be prompted to post personal content, and that content must be broadly socially appealing. This is why weddings and babies are the main types of content on Facebook at present, and why Facebook perpetually experiments with the "status update" question, to find questions that prompt the widest range of people to post a personal update or even better, visual content, which performs best in News Feed.

The Ice Bucket Storm

If the Ice Bucket Challenge had not been invented as a fundraising drive, it would make an excellent social media site engagement driver, because it solves the problem of getting people to post and share personal, visual content. It does so first by providing an excuse to make a video selfie-- because in the age of ubiquitous cameras, the biggest hurdle to content production is self-consciousness, which can be overcome by being commanded by friends or philanthropy. Second, the ice bucket meme's format includes a prompt to friends to create their own video selfies (this is the human equivalent of when Facebook apps used to ask you to invite people to the app before you had used it). The Ice Bucket Challenge is thus a perfect viral storm that, while generating millions of page clicks and new content for Facebook and other sites, happens happily to also generate awareness and donations for a good cause.

As such one could imagine a philanthropically inclined Facebook feeling moved to make its own donation to the cause; or even for its own benefit, building products that contain some incentive to produce and share personal content a la the Ice Bucket Challenge. Slingshot, Facebook's Snapchatty app, does a version of this by forcing people to share content in order to see content.

Direct v. Algorithmic Curation

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the motivating factor for #Ferguson tweets is of a different order: concern with the injustice and overwhelming force shown in Ferguson by police against Mike Brown and unarmed residents. The news is urgent and the desire to share it is equally urgent and direct, along with the IRL responses of people organizing and sending supplies. Fortunately, a selfie isn't necessary to spread the news on Twitter; while on Facebook, due to algorithmic curation, it may be. But just the same, this viral sharing benefits Twitter insofar as it drives content and usage. As such one could imagine Twitter, like one could imagine Facebook for ALS, acknowledging the cause with a financial contribution. Because if paying producers for content is no longer on the table, perhaps the next ethical step will be to pay the meme's original creators (or their causes) for the engagement they drive.

Facebook for Space?: Airbnb's Weird Corporate Nationhood

Airbnb’s announcement of its new #branding struck the technical community on a lot of levels, not least of which are the many genitalia-related ways in which the logo can be interpreted. What I find most interesting in the new branding, however, is the way in which it articulates a logic of company nationhood very similar to that of Facebook's; making the “companies as countries” ideology of Facebook into not just one social network’s ambition but into a genuine tech trend that raises interesting questions about the future of platforms.

Local v. National

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky narrates Airbnb’s mission origin story in his blog post. “We asked ourselves, "what is our mission? For a while people thought it was about renting houses. But really, we’re about home. What makes this global community so great is that you can belong anywhere.” The advertised difference here is between renting a room—a transactional exchange in which money is exchanged for space—and participating in a community in which you belong simply by membership in Airbnb. This concept of belonging is described first as having insider access into a locale on your travels: the hidden discos, the off-the-beaten-path galleries. And insofar as a traveler seeks "authentic" entertainment, the inside information one gets via a local stay is valuable. “Belonging,” defined as “going where the locals go”, gives the Airbnb renter something, and thus makes business sense to advertise as a perk of the platform.

But what’s interesting about Airbnb’s announcement is that Airbnb is not content to stop with the idea of “belonging” as a stay that provides a bit more local access than a hotel. Rather, the real force of “belonging” for Airbnb is to belong not to a particular neighborhood but to Airbnb itself (via a “shared brand identity” that “cannot be separate from all of you”), which is imagined as a rich, welcoming nation that spans the world, complete with its own flag/logo to symbolize that the inhabitants of a house are allegiant to the culture of Airbnb. In this way it is not at all dissimilar to Facebook’s vision of the world as a set of interconnected nodes that Facebook hosts under its own, square F logo.

Best Western, the early hotel platform

Airbnb’s sense of the world as a set of connected spaces under its brand umbrella could also mirror the way in which chains like Best Western have franchised the Best Western brand to various independent hotels beginning in the 1950s, thus creating a global hotel network where each hotel is nonetheless independently run. However, Best Western’s corporate identity stops at the business level, seeking no particular emotional or moral commitment from either its guests or its franchisees. When you stay at a Best Western hotel, you don’t leave the hotel feeling pressure to fly the Best Western flag in your home or promote Best Western values in the world. Best Western and its guests have a business relationship: the guest pays to stay there and when they leave, the relationship ends until the next time they need a hotel.

The value of staying in an Airbnb, according to Chesky, is not the space you rent in which to sleep but the emotional connections you forge with other people in the process. The renting is a technology of social and spiritual connection, not merely housing. “However we first entered this community, we all know that getting in isn’t a transaction. It’s a connection that can last a lifetime. That’s because the rewards you get aren’t just financial, they’re personal.”

Keep corporations weird?

As anyone who has used Airbnb before might feel, Chesky’s focus on the personal connection is a bit, well, weird. For one thing, many Airbnb rentals do not involve so much as a meeting between host and renter—this function is performed by the website, which allows the renter and host to arrange the transaction without having met (and often the purpose of the exchange is so the hosts can rent while they are away from the house, thus making money for vacation). Chesky’s desire that the host and renter come to love one another on a personal level is thus rather emotionally demanding; but why? What does insisting on the intimacy between host and renter do for Airbnb? Why do they need us to join an Airbnb nation?

Airbnb’s insistence that we participate in their community for the love of Airbnb and Airbnb’s community echoes Facebook’s insistence that we use Facebook not for efficient exchange of updates and photos but because we believe in Facebook and Facebook’s mission. Facebook, that is, wants us to belong to a "Facebook nation", and it does so for a practical business reason: Facebook relies on the increasing exchange of data between users for its growth, but the platform does not compensate users financially for the exchange of their data. Thus, Facebook asks users to believe that by providing information free to Facebook we are participating in a global, transcendent project of connection under Facebook’s roof, where our own personal and national boundaries gradually dissolve and we are finally one with (or at least fully known by) Facebook’s elaborate algorithmic machinery (and by extension, the billion other people seamlessly connected to that machinery). My early history of Facebook, The Boy Kings, has more detail on this ideology.

Airbnb, similarly, wants us to overcome our suspicion of strangers (and crucially also any mistrust we might have of the Airbnb platform) in favor of the achievement of a personal connection with the platform and our fellow Airbnbers.

This focus on personal connection submerges some practical issues regarding the space being traded. For one, humans who have no real obligation to each other are, as the tragedy of the commons states, not necessarily going to assume mutual interests, and renting to strangers means a risk to property. But in the new logic of "sharing" this becomes an opportunity to "trust" and thereby make things more personal. 

What differs from Facebook in Airbnb’s focus on “trust” over financial exchange, however, is that Airbnb users are being compensated for their exchange of personal property, unlike on Facebook where the exchange of personal data is done without monetary compensation to users. The whole premise of Airbnb for most people I know is financial: it allows you to occupy space somewhere for slightly less money than a hotel, and the owner of the space can be compensated for allowing users to occupy it. Given that for most this is the real value proposition of Airbnb, in another marketing universe Airbnb could imagine itself as the Best Western of freelance house rentals; and simply focus on being the most efficient and trusted place to transact rooms. But it could do all of this without relying on the users themselves adopting the nation of Airbnb, flying its national flag and posting its logo in their homes, committing to “sharing” and “connecting” (two words that are also foundational to Facebook’s mission) with renters rather than simply providing a comfortable space to sleep.

A Facebook for Space?

Given all this, I am left with several questions after consuming Airbnb’s new #brand: will Facebook and Airbnb eventually become competing corporate “sharing” cultures; one based on sharing through the Facebook graph and the other based on sharing through the Airbnb space graph? Does Airbnb want to be the Facebook for space, and will Facebook and Airbnb eventually have a merger, given that their ambitions to become global sharing networks are so aligned? Airbnb has already replicated the social network profile aspect of Facebook as a means of promoting trusting social transactions; wouldn’t it make business sense to conjoin the networks completely?

And finally: with Airbnb on the ascendant, are corporate hotel chains like Best Western going to become the new, hip model of space-renting, in that you can stay at a Best Western for a night and just sleep, without the social networking imperative to develop deep personal attachments with the #brand, its philosophy, your hosts, and your fellow guests?

What Tech Offices Say

My new essay on Tech Aesthetics is up at Aeon Magazine.

“The tech industry has reimagined the office as a vehicle for conveying workers’ social and professional prestige.”

— http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/what-tech-offices-tell-us-about-the-future-of-work/

Let's Pretend

Meanwhile, in Portugal, I found a pretty art piece on a theater at dusk.

Corp Weird Twitter, Illustrated

Toronto artist Meredith Sadler was inspired to paint an illustration based on my Corporate Weird Twitter article. Cool!

My new essay "Weird Corporate Twitter" is up at The New Inquiry. #pancakewave

Orchid Halo

Pretty day on a boat in New Orleans.

Further Notes on Kink as a Platform

"Be the porn you want to see in the world," said our tour guide at the Kink.com studios in San Francisco's Armory, deploying repurposed inspirational slogans as readily as any Silicon Valley CEO at a #TCDisrupt talk. Thus began a tour that, the farther along we went, started to seem like a revelatory mirror of the trends that are driving San Francisco's tech and business culture generally. As Melissa Gira Grant's recent piece in Dissent argues, porn like all other media these days wants to jump from content production to content platform-- not just publishing, but mediating and distributing user-generated content. I left the Kink.com studios feeling that, in wanting to be a platform for sexual content like others are for social content, Kink has interesting things to teach us about platforms and our relationship to them.

The first thing our tour guide wanted to make sure we understood was that not only is tourist photography fine at Kink, it is also encouraged, as is posting photos from Kink to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. "If you feel inspired to enter a cage and pose for pictures, please do!" the guide said enthusiastically, cautioning us only that the professional performers in the building were not fair game for photos/friend requests unless asked. "Just because you've seen someone's asshole doesn't mean they want to be your friend on Facebook," our guide admonished.

This was the first of many uncanny moments I felt during the tour, where a porn platform representative was laying down rules for social media that are more explicit than those of social media companies themselves. When was the last time a social media platform told you the house rules for friending or distributing information? For social media platforms, all information flow is good flow. At Kink, there are rules, and the proprietors of the platform wanted to make sure we knew them.

"If any of the information I am telling you is too much, I'm going to teach you the safe words," our guide told us. "'Yellow' means that you are reaching your limit; 'Red' means that your boundaries have been reached and I should stop immediately." "Hmm", I thought, increasingly interested in the platform analogy. What if when I went to a website and it placed cookies on my browser, it would tell me what information it was registering, and if I said "yellow" it would slow down, or "red", it would stop? Why don't media platforms have safe words? What does it mean that they don't? Would we 'play' more freely on social media if they did?

At Kink, having safe words means that all possibilities for play seem realized, because within the "platform" people have boundaries that they can set and have respected. We went to the "electrosluts" room, which simulated a brightly-lit futuristic space where people could play with all kinds of electric gadgets. Aesthetic specificity is important at Kink: there are actors-turned-auteurs and set designers, and the Electro room was apparently modeled off of a science fiction movie, all white walls and bleeping consoles. Earlier we had visited the Abattoir room, a room decorated as a meat locker with meat hooks upon which could dangle enormous slabs of fake meat (there was confusion among the tourists about whether the "fake meat" was edible vegan meat or foam; it turned out to be foam).

fake meat for the "meat locker"

crumbs as props on the "kitchen" set

cool vintage drinking fountain in the prop room

Law & Order set under construction

The uncanny valley of fake and real within the Armory-- is the meat fake or real? is the creepy crawlspace just a creepy corner or a creepy dungeon set? is the drinking fountain real or prop?-- evoked other interesting resonances to social media. When we perform "pleasure" on social media is it "authentic" or show or both? What if our performance and our possessions are "props" in a show we are creating for our social media voyeurs-- not unlike the voyeurs who pay to watch people play on Kink.com? Does it matter? What "is" authenticity anymore? If not paid, for whom are we producing content, and for what reward?

"this corner was too creepy not to use," the guide said, speaking about an area of the Armory where Mission Dolores creek bubbles up from underground, creating a dank atmosphere.

Kink.com plays with the real-fake distinction as much as any social media platform: it invites people to play, for free, in its spaces, along with performers who are paid, in order to create "authenticity", a sense of unscripted fun. Unscripted fun, of course, is what social media platforms traffic in as well, and the unscripted amateurism of the production is what draws us to social media: anything can happen. On mainstream social media, porn is the one thing that can't happen, via the Terms of Service; on the other hand, at Kink, porn is the terms of service, a space of play that is created when the field around it is defined and made safe, and when the platform has been built and furnished so that the resulting content can be broadcast to paying customers.

The "Speakeasy" set, where bottles are filled with colored water due to regulations around serving alcohol in conjunction with nudity. However, according to our guide, the actors have monthly "employee appreciation parties" where they bring in real booze.

I was left to wonder what else Kink, the porn platform, has to teach social media platforms. What if a social media platform was created where we did know our privacy boundaries, where we could play freely because we knew where our information would go, and that it would be safe if we said "red"? How much do we curtail our social media play because we don't have those safe words and we don't know where our information is going? What would a social media platform built on consent look like?