Asides
Some shorter, collected thoughts from the last week:
No, the news is not information junk food
Every so often, a post goes around in tech circles about how news is bad and we shouldn’t pay attention to it. I think that’s ludicrous.
Today’s was a post from 2022 called The News is Information Junk Food . I think it’s a bad argument that could have poor consequences.
It was featured on Hacker News , so, gods help me, I commented there. Here’s what I said:
This is a pretty bad take.
For example, multiple studies have shown that in communities that aren't addressed by a robust local news outlet, local corruption goes up. Having a good newsroom does improve an understanding of what your representatives are up to, and a lack of information does allow them to get up to more behind our backs.
I think the biggest failure of this piece is to make all news equivalent. Yes, much cable news is junk; yes, many of the corporate newsrooms that churn out hundreds of articles a day are junk. They use engagement as a metric for success rather than finding ways to align themselves with impact and creating an informed, empowered electorate. That last thing - an informed, empowered electorate - is what it's all about.
Real journalism that is diligently undertaken in the public interest does make a real difference. (Should we know whether Clarence Thomas was taking corrupt bribes? Yes. Should we know how climate change is progressing? Yes. Should we know if the police are killing innocent people? Yes. Should we know that the police at the Uvalde school shooting hung around for over an hour doing nothing? Yes.) Telling people not to pay attention to the world around them results in an electorate who cannot meaningfully vote on real issues.
For those of us who build software, we need to know the factors that impact the lives of the people we're serving. We need to know the trends in the marketplaces and communities where we show up. The news is good for that, too.
Turn off cable news; pay more attention to non-profit news; go for long-form written journalism. Stay informed.
It's absolutely true that we take a psychic hit for doing so. I'd say that's more to do with the world than it is the media overall. Perhaps we should spend more time trying to make it better?
One user responded:
The key is to focus on local news: these are updates that a person can take action upon.
Seeing the latest tragedies on the other side of the world catches headlines, but rarely actionable by regular people.
To which I replied:
We all have foreign policies. For example, in the US, our government is heavily involved in Gaza and Ukraine. It's far away, but it's also highly relevant to how our representatives work on our behalf.
Should we give aid to other countries? How should we think about global society? Those things are all relevant, too.
The bottom line to my argument: Journalism is a key to understanding the world around us. We shouldn’t give ourselves excuses to look away.
It's not partisanship when democracy is at stake
This moment isn’t about partisanship, because the discussions we’re having aren’t about tax policy or the intricacies of how we interact overseas. In 2024, one candidate’s supporters are waving flags that read “mass deportations now”, while the candidate is telling them they’ll never need to vote in another election and calling for the termination of parts of the Constitution. The other candidate, while we might quibble about policy differences, is advocating for fairness and inclusivity, and, you know, continuing to have a democracy .
So I don’t have any qualms about throwing myself in for Harris and Walz. I would have voted for Biden and Harris, too, and probably also three ferrets in a trenchcoat, as long as we were sure the ferrets didn’t advocate for a white Christian nation. As it happens, I’m more aligned with Harris and Walz than I have been with any Presidential candidate maybe ever; certainly the last time I felt anything close to this excitement was when Obama was running in the wake of eight disastrous years under George W Bush. Even Obama was cautious on the campaign trail and knocked back support for marriage equality, for example.
I’m particularly excited to see us move beyond the level of discourse where we’re arguing about democracy vs not-democracy. Let’s get into the intricacies of how we can help people without homes get back on their feet, or to figure out how to help people buy their first houses; let’s talk about literacy levels and how to move ourselves away from fossil fuels without losing jobs and improving working conditions. A return to a marketplace of genuine ideas rather than ideas vs unbridled id would be an incredible step forward. I can’t wait to talk about tax policy again.
And yeah, I’m looking forward to not thinking about That Guy, the folks behind Project 2026, and their brand of nationalism for a good long time. We need to move forward. We’re not going back.
The future could be much, much brighter than it has been for almost a decade. Now we just have to win this thing.
A re-introduction for Blaugust
So, the Blaugust festival of blogging is a thing. Who knew?
For anyone arriving here for the very first time Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last several years. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly.
Cool, cool. I already post very regularly, but I appreciate the spirit of this, and I’m delighted to take part.
I discovered this via Andy Piper’s post , and I like the way he’s taken a step back and (re-)introduced himself. So I’ll try and do the same.
You can learn more about me on my About page or on my narrative resumé , which collectively explain who I am and how I got here at length. Or at least, they explain the professional version of me. So perhaps this “about me” can be a little more personal.
About Me
I’m Ben Werdmuller. I’m in my mid-40s. My mother’s family are half Russian Jews whose village was burned down in pogroms conducted by the White Army, and half institutional east coast Americans who can be traced back to the Mayflower. My dad’s are Indonesian, Swiss, and Dutch. He is one of the youngest survivors of Japanese concentration camps in Indonesia.
We moved around a bit when I was a kid, but the closest thing I have to a hometown is Oxford, England. These days I live in Greater Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after twelve years or so in the San Francisco Bay Area. I also lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, for close to a decade.
I see the world through a strongly internationalist lens, am fiercely pro-union and anti-war, love immigration, and believe in a strong Europe as long as it is a force for inclusive democracy and peace. I mostly align with progressive principles and emphatically reject the idea that the political center is the most reasonable — particularly in America, where the universal healthcare, gun control, and educational principles that are just accepted in most of the rest of the developed world are somehow considered to be incredibly left-wing.
I’ve lost five members of my family, including my mother, to a (so-far) incurable, genetic telomere dysfunction. Although I’m grateful to not have the genetic trait, I would gladly have exchanged it with them. It doesn’t and must not define any of their lives, but it hangs over my family. We’ve experienced a lot of loss in a short time and we miss them all terribly.
I’ve founded a handful of startups , have been the first employee at a few more, and generally find myself in CTO roles across smaller, growing organizations. A few years ago I took a sharp career turn and started leading technology in non-profit newsrooms, because I became more and more concerned about the state of the world and wanted to be on the side of strengthening democracy. These days I lead tech at ProPublica . I care a lot about supporting the fediverse and the indie web , which I see as incredibly liberating in a human way: they’re how the web should be.
I’m a lifelong Doctor Who fan. I remember watching the Daleks chase Peter Davison’s Doctor when I was very small, and I still look forward to every new story. I wrote this story about the 50th anniversary , eleven years ago now.
I care about using technology to make the world more informed and equal. If we’re not doing that, what’s the point?
About My Blog
Over time my blog has transitioned from just being my indie space to mostly talking about the intersection of tech and media. It’s led to working interesting jobs and meeting interesting people. I don’t have a ton of time to build new software or write longer work, but I’ve made reflecting here an integral part of my life. Lately I’ve been thinking about making it more personal again.
I’ve been blogging since 1998, which feels like a very long time ago, but this particular space has been going since 2013. Prior to that, I blogged at benwerd.com , which I keep online as an archive. My sites before that have been lost to time but are probably still available on the Internet Archive.
This site runs on Known . I write posts using iA Writer , and power the email version using Buttondown .
Every so often I ask readers here what they’d like me to write and think about . So I’ll ask you, too.
If you’re new here: glad to meet you! If you’re a long-time reader: thanks for sticking around.