I’ve spent the better part of 2023 and 2024 trying to imagine the specific changes we technology nerds could make to improve things somewhat.

I’ve shared some of my ideas and musings throughout the past year. Briefly:

• Ambition, the Fediverse, and Technology Freedom
• Some Thoughts on the Twitter Mass Exodus
• The Continued Trajectory of Idiocy in the Tech Industry
• Ideas and Execution

You are not required to read any of these blog posts. In fact, none of this matters.

Not to put too fine a point on it: If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, don’t expect a black bar on Hacker News (should word of my passing even reach them).

Most people don’t give a fuck about me or you.

Most people shouldn’t give a fuck about us. Isn’t it enough that we care about ourselves?

Enough

Much yarn has been spun about the evils of social media, and of “algorithms”. (Really, recommendation systems.)

Journalists seem to love to write about how tech companies amplify engagement-bait to keep you coming back to their platform, and use the data you provide to improve the efficacy of their ad placements.

Greed is good. Everything in service of the line going up.

I’ve spent the past couple of years primarily posting on Mastodon, where there is no recommendation algorithm to appease. If you post good things, other people will see it, and it will get popular because other people will boost it.

I’ve spent the same number of months diving through specifications and trying to envision the best strategy for improving the privacy of direct messages.

I will refrain from describing this time as a “detox”, as so many bloggers are prone to do, because I’m painfully aware of the distinction between an addiction and a compulsive behavior. (This is partly because, as a gay furry online, I’m constantly forced to engage with the “sex/porn addiction” narrative.)

But I will say the past couple of years has been enlightening.

The worst evils of social media might related to the greed of the companies that built the platforms, but the power of such platforms to poison our egos cannot be overstated. Even the Fediverse is not immune to this effect.

Gamification and enshittification are never far apart.

I recently suggested Bluesky replace raw follower counts with a humbling percentage of all Bluesky users that follow you. For most of us, this would result in something like this:

This wasn’t entirely a serious suggestion; I merely wanted to provoke others to imagine software that didn’t try to hijack people’s dopamine receptors through gamification and dark patterns.

Of course, if you suggest this sort of notion to any VC-funded startup, you’ll struggle to be taken seriously. After all, the tech industry collectively chooses to not understand consent.

The harms of ego poisoning aren’t mitigated by intelligence or social status. Let me share a poignant example:

American Bald Ego

Daniel J. Bernstein (DJB), a prolific cryptographer (who has provided the Internet with Curve25519, Salsa20, Poly1305, and many other important algorithms used widely today), was recently admonished for his unprofessional behavior on an IETF mailing list discussion.

You continue to violate list policy with unprofessional commentary on other participants’ motivations and repeatedly raising points that are out of scope. Please stop this behavior. This is the last warning before we will take action and temporarily ban you from the list; see BCP 94 [0].

This caught my attention, so I read the discussion that preceded this warning to figure out what the hell just happened. But as with most IETF mailing lists, the context isn’t super interesting to most people who aren’t (in this case, antitrust policy) super nerds.

The discussion in question started with an RFC draft proposed by Deirdre Connolly to support ML-KEM (the NIST approved post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism) in newer versions of TLS.

It’s important to know that Deirdre Connolly also co-authored X-Wing, a hybrid KEM. When someone suggested they have customers asking for non-hybrid KEMs (i.e., only ML-KEM), DJB cited antitrust rules while concern-trolling, which led to this succinct response from Filippo Valsorda.

When I last attended Real World Cryptography, a NIST employee recounted his decades of experience with the cryptography community all the way back to the announcement of AES. His stories very sharply contrasted with my personal experiences with this community.

Cryptographers, to me, have mostly been people like Deirdre: Fiercely intelligent, kind to a fault, and humble.

Don’t take my word for it, listen to her on the Security, Cryptography, Whatever podcast.

To this NIST employee, though? Well, the experiences he shared with me are eerily reminiscent of the early black hat hacker culture of the early 2000s, with echoes into the current day.

If you weren’t there, you probably don’t immediately get what I mean. That’s okay.

I can think of no better example of old school black hat hacker attitudes than the first Zero For 0wned ezine, circa 2005:

skram, some noob told me you were an elite hacker! Unfortunately, I went to your presentation at HOPE to meet the “man” himself, instead I see a little 15 year old boy who was too nervous to look at his audience while he whispered into the microphone “Virtual Private Servers and the (Free) Open Source PBX”. Guess what skram, people know about Asterisk. It’s no secret. You’re not liberating us. Oh and yes, we can figure out how to do that “while still using the same server to run your website!”, Mark. Geeks don’t really come to HOPE to be lectured on the application of something simple, with very simple means, by a 15 year old. A combination of all the above could be why your room wasn’t full. Not only was it fairly empty, but it emptied at a rapid rate. I could barely take a seat through the masses pushing me to escape. Then when I thought no more people could possibly leave, they kept going. The room was almost empty when I gave in and left also. Heck, I was only there because we pwned the very resources you were talking about. And now you’re being humiliated, Skram, it just isn’t your day. Maybe you should retreat and come back in five years. Oh, and Mark, cut the hair.

By the way, did you know it’s not good to leave your personal information just laying around?

Zero For 0wned #1 being completely toxic to a young technologist they hacked

The attitude exhibited here by hackers towards a goddamn teenager (at the time) is almost exactly how DJB comes off in this IETF mailing list discussion about antitrust and transparency.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Look at the various talks he’s given, including by NIST’s invitation, over the years and you’ll see the same attitude espoused by DJB: when he’s not actively trying to accuse others of having sinister motives, he often tries to paint them as incompetent.

Being such an asshole all the time is exhausting and counterproductive. There is a time and a place for it, but it’s not all the time, everywhere.

Hell, we probably could have had EdDSA land in FIPS-186 years earlier if not for his abrasive personality making people not want to work with him at all.

If you want to improve things at all, being technically correct is only half of it.

If you do not respect the humanity of the other person, you will have a damn hard time winning them onto your side. Even if you’re right.

A Modicum of Kindness

Karen Tolkkinen wrote an article for the Star Tribune about her willingness to check into conspiracy theorists’ claims, but only if they’re willing to share concrete details. I was made aware of this article because of a Google News Alert I setup way back when the furry litterbox hoax first began circulating.

I don’t look down on people who have conspiracy theories. We are all bombarded daily by radio shows, podcasts, social media, television, newspapers, YouTube, TikTok. How do you separate things that are true from those that aren’t? I’ve been fooled myself into thinking a pay-to-play online publication was a scholarly journal. The mainstream media were fooled about weapons of mass destruction. We’re all just humans trying to do the best we can with the knowledge we have.

Karen Tolkkinen

And, like, yeah. That’s a healthy attitude. But things never needed to be this way.

The technology industry made a lot of this mess. Social media is just one of many experiments that has significantly harmed our culture. The few corporations controlling most the mainstream media is arguably just as damaging as social media in eroding Americans’ trust in journalism.

One problem that has persisted throughout the Internet age is the belief that fact-checking is convincing to most people. It simply isn’t, as Adam Conover confesses in this video:

This is the same Adam Conover that used to produce a series called Um, Actually. The “Adam Ruins Everything” guy, where he cited facts and statistics to ruin people’s vibe. His stage character is basically everything that a Reddit comment thread aspires to be!

And here he is, admitting that it doesn’t work.

Karen’s approach is more likely to succeed than Adam’s: Instead of challenging their beliefs with facts, asking for concrete details. With this kind of framing, the person is forced to engage with reality without feeling attacked. In fact, they probably feel like someone is finally listening to them for once.

Not everyone will completely come to grips with reality, but it’s better than digging their heels in.

Against Negative Peace

My profession is within an interesting intersection: software engineering, mathematics, and information security. The stakes are very high for getting the technical details right, but the risk of egocentrism is also extremely high.

The existence of an occasional charlatan makes hostility inevitable (which is one reason why I am so unkind to messaging app evangelists), but it’s not compulsory in all situations.

Sometimes you have to be an asshole to someone to be kind to others. Kindness is not niceness, after all.

But being kind isn’t nearly motivating enough to change the trajectory we’re on, as an industry. We need to try something different.

Towards Better Daemons

Appealing to others’ better nature doesn’t work. It just makes you sound self-righteous.

This is especially true when many of the people you’d be trying to appeal to simply don’t have a better nature to appeal to in the first place. After all–to cite a recent example that has captured the public imagination–you simply don’t become the CEO of a billion dollar health insurance company by caring about the lives that must be destroyed in order to make a bigger profit.

If we want to build and popularize technology that respects user consent and privacy, moral arguments won’t get us there. Instead, those goals need to be tethered to others’ sense of self-interest with a convincing narrative.

You don’t need to look far in the technology industry to see an example of what I mean.

Decades of privacy activists talking to policy experts about the benefits of encryption technology was barely able to stop the US government from passing stupid laws. But then a common enemy (foreign hackers breaching our telecommunications infrastructure) allowed both sides of the political system to unite in favor of reason: Everyone is suddenly urged to use Signal or other encrypted messaging apps.

This is a far cry from, a mere decade ago, the FBI describing people using encrypted messengers as the “going dark” problem.

People have been arguing this since the 1990s, when Daniel J. Bernstein (remember him?) sued the US government over export controls on cryptography.

As technologists, we can affect change without the need for violence. But we need to be smarter about it, which means being honest about human nature. Non-violent protests are a form of emotional blackmail that simply will never reach the hearts of sociopaths.

Every goal we have that can stand on its own merits, that we’re used to arguing from first principles, that is a clear and obvious benefit to society? Well, one huge reason “it’s not happening” today is that we lack a convincing narrative that ties it into the interests of other people.

And it’s not always obvious what narrative will work. Months before the Cambridge Analytica story captured the public’s imagination, technologists were already talking about it at length.

By the time it became a major news story, it wasn’t even news anymore!

But it was made relevant to the political zeitgeist.

It’s tempting to blame this on social media. It’s tempting to blame this on governments. It’s tempting to blame this on propaganda, capitalism, incumbent power structures, or secretive organizations.

Hell, a friend recently shared this conspiracy theory about furry hackers:

I think it’s not worthwhile to do such a thing; the blame game cannot be won.

What good does it do you, if the outcome is unchanged, but you get to blame someone else for your goal being unfulfilled?

That doesn’t fulfill your damn goals. It massages your bruised ego, at best.

It seems we’ve come full circle.

Pride and vanity are not our better daemons. They are already being hijacked by the systems we live within to serve others’ greed. This is on top of the fear-mongering and rage-bait.

I can’t help but feel like we’d be better served by appealing towards lust instead? But perhaps I’m biased.

This year has taught many about the dangers of corporate-controlled watering holes. I’ve seen an increasing number of artists embracing the Fediverse as their main avenue of sharing their work.

The downside of not having recommendation systems powering our social media is that we need to be proactive about self-promotion. Assholes don’t like to see people promote their own work, but assholes are overwhelmingly not in the spaces you want to be. Boost your own posts; it’s the only way most of us will see it.

Arbitrary rules against self-promotion were always meant to deter spammers, not prolific contributors. But that’s how they’re weaponized by gatekeepers on every message board.

…And A Happy Nude Deer

This is most likely the last blog post I will write in 2024. I didn’t write an end-of-year blog post last year. It didn’t seem interesting to me at the time.

My guiding principle for this blog is: if I don’t think it would be interesting to write, it’ll probably be hellishly boring for others to read. So I just don’t–especially if an advertiser is asking me to!

The year ahead of us will have significant challenges.

Many of these challenges could become opportunities, if only we are able to exercise a little humility in how we approach them.

But alas, the odds are stacked against that happening for most of us.

Work on my projects will continue until I’m satisfied with them. Some of these may prove useful to other technologists. Hopefully, at least one will be complete in 2025.

I have no delusions of grandeur about the work I’m embarking on. I certainly lack the social capital to make a big enough splash to affect the entire technology industry. A few people will appreciate it for what it is, and perhaps some of them will go on to build something important atop it.

Separately from all this technology stuff, I plan to write more fiction and publish it on my other website.

Did you know I had a personal website? Yeah, I revamped it at the end of last year. It’s still a bit barebones for now, but next year I want to make something fun and enjoyable to share with you all.

I’m definitely not the best fiction writer, but I’ve had a lot of friends share positive feedback about A Very 13/12 Christmas (which has a touch of science fiction to it), so I plan to keep at it.

Until then, happy hacking.

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Header image includes works created by the following artists: WeaselWorks, Johis, Primorde Designs, and LovieSophie.