Thanks to the folks at Mixpanel’s blog for two nice posts summarizing a conversation we had earlier this summer
Part 1: The Hustle
Part 2: The Career Dilemma
Monthly Archives: July 2016
“WHAT WAS ALL THIS VIDEO???” Five Questions with Magic & Loss Author Virginia Heffernan
Oh I was so intimidated to meet Virginia Heffernan for the first time. She was a cultural critic at the New York Times and writing about YouTube in a way that no one else was. About its communities, content niches, the aesthetic of the first wave of user content. In a manner which was academically-informed but not stuffy. Critiquing but not judging. I imagined she lived in Brooklyn, lived some cool life and really, really wanted her to like me, even though I was sure she’d think I was just a big nerd.
So, it turned out that she did live in Brooklyn. Lived a cool life but was also a big nerd. And not just tolerated my fanboy love of YouTube but we grooved about technology, avatars, adolescence and all things Internet. A great friendship was born and I’m thrilled almost a decade later to ask her Five Questions. Virginia recently wrote Magic and Loss, an amazing and well-received book about the Internet as art.
Hunter Walk: The Internet moves at fruit fly generational cycles – always evolving. When you sat down to write Magic and Loss, how did reconcile what you wanted to say with the traditional cycles of book publishing timelines?
Virginia Heffernan: Part of the reason for the development of critical theory—literary theory, art theory—in the 20th century is that critics recognized that without it all they were doing was generating just one more reading of a specific work. I wanted, with Magic and Loss, to leave off individual reviews and prognostications about the market, or one digital service or another—except to prove a larger point. The book’s case about design—that elegant app design is a reproof to the junky non-design of the open Web, which is built to pick your pocket and read YOU even when you think you’re reading IT—that argument, if true, should hold up even with Yahoo’s demise, the ascendancy of Pokemon Go and new styles in Bitmoji. I aimed to identify the tectonics of digital culture, its logic, rather than keep pace with the play of surfaces. However lovely those surfaces can be.
HW: I have a theory that each generation of teenagers needs a new online space to call their own. That is, each group of 13-17 year olds will birth a successful social platform, even if they’re also participating in legacy products. Is this consistent at all with your POV?
VH: Absolutely. The mandate for adolescence is to do something that mystifies your parents, and ideally entirely illegible to them. I knew my kids were up to something good with Minecraft when I saw the interface and it looked like visual noise to me—the way skiffle music, rock, disco, punk, hip-hop sounded like noise to my grandparents and parents.
HW: As a kid, you had the geographic serendipity to grow up in Hanover, New Hampshire, one of the first towns wired to the Internet. Would you have found a path to tech-oriented journalism and culture regardless or is there an alternate reality where Virginia Heffernan had a totally different future?
VH: I’m not sure. I wonder this all the time. Before I joined Conference XYZ on Dartmouth’s time-sharing system, I was already drawn to electronic games like Merlin and Simon, and something called TEAMMATE, a proto-computer I got at Sears. I loved non-linear “electronics,” and my grandfather, Lyle W. Coffey, had introduced cable television in Appalachia before it was even in New York, on the grounds that country people needed entertainment and escape more than people in cities, who had parties and Broadway and all manner of diversions. So I knew tech was good for people in rural areas, like me.
I also loved telephones, and even the kind of pranks that—had I been more skilled—might have turned in phone phreaking, a hacker gateway drug beloved of Jobs and the Woz. CB and ham radio also seemed very exciting, though I was too young for them. And I loved penpals and mail-order stuff from the back of comic books. I think I liked networks, fantasy games like D&D, surprising connections across time and space, non-linear systems, and digital culture before it was called that. So even without Conference XYZ I might have found another way through the looking glass.
HW: We first met when you were a columnist at the New York Times and, from my perspective, understood YouTube’s community better than anyone outside of our team. Do you recall what attracted you to study YouTube and what hooked you?
VH: That meeting with you was really exciting—because I remember just nodding as everything clicked. I’m not sure what kicked it off, but I’d been writing about TV for so long—and wondering why ratings and quality seemed to be falling off so steeply, on shows that cost a fortune to make. Then I saw the video “guitar,” in which Funtwo plays “Canon Rock” in a video that broke all the rules of television. And I realized I had been longing to see behind the canned illusions of TV—the multiple cameras, the mandatory body shapes and ethnicities, the lighting, the three acts. I wanted to see something like a kid in Seoul playing guitar in his room that I wasn’t quite supposed to see.
Think of “lonelygirl15″—what a wonderful fakeout. It looked like other girls keeping kind of teasing video diaries. You expected something unwholesome, but with “lonelygirl15” you got a serialized, scripted adventure that played on the audience’s curiosity about YouTube generally. WHAT WAS ALL THIS VIDEO? I still don’t know! And that’s what keeps me coming back. The sheer size and eccentricity of that video clearinghouse. It’s mind-boggling.
HW: As a parent, how have you introduced your children to the Internet? For them it’s always been a given that all the world’s information is available at all times. What does this mean for kids in general vs our generations?
VH: I don’t know, and I’m glad I don’t! We all love to muse about how things have changed but the small stuff—dinner hour looking different than it did in the 70s and 80s, more kids having expensive phones earlier—is not where the change really lies. The move to much greater abstraction and densely symbolic experience (when it happens with capitalism, say, which supplanted feudalism, or the move from gold to paper and then electronic money) is so tremendous with the Internet that I don’t even know how to measure or conceive of the psychic changes we’re undergoing.
My kids’ experience of the Internet is relentlessly creative and progressive and, at best, illegible to me. I spoke about Minecraft’s illegibilty. The same is true for AR and Pokemon GO. They picked it up fast and quickly started speaking a language with their friends that I couldn’t understand. But in other ways, I recognize their path through the culture. My son found Weird Al Yankovic and Monty Python on YouTube at (almost) 11. He worked around the superheroes and cartoons dominating movie theaters; it wasn’t his thing. That was a canny way through the culture on his own terms, and he was only able to pilot it using the Internet.
My daughter loves to make avatars of all kinds. She doesn’t play Wii games so much as make new avatars and give them new names. Because avatar creation is so important to me—creating some that are fantasy and at least one that is both authoritative and authentic—I do talk with her about her choices. There’s a big element of roleplay to them—she likes appearing as a boy, as a black woman, as a gigantic adult. But then why did my son make his headshot for Google a kind of corporate power-pose—with his arms behind his head, as if leaning back at a giant desk? We discussed this—and I got it. It’s the equivalent of decking yourself out in armor in Second Life. What better move for a preteen who feels vulnerable and is trying to give himself courage and confidence? But they are clearly inventing new forms.
I’ve been surprised to see how much my son and his friends write together in Google Docs, for instance. They make brackets or write stories and comment on them, and sometimes just chat in the docs! That reminds me a lot of ConferenceXYZ — how everything has a chat element. On an app called QuizUp my son discovered someone in Lithuania with his exact three areas of expertise—Tintin, How I Met Your Mother, and WWI—and it was like MAGIC to find this person. How in the world? When I see the kids getting to that state of awe, I know they’re in the pocket. I love to see it.
You can order Virginia’s book Magic & Loss: The Internet as Art RIGHT NOW.
Why Doesn’t Twitter’s Safety Policy Differentiate Between My Backyard and Your Backyard? A Simple (?) Proposal.
I love Twitter. 45,000 Tweets. 263,000 Likes (even though they’ll always be Favs to me). Their commitment to free speech has always been clear (thank you amac!). But they’re, by many accounts, losing users to continued abuse and trolling. And Twitter has said they want to fix this, but never published a roadmap as to how they intend to do so.
Today I was drawn to SNL comedian Leslie Jones’ timeline. Currently starring in Ghostbusters, she seems like exactly the type of celebrity account Twitter wants. Funny, engaging, speaking openly – not just through social media managers. On the Monday after her movie opened to a $40m+ debut she should be interacting with fans. Instead she spent the day dealing with a deluge of racist tweets in her mentions.
You know I'm gonna stop blocking so y'all can go through my feed yourself and see the bs. You won't believe the evil. It's fucking scary
— Leslie Jones 🦋 (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016
It’s disgusting.
There’s a relatively simple change that perhaps Twitter can make and it involves the difference between what you can say in your house versus what’s ok to come into my house and say.
If some low-class individual wants to tweet in their account that Leslie Jones is all sort of awful things, including comments that might be racist, let them do it so long as they’re not tagging her (and of course violating other Community Standards around direct threats, etc). If this person’s followers find that entertaining, then whatever, that’s a group of people I can ignore or block.
But when this person comes into Leslie’s house by replying to her tweets or tagging her, boom, if she reports it for harassment, take it seriously. If it’s racist, violent, profane it deserves attention. It’s not ok to come into Leslie’s house and say these things to her, even if they are protected by free speech. Free speech doesn’t give you the right to come on my lawn and start shouting despicable things at me.
I know this isn’t a perfect solution but to me at least, there’s a big difference between the people who want to say horrible shit into the wind versus those who seek out specific people to target and offend. The latter don’t belong on Twitter’s service.
Trump Would Hurt Innovation (& I’m With Her)
I’ve cosigned a letter elaborating why a Trump Presidency would be devastating for America’s innovation. Along with 150 of my tech industry colleagues, this collaborative effort identifies some of the ways we believe Trump’s rhetoric and policy beliefs put the American economy at risk.
My support of Hillary Clinton this election coincides with my distaste for the Trump campaign. Electing Hillary is a start but I’m under no illusion that her Presidency would be the full solution to an increasing economic dislocation that is causing inequality and fear among a large percentage of Americans. I have no interest in developing empathy for racists but to write off all of Trump’s support with that label would be ignorant. Personally, I’m committing time and dollars for the next four months to campaign for Hillary but also speak with and learn more about the local and national economic challenges many communities face.
We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector. We are proud that American innovation is the envy of the world, a source of widely-shared prosperity, and a hallmark of our global leadership.
We believe in an inclusive country that fosters opportunity, creativity and a level playing field. Donald Trump does not. He campaigns on anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people, and a fundamental belief that America is weak and in decline. We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation. His vision stands against the open exchange of ideas, free movement of people, and productive engagement with the outside world that is critical to our economy—and that provide the foundation for innovation and growth.
Let’s start with the human talent that drives innovation forward. We believe that America’s diversity is our strength. Great ideas come from all parts of society, and we should champion that broad-based creative potential. We also believe that progressive immigration policies help us attract and retain some of the brightest minds on earth—scientists, entrepreneurs, and creators. In fact, 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Donald Trump, meanwhile, traffics in ethnic and racial stereotypes, repeatedly insults women, and is openly hostile to immigration. He has promised a wall, mass deportations, and profiling.
We also believe in the free and open exchange of ideas, including over the Internet, as a seed from which innovation springs. Donald Trump proposes “shutting down” parts of the Internet as a security strategy ― demonstrating both poor judgment and ignorance about how technology works. His penchant to censor extends to revoking press credentials and threatening to punish media platforms that criticize him.
Finally, we believe that government plays an important role in the technology economy by investing in infrastructure, education and scientific research. Donald Trump articulates few policies beyond erratic and contradictory pronouncements. His reckless disregard for our legal and political institutions threatens to upend what attracts companies to start and scale in America. He risks distorting markets, reducing exports, and slowing job creation.
We stand against Donald Trump’s divisive candidacy and want a candidate who embraces the ideals that built America’s technology industry: freedom of expression, openness to newcomers, equality of opportunity, public investments in research and infrastructure, and respect for the rule of law. We embrace an optimistic vision for a more inclusive country, where American innovation continues to fuel opportunity, prosperity and leadership.
*DISCLAIMER: The individuals listed below have endorsed in their personal capacity and this does not reflect the endorsement of any organization, corporation or entity to which they are affiliated. Titles and affiliations of each individual are provided for identification purposes only.
Marvin Ammori, General Counsel, Hyperloop One
Adrian Aoun, Founder/CEO, Forward
Greg Badros, Founder, Prepared Mind Innovations; Former Engineering VP, Facebook
Clayton Banks, Co-Founder, Silicon Harlem
Phin Barnes, Partner, First Round Capital
Niti Bashambu, Chief Analytics Officer, IAC Applications
John Battelle, Founder/CEO, NewCo, Inc.
Ayah Bdeir, Founder/CEO, Little Bits
Piraye Beim, Founder/CEO, Celmatix
Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners
John Borthwick, Founder/CEO, Betaworks
Matt Brezina, Co-Founder, Sincerely and Xobni
Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO, TaskRabbit
Brad Burnham, Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures
Stewart Butterfield, Co-Founder/CEO, Slack
Troy Carter, Founder/CEO, Atom Factory
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Founder/CEO, Joyus
Vint Cerf, Internet Pioneer
Amy Chang, Founder/CEO, Accompany
Aneesh Chopra, President, NavHealth; Former US CTO
Patrick Chung, General Partner, Xfund
Tod Cohen, General Counsel, StubHub
Stephen DeBerry, Founder/Managing Partner, Bronze Investments
Peter Diamandis, Entrepreneur; Author, Abundance and BOLD
Barry Diller, Chairman, Expedia and IAC
Esther Dyson, Executive Founder, Way to Wellville; Investor
Amy Errett, Founder/CEO, Madison Reed
Caterina Fake, Founder/CEO, Findery; Co-Founder, Flickr
Christopher Farmer, Founder/CEO, SignalFire
Brad Feld, Managing Director, Foundry Group; Co-Founder, Techstars
Josh Felser, Co-Founder, Freestyle Capital & ClimateX
Hajj Flemings, Founder/CEO, Brand Camp University
Natalie Foster, Co-Founder, Peers
David Grain, Founder/Managing Partner, Grain Management, LLC
Brad Hargreaves, Founder/CEO, Common
Donna Harris, Co-Founder/Co-CEO, 1776
Scott Heiferman, Co-Founder/CEO, Meetup
David Hornik, General Partner, August Capital
Terry Howerton, CEO, TechNexus
Reed Hundt, Former Chair, FCC
Minnie Ingersoll, COO, Shift Technologies
Sami Inkinen, Founder/CEO, Virta Health; Co-Founder, Trulia
Craig Isakow, Head of Revenue, Shift Technologies
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., President and Founder, Rainbow PUSH Coalition
Irwin Jacobs, Founding Chairman/CEO Emeritus, Qualcomm Inc
Paul Jacobs, Executive Chairman, Qualcomm Inc
Leila Janah, Founder/CEO, Sama & Laxmi
Sujay Jaswa, Former CFO, Dropbox; Founder, Witt Capital Partners
Mark Josephson, CEO, Bitly
Sep Kamvar, Professor, MIT
David Karp, Founder/CEO, Tumblr
Jed Katz, Managing Director, Javelin Venture Partners
Kim Keenan, President/CEO, Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council
Ben Keighran, Entrepreneur; Former Design Lead, Apple
William Kennard, Former Chair, FCC
Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Ventures; Co-Founder, SUN Microsystems
Ron Klain, Executive Vice President, Revolution LLC
Walter Kortschak, Former Managing Partner and Senior Advisor, Summit Partners
Jared Kopf, Founder AdRoll, HomeRun, Worldly
Joseph Kopser, Co-Founder, Ridescout
Karen Kornbluh, Former US Ambassador, OECD
Othman Laraki, Co-Founder/President, Color Genomics
Miles Lasater, Serial Entrepreneur
Jeff Lawson, CEO, Twilio
Aileen Lee, Founder/Managing Partner, Cowboy Ventures
Bobby Lent, Managing Partner, Hillsven Capital
Aaron Levie, Co-Founder/CEO, Box
John Lilly, Partner, Greylock Partners
Bruce Lincoln, Co-Founder, Silicon Harlem
Ruth Livier, President, Livier Productions, Inc.
Mark Lloyd, Professor of Communication, University of Southern California – Annenberg School
Luther Lowe, VP of Public Policy, Yelp
Nancy Lublin, Founder/CEO, Crisis Text Line
Kanyi Maqubela, Partner, Collaborative Fund
Jonathan Matus, Founder/CEO, Zendrive
Josh McFarland, Vice President of Product, Twitter
Andrew McLaughlin, Head of New Business, Medium; Venture Partner, betaworks
Shishir Mehrotra, Entrepreneur & former VP of Product & Engineering, YouTube
Apoorva Mehta, Founder/CEO, Instacart
Doug Merritt, CEO, Splunk
Dinesh Moorjani, Founder/CEO, Hatch Labs; Co-Founder, Tinder
Brit Morin, Founder/CEO, Brit + Co
Dave Morin, Entrepreneur; Partner, Slow Ventures
Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder, Asana; Co-Founder, Facebook
Amanda Moskowitz, Founder/CEO, Stacklist
Alex Nogales, President/CEO, National Hispanic Media Coalition
Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder, Reddit
Mike Olson, Founder/Chairman/CSO, Cloudera
Pierre Omidyar, Founder, eBay
Felix W. Ortiz III, Founder/Chairman/CEO, Viridis; Board Member of The NYC Technology Development Corporation
Jen Pahlka, Founder/Executive Director, Code for America
Barney Pell, Founder Powerset, MoonExpress, Locomobi; Founding Trustee, Singularity University
Mark Pincus, Executive Chairman and Founder, Zynga
Shervin Pishevar, Co-Founder/Managing Director, Sherpa Capital and Co-Founder/Executive Chairman of Hyperloop One
Brandon Pollack, Director of Global Affairs, 1776
Amy Rao, Founder/CEO, Integrated Archive Systems, Inc.
Eric Ries, Entrepreneur & Author, The Lean Startup
Justin Rosenstein, Co-Founder, Asana
Alec Ross, Author, The Industries of the Future
Javier Saade, Venture Capitalist; Former Associate Administrator, SBA
Chris Sacca, Founder/Chairman, Lowercase Capital
Dave Samuel, Co-Founder, Freestyle Capital
Julie Samuels, Executive Director, Tech:NYC
Reshma Saujani, Founder, Girls Who Code
Chris Schroeder, Venture Investor; Author, Startup Rising
Jake Schwartz, Co-Founder/CEO, General Assembly
Robert Scoble, Entrepreneur in Residence and Futurist, Upload VR
Kim Malone Scott, CEO, Candor, Inc; Former Director, Google
Tina Sharkey, Partner, Sherpa Foundry & Sherpa Capital
Clara Shih, Co-Founder/CEO, Hearsay Social
Shivani Siroya, Founder/CEO, InVenture
Steve Smith, Executive Director, Public Policy Institute, Government Relations & Telecommunications Project, Rainbow PUSH Coalition
Jonathan Spalter, Chair, Mobile Future
DeShuna Spencer, CEO, kweliTV
Katie Stanton, CMO, Color Genomics; Former VP of Global Media, Twitter
Jenny Stefanotti, Co-Founder, OneProject; Board of Directors, Ushahidi
Debby Sterling, Founder/CEO, Goldiblox
Seth Sternberg, Co-Founder/CEO, Honor
Margaret Stewart, Vice President of Product Design, Facebook
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp
Michael Stoppelman, SVP, Engineering, Yelp
Baratunde Thurston, Former supervising producer, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah; Co-Founder, Cultivated Wit
Stephanie Tilenius, Founder/CEO, Vida Health; Board of Directors, Seagate Technology
Richard D. Titus, Entrepreneur; SVP, Samsung
Anne Toth, VP of Policy & Compliance, Slack
Bill Trenchard, Partner, First Round Capital
April Underwood, VP of Product, Slack
Max Ventilla, Founder/CEO, AltSchool
Tabreez Verjee, Co-Founder/Partner Uprising; Board Director Kiva.org
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Hunter Walk, Partner, Homebrew VC; Former Director of Product Management, Google
Tristan Walker, Founder/CEO, Walker & Company Brands, Inc.; Founder/Chairman, Code 2040
Ari Wallach, CEO, Synthesis Corp.
Padmasree Warrior, CEO, NextEV USA; Former CTSO, Cisco
Laura Weidman Powers, Co-Founder/CEO, Code2040
Kevin Weil, Head of Product, Instagram
Phil Weiser, Hatfield Professor of Law, University of Colorado and Executive Director of the Silicon Flatirons Center
Daniel J. Weitzner, Principal Research Scientist, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Emily White, Entrepreneur; Former COO, Snapchat
Ev Williams, Founder/CEO, Medium; Co-Founder Twitter, Blogger
Monique Woodward, Venture Partner, 500 Startups
Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder, Apple
Tim Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia University
Andrew Yang, Founder/CEO, Venture for America
Arielle Zuckerberg, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
What YouTube Taught Me About Facebook Live & Violent Footage
“A technical glitch.” That’s what Facebook stated was the cause of the temporary removal from their service of the video capturing Philando Castile’s shooting. Ben Thompson has a smart Stratechery column today about Facebook’s emerging role as a Journalism Company. And the internal discussions (debates?) which are likely occurring.
I saw this firsthand during my time at YouTube where in addition to running the product org from 2007-2011, I sat on our Policy Committee. This group helped provide cross-functional input into the Community Standards maintained by our superb Policy and Operations teams. While some of the topics (what defines a “fetish video”) had humorous aspects, overall there wasn’t a more important document at the company than our Community Standards and the enforcement of these guidelines on behalf of the YouTube users.
While the Community Standards certainly evolved throughout my time at YouTube, it was really Middle East protests, and eventually the Arab Spring, that forced us to confront questions of “newsworthiness” formally for content which would otherwise violate our policies around graphic violence. Remember Neda?
Video which depicted – or seemed to depict – injuries and deaths of protesting citizens at the hands of authoritarian governments, soldiers or third party agents. These videos often were uploaded to the site with little contextual data – sometimes none at all. Uploaded not always from regional IP addresses given the need to obfuscate identity, tunnel out of regions where YouTube was blocked – or event transported on memory cards out of the Middle East to where they could be safely uploaded by collaborators or NGOs.
Most of us wanted to work hard to leave these videos up on the site and it took a collaborative effort to make it work. Steps we took included:
- Partnering with in-region or specialized human rights NGOs to help us verify content as authentic.
- Training our review teams to be able to judge between graphic violence which might violate our guidelines versus that which had a newsworthiness to it. Remember, we weren’t proactively reviewing videos so it was a question of user flagging and other algorithmic determinants which put a video into the review queue.
- Creating an interstitial page which warned the viewer about the violent contents of the video versus removing it completely.
- Building features such as face blurring, which allowed uploaders to obfuscate portions of the video to protect identities when it could lead to collateral damage – for example, faces of people at a peaceful protest in a country where such organizing is outlawed.
What’s most important – IMO – is that YouTube executives started to think about human rights and activists as a “user segment” we wanted to support. Commercially there had been a lot of effort to understand what “celebrities,” “media companies,” “musicians” etc wanted from the platform. But until we put some elbow grease behind supporting activism as a use case for YouTube, everything else was anecdotal and at risk of being lost while we prioritized monetization, celebs, and other tangible business goals.
So my hope for Facebook Live – and Periscope – is that they’re able to not just feel proud they’ve built a tool that can help activism occur, but continue to put resources behind supporting activists. Not just with #StayWoke t-shirts (although those are cool), but with engineering resources and policy decisions.