User Profile

History, in contrast to the archive with its “overabundance of life,” has a narrow throat: it only has need of one or two examples, two or three enlarged details. The archive returns us to the single unit, the one-off nature of every unfamiliar event.

— In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, Sasha Dugdale (29%)

Memory is handed down, history is written down; memory is concerned with justice, history with preciseness; memory moralizes, history tallies and corrects; memory is personal, history dreams of objectivity; memory is based not on knowledge, but on experience: compassion with, sympathy for a desperate pain demanding immediate involvement. At the same time the landscape of memory is strewn with projections, fantasies, and misrepresentations — the ghosts of today, with their faces turned to the past.

— In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, Sasha Dugdale (19%)

Micropayments make the transaction about content, rather than about creators, but because there is so much freely available, highly substitutable content they create decision fatigue for consumers.

— Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (75%)

The platform-creator relationship makes things even more confusing, because it’s not always clear whether a creator is operating in the platform’s space or in their own. Moderation, for example, requires that communities be empowered to self-organize and manage their own rules, as we discovered from Ostrom’s work. Platforms ought to give creators the tools they need to manage their own communities. But platforms also face enormous public pressure to develop their own moderation policies, which are difficult to apply indiscriminately to every creator and their respective community.

— Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (74%)

Fundamentally, social platforms like Twitter and Facebook still follow the post-and-comment model of an earlier era, where interactions with the author are frictionless, even encouraged. These platforms struggle, more than any other, to adapt to modern social needs. One problem is that these platforms assume that all users are interchangeable, whereas in a one-to-many broadcasting format creators are a particular, non-fungible type of user.

— Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (73%)

Intrinsic motivation can generate more attention, but so can extrinsic motivators like money or reputation. However, allocating money, reputation, or intrinsic motivation to the wrong places can be counterproductive. In this chapter, we’ve treated the production of open source software as a common pool resource, where maintainer attention is both non-excludable (anyone can bid for their attention) and rivalrous (appropriating their attention reduces the total amount available).

— Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (63%)

Every developer tries to reduce the amount of maintenance work they need to do over time. But software is never done, and also never dies: the cost of maintaining a project can be near-zero, but it is asymptotic.

— Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (57%)

Open source code itself is not a common pool resource but a positive externality of its underlying contributor community. Users can consume, or “appropriate,” code at zero marginal cost, because what the commons actually manages is not code but attention. When developers make contributions, they appropriate this attention from the commons.

— Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (54%)

Much of the fatigue that open source developers experience comes not from making their code public but from expectations around making their code participatory.

— Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (54%)

But to quote Morgenthau one last time, “The very act of acting destroys our moral integrity. Whoever wants to retain his moral innocence must forsake action altogether.”

— The Inevitability of Tragedy by Barry Gewen (70%)