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We are still mourning.

The pandemic began six years ago and it’s still on the tip of our tongues. It’s implied in conversations, when not explicitly invoked. The before. The after. The what could have been.

Everyone is currently living two lives. The one they’re living, and the one they had expected to live six years ago. Six years. It’s who we knew we would be based on a reality that never materialized. We’re a record, stuck in the rut, the needle skipping back and forth in the worn groove of friendships out of alignment, relationships that ended, jobs that no longer exist, places we no longer live, but only in this timeline.

Everyone is currently living two lives.

We are still mourning. AI came for their skills and we were amused. It made us all into characters from a famous indie studio or retail packaged toys and we loved it. And now it has come for our skills. Skills we spent our lifetimes acquiring, marketing, selling our time for. And those skills are now their’s. And we use their tools and we are… productive. If nothing else, we are productive. We are so productive because they are productive for us. But we mourn the craft that we thought we had built and the fulfilling work we did to build it.

We are stilling mourning. The government came for their lives. We did not know what to do. It’s not our business. We might have gotten it wrong. Authority is often the shape of correct, if not actually right. Maybe we won’t be noticed. The others will disappear, but we will blend in. We will survive by behaving. By avoiding the wrong topics of conversation. By performing well at our jobs, if we have them. And yet we will miss our neighbors. And then we will be noticed. And others will miss us.

We are still mourning.

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In a recent conversation a peer asked me, “How does your company define Design Engineering?” The thing is, we don’t, formally—and I think a lot of companies do not either, yet. They’re all waiting to see how it1 shakes out. While the needs and skillsets have always existed in our industry (I see you, o.g. “web designers”), the role of a more formal design/engineering hybrid individual is still a newer trend at companies.

In this modern incarnation, I’m seeing 2 tracks emerge—and while they’re not necessarily incompatible at all, they’re very different.

The first: the frontend engineer under design leadership

This group’s day-to-day might not look all that different from someone with a Frontend Engineer (or UI/UX Engineer) title. They’re not doing product design work, per se. They’re working in code to build product UIs; they’re responsible for fit-and-finish, accessibility, and ensuring the experience for customers matches what has been designed by the company’s product designers. Maybe they work formally on the code components of a design system, or maybe they work at a company with a culture that can take early prototypes into the production pipeline. But the core difference between them and a Frontend Engineer is that they report to design/product leadership and not engineering leadership.

This group’s day-to-day might not look all that different from someone with a Frontend Engineer (or UI/UX Engineer) title

This track can develop for a lot of reasons—company politics around who should “own” the top experience layer, how a company and its leadership defines engineering (“only backend is real engineering”), and sometimes (but too rarely) a strong design leadership that believes their work doesn’t stop in Figma and embodies the user experience mission all the way through the product, at a technical level.

The second track: the hybrid skillset working in support of design and product, but not on the product

This group often falls into place because of design/product tooling needs that the company’s formal engineering group is either unaffected by (gaps in Figma and other design tooling) or simply under-resourced (or even uninterested) in handling.

Teams in this track primarily build tools. They prove the value of their work by helping designers and PMs move faster while reducing the effort and back-and-forth it takes for an engineer in the Engineering Org™ to understand a designer’s work and execute on it. But these design engineers generally don’t help build the work product they support. In some organizations, they might help prototype it, providing a fidelity the typical design tooling cannot communicate, but that’s as close as it comes.

These design engineers generally don’t help build the work product they support. In some organizations, they might help prototype it… but that’s as close as it comes

A converged track: the Design Engineer

What I’d love to see is more companies embrace a third track: it’s somewhere in the middle. There are opportunities within the work under a Design Engineer title to take both paths. Perhaps they move between each path regularly, or perhaps they’re niched between one or the other, but only on a project-by-project basis.

From a company culture and leadership level, the idea is to enable more people with a hybrid skillet to contribute to designing the product, while also building the product—and when warranted—supporting the first two in process and tooling.

Why would a company want to support this third track? It sounds messy.

A lot of change is on the horizon in product development. I don’t yet have any strong theories on how it all looks when (if?) the dust settles, but I am pretty sure of one thing: the connection between the discipline of product design and the user interfaces that our customers touch will only become tighter—less abstract with more direct inputs providing production-level outputs.

The connection between the discipline of product design and the user interfaces that our customers touch will only become tighter

Design Engineers are well-positioned to step into that gap as it currently exists and help close it from both sides. We know product design, we understand engineering—often with an emphasis on frontend/UI—and we’re uniquely-positioned to fulfill current engineering and design needs while working on tooling to pull the two closer together over time.

  1. AI? AI interfaces? A/R interfaces? The metaverse? The next glorious JS framework to end all JS frameworks? The general vibes? We shall see…⏎

A version of this piece was originally published on LinkedIn.

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Friend Naz tossed this blogging chain letter1 my way. I feel a bit odd participating because I don’t consider myself a writer/blogger. But I also don’t consider myself a photographer2, and yet both disciplines get featured sections on my new site, sooo… :shrug-emoji:

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

In its most recent form, I restarted public writing out of a reluctant acknowledgement that sharing my thoughts is something I do actually enjoy.

Years ago, I ran a dedicated, regularly-updated link blog with occasional long-form pieces. It was mostly focused on design and technology. I really enjoyed contributing to it, initially. By the standards of the time it was successful: traffic was growing regularly—people noticed. And eventually I didn’t like that people had noticed, so I stopped doing it. Shutting it down was reactionary—I’ll admit—but I think I’d reached a place where I had offered up too much of my inner life for individuals I’d never met to inspect and push back on. I was also still partially-closeted back then, so that was a contributing factor.

[F]or many years I’ve not felt like writing publicly was a good idea for me.

I don’t quite know how to explain it, but for many years I’ve not felt like writing publicly was a good idea for me. In some part, once we all had places on the internet to write, I didn’t feel like I had much unique thought to contribute. But I also felt unsure that my contributions—meager as they’d be—wouldn’t eventually be twisted and used against me. I suppose that’s simply the risk in doing any of this publicly.

So, why start again? I’ve come around to this idea: the possibility of like-minded individuals finding resonance in one’s thoughts outweighs the potential that someone will intentionally use them against you (I hope).

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

This site is a recent, new design, but the underpinnings are the same as the previous, much smaller micro site. I built it on a heavily-modified Jekyll install that I’ve essentially frozen in time and keep adding custom bits to. There is no database; it renders static files and any activity on Github triggers builds on the CI server, which automatically push updates to the static web server and CDN. I have a lot more details on my Colophon page, if you’re curious.

Do I recommend this setup to anyone else? No. But as someone who writes code for a living, I think my own site should be something I create—a place where I can experiment with the building blocks of the web (HTML, CSS, and Javascript), and a place with as little opinionated software written by someone else between my code and what you see.

Do I recommend this setup to anyone else? No.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yes, my last dedicated blog was built on top of a CMS—a custom, blogging platform I called Trident that I had built early in my Rails days. I didn’t like php and I liked Wordpress even less, so I made my own publishing platform. It worked for me, and worked well. I even hosted a couple other friends’ sites on it for a time, and eventually forked it into a CMS I could use for client work. As with many of my early-days projects, I regret never open sourcing it or pushing it into some form of publicly-available product. I always wanted/intended to, but I wasn’t confident enough in my own engineering skills at the time to take on those responsibilities.

It’s both a joke and a right of passage as a software developer to build your own blogging platform, so I can now check that one off the list. It was fun, but also: good riddance.

View from behind the Hollywood Sign
Maru Coffee, Los Angeles

How do you write your posts?
For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Most everything I write these days starts in Bear. From there it generally goes right into a code editor, in HTML markup. If it’s something with photos, or that will need a lot of iteration/editing, it gets its own Git branch to wall it off from the rest of the site until I’m ready to publish it.

Sometimes, as I’m writing, I know exactly what photography or pull quotes I want to pair with a piece and note them in Bear; other times I get the writing into code and then decide what, if anything, to form around it.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

It has been years since I’ve been in a regular practice of writing. I used to maintain a list of ideas, pick one off and flesh it out as I felt moved to do so, establishing a fairly regularly cadence. But, lately, I’ve only found myself writing when I just had no other way to process the idea.

I’d like to get back to a regular practice and hope to, now that I have the new site.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I used to publish quickly, but I’ve learned that giving things time and space is the best method for me. Some pieces go through drafts/editing over days (usually a week in total)—those are now the “urgent” ones. Others take months. A few I’ve even picked up after years and decided to finally publish (or rework only to put back down). It’s telling to me that some drafts, now many years old, are ones that I’m grateful have never existed publicly.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

I write to process patterns of thinking I see in the world. Sometimes I’m trying to call out things that I think are obvious and don’t seem to be noticed by others, at other times I’m expressing my own lack of understanding. Writing in that latter category likely leaves the reader unsatisfied because I can’t button it up with a tidy or helpful conclusion. But it’s those pieces that usually rattle around in my brain until new bits later fall into place, helping me better understand what I was originally trying to comprehend.

Topics wander, but how we live and interface with each other in the physical world around us and how it all relates to cultural assumptions we mistake as intractable rules seem to be recurring themes. And nerdy computer shit, because: it me.

Who are you writing for?

I’m writing for me, but also for the me that exists who I don’t know. I wouldn’t call it “journaling”, but writing is a method that helps me process the world.

I don’t journal privately, as a practice, so it’s rare that I sit down and write something knowing it will never be released. Whether or not to release it is a decision that I make in the process. When I know there is a potential that even one or two other people might read something, it changes how I think about it. It challenges me to ensure arguments are well-formed and helps me abandon lines of thinking that won’t stand up to scrutiny.

I don’t believe I’m the only person processing the world this way and I worry that tools like generative AI will diminish this practice without many of us noticing we’re losing it.

I worry that tools like generative AI will diminish this practice without many of us noticing we’re losing it.

Ultimately, I don’t expect things I write to be read. They’re for me and I just don’t think I’m so smart as to have a unique opinion that no one else has thought of and needs to be shared. Lightning doesn’t strike that often. But I like the tension that writing in a public forum provides me and that’s what I get out of it. The possibility that something might be read is what shapes the writing.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

My current favorite is the one I highlight when you first visit my website. It’s about the web. What made the web so attractive to a young kid with a Netscape Navigator and a text editor over 30 years ago remains true today: you can build it, you can control it, and frankly, even if nobody else cares, it’s still yours and that’s something.

Self-portrait of your author
Detroit has neat one-way signs

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

When I set out to design the new site, I briefly dabbled with the idea of updating the platform/infrastructure around it as well, but I didn’t want that additional project to become the excuse as to why I wasn’t done with the new site. Now that the first pass of it is finished, I’m curious about changing a few things:

A CMS would be more convenient for some aspects of the site and Sanity is attractive to me. I’ve also been eyeing SvelteKit. I use Svelte to build the UI for Figma plugins at work and it’s such a wonderful breath of fresh air, as compared to React. It makes writing componentized, state-based frontends fun (I hesitate to say, “again”, because were they ever fun with React?).

As for features, I need a new home for photography. It’s a hobby of mine, and like writing, a way I process the world around me. I made a significant, decade+ investment in Instagram only to have my primary account summarily banned, so I think it’s time I own my photographic home as well.

Tag ’em.

Watching this thing make the rounds, I can’t think of many folks in my orbit that haven’t taken a turn, but I’ll toss it out to Matt and Erica. Matt keeps telling me he’ll get his blog up soon, so consider this some peer pressure. And I don’t know that Erica considers herself a blogger, but she most definitely is a writer and I always enjoy her thoughts on work and life.

  1. Remember participating in chain letters as kids? The thrill of getting a thing addressed to you in the physical mail alone made it worth it. You also got to lick stamps. So much fun! Now my physical mail is endless political mailers (I hear 2026 is right around the corner?) and the cable company that absolutely knows I’m one of their customers sending me—inexplicably plastic—postcards to try to get me to become one of their customers for the very first time ever. :dumpster-fire-emoji:⏎

  2. I am fully copying Matt Haughey’s idea to intersperse this post with completely unrelated photos I’ve taken; enjoy!⏎

Fall below Ute Mountain in Southwestern Colorado
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Broadly, the issue with big tech is often not the tech itself, but the human biases at the core of any piece of software, compounded at scale. Take Google’s Waze, for example: once-quiet neighborhoods can become thoroughfares at rush hour because an algorithm looks for the “fastest” route for cars (often only shaving minutes or seconds) while giving little consideration to street design, children at play, or other street uses. These lack of considerations are decisions made (or sometimes decisions arrived at through inaction) on the part of the companies providing these services. And, generally speaking, if any other party has influence in the shape of these technologies, it is only the “direct user”—the group of people who use the app for directions—and not other groups of people also affected by the inbuilt biases and decisions made to shape turn-by-turn directions.

I am baffled by how little influence cities and other urban governing bodies have exerted over mapping apps. In the case of Waze, some cities have begun to work with mapping companies to ease the burden some smaller roads are playing in the grand scheme of city-wide driving, but the involvement of an urban governing body remains largely reactive or defensive. And the apps themselves are largely reactive, by design. The algorithm watches everyone on the road, as traffic builds, and suggests altered routes to new entrants as they initiate their travel. More recently, Apple and Google Maps have begun to offer updated routes in-transit in a sort-of Waze-light fashion, but this is still based on reactive data.

What if cities and mapping companies worked more closely together? A city would know that a road lane will be closed for construction in a few days. What if that information was relayed to all mapping companies ahead of time so that traffic patterns could begin to be adjusted even before the closure? What if upcoming event street closures were given to drivers as an audible reminder? How about bike routes on smaller side streets? Cities could ask that mapping companies keep vehicle traffic away from those routes unless the final destination dictates otherwise. How about lane guidance? A mapping app could prompt drivers to stay out of a bus lane, or institute “slow lane” reminders on roads that mix car, bus, bike, and scooter travel. Turning: an app could remind drivers that right-on-red is not suggested during times of the day when pedestrian traffic is high. When reaching a destination, an app could remind drivers (and passengers) to watch for cyclists in a bike lane—and even route car travelers to a nearby loading/unloading zone that has a lower chance of impeding bike lane travelers or pedestrians.

All of this is part of the data sets that cities (and, likely, the mapping companies) already have. And much of it would be possible to achieve within the existing algorithms and feature sets of current mapping apps. But it requires a mindset switch: mapping apps would still optimize vehicle travel for shortest/fastest distance, but they need to stop doing so at the expense of other road uses.

The compounding scale effect of these efforts would be noticeable. Much of our urban traffic today is at the hands of Uber and Lyft and generally their drivers blindly follow turn-by-turn and lane-by-lane instructions from Google or Apple, often even listening to the audio cues. In big cities like LA, where I live, people who know the roads well still tend to use mapping apps to help them avoid traffic or find the fastest route for a given time of day.

Additionally, cities could affect modal change. They could ask for app defaults to change based on the location and status of the direct user. An app often knows if a device is currently connected to a car’s hands-free system. If it is not, perhaps the mapping mode defaults to transit, or if under a 15 min walk, to walking directions. More data from city transit efforts could prompt mapping apps to finally integrate their routing between bikeshare programs, and bus/rail service. Right now, the friction is in the other direction. Google Maps at least tends to remember the last mode I used (car, bike, walk, or public transit) and they experiment with walk/transit multi-modal trips, but Apple Maps, for example, knows I haven’t driven my car in weeks, but still prompts me with driving directions first (even when I’m visiting New York and standing next to a subway station). The friction should be in the other direction. If we want livable cities (let alone addressing climate goals), we need to stop defaulting to driving.

Would companies like Google and Apple want to embrace these sorts of partnerships? Possibly. I’m cautiously optimistic. Generally speaking, these apps are designed to move humans around efficiently, but within the sets of data that they have access to and the algorithms that have been previously-defined. “Efficiency” can be redesigned and redefined at any time—it is a much more subjective matter than we tend to think. And these companies tend to enjoy ingesting more data and generally seek to add and refine features that make trips better holistically, not simply within a car.

But what if they don’t? We act like technology companies in the realm of driving are a fait accompli. Yet, at the same time, cities are regulating scooter and bikeshare programs within an inch of their viability (if they haven’t already banned them outright). If necessary, let’s apply the same logic to mapping companies. Let’s tell Lyft and Uber that they cannot operate in a city if they do not use a mapping provider that supports an open partnership with a city or county or metropolitan transit agency. Let them put pressure on their mapping vendors. Let’s tell Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others that they cannot operate their mapping/imagery vehicles on our streets without changes to their apps. We tell film companies they cannot film in a city without a permit, we ask delivery trucks to register with a city and follow certain rules, how is this data collection any different? The governing bodies or urban areas—and more importantly their constituents (us)—hold the leverage to the products these companies want to build and the data they want to collect.

The “rules” these mapping apps currently play by are most certainly going to set the tone for how an automated vehicle roams our streets.

Cities, counties, and transit agencies are and will continue be a wealth of new and better data for technology companies, but collectively, we are not getting much in return for the use of those resources. Make no mistake, these mapping apps are a stopgap solution for these companies: part research and part prototyping. All of them (whether public or rumored), have partnerships or their own endeavors in the realm of automated driving. Some or all of these companies will be the providers of these services either directly on the streets with their own self-driving vehicles, or through software licensing in support of self-driving vehicles. The “rules” these mapping apps currently play by are most certainly going to set the tone for how an automated vehicle roams our streets. As urban communities, we do not need to wait for self-driving vehicles to leverage technology and shape vehicle travel in our cities. In fact, if we do, I think it will be too late. We should start now. We will get the city we ask for.

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The country chose darkness. A majority of voters looked right into racism, misogyny, and anti-queerness—on full display—and said to themselves, “Yes, that. I am choosing that. I have my reasons.”

Those of us that did not make that particular choice will spend months (years, actually, if not decades) re-litigating what “went wrong”, but I don’t think it’s actually that complicated. Even those that voted for this darkness under the “it won’t actually be that way” assumption, still made an active choice. And I don’t think we should write it off and try to explain it as frustration about—pick your pet issue: the economy, progressive values, etc.

You cannot ignore a bully without implicitly supporting them. You cannot ignore transphobia without supporting it. You cannot ignore the elimination of the rights of women without being in full support of taking away those rights. And you cannot ignore White Supremacy without offering it your support. These things must be called out. And a vote is an affirmative choice—an expression of support.

It has become ok to nibble at the margins of [our] ideals, “because it doesn’t affect me”.

People are hurt. And hurt people do things that are selfish and yet—often, reliably—not in their own best interest. I understand that. But there has to be a line in society that even selfishness does not surpass. This year may or may not mark our country’s beginning dalliance with full-featured fascism; time will tell. But it absolutely shows the outcome of a culture that has become so individualistic that even the most basic tenants of a collective society no longer look attractive to these individuals—like the right to exist, to travel freely, and to have domain over our own bodies. It has become ok to nibble at the margins of those ideals, “because it doesn’t affect me”.

Yes, we have always been a country built on racism, a country late to grant rights to women, and a country that had to be drug by courts into some modicum of permissiveness toward queer existence1, but this election put it all on display—no dog whistles, no code to decipher—and the majority of people still said “yes” to all of it, with clarity. That breaks my heart. My personal disposition trends toward acknowledging the cynicism in our world, but I had actually hoped a majority of us knew better.

In 2016 my surprise led me to believe I didn’t understand the country I was living in. Now, sadly, in 2024, I believe I do.

  1. On the last two, note that we’ve never managed to add the Equal Rights Amendment to our Constitution. It just hangs out there in the wind, un-ratified, its absence alive as fodder for Supreme Court Justices to whittle down personal freedoms as they please. Justice Anton Scalia, for example (emphasis mine):

    ”Certainly, the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that is what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.”

    Chilling.⏎

", "summary": "A short reflection on the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election. I fear it has become ok to nibble at the margins of our ideals, “because it doesn’t affect me”.", "title": "The popular vote", "url": "https://grantblakeman.com/writing/the-popular-vote", "date_published": "2024-11-11T19:00:00Z" }, { "id": "writing-the-messy-overlap", "content_html": "

Early in my tech career—when I was living in Boulder—a friend introduced me to someone notable from the Bay Area. He introduced me as “one of those unicorns” who can write code and design. I’ve never enjoyed that term, but it was a very endearing introduction and my friend was obviously very proud of me. However, the person I was introduced to incredulously stated something along the lines of, “Why are you doing both? Focus on one.”

I didn’t. I kept pursuing both. I loved following the entire through-line from idea on a napkin to working software. It was fulfilling to know whatever I could dream up, I could bring in to existence.

I loved following the entire through-line from idea on a napkin to working software.

But I also did both, in no small part, because of the economics of my local market at that time—something the Bay Area notable was likely not aware of. Boulder had a burgeoning startup scene and was punching above its weight, but it was engineering-driven. Startups knew they needed design, but didn’t value it in a way that correlated to them paying much for it—beyond free beer and paper equity. I couldn’t pay my rent with unrealized gains.

I was embedded in the local design community. I knew so many amazing indie designers and small studios. They were bringing in clients who needed dev work and naturally began to turn to me to execute their designs. They knew my work was high quality, but more importantly, they knew I cared about the design. I cared about the outcome beyond the code under the hood.

I stopped introducing myself as a designer

Years later, by the time I arrived at LinkedIn on a short-term engineering contract (to build a Sketch plugin), I fully considered myself an engineer. After a long crisis of professional identity I had claimed the title. At subsequent tech events I stopped introducing myself as a designer or design/engineer hybrid. It’s not that I’d left design behind, but I certainly wasn’t advertising it. Maybe once a year I took a vanity project where I got to design or I’d put some cycles into a personal project—otherwise I focused on frontend and backend engineering skills.

But that’s the cleaned up version. In reality, I never fully stopped designing. A designer would hand me their designs and I’d fill in the gaps: motion, transitions, states that hadn’t been specced out (or even accounted for). Rather than asking what a designer wanted me to do, I’d add something in code—during the buildout—and propose it. I’d self-select: picking clients that met my design bar, avoiding messes and ensuring my design input would be considered and valued. With some designers, this balance was the explicit agreement. Those were the designers I was always most excited to collaborate with.

After a few initial projects at LinkedIn, I saw some space to do design again, and I took it. The work I was doing was under the umbrella of the design organization and it felt natural. Rather than wait for a busy product designer to free up cycles for a lower-priority, internal tool, I’d design the tool myself. Or, I’d get it started and then collaborate on the design. And I’d get to build it, completing that satisfying loop: idea > design > execution > refine the idea > repeat.

I was ultimately hired out of that contract into a full time role. We didn’t have a title for what I did, but I was expected to do both product design and engineering. Sure, the balance shifts—it’s never a 50/50 week, month, or even quarter, but it is really fulfilling to be able to put a critical eye to product design again and then also have the chance to build the idea—rare at any company; rarer still at a large company.

Engineers who understand the value of design and designers who want to understand—or even contribute—to the code behind their work have always been part of the process in creating software.

The titles our industry uses for the multidisciplinary work I do day-to-day continue to evolve: Design Engineer, Creative (or Design) Technologist, UX Engineer, or simply, “a designer who writes production code” are all thrown around. At LinkedIn we call ourselves Design Engineers internally, but still don’t officially have a title that reflects the work. I am curious how this hybrid discipline—and its multi-variant titles—continue to iterate in our industry, but my point is that the role has always existed. It has always been needed.

Engineers who understand the value of design and designers who want to understand—or even contribute to—the code behind their work have always been part of the software creation process. And often those skills are embodied by the same human, regardless of their role or title.

I try to describe my work history in the following way: I have experience in product design, backend and frontend engineering, and particularly enjoy roles that intersect some or all of these disciplines.

I’ll always enjoy that intersection because I do not believe you can build great software without it. That doesn’t mean a single person has to embody it completely, but it does mean a team has to embrace the messy overlap of disciplines required in building software people will actually want to use.

This piece was originally published on LinkedIn.

", "image": "https://grantblakeman.com/assets/share/share-image_the-messy-overlap-1ceeb01549a3ee3c61c35fd09d5d00f2170f2fca5eec9a2c1673ed52d35f55c3.jpg", "summary": "I stumbled into Design Engineering. I didn’t set out to become one, but in a way I suppose I have always been one… I just couldn’t help myself. Good software can be created in organizations siloed by discipline, but it’s in that messy overlap of design, engineering, and other disciplines truly collaborating where great software is made.", "title": "The messy overlap", "url": "https://grantblakeman.com/writing/the-messy-overlap", "date_published": "2024-08-24T19:00:00Z" }, { "id": "writing-the-web-is-important", "content_html": "

The web is important. I think I’d forgotten that for a while. The apps are all shiny, sugar-coated with gaming mechanics that meter out dopamine hits at just the right cadence. I would find myself closing Instagram only to re-open Instagram; pull-to-refresh, hope for a new hit, repeat. The apps are comforting—they fill your screen and hold you within themselves.

The web was not designed for casual dopamine hits. It doesn’t try to keep you. Any single click may take you to an entirely different world with new possibilities…

But the web: it’s messy and chaotic. It requires searching on search platforms that increasingly don’t want you to leave them or it requires knowledge of an address, with an esoteric structure and an inscrutable protocol. The web was not designed for casual dopamine hits. It doesn’t try to keep you. Any single click may take you to an entirely different world with new possibilities, leaving the old one behind.

The web is a beautiful chaos where anyone is welcome to contribute, but where, increasingly, you can live in quiet isolation.

", "summary": "The web was not designed for casual dopamine hits. It doesn’t try to keep you. Any single click may take you to an entirely different world with new possibilities.", "title": "The web is important", "url": "https://grantblakeman.com/writing/the-web-is-important", "date_published": "2024-07-07T19:00:00Z" }, { "id": "writing-infrastructure-is-a-class-system", "content_html": "

I took the E-line train west out of downtown LA today. I love that this train exists and yet it’s also such an exercise in frustration. It’s relatively early on a Saturday morning. The train is full. And yet, we spent about 5 minutes waiting at stop lights for the convenience of quite a small number of drivers, usually solo in their personal vehicles, passing through the mostly empty streets of sleepy LA. It is madness. We have the technology to solve this (other cities with similar on-street light rail stretches have done so), yet the City of Los Angeles refuses to do much of anything that could potentially inconvenience a few private vehicle drivers at the expense of a full train of public transit riders.

We create class systems in many of the ways in which we design our society, but, at least in America, we don’t like to acknowledge them for what they are: choices to privilege some over others. We could make public transit the best choice for the most number of people moving about a city, but we’ve decided it’s a service for the less fortunate—for the people who can’t drive (or can’t afford to).

We build these class distinctions outside of cities too.

I am fortunate enough to spend a good chunk of my time outside of Los Angeles, in a beautiful, rural red rock canyon tucked down in the Southwest corner of Colorado. It is a place that few people know about, near a town that even few Coloradans have heard of. And that town and the broader county are, by all American standards and measurements, relatively low-income and disadvantaged. A few of us thrive there because we’ve built wealth elsewhere while many more struggle to get by.

When I am there, I am able to do my very online job thanks to the immense privilege of having access to not only one, but two excellent internet connections. This is not the case for most of that county.

It is an immense privilege that I have a job that allows me to afford excellent internet connectivity, now generally unlimited by where I chose to live. And, in a paradox of circular dependency, that job requires high-quality internet for me to accomplish it.

I have my qualms with Elon Musk, but Starlink is, quite simply, amazing. Other satellite-based internet connections that I have experienced are expensive, have prohibitively-large data caps, onerous contracts, can’t handle weather, and work about as well as the dial-up modem I used as a teenager in the 90s. The only quality Starlink shares with these legacy services is the cost. It is truly disruptive. I cautiously signed up for the beta a few years ago and used it as a backup internet service in case the local provider went down. As Starlink has launched more satellites and improved the service, it is now my primary provider. Its most important quality? I rarely think about it. It works and in day-to-day use isimperceptible from my wired connection in the city. It is incredible to me that the main limiting factor to how I make my living is no longer tied to geography or even the available local infrastructure.

But if you are in the county’s average income tier, it will be hard for you to outlay the initial cost for the equipment and pay the ongoing fee for the service.

Before Starlink, a local provider started out as my primary connection in the canyon. It is a relatively new company (it didn’t exist a few years ago when I started visiting the area) and the person who runs it is knowledgeable, responsive, and has responsibly expanded the network’s coverage area as he has grown the business. The bulk of the network is point-to-point wireless, which means once your neighbor up-canyon has a signal tower, the provider can relay (extend) the signal to your property without the expensive infrastructure investment of laying wires. The high-dependency nature of its construction is slightly more fickle than Starlink, but ultimately it is still an excellent and (mostly) reliable service. At the time I got access to it, I was so grateful. My only other choices were the aforementioned legacy satellite service, and the Big Telecomm™ DSL service that was, for all intents and purposes in our modern society, dial-up (it would not actually qualify as “broadband” under the old 25/3 definition from 2015, let alone the updated definition).

This local provider is still not cheap (for broadband speeds), but it is more reasonably-priced than Starlink and requires no up-front equipment expense. The big limiters to the service are density (how many people will be served as the network is built out) and physical topography (if I can’t get line-of-sight to any of my neighbors, I can’t get service, full-stop). In a rural area with undulating hills, mountains, and canyons, this is a true limitation. I don’t know the coverage map of the local provider, but I would suspect the economics of the service buildout would map coverage fairly neatly alongside the more wealthy and dense areas of the county.

Public transit, broadband—these are two ways I see class imperceptibly showing itself in my American experience. It’s easy not to notice if you’re not affected, but it’s there and it’s unforgiving.

It is an immense privilege that I have a job that allows me to afford excellent internet connectivity, now generally unlimited by where I chose to live. And, in a paradox of circular dependency, that job requires high-quality internet for me to accomplish it. Yes, some government subsidies exist, but they’re not always easy to get, and the programs are often not well-run. Starlink itself was part of such an FCC program and no longer qualifies for it, to the detriment of the lower-income customers it was serving. And the program itself is no longer accepting applicants.

The internet is a utility that society treats as optional entertainment. When you have access to it, and when you can easily afford it, it is taken for granted. It does not feel optional, but it also does not feel like an economic burden.

From a recent FCC Press Release announcing their update to the broadband standard:

Fixed terrestrial broadband service (excluding satellite) has not been physically deployed to approximately 24 million Americans, including almost 28% of Americans in rural areas, and more than 23% of people living on Tribal lands

Mobile 5G-NR coverage has not been physically deployed at minimum speeds of 35/3 Mbps to roughly 9% of all Americans, to almost 36% of Americans in rural areas, and to more than 20% of people living on Tribal lands

If you drive your private automobile from your private garage, point-to-point throughout the city of Los Angeles, throwing keys at city-mandated valet parking attendants each stop along your way, I would almost forgive you for not realizing that you are being specifically catered to.

We have made some progress in rural areas. One local example: there is a local school in my canyon and a number of years ago, government assistance helped connect it to the internet with fiber—an expensive endeavor. But to my knowledge, no homes—not even those on tribal lands of the adjacent Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, have been able to tap into that connection. The Big Telecomm™ provider in the area, which presumably could lay those connecting wires, still only offers its paltry DSL connection. I’m sure it has run the numbers and decided serving less-wealthy customers in a low-density area won’t pay out. We still have a lot to do.

If you drive your private automobile from your private garage, point-to-point throughout the city of Los Angeles, throwing keys at city-mandated valet parking attendants each stop along your way, I would almost forgive you for not realizing that you are being specifically catered to. Priority traffic signaling at the expense of public transit, free or quick attended parking, and homes with automobile storage feel normal. You might not even think about all of the little micro-decisions in society that created the system you move within and understand that many people in the city don’t have access to it.

If you move into a new home and can immediately sign up for a $100+/month internet service delivering fast, reliable speeds, you probably wouldn’t even think about how the zip code you chose to live in (and can afford) is part of what gives you that access.

I want to acknowledge that in a country as physically vast as the United States, infrastructure is expensive. But with services like Starlink or local line-of-sight wireless, we can no longer use that excuse as to why rural economies tend to face the burden of fending for themselves when it comes to basic services.

I do the work I do for a living in no small part because I had access to an internet connection as a teenager. That connection helped shape me and open up my world. What art, creativity, skill, and sure, economic potential, is going untapped right now in Rural America because a child does not have access to a solid connection to the wider world?

This piece was originally a /now update on a previous iteration of this site. It appears here with some minor edits.

", "image": "https://grantblakeman.com/assets/share/share-image_infrastructure-is-a-class-system-b42df9e98a309595d0bd30fcd2caea3abc496e1180bbdede070d1f6237cf6bd2.jpg", "summary": "We create class systems in many of the ways in which we design our society, but, at least in America, we don’t like to acknowledge them for what they are: choices to privilege some over others.", "title": "Infrastructure is a class system", "url": "https://grantblakeman.com/writing/infrastructure-is-a-class-system", "date_published": "2024-06-08T19:00:00Z" }, { "id": "writing-am-i-human", "content_html": "

At the moment, I am not on Instagram. My 13-year-old account (@gb-turned-@grant.blakeman – a long story for another time) is suspended and with it, my nascent Threads account. My current plan is to allow the appeal-window to expire, deleting the account, permanently.

I wasn’t planning on leaving Instagram—it was the one personal social network I still actively participated in and after a long Twitter hiatus I had been coming around to Threads. But last July I sat down on my living room couch on a Saturday, absentmindedly tapped open the app and noticed I was no longer signed in.

A decision had been made by an algorithm deep within the infrastructure bowels of Meta: I was not me—not human—I was a bot.

I know what you’re probably thinking: I’d been hacked. And I had before, actually, years ago (again, part of that story for another time), but I had not been hacked. I was able to sign back in and instead of my feed I was presented with a message telling me the account had been suspended, and along with it, my Threads account, because of course they are tied together. A decision had been made by an algorithm deep within the infrastructure bowels of Meta: I was not me—not human—I was a bot.

I don’t envy how the big social media companies have to police their own customers. Some of it is genuinely necessary for the safety of their userbase and some of it deemed necessary for walled-garden, competitive reasons. I even work for one of those companies, so I guess, in a round-about way, my hands aren’t clean.

But I wasn’t scraping Instagram data, using bots, connecting 3rd-party apps, or any of the other ToS violations listed as potential reasons for my account suspension (they don’t actually tell you the specific reason). I’d come by my thousands of now mostly-inactive, ghost account followers honestly, gosh darn it! I’d spent time in this virtual place. I’d put in the likes, crafted the posts, submitted the stories (and somehow never succumbed to Reels 😂) over years and years using my human meat hands, poking at Meta’s official apps.

I have boring theories as to how this happened that I’d be happy to get into if there was someone from Meta to talk to, but there isn’t.

Left with a choice between trying to appeal the suspension through an opaque, automated system of robots and doing nothing, I decided to walk away. The suspension was the prompt I needed to re-evaluate something I had invested over a decade in. How could it just disappear in an instant—and without a way to understand how I had triggered an algo that decided I was up to no good? The fact that I didn’t understand the reason for my suspension beyond the broad strokes of, “I must’ve tripped a false positive 🤷🏻‍♂️”, gave me little self-assurance that even a successful appeal wouldn’t end in other, future suspensions at indeterminate dates.

The account will be gone for good in another month or so. I’m oddly a little sad about that and sort of embarrassed for being proud of the capital-“C” Content that I’d put there, but I’ve made peace with it washing away in the digital tides.

We don’t really own anything we put online. There’s always an end-user license agreement between us and the person (or bot) on the other end of the screen.

More importantly, I’ve been spending time thinking about what it means to be “online”. We don’t really own anything we put online. There’s always an end-user license agreement between us and the person (or bot) on the other end of the screen. The agreement could be through a social network, a hosting company, or even the very physical device we are using. The bits and bytes can flow in a different direction at any instant because of a perceived infraction, with those infractions increasingly determined by digital agents whose decisions are not reviewed by a human. For the most part, we shrug and move along with our lives because we’ve decided that the system can’t work in any other way. I doubt incentives are aligned to leave room for any other sort of system than what we currently have for our little software worlds and the identities we create. I am unsure what would realign those incentives.

On some level, I place no blame on Instagram/Meta. At a user level, I absolutely do: the experience of being accused of doing something you know you didn’t do, and given no recourse to have it explained to you, understood, and no assurance that if found to be a mistake, the company will learn from it and improve their systems, is—to put it mildly—rather poor. But at a professional level? What is the loss of one set of eyes worth over the cost/convenience of so much automated gate-keeping? I’m not special and I doubt anyone within the company will notice my absence, financially-speaking.

Additionally, with so many social forces pulling us into these online worlds, I can’t even declare that I won’t return to that particular walled-garden, despite my misgivings. Not having easy access to these products is incredibly inconvenient to my offline existence. I miss out on in-person events I didn’t hear about, I struggle to understand if the local coffee shop is open on a holiday because they only post in their IG Stories, I have less ambient awareness of what friends—actual humans I have lived life with—are up to. Occasionally, I’ve even connected with future romantic partners on social networks, so I am likely at a disadvantage here as well.

It has felt necessary to ask myself what it means to invest so much in a singular walled garden and wonder if it could it be better to create and publish in different places, even if less people see my stuff…

But somehow, this time, unlike years ago when my account was hacked, it has felt important to walk away and to feel the void. It has felt necessary to ask myself what it means to invest so much in a singular walled garden and wonder if it could be better to create and publish in different places, even if less people see my stuff, even if there are still EULA’s between us all, and with algorithms still watching everything we do.

Maybe I’ll learn something useful. Maybe I’m just making life unnecessarily difficult for myself. It can be hard to tell. I’m pretty stubborn that way.

This piece was originally a /now update on a previous iteration of this site. It appears here with some minor edits.

", "summary": "On leaving Instagram—or, rather, Instagram leaving me. I’ve been spending time thinking about what it means to be “online”. We don’t really own anything we put online. There’s always an end-user license agreement between us and the person (or bot) on the other end of the screen.", "title": "Am I human?", "url": "https://grantblakeman.com/writing/am-i-human", "date_published": "2023-11-26T19:00:00Z" }, { "id": "writing-hello-interdiscipline-and-goodbye", "content_html": "

Let’s call this a reset. My last update was… [checks notes] mid-2019. Oof. I’d started writing a few that I never got around to publishing, and then March 2020 hit, and [gestures broadly] and then June 2020 and [gestures broadly] and then… [gestures broadly] and then… and then. Updating this bit of internet with the now of my little world, just didn’t seem to be a relevant exercise for me, or (presumably) you, the reader.

But in the long run, I still believe in the exercise, so here we are. Reset. Start anew.

And maybe a reset is good? For much of my adult life this little spot on the internet has been the main gateway into my professional world, my work world. I briefly had a standalone “agency” website under the name “gb Studio” (original, I know), but quickly realized people were hiring me for, well, me. And the internet and working world changed in ways that made it less weird to hire someone directly as a consultant, so grantblakeman.com—the site you’re reading right now—became the place I’d direct people who potentially wanted to hire me on a contract basis. So, what’s changed? Two major things have happened:

I wanted a way to create a dividing line between the consulting work I would do and the person I am… There was a growing cognitive load in my life parsing between “Grant” the business entity and “Grant” the person.

Thing 1

I got to the point where my working identity and my personal identity needed space from each other. If this is all in my head and only for my benefit, I’ll allow for that, but whatever the reasons I wanted a way to create a dividing line between the consulting work I would do and the person I am. A lot of people use a work moniker—a stage name, if you will. I wanted something similar. And not simply for the internet, but for me. There was a growing cognitive load in my life parsing between “Grant” the business entity and “Grant” the person. Even as I stopped going to an office because of a global pandemic, I craved a mental way to shut the door on work when not working and separate myself from it.

I’d been thinking about and planning this change for awhile—as far back as 2018. I already had a name and had asked friend and excellent designer, Justin McKinley to help me with some branding before the pandemic. And so, Interdiscipline, was born.

Going forward Interdiscipline is the home for my professional work on the internet. It’s not an agency or studio, per se (though it kind of is?), but rather a way for me to say, “work life is over there, under that name; life life is over here.” I’ll have more to say about this reorganization at some point, but internally (mentally/emotionally), I’m already very glad I did it.

However, before Interdiscipline was even properly launched into the world, I put the consulting side of my life on hiatus, leading me to “major thing two”:

I took a job.

I’m now spending my days designing and building productivity tools for other designers.

Thing 2

After 15 years working independently, largely as a consultant, an opportunity opened up to transition a contract consulting role at LinkedIn into a full-time role.

I’m now spending my days designing and building productivity tools for other designers. I’d hinted at this work in earlier updates without naming the company and when I’d first started as a contractor I hadn’t even considered the idea of taking a full time role. But over time, as I worked with some simply amazing people and asked myself where I wanted my own career to go, the possibility of working at a company with such a clear mission: touching work/hiring and education at a global scale, seemed like something I would regret not trying.

And uniquely, for myself, to be able to work at a large company in a position where I could do both product design and engineering work made the role enticing. Even in most of my consulting work, I usually had to pick one discipline or the other.

And so…

And so, those are two things that transpired in my life over the years since my last update. And they’re both, in their own ways, the reason that I expect the nature of my (hopefully more frequent) updates to this space will evolve into something different, possibly reflecting my life more broadly.

This piece was originally a /now update on a previous iteration of this site. It appears here with some minor edits.

", "summary": "A long-overdue update in my previous “/now” series. This update covers the launch of a standalone brand for my independent work—Interdiscipline—and the near-simultaneous loss of that independence. Awkward.", "title": "Hello Interdiscipline. And goodbye?", "url": "https://grantblakeman.com/writing/hello-interdiscipline-and-goodbye", "date_published": "2022-05-08T19:00:00Z" }, { "id": "writing-on-pride-doing-it-wrong-and-maybe-thats-ok", "content_html": "

It’s Pride month, and, more specifically in LA, it’s Pride weekend. I never really had a specific “coming out” moment—it happened incrementally, over time—but thankfully it has been years since I’ve felt afraid to be open about my sexuality in real life or online. I am not old, but I’m old enough to remember the idea of marriage feeling impossible. And even though I live in California, I am aware that those of us in the queer community still do not have the protections we need in most states, including the right be able to hold a job without hiding ourselves. In that frame of mind, I tire a bit about the yearly, methodical, manufactured controversies surrounding Pride.

If you cannot see that the space is still necessary or worth creating I’d ask you to give us the benefit of the doubt. It is necessary.

No, straight people, you do not need your own party. Every day and every moment and every place is your party. Even during the Pride Parade, it’s still your party and we’re asking permission to temporarily create our own space within it. And we ask for the space in the face of a government that has—at least at the federal level—never been more explicit in its marginalization of virtually all minority groups, the queer community included. If you cannot see that the space is still necessary or worth creating I’d ask you to give us the benefit of the doubt. It is necessary.

I also tire a bit of the “you’re doing Pride wrong” tropes within the queer community. Yes, by all means, let’s keep corporations from turning it into a commerce event of infinite rainbow proportions. But some of the related cynicism bothers me. Growing up in one of the boardroom-planned, mass-manufactured, heavily-franchised suburbs of America—where the most viable hangout spots were the mega-church, the mall, or the movie theater—my closeted self would’ve given anything to know that the brands I encountered every day acknowledged my existence. It would’ve been easy to overlook the crass consumerism embedded in these acts (and it is crass) because it would have been life changing to me. And, I suspect, it still is life changing for some version of me that exists out there in a suburb with a mall and a movie theater and an evangelical mega-church. Let’s call out the crassness and absurdity when we see it. Let’s demand the profit goes somewhere worthwhile. Let’s try to keep the focus on the real reasons Pride events need to exist. Let’s not create a litmus test for each other that starts excluding our own and our allies based on authenticity. It’s a losing game that creates an ever-diminishing number of winners. 🏳️‍🌈

Growing up in one of the boardroom-planned, mass-manufactured, heavily-franchised suburbs of America—where the most viable hangout spots were the mega-church, the mall, or the movie theater—my closeted self would’ve given anything to know that the brands I encountered every day acknowledged my existence.

This piece was originally a /now update on a previous iteration of this site. It appears here with some minor edits.

", "summary": "I never really had a specific “coming out” moment—it happened incrementally, over time—but thankfully it has been years since I’ve felt afraid to be open about my sexuality in real life or online. I am not old, but I’m old enough to remember the idea of marriage feeling impossible. And even though I live in California, I am aware that those of us in the queer community still do not have the protections we need in most states…", "title": "On Pride, doing it wrong, and maybe that’s ok?", "url": "https://grantblakeman.com/writing/on-pride-doing-it-wrong-and-maybe-thats-ok", "date_published": "2019-06-11T19:00:00Z" }, { "id": "writing-the-value-of-a-name", "content_html": "

I woke up to a text on Saturday morning that was only about twenty minutes old: “Google Account password changed.”

Shit. It had happened.

For as long as I’ve been using Instagram people have wanted my short, two-letter username. Like here on Ello, I am @gb on Instagram. Some people have asked politely, some have dug up my email address and offered to buy it, but more than anything, multiple times per week I get password reset emails from Instagram that I didn’t request, and every so often, I would get authorization code texts for the Gmail account that was tied to my Instagram handle. When I saw that text—the one about my password being changed—I knew someone was after my Instagram account.

I jumped out of bed and to my computer: sure enough, I couldn’t get into my Google account. I couldn’t get into my Instagram account. I was able to regain access to Google by re-authenticating my phone (the hackers had removed it from my account, but Google has a short window where it can be re-added, even if you no longer have access to the account). But, unfortunately, it was too late for Instagram.

I poked around a bit: only my Instagram account seemed to have been compromised. Once they had access and re-assigned the @gb handle to another account, I believe they deleted my account entirely. Friends could no longer find it in the app, and any photos I had taken of them disappeared.

…sure enough, I couldn’t get into my Google account. I couldn’t get into my Instagram account.

The Details

How did this happen? I had two-factor authentication turned on for Google (remember how I said I would occasionally get auth code texts that I hadn’t requested?). I use 1Password and passwords I use to each service are painfully-long, complex, and unique. I was baffled.

I’ll keep the main details brief, partly because I only have knowledgeable guesses about what happened, and partly because I worry that too many details could leave myself and others vulnerable again.

I filed a support request with Instagram, reporting the hack (thanks @benjaminchait for finding me that link). An online buddy who had been through his own issues with hackers before guided me through checking my Gmail account and ensuring other accounts hadn’t been compromised:

  1. make sure no new filters exist
  2. make sure email forwarding hasn’t been enabled
  3. check the trash and folders for other service password reset emails that might have been purposefully hidden

And then I changed so many passwords. Don’t get me wrong, I had some peace of mind because I knew my passwords were unique across services, and as far as I could tell, no other services had been compromised, and I had regained control of my Gmail account, but it still seemed like a good precaution.

I went outside, rode a bike, and tried to go on with the rest of my weekend, hoping I would hear back from Instagram on Monday with some good news.

I thought I’d done everything right. I considered myself fairly security-savvy. How did this happen? It’s a humbling feeling.

The Weakest Link

There was still a lingering question in the back of my mind: I thought I’d done everything right. I considered myself fairly security-savvy. How did this happen? It’s a humbling feeling.

On Saturday, I had tweeted about the attack. Several people retweeted me and it cast a wide net. One of those people was Mat Honan, a senior staff writer at Wired. Mat has his own history in dealing with these kinds of attacks. On Monday, he kindly reached out to me suggesting he might have some information and we arranged a phone call.

Again, specific details from this point are murky, but he suggested that I check with my cell phone provider and make sure that call-forwarding had not been enabled on my number without me knowing. Creepy, I thought.

I called, and sure enough, as of Saturday morning my number had been forwarded to a number I did not recognize. Unreal. So, as far I can tell, the attack actually started with my cell phone provider, which somehow allowed some level of access or social engineering into my Google account, which then allowed the hackers to receive a password reset email from Instagram, giving them control of the account.

Go outside. There’s no internet out there.

Resolution and Learned Lessons

Cell Phones

As you might imagine, my cell phone provider was fairly non-plussed about the ordeal. They assured me I wouldn’t be responsible for any charges to my account I didn’t authorize, but also assured me that no one but me could make changes to my account. Ironic, I know.

The takeaway: It is possible to add a voice authorization code to your account that the CSR is supposed to prompt from you to ensure changes can only be made to the account by you. I added that code and you should too. It’s likely it may not have helped, but it’s something.

Google

This one is still a black box to me. I can’t find a way to report the incident to Google, and my cynicism tells me they deal with this kind of stuff enough that they wouldn’t provide me with much information or resolution even if I could. I’ve since re-enabled two-factor auth, and I use an app to retrieve the authorization codes instead of texts.

The takeaway: My Instagram account was tied to an email that was basically my name. That was probably a mistake. I have other public email addresses, so I’m not sure how someone would have known it was my Gmail account they should go after, but it probably wasn’t hard to figure out. I’ve since moved all important accounts that allow password reset emails to a different address that does not contain my name, you might want to consider doing that too.

Instagram

Initially Instagram’s support sent me an email saying that they could not verify that I had ever owned the @gb account in the first place (despite the fact that they had made me a Suggested User to follow for a time) and would not be able to take any further action. Bummer.

Thankfully, some friends in high places did some digging and prodding and an Instagram team member got in touch with me personally and worked to restore my username and account. In the end, I really appreciate their effort and kindness.

A Word on Two-Factor

In this particular case, it seems that two-factor authentication wasn’t the security cure-all that many of us in the industry want it to be. However, I still think it’s a good idea and I have it enabled on any accounts that allow it (I did before the attack). Nothing is foolproof, and nothing is perfect, but it certainly makes it a lot harder for people to get into your digital stuff when you don’t want them too.

Stuff

In the end, like anything else in life our digital stuff is just that: stuff. I’m pretty lucky. The folks that went after me really wanted just one thing and one thing only, it seems. It could have been a lot worse. It shakes you to feel like something you “own” is taken from you, but you can only take the reasonable precautions and then just let it go.

Go outside. There’s no internet out there.

This piece was originally published to my now-defunct Ello account and appears here with some minor edits. Internet Archive version.

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