fixed Ast photo and updated README

.gitlab-ci.yml

@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ build_site:
   # Define when this job runs (e.g., only on the main branch)
   # Adjust 'only' or 'rules' as needed for your workflow
   only:
-    - publish # Example: Run only on the main branch
+    - main # builds on commit to main branch
 
 # Job to deploy the built site using cloudron-surfer
 deploy_site:
@@ -63,5 +63,5 @@ deploy_site:
   # Define when this job runs (e.g., only on the main branch after build)
   # Adjust 'only' or 'rules' as needed for your workflow
   only:
-    - publish # Example: Run only on the main branch
+    - main # publishes on commit to main branch
 

README.md

@@ -22,14 +22,13 @@ hugo server
 
 ## Deployment
 
-Thanks to the [MEDLab Hugo template](https://git.medlab.host/dhorn/medlab-hugo-template), the site is set up to deploy automatically to the MEDLab server via GitLab CI. To do so, when developing locally, use these git commands:
+Thanks to the [MEDLab Hugo template](https://git.medlab.host/dhorn/medlab-hugo-template), the site is set up to deploy automatically to the MEDLab server via GitLab CI. To do so, when developing locally, use this git command:
 
 ```
-git push origin
-git push origin main:publish
+git push origin main
 ```
 
-A push to `publish` should trigger a pipeline in GitLab to deploy the site. If it doesn't, check for errors in Gitea and GitLab.
+A push to `main` should trigger a pipeline in GitLab to deploy the site. If it doesn't, check for errors in Gitea and GitLab.
 
 ## Interviews
 
@@ -47,6 +46,7 @@ Alternately, you can manually add a file there in the proper format.
 
 Optionally you can add a headshot photo to your interview. To do this:
 
+0. Edit the headshot to be a square to ensure high image quality
 1. Place your image file in the `/assets/headshots/` directory
 2. Add a `headshot` field to your interview's front matter with just the filename. For example:
 

content/interviews/albuquerque-contemporary_dance.md

@@ -0,0 +1,274 @@
+---
+narrator: Jasmine Albuquerque-Croissant
+subject: Contemporary dance
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2024-11-22
+approved: 2025-08-08
+summary: "A choreographer describes how dance helps people learn ways of being in shared space and in their bodies."
+topics: [art, health, family, dance, music]
+location: "Los Angeles USA"
+headshot: "jasmine_albuquerque.jpg"
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://www.jasminealbuquerque.com/"
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+My name is Jasmine Albuquerque. I'm a choreographer, dancer, storyteller and instructor.
+
+*How do you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start in your life as a dancer and choreographer? Where are you now?*
+
+I grew up on a mountain---which was problematic, because I never had a ride home. In that world of never having a ride home, I would go with my friend Caitlin to dance class and just watch her do ballet. It got to a point where I knew the difference between a *demi-plié* and a *grand plié* more than the girls in class. So I started taking ballet.
+
+There was something really beautiful about the musicality of ballet and the foundations of ballet. I then progressed into jazz. We had a company called the Dance Asylum. It was really sexy, and all the parents protested it because it was so risque. My teacher played Soft Cell and other eighties music and that was what all the older girls did. I finally got into that company and loved it.
+
+By the time I turned 16 I literally grew out of ballet. I was too tall *en pointe*. I was 6'4", so I was taller than my partners, and I was like, I might as well just pick YOU up because I'm bigger than you. My feet were huge. My feet grew out of my *pointe* shoes. It was such a mess! Then I moved to Budapest in my third year of college at UCLA.
+
+That's when I started studying contemporary, which was a huge shift for me. I would take a train outside of the city and take class from a wonderful teacher. It was in Hungarian, but it really made me realize that dance is a universal language, and I could take my shoes off, and I could stick my ass out, and I could do things that were so anti-ballet. I was even counting in Hungarian. I started going to all these contemporary dance shows in Hungary.
+
+That was before they joined the EU. It was 2003. You could go out for $5 and watch an opera or a dance show. Hungarian work then didn't leave Hungary. So I felt like I entered into this very special time. And they also learned contemporary in a very particular way, because of Communism. They weren't allowed to do it. Certain dancers would go to Italy or somewhere West and learn some contemporary then come back. There were two studios- when someone official would come in they would do the communistic dances, and then, when they left, they would do contemporary in the back. So it felt like this secret language that was really special, and it felt good on my body---finally, something that worked for this big body I had.
+
+Then I came back to LA. I started taking class from Ryan Heffington. Ryan Heffington, mind you, is a pioneer of underground contemporary dance in Los Angeles. One of the first times I met him he had a shirt on that said "I love dick" and sequined pants. I said, "Yo, you look like shit," and he's like, "Yeah, I just got out of jail." I'm like, "What'd you go to jail for?" He's like, "I was defending a woman, and I was a little bit drunk." I'm like, "And you're about to teach class?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm about to teach class." I'm like, "...okay."
+
+Then he goes and teaches the most amazing class you ever could possibly go through. There was an earthquake in one of the classes he taught, and I'm like, "Yo, there's an earthquake." He's like, "Whatever. Focus." Ha! Soon he taught me psycho dance. And that's when we started going into nightclubs to perform. This was happening from the eighties on but I was new to it.
+
+By midnight a fully choreographed, fully costumed 30-minute dance show would happen that no one knew was going to happen. Wild stuff went down in these settings. One time a friend of mine, her leg---someone actually stabbed her leg because they forgot to switch out the real knife with a fake knife. My other friend, her hair caught on fire. One time there was a drunk guy walking in the middle of the dance floor and all the lights came crashing down.
+
+At some point I was asked to choreograph a dance but the DJ was on speed and he played my track underneath another track, and I got so pissed because it was a very specific Aphex Twin song, and you couldn't hear the subtilites, so we just sort of melted and I got mad and I shined a light on him. I ran outside. I was wearing some little dress and a rat ran by, and then a dude offered me 20 bucks, and I was like, "Yo, I'm not a prostitute. What the hell?" I ran back inside to my family members who lied through their teeth: "That was great."
+
+With psycho dance, we were very mixed in. I was trained on big stages where you just look out and you see darkness and you just dance. You see the darkness, and then you hear applause. So I kept saying to Ryan, "I don't know how to do this. I'm staring at my ex-boyfriend. I'm staring at my mother. They're in my face. How am I supposed to perform? Where do I go? I'm too big. There's no space." He crawled through my legs, and he said, "There's space." And he crawled through my arm and he said, "There's space. There's always negative space."
+
+That was so beautiful. I love that. It trained me not only to literally face my fears, but to integrate that fourth wall, to walk into the audience and invite them in and to be able to go into a state in my mind.
+
+A lot of these dancers were doing drugs and drinking. I was totally sober. I just didn't like that kind of stuff. So I had to create a veil underneath my eyes that could allow me to have a little bit of separation and go into a state.
+
+The dancers in LA were so special. You have emotional dancers who are super, super amazing emotionally, and then you have physical dancers who are incredible physically. Then you have that rare group of dancers that can do the combo of both of those. And THEN you have that extra rare group of dancers who can channel past lives while they dance and that's what we were. We were called the Fingered Dancers. The show was called Fingered. You would come and get fingered psychologically. It was wild. It was totally crazy. This was around 2008.
+
+After that, the scene died out. Heffington got sort of famous. He made a music video with Sia. He started a band called We Are the World---two dancers and two musicians.
+
+When Heffington got too busy for us, I started a dance company with Nina McNeely and Kristen Leahy called WIFE. We all had looked in the mirror, and we were like, yo, we're getting old. Let's start talking about age, and we also were very into iconography and just these beautiful images that we had been looking at for so long. So we did a photo shoot where we were standing on boxes, on small boxes and projecting images on us to make us look like sculptures. And we actually looked like sculptures. And we were like, well, that's dope. Let's dance in that world.
+
+So we kept standing on those boxes. The confinement, the limitations of being on a two-foot by two-foot box all of a sudden created the most crazy choreography because you couldn't run across the stage. You couldn't leap. That psycho dance stage, which was already smaller than the giant stages I had danced on, all the sudden got even smaller.
+
+I realized that the best dance is when you have a large limitation around it. WIFE happened from 2010 to 2016 and it was a really special time. It was also a very nerve-wracking time. We were not using infrared, we were using regular projections, so our tech rehearsals were close to six hours long. The precision of where you had to be for the projections to map the body were so insane, and I kept blowing my back because I was so nervous about fucking it up. Nina was making all the projections. She's a self-taught animator and editor and incredible, but she was doing a lot of the work, and Leahy and I were producing everything. And we all had jobs, but we were just really trying to make this happen.
+
+And we did. We went to England. We went to Istanbul. We toured with it. People loved it. They would come and emulate some of the movement and be like, "Are you a WIFE?" It was this kind of secret "if you knew you knew" kind of thing.
+
+*It was an amazing show.*
+
+It really did look like those sculptures came to life. It got very popular. People started teaching it in Germany. It unfolded in ways that we didn't even expect. But by the time we did our last show, which was called "Enter the Cave," I think I had blown my back like five times. I had to use Tess Hewlett to be my replacement and this poor woman---an amazing dancer--would learn a piece that took us a year to choreograph in like three hours and perform it because she's my same height. That was the other thing. It couldn't be just anyone. We once used my friend Zak Schlegel because I had blown my back and we had to tuck his penis under so he looked like a woman. It was totally bonkers.
+
+After Enter the Cave, it got to a point where the energy between us was too intense. We were all fighting. The work wasn't distributed equally. We were stressed. Leahy ended up moving to Mexico and Nina continued on with her career in LA which has fully bloomed and blossomed in all sorts of ways and I did too. It crumbled at what was the pinnacle of what we were doing. It was very sad. It felt like I got divorced. Then I really did get divorced and those two literally got married. That's what was happening.
+
+Since then I've been freelance. I've been a freelance dancer and choreographer for a long time, at least fifteen years. I also have to mention that I started teaching when I was 21. I'm 41 now.
+
+Teaching was the experience that really shifted me into a choreographer. All of a sudden I'm in a room with women in their forties and I'm 21. "These are my students? What do I teach them? Shouldn't I be learning from them?"
+
+I asked them to walk across the room and stop in the middle and look in the mirror and not fidget for 10 seconds, and none of them could do it.  I realized that I needed to teach confidence. I needed to teach bodies. I needed to teach that it's okay to look at ourselves, it's ok to be in our bodies. 
+
+It got to a point where women were like---or people, you know I had a few men, but mostly women---saying to me, "I got a job after doing your class." "I slept for the first time after doing your class. "I broke up with my boyfriend." "I was able to be in my body." Doing that for twenty years turned me into a choreographer. I made a new combo every two weeks. I would have one combo one week, and then it'd be the same, and then we'd switch. So I was making a lot of choreography and I continue to. Teaching is a huge part of my career.
+
+And now? I'm in LA, and the industry's kind of bottoming out. It's a very strange time for dance. Covid was super devastating for us. We lost 80 percent of our dance studios. We've all been kind of dissipated and broken apart. The Sweat Spot was Ryan Heffington's dance studio that went under. It was 11 years of a space to create shows, rehearse, gather, teach, perform and party. You name it, everything...where we went to think and talk was in that studio and it went down. And The Edge, which was around for thirty years also shut its doors.
+
+So things shifted in a really weird way during Covid. We felt like we were Covid, because all we did was touch and grope each other and all of a sudden touching each other would kill each other. This was really, really hard for us. But it was interesting, too, because people started reaching out to dancers and saying, "We need you. We need you to teach us. We need you to help us get through this."
+
+I started teaching on Zoom, which was bizarre. I did it for two years and eventually started teaching movement therapy. I'm not a certified therapist. I was just like, you know, let's figure out how to get through this together. I ran into a woman when I was at the Biennale in Italy, and she said, "You saved my life," and I was like, "Who are you?" She's like, "I took your Zoom class during Covid." We became these fountains of health, in a way.
+
+Now I've had another baby. My brain has changed yet again.
+
+I choreographed a piece two weeks ago, which was really wild in a postpartum state. I took an old piece from 2019, took out the men, put it on women, bought silicon bellies for them that were six months pregnant, and turned them into pregnant women---naked, pregnant women. I pumped my breasts onstage and then had them walk around me in trench coats and heels, take off the trench coats, throw the heels away, and start this very psychotic dance to AFX, which is even more gnarly than Aphex Twin-his alias. It took me 10 years to choreograph to this song. It's so---it makes your brain bleed. I wanted to take people into one little element of birth---what it feels like. I don't think you die when you give birth. You are hyper-alive.
+
+Have I answered your question?
+
+*Oh yes---beautifully. So beautifully, Jasmine.*
+
+From a mountain to birth.
+
+*Knowing very, very little about choreography, the image I have in my mind is a piece of paper with Russian ballet movements on them, with foot positions.*
+
+Like actually writing choreography down?
+
+*Right? What does choreography mean for you like? What does it feel like? What does it consist of?*
+
+A lot of dancers don't choreograph because they want to be told what to do. They don't want to have to create it. When I first started choreographing I was writing things down, and it would be [moving hands and body] "Swoop! Wah! Hee haw! Pregnant swipe knife in out, left, right! Turn up up! La, la!"
+
+*Were you using a standard, or were you creating your own?*
+
+No standard at all. There's a name for that standardized choreography. I can't remember what it's called but it does not work at all. It's like this psycho map and also contemporary dance has changed everything. We're dancing to-you know-Philip Glass. How do you count that? Where is the five-six-seven-eight? Where's the one-e-and-a, two-e-and-a? It's not hip-hop. It's not jazz, it's not eights. Or even this song, this AFX song---like, try counting that song, there's elevens, there's tens, there's fives. I realized as I was teaching that I needed to teach from imagery. I didn't exactly realize this---I worked with a guy named Glenn Edgerton, who used to be the artistic director of Netherlands Dans Theater, which is one of my favorite companies in Europe and I took a choreography workshop from him. This was a long time ago...he taught from images. He always said, "Let's show things with images."
+
+That was really helpful for me. I was sometimes writing things down and that was fun. It helped me remember. I had a hard enough time picking up other people's choreography.
+
+When I was in the process of choreographing, I used to be very precious about it. I used to not allow anybody to watch me. That was what was nice about WIFE---we would have to choreograph in front of each other. But normally I would be like, "Don't watch me do this! This is so embarrassing."
+
+But I started being more comfortable choreographing in front of other people. What I do is I go to the most empty space in my mind---the biggest void you could possibly imagine--the blackest nothingness. I have to let everything out...then the song---I open a song, I enter the song into my mind.  The song tells me what to do. Sometimes it's a conversation, sometimes it's an argument between us and sometimes it just completely flows. It's the weirdest thing---sometimes one minute of a song can take me anywhere from ten minutes to three hours to create depending on the state that I'm in.
+
+But the song is the most important thing to me. The song has to talk to me. If the song does not talk to me, I cannot choreograph to it. So once I stopped writing things down and started working just with my body more, I realized that a dance is really just a repetition of three, you know---once you find a movement that you like, all of a sudden it's a dance. And I told that to my students: you can choreograph by just making a phrase on your body. Start improvising, and then, when you like one little thing, do it three times, and then all of a sudden, you have a dance.
+
+I also used to teach this thing I named "Bomb/Baby" which is where I would have your body experience what it feels like when a bomb goes off and then try to imagine what it's like holding a baby. I would make them do both at the same time. You're experiencing this motion of shock and energy vs. caress and gentleness. Two extremities at one time. I liked what that dichotomy did to the body. 
+
+All dance is a manipulation of energy.
+
+Everybody can dance. But how are you manipulating your energy? What are you doing to manipulate your energy that's manipulating my energy when I watch you? Why are the hairs standing up on the back of my neck when I watch you, but not when I watch *you*? *You*'re not doing anything for me, but you're doing a lot for me. I can watch beautiful dance, but if the person has not opened up their state and allowed me to come in, it's not going to do anything for me.
+
+Choreography is a very strange language. I try to run from it sometimes. I don't like it all the time---it's sort of brutal. It makes me nervous. I'm still nervous to choreograph after god knows how many years I've been doing this. I think now it gets to a point where I just can visualize a feeling.
+
+For example, I'm creating a piece in my head right now, and I know I want to have forty to forty-five bodies on their knees and I want them to be the sea...the grass on the ocean floor...a solid seagrass of humans. But I don't ever want us to see their faces, and I know that there's a future, a chunk of the future walking through that they keep looking at. We don't see their faces, and then I know there's a duet between my friend Maija and Malachi that's happening on top of this sea of bodies---the most abstract, weird stuff.
+
+And then all of a sudden, you have to physicalize that. I used to choreograph when I was on my bicycle, which was really nice because I had motion. I would get a lot of choreography from houseless people. I would watch them doing these moves that were so beautifully kind of psychotic. And I loved it because they were the ones who were watching humans for real, because they were out there seeing it every single day. Whatever they'd experienced in their paths, whether it was war or meth, or just not having money, or whatever it was that brought them to the streets, they communicate with their bodies in ways that's really beautiful.
+
+I'd ride my bike everywhere. I was on a bike for six years in LA and I had this motion underneath me. I'd be listening to music and observing houseless people on the streets and that would bring out a state I could enter into that helped a lot with choreography.
+
+*When you are communicating an idea to dancers, are you telling a story? Are you showing them images? What is the means by which you get your choreography out of your head and into their bodies?*
+
+No, I'm not telling a story. I don't like stories with dance. I think it's too boring. I want half the audience to get up and leave. I want them to be like, "This is shit." I haven't done my work if people like it. You know what I mean? I want them to see it and say, "Oh God, what the hell? This is rude and mean and not fair."
+
+So with my dancers---I told my last dancer, Maija, "Listen, I want you. But I also need a monster. I don't want a dancer, I want a monster."
+
+I had one process of creating a piece where I was teaching them what it felt like to be in a psycho dance situation. I was throwing things at them in the rehearsal space. I was turning the music on and off. I was turning the lights on and off. I was getting aggressive with them. And then when we did the show---it was at a club called Zebulon---which is a very special nightclub---I really loved my main dancer's body movements but her face was frustrating me because she kept doing this little emotional eyebrow thing.
+
+I was doing the piece to Pharmakon, which is super, super gnarly music. There's a section of it where she just coughs for the whole thing, and I came out dancing during the cough, and then the dancers come out, and I had them representing "Liberty, blood, land, justice." It was about immigration, but in a very abstract way. That was the one when my dad played saxophone at the end. He played free jazz and I danced to it. But the woman who was playing me as the Statue of Liberty when we later did this piece at Zebulon---she was doing that eyebrow thing. So during the show, I drank an entire bottle of water and spit it in her face, and she looked at me with an honest expression and I said, "That's the face I want!" She kept going. It was incredible. She tells me, years later, that that moment changed her life in a lot of ways.
+
+I don't know what I do to my dancers. I try to give them enough space that they can translate what's in their heads. But we're meeting at some sort of middle point in the music. I'm giving them movement and sometimes I give them a little bit of a backstory. Like for this last one I did about birth, I showed them what it felt like to be in labor. I screamed. I got on all fours. I ran around. I also had them put the fake bellies on. What does it make you feel like to be pregnant? These were all women who had never had babies. It took 30 minutes of them walking around the studio with their bellies, experiencing that. I asked them, "What do you care for most?"
+
+I don't like "this is the beginning, this is the middle, this is the end, this is the climax, this is what it's about." I don't treat dance as academic. New York has a very academic approach to dance, which I appreciate. Los Angeles is very "dance for fuck sake, dance to dance, dance because we can."
+
+It may seem kind of elitist or weird, but when you find that grit, it's so beautiful, because we're emulating things---again, like a houseless person or someone sitting at a bus stop. We're emulating the things that you see in life. A brief moment or the moment just before something happens. But I don't want to force feed you. Most of my stuff is from a dream or from an experience I've had. It's piecing together abstract elements of my life. My brain is also not normal. I'm an art baby. I'm Lita Albuquerque's daughter---I have cobalt blue pigment and toxins in my mind. That's why I don't need drugs. I am drugs, to quote Salvador Dali.
+
+*I'd love to hear a bit more about that relationship---the role that the dancers play in shaping a piece. How much is it a collective product of everyone who's involved as opposed to something that you are bringing to the dancers?*
+
+Dancers are huge---they are the piece. It's just that I am so particular about picking my music---I'll listen to a track for, I'm not kidding you, 10 years. I work with my dancers in that same way. It's not always the same dancers, but I'm very specific about who I use. Those are the people who can experience past lives when they dance. They're the ones who can throw me off. They have to throw me off. They are bold in their choices. 
+
+There's one woman named Maija Knapp who I just---I'm obsessed with her. She can do anything. She's got these thighs that are like trees and her deep *plié* is practically on the ground. Then all of a sudden, she's frolicking through a meadow, but she looks like she could cut your head off. She's just a beast. She's incredible. I've worked with her since she was 18. She's 26 now. I feel like she's what I always wanted to be in a dancer.
+
+It really depends on the piece. But thinking about who can execute it is a big part of my process, because half the time I don't believe in my work. I don't think it's going to be good enough, and then I put it on the body of a dancer who brings out a different light.
+
+When I was teaching a lot, I remember I would love the mistakes that people made. I would write down the mistakes. If all the bodies drop, and one person stands up because they forgot to drop, I would take that as the next piece of choreography. And Heffington always said, "Live in your mistakes." If you fall to the ground, live in it. Be that mistake, be it even further than you could possibly imagine. Don't run from it. Don't try to pick up the pieces. Thoroughly enjoy your mistake. I try to teach that with dance as well.
+
+*What have been some of your most important decisions in the development of your career, in your practice? What kinds of choices stand out to you?*
+
+I have no idea. What do you mean?
+
+*Did you have moments when you had to choose to go one way or another? When you had to locate what kind of choreographer you would be?*
+
+Yeah, absolutely. The industry in LA is very complicated. You have layers and layers. You have touring dancers, you have hip-hop dancers, you have contemporary dancers. Within the contemporary scene, you have the artsy ones, you have the more normal ones, you have modern dancers which don't really have too big of a place here, because they're more in the academic world---you're going to see them more at universities.
+
+Also contemporary and modern, we kind of butt heads a little bit. Modern dancers are introverted, they're looking down. To me---I'm sorry, modern dancers, I love you, but it looks like a pillow party. There's no guts to it. Rude! 
+
+Contemporary dancers look like they're on drugs but they make eye contact with you. And then all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh damn!" We always joke, we show each other videos of people walking who are on acid or on meth or whatever, and we're like, "Oh, a contemporary dancer." But then we make eye contact and that's what's powerful about contemporary---we use our eyes to communicate. We use our eyes for connection. We use our eyes for direction. 
+
+I've been in Hollywood for too long. In Hollywood, as a movement director, I'm a punching bag between a photographer who wants weird and a celebrity that only knows sexy. Honestly, that's my job. I'm in the way of the lighting person. It's the weirdest job because you have this celebrity that really knows how to be sexy, but the photographer wants them to look bizarre and is trying to convince them to do this for the cover of *Vogue*. It is not the easiest thing to do.
+
+When I was auditioning as a dancer, I would go to auditions with like three to four hundred people. I would be the one in the back, slow dancing with a ghost. "Can I please leave? Like I really don't want to do this. This is not my style." They were sending me out for like *Frozen* the musical, cruise ship gigs, things that were so out of my wheelhouse, and I kept saying to my agents, "I come from Heffington, I come from Kitty McNamee, Mecca Andrews...that world of contemporary," and they said they get it. But when they were sending me out for this stuff I'm like, "Help, I'm not this dancer."
+
+So eventually I got named the "eclectic dancer," which really drove me bonkers. And then I was the "East Side dancer" which also drove me bonkers. They just keep trying to categorize you, and after being with my agency now for like at least fifteen years---I think I've been with Bloc for a super long time---they finally understand me. It also took me a very long time to be repped as a choreographer. They have a very small choreography department and a very large dance department.
+
+It wasn't until I choreographed for Katy Perry that they accepted me as a choreographer. Then things shifted. All of a sudden, now I'm treated differently. But I'm still kind of low-hanging fruit in that world because there are so many incredible choreographers in LA.
+
+This is another thing about dance which is really weird: It's one of the only art forms where your body disintegrates, but your emotional experiences accelerate. So you're at this weird crossroads where you feel "my body can't do this," but I've experienced sexual assault, or I've experienced being robbed, or I've experienced falling in love, I've experienced having a baby. As a 41-year-old dancer, I can bring that. But I can't kick my leg up high and I can't do triple pirouettes anymore. When you watch an older dancer, it's so beautiful because you're witnessing those things that they've seen. And when you watch a younger dancer, you're like, "You can do all that with your body, but you need to go through a little bit more life."
+
+I feel like now they're trying to take the art out of me. Freelancing is constantly trying to take the art out of you. They always hire you, and they're like, "We want dance, but not *dance*. We want this, but not that." Why do I have all this skill but can't utilize it properly? Lack of funding in America for the arts. 
+
+I never became a touring dancer because I was always too tall. You have to look like---you have to blend in. You can't threaten the lead singer. I've always stayed in the art world of dancing. I've made like twelve collaborations with my mother. That kind of puts me in a different category, too.
+
+I don't know about the decisions. I think I've---I mean half the time I wonder why I still do this. It's totally crazy. It's such a weird thing.
+
+*Maybe decision is not the right word for what moved you along.*
+
+Yeah, I mean, I've surrounded myself with the people who move me, and then kept those people close to me as much as I could. I think now I've gotten to a point where I'm one of the people who moves other people, so that feels really nice, you know, for people to gravitate towards me. Some of my dancers were like, "I did this show even though we weren't getting paid because you're a legend." And I'm like, "A legend?!" Okay, that's nice.
+
+But I think it's just---I don't know. I don't know how I got here. I tell people I've tried to run from dance my whole life and it's obviously my passion, because it just keeps eating me.
+
+*It seems like actually the work has grown around you. Your turn to choreography grew out of the mismatch of your body to a certain set of expectations, right? And it grew out of relationships and out of need in the context of the pandemic and scenes you found yourself in, rather than something where you're directing it with an intention or plan.*
+
+And teaching---teaching really turned me into a choreographer.
+
+*Yes, that's right. That's not what one might expect.*
+
+Teaching was huge, because all of a sudden it was just like the---what's the word I'm looking for---the accountability of having to show up with new moves and a new song. That's a lot of pressure over twenty years of having to have cutting edge music and cutting edge moves. Whether I have two people in class or 300 people in class, whether I have professional dancers in class or someone who doesn't know left from right, and they walk into mirrors all the time. I've had everything---I've had people burst into tears. I've had people throw up. We've seen it all. Teaching really helped me understand what choreography is.
+
+*To go back to that question of transmission---and tear apart my framing here if it's not right: How do you communicate those moves that you come to a class with into the bodies of the people who come to experience them and to hold them? Is it through modeling them in your body? Is it through telling them who they're becoming, what they're becoming?*
+
+No, it's modeling it in my body and working it through my body with them. There's a lot of statistics now that say dance is a cure for depression, because bodies are moving in unison together and doing the same thing. You're not just going to the gym and working out by yourself. You're in a collective room of bodies that are doing something together. You're increasing your beta endorphins. You're finding a physical and cognitive alignment in your body. You're turning your goddamn brain off. That's the trick---you have to turn your brain off.
+
+It doesn't work if your brain is on. You need to learn my language, however. So you have to keep one part of your lizard brain on, with one eye open, but you have to turn the rest of your brain off, or else you cannot absorb this information. It's the most meditative state you could possibly be in. Again, going back to Heffington teaching when that earthquake was happening---I was the only one in the class who noticed the earthquake, and he got mad at me because he said, "You're not here, Jazz." And he used to say that to me all the time. He'd go "Jazz, why didn't you take class?" I'm like, "Dude, I was just in class." He's like, "No, you were not in class. You were in the mirror. You were fixing your hair. You were not in class." I'm like, "Damn! You can see that?" He's like, "I see everything."
+
+When I teach, I'm trying to keep it open for people who don't know how to move. I also need to let them experiment. They're trying---first of all, they're in a studio. Let's just start---step one: you're in a dance studio staring at a mirror for an hour and a half. Good God! Maybe you hate your body. Maybe you love your body, but you're staring at a mirror for an hour and a half. It's totally intimidating, especially for dudes, too, because you're walking into this room full of beautiful women in leggings. There's a lot going on.
+
+So I work them out for forty-five minutes. We do cardio. We do sit-ups, we do push-ups, we do burpees, we do stretching. We blow our lips out, we scream, we do so much stuff in that forty-five minutes of fully strengthening and release. There's a lot of release. And then we work on a combo for one minute to a minute and a half of a song and I start with maybe two or three counts of eight, or the beginning of the track, and we just do it over and over and over again. We start building and building and building until, "Does everybody feel good? Can we move on?"
+
+Half the class says no. Half the class says yes. We do a little bit more, then a little bit more, then a little bit more, and then all of a sudden, you have this dance. By the time class is over that dance---you're holding onto it by the cliff's edge. You're like, "I don't have it at all. I can't wait to come next week when I can actually turn my brain off for real."
+
+When I take other people's classes I'm usually struggle city---they do five moves, and I'm like, "Yo yo, do it again." I am so bad at picking up choreography. It is so hard for me, which is weird. Being a teacher, you get into this authoritative state where you're the one telling people what to do. And then when you take other people's classes, you're like, "Oh my God! I have no idea what I'm doing." If my students saw me, they'd be like, "Who is that? She doesn't know how to dance." That's one of the reasons I love dance so much. It's impossible to master. It is always changing. Just as your body is always changing too. It is a cognitive and physical duet. 
+
+Everything is very dependent on what physical and mental state you get to after the warm-up. The warm-up is a really big part of my dance. Some people come for just the warm-up so they can get into that. Some people come for just the choreo. But if they haven't gotten through the warm-up, it's like they haven't been initiated properly and I don't really want them to just do the combo, because they can hurt themselves.
+
+*That's how they begin to turn their brains off?*
+
+The warm-up. And it's the same every time. It's super hard and you're sweating buckets, and we blow our lips out. We stretch our mouths out. We do so much in that warm-up that all of a sudden, once you're done with that, most people say my class is in two parts. They're like, "Your class almost feels like two classes, because your warm-up is almost like its own class." And then we move into the combo.
+
+And I tell people with the combos---this is the other thing about dance that's really interesting, especially when you're learning with a mirror. The mirror can be very problematic. You have to either look through the mirror or practice the "school of fish". I call it a school of fish...if the fish start moving, make sure you know the direction---you don't want to go against the stream, you're going to physically get hurt.
+
+This is another reason why having professionals and non-dancers in the same classroom is very problematic. There's etiquette and there are a lot of rules within a classroom. When you go across the floor from diagonal to diagonal, you would never reverse and go back. You're going to get hit in the face. You go to the other diagonal and you come around to the other side. Some people don't know that and I forget that people are not classically trained. I have had a lot of collisions. I forget that I have to keep telling people, and a lot of dancers get really frustrated when non-dancers are in the classroom because they don't have spatial awareness.
+
+Spatial awareness is a huge part of being a dancer---huge. If you hit another dancer in the face---oof! You have not studied. You have not studied space. You have to understand space.
+
+*What does studying space mean? Does that mean knowing those rules? Or does it mean something else?*
+
+It means knowing that if I'm gonna do this, I'm going to do that. I'm committing to that. What does that mean for you if you're standing next to me? If you'd like to run into me, I will run into you. I will hit you so hard---not on purpose. But this is my space. That's your space.
+
+You can do all you want in your space. If you want to do it in my space, I will hit you in the face. We're gonna clash. We're gonna hit. And that's cool, too---like, I'm down, I'm down for us to mix spaces. We can mix spaces, but be prepared in your body. Hold your center, push your belly button to your spine, and know that you're gonna get hit. I'm gonna get hit.
+
+It's different than martial arts, because we're trained to not hurt each other. It's a team sport that does not hurt. We're trained to lift and help each other. We have to be on that same plane. We're constantly looking out of the sides of our eyes because we have each other's backs. We're in this together. If you screw up, if you fall off the train, you could potentially knock out the whole system.
+
+It's kind of like being on a spaceship. Everybody is part of that spaceship, and we all have to contribute. If you don't know the rules of space, you're going to mess up the ride. If you trip me as a dancer, and I break my leg, you've ruined my career. You have to know the space, or you have to be prepared to take the consequences of not knowing the space.
+
+Does that make sense? I don't know if I'm making any sense.
+
+*It's so beautiful to hear you articulate this stuff.*
+
+I'm really glad to talk about this, because I have a new brain now. Second child in, you get a new brain every time you get a child. I don't even know what left and right is right now.
+
+*A lot of what you've talked about seems to be moments of turning away from traditions like ballet. What legacies, what currents do you find yourself drawing on in building your work?*
+
+I didn't major in dance at UCLA, I majored in history. I was sitting there watching bodies get blown up. I'm watching someone with no legs scoot on their ass. I'm watching violence in the body, because a lot of my students would be like, "Your movements are like a little ballerina that has no head or no arms." My moves can be very violent. I have a lot of aggression too. I need to let it out in dance.
+
+I think of the visuals that I saw as a historian. I also learned as a historian that there are no answers to things. Historians are very different than political scientists. They're not saying, "This happened because of this." They're saying, "I'm going to read everything, and I'm going to say, look at this and look at this---isn't that an interesting juxtaposition?" This concept was working its way into my choreographic brain---history and broken bodies---without me even knowing. 
+
+One of the professors at UCLA would say that dance originated from agriculture, which was really beautiful because you were thinking about people stomping and planting seeds. We don't really know---like what comes first, the chicken or the egg, dance or music? Where is dance from? What is dance? I like this kind of idea that it came from agriculture.
+
+But, again, I am a ballerina at heart, even though I've rejected ballet. My feet look like monsters---like, I've had people come up to me and ask if I'm okay, just by looking at my feet. And I'm like, "Yo dude, yes, I'm fine. I've lived with them my whole life. Appreciate it."
+
+I've also seen a lot of amazing dance. I've seen Batsheva, I've seen Marie Chouinard, I've seen Louise Lecavalier, I've seen La La La Human Steps. I've seen these companies---Netherlands Dance Theater, Crystal Pite---that have blown my mind with choreographically. You know, Pina Bausch---I have to look at it like, "Try not to take everything that they're doing! I want it all!" I allow myself to take a little bit. And when I'm really stuck, I watch videos of these dancers and these choreographers---Paul Lightfoot, is another---people who have blown me away.
+
+Let's say you're going to make pasta, right? You're putting it through this pasta machine, putting the wrong ingredient through the pasta maker. I'm going to put meat or put apples through the pasta maker, and then see how it comes out in my body. I'm looking at them on a flat screen, which is the worst way to learn choreography. Then I close my eyes. I put on a different track and I see what happens. Have I taken some of their movements? Of course. Has it come into my subconscious? Of course. Am I choreographing from my dreams? Yes. It's all mixed in there. Have I ripped from people I love? Absolutely. Oh, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker! Amazing choreographer. So it blends in. It's kinda hard to pinpoint my choreography to one thing.
+
+I don't know how to answer these questions.
+
+*You're doing it.*
+
+I'm realizing dance is so abstract, it is just---it's so bizarre. I always did tell people I dance so I don't have to speak. There's so much I can't articulate with words. I can write them down, but verbally saying them is super hard.  
+  
+With my body I can scream and whisper, sometimes at the same time. 
+
+*What do you think that other aspects of life can learn from dance? Are there lessons to draw from the way in which patterns carry through bodies?*
+
+I don't know. Keep going.
+
+*Are there lessons from dance for other kinds of worlds---people who are creating traffic patterns, people who are trying to figure out how to go to other planets, people who are trying to survive in the streets? What are the lessons from dance that carry to other parts of life?*
+
+Well, first of all, you have this body just once, and you gotta have fun with it. We all hate our bodies to a particular degree. You're in this sack---what is this thing? What does it do? It gains weight, it loses weight. It looks pretty, it looks ugly, you know---it's all these things. You have to have fun with your sack because you get that sack only once. Please have fun with your sack---step one. It gets so heady, especially the body dysmorphia among dancers. The amount of stuff we do to ourselves is horrible.
+
+In terms of what people could learn, I think it would be the spatial awareness. It has to also do with carrying yourself in a way that makes sense to you, carrying yourself in a way that you want to present. For example, if I'm gonna walk down the street, I'm holding my heart open. My back is down. I'm breathing out of my back. My rib cage is closed, my center is engaged, and I'm walking. Do you think I've ever been beat up in my life on the street? Have I ever been mugged? Hell no! People don't touch me because I'm holding my body in a way that says I understand this body. I own this body and I command this body. Would you want to hurt me? Try to---let's go.
+
+It's a matter of building a body that you're having fun with and that carries the person that you want to be. We have to walk into the world like that, or else we're screwed. Especially as women these days---there's a lot of imagery out there. There's a lot going on with social media---we could go down that rabbit hole, which would be a whole other conversation.
+
+But if you want to wear a mini skirt and you want to wear tassels on your tits, you better own your body. Same with men. If you want to wear a miniskirt and tassels on your tits, you need to own your body. Or non-binary folks or trans. Dance is about understanding your body and understanding where you have your limitations and also where you have your strengths. It is going to make us more powerful as humans walking down the street.
+
+Maybe what I was talking about with spatial awareness: You know your space. I know my space, you know your power, I know my power. If you know your power, I can know my power even better. We can power it up. But if you don't know your power and I have power, this is a problem. Let's move smoothly through this world together, eh? 
+
+I think it's about having a conversation. I talk about dance as having a conversation between your body and energy. Where does my body end? Does it end at my fingertips now? No, because the energy is shooting past and going out from there. If you see a dancer who stops their energy short, it's not good. It's not right.
+
+Taking the outline of the body and extending it, and then having a conversation---that is when you have a beautiful dance. When you bring other bodies into the mix, when you have multiple bodies, that's when things get super beautiful because you have lots of conversations. But it's also---this is something I learned with WIFE---it's also about the silence. We would stand on those boxes very, very still for a long time, for an almost awkward amount of time. There was music, but we were so silent with our bodies that you didn't know what was going to happen.
+
+All of a sudden, the first move was powerful because there had been so much space in silence. It allowed that movement to scream.

content/interviews/ast-decentralized_justice.md

@@ -0,0 +1,173 @@
+---
+narrator: Federico Ast
+subject: Decentralized justice
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-01-31
+approved: 2025-09-25
+summary: "How a blockchain-based protocol is prefiguring an Internet-native justice system."
+topics: [conflict, economics, decentralization, mediation, open source, software]
+headshot: "federico_ast.png"
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://federicoast.com/"
+  - text: "Kleros"
+    url: "https://kleros.io/"
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+I am a founder and CEO at Kleros.
+
+*How would you outline the trajectory of your life, starting from wherever makes sense to start to where you are now?*
+
+I was born in Argentina in 1981. When I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer. I loved reading. I loved novels. I read a lot of science fiction. For example, I loved Jules Verne. And then I also loved sports. I was quite good playing football---as an Argentinian, that's an important skill to have. 
+
+And then I went to the university. I did two majors at the University of Buenos Aires, which is a major public university in Argentina---first in economics and then in philosophy. When I was still studying, I started working in online media. Since I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to start my career with was journalism. I started working at this very big newspaper from Argentina called _Clarín_, which had, of course, the online unit, and in that online unit there was a business section that was for management. It was a bit similar to _Fast Company_, if you want, but from Argentina. And I started there as a writer and became an editor soon after starting.
+
+It was a one-man show. At that company, it was me doing everything---very Latin American style, very improvised, with few resources. That was the way in which I got in touch with innovation and startups. In those days when I was working there---it was around 2012---people started talking about Bitcoin: magic money from the Internet. Argentina, because of so many problems with inflation and bad governance, was kind of a pioneer country in Bitcoin.
+
+I was interested in the financial aspect, but I started seeing blockchain more generally as a technology that could be used for lots of different things, and in particular to build new institutions. Some people were starting to think about how to use blockchain for building tamper-proof voting systems to prevent voting fraud and stuff like that. And I started thinking, you can use this also for building an institution that covers a very important part of governance of a society or community, which is the justice system.
+
+I was thinking this in the context of Argentina, which was a highly corrupt country. Back then it had lots of high-profile corruption scandals in politics. You would open the journal, the newspaper, and you would always see a big scandal about that. So I was thinking, you have this currency, this technology that you can use for money. And then can you use it to build more transparent governance systems? That was the question I asked myself.
+
+I was also thinking about how the Internet had been helping everyday people from Argentina have more economic opportunities. For example, with YouTube you could watch tutorials and learn how to code or how to do design stuff, and then you could sell your services to other countries and customers in the rest of the world---which was very hard before that, because you could not have sold a $1,000 website to a customer from the US from Argentina.
+
+But there was a problem---it was very hard for you to get paid because there were capital controls, high taxes to receive money from other countries. Bitcoin was a way to circumvent all of those restrictions that the government put on the economic opportunities of people. Now you could learn how to code and contact foreign customers, and now you could actually be paid. But the last thing you need is---if they have a dispute with you because they don't like your website, and they're not going to go to court in Argentina against you, or they're not going to go to arbitration. But what if they could have a very efficient, very fast system to resolve small claims? That was the early idea of how a justice system could be created based on this new technology.
+
+I got tired of working at the newspaper, so I went and I did a PhD. And I did a PhD in business management at IAE Business School, which is quite important in Latin America. And what I researched was moral philosophy and, in particular, how collective intelligence works---how people make decisions together in deliberative settings.
+
+At some point things connected. What if you combine this idea of crowdsourcing and deliberative democracy with this idea of blockchain as a transparency tool? It's kind of a mini justice system where all of the process is going to be following rules, code, and blockchain, and people are going to be able to participate. Because of course I had studied philosophy, and I loved political philosophy. I had read Aristotle, and I had read ancient history.
+
+I was thinking, okay, you could combine these ideas into building a crowd---when I started I called it the crowd jury, a jury of the crowd. And then I wrote a paper about how I thought that system could work. Pick the jury through blockchain so everything has a rule of law. I thought my contribution would be only to write that paper, that blog post, and maybe someone would read it and maybe implement it. I was thinking, who am I to actually do this? I'm just a poor guy from Argentina---who is going to pay attention to me?
+
+At some point I applied for a scholarship that was given by the government of Buenos Aires to go to Singularity University in Silicon Valley. I won that with this idea of the crowd jury. I went there, and I spent about five months at SU, surrounded by people from different countries, people doing nanotechnology, biotechnology, blockchain, AI, VR---all of the hype technologies.
+
+After that I was finishing my PhD and I had to go back to Argentina. I was thinking, well, okay, what am I going to do with my life now that this Disneyland trip is over and now I have to go back? And I was thinking of finding a job or whatever, and at some point I got contacted by Bitnation. Do you know Susanne?
+
+*Yeah, absolutely. Susanne Tartowski Tempelhof. She is hard to forget.*
+
+So she sends me an email, and she tells me, "Look Federico"---she knew me because I was in her Slack or something, I mean we had talked a bunch of times because of decentralized governance---and she tells me, "Look, I was at a hackathon and I was a judge, and there was this guy who was presenting a dispute resolution idea similar to what you are thinking. He's a technical guy, and you are more the business guy. So I think you should meet and see if you can work together."
+
+Clément Lesaege and I had a Zoom, and then started Kleros---it was May 2017. I only met him in person for the first time, I think, six months later at the Devcon conference in Mexico. That's how it started. Going to Singularity was important---it was a way for me to be convinced that I could actually work on this and build it, not just write the paper, because I saw people who had started from nothing and built very important projects. Why couldn't I do this also?
+
+*Can you say a bit about what Kleros is and how it has developed?*
+
+In the very early days, the main idea was that we were transitioning from this centralized web ecosystem of big companies like Facebook and Twitter---and from a political perspective, they look a bit like monarchies, if you want, absolute monarchies that have centralization of decision-making power. They have users who are subject to the authority of the king. And I was thinking of transitioning to this more republican version of the web with Web3, where users actually have a voice and have a vote. That means they also should be participating as jurors in decision-making and dispute resolution in the platforms where they work.
+
+Back then, we didn't call them DAOs---I think the idea was more like platform cooperatives. That was the word we used. But I was thinking that these platform cooperatives are like small governments or nation-states---digital nation-states---and we need to start thinking about how to govern them. That what we thought when we started Kleros.
+
+We expected that soon there would be a decentralized Uber, decentralized Airbnb, decentralized e-commerce, and decentralized everything, and all of those would have something in common. They would have disputes between their users, and you would need a system to resolve them. So the initial vision was: what if they plug their DAO into Kleros, send disputes, and then Kleros picks the jurors and sends back the decision to the case? It was a justice-as-a-service project, based on systems of economic incentives. In order to be a juror, you need to have the token and stake it into the court, and then you are drawn randomly through an algorithm.
+
+The system was inspired by how ancient Greek courts used to work. *Kleros* means "randomness" in Greek. The *kleroterion* was the machine that they had at the door of the courts in Athens to do the allotment lotteries for jurors. And the token that we use is named after the *pinakion*, the ancient Greek ID that people used to be drawn. They deposited the *pinakion*, and it would be drawn by the machine.
+
+You might imagine the reaction when we were pitching this ultra-sophisticated interpretation of the ancient Greek democracy to VCs---but we survived, and so we started implementing all this.
+
+The main problem we have is that the Web3 ecosystem grew way slower than everyone expected. We don't have decentralized Airbnb, we don't have decentralized Uber, we don't have any of that. So we started focusing more on business-to-business and higher-value disputes---prediction markets is one of them, decentralized finance like lending protocols, things like that.
+
+Another big segment is also the enterprise sector---traditional insurance companies, traditional governments, and all that. Even if the enforcement is not on-chain, as we envision this with Web3 customers, Kleros can still produce a decision thay is seen as legitimate by users because it's made by a jury that's selected randomly through some transparent method, and they give justification. So this is actually what is working better now for Kleros---this enterprise segment. That it's not what we imagined in the beginning. In my mind there was always this idea of enterprise and using this in real governments. But since we expected Web3 to grow way faster, we didn't pay that much attention to it. So we started with it about two years ago, and now we are starting to see the fruits.
+
+That's it, more or less. Yeah, I can explain. Tell me where you want me to double-click now.
+
+*Let's first double click on that word _protocol_. On the website right now, if you go to Kleros.io, it says "the justice protocol." What does the word mean for you? Why is it important, not only as a technical term but as part of the messaging that you use to introduce the project to the world?*
+
+I think it's the set of rules that defines how this system of justice works. We typically call it decentralized justice. So this is a protocol that follows these rules, this procedure, and that also---well, in our case at least---coordinates people in order for them to produce a service that we could call justice.
+
+Some people don't like me to call it justice, especially those coming from arbitration or the legal field. I still think that it was a good idea, at least in the very early days, to call it justice, because it got people's attention way more than if we were just building a solution system. And also because, the way I saw this in the early days, it was really a justice system for the metaverse.
+
+There is an interview I did with Max Keiser in 2015, I think, where I said: "Imagine you have---you're in a virtual world, a VR world. You have a dispute, and my avatar can sue your avatar because of something you did to me in some VR world, and then this can go to a trial, and then you could have a bunch of bots as jurors in that trial." That's how I was thinking---I was thinking of this as a justice system. The word protocol came in when people started speaking of protocols in Web3, but also protocol as set of rules that you follow for delivering justice.
+
+*How was the protocol developed? Can you talk a little bit about the social dynamics? I mean, you talked about your PhD process initially, but I imagine others got involved. What was the design process like? And how much is that ongoing?*
+
+The technical elements for Kleros were developed by Clément, who is my co-founder. I don't code, but I do have ideas of how I think this should work. For instance, when we started, my early idea was for the mechanism of Kleros to use a matching algorithm. You would have a type of dispute involving, I don't know, like e-commerce of websites, and then you'll have an algorithm trying to look for jurors who would be qualified in that type of skills.
+
+When I met Clément, he came with a different idea. He told me, "You cannot do this because you don't have an identity protocol, so you don't know who is behind an address. The only way to do this is to use tokens that produce that kind of specialization through economic incentives---that if you stake your token into a court where you don't have the right skills to resolve the cases, then you will lose money, and this creates an incentive for people not to do that, and then if they do it, they will lose all their money and exit the system." This is how Kleros started to work in the very early days, and it is still mainly how it works. Since then, however, lots of things happened. 
+
+This type of mechanism is okay for some use cases, especially for use cases involving people deeply embedded into Web3, since they are usually okay with this type of financialization. To me, the first time, I found it extremely weird. I didn't buy it, it was the only way to build Kleros because we didn't have identity system on-chain. There was no other choice. But then we moved forward, and we launched this project called Proof of Humanity that can solve this problem of having one person, one vote. Now you don't necessarily need to have the system where people with more money have more votes in the jury, which was a big friction point for many.
+
+And the there was this other idea from Glen Weyl, Vitalik Buterin, and Puja Ohlhaver: you can start having SBTs.
+
+*Soul-bound tokens, which attach permanently to a certain address.*
+
+Yeah. With soul-bound tokens, version 2.0 of Kleros launched Beta in November, and it can do that. You can pick a panel of jurors who are part of a certain DAO, maybe they have to have skills in JavaScript or websites or whatever. Now you can have a fqr more rich design field, addressing lots more use cases that were not possible to address before.
+
+People see this type of mechanism, where they can select jurors from some community or with some skills, as way more legitimate. And this is also driving more adoption. What happened before is that some people didn't want to just have this token voting system. The pure token voting is still present. You could even use the pure token voting for AIs. We will have AI courts, and AIs don't have identity availability. So you can just have them do the decision fully incentivized with a utility function, and then if people appeal, they would go to a higher level court where there are humans selected through soul-bound tokens.
+
+This is how the mechanism is evolving in response to different learnings we have over time. And it is way more sophisticated than what it was at the beginning. It is actually starting to look a bit like what I had in mind before starting Kleros.
+
+*Can you say a bit about the story of adoption? When you first started deploying this, what did it take to bring people into participating, say, as jurors or bringing disputes? And what were those early experiences like? How did you draw people in and help people understand how to participate?*
+
+The first version we launched was called Doges on Trial---a curated list, a verification system based on Kleros, where people would submit images, and then people would verify them. And if there was a dispute about whether an image was or not a doge, there would be a trial.
+
+That was the first thing we did. The thing that happened there in the early days is that we were mostly at the beginning---this is something very new, something that people don't trust at the beginning. People think, okay, if you want to use this for a low-value dispute and it gets it wrong, and then it's $200, it's fine. No problem, we can try it. But the problem is that this was built on Ethereum mainnet, so it was extremely expensive to use for low-value claims, for consumer disputes.
+
+*Because of the transaction costs.*
+
+Yes, the cost was very high---dozens of dollars, sometimes hundreds of dollars to solve a $200 claim. So it didn't make any sense. We had to focus more on DeFi claims.
+
+One of the famous disputes was when there was the US election, the previous one with Biden and Trump, and there was a prediction market. Some people bet for Trump, others for Biden, and you remember what happened on January 6 and all that. The market had to clear, let's say, on December 29. But on that day there still wasn't clarity about who had won. Most people thought that Biden had won, but there were presentations in the courts up to change the result. So some people claimed that the result for the prediction market was invalid because there was no clarity. So there was this case about who was right. Did Biden win, or is this invalid? People were doing constitutional interpretations, hiring lawyers. There was $2.5 million at stake in total.
+
+It was kind of a strange thing, because these random people from the Internet, through this token mechanism, were deciding something that not even the most qualified lawyers in constitutional law could. It was a really great experiment. But we didn't see that as how Kleros is going to help the world be a better place. This is something that solves a need for some specific type of use case---prediction markets---which is fine, but it kind of didn't resonate with the reason why I got into this in the first place.
+
+The reason I started this was the lack of access to justice for the guy who wants to sell his services to a customer, or the guy who gets screwed by a company and isn't going to go to small claims court because it's too expensive, and maybe that doesn't even exist in countries in emerging economies. So all of those high-value cases, even if they are legitimate use cases, were not the most interesting cases to me. But a lot of people came from that because there was money to be made. Because of the transaction fees, you could resolve those high-value cases but still not the small-value ones.
+
+Kleros clearly has a very big community of people who are from the fields of law and arbitration. Many of them haven't even used Kleros, but they all know about Kleros because it's kind of a cool thing to know if you are into legal innovation, and you have to have an opinion about the use of economic incentives in arbitration. You can see, if you search for Kleros in Google Scholar, there are lots of mentions, mostly from the legal side, legal tech people. They don't bring lots of users, but they do bring lots of buzz. If you go to a legal innovation conference, someone is going to be speaking about Kleros.
+
+*How much do you know about the jurors, about who these people are?*
+
+In theory, we don't track anything. So we don't know who are, and in the long run we will know even less. But in the short term when we have---say, we're working with a fintech company from Argentina, and they send disputes to be resolved, and to resolve it you need to understand Spanish, and you need to understand how crypto works, stuff like that. So when we start a new use case, we tell people from the community, "Okay, who knows how to resolve this type of case?" Then they can stake into this court, and they will be drawn.
+
+So even if we don't know who is behind every address, we generally know from which part of the community they come. Sometimes some of them tell us, "I was this juror, this is my address," and it's okay. We never ask, and we don't have any tracking. Some of the community are crypto hardcore, who value privacy above everything. Some of them are lawyers, and they say, "Well, it's not a problem, this is my address." So we have a bit of both.
+
+*Have you had experiences of capture---experiences, for instance, where you saw the protocol used in a way that you didn't design it for and didn't expect, or where a source of power outside of the protocol was able to use it for its own ends?*
+
+Fortunately not yet. There was an attempt in Case 1170. There was this attacker called Avraham Eisenberg, who is in jail because of an attack on a protocol called Mango Markets, and he tried to do something like that to Kleros, creating a narrative about Kleros being rigged. I think he hired some influencers to try to attack the system in a way that is a bit similar to what you would expect when there is a very high-profile trial in the real world. The OJ Simpson trial---everyone has an opinion about this, and if the jury rules in a different way to what was expected, people will think it was rigged, even if it was not. So there was an attempt of an attack similar to that. It didn't succeed.
+
+At some point I think there's going to be things like this. We don't want---of course we didn't build this for people to use it in assassination markets or stuff like that. There is a supreme court in Kleros: the General Court has some rulings about morality, where if you have a case about assassination markets or something, jurors are instructed to refuse to arbitrate. But in the end, we don't control it. Someone could come, copy the code and build another version of Kleros, and do whatever. I don't encourage that---I strongly discourage that. But that is the world of open source.
+
+*Has it happened where someone has tried to fork it?*
+
+No, because it's still a bit early-stage. I think we still need to prove that this works as we expect it to work. But I think at some point, if we are successful---that is the irony of success. If we are successful in building this, I'm sure someone will try to do that.
+
+*Are there cases or stories where you feel like you've had that glimpse of success, where you've seen it working the way you really wanted it to?*
+
+Yeah, we have a bunch of those. One of those was in 2020. There was this app that we built called Kleros Tokens designed to analyze and vet cryptocurrencies that people might want to list. It was after the initial coin offering boom, and there were lots of scams. We built an app where if you want to list your token on an exchange, you can submit it and a jury will verify it. If you make it through the jury you get listed. It's a good tool to prevent scam projects.
+
+There was one case about a coin called Baer Chain. People sent the submission and it was challenged, and it went to trial. When the jury started to analyze the case, they saw that the whitepaper of this currency had a CTO called Scott Bingley, who claimed to be affiliated to some Oxford blockchain group. They called Oxford, asked for this guy, and someone answered, "No, we have no idea who this guy is, and there is no Oxford blockchain-whatever here." It was a fake profile with a stock photo---it was a scam.
+
+Six months later, we read on _CoinDesk_ that the police from China made an arrest in a project called Baer Chain because of a Ponzi scheme or whatever. So Kleros got that information six months before the Chinese police. Imagine all of the people that got scammed during those six months---if there was a robust tool for the certification of tokens, this could have been prevented. That was an amazing thing.
+
+The second moment is happening now. We are working with a fintech company, and we developed this system where you have a user that has a claim against the company---it's like Coinbase, it's the Coinbase of South America. They have a claim on the company because they were charged for something they didn't buy. They go to customer service, and then customer service says no, and they can just go to small claims court. But people don't go because it's very cumbersome.
+
+What we did with this company---developed a system where, after customer service rejects a claim, they offer going to Kleros, and the company will pledge to abide by the decision. But if the customer loses, they can still go to small claims court, so they don't lose any access to justice. It's asymmetric.
+
+We have had already a hundred cases like this, and 90% of people who go to the system and lose their case still are happy with this process and stay as customers of the company. This is quite amazing because this is what I envisioned. This is what people feel when they are treated fairly by the company. They got their day in court. It only took four days and not four years or four months. And then they got people from the community---peers who analyzed the case and thought that they were not right. And they go, "I'm seeing five of my peers saying I'm not right. Okay, maybe I'm not right." And then they come back to the company, stay as a customer.
+
+So for the company, the person stays as a customer---customer retention. And more importantly, they don't go to the competitor, and even worse, go to Twitter to say, "This company, they are scammers, don't use it." So there is a reputational risk. So I'm seeing this working perfectly well now, in the way I intended it to work, in the sense that it creates value for everyone. There is value for the company because it avoids losing reputation. There is value for this person who has access to justice in a few days, at a cost that is nothing. This is what I think should happen, this is how it should work, and that's what we are trying to scale to other industries now.
+
+*What would it take to have real kind of accountability in the blockchain ecosystem? Because one thing that was really striking to me in the 2021-22 scam wave, and the collapse wave of things like FTX and Terra-Luna and so forth, was how immediately things went to territorial courts. It was striking that the crypto ecosystem was really not equipped to handle the scale of bad behavior that was going on, and people were immediately running to the legal system that supposedly this whole ecosystem was built to get out of.*
+
+That's a very good question. I think that Kleros and all the projects for dispute resolution are going to be a self-regulation tool for the ecosystem. Like the tool we did for verifying tokens---if we as an ecosystem can verify tokens and root out the fake tokens, then we will have fewer scams and less need for outside regulators to intervene.
+
+For now, it is too early to use Kleros as a binding arbitration system for all kinds of disputes. The FTX thing was too complex, too many moving parts. You could resolve that through arbitration eventually, and maybe not even that one, because it was so complex. But there are other cases. Binance had cases that were sent to arbitration---though it was a traditional arbitration process, not a crypto-native method.
+
+Arbitration is meant to be voluntary by parties. So lots of protocols have arbitration clauses. And sometimes you don't know what goes through arbitration because it's confidential. I think for now we are still a bit early. But if we succeed in this---I'm not saying that we're going to replace all of the traditional arbitration. I think for more complex cases, I people will still want to go to courts or traditional arbitration. But what I care more about is disputes happening for a few thousand dollars---or fifty, or a hundred---where people will not bother. If you want to go to traditional arbitration, it's at least $1 million, otherwise it's not worth it. But all of the small economic activity happening in blockchains, like the contractors making videos or websites, that is for a few thousands, and sometimes parties are anonymous. Sometimes they are in different jurisdictions. All of that, I think, Kleros can handle. I don't know about the high, multi-million dollar cases---I think we are still a bit far from that.
+
+*You talked a bit about the influence of ancient Greek democracy on the design of this. Are there other legacies that you've drawn on, other kinds of historical patterns or lessons that you've drawn on in designing this protocol?*
+
+The obvious influence is the Greek. But then there is another part of Kleros that is---this is even more science fiction---a supreme court for the Web3 ecosystem. You have disputes happening or governance proposals happening in a protocol, and then someone claims that this breaks the fundamental values of the DAO, and they want it to be overturned. This is the type of things that the supreme court does.
+
+The way we structure the Supreme Court of Kleros---the mechanism is inspired by the Greeks also. It's a system called the *nomothetai*, the law-makers. But another big inspiration for me is the Founding Fathers of the United States. All of the discussions they had, the separation of powers---I read the Federalist Papers, I read Madison, all of that. And also I read the people that they read. I always see ourselves as trying to build institutions for the Internet age, just as they saw themselves to be building institutions for the industrial age. They only had the Greeks and the Romans to learn from, and we have a bit of that---we also have what they did.
+
+We are also pioneers trying to understand new things going on around us. The challenge we have is needing institutions that can be resistant to the age of AI, because the vectors of attack are going to be way higher. Everything happens way faster, so we need as much help as we can get.
+
+I also read a lot about random selection in general, and about the medieval Italian city-states like Venice---how they chose the Doge of Venice, with all of these super complex mechanisms. And also the Florentine republic, and why it failed according to Machiavelli's understanding and others.
+
+The big question that we have---which they discussed in that time---is whether a good community is made of good laws or of good people? I also read a lot of social capital stuff---Robert Putnam's _Bowling Alone_, and the study he did about the Italian regions, where the same institutions have different results because of the underlying social capital. So I read a lot of history to try to learn about patterns that we can use. 
+
+I also read a lot of things about game theory to try to understand how eventually AIs will build their motivations. Part of that is behavioral game theory, which is about how people react to situations. For example, the ultimatum game---you have to split some value with others. If you think that the other guy is purely rational, and you have to split $100, you can offer one dollar. He will take it because it's more than zero---an AI should behave like that. But humans rarely take less than $30 because they see it as unfair. 
+
+*Finally, what lessons might you share with people who are also building protocols, who are coming after you?*
+
+I think that you need to be someone who has a wide view on things, because this is not just computer science. Kleros doesn't only need to work, people need to see this as a legitimate thing that they want to use. You cannot understand this from just coding---you need to learn lots of anthropology, sociology. My own background has one part that is economics, then the other part is philosophy, and lots of cultural studies. In the end it's about understanding that all of these protocols are trying to affect human behavior and coordination in different ways.
+
+I always say this---they need to read more books. They need to read the classics. They need to read political science. They need to understand why the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, and why Athens failed in the war against Sparta, and what were the concerns for the Founding Fathers. You have to learn a lot of history, a lot of politics and economics. I also read the history of economic thought. But these things are not on the reading list of most builders of protocols, unfortunately.

content/interviews/berjon-web_standards.md

@@ -0,0 +1,252 @@
+---
+narrator: Robin Berjon
+subject: Web standards
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-08-01
+approved: 2025-08-04
+summary: "The standards that govern the World Wide Web develop at the intersection of profit-seeking companies, nonprofit organizations, and small groups of people with rarefied expertise."
+location: "Brussels, Belgium"
+headshot: "robin_berjon.jpg"
+topics: [decentralization, open source, organizations, software, standards]
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://berjon.com"
+  - text: "Social media"
+    url: "https://robin.berjon.com"
+---
+
+*How do you prefer to introduce yourself?*
+
+I'm Robin Berjon, and I generally describe myself as a technologist working on issues of governance. It's sort of fuzzy and blurry, but that's basically what I'm doing.
+
+*How did that journey begin for you, and when?*
+
+It began more or less in the mid-1990s when I was a first-year philosophy student. I got a computer to do philosophy essay writing and homework on. Instead of doing philosophy, I started doing a lot of web things. I'd seen computers before, but they never had people in them. That was immediately fascinating to me.
+
+I built a website that came second in a website competition. I got hooked on that and started making my own tiny web company. Not a family-money kind of thing, but just a tiny thing with my roommate. We basically had a computer between the two of us and started making websites for people. I would do nights, he would do days, because we only had the one computer.
+
+That collapsed within a few months because we had no idea what we were doing. But I got the bug for it and started another company in Belgium that worked significantly better. I started working more consistently in tech from then on. I started asking questions: "Hey, this HTML thing is nice, but I would like it to work differently. Who do you have to ask? How does this thing work? Where does it even come from?"
+
+There was this weird organization called the W3C, or World Wide Web Consortium, where apparently people discussed these things and started agreeing on how they would work. It was complicated to observe from the outside. Back then, as someone who wasn't a paid member, you couldn't get in. You could only send feedback from the outside and maybe receive an answer within a week or two.
+
+I started getting interested in how you change the styling of things and eventually started scratching at that. In 2001, I was invited to participate in SVG---Scalable Vector Graphics, a file format. In 2002, I got a proper job where I was doing standards. Then I did a lot of standards for the following decades.
+
+*Can you say a bit about what drew you into the SVG process? What were you engaged in there?*
+
+What I liked with SVG is that it was a very powerful graphics environment. With JavaScript and all that, you could start to represent anything, from documents to games. You could use it as a rendering layer on the web.
+
+I started building SVG things as part of my job. We were still making websites for other people. I started adding SVG to projects when possible, which was way too cutting edge back then because you couldn't use it. Not enough people had the SVG capabilities on their computer. I had to constantly find customers who would be interested, so I ended up working, for instance, with the French---I don't know what it's called---the people who manage the road network at the level of France. They had these very complicated mapping requirements. They had this antique database with all kinds of weird conventions, and they wanted to bring that into a more modern world. They exported to XML and then wanted to turn that into something else. I started doing all these things around SVG.
+
+Eventually, since it was a relatively small community, the working group noticed and brought me in as an invited expert without having to pay for membership.
+
+*What is the business model for working on standards? Why is it valuable for a company---and in particular, the cases that you were starting out with---to pay someone to work on abstract rules for the whole ecosystem?*
+
+That's a perennial question, and I don't think anyone has a definitive answer, or at least not an answer that works in all contexts. For that specific company, it was a small startup in Paris. When you're small and you have a very specialized area of knowledge, you need to create markets for things. You need to create some stability to improve your credibility.
+
+What they had was a binary XML format primarily focused on optimization of transport at a very infrastructural level. The kind of customer that could adopt that thing would be a large telco or TV broadcaster---those kinds of big companies. But you're not going to get a large telco to adopt something deep in its infrastructural stack that's made by a company of twelve people in France with no proven business model.
+
+In order to solve that issue, the company was very interested in developing standards that included or referenced or made use somehow of their technology so that they would have something credible to offer these large companies. Of course, there's a flipside to that---they had to open up the technology and share it with others.
+
+It was a trade-off. If we keep everything completely proprietary, well, it's ours---and they had patents and everything that was still done a lot at the time---but then they could have no customers, so not wonderful. Or they could agree to open it up at least some and share it with others, and then get customers. That was essentially the play they made.
+
+They were also interested in figuring out avenues in which their technology could be used. Even though they were not directly working on SVG themselves, they were very interested in the potential bridging between their technology and SVG. So they allowed me to continue working on the SVG working group. When I was with that company, I made quite a few projects that used subsets of SVG in embedded devices with tiny screens and limited processing capabilities.
+
+*How did your involvement in W3C develop? This was a long-term process. How did it stick for you?*
+
+What really made it stick for me was that back then it was a fun community. I felt at the time that there were a lot of shared values. People were there from all over---a lot of people who didn't have any formal training in computer science or anything. It was very different from trying to talk to people who were old school professional programmers or people who went to engineering schools. Those tended to look down on web people at the time.
+
+In W3C, you made friends with someone, and they'd be, for instance, a history major---it was a very cobbled together, motley-crew community at the time. People were talking about building the web, and how amazing it was going to be, and all the cool things that we could do.
+
+There's also the thing that---there was this sort of whiplash thing where I was super young and I didn't come from anywhere particularly interesting. Just because I was specialized on this super specific thing, all of a sudden people were flying me to Australia and Japan to talk about my work. This tiny bit of expertise that I randomly developed immediately became weirdly relevant in ways that I absolutely hadn't anticipated. As a twenty-year-old, it's exciting---"Wait, I get to fly to Japan?"
+
+*Just to paint a picture of what is happening here: Are these conversations taking place largely in in-person meetings? Are they taking place largely on email lists or things like that? Where is this discussion occurring? Where are these dynamics unfolding?*
+
+It changed over time. If we're talking about the early 2000s, most of the conversations were on mailing lists and in chat on IRC. You would get to know what people looked like only when you finally met them, but otherwise you had no idea what they looked like. A lot of the time the groups would have a weekly or every other week, or maybe monthly---it depends---phone call. That's very different in terms of focus and difficulty compared to video calls, where you can see the person speaking. These were a grind. They were really difficult, especially if you're working internationally. Everyone has accents all over the place.
+
+The tooling was interesting in those days because W3C had better tooling than other contexts. For instance, they had their own phone bridge---a physical phone---and that was driven by a laptop that had Windows 3.1, I think, on it. The one guy at W3C who was a really good hacker had bridged it to IRC. So you could be in IRC. A lot of the time you didn't know who was speaking unless you recognized everyone's voice. It was tricky. You could ask the bot, "Who's speaking?" You could get the bot to mute or unmute people. There was a whole lot of tooling that worked that way.
+
+I think my first in-person meeting at W3C was the first meeting of that group when they decided they had sufficiently good Internet at the meeting place that they didn't need to bring a server with the email archives. Normally, for the meetings, someone would come with an actual computer that would be the email archives where the group discussions had taken place, because you need to refer to them. That's where the issues are and things like that. They would basically plug it into a local LAN, and everyone in the room could read the email archives on location.
+
+It's not like that anymore. Nowadays it's all GitHub issues and stuff like that.
+
+*How did the relationship progress between standards development and your day jobs?*
+
+I worked at that company for several years, and within that time I started chairing a working group, then a second working group, then being editor of several things. I was on the Advisory Committee of W3C. I basically said yes to every opportunity, which was not necessarily very intelligent in terms of time management, but it was so attractive, and so interesting, that I couldn't say no.
+
+Then, because I became a specialist, I was more hireable in that space. So there was this loop. The first job I got after that was with a company that wanted to build a video system where everything was standards-based. The entire environment was---the entire application was built around Mozilla Gecko. It was a fork of XULRunner, for those who remember. The entire user interface was HTML and CSS and SVG, and the data backend was RDF. The whole thing was super standards-centric. Again, building a completely different set of products with a completely different focus, but it still involved the same building blocks.
+
+After that company, I started my own consultancy, working for other companies as a standards specialist. I was usually referred to as tech strategist or something because the idea was really that you would come in and take in the business strategy that existed, and figure out how that mapped onto standards participation or more generally tech development. The web was still very confusing to many companies. Precisely for the kind of question that you asked initially---how does it make sense? What is the approach? How does it work?
+
+I did that for several years, and in part I worked for a lot of tiny startups that had often a very specific goal: "We're building this. We're trying to understand the role of standards." In those cases, twenty percent of one person is a huge investment for them. So they were figuring out, "Is it worth it if we do this? What's the most effective way of doing it?"
+
+At the other end of the spectrum, I also had massive multinational companies---Vodafone or Samsung, Canon---these really big companies. A lot of the time, they had very much the same questions.
+
+One of the things that I always remember, and that explains a lot about the power structures in standards---I remember being contracted by Samsung HQ, which is rare. They didn't bring in people from abroad to the Korean HQ very often. They brought me in, and there were all these people with very important-sounding titles, half of them from tech units and half of them from strategy.
+
+Essentially they opened by saying, "We have a problem we would like you to solve, which is that we don't think that Samsung can have any influence in web standards." This is from a company---you have to imagine, I was sitting in a part of the world that's called Samsung City, because it's a city where they have their own police force, their own supermarket. All the buildings are built by Samsung construction, they're insured by Samsung insurance. The whole thing---this is a massive William Gibson kind of futuristic massive corporation world, and then they go, "We don't think we can have influence on web standards. Can you help us, Mr. One-Person Company from nowhere?"
+
+It was true, because even though they had, I think at the time, something like an 8 percent market share with Samsung Internet Browser, they had no idea how to use that as political leverage or influence in the standards process---how to put people in the right positions, how to bring in a developer perspective. It was very much a hardware company, and hardware companies do not understand a sort of very agile, fluffy, and imprecise software world. It was baffling.
+
+The kind of process that you have at Canon, for instance---they would design chips two years in advance, and have a full specification with tests, and everything. The idea that you could just rock up there and code up a feature on the thing and just ship it---and then, oops, it's buggy, sorry we'll just fix it---was something that was outside of that sphere. Those interactions were super interesting in seeing how worlds collided there.
+
+*In these kinds of interactions, did you ever feel a sense of divided loyalty between the interests of the company that you might be working for or consulting with, and the organization---the standards themselves, the broader ecosystem?*
+
+That's interesting because I think I pretty much always managed to dodge the issue. It's an hourglass communication system. You're this tiny, very small thing, with an organization on one side and an organization on the other, and you're the entire point of contact between the two. You can sort of represent---without lying---the information from one side to the other and back.
+
+One thing that is pretty clear is you could be Samsung, and you still have no decision power over what W3C will agree to. You have influence if you play your cards right, but the whole thing---if you want to have influence, you can't be a total asshole. When something would come up that might trigger divided loyalties, I would say, "Yeah, that's very interesting. But I'm not sure I could get it adopted by the community, because that is the kind of thing that they disagree with"---without saying, "I disagree!" and without going into a group being a mercenary. You could make that representation, which wasn't lying in the sense that it was true. It's very hard---at least, it was particularly hard at a time when this process was not captured by a few big companies---to make a change without getting significant political support from multiple people, and that generally meant having to align with the values in one sense or another.
+
+*Did everyone else operate that way?*
+
+No, but it's certainly true that---and this is something I explained to my customers as a freelancer---you can't be a mercenary and be credible. What the group is interested in is not the fact that you're representing Company A, B, or C. The group is interested in your expertise as the person who's in the room. If for the first six months you work for Samsung and you're saying, "Yeah, we really need this feature," and then two weeks later, you move to Canon, and you're saying, "Oh, no screw that feature. It's a really bad idea"---your credibility is shot. So the group won't be interested in what you have to say anymore---or very occasionally, when they wonder what the companies think. But in terms of expertise, it wouldn't work. That is something I would always explain to clients initially. People understand it well. It's your expertise that is valued, and that is how you bring influence. But you can't just snap your fingers and make things happen.
+
+There is one company that did try. I didn't even start working for them, but they tried to basically get me to abandon my previous customers because they wanted an exclusive deal. They promised a lot of money and were saying, "We want you to work for us full time starting next week. We don't want to wait for the three or four months"---or however much was left on my previous contract. "We'll give you money to match or more than you would make from them to compensate, you just have to ditch them this weekend."
+
+I said no, in part because that's not how I work, and in part also because I don't want to work for people who operate that way. But also, you're talking about a tiny pool of potential customers. Even from a purely self-interested perspective, that's the kind of thing that would have shot my credibility right away.
+
+*You mentioned the sense that something has changed from this period. What years are we talking about when the standards processes you were involved in were more distributed---felt more like something that required widespread buy-in---and then walk us into the story of capture that you alluded to.*
+
+The years I'm talking about are---when did I stop consulting? I stopped consulting in 2015. It goes more or less up to then-ish. It's not like there was a sea-change moment where one day everything was fine, and the next day everything was captured. It happened gradually. I think a lot of us were frogs boiled in that water quite progressively before people started noticing. There's still people who are starting to notice today. So there's a spectrum. But in those initial years, from say 2000 to 2015, things were more balanced.
+
+Eventually, it comes down to what the enforcement mechanisms are. We're talking about what's called voluntary standards. In theory, it's standards that you would only adopt if you want to adopt them, and otherwise you can ignore them. Of course, that's never really---it's rarely really the case. But the enforcement mechanism for standards-making and standards adoption was the market. You could rely on market discipline. If most of the players have agreed on the standard and you haven't, you're just going to lose out on the market. For that to work, it's a very convenient enforcement mechanism, because you don't, as an institution, have to do any of the enforcement work. That's what always makes the market so attractive---it's just, yeah, like magic.
+
+But, of course, that assumes that there's competition. The moment competition disappears, the moment the market ceases to have any kind of disciplining power, then you lose that factor. Voluntary standards start to lose the ability to operate as shared standards.
+
+In terms of capture, it wasn't immediate, but the gradual focus on only doing the browser engine part---so really just the rectangle inside the browser chrome, and nothing else---was very much driven by that increasing power by certain players. They didn't want us to standardize search protocols, or e-commerce protocols, or advertising, or anything in the higher layer that they could see as capturable.
+
+There was a push to focus just on this, and it was always presented in terms of, "That's the specificity of the organization. That's what we're good at. That's where we can drive interoperability. Let's leave the rest to *innovation*"---which I think is always a red flag. It gradually got to this place where now it's pretty much only those standards. The only companies that have a say are the ones who have implementation power. That's mostly Google, Apple, and a tiny weeny bit of Mozilla.
+
+*Around 2015, you switched out of consulting. Was that because of the changes that were taking place? What brought about that shift for you? And where did it lead you?*
+
+No, it wasn't because of those changes. It was still early enough in the transformation that I either hadn't noticed, or it wasn't bothering me yet. But starting from 2012, mid-2012-ish, my primary customer became W3C itself. I was still formally a consultant, but during mid-2012 to 2015 I was paid in part by MIT, and in part by Keio University in Tokyo, to work as part of the W3C team editing the HTML5 standard. We had this situation in which W3C had gone down a bad direction with HTML, trying to make it all about XML. That was very unpopular with developers and browser vendors. So the browser vendors sort of forked and went to build their own HTML in the WHATWG. Then there was an attempt to bring everyone back around the same table, because that was silly. I was hired to be the W3C part of that sort of rejoining-the-people.
+
+Part of it was editing the actual spec, bringing it to completion. I think we were given a mandate to close it in two years, and it took twenty-six months, which was good, because no one believed the two years was possible. That was very aggressive. I think we had 400 issues when we started.
+
+Part of it was to be a diplomat and rejoin those two communities from the bottom up. We knew there were people who wouldn't ever get along, ever, but it felt that it was possible to drive alignment, and that actually did work. But to answer your initial question: in 2015, I was really done with that. It was a grueling process, and I was ready to work on something that was not standards at all. So I went to work for a startup, as CTO doing some product work.
+
+*As you reflect on processes that affect things we experience on the web all the time, do you see traces of those processes---and of your handiwork---in your experience of the web today? How does somebody who has been there in the room and on those lists throughout that period experience the web differently from somebody who wasn't?*
+
+There's several things. There are times I see features and I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah, I remember when we were talking about that." It's something silly, and it's not important---doesn't necessarily affect my experience of the web. But you see it in there. It often comes when, say, maybe there's a bug in a video UI thing inside the browser, and I'm thinking, "Oh, that's clearly because they didn't set the whatever-attribute correctly." I remember we talked about how that would might go wrong, the trade-offs, et cetera. So you have an extra level of understanding of what's going on. That jumps out at weird times.
+
+There is another thing where I think, more than a decade later, a sense of "Hey, we got that right." One of the hard projects that got off the ground as part of this HTML thing---the project I really relied on to bridge communities---is Web Platform Tests.
+
+Everyone hates writing tests. It's a drag. You have to go through the spec with a fine-tooth comb and find all the corner cases of any given statement, write code that matches every single thing, and then run it, and then look at what happens---the whole thing is terrible. But also when it's there, and it works, you have actual interoperability.
+
+Before the HTML thing I was doing, every specification had a separate test suite. They used different frameworks. A lot of them did it as a checkbox exercise---so the entire SVG test suite, I think, was 180 tests, or something like that, which is ridiculous. It's tiny. Groups would do it once to get approval to move forward with the standard, and then they would never touch it again, and no one would use it. So you got all these interoperability problems from lack of testing.
+
+We decided to get serious about it. I basically went and took everyone's test suite. I didn't ask permission. I took everyone's test suite, dumped them in this massive repo and started running really horrendous Perl code to replace the ad hoc frameworks everyone had, and put them all in the same kind of test framework---which some other guy had written, and it was very usable and very good. That's how we started having a unified test suite for the entire web platform.
+
+Today, I think it has two million tests or something like that. It's still really big. It's operated in production by every single large browser vendor. So any change you make to any browser will go through the test suite, and if it adds a failure, or whatever, it will notify them.
+
+I still get little sparks of excitement from that thing whenever I write a relatively complex web thing. I'm on Firefox. When I develop, I only look at Firefox, and then at the end, I usually look at other browsers. That's when you're thinking, "Oh, yeah, I've forgotten that Chrome doesn't support this or whatever." But sometimes you do it, and it just works the same everywhere.
+
+It's hard to convey just how incredibly hard it is to get a reproducible execution of something as complex as HTML plus CSS plus JavaScript, plus all those APIs---this is an insanely complex platform. The fact that you can write something complicated, and it works the same in completely independently implemented browsers, still sort of gives me a bit of goosebumps. Just by doing that, we saved---there are about twenty million web developers worldwide I think. We saved all of these people so many hours each, and they've been able to build better things for it. You still see the value in that.
+
+*Amazing. But after that process you moved on to a startup and then also, later, the New York Times. Tell us a little bit about those experiences.*
+
+The startup was very startup-y---five or six of us in a room that was probably ten feet by twelve or something like that. It was called science.ai, and the goal of the startup was to fix scholarly publishing---which, as you are well aware, we didn't succeed in doing. But the tech stack was very interesting. I still think that with more money and better strategic decisions, it could have succeeded, but it didn't.
+
+One thing that was interesting is I was running away from standards, and I managed to do only product work for about a year at that startup. Then it became very clear that we would need to do standards work for what we wanted to achieve. Because if you're building replacement document formats for scholarly publishing, and you're talking to a Wiley or Elsevier, et cetera---once again, you're not going to say, "Hey, please use this crazy little thing that these five people did." You have to document it and start standardizing it.
+
+I tried to avoid doing too much of it, so there was a strategy of doing enough to make them happy, but not a full standards project. But we used a lot of Schema.org to make sure that we were grounded in an ontology that was maintained elsewhere. Then we had this project that brought together what I called HTML vernaculars. The idea was that you could do specialized versions of HTML that would map to a specific domain. You would constrain the HTML in specific ways and also enhance it in specific ways. We constrained it to just be the kind of content that you would have in the scholarly article, which is already quite broad, and then enhance it with all these semantic annotations from Schema.org so that you could say that this figure is this type of figure, and it was authored by this person, who is different from the authors of the paper. We wrote a spec called Scholarly HTML around that. But I was still trying to stay away from standards.
+
+Then at the Times again I managed to go, I think, two or three years without doing standards work. But at some point we needed it for strategic reasons. Google was trying to change how advertising was working and doing this whole "Privacy Sandbox" stuff. The Times needed to be in that room and be in those conversations, and since I was the person doing privacy and strategy around data and tech, that fell to me.
+
+The Times was really trying to push for this world in which you had only one data controller. When someone interacts with you as a first-party website, only you as the website control the data, even if you work with other people---you're still the driver.
+
+That's why we worked on GPC, the Global Privacy Control. With the law that was emerging in California, I wrote the spec specifically for the technical signal in browsers to match the law. Because this needed to move forward and they needed someone who understood standards for that. So yeah, it tends to catch up to me. Right now, I'm in a phase where I'm really trying not to do standards. But I'm not sure how successful I'll be.
+
+*That was a case of standards as regulatory compliance. Is that something that had been a big part of your story before? Or was that something new at that point because new regulations were coming online?*
+
+It was pretty new at that point. It's not the first such thing, but it's definitely the first that I was involved, and it's still not a big thing. I think it should be a much bigger thing. I think there's huge promise in using standards processes to complement the work of regulators. But this was---and just to give you a sense for how hard it is to bring lawmakers and technologists in the same room to align on a standard---this is a one-bit standard. This is a standard for the transmission of a single bit over HTTP, which is a well-known protocol. Several years in, it is adopted but not yet ratified. So there's the whole human component of getting all these interests---the business interests and regulation---to align so that you get a standard. It is pretty challenging.
+
+*To pick up on the earlier story of capture, you mentioned that different people in the community discovered that there were frogs in boiling water at different times. Can you describe a moment or a process when you started to change your perspective on what was going on?*
+
+For me, it really was working at the New York Times that helped me realize we had a problem. Before that, if you'd asked me, I would have said, "Yeah, those Google people---I mean, clearly, they're not very good at privacy, that's not a thing they do well. But I've met a lot of them, and they mean well. They're really trying to do something, and it's complicated. I'll be the first to point out their failures and all that. But overall, it's looking pretty well."
+
+Then I got to see how those tech monopolies treat the media, including pretty powerful media companies. You'd think that the New York Times would have a say. But really what they get is fake deference. It's like the tech companies will send twenty people to the meeting to tell you you're important, but then they won't change anything. The constant arrogance of those tech monopolies---where they assume that if you work for a media organization, you don't understand technology. The people would explain very silly things. I saw that any change I was trying to make to push technologists or people in the standards world towards solutions that would work better for the media would stop moving. You could push a little bit, and then you'd feel a massive resistance.
+
+For instance, one of the things I was interested in at the Times was not doing AMP, because AMP takes your content away and publishes it on google.com instead. You no longer get data, and it's basically Google---
+
+*What does AMP stand for?*
+
+Accelerated Mobile Pages. So it's the whole idea that, because of performance and because the open web has to beat the mobile native apps, you have to give all your content to Google, who will publish it for you.
+
+*Facebook was doing that, too, right?*
+
+Yeah, so AMP was the most aggressive one by far. But yeah, Facebook had something called Facebook Instant Articles that was horrendously, badly designed. Clearly it was one person's job to figure out the format, and they had never built a format in their lives before. But Facebook didn't care. Facebook doesn't care about tech quality. They just care about shipping.
+
+Apple also has the thing that they use for Apple News, which is also not really great. None of them thought to reuse an existing thing---maybe RSS. Google was very aggressive in pushing it, though, because if you didn't do AMP, you couldn't be in the AMP carousel, which means you couldn't be at the top of the search results.
+
+They kept saying, "Oh, it doesn't help for your ranking, because it doesn't change the ranking. It just puts you more at the top." Yeah, okay, so it's not ranking except it's the only way to be in the top position. Gotcha. I could see how everything would get locked down if you tried to push back.
+
+That was one of the ways I almost went back into standards when I was at the Times. I started talking about, "Hey, how about we standardize ways of doing content aggregation such that publishers have a say about how it works, and we can make it work in a way that doesn't push everything to Google?" Everything ground to a halt. You could see that all the avenues of discussion would freeze up. I was thinking, "Okay, yeah, I know who's doing that."
+
+*After the Times, you shifted to a different kind of organization. You were starting to work with organizations that---for instance, Protocol Labs, or the IPFS Foundation---were not just businesses using standards. They're organizations that are trying to build protocols rather than the platform model that big tech companies were involved in. Could you talk a bit about that transition?*
+
+I went there because that's what I was looking for. After five years at the Times, I felt that it was not possible to move the web, either from inside standards organizations, or from significant businesses that were not themselves big tech.
+
+I didn't want to go to big tech with the hope of changing things from the inside, because I've seen too many people do that over the years, and nothing ever changes. Then you have all these people who are smart somewhere on the inside, but who keep justifying things that are less and less justifiable. They are basically frogs boiling themselves. So I didn't want to be one of those people.
+
+It wasn't easy to find a place where my skill sets would work---but at the same time not be a complete blockchain thing, and still be adjacent to this dWeb and web3 world. I really didn't want to do a five-person startup again. I didn't feel I had the energy after all that. So I landed at Protocol Labs.
+
+It was a very chaotic company, I have to say. But there was a very significant community of people who also wanted to do what I wanted to do. Even though I wouldn't say that anything that we built at that time has had massive commercial success yet, the sort of excitement and research and experimentation that happened there is starting to bring dividends today in terms of better protocols that are built on good ideas.
+
+That's a lot of what I've been focusing on at the IPFS Foundation. To give you a bit of context, IPFS was invented, I think, in 2013, 2014---ten-ish years ago. It was this way of doing content addressing. But over the years, many cooks were involved, and also it sort of worked on the principle that it needed a lot of optionality to work in different contexts. While that made it very flexible, it also made it almost very challenging to implement well, and it made it very hard to build anything on top of that you could expect interoperability from.
+
+What I've been working on---at the tail end of this crazy few years of experimentation---is, okay, how can we make these ideas more usable? A project called DASL ("dazzle") is in the process of taking this and eliminating all the options, eliminating everything that's not reliable and just picking one. Even if it's controversial, it doesn't matter. Sometimes there's no good choice. You just pick one making these tiny specs that can easily be reusable by other protocols. The AT Protocol that underlies Bluesky uses DASL under the hood for data, for CIDs---for content identifiers and for packaging.
+
+I think that there is something to the basic idea of data that can be self-certifying. You can have linked sets of content addressed data. I think it changes the kind of governance that you can build on top of the system compared to something that uses a more traditional domain name authority.
+
+*Can you explain what the goal of IPFS is? Protocol Labs is trying to build an economic layer on top of that, I know. It's an addressing scheme, but to what end?*
+
+There's so many different ways of describing it and all of them are partial truths.
+
+The first thing I always explain is that IPFS stands for InterPlanetary File System, and it is neither interplanetary nor a file system. On the first part, the interplanetary part, there is a satellite in Low Earth Orbit that is conducting IPFS-related experiments. So that's as far as the interplanetarity goes. In terms of the file system, well, a file system---when you tell people you have a file system, they expect you to give them something like the Finder or whatever, a directory browser. You put a file there, and it's going to be there. If you come from another machine to the same file system because it's interplanetary, you're going to find that file, which you generally won't in IPFS.
+
+IPFS is essentially a suite of protocols to retrieve data in a content-addressed manner. So content-addressed means that the address of a piece of data is derived from its hash. So it's derived from its content. The retrieval method for that can be---it's very open-ended in IPFS. There is this thing called the IPFS Principles that actually celebrates the fact that it's open-ended. I mean, it's great that it's open-ended. But that doesn't always help people building apps.
+
+The core---the most typical way of retrieving IPFS content---is that there's this global distributed hash table, a DHT. Anyone who wants to expose data on the IPFS protocol through that network basically says, "Hey, I have this content, and here are the hashes for that content." When you connect to the distributed hash table, if you have the hash for something you want, you can use that distributed hash table in a peer-to-peer fashion, using libp2p or something to find who is actually providing that data. It could be multiple people on the network---and then you fetch it from them.
+
+*What will ordinary users be able to do with this that they can't do now?*
+
+I think it's not so much about what users can do directly, in terms of user interface. In my mind, forgetting the specificities of IPFS, but really thinking in terms of content addressing and self-certifying data, it really is about the kinds of governance systems that you can build on top of this.
+
+One way of thinking about that---I always tend to think of protocols in terms of Elinor Ostrom, ADICO, and institutional analysis, and all that. If you think of how data works in Web 2.0, for instance, where the authority for any information you have is grounded in the Domain Name System, you know it's a true thing, or it's authoritative in the sense that you got it from the horse's mouth.
+
+For instance, if we're on Twitter---the only way I can know that I'm reading a tweet from you on Twitter is by trusting that Twitter really received that from you, verified that it's from you, and then is giving me something untransformed. But technically, they could go in---you tweeted "I love cats," and they could go in and just replace "cats" with "dogs" and show that to me. You could tell me that it's not true, but authoritatively, Twitter is telling me that. That is architecturally part of the HTTP protocol. It's part of how we've built the web. Any institutional arrangement you build on top of that has to build in that trust of a specific party. It becomes this control point of power for all kinds of interactions you might want to build. That creates bottlenecks, and it increases the institutional complexity of what you're building.
+
+If you switch from that to a system that's content-addressed---where you know you're getting the right thing because you can always verify that you got the right thing---you know the data is correct intrinsically, without needing to ask anyone else. There's no other authority involved.
+
+On top of that, you can---because it's all hashed and deterministic and all self-certifying---you can also add a signature layer. If I know that you have a specific key, you can sign that content and say, "It's from me." I can then have a thing that's a hash that has the content and the signature embedded in it. I know all of these things come together. It's a real statement from you. It has its own authority. Then, because you have the content identifiers that are basically links between various things, you can have a graph.
+
+I have this thing that is content-addressed, so I know the content is correct. It's signed, and it's also referencing all these other things. I know that these references are correct, and therefore I can follow this thing and know what I'm getting without any third-party authority.
+
+Just to add a small point on top of that, in terms of the institutions that you can build: it creates a lot more flexibility. For instance, say again that we're in a social media environment, and you want to create a feed generator, and that feed generator has content from arbitrary people. Normally, I would have to trust you not to transform that content. But in this case you can't. If you transform it, the thing becomes invalid. This means that you can create your own thing, and I don't have to worry about what you're doing other than maybe I'm interested in the governance of how the content gets in. But all the other nitty-gritty of the data itself is taken care of.
+
+To my mind, what matters are the things you can build on that. It means that you switch to a system where you can have an institution over here dealing with identity, an institution over there dealing with data storage, one here that produces feeds, and another here that does search---and you don't need to integrate them. They can operate separately. A good separation of concerns makes them simpler, and they can remain trustworthy in terms of what you see. That's really the goal of these things. It's not, "Hey, you can now do crazy AI, with whatever-super-gradient-looking features." You can build a new world. That's really what I'm interested in.
+
+*How does the work of building protocols for building a new world compare to working in standards organizations with big companies? I mean, in both cases, you're trying to build a kind of rule book, but I imagine it's a very different kind of process.*
+
+It's different. But you always end up having a bunch of geeks in a discussion channel explaining technology to one another. Very quickly, you get interest from---not maybe the Googles or the Apples, but significantly larger companies start to get involved relatively quickly, because if you have something with promise, and you can demonstrate that promise, they come in.
+
+But one thing that's different is---and it might not be an actual difference, it's more like a time shift. The vibe is much closer to what it was like to do web standards in the early 2000s. We have meetings that have maybe ten people and it's super friendly. It's relatively informal. We know that we're a small group who understand these things, and that there's not many other people who understand them. It's not a point of pride, but it creates a bond. You keep having these conversations where you're thinking, "No, no, I promise you---self-certifying data is something that transforms the governance of digital---" and outside that group, those are conversations that are hard to have. Because you have to give twenty years of background and a bit of computer science about what hashes are---because you have something new that no one has explained to the world yet.
+
+It makes those meetings very nice, because you're thinking, "Oh, for the next hour, I can just kick back and just say things plainly the way they are in my brain without having to provide seven layers of explanation." It's also very interesting, because people build cool, small things that they demo to one another, which is something I haven't seen in a while. It used to be that on the web---"Hey, I made this crazy table. Look how cool it is. It's all pixelated!"
+
+For instance, there's this streaming service that is all around self-certifying data. All the video blocks are self-certified, and they create the giant Merkle tree. The whole thing is crazy from a technical level. But that guy could explain it, and he joined one of the meetings, and within two minutes, you could see he understood that everyone knew what he was talking about. His eyes lit up, and he was thinking, "Oh, baby!" He would start talking about how they have this guy who now broadcasts 24/7 streaming, and they don't know how big you can make a Merkle tree of video fragments---you really get that vibe.
+
+I really think it's a time thing. If we do it right and this is the next world, which I hope it is, at some point we're going to screw up and there'll be a new oligarchy. The question is how long can we---how slow can we make the capture process? I think by building better fundamentals in there, we can make it slower. We can enable much more democratic powers, and hopefully, instead of a twenty-year or fifteen-year path to oligarchy, we can get a two-hundred-year path to oligarchy---make it the problem for our great-great-grandchildren.
+
+*It's something to aspire to. Based on these lessons---in some respects you described what you're doing as returning to where you started and trying again---can you say a bit about the lessons you've learned? Not only for your own work, but what do you try to impart among the twenty-year-olds showing up in these spaces, and having the kind of excitement that you had when you first entered the web standards world?*
+
+I try not to pontificate at the twenty-year-olds too much, in part because they wouldn't listen anyway. But if there's something that I think has become really important in understanding how to build these systems, it is this idea that technology is politics by other means.
+
+A lot of what got us to fail in the previous iteration is we were a community that was very much a product of the 1990s. Neoliberalism---great, it works. We built these systems where---and you see that in all the "splinternet" discourse---fragmentation was always bad. You have only two levels, the global and the individual. Anything that intervenes in between is bad. It's going to slow you down, it's going to be a problem. So you build these systems such that you have that global standard for everything. You make it good because you're "ethical," and you have the "right values." Then individuals use it, and they have some choice. That's it. So we really built a system that reflects that. The current Internet governance institutions still reflect very much that mindset.
+
+If that had been on purpose---people consciously trying to build exactly that system---then, fine. I mean, I would politically disagree. But at least you could say that this was done on purpose. It wasn't. It was done by default, through lack of understanding of the mechanics involved in building this.
+
+Really, now, I'm very adamant about the idea that this is political project. What we're building is democracy. In the same way that what makes science work is democracy, the project here is a democratic project. It's a political project through and through.
+
+We have to stop seeing it as a defensive thing. There's a lot in the IPFS world that's very much about censorship resistance---the idea that you have an attacker from the outside, and you're protecting against that. But you're not proposing anything positive. I really trying to ground this in a capabilities approach, looking at what capabilities we're giving people. Again, self-certifying data gives you the capability of building something such that you can trust the data, no matter what institutional structure you put around it. The thing I would bang people on the head about is an old joke that I made many years ago: if you got into tech because you didn't like politics, now you have two problems.
+
+That is the core of it. I think people who are interested in the architecture of technology and of protocols today should take the time to familiarize themselves with subsidiarity, polycentricity---basically, how institutions work, how democracy works. It's not about voting or capture resistance. Then you could build much, much better protocols from that. That would be my lesson learned. I'm sorry it took me twenty fucking years to get to that point before I started, but you gotta start sometime.

content/interviews/dusseault-interoperability.md

@@ -0,0 +1,258 @@
+---
+narrator: Lisa Dusseault
+subject: Interoperability standards
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-10-10
+approved: 2025-10-13
+summary: "Reflections on a career trying to make software systems work together for users, across competing companies and standards bodies."
+location: "Palo Alto, CA USA"
+headshot: "lisa_dusseault.jpg"
+topics: [gender, open source, organizations, software, standards]
+#links:
+#  - text: "LINK 1"
+#    url: "https://..."
+---
+
+*Could tell me how you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+Lisa Dusseault, she/her. I'm the CTO of Data Transfer Initiative these days.
+
+*What is Data Transfer Initiative?*
+
+The Data Transfer Initiative is a nonprofit founded to help facilitate conversations between policymakers and implementers around data portability. We not only want to allow users to move their data off a platform if they want to try another service, but also to improve the ecosystem for competition and for add-on services. Users have more choice, and it's easier to enter. We think a lot of benefit can be had by standardizing and improving trust, letting users have more options about how they use their data online or in personal storage.
+
+*I know you've worked for big tech companies and startups. Why is this organization a nonprofit? How did its design come about to be that way?*
+
+There were three policy folks from Google, Apple, and Meta who decided that the open source project they were all working on to improve data portability among them and with other partners would benefit from a neutral nonprofit sponsor. They wanted policy conversations to be assisted with a neutral third party. They founded the Data Transfer Initiative to be that neutral third party and gave it a lot of independence. They hired Chris Riley as executive director, who is fantastic. He's not easily pressured or swayed. He will formulate a plan and work toward it if he thinks it's a good plan. Chris recruited me.
+
+I'm pretty senior in my career, so I asked and hoped that it would be a partnership between us, which it absolutely has been---a fantastic partnership in the last couple years where I get to shepherd an open source project. But I also work on additional projects when I think a specification would help make things better, or when a library---an open source library---might improve interoperability and access. We've been building systems that aren't run by a large platform or by a small startup who can ill afford to. We're hoping these systems boost interoperability and security.
+
+*Let's go back to your earliest encounter with standards and standardization. How did you first encounter this as a challenge or a need or something worthy of your attention?*
+
+I was right out of university, although I had several work terms under my belt, including several at Microsoft. I joined Microsoft full-time on a team that was working on internet servers, which was interesting to me because I'd already been exposed to the web in university---not everybody had been in 1996. I worked with some of the Microsoft managers who were very forward-thinking about the internet, and being able to talk to them about what the internet could be meant I got to do some cool things as an intern and then as a full-time employee.
+
+I joined a team that was building, among other things, an IRC server, an early directory server, and some early web tools. It was code-named Normandy, this project. I was made a program manager for this team that had seven or eight engineers and was working on five or six small services or servers that Microsoft could run. Then the senior program manager quit the team, so it was just me.
+
+When it came to the IRC server, it didn't meet Microsoft's enterprise requirements around authentication and internationalization. I thought this was an opportunity to talk to people about how the protocol works. I investigated who defines IRC and how it can be changed, and I discovered that it was an IETF RFC.
+
+I got the budget and approval to travel to the IETF and email people around the world, saying, "Hey, IRC is a great protocol, but it doesn't have internationalization and authorization. How about it?"
+
+My reception in standards was crazy. People would recoil physically from a Microsoft person. Yet clearly, I was naive, sincere, energetic---it was hard for people to be put off by me for very long.
+
+I didn't make progress on IRC because doing standards work always requires other people to collaborate. You can't single-handedly push a standard out into the world and make it happen.
+
+*There wasn't a will to solve those problems in the community?*
+
+The founders of IRC wanted it to be anarchic. They were explicit that internationalization was not a feature they wanted because they wanted a channel in Japanese to just be opaque to non-Japanese speakers. That was part of their anarchic, federated vision---anybody can run a server, anybody can do connections between servers, use whatever character set you like, and they also wanted it to be anonymous.
+
+It was a philosophical viewpoint that was very strongly held. Without the founders of IRC supporting the project at all, it didn't go anywhere. But I did meet lots of other interesting people and was exposed to a lot of interesting open source philosophies very early in my career. I also got to meet the other Microsoft people who were working in standards, which was key for then starting to work on WebDAV.
+
+When my team was imploding, I got recruited over to work on a team in the Exchange server that was working on WebDAV, a whole platform for Exchange data to be accessible through an internet standard.
+
+*Before we get into that, I wonder if you could say a bit about the positionality of Microsoft in these processes at that time. You mentioned that people were put off by Microsoft. The company has had an evolving relationship with open source and open standards. Can you say a bit about where it was at that point and any tensions within the company about its relationship to these standards processes?*
+
+I assumed that the negative attitude toward Microsoft was around the things that were in the news. The Federal Trade Commission was investigating Microsoft for predatory pricing because it would give significant discounts to computer companies if all of their computers went out the door with Windows. Once a computer manufacturer was being charged for Windows for one hundred percent of its PCs, why would it then spend extra for any other operating system?
+
+The stance of "embrace, extend, extinguish" was beginning to take hold. The idea that if Microsoft wanted to plow its way into a market, it could do so by embracing open standards. But then, as it was successful, it could use those standards in ways that actually prevented the next entrant. Every large company looks at its market position and makes its strategies similarly. Some are more cutthroat than others in certain kinds of competition.
+
+One of the interesting things with the FTC stuff at Microsoft and with the standards stuff was that it's a bubble. It's drinking the Kool-Aid. Most of the Microsoft people I ever talked to about the FTC could not see that Microsoft could possibly have done anything wrong. It's legal, it's good for customers, it's good for these machine vendors, it's good for us---what's wrong with that?
+
+There's a Mark Twain quote about how a man's opinions are remarkably formed by what is to his benefit. That was absolutely true for the bulk of Microsoft employees. There are very few Machiavellian people that I ever worked with inside Microsoft, but if a Machiavellian purpose was needed to adopt an open standard, sometimes somebody would say, "I think we should adopt this open standard for instant messaging, and an open standard would be great for the world and the internet and users." But you had to justify it to VPs. Because at Microsoft internally, the management had a reputation for being cutthroat, I think people would sometimes pitch their stuff in a Machiavellian way, even if what they really wanted was for the whole internet to interoperate, and they wanted to be part of it.
+
+*Let's turn to the WebDAV process. Talk about what was going on with Exchange and why standards became part of the development of this core piece of the Microsoft Office product offering.*
+
+I was recruited to the Exchange team internally at Microsoft because it was doing amazing things. The vision, the architectural vision---Alex Hoffman was one of the people holding this vision, Joel Soderberg was another. Several people were on board with this vision of having a standardized access protocol to the massive amounts of data in an enterprise email, calendaring, task, and notes server.
+
+The benefits to this standard interface could be large. One was that third-party clients could interoperate with an Exchange server, which they already could for email, but not at the time for calendaring or for tasks. Another benefit was that enterprise customers could write enterprise tools to interact with the Exchange server and manage the data in it, or add more data in it and get more value out of the platform. Another benefit was that---this is the early days of web UIs---the Exchange team was building a web UI.
+
+The Exchange Web UI could use---it wasn't JavaScript at the time. It was AJAX before AJAX, before all the components of AJAX really existed. It was Microsoft's dynamic web scripting language, whatever it was using at the time, ActiveScript maybe, calling WebDAV interfaces over the internet to fetch data, put it into a web page, get the answers in XML, and interpolate those into the webpage. This is what AJAX became, but it was independently thought of and worked on and formalized within the Exchange team at the time. I could see how powerful that would be.
+
+That vision absolutely attracted me to the Exchange team, and I worked on that there for two years.
+
+*What was the relationship between the development of those internal projects and products and the standards processes?*
+
+Rather than invent a new protocol, which there's always a temptation, one of the wisest things that this team did was say we think this can be part of this emerging web distributed authoring and versioning effort. We already know that making this HTTP-based will make it so much easier to do this web UI stuff. We think that's easy for third-party clients to implement and enterprise access. Making all of that be an HTTP API was already, obviously, a good idea, even back then.
+
+What companies came to do in Web 2.0---using JSON and just defining their own APIs and publishing them and being done with it---that wasn't very common at the time. The idea that you just publish your API and move on quickly had not dominated, so the idea that we should join the standards process that was already working on making the web editable was pretty attractive.
+
+It's really interesting to me that although the working group and the very early energy around WebDAV was around making websites remotely editable, that never really paid off in a big way. All kinds of Web editors continue to use completely different protocols that are not web. They used FTP for fifteen years to edit a website, which is crazy because then you're trying to manage two namespaces.
+
+*I think this is an interesting story because Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the web was an editable protocol, and the editable side wasn't implemented in the early browsers like Mosaic. Was this tied to that earlier vision?*
+
+Yes, because one of the main pieces you need in order to make the web editable in Tim Berners-Lee's vision was a way of seeing and affecting what's in a collection. You can't edit the resources if you can't find them. Discovering which resources you have in your web server so that you can then send them PUT requests to change their content is a prerequisite. The WebDAV collection model and PROPFIND for getting the metadata, the properties of a resource that aren't visible when you just get it, was the key piece to making the web editable.
+
+But also, once you have a collection and an extensible set of properties, the very earliest proposals for PROPFIND and getting a collection listing were so generic and extensible that it was obvious how you could even use it to get a database table. That was what led these visionaries on the Exchange team to realize---Yaron Goland was another of the Microsofties who saw this vision really early---that WebDAV PROPFIND gave them a standardized basis for a common data access protocol.
+
+*What kinds of things does it end up being used for, if not editing web pages? What kinds of user-facing experiences are made possible by that standard?*
+
+It's turned into a little-known but still widespread document sharing and collaboration basis. There are research organizations around the world and universities that agree to use WebDAV-based shares so that they can each access each other's research datasets, research papers in progress and other materials, presentations, and things that they're working on across these boundaries and with their different tools. File sharing, file sync, network file access, that kind of thing is definitely ongoing.
+
+As I know you know, calendaring---we built calendaring on top of WebDAV. When WebDAV is used to access a calendar, you can do that with multiple different clients against multiple different implementation servers, thanks to CalDAV. I think CardDAV---similar concept but for address books---has some uptake and interoperability as well.
+
+*I use all three of them constantly in my life, mainly because I live on several Nextcloud servers. Can we zero in on the calendaring piece? You mentioned earlier that at this time calendars across different services were not necessarily interoperable. Can you say about the ecosystem as you found it and how standardization started to change it?*
+
+It became forgotten very quickly, but it was obvious at the time that Exchange was not necessarily going to win the personal data enterprise space. Lotus Notes was the market leader. IBM was a very powerful company. Exchange had a lot of problems. At the start of my career inside Microsoft, Exchange wasn't even widely used inside Microsoft for email. There had to be a push inside Microsoft to use Exchange for email, and a lot of people inside Microsoft were very unhappy when they were forced to use Exchange. But it also forced Exchange to develop.
+
+As the second mover in the market, maybe the third or fourth but definitely not the first, it's more likely to be to the second mover's advantage to promote standards. Lotus was not particularly supporting standards. They sent people to the standards meetings, but their contributions did not frequently move things forward.
+
+There was a very complicated protocol being endlessly worked on for calendaring when I showed up at the IETF. I would sit in those rooms meeting after meeting every four months, finding that basically no forward progress had been made because it was a complicated protocol and they were inventing too many things from scratch.
+
+*Was this the iCal process?*
+
+iCal, the iCal proposal, and the iCalendar working group, probably. The IETF had successfully made several interchange formats standards. You could put a calendar item in an email and send it to somebody, and their software could open up the email, open up the attachment, and say, do you want to put this on your calendar? Do you want to accept? That was working very nicely, but the server access requires more of a level of the servers being able to handle an outside data model and just a lot more stuff is involved to standardize an access protocol than an interchange format you can send as an attachment.
+
+That was the level of calendar interoperability at the time. Everybody supported these attachments. Nobody supported a protocol that you could use to use a third-party client.
+
+*How did this process develop, and how did it also relate to the iCal process? Was it an ongoing dialogue, or did they get the job done and then you built another piece of functionality on top of it?*
+
+I was in yet another meeting where barely any progress had been made on iCal, and the sense of the room was exhaustion. People were exhausted---the authors were exhausted, the spectators, the occasional participants were exhausted. I can't remember if it was officially in the notes or loudly in the break or something, but I said we should just explain how to exchange the events over WebDAV and be done with this. Larry Greenfield turned around to me and said, well, why don't you write that up, Lisa? That's almost like being dared.
+
+I didn't want to write it up alone, so I quickly recruited two people who were invaluable coauthors, Bernard Desruisseaux and Cyrus Daboo. Cyrus and I even flew to Montreal to have a meeting with Bernard and work out some of the details. With me from Microsoft and Bernard working on a lesser-known calendaring server and Cyrus working on related projects, we had three implementers, three authors, and it was just a lot easier to make things happen. Not only because we were building on top of a higher level of functionality to begin with by building on both vCard and vEvent and WebDAV and building on top of both of those. It still was a substantial spec, but it made a lot more things inarguable. There's a lot less to argue about, which is one of the big time savings in internet standards.
+
+*Because you were building on primitives that were already established, and so you're able to work with those.*
+
+Primitives that---because we said we have a dependency on WebDAV, the architectural assumptions of WebDAV were not part of the debate. We'd moved those off the debating stage and said, no, those are good.
+
+*Did the design process mainly reside with the three of you, or did it get more complex as it proceeded through the IETF?*
+
+I'm a big believer in editor independence. When I'm a chair or offering notes on something, I believe that a good author, an editor team can hold the overall system in their mind and should be opinionated about what it should be. They shouldn't just take every comment given to them but should say, okay, I see the text you suggested, but I think it'll be better over here and explained in this way.
+
+One of the reasons to prefer that is practical. You can have a meeting with just three people to hash something out, me and Cyrus and Bernard. It's a lot more pleasant to be the author than it is to just be the secretary. People don't agree to do this job unless they have a vision and a goal in mind, and you want to give authors of these complicated specs the tools they need to get them done. I think this was common at the time. Now a lot of authors operate more off of pull requests, and they have to decide whether to accept somebody else's pull request.
+
+There are standards organizations that believe that every meeting about the protocol needs to be done transparently with open participation. In ActivityPub, Evan Prodromou has triage sessions that he announces to the public. But we had the ability to iterate on this, just the three of us, and then bring our work when it was ready for a new chunk to be digested to the working group. Then we'd take people's high-level comments. You also get a whole lot less nits this way. A whole lot less, oh, there's an extra space over here, or you've changed your tense in the middle of this sentence. Those are such an annoyance when you're trying to get the overall structure right.
+
+*As you're proceeding with this, how did the spec development interact with the running code, as they say in the IETF? Were the companies that you were involved in already engaged in implementing these specs, or were they waiting for the specs, or were they indifferent to this process? How did the design interact with adoption?*
+
+By this time, I was working in a nonprofit. I had recently joined the Open Source Application Foundation, working for Mitch Kapor, another amazing organization I've worked for. Mitch was fully supportive, and the goals of OSAF and the tools it was building really supported an interoperable open exchange protocol. We wanted it to work for contacts and notes. The idea was to build a seamless experience for contacts, notes, email. I love this idea---the idea that you don't know when you're starting to work on something what it's going to be.
+
+If you start with a note, you need to put down your thoughts on how you're going to make progress on defining a process that you can then have people to come and do. Wait, first thing I need to do is I need to meet with so-and-so, and then you turn what you just started out as your notes into an event. But your notes could just as easily turn into an email. You need to email that person your thoughts, or turn into a task, or not necessarily a meeting with somebody else but also time on your own calendar---book out time on your own calendar to think about something you want to make progress on.
+
+The idea that all of these personal productivity tools should be blended rather than siloed was the inspirational idea under OSAF. Having interoperable protocols for the pieces in there was also a good part of the vision because collaboration was also part of the vision, because the idea that not only would you have your own notes and tasks, but you'd be able to share your notes and tasks with your team or with somebody you were collaborating with in another organization.
+
+*You said in passing earlier that in a lot of ways, these tools are still pretty siloed from each other. What were the challenges of seeing that vision translate into actual products?*
+
+One thing is it's hard to be excellent at all of those things. I use Gmail, and although I have my complaints about it, it's honestly excellent at several things, including massive scale. But I've never liked Gmail's associated task thing, and it's not even that integrated. You can't turn a task into an event or turn an event into a task or link them together in any way that I've found. It's possible that you can do this, but it was also built as separable features, clearly.
+
+Maybe it's just too hard to be excellent at all of them. I use Bear for notes and tasks, and it's absolutely better than the things that are built into email because email sells first on email for features. You only have so much attention.
+
+*It seems like you were in developing this set of standards articulating not just an attempt to connect things that already existed but actually dreaming up a different way of having workflows and relating to the tools in our lives.*
+
+It wasn't that different from what I'd been doing at Microsoft or from what I wanted to be doing at Microsoft.
+
+*How did that process change when you left Microsoft? You've got a sequence of different jobs here. How does standardizing change when you're not in the behemoth?*
+
+As soon as I left Microsoft, pretty much, people were saying, hey, Lisa, you should chair this working group. Hey, Lisa, you should author this document. The openness to my contributions increased dramatically because people already knew me, and now I was no longer Microsoft.
+
+*They felt like they could trust you.*
+
+Larry Masinter suggested I cochair the WebDAV working group pretty soon after that. I did so gladly. The suggestion to author CalDAV was shortly after I left Microsoft too.
+
+*But doesn't not working for the big company also mean that it's harder to see these things be implemented?*
+
+Many people in open standards are currently very afraid of participation from large company employees, and there is reason to worry about what they'll do. But I think, on balance, on average, there's even more reason to invite them in to open standards because it allows that person to make the standard work for their big company. They have a seat at the table. They have commitment consistency. By having a representative who's an author or a chair or a major contributor, the company has this commitment to the open standard, which then they are pressured to be consistent with.
+
+I think people, when they are worried about something bad, are more afraid of something bad than they are happy about something good coming out of it, if that makes sense. People are risk-averse when it comes to, oh, a big company could do something bad if we don't always keep our guard up and be nasty to them when they come into open standard spaces. It's not like being nasty to big company representatives when they're on a mailing list or in a forum talking about open standards solves anything. It doesn't make them more likely to implement the standard well or be honest about their plans or their license terms. It's just pointless.
+
+*I'm curious if you could reflect on how that standards process has shaped the way you use these technologies today. Do you see them differently than you think other people might who were not part of the processes of working on these standards? Do you notice things that you think maybe most people don't notice because of these experiences?*
+
+Probably, but I'm also very pragmatic. You said you use a bunch of Nextcloud services, which I love. I just do what most people do, and I use Gmail for mail and Apple Photos for photos. It's a very pragmatic---or you could call it lazy---decision. Then I whine about them, and I could see how they could be so much better because of the dreams we had.
+
+*I recall reading in an earlier interview you gave that you took a hiatus from standards, that you had enough and you stepped back. Can you say about that experience?*
+
+There were so many reasons to step back, and I was clearly, in retrospect, somewhat burned out. It helped me to get some distance and develop different skills and then come back. I feel like I have superpowers now from both having experience doing standards committees over the long term and having startup experience shipping software on the daily.
+
+I stepped back because I was trying to make progress on some things that I thought were important to the IETF, and people objected to for reasons that really infuriated me. Sometimes it was opposition to change, sometimes it was the interests of their employer, and these were things that I didn't think should need to be blocked. The idea of having images in standards---does that really hurt some big company? The stop energy was enormous. I watched some people change companies, and somehow their opinions changed without them noticing or at least admitting to noticing that their opinions had changed. They'd have a philosophical position, change companies, and a year later they'd be stating something that was opposite to their philosophical position they'd stated a year ago.
+
+I had young kids. It was getting harder and harder to travel. You can travel with a baby, actually, pretty easily if you're willing to put them in a carrier---babies can be happy in a lot of different places, but a toddler is hard.
+
+I was getting sick of the ten-year time horizon in standards. Everything I worked on, would I have to wait ten or twelve years to show my mom, who's a great supporter of me and my work?
+
+I was an area director, so I was even farther removed from anything practical or immediate. I was recruiting people to come to the IETF, I was helping them charter working groups, I was choosing chairs, I was helping them write a charter so that then the chairs could choose the editors to write the drafts to meet the charter to then be approved by the working group to then be sent to the IETF to then become RFCs, and then implementers really start thinking about them. You can see why this becomes a ten-year time horizon before it ends up in something mass market.
+
+*How does that experience make you reflect on the openness of the IETF? In some respects, it's an incredibly open organization and process, in the sense that discussions are on email lists and there isn't a closed membership logic that some standards bodies have. But at the same time, there are these bureaucracy of its own and the kinds of social norms and so forth that some have found off-putting. How do you end up understanding the idea of openness in that organization?*
+
+First, have you read Kaliya Young's paper on IETF culture? It's very good. It's very hard to be open and be technical and make progress. There's some triangle of---you can't have all three, it sometimes seems.
+
+One of the things that I think saves the IETF in its extreme openness---because I've been a member of CalConnect, I've been a member of Trust over IP, I've been a member of the W3C, I've certainly looked at other standards organizations. Sometimes standards organizations just pop up, like the ones under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation now. ITU, IEEE, none of these is as open to participation as the IETF.
+
+Many of them look at it and say it's impossible, it's impossible to be that open, it's impossible to do that well. Kaliya has dug into the history of how Tim Berners-Lee came to the IETF, saw utter chaos because the IETF was in the middle of a transition, and said, this is crazy, this is impossible to make any progress in this environment, and went off and founded the W3C with a closed membership model so that you can make progress. But then the IETF recovered from its existential overturn and continued to make progress, although slowly.
+
+I think what saves the IETF is, when it works on very technical things, the technical things themselves are somewhat of a barrier to entry. Then there are cultural norms around, did you read the documents before you start commenting on them, which help. We're not just asking for opinion on policy or ideas or vision statements. We're opening up to public opinion on technical specifications. Did you read the forty pages before you comment? That makes open participation a lot more manageable.
+
+I'm part of a process right now in which the IETF is advancing its participation models to have more effective moderation. When the open participation allows harmful participation, there's a lot of concern about silencing when you talk about moderation in these forums. But there's a whole suite of voices, there's a whole population of voices that are silenced because they are turned off so early. They may even be invited, come to an IETF, IETF has outreach, but then they try to participate and they're treated badly, like I was at first, and leave. You never get that voice.
+
+I've talked to many people individually who feel that they'd like to participate in the IETF, but it's just not worth the stress, the emotional stress, the aggravation.
+
+*What kinds of things are you working on to address that issue?*
+
+The instigators of this work were Roman Danyliw, the IETF chair currently, Lars Eggert, a past IETF chair, Elliot Lear, one of the long-standing contributing members of the IETF community. They were the real instigators of some work to revise the IETF's moderation procedures. I got invited, just as I was reentering standards from my hiatus, to chair this working group, which I agreed to do despite it being---a working group on moderation procedures attracts every troll, and every person who's most worried that their interactions might get moderated.
+
+It's hard. They're not bad people, and they're often not wrong. With my co-chair, Jon Peterson, also amazing, we've steered a very careful course of allowing lots of things to be said, even the things that we don't think should be allowed to be said and repeated if we had proper moderation  in place, because we have to allow an unusual amount of free speech and open participation in the very procedures that might shut that down in the future to legitimize them and make sure we get it right.
+
+*It sounds like an immense challenge to adjust that plane while it's flying. After your hiatus, you got back into standards processes. Can you say about what drew you back?*
+
+My last startup was wrapping up after seven years and a pretty good run. Up until that point, that had been the best job I'd ever had, so I enjoyed those seven years, but they were coming to a close, clearly. Chris Riley reached out to me at just the right time with an irresistible offer.
+
+As soon as I looked at how do we make data portability work better, standards was one of my first thoughts, and Chris was like, oh, this person has done startups and standards, has done open source as well as worked at a big company. Chris and I had a lot of the same ideas about what could be done. He did ask me in our early conversations---I hesitate to even call them interviews, they were more proving to each other that we could have a great working relationship---what's the silver bullet for making data portability better? I laughed and said there's no silver bullet. None of this is easy. If it were easy, you could have done it already. Building standards and demand for standards is hard. Doing things securely and openly at the same time is a notably hard trade-off.
+
+*How do you approach this standards work now, maybe differently than you did before? Do you have a different orientation to it after the hiatus?*
+
+When I said I joined Microsoft as a program manager right out of university, that means I was in a non-full-time programming role. From program manager, I became a manager, and then I joined the nonprofit and became a manager. For many years, I wasn't coding enough full-time to become what I considered to be a good enough senior engineer. I hired great senior engineers and trusted them and had them teach me. But sometime in that last startup, in the ten or twelve years hiatus from standards, I became a senior engineer. I could no longer rely on my senior engineers to do better than I could do. I was having to say can we think about this architecture because I don't think it's great, or why did you write the code like that, or that library was not worth integrating? When you're the first engineer in a startup, even if you intend to hire a team, you start writing code. I had written enough code by that time to get Malcolm Gladwell's ten thousand hours of practice. I'd accumulated ten thousand hours of programming, so in this case, that feels about right.
+
+I came back to standards with even more confidence about my technical abilities. I always knew I was capable of understanding, but more confidence in my opinions. It's harder to convince me that an idea that I don't like---something in my now well-trained gut is giving me a little bit---experience really builds pattern recognition, and the pattern recognition I was starting to trust and say, I see what they're saying, but something's niggling, and I have to work with this problem. If I have time, I'll work with the problem to analyze what's making me feel a little bit off about it. That confidence.
+
+But also, the amazing people I worked with---my cofounder at that last startup is just a terrific individual. She taught me so much about being a manager, being a leader, listening to people. I've come back simultaneously very confident in my management and leadership skills compared to my hubris, my less-founded confidence of a younger me. But now I also have a confidence in my technical skills, which the younger me didn't have to the same extent. I no longer have imposter syndrome, whether it was imposter syndrome in the beginning.
+
+I remember being very defensive about my technical skills back then. After a year of working together with an IETF colleague, he said, Lisa, let's talk to each other about how we're doing and give each other feedback. I said okay.
+
+One of his bits of feedback was, I feel sometimes you don't know as much about a technical subject as you should because there are things you should know, and yet you're asking questions about it. I said, "Have you heard about the Socratic method?" His mind was blown.
+
+But I was also defensive about it. From my first year at Microsoft as an intern, can you get things done as an intern by walking into offices and telling people what to do? No. Can you ask questions until you either understand or have convinced them to change their mind? Yes. Nobody expects the twenty-five-year-old who looks twenty to have all the answers, so people have such patience for asking questions. I honed that skill at Microsoft and brought it to the IETF. I will continue asking questions for as long as I can until we get something better than what was making me start to ask questions.
+
+*It's a very powerful skill.*
+
+But I was definitely defensive about it, and I felt I had to do things to prove my technical skill, and now I don't feel like that. I have decided, also, coming back to standards, to prioritize technical contributions because organizational contributions just---I have a limited budget for that. If I use up all my organizational energy, I don't have energy to organize my friends knitting night or my kids' baseball season and schedule. I just turn into a blank face checked-out person halfway through the day because if everything involves organizing, planning, coordinating, asking people, looking at schedules, it's important work and I can do it, but I just run out of capacity for it. I have to maintain those technical, those solo contributions, the things that get you in flow, and combining together, then I can use up both reserves of energy every day and get a lot more done.
+
+*I think it's interesting that you've moved more toward the technical side as your career has progressed. It seems to me it's more common in the industry for people to begin with a high level of technical emphasis, as engineers building with particular new technologies, and then over time they grow into management and they become less in touch with the most current frameworks or whatever people are using right now. Do you feel like you've gone in some ways in an opposite direction from people around you?*
+
+I mentor people pretty regularly, and I'm often asking women who I mentor, do you want to get management tracked? Because if you get management tracked too early, your opportunities cap out. If you stay in the individual contributor, technical contributor for longer, somehow manage to combine that with a management role, then you're planning for five years in the future being a CTO, being the VP of engineering, instead of being the director of the project management team or something like that. Where do you want to end up? As a woman, how do people see you so that you can get there?
+
+*Can you say about the contributions you're making now and the standards that you've been focusing on?*
+
+Chairing the Moderation Procedures Working Group is one contribution. With Alexey Melnikov and another coauthor, we're proposing an email and personal productivity data archive format. One that, if you export all your personal data from a system, can you synchronize it or some of it to another system? Can you do a backup and restore? Can you move your stuff to another system? This perfectly fits into our Data Transfer Initiative goals. The moderation procedures stuff, I consider almost a personal volunteer contribution, but the PDP archive, the Personal Data and Productivity Archive, is absolutely work.
+
+I've got a proposal to the ActivityPub working group, possibly. The Social Web Community Group is trying to form a Social Web Working Group within the W3C, and I've proposed a mechanism specifically to move your account from one server in the Fediverse to another server in the Fediverse. I think it's pretty solid, and I think that also supports other work in data transfer because it establishes use the access protocol to access the data, so you don't have to write a whole data access protocol, and use OAuth to provide authorization for a third party to access the data. Now the third party can do it to help you moderate your inbox or help you move to a different service or provide additional value adds or just be able to back up and restore your stuff if you need to. Fediverse servers sometimes shut down suddenly.
+
+I've just agreed to chair a new working group as it's getting formed. The IESG just approved the charter, which means it's going for IETF-wide review. I was asked because of my WebDAV background and because this is a protocol that builds on top of WebDAV as well as other file sharing protocols. It's the work of CERN and some other research organizations to be able to securely share private collections of resources across organizational boundaries, where you don't---if you're a CERN researcher and you want to invite somebody from Stanford, you don't have to create an account for them and for every other external contributor and make them remember a login and all of that. Instead, it follows a federated model similar to the Fediverse, where the CERN document server can allow the Stanford documents server to clone the shared collection, and now it's available in theory to whoever the Stanford server wants to share it with. But in practice, these organizations trust each other to honor the access control models of the originator of the collection. I'm going to chair that working group, assuming it gets approved by the wider community.
+
+I think that's the major standards contributions right now. I also show up in things like HTTP API and OAuth to say when I approve of a draft or I think this work should go forward, I think it should be adopted by the working group.
+
+*One thing that I saw in an earlier interview you gave was a reflection on the way in which sometimes people become cold and bitter after a long career in standards and this image of the bitter elder saying no to everything and only seeing the problems. I'm curious whether you have any insights about how to avoid that trap and in general any advice for people who are getting into the work of standards building.*
+
+What you're not saying now is that I'm clearly now an elder. I'm fifty-three. I'm sure when I was twenty-six, some of the people I met who were forty seemed old.
+
+What's the live fast and die young ethos? That never made sense to me. Yet, ironically, when I was in my twenties and early thirties, my participation in standards was---I often would grumble to myself, I never want to be old and doing standards. Look at what's going on here. It's so frustrating. I was also bitter and burned out when I went on hiatus, so that absolutely colored that worldview. Obviously, I now don't have as negative an opinion of institutional elders. How convenient. At least when I have a conveniently held position, I'm aware---I try to be aware of a conveniently held position.
+
+One of the things I realized is there's purely selection bias. New people are there to work on new ideas because that's why they're new. It's entangled in why they're new. People who've been around for a while aren't necessarily working on the new ideas just because time passes, but it doesn't mean that they can't. Of course, a person who's worked on one thing for twenty years can pick up a different thing and work on it, which I think is extremely healthy. I think working on the same thing for twenty years is bad for the intellect, if not the soul.
+
+*I wonder if that direction that you've moved from more organizational work to more technical work could insulate you from some of those dynamics you observed.*
+
+I hope so. I'm going to psychoanalyze people a little bit---this is one thing that my last cofounder really helped me to see. She's amazing. She helped me to see people's trauma expressed in how they work. Sounds fluffy, but it's actually extremely specific.
+
+I think we all know it by the time we're in our late twenties. We've all seen that friend who got badly hurt in a breakup or something, and they say I'm never going to date *x* again or make some statement about how they can't handle that risk, they can't take the risk of putting their hopes and love into that kind of situation ever again.
+
+I've also met founders who had a terrible cofounder experience and will say I can never found a company again, it's just terrible, it's a terrible experience, it hurts so much. Or people who take venture capital from the large number of, frankly, toxic investors and say I can never do that again, I've been---it hurt too much.
+
+It would have been easy to look at failures in my own past and say, well, that failed, and if we can't have that, then I can't believe in anything else. But I'm fundamentally a person who loves again, who trusts in another person. I was badly burned by a cofounder in one startup, but I put my trust in the next one.
+
+One of the things that people who have been traumatized in this way try to do is they deal with disappointment by trying to put rules and boundaries and structure or promises around the situation so that it doesn't happen again. You see this when somebody---I got the advice, when you're starting a startup with somebody, you have to get everything in stone with your cofounder because if you don't, then they can hurt you. I look at that and say, you could put everything in stone around your relationship with your cofounder, and they can still hurt you. In the meantime, it's distrustful, it's stop energy. You have to have the right amount of structure and rules and setting in stone with your cofounder, and then take a deep breath and take a leap of faith.
+
+I think the same thing is true with technical projects. I think there are a lot of people who've been burned, and so they want to avoid possibly being---there are lovely people who want to avoid other people being burned. But they're putting too much of the risk management up front too early, even in cases that only rhyme with the time that they got hurt.
+
+I feel like I can see this often very specifically, and it's so nontechnical of me to use words like love and hurt. But I think using those words is necessary to understand how enduring it is and how it can even become part of somebody's personality. When somebody gets pushback for being who they are, sometimes they double down.
+
+*I think that's very wise, and sometimes hurt and love are the best way to understand why one standard was created and adopted and another wasn't. These kinds of dynamics shape our technical world. That is a wonderful way to end, I think.*
+
+On the fuzziest things I've said so far!
+
+*You said a lot of non-fuzzy things, so don't worry.*

content/interviews/finley-quilting.md

@@ -0,0 +1,216 @@
+---
+narrator: Janet Finley
+subject: Quilting
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-07-19
+approved: 2025-08-05
+summary: "In the American West, quilts represent an ongoing tradition of women's lives, their skill, and their love."
+location: "Lakewood, CO USA"
+#headshot: "first_last.png"
+topics: [ancestors, art, gender, family, organizations]
+links:
+  - text: '"Quilts in Everyday Life," The Quilt Show'
+    url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXPgwQ4D3c"
+---
+
+*If you're meeting people in the world of quilting, how do you introduce yourself?*
+
+I just use my name. A lot of people will know my name who don't know me personally. But for today you can just say Janet.
+
+*How do they know you? What does your name mean for people in that world?*
+
+They know me because I wrote this book called *Quilts in Everyday Life, 1855--1955*, with the subtitle *A 100-Year Photographic History*. The book came about when I was director of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum from 2000 to 2004. One of the interns showed me her website for her quilt guild, and it had a 1930s photograph of women holding up a quilt. I said, "Where'd you get that?" She said on eBay. I didn't know what eBay was---it was new then. She showed me how to bid on photographs.
+
+It turned out there were quite a few of them. I learned to bid on eBay and started collecting them assiduously. It was the perfect time and place because I had the time and extra money. I did it for a good ten years and was the major buyer on eBay of photographs with quilts in them. At the beginning, eBay didn't have good controls on who was bidding, so if you lost the auction for a photo, you could find out who the winner was and contact them to offer more. Now you can't do that anymore. They've tightened up their control. But at the beginning it was fun.
+
+For about ten years I bought almost every photo that had a quilt in it, dating from 1855 to 1955. I stopped at 1955 because it didn't interest me to go more current. I wound up with about a thousand images and have the largest collection of photos with quilts in the United States. Anyone can challenge me, and I can defend that.
+
+To write the book, I wanted to date the photos because the more interesting part wasn't particularly the quilt---it was the socioeconomic background that envelops the photo. I always had an interest in photography. I was an amateur shutterbug---I was taking photos of my family all the time, so the combination of my two interests was great. I had to learn about different photographic formats like tin types, cabinet cards, and *carte de visites*. I could date the photograph by the photo format. I also had to delve into fashion because you can date photos by dress. I had costume experts helping me on dress. I'd make a stab at it and they would either agree or correct me.
+
+The photos were so interesting because of the stories they told about the sociological conditions of the time. Out of those thousand photos I owned, I took 250 and put them in the book. That's how people know me.
+
+*How did quilting begin for you? Where did your life with quilting start?*
+
+My grandmother was a quilter---my grandma, Matilda Maser---but I didn't know it at the time. She lived in Greeley, Colorado and we'd visit her during the summer. I saw a lot of her, but she wasn't quilting then. That was done with. She was making cross-stitch aprons. Quilting was in her past.
+
+As time went on, I found out she was a big quilter. She made a quilt for all of her six girls and had quilting bees at her house. She made her quilts on a treadle quilting machine. But she didn't teach me to quilt. I didn't even know she was a quilter.
+
+It turns out she gave my mother a Sunbonnet Sue quilt, but my mother didn't value it as craft. My grandmother made all her girls' dresses throughout the time they were growing up, and my mother's goal by the time she graduated from high school was to get a store-bought dress. So she didn't value this quilting heritage and did not pass it on to me. In fact, she used her Sunbonnet Sue quilt as a mattress cover under the bed. It has worn marks to this day showing that use.
+
+So where did I get quilting from? It came genetically, I guess, because my mother didn't pass it on and my grandmother didn't particularly either. In high school, I loved fabric and doing things with my hands. I'm a crafting-type person. I have a brother and sister who both have PhDs, but that's not the route I took. I was a failed dressmaker but loved the fabrics.
+
+When I got into college, I made my first quilt. I thought I wanted something that was cheap, that you could use fabric scraps with---it's thrifty that way. But little did I know it would turn into this obsession for the rest of my life, and it was not inexpensive.
+
+*How did you learn back in high school and college?*
+
+I taught myself. It was just the beginning of a big revival of quilting. I was in college from 1960 to 1964 in Greeley, but by the '70s there was a revival going on nationwide. There was a big quilt show in New York City where they showed quilts as an artistic expression. That started waking people up. The '70s, '80s, and '90s were a real heyday for the quilt revival nationwide---for collecting quilts and making them. Colorado was a big part of that. It's waning a bit now, but it'll come back. But in those days I was in the right time and right place.
+
+I made my first quilt in college and taught myself. There were very few quilt books then, though there are thousands now.
+
+*Were there people you knew around you who were doing this as well? When did you start finding communities around it?*
+
+I was the only one at the beginning. I got married and said to my husband, "I want a sewing machine." We went to Denver Dry Goods and they had a fabric section. I asked my aunt, who was a farm woman in northern Colorado, what sewing machine should I buy. She said, "Bernina---the only one." So that's what I bought. I was just tootling around at home.
+
+Then quilt stores started opening up and quilt magazines came out. I started going to quilt stores and taking some of their lessons, reading the books, and getting more and more involved.
+
+Quilt guilds started coming up. In my area, it was Columbine Quilt Guild in the Arvada area. I was actually at their very first meeting.
+
+*What did the guild do? What was its purpose?*
+
+The guilds are just to get women together to share the quilts they made. They always had show and tell. Then they would pool their resources and invite teachers to come in. By then it was a big phenomenon that was growing, so there were national teachers. You would invite them to your guild and have lessons from national teachers. We were sharing the products we made. You keep getting more and more ideas the more you see.
+
+I became active in that Columbine guild. In the late 1990s, the guild didn't have a charter. So I said, "Well, we're going to write a charter for this quilt guild." There were about thirty women in that guild. They didn't know what I was talking about. But I instigated our first charter.
+
+*Why was the charter important for you?*
+
+Because other, bigger guilds have them. So I thought we needed one. It had rules and regulations and told you how you could run your guild, who would be eligible to join, what your purpose was, and what you're going to do with your dues.
+
+I started bossing people around and found out it's kind of easy. They were listening to me! It was easier than I thought, so I became their president, and we got our charter.
+
+*So you could officially boss people around!*
+
+I was astounded because I never thought I'd ever be in that position. But it actually came easily to me.
+
+Then I was interested in interviewing people who were quilters---people like us often became historians. I had my guild doing that a lot. We would interview people. I was also instrumental in deciding what kinds of classes we would bring in from out of state.
+
+*In a guild like that, did people create boundaries around what the right kind of quilting was or the wrong kinds? Were there debates about how this should be done and how it shouldn't be done?*
+
+There weren't debates per se, but there were influencers. You'd find them in magazines. There were trends. Fabric companies developed fabric lines just for quilters, and those influencers tended to dictate what colors were the right thing and what fabrics you should use. There was an informal set of rules. You didn't say you had to follow the rules, but you were greatly influenced by outside forces---fabric companies, magazines, guild teachers. Things would change, but it would take several years for these modes of influence to evolve. We were being influenced.
+
+*What's an example of one of those rules that people would try to assert?*
+
+A fabric company would come up with a designer line of fabric---maybe ten or twelve patterns with colors. Maybe bluebirds would be in pink, orange, and green. They said you have to make your quilt with our fabric line. Another line would be reproduction fabric. It was really popular to reproduce Civil War quilts, so they would have a whole line of Civil War fabrics.
+
+Modern quilting wasn't really popular then---it is now. Before that, people said you can't use plain fabric colors with fabrics that have a print on them. Those kinds of rules. But now everybody breaks the rules.
+
+*Was there a particular tradition within this culture that you identified with most?*
+
+I love the Civil War.
+
+*Why is that?*
+
+I just like history, and the Civil War fascinates me. So does World War II because I was born into World War II. But the Civil War---I think we're still fighting the Civil War. I like history because it explains the world to me---I always wonder, what the heck happened? Why do we do this or that?
+
+The Civil War was a big draw for me. For about twenty years I collected Civil War fabrics and tried to do Civil War reproduction fabrics. The women in those days were excellent---the surviving quilts we were looking at were fabulous. So it was very inspirational to want to reproduce stuff or be on their par.
+
+I finally got over my Civil War thing. It took twenty years. There was a designer who came on board from California named Kaffe Fassett. By now the men are in on it.
+
+*When do men get involved?*
+
+Almost at the beginning, but they're bigger each year as the years go by. In fact, the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum has a show every two years that is just men's quilts. They tend to look at it as a business and a profession, and they really are hot stuff. Women are just doing it for fun, but men are doing it more professionally.
+
+This designer from California, Kaffe Fassett, raised the bar. His colors are what they call "brights" now---really outrageous colors. I thought, "This guy's nuts," because Civil War is browns and grays and blues---really dull colors with beautiful patterns. But over the years, I liked him more and more. I'm into bright fabrics now. It changes.
+
+*What role did quilting play in your life? What did you make quilts for? What did you do with the quilts that you made?*
+
+I didn't make quilts to keep warm. Even making them today, they're my mental therapy. If things get tough, I don't care if I finish anything---it's the process that counts. When I'm sitting there with this fabric in front of me and the needle and thread, I just calm down. It's so therapeutic. I can never underplay the value that has for me.
+
+I didn't make quilts to be a teacher or to give to family members. I just made them to make them, because I like working with the fabric. A lot of these guilds made quilts for charity, but that wasn't a factor for me. The biggest factor was the therapy part---it's very soothing and calming and satisfying.
+
+I was also drawn to quilts because they told stories about women's roles in the United States. That was especially when I was director of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum. What interested me was how quilts showed the value of the unknown woman. We're delving into women's history. Quilts were powerful to me because they showed---our society tends to adulate male figures and forget the common woman who raised the family with the strength and fiber that kept society going.
+
+I thought that opportunity was a miracle. Why would they hire me as director? I was in awe. But they did, and I did a good job.
+
+The exhibits at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum when I was director would have one-person shows for unknown women---their life's work. We were adulating unknown women and giving them a place in society. That inspired me a lot.
+
+*Did you know their names?*
+
+We knew their names. But often you don't know the maker. There has been a movement in the past thirty years to put a label on your quilt. That's really been a big message that we've gotten into the quilt world---that you label your quilt.
+
+*To challenge that type of silencing, where women's names were lost.*
+
+To challenge that history, that silencing. When a woman passes away, and after decades have gone by, the only thing you remember her by would be maybe a piece of jewelry, a recipe, or her quilt. So we do know the names of a lot of them. Even if we didn't know their names, we're still in awe of them.
+
+*Tell me about the journey from writing the charter of the guild to becoming director of the museum. What was in between?*
+
+I was raising a daughter, I was married, I had other jobs. We ran a carnation greenhouse in Colorado. So my quilting hobby was always in the background.
+
+Still, I made many quilts. They've been shown in competitions. I've won many prizes at competitions. I've won a couple of ribbons at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, which is a national show. I cannot believe it. One was on machine quilting. In the very late 1990s, I entered a quilt that was machine quilted for Hari Walner's book on machine quilting and trapunto by machine. But I entered it in the wrong category. The International Quilt Festival called me and said, "Well, if you enter it in the machine quilting category, you'll get third place." I said, "Okay." So they gave me third place down there.
+
+But when I became director of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum, things flourished for me. I was semi-retired and could devote more time to my quilting. That led to me becoming a speaker on the national circuit. I would go to other cities and talk about these photographs---the ones with quilts in them---and usually teach a hands-on class. The University of Nebraska has the International Quilt Museum. I would visit them often, and one time I said, "I have these photos. Do you want to see them?" I showed them my slide show, and they said, "Wow, we love it. We've never seen that before."
+
+They said they wanted an exhibit of these photos. The solo exhibit was called *Posing with Patchwork: Quilts in Photographs 1855-1945*. It ran from March 2013 to November 2013. The curators blew-up the photos into huge enlargements of these little cabinet cards. They would show my photo and alongside put a representative type of quilt next to it from their collection. At the exhibit opening, the museum invited me to lecture on my photos. There were about 200-300 people present, and it was exciting for me. My book was out and featured in the museum's bookstore---quite an experience.
+
+Then I became a member of the American Quilt Study Group. I'd always wanted to be a member. Now I had the time. Again, I had these photos that I can be bragging about. I gave many lectures to the American Quilt Study Group. They meet once a year in a city, and that's why my name is known, along with my book.
+
+*What was the difference between that group and the guilds?*
+
+The guilds are just really local---your neighborhood quilters. The American Quilt Study Group was national, so they have about a thousand members. They meet once a year in a big city in the United States. All we do is study and talk about quilts. You learn a lot when you go to those meetings.
+
+By then, historians are focusing on quilts. They date quilts by fabrics, so there are lectures every year about how you date and identify a quilt. Just tons and tons of stuff.
+
+I became a collector too. At the very beginning, I was collecting old, antique quilts. By the time I learned how to buy photos on eBay, I stopped collecting antique quilts because I was going into the photos.
+
+*Say more about what you were talking about earlier---the socioeconomic background of the photos. What do you look for in these photos? How do you read them?*
+
+I have one to show you. To look at this photo, you can see she's sitting in front of a quilt that's an appliqué quilt. Do you know what appliqué means?
+
+*No.*
+
+It's when you take one fabric and lay it on top of another and sew it down. You can make shapes and figures---it has a large range of creativity. Here she felt it was important to have this studio photograph taken, and it was also important to have the quilt in the background, not the studio's painted background.
+
+I am guessing---we don't have her name---it was probably her grandmother's quilt. Next to it is a photo of her grandfather. That was important to her---that those two people show up in her photograph. She valued those two people and wanted them to be a part of her.
+
+*It's interesting how one person is represented in a photograph, the other person is represented in the quilt.*
+
+Yeah. That was important to her and she was a quilter.
+
+Here's another one. This is a cabinet card. The gals on roller skates, but she's wearing a dress that's done in crazy patches all over. We call that a crazy quilt.
+
+*That's beautiful.*
+
+Crazy quilts were really popular from 1880 to 1910 or 1920. It was the fad. But it was such a fad that she made her dress from a crazy quilt. I also had to investigate roller skating. It turns out it was a really hot thing to do in that era because people were skipping church. They weren't going to church---they were going to these roller-skating rinks where young kids could meet with their beaus in ways they couldn't normally. They could skate off, away from the chaperone, and had quite a bit of freedom that way. It was a very fun thing to do in those days.
+
+*So, the quilt becomes an opening into something more.*
+
+The quilt becomes an opening into the lifestyle of that era or the cultural context of that era. In my book, I have post-mortem photos---and a lot of them are babies. I decided to include them because this was a reality of the time. The only memory a family would have of a child might be the photo.
+
+Today it freaks out people because you're not supposed to take pictures of dead people. But in that time era---1880s to 1920---it was okay. It was tastefully done and was a keepsake. I remember my own grandmother on my dad's side had a photo in her bedroom of the ten brothers standing alongside the coffin of brother number eleven. He had died of appendicitis. You could see him in the coffin. This was very tastefully done and was part of their culture.
+
+When the book came out with these post-mortem photos of babies---I only bought pictures of babies in carriages with quilts on top of them---my readers were offended. But I said, "Tough cookies." That's the way it was. I talked about funeral habits of that era versus today.
+
+There are photographers today who are starting to volunteer their time to take pictures of babies that die stillborn. One organization I know is called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. They do very tasteful, beautiful jobs and the parents are very appreciative. The way culture deals with death is interesting.
+
+*How do you learn to see history differently when you look at it through the lens of photographs with quilts? How does history take a different shape?*
+
+It takes you down to the level of the everyday unknown citizen. The unknown woman is what influences me to this day. I'll watch documentaries about generals, and they're fine---great guys who did good---but quilts bring to me the power of women in our society. Most of them are unknown. I want to treasure them.
+
+*What kinds of things can you learn about them from their quilts?*
+
+They lived hard lives. Even in the 1880s and '90s, you think of women on the frontier making quilts by candlelight, and their access to fabrics was limited. But they valued the work because it opened up friendships. They would interface with their neighbors, trading fabrics, trading patterns. There were no quilt books, so they had to learn from their neighbors. They persisted.
+
+That gave them value. They had an artistic way to express themselves. A lot of these quilts, when you look at them, are just beautifully done. If they were exhibited in national shows today, they would win prizes. A lot of them are intricate---a high sense of mathematical ability. It wasn't just a labor of love. It was a labor of love, and it connected them to their community. It kept the community together. It was an invisible cord that tied communities together.
+
+*How do you see the current state of the quilt community today?*
+
+I used to collect antique quilts. Well, that market for antiques has gone down recently. In fact, the market for antiques period has gone down. But things go in cycles, so it'll go up again. The quilting community is still thriving. It's gone in the direction of wall art and fiber expression and color and vibrancy.
+
+In fact, the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum---when I was director, our membership was around 300 or 350 people, but now it's like 900 people. We're talking about twenty years later. So it's thriving. They have more than enough quilts for exhibits. It's not dying---it's there, but it's more embedded in craft. Is it a craft or an art---that's a debate. It's alive and well.
+
+*What's at stake in that debate about craft versus art?*
+
+There's always a debate, and it's not answered---it hasn't been settled yet.
+
+Here's a story. When I worked for an oil and gas company at the Republic Plaza building in downtown Denver, on the 53rd floor---the very top one---they had an annual show for all the personnel in that building, showing their crafts. The show was called *On Your Own Time*. People entered pottery, oil painting, watercolor---hundreds of employees in the building. I entered my quilt, which was on the modern side. It won first place. So, is it a craft or is it an art? In that show my quilt won over pottery, oil painting, watercolors. It's an art to me---I'm on the art side.
+
+*At the same time, these things can keep you warm.*
+
+Yes, they can. The new trend nowadays is to machine quilt, and that's an art unto itself. But I decided not to indulge in that too much because they are so intricately done, and there's so much thread on the surface of that quilt that it makes it stiff. It's really more like a wall hanging---can't really be used as bedding. I'm into hand quilting where you get a soft, pliable, comfy type thing.
+
+*Is that also where the relaxation comes in?*
+
+Yes. Again, that needle is mental therapy.
+
+*How do you approach teaching people who are coming into this tradition?*
+
+I don't do it now, but I did. I have two grandkids and the first one---I taught her how to quilt. I enrolled her in some classes at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum, and we wound up with a quilt. I gave her a sewing machine and gave the youngest one a sewing machine too. But she didn't take to it. Maybe she will later, maybe not. She does have her sewing machine. I thought that's good because you need a sewing machine to do mending, if nothing else.
+
+All of us---everybody in the quilting world---wants to share. They all want to show you how they do it. There's always that. When I have my two quilting friends come over here every few months, we sit around the table and talk and gossip, but we want to show, "Oh, this is how I do this, and this is how I did that." "Oh, I didn't know that." You're always picking up something.
+
+*How do you maintain that culture of sharing?*
+
+You just keep going to guild meetings, and then you can have these little quilting bees coming to your house. Like these two women come. That's how we do it.
+
+At my age, I don't care what other people do. I'm just going to do what I like to do, and I'm not going to try to be a good machine quilter. I just mess around with my fabric. I have two rooms full of fabrics. I don't really need to buy any more fabrics, but I do it for mental therapy and as an outlet. I have a couple of outlets---I like reading books. And I still hang on to that---messing around with my fabrics, is what I tell my friends.
+
+What they're doing now with sewing machines is so much beyond what I had. But it was fun. It has always been interesting and fun for me. I was in on the revival of this whole thing. It's not over---it's still going strong. But I was in on the ground floor.

content/interviews/hornbein-tarot.md

@@ -0,0 +1,204 @@
+---
+narrator: Drew Hornbein
+subject: Tarot
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-08-22
+approved: 2025-09-16
+summary: "Summoning experiences of magic through art, divination, tattooing, and software."
+location: "Denver CO"
+headshot: "drew_hornbeam.jpg"
+topics: [art, divination, open source, ritual, software]
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://www.dhornbein.com/"
+  - text: "Ritual Point Art & Divination"
+    url: "https://ritualpoint.studio/"
+---
+
+*Drew, let's begin with how you like to introduce yourself.*
+
+I introduce myself as Drew Hornbein. Depending on who I'm talking to, I'll say technologist, activist, or mystic. If I want to get more of a rise out of people, I'll lean on mystic or anarchist. The edgiest one feels like mystic. The easiest one feels like technologist.
+
+*Where does your practice of tarot fit into those different ways of introducing yourself?*
+
+At the core, tarot is an intuitive practice of seeing what's going on and elevating it. Tarot is about surfacing the subconscious into the conscious realm. When it comes to technology, that's about taking the feelings and ideas and making them manifest on screens---a very potent magical power.
+
+In activism, it's about connecting with the feelings of my human animal that bristles against the inequities and bad design of the systems we find ourselves in. There's something viscerally there but hard to articulate---being able to draw the connection between feeling something's wrong and recognizing what is not right.
+
+With tarot, it's about doing that on a personal level---noticing something but you can't put your finger on it. Let's find out what that thing is. You have a question about the way a system works, whether an internal system of your own or in your local area. There are throughlines for all these things that the practice of being with tarot can make more clear.
+
+I was an activist before I ever picked up a deck of tarot cards. I was a technologist before I picked up a deck of tarot cards. Tarot feels downhill from all those things.
+
+*When did your relationship with tarot begin? Where does that story start for you?*
+
+The first reading I remember getting was a friend pulling cards for me in New York City, on their bed. We did the Celtic Cross, a ten-card spread. I don't remember any notion of tarot before that, and I don't recall how it showed up in my life after that until my best friend and business partner got me a deck as a gift.
+
+It must have been something on my mind that they were able to track. I remember it clearly because I got the Robin Wood deck, which is a very accurate reimagining of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. I remember because it was on the solstice. I got the deck, then I did DMT for the first time.
+
+I had a very profound experience of blasting off. I don't remember what I did when I went to that realm, but I remember coming back and having this experience of realizing that I'm a consciousness in reality, and oh, there's other consciousnesses, oh, and we're all in bodies. That's right, I'm a consciousness and a body with other consciousnesses and bodies, and we're playing this game of existing.
+
+That set the stage for how I began this process of unraveling. Before that, I had been very much a materialist rationalist. I was in the James Randi atheist, skeptic world that rolled its eyes at astrology and saw tarot readers as charlatans---a very low-level charlatan, in the same category as water dowsers and mediums and psychics. That moment represents this fulcrum moment when I went over the other end.
+
+I remember that night as well because I went to an ecstatic dance. In the ecstatic dance, if you're not familiar, it's a solo dancing experience. You go and dance for yourself. The community there, after the dance---we all sit down and they do this woo-woo stuff. The skeptical, materialist, rationalist part of myself bristled against that.
+
+But then there was a moment where I'm like, "Okay, let me just let it in." Do the breathing exercise, and sit, and imagine the energy from the earth coming in through my feet and filling me up and shooting out of my crown chakra. When I started playing along, I became---it was just more interesting. Letting a little bit of this magic in felt nice. It just felt nice. Letting the magic in felt nice. I started doing it more and more.
+
+*What did getting into it mean? What kinds of practices did you start developing?*
+
+There are two practices I developed. One came a little before that, on a road trip. A friend of mine, while we were driving from North Carolina to Ohio, introduced me to the concept of chaos magic, which is attached to this fake religion that started in the seventies called Discordianism. It has this tongue-in-cheek idea---and a little bit of a colonizer frame---that's basically: you allow for any entity or god or spirit to be real so that you can interface with it. You believe it.
+
+One of the practices in chaos magic is noticing coincidence---noticing happenstance and coincidence and when random things align magically. That became a bug in my mind where I would notice synchronicity and take note of it.
+
+Once I started getting into tarot, it became a matter of study, to learn the cards. I'm in this process of noticing the magical things happening around me and studying this encyclopedia of archetypal energies. You begin to make these connections.
+
+My practice with tarot started with pulling a card every morning and journaling about the card. I got into that rhythm and practice. Through that, I filled up a whole notebook and got fairly close with many of the cards. My next move was, once I finished the notebook and was bored of journaling, I got a little sketchbook and would pull a card and sketch my interpretation.
+
+Thirty cards or so in, it dawned on me that I was drawing my own tarot deck. That became this phenomenal curse that haunts me to this day: I didn't intend to make it, but I did, and now I have this artifact that continues to speak to me and unravel itself. It represents my deepening understanding of this protocol around tarot. I've written my own fork of the protocol.
+
+*When you think of the story of tarot, in relationship to your own story, how important is the history of it? For some people, the authority or power of tarot comes from its relationship to claims that it derives from ancient Egypt or other ancient cultures, or early modern Europe. How is the story of tarot and its history part of your relationship to it? Or do you take a different approach?*
+
+I think I take a different approach because tarot feels---it has multiple histories.
+
+The story that I always liked was: it was a playing card game, then Aleister Crowley and his wacko friends turned it into a divination tool. They created story around it being this divination tool, where it was never really that in deeper history. Something about that story makes it feel more accessible.
+
+There are so many practices that feel colonized and taken without permission, or used in the wrong ways---practices that have deep, deep lineages and histories. Having something that is: some weirdos in the twenties just turned this playing card into something that it never was, and it became this fun thing---that gives me permission to interact with and change and play with the tarot.
+
+At the same time, from a protocol lens, tarot is this very interesting, open-source project that has been developed over hundreds of years to catalog different archetypal energies and stories of the human condition. The major arcana describes huge life cycles, then the minor arcana describes the smaller, more mundane things that happen in our world. Each illustrator and writer takes these concepts and adds their own twist---essentially, a fork of the protocol.
+
+It's an interesting protocol because the more people who take and remix it, the more robust it gets. It's not like we're changing something and then the interoperability diminishes. It actually increases the potency of each card, because now---at least in my practice, when I encounter a new deck and they explain something, or when I give a reading and a person reflects something about a card---I'm constantly finding out new angles to look at the same thing. It's expanding, constantly expanding, always growing. The information that is entangled with each card is constantly expanding through other people's decks and other people's interpretations.
+
+*How did you begin to learn to the point where you felt you could wield this practice? What kinds of things did you discover in readings that other people did for you? How did you begin to develop a sense of mastery?*
+
+I think the honest answer is that I saw how differently everyone did it. It's less about perfectly accurately interpreting the card than it is about giving people an experience of being seen.
+
+When I'm reading for somebody, the work we're doing is taking what our body and our subconscious knows and understands and getting it into language. We're moving it into the conscious construct and limitation of the symbolic language that we're all---as Cormac McCarthy described it---afflicted with. We've all been afflicted with language, and it sits on top of our much larger understanding and knowing. That is our intuition. The tarot is the thing that bridges it.
+
+I remember doing a reading once, and somebody who has much more knowledge of tarot than me asked: "Could you just rip pages out of a magazine and give a reading like this?" The answer's yes, because the way I read is about asking a person to notice things and come up with a story about this image that's in front of them.
+
+It doesn't require historical accuracy about the actual meaning of the card. It needs to connect to something that creates revelation for the person---to do the magic, to do the work. All it has to do is connect. That is the primary purpose.
+
+The way I've been brought up as a man in our current society, it says you can just have a seat at any table, you can go anywhere, you don't have to---just call yourself a tarot reader. As problematic as that orientation can be, it helped me because I was able to come with confidence into the space. It's more the confidence that---I know that you and I, if I'm sitting down with you to read these cards, I'm confident that you and I will land somewhere. We'll get somewhere if we both want to get somewhere.
+
+From the skeptical mind, I can explain the way tarot works as: it's two people sitting down and trying to reach a destination---that is, to have a magical experience. As long as you're sitting with someone who's trying to play the game with you, then you will have that experience.
+
+It's also a matter of memorizing the cards, and that means reading the booklets enough that you don't have to read the booklets. You can just look at a card. What I do is look at a card and ask questions. The card becomes a prompt for me to ask questions to a person that seem---they're looking at a card that's so abstract, then I ask them this very pointed question: "Where are you if you were on a boat and weren't in control? Where would that boat be taking you right now?"
+
+It is this confusing, potent question that is prompted by the Six of Swords, the card about passage. It's moving from the Five of Swords that is about conflict into the Seven of Swords that's about getting a thing at any cost. The more I build that knowledge, the more I can ask weird questions that sit in a coherent reality with the cards.
+
+I think it's about building and cultivating a confidence that everybody---the cards included---want the game to succeed, want the magic to happen. Everything else on top of that is just making the process easier.
+
+*I wonder if you could say a bit more about what a magical experience is, and maybe what it's not---when it doesn't work. You talked about games a lot. Is it in the same category as Monopoly or chess, or is it something different?*
+
+I think it's in the same place as Monopoly and chess, insofar as it works when both players come to play the game.
+
+*Do we call it a cooperative game then?*
+
+Yeah, it's definitely a cooperative game. Like chess is a cooperative game. You and your partner sit down and agree to have a chess experience together. If you both happen to know the same rules then chess happens. If you've ever played chess with a little one and they move pieces willy nilly, you're playing a different game.
+
+When tarot fails, it's almost entirely because the other person isn't taking their place in the game. They're not playing their role. When I sit with you and read your tarot, we are agreeing to have a tarot experience.
+
+I think the magic is that you come with both the question and the answer. Then we play the game to make the connection and to make it in a way where it feels like you didn't already come with the answer.
+
+If you don't participate in that, if you pick my king up and throw it off the board, the experience---if you come and you expect me as the reader to just reveal everything to you---I don't think it works either at all or as well. It's a collaborative process.
+
+The thing that causes it not to work is the person ceding their agency and power. A lot of what I do is about illustrating to people that they come with both the question and the answer. The magic that I hold is self-evident.
+
+I am not trained. I didn't go to the monastery and pass through the rites of passage. There's magic systems that require that sort of dedication. I'm simply allowing what is---I'm reaching out and grasping what's right in front of me, and if I can do it, then so can you. My job as the reader is to help you tap into your birthright, your ability to sense the field, your ability to move from the pattern symbolic world of language and reach into yourself for the symbolic felt sense of the subconscious and make meaning around that.
+
+The game is---this is why it can be done with ripping out paper, with looking at tea leaves, with beholding pixels on a screen. It's all just looking at the world and making sense out of the chaos of all of this.
+
+*How has that magic shaped your own life?*
+
+There is this idea that neuroscientists are in some level of agreement that there is no free will, that you are just a chemical reaction playing out. The prenatal conditions of your mother's womb has more to do with your success and actions in the world than almost anything else. We are these beings that might have absolutely no agency, and really, all we're doing is retroactively coming up with stories about why we inevitably did a thing.
+
+Magic helps me deal with that---the chaotic nature of reality. It helps me come to grips with the way I'm out of control, and it creates all this rich story about why things happen and the meaning that comes out of the things that happen, because everything's just random shit going on. Stuff you can never prepare for or foresee. The story you create around the things that happen to you is whether or not you have a good or bad time here.
+
+*Have you encountered debates about legitimacy---for instance, people telling you that you're doing it wrong? Or have you seen others be told that they're doing it wrong? Are there boundaries around this practice that perhaps you're anxious to not cross, or that you've seen others cross?*
+
+My only experience that comes to mind is meeting people who do put in the work and get really deep into it. I'm thinking of a particular person. They had an orientation around what is the right way. There's a right way to do it, and there's all this history and knowledge to gain and study to do. You gotta understand astrology and the Kabbalah Tree of Life, you gotta study the Thoth deck and the Rider-Waite-Smith, and you gotta read Jordavotsky's book on tarot, and you have to listen to all these different people.
+
+Then they see other people who didn't do that work still getting outcomes. I think that's---the proof is in the pudding. If the objective is to find the places of revelation, and people are receiving that through my ignorant manner of doing it and through their extremely well-researched and perhaps more correct way of doing it, what's the difference?
+
+It could be that I might be bringing in harmful things because I haven't studied. There might be huge consequences to the loosey-goosey way I do this, I am certainly taking a risk. In my experience, though, the feedback I am getting from people and the world is positive. I don't think there is a wrong way to go about it.
+
+Other than telling people the future. If I'm telling you the future, if I'm speaking to the dead, if I'm channeling spirits, that's outside of my wheelhouse. I don't know how that works. The only way to do it wrong is to create unrealistic expectations about what is happening.
+
+I very firmly believe---I have made the decision to believe that magic is real, that there are forces beyond our control and understanding that are shaping the way things unfold. But all of that belief, I can drop down into the rational brain. I can explain to you rationally how studies have shown that the placebo effect is real. Your belief in things changes your physiological body. I can point to the rational scientific way of understanding reality and make all this stuff work, because I'm not talking to entities outside of reality. I'm not doing things I don't have training in. I'm interfacing with what is self-evident to me and dressing it up in fantastic story.
+
+Magic is the story we wrap around the things happening in consensus reality.
+
+I'll give you an example. This was the moment that I made this switch into allowing magic to be real. I was in this terrible year of grief, and for some reason, I started noticing angel numbers on phones---when it's 11:11 or 12:34. I start noticing these numbers come up, and the rational part of my brain says, yes, this is called cognitive bias. You see something, you notice yourself see it, then you notice yourself noticing it more. Nothing special or magical about it. You look at your phone all the time, and you throw away every time you look at it that doesn't have a magical number, and you keep all the times that it does. This is just how brain cognition works. Nothing special going on.
+
+Through the year of grief, I'm noticing these more and more, and I'm allowing myself to get into it. I'm throwing away all the time I look at my phone when it doesn't have something special---I don't remember it. But every time it does, I'm making a note of it.
+
+At the same time, I'm reading *The Man Who Could Move Clouds* by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, which is about a Colombian woman whose grandfather was a magic man and against tradition taught his daughter, Ingrid's mother. Throughout the book fantastic magical things happen to the family. She describes how her Western colleagues in America saying, "Oh, you called this a memoir, but it's actually magical realism." She's saying, "No, this all happened." It's this book very much about practical, real magic, and it's speaking to me. Giving permission really.
+
+One night, I'm out late, sitting on my porch. It's early in the morning, I can't sleep, I'm still in this grief. This bright light fills the sky. I thought a helicopter was shining a spotlight down on my house. I stand up and look out over the western sky, and there's this huge green fireball breaking up in the atmosphere. I see this phenomenal meteor.
+
+I look down at my phone to note the time (so I can look on Twitter later), and it's 3:33.
+
+It's the confluence of me reading this book, me stepping into this patterning of recognizing the time, then coincidentally being at the right place at the right time where this event happened at this randomly specific time. With those facts laid out in front of you, you're presented with a fork in the road where you can say the world is meaningless, that all of this is coincidence and none of it is connected. Or you can turn towards: the world is fantastic, there's magic everywhere. All things are connected. Everything is happening in relation with something else.
+
+I chose that path.
+
+*What do you do when somebody is not playing the game, when somebody hasn't chosen that path yet? How would you do a reading for the version of yourself before you had chosen that path?*
+
+That's both the magic and the skill of divination---very quickly intuiting where someone is, then speaking to them in a language that they understand. If I came to myself and did a reading and talked about the interconnectedness of all things and magic, framing it in that way to my 23-year-old self, they wouldn't have been able to hear me.
+
+But I would explain it to them this way: tarot cards represent patterns that show up in life. It's the illustration of archetypal patterning throughout our shared history. It's simply a catalog of things that humans do and roles they play. Those things show up in our life because there's only so many ways that interpersonal conflict can come out in the wash. There's gotta be a perpetrator, there's gotta be a victim, and they're perpetrating from some trauma, and the victim is---all these things that happen to us, and it's usually about dads and moms.
+
+There is a finite amount of reasons that drive people to react and respond to things. The cards simply try and illustrate those reasons, and we can use the cards to ask questions and reveal a random piece of nonsense that triggers a connection in your mind, because your mind works through symbolic connections.
+
+When you think of water, you remember---it flows through every experience you have of water, and not just literally being in water. It's tied to stories about big waves, it's tied to paintings of water, it's tied to the first time you drank water and it went down the wrong pipe. We can explore concepts by firing up this web of neurons.
+
+It can be explained rationally. Magic is way larger than rational frameworks. Magic interfaces with more of reality, and thus it's very easy for the rational frameworks to hold a piece of it.
+
+Everything I do and believe, as a fun game, I like to figure out how to put it into rational terms, and I think that's part of my orientation, my power. I've played that game with everybody. I have friends that have seen aliens, and I know people who have spoken to many different permutations of God or have had profound experiences dancing. I'm always asking the question: how can we live in a reality where all these things are true, even the ones that are contradicting each other? How can we make it all work together?
+
+The practice is about identifying where a person is at and speaking to them in a language that they'll understand.
+
+*What is the relationship for you between the work you do with cards---drawing cards, both making them and playing them---and tattoo? It seems like these practices are deeply connected. As you were developing your deck, the deck looks like your tattoo art in some respects. I'm curious about how you think about the relationship between the medium of the card and the medium of the body and skin.*
+
+As you ask that question, it becomes immediately clear and obvious, but I don't think I've thought about it. The tattooing and tarot---the way I practice both is about revealing meaning.
+
+I sometimes describe tattooing like this: the tattoo is in your skin, and my job is just to uncover it. In the same way, the answer to your question is already inside of you, and my job as a tarot reader is simply to uncover it, then for us to put together these shapes and patterns.
+
+In tarot, it's about creating a story around shapes and symbols, and then in tattoo, it's about taking a story and turning it into shapes and symbols. In a way, it's just a directionality thing. Let's uncover the meaning by pulling out shapes and symbols, and then the other one is, let's take the meaning and turn it into something that can live on you. Tattoos are scars that remind us of something.
+
+The two are very interrelated. There are ways of doing tattoos that are just aesthetic, but I focus on a very ritualized, meaning-rich orientation toward the art of tattooing. It does have a symmetry with tarot.
+
+I'm only making that connection now that we're talking about it, but it's so obviously what I've done and been doing. This is very much like my tarot deck. I created the tarot deck, I did the thing, and now I'm retroactively making meaning around it.
+
+I started doing the tattoos through an intuitive sense---I feel like doing this and thus I am going to do it. That's how I've been trained as an artist. You can try to plan things out, but really you just follow what you're already doing.
+
+This ties back to the subconscious. It is this enormous ocean, and our conscious experience of it is so limited. We exist in the pattern language world that is unable to encompass the ocean of subconscious feeling and expression and emotion. We're all moved by the subconscious. We're constantly animated by it, and then it's only later that we can tell a story.
+
+I started doing tarot and I started doing tattooing, and in this moment right here, live, in this interview, I'm adding to the facade of my practice. Now I can speak to it as: we reveal the meaning with tarot, then we cement the meaning into the body in tattoo.
+
+You can see the loop that's there---we pull out from the subconscious, then we make it permanent on the body so that it is constantly there to speak to the subconscious and influence the subconscious and create right action. You've put the right symbol there that will trigger a response in the conscious and subconscious. All of that, I never considered until now.
+
+There is an example of the synchronicity. You and I met so many years ago so that we could eventually come to this moment and have that revelation, and then that revelation is going to influence somebody down the line who's gonna get a tattoo on their finger that does some work in their system and helps them on their path. They're going to meet somebody, and the meeting will only happen because the other person sees the tattoo on their hand. The web of magical influence---once you start to pay attention to it, it's mind-bogglingly complex because the world is mind-bogglingly complex. Having some frameworks around explaining it or telling a story about it can be fun and useful.
+
+*Does that same resonance occur when you think about writing code? It seems like one could imagine an engineering-like practice being separate. But you're also engaged in symbolic design when you do web design. Does that also feel like a part of that work of magic, or does it feel like something else?*
+
+It definitely has a different flavor, but it's working on so many of the same systems. What immediately pops into my mind is the hamburger button---the hamburger icon, which is three straight lines. We have agreed as a society that that opens up a menu. You click that and you expect a list of links that take you different places.
+
+My specialty is in front-end engineering. It's where the code and the art collide. The designer wants things to be and act in particular ways, and the developer is limited by what technology can do and by what are best practices. Melding those two worlds has always been such a fascinating thing. I'm working within the physical limitations of computational power or the box model of cascading style sheets---how do you create a circle when everything is a box?
+
+Taking the art and translating it---the art is all these---it's very potent because it's so much of it is illusory. The button is given a bevel so that it looks clickable. There's so much going on in all of our interfaces where we have to explain without words there's more to this, and you have to scroll down the page. How do you explain that to people?
+
+Then all of humanity is feeding back into that system. We don't understand what a hamburger menu is, and nobody clicks it because we're lost. Or if you don't use the hamburger, nobody clicks it because two horizontal lines isn't enough. There's all this feedback happening in the interfaces.
+
+There's something about the code, which is just electrons moving through a lattice of silicate. Then we abstract---the physical little gates inside your CPU that are on or off a billion times a second, and out of that absolute nonsense comes all these abstracted layers of meaning. Then it hits normal people and they're dumping all of their meaning-making into it. All of this stuff is arising at the collision point of incredible magic---moving electrons through sand.
+
+Now, with large language models, we have these reflections of our symbolic languaging that we can interface with. We have an economic bubble whose entire basis is, to put it simply, our ability to make story about inanimate objects and to breathe life into things that have no life. It's not that the AI is conscious, it's that we're able to ascribe it with consciousness. You put googly eyes on a water bottle, and your mind will be like, "Okay, yeah, that's a being that has agency." We have this entire economic bubble that is: this fancy autocomplete is alive, and I can talk to it, and it can do anything. There's an incredible amount of magic and divination and profoundness swimming around in the technological sphere.
+
+*As we come to the end, I wonder if you could share a bit about what you're working on and developing in your practice right now. What areas of growth are you building? How are you advancing your work with these protocols?*
+
+The main thing is that I am trying to finish what I started with my tarot deck---making the booklet that goes along with it. That's been an interesting process because it's been months and months and months of not doing work, not selling my tarot deck, not promoting my tarot deck.
+
+I feel like I'm missing the boat. We're going into an economic downturn. Tarot cards were hot three years ago, and now that this shift is happening, and the market's oversaturated, I missed the moment. I'm deepening my practice by being okay with it, allowing it to unfold as it's supposed to unfold.
+
+Fucking up feels like the practice. Not having the discipline or not having the energy to do the work---all of that is learning to see the magic inside of it. Inside of the self-judgment and the annoyance and the feeling like I'm doing things wrong, all of that is---that's been the work of trusting that everything is unfolding at just the right pace, and I don't need to push and try and make things happen any faster than they can or will.
+
+Allowing all the things to unfold in their right time is the practice---it's the practice I feel as an activist. Things are just unfolding, and I am starting to get real with where my agency is in the unfolding.

content/interviews/mannan-diplomatic_protocols.md

@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ In protocol one has to work out all the details when you are organizing an event
 
 Once in an embassy National Day event---I will not say which embassy---this was when I was in Tashkent, the CD player suddenly stopped, guests waited for the national anthem to resume, the ambassador turned red in the face. You understand, all the dignitaries were present and the national anthem had halted because of a technical glitch. I'm sure next day the person in charge, whether it was staff or junior officer, was packing his baggage and was headed back to his capital. In Bangladesh too, once when the Prime Minister came to attend a formal program, there was a technical problem that prevented the national anthem from being played, and the next day the chief of protocol was fired. These things happen. With protocol, you have to be extraordinarily careful, you have to be calm and collected under pressure, and you have to be well-trained on how to swiftly handle a *faux pas* or unmeditated disruptions. One has to understand the enormity of any failings and one has to always be on alert. 
 
-*How did you learn to develop that sense of detail? *
+*How did you learn to develop that sense of detail?*
 
 I took interest, that's the main thing. From the very beginning I knew this is one of the most interesting jobs because you will be meeting the heads of state and government, and at least the foreign ministers. My opportunity came as a junior officer to be a guide to a visiting minister---showing him around, taking him to the market, taking him to another ministry, just accompanying him---I was very alert from the onset. And I received very glowing commendations after the visit. No matter how difficult the task was, I never said ‘no’ to anybody---I tried to manage. That is another hallmark of a diplomat, protocol instills this quality because we are entrusted to create positivity and an atmosphere of confidence. The objective has to be achieved, no matter how difficult. At the same time the process has to go smoothly, almost seem effortless. 
 

content/interviews/mayer-mediation.md

@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ A second formative fact was that my father was a director of a residential treat
 
 A third formative factor was that I was also, and you probably know the term, a "red diaper baby." I'll just leave it at that. Even though my father became somewhat conservative when he had to confront the sixties, I grew up with that consciousness. Then I was also a child of the sixties, and was very active in the civil rights movement, anti-war movements, peace movements. That was a big part of my identity. I went to Oberlin College, which was a focal point for student activism.
 
-All those things were about conflict. In a sense, conflict was a unifying factor of both the bad things that had happened and good work that could be done. In the early days of teaching and writing---particularly teaching people to be mediators and conflict interveners---I used to say that I grew up as a teenager and young adult, knowing pretty well how to raise conflict, but not what to necessarily do once I had raised it. As time went on the initial answer was: get people together to talk and see what we could work out. But as time went on I realized, no, raising conflict is really important as well. It's almost in a dialectical relationship with doing something to move it in a more constructive direction .
+All those things were about conflict. In a sense, conflict was a unifying factor of both the bad things that had happened and good work that could be done. In the early days of teaching and writing---particularly teaching people to be mediators and conflict interveners---I used to say that I grew up as a teenager and young adult, knowing pretty well how to raise conflict, but not what to necessarily do once I had raised it. As time went on the initial answer was: get people together to talk and see what we could work out. But as time went on I realized, no, raising conflict is really important as well. It's almost in a dialectical relationship with doing something to move it in a more constructive direction.
 
 I graduated from college in '68. I was facing the draft. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. My initial efforts to avoid the draft by applying to be a conscientious objector didn't work because they decided I really did believe in war. I thought, well, I don't know where this is going to lead me. But what would be a good thing to do during the period of time before I actually do get drafted? I was a child of social workers, and I liked working with kids. I'd done a lot of work as a childcare worker at this residential treatment center and as a camp counselor. So I went to social work school at Columbia in New York. Over the two years that I got my master's degree there, I received a very high number in the lottery, which meant I didn't get drafted.
 
@@ -166,7 +166,7 @@ I basically looked at them and said, "All right, here's what I think is going on
 
 *You helped them develop a shared meta-story about what was going on between them.*
 
-That's exactly it. And it worked. I'm sure to this day it still is a striggpe, because I think it's a long-term relationship--- and they're probably completely different players, but the structure is still there. They probably still struggle with that.
+That's exactly it. And it worked. I'm sure to this day it still is a struggle, because I think it's a long-term relationship---and they're probably completely different players, but the structure is still there. They probably still struggle with that.
 
 *Have you had experiences where ideas or practices that you've developed have been used in a way that you were not comfortable with?*
 

content/interviews/mayernik-disegno.md

@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
+---
+narrator: David Mayernik
+subject: Disegno
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-06-18
+approved: 2025-06-18
+summary: "An artist and longtime professor at the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture practices a kind of design that reaches across time and space."
+location: "Lucca, Italy"
+headshot: "david_mayernik.jpg"
+topics: [architecture, art, urban planning]
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: https://www.davidmayernik.com
+  - text: "The Meaning of Rome: The Renaissance and Baroque City"
+    url: https://www.edx.org/learn/humanities/university-of-notre-dame-the-meaning-of-rome-the-renaissance-and-baroque-city
+---
+
+*Your body of work includes oil painting, frescoes, opera sets, architecture, and more. How do you describe your practice, primarily?*
+
+I would say I'm an architect only because architecture incorporates all those other things. If you say you're a painter, it's harder to pull architecture into it. Architecture can incorporate the other arts, while the other arts don't easily weave in architecture.
+
+The people who were exclusively architects in the Renaissance in Italy were the exception. An architect was often someone who knew how to paint or sculpt. The Sangallo family—especially Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who did a lot of palaces in Rome and was in charge of St. Peter's for a while—were thought of as architects. They came out of a woodworking tradition, and they weren't painters or sculptors. But most of the architects of the Renaissance were painters or sculptors first. Bramante was a painter before he became an architect, like Raphael and Leonardo—most people we think of as famous architects of the Renaissance were trained as something else.
+
+Architecture was an extension of the other arts, and that had credibility because the fundamental skill that underlay all the arts was drawing. If you could draw, you could design anything. It was Bernini who said in the seventeenth century that architecture is pure *disegno*, pure drawing and design. Architecture is a manifestation of drawing more directly, but also in a more abstract way, than painting or sculpture.
+
+Drawing is the thing that allows artists to migrate and do different things because it is conceptual. In Italian, *disegno* means both drawing and design, so beyond delineating it also means the ability to conceptualize. 
+
+*What does that mean for the relationship between the drawing and the building? Is the building just an expression of the drawing, which is the ideal form?*
+
+That's a really hot debate. A lot of people lament the fact that, in the Renaissance, building became the execution of somebody else's drawing. The romanticized idea about the Middle Ages is that there was no such thing as the architect—there was a master builder, and while they could draw, they were building their own buildings. They were both the executor and the conceiver of the building.
+
+In the Renaissance that process gets segregated into the person who conceptualizes and somebody else who executes. It's not that the person who drew the building didn't have experience with materials—every painter in the Renaissance knew how to paint fresco, which is basically working with plaster, what most buildings were covered with. Understanding plaster means you also understand the masonry support for the plaster. In the modern era, architects rarely get their hands dirty with any material participation in the building process.
+
+*Is there a particular time and place where you center your practice?*
+
+I don't want to say I live in the past—I'm very much a modern person—but I do think people were very good at what they did in periods in the past that I aspire to. I would like to be as good as them. I'm not interested in replicating what they did or living in the past. My life would be completely different if I lived even one hundred years ago; I wouldn't be married to the woman I'm married to. I don't want to return to the past. But there's a lot we can learn from it.
+
+My happy place—as much as I love the Renaissance—is that I'm really a Baroque guy, because I was formed in Rome, and Rome is a Baroque city more than anything else. My way of approaching things comes out of the late seventeenth, early eighteenth century—a time when things hadn't gotten too ideological as they would with neoclassicism. Somewhere in there is probably where my natural hand is, my way of working.
+
+*How did Rome teach you?*
+
+I tell my students now—which is not exactly how it happened for me—that you can't learn from Rome. You can learn from the people who worked in Rome. Rome is this overlay of accomplishment and transformation over thousands of years. You can't take Rome and transplant it elsewhere. It's such a unique response to its own position and history. But you can learn from the  many great architects who worked there. You can learn from Bernini or Raphael or Bramante.
+
+There's a kind of romantic idea about *romanità*, a Romanness that you can bring to your work—a gravitas, a sense of seriousness, a weightiness that's very Roman. But there's a light, graceful side to Rome as well. You could take away a sensibility from Rome, but I think you can more directly, as an architect, learn from the architects, not from some vague feeling about Rome. I don't know how to take that and transplant it.
+
+One of the things I tend to teach—which was controversial in my school—was that if you want to analyze something, you can only analyze something that was done intentionally. You can't analyze an accident or induce principles from a series of accidents, and a lot of what we have in Rome are accidents—things that happened without any design intent. The things you can actually apprehend and understand and learn from are the things that were done on purpose.
+
+*As you're developing your practice in relationship to this place and its intentions and accidents, what kinds of rules or disciplines did you start adopting for yourself that, perhaps, other architects weren't adopting?*
+
+When I was teaching at Notre Dame, a big part of the loose community of people who are roughly aligned with me—though we're actually more factionalized than many people understand—was a strong emphasis on urban design. By urban design, I mean the ways in which buildings play well together and contribute to something bigger than themselves, the making of streets and piazzas, the public realm.
+
+One of the things I took away from Rome and emphasized when teaching was the role of buildings in shaping public space—that is one of their primary jobs. The role of buildings is to collaborate with other buildings to make public space. Unless you're building somebody's house in the middle of a field, anything in an urban context or even loosely related to an environment with other things around it has a responsibility to articulate and shape space and collaborate with other buildings.
+
+*What are some of the ways that you do that, especially if you have buildings being built by different people at different times? How do you create the framework in which buildings collaborate around public space?*
+
+If you're building in an existing urban context, the street system has already been determined, and unless you have some license to change how the street system works, your job is basically to reinforce that street system.
+
+Creating public space in the American grid is challenging. If you want to create a plaza in an American city, the easiest thing is to remove one block of buildings and make it open space. Philadelphia has squares like that. Chicago has squares like that. One problem with them in terms of spatial definition is that usually the grid passes along the outside edges, making the corners kind of open. They don't have the same sense of containment with a closed corner that you have in European spaces, where streets often pass through the middle of the piazza. In Europe, you enter into the space rather than passing along its flanks.
+
+For the TASIS school in Switzerland, I'm the master-plan architect, so I decide how the buildings relate to each other. If you're planning a campus, you have the responsibility and opportunity to organize buildings in ways that contribute to shaping space.
+
+Some familiar campus plans include the college system at Princeton, Oxford, or Cambridge. The colleges are relatively self-contained, organized around a courtyard made by a grouping of buildings, like a monastery. They're all contiguous and collaborating in shaping a unique space. In that case the university is an accumulation of those colleges. A campus like Notre Dame is more like Harvard's, where it's an accumulation of individual buildings loosely organized around open quadrangles.
+
+The TASIS Swiss campus is on a hillside, so it's really hard to connect the buildings and shape space in that monastic way. Because we're building it over time and the campus has evolved, it's an accumulation of discrete buildings that define and shape space, looser than a monastic model. The campus in Switzerland is more like a village.
+
+I've tried—and it's actually been somewhat problematic for some people in the local planning department—to not make the Swiss campus look like there's a monotony of style. I've tried to particularize every building, give each their own unique character, but also respond to their specific type. The theater doesn't look like the gymnasium, which doesn't look like the library, so you can read the campus. As much as you want harmony between buildings, you also want special things to stand out or unique buildings to be legible as what they are. You can tell a church is different from a palace.
+
+*When you're walking through the streets of a city—like here in Lucca—how do you see buildings interacting with each other?*
+
+A city like Lucca is pretty harmonious. A lot of that happens in Italy because historically, people were building with a palette of materials that was constant over time. Masonry bearing wall buildings, mostly covered with stucco, are all going to harmonize almost by nature because of the constraints that masonry construction imposes on you—how big you can make openings, how many floors you can make a building. If you put a roof on, there are only so many ways of making eaves. There's a kind of natural harmony in most Italian cities, even if they're built over long periods of time, because the palette of materials was local and constant.
+
+Lucca has a lot of brick because it doesn't have a lot of stone natively, while other cities are made more of stone because that was the indigenous building material. In the Italian tradition, brick is often just thought of as the structure, but the skin is stucco, and you can paint stucco any color you want.  Historically those colors were earth pigments, so you have a natural palette that's already harmonized.
+
+In Lucca, there's not the same kind of coordinated spaces that we have in Rome. Some of the great piazzas that I loved in Rome are designed to be coordinated. Lucca doesn't have that—it's kind of a looser gentility. The buildings are all polite to each other, but they're not all cooperating in an orchestrated way.
+
+*When you're working in relationship to these traditions, do you impose particular constraints on yourself or on people working within your master plan? Is there a sense of accountability to the tradition? Are there lines you try to avoid crossing that another architect might not?*
+
+I'm the master planning architect for the campus, but I'm also designing all the buildings, so I'm true to myself in that sense. The project has stretched out over time—it's coming up on twenty-nine years I've been working for them, and we're still not done yet. Their needs have changed too.
+
+What has held the project together is the idea of it as a village. The actual form of the village has changed; we've done a variety of master plans, and we've resubmitted the master plans for a variety of reasons. The core principle isn't the form, it's the intent—the idea that it wants to feel like a harmonious village. The form is evolving and changing, and I'm evolving and changing with it.
+
+It's been interesting. I've had to adapt. I'm designing buildings now that are different from the ones I had imagined before. It's almost like I'm working in my own historical context, which I'm responsible for. I'm responsible for negotiating with my own buildings, with different needs and purposes that I didn't see coming twenty years ago.
+
+I've imposed on the process—and it's been a long struggle and we're still battling with it—that all buildings would be built in masonry bearing wall construction. I personally want my buildings to be made the way they appear to be made. Not all architects care about that. Most buildings on the Notre Dame campus for the last half century look like brick buildings but are really steel-framed buildings with a brick skin.
+
+I imposed on the school that the buildings should be what they look like, masonry bearing wall. We've more or less been true to that, with some recent compromises that bother me, but basically the buildings are what they appear to be. That process is slower and can cost more, which means you can't afford to do other stuff like use fancier materials, or have more columns or carvings.
+
+They're pretty simple buildings, and I'm prepared to live with that. I would like to do more elaborate stuff, but I made a choice that we were going to build these things in a solid, durable way, and I had to give up other fancier elements that we might have been able to do otherwise. That's the choice I made—not every architect would do that.
+
+At the school, I've done frescoes on the outside of the buildings. The theater has an iconographic program, and so does the gymnasium, which I interpreted in a more ancient, holistic cultural way as a place where you form the whole person, not just the body. I gave the gymnasium an iconographic program, but not all the buildings really need that or merit it.
+
+I would love to do a chapel or a church someday, because it's a space where all the arts can collaborate. I think architecture is limited in terms of what it can say rhetorically or poetically. In order to say something specific, it needs painting and sculpture, and not all spaces need that.
+
+*How does working in a context like a school compare to religious spaces that you've also engaged in? How do you approach the craft when the job involves a church?*
+
+What I've done is paint a cycle of frescoes in a historic church in Tuscany. There's a whole story—there was an amazing unfolding of events, a consequence of preparing the wall to paint a frescoed crucifixion; they discovered an eighteenth-century fresco under the whitewash, so we had to move the crucifixion. It resulted in a whole other series of paintings in response to the one that they discovered.
+
+While I was painting the crucifixion, the people who took over the school where I'd studied fresco technique were restoring the eighteenth-century fresco. It was super interesting because the past was coming back to life.
+
+*What was the exchange like with that older painting that was uncovered? How did it affect what you were creating?*
+
+The chapel had an oil painting of Mary and John at the foot of the cross from the late seventeenth century. They were two canvases that were meant to be together, the same size, mounted in a simple frame with a seam between them, and mounted over the seam was a wooden crucifix. This church happens to be next to the Tuscan home of my Swiss client. She paid for the renovation of the chapel and said, "My architect paints frescoes, and I think you should have a painted crucifix."
+
+I made a choice that I did not want to imitate the oil on canvas historical paintings. I would paint the crucifix in fresco so that it would not be confused with the historical paintings, but would also complete the narrative of Mary and John at the foot of the cross. I wanted to paint the cross on the wall with the canvases hung on either side, so it would function as an ensemble in two different media.
+
+It was supposed to be at the end wall of the chapel. But as they were scraping down the whitewash on that wall, they discovered there was an eighteenth-century painting, an Annunciation. So then the Belle Arti had to come in and decide what it was and how important it was. We decided to move the crucifix to the middle of one of the long walls.
+
+Because the church is dedicated to a local saint who was the evangelist of that area in the early history of the church—the third century—and his martyrdom happened on the spot where the church was built, I was going to have an oval of the martyrdom of that saint over the crucifix. Because we had to move the crucifixion to a long wall under a pitched roof, that wall was shorter, and I couldn't fit the oval over the crucifix. I decided to slide the oval down behind the crucifix, like a window, and paint a series of five ovals around the rest of the upper part of the chapel, showing the whole cycle of the martyrdom of the patron saint.
+
+By sacrificing something where the fresco was originally intended, it actually sponsored the creation of a richer narrative cycle about the martyrdom of the patron saint. I didn't actually show the martyrdom itself; I used the crucifixion where the martyrdom would have happened in the cycle. On one side of the crucifixion is the moment when the saint and his companions are captured by Roman soldiers. The moment after is where his decapitated skull is set up as the site of an altar that then sponsors the church. We lost the actual martyrdom because I thought the crucifixion, the paradigmatic martyrdom, could take the place of that scene. 
+
+*What is the state of fresco painting today? Who still does it? Is it at risk of being a lost art?*
+
+It was almost lost in the twentieth century. I got interested in it because of studying in Rome and wanting to paint and be an architect. I thought fresco was the perfect way to integrate the two. I knew someone who later became the Chairman at Notre Dame, an architect who dabbled in fresco; I asked him how he learned, and he said he read WPA manuals. During the 1930s, when they were trying to give work to artists and had artists painting murals in post offices and elsewhere, the fresco technique had sort of disappeared, so the WPA actually put out  manuals on how to do fresco painting.
+
+I  found those manuals in the University of Pennsylvania Library, but I didn't really get it. Eventually I had the chance to study with a great restorer in Italy, Leonetto Tintori. He was one of the vehicles in Italy for continuing the fresco painting tradition.  He was an artist who, during World War II, got involved with preservation of frescoes in Pisa and then made a career out of it.
+
+The other conduit was an artist named Pietro Annigoni, who was a portrait painter from Florence. He got wealthy painting portraits, including the Queen of England, and then essentially dedicated the rest of his life to painting frescoes pro bono for churches. He trained a whole generation of people, and one of them is a guy named Ben Long, an American who went back to North Carolina, and has done a whole series of frescoes there. Ben Long is probably the most famous fresco painter in the United States.
+
+There was a vogue for it in the 80s and 90s, I think because of postmodernism in architecture. I feel like it's fading away now—there aren't a lot of people that I'm aware of doing it. In Italy, there are some people painting frescoes, including some of the students of Annigoni's students.
+
+There's a Russian artist who painted the dome of the cathedral in Noto, Sicily, which was damaged by an earthquake. When they restructured the dome, they hired him to paint frescoes of the apostles—over life-size, super realistic, very impressive frescoes.
+
+Fresco was practiced all over Europe historically. Here in Italy people are very cautious about introducing new things into old contexts. It's one of those things that's just not thought of mostly unless you're recreating a historic fresco for some reason or you're allowed to reintroduce a fresco in a damaged historic context. Most people don't think about frescoes in new building projects.
+
+The onus is on architects to bring it into the discussion, but most architects don't have training in that kind of thing. They're not figurative artists themselves—they don't think that way. I've hired myself to do them for the school in Switzerland. I bring them into my own projects, but a lot of architects aren't thinking that way. They're thinking about just getting the building built.
+
+*How do you see the overlap between these traditions and practices and the institutional authorities that set rules for preservation? How do you relate to the rules they impose?*
+
+It's a pretty intense discussion, and the fact that it's actually softened a little bit recently is interesting. Italy has a hang-up—it's not unique to Italy, but it's really strong in Italy: this fear of something they call *falso storico* or "fake history." Essentially, doing new things that look like old things and creating ambiguity about what really is old versus what is new. That is a modern art historical or preservation mentality.
+
+We have it in the United States too. The Secretary of the Interior's guidelines for historic preservation also essentially mandate that additions to historic buildings have to be in a distinctly different style, which is a very modern thing. It's a kind of obsession with imposing the zeitgeist.
+
+Williamsburg is an interesting case of rebuilding, but Williamsburg is essentially a fake—a recreation of a city that was virtually non-existent. But mostly there's an aversion to doing that. In Italy it has been very much frowned upon to work in a traditional mode.
+
+Pietro Annigoni was called in to paint the frescoes when they rebuilt Monte Cassino, and they decided not to replicate the old paintings that were there but create new ones. Annigoni's style does not look old-fashioned. There's something very modern about his work. I think self-consciously he didn't want to look like he was painting neo-Renaissance paintings. They're figurative, but there's a dark, almost menacing quality to a lot of his paintings—like somebody who lived through World War II and seen the worst of humanity and just can't paint happiness. There's a dark underbelly to a lot of his work. I don't think there was ever fear that his stuff would be confused with historical paintings, so he was allowed to do that in the 1960s.
+
+Otherwise, working in historical contexts and painting new frescoes—people would rather do nothing. I think that attitude is softening. I was recently asked to do a big fresco for a monastery in the Marche. We had to get approval from the local Belle Arti, and we did get approval because it wasn't in the church. It was in a space that was basically kind of neutral—a whitewashed, vaulted historical space that didn't have any old art that could be confused with it. It was a new thing.
+
+I think anybody who does something traditional in art or architecture in Italy is often thought of as being a forger or a falsifier. Restoring instead really means that you have something existing to restore.
+
+The guy I studied fresco with had a philosophy about restoration: if you have a fresco that's missing something, you do not fill it in—you plaster the wall and leave them unpainted. You do not fill in the gaps, even if it wouldn't take a lot of imagination to do so. He was rigorous about not replicating or filling in missing bits in frescoes. But I do not share that philosophy.
+
+There is also a tradition in Italy that when you have a missing bit, you can fill it in if you're pretty sure about what was missing; but you're supposed to do it in a technique that's distinguishable—not in true fresco. Let's say you have a purple drapery. The Italian technique is what they call *tratteggio*—it's hatching with little fine brushstrokes. You paint red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, and your eye from a distance reads it as purple. But up close you can see it's a hatching technique, so that future restorers a hundred years from now can distinguish what was original from what wasn't.
+
+*Why do you disagree with your teacher's philosophy about filling in gaps?*
+
+Historically, no one had a problem painting what was missing, scraping off a damaged fresco and painting a new one. That's how we have the history of art we have today. Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling was painted over a decorative blue sky with stars on it. Raphael came into the Stanza della Segnatura, where the School of Athens is, and there were already frescoes that had been begun, but they got rid of them, and he was allowed to start from scratch and repaint everything.
+
+That fear of the past being something we have to cherish to the point at which it becomes untouchable is a really modern idea. I think it's because we have ruined so much stuff. There's a fear now that all we can do is something bad—we're so afraid of our own interventions in the modern world that there's a deep cultural assumption that we're focused on preventing the worst. We're not really interested in encouraging or allowing for the best because we don't trust ourselves.
+
+*We also assume there's a kind of discontinuity or break—that we can't understand what people were trying to do in the past because we are modern now, and therefore we have no ability to be in relationship to that tradition.*
+
+L. P. Hartley said that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." I think there's a problem with the idea of going back to the past. The Renaissance—even though it was a renaissance, which means a "rebirth"—was not a recreation of antiquity. They didn't do neo-antique buildings. They did new buildings using the knowledge of the ancient world as they understood it, but to make new things for new purposes. Neoclassicism is something different. Neoclassicism was really an attempt to recreate antique forms. Everything looked like a temple. The Renaissance didn't do that.
+
+I think we have to have a richer conversation about how you can learn from the past without replicating it. To not learn from the past is to impose on yourself a kind of cultural amnesia that I think is quite destructive. We should be capable of continuity without being afraid of doing a bad version of the past.
+
+I had a professor who was a famous architectural theorist, Colin Rowe—a major theorist about architectural form and urbanism. When I was at the American Academy in Rome, I did a project to fill in the street that leads to St. Peter's; historically, it had been two streets. I presented it, and Colin came to my presentation. He said, "Isn't the problem with doing this kind of architecture that all you'll ever be is a mediocre version of the past?" I said that no, the onus is on us. I don't think there's something in the water or the air that keeps us from doing things as well as they did. It's just that the onus is on us to be as good as we possibly can be—to learn as much as we can. I don't think it's impossible to equal the past.
+
+A lot of modernists assume that the past is so great, they revere it so much that they won't even try because they're afraid of failing. There's a cultural assumption in our world that if you really value the past, it's so great you can't ever achieve what it did, so you should just let it be its own thing and we do our own thing. That's deep in our culture.
+
+*With that in mind, how do you teach your students to develop an architectural sense in cities with many layers? How do you teach them to see a historic city and understand their relationship to it?*
+
+You have to teach principles. You shouldn't teach students to be mimics. You want them to be analytical and try to understand how the thing that they're looking at got to be the way it is. From that, you can induce principles—you can look at a series of particular cases and try to discern what was operating behind them. Those are the things that you can then apprehend and take with you and apply elsewhere, as opposed to mimicking a thing and replicating it.
+
+You have to be able to peel away all the stuff that you see on the surface and try to figure out what the architect was thinking when they first started sketching. Design analysis is design in reverse—you're trying to unwind the process and get back to what was informing it. If you can do that, then that's where you can take the process with you, not the product. That's a big distinction. It's easier to copy—copying is pretty easy, actually. Analytical work, and apprehending a process, is a lot harder.
+
+*How much do students have to know about history in order to understand historical work?*
+
+It's definitely true that you get better at it the more you know. At some level, when you're a raw student and don't know much history, all you're doing is a kind of reacting to what they see. It's my job to give them a little bit of a backstory.
+
+My sense of what schools should teach you is how to continue to learn after you get out of school. Not a repertoire, not a kit of parts or some tricks, but how to learn. That's a lifelong process, and you get better at it the longer you do it.
+
+The more you do things of your own, the better you're able to understand what other people have done, and so that kind of iterative back-and-forth between practicing and studying and practicing and studying makes both of those exercises richer and better over time. I'm still a student—I'm still learning stuff—and I'm better at learning because I've done more things myself.
+
+*Is there a particular building or place you keep coming back to that exemplifies the traditions and creative practice you've been trying to develop?*
+
+In Rome, I think the most sophisticated piazza is Santa Maria della Pace, which was all designed by one architect, Pietro da Cortona, but dealing with existing urban conditions that were imperfect. He tried to mask or transform them into something that is more whole and perfect and woven together. It's almost  symphonic. It's this unbelievably rich dialogue between the church and the fabric of buildings around it. You can't extrapolate that or take that and transplant it elsewhere, but you can definitely try to do that kind of weaving and stitching of things together.
+
+At the Swiss campus, it's a little more call and response. There are ways in which certain things in certain buildings talk to or say things to other buildings. In the gym I painted a fresco at the top of a flight of stairs that climbs about twenty-three feet; when you get to the back there is a loggia. The  fresco I painted in the loggia is the Choice of Hercules, which is supposed to be this idea that he's visited by two female figures that represent virtue and vice. Vice isn't a dissolute life. She offers him a life of ease in the shady grove, but Virtue shows him the hard, rocky, uphill path to fame.
+
+The rest of the hillside was the harder part of the campus to be built, and I didn't know if they were ever going to build it because it was challenging. So I have Virtue pointing uphill with a trowel, basically an admonition to the school to build the rest of the campus, the hard part. And eventually they did, within about ten years.
+
+On the facade of the building at the top of the hill—I designed it and had somebody else paint it—there are two big cornucopias with this great bounty flowing down. The reward for the hard path of climbing the hill is all this good stuff that cascades down on you. When you get up to that building, there's a big arched passage in the stairway, and from there you look out over the Alps and Lake Lugano. It's definitely a reward for having climbed the hill.
+
+I set up a dynamic and told the end of the story when I had the opportunity to do that. But mostly people don't know those stories are there. The students don't know it unless somebody reinforces it or tells them that it's there, as the current headmaster has done. It can be read like a text, even if not everybody has the tools to read it.
+
+*What kinds of responses have you experienced to what you're trying to communicate in architecture? How do people respond to your work? How does it surprise you?*
+
+I think people respond to stories. I had a great professor who taught me a design process but was also really big on the idea that architecture could be narrative—that it can unfold or tell stories—and I think people are really captivated by that. I think the extent to which you can treat your environment as a place that you can read, like it actually has messages—not every environment has it, somebody has to put them there. Most places have a history, and so there's a kind of unspoken story that's often the history of a place.
+
+I do think it's one of our jobs, apart from making buildings behave well together, to tell stories in some way or to contribute to some larger story that our society wants to tell about itself. I think we're desperate for it, actually. We want to believe our world makes sense somehow, and I think we need that. Sometimes people have said you could read our Constitution in the layout of the National Mall and the disposition of buildings in the center of Washington, DC. I think the extent to which our environment, especially in the United States, could do more of that—it could be one of the things that gives us a sense of shared purpose and a sense of what we have in common.
+
+We have enough in common that we can tell some stories. One of the things I get when I present the idea that architecture can be narrative is a lot of people say, "Well, we don't have enough shared stories that everybody could agree on." I don't think that's actually true. I think we have more in common than we think. Often it's the interpretation of our stories that we argue about. If we didn't have some shared principles that allow us to deal with each other every day—those are maybe the protocols, the things underneath who we are—instead of using them as partisan divides, we could be using them as ways of unifying us.
+
+*You can imagine the stories in a village where everybody's going to the same places all the time and everything is marked with meaning—this happened there, this happened there. On the opposite end is this kind of fascist propaganda, which is like the looming building that's telling you exactly one story and you know what's wrong in some way. There has to be something in between.*
+
+There's a difference between iconography and propaganda. I think, historically, most societies talked about who they wanted to be, not who they were. I don't know if you know the _Allegory of Good and Bad Government_ in Siena in the Palazzo Pubblico. It's amazing. It's sometimes called "The Allegory of the Effects of Good and Bad Government in the City." It doesn't really talk about how the government worked. It talked about the ideals that allowed the government to function.
+
+In the allegory of good government, what seems to be a ruler—it's a guy who looks like a king with a sword—is actually *bene comune*, the common good. The ruler of the city is the common good. Through a whole series of connections, he holds a sword that is ultimately tethered to a rope that's being carried by citizens from the figure of Concordia, who's taking two ropes that pass down from the scales of justice. Concordia weaves the rope together and passes it on to the citizens, and the citizens hand it on to the Common Good.
+
+Nobody's going to argue with that. Basically, social concord comes from justice, and it's conveyed to the authorities—who really are themselves just representatives of the common good—by the civic body, by the people of the city. We all want that. That's fourteenth-century Siena, but at some level that's how good, healthy societies operate today, I think.
+
+So I think allegorical messages used to be more based on principles and values, rather than mandating particular kinds of behavior. They were basically shared senses of purpose, and they were aspirational. They tell you, "Here are the virtues, here are the things we need in order to be able to do this," but then the actual mechanics of governance—who knows if Siena ever was like that? They were obviously saying, "We believe this is who we are," but it was probably better than who they were, and it didn't impose anything on anybody other than a shared sense of responsibility.
+
+We shouldn't have a hard time doing that today. I think everybody's too vested in the idea that we're slugging it, out instead of trying to figure out what we could actually share. Ultimately, iconography shouldn't be that mechanistic and specific—it should be more broad and general. You shouldn't be able to argue with the principles; if there's major dissent about the principles, something's wrong.
+
+The statues of Civil War leaders—that's problematic because there is all kinds of stuff behind that was wrong. Whereas celebrating justice—who doesn't want justice? A statue of truth—we should all want that. If we didn't want a statue of truth, that would be a problem.

content/interviews/mwaselela-saving_circles.md

@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ approved: 2025-05-04
 summary: "The practice of collective savings and lending takes many forms, from women-led community finance to mobile-money software."
 location: "Dar es Salaam, Tanzania"
 headshot: "alinagwe_mwaselela.png"
-topics: ["family", "finance", " gender", "software"]
+topics: ["family", "finance", "gender", "software"]
 links: 
   - text: "Jukumu Tanzania (X)"
     url: "https://x.com/JukumuLETU24?t=A7YYfGJUZ3QVJfeh2dVgTA"

content/interviews/newbold-protocol_engineering.md

@@ -0,0 +1,294 @@
+---
+narrator: Bryan Newbold
+subject: Protocol engineering
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-08-12
+approved: 2025-11-09
+summary: "A protocol engineer at the social-media platform Bluesky describes building an open protocol around a fast-growing social media platform."
+location: "Seattle, WA"
+#headshot: "first_last.png"
+topics: [decentralization, open source, organizations, economics, social media, software, standards]
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://bnewbold.net"
+---
+
+*Let's begin with how you introduce yourself. Who are you?*
+
+My name is Bryan Newbold. I work at Bluesky on the AT Protocol. I've worked here for a couple of years, after previously working at the Internet Archive. I have an ongoing interest in the web as a public commons and cultural artifact. I live in Seattle. That's my usual intro.
+
+*How did the story that brought you to Bluesky begin? How did you start working on this new social network? You can go back as far as you want.*
+
+I could go way back to being interested in the web in general, but the more concrete narrative starts with participating in the open source and free software movement. I worked on Open Hardware project. Then I moved cross-country in the early 2010s, which disrupted my career in hardware.
+
+After that move I attended the Recurse Center, a programming workshop, which exposed me to a bunch of new ideas. My project at Recurse was to build a decentralized tool for modeling mathematical equations in the natural sciences. I was trying to build a model of the physical world---one giant equation of how everything works. It was somewhat intentionally over-ambitious, the sort of project that was never going to really work. But it raised questions: How would people collaborate on a huge model? How could different people work on different pieces of it, and then have it all come together?
+
+*But when did you first get into building technology? Was it the math? Was it trying to figure out the nature of things? Was it just building things that were useful to you? What was the starting point?*
+
+I'm a bit uncomfortable with "it all started I was 7 years old" narratives. But I did grow up in a household where my father worked in computer networking. He worked at 3Com under Bob Metcalfe, the Ethernet inventor. Then he worked at various places---Iris, Lotus, IBM.
+
+He worked on Notes, an enterprise software product which used interesting database replication technology. You could synchronize arbitrary company data down onto your laptop. I could see this in practice because we'd go on a family vacation, and he'd be synchronizing his work database at night. The 56K modems back then were slow. There was a vision where workers could download company information  onto personal computers and still collaborate offline. It was a vision of computing technology enabling collaboration.
+
+Like every millennial I grew up with the web. There was constant turn-over on the web---lots of people making their own little websites, participating idealistically. But then later it all centralized into big platforms. When Twitter and Facebook first came out I thought: "These networks are getting big. But presumably they too will churn after a year or two," because that was the pattern at the time. There used to be a hype cycle, but then all at once one last product generation got fixed in stone and the turnover stopped.
+
+That was the start of the decentralization interest for me---this feeling that it would continue to evolve and end up better. I was interested in alternative and decentralized networking technologies because they felt like the natural progression: water running downhill. It felt like giant corporations wouldn't innovate, and that the internet would continue to evolve and stay heterogeneous.
+
+Part of that belief was because people on the early web talked about these dynamics a lot. Using the web was a big deal, part of their identity. The experience was new, and people really thought about what the impact on society would be---how the web should be structured, the power dynamics. The fraction of people caring about the network itself was so high in the early days. It really felt like that aspect was going to continue.
+
+But that energy hasn't stuck around. People got busy, grew up, had kids, had other things to do. They didn't want to spend ten hours a day talking about the impact of blogging on journalism, or what the internet means for civil liberties, or whether it would be the end of religion. Remember early debates about atheism and the internet? What the impact on broader society was going to be? Would it be the end of war? How could you convince normal people to go to war against strangers when everybody can chat directly on IRC? All that churning idealistic energy.
+
+Folks still discuss social impacts today, but much less, and that is crazy because the Internet has become so much more important. So many more people are employed working on the web. Our reality today is that proclamations from "the king" come down on the king's own website as shitposts. That would have sounded like a fever dream in the nineties, but now it's happening. And people are just like, "Oh well, there's nothing we can do. This is just how the web works."
+
+But then Elon Musk bought Twitter and kind of set it on fire. There was this incredible feeling of things becoming un-stuck. The impenetrable fortress of modern, multinational  corporations---how could you possibly out-compete their engineering resources? Their computers are faster, their bandwidth's better, they have so many employees on call, they have trust and safety teams. For a while you couldn't compete with that. But now that is all kind of crumbling.
+
+*Pre-Musk, pre-Bluesky, where were the spaces you were finding, the communities that kept that dream of an open, playful, post-war, post-everything internet alive?*
+
+The dream never full went away. I worked at the Internet Archive during that era of corporate dominance and it felt like an institution holding on to its original ideals. The European hacker scene is more collectivist and politically thoughtful about the impact of technology on society. For many years I would travel to the Chaos Communication Congress. I've probably been to ten or fifteen of them over time. It was always inspiring to see what people there were thinking about, worrying about, working on.
+
+There are role model figures---people like Moxie Marlinspike working on Signal. I have disagreements with some of Signal's decisions, but I'm very impressed by Moxie's principles and drive to take the work seriously and make an impact. I was never close personal friends with him, but being able to watch the Signal project and the debates around it---not just the team building Signal, but a community debating and critiquing it. There was a whole group of people saying, "But you failed to do this, or you were doing it in some way that's problematic." A critical community like that really raises the bar.
+
+Another space keeping the dream alive is wiki energy, which connects to academia and scientific values. The common thread is people trying to work together and make progress for the benefit of broader society, the wiki folks just have a different model and way of working. You don't have to go work at Encyclopedia Britannica---anyone can participate and improve Wikipedia. You don't have to go work at Microsoft on Windows if you want to improve computer security. You can go hack on the Linux kernel or Debian. It's a more direct way for people to participate.
+
+That was a utopian dream for my generation. In the past to contribute you had to go work in a specific place, in a physical setting. Then we got the internet. People could collaborate at great distances and get really impressive, large projects done with less social structure. But it turns out you still need the social structures. It's deeply important. Just leaving things unstructured, nothing happens. Successful projects like Wikipedia, Debian, or Linux stand out as being more structured compared to other open online collaborations.
+
+*In the process of being part of these communities and working at the Archive, what kinds of skills did you develop?*
+
+That's a great question. I don't know about "skills" though. Taste, maybe, or practice debating---developing lines of argument, or a value system. Working at the Archive did gave me experience with their technical approach. They are pretty frugal, trying to get as much done with as little money as possible. They do a kind of scrappy engineering, at large scale. They have buildings, racks, computers. They are not trying to get it done at home on a used laptops. They do have resources, but they try to squeeze the most out of them.
+
+There are some skills there---weird tricks with kernel tuning, things you can do with GZIP that you never thought of, systems you can build cheaply with spinning discs. The actual skills aren't necessarily different, but the line of thinking and debates and background knowledge is different from what you'd get working at a big tech company.
+
+*Take us back to that trip across the country.*
+
+I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. I didn't find a new job when I arrived, so I went to the Recurse Center, which got me thinking more creatively. It shifted me from hardware work---embedded hardware stuff, scientific instrumentation---toward more web, internet, collaborative online stuff.
+
+After Recurse I worked in the tech industry a little, then ended up at the Internet Archive because they had a job opening. There was a career thread where earlier on I had done data collection for scientific instruments---projects doing multiple gigabits of streaming brain data that needed to end up on disk arrays and servers. I was used to working with large amounts of data. The Internet Archive was trying to get a big grant to build a scientific data repository using new dweb tech. The specific protocol was dat://, which was originally pitched as a successor to BitTorrent for doing distribution of research datasets that could be updated. The idea was that scientists would put their data in a folder folder on their laptop, and the system would synchronize out to other server clusters and researchers. Like a Dropbox alternative, but using modern content-addressed data structures and Merkle DAGs.
+
+When I was hired the Archive thought that they were going to get on the bandwagon and work with the dat:// people. I thought that was a good collaboration. The Internet Archive has cheap data storage. Scientists need to store data. If they store it in the commercial cloud, it can be very expensive. All the research data wasn't ending up in a good home and was difficult to access. Researchers need to track down where datasets are actually stored, which causes friction. If researchers got something like a BitTorrent magnet link and could download it from anywhere, that would work better. But torrents don't work right because they don't support updating data. Datasets get corrected, there are errata, things need to be redacted. So you need updates. I thought it was good technology and a good organization. And they needed an engineer to figure this out and make it work.
+
+I was very excited and applied to work at the Archive. But that project fell through immediately. Almost as soon as I started at the Archive, it was like, "Okay, this grant isn't going to happen. We don't actually have a big budget for this." But first I did have a couple of months to dig into implementing the dat:// protocol, and got involved in the community. That was my hook in to the whole DWeb thing.
+
+At the Archive I ended up preserving papers and datasets from the web. I built the scholar.archive.org service and the Fatcat project, neither of which had much to do with peer-to-peer or distributed, decentralized technologies. But the whole time I worked at the Archive I was involved in the dweb scene, because that's what I'd originally be hired for. Other people in the organization were interested in DWeb and we would talk and hang out.
+
+The Archive had been hosting DWeb Summit events. I didn't go to the first one, but they became a series that I attended and helped out with. I'd chat with people about how their projects and new tech could be used at the Internet Archive. That was my introduction to the scene socially.
+
+One connection was Paul Frazee, who worked on the dat:// project and now works at Bluesky. We collaborated a bit on written specifications for dat://. And Jay Graber helped organize some of the DWeb Summit events.
+
+*Let's get into Bluesky. Tell us about your relationship to it, how you saw this project developing, the motivation, and how you got involved.*
+
+I thought Bluesky was bullshit at first. I thought there were more interesting projects in the DWeb scene, things like Secure Scuttlebutt. I knew Jay a bit socially, and I remember her mentioning it early on: "I'm going to try to get involved with this Bluesky thing." I thought to myself: "You are working with Twitter and Jack Dorsey---this sounds extremely suspicious. You are probably wasting your time." I thought she was kind of a hot ticket, and wished she would work on something else. She could have contributed to an existing project or started a non-profit.
+
+Jay is quite smart. She was effective at going around and figuring out what other people were working on. That is an important lesson I've learned from European hackers: First go help other people with their projects. Don't come in with attitude of "I solved the problem"---no one's going to listen to you. You have to go around, fix some patches, try other people's stuff, give other folks attention first if you're going to expect any attention on your own work.
+
+Jay was good at that. She went around, talked to all these other people, got involved in these other protocol discussions, and did write-ups of the differences between protocols. It is so valuable to have someone who is not a founder or competitor do comparisons. Being a credible, neutral party allowed her to do really helpful community work in the DWeb scene.
+
+But with Bluesky I thought, "She's going to get screwed over somehow. Twitter is going to win in some way." I was disappointed that she was working with them. I was impressed when I saw that she had hired Paul. But I was still very skeptical of the venture capital model in general---it has not worked out super well for society.
+
+In the summer of 2022 Bluesky put out a whitepaper and I skimmed it. Later that fall, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next in my career. I liked the Internet Archive, but didn't want to work there forever, and was ready to do something new. I loved working in-person at headquarters, but I had moved up to Seattle during COVID. I was thinking about getting back in to hardware, maybe robotics.
+
+I remember around that time traveling to an Internet Archive event back down in San Francisco. While I was there I had a conversation with Brewster Kahle about what was going on the DWeb scene. Bluesky had put out another white paper about AT Proto, and I started reading it. I though to myself, "Yeah, okay, they really nailed it. But I don't want to work on a DWeb project right now."
+
+I started implementing it in Rust anyways. I stayed up late at night programming while living in a motel room for a week at the Archive event. I traveled back home to Seattle and continued hacking on it. When I finished I thought it would be out of my system. "It works, it's cool. They are probably going to win. This is probably going to be a big deal." But I was done with DWeb.
+
+But then I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Elon was buying Twitter, and all this other crazy stuff was going on.
+
+I'm just pitching you now, I guess---this is kind of the hype story.
+
+*Say more about what attracted you when you were implementing it in Rust. What stood out to you about this approach?*
+
+The protocol was simple enough that I could implement it as a solo developer. There are a couple of bigger projects floating around---SOLID or these other efforts---and they are like two hundred pages of specifications. To be fair, AT Proto has gotten more complex. But at the time it was a relatively simple thing I could dive into.
+
+I had been hacking on IPFS, which was less web-y and more about file sharing, a kind of distributed file system. Looking at IPFS, looking at Scuttlebutt, looking back to these ancient things like W.A.S.T.E. and GNUNet, I had seen a lot of projects and knew what might work. AT Proto really nailed this balance of peer-to-peer stuff and web stuff.
+
+The web works, right? The traditional web, HTTP, HTML---that stuff is pretty accessible. Working with it feels like you're on the right path. The Internet Archive builds on all that. Indexing webpages, dealing with billions of documents, dealing with URLs---everything just kind of works. So if you can make your system function more like the web, things will work. We all know the web works from a scaling and infrastructure perspective.
+
+AT Proto is pretty web-y. It's not trying to force developers into the pattern of "all the data will be on your phone, you have to index everything on your phone, you need to figure out how to get your phone to talk to everyone else." Instead it says, "Nope, you're going to have big servers, and they cost some money, but it works. You can build big indexes." But at the same time they kept all the user autonomy and control that you get from the more peer-to-peer stuff. The cryptographic ownership aspects---they retained a lot of that.
+
+I take part in puzzle hunts, like the MIT Mystery Hunt. When you start solving a puzzle, you're like, "How am I going to approach this?" But some point, even if you don't have the final solution, you can see how you're going to solve it. And when you see it, you're always like, "This is going to work." That it is elegant enough to work. That's how I felt with AT Proto. It was just like, "This is going to work. I can see how it will all fit together, and it's actually going to work."
+
+*Did you join pre- or post-Musk's takeover?*
+
+I think he had completely taken over when I started. It had been going on all summer, and I just---
+
+*And people were already migrating, right?*
+
+At the time people were migrating to ActivityPub. When I started taking Bluesky more seriously, they had a public chatroom, and I joined it. I talked to Paul, and because I had implemented the protocol, he was asked if I was interested in working with them. "Is this something you want to do?" Initially I replied, "No, I don't want to social media stuff. I want to go back and do robotics."
+
+But two weeks later, I was replied, "Okay, I can't stop thinking about this. It's actually going to work, so I'll come work for you." Right around that same time they were getting a prototype of the app working. They hadn't really announced that they were going to do an app yet. They were making a decision to pivot away from just R&D and to build an app. I got in during that early transition phase.
+
+*Was that in 2022?*
+
+This was all around November 2022. October was the event at the Internet Archive, and November was when I was hacking. I started work the first week of January. But before starting I went on a good bike trip.
+
+At the same time as all of this, ActivityPub was starting to take off. Some time around that summer or fall, the Internet Archive set up a Mastodon instance, and I was pretty excited about that.
+
+I had never really used Twitter. I had an account for a month, but on principle I was against using corporate social media since I was in high school or college. I'd never really used Twitter and always felt it had a bad impact on people around me.
+
+But there was some appeal, so it was fun to use Mastodon. I got to experiment and experience that kind of social media. The library community is pretty online, and people have relatively healthy, productive conversations on social media around archives. It's a good way to find out about events and new projects and gossip---all the classic stuff. So it was fun to start using it.
+
+But there are some usability issues with Mastodon, which I still feel conflicted about. I do think they could probably be resolved over time. I do think that ActivityPub will last. It's going to be like IRC---it will not grow and be mainstream, but it works for a number of communities quite well. The experience works for some folks.
+
+*Now you're at a moment where Elon Musk has bought Twitter, you're working for a project that had spun out of Twitter and was starting to become a competitor, and it had gone from building a protocol architecture to actually building a product. Talk about what you started getting involved in there. First of all, was your title Protocol Engineer from the beginning?*
+
+Yeah, it was. I originally applied for the only open job position, which was DevOps, kind of like being a sysadmin. I had done a lot of sysadmin and scaling stuff at the Internet Archive, and at the job before that I had been doing infrastructure stuff. It was my most marketable skill set, and the role I was most likely to be hired for. So that's what I applied for. But they someone else for that at the same time as me, and I was put on protocol engineering.
+
+*What is it like to build a protocol in the context of a new product that's growing and starting to be in the political spotlight?*
+
+It's interesting. To be clear, many of the core ideas had already been worked out before I started. They had gone through a couple rounds of design iteration. So I can't say that I came up with many of the ideas.
+
+My first day, I remember very clearly. My first week was a team offsite which I flew out for, then sat down in the airport. When I landed, I had been granted access to all the internal documentation, which I hadn't seen, so I was like, "All the secrets! Surely the plan is in here---the rest of the protocol, the federation parts." Before I applied I had seen that it could all fit together, but the federation details were not public.
+
+So I sat down in the airport reading for two hours, while the team called me: "Where are you? Why haven't you shown up yet." I was trying to find the details, but the design wasn't done. There were still big parts missing. The main pieces were there, but a lot of details were not.
+
+That time was very intense because there was a feeling of a historic window being open. Through my first two years, every time Twitter did something weird that drove everyone nuts, we'd think, "Surely this can't be real. Elon Musk is weird and eccentric and seems like kind of a jerk, but surely he won't drive Twitter into the wall repeatedly. He just spent so much money on it."
+
+We felt we had a short window to get the protocol out before Twitter changed direction again, hired a new CEO, and cleaned up the mess. There was a huge amount of time pressure---just insane pressure to get it all launched, get a product out that both worked and used the protocol, and to do moderation and safety and comms and everything. There was high pressure on all dimensions at the same time.
+
+That was a very intense period, trying to get it launched. To some degree, we were just incredibly lucky and fortunate. By historical accident, because of external events, we had a huge amount of press attention. Anytime we wanted an interview, we just picked up the phone and someone would do the interview. People would give us their time and attention and give the app a chance. If we gave people invite codes, they'd come over, try it out, and write about it. People were endlessly patient---for the most part---about bugs or slowness or these other things. That is pretty incredible in the modern era.
+
+Everyone on the team, and Jay in particular, has an awareness of modern markets and monopoly power and how the whole project could go wrong. She is very attuned to power dynamics between the government and companies and individuals, and extreme wealth. She wants us to build a company that will not enshittify and go wrong, which is hard. It's hard to come up with a business model that cannot go wrong.
+
+There was a lot of pressure to get these these conceptual long-term things right and to actually make it work at the same time. It was the right kind of pressure, but it was very intense to get everything done. Figuring out how to sequence things was painful and difficult, but also classic for an early startup. "What do we work on this week versus next week," endlessly.
+
+*Can you articulate why the approach of designing around a protocol was so important? I remember that was part of the original idea of what Jack Dorsey wanted to create out of Twitter---to build a protocol around it so that the platform itself wouldn't be responsible for everything.*
+
+To some degree, we are a protocol company. We talk about the protocol a lot. We're all interested in protocols, we like protocol values. But the protocol for the sake of protocol doesn't matter. It's interoperation that matters---working with other projects.
+
+Around the time I started, thinking was solidifying around a core thesis. We focused a lot on "credible exit"---credible exit being that users can walk away. You can't have decentralization without that. You need that counter-pressure on the operators. There are many ways to define decentralization, and I don't think credible exit on its own is sufficient for decentralization---they are related but different concepts.
+
+Another phase we used a lot internally: "No one organization should moderate the entire internet." We say that over and over again.
+
+There were so many times when it would be tempting to just have one organization that operated some aspect of the network. But we would come back to the goals over and over again. We would iterate on architectures and ideas and shift things around. Does this design give us credible exit? Can other people build on top of it? Will it avoid one party moderating the entire internet? We came back to those questions a lot.
+
+Everyone on the team was influenced by Mike Masnick's essay, "Protocols, Not Platforms," which was a founding document. The design challenge was to ensure that there was no piece of the system that could not be substituted. That's a big thing for us---that's still how we think about it. There are pieces of the protocol we haven't finished yet, like private data, and we relentlessly ask: How will you be able substitute that? How can a small new company or team---not necessarily a hobbyist, but a group who is really trying to build infrastructure---have a relatively smooth on-ramp into the network?
+
+A small team needs to be able to grow market share. You need to be able to come in and compete and start seeing success, or new providers will never join. The system has to be designed with antitrust in mind, and remove any points where you could squeeze and exploit too much.
+
+Those are the goals, and we try not to violate those goals. There are a bunch of other ideals we haven't delivered---community stuff, democracy. I'm interested in those. The team isn't against them, but when we are up at 4 a.m. sweating, the anxiety isn't "how do we make sure everyone has a vote?" It's "how do we make sure that no one party is moderating the whole internet? How do we make sure you have credible exit and new people can come in and compete?"
+
+Those are the core values, and the protocol is a means to those ends. How do you have credible exit? You need to be able to take your stuff and import it into another server, and it can't be hard. It needs to be an easy thing to do. That's why account migration ended up being such an important thing.
+
+This has been a fun weekend for account migration---the Blacksky PDS is getting up and running, and more people are migrating. By total numbers, it's not huge, but this is a moment when some of these ideas are being tested.
+
+*I'd love to hear about building a protocol while also building a product and trying to solve user problems. ActivityPub was designed in the context of the W3C, kind of in the abstract, and then Mastodon showed up and implemented some of it. But it was a protocol designed not necessarily with a single product in mind. You've been designing a protocol while also building a product and trying to solve user problems. What are the advantages and disadvantages of building a protocol that way, while the plane's flying?*
+
+My understanding of the history is that ActivityPub came out of a succession of similar protocols and projects. There was a moment where there were three or four small but growing projects, and they were like, "We should interoperate better." They were not all building the same thing, but they were all doing somewhat similar things. So they went to the W3C and said, "Let's do a standard."
+
+They were trying to get existing projects to interoperate, and they were not people who had standards experience before. That is not normally a thing the W3C does, but somehow they were able to get a working group and make it happen. It was a painful process. I think most people involved have said the ActivityPub working group was a difficult process.
+
+They were a bunch of projects trying to figure out a kind of lowest common denominator. Mastodon already existed and was one of the larger project, and during the W3C process Mastodon continued to grow. But they only updated Mastodon a bit to match ActivityPub. Mastodon doesn't implement all the details. I'm very sympathetic, it's a hard situation, and that they tried at all is really admirable.
+
+The situation for Bluesky is very different. We are doing the "cathedral" thing. We have six people sitting together in a conference room. We are all aligned, we're all working on the same thing. The core ideas came from three or four individuals, all of whom had worked on other projects and protocols and had thrown them away. We started with a blank slate.
+
+The original idea was that Bluesky would build a protocol that Twitter could run on, at scale, but even from the beginning, everyone on the team was more ambitious. We want the protocol to be general purpose. We don't want it just to be microblogging. It is a good first use-case, but we want it to work for other things.
+
+What was it like doing the product and the protocol together? It worked in the ways you would want it to work. The people designing the protocol were the people who were getting paged on the weekend because the service wasn't working. So they are really motivated to fix performance issues in the protocol. Enough of us were programmers that we were doing separate implementations and testing to make sure that the implementations all interoperated from the beginning. So the specifications stayed pretty close to implementation and implementation to specification. Not perfect, but we've kept it much tighter, and we were able to do that because we were all on the same team. It wasn't like we were writing the protocol and then we tossed it over the wall to developers.
+
+That is a value people have had in standards for a long time. The IETF embodies it. They have the slogan of "rough consensus and running code," where the work is not done until someone has implemented it. I suspect that never happened with ActivityPub---no one had built an app that implemented the entire ActivityPub standard completely and correctly before it was ratified. When you do implementation work, it turns up issues. It's like trying to write a recipe without making the meal.
+
+As a tangential analogy: I worked on LIGO as an intern. LIGO is this giant gravitational observatory. They were working on an iteration of the entire whole system to upgrade the end mirrors. All the work was done in CAD, and they had designed this huge aluminum structure. One of my tasks as an undergrad was spending two or three weeks just putting it all together. They had the structure machined and were like, "We don't know if a human can actually put it together," because when you use CAD, there can be problems where you can't actually get a bolt in to position or you can't fit a tool.
+
+So it's worth having a human put together a prototype to make sure it all works. You have to do that with standards. You can't just specify things and assume it's going to work. You've got to actually implement it and make sure it fits together. Really, you need more than one person to do it.
+
+For all the core parts of AT Proto, we've had at least two people implement it independently and make sure the implementations work together before we publish the specs. We had the resources to do it. A lot of that was having funding. We had time and money. People can still do this if they are not in the same company, but it sure helped to do it together.
+
+In retrospect, the protocol-product design loop was tightest---with feedback from the user base or external people critiquing the protocol---back when we were not interoperating at all yet. We were still making major changes to the protocol. That was really only a six-month window.
+
+We made a bunch of changes. The most famous in my mind was getting rid of repo history. By default, we were saving all the old revisions. So if you deleted a post, it would still be there, like in Git. We knew that we needed to be able to purge things, because of experience with Secure Scuttlebutt. So from the start we did build in a special operation that deleted history.
+
+But what we were finding was---literally, there was a situation where a bunch of people were posting nudes, and then an elected congressperson was seeing at the nudes and talking about it. People were like, "Oh my god, I need all my nudes out of here immediately. When I delete the nudes, they need to be gone now, reliably." Developers were starting to build a service that would purge history every time you deleted a post, and we're like, "Okay, this is a mess. We need to get rid of history." Clearly, when confronted with real users, it just wasn't going to work. That was the biggest change.
+
+There are other problems we still haven't figured out a solution to. Having blocks be public and enumerable clearly drives everyone insane, and we would really like to get rid of that. We just haven't quite found a way. We spent a lot of time thinking about that one.
+
+I don't know how to replicate the opportunity we had. We had fifty thousand, one hundred thousand extremely online, extremely experienced, very engaged, very positive and hopeful people giving us lots of feedback while we were building. I hated that we were not interoperating at the time, and I was super anxious that we weren't ever going to interoperate properly. But it did let us make major changes to the protocol without having to worry that we were breaking other projects.
+
+Today if we want to make a protocol change, it's like, "How are we going to roll this out to the network?" We are still the authority. We haven't completely turned over protocol authority yet, so we don't have to have a public debate. If we decide we want to make a change, we do have to figure out how it's going to roll out. We do increasingly need to get out of being the authority though.
+
+*But it sounds like there are advantages to retaining that control and to not having really widespread federation in the process when you're designing and working through some of these issues.*
+
+There was a time when it was important for us to move fast and iterate. But the tradeoff is that the network can get too centralized. So there's a question of when is having control is beneficial, and when is it not. It's not the only way to do protocol work. I don't think you need to do it this way.
+
+It's like Apple coming up with a protocol. You're like, "Is this going to be the best for everyone? Or is it just good for that company? What were their motivations? What were they trying to do?" I would be very skeptical if Apple put out a protocol. The process we have taken is kind of like Apple coming up with a protocol. The Google Chrome team develops tons of web standards, but is that one team designing everything really in everybody's best interest?
+
+I think our process worked out---at least it has worked out to come up with the nugget of ideas. The protocol is compact. It clearly fits in one or two people's brains. It works for one application quite well. We were able to really focus. Especially because the company was still a startup, there weren't complicated internal politics or anything. No one was trying to get the numbers up this month or other things. We were just trying to make the protocol good. So we were able to do that.
+
+I think the small team model is a good tool in the toolbox, and good option for designing protocols. The analogy I make is public research funding. How should do you give out funding? Should people be accountable and assessed every year? Every quarter? How long is the grant for? Two years? How long of a runway is right? If it's too long, maybe you just slack off and never get anything done. Or if it is too short, you're just constantly doing paperwork and going month to month.
+
+There are people who talk about DARPA, or the original ARPA, and they say, "If you could get five people for five years, that's just a real sweet spot." For a modern academic, it's like, "Five years? That's a very long time! And five people? That's a whole group!"
+
+It is enough time to breathe. It's not a whole career, but you can get a lot of work done. I feel like we kind of got that. Because of external events, we didn't get the full five years. We had to do it in a year or so. But that model, I think, has a lot of appeal. I don't think all research should be done this way, but this timeframe and size of a team is enough to do good, focused work.
+
+*What are you learning from other projects that are starting to use AT Proto to do things other than microblogging, or from people who are starting to build other services on top of Bluesky, like the personal data servers? What is surprising you about how other people are starting to take up the protocol?*
+
+The other people have been pretty great. We don't really have any jerks in the ecosystem. I really enjoy talking to the other people building stuff with AT Proto, and that has not been my experience in free software in general. There are some great people in free software, but it can be pretty mixed overall. Even software projects I really love, often it's like, "This is fun, but I do want to avoid..." It's fun with a big asterisk.
+
+But broadly, I can say that the AT Proto development community is just great vibes, and really smart, thoughtful people. I really like that.
+
+I think one big distinction from the ActivityPub community is in being "open for business." We are intentionally open to people building businesses. There are some startups building on the protocol, and that's good. There are still open questions about how all the funding will work, how monetization will work. But we are open about it, and we want to figure it out. We want people to experiment with money. Though there are people who are strictly hobbyists as well.
+
+People are coming up with a bunch of technical tricks. It's really impressive what some people have been able to cram on to teeny devices. Using exotic database engines or weird indexing solutions---I've learned some new things about databases I had never seen before. So there's definitely some technical learning from the ecosystem.
+
+Everything is communications. For the people who have made attempts at moderation or community-building projects, communications is everything. You have to build trust, and whatever the internal processes are or whatever safeguards you build, all that matters is communications.
+
+I've seen so many projects flame out and get dragged down by their communities. While other projects have been more successful and have community support and legitimacy. I want to say it's because they have voting or some form of direct accountability like that, but really so much of it is just being out there and being personally accountable, and apologizing and owning failures. Classic community leadership things.
+
+Especially for social media, what's most important for success is having leadership and processes, and responding to people out in the open.
+
+*Where do those conversations take place? Is it through posts on Bluesky, or are there dedicated spaces where people are debating potential changes to AT Proto?*
+
+Mostly posts on Bluesky.
+
+It has been interesting to see who feels empowered to make bold proposals about parts of the protocol and who does not. For a long time we were quite worried that people would rip the protocol out of our hands, or use it in ways that we thought were bad. That made us hesitant at times.
+
+Maybe we did the right thing and it was important to thread the needle the way we did. Or maybe we had too much anxiety and could have let people pull it out of our hands sooner. I don't think our approach was a big mistake either way.
+
+*Where are you now in the process of moving that protocol, the governance of that protocol, outside of the organization, outside of Bluesky?*
+
+There are two parts to that. Your question is how are we moving governance of the design of the protocol out of Bluesky. The other part is material decentralization: who else is powerful in the ecosystem? The two parts are entwined---maybe a chicken and the egg thing. We have to do both.
+
+Other people are taking big steps, setting up independent hosting and building other apps, and that helps. To some degree that was a blocker for creating a standard through the IETF---they want to see other implementations by other parties. So we couldn't move forward on governance until there were other projects, or it didn't really make sense to try. But on the other hand, not a lot of people want to take the leap of investing time and energy in a protocol if there isn't clear governance. So the two parts have to go together. Recently we have been focusing on encouraging projects getting built, and being responsive to the frictions that people identify when they do.
+
+I just traveled to an IETF event a couple weeks ago. There is a long history of projects that get taken to the IETF and succeed or fail. We are trying to find the path that will make sense for the IETF folks. They would be investing a fair amount of time in facilitation for ATproto. We want to make sure we are doing the process right. So there is diplomacy there, and it's a slow process. I think it is going well, and we will be taking more steps in this direction.
+
+But bringing the protocol to the IETF raises new questions. Who gets to participate in governance there? At a minimum, there ends up being a public mailing list and people can bring their concerns. There is an expectation of responses to points raised on the mailing list. It's a little more formal. It's different from people complaining in the app, who often have very good points. The set of people who are going to participate in these venues is pretty different.
+
+The goal is to bring the protocol to an existing venue and have Bluesky-the-company transition from being the sole authority to being just a participant with opinions. Because the team does have strong opinions, and we want to be able to express our opinions to peer participants---have a debate, basically. If we set up our own venue and inviting people in, we would have to play the host, and we wouldn't get to debate. That's some of our thinking.
+
+We tried to design the protocol so that it does not result in a single community structure. Instead you build multiple communities on top. We do have an ecosystem of many developers working on the protocol itself. But if you need to be a protocol engineer to change how the social structure of the web works, that's not a great outcome. The IETF should not be the venue for content moderation decisions or a lot of the important questions of how communities function.
+
+We tried to design a infrastructure layer of the protocol that has a couple opinionated values baked in---like credible exit---and then we want to have communities build on top in a way that Bluesky can't exploit them.
+
+I imagine that the protocol governance will matter less over time. When you take a protocol to the IETF, there's a period of debate, there are questions that get resolved, and then it gets frozen. So it's not such a living thing after a certain point.
+
+*Say a bit more about your experience hearing about people's feedback using the app. Bluesky gone through, as any social network has, some crises around moderation and disagreements over what a social network should look and feel like. On the one hand, you have to address those. On the other hand, you have this longer-term vision---that people will build their own moderation systems. But that answer is, in the short term, not satisfying to a frustrated user. Is there something that you hope users in the future, in a more protocolized social network landscape, might think differently about? Are there ways in which we should be shifting our expectations for how these networks should function?*
+
+It can be tempting to respond to folks, "Open a pull request, or fork the code," or something like that. I think that is just being dismissive. Because it's usually being addressed to an individual who doesn't necessarily know how to do all those things, and doesn't have venture capital funding to do it. That is why I want there to be many institutions involved, of different types---some are going to be startup companies, some are going to be tech companies, but I hope some of them will be small community groups or civic groups. It's groups with funding, who have figured out how to have a bank account. I want more of that.
+
+There are a lot of existing groups and organizations in society that could be participating online in healthier ways. That's my idealistic, optimistic goal---to make it possible for more people to participate through organized groups. It's not necessarily going to be an individualist, libertarian thing. Groups, small organizations---that's my hope.
+
+*I think there's an interesting learning curve. In the context of my university, when they were coming on to Bluesky, I was working with the social media team as they were doing that. The idea of moving from a bsky.social handle to our university's domain as a handle was a difficult unlock. They said, "We want an account on the platform, and you're telling us we have to set up our domain name as a handle?" The idea that they were one node in a network was very foreign, as opposed to just relying on somebody else's infrastructure.*
+
+I would love for institutions to manage their social networks more. The trend is in the other direction, unfortunately. It wasn't that long ago that many universities ran their own email servers, but today they mostly do not. It's not that the email protocol changed, or that it got bought out. It is just easier to pay someone else to do it.
+
+I think Bluesky set a reasonable baseline for the network. If it was just a hellscape when you first logged on, then no one would want have anything to do with the protocol. The stakes for moderation and accountability and legitimacy were quite high from the beginning, so we had to get those right. We have ever-growing and improving moderation and trust-and-safety resources. More recently we have been able to catch our breath on a lot of fronts, finally, and start to raise the bar and do better.
+
+The rest of the industry has just walked away from talking about trust and safety, so Bluesky has a growing role in that area. But on the flip side, I hope that the importance of our moderation work to the network decreases over time. We have shown that moderation can be done in the network, and it's not a hellscape. That doing an open protocol doesn't mean you're going to be awash with spam.
+
+To be clear, we've shown it as a dominant company. The question of whether we can do this with no one company controlling more than ten percent of the network---that remains to be seen. But I think the decision to moderate made the network appealing and approachable enough for other people to get involved. I think that was an important phase to get through.
+
+If we had been really stridently at the start, like "We're not going to moderate the network at all," we would never have gotten as far. It has been tempting at a number of points to respond, "If you don't like the moderation, do it yourself."
+
+One take is that we should have done moderation even worse. We could have been super evil to encourage people to move off our servers and build their own infrastructure. But I don't think that would have worked. I think we needed to do a decent job with moderation, and I think we have.
+
+It is tempting to think, "Can we take the weekend off?" When I was in elementary school, the school held a fundraiser, and one of the auction items was "your child can be principal for the day." When you're a kid, you think, "Wow, they're really letting a kid be principal?" I think about that sometimes... what did it feel like for the principal. "Alright, you think it's so easy?"
+
+*What lessons would you share with people building protocols---someone starting from scratch, or someone who's taking over your job?*
+
+I don't know! A lot of the Bluesky story has been driven by historic events. It's just been really weird. That is awkward because I would like to be a role model and have a process that is reproducible, but a lot of our story hasn't gone that way.
+
+I think it important not be totalitarian about protocols. A lot of designers have very grand ambitions. But draw a box around your project and try to make it as small a box as possible. Start by contributing to existing projects and find allies that you can work with, so you're not alone. Don't make it all about just your project. Try to make it so your new thing fits into an ecosystem, and spend time making attachment and integration points actually work.
+
+I don't know if we've done that super well, but we tried. Bluesky is not trying to reinvent how TCP/IP works. Sometimes early projects tend to be over-ambitious or take on too much.
+
+The other thing is what Jay did so well early on: go help other people first. Go and learn from them. If you're a coder, go fix a couple issues in other people's projects. Even simply install their thing. Set up an instance. Even if you think you're not going to like it, go participate in what other people have done first and give it a try. You'll at least get the flavor of it, and a feel for what you could do better. You're building social capital when you talk to other people about their projects. I think that is important.
+
+As a last thing, you either need to be in very tight contact with a diverse set of users, or you've got to be a really active user yourself of whatever you are building. Especially if you have a small group or a small team. Trying to fix a problem that you don't care about or that you don't have intimate experience with does not usually work out well.

content/interviews/odinenu-igbo_music.md

@@ -0,0 +1,166 @@
+---
+narrator: "Keren-happuch Odinenu"
+subject: "Igbo music"
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-09-22
+approved: 2025-09-24
+summary: "A singer-songwriter moves between ancestral traditions and contemporary social-media cultures."
+location: "Abuja, Nigeria"
+headshot: "keren-happuch_odinenu.jpg"
+topics: [ancestors, art, dance, family, indigeneity, language, music, ritual, social media]
+links:
+  - text: "Kenké on Linktree"
+    url: "https://linktr.ee/thekenke"
+---
+
+*Can you tell me how you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+I like to be introduced as Kenké because it's who I've always been. I've also been Keren-happuch. People now call me Kenké, and that is also my artist name. But for this project, I could go by my formal name, my actual government name, Keren-happuch. Identity, especially regarding names, is something I have grappled with for a while.
+
+*What does Kenké mean, and why is that your name as an artist?*
+
+Kenké was actually derived from Keren-happuch. In Nigeria, like in many different cultures around the world, sometimes people coin nicknames from your actual name that may not sound like your actual name but are inspired by it. In my household, my dad and mom started calling me Kenké. The people closest to me---my family, some of my friends---they call me Kenké.
+
+My name, Keren-happuch, has huge significance in my life and the way I view myself, but I realized going into the music industry that naming is very important for ease of remembrance. I would go for shows and people would ask, "What is your Instagram handle? What is your name?" Every time I said Keren-happuch, either they missed it or had to repeat it or had to write it down. It made it difficult to be found, to be perceived. Unfortunately, when people hear "Keren," they think I'm saying "Karen." Coming to the US, that became a big thing because people think I'm a black girl called Karen. Apart from the unfortunate stereotype around the name, they're two different names. Mine is actually Hebrew, Keren-happuch, and I believe Karen is of English origin.
+
+I thought I needed to be comfortable using a different name, but I also wanted a name that was already mine and that already meant and felt what Keren-happuch meant and felt. Because Kenké came from Keren-happuch, I say it means the exact same thing that Keren-happuch means.
+
+*Tell me about that significance.*
+
+Keren-happuch means---when you search it up, you see different meanings of the name, but all having one interpretation. You see things like "horns of makeup," "splendor of color," "radiance of beauty." When I did some research I found that they all meant outward beauty that comes from inward character. I'd think that's how I've tried to live my life. The physical is great and all, but it is fleeting. The real essence of humanity is what's inside. Are you kind? Are you actually seeking to be better to people, to yourself? That's how I've tried to live my life. I feel my best outwardly when I feel my best inside.
+
+*You're a professional musician doing contemporary music, but you've also created a documentary about traditional music in Nigeria. Can you talk about where your journey as a musician began and how those different threads fit together in your early relationship to music?*
+
+I started in the children's choir of my church when I was about seven or eight because we were so involved in church. Someone said they wanted to form a girl band---there were all these talented children in the choir. He picked six of us. We started to write songs, go into the studio, and perform in church. I was largely inspired by my elder sister---she's late now---but she used to do music, write, and sing. I used to watch her. I started writing early, started playing guitar early.
+
+After secondary school, I went to do my undergrad in the eastern part of Nigeria where I'm from. In Nigeria, we are from where our parents are from, where our grandparents are from. It doesn't matter where you're born. Even though I was born in Abuja, in the northern part of Nigeria, I cannot say I'm from Abuja. I'm from Anambra State in the eastern part of Nigeria.
+
+It's very common in Igbo culture for people to return back to their hometown every year. You see people living in the Western world---America, the UK, Canada---a lot of people from Igboland go back during Christmas. Even while I was growing up, living in Abuja, it was the regular tradition to go back home during Christmas. My dad said that wasn't enough. He wanted me to consider going to school in the east, in Anambra State. I applied for my university program there, got in, and went. I spent the next four years of my life there.
+
+Even though I've always been an Igbo person, it was different being there and interacting with people who were born there, who had grown up there. Because I would naturally gravitate towards music, I became very fast friends with a lot of people from the music department. I met somebody who was doing his research in Igbo music traditions. Of course you have to learn classical music and classical instruments while you're in the music program, but he was also focusing his research on traditional music. He played the oja. That was the first time I was introduced to this instrument.
+
+If you grow up as an Igbo person, or even a Nigerian, and you are in the East for a while, the oja is not foreign or strange to you---but I never understood it. I never really tried to understand it at that time, but I was still fascinated by it. My earliest memory of how it could move the spirit of people was when this friend of mine, his name is Gerald Eze, came to visit my grandmother's home in the village during one of the many Christmases I spent back there. He always carried his oja with him. They call him Ogbu Oja---that is, the player of the oja. My grandma said, "Ah, Ogbu Oja, you've come to see me. Play something for me." And he did.
+
+My grandmother---she's old. She walks with a limp. She doesn't walk without the aid of her stick anymore. But for some reason, in that moment, as he started to play, she jumped up and she started to dance. It was maybe ten seconds, but I had never seen her move like that. I didn't know she was capable of that. I don't think she knew at the time that she was capable of that anymore. It was so short, but it was so profound for me because I had heard stories about this oja. But seeing it---it really does move something in a lot of people who have been in that cultural space, who have been in that place of Igbo history, Igbo tradition, who are Igbo themselves.
+
+I didn't know specifically what it was. I came to know more over time. But I remember it unlocked a part of my brain that felt I would love to know more about this. When I came to graduate school in the US, I kept thinking, "What could I possibly do my final project on?" I realized that I wanted to leave a part of my culture there. I realized that I didn't just want to do it for the university. I wanted to do it for people in that school, in Unizik in Nigeria, for people in Abuja. I wanted to do it for Igbo people, but I also wanted to do it for people who were interested in learning about a different culture. I'm an Igbo person, but it took making the documentary to learn about this tradition. It makes you realize that lots of people in the eastern part of Nigeria don't know a lot about the cultures that have existed or are existing there.
+
+*For those who aren't familiar, can you talk a bit about oja and the context in which it is played?*
+
+The oja is a wooden flute played among the Igbo people of Nigeria. It is also a musical tradition. It used to be for the hunters' guild, the warriors' community. The people who played the oja, the ogbu ojas, would play it to usher the warriors in. You would always find in the past a warrior accompanied by his ogbu oja.
+
+It was also used to communicate. Sometimes the oja would warn people of impending danger---because the oja speaks, the oja communicates. How does it speak? It speaks through the Igbo language. The Igbo language is musical. You could say "*abatete*," and when the oja is trying to communicate that, it says it through what we know now as musical notes in English. For the people who were in tune with how the oja speaks, they would understand.
+
+Sometimes if you couldn't tell someone---maybe you're at a function, and you couldn't tell someone with words---"Be careful of who's sitting next to you," or "Your drink may have been poisoned," or "This person is looking at you suspiciously." Sometimes the oja would do that. Even though you're an Igbo person, not all Igbo people can understand it. It's the warriors and the ogbu ojas that are accompanying them who have that synergy.
+
+Over time, it started to be used as entertainment. You would see the oja being used to introduce the masquerades. Now, every time you see a masquerade in the Igbo community setting, you see someone playing the oja right next to them. What I learned during that process was, because it's the language of the spirits, it was used to accompany spirits. The hunters were seen as the spiritual protectors of the communities in human form. Some people believe masquerades are just costumes, but in my culture today, there are masquerades where there's a lot of spirituality around them. There are masquerades that come out for entertainment, but there are masquerades that don't come out except when there's something that brings them out. People don't know where they come from, people don't know where they go to. In those cases, this is why the oja is always accompanying the masquerade---because it's always accompanying the spirits.
+
+*I'm curious---when we're talking about spirits, how does the spirituality encountered there through this instrument in Igboland relate to the other kinds of spirituality that you learned in church growing up?*
+
+I studied religion in my undergrad. I was studying the history of the Catholic church and taking classes on African traditional religion. I'm also a person of faith. I'm a Catholic, and I believe in Jesus Christ.
+
+Some of the people I interviewed during that process---like Ed Keazor, who's a documentary filmmaker and a historian of Igbo culture---and some of the priests I interviewed---like Father Chika Opalike---said when people came in, when the white men came in to colonize Africa, to colonize Nigeria, they didn't seek to understand the culture. I feel we live in a spiritual world, and that spirituality has taken on different forms of expression over time. Unfortunately, colonial masters came and said that everything they didn't understand was evil. I've seen how the oja has taken on a different form of expression now. I wonder, if it can be played in the church now, is it still evil? And if it's evil, shouldn't we have known by now? During the consecration of the body and blood of Christ, God would have come down by now if it was evil.
+
+There are so many things that can speak to the spirit of a person. In my research, there was never a time I heard the oja used to do evil things or to say evil things. It was always supposed to usher in something good. All the spirits that it was said to usher in were spirits that had to do with protecting the community. When it had to do with communication, it was mostly trying to warn about evil, trying to protect---it was always used in that sense.
+
+I did experience moments where I felt, "How do I make sense of this, coming from my background as a Christian?" But listening to the people I interviewed helped, because I started to see that these things are also created by God. He's the inspirer. He makes everything. How we use that is a human problem, but in and of itself, that inspiration, that tradition---I believe it was put into the heart of the Igbo people by the Creator as well.
+
+*How is the oja used today?*
+
+You will still see the oja being used to usher in the masquerades during the festivals. I was in my village last Christmas, so I experienced it all again. It's so beautiful to see how it has transitioned into different traditions and spaces. You will still see the oja in some churches, especially in the east, because this is an instrument that's predominantly played and understood in the eastern part of Nigeria. I've never seen it played at Mass in the northern part of Nigeria, or the western part of Nigeria. But in the eastern part of Nigeria, I've seen it quite a few times.
+
+Because this is an instrument that has a way of moving a particular cultural group, when it is used in that moment of consecration---in the Mass, in that holy moment---it does something special for the people experiencing it. They are Christians. They are about to receive the body and blood of Christ. But they are also Igbo people. They are people whose hearts and spirits and ancestry are conditioned to receive the oja. I feel it is an elevated, heightened sense of the divine in that moment, because I experienced it. It felt different from when I hear other music during the consecration of body and blood of Christ. I was moved more. I can only imagine what it does to other Igbo people in that setting.
+
+The oja is now being used purely as entertainment in other musical genres as well, which is a big thing because it is cultural exchange. This tradition is permeating more modern circles. We have Afrobeats now, which is the fusion. When we talked about Afrobeat in the past, we think about people like Fela Kuti, who introduced elements of jazz and Fuji and we had African drums---they called it Afrobeat. Apart from Fela, we have people like King Sunny Adé, we have Oliver De Coque. These people did highlife music. They did Fuji music.
+
+Fuji music, highlife music---these things still exist now. We're still doing them, but there's now a fusion. The kind of music that comes from the continent, most people call it Afrobeats because it's an umbrella term. But when you look at a certain artist---maybe you take a look at Tems, or maybe you take a look at Simi, maybe you take a look at Johnny Drille---you find that they are doing Afro something, Afro pop, or Burna Boy. He calls it Afrofusion, because there's highlife in his music, there's Fuji in his music, there is R&B in his music, there's pop in his music.
+
+We have all these artists combining different styles and genres of music, heavily inspired by Fela's Afrobeat, and we call it Afrobeats. We've seen the oja enter that space because there's Afro highlife now, and typically when you think about highlife, you think about sounds from the eastern part of Nigeria. Of course, highlife is also very prominent in Ghanaian cultures, but we do have the history of highlife in Nigeria as well.
+
+In the past couple of years---three years, four years, this year---people are starting to use the sound of the oja in this new-age music. There are people like the Cavemen---they're a band in Nigeria, they are also Igbo, they are from the eastern part of Nigeria. They make highlife music, and they are always using the oja. Now they have gone global, they have tours in Europe. What that means is they are carrying the sound of the oja to Europe. People are dancing to the oja and it's entering spaces. You may not understand it, but it's entering spaces.
+
+It was used in a song in the *Black Panther* movie. To be fair, the oja has always been used in movies---but Nollywood movies, eastern Nollywood movies. In fact, for a lot of people in Nigeria, when you ask, "Do you know the oja?" they immediately associate it with epic Igbo Nollywood movies. But now you hear it in a Hollywood movie. I believe the people who used this sound did their research. That movie explored different African cultures, and it made sense that the music would have elements of certain African musical traditions as well.
+
+This is the way that the oja is now taking shape and form in today's world---still used in certain Igbo traditions like the masquerade cult, now used in the church, now used in Afrobeats music.
+
+*How do you go about learning the oja today?*
+
+I never learned it. But most people have to have a teacher, because you're not just learning a musical instrument, you're learning a musical tradition. The right way is to have a teacher who understands the oja as means of communication and as musical instrument. It's not just one, it's both.
+
+A lot of people now apply the Western ways of learning an instrument to learning the oja. Some of the people I interviewed---they can play different songs on the oja, they can play classical music on the oja, they can play all these things, which is good and fine. But you realize that what it would evoke in the Igbo listener is fascination as opposed to deep appreciation or being moved.
+
+I feel it is important for anyone who's trying to learn it today to learn from the right source---someone who can explain the cultural significance, explain the traditions around it, explain the communicative aspect of it, and then, of course, allow you to express yourself musically as you want.
+
+*You spoke earlier about its role in relationship to warrior identities. One of the aspects of your film is gender. I wonder if you could say a bit about how you, particularly as a woman, were exploring this tradition and encountered the question of gender.*
+
+Thank you for that question. I think this is where the idea of protocols comes in, because I think protocols are the unspoken rules of the tradition. When it comes to this cultural context, I would use *rules* or *traditions* or *rituals*. The oja has its own cultural protocols, it has its own traditions. There are certain people that are typically allowed to play it. There are certain people you, in the past especially, were supposed to play it for. Things have changed a little bit, but in Igbo history, it was not an instrument that was allowed to be played or experienced closely by women.
+
+This has changed. Now, women who want to are encouraged to play it. That's the thing about culture. One of the things I learned about culture from some of the people I interviewed is that it's always changing. The soul of it is always there, but the oja itself is a dynamic instrument. The oja itself is an instrument that by its nature takes on different forms. The culture around it cannot remain static. The traditions around it cannot remain static as long as---Ed Keazo said in the documentary, as long as it is not harming something or someone, he doesn't see why this should not be encouraged.
+
+I met a girl through Gerald---a young girl, just a teenager---who was fascinated by this instrument and decided she could play it, and she plays it really well. She's a student of Gerald, and interviewing her, I realized that it is possible. She's an Igbo girl, of course. She's not the only one, there are other people. She's just the only one I could interview. It was interesting to see---you could tell that even though there is a deep appreciation of the instrument, she's still learning not just the instrument itself. She's learning how it can speak.
+
+I think there is definitely something to be explored there when it has to do with the spiritual connection to it and being a woman. I don't know if it was a factor of her age, but I definitely found that the way the male participants I interviewed talked about it was a little different from the way she talked about it. That remains to be explored.
+
+I, as a woman going into the process, also had to be confronted with protocols. I had to be confronted with rules. I already knew that in Igbo tradition, first of all, it's a very patriarchal culture. Igbo tradition is generally very reverencing of women. People joke around in Nigeria and say an Igbo man may not be romantic, but he will always make sure his woman is in front of him. You see an Igbo man---he may be driving a small car but he's buying a big car for his wife. It's always a joke in Nigeria. But what I realized was there are certain things that you're just not allowed or permitted to do as a woman.
+
+For instance, women are not supposed to be in close contact with masquerades. While I was doing the interviews and I was trying to collect all the footage, one case involved seeing a masquerade performance with an ogbu oja. Even though this was my project, I was not allowed there. I couldn't fight it because I already knew this. I didn't expect it to change just because, "Oh, she's somebody doing a project." It didn't matter that they were out there because we had created the opportunity for them to be out there---I wasn't allowed there. It was something that I had to respect, because this is tradition. I may not understand this or be pleased with it, but it was something I had to respect regardless.
+
+*Are there other limits around where the protocols around this instrument are interacting with the modern world and coming into conflict?*
+
+I did not see a lot of limits. The only limitation that I saw was with allowing ladies to play. Having seen that this is changing, I felt that was the biggest thing. In terms of history, it was just not a thing that associated with the oja---the female gender. Now it is.
+
+But if we're stepping outside of the oja, of course there are still limits with women in Igbo traditional society. There are limits as to right hand and the left hand. You give an elder something with your left hand, and they will not accept it. There are certain traditions where you meet people from your father's family; you have to kneel down to greet until they tell you to stand up. There are certain traditions regarding women speaking in certain spaces. I remember one time we were in the living room of my hometown home and my dad was busy doing some things, and there was a bottle of wine. I was trying to open it for the guests, and I was stopped because it's not something traditionally that's accepted. As a woman, you're not supposed to open the bottle of wine if a man is present.
+
+Of course, there are still limits in Igbo tradition, and in a lot of African cultures, to be fair. But I do see the ways in which people break those limits. For instance, the masquerade cult has become largely entertainment in Igbo societies. The masquerades come out for entertainment purposes, just to make money. If they see a woman, especially a woman who seems to not be from around the area, and she's saying, "Oh, can you shake my hand?" They will be reluctant to do it. They may even hide so other people don't see them. But if it means they get some money out of it, I've seen it happen. This is not a thing that could happen before. You couldn't look at them before. Now it's different. It's changing a little bit because we have to think about economic factors, especially in the current climate of Nigeria.
+
+*Let's talk about your music today. In what kinds of ways do you draw on legacies that you grew up with? In what ways do you depart from them when you are writing songs, when you're making videos, when you're deciding what kind of artist you're becoming?*
+
+I grew up listening to very diverse artists, artists that were very different from each other. I grew up listening to Fela. I also grew up listening to Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. I also listen to a lot of new-age musicians, a lot from the Afrobeat circle and a few Western musicians.
+
+I would say there's always been common elements of songwriting. There are patterns that have worked. Maybe in the way that we have expressed and interpreted those patterns, it could be different. What I'm trying to do in my music now might be different from some of the people that I grew up listening to. In subtle ways, I try to explore my identity in language. Some of my music has Igbo. That is a thing that is common now with Afrobeats artists. But even Fela---he spoke a lot in broken English but I never really remember him using Yoruba, an actual Nigerian language. The other artists I listened to, they were mostly speaking in English.
+
+What I'm trying to do now, which is similar to a lot of what artists now are doing, is that mix of languages in the music. You find people singing in both Yoruba and English, or in both Igbo and English. I think it appeals to a wider audience as well.
+
+In terms of storytelling, I still draw from a lot of the people I used to watch. A lot of artists seem to be drawing from past musicians. You see that there is a comeback. It's not just in the music world. There is this comeback of what we now call vintage. A lot of people want to have that vintage feel in their dressing, in their art. You see that a lot of things that would have existed in maybe the eighties are coming back, especially in fashion.
+
+The way social media is consumed and used---that would be the biggest thing, social media. Now artists have the opportunity to be discovered way more easily than before. That's the upside. The downside is, because of this opportunity, the market seems saturated. We are saturated with content. There's no scarcity of content anymore. Everybody's creating, everybody has an opinion, everybody has something to say. I feel maybe just the biggest difference would be in the way that I feel I'm marketing my music, because now I don't need a record label to start. Those earlier musicians needed a record label to start, but because you can just put on your phone, take a video, put that on TikTok or on Instagram and you could get a million views, the possibilities are now endless.
+
+Also, because there's a saturation, it means you have to be creating on the go. You have to be creating all the time. The tricky part is sometimes you're distracted with creating the content, and you're not creating the music anymore. I feel that is definitely the tricky part. I'm not sure the people that I was inspired by had to deal with some of these issues that we are dealing with right now as creators and musicians in 2025.
+
+*How do you find the meaning that you're creating in your music being heard by the audiences who are encountering you through algorithms? Do you feel the things you're saying are getting through?*
+
+For sure, I am. When I think about art, the biggest thing I think about is relatability. A lot of people who are budding songwriters---or, I mean, you could actually be an established songwriter and you still fall into this trap---you're thinking, "What do they want to hear? What can I create that they want to see?" But that's not what matters. What matters is: What do you want to tell? What do you want to create? What do you feel? Because there's always going to be somebody in the world who can relate. There's no experience that is unique to you. Maybe in the things surrounding it, of course, but there's no feeling that is new to one human being.
+
+You wake up one morning and you write a song about feeling lazy. I mean, Bruno Mars did it, and it charted because that's the reality of almost every adult, at some point at least. You write a song about falling in love---doesn't matter how you write the song, someone feels it. You write a song about being heartbroken, you write a song about not being able to reciprocate that---someone feels it.
+
+When I feel something, I typically want to express it in music. I do that, I brush it up---obviously, I need to think about rhyming, I need to think about patterns. I need to think about melody. I need to be intentional about the writing now more than ever.
+
+So many people are going through the same thing. You hear people say, "Wow, you took the words out of my mouth." One of the songs I released this year is a song called "I'm Sorry," and it was a song that was born out of a heartbreak situation. But it wasn't a typical, "Oh, he left me, he did something wrong," it was, "I left him." It was that moment of realizing we weren't working and trying to do the bold thing to do what was best for me and what was best for him, even though he did not think it at the time.
+
+I was performing the song right before it was released. It was a very intimate gathering. I was just on my guitar. There was no mic setup. I was just going to sing the song, but I said to myself, "It is part of your work as a musician to allow people into your space. You can't just drop these songs and not say anything about them." I said, "Let me talk about this song." I was talking about the song, and I started to tear up. I started to cry in front of all these people, and I was so shocked at myself. I literally said, "What is happening right now?"
+
+I was so blessed to be in a space where I was even given the room to do that, because everybody paused and gave me space. They came to me with tissues and they were hugging me. Somebody captured that moment. I wasn't even trying to capture the moment. Somebody did record and sent it to me afterwards. I thought about it for a week and I said, "I will put this out on social media." I put it out on social media, and it went viral. It went viral on Instagram, it went viral on TikTok. It has been two months, and I still get comments on that post almost every single day.
+
+What happened was it opened up my comment section to people who were expressing their own heartbreak stories. People were confessing things. Of course, I started to feel, "Am I responsible to---I'm not a therapist. I'm barely surviving with my own emotions. How do I---" But what started to happen was so interesting. The people in the comment section started to respond to each other. It was almost like a support group in my comment section.
+
+This is ultimately what I have found with music---that real recognizes real. Whatever you have to say, if it's what you feel, there will be someone that feels it, there will be someone that connects to it. You don't have to be something that you're not, you don't have to try to express something that you don't feel.
+
+In the way people have reacted to my music, it's been a blessing because it's not just, "Oh, I can relate." There are also elements of healing. Sometimes we find healing when we know that we're not alone. It doesn't have to be a solution to that thing, but just knowing that there's someone out there who's putting herself or himself out there, who's going through exactly what I'm going through. And if they can put themselves out there, if they can stand up and work through it, I can work through it too.
+
+*Earlier, when you were talking about the oja, you were talking about the way in which it's heard differently among people who grew up with the culture. When you talk about these shared experiences, do they also depend on a shared cultural background, or are you finding this music crossing cultural lines more easily?*
+
+I'm finding it crossing cultural lines more easily. The language is different. The universal language is English now, and I'm doing most of my music in English. Ninety-nine percent of my music is in English. The song "I'm Sorry" was actually written all in English. Of course, there's a little pidgin English there, but if you're not paying attention, you may not notice it. You would still understand the message.
+
+Different people have been able to relate to it. I've had people DM me from the Philippines about that song. I've had people in America, in the UK, I've had Nigerians, Ghanaians, South Africans---it doesn't matter. I feel there's just very few musical traditions that the world cannot universally relate to because music on its own is a universal language. I take it back---you still see people who would be moved by the oja, even though they're not Igbo, even though they're not Nigerian. It may just differ from the way the typical Igbo man is moved by it.
+
+I listen to artists who sing in different languages that I don't understand, and I'm moved by it. Of course, I would be moved differently if I understood it, but I'm still moved by it.
+
+*You started at the beginning talking about your grandmother and the dancing to the oja. How does the music you're creating now sound to her?*
+
+To her---oh my gosh. She appreciates it, but it's not music she would---I think she would say, "Oh, I cannot believe my granddaughter created this." But most of the music my grandmother listens to is Igbo traditional music, especially worship music. It's very different from the kind of music I'm doing. She's approaching it from a place of pride and appreciation, not a place of enjoyment.
+
+*What kind of musician are you working to become? How do you see yourself, where do you see yourself going?*
+
+Thank you for that question. I think there are musicians who inspire generations through their art and through their lifestyle. I really want to inspire through both. When I started to play guitar, I remember it almost felt like an out-of-body experience. Most of my childhood, up until my teenage years, I didn't really believe I was capable of doing great things. Music changed that for me. I discovered I can learn an instrument. I can sing. I can sing well. I can perform.
+
+The biggest thing for me is when people take a look at that journey and feel inspired to do something as great or even greater. I've been inspired by the stories of musicians, and I've also been inspired by their music. That's where I am trying to get to, where it's not just about consuming my art. I feel it's an even more wholesome experience when you're consuming the art of someone whose story you know intimately in a way that stands out to you, in a way that makes you feel you can do anything. That's what I'm working towards. That's who I want to be.

content/interviews/osorio_ayurvedic-medicine.md

@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@ I used to do this in a more mystical way before. You can just measure a person's
 
 The other way of teaching, which is “slapping the person in the face”? I think that's a lot of arrogance, because I'm going to tell you what you have instantly, all the products, all the solutions. But I didn't give you a path to walk. Your body will improve in three months, you will improve. But then what will you do afterward? You'll come back, and I'll see you again. And it was precisely this that I wanted to escape from.
 
-If I hadn't escaped from this, today I would have a fuller schedule. I would charge more for my consultation. I'd just be measuring pulses, just doing that. I would earn more money. I wouldn't be making free videos, then answering two hundred questions per video. But if I really believe it, I'm thirty-nine years old. If I really believe that I'm going to die, I'm going to be born again, one of the things I wanted to do was leave knowledge good enough because people talk about the Final Judgment in the Bible. Ayurveda says that there is a moment of disembodiment, a millisecond that you will experience your life. And you will say to yourself. And that's what the Ayahuasca folks call DMT, divine pinterview, that kind of thing. Ayurveda explains this in a very cool way.
+If I hadn't escaped from this, today I would have a fuller schedule. I would charge more for my consultation. I'd just be measuring pulses, just doing that. I would earn more money. I wouldn't be making free videos, then answering two hundred questions per video. But if I really believe it, I'm thirty-nine years old. If I really believe that I'm going to die, I'm going to be born again, one of the things I wanted to do was leave knowledge good enough because people talk about the Final Judgment in the Bible. Ayurveda says that there is a moment of disembodiment, a millisecond that you will experience your life. And you will say to yourself. And that's what the Ayahuasca folks call DMT, divine particle, that kind of thing. Ayurveda explains this in a very cool way.
 
 A few years ago, I got into the idea that I couldn't die because I hadn't recorded my diagnostic course yet. So I think you get the desire to communicate in a way... that's what happened in my life. I want to be well with myself. That's it. And I also became a person who had to learn the division between right and wrong in the sense of going beyond just being nice. So I can't just be the nice guy on the Live. I also have to be harsh sometimes. I also have to scold sometimes. And it's part of this path that I've adopted. I used to get angry when people called me master. Because all my masters disappointed me. Today, if you want to call me Master, call me, but I'm an Ayurveda teacher. I'm here to pass on what I've studied, as incomplete as it may be.
 

content/interviews/prodromou-distributed_social_networks.md

@@ -161,7 +161,7 @@ So we had these submissions---the RDF people had gone, so we had these two sets
 
 We couldn't agree on any one of the models. Finally, Tantek and I sat down, and Tantek was like, "Hey, look, we can just publish all of these. Let's just go ahead and do it. That way we don't have to argue about which one's right and which one's wrong. Let's just get them out, and they'll be official W3C standards, and they're out there."
 
-James Snell had taken the earlier versions of ActivityStreams and made a new one that was JSON-based---ActivityStreams 2.0. He had built most of it already, so we were in an editorial stage by then. It's the data structures defining what is a note, what is an interview, what is an image. What does it mean to like something, to follow someone? He set up that architecture of the data structures. ActivityPump was the protocol for getting those data structures moved around.
+James Snell had taken the earlier versions of ActivityStreams and made a new one that was JSON-based---ActivityStreams 2.0. He had built most of it already, so we were in an editorial stage by then. It's the data structures defining what is a note, what is an article, what is an image. What does it mean to like something, to follow someone? He set up that architecture of the data structures. ActivityPump was the protocol for getting those data structures moved around.
 
 But Erin, who submitted this proposal, was not interested in taking it any further. We had two people who had joined the group from an open-source project called MediaGoblin. It was kind of a distributed social network with a focus on images and video and things like that. They wanted to support OStatus, and I had been like, "Hey, you should come be part of this W3C thing. We're doing the next protocol after OStatus, so come help build that."
 

content/interviews/xavier_rodrigues-beekeeping.md

@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
+---
+narrator: "Manoel Xavier Rodrigues, Glaicon Nei Ferreira de Sousa, and Dionizio Jansen"
+subject: Beekeeping
+facilitator: Júlia Martins Rodrigues
+date: 2025-01-18
+approved: 2025-04-28
+summary: "Meliponiculture—the practice of raising stingless bees—represents a vital intersection of environmental conservation, traditional knowledge, and sustainable agriculture in Brazil."
+location: "Minas Gerais, Brazil"
+topics: [ancestors, food, friendship, indigeneity, organizations, science]
+---
+
+*How do you introduce yourselves?*
+
+**Glaicon:** My name is Glaicon, I am a meliponiculturist and beekeeper. I have been working with bees for 30 years and professionally for 11 years.
+
+**Manoel:** My name is Manoel Xavier, I'm also a meliponiculturist and beekeeper, and I've been working with stingless bees for approximately 8 to 10 years.
+
+**Dionísio:** I'm Dionísio Janssen, also a meliponiculturist for 8 years. I feel responsible, along with my colleagues, for spreading this practice, given that 70% of the food that reaches our table requires our bees. For those of us living in this neotropical region, stingless bees are our main pollinators.
+
+*How is meliponiculture knowledge transmitted today, and how do you participate in this network?*
+
+**Glaicon:** When I started in meliponiculture, I saw the need to share my knowledge with others. I began studying more and building capacity. I saw the need to raise bees in a more organized way. Over time, I realized the necessity of creating a group so that more people like me could spread the idea and transform it into environmental protection. Today, our group---which has a presence throughout almost the entire country---has done good work with students who started with ten hives and now have 400 hives. Our environmental protection work has become family income, and all this was accomplished through creating a group for training new agents.
+
+*How does this group and network interact?*
+
+**Glaicon:** This network interacts through shared knowledge. We have small, medium, and large meliponiculturists who have doubts and teachings. Our information sharing enables us to build capacity for healthy meliponiculture and strong, focused environmental protection.
+
+**Manoel:** To add to that, we believe that to protect bees, we have rational management techniques that respect nature. We try to disseminate this knowledge so people can expand the number of hives and bees being raised rationally and sustainably, respecting nature.
+
+*What role does this network play in transmitting knowledge?*
+
+**Dionísio:** It's about bringing responsible, quality knowledge not only to group members, but to all people interested in species conservation, biodiversity, and especially our stingless bees.
+
+*Are these exchanges informal? What is the group's purpose and which platform do you use?*
+
+**Glaicon:** We use WhatsApp. We have a group among us that's available 24 hours a day to obtain information, management techniques, and learning---always interacting with each other and learning more each day.
+
+*So it's a space for sharing and exchanging experiences?*
+
+**Manoel:** Generally, people don't start with this as their primary source of family income. So obviously, all this is done during free time, when each person is available.
+
+*What are the criteria for participating in these groups? What rules and protocols are adopted?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Our group is very selective. We cannot address any topic that doesn't relate to meliponiculture. We keep our group well-focused on our perspective. All people there share the same idea and profile. There are people in the group who administer it, creating protocols so everyone can freely come and go with their questions and teachings.
+
+*How are conflicts addressed when disagreements arise?*
+
+**Manoel:** Conflicts always have a moderator who will calm the situation. The group administrators are responsible for this moderation and ensuring harmony in experience exchanges, question responses, or posts that some might find inappropriate for the occasion or the group's purpose.
+
+**Dionísio:** These decisions are deliberated among administrators, and before any action, we first discuss what measures to take. Whether it's excluding a member or simply making a private call to get them to retract, or if it's less serious, perhaps just a correction on the topic is enough to address the issue.
+
+*Glaicon, you're an administrator of one of these groups, correct?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes, Grupo União (Union Group).
+
+*How are these moderators chosen? Based on what criteria?*
+
+**Glaicon:** They're chosen based on their commitment to the subject. People who truly believe in environmental protection and pollinator conservation. These people are chosen carefully. They must fit the profile to provide answers to everyone present. The people in Grupo União are handpicked based on their commitment to healthy culture and environmental protection.
+
+*Do you have examples of teachings or exchanges that happened through these groups that modified your practice or bee protection?*
+
+**Manoel:** May I share an example? Our main concern is: how do we save bees from extinction? By multiplying hives. Often, people go and extract a hive from nature thinking they're helping, but they're actually causing harm. One method we found for hive multiplication is division. You take a box, like this yellow *uruçu*, and divide that hive into two. Previously, we would take the daughter or mother box and move it to a distant location for division, to prevent the forager bees from the separated box from returning to the original location, leaving the other uninhabited. A great teaching we learned in the group is that we can divide the hive by placing the mother box and daughter box side by side. The forager bees will find each other and divide between the two boxes. We quickly have two hives. This is knowledge we acquired in our group.
+
+*What do you understand as protocol?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I understand protocol as an action. My protocol today, which directed me to reach my current state, was my daily training, learning from friends, and resolving consistent doubts. Starting to work with facts and forgetting assumptions. After I began studying Paulo Nogueira Neto, whom we lost two years ago and who is considered by the UN as one of the world's greatest biologists---he studied and taught about stingless bees at USP in São Paulo for 65 years. I’ve built capacity and directed myself with the protocol of learning from USP, from Paulo Nogueira Neto. Today I can teach what is truly factual to all people. I have students who started with ten hives and now have 400. Meliponiculture has become family income for them.
+
+*Beyond this knowledge from the University of São Paulo, how did your journey with other communities happen? In other networks and groups?*
+
+**Glaicon:** What happened during my journey was the opportunity to know different types of places, like indigenous villages and large companies involved in extractivism. We managed to be present in various university courses, participating in university theses in anthropology and agroecology, which somehow built our capacity and taught us, enabling us to disseminate this wonderful idea of environmental protection and meliponiculture.
+
+*Could you tell us more about the indigenous communities?*
+
+**Glaicon:** The indigenous communities I work with today, in Espírito Santo and Bahia, have undergone significant cultural changes and no longer live as they did before. But they still carry in their veins, in their blood, love for nature. They taught me a lot about dividing hives and caring for bees, and by caring for the village and community, I learned much from them.
+
+*Did you visit these villages?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I visited them and we're still friends today.
+
+*Did they also teach you some of these techniques?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I learned much more than I taught them.
+
+*Today, how do you transmit this knowledge acquired from various sources?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I’ve built capacity so I wouldn't speak from my personal perspective. I teach everything scientifically. Taken from books by great biologists, from universities, from studies. I teach what has been thoroughly studied. I'm very careful to limit myself when teaching, to ensure I'm doing what has been extensively studied.
+
+*And you, Manoel, your path was different. How was this learning process?*
+
+**Manoel:** My learning process---I used to work more with stinging bees, which are exotic in Brazil. I had my first contact with a cousin's meliponary. I was enchanted by the bees and ended up joining Grupo União, where I gradually acquired knowledge about each species and how to manage each species, the type of box, which box is most suitable, the dimensions of each box, the type of division, the type of hive modification, how they're fed, what type of flowers they prefer. Gradually, we solidify our knowledge. With this knowledge, we can share this information and disseminate this knowledge to other people interested in bees and nature in general.
+
+**Dionísio:** We also have in Brazil a federal institution that's over 100 years old, INPA---the National Institute for Amazon Research---where there's work with these pollinators involving biologists from Asia, Europe, and South America. As a result, they taught us much about raising these pollinators. This greatly facilitated our work in the beginning. To this day, we share the idea of raising our bees with boxes developed by this federal agency, INPA.
+
+*After building this knowledge over the years, learning from scientific sources and indigenous sources, what protocol was created to transmit and disseminate this knowledge through networks?*
+
+**Manoel:** The protocols are actually rules we created to allow the group to be homogeneous and have a consistent form of knowledge transmission, always focused on the group's objective. We use the União meliponary groups to transmit what we know, as new people are always arriving. Sometimes, knowledge that's basic to us is fundamental for them to start from the beginning---learning in a guided process to practice sustainable stingless bee raising.
+
+*Why this concern with transmitting meliponiculture knowledge?*
+
+**Dionísio:** We feel obligated, so to speak, to be facilitators of this process. Why? To have the opportunity to share with people the importance of maintaining this biodiversity, keeping bee species alive that, as I said at the beginning, are responsible for bringing food to our tables. Most people don't know about this potential or importance that bees have for our lives.
+
+*How is leadership in this group? Is it individual or collective leadership? Why did it happen this way? How have these dynamics evolved?*
+
+**Glaicon:** In the beginning, it was practically the founder---me. Over time, I saw the need to let others also become administrators based on each person's capacity and effort. The group grew wings and evolved very satisfactorily. We became a group, and today, as Manoel emphasized, new people arrive daily, which for us is sometimes common---those arriving need that information.
+
+*The group plays a fundamental role in training new meliponiculturists.*
+
+**Manoel:** Yes, largely due to knowledge mastery. Sometimes a person has knowledge mastery but has difficulty transmitting it. But just by showing in the group, making a little video of how their hive is doing, what management they're doing, they're teaching a lot without even needing to speak sometimes. We perceive that their management and mastery is captured and perceived by group members, and they manage to transmit this knowledge.
+
+**Dionísio:** Another thing I find relevant is this information exchange, because each creator's objective, each bee multiplier, can be different. You might have bees for a collection, for distraction, therapeutic treatment, or to have healthy foods of the best quality through these bee products. This is very important to highlight because these are different objectives within the same group that need this knowledge exchange for growth in each area where a person chooses to engage.
+
+**Glaicon:** Something very interesting is that humanity---the first human communities, the first peoples---already directed themselves toward copying bees. If you go to Sumeria, back to Egypt, you'll discover that bees are present in all ancient peoples. This is scientifically proven. Communities were formed because they had a king, guards, foragers---all copying a bee hive. This is a structure humanity has been trying to copy from bees. It's very important today that we emphasize this magical bee creation, this bee's influence on human life---not just for the entire planet, but especially on human life and organization.
+
+**Manoel:** It's also important to highlight that this group enables us to better know the bees. Sometimes we're valuing only the bee, concerned with environmental and preservation issues, but we need to explore each bee type's potential. We learn about the diverse types of honey they provide, diverse types of propolis. Friend Dionísio, for example, just taught me that yellow *Mandaguari* propolis is wonderful propolis. Could you explore *Samburá* a bit for us, please?
+
+**Dionísio:** *Samburá,* which few people know about, is pollen produced by stingless bees. It's a food classified today as one of the world's best, so much so that it's the food source for future bees. This *Samburá* is nothing more than pollen enzymatically processed by bees and deposited in pots within colonies. Besides this, we also have honey and propolis extract---all wonderful foods that humans should consume periodically. None of this knowledge would be possible if we didn't have a tool like our group to transmit this knowledge to each other. It's no use researching this and keeping it within a university, in books, if it's not disseminated to the population, to creators who often have little information and limited access to books and universities. This is the great importance of having a tool like this group, plus we make excellent friends.
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes, the group is focused with direction as Dionísio just mentioned---honey, an energetic food that bees produce through sucrose, and stingless bees through fructose. Then we have pollen, which is the male gamete of all vegetation in our biomes. It's the most relevant protein source in nutrition, not only human but animal. We also have propolis, which is extracted with antifungal, antibacterial, antibiotic enzymes that when consumed by humans, help us elevate our physical condition and significantly increase our immunity. The group is ready and able to do work not only in environmental preservation, but as Manoel said, we learn a lot from our União group, studying meliponiculture and bees.
+
+**Manoel:** And their products too.
+
+*You mentioned there was evolution---it began with individual leadership, then moved to collective leadership. How did these community rules and protocols evolve? What were the inspirational models and lessons learned?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Actually, it's nothing more than our own learning from studying meliponiculture. What was created was cutting out everything that doesn't relate to meliponiculture. As things appeared, we created a protocol to maintain our focus on what represents the entire group's profile. That's how rules emerged, because we didn't know various types of problems that could arise. When they came, we created the protocol---the need to direct everyone toward healthy meliponiculture.
+
+**Manoel:** These protocols are important because there are many beginner, adventurous people who want to enter meliponiculture but sometimes don't understand there are rules. For example, box types. We talk a lot about rational use, rational creation. What is this? You have a box for each bee type, with adequate dimensions, and adequate dimensions for each hive size. Sometimes people don't know and put a tiny bee in a very large box. It goes well, but come winter, during the rainy period, it will weaken and that hive will die. We must guide people to follow these rules to ensure meliponiculture continues progressing as it is.
+
+**Glaicon:** What Manoel is saying is very interesting because each bee type has a specific management approach. Bees come in various sizes with different characteristics from the Apidae group. The Apidae group develops in two different segments: trigonines and meliponines. Trigonines divide by royal cells, and meliponines by cells. Understanding this bee subdivision and each specimen's pollination capacity, how they live, how they need to be treated so we can achieve comfortable meliponaries---these are fundamental ideas we share in our group for responsible, focused meliponiculture.
+
+*What other examples of rules govern the group, for instance, regarding commercial use and informal exchanges?*
+
+**Dionísio:** These rules are well-defined. In our main group, commercialization or advertising of products or anything commercial is not permitted. It's exclusively for information exchange and clarifying doubts. Commerce is prohibited in this group.
+
+*How do you attract new members and participants? How do you search for new meliponiculturists?*
+
+**Glaicon:** We believe our group would be and is much stronger when it has concentrated, focused people. Having large numbers of participants can sometimes take us off our trajectory. When we receive a request from an administrator to add a new member, we first call them privately and ask where they are in meliponiculture, what their perspective is. We study the person. If administrators think they're suitable for the group, we admit a new participant.
+
+*What are your expectations for improving and evolving this protocol, knowledge transmission, and group interactions? What lessons have you extracted from this process that you plan to improve over time?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Each person teaches us the way. Daily work, management, and knowledge create new situations where the group finds itself in a better place each day, with more knowledge.
+
+**Manoel:** Correct, because this is very dynamic---we can't leave fixed rules. These protocols can mature according to group dynamics, with new people entering and the needs of each moment. The world is in transition, so we can't stand still. We must edit rules daily for each situation.
+
+**Glaicon:** That's a beautiful statement, because if we observe, when we started the group, many management practices were very common that we don't use today because they've been modified. We have to change rules to accompany this.
+
+*How did these modifications happen through these exchanges?*
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly as I said---observing each other, establishing management rules, knowledge, observations. I recently went to Bahia and saw a tree there. I had the opportunity and was dazzled by such grandeur, such beautiful things. I observed the flower clusters of this tree, a schefflera, loaded with pollinators---wasps, butterflies, bees. I couldn't miss the opportunity to share this new discovery throughout Brazil---this find in Abrolhos, on the Bahian continent, 70 kilometers away. This is how we form and strengthen ourselves, and the protocol always receives new directions and forms, creating a strong group. Grupo União today is a strong group.
+
+**Manoel:** We need protocols not to be unpleasant or authoritarian, but because more people are participating---people need to know the rules to continue preserving group harmony.
+
+**Dionísio:** Exactly. To maintain focus on what really matters to the group.
+
+*Is environmental education focused exclusively on bees?*
+
+**Glaicon:** No. Bees are inserted in an environment where everything is connected. For example, reforestation. Bees are very responsible because by pollinating, they don't let any type of native forest in any biome go extinct. It's fundamental to know that bees aren't only directed toward producing honey, but maintaining native biomes strong, healthy, and natural. Consequently, our springs will be suitable, flowing water, because where there's native forest, there are springs. Bees are somehow connected to springs, mangroves, seas, lakes, lagoons, dams, rivers---our entire water chain. Most interestingly, the union of this reforestation with protection of our water sources results in purer, better air and a healthy planet. This is the meliponiculturist's greatest objective---maintaining all this influence that bees give us and that keeps us alive.
+
+**Dionísio:** It's interesting to note that because we know bees, we need to know much about what they feed on. Starting from this premise, the biggest discussion in groups I've observed lately, and it's always been this way, is the type of vegetation they visit, the type of flower they like, the type of tree, the type of resin they need. We end up discussing this a lot. Naturally, everyone will want to have near them the type of vegetation, flower, tree, plant. So we are vegetation multipliers.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. We are reforesters, just like bees. We must always think that before a bee, you must have a tree, a plant that produces food for these bees. Consequently, a producer of food for our table, for all world inhabitants. A concept our group in Juiz de Fora talks about, which I find beautiful and old: "Bee doesn't do harm, bee makes honey."
+
+*Could you give an example?*
+
+**Manoel:** Following this line of reasoning, I could mention that I have a farm in Leopoldina, in Piacatuba, and we're always concerned with plants that will improve bee nutrition. We're very concerned there with increasing basil, basil plantations, coffee vine, clove vine, and various other trees and plants that will support these bees' nutrition.
+
+**Glaicon:** What Manoel is saying is so interesting---some trees are very relevant compared to others regarding melliferous pastures. For example, *pitanga*. Our meliponine bees are ready to fly up to 120 meters high, so they don't forage far. There are smaller bees, but when it comes to low trees that have great relevance in food supply---pollen and nectar---bees don't waste time. Among these we have *pitanga* and *jabuticaba*. As Manoel just explained, this is how we try to facilitate, besides feeding and bringing healthy fruit to our tables, feeding our hives. We need great plant variety, so we can't have monoculture---we need diverse plant types to serve diverse bee types, according to region and time of year. Some flowers are very abundant but have very small flowering cycles.
+
+This is very interesting because we have a time when flowers bloom abundantly---spring, as everyone knows. So hives will experience great food discomfort in autumn and winter. Therefore, we stay alert and seek to improve our melliferous pastures so that during this off-season for bee feeding, we're involving trees in our biomes that will feed not only bees but mammals, reptiles, birds, etc., because it's a food chain.
+
+**Manoel:** Just one observation---notice that all the plants mentioned here, besides producing food, some spices, other fruits, are also medicinal herbs that serve to treat health. And here comes production. In the same plant, you have three or four food sources. You have pollen, nectar, resin, and leaves that often serve as spices and other things.
+
+**Dionísio:** I think it's also good to highlight that ornamental plants don't produce food for any type of pollinator. They're not angiosperms. So when we're inserting ornamental plants in our gardens, we're not collaborating with melliferous pastures. Many people don't know this information.
+
+*Besides exchanges made in the group through the internet, which connect people from across the country, what other channels are used to propagate this information?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I'm a small meliponiculturist. I've taken on the condition of meliponiculture, but I recognize I have a very small public reach. Sometimes, for example, I know I'm in relevant groups in Peru. They love my posts and ask me to post more. I see that we're somehow being facilitators in Peru, Argentina, here in South America. There are other countries where some of our colleagues are more present. But I see our work as a whole today, with my friends, as great progress, because some years ago, people killed bees. Today, there's understanding because our work is showing results. Dionísio, for example, Dr. Dionísio, has a completely different professional segment. Today, within his professional condition, he's clearly promoting and teaching meliponiculture and environmental preservation. This is very nice---bees are going into law, health, entertainment, various different fields, always bringing life, health, well-being.
+
+**Dionísio:** And complementing, another way we disseminate this is through congresses and meetings we organize. Now, for example, we're organizing the monthly meeting of meliponiculturists in Juiz de Fora. This word-of-mouth is still fundamental for knowledge dissemination. It attracts many new meliponiculturists, many new people, many curious people who today or tomorrow will be great meliponiculturists, great guardians of bee propagation and environmental conservation.
+
+**Manoel:** I'd add that as a form of knowledge dissemination, we're always invited to public events. We go to schools, squares, where there are larger crowds. We can explain and demonstrate what stingless bees are and the benefits they bring.
+
+**Glaicon:** I work in two municipal schools as a volunteer. I work with science teachers because state schools have an educational program where science teachers must execute field classes. This isn't possible today due to lack of training. So what has been my work in these schools with students from first to ninth grade? I work with their teachers teaching this biological and morphological part of bees. They complete the educational cycle that is the field science class that the State needs today, requests, but isn't being done. It's a very nice legal project. There's also demand for bee presentations at agricultural exhibitions, agribusiness events. You yourself participated and collaborated with our rich region here, Leopoldina, where Manoel went and did exhibition work with bees and honey. It was very interesting and very nice work.
+
+*What is your vision for the group's future?*
+
+**Glaicon:** I have an optimistic vision. I'm a person who always thinks we can be better, so I didn't create this group just for it to end one day. I created it so it could take flight and reach horizons, reach as many people as possible, and the result would be at minimum the satisfaction of living with health, with freedom for our children, grandchildren, all inhabitants, our descendants who come forward, to have a better world, a healthier world, something really nice. I don't want our group to end. To fix this information, I'd cite the case of our friend PPP, who must be 93 years old, working with stingless bees for 40, 50 years. If you asked him 50 years ago, today you'd have the answer that his own self-motivation and enchantment with bees kept him going. Even he is a reference for us. I think the group's future objective is that we don't pass through here leaving only peace. We must make our contribution to improving the world, the planet, and the population in general. The group becomes so strong that when my friends call me privately or say something in the group, I stay quiet because I want to listen---it seems like I'm going to learn something more. So our desire is always to continue, improve. This is very nice and true. The meliponiculturist has a mission in my view---the mission of not letting some pollinators, these wonderful insects, go extinct. Isn't that right, Manoel? This bee here is a capixaba bee from Espírito Santo that is extremely endangered, on the first extinction list.
+
+**Dionísio:** Does it only exist in Espírito Santo?
+
+**Glaicon:** Only in Espírito Santo. It's not known as *Capixaba* anywhere else---that's why it's called *Uruçu Capixaba*. What's interesting is highlighting what led this bee to extinction. The invasion of mangroves, mountains, monoculture, condominiums, deforestation, industry---industry caused this bee to become extinct. Today, we have this bee in the south of the country, in the mountains of Petrópolis and Teresópolis, because this bee only survives 700 meters above sea level. Certainly, Paulo Nogueira Neto wasn't wrong. If Espírito Santo today needs pure *Capixaba*, we can send them some. Because the meliponiculturist had the responsibility to treat this pollinator with love to prevent extinction. So we're going to see this *Capixaba Uruçu* hive now.
+
+**Dionísio:** The yellow *Uruçu* is a bee that is truly endangered and continues to be endangered. We no longer find it in nature.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. It builds its nests, every 3 kilometers on average. It flies 4. Today we have only 200 hives. I believe that registered in the last 3 years, I multiplied about 4 thousand specimens that were sent to other meliponaries that today have 300, 200 hives. So it's a bee that is far from extinction but still endangered because it's not present in Atlantic forests.
+
+**Dionísio:** And remembering that this bee is from our Atlantic forest.
+
+**Glaicon:** Yes. Can't forget to highlight. The yellow *Uruçu* bee divides into 11 types of yellow uruçu. The one from our Atlantic forest is the mondore, which is the bugia---that's the popular name. So we're going to open the box here for people to see.
+
+**Dionísio:** This bee looks like gold, doesn't it?
+
+**Glaicon:** It looks like gold. Look how beautiful. It has the color of the Atlantic forest howler monkey, so it has the popular name *Bugia* bee. Taking advantage of this connection, these here are the resins, right?
+
+**Dionísio:** These are geopropolis used to make propolis extract.
+
+**Glaicon:** Exactly. Which protects the hive from fungi, bacteria.
+
+**Dionísio:** Yes. And we talked so much about *samburá* and honey---the honey of stingless bees is stored in these pots, called *samburá*. Here there are pots with samburá and pots with honey, and extraction is totally different from traditional apiculture.

content/interviews/zargham-ultimate_frisbee.md

@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ I think so. As a quick caveat, there are a couple dimensions we might want to co
 
 What's interesting is that in your onboarding to the sport, you have to learn norms, and the norms differ based on competitive environment. I saw this when helping run youth outreach and recreational leagues in Philly---stark differences in norms depending on age group, background, or whether it was a beginner league or a more competitive league. What constituted acceptable behavior under the rules of ultimate was different.
 
-This is one of the nice things about protocols. The rules for ultimate just say that you can call a foul if you believe an infraction has taken place. Obviously you have to know the rules, and then the person can either agree or disagree. One just says "contest" or "no-contest". The rules have a fork in them---if the person says no-contest, one thing happens; if they say contest, the other thing happens. Except in cases where people get really litigious and start arguing over what happened (which does happen), it mostly just becomes part of the flow of the game. People want to play the game, so even your own team will tell you to stand down if you're wasting time arguing.
+This is one of the nice things about protocols. The rules for ultimate just say that you can call a foul if you believe an infraction has taken place. Obviously you have to know the rules, and then the person can either agree or disagree. One just says "contest" or "no-contest." The rules have a fork in them---if the person says no-contest, one thing happens; if they say contest, the other thing happens. Except in cases where people get really litigious and start arguing over what happened (which does happen), it mostly just becomes part of the flow of the game. People want to play the game, so even your own team will tell you to stand down if you're wasting time arguing.
 
 You learn to get a feel for what is and isn't actually an infraction within your social context, learning to handle that kind of incompleteness while still using the rules. The sport attracts people who are both interested in rules and willing and able to understand and abide by them, but who won't abuse them---because you get shunned if you do. This can happen at the individual level within a team or between teams in the competitive scene. Teams that pushed the rules too far got a reputation for being "bad spirited." A team might come in second in a tournament, and people would say, "Oh yeah, but they're really bad spirited," and somehow that took away from their achievement within the social standing among the teams.
 
@@ -172,7 +172,7 @@ This is partly why being a leader within this community is mostly about dispute
 
 Related to this, I mentioned observers earlier. In competitive ultimate, observers basically take on that de-escalation responsibility in competitive play. When you get to the finals at regionals, or at nationals---at least in the winners' bracket---you'll see observers. When I was there, there were only enough observers to spot-cover games at nationals, but observers had a passive role. They only had two kinds of active calls: offsides and line calls---basically in-bounds/out-of-bounds type calls. This is because it's almost impossible for anyone else who's not dedicated to that to have a good perspective on it. There are a lot of arguments about in or out, and it's almost impossible to watch your own offsides when you're pulling (that is when throwing off to the other team).
 
-Otherwise, the way self-officiation could escalate is you could do the normal workflow, but you could also escalate to the observer, at which point if either person escalated, they got to make the call. But the observer is only a failover---the primary mechanism is still "foul" or "travel", "contest" or "no-contest". This creates a second layer to reduce the risk of abuse. I view this as helpful---it adds an extra normative bit because in cases where things are going smoothly, you basically never go to the observer. But in a game where there's genuine conflict about what is and isn't appropriate---maybe you've got a West Coast team playing an East Coast team with sufficiently different cultural expectations---the observer is the de-escalation point. You can just say, "Fine, go to the observer," and they make a judgment call.
+Otherwise, the way self-officiation could escalate is you could do the normal workflow, but you could also escalate to the observer, at which point if either person escalated, they got to make the call. But the observer is only a failover---the primary mechanism is still "foul" or "travel", "contest" or "no-contest." This creates a second layer to reduce the risk of abuse. I view this as helpful---it adds an extra normative bit because in cases where things are going smoothly, you basically never go to the observer. But in a game where there's genuine conflict about what is and isn't appropriate---maybe you've got a West Coast team playing an East Coast team with sufficiently different cultural expectations---the observer is the de-escalation point. You can just say, "Fine, go to the observer," and they make a judgment call.
 
 There are observer training programs which are also self-organized. You built in this extra backstop, and I view it as more in common with what I was saying before---you've got the rules, you've got the norms, and then inevitably you have the natural evolution of problems that need to be de-escalated or mediated. The observer is in some ways like a mediator on standby, which is helpful as you get to these increasingly competitive levels where people have been training for nine months and they're at the semifinals of nationals. Just knowing the observers are there helps, but I think they did a good job not usurping the authority of self-officiation. This ties back to the pros where they were like, "No, we're going to do refs," and it changed everything. The observers were essentially the equivalent of seeing the problem and solving it with an ultimate native solution, instead of seeing the problem and trying to paste on something from another culture.
 

content/interviews/zayner-biohacking.md

@@ -0,0 +1,264 @@
+---
+narrator:  Josette Adeline Zayner
+subject: Biohacking
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-07-30
+approved: 2025-07-30
+summary: "How hacking computers led to hacking biological systems, including her own body."
+location: "Austin, TX"
+headshot: "josette_zayner.jpg"
+topics: [art, gender, health, science, software]
+links:
+  - text: "Biohack the Planet newsletter"
+    url: "https://amateurgods.substack.com/"
+  - text: "The Embryo Corporation"
+    url: "https://building.life/"
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+Oh, I hate when people---my name is Josie Zayner. I have a PhD from the University of Chicago in biophysics, and I'm CEO of two biotech companies simultaneously. I know. Long story.
+
+*Let's get into that story. How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start?*
+
+I grew up on a tiny farm in Indiana. It wasn't really a farm---I think we just called it a farm because we were so poor and wanted to pretend life was better than it was. We had chickens that we collected eggs from, some goats, dogs. I grew up in rural America in pretty bad poverty.
+
+This was in the eighties, and we actually drank dehydrated milk. I don't know if most people here even know that's a thing. The people I know who know about dehydrated milk come from some third world country. We were really poor.
+
+My mom was divorced at a young age from my biological father, who was violent. Not a lot of good things happened there. My early life was probably pretty foundational for who I am today. I have three brothers, raised by a single mother who had to work all the time. We had no money, so you had to learn to be self-sufficient pretty quick and pretty early. If you needed something, you had to figure out how to get it yourself, because you couldn't ask my mom for money or help.
+
+When I was about eight, nine, or ten, I moved to the Chicago suburbs to live with my grandparents. My grandparents really raised me from then into my teens. I kind of take after my grandma---she taught me how to cook Italian food, and I like to cook Italian food.
+
+I wasn't good in school at all. I did terribly in high school---almost failed out. It wasn't that I was bad at school, I'm just not good at imposed structure. That's just the way I am to this day. I don't like imposed structure, and it's kind of made me who I am, stemming from needing to take care of myself and needing to decide what's best for me.
+
+I was arrested twice before the age of eighteen, which is pretty crazy considering where I am today. I don't know many people who are founders and have raised millions of dollars, or have PhDs, who have been arrested, much less twice. Very non-traditional upbringing compared to most people in my social class.
+
+*When did you finally start to engage? What was the bridge between getting arrested, not doing well in school, and then going to the University of Chicago?*
+
+It was computers. Do you remember "The Conscience of a Hacker," the hacker manifesto?
+
+*I teach it in one of my courses.*
+
+There's this line: "like heroin through an addict's veins." That's how computers were to me. My mom did this job for somebody, and they couldn't afford to pay her, so they gave her an old computer. I experienced being online from my friend who lived across the street, so I was like, "I gotta get my hands on a modem."
+
+I forget exactly how, but maybe I saved up money because I started working---once I was old enough to work, I was at the grocery store bagging groceries. I bought a modem, and it was just like, "Oh shit, this world is crazy. I love it." Got really into computers, into computer programming. Got a job at Motorola doing computer programming when I was eighteen. I was making more money than my mom, which was wild.
+
+I was really enthralled with that world. But then, in the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble burst, and Motorola laid off a bunch of people, including me. I was just like, "Is this really what I want to do with my life?" I was working for this giant, corporate company. I remember working on the Nextel cell phone network, and one weekend we were updating subscriber databases. I uploaded the wrong database or something, so maybe a hundred thousand people were without cell phone service for the weekend.
+
+When that happened, I remember the communication between everybody wasn't about how these people didn't have cell phone service---it was about how much money we lost. I was like, "Is that all I am here? Just a way to make other people more money?" I didn't want to be that. I wanted to work on something bigger.
+
+I decided to go into biology. The natural world has always fascinated me---it should fascinate everybody because it's so wild, but it really fascinated me. I did an undergrad degree in plant biology. I was always enthralled by the idea of plants starting out as a seed, sucking molecules from the soil, eating CO2 and sunlight, and growing. I was like, "How do you do that? That's crazy. I want to understand how you do that."
+
+I'm a reductionist. With computers, I wanted to control things on the lowest level---I wanted to program in assembly and move around all the memory, do different stuff so I had complete control. It's kind of the same way with living things.
+
+*Did that experience with computers leave you approaching biology differently than other people you studied with?*
+
+I think so. I saw it more as---especially in Western culture, we have this view of life as this sacred thing, and I'm not saying it's not at all true. But I approached it more from the idea that it was like a computer, like an operating system, something to be manipulated and programmed. From when I started biology to when I started my first company, I always approached it with that same hacker mindset. It was like, "How do I hack this stuff?" and not, "How do I write scientific papers about this stuff?"
+
+*How did you begin learning biology? What kinds of protocols became part of that practice?*
+
+In undergrad, I was poor enough that the government would pay people at the university to pay me---this work-study program. Basically, find a job and we'll give them money to pay you. So I would go work in labs---scientific labs. All plant biology labs in undergrad.
+
+That really got me excited about research, because undergrad is just learning, you're not necessarily doing. I wanted more of the doing. Once I started doing research, I was like, "Oh, this shit is fun." You can mess around with things and go crazy---if you have a crazy idea, you could just try it out.
+
+After my undergrad, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, so I applied for some master's degree programs. I had two: one where I went to undergrad, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, which was like a six-hour train ride from Chicago where my family lived, and Appalachian State in Boone, North Carolina, because they had good rock climbing and I was really into rock climbing. I had a couple of friends who lived out there and ended up going to Appalachian State.
+
+*How did the organizational life in research labs compare to working for Motorola?*
+
+I definitely could have more autonomy. I wanted to find somebody who would just let me rip, and that's what I did. I found this person working on understanding the molecular mechanisms of cholera---the bacteria that causes the disease cholera.
+
+She also got pregnant and gave birth within the first six months I was there, so it was literally just me in the lab. I think there was nobody else. She would stop by once a week to have a meeting with me, but otherwise it was just me doing whatever I wanted. I'm somebody who can get super obsessive. I just dug in and went hard and made a lot of progress, had a lot of success---won all these grants and awards.
+
+At Appalachian State, it was a small school, so they didn't pay us big stipends---we had no money. I would work all night and then go to the bar right next to campus and drink dollar beers on dollar beer night. Another living situation with no money in some shitty-ass apartment, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
+
+*Were there particular moments where you found yourself able to achieve something or manipulate something in a way that you experienced with computers early on?*
+
+It was different in that science is this very physical thing. You're using your whole body. Computers is like---typing. It really turned into a form of self-expression to me. I could channel my anger or happiness and express that through my work. Sometimes in labs when experiments would fail, I would throw something across the room. Sometimes when things would succeed, I would scream. It became this art form for me that computers never could be necessarily. They couldn't reach this level because it was all in the digital world. Even when I did some electrical engineering work, building electronics, I felt like it was all in this digital world. Science became more of a real thing for me.
+
+*How did you move toward the PhD?*
+
+For my PhD, I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to break it down even further and be really reductionist. I wanted to get into biophysics---to be able to watch these atoms move and manipulate them.
+
+I applied for biophysics PhD programs all across the US and got accepted to University of Chicago, which was the only school I applied for in Chicago. I went because it was probably the best school I got accepted to, it was near my family. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Here's some kid who came from shit, and you get a PhD from University of Chicago. Immediately you start to enter---you're no longer lower-class anymore. Even just the stipend they pay you every year as a graduate student is a reasonable amount of money.
+
+All the people I was around had summer homes and lake houses that we'd go to. I was definitely one of the very few kids who came from poverty. It was one of the moments of my life I'm most proud of---being accepted there.
+
+When I went there, I knew what I wanted to do. I found the nerdiest, smartest professor who tried to work on things in the most reductionist way and worked with them to get a PhD. It was such an amazing lab. A lot of people from that lab have gone on to success. One of the people in my cohort, John Jumper, just won a Nobel Prize. It was a really impressive group of people.
+
+The knowledge I gained there set me up for the rest of my life. It was like a firehose of knowledge and information that I absorbed like a sponge. I spent extra time studying outside of the lab and classes. Nowadays, there's so much shit in my brain that I try to anti-learn. I don't need to learn anything more for the rest of my life.
+
+I had some amazing mentors there who really spent time with me, like Tobin Sosnick. Another professor doing biophysics research would invite me over to his office every other day. He would have fancy whiskey or alcohol that somebody gave him for giving a talk, and we'd sit there for two or three hours sipping whiskey, just talking about science. He would close the shades on his office door window. Amazing mentors there.
+
+But I also realized that academia wasn't the place for me. There were these guidelines of the way you're supposed to do things. It happened twice. 
+
+Once was when I published my first paper---I wrote the whole thing, made all the figures. I think maybe it was just me and my PI as the only two authors on a massive body of work. It was like a work of art. I put my soul into that paper. If somebody could read it and actually understand it on a truly deep level, it is like a work of art. Some of the experiments I did were so novel and wild---a breadth of experiments, from computational stuff to complex NMR measurements. I was super proud of it.
+
+We sent it off to the journal. Initially, they were really excited about it---do some revisions. We did the revisions and they came back, and they're like, "We're not interested in it anymore. Sorry." I was like, "What do you mean you're not interested anymore? What the fuck?" Even my PI wrote a strongly worded email to them.
+
+I was just like, this system---the scientific system---is not about the beauty. It's not about the cleverness, like that hacker world where it's all about the cleverness of stuff and the beauty of what you do.
+
+*How did you find balance between that rigor and regimentation of a lab environment and the art?*
+
+My PI just let me do whatever the fuck I wanted. "Do your shit, go off, go off, homie," and I did. I published four first-author papers, won the best thesis award at the university. I did really well, even by academic standards.
+
+But after that paper I got really jaded, and I decided to start fucking around. I built this musical instrument. I was really interested, because I was studying this protein and looking at the atoms move in this NMR machine. I was so obsessed with it---I had such a strong relationship with this protein molecule. I could tell you where all the amino acids were and where they pointed, what it looks like, how they vibrated. I knew way too much from spending so many hours and days with it. I didn't take days off ever, maybe one or two weeks off around Christmas, and I worked every weekend.
+
+I wanted other people to be able to experience this. I was like, "How can I do that?" Because it was this light-reactive protein that followed this photo cycle, I was like, "What if I could take that cycle, that exponential decay of function, and map that to a musical note?" Then people could kind of experience the life of this molecule and understand it, maybe even a little bit, because I'm taking it from the molecular world to the macro world.
+
+I built this musical instrument. I would be in the lab all day, come home at night, be working on this, and literally just fall asleep. I bought this wooden lap bench off Craigslist for a hundred bucks---person hand-built it and delivered it. I still have it actually, and it's a piece of shit, but it was a hundred bucks.
+
+I had never built a musical instrument. I had no idea about music or sound, never integrated sound with electronics. It was an impossible task to me---how do you even begin doing this? But slowly, over time, I built more and more, got better and better, figured it out more and more.
+
+We used to have this thing called Graduate Student Seminar---just graduate students could go. They had beer and pizza, every Friday. I went and played this musical instrument. Everybody had no idea how to respond and kind of laughed and stared at me.
+
+It was wild, and then it was even more wild because _Scientific American_ and _The Verge_ wanted to write news articles about this shit. I remember talking to my PI in the lab, and they were like, "Oh no, you can't put this in your thesis or anything," but I'm starting to catch recognition from these outside publications.
+
+To me, this has scientific relevance and interest in many different ways. But the fact that I can't include it with my thesis or can't contribute it to my scientific body of work seems silly and dumb. That was kind of the final thing with me. I was like, "I'm done with academia. I'm on this trajectory that I think is totally different, and I want to embrace that."
+
+*Where did you go next?*
+
+I went to this conference wearing a shirt---because in graduate school I was known to be a curmudgeon---that said, "I need my space," and it had a NASA logo on it. At this conference, somebody was like, "There's a guy from NASA here. You should talk to them." This person from NASA talked to me and they're like, "You should apply for this NPP fellowship. It's this prestigious fellowship---you basically write a proposal for research, NASA funds you, and you get to do whatever you want." It was in Silicon Valley.
+
+I wrote this proposal, and it was so weird. I'm coming from this world of watching atoms move in the basement of the library---the NMR room was in the absolute basement underneath the library---to writing a proposal about helping astronauts on Mars do this shit. It was so surreal, and then they accepted it.
+
+This was one of the first times where they're just like, "Here's a bunch of money to move out here, you get a nice salary, amazing health insurance." I lived in a hotel on base for the first two weeks I was there till I found a place to live. I wound up at NASA with a fellowship, which was pretty wild. I got to work on something cool and crazy, and I didn't have to deal with all the fucking academic bullshit.
+
+I worked on engineering bacteria to degrade plastic or degrade human waste so they could reuse it. It was pretty fun. I had two interns who worked with me, and we'd go to all these trash dumps to bio-prospect. I'd just be like, "I'm from NASA. Give me samples of your trash." People would be like, "Okay." It's so funny because you got this official NASA badge, and people just do whatever you say.
+
+*Did you find your way into startups through being in the Bay Area?*
+
+NASA was also really bureaucratic, and nobody worked---seriously, nobody worked. My boss came in one day a month. I was coming from academia where I was working my ass off, working on weekends and everything. So I come into NASA, I'm working on weekends, and they start telling me, "Don't come in on weekends---it's not a good look." I'm just like, "What? Why? What's going on here?" I was this naive person who doesn't understand social dynamics and bureaucracy.
+
+I remember one time the fire alarm went off in the building---it's this six-floor building that's really cool, pockmarked to look like the moon from all the micro-meteors. The base fire department comes, and the fire people were like, "Is everybody out of the building?" We're like, "I think so." There were five of us standing there, and I was like, "Holy shit, this is how many people come into work on any given day?" There's this six-floor building that employed enough people to fill it, and I was just like, "Oh my God, I don't think I'm gonna get anything done here."
+
+I worked on engineering. I wanted to start working on stuff that was less molecular because I realized from the musical instrument that if you want to have an impact on the world---the real world, not just mental masturbation that you enjoy---you need to build things that impact the world. That's when I figured out, "Okay, if I want to do something that I want to do, I'm gonna have to build it myself," because all these systems that have been established, I just don't fit into.
+
+When my contract was coming up---the fellowships are for three years---I was just like, "I'm out, homies. We had a good one. I'm taking off."
+
+I was really interested in democratizing this technology. From the computer hacker days, what made computer hacking so great was access---access to the ability to program, access to knowledge and information. I believe that really drove the computer hacker movement. I was like, "I want to recreate that in biology."
+
+I made this CRISPR DIY---a CRISPR genetic engineering kit where anybody could gene-edit some bacteria in their home, and I did a crowdfunding campaign. If I raised $20,000, I thought, I'm just gonna do this full time. I ended up raising like $150,000 and got a ton of press. It started this trajectory of running companies and being in the public eye.
+
+*When you started building these tools that enable people to take things out of the lab and into their homes, how easy was that translation? How is providing access to biology different from doing it with computers?*
+
+It is a lot different. One thing I really learned about science is there's no user interface, no user experience design. It's just terrible. It's not intuitive in any way and requires all this complex equipment, expensive equipment. I was just like, "How do I package this in a $150 kit?" Which was the first problem---how do I make the protocols and experiments for somebody who doesn't have a whole lab full of equipment to use?
+
+There was a lot of translation, a lot of R&D that had to go into making this work for somebody in their kitchen who doesn't even have the ability to control temperature. That's a basic process of biology---you have an incubator, you can control temperature. People don't normally have that in their life. We have a thermostat that we could generally control room temperature, but that's it. You can't go up to 37°C or down to whatever.
+
+I had to adapt things and do things over and over again. I made more kits---letting people engineer human cells in their home, letting people genetically engineer plants in their home. The company still sells this stuff. It was always like, "How do I take this complex scientific experiment and break it down so that somebody without complicated equipment can do it?"
+
+Every time I did something like this, people would be like, "That's impossible. You're never going to be able to do that." And every time I was able to figure something out. I think it was just that hacker mindset---being clever and understanding things. Graduate school really helped because I came from this world where I tried to learn things from first principles. I didn't follow protocols---I wanted to understand the process so that I knew how to do things intuitively because I understood each step and why it was supposed to be done. I think that helped me greatly to take these protocols that people have been doing and still do and just be like, "Fuck that, you can do it this way also. That's way easier, requires way less equipment."
+
+*What did people start doing with these kits, and did it surprise you?*
+
+A lot of the kits are educational. You have to understand that even nowadays---I started the company around ten years ago---people still don't have an intuition for biology, which always blew my mind. We understand these devices, we use computers and cell phones so intuitively, and we have no intuition for ourselves and what we're made of.
+
+Almost all the kits we sell are geared towards, "Here's a basic experiment that's pre-built for you so you can understand the principles by doing this experiment to get this desired result." 99.9% of people do not move past that. But some people do. A couple of people that work with me today started off with those kits.
+
+It's more foundational. We're not at the place yet where people really understand or are willing to put in the effort to take it beyond just learning from a kit. It's like when you buy a little electronics board and you make the LED blink on it or something---it's basically like that for the world of biology or, in programming, writing a "Hello World" program.
+
+You have to understand the difference between playing a song and writing a song. It's really hard to get people to that writing-a-song stage. Very few people make it there in general in the world. With biology, most people are just going to be people who do the experiment, understand it, enjoy the process, brag to their friends, and then move on with their life.
+
+*How has art continued to be a part of your life as you've been a founder of companies?*
+
+When I was at NASA, one of the things I did was apply for this art fellowship at Stochastic Labs. It was this new organization that just opened up in Berkeley---a rich person gave them a bunch of money to buy this mansion and set up this hacker space. It was super cool, a bunch of brilliant people from the Bay Area.
+
+I applied by myself, but they paired me with Lynn Hershman Leeson. She is an icon---a feminist icon and art and technology icon. At the time I didn't know. She's made a bunch of movies with Tilda Swinton---Tilda Swinton starred in a bunch of her weird, crazy movies.
+
+We started doing art together. This brought me into the more professional world of art because the projects we worked on ended up in museums, which was really wild. We worked on some genetic engineering projects together. I think it was called the Infinity Engine---we worked on a bunch of different stuff to create this huge installation. I was combining some of my computer programming knowledge with biology knowledge.
+
+The first place it showed was ZKM, which is this new-media, techno-art museum in Germany. Then it went around Europe---I think it went to the Tate Modern and all these other places. It was really wild. That's when I first started to actually be considered an artist and consider myself an artist.
+
+But at the same time, outside of that, I started doing these weird experiments. I had gut health problems, and people were talking a lot about microbiome transplants. I learned a lot about the microbiome---the bacteria in and on your body. There's this really famous bio-artist at the time who I was friends with, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and she did this DNA sequencing from cigarette butts to facial reconstruction of people, which got a lot of press.
+
+I was like, "Let's do this experiment where we transfer our microbiomes---I transfer yours to me, and I transfer mine to yours." We're like, "Oh yeah, this is gonna be really cool." Eventually, she's like, "I don't know if I want to do this. It seems dangerous, and I don't want to fuck up my microbiome."
+
+We were having this conversation at this event, and some people I met who are filmmakers were just like, "Oh my God, that sounds fucking crazy! We'd love to film this thing." I was like, "Okay, I guess." Heather was out, so it was just me these people wanted to film.
+
+Somehow _The Verge_ got wind of this idea, and they're like, "We want to do a huge feature on this." This was the first time I had serious press coverage---before, I had some articles written about me, but very superficial. This was the first time I actually had serious principal photography and cameras in my face, a cinema camera, people following me around asking me questions, a journalist who's there.
+
+I'm doing this experiment and going through this process over the course of two weeks, and I have people following me around everywhere, asking me questions the whole time, recording every moment of my life. It was so intense---what the fuck is going on?
+
+It was intended to be a science experiment, and it was, but it turned into performance art where the world was interested in this crazy science experiment. It was super rigorous---I took all these samples of bacteria in and on my body, had the DNA sequenced, matched it to the bacteria, looked at how my microbiome changed.
+
+It was a huge success. The film documentary won a bunch of awards and went to South by Southwest and all these places. I'm at South by Southwest on stage answering people's questions because everybody's like, "Oh my God, that's crazy." This huge article comes out about me, and I started to become a public figure at that point. People started caring about what I did and what I said. It was weird. It was really weird.
+
+*How did your approach to science change when you turned it on yourself and your own body? What made you willing to do this?*
+
+It was really freaky because the journalists talked to a lot of scientists, and they were just like, "Oh, they shouldn't do that." At the time I was still male-presenting, so if I refer to myself as "he," just understand that, at the time, people referred to me as he.
+
+I felt like I understood it well enough and deep enough that I was taking a calculated risk---a risk that something could happen, but also I think something profound or really interesting could come of it. And it did. The results were amazing, just to see the shift in the microbiome. Nobody had done an experiment anything like that.
+
+When I started experimenting on myself, I thought there were probably few, if any, people in the world who understood this as good as me, and I understood it well enough that I thought I could make a calculated risk.
+
+It wasn't until later---when there started being copycats, who started copying some of these self-experiments that I was doing---that I was like, "Oh, holy shit, I never imagined that people who didn't have the knowledge would just start doing this shit also." They're crazy motherfuckers. But I think to do good science, to do a lot of this stuff, you need a certain amount of crazy to push boundaries, to do the impossible. You do need a certain amount of crazy, and you do need a certain amount of knowledge.
+
+I think I have a combination of crazy and knowledge that's really unique. Growing up, I never had anything to lose---I wasn't afraid of getting arrested or stealing shit. Where am I gonna go back to? I'm probably not gonna be worse off than I was at one point in time.
+
+It really built in me---this attitude of "I have nothing to lose." I think that's still ingrained in me to a certain extent, even though I've grown up and I do have stuff to lose. I still kind of more than not have that attitude of, "Shit, what's the worst that could happen? I've seen some shit. What's the worst that's gonna happen?"
+
+*I'm curious about whether you're influenced by the legacy of DIY medical interventions in the trans community, where people have had to take these matters into their own hands for a long time.*
+
+Oh, for sure, especially later on. At the time, my transness was really weird---I didn't quite understand. And I don't want to get into specifics because I think it makes me really vulnerable, and I don't like this information out because some journalists do use this shit against you.
+
+At the time I was still understanding who I was, and I think it definitely played into this idea of the body being malleable and not so set in stone like people thought it was.
+
+It wasn't long after that when I started doing more experimenting with medications---hormone replacement therapy in a trans context, DIY outside of medical intervention. To me it was a big deal---if I go to a doctor and say I want to experiment with this stuff, it's like you're either trans or you're not. And if you're trans, it's a big deal. Your partner obviously is going to know you're trans, everybody in your life is going to know you're trans, and it completely changes everything.
+
+I had just started to become a public figure. I did _Gut Hack_, which was huge, and then after that, all these documentaries started getting made about me from 2016 to 2019, culminating in a Netflix documentary coming out in 2019. I was constantly in the spotlight. I can't just one day all of a sudden show up and be like, "I'm a woman now. I'm trans." I mean I could, but to me that's a lot.
+
+There was a lot of experimentation going on behind the scenes---experimenting with different drugs and how they made me feel, how they made me feel about myself, what I thought about it. I think that was really helpful, and it was really amazing to have access to this stuff.
+
+There's a great resource---there's a DIY trans wiki that's associated with Reddit---that was so helpful to me to understand who I was and how I felt about all these things. It was super scary because you're going into the unknown, not just socially but also medically.
+
+*Do you think there are lessons that community has to offer the wider world in terms of thinking about medical interventions, about experimentation, about our relationship with our bodies?*
+
+I think our relationship with our bodies is huge. It really taught me a lot about body autonomy. When most people think of body autonomy, at least in more modern context, a lot of it's centered around abortion. But I think we don't realize how little body autonomy we have in general.
+
+Learning about this stuff, getting involved in the trans community, and just seeing that our bodies are so policed on every aspect---a woman can go and get an estrogen pill for birth control over the counter, there's no requirements. But for somebody who is born male, you have to sign all this paperwork.
+
+In California, when I eventually went and got prescriptions, there was all this paperwork---"I understand the consequences of this, I understand I could go sterile," and all this shit. You're just like, "Holy shit, they really want to control what we can put in our bodies."
+
+It really opened my eyes to that, and I think people don't even realize how much control they're under. It opened up my eyes to the idea that body autonomy is this huge thing---the right to take whatever medications we want, use whatever pharmaceuticals or drugs we want to get high or whatever it is, abortion, surgical medical procedures. It goes deep.
+
+A woman can go and get breast implants and nobody asks any questions. If you're transgender, you need three letters from psychiatrists. How does this make any sense? How is one different than the other when they're both gender-affirming surgery?
+
+It opened up my eyes to the struggles that a lot of people have. I've had it so good because, when I came out, my life was starting to become more upper middle class. I had access to insurance, I had money to pay and see therapists, really try to deal with this. In my life, I have been fortunate to---outside of online---not really experience much bigotry. The group of people I get to be around are very accepting people.
+
+I understand that a lot of people don't have that. A lot of people don't have access to insurance. A lot of people don't have access to people who---everybody around them will be bigoted towards them. It's complicated, and going to a doctor to get access to this stuff can be dangerous.
+
+Still to this day, even though I generally always pass as a woman, I'm still afraid to use women's bathrooms. Shit's crazy out there. Subverting that system again, I think this goes back to being a hacker---be clever enough to subvert the system. When I first started, I took medication off the internet and found websites where you can get a doctor to prescribe you blood tests. So I just go get my blood drawn to see what levels of my testosterone and estrogen levels and all sorts of stuff, so I had an idea of how the medications were affecting my body. It was really cool.
+
+*I wonder if you could say a bit more about your interaction with public health authorities. Where have you run into the limits of the dominant system?*
+
+Once I started to get more public attention and people paying attention to me, then the government started paying attention to me---and not even just the US government. It started at the time it was just me and two other people running this company, and I have the FBI chatting with me, meetings with the FBI, meetings with the FDA, meetings with the California Board of Medicine, California Medical Board. So many organizations just started to come after me.
+
+It was so freaky because here I am---the company is still growing, we don't have much money. If somebody wanted to do some sustained court battle with me, I would totally crumble. I'm flying by the seat of my pants, trying to figure things out as I go, and operating under the premise that I have nothing to hide---I'm not doing anything wrong.
+
+I made sure I would always research all the regulations and rules. Then the government started changing them, and California made a law, and the FDA came out with new guidances to start to try to counteract some of the stuff I was doing. It was so wild to have these government agents. The Bavarian government in Germany came after me, which caused this international incident that got the FBI and other people involved.
+
+It was way too much for somebody who---I don't want to say lowly, but what's all this drama going on? I'm just this farm girl who runs a small company in Oakland, California, out of a house! We didn't even have---because bio labs were so expensive, I just rented a house in this kind of reasonable but also not great neighborhood in West Oakland. It was right by the West Oakland BART stop where people got shot on the regular. I just run this fucking biotech genetic engineering company out of this house in West Oakland. What the fuck?
+
+*Where is the line for you between protection and guarantees that people should be owed, and that autonomy?*
+
+It is really complicated. I guess I'm kind of more libertarian at heart. There's these libertarians who are like, "Oh, you shouldn't need a driver's license to drive, or there shouldn't be stop signs," but when you think about it, stop signs and stoplights and guardrails do protect us, and they don't really infringe on our rights very much. You have to stop when you get to a stop---that's not really infringing on your right too much. These are good things. Having certain stoplights and stop signs aren't necessarily a bad thing when you're trying to prevent people from accidentally hurting themselves. What are those boundaries? I don't know. It's really tough.
+
+I'm sure there's some things we can all agree on---nobody should have access to Ebola. I think 99.9% of people are gonna be like, "All right, reasonable." I think when it gets to those gray areas is when it starts to get complicated.
+
+Honestly, what I've come to learn is that the system does play a role in---it scares, it prevents a lot of people from doing stupid shit, but it also allows room for pushback. If you're actually thoughtful about the pushback, I think you can actually hack the government, so to speak, in certain ways. Hack the regulations, find these loopholes and bypass them. That's what I've worked to do and still do today---find these loopholes and bypass them to your advantage, where they can't do anything to you because that doesn't break any of the things.
+
+And learning what's important to the system---what does the system value? How do I not fuck with the things that they value? I think I've become way smarter about it by understanding that the system does have a role to play. There should be some amount of pushback because I think just giving people freedom to do whatever they want isn't necessarily in everyone's best interest.
+
+So pushback so that the thoughtful people who are trying to push the boundaries end up making it through, and the people who are just doing dumb, crazy shit kind of get---don't make it as far. It's kind of like a self-selective sieve---if you made it this far where you're talking to the FBI, you probably hopefully have done it in such a way where they're not going to arrest you. If they are, you deserve it.
+
+*When you think of yourself encountering that computer and discovering your power as a hacker, what are you hoping to convey to people who are experiencing something similar with the tools you're providing now? What do you hope they learn?*
+
+I'm just trying to open people's eyes. I want them to see the beauty that I saw or see, because once you see that beauty---I call it "the illness"---it becomes this illness where you become obsessed. It's just like, "Oh my God, that thing is so beautiful. I just want to know more. I just want to feel it. I just want to touch it. I want to experience it in every way possible."
+
+That starts with showing people the beauty. That's why I started my new company. My first company was this bottom-up approach---people are never going to be able to see that beauty if they don't understand it. My new company is like, people are never going to be able to completely express that beauty if they don't see what's possible.
+
+In my new company, we're gene-editing animals, gene-editing embryos, which has been so wild and surreal. I want people to have the power to be able to be hackers, but I need to show them what's cool first. Just like when I was a hacker, there was a lot of code that inspired me---a lot of code that inspired a lot of the programming and clever hacking stuff that I did. People need that inspiration.
+
+It's also something I've learned being a trans person---I used to never understand what representation meant until I was the only woman, trans woman, queer person in a room. Then you're just like, "Holy shit---wow, it's very isolating." You start to realize people need representations of cool, interesting, beautiful things. I'm just trying to bring that to them, I guess.
+
+That's kind of one of my mottos---I even tattooed it on my arm myself: "create something beautiful." I want to inspire other people to create beautiful things, because what's the point if you're not seeing beauty?

layouts/interviews/single.html

@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@
 {{ define "main" }}
     
-    <interview class="single-interview">
+    <article class="single-interview">
 
       <header class="mb-4 wompum-container wompum-container--wide-gap aspect-2/1 md:aspect-3/1">{{ partial "interview-wompum.html" . }}</header>
 
       <div class="flex md:flex-row flex-col gap-4 mt-4">
-        <aside class="md:sticky md:top-24 md:h-screen lg:w-1/3 p-4 font-iosevka">
+        <aside class="md:sticky md:top-24 md:h-screen p-4 font-iosevka max-w-sm">
           {{ $headshot := resources.GetMatch (printf "**/%s" (strings.TrimPrefix "/" .Params.headshot)) }}
           {{ if and .Params.headshot $headshot }}
           <div class="narrator__container -mt-24" data-text="{{ .Params.narrator }}">
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
           {{ end }}
           <div class="md:block hidden">{{ partial "interview-metadata.html" . }}</div>
         </aside>
-        <div class="prose-xl dark:prose-invert lg:w-2/3 p-4 mx-auto md:mx-0">
+        <div class="prose-xl max-w-prose dark:prose-invert p-4 mx-auto">
           <p class="font-bold text-4xl interview-title interview-title--single">{{ partial "interview-title" . }}</p>
           <p class="text-2xl">{{ .Params.summary }}</p>
           <div class="wompum-container wompum-container--no-gap h-1">
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
         </div>
         <aside class="md:hidden block p-8 mt-8 border-t border-gray-200">{{ partial "interview-metadata.html" . }}</aside>
       </div>
-    </interview>
+    </article>
     <aside class="max-w-screen-xl mx-auto">
       {{ partial "related-interviews" (dict "page" . "topics" .Params.topics "limit" 3) }}
     </aside>

layouts/partials/wompum-demo.html

@@ -1,7 +1,8 @@
 <div class="wompum-demo max-w-2xl mx-auto">
-  <h2 class="text-2xl font-bold mb-4">Wampum Grid Protocol</h2>
+  <h2 class="text-2xl font-bold mb-4">What are the color grids?</h2>
 
-  <p>The color scheme on this website is inspired by <em><a href="http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ws63912f5dd-e703-4759-8c31-33ac98b3c190">Constitutional Wampum</a></em> by Robert Houle. The site uses the following protocol to generate the colorful wampum style grid.</p>
+  <p>The color scheme on this website is inspired by <em><a href="http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ws63912f5dd-e703-4759-8c31-33ac98b3c190">Constitutional Wampum</a></em> by Robert Houle. This is a tribute to the convergence in that work between the long legacy of political protocol-building through wampum belts in Indigenous communities of North America and a pixelated aesthetic that evokes life in the digital world. In the concept of protocol, the ancient practices and recent technologies converge.</p>
+  <p>The site uses the following protocol to generate the colorful wampum style grid.</p>
   
   <div class="mb-8">
     <label class="block mb-2">Enter text to generate a grid:</label>