What better way to kick off this week's theme than with news of our own transformation?

After 18 years, we have said goodbye to the Fog Creek name and we are now Glitch. Read the official announcement here, and learn about how we came to this decision, take a look at what's coming up in the future, and hear about our new slate of advisors. Also, we're hiring!

Sonification sounds like a relatively new term, but it has been around for well over 100 years! The concept involves using non-speech audio (like a musical tone) to convey data. Both sonar and the clicks of a Geiger counter are two such examples of sonification.

In his recent talk at the Web Audio Conference this year, software engineer and Glitch user Nick Violi (@nvioli) showed a demo of sonification using Glitch and Google Analytics! View his slides and have a listen at the sound of real-time website traffic!

Are deep space radio signals like the famous Wow! signal from the 1970s evidence of a world out there beyond our own? Only time will tell, but until then, Root Angel (@acgillette) has provided the Internet with an app providing mysterious dispatches from Mars. Keep clicking for new entries from the Red Planet!

Digesting the ongoing Twitter timeline can be like drinking from a fire hose. So it's always fun when people like Lesley pull off a really entertaining feat like slyly meting out the lyrics to Toto's  over the span of about a month. It's really one of those fun "blink and you'll miss it" type of experiences that make you love the Web.

In case you missed it, Glitch user Brian Arnold Sinclair (@brianarn) created an app that not only displays Lesley's tweets, but also syncs them to a video of ! It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from this app!

If you're having a rough day, take a breather and go to the islands! Well, maybe not , but this app from Glitch user Brian Jones (@jonesbp) is a good substitute! Islands Division is a riff off the famous Joy Division album cover, with a bit of a generative art twist inspired by Web tinkerer Tim Holman. Clicking the circle arrow will generate a new landscape and color scheme, and you can just sit back and watch the gently undulating waves. I'm feeling more relaxed already!

This Week's Featured Illustrator: Jonathan Vermersch

Have you seen our highlighted apps this week on the Glitch homepage? Each app is accompanied by the artwork of London-based illustrator Jonathan Vermersch. His work is character-based, drawing on vibrant colors and surreal elements to create his unique and fantastic style.

Have a look at this week's featured illustrations, and head over to Jonathan's website to see more of his awesome work!

One of the features that makes Glitch great for anyone is the ability to take an app, remix it, and transform it into something new! These apps are just a sample, and you're only limited by your own imagination. Create something awesome today!

Transform!

This is Glitch

TLDR: We’ve renamed Fog Creek to Glitch, Inc. to represent our single-minded focus on Glitch. We’re hiring for a bunch of new positions (with more to come!) and welcoming a slate of new advisors. And it’s all in service of making Glitch one of the most important creative communities on the Internet, and having our company set the standard for thoughtful, ethical technology.

Back in 2000, two visionary founders, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it treated people — both its employees and its customers. Their belief was that being better to people would yield more invention, more innovation, and a much more pleasant place to work.

Well, they were right. The company they created, Fog Creek Software, has gone on to create multiple groundbreaking products and to help change the entire tech industry along the way.

From inventing Trello to co-creating Stack Overflow to pioneering bug tracking with FogBugz and launching other successful and influential products like Manuscript and Kiln and Copilot and CityDesk and many other experiments. Fog Creek has been a bastion of innovation for nearly two decades.

And today, we’re turning the page on that chapter for something new.

When we started working on the project that would become Glitch, it was originally just part of our regular “Creek Week” process — the internal hackathons where members on our team come up with new ideas and try to inspire each other with cool projects. It became obvious pretty quickly that Glitch was something special.

Then earlier this year, when Glitch came out of beta, we saw an incredible groundswell. As a creative community, Glitch inspired people to create over a million apps in record time — including cutting-edge work in VR, machine learning, distributed apps, bots, and more. And Glitch has won the hearts of developers around the world who now feel that coding with other tools feels a lot more lonely and less productive. Just as importantly, Glitch has reminded an entire community that a healthy, independent, open web generates enormous value for everyone on the Internet, earning the attention and respect of many of the biggest players on the web.

One of the guiding principles for Glitch is that we should communicate with clarity, and that our purpose and goals should be self-evident in all we do. And that’s led us to recognize it’s time for us to become Glitch. It’s not just what we’re building, it’s who we are as a company. While the core values of Fog Creek still persist, we’ve also learned a lot and evolved a lot over the last two decades, and now our name and identity are evolving, too.

In terms of Glitch as a community and as a product, nothing’s changing. We’re doubling down on being a friendly and welcoming community, and focusing our efforts and investment on extending our lead in innovative features that creators and developers love.

We’re holding tight to our values, honoring our core principles of valuing people — whether that’s our community members or the workers on our team. And we’re expanding our history of transparency and accountability, with meaningful efforts like publishing our entire employee handbook publicly. (It’s a Glitch app, naturally.) This lets us show the world how we put our values into practice. We also want to do more: Glitch, Inc. is designed to be a company that sets the bar on best practices for how we treat our community, customers, coworkers and collaborators.

There’s lots of news coming for Glitch as a product, too. We’re getting ready to open up , to make it easy for your whole organization to collaborate on Glitch. (Tell your boss you want your team to be one of the first to use this new super-productive set of tools!) We’ll be building a powerful and valuable set of paid features on top of Teams to give even more options for organizations that want to get more out of Glitch, and to build a long-term sustainable business model for the platform and the company.

And we’re ecstatic to welcome a formidable slate of new advisors to help us grow Glitch, and expand our vision, and ensure that we practice the values we aspire to exemplify. Kimberly Bryant, Alan Cooper, Jason Goldman, and Franklin Leonard have a broad set of backgrounds covering everything from education to policy, user experience to filmmaking, social networks to social justice. And each of them brings unique expertise and insight into how we’re going to bring Glitch to millions more people around the world. We’re so thankful to them for joining us!

That brings us to perhaps our most important announcement today: . Whether that’s as a member of the Glitch community, or by checking out the new job listings we’ve rolled out today (with more to come soon), we want you to be part of where Glitch is going.

Glitch is a very different kind of tech company, explicitly committed to setting the standard on thoughtful and ethical practices, and with an unparalleled track record of nonstop innovation for almost two decades. If that combination is appealing to you, take a look at the positions we’ve listed, and share the job openings with your friends who share those values.

Fog Creek is now Glitch!

Tech’s history is full of startup founders who all shared a common connection or history, from the “Traitorous Eight” at Fairchild Semiconductor and the resulting “Fairchildren” companies like Intel and AMD, to the more recent PayPal mafia, which spawned Palantir, LinkedIn, Tesla, and various VC firms, among others. But one of the most successful tech founder networks of all time often gets overlooked.

The network of companies built by Fog Creek employees, alumni and the descendants of those efforts is extraordinary. Fog Creek’s founders and alumni have co-founded or led many of the most beloved and important tech companies of the last decade. If we were a little bit more cheesy, we might call it the “Creekosystem”.

First, there was Fog Creek. Founded by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor in 2000, it began as a consulting company working out of Joel’s grandmother’s brownstone apartment in New York. But while the origins may have been humble, their ambition was far from it: Joel and Michael set out to create the best place for developers to work.

Although it’s hard to imagine now, back then, software developers weren’t treated very well. Joel and Michael couldn’t find a place to work where programmers had decent working conditions and got an opportunity to do great work, so they decided to create their own.

They began with the physical environment, creating an office that was custom-designed by a top architect to be the ideal programming workspace. With private offices, windows everywhere, really comfortable chairs and all the large screen monitors you could want. But their people-friendly thinking didn’t stop there — it went into every decision they made. So Fog Creek set out to remove all the barriers that can get in the way of people from doing their best work. There was no getting sign-off to buy the tools you needed, and technical decisions were made by people with technical expertise, instead of having mandates handed down from above.

And it worked. Fog Creek successfully navigated the dot-com crash, bootstrapping the company into a growing business lead by its pioneering bug tracking product, FogBugz. Over the coming years, more products followed and lots of them were hugely successful. Fog Creek’s focus on treating developers well meant our company has always been able to attract talented individuals who were given autonomy to try out ideas and see where they went.

Noah Weiss, a young programmer who spent the summer of 2006 at Fog Creek, was one of those people with an idea. He proposed to Joel that a developer job listing business might be worth creating. The job listings were a runaway success, and the idea would later inform a big part of the business model behind Stack Overflow, which Joel teamed up with Jeff Atwood to create. It’s now the largest online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and advance their careers.

The next huge break out from Fog Creek was Trello. It began during a “Creek Week” — the internal hackathons where new ideas at Fog Creek get invented. Trello was an instant hit and went on to be used by millions of people around the world to organize everything from their work to their wedding.

Fog Creek, Stack Overflow, and Trello operated as a family of companies, connected not just by their co-founders, but by their shared DNA of people-first principles. As people moved on, they embedded these principles wherever they went. Many staff from Fog Creek went on to roles at Trello and Stack Overflow, while others worked for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Twilio, Slack, Heroku, GitHub, Dropbox, and Amazon. But working at Fog Creek didn’t just help them upgrade their careers — through their contributions they’ve upgraded the whole tech industry, too.

Take Ben Kamens, for example. He became the founding engineer at Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization who create online tools that have helped educate millions of students around the world. He’s now founder and CEO of Spring Discovery, a health-tech company who use machine learning to develop therapies that reduce disease.

Fellow alumni, Andrew Song, co-founded Whisper.ai who use deep learning in hearing aids, after roles at Facebook and Google. William Zimrin is co-founder and CTO at OrganizeTogether, who create tools for grassroots organizing. The super-handy secure tunnel software, ngrok, was created by another Fog Creek alumni, Alan Shreve. And Emmett Nicholas is cofounder and CTO at Airtable, who launched the popular, VC-backed collaboration tool company after working for many years at Stack Overflow.

But former Creekers haven’t just created their own businesses, they’ve helped grow major companies too. Like Noah Weiss, the ‘job listings guy’ we mentioned earlier. He leads the Search, Learning & Intelligence group at Slack, having forged a fantastic career via roles at Google and Foursquare. And there’s Liz Hall, one of the earliest Fog Creek employees who almost single-handedly ran recruiting at Trello, and is now having the same impact as VP People Ops for the innovative real estate platform, Cadre.

This network of companies and people have been hugely successful. But what really joins them are just a few simple, shared principles and practices:

The most important tenet that began it all back in 2000 is still as important as ever today. By putting people first, they’re free to do their best work and it’s a big part of why Fog Creek’s impact on the world rivals companies a thousand times its size.

Fog Creek alumni haven’t created growth-at-all-costs, get-rich-quick businesses. Instead, they’ve applied the bootstrapped sensibilities learned at Fog Creek and have established business models that thrive only when they’re creating real value for their customers.

This is more than just selling shovels in a gold rush, it’s a desire to really make a difference. Whether that’s helping people work together with products like Airtable, ngrok and Trello, or by preserving their health and advancing their personal development at Whisper, Spring Discovery, and Khan Academy.

Few sites have been a force multiplier for developers quite like Stack Overflow. But with Glitch, we aim to have an even greater positive impact. We’re innovating on what to date has just been seen as “developer tools”, turning them into a set of creative and expressive tools that enable people of any skill level to be able to create online. And as a platform, Glitch is reminding folks that the web is still a fun, creative place that any of us can build. It’s already inspired people to create over a million apps — from cutting-edge VR apps to distributed apps, bots, and more.

Perhaps what’s most exciting is that now Fog Creek employees and alumni are joined by the creative coders, designers, artists, activists, and educators from all over the world who comprise the friendly, creative Glitch community. And together, the impact we can all have on the web is far greater than anything we’ve seen as a company so far.

To the Creekosystem and Beyond

Extra extra! Read all about it! XOXO 2018 has come to a close, and we're still giddy off of the reaction of the Art+Code sessions from this year's event. From generative art to renegade GIFs across San Francisco, Art+Code really showed the wonder and magic that still exists out there on the Internet. Check out our recap and learn about how it all went down!

While you're browsing the web, listen to the latest episode of Product Hunt Radio with our CEO, Anil Dash. He talks with guest Allison Esposito and host Ryan Hoover about the early days of the web, what's changed since then, and the challenges with building community online.

Every project needs to start somewhere, but often times that first step can be the hardest one to take. If you're stuck in analysis paralysis mode, then Glitch user Jillian Meehan (@jilliangmeehan) has just the app for you. Shouldidoit is a simple yet handy exercise for figuring out whether or not you should do a new project. Apps like this can really help decrease your anxiety around starting something new!

Monica Dinculescu is one of our most prolific creators, and her work embodies that spirit of creation that Glitch is all about. Her app Color Gradient was a way for her to lighten, darken, and blend colors in JavaScript. Remix the app and use whatever colors you like to make your own color gradients!

Spotify's algorithms for making playlists are top notch, but have you ever wanted to make collections out of artists or albums? If so, Spotify's head of engineering (and Glitch user) Josh Blaney has the tool for you. Collections uses Spotify's web API to add artists and albums to collections that live as playlists on your account. Take a look at Spotify's collection page for more Glitch apps!

Did you know that 10,000 is just 2 x 5? Or that 1999 is a prime number? In case you didn't, then you can keep those bits of knowledge for your next trivia night. But if you're interested in prime numbers and factorizations, then Glitch user and mathematician Christian Lawson-Perfect (@christianp) made an app that generates a never-ending list of both. As he puts it, "you can't scroll faster than the absolutely most naive algorithm imaginable can keep up with." (I tried, too. The app just keeps going!)

This really fun Bongo-Cat app from our design engineer Tiffany Tseng (@scientiffic) came about in such a cool way. Earlier in the week during our regular design review, we learned about the bongo cat meme. Tiff mentioned wanting to make an app around this, and a few hours later Bongo-Cat Creator was born. Upload the song of your choice, and use your keyboard to play along with the furry feline!

Tiff's app has already gained some fans, including a few who have remixed bongo cat in some interesting and fun ways!

Educators across the country are using Glitch to teach the next generation of coders. You may remember Prof. Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) from our article about how Glitch is used in the classroom. In that article, he talked about creating resources to help educators move into open educational resources, and his Indie Web Course Template is the first step to making that happen. Remix the course template and check out the detailed README for information on how you can customize this for your own course!

This Week's Featured Illustrator: Ailsa Johnson

You may have noticed the illustrations of Ailsa Johnson on the Glitch homepage this week. The British-born, Tokyo-based illustrator's distinct flat style mixes vibrant colors with slightly rough textures and sharp angles.

Have a look at Ailsa's illustrations for our featured apps, and see more of her work at her website!

Sometimes, the solution to the issue you're having is just right outside of your grasp. Like this quote from Questlove implies, our thoughts are the launchpad from where great ideas take flight. Hopefully these apps inspire you to "do it yourself" and create something awesome!

Doing It Yourself

From the opening party on Thursday, September 7, it was clear that this year’s XOXO was going to be different from previous years. Event creators Andy Baio and Andy McMillan — colloquially known as “The Andys” by attendees — spoke about how XOXO has become more than a festival.

“Really, it’s a community, here to support each other through dark and difficult times — and these are certainly dark and difficult times,” according to the official festival guide from The Andys. “We took a break last year to think about what XOXO should be going forward. In its absence, we realized we needed each other more than ever.”

XOXO has always been referred to by both its creators and the community as an experiment, and this year’s event was no different. A lot of new things happened: attendance numbers were scaled up, hundreds of passes were offered for free, and one of two new events were added to the festival schedule — Art+Code.

Art+Code was hosted by Glitch’s director of community engineering Jenn Schiffer, and she kicked off the event with a rousing presentation that not only had the crowd in stitches, but also prepared them for the other presenters for the night.

Part of Jenn’s talk also included our new Wayback Importer app, a way to help you bring your first website back to life. Several people’s first websites even made their way onto the big screen for everyone to see! As Jenn eloquently put it near the end of her talk, “don’t be surprised if you end up with a feeling of hope listening to our speakers tonight.”

From here, the eager crowd was rewarded with the comedic stylings of Baratunde Thurston, Emmy-nominated writer, cultural critic, and New York Times best-selling author.

Baratunde’s talk was a lead-in to the unveiling of Living While Black, a Glitch app that quizzes users on the difference between true and fabricated headlines about white people calling the cops on Black people. His talk pushed the audience to consider the implications of unnecessary over-policing and breaking down the grammar and patterns of how it occurs.

The remaining speakers talked about their projects and the processes behind them, further building upon the premise that the good, fun Internet from decades ago is not only still here, but that it’s a place full of unexpected surprises.

Research scientist Janelle Shane talked about training AI to do everything from generating other-worldly knitting patterns to coming up with unique flavors of ice cream. Nicole He is a programmer and artist, and the creator of , a voice-enabled game played in your browser that forces you to “zoom in” and “enhance” to find the solution to the puzzle. Web developer Diana Smith is the brilliant mind behind Francine, a breath-taking Rococo-style portrait rendered entirely using CSS.

Becca Ricks, current Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow at Human Rights Watch, extrapolated data from her Facebook account to make 3D maps of her locations, and even create eigenvector values of her face (which she turned into a jacket). Her apps Fuzzify.me and How PayPal Shares Your Data (built on Glitch!) illustrated just how much data web services have on us, and how we can obscure it or see where it goes.

The brilliant interdisciplinary artist Everest Pipkin crafted a haunting tale involving language and code, illustrating the softness in digital spaces such as this tiny star field Twitter bot or generative poetics vis-à-vis spambots. Roberto Baldwin of The Hard G Project, along with the mononymous (and anonymous) entity known on Twitter as @darth, detailed a collective art project showcasing original animated GIFs from a variety of artists all through the streets of San Francisco. And artist and inventor Kate Compton displayed her generative art on stage and in the theater, compelling the audience to consider a more “baroque” future where AI possesses an ornate opulence.

Omayeli Arenyeka and Monica Dinculescu are two creators we’ve featured here on Glitch in the past. Monica displayed her wildly popular Glitch apps emoji-garden and tenori-off, while also showing us her current work with Magenta.js. Omayeli’s talk was about a phenomenon known as the “creative savior complex” which forced the audience to consider if they work they’re creating is making an impact and a difference in the world.

Even better, both Monica and Omayeli’s presentations are online for you to view. Monica’s slides are even hosted on Glitch! Check them out below:

And lastly, the sweet comedic sounds of Botnik Studios got the audience on their feet at the end of the night, singing along to their auto-generated song lyrics, such as this ditty about P90X reviews on Amazon sung in the style of Morrissey.

By the end of the night, attendees were awed and delighted. Just look at this feedback!

Thank you to the XOXO crew and volunteer staff, and for all the presenters and attendees for helping make Art+Code a success!

Art+Code: Glitch at XOXO 2018

The early days of the Web were full of curious little websites. Whether you had a simple Geocities page or a tricked out Blackplanet or MySpace profile, those beginning days felt like a totally different space than the Internet we know today.

But guess what -- that whimsical, creative web is still out there, and we want to help you rediscover it! The Glitch team has created the Wayback Importer, an easy way for you to grab your first website from archive.org and bring it back to life on Glitch. Everything old is new again!

Every day, there seems to be a new incident in the news that makes you shake your head in disbelief. Comedian and New York Times bestselling author Baratunde Thurston worked with Color of Change and the team here at Glitch on an app that debuted at this year's XOXO in Portland, Oregon.

Living While Black cycles through ten headlines and asks you to figure out which one is real and which one is fake. The answers may surprise you!

Do you remember jumping on a trampoline as a kid? Nothing beats that fun feeling of leaping into the air and continuously bouncing higher and higher. Educator and Glitch user Justin Riley (@OhioFi) brought back that fun feeling in this app which features multicolored robots jumping joyfully on a trampoline. Try remixing the project and adding some variety to the robots!

If you've been active on Twitter for a few years, chances are you've "favorited" a number of tweets from other users. Over time those can add up, and you may not remember which tweets you liked, made you smile, or gave you a good laugh.

Now there's a solution to ths problem! 15-year-old Samarth Jajoo (@jajoosam) whipped up a project over the span of a weekend called the Twitter Wayback Machine. Just type in your Twitter username, and the app will show you a new tweet from your list of favorites. Best of all, there's no app permissions!

When I was younger, tilt cards were everywhere -- postcards, trading cards, bookmarks...you name it! The process goes back to the late 16th century, and it's still used today as an effective way to add interactive effects to a static print design.

Front-end developer and Glitch user Dan Wilson (@danwilson) built a nifty app that takes this lenticular design process and applies it to an image via CSS transforms. Remix the app and add your own images!

Space: the final frontier. The vast expanse beyond our world has captivated humans since time immemorial. Satellites and probes give us an idea of what else lies past Earth's atmosphere, and our imaginations fill in the rest.

That sense of wonder is behind this planet generating app from Glitch user Root Angel (@acgillette). Click the randomize button to create a new planet, and let the soothing, meditative music take you to another world!

We're honored to have the work of Tokyo-based illustrator Yacoyon for our featured apps this week! Yacoyon's style draws from fashion and video game culture, and the result is a mix of modern style and retro pixel art.

Check out Yacoyon's illustrations for our featured apps, and see more of Yacoyon's work on Instagram!

As industrial designer George Nelson says, you don't think your way to creative work; you work your way to creative thinking. This week's collection of apps are proof that the web can still be a fun place full of creativity. And Glitch is just the community to help you (re)discover that!

Space and Time

It’s easy to forget in this era of billion-dollar Internet startups, that many people got started on the web by learning to tweak HTML creating a GeoCities page, or fiddling with CSS to perfect their MySpace profile. Back then, people were almost as likely to make a web page as to read one — it was a rite of passage growing up.

Now though, things are a little different. Many modern websites all look the same, and people spend most of their time online using just three apps. So it seems more important than ever to remind ourselves that the web is still a thing we all make, not just something we consume.

We know the good, fun internet is still out there. Help us bring back the creative web and show everyone how you got started building the web. Bring back your first web projects and share them with the world, and help encourage a diverse community of creators to experiment with their broadest set of ideas.

To help you out, we’ve created the . An easy way for you to grab your first website from archive.org and bring it back to life on Glitch.

It’s complete with an authentic early-web design of course — check out that cursor animation!

And we’re showcasing peoples’ first websites in a collection, alongside some classic layouts from sites like LiveJournal, Neopets, Movable Type and many other old-school ways of publishing a web page.

If you were on the Internet back then, or are just curious about web history, you should check it out, and remix some sites to make your own new classic.

If you do make a page, let us know by sharing it on social media. We can’t wait to see what you create❣️

Help Us Bring Back the Creative Web!

But first, we're excited to tell you about this evening's Art+Code event at XOXO fest. MC'd by our own Director of Community Engineering, Jenn Schiffer, it's an evening of creators working at the intersection of art and technology. Included in the incredible line-up are some of our favorite creators from the Glitch community, including Monica Dinculescu, Omayeli Arenyeka and Mozilla Open Web Fellow, Becca Ricks.

OK, let's get into the apps! First up we have "incredible-spinners", an AI-powered interactive music experience created by software developer and music hacker Tero Parviainen.

Tero has combined Google Magenta MusicVAE, Magenta.js, TensorFlow.js, Tone.js, and three.js to create a musical experiment in which you can listen and move around a grid of musical measures generated by a neural network, creating your own musical patterns.

Do yourself a favor though and try it out on your desktop computer. This thing is making TensorFlow work hard in the browser and your mobile phone will struggle to keep up.

 is a random  episode generator which links off to Netflix for easy viewing. Cory Evan Wright captures the randomness of TV re-runs with this little app that's perfect for cord-cutters and Friends fans alike.

With "curator-and-the-machine", Stefan Bohacek explores ideas of creativity and authorship. You can curate the output of a random generative art script and share it via the @curator_machine Twitter bot. Currently, every visitor sees a unique artwork, but what if everyone saw the same thing? Should curating the artwork reset it? and should the curator have more influence over the art? Try it out and see what you think.

Inspired by a lightning talk about generative art, Matt DuLeone created "tranquil-island" - a generative art maker. Change the background color, line thickness, cell width and shape to customize and create your own generated art masterpiece.

We've featured Olivia Jack's Hydra before. It's a set of tools for livecoding networked visuals. But it has been great to see the amazing things being created by music hackers and tinkerers using it on Glitch.

Of course, the above aren't the only great apps you can find on Glitch this week -- we regularly feature projects on glitch.com itself. And starting this week, we're doing something new and fun. We'll be featuring different artists illustrating the featured apps, to help you discover the coolest new projects and show off the community's creativity.

So this week, our inaugural set of featured apps have been illustrated by Roman Muradov. Muradov is an award-winning artist who is Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts. He's worked with major publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times, as well as tech brands like Dropbox and Notion. See more of his work on Instagram and his website.

Talking Tech with Baratunde Thurston 🗣️🎙️

We haven't just spent the week playing around with awesome apps though (we pinky promise!) We squeezed in some time to chat with comedian and best-selling author Baratunde Thurston. We got into topics like the current climate around data privacy, social media, and why he uses humor to tackle tough topics. Check it out.

Randomosity!

There’s rightly a huge distrust of big tech companies right now. From execs being jerks to constant privacy woes, it’s easy to despair at the current state of tech. But in “A New Tech Manifesto” and “Find out what Google and Facebook know about you,” Thurston outlines why this is, in fact, a massive opportunity for ourselves and for big tech. We can use this moment to rewrite the rules governing how the data we generate is collected, used, and valued. And on a personal level, we can take back control of our own data.

What initially prompted you to do a data detox?

Baratunde Thurston: I had an experience, a physical world experience at a pop-up kind of art installation called The Glass Room — a walk-through experience of our data and ourselves, and I left terrified. It’s not easy to terrify me with technology ’cause I’ve been using it for a long time. Even with all that history, I was like, “Man, this is worse than I thought.” At the end of the exhibition, they had a data detox bar to understand and detox yourself in eight days.

So I was like, “Oh I’m gonna take this. I’m gonna do this.” So I just kind of documented every step and I took track of my feelings and emotional response and joke possibilities and frustrations and all that in an Evernote notebook and then a big Google doc.

I had way too much. Even what we published was maybe a half to two-thirds of the overall experience. I didn’t get to go in much on my ISP or browser trackers, like website trackers, which I think are one of the most evil pieces of shit that we have online right now. It’s just terrible the amount of weight that our web pages carry that slow down our connections, that consume bandwidth that some of us are paying for, especially on mobile, and that is being used against us. Not in a court of law, but in a marketplace where we are the product.

What are the implications of this collection and usage our data?What are the implications of this collection and usage our data?

Baratunde Thurston: I mean, we’ve seen some of the early negative implications in terms of election interference, cyber attacks, and information warfare broadly speaking. When we have been sliced and diced for marketing purposes, we can also be sliced and diced for propaganda purposes of non-commercial but political points of view. So that’s happening. I think that made it a less hypothetical concern.

Identify theft is a real and proven concern. Hacking and theft of financial data and value? I mean it happens every day. Every day somebody’s hacking into somebody’s database that they probably shouldn’t have ever built, and sucking our stuff out of it. The Russians probably have voter rolls and all kinds of personal details on people that they could then cross reference and use for targeted Facebook ads. It makes it more difficult to live. So I think from a practical convenience standpoint, we have a very inconvenient future when we constantly have to reset our identities.

In the more frightening sense, I think that you read Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction” as an example of how the faith that we put in automated systems, which are built on interpretations of historic data, can make the future too much like the past when it comes to discrimination and unequal treatment and bias. So that shows up in a really deadly way potentially with policing. It’s like, “Oh, this is how we’re gonna determine where to deploy armed men with the power of the state to kill based on historic patterns.” Well those historic patterns are also powered by over-policing and under-schooling and lack of education and jobs. So if your algorithm doesn’t take into account all those things, if it only reflects history and doesn’t try to mitigate its effects, then it’s not as dope as it could be.

I think we could use the power of connectivity, of algorithms, of data to unscrew ourselves out of an oppressive past, or out of a terrible or uneven economic presence. I’d love to see people using algorithms for justice.

Recently, we’ve seen people online deactivate their Facebook or Twitter accounts en masse. Do you think that these businesses are aware how coordinated detox efforts like these might affect their products?

Baratunde Thurston: I am sure they’re aware of it. I hope that they take it seriously. I don’t necessarily want all these companies to go out of business. I want them to change the way they do business. That’s possible. Companies have changed before. The jury is still out on these two I’m thinking of right now — Wells Fargo and Uber — but they’re expending massive amounts of energy to try to right some serious wrongs from their past. I mean, Wells Fargo? I can’t listen to a podcast without an ad from them. “Founded in 1868, re-founded in 2018.” Why? Because they were guilty of fraud at scale, giving people credit cards that didn’t ask for them, denying mortgages in a discriminatory fashion, and probably some other shenanigans that I can’t remember that we don’t know about.

So could Facebook or witter try to re-earn our trust? I want them to try. Whether they succeed is up to us and them and probably some luck and circumstance. Yeah, I hope that these movements to shock and to talk openly more about the risks to leave en masse relative to historic attempts have some effect.

I say unplug, deactivate, reactivate, streamline, trim down.

I hope that the leave will shock these companies, but I also hope that for the people doing it or hearing about it, it encourages us to think about how much we’ve advocated control over the things we say matter.

What’s one setting that you think everyone should disable when they use the web?

Baratunde Thurston: I mean if it’s one, then I’m gonna invert it and say install a VPN — a virtual private network — and browse more privately. What that will do is encrypt a connection between you and whatever server you’re connected to so no one in between can snoop, including our Internet service providers, whose violation of our sovereignty of people is really, the dramatic way I see it, deeply offensive. These are companies whose job is to connect us. Instead, they’re exploiting and extracting. They promise big talk. Fastest network, this and that, but they can’t cover impoverished inner city neighborhoods. They can’t cover rural American neighborhoods. When I say they can’t? They’ve chosen not to. They could, but they’ve chosen not to.

Until such time as they can run a network competently and ubiquitously, I’m really less interested in them trying to turn themselves into ad agencies. That is so far from their core competency. Focus on the network. When you’re killing it at that? When I am sick and tired of my bandwidth? Then sure, we can talk about you selling out my browsing patterns to cross promote a TV ad on the service that you’re also running ’cause you’re not satisfied making money off my voice communication and my data communications. You want my video entertainment budget as well.

That’s too much. So the one point that I would drive home is to deny them access by installing a VPN.

Let’s go into your talk at this year’s XOXO and the app that you’re creating with Glitch. Why is making an app about the issues of over-policing worthwhile?

Baratunde Thurston: I think because over-policing is still an issue, and a particular one to particular communities. I think we need to make all kinds of art and use all forms of media to highlight challenges and opportunities to improve ourselves. This is one such area, and apps are one such form of media and one such expression of art. I think apps are a new mode of expression, relative to some other ones like literature or plays of culture. But it’s about this theme of “living while black” and these headlines which are kind of the new version of police shooting videos that have this perverse, macabre, viral moment where that was like the new hotness in not an exciting way, but in an impressive and devastating way. It just felt like every day we were seeing a state-sponsored murder play out in our feeds.

Now to some degree, thankfully, we’re not seeing the murder — we’re seeing the call. We’re seeing the person who called the police when they don’t know what else to do, when they don’t have communications and tools crossed with empathy to just talk to their fellow citizens and their fellow resident, but instead call in men with guns to resolve the situation. That certainly, in most cases, doesn’t require it.

People need to understand more that this is a problem.

Baratunde Thurston SXSW Opening Keynote 2012: On The Power Of Comedy

You’ve done this work, not just around tech advocacy, but political advocacy as well for years now. The thread through all of that has been humor. Why do you use humor in your approach to serious issues like this?

Baratunde Thurston: People don’t always want to be lectured at, man. It’s exhausting to just have truth shoved in your face. Truth is like the proverbial Brussels sprouts to a child. I need some Honey Nut Cheerios. I need some hot sauce on that truth. Humor’s the hot sauce. Humor’s the sugar that helps the truth go down. In an attempt to selfishly and internally manage my own emotional response and burden, humor helps me. It’s my survival technique for existing. In terms of communication and reaching other people, it has often helped open a door.

Folks will listen to a joke. They’ll laugh. That’s like an emotionally open moment where they’re connecting with the person, and then you just drop in that pellet.

I have found that humor is a more compassionate welcome and invitation to a conversation versus a straight up lecture, and certainly versus self-righteous condescension. Humor is one tool that’s available to me, so it’s an opportunity to use it.

Baratunde Thurston is speaking more about topics like these as part of Art+Code at XOXO 2018 on Friday, September 7 at 7:20pm.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Talking Privacy and Data Detox with Baratunde Thurston

Anil Dash is CEO of Glitch, and the host of Function, a podcast exploring how technology shapes culture and society. 

He also serves on the boards of Stack Overflow and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Maurice Cherry is Glitch's creative strategist.

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