David A. Jedeikin

Tag: Technology

  • My Year-End Facebook Cleanse

    It’s been more than a decade since I gave up soda. Coca-Cola in particular.

    I kept hearing about its harmful health effects. I’d been a committed one-Coke-a-day guy for almost a decade, then a Diet-Coke-a-day guy for most of another. I was sure I was hooked, had less chance of quitting than I would have much stronger stuff. Heck, there’s even evidence that some Cola ingredients are as addictive as any—and let’s not forget, once upon a time, the product contained a certain particularly habit-forming substance that made up part of its name.

    But nope. One day I just stopped and…that was that. Oh, I still drink some from time to time, particularly the Mexican-sourced variety, the one that uses cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. But once I quit, I never went back to daily or even weekly use. I’m at fewer than one a month these days. And I really don’t miss it.

    I wonder if the same will be true about Facebook.

    I was a (somewhat) early adopter of social media: Friendster in 2003, MySpace in 2004, LinkedIn around 2005, Facebook in 2007, Twitter in 2008. I probably would’ve been on Facebook even sooner if I was of the generation still in school when the platform was using college as a combined exclusivity ticket and way to scale up incrementally. It was a master strategy to build a global online brand that now attracts a surprisingly large fragment of all humanity.

    At first, it made sense, the whole social network thing. Once we had telephone books, newsstands, our own address books, home phones, mobile phones, email. Now we had it all in one place, everywhere, all the time, mated with the capabilities of old-school BBSes and the power of video-capable computing. Social networks went from wonder to utility in a very short time.

    Thing is, this killer app of the Internet age didn’t come free. Lots of them started or scaled as venture-backed enterprises…and VCs don’t run charities. It also had become clear, after the age of Napster and Limewire, that people had a thing against paying for content online. The mindset was: it’s not on physical media; it shouldn’t cost anything!

    Except most of the cost of putting out media isn’t the medium it’s on: it’s paying talented, experienced people to create the content. And paying talented, experienced people to curate it. And paying talented, experienced people to write the code and maintain the systems that keep something like this up and running. For years, people talked about nothing making money online except porn (remember those days?) and nobody having figured out the economics of online advertising. Well, turns out, the economics are alarmingly similar to advertising anywhere else: if there are a lot of people spending a lot of time in one place, that place can sell that value, the value of those eyeballs, to the highest bidder. Best of all, unlike the random spray of TV or print ads, Facebook had all this data on who a person was. Which meant they could sell advertising that was targeted. Micro-targeted. Perfectly targeted.

    That was the devil’s bargain we collectively struck, when we said we didn’t want to pay for something that we knew not to be free. The system found a way to monetize us, effectively turning consumers into the product.

    Now, all that would be fine and dandy in the naïve old world of thinking shitty, bad, fake advertising never works, and that if it did, regulatory mechanisms and/or media gatekeepers would keep it out of the system. Except, that means admitting you’re actually a media company, which Facebook had repeatedly refused to do. I’m only more convinced of this as one of a relatively few people who’s worked in both the creative side of media and the technical side of tech, witnessing over two decades as the latter industry transformed itself from a fringe curiosity to one of America’s economic powerhouses. Because, to steal from Spider-Man for a minute, with great media-company power comes great media-company responsibility.

    I’m not a complete Luddite, of course. I recognize that popular products and innovations have their place, their legitimate reason for being popular to begin with. I also know a number of perfectly fine individuals who work, or have worked, for today’s flavor of Big Blue. And I know the company I’m shunning also owns Instagram, which I still actively use, meaning at least some of the espionage harvested from us all is at least in some tiny way still gleaned from me.

    But Facebook as Facebook? It’s long since stopped being useful for me at connecting with people, given so many other options out there in the wild. I’m already in touch with everybody once long-lost. And so weary had I grown of those endless “feeling happy/sad/grateful” posts that I’d unfollowed pretty much everybody, save a dozen or two close family and friends whose lives and opinions really matter to me. Well, that and a few legitimate news sites, the ones close to the top of that pyramid of responsibly-fact-checked, sober journalism.

    But why do I need Facebook for that if I can just download the Atlantic app? And the New York Times app? And (platform plug) Medium? And, for photos, Instagram, where pictures are worth a thousand far less nasty and discordant words than what’s found on their literal big brother.

    We’ll see how long this lasts. Maybe it’ll take a bunch of us on a Facebook vacation for the social media behemoth to tinker with its core product, re-evaluate its role in the world, and lure us back with an improved, sounder offering. Or maybe I’ll find it harder than I think, quitting a two-billion person entity cold turkey. For now, I’m logged out on all devices. I’ll post articles like this one to my Facebook feed from outside. Need to reach me? Try me in one of these other spots.

    We all moved to Facebook once. We can move again.

  • Decade

    Exactly ten years ago today, I boarded a JetBlue flight from Boston, bound for a relatively new destination on their roster: SFO.

    I wasn’t exactly Mary-Ann Singleton, at least not anymore. For one thing, I was a good bit older. For another, I’d lived in San Francisco before, in the heat of the dot-com era. Back then, almost as quickly as I’d been granted admission to Baghdad-By-The-Bay in 1999, I was ejected in 2001. I was in the middle of a Green Card application that could only stay alive, in those post-9/11-economic times, care of a new job deep in the Midwest (more on that saga here).

    But even without that, I’d soured on San Francisco. The intolerable cost of housing. The angry backlash it engendered. The can’t-seem-to-get-it-right public transit. And, for me, some personal stuff, too: a friend who fell prey to drug addiction. A messy breakup for one of my earliest relationships. I thought it all spelled the end of a lifelong dream to live in California.

    So why come back?

    Turns out some other bits of America were even less of a fit for me. Oh, sure, I found cities that seemed better run, that had friendlier people, and more affordable real estate. But something about SF called to me in those years, across the miles and time zones. For one thing, as a software developer and progressive-minded science nerd, I found Thomas Friedman’s thesis about the world being flat to be a bit of optimistic overreach. Heck, Tom, America isn’t even flat. And, for me, there was no better way to experience that than by working at a San Francisco startup one year… and then working in Middle America with ex-military software guys at an investment bank in the heart of the Dubya Bush years. You can guess how those lunchtime conversations went.

    And so, after years of cobbling together contracting gigs in America’s Number Two tech center, I decided, for the first time in my life, that an earlier decision I’d made about a place I’d left wasn’t the right one, and that, yes, it was the right place, after all.

    Oh, it was no small change of heart: it led to the end of a four-year relationship, the fortuitous sale of a Chicago condo right before the big housing crash, and the niggling suspicion that, for all its attraction, SF would still present many of the same issues in 2007 that it did in 2001.

    I wasn’t wrong: MUNI still sucked, leading me to get a motorcycle license and a scooter (I still own one a decade hence). There was more melodrama with friends and more-than-friends as I found the city less welcoming, at least socially, than those Middle America spots I’d previously called home.

    And I watched the tech industry transform. Ten years ago it had recovered from its dot-bomb hangover, and had reached a sort of equilibrium where work was widely available, the Bay Area was still an international software center…but enough of the old guard was around to make an offbeat fellow like me feel right at home. One of the senior guys I worked with at two of my first jobs was a gay hippie type who was as great to work with as he was brilliant.

    But then, along came Facebook. And Twitter. And an ever-expanding Google. And the iPhone, released within days of my return here. On the one hand, it was reason for techies like me to cheer: more work opportunities and new technologies. But it felt a bit different this time, as I found myself contending with new challenges in the business (once they assailed me for being too young; now it’s the opposite); and an even greater conflict between the burgeoning business (now populated by more than a few of those types I thought I’d left behind in the Midwest) and a metro area that wasn’t entirely sure what to do with this major world industry exploding on its doorstep.

    And yet, I somehow managed to make it all work, and can now count San Francisco as the second-longest place I’ve lived in after the city of my birth. I became a U.S. citizen here. I springboarded into a trip around the world from here, which led me to write a book about those experiences. It sucked me into the vortex of an ever-buoyant real-estate market, where I bought and sold one home and am now in the midst of fixing up another. With all its foibles, faults, and transformations, San Francisco’s still got an ineffable uniqueness, a heart-stopping beauty and force among the great metropolises of our age.

    But the biggest thing San Francisco granted me was a long-delayed adulthood: I met the man I’d eventually marry here. I dealt with the loss of a parent here. I adopted two pets and am planning an even bigger adoption with my husband here in the years to come. For better or worse, this lifelong nomad can finally say he put down roots in this most rootless of cities.

    Here’s to the next San Francisco decade.

  • Twencennial American

    What my two-decade journey as a Canadian living in the United States says about this year’s election

    via Flickr @mrjoro

    Twenty years ago this month, I stepped up to a U.S. Immigration podium at Montreal airport, Canadian passport and plane ticket in hand, bound for Los Angeles.

    My trip lasted exactly an hour.

    American Immigration officials had me all figured out. I triggered what’s known as a pattern of preconceived intent: all that luggage, a desktop Mac from those pre-smartphone days, plus some correspondence I’d packed with me from movie producers, short-term apartment rentals, and family relations—noob mistake. Oh, I wasn’t actually trying to settle in L.A., at least not yet. Unlike many would-be immigrants, I could reasonably go home, albeit tail between my legs, Joe Gillis-in-Sunset-Boulevard style. I was giving myself four months to see how things would work out, much like any other Hollywood-bound dreamer from podunks near and far. Only difference was, my not-so-podunk happened to be north of an important imaginary line.

    “You can’t just go and move to the United States,” growled one of those officials as he made some entries into his computer, handing me back my passport after a seeming eternity of police-style intimidation questions. I didn’t realize what was going on at first: I was being refused entry to America. I was in the INS’s system, the Mark of Cain upon me for all time, for all I knew.

    Americans have this weird relationship with their neighbor to the north. Too many of them don’t even realize Canada actually is a separate country (to our constant exasperation, and no doubt to Ted Cruz’s benefit.) For the most part, Canadians are subject to the same immigration laws as our European, and Asian, and Latino counterparts—though our proximity to the U.S. and our near-identical culture and speech patterns obviously gives us a leg up.

    Unlike our southern neighbors, however, for whom el norte can be an enigmatic, tantalizing prize (or so politicians want you to think), for Canucks, America’s mostly just a convenient place to visit for cheap gas and factory outlet shops, and—for the better-heeled—sun-dappled vacations with the kids at Disney resorts in the wintertime. When those well-off children grow up, their parents do the same thing their American counterparts do: send them to elite colleges with the aim of getting them hired by top-flight U.S. legal or consulting or investment banking firms. Those lucky Canadians then often have their immigration paperwork handled as part of their employment package. Heck, if they’re high up enough on the totem pole, a Green Card usually follows not too long after. And don’t even get me started on Justin Bieber.

    For those not quite so well placed, things can get dicier. Canadian-ness mitigates some, but not all, of the obstacles we face as would-be migrants. In my case, a bit more initiative was all it took: a week after my initial refusal, with rearranged plane tickets and a few letters of explanation, Immigration officials did let me in. On arrival in L.A. I enrolled in a night school screenwriting class at UCLA, went to some LGBTQ coming out groups, and worked to kindle a life in a new land.

    In case you’re wondering why they did they let me in: Well, you’re technically allowed to decide to try setting up shop in America once you’re in the country, as long as you go home once your legal time as a visitor in the country is up if things don’t work out (a very loosely enforced six months for Canadians pre-9/11). You’re just not allowed to intend to do that at the instant you cross the border. Capiche? Me neither.

    Lost in all the rhetoric about immigrants and open borders these days is the big question: why come here? Why uproot ourselves—or, sometimes, flee in fear and desperation—from homelands, crossing deserts hidden in false bottoms of trucks, or boarding planes to California with three month’s savings and only the vaguest of invitations to pitch stories to off-Hollywood kids’ TV shows… all to live in a land it’s now claimed needs to be made Great Again?

    I can only begin to imagine the urgent and heart-rending needs of migrants and refugees both political and economic, and the concomitant will and desire migrants share to better their lot, and in so doing, their new homelands. The overwhelming number of us don’t come to the Land of the Free to lead a life of depravity and crime. We live in a peculiar time, an era of declining illegal immigration amid hot-button election-year immigration stances. But then, this stuff was big news when I first arrived as well, and has been so many times in the past when politicians wanted to fear-monger. But others are better qualified to report on all that. What I have to offer is my own perspective: twenty years as an immigrant in this country.

    Let’s start with the “why leave” question, and my answer to it.

    I was no refugee or victim of global poverty. I was, rather, a closeted gay nerd of moderate means growing up in a quasi-traditional, cosmopolitan, eastern-Canadian community in an age before Canada surged ahead of its southern neighbor on same-sex legislation. America, particularly California with its movies and technology and LBGT meccas, beckoned from an early age. “Go West,” sang the Village People, and I heeded the call, the strains of that seventies disco tune playing as I packed up my life of temp jobs and spec scripts and nascent gay identity. The fact that many of my cohorts viewed America with disdain, even suspicion, only whetted my appetite further.

    “The asshole of America in Gucci loafers,” sneered one colleague as he characterized Los Angeles. Hollow rhetoric, I thought, as I beheld the grandeur of the city at night from the Hollywood Bowl Overlook off Mulholland Drive, or took in sunset vistas of the Pacific from grassy clifftops above Santa Monica beach. Oh, it wasn’t easy at first; I ended my first year in L.A. twenty grand in debt and survivor of more than a few clumsy first dates. But those early, painful months as a new arrival gave way to a gig as a technical writer and my first work visa, a product of NAFTA, turns out. Politicos, please note: I was indeed paid the prevailing wage for that position, and for every other I held during my time as a non-American. While I have no illusions about the shenanigans many companies pull on this front, I’m happy to report my citizenship status was never used to deny me or any native-born American or citizen of any nation any employment right or benefit or means of advancement.

    A job may bring you somewhere, but a life is what’ll keep you there. For me, two fantastic bosses at that first job saw potential (and needed a new database) and sent me back to night school at UCLA—this time for a vocation I’d long neglected, computer programming. With the dot-com boom raging, I again packed up my life and headed north, to San Francisco. I watched the millennium turn, filed an application for a Green Card, and met my first American boyfriend in those Red Bull and (for some) MDMA-fueled late nights of the early Internet age.

    But the story didn’t end there.

    As boom turned to bust and airplanes exploded into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, I got laid off with my immigration petition still pending. Some new laws allowed me to keep the application alive, but only if I uprooted my life yet again. So I did some soft time, in Lansing, Michigan, working a tech job for an insurance provider while nervously awaiting final approval. When that finally happened, a year later (and almost six after that initial arrival in L.A.), I wanted to put down roots. Good thing about a big, diverse country like America: it gives you options. In my case, a friendly, welcoming, urbane yet surprisingly affordable spot lay right across the lake: Chicago. I bought a condo in East Lake View and entered a four-year relationship with a native-born Wisconsinite and (yes, really) became his living liver donor after a congenital childhood illness threatened his life. I did it all proudly and willingly, of course, but score one for immigrants giving back.

    Oh, but the story didn’t end there either.

    The relationship, in spite of all that, didn’t quite work out. So I packed up my life yet again and returned to the West Coast. Not long after, I took the oath of U.S. citizenship, renouncing allegiances to other princes and potentates. Some years later, with America joining a growing chorus of nations (including that of my birth) in making same-sex marriage the law of the land, I met and married my love and life partner here in San Francisco, where we are now in the process of remodeling a home amid the city’s hurly-burly property market.

    It seems every group, every religion, every nation in its most fevered imaginings thinks it’s got things figured out. America sure does: I mean, part of the country’s origin story’s got city upon a hill on the marquee. My native homeland professes a greater modesty, but don’t let that fool you either: Canadians sometimes think they’re America done right, Yankeedom with the rough edges smoothed out. In truth, my becoming a Twencennial American has taught me that both places, indeed all places, have so much to learn from one another—which is the best argument for a more open world I can possibly imagine. For me, the true essence of globalization is found not in the market-driven calculus of corporations but in the wanderings and discoveries of inveterately curious people.

    And so, too, the American Dream, or whatever you want to call it. Just as the world is shaped by its wanderers, its misfits, its personalities unsatisfied with the status quo; so, too, America, a nation of nomads going back to the Pleistocene. It is this very melding of peoples and cultures that has made the nation a place grand, creative, and wondrous. Politicians and polity alike would be wise to remember that this election season.

    Because that’s what one scared, closeted twenty-six year-old stepped up to an Immigration podium, twenty years and half a lifetime ago, to come to America to find.