Tara McMullin

On top of dealing with the actual content, moderators are probably using an interface that hasn’t been updated recently, because engineering resources go toward developing new products and functionality for customers. Improving the experience for content moderators is never at the top of a company’s to-do list. For example, an old interface might... See more

While being underrepresented is a fixed state that requires coordinated action to remedy systemically, being underrecognized is an ongoing, active state that we can change from moment to moment. Intuitively, it has an agent. That’s what makes this word an actual call to action. It puts the onus on the folks with the power to act, and it makes the... See more

That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a... See more

Though histories of capitalism tend to distinguish between three stages (market, monopoly, late), its story can be retold as one of an ongoing dematerialization of value that begins when an “ordinary, sensuous thing”—a table, say—is transformed into a commodity.[31] Value performs an acrobatic feat, leaping from the ligneous form of the... See more

Status and Relatedness are stress/reward triggers and Attachment is a core human need. The exclusive "we" may reward Status for the ingroup members, but it threatens Status for the outgroup – especially those that want to belong. For outgroup members, the exclusive "we" meddles with the sense of Relatedness and creates insecure Attachment. Those... See more

Willfulness can create all sorts of personal suffering because, at the end of the day, we don’t have control over all sorts of things, and certainly not over other people. Some walls are meant to be broken down or scaled, but others are clear signals to attempt a different tact.

What sorts of signals are we ignoring when we hit those concrete... See more