Blog – Page 7 – Sonya Ellen Mann

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Remote Mentorship

Posted on August 22, 2016August 22, 2016 by Sonya Mann

I read a lot. And I learn a lot from what I read. When I discover a writer I really like, whose work is particularly insightful, I glom onto them — I’ll tear through their whole archive, or if they’re particularly prolific, read all of their classics (defined as the pieces they themselves reference the most).

The internet’s casual and iterative blogging culture encourages this behavior in a way that the offline world doesn’t. Sure, you can read every book an author has written. But what about doing that and following their life on a day-to-day-basis? Social media lets you get to know someone in real-time even when they have never registered that you exist.

Map of the internet via Bill Cheswick. Remote mentorship is possible because of this technology. — Map of the internet via Bill Cheswick.

The term I use for this process is “remote mentorship” — it’s similar to traditional mentorship, but without the constraints of time or place. The mentor doesn’t have to be interested in the mentee or pay any specific attention to them. There’s no need to meet for coffee or exchange letters. In fact, this is scalable mentorship: someone can post once and influence many, without having to dispense one-on-one advice to each enthusiast.

I maintain a public list of people who shaped my intellectual growth. Some of them have mentored me in the traditional sense, and some are friends, but the majority are busy professionals who have maybe acknowledged me once or twice on Twitter. It’s not the same as dedicated hands-on mentorship, but I get just as much out of reading Slate Star Codex as I have out of personal coaching relationships.

Remote mentorship is a combination of the intellectual hero-worship that’s been around forever (boosted by the printing press), and today’s burgeoning influencer economy. It’s like the nerdy version of lusting after Instagram stars.

I’ve been thinking about this for literally years, but I owe a hat-tip to Venkatesh Rao’s “Cambrian Explosion of Consensual Realities” for the immediate inspiration. Guess what Rao qualifies as 😉

The Cacophony of Need on GoFundMe

Posted on August 8, 2016August 8, 2016 by Sonya Mann

Last month I visited GoFundMe’s website to donate to the campaigns for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile’s families. After I finished that task, GoFundMe showed me an array of other people’s fundraisers. I clicked through to look at a few of them, perhaps voyeuristically. One representative campaign is seeking ten thousand dollars for a father without health insurance. He needs a knee surgery, so he can go back to his construction job and keep paying child support.

A panhandler whose sign says, "Will accept verbal abuse for spare change." Photo by Morgan. — Photo by Morgan.

Crowdfunding has certainly been critiqued before as a woefully inadequate way for society to address its collective ills. People have to rely on connections and charisma in order to obtain medical care or be able to pay their rent. Encountering these campaigns puts each of us in the position of arbiter — how do we decide to dole out our dollars? And how do we cope with the unceasing cacophony of sheer need?

Every time I skim through my Tumblr dashboard, another queer youth is being kicked out of their house and needs to cover the gap in support. On Twitter there’s a bail fund for every urban protest. Occasionally my Facebook friends ask for help affording vet bills.

Navigating this cyberscape is akin to walking along a busy city street and turning away from all the panhandlers because you can’t choose among them. Or handing out change based on arbitrary factors — from each according to their bank balance, to each according to their ability to look cheerful while playing the tambourine.

The crowdfunded version of charity requires far more emotional labor from all the participants than institutional charity. My monthly commitments to standard charities are easy — the sums disappear every month and the receipts show up in my inbox.

People who start campaigns on GoFundMe and similar platforms have to perform their suffering compellingly or face fundraising failure. Those of us who have money to donate, even if it’s only a little, are thrust into judging which supplicants are eligible for a less miserable existence.

Nothing indicates the rise of the precariat quite like scrolling through thumbnails on GoFundMe, wishing you had enough money to pay for everyone’s knee surgery.

Zine(s) Review: Comics by A.D. Puchalski

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Sonya Mann

I haven’t blogged about zines in a while, but artist A.D. Puchalski sent me the four comics pictured below to review. Luckily I enjoyed them, so here I am, reviewing!

Four comics by A.D. Puchalski — Buy ’em here.

Puchalski’s drawings are a cut above what I’m used to from self-published comics, and the visual style reminds me of the illustrated children’s book Corgiville Fair. (That is a compliment.) The narratives are playful with a couple of brutal twists. Think, like, Disney stories updated for sardonic adults. Disney stories plotted by Weird Twitter.

Sword of Fray features two diabolically mischievous mythical creatures — a unicorn and a sort of feline yeti. Meadow takes place in a universe where medieval knights use cell phones in between battling dragons, and rogues definitely hit that sweet kush in their downtime. Restless features a little girl who falls in with a crowd of amiable-but-destructive monsters. Tough is probably the darkest of the bunch — think The Martian with a dash of My Little Pony or the pegasus bit from Fantasia.

Recommended if you like comics and any (or all) of the works I referenced.

Behavior Design: Teaching Your Users Security

Posted on June 29, 2016September 7, 2016 by Sonya Mann

I presented this talk at CodeConf LA in June, 2016. The full slides are available on their own as a PDF, but the most relevant ones are included in the post below.

Hi, my name is Sonya Mann. I’m a tech enthusiast, freelance word person, and user of many websites, apps, and software products. This talk is aimed at people who make websites, apps, and software products. It’s about how you can nudge your users toward better security habits.

Forewarning: I’m going to use passwords as an example quite a bit, because they’re the most common security credential that regular users handle and control, but this way of thinking about things is not limited to passwords. Now let’s dive right in!

You may already know this, but typical users have bad security habits. It’s not because they’re stupid or lazy, but because they have different priorities. Most people aren’t judged at work or in their personal life by their password hygiene. And if they haven’t personally experienced an account takeover or identity theft, they’re not on high alert.

If you’re a quote-unquote “normal person” — sometimes we call them “non-technical people” or “people who aren’t paranoid hackers” — if you’re that kind of person, strong security habits don’t necessarily feel like they’re worth the hassle. Just in case you don’t believe me, I want to show you some stats.

SplashData is a password manager company that conducts an annual analysis of commonly used passwords. For the past five years straight the most popular passwords have been the number string “123456” and the word “password”. I find it disturbing that any application allows users to choose either of those values as their password!

In the same vein, last year RoboForm, another password manager company, commissioned a survey of 1,000 people in the US and UK about their password practices. Only 8% of respondents said they used a password manager. Compare that to the 23% who said they always use the same password.

Furthermore, I contacted the makers of the two most popular password managers, 1Password and LastPass. The 1Password team said they have unspecified millions of users, and LastPass’ spokesperson told me that they have eight million users. So let’s guesstimate, generously, that twenty million people use password managers. That would only be 6% of America’s 2014 population — and the world is a lot bigger than America. So there is plenty of room for improvement here. Especially since passwords are only the most obvious credential!

One of the most visible types of problems that people’s poor security habits cause is the account takeover. If you’ve ever worked support, you’ve probably had to deal with these. Mistakes that lead to these issues are not limited to the “normal people” I mentioned in the beginning.

Continue reading “Behavior Design: Teaching Your Users Security” →

The Means Are All There Is

Posted on June 24, 2016June 26, 2016 by Sonya Mann

Tit for tat. Artwork by Jungshan. — Artwork by Jungshan.

Blood in the Polity

Earlier this month, Trump supporters were attacked by protesters outside of a political rally in San Jose. Leftists and liberals (the leftists would say “neoliberals”) clashed over the issue. Those with anarchist and Marxist bents argued that violence is justified in face of xenophobia and fascism.

It's very simple. If this is the beginning of American fascism, real organized political violence is called for. If it's not, it's not.

— HR-Compliant Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 3, 2016

Dara Lind summarized:

“A lot of political commentators recognize that Donald Trump poses a categorical threat to established norms of American democracy, governance, and society. They believe that he represents (whether intentionally or not) an ideology that is hostile to groups of nonwhite Americans. […] You don’t have to agree with protesters beating up Trump supporters, or even sympathize with them, to understand this. There are people who feel Trump’s rise puts their lives in danger. And many people make decisions about what actions are ‘appropriate’ differently when they feel personally under threat.”

Jonathan Chait critiqued this view:

“Yes, electing Trump would amount to a dire peril for American democracy. But not only is violence unlikely to prevent his election as a practical matter (it makes Trump a figure of sympathy, and at any rate, his supporters are far more heavily armed). It would also be a disaster as a moral matter. Suppose that Trump’s election could be prevented by breaking up his speeches and intimidating his supporters. Such a ‘victory’ would actually constitute the blow to democracy it purports to stop, eroding the long-standing norm that elections should be settled at the ballot box rather than through street fighting.”

Chait continued:

“Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. ‘Democracy’ means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights. […] A liberal sees Trump’s ability to deliver a speech before supporters as a fundamental political right worth defending. A radical sees this ‘right’ as coming at the expense of subordinate classes, and thus not worth protecting.”

Donald Trump waving to supporters at a rally. Photo by Ed Ouimette. — Photo by Ed Ouimette.

The Point of Liberalism

Why am I bringing this up? Both arguments have been tweeted to death, including by me. Well… the conflict has stuck in my brain. I think my takeaway is something like this: Don’t normalize tactics that you don’t want your enemy to use. Resist upping the ante. Your principles are only as good as how you deploy them. Or, to quote Slate Star Codex:

“Civilization didn’t conquer the world by forbidding you to murder your enemies unless they are actually unrighteous in which case go ahead and kill them all. Liberals didn’t give their lives in the battle against tyranny to end discrimination against all religions except Jansenism because seriously fuck Jansenists. Here we have built our Schelling fence and here we are defending it to the bitter end. […] Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until eventually an equilibrium is disturbed.”

(See also: “We should all feel unsafe around anybody who relishes uncoordinated meanness — beating people in dark alleys, picketing their funerals, shaming them, harassing them, doxxing them, getting them fired from their jobs.”)

Ends Are Made of Means

“Means to an end” is a familiar phrase. The end is the goal, and the means are how you get there. For example, democratic government is presented as the means to a just society. Democracy is not virtuous in and of itself; it’s virtuous because of what it can achieve. (Yes, I know the US is not a pure democracy, but it’s grounded in democratic principles.)

But really, the means are all there is. What we do while trying to achieve a certain state — whether governmental or epistemic — ends up being the state. Democracy is both process and result. Make sure your process constitutes a result that will satisfy you.

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