The hidden values of our digital lives
We know so little about the meaning and consequence of our digital life choices

Some unresolved notes and questions about how to decipher good from evil in consumer tech, or whether there is such a thing. Feedback welcome ...

I don't know who built my Mac, or the conditions in the factory where it was built, or on the ship and trucks that got it from China to Virginia; or where the rare earth metals, plastic and other raw materials required to build it came from; or whether the person who built the publishing software I'm using to write this, Dave Winer, is a good or bad person, or if his web server is powered by wind or coal. I know of him, I think I was at an event with him once many years ago and we pass each other on Twitter from time to time (today, actually).

I do know a few things about his software, myword.io: it's open-sourced and it's pretty easy for me to move the archive of my work produced with it into another publishing app, if I want to.

I'm using it for the very first time right now to write this post. Why? Mostly to satisfy my curiosity; but also to try something new from an independent software developer and blogging pioneer whose work I respect.

Not that any of that matters if the software shuts down without notice. Life in the digital world is full of risks, most of which we ignore or take for granted. That life is also infused with values that are barely visible to the consumer and, in most cases, are virtually impossible to assess.

In a tweet and blog post, Winer called attention to Medium, the next-gen blogging platform from Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Lots of people use Medium for long-form essays, personal news and the sorts of things that might also be posted on a blog, or in an online magazine or on Facebook.

Unlike myword.io and Wordpress, Medium is not open-source. And unlike Tumblr, which is not open source, you can't easily export your work out of Medium if you want to move to another tool, like Wordpress.

Medium is, in Winer's words, a silo.

I am not an open source zealot or absolutist, but even if I were, that's not what interests me today. Winer calls out the values embedded in Medium - and that got me thinking about the values implicit in all the tools and technologies we use to get by in the digital world.

What are the values of a silo? It is closed. It locks in users. In exchange for its utility, anything you do with it stays with it. You can leave any time, but your work can not.

There is an obvious solution: Medium could enable easy exports to other publishing platforms; and it could open-source all its code and support self-hosted instances, just like Wordpress.

Winer implied that this is what Medium should do. That got me thinking about what I should do, and where to start to figure that out. What should I do to support companies whose values I support? What should I do to encourage others to join me? What should I not do?

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