In May of 2012, I got together on Skype with my Internet friends Andrew Marvin and Matt Keeley to start a podcast about music and being a music fan: Crush On Radio. The premise was simple: we’d all pick an album, we’d all listen to each others, and then we’d talk about it along with some general music-fan chat. Occasionally, we’d bring on a guest, and have them provide an album for us to chat about.

After two years of the show, the challenge of scheduling three people with full-time jobs, one in Seattle, and two on the East Coast, and finding time to listen to albums became a hassle–even moving to a bi-weekly schedule, not that we’d been great at keeping to weekly. Even after streamlining the recording and editing processes, putting the show together still remained a tedious pain the rear. Perhaps if we had any audience traction, it might have been worth it, but our download numbers peaked at around 150, and averaged in the low double-digits. I needed a change.

The original idea for Crush On Radio was to be an interview show, talking to interesting people about the music that shaped them and focused on albums. Realizing this might be a bit beyond me, I decided to draft my friends and do it as a panel show. The change was to go back to the original idea, and with two years of podcasting under my belt, I figured I could make a go of it. I just didn’t want to edit the stupid thing. If I could unload the tedious grunt work of audio editing onto someone who knew what they were doing, everything would be in place to bring the show back with a new format. That’s when Ben Alexander came in.

I was connected to Ben through Sid O’Neill, who helped create Constellation’s web site. I shot Ben a quick proposal, and he accepted me into the family. I was part of a network, and the editing would be handled by house editor Lorenzo. I reached out to a few dream guests, and got a couple episodes in the can before going live: Merlin Mann and Patrick Rhone. Lorenzo edited, and I put them out into the world, and everything seemed gold. Then, things got a little crazy in Ben’s life. While Ben was unable to publish shows, my pipeline of guests dried up. Rather than double-down and try to get more episodes out the door, I got discouraged with the lack of guests, the lack of feedback, and the difficulty of doing a podcast. I stopped producing shows

Turns out that trying to organize and book guests, especially when being on the show requires homework of both picking an album and listening to it, is a pain for both sides of the call. Even without the main editing job, I still had a bit more to do with the audio than I found pleasant as well: cleaning up my side, making song clips, etc. And, with the irregular release schedule—a problem since the start as an independent—any signal boost from interviewing Merlin and Patrick out the gate dried up. I was back in the same place I was after two years of podcasting, but enjoying the process even less.

So, I’ve decided to put an end to it. There’s one episode left in the queue, with Myke Hurley. Myke reached out to me after Patrick’s episode went out, and that is the professional highlight of my brief career as a podcaster. It should be out soon, as Ben rebuilds Constellation as Fiat Lux. After that, I’ll be hanging up my podcaster hat, though I still have my Blue Snowball. The possibility exists that I might try something less ambitious in the podcasting realm in the future, but I want to focus on writing and on Sanspoint.

Things could have been different. If Crush On Radio had a larger, more supportive audience, it might still be a going concern. I had dreams of getting sponsors, doing live shows (streamed and in-person), and being the music-fan equivalent of a 5by5 show. It didn’t work, for whatever reason, but all of them come down to my own failure to make the show on a consistent basis. There’s other factors, but the only person who should be falling on the sword is myself. That said, there’s still fifty-seven episodes in the can, and I can point to them and say “I (and my friends) made this.” I got to speak to some of my heroes, and got turned on to new bands. It’s a net win all around, and I thank everyone who supported the show.

Simply moving on is not an option for the haters once you’ve been labeled a Koolaid server and/or a rich source of lulz. Ignore them, and the trolls cry harder, scream louder, and become destructive.

If you’ve already hit the Koolaid Piont, you usually have just three choices:

1. leave (They Win)

2. ignore them (they escalate, make your life more miserable, DDoS, ruin your career, etc. i.e. They Win)

3. fight back (If you’ve already hit the Koolaid Point, see option #2. They Win).

— Kathy Sierra – “Trouble at the Koolaid Point”

I have no words. I didn’t get halfway through before I felt sick and angry. Please, please, please read this. Of course, this is Trigger Warning out the wazoo, but worth powering through.

Kathy Sierra is a hero.

The biggest problem in technology isn’t buggy Apple software, government and corporate spying, or the venture capital bubble. It’s the systematic and aggressive disenfranchisement of half of the world’s population from the technology world. It’s the ongoing, increasingly violent and visible war on women in technology. Compared to that, a buggy iOS update is nothing. This is not a new war, but it’s had a few flare-ups in recent months. The most visible, of course, is Gamergate, a systematic harassment of women gamers and game journalists under the ostensible banner of “corruption” in games journalism. The war on women in technology extends far beyond such things, covering the gamut from hacked celebrity nude photos to women quitting–or being forced out of—their jobs by the culture in tech companies.

Why is this such a problem? If you have to ask that question, you may be too far gone already. So much of the promises of technology are egalitarian. The Valley likes to promote itself in the guise of a meritocracy. GitHub, considered the new résumé for coders, described itself as a “United Meritocracy” until sexism and harassment in its workplace was revealed. Meanwhile, startups founded by women get less than 5% of all venture capital funding. In established technology companies, there is a gigantic gender imbalance, and it’s not getting better.

Certainly not with a vocal and obnoxious contingent of powerful men in technology using their influence to shut down women. Just a few days ago, legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick attempted to harass a woman out of her job when she spoke up about the harassment that forced another woman developer off Twitter. Sexual harassment of women is endemic at technology conferences. This sort of behavior is unacceptable in any context, and certainly not in an industry that prides itself on the empty rhetoric of “meritocracy.” Even those few technology organizations that recognize the problem and seek to fix it are accused of racism and bias by clueless white men in technology.

This problem isn’t just something women face. It’s a problem experienced by gays and lesbians, by trans and genderqueer individuals, and by minorities in technology. It needs to end. Many men, too many men, don’t see this as their problem. This is the fundamental issue behind the infamous #NotAllMen hashtag. When you say “Not All Men,” what you mean is “I’m not contributing to the problem, therefore it is not a problem.” As long as it is men who are disenfranchising women, men sending rape threats, and publishing personal information about their “targets” for having the temerity to just be female and exist in a public space, it is our problem. We created it. To sit idly by as people like us make the lives of women and other groups a living hell is shameful. If you’re upset by being lumped in with the angry masses of misogynist men, stand up against them—don’t just blithely wash your hands of it.

But, what can we do? Aside from doing our best to shut down those in our midsts who contribute to the problem, and to amplify the voices of women and other marginalized groups, I’m lost. I’ve been thinking about how to approach this issue in my writing for weeks. Part of why it’s taken me so long to publish anything is that I’m worried both that I wouldn’t add anything of value, and that my voice, like that of so many white male “allies” would be amplified to the detriment of important work women and other activists for the technologically marginalized are doing. When a male technology CEO publishes a book about the struggles of women in technology, he gets praised. Meanwhile, activists in the trenches, of all stripes, are ignored once again. I don’t want that to happen here.

There are plenty of women making their voices heard. At the forefront is Shanley Kane’s Model View Culture, with contributors across the gender and racial spectrum contributing insightful criticism of technology. Brianna Wu, of game studio Giant Space Kat is essential to follow, as is Randi Harper, a DevOps engineer, and OSS contributor (the one whom Mitnick tried to get fired). Creatrix Tiara has led the charge against Ello and how social media fails the marginalized. This is just a sampling, and there are plenty more women, trans*, and minorities who are fighting the good fight in technology. Follow them, read them, and learn. Then, take action.

If anyone is going to break the hegemony of Twitter and Facebook for being the focus of our online social lives, they’re going to have to do what Twitter and Facebook—and Ello—are not doing. They’re going to need a understanding of how human social interactions work offline, and find a way to reflect that in interactions. The closest implementation of this is Google+’s Circles, though Google+ failed by requiring a huge amount of cognitive overhead to build and maintain them. Google at least understood that we don’t share everything about us with everyone we know. The binary nature of Facebook friends is not even close to representative of human friendship.

Getting this right goes a long way in solving most of the problems in social. It’s a huge step in preventing both violations of privacy, and preventing abuse. If Facebook understood this, gay students wouldn’t be outed to their homophobic families by joining a Facebook Group. Our relationships with our families, our friends, and our coworkers are all different. We even have different relationships with certain groups of friends. There are things I would tell my partner that I wouldn’t tell my parents. There are things I would tell my parents that I wouldn’t tell my friends—and vice-versa. There are things I would tell my real life friends, but not my online friends. There are things I would tell all those groups, but not my coworkers.

If you feel that you can be free and open with all the people you know, you have a luxury that most people don’t have. There’s always the risk that something you say or do online will become public. It shouldn’t be easy for this to happen. When a secret told to a friend leaks out, it’s a violation of trust, and that person should not be your friend. The structure of most social apps makes it all the more likely someone will make a private statement public. It’s caused by a mix of apathy in implementation, failure to understand the nuances of real social structures, and the needs of advertisers to see data before they give you money.

This is why it’s so bothersome that Ello is considered the vanguard of “private” social networking when its idea of privacy is just to not sell your data for ads. For real privacy, you’ll have to pay for it. If the choice came down to an ad-supported social network with fine-grained personal privacy controls, versus an ad-free social service that forced users to live in public (even with a pseudonym), I’d take the former any day. If half of the effort that went into Ello’s artistic site design and manifesto went into trying to find a smart way to incorporate the same nuances, filters, and limits in our online social lives that we have in real life, this is a debate we wouldn’t be having. “Friends” and “Noise” are not enough.

Understanding is the start. Implementing it the next step. With all the machine learning algorithms we have applied to our social graphs, it strikes me that it would be possible to algorithmically determine the relationship between two users—to a certain extent. If you’re friends with someone who shares your last name, for example, but is a few decades older than you, chances are they’re a parent or other older relative. So, the theoretical network can say “this person may not be someone you want to share everything with. Can I put them in your ‘relatives’ group?” The analytical tools used to target ads can be used to help users target the audiences of their posts. It would take some machine learning and trial and error, but at least they’d be doing something new in a moribund space.

Modeling real life, pre-Internet relationship models combined with strong and usable privacy controls that put real people in control of who sees what, when, and how. This is the real future of social networking. Getting it right, so it doesn’t require much more thought than just clicking “Post” is the hard part, but we have all those smart programmers and designers out there wasting their time on slicing and dicing data for marketers. There has to be a group of them somewhere willing to turn the tables. Once someone rolls out a service like that, I’ll be first in line to sign up—and I’ll bring as many friends as I can with me.

It always amazes me when I meet someone who claims they don’t cook—especially those who don’t cook because they “don’t know how.” This is alien to me. Food was a part of my life from the earliest. I had a little kids cookbook growing up that my parents and I would cook out of some weekends. On Saturdays, my Mom would watch the cooking shows on WHYY. I grew up on The Frugal Gourmet and Yan Can Cook. Later, I would watch the Food Network, and develop a fondness for the brilliance of Alton Brown. I understand that not everyone was lucky enough to have parents who had time to cook, or care enough about what their family ate, or any of a host of things… but to not have the simple appreciation for food that you want to make your own just confuses me.

But, when you think about it, cooking is actually difficult. You have to measure things, and time things. Add too much of one spice, and that’s all you taste. Don’t cook your chicken long enough, and you’re vomiting and moaning in pain. There are sharp things that you can cut yourself on. There’s fire. Then there’s washing the dishes—cooking is a pain in the ass. But when it comes together, it feels so good. Even if you’re just following a recipe, cutting into a roast chicken (an intimidating, but actually quite easy thing to make), or stabbing a forkful of scrambled eggs… it feels great. Even when it doesn’t come out perfect.

Cooking is one of those skills where you get (almost) instant feedback. You know if your risotto is undercooked, or if your pasta is overcooked. You can even save a recipe that’s going off the rails if you realize your mistake quick enough. If only everything had that level of obvious feedback. With almost every other skill, it’s easy to get stuck in advanced beginner mode for life where all you know is what you know, and what you don’t know is how little you truly know. I don’t want to steal Merlin Mann’s thunder here. His latest talk, “Advanced Tricycling,” hits all the salient points, and then some.

It’s easy to lull yourself into complacency with the lies of “I already know enough about $thing,” or “I don’t need to know $thing.” Learning more is always a good thing. A more insidious problem is identifying what you need to learn next. The Internet pulls us in so many different directions. There’s a shiny new thing you can discover with every tap you make on your portable computing device. With Internet-Enabled ADHD keeping us from plopping our butts in our chairs and banging our heads against the keyboard until we climb up to the next level of the Dreyfus Model, we’ll hit Advanced Beginner and stay there while we try to become an Advanced Beginner at the next thing. And if you stay at Advanced Beginner on the first thing, you’re lucky. Skills atrophy with disuse. I tried to make an omelette for the first time in about two years last week. It was edible, it was tasty, and nobody died, but it was not an omelette.

Combine Internet-Enabled ADHD with all the silly talk about following your passions, and doing what you love, and all that crap, and it’s no wonder the forae of the Internet are chock full of fellow Advanced Beginners, blissful in their ignorance of their own ignorance, and keeping the vicious cycle alive. It sucks. It especially sucks if you’re in that spot where you know you need to know something, but you don’t know what you need to know. But, to quote Merlin again, “It’s hard to know what you’ll need to know in order to know what you’ll need to know.” Advanced Beginner-ism is so infectious that it infects trying to solve the problem of being an Advanced Beginner. Just ask anyone who’s tried to “do” productivity instead of being productive. (See also, this relevant Merlin Tweet.)

The only way out is through.

It’s not much of an answer, but it’s something. The real symptom of the Advanced Beginner is a focus on outcome over process. It must look like the ideal thing in your head, or at the very least, like the design brief someone in the Art Department dropped on your chair while you got coffee. You’re not going to get the chance to execute on this during your day job. It’s more a guideline to avoid living life like an Advanced Beginner applying the same limited set of tools to an ever evolving set of problems. Sometimes you just need to pick something crazy and new—or something you did before and failed at—and just try it. Then whiff, fail, and try to do it again a different way. Open your cookbook to a new page, and try cooking something else.