{.align-center}

UPDATE: As of August 5th, registrations have now filled up! See all of you who registered at ActivityPub Conf!

That's right! We're hosting the first ever ActivityPub Conf. It's immediately following Rebooting Web of Trust in Prague.

There's no admission fee to attend. (Relatedly, the conference is kind of being done on the cheap, because it is being funded by organizers who are themselves barely funded.) The venue, however, is quite cool: it's at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, which is itself exploring the ways the digital world is affecting our lives.

If you plan on attending (and maybe also speaking), you should get in your application soon (see the flier for details). We've never done one of these, and we have no idea what the response will be like, so this is going to be a smaller gathering (about 40 people). In some ways, it will be somewhere between a conference and a gathering of people-who-are-interested-in-activitypub.

As said in the flier, by attending, you are agreeing to the code of conduct, so be sure to read that.

The plan is that the first day will be talks (see the flier above for details on how to apply as a speaker) and the second day will be an unconference, with people splitting off into groups to work through problems of mutual interest.

Applications for general admission are first-come-first-serve. Additionally, we have reserved some slots for speakers specifically; the application to get in submissions for talks is 1 week from today (July 29th). We are hoping for and encouraging a wide range of participant backgrounds.

Hope to see you in Prague!

A little over a decade ago, there were some popular blogposts about whether Ruby was an acceptable Lisp or whether even Lisp was an acceptable Lisp. Peter Norvig was also writing at the time introducing Python to Lisp programmers. Lisp, those in the know knew, was the right thing to strive for, and yet seemed unattainable for anything aimed for production since the AI Winter shattered Lisp's popularity in the 80s/early 90s. If you can't get Lisp, what's closest thing you can get?

This was around the time I was starting to program; I had spent some time configuring my editor with Emacs Lisp and loved every moment I got to do it; I read some Lisp books and longed for more. And yet when I tried to "get things done" in the language, I just couldn't make as much headway as I could with my preferred language for practical projects at the time: Python.

Python was great... mostly. It was easy to read, it was easy to write, it was easy-ish to teach to newcomers. (Python's intro material is better than most, but my spouse has talked before about some major pitfalls that the Python documentation has which make getting started unnecessarily hard. You can hear her talk about that at this talk we co-presented on at last year's RacketCon.) I ran a large free software project on a Python codebase, and it was easy to get new contributors; the barrier to entry to becoming a programmer with Python was low. I consider that to be a feature, and it certainly helped me bootstrap my career.

Most importantly of all though, Python was easy to pick up and run with because no matter what you wanted to do, either the tools came built in or the Python ecosystem had enough of the pieces nearby that building what you wanted was usually fairly trivial.

But Python has its limitations, and I always longed for a lisp. For a brief time, I thought I could get there by contributing to the Hy project, which was a lisp that transformed itself into the Python AST. "Why write Python in a syntax that's easy to read when you could add a bunch of parentheses to it instead?" I would joke when I talked about it. Believe it or not though, I do consider lisps easier to read, once you are comfortable to understand their syntax. I certainly find them easier to write and modify. And I longed for the metaprogramming aspects of Lisp.

Alas, Hy didn't really reach my dream. That macro expansion made debugging a nightmare as Hy would lose track of where the line numbers are; it wasn't until that when I really realized that without line numbers, you're just lost in terms of debugging in Python-land. That and Python didn't really have the right primitives; immutable datastructures for whatever reason never became first class, meaning that functional programming was hard, "cons" didn't really exist (actually this doesn't matter as much as people might think), recursive programming isn't really as possible without tail call elimination, etc etc etc.

But I missed parentheses. I longed for parentheses. I dreamed in parentheses. I'm not kidding, the only dreams I've ever had in code were in lisp, and it's happened multiple times, programs unfolding before me. The structure of lisp makes the flow of code so clear, and there's simply nothing like the comfort of developing in front of a lisp REPL.

Yet to choose to use a lisp seemed to mean opening myself up to eternal yak-shaving of developing packages that were already available on the Python Package Index or limiting my development community an elite group of Emacs users. When I was in Python, I longed for the beauty of a Lisp; when I was in a Lisp, I longed for the ease of Python.

All this changed when I discovered Racket:

• Racket comes with a full-featured editor named DrRacket built-in that's damn nice to use. It has all the features that make lisp hacking comfortable previously mostly only to Emacs users: parenthesis balancing, comfortable REPL integration, etc etc. But if you want to use Emacs, you can use racket-mode. Win-win.
• Racket has intentionally been built as an educational language, not unlike Python. One of the core audiences of Racket is middle schoolers, and it even comes with a built-in game engine for kids. (The How to Design Programs prologue might give you an introductory taste, and Realm of Racket is a good book all about learning to program by building Racket games.)
• My spouse and I even taught classes about how to learn to program for humanities academics using Racket. We found the age-old belief that "lisp syntax is just too hard" is simply false; the main thing that most people lack is decent lisp-friendly tooling with a low barrier to entry, and DrRacket provides that. The only people who were afraid of the parentheses turned out to be people who already knew how to program. Those who didn't even praised the syntax for its clarity and the way the editor could help show you when you made a syntax error (DrRacket is very good at that). "Lisp is too hard to learn" is a lie; if middle schoolers can learn it, so can more seasoned programmers.
• Racket might even be more batteries included than Python. At least all the batteries that come included are generally nicer; Racket's GUI library is the only time I've ever had fun in my life writing GUI programs (and they're cross platform too). Constructing pictures with its pict library is a delight. Plotting graphs with plot is an incredible experience. Writing documentation with Scribble is the best non-org-mode experience I've ever had, but has the advantage over org-mode in that your document is just inverted code. I could go on. And these are just some packages bundled with Racket; the Package repository contains much more.
• Racket's documentation is, in my experience, unparalleled. The Racket Guide walks you through all the key concepts, and the Racket Reference has everything else you need.
• The tutorials are also wonderful; the introductory tutorial gets your feet wet not through composing numbers or strings but by building up pictures. Want to learn more? The next two tutorials show you how to build web applications and then build your own web server.
• Like Python, even though Racket has its roots in education, it is more than ready for serious practical use. These days, when I want to build something and get it done quickly and efficiently, I reach for Racket first.

Racket is a great Lisp, but it's also an acceptable Python. Sometimes you really can have it all.

I've been hacking away at Spritely (see previously). Recently I've been making progress on both the actor model (goblins and its rewrite goblinoid) as well as the storage layers (currently called Magenc and Crystal, but we are talking about probably renaming the both of them into a suite called "datashards"... yeah, everything is moving and changing fast right now.)

In the #spritely channel on freenode a friend asked, what is the big picture idea here? Both the actor model layer and the storage layer describe themselves as using "capabilities" (or more precisely "object capabilities" or "ocaps") but they seem to be implemented differently. How does it all tie together?

A great question! I think the first point of confusion is that while both follow the ocap paradigm (which is to say, reference/possession-based authority... possessing the capability gives you access, and it does not matter what your identity is for the most part for access control), they are implemented very differently because they are solving different problems. The storage system is based on encrypted, persistent data, with its ideas drawn from Tahoe-LAFS and Freenet, and the way that capabilities work is based on possession of cryptographic keys (which are themselves embedded/referenced in the URIs). The actor model, on the other hand, is based on holding onto a reference to a unique, unguessable URL (well, that's a bit of an intentional oversimplification for the sake of this explaination but we'll run with it) where the actor at that URL is "live" and communicated with via message passing. (Most of the ideas from this come from E and Waterken.) Actors are connected to each other over secure channels to prevent eavesdropping or leakage of the capabilities.

So yeah, how do these two seemingly very different layers tie together? As usual, I find that I most easily explain things via narrative, so let's imagine the following game scenario: Alice is in a room with a goblin. First Alice sees the goblin, then Alice attacks the goblin, then the goblin and Alice realize that they are not so different and become best friends.

The goblin and Alice both manifest in this universe as live actors. When Alice walks into the room (itself an actor), the room gives Alice a reference to the goblin actor. To "see" the goblin, Alice sends a message to it asking for its description. It replies with its datashards storage URI with its 3d model and associated textures. Alice can now query the storage system to reconstruct these models and textures from the datashards storage systems she uses. (The datashards storage systems themselves can't actually see the contents if they don't have the capability itself; this is much safer for peers to help the network share data because they can help route things through the network without personally knowing or being responsible for what the contents of those messages are. It could also be possible for the goblin to provide Alice with a direct channel to a storage system to retrieve its assets from.) Horray, Alice got the 3d model and images! Now she can see the goblin.

Assuming that the goblin is an enemy, Alice attacks! Attacking is common in this game universe, and there is no reason necessarily to keep around attack messages, so sending a message to the goblin is just a one-off transient message... there's no need to persist it in the storage system.

The attack misses! The goblin shouts, "Wait!" and makes its case, that both of them are just adventurers in this room, and shouldn't they both be friends? Alice is touched and halts her attack. These messages are also sent transiently; while either party could log them, they are closer to an instant messenger or IRC conversation rather than something intended to be persisted long-term.

They exchange their mailbox addresses and begin sending each other letters. These, however, are intended to be persisted; when Alice receives a message from the goblin in her mailbox (or vice versa), the message received contains the datashards URI to the letter, which Alice can then retrieve from the appropriate store. She can then always refer to this message, and she can choose whether or not to persist it locally or elsewhere. Since the letter has its own storage URI, when Alice constructs a reply, she can clearly mark that it was in reference to the previous letter. Even if Alice or the goblin's servers go down, either can continue to refer to these letters. Alice and the goblin have the freedom to choose what storage systems they wish, whether targeted/direct/local or via a public peer to peer routing system, with reasonable assumptions (given the continued strength of the underlying cryptographic algorithms used) that the particular entities storing or forwarding their data cannot read its content.

And so it is: live references of actors are able to send live, transient messages, but can only be sent to other actors whose (unguessable/unforgeable) address you have. This allows for highly dynamic and expressive interactions while retaining security. Datashards URIs allow for the storage and retrieval of content which can continue to be persisted by interested parties, even if the originating host goes down.

There are some things I glossed over in this writeup. The particular ways that the actors' addresses and references work is one thing (unguessable http based capability URLs on their own have leakage problems due to the way various web technologies are implemented, and not even every actor reference needs to be a long-lived URI; see CapTP for more details), how to establish connections between actor processes/servers (we can reuse TLS, or even better, something like tor's onion services), so are how interactions such as fighting can be scoped to a room (this paper explains how), as well as how we can map human meaningful names onto unguessable identifiers (the answer there is petnames). But I have plans for this and increasing confidence that it will come together... I think we're already on track.

Hopefully this writeup brings some clarity on how some of the components will work together, though!

Approximately a month ago was Morgan and I's 10 year wedding anniversary. To commemorate that, and as a surprise gift, I made the above ascii art and animation.

Actually, it's not just an animation, it's a program, and one you can run. As a side note, I originally thought I'd write up how I made it, but I kept procrastinating on that and it lead me to putting off writing this post for about a month. Oh well, all I'll say for now is that it lead to a major rewrite of one of the main components of Spritely. But that's something to speak of for another time, I suppose.

Back to the imagery! Morgan was surprised to see the animation, and yet the image itself wasn't a surprise. That's because the design is actually built off of one we collaborated on together:

I did the sketch for it and Morgan embroidered it. The plan is to put this above the tea station we set up in the reading area of our house.

The imagery and phrasing captures the philosophy of Morgan and I's relationship. We're both weird and deeply imperfect people, maybe even in some ways broken. But that's okay. We don't expect each other to change or become something else... we just try to become the best weird pairing we can together. I think that strategy has worked out for us.

Thanks for all the happy times so far, Morgan. I look forward to many weird years ahead.

Did I somehow not blog here that I started co-hosting a podcast named Libre Lounge with my friend Serge Wroclawski? We're talking about all sorts of topics facing user freedom. Take a look at the archive and you might find something you like!

At the time of writing we've also had on one guest, Karen Sandler. This was a really nice treat since the show Free as in Freedom, which Karen co-hosts, is clearly a big influence on Libre Lounge. Anyway, we plan to have on lots more guests in the future.

Hope you enjoy!

Good news everyone! I've been awarded the Samsung Stack Zero Grant. But why not quote them?

Chris Lemmer-Webber is the co-editor and co-author of the now-ubiquitous ActivityPub protocol. While it provides a great framework for creating, updating, and deleting content across applications, it doesn’t provide any standardised mechanism for secure authorisation. With Spritely, Webber will work on extending the protocol in a backward-compatible manner, while at the same time building tools and applications that showcase its use. This will enable developers to build applications that enable richer interactions through a federated standard.

This should fund my next couple of years of work on full time advancement of the fediverse.

You may remember that I've talked about Spritely before. In fact I am finally in launch-mode... I am currently sitting in a wizard's tower at a hackathon, getting out the first release of Golem, a Spritely artifact.

Anyway, I'll be at FOSDEM 2019 giving a talk and on a panel. And after that I'll be speaking at CopyleftConf. Maybe I'll see you?

More news soon...

In my last post I talked about launching the Spritely project in all its ambitiousness. As I said, I plan on releasing it as a series of "demos". What I mean by "demo" is fairly loose: things you can try and see, artifacts to indicate progress as I go. Convergence slowly towards a goal.

Over the last week I released the first version of the foundation of this work, which I'm calling Goblins. v0.1, a pre-pre-alpha release, is now out the door. Goblins is an actor model implementation for the Racket programming language. I think if you know some Racket, then the Goblins documentation should be fairly approachable, and I'd love to hear feedback. Not everything is documented, but it should give you a nice taste of what the core ideas are. (Astute readers may observe that Goblins' name shares striking resemblance to another project I have worked on; this is no coincidence and is indeed a hint as to what I think the future direction of that area of work is.)

Most live distributed systems are in some way a language-level actor model implementation, but knowing that you're an actor model implementation may change how you do things. (ActivityPub is itself an actor model protocol, though I think not all implementors realize that.) Goblins is the third generation of an actor model I've written, the previous ones being XUDD and 8sync. (Maybe if you count the big rewrite I did of 8sync to run it on top of fibers, it could be the fourth generation.)

If you read the Spritely blogpost you'll know that distributed games are part of the long con here. This isn't the first time I've written a game system on top of one of these actor model implementations; in fact if you scroll down on 8sync website you'll (currently) see a video of me presenting on Mudsync, a multi-user dungeon written in 8sync, where in the talk instead of slides I had rooms, and the audience was moving around in the world and I was changing it in response to their suggestions.

But the drive of the actor model connected to social distributed games goes back further for me. I initially got interested in an actor model the first time I tried to work on the whole multiplayer game front about a decade ago. A friend and I spent a couple hours experimenting with threads and locks and after the first demo it was obvious that was never going to work. I remembered I had been told by a former coworker that they had used a system that had an actor model + coroutines as its basis; I didn't know what either of those things were yet, but as I looked into them it became clear to me that this was the right route. But one piece since then until recently remained a mystery to me, which was how to manage the complex web of authorization between the objects.

Last year at TPAC, the World Wide Web consortium's conference, I was staying with some people who asked me what I would do if I had unlimited time to work on whatever I wanted. I sheepishly admitted to my dream of a federated social web as a distributed game, and expected to be laughed out of the room. I was surprised to find out that nearly everyone I was working with had some background in this same work and dream. This gave me some hope that I wasn't completely foolish, and the observation that even failure in persuing this ambitious dream would probably result in useful artifacts.

And last year at Rebooting Web of Trust, I hit a big breakthrough. I had the chance to meet Mark S. Miller in person, someone who's work I read but barely understood at the time, and this meeting in some ways changed the direction of my career. For one thing, it lead to us collaborating on the foundation for the ocap-ld specification, which came out of a paper we collaborated on from that event (also available in nicely formatted PDF form). But what I also discovered was that Mark Miller and company had actually built the distributed and secure social network dream in the late 1990s and called it Electric Communities (rare video of it being demonstrated, and a rare video of some of the out-there ideas). What I found out was that they had solved most of the remaining questions about authorization and security through object capabilities, and that was through a pile of object capability patterns built on top of the actor model. While Electric Communities did not survive, its foundation of the the "E" programming language lived on, pulling in many of its good ideas with it. I proceeded to read as much documentation about E and surrounding capability patterns as I could, and this has majorly influenced Goblins' design. (Don't underestimate the depth of ideas on erights.org just because it looks like an ancient Geocities page... it did come from that era after all...)

Another key insight came from discovering the Object-Capability Security in Virtual Environments paper. I won't go into details on this except to say that it's a must-read for this problem domain, with the caveat that it pulls in a lot of terminology baggage from the object capability (aka ocap) community. The ocap community is one of those groups that has so many of the right ideas but which unfortunately is also drowning in its own verbiage, despite true efforts to make the ideas more accessible. We (and I guess I'm part of this group now, so "we" is appropriate) need to do better, but it isn't easy.

Goblins is still in its very early days. Its api is unstable and it surely has bugs (this one in particular I need to deal with, and which even exposed an underlying bug in Racket, which did get fixed quickly because the Racket community is amazing). Please don't build anything production-oriented on top of it yet. That said, I'd love users to try things. Check out the docs, see if they're up your alley.

If you like this kind of work and want to see more of it, consider donating; I don't have a corporate sponsor, so progress is funded by people like you. And keep watching here; more Spritely demos/artifacts/releases on the horizon.

If you follow me on the fediverse, maybe you already know. I've sent an announcement to my work that I am switching to doing a project named Spritely on my own full time. (Actually I'm still going to be doing some contracting with my old job, so I'll still have some income, but I'll be putting a full 40 hours a week into Spritely.)

tl;dr: I'm working on building the next generation of the fediverse as a distributed game. You can support this work if you so wish.

What on earth is Spritely?

"Well, vaporware currently", has been my joke since announcing it, but the plans, and even some core components, are starting to congeal, and I have decided it's time to throw myself fully into it.

But I still haven't answered the question, so I'll try to do so in bullet points. Spritely:

• Aims to bring stronger user security, better anti-abuse tooling, stronger resistance against censorship, and more interesting interactions to users of the fediverse.
• Is based on the massively popular ActivityPub standard (which I co-authored, so I do know a thing or two about this).
• Aims to transform distributed social networks into distributed social games / virtual worlds. The dreams of the 90s are alive in Spritely.
• Recognizes that ActivityPub is based on the actor model, and a pure version of the actor model is itself already a secure object capability system, so we don't have to break the spec to gain those powers... just change the discipline of how we use it.
• Will be written in Racket.
• Is an umbrella project for a number of modular tools necessary to get to this goal. The first, an object capability actor model system for Racket named Goblins, should see its first public release in the next week or two.
• And of course it will be 100% free/libre/open source software.

That's a lot to unpack, and it also may sound overly ambitious. The game part in particular may sound strange, but I'll defend it on three fronts. First, not too many people run federated social web servers, but a lot of people run Minecraft servers... lots of teenagers run Minecraft servers... and it's not because Minecraft has the best graphics or the best fighting (it certainly doesn't), it's because Minecraft allows you to build a world together with your friends. Second, players of old MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes and etc from the 90s may recognize that modern social networks are structurally degenerate forms of the kinds of environments that existed then, but contemporary social networks lack the concept of a sense of place and interaction. Third, many interesting projects (Python's Twisted library, Flickr, much of object capability security patterns) have come out of trying to build such massively multiplayer world systems. Because of this last one in particular, I think that shooting for the stars means that if we don't make it we're likely to at least make the moon, so failure is okay if it means other things come out of it. (Also, four: it's a fun and motivating use case for me which I have explored before.)

To keep Spritely from being total vaporware, the way I will approach the project is by regularly releasing a series of "demos", some of which may be disjoint, but will hopefully increasingly converge on the vision. Consider Spritely a skunkworks-in-the-public-interest for the federated social web.

But why?

Standardizing ActivityPub was a much more difficult effort than anticipated, but equally or more so more successful than I expected (partly due to Mastodon's adoption launching it past the sound barrier). In that sense this is great news. We now have dozens of projects adopting it, and the network has (at last I looked) over 1.5 million registered users (which isn't the same as active users).

So, mission accomplished, right? Well, there are a few things that bother me.

• The kind of rich interactions one can do are limited by a lack of authorization policy. Again, I believe object capabilities provide this, but it's not well explained to the public how to use it. (By contrast, Access Control Lists and friends are absolutely the wrong approach.)
• Users are currently insufficiently protected from spam, abuse, and harassment while at the same time administrators are overwhelmed. This is leading a number of servers to move to a whitelisting of servers, which both re-centralizes the system and prioritizes big instances over smaller instances (it shouldn't matter what instance size you're on; arguably we should be encouraging smaller ones even). There are some paths forward, and I will hint at just one: what would happen if instead of one inbox, we had multiple inboxes? If I don't know you, you can access me via my public inbox, but maybe that's heavily moderated or you have to pay "postage". If I do know you, you might have an address with more direct access to me.
• Relatedly, contemporary fediverse interfaces borrow from surveillance-capitalism based popular social networks by focusing on breadth of relationships rather than depth. Ever notice how the first thing Twitter shows you when you hover over a person's face is how many followers they have? I don't know about you, but I immediately compare that to my own follower count, and I don't even want to. This encourages high school popularity contest type bullshit, and it's by design. What if instead of focusing on how many people we can connect to we instead focused on the depth of our relationships? Much of the fediverse has imported "what works" directly from Facebook and Twitter, but I'd argue there's a lot we can do if we drop the assumption that this is the ideal starting base.
• The contemporary view in the fediverse is that social scoping is like Python scoping: locals (instance) and globals (federation). Instance administrators are even encouraged to set up to run communities based on a specific niche, which is a nice reason to motivate administrators but it causes problems: even small differences between servers' expected policies often result in servers banning each other entirely. (Sometimes this is warranted, and I'm not opposed to moderation but rather looking for more effective forms of it.) Yet most of us are one person but part of many different communities with different needs. For instance, Alice may be a computer programmer, a tabletop game enthusiast, a fanfiction author, and a member of her family. In each of those settings she may present herself differently and also have different expectations of what is acceptable behavior. Alice should not need multiple accounts for this on different servers, so it would seem the right answer for community gathering is closer to something like mailing lists. What is acceptable at the gaming table may not be acceptable at work, and what happens on the fanfiction community perhaps does not need to be shared with one's family, and each community should be empowered to moderate appropriately.
• I'd like to bridge the gap between peer to peer and federated systems. One hint as to how to do this: what happens when you run ActivityPub servers over Tor onion services or I2P? What if instead of our messages living at http addresses that could down, they could be securely addressed by their encrypted contents?
• Finally, I will admit the most urgent reason for these concerns... I'm very concerned politically about the state of the world and what I see as increasing authoritarianism and flagrant violations of human rights. I have a lot of worry that if we don't normalize use of decentralized and secure private systems, we will lose the ability to host them, though we've never needed them more urgently.

There are a lot of opportunities, and a lot of things I am excited about, but I am also afraid of inaction and how many regrets I will have if I don't try. I have the knowledge, the privilege, and the experience to at least attempt to make a dent in some of these things. I might not succeed. But I should try.

Who's going to pay for all this?

I don't really have a funding plan, so I guess this is kind of a non-answer. However, I do have a Patreon account you could donate to.

But should you donate? Well, I dunno, I feel like that's your call. Certainly many people are in worse positions than I am; I have a buffer and I still am doing some contracting to keep myself going for a while. Maybe you know people who need the money more than I do, or maybe you need it yourself. If this is the case, don't hesitate: take care of yourself and your loved ones first.

That said, FOSS in general has the property of being a public good but tends to have a free rider problem. While we did some fundraising for some of this stuff a few years ago, I gave the majority of the money to other people. Since then I've been mostly funding work on the federated social web myself in one way or another, usually by contracting on unrelated or quasi-related things to keep myself above the burn rate. I have the privilege and ability to do it, and I believe it's critical work. But I'd love to be able to work on this with focus, and maybe get things to the point to pull in and pay other people to help again. Perhaps if we reach that point I'll look at putting this work under a nonprofit. I do know I'm unwilling to break my FOSS principles to make it happen.

Anyway... you may even still be skeptical after reading all this about whether or not I can do it. I don't blame you... even I'm skeptical. But I'll try to convince you the way I'm going to convince myself: by pushing out demos until we reach something real.

Onwards and upwards!

Recently I was on a private mailing list thread where there was debate about whether or not the project should take on steps to improve diversity. One of the mailing list participants was very upset about this idea, and said that they didn't like when people accused them of the "original sin" of having white male privilege.

I suspect this is at the root of a lot of misunderstanding and frustration around the term "privilege". Privilege is not a sin... you are not a sinner for having privilege. However it is a responsibility and a debt to be repaid and corrected for, stemming from injustices in society.

A popular social narrative is that everyone has an equal place at the starting line, so the winners and losers of a race are equally based on their merit. Unfortunately this isn't true. Privilege is being able to show up at the starting line having had sleep and a good meal and the resources to train... you still worked to be able to get to the finish line and having privilege does not take that away. But if we look at the other people on the track we could see that they not only maybe didn't get enough sleep or were not able to allocate time to train (maybe they had to work multiple jobs on the side) or couldn't afford to eat as healthily. Some of them actually may even have to start back farther from the starting line, there are rocks and weeds and potholes in their paths. If we really want to treat everyone based on merit, we'd have to give everyone an equal place at the starting line, an equal track, etc. Unfortunately, due to the way the race is set up, that does mean needing to correct for some things, and it requires actual effort to repair the track.

My spouse Morgan Lemmer-Webber is an art historian and recently got into free software development (and software development in general). She has faced sexism, as all women do, her entire life, but it was immediately more visible and severe once she entered the technology space. For example, she wrote a web application for her work at the university. I helped train her, but I refused to write any code because I wanted her to learn, and she did. Eventually the project got larger and she became a manager and hired someone whom she was to train to take over development. He took a look at the code, emailed her and said "Wow, this file looks really good, I assume your husband must have written this code?"

What a thing to say! Can you imagine how that must have felt? If I heard something like that said to me I'd want to curl up in a ball and die. And she had more experiences like this too, experiences she never had until she entered the technology space. And if you talk to women in this field, you'll hear these stories are common, and more: dismissal, harassment, rape threats if you become too visible or dare to speak out... not to mention there's the issue that most of the people in tech don't look like you, so you wonder if you really actually belonged, and you wonder if everyone else believes that too. Likewise with people of color, likewise with people in the LGBTQ space... stones and disrepair on the path, and sometimes you have to start a bit farther back.

To succeed at the race with privilege, of course you have to work hard. You have to train, you have to dedicate yourself, you have to run hard. This isn't meant to take away your accomplishments, or to say you didn't work hard. You did! It's to say that others have all these obstacles that we need to help clear from their path. No wonder so many give up the race. And there comes the responsibility and debt to be repaid: if you have privilege, put it to good work: pitch in. If you want that dream of everyone to have an equal place at the starting line to be true, help fix the track. But there's a lot of damage there... it's going to take a long time.

Morgan was knocking on the bathroom door. She wanted to know why I was crying when I was meant to be showering.

I was crying because my brain had played a cruel trick on me last night. It conjured a dream in which all the characters from the comic strip "Peanuts" represented myself and friends. Charlie Brown, the familiar but awkward everyman of the series, was absent from every scene, and in that way, heavily present.

I knew that Charlie Brown was absent because Charlie Brown had committed suicide.

I knew that Charlie Brown was my friend Matt Despears.

The familiar Peanuts imagery passed by: Linus (who was me), sat at the wall, but with nobody to talk to. Lucy held out the football, but nobody was there to kick it. Snoopy sat at his doghouse with an empty bowl, and nobody was there to greet him. And so on.

Then the characters, in silence, moved on with their lives, and the title scrolled by the screen... "We Miss You, Charlie Brown".

And so, that morning, I found myself in the shower, crying.

Why Peanuts? I don't know. I wouldn't describe myself as an overly energetic fan of the series. I also don't give too much credit for dream imagery as being necessarily important, since I think much tends to be the byproduct of the cleanup processes of the brain. But it hit home hard, probably because the imagery is so very familiar and repetitive, and so the absence of a key component amongst that familiarity stands out strongly. And maybe Charlie Brown just a good fit for Matt: awkward but loveable.

It has now been over six years since Matt has passed, and I find myself thinking of him often, usually when I have the urge to check in with him and remember that he isn't there. Before this recent move I was going through old drives and CDs and cleaning out and wiping out old junk, and found an archive of old chat logs from when I was a teenager. I found myself reliving old conversations, and most of it was utter trash... I felt embarrassed with my past self and nearly deleted the entire archive. But then I went through and read those chat logs with Matt. I can't say they were of any higher quality... my conversations with Matt seemed even more absurd on average than the rest. But I kept the chat logs. I didn't want to lose that history.

I felt compelled to write this up, and I don't entirely know why. I also nearly didn't write this up, because I think maybe this kind of writing can be dangerous. That may sound absurd, but I can speak from my experience of someone who frequently experiences suicidal ideation that the phrase "would anyone really miss me when I'm gone" comes to mind, and maybe this reinforces that.

I do think that society tends to romanticize depression and suicide in some strange ways, particularly this belief that suffering makes art greater. A friend of mine pointed this out to me for the first time in reference to John Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces", often advertised and sold to others by, "and the author committed suicide before it was ever published!" But it would have been better to have more books by John Toole instead.

So as for "will anyone miss me if I'm gone", I want to answer that without romanticizing it. The answer is just "Yes, but it would be better if you were here."

A group of friends and I got together to play a board game recently. We sat around the table and had a good time. I drew a picture of "Batpope", one of Matt's favorite old jokes, and we left it on an empty spot at the table for Matt. But we would have rathered that Matt was there. His absence was felt. And that's usually how it is... like in the dream, we pass through the scenes of our lives, and we carry on, but there's a missing space, and one can feel the shape. There's no romance to that... just absence and memories.

We miss you, Matt Despears.