I believe that social media is the cigarette smoke of our time. Some day, our grandchildren will demand answers.
“You knew it was bad for you. Why did you keep doing it?”
(For whatever it's worth, I tweeted that sentiment in 2019, before it was cool to compare social media to cigarettes. Of course, I later deleted my account.)
Last week, I read the bizarre story of Governor Mike Parson of Missouri vowing to prosecute local journalists who notified his office of a data leak in a state website. In a press conference, he claimed that the reporters “decoded” the site's HTML in a “multi-step process,” struggling to pronounce the unfamiliar abbreviation and testing the credulity of his technologically-literate audience. (Does clicking View source involve more than one step? Perhaps among those who find mice to be confusing.)
As someone who started a career by clicking View source, I couldn't let this weird, funny, aggravating news story go. After calling the governor's office to call his actions, “respectfully, moronic,” I decided to create a change.org petition asking him to apologize, which I have copied below.
I was laid off last week. Officially, I was impacted by “significant restructuring”. I never expected to become so conversant with corporate lingo. It's one of the lesser skills I acquired during my 8 years at Mozilla, mostly after Firefox OS was announced as a priority. Another lesson: companies change.
Driven by COVID-19 and the resulting economic downturn, the layoffs affected fully 25% of all employees, including long-time teammates and friends. As in the previous round of layoffs, some of the people affected were among the most passionate and talented people I have ever known. It's unfortunate that they could not all be retained.