Layover, Over

I've been to Charlotte, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, and Dallas. By which I mean I've seen their Hudson News locations and used their bathrooms. I got brave once in Miami International and told myself I'd take a cab to Miami Beach, just to say I'd been there but the automatic doors opened and a wall of wet heat hit my face like someone's breath. I went back inside and found a chair that appeared to have been designed by someone who'd never sat down before. The armrests were positioned for a species with wider shoulders and shorter torsos. One of those molded plastic numbers with a metal bar running across the lower back at exactly the wrong height, guaranteeing you'd wake up with a spine shaped like a question mark.

I slept there until the gate agent woke me by my last name over a loudspeaker.

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People love a form input (technically a textarea). Give them one and they'll fill it. Back in 1999, when I started this site, that seemed like a beautiful truth. A couple of year later at Blogger, we'd roll out new features and people would immediately use them to criticize Blogger. The tools we built to democratize publishing were being used to hold us accountable for building them. It felt like democracy working exactly as intended.

At Google I worked with a group of people to create the Atom feed format - a standard way to publish content to the web, then we created Google Reader. We thought that if people were exposed to more viewpoints they would understand each other better. We built pipes, essentially, believing that better plumbing meant cleaner water.

We never imagined that “more information” could be weaponized, that feeds designed for fun, personal updates and news could be gamed for engagement. That the loudest voices, the blowhards who discovered that certainty and bluster play better than nuance, would claim the best seats in the house while everyone else fought for the uncomfortable chairs. The platforms we built turned out to be very good at amplifying whatever generated the most heat, regardless of whether it produced any light.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped filling my own textareas. I've spent years in the terminal of technology discourse—observing, deplaning, snacking, just passing through. That terrible chair felt like an appropriate place to wait.

But a layover isn't a visit. The city's still out there. The gate's still open.

This time I'm walking out, even if the air hits hard. Layover, over.