REWORK

Listeners may remember that last year Wailin watched ALL of the holiday rom-coms and decided to share them with me on our ill-advised holiday bonus episode. Well, we're bringing it back! This year Wailin made Shaun watch The Knight Before Christmas. It's got magic, chivalry, time travel, wide-legged pants, and an inexplicable post-credit scene. Is the holiday bonus episode still ill-advised? Yes. But, is it fun? Also, yes! Happy Holidays to all of our listeners and we'll be back in 2020 with more stories.

In this anxious era of bullying, teen depression, and school shootings, tech companies are selling software to schools and parents that make big promises about keeping kids secure by monitoring what they say and write online. But these apps demand disturbing trade-offs in the name of safety. In this episode, we dive into the normative, privacy, and transparency implications of this software for both schools and families, and examine how the rush to fix societal problems with technology can amplify harm to young people while enriching companies that stand to profit from increased surveillance.Show NotesGennie Gebhart's bio | Twitter - 00:38Electronic Frontier Foundation - 1:02The EFF's 2017 report on student privacy (PDF) - 1:12"Facial Recognition Tech Comes to Schools and Summer Camps" (Wall Street Journal) - 1:32"Heal the Internet," our episode on removing tracking pixels from emails - 2:06"Big Brother at the Office," our episode on workplace surveillance - 2:10Previous episodes on Big Tech include "100% Facebook-Free," "The Google Ads Shakedown," and "Nevermore, Amazon" - 3:19"Breaking the Black Box," our episode about algorithmic bias - 3:24Caroline Haskins on Twitter | her stories for Vice | her stories for BuzzFeed News - 3:51BuzzFeed News' series on schools and surveillance - 4:04"Gaggle Knows Everything About Teens And Kids In School" (BuzzFeed News) - 4:06Gaggle - 4:08Bark - 7:05This Vice article takes a closer look at Bark's self-reported safety statistics in North and South Carolina - 7:29ManagedMethods - 8:31Bark's FAQs about its Parent Portal - 8:57Ryan Stanley's op-ed for the Juneau Empire - 10:14"School computer monitoring program makes botched debut" (Juneau Empire) - 11:10"Schools make adjustments to Bark" (KINY in Juneau) - 11:15More anecdotes about false positives can be found in this Guardian piece about school surveillance - 12:25"Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws"

Get out your Bunsen burner! It's time to do some experiments. In this episode, we talk to two businesses that aren't afraid to try new things. First, the three founders of The Mad Optimist, a soap company in Indiana, talk about letting customers choose what they pay for their products. Then Natalie Nagele, the co-founder and CEO of software company Wildbit, talks about an ongoing experiment with four-day work weeks and what she's discovered about productivity, happiness, and deep work.Show NotesThe Mad Optimist website | Facebook | Instagram - 00:45You can find The Mad Optimist's live revenue number in their Humanifesto under "We practice radical transparency" - 9:43Natalie Nagele on Twitter - 16:51Wildbit website - 16:53Basecamp's entry on Summer Hours in the company handbook - 16:57Deep Work by Cal Newport - 18:54

Dave Teare is the co-founder and official "heart and soul" of 1Password, which recently raised $200 million in its first round of venture capital. Basecamp is a longtime happy customer of 1Password and also a longtime critic of venture capital, so the funding announcement led to some back-and-forth on Twitter between Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson and Dave Teare. In this episode, DHH and Dave get on the phone to hash out their feelings about venture capital and what this funding round means for 1Password's future.Show Notes"Open Source and Power with Matt Mullenweg," our episode featuring a phone call between DHH and Automattic's Matt Mullenweg - 00:34DHH's tweet about Automattic's funding round - 00:49Dave Teare on Twitter | 1Password - 00:561Password's blog post announcing the funding round - 1:02DHH's tweet about 1Password's funding announcement - 1:04"A love letter to DHH and others concerned about our recent funding announcement" - 1:30"Bezos Expeditions invests in 37signals" (Signal v. Noise) - 1:551Password co-founder Roustem Karimov on Twitter - 3:10DHH's Ruby on Rails demo about building a blog engine in 15 minutes - 3:30"Conceal, don't feel" is a lyric from Frozen's Let It Go - 14:14"Inside WeWork's week from hell: How the mass layoffs went down" (CNN) - 19:16"The day I became a millionaire" (Signal v. Noise) - 21:22"It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work" - 25:31Apple's Differential Privacy policy (PDF) - 26:25Our Incredible Journey (Tumblr) - 31:42"The Mess at Meetup" (Gizmodo) - 32:08"Meetup wants to charge users $2 just to RSVP for events — and some are furious" (The Verge) - 32:18"Patreon now offers creators 3 plans, with fees ranging from 5-12%" (VentureBeat) - 32:45An irate forum post about Dropbox's new storage plan - 33:12"GitHub is trying to quell employee anger over its ICE contract. It's not going well" (LA Times) - 34:55"The deal Jeff Bezos got on Basecamp" (Signal v. Noise) - 39:20"How to Fly a Horse" by Kevin Ashton (Wikipedia) - 41:00

Workplace cultures in politics and tech share many similarities: Overwork is glorified; long hours are the norm; employees are expected to respond to communication instantly, no matter the day or time; and those that opt out are seen as lacking hustle or ceding ground to competitors. Marty Santalucia, a political consultant in Pennsylvania, wanted to do things differently. In this episode, he talks about applying calm work principles to an industry that's known for the opposite dynamic.Show NotesNPR's Up First podcast - 00:51FiveThirtyEight's Politics podcast - 00:55Dan Sinker's website | Twitter - 1:15impeachment.fyi - 1:21Marty Santalucia on Twitter - 2:55MFStrategies website | Twitter - 2:58"Sanders Campaign, Workers Ratify Union Contract" (NPR) - 22:23Bonus link! The New York Times asked 2020 Democratic candidates how much sleep they get a night and filmed the responses.

Basecamp has a long history of experimenting with "freemium" models and recently launched its most generous free plan yet: Basecamp Personal. Co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson talk about the debate and data analysis that went into the launch, what makes this a little scary, and why it's healthy for a business to experiment.Show Notes"Launch: Basecamp Gets Personal" (Signal v. Noise) - 00:1337signals' 2004 announcement about the launch of Basecamp - 1:44Basecamp's announcement about closing Backpack to new signups - 2:18"Launch: Basecamp 3" (Signal v. Noise) - 2:31Our episode about finding an SEO consultant - 7:10Our episode introducing Basecamp's new head of marketing - 7:18Basecamp's ace Support team - 23:46Our episode about the Apple Card controversy and algorithmic bias - 25:06Basecamp Personal on Product Hunt - 26:10Basecamp's "Until the End of the Internet" policy - 26:53

Basecamp has cut back its reliance on Amazon and Google, but there's one area where it's tough to find alternatives to Big Tech: cloud services. Even so, there are ways to cut spending on this $3 million annual expense while keeping the company's apps running smoothly. In this episode, Blake Stoddard on Basecamp's Ops team talks about how he volunteered to look for savings on cloud services and really delivered—to the tune of over a half-million dollars.Show NotesBlake Stoddard on Twitter - 1:27AWS Lambda - 4:45The Reddit hug of death is also known as the Slashdot effect - 4:55Maybe Roxane Gay can save us from our cord-cutting dystopia - 15:49

Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson sparked a national controversy this week when he posted a series of livid tweets about how his wife received a much lower credit limit than he did on their Apple Cards, despite applying with the same financial information. What began as a rant against opaque algorithms turned into a regulatory investigation and more. In this episode, Dr. Ruha Benjamin of Princeton University and entrepreneur Mara Zepeda, co-founder of the XXcelerate Fund and Zebras Unite, talk about how the tech and financial sectors perpetuate systemic inequalities and how to start repairing the damage—or building something more equitable and inclusive from the ground up.Show NotesApple Card - 1:31DHH's Twitter thread - 1:53Steve Wozniak's response - 1:58The New York Department of Financial Services' announcement of its investigation into Goldman Sachs - 2:11"About the Apple Card" (Jamie Heinemeier Hansson) - 2:28Ruha Benjamin's website | Twitter - 2:57Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin - 2:59University of Michigan article about the failures of the state's MiDAS system - 7:31"Racial bias in a medical algorithm favors white patients over sicker black patients" (Washington Post) - 8:18"Biased bots: Artificial-intelligence systems echo human prejudices" (Princeton University) - 12:40"Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women" (Reuters) - 14:15Ruha Benjamin's Resources - 15:29Joy Buolamwini on Twitter - 16:52"Atlanta Asks Google Whether It Targeted Black Homeless People" (NYT) - 17:40Tuskegee Study, 1932-1972 (CDC) - 18:35Atlantic article about J. Marion Sims and his experiments on enslaved women - 18:51NYT article about China's use of facial recognition technology to oppress the Uighur minority - 20:10"Somerville Bans Government Use Of Facial Recognition Tech" (WBUR) - 20:38"Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game" (MIT Technology Review) - 22:31

Jason Meller - 00:25"What is SSL?" - 1:13This is Outback Steakhouse's page for the Bloomin' Onion, which is categorized as an "Aussie-tizer." Yes, that's what Outback calls appetizers. I cannot un-know this fact and now I pass it to you. - 2:43"At an Outback Steakhouse Franchise, Surveillance Blooms" (Wired) - 2:51"Presto Launches Computer Vision Product for Real-Time Restaurant Operations Insights" (Presto press release) - 3:18"The Employer-Surveillance State" (The Atlantic) - 3:40Kolide - 5:45Basecamp's security overview with a mention of Shipshape (PDF) - 20:54"Introducing Netflix Stethoscope" (The Netflix Tech Blog) - 20:58

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard - 2:57Max Temkin is a Chicagoan and a co-creator of Cards Against Humanity - 4:01Little Free Library - 4:04Maverick by Ricardo Semler - 4:48Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters by Warren Buffett - 5:27Amazon's 2018 shareholder letter by Jeff Bezos - 5:38Listen to our previous episodes about hiring a director of marketing, "In the Market for a Marketer" and "Meet Andy" - 13:02