That framing cuts through a lot of the marketing nonsense. The promise is always that AI will help people do their jobs better. The deployment story, far too often, is that a human gets stuck reviewing machine output at impossible speed while absorbing the blame when things go wrong. That’s not augmentation; it’s a liability dump.

This is not a minor bug trend. It is a systematic civil-rights failure that has now found its way into software as a whole, through lightning-fast adoption of AI systems that are trained on over 20 years of institutional barriers.

The numbers here are bad enough on their own, but what makes this especially troubling is where these systems are being deployed: education, healthcare, finance, employment, and other places people can’t simply opt out of. That’s why I appreciate how direct this project is about accountability. If we automate interface generation without putting accessibility at the center, we’re automating exclusion.

I appreciate how clearly Anil connects dots that too many people are still treating as separate problems. This isn’t just about AI summaries siphoning traffic from publishers or slop code drowning maintainers or bad actors ignoring long-standing norms like robots.txt. It’s all of those things at once. The through-line is extraction: taking value from open systems without giving anything back, then undermining the very ecosystems that made that extraction possible in the first place.

The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can’t just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying “enough”.

If you care about the web as a public good, this post is worth your time.

I also appreciate Mark’s call for more ambition here. Too often, we talk about the web as if it’s destined to be an OS for web apps rather than a public-interest platform in its own right. That’s not inevitable. But getting somewhere better requires recognizing that refusal, delay, and strategic disinterest can be every bit as consequential as formal opposition.

And so, when I was listening to the latest episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, I was struck by how the left and right may actually be more aligned on DEI than the headlines lead us to believe.

In the episode, Stewart was interviewing former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican. When the topic of DEI came up, they got into a discussion of merit vs. diversity in the context of the Secretary of Defense role. Both agreed that, in terms of merit, General Lloyd Austin was a much better hire than Fox’s former weekend host Pete Hegseth. The fact that Austin is also Black has no more impact on his being a better candidate than the fact that Pete Hegseth being White makes him a worse candidate. What Austin does bring to the table, however, is first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to rise up the ranks as a Black soldier. That’s a significant knowledge gap when it comes to the U.S. military, whose top brass isn’t representative of the diversity of its personnel.

This is something that Christie actually points out when discussing becoming the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey back in 2002:

When I got there, I just did a lot of walking around the office to see, okay, who’s here? Jon, it was the whitest, malest office I had ever been in in my life. And I was coming from private law practice.

He, rightly, saw this as a problem and wanted to address it. He told his staff

[We need] to go out and recruit candidates who are African-American, Latino, Asian, women. Bring them to me. If they’re not good, I’m not going to hire them. But I’m convinced we’re not seeing them.

His approach to address this was perfectly rational and aligned with the approach Jon had discussed mere moments before:

What I found was hiring has a certain inertia to it, right? Generally, the people that started whatever industry or whatever office did, generally hire close to people that resemble them. So I’m not even talking about White/Black. I’m talking about like… I’ll just go with late-night comedy, right?

David Letterman revolutionized late-night comedy. He did it with a lot of Harvard, Lampoon, SNL, same way, writers. The comedy writing industry was for a long time — not necessarily out of malevolence or prejudice — the inertia of it, the status quo of it, was nerdy white dudes from Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues.

But even when we went to like, “Oh, we’re going to do blind submissions,” what we didn’t realize is all the agents are also steeped in that same status quo. So all the resumes — even when we would get them — still predominantly [trails off]. When we went specifically to say — now, this is what you would consider DEI — “Give us not that. Open it up to make sure you give us women, people of color, other writers, so that we can at least see what that is.” And all of a sudden, we found these incredible writers. Now, you could say, “Oh, you put diversity over competence,” but that’s the red herring. We didn’t. We opened up what were stagnant pools. Pools that were incestuous. And we opened up those tributaries. Isn’t that what increases competition, not decreases it?

What’s fascinating here is that they are both making the same point. As Christie says later

We then went about this process of hiring a large number of African-American, Latino, and Asian prosecutors, but I would tell you that every one of them checked both boxes. They checked the box of, “they now look more like the community we represent than we did before.” And these are really good lawyers.

So these two men from very different political viewpoints totally agree on the importance of representation. So where’s the issue?

# The Issue is Tokenism

When Stewart highlighted how aligned their two perspectives were and Christie pushed back, stating that DEI policies were problematic:

I think there have been a number of areas where there are people who hire certain folks just for their diversity. I’ve seen it happen here in New Jersey, in the government since I left. Where people say, “I am going to make sure that I have one of every…” It’s almost like a half a Noah’s Ark. “I’m going to have one of these and one of these and one one of these and one of these.”

Stewart questioned that:

But you just told me that’s what you did in the prosecutor’s office.

But Christie didn’t see it that way:

No, what I did was get them in to interview them. If it turned out, Jon, that they were also really good lawyers, they got hired. I’m talking about something different. I’m talking about predetermining the outcome in the way that you just talked about — and I believe that legacy admissions predetermined the outcome — that there have been some in charge of government across this country who have predetermined determined outcomes and said, “I am going to have this many African-Americans, this many Latinos, this many Asians, this many lesbians, this many gay men…” I think that when people see that, they say to themselves, “That’s not right either.”

What he’s talking about is what I’d call performative DEI. It’s not substantive, but attempts to give off the appearance of being so. It’s the DEI equivalent of greenwashing.

# DEI Cannot be Performative

When people hire folks or celebrate folks for their diversity rather than their diversity plus their competence or talents, it undermines the legitimacy of DEI programs that are attempting to do what they both discussed being important: representation.

As they both said, we need to screen in job applicants who wouldn’t otherwise consider applying for roles in our organizations. Christie talked about this too:

The aha moment for me on that concept and why it was the right way to go was there was a young guy that I hired very early on: African-American, University of Michigan, University of Penn Law School, clerk for Alan Page — the former Minnesota Viking, defensive tackle in the Supreme Court of Minnesota— He’s from New Jersey, grew up in Maplewood. I said to him, “Why didn’t you ever apply here before?” He said, “Because I knew people like me wouldn’t get hired.”

Hiring is just part of the process though. You can widen the applicant funnel and bring in a more representative — which is to say diverse — applicant pool with relatively little effort. Where things often fall short is retention.

# Is Your Organization Even Ready?

If your organization isn’t excited at the prospect of a more diverse workforce and prepared to support them when they are onboarded, you need to press pause and get prepared. Similarly, if your company is eager, but very homogenous, you’ve also got work to do. No one wants to come into a job and feel like “the only” or “the token” anything. And even if they were the most qualified applicant for the position, some jackass will say something that implies they are. It’s a tale as old as time and you need to be prepared for that reality.

The first thing you need to do is educate. You need to help folks on your team understand the gaps in your collective knowledge & experience. They need to see that a more diverse team can help fill those gaps. The data that shows that more diverse organizations are more successful. Share that! I’m guessing most of your team is there because they want your organization to be as successful as possible.

And make sure they understand the historical barriers folks from different communities have faced in getting access to jobs at organizations like yours… even when they were equally or more accomplished than folks from the dominant group. As Stewart said on the show:

It’s not rigging [the system] in a different direction, it’s unrigging it.

It’s also important to note that the process here needs to be inclusive as well… call people in, don’t call them out. Everyone is on their own journey and deserves the space to fail and learn from their mistakes. If someone says something offensive, let them know that it’s offensive and why. Tell them what they should say — if anything — instead.

If you approach people with empathy, you’re much more likely to get a positive response. And, Twitter aside, most folks aren’t out in these streets trying to be trolls. People are a product of their own experiences and those experiences can be quite different from yours. Help your colleagues broaden their perspectives with positive reinforcement, not chastising.

That said, you also need the proper mechanisms in place to address non-inclusive behaviors when they become a pattern or reach a certain threshold of severity. Those mechanisms need to outline the consequences for such behavior. The severity of the consequence needs to align with the severity of the harm, but it may need to escalate in severity for repeat offenses. Depending on the size of your organization, coming up with these policies and consequences could be a group activity to ensure both awareness and buy-in.

# Embrace DEI and Pave the Way for Mediocrity

To be clear, neither Jon Stewart nor the progressive left are pushing for diversity quotas like Christie seems to think they are. But there are folks out there who are. These performative DEI programs have got to go. As my colleague and friend Ebele Okoli says “bake it in, don’t cake it on.”

Don’t hire or promote someone just because you think their headshot would help to melanate your About page. That’s not what DEI is about and it doesn’t help us to reverse the dire course the U.S. government and cowardly companies are taking currently. DEI needs to be a part of every process in your organization on order to give everyone — white men like me included — an equal chance to succeed.

Cast a wide net. Hire and promote for competence and to address the knowledge gaps your team absolutely has. Foster an inclusive workplace that values the different lived experience and perspectives brought to the table by each and every employee. That is how you succeed with DEI. It’s also how DEI will help your organization succeed in its mission and grow to hire more folks.

And as more of the incredibly talented people out there get hired on at organizations like yours, all boats will rise, creating more jobs and space for mediocre people of all stripes to get hired and rise up the ranks too. But they won’t get there just because or who they know, what they look like, or because they tick a particular box on your diversity bingo card.

This passage from Micah Altman of MIT’s Center for Research in Equitable and Open Scholarship really resonated with me (emphasis mine):

Decisions determined by algorithms affecting our lives are increasingly governed by opaque algorithms, from the temperature of our office buildings to what interest rate we’re charged for a loan to whether we are offered bail after an arrest. More specifically complex, opaque, dynamic and commercially developed algorithms are increasingly replacing complex, obscure, static and bureaucratically authored rules.

Over the next decade and a half, this trend is likely to accelerate. Most of the important decisions affecting us in the commercial and government sphere will be ‘made’ by automated evaluation processes. For the most high-profile decisions, people may continue to be ‘in the loop,’ or even have final authority. Nevertheless, most of the information that these human decision-makers will have access to will be based on automated analyses and summary scores – leaving little for nominal decision-makers to do but flag the most obvious anomalies or add some additional noise into the system.

This outcome is not all bad. Despite many automated decisions being outside of both our practical and legal (if nominal) control, there are often advantages from a shift to out-of-control automaticity. Algorithmic decisions often make mistakes, embed questionable policy assumptions, inherit bias, are gameable, and sometimes result in decisions that seem (and for practical purposes, are) capricious. But this is nothing new – other complex human decision systems behave this way as well, and algorithmic decisions often do better, at least in the ways we can most readily measure. Further, automated systems, in theory, can be instrumented, rerun, traced, verified, audited, and even prompted to explain themselves – all at a level of detail, frequency and interactivity that would be practically impossible to conduct on human decision systems: This affordance creates the potential for a substantial degree of meaningful control.

Which brings me to the subject at hand: 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. I tweeted about this case, which is currently before the Supreme Court of the United States, the other day, but felt like I owed it a lengthier—and perhaps more enduring—discussion. So here goes…

# The case, in a nutshell

Lorie Smith, a web designer operating as 303 Creative LLC, is interested in getting into the wedding announcement website game. She does not believe same-sex couples should be able to marry, so she wanted to put a notice on her website to that effect, stating that she would not create wedding announcements for same-sex weddings. This violates Colorado’s anti-discrimination law (some of you may recall it from Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission) which prevents public businesses from discriminating against gay people, who are a “protected class” in legal speak.

Smith contests that her web design work is her “expression” as an “artist” and that the First Amendment protects her right to that expression. What a lot of the coverage fails to include, however, is

1. She does not currently offer wedding announcement website services, and
2. No same-sex couples have requested her services in creating a wedding announcement website.

In other words, this case is not based on fact, but rather on hypotheticals. Additionally, there has been no injury on either side, just the potential for one. Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more about the case, you can check out the following:

• 303 Creative LLC v Elenis on Wikipedia
• Court Docket at the Supreme Court
• Oral Arguments before the Supreme Court
• Strict Scrutiny podcast episode following oral arguments
• Boom! Lawyered podcast episode following oral arguments

In particular, I highly recommend listening to Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson’s and Sonia Sotomayor’s contributions during oral arguments as they really cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of the case and its implications.

# Fact: Design ≠ Art

This is something I talked about way back in my 2013 talk “Designing With Empathy”: Design is not art. Art is self-expression and serves the artist; design serves someone else (typically the client or their audience). If you don’t work in the industry, however, this distinction isn’t always clear. To quote Jeff Veen:

I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving.

Design is not the creation of pretty pictures and decoration. Design serves a purpose. In fact, the term “design” originated in Medieval Latin as designare which meant “to mark out” (hence the related term designate). To design is “to devise for a specific function or end.” To practice “web design” is to use the tools of graphic design to achieve the purpose of the project.

In the context 303 Creative LLC seeks to operate, the purpose of each project would be to announce and provide the details about a wedding. 303 Creative LLC seeks to provide these services in exchange for money, at the behest of a client. It is not artistic expression any way you slice it.

# Fact: This Case is About Advertising Bigotry

If you’ve run any sort of service business, you’ve likely come across clients and projects you had to turn away. Sometimes you don’t have the bandwidth to take on the project. Other times you may not be interested in the kind of work it entails. Still others, you might not have the right expertise to do the project justice. And sometimes you just get a sense that the potential client is not someone you’d work well with (perhaps based on the tone of their inquiry). Regardless of the reason, however, you can gently explain to them that you cannot do the project for them and either leave it at that or recommend someone who might be able to help them.

In the case of 303 Creative LLC, Smith could have easily used this approach to turn away same-sex couples without making it a thing. She could even have a form email prepared for this very purpose! And unless several couples approached her at roughly the same time and got wildly different responses with respect to her ability to create them a wedding website—which, to reiterate, is not a service she currently offers—no one would be any the wiser when it came to her belief that same-sex marriage doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist.

But no, that’s not the route that Ms. Smith and 303 Creative LLC seeks to go. Instead, she would like to be able to express her “firmly held religious belief” that same-sex marriages should not happen and to put a notice on her website explicitly saying she refuses to create a website for a same-sex wedding. She wants to put her bigotry on full display and she doesn’t think she should suffer any legal consequences for doing so.

# Clarification: Who qualifies as “Protected”?

Over on Mastodon, I was asked to clarify whether the law allows you to refuse to work for a particular individual or corporation. For example, could a web designer refuse to do work for Chick-fil-a on account of their anti-LGBTQIA+ positions (a stance which I think they’ve reversed, but I don’t eat there so I’m not sure). A similar question was asked in Oral Arguments, framed as a speech writer’s ability to refuse to write a speech for a political candidate they disagree with. Public accommodations law, which is what is being considered in this case, would not require you to work on any project for anyone as long as the reason you are refusing your service is not on account of their membership in a protected class.

Corporations are not a protected class. Neither are politicians. Same-sex couples are protected from discrimination under both the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

# Potential Fallout

If the conservative majority on the Court decides to ignore all of the facts in this case an rule in favor of 303 Creative LLC, that decision will open the floodgates for discrimination against people based on their protected status by anyone who claims to have a religious objection to treating that person respectfully.

For example, people with disabilities are a protected class under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If this ruling goes in 303 Creative LLC’s favor, a business owner could claim eugenics as a “firmly held religious view” and refuse to provide accommodations for them. From the web side of things, that could mean they could intentionally make their site inaccessible to people who use screen readers. In the physical world, it could mean they could make entry to their business impossible for anyone using a wheelchair.

It might take a little time, but we’d likely end up in another “Jim Crow”-like era where restaurants are once again free to adorn their windows with “Whites Only” signs. Where the grocery store hangs a “Christians Only” sign on its door. Where the local bank proudly announces that only “Heterosexual Evangelical Christian Women” can apply for an open teller position. Where only women under 25 can date Leonardo DiCaprio… wait.

Instead of embracing our differences as a complement to one another and for the betterment of our society, condoning this would further drive us apart and foster a world of exclusion. People could use their religion to mask their bigotry and claim exemption from having to provide equal access to people based on their disabilities, gender (or gender expression), sexual orientation, racial characteristics, religion, age, or any other protected category. That’s not a world I want to live in nor is it a future I want for my kid.

If it comes to pass, I suppose the one silver lining is that we’ll learn what companies deserve our business, but that hardly outweighs the potential harms for people who need access to food, clothing, shelter, information, and other necessities for existence both online and off that are supposed to be guaranteed by anti-discrimination laws.

It’s all in the Supreme Court’s hands at this point, but I am more than a little concerned with what this could mean for the future here in the United States.

“We need more engineers who embody the three principles of any profession – independence, scholarly pursuits, and commitment to public service. Those are the vital ethical pillars to helping engineers withstand the great pressures to place commercial priorities over their engineering integrity and limit harm to the public.”

Tech companies also need to make their content moderation training materials publicly available so anti-hate advocates and the public can make sure the trainings accurately reflect what we need to feel safe on these platforms. Recent leaks of moderation materials have shown these documents to be woefully inadequate – one leak of a Facebook manual featured passages lifted straight from Wikipedia. When asked for comment by one media outlet, Facebook directed it to the “community standards” document the company released to the public. A $500 billion company such as Facebook should have higher standards than a college freshman rushing to finish a term paper.

Government is supposed to work for the American people, and we owe it to them to do a better job. The tools we need to restore the United States’ global leadership in technology and digital government are already at our fingertips. Now it’s time to act.

In the 21st century, more and more information is “born digital” and will stay that way, prone to decay or disappearance as servers, software, Web technologies, and computer languages break down. The task of internet archivists has developed a significance far beyond what anyone could have imagined in 2001, when the Internet Archive first cranked up the Wayback Machine and began collecting Web pages…

This is my son Oscar. In case you can’t see the picture, he looks nothing like me because he’s adopted. He’s also friggin’ adorable, but that’s not why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because my son is Black and despite the fact that he will grow up in a family that has the means to provide him with a good education and far more opportunity than a lot of children in America—including me—the sheer fact that his skin is dark means he will grow up in a far different America than I did.

He will be suspected when he enters a store. He will be treated differently in school. He will be policed differently. If he commits a crime, he will be six times more likely to be incarcerated than his white friends in daycare; and if it’s a drug offense, he’ll be ten times more likely to serve time.

He will be feared by default. He will be suspected by default. He will be guilty by default. All because he’s Black.

I don’t want him to grow up in an America where he could have his life ended during a traffic stop for a broken tail light. I listened to Diamond Reynolds’ recording of Philando Castile dying and I had to stop the car and cry; I couldn’t bear to watch the video. He was someone else’s son. Someone else’s little boy.

This is not the America I want Oscar to grow up in and we have an opportunity to change it. I fully recognize that the societal issues that underly the way we (as a nation) treat the Black community and other people of color in the U.S. are not new, nor are they going to go away overnight. It’s going to take time and commitment to making it happen.

What I also know, however, is that electing a president who proposes racist policies, uses racist rhetoric, and gins up racial tensions among his supporters is not going to make America a safer place for Oscar to grow up. A man who routinely derides and demonizes immigrant populations of varying shades (despite marrying numerous immigrants himself) is not going to lead us to be a more inclusive nation. And a man who has a history of treating the Black community unfairly is not going to be the champion we need to help unify our different racial and ethnic communities into that melting pot of ideas and cultures we’ve been taught is America’s greatest strength.

When I go to the polls this Fall to help my country choose its next leader, I will be thinking of my son and all of the other children in this great nation of ours. I will think about the future America they stand to inherit and I will vote against Donald Trump. I hope you will join me in taking a stand against fear, against further segregation of our society, and against racism. America is already great, and it will be much better without Trump.

Can you please tell what are keys to success and what should I do to become a successful programmer and software engineer? Anything is appreciated.

That’s a tough one. “Success” can be defined in so many ways. Is success making truckloads of money? Is it having 100,000 Twitter followers? Is it getting invited to speak at conferences in exotic locations? Those are very external notions of success, perhaps it’s more personal: Feeling like you’ve accomplished what you set out to do. Feeling like your life has meaning. Finding joy in both your work and your play. With so many ways to define success, there’s no magic formula for achieving it.

Unsure how to answer this perplexing question, I decided to answer by sharing what makes me feel successful—the Golden Rule. I used the Islamic version in my response:

No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.

That I chose the Islamic version had more to do with where my protege resides than anything else. This concept is universal, cropping up in nearly every faith and philosophy as well as in numerous cultural proverbs:

Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself. (Baha’i)

One should seek for others the happiness one desires for one’s self. (Buddhism)

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Chrisitianity)

Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence. (Confucianism)

He sought for others the good he desired for himself. Let him pass on! (Egyptian)

Don’t go around hurting people, and Try to understand things. (Hopi)

Humanists acknowledge human interdependence, the need for mutual respect and the kinship of all humanity. (Humanism)

In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self. (Jainism)

One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts. (Nigerian)

Do as you would be done by. (Persian)

Then there’s my personal favorite, from Judaism:

What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the entire law; all the rest is commentary.

The Golden Rule is a wonderful tool for helping maintain balance in your life, business, and relationships. And so, I followed this recommendation proverb with a bit more detail on how I feel we can embody this philosophy:

• Treat others with respect (means respecting their time, dignity, etc.).
• Look for opportunities to help others accomplish their goals.
• Give of yourself freely without expecting return.

My twelve years of Catholic schooling drummed the proverb “to whomever much is given, much will be required“ into my head, which accounts for my emphasis on sharing. I know that my “success”—as I define it at least—has been made possible by the generosity of others. And so I think it’s my duty to “pay it forward” and I look for every opportunity to create opportunities for others.

In my experience, living life this way—or at least improving on it a bit each day—makes me feel successful. Perhaps it will work for you as well.

Note: Passing along this tiny bit of wisdom made me feel successful today :-)

On one hand I think this is great. I love to code and I love to share my knowledge of that world with anyone who will listen (I’m sorry, Kelly). Also, as someone who ran a web design studio, I know first hand how hard it is to find talented people to hire. More coders equals a larger talent pool; it’s simple math.

Currently—at least here in the U.S.—the numbers aren’t where we need them to be. We just aren’t graduating enough STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) students. And the pressure to fill open positions has led to a lot of outsourcing and an increased demand for employment visas. As an unemployed or unhappy worker, making yourself employable as a coder sounds like a win-win.

Couple this with the constant barrage of news about startup acquisitions and funding rounds and it certainly seems like learning to code is your key to financial stability if not extreme wealth. (The “American Dream,” right?) But it’s not.

As Jerry Davis pointed out so deftly in the Harvard Business Review, the vast majority of startups don’t succeed. Learning to code is not a guarantee of wealth and success. And, let’s be honest, not everyone is wired for coding and that’s okay.

So I’m not sure everyone needs to learn to code. That said, I think this movement (if you can call it that) has merit.

First off, on the Web side of things, I think learning to code can be empowering. The Web is for everyone and I love to see more and more people using it as a tool to amplify their voices and to build community across the globe. So for that reason alone I’m thrilled these programs exist.

The other reason I like that people are learning to code is that it changes how they see and deal with problems.

As a programmer, I am forced to break lumbering, gnarly problems into simpler, accomplishable tasks. I’m forced to think about cause and effect, of process, of the steps required to achieve the desired outcome.

I also experience failure. Constantly. I’ve learned to find the errors in my own logic, to second guess myself, to refine and improve, to refactor my code and my brain. This constant refinement helps me achieve a deeper understanding of my tools and my medium.

To me, those lessons (taught to me through nearly 20 years of coding) are invaluable. These are the sorts of lessons I wish they taught in school, but sadly the U.S. has largely done away with reason and critical thinking in favor of memorization and regurgitation. So maybe it’s something we need to learn at home. Or in a coding class.

Regardless, if the world was filled with curious people who asked questions, applied logic, and refined their understanding of the challenges they see every day, I can’t help but think we would all be far better off.

In reviewing their domestic readership, comparing time spent reading online versus time spent reading print editions, the study found that 96.7% of reading time was spent with the print edition. Of course the “quality” of said publications varied greatly and that sad figure was even sadder for some online editions: Readers of “tabloid” newspapers spent, on average, a depressing 1.16% of their time reading the paper online. On the flip side, proper news outlets that are not behind a paywall saw 6.98% of their readership online. Paywalled online editions were all over the place: 4.1% for the Financial Times and only 0.83% for the Times.

I think the most interesting stat, however, was that the overall reading of some of these publications actually declined over the study period. In fact, the total time people spent reading the Independent went down 30.88% between 2007 and 2011.

Due to limitations of the data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the study was not able to include circulation data via apps and the meager data they could get was mostly self-reported and had to do mainly with page requests. They could not get data on reading time spent with the various newspapers’ apps.

Now granted, the data they used for the study is two years old at this point and some of the newspapers have redesigned their websites since this time, but the study got me wondering:

• Is the reason online newspaper readership and engagement doesn’t compare to print because so many newspaper websites are cluttered and unreadable?
• Is the lack of decent mobile web support a contributing factor?
• How has the advent of media queries and responsive design changed the data since 2011?
• Is there a correlation in the US and other newspaper markets as well? It seems all the stats we see show print declining here.
• With Newsweek killing off its print version back in 2012 and many calls for Jeff Bezos to do the same with the Washington Post, is that a wise strategy?

Having come from a journalism background, I am incredibly interested in seeing where things go. I have mixed feelings about print versus digital. On one hand, I have not subscribed to a newspaper for as long as I can remember. I only read them occasionally while traveling; most of my reading takes place digitally (online or at least via online sources). On the other hand, I do see print editions as being some people’s only access to what is going on around them.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

Update: I made a small tweak to the declining readership paragraph per Neil’s correction in the comments.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which finds Ehrenreich in a new location, looking for work and a place to live. Her first stop was Key West, where she took a job as a waitress at one restaurant before moving to a busier one attached to a hotel. A bit later, she tried to increase her income by picking up some additional work as a maid at said hotel, but the exhaustion (and accompanying pain) got to her and she decided just to stick with the waitressing.

In the second section, she journeyed to Maine, where she picked up a job working for a cleaning service during the week and working at a nursing home on the weekends. It was the “off season” in Maine, meaning weekly rents were far cheaper at the extended-stay motels, but she still had problems making ends meet. There’s no doubt that the tourist season would have bankrupted her or had her sharing a single-room efficiency with several other workers.

Finally, it was on to the heartland of America, Minnesota, where she was shocked to discover a severe affordable housing shortage. She took a position as an “associate” at Wal-Mart to gain additional insight into the largest private employer in the United States (possibly the world), but no matter how hard she tried, she just could not afford to live, even in the seediest of motels with assistance from local charities and the State.

In each location, Ehrenreich tried to live as cheaply as possible, often finding shelter at hotels, motels, and trailer parks that cater to those unable to afford an apartment. And, in Minneapolis, when she couldn’t even afford to do that, a local organization suggested she live at a shelter (while working full-time at Wal-Mart, mind you) until she had saved enough to afford the first month’s rent and security deposit for an apartment in the tight real estate market.

While it is arguable that she could not even hope to capture the complete experience by spending just a month in each place (and, of course, being able to return to her “real” life at any time), she was able to glean a good deal of insight into the struggles of low wage workers in this country. Her final chapter, in fact, articulated perfectly some of the thoughts and feelings I’ve had for some time. Here’s an excerpt:

When poor single mothers had the option of remaining out of the labor force on welfare, the middle and upper middle class tended to view them with a certain impatience, if not disgust. The welfare poor were excoriated for their laziness, their persistence in reproducing in unfavorable circumstances, their presumed addictions, and above all for their “dependency.” Here they were, content to live off “government handouts,” instead of seeking “self-sufficiency,” like everyone else, through a job. They needed to get their act together, learn how to wind an alarm clock, get out there and work. But now that government has largely withdrawn its “handouts,” now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy’s—well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what outlook makes sense?

Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame—shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

I highly recommend checking this book out if your a social activist interested in pushing for a living wage or are simply interested in the nature of labor and the workforce in America.