 |
|
|
|||||
Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In. On March 9, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO of Bluesky. She will become the social networking platforms chief innovation officer, while Toni Schneider, a venture capitalist and former CEO of WordPress parent company Automattic, joins Bluesky as interim CEO. (I may be the last person left who also associates Schneider with Oddpost, an impressive browser-based email client he co-created way back before Gmail existed.) Graber explained her decision as stemming in part from a desire to turn the CEO role over to someone who can help scale up the platform. From November 2024 to January 2025, as Elon Musks role in Donald Trumps reelection prompted many Twitter users (including me) to hatch exit strategies, Bluesky added 10 million users. That turned out to be the peak of the networks boom, at least so far; 10 million users is also how many its added in the past 12 months. Its still growing, but not at the torrid pace that will get it to hundreds of millions of people anytime soon. If I had invested in Blueskywhich Schneiders venture firm, True Ventures, hasId want to see it grow far larger. As an individual user, however, I find it quite pleasant at its current size. Maybe even cozy, in a way Twitter had stopped being long before Musk trashed it. (I also enjoy the even tinier Mastodon.) Should Bluesky ever get ginormous, I hope it manages to retain the intimacy that it kindles today. But Im less curious about the future of Bluesky the social network than I am about the technology behind it. Called AT Protocol, its responsible for organizing all those users and posts so that the right people see the right stuff at the right time. And unlike the comparable infrastructure in place at behemoths such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, its open. Anyone can create their own social network based upon AT Protocol, or remix an existing one (such as Bluesky) by tweaking its algorithm or other attributes. Users can preserve their personal social graphs even if they use several otherwise distinct networks based on the protocol. When I first talked to Graber in December 2023, Bluesky wasnt yet fully open to the public, and had just 2.3 million members. She seemed as excited about AT Protocol as Bluesky itself, and told me she saw it as a potential antidote to social-media toxicity, moderation problems, and general user dissatisfaction with how the people who operate social networks do their jobs. If you didnt like Bluesky as Graber managed it, you could switch to a version of the service powered by a different algorithm, or a wholly independent social network running AT Protocol. You wouldnt even have to do so much as create a user account. From both a technological and cultural standpoint, thats a way more grandiose goal than simply building a social network thats bigger and better than Twitter. As someone who loved Twitter until I didnt, I found it immensely appealing. Who wouldnt want more control over their social presence? But a little over two years later, it remains a vision more than reality. Indeed, Bluesky has a festering reputation in some quarters as an obnoxious liberal bubble unwelcoming of other perspectives, which might not be a problem if people were remastering the network or creating new alternatives based on its technology. AT Protocol was hardly dead on arrival. There are hundreds of applications that use it, from Instagram and TikTok alternatives to a stock portfolio tracker to an app that puts Bluesky on your Apple Watch. Many are intriguing in their own right. But most are satellites revolving around Bluesky and its community, which was not the original idea. Even when I spoke to Graber in 2023, the possibility of an open social protocol changing everything was not exactly new. Mastodon, which turns 10 on March 16, is powered by ActivityPub, a standard with goals similar to AT Protocol. Meta incorporated a measure of ActivityPub support into Threads (kinda, sorta)and its not clear how invested the company is in going further. Even more to the point, Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has long said that he regrets that Twitter ever became a company. Instead, he contends, it should have been an open protocol all along. Toward the end of his time there, he channeled that belief into incubating two such protocols. One became Bluesky; the other is the lesser-known Nostr, whose homepage cheerfully acknowledges the challenge it faces with the tagline An open social protocol with a chance of working. I wish the best for everyone behind AT Protocol, ActivityPub, and Nostr, but I cant help but wonder if the failure of the relatively small number of people interested in this stuff to coalesce around one protocol helps explain why progress has been so slow. (As computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum waggishly put it in the 1980s, The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.) Its as if the companies that made browsers had never agreed on the shared technological underpinnings that let us use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or any of innumerable other options to explore the same World Wide Web. For now, I am attempting to stay active on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, though its hardly a cakewalk. Openvibe, the app I used to post to all three, has become so unreliable lately that Ive mostly given up on it. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue tells me that he wants to add crossposting to Surfa wildly ambitious app, still in closed beta, that weaves ogether the entire internet into user-curated feedsbut is still figuring out how to do it well. The only long-term solution involves all of these networksplus Twitter, Facebook, and many others yet to be bornsettling on a protocol so universal that they all just work together, without 99.9% of us needing to stop and wonder why. Im realistic about the daunting odds of this happening, but I havent given up. And I hope that Bluesky wont eitherregardless of where it goes under new management. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company MacBook Neo review: niceness on a budgetApple’s long-awaited laptop is even cheaper than the pundits expected, and still feels like a Mac. Read More Phoenix has lived with Waymos longer than any U.S. city. Here’s what its mayor learnedMayor Kate Gallego talks about working with Waymo, redesigning cities for autonomous vehicles, and why robotaxis may reshape everything from parking to public transit. Read More GoFundMe launches AI fundraising coach to help people raise more moneyThe new tool drafts campaign messages, suggests titles and photos, and guides users on how to share their fundraiser. Read More This new foldable phone may have upstaged Apple in the ‘zero-crease’ warOppo’s Find N6 isn’t fully creaseless, but it’s close. Read More OpenAI’s delayed ‘adult mode’ underscores the challenges of age-gating AIA lot is riding on OpenAI’s ability to separate older ChatGPT users from younger ones. Read More The uncomfortable valley: Microsoft Teams emoji faces have got to goThey don’t make the digital workplace more casual. They make it uncomfortably weird. Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
As of yesterday, March 12, hundreds of thousands of innovators, disruptors, and leaders began descending on Austin for SXSW. If you search “Tech and AI” in this years schedule, youll find 185 results. Thats more than double the 80 AI sessions in 2024, the same year I wrote a Fast Company op-ed about how women have spent decades building the intellectual foundation of AI while receiving almost none of the credit. It was also the year that companies with at least one female founder raised $38.8 billion in venture capital funding which is a 27 percent increase from the year prior, but still not close to the high point in 2021 with a raise of $62.5 billion. Two years later and the gapboth in acknowledgement and investor fundinghasnt closed. However, something else is happening and its worth paying attention to. There is a new wave of women who refuse to wait for the AI industry to become “fair” and “equal.” They are building their own companies, on their own terms, with a more authentic and purpose-driven design mentality. Its not general-purpose AI; its gender-purpose AI. An important distinction Before you roll your eyes, the distinction matters more than you might think. By 2030which is now only four years awayAI wont just enhance companies’ business models. According to IBM, it will be the business model. Right now, that business model is being built unsurprisingly by male-dominated teams for general audiences. The truth is technologyas an industry and a conceptwas never built for women. It was not built to prioritize or accommodate our visions. But that is changing. A new class of female leaders in AI is disrupting this model and demanding more room for gender-purpose AI and less patience for the influx of male-dominated teams building general-purpose tools. This is the year we move beyond celebrating their presence and start backing their vision with real investment. One of those women is Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and general partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, who will deliver a keynote at this years conference titled “Why the Future of AI Must Be Human Centric.” She has spent more than two decades humanizing technology. As co-founder of Affectiva, she pioneered the field of Emotion AI, which reads human feeling through facial expression and vocal cues, and now as co-founder and general partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, she literally puts her money where her mission is and invests in early-stage startups building ethical AI that is good for people. The word “good” is subjective. But for too long, its been defined by the people building the problem, not solving it. The problem is also being solved by women like Valerie Chapman, CEO and co-founder of Ruth AI, an AI-powered career advancement platform. Last month, Valerie asked Sam Altman at an OpenAI builder town hall how AI can be used to fix the $1.6 trillion gender wage gap. His response was that AI should be an equalizing force in society and like Valerie pointed out in her recent op-ed, when AI is designed with intention, it can close the gap and its time to build it. What’s next As a fellow female founder helping brands understand and utilize AIas a topic and technologyin their comms strategies, heres what this shift tells me about where we are headed in 2026. 1. Male tech leaders want AGI. Female tech leaders want gender-purpose AI. The second is more inclusive. When women build AI, they tend to ask different questions in the design and development stage. Questions like who is this actually for and who will benefit from these capabilities? The truth is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is at least 10 years away and the race toward the “holy grail,” as Big Tech has coined it, should not hold as much power and influence as it does. Gender-purpose AI is a race toward something more rewarding and meaningful: relevance. What a conceptthat we could have more technology that works for the people it claims to serve. 2. The gender wage gap will not close with more women working in tech. It will close when more women are building tech. Representation matters every month, not just during Black History Month, Womens History Month, or International Womens Day. Women deserve representation in the very tools and technologies they depend on. With almost 78 million women in the American workforce, this is a demographic that has earned our time, attention and investment. 3. Investment in gender-purpose AI means nothing without investing in the women who will build tomorrows innovations The increase in female founded and funded VC companies is a great step in the right direction. But the progress pipeline matters just as much if not more. We need more mentorship programs, technical education, access to capital for first-time female founders who have the vision but not a seat at the Big Tech table. To ensure we double down on gender-purpose AI as an industry, we have to prioritize and support the women who want to build what comes next. 4. The milestones for women in AI arent just on stage. They are in hallways and in boardrooms. When women lead AI companies, th product looks different. Canadian computer scientist Joy Buolamwini pioneered Gender Shades in 2018, which piloted an intersectional approach to inclusive product testing for AI and exposed racial and gender bias in Microsofts, IBMs, and Amazons facial recognition systems and insisted they change. Rana built technology that reads human emotion because she believed machines should understand people, not just process them. These are real-world use cases that prove that whoever builds the technology determines what the technology does and who it serves. In 2026, women wont be waiting for “the next big thing” because they will be the ones behind it. They will be the ones building the technology that addresses what male leaders have not addressed: equity, inclusion, and a redefinition of “good” that finally reflects what 51% of the world wants, needs and deserves. Its time the other 49% joined us.
Category:
E-Commerce
Usually the epitome of good humor, my friend was seething. She had devised a zany and creative marketing idea for her firm. Securing the budget, designing a content strategy, hiring a creative agency, and then doing all the related work had consumed Alex and her team for a full six months. This was on top of their already demanding jobs. And then the unthinkable happened. Before the idea was announced, one of my coworkers, a PR guy, shared the ideamy ideawith the CEO and CMO. I watched her pace around my kitchen, her face getting redder and redder. While he didnt exactly say hed done the work himself, how he talked about it made it seem like it was all his. Did you tell anyone, go to your manager? I asked. Alex stopped her pacing. I did, and he said, When youre creative, people will steal your ideasyou should just get used to that fact. As we talked, I could hear that under Alexs anger was something elsecuriosity. About what this all meant. About what she could have, or should have, done differently. Was she the problem? Did she need to figure out how to play the game better? Was the PR guy the issue? Or her boss? And if it was her boss, did she need to quit? Those were the wrong questions. Its not you or them. The problem lies in the norm of tolerating bad behavior. When workplaces say, Creative ideas get stolen, harm becomes a given, not a choice. Ideas get stolen because theres no accountability. To be clear, sometimes an idea is just in the air, and two or more people come to it around the same time. And oftentimes, we create ideas together. Im not talking about those moments. Im talking about when its fully apparent what is happeningidea theft, where one party takes credit for the work of othersand how that theft is tolerated. Research shows that knowledge workers are keenly aware of idea theft; nearly one-third report having had it happen to them. Work often treats idea theft as no big deal. But the cost is real. Integrity is lost when ideas are disconnected from their source. The depth of the concept or the completeness of the thinking is lost. Downstream decisions are made without the rootedness of the original inspiration. Theft demotivates the next idea. When ideas are stolen regularly, idea generation shuts down because no one volunteers to be violated. And Alexs boss was right about one thing: Alex will certainly create more ideas. People create when they feel safe enough to imagine something new. Thatby definitionis why regulating bad behavior matters. The idea that was stolen? It became one of the firms most successful efforts that year. It inspired the companys next ad campaign and even a Super Bowl spot. But they didnt have any follow-up to this one-off success. Why? Because they no longer had Alex. The Counterintuitive Insight: We Can Take Care of Our Commons Most of us are taught to stay quiet. Dont make a scene. Go along to get along. And when someone crosses a linesteals credit, dominates meetings, dismisses ideaswe assume someone in authority will fix it. But that assumption hides a deeper truth: the rules of our workplaces are not enforced by leaders alone. They are enforced by what we tolerate together. In 2009, political economist Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for proving something that ran against decades of economic orthodoxy. Before her work, economists widely believed in the tragedy of the commonsthe idea that when a resource is shared, individuals will inevitably overuse it and destroy it. The only solution, it was thought, was top-down control: private ownership or government regulation. Ostrom proved otherwise. She showed that communities, left to their own devices, often devise highly sophisticated systems of shared managementsystems where consequences dont come from a distant authority but from the group itself. The people who depend on each other can also hold each other accountable. Her work wasnt about office politics. But it applies. Every team shares something. It might not be water or grazing land. But trust. Energy. Credit. Voice. And just like natural resources, these intangible goods are depleted when people act only in their own interests at the expense of shared interests. When a manager takes all the credit. When someone interrupts constantly. When emotional labor always falls on the same shoulders. What Ostrom teaches us is that we dont have to live inside that dynamic. We can protect shared goodsnot with permission from the top, but through practices we design ourselves. Through consequences we create and apply together. Shared spaces survive when the people inside them protect them. Change the Norm When something harmful happens at work, our instincts split: ignore it or wait for someone in charge to handle it. But silence has a cost. It makes us complicit in what we ache to change. Monica Lewinskydragged through the mud of a scandal she didnt create alonecalls on us to be upstanders: people who dont just stand by, but stand up. Who see cruelty and choose courage. Who see harm and refuse to treat it as normal. Research shows that when bystanders step in, bullying stops within secondsproving that empowering peers to act can cut bad behavior in half. What we allow becomes the rule of the room. When someone steals an idea, and no one says anything, the norm survives. When someone names itcalmly, clearlythe rule changes. But lets be clear: This isnt work any of us do alone. If bad behavior is tolerated, it grows. When it meets consequences, it stops. Bad behavior isnt mysteriousits simply a crime of opportunity, repeated when no one intervenes. This is not a personal problem. Its a social problem. Its up to those who see it to actto create the consequences. Not just to protect the harmed, but to stop the harm from spreading. Behavior doesnt change because people suddenly become better. It changes because someone names whats happening and refuses to treat it as normal. When you do, you wont do it alone. Another person will join in. And then another. Until teams decide, we can be clear, fair, and firm with each other. That our shared space is worth defending, protecting. Let yourself run toward that danger, not away from it. Adapted from the book Our Best Work: Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us, by Nilofer Merchant. Copyright 2026 by Nilofer Merchant. Reprinted by permission of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||