I never was a Boy Scout. As a kid, I leaned heavily toward papers, screens, and other indoor pursuits.
Despite this, I was always drawn to camping. Setting up in the forests of British Columbia for a few days, surrounded by trees and fresh air, always felt good. Worthwhile. Right.
While camping was always joyful, there is one aspect I long struggled with: I was bad at knots.
Okay, that is too charitable. I was incompetent at knots. All I could really do is tie the basic learn-it-when-you’re-five knot, repeated twice for good measure. Knot connoisseurs call this a “granny knot,” and it is an objectively bad knot.
These bad knots got me through most of life – they tie a garbage bag until it’s out of sight and out of mind – but when it comes to camping, they are not very helpful. They don’t stay tight, but they’re also hard to untie. They’re not adjustable for tarp lines, and they’re not useful when you only have one end of a rope to work with. They’re just generally bad, and they should feel bad.
I kind of knew this. I had camped every year for decades, and my knots were always a source of frustration. But I was never a Boy Scout. I missed the knot-tying part of life! And my dad moved out when I was a kid. And… I dunno. I’m a computer guy, don’t make me learn knots.
I mean, obviously I could learn knots. I learned long ago that we can learn anything at any age! Being bad at something is just the first step to getting pretty good at it.
But if you try to get started with knots, it’s… a lot. The Ashley Book of Knots documents 3857 of them. I downloaded the Knots 3D app, hoping it would give me some guidance. It explains 201 knots, but specifically calls out the “essential” knots: the mere 18 knots one must learn how to execute in order to survive.
You see, there are knots for binding an object down, hitching a rope to an object, adding a loop to a rope, joining two ropes together, stopping a rope from going through a hole, and making an adjustable tie. The ideal knot can vary depending on the direction of tension, the kind of rope, and the relative size of the ropes you’re using. Plus, many knots can easily be done incorrectly, resulting in a problematic bad version – like our cursed double-tied shoelaces.
But… I just wanna quickly tie tarps. And do basic camping stuff. There are a lot of things I’d rather spend my time mastering than knots! So I went back to ignoring them.
A couple years ago, after one particularly frustrating battle with a large tarp in the rain, I finally realized I’d played myself. By avoiding knot practice for so long, I’d let it become a gremlin in my mind. A thing I was bad at, not as a transitional phase towards being good, or even because I was happy to be bad at it, but because I’d let being bad at it become part of my character.
So, when I got home, I set myself down and learned one single knot. Something that would help with tarping. I spent a couple hours and learned the adjustable Tarbuck Knot.
The Tarbuck Knot. There are many others, but this knot is mine.
The Tarbuck Knot isn’t an ideal knot in any sense. But it’s adjustable, it’s reasonable, and I like it. And by going from knowing nothing – other than “I am bad at this” – to knowing literally anything levelled up my vacation every year. I now have nice little adjustable tarp lines everywhere.
Sure, I sometimes have things tied together with adjustable knots that don’t strictly need to be adjustable. But it’s quick and useful.
I guess the thing I learned – other than how to tie a knot – is that there is nothing so outside your wheelhouse that you can’t go 0 to 1 with it. It’s too easy to dismiss a topic or discipline as not your domain and let your ignorance slowly hinder you. One of the miracles of being human is that we can learn a little bit about everything.
I suppose there’s one other thing I learned. When it comes to the plain knot – the “I’m gonna tie my shoelaces” right over left knot – you should never double-tie it. Instead, tie the second one in reverse, left over right. That upgrades the bad knot into a Square Knot: stronger and easier to untie.
It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long. Yet a paper posted on February 10 left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo, just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old…
So, I wrote an alien artifact no one else on my team understood. (I know, I know.) I’m not a monster — it has documentation and tests, it went through code review for all that that didn’t accomplish its usual knowledge-transfer goals — and there were solid business reasons the alien artifact had to exist and solid skillset reasons I had to write it, and yet. There we were. With an absolutely critical microservice that no one understood except me.
One day someone reported a bug and my creative and brilliant coworker Ivanok Tavarez was like, you know, I’m pretty sure I know where this bug is in the code. I have no idea what’s going on there, but I asked Copilot to fix it. Also I have no idea what Copilot did. But it seems to have fixed it. Knowing that I’m rather more of an AI skeptic than he is, he asked, would I entertain this code?
And you know what? Let’s do it.
I mean obviously we’ve gotta have a human review this code before it lives in main and there isn’t an option besides me. But suddenly we have an opportunity, because if I turn this code review into a Twitch-meets-Webex livestreaming party, my whole team can watch me talk my way through it, interrupt with questions, and hear my whole mental model of this section of the code, right? Hear my reasons why this code works or doesn’t, fits with the existing structure or doesn’t?
It turns out I just needed some code from outside of myself to make this possible. And the only way to get code for our alien artifact was from an alien author.
And it was great.
I could see the gears turning, the lightbulbs flipping on, the “+1 XP”s pinging up. I think it was the first time anyone else on the team got real mental traction on this code. Actually it was so great I’m now doing a series of walkthroughs where I just narrate my way through the code with the team until we all get tired of it or feel adequately enlightened. And for the first time, I feel like if we need to add more functionality to this microservice, I might actually be able to assign someone else to do it — with handholding and consultation, yeah, but without me being that guy from Nebraska for my team.
So…yeah. I’m pretty interested in machine learning (I did the original Andrew Ng Coursera course and several of its followups, on my own time! I did a whole experimental neural net interface (now offline) to MIT’s thesis collection in 2017! I taught an AI course at the SJSU iSchool! I was an ML researcher for the Library of Congress!). But I’m also reflexively skeptical of it (I use it in my own coding for autocomplete, but I’ve never described code and had the LLM write it! that AI course sure did talk a lot about algorithmic bias! I went to a college whose actual mission statement is about the impact of technology on society! I believe in the importance of real human thought and kinda want LLMs to just get off my lawn!). This use case captivated me because it genuinely surprised me. I hadn’t thought about it as a way to potentially expand the capacities of my team — not in some hackneyed capitalist-grind productivity way, but by getting us outside my own head (the limiting feature in this case) and giving us a shared artifact that we could use as the basis of a conversation to genuinely advance our own skills.
I can hear you asking whether the code was any good. For the purposes of this use case, the great thing is it doesn’t matter; it just has to be relevant enough to support substantive review. But fine, fine, I won’t leave you hanging: I had minor stylistic quibbles but in fact it correctly identified a semantic bug I had totally missed and fixed it in a way which fit cleanly into the existing structure, and I merged it without qualms.
And yesterday Ivanok came up with a clever new way to leverage AI for teambuilding and skill-building purposes, so I’m gonna tell you about that too! But in the interests of word count, you’ll have to wait for part two :).
The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it's 1995.
Think about it: They gave blockchain the sniff test and walked away. Ignored crypto (and yeah, we're not rich now). NFTs got a collective eye roll.
But AI? Different story. The same folks who hand-coded HTML while listening to dial-up modems sing are now vibe-coding with the kids. Building things. Breaking things. Giddy about it.
We Gen X'ers have seen enough gold rushes to know the real thing. This one's got all the usual crap—bad actors, inflated claims, VCs throwing money at anything with "AI" in the pitch deck. Gross behavior all around. Normal for a paradigm shift, but still gross.
The people who helped wire up the internet recognize what's happening. When the folks who've been through every tech cycle since gopher start acting like excited newbies again, that tells you something.
From cars to air conditioning, television to social media feeds, one cost of modern life has been the way it makes it ever more comfortable to sit alone in our living rooms or cars. It makes us need our neighbors less, which means we know them less and trust them less. The rise of cable TV, microcasting, and finally social media has also fed people a steady diet of stories showing the worst of human nature. This growing isolation, combined with a growing feeling of threat (even during the long period when crime rates were dropping), is a major reason why Americans stopped letting their children out by the late 1990s, as we have discussed in other posts in this series. If we want to restore a play-based childhood, we need to understand the reasons for its demise.
Today’s piece illuminates these issues through a story about a birthday party, a neighborhood app, and a boy who just wants to play outside. It explores how the fragmentation of community has accelerated with the rise of social media, making parents more fearful of one another and neighborhoods more disconnected. The essay shows that some of the very platforms marketed as ways to make communities safer — such as Nextdoor — have ended up amplifying fear, fueling the decline of social trust.
The post is written by Deepti Doshi, who co-directs New_ Public along with Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble. New_ Public is a nonprofit Research and Development lab reimagining social media, with a focus on creating digital public spaces that connect people, embrace pluralism, and build community. The best way to follow along is their Substack newsletter.
Recently, we had a birthday party for my nine-year-old son Aiden. A pack of thirteen boys careened towards the little field around the corner from us to play a Nerf flag football game he made up.
However, not long after they left our front porch, one of the boys, Liam, came back to our house. “My mom says I can’t go unsupervised,” he said. Not knowing what else to do, my husband accompanied Liam back to the field, so he could rejoin the fun.
Liam's mother is my friend Caitlin. I know that Caitlin isn’t intentionally trying to punish Liam, she’s just scared. (I’ve changed both their names.)
Caitlin will often text me a horrific screenshot from her Instagram feed, or from Nextdoor, the neighborhood platform used by as many as one third of American households. These feeds seemingly deliver proof of Caitlin’s greatest fears: somewhere nearby, a child is in danger.
What is she supposed to think when a headline about a missing child from a nearby elementary school rises to the top of her feed?
And yet, what she’s seeing is not actually our lived experience: Our city — Berkeley, CA — is not dangerous. Like many towns, cities, and neighborhoods around the country, we saw some kinds of crime increase during the pandemic, and decline more recently. My neighborhood within Berkeley is particularly safe: only a few non-violent crimes were reported on nearby streets in the last month — not bad for an urban college town. Unfortunately, Nextdoor can make anywhere seem dangerous. What Caitlin sees on her phone is a warped version of our area, mediated by Nextdoor’s money-making algorithm. Isolated incidents from nearby areas are highlighted and made to seem like an epidemic of crime.
Image. Posts from Deepti Doshi’s Nextdoor feed. (Highlights added.) These crime and safety posts are a small percentage of what’s on Nextdoor, but they receive a lot of engagement, so they are pushed to Deepti’s feed, even though she lives miles away in a different part of Berkeley, CA.
This phenomenon is not unique to social media and engagement-based algorithms: cable television and its associated 24/7 news cycles in the 1980s and ‘90s played a key role in amplifying public fears around “stranger danger” and child abductions. It has long been a truism that “if it bleeds, it leads,” on local news.
But social media is different in one important respect: TV producers do not have access to a firehose of data to custom-tailor their programming to each viewer. Whereas now, courtesy of algorithms, we each have a personalized feed or For You Page to scare the hell out of us.
I feel empathy for Caitlin, and all parents who are afraid of what might happen to their kids. Terrible things do sometimes happen. But it’s crucial, for the sake of our children, to put our fears in perspective. We must understand the dynamics of our local information ecosystems and regain our own agency to do what's right for our kids.
For me, this highlights an important issue, tangential to those explored in The Anxious Generation: the effects of social media and smartphones on the parents ofkids and teens. Other social platforms, including the local digital spaces we rarely think about in the context of “social media,” like Nextdoor neighborhoods and Facebook groups, are making parents afraid.
The Unintentional Business Model is Fear
The stakes are so much greater than one boy, Liam, needing a chaperone to play with the other boys at my son’s birthday party. It’s about a generation of Liams, who aren’t exploring their independence, cultivating friendships, and building self-confidence in their own neighborhoods.
If you don’t know your neighbors, everyone on the block is a stranger and potential threat. Kids like Liam stay inside to play video games, and when they get older, scroll social media. They become the data points of our loneliness epidemic.
My friend Caitlin’s feeds are not at all unusual: Nextdoor’s best performing content is often the most incendiary content on the platform — the most violent and alarming incidents closest to you (which are often not even all that close, depending on how active your area is1).
If you’ve got an account, search your email for “Nextdoor” and you’re likely to see some of the worst things people are capable of and can experience: shootings, abandoned animals, car crashes, robberies. A small number of crime and safety posts are a huge source of engagement for Nextdoor, and engagement is vital to their stock price.
Nextdoor has just rolled out a redesign of their app, with a glossy new interface and some AI features. It’s too soon to say for sure, but at first glance, the fundamentals have remained the same: Nextdoor is in the business of fear.
And beyond Nextdoor, Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, and email listservs are everywhere, in almost every community throughout the US. According to Pew, about half of US adults get local news and information from online forums and groups like these. Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for them to spill over into chaos, toxicity, and fearmongering.
I know, because I used to be on the inside: I was an exec at Facebook, working specifically on Groups. I saw firsthand how the incentives of these companies — to grow and drive engagement and sell ads — aren’t aligned with building the social cohesion and trust that parents and children need.
It’s Possible to Cultivate Safe Neighborhoods with Digital Spaces
But there are different, better ways for neighbors to connect online.
This is exactly what we’ve been researching and developing at New_ Public, a nonprofit I co-direct along with Eli Pariser. Back in 2012, Eli forecasted the divisive consequences of these algorithms in his book The Filter Bubble, and now they’re impossible to ignore.
We both believe that we can break the toxic cycle of platforms that profit off our fear. Let’s re-imagine social media as digital public spaces that build community trust and cohesion, in the same way that our libraries and parks do.
We need digital spaces that embody our Civic Signals: fourteen qualities of flourishing public spaces ranging from feeling safe and human to building bridges between groups.
And we’ve seen on some platforms that when developers and technologists design prosocial, public-spirited features and tools, so much is possible. Good design can help create the conditions to give our kids more freedom, and for parents to trust the community to look after them.
For example, Front Porch Forum is a homegrown, humanely-moderated network of local forums in Vermont. Over the course of two decades, FPF, a public benefit corporation, has worked with local advertisers to fund a sustainable network of over two hundred town-level forums. They collect no data from their users and only update once a day at most;reading FPF typically only takes five or ten minutes.
In our research, we found that people who spent more time on FPF learned more about their towns and became more civically engaged. Rather than making people afraid, FPF actually inspires neighbors to get to know each other and build social trust.
You can see the difference in the way people talk about FPF. Don Heise, who lives in Calais, a Vermont town with about 1600 people, told the Washington Post that FPF was “the glue that holds our community together.” Can you ever, in your wildest dreams, imagine someone saying that about Nextdoor?
Recently, our team at New_ Public has begun working on some Front Porch Forum-inspired community spaces of our own. We’re currently designing a platform that we aim to eventually scale throughout the US. Our work is guided by research into what works, along with our co-design process of building alongside the people who inhabit and care for these communities.
Image. Children playing at the community event in The Island, a neighborhood in Chicago. Nate Tubbs, a community leader and moderator of The Island Civic Association's online space, participated in New_ Public's Neighborhood Steward Fellowship in 2024.
Image. A poster at a community event in Washington, D.C., calls on neighbors to get in touch and share interests, recommendations, and requests.
Throughout, we’re determined to keep a laser-focus on the needs of parents like Caitlin, who just wants her son to be safe, and Liam, who really needs to be able to run around with his friends and be free.
As a mom, I believe independence in public spaces is formative to childhood development and our development as an interdependent society. Kids should be running loose on the streets, eating impromptu dinners at a neighbor’s house, building lifelong relationships, and having so much fun in real life that screens can’t even compete.
Step up into Stewardship!
Building new technological tools will take time, but there is something everyone can do in the meantime: be a local community steward. Volunteer your time and energy where your neighbors already are: find a local Facebook group, subreddit, email listserv, or even a Nextdoor neighborhood, and offer to moderate. It’s never too late to introduce yourself to your neighbors — you probably have a lot in common!
If there aren’t any spaces like this near you, you might consider starting one. Or, you can sign up to get involved in what we’re building. Your care and attention are very likely to be appreciated by your neighbors.
We can shift from fear to trust, but we need to step into our bold ability to imagine — to imagine and build a new generation of healthy, useful, and fun digital spaces for connecting with our neighbors.
Nextdoor has a number of different ways to filter your feed, but the default — “For you” — prioritizes highly engaging content, including crime and safety posts. If you live in a Nextdoor Neighborhood with very little of this content, the algorithm will reach from further away to find posts for your feed. Depending where you live, this can be around the corner, or many miles away.
The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.
Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science — the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others — and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility — or else be subject to correction by political appointees.
And so:
Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since [World War II]. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America’s research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”
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The Tarbuck Knot. There are many others, but this knot is mine.
