Jim @sullybiker@sully.site

Today in 1884, 139 years ago: The Siege of Khartoum begins. It lasts until January 26, 1885.

#OnThisDay

34 years ago our Director Tim Berners-Lee submitted "Information Managment: A Proposal" for a global informaton sharing platform he called the World Wide Web.
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
See more about the history of the Web and the role of the Consortium at:
https://beta.w3.org/about/history/

So, for those of you who don't know me that well:

My first full-time job in "tech" was at the little newspaper company in Kansas that open-sourced Django, and which was trying to improve the state of journalism.

After that I worked for Mozilla trying to improve the open web.

After that, a couple of companies trying to make health care better and more accessible for everyone.

Now, at a company that tries to help artists get paid for their art.

And for basically that entire time I've been a vocal supporter of and contributor to open-source software and communities.

Except... well, I don't know the status right now, because the company I work for is apparently affected by the SVB collapse. Right now I don't know if I, or any of my colleagues, or any of the artists we work with, still have a source of income. I may not know for a while.

And it turns out, lots of companies were pushed by their investors into using SVB. Or didn't even know that their payroll provider used SVB. And so a lot of the people being left wondering about their next paycheck are *not* billionaire tech bros, are not people who had any say in their involvement with SVB, may not even have known about it, and are currently just trying to figure out how they're going to make ends meet if the worst-case scenarios play out.

So. If your hot take is WOOHOO SUCK IT BILLIONAIRES AND TECH BROS AND USELESS STARTUPS, then I honestly don't even know what to say to you. The people who are going to suffer from a complete collapse are not the people you're hoping will suffer. And the people prancing around and celebrating the idea of a complete collapse are making it clear exactly what their values are and who they're happy to throw under the bus in service to those values.

I suggest not being one of those people. That would be a good start.