I Fight For The Users Jeff Atwood 30 Nov 2023 — 5 min read — Comments If you haven’t been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don’t blame you. There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a busy time. But let’s pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I can’t possibly say it better than Paul Ford, so I’ll just refer you there:Every five or six minutes, someone in the social sciences publishes a PDF with a title like “Humans 95 Percent Happier in Small Towns, Waving at Neighbors and Eating Sandwiches.” When we gather in groups of more than, say, eight, it’s a disaster. Yet there is something fundamental in our nature that desperately wants to get everyone together in one big room, to “solve it.” Our smarter, richer betters (in Babel times, the king’s name was Nimrod) often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment – and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”It’s been clear for quite some time that the early social media strategery of “jam a million people in a colosseum and let them fight it out with free speech” isn’t panning out, but never has it been more clear than now, under the Elon Musk regime, that being beholden to the whims of a billionaire going through a midlife crisis isn’t exactly healthy for society. Or you. Or me. Or anyone, really.I tried to be fair; I gave the post-Elon Twitter era a week, thinking “how bad could it possibly be?” and good lord, it was so much worse than I could have possibly ever imagined. It’s like Elon read the Dilbert pointy-haired-manager book on management and bonked his head on every rung of the ladder going down, generating an ever-growing laundry list of terrible things no manager should ever do. And he kept going!It’s undeniably sad. I really liked Twitter, warts and all, from 2007 onward. In fact, it was the only “social network” I liked at all. Even when it became clear in the Trump era that Twitter was unhealthy for human minds, I soldiered on, gleaning what I could. I’m not alone in that; Clay Shirky’s moribund signoff at the end of 2022 reflected how I felt:Indeed, Twitter was murdered at the whims of a billionaire high on Ketamine while it was (mostly) healthy, because of the “trans woke virus”. I urge you, all of you, to disavow Twitter and never look at it again. No one who cares about their mental health should be on Twitter at this point, or linking to Twitter and feeding it the attention it thrives on. We should entomb Twitter deep in concrete with this public warning on its capstone:In the end, I begrudgingly realized, as did Paul Ford, that Elon unwittingly did us a favor by killing Twitter. He demonstrated the very real dangers of any platform run by a king, a dictator, a tyrant, a despot, an autocrat. You can have all your content rug-pulled out from under you at any time, or watch in horror as your favorite bar... slowly transforms into a Nazi bar. I’ve been saying for a long time that decentralization is the way to go. We can and should have sane centralized services, of course, but it’s imperative that we also build decentralized services which empower users and give them control, rather than treating them like digital sharecroppers. That’s what our Discourse project is all about. I propose collective ownership of the content and the communities we build online. Yeah, it’s more work, it’s not “free” (sorry not sorry), but I have some uncomfortable news for you: those so-called “free” services aren’t really free.Which, again, is not to say that “free” services don’t have a place in the world, they do, but please don’t harbor any illusions about what you are sacrificing in the name of “free.” Grow up.I take a rather Tron-like view of the world when it comes to this stuff; in the software industry, our goal should be to empower users (with strong moderation tools), not exploit them. So I encourage you to explore alternatives to Twitter, ideally open source, federated alternatives. Is it messy? Hell yes it’s messy. But so is democracy; it’s worth the work, because it’s the only survivable long term path forward. Anything worth doing is never easy.I’m currently on Mastodon, an open source, federated Twitter alternative at https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror – I urge you to join me on the Mastodon server of your choice, or quite literally any other platform besides Twitter. Really, whatever works for you. Pick what you like. Help make it better for everyone.To inspire that leap of faith, I am currently auctioning off, with all funds to benefit The Trevor Project which offers assistance to LGBTQ youth, these 10 museum quality brass plaques of what I consider to be the best tweet of all time, hands down:(Blissfully, @horse_ebooks is also on Mastodon. As they should be. As should you. Because everything happens so much.)If you’d like to bid on the 10 brass plaques, follow these links to eBay, and please remember, it’s for a great cause, and will piss Elon off, which makes it even sweeter:(Apologies, I had to cancel the old auctions because I forgot to allow international shipping – I’ve also made shipping free, worldwide.)I will sign the back of every plaque, because each one comes with my personal guarantee that it will easily outlive what’s left of Twitter. Related posts Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line. To Serve Man, with Software I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero downsides. The Raspberry Pi Has Revolutionized Emulation very geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It’s practically a rite of passage. I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my Here’s The Programming Game You Never Asked For You know what’s universally regarded as un-fun by most programmers? Writing assembly language code. As Steve McConnell said back in 1994: Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages. Languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, and Visual Basic have been credited Recent Posts The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans. Let's Talk About The American Dream A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront Stay Gold, America We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream. The Great Filter Comes For Us All With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now? (Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much I’m feeling unlucky... 🎲   See All Posts

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now?(Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much additional nuance.)This is called the Fermi paradox: The Fermi Paradox is a contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, such as in the Drake equation, and lack of any evidence for such civilizations. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are similar to the Sun, including many billions of years older than Earth. With high probability, some of these stars will have Earth-like planets, and if the Earth is typical, some might develop intelligent life. Some of these civilizations might develop interstellar travel, a step the Earth is investigating now. Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in about a million years. According to this line of thinking, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial aliens. In an informal conversation, Fermi noted no convincing evidence of this, nor any signs of alien intelligence anywhere in the observable universe, leading him to ask, “Where is everybody?” To me, this is a compelling argument, in the same way that the lack of evidence of any time travellers is:Many have argued that the absence of time travelers from the future demonstrates that such technology will never be developed, suggesting that it is impossible. This is analogous to the Fermi paradox related to the absence of evidence of extraterrestrial life. As the absence of extraterrestrial visitors does not categorically prove they do not exist, so the absence of time travelers fails to prove time travel is physically impossible; it might be that time travel is physically possible but is never developed or is cautiously used. Carl Sagan once suggested the possibility that time travelers could be here but are disguising their existence or are not recognized as time travelers.It seems, to me at least, clear evidence that time travel is not possible, given the enormous amount of time behind us. Something, somewhere, would certainly have invented it by now... right?So if not, what happened? The Great Filter maybe?The Great Filter theory says that at some point from pre-life to Type III intelligence, there’s a wall that all or nearly all attempts at life hit. There’s some stage in that long evolutionary process that is extremely unlikely or impossible for life to get beyond. That stage is The Great Filter.I liked Wait But Why’s take on this a lot, which covers three main filter possibilities:Life is extraordinarily rare, almost impossibleWe are not a rare form of life, but near the first to evolveAlmost no life makes it to this pointThose are three Great Filter possibilities, but the question remains: why are we so alone in the observable universe? I grant you that what we can observe is appallingly tiny given the unimaginable scale of the universe, so “what we can observe” may not be enough by many orders of magnitude.I encourage you to read the entire article, it’s full of great ideas explained well, including many other Great Filter possibilities. Mostly I wanted to share my personal theory of why we haven’t encountered alien life by now. Like computers themselves, things don’t get larger. They get smaller. And faster. And so does intelligent life. Why build planet-size anything when the real action is in the small things? Small spaces, small units of time, everything gets smaller.Large is inefficient and unnecessary. Look at the history of computers: from giant to tiny and tinier. From slow to fast and faster. Personally, I have a feeling really advanced life eventually does away with all physical stuff that slows you down as soon as they can, and enters the infinite spaces between:This is, of course, a variant on the Fermi paradox: We don’t see clues to widespread, large-scale engineering, and consequently we must conclude that we’re alone. But the possibly flawed assumption here is when we say that highly visible construction projects are an inevitable outcome of intelligence. It could be that it’s the engineering of the small, rather than the large, that is inevitable. This follows from the laws of inertia (smaller machines are faster, and require less energy to function) as well as the speed of light (small computers have faster internal communication). It may be – and this is, of course, speculation – that advanced societies are building small technology and have little incentive or need to rearrange the stars in their neighborhoods, for instance. They may prefer to build nanobots instead.– Seth ShostakSeth delivers an excellent TED talk on this topic as well: If we can barely see far in the universe as is, there’s no way we could possibly see into the infinite space and time between.That is of course just my opinion, but we’ll see... eventually.

We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I’m concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream:The costs of housing, healthcare, and education have soared far beyond the pace of inflation and wage growth.We are a democracy, but 144 million Americans – 42% of the adults who live here – do not vote and have no say in what happens.Wealth concentration has reached historic levels. The top 1% of households control 32% of all wealth, while the bottom 50% only have 2.6%.We must act now to keep the dream alive. Our family made eight $1 million donations to nonprofit groups working to support those most currently in need:Team Rubicon – Mobilizing veterans to continue their service, leveraging their skills and experience to help Americans prepare, respond, and recover from natural disasters.Children’s Hunger Fund – Provides resources to local churches in the United States and around the world to meet the needs of impoverished community members.PEN America – Defends writers against censorship and abuse, supports writers in need of emergency assistance, and amplifies the writing of incarcerated prisoners. (One of my personal favorites; I’ve seen the power of writing transform our world many times.)The Trevor Project – Working to change hearts, minds, and laws to support the lives of young adults seeking acceptance as fellow Americans.NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund – Legal organization with a historic record of advancing racial justice and reducing inequality.First Generation Investors –Global Refuge – Supporting migrants and refugees from around the globe, in partnership with community-based legal and social service providers nationwide, helping rebuild lives in America.Planned Parenthood – Provides essential healthcare services and resources that help individuals and families lead healthier lives.I encourage every American to contribute soon, however you can, to organizations you feel are effectively helping those most currently in need here in America.We must also my family pledges half our remaining wealth towards long term efforts ensuring that all Americans continue to have access to the American Dream. I never thought my family would be able to do this. My parents are of hardscrabble rural West Virginia and rural North Carolina origins. They barely managed to claw their way to the bottom of the middle class by the time they ended up in Virginia. Unfortunately, due to the demons passed on to them by their parents, my father was an alcoholic and my mother participated in the drinking. She ended up divorcing my father when I was 16 years old. It was only after the divorce that my parents were able to heal themselves, heal their only child, and stop the drinking, which was so destructive to our family. If the divorce hadn’t forced the issue, alcohol would have inevitably destroyed us all. My parents may not have done everything right, but they both unconditionally loved me. They taught me how to fully, deeply receive love, and the profound joy of reflecting that love upon everyone around you. I went on to attend public school in Chesterfield County, Virginia. In 1992 I graduated from the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson.During college, I worked at Safeway as a part-time cashier, earning the federal minimum wage, scraping together whatever money I could through government Pell grants, scholarships, and other part-time work to pay my college tuition. Even with lower in-state tuition, it was rocky. Sometimes I could barely manage tuition payments. And that was in 1992, when tuition was only $3,000 per year. It is now $23,000 per year. College tuition at a state school increased by 8 times over the last 30 years. These huge cost increases for healthcare, education, and housing are not compatible with the American Dream.Programmers all over the world helped make an American Dream happen in 2008 when we built Stack Overflow, a Q&A website for programmers creating a shared Creative Commons knowledge base for the world. We did it democratically, because that’s the American way. We voted to rank questions and answers, and held elections for community moderators using ranked choice voting. We built a digital democracy – of the programmers, by the programmers, for the programmers. It worked. With the guidance of my co-founder Joel Spolsky, I came to understand that the digital democracy of Stack Overflow was not enough. We must be brave enough to actively, openly share love with each other. That became the foundation for Discourse, a free, open source tool for constructive, empathetic community discussions that are also Creative Commons. We can disagree in those discussions because Discourse empowers communities to set boundaries the community agrees on, providing tools to democratically govern and strongly moderate by enforcing these boundaries. Digital democracy and empathy, for everyone.In order for digital democracy to work, we need to see each other through our screens.We often behave online in ways we never would in the real world because we cannot see the person on the other side of the screen. But as our world becomes more digital, we must extend our kindness through that screen.I’ve always felt Stack Overflow and Discourse are projects for the public good that happen to be corporations. I probably couldn’t have accomplished this in any other country, and I was rewarded handsomely for a combination of hard work and good luck. That’s what the American Dream promises us. We built it, and people came. I earned millions of dollars. I thought that was the final part of the American Dream. But it wasn’t.I recently attended a theater performance of The Outsiders at my son’s public high school. All I really knew was the famous “stay gold” line from the 1983 movie adaptation. But as I sat there in the audience among my neighbors, watching the complete story acted out in front of me by these teenagers, I slowly realized what staying gold actually meant: sharing the American Dream. In the printed program, the director wrote:This play is a reminder that strength lies not just in overcoming hardships but in staying true to ourselves and lifting up those around us. We hope you feel the raw emotions, sense the camaraderie, and connect with the enduring themes of resilience, empathy, and unity. Whether you’ve read this story recently, long ago, or not at all, I hope you are able to find inspiration in the strength and passion of youth. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.Stay gold.I believe deeply in sharing The American Dream. It is the foundation of our country, the second paragraph in our Declaration of Independence, written by the founder of the public university I attended:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.But the American Dream is not always available to every American. Its meaning can be distorted. Jimi Hendrix captured this distortion so eloquently in his rendition of our national anthem. We are still trying to live up to those ideals today. In November 2024, enough of us voted for people who interpret the dream in a way that I don’t understand.34% of adults in America did not exercise their right to vote. Why? Is it voter suppression, gerrymandering causing indifference, or people who felt their vote didn’t matter? The 7.6% that are ineligible to vote are mostly adults living in America who have not managed to attain citizenship, or people convicted of a felony. Whatever the reasons, 42% of adults living in America had no say in the 2024 election. The vote failed to represent everyone.I think many of the Americans who did vote are telling us they no longer believe our government is effectively keeping America fair for everyone. Our status as the world’s leading democracy is in question. We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as state and local election boards, as well as the Federal Election Commission.It was only after I attained the dream that I was able to fully see how many Americans have so very little. This much wealth starts to unintentionally distance my family from other Americans. I no longer bother to look at how much items cost, because I don’t have to. We don’t have to think about all these things that are challenging or unreachable for so many others. The more wealth you attain, the more unmistakably clear it becomes how unequal life is for so many of us.Even with the wealth I have, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be a billionaire. It is, for lack of a better word, unamerican. In 2012, the top 1% of Americans held 24% of our country’s wealth. By 2021, the top 1% of Americans held 30%. So many have so little, while a tiny few have massive, wildly disproportionate wealth, which keeps growing. Now the global top 1% hold nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world combined.I grew up poor in America, inspired by the promise of the American Dream that I could better myself and my family by building things that mattered:Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books. – Du BoisOur version of capitalism delivered so much wealth to my family for my hard work in co-founding two successful companies. My partner and I gladly paid our full taxes, and we always planned to give most of our remaining wealth to charities when we pass, following the Warren Buffett Philanthropic Pledge:More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death.I admire Buffett, but even having only a tiny fraction of his $325 billion fortune, to me this pledge was incomplete. When would this wealth be transferred? Last year he amended the pledge, giving all his wealth at death to a charitable trust run by his children, aged 71, 69, and 66, who do not make for natural charitable bedfellows. I am only holding back enough wealth for my children so they can afford college educations and buy a home. I am compelled to, because being a parent is the toughest job I’ve ever had, and I am concerned about their future.November 5th raised the stakes. It is now time to allocate half the wealth I was so fortunate to be dealt within the next five years, not just for my own family, but for all my fellow Americans. Our government seems to be slower and slower at delivering change due to the increased polarization of our two party system. The last meaningful constitutional amendment we’ve managed to pass in the last 60 years was the 26th amendment in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18 and giving more people a voice in our democracy. Political polarization is at historically high levels and rising. In a two party system, this level of polarization is counterproductive and even dangerous. Do we all still believe in the same American Dream? I’ve always loved the ideals behind the American Dream, though we continually struggle to live up to them. They are worth fighting for, even if it means making “good trouble”. We must come together and believe in our shared American Dream so deeply that we can improve our democracy... but which dream?The American Dream contains the path of hate, and the path of love. Throughout our history, one hand is always fighting the other. Which path are we choosing?Our family pledges half our remaining wealth toward an American Dream founded on love.Here are some starting points for longer term efforts:We can support organizations making it easier for Americans to vote for a new Congress in two years and a new president in four years. My concern is damage to our democratic institutions may happen so quickly that our votes could matter even less within the coming years.We could fund nonprofits that have a proven track record of protecting democratic institutions.We could found a new organization loosely based on the original RAND Corporation, but modernized like Lever for Change. We can empower the best and brightest to determine a realistic, achievable path toward preserving the American Dream for everyone, working within the current system or outside it.All states are shades of purple, not fully red or blue. We have more in common on specific policies than we realize. It would be very difficult to draw borders if we split. I know what divorce feels like, and we don’t want this. Let’s come together through our shared American Dream. We can start with change in our local communities. Vote in your own city, county, and state elections. Support local independent journalism and media. Find a local organization doing work you admire, ask what they need, and help them meet those needs. Listen to the stories of fellow volunteers, listen to the stories of the people you’re serving – that is the heart of Democracy.We’ve already completed the eight $1 million donations listed above to help those most immediately in need. Within the next five years, half of our family wealth will support longer term efforts. There is no single solution, so let’s work together. I will gladly advise and empower others working towards the same goal.Please join us in Sharing the American Dream:Support organizations you feel are effectively helping those most in need across America right now.Within the next five years, also contribute public dedications of time or funds towards longer term efforts to keep the American Dream fair and attainable for all our children.Stay gold, America. 💛(Edit: 3/9/25 – if you are curious what long term efforts we have chosen to support, please see my followup blog post Let's Talk About The American Dream, and stay tuned for our Cooper Union talk co-presented with Alexander Vindman on Thursday, March 20th at 7pm eastern time.) (I could not have done this without the support of my partner Betsy Burton and the rest of my family. I'd also like to thank Steve McConnell, whose writing inspired me to start this blog in 2004. So many people from all walks of life generously shared their feedback to improve this post. We wrote it together. Thank you all.)

Let's Talk About The American Dream Jeff Atwood 06 Mar 2025 — 2 min read — Comments A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront where we’ve been, where we are, and who we want to be.That’s why I’m incredibly honored to be joining Alexander Vindman in giving a talk at the historic Cooper Union Great Hall 14 days from now. I greatly admire the way Colonel Vindman was willing to put everything on the line to defend the ideals of democracy and the American Dream.The American Dream is, at its core, the promise that hard work, fairness, and opportunity can lead to a better future. But in 2025, that promise feels like a question: How can we build on our dream so that it works for everyone?Alexander and I will explore this in our joint talk through the lens of democracy, community, and economic mobility. We come from very different backgrounds, but we strongly share the belief that everyone's American Dream is worth fighting for.Alexander Vindman has lived many lifetimes of standing up for what's right. He was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. as a child, growing up in Brooklyn before enlisting in the U.S. Army. Over the next 21 years, he served with distinction, earning a Purple Heart for injuries sustained in Iraq and eventually rising to Director of European Affairs for the National Security Council. When asked to choose between looking the other way or upholding the values he swore to protect, he chose correctly. That decision cost him his career but never his integrity. I have a lot to learn about what civic duty truly means from Alex.I build things on the Internet, like Stack Overflow and Discourse. I write on the internet, on this blog. I've spent years thinking about how people interact online, how communities work (or don't), and how we create digital spaces that encourage fairness, participation, and constructive discourse. Spaces that result in artifacts for the common good, like local parks, where everyone can enjoy them together. Whether you're running a country or running a forum, the same rules seem to apply: people need clear expectations, fair systems, strong boundaries, and a shared sense of purpose. This is the part of Stay Gold I couldn't tell you about, not yet, because I was working so hard to figure it out. How do you make long-term structural change that creates opportunity for everyone? It is an incredibly complex problem. But if we focus our efforts in a particular area, I believe we can change a lot of things in this country. Maybe not everything, but something foundational to the next part of our history as a country: how to move beyond individual generosity and toward systems that create security, dignity, and possibility for all.I can't promise easy answers, but what I can promise is an honest, unfiltered conversation about how we move forward, with specifics. Colonel Vindman brings the perspective of someone who embodied American ideals, and I bring the experience of building self-governing digital communities that scale, which turned out to be far more relevant to the future of democracy than I ever would have dreamed possible.Imagine what we can do if Alex and I work together. Imagine what we could do if we all worked together.This event was streamed in real time via the Cooper Union Great Hall YouTube channel:

The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans. Jeff Atwood 20 Mar 2025 — 14 min read — Comments The following is drawn from a speech I delivered today at Cooper Union's Great Hall in New York City, where I joined Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman to discuss the future of the American Dream:What is the American Dream?In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, James Truslow Adams first defined the American Dream as“[...] a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. [...] not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which [everyone] shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position”I wanted to know what these words meant to us today. I needed to know what parts of the American Dream we all still had in common. I had to make some sense of what was happening to our country. I’ve been writing on my blog since 2004, and on November 7th, I started writing the most difficult piece I have ever written. I asked so many Americans to tell me what the American Dream personally meant to them, and I wrote it all down.Later in November, I attended a theater performance of The Outsiders at my son’s public high school - an adaptation of the 1967 novel by S.E. Hinton. All I really knew was the famous “stay gold” line from the 1983 movie. But as I sat there in the audience among my neighbors, watching the complete story acted out in front of me by these teenagers, I slowly realized what "stay gold" meant: sharing the American Dream.We cannot merely attain the Dream. The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans. That act of sharing is the final realization of everything the dream stands for.Thanks to S.E. Hinton, I finally had a name for my essay, “Stay Gold, America.” I published it on January 7th, with a Pledge to Share the American Dream.In the first part of the Pledge, the short term, our family made eight 1 million dollar donations to the following nonprofit groups: Team Rubicon, Children’s Hunger Fund, PEN America, The Trevor Project, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, First Generation Investors, Global Refuge, and Planned Parenthood. Beyond that, we made many additional one million dollar donations to reinforce our technical infrastructure in America – Wikipedia, The Internet Archive, The Common Crawl Foundation, Let’s Encrypt, pioneering independent internet journalism, and several other crucial open source software infrastructure projects that power much of the world today.I encourage every American to contribute soon, however you can, to organizations you feel are effectively helping those most currently in need.But short term fixes are not enough.The Pledge To Share The American Dream requires a much more ambitious second act – deeper, long term changes that will take decades. Over the next five years, my family pledges half our remaining wealth to plant a seed toward foundational long term efforts ensuring that all Americans continue to have the same fair access to the American Dream.Let me tell you about my own path to the American Dream. It was rocky. My parents were born into deep poverty in Mercer County, West Virginia, and Beaufort County, North Carolina. Our family eventually clawed our way to the bottom of the middle class in Virginia. I won’t dwell on it, but every family has their own problems. We did not remain middle class for long. But through all this, my parents got the most important thing right: they loved me openly and unconditionally. That is everything. It’s the only reason I am standing here in front of you today.With my family’s support, I managed to achieve a solid public education in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and had the incredible privilege of an affordable state education at the University of Virginia. This is a college uniquely rooted in the beliefs of one of the most prominent Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson. He was a living paradox. A man of profound ideals and yet flawed – trapped in the values of his time and place. Still, he wrote “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” at the top of the Declaration of Independence. These words were, and still are, revolutionary. They define our fundamental shared American values, although we have not always lived up to them. The American Dream isn’t about us succeeding, alone, by ourselves, but about connecting with each other and succeeding together as Americans.I’ve been concerned about wealth concentration in America ever since I watched a 2012 video by politizane illustrating just how extreme wealth concentration already was. I had no idea how close we were to the American Gilded Age from the late 1800s. This period was given a name in the 1920s by historians referencing Mark Twain’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, A Tale of Today. During this time, labor strikes often turned violent, with the Homestead Strike of 1892 resulting in deadly confrontations between workers and Pinkerton guards hired by factory owners. Rapid industrialization created hazardous working conditions in factories, mines, and railroads, where thousands died due to insufficient safety regulations and employers who prioritized profit over worker welfare.In January 2025, while I was still writing “Stay Gold, America”, we entered the period of greatest wealth concentration in the entirety of American history. As of 2021, the top 1% of households controlled 32% of all wealth, while the bottom 50% only have 2.6%. It's difficult to find more recent data, but wealth concentration has only intensified in the last four years.We can no longer say “Gilded Age”.We must now say “The First Gilded Age”.Today, in our second Gilded Age, more and more people find their path to the American Dream blocked. When Americans face unaffordable education, lack of accessible healthcare, or lack affordable housing, they aren't just disadvantaged – they're trapped, often burdened by massive debt. They have no stable foundation to build their lives. They watch desperately, working as hard as they can, while life simply passes them by, without even the freedom to choose their own lives.They don't have time to build a career. They don't have time to learn, to improve. They don't get to start a business. They can’t choose where their kids will grow up, or whether to have children at all, because they can’t afford to. Here in the land of opportunity, the pursuit of happiness has become an endless task for too many. We are denying people any real chance of achieving the dream that we promised them – that we promised the entire world – when we founded this nation. It is such a profound betrayal of everything we ever dreamed about. Without a stable foundation to build a life on, our fellow Americans cannot even pursue the American Dream, much less achieve it.I ask you this: as an American, what is the purpose of a dream left unshared with so many for so long? What’s happening to our dream? Are we really willing to let go of our values so easily? We’re Americans. We fight for our values, the values embodied in our dream, the ones we founded this country on. Why aren’t we sharing the American Dream? Why aren’t we giving everyone a fair chance at Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness by providing them the fundamentals they need to get there?The Dream worked for me, decades ago, and I deeply believe that the American Dream can still work for everyone – if we ensure every American has the same fair chance we did. The American Dream was never about a few people being extraordinarily wealthy. It’s about everyone having an equal chance to succeed and pursue their dreams – their own happiness. It belongs to them. I think we owe them at least that. I think we owe ourselves at least that.What can we do about this? There are no easy answers. I can’t even pretend to have the answer, because there isn’t any one answer to give. Nothing worth doing is ever that simple. But I can tell you this: all the studies and all the data I’ve looked at have strongly pointed to one foundational thing we can do here in America over the next five years.Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, makes a powerful case for the idea that, with all this concentrated wealth, we can offer a Guaranteed Minimum Income in the poorest areas of this country – the areas of most need, where money goes the farthest – to unlock vast amounts of untapped American potential. This isn’t a new idea. We’ve been doing this a while now in different forms, but we never called it Guaranteed Minimum Income.In 1797, Thomas Paine proposed a retirement pension funded by estate taxes. It didn’t go anywhere, but it planted a seed. Much later we implemented the Social Security Act in 1935 . The economic chaos of the Great Depression coupled with the inability of private philanthropy to provide economic security inspired Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal government programs. The most popular and effective program to emerge from this era was Social Security, providing a guaranteed income for retirees. Before Social Security, half of seniors lived in poverty. Today only 10% of seniors live in poverty.In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King Jr made the moral case for a form of UBI, Universal Basic Income. King believed that economic insecurity was at the root of all inequality. He stated that a guaranteed income — direct cash disbursements — was the simplest and best way to fight poverty.In 1972, Congress established the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, providing direct cash assistance to low-income elderly, blind, and disabled individuals with little or no income. This cash can be used for food, housing, and medical expenses, the essentials for financial stability. As of January, 2025, over 7.3 million people receive SSI benefits.In 1975, Congress passed the Tax Reduction Act, establishing the Earned Income Tax Credit. This tax credit benefits working-class parents with children, encouraging work by increasing the income of low-income workers. In 2023, it lifted about 6.4 million people out of poverty, including 3.4 million children. According to the Census Bureau, it is the second most effective anti-poverty tool after Social Security.In 2019, directly inspired by King, mayor Michael Tubbs – at age 26, one of the youngest mayors in American history – launched the $3 million Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration. It provided 125 residents with $500 per month in unconditional cash payments for two years. The program found that recipients experienced improved financial stability, increased full-time employment, and enhanced well-being.Michael Tubbs, Former Mayor of Stockton, on Creating a California for AllIn my “Stay Gold, America” blog post, I referenced the Robert Frost "Stay Gold" poem and S.E. Hinton's famous famous novel The Outsiders, urging us to retain our youthful ideals as we grow older. Ideals embodied in the American Dream.Which brings us to another Robert Frost poem, the Road Not Taken. Our proposal to ensure access to the American Dream is to follow the path less travelled by: Guaranteed Minimum Income. GMI is a simpler, more practical, more scalable plan to directly address the root of economic insecurity with minimum bureaucracy.We are partnering with GiveDirectly, who oversaw the most GMI studies in the United States, and OpenResearch, who just completed the largest, most detailed GMI study ever conducted in this country in 2023. We are working together to launch a new Guaranteed Minimum Income initiative in rural American communities.Network effects within communities explain why equality of opportunity is so effective, and why a shared American Dream is the most powerful dream of all. The potential of the American Dream becomes vastly greater as more people have access to it, because they share it.They share it with their families, their friends, and their neighbors. The groundbreaking, massive 2023 OpenResearch UBI study data showed that when you give money to the poorest among us, they consistently go out of their way to share that money with others in desperate need.The power of opportunity is not in what it can do for one person, but how it connects and strengthens bonds between people. When you empower a couple, you allow them to build a family. When you empower families, you allow them to build a community. When you guarantee fundamentals, you're providing a foundation for those connections to grow and thrive. This is the incredible power and value of community. That is what we are investing in – each other.A system where there are no guarantees creates conflict. It creates inequality. A massive concentration of wealth in so few hands weakens connections between us and prevents new ones. America began as a place of connection. Millions of us came together to build this nation, not individually, but together. Equality is connection, and connection is more valuable than any product any company will ever sell you.Why focus on rural communities? There are consistently higher poverty rates in rural counties, with fewer job opportunities, lower wages, and worse access to healthcare and education. It’s not a new problem, either — places like Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and American Indian reservations have been stuck in poverty for decades, with some counties like Oglala Lakota, SD (55.8%) and McDowell, WV (37.6%) hitting extreme levels. Meanwhile, urban counties rarely see numbers that high. The data from the US Census and USDA Economic Research Service make it clear: if you’re poor in America, being rural makes it even harder to escape.Rural areas also offer smaller populations, which is helpful because we need to start small with lots of tightly controlled studies that we can carefully scale and improve on for larger areas. We hope to build a large body of scientific data showing that GMI really does improve the lives, and the communities, of our fellow Americans.The initial plan is to target a few counties that I have a personal connection to, and are still currently in poverty, decades later:My father was born in Mercer County, West Virginia, where the collapse of coal mining left good people struggling to survive. Their living and their way of life is now all but gone, and good jobs are hard to find.My mother’s birthplace, Beaufort County, North Carolina, has been hit just as hard, with farming and factory jobs disappearing and families left wondering what’s next.Our third county is yet to be decided, but will be a community also facing the same systemic, generational obstacles to economic stability and achieving the American Dream.We will work with existing local groups to coordinate GMI studies where community members choose to enroll. We will conduct outreach and and provide mentorship to these opt-in study participants. It will be teamwork between Americans.We hope Veterans will play a crucial role in our effort. We plan to work with local communities and veteran-serving organizations to engage veterans to support and execute our GMI programs – the same veterans who served our country with distinction, returning home with exceptional leadership skills and a deep commitment to their communities. Their involvement ensures these programs reflect core American values of self-reliance and community service to fellow Americans. We'll also partner with established community organizations — churches, civic groups, community colleges, local businesses. These partnerships help integrate our GMI studies with existing support systems, rather than creating new ones.GiveDirectly and OpenResearch will build on their existing body of work, gathering extensive data from these refined studies. We'll measure employment, entrepreneurship, education, health, and community engagement. We'll conduct regular interviews with participants to understand their experience. How is this working for you? How can we make it better? You tell us. How can we make it better together?Economic security isn't only about individual well-being – it's the bedrock of democracy. When people aren't constantly worried about feeding themselves, feeding their family, having decent healthcare, having a place to live… we have given them room to breathe. We have given them freedom. The freedom to raise their children, the freedom to start businesses, the freedom to choose where they work, the freedom to volunteer... the freedom to vote.This isn’t about ideology or government. It’s about us, as Americans, working together to invest in our future – possibly the greatest unlocking of human potential in our entire history. I do not say these things lightly. I’ve seen it work. I’ve looked at all the existing study data. A little bit of money is incredibly transformational for people in poverty – the people who need it the most – the people who cannot live up to their potential because they’re so busy simply trying to survive. Imagine what they could do if we gave them just a little breathing room.GMI is a long term investment in the future of what America should be, the way we wrote it down in the Declaration of Independence, perhaps incompletely – but our democracy was always meant to be malleable, to change, to adapt, and improve.I’d like to conclude by mentioning Aaron Swartz. He was a precocious teenage programmer much like myself. Aaron helped develop RSS web feeds, co-founded Reddit, and worked with Creative Commons to create flexible copyright licenses for the common good. He used technology to make information universally accessible to everyone.Aaron created a system to download public domain court documents from PACER, a government database that charged fees for accessing what he believed should be freely available public information. A few years later, while visiting MIT under their open campus policy and as a research fellow at Harvard, he used MIT's network to download millions of academic articles from JSTOR, another fee-charging online academic journal repository, intending to make this knowledge freely accessible. Since taxpayers had funded much of this research, why shouldn’t that knowledge be freely available to everyone?What Aaron saw as an act of academic freedom and information equality, authorities viewed as a crime—he was arrested in January 2011 and charged with multiple felonies for what many considered to be nothing more than accessing knowledge that should have been freely available to the public in the first place.Despite JSTOR declining to pursue charges and MIT eventually calling for leniency, federal prosecutors aggressively pursued felony charges against Aaron with up to 35 years in prison. Facing overwhelming legal pressure and the prospect of being labeled a felon, Aaron took his own life at 26. This sparked widespread criticism of prosecutorial overreach and prompted discussions about open access to information. Deservedly so. Eight days later, in this very hall, there was a standing room only memorial service praising Aaron for his commitment to the public good.Aaron pursued what was right for we, the people. He chose to build the public good despite knowing there would be risks. He chose to be an activist. I think we should all choose to be activists, to be brave, to stand up for our defining American principles. There are two things I ask of you today.Visit givedirectly.org/rural-us where we'll be documenting our journey and findings from the initial three GMI rural county studies. Let’s find out together how guaranteed minimum income can transform American lives.Talk about Guaranteed Minimum Income in your communities. Meet with your state and local officials. Share the existing study data. Share outcomes. Ask them about conducting GMI studies like ours in your area. We tell ourselves stories about why some people succeed and others don't. Challenge those stories. Economic security is not charity. It is an investment in vast untapped American potential in the poorest areas of this country.My family is committing 50 million dollars to this endeavor, but imagine if we had even more to share. Imagine how much more we could do, if we build this together, starting today. Decades from now, people will look back and wonder why it took us so long to share our dream of a better, richer, and fuller life with our fellow Americans.I hope you join us on this grand experiment to share our American Dream. I believe everyone deserves a fair chance at what was promised when we founded this nation: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of The American Dream. Related posts Stay Gold, America We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream. They Have To Be Monsters Since I started working on Discourse, I spend a lot of time thinking about how software can encourage and nudge people to be more empathetic online. 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