2022

The second act of Neeraj Arora, former WhatsApp CBO

In May, a post by Neeraj Arora went viral on Twitter. In that thread, he told how he was duped by Mark Zuckerberg in 2014, when the then Facebook bought WhatsApp for USD 22 billion. Neeraj was the chief business officer of the messaging startup and was directly involved in the sale to Facebook.

The unfolding of that story is known by now: Zuckerberg violated some of the commitments he made in 2014 to WhatsApp’s founders, such as not cross-referencing WhatsApp users’ data with that of other properties, and the founders eventually left the company while WhatsApp continued to grow into one of humanity’s leading communication engines.

Neeraj hasn’t given up on his dream of creating a better app, however. In that Twitter thread, he said that WhatsApp has become “a shadow of the product we poured our hearts into, and wanted to build for the world.” Today, he is focused on HalloApp, a sort of “second act” — this time, proofed against multibillion-dollar takeovers by companies of questionable reputation.

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WordPress’s uncertain future and the promise of ClassicPress

Almost a decade ago, I launched a tech blog in Brazil called Manual do Usuário (“User’s Guide” in Portuguese). Since its inception, it is published with WordPress, one of the oldest CMS — a content management system — and by far the most popular on the web today: it’s estimated that 40% of active websites use it nowadays. WordPress is open source, works well, there’s almost nothing to complain about.

In December 2018, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, released version 5.0 with big fanfare and a radical change: Gutenberg, a new, very visual post editor based on content blocks instead of text.

Gutenberg changes the writing process a lot. If before I was presented with a text area with some formatting buttons at the top when writing some post — a kind of simplified Word —, now it was possible to manipulate the whole appearance of the content using these blocks.

This was not a very well received change. To this day, the Classic Editor plugin, which restores the Word-style editor used until WordPress 4.9, is one of the most popular on the platform, with +5 million active installations and a five-star (top) rating.

Automattic doubled down on Gutenberg in early 2022 by bringing to WordPress 6.0 a thing called Full Site Editor: now, in addition to posts, someone could design the entire site with blocks/Gutenberg. WordPress moved even further away from being a mere blog or text-based publishing tool to become… I don’t know, anything other than that.

With Gutenberg, Automattic — which, it should be mentioned, runs a commercial operation based on WordPress, WordPress.com — decided to pick a fight with DIY and more modern rivals, notably Squarespace and Wix. Not by chance: these have achieved great recognition and a lot of users (and money) in recent years, because they are easier to handle for non-programmers.

And it is indeed easier to make a custom site with Gutenberg, but at what cost? For me (a person who can’t code, but can deal with simple HTML and CSS, by the way), the biggest hurdles are the added complexity when writing anything with blocks and the “dirty” code Gutenberg generates when displaying the site to visitors. (I care a lot about this “invisible” part of the site. I’m not the only one).

WordPress’ new direction alienates a significant portion of its user base. At the very least, those 5 million who use Classic Editor by this day. Maybe we aren’t the most profitable users, but we’re a crowd that, in many cases, has relied on this tool for a very long time to earn our living or just to maintain sites that are doing just fine without Gutenberg, thank you. This is my case: Manual do Usuário has been around for almost a decade.

At the moment, WordPress meets the needs of a site like mine because it is still possible to neutralize much of the excesses that Gutenberg brings to the system using a lot of workarounds in functions.php. Until when? I don’t know.

All WordPress development is dictated by Gutenberg, both within Automattic and in the ecosystem, by third-party developers of plugins, themes, and solutions. This creates apprehension in those who don’t get along with the blocks and would rather do without them. WordPress community support has always been stellar, but it started to fade into something sparse for those out of the blocks train.

The Classic Editor, for example, was supposed to be discontinued at the end of 2021. It got an extra year of support due to its popularity. At the end of 2022, will it be abandoned? I don’t know.

Even a simple site like Manual do Usuário has several dependencies with the chosen CMS. After all, it’s a huge archive that was published on the features, limitations and possibilities of WordPress. Migrating to another tool is always an option, not infrequently a traumatic one that leaves after-effects.

That’s why I’ve been looking fondly at ClassicPress. In 2019, shortly after WordPress 5.0 was released, a group of developers decided to stay in version 4.9, forking the main WordPress into something new. ClassicPress was born.

In three years, however, progress has been slow. Making matters worse, the bureaucratic part and the internal dramas of ClassicPress’ project continue to distract everyone from what matters, from writing code.

At the end of June, the two developers leading the ClassicPress Initiative, the non-profit company responsible for the project, left under heavy criticism. A new group took over with the mission to regain enthusiasm and move the project forward.

It’s not an easy job. Automattic’s structure (and money) are on another scale of magnitude. ClassicPress Initiative is still counting the pennies to pay operating expenses. On exit, the former directors said there was USD 352 left in the company’s bank account.

Even in this not-so-promising scenario, it would be great if ClassicPress thrived. The new management has opened a crowdfunding initiative to cover expenses. Manual do Usuário, in my capacity, has become an early supporter.

It is not yet time to migrate my site to ClassicPress, however. The project is too raw for my needs and current dependencies, and ClassicPress new board still has to figure out fundamental issues, such as deciding to maintain compatibility with WordPress plugins or going for a complete break.

One day, if things go well, I’ll migrate. My fear, however, is that that day will come before rough edges are polished, when WordPress becomes something incompatible with Manual do Usuário, with what it was at the beginning until the fateful version 5.0 at the end of 2018.

I went all in spreadsheets for personal finance

The obscure, weird app that I had been using for five years to record my financial transactions failed to import data from the old phone to the new one. I took this as sign: it was time to move onto a better solution.

Personal finance doesn’t need to be complex, yet it’s only useful with a pinch of automated calculations, consolidations, and charts. I started researching for a new app with low requirements: something simple, that allowed me to enter my transactions (expenses and income) and review them at the end of each month or specific period.

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Apple’s Marxist TV Show

Apple TV+’s Severance is that kind of entertainment full of references to thoughtful, deep themes distilled into obviousness. No wonder (and, of course, not only because of this) it’s been so successful.

Even someone as ignorant as I am in Marxist theory can pick up on such influence in the show. Not so much on the viewer’s merit, though. It is that Severance kind of rubs this in our faces: the work is repetitive, mysterious, nobody there can see its result or even know what it is for, and employees give up their autonomy in a way that the owners of capital can only dream of today. It’s pretty much Karl Marx’s theory of alienation 101.

To those unaware, in Severance (the TV show) a mega-corporation, Lumon Industries, developed a brain implant capable of splitting someone’s consciousness into two: one exclusively dedicated to work, and one for everything else. Whoever goes through the severance procedure kind of becomes two people, whom everyone refers to as “inners” (workers) and “outies” (free, non-worker one).

The novelty is sold as the future of work, an easy and convenient solution to enable the utopian split between “real life” and “work life,” taken to an extreme there: when going down Lumon’s underground elevator, employees simply switch personalities and forget any memories from outside the company building, and vice versa.

Mark S., the protagonist played by Adam Scott, volunteered for the severance procedure after losing his wife in a car accident and burned-out at his job as a professor. It was the escape he found to mitigate the pain (at least from 9 to 5) and get back on the market.

Obviously, this arrangement doesn’t work for long. Two interconnected events trigger the suspicions and move the story forward: the arrival of Helly R. (Britt Lower), who from the first minute hates the “inner” life she sees herself stuck on and does her best to escape Lumon after Petey (Yul Vazquez), Mark’s former boss and friend, fired and “reintegrated” — i.e. reversed the severance procedure —, goes after the “outie“ Mark, to whom Petey is a complete stranger.

Along the way, Mark and his colleagues begin to discover the inhumane system they have subjected themselves to, the widespread corruption from their superiores at Lumon, and that the sky is blue. (It could just be a silly joke, this last discovery, but considering that the “inners” never go outdoors… maybe not?)

The macrodata refinement division’s office, where the four main characters work, resembles a typical 1980s American office — right down to the computers, with their monochrome CRT screens with keyboard and trackball attached.

Four people (three men and one woman), in formal/office clothes, sitting or leaning on office tables separated by green partitions, in an old-fashioned office environment, green carpet and artificial lights on the ceiling. On the left, standing, a black man, also with formal clothes, supervises the group.
Photo: Apple.

The aesthetics of this environment is a marvel in itself. And despite the visual strangeness and the anachronism — revealed in external scenes, outside the weird office and Lumon’s labyrinthine corridors, where tech and other things are contemporary —, the treatment of the employees is recognizable to anyone who has ever worked in an office, perhaps just a little more exaggerated. From the pathetic “perks” (although the “defiant jazz” scene is quite amusing) to the dumb bureaucracy, not to mention the micromanaging of the employees, it’s all there.

In that sense, Severance is perhaps the best joke that comedian, director and executive producer Ben Stiller has ever told: the show works perfectly as a self-parody of Apple, which publishes it on its streaming service. Apple, let’s remember, a company that built a USD 5 billion headquarters where employees bump into unsigned glass walls because ~aesthetics and creates barriers for WFH despite the increase in productivity and quality of life of employees, both of which was proved true during the pandemic.

That Severance is available only on Apple’s streaming service is both a fine irony and a declaration of the overwhelming victory of capitalist logic over other ways of thinking, a logic capable of swallowing everything, even the sharpest criticism, and regurgitating a sleek product with a price tag attached.

In the universe of Severance, the Severance show could just as well be released on a Lumon streaming service. Even a Steve Jobs-like leader they have: the spirit of Kier Eagan, the beloved founder, is present all the time as a guide and an inspiration to the obedient employees of the company.

The first season ends at the climax, but with a cheap and lazy cliffhanger, another symptom of the system in which the show exists — after all, you gotta keep those Apple TV+ subscriptions. And here we go, waiting a whole year to find out what happens in the already confirmed second season.

Unfortunately, all this transforming potential ends up being wasted by many people, judging by the comments on social media and reviews from the press, for whom apparently Severance is just a stylish, well paced science fiction set in a strange office. C’mon, even Apple itself, which vetoes sex, violence, and politics from a number of Apple TV+ shows, seems to ignore the extremely subversive appeal and political nature of Severance.

In the end, it’s like those people who complain that Rage Against the Machine’s music would be better if they left “political bs” out of it. Ignorance is bliss.

The iPhone with a button joke

In my iPhone SE (2022) review, I wrote that the “iPhone with a button” (Touch ID) became a recurring joke in Brazil. Explaining the joke is rarely a fun proposition, but hold on for a second; that’s interesting, I promise you.

A few months ago, random people started making jokes on Twitter associating Touch ID iPhones with poverty.

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The best iPhone

The iPhone SE is the most boring phone that ever existed. Almost nobody notices you have a new phone; when someone does, the conversation ends quickly and invariably in a sentence like “it’s just like the old one, only faster”.

I love this.

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