ethics

WP Engine’s Three Problems

Duration 11:08

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If you’re active in the WordPress space you’re probably aware that there’s a lot of drama going on right now between (a) WordPress hosting company WP Engine, (b) WordPress hosting company (among quite a few other things) Automattic¹, and (c) the WordPress Foundation.

If you’re not aware then, well: do a search across the tech news media to see the latest: any summary I could give you would be out-of-date by the time you read it anyway!

A declaration of war?

Like others, I’m not sure that the way Matt publicly called-out WP Engine at WCUS was the most-productive way to progress a discussion².

In particular, I think a lot of the conversation that he kicked off conflates three different aspects of WP Engine’s misbehaviour. That muddies the waters when it comes to having a reasoned conversation about the issue³.

Matt Mullwenweg on stage at WordCamp US 2024, stating how he feels that WP Engine exploits WordPress (to great profit) without contributing back. — I’ve heard Matt speak a number of times, including in person… and I think he did a pretty bad job of expressing the problems with WP Engine during his Q&A at WCUS. In his defence, it sounds like he may have been still trying to negotiate a better way forward until the very second he walked on stage that day.

I don’t think WP Engine is a particularly good company, and I personally wouldn’t use them for WordPress hosting. That’s not a new opinion for me: I wouldn’t have used them last year or the year before, or the year before that either. And I broadly agree with what I think Matt tried to say, although not necessarily with the way he said it or the platform he chose to say it upon.

Misdeeds

As I see it, WP Engine’s potential misdeeds fall into three distinct categories: moral, ethical⁴, and legal.

Morally: don’t take without giving back

Matt observes that since WP Engine’s acquisition by huge tech-company-investor Silver Lake, WP Engine have made enormous profits from selling WordPress hosting as a service (and nothing else) while making minimal to no contributions back to the open source platform that they depend upon.

If true, and it appears to be, this would violate the principle of reciprocity. If you benefit from somebody else’s effort (and you’re able to) you’re morally-obliged to at least offer to give back in a manner commensurate to your relative level of resources.

Two children sit on a bed: one hands a toy dinosaur to the other. — The principle of reciprocity is a moral staple. This is evidenced by the fact that *children* (and some nonhuman animals) *seem to be able to work it out for themselves* from first principles using nothing more than empathy. Companies, however aren’t usually so-capable. Photo courtesy Cotton.

Abuse of this principle is… sadly not-uncommon in business. Or in tech. Or in the world in general. A lightweight example might be the many millions of profitable companies that host atop the Apache HTTP Server without donating a penny to the Apache Foundation. A heavier (and legally-backed) example might be Trump Social’s implementation being based on a modified version of Mastodon’s code: Mastodon’s license requires that their changes are shared publicly… but they don’t do until they’re sent threatening letters reminding them of their obligations.

I feel like it’s fair game to call out companies that act amorally, and encourage people to boycott them, so long as you do so without “punching down”.

Ethically: don’t exploit open source’s liberties as weaknesses

WP Engine also stand accused of altering the open source code that they host in ways that maximise their profit, to the detriment of both their customers and the original authors of that code⁵.

It’s well established, for example, that WP Engine disable the “revisions” feature of WordPress⁶. Personally, I don’t feel like this is as big a deal as Matt makes out that it is (I certainly wouldn’t go as far as saying “WP Engine is not WordPress”): it’s pretty commonplace for large hosting companies to tweak the open source software that they host to better fit their architecture and business model.

But I agree that it does make WordPress as-provided by WP Engine significantly less good than would be expected from virtually any other host (most of which, by the way, provide much better value-for-money at any price point).

It also looks like WP Engine may have made more-nefarious changes, e.g. modifying the referral links in open source code (the thing that earns money for the original authors of that code) so that WP Engine can collect the revenue themselves when they deploy that code to their customers’ sites. That to me feels like it’s clearly into the zone ethical bad practice. Within the open source community, it’s not okay to take somebody’s code, which they were kind enough to release under a liberal license, strip out the bits that provide their income, and redistribute it, even just as a network service⁸.

Again, I think this is fair game to call out, even if it’s not something that anybody has a right to enforce legally. On which note…

Legally: trademarks have value, don’t steal them

Automattic Inc. has a recognised trademark on WooCommerce, and is the custodian of the WordPress Foundation’s trademark on WordPress. WP Engine are accused of unauthorised use of these trademarks.

Obviously, this is the part of the story you’re going to see the most news media about, because there’s reasonable odds it’ll end up in front of a judge at some point. There’s a good chance that such a case might revolve around WP Engine’s willingness (and encouragement?) to allow their business to be called “WordPress Engine” and to capitalise on any confusion that causes.

I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of the legal case: I Am Not A Lawyer and all that. Naturally I agree with the underlying principle that one should not be allowed to profit off another’s intellectual property, but I’ll leave discussion on whether or not that’s what WP Engine are doing as a conversation for folks with more legal-smarts than I. I’ve certainly known people be confused by WP Engine’s name and branding, though, and think that they must be some kind of “officially-licensed” WordPress host: it happens.

If you’re following all of this drama as it unfolds… just remember to check your sources. There’s a lot of FUD floating around on the Internet right now⁹.

In summary…

With a reminder that I’m sharing my own opinion here and not that of my employer, here’s my thoughts on the recent WP Engine drama:

WP Engine certainly act in ways that are unethical and immoral and antithetical to the spirit of open source, and those are just a subset of the reasons that I wouldn’t use them as a WordPress host.
Matt Mullenweg calling them out at WordCamp US doesn’t get his point across as well as I think he hoped it might, and probably won’t win him any popularity contests.
I’m not qualified to weigh in on whether or not WP Engine have violated the WordPress Foundation’s trademarks, but I suspect that they’ve benefitted from widespread confusion about their status.

Footnotes

¹ I suppose I ought to point out that Automattic is my employer, in case you didn’t know, and point out that my opinions don’t necessarily represent theirs, etc. I’ve been involved with WordPress as an open source project for about four times as long as I’ve had any connection to Automattic, though, and don’t always agree with them, so I’d hope that it’s a given that I’m speaking my own mind!

² Though like Manu, I don’t think that means that Matt should take the corresponding blog post down: I’m a digital preservationist, as might be evidenced by the unrepresentative-of-me and frankly embarrassing things in the 25-year archives of this blog!

³ Fortunately the documents that the lawyers for both sides have been writing are much clearer and more-specific, but that’s what you pay lawyers for, right?

⁴ There’s a huge amount of debate about the difference between morality and ethics, but I’m using the definition that means that morality is based on what a social animal might be expected to decide for themselves is right, think e.g. the Golden Rule etc., whereas ethics is the code of conduct expected within a particular community. Take stealing, for example, which covers the spectrum: that you shouldn’t deprive somebody else of something they need, is a moral issue; that we as a society deem such behaviour worthy of exclusion is an ethical one; meanwhile the action of incarcerating burglars is part of our legal framework.

⁵ Not that nobody’s immune to making ethical mistakes. Not me, not you, not anybody else. I remember when, back in 2005, Matt fucked up by injecting ads into WordPress (which at that point didn’t have a reliable source of funding). But he did the right thing by backpedalling, undoing the harm, and apologising publicly and profusely.

⁶ WP Engine claim that they disable revisions for performance reasons, but that’s clearly bullshit: it’s pretty obvious to me that this is about making hosting cheaper. Enabling revisions doesn’t have a performance impact on a properly-configured multisite hosting system, and I know this from personal experience of running such things. But it does have a significant impact on how much space you need to allocate to your users, which has cost implications at scale.

⁷ As an aside: if a court does rule that WP Engine is infringing upon WordPress trademarks and they want a new company name to give their service a fresh start, they’re welcome to TurdPress.

⁸ I’d argue that it is okay to do so for personal-use though: the difference for me comes when you’re making a profit off of it. It’s interesting to find these edge-cases in my own thinking!

⁹ A typical Reddit thread is about 25% lies-and-bullshit; but you can double that for a typical thread talking about this topic!

Idea: Meeting Spoofer

Focus time is great

I’m a big fan of blocking out uninterrupted time on your work calendar for focus activities, even if you don’t have a specific focus task to fill them with.

It can be enough to simple know that, for example, you’ve got a 2-hour slot every Friday morning that you can dedicate to whatever focus-demanding task you’ve got that week, whether it’s a deep debugging session, self-guided training and development activities, or finally finishing that paper that’s just slightly lower priority than everything else on your plate.

I appreciate that my colleagues respect that blocked period: I almost never receive meeting requests in that time. That’s probably because most people, particularly because we’re in such a multi-timezone company, use their calendar’s “find a suitable time for everybody” tool to find the best time for everyone and it sees that I’m “busy” and doesn’t suggest it.

If somebody does schedule a meeting that clashes with that block then, well, it’s probably pretty urgent!

But it turns out this strategy doesn’t work for everybody:

My partner recently showed me a portion of her calendar, observing that her scheduled focus time had been overshadowed by four subsequently-created meetings that clashed with it. Four!

Maybe that’s an exception and this particular occasion really did call for a stack of back-to-back urgent meetings. Maybe everything was on fire. But whether or not this particular occasion is representative for my partner, I’ve spoken to other friends who express the same experience: if they block out explicit non-meeting time on their calendar, they get meeting requests for that time anyway. At many employers, “focus time” activities don’t seem to be widely-respected.

Maybe your workplace is the same. The correct solution probably involves a cultural shift: a company-wide declaration in favour of focus time as a valuable productivity tool (which it is), possibly coupled with recommendations about how to schedule them sensitively, e.g. perhaps recommending a couple of periods in which they ought to be scheduled.

But for a moment, let’s consider a different option:

A silly solution?

Does your work culture doesn’t respect scheduled focus time but does respect scheduled meetings? This might seem to be the case in the picture above: note that the meetings that clash with the focus time don’t clash with one another but tessellate nicely. Perhaps you need… fake meetings.

Calendar showing (fake) meetings titled "SN / AFU Project Update", "Team ID107 training session", "Biological Interface Error Scheduling Meeting", and "(Rescheduled) ADIH Planning". — “Wow, what a busy afternoon Dan’s got. I’d better leave him be.”

Of course, creating fake meetings just so you can get some work done is actually creating more work. Wouldn’t it be better if there were some kind of service that could do it for you?

Here’s the idea: a web service that exposes an API endpoint. You start by specifying a few things about the calendar you’d like to fill, for example:

What days/times you’d like to fill with “focus time”?
What industry you work in, to help making convincing (but generic) event names?
Whether you’d like the entire block consistently filled, or occasional small-but-useless gaps of up to 15 minutes inserted between them?

This results in a URL containing those parameters. Accessing that URL yields an iCalendar feed containing those meetings. All you need to do is get your calendar software to subscribe to those events and they’ll appear in your calendar, “filling” your time.

So long as your iCalendar feed subscription refreshes often enough, you could even have an option to enable the events to self-delete e.g. 15 minutes before their start time, so that you don’t panic when your meeting notification pops up right before they “start”!

This is the bit where you’re expecting me to tell you I made a thing

Normally, you’d expect me to pull the covers off some hilarious domain name I’ve chosen and reveal exactly the service I describe, but I’m not doing that today. There’s a few reasons for that:

Firstly, I’ve got ~~enough~~ too many pointless personal/side projects on the go already¹. I don’t need another distraction.
Secondly, it turns out others have already done 90% of the work. This open-source project runs locally and fills calendars with (unnamed, private) blocks of varying lengths. This iOS app does almost exactly what I described, albeit in an ad-hoc rather than fully-automated way. There’s no point me just doing the last 10% just to make a joke work.
And thirdly: while I searched for existing tools I discovered a significant number of people who confess online to creating fake meetings in their calendars! While some of these do so for reasons like those I describe – i.e. to block out time and get more work done in an environment that doesn’t respect them simply blocking-out time – a lot of folks admit to doing it just to “look busy”. That could be either the employee slacking off, or perhaps having to work around a manager with a presenteeism/input-measurement based outlook (which is a terrible way to manage people). But either way: it’s a depressing reason to write software.

Nope

So yeah: I’m not going down that avenue.

But maybe if you’re in a field where you’d benefit from it, try blocking out some focus time in your calendar. I think it’s a fantastic idea, and I love that I’m employed somewhere that I can do so and it works out.

Or if you’ve tried that and discovered that your workplace culture doesn’t respect it – if colleagues routinely book meetings into reserved spaces – maybe you should try fake meetings and see if they’re any better-respected. But I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.

Footnotes

¹ Consider, for example, how I’m trying to take a photo of my dog, with her tongue stuck out, every day of this month.

Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

I don’t care whether anything materially bad will or won’t happen as a consequence of Wacom taking this data from me. I simply resent the fact that they’re doing it.

The second is that we can also come up with scenarios that involve real harms. Maybe the very existence of a program is secret or sensitive information. What if a Wacom employee suddenly starts seeing entries spring up for “Half Life 3 Test Build”? Obviously I don’t care about the secrecy of Valve’s new games, but I assume that Valve does.

We can get more subtle. I personally use Google Analytics to track visitors to my website. I do feel bad about this, but I’ve got to get my self-esteem from somewhere. Google Analytics has a “User Explorer” tool, in which you can zoom in on the activity of a specific user. Suppose that someone at Wacom “fingerprints” a target person that they knew in real life by seeing that this person uses a very particular combination of applications. The Wacom employee then uses this fingerprint to find the person in the “User Explorer” tool. Finally the Wacom employee sees that their target also uses “LivingWith: Cancer Support”.

Remember, this information is coming from a device that is essentially a mouse.

…

Robert Heaton

Interesting deep-dive investigation into the (immoral, grey-area illegal) data mining being done by Wacom when you install the drivers for their tablets. Horrifying, but you’ve got to remember that Wacom are unlikely to be a unique case. I had a falling out with Razer the other year when they started bundling spyware into the drivers for their keyboards and locking-out existing and new customers from advanced features unless they consented to data harvesting.

I’m becoming increasingly concerned by the normalisation of surveillance capitalism: between modern peripherals and the Internet of Things, we’re “willingly” surrendering more of our personal lives than ever before. If you haven’t seen it, I’d also thoroughly recommend Data, the latest video from Philosophy Tube (of which I’ve sung the praises before).

10 Insane Trolley Problems

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VanDeGraph2

Would You Edit Your Child’s Genome?

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Idea Channel

How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Don’t Eat Your Meat?

To those of you that don’t know already, I have a confession to make. After years of picking holes in and finding flaws in their various ethical or other arguments and of mocking their dietary choices, I’ve become… a vegetarian.

This cow, which was not harmed in the making of this blog post, was just as shocked as you are by the news of my vegetarianism.

Okay, this probably wasn’t actually a shock to anybody. Between the observations of the barbeque food I’ve been enjoying recently and the fact that I willingly chose falafel over hog roast a month or so ago, it’s quite possible that you’re saying “well, duh” at this so-called revelation. That’s why I thought it’d be far more-interesting for me to talk about the principal reason for this change.

You don’t eat what, now?

For some, however, this change has been a gradual one, beginning with dropping beef from my diet in January, and other red meats in March (making me, technically-speaking, a lacto–ovo–melo–pollo–pescetarian, which is quite a mouthful). Poultry and fish disappeared from my diet in April and May.

For a brief stint, I tried to remove milk, too, aiming for ovo-vegetarianism, but it turns out that – while oatmilk is a perfectly reasonable alternative to the white stuff, and there are some great soya-based dairy-free deserts – there really are no adequate vegan substitutes for cheese… and I’m just not quite capable of coping without it.

Why, Dan? WHY?

My decision to adopt a vegetarian diet is based on a few different influences, but the principal one amongst these is one of environmentalism and sustainability. Over the last few years it’s become increasingly apparent to me that the Western Pattern Diet has a hugely damaging effect in the following areas:

Water usage sustainability – studies consistently show[1][2] that it takes an order of magnitude more water to produce beef than wheat, rice, or maize, by weight of food produced. Other meats fare somewhat better, being only three or four times less water-efficient per unit of weight of food, but are still unacceptably water-expensive, to me. Milk and eggs are really quite water-efficient, being (respectively) about as efficient as soybeans/rice (depending on the region they’re grown in) and maize (note, of course, that beef and dairy cattle are almost always separate breeds[3], so the counter-argument that beef is a by-product of milk production or vice-versa is not valid).
Climatic impact – intensive modern livestock farming has an appreciable negative impact on global climate, contributing over a third of the world’s methane[4], probably the most-significant of the greenhouse gases[5].
Food scarcity – despite worldwide crop yields increasing faster than population growth[6], year on year, food security is becoming a growing issue owing to desertification of equatorial regions, increased uptake of the wasteful Western Pattern Diet, and an increase in the production of biofuels. A still-growing population, the depletion of fish stocks, and a rapid increase by developed nations in biofuel demands as oil supplies dwindle will only aggravate these issues. While a widely-adopted vegetarian/vegan diet would not in itself alleviate these problems (many of which are caused by political and economic constraints), it would help to ensure that it is possible to feed our booming population in the decades to come.
Overfishing – most of those reasons, of course, are only applicable to the farming of mammals and birds, but it’s hard to deny that there are huge problems with our consumption of fish, too[7]. We’re already reaching the point where the consumption of many species of fish is ethically very dubious, and an increasing number of species are threatened with extinction. To ensure that fish stocks remain available for future generations, we need either extremely restrictive multinational agreements on fishing quotas (unlikely), or dramatic reductions in the demand for fish.

In short, I could probably best be described as an economic environmentalist vegetarian: I’m concerned primarily with making sure that our agricultural practices are sustainable for the benefit of humans, whether currently existing or future. More on that, little doubt, in the Frequently Anticipated Questions, below.

So… how’re you finding it?

Man, I miss bacon.

A BLT; one of many culinary delights that I'm now denied. /sob/ — A BLT; one of many culinary delights that I’m now denied. /sob/

Giving up beef, it turned out, was reasonably easy. Ditto lamb. But bacon: that’s something I miss. When my co-worker Liz had a bacon, mushroom and cheese jacket potato at an office lunch the other week, I could have almost drowned in my own drool. I find myself envying those vegetarians I know who don’t eat meat because they don’t like it: those guys have it so easy…

Chicken’s been challenging, too, because it’s always been a go-to base ingredient for me, and I’ve had to learn to substitute other sources of protein into my diet. Thankfully, I’ve been in a strong position: many years of cooking for vegetarians, at one point or another, has given me a pretty good understanding of what’s good for what and a decent repertoire of already-vegetarian dishes.

I tried to give up milk and milk products after realising that the ecological impact of milk production – while significantly less than beef, for a variety reasons – is still higher than I’d like. Sadly, it turns out that milk turns up in just about everything, and cheese and cream are remarkably hard to do without. Maybe some day I’ll give that another go.

On the up-side, though, I’ve discovered a reasonable number of things that I didn’t think I liked, that actually I do… or at least, that are perfectly adequate substitutes for meat products.

But man, I miss bacon. Pigs may be clever, but they’re not smart enough to not be delicious.

I also routinely slip up on the likes of isinglass (used in the production of many of my favourite beers), and gelatine (which appears in a surprising number of things), and I try not to kick up a fuss where food is being prepared for several people, of which I’m only one, in a non-compatible way. For example, I tolerate the addition of Worcester sauce (containing anchovies) as an ingredient where a meal is being prepared for several people – it’d be incredibly inconvenient to require a separation of the food at this point during cooking, and I’m happy to compromise a little where the chef’s convenience collides with my ethics.

Frequently Anticipated Questions

In order that I jump the gun and answer you before you ask:

You consume products made using isinglass, gelatine, and occasional small quantities of fish sauce… you’re not a vegetarian at all!

I guess not. But the label’s for my convenience, not yours. I use the word vegetarian because it’s the simplest-common-denominator. If I ask in a restaurant “what have you got that’s vegetarian, or would be but that it contains trace amounts of isinglass, is made using gelatine, has Worcester sauce in, etc.” I’d never get my meal. Plus, the staff would be confused. To take a mathematical model: the set of things that better-vegetarians-than-I eat is completely contained within the set of things that I eat, and the two are very nearly the same, so to call myself a vegetarian is closer to a convenient rounding error than a lie.

Also; that wasn’t a question.

Do you expect to make a significant difference?

No. But, like many moral decisions, this isn’t about making a significant difference but about doing the right thing.

If there’s a riot in your town and an out-of-control crowd begins damaging and looting the shops in the high street, you might be tempted to go out and steal a nice laptop or television yourself, too. Regardless of whether or not you do so, you won’t make a significant difference – Currys will be just as empty in the morning whether you partake of a little ransacking or not. But that doesn’t change the fact that it would be wrong of you to rob them.

On the other hand, over the course of the rest of my life I’m liable, under ideal circumstances, to make a miniscule but measurable net decrease in the demand for meat products, which might, under ideal circumstances, have an impact on meat production, thereby coming some way to achieving my ideals. Moreover, I’d like to think that my dietary choices go some way to making those dietary choices more palatable (hah!) for others, which may influence others to reduce their meat consumption too.

If the aim is to reduce meat consumption, why not simply eat less meat?

Because I can’t trust everybody else to play along.

My gut feeling is that this would work (although I haven’t read any research to either confirm or deny that suspicion): that if we all just cut down our meat consumption so that we were eating meat only once every few weeks, that we’d have a huge impact on sustainability for the future. But I can’t make everybody do this. The best I can do is to do so myself.

However, if I go just a little bit further and stop eating meat altogether, then I also help to “make up” for other people’s meat-heavy diets.

For every animal you don’t eat, I’m going to eat two!

Well, I hope you enjoy it, because you’ll probably not live too long after consuming all the saturated fats of all of the animals I don’t eat.

In any case: I’m not responsible for how you choose to live your life, even if you are threatening to push Comic Book Guy off a railway overpass.

You mentioned that the economic/ecological reasons were the principal cause for your vegetarianism. Are there other reasons, too, like the health and longevity benefits or the cost saving?

Yes. But they’re not the principal reasons.

Incidentally, removing meat from my diet made it far easier for me to lose the second of my three 10kg weight loss goals (as part of my ongoing effort to get down from 110kg to 80kg; I’m currently at about 89kg), because it’s far easier to avoid fats when you’re already avoiding meat.

How does JTA feel, being the only non-vegetarian in the house?

He’s not… so much. These days, Ruth eats a reasonable amount of a select few different varieties of meat, and Paul… well, I’m not sure I can keep up with our favourite pepperoni-eating vegetarian, but I think that right now he’s abstaining from meat entirely, but I’m not sure.

I have a hypothesis that perhaps the world can only tolerate a certain number of vegetarians at once, so as I became one, Ruth had to stop.

What about sustainably-farmed fish/synthetic meat/a survival situation/some other hypothetical situation?

I’m pragmatic, first and foremost, so if somebody wants to demonstrate that a particular farmed fish is environmentally sound, to my satisfaction, then great: it’s back on the menu! I’m not going out of my way to look for any, though, because I was never a big seafood fan to begin with! It’s not a high priority for me to make my life more complicated by coming up with some kind of complex list of what’s okay and what’s not, when the simple rule “no meat” seems to be perfectly workable.

Survival situation: sure, I’d chow down on whatever was available to stay alive. I’m not stupid!

And synthetic meat? If it was economically-sound, environmentally-friendly, safe, and tasty… sounds like a win to me. Fetch me a plate!

Isn’t this quite a turnaround for somebody who was once quoted on the BBC as describing vegetarianism as an “eating disorder”?

Yes, I suppose it is. I’ve always prided myself, though, on what I call “correctness over consistency”: that is, I’d like to think that I’m able to do the right thing, even where it means contradicting my previous attitudes or behaviour. I believe that we’d all do a lot better if people were less attached than they are, on average, to appearing consistent, especially when they’re faced with new information. There’s no shame in saying “I was wrong then,” so long as you can show that you’re learning.

But yes, I’ve been quite mean to many vegetarians for many years, as if I needed reminding. And so yes, this really is quite a turnaround. And I’m proud to be capable of that.

References

[1] [PDF] Virtual water flows between nations in relation to trade in livestock and livestock products, A.K. Chapagain and A.Y. Hoekstra, 2003
[2] [PDF] Virtual Water in Food Production and Global Trade Review of Methodological Issues and Preliminary Results, Daniel Zimmer and Daniel Renault, 2003
[3] [PDF] The Changing Landscape of U.S. Milk Production, Don P. Blayney, 2002
[4] Livestock’s Long Shadow; environmental issues and options, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 2006
[5] Methane’s Impacts on Climate Change May Be Twice Previous Estimates, Krishna Ramanujan (NASA), 2005
[6] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2006
[7] [PDF] Hundred-year decline of North Atlantic predatory fishes, Villy Christensen et al., 2003

Googling For Suicide In The UK

I sent a letter to Google, today. Click to see it in large-o-vision.

I my letter, I suggest that the search giant should add a feature to their UK search, as they already have to their USA search, that would provide the details of an appropriate emotional support helpline service to people searching for suicide-related topics (such as “how to commit suicide”, etc.). This would provide minimal disruption to users merely interested in the topic, but could potentially provide a critical lifeline to somebody in dire need.

Just thought I’d share that with you.

Update: Google have now made the change I suggested! Read more about it here.

Insanity Clause

This was one of my most-popular articles in 2009. If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy:

The Ten Weirdest Sex Toys I’ve ever seen (2009)!
A dirty-looking calendar I found at work (2011).
My beliefs about why it’s wrong to lie to children about Santa (2009), complete with pictures of naughty elves.
An argument I had (2011) with the Office of National Statistics about nonmonogamy and the census.
Open Source Shaving (2009).

I believe that it is ethically wrong to lie to children about the existence of Santa Claus. And, as it’s a topical time of year – and because I know that this view brings me into conflict with the views of many others (I’ve certainly had more than a couple of arguments about this before) – I thought that I’d explain my thinking.

"I'm not real, but don't tell anyone!" — "I'm not real... but don't tell anyone!"

Bias of background

I probably ought to come clean, first, about my own background. There’s a certain bias that people can have towards their own upbringing: the implicit assumption that the way one was brought up is somehow the best or the most-correct way. I’d like to think that I’m speaking from a position of rationality as well as morality, but I can’t deny that my judgment may be clouded by my own childhood.

I never believed that Santa was real, and was never encouraged to. My family played out a whole variety of modern, secular Christmas traditions, such as leaving out a mince pie for Santa, hanging stockings, and decorating a tree. But these were always understood to be what they actually were. There was never an illusion that the mince pie wasn’t being eaten by my dad just minutes after he’d checked that I’d finally managed to curb my excitement get to sleep (even without a belief in the patently mythological, Christmas can still be an exciting time for a child).

What’s the harm?

When I was growing up, I came into contact with many children for whom the Father Christmas myth was very real. I gather that they’re still remarkably common… and who can blame parents: perpetuating the Santa lie can provide a very easy and pervasive way to control the behaviour of their children!

For the vast majority of these children, the revelation of the lie was a harmless experience: over time, they developed doubts, from the childish (“We don’t have a chimney? How can Santa slide down radiators?”), to the logical (“Reindeer can’t fly! And how big is a sleigh that can carry presents for every good child on Earth?”), to the profound (“Why does Santa give the children of rich parents more expensive gifts than the children of poor parents?”). They’d hear stories from other children about the falsehood of the Christmas stories when they spoke to other children or, often, older siblings. Many would eventually challenge their parents on these lies, and most of these parents would then come clean, correctly judging that the lie had run it’s course. So what’s the harm?

There are some children who didn’t come off so well. I’ve seen children bullied at school and in social settings as a result of clinging to their belief in Santa. One kid I knew – bolstered by his mother’s ongoing lies (she would later claim that she thought he knew, but was just “playing along”) – genuinely believed in Santa until he was 14 years old, defying all argument to the contrary, and suffered so much that he ceased to gain any enjoyment at all from the festival for years to come.

I’ve spoken to parents who have attempted to justify their decision to lie to their children by dismissing it as only “a white lie”, something which does more good than harm, and I can see their argument. But for some children, as we’ve seen, this lie can spiral out of control, and even if this were to happen with only one in a thousand children, I wouldn’t personally want to take the risk that it was a child of mine.

Sexy Santa Helper — One of Santa's biggest benefits is that he has a list of where all the naughty girls live.

That Magical Christmas Feeling™

A common response to my claim that lying to children about Santa is ethically wrong is that there is something particularly special (or “magical”, it is often said) about being able to believe in Santa. Those who make this claim invariably come from a background in which they were encouraged to believe in him, and they frequently talk of wanting their children to be able to have the same experience as them. (I would speculate that there’s a large crossover between this group of people and the group of people who would rather their children were brought up with their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, than be given the opportunity to make their own choices, too).

Having experienced life as an a-santaist, I can say that there never for a moment felt like there was something missing from my childhood Christmases. Children have a rich and beautiful imagination and a way of looking at the world which will find wonder and magic, if they want it, regardless of the untruths they’re told. Imposing false beliefs as truths on healthy young minds does not result in a net addition of “magic”. At best, all that is achieved is that the child fantasies about a specific lie, perhaps one that the child’s caregivers can relate to. We’ve discussed a couple of the worth cases already, and these aren’t isolated incidents.

Christmas can be a magical time anyway. There’s time away from school (for children of schoolgoing age), a chance to see distant relatives, the giving and receiving of presents (how can I have left this until third in the list!), following unusual and exciting traditions, eating special food, the potential for snow (at least in this hemisphere), and a time for telling special stories and singing special songs. Special events are magical, and that’s true whether or not you subscribe to any particular religious or secular holidays. For a child, birthdays are magical, bonfire night is magical (ooh! fireworks!), the summer solstice is magical: whatever you’ve got can be magical when you’ve got a child’s imagination.

Think back to whatever family traditions you had as a child, especially the ones you had to wait a whole year for. They’re all special, all by themselves. You can enjoy eating delicious chocolate eggs without believing in either a magical rabbit with a confusing reproductive system, the crucifixion of the embodiment of a deity, or spring coming forth thanks to the earned favour of the fertility gods. Sorry, what were you saying? I was still thinking about chocolate.

Carlos Santana — Santana - a full 100% more real, but only 95% less magical - than Santa

So, no Santa at all, then?

If you were paying attention, you’ll have seen that I said “telling special stories and singing special songs”. My childhood was a secular one, certainly, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t full of stories of a jolly red man, songs about cervines with nasal photoluminescence, and so on. I enjoyed stories about a gift-giving magical man, just like I enjoyed stories about anthropomorphic talking animals: and it’s okay to understand these things for just what they are: stories! There’s perhaps something a little special in stories about Father Christmas in that they’re told pretty-much exclusively at Christmas time (and, perhaps, a little much – how many Christmas-themed movies are scheduled for television broadcast this winter?), but we don’t have to treat them as if they’re real.

My rules are pretty simple. If you (a) know something to be false and (b) teach it to a child to be real with (c) the intent for them to believe it wholeheartedly and for an extended period of time, you’re abusing the position of trust in which that child has placed you. (a) provides an exception for religious upbringing, (b) provides an exception for relationships in which there is not a disparity of power, and (c) provides an exception for whatever so-called “white lies” you feel that you need: that’s a pretty hefty lump of exceptions, if you need them – but still people raise objections.

Here’s what Santa means to me. To me, “Santa” is, and has always been, the embodiment of anonymous gift-giving: the genuine “spirit of Christmas”, if you like. And given my way, that would be what I’d want to teach my children, too. I’m not for a moment denying anybody the magic of the season, I’m just saying that there’s a big difference between Santa as an abstract concept (like a storm “wanting” to break) and Santa as a real, albeit magical, being (like Poseidon sending the storm^†).

It’s a matter of trust

For me, this all comes down to trust. I don’t want to lie to my children. It’s not a difficult concept to understand: the only difference between me and a large number of other people is that they choose a different definition of “lie”. For the virtually all children who discover that they’ve been deceived about Santa, their trust in their parents remains fundamentally unharmed. For some, it’s dented for a short while but then comes back. But this still doesn’t make it right.

I want to be somebody who my children will always know that they can trust. I want them to know that I will not lie to them or deceive them. I want to be somebody who they can turn to for advice. I want to be somebody who they know will put them first, even in spite of tradition and convention.

That’s where I stand. Let’s here what you guys think.

'Sexy Santa' — Now this is the kind of Santa that I can get behind.

But first, there’s one more argument…

…that I’ve heard recently. I’ve heard it put that it’s beneficial to lie to children about Santa because it teaches them not to trust everything they hear, teaches them to be critical thinkers, etc.. That being taught a lie will toughen them against other lies that they will be given to them later in the big, wide, and cruel world.

This argument holds no weight with me. Do these same parents like to beat up their children “just a little” so that if they get into a fight at school, it won’t be so bad? Do they lock up and abuse their kids so that if they’re kidnapped and raped that it isn’t so hard on them?

In my mind, a lie that you keep up for years on end is no longer a harmless lie. When I want to teach my kids about deceit, I’ll perform magic tricks for them. The first time you perform a magic trick for a child, they genuinely believe it – how did he make that coin appear from behind my ear? Leave it for a minute or so (a minute can be an eternity when you’re a kid). Then I’ll show them how it’s done. I’ll teach them to do the trick themselves, and they’ll see for themselves that magic is an illusion. Plus, they’ll have learned a cool trick.

The world is full of many very clever illusions and tricks, and often you can’t see how they’re done, but that doesn’t mean that they’re magic. There’s no shame in not knowing all the answers, but looking for answers is a noble and beautiful thing. I want to foster in my children a natural suspicion of magic, so that they’re better-able to avoid being conned by those who would do them harm. And I can achieve this without lying to them for more than a few minutes at a time. Shove that in your stocking, Santa.

DISCLAIMER: THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE NATURE OF SANTA CLAUS. IF YOU BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS, PERHAPS YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE READ IT.

^† No offence intended to those who genuinely believe that Poseidon is the master of storms, naturally.

How Would Sian Feel About This?

Here’s a conundrum. Based on prior conversations, I’ve concluded that Sian is against the idea of genetic modification of plants etc. I’ve never really agreed with her on this – although I can see her reasons.

As a member of Amnesty International, it’s safe to assume, then, that she’s also not in favour of landmines. I’d certainly agree with her here: landmines are particularly nasty devices, and as we all know, hang around to kill people for decades after wars are over.

So how would she feel about a genetically modified flower which changes colour if it’s roots come near landmines [Yahoo! News]? These things, which are sterile to prevent cross-contamination, could be planted using seed-sprays from the rear of low-flying planes over areas known to have minefields, and those near mines would be a different colour, warning locals and making diffusion easier for UN soldiers. Of course, they wouldn’t be foolproof – nothing is – but how many lives could this GM tool save?

So; Sian – place a comment if you like: where do you stand on these flowers? (other than ‘away from the red ones’) And of course, anybody else is also welcome to have a say…