Maciej Cegłowski Explained

Maciej Cegłowski (born 1975) is a Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic, based in San Francisco, California. He is the owner of the bookmarking service Pinboard,[1] [2] [3] which he calls a social bookmarking site for introverts.[4]

Career

Cegłowski was born in Warsaw, Poland and "accidentally immigrated" to the United States with his mother at age six, in 1981, but calls himself "as American as gooseberry pie." He attended Middlebury College, where he studied Russian, French, and studio art,[5] graduating with a BA in 1997. He then became a backend software developer and community manager at Yahoo!'s Brickhouse in San Francisco. While there, he created a visual search engine for airfares called FareMaps. With Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious, and Peter Gadjokov, Cegłowski created LOAF (List of All Friends) as a way to share social network information through email without exposing private information.[6]

He established Pinboard in 2009, after leaving Yahoo. With Joshua Schachter and Beniamin Mincu he had been impressed by initial versions of the bookmarking service Delicious, which Yahoo had bought.[7] However, he felt that it had been mismanaged by Yahoo! management and that it would be possible to produce a more successful website with the same concept.[8] [9] [10] [11] As of 2016, he remains Pinboard's only full-time employee. The business is a model of a small ad-free pay-for-service that emphasizes privacy.[12]

In December 2012, Cegłowski announced a project called the Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud, offering $37 and promotion for six startup companies, to encourage bootstrapping technology companies with low costs.[13] [14] He awarded winners in January 2013.[15]

In 2016, Cegłowski entered a competition on Hacker News that would have allowed Pinboard to become a Y Combinator Fellow. In light of his frequent criticism of Y Combinator, he humorously described his entry as "a tremendous, huge opportunity to fund the Bay Area's slowest-growing unicorn."[16] Pinboard was not chosen for the fellowship, despite receiving the largest number of votes.[17]

He was credited as a technical consultant for the 2018 season of HBO sitcom Silicon Valley.[18]

Speaking and writing

In addition to promoting his business, Cegłowski is known as a critic and provocateur on social media and offline. Between 2013 and 2017 he delivered a series of talks criticizing the contemporary Internet and the Silicon Valley tech industry.[19] In November 2016, he founded Tech Solidarity to "to organize tech workers around an ethical agenda through collective action and the creative use of American labor law."[20] [21] Between 2018 and 2020 its focus shifted to raising funds from the tech community for a 'Great Slate' of candidates for office in the United States. [22] He joined the protests against Hong Kong's National Security Law in August 2019 and reported how Hong Kongers were organizing.[23] Cegłowski argued that "While Hong Kongers took the threat to their freedom seriously and organized a vigorous political response, Americans (in October 2020) remain suspended between feelings of anxiety and a hope that transformative change can come on its own, without the hard work of harnessing protest to electoral gain."[24] In 2023 he returned to his blog and twitter to criticize plans by NASA and private corporations to land humans on Mars.[25]

Cegłowski is particularly known for his conference talks on the impacts of technology, and for posting on Twitter, which he uses to joke about the failings and inflated claims of Silicon Valley companies.[26] [27] [28] He has written and spoken extensively on the problems of advertising-funded services with dubious business models.[29] [30] He has described programmatically generated advertising and data mining as a business model that encourages the growth of surveillance.[31] [32] [33] In particular, Cegłowski has compared large stocks of data on Internet users to the archives of Communist secret police services in his native Central Europe, as a threat to user privacy that may increase as archives remain in existence.[34] [35] [36] [37] He has also argued in favour of simplified, more minimal web design, arguing that immersive web design can be bloated and unsuitable for consumers with a poor internet connection.[38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] Cory Doctorow has described him as a "characteristically provocative" writer of "barn-burning speeches about the Internet's problems".[44] [45] [46]

Cegłowski has spoken at conferences including dConstruct, Webstock, XOXO Festival, O'Reilly Media's Strata+Hadoop and Emerging Technology Conferences,[47] the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, and beyond tellerrand. He has spoken about his experience of running his own company, including listening to users from the fandom community and "failing really, really slowly", working on a project for a long time instead of looking for immediate success.[48] [49] [50] [51] Cegłowski has discussed prioritising simplicity and stability over using cutting-edge technologies for building Pinboard in order to reduce cost and allow his company to remain simple and practical for a single person to run.[9] [39] He also gave a talk about the negative effects of advertising being the economic foundation of the web, saying that it encourages the growth of surveillance.[34]

Cegłowski writes a Pinboard blog on topics including new features, site growth, the benefits of paying for services in general,[52] technical aspects of running Pinboard, and critical commentary about social websites like Facebook.[53] Cegłowski has discussed prioritizing speed and stability over using cutting-edge technologies for building Pinboard.[1]

His personal blog, Idlewords, includes blog posts and short essays Cegłowski has written since 2002, mostly about travel and food, including his 36-day voyage to Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf in 2016, which he financed through Kickstarter.[54]

He has written occasional features for Wired.[55] [56] and opinion pieces for The New York Times.[57] His ideas have been quoted in Time, The Atlantic,[58] The Guardian,[59] The Economist,[2] TechCrunch, Wired News,[60] Bloomberg View, Mashable and Gigaom.

Selected publications

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Hacker Chat: Pinboard Creator Maciej Ceglowski Talks About Why Boring Architecture is Good, and More . Klint Finley . February 10, 2011 . ReadWriteHack . . December 30, 2011 .
  2. Web site: Price of fame: Stick a pin in it . G.F. . April 4, 2011 . Babbage . . December 30, 2011 .
  3. Web site: Zuckerman. Ethan. Ethan Zuckerman. The Internet's Original Sin. The Atlantic. 14 August 2014 . The fiasco I want to talk about is the World Wide Web, specifically, the advertising-supported, "free as in beer" constellation of social networks, services, and content that represents so much of the present day web industry. I've been thinking of this world, one I've worked in for over 20 years, as a fiasco since reading a lecture by Maciej Cegłowski, delivered at the Beyond Tellerrand web design conference. Cegłowski is an important and influential programmer and an enviably talented writer. His talk is a patient explanation of how we've ended up with surveillance as the default, if not sole, internet business model.. 20 June 2016.
  4. Web site: Idle Words - Maciej Cegłowski . idlewords.com . 2016-01-06.
  5. Web site: Middlebury College Students Receive Watson Fellowships. 24 March 1997 . Middlebury College. 19 June 2016.
  6. Book: Livingston. Jessica. Founders at work : stories of startups' early days. 2008. Apress. Berkeley, Calif.. 978-1-4302-1078-8. 229. Pbk.. 7 January 2016.
  7. Dell. Kristina. Entrepreneurs Who Go It Alone — By Choice. Time. 24 October 2011 . 20 April 2016.
  8. Book: Adrian McEwen. Hakim Cassimally. Designing the Internet of Things. 7 November 2013. John Wiley & Sons. 978-1-118-43065-1. 153–4.
  9. Web site: Perrine. Tom. An interview with Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard. Thuktun (blog). 3 January 2011 . 20 April 2016.
  10. Web site: Haughey. Matt. Quick thoughts on Pinboard (review). Whole Lotta Nothing. 27 December 2010 . 20 June 2016.
  11. Book: Steven Ovadia. The Librarian's Guide to Academic Research in the Cloud. 30 September 2013. Elsevier Science. 978-1-78063-381-7. 124, 172.
  12. Web site: Maciej Ceglowski. Webstock 14. 7 January 2016.
  13. Web site: Why Entrepreneurs Are Competing for $37 From This Startup Incubator . Seth Fiegerman . December 18, 2012 . Business . . December 30, 2012 .
  14. Web site: Meet the World's Cheapest Venture Capitalist . Ryan Tate . December 14, 2012 . Business . . December 30, 2012 .
  15. Web site: How to Spend a $37 Venture-Capital Infusion . Ryan Tate . January 21, 2013 . Business . . March 14, 2013 .
  16. Web site: Apply HN: Pinboard – Make Y Combinator Great Again. Hacker News. 25 August 2016.
  17. Web site: Tell HN: Winners of Apply HN for YC Fellowship 3. Hacker News. 25 August 2016.
  18. Web site: Maciej Ceglowski. IMDb. 26 May 2019.
  19. Web site: Idle Words: Talks .
  20. Web site: https://www.techsolidarity.org/.
  21. News: This article is more than 5 years old Silicon Valley revolt: meet the tech workers fighting their bosses over Ice, censorship and racism . The Guardian . 29 March 2019.
  22. News: Janesch . Sam . How Jess King spurred a Silicon Valley-led fundraising blitz that netted $200K for her and $1.7 million for other candidates . Lancaster Online . 17 June 2018.
  23. Web site: A Week with No Tear Gas (Idle Words) .
  24. Web site: Protests and Power (Idle Words) .
  25. Web site: Why Not Mars (Idle Words) .
  26. News: Dear Facebook, why are Facebook Comments so unremittingly terrible?. Jon Evans . 2016-04-09 . . 2016-06-19 .
  27. News: Money For Nothing For Everyone . Jon Evans . 2015-11-21 . . 2016-06-19 .
  28. Web site: Love our open API? Talk to our lawyers, says If This Then That . Richard Chirgwin . 2016-03-30. . 2016-06-19 .
  29. Web site: Fister. Barbara. Maciej Ceglowski's Internet Repair Kit. Inside Higher Ed. 19 June 2016.
  30. Web site: Cegłowski. Maciej. The Advertising Bubble. Idle Words (blog). 19 April 2016.
  31. Web site: Doctorow . Cory . Big Data's religious faith denies the reality of failed promises, privacy Chernobyls . Boing Boing . 2015-10-07 . 2016-06-19.
  32. News: Digital Advertising at the Crossroads: Will Angry Consumers Block Brands? . Zak Pollack . 2016-01-15 . . 2016-06-19 .
  33. Web site: Doctorow . Cory . Big Data refusal: the nuclear disarmament movement of the 21st century . Boing Boing. 2015-11-03 . 2016-06-19.
  34. The Internet's Original Sin . Ethan Zuckerman . Ethan Zuckerman . August 14, 2014 . . November 13, 2014 .
  35. Web site: Cegłowski. Maciej. What Happens Next Will Amaze You. Idle Words (blog). 20 April 2016.
  36. Web site: Cegłowski. Maciej. The Internet With a Human Face. Idle Words (blog). Beyond Tellerrand Conference. 19 April 2016.
  37. Web site: Woodie. Alex. Big Data Really Freaks This Guy Out. Datanami. October 2015 . 20 June 2016.
  38. Web site: Cegłowski. Maciej. Web Design: The First 100 Years. Idle Words. 19 April 2016.
  39. Web site: Cegłowski. Maciej. The Website Obesity Crisis. Idle Words (blog). 19 April 2016.
  40. Web site: Dale. Brady. Is Google's Fight With Facebook Undermining a Web That's Fair to Everyone?. Observer. 2 March 2016 . 20 April 2016.
  41. Web site: Doctorow. Cory. Cory Doctorow . Tools, ads, and bad defaults: Web bloat continues unabated . Boing Boing . 2016-01-01. 2016-06-19.
  42. Web site: Doctorow. Cory. Cory Doctorow. Botwars vs ad-tech: the origin story of universal surveillance on the Internet. Boing Boing. 2015-10-05. 2016-06-19.
  43. News: I Like To Block It Block It . Jon Evans . 2015-09-26 . . 2016-06-19 .
  44. Web site: Doctorow. Cory. Cory Doctorow. The Internet With a Human Face: Maciej Cegłowski on the things we need to fix. Boing Boing. 2014-05-27. 2016-06-19.
  45. Web site: Doctorow. Cory. Botwars vs ad-tech: the origin story of universal surveillance on the Internet. Boing Boing. 5 October 2015 . 20 June 2016.
  46. Web site: Doctorow. Cory. After a rush, aviation stopped "progressing" -- the Web might be next. Boing Boing. 21 July 2015 . 20 June 2016.
  47. Web site: Speakers - O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003. 7 January 2016.
  48. Web site: Notes from dConstruct 2013 . Matt Sheret . September 10, 2013 . . December 17, 2013 .
  49. Web site: Why the Most Ambitious of Tech Startups Should Fail Slowly . Ryan Tate . November 19, 2013 . The Next Big Thing You Missed . . December 17, 2013 .
  50. Web site: Koziara. Chip. Why The Most Important Step In Creating A Startup Is Selling Your Idea. Elite Daily. 9 December 2015 . 20 June 2016.
  51. Web site: Pinboard explains why you should care about fandom. Ada Initiative. 20 June 2016.
  52. Web site: Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard: why we'll pay for internet plumbing . Charles Arthur . December 16, 2011 . Technology Blog . . December 30, 2011 .
  53. Web site: Strata Week: The social graph that isn't . Audrey Watters . November 10, 2011 . O'Reilly Radar . . December 30, 2011 .
  54. Web site: Cegłowski. Maciej. An Antarctic Appeal. Idlewords. 25 August 2016.
  55. Cegłowski. Maciej. I'm Going to Antarctica for the Penguins and to Hide From the Internet. Wired. 20 April 2016.
  56. Tate. Ryan. Meet the World's Cheapest Venture Capitalist. Wired. 20 April 2016.
  57. News: Ceglowski. Maciej. We Need a More Forgetful Internet. 7 January 2016. New York Times. 2012-12-11.
  58. News: Zuckerman. Ethan. The Internet's Original Sin. 7 January 2016. The Atlantic. August 2014.
  59. News: Arthur. Charles. Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard: why we'll pay for internet plumbing. 25 August 2016. The Guardian. 16 December 2011.
  60. Thompson. Clive. Clive Thompson on the Problem With Online Ads. Wired News. 25 August 2016.

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