Thom Porter - A Journey to Find Optimism

The Terminal, The Data, and The Pivot

I’ve been staring at command-line interfaces since I was eleven years old, back when the world was navigated via Unix & DOS prompts. For over thirty years, my professional life has been defined by code: designing software, managing databases and debugging apps. Almost every professional programming job I’ve had has revolved around data. Tracking it, analyzing it and building reports so people could understand it. If you look at my history, you’ll see a software engineer.

But if you look closer, you’ll see someone who has always used data to understand how systems work - and how they break.

I’ve always been fascinated by history too, and as a young adult I became very cynical because of it. Watching how we have treated each other for millennia, and how we continue to treat each other made me very pessimistic about our future. And in recent years, it seems like it’s getting worse. Political extremes are getting louder, spewing more vitriol than I saw in my early years, and it feels like we are more divided than ever. For years, I brought my own cynicism to those debates.

Then, I decided to audit the data.

The Optimistic Journey

For a while now, I’ve felt the weight of my own cynicism, and I’ve grown tired of it. It forced me to consider the history of my own online interactions over the years: how I communicated, where I failed to listen and try to understand, and how I let my cynicism shape my views. The seemingly endless rhetoric I experienced online didn’t help. Online discourse is full of mudslinging and us-vs-them thinking. But as I began to audit my own past conversations and my own behavior, I realized I was a culpable participant in that, and I didn’t like it. When you don’t like something about yourself, you’re the only one who can do anything about it.

I decided it was time to change - to remain civil, factual, and optimistic, even when the cultural current pulls the other way. I still have the cynical thoughts, but they don’t help, and I keep them out of the discourse.

This website is the result of a deliberate, personal pivot. I realized that my own behavior had become a trap; it felt smart, but it built nothing, and may have helped to tear some things down. I didn’t want to be a part of that anymore. I wanted to see if a lifelong habit of analytical thinking could be used for something better: deliberate, data-driven optimism.

I’m still a software engineer, and I’ll always love building applications, but thomporter.com is no longer just a place for me to experiment or showcase code. It is a structured repository for the research I do to try to affect the public discourse in a different way. It is an online diary of my journey to find optimism in all of us.

What You’ll Find Here

I’m building this site as an open-source research catalog. I plan to explore the things that drive our civic life, and over the next few weeks I will be putting together articles covering my thoughts on a variety of topics, including:

• Alternative Voting Systems: I will be exploring various voting systems, comparing them to what we use here in the United States. I believe we can have better representation, and I believe our voting system needs to change to get there.
• Economic Fairness: I will be discussing the realities of our economic system and how it fails for far too many of our fellow citizens, and how we can improve, without going to the extremes that we see in many other parts of the world.
• Public Disourse: This will be a common theme across many of the topics I will cover. Looking at how we communicate with each other and how we can do better. How we can learn to listen and understand, instead of just reacting.

I don’t promise or even pretend to have the answers to all of the questions I will be asking, but I’m committing to following the data where it leads me, keeping an open mind, and fighting for optimism.

I will be hosting this site on GitHub in a public repository and welcome any feedback through that. I look forward to open and honest debate.

More to come soon.