Spider moments
When I was eleven years old, my family relocated to the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina for a little while while my dad taught at Duke. We home-swapped with an abortion doctor, and our temporary...
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X and the Digital Services Act
The EU has opened up an investigation into Elon Musk’s X:X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, may have broken the European Union’s tough new Digital Services Act rules, regulators said as they...
View ArticleLeaving the Nazi bar
Newsletter subscribers might be surprised to see a slightly new design. I’ve moved away from Substack and back to Buttondown, an indie mailing list service. Every email will be free from now on; paid...
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Looking back at 2058
2058 was many things: the hottest year in recorded history, a year when civil rights protests made national news in the face of deepening inequality, and where conflicts and the climate crisis turned...
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Looking forward to 2024
Let’s get this out of the way first: 2024 is going to be a hard year across the board. Mass layoffs, another hottest year on record, escalating conflicts with enormous human tolls and flagrant human...
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My favorite books I read in 2023
I don’t want to call these the best books I read last year: I read plenty of other well-written, worthy contenders. But these six titles are the ones that stuck with me and left me thinking about them...
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45 wishes
Previous birthday posts: 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things.This post is in partial answer to Matt Mullenweg’s birthday request for everyone to blog, which is a...
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Running your own site is painful. Hosting Nazis is worse
I’ve spent much of my career telling organizations that they should publish in a space that they control, on their own domain name.My usual argument is that it shields you from major changes in...
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The fediverse for media organizations
Given all the talk lately of Threads, Mastodon, and ways that people can publish on their own sites, I thought it might be worth revisiting what the fediverse actually is — and why an organization...
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The right to see who is spying on us
CNN reports that the NSA has been buying internet data as a way to track Americans without a warrant:[Oregon Democratic Senator Ron] Wyden, one of Congress’ most vocal privacy advocates, said he spent...
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The indieweb is for everyone
Tantek Çelik has posted a lovely encapsulation of the indieweb:The #IndieWeb is for everyone, everyone who wants to be part of the world-wide-web of interconnected people. The social internet of...
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Stripping the web of its humanity
I tried Arc Search, the new mobile app from the Browser Company. Its central insight is that almost every mobile browsing session starts with a web search; rather than giving you the usual list of...
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The four phases
This post is part of February’s IndieWeb Carnival, in which Manuel Moreale prompts us to think about the various facets of digital relationships.Our relationship to digital technology has been through...
View ArticleThree variations on Omelas
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K. LeGuin:They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all...
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A creative process
Over on Threads, Amanda Zamora asks:I'm plotting away on Agencia Media and some personal writing/reporting this weekend (over a glass of 🍷 and many open tabs). One of the things I love most about...
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Social, I love you, but you’re bringing me down
This weekend I realized that I’m kind of burned out: agitated, stressed about nothing in particular, and peculiarly sleepless. It took a little introspection to figure out what was really going...
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Stop what you're doing and watch Breaking the News
Breaking the News, the documentary about The 19th, aired on PBS last night and is available to watch for free on YouTube for the next 90 days.It’s both a film about the news industry and about...
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ASCAP for AI
Hunter Walk writes:The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough...
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Platforms are selling your work to AI vendors with impunity. They need to stop.
404 Media reports that Automattic is planning to sell its data to Midjourney and OpenAI for training generative models:The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled...
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Some personal updates
I write a lot about the intersection of technology and society here, and lately a lot about AI, but over the last year I’ve written a little less about what I’ve been up to. So, this post is an update...
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Startup pitch: Fediverse VIP
Here’s my pitch for a fediverse product for organizations.Think of it as WordPress VIP for the fediverse: a way for organizations to safely build a presence on the fediverse while preserving their...
View ArticleExploring AI, safely
I’ve been thinking about the risks and ethical issues around AI in the following buckets:Source impacts: the ecosystem impact of generative models on the people who created the information they were...
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Building engineering
I’ve spent most of my career — now well over two decades of it — building things on the web. I’ve worked as a software developer, I’ve founded a couple of my own companies, and I’ve often found myself...
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Share Openly
You know all those “share to Facebook” / “share to Twitter” links you see all over peoples’ websites? They’re all out of date.Social media has evolved over the last year, yet nobody has “share to”...
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72
It’s my mother’s birthday. She would be 72 today.The week we lost her, I wrote this piece, which I re-read today.In it, our friend Anita Hurrell remembered her like this:One time you drove us in the...
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