Critical perspectives on the web, AI, and digital culture.
There's no King in No Kings When did we get so fucking polite? Today, I find myself reading Letter From a Birmingham Jail in the hope of finding some familiarity. The essay by Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deal much in metaphor, unlike his speeches. Instead,…
The Computational Web and the Old AI Switcharoo For two grand I can buy a laptop with unfathomable levels of computational power. Stock, that laptop comes with silicon made of resistors so impossibly tiny, it operates under different laws of physics. For just…
Slop is Everywhere For Those With Eyes to See The size of your plate can influence how much food you eat. The absence of a clock on a casino wall can keep you gambling through the early morning. On social media, our For You Pages give us the illusion of infini…
Hank Green And The Fantastical Tales of God AIs AI Doomerism is a Decoy: Yet the supposed AI apocalypse remains science fiction. “A fantastical, adrenalizing ghost story is being used to hijack attention around what is the problem that regulation needs to solv…
The bliss of good enough— an ode to my moka pot It's early and unpleasant, and I am woefully uncaffinated. I brave my way through my small apartment towards the kitchen. My back and my left hip ache. I am getting older; crankier. The steady march of time is st…
The future of social media Imagine a world, in the not-so-distant future, where anyone can launch a fully functional social media platform with a few clicks and a credit card. From a menu of options, you choose the primary media type (video, microblog, photos,…
OpenAI's “Operator” is Facebook's “like” button Remember when Facebook convinced us that our websites needed a "like" button in the late aughts? Few, if any, of us at the time knew what Facebook was up to. We all sort of just obliged, and by 2010, tens of mill…
The Computational Web This note is a placeholder for a potentially longer, more in-depth essay I hope to publish in the future. Decentralized social media, like blockchain and crypto, promises to topple old power structures and hand the Internet back to the pe…
Bluesky may have the juice, but we don't have to drink the Kool-Aid Any marketing guru with a Substack and a Udemy course will tell you that your brand should have a mission and an enemy; make your customer the hero, and you play the role of sherpa. I know thi…
Meta's Toaster Problem Meta has a toaster problem in that Meta does not sell toasters. Remember the guy who tried to build a toaster by sourcing all its raw materials? His name was Thomas Thwaites, and by his own account, the project was a spectacular failure.…
Data Piggy Dear Internet, It has come to my attention that people are calling Venture Capitalists "data piggies,” and I for one am appalled. Sure, the definition of a data piggy is a tech sector Venture Capitalist who stuffs their little piggy faces on people'…
Raw dog the open web! Monoculture is winning. The Fortune 500 has shrink-wrapped our zeitgeist and we are suffocating culturally. But, we can fight back by bookmarking a web page or sharing a piece of art unsanctioned by our For Your Page. To do that we must g…
FireChat was a tool for revolution. Then it disappeared. For years, FireChat helped people circumvent their internet gatekeepers— the authoritarian governments and spineless corporations that control our every move through a network of proprietary data centers…
Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something Somewhere between the death of our favorite aggregator websites and the world surviving a pandemic, the modern internet was reduced to four companies in a trench coat. On the breast pocket of tha…
Where have all the websites gone? It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends. Your head rings, and your mouth is the type of dry that makes you question your adulthood. You feel something sc…
Bloktoberfest— Some anticlimactic thoughts on blocking Note: this post is what I consider a note— some light musing that may or may not have a conclusion and may or may not turn into an essay one day. Oh, Elon Musk. You’re like the Trump of the tech world. Not…
How do we stop Meta in 2024? We fix the information loop Discursive dominance is “the ultimate emergence of one discourse as dominant among competing ones in their struggle for dominance.” Once discursive dominance is secured, objectives are easier to achieve.…
Copy, Acquire, Kill— How Meta could pull off the most extraordinary pivot in tech history Meta's sudden interest in ActivityPub and Mastodon doesn't make much sense. There are a few impossibly consistent talking points floating through the Fediverse. Each trie…
Posts critical of Threads and Meta missing on Mammoth app There were big chunks of posts missing under the threads hashtag feed. Some are still missing. Many of these posts were critical to the Threads / Mastodon interpolation. I’ve observed this behavior only…
The medium is the message— Threads isn't a win for the Fediverse Meta needs the Fediverse more than the Fediverse needs Meta. I say this in the sense that the Fediverse never needed Meta at all. In fact, the Threads / Mastodon interoperation is a net negative…
I got my first blue bubble scam text the other day and I think I know why Beeper Mini is a new Android app that gives Android users a blue bubble when they text iPhone users. According to some folks on the internet, Beeper Mini tricks iMessage into thinking th…
Why it feels like AIs are coming for the artists Each week, a new AI thing goes viral. It's always something artistic-adjacent. Either it's a GPT-illustrated kids' book, an AI pop singer, or a chatbot promising to write the next blockbuster movie. And it's alw…
The Village Effect of the Greater Web The internet is a vast and open plain. It represents the best account we have of the human condition (it's also really fun and interesting once you know your way around). So why does it feel so cramped in here? Why are so…
A Frantic Friday Massacre Update: The Verge is reporting that Altman is in talks with the board to come back as CEO, is "ambivalent" about retuning without governing changes to the company. Lmao. What an embarrassing fiasco this all is. It's not even Monday ye…
My precious From Atlantic Staff Writer Charlie Warzel (via Threads): One thing in the OpenAI stuff that feels consistent (based on some internal convos I've had) is that a group of people that are laser focused on the doomer elements of AI and the more abstrac…
App defaults Just last night I stumbled on The Small Website Discoverability Crisis post while scrolling Hacker News. And here I am tonight, writing a post based on a viral trend with over 150 personal sites participating so far. The internet finds a way (gold…