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Link: You couldn't create a more anti-news internet if you tried, by Matt PearceMatt Pearce, Director of Policy for Rebuild Local News, writes a behavioral economics inspired take on why our current embodiment of the internet is so bad for news and information.In particular, he sees the introduction of “nudges” as being a pro-information feature that search engines, LLM interfaces, and social media platforms could introduce:“Social media, too, could choose to feature quality news outlets as…
Link: Radical Speed Month — The Reader Meets the Fediverse, by Mattias PfefferleWe’re closer to the entire web being a social environment than ever before. That’s very exciting to me on two fronts. The first is that it’s always been the promise of the web that anyone could publish and be heard, and baking in social functionality is a huge part of that. The second is that it undermines the stranglehold that traditional social media platforms have had on the public discourse and democracy itself.…
Link: 'The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History': Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech, by Jason Koebler at 404 MediaI started in edtech. When I graduated with my Computer Science degree, I returned to the university to work at the Media and Learning Technology Service. There, I discovered that all the edtech software at the time was so bad — the learners hated it, the teachers hated it, the administrators hated it, and I have to assume the people who made it also had…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.An Invitation to Build the Civic Information EconomyThis feels like a vital exploration to me:“What does it take to fund civic information? We often focus on “more money,” but we limit the field’s potential by ignoring better capital design. Today’s landscape often sees dollars concentrated in intermediary and national…
Link: An Invitation to Build the Civic Information Economy, by Lillian Ruiz, Simon Galperin, and Jennifer Brandel at News FuturesThis feels like a vital exploration to me:“What does it take to fund civic information? We often focus on “more money,” but we limit the field’s potential by ignoring better capital design. Today’s landscape often sees dollars concentrated in intermediary and national plays—often with good reason—but without deliberate examination, we risk stifling the imagination of…
Link: Some Rationalization May Finally Be Coming for Newsroom Intermediaries, by Richard J. Tofel in Second Rough DraftIn his latest post, Dick Tofel talks about a need for consolidation in organizations that support newsrooms (and, in fact, in newsrooms themselves).“Devoting limited resources to competing services where one offering is superior not only leads those using the inferior service to poorer results, it also subsidizes entirely unnecessary administrative costs at the inferior…
Link: Report on Burnout in Open Source Software, by Miranda HeathThis bleak report on burnout in open source software communities from last year has been doing the rounds. I think it’s clearly indicative of where open source is at (and its trajectory), but the solutions aren’t immediately clear — we know this because similar concerns have been anecdotally highlighted by various people for well over a decade. However, this is the first formal research report I can remember reading.It’s pretty…
Link: I can never talk to an AI anonymously again, by Kelsey Piper in The ArgumentOn first read, I found this a little bit sobering:“But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.The people do not yearn for automationThis piece is important to internalize — particularly for the terminally AI-pilled and people who might want to force everyone into using LLMs to do work they were previously doing themselves.AI is incredibly unpopular, and it’s not because it’s bad at marketing. These are multi…
This is the IndieWeb Fiction Carnival call for submissions for May, 2026. Everybody is welcome to participate.I'm a long-term member of the indieweb community, and a speculative fiction writer, so I was delighted to see the IndieWeb Fiction Carnival appear. Previous prompts include platonic soulmates (for which I entered my story Sharing is Caring), silvered eyes, and we've got to dream past it.This month, I've signed up to host.PromptThis month's prompt is sticks and stones will break my…
Link: Matt Mullenweg Says “The Wheels Have Fallen Off” in Wide-Ranging WordPress Critique, by Rae Morey in The RepositoryI’m going to put my neck on the line on this story about Matt Mullenweg’s criticism of Wordpress’s open source release culture:“WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg has delivered a wide-ranging critique of the WordPress project, saying it has spent years doing damage to itself and calling out a release culture he says produces ‘boring or mediocre crap.’”It goes on to describe…
Yesterday I wrote about how the value for a product or service’s community may be different from the thing that drives its creators to build it — and unlocking and understanding that difference could be part of the key to making it sustainable.The people building Bluesky might be excited to be creating a decentralized protocol and an open source platform, but it’s not a given that the people already using Bluesky care all that much about that. For them, it might be more important that there’s a…
A quick note before this one: this post isn’t intended as commentary on any internal conversations at ProPublica. We care a lot about sustainability, fundraising, and memberships! But this piece has a broader focus.I remember the comment like it was yesterday. The social networking platform I was building had already been used by major non-profits, universities, Fortune 500 companies, and even governments. It was created in the public interest and distributed in such a way — under an open…
Link: Apple Fixes Bug That Let FBI Extract Deleted Signal Messages After 404 Media Coverage, by Joseph Cox at 404 MediaYou may remember the story about the bug in Apple’s on-device notifications database that allowed the FBI to retrieve the content of Signal messages. It’s good to see that it was treated as a genuine bug — and fixed.Signal announced the change on Bluesky:“We are very happy that today Apple issued a patch and a security advisory. This comes following 404 Media reporting that the…
I've had "All You Fascists (Bound to Lose)" in my song rotation for a little while – for, you know, reasons.Bette Midler's getting some coverage for her cover, so I thought I'd round up some other versions I like very much.To begin with, here's that Bette Midler cover:This Resistance Revival Chorus with Rhiannon Giddens version is probably my favorite: upbeat and alive.The Billy Bragg version with Wilco is really strong too: Nina Hagen's father Hans was a Holocaust survivor held at Moabit, and…
Link: A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform, by Jennifer PahlkaImportant analysis from Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, that is about government technology and services but could just as easily be about news and journalism.She introduces the Three Horizons framework for thinking about change and building towards a shared vision of the future. Here, Horizon 1 is the status quo, Horizon 2 represents improvements to that system, and Horizon 3 represents an improved system…
Link: Why AI alone cannot fix social problems, by Deepak Varuvel Dennison and Aditya Vashistha in Rest of WorldFrom the AI is a tool for people and not a replacement for them dept:“AI is often framed as a tool for efficiency, but efficiency alone does not strengthen public systems without the underlying capacity being improved. Even when tasks are completed faster, the deeper constraints of the system do not automatically disappear. In many cases, AI ends up addressing the symptoms of these…
Link: The People Do Not Yearn For Automation, by Nilay Patel in The VergeThis piece is important to internalize — particularly for the terminally AI-pilled and people who might want to force everyone into using LLMs to do work they were previously doing themselves.AI is incredibly unpopular, and it’s not because it’s bad at marketing. These are multi billion dollar companies that have attracted some of the brightest talent from across Silicon Valley across all disciplines. AI vendors are not…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.The Technological Republic, in briefPalantir CEO Alex Karp wrote a book last year called the Technological Republic, but perhaps because it didn’t have the impact he hoped, the company posted a tweet thread (and LinkedIn post, etc) that summarizes its core points. Which are, to be clear, an argument for hard-right…
Link: “Data embassies” and safeguarding digital assets during wartime, by Rina Chandran in Rest of WorldAmong the targets in the war between Iran and the US have been data centers. AWS was hit by drones, and Iran has threatened to target US tech. This piece makes the point that these buildings don’t just store vast amounts of civilian customer data: increasingly, they store military data, too. That make them an even more attractive target and makes the security consequences of an attack that…
Link: Launching XOXO Explore, by the AndysI freaking loved XOXO, the experimental festival for independent artists and creators from the internet. I attended the first one during a fraught, stressful, often sad period of my life; I’d ripped my life up to move to the US to be nearer to my terminally ill mother. I thought I knew where my life was going, and then everything was uncertain.And here was this joyful festival of people doing things on their own terms, in their own way. I attended with…
Link: The Content Management System Is Dead. Long Live the Context Management System., by Burt Herman at Hacks / HackersI thought this was a pretty compelling demo. It’s obviously a proof of concept, but it points to some interesting places journalism could go, and it opens up some new platform questions in the process.In Burt’s vision, the reader has a profile that expresses their interests, and then the newsroom curates material that is surfaced using that lens. His demo makes that more…
[Flare Before You Focus, by Corey Ford at Point C]Corey’s advice on separating flaring and focusing is something I draw on every workday: it prevents self-editing, allows more creative ideas to flourish, and helps enforce a more rigorous creative process. But as he points out here, to encourage curiosity on your team, you’ve got to model it yourself.I have been in this meeting so many times:“Two people, both in Focus mode, talking across each other, each trying to prove they have the sharper…
[Mitch Stoltz at the EFF]A useful guide for anyone who is running their own community space — which includes folks running Mastodon instances, Bluesky hosts, RSS services, and so on. As the author explains in the preamble, there’s the potential for “massive, unpredictable financial liability”. It’s therefore really important to find ways to limit risk.A lot of this is common sense:“Finally, make sure that nothing you post or advertise actively encourages copyright infringement. For example,…
[Palantir]Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote a book last year called the Technological Republic, but perhaps because it didn’t have the impact he hoped, the company posted a tweet thread (and LinkedIn post, etc) that summarizes its core points. Which are, to be clear, an argument for hard-right nationalism — complete with remilitarization and implied cultural hierarchy — and fusing Silicon Valley with the national security state.In Karp’s world, Silicon Valley innovators have an obligation to build…
How AI is affecting thinking and distribution – and why relationships are still at the heart of great teams.
"Google had already disclosed my data without telling me. There was no opportunity to contest it."
"A mantra to clarify ownership while reinforcing shared responsibility." I agree with every word.
An innocuous iPhone notifications setting could put your Signal contacts at risk.
Flock is building a national surveillance network. A protest movement is forming to tear it down.
