Hint: if a party is heavily supported by people who throw Nazi salutes, it might not be up to much good. Some voters for new right-wing parties are economically worried, but blame their issues on the influx of immigrants rather than the increasing divides between rich and poor th … | Continue reading
For the avoidance of doubt: All empires are bad. All empires have always been bad. All empires always will be bad. The concept of empire is bad. The prerequisites for empire are bad. And the people who like empires — any of them — are bad. Do not have fondness for empires. Do not … | Continue reading
I was privileged to be interviewed for this week’s People and Blogs: Hi! I’m Ben Werdmuller. I was born in the Netherlands, grew up and spent my twenties in the UK, and spent twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I live in Greater Philadelphia in a creaky old house with … | Continue reading
[Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Kavitha Surana at ProPublica] My colleagues at ProPublica conducted a first-of-its-kind data analysis on health outcomes after Texas banned abortion in 2021. Here's what it found: "The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women … | Continue reading
[Matt Webb] I love this: "Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And the … | Continue reading
[Alissa Quart in Columbia Journalism Review] This article cuts right to the core of why media is failing to connect with mass audiences in America. It doesn't report from a perspective that they can identify with - largely because it doesn't hire people like them. What would work … | Continue reading
[Allison Hantschel in DAME] Hand-wringing over people leaving overtly unsafe spaces like X to find communities that are actually enjoyable to hang out in (like Mastodon and BlueSky) is absolute nonsense. "With that user growth, mostly from liberals disgusted with Musk’s nonstop p … | Continue reading
[PJ Onori] I can't disagree with anything here: "Web 2.0 seemed like such a great idea in a more innocent time. We’re at a point where it’s only prudent to view third-parties as guilty until proven innocent. Not as some abstract, principled stance, but for our own direct benefit. … | Continue reading
Ask a CTO is an irregular column where I answer anonymous questions from a technical leadership perspective. You can ask questions using this form. I have two answers to two questions this time around: Security vs. productivity Where do you draw the line between security and prod … | Continue reading
[Matt Binder at disruptionist] Just in case you thought he was still all about free speech: "Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, is currently banning links to “Signal.me,” a URL used by the encrypted messaging service Signal. The “Signal.me” domain is specifically used by the s … | Continue reading
[Mastodon] Mastodon doesn't have quote posts, but is finally adding them after years of pressure. It's a harder decision than you might think - which is made clear by this excellent post by the team. In order to help mitigate potential abuse, the team has imposed three main requi … | Continue reading
[Joe Wilkins in Futurism] The job market in the tech industry has been brutal for a little while now, and doesn't show signs of getting easier. "Of all the workers devastated by the carnage, former tech workers in Silicon Valley are having a particularly rough go of it. The regio … | Continue reading
Inspired by Gina Trapani, Buster Benson, and others, I started to build my own Life in Weeks page from scratch. It looks pretty cool, and it’s interesting to see my life milestones presented on this scale. But I’m not going to share it with you. As I was building it, it became cl … | Continue reading
Last month I asked to hear from trans-friendly employers who sponsor visas, and provided a simple form for interested employers to reach out. In the process, I heard from many individuals: people who were hoping to find new employment in another country, and people who worked for … | Continue reading
[Jon Pincus at The Nexus of Privacy] There's an argument that one reason Elon Musk bought Twitter was to reduce its effectiveness as a platform for progressive organizing. Whether you buy that or not, it's clear that the new set of social networks are fertile ground for new and e … | Continue reading
[Miriam Eric Suzanne] Every single word of this piece resonated for me, from the underlying discomfort to the realization that AI as it currently manifests reflects a kind of fascist mindset in itself: an enclosure movement of culture and diversity that concentrates power into a … | Continue reading
It’s a small thing, but I broke my Apple Fitness longest streak this week. That means my consecutive number of days that I’ve hit my fitness goals on my Apple Watch has been longer than it’s ever been.Here’s why that’s meaningful: my previous longest streak was broken when my mot … | Continue reading
[Sergey Bogdanov]This is a story about parenting, but also about the importance of considering context inclusively. We've all heard about the Stanford marshmallow experiment, but:"Kids from wealthier families waited longer than kids from low-income families. Not because they had … | Continue reading
[Jennifer Gerson at The 19th]Musk has been seen with his child, X Æ A-Xii (or "Lil X" for short), at press conferences. But, as Jennifer Gerson notes here, it's not just a photo op."Musk, a father of 12, is an avowed pronatalist, or someone who believes declining population rates … | Continue reading
[Social Web Foundation] The Social Web Foundation has joined the W3C: "SWF joins CDT as one of the few civil society organizations that comprise the Consortium. SWF’s membership in the W3C underscores our commitment to promoting an open and federated social web, and our alignment … | Continue reading
[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch] This was a very nice surprise to see: "Automattic confirmed to TechCrunch that when the migration is complete, every Tumblr user will be able to federate their blog via ActivityPub, just as every WordPress.com user can today." ActivityPub is the open p … | Continue reading
From time to time, people ask me if they can use the content of my posts in another venue or another format. To make that possible, today I released all the text of all my posts under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You’ll see th … | Continue reading
[Oneofthelibrarians at LibrarianShipwreck] Some advice about how to survive this era from LibrarianShipwreck, one of my most favorite blogs on the planet: "So, uh, it’s pretty bad out there! You are probably trying to figure out what the hell to do about it. Here are some words o … | Continue reading
[Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby in Popular Information] The removal of banned terms on both internal and external government websites is going more stupidly than one might have expected: "One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed … | Continue reading
For a while now, I’ve been syndicating my posts to MSN. You can see Werd I/O’s profile over there. In some ways, this is my normiest network: whereas my Mastodon community is more technical, my Bluesky community is more political and my newsletter subscribers tend to be a mix of … | Continue reading
[Iker Seisdedos interviewing Judith Butler in EL PAÍS English] Judith Butler is as on-point as ever: "Q. It wasn’t just Trumpism. Some Democratic voices say it’s time to move beyond the issue of trans rights in areas like sports, which affect very few people. A. You could say tha … | Continue reading
[Jessica Kutz at The 19th] USAID's defunding will lead directly to women's deaths: "As of 2023, 67 percent of contraceptives supplied through USAID went to Africa, where some of the leading causes of death for girls and women are related to pregnancy and sexually transmitted infe … | Continue reading
[Mica Rosenberg, Perla Trevizo, and Zisiga Mukulu in ProPublica, co-published with The Texas Tribune] This is a beautifully-designed co-production between ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, illustrating the immigration policies that Donald Trump enacted on day one. These encompass … | Continue reading
[Natalia Antelava in Coda Story] This is a useful framework for thinking about ongoing harm. "It was 2014, and I was standing in the ruins of Donetsk airport, when a Russian-backed rebel commander launched into what seemed like an oddly academic lecture. Between bursts of artille … | Continue reading
[Dan Hon in MIT Technology Review] The always-brilliant Dan Hon on DOGE: "We’re seeing in real time that there are no practical technical measures preventing someone from taking a spanner to the technology that keeps our government stable, that keeps society running every day—des … | Continue reading
[Gil Duran in The Nerd Reich] Curtis Yarvin's influence is felt again: " In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk w … | Continue reading
[Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing, Annie Waldman, Brett Murphy, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg, Sebastian Rotella, Alex Mierjeski, Pratheek Rebala and Al Shaw at ProPublica] My colleagues at ProPublica have published the largest list yet of who is actually involved … | Continue reading
[Caralee Adams at the Internet Archive] The Internet Archive is always a gem, but it's been particularly important this year. "With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million uniqu … | Continue reading
[Janus Rose at 404 Media] This is an important but hard pill to swallow: "“The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, … | Continue reading
For the last few years, AI vendors have had an interesting marketing playbook: they’ve described the potential power of the technologies as being so great that it could lead to an artificial general intelligence that could either kill humanity or leave us behind and head for the … | Continue reading
[Alex Heath at The Verge] And so begin the knock-on effects on companies across America: "In a Wednesday memo to employees that I obtained (and you can read below), Google’s head of HR, Fiona Cicconi, said there will no longer be DEI hiring targets due to the company’s status as … | Continue reading
[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub] This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next: “By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” ne … | Continue reading
[Maxwell Zeff at TechCrunch] I know "don't be evil" is from another era of Google, but still, this rankles: "Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have upda … | Continue reading
[Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica] From my colleagues at ProPublica: "Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing … | Continue reading
[The Guardian Editorial] The Guardian editorial board isn't mincing words: "Donald Trump is provoking a US constitutional crisis, claiming sweeping powers to override or bypass Congress’s control over spending in a brazen attempt to centralise financial power in the executive bra … | Continue reading
[Jameel Jaffer in The New York Times] Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University: "The spectacle of powerful media organizations debasing themselves before Mr. Trump has become so familiar that it is beginning to feel li … | Continue reading
I’ve been a technical leader a few times: CTO and Director of Technology at two nonprofit newsrooms; technical lead at five tech companies of varying sizes; investor and advisor in early-stage startups. I’ve enjoyed reading Ask a Manager for years, and it occurred to me that a si … | Continue reading
[Cathy Gellis at TechDirt] On point: "So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into government offices to take over computer systems where they had no legitimate authorization or entitlement needs to be understood as a cyberattack by a rogue actor. And every o … | Continue reading
[Matt Haughey] I really like the way this guide to Signal lays it all out. As Matt Haughey explains: "A friend of mine works in the federal government and wrote a guide for their fellow federal workers on how to use Signal. There are lots of good reasons for switching to Signal f … | Continue reading
Okay, friends. Here’s what we’re going to do. It’s not going to take long. Let’s install Signal. Signal is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted instant messaging app. When you message someone with Signal, nobody can intercept your conversation to learn what you’re saying. It’s ve … | Continue reading
[Naseem S. Miller at the Journalist's Resource] A massive, last-minute data preservation effort was undertaken this week as important federal datasets were taken offline: "The new Trump administration has at least temporality halted most communications from the Department of Heal … | Continue reading
Imagine being so genuinely empty as a human being that you support a regime that conducts mass deportations and runs concentration camps because they support Bitcoin. Imagine watching the rights, freedoms, and safety of trans people being torn down over the course of 72 hours and … | Continue reading
The 19th celebrated its fifth birthday yesterday. CEO Emily Ramshaw’s reflective post is quite lovely, but also announces a very bold strategy: On our fifth anniversary, we’re launching our first-ever endowment campaign, with a goal of raising $20 million over the next three year … | Continue reading