Accepting "I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein." into the canon of captions that would work on any New Yorker cartoon.

teaching my escape the algorithm course again and it’s such a joy to be able to put such kind testimonials on the flyer 🥺

I’m honored to have my essay The New Turing Test published in the Internet Phone Book, now in its second reprint through @metalabel.bsky.social Revenue is split between contributors and the Living Web Institute, which has the goal of cultivating a better web livingweb.metalabel.com/internetphon...

whoever said AI won’t create jobs can eat their hat now

Exploring the concept of gifting through experimental design — this is the beauty of the internet when it’s totally free from engagement-maxing algorithms and corporations. Highly recommend diving into this collection from @spencer.place and @elan.place's Gifting Interfaces class.

It was an honor to talk to Willa Paskin about artisanal white noise for @slate.com’s excellent Decoder Ring podcast slate.com/podcasts/dec...

In late March, @spencer.place and I wrapped up our Gift Interfaces class at @sfpc-study.bsky.social. On our last day, we threw a gift wrapping party. Then we opened them together. The resulting website represents the archive of our work together: gifting-interfaces.pages.dev

the economy

🌳 new work > Over the past couple of years, I’ve been marking the seasons by the inhale and exhale of this tree. tree.kayserifserif.place/

one day maybe i'll write my snarky hyperbolic essay about how substack is three different pyramid schemes in a trench coat, but in the meantime i'll just point out that this is the most tried and true way to get engagement in the app 🥲

teasing you with more from our gift interface but sorry you'll have to stay tuned to open them!!

I talked to @dzkalman.bsky.social about our experiences of Shabbat, and why disconnection remains so elusive despite our societal obsession with it. escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/have-you-t...

my take is that if you’re evaluating whether something is AI using methods that are tritely computable — for example, the presence or absence of em dashes — then you are engaging with it on its own terms, rather than human terms, and will lose.

Every semester I take my Escape the Algorithm students at Penn to the local zine library called The Soapbox to talk about radical publishing and expressive design. While we’re there, the students each pick a zine and recreate it as a website.

A real embarrassment of riches: postcards from Escape the Algorithm readers turned ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporters!! 🥺🥺🥺

Gather, the offline-first client for collecting, curating, and cultivating multimedia collections, is officially on the app stores! Start archiving daily moments like you would text a friend on gather.directory and cultivate your capacity to notice

If you have questions that haven't been answered by this job posting or are wondering how our process works, we'll be hosting our second and final hiring office this Friday, February 28th at 12 PM ET. Registration info at the job link. (Audience members will remain anonymous to each other).

My team @themarshallproject.org is hiring a Designer! You'll work on everything from interactive storytelling to improving our digital products, making complex issues in criminal justice more accessible and impactful. www.themarshallproject.org/jobs/designer A bit more about what we're looking for…

"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself" www.youtube.com/watch?v=55PS...

"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself" www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQYO...

FlappyFavi is a flappy bird clone that lives in your favicon mewtru.com/flappyfavi (by tru narla)

For some completely unknown and totally undiagnosed reason, I collect envelope security patterns. Today I found a new pattern for my collection so I celebrate by sharing my collection with you: 79 envelope liners for your viewing/art making pleasure. www.are.na/brandon-alva...

My team @themarshallproject.org is hiring a Designer! You'll work on everything from interactive storytelling to improving our digital products, making complex issues in criminal justice more accessible and impactful. www.themarshallproject.org/jobs/designer A bit more about what we're looking for…

your subscribers are sending you $10/month. my subscribers are sending me jars of homemade pepper jelly. we are not the same.

your subscribers are sending you $10/month. my subscribers are sending me jars of homemade pepper jelly. we are not the same.

today i’m launching a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter program: readers can support Escape the Algorithm by doing something as little as sending me a gift/postcard in the mail or taking me out for a cup of coffee. here’s why:

Every generation gets a Tronc

This is the policy/rubric for using generative AI in my Escape the Algorithm classroom:

find someone who looks at you like the spotify algorithm looks at white winter hymnal by the fleet foxes

"[This] connects me to the long history of queerness... Anonymous, often scared people saying 'I was here. No matter what they told you, I was here.' Queer people will never be erased. Trans people will never be erased. We were here. We are here. You are living history that deserves to be saved."

still thinking about "the vertigo of Net travel" and how sometimes it feels disorienting and other times delightful. is the difference just agency?

the wonderful critical coding cookbook is now available as an #openaccess pdf ✨🫧💜 criticalcode.recipes featuring recipes from @xinemata.bsky.social @ann9na.bsky.social @joanachicau.bsky.social @renick.bsky.social @rouxpz.bsky.social @autolumi.bsky.social @anu1905.bsky.social @drs.bsky.social & more

collecting anecdotes of how it felt to use the early internet. this one from gary wolfe in a 1994 issue of wired is hitting me as simultaneously familiar and foreign

"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself"

“an open source ‘tar pit’ to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power” @404media.co www.404media.co/developer-cr...

the tediousness of synthesizing and summarizing [in this case, public meetings] is a feature, not a bug (by @biancawylie.com) biancawylie.medium.com/automating-s...

i've spent months searching for a definition of "algorithm" that feels alive to the agency of both practitioners and users, and looks beyond the codebase to inputs and outputs in the broadest, societal sense. stumbling upon @nickseaver.website's work feels like homecoming.

Great assignment / exercise prompts from @elan.place to promote algorithmic literacy, critical understanding of "user" experience, practices for creative adaptation and détournement

building algorithmic attunement and agency (for @are.na editorial) www.are.na/editorial/so...

it makes me incredibly sad that it's become cool to brag about how little time and care was put into building something

"The Doc Web" has reached the perfect level of coinage wherein nobody uses it most of the time but once in a while it inspires a really thoughtful/personal screed on publishing. Just came across this by @thejaymo.net thejaymo.net/2024/08/20/t...

Honored that read.cv named howdidyoufind.me one of the best projects of 2024!

💌 a message in a bottle, collaged from correspondences that embodied the heart of my time as a charge of my teachers, from secondary school to college kayserifserif.place/teachings

is the cure to the loneliness epidemic aimlessly searching the word “penpal” and stumbling upon the tale of someone receiving a postcard with a url written on it that leads to a website that tells the story of how people found it?

i have a lot of money therefore i'm smarter than you sounds like something the worst kid in your 4th grade class would say

for the past month i’ve been desensitizing myself to notifications by having my phone send me random pushes it hasn’t worked at all, but I do check my phone more and feel insane all the time

It was an honor to be asked by @caitlindewey.bsky.social to curate my favorite links of the year for her fantastic Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends newsletter linksiwouldgchatyou.substack.com/p/the-best-l...

Every week I get an email from the university I teach at with no unsubscribe button asking for feedback on a bureaucracy I didn't know existed (the body that assigns classrooms). Meanwhile they still haven't assigned me a room. Feels of or related to Kafka, if only there were a word for that...

Google Analytics could never (2) howdidyoufind.me

Substack is also extremely aggressive about attributing a lot of subscriptions to the "Substack Network" that it shouldn't, as I wrote about here: escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/is-substac...