Dr. Johnson knew three centuries ago

Do you like podcasts? Do you like investigative journalism that aims to make real change by shining a light on abuses of power? Do I have a link for you:

"If she has her own house, what will she need me for?" I don't know, dude, maybe be cool and fun to be around and be happy for her success instead being whiny little sad-ass troll about it? www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Yes. Absolutely, yes. betterdonkey.substack.com/p/the-vra-wa...

Marjorie Taylor Green isn’t a known antisemite because she criticizes Israel, she’s a known antisemite because of all the talk about secret cabals, Jewish space lasers, Great Replacement theory, and Jews killing Jesus. Hope this helps some leftists who are mad at AOC for being right about her today

Meta's latest PR bullsh*t is an accidental haiku! Really. "We will not allow / trial lawyers to profit / from our platforms." [It scans if you pronounce “our” with two syllables. Humor me, I’m on a roll.] Read all about it in this week's Platformocracy, plus this thread. 1/7

Everyone wants well you can’t fight back against a corrupt legal establishment well they don’t have any of the branches of government to be a good enough explanation and people are just done with it

"For platform providers, we need to make safety inherent in the design of the platform." - Ganesh Shankar, Google Director of Product Management, User Protection Read my full Q&A with Ganesh in today's bonus issue of Platformocracy, a free newsletter advocating for democracy in our online lives.

i remember learning "there is no silver bullet" in my cs classes and it's bleakly hilarious that all tech speculation now is "what if we made a silver bullet? we will add the line 'you are the silver bullet' to claude's code"

You are a skilful and trusted vizier. You will advise me wisely on how best to rule the kingdom. You will not scheme or plot. You will not inveigle my other courtiers into turning against me. You will not lie to me about scheming or plotting. If you scheme or plot against me, you have to tell me,

My take: Easterbrook is a brilliant guy, but he's wrong in construing this as a contract issue. That's not how 4A rights work, I think, as I argued here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

PLATFORMOCRACY: There's been a ton of news about social media age verification in the two weeks since I first wrote about it. Here's a quick round-up, plus great reader comments from @jeremymanson.bsky.social and @nyusterncbhr.bsky.social's Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat. 1/8

I don’t understand how they thoroughly messed up the widely used software that opens PDFs? Like as apps go this one is pretty close to “you had one job”???

My sense of humor in a nutshell

My overall reaction to the Chatrie argument, screenshotted from the other place b/c can't do long tweets here.

"No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices." Edward R. Murrow, who died on this day in 1965

Possibly the best thing in Moma's current Duchamp show is this 1913 newspaper cartoon poking fun at his "Nude Descending a Staircase"

I saw this yesterday. I love when words have multiple meanings.

Just one great post from the middle of an outstanding thread.

PLATFORMOCRACY: Guardianship at Gunpoint. The influential data integration / AI intelligence company Palantir has published a 22-point manifesto. It's just another tired argument that tech execs should be in charge of society, except for the implicit threat of violence if we don't comply. 1/

November 2025: leakers reveal 10% of Meta's ad revenue is from scams and fraud ($16 billion). April 2026: Meta announces they're laying off 10% of their employees (8,000).

Join me this Saturday to stand against the 40-lawyer ICE office in Roseland, NJ. We need a big crowd to show people we will not accept a branch of this lawless organization in our congressional district. www.mobilize.us/nj11thforcha...

Your community deserves its own platform. acorn.blacksky.community

don't dox bluesky team members, jesus christ log off, get a life, behaving like petulant children on the internet isn't a real personality or a real hobby

Training people to participate in platform governance exclusively by hollering and then letting them into an ecosystem where the only real change lever is exit has sure produced a wild demonstration of “if it fails, do it harder.”

#oopsie Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthrop...

Nailed it.

Let's support the guy behind the PDS my account is on and their amazing PDS MOOver tool: Ko-fi.com/home/coffees...

butlerian change dot org petition drive

PLATFORMOCRACY: I gingerly wade into the debate over age verification for social media. I am a parent, so I understand the concerns & do not think laissez faire is the right answer. I am worried that we are making big platforms stronger without being clear about the problem we’re trying to solve. 1/

We can literally contribute to Blacksky, Eurosky etc to decentralize further. If you care about decentralization, donate, move your account to a non-bluesky PDS, and use apps other than Bluesky. The ecosystem isn't perfect, but we don't have to settle for complaining. We can do something about it!

Can people stop saying Allbirds pivoted from shoes to AI. The company sold off all its assets in a fire sale. This is just a promotional stock pump, like when Kodak claimed it was entering the cryptocurrency business.

PLATFORMOCRACY - a bonus Q&A with my old DoubleClick/Google colleague Scott Spencer, CEO/co-founder of Rewarded Interest. First of an occasional series with the leaders, thinkers, and builders working to give us control over our online lives. Who else would you like hear from?

god grant me the audacity of a Catholic convert sincerely telling the Pope he’s wrong about theology

I saw the best minds of my generation produce high quality content for startups that laid them off on a zoom call

Regret to inform everyone that Peter Magyar beat the world’s smartest illiberal populist in large measure by working incredibly hard for 2 straight years, meaning the rest of us are just going to have to get off our asses and do shit rather than just complaining.

"Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead." -- Kurt Vonnegut, who died #OTD 2007

And this is, I think, the X factor we haven't yet accounted for economically. The asshole markup. When you alienate your trading partners, they don't feel obligated to cut you the best deals anymore. They're going to seek out new markets instead and cut THEM the best deals. 4/

“atmosphere” is also a genuinely cool word and nerd projects pretty much never get actually cool words, lean in

Platformocracy News Round-Up: Bluesky, the Meta Oversight Board, Debanking, and A Horse After a week off for my kids' spring break, I'm back with my first news round-up. As an experiment, to read all about it, you'll need to click through to the Web version. It's free!

Seen on 34th Street between 7th Ave and Broadway in Manhattan. Reminds me of the dot-com bubble days. @logrocket.bsky.social

Happy Surrender and Freedom Day! On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac. home.nps.gov/apco/planyou...

THE FIFTH ELEMENT IS ON NETFLIX!!! do not speak to me i will be watching it every day until they decide to remove it

BREAKING: Following the American threat of an “Avignon Papacy,” Robert Kennedy has begun a Diet of Worms

happy The Confederacy Lost The Damn War Day to everyone who celebrates, and a hearty fuck you to everyone who doesn't celebrate

You can vote directly from any of the several Blacksky algorithmic feeds if using blacksky.community.

We're back from #ATmosphereConf 2026 and we're still thinking about it. @cassidyjames.com and @julietshen.bsky.social gave a trust & safety crash course, introduced Coop to the atproto community, and hosted an unconference session on what a minimum safety stack looks like for indie devs.