Every time someone tells me that interoperable protocols are too complicated for the average person, I point out that they use email and the web. The goal needs to be to get atproto to the point that it is just "how the internet works" and the details fade into the background like https & smtp.

Here's the first in a series of instalments from my book ‘Fracture' in which I'm going to explore: — why decades of digital initiatives have failed to deliver the desired modernisation of government — what a modern, adaptive democracy could look like — what changes are needed to get us there

Populist, conspiratorial, & authoritarian stacks perform very well in the new information environment. They deliver speed, certainty, & identity coherence where traditional democratic institutions deliver delay, complexity, & opacity, assuming they're performing in a substantial way to being with.

Please share. 💔

CNN airs a compilation of ICE aggression against peaceful protesters in Minnesota

I've signed up for this. Work worth doing: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/23/got-ideas-for-growing-the-open-social-web-bring-them/

National media should really be covering the fact thay every major school, museum, and arts institution in the Twin Cities, and hundreds of local businesses are closed tomorrow to protest federal occupation. Nothing like this at this scale has happened anywhere in America anytime in living memory.

Tomorrow's premium newsletter - The AI Bubble Is A Time Bomb, with every hyperscaler facing $10bn-$20bn a quarter in depreciation in the next two years and AI startups draining all that's left of venture capital. Here's $10 off annual. edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo...

With that much support it's only fair #BBCNews should invite the bots onto #BBCquestiontime. - #TimDavie #Impartiality

🚨 Come to our Power and participation in public tech conference in Manchester on 6th March! 🚨 There'll be inspiration and lessons from practitioners, reformers and activists, as well as time to connect and discuss the topics you care about with peers. Sign up at connectedbydata.org/events/2026-...

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

18 and two halves out of 20 after just one year

The official GovCamp pub is announced! #ukgc26 @gavinfreeguard.bsky.social

If you’re travelling from london to GovCamp this seems like the best option. Marylebone route has rail replacement bus. #ukgc26 #ukgovcamp #govcamp Next departures: 08:35 – 10:38 09:02 – 11:15

Not sure if I will make it to #ukgc26 today. Trains to Birmingham from london all cancelled this morning. Disruption expected until 9am. www.nationalrail.co.uk/service-disr... “Emergency services at Leighton buzzard”

The UK is almost as cheap to influence online as Russia. Cambridge researchers have mapped the bot market. The next move belongs to Parliament. By Fred Lewsey

Not a single day in 2025 was cooler than the 1991-2020 average, on a global scale. @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social

Technical design *is* business process design *is* team design *is* service design *is* user centred design. If you insist that one is superior to another or that you don’t need to concern yourself with all aspects, you’re doing your organisation and your users a disservice. This course looks great!

I’m seeing lots of people on here misunderstand the purpose of ICE watch. It’s de-escalation. And it’s grounded in the social science of violence. 🧵

Help us build a solidarity network for Hopeful Technologists ☀️hopeful.technology

Holy crap cash payments will be huge. Not having credit card companies gatekeeping their version of morality will help so many folks. I don't know how this works with the regulatory/legal issues, but I look forward to hearing about his team's pulled that off, that's a HELL of a flex.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Happy 35th Birthday WorldWideWeb – the first browser! On December 25, 1990, at CERN, a British physicist and internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb. Try the browser emulator worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/ #InternetHistory

Exciting news! We've confirmed @emilybache.bsky.social as a trainer for the training day at our event in June! Have you made any plans for 2026 yet? Registration is now open for SoCraTes UK 2026! Register: socratesuk.org/tickets.html

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.” Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life. Common sense. Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

True fact

Day 356 of non-stop #GeorgiaProtests! 🇬🇪🇪🇺🇺🇸

love this for you ICC www.euractiv.com/news/interna...

I get frustrated by the press release culture around time savings from AI tools. I couldn't resist responding to a recent one about Microsoft Copilot in the NHS. There's still a missing step of being able to reimagine the future of work with technology benholliday.com/2025/10/23/4...

The most common things engineering leaders think will make dev teams go faster actually have the opposite effect. codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/11/13/t...

Bad news from Georgia where Georgian Dream is banning the opposition and charging its main leaders with plotting a coup.

Incredible thread from Steve. Please read.

I'll tell you something. I have a private theory that this kind of division (which is clear as day to ppl in tech and like, baffling to ppl outside of it) is a version of the "I will help you survive but not thrive" phenomenon but worked out re: tech belonging journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Blind (and much of mainstream media!): the AWS outage is the result of “mass layoffs, outsourced talent.” Me: talks to the AWS engineers handling the incident. Turns out the creators of the systems impacted were in the call (not laid off!), no outsourcing etc Will share more

Oldest victim of Post Office scandal, 92, receives final compensation payout. At last. But ruined lives can't be restored. £1.2bn paid to 9,100 victims from public purse. Not a penny from PO execs, Fujitsu, lawyers, accountants, advisers who benefited from persecution of the victims.

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.” Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life. Common sense. Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

I keep being amused by some devs claiming that multi-region support for a service should be easy to add. Then turns out they're unaware of what active-active arch is. Multi-region support is not all that complex from afar, but it gets complicated with the details.

I was deadly nerdsniped: Nick Kimber on LinkedIn: “Hello. Can anybody point me to a decent accessible history of relational practice/thinking/ leadership (ideally short form)?” stream.syscoi.com/2025/10/24/n...

An OpenAI executive said GPT-5 found solutions to 10 "previously unsolved" math problems when in reality all it did was find online references to places where people had already solved them techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/o...

Come and join an open house meeting to further shape these and work out what to do next. We need a collective hopeful tech vision if we have any chance of putting out the current ridiculous bin fire fuelled by hype, power & billionaire egos. Booking links in this post buttondown.com/society-of-h...

NEW: The British politician, his Russian intelligence handler & a Kremlin plot against the US & Ukraine. My new piece about Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage for @thenerve_news in which we ask: Why, even now, is no-one asking questions? t.co/BUTtpK9C4S

Are there any live proposals to get DSIT (and/or CLG?) to create a Civic Tech Fund? An initiative to support the UK’s civic tech movement (pro-social platforms like Library of Things, Olio, Park Run, etc) and shared infrastructure for community organising. 1/n

Some people are saying the potential overbuild because of AI might not be a bad thing because, like the dotcom era, it could leave behind infrastructure we’ll benefit from for a long time. 1/6

Refactoring is a key skill for good software design and it's also something you can get better at through practice. Check out my newly-published video training course which has lots of examples and exercises you can try courses.cd.training/courses/refa...

Some good news. London is meeting legal limits for toxic NO2 pollution for the first time – almost 200 years earlier than predicted – following the Mayor’s "world leading air pollution policies," City Hall announces. The Ultra Low Emissions Zone - and similar policies - really do work.

On Monday Oct 6:

“[With WhatsApp] gold is in the ingredients, but Signal is the gold standard. Privacy is our sole focus. We do one thing and we do it very, very well, which is provide the world’s largest actually private communications platform” Join Signal and persuade just one of your friends to do the same

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again. Ignore the haters, London is the 🐐

this is very good www.gov.uk/service-manu...