@vruba ~~ Ian Hodder’s hermeneutic spiral ~~

I have been very hesitant to repost nice things about my own work but then this year happened and I got over it.

RE: https://mas.to/@gleick/115779985970021187 Oh my god

Gosh, there is just so much to love about a new essay from @kissane, even when it’s about so much heaviness like widespread memory leak. Erin is like a superfan for readers because she unpacks topics with such care and wit. This stuff seriously just rewires my brains […]

Happy holidays, fediverse! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us […]

Why yes I am putting Mac System 7 style holiday lights on my computers and no one can stop me https://benkurtz.org/maclampsx.html

Heads up that There Is No Antimemetics Division is out in revised and thoroughly superior new version, including an extremely good audio edition, just in time to ruin someone’s winter holidays.

I need a linter that just removes commas I stick everywhere in informal writing but I need it at the level of my brain

best three horror movies from the past 10 years, no torture porn, no hurting children, go

RE: https://mas.to/@kissane/115532882511128403 Update! https://www.euractiv.com/news/international-criminal-court-to-ditch-microsoft-office-for-european-open-source-alternative/ (via @marthadark.bsky.social in the other place)

The Tech Review article mentioned by @kissane is worth reading in its entirety: It outlines how many clickbait actors spread dangerous misinformation and fake news not so much out of malicious intent but entirely from a banal profit motive. (Of course there are propaganda actors too who use […]

This thing that 404 is writing about in the US—the dehumanizing fake content created purely because Facebook pays people to make it? https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-videos-of-ice-raids-are-wildly-viral-on-facebook/ It has a direct precedent in the Myanmar genocide and has been widely […]

The process of getting the right reading prescription and then training my eyes and brain to handle it has been so much wilder than I had expected, as someone who'd previously had extremely good eyesight. Wiiiiild.

NEW EPISODE OUT TODAY! I talked to art historian and curator @brigittevdsande.bsky.social about war, art, fiction, disasters, imagination - join us: issues.org/not-now-but-...

I had missed this whole thing, yikes yikes yikes. https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/ h/t @janl

@bonfire is doing some of the most interesting work on the open social internet, and they're doing it in the most exhilarating ways. I am delighted to be even a little bit involved in the work they have planned: https://www.wrecka.ge/sparks-fly-up/

“People aren’t misguided to want shelter from surveillance and harassment, or to seek high-context, community-centric moderation; all echo-chamber punditry notwithstanding, those are necessary conditions when life online has such direct and dramatic effects on the character of our offline […]

I wrote about Bluesky’s moderation tensions and the White House’s threats and the critical need for open networks that can do broad connection and also care for communities at Tech Policy Press […]

I still don’t know how I missed it last fall, but The Empusium is my favorite novel of the year by a mile. Stellar translation from Antonia Lloyd Jones. The critics who found it trivial are my enemies.

I think Mastodon's proposal for starter packs is a significant positive evolution of the way Bluesky rolled them out. I wound up on a bunch of packs there and it was…not a great thing for my specific brain and purpose. I do hope the people in Masto's comments saying […] [Original post on mas.to]

It’s me, stumbling around the kitchen (my ghost install) trying to find the coffee (my ability to write words about networks in this wild year). Which is to say: Still here, still hammering away on a lot of things. Still don’t know what will happen! […]

Vital, highly condensed, very well prioritized stuff on why the open social web matters so much—and how it can help people do the necessary work of society in our very rough moment—from @ben at #fediforum. The keynote is being recorded and I'm so glad, because I will be recommending it widely.

The new Brandee Younger album is so, so good. Life-sustaining vibes. https://brandeeyounger.lnk.to/GadaboutSeason

🔥 Bonfire Social 1.0 release candidate has landed! Curious about what the fediverse could look like with real community control? Try out features like custom feeds, nested discussions, shared profiles, circles, and boundary-based permissions — then let us know what breaks or needs improvement […]

(Unbreaking needs a Mastodon account…somewhere. We'll figure it out! So many things to figure out, but that's the work.)

I don't think it's possible to be where we are in #uspol (and in the global authoritarian slide) without our information ecosystems being such a mess. There's a ton of work to do on the distribution side of the problem, but also on the info-making side: Even great newsrooms aren't built to make […]

The day I most look forward to the whole year is the day the first Salmonberry bird/Swainson’s thrush arrives in our woods, and this year that day was today. No one’s recording gets them quite right, it’s the most beautiful sound in the world […]

Do I know anyone here who knows a lot about deploying a Loomio instance and would be willing to talk to me about it?

Anyone reading this yet? https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/05/29/one-brief-shining-moment-rise-and-fall-of-the-second-american-republic/

Mergoat Magazine has turned out to be the (print) subscription of the year for me https://mergoat.com/mergoat-magazine/ Southern Appalachian vengeance horticulture with a side of queer & trans everything and p.s. abolish borders

New at wreckage/salvage: Vernacular institutions, part one. New project. Old projects. Lots of projects. Bruegel? Bruegel. The struggle with email this month has been so absurd and I hope this makes it to your inboxes if you've signed up. https://www.wrecka.ge/the-work-at-hand/

I will be talking soooo much more about this in the coming weeks, but the collective knowledge-building mutual aid project I've been working on with friends and fellow travelers is starting to emerge into the world, and this is where to sign up if you want notifications. Boop […]

Today is exactly five years since we opened up the Covid Tracking Project and I think my body can tell.

I guess the main theme in my last decade or so of work-life has been that the process of building a solid understanding of the big grim facts necessary to provide distilled, solid information about difficult things is exhausting and kind of damaging, but that the end-use value of that distilled […]

Duckworth N CLOTURE FAILS, CONGRESSIONAL SPORTS BAN WILL NOT HAPPEN. Last few votes rolling in.

I saw a particularly beautiful newt on my morning walk today and I had a deeply revivifying conversation and I am going to put the day in the plus column.

I will just put it out into the universe that I would sure love to get ghost-comped into someone's Politico Pro account if you happen to have a login lying around 🫥

the destruction of 18F is a wrecking ball to the real and meaningful efforts—by some of the best and sharpest people in US tech—to make government work *for people*. such a kick to the chest.

Things have been so much better since they started congestion pricing and I can't help but think the attempts to break it are just... petty. Anyways there is a rally @3 in NYC times square. Gotta get my wingtips on and catch the bus down there.

I saw someone expressing very understandable frustration this morning about not seeing any headlines about a Trump admin EO (executive order) that was posted late last night, and I think this is maybe a good way to explain in real time how an EO becomes A News here. I’m not going to get into […]

I’m going to say this once: My life and my body and my work have been designated as “political” by people in my country who want people like me quiet, subservient, or gone. This goes double for Black, immigrant, and trans folks. I don’t post news, but I am not going to CW the “uspol” of living […]

Ethan Marcotte, who is one of the most principled and thoughtful people I have ever known and also a dear friend, has resigned from his job at 18F after being asked to meet with shadowy gov-dismantlers. The whole post is worth reading. https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/leaving-18f/

@aworkinglibrary always comes through. Le Guin + Seeing Like a State + Mandy’s own orienteering == ways to move in uncertain and unstable moments. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/make-life-possible

If you and/or your company/nonprofit/whatever have a bank account in the US, this would be a very good thing to try to read and act on in short order. Henry Farrell is the person I trust most in the world to understand and explain the ways the dull boring mechanics of financial systems can […]

[Know someone in Washington State who might support a better privacy law?] Now is the moment to get them behind it: https://wa-privacy.net/take-action-peoples-privacy-act/ see also https://pnw.zone/@waprivacy/113986440115936329

Reposting bc @boby_biq either found or made a gif of the *exact moment* I was thinking of when I wrote it Give me the Avasarala interface you cowards, I yelled into my desk drawer https://erinkissane.com/against-entropy

I wrote about the thing I am looking for to make sense of the moment so that I can stop posting about it. (First post on my personal site in some time.) https://erinkissane.com/against-entropy This is part of a series of backstage conversations with friends and between people I respect, about […]

Wikipedia is rolling out anonymity features piloted in countries with authoritarian governments in the US & is making a change to not show editor IP addresses in response to a global "increase in threats" from Elon Musk, Heritage Foundation, and governments […]

The questions I would like to see people thinking about w/r/t ROOST are things like: * Who is NOT on that founding partners list? And what does that mean? * How much do I know about Camille François, the actual president of the initiative, and how does that change my sense of what this is? * […]