Hi. I’m working toward better networks for human sociability and collective survival. My new microstudio is over at wreckage/salvage.
This site collects my work spring 2022–fall 2024. You might want to start by:
- Watching or reading a talk I gave at the final XOXO Festival in August. It's the first time I've tried to explain the extraordinary thing the Covid Tracking Project was and did in any detail, and explains how I got from off the internet almost completely to putting all my spare cycles into fixing our networks.
- Checking out these crunchy findings on governance in the fediverse, based on in-depth research with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers. (It's juicier than it sounds.)
- Reading one or more chunks of a feature-length dive into what Facebook/Meta did and didn’t do in Myanmar and how it relates to the genocide of the Rohingya people (spoiler: it wasn't just shoddy content moderation).
- Getting really into ghostly frequencies in an after-hours medical equipment lab and our haunted internet with a side of one of Susan Cooper’s lesser-known books from the Dark Is Rising sequence.
- Find out who I am and what I do, and why.
Some recent posts:
XOXOThis post annotates a talk I gave on August 24, 2024 at the final XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon, about the gifts and terrors of the social internet and why fixing it is essential to our ability to respond to collective crisis and institutional failure. 24 August 2024
Fediverse Governance DropAfter a few months of prepping and conducting interviews and then many more months of analyzing and writing up what we found, we’re releasing our findings. We found…so much. 20 August 2024
Untangling ThreadsMeta's Threads service is joining the Fediverse, and I think there are some things about Meta—and about Fediverse mechanics—that it's important to include in that conversation. 21 December 2023
Root & BranchWho should do the heavy, tricky, fraught work of making and keeping our networks good? How should they work? To whom should they be accountable, and how can “accountability” be redeemed from its dissipated state and turned into something with both teeth and discretion? 6 December 2023
Meta in Myanmar (full series)The landing page for the full series on Meta in Myanmar. 16 October 2023