Hi. I’m working toward better networks for human sociability and collective survival. My new microstudio and current network writing is at wreckage/salvage.
If you're new here, you might want to start by:
- Watching or reading a talk I gave at XOXO to explain the extraordinary thing the Covid Tracking Project was, why I got off the internet, and why I'm back and all in on networks.
- Checking out the big findings report on governance in the fediverse, based on in-depth research with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers.
- 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 (it is almost certainly worse than you think).
- Getting into ghostly frequencies in an after-hours medical equipment lab and our haunted internet with a side of Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising sequence.
- Find out who I am and what I do, and why.
Some recent posts:
Meta in Myanmar, Part I: The SetupI’ve never trusted Facebook, mostly because I’ve been around tech for a long time and everything I’ve ever learned about the company looked like a red flag. But once I started to really dig in, what I learned was so much gnarlier and grosser and more devastating than what I’d assumed. 28 September 2023
Meta MetaHousekeeping notes for the Meta in Myanmar series. 28 September 2023
Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’tA very informal inquiry into why some people on the Bluesky network didn't have a great time when they tried using Mastodon in the period leading up to the summer of 2023. 28 July 2023
Notes From a Mastodon MigrationHere's what I've learned by migrating from one Mastodon server to another, including what I wish I'd known in advance and what I hope the makers of federated systems will change. 26 July 2023
The Affordance LoopOn the social internet, people who have used the biggest platforms and networks enter new ones expecting to find ~standard affordances *and* expecting that familiar interface cues will map to familiar affordances. When newer systems and tools confound those expectations, people get, *at best*, confused. At worst, they try to walk across a solid-looking but sink-into-able surface and get stuck in a bog. 20 July 2023