Do Flamingos Know They're Pink?
another internet is possible
On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse
Somewhere between Audre Lorde's 1979 speech and contemporary tech discourse, the "master's tools" became a meme. This essay traces what was lost in the translation.…
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Building a Digital Sovereignty Castle in the Sky
European leaders keep summoning digital sovereignty into being with summits and tech champions. A speculative proposal for the thing they keep skipping: an institution that funds open hardware through public bonds.…
The UK's Online Safety Act: A Lesson in Technosolutionism
The UK spent two years and billions making the internet less safe. The Online Safety Act as a case study in why you cannot regulate complex social problems away with surveillance and algorithmic band-aids.…
The Hardware Innovation Monopoly Problem: Why Europe Should Stop Chasing Unicorns
Europe's hardware problem is not too few unicorns. It is mistaking private control over public infrastructure, from ASML's lithography monopoly outward, for innovation success.…
How can Open Hardware catch up with Open Source Software?
Open source reshaped how software gets built. Open hardware hasn't caught up, and the reason is funding: venture capital and data extraction are incompatible with the commons that open hardware would need.…
Gardens, Not Roads: Cultivating Open Source Communities
For a decade, 'roads and bridges' has framed open source as infrastructure to maintain. This piece argues for a different metaphor: gardens to cultivate, not roads to repair.…
Digital Sovereignty in Practice: Web Browsers as a Reality Check
Servo, a memory-safe browser engine, is kept alive by five engineers and a trickle of donations. A reality check on what an independent browser would actually cost the digital-sovereignty talk.…
FOSS is more than just Licences
Openness is not neutral. Prompted by a new Open Knowledge Foundation report, a frustration with how small our imagination of free software has become, and what it could be for instead.…
The Last CVE: A Science Fiction Short Story
A short story. In 2035, after the global vulnerability management system collapses, a small collective guards the last allocation from an underground bunker. Fiction, entirely.…