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Panoramic view of Chuquicamata, a state-owned copper mine in the north of Chile.
Article

I Get No Ideas Inside the Machine

· 05 Jul 2026 · 11 min read

At Cables of Resistance, I ran a workshop asking if we can build hardware without capitalism. I was grieving what AI is doing to open source. Technologists need to see there's no innocent ground under the machine. It was always someone's land.…

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A mosaic with an octopus on it made of limestone
Digital Sovereignty

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.…

27 Jun 2025 · 5 min read
tropical pitcher plant - Tanjung Puting National Park - Indonesia
Open Source

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.…

27 May 2025 · 3 min read
A picture of an old fabric hooded figure in a museum.
Creative Writing

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.…

16 Apr 2025 · 4 min read
A tiny version of the Voynoch Manuscript
Creative Writing

Training an AI on Ancient Undeciphered Texts: What I Wish I DIDN'T Learn

A skeptic of machine intelligence trains a model on an undeciphered ancient script, and learns something about pattern-matching, meaning, and himself that he would rather not have.…

31 Mar 2025 · 12 min read
Bunch of flowers surrounding a book and a feather.
Creative Writing

Shakespeare in the Code: The Tragedy of Xzlibius

The xz-utils backdoor, retold as a Shakespearean tragedy: a noble robot prince, a hidden deceiver, an overburdened maintainer, and the kingdoms of giants watching from the edges. Entirely fictional.…

16 Mar 2025 · 18 min read
Cat sitting infront of a Go board.
Digital Sovereignty

Two Visions: Digital Sovereignty Between Reform and Transformation

Two proposals for digital sovereignty that look like rivals but aren't. On reform versus transformation, public procurement as a lever, and why the difference between them matters more than the overlap.…

07 Mar 2025 · 1 min read
Painting of young woman sitting on a sofa looking annoyed
Essay

Optimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will

With apologies to Gramsci. On the particular exhaustion of being certain a better world is possible, and then talking to people who have been taught that this one is the only one on offer.…

28 Feb 2025 · 1 min read
A small scale Cobalt mine in the DRC. It represents 70,000 and 100,000 artisanal miners who often work without protective gea
Digital Sovereignty

We Need More Than the EuroStack

The EuroStack initiative is hard, valuable work, and still not enough. Where Europe's flagship digital-sovereignty proposal runs into the same lack of political imagination it was meant to escape.…

15 Feb 2025 · 2 min read
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