another internet is possible
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.…
New writing on what technology does, who it serves, and what it costs, whenever it lands. No more than that.
Or just take the RSS.
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…