Do Flamingos Know They're Pink?
Articles about how technology works, who it serves, the systems around it, and what it all costs. Digital sovereignty, open source governance, and internet rights.
I Get No Ideas Inside the Machine
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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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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…