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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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.…
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.…
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.…
The Luddite Stack: or How to Outlast the AI Ice Age
Subsidise, kill the competition, lock in the overpriced mess: the monopoly playbook now runs on AI. A guide to building the kind of stack that can outlast the subsidies when they end.…
The Future is Meaningless and I Hate It
The Semantic Web promised a digital future that actually understood us. Instead we got brute-force models passing probability off as comprehension. On the meaning we were promised and the noise we got.…
Mozilla: All We Want is a User Agent
Part frustration, part former appreciation. On Mozilla's turn toward 'privacy-first' advertising, and the quiet wish that it would go back to building a browser that works for the person using it.…