New Blog

When we use centralized social media, we compromise heavily on our personal freedoms and control over information.

We’ve all spent too much time giving out our data for little in return. I’ll be charitable and chalk up my frustrations with Twitter, Facebook, and the others to their tightening of echo chambers for advertising revenue, but really their interfaces are uncomfortable and designed to condition our behavior.

Some years ago - but not many - the web was a network of personal sites hyperlinked to each other, with ad-hoc communities forming on bulletin boards or Usenet, and then moving private to mailing lists or IRC. This was one of the first realizations of the web as a tool for building intentional societies and gift economies.

We can do this again. We can discover new connections in corporatespace, then move them to more private, intimate platforms. We don’t need to be limited by their artificial constraints. We don’t need our relationships to suffer in the name of analytics.

I’ll be writing substantive works here from now on, though I’ll still maintain a presence elsewhere.