Pavel Durov and the BlackBerry Ratchet

I didn’t have a great time when I started at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was my first office job in the US (I think I’d got an SSN barely weeks beforehand) and there was a lot to culturally absorb. My predecessors as EFF’s sole activist were Cory and Ren Bucholz; big shoes to fill. […]

I’m not fond of Twitter as a communicative form — I still believe that the question “what if we put everyone on the same IRC channel?” was one that we didn’t need to run an experiment to answer. But I am enjoying having multiple reincarnations of Twitter, from the individual yurts of the Fediverse to […]

Continuing the Old Hippy mulling: instead of just trying to make old fires spontaneously light again using the same old ashes, my thought is — how do you find a role for the values, for the insight, and keep that in a place that preserves the best of it? I wrote about this a fair […]

Around about 2000, I began to consider how it would be, when and if I became an Old Hippy. Old Hippies had been a common part of my cultural heritage ever since the Eighties, when it was generally understood that they were terrible embarrassment to everyone — including, somehow, hippies. They continued to wear the […]

I didn’t write for a bit. The world doesn’t end; I still get paid; it’s all good. Also, I had no opinions to speak of. Well, that’s not true. For instance, if I took a moment, and I might soon, to write about the fading away of the arcane knowledge of the link. (As a […]