zero to sum

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 […]

Why do governments go after companies and executives of services of more weakly encrypted tools? It’s very hard, this early, to pierce through what’s going on with the French authorities’ arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram — but that doesn’t stop people from having pet theories. Was it retaliation from the US and […]