internet
Call for abstracts: Rewilding the Web: diversity and resilience in digital infrastructure
This workshop will bring together ecologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and technologists to discuss how contemporary insights from theoretical biology and ecology can provide a richer understanding of what makes for a thriving biosphere, and how this might provide inspiration for cultivating sociotechnical infrastructure that is more resilient against co-option by monopolising tendencies.
Over-Filtering The Internet
Despite many, many failed attempts to do so, people keep trying to filter the internet. Let’s look at the lens of the current moment through past attempts—including one led by, of all people, a librarian.
Presenting our Ecology of the Internet ideas at Aarhus 2025
Presentation at Aarhus 2025 on Internet ecology, proposing AI-driven software diversity to fight protocol ossification and create more resilient networks.
Steps towards an ecology of the Internet
Paper exploring biological ecosystem models as inspiration for Internet architecture evolution towards trillion-node scale at Aarhus 2025.
They paved paradise and put up a bunch of slop
Bluesky, Fedi, and making centralisation modular
LLMs are DRM for information
Taking A Mile
The risk of the open internet is that someone will exploit your well-intentioned openness thoughtlessly. That’s how the internet slowly stops being open.
Several people are typing...
The Web App Switcheroo
In its quest to do as little as possible to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple randomly kneecaps web apps. Also: Am I sending this newsletter to fake people?
The Modem Tax
How a real-life attempt to charge online services for using the phone line became an infamous internet legend. The “modem tax” was a chain-mail boogeyman.
Let The Internet Be Grimy
Meta’s take on mimicking Twitter feels like it was built for brand safety first, and you don’t get fulfilling internet experiences when you build for brand safety first.
The Next Chapter
Online culture sure feels like it’s in a transition phase, doesn’t it? In an attempt to understand what we learned this week, let’s compare it to some prior internet-era shifts.
Surfing Upstream
In an era when hundreds of free web browsers exist, Orion Browser has a novel idea: It wants to charge money. Why’s that? Simple: It wants to fix the paradigm.
Source Tags & Codes
The saga of the Missouri governor reflects a failure by the powerful to embrace curiosity—curiosity encouraged by the HTML language he fails to understand.
Tab It Your Way
How the power-user web browser Vivaldi has managed to maintain a flexible design philosophy in an era when so much is decided for you online.
Dr. Koop’s Digital Korner
How famed U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, at the age of 82, became an internet entrepreneur, and why his namesake website burned out, fast.
By Our Powers Combined …
How the webring became the grassroots tool of choice for sharing content online in the ‘90s. The concept was social media before media was social.
FTP Fadeout
The beating heart of the early internet may have been FTP, or file transfer protocol. But after 50 years of mainstream use, its demise may be imminent.
News In Small Bytes
Newspapers said they wanted to protect the print product, but they were raring to go when it came to experimental online news approaches in the early '80s.
We Were Promised Skynet
Satellite internet was once seen as a holy grail of connect-anywhere online access. It hasn’t worked yet, but the promise is closer than ever.
Now You’re Playing With Power
How I found home networking nirvana with a powerline connection, a form of home networking that might be called poor man’s ethernet. No drilling involved.
Browse Minimally
Perhaps the problem with the modern web browser is that there’s just too much stuff. What if we cut things down to the bare minimum?