Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations
Your Body, Your Feed – Creating a bridge between consent and self-expression - What’s Happening on My Feed?
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in discussion around how adult content currently shows up on our platform. By adult content, we mean content that is usually labeled as pornography, non-sexual nudity, or sexually suggestive content. Labeling adult content (both text- and image-based) is an example of how we empower community members to share more of themselves with folks, without creating a non-consensual experience for other members that do not wish to engage with adult content. To solve this, we want to present you with options and invite you, as a member of our community, to decide how adult content shows up on Blacksky.
Being in a crowd doesn’t make you part of a mindless mob | Psyche Ideas
It’s often assumed people lose their minds in a crowd. Research on riots, festivals and sports tells a more uplifting story
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
Introducing ONCE
Once upon a time you owned what you paid for, you controlled what you depended on, and your privacy and security were your own business. We think it’s that time again.
Custom Feeds Are Not Communities — A Design Theory of Feeds and Commons - Nightflight
The Dystopian Reality of Online Advertising
How to curate your personal canon
"The things won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names. Nothing exists unless I maintain it."
Media Ownership Monitor
Mass media influences how facts are viewed and debated in a society, contributing to crafting its public opinion. Independence and pluralism...
We Need To Stop Calling Entertainers ‘Artists’
Expert in building reliable digital platforms and leading high-impact technical teams. 20+ years experience at the intersection of technology, teams, and learning.
Community by Design
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.
Out of Sight; Out of Mind - Ewan’s Blog
Disability did not become fashionable. Disabled people became harder to ignore.
Credentials, Rooms, and Walls: Mezzanine Meets Composable Trust - Nightflight
A Model for addressing privacy on ATproto
When I first got involved with Northsky social, we knew we would have to eventually address the elephant in the room. How do we proactively protect a community from outside influences without relying purely on moderation? And more importantly, how do we keep bad actors from simply pulling their data straight from a relay?
Ambient Co-presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent
Our autonomy can be compromised by limitations in our capacities, or by the power relationships within which we are embedded. If we insist that real consent requires full autonomy, then virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual. I argue that under conditions of compromised autonomy, consent must be socially and interpersonally scaffolded. To understand consent as an ethically crucial but nonideal concept, we need to think about how it is related to other requirements for ethical sex, such as the ability to exit a situation, trust, safety, broader social support, epistemic standing in the community, and more.