Investigative essays on corporate enshittification — how the brands you trusted made everything worse on purpose, and who profits when they do.
Enshittification Arises from Enclosure: Open Protocols refuse both - Identity Woman
I am posting this on the first full day of Decentralized Web Camp on July 9th, 2026. TLDR: Infographic! Doctorow named what we’re all feeling Cory Doctorow gave us the word: enshittification and a description of a pattern that keeps happening. His original framing, from his January 2023 Pluralistic post: “First, they are good to […]
Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet
It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes.
Opinion | The Age of Interdisciplinary Slop
The corporate jargon of change masks the decimation of intellectual life.
Making the Case for Actionable Prosocial Design Research
Regulating harmful design is only half the equation — attention must also go toward how platforms can build prosocial design, and toward the research that shows them how.
i am going to solve the cyberpunk discourse forever, part 2: the punks.
“Cyberpunk 2077,” they said, “isn’t really Punk. It’s a Corporate Product, made out of Corporate Greed. It completely Misses The Point of…
Against False Indulgences in LLM Alignment
Unnecessary moral concern, and the false indulgences that drive it.
A programmer's loss of identity - ratfactor
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me. In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be. Everything I wrote there is still true, but amplified.
Value(s): building a better world for all
A bold, urgent argument on the misplacement of value in…
Verification Handbook | DataJournalism.com
This book equips journalists with the knowledge to investigate on disinformation and media manipulation.
Defending my own brain against enshittification
If you haven't had Belvita breakfast cookies, you have probably had Biscoff cookies, which are similar. These are a classic airline snack. You've probably ha...
Science rightly impinges on Virtue Ethics
Iris Murdoch, C. P. Snow, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the role of Truth
Guide to Responsible, Strategic Reporting on Hate and Extremism
Recommendations for researchers, journalists and others on how to avoid unintentionally bolstering extremists and causing additional harm.
On Betraying Principles
Why Creative Commons must be about more than reducing friction on reuse This week, I had the experience of being told the work we are doing at Creative Commons right now is betraying the founding principles of the organization. This is not the first time and it won’t be the last.
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…
‘Shut up and focus on the mission’: Tech workers are frustrated by their companies’ silence about ICE
“I’ve hit my limit of what I’m willing to tolerate”
Tracing the rogue ideology of the frontier labs to their product choices
A drawing of Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Paperclip Maximizer that I commissioned back in 2016 and have had an alarming number of chances to use since This is a...
