The book 1.0
Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.
Maria Farrell • We Need to Rewild the Internet
The belief that the Earth is flat is not in and of itself problematic for most people, since most people will never need to circumnavigate the globe. However, the effects on adherents’ social relationships are problematic. The belief both signals and generates frame shear, the lack of mutual intelligibility, with all except those who share... See more
Everyone’s Existential Crisis
We’re looking at what’s going on in the world and using words to help people make sense of it. It’s ultimately a service to the reader — here’s what’s happening out there, why it’s important, and what it means for you.
What my writing is really about
chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.
Everyone’s Existential Crisis
Working notes for Summer of Protocols
Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.
Maria Farrell • We Need to Rewild the Internet

Not a day passes that I’m not reminded of these words from Ric Sluiter, art director of LILO & STITCH. https://t.co/illJ76a41j https://t.co/7jGUzcdLUa
I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:
- Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)
- Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)
- Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing,
nadia.xyz • Reimagining the PhD
Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficiency become the sole metric by which we judge art? Filterworld represents the idea that the messiness of culture can be optimized and that only what is optimized for shareability is worthwhile. I... See more