We’re moving out of the era of platforms owning people and into an era of people owning platforms—an era in which creators will rightfully demand more ownership, and more say over their relationships with their communities.

There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you want to want.

I grew up with painted billboards and now they are digital. I prefer the painted billboards they were works of art. Digital just isn’t the same.

when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why ... See more

Degrowth is about abandoning GDP [gross domestic product] as the single measure of our progress. Degrowth is also about reducing what is unnecessary.

GDP can be increased by producing what is unnecessary, like private jets. I’m saying, OK, maybe we don’t need these things because that’s only for rich people, and that’s also destroying the planet. S... See more

look at how the word “ community ” itself has been warped in recent years into a cynical marketing cliché to rival “storyteller” — annexed as the torched rhetorical territory of people who live to “move product” above all else.

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people t... See more

No one is going to give you what you want unless you voice it. I now see it less as going out on a limb and more as extending a possibility. If someone is interested, that's excellent. And if they’re not, fine. There's really no harm in trying, because the worst thing that happens is someone doesn't share your vision and you move on.

people still carve out community in the most hostile of places and subvert platforms to create space for human-first desires. We create solidarity infrastructure out of text chains, subvert government control through form submissions, and carve intimate sanctuaries in the comment sections and profiles of algorithmically controlled wastelands. We ma... See more

To reach an internet that cultivates mutual love, we have to move through the hate, pain, and existing preconceptions of what it is for and can be. We have to be able to first imagine, and then, create different possibilities for how technology can bring people together and help us create a better world.