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.
The messages I receive from Micro.blog and Mastodon and my RSS feeds are that everyone is retreating back to their own sites and/or their own domains. Everyone is remembering fondly that twenty-years-ago life. Everyone wants to get away from the algorithm and read the weekly musings of the everyday people. Everyone wants to recapture that feeling o... See more
What I’m proposing asks you to give up the possibility of earning more than you are owed, to instead find satisfaction in reaping exactly what you’ve sown.
To treat the business as an ongoing, regenerative space of offering value and support. To receive returns based on your labor, your contributions, and to center collective success over individua... See more
Above all, people need agency. They need to feel in control. Sometimes, that means designing for subversive behavior. I mean, isn't the most fun often had when you're breaking rules? But this is enormously difficult in software, where you must design almost everythingfrom scratch. Unlike life, you don't get a common repertoire of actions for free –... See more
To start to work toward a sustainable media ecosystem, you must start with the media businesses themselves. These businesses face a daunting task of sorting out competing interests of audiences, advertisers and platforms. Time and again, we have seen platforms make decisions in their own interests that have cascading effects on publishers.
Georgia O’Keefe says “To see takes time.” And in her career, she returned to the same subjects over and over in new mediums, during new seasons, and at different points of her life, finding new details and entire worlds emerge in the same subjects.
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
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.
We do not filter our work through our identity. To filter one’s work through identity labels is to constantly be addressed through that identity, and the work never stands on its own.