Sam Liebeskind

Many people have long wondered why the Grateful Dead succeeded in creating a world of Deadheads. It turns out that’s because the people who allocated tickets understood familiar strangers. If you bought a ticket for a Grateful Dead show in Miami, they kept a record of who you were seated near. Then, if you bought a ticket for the Nashville show,... See more

Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of... See more

Structural power isn't always a problem, for instance there is no reason to complain that a game designer will pick the rules of their imaginary world, but there is a large set of cases in which this structural power gives corporations " coercive powers like the state but (...) not subject to the kinds of democratic constraints and accountability... See more

Instead of firing off salvos on social media, find a local problem you’d like to work with other people to help solve. Like most communities, we need trails cleared, litter picked up, funds raised for cheerleading teams and brass bands and animal shelters. In my community, we have programs where residents help elderly neighbors get to medical... See more

Bluesky’s approach to curation is based on the idea that people “must have control over

our algorithms if we’re going to trust in our online spaces” (The Bluesky Team, 2022).

The platform’s support for custom feeds supports this mission, offering “essentially a

farmers’ market of algorithms” (Graber quoted in SXSW, 2025, 54:18). Yet custom feeds

exist... See more

Donnelly and Schrantz are arguing for a major shift: “a long-overdue scaled investment in community organizing around the country.” I agree 100%, especially because I concur with them that how we do politics now, as a purely transactional process of extracting votes from people, has contributed to the crisis of democracy and the allure of... See more