The so-called “copyright war” began years before I joined the fight, arguably in 1999, when defenders of the P2P platform Napster equated music piracy with liberty. Thus, rather than a rational discussion about the interdependence of creators and technology, Big Tech cultivated a syncretic foundation from which to sell the paradox that devaluing individual rights was somehow good for democracy. ...
As of today, the social media platform BlueSky has grown to about 25 million users, which is still a fraction of the 600 million on X, but the recent spike at the former is attributable to people abandoning the latter. After Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter, fired the accountability team, reinstated Trump, and then devoted both X and personal ...
I haven’t posted here since before the election, and admittedly, it has been difficult to resist escapism and simply stop giving a damn. That the United States (and with it the democratic world) is now in jeopardy is not in doubt. Rather, the questions for the moment are the order in which institutions will begin to break and what the ...
It may be true that “democracy dies in darkness,” but it can also be wiped out in blinding light. If Donald Trump is reelected, it will have been 20 years after the launch of Facebook and 18 years after the launch of Twitter—less than one generation for the “greatest invention for democracy” to be the proximate cause of the death ...
This month is the tenth anniversary of The Illusion of More. Specifically, I believe the site launched on August 12, but I did not know what, if anything, I wanted to say to mark the occasion other than to thank readers for following and supporting the blog for a decade. And I am very grateful for that. But in light ...
