It's almost as if corporate social media was a machine built to eradicate progress by putting it on an equal footing with oppression. But who benefits from such a system? Hmm....

I do have some bad news. Right-wing actors are also using corporate social media to spread disinformation and to bolster oppressive discourses. There are many papers focusing on them, although everyone seemed to be surprised by them around 2016.

I'm reading a lot (A LOT) of scholarship focusing on corporate social media from the past 20 years and I have very good news: at the rate that individual influencers and small groups are disrupting oppressive hierarchies and bringing about new ways of living, we are going to live in an […]

why oh why is there a man who drives around my neighborhood ringing a loud-ass bell to alert us to his blade sharpening services? this isn't 1923.

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] The lack of corporate social media involvement in the SocialWG’s work was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the group was free to conceptualize social media in any way they saw fit without having to address the particular […]

This sentence isn't merely a run-on, it's a comma splice.

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Today, the argument for defederation to protect the covenantal fediverse is strong – so strong, in fact, that Mastodon’s developers built the capability to easily block entire swathes of the fediverse into the code. This […]

It's time for Rifftrax (Rifftrax)

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Degrowing federated social media will require cutting through clouds and imagining futures past the current way of thinking, finding alternatives to the dominant, corporate social media approach […]

Every news article about business leaders and/or social strife should mention that a cabal of billionaires and their trillionaire buddy are currently and explicitly trying to accelerate social collapse so they can be neofeudal kings in digital paradise forever. I dunno, seems like important […]

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] These patterns have happened on Mastodon and the fediverse for years. In 2022, during the height of the Elon Musk-provoked migration from Twitter to Mastodon, philosopher of technology Johnathan Flowers observed this […]

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] In 2015, there was a tremendous amount of anger over Facebook’s emotional contagion study. Facebook researchers partnered with academics at Cornell and the University of California—San Francisco to study how emotion-laden […]

My latest post in my "Year of the Content Creator" series, where I show my work for my next book, is live. The year is 1998, and a familiar figure emerges: the individual content creator. But, much like today, the individual content creator has a fraught relationship with larger entities, and […]