Not too long ago, I said "Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again."...

Back in the latter part of the 20th century, a lot of subcultures held onto a concept called "selling out", a nebulously-defined idea based on a negative view of compromising one's values or creative expression in the pursuit of money or,...

The Webby Awards have recognized Kevin McCoy and I with their Lifetime Achievement Award this year, for "developing a blockchain powered way for artists to own and monetize digital work, which laid the groundwork for what would be known as...

If a company is debating whether a user's account should be suspended, they've already failed to build a modern platform that follows best practices. Why are today's billionaires competing for control of tech that’s broken by design? It’s unusual to...

Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again. If you had to pick the unexpected...

Here’s how you do it. Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to this insistence on being solely a “neutral” tech company in every aspect of decision-making,...

You can't win unless you know what you're fighting for. Many of the most important and valuable milestones of progress in society have been achieved through compromise and incrementalism. It's no surprise that idea of negotiating a brokered future in...

I've been blogging here for more than 20 years, and the only organizing principle behind what I write here, if anything, is a fascination about how we make culture, and especially how we make culture around, and with, technology. Nothing has...

The key to protecting people's privacy on the internet isn't in trying to stop users' data from being sent to different services, it's in poisoning the well by having user data be so inconsistent, disconnected, spurious or expensive to collect that...

One of the biggest sources of miscommunication is people having different styles of communication, or different norms about the right way to express emotion or context even if there's agreement on more straightforward aspects of verbal communication....

Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his career. Beginning in 1973 as a then-15-year-old Prince taped his first few tracks, and going...

Amongst the many new publications that's popped up in the current newsletter boom, I've been enjoying Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci's "Embedded". One of the biggest reasons why is the recurring feature "My Internet", which details...

After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their account. The social and technical dynamics around Twitter verification remain as fraught and...

Anytime a big new market pops up, people rush in to stake their claims and make their fortunes. Our culture loves creation myths, especially in technology. Fables about lone geniuses are ubiquitous in the tech industry, with their fundamental falsity...

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games ever made, and one of the breakout hits of the Nintendo Switch platform, which is on its way to becoming one of the 10 most popular video game consoles of all time. But now, years...

On this day in 2007, Prince won Super Bowl XLI with a soaring halftime performance that climaxed with the skies opening up to honor his guitar solo. It is not just the best-regarded halftime show ever, but was to that point the most-viewed musical...

It is almost impossibly difficult to explain Robin Byrd to anyone who was not an adult living in NYC toward the end of the last century, though everyone who recognizes the name immediately responds with unbridled enthusiasm. This comes up in...

I love any kind of advocacy for safer, more humane streets, so it was a real joy to get to guest on the wonderful The War on Cars podcast. Doug Gordon went deep, really pushing into the connections and surprising resonances between what makes...

Duleshwar Tandi, better known these days as Rapper Dule Rocker, is one of the most successful and influential rappers to have ever come out of the Kalahandi district in Odisha, where my family is from. I jumped into his catalog of videos this weekend...

A while back, when I wrote out in plain words that we have a politically dominant death cult ruling America right now, I worried about the risks of saying my opinion so straightforwardly. As you might expect, I did get a good number of people saying...

Ted Lasso, the standout series of Apple's new Apple TV+ streaming service, rightfully earned a place on many people's lists of the most-recommended new shows of 2020. But what's best about it is what makes it so different from most other...

About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I hope that sharing some of what I do might help inspire you to manage the technology in your...

Twenty five years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it changed popular culture's relationship to technology. For context, when Windows 95 was...

With authoritarianism at our door, the policies that progressives are driving for will be dependent on whether the fundamental institutions of democracy are protected at all. I believe every vote needs to be earned, and every candidate needs to be...

People are wrong on the Internet every day; generally I don’t try to fuss about that too much. But when Sam Lessin, a former VP of Product Management at Facebook, publishes a wildly wrong recommendation about online identity in a credible media...

A significant percentage of conservative culture in America defines “freedom” as death. This is causing a lot more problems right now than even its usual horrible effects. Some explanation, for those who may not have context. Why do we need to have...

I almost can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the work the Electronic Frontier Foundation was doing on behalf of all of us who care about the impact technology has on society and culture. They describe their work as protecting digital...

Today, for about half an hour in the afternoon, pretty much every app that you might try on your iPhone would likely have crashed upon opening it. It's probably worth understanding why, but more importantly, worth understanding what that reality...

(Warning: this will be upsetting; you will not want to read this if you are already stressed.) [This piece was written in late February 2020, before there was widespread social distancing in place, under the assumption that no such distancing would...

Every day, millions of people rely on independent websites that are mostly created by regular people, weren't designed as mobile apps, connect deeply to culture, and aren't run by the giant tech companies. These are a vision of not just what the web...

We don’t even notice it anymore — “link in bio”. It’s a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web link can be found on that user’s profile. Its presence is so subtle, and so pervasive, that...

I often talk about South Asian people, or how I identify as being an American of South Asian descent. Many folks outside of our communities don’t always know the details of how to understand our identities, so I wanted to share some generally useful...

Even though I watched the medium of podcasting being created since its inception, I'd always resisted a little bit participating myself. I think I just felt more at home in this format, blogging, as that's where I'd found my voice. Well, that might...

This week marks the 20th anniversary of this blog. I thought the best way to observe the milestone, and to try to pass along some of the benefits I’ve gained from keeping a presence online all these years, would be to share some of the most important...

Playdate, the upcoming indie handheld gaming console from venerable software publisher Panic, is really important. But if you don't know the history of where the little company behind this little device comes from, it might be hard to understand why...

About seven years ago, inspired by Caterina Fake's seminal essay about fear of missing out, I wrote a bit about the Joy of Missing Out, and for a little while, JOMO became a thing. It showed up in those "100 trends to watch this year"...

With Janet Jackson's (woefully belated) acceptance into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it's well past time for a broader reckoning with her place in popular culture, and especially the way she's challenged narratives in pop music. To me, her...

“You can’t say anything anymore! You can’t even make jokes!” There’s a constant complaint from people in positions of power, mostly men, who keep making the ridiculous assertion that they’re not able to speak in public. What they actually mean is...

I struggled for a long time when the nice folks at the Heat Rocks podcast asked me which Prince album I’d want to talk about on their show. Oliver Wang and Morgan Rhodes run an amazing podcast, where every episode is a deep-dive into a classic...

It’s always great to reconnect with old friends, and that especially holds true for old Internet friends. That must be why it was such a delight to spend some time chatting with Ana Marie Cox, as a guest on “With Friends Like These“. (And, as we...

Back in November, I got to sit down with the amazing Krista Tippett for a lengthy interview in front of an incredibly warm crowd in Easton, MD. Now, that interview has been edited down and is available as the latest episode of Krista’s hugely popular...

There are going to be endless think-pieces and armchair analyses about why America elected Donald Trump as its next President. But you already know why. Don’t waste a single moment listening to the hand-wringing of the pundit class about Why This...

Everybody’s got advice on what Twitter needs to do at its current crossroads. The answer might lie in revisiting the moment they first broke geeks’ hearts. I took it as a bad sign that Will.I.Am was hanging around backstage at a conference for...

There’s an oddness to working on a project that most people don’t (yet) understand. And the last year (or years!) of working on ThinkUp has definitely been permeated with that oddness. As fiercely proud as I am of the work, as absurdly convinced I am...

In my my latest piece, I wrote about an issue that’s been bugging me for a long time: Asian American men in tech don’t do enough to speak up about inclusion in our industry. Honestly, I think our sexism and our racism against fellow people of color...

We all know tech is excluding most people from participating. But one group is actually over represented. And we’ve been conspicuously silent. The major tech companies finally gave in and published their statistics confirming the stark reality that...

We don’t do nearly enough to examine what it means when we perform common actions on our social networks. These aren’t just guttural, reflexive responses! They are actions with meaning, choices that signify something emotional and expressive, just as...

I’m sick to death of this whole stupid topic, and fighting off a brutal chest cold, so I’m going to ask your forbearance on this piece; It’ll be a little less even-handed and detailed than I usually try to be, and if my language is ambiguous, I hope...

I read my friend Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong To Us straight through; On its surface, this is a book that tells a riveting true (not inspired-by-true, but true) story of two young lovers and the fantastic, farcical way in which they pulled off...

Every single day, almost every mainstream news source in America offers live updates throughout the day on a few metrics which have almost no meaning for most Americans. Whether it’s a radio broadcast, a local TV station going to commercials, or the...

Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Bill Gates as part of a small group, in a discussion focused around the release of his annual letter and the progress that has been made against the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. (You can...

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you’ll give it a...

Oh, hello there! I didn’t see you come in. Well, as long as you’re here, let’s look at some links around the web that I’ve found to be related to what we’ve been talking about here. My August column for Wired, talking about Microsoft’s return to its...

The current fashion amongst alpha geeks is to reinvent many of the building blocks of the social web. Given that I’ve been obsessed with that particular intersection of technology and culture for a dozen years, I should be unequivocal in my...

The other night, we had a wonderful dinner made by chef Tien Ho, who’s best known as the founding chef of Má Pêche (I got to join Ed Levine when he had the meal that inspired him to write on Serious Eats that Tien was then “the best chef in New York...

One of the great struggles in trying to challenge racist aspects of culture is that we’ve moved from overt, obvious, overbearing racist practices to things that are much more nuanced, and which are often the result of bad habits or ignorance from...

Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that indicates he understood much of what I was trying to say here. I’m cautiously optimistic to see...

Update: The students did it! The re-vote from the board yielded a unanimous vote in favor of forming the Coexist club. I’m sincerely thankful to the students, to their advisor Christina Baker, and to Superintendent Bruce Deveney for their leadership...

Apropos of nothing, I’ve become somewhat obsessed of late with the evolution of Eddie Murphy’s career and persona. Some relevant links: An absolutely exceptional interview from 1990 by Spike Lee, from the issue of Spin that Spike guest edited (!) in...

We’re twenty years in to this world wide web thing. Today, I myself celebrate twelve years of writing this blog. And yet those of us who love this medium, who’ve had our lives changed by the possibility of publishing our words to the world without...

Recently, I’ve had the chance to talk to a lot of talented people who are working on new projects or new startups, most of which aren’t really companies yet, but all of which are interesting to various degrees. It’s quite a privilege, to be trusted...

For more than a decade, an intellectually bankrupt habit of maligning new media has reared its head in traditional media outlets, perpetuating a false impression of technology being bad for society. Worse, this tendency masks the actual social ills...

In improvisational theater and comedy, one of the first rules of participation is allowing co-creation. Basically, instead of saying “No, wait!” you respond to your collaborators with “Yes, and…” to continue the conversation and start to create...