Asides
Two posts about writing
Ideas that spoke to me
Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
AI
Are frontier models really too dangerous?
To an increasingly authoritarian regime, the opportunity to shape how models describe the world may be too good to pass up on.
Notable links
Notable links: June 26, 2026
To meet your community where it's at, you need to empower your people.
AI
All you need to poison an LLM is 13 words.
"It really is just that simple. The way that you can attack these systems is usually so much dumber than you think it is, or than you think it needs to be."
Business
To build resilient organizations, you need to empower your team to make decisions.
"That is not leadership. That is control. And it creates dependency, not growth."
Media
Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself.
"In philosophy, we have a term for this: a logical fallacy. And right now, journalism is full of them."
Democracy
Signs you're a dangerous terrorist: using Signal, moving zines
The unusually long sentences criminalize being an anti-fascist activist, reading the wrong zines, and using the wrong communication apps. They're incredibly dangerous.
Notable links
Notable links: June 19, 2026
Preparing for the fastest period of technical change in decades.
Technology
The European Commission falls for openness theater by working with W Social
The European Commission has moved its profiles to W Social. That's a terrible decision.
Media
More people get their news from social media than anywhere else - globally. The platforms we use matter.
"For the first time, social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news."
AI
AI answers are a new vector for election disinformation
For years, people have used social media to seed disinformation in order to swing elections. Now, the answers our search engines and expert systems produce have become more vulnerable.
AI
The honest truth about leaders who want to replace their workers with AI
"The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?” This is a bad CEO."