Ben Werdmuller
  • About me
  • Let's build together
  • Notable links
Sign in Subscribe

Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

You (Yes, You) Should Start a Mailing List

If you own your relationships with your community, you'll never be locked into any platform. Start a blog, start a mailing list - get out of the algorithmic content game. This is even more important if you make a living from your work. Parker is right on the

03 Jul 2023

'Environment is burning', warns UN rights chief

Plenty of people argue that the climate crisis is overblown. I think they're wrong. If anything, we need to be screaming about this more - and, I agree, calling out the deniers and green-washers. Billions of people will starve. Entire nations will become uninhabitable. It's not

03 Jul 2023

Licensing site content using a text file

Dare Obasanjo, over on Mastodon: Robots.txt needs an update for the 2020s. Instead of just saying what content can be indexed, it should also grant rights. Like crawl my site only to provide search results not train your LLM. Call it license.txt. The robots.txt standard allows a

03 Jul 2023

View of 'man as hunter, woman as gatherer' upended by new study

So much of gender essentialism is self-feeding: the idea that men are born to be aggressive hunters was conducted by men who made assumptions based on contemporary societal sexism. Of course women hunted. Of course grandmothers hunted. There's so much value in re-examining the prejudiced assumptions of the

03 Jul 2023

Eigg Electric

This seems like what a part of the future looks like: the island of Eigg has its own power, generated by renewable energy. Members of the community are trained and paid to maintain it. A power grid is not a bad thing for resiliency (see Texas), but I can imagine

03 Jul 2023

A Teenage Girl Is a Funhouse Mirror

I love this kind of short story: small, personal, revelatory. I wish I could write like this.  #Culture [Link]

03 Jul 2023

Why I post links without context

I’ve worked alongside news and journalism for a long time - since helping the team at Latakoo to define and build their first products that helped journalists with networks like NBC News send video back to their newsrooms using commodity internet connections. But the last few years have marked

03 Jul 2023

Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence

““Language skill indicates intelligence,” and its logical inverse, “lack of language skill indicates non-intelligence,” is a common heuristic with a long history. It is also a terrible one, inaccurate in a way that ruinously injures disabled people. Now, with recent advances in computing technology, we’re watching this heuristic fail

02 Jul 2023

King of the Netherlands apologizes for country's role in slavery on 150th anniversary of abolition

“King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands apologized Saturday for his country’s role in slavery and asked for forgiveness during a historic speech greeted by cheers and whoops at an event to commemorate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Dutch colonies.” Now do Zwarte Piet.   #Society [Link]

01 Jul 2023

Policing misinformation

“In general though, I think we should tread lightly.” This piece captures my opinion on the subject well.  #Media [Link]

01 Jul 2023

TwitterMigration

The notable list: July 2023

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know! Books Fiction How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Not what I thought it was going to be. An early chapter was so heartbreaking that I

01 Jul 2023

What the 303 Creative vs. Elenis Supreme Court decision means for LGBTQ+ rights

““Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion.” A reprehensible decision. #Democracy [Link]

30 Jun 2023
See all
Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Writing at the intersection of technology, journalism, and community.

Recommendations

  • Elena Rossini
    Elena Rossini
    news.elenarossini.com

    Elena Rossini is an Italian filmmaker, photographer and activist. Her work focuses on issues of media literacy, digital sovereignty, and harnessing the power of the internet for change.

  • Relay, By We Distribute
    Relay, By We Distribute
    newsletter.wedistribute.org

    A weekly newsletter about the open social web. We Distribute is the best website about the next generation of social networks - their newsletter is a regular dive into what's going on.

  • Internet Exchange
    Internet Exchange
    internet.exchangepoint.tech

    Feminist perspectives on digital justice and tech from some of the most important voices in ethical tech.

  • When The Going Gets Weird
    When The Going Gets Weird
    newsletter.mathewingram.com

    Mathew Ingram, a longtime journalist whose bylines have chronicled the intersection of journalism and the web, shares links that interest him.

  • Point C
    Point C
    pointc.co

    Corey Ford has been a mentor and friend for over a decade. His advice changed my professional life, and now it can change yours, too.

Ben Werdmuller
Mastodon
Bluesky
Threads

Subscribe to new posts

Ben Werdmuller explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. Always independently published, reader-supported, and free to read.