Media
To build the future, we need theories of change
News tends to treat technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid. To better navigate the future, we need to imagine what might come next.
Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
Technology
It's not enough to have better ideals.
You also need to build a better product.
Technology
The community-first software era
Some ideas about how to encode our values into the tools we use
Notable links
Notable links: May 29, 2026
On sustainably building tech that serves humanity.
Technology
"The protocol world has been trying to solve the problem of how to leave, and the next step is working on how we can stay together."
It's not enough to be free. We also need to be in community
Business
To reach your big goal, you need to sell where you're heading next
"You need to sell Point C: the concrete, vivid destination you will take yourself, your team, and your company to over the next twelve to twenty-four months."
Technology
The Fediverse is not a product. It's time to get real about marketing
If projects are going to convince people to try alternatives to Big Tech, they need to do a much better job of explaining why they're better for people who don't care about technical details like protocols and decentralization.
AI
When the AI boom subsides, the data centers will remain. What we do now matters
Data centers are the new factories. How we think about the precedents they set matters.
AI
The Pope used his first encyclical to warn about tech centralization
"When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, [giving] rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities."
AI
Affordances for me, but not for thee
For years, people have tried hard to get websites to build accessibility affordances. Now developers are willingly building them for AI.
AI
Like sunrise over a sink
It appears that the winner of a short story prize was generated with AI. But how was it selected?
AI
Why micropayments can't save news
Why an ephemeral model can't fund relationship-based work