Media
Substack's Secret
"Substack's One Weird Marketing Trick was leveraging the economic interests of traditional media employees against their publishers to get positive "earned media"."
Democracy
The High Stakes of Biometric Surveillance
"There are clear indications from oppressive governments around the world that biometrics will be used to harm human rights, regardless of their accuracy or fairness."
Democracy
The New Surveillance State: Why Data Privacy Is Now Essential to Democracy
"When the government can track where you go, whom you associate with, and what you spend your money on, it [...] chills freedom of expression, undermines your freedom to travel, and destroys the fundamental privacy right that underlies American liberty."
AI
Publishers facing existential threat from AI, Cloudflare CEO says
Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent to a publisher. Today, Anthropic crawls 60,000.
Future of News
When people trust humans more than brands: the incubator newsroom
How we might rebuild journalism from the ground up by rethinking what a newsroom is.
Democracy
Some of those who work forces
404 Media reveals collaboration between ICE and local police
Democracy
Just another Saturday in June.
At the time of writing, the world looks pretty hopeless.
Technology
What is open source?
Why the idealistic promise of collaborative software often falls short of its potential.
Democracy
How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance
It's going to be a long summer. WIRED has some advice for being prepared.
Fediverse
Welcome to the new Werd I/O
I relaunched my website on Ghost. Here's why.
Notable Links
Airlines Don't Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS
404 Media reports that the country's major airlines are selling passenger data to Customs and Border Protection and ICE.
Who's reading Werd I/O? Community survey 2025
I’m grateful that people stop by and read my posts. I think I’m really lucky. Thank you! I love writing here, but I’d love to know how I could serve you better. So every year I ask my readers to fill in a short survey. It doesn’