Notable links
Notable links: May 1, 2026
AI and society; and sustaining innovation has failed us.
Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
Fiction
IndieWeb Fiction Carnival: May 2026
This month's prompt is "sticks and stones will break my bones".
Technology
Matt Mullenweg thinks WordPress is in decline. He may be right
When open source becomes a bureaucracy, it stops being able to innovate. For a product, that can mean death.
Business
Product-shaped or movement-shaped?
People love your work because of its impact, not how it works.
Business
Building with love, and paying for it
How do you fund work people don't want to pay for?
Technology
That terrible Signal exploit has been fixed. We have journalism to thank for it
"Apple’s fix means iPhones should no longer save copies of deleted messages from Signal or other apps, and Apple said the patch also purges already saved and related notifications."
Music
All You Fascists (Bound to Lose)
A collection of Woody Guthrie covers
Democracy
Sustaining innovation has failed us. It's time to think more radically
Some innovations create a new future that serves people better. Some sustain the status quo. It's time to think more radically.
AI
AI is not a magic wand and it won’t fix your problems
Without investment in people, processes, and working conditions, AI becomes merely "a technological smoke screen for deeper institutional decline."
AI
The world is not a database
One of the most important pieces of AI commentary: "software brain" is important to understand if we want to get through this era with our humanity intact.
Notable links
Notable links: April 24, 2026
Data and electronic civil rights in wartime; building safer creativity at work.
Technology
In wartime, megascale data centers may make way for distributed architectures
"To avoid collateral damage, countries consider ditching giant server hubs for smaller, distributed ones—especially now that military and civilian data live side-by-side."