Werd I/O
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Notable Links

Can J.D. Vance's Populist Crusade Succeed?

[Matt Stoller] "So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing

18 Jul 2024

Technology

Taboola + Apple News? No thanks

[Om Malik] "Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy." This move says a lot about modern Apple, but more

18 Jul 2024

Media

News CEOs and the Question of News Experience

[Richard J. Tofel] "I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance of

18 Jul 2024

The Silicon Valley Would-Be Vice President

JD Vance is an obvious, bald-faced opportunist. It makes sense that Trump would pick him as his Vice Presidential candidate; they probably understand each other quite well. It can’t have hurt that a bevy of tech billionaires told Trump to pick him, and it’s not unreasonable to assume

18 Jul 2024

Technology

Ethicswishing

[Robin Berjon] This is somewhere between a call to action and a wake-up call: "If you wish to be moral, you have to also pay attention to whether what you're doing actually works. And the best way to do that is to set up a forcing function

17 Jul 2024

Innovation in news is an oxymoron

If you’re waiting for permission to build something, or if you want to see how well something has worked for your peers or competitors before you implement it yourself, you will never, ever innovate. That’s the trap that news media seems to be in: nobody wants to be

17 Jul 2024

Todoist is really good

I’m, uh, very bad at task management. I wouldn’t want to pathologize, but I’ve never been a particularly organized person. I’ve always aspired to be more organized, but I’ve never found a tool or a methodology that really works for me. They were either too

17 Jul 2024

15 books that made an impact

I really like Lou Plummer’s list of 15 books which made the most impact on him, which I discovered via Tracy Durnell’s own list: I think you can figure out a lot about a person if you know what books have had the most impact on them. At

11 Jul 2024

Technology

Introducing Plausible Community Edition

[Plausible Analytics] "We’re real people who have rent to pay and mouths to feed. We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team. If we cannot

10 Jul 2024

Climate

‘It’s about survival’: Athens mayor focuses on getting capital through extreme heat

[Helene Smith at The Guardian] "Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s top priority is simple: ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already

10 Jul 2024

Fediverse

Substack rival Ghost federates its first newsletter

[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch] "Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that

10 Jul 2024

Education

Rural Republicans Pushing Back Against School Voucher Expansions

[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica] "Voucher advocates, backed by a handful of billionaire funders, are on the march to bring more red and purple states into the fold for “school choice,” their preferred terminology for vouchers. And again and again, they are running up against rural Republicans like Warner, who

10 Jul 2024
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Werd I/O explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. It's independently published by Ben Werdmuller, reader-supported, and always free to read.