Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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Every single one of these titles looks beautiful: I'm excited to put them on my want-to-read list. I don't think I read a single graphic novel last year, and I love them. I'm grateful to Ritesh Babu for putting this list together.
Previous birthday posts: 44 thoughts about the future, 43 things, 42 / 42 admissions, 41 things. This post is in partial answer to Matt Mullenweg’s birthday request for everyone to blog, which is a lovely idea in its own right - happy birthday to you, too, Matt. 2024 feels like a
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Molly White, who has been one of the most important voices on technology and society, has moved her newsletter from Substack to Ghost because of the Nazi problem. As she points out: "To be very clear, we're talking about Substacks that are using swastikas, sonnenrads, and photos
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Pascal was my first real programming language. I'd learned BASIC first, but I never built a full software application in it. Pascal allowed me to build and release software for the first time. It was magical. What I didn't know: Niklaus Wirth was from Winterthur, Switzerland,
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"Your career is not your job. It’s the humans you help along the way." I feel this in my bones. The people who have helped me in my career have made an outsize difference to my life, and I hope to make the same kind of difference
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"Until Substack, I was not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that stated it would not remove or even demonetize Nazi accounts. Even in a polarized world, there remains broad agreement that the slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust was an atrocity. The Nazis did
I don’t want to call these the best books I read last year: I read plenty of other well-written, worthy contenders. But these six titles are the ones that stuck with me and left me thinking about them long after I was done; they were, in that sense,
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Charles Stross on tech oligarchs trying to build the torment nexus: "SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but
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Among other things, this campaign site has a useful list of US retail stores that use facial recognition right now (for example, Home Depot) as well as some that are thinking about it - and some that definitely won't (thank you, Costco). "Your face should not be scanned,
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I really like this exploration of what it might mean to build a sense of ambient togetherness on the web. "We currently have no visual, audible, tactile, spatial, or embodied awareness of one another. We also have no awareness of the other people reading this post, even if they&
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"Of course there will be examples of AI-generated misinformation, bots, and deepfakes during various elections next year. But the key question is how politicians will be using these tools." This is it: misinformation and disinformation threats are not some nameless force. Sure, there are people out there
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"Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media amid the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups that began on October 7, 2023." This includes