Notable links: April 24, 2026

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

The Technological Republic, in brief

Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote a book last year called the Technological Republic, but perhaps because it didn’t have the impact he hoped, the company posted a tweet thread (and LinkedIn post, etc) that summarizes its core points. Which are, to be clear, an argument for hard-right nationalism — complete with remilitarization and implied cultural hierarchy — and fusing Silicon Valley with the national security state.

In Karp’s world, Silicon Valley innovators have an obligation to build weapons through a kind of moral debt to the country. He also wants to see Germany and Japan re-militarized, escalating tensions that will see his company make more money through those arms sales — particularly as his manifesto declares that AI weapons, exactly of the kind he happens to sell, are an inevitable future of military action.

He says we should be more tolerant of billionaires and scrutinize their private lives less, while being less tolerant of other cultures. He declares that no nation has advanced progressive values more than the US (a tough sell in itself), but then recites a litany of anti-progressive ideas. He takes time to defend Elon Musk by name.

He also furthers the idea that people who further progressive ideas are some kind of “elite”, instead of what they actually are: people from all slices of life, including working class unions, who want to have a more inclusive, more peaceful society.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has a great Bluesky thread that lays out the issues plainly:

“Point 21 is the giveaway, some cultures produce "wonders," others are "regressive and harmful." Once you accept that hierarchy, you've quietly been given permission to apply different standards of verification to different actors. The form of verification stays, but the democratic function doesn’t.

This is what verification looks like once national identity sits above method. Rigorous when it's pointed at adversaries, conveniently absent when it's pointed at us. Symmetric, evidence-led investigation of allied conduct, exactly what Bellingcat does, becomes the thing the worldview can't tolerate”

In short, I find this offensive, often contradictory, and terrifying in equal measure. It makes clear that Palantir, its associates, and companies like it (Anduril, for example) are a threat to a democratic, peaceful, inclusive society. There’s no point in being cautious or pulling punches; it must be opposed.

“Data embassies” and safeguarding digital assets during wartime

Among the targets in the war between Iran and the US have been data centers. AWS was hit by drones, and Iran has threatened to target US tech. This piece makes the point that these buildings don’t just store vast amounts of civilian customer data: increasingly, they store military data, too. That make them an even more attractive target and makes the security consequences of an attack that much worse.

Meanwhile, data centers — including here in Pennsylvania, where I live, as well as Chile, India, and many other places around the world — have been the cause of significant objections from local populations. They push energy costs up, have a serious environmental footprint, and can even change the local climate.

So why have these giant megascale data centers at all?

““It’s very possible that we see a move away from hyperscalers to small data centers for greater safety,” [Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford] said. “Lots of small data centers with randomly distributed backup copies of data are more resilient – but harder and more complex to build, more costly to maintain, and less effective, as data needs to be kept up to date not just in one or two centers, but in many.””

The latter half of Mayer-Schoenberger’s claim is true if we cling to the same architectures. But if we embrace more decentralization on the architectural level as a founding premise, some of these inefficiencies become less of a problem. It could even be worth it to companies like AWS to build new underlying services that make decentralization easier: abstractions that allow data to be sharded across distributed data stores, and that make secure communication between distributed nodes easier.

That’s clearly necessary if we move to smaller data centers: a smaller venue can’t simply hold a copy of all the same data as the larger ones but in more places. It also opens up the possibility for mesh application layers rather than the monolithic mainframe-style architectures we’ve mostly seen on the cloud. Behind the scenes, cloud services are a sea of proprietary micro services and components; building more distributed architectures could more easily allow each component to be built, hosted, and supported by different entities.

Regardless, the change is an interesting thing to think about, and the cause for it is sobering. What does data infrastructure look like in an increasingly antagonistic world — one with more war, accelerated climate change, and authoritarian threats? Those considerations will need to be built into the internet at a backbone level, and into its applications from the ground up.

Flare Before You Focus

Corey Ford’s advice on separating flaring and focusing is something I draw on every workday: it prevents self-editing, allows more creative ideas to flourish, and helps enforce a more rigorous creative process. But as he points out here, to encourage curiosity on your team, you’ve got to model it yourself.

I have been in this meeting so many times:

“Two people, both in Focus mode, talking across each other, each trying to prove they have the sharper analysis. Everyone in the room thinks they're having a robust debate. What they're actually having is two monologues masquerading as a conversation. […] They're asking themselves, How do I make sure everyone knows I'm smart?”

The thing is, when everyone is coming into a brainstorm with genuine curiosity, and when everyone has the right to share and ideate without the outcome being predetermined, it’s genuinely more fun. It’s certainly more inclusive. And when it’s both of those things, you get more interesting ideas. If you “yes and” those ideas and model what it looks like to build with curiosity, you get more of them. It’s a virtuous circle.

Conversely, if you’re coming in with predetermined ideas, or you set the tone of a meeting to be evaluative rather than collaborative, people won’t speak up. The output becomes monocultural. Or, at its worst, you get the kind of posturing that Corey described above: a culture where people want to be recognized for being smart rather than helping to get to the best possible outcome.

It helps to be genuinely curious; playful; maybe risk being a little bit unserious. Then people start to loosen up, and that’s when the good stuff starts coming.

The Content Management System Is Dead. Long Live the Context Management System.

I thought this demo, by Hacks / Hackers founder Burt Herman, was pretty compelling. It’s obviously a proof of concept, but it points to some interesting places journalism could go, and it opens up some new platform questions in the process.

In Burt’s vision, the reader has a profile that expresses their interests, and then the newsroom curates material that is surfaced using that lens. His demo makes that more concrete: here he’s pointed an engine at communications from New York City Mayor Mamdani’s office, and set up personas like “renter in Bushwick” and “parent in Park Slope” that are served a briefing drawn from different information depending on that persona’s particular lens. A parent in Park Slope receives more information about schools in that neighborhood; a retiree in the West Village receives information about their neighborhood but also about services that pertain to them.

You can easily imagine how this might scale up to a newsroom. An engine like this doesn’t have to be limited to source material as in Burt’s demo: it could also be journalistic investigations, interviews, and net-new content created by skilled reporters. In some ways it’s a vision for a better homepage (often among the least-visited parts of a news website) more than a redefinition of journalism itself, except in the sense that surfacing more raw material is welcome.

There are so many interesting questions to consider — many of which dovetail with ideas that have been tackled outside news for years.

For example: if a reader creates a profile, where does that live? Is it on the news website, in which case they have to create a new profile every time they read another site? Or does it live in the browser, so that the user creates their profile once and consents to share it with the various sites they read? People have been working on browser-based identity, and now identity for agentic users, for a long time. It may make sense to apply that work here.

Where should the briefing live? Is it a news website’s homepage, as I’ve surmised above, or is it actually also at the browser or news reader level, drawing not just from one newsroom, but all the newsrooms a user reads? And if it’s the latter, how does the newsroom retain credit, get compensated, and build a first-party relationship with the reader?

I also think there’s an obvious business model here: when a user has created a profile for themselves, it’s just as easy to say that they’re in the market for a car, or that they enjoy single-origin coffee beans. Then you can serve useful sponsored content (like deals) to people who actually want to buy those things, which is both significantly more valuable to an advertiser and more consensual / less adversarial for a reader. It brings newsrooms very close to the Customer Commons ideas that people like Doc Searls have been talking about for many years.

I agree with Burt’s warning here:

“For publishers and journalists who ignore this: Don't be surprised when human readers stop coming to your websites and mobile apps. Not because the journalism is bad, but because it's more efficient to send an AI agent to gather what you've published, sift out what's truly relevant to the user's own context, and reassemble it in whatever format works best for them.”

What might a version of this future that centers reader needs but does it in alignment with the newsroom’s needs and values look like? It’s a good time to start experimenting.

Launching XOXO Explore

I freaking loved XOXO, the experimental festival for independent artists and creators from the internet. I attended the first one during a fraught, stressful, often sad period of my life; I’d ripped my life up to move to the US to be nearer to my terminally ill mother. I thought I knew where my life was going, and then everything was uncertain.

And here was this joyful festival of people doing things on their own terms, in their own way. I attended with my partner at the time, who was visiting back from the UK, and we discovered Portland itself in the process. We played Johann Sebastian Joust with Dan Harmon. Ben Brown, who I had followed for years, silently sidled up at an arcade and played the 1990s X-Men cabinet game with me. We had a beer with MC Frontalot. And felt home in a way I desperately needed to.

Clearly, a ton of work went into this archive site, which contains almost every talk. (One in particular was too sensitive to record.) I’m grateful that this exists. I can relive Maggie Vail and Jesse Von Doom’s CASH Music talk; relive one of my childhood heroes, Tim Schafer, talking about his work; and see talks from years I couldn’t attend by people I am in awe of like Molly White and Erin Kissane. It’s really worth plumbing the archive; it’s all good stuff.

It can’t show me the absolutely insane Q&A with the Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared team ("...How?" "Because!"), or remind me or chatting with Cory Doctorow, or let me cuddle a baby goat again. But I can remember. And this is a lovely start.

Bonus link: here’s how I wrote about the first event at the time.

Copyright and DMCA Best Practices for Fediverse Operators

A useful guide for anyone who is running their own community space — which includes folks running Mastodon instances, Bluesky hosts, RSS services, and so on. As the author explains in the preamble, there’s the potential for “massive, unpredictable financial liability”. It’s therefore really important to find ways to limit risk.

A lot of this is common sense:

“Finally, make sure that nothing you post or advertise actively encourages copyright infringement. For example, don’t post examples of users uploading copyrighted music or video without permission, or insinuate that your server is a good place for infringing content.”

Some of it is less obvious but still important. For example, responding promptly to DMCA notices — and not ignoring them regardless of technicalities — is one place where a less-savvy operator might fall over.

It’s easy to imagine compliance as a service for these kinds of operators, baked into the platforms themselves. So if you install a Mastodon instance and you could be subject to US law (which isn’t limited to instances operating in the US), there could be an easy way to set up with a service to handle all that for you. It could sit right alongside trust and safety services that are more aligned for community safety.