Notable links: March 13, 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.

Coming Off the Bench for Bluesky

I’m mostly pretty excited about Bluesky’s CEO change. Toni Schneider was the CEO of Automattic for a very long time, and was arguably the grownup in the room. I’ve never met him, but he seems to understand open source and the principles that Bluesky is trying to uphold.

Jay Graber, of course, did an amazing thing. She first wrangled the community that was established to figure out what Bluesky even was, then was the keeper of the argument that it should be an independent entity rather than part of Twitter, and finally marshaled it into a real startup that raised millions of dollars to bring the platform to life. When Jack Dorsey became upset that Bluesky was embracing community safety over laissez-faire decentralization, she weathered that too, and he left the board. These things are hard. I’m glad she’s sticking around as Chief Innovation Officer; my sense is that she’s going to kick ass in tech for a long time.

Toni explains the miracle here:

“I’ll be honest: I was skeptical about decentralized social. The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships, where anyone can build on top of the protocol. But I’d seen enough promising decentralized projects fade or fragment that I had stopped expecting one to get to scale.

Bluesky changed that. Hearing their vision and, more importantly, learning about the architecture they’d built (the AT Protocol) I became a believer. This was a real, scalable foundation for a different kind of internet.”

Over 40 million people use Bluesky. Toni’s job is to add a zero, or find the right person who will — and wrestle with all of the organizational, financial, engineering, and product decisions that lead to that growth. The result will be a significant decentralized platform in social media, a realm where the underlying power dynamics of centralization have led to thrown elections, genocides, wars, and a global rise of fascism. So no pressure! The world needs a change, and I want Bluesky to succeed.

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester

Worth knowing if you think of Proton Mail as being a blanket security solution: in this case it was compelled to provide payment information for an account to the Swiss authorities, who then, via a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, handed it over to the FBI. As a result, the FBI were able to determine the identity of the account owner, an activist who does not appear to have been charged with a crime.

This is also kind of a weasely statement:

“Edward Shone, head of communications for Proton AG, the company behind Proton Mail, told 404 Media in an email: “We want to first clarify that Proton did not provide any information to the FBI, the information was obtained from the Swiss justice department via MLAT. Proton only provides the limited information that we have when issued with a legally binding order from Swiss authorities, which can only happen after all Swiss legal checks are passed. This is an important distinction because Proton operates exclusively under Swiss law.” Functionally, though, the material was provided to the FBI.”

Not every Proton Mail account is paid. But adding payment information can effectively de-anonymize a user. Proton does allow cash payments, which are effectively anonymous; this is in line with tools like the Mullvad VPN, which also allows payments to be made fully anonymously.

BBC says ‘irreversible’ trends mean it will not survive without major overhaul

I hold three potentially-conflicting opinions about the BBC at once:

• The license fee is a regressive tax that is punitive for lower-income people and needs to be overhauled
• While it’s supposed to be independent and representative, its news coverage has sometimes fallen short of this standard
• It is a treasure and must be protected at all costs

Every British household that watches live content is supposed to pay £169.50 (around $225) a year. That’s more than many streaming services — although you arguably get a lot more for your money, considering the plethora of local coverage, stations, and other programs that the BBC supports. It doesn’t represent all of its income, but it accounts for most of it.

“In its opening response to government talks over its future, the corporation said 94% of people in the UK continued to use the BBC each month, but fewer than 80% of households contributed to the license fee.”

Because more households are moving to on-demand instead of live — except, perhaps, for sports and some rare but high-profile events — license fee revenue has fallen. It’s interesting to think about what it would take to reform this funding structure to preserve public service broadcasting in the UK.

There’s also an elephant in the room, which is the intentional gutting of public service broadcasting here in the US. How could the British ecosystem be inoculated — or at least strengthened — against that kind of threat from a future government?

I’m not sure that turning it into a “Netflix for British TV” is the right answer. What might it look like to take a more open approach and turn the BBC into something that doesn’t copy any private company’s business model but is something truly new that meets public service media needs in the 21st century? Could it be more of an operating system that supports new experimentation and different kinds of media? How might it be more radically collaborative and representative in ways that private broadcasters aren’t able to achieve? There’s a lot to talk about.

The Safety Levers

Another really good framework from Corey. Leading with vulnerability gives the people on your team permission to be vulnerable too.

“When leaders frame work as execution, they imply the answer is already known. When they frame it as learning, they acknowledge uncertainty is part of the work.

[…] When leaders project certainty, dissent feels risky. When leaders acknowledge fallibility, speaking up becomes contribution, not challenge.”

Modeling uncertainty, learning, and humility allows everyone to be in growth mode vs approaching their work with a fixed mindset. But it has to be done with intention: uncertainty that doesn’t also come with norms around experimentation, feedback, and accountability just feels like instability.

I’m still growing here myself: in my world, everything is a prototype that can be challenged, experimented with, and iterated on. But providing the clear, structured lanes for people to experiment is crucial — and that intentional structure can be one of the first things to go when things get busy or fraught. Structures and norms only matter if they guide us through every situation and if they’re for everyone.

Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

The results of this study into corporate BS isn’t going to surprise anyone who’s spent much time in an office. The researchers generated meaningless corporate gobbledegook and tested how workers rated its business-savviness.

“Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

[…] Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by “visionary” corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.”

The Cornell report labels this as a paradox, I guess because these people disproportionately liked their supervisors but were also bad at their jobs. I don’t see that as a paradox at all: my bias is that people who think for themselves and are more distrustful of hierarchy are, to be honest, smarter.

I love this sentence:

“Researching BS also points out the importance of critical thinking for everyone, inside the workplace and out. “

Well, yes.

Your Browser Becomes Your WordPress

This is absolutely bonkers. If you’re on a desktop browser, it’s worth trying now.

“With my.WordPress.net, WordPress runs entirely and persistently in your browser. There’s no sign-up, no hosting plan, and no domain decision standing between you and getting started. Built on WordPress Playground, my.WordPress.net takes the same technology that powers instant WordPress demos and turns it into something permanent and personal. This isn’t a temporary environment meant to be discarded. It’s a WordPress that stays with you.”

Using WASM and local storage, an entire WordPress setup is installed in your browser, private to you. I’m curious about how nicely this plays with browser syncing — I’m a Zen user and use Firefox accounts to sync between devices, but haven’t kicked the tires yet. Because I flip between a few devices every day, that would be meaningful to me.

But still: running a web application like WordPress in a browser is a meaningful innovation. Launching it as a product instead of some kind of labs experiment tucked away somewhere also indicates that they’re confident in it. It’s interesting to think about what that might mean for other self-hosted personal applications. To-do lists? CRMs? Source management? Lots of scope for private apps that are entirely based on the web platform. What a neat thing.