Notable links: May 29, 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.

Know your Point C

There’s so much packed into this idea:

“You started at Point A. Now you're at Point B. To reach your big goal, you don't just need to paint a picture of the long-term vision. You need to sell Point C: the concrete, vivid destination you will take yourself, your team, and your company to over the next twelve to twenty-four months.”

I’ve worked with so many teams where the Point C is essentially defined as: “continue existing”. And on one level, sure, it may be a good idea to find a sustainable path and keep plugging along. But how are you supposed to rally your team and community around that vision? It becomes an argument for treading water, and worse, a way to avoid making an opinionated decision about where the team should head.

Every team needs a mission (why it exists in the first place), a vision (the world it intends to create), and a strategy (the concrete steps to get there). The Point C is a well-defined, strategic, coherent lily pad on the way to that vision. Corey calls it the next fundable lily pad: what “fundable” means probably varies on your context, but it’s always a big decision milestone for your team.

Not every team finds it easy to know where it’s going. I like Corey’s point about prototyping potential futures, and particularly the way it should be undertaken as a collective activity. Implicit is that there needs to be an underlying “why”: why is this the Point C that this team needs to head to? What will you be able to do from there? Is this anchored in the needs of your community — the people you’re trying to serve? Does it hang together as a vision that improves their lives, serves the needs of your business, and inspires the team who will make it real?

And it’s worth asking: who on your team is empowered to define this? Is anyone? And if the answer is “no”, how might that change?

In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV says AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few

It’s perhaps a sign of how integrated technology is into society that this is a quote from the actual Pope:

“AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data. Small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage, undermining social justice and solidarity among peoples.”

I’m not religious, and had to look up what an ‌encyclical is. It’s a formal letter that the Pope writes to his Bishops and “people of good will”. That he chose to spend his first one talking about the adverse power dynamics and power centralization inherent to artificial intelligence is significant.

“Technology is never neutral,” the Pope wrote. I agree, of course; this is my entire career thesis. I very much appreciate the implication that decentralizing power and focusing on the humanity of individuals and communities is the ethical, moral path. If you’d asked me at any time in the past if I thought it would be something advocated for by the Pope, I would have laughed in your face, but it’s nice to be surprised.

More importantly, this is absolutely a discussion that’s worthy of focus. As technology becomes more and more ingrained in society — with people now making very consequential decisions informed by AI systems, whether they should be or not — how those systems are built, who they benefit, and what achieving equity looks like in a world where they dominate could not be more important. The Pope’s on-side; are you?

Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity—and the Backlash Has Begun

When the dotcom boom came to a crashing end, the companies behind it imploded in sometimes spectacular ways, but the infrastructure they built continued to exist. That in turn laid the groundwork for Web 2.0, the cloud revolution, and everything that came afterwards.

When we think about the AI boom, we should consider what will be left behind: the infrastructure precedents being set that will be with us for a generation. If I was a betting person (I’m not), I’d put money down on the current crop of AI tech companies imploding at some point, with their assets acquired by companies like Microsoft and Google (who already own the majority of data centers). The applications will flounder, but the data centers will remain — and the energy infrastructure that enables them.

As the linked article notes:

“Data centers have always been energy-hungry, but the AI explosion is causing computing demand to skyrocket. The biggest data centers now consume as much electricity as small cities and are proliferating at breakneck speed.”

Data centers now account for 6% of US energy use, and their water use is similarly staggering. 13% of the underlying workloads are useless: zombie processes that have been left running by inattentive owners whose priorities now lie elsewhere. Beyond the environmental impacts, which are no joke, data center consumption is pushing up people’s bills and disrupting communities. And beyond that, they push up real estate costs, with real knock-on effects for communities. It’s no surprise, then, that legislation is being written to limit their growth.

It’s not that we shouldn’t have data centers. But their footprint is enormous, and the effects are sometimes disastrous. We need to consider the effect on people’s quality of life more than the impact to GDP, not least because economic indicators like these don’t actually show if people’s lives are improving.

It’ll be an arms race: developers are considering building distributed data centers into people’s homes, making them harder to regulate. Presumably homeowners will be sold on the upside, but when the market crashes will be saddled with obsolete tech that comes at a cost to them.

My take: require them to be built with self-sufficient renewable energy that pushes excess capacity to the grid and encourage the development of new architectures that don’t require water cooling to the same degree. Outlaw the widespread practice of building data centers using shell companies that obscure their real ownership. And ensure they are taxed robustly nationwide, so that revenues can benefit local communities.

In a few years, when the hype cycle dies down and people understand the capabilities and limitations of AI with clearer eyes, we’ll have a ton of new infrastructure that can’t easily be turned down — and we will have set energy consumption precedents that will be hard to reverse. Now is the time to set the right standards, and for communities to push back against what they won’t tolerate.

The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People

This is worth sitting with:

“The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user.

What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. […] But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based representations of complex content are almost exactly the kind of accommodation that blind and low-vision screen reader users have spent decades requesting from web developers, largely in vain.”

One of the oddest parts of the AI shift is that people are much more willing to do things for LLMs that they should have been doing for human beings all along. Accessibility is clearly an important one: 95% of websites have accessibility flaws, and convincing teams to allocate time for accessibility concerns can be like pulling teeth. But now that similar affordances are required for LLM use, people are leaping over themselves to implement them.

The same goes for specifications and documentation. Often, these have been afterthoughts; policies have been hand-waved rather than concretely written down in ways that people can point to. Sometimes it’s even made explicit that this is to preserve manager optionality. But now that LLMs need more concrete instructions in order to behave well, specifications, documents, plans, and policies have rocketed up the priority list.

It would be beautiful if these needs converged, but as the article notes, the affordances needed by screen readers and LLMs are different. Similarly, documentation and planning documents aimed at an LLM are coercive in nature: they’re designed to force the software to do the right thing, rather than to provide background as to why something is the case.

The simple truth is that there is clearly a perception, in some quarters, that there is a stronger productivity gain from doing this work to serve AI than doing it to serve real human people. That’s quite a dystopian idea, particularly as, even if you don’t care about people with disabilities or your own colleagues, doing those things for humans clearly actually has a real benefit. Making your site more usable allows more people to interact with your work and improves your search engine performance. Writing clear documentation and policies allows your colleagues to spend less time figuring out what to do.

But you can’t measure those things neatly. The cause and effect aren’t immediately tethered; managers don’t see a boost they can cleanly ascribe to this work. In contrast, you know pretty instantly whether the AI you’ve trained on your documentation is doing the right thing.

More importantly, whereas accessibility affordances provide new abilities for vulnerable people, an AI affordance provides new abilities for people with power. And that’s probably the heart of it.

The 'normal' response to the Social Web

An accessible, nuanced piece from Saskia Welch about marketing the open social web, which translates easily to being a piece about marketing any transformative technology.

“Fediverse this, Social Web that, no one cares!

Genuinely, no one cares. And, even if you get them to start caring, they do so in the complete opposite direction we've been heading with our messy, undoubtedly decentralised, marketing.”

When we’re building as part of an open source movement (or any kind of ideological movement), we run the risk of gauging our decisions based on the reactions of the movement itself. It’s easy to say that you can’t build a feature, or talk about your project in a particular way, because the community won’t like it. Fine, but are those people the ones you want to reach? Are you speaking to the converted or trying to find a bigger audience?

Talking to existing believers is fine if you want to gain approval or achieve consensus with collaborators who are already in the tent. It’s next to useless if you want to bring more people in and sell them on why what you’re building is going to make their lives better. It’s also worth saying, as Saskia does, that projects need money to reach sustainability; it’s rare that existing converts are going to be your customers.

Converts are people who want your project to exist because they believe in the cause; they are not necessarily people who want it to exist because they themselves need it. The former group is comforting, but you need to find the latter group in order to survive. And if that group doesn’t exist, your project is dead in the water.

The open social web — the fediverse, the atmosphere, any open standards movement — is not a product. Imagine selling the idea of Bluetooth instead of a great pair of wireless headphones. You set out to buy the headphones; Bluetooth is what makes them useful. Headphones can be designed and targeted for specific groups of people (people who work out, people working at their desk, frequent travelers, etc). If people get used to Bluetooth working seamlessly well, then Bluetooth becomes a feature they look for — but it’s not the thing they look for first.

Really great social media platforms are the product. The underlying standards and tooling are what makes them work. Very few people go to Bluesky for AT Protocol; if AT Protocol then gives them superpowers that genuinely make their lives better, then they might look for other products that support it. Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, et al are the products. The onus is on them to be better than other social media for people who don’t care about the underlying principles or protocols.

The Pope on Defederation

Laurens Hof provides some of the best and most important analysis of the open social web. This piece about how the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical applies to technology movements that seek to take is beyond Big Tech is no different.

“The dominant thinking that decentralisation is built upon has lots to say about the threats of concentrated power, but has little to say about social obligations. Cyber-libertarian tradition can tell you why no one should rule the network, but it cannot really tell you why the individual pieces should be together once it does.”

Pairing subsidiarity with solidarity is smart. The former is the liberartian-esque idea we know: that a larger entity should not affect the freedom of a smaller entity. But that’s where many decentralization projects end. Here, a call for solidarity covers the social contract we all have with each other; something that pure libertarianism often pretends doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.

As Laurens notes:

“What is striking is that the two ecosystems struggle in opposite directions, where the fediverse has subsidiarity without solidarity, all autonomy and no way to govern the commons, and the atmosphere has solidarity without subsidiarity, a commons that almost no one shares responsibility for. The fediverse does not need more servers, it needs reasons for them to act like they owe each other something. The atmosphere does not need better tools, it has those, it needs the autonomy those tools enable to actually be taken up.”

His whole piece is very much worth your time.

25 years of OLDaily

If you’re not in educational technology, it’s possible you might not know who Stephen Downes is. If you are, there’s no way you don’t. For a quarter century now, his daily updates at OLDaily have been one of the main ways people learn about the space; part reporter, part advocate, he’s pushed for an open web approach to education that’s been genuinely influential. And all on one of the very first ling blogs.

My own work on Elgg, which kickstarted my career, was directly inspired by a post Stephen made about a white paper Dave Tosh and I had written about social spaces for learning, 22 years ago:

“[…] The authors' proposal is visionary. "Creation of a learning landscape where learners engage in the whole process both academically and socially should increase the opportunity to build one's learning instead of just being the recipients of information." If your view of portfolios is just something akin to a content management system, don't bother. But if it's the student's personal and continuing presence in an online community of discourse, then you are on to something.”

Twenty five years of this is an incredible achievement — clearly he touched my life, but I’m certain I’m not alone.

As Stephen says:

“Though nothing I have ever written has been as popular as that first Guide to the Logical Fallacies (I could probably have built a career off it), I think that OLDaily has been my most substantial contribution, not the least because it wasn't about me and my accomplishments, but about the wider community that made everything possible. My story really is our story, my history really is our history.”

For open educational technology, there has been no more diligent and influential chronicler.