Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Democracy
"When the government can track where you go, whom you associate with, and what you spend your money on, it [...] chills freedom of expression, undermines your freedom to travel, and destroys the fundamental privacy right that underlies American liberty."
AI
Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent to a publisher. Today, Anthropic crawls 60,000.
Democracy
404 Media reveals collaboration between ICE and local police
Democracy
It's going to be a long summer. WIRED has some advice for being prepared.
Notable Links
404 Media reports that the country's major airlines are selling passenger data to Customs and Border Protection and ICE.
Notable Links
[Cameron Faulkner at The Verge] Bounce is a game-changer for the open social web: "Bounce is built on the work of Bridgy Fed, which makes your Bluesky posts visible on Mastodon and vice versa. Using Bounce will bridge your accounts, in case you haven’t already set up Bridgy
Technology
[The Browser Company] Arc is my primary browser, and I'm feeling like that's a choice I should never have made: "The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc — and even Arc Search — were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at
Democracy
[Ava Kofman in The New Yorker] Curtis Yarvin is a pathetic little man: "As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months
Technology
[Andrew Losowsky] Running an open source community platform for a decade is no small feat - particularly one as storied and supported as Coral. Andrew Losowsky's reflections on its first decade are inspiring. "Among so many conversations, we brought commenters into newsrooms to speak with journalists, moderators
Notable Links
[Sahil Lavingia] I personally don't think his decision to join DOGE was defensible, but there are lots of interesting details in Sahil Lavingia's diary of the 55 days he worked there. For example: "I was excited to help in-source VA's software, but I
Media
[Lauren Egan at The Bulwark] If I was Substack, this is exactly what I'd be doing. But then again, if I was Substack, I wouldn't have paid Nazis to post on my network. "The company sees an opportunity. Its employees have been meeting with congressional
Technology
[John O' Nolan at Ghost] This is a lovely reflection on 12 years of Ghost, the non-profit, open source publishing platform that powers independent publishers and allows them to make a living on their own terms. "Over the years, we've focused consistently on building the best