Media
Substack's Secret
"Substack's One Weird Marketing Trick was leveraging the economic interests of traditional media employees against their publishers to get positive "earned media"."
Notable links
Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Democracy
The High Stakes of Biometric Surveillance
"There are clear indications from oppressive governments around the world that biometrics will be used to harm human rights, regardless of their accuracy or fairness."
Democracy
The New Surveillance State: Why Data Privacy Is Now Essential to 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
Publishers facing existential threat from AI, Cloudflare CEO says
Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent to a publisher. Today, Anthropic crawls 60,000.
Democracy
Some of those who work forces
404 Media reveals collaboration between ICE and local police
Democracy
How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance
It's going to be a long summer. WIRED has some advice for being prepared.
Notable links
Airlines Don't Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS
404 Media reports that the country's major airlines are selling passenger data to Customs and Border Protection and ICE.
Notable links
Bounce lets you move your followers from Bluesky to Mastodon
[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
Letter to Arc members 2025
[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
Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America
[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
What I've Learned from Ten Years with Coral
[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's DOGE diary
[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