Kramer's piece points out that even Discord "is moving closer to offering stock and becoming a publicly-traded company." I was also disappointed to learn recently that BlueSky is headed in a similar direction, following a $100 million funding injection from "Bain Capital Crypto."

Ugh!

Perhaps I was overly optimistic about BlueSky. I mean, it is basically a rewrite ActivityPub, with a few superficial changes. Perhaps if BlueSky really believed in the spirit of protocols, they would work to improve the existing protocol. I am still on the app, but, my hope is dwindling.

In fact, I am still on pretty much all the apps. My defensible justification is mostly related to identity protection. That is, if I deleted my Twitter/X profile, for example, it would open the door for impersonators.

But that security justification often becomes more of a rationalization. When I lose an hour or two in one of these apps, I wonder, "why do I even have this app again?" "How is this helping me reach my goals in any way?" And then I think through deletion, and remember that I want to maintain an "active" account.

As I argue in my book, the "social" components of these "social media" apps have become so dilluted as to make "social media" a misnomer. The apps do not help me connect with people. And if I made a more thorough attempt to answer "why do I even have this app?", I think it would end in someone else's intentions (not my own values or goals).

So my question has become, how do I "quit" without deleting all my profiles and such? I have done plenty of unfollowing, scrubbing, and data exports across varous services. I have what I need from them. If I deleted these profiles, the main thing I would lose is the ability to represent myself on these platforms.

In short, "digital sovereignty" must mean more than just getting off these apps and doing something different. To me, the identity control, and the option to post and represent myself in some (shallow) way, is worth it. So I will not be deleting my accounts any time soon.

That being said, I am trying to build some new habits - I hear it's one of the best ways to kill bad habits! Namely, I am publishing the "text" portion of this website as an RSS feed.

Yeehaw!

Nothing groundbreaking here. Plenty of people have advocated for returning to RSS feeds, and the format dates back to 1999.

What makes sense to me is that I can "post" to an audience that actually wants to read what I have written, however small that audience may be. And I don't have to rely on a massive, for-profit multibillion dollar corporation to make it happen. I mean, my current setup relies on GitHub pages, but the code is all mine and I can move it somewhere else if I want.

Anyway, all this to say: welcome to my RSS feed.

Here is one quote that has made me think quite a bit: "In order to have a public voice, you have to care about something. So figure out what you care about."

Oof!

And he doesn't stop there: "It's not just being against something, and it's not just wanting to have a community. It means having values that make the world make sense."

Double oof! By the way, this is from his piece, "Find Your Voice."

Agre describes a public voice as in between a private voice and a commercial voice. A private voice only prioritizes honesty -- it's just for one's self. The posts here on my website lean towards a private voice, although I've found that the simple act of making a piece discoverable online helps me write (and think) more clearly.

Then there's the commercial voice, which has a "predetermined effect on the audience." A commercial voice tells the audience to do something, but in a way that the audience wants to hear. "Follow this account!" "Buy this book!" "Delete this app!" "Sign this petition!"

One alternative to the private voice and the commercial voice is the public voice. I've been thinking a lot about this concept of a public voice, particularly after a weird experience with posting recently.

I do not make any commission money on my book. I still feel some obligation to promote it, so I put together a series of posts and started dolling them out on Instagram and TikTok. I have over 8,000 followers on TikTok (🤪) from a brief stint of videos I posted during the 2020 pandemic lock-down. Something about being home all day every day allowed me to engage quite differently. I digress...

Anyway, despite those 8,000 followers, my book promo posts have about 150 views each on TikTok. LinkedIn claims my post has over 3,300 views. My Instagram posts also seem to be averaging about 150 views, although my initial announcement did a little better.

I have to remind myself, this is not what I actually care about!

For transparency, audience metrics are alluring. Very alluring. Seductive, even. Maybe it's just the thrill of seeing numbers go up (at SIGCSE this year, someone presented results by saying "the number goes up, so, yay" and I had to contain my laughter). Or maybe our brains have been tricked to receive those numbers as a social signal of some kind.

This creates a kind of dilemma: "You must be extremely online to build an audience, but you must be extremely offline to actually have a thought worth sharing." It is also a dilemma "between visibility and depth... work must be formed in private conviction first, otherwise the demand for attention reshapes it before it knows what it is."

Side note - I came across this post via Taylor Lorenz on Instagram, who shared a screenshot of a tweet, and the tweet had an attached screenshot of the substack post. Truly it has been said unto you, the internet has degraded into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four."

So, back to what I care about. Well, for the book promo posts I have been working on, I am curating vector graphics of 50 or so different mobile devices -- iPhones, iPods, iPads, and some Android devices as well. I always found it fascinating that a few engineers could add a button or change a screen resolution, and then millions of people would deal with that decision every day. I vividly remember following "antennagate" when I was in high school.

When placed in the Instagram grid, the graphics for the iPhone 4, the first-generation iPod touch, and the iPhone 5 all look pretty similar. Instagram shrinks them. It's just another post.

Although I am not an Instagram guru, I know enough about the app to realize that this series of posts will not "do well." They look similar and they contain a similar message ("this app sucks").

What I care about, here and elsewhere, is that the posts are actually quite different. The iPhone 4 was quite different from the iPhone 5! Apple stretched the screen from 960 rows of pixels to 1,136! Apple switched from the 30-pin iPod-style connector to the reversible "lightning" connector! The details...

From what I can tell, apps like Instagram and TikTok do not really care about details, which may be due to the fragmentation in these systems. By designing the feed around individual posts, each post is forced to be its own self-contained story. There is no way to know what kind of post will show up next. There is no way to know what kind of audience will see what you post. It all collapses into the vortex of the feed. If you want to know more about context collapse, time collapse, and relevance collapse, well, my book goes into more detail.

Perhaps this does not answer the titular question, and perhaps it does. It is tempting to make a list of "what I care about," however this does not seem like the kind of inquiry to answer in a list. If I was really forced to choose a single word, I think it would be democracy. If I were forced to choose a single phrase, it would be "the details of democracy," because I mean democracy in a deep and detailed sense: the day-to-day challenges of attempting self-governance and self-determination within a social system designed hundreds of years ago. Our democracy, if we are still willing to call it that, has yet to contend with the realities of the 21st-century. I am especially concerned about a handful of big tech companies managing what we see for several hours every day. That is one attempt at stating what I care about.

It's been said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it seems that the same goes for monopoly power. We saw it happen with oil and tobacco. It happened with steel and railroads. It happened with newspapers, television channels, and phone companies. It happened with computer operating systems. It seems to be happening with restaurants and airlines.

Heck, it happened with tea and spices as early as the 1600s -- they taught me about the Dutch East India Company in public high school!

Perhaps the title of Sally Hubbard's book says it most succinctly: Monopolies Suck.

And yet, here we are in 2026, with a small handful of companies that own and operate almost the entirety of the digital communication industry. Sure, it is technically an oligopoly, not a monopoly. There are a few of them, so the car manufacturing industry may offer a more accurate analogy than Standard Oil.

My book, Algorithmic Media, explores the unchecked power of big tech companies, particularly in the context of digital communication. The chapters discuss communication challenges that arise for three groups of communicators in the "digital town square:" (1) journalists and news organizations, (2) advertisers, and (3) common social connections like friends and family. Here are a few more details.

Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message, and Neil Postman offered a revised version -- the medium is the metaphor. I prefer to say that the medium is a message or a metaphor -- a very important one, just not the only one.

(I am also attached to one other revision of McLuhan, related to the terminology of the "Global village." His idea was that the spread of new media technologies would connect everyone in the world, allowing us to communicate as if we all lived in the same village. Sounds nice. What the big tech oligopoly has created instead seems to resemble a global casino, where elite owners adjust dials to control the flow of different resources. The enshittified town square has a lot more in common with a casino than a real town square -- TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram offer addictive entertainment, through features that encourage compulsive use.)

Back to "the medium is the message." In today's digital communication ecosystem, the medium/metaphor/message in question is often algorithmic. That is to say, the media through which we exchange messages will often use algorithmic processes to determine who receives what messages, as well as when and where they are received. To rephrase McLuhan and Postman, "the algorithm" itself has thus become a sort of message -- a central metaphor in our day-to-day thoughts and decisions.

There seems to be broad (and growing) awareness around "the algorithm" (or "my algorithm") as an influential mediator in our communication. But what exactly does this entail? What are the effects and implications of algorithmic media? And why does it matter?

One important implication of our current algorithmic media ecology is that big tech companies have come to dominate. They own us. Hundreds of millions of people spend hours a day on their screens, only to use a handful of services from the big tech oligopoly: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat are among the most dominant.

Whether the messenger is a news organization, an advertiser, or a friend / family member, there are fewer and fewer guarantees as to how their messages will be delivered. Many people know this intuitively -- your post may or may not reach your followers, regardless of its quality. Cory Doctorow describes this as a breakdown of the "end-to-end" principle. In a service that follows the end-to-end principle, messengers can reliably send messages to people ("receivers") who have willingly chosen to receive such messages.

Some services used to follow the end-to-end principle, for example, when your feed showed posts from people you willingly chose to follow. It was nice! But it turned out to be a trap -- a setup for future enshittification. The typical three-step enshittification, according to Doctorow, goes like this:

1. Be good to users
2. Be good to business customers, in part by abusing users
3. Abuse business customers and claw back all possible value

Here is how that plays out in the context of algorithmic media services.

Phase 1

In phase 1, the communication service works well. It follows the end-to-end principle, such that you can expect your posts will reach your followers, and your feed includes posts from people you willingly followed.

Nostalgia can be dangerous, but sometimes it's worth remembering the good old days. Remember when you opened Instagram, and you got to see posts from friends and family? And you could scroll through the new posts until you saw a picture that you recognized, at which point, it really was a good time to close the app. It was nice, but it was short-lived.

Before November 2013, Instagram did not even have advertisements. In the beginning, before their enshittification, services like Instagram actually worked: they showed your posts to anyone who asked to see them. To use Cory Doctorow's terminology again, the service reliably delivered messages "from willing senders to willing receivers." It was an effective communication tool, attracting millions of active users.

Phase 2

Then came advertising. This is phase 2, in which the feed remains somewhat usable, showing posts from people you followed. But in phase 2 of enshittification, any advertiser willing to pay the price is able to put a post in your feed.

Phase 2 is the key growth period for companies to build up their business clientele. The advertisers have a heyday. As long as the feed is usable (not necessarily good, just usable), people keep using it. In this phase, the owners sit back and relax. All they have to do is get the advertisers hooked. And if your company is bringing in millions of dollars in advertising revenue, it's worth the investment to hire full-time employees whose only job is to make sure advertisers keep up their spending.

You can think of phase 2 like adding a toll to a road, but only after people have become used to driving on that road every day to get to work. Oh, and the alternative roads are no longer maintained. With advertising, the company starts turning communication into a challenge. If you want to reach your followers, you cannot simply publish a post and expect it to appear in their feeds. Now, to communicate with your friends, you need a strategy: multiple posts per day, carefully-selected hashtags, engaging captions, etc. etc. etc. Even then, your message might not reach your intended audience. Welcome to the great audience competition of algorithmic media, may the odds be ever in your favor.

Phase 3

Phase 3 is the current state of affairs. We all know some things are wrong. I can't speak for everyone, but at the very least, it seems like more and more people recognize that these apps suck.

The platform becomes so saturated with advertisements that users develop genuine fatigue. By the early 2020s, Instagram users were seeing about 4 ads for every 10 posts. The only one who benefits in phase three is the technology company itself -- users and advertisers are frustrated, but they have no meaningful alternatives (thanks to phase one and phase two locking everyone in). Instagram is no longer fun, unless you own it.

This third phase of enshittification makes for a structurally chaotic and unpredictable communication ecosystem. The primary goal is no longer to facilitate interpersonal communication, but to keep advertisers paying and keep users coming back -- to build a better mousetrap. Feedback loops emerge that reward a small portion of users while undermining the more balanced, two-way communication that made these services usable in the first place. Pew Research found in 2024 that about half of adult U.S. TikTok users had never posted a video, and the top 25% of users produced 98% of public videos. A similar study of Twitter users found that the top 10% created 80% of tweets.

The monopoly / oligopoly patterns thus show up in multiple ways. We have a few companies that own these apps. And within these apps, there is a select group of users who dominate the attention field. Again, welcome to the audience competition of algorithmic media!

What next?

As I have talked to more people about the topics in this book, I have become more and more encouraged to realize that more and more people are simply fed up with big tech companies and their services. We hate it. We know these apps suck. Maybe that means this book is late to the party. And, maybe, that means we are ready to organize for better media futures.

How do we do that? Perhaps by some combination of public media, public education, real democratic governance, and probably some other changes that will require us to do more than click. I am convinced that we need to keep making a big fuss about how much these apps suck, and why big tech companies are to blame. Technology can still be cool!

But the purpose of this blog post is just to give you a taste of my book, not to solve all these problems. So if you enjoyed reading this post, you might enjoy the full book. If not, well, thanks for your time.

So, when I published a new website that was substantially shaped by Claude Code, I felt the need to share some of my reasoning.

To get a little meta, let me start by saying that drafting (and/or editing) my writing is one of the tasks for which I refuse to use LLMs. I believe writing is thinking -- that is, (I think) one of the best ways to understand what is happening in my brain is to translate my thoughts into language (and/or visualizations). Within this framework, every word outsourced to a generative model is a missed opportunity to strengthen my own thinking.

The analogy of "bringing a forklift to the weight room" has been an effective way to communicate this principle to students. If you don't want to strengthen your thinking, then by all means, go ahead and have LLMs do your writing. And I have to ask, if you don't want to strengthen your thinking, what made you decide to enroll in school?

There does seem to be a difference between outsourcing a thought process and outsourcing a building process. In the case of my website, for example, I have gone back and forth between managing it on my own versus outsourcing it (Ghost, Wordpress, etc.). Writing html is time-consuming. But when I let Ghost handle all the html, I lose some control. It also costs more money, and creates a dependency on their hosting services.

I wanted the best of multiple worlds:

• Quick editing
• File hosting
• Customizable/controllable html
• Fast and lightweight

It's only a little personal website, but ultimately, all technologies are political. So I sketched out my idea for a new website and fired up Claude code. I checked all the outputted html, performed some tests, and kept track of my prompts. For the most part, it felt like working one layer of abstraction above existing high-level programming languages -- for example, I still used html vocabulary (e.g. div, span) to guide the output.

Why all the fuss? Who cares if a website is vibe-coded? Well I do, and if you are reading this, you probably do as well. We are the working-class nerds! We know it's not just about code and control, it's about freedom! And as Eliza Ludd wrote, "curs’d his the man that even lifts a straw against the sacred cause of Liberty." Dare I say, we are the Neo-luddites?

As you may have heard, Claude code is pretty capable. It made the website renovations pretty quick, and eliminated a lot of time that I would have spent searching online for different html and css snippets. Since it is my website, I do feel responsible for the code that is published -- understanding it well enough to maintain it and adjust it without an LLM.

My main hesitation at this point is that Anthropic kind of sucks. They're running on billions of dollars from Amazon and ruthlessly stealing intellectual property wherever they can. This is not to mention their violent partnerships with Palantir and the U.S. military. And don't forget about all the unnecessary resource-hungry data centers!

So, as of writing, I am exploring ollama launch in order to hopefully "get off" Anthropic as well. The struggle continues.

Thanks for reading, fellow nerd!