As autumn deepens into winter with the first snow of the season here in Detroit, these are recent articles that have deepened my understanding of the world at the intersection of the open web, polity, & learning.
Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
Peter Coviello:
Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003.
Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as normal
Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian:
Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo cafe, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.
“Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet.“Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.”
Toronto ER costs, visits by frequent patients reduced with new housing model
Liam Casey, The Canadian Press:
Preliminary data shared with The Canadian Press show the residents experienced a 52 per cent drop in emergency department visits and a 79 per cent drop in the total length of hospital stays.
“It’s just staggering,” Boozary said. “And it’s just incredibly encouraging and validating for how we need to rethink and act on homelessness across the country.”
DHH and Omarchy: Midlife crisis
Jordan Petridis:
I think there is hope, but it demands more voices in tech spaces to speak up about how having empathy for others, or valuing diversity is not some grand conspiracy but rather enrichment to our lives and spaces. This comes hand in hand with firmly shutting down concern trolling and ridiculous “extreme centrist” takes where someone is expected to find common ground with others advocating for their extermination.
Bluesky’s CEO meltdown: How leadership continues to fail its most marginalized users
Nico Mara-McKay:
Bluesky’s leadership deliberately courted systemically marginalized users and encouraged parasocial relationships with its lead staff. It seemed, for a moment, like this time things could be different.
But that sense of safety and mutual trust wouldn’t last long.
“Productivity”. You Keep Using That Word.
Jason Gorman:
In the average software organisation, so little thought is given to why we’re building what we’re building. And when it is (usually by business stakeholders), those goals are not often communicated to development teams. It’s one of the most common complaints I hear from developers – nobody’s told them what that feature or change is actually supposed to achieve. What problem does it solve?
And this can easily translate into dysfunctions in the organisation of teams. Teams organised around technology stacks and technical disciplines -“front-end”, “back-end”, “database”, “QA”, “ops”, “architecture”, “UX design” – have about as much chance of achieving a business goal as a sack full of ferrets has of changing a lightbulb.
Why I Chose Discourse Over Discord
JA Westenberg:
The Romans had a concept called the cursus honorum, the sequence of public offices that ambitious men would climb. You couldn’t just jump to the top. You had to hold lesser magistracies first, building a track record, demonstrating competence, earning the trust of your peers. The system wasn’t perfect (obviously, given how the Republic ended), but it embedded a crucial insight: power should be visible, accountable, and earned through demonstrated trustworthiness.
Modern platform moderation has none of these characteristics. Someone creates a Discord server and immediately has absolute power over it. Someone becomes a Reddit moderator through random chance or by asking nicely, and suddenly they control a community of thousands. There’s no track record required, no accountability mechanism, no way to remove bad actors unless they violate the platform’s terms of service in especially egregious ways.
What we’ve built, in other words, is a system of tiny dictatorships masquerading as communities.
Scaling Innovation: Building Ecosystems
Hazel Weakly:
The journey to high performance in a community is equivalent to pursuing the art of learning. For an enterprise, that means the enterprise should built towards having and maintaining a culture that seeks to understand itself better.
AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education
Olivia Guest & Iris Van Rooij, Project Syndicate:
The deskilling, denigration, and displacement of teachers and scholars have historically been central to fascist takeovers, since educators serve as bulwarks against propaganda, anti-intellectualism, and illiteracy. Today, AI advocates do not merely assume automation is necessary; they aggressively proselytize their faith, thereby paving the way for techno-fascism.
Europe’s plan to ditch US tech giants is built on open source – and it’s gaining steam
Steven Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNET:
Carrez thinks a better word for what Europe wants is not isolation from the US: “What we’re really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience. Resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source,” he concluded, “allows us to be sovereign without being isolated.”