I have been worried about the state of FOSS in general and having read these two posts is a good an excuse as any for getting the rudimentary outline of the worry out onto the page.Short version: my mental model of FOSS is that it’s a function of industry and labour surplus:

For many queer, racialized Torontonians, Church and Wellesley doesn’t feel welcoming. As they push for inclusion, they’re also building their own spaces far from the Village.

The Personal Web, to many people, only exists in a select few places. It could be solely sites on Blogspot, or Neocities, or some other adjacent platform, and that to them is the “Personal Web”. However, once you’ve exhausted these places and found the sites that you find interesting, it’s extremely difficult to figure out where to go next—to go to some unknown territory that you don’t even know exists.

A well-organized homepage was a sign of personal and professional pride — even if it was nothing but a collection of fun gifs, or instructions on how to make the best potato guns, or homebrew research on gerbil genetics.

The month that I wrote this, I hope, an awful lot of people woke up to the facts that our climate is getting worse, our existing systems are showing their cracks, and that no one from the top is coming to save us – that those of us at the bottom are going to, as always, need to build the solutions ourselves.

The 19th-century poet, whose verse still resonates with its open-ended sense of how language produces meaning, is a model for a group of Brooklyn coders inventing a more humane computer.

Documents are documents. Books are books, recordings are recordings, and so on. As time has gone on, though, I’ve observed the probably obvious-to-others fact that Lore is the grease between the concrete blocks of knowledge, the carved step in an otherwise impossible-to-scale mountain, the small bit of powder sprinkled through a workspace to ensure sparks don’t fly and things don’t burn. Inconceivably odd to the outsider, but vital to the dedicated or intense practice of the craft.

In which “theory making” is talked about, but tangentially from the side

Teams who try to go remote without putting in place tools, workflows, and norms for asynchronous communication will fail.

In the move to radically reinvent a ‘poetic’ web, I motion to look at the spaces that we have already cultivated. That digital intimacies are not just ‘built’ or ‘resolved’—that the act of cultivating this internet is beyond the hands of any technologist alone: it is in consciousness-raising, recognizing the dwellings and spaces people have already cultivated, and intentionality over what institutions & politics we are modeling this new web after.