Rather than hold on to technostalgia for a time when it wasn’t this bad, sometimes it is worth asking what it would take to uninvent social media, so that we can chart a course for the web we want—a web that promotes democracy, knowledge, care, and equity. Otherwise, every unexplained decision by tech companies about access to information potential... See more

Our preparation for rolling the network out included a survey of the community about local civic engagement and a mapping of existing civic groups—both helped us identify potential partners and build an understanding of civic life in the community. This fact-finding and coalition building, along with prior work, informed our approach to building an... See more

Despite the popularity of analogies comparing social networks to casinos, the best metaphor for our current cultural anomie, or at least the part that’s shaped by the internet, may be the shopping mall. A core principle of 20th-century mall design, which has since spread to a much wider variety of spaces, was a type of environmentally-induced diso

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