social fractals
These past few weeks have been hard. Hard to keep up with, hard to stomach, hard to assimilate, and hard to find a pathway forward. It's designed to be hard. The intent is to cow those of us who would be cowed; thrill those of us who would
movements
Once upon a time, I looked for missing books at my college library. I had one of the best finding rates of anyone that had that position before me, and for years after (footnote). The secret to my success was in looking for each book as though it were a
social fractals
We won't get a chance to fix systems if we can't touch them.
And I truly mean zero. I've done what I can to block AI scraping, build my own graphics, and write every word...often three or three dozen times. 😂 The information architecture is my own (better be, since I consider myself an information architect). I even do my best
A habit of intentional design is the gravity point of building trust for what's new. Humanist design is the gravity point of real loyalty.
Current information technology hardware functions on a binary substrate of ones and zeros translated to electric gates (highly simplified!!), with lots of programming layers between that substrate and the code. That code controlling the hardware is something most of us don't understand. Over that, we're layering
Basic mechanics of information literacy explained: transparency, traceability, replicability, accountability.
Information technology — internet, genAI, software, all of it — is stuck. I’ve heard more people in the past month want to walk away from using what they consider irredeemably broken tools than I had the three years previously. The first time I heard it was from a developer, complaining around
humanizing information: literacy, social fractals, function/abstraction, and design concepts
As more companies move to "determined algorithms", we need to talk about deterministic software. It's been around. We have some people enamored with it, some people angry at it, and lots of tangled meanings. That means that we all have to be careful about packing too
Information architecture is not set in stone. Done well, it will live longer than the raw data, which is moving and accumulating through time at the speed of time and the amassing of a quantity of information driven by the quantity of people. But as the data shifts, as our
And I truly mean zero. I've done what I can to block AI scraping, build my own graphics, and write every word...often three or three dozen times. 😂 The information architecture is my own (better be, since I consider myself an information architect). I even do my best
We're hitting a very scary point in information. We have to care about information. Not caring about information is tantamount to giving up – of saying that nothing matters enough about anything. Narrative is living for the next five minutes in the misguided confidence that you understand the world
A habit of intentional design is the gravity point of building trust for what's new. Humanist design is the gravity point of real loyalty.
We need to have both if we intend to have a democracy. Think about the economy like water: it flows and spreads to fill the nooks. The below breaks, percents, and distribution is per the 1Q 2025 FRED. The households number isn't provided in the FRED blog piece,
12/10/25 update: Today I was reminded of Cory Doctorow's enshittification, which I've been reading about almost as long as he's been writing about it. There is absolutely overlap, and I strong suggest reading his work. I came at it through my core
All our everyday things that would have seemed magical to someone 200 years ago came from understanding. Cars, phones, computers – they're all things we figured out. The information was around us, but we had to get the right mix involved before we could see our way to the
Information is complex. You already know that. I'm here to tell you, as someone who freaking loves information, that it's probably even more complex than you currently think. We have a tendency right now, on a social level, to makes things simplified (often binary), and try
