This ep of People’s & Things with @leev.bsky.social and @bialski.bsky.social interviewing @susansegfault.bsky.social about @torproject.org completely nerd sniped me and was very enjoyable!
micro.chadkohalyk.com/2026/04/09/p...
Chad Kohalyk
Working on a short post called "Notes on Boomer STS" on the problematic twins of a) critique of "technocracy" and b) thinking "participatory democracy" is *the* solution, but now I think my prompt that led to this beautiful image may be my greatest contribution to the field.
Ah, the last bubble was so great.
I have friends who live in European cities where procuring air conditioning is basically illegal. One theory I've heard is that part of the problem is that the elites - who, let's be real, control environmental policy - have summer homes they escape to when it gets too hot.
It just keeps getting better. Thanks to my friend Dr. @olamichael.bsky.social of the Hype Studies crew for inspiring the improvements.
Lee Vinsel
So wild that the first Maintainers conference was a decade ago!!
The other day I looked back at the class I taught called Peoples & Things that eventually led to the podcast to see when I first conceived of it. ALSO A DECADE AGO. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
TIME FLIES.
I ask this question constantly. I thought our major upshot of the whole Aaron Swartz thing was that IP is a nonsense construction. Many GenAI haters would clearly have me believe otherwise.
MIT Technology Review asked me to review Stewart Brand's new book _Maintenance: Of Everything_, vol. 1. I went into it with a lot of questions, including about how he'd deal with labor, politics, and social structure. It's a lot worse than I expected.
www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/17/1...
Stewart Brand joined The Maintainers listserv in 2019 - see below - and he attended the Maintainers III conference, also in 2019. He knows there are entire scholarly communities studying maintenance and repair. He's not ignorant; he's just a dick.
Lee Vinsel
Lee Vinsel
Lee Vinsel
Lee Vinsel
www.technologyreview.com
A new book by Stewart Brand, an architect of modern tech culture, asks: How do we prioritize maintenance? And why? But it doesn’t quite have the answers.
LA weirdos! It appears that @uchicagopress.bsky.social is giving away my book OIL BEACH for FREE this month (as an e-book)
Link is here: press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEb...
Lee Vinsel
“This series, I'm pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general.”
Okay right off the bat, no. Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell wrote an excellent book, The Innovation Delusion, which is all about how Silicon Valley ignores maintenance and celebrates “disruption.”
Brand oughta know that
Dave Karpf
Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy This episode of …
professor tools for commensality (red scare edition)
TIL heat is really killing a lot of people in Europe.
hannahritchie.substack.com/p/heat-guns-...
Julia M. Rohrer
10 years ago on a social media platform far, far away...The #Maintainers were trending!
themaintainers.org/maintainers-...
#histSTM #STS #maintenance #infrastructure
Remember when every new tech company had a blockchain and they had ”initial coin offerings” and “tokenomics” was going to eat the economy and VCs switched parties and donated millions just to stop the SEC from regulating it and now you literally never hear a peep about any of it?
Ben Gross
Christopher Mims
I wonder how many of the people who have anti-theft beliefs apply to them to downloading books too
