The Real Name Fallacy - Coral by Vox Media

The Coral Project is an open source project to help publishers of all sizes build better communities around their journalism. We’re creating tools that help everyone to feel safe, respected, and heard.

On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse

🖼️Cover Photo: Train at the Nairobi terminus of the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway. It runs parallel to the Uganda Railway that was completed in 1901. The first fare-paying passengers boarded the "Madaraka Express" on Madaraka Day (1 June 2017), the 54th anniversary of Kenya's attainment of self-rule from Great

Yes: Affirmative Consent as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Imagining Social Platforms

Affirmative consent is the idea that someone must ask for, and earn, enthusiastic approval before interacting with someone else. For decades, feminist activists and scholars have used affirmative consent to theorize and prevent sexual assault. In this paper, we ask: Can affirmative consent help to theorize online interaction? Drawing from feminist, legal, and HCI literature, we introduce the feminist theory of affirmative consent and use it to analyze social computing systems. We present affirmative consent’s five core concepts: it is voluntary, informed, revertible, specific, and unburdensome. Using these principles, this paper argues that affirmative consent is both an explanatory and generative theoretical framework. First, affirmative consent is a theoretical abstraction for explaining various problematic phenomena in social platforms—including mass online harassment, revenge porn, and problems with content feeds. Finally, we argue that affirmative consent is a generative theoretical foundation from which to imagine new design ideas for consentful socio-technical systems.

No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior

Electronic media present us with a collage of experiences from everyplace. We eat dinner at home while watching starving children thousands of miles away reach out to us for food. From our easy chairs, we stare at blindfolded hostages, and coolly

epistemic garden - mapping how ideas spread online

We're building tools to help communities understand their information landscape and protect against harmful coordinated narratives.

Against the dark forest

The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.