Augment

A collection of essays on the future of personal computing — specifically, on the kind we’d like to see more of in the future, and the ideas that might help us get there.

Ali Alkhatib: On techno-optimism

I’ve got a longer draft in the works, but I don’t think that’s going to become a blog post, so I figure it might be useful to publish something here and solicit feedback, or just plant a flag in the ground that this was a thing I did. Last week Several weeks ago I gave a talk at Wayne State University titled “the uncanny pessimism of techno-optimism”. In this post I’m going to breeze through some of the stuff I talked about and give a sense of what’ll be coming. Eventually.

What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?

We analyzed 100+ conversations and essays on positive futures to find out

Feeling of Computing — Conversations

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…

A People’s History of Tech

A collective storytelling project to build a more representative history that reflects the human impacts of technology.

Alexander Obenauer

Exploring new and renewed ideas for how personal computing and the interfaces we think with can better serve people’s lives – expanding opportunity, agency, curiosity, and creativity.

Optimistic Computing

I recently made two new friends: Abhinav Omprakash and Dawn Walker. Abhinav said I’m an optimist and I should write about it. Dawn said I shouldn’t try to coin any new terms. I should know better, but this essay follows Abhinav’s recommendation — and credits Dawn, in the very likely event I should have followed her advice instead. I have been alive for approximately four decades. Each of those decades was witness to its own fun brand of computering.

On Writing #3

Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.

Feeling of Computing

Feeling of Computing is an online community with a welcoming, cooperative, and revolutionary spirit. We are unified in the belief that the computer is tragically less humane than it could be. There’s a world of possibilities that get more beautiful the further away from the norm you go. We’re here to explore this world together, to discuss ideas about theory and practice, and to champion and support our members’ research and development efforts to reimagine the computer.

Clouded skies for open networks

Last week, I finished an essay about platform design affordances and content moderation expectations and community-level context collapse on Bluesky for Tech Policy Press and set it aside to cool before a last read-through. An hour later, the Trump administration brought to Bluesky a propaganda-zombie army made