UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and FCCW Present Peer2Peer: A Critical Internet Studies Gathering in LA Friday, May 2 & Saturday, May 3 FCCW: 3035 Rosslyn St. LA, CA 90065 Info on our space Free Peer2Peer is a two-day gathering bringing together researchers, artists, archivists, and makers to think collectively and critically about the Internet. Come hear incredible new work from our research community, learn how to up your digital security, learn how to archive (or not!) the web, come laugh at jokes about the Internet! All events unless otherwise noted are open to the public. Come for an hour or stay for the whole two-days!
The Attention Forum: October 23/24th 2025
The internet was initially sold to us as a force for connection – a borderless, democratizing set of technologies that would amplify voices, allow us to spread ideas, and strengthen civil society.
Growing the Social Web
I'm going to be participating in the Growing the Open Social Web workshop at Fediforum on March 2, 2026. I'm excited to talk to other people who care about the Fediverse about ways to connect more people through ActivityPub. Fediforum invited attendees to publish position papers before the workshop. SWF has a number of hypotheses…
the chronically online will become a new underclass
Eaten by the Internet
This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop, 2026/03/02
Chad Kohalyk (@chadkoh@indieweb.social)
Web publishing is facing its next challenge: a new iteration of centralizing platforms. BUT there is also a new wave of open protocols and standards that can help us gain our independence. Next month in NYC we are gathering a group of frontier technologists and popular web publishers to discuss how we can sail into this next platform shift as captains. #ProtocolsForPublishers https://pfp.unternet.co
2026 IC2S2: Keynote Presentation by Kate Starbird
Local-First Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure: Create, Collaborate, and Publish Without the Cloud
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams
I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…
Please join this webinar on Moving from Harmful Platforms to Social Technologies, discussing how digital public goods and other open-source solutions can support the scaling of a more transparent, interoperable, and accountable social technology landscape. 📝 Register Here zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__IHGcRbVR…
I’ll be at #IC2S2 this week! I will be presenting two papers from my lab, led by my amazing students @laylab.bsky.social & @elhamagk.bsky.social. If you’re interested in narratives,mental health, stigma, or NLP, let’s connect! Looking forward to catching up with old friends, and meeting new people.
