Hedgie on Twitter / X

Taking on the Technosphere: A Kitchen Debate

In his original writings on the technosphere from the early 2010s, Peter Haff identified its existence as a grand metabolizing system. Back in early 2016, spurred on by the preparation for HKW’s Anthropocene Campus: The Technosphere Issue, a vehement debate sprang up in the home of science and technology scholars Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards: How valid is Haff’s approach? What is its overall reality? And what is its heuristic purpose? In this republication of their dispute, you, the reader, can engage alongside Hecht and Edwards in the ongoing question of whether the concept of the technosphere is indeed “a useful tool,” “silverware,” or “a barren gadget” in understanding the current and future condition of planet Earth.

adammaj on Twitter / X

from the outside, it is very reasonable to interpret the past 2 weeks as an orchestrated industry-wide regulatory capture strategy.I realize that no one has properly explained yet what all the lab employees have seen that scared them so suddenly.I will try to explain -…— adammaj (@MajmudarAdam) September 12, 2026

Dopamine Fracking

The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources into a previously casual or complex and layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit

Don't Frack. Precipitate!

Don’t Frack. Precipitate! Two opposing approaches to create soft software for the age of AI Author: If you stop someone on the street and ask them to imagine the canonical piece of software, what will they say? Almost certainly something like “Instagram.” An app. Apps have become such a dominan...

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit

The long read: Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort

Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.

Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.

What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.

This started with a tweet. I’m embarrassed how often that happens.

Pluralistic: Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform (23 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:

Self-Burn

Thanks to Trump, people around the world are scrambling to get out of fossil fuels.

Hyperstition

A hyperstition is a self-fulfilling idea that becomes real through its own existence.[1] The price of Bitcoin,[2] Roko's Basilisk,[3] accelerationism,[4] and the QAnon conspiracy theory[5] have all been described as hyperstitions. Self-fulfilling prophecies are a kind of hyperstition where predictions are made about the future that become true by being known.[6] The concept was coined by Nick Land in 1995 as a portmanteau of hyper- and superstition,[7] during his time at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit developing the philosophy of accelerationism.[3][8]

How Spotify’s Discover Weekly cracked human curation at internet scale

The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.