Nicky Case: The Attractors Behind Disasters

Landslide / Holdfast

Notes on what’s happening to our ability to collectively know things, and a look ahead to what this community is especially well positioned to do to support and revitalize our info ecosystems and the humans inside them.

Start your own Internet Resiliency Club – Bow Shock Systems Consulting

Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it until a crisis is already here. However, small groups of volunteers with a little bit of time and money can provide crucial initial leadership to bootstrap recovery.

The Internet Transition

The Internet is allowing us to build a richer, more complex society but the way in which we Internet today is failing to support the governance systems that a more complex world requires. I take a look at why these issues are related, try to develop an intuition for a way forward, and point at the emerging field that is coming together to build that future.

Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh)

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

Positech@CSCW2026

People care about climate change, injustice, and humanitarian crises. The challenge is not apathy but capacity: sustained engagement with large-scale problems is psychologically costly, and social media architecture often amplifies awareness while providing few pathways to meaningful action.

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

Why the dark forests of the internet — podcasts, newsletters, and other private channels — are growing, and why might that pose a problem

Strengthening Online Communities | Rise Against Big Tech Powerbase

We asked our climate reporters to highlight one idea for positive change. We got a chronicle of global transformation

There are countless initiatives around the world that can inspire people and spur them into action. Amid the devastation of the climate crisis, our journalists strive to highlight these stories of hope

Jacky's homepage on the DARPA-created, commerically-available Web. - Jacky Alciné

In your Web browser, of course. And not all of me; that'd be weird! You're using Firefox, right? You can catch up by email with 112 other folks, on a social network in the Meta, commonly known as Facebook, Threads, Blacksky in the Atmosphere or X, commonly known as Twitter as I continue to share and work on all things towards history, open digital technology, culture — and everything in between. I write essays of varying length; most recently I wrote "On the Notion of Shutting the Fuck up". I keep notes weekly and (near) daily links. Here's what I use on the regular.

How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our shared systems for a changing world

'Pulsing with wisdom and humanity... a masterpiece' ED YONG'A hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world' CORY DOCTOROW'An extraordinary book' MARK MIODOWNIK'You won't see the world the same after reading this book!' AUSTIN KLEONEvery day, we are granted the power to travel at high speeds, fly, see in the dark, summon water from distant mountains and electricity from the sun. The systems that run our world are invisible to us until they fail.Infrastructure enables lives of astounding ease and freedom that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. These technological systems - the most complex and vast ever created by humans - have allowed us to work collectively for the public good. But these systems are now beginning to fail us.Engineering professor Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, and just how much they shape our lives - but also the price they extract, who pays it and in what ways, as well as the threats to our infrastructure in a changing world.From Snowdonia's Electric Mountain to a solar plant in southern India, Chachra shows how we can rebuild our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. We need to learn how to see these systems and to transform them, together, because the cost of not being able to rely on them is unthinkably high.