The feed of updates to Erin Kissane's small internet website
This is a reference page for “ People in Protocols,” a talk I gave (remotely) on March 23, 2025 at the first ATmosphere Conference in Seattle. Right now, it contains citations and further reading, but I may expand it later with additional material and/or a written version of the talk. Massive thanks to everyone who ran the conference and let me remote in when I couldn’t come in person. Text notes…
What I want is a transparent model of the kinds of harms that are likely to fall onto which brains and bodies when someone swings a wrecking ball through the governmental institutions that do work that is tragically flawed but nevertheless necessary to the sustenance of our collective life. What I mostly have is a surfeit of takes, including some very good specialist analysis and a whole lot of…
Paulo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest , c. 1465–1470 This post annotates a talk I gave on August 24, 2024 at the final XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon. The talk was about why I left the internet, how the Covid Tracking Project got me back online, and most of all how the work we did at CTP led to me to believe that we—the weirdos of internet-making and online life—have to not merely retreat from…
The fediverse governance processes of moderation, server leadership, and federated diplomacy. (Courtesy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek ) Back in the fall, I wrote about a research project I was diving into with Darius Kazemi . Now, after a few months of prepping and conducting interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers about how they govern their parts of the network and then many…
Back in the fall, I wrote a series of posts on a particularly horrific episode in Meta’s past . I hadn’t planned to revisit the topic immediately, but here we are , with Threads federation with the ActivityPub-based fediverse ecosystem an increasingly vivid reality. My own emotional response to Meta and Threads is so intense that it hasn’t been especially easy to think clearly about the risks and…
I took a break after the Meta in Myanmar posts , partly because I was crispy and partly because of heavy family weather. Then, wonderfully, we got a puppy, and so I’ve been “ sleeping” like a new parent again, dozy and dazed and bumping into the furniture. The puppy is very good, and the family members have all survived. But in the peculiar headspace of parents in the hospital and sleep…
Between July and October of this year, I did a lot of reading and writing about the role of Meta and Facebook—and the internet more broadly—in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. The posts below are what emerged from that work. The format is a bit idiosyncratic, but what I’ve tried to produce here is ultimately a longform cultural-technical incident report. It’s written for people…
The Atlantic Council’s report on the looming challenges of scaling trust and safety on the web opens with this statement: That which occurs offline will occur online. I think the reverse is also true: That which occurs online will occur offline. Our networks don’t create harms, but they reveal, scale, and refine them, making it easier to destabilize societies and destroy human beings. The more…
“ Well, Congressman, I view our responsibility as not just building services that people like to use, but making sure that those services are also good for people and good for society overall.” — Mark Zuckerberg, 2018 In the previous two posts in this series, I did a long but briskly paced early history of Meta and the internet in Myanmar—and the hateful and dehumanizing speech that came with…
This is the second post in a series on what Meta did in Myanmar and what the broader technology community can learn from it. It will make a lot more sense if you read the first post —these first two are especially tightly linked and best understood as a single story. There’s also a meta-post with things like terminology notes, sourcing information, and a corrections changelog. But in case you…
“ Technology is like a bomb in Myanmar.” —Kyaw Kyaw, frontman of Burmese punk band Rebel Riot 1 Back in early July, I started working on a quick series of posts about online structures of refuge and exposure . In a draft of what I meant to be the second post in the series, I tried to write a tight two or three paragraphs about the role Meta played in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar,…
I wrote so many posts that that my posts needed a post. Sorry about that. All four posts are now up: Part I , Part II , Part III , and Part IV . The series this note accompanies is a work of synthesis, in which I attempt to collect up the hundreds of pieces of the overall story of Meta’s actions (and inactions) in Myanmar before and after the peak of the genocide of the Rohingya people in 2016 and…
Ed. note: This post is from July, 2023. It circulates every month or so on social networks and a lot of people think it’s new, probably because I run dates at the bottom of each post intead of just under the title. Until I get around to changing that, this is your temporal location-finder. After my last long post , I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source…
I changed servers on Mastodon last week and I learned a lot and I have opinions. To begin with, the best time to move from one home server to another (“migrate instances”) on Mastodon is never . The second-best time is as soon as possible , because the longer you wait, the more you stand to lose. But until you’ve been on Mastodon for a while, you aren’t going to know how well you get along with…
The stiltwalking French shepherds in the marshes of the Landes are incredible, and I love this postcard—which you can buy from a nice person on eBay—in particular . Affordances, in the simplest terms, are what an object offers or provides to a specific individual at a particular moment in time . This sense originates with James and Eleanor Gibson, a pair of celebrated researchers in psychology.…
In an unfortunately fascinating 1963 collection of essays on computer-simulated personality, Silvan Tomkins, the founder of affect theory , wrote about: …the tendency of jobs to be adapted to tools, rather than adapting tools to jobs. If one has a hammer one tends to look for nails, and if one has a computer with a storage capacity, but no feelings, one is more likely to concern oneself with…
Straight out of undergrad, I applied to a bookselling job and didn’t get it, so I started working in tech. By the end of my first year there, I was convinced that the internet was having and would continue to have a norm-smashing, discombobulating effect on the shape of the world and that, left to the paths it was on, it was going to concentrate social inequalities and extractive corporate…
We realize then that it is just the patterns of events in space which are repeating in the building or the town: and nothing else. Nothing of any importance happens in a building or a town except what is defined within the patterns which repeat themselves. —Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building At the core of Christopher Alexander’s work is the belief that the shape and character of…
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere , I’m doing a bunch of reading-like-a-grad-student* this spring to try to get my head around the current state of online places and ways to be together and work together. A few people asked for a reading list, so I’ve pulled the books together—my stack of papers and articles is pushing 350 items and I don’t have time to winnow it down yet, but I’ll get there. (Also I’m…
This is the first in a series of reading notes I’m posting as I work through a stack of texts on community and sociability. I posted an intro to this series yesterday. You don’t need to read the intro to read this, but if you’re unfamiliar with either Christopher Alexander or adrienne maree brown, you might want to glance over it because I’m going to dive straight in. (The other most useful piece…
I’ve been working on communication and community online for a couple of decades, but the past few years have shaken up my understanding of what we’re really doing here. So I’m trying to think in a focused way about how we work and hang out together online and because I’m me, I’ve collected a working library of about 300 articles and papers and 30ish books to get through, most of them fairly…
In the early 80s, my mom worked a couple shifts a month at a little small-town food co-op that smelled like nutritional mummy. She brought home things like carob chips and first-generation Soysage, which remains one of the grossest things I have ever eaten. This was also a real boom time for unsalted Legume Surprise and macrobiotically balanced grain mush that tasted like macrame owl. This food…
Grief is weird in the nineteenth-century sense, uncanny and otherworldly; it eats words and turns up every card blank. Two years ago, I left the most meaningful and by far the most wrenching job I’ve ever had. I wrote about it before we wound down, and afterward said almost nothing. Now I find myself having things to think again, and maybe write. First going back a little, then moving on. The…