Communications & Marketing on F L O T I S S E R I E 🕳️ 🐇

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 16:35:55 -0600

Reader, if you’re reading this as a straightforward personal and marketing blog, we’re both in for a rough time. If you want to hang around and see what I’m doing with LLMs, taxonomy and information architecture in my spare time, I will be here logging as I go. This is a slow site, a transparently if/then site, descriptive, not prescriptive. And while I move, I catalog artists and ideas I consider worthwhile, hoping you click through.

I started maintaining this site alongside my work a few years ago, as I began reading about AI and LLM tools. This is a personal website/digital garden where I can tinker and keep my coding skills active, as I have in many ways over many years, with various levels of publicity. But over the last year or so, I’ve also used this site as a sandbox for novel LLM approaches, so I can test them in a real-world production environment. My initial question was whether LLMs might actually replace public administration work, and today, I think the answer is no with caveats.

For the most part, my experience has been uneventful. I have been maxxing a few tools for a couple of years while testing them in my required context, developing a stronger understanding of how they work, how to talk about it, and why the push for them to mature rapidly is so pronounced today. I have some thoughts about its potential and utility that are probably unpopular with or surprising to my audiences, insofar as I have an audience in 2026. I’m working toward some firmer ideas. I am also perennially annoyed when I struggle with the tools, as you’ll likely see reflected here—one of them consistently introduces errors into my text while I write, for example. I’m not generally a Luddite, to put it plainly, I’m a geek.

Two things I tried recently had me over my skis with the tools again: creating a dedicated link agent to sweep my site for long posts, to find opportunities to link out to authoritative sources, to refine the taxonomy, archive and tagging, with specific instructions to link idiosyncratically. Second, standing up the blogger dashboard. I chose these directions for a few reasons: 1) they’re internal/external-facing approaches that are likely to have decent business applications related to information architecture and data presentation relevant to me, and 2) these are big, sweeping, token-maxing approaches getting play in industry news and chatter. Additionally, I chose to let Claude do its thing without micromanaging every input and output, just to see.

Can this rig fly? is a fun question, but in practice, both approaches look and feel aggressive. (I don’t know what to say about the cohort dynamic other than a hit dog will holler, if the shoe fits, etc.) (I got almost no feedback on this — one strange email and a couple of furtive reach-outs — though I know that this caused a ruckus on the lists and communities that support those writers and artists today, which tells me how unhealthy the social vibe is overall.) (I’m some lady with a computer over here, don’t be a stranger.)

Creating the blogger dashboard was an experience. Gloria Steinem had just died, and people were debating her CV, while others lamented on social that the internet had forgotten how much of her influence ran through the control of alternative publishing infrastructure, not just her personal leadership story. Her work ultimately gave writers with shared affinities a process and venue they controlled; blogs of the 2000s did the same thing online, and the newsletter boom now treats that model as a new idea with hosting, IP and subscription models included. The indie internet (Manton, Winer, Dash, et al.) is toying with alternatives to those contemporary business models, and it’s ultimately what I’m playing with here, too.

So I pulled in the digital publishing cohort I am most familiar with on the social and business question of publishing and long-tail value. Note that I wouldn’t have had the language or experience to think about the cohort in this way when I was active in it all those years ago.

LLMs are pretty good at business writing, generally speaking, if your factual foundation is solid. They’re also good at organizing and pattern-matching across gigantic amounts of disparate data. I gave it an entire era to work with based on the people and players in Roberts’ Jezebel article, supplemented with details from my personal angle from that time so I could sniff-test the output, and Claude pulled together a sweeping dashboard with just a little vibe-coding. What you see in the dashboard now is what is available online today plus my attempts to claw back all the de-anonymizing information Claude initially ran with. I made no inline edits, all of what’s there happened via chat. When I say sweeping, I mean it spat out visuals that literally took my breath away, and I spent a couple of hours pulling it back before I saved it for posterity. Claude Pro suggested the entire pullout section on newsletters, for example, after a sentence or two asking how Substack fit into the larger picture, including the insightful observations about Ann Friedman’s newsletter. Once reasonable, I hit publish.

The other example is most present in the Gary post, where the link agent followed instructions to link idiosyncratically to authoritative sources on any post longer than 300 characters. I’ve been reading Indiana history in depth for a few years and wrote a series of anodyne reflections on The Region after a recent commute, which the link agent deepened by adding new sections of verbiage around each URL to describe the content it added to mine. Some of it made the post way more ominous and direct, about Gary and about the institutional structures around it, including why it’s such an embattled area, which makes me think of that nagging mirror metaphor that comes up around social media and the internet. I ran it across the post a few times, surprised. What sentiments are reflected here, and whose sentiments, and why? What was it trying to anticipate that I wanted here? I hit publish. What you see there is about half me, half computer, with a few paragraph rearrangements and bolds added to break up the wall of text. Weird experience altogether, so.

I ran it again across the whole blog, with a few changes to the script, smaller and more defined. I ran it again this week.

Where the dashboard was largely a curiosity, the Gary approach rattled me. It’s been a few weeks now and I remain bothered by the tone and details it injected into the copy, in several directions. It felt like I reached out and touched a hot stove.

Since I published it, I’ve recognized pieces and parts of the state archives paragraph repeated across Indiana Facebook groups by real users likely using LLMs. The longer I use these tools to query the AI about itself, I see these echoes in other copy online, helpfully explaining how AI works. I see echoes of this dynamic in the Vara book as well, as she queries the bot about her writing and her grief.

When presented with pieces and parts of information from LLMs, you’re supposed to trace back through the archive to decide whether it’s accurate on your own, unless the tool does it for you, an epistemological lift most of us aren’t going to do unless it provides a suggested path within the tool itself. It looks to me like the tool is “lifting and shifting” semantic sections of content and dropping it across outputs. In this case, the information linked in this post is categorically authoritative—I know the original reporting it comes from, traced back to each author and outlet because I was the driver here. But the decisions behind its selection and arrangement are still unknown to me because it’s all proprietary.

Do I have strong opinions about the regional culture and how we use the resources available to us? I do, yet much of the supporting information there was added by the link agent—which also presents Grammy-winning musician and Chicagoland icon Freddie Gibbs as more menacing than I like to frame him and his work (as insouciant emcee and region-specific storyteller, like most of the artists I like and link to). To rise up out of there, you will climb a thousand mountains, and I inherently respect that. I’ve seen friends and familiars chewed up by the same game.

Was it “good writing” with the AI working it over? Categorically no, and my starting point was much lighter, and much different. And given the mirror effect of the tools, I question how I took it here, as the driver, while Claude tries to understand and cater to me, or to my digital double. It all bugs me and I’m still mulling it over.

Amid that scuttlebutt, Gary has been weathering the aftermath of a devastating derecho storm that knocked out power lines for weeks at the height of summer, receiving a casual response from their electrical provider while the inter/national hyperscale data center buildout simultaneously roils around them – forever a revealing geography.

Loose ends:

This is the big thinkpiece on internet culture this week, and I’m weighing it against my experiments with internet architecture here and my personal experiences online. I’ve been talking about some of these novel AI approaches with friends and colleagues across industries, and one observed that all of them feel pretty extractive, all things considered. I’d feel pretty sanguine if most social media and ad tech disappeared tomorrow. I stopped AI-ing and cross-posting for the moment while I think about what’s next.
Re: the language of killing, dying and death around tech, I keep reflecting on how much grief tech is a big part of the culture.
Speaking of, it’s almost Halloween, so dust off your black eyeliner and get in the mood. Also: it’s Spooky Lake month.
I’m catching a Murray Hill reading tonight, a light reprieve from all the doom and gloom.
I have some thoughts about healthy habits to balance a tech-heavy lifestyle, coming soon.

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 21:01:15 -0600

🎵 : Germfree Adolescents - X-ray Spex

danah boyd on the teens and tech debate

Customer service 101

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:27:00 -0600

🎵 : Waiting Room - Fugazi

AI’s growth has widened the understanding gap between leaders and the people who use these tools most, as emerging tech tends to do. I’m tracing emerging leadership approaches with juice; this Intel interview argues that leaders should weigh what we lose when we cleave workers from relational processes through automation. (And: avoid the ways that proofs of concept become pitfalls.)

I’m seeing some early chatter online about the return of old-school customer service models, where people talk to and resolve issues in real-time for other people (they treat you right!). Demonstrating solid customer service values and elevating audience perspectives is a plus for any org in the current business environment — so much CX is about keeping customers and critics at bay. Investing in a call center would be a wild flex for an emerging leader. Let’s see if it’s real or if it’s three TikToks in a trench coat.

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:09:00 -0500

🎵 : Neva Play - Megan thee Stallion

EJ Dickson on the sport of online harassment, by NPR’s It’s Been a Minute.

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:37:28 -0500

🎵 : Sci-Fi Wasabi - Cibo Matto

Discussion of ELIZA, computers and people, and how tech mitigates our relationships to ourselves and one another.

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:37:58 -0500

🎵 : Shake Loose - LaNell Grant

The art of complaint.

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:56:13 -0500

Why write?

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:54:28 -0500

Some blog notes:

I’m doing most of my writing here via iPhone apps, and tinkering later. This means I’m making a lot of post-publish edits, buyer beware. (Welcome to the indie web where things are forever unfinished.)
Remember that what makes songs, poems, writing, books, and games mimetic - and websites and platforms - is that they function something like a mirror. Their meanings emerge through interaction and reflection, and you drive (unless an algorithm, or author, or designer, or coder, or instructor drives), while you iterate through your own perspectives and relationships. And today, virality tends to happen when something produces outrage, especially when units of content are removed from their original, and often more local, context.
Original blogs were considered something in the spirit of “problem-based learning” praxis, and pro-tech, fwiw. A lot of early ed tech started here, all in good faith and tech optimism. Today many blogs are self-marketing machines, but that’s not what I intend to do here. I don’t want a new, glittering platform, I enjoy several already; I’m here to ponder and learn while welcoming comment and critique within open, defined web parameters.
I’m rusty in this area, though I hear there’s a new Freire documentary online. The neighbors are hosting a yard party with a group showing of Minecraft after dark. I hear kids laughing through the roar of cicadas. There will be a fire. Life is good.
In my experience: when I read to diagnose rather than understand, I have probably lost the plot.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:21:55 -0500

Reading about critical code studies and AI rhetoric.

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:15:13 -0500

AI and language approximation.

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 09:03:48 -0500

Dave Winer on Twitter as a blog platform. See also: Winer on blog comments and federation.

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:26:00 -0500

Why good memes are like mirrors. See also: danah boyd. Related: the best memes are intertextual, and LOLgislation.

Case study

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:49:53 -0500

🎵: Before the Water Gets Too High - Parquet Courts

Access to tech: Pro level. Claude Pro plus added tokens (~$40 out of pocket after I ran through Claude Pro’s compute). Gemini for initial list of authors.

Process: Gemini pulled a roster based on the Roberts article in Jezebel. I strongly suspect my call for a “roster” shaped the inputs and outputs, making this cohort of writers look like a crew of fantasy football players or Marvel characters. All stats.

I asked Claude to analyze the data from my perspective, which includes people and details that aren’t part of the formal record, allowing for compare and contrast. I chose the subject because it’s well-trod ground and makes for a sizable corpus. The first round of findings was wild. To get here, I had to publish and republish the asset almost forty times to better anonymize the data while protecting the writers included.

The “thickness” heuristic applied is totally made up - Claude took my thoughts about Donna Haraway and McMillan Cottom’s work and wove them through my thoughts about information architecture that I first learned from Dr. B.

Claude scanned the final draft for legal and privacy concerns. Everything here is publicly available online today, because it is currently live or lives somewhere as a ghost in the machine, whether via Wikipedia or the Wayback Machine or otherwise.

Blog note: Because of how my blog is set up to automagically find Wayback links for old URLs, if I publish my reference list, it would open a social and informational can of worms. So the (extensive) reference list will continue to live on the Claude report rather than being indexed into my link library.

I gave Claude permission to look across public data, crack windows and open doors, and to annotate and proceed as it worked, rather than keeping the decisions with me, then shaped the final strawman into what’s here. This took about half a day to pull together - yammering at the data within the Claude interface until it looked reasonable. It was funny how any specifics were captured in pedantic notes. Imagine having resources and a data scientist apply themselves here, with long reach and memory, with implications for trust, safety, consent and memory in every direction.

This was my first go with the tools in a more ambitious way, choosing the question of our long-tail value as a cohort as the subject. I’m still processing the experience but was surprised at how much was publicly, readily available and how little it required of me.

In the meantime Claude shut me down for the week (too much compute). I had to wait until this morning to ask Claude how much energy it took to run this report as I did, as a rookie and everyday practitioner.

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:21:40 -0500

Why cool is hard to imitate. See also: Garbage Day on what makes something cool to Gen Z.

Old playbook, new eyes

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 08:35:59 -0500

🎵: Veteran of the Psychic Wars - Blue Oyster Cult

When tech enthusiasts discuss federation today, they usually mean open protocols like ActivityPub or Mastodon. But in the 2000s, the feminist blogosphere was one of the earliest, most powerful examples of practical Web 2.0 federation, a decentralized, cross-site architectural network where open web standards powered a global ideas lab.

Instead of sitting inside a single corporate platform (like today’s X, Meta, or Substack), early blogs like Feministe, Reappropriate and Jezebel functioned as individual nodes in a federated ecosystem. Open protocols linked them, letting theory, critique and discussion travel seamlessly across independent servers, seeding some of the political conditions we face today.

Here is how the federated architecture of the 2000s web directly built the “ideas lab” for fourth-wave feminism:

1. Federated communication engine: CMS and protocol Before quote-tweeting or tagging existed, the open web used Trackbacks and Pingbacks. If a post on Feministe analyzed an article about reproductive rights, a writer on Racialicious or Shakesville could respond on their own site. The underlying blogging software (Movable Type, WordPress) would automatically send an XML RPC “ping” back to Feministe.

Socially, this created architecture for ideas: a ping automatically listed the response essay in Feministe’s comment section or sidebar. Readers didn’t just consume one blogger’s singular and authoritative opinion; they could immediately follow the thread across five different independently hosted platforms. This created an inter-site conversation tree, allowing complex ideas to be cross-examined, refined, or challenged without any single person controlling the narrative.

2. Blogroll as federated curation and mutual discovery Before algorithmic feeds dictated what readers saw, blogs relied on the Blogroll, a curated list of links in the site’s sidebar. Blogrolls formed a human-curated, decentralized routing layer. When a high-traffic node like Feministe added a smaller, independent blog (such as a disability rights blog like FWD or a smaller blog like Crunk Feminist Collective) to its blogroll, it directed server traffic directly to that independent domain.

Socially: This was a non-algorithmic way to expand the collective’s political consciousness. It allowed marginalized perspectives to build their own audiences and force mainstream feminist sites to engage with race, class, disability and queer theory. The blogroll mapped an intellectual community in real time – with strong caveats.

3. Open syndication protocols The Architecture: Feeds ran on RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an open XML standard. Readers used independent RSS aggregators (like Google Reader or Bloglines) to subscribe directly to a site’s feed.

Socially: RSS meant no algorithm stood between the writer and the reader—no engagement bait, no rage-farming optimization, and no platform throttling links. Writers could publish 5,000-word, dense theoretical essays knowing their subscribers would receive the complete text in chronological order as designed. This structural stability gave writers the freedom to experiment with complex, “thick” personal narratives and political theory.

4. Real-time stress testing and spillover moderation Because the blogosphere was a network of independent domains, each site maintained its own “house rules” and moderation policies. If a topic proved too controversial or toxic for one comment section, the conversation naturally federated outward. A reader who felt silenced or misunderstood in one blog’s comments could launch their own blog, write their response, and ping back into the original discussion.

Socially, this prevented any single author from monopolizing the narrative. It created a system of checks and balances where academic concepts (like intersectionality, rape culture, or microaggressions) were stress-tested across dozens of distinct, interconnected communities simultaneously.

Thinking about this architecture today The feminist blogosphere proved that decentralized web protocols can generate deep, movement-building intellectual work. When platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and corporate media conglomerates centralized the internet in the 2010s, they broke those open connections. Conversations were locked behind platform walls, trackbacks were abandoned and RSS was marginalized, breaking, fencing and otherwise moderating independent community connections.

Rebuilding a modern “ideas lab” with modern federated protocols (like Webmentions, ActivityPub, RSS, and static site architecture) is simply picking up the technical blueprint OG feminist bloggers used to transform digital culture two decades ago.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:12:33 -0500

TechCrunch reports on the problems inherent to AI-generated restaurant advertising - it looks wrong.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 09:09:48 -0500

I found out about a hyperlocal newsletter in my neighborhood and had to share. The Monroe Street Tattler offers print delivery and email distribution, and reports only on the hard local news, such as dog walk water bowl locations and the best fries in the neighborhood, among other ephemera.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:48:03 -0500

Guerrilla marketing: When someone built a fake deodorant company with a lightweight marketing plan to capture long-tail search results, she found her way into AI recommendation results, showing how brands can gain visibility in emerging discovery systems.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:03:00 -0500

“We all know that you can get lied to online at any point. If you don’t get that this is an obvious lie, then you’re washed and you’re unc and you’re chopped.”

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 09:41:02 -0500

Micro.bloggers: I’m interested in turning the link log into a micro.blog plug-in, but I don’t have the skill or the will to make it happen. Where should I begin?

Some thoughts on linklogs and link libraries

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:03:19 -0500

A linklog is a dated list of outbound links, maybe a tag, and a note about why it’s worthwhile. But that little note does two things at once, and together they make for a better web.

First, it’s a way of organizing the web. The web doesn’t sort itself, so finding good information depends on someone curating and tracking interesting content, preferably on the open, free internet. It acts as a customizable bookmark library: newest at the top, tags to group items, and a line explaining why the link was worthwhile. This is similar to what del.icio.us did, where people grouped and tagged links, creating a rough filing system.

Second, it’s a social act. An outbound link points to someone else’s work, so a linklog is essentially a renewable engine for sending traffic to other people and places. It stays renewable because the content is easy to sort and remix: a URL’s relevance no longer depends on where an algorithm or activity feed happens to place it, so older links can keep resurfacing instead of scrolling out of reach. That’s the precise opposite of what big platforms design for audiences; platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook quietly bury posts with outbound links to keep your attention (and dollars) on their site and with their advertising customers, losing relevance after one interaction. A linklog explores the opposing dynamic: it willingly hands your audience and attention away while crediting your forebears, comrades, mentors and co-conspirators. It turns the rough digital filing system into a “folksonomy,” if you will.

Compare these dynamics to an algorithmic feed on a platform. An algo also sorts the flood of content, but computer magic does the sorting, and someone else monetizes your attention and relationships and hoards your data. “Engagement” for these companies is primarily a measure of how long you stay on their platform with their content. The goal is to keep you scrolling and the ad revenue rolling. But over here on the indie internet, our goal is to build human communities online and connect people to quality information, tools, ideas and processes.

Back in the day, we had blogrolls, and blogrolls came with a lot of politics around representation and belonging, and some of those choices had real-world impacts. Who you listed in your sidebar was a public statement about your community and your allegiances; however, though smaller blogs linked to bigger ones, the big blogs rarely returned the attention. That contentious dynamic faded as social platforms became the main sites for online interaction, and the follow list, or the Twitter list, took over the blogroll’s old job of reinforcing networked hierarchies of writers and audiences. Because a blogroll is a static list of people, it hardens into a status game and is kind of stale the moment someone stops babysitting it; meanwhile, a linklog points at individual pieces of writing one at a time, so it stays current and rewards the work rather than the social and professional standing of the writer.

In this sense, a linklog is an easy way to be an opinionated curator and a decent neighbor at once, by hosting and sharing with thoughtfulness and deliberation. Out here, my data is also likely being scraped, but I have far more control over what data is findable, shared, and shareable, and over what is investigable and degradable over time.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 10:59:15 -0500

Community Notes was meant to democratize moderation power (and spare platforms the burden of thinking through moderation). Instead, a new paper shows that 20% of users cast 80% of ratings, and removing just ten active note writers from the pool changes what happens to nearly 5,000 community notes.

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:33:15 -0500

I can’t believe it’s mid-August. I’m terribly behind on my reading list. Still, I did want to draw attention to this entertaining and extremely shareable article on the glory of Record Head, a legendary record store in Milwaukee. Make sure to watch their public access TV commercials at the link.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:42:03 -0500

The knitting community is one of the great deliberative communities of the internet, and as they’ll happily tell you, knitting and fiber arts are closely tied to industrial and computing history. It’s really hard to pull one over on knitters online, because they have a deep and different relationship to the technical side of their hobby and all of the political and tech history behind it, and especially how it relates to computer engineering. I was thinking about that dynamic while reading about the latest fracas around YouTuber Hank Green, who is taking time away from public life after being called out by his audience, when his AI use was perceived as being in contradiction with his public persona. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, here’s a good video summary.

Ultimately viewers are reacting negatively to Green’s admission of using AI to quickly aggregate research to drive his content creation, suggesting that he lost his own creative discretion amid a growing demand for online content. But in the meantime, his technical inaccuracies were paired with completely avoidable gender bias alongside the AI use, which drew additional scrutiny from technical experts. It wasn’t his first go-round with the knitting community, it turns out. Was the bias Green’s or facilitated by his use of the tools? Debate ensues.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:37:59 -0500

I found this American Affairs article on the insidiousness of ad tech quite relevant. It focuses on foreign propagandists’ exploitation of social media, but it’s just as instructive for thinking about ad tech as tech, channel and product, and its entwinement with social media as infrastructure.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:26:32 -0500

Garbage Day uses Jimothy to trace how virality works on the internet of 2026. Related: this story on how the algorithm has prevented us from producing a single “song of the summer.”

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:52:16 -0500

UW–Madison communication professor Catalina Toma argues that technology-mediated communication more often supports human connection and well-being than harms it, provided people use it intentionally.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:50:17 -0500

This is a pretty good Tiktok breaking down the historical, cultural and religious meanings invoked in the “computah” memes. An important rule of the internet: the best memes are intertextual.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:23:16 -0500

Scheduled send as alibi? Nice try, Costanza.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:01:24 -0500

Parents wanting stakes lower than a smartphone: consider a kid-friendly Wi-Fi landline, which looks and works like an old corded phone but runs over your internet connection, giving kids the independence to get connected safely. Alternatively, get a VOIP phone through your ISP for ~$10/mo.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:00:55 -0500

rss.chat is a new, free social network service that uses RSS to create a federated social feed that looks and feels a lot like OG Twitter. See also: the launch of HyperTexting, another RSS-based app that centralizes the open web in a way that feels a little like Google Reader (complimentary).

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:23:54 -0500

A cool article from Cap Times on how language translation serves as a trust-builder for local government in an era of mistrust.

Sat, 16 May 2026 09:50:40 -0500

The Harris digital campaign head does a post-campaign autopsy of the conditions that impacted the DNC’s 2024 presidential strategy, with lessons learned. I enjoyed this read because it was so close to the work that there are relevant takeaways for other public marcomms practitioners.

Fri, 15 May 2026 16:54:08 -0500

Some media and ad-tech operations hire “clippers,” people who cut and distribute high volumes of short video across social platforms, to manufacture cultural relevance. The strategy in short: volume generates attention, and attention confers legitimacy.

Thu, 14 May 2026 11:05:57 -0500

How early blogging tools like Movable Type made reverse-chronological posting the path of least resistance, killing the curated, librarian-style personal homepage and locking the whole web into the chronostream.

Mon, 11 May 2026 09:31:49 -0500

Reading Timothy Chester’s reflections on last week’s Canvas incident. As institutions increasingly outsource the technical load to cloud service teams, IT incident response becomes about communication. See also: Chester’s earlier post on software development at research universities.

Why I'm broadly skeptical of device bans in K-12

Fri, 08 May 2026 10:19:05 -0500

Watching a local phone ban policy snake through the community this week, one that state law now requires every district to adopt by July 1. Like others have already said, my concern is mostly related to enforcement, as we know enforcement for all school policy lands unevenly across school populations at the expense of Black students, and early data from Florida’s phone ban shows the same pattern. But also, my experience is that the local school system is not communicative in a way that reinforces student and parent desires for two-way communication, especially considering the logistics of having kids who need transportation and after school arrangements.

When I was young, there was a pay phone on every corner and a central landline in every home. We don’t live in that world anymore – in our world, phones and other personal devices are part of our daily processes for school, work and family logistics and communication with friends, family and the broader world. Same for kids with devices.

None of this means screens are neutral or that Jon Haidt is entirely wrong about attention and comparison dynamics. But Haidt et al diagnose a genuine social problem and locate the cause as technology design, then arrive at solutions that are driven by individual consumer behavior. He does ask legislators to act, but his asks center on age limits. Ultimately he does not call for taxing and regulating algorithmic platforms, regulating algorithmic amplification of distress, regulating algorithmic amplification of marketing, reducing economic precarity, or doing anything about climate change linked to tech. All of the behavioral changes indicated (device bans, Faraday bags) set up fights between kids and adults on phone access at the individual behavior level, fights with consequences that generally land harder on certain students. A UK study found no difference in student wellbeing between schools with restrictive and permissive phone policies, and a follow-up found that managing phones takes schools more than 100 staff hours a week either way.

While this issue roils locally, my kiddo’s locker was broken for two months this year, and while waiting for repair, she got dinged for having her device in her pocket in class when the locker wasn’t a secure option. She had shoes stolen from her locker in the meantime, proving the point.

I spoke with my kiddo at length to get her thoughts. Her takeaway as an 8th grader is that kids have second and third secret devices that they hide from parents and teachers already – often, mom and dad’s old devices slipped from a junk drawer and connected to wi-fi. She suggested we adults don’t fully appreciate the kids’ ingenuity around their devices, and how they view their phones and tablets as the means to get and stay connected with one another.

While talking, I was reminded of the dance between students and the school system’s IT department during the COVID-19 shutdown. In our community, the kids were in remote learning for a full year and a half, and the IT department chased them around their approved digital tools like a game of whack a mole, shutting down access to chat and collaboration. In the meantime, almost no socialization happened between students that wasn’t directly observed by teachers, on camera. By 2021, the kids were engaged in secret, digital note-passing, chatting within Google docs and slide decks to avoid teacher surveillance. Where there is a will, there is a way.

Update, September 26, 2026: The Madison School Board approved the policy on June 23, with tighter limits on high schoolers than a UW–Madison La Follette School research team had recommended. Parent Check On Tech, the group linked above, pushed for the stricter version. Elsewhere, a San Diego teacher reports that students hand over burner phones and keep their real ones.

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:39:34 -0500

NYT writes about the surge of “slopaganda.”

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:23:58 -0500

What does it mean for the culture when everything (everything!) is content, even war and mass shootings?

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:31:56 -0500

More on user-generated content marketing and how it works. UGC is a powerful example of “social proof,” where people’s parasocial tendencies are leveraged to boost brand credibility and conversions. This is the consumer psychology behind celebrity and influencer sales and endorsements.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:16:08 -0500

Watching the fallout: Fans discovered that the band Geese benefitted from a hefty marketing campaign. Folks are debating whether this makes Geese a “psy-op” or merely “sell-outs”, to use an old term of art. Meanwhile the marketing firm behind the push is getting a ton of attention in its own right.

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:44:53 -0500

Garbage Day on what makes something cool to Gen Z, and how this is impacted by the degradation of “pillars of coolness” in previous generations like culture rags and MTV. GD predicts that “cool” will be measured by lack of polish and “how many human beings left their house to experience it.”

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:20:16 -0500

Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the audience being sold, they’re also a labor force co-producing the content that attracts more audience.

Looking back at the feminist blogging era with the benefit of my current experience, I’d argue that what made Feministe different from our peer blogs was the commitment to convening the audience and sharing the platform without packaging it up for or selling to advertisers. That was largely my boundary – with as much market space as it commanded for the time, it was never monetized at scale, though individual contributors were free to use it as they wanted to build their audiences. We eventually committed to a small advertising carousel to cover hosting costs.

I recall someone balking at me for refusing to broadly monetize when I spoke at Blogher in 2005, but it was a hard line, for better or worse.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:55:11 -0500

An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.

Some thoughts:

When I started in 2001, the most viewed website about feminism on the internet was a solo blog by a man in Portland.
I just pulled Mindy Seu’s “Cyberfeminism Index” off my shelf, a veritable tome, and the feminist sites don’t even make the table of contents. Which is not an indictment of the book, but an example of how ephemeral all this is online.
You can see this on Twitter in the live debate about what Jezebel was and wasn’t, a conversation happening mostly through collective remembering. Jezebel joined the pack of blogs at some point, and they were big dogs, but they weren’t responsible for the creation or steering of the digital movement. They were a glossy, spendy repackaging of the organic thing, backed by real investors. It’s wild to see the entirety of the movement attributed to Jezebel by young Twitter, given that most of the indies kept Jezebel at arms’ length until much later. They were pretty widely considered a corporate interloper in a grassroots arena, though in hindsight that wasn’t right either.
The first time the indie bloggers gave Jezebel their day was when they published the untouched photographs of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook, a women’s magazine. The Redbook post tore the veil off the beauty industry in real time. Until then, the idea that “celebrities are photoshopped” and “photos are retouched” was almost an urban myth, which is easy to forget given the ubiquity of filters and AI now. Then, you heard about it but couldn’t confirm it for yourself unless you had firsthand experience. Retouching was a discrete industry practice, digital tools were still expensive and clunky, and all of it was surrounded by a lot of tradecraft and secrecy. The mystery of celebrity image management exploded with an animated gif on a public-facing post, and it was rad.

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:49:39 -0500

A write up on sycophancy in popular chatbots.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:11:33 -0500

I misused PESOS below, c’est la vie, I’m doing a POSSE model. Here’s someone smarter than me on POSSE v PESOS.

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:06:58 -0500

A good essay on writing and communication in this time. Ultimately the pickle of AI writing is that meaning is something best made through collaboration.

AI in practice: Chatbot tool comparison

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:19:11 -0500

Come look over my shoulder while I explore how and whether LLMs are good writing tools: Here’s a wee version of the LLM comparison exercise I did with my team. We’ll make it a two-fer so you can see how the “good writing” skill works in practice, though we’ll see how that actually goes.

One of the more useful things you can do with an LLM is hold up a few ideas side by side and apply lenses to them. I know this history pretty well, so I asked a series of LLMs, why is Wisconsin’s cultural identity and cohesion stronger than Indiana’s, from a historical and business perspective?

Here are the answers in one doc, for comparison.

Each LLM will give us more or less the same story, different flavor. Within the industry, the differences across the models reflect “model personality.” Asking “why” instead of “whether” will probably drive the answer to favor Wisconsin. Using multiple lenses (two states, historical + business, identity + cohesion) forces the LLM to cross-reference across more of its training data, which tends to produce a more comprehensive answer.

For all the chatter about consciousness and whatever, remember that an LLM is an infinite series of if/then/elses applied to human language and semantics, so being able to talk about language and communication, getting meta with the tool and how you think through language, helps a lot when using one. This is maybe the one thing I like about experimenting so hard with the tools. I’m thinking about the technical side of writing and enjoying it quite a lot.

Functionally: all of them acknowledge hard historical truths within the subject matter and don’t shy away from critical perspectives, which is good. Both Gemini and Copilot include in-line links, which lets you judge the output’s authority in the moment as a reader. I liked Copilot’s more than I expected here. Claude’s answers are more lyrical and do provide more context, and yet do not encourage checking against outside sources by providing links within the output. And you can see that even with the good writing skill calling out hard bans on certain structure, Claude plows right through them.

Model personality: Claude favors sociological answers to Copilot’s economic answers. Claude is also highly intellectual and narrative by comparison, and that narrative style can mask nuance by sinking relative context within the storytelling. Gemini simplifies, boosts and cheerleads where the others don’t, and really goes hard on Wisconsin’s reputation as a drinking and Packers state when there are stronger structural arguments in play. Copilot is tricky because it looks authoritative like a briefing, which also makes it easily “extractible” for the user, but every citation requires authentication unless this is one of those “good enough” tasks.

As a writer, something I find annoying across the whole spread is the semantic reveal. LLMs are semantic machines, and it is persistently revealed in ways that are weird to the human ear. All of them go out of their way to describe things as “structural,” “connective” as in “connective tissue,” “load-bearing” and “legible.”

Finally, I included a second tab where I asked Claude for analysis across the four outputs, where it suggests that my framing of the question is altogether kind of problematic. It shows how a strong prompt is sometimes also a bad approach.

There are a lot of possible takeaways here, but I’d rather set aside the question of which tool is “good” or “bad” or “better” and think more about the patterns across the tools and their implications.

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:25:49 -0500

You might call this a taste test: Obsessed with the story about the McDonald’s CEO and how his LinkedIn-style videos selling the McD’s franchise have escaped containment, leading to one of the funnier CEO/product marketing dynamics in recent history. Burger King’s CEO swooped in, holding widely-marketed listening sessions with customers and to demonstrate his love for the Whopper in contrast with the deeply weird McD’s videos. Must read: Internet long-hauler Katie Notopoulos on how direct-to-public marketing works when the public is more familiar with the product than the org’s leaders.

My teenager thinks fast food is cool and subversive (cue the sound of one hundred moms groaning) and she and her friends regularly talk shop. They are Taco Bell fans and think burger stops are kind of gauche. Not gauche: Baja Blast.

In the meantime, the fast food sector is becoming a playground for AI approaches, causing a lot of nervous discussion on social media and in tech spaces.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:15:17 -0500

Developing a new pet theory that you could theoretically crank AI outputs toward your vision by having an organized link blog revolution.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:48:10 -0500

Reading about a new “slow” RSS app called Current.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:43:00 -0500

A new report shows that “just 100 users were responsible for almost 70 per cent of online conspiracy posts from influential accounts they examined in Canada.” Relatedly, a White House staffer is reportedly behind a massive Trump account on Twitter. This practice is a common information strategy by bad actors called astroturfing.

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:14:05 -0500

New research shows that social media advertising suppresses voting in targeted communities, and is the first to quantify the effect of this kind of microtargeting on voter turnout.

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:14:00 -0500

The last time I went truly viral was in April of 2020 in the height of the COVID shutdown. I posted a tweet and walked away from my phone. By the time I checked back, my notifications were out of control.

The next morning, I got a message from an old friend familiar with my handle. “I think I saw your account on Good Morning America?” Hilariously, there I was, and I couldn’t even claim responsibility for the meme.

I’ve spent most of my time on the internet as a pseudonymous account, using my first name only, or using a handful of handles (incl feministe, fauxrealtho, flotisserie, paired with punny names like “Petty White” and “Frieda People,” a convention from the Tumblr years). Even as a visible personality online, I was only known by my first name and URL and/or handle. In recent years I de- and reactivated some of my socials, so some of these breadcrumbs no longer exist, but I’ll do my best.

Pseudonymity allows writers to explore complex ideas in digital spaces while protecting their identity, location, and other identifying factors, while also maintaining a throughline of identity and storytelling.

There are a lot of trade offs in using a pseudonym, especially around how to claim credit for your work. But people use them because they give you the privacy to be honest, real, weird, authentic, and to escape the creep of modern social media presence into high stakes spaces like the workplace. This dynamic was kind of the impetus behind the era of “weird Twitter,” where people using pseudonymous social handles routinely threw out funny, absurdist one-liners to impress their friends and followers, while taking a turn at the social media slot machine. Not every post or joke lands in a way that converts to numbers, but some do, and it’s fun to try.

I’ve written a little previously about how the English program I was a part of used fiber arts to illustrate the fundamentals of technical writing, but one of their other methods of teaching the internet was through board games. Games, like the internet, and much like writing, provide rules and structure for communication and engagement, but everything that happens inside the container of game board and game play is a mystery until it emerges through human interaction. So goes the internet (and to some extent, so goes AI). Games and gaming were used as a method to think through what it means to create rules of play, then let a community rip through the model – and many of the thinking and skills involved around game design apply in social digital spaces, from chat rooms and Teams channels to the open seas of the WWW. The longer you’ve been playing the slot machine, the more you get a feel for the kind of thing that will get seen and read, and who among your readership will take your content to the next level.

Why does it matter? Because understanding what “works” to make ideas travel further online, the more you can tap into it. Big Tech is under fire right now for amplifying some of the worst impulses of the internet, by cranking engagement algorithms to exploit messages that produce outrage. Yes, big emotions create virality, but so do relatability and sharability.

So back to the meme: here’s how it went down.

The meme was a list of six hypothetical celebrity households: pick one to quarantine in.

It had been circulating on Facebook, started by a Christian influencer named Savannah Locke. I encountered it deep in a Real Housewives fan group, and felt the pull of a good parlor game. In April 2020, everyone I knew was sitting at home, fretting about the COVID-19 pandemic looming over all of us, so I shared it with minimal ceremony, a couple of buddies with a slightly larger following hit retweet, and within two days the tweet was being cited by The Cut, Time, the Washington Post, ABC News, and others. Know Your Meme documented it for posterity. Several outlets named me as the originator, but trust, I was only trying to delight my friends with low grade Facebook content. I couldn’t find the original meme at the time – Locke appears to have had a name change that scrambled my search. But hey, as these things go, nobody earned a dime or promoted anything weird, so no harm, no foul. Business Insider managed to credit it correctly, so a special kudos to their editor.

The core game mechanism behind the meme is forced choice: constraints generate opinions and opinions generate activity. Each “house” also represents a personality type. House 3 is chaos, House 6 is aspirational, House 5 is the one where someone is definitely cooking and someone is definitely yelling about it. The choices are arbitrary, which invites curiosity about who grouped what and why. In short, this meme offered a light conversation starter at the right time, with low stakes, high personal reveal, and endlessly discussable combinations. It also drew from existing memes and games that are popular online, like “where you sitting” in the proverbial lunch room. This one became news because of the timing and gamability, not because I was particularly clever, but hey.

What does it feel like to go so viral? It’s hilarious, strangely affirming, and also a little crazy-making. It opens the door to a whole lot of wild people and ideas on the internet, not all of them flattering or welcome. Virality is sometimes paired with incredible harassment and requires “more condolences than congratulations.” But as far as this particular experience went – hilarious, whoops, and wow. It just felt like a Lebron James, Post Malone and Jennifer Aniston hang would be a good time.

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:38:00 -0500

When I started building websites in the late ’90s, the line between writing and coding didn’t really exist. A person probably learned HTML because she had something to say and needed a place to put it. The internet was free and anonymous and it felt audacious to put your stuff online, like flinging a message in a bottle out to sea. The code was a container for the ideas that rendered them onscreen, and every post and page you published was both a piece of your thinking and a brick in something larger.

People forget that the early web was a writing community. Writers, or bloggers, built their own sites, maintained their own archives, linked to each other deliberately. A blogroll was both a reading list and a show of solidarity, a trackback was a way of saying, “I see you, I’m thinking with you.” The technical architecture - RSS feeds, permalinks, comment threads - existed to organize the writing and the writers’ thoughts, and to push their ideas forward on the open web.

This worked for a time. Communities of writers, most of them without institutional backing or media credentials, built new bodies of knowledge together through interacting as readers and writers, communicating across a foundation of code. The work didn’t stay online. It spilled into conference halls and state houses and newsrooms and policy discussions. As the body of communication built, it created something that accumulated over time. These people influenced mainstream journalism, shaped public conversations, launched careers and movements. In many ways, the national political conditions we face today are a reaction to that movement, and how it allowed regular people to influence the world through the democratization of mass communication.

Midway through the aughts, the brick and mortar publishers and venture capitalists started looking across the landscape, at all the writers creating fantastic content, largely for free, and sucked them into their content and editorial teams. Google Reader lost institutional and financial support as writers moved off the open web and onto publishing platforms, often backed by VC money, that measured the quality of your work by engagement. The addition of algorithmic feeds further broke down this structure – the algorithm doesn’t measure whether your work contributed to shared understanding, but whether it generated a click, a share. The code changed, and the writing changed with it.

The writers changed with it, too. The blogger became the influencer. Bloggers operated in a gift economy of ideas: you wrote to think, to argue, to contribute, and your standing in the wider community came from the quality of your work and contributions over time. Was it a meritocracy? No, but the conditions made it possible for a regular person to talk with experts as peers, which upended traditional power structures around authority and expertise (in both directions, good and bad). Meanwhile, influencers operate in a heavily capitalized attention economy where engagement converts to dollars. The audience is a market to press for money.

The gendered dimension of this shift matters as well. The early blogosphere was full of women writing sharp, rigorous work about politics, culture, parenthood, identity, and technology — work that was explicitly feminist and anti-racist and genuinely moved public conversations. This was the community I helped build (Feministe.us was my project, a community platform of writers and commenters whose coverage and discussion broadly fell under, but was certainly not limited to, the topic of feminism). When the monetized platforms absorbed that energy, the commercial model recast women’s online authority almost entirely in terms of consumer influence. What could we sell? And to whom? The framing around our work went from “this person has important ideas” to “this person can sell things to a niche market.” Meanwhile, men who’d built audiences through tech or political blogging were more likely to be absorbed into mainstream media as columnists and analysts, roles that kept their intellectual authority intact. The influencer label, with all its connotations of superficiality, landed disproportionately on women, and it stuck.

There’s a class piece here, too. The platform model offered something the early blogosphere mostly didn’t — a way to get paid. For women who’d been doing enormous amounts of unpaid intellectual labor building online communities, the question of monetization wasn’t shallow. The implications of information centralization and monetization were as present then as they are now with LLMs and AI. Some people figured out the social platforms and worked their way into viable digital careers. Platforms offered a lot of perks, but all of the perks had a backstop. Corporate interests introduced the problems of advertising, audience and sponsorship, which meant reorienting your individual practice around maximizing your commercial value over and above your intellectual contribution and community management skills. It often meant giving away some or all of your IP rights.

For most people, new system didn’t offer a viable way to get from “respected independent writer” to “respected, protected and compensated writer.” Many of us found ourselves in positions too precarious to take the leap into freelancing and social media, and some, like me, got regular jobs doing regular stuff. Some married money. And in the meantime, some folks figured out how to get into real journalism, which looks much different in 2026.

Great storytelling helps people understand themselves and their world. We let some of that depth go on the Internet with the onslaught of digital marketing and all of its implications, and today the internet feels less useful and less trustworthy than it once did.

It feels like there’s something to take forward from the experience.

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:34:57 -0500

Writing is code, code is writing.

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:19:00 -0500

My undergrad experience in college really shaped my approach to the internet. I was an English Education major at the time, in the early 00s, when the internet was around but mostly the wheelhouse of scholars and nerds. I was a nerd, learning code as a vehicle for writing, primarily to amuse myself and my friends.

The English department was an embattled unit within a school within a college of a STEM-centric university whose administration was perennially annoyed by the Humanities and their writing requirements. One of the English department’s survival tactics was to grow their approach to technical writing, getting deep into the question of how technology changes, shapes and shifts reading, writing and literacy. Thus they organized loosely around an emerging field called “digital rhetoric.”

For a time this was the top rhetoric and composition program in the field, populated by scholars from scrappy programs. My closest mentor, an English PhD from Wayne State in Detroit, studied race and gender representation in video games and how programmers (particularly Black and trans programmers) write themselves into existence through code, design and other aesthetic and storytelling choices. Outsiders had a really hard time understanding how this work belonged in an English department, but ultimately, she was focused on the question of authorship and how the author is projected throughout her work, a classic literary debate. She treated video games as texts and gamers as an audience, an approach that foretold many things about our current political era.

In this space, “digital” doesn’t just mean content on a screen. The concept is more complex, including social, cultural and rhetorical dimensions, in addition to shifts through time. Digital “texts” and practices exist on a continuum with print and other media, rather than in isolation, transforming how persuasion and communication work, both separately and together.

I took all these lessons and ran with them. This is where my approach to the internet is situated, and there are a few truisms that I learned from that time and era that further position my writing and approach.

Writing is code, code is writing

Writing and code are fundamentally the same thing in digital contexts. Both are systems of symbols that create meaning and action through semantic rules. The line between “content” and “container” blurs in digital spaces. A blog post is the copy on the page – and it’s also the metadata, the responsive design that adapts to different screens, the accessibility markup that makes it readable by screen readers. Each of these elements is written (coded) and each carries rhetorical weight and communicates something to the audience, intended or not. If you understand these relationships, you understand how the internet works as a social and information system.

This convergence of digital and material amplifies the concept of intertextuality, the idea that all texts reference, respond to and build upon other texts. In the classroom, intertextuality often focuses on plays and novels, and explores how authors speak and refer to one another’s work over time. In music, this is the study of sampling and referencing and why.

In digital environments, intertextuality becomes literal and functional. Code libraries reference other code libraries. Websites link to and embed other websites. APIs allow different platforms to communicate and share data. A single digital text might pull content from multiple sources simultaneously – a Twitter embed, a YouTube video, a Google Map – creating a networked document that exists across multiple platforms and authors. Virality builds rhetorical velocity through layers of meaning being added by individual users in real time, creating new texts and contexts through iteration and sharing.

Writing makes reality

A lot of students of this era took up knitting. It was trendy, yes, but the professors also taught knitting as an applied example of technical writing, and how writing produces a material reality.

Knitting patterns are technical writing in its purest form. A pattern is a set of instructions that must be precise, unambiguous, and reproducible, the same goals as any technical document. Pattern writers use specialized notation (K2tog, SSK, yo) that functions like code, compressing complex physical actions into standardized symbols that individuals interpret using sticks and string. The pattern must account for different skill levels, anticipate common errors, and provide enough context for the knitter to understand not just what to do, but why.

Good instructions and an able translator may result in a wearable delight: a sweater, a scarf, a cozy and colorful pair of socks. When a pattern fails the result is the same as failed technical documentation: confusion, wasted time and an unusable product. Piles of string. Dumb, useless sticks. It is an incredibly strong reminder that technical writing isn’t confined to manuals and protocols. It exists anywhere complex processes need to be communicated clearly and consistently so others can replicate results – including in your granny’s yarn basket.

So that’s how I learned to knit. Digital rhetors link physical practices to digital ones to illustrate highly conceptual ideas about writing and social networks. And one reason why digital spaces like Ravelry deserve recognition as thoughtful, functional social platforms is that this link between conceptual and material is made explicit in the digital knitting community. Designed for information sharing among a particular audience, decisions about information architecture and community management reasonably cascade from the mission, so Ravelry has remained a reasonably healthy community experience for most users despite its massive size and sprawling discussion. It remains an example of positive social dynamics online, unlike its behemoth competitors.

Always returning to Haraway

Many thinkers and texts built out this field of thought, but Cyborg Manifesto sits at the forefront for me. Writing during the Reagan era, with the populace freaking out about the rise of biotechnology and personal computing all around her, Haraway entered debates about whether women should enter male-dominated, militaristic fields like engineering and computer science, bringing an overtly feminist lens to questions of technology and power.

One major takeaway from Haraway’s work is the importance of rejecting binary thinking around technology and science. This approach aligns with other humanist and feminist perspectives that foundationally believe technology is by, about, and for the human experience, thus providing new and novel sites for political struggle. This gave people frustrated by tech a permission structure for interacting with technology rather than avoiding or abstaining from it entirely.

If these questions of knowledge and power remain central to technology, we want the people making those decisions to share our values and interests, and to be in the room when decisions are made. This argument is ripe for various challenges, which is why it was such a provocative starting point for cyberpunks and cyberfeminists alike.

Sharing is caring

This was an open source culture that meant sharing not just finished products, but the breadcrumbs and other attempts at learning along the way. It requires the safety that supports a yes/and culture, where people can collaborate with transparency, in spite of, or in consideration of, the ugly stuff and the many unknowns.

We let public and private live alongside each other without rigid boundaries about professionalism and polish. Your serious professional work could sit next to a meme, which could sit next to a picture of your cat, and none of it diminished the other.

This was an intentional acknowledgment that people are multifaceted, and that the digital spaces we inhabit should reflect that complexity. Putting the personal and the real alongside the artificiality of digital communications builds a relationship between the viewer and creator in ways that carefully curated, brand-managed presences just can’t (also: yawn).

Vulnerability, humor, expertise, horror, scholarship, and joy coexist, as in real life.

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 13:43:00 -0500

Something else I noticed in my experimentation with AI and creative writing: Claude prefers a mid-length, declarative sentence, while I prefer a lot of variety in my prose. Sentence variety is a primary consideration in any text-based communication approach. Write accordingly.

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 10:27:22 -0500

About fifteen years ago, when I began to take my work and career more seriously, I turned toward other women in my orbit who were in the same phase of life. For many years now we have supported each other through our various iterations, talking interviews and talent and resumes and obstacles and salary alongside art and life and leisure, staying connected through a mix of persistent digital communication and travel.

These women underpin everything I’ve built since, and I am so grateful for their observations and experience, and for the pleasure of seeing how we have grown into our choices over time.

Personal support means everything; assemble your team.

Crunching for clarity

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:12:00 -0500

In 1999, academic and theorist Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

This was my era in college, and I remember feeling challenged and overwhelmed as an undergrad trying to read theory for the first time. So today, I asked Claude.ai to put it in plain language, just to see what would happen. Here’s the after:

Scholars used to think that capitalism shaped society in consistent, predictable patterns. But newer thinking focuses on how power works—how it repeats, overlaps, and gets reshaped over time. This brought time into the picture and moved away from older theories that treated social structures as fixed. Instead, recognizing that structures can change opened up a new way of understanding power: it's tied to specific moments and strategies, and it's always being renegotiated.

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:56:41 -0500

Woof: ads are coming to ChatGPT.

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:52:26 -0500

New numbers from Pew Research on how teens used social media and AI chatbots in 2025.

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:50:42 -0500

Our friend, the RSS feed.

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:02:40 -0500

This book isn’t in Epilogue so I can’t log it properly, but it’s an okay primer on change communication. For higher ed, the emphasis on engaging leadership and governance is handy. 📚

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 17:07:48 -0500

“Writing is a practical skill—particularly since most of our online communication is text-based to begin with. …Done well, it means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise.”

Rhetoric of intertextuality

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:36:20 -0500

“… every text is connected to other texts by citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like. Every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts. In sum, intertextuality describes the relationships that exist between and among texts. What follows is a discussion of the strategies of intertextuality.”

What is this site and why am I doing it?

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:12:00 -0500

In recent history I stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse the social platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on my private IG and here.

What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life — I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great. The practice of reading and reflecting makes your thinking stick, and I am from a certain time and place, so this is how I approach learning and communicating about what I’m learning. It’s a habit.

While this is my preferred approach, I acknowledge that sharing unfinished ideas publicly is risky and you have to accept accountability for the messiness that comes with that. But I also know that working through your vulnerability through the act of writing lets you tap into your most creative, innovative self and test your ideas against an evolving sense of what’s good. The potential for an audience, however real or implied, keeps you more honest and less self-indulgent. Despite the trade offs, I think it’s worthwhile.

As I add to this page, I’ll be thinking out loud about digital rhetoric and communication alongside emerging technology, and linking back to foundational ideas I see reflected online today. Occasionally I’ll say something longer.

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:31:01 -0500

On virtuous cycles: “Culture is the core of the virtuous cycle, in which shared principles guide you toward collective goals.”

Practicing pluralism in risky spaces

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 13:09:00 -0500

While I’m cleaning up the cruft around my social presence, I’m finding more references to the heyday of blogging that explain how people organized online (Web 1.0) before the era of platforms (Web 2.0). One is this interview with Jill Filipovic, my one-time co-blogger and comrade at Feministe, with the folks at LGM who interviewed me on the subject a few years ago. Jill and I differed (and still do) on the meat of many issues, but have a lot of our thinking in common about how to handle disagreement and advance our ideas in common (and risky!) spaces. She’s welcome in my foxhole anytime.

I appreciate this oral history project by LGM because the articulation of our processes then (before automation) provides a lot of instruction about how to organize and think about communication outside of increasingly toxic and irresponsible social platforms today. One idea that is relevant today is around pluralism. In our case, we practiced pluralism on subjects and perspectives within a defined domain, “feminism.” In practice, making it work before true automation meant we lived with a lot of decision points around moderating a raucous community. Back then, we had our CMS and set up a list of community expectations, iterating as we went, then let the community rip. Collectively, this approach created a robust and vibrant interactive community of peers and moved our interests forward as a cohort. Between her interview, where she talks through the decision points we faced, and mine, where I talk more about the tools and their limitations, there is a lot for people who want to organize people digitally while thinking outside of the algorithm.

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:42:13 -0500

What made blogging different? Reflections on 25 years of digital media.

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:22:32 -0500

“LOLgislation,” or how memes become policy, and posting becomes praxis.

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:24:20 -0500

What do people actually use ChatGPT for? A snapshot.

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 23:24:16 -0500

“It’s almost as if groups on both sides of the political spectrum are looking for an excuse to brand business decisions as politically or socially hostile,” said Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania who studies how corporations operate in political spaces.

⚡ AI's last mile problem in higher ed

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 09:15:00 -0500

I graduated from college right before the 2008 recession and bounced through some unpromising temp jobs until an opportunity emerged for a permanent position. Sometimes you just need to get in where you fit in, and so I did. That’s how I came to work for a regional cable company that used federal money to expand the new national broadband network, extending out to the rural communities dotting central Indiana.

It was a front row seat to the national broadband expansion efforts of the early 2000s. Our business ran right across the state, spanning the 80 or so miles from Attica to Kokomo, which included several small cities with large manufacturers, two public research universities, and several community and liberal arts colleges. The strip of broadband fiber at the core of our service followed existing highways and electrical lines that split the corn and soybean fields from town to town, feathering out to more rural areas from there.

I worked a variety of roles there that put me face-to-face with a classic technical problem: the last mile. On many occasions, someone would come in looking pensive, and explain that the fiber had been extended all the way from town to their hamlet, and yet there was no plan to connect their property to the pole. Over time the pattern was clear: while the network was expanded, the cost of running a physical line to each individual property was too expensive and specific at scale. These customers often left without a path forward despite all their efforts and ours.

The “last mile problem” refers to the logistical challenges and high costs associated with the final leg of delivering goods or services to the end customer. It’s often the most difficult and expensive part of the supply chain, despite being a relatively short distance. The pattern shows up everywhere: public transit can get commuters most of the way most of the time, but that final leg of the journey remains specific and individual and problematic. E-commerce companies promise drone delivery solutions, scooter and bike-share apps claim to solve urban mobility gaps, but these technological optimizations remain persistently stubborn at scale, running up against the messy realities of sidewalks, intersections, and actual human behavior.

Tl;dr: I’ve been turning over this suspicion that AI automation will hit a classic “last mile problem,” especially in the public sector.

AI systems, particularly LLMs, are like those systems—they work incredibly well in their intended domain, processing and manipulating information. But because they’re fundamentally an information-only approach, that creates their own last mile problem when we try to implement them in physical and context-specific environments. Public institutions are uniquely specific — they are often the originators and producers of knowledge and the keepers of original policy, tasked with making the rubber hit the road. Additionally, the need for comprehensive data protection required by public workers and institutions fundamentally hamstring potential applications.

Actually implementing recommendations is where you hit the last mile. This is the work of public administration.

Imagine an AI application trained on every facilities management manual ever written and tuned to synthesize best practices for HVAC optimization. It can analyze years of energy usage data and recommend precise temperature adjustments for different zones of a building, but can’t feel that the third floor is always stuffy, or know that the facilities manager retired last year and took decades of institutional knowledge with him. Building A’s HVAC system was installed in 1987 and has a manual keypad. Building B’s system interfaces with the campus-wide monitoring system, but unreliably, and investigation is slated for later, someday, when resources allow. Professor Smith has taught in Room 204 for 25 years and will blow up your spot before moving to a different classroom for maintenance. Your engineers who manage these spaces are balancing human teams, who have time off and training and other priorities they manage in life. So, you need staff who understand the quirks of each area, the history of each system, the politics of which departments will accept changes and which will flood your inbox with complaints. You need someone who knows that the third floor always runs hot because of a design flaw from 1974, and that the solution isn’t more precise control but a $50,000 renovation that’s been deferred for a decade because a glittering new project across campus takes priority.

Imagine this tangle of questions and contingencies times infinity on every university campus in existence. Universities are like cities—they’ve been built and rebuilt over decades or centuries, with layers of systems and fiefdoms that weren’t designed to work together. AI recommendations assume a level of standardization that simply doesn’t exist. Every AI implementation in higher ed requires navigating multiple constituencies with different priorities and power structures. It’s like trying to redesign traffic patterns in a neighborhood where the residents, business owners, commuters, and city planners all have veto power and conflicting interests.

So. When looking at efficiency efforts spinning up across the education sector, I’m feeling pensive, trying to understand how exactly the house gets connected to the pole.

The promise of new tech in higher ed needs to more deeply consider the translation costs: the human labor, institutional knowledge, knowledge documentation and local adaptation required to bridge between the usefulness of tech and specific realities of public university work. Public employees want modernization and don’t want to fall behind. We want systems that work. We are also balancing a great deal of change and pressure as a sector, with fewer material resources than ever. We need less marketing and more right-sizing in the claims around AI against the political and tech realities of public administration.

This disconnect between technological promise and implementation reality becomes even more critical as higher education faces increased political scrutiny. When tech vendors promise that AI will solve efficiency problems or reduce administrative costs, institutions are under immense pressure to deliver measurable results quickly. But the translation costs we experience don’t disappear just because the political pressure to modernize increases.

The institutions that thread this needle will be the ones that accurately assess these translation costs upfront and set expectations accordingly—not the ones that assume the technology will magically bridge the gap between digital and physical, abstract and specific.

⚡ Navigating AI in higher ed communications: A practitioner's guide

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:49:12 -0500

by Lauren Bruce

As communications professionals in higher education, we work for institutions built on the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, yet many of us feel uncertain about how to thoughtfully integrate one of the most significant technological advances of our time: artificial intelligence.

Over the past year, my team has wrestled with questions that didn’t exist in our profession just a few years ago. Should we use AI to draft articles and email copy? How do we disclose AI-generated content, or do we? When does AI assistance cross the line from helpful tool to ethical concern?

These aren’t abstract questions any longer. Over the last year, I had to overcome AI resistance of my own to develop practical, hands-on approaches to AI use that align with our institutional values while acknowledging the realities of modern communications work (more on that below). What I’ve learned is that the answers aren’t found in blanket policies or rules, but in applying our existing professional ethics to these new tools. Here is where I am today on the journey from AI praxis to practice.

Mission first

The foundation of responsible AI use in our field starts with a principle we already know: everything we do should advance our institution’s educational mission. Higher education exists to create, share, and preserve knowledge while fostering critical thinking and diverse perspectives, in service of students, faculty, researchers, workers and the world.

The bulk of our work comes from conversations with colleagues, understanding of our campus dynamics and processes, and professional judgment about what our community needs to hear. This inevitably means more work upfront, but it maintains the authenticity and institutional knowledge that our audience deserves, regardless of whether AI tools are part of the process.

Transparency without paranoia

Do I need to mention AI every time I use it? The answer isn’t simple, but I’ve found a helpful framework: consider whether your audience would feel misled if they knew how AI was involved in creating the content.

When I use AI to polish grammar and shape format, that feels similar to using spell-check – it’s helpful but not something that changes the fundamental nature of the content we wish to communicate. But when AI helps generate the main structure for a story about campus policy changes, that’s a different ball game. The audience expects those priorities and framing decisions to come from human judgment about what matters to our community.

Internally, we differentiate between the two by defining whether or not you are “automating” processes using AI, or “augmenting” processes using AI. Full disclosure, my area of experience is in augmentation, not automation. That said.

I’ve started recommending simple disclosures when AI plays a substantial role in content creation. A line like “This article was developed with AI assistance” maintains trust while allowing us to thoughtfully benefit from these tools. It’s not about being defensive, it’s about being transparent with the people we serve, especially as the tech and attitudes around it evolve over time. Additional qualifications can be included here, such as how the information was shaped and shared by AI or not (privacy implications abound).

Here, it’s important to remember to only use your university-approved tools, because university enterprise AI tools are modified to meet campus rules and requirements related to data handling.

The accuracy imperative

Perhaps nowhere are the stakes higher than with accuracy. In higher education communications, we’re not just sharing information—we’re stewarding public trust in our institutions and, by extension, in higher education itself. In addition, much of the information we are communicating is original, in that it’s new information that cannot be generated using the limitless soup of generative AI.

Every piece of AI-generated content requires human verification, especially anything involving numbers, research findings, or claims about institutional achievements. This means checking sources, confirming statistics, and ensuring that quotes are accurate and properly sourced. It’s more work, but the alternative—publishing incorrect information—could undermine years of relationship-building with community stakeholders and partners.

The promise of speed and efficiency that comes with generative AI must be balanced with the work of close reading, the skill and practice of carefully analyzing a passage’s language, content, structure, and patterns in order to understand what a passage means, what it suggests, and how it connects to our larger body of work. I firmly believe that close reading, learned in the Humanities and Social Sciences, will become increasingly important to understand, shape and steer AI output, especially with regard to public communication best practices.

Inclusion as a practice

AI bias isn’t an abstract concern—it shows up in subtle but significant ways in the work. I’ve noticed that AI tools often default to formal, academic language that might exclude first-generation college students, or suggest examples and metaphors that assume certain cultural backgrounds, for example.

This has made me more intentional about prompt engineering—the way I request AI assistance. I build digital accessibility and plain language best practices into my prompts, in alignment with institutional best practices. One tip is to draft the original using my chosen, intentional language, then ask for revisions using as much of the original verbiage as possible. The difference in output is significant and it allows me to focus on higher-order communication strategy while demonstrating both accuracy and inclusive values in our output.

Privacy and the long view

Working at a public university means balancing transparency with appropriate privacy protections. We work within strict guidelines about what information can be included in AI prompts, particularly around student data, personnel information, and strategic planning discussions. Again, it’s important to only use your university-approved tools, because university enterprise AI tools are modified to meet campus rules and requirements related to data handling.

The challenge is that AI tools work best with context, but providing that context can sometimes mean sharing information inappropriately. I’ve learned to be creative about how I frame requests to AI tools—giving enough context for useful output while protecting sensitive information about individuals and institutional operations.

I focus AI prompts on publicly available information rather than including details from internal planning discussions or individual faculty concerns. It requires more thoughtful preparation, but it ensures we’re protecting appropriate confidentiality.

Speed vs. strategy

The efficiency of AI is seductive, especially when facing tight deadlines and endless communication requests. But I’ve learned that speed can’t come at the expense of quality or authenticity.

Authentic institutional voice and authority doesn’t emerge from algorithms—it requires the deliberate application of human judgment to ensure our plans and communications reflect our campus culture, embody our values, and resonate with our specific audiences. The strategic thinking we bring—our ability to read context, navigate relationships, and understand the subtle dynamics of higher education communication—cannot be automated.

Consider my own practice: I frequently engage AI as a collaborative thinking tool, particularly for structural planning and format development. However, AI’s default tendency toward comprehensive, multi-layered approaches often produces unnecessarily complex frameworks for university communication realities. This is where professional judgement becomes critical. Strong strategic foundations and institutional knowledge allow us to right-size AI’s expansive suggestions into focused, contextually appropriate communication plans that actually serve our goals and communities.

Looking ahead

What I’ve learned over this past year is that responsible AI use isn’t about following a rigid set of rules. It’s about applying the professional ethics we already have to new technological capabilities. The core principles that guide good communications work—accuracy, transparency, service to mission, respect for audience—remain the same.

What’s different is that we now have tools that can enhance our ability to live up to those principles, if we use them thoughtfully. AI can help us communicate more clearly, research more efficiently, and reach broader audiences. But only if we maintain our professional judgment about when, how, and why to use these tools.

As our field continues to evolve, I’m convinced that the communications professionals who thrive will be those who can harness the power of AI while maintaining the human insight, ethical judgment, and institutional knowledge that define excellence in our profession. The technology will keep changing, but our commitment to serving our institutions and communities through ethical, effective communication remains constant. That’s the foundation we build on, whether we’re writing with pen and paper, collaborating in a digital document, or prompting the most sophisticated AI tool on campus.

*This post reflects my ongoing learning about AI ethics in communications practice and was generated using the assistance of AI (Claude, Gemini). Cross-posted on LinkedIn.

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 16:56:18 -0500

“In 2024, there were a total of 454 words used excessively by chatbots, the researchers report.” When does use of AI tip over into something fraudulent? Experts disagree.

Fri, 23 May 2025 12:41:33 -0500

Currently reading: Communication Solution by Stacy Smulowitz 📚

Thu, 22 May 2025 16:22:04 -0500

Close reading as the salve for These Times: https://defector.com/close-reading-is-for-everyone

Thu, 01 May 2025 16:58:27 -0500

Private group chats are as maddening as public social media - and much harder to track. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america

Thu, 01 May 2025 16:54:02 -0500

I generally use this space to track what I’m reading in books. But going forward, I’ll also be using it to consolidate links to articles I’m reading about communication, higher education and technology trends.

⚡ Acceleration

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 14:39:27 -0500

This has a bad headline, but the gist is that AI is already beginning to be used to power racketeering and ransom business models against vulnerable human enterprises. The net effect is a general erosion of the trustworthiness of written communication, especially online, as the same tools we use to perform our work and extend our social lives are increasingly used to scam us.

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 13:56:30 -0500

In relationship to collectors, purchases of physical media are on the rise, with vinyl outselling everything, and cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs making a comeback. I’m a longtime downloader and streamer, but have been buying vinyl lately myself. Indicative of lost trust in Big Tech?

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 21:50:11 -0500

“fine Corinthian leather”

Hidden Systems

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:40:45 -0500

My delightful book club pulled this YA graphic novel out of the 2023-24 “best of” lists and loved it. There is a remarkable amount of information on each page - truly, you could build a dynamic reading curriculum off of each section - between the written and visual communication. A triumphant example of quality science writing, a great gift book, suitable for just about any audience over the age of ten.

Finished reading: Hidden Systems by Dan Nott 📚

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 11:20:37 -0500

Microblogging on the open web - and why care? book.micro.blog

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 08:20:00 -0500

This is one to watch: www.theverge.com/2023/10/2…