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.
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.
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.
This one has been in the pile all summer, and I’m glad I set this one aside for now. Lemieux’s personal story is so smart and relatable, she shares without shame, and her voice is light and clear despite navigating often-heavy subject matter.
In particular, I want to tag the last section of the book where Lemieux invited other Black single mothers, from activists to viral Twitter personalities, to write about their experience from their individual perspectives, centering their voices in their own words, including stories from notable names like Tarana Burke. Timely and well executed.
Within this report, the LLM reflected my concern about my old blog appearing to be the center of these old networks. In fact, this is an effect of me pouring into the model.
It says:
The compiler appears on this page more often than her place in the blogosphere warrants. That emphasis is an effect of how large language models work: the models that compiled the page (Gemini and Claude) build their output from the material in front of them, and the compiler’s recollections were the fullest source they had, so her name attached to claims as their source and her own path filled more of the page than the record supports. This version names her less and marks firsthand claims as “firsthand.”
I asked Claude why LLMs work this way:
Context outweighs training data. A model has two sources: what it absorbed in training and what sits in the prompt. For feminist blogs of the 2000s, the training data is thin and scattered. Many of those blogs are dead links, partial Wayback captures, or sites that only show up as names in other people’s blogrolls. Your recollections, by contrast, were dense, specific, and right there in the context window. Generation is conditioned on that context, so the model draws the words, names, and connections it gives the highest probability from the prompt far more than from faint training memories. The fullest source sets the terms for everything else.
Source and subject merge. When you write “I remember that X linked to Y,” the text contains two facts: something happened between X and Y, and you are the one reporting it. [LLMs are semantically responsive to triangulation of meaning ~LB] Models don’t track provenance well, so the narrator’s name tends to drift into the content. “Compiler recalled” turns into “Compiler was part of,” and the person reporting a network becomes a node in that network. Your note’s phrase “her name attached to claims as their source” describes this accurately. It is a familiar failure in summarization, and it gets worse as the documents get longer.
Detail density reads as importance. Where the record is thin, the model fills gaps by extending whichever thread has the most material, and that thread was your path. A blog you described in four sentences gets more space, more connections, and more apparent centrality than one you mentioned in passing. The page ends up showing how much the compiler knew about each blog. That is a different quantity from each blog’s place in the network, and nothing in the process separates the two.
Training data favors the same names. Feministe is one of the better-documented blogs from that period. It was archived, cited in academic work, and linked from other surviving blogs. So the model’s background knowledge already over-represents the blogs that left records, and your recollections reinforced that bias instead of offsetting it.
Tuning rewards engagement with user material. Preference training rewards responses that use what the user supplied. A model that set aside half your recollections as over-represented would probably have been rated lower during training, so it leans toward incorporating whatever it was given.
Two models compound the effect. Gemini’s output became Claude’s input. The second model received a document that was already weighted toward you and treated that weighting as part of the record. Each pass inherits the previous pass’s emphasis and adds no correction, because neither model has an outside reference point.
The compiled page presented one person’s situated knowledge as a neutral overview, which is close to Haraway’s “god trick.” Labeling claims “firsthand” puts the situation back on the page. For the notes you plan to write, a useful test is whether that label changes how the model weights claims when it compiles the next version, or only how readers weight them. I expect it changes only readers’ weighting unless the prompt also tells the model to give unsourced firsthand claims less space than claims with external citations.
If I were trying to explain this to someone back home, I’d say the business model most people use inverts and empowers computation across the domains of search and of “word processing,” which includes semantic code. And because of the dynamics around the single-user interface, it lends more data authority to those outputs than is perhaps warranted. The vision is that the machine does the writing and the author steers, not unlike driving a car or using a hammer.
Konstantinos Komaitis has started a ten-part series at Techdirt called The Metric Is Not the Mission. It traces how Big Tech went from building the open internet to reshaping it around its own metrics and incentives. Part I argues that the recurring fights over content moderation, privacy, recommendation algorithms, and AI are symptoms of one long shift.
Search, social networks and recommendation systems solved real problems of navigation and abundance. Eventually each solution becomes the environment itself, and continues to be optimized for incentives that benefit the companies behind tech solutions. His phrase for how we’ve been reading the news about tech is “paying attention to the weather while overlooking the climate.”
The historical framing will only pay off if later installments name specific mechanisms and the people who made the decisions, and I’m reading the rest to see whether they do. New parts come out twice a week, with a full PDF at the end.
Yesterday I cut through Gary to get around a traffic jam on the toll road and picked up the Dan Ryan and the Skyway. Since living in Madison, I’ve made some version of that drive more times than I can count. I grew up south of Gary, at the edge of what a colleague called “the Chicago ombré,” and in my twenties my friends and I spent our weekends in The Region, thrifting our way across Lake County and hitting 18+ hip hop clubs in East Chicago. (King Von measured the same gradient from the city side in “Took Her to the O.”) To many, Gary is the city you drive through on the way to somewhere else.
The Skyway has a long political history: Chicago built it in 1958 with revenue bonds, then the bonds defaulted in 1963, and the city spent the next few decades catching up on deferred maintenance, according to Louise Nelson Dyble’s history of the road. In 2005, the Daley administration leased it for 99 years to Cintra and Macquarie for $1.83 billion, making it the first existing toll road in the country to be privatized. Eleven years later, the consortium sold the lease to three Canadian pension funds for $2.8 billion. The crossing now costs $8.10 in a car, and CBS Chicago reports that tolls have gone up more than 200 percent since the lease, about three and a half times the rate of inflation.
Indiana saw the incentives in this arrangement and followed along. In 2006, then-governor Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana Toll Road to the same Macquarie-Cintra group for 75 years and $3.8 billion, and he used the money to pay for Major Moves, his statewide highway program. Stateline’s 2012 retrospective called the lease one of the most divisive things Daniels did as governor. The bill passed without a single House Democrat, and the Region hated it. At a town hall in Crown Point, one resident told Daniels the deal amounted to taxation without representation. The operator went into Chapter 11 in 2014, and an Australian fund bought the lease the next year for $5.7 billion. A big share of the original money built I-69 between Evansville and the Crane Naval Base, at the other end of the state. When Eric Holcomb later approved a truck toll hike in exchange for another $1 billion, he had to deny in public that the Region was once again paying for highways its drivers would never use.
The state keeps the paperwork on deals like these. The Indiana State Archivesopened a new downtown building in Indianapolis on Thursday after 25 years in a “temporary” warehouse on East 30th Street, a former RCA record-stamping plant whose roof leaked partly because people shot holes in it. An old combination safe in the new building holds the state’s original constitutions, Jim Jones’s church incorporation papers, and Donald Trump’s application for a casino in Gary. Upstairs, a conservator expects to spend four to six weeks piecing together a Porter County survey map that had broken into fragments. The reading room is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, and the staff asks you to make an appointment so they can pull the boxes before you arrive.
Freddie Gibbs grew up on Gary’s east side, and Jeff Weiss has profiled him twice. The 2021 profile in The Ringer catches Gibbs around his Grammy nomination for Alfredo and opens on a 2009 visit to his Van Nuys apartment, where Gibbs told Weiss that robbing freight trains was a popular hobby back home. Weiss’s earlier piece, The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs, adds that one of Gibbs’s teachers got fired for robbing them too.
(Weiss, bless him, professes not to understand the rabbit metaphor present throughout Gibbs’ work, yet confidently persists.)
Gibbs’s father, Warren Tipton, spent about twenty years on the Gary police force and later sang with the Chi-Lites. He died in May, and AllHipHop’s obituary places him in the same Gary music scene that produced the Jacksons. That detail stuck with me because my ex-father-in-law was a police officer and chief of police downstate during the same years, and also played drums in a local band. Jamelle Bouie has historically described police departments as “jobs for the boys,” a steady public paycheck handed to working-class men, and that fits both of their careers better than anything about their relationships to law and order. In towns where the mills were shedding jobs, a badge was one of the few paychecks that came with a pension, and a man who could sing still needed that safety net.
Policing in the Region has much uglier chapters than that. The Chicago Sun-Times has spent years covering the federal case against the Sin City Deciples, a motorcycle club founded in Gary in 1967. One member admitted he worked as a Gary police chaplain while killing two men, one of them the son of a former Gary police chief. The Chicago Reader’s Tiger King of the Midwest profiles Roy “Roy Boy” Cooper, who ran a tattoo shop called the Badlands with Bengal tigers in cages next to the chairs. Tattooing was illegal in Indiana then, and Cooper’s lawyer reportedly steered him to Gary because the police had bigger problems than a tattoo shop — as long as it paid its taxes. Media Burn has raw footage of Cooper setting a leashed tiger on a pool table while his wife runs through the rest of their animals, which included a grizzly bear and a baboon. In the video, Lady Cooper recommends taking the animals out in public, to the grocery store, socializing them on the locals.
Anderson went through the same collapse with auto parts. General Motors moved in during the 1920s and eventually ran two divisions there, Delco-Remy for electrical systems and Guide Lamp for headlights. By the time Jon Alpert made Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana for HBO in 2008, a town that once had 33,000 GM jobs had empty factories and shuttered stores, and what was left of it went to the Anderson Speedway every Friday night. The Herald Bulletin caught up with one of the film’s drivers, Sammy Hawkins, as he flew home from the New York premiere to a Firestone job in Noblesville that he expected to lose. His line in the film is that Anderson doesn’t make cars anymore, but it can still race them and wreck them.
Music in Gary started in the mills. Joe Jackson ran a crane and played guitar in a band called the Falcons, which never got a record deal, so he kept the mill job and trained his sons into the Jackson 5 instead. Their first contract came from Steeltown Records, a Gary label, in 1967, and “Big Boy” was a local hit before Motown signed them.
Detroit turned its losses into techno. Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson learned Kraftwerk and Parliament from a late-night DJ called the Electrifyin’ Mojo, and by 1987 more than half of Detroit’s manufacturing, retail, and wholesale base was gone, as SPIN reported in 1998. Midstory’s Built to Boom traces the line from the assembly plants through Motown to techno, and May describes sampling industrial noise, traffic, and construction into his tracks.
The techno ran straight into the rap Jorjiana grew up on. NPR’s piece on how Detroit and Flint became havens for rap dark horses credits the producer Helluva with a “basement sound” of ominous pianos and synth stabs, which he built by crossing West Coast gangsta rap with Detroit techno, and it describes the Flint rappers as a crew of flippant, vulgar jokers. Flintside’s history of the Flint scene shows how a co-sign from Detroit’s Peezy lifted Rio Da Yung OG and everyone around him. Lil Yachty spent years showing up on Michigan records, and he later vouched for Jorjiana too.
Jorjiana is 21, and a single mom, and from Michigan City, just down the shore from Gary. The Times of Northwest Indiana profiled her recently after “ILBB2” took off, and her Complex interview covers a childhood spent moving between relatives while her parents struggled with addiction, bouncing through the greater area in foster care. By her account, her music career started with screwing around with her friends around town. She and her friends were bored during the pandemic, so they freestyled in her car, and she posted the results, doing actual numbers. She told Justin Moran that her friends talked her into cross-posting the TikTok clips to Instagram, which she barely used, and that’s where the A&Rs found her. At the time she didn’t know what an A&R was. In a clip Complex posted, she admits she doesn’t know who Freddie Gibbs is either, so what ties her to Gary is the shoreline more than any influence. She should get familiar with his catalog (and a metronome!).
Plenty of good bands started as friends goofing off: Devo began as a satirical art project at Kent State, and the Maels studied graphic design and film at UCLA before Sparks. Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers spends a lot of time on how they built their act for Top of the Pops closeups. Both bands treated the dominant screen of their time as part of the instrument. Jorjiana’s screen is the short-form feed, and I’ve been watching her work it for the last year or so: snippets of songs previewed, clips pushed to every platform, a freestyle on On The Radar at the end of 2024 that brought more than a dozen labels calling, a GloRilla remix, and co-sign from Lil Yachty. Caitlin Clark, slanted.
If you want to know what Gary is doing now, read Capital B Gary, which covers the city more consistently than anyone else. Start with their feature on Koney King, a Broadway diner that has been serving chili for more than a century, and then look through their 2024 year in photos, which has residents cleaning up parks on the East Side and crowds on the beach for the eclipse.
Other notes: Akron went through its own version a decade later, with rubber instead of steel. Midstory’s history of how Akron became “the new Liverpool” describes Devo, Tin Huey, the Bizarros, and the Rubber City Rebels as kids from factory families trying not to follow their fathers into the plants. The scene got its home during one of the longest rubber workers’ strikes in the city’s history, when the Rubber City Rebels took over a rubber workers’ bar called the Crypt, as PBS Western Reserve tells it in It’s Everything, and Then It’s Gone. Chris Smith’s 2024 Devo documentary picks up the story from Kent State and follows the band into the early days of MTV.
While I still go back to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Haraway asks where a knowledge claim is standing, while Dr. Tressie asks who pays for it. Lower Ed traced how for-profit colleges sold credentials to audiences the rest of higher education had shut out. In a TikTok mini-lecture on AI, politics, and inequality, she carried that analysis forward using Daniel Greene’s “access doctrine,” which holds that the answer to economic inequality is more skills rather than more support, and which universities facing their own precarity have leaned into. Audrey Watters and Ed & Class both wrote it up.
Her question fits my work life better right now while AI begins to show up in procurement, policy and training decks, and her ongoing attention to pedagogy keeps the conversation tied to what happens between a teacher and a student. I read Haraway for the epistemology and Dr. Tressie for the current evidence of how it plays out in real classrooms.
Noted: Because I’m using Gemini to find and complete resources related to the earliest blog years, I’m citing a Clancy throughout my project, which the LLM keeps pulling back to center events and articles related to the Clancy trial.
Neither company publishes a timeline, and most of the numbers floating around come from SEO consultants, so treat this as rough. The short answer is that Gemini usually gets there faster because it searches Google’s index, while Claude appears to search Brave’s, which fills in more slowly.
Gemini grounds its answers in Google Search, so its lag is roughly Google’s indexing lag. That can mean a few days for a page on an established site and two to six weeks for everything else. If your robots.txt blocks Google-Extended, Gemini won’t use your pages for grounding at all.
If you paste a URL directly into either chat, the model reads the page right away without waiting on any index. To check whether you’re findable, search your domain on search.brave.com and in Google Search Console. Blocking ClaudeBot, the training crawler, doesn’t stop Claude from citing you; Claude-SearchBot is the one that governs search.
Fellow SEO/GEO nerds are citing an average of six days to show up in Google’s systems, though it is sometimes taking as long as thirty days on smaller, less-visited sites.
(I am sad to hear that Soraya passed away last month. During her research for this article, I enjoyed discussing the technical details that created these spaces and how our collective work facilitated everything that came afterward, or didn’t. I know Soraya was hanging a lot of her career on this article and felt it was poorly handled at the time, speculating it was because the voices most implicated by the research now manage the levers of publishing.)
Knowing Google has the juice for search, including all the missing bits deprecated over time, I asked it what technical and social lessons were learned, assuming Gemini could treat that work like a portfolio and provide a business analysis with the full benefits of hindsight.
Per Gemini, links added by me:
Looking back at the mid-2000s, the feminist blogosphere achieved extraordinary cultural breakthroughs, but it also operated with distinct technical and social failings and prejudices. By treating cyberspace as a purely ethereal or detached realm, bloggers unintentionally reproduced offline power dynamics, a phenomenon known as the “digital twinning” of cyberspace.
Viewed through a critical, retrospective lens, four major areas show where different choices around technology, institutional strategy, and social solidarity could have altered digital feminism’s trajectory.
1. Technical: platforms are not neutral
The early blogosphere largely treated technical tools (like WordPress, Blogspot, Google Search, and ad networks) as neutral pipes rather than profit-driven entities with embedded incentives. Bloggers built incredible social capital on free or cheap third-party services without owning the underlying code or digital infrastructure. When Web 2.0 shifted toward algorithmic feeds and centralized social media (Twitter, Facebook), bloggers willingly migrated their engagement to those platforms to chase larger audiences.
Protocol-Level Investment: Instead of relying on proprietary platforms, the cohort could have invested in building and maintaining independent digital commons, including federated software, cooperative hosting collectives and shared digital archives owned directly by the movement.
Data Sovereignty: Early writers rarely anticipated how their essays, comment sections and personal narratives would be scraped, monetized, and eventually used as training data for commercial algorithms and search engines. Establishing strict open-source licensing (such as Copyleft or peer-production licenses) and sovereign archiving practices could have protected intellectual labor from platform extraction.
Many of the highest-profile blogs were anchored by white, college-educated, urban writers who inadvertently treated their lived experiences as the “default” feminist lens. Marginalized writers, particularly Black, Indigenous, AAPI, disabled, and trans writers, frequently had to demand inclusion, fight for citation, or build separate spaces (Racialicious, Crunk Feminist Collective, Reappropriate, FWD/Disabled Feminists) to address the dominant blogs’ weak spots.
Resource and Power Redistribution: Rather than treating traffic and ad revenue as individual metric wins, major sites could have operated as resource-redistribution networks—directly funding, platforming, and sharing domain authority with writers from marginalized backgrounds from the outset. This is what Feministe.us aimed to do with our rotating lineup of guests, with mixed results.
Rethinking “public” vulnerability: The blogosphere heavily rewarded raw, highly personal exposure (“confessional blogging”). However, this cost was asymmetric: white, middle-class bloggers often parlayed personal exposure into book deals, while marginalized bloggers faced severe offline economic risk, doxxing and targeted harassment for sharing the same level of personal detail. Many of us also needed to earn a paycheck with benefits. Depending on your demographics, angles and timing, writing opportunities were limited, and only a small fraction of the talent generated in the collective saw durable career impacts. A more intentional approach would have prioritized pseudonyms, pen names, shared authorship, and safety-first rhetoric.
3. The siren song of individual upward mobility
The most consequential structural shift was how the blogosphere interacted with traditional media and corporate capital. As more corporate outlets (Jezebel, HuffPost, The Guardian) realized feminist commentary drove clicks, they offered individual bloggers lucrative staff jobs, book deals and column spaces. This transformed a collective political movement into a pipeline for individual career advancement. As top talent moved into legacy media, independent blogs lost the labor needed to sustain them.
Building cooperative media outlets: Instead of individual writers accepting staff roles at corporate outlets, the cohort could have formed reader-owned media cooperatives (similar to worker-owned publishing models today). This would have allowed writers to earn a sustainable living while keeping their intellectual output in a community-controlled space.
Resisting algorithmic speed: Legacy media required bloggers to output somewhere between 3-10 quick, hot-take posts per day to satisfy ad-driven impression quotas. Resisting this pressure in favor of slower, deeper, “thick” theory would have preserved the intellectual rigor of the spaces instead of reducing feminism to consumable digital commentary.
4. Politics: Hesitancy to be the “fly in the ointment”
Beyond technical tools and corporate pipelines, there was a profound rhetorical hesitation within many of the era’s flagship blogs to comfortably occupy the role of the “fly in the ointment,” the deliberate, disruptive presence that insists on disrupting false consensus to center genuinely aggrieved interests.
Because major blogs faced constant, bad-faith attacks from right-wing media and anti-feminists, an implicit pressure emerged to project a unified “united front.” This often created an environment where internal dissent, particularly from disabled, working-class, trans, or non-white women pointing out the movement’s ongoing failures, was framed as unhelpful infighting or a distraction from the broader political battle. The push for a polished, accessible and broadly appealing “Feminism 101” frequently smoothed over the jagged edges of critique.
Sanctifying disruption as methodology: The blogosphere could have explicitly framed the “fly in the ointment” not as a threat to solidarity, but as the primary engine of accountability. Rather than managing or policing internal conflict to maintain a clean editorial brand, blogs could have deliberately designed their platforms to hold open space for radical and uncomfortable grievances within the plurality of feminist thought.
Protecting uncommodifiable voices: Corporate platforms favor palatable, easily shareable commentary by design. By shying away from deeply uncomfortable, non-mainstream grievances, the blogosphere left a vacuum filled with endless explainers. A more resilient model would have actively protected and amplified the most uncompromising, “unmarketable” voices, including those whose positions could not be sanitized for an ad sponsor or a cable news segment.
By failing to fully institutionalize the “fly in the ointment” as an essential, protected role within digital spaces, the early blogosphere left itself vulnerable to the corporate absorption that eventually dismantled it. When mainstream media stepped in, it easily plucked away the polished, palatable commentary while abandoning the uncomfortable, dissenting labor that keeps a political movement expansive and honest.
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.
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.
A composition teacher friend shared this paper on social media: Lester Faigley’s “Literacy after the Revolution”, the essay version of his 1996 CCCC Chair’s address. In it, the author argues that the economic impacts of the digital revolution had begun to undo an older commitment, formed in the Civil Rights era, to teaching literacy as a path toward equality. He further argues that writing instruction was being reorganized around tools owned by a few firms (then: Netscape, Microsoft) at a moment when wealth was concentrating upward. Faigley left us with the question of whether educators can hold onto literacy-for-equality while the tides run against it.
Thirty years later, the worry has a new face: AI will do young people’s writing for them and their thinking with it. Ultimately, Faigley believed the need for the skills that composition teaches will keep growing, not despite, but because of our need to convey information in and around that technology and the humanity it serves in a complex society.
In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links:
Dolly Parton’s America: This nine-episode podcast offers a deep dive into the Dollyverse, covering Dolly’s biography and lore and her role as an icon within a broader story about American ideals. This series swept the best-of lists of 2019.
“Students who spoke to ESPN said that betting is an accepted part of day-to-day life and that they learned about their school’s gambling culture immediately after arriving on campus. A 2023 NCAA survey of 18- to 22-year-olds found that 51% of the women and two-thirds of the men have bet on sports.”
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. By 2021, the kids were engaged in secret, digital note-passing, chatting within Google docs and PPT slide decks and Pinterest DMs to avoid teacher surveillance on their approved tools. Where there is a will to socialize, there is a way.
Business Insider provides an update on how teen social media bans are going in Australia, and it’s not great! After a few months, kids steadily got back online, nearing or matching pre-ban levels.
Reading over the $18b Meta settlement over social media harms to children, and while it’s not perfect, it’s something. I’m a fan of default time limits, night and school-time blocks, and other limits baked into the software. It’s not fair to ask every parent to become an IT governance expert.
