My particular talents aren’t exactly oriented towards promoting small things, or building usable small systems. My sense is rather that the question of scale, and smallness, in particular, hasn’t yet been posed fully or correctly. The critical discourses about computers–media theory, science and technology studies, game studies, and so on–have grown up theorizing a technology surround that was getting bigger all the time. It’s time to think well about how to get small.

When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums. Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.

[Rewilding is] a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command-and-control.

One of the relatively little-discussed phenomena in the social critique of AI is the fact that it is not only a centralizing technology, but also one that increases the distance between people and the power of the owners of the coordinating infrastructure. Of course, there is no direct determinism of the infrastructure, but it matters in which way the playing field is tilted.