iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

the playbook for most digital platforms will continue to be gain adoption via network effects and integrations from open protocols, then lock things down by removing open protocols.

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 1h

Feels like atproto is around this point – past commercial access to the web (CIX, 1991) and just before the world-wide web was fully operational (~1996). itsec.group/blog-post-sh...

"There wasn't much fun to be had on the internet back then, it was mostly still just geeks, business people, universities and the government using it. For a lot of people, it still didn't make any sense to use the internet, especially as you still had to connect using a command line, or a proprietary graphical user interface. The internet browser along with HTML to build web pages had not quite been invented yet and IBM/Microsoft was still in the process of building internet technology into their operating systems and hardware."

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bianca wylie @biancawylie.com · 4h

Making common cause in slowness. Operating actively against the industrialized clock of never-ending productivity is part of disability justice. It’s also a way to protect the time and space necessary to reconsider and reconfigure relations. medium.com/@biancawylie...

medium.com

tech isn’t the future it’s just capitalism faster

responding with slowness in relations

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 28/09/2026

It's worth noting that technological mysticism isn't specific to the computer or AI. It's a continuation of a much deeper zeitgeist that Leo Marx calls the technological sublime, which is deeply interwoven in to the founding and history of America.

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 28/09/2026

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 26/09/2026

www.wired.com/story/paulin...

"The piece appeared in a remarkable anthology from 1996, Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, published by Seal Press, a sort of consciousness-raising meeting in book form. One of the anthology’s editors, Elizabeth Reba Weise, stops short of saying it was the first book to examine the experience of women online, but it was certainly one of the early ones. “We called it cyberspace, for God’s sake,” Weise says—that’s how early this was. Over and over the contributors, a mix of academics and journalists and women working tech jobs of one kind or another, emphasize that the computer and the internet are tools for women, a way of enabling communication and connection—the gendered division of labor coming to roost now in the differing ways of being online. From Weise’s intro: “In my circle, computers aren’t fetish objects, but tools.” From Ellen Ullman’s essay: “We use the Internet as a tool, like the phone or the fax, a way to transmit news and make appointments.” Susan Clerc: “Like the TV and VCRs, the home computer is a tool that lets her participate fully in the community.” And Borsook: Women “generally are interested in the utilitarian value, not fetish-worthiness, of tools.” The Australian feminist Dale Spender has a pithy old line about computers that is applicable here: “Women use them, whereas men fall in love with them.”"

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Kate Klonick @klonick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This is a very cute clip, but I love it for reasons that the episode doesn't really explore: *All networked technology comes down to chat* Talking to each other is either the foundation of all new networked technology or becomes inexorably tied up with it-- since the early days of the Internet 1/

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kelly pendergrast @kellypendergrast.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Pretty pumped about our new research project, about people's experiences with once-ubiquitous technologies & what happens when they disappear. First up: the landline. We just expanded the project website big time! Take a look & get in touch if you might want to collaborate: www.everyobject.org

everyobject.org

Every Object an Archive

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 24/09/2026

"Remembering forwards: or how to live together in the future with divided memories" by Brewer, J. (2016) pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/385...

"Let me conclude by drawing my arguments together. In societies emerging out of conflict, where divided memories in part constituted the conflict, social memory privileges remembering backward. Collective and personal memories elide within social memory to perpetuate divided group identities and contested personal narratives. Above all, social memory works to arbitrate the future, by predisposing a memory culture that locks us into the past. Forgetting the past is impossible and undesirable. What is needed in societies emerging out of conflict is being released from the hold that oppressive and haunting memories have over people. I have argued that this is found in the idea of remembering
forwards. This is not the same as forgetting. It is remembering to cease to remember oppressive and haunting memories. It does not involve non-remembrance but active remembering: remembering to cease to remember the past. The past lives in us always; remembering forwards assists in us in not living in the past. Remembering forwards allows us to live in tolerance in the future despite divided memories that endure and live on. I have suggested that these enduring memories, however, need to be reimagined by the application of truth, tolerance togetherness and trajectory."

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 23/09/2026

I'm working on revamping my cursor parks project and turning it into custom HTML elements that anyone can use for their personal websites. First up <cursor-library>, it's free libraries but for the web.

A screenshot of a cursor looking at the free cursor library, containing links around mouse cursors and public digital space.

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spencer chang @spencer.place · 03/09/2026

get in gang we're making an internet map

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 23/09/2026

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 22/09/2026

"The New Control Society" by Jon Askonas (2025) www.thenewatlantis.com/publications...

"In the same way that the industrial age called forth a political science of management, we need a political science for the age of the protocol. We need to conceptualize new ways of asserting agency, new ways of finding both “exit” and “voice” in malfunctioning systems, ways of embedding protocols in the kinds of human communities that can generate legitimacy and accountability, ways of fighting the complexity and obscurity that can hide the exercise of power."

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andrew blinn @disconcision.com · 21/09/2026

introducing the embodied coding agent canvas I've been working on, and how it integrates with per-data-type GUI generation to support more transparent type-directed agent dev processes. remote demo for ARIA SGAI www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6lY...

youtube.com

Hazel constellation canvas demo

YouTube video by andrew blinn

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Marisa @marisa.blacksky.team · 21/09/2026

it's not lost on me how critical it is to be building community-driven social technology in this time, because there's a lot we need - more joy, more connection, more education, more agency, and more privacy. breaking out of the box of "social media" - what are the tools we need in these times?

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Brookie @brookie.blog · 21/09/2026

we made a zine at @atproto.la !! 📝👩‍🏫 these are some of the questions and discussions we shared at our atproto LA meeting today. lots of overlapping themes and ideas. sometimes it's nice to have open conversations and share how we're feeling about the internet and technology. thanks for coming! ⭐️

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 18/09/2026

Taking this a step farther, what if we popularize the idea of Account Service Providers (ASP) and advocating for laws where: - accounts on the internet are separate from apps/platforms - ASPs follow net neutrality - ASPs must interop so accounts freely move between them (like phone numbers)

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 19/09/2026

youtu.be/Nbwv5wHQoj0?...

"It's more like in order for a human to find these proofs, they have to figure out the patterns of thinking and constructs and new mathematical objects, objects that elevates their understanding enough to make that proof available. But what's useful is not the proof or even the result, it's all of that surrounding understanding and the spillover effects that it can have into the engineering world. But this raises a very serious question about how we measure academic progress, because the idea of using proof as a proxy is so deeply ingrained into what we give academic credit for that it exposes a very stark need for a new distinct way to measure whether someone's published output really does push forward human understanding. For my part, I actually think this idea of a motivated explanation could do a lot to fill that void."

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 18/09/2026

lots we can learn from what happened to OpenID www.wired.com/2011/01/open...

"Facebook also added a key ingredient that helped drive other sites to adopt Facebook Connect -- sharing user data. One of the reasons more sites support Facebook Connect is that they get a piece of the user pie.
Web publishers never warmed to OpenID since it allows a user to log in to a website and leave a comment on a story, a blog post or a photo while essentially remaining anonymous to the publisher. That anonymous aspect has made OpenID less attractive to publishers who want to collect more data about their readers or interact with them -- whether that means following them on Twitter, connecting with them on Facebook or sending them e-mail."

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 18/09/2026

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spencer chang @spencer.place · 18/09/2026

what are your sacred activities that would feel very wrong to see someone automate with AI

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 17/09/2026

A observation I’ve been noodling on is that, in practice, the AT in ATproto stands for authenticated trust, not authenticated transfer. The boundary where data stops being self-certifiable (e.g. jetstream, app APIs, ) is replaced with infrastructural trust and, as a backup, PDS verification.

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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 17/09/2026

I'm convinced that open social protocols like #atproto have a crucial role to play in the future of science. Excited to share MOSAIC - our best effort at articulating the thesis, why it matters, and how to build and fund it (in collab w/ @exgenesis.ingroup.social ) 🧵

mosaic-program.org

MOSAIC — Modular Open Science, AI & Collective Intelligence

MOSAIC is an R&D program to build a new medium for large-scale, AI-augmented networked research.

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 16/09/2026

Here's an actual example I described when explaining why the at-tags proposal will become increasingly important as we see more plurality across the atmosphere

chrisshank.leaflet.pub

The disconnect between web pages and the social filesystem.

And a community proposal to fix it.

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 16/09/2026

Still yet to bump into anyone's highlights on margin 😭

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 16/09/2026

There are also now settings in Zemble, the @zotero.org plugin for @semble.so, that let you sync tags and connections from Zotero to Semble!

A screenshot of the settings page for Zemble.

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Semble @semble.so · 15/09/2026

If you like to #tag and @mention, today is your special day. Tagging and mentioning are now available in Semble!

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Ivy Reese @spiralganglion.com · 15/09/2026

here's a peak at what i've been doing for the past few years: building a calm, playful little space for thinking, doodling, journalling, and programming with materials like ink, paper, and… flux that spreads through your notes like a fluid wait what? www.youtube.com/watch?v=GurW...

youtube.com

PlayBook: A Programmable Paper Notebook

YouTube video by Ink & Switch

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 15/09/2026

Does anyone know where the logic that deletes a app.bsky.feed.like when a second like for the same post is created lives?

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 15/09/2026

always good to observe when a complement can be commodified gwern.net/complement

"This is an alternative to vertical integration; in it, companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist. No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere. A classic example is the commodification of PC hardware by the Microsoft OS monopoly, to the detriment of IBM & benefit of MS."

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 14/09/2026

Here's an interesting case study on how the programer class evangelizes AI, yet will not systematically invest effort to using it to improving accessibility infrastructure, even when temporarily disabled themself and experiencing the failing of AI systems in these cases.

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Shana V. White (she/her) @shanavwhite.blacksky.app · 14/09/2026

"Being good with computers is not the same as being good with people. We should not rush to be governed by computational systems designed by people who don’t care about or understand the cultural systems in which we are all embedded." Dr. Meredith Brossard

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 14/09/2026

Rehashing this... if the main concern for atproto clients writing directly to the PDS is not having optimistic writes, then I don't get why we'd want to move towards a app server architecture as opposed to a local-first one. Are there other examples when server side computation is necessary?

pfrazee.leaflet.pub

The politics of purely client-side apps

There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere

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charlotte 🐇 @char.lt · 14/09/2026

new blog post char.lt/blog/2026/09/atproto-full-net-backlinks/ + new service backlinks.cerulea.blue + demo bsky-thread.bun.how

char.lt

designing a storage engine for AT Protocol backlinks - charlotte!

economical full-network-scale application-agnostic data storage

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 14/09/2026

pfrazee.leaflet.pub

The politics of purely client-side apps

There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 19/02/2026

have you seen this from doi.org/10.31235/osf...? quoting @bpfaffenberger.bsky.social's great 1988 paper Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature: Towards an Anthropology of Technology www.jstor.org/stable/2802804

6 (De)fetishizing AI[T]echnology, under the sway of Western culture, isseen as a disembodied entity, emptied of social rela-tions, and composed almost entirely of tools and prod-ucts. It stands before us, in other words, in what Marxwould call fetishised form: what is in reality producedby relations among people appears before us in a fan-tastic form as relations among things. [...] Technol-ogy, in short, is a mystifying force of the first order,and it is rivalled only by language in its potential (toparaphrase Geertz) for suspending us in webs of sig-nificance that we ourselves create.Bryan Pfaffenberger, 1988, pp. 242 & 250Herein, we propose a critical tool, our Pygmalion lens (re-call Table 1), to examine AI in all three of its three interwo-ven senses, i.e., the academic field of AI, the technical industryof AI, and the philosophical and sociotechnical beliefs held byAI practitioners. The lens is developed as a function of inter-

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 12/09/2026

i usually use the provocation that atproto is a post-app protocol, but i like post-platform as well. The key insight is that we want composable, interoperable services not siloed, extractive platforms.

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sōm ⁂ @hyl.st · 12/09/2026

Turning to @semble.so over other search engines, the hit rate just too good. For atproto things it's 100%, they don't miss Community search engines are just better 💅

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 12/09/2026

What's amazing about this piece is it contains a scathing critique of SF like the "Californian Ideology" and a broadening of what technology is like Le Guin's "A rant about Technology", but came out 20 years before both of those pieces.

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laugh.town @laugh.town · 11/09/2026

Introducing laugh.town, the atmospheric place for your comedy stuff on the internet. You should go to a comedy show this month 8)

crier.laugh.town

Laughter is the answer

welcome to laugh.town!!!

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 10/09/2026

I want weirder representations of "readings"—the trace/artifact produced by a reader's interaction with text(s). Here playing with a cut-up "poster-ification". Cumbersome in many ways, but interesting.

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 10/09/2026

cool article, but red scare fear-mongering feels a bit unnecessary for the capitalist hellscape we find ourselves in lol

“ When Devin Gaffney, co-founder of the social media feed builder Graze Social, thinks about the attention economy, he goes back in time — specifically, to 1970s Chile. During Socialist Salvador Allende’s presidency, the country experimented with using an algorithm, named Project CyberSyn, to plan its economy and tackle a dizzying scope of decisions, from testing specific policies to using data to determine resource allocations across the country.

The CIA-supported coup that overthrew Allende ended the project, but Gaffney sees more echoes of Project Cybersyn in the TikTok, X, or Instagram algorithm than we realize. “We run the attention economy as a hyper-Soviet central system,” he says, arguing that just a handful of decision-makers “are the ones that decide how this system works.” In Gaffney’s perspective, algorithms shouldn’t be controlled by a small subset of people, regardless of their politics or goals. Rather, he thinks more people should be creating — and sharing — their own.”

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