iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Orion Reed

𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 09/07/2026

As @orionreed.com states "enclosure succeeds not by offering users less, but by bundling genuine capability gains with topological restructuring, so that the user cannot accept the improvement without accepting the new relationship of power".

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 03/05/2026

Does ‘relative differing continuous scaling’ mean something other than ‘scaling’? You can scale things, but it’s not a vector image, so you can’t scale up arbitrarily and still have it look good

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 03/05/2026

Ahh yeah, I almost went to their talk while at CCC

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 02/05/2026

The nascent HTML-in-Canvas API is exciting to me not because of flashy effects, but because it extends the semantics that the DOM can (tractably) represent — as a tiny example, it's possible to show an element in multiple places, cheaply, under arbitrary transforms. folkjs.org/demos/html-i...

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 23/04/2026

I made so many letters for tenfold and it was one of the most fun weeks I’ve ever had programming

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 07/04/2026

doing some pixel science

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 01/04/2026

I have been nerdsniped by radiance cascades

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 27/03/2026

shader debugging so quickly turns into abstract art

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 10/03/2026

sidenote: there are other sketches for "long tail of user needs" but I was making a specific point about the app paradigm of software.

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 10/03/2026

Yep, I made it :) It comes from this memo I wrote (originally internal to @blockscience.bsky.social) www.orionreed.com/artifact/int...

orionreed.com

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 07/03/2026

Great q! Work needs to happen at the level of the web, OSs, apps, protocols, and policy. The tech side is not post-length but I think the forcing function might need to be “data unbundling” laws like with IBM in the 60s for large companies + new filesystems, protocols, and software architectures.

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Reposted by Orion Reed

Brooklyn Zelenka @expede.wtf · 05/03/2026

Software should be fun, actually

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 05/03/2026

So even a threat to business as mundane as open file format usage within government institutions in one state, was met with overwhelming counter-mobilisation from the tech industry, and the policy institutions can't even handle something that minor :|

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 05/03/2026

one mundane example of this: In 2005, Massachusetts mandated open document formats. Microsoft responded with lobbyists, campaign cash, and hounded the state CIO into resigning. Then made a 6,000-page 'open' standard that was practically useless to anyone but Microsoft. By 2007 the mandate was dead.

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 05/03/2026

Yep! Though portability is a lesser demand than what I’d like to see here. It’s also something we *had* in the past, though inconsistently, through local files

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 05/03/2026

Yep! Though ‘users’ is accurate in the sense of being a subject which was produced *by* a particular form of software. The computational passivity of users and inability of the subject (users) to articulate structural changes — users can only express consumer choices via product switching, etc…

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 04/03/2026

In the late 60s, IBM was forced to unbundle software from hardware. It's time to do the same for data and applications.

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 04/03/2026

We need to structurally separate user data from applications so that applications become *users* of data rather than *containers* for it.

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Reposted by Orion Reed

Nick Bergson-Shilcock @nicholasbs.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

This computer is the reason you can't download all software for free. The Franklin Computer Corp was a computer manufacturer founded in the early 1980s. Their flagship product was a clone of the Apple II, one of the most popular personal computers of the day. 1/4

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 27/02/2026

Read “retardant” in a French accent as if it wasn’t a word I knew, almost googled it… but yes,

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 27/02/2026

who should I be following on Bsky? need more food for the algo feed…

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Reposted by Orion Reed

Boris @bmann.ca · 26/02/2026

Lots of great phrases in here by @orionreed.com as he traces the portable file separate from apps, and describes the path to proprietary formats, to internalization, and finally how cloud affordances can't be exported and represented as a file.

margin.at

Highlight on Margin

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 26/02/2026

Wrote a mini-essay, "Digital Topology & Economic Power", on how the file went from a site of user agency to one of enclosure — through proprietary formats, data internalization, then the cloud. Each step bundling real gains with a quiet transfer of power. www.orionreed.com/posts/app-fi...

orionreed.com

Digital Topology & Economic Power

The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, ...

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 26/02/2026

"The 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 inherited the organisational form of the 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞: self-contained, manufactured at a distance from its users, designed for a general market."

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 26/02/2026

Software is not soft. It arrives rigid, opaque, and brittle. The most malleable medium we have produced is, in practice, among the least malleable materials we encounter in daily life.

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 23/02/2026

Still one of the paragraphs I'm proud to have had a part in writing. From the ever-nascent libcomp.org (the great phrase "rendered computationally passive" is from Melanie Hoff's "Always Already Programming")

We live under a capitalist mode of computing. The tools, languages, techniques, and assumptions of digital systems are structured by economic forces that shape not just what we can do, but what we can imagine doing. By separating production from use, producing inflexible software, and slicing up computing into siloed apps, your agency is held back by a tech industry that profits from a population rendered computationally passive.

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 19/02/2026

code goofy but go regular if I’m feeling spicy (or if things have gone terribly wrong and I’m limping my way through the code)

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

Nothing for general media AFAIK, only for text. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVTT Then there’s the Web Animations API developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

en.wikipedia.org

WebVTT - Wikipedia

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

See also @maggieappleton.com’s post/talk where I first saw the link to that first one maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-... And if you haven’t read diSessa’s book I highly recommend it! I think to this day it’s one of the most radically emancipatory visions of computing.

maggieappleton.com

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

First is hard to trace an origin to, but here is a well-known one: newsletter.getprimitive.ai/p/when-to-de... Second is from diSessa’s great book, “Changing Minds” direct.mit.edu/books/monogr... and third from @todepond.com’s twitter feed somewhere (Lu may be able to find it)

newsletter.getprimitive.ai

When to Design for Emergence

Market applications on the long-tail of user needs

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

I.e. this is the ‘interop’ seen in the Adobe Suite, Microsoft Office, and in a different sense Notion or similar apps/platforms. There is *always* an outside, so without firms intentionally reducing control over data and coordinating efforts/investments to do so, we will always see this same pattern

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

Almost! Same kinda vibe but I like it because it’s more specific, @todepond.com’s one points out a specific structural limitation of interop-by-absorption (unless we had literally one emperor-like software vendor lol)

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

I know, @todepond.com has a banger there. If could be an @xkcd.com

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

"Just as the invention [of industrial automation] had the paradoxical effect of turning more [people] into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities turned us into part- or full-time administrators" — David Graeber

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

What are your favorite visual critiques of software? On my mind right now are: 1. "The long tail of user needs" 2. diSessa's monolithic apps vs computational media 3. (a recent favorite by @todepond.com) "wish these apps could talk to each other"

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 13/02/2026

The biggest existential risk of AI is not AGI but the undermining of labor’s power as a counterweight to capital.

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 11/02/2026

Enclosure [of agency supported by file-app separation] worked through the existing material form — first by hollowing it out (proprietary formats and internalization), then by abolishing it entirely (cloud platforms)

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Reposted by Orion Reed

Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 25/01/2026

"The forces that are now shaping AI are the same forces that turned the open internet into monopolistic platforms, converted peer-to-peer participation into precarious labor, and enclosed the digital commons. They are now threatening to capture and enclose thought itself." osf.io/preprints/so...

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