Hi Crowd! Anticipation is a funny thing. About to happen. Almost there. Not quite just yet. Soon? Soon. I'm slowly de-Google-ing my life with the help of a number of services not the least of which is Proton. Mail is/was easy as I'd been kind of juggling the two for 15 years or so anyway. Migrating from Google Calendar is not as simple, in part because Proton Calendar is encrypted so syncing back and forth is a bit problematic.

Hi Crowd! It's a lovely day here in Canada, future associate member of the EU. Sorry US neighbors (or neighbours) but things just weren't working out between us and we've moved on. But don't feel lonely, Mitch McConnell is back in action out there putting in the work for you so I'm sure everything will be fine. Speaking of things not working, I'm shutting down…

Hi Crowd! Rabbit rabbit. As a quick follow up to the last post, Twitter Dot Now is already dead or down or on vacation or dead. For the few hours it was up it was really fun and a bunch of people jumped in and it seemed like old times, then it started crashing and people started spamming and everyone noted the "team" whoever that is were terrible at communication and the app looked like it was vibe coded and falling apart under the weight of it all they weren't giving any useful feedback and then poof.

Hi Crowd! Funny thing I just did in the year 2026 of the common era, I set up my Twitter account. As a reminder twttr became Twitter which then became X, and apparently somewhere in there the trademark for "Twitter" has been challenged and a new company called Operation Bluebird have (re)launched Twitter at dotnow instead of dotcom. X Corp…

Hi Crowd! One of my favorite art things is the conversations that happen between images when one artist is reminded of another or references another in their work, and one of the (few) good things about social media right now is the ability for that to happen in real time. Yesterday the artist PIV posted his newest piece titled "Propaganda Punk" which immediately reminded me of…

Last month Sssluke asked about websites that are created as artworks themselves. Not about art, the actual art. I've written before about the early net.art movement in which a bunch of artists looked at the (at that time) new word wide web as a medium itself, browsers as canvas and html as paint, and asked what that enable. It's a really deep rabbit hole and I love that people are still exploring it.

Hi Crowd! Search is cooked. Which might mean the internet as we know is about to very different. That's a bold claim, but hear me out. If you are not someone who makes your livelihood by posting things on the internet it may come as a surprise to you that publishers have a somewhat complicated relationship with search (Google specifically, but all search in general).

Some thoughts and links and memes and introspection. Click to read The Crowd, a Substack publication.

Hi Crowd! It all goes well this is the first native Crowd post from my own website that's automagically crossposting to Substack. I'm using this wp-substack plugin in conjunction with this wpsubstack Chrome extension to make it work. As I've written before I'm somewhat ambivalent about Substack as a thing for any number of reasons but I'm not going to pretend that lots of people only read things there now so while I have no interest in ever posting my own stuff first to any place other than my own site, cross posting it to a place where lots of people are reading things probably makes sense.

Hi Crowd! You've probably seen any number of headlines recently about autonomous AI's hacking various systems after "breaking out of their sandboxes" or "using secret message boards to coordinate with each other" and you may or may not have understood what that meant or if it was as important as people are making it seem. Yes, it's that important. Regardless of how much you do or don't already understand it, …

Hi Crowd! Not a thing I expected to be doing in 2026, but here we are. It's no secret that I have a complicated relationship with my devices. I love what they can do, what I can do with them, hate what they make me do, and the reliance on them. I daydream about simpler times when I wrote tiny space efficient notes on carefully folded up pieces of paper and never worried about the battery on my pager because a AA would last months, and txt codes from friends meant that most often getting paged contained all the info I needed and there was no expectation of a return call anytime soon.

Chris Burden was shot. That is the physical fact of what happened. We can build on that statement by adding that his friend pulled the trigger, that this took place in an art gallery, that an audience was in attendance. None of that changes the fact that Chris Burden was shot. Here's the video: We can also turn the facts into a story with some narrative.

Hi Crowd! for some reason The Algorithm presented me with this post earlier today with this snip from an interview with Naval Ravikant where he's talking about his schedule, or rather his lack of one. "I read a blog post by Marc Andreessen where he said don't keep a schedule. And I took that to heart. So I deleted my calendar and I don't keep a schedule...

Hi Crowd! Over the weekend I saw that Nick Gray launched slashfriends in an attempt to get people to add a /friends page to their websites. The basic idea is that this is like an old school blogroll or webring, which fellow olds may remember was how we used to find interesting people on the internet before search and algohell took over.

Hi Crowd! I've been thinking a lot about narratives and how stories are told and what the public walks away with recently so perhaps it's fitting that the first thing I have to tell you about is ALIEN: PARADISE which is a fan made edit combining Prometheus and Covenant into a single film as well adding in some of the extra content that was available as promotional material or DVD extras.

Hi Crowd! Today the USA turns 250 years old. Our relationship has always been a bit complicated. I recognize that the divide between what the United States of America promised to be and what it's become is far wider than many want to admit. Honestly it has been since the beginning. But I also hold hope that it can be better.

Hi Crowd! Almost 7 years ago I co-wrote a book about philanthropy and the importance of open. Open principles, open source, and generally building, failing, and learning in the open. 7 years feels both too long and too short when I think about it, so much has changed since then and so much is exactly the same. The book, 50 Shades of Green: Reimagining Philanthropy…

Hi Crowd! While everyone else in the world is either betting on World Cup games, refreshing their Claude accounts to see if they have access to Fable 5 again yet, or spitting their coffee all over their laptops when they saw that Kamala Harris is privately reaching out Zohran Mamdani and others to think through a Palestine strategy for a potential second presidential run, I've been staring at my feet.

As I was finishing off my newsletter the other day I heard that Om died. It didn't fit at all with the themes in that edition but I had to say something regardless, he played a role in my life at different times and in different ways, and I felt like I had to mark that. I was also still a bit in shock from the terrible…

Hi Crowd! Yesterday Derek Guy posted about Emily Segal's recently coined term "tasteslop" in part because of Phoebe Luckhurst's big piece in The Times about it. If you are in the Telegram group you saw this come through last night but I've been thinking about it a lot since then. Tasteslop, as Emily defines it, is "1. Slop made out of things considered to be tasteful 2.

Hi Crowd! I made a thing, that relates to a thing, and is driven by another thing and very much out of my hands by design. It's abnormal. I'll try to explain... Sterling released an NFT project a few years ago called Wiiides. The pieces changed every time they were transferred, and I always loved this idea, of a thing that is on-chain but always changing.

No one has more at stake than Kamala Harris – who has ‘signaled’ support for its release without saying so publicly

Hi Crowd! What a timeline we're on amirite? As a non-US resident I often find myself looking at what's going on in the US and thinking it's too absurd to be real. I know this isn't an uncommon perspective as it's the most common discussion that comes up anytime the US is mentioned in conversations with other non-US residents. Last week I ventured across the border and spent a few days with friends new and old and while it wasn't the primary conversation, it was certainly a conversation.

Hi Crowd! I've been really into this series of photos I've been taking and posting recently and think I'm going to build on it a bit more. I don't know how much I want to talk about what is drawing me to them just yet but there's a few levels of tension and unease in them that I'm just loving. I don't know what anyone else thinks about them yet, but if you are enjoying them as much as I am stay tuned.

A registry of CryptoPunks acquired by museums.

So the EFF announced that they are leaving X, not because of any political objections though they note that’s a legitimate reason as well, but because they did the math and they get only 3% of the engagement on a post today that they did 7 years ago. People have opinions about this, not the least of which is…

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue.

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Hi Crowd! Here's an old school meme frontloaded Crowd for you today, let's get the self back patting out of the way first: If you've been following along the multipart essay series I've been writing about the conversation around AI & Art is now 4 parts long, I think it'll be about 9 when it's done and at that point I guess it needs to become a book since combined it's already over 10k words.

In the beginning of this series I stated my intention to write “not just another piece about AI Art, or about AI and Art, but about the conversation around AI and Art.” So far I’ve spent a lot of time discussing historical precedence and flawed framing and some readers might have been bracing themselves for some oncoming wave of apologetics. I wanted to point out the non-starters for productive conversation so there’s a stronger foundation for where we go next.