79 Taking Stock of the Everything Store with Moira Weigel

For our first ever episode talking about Amazon (somehow?), Logic Magazine co-founder Moira Weigel tells us what she learned about Amazon by spending years interviewing its third-party sellers. From hand sanitizer hoarding to Chinese vendors getting “dragon boated,” Moira gives us a fascinating look at a massive, unregulated economy. Moira Weigel is assistant professor in… Continue reading 79 Taking Stock of the Everything Store with Moira Weigel

We Mapped Reddit: Introducing RedditMap.social

By Ethan Zuckerman “Accents are just mouth fonts.” That brilliant observation is just one of the gems I found today on r/BrandNewSentence, an online community dedicated to collecting “sentences never before written, found in the wild”. Fans of these strange sentences also enjoy r/NatureIsMetal, which features images of animals being savage or brutal, and r/InstantKarma,… Continue reading We Mapped Reddit: Introducing RedditMap.social

Keyword: Decentralization

Map of United States postal service routes west of the Mississippi in 1867, depicting an early distributed communication network. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

This is an entry in our Keyword series, where we try to define the terms you’ll often hear when people talk about building a better Internet and put those keywords in their current context. The term decentralization gets thrown around a lot today, often referring to a paradigm shift in Internet technologies that’s just around… Continue reading Keyword: Decentralization

Trust: A Reimagining Miniseries

In March 2023, we ran a four-part miniseries called “trust,” where we talked about how trust works online from a bunch of different angles: free speech and platforms, gamer guilds, crypto and DAOs, justice, and more. These episodes are pretty unique in their feed, with each one covering a different topic through interview segments and… Continue reading Trust: A Reimagining Miniseries

The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet

“The Three-Legged Stool” is the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure’s banner white paper: the culmination of our work here at the lab so far and our roadmap for our efforts in the coming years. It was written primarily by Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Michael Sugarman under the editorial direction of Ethan Zuckerman. Access “The Three-Legged Stool”… Continue reading The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet