𝔰𝔥𝔦𝔟𝔠𝔬

hello new followers!
300+ new followers here in less than 8hrs. Crazy!

In less than 24 hours, 10,000 people spent 20+ minutes on the NDC website, reading `Who Will Remember Us When the Servers Go Dark?`

If you want to learn more about the circumstances surrounding this essay, we put a short update out on the New Design Congress mailing list: https://newdesigncongress.org/email/11d79bbe-72f0-4a55-b2ca-4e219672e35b/

There is an entire pipeline of work coming. Please stay with me as we publish!

You can also keep track of NDC work via-

Signal: https://signal.group/#CjQKIJ6knE20PSojjfgFcxR4GZCBQ8ptFYclrS2dFXoQ-SWCEhAJ9T26QwIbJTAcxMxa_L_m

Telegram: https://t.me/ndcdrops

Newsletter: https://newdesigncongress.org/en/#/portal/signup/free

(also please enjoy this photo of my shibas, Ripley and Kodak)

In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under @Mer__edith@mastodon.world's stewardship.

In this new essay, I trace the line from Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace through smart-home forensics, metadata killings, and Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: when did we decide that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, that storage is memory?

The answer involves a boat off Honolulu, the early days of Signal, Iran's missiles over Amazon's Dubai AWS facilities, and the communities already building for a world where the server goes dark. This is an essay about infrastructure, memory, archiving without consent, and what we lose when we mistake the filesystem for memory.

It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too. We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, fate has come to collect that wager.

California has a lot to fucking answer for.

https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/

Moved mountains today 🥲🔥

It would be really funny if governments introduced legislation to make AI companies responsible for their models hallucinations lmfao

ngl, Davos fucking rules this year

Absolutely fascinated to see that Nextcloud's AI efforts are just as half-assed as everything else. Truly a sovereign option.

I have spent the last four months unearthing and meticulously rewriting the songs I originally wrote when I was a closeted teenager living in Singapore.
I now have this full collection of songs I hadn't listened to in over 15 years, and probably wouldn't have if 2025 hadn't been the year it was.
They're all re-assembled now as part of a larger, very surreal and ambitious and unannounced creative project and as I lie here in the dark listening through them I feel something unlike anything I've ever felt. This is something other than nostalgia. I feel like I am reaching into the past to make contact with that anxious kid obsessed with nuclear war and authoritarianism. If anything it's utterly clear to me how single minded my entire body of work has been.
For whatever it's worth, I do plan on putting out select songs on Bandcamp before I share more about the larger project. Para-Real is in the process of being registered as a record label in Ireland, and as soon as I can meet with some session musicians, I will be pretty close.

This post is longer than I was planning and is unpleasantly vague.