s19e08: It’s Not 2006 Anymore; The Useful, Vernacular Institution; What Is Free Our Feeds, Anyway?

0.0 Context Setting

Monday, 24 March 2025 in Portland, Oregon where it is not raining.

0.1 Events: Hallway Track

No Hallway Tracks on the slate at the moment.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 It’s Not 2006 Anymore

I was at ATMosphere Conference 2025 in Seattle over the weekend. I’ll do some quick scene-setting shorthand so that some people will understand why I’m so excited coming out of it:

It felt like being at an O’Reilly ETech conference in the early 2000s. These were the conferences where web2.0 was invented, solidifed, and named. They were incredibly optimistic times and clearly with the benefit of hindsight, we were stupendously naive and privileged. You just have to look back over the last 18-odd or so years to see how what we thought would happen by default (“more people connected means good things will happen!) totally did not happen and instead ended up reinforcing and making existing power structures worse. Sorry.

But the energy from those conferences was there over the weekend. It felt like the beginning of something that could make a difference.

What