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@chrisshank.com

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seeding discontent in present-day computing and radical patience in how we reimagining it libcomp.org • @folkjs.org foraging the web: https://semble.so/profile/chrisshank.com

The first page of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989.
the following javascript ``` import { createSembleClient } from "@semble.so/api"; let client = createSembleClient({ apiKey: "<API KEY>", }); await client.connections.createConnection({ body: { targetType: "URL", sourceType: "URL", sourceValue: '<url>', targetValue: '<url>', note: '', connectionType: "RELATED", } }) ```
A diagram of a water cycle.
"But those recommendations—and the users behind them—were what set Google Reader apart from other RSS readers. It had, at launch, an option to sort feeds by relevance, an early attempt at a personalized feed (one that Arrington noted didn’t work, at launch at least). But more tantalizing, you could follow other people in Google Reader, and see what they were reading. You could share anything, either from the RSS feeds you followed or from the wider web, with your followers in Google Reader. No commentary, no need to think up a pithy title or expand on the takeaways. Just links, as almost a proto-link blog or newsletter, with no connection between the articles other than being a few of your favorite things. Curators became community leaders, people you’d follow for everything about a topic, and if you squint, the tamed internet and TV channels metaphor were both alive in those tiny social parts of Google Reader. “The communities that spring up around things like GReader [were] like lightning in a bottle,” @asoneth recalled. “It was a social network for people who don’t want to talk about themselves,” as @vanderZwan put it."
"IBM announced last year at a major personal computer trade show that connectivity would in fact become the theme of its personal computer division, and chose to do so in a bizarre performance with a laser light show and black female singers, who emulated a "rap" song ("Yeah, baby, connectivities hot."). Many thought the symbolism tasteless and overbearing, but the message was clear: the signified–the "People" in the inchoate Sixties sense–has been brought back within the encompassing mantle of centralized, corporate authority, and this is the wave of the future.And so it was declared that the personal computer revolution, which was never a revolution, is over and done."
Google ngram showing a comparision between the usage of "technology", "high technology", and "low technology". "high technology" peaked between 1980 and 2000.
Screenshot of a Zotero library with "Added By", "Collections", and "Connections" columns populated from Semble.
The following HTML <meta property="at:canonical" content="at://did:plc:author/site.standard.document/rkey" /> <meta property="at:alternate" content="at://did:plc:author/site.standard.publication/rkey" /> <meta property="at:author" content="at://did:plc:author" /> <meta property="at:me" content="at://did:plc:my-did" />
"This arrangement — the topology of digital objects, meaning the structure of boundaries and relationships between the concrete things that computing is composed of — is where power finds grip. Ownership, copyright, and control attach to the boundaries of digital objects. For users, file-app separation was a source of agency: your work existed independently of the tools which operated on it, and switching costs stayed low. But the same boundary that lets you say "this is my document" is the one that lets Adobe say "this format is our intellectual property" — and the one that allowed competing tool-makers to build alternative applications against incumbents' wishes. The file was a site of both user agency and market contestation."
Screenshot of the contributions tab on a open semble collection, which lists the number of contributors and their contributions.
A diagram comparing the topologies of the open web, closed web and the web atproto is aiming to build. RSS and closed apps built on top of transfer (HTTP) and content (HTML) of the web. atproto builds between the transfer and content layers.
An HTML code snippet: <!-- The DID of the web page's author --> <meta property="at:author" content="at://<did>" /> <!-- The canonical AT URI of the web page --> <meta property="at:uri" content="at://<did>/<nsid>/<rkey>" /> <!-- An open set of non-standard relationships of the web page. --> <meta property="at:rel:{...}" content="..." />
A screenshot of a right-click menu with the option to "save all tabs in this window to Semble"
Pix transactions take place almost instantaneously. A Pix payment settles in 3 seconds on average versus 2 days for debit cards and 28 days for credit cards. and · Transaction costs are low. The authorities have set a requirement on Pix to be free for individuals, and the cost of a payment transaction for firms/merchants is only 0.33 percent of the transaction amount, versus 1.13 percent for debit cards and 2.34 percent for credit cards. I can’t help noticing that Pix is actually achieving what cryptocurrency boosters claimed, falsely, to be able to deliver through the blockchain — low transaction costs and financial inclusion. Compare the 93 percent of Brazilians using Pix to the 2 percent, that’s right, 2 percent of Americans who used cryptocurrency to buy something or make a payment in 2024.
Screenshot of a article with an orange link and a count of all of the links on the web page already saved to semble.
A screenshot of an atmospheric weather report with many orange links.
Screenshot of a bluesky post with a link and embed to youtube colored orange.
Screenshot of web search results where the second link is colored orange.
We’ve also mentioned before that being a paid newsletter doesn’t preclude us from taking on ads. Substack doesn’t really have an internal ad network to use, while Beehiiv does. We’re in full control of those ads and we can avoid advertising for companies or newsletters that violate our values — when approached, it’s been almost entirely for prediction markets and gambling sites.
Substack is great for those who don’t want to be involved with the technical side of running a website, but those with a bit more technical knowledge or willingness to learn will find themselves held back. The element that makes it user-friendly can also limit it. We want to offer more features and give our readers much more bang for their buck. We have a few ideas in mind but need to work on them before even promising that we can offer them in any real way. We couldn’t do that on Substack’s platform and the hope is that we can find a way to do that on Beehiiv.
Substack’s biggest draw for newsletter writers is their recommendation engine; when people sign up for our newsletter, they receive recommendations to subscribe to others based on the publications I specifically recommend and similar newsletters in the network based on what other subscribers have signed up for. These network effects are significant for a newsletter like ours; a sizable portion of our readership comes from recommendations through other Substack newsletters. One must always be aware of where one’s data comes from, but Substack’s internal analytics indicate that about 25 percent of our paying subscribers came through their network.
Beehiiv approached Wide Left a while ago about moving our newsletter to their platform. Even before they approached us, we had discussions about moving our publication to Beehiiv or another platform for both technical and ethical reasons.
Beehiiv is not wholly independent and has received investment from venture capital firms — no one is free from this particular sin in the modern economy — but, as far as I can tell, ownership is diffuse enough among private equity and venture capital firms that the impact is relatively minimal. The concern with platforms owned in part by a16z (Andreessen) or the Founders Fund (Peter Thiel) is that they funnel money directly into political projects designed to rob us of our rights. Beehiiv’s investor list, which constitutes far smaller ownership shares than Andreessen Horowitz has in Substack, is not ideologically pure; Lightspeed also invests in the defense industry, and so does NEA. But it is a big move away from some of the most serious concerns I’ve had with Substack. Not only is significantly less subscriber money going to these firms (more on that below), but the impact each dollar has with regard to my primary ideological concerns is minuscule by comparison.
"In these ways, AI's construction of itself as a self-contained technical discipline, though seemingly governed by practical-minded criteria of success and failure, is actually a powerful force for intellectual conservatism. Critics will be asked, "what's your alternative?", within a tacit system of discursive rules that virtually rules out alternatives from the start. All the same, I think that the very concept of "alternatives" is misleading, and that it is actually impossible to achieve a radical break with the existing methods of the field. This is because AI's existing language and technical practice, like any disciplinary culture, runs deeper than we are aware. Having been socialized into the field, by the time I began conceiving myself as a dissident I had acquired an extensive network of linguistic forms, habits of thought, established techniques, ritualized work practices, ways of framing questions and answers, genre conventions, and so forth. It would have been impossible to simply cast off that whole network of cultural forms, any more than I could simply decide to stop being American and start being Thai, or to become transcendentally stateless and cultureless. As a result, attempts to formulate a wholly distinct alternative worldview for AI, or even to secede from the field altogether, are bound to fail. The point is exceptionally subtle: AI's elastic use of language ensures that nothing will seem genuinely new, even if it actually is, while AI's intricate and largely unconscious cultural system ensures that all innovations, no matter how radical the intentions that motivated them, will turn out to be enmeshed with traditional assumptions and practices. When AI people look at an innovation and pronounce it nothing radically new, they will be wrong in some ways and right in others, and it will require tremendous effort to determine which is which. Critical practice is essential to make sense of such things, but its goal should be complex engagement."
A screenshot of Zotero with the Zemble plugin enabled. The plugin addition columns for each item that has been saved, added to collections, and connections in Semble.
"There is a recurring move in industries where technology fails to provide the natural moat the financial structure assumed. The move is to manufacture scarcity through means other than the technology itself. American capitalism, despite its mythology, is unusually good at this. It has done it in pharmaceuticals, where patents and FDA exclusivity create monopolies the molecule alone could not. It has done it in finance, where regulatory complexity creates barriers to entry the underlying business of lending does not. It has done it in telecom, where spectrum allocation and right-of-way agreements substitute for technological superiority that competitive carriers would otherwise force. The pattern is reliable enough to be predictable. When a technology produces something that wants to be a commodity, capital does not gracefully accept commodity returns. It reaches for three tools, in roughly this order. First, regulatory enclosure — using the policy apparatus to manufacture exclusion the market does not provide. Second, vertical integration — moving up or down the stack to capture margins the immediate product can no longer command. Third, bundled distribution — leveraging adjacent monopolies (cloud, ad networks, app stores, payment rails) to gate access to the commodity layer beneath. All three of these tools are now being rehearsed in the U.S. AI sector. They are being rehearsed because the technology is producing a commodity, and the capital structure cannot survive a commodity. They will be deployed because the financial commitments are too large to walk away from. They will be deployed regardless of what is best for the user, because that is not what capital is selecting for at this stage of the cycle."
"Through the personal computing era and into the present, the application boundary can be understood as the commodity boundary — the unit that can be named, sold, installed, updated, and owned by a producer. An application must be a discrete unit that can be exchanged; it requires a producer-consumer relation between developer and user; and because software can be copied at zero marginal cost, it requires artificial scarcity mechanisms — proprietary formats, restricted APIs, platform lock-in, source secrecy — to sustain exchange value. This is not a neutral technical arrangement but a self-reinforcing one. As Tchernavskij demonstrates, Parnas’s invention of information hiding was motivated by a specific mode of production: top-down, centralized management of large disconnected teams in an industrial design process. [7] This technique, devised for commodity production, became encapsulation in object-oriented programming and embedded itself in compilers, frameworks, and IDEs. The mode of production inscribes itself in the tools; the tools reproduce the mode of production."
"Cloud platforms solved real problems of versioning, collaboration, and cross-device access, and these genuine improvements are not incidental to enclosure — 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."
"Metropolis recognizes class struggle but rejects class warfare. It condemns exploitation while warning against revolt. It imagines a society where labor and capital reconcile beneath a benevolent mediator. The film reminds us that protest art is not inherently liberatory because it depicts oppression. Art can critique power while still fearing the consequences of dismantling it."
example atproto query of a bluesky post ``` full_post: app.bsky.feed.post:uri { LIVE COUNT likesCount app.bsky.feed.like:subject.uri LIVE COUNT repostsCount app.bsky.feed.repost:subject.uri LIVE COUNT quotesCount app.bsky.feed.post:embed.record.uri COUNT repliesCount app.bsky.feed.post:reply.parent.uri replies full_post:reply.parent.uri } ```
"An embodied view of technology and the people making use of it, considering the materiality of hardware and software, An emphasis on technology being shaped by, and part of social practices, Making hidden labour and labour conditions visible, Approaching the everyday as a place of political struggle, the personal as the political, Asking who benefits? Looking at who a technology serves and who it harms and excludes, Telling stories of power and unmasking false claims of universality: sociologist Susan Leigh Star proposes starting with the zero point; the point in between two dichotomies, with positions that do not fit the standard, thereby entering a high tension zone, which gives insight into the standardized aspects of networks that are stable to most, yet violent to some and stabilized by the invisible work of others. 7 This point of departure allows us to ask how it could be otherwise. There is nothing inevitable about any science or technology."
A draft blog post titled "The Atmosphere is full of water, but how does it flow?: Sketching out a visual metaphor to understand how atproto works."
"And then I thought about the choice of text, and I realized that the UI wasn’t the real problem; and the problem, for all these many decades, wasn’t the team either. The whole concept of side-by-side range transclusions is a solution in search of a problem. The range-specific transclusion & commentary made sense for the Book of Genesis, where there are detailed commentaries on every line, and much Biblical criticism sorting out how it’s redacted from multiple contradictory texts (like the famously self-contradicting multiple stories of creation), but as I thought to myself about how “hey, we can do sidenotes and range transcludes/commentaries with bidirectional backlinks on Gwern.net too, and we do do it in my ”Suzanne Delage” short story analysis!”3, I suddenly realized: we can, but we mostly don’t, because no one really needs to do that. This is especially true if we look at Ted Nelson’s “Examples of Parallel Documents”: textual criticism again (the Bible, Hamlet, “Rashomon” vs the movie Rashomon), the stretched example of the Virginia Declaration of Rights influencing the United States Bill of Rights, and then very dubious examples—lists of saints, telephone phone-calls inside an organization, and comedy TV episodes⁠…?"
example atproto query of a bluesky post ``` full_post: app.bsky.feed.post:uri { LIVE COUNT likesCount app.bsky.feed.like:subject.uri LIVE COUNT repostsCount app.bsky.feed.repost:subject.uri LIVE COUNT quotesCount app.bsky.feed.post:embed.record.uri COUNT repliesCount app.bsky.feed.post:reply.parent.uri replies full_post:reply.parent.uri } ```
an example query syntax for an atproto query langauge ``` network.cosmik.collection[uri="$uri"] network.cosmik.collectionLink:collection.uri network.cosmik.card { network.cosmik.note:card.uri } ```
"But this week, due to a few conversations with subscribers, I had a far more significant realisation: When I migrated my subscribers from Substack, I assumed that every one of them would then receive the newsletters I was sending (via the Ghost platform) from my website. What I did not realise was that all the people who’d subscribed here on Substack but had clicked the “read in app only” option instead of opting to receive my writing via email had NOT been getting my newsletters. None of them. That’s a scarily large number of people. People who, if they hadn’t used a search engine to find my site, or seen my posts on Substack in August announcing my move, might, quite reasonably, have believed I’d stopped writing."
A leaflet draft titled "The atmosphere is full of water" with the byline "Sketching out a visual metaphor for understanding what the hell atproto is."
A slide highlighting Spencer Chang’s recent work from Arushi’s closing talk of the Atmosphere Conf
screenshot of the atproto wikipedia page
atproto architecture diagram from https://atproto.brussels/atproto-architecture
Architecture diagrams of atproto from its wikipedia page.