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chrisshank.com
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@chrisshank.com
1.2K followers 700 following 1.3K posts
𝒻𝑜𝓁𝓀𝒾𝒻𝓎𝒾𝓃𝑔 how we create and commune on the web with @folkjs.org
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chrisshank.com
November 17, 2025 at 9:22 PM
chrisshank.com
"Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property" by Andrew Ross (2006)

web.archive.org/web/20221206...
"By contrast, there is little room for those without an immediate legal stake in the disputes. Legal analysts of landmark cases rarely have anything to say about the multitude of jobs and livelihoods affected by the judicial treatment of IP-based assets and new technologies. Not only does this offend our sense of cultural and social history; it also weakens our capacity to understand, and react to, the vast changes occurring today as a result of the technology-driven IP property grab that has resulted in an aggressive expansion of copyright, patent, trademark, or publicity rights. In this essay, I will try to show why labor issues should be a more obligatory component of public debates about new technologies and the so-called corporate enclosure of the “information commons.” We ought to acknowledge that efforts to regulate or propertize new technologies have the potential to drastically alter the landscape of work. Yet these consequences tend to go unexamined, whether in case analysis or in the realm of public opinion making, where libertarian concerns about the freedom of consumer choices hold sway to the detriment of attention to labor issues."
November 17, 2025 at 8:40 PM
chrisshank.com
rewatching this talk, i love this framing
A slide from Paul Rony’s talk titled “The suburban trinity of computing: proprietary file formats, apps, and services”
November 15, 2025 at 7:46 PM
chrisshank.com
that's a good way to put! it intrigues me that the local-first ideals that attempt to challenge power dynamics are dismissed as "hard" and "controversial".
November 13, 2025 at 6:47 AM
chrisshank.com
I think you're right, the builders adoption curve is partly how the co-option happens to reproduce existing social and meaning systems.
Slide 64 from https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ofac1voz9hwj3mgrzfd6o/Local-first-web-apps.pptx?rlkey=mzy7iphgcq7vtbb1d1vrw6sz9&e=2&st=fz86cybq&dl=0
November 13, 2025 at 6:13 AM
chrisshank.com
November 12, 2025 at 6:13 PM
chrisshank.com
A map of the "Post-Naive Internet"

www.mozillafoundation.org/en/nothing-p...
A map of the post-naive internet era, an ecosystem of media, hubs, catalysts and platforms that build digital infrastructure to change the status quo.
November 12, 2025 at 5:14 AM
chrisshank.com
I'd go down the imperative route, should be more performant and less code to grok
ths following javascript "export function bounds(...rects: ReadonlyRect2D[]): Rect2D { let left, top, right, bottom; left = top = Infinity; right = bottom = -Infinity; for (const {x, y, width, height} of rects) { const r = x + width; const b = y + height; if (x < left) left = x; if (y < top) top = y; if (r > right) right = r; if (b > bottom) bottom = b; } return { x: left, y: top, width: right - left, height: bottom - top }; }"
November 12, 2025 at 5:02 AM
chrisshank.com
What happened with the P2P computing movement of the 2000's?
A google n-gram of the usage of "peer-to-peer" and "p2p". The graph shows the usage peaked in 2005 until dramatically declining until 2012.
November 10, 2025 at 7:42 PM
chrisshank.com
”Filling the potholes of the web” by @frank.computer (2024)

www.frank.computer/blog/2024/04...
“ The technology used for this idea is inspired by two separate research projects: first is the idea of “ambient co-presence.” Here, we are exploring an ambient co-repair, where the vestiges and lingering traces of others aren’t just ghostlike or aesthetic, but rather people leave their mark through the subtle and careful repair of the shared digital spaces we inhabit. The other idea is inspired by a project from CSCW where users had a browser extension and could change the headlines on news articles to fix sensationalized and click-baity language into something factual or more reasonable.”
November 10, 2025 at 5:42 PM
chrisshank.com
It mentions it at some points, but I wish it went into more depth.
"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."
November 10, 2025 at 8:11 AM
chrisshank.com
International Conference on Live Coding

iclc.toplap.org/2025/index.h...
"-Liveness in the social and cultural contexts of live coding - Liveness & algorithms - Liveness & interfaces - Liveness & remoteness - Liveness & software agents - Live coding languages that integrate other artistic vocabularies - Forms of artistic expression that integrate live coding - Hybrid interfaces and offscreen tools in live coding performance - Hybridization between the digital and the material in live coding practices - Creating and sustaining live coding communities - The social state of live coding: diversity, equity, inclusion and the TOPLAP manifesto after 10 years of ICLC - Accessibility in live coding languages, interfaces, and performances"
November 10, 2025 at 1:28 AM
chrisshank.com
Draft of the editorial of the Mar/Apr 1997 issue of Web Apps Magazine

www.w3.org/People/Conno...
"HTTP was design as a distributed realization of the Objective C (originally Smalltalk) message passing infrastructure: the first few bytes of every HTTP message are a method name: GET or POST. Uniform Resource Locator is just the result of squeezing the term object reference through the IETF standardization process."
November 10, 2025 at 12:33 AM
chrisshank.com
How did I miss the qr show this spring? (organized by @greg.technology and Sasha friedenberg)

qrshow.nyc/retrospectiv...
archive web page of qrshow.nyc
November 9, 2025 at 1:31 AM
chrisshank.com
November 6, 2025 at 5:48 PM
chrisshank.com
Some quotes
November 6, 2025 at 5:48 PM
chrisshank.com
Disability Driven Development

damaged.bleu255.com/Disability_D...
"Disability Driven Development (DDD) is a practice that reimagines computing from a disabled perspective, challenging its seemingly seamless and stable hegemonic operations. It asks who is left out of creating (and joyfully using) digital technology, and how this can be changed. It is a practice by and for those who did not get to shape computing to meet their needs. It is a work related to crip technoscience, a practice of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world1. It is also heavily inspired by "fourth wave" womanist thinkers like EbonyJanice Moore, drawing on the notion of "a revolution that does not cost us our whole spirit, soul, and bodies."2 DDD was coined by Amelia Laumann to describe her work on SpoonStack 3. Currently computing is stuck in a catch-22: while nobody is better qualified to create access solutions than disabled people themselves, systemic oppression and exclusion result in a situation where those with access needs rarely have the resources to envision or implement those solutions. The history of disability justice demonstrates an abundance of curb-cut effects—situations where focusing on access for one group, yields ideas, changes and solutions that are beneficial to many more people than those in the group the changes were originally meant for."
November 4, 2025 at 10:00 PM
chrisshank.com
"Permacomputing" by Ville-Matias Heikkilä (2020)

viznut.fi/texts-en/per...
"In the computer world, this phenomenon gets multiplied by itself: "progress" facilitates ever greater densities of data storage and digital logic, thus dramatically exploding the availability of computing resources. However, the abundance has also caused an equivalent explosion in wastefulness, which shows in things like mindblowingly ridiculous hardware requirements for even quite trivial tasks. At the same time, computers have been failing their utopian expectations. Instead of amplifying the users' intelligence, they rather amplify their stupidity. Instead of making it possible to scale down the resource requirements of the material world, they have instead become a major part of the problem. Instead of making the world more comprehensible, they rather add to its incomprehensibility. And they often even manage to become slower despite becoming faster. In both computing and agriculture, a major issue is that problems are too often "solved" by increasing controllability and resource use. Permaculture takes another way, advocating methods that "let nature do the work" and thus minimize the dependence on artificial energy input. Localness and decentralization are also major themes in the thought. What makes permacultural philosophy particularly appealing (to me) is that it does not advocate "going back in time" despite advocating a dramatic decrease in use of artificial energy. Instead, it trusts in human ingenunity in finding clever hacks for turning problems into solutions, competition into co-operation, waste into resources. Very much the same kind of creative thinking I appreciate in computer hacking."
November 4, 2025 at 8:04 PM
chrisshank.com
"The Texan Ideology" by Fred Turner (2025)

thebaffler.com/salvos/the-t...
"Today, the hippies have aged out of the computer industry entirely, the yuppies are retired, and high-tech entrepreneurs like Musk are leaving California for Texas. The world of digital technology has changed too. In the 1990s, everyone from modem makers to software developers was focused on building the global network. Connection was the order of the day. Today, the World Wide Web is in place, our computers are in our pockets, and the smart money bets on turning the data we generate into patterns that can be sold to the highest bidder. The global system of connection built out in the 1990s has turned the social world into a resource for the oldest form of capitalism, extraction. For that kind of work Texas makes an ideal home. Built early on from the profits of cattle ranching and slave-picked cotton, propelled to national prominence by the oil booms of the early twentieth century, Texas has long been synonymous with turning natural and human resources into money. Its promoters have been expert, too, in turning cowboys and oilmen into emblems of American masculinity and celebrating a muscular Christianity. From its earliest days as part of Mexico, when the Mexican government required settlers to convert to Catholicism, extraction has been entwined with religion and racial politics. In the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalist Christian radio echoed across the state. In 1953, Reverend Billy Graham staged a revival that filled the Cotton Bowl with seventy-five thousand Texans. Since the 1950s, Southern Baptists, whose conservatism has increased over the decades, have dominated the state’s religious scene. Today, they and right-wing members of other denominations help organize and fund the state’s politics."
October 31, 2025 at 6:52 PM
chrisshank.com
There’s a fascinating history of how the personal computing “revolution“‘s proclamations of liberation backfired stupendously leading the hindsight you describe.
bsky.app/profile/chri...
October 30, 2025 at 6:26 AM
chrisshank.com
"The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution" by Bryan Pfaffenberger (1988)
Abstract of the paper: "This essay presents a processual model of thepersonal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is d(fficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effectivepolitical vision andfailed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators."
October 29, 2025 at 12:30 AM
chrisshank.com
Server Charms are tiny, portable microcontroller setups made with recycled vape batteries. They create their own Wi-Fi network, inviting curious people to connect with their devices where a captive portal opens, leading to small webpages.

codeberg.org/actinomy/ser...
"To serve is to offer something, a name, a website, a document, an idea –something to be shared, something that connects us. But who serves whom? Serving can be a painful experience. It is a relation that carries histories of gendered violence, histories of slavery, serfdom and oppression as we are taught by archives of resistance, black feminists and anti-colonial scholars. This violence extends to the materialities of the earth which is made to serve as resource, ready to be extracted for the minerals that make up the very chip that carries these thoughts as binary strings of information. Serving does not have to manifest as violence if we insist otherwise. Serving can become an act of empowerment when we build infrastructures that serve the needs of local and remote communities evolving around situated knowledge of those around us – while keeping in mind privilege often determines who has access to a community and its resources. The complexities of the internet with its corporate and state entanglements, its huge data centers, relentless data crawlers and transatlantic fibre cables can feel inevitable. To delink from time to time means to shift our focus back to the local networks and groups that we are already part of. We know that the internet is much more than its corporate occupants, it is about forming connections and sharing resources. Independent, selfmade networks remind us of the physical connections that are the base of all kinds of signal transmissions. Intimate networks that make us share and mitigate our vulnerabilities through trust and kinship. In the smallest scope, networks such as this ones."
October 28, 2025 at 5:50 PM
chrisshank.com
“Confronting Data Centers, Deep-Sea Cables, and Colonial Legacies in the South Pacific” by @emmaquilty.bsky.social

datasociety.net/points/confr...
“Colonial investments in infrastructure, resorts, roads, railways, and telecommunication systems played a crucial role in promoting the unequal economic systems that persist to this day. Layered both literally and figuratively on top of the future pathway of the Google internet infrastructure, the sugarcane railway tracks evoke the longevity of colonial infrastructures as well as the ideologies underlying them.”
October 22, 2025 at 6:43 PM
chrisshank.com
your's can equally be collaborative :p
October 21, 2025 at 10:21 PM
chrisshank.com
What would it look like if accessibility infrastructure became the foundation of malleable computing? Here's a demo by @orionreed.com that adversarially adds find and replace functionality to a hermetically sealed messaging app.
October 21, 2025 at 7:14 PM