Anil Dash

Friends, I have some urgent and very timely information for you: Here is how to install an app on your Commodore 64. https://anildash.com/2026/10/08/install-an-app-commodore-64/

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then vibe-coded in rust.

For future reference: a simple documentation of the pattern that Meta follows wherein the company breaks the law it violates people’s privacy, gets caught, waits a while until the storm blows over or people get distracted, and then does it again until people stop fighting. I write it down so you can share it with media or policy makers when they get fooled by this stupid truck over and over. https://anildash.com/2026/09/29/facebook-fake-out/

RE: https://cyberpunk.lol/@mxchara/117092734696654321

What do you even do when some stranger just writes batshit fanfic about you all the time? In this imagination, Cory Doctorow of all people doesn’t want folks to have agency over their tech?

People really will just say any old goddamn thing on the Internet and expect not to be called out on it.

So, I am writing a post about "why Bending Spoons picking up Airtable is everything bad in tech right now" — which questions do you want to make sure I answer in the piece?

I really wish Apple sold a standalone TouchID button. I know there's that crazy hack where you can rip apart a keyboard and just use the TouchID button, but that's nuts. Just give us the button so we can use TouchID with our own mechanical keyboards!

The biggest reason I don’t use Mastodon nearly as often as I’d like to is because, unlike other platforms, too many of the people who act like asses here are people who follow me. It’s really weird, because every platform has assholes or whatever, but usually it’s due to context collapse from strangers. Here, it’s usually a tiny minority that wants to scold or police over (often contrived!) objections, and it’s just… exhausting. Takes the fun out of hanging out online. Not sure how to fix it.

So, the biggest IPO in the history of the world has the vast majority of its future value being created by an AI platform whose only distinction, thus far, is that it is the only one that's generated sexualized imagery of children? And they're going to force it into our 401ks so we're bag-holders for all the assholes who put stupid money into buying Twitter?

Inspired by Hank Green’s fun new timeline of photos from the Artemis II mission, I wrote up an answer to a question that's more pertinent these days than it may seem: Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr? https://anildash.com/2026/04/30/artemis-photos-flickr/

This has been on my mind for weeks. I've been saying for a long time that it's possible to have an AI that only uses consensually-gathered content, is open source + open weights, runs on your own machine, and is designed to empower creators instead of exploit them. Well, we've finally got one. https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/28/one-good-ai-is-here/

RE: https://social.freedom.press/@freedomofpress/116449031735670570

Tonight! Come join us! Will be a great conversation.

If you're thinking of Tim Cook's legacy, this piece from last September: How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

Tomorrow marks 10 years since Prince passed. For the first time, I gathered nearly two decades of my writing, podcasts, talks & more into one curated resource, including playlists, rarities, a review of every video he ever made, and collaborations I did with his estate. I close it out with a talk I gave in Minneapolis on Prince’s birthday just after he passed – one of my most personal ever, and one I’m most proud of. I hope you’ll check it out. https://anildash.com/2026/04/20/prince-ten-years/

Next week is 10 years since we lost Prince. Since then, the community of Prince scholars has come together regularly for academic symposia on his legacy and works; you can watch for free this weekend if you'd like to join us online or in person at NYU. This year's focus is Prince & the Revolution's 1986 album "Parade" & the movie it accompanied, Under the Cherry Moon. Register for free, and come join us! https://iwonderu.polishedsolid.com

What is the maximum amount of value destruction that could be wrought on the big centralized commercial AI vendors, and the maximum amount of acceleration of the ecosystem of open source and community-led alternatives, using the knowledge gained from the leak of the Claude Code source code?

You must picture Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berner-Lee's throat. We are in a truly existential level of danger when it comes to the survival of the open web, across every front. This year is when it all comes to a head. https://anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

Apple is adding video support to its podcasting apps — that’s great. But the way it’s doing so might jeopardize the openness that’s kept podcasting from getting enshittified like every other form of media. It’s not too late for them to fix this. https://anildash.com/2026/02/28/apple-video-podcast-power/

Everybody is (understandably) very excited that Anthropic isn't selling their AI for Hegseth to use to automate his war crimes. But I would gently suggest that we not accept setting the bar quite so low. https://www.anildash.com/2026/02/27/a-cookie-for-dario/

One of the things that's most frustrating about the hype cycle around OpenClaw is that so much of what people are excited about is just... software? You can automate doing lots of cool stuff with your inbox with deterministic software that's been around for decades, and it won't delete your inbox! And much of it is easier to install than OpenClaw is!

On this day in 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided that people of South Asian descent could not be American citizens, and retroactively stripped citizenship from many who had already been naturalized. Years of organized persecution followed. https://www.saada.org/explore/publications/tides/articles/united-states-of-america-vs-vaishno-das-bagai

It is a vile scandal that 2 of the biggest AI companies in the world attack children by inciting them to self-harm, and by generating sexually exploitative imagery of kids for profit. I wanted to document this so that people in tech will stop saying they don't know: https://www.anildash.com/2026/02/18/threatening-kids-with-ai/

"In 1999, I interviewed Prince for TIME and he told me to leave my tape recorder off because he didn’t trust what future technology might do with unauthorized recordings of his voice.

At the time, I thought Prince was being paranoid ... I realize now that Prince wasn’t paranoid, he was prescient."

https://time.com/7338205/rage-against-ai-generated-music/

Many folks are reflecting on Prince’s extraordinary halftime performance, the greatest of all time. What you may not know is that it was a profound, nuanced statement and a powerful reclaiming of a proud Black music tradition. Some background: https://anildash.com/2021/02/05/how-prince-won-the-super-bowl/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/115884631610047441

If you reserve this, they’ve got… some land on the moon they’d like to sell you?

Looks like my Markdown piece has been submitted to Hacker News; if you frequent the orange site, I guess please upvote? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46556695

I've been working on this one for a while. The multi-trillion-dollar AI industry? Their most advanced platforms are controlled by a plain text format that John Gruber made up for his blog, and then bounced off of a 17-year-old Aaron Swartz, before sharing it with the world for free. That is the internet. Here's the amazing (true!) story of how Markdown took over the world. https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/

Since ChatGPT came out in late 2022, over half a million tech workers have been laid off. That fact, and their voices, aren't really shaping the conversation about AI, and what "AI" really means in culture. So I started to get into it: https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/06/500k-tech-workers-laid-off/

The number one thing I've been hearing from people in tech lately is, basically, "How the hell am I supposed to work in this industry anymore?" Though most folks are kind of afraid to say it out loud. So I wrote about how to think about it: https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a-tech-career-in-2026/

One amazing thing about 2025 is that, if you start up an Apple product, it forces you to choose between three different window mangers, but if you start up a clean install of a current version of Linux, it just chooses good defaults for you.

lol it’s so genuinely fun seeing Cory take decades of fluency in how these systems are broken and serve it up for a mainstream audiences. Even if you know “enshittification” well, this is worth the watch. And love to

! https://youtu.be/d2e-c9SF5nE?

Bleh. Just saw a friend who found out they couldn’t be followed by one of their friends because (unbeknownst to both parties) the moderators of their friend’s instance had defederated from their own instance. All of this, for people who barely know what any of these terms mean. What they experience is, “Two people you’ve never met have a beef you’ve never heard about over an issue you don’t know about, so your friend can’t see you. And there’s no fix.” It’s just terrible all around.

How many different people's work do you think you've seen since you've been on social media? Like how many different individuals have created the photos, videos, and words that you've looked at since you started scrolling timelines on your phone?

So much of what's wrong with tech started from one simple phenomenon: focusing on the money-movers instead of people who actually make shit. Real technology matters. Inventors over investors, every time. Founders over funders. Writing code > writing checks. https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/24/founders-over-funders/

Imagine a browser where you type in “Taylor Swift” and it doesn’t even admit that her website exists. I write about Atlas, ChatGPT’s new anti-web browser that should come with a warning label. https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/22/atlas-anti-web-browser/

By popular request: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful take on LLMs that (in my experience) the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. https://www.anildash.com//2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/ Please share!

One first step people should do to respond to this is start using the “report a speed trap” function in Apple Maps to report where ICE is operating. Make Apple party to the attempt to protect people. https://www.theverge.com/news/791533/google-apple-ice-tracking-app-store-red-dot-iceblock

I've been trying to find a name or descriptor for people who I think are looking at "AI" broadly and soberly, with a genuinely objective perspective and information that's not captured by the big tech companies but also fluent in the technology behind it. (

would be the exemplar here.) What would you call this cohort? Because I think it's sort of a community without a name, which limits its impact.

I guess I actually was pretty mad about that stupid golden paperweight https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

Today's my birthday! I've got five simple requests, based on what I've learned over the last... 50 years. I hope you'll take a moment to give them a look. And thanks to everybody who's taken a moment read my writing over the years. https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-for-fifty/

One of the biggest cultural issues we have is that no major media or journalistic institutions have been reinforcing norms of what things should look like. That corruption isn’t normal, that cronyism isn’t normal, that lies and scandals should be punished, that incompetence is disqualifying.

They’ve simply stopped pointing out that there are any standards at are, or that there used to be a bar of any sort. And now an entire generation doesn’t know this concept at all.

There could not be a more opportune time to make a competitor to GitHub, especially one grounded in community and accountability. Git was not meant to be centralized; “pull requests” are not actually an open standard and throwing code over the wall at others is not actually social coding.

This Zohran Mamdani video is absolutely INCREDIBLE. The numbers he cites, the strategy and results they produced — it’s the future. When have you heard any campaign talk about this, ever? It is the blueprint.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/11/lets-be-clear-the-rioting-in-la-is-by-the-cops-not-the-protestors/

It’s time for something new. So: what do you think I should do next? I want to be of service. https://anildash.com/2025/06/11/time-for-something-new/

There was somebody fussing in my replies to my last link to my blog post about Medium (I don’t see them now; they probably blocked me, but their specific words don’t really matter), and the gist of their message was that they didn’t like that site. On the modern internet, if you have an issue with content written by humans, with no surveillance ads, that doesn’t allow AI scraping or AI slop content, with a business model that makes money… I don’t know how to help you. Honestly.

The entire modern internet has been built on platforms that don’t believe in asking for consent. What if we started demanding a culture of consent online? https://www.anildash.com//2025/05/27/2025-05-27-internet-of-consent/

What lessons can we learn about the fact that MCP got more adoption as a quasi-open standard in a few months than the entire fediverse stack has in nearly a decade? (Or two, depending on how you count.) Obviously, they’re in different domains, but there are some parallels. How might other open efforts piggyback on hype cycles like AI to bootstrap open efforts we could use to re-open the social web? Who’s integrating MCP interfaces into the ActivityPub stack?

I have a lot of thoughts about this. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/

This one was, obviously, bittersweet to write: we’re shutting down app hosting on Glitch. This post covers how everybody can export your apps & download your code. I didn’t get into where the Glitch community goes next, because honestly we’re still figuring it out, but it’s still the end of an era. I’ll have more to share about this later, of course, but I just wanted to make sure everyone got the news straight from me. If you have any questions, you can ask in the forum. https://blog.glitch.com/post/changes-are-coming-to-glitch/

It’s been fun watching the unlikely rise of MCP as a standard, which is open and messy in a way that mimics the dynamics of the good parts of Web 2.0. Maybe something interesting will happen! https://www.anildash.com//2025/05/20/mcp-web20-20/

I would only add that this is a valid assertion about all of the major platforms funded by big tech. (Whether they are framed as non-profits or B corps or not.) It need not be intrinsic to the technology, but we do not yet have any meaningful large-scale counterexamples. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114530048579737393

This is wonderful news for the future of Mastodon, for everything from governance to continued evolution and innovation. Love to see it! https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/05/evolving-the-team/

A bunch of tech CEOs are talking about being “AI-first”, the latest in a series of CEO fads like “return to office”, “founder mode” and “pivot to full fascism”. This one’s weird, though, because it only makes sense if… none of their workers are great at their jobs. https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/

Truly my greatest professional joy is that, not only did we get to build a tool to help people stop AI bots from scraping up their work without consent, I was able to have our in-house artist create a SLOP sign to mark the spot where the bots expire.

If you are a non-profit or open source project that does good internet stuff, we’ll protect you for free. If not, then you can pay us money and we will hook you up. Either way, good tools to put you in control over the bots. https://www.fastly.com/blog/take-back-control-make-ai-bots-play-by-your-rules

I took a look at the top “tech” podcasts and holy SHIT all but, like… 2? of them are just straight up fascist propaganda by VC firms promoting their defense investments or lifestyle scams from right-wing bros? Obviously we don’t need any more podcasts, but it made me think I should bring mine back.

I know this is silly, but bringing some of my older pieces online, this one made me happy: Years ago, Prince invited me to his house in LA to preview his new album — and I couldn't go. So I asked for a Purple Raincheck. And I ended up with an even more amazing story. https://www.anildash.com//2016/05/12/the-purple-raincheck/

Okay, after years of over-hype about AI, does the DeepSeek moment and the deflation of the AI bubble mean we can finally be normal about AI and treat it like any other tech, evaluating it on its pros and cons, and its actual utility? I wrote about how we might actually do that in our day jobs: https://www.fastly.com/blog/can-we-be-normal-about-ai-now-that-deepseek-happened

Hey! If you care deeply about the open web, I hope you’ll consider joining our team at Fastly. We get to support open source and good internet projects ranging from Scratch to Kubernetes, Watch Duty to Mastodon, Python to Perl, Ruby to Rust, and many, many more. We’ve committed nearly $100M in resources to making the Internet better, and helping to build healthy, sustainable communities. And we haven’t wavered one bit in our inclusive hiring policies. https://www.fastly.com/about/jobs/apply?gh_jid=6523073

This is a monumental day for the future of the social web, though it might not be obvious for a while. Mastodon matures its governance model with a great, solid non-profit https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/ and a coalition of independents push to open up Bluesky's AT Protocol: https://freeourfeeds.com/ These two moves together put the most credible players on solid ground for years to come — and set up the open platforms to enable lots of innovation just when it's needed most.

We’ve been watching the Watch Duty team do absolutely unbelievable technical work all week (they’re members of the Fast Forward open source program that my team at Fastly works on), handling a surge of millions of people trying to see where the LA fires are in real time. Amidst the hopelessness of the fires causing so much destruction, there’s hope in seeing people taking care of each other in this way. There are still people who do such good on the internet. https://gizmodo.com/watch-duty-hits-1-on-apple-app-store-as-wildfires-rage-in-california-2000547740

Here's a quick piece I wrote up on how to understand DOGE as a very blatant attempt at procurement capture, a simple way of making government spending corrupt to benefit the tycoons. Please do pass it along & share any feedback! https://www.anildash.com/2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-capture/

I think everyone who has an opinion, positive or negative, about LLMs, should read how

summed up what’s happened in the space this year. He’s the most credible, most independent, most honest, and most technically fluent person watching the space. https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/

It is such a stupid and obvious market failure that nobody has made a consumer AI LLM product that is 1. trained on consensually-acquired material 2. powered with renewable energy 3. genuinely open about its weights and models. Just achieving these things and being creator-friendly would be massive.

The NY Times refuses to cover the murder of Yeremi Colino, which took place in Manhattan the same day as the murder of the UHC CEO, because Colino was an immigrant child killed by a white supremacist who asked whether he could speak English. Just like NYPD refuses to carry out the same kind of manhunt with hourly updates on the killer. They only care about corporate tycoons, not teenagers being killed. This is how they cover for the hate crime.

Today is a great time to make

the beneficiary of your generosity, specifically to help protect privacy for activists working on vital efforts to protect human rights and reproductive rights. I'll match the first $5000 in donations, just go to eff.org/anil and be as generous as you can, then DM me so I can match it!

Hi everybody! In anticipation of doing more writing, I’ve brought all 25 years of my blog archives online, cleaned up lots of dead links, and even added a basic search capability. I hope there’s something there you find valuable! (And let me know what I should write about next.) https://www.anildash.com/

I wanna say something to people who work in tech-related jobs in America: this is still a field where most people hate the rise of fascism and want to stop it. I know the media & amplification of the tycoons makes it seem like that’s the whole industry. But it’s not. And we still have power.

As I said yesterday, and will say tomorrow: I am steady in standing with you, as we fight together to protect the vulnerable and to stop the fascists. I have enough love to go around when you’re tired or scared, and I know you have the same. Let’s get to work, no matter what we wake up to.

Hey, friends: today we win. Today will protect each other, and the most vulnerable in our communities. Today we are going to stand up against fascism & violence and joyfully come together to care for those who need protection & support. We do this no matter how votes go today, no matter what disruptions or attacks come, so find peace in knowing what does not change, what they can never stop. Once you’ve voted, sign off, and don’t look or scroll if it causes you stress. Tomorrow we get to work.

4th day of November…

Please, if you have kids out tonight, be aware and careful as drivers will kill more children tonight than any other night of the year. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/10/31/23427256/halloween-children-car-deaths-pedestrian-safety

I have an old iMac with a 5K screen and an Intel processor, and I'd love to pay somebody to hack one of the new M4 Mac minis into fitting inside that great old case and using that screen.

Hi friends! Today is a good day to remind you: if you are in this fight against the fascists, doing the work to care for the vulnerable, I am joyously conspiring with you! If you are enthusiastic & excited, I am too. If you are worried and have misgivings about some of the people or policies in the coalition, I do too. But if you are committed to the work, we will get there together. I’m grateful for your company.

Hey everyone! Tomorrow (Friday the 25th) at 5pm NYC time on YouTube, I'm going to try something I've been wanting to do for a while: answering your questions about the tech world from the perspective of someone who's been in many different roles over the past 2 decades. I'm especially interested in questions that can help folks with their careers! If you have a question you want answered, just reply or DM, along with whether you'd like to be anonymous or not. https://www.youtube.com/live/bnWJxxczsB0

Your LinkedIn should list whatever emojis you added to Slack at your workplace.

I rarely use ride-sharing apps because they're destructive to public infrastructure I care about, but recently I had to use Lyft and YOU CAN'T USE IT ON THE WEB. Their website literally tells you to go get the app, so you can't use a desktop browser at all to access their platform. That is an absolutely wild choice, and even more absurd that it goes unnoticed in the current media/tech ecosystem.

Proud of everyone at

— workers, leadership and community — for coming together on a milestone agreement. Working together so they can do such vitally important work. https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-and-ifpte-local-20-attain-labor-contract

Congrats to @molly0xfff who is now impossible to find on Meta Threads.

Is there a name for when people reply to a social media post but they're definitely talking to an imagined audience or a theoretical opponent, instead of to the person and post that they're actually responding to?

I’ve been thinking about doing a tech advice live stream where I take questions about the tech industry (especially careers, particularly people who are early career) and how it works. Would anybody be interested in watching that, or submitting questions for a test run?

Has anybody switched from a standalone 2FA app like Google Authenticator or Authy to Apple’s Passwords app? Looking for folks who have actual experience with it and how it works.

I’m bringing back lolcats

Every year, I write a remembrance on the anniversary of this date. This year, I went a little deeper, and shared what I wish I could tell everyone who was too young to remember the day. What was it actually like to be in NYC on that day? Without the constructed, contrived myth that's arisen in the years since. https://www.anildash.com/2024/09/11/23-what-was-911/

Is there a vendor that does a good job of letting an individual run a mailing list? Like, an old-school-style list we would hard find with majordomo back in the day (moderated, anyone can post) but with contemporary design and UI?

Here’s John Legend & Sheila E. warming up for tonight’s performance ahead of Tim Walz’s keynote. (Sheila’s yellow outfit is a sly nod to Prince’s most notorious no-bottom pants.)

Just trying to imagine if people a few hundred years ago had been here to witness, in the span of a few weeks, an eclipse, an earthquake, a supernova as bright as the North Star, and an unexpected appearance of the northern lights.