Erin Kissane

Good morning from Kelpland. Perhaps you’d like to look at some beautiful seaweed and/or think about knowledge.

https://www.wrecka.ge/holdfast-0-situating/

At Unbreaking.org, we added dozens of events across four timelines this week and did a short briefing on Immigration events in the US along with smaller updates from our Data Security, Federal Workforce, and Medical Research teams:

https://unbreaking.org/blog/this-week-at-unbreaking-jan-16/

#uspol

I have been very hesitant to repost nice things about my own work but then this year happened and I got over it.

Happy holidays, fediverse!

I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us.

https://www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-ghost-story/

Heads up that There Is No Antimemetics Division is out in revised and thoroughly superior new version, including an extremely good audio edition, just in time to ruin someone’s winter holidays.

best three horror movies from the past 10 years, no torture porn, no hurting children, go

This thing that 404 is writing about in the US—the dehumanizing fake content created purely because Facebook pays people to make it?

https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-videos-of-ice-raids-are-wildly-viral-on-facebook/

It has a direct precedent in the Myanmar genocide and has been widely reported on for years. Karen Hao's work on this is outstanding:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait

is doing some of the most interesting work on the open social internet, and they're doing it in the most exhilarating ways. I am delighted to be even a little bit involved in the work they have planned:

https://www.wrecka.ge/sparks-fly-up/

I wrote about Bluesky’s moderation tensions and the White House’s threats and the critical need for open networks that can do broad connection and also care for communities at Tech Policy Press:

https://www.techpolicy.press/trump-administrations-arrival-on-bluesky-highlights-growing-pains-for-open-networks/

I think Mastodon's proposal for starter packs is a significant positive evolution of the way Bluesky rolled them out. I wound up on a bunch of packs there and it was…not a great thing for my specific brain and purpose.

I do hope the people in Masto's comments saying they must allow opt-out and removal will read the actual post, which features both blanket opt-out and individual removal.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/

After some completely predictable stretches of hard slogging, we're getting ourselves sturdied up in the Unbreaking collective (Unbreaking.org), and one of the things on my list for the next month-ish is sorting out where to start offering paths into that project on the fediverse. (1/x)

I don't think it's possible to be where we are in #uspol (and in the global authoritarian slide) without our information ecosystems being such a mess.

There's a ton of work to do on the distribution side of the problem, but also on the info-making side: Even great newsrooms aren't built to make the kind of knowledge we need in this moment, bc what they make are endless streams of atomized stories.

And we ordinary people are all out here in the feeds trying to piece it together in our heads.

The day I most look forward to the whole year is the day the first Salmonberry bird/Swainson’s thrush arrives in our woods, and this year that day was today.

No one’s recording gets them quite right, it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.

https://www.birdnote.org/podcasts/birdnote-daily/salmonberry-bird

I’m still so mad about the new James Burke Connections fiasco, in case anyone was wondering.

gotta go turn into a bone horse, see you next year

Hey I would love help calibrating something, if you see this and you’ve read Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place (more than short excerpts), would you let me know?

If you haven’t, you don’t have to say, I will assume most people have not!

I can't have zotero and a code editor open in the same work session or everything truly goes to hell, can't explain it but it's unquestionably true and someday I will learn

Hey I made a basic style switcher for folks who find the headers on my site to be A Bit Much and by "I made" I mean

VERY KINDLY extracted and simplified his js and css for me because Im baby about everything this week.

Switcher's in the footer!

https://www.wrecka.ge

(The ugly CSS and any glitches are 100% my fault, Ethan's code was ofc pristine but I did selector crimes to work around a theme conflict that I'm not clever enough to solve this week, ask me nothing.)

So this week I wrote to everyone who was working on something “for”/adjacent to me and suggest that they might like to intentionally boot it to January and honestly, based on responses, this is the way. (I come from publishing culture, which runs on guilt and exhaustion and gently pestering people so maybe that’s why it took me so long to humanize.)

I think when the owls are still hooting at wake-up time it means we should go back to bed

Alas, alas for me, no logs.

So I need a tiny bit of traffic analysis on my Ghost website, but like…tiny. I don't need or want details, just a rough count of views (partly so I can pay for the right type licenses) and referrers, and Ghost doesn't do that.

I don't want to use Google Analytics. I could use Plausible, but it produces more info than I need and the number of $10/month add-on services I use adds up. Recommendations?

(I appreciate the "never track anything" POV, but I could really use basics here.)

I wrote up the things I think are the most relevant for fediverse advocates and network builders from a great new Engine Room report on what activists and other folks doing social justice/civil society work in the Majority World/Global South need from networks. I'll do a thread tomorrow, but here's the link for the night shift:

https://www.wrecka.ge/what-people-in-the-global-majority-need-from-networks/

the things I do for fonts

I'm posting my first summaries of other people's research on https://wrecka.ge soon, and I realized should ask what kinds of things people here would find helpful.

I'm covering who did the research and their stated goals, known funding info, overall findings, and why I think the work is relevant/interesting for people working on and interested in better networks for humans. (My non-secret goal is to lure people into reading the research itself.)

What else would you want to know?

For people keeping track but maybe not on Bluesky itself, Libs of TikTok started posting there last week, immediately become one of the most blocked accounts on the platform via individual blocks and shared lists, and then got suspended by Bsky central mods.

This was the specific account/interaction I was waiting for to gauge how it's going to shake out over there, mods-culture-wise.

(Off-site citation https://jewelcitytimes.com/2024/12/02/bluesky-social-suspends-far-right-libs-of-tiktok-account/)