The Months Ahead
Welcome to the new year — here's what I've got on my plate
Jesse Lawson
Jesse is an anti-disinformation writer and social technology engineer at the intersection of technology, social media, politics, and public policy. He also writes and edits speculative fiction as well as computer programming books and tutorials.
Website
California
While Cultivating a Third Space
It's been a wild year indeed. So much of what we were worried about this time last year has come to pass, with the trajectory of things looking so much like an increasingly obfuscated and painful process of... well... whatever it is our nation is going through right now. I have some thoughts.
Signing off (for a short while)
Hi everyone, The last three months have been a wild ride. While I'm not ready to share a LOT of details to anonymous people online just yet, what I can share is that an opportunity of a lifetime fell into my lap and after much consideration, I decided
My Final Thoughts before Battening Down the Hatches
On journey, discovery, experimentation, and my hardened focus for the coming months.
The Shame Machine
On the mining of our insecurities, the optimization of shame, and social media cycles of curated self-diminishment.
Why "Legacy Media" is Effective Propaganda
It's because "Legacy Media" is the new "Fake News."
On Algorithmic Suffering
How digital spaces amplify both connection and alienation through algorithmic mediation—and what that reveals about our inherited patterns of belonging.
On Brutalism in Product Design
Product designers have developed an unfortunate habit of appropriating architectural movements, stripping them of their philosophical foundations, and reducing them to a set of optimistic but still existentially restrained aesthetic guidelines. Brutalism is perhaps the most prevalent example of this trend. The brutalist movement emerged from post-war Britain's
An Internet for Masochapitalists
My earliest online activity sans usenet was posting on gamedev.net around the year 2000. Back then, surfing the internet was about exploration; humans made lists and shared links with each other as blogrolls, bookmarks, and posts on their personal homepages. Using a search engine felt like browsing content at
Agency and Context Collapse on TikTok
It's been about a month away from the platform for me, and I've been reflecting on what it feels like to see it from another angle.
BlueSky's Tradeoffs: Privacy, Centralization, and Protocol Design Decisions
A look at the real-world implications of 'decentralized' social technology.
AI Summer, AI Winter
I appreciate how optimistic people are about text generation tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Personally, I'm concerned about production use of models in any form that do not have strict oversight rules and accountability of training data—especially in digital social spaces. It feels like we need transparent,
Is BlueSky really an echo chamber?
Or are some people just uncomfortable with respecting boundaries?
The Spoils of Information War
Last week was the election, and my contribution to post-election commentary just went out in a different article: Russia’s 21st Century Warfare on our 18th Century Election SystemTrump has exposed a critical design flaw in our 18th century election system: since corporate social media has pulled our country into
Russia's 21st Century Warfare on our 18th Century Election System
Trump has exposed a critical design flaw in our 18th century election system: since corporate social media has pulled our country into rhetorical echo chambers, surgically targeted disinformation can determine the outcome of an election.
Pioneers of Social Technology
I am constantly thinking about what it means to be a person online these days—the act of using computers to find, discover, share, and engage with each other about information. For people like me, computers and social technologies are part of an evolutionary tradition of humans making experiences more