This is Jesse's personal essay column, a weekly reflection on social platforms, education, politics, parenthood, relationships, anti-disinformation, propaganda, non-fiction, and many other things in between.
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.
On journey, discovery, experimentation, and my hardened focus for the coming months.
How digital spaces amplify both connection and alienation through algorithmic mediation—and what that reveals about our inherited patterns of belonging.
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,
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
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
Wrapping up the code for an election poll simulator project I wanted to ship this week took more time than finishing the article it is associated with. As is the case with most of my projects, once the leaves start growing, I have to commit to a period of hyperfocus
It's my third week since leaving my corporate job, and my brain still has a lot of corporate clutter in my head to clear out. Thankfully, that clutter is being removed at a steady rate, day by day—and each week that goes by I can feel more