Tag

Social Commentary

Articles and publications tagged Social Commentary across the Atmosphere.

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Articles

Publications

BeatinspectorSep 23, 2026

Humpday Hemp Camp w/ Beatinspector - VOL 32. - The Burning Skip Special

Event invitation

dubdub music

brennan.daySep 21, 2026

LLMs Democratize Extraction and Scale Malice

Responding to Coyote's essay on data ownership, I look at how genAI has democratized the kind of extraction that once required corporate infrastructure—iLands spam agents, scrapers, and agent swarms—why my apathy-and-ignorance approach to AI crawlers is no longer enough, the two competing realities of AI 2027, and the tools and organizing we actually have: ai.robots.txt, Glaze and Nightshade, tech-worker unions, and the CARE and OCAP principles of Indigenous data governance.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.daySep 18, 2026

'Would You Like to Reload a Previous Save?' (➤Yes / No)

Revisiting my maladaptive daydream of waking up at twelve years old with all my present knowledge intact, I weigh the seductive fantasy of correcting every regret—being a better brother to Byron, buying Bitcoin with birthday money—against everything that would be erased: 500,000 words, hard-won relationships, the album that got me through a specific winter. A meditation on the future self who would trade almost anything for one more ordinary day. The door is already halfway closed.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.daySep 16, 2026

Proper English is a Myth: There's No 'Correct' Way to Write

Responding to a blog post urging people to 'please learn how to write,' I pull rank with my English degree to argue there's no such thing as proper English. Looking at the 18th-century grammarians who invented 'correctness,' the linguistic racism of policing dialects from AAVE to Jamaican Patois, and why blogging should be about meaning, not mechanics.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.daySep 15, 2026

I, CEO: How Medium.com went from being anti-AI to pro-AI

Medium.com went from a defiant anti-AI holdout—blocking GPTBot, rejecting a multimillion-dollar training deal, banning AI writing from monetization—to launching an AI licensing standard and its own AI writing app under CEO Tony Stubblebine. What happens when one man's changing mind becomes a platform's policy, and why I'm still staying.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.daySep 14, 2026

There is so much to love and celebrate. Reclaim joy. Be open. Forgive.

Taking stock of myself and the world, I reflect on the overwhelming joy of being alive on this Pale Blue Dot—from the billions keeping civilization running to the unpaid volunteers maintaining curl and OpenSSL—and argue that reclaiming joy is an act of resistance against systems built on scarcity and fear. People are inherently good, and there is always room for grace.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.daySep 13, 2026

It's Christlike to Love Immigrants and Transfolk

Responding to readers who invoke Christianity to defend exclusion, I argue that the Gospels consistently welcome lepers, foreigners, sinners, and gender-nonconforming people while reserving the strongest warnings for the wealthy and powerful. On the Christlike call to love immigrants and trans people, and why compassion cannot be rationed by politics.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.daySep 11, 2026

A Quarter of a Century Later

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, I reflect on being five years old and watching the attacks from a green shag carpet in Winnipeg, the cultural aftershocks that still echo through media and memory, and the urgent need to not forget the cruelty and the kindness of that day and its aftermath.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.daySep 5, 2026

Love is for the ones who love the work.

Taking the final line of Joseph Fasano's poem 'For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper' as a starting point, I argue that loving the verb of creation matters more than daydreaming the noun. There's a wide chasm between writing discipline and the seduction of genAI shortcuts. The only way forward is to start doing the work—badly, bravely, and now.

personal essaywriting

brennan.daySep 3, 2026

I Want to be Unremarkable

A meditation on the contradiction of writing publicly while wanting to remain unremarkable, drawing on Daoist uselessness, Epicurean lathe biōsas, state legibility, and Deleuzian imperceptibility—and why the only peaceful path is to keep writing and surrender to shared oblivion.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.daySep 2, 2026

Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH

Open source has become a safe harbor for far-right politics, from David Heinemeier Hansson's white-nationalist rhetoric and the Omarchy Foundation's $12 million in patron funding to so-called apolitical projects that treat marginalized contributors as political, and why a united boycott of complicit tech companies is our only way forward.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayAug 31, 2026

SAD MACHINE

Debian's recent vote to permit genAI contributions, alongside the questions raised by the IndieWeb is Punk manifesto, leads me to reflect on the harm-reduction case, the deskilling of creators, the NFT-like grift of genAI output, and the Potemkin village of an industry that has yet to find profitability.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayAug 30, 2026

A Few Small Things

Reflecting on the mental fatigue of posting every day during Blaugust, I share a few small things that cheered me up: a new keyword filter on Bubbles.town, Jan Miksovsky's Origami Projector, and the ongoing, hand-made goodness of the independent web.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayAug 30, 2026

A Few Small Things

personal essaySocial Commentary

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 28, 2026

Notice: Bandwidth Exceeded

After exceeding my free Netlify bandwidth for the first time and wiring up a homelab to run this site, I reflect on how my life has narrowed around writing and code, the friendships that did not survive that focus, and the loneliness of a devotion without a clean resolution.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayAug 27, 2026

Being a Toolshed of Optimism

Reflecting on a reader's description of me as 'nice' and the responsibility of having an audience, I commit to becoming a 'toolshed of hope and stubborn optimism' in my writing. Drawing on solutions journalism, restorative narrative, and thinkers like Rebecca Solnit, Mariame Kaba, Joanna Macy, adrienne maree brown, and Christiana Figueres, I explore how hope is a discipline and how to tether anger and grief to concrete, actionable repair.

personal essaySocial Commentary

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 26, 2026

Bubbles.town: Four Months Later

After four months of using Bubbles.town, I share my long-term review of the IndieWeb aggregator. The good: discovering diverse blogs across niche topics. The issues: glacial pace of content changes, popularity contest dynamics, categorization problems, and sparse community participation. Overall, Bubbles is a valuable tool among many for web discovery, but not without its problems.

personal essayIndieWeb

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 25, 2026

A 450-year History of Blogging

A four century etymological journey from wooden ship logs and logboards to the modern web log, tracing how the word 'blog' emerged from centuries of record-keeping, computing, and online publishing. On Peter Merholz's coinage of 'blog,' Jorn Barger's 'weblog,' Justin Hall's online diary, the rise of Blogger and Medium, and the state of the blogosphere in 2026.

personal essayblogging

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 24, 2026

I'm Looking for Love

Responding to anonymous blogger Unstory's claim that love is a fake story and does not exist, I argue that love is a real, measurable, and physical fact of human connection. On fMRI studies of spouses, Harvard's 87-year Study of Adult Development, oxytocin and Queer chosen family, and the courage it takes to keep looking for love anyway.

personal essayLove

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 19, 2026

In Defence of Vent Posting

Drawing on my decade of experience as a 7cups Listener and research on emotional sharing, I argue in defense of vent posting. Venting is a natural human need for connection and validation, not a character flaw. Community support and empathy are essential medicine, and we should meet people where they are rather than moralizing their coping mechanisms.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayAug 18, 2026

Outjerked by the Trickster

I've been satirized by circlejerk.blog, and I reflect on the history of online circlejerking, Indigenous trickster traditions like Coyote and Chi-Jean, and the concept of survivance. A call for more humour and satire in online spaces, and how trickster storytelling can build empathy through shared laughter.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayAug 13, 2026

Suspect Happiness in Pursuit: An Anti-Interview with Unstory

On the 50/10/40 split of happiness research, the Declaration of Independence's 'pursuit of happiness,' and an exchange with anonymous blogger Unstory about free will, determinism, and whether we can choose joy. A diptych of opposing worldviews: humanist optimism vs. anti-humanist determinism, and the strange beauty of two people staring at the same abyss.

personal essayphilosophy

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 12, 2026

The Weight of Words

On the weight and responsibility of words in public discourse. Drawing from John Rawls's reasonable pluralism and Paulo Freire's philosophy that dialogue requires love, I argue for extending grace even to those we disagree with. A reflection on compassionate conversation, accountability versus punishment, and maintaining hope in a cruel world.

personal essayfree speech

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 8, 2026

Free Speech and the IndieWeb

After rescinding a recommendation for BlueDwarf, I explore the spectrum of harm across platforms from X to Substack, and argue that not all harm is equal. On free speech absolutism, cognitive dissonance in platform choices, and where we draw lines in the sand for what's acceptable in the IndieWeb.

personal essayIndieWeb