BlogFlockI’ve been watching far too much World Cup this summer. It’s great. I’m in Paris, where it’s playing everywhere; in bars, brasseries, on people’s phones on the metro. At night, you can hear cheers erupting from blocks away no matter where you are, for France whenever they’re playing, sure, but…
Friends,
If you’re reading this, you are currently or have recently been a paid subscriber to The Convivial Society. This newsletter has always operated with a patronage model, which is to say that t…
Since finishing up the edits on my book Hyperscale (which you can preorder now!), I’ve had a lot more time to read for pleasure — and it’s been so wonderful. I’ve become particularly taken with the fiction of Emily St. John Mandel, a fellow Canadian. I really enjoyed Station…
The year has been marked by the rise of open, widespread, and increasingly spirited backlash to AI, data centers, and big tech. As such, the stage was well set for the Summer of Ludd, a series of protests, performances, talks, and meetups in New York City organized around the…
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. You may have noticed that over the last month or so new installments are coming your way at an unusual clip of about once per week. I don’t know that this pace will continue indefinitely,…
This year on Disconnect I’m trying to interrogate how we use technology and what capacities we have to change it. But that work is only possible because of readers like you.
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I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that people all over the world are turning against data centers.
Residents of Great Torrington in England are trying to stop one of Europe’s largest data centers. Australians recently dealt a blow to one planned near the Blue Mountains, as more than…
Google is the patron saint of enshittification. Sure, the tech giant faces some stiff competition from the likes of Facebook and Microsoft, but when it comes to creating a product that became so widely indispensable, so ingrained into modern life that it’s permanently rendered as a verb, and then…
I feel like if there was a month that brought home how the data center buildout is pushing up the price of consumer electronics, it was June 2026.
Valve announced its Steam Machine would start at $1049, though many buyers will end up paying more than that, while Microsoft …
Well I’ve finally done it. I’ve been threatening to start a regular audio enterprise here at Blood in the Machine Inc for quite some time, and now it’s officially happening. In the player above, embedded in the video below, and populating that long-dormant BITM podcast feed is what’s essentially a…
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