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Charley Johnson
Jan 126 min read
The Age of Participatory Media
Let's generate 'cold media,' shall we? In “Fragment the media! Embrace the shards!” I argued that we need to shift in seeing ourselves...

Charley Johnson
Nov 2, 20246 min read
The media is fragmented. Embrace it!
For this election, think less about our ‘shared reality’ and more about information integrity The U.S’s pursuit of a multiracial...

Charley Johnson
May 4, 20245 min read
Is AI a religion?
Come, human. Ensconce yourself in the fine swaddling robes of rational perfectionism I’ve written a lot of words about how we...

Charley Johnson
Jan 7, 20245 min read
🧠 Synthetic social media
Internet users, brace for the emergence of E-Swift In May of 2022, I tried to look around the corner and imagine the future of social...

Charley Johnson
Dec 3, 20235 min read
🧠 ‘AI Alignment’ isn’t a problem — it’s a myth.
Come with me on a journey through ordered and unordered systems I ’ve written about the false promise of emergence , and why AI doomers...

Charley Johnson
Aug 5, 20235 min read
The Doom Loop of Synthetic Data
Apparently AI systems will continue to improve forever — but is that even possible? If you’ve only got a minute this Sunday, here’s the...

Charley Johnson
Jun 3, 20236 min read
🤖 AI isn’t ‘hallucinating.’ We are.
Why 'hallucination' is a problematic term (hint - it's not just because it anthropomorphizes the technology!) and what to do about it. If...

Charley Johnson
Mar 5, 20238 min read
When it comes to social media, bigger isn't better; it's harmful.
Why ‘scale thinking’ is a big problem, and what to do about it. My dad is an economist and I studied economics in undergrad. Hey look at...


Charley Johnson
Jan 1, 20236 min read
Beyond ‘minimizing harms’
Algorithmic bias is still a huge problem — but where do those problems start? Remember playing the game whac-a-mole as a kid? You hit the...

Charley Johnson
Jul 30, 20225 min read
Tech for... what, exactly?
How ‘tech for good’ launders the expertise, interests, and beliefs of technologists. What if I told you that the key to unlocking...

Charley Johnson
Apr 30, 20226 min read
Trust me, I’m a smart contract.
If we’ve built totally ‘trustless’ systems, we may never have to trust another human being again, right? Right?? Wormhole is a crypto...


Charley Johnson
Apr 3, 20226 min read
Are blockchains immutable?
A dive into the collective belief that ‘yes, assets CAN be digital, and you CAN own them!’ There’s a big idea making the rounds in crypto...

Charley Johnson
Mar 6, 20226 min read
🦄 Tokenizing Creators
How 'social tokens' turn creators into stocks A year and a half ago, a guy named Alex Masmej conducted the first-ever “human IPO.” He...

Charley Johnson
Dec 5, 20219 min read
💆 Some Unsatisfying Solutions for Facebook
In the limitations of each of these solutions, we can find lessons for a healthier information ecosystem Solution 0: rename the company,...

Charley Johnson
Nov 5, 20217 min read
Crypto is not decentralized
Because technical decentralization does not decentralize power — it only hides it I remember the early days of social media. There was a...
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