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Does generative AI have ‘emergent’ properties?
A few issues back, I explored what ‘information’ actually means , and argued that it’s a big ol’ problem when we treat metaphors not as...
Charley Johnson
Jul 2, 20235 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
Jun 4, 20236 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
Mar 5, 20238 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
Jan 1, 20236 min read
Who are you?
A wonky romp through identity, classification, and power. Who are you? Heady stuff, I know. How we choose to identify ourselves is not...
Charley Johnson
Dec 5, 20228 min read
What connects crypto and ‘Love is Blind’?
The sociology of speculation and how it is shaping crypto communities and modern life. Ever wondered what connects crypto and the Netflix...
Charley Johnson
Oct 2, 20226 min read
Venture capitalists are the new narrators of crypto
That’s a big problem, and not for the reason you might think. Steve Jobs once said, “The most powerful person in the world is the...
Charley Johnson
Sep 4, 20226 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
Jul 31, 20225 min read
DeFI is an accident waiting to happen
But don’t blame ‘bad actors’ — accidents are a failure of the system Is DeFi a house of cards? As I write, the Celsius Network, which is...
Charley Johnson
Jul 3, 20226 min read
Is pseudonymity the answer?
It depends on who is asking the question, and their societal position. On February 4, BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos published a story...
Charley Johnson
Jun 5, 20225 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
May 1, 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
Apr 4, 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
Mar 6, 20226 min read
🤷 What’s the deal with Decentralized Autonomous Organizations?
🤿 And now for a sociological deep-dive into a topic that you didn’t know you needed to understand: Decentralized Autonomous...
Charley Johnson
Feb 6, 20228 min read
Let's imagine an alternative metaverse...
Society's entanglement with technology has brought forth unprecedented harms — do we really want to risk augmenting these in a metaverse?...
Charley Johnson
Jan 2, 202210 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
Dec 5, 20219 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...
Charley Johnson
Nov 6, 20217 min read
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