Anil Dash

[cw: violence] I just wanted to capture this story here once so I don't have to tell it to anyone again. Because, while I am okay now, it is unpleasant to keep having to repeat the story to new people over and over. The short version is, I was violently

Just to document a conversation that I've had a number of times in the last year, its important to understand the implications (and indeed, the motivations) of much of current public health policy. Now that more than a decade has passed since the ratification of Obamacare, the cultural memory of

Somehow, improbably, I am again referenced in a crossword puzzle, this time it was the Sunday Boston Globe from back on April 17th. This time, I have Joon Pahk to thank! Who knew there were so many small fringe benefits to having a four-letter name with two non-consecutive vowels? I'd

Listen, I'm not the one making this assertion. It's Vulture's daily 10x10 crossword puzzle for May 17th, entitled "The Sexual Tension Puzzle", in which I am, apparently, a clue. (Sorry to spoil the answer to 25 Across!) Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself. Thanks so much to Malaika

The Webby Awards have recognized Kevin McCoy and I with their Lifetime Achievement Award this year, for "developing a blockchain powered way for artists to own and monetize digital work, which laid the groundwork for what would be known as Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)". I have a lot of complex feelings

If a company is debating whether a user's account should be suspended, they've already failed to build a modern platform that follows best practices. Why are today's billionaires competing for control of tech that’s broken by design? It’s unusual to see the most powerful people in tech all

Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again. If you had to pick the unexpected breakout consumer tech hit of 2022, you could

Security reports from other sites are welcome. Why aren’t safety reports? One of the most fundamental triumphs of the last few decades of open source culture is the open sharing of bugs and how to fix them. There are mature, effective systems for responsibly reporting things like security issues,

Here’s how you do it. Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to this insistence on being solely a “neutral” tech company in every aspect of decision-making, policy, hiring and operations, except for your

You can't win unless you know what you're fighting for.Many of the most important and valuable milestones of progress in society have been achieved through compromise and incrementalism. It's no surprise that idea of negotiating a brokered future in collaboration with those who might disagree with your views has

Though he’s one of the most gifted and important artists to have ever created popular music, Stevie’s legacy as a tireless and fearless advocate for justice may he even more powerful, and is too often overlooked. We should heed every word he says. On April 4th, 1968 at

Each year, folks ask me for predictions about what's going to happen in tech in the coming year. Generally, what they're really asking is what I hope/expect is going to happen to the five or six biggest companies in the tech industry. That matters, especially in the context of

I've been blogging here for more than 20 years, and the only organizing principle behind what I write here, if anything, is a fascination about how we make culture, and especially how we make culture around, and with, technology. Nothing has exemplified the complexity of that conversation more than my

I've spent a couple weeks using a new 14" Apple MacBook Pro daily (as a replacement for my last machine, which was a similar, but rather terrible, 2016 MacBook Pro) and thought it might be valuable to share a few observations that might help you assess whether it's a useful

The key to protecting people's privacy on the internet isn't in trying to stop users' data from being sent to different services, it's in poisoning the well by having user data be so inconsistent, disconnected, spurious or expensive to collect that today's surveillance infrastructures (often referred to as "ad tech"

One of the biggest sources of miscommunication is people having different styles of communication, or different norms about the right way to express emotion or context even if there's agreement on more straightforward aspects of verbal communication. Things like "ask vs. guess" cultures are one common manifestation of this, and

Recently, a motivated Prince fan created a spreadsheet that attempts to catalog the entirety of Prince's thousands of recordings over the course of his career. Beginning in 1973 as a then-15-year-old Prince taped his first few tracks, and going through (so far) the end of the 80s, it's a remarkable

Every year, for twenty years now, I've written an observance of this day. Sometimes it's for myself, sometimes it's for the small cohort of folks who've checked back in with me on this day every year since then, a group which has shrunk a bit over the years. But this

Amongst the many new publications that's popped up in the current newsletter boom, I've been enjoying Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci's "Embedded". One of the biggest reasons why is the recurring feature "My Internet", which details the way one person uses all the common aspects of the internet that we

Here are some before-and-afters from a set of photos my parents took on a visit to Manhattan in 1985. I tried to replicate the angles as best I could in the modern photos. MacDougal StreetSixth Avenue

The Konami Code is one of the longest-running inside references amongst both gamers and coders, acting as something of a shibboleth for a certain kind of nerd. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, didn't care about most Konami games,

After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their account. The social and technical dynamics around Twitter verification remain as fraught and fascinating as they were in the earliest days of the service,

Anytime a big new market pops up, people rush in to stake their claims and make their fortunes. Our culture loves creation myths, especially in technology. Fables about lone geniuses are ubiquitous in the tech industry, with their fundamental falsity doing nothing to undermine their utility for most people in

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games ever made, and one of the breakout hits of the Nintendo Switch platform, which is on its way to becoming one of the 10 most popular video game consoles of all time. But now, years after