Notices by Nathan Schneider (ntnsndr@social.coop)

@cyberlyra @inquiline @rwg @andresmh totally. One of the big realizations in my early years teaching is that students actually had never heard of labor organizing. I had to switch from being appalled to seeing it as a wonderful opportunity to teach:)

Everytime the gov't does something crazy the Times watches the markets, expecting them to agree it is crazy.

But the markets have learned to crave instability. Every disruption is an opportunity. Suffering is an externality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/business/iran-war-markets-stocks-bonds.html

@gert The more infrastructure gets developed on it outside Bluesky, the more decentralized it becomes.

@Gargron It feels the same way from here in the US.

But: It was really wonderful to see my kids excited to watch the launch, and to have something to be proud of in our country that is not attacks on other countries and raids on our neighbors.

At #SocialCoop, we've been having a mighty debate about whether experiment with ATProto infrastructure. For fellow members, I've just created a sense check around a potential direction for a proposal: https://www.loomio.com/d/IF5MGpyU/would-social-coop-want-to-experiment-with-running-a-bluesky-pds-/36

It kills me that an xopp file with a handwritten version of an essay is 900 times the size of a .txt file of the same.

Phew, really depends. Usually it takes a couple hours of an evening for me, and then I try to check my biases the next morning.

Drones, blockchains, and climate: The nation-state is not that old, and probably not long for this world.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-shakeup-is-coming-for-the-nation-state

@fpianz thanks! What about paywalled journals?

Academics: what is your annual quota for peer reviewing papers, and what proportion of invitations do you reject?

I honestly have no idea what is normal or expected.

Our Center for Media, Religion, and Culture's next conference is on the radical arts of gathering. Join us—along with Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and more speakers TBA.

The call for abstracts is out, due May 1: https://www.colorado.edu/cmrc/2026/03/26/why-we-come-together-media-religion-and-community

I'm thrilled to share that my lab's podcast, Looks Like New, just hosted the brilliant Timnit Gebru on the possibilities of community-serving AI—listen and subscribe here: https://lookslikenew.net/podcast/can-ai-be-rebuilt-to-serve-communities/

https://hci.social/@bkeegan/116295809905217444

Great stuff from @loriemerson on our fight against CU's OpenAI deal: https://www.axios.com/local/boulder/2026/03/23/cu-boulder-professors-concerns-openai-chatgpt-deal

Please share this primer on open protocols with your favorite government officials. https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/a-government-guide-to-open-protocols

My latest piece in America Magazine lays bare the extent to which US government policy seems to be going in outright opposition to decades of Catholic teaching—particularly on climate, war, and civil discourse. Catholics, we cannot participate in this: https://www.americamagazine.org/short-take/2026/03/19/government-trump-america-catholic-church/

Just read. This is great, @LaurensHof!

In my forthcoming protocol book, I explicitly define protocols as *not meaning*, which is consistent with the pattern you identify. Meaning begins where protocols end.

This also extends the notion of power vacuums that I develop a bit in ch. 1 of Governable Spaces. And I think in ch. 4 I make clear that the fediverse does not address these but replicates implicit feudalism (which is not quite a vacuum but a specific theory of governance embedded in software like Mastodon).

Thank you for further making the case for why we need real governance design for a truly decentralized social.

I think more general

Good point

And stay tuned for my next book, all about protocols!