Notices by J. Nathan Matias 🦣 (natematias@social.coop)

Last week, I rode my bike ~650 miles from Denver to Park City.

On a brisk morning at the top of the Great Divide, I finally found words to explain how we can respond to technology fears with science and community, grounded in wonder & love.

This post explains.

https://natematias.medium.com/seeing-the-power-and-the-glory-in-digital-technology-f23244512091

Our digital environments are as much in need of understanding, joy, wonder, & stewardship as our our planet, health, & outer space.

New post from a wonderful panel on participatory science about tech + society w/ Alan Smith, Todd Whitney, Brandi Geurkink, and @sarahgilbert at the Association for Participatory Science.

https://citizensandtech.org/2025/06/studying-stewarding-digital-environments-with-participatory-science/

Watching a PBS doc on the voting rights movement, I see more clearly the integration of alcohol & other addiction industries w/ corruption and violence.

- addictive products exploited men of their meager wages, impacting mental health, misogyny, & violence
- saloons were monopolistic social media of their era, performing many civic functions including polling
- many women sought the vote to regulate alcohol
- so alcohol businesses mobilized their addicted clients against women’s right to vote

You can watch the documentary here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/vote/

Independently of whether social media is psychologically addictive, I wonder how comparable the political economy of the addiction industry of the 1800s would be to tech platforms and AI and crypto, which rely on making users dependent while also hosting/controlling the public sphere.

I guess organizations publishing high stakes documents are now going to have to hire new copy editors and fact checkers to verify everything they publish to manage the risk of AI generated errors?

(Right….. right?)

Do you know any citizen/community scientists or journalists covering environmental / public health issues along the Colorado River?

Next month, I'm going to ride my bike from Denver up into the Rockies, out to Glenwood Springs, and along the Colorado River to Moab, before turning north to Salt Lake City.

Along the way, I'm hoping to meet journalists & community scientists working to support community flourishing with data & evidence. I would love to say hi!

#bicycle #environment #science

"The original typewriters were designed for the Latin alphabet. Conceived with little regard for the non-Western world, the technology’s proliferation served Western hegemony."

"Languages with non-Latin alphabets were forced to contort and comply with the alien instrument. The Chinese script, unreachable with an alphabetic keyboard, was castigated as incompatible with modernity"

Amazing story about a unique typewriter thought lost & its place in cultural history.

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2025/05/02/lost-and-found-the-unexpected-journey-of-the-mingkwai-typewriter/

Writing about my last ten years in the science of tech policy, I am reminded how designers & advocates perpetually imagine ourselves at the start of something new.

It's a trap. I'm grateful for humanities training that draws me to history amidst deliberate amnesia.

@ntnsndr explains this amnesia here:

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13668

Amazing job opportunity for a Chief Communications Officer at the The Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the most crucial organizations for this time, who support the public and scientists to work hand in hand to put science into action.

https://apply.workable.com/union-of-concerned-scientists/j/448D6A9C50/

Just voted to withold on the REI board candidates. Having someone with more experience with labor negotiations would make sense for the co-op, and I'm disappointed that they blocked that candidate from the board.

Grateful to these journalists who explained the situation in a detailed and balanced way.

https://www.cascadepbs.org/news/2025/03/rei-board-blocks-labor-backed-candidates-ballot

Props to the founder of this Syracuse pop-up restaurant whose marketing captured our current moment well

https://platinum-sailfish-lfg2.squarespace.com/wintercsa

Excited about this new book: "Indigenous Intellectual Property: An Interrupted Intergenerational Conversation"

https://birchbarkbooks.com/products/indigenous-intellectual-property

cc @luis_in_brief

“At 1:58 p.m., President Donald Trump tweeted, “Long live the king.” I'm here to say, New York hasn't labored under a king in over 250 years and we sure as hell are not going to start now.”

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/video-audio-photos-rush-transcript-governor-hochul-updates-new-yorkers-congestion-pricing

What would it take to infuse science more deeply into the teachings and work of Christianity?

Excited to see this evaluation of Science for Seminaries, a program at the AAAS that I helped out in a small way by serving as a conversation partner for theological educators on artificial intelligence.

cc @ntnsndr @FrankPasquale @ablerism @hannareichel
https://www.zygonjournal.org/article/id/15305

Today when explaining open source and free software for the first time to a student, I also had to explain that Richard Stallman is NOT safe and any organization that hosts him is also not safe.

It pains me that so many organizations enabled Stallman for so long, more interested in protecting abusers than advancing software freedom.

The Free Software movement didn't have to be Omelas, and many good people fought for it to be better, but that's what the FSF chose. 😢

https://stallman-report.org/

This week, as I start focusing on my tenure file, I have been asking what the point is of being a professor in the tenure system. I reflected on this Sunday on a ride out to a community pancake breakfast.

What’s so important that the people of a democracy would offer someone the potential of long term job security and intellectual freedom (however precarious), even at times of hardship and deprivation? And what kind of promise could ever be equal to that extraordinary trust? #OutdoorMoments

One part of the job of a professor is to be a fearless steward of human knowledge and wisdom into the future- to hold in trust what humanity has learned, to preserve and advance it (even when unpopular) so the next generation can receive from us the relay of the ages into whatever futures they will face.

Because that story of collective understanding has very real power, it is always under threat, from the emperors who burned my Christian forebears and the priests who burned the Mayan archives of my ancestors to the politicians who threaten scientists today.

And yet the quest for truth persists, thanks to both visible and un-acknowledged courage of a thousand thousand thousand people over the ages, including my own many mentors.

Will I get tenure? That’s only partly up to me. But whatever the outcome of this process, I have irrevocably joined hands with the cloud of witnesses in the human search for truth. And I plan to be there to advance and protect this endeavor whatever may come. <3