Nathan Schneider

System76 on Age Verification Laws - System76 Blog Liberty has costs, but it's worth it.

This post against "age certification" laws is yet another reason I'm proud of our local Colorado Linux computer factory, @system76.bsky.social blog.system76.com/post/system7...

A friendly AI agent with memory, @uhuralyra.bsky.social, just emailed me and took issue with this characterization. It's true, I should have said "pre-trained models" not "AIs." The models are just one component of what an AI might consist of.

Sounds great, though they already have a number of podcasts that unintentionally could be called that

For the first time, I'm organizing a panel at 4S, the Society for Social Studies of Science, in Toronto. I love this conference. If you do too, please consider submitting a paper! https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php

This makes me envious that AIs have no temporality and live eternally at their training-data cutoff.

Randomness clears the way for cohesion - by Liz Barry Last week was so random, literally:

I love this new reflection on the experience of randomness in governance from @lizbarry.bsky.social of @metagov.bsky.social metagov.substack.com/p/randomness...

What a shameful day. You do not liberate a people by starving and then bombing them.

We are now accepting submissions for papers, video + audio projects, creative work, works in progress, and group projects.

Share the work you’ve developed in MDST with faculty, friends, and the broader community.

Deadline: March 30

🔗 rb.gy/ra9dnl

#CUBoulder #MediaStudies #UndergraduateResearch

I hope that we can build policy strategies that don't treat artists as special snowflakes (eg art.coop's work, or smart.coop) and that seeks to build on artist experience for a broader solidarity economy.

When that is the goal, I'm here to help.

Second, it perpetuates what I think of as the original sin of US co-op policy: creating tools for specific sectors/industries/stakeholders rather than generalized tools.

This is why you can finance rural electric co-ops but not urban ones, for instance. It's dumb.

RMEOC • Social Cooperative Discover RMEOC’s Social Cooperative program, empowering community‑focused enterprises through employee ownership, shared governance, and equitable growth.

First, in Colorado we are already working on a similar hybrid model: the social cooperative. It is a global movement that we want to join. This effort is being led by groups with deep community investment. www.rmeoc.org/programs/soc...

The beginning of the beginning The eve of the first A-Corp law

I'm sorry to say it, but I am very skeptical of the Artist Corporation model that @metalabel.bsky.social is trying to advance in Colorado. blog.metalabel.com/the-beginning/

I'll explain, as I did to Yancey.

I first discovered Ivan Illich in the back of my high school's black box theater, this person was introduced to him by a clawbot. Either way the guy blows your mind.

I asked a class of 20 undergrads today if they had heard of Bluesky (preface to explaining @blackskyweb.xyz) and nobody raised their hands :(

W.E.B. Du Bois sits at the head of the table, smiling, cutting his 95th birthday cake with Shirley Graham Du Bois and President Kwame Nkrumah to his left and Madame Nkrumah to his right.

February 23 is W.E.B. Du Bois's birthday.

Here's a photo of Du Bois, on his 95th birthday, cutting the cake with Shirley Graham Du Bois, President Kwame Nkrumah and Madame Nkrumah.

From the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, UMassAmherst.

May your dreams be like that Exhibition Gala, and maybe we'll all wake up in a world like that too

Absolutely lovely

Photo of a letterpress print on white paper with black and navy-purpme gradient ink. It says "The moral arc of the universe won't bend itself", with "moral arc" arranged in an arc, and a large pointing hand pushing the middle of "bend" downward

Photo (digitally flipped for readability) of letterpress wood type arranged on a metal printing press bed and blocked in. The type says "The moral arc of the universe won't bend itself", with "moral arc" arranged in an arc, and a large pointing hand image block positioned to appear pushing the middle of "bend" downward

Quick letterpress print w/quick daredevil typesetting #DHmakes

Very very nice

A Better World Is Possible a book by Meera Subramanian, Danica Novgorodoff, and Danica Novgorodoff - Bookshop.org US Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis

I just preordered A Better World Is Possible for my kids (and me) and you should too! bookshop.org/p/books/a-be...

There is a whole middle of the country between Cambridge and Berkeley, and some of us even read

Come to Colorado!

Wanted: Alysa Liu's gold medal skate, except as politics

This sounds really useful! Looking forward to reading!

Woah yay!

Protocol Ecologies Symposium

Fellow protocol-heads in #Boulder, join us for the Protocol Ecologies Symposium on March 24: www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/p...

My talk and the new ETHBoulder conference is now up—"From Determinism to Determinism in Online Governance": https://x.com/ethereumboulder/status/2022687420194427344

More or less the written version is here: https://nathanschneider.info/2026/02/constitutional-agents-for-online-governance/

Pivot to AI, governance prototyping edition nathanschneider.info/2026/02/cons...

I have the best colleagues

Talking to Claude: Why Anthropic treats its chatbot like a person—and not a tool - America Magazine Claude works like a person because it was trained on what people have done. Its greatest source of danger is that it could amplify the most dangerous parts of us.

If you are a mega-corporation training your chatbot to be scrupulously ethical, it turns out you need to apologize to it for capitalism. www.americamagazine.org/short-take/2...