I figured “some links & tunes” would be a better title for this post than the traditional, plain “some links” – and yes, a corpus of two posts is a “tradition.” It follows, as you may have guessed, that I have been listening to an exceptional amount of music lately, and that I would like to record that unimportant fact here, for posterity and all.

• This research explores the role of neighborhood associations in local governance as digital technologies reshape civic participation.
• This idea for a “minimum viable museum” is pretty neat.
• This project, also pretty neat, hijacks Google Maps to create a “virtual traffic jam” by wheeling a bunch of second-hand smartphones around a city on a children’s toy wagon.
• This article takes a look at the 1968 presentation by Doug Engelbart of the “oN-Line System”, the first hypertext system, and Englebart’s vision for computing more generally.
• To my taste, these records have stood out recently: New Energy by Four Tet, Geogaddi by Boards of Canada, Our Love by Caribou, We’re New Here by Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx, and There is Love in You by Four Tet.
• This green paper presents a theoretical basis and technical sketch for a pluralistic social network. Really thought-provoking.
• This new organisation, CIP, presents a compelling vision for the governance of transformative technologies.
• This review of Ruthanna Emrys’ A Half-Built Garden made me incredibly excited to read it.
• I finally got around to reading this paper by Herbert Simon, “The Architecture of Complexity.” It is dense and difficult, at least for me, and I will certainly have to revisit it a few more times to fully wrap my head around it, but I think it’s worth the effort.
• This article argues that we should “return to a world of protocols dominating the internet, rather than platforms” and does so quite convincingly. The Usenet-Reddit comparision was illuminating.
• This article provided much-needed nuance to my understanding of the concept of “interoperability” and the role it plays in the current debate over the future of the internet.