Today's my birthday! I've got five simple requests, based on what I've learned over the last... 50 years. I hope you'll take a moment to give them a look. And thanks to everybody who's taken a moment read my writing over the years.
Five for 50 - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
One of the biggest cultural issues we have is that no major media or journalistic institutions have been reinforcing norms of what things *should* look like. That corruption isn’t normal, that cronyism isn’t normal, that lies and scandals should be punished, that incompetence is disqualifying. They’ve simply stopped pointing out that there are any standards at are, or that there used to be a bar of any sort. And now an entire generation doesn’t know this concept at all.
There could not be a more opportune time to make a competitor to GitHub, especially one grounded in community and accountability. Git was not meant to be centralized; “pull requests” are not actually an open standard and throwing code over the wall at others is not actually social coding.
This Zohran Mamdani video is absolutely INCREDIBLE. The numbers he cites, the strategy and results they produced — it’s the future. When have you heard *any* campaign talk about this, ever? It is the blueprint.
Techdirt
Let’s Be Clear: The Rioting In LA Is By The Cops, Not The Protestors
I already wrote about the GOP’s bloodthirsty desire to use the military on Americans. They manufactured a nonsense “crisis” by over-aggressiv...
It’s time for something new. So: what do you think I should do next? I want to be of service.
It's Time for Something New - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
There was somebody fussing in my replies to my last link to my blog post about Medium (I don’t see them now; they probably blocked me, but their specific words don’t really matter), and the gist of their message was that they didn’t like that site. On the modern internet, if you have an issue with content written by humans, with no surveillance ads, that doesn’t allow AI scraping or AI slop content, with a business model that makes money… I don’t know how to help you. Honestly.
The entire modern internet has been built on platforms that don’t believe in asking for consent. What if we started demanding a culture of consent online? https://www.anildash.com//2025/05/27/2025-05-27-internet-of-consent/
What lessons can we learn about the fact that MCP got more adoption as a quasi-open standard in a few months than the entire fediverse stack has in nearly a decade? (Or two, depending on how you count.) Obviously, they’re in different domains, but there are some parallels. How might other open efforts piggyback on hype cycles like AI to bootstrap open efforts we could use to re-open the social web? Who’s integrating MCP interfaces into the ActivityPub stack?
I have a lot of thoughts about this.
The Pragmatic Engineer
Stack overflow is almost dead
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.