Maria Bustillos

It's not the friendliest interface yet, but the chance to connect on your own terms is real.

a long-overdue reckoning

Some months back the novelist and media activist Cory Doctorow, whom I generally believe to be the bee’s knees, wrote “The Inevitability of Trusted Third Parties,” with the subhead, “The search for a crypto use case continues.” I agree with the headline: yes, trusted third parties are inevitable. Sure! The subhead, on the other hand, […]

on transnational media and the war in Ukraine

gazing into the soul of the Republican Party's deepening admiration for the Russian dictator

the "science of happiness"??

The last time there was a world-altering tech revolution, Nobel prizewinning economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman got it wildly, comically wrong. In 1998, he famously predicted that by 2005 it would be clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy would be trivial. The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw […]

a wrangle on the topic of Controlled Digital Lending

Moxie Marlinspike is the founder of the encrypted messaging app Signal, and his recent post criticizing web3 is insightful and great, even though it centers largely on this Banksyesque prank he played at the NFT marketplace OpenSea, where he sold a digital artwork that displays as a poop emoji when viewed in a crypto wallet […]

Smart people wouldn’t yell in circumstances like those. They’d lay down their lives to persuade.

fill out the grid

One year ago, the Brick House Cooperative began publishing on a website built with the proceeds of a successful Kickstarter. We are beyond proud of the Brick House’s many achievements over the course of our inaugural year, despite the many challenges of the pandemic. And 2022 is shaping up to be a beautiful one, with […]

Web3 replaces secretive, top-down platforms, like Facebook and Google, with transparent, shared-ownership networks powered by blockchain.