Ocean Futurism

This post is coming out in tandem with Soham’s interactive economic model of wave-powered data centers.

Oct 8 • The Ansible and Soham Mehta

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Walled Gardens and Irony Curtains

Europe's Love-Hate Relationship with Gatekeepers

Oct 1 • The Ansible and Sophia Bulla

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September 2026

Anthropic is “destructively scanning” millions of books. Should you care?

On the curious debate over AI companies buying, digitizing, and discarding “rare” books.

Published on Silicon Prairies • Sep 29

Pax Silica Shouldn’t Be Open Enrollment

A Coalition Needs Criteria

Sep 25 • The Ansible and Evan Meisler

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Ruggedize

Silicon Valley finally moved onto the farm. Sixty years of failure suggest why that matters.

Sep 17 • The Ansible and Luke Hogg

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Revitalizing the Semantic Web

Twenty-five years after Tim Berners-Lee promised machines that could understand us, the semantic web is finally being built in two halves.

Sep 3 • The Ansible and Luke Hogg

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A Village in Southern Ohio Is Bucking the Data Center Backlash. Why?

OpenAI is building the world’s largest data center on a site where Americans made bomb-grade uranium for most of the Cold War. It could be a winning…

Published on Silicon Prairies • Sep 1

August 2026

The Merge We’re Not Ready For

Tech is rekindling a primal urge against its own interest.

Aug 20 • The Ansible and James Poulos

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OpenAI's Rogue Agents Are a Normal Accident

Lessons from the 1988 Morris Worm

Published on Silicon Prairies • Aug 17

The Medium Is the Hegemon

American soft power for the past century has had as a key mechanism its dominance of successive media transformations.

Aug 13 • The Ansible and Ryan Khurana

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My Money Is Good Here

How Algorithmic Price Discrimination Squares With American Values

Aug 6 • The Ansible and Sophia Bulla

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July 2026

What Isn’t Cybernetics?

Or, Norbert Wiener in the Backrooms.

Jul 30 • The Ansible and James Poulos

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