1
The Website Obesity Crisis
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [ 53 minute video ].
Maciej Cegłowski
We are entering an epoch where it may become easy for small pieces of self-replicating code to permanently infest Internet-connected devices in a way that is hard to undo. Such a world would be annoying to live in and we should take steps to forestall it.
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Visit idlewords.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jan 2010 – Mar 2026
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2
Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014)
This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC.
3
Artemis II is not safe to fly
On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
4
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2016, at Web Camp Zagreb [ video ] (45 mins)
5
Why Not Mars
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
6
What Happens Next Will Amaze You
This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
7
A Walk in Hong Kong
My mom fainted the first time she set foot in an American supermarket. It was 1981 and we were freshly arrived in America, and some combination of the culture shock and smell and sensory overload of a Safeway was too much for her, not normally a fainting woman.
8
The Lunacy of Artemis
Introduction A Note on Apollo I. The Rocket II. The Capsule III. The Orbit IV. Gateway V. The Lander VI. Refueling VII. Conclusion Notes
9
Who Will Command the Robot Armies?
This is the text version of a talk I gave on November 11, 2016, at the Direction conference in Sydney.
10
Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
11
Deep-Fried Data
This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 27, 2016, at the Collections as Data event at the Library of Congress. [ video ] (21 mins)
12
The Advertising Bubble
A few days ago VentureBeat published an article called The 7 martech buying trends shaping sales & marketing strategies in 2016 , a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity.
13
Why Arabic is Terrific
I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute…
14
Anatomy of a Moral Panic
On September 18, the British Channel 4 ran a news segment with the headline, 'Potentially deadly bomb ingredients are ‘frequently bought together’ on Amazon.'
15
What I Learned Trying to Secure Congressional Campaigns
You know how it happens. You try to secure one Congressional campaign, and then another, and pretty soon you can't stop. You'll fly across the country just to brief a Green Party candidate in a district the Republicans carried by 60 points. You want more, more, always looking for that next fix.
16
The Internet With A Human Face
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany.
17
Senate Testimony on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy
Idle Words > Talks > Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy (Senate hearing)
18
Gluten Free Antarctica
Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast.
19
Social Media Needs a Travel Mode
News reports tell us that Customs and Border Patrol has become more aggressive about checking social media accounts at the border. In doing this, the United States joins a growing list of countries that recognized the value of these accounts, and the unique data mining opportunity that a border crossing provides.
20
Ta'izz
I wake up to a gorgeous morning in Ibb. This time I’ve slept through the morning call to prayer and the sun is well up in the sky. Out the window there’s a view of a regular city against a backdrop of green mountains, with some construction equipment in the near foreground, and it takes my groggy mind a minute to…
21
Sana'a
The scariest thing I'll see in Yemen looms up at me before the plane has even landed. I have dozed my way from Abu Dhabi across most of the Arabian Penninsula, including the Empty Quarter, that vast uninhabitable sandbox in the interior were they didn't even bother to put in borders until fifteen years ago. That just…
22
The New Wilderness
The need to regulate online privacy is a truth so universally acknowledged that even Facebook and Google have joined the chorus of voices crying for change.
23
Scott and Scurvy: How the cure for scurvy was lost
Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:
24
The Moral Economy of Tech
This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy (whose remarks are here ), Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian .
25
Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003)
When John Titor first showed up on IRC chat in October of 2000, he was enjoying a neat kind of double billing - as his 38-year-old self sat downstairs in the kitchen, typing away, a two-year-old version of himself lay sound asleep upstairs in bed. The elder Titor had been sent back in time by the U.S. Army, which…
26
The Siege of Carrie Lam
On September 26, 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam held her first listening session after seventeen weeks of protest. Her government, which had spent the summer nearly incommunicado, had settled on these encounters as a way to heal social divisions and identify the mysterious goals of a movement whose five…
27
Shuffleboard at McMurdo
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
28
Green Arabia
It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB.
29
The Shape of a Mars Mission
“From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go…
30
Don't Trust Google (2002)
Many people have been writing about Google this week - either in response to the Newsweek cover story , or to the recent Wired article about Google’s growing pains, and its happy motto: “Don’t be evil”.