Lot has been said about how the web evolved to become a kind of monstrous entity. If you are on Gemini, you probably see what I’m talking about. The mail protocol has followed a similar evolution but it’s a bit more subtle and has often been summarised as « too much email. ». I’m currently thinking deeply […]
The computer built to last 50 years
How to create the long-lasting computer that will save your attention, your wallet, your creativity, your soul and the planet. Killing monopolies will only be a byproduct. Each time I look at my Hermes Rocket typewriter (on the left in the picture), I’m astonished by the fact that the thing looks pretty modern and, after […]
The Story Behind an Open Source Software Un-Maintenance
How a broken screen kicked me out of developing an Open Source software and how the community revived it 6 years later When I discovered the FLOSS world, at the dawn of this century, I thought developers were superheroes. Sort of semi-gods that achieved everything I wanted to do with my life like having their face […]
Despair and Hope: From the Stupidity of Academic Bureaucracy to the Poetry of Bitcoin
This is not a structured essay. By letting ideas flow, I want you to share my pain and enlightenment, to travel from the stupid administrative inefficiency of our time to Bitcoin, from the fake marketed revolutions to the real social innovation which is happening right in front of us and might be our only hope to […]
How I learn to stop worrying and love the decentralized future
Even if everybody is not realizing it consciously, our world is becoming incredibly more virtual, borderless and decentralized. Fighting the trend may only make the transition more violent. We may as well embrace it fully and ditch our old paradigms to prepare for a new kind of society. How we built the virtual world Virtual […]
An “Open Pay Wall”, has Medium lost its mind?
If there’s one thing we have learned in the past decade, it’s that paywalls don’t work and that they are a threat to the openness of the Internet. Writing “open” on it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a wall. By building such walls, Medium will either kill itself or become a threat to the […]
Sunrise, the calendar of the future
Version en français. In February 2015, Pierre Valade, co-fondator of the Sunrise calendar app, offered me to collaborate on a short fiction exploring the future impact of calendars in our lives. Sunrise was later bought by Microsoft and Sunrise was shutdown this September 1st, 2016. Pierre agreed to let me publish this text as a […]
Dreaming of subscript.io
I find myself dealing with more and more subscriptions to web services. This year, I had a peak at 16 subscriptions running at the same time. When I subscribe to a service, I always do it for a full year. That’s usually way cheaper than a monthly subscription and, also, it allows me to see […]
Dear 2002’s self,
You just saw a space probe called Rosetta in the ESTEC facility from the ESA. You couldn’t touch it because there was a glass wall and the probe was in a white room. But it was very cool anyway. You are currently pinning the official Rosetta poster on your student’s room door. What you don’t […]
Flattr: Decentralized Payments Paving A Roadless Web
Peter Sunde, recently arrested for having been the spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, is lesser known for co-creating Flattr. The fact that Flattr is often forgotten by the media is a clear illustration about how the society doesn’t protect the artists or the citizens. It is now obvious that the copyright establishment fights only to […]