The language of “trust” is carrying too much regulatory weight.
Personal publicationWashington, DC → The web
Technology is never only technical.
AnnaKhotsanyan
Notes on how the internet becomes culture, infrastructure, and public life.
Long-form essays, current signals, and curious detours through digital regulation, responsible innovation, research, and the futures we make online.
Enter this edition
Now indexing: digital sovereignty · public interest technology · the open web · online memory · creative labour · platform power ·
01 / The daily desk
What is moving through the web?
A working overview of the questions, disputes, and ideas worth opening in another tab. This edition is a sample of Anna’s future editorial desk.
Personal websites are returning as small acts of digital autonomy.
A new question for AI evaluation: useful to whom, and on whose terms?
Interoperability is becoming a cultural argument, not only a technical one.
02 / Writing archive
Dispatches from the present
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001 / Regulation
The internet is becoming infrastructure. Our language has not caught up.
What changes when platforms stop being products we choose and become environments we inhabit? A closer look at the language, duties, and public expectations that follow.
Field note · 08 min
002 / AI & society
Responsible AI needs more than a compliance vocabulary
A humanities-led reading of who gets to define harm, progress, and acceptable risk—and why responsible systems require more than standards, checklists, and technical assurance.
Essay · 12 min
003 / Internet culture
Whatever happened to surfing the web?
Following the shift from wandering between handmade websites to being delivered a feed, and asking what curiosity, chance encounters, and digital independence lost along the way.
Archive · 06 min
004 / Research
A working index of grants for public-interest technology
An evolving collection of calls, fellowships, and research programmes supporting work on digital rights, civic infrastructure, accountable technology, and the public interest.
Living index · 09 entries
005 / Regulation
Who speaks for the user in a room full of institutions?
Notes on participation, expertise, and the people policy consultations leave outside—especially when institutional processes decide who counts as a credible voice.
Dispatch · 10 min
006 / Internet culture
The interface remembers what the archive forgets
Design choices are historical records too. Reading old interfaces reveals the assumptions, habits, and imagined users that conventional archives too easily leave behind.
Visual note · 05 min
03 / Sound on
Song of the day · 04:37
World Wide Web
A listening prompt for remembering the internet as a handmade place.
04 / Current reads
REPORT / 01Digital Public Infrastructure and Public ValueResearch queue
BOOK / 02A Prehistory of the CloudCurrently reading
PAPER / 03Participation in Platform GovernanceAnnotated
ARCHIVE / 04The vernacular web, revisitedReturn often
I am interested in the space between how technology is imagined and how it is lived.
I write about how society, academia, enterprise, and government create knowledge about technology together—and about the people whose knowledge is too often treated as an afterthought.
This publication is an honest, evolving corner of the web: a place to ask how innovation can uphold healthy competition, value human creativity, and invite conversations that create change, however small.
“The future of the internet is also a question about what kind of culture we want to live in.”Professional profile