Members and Supporters help the weekly newsletter thrive while remaining free for everyone. To get monthly single-topic Dispatches, access the Discord server, and make quarterly projects possible, please consider supporting these explorations in tech, changes, and futures.
Member Become a member for $50 USD to support the weekly newsletter and all my writing and projects.
Supporter Join as supporter for $100 USD if you find the newsletter useful professionally, or especially valuable for you.
If you prefer, there’s also a monthly member option.
What you get
- Access to the members only Discord server, where you can participate in discussions around the same variety of topics as in the newsletter.
- Members’ Dispatches. Only sent to members, they are available to everyone on this site, in alignment with the principle of the unlocked commons, and participating in a more open web.
- Support the quarterly projects.
- The Learning Collection booklet.
- Five issues of Sentiers at Work (now retired, a business focused publication available as PDFs).
Recent Articles & Dispatches
- Unease, writing, and thinking — Feb 05
- Ambiance & Attention — Jan 11
- Using Twitter at a distance — May 18
- Ceci n’est pas un humble brag — May 11
- Some scanning principles — May 02
Past projects
Archive to library
The first member supported project was the transformation of the simple newsletter archive into something I call a ‘Library.’ Every issue has been deconstructed into ‘Notes,’ tagged, and some are getting ‘backlinked’ like in a digital garden. You should check it out, and have a look at some of the new nodes to connect notes together, like obfuscation or Just Enough (notice the “Notes mentioning this note”).
When you read an issue online you see a normal archive page which looks very much like the email, but each featured article is clickable to see the full note and tags, which I’ll be able to remix in other combinations and backlink as needed. That way you can also link, share, or bookmark a specific commentary you liked. The project was also supported by Grant for the Web and the library integrates Web monitization with Coil.
Getting Tech Right
The second project was to participate in The Getting Tech Right podcast with Peter Bihr. The podcast is a series of interviews exploring issues around how technology shapes our society and how to think about these issues better.
It is the first phrase in a book project to “distill in the most accessible way what I’ve learned from the last decade or so of working with designers, developers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, foundations and others and give some guidance as to how to approach responsible tech.”
Schedule
The free Sentiers goes out weekly, except for a couple of weeks off around the holidays, and three weeks off in the summer. Member Dispatches will be going out once a month initially.
Payments / security
Payments and access are managed by Memberful, which is now a Patreon company. They’ve been around for a while and excellent newsletters and websites like Stratechery, Kottke.org, The New Consumer, and Craig Mod’s Special Projects use the same platform. Credit card payments go through Stripe. I don’t have access to any of your credit card information, other than transaction confirmations.
Emails
Issues of the newsletter are sent using Mailchimp. Google tracking is disabled in my Mailchimp account, although I do use their in-house tracking to get a bit of information concerning open and click rates, which helps me figure out what works.
And of course, if you have questions, comments, or critiques, don’t hesitate to contact me.