Blaise Alleyne

313 posts
A technologist, musician, writer, speaker, and activist based in Toronto.

Daily Catechesis for Catholic Kids: A pedagogy of desire in the domestic church

Last week, while watching WandaVision (no spoilers here), there was a scene in which one of the characters was describing another in a very reductionist way. I paused the show, and asked my kids abruptly, “What would JPII say?” My seven-year-old daughter responded, “That this is bad” (and the look […]

Network Nodes by Daniel Aleksandersen CC BY

Defending Against Deplatforming: The Three P’s of Protecting Free Speech Online

In Part 1 in this series, I explained why there are no easy answers to social media censorship. The problem is not a “Big Tech” conspiracy to silence particular voices. The problem is that too much of our public discourse is mediated by private platforms — centralized, proprietary, walled gardens. […]

Ralph Breaks the Internet: Social Media District

No easy answers to social media censorship

There are no easy answers to speech, censorship and internet freedoms given the current state of the internet. Some solutions are better than others, but there’s no perfect answer. If someone suggests there’s a simple answer, they’re probably wrong. As Harvard internet law professor Jonathan Zittrain explained in June: The […]

White House January 6

Reverse engineering the intellectual anti-patterns of conspiracy thinking

Refuting conspiracy theory arguments is exhausting. It’s like battling an army of orcs or white walkers. It’s not very hard to take down any given individual, but they just keep coming. It’s a pattern of overwhelming, and these arguments are almost always smokescreens for the true beliefs — and the […]