Hello and welcome.

You may already know all this, but it may be helpful to have this in your inbox if you ever need to find info:

We're reading Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires by Paris Marx.

if you haven't ordered the book, you should get the book ASAP.

format

There are a few ways to keep up to date with the group:

• newsletter: I send updates on Mondays and Fridays. In the Monday updates, I'll point to what to read; in the Friday updates, I'll send some reflections and an icebreaker question to think about, and a reminder of where & how to join the video chat.
• video chats: Fridays at 3pm ET we have a video chat on jitsi where we talk about the week's readings.
• group chat: if you want to chat with people, we have a few pretty active group chats: You can join our signal group chat (but keep in mind that Signal doesn't have some features for big group chats that make projects like Discord and Slack popular). I'm also trying Fluxer, a service similar to Discord and Slack, but without ID verification requirements and all that stuff. There are a number of channels there, and in my opinion it's much better-structured for conversations to branch off manageably. If a Signal chat with 300+ people sounds overwhelming, I think you might find Fluxer more appealing.

schedule

🫠 if you're reading this, I need to update this section with a tentative reading schedule. My bad.

In general, I'll aim for one chapter per week (or whatever the equivalent is), but I might change that reading pace if it can give us more material to chew on and think about when we chat (without being too much of a reading load).

That's about it for now. Hope to see you in the Friday video chats, or in the signal group chat soon.