If you are new to this place, treat this preface as an entry point—a chance for us to get to know each other a little better. Like gearing up before a deep dive. Take a breath.

This interview was originally published in EFF’s Speaking Freely series. For me, putting it back on the Lezismore main site is not a “Hey! We got interviewed by EFF! 🤩” trophy-post narrative.

A more accurate way to put it would be this: this is an attempt to reconnect a conversation that was already made public in another linguistic and institutional setting back to the site of its actual emergence.

Because what is truly valuable about this conversation is not simply which organization published it, but the fact that many of the issues it addresses did not originally emerge from policy rooms or academic terminology.

Many of the issues now categorized under terms like “platform governance,” “digital rights,” “privacy design,” “age verification,” and “anonymity risk”—issues that now come with polished definitions—had already long existed inside marginal communities.

Back then, they did not come wrapped in such complete terminology, nor were they often situated within international policy discourse.

More often, they came crashing down in a concrete, chaotic, and viscerally bloody way: Do you leave data behind? How do you assess risk? How do you sustain trust without mandatory identity verification? How do you carry platform liability when having fewer resources does not actually reduce the burden?

None of these community governance decisions are abstractions, slogans, or armchair theory. They are more like a constant weight pressing on your back, a blade held against the side of your neck. This unglamorous, painfully real social terrain means no decision will ever be perfect. Someone always gets hurt.

The person in charge has to decide who gets hurt. And how.
There is no way out. No redemption. No comforting resolution.
Only tradeoffs.

Looking back, many of my convictions, practices, and judgments about governance, technology, and community were never just situational reactions, personal preferences, or instinctive slogans about “tech justice.” They are rooted in a deeper history, one closely tied to the internet environment I grew up inside.

I belong to a generation that actually lived through a time when possibilities existed beyond the default interface: a generation that knew the internet did not have to look only like this, and that platforms did not have to become today’s scaled, homogenized, overdetermined forms. Only if you truly lived through that kind of digital environment do you retain an almost bodily sensitivity to the default setting.

Because I really did live in that air.
I lived through the era of rewinding cassette tapes with a pencil and DVD players—an era that still preserved the innocence, commitment, immersion, and joy of doing things by hand. Then, in my teens and twenties, I entered the earliest, most primordial version of what might now be called the metaverse: blogs flourished, linked to one another, and people could slowly build their own digital corners by hand, with all the pleasure and breakdowns that came with that. I was born into a world before the tech giants fully took over, and I physically knew what it meant to feel, deep in the blood and bone, that beyond the “default interface,” things could be otherwise—more than this. That reflex became part of how I move through the world. For that, I feel both grateful and profoundly alone.

Then came the 2010s: a period when platform liability, legal regulation, and tech giants had not yet fully locked into the mutually reinforcing machinery they have today, each competing to become larger and more dominant. In that window, many marginal, experimental, excessive social movements could still rapidly materialize on major platforms—even if they were quickly banned, the scale of their impact had already been proven.

Lezismore was born in precisely that stage—forced into the reality of independent site-building through repeated account deletions and bans by the tech giants.

Then came the 2020s: pandemic acceleration, remote life, AI tools everywhere. Efficiency and convenience increased exponentially. The turnover cycle for tools and interfaces collapsed from ten years, or several months, into a matter of weeks before everything could vanish and become unrecognizable.

These changes have brought many real advantages. I am not simply nostalgic, nor am I refusing to understand new technology. Precisely because I continue to track new developments, tools, and technical shifts, I can feel even more clearly that some possibilities are disappearing very quickly—and that this disappearance often happens in silence. It is an almost irreversible process.

Human conversation, too, is becoming more fragmented, more flattened—compressed and diluted into a “data format” that can be quickly processed, consumed, and forgotten.

Data formats are incredibly convenient. As a former AI PM, I think I’m qualified to say that.
But if “data format” becomes the only, best, or highest-priority way for human beings to define themselves, connect to one another, and build society, that would be a catastrophe.

And that catastrophe is already underway.

Even so, I still want to leave traces behind—to make “possibility” something others may still be able to discover and follow. And in doing so, to continue refusing the defaults imposed by the attention economy.

So, for me, putting this piece back on the Lezismore main site is simply a way to leave certain traces behind: traces that show how, outside mainstream platforms and beyond default interfaces, there were people trying to think differently about anonymity, trust, desire, risk, and coexistence.
It is also a way to make it possible for those who come later to discover that platforms and communities could have grown otherwise—and that this possibility is not theoretical abstraction or intuition-driven fantasy, but living evidence sustained across more than a decade.

That is why I am putting this piece back onto the Lezismore main site—the place “almost nobody reads.”
And why I am not actively promoting it on any mainstream platform or social account.

Will this piece be noticed? Will it have impact? Or will it simply remain here, quietly? I do not know, and I do not care very much about the click count.
Let’s see.

Thank you for reading this far. In some sense, you have also become part of this meaningful journey.
At least, it is meaningful to me.