Disclosures

I’m posting this disclosure to set forth the things that I think readers of this site ought to know about some of my biases. No one pays me to write this blog, nor will I agree to blog anything here for payment.

Most of my time and focus is geared toward my work as president of the MacArthur Foundation. To the extent that you are interested in my academic biases, I would point you to the elements of the Berkman Klein Center’s mission. (I was previously executive director of the Berkman Center and a faculty director.) I strive to be an objective researcher and teacher, but of course I adopt certain normative viewpoints on the issues that I write about here.

I also have “outside activities” beyond my MacArthur Foundation-related obligations. For instance, from time to time, a book or article that I write may generate royalties.

I believe in open-access publication and wide dissemination of scholarly work where possible. Some of my books have resulted in serialized articles or related publications, so ideas or text that I have written for one project may appear in another published work. I do this not to “double-count” publications or confuse the reader, but rather to ensure that ideas reach their broadest possible audience–which I take to be the job of the scholar, at least in part. I flag this approach here and, where appropriate, inline.

Please consider this website a “best efforts” enterprise. It began in the early 2000s as a personal blog at the then-Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. It then moved over to Andover when I became Head of School in 2012. I converted it to a standalone WordPress site when I moved to the MacArthur Foundation in 2019. As a result, the content on the blog has been ported twice and so forth, meaning that a post from, say, 2003, may look a little different twenty years and two formats later, in 2023. Here and there, I or those helping me may have edited categories, tags, formatting, code, and tidbits of texts to make certain old entries more readable over time, never intending to change the meaning of historical text. For instance, a lot of links have broken over time so they have been edited or eliminated, or bits of text added to provide context that may have been clear from the older link. You get the point — don’t take anything here as Gospel.

I participate from time to time in non-profit organizations and/or companies as a board member, adviser, and/or investor. I also have a modest number of not-very-valuable stock holdings in other private and public technology companies — nowhere near the “5% beneficial owners of a publicly traded security” threshold that the SEC sets forth — mostly through index funds held in retirement accounts and the like. I can’t imagine any of that would affect what I write here, but I suppose you never know.

I promise not (knowingly) to promote any given product or service on this site, whether or not I have any interest in such products or services–though I do link to my own books. If ever I think that I ought to disclose a specific conflict, I will do so inline within a given blog entry, article, or other writing, in the standard academic disclosures convention.  As David Weinberger puts it in his fine disclosure on his own site (which is admittedly a model for this one): “All I can promise is that I will be honest with you and never write something I don’t believe in because someone is paying me as part of a relationship you don’t know about. Put differently: All I’ll hide are the irrelevancies.” If I ever have anything of a close call, I’ll look to his principle as a guiding light. When in doubt, I’ll err on the side of disclosing more, not less.

(Up-to-date as of 2026.)