Disclosures

I’m posting these disclosures regarding the things that I think readers of this site ought to know about my principal biases and related notes that may provide useful context.

• This is a personal website to share my ideas over time. No one pays me to publish this website, nor will I agree to write anything here for payment.

• I devote most of my professional time to my work as president of the MacArthur Foundation. If you are interested in my academic biases, please refer 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 moved from there 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, 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 with this site, may have edited categories, tags, formatting, code, and / or text to make certain old entries more readable over time, never intending to change the meaning of historical text. In particular, 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, or random blog posts from the distant past eliminated — they were ephemera. You get the point: don’t take anything here as Gospel. But hopefully it is a fairly reliable record over time of contemporaneous thoughts and commentary.

• 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 holdings in other private and public companies — nowhere near the “5% beneficial owners of a publicly traded security” threshold that the SEC sets forth. The vast majority of what I have financially is invested 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.)