Welcome to Untangled 🧵

👋 Hi, I'm Charley Johnson

I’m thrilled to welcome you to Untangled, an acclaimed newsletter and podcast about our sociotechnical world, and how to change it. New sociotechnical futures might seem out of our reach. Systems might feel entrenched. Technology’s path might feel inevitable. But as Marshall McLuhan reminds us, “There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” My job is to help you turn these seemingly inevitable futures into concrete mindset shifts and practical strategies.

Technologies and social systems are entangled in complex, unpredictable, ways. But your thinking should be clear, your actions should be simple, and your strategies — as product managers, researchers, grantmakers, civil society leaders, policymakers, and anyone concerned with the direction technology is headed — should map to more just and equitable sociotechnical futures. By the way, ‘sociotechnical' is just a fancy word that means people, technology, and power are entangled, and can't be analyzed separately. I help you disentangle and change these systems through the following offerings:

• ✍️  Newsletter & Podcast: I write evergreen essays and host expert conversations (~4 per month)

• 🎤 Live Trainings & Courses: I teach you the key skills required to disentangle sociotechnical systems and change them. (Learn more about my first-course offering here.)

• ⚒️ Practical Tools & Frameworks: I develop practical tools and frameworks that you can use to align your actions with your values and the future you want to create.

• 💫 Executive Coach & Advising: ​I help mission-driven leaders like you facilitate change -- in yourself, your organization, and the system you work within -- and live more impactful and freer lives. (Limited spots available. Sign up here.)

💗 Untangled is an incredible community of 7.8K tech & society leaders from:

👉 This is a personal project, all thoughts and opinions are my own and don’t reflect the institutional positions of Data & Society.

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Who, me?

Oh hi, I’m Charley 👋

I get a kick out of untangling sociotechnical systems. I founded Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about our sociotechnical world, and how to change it. I co-founded The Facilitation Leadership Lab, which helps leaders facilitate organizational change. I coach and advise mission-driven CEOs, Executive Directors, and senior leaders to live more impactful and freer lives. I lead the Public Technology Leadership Collaborative at Data & Society, a peer-learning collective of scholars, researchers, and government leaders working to ensure data and technology serve the public interest. And I'm a Non-Resident Fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.  

Before all that, I led the Disinformation Action Lab at Data & Society, which won the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public inaugural Award for Excellence for its multi-stakeholder work on the 2020 Census. Once upon a time, I co-founded and ultimately led the Center for Digital Development at the U.S. Agency for International Development. I helped grow the team from 2 to 55, developed our strategy, and designed multi-stakeholder alliances like the Digital Impact Alliance.

I’m a graduate of the University of Washington (Go Huskies!) and the Harvard Kennedy School, and sometimes I teach at George Washington University. I’m a Seattleite by disposition living in Los Angeles, an obnoxiously proud uncle, and a new pug dad.

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With your free trial, I’d start by checking out the special issues (my personal favorites are The Primer and Technically Social) and then dig into the archives. I’m obviously biased, but I think there is a lot (!) of value in the archives. Here are a few pieces to start with, organized by technology:

Artificial Intelligence

• AI isn’t ‘hallucinating.’ We are. Why 'hallucination' is a problematic term (hint - it's not just because it anthropomorphizes the technology!) and what to do about it.

• ‘AI Alignment’ isn’t a problem — it’s a myth. Come with me on a journey through ordered and unordered systems

• Will ChatGPT replace search? How the limits of chatbots can point us toward a better search system.

Social Media

• Synthetic social media - Internet users, brace for the emergence of E-Swift.

• How can we govern speech fairly on anti-democratic platforms? Maybe citizen assemblies are a start!

• Bigger isn’t better; it’s harmful. Why ‘scale thinking’ is a big problem, and what to do about it.

Crypto

• In crypto, everything is a ponzi…until sometimes, it’s not.

• What connects crypto and ‘Love is Blind’? The sociology of speculation and how it is shaping crypto communities and modern life.

• Crypto is not decentralized. Because technical decentralization does not decentralize power — it only hides it.

🙏 Let’s be a community, pls & ty!

I want Untangled to be a lovely li’l learning community.

• Got ideas for how to improve Untangled or a topic I should write about? Tell me.

• Think an essay misses the mark? Or maybe you have a different perspective? Let’s chat.

• Curious about how it's all going? You know what to do.

Just reply to one of my emails or ping me directly at charley.c.johnson@gmail.com.

Don’t be shy, okay?

Charley