Blogs and Independent Analysts
Blogging is a communicable disease. I've had a blog of some kind since I was twelve, but I've been reading blogs for far longer than that.
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At? is an excellent semi-regular read. While I might conceptually despise Ed for being engaged in the PR industry, he has considerable tech expertise and a pretty clear moral compass. His blog focuses on long, detailed, expressive analyses of the material factors behind trends in technology and politics, and he's most recently (2024–2025) taken up an ongoing investigation into the fundamentals of the generative AI industry.
Cory Doctorow is the OG hyperlexical blogger. While he does not lean as left as most of my readings, he exells in his deep knowledge of the technological, economic, and social systems that currently exist, how they're affected by specific political acts, and his consistent vision for how they can all realistically be made materially, meaningfully better.
Gio is just, like, this guy, you know? After finding his blog and getting sucked into one of his many extremely in-depth explorations of copyright and technology, I realised I'd been seeing bits and pieces of his writing all over my feeds for years. Gio also writes about fandom and Homestuck. Additionally, I enjoy how he formats his blog. It has (obviously) influenced my own layouts.
Molly White is a powerhouse. Her Web3 is Going Just Great feed was single-handedly responsible for keeping me sane during some particularly bleak working conditions in an exploitative industry, and it's a tremendous achievement that it's still running almost five years later. Much like the late Mark Colvin, she has an immense talent for collating and curating information. This ability to synthesise (and perhaps an inability to not synthesise) makes her long-form writing equally compelling. White's work with helping on-board people into Wikimedia editing is also valuable (and worth checking out if you have an interest but don't know where to start).
Eliabeth Bik's Science Integrity Digest makes for fascinating reading. Even before the public availablility of generative tools, science publishing has been full of people using unethical tricks to fudge their results. Bik's work shows not only the scale of the issue, but the ease with which a small group of people, or even a single person, can make a serious dent in the issue.
Sam Keeper's media analysis blog Storming the Ivory Tower is always surprising me. There's a real talent on display for seriously engaging with the political themes of work, peeling back layers of metaphor, and generally producing thought-provoking analysis.
News Outlets
A lot of interesting writing requires the backing of some kind of institution. These ones are worth checking out.
Tech Dirt isn't exactly niche. It is, however, more comprehensive than many indiviual writers can manage to be, while still maintaining the level of 'personal obsession' that I think any good, dedicated topic writer requires.
Retraction Watch is how I remain sane in a world full of scientific misconduct. I have an extreme interest in working against the perversion of useful data provision. Keeping an eye on retractions provides, at the very least, some reassurance that someone else is paying attention and taking steps. While not a news outlet, PubPeer is also good for this.
Fiction
Sometimes, things that aren't true are better.
Peter Watts' human-unfriendly hard sci-fi Rifters setting is one of a kind. No other setting has lodged in my mind quite like it, and this is largely due to its first book, Blindsight, which is available to read online for free. Watts seems less interested in the standard ideas of dystopian fiction, instead drawing from a tremendous bibliography of contemporary scientific knowledge and psychological hangups to explore create worlds that frame humanity as a scaffold for greater things, seen through the raw, limited perspective of all-too-human protaganists who are dwarfed, both physically and conceptually, by the things they witness.
Another writer that handled 'moving beyond humanity' in the same way as Watts, unafraid to be abrasive, was Isabelle Fall. I say 'was' because Fall published one story, I Sexualy Identify as an Attack Helicopter. She was then harassed by a social media frenzy that construed her sharp deconstruction of a decade-old transphobic joke and genuine exploration and critique of gender and its exploitation as something 'harmful' that could obviously have only come from someone mocking the trans community. Fall withdrew the story from publication and stated that she would never publish her work again. To this day, as far as anyone knows, this is still the case. The above-linked version of her Helicopter story is an unofficial re-upload. It is worth reading.
I've enjoyed qntm's writing for longer than I've known it was their work I was reading. They're in the process of hopping from a well-regarded SCP writer to a published novelist, although they had no small amount of original shorter-form fiction available before this transition. Their handling of unintuitive premises is delightful and engaging. Antimemetics Division will (ironically) be a hard read to forget, I promise.
Reckoning, while centred around the entirely real topic of climate and environmental justice, is an anthology publication that regularly publishes excellent works of fiction and emotive non-fiction. I am biased, because I have been published in one of its editions, but work far better than mine regularly appears in its pages.
One of the first web serials I was ever hooked by was The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, a fractally nested 'whodunnit' that, without really telegraphing it, morphs into a genre-spanning mediation on the nature of death, existential dread, godhood, and (very specifically) what it means to have a personality. It is still ongoing. Despite the author's semi-frequent worries that they are not doing a good enough job, the story continues to be excellent.
You can do a lot with html. LINK ROT plays with the multi-media potential of websites, telling a story in a format that is just interactive enough to feel unpleasantly... icky. Tactile. Still ongoing. Go play in the meat. :)
Ergodic Fiction
Making this its own section is a little bit of a cheat, but I really think the works here stand apart from other fiction. 'Ergodic' works are ones that make you work for the content — think ARGs, House of Leaves, or hidden stories-within-stories. Everything I link below is odd and sometimes difficult to engage with, but ultimately more than worthwhile.
A good starting point is Diet of Worms by Stanley Baxton. It is a story about a prophet. Well, it's a scanned PDF of a story about a prophet. Okay, rather, it's a scanned PDF of a conversation written in hand-scrawled notes in the margins of a library book about a prohphet that, in-universe, is regarded with significant skepticism as to its truth. Well- look, just read it for yourself. Then, when you're done, read Baxton's post-publication writeup — but not before.
Inside the simulated file structure of Nyoperativesystem, there is a story called 'These people you call friends' (located, as a minor 'spoiler', inside the file path '/mens rea/imaginativa/fiction'). This PDF, a fiction-within-a-fiction, is a jagged series of snapshots that was so grimly, bleakly compelling that, when reading it, I forgot it was not the specific and singular work I was exploring, and emerging from its end to remember that I was, in fact, browsing an entire file directory of other content was a remarkable and overwhelming experience. This 'shared drive' is part of Chris Pang's The Savage Computers world. Plenty to get lost in.