As some of you may have heard, I have joined the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, as a Senior Research Fellow. I am thrilled to join the outstanding team at CTEC/MIIS, which has been supporting cutting edge work on extremism, online and off, dangerous organizations in general, and accelerationism in particular. The institution is a great fit with much of my recent work.
From the perspective of you, the readers, the big change is that I’ll be much more empowered to write and research for public-facing projects, the fruits of which will be memorialized here. Look for details soon(ish) on a number of forthcoming projects, including The Last Twitter Census, another paper looking at an under-studied venue for online extremism, and a more ambitious project for which I’ve been laying the groundwork over the last couple of years. I’m very excited about what the future holds.
All good things
As some of you may have noticed, changes to the Twitter API have killed off the INTELWIRE Daily Brief. The brief was powered by Paper.li, which allowed me to curate Twitter sources to automatically generate a daily “newspaper” focused on extremism. When Paper.li was put out of business by Elon Musk, it broke both the INTELWIRE Daily Brief and the INTELWIRE web site, which used Paper.li for a dynamic front page.
INTELWIRE dot com is currently redirecting to my Substack page, until I can figure out the best way to try to reconstitute a working website. Honestly, this is only the latest problem. Nearly two decades of web hosting migrations and changes to publishing tools had left the site with more broken links than active content.
In the short term, I have posted some of the most important Intelwire documents on Archive.org, a collection that I will continue to expand. You can also find links at https://www.jmberger.com/documents. I can’t really predict a timeline or format for Intelwire going forward, except to say I haven’t forgotten about it. I have a lot of irons in the fire at the moment.
In the interim, I am experimenting with ways to keep the Daily Brief alive. For now, I am trying to do it as a Flipboard magazine. Unfortunately, I can’t automate the curation process in the way that Paper.li permitted, so the “Daily” part may be a bit aspirational. You can find the Flip at:
https://intelwiredailybrief.com/
I’ll continue pondering this, and if I come up with something better down the road a bit, I’ll let you know. It’s a work in progress. My apologies for any inconvenience.
Somewhat relatedly
For various reasons that probably don’t require a great deal of expounding, I’ve substantially downgraded my presence on Twitter. The account remains active, in large part so that it can’t be sold off to the highest disinformation bidder, but I’ve closed it to new followers, and nothing gets announced there that you can’t find on one of my other online platforms, including this one. I’m most substantially active here, and most frequently active on Mastodon and Bluesky, followed by LinkedIn. An updated list of my online platforms can always be found here. On some of these (I’m looking at you, Post.news and Facebook), my presence is very minimal.
We will return to our regularly scheduled programming here next week.