Speaking at SXSW 2025, Graber appeared with her hair discreetly pulled back, dressed in black and wearing an oversized T-shirt, in what at first might have been interpreted as the typical strategy that, unfortunately, many female Silicon Valley executives employ: downplaying their feminine appearance. Don't worry, I have not become a fashion columnist, nor was the Bluesky CEO dressing down for no reason: her black T-shirt bore the Latin phrase, 'Mundus sine caesaribus', which translates as 'A world without Caesars'. A direct response to a similar T-shirt worn by Mark Zuckerberg in September 2024 that read 'Aut Zuck aut nihil', a play on Julius Caesar's phrase 'Or Caesar, or nothing'. Faced with a disgusting phony who runs his company like a dictator, running the world's largest social networks without any kind of supervision, Graber offers another vision: open-source, decentralized, and user-governed. Bluesky has been built to resist a takeover of the kind that has happened at Twitter. It is now clear that Elon Musk was not interested in turning the company around or protecting freedom of expression, and instead the move was about the transition into politics of a guy who'...

When I was 5 or 6 years old, I pulled an extremely mean trick on my little brother. I told him that if he cleaned my room, I 'might give him a dollar.' Once he had performed the chore, I told him I'd decided against paying him. I thought of that shameful (and oddly Trumpian) moment a few weeks ago, when I began encountering news stories reporting that President Donald Trump was considering a plan to raise taxes on the rich. (Axios: 'Scoop: Trump might let taxes rise for the rich to cover breaks on tips.' Semafor: 'Trump told Republican senators he's open to raising taxes on highest earners.') As young children understand when they learn the meaning of words, almost anything might happen. Trump might put Joe Biden's face on Mount Rushmore. That's about as likely to happen as him signing into law a hike in the top income-tax rate. It's true that a Trump-administration staffer has floated a proposal to do so, and the fact that the president said he was open to it'as he says of nearly every idea lobbed his way'is inherently, if marginally, newsworthy. But the important context missing from the coverage that followed is that Republican politicians promise to raise taxes on the rich routinely. Trump, in fact, said many times during the 2016 campaign that he would raise taxes on people like himself....