Sameer Vasta

Having a bouquet of sunflowers in the house really does make the day brighter.

Sending hugs and good wishes.

join us tonight? :)

when we do breakouts, will be doing one about slowly reviving/revising a project to try to figure out ways to map public tech infrastructure.

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

Ya Ali Madad! Small world. I’m assuming our paths may have crossed at some point in our youths? (I was a bit of a Ismaili-activity nerd when I was younger.)

Come hang out with me at Civic Spark next weekend!!

Look, I'm a total idiot when it comes to coding, but I'll stand by my conviction that a mid-level bureaucrat who can keep a complex social safety net program in a massive country humming along has a greater claim to the title of "genius" than a prep school kid who made a marketable iPhone app at 19.

Show Up TO Show Up Toronto is a hub and weekly newsletter of community organizing, mutual aid, and advocacy events from around the city.

It's been almost three months since I launched Show Up Toronto and in that time I've posted 426 events from over 200 groups, which is pretty dang cool. The fact that there are consistently 100+ events a month representing the labour of thousands validates my optimism about the city. showuptoronto.ca

Escape enshittification Using RSS is a way to regain control over the information you read online. Instead of letting platforms like Twitter or TikTok control what you see based on engagement metrics meant to prolong your time on the platform and subject you to endless ads, you can subscribe only to the sources and writers you want to read. Unlike enshittified social networks, your RSS feed will give you exactly what you signed up to read — no promoted posts, no algorithmic deboosting for posts that dare to link to articles, no ragebait from people you don’t follow. RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries

Driving on the left - Flashing Palely in the Margins Sameer Vasta is an epistolarian, anthropologist, urban explorer, and over-user of the discretionary comma.

A short rumination on driving on the left, and a poem and a collection of good links from around the web: www.inthemargins.ca/driving-on-t...

Civic Spark A conference + unconference for organizers, innovators, and community builders interested in creating a better future of public life.

come join us at a two-day gathering for organizers, innovators, and community builders working toward a better future of public life :)

August 16 – 17, 2025 in Toronto

more info:
civic-spark.com

Favorite website of the day: drawafish.com

Just trust me on this one.

It actually is important to talk about things other than politics on here and in particular pleasant things that bring you joy not just because of social media platform reasons but mostly because it's invaluable in times like this to remember who we are as people on a fundamental level.

The same people who claim public transit is unsafe, unclean, undignified & inconvenient also actively advocate to underfund it.

the centralization and consolidation of the internet was such a fuckin mistake

@plannersean.bsky.social Happy birthday!

Ah! Enjoy it! Would love to hear any great insights you get from it. Sad to be missing — and you!

Congrats on the new job!! And definitely enjoy the break — much deserved!

Civic Spark A conference + unconference for organizers, innovators, and community builders interested in creating a better future of public life.

Anybody going to this conference next month? I sadly can’t make it but would love to hear all about it if someone is going: civic-spark.com

Show Up TO Show Up Toronto is a hub and weekly newsletter of community organizing, mutual aid, and advocacy events from around the city.

Regular reminder that if you’re in Toronto or anywhere nearby, you should be following @showuptoronto.ca, and signing up for the newsletter too: showuptoronto.ca

The food waste of a preschooler’s lunch is probably a few percentage points of GDP, tbh.

If I didn’t have a kid to take care of, I’d fly down to NYC for that. Sadly, I can’t, but I shall enjoy vicariously!

33. I love and am a huge proponent of therapy and also the rise of therapy is not unrelated to the overall trend of professionalizing activities (organizing, care work, mutual aid, home maintenance, etc) that were previously just part of being a person in a society and this is overall not great

28. While we’re on things that aren’t other things, having friends is not the same thing as having a community.

27. Charm is not an indicator of eloquence, eloquence is not an indicator of intelligence, intelligence is not an indicator of goodness or morality. They’re all largely independent qualities and this is a lesson I keep having to learn when people whose writing I love turn out to let me down.

Thank you!

I’m intrigued! Do I need to do anything to sign up?

among the many things they don’t tell you about having kids is the amount of money you will shell out to buy various berries

Canonically, he did.

Great interview with @emilytav.bsky.social and @kathypham.bsky.social on “civic tech.” Love the comment that civic tech = civic duty + technology.